In April 2018 I got a notification through Ancestry.com announcing a new 2nd cousin DNA match. The graphic accompanying the match was unlike any I’d gotten in the years since I’d joined Ancestry, in that this new cousin was half Vietnamese. Its arrival, and the message that soon followed it, set off a years-long odyssey that brought me together with relatives I’d never known of–one of them a Vietnamese woman searching for her American Vietnam vet father–who were united by a thread of shared DNA on my father’s side that I can trace back to Austria and Poland in 1800. 

The message I received was written by an Amerasian named Jannies, who was writing on behalf of her friend, Lien, who was identified by Ancestry as my second cousin. Jannies asked on behalf of my cousin if anyone in my family had served in Vietnam in 1968.  I didn’t know which side of my family Lien could be connected with– maternal or paternal–but in either case, no one I knew of on either side had served in Vietnam. My parents had both passed away, as had most of the older generation on both sides, but I checked with the few relatives who might have known an answer to this question, and all agreed that there were no relatives who had served in Vietnam. I wrote back to Jannies saying I was really sorry, but I knew of no one in my family who served in Vietnam.

Jannies explained that Lien wanted to find her father so that she, her husband, and youngest child could move to the United States through the Amerasian Homecoming Act/Immigration Act, passed by Congress in the late 1980s, which required that the Vietnamese child of a U.S. war veteran prove paternity via a blood test performed in an approved government lab. The potential father had to agree to be tested. With many Vietnam Vets entering their 70s and 80s, Lien was worried that her father, should she find him, might have already passed away or soon would. “Lien is an orphan from the day she was born,” her friend Jannies wrote. “Amerasians’ life in Vietnam was very bad. They looked at us as the enemy. We got beat up everyday at school, told we were children of the enemy. Some were not allowed to go to school. Some of us were killed, and many more bad things. It was a very painful childhood, any bad thing you can name, we have been through it all and now we carry the scars in us.” I wanted to help Lien in her quest to find her father, but I’d hit a dead end. When Jannies contacted me again a month or so later asking me if anything had changed, I regretfully repeated that I still could not help Lien find her father.  

A “Like” from a West Coast Syrop

One day some months later, I noticed someone named Jeff Syrop had “liked” a photo on an Instagram account I also followed. “Who are you?” I messaged him. He wrote back saying he was “not a blood Syrop,” but had been adopted by his stepfather, Leroy Syrop, and taken his last name when Leroy married Jeff’s mother. Leroy had adopted Jeff and Jeff’s brother and also later had a biological son with Jeff’s mother. Jeff had grown up in, and still lived in, California. I was stunned, because the very same Leroy Syrop had emailed me back in the mid-1990s when the internet was first becoming widely used, searching for people with the last name Syrop. Leroy had been born in the Bronx, where my father had been born and grew up, but then his family moved to Coney Island and eventually out west, and he wanted to talk to any of us who knew about all the relatives he had known back in the Bronx. He said he’d known some of my father’s relatives, and he even called my father’s mother Dorothy, who was at that time still alive and in her 90s, because she was the last of generation who might know his parents’ generation.

I asked Jeff if any of the West Coast Syrops had served in Vietnam in 1968, and he immediately replied, “Yes, my uncle Glenn, Leroy’s younger brother, was in Vietnam in 1968.”  He’d been a Sergeant in the Air Force, and was stationed in Saigon, where he repaired electronic equipment and radios. Jeff said that a Vietnamese woman named Ko Fung had lived with Glenn in his apartment in Saigon, and that Glenn had loved and wanted to marry her, but didn’t because his brother Leroy had advised him against it. When the Air Force had shipped him back to the states exactly one year after he’d arrived, he left Vietnam never knowing his girlfriend was pregnant.

Lien’s mother had given her up 5 days after birth, as was common because Amerasian children were considered signs of collusion with the enemy. Lien never knew anything about her mother and moved from one foster home to another as a young child. She was eventually adopted by a Vietnamese family. Lien never knew who her biological mother or her father were. Until she had her own children, she’d never met a blood relative. In Vietnam, paternity is a very important part of status in society and even the language stresses paternal connections. Understandably, she was intensely committed to finding her biological father. Upon receiving Jeff’s news, Jannies wrote, “Your information gives us hope, a hope that a lost child who wishes to have love and a family will have a family that she belongs to. A family that understands who we are and where we are coming from.”

The Odyssey Begins

Jeff’s information about his uncle Glenn set off over a year of drama. Jeff spent many weeks trying to convince his uncle to do a DNA test on Ancestry.com to see if Lien showed up as his daughter. If the test showed no relationship, the whole matter would disappear. Glenn was already in his mid-70s and not in the best of physical and mental health. Though Lien was devastated at the idea that her father was not willing to have her in his life, to allow her to care for the only parent she might ever meet, she volunteered to sign any paper saying Glenn had absolutely no financial or other obligations to her. If he wanted nothing to do with her, she wanted only to prove his paternity so she and her husband and youngest child could emigrate here. “I will NEVER expect or need ANYTHING from you except for this one simple test of paternity, no promises or document to sign, nothing else at all beside the test,” she wrote. 

Unfortunately, Glenn’s brother Leroy steadfastly maintained that Glenn was the victim of a false paternity scam and advised him not to do the DNA test. Glenn’s relationship with his older brother Leroy was the strongest in his life. Leroy was 9 years older than Glenn and had been like a father to him in their turbulent, dysfunctional family. Glenn’s parents, Abraham and Rose, fought constantly and eventually separated. The young Glenn saw Abraham, one of my paternal grandfather’s younger brothers, standing in the doorway of the house he had previously lived in with Rose and their children, as he emptied a 5-shot revolver at Rose and her boyfriend, but he was too furious to shoot straight and missed every time. Glenn tried to keep his gun-toting father out of the house by holding the door shut, but his father overwhelmed him. The boyfriend tackled Abraham and broke one of his legs by slamming the door on it. Abraham did 2 years in San Quentin. But Glenn suffered from this and other violent episodes in his family and came to view his big brother Leroy as a mentor.

Because Leroy thought this was all a paternity scam and believed Lien’s story was untrue, he became angry and verbally nasty to us. Jeff, especially, who had looked up to his stepdad Leroy and had grown up with his uncle Glenn, could not believe the pushback we were getting. Believing deeply that logic would overcome all, he tried every which way to appeal to their logical minds but nothing worked. Things went south between Jeff and Glenn and Leroy, though they’d been close for many years. Jannies’ and Lien’s emails pressing the matter only inflamed matters, to the point that I asked them to hold off. I blocked Leroy’s and Glen’s emails for a period and tried to imagine a new approach to this problem. 

Around this time, Jeff convinced his half-brother, Leroy’s biological son and Glenn’s nephew, to do an Ancestry.com test to prove that Lien was his first cousin, meaning that since Glenn was the only one of the Syrop brothers who went to Vietnam, Lien was his daughter. Sure enough, Lien showed up as his first cousin and I showed as his second cousin. Coincidentally, a new nephew of Glenn’s–who turned out to be the son of Glenn’s deceased younger brother, Jay–also turned up on Ancestry.com as related to Lien, Leroy’s biologic son, and me. (Jay’s son had previously been unknown to the family and they have since all met.) These new DNA results in his immediate family impressed Glenn, and he wrote to tell me that he was doing research on the leading DNA tests and how they worked. 

Also around that time, Jeff put me in touch with Jimmy Miller, an Amerasian man who found his own Vietnam vet father years back, and who had become an activist for forgotten Amerasian children. Jimmy founded Amerasians without Borders, a great resource for Amerasians looking for their American servicemen fathers. He sent me a really powerful video about a Vietnam veteran in Yakima, Washington, who discovered, like Glenn, that he had left a daughter behind in Vietnam. The discovery had occurred when the Washington man’s American daughter had done a DNA test and was shocked to discover she had an Amerasian half-sister. The man in the video, like Glenn, had had a relationship with a local woman while he served in Vietnam, and like Glenn he was shipped out not knowing the woman was pregnant. I hoped that Glenn would identify with the veteran, who chose to meet his daughter in Vietnam and make her part of his life. It was such an amazing, emotional video and so easy to identify with the veteran and his daughter, so I sent a link for the video to Glenn hoping he would watch it in its entirety. 

Because my own father had died only a month before I first heard about Lien, I was very much thinking about fathers and daughters. It saddened me that Lien had come so close to finding her father, which she had waited all her life to have happen, and Glenn was potentially going to let their relationship slip away. I wrote a very personal letter to Glenn about how it felt to lose my father and how much he had meant to me and how he had so shaped my life. I told Glenn that he was throwing away a chance to have a relationship with his only child, this daughter who wanted to care for him. I also said I wasn’t going to keep contacting him going forward if he refused to do the paternity test. 

I didn’t expect to hear anything back, but several days later, Glenn emailed to say that he had made an appointment at the nearest approved lab to do the paternity test. I texted Jeff with the news and we both spent the day gobsmacked on two different coasts. 

Only a day later–almost 1 year exactly since I’d first heard of Lien–Glenn received an email from the testing lab, and he forwarded it to me and his nephews.

“Do you know what this means?” Glenn asked all of us. Glenn’s nephew who had done that earlier DNA test responded, “Yes, I know what it means. It means that you are a father, a grandfather, and that you have a new nephew. Congratulations on your new family!” We all congratulated Glenn. “Do I give out cigars?” Glenn emailed back. 

In his next email to family, friends, and some of his doctors, Glenn sent the news out and wrote, “Lien has my tenacious blood. I know now we will meet together, Vietnam or USA, father and daughter.” On the phone later, Glenn wept at the thought of how terrible his daughter’s childhood had been in Vietnam and how much he had to make up to her. But he was also terrified. “I don’t know how to be a father,” he said. “I will learn. I will do the right thing.” Glenn thought about all the suffering his daughter went through during her childhood, and how he hadn’t been there to help her for 50 years. He said he wanted to spend the rest of his life making things better for her and her family.

