PENN’S UNWELCOME PUBLICITY

 

Penn’s President stepped down voluntarily, largely to generate shalom bayit, or peace in the house.  Calls for her ouster had already begun. Some came from donors of influence.  Some came from advocacy agencies.  Some came from nobodies who never made a peep before, infuriated by pictures they saw of student or faculty protesters condoning or redirecting blame for what every person of Ivy League intellect should be able to pick out as a targeted ethnic massacre. Virtually everyone who knows her or has worked with her through a distinguished career describes Liz Magill as a thoroughly honorable person.  The UPenn search committee in all likelihood performed its role diligently before selecting her, as successor to their very iconic, widely admired University President.  I might have expected a towering figure in the world of academic Law and Legal Education like Prof. Magill to be more forthright when questioned by Congress, or perhaps part of legal education is acquiring skills to sidestep being straightforward.  In any case, her performance, as Hollywood would say, laid an egg.  While she gives up her high-profile office, she does not give up her talent or her mind as she licks the recently inflicted wounds to her legacy.  President Truman, who had not attended college, kept a Buck Stops Here plaque on his desk in the Oval Office.  While Prof Magill did not create the growing anti-Semitic expression or its tolerance at Penn and at other top academic institutions across America, she also was not at the forefront of repelling it, let alone reversing it.  And she won’t be the first Penn President to have dropped the ball when pressured to resist harassment of Jewish students.  Sheldon Hackney, who presided in the 1980s, probably did his best to advance the University’s academic stature.  His legacy will be about Water Buffaloes, where he sold two Orthodox students down the river, putting their degrees in jeopardy over a trifle.  In a bestseller written not long after Prof. Hackney’s tenure, Bernard Goldberg, in his 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, not only outlined the incident but created a fictional award which he termed The Sheldon.  Its statue has no spine.  Prof. Magill could have used a more rigid spine too.  This seems to be the majority opinion of many Jewish alumni, who, like me, owe a good measure of our adult success to our years on the Penn campus.

My family’s attachment to UPenn spans three generations.  The classes range from ’37 to ’08.  From my own direct line, I have my entire household, wife’s father, two wife’s siblings, my sibling.  Extended a little farther, we include my wife’s uncle and his son and that son’s two children.  All undergrads.  My brother and I have some experience with their graduate programs.  We all had fulfilling and reasonably prosperous careers.  We served as doctors, scientists, engineers, educators.  For seventy years, we were individually secure on campus, less a few punk crime risks from the adjacent neighborhood.  Over time, the University addressed this downside through a combination of physical expansion and tighter security measures with ID access to buildings.  But as I returned to campus for my 50^th graduation programming, anybody could roam peacefully amid the public spaces, seek medical care at the many divisions of its world class medical facilities, or purchase a ticket for an athletic event, or buy lunch.  Jewish students had a presence.  I worshiped and ate at Hillel.  People wore their kippot to classes and in dorms.

Opposition to a Jewish State with Jewish sovereignty existed then but in a dignified way.  During my undergraduate years, men with crew cuts, blazers, and black bow ties mandated by their leader Elijah Muhammed would stand on the part of College Green closest to the Hillel Building handing out tabloid style newspapers with anti-Israel headlines to anyone who would take one. I never took one, but had a one sentence verbal quip or two as I moved on to my next class.  A grad student who would go on to be a pioneering scientist, a native Egyptian, would periodically stand with a picket sign accusing the Israelis of some type of global infractions, this prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973.   But our physical safety was not at risk, and it would have been unthinkable to tamper with the grades of pre-meds with Jewish names.  We had protests over Vietnam policy.  We even had a professor shot in his classroom by a disgruntled student in the Rittenhouse Physics Lab.  What we did not have was the collective targeting, let alone intimidation of classes of people.  If the Admissions Office made an offer, the person had the right to not only attend but partake of any facility, join any campus group including a pro-Nixon one and rather unpopular ROTC.  Our Conaissance Series, which brought lecturers of public prominence to Irvine Auditorium, included provocative speakers who the majority would vote against.  And their talks could expect a few jeering signs, but not jeering people.  Nobody got disinvited in fear of how some might receive their public message.  If they were household names, we knew what their controversial stances included. 

