I Was Never Any Good at Titles

My Grandmother

2008-03-04T07:24:00.000-08:00

Frances Kornbluth, my grandmother, was a hard woman whose ice blue eyes and hefty girth reflected her steely, obstinate personality. She was full of contradiction, hypocrisy, and black and white opinions; no matter how much knowledge you obtained, you could never be right and you could never know more than her. She demanded and deserved reverence for her remarkable ability to survive, but her tactless and harsh treatment of others turned her into caricature.

My grandmother claimed to be an authority on everything without having the proof or experience to back it up. She bellowed her politics but rarely voted. She lectured my mother (her daughter), a real estate agent, about the housing market. She lectured my father, a criminal defense attorney, about the law. She lectured me, a brimming baseball scholar on a sport about which she knew little.

As a kid, my grandmother’s braggadocio, backhanded compliments, broken promises, and obvious barbs intimidated the hell out of me, and I used to cringe whenever I knew we were visiting her or when I heard her gravely voice destroyed from decades of heavy smoking. She even had these talon-like fingernails, always painted dark red. I wondered if they could pierce my flesh as easily as her tongue punctured my self-confidence.

“You had better not ever bring home a fat girl,” she once told me, her ample frame stuck in the restaurant booth where we sat. I sucked in my stomach to mask my own chubbiness.

“You’re not a real baseball fan,” she once admonished me, her finger pointing accusingly at my youthful face after I’d expounded on my beloved New York Yankees. There were no further comments from her, just those painful words deflating my childhood enthusiasm.

Her worst offense came when I was fourteen. At the time I was a struggling junior high school kid. I was lethargic in my studies with a massive procrastination problem. I was the poster boy for a supposedly “gifted” student failing to live up to his potential. Disgusted by my poor work ethic, my grandmother decided to make me a deal; if I would bring up my grades beyond a 90 average, she would quit smoking, a habit that she’d practiced for more than forty years and absolutely loved. The deal was struck in a restaurant and my parents, sister, and best friend were witnesses. No one except me believed my grandmother could quit smoking if I came through, but she was adamant. She could quit whenever she wanted.

By the end of the school year, my grades had improved dramatically and I had far surpassed the agreed-upon threshold. I had held my end of the bargain and consequently, it was time for my grandmother to do the same. As promised, she quit. I was so proud of myself, not just for getting my grades up but for getting my grandmother to quit a habit I found repulsive. And I was so proud of her for quitting. When I caught her outside smoking a cigarette a few months later, my heart sank, but it wasn’t until I accused her of going back on her promise that it actually broke. “There was no deal. I never said such a thing.” She never did gain back my full respect.

By the end of her life, my grandmother’s power over me had considerably weakened for I had adopted my father’s approach to dealing with her. To my mother’s chagrin, we goaded her into making buffoonish statements. By doing so, we made her into a cartoon, a mascot. At family get-togethers, we’d challenge her until she said something outrageous that could get the whole family (except my mother) chortling behind her back. No longer did she have the power to split the family as she did once when she told my cousin, who had just had a nose job and finally felt good about herself, that she should have corrected her “ugliness” years ago.

Now in my 30s, I can understand what caused her inability and outright refusal to appear weak or vulnerable. She came to New York from Poland when she just sixteen. She spoke no English and had little family in the United States. She was supposed to be followed by her parents and brother but they fell victim to Adolph Hitler and the Holocaust. Like most immigrants, she learned American ways and values on the fly: hard work, persistence, family. She married a brilliant doctor and had a child but lost her husband at a very young age. Moments before he died in fact, my grandfather apparently diagnosed himself and told my grandmother that a brain aneurysm was about to take his life. She spent most of her life working. She took a job at Lord and Taylor and eventually retired with a prestigious title but little in the bank. She suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure. She relied heavily (but without recognition) on the good will of my parents who paid for her apartment, drove her wherever she needed to go, and took care of her when she fell terminally ill. She led a difficult life of heartbreak and it only makes sense she would construct mental walls of the thickest material. By the end of her life, even her accent had disappeared.

In her final months, as she lay ravaged by lung cancer, my grandmother finally praised her family and told us how much she loved us. This woman, who for as long as I knew her would never acknowledge her mistakes even when faced with blanket proof, finally admitted she had been wrong. She told me she was proud of me, proud of all the things I had accomplished and all the successes she knew were in my future. She called my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) beautiful and wonderful. I sometimes wonder, though. Had she made some miracle recovery, would she have denied ever saying these words?