Here’s one of the emails Glenn sent to Lien and me:

Lien My dear Daughter,
My name is Tenacious for a reason!
I will help my daughter and her family at all costs. My daughter is the most important person in my life. Whatever she wants I will give her. I will help you in getting my two oldest grandchildren to the USA After you arrive in the United States.
We will work together like father and daughter.
You are the most important person in my life. I believe you have my tenacious blood.
Sending you all my love from my heart,
Your father.

💈Glen TENACIOUS Syrop

I wrote to Lien to ask her if she understood what had just happened. She always put everything into Google Translate, which sometimes produced less than stellar translations–but it was easy to understand the momentousness of what was now happening.

“Yes, Miss Jackie. I am very happy, because he called me his ‘daughter.’ That’s what I long for and look for. I also really understand my father’s personality. I understand he is a kind person, only misunderstanding makes him irritable. I was always patient and never blamed him. On the contrary, since I knew he was my father, I always loved him, though he did not recognize it. Dear Jackie, now the results have been rewarded. I understand you are also very happy for me, because you have tried so hard to get it. I think, I will try more to make my father happy. He has absolutely no errors, for the Vietnam War, he only made the arrangement of the United States. He was also not at fault for my birth, because he really loved my mother. I was really happy, when I found him, and was very proud of my father. Now, I apologize to my father, and hope he will have peaceful and happy days in old age. I will be very worried and scared if I hear a sad news about his health. I will be very sad, if in this life, I do not grasp his hand, to say “Daddy! I love you very much. ”

Once the embassy received the blood test results, Lien moved forward with her application to move to the United States with her husband and youngest daughter. Her older children would have to be sponsored later to visit the US. Lien was to get settled at first in Oklahoma, where Jannies lived, and where people would help the family get on their feet.

In mid-December 2019, Lien and her family flew from Vietnam to Los Angeles to meet Glenn for the first time at a hotel near the airport where they’d taken rooms for a night before Lien and her family flew on to Oklahoma. It was an emotional meeting for father and daughter. Glenn also met his youngest granddaughter and son in law, Thanh.

After she spent time settling in to this country in Oklahoma, Lien wanted to move close to Glenn and care for him. Some months later they visited Glenn for a week to see if they could line up work and places to live in Southern California. In 2021 Lien and her husband and daughter moved to be near Glenn.

A New Life

Over the several years since Lien came into Glenn’s life, Glenn has become the father he didn’t believe he could become. He has experienced a daughter’s love in a way that he never imagined, and of course it has transformed him. He’s enjoyed her devotion and constant concern for him, and he loves visits from his youngest granddaughter, who attends a Buddhist school. His son-in-law is quite possibly the most patient man I’ve ever met. Glenn has become the giving father and grandfather Jeff and I knew he could be but which he doubted.

Soon after arriving, Lien and her family put Glenn’s condo into tip-top shape (a huge undertaking). He no longer gets into trouble with the condo association for not maintaining the sidewalk and leaving a sink as sculpture along with an upside-down US flag on the patio. Lien brings him to her Buddhist temple for holidays, and his granddaughter and her friends visit him on school holidays.

When I speak with them on the phone, Lien frequently says, “DADDY!” and he corrects her English so she will improve. When Glenn uses spicy language, as he likes to do, she asks him to be more polite. He loves this.

As Lien once predicted, when Glenn settled into his new life with her and realized the role that Jeff had played, that rift between the two would heal. And it has. “Still, solving this problem was an interesting challenge in psychology and diplomacy,” Jeff told me. “I nominate you to be the next UN Secretary General.”

We Meet!

In May 2023, I met Glenn, Lien, and Thanh at our son’s wedding in Brooklyn. I marveled at the series of events, large and small, individual and global, that had occurred over centuries in order for me to be meeting my Amerasian cousin Lien (who calls me “sister”) and her father Glenn, neither of whom I’d ever met or even heard of until 6 years ago. The family tree I have been working on now includes Lien and Glenn, and it shows our common ancestors, as far back as my great-great-great grandfather Joseph Syrop (and his wife Rose), both born in Poland in 1800. Here’s the tree (for easier understanding, red boxes are drawn around the male Syrop relatives we have in common):

We also share my great-great-grandfather Abraham, born around 1829 in Poland. One of his and his wife Chaya’s many children was my great-grandfather Samuel Syrop, who was born in 1865 in Austria. Samuel Syrop seems to have ended up in Budapest running a beer hall before he and his brother Henry emigrated to New York City in 1881, where Samuel married another Austrian immigrant, Lena. Among their many children was my father’s dad, my grandpa Jack (for whom I am named) and Glenn’s father, Abraham.

I spent the day after the wedding with Glenn, Lien, and Thanh, ticking things off Glenn’s list of what he wanted to do in New York City. We took the subway (Glenn somehow managed to charm 4 or 5 fellow riders with his tales and pronouncements), bought pretzels from a vendor, walked to the Empire State Building, and finally took one of those open-top tourist buses around all of Manhattan. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and we had a wonderful time. Glenn was obsessing about whether he’d see rats (he didn’t but he discussed it with a lucky German tourist who had seen rats TWICE) or anyone urinating in public (he did not). And he told a young man with fashionably ripped jeans that in his day, ripped clothing meant you were poor. Miraculously, no incidents occurred.

We had dinner in their hotel room, a feast that revisited Glenn’s childhood foods: lox, bagels, cream cheese, and especially half-sour pickles. Lien was a good sport but she wasn’t really into the classic Jewish food. The half-sour pickles were Glenn’s favorite thing. He took the remains of the jar back to California on the plane to finish at home. I was sure that they would be confiscated at the airport, but two weeks later I received the text at the top of this piece: “Jackie, I ate the last pickle yesterday. Thank you so much, I love you! Cousin Glenn.” For his birthday in July, I sent him a big supply of half-sour pickles via Goldbelly so he could continue to enjoy them.

Vietnam

But Glenn had never met his two other grandchildren (and one great-grandchild) in Vietnam–Lien’s older children who were over 21 at the time of the petition were not able to be included under the Immigration Act). Even after spending months trying to enlist the help of two Congressional representatives, they were unable to get visas to visit Glenn here, and the wait is likely to be yearslong. Glenn grew more and more depressed because he believed he would die before meeting them, but Lien didn’t think he was healthy enough to make a trip to Vietnam. The long trip and his poor health made it a risky decision but Glenn was not to be dissuaded. “If I die there, so what,” he told me. So in January 2024, Glenn and Lien flew to Vietnam so he could meet his two other grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

The other day I called Glenn, and Lien said he was not in the house because he was at the complex’s Jacuzzi. Lien was able to tell me, in English, that she had gotten a date in December to take the US Citizenship test, and was studying for it weekly along with classes to improve her English. She is studying tenaciously. Because she is Glenn’s tenacious daughter.

Addendum: We have a new US citizen!

Linda Liên Syrop, December 18, 2024.

I wish to thank Elaine Paxson of Big World Design for all her help with blog crises and graphics.

A few days ago on the podcast “The Daily,” reporter Michael Barbaro interviewed a group of teenaged girls in Brooklyn to ask them about their views on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when both were in high school.

Among the amazing disclosures the girls made were that for most of the week-plus that the confirmation process was so prominently in the news, the girls hadn’t actually spoken to any of the adults in their lives about what was happening. Two girls who attended private high schools said they had been allowed to watch some of the live coverage at school. One girl said no adult had discussed it with her until her dad made an angry comment about it. In response to his daughter saying that it wasn’t fair that people were attacking Blasey Ford, her father said he was mad that people were trying to ruin Kavanaugh’s life. His response made the girl really angry, and she had a bitter edge to her voice while recounting it. I wonder if her father even knows how she felt about his comment. I’m so tired of hearing men trot out the by-now exhausted trope, “I have daughters of my own… BUT [….going after a man for what he did in high school….well…]

One girl noted that Blasey Ford wouldn’t have come forward and talked about the assault, and ruined her own life in the process, for no reason. “You are not going to lie about something that will  affect you forever just to keep someone out of office,” especially someone with that much power, she pointed out. You know you are going to be attacked and invalidated and made to feel stupid, the girl concluded.

A majority of the girls had female friends who had been sexually assaulted or they themselves had experienced uncomfortable and unwanted sexually threatening situations with boys or men. One girl said that friends who’d been assaulted always had permanent triggers of the assault, and she compared that to what Blasey Ford had said about the laughter she said she heard from Kavanaugh and his friend during and after the assault. One girl in the podcast group had come close to being assaulted by an unknown man in her neighborhood as she made her way home one night after visiting a friend, but fortunately she had managed to run away. When she got home, adrenaline pumping, and told her mother, her mom blamed her for being out too late. It was her own fault. After that, she confided only in trusted friends, and eventually she just stopped talking about what happened, a pattern that other girls said was common.

The message the girls took from the approval of Kavanaugh as a Justice on the Supreme Court was “that anyone can get away with anything as long as they have enough power,” one girl said. “People who watched [it] will think if he got away with it, I can too. Maybe I won’t get caught either.”  “It feels like a big old ‘I don’t care about your situation’ from the higher ups in government,” another said. “It felt like they said, ‘We don’t care if you like it or not, you have to take it.’ They don’t care about our opinion, our safety, even though we make up a big percentage of people.”

The high point of the interview was when Michael Barbaro asked the girls this question: “Should what you do in high school, now, follow you around for the rest of your life?”

The girls said yes, it should. “There are certain things …that follow the victims forever, so if it follows the victims forever, then you have to deal with it too, since it’s your fault,” said one girl. “You have a moral compass when you’re 15, 16 that will tell you if it’s right or wrong, so you’re consciously deciding to do something wrong or you’re consciously deciding to do something right. Which is the same thing you’re going to be doing the rest of your life.” The rest of your life, as in, a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.

