"The reason for the season": Whatever our religion, we need peace and goodwill all year round!

The thing that I like best about the holiday season is the open and frequent call for “peace on earth” and “goodwill to people”(at one time, “men”). OK, at one time, many decades ago, I most liked the presents. Of course, the main “holiday” in the US is Christmas, a Christian celebration. But, as someone who is not a Christian, and was not brought up in any Christian church, I like those sentiments, expressed in Christmas cards and banners and the ubiquitous holiday movies like “A Christmas Carol” and its descendant “It’s a Wonderful Life” (Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5000? A lot longer back in 1946!). What I hope that they mean is that Christianity, the dominant religion in the US values them.

It is important because it could, at most times of the year, be hard to identify these as the values held by the bulk of those who call themselves Christian. Peace, and goodwill, and empathy, and caring about others including strangers, are not – by a long shot – the dominant sentiments or behaviors we see among Americans (and others). War is big. Hate is big. Castigating and oppressing the other is big. Excluding, not welcoming, the stranger, is huge. Anger, rage, meanness, violence, and close-mindedness often seem to dominate the landscape.

While not Christian, I have read the New Testament, but more important have watched what many people who are Christians say and do in all seasons. There are many thousands who volunteer to help the needy, to feed them, to build houses for them, to offer both financial and moral support. In my area, southern Arizona, groups such as Samaritans, Humane Borders, and No More Deaths (No Mas Muertes) welcome the stranger and reach out, giving of themselves and taking real risks to help. As a doctor, I see others who travel around the world to impoverished countries and even war zones to offer their skills, usually at their own expense. These people are around all year, doing amazing things, motivated by their faith. I do not share their religion, but I am awed by the good works that they do. There are a lot of ads for St. Jude’s Hospital for Children on TV at this time of year. I knew that Danny Thomas, the late actor, was deeply involved in supporting it, but I looked it up and discovered that he founded it. And took responsibility for raising money to build it and to operate, and “never send a bill” to a patient or family. The former president and first lady Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter built houses for the needy with Habitat for Humanity.

There are many other examples of people whose actions demonstrate that they seek to emulate the Jesus of the New Testament who helps the sick and poor. Who commands his followers to treat their neighbor, and indeed the stranger, as themselves. Who reaches out and touches, not just heals, the leper, an act that would have made him unclean in those days. Who brings women into his ministry. Who turns over the tables of the moneylenders at the temple, and warns that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven.

It is quite remarkable that entire church structures have been built on principles at variance with, indeed in opposition to, those teachings and, more important, those actions throughout the history of the last 2000 years. Selling indulgences, passports for admission to Heaven for the rich? Crusades? Capital punishment? Hating the other? Excluding women from central roles? People of color? People with different gender and sexual identities? Fire and brimstone? Given that history, I guess it should not surprise me, then, that so many today who profess to be Christians in fact act on hate and intolerance rather than peace and good will. But it makes me sad.

When folks, I guess particularly Christians, want to justify hate, punishment, exclusion, and generally mean things, they turn away from the New Testament and cite the Old. That part of their Bible, the only Bible for Jews, is chock full of nasty and mean things that you are supposed to do to other people. Leviticus, the third book of the Torah (called the Pentateuch by Christians) is especially rich in meanness. It is where the proscription of men sleeping with men, for example, is found. Of course, there is a whole lot of other stuff proscribed, and to be punished with death (often with a specific type of death, such as stoning or burning – no guns, they didn’t have them, no lethal injections either). Chapter 20 is especially rife with things that folks should be put to death for. One of the most effective expositions of the selectivity with which many Christians choose the parts of that chapter to believe in and enforce is provided by the fictional US President Jeb Bartlet on the old TV show “The West Wing”, where he takes down an ostensible Bible fundamentalist by asking about how he should follow many of the less well-known commands therein. But, by the way, Leviticus also contains a lot of good stuff foreshadowing the teachings of Jesus in the 19^th chapter. Check it out. Some of that chapter is observed today only by the most Orthodox Jews (e.g., not cutting the hair at the sides of the head or the beard, Lev 19:27), but, relevant to today, there is Lev 19:34 “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” This does not seem to be the dominant ideology around now.

A popular phrase not long ago was “What would Jesus do?”, abbreviated “WWJD?”. Taking it at face value, this is what those I have referred to above do. It is hard, reading about Jesus in the Gospels, to believe that he would not, in virtually in every situation or controversy, take the side of the poor against the rich, the powerless against the powerful, the peacemakers against the warmakers, the weak against the strong. It’d be great if that were what we saw that from most people, Christian or not.