And for those seventy years of my family’s inclusion in this academic pageant, the people with whom I shared the campus used the knowledge they acquired there and nurtured skills of lifelong value for dealing with people you didn’t particularly like but knew you had to tolerate.  These are the foundations for advancing commerce, science, the arts, medical care, entertainment.  It is how doctors learn to give their all even to the most bothersome of patients, and law graduates do the best they can for their most guilty client.   For all the turmoil that campuses have, from the Kent State shootings of my undergraduate years to some very ugly targeting of vulnerable people on campus now, the telos, or fundamental purpose of the university has not changed.  It is those alumni who gave us our electronic advancements, take mRNA science from the lab to mass immunization from a catastrophic disease, create highway and air grids that get us to places where people are different than us.  We still read novels, perform a variety of civic and social functions, often earn a high enough income to live well and invest in our own children.  All enabled by the education we were able to obtain at UPenn for my family and hundreds of peer universities.

Prof. Magill’s tenure, now brief, does not negate any of that despite her misjudgments.  What seems to be failing are the pleasantries, as they are in other contemporary experiences.  People hostile to us, whether on Twitter, on the political stump, or in a random parking lot, no longer seem to register as outliers.  In some ways the universities, once the best hope of correction, have taken a dysfunctional path of least resistance.  Some adverse experiences needed to become effective antifragile adults have been unduly protected, whether microaggressions, dorm insensitivities, or disinviting speakers you would rather not hear.  At the same time confrontational assemblies whose purpose is intimidation flourish.  Upon graduation, we proceed on to workspaces where the executives want their employees judging their experiences with the company favorably.  The most vocal critics of the President’s handling of anti-Semitic confrontations on campus came from those most accomplished, generous alumni, where such ethnic targeting would have very negative consequences for any employee that besmirched the company’s reputation for fairness that way.    

The workspace can be rough and tumble in its own way.  People really do get fired for reasons of their performance, their behavior, or changes in corporate fortunes.  But hostile workplaces diminish output.  There are safeguards, and there is enforceability and accountability.  Our feeder universities have been failing on this for some time, though never quite put to its current exposure of what the University values.  The Bernie Goldberg’s fictional award, the Sheldon statue with no spine, first appeared in print in 2006.  It seems it needs to be mass-produced and granted to university Presidents far beyond its namesake and the three at the Congressional Hearing microphones.  Students should never be shielded from the slights that make them stronger but they cannot be subject to some very real harm that genuine intimidation and mixed desire for defense and retaliation invariably creates.

We have a few favorable models, both on campus and in our communities.  On football weekends, Saturday on campus, Sundays on our big screens, we set aside our local animosities.  We only care that athletes perform to capacity, fans in the stadium follow the scoreboard’s instructions to Make More Noise, and that injured players have their heroism cheered when escorted off the field.  Even the opposing player who performs well gets some expression of admiration.  And infractions of good conduct, those personal fouls and targeting, generate the most severe penalties meted out with consistent vigilance.  Our science and art classes, our labs, our frat parties with open kegs also don’t seem to need policy makers to shield anyone from hostility.  The models are out there.  But certainly the experience of those at UPenn now needs some restoration to those seventy years in which my family once thrived there and beyond.  And it takes a more global commitment to assuring that no citizen of the campus should ever study in fear beyond not knowing the answer to what the professor may ask on the next exam.

 

Worth the Fee

When I opted to let my medical licenses lapse, that rather large sum of $885 spread over two years would be allocated to immersing myself with other people, as post-retirement senior loneliness has taken hold.  I have forums for engagement, the synagogue where I have been more assertive about bantering at kiddush and OLLI where I randomly pick conversation partners, probably with less success.  None of this comes out of those savings, but are ordinary allocated expenses.  I might rejoin the regional Endocrine Society after a year's absence, if only to sit at a table with other doctors and exchange greetings with pharmaceutical representatives once a month. 

