Dr. Joshua A. Fishman, the Passing of a Good Man / Lloyd & Judy

In 1969 I began a Doctoral Program in Language and Behavior at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Yeshiva University in New York City.

Dr. Joshua Aaron Fishman and his wife Gella helped Judy and me establish an enduring family fabric. In their home and at their table we observed Friday night candle lightings and religious and yiddish tutoring woven into their family life. We experienced the dynamic synergy of husband & wife, mother & father raising their sons. We participated in lively Hanukkah and Passover celebrations and in their Synagogue, Purim where groggers and stamping feet drowned out every mention of Haman. 

Gella introduced me to Yiddish education and encouraged me to enter an intensive summer study of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewry, a joint effort of the YIVO Institute, Columbia University and Yeshiva University.

All that we saw and felt in our interactions with Gella and Dr. Fishman provided an essential contribution to the spiritual and cultural architecture for our beginning family.

Judy and I have 9 children, who are all married, and this year we’ll have 40 grandchildren. The Fishman influence has been enormous and continuing as our children have established families of their own and carried our family culture forward.

We named two sons Aaron and Joshua.  And now after the deeper insight of 47 years of marriage and watching our daughters working with their husbands in bringing their own children to adulthood, Judy and I regret not having named a daughter Gella. 

Dr. Fishman died March 1, 2015.  Obituary at The Jewish Daily Forward.

The Delusion and Yearning for "Normal Time" / Lloyd

INTRO NOTE: 6 years ago this month we were upon interesting times in our family.  I was home recuperating from surgery, Judy was about to have her thyroid irradiated with radioactive iodine. This is treatment for hyperthyroidism, where thyroid tissue is destroyed and the patient takes thyroid hormone daily the rest of her life.

Judy's endocrinologist had simply scratched out this order on a standard prescription pad and told her drop by her local hospital radiology department for the medication whenever she had time.

Radiology said she had to have an appointment with nuclear medicine, that she’d be radioactive for a couple of days, and that she’d have to isolate herself-- especially from small children, pregnant women, her seminary class students, and her elderly father.  And get no closer than 3 feet to everyone else, plus many other precautions. Wow!

I was reading Michael Chabon’s recently published Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, 2009 as these interesting times were unfolding. Here are remarkable insights excerpted from his reflections on “Normal Time” (pg 275 ff):  

“We’ve had a run of crazy stuff going on around here lately, culminating (for the moment) with global economic collapse and my mother-in-law’s suffering an injury that looks as if it may permanently alter the contour and quality of her life, as well as the whole family’s—a pair of calamities that followed on a series of unpleasant surprises, diagnoses, minor crises, the dog undergoing a “spinal stroke,” professional setbacks, sorrows in the second  grade . . . and all the usual, unusual alarums and disruptions that result when six people and a Bernese mountain dog, requiring various mental, emotional, and physical accommodations, therapies, and treatments, conduct an ongoing experiment in measuring mutual interference in one another’s reality distortion fields by sharing a house in Berkeley, California, a place that may, at any moment—which will, given the way things have been going on lately-- be destroyed by a massive once-a-millennium earthquake, or by a raging October wildfire, or by the fire that immediately follows the earthquake. . .

“The thing is, we are six lucky people (and a dog), and all our needs and desires are amply met. We have set up the household to run smoothly when possible and to recover quickly when smooth is not an option. The children do their chores and their homework, the adults our work as spouses, parents, and writers, and if you took a sample of any random hour any day, if you employed some human calculus to arrest our progress, to ascertain our state at any given instant, you would find contentment with one another’s company, love and respect, a fruitful exchange of ideas, compulsive storytelling, joking around, even the odd outbreak of peace and quiet. But since this thing with my poor mother-in-law (broken femur, shattered wrist), I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how long it has been since the days around here have been normal. Steady. Routine. Productive. Neither beset not fraught nor teetering on some brink of disaster, free of emergency and crisis. I spend a lot of time thinking about, wishing for, working to arrange and to render inevitable, the return to our lives of Normal Time. And yet in trying to work my way back to the last golden era, I find myself casting my memory so far that the exercise begins to call into the question the very idea . . . that there has ever been such a time. It turns out that the whole thing may be a delusion. . .