There are rich people in the Bible, and I cannot find a call for them to be stoned to death per se. But they do not get the privilege and honor that they receive today. Today those who are billionaires and do not care about others, who keep hoards of wealth that neither they nor their dependents will be able to use while millions go hungry and homeless, are honored. But their behavior is despicable whatever religion or non-religion they subscribe do.

If they are Christian, they must be imagining a needle with a very big eye.

Teasing is never OK: Maybe we did learn that in kindergarten

In 1986, American minister Robert Fulghum wrote “Everything I need to know I learned in Kindergarten”, and it has been revised, reprinted, and widely quoted ever since. It is a good book, and has good insights, most of which are to a large degree wishful thinking – that is, they point to lessons regarding how to behave with others that were taught in kindergarten and should be observed by adults, but too often are not. If my mother was your kindergarten teacher, you learned this – and this was only one of the many ways you were very lucky to have her.

But, at an advanced age, I realize that many of the things that I – and IMO others – need to know was, if taught in kindergarten, not sufficiently emphasized, and we need a reminder. One particular example is teasing, making fun of other people and then, ostensibly, excusing it by saying “I was only teasing,” or “I was only joking,” as if that made it ok. Kind of like shooting someone and saying “I was only trying to wound, not to kill”.

The underlying postulate here, which it has taken me into old age to be sure (IMO) is correct, is that ANYTIME ANYONE says ANYTHING bad about you, it hurts. Maybe more, maybe less; maybe you get over it soon and forget about it, or maybe it sticks around making you feel at least a little (or maybe a lot) bad for a long time. Maybe your whole life. It never makes you feel good, and, contrary to what is sometimes said, it doesn’t even matter if it is true, a little bit true, or completely false. People saying something negative or critical to or about you feels bad.

Of course, there are times when this is intentional. Any criticism of what you do or did, whether at school, or at work, or in your personal life, feels a little bad. And if that is the intent of the critic, it is a separate (but important) issue, not exactly the one I am dealing with here. Sometimes people are doing something wrong (or “wrong”) at their job and need to be corrected, and if it feels a little bad, then that is the price to be paid. Or sometimes the critic is just mean, in general or to the person being criticized. But if the intention is to hurt, I can’t argue that you shouldn’t do it because it might hurt. I guess.

I realized in the work environment that, sincerity aside, when someone says something good about you it feels at least a little good and when someone says something bad it feels at least a little bad. If your boss compliments you, even if it feels insincere (like they just came from a managements seminar where they were told “compliment your employees”) it still feels a little good. And if someone says something mean or critical that you know to be totally untrue and coming from the ignorance, meanness, or vindictiveness of the critic and is without real value, it still feels a little bad. And, of course, the mean and vindictive (and, to be sure, the incompetent who may have no other weapon) know that it does.

But what I am concerned about here is when the critic is (or says they are) not intending to be mean or hurt, but are “only” teasing. There is no “only” teasing. It always hurts, a little or a lot, and the teaser is as guilty of being mean as if they consciously meant to be, and hurt the other person – which often is the case. 

Maybe (probably) folks will say “Oh, lighten up! People need to be able to take criticism! Don’t be so thin skinned!”. Maybe, or maybe not. People should be able to learn from criticism. Especially (and this is too often ignored) if they ask for it. If it is constructive criticism, if it is meant to help someone to do their job better, if it is carefully and specifically stated, if there is in fact something that the person being criticized can do to address the issue (a really important point! Criticizing someone for something they cannot do anything, say a physical or hereditary characteristic is always bad, and never “just” teasing!) then it can be useful. 

But just criticizing? Just teasing? Just making fun of someone? That can never be good.

And maybe I did learn that in kindergarten and forgot. We all need to remember.

