When Opposites Repel

Pop quiz:

What is the opposite of the word depth?

This question appeared on a test I took in English class in the 7th grade. The reason I remember the question so well is that it is one of the few times in my life, so few that I could probably list them all, that a teacher marked a reply of mine on a test incorrect when I felt that my reply was correct. In fact, in this case, not only did I feel that my reply was correct, but I felt that the reply that the teacher thought was correct was incorrect. (Still with me?)

I showed the test to my father and asked his opinion. Not only did he agree with me, but he adduced evidence to support my point of view. Funnily enough, I don't recall whether I disputed the point with my teacher.

I had pretty much forgotten about this episode until about 7 years ago, when I was at a small dinner party. Something triggered my memory of it and I related it to those present and accounted for, and asked what answer they would have given. To a person, they all gave the answer that my teacher wanted.

At this point, I know that you are bursting at the seams on pins and needles (ah, the danger of mixing metaphors) to find out the answer. Without further adieu, my fellow wordsmith:

• The response my teacher was looking for: shallowness.
• The response I gave: height.

Now I would certainly agree that the opposite of deep is shallow, just as the opposite of hot is cold, the opposite of rich is poor, and the opposite of tall is short. In each of these cases, one word indicates a large quantity of the property being measured, while the other word indicates a small quantity.

But to my mind, depth and shallowness are not opposites, but rather synonyms, for both indicate the very act of measuring a property. Is there a difference between saying that the depth of a pool is 5 feet and the shallowness of the pool is 5 feet?

This is the reason I chose height as the opposite of depth: one is a measure of distance from the ground upwards, while the other is a measure of the distance from the ground downwards.

And the evidence which my father mustered in my support comes from Irving Berlin:

How much do I love you?
I'll tell you no lie.
How deep is the ocean?
How high is the sky?

By the way, I'd be happy to hear from someone who disagrees with this and can explain my teacher's point of view. I think part of the disagreement stems from the fact that the very concept of opposites is to a degree subjective.

If that same teacher were to give me the same test today, I'd give an answer which I believe would be in line with her way of thinking on the issue, but which I think she would nevertheless find highly unexpected. I wonder whether she'd give me credit for it.

Superficiality.

Light My Fire - Illuminated

One of the most well-known American pop music bands of the 1960's was The Doors. Far and away the most popular member of the band was front-man and lead singer Jim Morrison, who, in 1971, joined an exclusive club to which few would wish to be accepted: the club of musicians who met their demise at the age of 27.

But in 1998, it was keyboardist Ray Manzarek who was interviewed by NPR's Terry Gross. The interview may be read here or listened to here. Hear, hear!

Ray was an extremely intelligent, interesting, friendly and charming interviewee. In fact, I found myself thinking that he was the kind of person with whom I would really enjoy to spend time. Such a positive person. An absolutely delightful interview.

(An interesting aside. Around the same time, I listened to another interview conducted by NPR's Terry Gross, this one of David Hyde Pierce, who was then starring in the hit sitcom Frasier. What I found so fascinating was the contrast between the interviews. Whereas every question put to Ray served as a springboard to a sprawling 5-plus-minute-long tale of adventure, David's replies, while polite, informative, and interesting, were brief and to the point, almost to the point of being perfunctory, as if he were taking a test and his goal was to reply to each question in a manner which would simply ensure that he would get credit for answering that question correctly.)

In the interview, Ray, an expert racounteur, regaled with various stories revolving around the band, such as how the band formed from a chance encounter on the beach between Ray and Jim, and Jim's antics during his tenure with the band, which on at least one occasion landed him in jail.

For me, the highlight of the interview is when Ray discusses, at great length, the recording of the band's most famous song: Light My Fire. This happens to be not only my favorite song by the band, but one of my favorite songs of all time, to my ear a perfect synthesis of the "coolness" and improvisational style of jazz with the "sweetness" and "edginess" of pop rock music.

For 15 minutes, Ray gives a wonderfully detailed exegesis on the genesis of all aspects of the song, including:

• The lyrics and melody, a collaboration between guitarist Robby Krieger and the other band members and Johann Sebastian Bach;
• The time signature and the rhythm, influenced by both jazz great Johnny Coltrane and Latin flamenco music;
• The chord structure, with a clever interplay between major and minor keys;
• The introduction, a musical pattern known as a circle of fifths, based on the aforementioned baroque composer; and
• The 4-minute instrumental, an eloquent dialog between Ray's keyboard and Robby's guitar (which, much to the outrage of the band members, is cruelly excised by the producer for the single version, to bring the song's length down from 7:05 to 2:52)

Ray analyzes each of the above elements of the song with consummate musical erudition, bringing a crystal clear illumination of the evolution of how this masterpiece of a song came into being. And I must mention that Ray has his keyboard with him during the interview, so throughout, he is constantly elucidating his expositions musically.

So of course, once the interview was over, I decided that the thing to do was to now listen again to the song Light My Fire, having now learned all of the myriad facets of the song. The result was an experience that I will never forget. Like many experiences, it is very difficult to explain in words. I can use an analogy and say that it was like seeing life in black and white and suddenly seeing it in color for the first time. Every single second of the song just exploded in my mind, rife with the multiple layers of musical meaning contained therein. With every note, I was hearing simultaneously the note itself, and Ray's beautiful explanation of the process that had gone into its creation. What a superlatively rich experience!

