A story about Ron Thiemann my teacher

One of my favorite memories about Ron Thiemann goes like this:

I think I was in my senior year, maybe even my last semester of college.  I was a TA in Ron's Religion 102 class, the class where I had met him my freshman year.

He was looking for someone to drive him to the airport early one morning and was offering to pay.  I was happy to volunteer.

I think he picked me up at my house, in a white sports car.  I don't know what it was - probably not a Mazda Miata (remember them?) but maybe an old Triumph or something, stick shift.  We drove (he drove) to the airport on Cobbs Creek Parkway.  Maybe it was even a Saturday, or else it was just very early in the morning.  There was no traffic at all.

Then the best part - I got to drive this sports car back to his house!

And for this he paid me $10!!!

And then, because this was the kind of guy he was, I think he even wrote about it on a recommendation for me, about how helpful I was, or else he took the trouble to write me a note of thanks. 

So let's see - I got like 30 minutes alone with my advisor, whom I greatly admired.  I got $10.  And I got to drive a cool white sports car.  And then I got an additional thank you!

What I love about this memory is how different things seem when you are 20 and when you are 36 or so (that was his age then) and when you are 50.  Those little joys like driving a car that mean so much when you don't own one.  What $10 meant to me then and what it means to me now.  And the joy of driving down an empty, beautiful road, where I had never been before. 

Who Made Me the Teacher I am?

This is my undergraduate advisor, Ron Thiemann, z"l, as I knew him 30 years ago.  He passed away on November 29, 2012, at the age of 66.  His passing reminds me of that quote that goes around - people will forget what you say and forget what you do, but they won't forget how you made them feel.

It's hard for me to believe that Ron has died without my having a chance to say goodbye to him.  I would like to think that I told him enough times how much he meant to me, but of course we never tell anyone that enough. 

Ron was a very charismatic teacher.  He was energetic, so smart, and pushed us all the time to think.  My friend Bill from college wrote that Ron taught him to think, to analyze, to really understand someone else's argument before disagreeing.  His classroom was charged, full of excitement and of the joy of learning.  He was tough on us - quick to tell me on my papers when he thought I'd missed the mark or failed to understand the material.  A 3.7 from him meant something.  A 4.0 was an extremely happy day - one I did not see frequently!

I took my first class with him in the spring of 1979.  It was not an easy semester for me - a lot fell apart for me then - but in his class I felt whole and happy.  He cared about us and he cared about what he was teaching.  I fell in love - with a TA, with the material we were learning, with learning itself.  And somehow that love stayed with me beyond that semester and into my religion major.

I took my questions and my challenges to Ron.  He was never diminished by a student's challenges.  He supported me through my learning and through the years that followed.  We stayed in touch.  I don't know if he recommended me for rabbinical school but I know he knew I was there, and later in my congregation, and later here in Israel. 

He had a turbulent career at Harvard and some challenges.  He and my mother became Deans in the same year - 1986.  I remember going out to lunch with him somewhere and talking about it - he was in orbit, as my mother says, very busy, very challenged.  I'm not sure if I saw him after that, but we talked in 1990 I'm sure, and later when I was here in Israel. 

I got from him that wonderful teachers love what they are learning, love their students and love seeing students grow.  I got from him that religion matters, greatly, in our world. 

One of the courses I never took from him was one he always taught - Religion and the Third Reich.  He was a big fan of Dietrich Bonhoffer, and he deeply believed that what we think and how we live matters. 

I'm so grateful that at age 17-20 I had such a caring, committed teacher.  If you are reading this, thank one of your teachers! 

Chocolaty Cookies

At long last a recipe!

We doubled this from the cookbook and it made about 40 cookies.  You can half it if you don't want so many.

2 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar (you could use less)
1 tsp vanilla

Mix all this together until smooth.  Add:

1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt

Mix it all together, then add 1/2 cup chocolate chips, and 1/2 cup chopped nuts if you want (we didn't).

Now cover the batter with plastic wrap and put in the freezer for one hour.

To make the cookies, take small balls of the dough and roll them in powdered sugar.  The kids made the balls about the diameter of a quarter - I made them a little bigger.  Put them on a greased cookie sheet or on greaseproof paper on the tray.  Put them back in the freezer for 10 minutes, then straight to a 350 degree/170 degree oven.  Bake for 12 minutes or more or less.  The sugar on top gets cracks and looks fun.  I found them a bit soft at 12 minutes, but your mileage may vary.  Personally, I would skip the sugar coating, but the kids enjoyed doing it!

Enjoy!

Top 10 things I learned from my mother in law

October 24 is here again.  It's been 9 years since Sylvia died suddenly from malaria.

Here are top 10 things I learned from her:

1.  Live in a beautiful place
2.  See every part of the world you can
3.  Get into a swimming pool whenever possible
4.  Stop the car if you think you see a monkey
5.  You can open a can of tuna or sardines and eat anywhere
6.  A dinner mint will solve any nausea you get from eating a tuna sandwich while driving down a winding road.
7.  Comparison shop
8.  It's not a depression mentality, it's "good Yorkshire sense"
9.  Visit your mother whenever you can
10.  And as true today as the day she said it in 1996 "Gail is kind of high strung".

We miss you Sylvia.