But President Trump is worried about young men, fearing it’s a bad time to be a young man. He worries about the collateral damage that may occur if women are going to feel free to come forward and accuse men of sexual transgressions. Trump has 20-odd women charging him with a range of assaults and rape. I’d like to know if he is worried about men being falsely accused–because they didn’t commit the assault–or is the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief actually worried that now the behavior discussed in the Kavanaugh case–the all-too-common “boys-will-be-boys” assaults that he normalizes–will be something men and boys will have to actually worry about?? Wait, who changed the rules in mid-game??

The reaction to the Kavanaugh hearings was so revealing. As long as women have been collateral damage throughout the long human history of sexual violence, harassment, and degradation, it’s been OK. Now that a man may potentially be collateral damage in a “he-said-she-said” (or should I say, “he SCREAMED-she-said”) situation such as this, we had better not allow that to happen. I’m not saying it’s ever good to have someone unjustly accused of something and found guilty of something they didn’t do. I’m just pointing out that, for a very long time, it’s been acceptable for women to have to keep sexual assault quiet, live with the consequences for the rest of their lives, and chalk it up to “boys will be boys” or other patriarchal societal or religious fallacies that normalize such behavior as men’s right and entitlement.

And there’s another element in the Kavanaugh case. Obviously, I believe Christine Blasey Ford and I do not believe Brett Kavanaugh. However, I know that people make terrible mistakes in judgment, at all ages. Most of the time, one hopes for an apology as an acknowledgment of the wrong done and as a way to promote healing and moving on as much as it is possible. Caitlin Flanagan recently wrote in The Atlantic about her own experience of an attempted date rape in high school, but in her case, the boy who assaulted her actually apologized a few years afterwards, making all the difference in how she came to terms with her experience of sexual assault. “Teenagers make mistakes, some of them serious,” Flanagan wrote. “One measure of a kid’s character is what he or she does afterward.” Flanagan recounts how the boy apologized 2 years later, when she was home from college for the summer working at a department store. She describes herself at the time of the apology as a far more confident person, about to transfer to a great university, no longer suicidal and depressed. As she was ringing up a sale at the store, she saw someone in her peripheral vision approaching the register. But when she finished the sale and looked up, he was gone. “A few minutes later, I saw him coming back; it was the boy who’d tried to rape me. He had tears in his eyes, and he seemed almost overwrought. And right there—in the A&S department store in the Smith Haven Mall—he apologized profusely.” She told him she forgave him. “It was a weird ambush of intense guilt and apology, and it was the wrong place and time—but the thing was, I really did forgive him. My life had moved on, and things were better. It felt good to get the apology and—as it always does—even better to forgive him. He’d done a terrible thing, but he’d done what he could to make it right. I held nothing against him, and I still don’t.”

I believe Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape Christine Blasey Ford when he was in high school and only failed to do so because he was too drunk to get her one-piece bathing suit off before his equally drunk cohort in crime, Mark Judge, jumped on the bed, causing all three to topple off. Kavanaugh never apologized or took responsibility for what he did during the 3 decades that have passed. His acts caused lasting damage, and he’s done nothing to try to make that right. He was apparently too busy creating a false persona that couldn’t afford to make amends to the young woman (or women) he abused or treated badly in his youth so he could get that seat on the Court that he and the other members of Congress believe he is entitled to. He didn’t fool anyone but a bunch of old entitled white people in the Senate when he feigned ignorance about his yearbook remarks about the Devils Triangle and other sexual references.

So, yes, the mistake of a 17-year-old kid matters years later. The teenaged girls on that podcast understand that, but Congress does not.

 

 

On March 14, 2018, my father, Herbert, passed away at the age of 90. He had been home only 8 days following a week spent in the hospital, surgery, and then 3 weeks in a rehabilitation facility. The medical odyssey had started, characteristically, with my father driving himself to the emergency room in the evening without telling anyone until he was already there. During his stay in the hospital, several serious conditions were diagnosed, some of which he had managed to hide (and/or ignored advice about) from family and friends. It felt like the hospitalization came out of nowhere, but what became apparent was that he had various health problems that he didn’t attend to because he was focused on living each day for my mother. When my mother passed away in late November, my father literally fell apart, reminding me of the quote from The Sun Also Rises, where a character responds to the question of how he went broke: “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.” My son Joe said Herb was Johnny Cash to Ruth’s June Carter. He couldn’t last more than a few months without my mother.

The last month in particular was an exhausting odyssey as my father spent time first in the hospital in Bronxville and then in a rehabilitation facility in the Bronx before he finally made it home to Yonkers. He needed 24-hour/day care when he left the rehab facility, and a group of wonderfully caring and empathetic women from Ghana and Jamaica were hired.  The daytime aide, Nana, firmly dismissed my concerns about how much extra work she was doing by saying, “In Africa, we say, ‘He is your father, but he is also  everyone’s father.'” Nana was the one who was with him when he died.

Right now my emotions are running high. I know that in the coming months I have things I want to write about my father that I could not set down while he was alive because he figured out how to subscribe to this blog and I could not figure out how to unsubscribe him. For now, I will post the remarks I made about my dad at his funeral, along with some photos of him over the years. My father was a huge force in my life and I will miss being able to talk to him and look in his green eyes again. Here’s my eulogy:

 

 

It’s hard to believe that we’re here again today, less than 4 months after we gathered to bury my mother, Ruth. My father’s rapid decline in the last few weeks was shocking, but not surprising, because after Ruth died, his heart was broken, and his famous fighting spirit largely deserted him. I say “largely” because even in the last week of his life, he objected vociferously to my getting him a Life Alert system to call for help if he fell down–which had happened several times the previous week. The fellow who installed the system patted me sympathetically on the back as he ran out the front door.

Herb was well-known for his fighting spirit, which he tapped over many decades to do battle in his adopted city of Yonkers and his upstate Adirondack getaway of Corinth, where he and my mother spent many summers on Efner Lake. He was well known around City Hall in both cities. If you Google “Herbert Syrop,”  one of the first entries is Matter of Syrop v. City of Yonkers, a lengthy fight to prevent Stop & Shop from detonating part of a hill near his house to build a new supermarket. Upstate, he was a founding member of the Efner Lake Association and was a passionate advocate for preserving the Adirondacks and its natural environment. He and fellow townspeople successfully prevented Corinth from allowing a garbage processing plant to set up on the banks of the Hudson River, which would have endangered water quality on the river after it had finally recovered from decades of pollution from the International Paper mill.

And there is what I refer to as the Herbert Syrop Sidewalk, the result of his single-minded pursuit of the Sarah Lawrence College president to pay for constructing a sidewalk running the length of the Yonkers-located portion of the college so the students no longer walked in the busy road on their way to and from the train station and town of Bronxville. After numerous letters and phone calls to the college president went unanswered, Herb found himself seated behind her one night at a public performance of Chinese music on campus. Seizing the moment, he introduced himself. “Hello, my name is Herbert Syrop. You might recognize my name from the many letters and phone calls I’ve sent you about the dangerous situation on Kimball Ave.” My father said that the President’s face instantly registered dread. But she found no escape. Herb mentioned the college’s $60K+ yearly tuition and how she was responsible for all those young people under her care. Not long afterwards, the school capitulated, and the sidewalk was built, and that is why, when I drove past the college on my way to Bronxville Hospital when my father spent a week there last month, I laughed (and cried) as I passed the students walking down the sidewalk, oblivious to the drama that had created it.

Of course, his fighting spirit wasn’t always easy to bear, as his one of his friends recently wrote: “Herb was tireless in advocating for what he believed to be right. I admired him for that rare quality, even when it made me a little crazy.” It made all of us more than a little crazy at times.

But Herb had an incredibly playful side. When my brother was a little boy obsessed with airplanes, my father helped him write letters to airplane manufacturers and then stood outside with him gazing up at planes flying overhead, telling Mitchell the planes were flying over the house so he could review them. In desperation to get me to go to bed on time, Herb told me that I was actually half human/half-from-planet-Chromo—my father’s secret home planet–which earthlings would never detect because it was always exactly opposite Earth with the moon in between. He said I had transponders inside my neck that allowed me to receive messages from Chromo, though him, that could only be heard at night if I was in bed. He sat next to my bed reciting monotone messages from Chromo until I finally drifted off to sleep. He also told me that the King and Queen of America lived in the gold-domed St Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, and although they had crowns and sat on thrones, they never appeared in public.

Like my mother, Herb had a soft spot for birds. I’ll always remember my father helping me rescue a baby robin that fell from a nest onto the front lawn. We waited a while to see if its mother would be able to help it, but eventually we took it in. We spent many days feeding the bird, which I named Big Mouth, through a dropper, and eventually I believe we graduated to worm cocktails. Because we had a trip upstate planned, we brought the robin with us. I recall trying to encourage it to fly by gently tossing it out of my hand as Herb ran ahead, flapping his arms. Eventually the bird did seem to get interested in flying on its own, so he and I drove to an Audubon Society park and tearfully watched as Big Mouth flew away.

Herb had a lifelong fascination with the cosmos and talked about the Big Bang all the time. When I returned to his house after he died, a book with the title “Cosmos” was on the dining room table and a Netflix DVD still inside the player was called “Particle Fever,” which “follows the exciting inside story of 6 scientists seeking to unravel the mysteries of the universe.” The definition of cosmos, which is “the universe regarded as a complex and orderly system; the opposite of chaos,” –makes it a perfect subject for my father, who was on a mission to impose order onto the chaotic world.

In the early 1960s, he constructed a fallout shelter in our Yonkers basement in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, just in case a nuclear bomb struck Manhattan, only 7 miles away. He calculated that if we survived the blast, we still had to worry about nuclear fallout and be prepared to remain in the basement for some time. For years I wondered why the windows had cement covers. The first time I told David about the fallout shelter, his response was, “Wow, I never actually met anyone who had a fallout shelter.” Two weeks before he died, Herb and I were arguing (Surprise) about the wisdom of the “Duck and Cover” drills we had to do in elementary school, and he snapped, “You have no idea what you’re talking about! Always be prepared!” he said. “I took that to heart when I was a Boy Scout.” When I raised my eyebrows, he said, “Well, maybe I took it too much to heart.”