Next week I have the fiftieth anniversary of my college graduation.  Festivities for my landmark class have been arranged.  I knew very few people who RSVPd their intent to be there, yet there are a lot of people.  Cost $50 + parking and missing shabbos, though technically I could go to their Hillel that morning.  Maybe I will.  There are tours.  There is a luncheon, including a Kosher option.  And everyone there has at least one thing in common with me.  And it's immersion in a throng of the unfamiliar, something currently lacking.  Worth the effort.  Worth the fee.

Knew Surprisingly Few

 

As my college class prepares to commemorate our 50th commencement anniversary, an array of activities has been offered to us as we join UPenn's Old Guard.  While they know where I live, sending me the periodical Alumni magazine on schedule and asking me for money, I've not had success interfacing with the alumni office to receive the mailings of the upcoming events or to post my own profile for the curious.

My entering class had about 1800 students distributed over several divisions, Arts & Sciences, business school, engineering schools, nursing and a few others.  Some students matriculated in the Evening Division, older people already in the workforce.  We all graduated together, appearing on a unified Alumni roster on the 50th Reunion website. I do not know how many of those first arriving at freshman move-in day earned their intended degrees.  No doubt some dropped out, others transferred to other schools, some from elsewhere transferred in.  There were a lot of people at Commencement ceremonies, with the baccalaureates all seated together.  We stood as a group as somebody important, whether President or Provost or designee, announced that we had earned our degrees, a ceremony repeated some thirty years later for both of my children.  My Commencement filled The Civic Center, of blessed memory, while it's demise made Franklin Field the venue best able to accommodate my children's classes.

Unlike my high school class of 400 where I could at least recognize the majority by name, the University experience was much different.  Some introductory lecture courses would have 400 individual notes in a students taking individual notes in spiral notebooks with the UPenn seal on the cover, purchased a few at a time from the University Bookstore.  The few post introductory courses that freshmen sometimes take populate with upperclassmen.  Once past freshman year, the individual courses attract students across multiple years, in contrast to high school where we all moved forward as a single class.  As freshman, we nearly all lived in one of two places, a large men's Quadrangle or a women's dormitory whose architect thought it would be cute to fashion as a blend of fortress and prison.  The people I got to know either shared classes, lived nearby in the dorms, or came to the Kosher dining room for supper each evening.  Once past freshman year, the people mostly moved out of freshman housing, distributing among some new high rises, fraternity/sorority buildings, some private apartments within walking distance of campus, and a handful like me staying in the Quad.  Many had kitchens, so even the nightly dinner at the Hillel dining room became less of a gathering place.  I suppose part of the purpose of a large university is to have the students circulate among many diverse students, distributed among ethnicity, religions, academic interests, geographic origins, and year of graduation.  Casual encounters become plentiful.  Close friendships become few.  Sustainable friendships that endure fifty years past graduation measure in the single digits, unlike my much smaller high school class where they probably reach double digits.

Accomplishment and geography take its toll as well.  A mere handful of my college classmates became public figures, though many others achieved more limited public recognition in what became their areas of expertise.  Even the people that you knew from the dorm, lab, or dining room went their own ways once their diploma was issued.  People lived everywhere, worked for enterprises from the corporations of household names to solo professional practitioners.  That semi-cohesive collection of freshmen transformed to social entropy.  Again, this probably falls within the mission of the finest universities, which take justified pride when they gather promising young talent from innumerable origins and redistribute their newly educated graduates far and wide.

How few people I actually got to know from my class became too apparent when I reviewed the list of deceased members of my class.  This list, alphabetized, identified by their university division attended, and displayed in two columns, ran a considerable length, though I did not count the total.  Fifty years generates its actuarial mortality.  Not everyone reaches three score and ten, the approximate age of people who received their undergraduate degrees fifty years previously.  Undoubted others also passed away under the radar of the Alumni Office that tracks this.  

