It was May 23, 1946, in a New York City Hospital, that 30 year old Sylvia Livingston Bernstein gave birth to the 2nd and final child of her marriage to Louis Morton Bernstein, then 35.
I am that child, and this post is a looking back at things I have lived through, experienced, people I have known.
It is especially a reflection on the changes in America over almost 8 decades and some musings about where we are now and where we — Americans to be sure, but people across the world as well — may be heading.
I will not claim that this is well-crafted or superbly organized. As I have approached this birthday I have been remembering things, reflecting, but not necessarily crafting what I would say.
If you are not interested in the mental meanderings of one aging person from the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation, I assure you my feelings will not be hurt if you do not continue reading.
So proceed at your own pleasure or risk, however you may choose to describe it.
When I was born my family lived in NYC. The summer after I turned 2 we spent at my mother’s parents summer home in Long Beach NY, which in the census of 1950 had a Jewish population of about 20,000 out of a total of about 22,000. In the Fall we moved to 1 Huguenot Drive, Larchmont New York, Westchester County, the house that was my home until after my freshman year of college at Haverford, my father selling it after my mother died shortly after I graduated from high school , and then he remarried a Brazilian diplomat who was a friend of my mother’s sister and her husband (a marriage that did not work out and which was ended by a quickie divorce in Haiti).
We attended public schools, and then both my older sister Judy (born 10/22/1943) and I became quickly involved with music, me first on piano and then later cello, and her on violin (where she was outstanding). That eventually led to summers in Interlochen MI, at what was then called National Music Camp, 7 years for her and 8 for me. We both made live long friends there and developed other interests as well, in my case for soccer, although that would not blossom for me until college, since there were no teams in our schools or our community during my childhood.
America was still very segregated. There were no blacks in our elementary school, one of four that fed into our junior and senior high schools, and even there we were in the more advanced classes which rarely had the Black kids, although there were a few in orchestras, choruses, and then for me on Cross Country team in high school and intramural basketball. We knew the young man who delivered our groceries, and one long time maid my mother hired after she went back to her law practice and then became Assistant Attorney General of New York State were the only other Blacks with whom we had regular contact.
But in December 1956 we took a winter vacation in Miami Beach. I remember getting off the airplane in the old Miami airport to experience legal segregation for the first time in the form of Whites only bathrooms in the terminal. That opened my eyes, which were opened further the following fall, which was the integration of Central HS in Little Rock. My family were, as were most Reform Jews in the 1950s, politically liberal — at least to a point. And I note all of this at the same time I note that they were both Republicans. For what it is worth, they had both been in the Office of Price Administration at the same time as Richard Nixon (my mother a lawyer in the same unit briefly) and neither ever voted for him directly although they both supported Ike. At the time my mother was Vice Chair of the Town of Mamaroneck (of which Larchmont was a part) Republican Committee I was for a time Vice President of the Teen Dems, with which she had no problem. Both supported JFK for President in 1960, because, as my mother noted, if a Catholic could not become President in 1960, when would it ever be possible for a Jew?
Don’t worry — I will NOT recount my entire life. I put down these things to give some context to how my life came to be shaped over time. Things early in life can have long-term profound effects.
The school system decided when I entered it that they wanted to skip me because of how bright they considered me, but my mother kept saying no because of her experience. She was part of an experiment in NYC where she went through school as fast as she could, and as a result never completely grew up. She graduated from Hunter College HS at age 14, Cornell U at 18, and Columbia Law (2nd in her class) at 21. But I quickly became bored in school, and hence disruptive as well. She did let me be part of an experiment where a group of us starting in 2nd grade were accelerated by the reading specialist (I was already a behavior problem) — I started 2nd grade reading at about a 5th grade level, and by the end of the year was reading at around an 8th grade level. As a result, I was able to get a card for the adult library when I was ten — the first exception they made for me. Then one Saturday, the only day I could get to the library, I took out the maximum of 3 books at 9 in the morning, came back shortly before it closed to turn them because I had read them (yes I had) and wanted to take out more. But libraries were not computerized, and the circulation cards had not yet even been filed, so for me there was a 2nd exception made — I was allowed to take out 6 books at a time.
What no one knew is that I actually was dyslexic, although I did not fit the normal definition, which required one to be of average or better intelligence but read below “grade level” (a term with which I have always had a problem. It took until well into my adulthood that I figured it all out — I did not read sequentially (if I do, I am NOT a fast reader) but tended to grab chunks of material using among other things peripheral vision and somehow processed it in my mind. It was that realization in my 30s that finally helped me accept some of the ways I am different, and that I do NOT fit into normal patterns.