Dear reader, if you wish to do yourself a great favor, I highly recommend that you treat yourself to this experience, and listen to the interview and the song, in that order. I'd be most happy to hear your reactions.

Footnote. In the interview, Ray states that the song's introduction, which he terms the "turnaround", was the last piece of the song to be composed. I find this very odd, since every phrase of the instrumental seems to be an improvisation based on that turnaround. As I composed this post today, I just learned sadly that Ray died earlier this year. So it looks like I will not get the opportunity to ask him about this point.

Keep On Smilin'

Upon my completion of high school, I spent 2½ years in Israel, studying at two Jewish theological seminaries. The first year-and-a-half of that period was spent in an institution in Jerusalem called Yeshivat HaKotel. The school is located in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, just a few minutes' walk from the holy Jewish site known as The Wailing Wall, or, in Hebrew, as HaKotel, meaning simply "The Wall".

There were approximately 300 students in the Yeshiva, enrolled in various programs. Most of the Israelis ranged in age from 18 to 23 and were there as part of a five-year program known as Hesder, which is a combination of military service and religious study. There were also a few dozen students in their mid-20's in the Rabbinical program. And there were about 70 non-Israeli students, mostly from the U.S., who, like myself, were just out of high school. Most of them returned to their respective countries of origin after a single year at the Yeshiva.

Obviously, in an institution with a student body of that size, I didn't get to know the majority of the students. I made friends of varying degrees among both the Israelis and the non-Israelis.

But there was one student with whom I shared a very special friendship. He was an Israeli, a couple of years ahead of me, on the short side, with thick, long, straight black hair and a thick, long, wispy black beard. We would see each other only every few weeks. In all the time I knew him we never uttered a single word to each other.

But every time we would pass each other, typically in the large study hall, which was often by filled with the roar of 200-to-300-plus students engaged in Talmudic discussions, he would radiate towards me the most beautiful, beatific, beaming smile, not from his mouth, but from his entire face, and, it seems, from his entire body. I never ceased to derive enormous pleasure from these brief encounters, and I think I reciprocated very much in kind.

But although I always enjoyed these interactions with my cheshire friend, for some reason it never occurred to me to take the friendship to the next level and engage him in conversation. Indeed, I never even learned his name. I think that in my mind, and very likely in his as well, our silent relationship was so complete, in its total mutual expression of good will, that any words would have been superfluous.

Then one day a few months later, another Israeli student flashed at me a similar Mother Teresa smile. This student was younger, of average height, with thick straight fair hair and no beard. But this encounter began a new friendship which was identical in all respects to the friendship I had with my bearded ami. I found it both sweet and amusing that I now had not one but two special friendships of this kind.

One day, not long before the conclusion of my tenure at Yeshivat HaKotel, I learned somehow that my two mute best friends were brothers.

Full Frontal Non-Nudity

One day, many years ago, I was on my way to meet a woman with whom I had arranged to go out on a date. She had told me to meet her at the place where she then worked, a drugstore on a main street. As I walked along the sidewalk towards the drugstore, I felt a sudden call of nature. And this call became quite loud quite quickly. I quickly entered problem solving mode.

After a few minutes of fruitless searching, the only obvious venue in which to respond to the call presented itself: a municipal swimming pool. With a mixture of urgency and gratitude, I proceeded towards and entered the building which housed the locker rooms, found the pertinent facilities, and expressed my rejoinder to the call of nature.

On my way out from the facilities, I again passed through the men's locker room. But I was unprepared for the vision which greeted me when I entered it.

Apparently I had entered the room at precisely the moment when the pool swimming hours had ended, or some such. For I found the room full of men who had clearly just completed a swimming session, as the water dripping from their bodies and their discarded bathing suits indicated, and were therefore at that moment in a state of complete undress. The incongruity of being the only clothed man in a room full of completely disrobed men was jarring.

In fact, there's but one word that perfectly captures how I felt at that moment.

The Heart of Darkness at The Heart of Darkness

When I was about 14, my parents bought me, as a Chanukah gift, the Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness, which I soon proceeded to read -- after a fashion. What I mean by that last phrase is that although I certainly went through all of the pages of the book and took in all of the words, if you would have asked me what I came away with from the book, my response would have been: precious little.

Why I bothered to read an entire book that I really didn't understand at all escapes me. I have certainly been known to abandon books in the middle. For example, after adoring Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 900-page sprawl The Brothers Karamazov, I next attempted Crime and Punishment, and when I found that book inaccessible, I put it down, after a 150-page investment.

On the other hand, I do have a streak of stubborn tenacity. I went through a George Orwell period in high school, thoroughly enjoying Animal Farm, 1984, Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Burmese Days. When I then tackled his The Road To Wigan Pier, which, unlike the other works, was not a novel but rather a collection of essays on socialism, I bravely plodded through the entire tome, even though it largely went over my head.

And when I was in my Somerset Maugham phase, during which I happily devoured his four volumes of short stories, as well as his novels Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge and The Moon and Sixpence, I eventually found myself face to face with his memoir, The Summing Up, which I found inscrutable, but which, again, I nevertheless muddled through.

