The Slippery Slope of Joy

A few years ago I was invited to a fundraiser for a drug rehab facility by a friend of mine who was one of its alums. My friend, like most of the rest of the gathering, was African-American, and before we lit into our dinners, a minister stood up and began to clap on the upbeat and half sing and half preach a welcoming incantation that had the whole room on its feet, clapping and nodding and shouting amen’s.

     The whole room, that is, except me. I was fascinated by the spontaneous response of the other attendees. But I remained seated. This was in part because there was a lot of Jesus talk in the reverend's incantation, and I do not believe in Jesus. Even if I did believe in Jesus, I regard Christianity's persecution complex as unseemly among any but the persecuted, which I am not. 

     On the other hand, I do not wish to offend, and so at such times as this I never know how to respond, especially if the music is any good. As I remained seated, my host looked down at me and, seeing that I had begun to tap one foot slightly, gave me a wry smile. 

     “Easy now, Andy” he said.

      When Cordelia fatally refused to flatter her father, she declared that she could not "heave her heart into her mouth." I share this problem, though not her predicament, as my father was not King Lear: Dad distrusted flattery, dismissing its practitioners as people who, "you know, try to crawl in under your vest." 

But it's not just flattery I find difficult. It's joy, especially of the unalloyed variety.  
     This morning my wife and I went to the farmer’s market, where one of the University's marching bands was putting on a freeform concert at which, for a donation of $25, you could conduct the band in one of its numbers. I stood listening to the jolly racket they made and enjoying their line-dance moves as they blatted and blasted their way through seventies standards-turned-marching-songs.

     I began to imagine what would happen if I were to fork over $25 and climb onto the little stepladder that passed for the conductor’s dais. I began to choreograph the whole routine. I would identify myself as Arturo Bernstein, perhaps, and play the martinet maestro, commanding them in a German accent to play their pianofortes pizzicato, keep their allegros andante and their andantes al dente and so on, then tapping my baton and declaring, “All right, on seven,” to my wife's astonishment and the crowd's delight. 

     I remembered how Jerry Lewis and Danny Kaye used to take up the baton and lead whole choruses and orchestras in what seemed like spontaneous routines that were actually carefully rehearsed. I would try to follow in that tradition. So on and on I fantasized about my act and the gales of appreciative laughter from the crowd and the musicians, until my wife and I had finished buying vegetables and returned to the car.

Today was Whole Earth Day here in Davis -- not just Earth Day, mind ou, but Whole Earth Day. So this afternoon my wife and I headed off to join the throngs that had gathered on the university quad to celebrate the Whole Earth with whole drum circles, falafel, tie-dye booths, and didgeridus. 

     The crowd was full of people who seemed time-locked in the early seventies (which is the period most people mean when they say the sixties) with their long hair and gypsy outfits and beatific grins. Face-painted and beaded and bare-midriffed young persons in eccentric head gear and sloganeering T-shirts traipsed barefoot through the grass, hackey-sacking and hula hooping, romping and cavorting.

     A capoiera drum line wended its way toward the dance stage, with a large crowd bumping around in rhythm in its wake. My wife began to follow as well, and as I stumbled after her, I managed a couple of slight knee bends and maybe two sways and a few rhythmic shrugs as the drummers led us along. 

     But all this festivity only brought back to me how ill suited I was to my own era, how unfit I am for some varieties of human company, how much time and energy I have spent trying not to make a fool of myself, only to make a derisive ass of myself instead.

        Maybe I would have been better off in upper class 19th century England, when decorousness rather than disinhibition was one of the cardinal virtues. But I don’t really think so. I think that just as I felt stuffy and out of it in the 1970s, I would have suffocated in the 1870s.

     The great ballplayer Satchel Page once prescribed three roads to happiness: to work like you don't need the money, to love like you've never been hurt, and to dance like nobody's watching. 

     I don't know what the hell he was talking about. 

