Posts filed under 'General'
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EULOGY FOR MOMMY
Esther 7/18/10
Mommy was at once the consummate teacher and the eager, curious learner. She grew up in an idyllic household ripe with an excitement for new ideas and yet steeped in the spirit of ancient dreams. What is so incredible is that she recreated that wisdom and “ruach”, that spirit in our childhood home. She was smart and skillful, making and taking each teachable moment and permeating it for us with her powerful, beautiful little stories and even her songs in Yiddish, in Hebrew and in later years, in English.
Even though her parents and brothers and sisters were killed years before our birth, they became real presences in our lives. Hers is the triumph of sheer will, personality and skill over the destruction that was intended to end her life. Instead, she survived to rebuild it and we were the lucky recipients of her selfless love and ingenious resourcefulness.
As she often loved to tell us throughout our childhood, when she gave birth to us as a resident of a displaced person’s camp in then impoverished Italy, she welcomed us with the words, SHALOM BANOT…… welcome daughters, literally, although the word shalom also signifies the peace that had finally arrived for her. With just this little phrase, she transmitted the strategic, highly focused coded message, “I will bring you into the world I know and love even though its physical presence has been destroyed.” And that she did!
She was truly the heroic embodiment of an idea she often talked to us about…. That WHAT you HAVE is not nearly as important as WHO you ARE. She liked to point out with intense pride that, even though everything and everybody had been taken away from her, she remained in full possession of her most prized possessions, her knowledge and her skills, her dreams and her values.
Against all odds, she has created, already, 3 new generations who are illuminated by her clear vision of the kind of goals that are important and who are informed by her model for how to achieve them.
July 19th, 2010
Note: I’ve edited this a few times. It’s just about the hardest thing I’ve ever written.
Har Hamenuchot, Jerusalem
For the ten years before she died, I visited my savta whenever I was in LA to sit quietly with her and enjoy her calm strength.
She couldn’t say it, but I always felt she was deeply satisfied to have me sitting next to her. It was physical proof that she’d won. Her family was safe, secure and growing.
She was the model in many ways for who I’ve become. I never told her and I wish I had.
She was a kind, smart and intellectual person that spoke five languages. I saw her approach life with intense pragmatism and deep morality. She was optimistic and cheery even when she had no reason to be. She always seemed to know what was right and what was wrong. She knew what she wanted.
She didn’t get what she wanted much though.
She didn’t get to grow old around her close family. She lost them, her first husband, her baby and everything she knew in a few short years. She didn’t get to move to Israel after the holocaust. When she finally made it to Israel in the 90s she was soon chased out by SCUD missiles. My grandfather was a good man but a poor match for her.
I sat down to record her life story when I was in my teens. I’ve lost or taped over the cassette but remember many of her words. It makes me cringe to think that I might have traded her story for a Thompson Twins album!
I remember her telling me about how much she loved her father who was her idol.
I remember her telling me that her main complaint about the russian occupation of her village were the mandatory communal dances around a bonfire. I was just getting into clubbing and thought it actually sounded pretty cool.
I remember her eyes lighting up as she talked passionately about the first husband she had loved and connected with deeply.
I remember her mentioning that her papers were faked because she had to take someone else’s identity after the war. She said that she was really was a few years older than we thought.
I remember how she segued matter-of-factly from escaping a line of her family members being marched off to telling me - in great detail - about a good looking fellow partisan in the forest that played a mean violin.
Finding the bright side of years as a partisan in a forest was her in a nutshell.
She had an unconditional way about her that always made me feel loved and special even when I was being an idiot.
When I was 18 and telling her about hanging out in Europe, I insisted that Switzerland was in Northern Europe and full of sexy blond girls. She finally looked at me and said with an affectionate smile ‘I know where Switzerland is. I went through it when I walked from Poland to Italy’.
I regularly see her values and legacy in the way I live my life.
I’m certain that she influenced my love of adventures, living around the world and a good story.
I’ve tried to do the right thing for people like her that have lost their home in helping illegal aliens in the US and Japan and now working with refugees in London.
I’ve taken strength from her in dealing with otherwise crushing experiences.
And I’ve tried not to take life too seriously. I learned from her that shit can happen and you still have to find your own happiness.
This last bit of my savta’s legacy is the part that matters most. It’d be easy to get caught up in my savta as hard-core survivor and miss her sweetness.
It’s a sweetness I saw every time she took five minutes at her door to say goodbye with a strong ‘Be Helty and Heppy’. Survive and thrive.
Every time I think of her it reminds me how fortunate I’ve been to have so much goodness in my life and how much of it I owe to her.
June 21st, 2010
UPDATE NOTE: Not surprisingly, more than one group is working on the concept I described. One of the vCard extensions that I received an email about is Hcard.
Between calls today, I thought about how personal information is still sliced and diced into multiple IM systems, multiple personal pages and difused in other ways. Places like MySpace are an improvement over the narrowly focussed kane.org for sharing information of the personal type with others. However, they are still largely a closed system.
These community and social technology enablers take the first stage of open syndication and content technologies to the next level, but don’t provide an equivalent to RSS to ‘publish’ personal information. I’m thinking of a network friendly, expanded vCard or Plaxo-type technology that lives in the world of open standards and technologies. A single authoritative, but syndicated/published source of the info would solve the issues I have with both the vCard (not universal or auto-updating) and Plaxo (it has to poll each contact with email).
There are good reasons for some folks not to want anyone else to have access to their phone number or email address, but the same restrictions may not apply to bands you like or technologies you think are cool. Some of the inevitable concerns about control over information could be addressed with a federated directory approach.
How about XMLRPC-type access so I can ping the place your personal info lives (if you authorize me) and grab updates to your phone number, favorite bands, blog location, etc.?
Wouldn’t it be great if your Outlook, cell phone or other address book could constantly update your contacts?
And last, wouldn’t it be great if these capabilities could be integrated into the relevant web services that you use?
November 8th, 2005