I scrolled through each column, encountering a lot of unfamiliar names before the name of somebody I knew, more often casually than well, registered in my mind as "yes, he/she lived upstairs from me" or I knew from a mutual activity.  For some, I had seen and remembered a previous death notice, usually from the University's Alumni Magazine which lists brief obituaries by class towards the end of each issue.  When this magazine arrives approximately each quarter, I go to the Class Notes first to reacquaint with people I once knew who achieved more than me.  Then I hit the obits, my class first, then earlier and later classes whose members would have overlapped with me on campus.  Finally, the Faculty Obits.  I make a mental note, one that apparently comes quickly out of mental storage when I see that name on a necrology list again, even years later.  Some on the Fiftieth Anniversary memorial list are new notifications for me.  

As I identified the familiar deceased classmates, I took advantage of what our World Wide Web makes so readily available.  Typing their names for Google more often than not guided me to a verbal snapshot of what they were in life, usually as an obituary, most often Legacy.com or the local newspaper from the city in which the graduate had settled.  Nobody I searched that way had their own Wikipedia entry, though many, particularly the physicians, had information about them from sites that bring information to patients about the doctors they might like to see.  These people all had careers of some type, Nearly all had descendants.  A UPenn undergraduate sheepskin, either the document or the acquisition of knowledge that generated it, moves its holders in countless productive paths.  Indeed, the Admissions staff, whose uncertainty created months of anxiety for many of us at age 18, had to project decades to assemble a class of 1800 whose promise will be fulfilled.  The cumulative lifetime accomplishments of our departed classmates confirms that promise.  It also exposes a measure of failure, the inability of most of us to connect with more people of talent during our short times on campus than we actually did.

Our landmark graduation approaches.  We enter UPenn's Old Guard.  It's a distinguished group, the majority still within the actuarial survival curves.  And while we got to know a fraction of the people that we could, for those of us who can return to campus, we can make our best effort to meet a few more.

Ten Places I've Always Liked to Be

1. Blood Bank

For decades I've been a donor.  There was an incentive initially, membership in the Blood Bank which in a Tit for Tat arrangement insured my household for blood products in exchange for a periodic donation whenever they asked for one.  Later they tapped me as a platelet donor.  Ever since I've been one of their reliable repeat donors.  There have been misadventures, one episode dizziness, some minor hypocalcemic symptoms, one major infiltration, and a few aborted donations with single arm plateletpheresis when the line failed.  I've been put on hold due to anemia and once due to a cruise that allowed me to disembark in Belize.  But whatever the outcome, I am invariably treated nicely and somebody who I don't know might get some longevity.

Initially platelet donors got an premium, maybe a hat, travel mug, fleece blanket, any number of t-shirts.  Enough to compete with a Blood Bank Museum.  And I got discount coupons for a brew pub.  None of that matters.  What matters has been that I am always treated professionally, never badgered, and invariably find myself in my most cordial disposition, from the time I arrive until I depart from the post-donor canteen.  It's a culture where people always seem appreciative of each other.  My visits there, whether completed donation or aborted, always leave me returning home having been to the right place.

2. Mercy Philadelphia Hospital ICU

For my eight years there, every consultation or follow-up that brought me there had importance.  I could make a similar comment about the ICUs of other places I've worked other than my residency.  There is something special about the challenges of patients brought to the physiological extremes.  Records to read, often lengthy and complex.  Answers from the lab still pending in a situation of forced anticipation of what they will be.  And even when there is no uncertainty, whether a new diabetic already controlled by my arrival, a person admitted for something else noted to have a calcium that needs attention later in the office, or funky thyroid tests that pose no harm, the people there want my expertise.  And grand people they are.  Nurses of top skill, residents working their tails off as I once did there, senior ICU physicians who amid the calamities that they do their best to remedy still offer some playful banter or insights of the working environment of medicine.  It's a place where I am always welcome, indeed always part of the team that called me in.