Back to Conrad. Flash-forward a year. English class. Our teacher announces that the next novel we will be studying will be Heart of Darkness, by the author Joseph Conrad.

A loud Ohhhh noooooooo! immediately rings through the classroom. All eyes turn to the source of said sad groan: moi. I relate to my curious classmates that I had already read the book and it was absolutely dreadful. (No doubt, a secondary reason for that groan was boastfulness, that I was such a well-read man-of-letters that my intake of literature included even obscure novels by authors that nobody else in my class had even heard of.)

Our teacher gave us a few days to read the novel, and then, before we began to study it, gave us a very brief quiz, consisting of a few very basic plot questions.

Receiving a failing grade on this quiz, which was designed simply to see whether we had read the book, on a book that I had by now read not once but twice, was certainly an interesting experience for me.

Meanwhile, a fellow classmate, who admittedly did not even crack the book open, aced the quiz. His secret? He told us that he had seen the film Apocalypse Now, which was based on the novel.

(This in turn reminds me of the occasion when our teacher gave us a similar quiz on a different novel, and the highest grade in the class had been attained by a different classmate, who had also eschewed the novel, but who had managed to get hold of the comic book version.)

At any rate, for the next few weeks, we studied the novel in class. And even though my own reading of the novel, twice!, had led to very few insights for me, when our teacher explained to us the various themes which the novel addressed, I gradually found myself increasingly fascinated by all of the profundities that it touched upon, such weighty matters as altruism, hypocrisy, man's inhumanity to man and the very nature of evil.

By the time we had concluded our unit on this book, I was positively enthralled with it. So much so that I resolved to myself with considerable enthusiasm:

This has been such a wonderfully illuminating experience! Now that, thanks to my perspicacious teacher, I completely understand all of the complex motifs of the novel, I am going to go back and read it again, so that the words will finally come alive to me, and I will be able to imbibe their profound wisdom!

Armed with my newfound erudition, I then eagerly proceeded to read the novel for the third time.

And did not understand one word.

Girls Will Be Boys

I spent the year of 1998-1999 in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Like many cities, Baltimore's layout is a grid -- and the safeness of any neighborhood was directly proportional to its distance from the center. I lived in an apartment complex in an intermediate area: if you would walk 10 minutes away from the city center downtown, you'd find yourself among some very handsome homes, but if you would walk 10 minutes in the opposite direction, towards the city's heart of darkness, you'd be in an area which you would be wise to avoid after the sun set.

One evening, I found myself in the AOL chatrooms, engaging in a form of socializing which was then still relatively new to me. As I would do from time to time, I entered a private one-on-one chat with someone I met in the chatroom, on this occasion with a young woman a few years my junior. We spent a pleasant half-hour getting to know each other, and conversing about various topics, and found that we shared many mutual interests.

Since the chatroom in which I met her was the Baltimore chatroom, I knew that she and I likely lived in close proximity to one another, so I took a risk and suggested that we meet at the downtown sports bar for drinks. She immediately agreed, and we started to discuss the logistics of arranging the tête-à-tête.

I don't recall how it emerged, but in the process of making these arrangements, it turned out that my new she was a he! Well! blow! me! down! It seems that I had been unwittingly chatting away with a young man, whom I had believed all along was a woman. And my fellow masculine interlocutor had similarly assumed all along that I was a woman!

How the two of us had managed to chat for ½ an hour without somehow picking up that we were talking to a fellow male, I'm not sure -- this was the only time I can recall myself in the midst of such a muddle. But the moment I learned the true gender of my fellow chatter, of the many thoughts which crossed my mind, the most salient was:

I knew this was too easy!

I mean, striking up a conversation with a completely unknown woman, and winning her over so completely within ½ an hour that she would agree to meet me for drinks then and there? Nuh-uh. This is my real life, not a James Bond movie.

So the two of us shared a laugh of mixed emotions -- bewilderment, amusement and frustration -- and went our separate ways.

Recalling this more-than-decade-old episode, the question only now occurs to me: why didn't we meet after all? Just because the romantic element was now off the shelf, we could have still met in fraternal friendship -- after all, we had clearly enjoyed each other's company. I mean, men do become friends and get together, male bonding and all that.

Was it the disappointment over a promising new romantic relationship dashed to pieces? Was it the embarrassment over the situation? Was it simply obtuseness and narrow-mindedness which prevented the other possibility from even occurring to us? I wonder. I think that today, years later, I recognize the value of friendships, and how precious every friendship is, far more than I did back then, and that in a similar situation today, I would have suggested to my erstwhile Juliet that we get together after all. After all, there would always be the possibility that at the bar, we would overhear two young women seated next to us who had just gone through the same mix-up...

Hi, Not So Nice To Meet You!

I recently enjoyed a couple of weeks at a vacation resort. Although I had come primarily for health reasons, and socializing was really not on my mind at all, I met a number of really nice people, all from the U.K., and spent many pleasant hours in their company.

One person with whom I struck a very nice friendship was a woman who was originally from Jamaica. A nurse, when she told me that she was in her 50's, I was quite shocked, because based on the appearance of her face, I had judged her to be approximately 20 years younger than that. We were very sympatico, and had some really meaningful conversations.