“. . . this utopian or millenarian yearning for the coming days of Normal Time, of time to spare, of time in plenty. Time not just for work and reflection and unhurried lovemaking but for all kinds of fine and tiny things. Time to learn German. Time to print out the digital photos and reorganize the albums. Time to lavish on my younger children as I seem to have lavished it on their older siblings (though back then I thought there was never enough time for anything). Time for regular lunches with my mother. Time to get deep into a baseball season again, to linger over the box scores in the morning, to watch a meaningless game between teams I don’t care about, just out of fondness for the game. . . Time simply to stretch out, to play with, to dandle and dilate and waste with my children and my wife.

“Instead it’s just, as Arnold Toynbee or Henry Ford or Dr. McCoy used to say of history, one damn thing after another, and often several damn things at the same time, overlapping swaths of color on the digital calendar, conflicts and cancellations, two tasks half-done badly where one might have been pulled off in style. There is never, in the words of Irish poet Tom Paulin, any “long lulled pause / before history happens.” Only days after my wife and I guided our last baby into kindergarten, we began preparing in earnest to send our half-grown woman off to high school next fall; in the interval, the stock market crashed and my mother-in-law fell down a flight of stairs. There is no Normal Time, or rather, this is it, with all its accidents and discontinuities. With a breathtaking sequence, your last child leaves home, gets married, has children, and then you fall and break your leg, and the next thing you know, you’re approaching  . . . The end, unless the end, too, is a delusion.  After that, either way, there is no time at all. . .”

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COMMENT: When working through Chabon's writing it helps to know that as a youth Woodie Allen's movie Annie Hall had a major impact on his attitude towards life--be suspicious about anything good happening. The signature Yiddish minor key in music and life is dominant.

My son Ben put a more positive spin on crazy times: 

“If all kinds of things seem to be going wrong in your life, don’t think, ‘The system is broken in my case.’ Realize that this is the system. Might as well enjoy it.”

Elder Dallin H. Oaks addresses making the most of limited resources through priorities in "Good, Better, Best." 

He also demonstrates a more expansive vision of mortality in the YouTube video, "In the Spirit of Thanksgiving."

Family In The Here And Now / Lloyd

I love having English majors and just readers in general in my life.  Jennifer has recommended that I read several books that were life changing and horrific, books which I could not recommend to anyone else unless we knew one another nearly as well as Jennifer and I know each other.  I have come to believe that English majors are the one subversive group that keeps BYU in the real world. The knowing Relief Society sisters make a similar contribution in our wards and stakes.

One book Jennifer recommended, the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr., took me back to the edge of the black hole of my worst and hospitalized depression. But it reminded me that at the time I didn’t let myself teeter into that abyss never to return and assured me that dropping or jumping into that deep hole wasn’t a foregone conclusion for the future.

Another book that Jennifer recommended was Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. And after reading that book I readily snapped up Michael Chabon’s just released Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son.

  

This can be a profane book and no amount of caution can prepare you for it, but the art of reading is to wisely pick and choose, and I would like to relate some of what Chabon has to offer. I did read it over to Judy, and she said that she couldn’t relate to any of it—it spoke so differently from her own experience. “Maybe because it’s a male memoir, maybe because of its Jewish perspective, maybe because the writing is almost stream of conscience like you speak,” she opinioned.

Still I like how Chabon got at how I feel when I’m with family across generations—visiting one-on-one, as a small group, or big like Thanksgiving. When we’re together and truly engaged, the differences are bracketed out and we’re contemporaries. And I have great joy.

one-on-one

small group

Thanksgiving Feast

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Chabon reflects on his daughter’s recent bat mitzvah (at age 13)/ pgs 302-306:

“She is young and strong, and I am graying, have acid reflux, and my neck hurts, and soon I am going to be dead, true though all of these statements may be. First of all, I feel that I am in the prime of my life. I have never understood more (though still very few) of life’s mysteries than I do now, or trusted my instincts to a greater degree . . . In spite of the creaky neck and the occasional needle of fire in my belly, my bones, joints, and organ remain more or less in good working order. . . [he’s 45 yrs old]