Military anthems, militarism, and our youth

 “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”

Most of us have known these lyrics to the “Marine Hymn” since childhood. Or I guess we have. It is entirely possible that, for a variety of reasons, the service anthems are no longer being taught in elementary schools, maybe not for decades, and kids are not learning them elsewhere. Of course, when we learned them (3^rd grade? 4^th?) we had no idea what those lyrics meant, what the ‘halls of Montezuma’ or the ‘shores of Tripoli’ were. Montezuma was dead for several hundred years when the Marines stormed Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City in 1847 during the Mexican War. There was great loss of life on the Marines’ side (and undoubtedly on the Mexican) and ostensibly the “blood stripe” on Marines’ trousers honors them. It was brave for these Marines on an individual and group basis, but it nonetheless true that they were part of an alien military force invading another country. Also, it was a while before I realized it was ‘Montezuma’ and not ‘Montezulema’, since the actual name is one syllable too short to scan and requires holding the “u” for two beats (“Mon-te-zu-u-ma”). It was even earlier, in 1805, that the Marines invaded Tripoli, on the ‘Barbary Coast’ of North Africa, to remove the Barbary pirates that had been attacking American shipping. And conquer the country.

OK, the rest of the song is comprehensible, if (unsurprisingly) exceedingly macho; that’s the nature of service anthems. But the other anthems had their issues also. The Army’s is called “The Caissons Go Rolling Along”, and we dutifully learned it, but never were told what ‘caissons’ were. None of us had any idea. Turns out that they were horse-drawn carriages that carried cannons and ammunition. Hadn’t been used in WWII. So an explanation would have been helpful. I understand that the lyrics have now changed to “the Army goes rolling along”. At least it scans.

The other word no one explained was “aweigh” as in “Anchors Aweigh”, the Navy song. I imagine we all thought it was “away”, and assumed that if the ships were going to sail they had to get rid of the anchors, so put them away. This makes at least as much sense as the actual archaic word, aweigh. The other thing about the Navy song, which I certainly didn’t recognize as a kid, is that it is obviously a college song from the US Naval Academy, apparently for the class of 1907, and thus a song for the officers rather than a song the Navy’s sailors. (“Farewell to college joys, we sail at break of day – ay – ay – ay” – another scanning problem.) It is also a drinking song, which I assume regular sailors can share with USNA students.

The Air Force song, “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder” was much more comprehensible, probably because it was 20^th-century. Maybe we even knew what “yonder” meant. The original lyrics were changed from “Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps” to “US Air Force” when the independent service was established. Although my father was in the Army, he was actually in what was the Army Air Corps at the time.

The final service anthem, from the oldest service, the US Coast Guard (which is the only one not part of the Defense Department, having landed in Homeland Security after a few other locations), is also pretty easy to understand, once you get past the title which is the Coast Guard motto and in Latin, “Semper Paratus”, always ready. It, like the Air Force, has a reference to dying (“to fight and die”; the Air Force has “go down in flame”), which the others lack, despite the definite possibility thereof.

Back in the late 1950s there was no audible controversy about promoting militarism and a simplistic flag-waving version of patriotism in our public schools. Our dress code included ties for little boys, and on Assembly Days, blue pants, white shirt, and red tie! I definitely remember an Assembly program put on by our 3^rd-grade (I’m sure of this; I remember the teacher) class, in which each of us participating stood up on stage and read from a short script that said “My father was in the Army (Navy, etc.). He served for X months.” Maybe there was another line. Anyway, obviously some kids couldn’t participate. Their fathers were not in the military. Maybe they were disabled and 4F, or were serving in a critical domestic role, or otherwise were ineligible for WWII. Given our age, born about 4 years after the war, none of them could have died in WWII, although it is not impossible that some could have been killed in Korea, a war begun when we were infants, or certainly later died from other causes; indeed I know this to have been the case for some kids.

So it was pretty unthinking, unfeeling, and inappropriate for our teacher (and by assent, the school) to make these kids feel left out and as if their fathers were “lesser”. But it was, and probably still is, part of an effort to encourage military service. It may have backfired for our generation, since in young adulthood many of us resisted and resented the current use of military force, in Vietnam, but it is a useful thing for a society that now depends upon an all-volunteer force that doesn’t think too much about where they are being sent or why.

A recent Facebook post making the rounds professes to be from a teen, and asks for good parenting because their brain is not yet fully developed however “smart” they appear to be. This is, in fact, true; the last part of the cerebral cortex to develop, in the mid 20s, is the frontal lobe, where making connections, coming to good judgements, and exercising “executive function” resides. This is why a young people, however smart they are or how much they know, still often make incomprehensibly bad decisions. (“When you drove into that intersection, what were you thinking?” “Thinking?”) It is also why they can be brave, violent, reckless with their own lives, and very obedient to authority, thus making good soldiers.

However, don’t ask me why adults, well past their mid-20s, make incomprehensibly bad decisions. That is a whole other story.

