A column from Jack December 11, 2010

Rubin is taking another vacation, which he often does nowadays.  Does he get paid anyway?  I promised to do him a favour but this is getting ridiculous.  I deserve at least half of his huge writing fee.

 This is Jack and I am looking for your support.  Write to the Bulletin editor and ask him to pay me instead of Rubin.  Isn’t that only fair?

 Anyway, Rubin inspired me to write this when he told me about a book he read in Italy , a translation of a novel by Alberto Moravia, called “Contempt” in English.  As I understood it, the whole thing is a kind of whodunit, or rather a whydunit.  The author spends the whole book trying to figure out why his wife despises him.  At the end he discovers what I could have told him from the beginning and saved him all the trouble.  But then there wouldn’t have been a book. 

 He also does a few stupid things along the way but really, don’t all men do stupid things? He finally realizes of course, it wasn’t the stupid things he did that stimulated the contempt.

What was it then?  Come a little closer and I’ll whisper it to you but when I tell you, you will hit your forehead and say, “of course, it’s obvious!”

You see women despise us for exactly the same things that make them love us.  You don’t believe me?  Let’s take the hero of the novel.  He is a kind of dreamy romantic who is artistic and creative and really believes he has the talent to write theatrical plays.  But no one is willing to pay him much money for that.  His wife loves his creativity and his romantic tendency but also wants a stable home.

He starts to feel the pressure and takes a job from a big producer, a decisive man of action, to write a screenplay.  This starts to bring in the cash but his wife starts to look at him askance.

She starts to admire the producer who is a successful businessman and gets things done but despises him because he is crass and materialistic.

Do you see where this goes?  In the end it is the woman’s disappointment that her romantic creative husband is not able to provide for her and is completely unaware of how the world works, that drives her growing distance from him.  At the same time she is attracted and repelled by the producer.

She leaves her husband for the producer but candidly admits she won’t stay with the producer either.

So the whole cause for the contempt is the woman’s desire for what is impossible.   She loves a man who is creative and unconcerned by worldly things but then is disappointed when exactly those qualities make it impossible for him to give her the material stability she wants.   Similarly, but in reverse, the producer.

The horrible truth is that this works the other way too.  The man marries a woman who is a homebody and will make a warm, wonderful mother and then is full of contempt because she has not read the latest novels.

My own wife loved me because I was full of pep and fun.   Now she likes nothing better than to stay home and read a book.

Come on people!  Make up your minds what you want!  Or make sure you really want what you think you want, because you just might get it.

So Rubin remember you wanted this column, because now you’ve got it.

Jack: what I sacrificed for sister’s dessert October 27, 2010

Hi, I’m Rubin’s friend Jack.  He asked me to write the column today because he is too busy resting.  Strange guy.

So I thought I would explain why I was in Collingwood with my wife to make up.

Here is what our argument was all about.

My sister and her husband invited us over to their house along with another couple, for a delicious home cooked meal.  And can my sister cook!  Everything has such a tam, the way I remember my mother cooked and she especially makes fabulous desserts.  Only she has the secret to how my mother made pineapple cake and apple strudel. 

My wife could never get a straight answer from my mother who always left out an important ingredient.  Once she said she used two cups of flour in a cake.  I was suspicious so I went to the cupboard and took out a measuring cup and asked if this was the measuring cup she meant.  “Oh no,” she said, went to the cupboard and took out some random tea cup.

I felt really lucky to be able to eat at my sister’s.

Throughout the evening, the woman of the other couple was drinking like a fish.  I was sitting there just waiting for dessert.  By the end of the main course, she was half passed out.  Her husband took her out of the kitchen while no one was looking and came back without her.  My sister asked where his wife was.  The husband said she was sleeping it off on the bed upstairs but that shouldn’t interfere with the rest of a fun evening.

My sister gave her husband a kick under the table.  He said nothing.  No one said anything and to my great relief we moved on to dessert.  My sister put it all out on the table and started the coffee brewing.  Then she turned to the other husband and told him she found it uncomfortable that he was still here while his wife slept upstairs.   How long was she going to be there?  Why did he not just take her home.  My sister’s husband turned pale and gave her a look.   