So Herb was on a mission to protect us from danger, whether it was a higher risk of car accidents on Friday nights or wearing flip-flops in New York City. During my sophomore year at Penn, I won the dorm room lottery and got a single room. When Herb found out that it was a ground-floor room on Spruce Street, he drove to Philly the next weekend with his tool box and installed 3 window locks. Even well into his 80s, my father stood at the curb in front of his house, inspecting my tires before I started off, telling me to call him if something happened on the drive back to NJ. “I’m still a good driver,” he asserted. As I drove away from the curb, I looked at him through my rearview mirror, as he stepped into the road to better see if I used my signal indicator when I turned the corner.

But my father’s legacy for me, personally, was a very powerful belief that I could be myself. I faulted his overprotectiveness as paternalistic when I was young, but in later years I recognized that he was unusual and, in many ways ahead of his time when it came to parenting a girl. He strongly encouraged me to study science at a time when–and this really happened–my high school guidance counselor belittled my interest in majoring in biology in college, scoffing, “What do you want to go and do THAT for?” When I reported this to my father, he advised me to ignore anything that came out of that guy’s mouth. “Two years ago, he was a shoe salesman!” Herb said. It went without saying that I could go to college and study what I wanted to, which was not, in 1970s Yonkers, a foregone conclusion in a lot of families. He and my mother did not comment when I wore only jeans and t-shirts to school for 6 straight years as a rebellion against the previous 6 years of schooling when dresses or skirts were required.

And while many Jewish families consider arguing one’s views, even heatedly, to be a normal part of life, my father took that to another level, so I had to learn to keep up with him and hold my own. Now, as I reach my 60^th birthday, I realize that—with some necessary tempering of Herb’s brand of fighting—it has often served me well as I made my way through life.

In the last weeks of his life, my father was especially concerned about his legacy. Marcus Aurelius said, “What we do now echoes in eternity.” I believe his dedication to his family, friends, and neighbors on both ends of the Hudson River, and to preserving the land and waters he loved so much, will echo in eternity.    

T

January 2018, his first year without Ruth since 1948.

 

On November  27, 2017, my mother Ruth passed away at the age of 91. Her death was sudden, unexpected, despite her advanced age and the fact that she was frail and 5 years into a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease isn’t what killed her, but it did rob her of what made her the person we all knew.

My mother was a born elementary school teacher, who took the greatest of pleasure in her chosen profession. Her other passions were gardening and reading. Her calm, Zen-like, live-and-let-live spirit, and good humor were how I most remember her, but she was also a mother bear who looked out for and defended us when necessary. She had a soft heart and encouraged us to take in wounded and orphaned birds until they were healed and ready to launch; likewise, if one of our friends needed a helping hand, she never needed to be asked twice. Ruth’s love of her career also set an example for me of how important work was, especially for women, and she encouraged me to find work I enjoyed and which left room for family if I chose to have one. Ruth was aways there for me during some difficult times as a young mother, when I felt overwhelmed and exhausted. Her advice was always so grounded, practical, and calm.

It was painful to see the person who she truly was unwind into something the disease created. Even in the terrible last year, she could occasionally rally, and there were always her beautiful blue eyes to look into, even when she had little to say.

Her funeral was a traditional Jewish burial with a graveside service, held on a cold day in early December. The rabbi gave us pins to wear with black ribbon that we tore to symbolize how Jews used to tear their clothing to show their grief and loss. We spoke about Ruth and recalled her goodness and joie de vivre. Once the coffin was lowered, we took turns filling the grave with shovelfuls of dirt. I dropped in a tiny red cardinal ornament because cardinals were her favorite bird and she loved putting out the sunflower seeds they sought at her feeder–just as I do now each day.

These are the words that I spoke at her graveside, and some photos of her over the years.

My mother was the real deal. Before there were “health foods,” my mother subjected our meals and desserts to a sprinkling of wheat germ. Before the word “feminist” was something I even understood, my mother refused to buy me a Barbie doll because she said it was a terrible example for young girls of what women really looked like. And when I begged her for white go-go boots in 3^rd grade, she made it clear that I’d have to pass on that fashion statement as well.

Ruth set an example for me that went beyond dolls and shoes. She was a first-generation American, the daughter of Russian immigrants. The 1930 census, when Ruth was 4, lists her father Charlie as a rag dealer who spoke Yiddish and had no schooling beyond elementary grades. Ruth was the first in her family to graduate from college—NYU in 1948. 

She became an elementary school teacher. When I was 9 or 10 she went back to teaching full time. Over the years, I visited her classroom many times and saw what a great teacher she was and how much the children loved her. Her classroom was like controlled chaos. I called it her 3-ring circus. There were bird nests, rocks, collections of seeds and milkweed pods; a bird feeder hung outside the window that the children could watch. Kids were scattered around the classroom doing different things as my mother moved around the room, making it look easy. It wasn’t easy. One year, she had a child who had to be held or have her hand held for many hours of the school day, and so my mother did just that as she taught the class. In the early 1970s, the Yonkers teachers’ union went on strike—which was illegal– and my mother was out on the picket line, waving her sign and wearing a wig to hide her identity, like other strike leaders, because the city had threatened to arrest the leaders. Unlike the other strikers, my mother wore a yellow wool mop. Why waste money on a real wig? She was never one to be concerned with vanity. And she didn’t get scared; she understood how important the living wage was, how we benefited from her health insurance, and that her future pension would help my father and her have a more comfortable retirement.

Ruth was always one to roll up her sleeves. I remember when we were living in Los Angeles while David went to law school, and Mitchell and Lorraine’s son Laszlo had just been born. My parents flew out right away to see him. To my amazement, my mother opened her suitcase and took out rubber gloves and some cleaning tools she’d packed and announced she was going to clean Mitchell and Lorraine’s apartment so they’d come home to a clean apartment with the new baby. Years later, when we had children and my parents drove the 2 hours out to NJ to babysit for us, we’d return from an evening out and find the kitchen clean and dishes done, and my father napping in preparation for the long drive back, while my mother, still up,  waited for us, reading the New York Times or doing the crossword puzzle.

My mother was, for most of her life, physically strong and enduring. Every summer she and David swam across Efner Lake, at the upstate cabin, scaring my father into taking the boat out to tail her, though she did not need his shadow. She swam out to the middle of the lake into her early 80s, wearing her glasses and white bathing cap while she swam the breast stroke with her head out of water to keep the glasses on. She did all her own gardening, filling the tiny space with beautiful flowers, fig trees, raspberries, and poppies. David and I have figs and raspberries that started out as cuttings she brought to us 20 years ago, and we treasure their bounty every year.

In the last 2 years, I believed I’d already lost my mother to Alzheimer’s disease. Yet even though this terrible disease robbed my mother of her memory, strength, confidence, and sense of humor, she was still the one who remembered to ask me, “And how are you?? What are the children doing? How is David’s work?” We could still share our love of sweets with a trip to Carvel. But many visits were profoundly depressing as she started to forget so many things. Still, each time I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the many photographs I have of flowers, my pottery, the beach, our dogs, she was still riveted by art, beauty, and images of animals or nature. On the refrigerator, there is still her handwritten note that says, “We are hardwired to make art.”

Throughout the house, there are many of these little notes taped to bulletin boards and the refrigerator, testifying to the things Ruth loved. There are numerous sweet love notes to my father, to whom she was married for 69 years. Other notes praise trees, dogs, wilderness, and birds. There is one note that I particularly love: “Talk not of wasted affections. Affection is never wasted.”   

Just 2 weeks ago, on what was to be my last visit with Ruth, David chatted with Herb upstairs while we sat at the dining room table downstairs. She asked me over and over what were the names of her four grandchildren, where they lived, how old they were, and what they were doing. Finally, she asked me to write the information on a piece of paper so she could look at it whenever she wanted. I covered 2 sides of the paper with the facts, and she read it repeatedly. Then we shared a toasted bagel. As I got up to leave, she said, “This was a great visit! I’m so glad you came!”

I didn’t know it was going to be the last time we spoke and I left feeling so happy that we had had a rare upbeat moment together. While I’m glad her suffering is over, I am sorry that I have now truly lost her. But as my mother was a tremendous optimist, not at all a true Syrop, I’ll end with the words on a note she posted directly across from her bed, where she could read it each day, written by the poet Stanley Kunitz:

“I can scarcely wait til tomorrow when a new life begins for me, as it does each day, as it does each day.”

 

 

 

 

The latest revelations about Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and a succession of men who occupy positions of power in all manner of fields send me back to the time about 25 years ago, a few months after our first child was born, when I was home watching the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings unfolding on TV as my baby son napped. I watched with horror as Anita Hill was vilified, minimized, and, of course, not believed by the roomful of men judging her worthiness to speak truth to their power. On top of it, the Congressmen implied Hill was responsible for bringing such unmentionable, crude matters as Long Dong Silver and pubic hairs in Coke cans into American living rooms, as if she was the one–not Clarence Thomas– who had been inflicting this pornography-inspired subject matter on the people he worked with. The Senators were killing the messenger, circling the wagons, and making sure that this ripple working its way into public consciousness would not make a real dent in the patriarchy.

It was obvious to me, and many others that Anita Hill was speaking the truth and did  so at her own peril only because, as an accomplished lawyer and law professor, she knew how high the stakes were when a man who behaved the way Clarence Thomas did could be nominated to a lifetime appointment in the nation’s highest court. You cannot reach adulthood as a woman in this country without having experienced, at the very least, sexual harassment at work, from professors, leering and groping men on subways and buses, and menacing neighbors, or at the neighborhood muffin store. Unfortunately, many women experience far worse than harassment and groping, in the form of assault and rape. But what I remember is that the takedown of Anita Hill was so effortless. The men in Congress didn’t lose any sleep over how they were treating her and what lengths they were going to in order to both discredit her but build up Thomas’s believability. And that included Joe Biden, who colluded with committee Republicans Arlen Spector and Orrin Hatch to quash several female witnesses who could have supported Hill’s allegations. The message that was transmitted so clearly was that Anita Hill was insignificant, a tiresome woman–there was a whispering campaign that she was probably a spurned lover!!– making a fuss about nothing–and, anyway, that nothing hadn’t happened in the first place, because the men said it didn’t. In all likelihood, they were living in glass houses and didn’t wish to throw stones at Clarence Thomas.