As long as he needs me

My wife has been doing a lot of traveling lately, getting the word out about the new nursing school she's helping to found at the University of California at Davis. This leaves me to my own devices, which seem to deteriorate as the days go by. 
     At first I am the model single male: rising early; cooking myself a wholesome, well balanced meal; cleaning up as I go along (because isn't that half the fun?); buckling down to write. But then I forget lunch, unless the hunger pangs get too pronounced, in which case I pull out a bag of chips, a soda, and some dip, if I can find any. Suppertime passes into night, and around ten I may microwave a hot dog or call out for a pizza, then it's over to the television for some late night viewing, after which I resume writing, snack some more, leave a couple of lights on, turn in, read for an hour or two, and finally drop off around three in the morning. 
     I don't think I'm particularly sleep-averse, and Debbie's regime is not so oppressive that it's as though I must go romping around the schoolyard when she's away. But something truly giddy and juvenile comes over me during her more prolonged absences. 
     I am not entirely helpless. In fact I am handy, can cook my meals, keep my environs relatively tidy, and by the time she gets back I've usually managed to clear away all evidence of my delinquency. The dishes are done, the kitchen sink is spotless, the laundry is washed and dried and sorted, the garbage has been dumped; the recyclables have been, well, recycled; and if I took the opportunity that her absence afforded of taking on some handyman project I have usually completed it, put away the tools, swept up the sawdust. 
     In other words, I usually present a home that's in better shape than when she left it. But I myself am a mess -- malnourished, sugar-high, sleep-deprived -- and may well greet her with my fly open. 


Her homecomings are always marked by a close and bustling inspection of the premises. I call these her fault-finding missions. The more immaculate the home when she gets back, the more intense her scrutiny, as though by getting everything ship-shape I were merely trying to put one over on her. 
     When, inevitably, she does find something amiss -- a paint drop on the laundry room floor, an errant screwdriver, a bottle left uncapped in the refrigerator, a letter unmailed, a call to the furnace repairman unmade  -- it seems to be almost a comfort to her, a confirmation of her core belief that I am a nitwit. 
     I am in no position to argue with that. Nevertheless, these inspections of hers do tend to diminish some of the pleasure I take in her homecomings. 
     But there's nothing like a little belated insight to soothe my wounded feelings, so I have decided that I know what really lies behind these inspections. It is a need to believe that I cannot live without her: that she is necessary to me, so central to my life that without her I would spin off into the void. 

Hyde Park Bred

I watched the Obamas at the Press Club last week, and enjoyed the comedy lesson the President gave a blowsy Jay Leno, especially when Obama followed a gentle jab at Michael Steele with a sly and perfectly timed, "My brother." 
     But what struck me again was the deep but wry affection in which Michelle and Barack Obama hold each other. It all seems to me utterly charming and entirely recognizable. 
     I was raised where the Obamas lived before coming to Washington: in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where my father was Dean of the College at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. There is something in the cerebral atmosphere of my old neighborhood that seemed to nurture relationships like theirs. 
     My parents shared it, as did several of their married friends. It was passion enriched by intellect,  devotion garnished with humor, erudition with humility. 
     My father went on to work for the Ford Foundation in India and in Africa, and died three years ago, at the age of 96. But before his death, my mother read Obama's autobiography to him, and he would make her pause every now and then to ask why Americans didn't choose men of Obama's quality and complexity for their President. How he would have rejoiced in Obama's election, and taken pride in the way he has handled himself. 
     
When I was very small my mother would sometimes say, perhaps in part to comfort herself that the sacrifices she made on his behalf were worthwhile, that my father should have been president. 
     I sometimes wondered to myself what sort of president my father would have made. I used to invent scenarios in which my father would be appointed, say, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Then some catastrophe -- an electrical accident at a White House pool party, or a shipment of toxic hair dye -- wiped out the rest of the line of presidential succession, leaving my father holding the bag. 
     I suppose my father would have made a better, or at least smarter and better spoken and more honorable Chief of State than Nixon, Johnson, Ford, or either Bush. But would he have been crippled by his erudition and fair-mindedness, his sometimes lofty rationality and instinctive trust in the other guy's good faith? And would the country have forgiven him his sense of humor? 
     Though I could never really imagine it, Obama comes close. The Presidency is a terrible job to wish on anybody. But it has been fascinating, for better or for worse, to watch one of our own go about his business. 

Bwanas and Sahibs

My brother Geoff is an amateur tiger conservationist, and he and I were talking the other day about a recent New Yorker article I recommended he read. It concerned a telegenic American couple named Mark and Delia Owens, whose passion for African elephants seems to have gotten out of hand. 
     Perhaps that is putting it mildly, as there's evidence that their troubled son shot an unarmed poacher to death as an ABC News team stood by, that Mark may have retrieved the body and dumped it into a nearby river, and that at least a portion of the ABC crew went along with the coverup.