3. Chinatown Bus

It takes about two hours on the road to get from the pick-up to the drop-off points between my home town and mid-town Manhattan.  While the sponsoring company has had its episodes of instability, I've never had a regrettable trip, often valuing those 4-5 hours seated on the bus more than the comparable time exploring various delights of Manhattan.  Fare is reasonable.  Departures and arrivals have always been timely.  Once the driver had to exit a highway to refuel, filling the diesel tank to over $300 worth, but for the most part they drive fast.  While one driver, usually nationals of Mainland China who have limited facility with English, got suspended for racing a semi in the adjacent lane, the drivers of the buses that transported me always made good time without a hint of recklessness.

Usually I drive a comparable route, never with Manhattan as my destination, though someplace else in or through metro NYC prompting the travel.  As the driver, one not used to the bridges, tunnels, or volume of other cars, my attention goes entirely to safety and staying on my planned route.  Being a passenger, especially one with a seat next to a picture window in a soft high-backed seat, affords me a chance to look around.  I cannot see the road.  usually I select a seat on the passenger side which allows me to see buildings with company names.  WiFi availability on the buses makes the travel more intersting.  I like searching the names on my device to see what these usually high-tech enterprises do.  There are a fair number of warehouses off to the side of the Turnpike.  As the bus approaches and then exits the Lincoln Tunnel, I get to see some waterfront and some of the secondary structures of Manhattan somewhat west of the core sections of mid-town.  Exit bus, get my bearings, make sure I know where the pick-up for home will be, not in the same place for each trip.  Then some tourism or visiting a friend.  Then an equally peaceful return trip, more often than not after dark.  Same seats.  The return route ends a little differently than the outbound route started.  It takes me through some battered sections of my home town, places I would not ordinarily drive, especially after dark.  But it's interesting to see how the marginal neighborhoods get by with gas stations and places for takeout and small businesses that have closed for the day.

The bus station, while I wait for my wife to retrieve me, always feeling more rested and more accomplished than when I left early in the morning.

4. In my green swivel chair

It currently sits in front of my desk in My Space.  It probably always took that position, though until my retirement access to my desk needed some navigation through clutter.  Creaating My Space took priority once I no longer had to go to work daily.  The desk, really a black laminate flat top measuring 36x72 inches straddled across two low off-white metal file cabinets, all purchased at the same time at Conran's, for the purpose of being my desk, now serves as my daily destination.  I do not know if there is still a Conran's, the founder being a British interior design icon of the 1980s.  I also don't know when I got my beloved green swivel chair, though I know where I got it.  The DuPont Company used to clear surplus office furniture once a month.  Hundreds of people would go there on a Saturday morning, mostly small business owners looking for cheap office furniture.  The line grew quite long by opening.  The rule, raise your hand and it's yours for the specified price.  Browsers, which included me the first few times, fared poorly, as the good stuff would be sold in minutes, leaving a few electric pencil sharpeners or plastic trays for dawdlers.  I learned quickly to enter the door with a desired purchase in mind, go for it, and raise your hand without hesitation.  I needed a desk chair and I got one.

Unlikely I would have purchased one like mine from a store.  Swivel and recline mechanisms have served me well.  Spring cushion lasts forever.  I don't know when it was built, probably not long after World War II and likely purchased for somebody whose salary wasn't all that high.  Seat made of cloth the texture of burlap, a shade of green with maybe a hint of yellow in the dye.  It's frame is faux silver base metal, four pedestal base which gives it a tad less than optimal stability.  The armrests are a brighter green, maybe a shade deeper than a traffic signal, and with edges that have worn through the vinyl in a few places.  Yet always adaptable to my seated comfort, bringing me within arms reach or a quick swivel to anything on my desk that attracts me.