So the Hill/Thomas hearing was a national “moment,” and it didn’t amount to much. Little of what has been written in response to the current revelations of sexual violence and harassment address what is at the root of the behavior we’re discussing yet again: a patriarchal system that feminist writer Bell Hooks explains is like any system of domination. It relies on socializing men and women alike to believe that there are inferior and superior parties in all relationships. This patriarchal system requires boys and men to see themselves as superior to women and to do whatever is necessary to remain in control of women. Nothing will change until we reject the idea that patriarchy is somehow the natural order of things, part of human nature, and start talking about how we got to a place where, as Masha Gessen notes, the power imbalance allows some men to take women hostage using sex.

How can this be changed? Punishment will only deter a few. No, the change has to come from the roots and move forward. Hooks said that parenting is political, and she challenges us to be willing to change the way we raise our children because that is the only way to make real, long-term change. For many years when my boys were young I worried about how to raise them to respect and value women and not be afraid to show vulnerability–without at the same time putting those boys in the crosshairs of schoolyard bullies and adult shamers if they weren’t “manly” or “hard” enough. I had vivid childhood memories of elementary and middle school bullies beating up and taunting other boys, and no adults intervened. The issue became less academic and more real when our older son entered elementary school, at which point whatever we modeled as parents and however many times we read Ferdinand to him, we could not control or change how other children and adults reacted during the school day. If a boy is perceived as too “soft,” it will not go well for him. I remember worrying if the boys cried “too easily” and wondered what would happen if they did so at school. As a mother, I wanted to encourage my boys to fully express their feelings and to feel safe doing so, but I knew that if they did so in public, they’d be bullied and shamed. It seemed to me that mothers are forced to walk a fine line, nurturing their son’s so-called soft side, but not so much that they couldn’t “fit in” with other boys, and eventually, men.

Maybe things are better now than they were in the mid-1990s, but what I saw at my son’s elementary school was disquieting. I went on all his class trips from kindergarten through third grade because he might need an insulin shot while away from school and there was no one to do so on a trip, so  I had the opportunity to hear children taunting other kids on the bus, to hear kids who were only 8 years old telling others about sordid, sensationalist scenes from the Sallie Jessie Raphael TV talk show they’d watched, and one boy in particular called other boys a “faggot” many times inside the bus as well as shouting it out the window at random passersby. None of this elicited any response from the busily chatting teachers in the front of the bus. I’m sorry to say that at the time I was following the unwritten rule of never speaking out to someone else’s kid. That was something the teachers were supposed to do, but it never happened.  I can’t say the behavior I witnessed was the sole reason we decided to leave the public school and send our sons to a Quaker school, but it certainly played a part in the decision. Sure, Quaker schools have their own craziness to contend with, but it is the kind of crazy that at least errs on the side of making efforts to address the more awful things that go on between kids, especially in middle school, when parents and teachers tend to look the other way and say, “Let them sort it out themselves.” That’s fine if your kid is not the one being bullied and taunted.

In “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love,” Hooks points out that how men are raised (and let’s not forget that women are heavily involved in how boys are raised) has a tremendous impact on the lives of both sexes. The patriarchal system demands of all males that they systematically kill off the emotional parts of themselves until they grow into men who are closed off, unable to understand their feelings, and eventually unable to feel at all. Men who are unable to examine their emotions, feelings, and anger are unable to feel any empathy or care about another person and that makes it easy to do what they want to them in the advancement of their own demands and needs. From a young age the patriarchy teaches men that it is their right–natural, in fact–to use  violence and aggression to get what they want–from women and men. A man should take what he wants; if he has to ignore boundaries to subjugate and win at all costs, that is his right. The woman across the desk or room is not an individual with needs and rights equal to his own, so he can act as  he wants to. And the inability to connect with others carries with it an inability to assume responsibility for causing them pain, Hooks points out. When I read the apologies most of the men in the news are writing–if they apologize at all, since Louis C.K. “acknowledged” that he had indeed forced women to watch him masturbate but he did not apologize. The wording of these apologies often states, “I apologize IF the women were injured, IF they feel they were hurt. If, if, if.  In other words, I’m so sorry IF I’ve offended you, others might not have been offended when I did the same thing.

If men are this cut off from their feelings, their ability to discern boundaries, to care about another person, how will they be available emotionally to their girlfriends, wives, and children–something the majority of women say they want from their husbands and lovers. Carl Jung said that where the will to power is paramount, love will be lacking. Men can’t dominate women and still truly love them, like them, or respect them.

Writing recently in Rolling Stone, Carina Chocano said that Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of behavior is emblematic of a patriarchal system that runs on power differentials. “It’s not just Weinstein, or Hollywood,” she notes. It’s corporate America, the legislature, everywhere you look, because it’s based on patriarchy: a system of oppression in action.    “Flexing power to coerce sex from the less powerful isn’t natural, it’s abuse,” Chocana says.  “And abuse is not natural, it’s cultural.” Abuse flows from a socially-sanctioned sense of entitlement that emanates from a patriarchal belief that men are entitled to more control over everything and all women.

Patriarchy has no gender, Hooks reminds us. Children come into the world with an ability to love and be loved, she says, but we shouldn’t assume that they do not need to learn how to love and receive guidance from adults in the ways to express love and respect others. Just because a boy might be raised by his mother, it doesn’t mean that a mother doesn’t have a patriarchal mindset. We women have absorbed the lessons of the patriarchy about masculinity and how it’s acted out, and as mothers we reinforce its dictums that to “be a man” or a “real man,” a boy or young man must not be soft and give in to his feelings. We tell boys not to cry, that it is better to be indifferent to their feelings and be strong and silent. But if you take that far enough, do it often enough, that boy/man will eventually not feel anything. And we’ll be having this same conversation in another 25 years.

 

I’ll risk sounding like another idiotic white liberal with the posting of this entry. Guilty as charged.  Last winter I began volunteering  at a food pantry in Trenton, NJ, after a friend invited me along to see if I’d like to join him when he volunteers each Thursday helping shoppers at the pantry. The organization that runs the pantry also runs housing and job support programs from the same location, as well as an urban vegetable garden a few doors down the street. Some of the people assisting at the food pantry are themselves part of a jobs program, others are volunteers. There’s also a very dedicated paid staff and a cast of characters who drive and unload the trucks that pull up to the curb, unloading the heavy skids of food cartons from the front to the back of the store where the freezers, walk-ins, and freight elevators are.

The pantry building is a busy place in the morning, with shoppers often lined up outside waiting for the doors to open when we get there at 8:45 a.m. in even the coldest of temperatures. Once we open, they must show identification and await their turns to be processed and receive cards identifying how many points they have to shop with in the food pantry. The number of points depends on family size. They wait for an available shopping cart and one of the volunteers to guide them through the store as they make selections, and once done, we pack the bags and help them outside if they need help.

There are times when the pantry is well stocked, and other times when the staff juggles mightily to keep enough on the shelves, especially enough frozen chicken and eggs. Sometimes there is frozen fish and fresh fruit and vegetables or donated bread from a local bakery. The number of shoppers increases when there are big holidays coming and as the month progresses and families’ money reserves get depleted. The pantry directors are constantly worrying about cuts in food donations, decreased budgets to purchase food, using up the fresh food on shelves before it goes bad, and keeping the shelves stocked in the face of rising numbers of patrons and increasing food insecurity in the very depressed capital city of New Jersey. I don’t say “worry” lightly, either. The hunger prevention coordinator loses sleep over the food supply and comes in on days off and weekends to deal with all sorts of problems with refrigerators and elevators. The pantry is not far from the gold-domed State House and the courts, where thousands of people work in state offices each day, and where funding decisions for food insecurity are being made.

The volunteers are a varied group. Some are retired or empty-nesters, but one is a graduate student, another has a son in middle school. We come from all over the county in which the pantry is located and are occasionally joined by groups of volunteers from a Quaker school or local businesses.

It’s hard to explain what I’ve learned in my months at the pantry. It may sound trite to ask and answer the question, “What does food insecurity look like?” that is, just “who” are our shoppers, because food insecurity affects so many people who didn’t expect to need help. Shoppers sometimes tell us a little about themselves. Last week one of the shoppers was a former Atlantic City police officer. There are veterans of the war in Iraq, veterans of the Vietnam war, many elderly people, and people who worked steadily for decades in businesses in the area but found themselves jobless, overnight in some cases, in their late 50s and early 60s–cut adrift a few years from retirement and now unable to find work. Some shoppers are missing limbs; others have hardly any teeth and must choose only the softest foods to eat. (I’m controlling myself here and saving a tirade about dentistry for another blog post.)  Some are now caring for grandchildren. Some folks come in a group van because they are autistic or have emotional problems. Quite a few shoppers have chronic health conditions, which they tell us about by way of explanation for why they don’t want any pasta or rice or even slightly sweetened Corn Flakes. Some come in wheelchairs or use walkers. There are some people who clearly have problems with drugs and alcohol, though it isn’t always immediately obvious. There are a few people who are demanding, but they are in the minority. Most shoppers are grateful for the food, and some are apologetic that they need to use a pantry at all. They may share their history because it matters to them to have you know they haven’t always needed assistance. Others just share their history because they badly need to talk to someone. Shoppers come alone, or with their kids and grandkids; they come on bikes, on foot, by bus, in cars. Some are dressed well, others have duct tape holding together the seams in their coats. They speak English, Spanish, French, and Polish.