There's less debate among conservationists than you might imagine about whether or not it is justified to shoot poachers on sight, especially when they're carrying AK-47's, and especially when whole species are being hunted to extinction for their parts, including several on which Chinese men are apparently willing to spend millions of yuan to avoid taking Viagra.
     But as Geoff and I got to talking, we returned to a beef we both have with Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and PBS, when it comes to nature documentaries. We were brought up on Mutual of Omaha's Animal Kingdom with Merlin Perkins, and Walt Disney's Truelife Adventures, and both of us recognize the extraordinary improvements that have been made to the genre. 
    We are agreed that no-one ever wrote a better documentary script than David Attenborough, and we thrill to the footage intrepid teams of cinematographers have captured for such series as Nature, Blue Planet and Life, including, recently, astounding images shot through falling snow of that most elusive of cats, the snow leopard, dragging its kill up a rocky Himalayan slope.


But our complaint is with the producers of a lot of other wildlife documentaries who, like the writers of historical romances set in exotic places, center their stories around white people instead of the real heroes of animal conservancy: local game wardens and animal conservationists. 
     With little remuneration and no fanfare; at risk to their lives; and often in defiance of their own governments; they are the ones who strive most courageously to sustain the world's wildlife. And yet, at best, they are relegated in most animal documentaries to bit parts: as loyal guides and faithful sidekicks to the sahibs and bwanas who come rolling in from L.A. with their film crews, safari jackets, lomotil, and little bottles of Purell: peppy, entrepreneurial, self dramatizing young people who have narrowly chosen animal conservation over skydiving or bungee jumping.
     We know of a few steadfast indigenes who have been featured, notably Geoff's friends Fateh Singh and the late Billy Arjan Singh, both tiger wallas of irresistible charisma, and I suppose a producer would argue that Western viewers need someone on the screen with whom they can identify. But it seems unfortunate and shortsighted to neglect the real heros of animal conservation and to understimate our capacity to identify with them.

Love Letters in the Sand

Before my grandmother died in 1976, she left instructions that my father burn all her correspondence with my grandfather. So when we found their love letters in an old trunk in the basement, my father duly consigned its contents to the flames.
     Both of my grandparents Ward had spent their childhoods haunted by scandal: my grandfather's father had embezzled millions of dollars as a financier on Wall Street: so many that the family is somewhat affronted that the sort of pyramid fraud Ferdinand Ward refined has been named after a piker like Ponzi. By rights, it should be known as a Ferd.
     Before he was sent to Sing Sing in 1885, my great grandfather had put large dents in several fortunes, and utterly ruined former President Ulysses S. Grant, whose son he had finagled into becoming his partner. It is to Ferdinand Ward that we owe Grant's military memoirs, which he wrote in an effort to dig himself out of debt.
    My grandmother was the daughter of Daniel Otis Eshbaugh, the President of New England Loan and Trust, who apparently committed his company to a disastrous investment. Temperamentally ill suited to the rough and tumble of turn-of-the-century commerce, he could not bring himself to face his Board of Directors and jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.
     Our family has fled from commerce ever since. But my brother Geoff has long been at work on a book about Ferdinand and his father, an almost equally odious Presbyterian minister, and I have always been fascinated by the mysteries of my ancestry. Geoff is an historian and I an erstwhile one, and we generally deplore the instinct among families to jettison their ancestors' correspondence. Researching various books, each of us has followed the trail of a cache of 19th century correspondence, only to be told by the latest heir to some family's archives that it was destroyed or discarded.