5. Trader Joe's

After a number of years, I've accumulated products that I preferentially seek at TJs.  Bread for sure.  Alternate over several kinds, but gravitate to their pumpernickel.  Risk having some staples withdrawn, as happened to me biweekly purchase of four top notch minichallot for shabbos motzi.  And cheese.  They list ingredients.  Without getting into controversies, I accept microbial enzymes or microbial rennet as a non-animal product, irrespective of who adds it to the huge commercial vat.  I'm not much for snacks, but sesame crisps, fruit bars, and TJ cheese curls often have a place in my cart.  Frozen tuna, if I can find two relatively equal size steaks of about a half pound each.  Almost like nutritious fast food once defrosted.  And best price on eggs, salad greens, and bananas.

Lots of places sell food.  TJ also sells wanting to be there.  Start with being among other shoppers who also want to be there.  Displays easy to locate, nothing shelved so high that an attendant needs to be summoned.  Never had a dysfunctional shopping cart.  Even at the height of Covid, when the number of shoppers inside the store at any one time was capped, the line never had aggressive customers pushing beyond their turn.  Once inside, shoppers do not clog aisles with their carts nor do vendors create aisle obstructions with delivery or shelving.

My state does not permit alcohol sales in supermarkets.  It is sold in other TJ states, and at an impressive discount.  Even without this inducement, I've never left TJ feeling irritated.

6. The UPenn Campus

I've had three sessions, an undergraduate experience, my specialty fellowship, and my children's time there.  And from time to time, I've returned to the campus for a variety of activities that could be completed in one day.  It's large.  It's diverse, which is what attracted me to attend as an undergraduate.  Yet from the Children's Hospital at one end to the Dental School at the other, it can be comfortably walked.  I always found quiet spots, from my dorm room, to a pond, to unoccupied nooks in their central and specialty libraries.  When hungry, I could go to a hoagie place as an undergrad or a lunch truck as a medical fellow, always within my willingness to pay what they charged.

A university depends on the diversity of its people.  As an undergrad, it bordered a scruffy neighborhood with hoodlums in training who would push people off the sidewalk when unsuccesssful at extorting a quarter.  The university took security very seriously as these incidents moved from annoyances to threats.  The campus had museums, worship, sports, an international center, people handing out leaflets or protesting some injustice.  I could be part of the crowd rooting for the Quakers.  Or I could read the Wall Street Journal by myself on a recliner in the Medical Library just an elevator ride downstairs from my department's laboratories.  But whether part of the pageant or self-isolated from it, I could always find for myself the best place at the right time.

7. Cruise Ship

There's a lot to do.  Time at sea.  Time eating. Time getting wet. Time exploring new places.  I've taken three cruises, the Western Caribbean, Alaska's Panhandle, The Adriatic.  Each with a different cruise company.  While none of these were the biggest on the Seas, they all had lots of people, some more eager than me to engage with other travelers, some less.  The crew originated from everywhere, often the only person I ever met from that native country.  Cabins are small enough to discourage camping out there for extended times.  Walk around.  Stop for food scattered multiple places on pretty much any route taken.  I like hot tubs, less attracted to pools, though they are warm and one had a Thessaloniki theme that I never quite figured out.  Array of food maybe too vast.  Attracted to meatless things not readily accessible at home, but hard to pass up pizza lying on a tray for the taking, croissants and similar breakfast pastries, or a tuna sandwich at midday when I'm used to eating nothing at midday.  I rarely attend shows, but always enjoyed whichever I watched on a cruise.  Ports of call bring me to places I've not been and likely will not return.  At home I have things.  At Sea I generate experiences and memories.  While I've been imprinted to be wary of people who are paid to be nice to me and to avoid people who indulge me, the liners do their best to hire people who are innately motivated to show their good dispositions and the pampering fits the job description.  So for a week I can be a sport and let people do things for me that I would do myself pretty much everyplace other than a resort.