Some, like me, are cooking-challenged, going for the microwavable foods and simple-to-heat soups and pastas. But others shop the way my husband does, with meals in mind, viewing ingredients and thinking about potential dishes. In fact, we have one shopper who cooks amazing meals and arranges them in beautiful presentations that he catalogues through pictures. He posts them on Facebook with links to the organization website to demonstrate how you can make healthy and delicious meals with only ingredients from the pantry and a little imagination: pineapple chicken, chicken with spinach, chicken tacos, grilled tuna steaks, rice balls, desserts made from frozen fruit. He’s telegenic and practical. We tell him, “You’re better than Rachel Ray.” He replies, “That’s what my wife says!”

I can no longer count how many times shoppers say, “Thank you. Thank all of you. It is a blessing that you are here.”  At first all the talk of God was a little jarring for me, especially when a lay minister grabbed my hand and launched into an impromptu group prayer to give thanks for the Pantry volunteers, but now I’ve learned to take it in stride and am glad for the comfort their faith gives them in this harsh world.

Over the last month, I’ve been bringing used books from my mother-in-law’s apartment as we clean it out after she died. The pantry has a few small shelves in the waiting area with books that shoppers can take home or look at while waiting. I left a number of dictionaries, thesauruses, and many children’s books. An elderly man came through the pantry with a Webster’s Ninth edition dictionary already in his cart. I asked him about the books and he said, “I’ve always wanted a dictionary!” I can’t stop thinking about that. I used to read dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun when I was kid. My house was filled with them. I’ve checked back on those shelves and there is not one dictionary or thesaurus left. The Klutz-series of books with built-in watercolors and nice paper are gone too.

One of the volunteers noticed that some people hesitated to take cans that didn’t have pull tops and she brought in a few can openers for what is called the Extras shelf. They were gone within an hour. Today I brought in 10 more and they too flew off the shelves. No one thinks about these low-tech analogue products anymore, but there is a tremendous need for the simplest of things: soap, shampoo, toothpaste and toothbrushes, and women’s sanitary napkins, all expensive items that are necessities if you’re job hunting.

Today we were asked to stop all activities for 5 minutes and join with shoppers, other volunteers, and employees for a small gathering in the front hall mid-morning.  The YWCA has for some years chosen April 27th to pledge to stand against racism, and the Pantry decided to join in that effort. I admit that I thought this was going to be pretty hokey and uncomfortable. I felt very privileged and inauthentic standing there with my pledge paper. I tend toward the cynical, am not a joiner, certainly not a believer, and I have trouble with kumbaya moments. But “my” shopper and I stopped what we were doing and joined the circle. We were given papers with the pledge printed out, and we stood in a circle—shoppers, volunteers, and staff–reciting the pledge together, which begins, “I take this pledge, fully aware that the struggle to overcome and eliminate racism will not end with a mere pledge, but calls for an ongoing transformation within myself and society.”

After we finished reading the entire pledge, we were asked if anyone wished to say anything. There was silence for a few seconds. Then a pantry customer spoke. “Well,” he said, “we all need to care for each other. That’s what it’s about. We just need to take care of each other.”  Another shopper nodded and said, “We have to remember: there are more good people out there than bad.” The shopper I had been taking through the store said, “We have to speak up when we see something wrong. Not just take our phones out and take pictures. We have to speak up right then!”

I was near tears by this point. Fortunately we all headed back to what we had been doing before the Pledge was read. Those with the least reason to have faith in humanity had the most faith. That restored some of my lost faith in America in 2016.

This is the story of a cross-species battle, of antagonism tempered by empathy, curiosity, and, yes, even respect. The title is an homage to a Godzilla film of a similar name (www.rottentomatoes.com/m/godzilla_resurgence/).

The Beginning

It all started with a new car. In August 2015 I became the proud owner of a baby blue VW Beetle convertible. It is perhaps shallow, but nonetheless true: I love this car. The convertible top is cream colored and the car is a lovely light blue. Mr Spock stands on my dashboard presiding over beach stones with his tricorder.

By April 2016 the Beetle had accumulated 10,000 miles, so I made an appointment with the VW dealer for a 10,000-mile oil change. I drove the car there, borrowed one of their loaners for the rest of the day, and drove away. Maybe 10 minutes later my phone rang. The VW service agent asked, “Ma’am, have you driven through a pile of leaves recently?” Of course not. “Did any of the dashboard lights go on when you were driving here?” No, no lights, no sounds, nothing. “Well, you better come back right away and see what’s under your hood,” he said.  So I drove back to the dealer, to find my Beetle parked close to the service entrance with the hood up and several men gathered around it, peering into the engine. “There’s a huge nest in here,” one of them said, as he pulled out a few large sticks and a bunch of leaves and grass. “Must be a squirrel.” And so it began.

It was indeed a huge nest, but there were no critters in it at the moment. Unfortunately, when they cleaned out the leaves and grass and checked the wires and connections beneath it, the squirrel had not only made a nice bed, it had satiated its appetite to the tune of $1400 worth of wires, covers, and relays. I called the insurance company to make arrangements, and the VW dealer said the car would be ready in about a week. I kept the loaner, a red Jetta.

About 3 days later I was at a local farm picking up some cider. It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to check under the hood of the Jetta loaner, just for the hell of it. You guessed it. There was the beginning of another nest. I called the dealer. This time they didn’t sound very friendly. “You’d better get the car back here immediately,” the customer service representative said, exasperation and blame in his voice. When I parked the Jetta next to the service entrance, the service guys again gathered around the engine. The service manager was pretty worked up. I would be liable for anything over $125 on the loaner, he said. David came to pick me up and we drove down the road to a car rental place to get a car for a weekend trip I had to make.  The dealer called to say the damage on the Jetta was minimal enough not to charge me, but they sounded pissed off, like somehow I had been negligent about warding off Squirrelzilla after the first attack on the Beetle. Like I’d grown complacent and lazy. “Maybe there’s something wrong with VWs,” I countered, feeling sure of myself. Our other household cars–my son’s 1996 Volvo and David’s Mini–were completely untouched. Or so I thought.

That night after work, we checked the Mini, a car David drives every day. We opened the hood with confidence. You see where this is going. Another nest, and more chewing. The chewing looked like it was centered on only the hood baffling and one connection–the wiper fluid hose. We were floored. We called the Mini dealer, and they promised to send out a tow truck. Several hours later, the tow truck arrived. David was talking at length with the driver, a burly young guy who listened with weed-fueled calm to the serial tale of squirrel woes. “Well, you’ve got a pregnant female,” he said, like it was the most natural, obvious conclusion one could arrive at. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “and she’s going to keep building and building nests until she has the babies.” He recounted his boyhood summers on his grandfather’s South Jersey farm, where they had built nesting boxes for the mother squirrels to have their babies in, and as a boy he watched the mother and babies through a clear panel his grandad made for the purpose. “They were really good mothers,” he said with some emotion, and I had more than a twinge of guilt about the unfortunate, misunderstood, pregnant mother squirrel, about to burst, who keeps building nests that the humans keep destroying, and all she wants to do is just give birth to a bunch of baby squirrels. There was a certain unspoken female understanding going on here. I’d been there twice. She’s there now. Like Godzilla, Squirrelzilla was misunderstood. And Squirrelzilla was a she. So the idea of building a birthing chamber for her sounded appealing on many levels. We had a clear plastic box with a lid that we filled with grass, bird seed, and sticks, and we cut an opening in the side and placed it near the driveway and under a bush. The Mini was towed away and repaired for about $400, which we did not notify the insurance company about.

The Middle

A week after the first Squirrelzilla incident, the Beetle was ready for pickup from the VW dealer. The nesting box was unused. Still, after retrieving the Beetle and leaving $250 at the dealer for the copayment, at first I parked the Beetle across the street, believing naively that it would keep the car squirrel free.  I reasoned that by now the nest-building mother in need of a place to  have her babies must be done with the task, so the whole thing was probably over. We grew complacent. Sometimes I parked back in the driveway.

A few weeks went by. One night in May, we set out to attend a graduation. Our neighbor across the street, who has an older VW Beetle convertible, motioned us over. He told us that the engine of his Beetle, which was garaged, had also been used to build a squirrel nest. That squirrel was a bit more aesthetically oriented as she had taken pieces of cloth and small items from his workbench and tool box and placed them in the nest. Squirrelzilla was not done.

Not at all. Over the next 2 weeks I repeatedly found the beginning of nests in the Beetle many times. I was compulsively checking the engine several times a day. It got so crazy that even if I checked the engine, found nothing, ran an errand, returned home, and parked, an hour later, a quick check under the hood would reveal another nest was under way. How could the nest be created so quickly?? So I’d remove the nest. Soon the insurgency reached a new level. One day I came out of the house and saw a squirrel’s tail hanging out of the bottom of the Beetle’s front grill. It didn’t move around, just hung there. I couldn’t tell if it was alive or dead, so I got a broom and banged on the front grill. The tail moved and sounds erupted in response to each tap on the grill. Call and response. I opened the hood. Sure enough, there was a new nest in the same spot, and a squirrel ran out the bottom of the engine and away across the lawn. A few seconds later two small squirrels also ran out the bottom. But there was still a squirrel or two left inside when I again smacked the grille with the broom. Smack, gurgle; smack, gurgle. I propped the hood open and went in the house to have a tantrum.

David went outside and stood in front of the car. He returned inside to report that the mother squirrel was up in the tree “yelling” at him. As he has been known to believe and repeat entirely unsupportable statements about animal behavior and biology, I went to the door to verify his statement. It was no lie. The mother was not too far up the tree next to the driveway, looking right at us and making persistent quarrelsome noises that stopped whenever we retreated into the house. We spied on her through the front window. After a short time she ran down the tree and stood a few feet from the car, standing up on her back legs, completely still, and checking in our direction; every few seconds she moved closer to the car until she was again right next to it. Then she did something we couldn’t believe we were seeing: she reappeared on the top of the engine carrying a baby squirrel. With a tremendous show of strength, she kept struggling to grab the baby. She held it in her mouth by its scruff and repeatedly tossed the bulk of the baby’s body over her shoulder. Finally, she got it the way she wanted and ran across the street with the baby, pausing every few meters to rest, and finally disappearing at the far end of a neighbor’s lawn. A few minutes later, she returned, and repeated the whole process with another baby. We were speechless. I guess the farm boy was right; she really was a good mother.