Let me jump ahead in leaps and bounds, although I may come back. I was clearly one of the brightest kids in my class, but I was not in the top third of my HS class, even though I was one of two National Merit Scholars. I could devour a subject if I were interested in but if I were bored my mind was elsewhere. This would eventually lead to my taking 10 years to get through undergraduate college — three stints at Haverford with one stint at NYU in between. My senior year at Haverford I was doing doctoral work in Musicology at Penn, one of several attempts at a doctorate. During my lifetime I have earned post secondary credits ata total of 14 different institutions, and have completed two Masters degrees, and did reach ABD in Educational Administration and Policy Studies, but have beyond the undergraduate fits and starts also dropped out of two other masters programs, and three attempts at a doctorate (the musicology never got far, and after ending without finishing my dissertation in education started a doctoral completion program late in life (I was more than 70) from which I also withdrew.
I also wandered through different religious traditions — I have been in all 3 main branches of Judaism, was an Episcopalian, held leadership positions in the Orthodox Church in America, and finally found a religious home in the Society of Friends (Quakers), along the way reading Sufi philosophy, practicing Buddhist walking meditation, getting a Masters from a Catholic Seminary, and having the abbot of a monastery on Mount Athos in Greece as my spiritual father for a decade.
I have similarly wandered through different kinds of work, with 20 years in data processing and now almost 3 decades as a classroom teacher, but also having been a car salesman, earned money from music and from playing Bridge and Scrabble (it was the Sixties) and working full-time at Cafe Figaro and part time in bars (as a bouncer, a doorman, and a piano player).
Even in the stints in data processing and in teaching I changed jobs far more frequently than did most people.
I was equally unstable in personal relationships until I was 28 and embarked on the relationship with the woman I married 11 years later and to whom I am still married now in our 40th year of marriage — the occasional poster here as Leaves on the Current.
In short, my life has been one of on the surface little that was permanent, I think in part because of how much the world I lived in was changing.
When I was a child the US Mail was delivered twice a day, a much bigger candy bar was a nickel, almost all adults smoked, gas cost less than 25 cents a gallon, and a postage stamp was 3 cents. But few of the highly educated mothers of my classmates worked — they might be involved with the school board or their synagogues and churches. The mother of one classmate was the first female president of a synagogue in the US. Most women who worked who were not domestics were nurses, or teachers, or worked in stores but rarely in management positions. Few Blacks other than male athletes had any prominent positions, although there were entertainers — think Nat King Cole, then Harry Belafonte and Sydney Poitier. There were few couples that crossed racial lines, even when I was in college. We had as I remember one Black in my original class at Haverford and he dated and married either the only or one of the few black women at Bryn Mawr, our sister school, but both he and she were from elements of NYC black elite culture. In my first two years at Haverford I remember one interracial couple, although when I returned as a 25 year old to finish up one of my Black male classmates had entered college with a White wife (and they are still married more than 50 years later).
As for issues of sexuality? There were a couple of teachers in high school we pretty much knew were gay, although that was not the term we used to describe them. Of our high school classmates, the ones kids thought were gay were not, and we were often shocked by those who came out later. In the 60s in between times in college I lived at times in two neighborhoods full of gays, the Village and Brooklyn Heights. My wife’s career in and association with the arts, particularly the dance world, but her in regular contact and close friendship with folks who were gay. For a while as a single guy in NYC I shared an apartment with a gay male. As I had become more aware of discrimination against people because of race, and as I had even sometimes experienced discrimination because I had a Jewish last name, and given my mother’s experience of difficulty getting work as a lawyer because she was female, Jewish, younger, with an immigrant mother, I became strongly opposed to any kind of discrimination, and that has for now almost 70 years been an important part of how I interact with the world.
In a look back one might be tempted to use the framing or perhaps some of the lyrics of a song popularized by Sinatra, using English lyrics taken by Paul Anka from A French original, and yes, one could well opine that what I have done I did my way, except I cannot say “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” There are things I do regret, especially unkind words and acts I have imposed on others.