8. Talley Day Park

Go To quiet time.  The park, part of the county recreation system, sits adjacent to my Go To library.  They share an access road and the few outdoor picnic tables and benches at the library face the park.  They have very different purposes.  The park is a small one as parks go.  Facing the main road, kids play mostly league soccer on an athletic field.  At the opposite end, farthest from the road, sit two fenced dog parks, one for small dogs which I usually find vacant, the other for large dogs whose owners sit on benches while their pets romp with each other.  I've been to the large dog section a few times while trying to improve my camera skills.  The dogs are fun to watch and will sometimes come over seeking attention.  My destination on nearly all visits, though, is an unfenced central field in the middle, surrounded by parking spaces.  A covered pavilion can be rented for birthday parties or similar events.  The county provides a couple of grills, kept fairly clean by users or staff.  A playground attracts mostly preschoolers.  My destination, though, is a seat at one of the metallic benches made of parallel rods.  Comfortable.  Usually no competition with anyone else for a seat.  I sit down, usually with some pre-determined expectation of for how long.  Rarely more than 20 minutes.  I will look at the cell phone screen but not do any exploration with the device.  I have taken pencils and a pad to draw, but I usually don't.  There are metallic picnic tables a few steps from some of the benches.  I've sipped a soda, ate a sandwich once.  Never brought any food from home there.  But mostly I sit for the allotted time, facing the playground, its activity having no material influence on my experience there.  I come for a few minutes of quiet time, not in my car, not reading anything, not interrupting another destination to be there.  And the quiet break that I seek always happens.

9. Standing in the surf

By now I've been to a lot of large salt-water bodies with waves.  Atlantic. Pacific.  Caribbean.  Mediterranean.  No water park wave pool comes close.  Some are places near where I lived.  Rockaway to visit the Great Aunts whose primary address was Beach 19th Street.  My first liking to waves.  Then the Cape and coastal New Hampshire while living in Boston.  Not very many of these trips.  Short rocky beaches, often chilly.  Then the Delaware Beaches, for some years with kids, more recently alone or as a couple.  Another Aunt lived near the Jersey Shore, which included a municipal beach pass.  Kids enjoyed it, even my infant son.  Great waves.  Lot of jellyfish.

And then distination travel.  Never vacationed with a beachfront as primary attraction until my honeymoon.  The two years later, bargain airfare made the visit to California too hard to pass up.  While Disneyland and Beverly Hills took top priority, my most enduring memory may be time on Redondo Beach in mid-June.  Not at all crowed.  Waves larger than anything I'd experienced at Rockaway, though not so powerful as to upend the young me.  Just pleasant crashing.  My job afforded ample income to sample many others, maybe one every two or three years, whether Virginia Beach with my toddlers as an alternative to Rehoboth or a once in a lifetime journey to Tel Aviv.  While standing amid the waves constitutes a tiny fraction of my time at each place, even those like Acapulco or Hawaii that would deplete their tourists in the absence of a beach, the attraction remains the same.  A few minutes at a time venturing about waist deep, watching for the next crest, positioning myself, having nature change that position, then feeling the undertow as the wave the just moved me invisibly receeds.  One of my favorite bodily pleasures, replicated over decades in numerous locations, but always with the same elemntal pleasure.

10. A brewery I've not been to before

Each brew sample intrigues me in a different way.  Few really warrant a second visit.  As a student in St. Louis, the Annheuser-Busch complex stood in walking distance from my apartment.  One afternoon I committed myself to a visit, only repeated one more time.  Tourists, and there were a substantial number even on a weekday afternoon, were shuttled on a tour, where the guide, a college classmate who I didn't know but dressed to be on display with A-B logo printing all over his conspicuous red and white pants, took the group around, pressing buttons that would turn on advertising tapes of Ed McMahon, giving the spiel that he memorized, and evading any serious inquiry about the products but reminding us how wonderful they were.  Amid this, tuning out the guide and Mr. McMahon, we could see the actual production and packaging of their beer.  A quick visit to the Clydesdales followed, magnificent creatures, then what any just of age visitor would wait for, a trip to their tasting room where each visitor was allotted two plastic cups of the brews of their choice.  Cheap stuff I would buy myself.  For me it was Michelob and one forgettable other.   One later visit, also A-B complex, this on a trip to Williamsburg with amusements at Busch Gardens.  A shuttle train brought us to the brewery, this smaller than St. Louis but without the hype.  