One of the things which I really like about my friendship with her is how we met. One day, I walked into the dining room of the resort for lunch. A young man I had met a few days prior was sitting with two young women. He waved me over to join them, and introduced me to the two ladies. After a minute or two, he and the other woman left, leaving Miss Jamaica and me alone at the table.

Now of course, what would be the expected next step? Naturally, that the two of us would ask each other all kinds of banal questions, the kinds of questions one asks of a newly met person:

How long have you been here?
How many more days will you be here?
How was your flight?
What activities have you been doing here?
What do you do for a living?
How many children do you have?
What is your cat's favorite brand of cat food?

But no. Instead, for the next several minutes, this woman and I sat in complete stone silence. I somehow sensed that she was uncomfortable in my presence, and so I did not wish to engage in any artificial act of filling the air with words designed solely for the purpose of masking the uncomfortable silence. Been there, done that. And I knew that the other two compadres would be returning very shortly, thus relieving the pressure of the two of us maintaining a conversation.

And sho' 'nuff, when our two other friends returned, the conversation resumed with gusto, and gradually, the ice broke between this woman and I. (Ha! Just kidding! Yes, yes, it's "this woman and me"!)

The next day, I told her that I really enjoyed the fact that our friendship began with that totally awkward 5 minutes of silence. I liked the fact that we had both chosen to flout the rules of etiquette and decided that a few minutes of social discomfort was not the end of the world, and that we could survive it. There was something so refreshingly honest about it, as if we had both said to each other:

Yes, I realize that I'm sitting with you and we're not saying one word to each other, because neither one of us really feels that comfortable with the other, and this is a major faux pas, but so what?

She, in turn, told me that her reason for maintaining the silence was much the same as my own, and that my sense that she was not comfortable in my presence was correct: I was feeling under the weather that day, and the concern apparently showed very much on my face.

So I learned a very valuable lesson that day: there is indeed life after social awkwardness.

Unlikely Kindred Spirits

Daniel Tammet is a young man who is a high-functioning "autistic savant". He has an extraordinary aptitude for numbers, and is able to perform incredible calculations in his head, even rivaling computers. For him, numbers are not mere abstractions -- he sees numbers as actual figures, each with its own personality. Nor are his spectacular mental skills limited to the numeric realm: among other things, he has taught himself 10 languages, including the difficult Icelandic, which he learned in a mere week. Sic.

One of Daniel's most celebrated feats occurred on March 14, 2004, when he recited the number pi to 22,514 digits in slightly more than 5 hours.

According to the 2005 documentary on Daniel, The Boy with the Incredible Brain:

Daniel's brain appears to be doing something almost magical. It appears to be doing maths without him actually having to think.

Just so.

Lauren Caitlin Upton is a very pretty young model. She was Miss South Carolina Teen USA in 2007. She is known for the very unique response she gave to the following question put to her during the Q & A portion of the pageant:

Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?

Caitlin's response:

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

But the above text doesn't begin to capture the gestalt of the response; hence, the proffered one-minute video.

Usually, when we speak, the words which come out of our mouth are, both consciously and sub-consciously, processed through 1,001 different filters, the products of our growing up self-consciously aware of the myriad rules we are taught, both explicitly and subtly, of what is and what is not acceptable discourse in polite society. Not that we are phonies, but there is a slight tinge of the artificial and contrived in much of our speech.

With two breathtakingly refreshing exceptions.

When I picture Daniel reciting digit after digit after digit of pi, I get precisely the same feeling as when I picture Caitlin's verbal cascade. And even though the former is the pinnacle of human mental achievement, while the latter is a torrent of utter nonsense, yet, they have a profound commonality: both represent the purest stream of verbal expression coming at us straight from their minds, completely unprocessed and unfiltered by any internal self-conscious contamination or strait-jacket. And there is something beautiful about that.

Funeral Pooper

A number of years ago, I was at the funeral of a woman who had died of cancer. I can recall only one brief moment of that funeral, but that moment has stuck with me all of the years. It was when her coffin was being lowered into the grave.

Her family were all quietly sobbing, but at that moment, as her body was being lowered into its final resting place, one of her sons completely lost all semblance of composure. He began bawling loudly and uncontrollably, nay, hysterically, with utter abandon.

This went on for several seconds, until his brother, who was standing next to him, said one word: he said his brother's name. Not in a comforting way, either. In a manner which very definitely and very sharply conveyed the message: Enough.

The sheer contrast boggles the mind.

Brother # 1:

Our sweet mother is dead! Gone forever! That wonderful woman who gave me life, who fed me, clothed me, bathed me, sheltered me, loved me, kissed me, hugged me, held me, took me to school, picnics, outings, vacations, bought me toys, gave me birthday parties, helped me through school, was my role model, taught me so much, listened to me whenever I needed someone to talk to, gave me warmth, comfort, security, is gone! I'll never again see those friendly eyes or that warm smile. They are lowering her lifeless body into the ground forever! My God, I miss her so much! How am I ever going to get by without her?! Mama, I love you!

Brother # 2:

Jeez, knock it off already. You're making a total jackass of yourself and you're embarrassing me.