Yet again I cleaned the new nest out of the car, left the hood propped open, and surveyed the engine for damage. Not seeing anything obvious, I gathered anew things I’d been told would ward off squirrels–a tarp under the engine on which anti-varmint pellets were spread; mothballs; two HavaHart traps, loaded with fruit and nuts. And whenever I wasn’t driving and it wasn’t raining, I left the hood up. I became obsessed. constantly checking under the hood and worrying about the next attack. There were times when I opened the hood to find the beginning of a new grass nest, but I didn’t see any squirrels and there was nothing in the Havahart traps.

David usually parked the Mini  across the street each evening when he came home from work. We checked it as often as we remembered and it seemed fine. Then one day I saw a squirrel run under it and not come out. I called to David that we should check the engine even though it had been parked for only an hour or so. He  opened the hood and there it was–a new, lush, grassy nest, and this time a big squirrel was sitting right on top of the engine block. As our hysteria level was elevated, the picture below is the best we could muster. Look on the right side of the engine.

We screamed and stepped backwards as the squirrel ran back into the engine. We banged on the car repeatedly (listen to the video) and it gurgled back at us. [After the tap-tap of the broom handle you can hear the response. The background noise you hear is the sound of cicadas.]

We spent some time attempting to scare the squirrel out of the Mini, to no effect. At the end of his rope by now, David started the engine to see if that would do the trick. Nothing. Finally, he drove a short distance up the street. The squirrel departed the vehicle. The hypocrite vegetarian returned triumphant.

The next day, the neighbor with the older VW Beetle came by to tell us about his own squirrel nightmare, this time in his State-issued Ford Explorer Hybrid. He got in and drove to work as usual and about 20 minutes into his morning commute his check-engine light went on. He was on a highway at the time, so he pulled over onto the shoulder and opened the hood. It was not just a nest that he found, and it was char-broiled.

Over the next few weeks I found the beginnings of new nests in the VW several more times. This problem was just not going away. The battle continued and I was losing. I began to think the squirrels were teaching each other. By now my obsession with squirrelzilla led me to do more “research” on squirrels, and I learned a lot of interesting facts. The females generally have two sets of babies per year, in the early spring and again in the summer. It turns out that there are two kinds of squirrels: tree squirrels and ground squirrels. Tree squirrels have smaller tails. So it turns out that tree squirrels are the ones plaguing us. I also found out that squirrels are not nocturnal, but are industrious, up-at-dawn types who like to build in the early hours of the day, when it is light. And they don’t like to build nests with open tops, so the advice to keep the hood up when possible is actually good.

In my online research I found what can only be described as a deep well of madness about squirrels and their nefarious activities. Not only are there people ready to kill and maim every squirrel on the planet, there are some in deep need of pharmaceutical and psychiatric help to cope with their anger, anxiety, and dread about squirrels and what they are doing and especially about what they might do in the future. I found scores of comments and pleas for answers on websites that sell animal-control products, with one in particular providing a huge amount of crowd-sourced knowledge and long, excruciating personal tales of woe about squirrels.

“We had the car back for 25 days, and it happened again. This time the damage wasn’t as bad and we had changed our deductible to $100 but it was still a $300+ job to fix it, and I lost my car from Thursday to Tuesday. Needless to say, we started trapping (Havahart traps) and transporting the squirrels 10 miles away and over a river. We just released #15 this afternoon and we do not live in a wooded area. We are in a nice little suburban area w/some trees. The only way back to our area is over the bridge or by swimming. I have nightmares of troops of squirrels marching back over the bridge to my car. What kills me is that there are 6 houses on our block, each house has 2 cars. With 12 cars to choose from, why did the squirrels choose mine, twice?!?”

One post, “How Do I Kill Squirrels That Are Eating My Car?” starts out saying the author just wants the squirrels to stop chewing on his wires.  Then it descends into Heart of Darkness-inspired imagery: “Ideally, this would be because they are dead, with their bleached skulls posted on stakes around the driveway as a warning to the next generation, but I’ll settle for “gone very far away, never to chew on vehicle wiring again.”(http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/02/28/how-do-i-kill-the-squirrels-wh/)

I also discovered that there are class action lawsuits concerning the earth-friendly soy coverings now put on wires of VWs, Hondas, and Fords, because small mammals apparently find this stuff very tasty. The level of desperation in the comments was funny at first, a little like the groundskeeper in Caddyshack, played by Bill Murray. But eventually the groundskeeper used explosives in an attempt to blow the critters out of the ground, where they were ruining the green.

The End–or So I Thought 

A month ago I was at home, working on my laptop in front of a window that looks out on the backyard. I heard some insistent scratching outside the window, so I stood up to look up at the gutters in an effort to figure out if there was a bird or something perhaps trying to get in, or out. With the onset of cold weather, we’ve had more than a few mice running around the house.  I couldn’t see anything going on above, so I opened the window and stuck my head out. I could now locate the mad scratching sound as coming out of a tall garbage can that was standing under the rain gutter to catch water.

I walked outside and slowly went over to the can, and peeked inside. A wet head with two beady eyes looked at me with what I can only say was desperation. It was a squirrel treading water. We looked at each other for a long moment. I fleetingly thought of Max Cady from Cape Fear, hair slicked back, talking in tongues. “COUNselor, save me.” Max, or Maxine, Squirrel may have eaten my engine–or perhaps its mother ate my engine.

What could I do? I tipped over the can, and as soon as it landed, a wave of water disgorged Max/Maxine, who went running off, stopping every few seconds to shake off water, all the while staring back at me, making shrill noises as he/she escaped along the wooden fence. I felt very charitable and magnanimous about sparing Max/Maxine. My self-congratulations were short lived.

Epilogue: Resurgence, February 2017

They’re back. No babies yet, but there are piles of acorns and leaves and even tufts of hair in my Beetle engine. I’m back to leaving the hood up, or putting it down a bit propped up, with a bag of mothballs inside. I have to take out the mothballs each time I drive, and then remember to put them in the engine each time I return. On top of waking up every day to the latest Trump assaults, I have to gather strength to keep up the  endless war against Squirrelzilla. But I must fight on, because like Godzilla, which has 29 sequels, Squirrelzilla has a new sequel each new season.

 

 

 

In Nathan Englander’s short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” a Jewish couple explains the Anne Frank game to their house guests. It’s not a really a game, the narrator says. “It’s dead serious. It’s ‘Who Will Hide Me?'” He explains how it works: first, they imagine that there’s an American Holocaust. Then they talk about which of their Gentile friends would hide them. “Would the friend do that for you? Risk it all?” he wonders. They discuss a couple that lives across the street. “The man would, but that wife of his… When her husband is at work one day, she’d turn us in,” the couple agrees. I know I’ve run through a similar mental exercise plenty of times even before I read Englander’s story some years back. I think most Jews play some version of the Anne Frank game, whether they realize it or not, especially if they grew up, as I did, in the 1960s and 70s almost entirely among Catholics and Protestants who had very little understanding that they might be interacting with people of other religions or beliefs. Sometimes their ignorance erupted into cruel remarks and stereotypes, often from the mouths of children, so that you knew they heard this from their parents. Sometimes their attempts at being magnanimous were laughable, such as when one neighbor introduced me to a new neighbor by saying, “And these are our wonderful Jewish neighbors.” Subtext: one of the “good” Jews.

With the election of Donald Trump, I’ve been thinking about the Anne Frank game again, only now the game’s players needs to be expanded from Jews to include Muslims, Latinos, African Americans, and LGBTQ people. There have been disturbing news reports about Trump’s appointees. First came the appointment of Steve Bannon, a noted anti-Semite and white nationalist–even though Newt Gingrich assured us that Bannon can’t be anti-Semitic because “he was a managing partner of Goldman Sachs… [and] a Hollywood movie producer.” There are rumors Trump disseminates personally or through his surrogates about “creating a registry” for Muslims. There was a televised interview on Fox with Carl Higby, a prominent Trump supporter, that included an actual discussion of how the internment of Japanese people during World War II could serve as a model for what the Trump administration might do to Muslims on the registry. For months before the election, we heard Trump talk about the anti-immigrant policies he plans to implement. Unsurprisingly, hate crimes are up all over the country as people who have long harbored hate and resentment now feel they have permission to put their feelings into action and words. Swastikas have appeared on buildings and have desecrated graves. Video footage showed hundreds at an “alt-right” conference celebrating Trump’s election, with prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer declaring, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” as the crowd gave enthusiastic Nazi salutes. The daughter of my late stepfather-in-law, who fled Nazi Germany in 1940, said that she was glad her father didn’t live to see this going on in his beloved adopted country, the United States of America.

Donald Trump won the election. Roughly half the voters think what Trump says and does is acceptable: that sexually assaulting women is acceptable, that Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals, that all Muslims are terrorists, and that disabled people can be mocked. Many people say that this nasty stuff was just pre-election rhetoric, that he will lead differently. That sounds remarkably similar to what one of my  landlords once said. He let his nephew live in one of his buildings, and he beat his girlfriend. A woman in that building confronted the landlord about his nephew, and she told us the landlord’s response was, “Don’t worry, it’s gonna be ok! They’re getting married!” Soon they got married and then moved upstairs from us, and one day the wife came to my door with sunglasses on to hide the black eyes he had given her and begged me for as many garbage bags as I could give her. She put all her possessions in the bags and never returned.

So I’m playing the Anne Frank game, wondering about my neighbors and the owners of the businesses I have long patronized. Did they vote for a man who espouses these beliefs? A man who retweeted racist and anti-Semitic images and connected them to Hillary Clinton, who fomented hatred of Muslims and Syrian refugees, and even made fun of a reporter with cerebral palsy? Who was silent when David Duke endorsed him?

This feeling of being a stranger in your own land is nothing new to African Americans and other minorities, of course. I recently heard an African American comedian on the radio recount how she called her mother the morning after the election to check on her because she thought her mother was going to be anxious about the results. Instead, she found her mother to be disappointed but calm. Her mother said, “Why are you surprised? You know where we live.” We live in the United States of America.