Craft beer then edged its way in.  Many varieties, each different, each personalized by a brewmaster.  What was available depended on what day you arrived.  Early Dogfish Head, a slew of different ones on a visit to Denver, a few very small ones near me.  The State of Delaware tried to promote its own industry.  Visit the requisite number, I forget how many, get the promotional passport stamped, and they would send you a glass stein with state decal, which I've still never used.  The project took me to numerous small towns in rural parts of the state, places I would never consider driving to without this incentive. Some were basically converted warehouse space with tanks.  But those were the ones where the owners conducted the tour, generating enthusiasm for their product in particular and beer recipes not yet created in general.  Each one with its liquid creativity to admire.

Massacred

I've never known a terror victim before, or even somebody murdered on the street.  Along the way patients, mostly minorities from the cities, have related a child or other relative who had been murdered, though I never knew one personally.  Shootings are common, appearing in the news pretty much every day.  Terrorist explosions have become all too common.  But those are other people with names, with families, but known personally to other people.

An old friend from college, however, became the first for me, a victim of a mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue where he attened Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation that rented space in the building.  I suspected it might be him as soon as the names with ages were released the day after the assault, confirmed within an hour or two.  Jerry Rabinowitz, UPenn C'73/M'77 had been my friend in college for four years.  We served together on the freshman rowing team, both as coxswains, he departing wisely at mid-year when the coach had a hissy-fit and made us all run beyond our reasonable capacity.  Jerry went on to excel at his studies, gaining admission to UPenn medical school and then settling in Pittsburgh as a primary care physician.  I would learn from the tributes and more formal obituaries that he got in on the ground floor of managing AIDS, being among the first to introduce anti-retroviral medicine as it became available to those with low CD4 counts.  We lost contact, and when the photographs appeared in public media, I probably would not have recognized him in a social situation but the identity would click in a minute or two with name tags at a UPenn event.  I remember Jerry as kindly and maybe somewhat direct in our conversations.  I do not recall him going to shul or having a girlfriend.  I cannot even remember for sure his major, though I think it was biochemistry as we shared classes into our junior or maybe even senior years.

Forty years of separation can be reconnected up to a point in an obituary.  He had only been married 21 years, he served as a pillar of the Reconstructive synagogue that rented space where the massacre occurred during shabbat morning worship.  In doctor fashion, his first inclination was to attend to the wounded in his presence.  His mother and his in-laws survive, though he had no children.  Some relatives, likely on his wife's side, had made Aliyah with many characteristic Israeli names among the survivors. 

For a while, I considered driving to Pittsburgh for the funeral.  That was not to be, as I had a deadline project that would delay travel and unknown to me, the funeral took place this morning, the first set of funerals for four of the eleven murdered.  I just could not have gotten there.

Does knowing a victim change how a mass murder of this type registers?  I do not know yet.  There is the function brain part of me that is well aware of targeting of Jews through history, whether by spontaneous pogroms, pre-meditated Holocausts or inquisitions, assassinations targeting individuals, or terror attacks where randomness that creates a who's next is integral to the plan.  The hatred that drives this is never rational, but there is usually an agenda from not allowing Jews who Islamists regard as dhimis from owning land to diffusing perceived economic power, to keeping the Church free of non-believers.  While murder usually gets condemnation, at least in America, the underlying desire to identify an external target to avenge one's social travails, often does not.  That's where we seem to be now.  Prosecution of perpetrators does not stop this.  Elections sometimes do.  We have an opportunity for this in just a couple of weeks.  My friend Jerry's shooting was random, but indirectly enabled.  It has to be disabled and I am optimistic that enough people will have connected to this to make for a return to some of the decency that America's electoral leadership has not seen as important enough to protect.