Threading The Needle

As mentioned in an earlier post, my aerobic activity of choice is running, and, more specifically, running on a treadmill. In fact, I purchased a treadmill 5 years ago, and have managed to use it fairly faithfully in the half-decade since. I generally run a set distance. For the past year, that has been 2 miles.

At a certain point, I realized that due to the fact that while I was running I was constantly looking at the dashboard, the result was that I was running in a slightly hunched over stance, which I felt was not fantastic for my posture. So I decided that I would run in an upright position.

Of course, this meant that I was not looking at the dashboard, so at any given moment, I did not know how far I had run, and how much remained to complete my set distance. So every once in a while, I would briefly look down, to see how far I had run.

But the result was that I would glance down quite frequently, since I wanted to make sure that I had not gone past my daily distance. I wanted to minimize the number of times I would look down, so that I wouldn't be constantly bending down to check the dashboard. So I decided to make a game out of it, and each day, I would see if could go through the distance and glance at the dashboard fewer times than I had the previous day. But part of the game was that I couldn't go past the set distance -- otherwise, it would have been an easy matter to win the "game", by simply not glancing at the dashboard altogether.

Back in the 7th grade, a game which was very popular with my classmates and I (ha! just kidding, of course -- I realize it's "my classmates and me") was a game called quarter football. Three items were required for this game: (a) a quarter; (b) a desk; (c) an absent teacher.

When it was your turn, you would begin with the quarter on your side of the desk, with part of the quarter on the desk and part of it behind the desk. The idea was to hit the quarter along the desk a few times, until the quarter was now partly on the desk and partly on the other side of the desk.

The catch was that you had only 3 "hits", so if you had hit the quarter 3 times and it was still entirely on the desk, it was then your opponent's turn. Of course, if you hit the quarter too hard, and it fell off the desk, it would also become your opponent's turn. So the trick of the game was to hit the quarter hard enough to move it along the desk in 3 hits to a position just at the far edge of the desk -- no more and no less. If you managed to accomplish this feat -- touchdown! 6 points. (And if you managed to do it in one hit -- 25 points -- which was a very rare feat indeed.)

Perhaps you can already guess why I have recounted these two seemingly utterly unrelated stories: one evening while I was on the treadmill playing my invented game of minimizing the number of times I looked down at the dashboard, the memory of "quarter football" --  a game that I hadn't thought about, much less played, in decades -- suddenly flashed through my mind.

I marveled at how the human mind stores information: in quarter football, the challenge is to control your hits of the quarter over the distance of the length of the desk, and therefore you want to hit the quarter neither too hard nor too soft. In my treadmill game, the challenge was to control how often I glanced down at the dashboard over the distance of my daily run, and therefore I wanted to look down neither too frequently nor too infrequently. And this completely abstract connection between the two activities had caused the one to trigger in my mind the decades-old memory of the other.

I find that one of life's greatest pleasures is finding interesting and amusing commonalities between otherwise completely unrelated things.

A Taste of Heaven

In the 40-odd years (and they truly have been 40 of the oddest years you'll ever know!) that have passed since I was a little boy, there has been a proliferation of consumer products, including those in the realm of junk food. Back in the early 1970's, when I was a young boy, the ubiquity and variety of food products designed to tickle the taste buds had not yet reached today's prodigious levels.

And so it was, one fine sunny Sunday morning, when my father and I were walking towards our parked car somewhere in my hometown of Toronto, in an area a few miles north of downtown, after whatever father-and-son outing we had just completed, the sight of the popcorn man walking down the street plying his wares, triggered in me an immediate rush of excitement. An unexpected oasis in the urban desert!

I asked my father if I could have a bag, and he replied in the affirmative. We walked toward the man. He was wheeling a popcorn-making machine which had a whistle that made a most pleasing sound. My father ordered a bag. The man grabbed a small paper bag, scooped some fresh popcorn from his fabulous machine, and then covered it with golden yellow butter, that elixir of life.

My father and I then turned and headed back to the car, me armed with my prized new acquisition. Agghh! As I opened the door and climbed into the passenger side of the car, I tripped and fell forward, spilling my diamonds and rubies all over the seat and floor of my father's car! Talk about a fall from grace! A moment of perfection -- completely ruined!

My father saved the day: no fuss, no muss, the mess quickly and quietly cleaned up, and my father bought me a second bag of popcorn to replace the first one.

Of all of the moments and experiences of the decades of my life, there is not one memory that brings me any greater excellent feeling of pure blissful joy.

Many of us have our various notions of heaven, real or imagined. I guess that this is one of my ideas of heaven: your father quietly and gently helping you clean up the bag of popcorn you've accidentally spilled all over his car, and then buying you a second bag.

Here You Go, Mister Chocolate Taker Man!

One fine day, about 13 years ago, I was in a department store in Toronto -- Zellers, I believe -- buying various items in preparation for my then upcoming trip to Israel, the country to which I had decided to immigrate.

After about an hour, having picked out the items I had decided to purchase that day, I proceeded to the checkout area.

But just before I entered one of the checkout aisles, a 2- or 3-year-old black girl walked up to me. In her hand, a chocolate bar. Very much opened. And her mouth, and the surface area surrounding her mouth, and, in fact, much of the rest of her sweet little face, were all gloriously covered with chocolate. Her eyes were wide open, bearing silent but eloquent testimony to the kiddie-heaven experience she had clearly just enjoyed.

