Moral luck

This week something strange happened to me.  I was in an elevator in my co-op, and I got stuck.  All four elevators in my 23-story building were replaced last year, at a significant cost to shareholders.  Yet the expense was necessary, because the old ones had begun to fail too often.  The new elevators were speedy, and after a few kinks had been worked out last year, they were running smoothly.  Until I stepped into elevator No. 3.

I got into the elevator on my floor, and was headed toward the lobby.  I pressed L, and the doors closed, but the elevator did not move.  The doors opened again on my floor.  I pressed L again, and the doors closed, but the elevator did not move.  One more time.  Of course, this should have been my clue to take another elevator, but I am a stubborn human being.  This time it cost me.

On the third try, the L button remained lit, and the elevator started to descend.  At about the fifteenth floor, it stopped.  The doors did not open, the L button was still lit, and I was stuck.  I pressed the button for the third floor, to see if that would prompt the elevator to move.  It did not.  I pressed the phone button on the elevator panel, but no one picked up at the front desk, and now I was peeved.  I wasn’t nervous.  I just thought, “This stupid contraption is wasting my time.  How much did we pay for this thing?”

I called our concierge on my cell phone, and Vinnie picked up immediately.  He said the mechanic had been working on elevator No. 3 and was about to leave.  Vinnie grumbled something about the need for better elevator mechanics.  He told me not to worry, that they would get me out in a few minutes.

I stepped away from the elevator panel, and reclined against a corner.  I was alone, but perhaps I could check my email, I thought.  I did notice the four shiny wooden walls around me, the painfully bright miniature elevator lights above my head, and a rising tension in my throat, but I quelled my own imminent claustrophobia by scrolling through my email on my beloved iPhone.  After about ten or fifteen minutes, my forehead was damp, but I was still okay.  Vaguely I could hear the mechanic on the other side of the door, perhaps a floor above or below me.  I didn’t even know on what floor I was stuck.

Suddenly the elevator moved.  It descended I would guess about two floors, and then braked hard to a stop.  I was getting angry.  Again it moved, and again it stopped abruptly, as if the emergency brakes had been automatically applied.  On the third time the elevator moved and stopped without rhyme or reason, the doors popped open on the third floor, and I jumped out, relieved.

A handyman from our building asked me if I was okay, and I said that I was, although I felt dizzy.  As I walked from the lobby onto Broadway, my head didn’t feel right.  I had errands to do, groceries to buy, manuscripts to send out, and I did all those things, but within an hour after my elevator incident I felt as if someone had kicked me in the head twice.  Perhaps those jolts in the elevator had been more severe than I had imagined.  I wondered how my brain had sloshed inside my head as the elevator dropped and jolted to a stop twice.

After two hours, I had to lie down.  It took about half a day to get my bearings again, to rid myself of being lightheaded.

Days later, I am fine.  Don’t worry, dear reader.  I’ll imagine you worried, even though you didn’t.  It just makes me feel better to think that, and sometimes you need to do whatever gets you back on track, even if it is only within your imagination.

Today, as I was walking home with my son after his tennis lesson, a woman who was texting as she drove a shiny SUV, narrowly missed us on a crosswalk on Broadway.  Well, narrowly missed my son.  I put my hand to his chest and stopped him, having eyed the driver and her fingers furiously working her little gadget over the steering wheel.  How do we ever survive in this world?  With a little luck, and sometimes a little help.

Harold Hernesh

I am late sending out my holiday cards again, but I did remember to slip one under Harold Hernesh’s door.  Harold lives in our building on the Upper Westside, and our family, including my children Aaron and Isaac, befriended Harold when we rented a one-bedroom across the hall from him.  The following year we bought a co-op in the same building, but on another floor; Isaac was a mere three-weeks-old.  We have lived thirteen years in this building-qua-miniature-city of 350 apartments.

Harold, who is eighty-seven-years-old, always reminded me of my grandmother, Doña Dolores Rivero, a survivor of the Mexican Revolution.  Both were unbelievably tough, gruff and perpetually half-frowning.  Yet if you stopped to talk to them, and got to know them beyond their flinty exterior and garbled retorts, beyond their complaints about dogs or inept store clerks or greedy banks, these viejitos revealed a fearful vulnerability of what they had seen and what they had barely escaped.  Harold was eighteen when he was imprisoned at Dachau by the Nazis in 1941, for being a Jew.

I have given Harold copies of my books.  He doesn’t know it, but I made a version of Harold a hero in my story of violence and redemption, “Remembering Possibilities.”

Yesterday Harold stopped me in the lobby and handed me three lollipops, one for me and each of my children.  He always carries candy in his pockets, and hands it out to children, or their parents, every day.  I have a jar of Harold’s candies in the kitchen.  For years, Harold sat with his sister in the lobby of our building, chatting and introducing her to his friends.  But Harold’s sister died recently.  Harold is now, I think, alone.