“And looking at my fine half-grown daughter as she led the afternoon service, her slender neck arched like a feat of engineering, her alto steady, clear, and shining like the silver pointer that she clasped in her hand as it traced the path of the Hebrew letters on the parchment before her, I found myself considering not time’s passage but its unfathomable stillness, its immobility, the great universal fiction that there is such a thing as time. Your children’s childhoods as you watch then unscroll are always indexed to your own, visibly and invisibly, their incidents and episodes, pleasure and calamities snarled with your own. Your childhood, or your memory of it, is present in every moment of theirs, answering it and prefiguring it and shadowing it like a continuo. And then every so often something happens to erase all sense of difference between you, as on one of those multigenerational Star Treks when the old Enterprise and the new both show up fifty years apart, at the same quantum singularity, a gateway through time, and Captains Kirk and Picard take each other’s measure. There is no future and no past, and they are both in the prime of their lives. There is only ever now, and they each inhabit it.

“Like gravitational wormholes in the fabric of the universe, children collapse time and space around themselves. I was standing just behind Sophie for part of the time that she spent reading from the Torah, and her silver yad, its tip formed in the shape an effete little pointing hand, seemed to careen down the column of ancient text, to fly like the thirty-one years gone since the day that I stood in a dusty-rose three-piece suit with white piping at the lapels, reading from that crazy old rolled-up book of lies, laws, and wonders. We hoisted our prayer shawl higher and swallowed, took a breath, then set off again down the column of Hebrew letters. For an instant, past and future perfectly coincided. She was not rising and I was not setting. Because the lives of a child and a parent are not a pair of counterweights, dragging the hands of a clock around its sorry dial, one rising and the other falling at exactly the inexorable rate of gears and passing seconds. Or perhaps they are, but if so, it’s a process that is happening still, much too slowly for me see it. All I could see that day for an hour or so, in that high sunny room with a blue-painted ceiling and everyone we love and care about around us, was my wife and my daughter and me, neither passing nor being passed but here together for a while, hanging out in the middle of life.

“We are so accustomed to thinking of ourselves, of our lives and histories, in terms of the succession of generations—“Let the word go forth from this time and place . . . that the torch has been passed to a new generation”—that we no longer even question the validity or truth of the idea, which apart from the most strictly biological sense, has no real meaning and no basis at all in the way we live those lives or experience our histories as they unfold. There is only one time, and one life, and we all share them, and if there is a torch, then it is far too cumbersome and heavy to be passed.

“When the dancing began—we started, of course with a hora—I escorted my daughter to a sturdy chair, and a bunch of us, young men and old, graceful and ungainly, stout and fit, took hold of the legs and hoisted her up. There were far more of us than chair legs or places to grab them, and yet somehow, lurching and laughing and tripping over own and one another’s feet, we got her up into the air and managed to dance. She tossed and shone like a torch as we carried her around the room, all of us working together to trace our passage across the dance floor, like the silver yad flying along the letters of the oldest story in the world. I looked up at her, grinning and beautiful and terrified and happy, and felt not the same old “time is fleeting and we are all mortal” but something finer and simpler and harder even to bear in mind. This is our life happening, I told her, or would have told her if I could have caught my breath long enough to say it over clamor the clarinet and fiddle, and it’s happening right now.” 

The spirit of man & computers (an analogy) / Lloyd

"'The spirit and the body are the soul of man.’ Man is a dual being, a spirit within a mortal body.

"It is difficult to teach about the intangible, spiritual part. But there are ways to do it. For example, your students know about computers. A personal computer made of metal, plastic, glass, and a dozen other materials will hold an astonishing amount of information. All of the standard works can be stored there, and in addition, sets of encyclopedias, dictionaries, books on a whole library of subjects, even illustrations and mathematical formulas.

"With the press of a few keys, one can select any part of what is stored and see it instantly on a screen. One may, by pressing a few more keys, rearrange, add to, or subtract from what is stored in the computer. Press another key or two and you can print a copy of whatever you desire, even in full color. You then can hold in your hand tangible, absolute proof of what is inside there and how it is arranged.

"If, however, you should take the computer completely apart, you could not find one word of it, not one illustration, not one tangible evidence that there are volumes, verses, poems, and illustrations inside the computer.