What I'm here for

It's that time of year - unbelieveably nine years have passed, and I'm of course thinking about Sylvia Kacal, z"l, my mother in law, whom I knew for too short a time and who will always be with us.

And I'm thinking about connections and about a piece a friend posted on facebook, about unfriending someone before facebook.  Many people found this funny, but I found it sad. 

I feel like the greatest blessing in my life is that I continue to have people from all parts of my life and all kinds of connections with me.  That I can quote something I said 25 years ago in my status and have my friend say "I remember that moment."  I want every day to be worthy of this blessing, so I work to stay in the game when things get difficult with friends, or when I'm going against what is easy to build connections with my Israeli relatives.  When I realized my 3rd cousin was living here in this town, and when my kids' 4th cousin was born here, I felt like G-d was somehow bringing things back together again.

It's my lifetime wish to find out where my Uncle Jack is buried and to be able to go to his grave and say I'm sorry for the break in our family.  And when I connect on facebook with my young cousin Jake or my cousin Andrew who brought us so much information about our family tree, I feel like all my ancestors are smiling on me.  It is such a huge privilege to be part of this world where we can be reconnected and where people don't have to disappear. 

As hard as it may be sometimes to stay in the game - with family, friends and community - I don't want one more disconnect.  I want this whole life to be about connecting the dots, about keeping the strands woven.  I can see the past - quite a few miles back - and I am grateful for this present.

About the verse - Eleh Toldot Shamayim VaAretz - these are the generations of heaven and earth - I said last week that these are the people who are in heaven, who are always with us, and the people who are here on earth.  Let us always be connected.

Grief again?

I got up in the morning and opened facebook.  Sasha saw that Auntie Lisa had a photo of Lucas, and he asked to see it, and then the next time I saw he had a huge page of photos of Lucas up on the screen.  I'm thinking, this really sucks.  First thing in the morning my 6 year old is looking at photos of his cousin who died.  Why am I waking up in this kind of world?

We went to visit the kids other cousins.  I somehow made my way through watching Sasha so want the approval and attention of his 13 year old boy cousin.  How many 13 year olds want to play with 6 year olds?  The whole interaction made me want to cry.  I didn't figure out why I felt so strongly until we were on our way out the door and Gabi said something about "I have four and a half cousins." Her aunt tried to say she has five cousins, but it's not really true, because one of them isn't alive.

I've tried to soften my words here.

Then I read on Lisa's facebook that she just went to church for the first time since Lucas's funeral, which was almost 18 months ago.  That said it all.

Once upon a time...

I've spent the past week in a kind of culture shock feeling of weirdness, triggered by spending the weekend with an LGBT birthright group.  We were invited to bring our family and be kind of Israeli gay role models of sorts.  Expecting to find ourselves somehow mirrored by this group of 20 somethings, we were instead confronted by how the world we came out into has disappeared.  Nearly all the women in the group had long hair.  Anyone who looked much like Alen had transitioned to being male.  We saw scars from "top surgery" for the first time (at the pool).  Rather than finding ourselves mirrored, I found myself fighting to understand what I saw, searching in vain for the world I came out into in 1987, the community I thought I belonged to.

It took quite a few emails with a young friend in Boston, and a conversation today with a gay man my age to get back my sense of humor and to remember that Romanovsky and Phillips already described this phenomenon in their song, "Once upon a time..."

Best of all, my old brain remembers all the lyrics (more or less):

Once upon a time when life was simple and serene
My roommate was a lesbian and I a happy queen
I lived to go out dancing in my tightest fitting jeans
While she read the well of loneliness and lexus magazine

But now I go to pot lucks where the food is rather bleak
And I've joined a new support group that meets every other week
While she lives to go out dancing with her hair done up in curls
It's getting hard to tell the boys from the girls

Once upon a time when life was easy to predict
Sex was something I could get and I could get it quick
I'd look at all the men and know that I could take my pick
While she frowned upon my lifestyle with each and every trick

But now my sex adventures while still fun are rather tame
While she's discovered Joann Loulan and she'll never be the same
Cuz she dates a lot of women and she buys erotic toys
It's getting hard to tell the girls from the boys

Once upon a time when life was crystal clear
Each of us had favorite music that we loved to hear
I'd go dancing to sylvester down in key west every year
While she went to music festivals and worshipped holly near

But now our taste in music has completely turned around
And instead of going to michigan she goes to provincetown
While I play alix dobkin on my walkman now and then
It's getting hard to tell the women from the men

Times they change, fashions rearrange themselves
If you don't stay on top, you find yourself
Parked on a shelf

Once upon a time when life was black and white
I used to do the drag shows to be famous for a night
While she drank her beer without a glass and shopped for Mrs. Right
I'd cruise the local customers just asking for a light

But now she is the only one who steps out in a dress
While I've been wearing all her flannel shirts and sandals I confess
Now she smokes Virginia Slims instead of lucky strikes
It's getting hard to tell the boys from girls, hard to tell the men from women, hard to tell the faggots from the dykes.

Now if all of this should seem to show that everyone's gone mad
It's only part and parcel of a somewhat larger fad
Look no further than the glint of gold in many a straight boys ear
It's getting hard to tell the breeders from the queers.

Thanks to Romanovsky and Phillips and to my friends for reminding me I'm just getting old, and this happens every few years.  I don't know if I'm parked on a shelf yet, but I apparently need to heed their advice to "stay on top".