My father-in-law was a pathologist, and, upon meeting my father for the first time, handed him his monograph about his research into coccidioidomicosis, a disease peculiar to California's Central Valley. My father, who was not a man of science, duly opened the monograph and read the following passage: "The practice by laboratories of pouring pus down drains is to be deplored." 
     My father was at a momentary loss for words. But my father-in-law's point was that this was a great waste of pus: of material others could put to use in their research. I guess Geoff and I feel the same way about the ancestral record, no matter how rancid it may be, and recall the disposal of our grandparents' correspondence with grief.
     Recently my mother has begun to go through her correspondence with my late father, who, like his mother, left orders that it all be destroyed. Reading it, however, has brought my father back to life for her, restoring him from the difficult and confused old man he was when he died, to the dapper, brilliant, loving young man she married.
     My belief is that we all have a right to destroy any of our inanimate possessions, and keep private whatever intimacies we deem unsuitable for children. But not necessarily from the grave. 
      My father's instinct was always to clam up, to not make any sort of fuss or display that anyone might construe as egocentricity. When his children volunteered to write something for his mother's memorial service, his first response was, "I don't want to turn this into some kind of Ward family dog-and-pony show." But in the end we prevailed, and he loved what we had to say about his mother. Though his objections were sincerely felt, it was not always clear that they were sincerely meant, for whenever we overruled him he seemed glad we did.
     I come from an unusually happy family. My grandparents not only loved each other but enjoyed each other's company, as did my parents, as do my siblings and my mother's grandchildren and their spouses. It's really quite a family, and owes a lot to the standard my father and mother set.
     It seems to me that some future generation might like to understand the source of such felicity, to learn from my parents' love letters that such happiness was not accidental, but took nurturing, respect, wit, persistence, fidelity, patience, and a lot of coaxing into the light. 
     So with all due respect to my father, I have urged my mother not to yield to his extravagant reticence but to grant my parents' descendants admission to their courtship.

But I did it for you

I have been married now, and to the same woman, for two thirds of my life. But then "the same woman" is a phrase that rebounds somewhat, for the woman I married is not by any means the same woman I am currently married to, nor am I the same man she married, and therein hangs a tale, perhaps for another time. 
     They may call it wedlock, but it's not gridlock. Stasis is not something you can expect from marriage any more than you can expect it from life, which is why we call it married life, I suppose. No matter how much we might want to sustain a particularly happy moment in our marriage -- "Oh, Darling, why can't it be like this forever?" -- it can't be like this forever, and that's just the way things are. 
     Now that may sound grim, but it isn't meant to. Because I am a better man than I used to be: grayer, shakier, deafer, more forgetful and more disabused, certainly; nevertheless I do occasionally have a game changing insight that keeps the ball moving down the field. 


My latest involves a longstanding pattern of our marriage that has occasionally sent us to our respective corners, bloodied, bruised and breathless after a verbal round of recriminations. 
     Here's what rings the bell. Debbie goes off somewhere on business, and I take the opportunity her absence presents of taking on some grandiose household project: tearing down a wall, building shelves, replacing the porch posts with columns, installing a hammock, clearing out a dying hedge -- you name it; I'm handy. 
     Now, I love to do this stuff. Nothing cheers me like slapping something together to delight Debbie on her return. The problem is that she is rarely delighted, or in any case, rarely delighted to a degree I deem commensurate to the wonderful thing I've just done for her. So I either sulk about this -- and I'm very good at sulking -- or I let her have it. "You don't appreciate all the things I do for you. And because you don't appreciate all the things I do for you, I am reduced to having to beg for your appreciation, and it's humiliating."
     But the last time around I prefaced all this with, "Now, I love doing this stuff, but -- " and then launched into my usual whine, to which she protested that she had thanked me, that she did say she liked the new raised bed I built for her. So what did I want her to do? Get down on her knees and throw up?
     I hesitate to reckon how many times we've had this argument, but something about my preface this time -- "I love doing this stuff" -- nagged at me afterward, and suddenly it occurred to me that as a matter of fact I don't do these things for Debbie. I do them for myself. I do them for the pleasure of doing them. 
     A little more thanks from her would be nice, sure, but not absolutely necessary if I simply absolve her of the expectation of tears of gratitude and whoops of appreciation I reflexively whip up as I go about my business. 
     I realize that I have done a version of this all my life: volunteering to be the go-to guy in family crises, making myself indispensable, and then resenting the hell out of everyone else for being insufficiently grateful, and for not stepping in more, when in fact I have left no room for them to step.
     I am much more likely to forget an insight than to have one, so I hurried over to Debbie with this one. From now on, I told her, I would not set us both up for another round or two of recrimination. She looked doubtful, but I meant it. Henceforward I will desist from pushing my own inner resentment button and stop setting her up for a fall. 
     I just hope she appreciates it. 