 

 

Red, yellow, cherry, lemon and cars in primary colors

I seem to like red now. Not red as in “communist” (although maybe that as well) or certainly red as in Republican (which I abhor), but just the color. My car is red, and if I get another one, red is certainly a preference. Hard to find; all cars these days seem to be various shades of beige and gray. Except in Tucson where they are mostly white, to reflect the sun. It is a beige world, but I like primary colors. I wouldn’t mind a royal blue car, and I thought that the FJ Cruiser in yellow looked cool, much better than the baby poop green that is also popular now, especially in Priuses, but probably red.

I’m wearing red, all layers on my upper body today. My old red windbreaker, with the many pockets and hood and elastic strings with plastic pressure clips on the end hanging down. Very good jacket, old and still the best. My fleece is red, thin, says KU Family Medicine. In red. A little stretched out at the wrists, and Pat doesn’t like it, but it is comfortable and not too heavy. Good for inside. And today a red t-shirt, once my father’s, ironically in fact with the logo “Sure, I’m a Marxist”, with pictures of Marxes: Chico, Harpo, Groucho, and...Karl. 

When I was a kid red was definitely not my favorite color. Red was everyone else’s favorite color. Perhaps that was why it was not mine; mine was yellow. I think, however, in addition to iconoclasm, it had to do with the flavor of candies. My favorite flavor in candies – Life Savers, Jujyfruits, Chuckles, Tootsie Roll pops (or any lollipops), popsicles, anything with flavor (of course there were candies like Necco Wafers which had different colors but essentially undistinguishable tastes, mostly dust-flavored) was lemon, and lemon candies were yellow. Red candies were cherry, and I didn’t like those that much, and it was pretty convenient because people were always willing to trade me their yellows for my reds. Of course, there were sometimes when you’d get fooled and a yellow one would be pineapple, or a red one would be strawberry or raspberry. Although I remember learning that blue popsicles – which we called “blue” as if it were a flavor – were raspberry. That tasted a lot better (to me) than cherry. This bled (ooh! blood is red!) over into colors in general; I liked yellow, everyone else liked red.

Later in life, maybe as a teen or young adult, I realized that I loved the flavor of actual cherries, ripe bing cherries, and also realized that that flavor was virtually nothing at all like the imitation cherry flavor in candies and popsicles. Maybe that is where I became more accepting of red as a color, and started buying red cars. They’re much more common than yellow anyway!

And now, to be honest, my favorite color is probably purple, deep purple, and likely always was. It is also my grandson’s favorite color, so we share that in common. And apparently royalty back in the day. Poor conches.

Poems for a Rainy Day, or Verses in Educational Philosophy

[Written -- actually typed on a typewriter! -- decades ago]

 

HEURISTICS

Heuristics lend a helping hand

For things hard to understand.

I wonder who invents these cues

That I so often have to use?

Would I be too strict a purist

If I called him (or her) a heurist?

  

EPISTEMOLOGY

Epistemology – ways of knowing,

How we can tell the grass is growing.

Observation, intuition,

Then there’s always

Superstition.

 

Some folks like things they can measure,

Others insight really treasure;

Me, I always opt for leisure.

 

QUALITATIVE METHODS

Naturalistic inquiry

Looks at how folks think and see

In the context of their place and time.

Hermeneutics doesn’t have rhyme.

But I still would be a little leery

Of distinguishing it from grounded theory.

Why do so many people find fun in loud, aggressive, intrusive behavior?

An easy (and, I guess, common) thing to do on a blog is to rant about the things that the author does not like in the world or about people. There is usually a long, sometimes seemingly endless, list. I have such as list, and I will be carrying on about many of the things on it, so it is a good time to bail if you wish. The thing that I would like to emphasize, though, is that I will really be complaining about one thing, in its many manifestations. This is behavior, mostly but not exclusively by males, that is seen as characteristically, stereotypically, and likely accurately, male.