The other husband, turned red and said that if that was how she felt he would get his wife and take her home.   Everyone got up, he went upstairs and came down carrying his sleeping wife like a bundle, got their coats and stormed out in silence.

I was staring at the delicious desserts and the cakes.  My mouth was watering.  Just then, my sister and her husband started a row.  He should have asked them to leave.  No, they should have waited, they were all good friends, etc.  Soon they were yelling at each other about whose job it was to handle the situation and then they stormed out to separate rooms in the house and slammed doors.

My wife and I were sitting there with delicious desserts and freshly brewed coffee.  My wife wanted to leave.  I wanted to stay and finish dessert.  It would be such a waste to leave it.  My wife started to get angry, so I said OK, we would leave.   While my wife went to get her coat, I got some snack bags and piled in some slices of strudel and cake.  No way I was going to miss this after sitting through agony, waiting for the payoff.

When we got home, my wife discovered what I had done and that lead directly to my having to get two reservations at a golf resort.  But after I ate the dessert, it was worth it!

Passion, guilt and illness do not mix. July 19, 2010

When I was a teen I gradually discovered that talking to girls was almost like talking to people.

 

One girl I liked asked me to be her date at a wedding reception.   The great day arrived just the day after my basketball team’s victory in the high school championships and my playing for hours at the YMCA.

 On date day, I awoke with a bad taste in my mouth and a bit of a stuffed nose.  Well I wasn’t going to let a cold get in my way of the date!  That evening, I dressed to kill in my black pants, pepper sports jacket and golden vest.  I was handsome.  My mom said so.

 I started to feel some aches in my legs and shoulders but what of that.  It was probably just leftover cramping from the thorough physical exercise of the day before.

 I met her at her house.  Her father would drive us to and from the reception. 

On the way, I found out a bit of their history.  Like my parents, hers were Holocaust survivors who had escaped to the Soviet Union during the war and she, like me, was born in a D.P. camp.  I spoke Yiddish with her father and with every word, she seemed to become happier.

 Her father dropped us off and promised to return by midnight.

 We had a great time at the reception.  We got along famously.  We danced every dance and during the slow dances, she danced very close to me.  I might have been more excited by this but I was now starting to feel the effects of what I thought was the strenuous exercise of the day before.

 My head started to feel strange, with a small ache in the nape of my neck.  By the end of the evening, I was feeling a bit clammy,

 “You look a little pale,” she said around 11.  “Why don’t you sit down while I go phone my father to come early?”

 By the time her father arrived, I was starting to feel dizzy, to go along with clammy and achy. 

On the ride back to her house, I started to feel a pain in my stomach.  I suppressed it and continued my previous conversation with her father.

 When we got to her house, she invited me in for a moment because she said, she wanted to give me a proper good night kiss. 

 She took off her coat and then, with her father standing beside us, she threw her arms around my neck and pressed tightly against me and started to French kiss me.

 Here I was standing two feet away from a Holocaust survivor while his daughter was basically giving me a frontal lap dance.

 I felt at first something I identified as guilt and anxiety but as the embrace went on, I started to realize it was actually nausea.  The stomach pain came back with a vengeance with a sudden searing stab.

I pushed my date away and vomited all over the hall entrance.  I got down on my knees and did it again. 

Out of the corner of my eye I could see my date and her father looking at me with undisguised horror as I lay back on the steps, eyes closed.

 “What happened!  What is the matter!”  I heard as if from a distance.  

“My god! Is he dead!” I heard her father exclaim. 

They placed a wet cloth on my forehead.

 “I’m all right,” I croaked.  I tried to reach out my hand but I felt so mortified I could barely speak.

 Somehow they got me out of the house, into the car and back to my place.  My date went out of her way to say it was not my fault.

 I felt so bad I never actually called back.  Too bad, she was a nice person.  But I learned not to mix passion, guilt and illness ever again.

How I learned about girls May 31, 2010

By the time I was eight or nine I had had a few girl friends, with whom I played, the way I played with the guys.  I just got along with them better.   But I would get invited over, especially to the home of the sisters, Eva and Lily, where I would be the only boy present.
    