But the earnest expression on her face as she looked up at me and held the half-eaten chocolate bar in her hand up towards me indicated unambiguously that the moment of rapture was passing, and her thoughts had now turned to the far more pedestrian chore of disposing of the evidence.

What has always struck me about this moment was the way she approached me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to hand me that half-eaten gooey chocolate bar mess. It was as if, in her mind, all department stores employed several people such as myself, whose official job description it was to patrol the check-out area in search of little children who were wandering around with half-eaten chocolate bars that needed disposing of.

Without a word, I performed my assigned task, and gently took the proffered chocolate bar remains from her extended hand, disposed of them, purchased my items, and immigrated to Israel.

Forget Me Not

My two earliest memories are from when I was 2: I can remember sitting in my high chair eating Alpha-Bits cereal. And I can remember the first time I went to Synagogue: my grandmother took me to one near our home, Beth David, where I would spend many a Sabbath in subsequent years.

I remember the general physical layout of the room, and I remember that on that first occasion, we sat on the left, near the back. Beyond any physical memories, I distinctly remember feeling very comfortable and very much at home in this strange, pleasant place. It felt like a special place that brought out the best in people. Obviously, I would not have been able to articulate such thoughts at the ripe old age of 2, but that is definitely the overall impression I still retain of that visit.

I was once told by a friend of mine that regarding such early memories, eventually what we retain is not memories of the actual events themselves, but rather, memories of our memories of the events. I'm not sure how you would measure when a memory had passed from the former to the latter category, but intuitively, this very much makes sense to me. (Although it begs the question: do we eventually retain only the memory of the memory of the event? And so on?)

It's funny how we can retain a general impression of things, even absent any specific memories. For example, I can think of some teachers from my school days of which I have absolutely zero specific memories, and nevertheless, I am left with a very distinct general impression of whether I liked that teacher or not. (Happily, with two exceptions, the lasting impressions are pleasant.)

When I was in my teens, I was reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. My father noticed my reading selection, and he mentioned to me that he too had read it in his youth. After a brief discussion, it emerged that he did not recall the main character's name. I was dumbfounded -- how could you read an entire book and not remember the main character's name? Meanwhile, it appears that I have very much followed in my father's footsteps.

I have an unusual ability to remember when most of the vignettes of my life have occurred. Whenever I tell someone a tale, be it from my misspent youth or my misspent adulthood, I am almost always able to recall the exact year during which said event occurred.

Meanwhile, about 5 years ago, I decided that it was high time to read some of the books on my bookshelf that I had purchased but never gotten around to reading. So I pulled one out and started reading it. I was enjoying it quite a bit. But then on page 10, I noticed that I had made a note in the margin. What the dickens?! I already read this?! I started flipping the pages of the book, and there were marginal notes all the way to page 200!

I had read 200 pages of a book, and not only did I not remember one iota of what I had read -- I had managed to forget the very fact that I had read those 200 pages!

But I can tell you with absolutely certainty that the time I spun my baby sister around took place in the year 1976...

You Light Up My Life

"Do you know what your sister did?"
"Yes, yes, I know what she did."

"Guess what your little sister did!"
"I know all about it."

"Hey --"
"I know!!!"

All day long, people coming up to me, telling me what my sister had done.

The setting: my elementary school. I was in the 8th grade (or, as Canadians call it, grade 8), and my sister, being 5 years my junior, was in the 3rd. What had she done on that fateful day to generate such a buzz? During lunch, in the lunchroom, she had climbed up onto her table and sung the song: "You Light Up My Life", which was a hugely popular hit that year. In fact, it had spent several consecutive weeks at the #1 spot on the hit parade of the local radio station I listened to.

Now at the time, having every person in the entire school inform me that my kid sister had sung this song in the middle of lunch made me roll my eyes. In fact, I'll be candid and say that it was one of the most annoying events of my middle school years. However.

Years later, or should I say decades later, I thought about this stunt of hers and decided that I loved it. What an original, brave, imaginative, spontaneous and creative thing to do!

A few years ago, I asked my sister whether she remembered the event. Her response: "Oh, you mean the time that I serenaded my friend Benji?"

Fascinatingly, even though thousands and thousands (I know, I know, if you've told me once, you've told me a million times, not to exaggerate) of people had told me about the event, not one of them had bothered to share with me the not entirely irrelevant detail that this was a serenade. All of those years, I had understood that my sister had just randomly decided to sing the song in the middle of the lunchroom. But it turns out that she was expressing her romantic feelings to her young Romeo. Making the episode all the more endearing. If everyone were to treat their loved ones to an expression of love like that, boy!

In fact, episodes like this just .... wait for it ... light up my life.

Play It Again, Shmulik

As mentioned in earlier posts, most of my high school Sabbath mornings were spent in the company of a small group of sixty- and seventy-something Jewish men, in a Synagogue located in the basement of a house, otherwise known as a Shtiebel. My position was the Baal Koreh -- I would chant the weekly portion of the Torah. It kept me off the streets, as they say.

Now most Synagogues I've been to in my life hold, after the closing of Sabbath morning services, something called a Kiddush, which is a brief prayer recited in honor of the Sabbath, followed by victuals, of the traditional Jewish persuasion.