This often is violent or overtly aggressive toward other people (see: January 6, 2021 + much violent crime) but also is often sublimated into going fast, often in cars but also in / on other vehicles, for no apparent reason. If asked to explain why they do it, it is usually described as fun or exciting. This is very common and in fact admired; note the popularity of both NASCAR and the “Fast and Furious” movie franchise. I guess it is actually fine as long as it doesn’t hurt, or have significant potential to hurt, other people. One example I always think of are the fisherman on the lake on which I had a house in Kansas. It was a small lake, and it didn’t take more than a minute or two for fishermen to get from the public dock at one end to the shallow inlets where they fished down by our end. Especially with the 200HP motors on them. Really fast, but really short trips. Other boats on our lake, and on other bigger lakes also do this all the time, towing water-skiers or running jet skis around and around in circles. What struck me about the fishermen in particular was that, when they got to the end of the lake in just a couple of minutes, they cut their gasoline engines, started their electric trolling motors, and quietly moved around in the shallows fishing for the next couple of hours. But they must have saved at least two minutes compared to going more slowly, two minutes more time for quiet fishing.  And, of course, they added on another two minutes on the other end. But harmless, I suppose, although loud, and creating huge wakes making the lake difficult to swim or canoe or kayak on.

I suppose jet skis are the same; their only function is enjoyment for the riders, but they really mess up the water. At least power boats towing water skiers are helping someone do something that actually requires skill and physical effort; I admit to a prejudice in favor of activities that actually require or help build some muscle and fitness and effort (canoeing, kayak, biking, hiking). The activities that are “just fun” for the people doing them regardless of how they affect others are often done on purpose to harass others – think of jet skiers “buzzing the beach”. Or, for that matter, folks who play their car radios really loud with the windows open (the rest of us mostly just hear the booming bass line) or have their motorcycle mufflers adjusted to make really loud noise. Sometimes this is all a reflection of immaturity, and this immaturity is to a degree “natural”; human brains are not fully developed into the mid-20s, and the last part to develop completely is the fontal lobe, controlling “executive function” and what we might generally call judgement. This is different from being smart, or even knowing a lot – it is being able to integrate the information you have and make a wise decision based on it.

Why did you drive into that busy intersection where you then had a crash? What were you thinking?

Thinking?

So that can be dangerous, despite the fact that it can also be normal for young people (mostly male) because of their incomplete brain development. But the problem is that for many, such behavior persists, long past the mid-20s, into middle and even old age. How do we explain this? Arrested development? The counter influence of a culture that glorifies violence and war (mostly, it must be said, for the profit)? The counter influence of substances, particularly alcohol? Does it matter?

It matters little if kids are just acting out and testing limits and don’t really cause difficulty for others, just sometimes irritation. It matters a little if people acting out do intrude on the life and activities of others, and a lot if it creates danger to them. And worse if it actually harms others.

I first thought that the question was why we accept such behavior as ok. Now I realize that this question doesn’t mean anything. I just wish the norm for acceptable behavior (at least for males) was  not aggressive, violent, mean, and stupid.

A Brooklyn boy moves to the Upper West Side: Now long ago

In 1966, shortly after I started college, my family moved from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to a then-new building. It was built under the states’s Mitchell-Lama urban renewal law that encouraged clearing of tenements and replacement with new buildings. These were not classically “rent-controlled” (like the controls instituted in older buildings post-WWII) but has restrictions on the rent, limiting the profit of the landlords and requiring justification of any rent increase.

I have very good nostalgic memories of my growing up in Brooklyn, in an era far very different from its current status as the hip center of the universe, mostly post-Dodgers and very much pre-Nets (at least in their Brooklyn incarnation). But I never regretted my family’s move to “The City”. As a college student and young adult when I came home for vacations or visits Manhattan, and especially the Upper West Side, was diverse and cultured and exciting in ways that were so different from where I had lived in Brooklyn. I loved coming there, loved walking the streets, day or night (a lot of night as a young man), reveling in the variety of small stores on Broadway, and the fact that the subway was only two short blocks away. And that coming from the subway you could stop for food for dinner from the butcher, baker, fish store, fruit and vegetable store; there were also family-run stores of everything from shoes to jewelry to laundries to delicatessens. And, within a few years of living there, my mother, a kindergarten teacher in the local school, knew most of the families whose children had passed through her class. That was not different from back in Brooklyn, where the same was true for my mother and her “kids” and their families, though there was probably more economic and ethnic diversity in Manhattan. There were (mostly) the same sorts of stores on the shopping streets of Brooklyn, but Broadway had a different feel; it was so intense!

One of the first, and most amazing things, we noted was how many movie theaters were within a few blocks of our house. There were also no multiplexes then, but the Riviera and the Riverside were on the same block of Broadway between 96^th and 97^th streets. The Symphony (now the Symphony Space, but then a movie theater) was on Broadway at 95^th, and in its basement, with an entrance on 95^th, was the Thalia. The Midtown was on Broadway between 99^th and 100^th and the Olympia up at 106^th. The New Yorker was at Broadway and 88^th, and the Loew’s 84^th St was at – 84^th St! There were even more theaters further south on Broadway. So I went to the movies a lot. This was a big change from the Avenue U, 25 cents + 5 cents candy Saturday double features in Brooklyn!