Sometimes, the two sisters and I slid down the rough slopes of Rosedale Ravine just behind their backyard on Bloor Street .  Sore from the ride down the hill, we followed the dirt road around to Riverdale Zoo.

At the end of our hour long hike, we got to spend time at the zoo, looking at decrepit lions, dirty mountain goats and chimpanzees who seemed to pass their days shrieking and playing chase or sitting in the corner chewing their toes and rubbing themselves in ways I did not understand at the time. 
 

On this day, one chimp in particular was playing up to the crowd and would swing and make faces for peanuts.  She took a paper candy floss cone and stuck it on her head.   Everyone laughed.  She licked it and stuck it in her nose.  More laughter.  She stuck it in her ear amid even more hilarity.  Then she bent over as people were still laughing and stuck the cone ‘where the sun don’t shine.”  Sudden shocked silence.  Mothers hustled their children away and we were left with an abruptly silent chimp cage and a chimp sitting in a corner, a discarded cone still near the bars.  I had turned red and averted my eyes. 

When we got back to their house, Eva and Lily seemed to remember my discomfort and whispered together and giggled.  I started to feel a sense of dread as we entered their room.  Their younger girl cousin was also there as she had come over to play.  Like them, she was lithe, with blonde hair and blue eyes.   Something about their giggling together made me nervous.  I could feel myself breaking into a cold and clammy sweat.

Lily, the younger girl, came up close and asked, “Don’t you know that boys and girls are different?”
 

“They’re the same,” I said, “that’s what my mom told me.”  This elicited gales of laughter all around.
 

“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard, “Lily said .   “Here, look.”  She stood up and pulled down her pants and panties.  “See, we’re different.”
 

I felt a dense fog fall over my eyes.  I could not see clearly.  I was gasping for breath as if in deep water and stumbled back against the wall.  Lily pursued me relentlessly.  “Look,” she said, coming toward me with her pants and panties around her ankles.  I was seized with the great fear that I would be struck dead and turned to face the wall, covering my eyes.  I would have done the same thing if I were a vampire turning from the cross, held in the outstretched hands of the priest.
 

Lily and her cousin were now on either side of me.   Both of them had their pants and panties down around their ankles.  “Look at us, look at us, look at us.”

They danced around me in a frenzy, while I buried my face in my hands.  My knees were buckling and my heart was racing.   “OK, OK, you’re different.  OK.”  I blurted out.  “Just leave me alone.”

Eva, the eldest, came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder.  “It’s all right,” she said, “it’s all right.  You don’t have to look. “ 

The other two girls pulled up their pants, still giggling.  Eva walked me to the door.  “Still friends?” she asked and put out her hand, that cool serene smile still playing on her lips.  Her arm was sinuous as a snake, as solid as a lifeline to a drowning man. 

My head still whirling I reached out and shook her hand in gratitude and uncertainty.  From a distance I heard myself ask, “What do girls want?”  

“The same as anybody,” she smiled, and closed the door.

Women and men do communicate- sort of November 15, 2007

I want to share with you one of my most important discoveries.   Interspecies communication, on a limited basis, is possible.  

This is an issue I have been working on for years.  Through careful and sometimes painful experimentation, I now know beyond doubt that men and women can sometimes break through the fog of war between the sexes and understand each other.

You may think this is far fetched but I assure you it is true.   Yesterday, for instance, I took out the garbage before being asked.   This is significant.   After many years, I as a male have come to understand that not only is taking out the garbage a job I have to do because someone assigned it to me – it is actually something I want to do because I care about taking out the garbage.  It’s almost like a revelation.

Yes, yes, I know that there are some males around who seem to have understood this early.   But my male intuition tells me that this is something most of us only learn later in life, and then for many of us, it is a perception that occurs to us only intermittently, like a flickering light bulb when the connection is still loose.

Some other lessons I am working on:  My hands do not fall off when I wash up and put away the dishes and the pots.  And you know, the kitchen actually seems cleaner.  Do you think there is a connection?

Dusting and sweeping I don’t quite get yet.   You get rid of the dirt and it comes right back.   Seems like a waste.   I think computer games are a much more useful way to spend my time.  They expand my mind.  The occasional basketball game is also important.   The plays and the passing are so intricate.  Very intellectually stimulating.