“There’s a lesson in this,” my mother said to me as my grandmother finally lay quiet in her bedroom. We both had tears in our eyes, though I don’t think either of us knew if we wept from grief or liberation. “Never wait too long to tell people you love that you love and appreciate them. It’s just not worth it.”

Get Outta My Head!

2008-02-26T19:13:00.001-08:00

How many of you have a song stuck in your head right now? Well, I've got one and it's not just stuck in my head, it's taken root and holding tea parties. For months now I find myself humming or whistling or God help me, singing it on a near daily basis. Now I know what you're thinking..."That's bad, but really, it could be a lot worse." It is. This song or "travesty" as I like to call it. is inexplicably MC Hammer's "Pray." You can start weeping for me now.

I could deal with this if it was a remotely good piece of music...some classical work or classic rock ditty maybe? A good 80's or 90's song perhaps? But Hammer's ode to the church? In the words of the immortal Gob Bluth: "COME ON!"

I never know when Hammer's gonna strike. Sometimes it's early in the day, sometimes late. Sometimes he's kind enough to give me (YOU GOT TO PRAY...PRAY!!...arrrgh...please Hammer, stop hurting me!) a day or 2 off, but that's probably because he knows that providing me with any sliver of hope or relief makes his comeback that much more offensive and cruel. I'm beginning to think I might have to start paying Hammer royalties.

Sometimes I even find myself unwittingly singing it but substituting whatever words I happen to see at that moment. Example: "pc riCHARD'S CHARDS!! pc riCHARDS!! CHARDS!! Sony tvs only 400 bucks...pc riCHARD'S CHARDS!!" and so forth.

So I figure there's only three ways out of this mess:

Go back in time and kill Hammer
Invent that machine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that allows you to pinpoint and exterminate bad memories
Listen to a good song a zillion or so times until it unceremoniously bludgeons "Pray" out of my head

Since choices 1 and 2 are currently impossible, choice 3 seems to be the way to go. But which song? Could The Sopranos theme whack Hammer? Song suggestions are most welcome.

What's in a Name?

2008-02-14T11:29:00.000-08:00

In case you didn't know it, I despise the name "Lorne." It's a mess of a name...ripe for ridicule and rhyming and confusion. In the Jewish religion, you must be named after a deceased loved one. I was unlucky enough to be named after my maternal grandfather, Leon. My parents disliked every "L" name they came up with - Lee, Lawrence, Luke, Leon the Second - until my mother suggested the name "Lorne." Where'd she hear it? It was actually the name of one of her students (yes, my mom the 20+ year real estate veteran was once a teacher). So in actuality, I'm named after some poor kindred soul in one of my mom's classes.

99.999% of people get my wrong. Most misspell it. Many find themselves tripping over it as if my name were as difficult to say as "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." A number, some who I've known and been friends with for more than a decade, still can't get it right.

Generally you can hear one or more of the following when you hear me introduce myself:

L-O-R-N-E
The "E" is silent
No, not Lo-REN
Not Lauren either
Not Lorn-IE
One syllable
As in "Green"
As in "Michaels"
Rhymes with corn or horn or porn (oh how the kids had fun with those...yes Corny Lorney is pure genius...as is Horny Lorney. Side note, my mom used to call me Lornie...maybe that's why I asked her to stop? There was even a song we were forced to sing in elementary school that included the phrase "The horn, the horn, awakes me at morn." Think of the variations!)

You'd think maybe I'd switch to my middle name, but alas, I've been cursed with the middle name "Ira." Sure people would probably get it right, but "Ira" just doesn't evoke strength or purpose or recognition. Plus there was "cousin Ira" on Mad About You. He wasn't much of a winner. Though Ira Levin did write Rosemary's Baby and I do like evil...

Anyway, even if I chose to go with Ira, the odds of me finding my moniker on a novelty key chain or mug would remain slim to none. And it's doubtful the Romper Room lady would have ever seen "Ira" in her magic mirror...oh how I wished she would have said my name just once!

I can't even win with my initials as I learned when I had them engraved on my bowling ball. "LIJ" also known as the acronym for Long Island Jewish Hospital. Sigh.

While I've been called everything from Lauren to Lance, from Alpo (thanks Lorne Green for endorsing such a terrific product!) to Lawnmower, my favorite name story has to be from my high school math class. My teacher, Ms. Murray, had a bit of a speech impediment. OK, that's an understatement...she spoke like Elmer Fudd. Imagine having your teacher instruct you on things like "fwactions." Good times. Anyway, she called me "Jeff." I figured she just couldn't pronounce my name as it'd come out "Wawn" or maybe she was doing a play on my last name, "Jaffe." Turns out neither was the case.