One night in the first summer we were there and I was home from college, 1967, my father and I were walking on Broadway, alive and vibrant at night as Avenue U or even Kings Highway never was. There was a lot of action and people as we approached a Stark’s Coffee Shop, on the corner of 92^nd (or maybe it was 91^st) St. We realized that they were filming a scene from a movie in the coffee shop, and we stopped for a while. I later saw that scene, many times, in the film The Odd Couple, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Indeed, most often at the Thalia, which had an enormous collection of films and played a different double feature every day! You needed to have the printed schedule (no computers!) to keep track of what was coming so you could catch what you wanted to see. Most often, the Odd Couple (1968) was paired with another great film set on the Upper West Side, A Thousand Clowns (1965) with Jason Robards and Martin Balsam. I am sure I saw that double feature multiple times. I recently saw a posting of the Greatest 100 Films of All Time, and neither was on it. I don’t suggest that I am an expert or fit to judge this, but I have my opinions, and if I were compiling the list of the 100 Greatest Films I Have Ever Seen (which, in full disclosure, would not include the majority of the films on that other list), those two would certainly be on it!

The two most-grounded-in-the-neighborhood members of my family were my mother, based both on her role as an early-childhood teacher in one of the local schools and her incredibly warm and engaging personality that made, really, everyone love her, and my youngest sister, who attended public schools through high school on the UWS. Actually, she went to the school right next to our building, while my mother taught at the one 3 blocks away, which was itself closer than my own elementary school in Brooklyn had been to where we lived, demonstrating the density of Manhattan. I mentioned diversity; in terms of race and ethnicity, and even income, it was. I am sure that Sesame Street, beginning about that time, was based on the Upper West Side of the late 1960s. Not only were many ethnic groups represented in the neighborhood and in our building, but unlike in Brooklyn there were many mixed families – not only Italian AND Jewish (the big ethnicities of my old neighborhood) but Irish and Puerto Rican, Black and Polish, and on and on.

Things change in 50+ years. My father, who lived in that building from 1966, died a couple of years ago; it was a rental, not a condo, so we couldn’t buy and keep it. This means lots of people – family (not just immediate but very extended), friends, friends of family and family of friends, no longer have his apartment to stay in while visiting New York. Just as Brooklyn has changed so much I cannot recognize it, so has the Upper West Side. The family-owned stores are mostly gone, and walking on Broadway it seems like most of the stores are the same chains you would see in a suburban shopping mall. But not completely; there are still places to get NY pizza (the BEST!!! No question or comparison!!), if not for 20 cents a slice, and a few delis to get knishes, and a lot of fruit-and-flower stands. But a lot fewer movie theaters. The Thalia (now the Leonard Nimoy Thalia) no longer shows movies; its day as a repository for thousands of films was doomed by DVDs and streaming services. It, and the old Symphony are now Symphony Space, still a cultural center. The Loew’s 84^th St is a multiplex fit for any suburban shopping mall. But there are still a few theaters that regularly play both old and new “art” films (an old term generally equated with “foreign”).

My mother has been gone for decades; even the “new” playground at the school she taught in that had a plaque in dedication to her has been replaced by a newer playground, with no plaque. The Upper West Side is both mallified and gentrified, and also become a destination for young Orthodox Jews, especially Lubavitcher. And, yet, despite the fact that no one with a regular job can afford an apartment, there are still lots of poor people living there, so it remains a diverse community.

So I still have warm memories of both Brooklyn and the Upper West Side  from different parts of my youth. Being a child in Brooklyn was good, and being a young adult in Manhattan was great. It was a much cooler place to bring people I was dating to see; long walks actually took you places – Central Park and Riverside Park and the river and the Boat Basin at 79^th St., and Columbia and Grant’s Tomb and Riverside Church. All those things are still there even if Broadway is full of chain stores.

For my father’s 90^th birthday, we hired a car and driver and went to Brooklyn, starting in Coney Island and heading up to the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg where he grew up. We saw my old neighborhood farther south, my high school and Brooklyn College, and the Ebbetts Field apartments. It was nostalgic, but it was good to get back to Manhattan.

But I actually have no plans to go back to either in the near future; I’ll work off of my memories and don’t need them replaced.