I am more inclined to look at choices I have made, opportunities foregone. It is clear my life could have been very different. During my brief time in the Marines I was more than offered an appointment to Annapolis, which I declined because as an enlisted Marine I would have been required to attend the Naval Academy Prep School for a year and after two years of college I was not going back to high school. Also while in the Marines I had been willing to extend for a year for language school — I’d had a year of Russian and after a year of intensive languege training at the Navy Language School in Monterrey CA it would have been 6 month stints alternating between Camp LeJeune and German, and figured I would come out fluent in German and Russian, but I did too well on the screening test and was told I was being processed for Vietnamese. Only then did I discover I would have to get a top secret or higher clearance, and having marched against the war in Vietnam and been active in Civil Rights there was a good chance I’d fail the clearance which would have made my life hell in the Marine Corps of 1966, so I spoke to my CO who found a way to get me out with an honorable discharge. Having expressed what were political opinions clearly at that point limited some options. I do not regret any of that, just note it, especially given what is happening to some now whether citizens or foreign students — it should NOT put people in jeopardy but that it does is not something unknown in our history.
When I dropped out of Haverford College (having returned after the Marines because technically I had been on leave of absence but then realized I was still not ready for college) I had applied to the Peace Corps and was offered an appointment to the Philippines, which I turned down because I had just signed a lease and started a job in NYC. I do not doubt that it would have been a valuable experience, one that would have provoked me to grow in ways I might not have been able to imagine. I know that from friends who were in the Peace Corps as well as a niece who was. But then my life pattern would have been so different I almost certainly would not have met the woman who has been my partner for almost half a century. I cannot regret that choice.
There are other occasions I have foregone opportunities — a chance to be in the college graduates program in a Wall Street firm when I did not have a college degree, an opportunity I turned down because they were only going to pay me as a high school graduate even though I was doing the same work as the others in the program (this at a time shortly before compensation on Wall Street exploded); being recruited to work for the DC office of Apple at the end of 1986 because I had just committed to return to the local government for which I had previously worked and I knew how long it took for them to go through the recruiting and onboarding process (think stock options and look at the price of Apple Stock then and what it is today and remember how many times the stock has split in the interim) — in short, I have principles that I will not violate even if it hurts me financially. My father, who was trained as an economist but never finished his dissertation told me in my early 20s that I would probably never become wealthy because of how I stood on principles. I do not regret that.
In other cases, I did not get the opportunity because of the decisions of others.Sometimes the decisions made sense to me, often they did not, but almost always I could recognize that the ways in which I am different, that I do not “fit” into certain models, may contribute to things like that, but I long ago stopped trying to be someone or something I am not. That does NOT mean that I insist upon “my way” — I am not so solipsistic that I come to the conclusion that it has to be my way or the highway — in fact, even as an elected leader or a supervisor or manager and especially as a teacher, recognizing that I am different means I know I am going to have to make adjustments in working with others because I am so different than them- perhaps this is something I have learned from being a Quaker, trying to “answer that of God” in each person, and in meetings seeking not just a forced consensus but something that tries to balance the needs of the group and realities of the individual.
But that requires a real willingness to truly listen and attempt to understand, For me at times that has been a weakness, not because I don’t understand, but because I tend to react and interpret intuitively and fairly rapidly which means that I do not give the other person the opportunity to understand me, why I am doing what I do.
That has several causes, First, while I am an extrovert, I am also shy and socially awkward. Many aspects of human interactions are NOT natural to me. Further, some who know me very much think I am least somewhat “on the spectrum.” It is not that I am unaware of the feelings or reactions of others but that I am often not very good at the expression others think are concomitant to the interactions we have.
Here I want to extrapolate somewhat. People from different cultural perspective often misunderstand one another, misinterpret what they THINK they are observing. To give an example, a white middle class adult correcting the behavior of an adolescent or child raised in many Native American cultures might say something like “I want you to look at me when I am talking to you!” yet for that younger person to do so would be to be acting disrespectfully, challenging the authority of the adult.
I believe far too much of our political discourse founders on things like this. I acknowledge that sometimes it is manipulated for effect — consider it a kind of propaganda.
I have by now given a broad sweep through a number of aspects of the life experience that has shaped me. I have lived far longer than I ever expected, although not yet as long as my father, I have lived longer than either of my grandfathers, not yet as much as either grandmother, more than 30 years longer than my mother. I have no sense of how much longer I will be on and not in the earth, no intimations of impending mortality. I act as if I will go on at least for a few more years. Living in an intellectually vibrant community where I know many people in their late 80s and seven some older (the oldest I know is 102), I could imagine that I might easily live another decade, or perhaps even a bit more. While I have survived a mild stroke, a surgery to clear the blockage that caused it, an episode of bladder cancer, and having a stent to control ananeurysm in my aorta, while I might no longer attempt to run around a soccer field coaching adolescents (something I did until my stroke in November 2019(0, and while both my hearing and vision are somewhat diminished, I have no real physical limitations at this point, have the energy of someone perhaps 20 years younger, look significantly younger than I am (especially if you do not look too closely!). In fact, I am in the process of attempting to go back into fulltime teaching — yes, I know it is difficult given my age, but I still have prospects, and might well do so for at least 4-5 years if someone wants to give me the opportunity.