"You could dissolve the computer with acids or burn it and you would not find one tangible word of evidence. You could no more find words in the ashes of a computer than you can find the spirit in the ashes of a cremated human body.

"No one doubts that this great base of information is actually stored in the computer. It should not be too difficult to teach each youngster that there is within the human body a spirit. Notwithstanding that it is invisible and intangible, it is the very essence of reality. You can, in context of the gospel plan, explain what that spirit is. Let me say that again. You can, in context of the gospel plan, explain what that spirit is, where it came from, and what the destiny of each of us is." Boyd K. Packer in Mine Errand from the Lord, Deseret Press, 2008.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: On 9 Dec 1998 my brother Paul and I gave my father a blessing of release. He passed away early the next morning before we had awakened. Later that afternoon dad's High Priest group leader assisted Paul and me in properly dressing dad's body for a Latter-day Saint burial.

I can tell you that the difference in dad from the night before when he was alive, as sick and physically debilitated as he was, and at the time of our dressing him was dramatically clear. Before, he was our father; after, we clothed his remains. But we also felt that dad's body was sacred and important to him. It was a most reverent experience. -- Lloyd

"Happy Thanksgiving" / Judy & Lloyd

Norman Rockwell

We want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving! We are all excited about tomorrow when everyone close-by will be here, 20 people all together.

When we were living in Germany, we knew an Englishman who told us, 

"You Yanks have the right idea about a holiday--you just stay home and eat. No church, no presents, not even cards. Just the feast."

Of course there is also the idea of gratitude and gathering around to dedicate a whole day to giving personal & family thanks. Now that's a great idea for a proper holiday!

Yay for Rain, Flossing and 3-D / Judy

first real rain in nearly 8 months -- lovely

It rained today, a real rain, the first one since last April. Hopefully, now the fire threat will diminish.

winning battles with dental floss

Also, I went to the dentist today and I was actually happy to go because for the past six months I've been flossing every day, unlike previous times when I only floss two weeks before my appointment. It's amazing the difference it made in my gums (I'm at the age when I'm interested in my gums).

And the hygienist said that flossing helps all kinds of other problems too from diabetes to heart disease. She says some doctors hold up a piece of floss and tell their patients it's one of the best tools to prevent heart disease. Who knew? I told her that to get myself motivated to floss all the time, I picture a mean-looking leprechaun and call him Perry O'Donnell-and every night I do battle with Perry O'Donnell. So far I'm winning.

3-D, an eye opener

Last night Lloyd and I went to see "Bolt" in 3-D. It was great and I'll see almost anything in 3-D. I'm convinced it's the first step to the Holosuite because almost all the previews of shows from Disney are going to be in 3-D too; it's only a matter of time. I wonder what it says that the last two movies we've seen at the theater are animated ones?

a word from our sponsor - keeping perspective

One last thing: we had our Primary program on Sunday too and there was one little girl, probably about 5 years old, with blond curls, who sang louder than anyone. She was great; she knew all the words and sang her heart out. Then when it was time for her speaking part, she said, "...and I know Jesus will come again and rule in the  M E N E L I U M."

Just Newsy / Judy

change in bishopric

We got a new bishopric on Sunday. When I first came in and looked at the program, it said the meeting  was under the direction of the stake president. I thought, wow, they’re going to talk about all the stuff that’s going on about Prop 8 and the backlash against the church. But no; it was a new bishopric. Bishop Pearson hasn’t been well, and the rigors of annual tithing settlement were looming large. We now have Bishop Eric Kasper and his counselors are Dave Platt and Brian Rober.

Madagascar 2

Last night Dad and I went to see “Madagascar 2” and it was really good. I laughed or smiled all the way through it. I think the kids would especially like it, although so would their parents. I couldn’t help but notice how amazing the animation/drawing was—absolutely beautiful. They’ve come a long way since “Snow White.”

just created a facebook account

By the way, I just signed up on Facebook because Hilary made me. Of course, since I’m brand new,  I have no friends, which is pretty pathetic. Now I’ll have to ask her how to get some.

great bumper sticker

I have to tell you about this great bumper sticker I saw:  “I have CDO, which is just like OCD except the letters are in alphabetical order, as they should be.”