At parent-teacher conference, my mom asked Ms. Muwwy why she called me Jeff. "I get him confused with Jeff who sits in the fwont," she said. That was a satisfactory enough answer for my parents so when they got home, they nonchalantly conveyed this information that was supposed to finally solve my mystery of mistaken identity.

"That's great, mom," I said. "Only problem is...Jeff's black!"

Maybe I should change my name to Max...Max Power. Hey, it worked for Homer Simpson once!

The Super Bowl

2008-02-05T09:26:00.001-08:00

I hate the Super Bowl. It's a joke...an exhibition of pure American commercialism and excess. It is an event that dwarfs the game itself. It is to the normal sports soap opera what the melodrama is to the normal drama.

So ask me how surprised I am to say that Super Bowl XLII (even this Roman numeral thing is pretentious) was one of the best and most thrilling sporting events I've ever seen. I'm shocked, stunned, dumbfounded! For the first time in years, I found myself forgetting about everything that surrounds this media monsoon...I found myself forgetting about the bloated half-time show and the commercials and who sings the National Anthem and the coin toss and all the other garbage that goes with it. For once, I was captivated by the game.

Now, I'll admit I'm a Giants fan, but I'll also state that I'm not longer as heavily invested in sports teams as I was back in the day. I learned long ago that real happiness does not lie in the outcome of an arbitrary game or season. Now I'm able to sit back and enjoy the game for what it is...a game. And that's exactly what I did during this Super Bowl. This was one of the greatest sports games I had ever witnessed. This was what sports is all about: David vs Goliath, miraculous plays as the final seconds tick away, come from behind victories, incredible athleticism on display, staying calm in the face of pressure (both real and figurative), the little guy becoming the "hero" of the day, people joyfully losing themselves in a common bond for a short period of time. Nothing else mattered. Not the Heinz Red Zone. Not the star player's lady friends. Not multi-millionaires playing a kids game. Not commercial tie-ins or corporate sponsors or parties or celebs promoting their upcoming movies or TV shows.

Just the game.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

2008 - 25 = 1983

2008-01-28T20:35:00.000-08:00

1983 was 25 years ago and by that I mean 2008 represents the 25th anniversary of Return of the Jedi. I find this rather frightening since it feels like just yesterday that my dad and I waited on a line wound round the block to finally see the infamous Jabba the Hutt. It seems like just yesterday I traded Return of the Jedi cards with my friends at Rolling Hills Day Camp (I remember my favorite card was the one featuring Max Rebo aka the blue elephant-like dude who played the piano in Jabba's bar band). It seems like just yesterday that George Lucas foreshadowed the abomination known as Jar Jar Binks by introducing the kid-centric ewoks and changing the original title from the ultra-cool Revenge to the more innocuous Return.

Now, to put this in perspective, back in '83 people were marveling over the 25th anniversary of Vertigo, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Old Yeller. That's right...the same amount of time has passed since Boba Fett, everyone's favorite bounty hunter, was beaten by a blind Han Solo that had passed since a boy heard his beloved dog take a slug in the skull. This is how fast time is going. Before you know it, Titanic will be 10 years old. Wait...Titanic IS 10 years old! Make it stop!

Other things celebrating their 25th anniversaries in 2008:

The final episode of M*A*S*H airs
The Cabbage Patch Kids cause mass murders amongst desperate parents
People begin to "Just Say No" to drugs (though they won't realize their drug-addled brains are equivalent to frying eggs until 4 years later)
Sally Ride becomes the first woman in space
The Police ironically advocate stalking in "Every Breath You Take"
The Baltimore Orioles win their last WS

American

2008-01-27T19:35:00.001-08:00

American: A person able to recite the entire cast of "Just the 10 of Us" despite not seeing the show for more than a decade, but unable to calculate a tip without using a cell phone

Happiness

2008-01-26T14:00:00.001-08:00

Happiness: waking up next to the woman you love

Endless

2008-01-25T08:11:00.001-08:00

Endless: a word used in endless articles (scholarly and journalistic), short stories, novels, opinion pieces, essays, memoirs, blog posts, classics, grant proposals, Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Prize winners, Newberry Prize Winners, advertisements, cookie fortunes, horoscopes, reviews, Dear John letters, instruction manuals, theses, dissertations, term papers, speeches, press releases, and an endless array of other written materials...

Who hates ya, baby?

2008-01-24T10:43:00.001-08:00

Facebook is weird, wild stuff. According to my Heroes Ability application, I can paint the future. According to my TV trivia box, I'm a virtuoso. According to my Superpoke application, I've been "trout slapped" (whatever that means) by my sister. And according to my entourage, I have over 90 friends.