A few days after the election I was eating lunch with a friend at a diner on the grounds of a small  private airport near our studio in a fairly rural part of New Jersey. The three white men at a table next to me were talking loudly enough for me to hear them, taking turns extolling Trump’s cabinet appointments, and saying that now things were really, finally, going to change for the better. America was finally going to become great again for them. One of them had flown there in his private plane, so I doubt America was treating him all that badly. He complained that he was tired of all the whining about Trump’s cabinet appointments. “They’re making everything out to be about anti-Semitism!” he said dismissively, referring to the controversy about Bannon. He then said that we would have “law and order” in this country again, which has always been code for targeting African Americans.

We live in the United States of America, where enough people voted for Trump that he was able to win the Presidency. With their votes, those who voted for Trump confirmed that his repellant views are fine with them. And that is a truly terrible thing to process. How many times in the last few weeks have I heard, “Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a….[fill in the blank]; I voted for Trump for other reasons.” In this supposedly “post-racial” age, people seem to think they’re not racists or anti-Semites if they never use certain expressions or epithets in public, or if they are able to work in the same office as African Americans, Latinos, Jews, or Muslims. They say voting for Trump was just a whole separate issue, that it nothing to do with misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, or xenophobia.

I won’t forgive or forget what was said. I’m not going to go along to get along. The Republicans spent Obama’s 8 years in office resisting and obstructing every thing he proposed and said, so I’ve learn that the “high road” is not always the right road. In times like this, you have to resist in order to stand up for what’s right.

“The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.” —Ian Kershaw

Though I write for a living, the demotion of “writing” to “content” snuck up on me. The change was well under way by the time I first noticed it seeping into my assignments. First, the term “branded content” began appearing regularly in job descriptions for work that had nothing to do with pharmaceuticals or products being promoted, which I naively thought went hand-in-hand with  branding. Branding, in fact, began to be applied to everything, because a “brand” could even be something an individual, much less a company, could have or want to protect or develop, the way Oprah Winfrey or Kim Kardashian have.

My Unbranded Space

I  was clueless about the change because at the time I first noticed “branded content,” around 2010, I still inhabited what I now understand was an unbranded space, writing for unbranded channels and assets, writing medical information for healthcare professionals and patients–material that had no real promotional element. But when I started working on a new, quasi-educational project about a serious health condition that was being treated by a recently approved drug, I was introduced to the concept of branded and unbranded content.  I had to look up the terms “branded” and “assets” when the editor used them while describing the project. At the time, I imagined it would be unusual to see these terms with any frequency because I rarely did work for agencies and I didn’t write for promotional projects.

So it came as a shock when I began to realize that the only time I would be working on “unbranded” material was the now-rare occasion I was asked to write about studies or health conditions just for informational purposes. I’m very late to the realization that marketing has penetrated every form of writing and editing, even work that is not done within or for agencies, and that technology and marketing together have driven and forever altered media.

The word “content” replaced “writing.” There are academic papers and entire courses—somewhat ironically called Writing Studies— that describe what content is and explain how to properly create content so that content management systems can properly digest it and disgorge it for online consumption, how to optimize it for search engines to bring it to the attention of a maximum number of eyeballs. Writing studies professor Lisa Dush begins her 2015 writing studies essay, “When Writing Becomes Content” thus:

“To work with writing today means to work with writing as content. If, for example, you’ve composed in a content management system such as WordPress, you understand good writing practice to involve both crafting well-written posts and optimizing these posts as transportable, findable, content, by applying categories, tags, and SEO (search engine optimization) metadata.”

Unclickable

Recently this email/spam landed in my inbox:

Hello, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings, You now NEED On-Page SEO. So what is good On-Page SEO?First your keyword must appear in the title.Then it must appear in the URL.You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article.Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page. You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword. There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword….Now what if i told you there was a simple WordPress plugin that does all the On-Page SEO, and automatically for you?

After marketing stomped all over writing, tech took its turn, and writing was turned into content created to suit “cross-platform repositories” (some of which were once called publications). As a result, writers and editors (now called content professionals) are creating content and “deliverables,” and managing that content in a “space” for “properties” that were once journals, magazines, and perhaps even books, for the “industry” of publishing—once the most unindustrial lines of work imaginable. A recent job advertisement I saw listed photography as an industry. The photography industry?

As the essayist Tim Kreider wrote in his 2013 New York Times article, “Slaves of the Internet, Unite,” delivering content suggests that words, writing, and art are mere filler to be delivered and placed between ads: “The first time I ever heard the word ‘content’ used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, ‘content providers’ — were essentially extinct. This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it’s the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called ‘art’ — writing, music, film, photography, illustration — to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads.”

I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s (Content) Farm 

It’s gotten hard to distinguish so-called “sponsored content” from ordinary content, which is the logical extension of what happens when writing is grown on “content farms” and subjected to content audits and search engine optimization (SEO). When I use the word “content,” I don’t wonder about its authorship– who wrote, filmed, or photographed the content. The individual imprint of the content’s creator matters less than where the content is residing and “iterating,” and you want to increase the clicks, the views, the traffic, no matter what it is or how well it was written. HubSpot just put out a report called, “What Kind of Headlines Make People Not Click?” The report is supposed to answer the question of what has negative effects on the CTR (click-through rate).  Might it be bad writing, like the title of the report?

Content is valued more for its dissemination than its quality. The quality of content has become binary: it’s clickworthy or it’s not. A major design website intones, “Content on the Web is always temporary.” I get it, I get it. The content of the content is secondary to the medium that carries it.

This excerpt from a recent job listing sums it up:

“… seeking a creative, energetic, and data-driven editor to work closely with team members in the daily creation of content. … play a key role in scheduling daily content for your assigned channels, …and developing on-brand articles. …producing content and headlines that drive traffic…should be comfortable monitoring, reporting, and exceeding traffic goals, and identifying business growth opportunities …”

What is a data-driven editor? I envisioned an editor in a room full of content consumers reading screens as their CTR is measured and analyzed. It’s an endless loop: first there’s audience research to find out which topics website visitors are likely to be interested in; this prompts the website to hire content creators for their content farm, addressing those particular topics. The website sets up these “articles” with targeted ads that are also based on audience research. Everyone’s happy. The eyeballs are pleased because the site gives them what they think they want; sponsors love it too. Happy, happy, happy. An endless feedback loop of giving the customer what he or she wants. The effect of the giving-the-customer-what-she-wants mentality is that it limits readers to only those things they already know or believe, never to stumble over something surprising or mind expanding. The goal is to drive traffic.

…conceiving and assigning clicky, well-researched, and highly engaging articles, many of which are image-driven…Creating analytics reports on your channels to help us monitor, reach, and exceed traffic goals. Experience working at a content studio is a plus.

And here it comes……straight out of an episode of Silicon Valley: having a passion for  creating self-important content with the power to improve lives! You too can write yet another article on the Top 10 Reasons To Exercise.

…seeking an experienced, passionate freelance health editor who shares our brand mission to create health and medical content with the power to improve lives. The ideal candidate will have strong digital experience creating content for a consumer audience, including sponsored packages and a proven record of creating health condition and lifestyle content in various digital formats.

I wonder how hard it is to find an experienced (but, oh, God, not old!!) content professional who shares a passion about the brand mission to create “health condition and lifestyle content” that improve lives using sponsored packages of pretested and optimized content.

The Human Touch

One of the scarier implications of a content-creation mindset is that we are moving to a place where humans need not be the ones creating content. A 2011 article by Steven Lohr in The New York Times reported on a news brief that covered a college football game, which was produced within 60 seconds of the end of the game’s third quarter and was “written” by a computer using software produced by Narrative Science. According to Lohr, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games in 2010, and it was said to help drive a surge of referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, and was responsible for driving the network’s Web traffic for football games 40% higher than the year before. So the computer-generated content was getting the eyeballs better than, and for less money than, the human content creators. The same software is used by a trade publisher to provide monthly reports on more than 350 local housing markets for the construction trade. It had become too costly to hire people to write the articles for the trade website, but it’s less than $10 for each 500-word article created by Narrative Science software. No need to worry about those pesky humans and their need to be paid!

One of the effects of the transformation from writing to content is that writing is devalued. Since it’s devalued, it’s no longer worthy of being paid for.  Unique and unexpected topics are too risky to run when you’ve got to worry about the CTR. Anyone who expects to be paid a living wage for their writing can forget about it because they’re competing with entities who are happy to give things away for free, because the free content is just there as a delivery device to get the eyeballs to click on the revenue-generating stuff. And we don’t really need editors anymore, because content can be crowd-edited if needed on its next iteration and refreshment.

Back to Tim Kreider’s article: “Not long ago, I received, in a single week, three (3) invitations to write an original piece for publication or give a prepared speech in exchange for no ($0.00) money… People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enough, evidently, to pay one cent for it.” Apparently, writers are supposed to be paid in the currency of “exposure,” all those eyeballs. “’Artist Dies of Exposure,’ goes the rueful joke,” Kreider notes.

My Internship

It feels like a permanent internship. Last week, a company that I have been working with for about five years—and which is growing by leaps and bounds–changed its policies on freelancers and said that if I wanted to continue working for them I would have to write the same-length articles for half of what I had been making, with the additional tasks of pitching the subject matter and getting the needed sources. When I tell editors I can’t accept a fee that is the same or less than what I was being paid in 1980, the year I graduated from college, I am not saying that for effect. It is true.

Writer or Content Creator?

Remember that email I got? It ended with: “Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page.” Ok, I’m going to take that advice. My keyword must be content, so here goes.

No one would call John Steinbeck a great “content creator”–at least I don’t think that’s happened yet. In all likelihood, however, the days are numbered even for fiction’s currently unbranded space. In the not-too-distant future, kids may tell their parents, “When I grow up I  want to be a content creator.”

[Cartoon, by Bruce Eric Kaplan, used with permission of The New Yorker]