But against that is the weight of what I perceive in the world around me, especially but not exclusively the political context of the current United States of America. For most of my life I could easily be optimistic about the possibility of improvement, of greater liberty, of less disparity of opportunity. Now optimism is hard, although absent some degree of optimism it would be almost unimaginable to contemplate going back into the classroom — after all, I teach Social Studies, and the course I have taught most often has been American government, and the one next often US History. The trend lines on what I see on both are scary, even somewhat depressing. And yet if I want to engage my students, to convince them of that it is worthwhile beyond filling requirements and earning grades to learn what I attempt to teach, there has to be the possibility that we are NOT devolving away from a liberal democracy, that their future will not be determined by race or religion or gender or sexual orientation or even political orientation.
There are things buried in the just passed by the House budget that are far from financial, some of which even might well function as the American equivalent of the Enabling Act that gave Hitler all of his power. There are actions occurring in the Supreme Court that serve as flashing red lights that it might not be willing to stand up to the dictatorial tendencies already evident in the current national administration, tendencies that are also racist and misogynistic and homophobic. The willingness already shown by too many in politics, media, law firms, corporations, and educational institutions to take the stands necessary to oppose the whittling away of liberties and constitutional rights makes it increasingly unlikely that our almost 250 year experiment in liberal democracy will survive, possibly not even until the next Presidential election.
And looming over all of that is the real possibility that total environmental collapse may already be irreversible, evidence of which is increasingly obvious. The disruption of climate will inevitably lead to economic crises, massive movement of refugees, outbreaks of military conflicts over things like water and food. And we can no longer assume that the nuclear genie unleashed in 1045 that resulted in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be contained as SO FAR is has been ever since.
I am now 79 years old. I have not recited the Pledge of Allegiance in ceremony since I was a sophomore in high school, because I came to the conclusion that the words were misplaced — my allegiance should be first and foremost to the Constitution. But now I see a nation that is under the current administration seemingly moving away from the notion of “liberty and justice for all.” I wonder if as the functioning of the Constitution may be being dismantled, to the point where there are no longer any meaningful checks and balances and when far too much power is put in the hands of an out of control unitary executive whether there is anything to which to commit allegiance? In one year will there be even less liberty and justice for those who oppose what this administration is trying to do?
79 is not considered by most to be a significant birthday. But this birthday occurs at a significant time in the history of our nation and our government, at a time when the future of both and of the world is very much in a precarious state.
I am shy. I am not necessarily skilled in persuading others. My voice is not one to which many will listen, because like most of us my position in life grants me no significance. I wield no power of office.
In a sense, perhaps I can be seen as one drop of water, at one moment in time. By myself I can effectuate little positive, although my failure to speak out and to act may allow destructiveness and distortion to increase.
I have been to Arizona, but never to the Grand Canyon. That magnificent place was cared by trillions upon trillions of drops of water, over millions and millions of years. IF we consider ourselves insignificant in a sense we might be correct, in that what we do by ourselves may make little difference. But together the possibilities become limitless, do they not?
And it is here that I can look back upon the expanse of my life, as flawed as it is, with all the mistakes I may have made and will probably make in the time left to me, and not be despairing. It took me decades to find my life’s work as a teacher, and I did not always do it as well as I should have. But I can look back over the past three decades or so and see where that work made a difference, in the lives of those I taught (almost 200 of whom have themselves become teachers) and the impact they have had and will continue to have. Some have already held elective office, which I never will. Some have achieved notable success in other fields — science, business, athletics, performing arts, etc. They include circus performers and bakers and cooks and plumbers as well as doctors and lawyers and those who have chosen to be stay at home nurturing parents, As a teacher I have always tried to empower my students to give them choices of what they do — I do not control how they choose.
It is perhaps why I still want to teach, even in a time of crisis and perhaps confusion, to empower more students who might be able to make even a small difference in the world going forward, so that I will not have been a single drop, but perhaps part of larger flow of water that over time can carve something magnificent?
That is being myself, as flawed and socially awkward as I am. And that is what I will continue to do, in whatever fashion I am able, so long as I am still on and not yet in the earth.
Peace.