So when he uncharacteristically asked me to follow him to his apartment, I said yes.  I had been to his place before, to fix his cable because he had forgotten he needed to have both the cable box on and the TV on channel 3 for the system to work.  Honestly, how do oldsters survive in this complex, idiosyncratic world?  I don’t know.  I battle with these things myself, and I can only imagine what shape I’ll be in when I’m eighty-seven.  Will I be able to manage an apartment by myself at that age?  Laura and I can barely do this now.

“The Lithuanians!  They were worst than the Nazis!” Harold blurted out, as he handed me a book to read, a story of another Holocaust survivor.  When Harold says words like ‘Lithuanians’ it sounds like ‘Lith-punians,’ and he half-spits every other word he says.  It’s possible Harold had a stroke a long time ago, but I’ve never asked him.  His blue-gray eyes wandered into the distance, and he recounted a story I had never heard before.  As he said, “The luk-thpiest daay of mai lifept.”  The luckiest day of his life.

A Nazi soldier and his Lithuanian collaborators had taken him to a field of mass graves, and ordered him to dig.  He would be digging not only his own grave, but the graves of other prisoners who would be shot that day.  His spade hit the ground, but it was frozen solid.  They beat him, and yelled at him to dig.  He smashed the shovel into the ground, but still the ground would not give.  They snatched the shovel away from him, and tried to dig themselves, to no avail.  “The luk-thpiest daay of mai lifept,” Harold repeated.  Bitterly cold and windy days like today, he said, have never bothered him on Broadway.

I don’t talk to Harold, nor did I ever bike fifteen miles as a kid to visit my abuelita on Saturdays, because I feel sorry for old people.  I listened to them, because I loved their stories.  I relished the bittersweet humor that came from hardscrabble or harrowing experiences.  They took me ‘there,’ wherever ‘there’ was, and I was captivated by and transported to another world.  For me, it was their gift.

Our Children in the World

Today I was teaching twelve-year-old Isaac to get to school by himself, on the New York City subway. This past school year he came home by himself on the bus, about 30 blocks, without a problem. He has reached these thresholds slightly earlier than Aaron, who at fourteen, now gets everywhere he needs to be by himself, and safely. As a parent on Manhattan’s Upper Westside, I have to worry about many more potential dangers than my mother did on Ysleta’s San Lorenzo Avenue. I don’t think I will ever stop worrying about my children in the world.

San Lorenzo was three short blocks to South Loop School, and my old neighborhood did have a few gangs, but they weren’t the real danger as I walked to and from school as a child. Dogs. I hated the Doberman pinscher that once lunged at me from the bushes of the house across the street. We had our own ferocious guard dog, Lobo, who had bitten many passersby straying too close to our fence or unlucky enough to be on the street when Lobo managed to vault the chainlink. And cars. The souped-up low riders and pickups never stopped, for there wasn’t even a crosswalk painted on our dirt streets. I remember seeing Reuben, a neighborhood kid, tumble underneath a pickup as it ran him over during our baseball game on San Simon. Reuben survived with only a broken arm.

In New York, cars are also dangerous, but in a different way. At crosswalks, even when pedestrians have the ‘Walk’ sign, cars do not stop. This happens every day on Broadway, and it’s a particular problem on two-way avenues. You get the ‘Walk’ sign on Broadway and you walk across the two-way avenue, but by the time you get to the other side, impatient drivers on the cross street have begun turning into the avenue, challenging pedestrians to get out of the way. The worst offenders are invariably taxis, livery cabs, city buses, and delivery trucks. Those on a schedule, a match up their butts. I have lost count how many times I have heard that awful screech of rubber on asphalt to avoid metal smashing into flesh at the crosswalk.

Less frequent dangers on Broadway are cars missing the red light entirely and zooming across the intersection and cars screeching to a halt at the crosswalk as their drivers realize they have a red light. If you jump into the crosswalk the instant you have the ‘Walk’ sign, you may be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After you have the ‘Walk’ sign, I tell my children, make sure the cars have actually stopped. Not only do you not have to make mistakes, but you must often catch the mistakes of others to be safe.

Bicycles, of course, never stop at the red light. Messengers, take-out delivery guys, Lance-Armstrong-wannabes. They’re even on the sidewalks.

Parked cars you’re standing next to often lurch backward without their drivers glancing into their rear view mirrors.

SUV-like strollers are battering rams deployed by harried mothers with a passive aggressive smile on their faces. At worst, your toe or shin will be bruised. It’s happened to me twice.

And I haven’t even gotten to the aggressive beggars on the street who follow you for a block, even after you have politely turned them down. The shifty-eyed losers who strike up conversations with young girls alone. The crazed woman I once met on a Number 1 train who, out of the blue, threatened to gut everyone in the car “like a fish.” The wild high school kids who, as four cops stand at the subway platform, push each other at incoming subway cars with snorts and guffaws.

I will do my best to train Aaron and Isaac for this New York City world they must navigate on their own. I will train them by being tough, by teaching them to be resourceful, by being available in case they need me, by going over scenarios with them, by watching them and not saying a word, even if they are making choices I would not make. I will do my best, and I will keep my fingers crossed and hope they learn from experience. The buzz of the doorbell, when they are home, is the sweetest sound of my day.