And what is with shopping?   Why try on so many shoes?  Or clothes?   I see something I like – I buy it.   It’s not as if women haggle over the price.   They just buy things in one place and then give it back – because they found something they liked better next door.   Me, I avoid this conundrum by not looking next door.   Why cause yourself a hassle?   How much time do you have in a day anyway?

My wife explains that she is just trying to find the right clothes with the right fit.   Why is this so hard and painful?  I stopped helping my wife shop when I discovered I would be happy with the first dress she tried on, yet she never just bought it.   And how many different ways can you answer the question, “How do I look in this?”

As you can see, women, unlike men, are very complicated. They cannot be understood on our terms.  The fact that men and women can actually talk together, I sometimes find to be a miracle.   I mean how many different shades of colour can you really understand and what is chartreuse anyway?  Magenta?  Cherry? Rose? Save me.

So are men and women really from different planets?  Between you and me, I have found females to be a mystery since I was a little boy and the little neighbour girl showed her affection for me by stealing my tricycle.

When I was older I asked her, completely exasperated after another argument, as I was leaving her house, “What do girls want?”

Her answer has hung over me since then and for the life of me, I am still trying to decipher it, like a message from a distant galaxy.  “The same as anybody,” she said and closed the door.

It all started with my mother October 23, 2007

It all started with my mother.  No, seriously, I mean my impression of women.  My mother could do things no one else could do.
 

When as a three year old, I hid under the covers in my bed, which was after all, huge, like a whole other country, she could always find me.  I was impressed with her uncanny ability to locate my body and tickle it even in the middle of this vast expanse of bedding and mattress.  Once, I left a pillow under the covers and hid in the closet.  Believe it or not, she found me anyway.
 

Combined with these amazing psychic powers, which enabled her to always be able to discern whether I was telling the truth, she was also very strong.  There is an expression in Yiddish which describes her arms in those days – “mamedik”, which is sort of a tautology because it just means “mother-like”.  But I, at any rate, could not put both my hands around them.
 

She lugged large bags of coal around in the basement and could easily shovel a load into the furnace.  Later, she described how she had worked in the coal mines in the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union during the Second World War.  She explained that she was one of the weaklings.  The Russian women, with their thick strong legs were the ones who could push and shlep the coal cars like the men.  She could only shovel the coal onto the conveyor belt.
 

When she gave birth to my brother in the Caucasus, on a collective farm, she had to walk to the hospital, climb up the stairs to the delivery room, give birth and after a few hours, take her baby back to the little hut she shared with her sister-in-law and baby nephew.  Not bad for a weakling, but she reserved her own admiration for the Georgian women who didn’t even bother with the hospital.  They just went into the fields by themselves and gave birth in a convenient haystack.
 

She did acknowledge that she was physically agile in those days.  When she and her sister-in-law earned money by selling some sandals in a deal they worked out with their neighbour, she was the one sent to the city to buy some potatoes.  One little detail.  They were in the mountains, they had no cars, they had to wait several days for the truck to make the trip and the only way to get to the city every day was by train, which unfortunately did not stop at their settlement.  This is how the men did it.  They waited at a particular curve, where the train had to slow down and jumped on to a freight car.  On the return trip, they jumped off at the same location.  My mother decided that if they could do it, she could.  And she did.
 

She always laughed when she described how she kept on tumbling down the hill when she jumped off the train on the way back.  The potato sack acted like a peculiar weight that kept her doing somersaults down the slope.  “Anyways,” she said, “I got home faster.”
 

But the most amazing thing was to go shopping with her.  She always seemed to carry two full shopping bags, one in each hand, which she swung to clear a path. 
When we got onto a street car, she would push her way to a seat and fend off everyone with her right arm until my brother and I could catch up to her.  In the bakery trying to get to the counter for rye bread, she bulldozed all the other women out of the way, even though they were also carrying shopping bags and using them in the same way.
 

When she got older, she developed a tremor in her right hand and arm, which the doctor claimed was due to overstraining the muscles.   I can believe it. 
 

So, nowadays, when I see a woman swinging shopping bags as we jostle in a line up to buy things, even though I feel a tender pang in my heart, I make sure to get out of the way.