Nizamuddin Dhargah

The New York Times reports that quietly, even furtively, the American government has begun making what it calls "overtures" to the Moslem world. It seems to me that overtures are supposed to be at least audible to the naked ear, nevertheless it's about time we did something to recognize that it's Moslems that are the primary victims of Islamicist terror, not us.  
     I have been scanning and sorting through the photographs I took between 1966 and 1971, among them images of a complex of Moslem shrines in  New Delhi, India called Nizamuddin's Dhargah. When I lived in New Delhi, it was one of my regular destinations. With its walls and warrens and labyrinthian alleyways, the Medieval complex had been a refuge for New Delhi's Moslem population during the riots that attended the partitioning of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and it remained a haven whenever communal tensions in the city approached the breaking point. Here lay the tombs not only of the 13th century saint Nizamuddin Auliya but the musician and poet Amir Khusrow; Jehanara, the sister of the Moghul Shah Jehan; and the great 19th century poet Ghalib.  

     It is said that as a young man Nizamuddin had to struggle hard to be humble because he had so little to be humble about. He was by all accounts brilliant, handsome, charismatic. Chased from Bokhara by Mongols, he and his parents did not find refuge until they reached the Doab, the fertile triangle that lies between the Jumna and the Ganga, where his father promptly passed away. He and his mother lived in abject poverty, but Nizamuddin was so brilliant that local sages gave him a “turban of scholarship” while he was still a child. By the time he made his way to Sultanate Delhi in the mid 13th century, his mother had died as well, and he was rescued from starvation by the greatest Moslem scholar of his day. 

     At first, Nizamuddin had entertained ambitions of becoming a magistrate, but as he immersed himself in the Koran, he resolved he would renounce the world and live the rest of his life as a penitent. His teacher, however, was a Chisti Sufi who persuaded his pupil that true humility lay not in abstruse scholarship and self abnegation but in defending the oppressed and doing good works. Refusing  to attach himself to the ruling nobles of his day, Nizamuddin established a monastery about a kilometer from where he now lies buried, to which he welcomed people of all faiths. He stood up to the nobles who tried to seduce him into their service, kept company with the poor, and tempered Sufi doctrine with generosity and practicality. Much like Gandhi, he was a very Indian sort of saint, and a bur in the side of the powers-that-were, and it is no wonder that in the precincts of his dargah he is still believed to be a living presence.

   

Some places have been hallowed for so long that even an irreligious young man like myself could feel the reverberations from the hordes of pilgrims who for six centuries had found their way here from the farthest reaches of the Moslem world. I felt as though I had found a refuge there too, and made friends over time with the local mullahs who permitted me to photograph the beggars as they sought out spots of sunlight in the sandstone alleys; the water carrier as he made his rounds through the adjacent cemetery, slaking the thirst of the dead with water he dribbled from a goatskin sack; the scholars studying their texts on the cold stone tombs; the women come to confer with astrologers and sages; the singers performing Qawwali in their lovely hoarse voices before Khusro's tomb; and the penitents with their beads reciting the 99 names of God: Allah the Merciful; Allah the Protector; Allah the Provider; Allah the Just; Allah the All Forgiving. This is the Islam -- generous, humble, open-hearted -- that stuck with me.

     I don't know whether Radical Islam has infected the residents of Nizamuddin Complex. I like to think that the saint's devotees would be immune to it. But what I think is misunderstood about Islamicist terrorists is that ultimately they are not directing their fire at the West. Even the attack on the World Trade Center was, to them, merely collateral damage. Their real targets are the kind of moderate and ecumenical Moslems whom I encountered at Nizamuddin Complex and the Islamic scholars who befriended my father at Aligarh University in the 1950s. 
     The terrorists hope that in our fear and outrage we will turn against all Moslems, and thereby compel them to join the ranks of the extremists. Radical Islam does not care a whit about Western unbelievers. Their intention is to force us to set fire to our end of the bridge that moderate Moslems have been trying to traverse between East and West, Old World and New. 

     That Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet but Christianity does not show Muhammad the same respect will always divide the two religions. But then, that's what religions generally do, isn't it? Divide? It's only when religion is entirely separated from nationalism, and people like Nizamuddin, Buddha, Gandhi, and the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas show a way to reconcile their own faiths with not just tolerance but true acceptance and respect for individual creeds that religion even begins to make any sense to me.