The house which housed our Shteibel had a front entrance and a back entrance. We would enter through the back entrance, then walk down a small flight of stairs. We would then be in an ante-room, where the Kiddushes took place. That ante-room in turn led to the room in which the prayer services were held.

Now for some reason, at our Shteibel, Kiddushes were held not every week, but rather only every few weeks. I suppose the Kiddush frequency was roughly that of Mickey Mantle's batting average. So each Sabbath, when you entered the back door and walked down those steps, there was but one thought on your mind: were the tables in the ante-room set, indicating that this would be a Kiddush week, or would they be tragically bare?

(Did I just say that? Obviously, a momentary lapse of judgment. Naturally, what I meant to write was: So each Sabbath, when you entered the back door and walked down those steps, there was but one thought on your mind: the excitement of imminent spiritual communal prayer amongst one's coreligionists. Yes, that's it. Clearly. Please ignore the above gaffe.)

At the conclusion of the services, the 20 or 30 or 40 of us would proceed to the ante-room, and take our seats at three long tables, covered with white plastic tablecloths. The regular staples, to the best of my recollection, were as follows:

• A shot-glass of scotch, or, as we used to call it, schnapps;
• An airy cookie known in Yiddish as eier kichel ("eier" is German for egg);
• A fish dish, which was delish, known, also in Yiddish, as shmaltz herring;
• And on rarer occasions, my favorite, a warm stew known in, what else? Yiddish, as cholent (actually, I have heard that the etymology of this term is French: "chaud lent": cooked slowly)

To this teenager, this was as good as it gets. Now although there was no official formal structure to these Kiddushes, nevertheless they followed a pretty definite pattern:

1. We would all sit down, and schmooze for a few minutes (if they made a Yiddish version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, surely one of the dwarfs would be Schmoozy)
2. Someone would recite the Kiddush prayer
3. We would all down a shot-glass of scotch
4. Within a minute or two, the usual lively din of conversation would disappear, as the various parts of our mouths were now engaged in a different activity
5. Some more schmoozing
6. Someone would give a brief speech, orating on the weekly Torah portion
7. Yet more schmoozing
8. Someone would be asked to lead all present in a song
9. Even more schmoozing
10. Someone would lead one and all in the blessing recited at the close of a meal
11. Kiddush adjourned, and we would begin to head for our respective homes, accompanied by, you guessed it, more schmoozing

Interestingly enough, I have no recollection of whether I ever participated in any of the aforementioned rounds of schmoozing. But what I do remember is a great feeling of warmth and camaraderie, sitting with these men who were 5 and 6 decades my senior. (Of course, that shot of scotch almost certainly contributed to the feeling of warmth.)

Now one of the items on the above itinerary was the part where we would all sing a traditional Jewish song. Each week, a different member of the board would be called upon to choose a song, and after three notes, we would all join in. Almost invariably, the song chosen was an oldie but goodie: Yismechu haShamaim, a song I actually learned back in the first or second grade.

Now I happen to like this song very much, but when, Kiddush after Kiddush, whoever was called upon to lead us in song would consistently choose that same song, I eventually grew more than a bit tired of it. Every Kiddush, when someone was about to choose a song to lead us in for that Shabbat, I would inwardly hope that they would have the temerity to throw off the shackles of conformity and choose something different. C'mon guys! There are other songs in the liturgical canon than Yismechu haShamaim, you know! Go wild! But more often than not, my vain hope would be dashed.

Finally, after having been there for well over a year, and possibly well over two, one Shabbat, someone called out my name to lead the group in song.

Huh? Who, me? Like a deer in the headlights, I froze. Only one thing came to my mind:

Yismechu haShamaim...

An Impressive Impressionist

In my previous post, I discussed the phenomenon of mistaking one person for another. You see a person whose features are so similar to someone else's that your mind mistakenly concludes that you have seen that other person. In my case, while watching a movie, I momentarily mistook Kirk Douglas for Sean Penn. The moment passed quickly enough, and once again, it was Kirk Douglas before me.

This experience is quite similar to the optical illusions we've all seen: you're looking at a drawing of an old woman, and then, all of a sudden, you are instead looking at a young, elegant one.

What is so amusing and entertaining about these optical illusions is that the very same visual stimuli that one moment cause your mind to believe that it is seeing a certain image just a split-second later cause your mind to perceive a completely different image. Your mind is in effect saying: "Wait a minute! I'm looking at the exact same person I was a moment ago -- so why am I now all of a sudden seeing a completely different person?! And I thought seeing is believing."

Now even though in both of the above situations your mind is being "tricked", there is an interesting difference between the two:

In the case of the "Dopplegänger Dilemma", where the source of the illusion is the similarity between two different people, the confusion arises because the visual stimuli being presented to your eyes are similar to the mental image you have stored in your memory for a different person (similar hair, facial structure, etc.), causing a mismatch.

On the other hand, in the case of the Old-Young Lady, something very different is at work. Our eyes see the picture and transmit its visual stimuli to our brain. Our brain then extracts from the totality of that picture various elements, and interprets each one. It then combines the interpretations of those elements and concludes that it has seen an old woman.