The friend section of facebook is pretty cool. It's helped me reconnect with people I haven't seen, spoken to, or even thought of in 5, 10, 15, 20, sometimes 25 years. I've reconnected with friends who now go by different names, friends who I never thought would remember me, friends from Australia and Canada and all across the USA. I've even reconnected with Richard Capatosto, a friend I haven't seen since JHS whose legendary 7th or 8th grade haiku has been quoted and re-quoted amongst my close friends for almost 20 years:

I see a kitten
I see a lead pipe
Everything is red

I'm finding it pretty exciting when I find someone I haven't seen since before Mr. Belvedere was even a twinkle in some hard-up TV writer's mind or someone sends me a friend request with a note asking what I've been doing since that time I wet my pants in kindergarten, but yesterday I received a friend request that actually gave me a little jolt. It was a request from a girl I knew in elementary school more than 20 years ago. The problem is, I HATED her with a passion on a rope on a stick. This girl made my 4th or 5th or 6th (can't remember exactly which) grade a living hell. You see, this girl was one of those people who found joy in the torturing and tormenting of nice, shy young boys. She made up a nickname for me, one that really didn't have any meaning, but one that stuck and burned nonetheless. By the time most of her friends had taken to calling me this name as if chanting a mantra, I was spending most of my nights crying myself to sleep. Eventually, I fought back. I'd call her a my own made-up meaningless name in retaliation and soon enough, the barbs stopped. But it took me a long time to get over the hurt.

Now this girl who 20+ years ago made me scared to go to school thanks to her arbitrary, yet venomous name-calling, wants to be my friend. She even attached a nice message asking how I've been and extending her well wishes. Hell, by now, she's probably a loving wife and mother and all-around nice person. I honestly didn't know what to do. She probably doesn't even remember what she did and actually, I hadn't thought about it or her in a looooooooooooooong time, but just seeing her name made my stomach twitch anxiously.

In the end, I accepted her friend request. Maybe, as another friend suggested, she's working through a 10-step and needs to make amends. Maybe she just wants to make amends. Maybe she's blocked the events of that grade school year out of her mind or simply, just forgotten them. More likely, she's actually a mature 33-yr-old woman who's genuinely excited to hear from someone she knew as a kid.

Regardless, the important thing and the reason why I accepted her facebookian request for friendship is: I'm no longer that shy, scared little boy. :)

Racists like Starbucks too!

2008-01-24T09:22:00.000-08:00

When you think of Starbucks, you generally think of overpriced coffee and forced hipness, not Klan members sans bed sheets. But just the other day I learned that the KKK is alive and well in America's favorite coffee house. I very rarely go into Starby's since I'm not a coffee drinker, but every once in awhile I'm willing to pony up a week's pay for a hot chocolate or strawberries & cream frappaccino. This past Tuesday, the day after MLK day as it turns out, was one of those days.

I stopped in the 3rd Ave and 23rd St 'Bucks, one of the 3 located on 23rd St between 3rd & 6th Aves in Manhattan. This one is rather small...only about 5 tables or so. I ordered a HC and moved to the designated spot to await my drink. Behind me, at a small table by the front window, a man and woman, both white, both probably in their late 30s to mid-40s are sitting and conversing just as a zillion men & women are sitting and conversing in Starbucks across the world. They're both dressed fairly well...the man in a nice button down shirt and slacks, the woman in a black suit and a faux fur hat. Neither person's head is shaved and there are no visible white supremacy tattoos. Of course, I just glimpsed in their direction...I didn't actually investigate.

Not exactly sure what they were talking about, but I overhead the guy saying "....that f**king jew c**t at the DA's office."

Now, of course, my ears prick up at this little burst of racial bias laced with profanity...not because I'm Jewish, but because I'm standing in a cozy Starbucks on a nice, sunny, Tuesday morning awaiting a cup of HC.

The guy asks the woman, "You got any jews at the office?"

"No Jews, just n*****s and sp*cs," she says nonchalantly.

This is one of the most bizarre things I've ever encountered. Not that I don't know there's blatant racism out there each and every day, it was just the context of the situation that floored me...that these two people, both seemingly "ordinary" if there is such a thing, are sitting there having a "normal" conversation on a Tuesday morning in a fairly small downtown Manhattan coffee shop filled with Asians and blacks and latinos and myself, a Jew married to a latino, mere footsteps away.

All I could do was get my HC and shake my head. Sure Starbucks is trendy, but since when did racial slurring over morning coffee become the hip thing to do?