When a moment later the mind suddenly sees instead the young woman, it is now extracting different elements from the picture, and interpreting them differently, and voilà! it comes up with a different interpretation of what is has seen.

Now all of the above is an introduction to another illusory experience I had a few months ago.

I've been familiar with actor Sammy Davis, Jr. for decades. But I was unaware until a few years ago that:

• He began his career as a performer at the tender age of 3.
• He performed with his father for many years.
• He was a multi-talented entertainer, his talents including: singing, dancing, acting and doing impressions.
• He was enormously popular in the 1950's, far more so than I had ever realized.

A few months ago, I saw a clip of Sammy Davis, Jr. He was doing impressions of various famous actors, and his ability to duplicate their voices was hugely entertaining.

But then he did an impression which absolutely astounded me. Now Sammy Davis, Jr. was a small, short, black man, and the actor he was mimicking was a tall, large, white man. (I have since forgotten which actor it was.) And for his impression of this actor, Sammy did not utter one word, relying instead wholly on visual prompts.

Sammy did such a superb job of duplicating this man's facial expressions and body language that at one point, all of a sudden, I was no longer looking at Sammy Davis, Jr. -- instead, this other actor who looks absolutely nothing like Sammy Davis, Jr. appeared before me. So completely had Sammy's mannerisms duped my brain. That moment was as much an unexpected surprise to me, as if I were to turn around right now and see an elephant standing in my room.

So on the one hand, my eyes were seeing Sammy, a man who looked nothing like the other actor, and the image of Sammy was obviously being transmitted to my brain. But at the same time, Sammy's expert duplications of this man's mannerisms were simultaneously being transmitted to my brain as well. What is so striking is that with a wink and slight shift of his body, Sammy was able to make my mind completely ignore the overwhelming visual evidence and see instead the image that those oh so very subtle cues conjured up. What a feat!

Recall the two types of optical illusions I discerned earlier in this post: (a) the "Dopplegänger Dilemma, where the illusion arises from two images appearing the same; and (b) The Old-Young Lady, where the source of illusion arises from your mind extracting different clues from an image and interpreting them differently.

Into which category did Sammy's impression fall?

Fool Me Twice -- No Shame At All

A few months ago, I watched an old movie called "Detective Story", starring Kirk Douglas. It was quite entertaining and thoughtful, but the point I wish to discuss has nothing to do with the movie itself, but rather an unusual experience I had while watching it.

At one point of the movie, when the camera shifted to Kirk, it was not Kirk Douglas whom I saw, but rather actor Sean Penn, another well-known actor born nearly half a century after his doppelgänger (who is within striking distance of becoming a centenarian).

Naturally, I did a mental double-take at that moment, for I thought I had been watching a Kirk Douglas movie, not a Sean Penn movie! A beat later, my mind's eye re-adjusted, and it was once again Kirk Douglas before me. This scenario repeated itself at another point later on in the movie.

I'd like to offer my insights into what happened in my mind at that moment. Am I an expert in the workings of the mind? No, I'm a Freud not! But nevertheless.

I see a photo and recognize my mother. The following steps occur:

1. My eyes see the photograph and take in the visual stimuli presented.
2. Those stimuli are transmitted to my brain.
3. Somewhere in my memory, under the label "Mom", I have stored a set of visual information: my mother's facial features, expressions, etc.
4. My brain compares the stimuli being transmitted to it right now from my eyes with the set of data stored in my memory under "Mom", and perceives ample similarity between the two.
5. My mind concludes that the visual image I'm seeing is my mother.
6. I smile.

What transpired in my mind at the aforementioned moment in watching the film was virtually identical to the above steps, with the following exception: in step (4), the visual stimuli of Kirk Douglas being sent to my brain from my eyes were markedly similar to the visual information stored in my memory under the label "Sean Penn" -- the thick, straight hair, the cleft chin, etc. My mind therefore concluded, incorrectly, that I was watching Sean Penn.

Fair enough, Dr. Freud Not, but not so fast. If what you're saying is true, then why did this "false-positive" recognition occur only at that moment of the film? Clearly, prior to that moment, every time my mind compared the visual stimuli it was seeing with the images stored in my memory, it found a match with the set of data stored under the label "Kirk Douglas". So, to borrow from the Paschal liturgy, how was this moment different from all other moments?

Put differently, at that moment, my mind, upon being presented with an actual image of Kirk Douglas, and comparing that image with both my memory of Kirk Douglas and with my memory of Sean Penn, somehow felt that an actual image of Kirk Douglas looked less like Kirk Douglas than Sean Penn. Surely an impossibility!

I don't think this question is easily answered. Perhaps at that moment, something in Kirk's expression or stance contained a spark which to my mind is more associated with Sean Penn. Or maybe at that moment, my mind's secretary, shuffling through the myriad of mental images stored in its memory, simply pulled out the Sean Penn file before it reached the Kirk Douglas one.

Finally, a note on human error. I believe that when the mind makes these types of errors, there is no conscious decision making process involved in the error. The part of the mind which is comparing the visual stimuli with the "wrong" stored mental image is taking place on an involuntary, automatic level. If in that process of comparing, the mind finds a significant number of points in common between the two sets of data, then there is absolutely nothing it can do negate that. There is therefore no shame in such errors. (To be sure, there ought to be no shame in any type of error!)