Confessions of a Class Clown, Part Deux

So, with high school over, the big wide world of college awaited. I have to say that my four years at Syracuse University were four of the most fun years I have ever experienced. Ably abetted by a fraternity house full of brothers as well as copious amounts of alcoholic beverages, those four years flew by. Some of them flew quickly because I have no memories of them.

My freshman year (1970) was the first time in the university’s history that first semester freshmen were allowed to rush and pledge fraternities. I really had no intention of joining one, but a couple of the guys at Acacia Fraternity were so nice (and were also in Air Force ROTC) that I made the commitment. By comparison, we were actually a fairly tame fraternity. (Let me get this out of the way right now. Despite what anyone who happens to be the mother of my wife may say to the contrary, we were not the model for the Delta Tau Chi fraternity in Animal House. Okay, we DID have an annual Night on the Nile party where we all wore what amounted to togas. And several years earlier, a couple of the guys led a cow into the bell tower of one of the campus buildings and left it there. But we were never on double secret probation, to our knowledge. And we never wrecked the Homecoming Parade.)

One of the joy’s of pledging a fraternity is what is generically called Hell Week. We called it Initiation Week because unlike some other frats, there was no physical torture involved. Okay, the pledges were kept in a state of sleep deprivation which has been characterized as torture by the UN. And pushups were rather liberally distributed. But there was no paddling or hitting; just a lot of yelling and bracing against the wall when an initiated brother passed by.

One thing that pledges were not allowed to do was laugh because Initiation Week was a solemn occasion. So every time I got caught laughing or smiling, I explained myself by saying, “I’m solemning, sir.” The pledge trainer and his roommate had a room that happened to have a brass door knocker. One of my pledge brothers and I needed to speak with said pledge trainer, so rather than simply knock on the door, I banged with the door knocker. When our pledge trainer asked what we were doing, I said, “We’re playing with your knocker, sir.” My pledge brother and I promptly lost it and the two of us fell down in fits of laughter. Our pledge trainer opened the door, looked at the two of us and just shook his head and shut the door without awarding any swift and terrible retribution. (My pledge brother became my closest frat brother and my roommate and we were later groomsmen in each others’ weddings.)

During Initiation Week, the pledges were required to wear ties and jackets and, at all times, have with them their pledge paddle, their membership manual and their local membership supplement. If the pledge happened to “lose” any of these things, he was given a larger, heavier (and far less useful) substitute. You may ask how one “loses” their materials. Well, it was a phenomenon known as the “Theta Chi Chameleon.” Theta Chi was the frat behind ours. The chameleon was an evil member of Theta Chi who could look astonishingly identical to any of our brothers. It HAD to be the chameleon because no brother would treat any other member, brother or pledge, in a bad manner. Honest. It was the Theta Chi Chameleon. Honest.

Anyway, in one particular pledge class two years after mine, I was very friendly with one of the pledges. (He and I later became roommates and we were also groomsmen in each others’ weddings. In fact, the night before my wedding, I slept with him. No, you dirty-minded people, I mean we shared the double bed in the motel where the bunch of us stayed the night before.) Anyway, the Theta Chi Chameleon impersonated me four times to steal his pledge materials. Can you imagine? My favorite pledge and the Chameleon chose ME to impersonate. By the end of Initiation Week, he was carrying two pencils (less useful substitutes for the written material) and a highway sign (that had been liberated several years earlier by another brother) that was about six feet square for his pledge paddle.

Once a semester, our Little Sisters (of whom my wife was one) would throw a 5:00 AM TGIF party. Because there was a combination lock on the door of the frat house, they needed a brother in on it to get in and set up. Because Joy could not have gotten out of bed without my knowing, I was the de facto choice for inside man. This one Friday was a spectacular success with whiskey sours, mai-tais and Bloody Marys. Coincidentally, Friday was also uniform day for ROTC students. Now, my fraternity big brother never made it to class because he over-served himself. I was just drunk when I went to my ROTC class. This was the year I had The Major who did not particularly approve of me. During class, he asked me a question and I slurred out the correct answer. The following conversation ensued:

The Major: Mr. Gutis. Are you drunk?

Mr. Gutis: Oh, yes sir.

The Major: At this hour?

Mr. Gutis: Oh no, sir, I was drunk by 6 AM.

Well, he reported me to the colonel. Now, the colonel was a good ole boy from North Carolina who had flown bombers his whole career. He knew I wanted to fly B-52s and the colonel really liked me. He called me into his office and asked me to explain myself. I told him exactly what had happened. He looked me up and down, thought for a second and then said, “Real fine. Keep up the good work.” I saluted and left.

Our house was directly across the street from the primary women’s freshman dorm. On the third floor of my fraternity, there was an amazing array of optical devices because it took many of the girls quite a while to recognize that there was a frat full of healthy, red-blooded, young men across the street from them and they left their blinds open. There was also a birch tree in front that blocked the view of many rooms. The summer that I had to go to AFROTC field training in Plattsburgh, New York, I drove through Syracuse on my way home and spent a few days. There were always a couple guys who stayed there year round so I had company. As fate would have it, one night, we had acquired some alcoholic beverages and we, shall we say, over-served ourselves. At some point, I said, “We’ve talked about it. No one’s around on campus. Let’s cut the tree down.” The initial guffaws quickly led to a steely determination. Have you ever noticed that trees look smaller than they really are when they’re standing up? For some reason, we tried to drag it into the back yard and it got jammed…just as the university police arrived. We scattered. I managed to run around to the other side of the house and come in the front door. Very innocently, I walked out the back door and asked the police officers what had happened. When they explained the obvious to me, I said, “Oh, I noticed a couple of guys running out towards College Place.” They thanked me and I innocently asked them what they wanted to do with the tree. They looked at me like I had two heads and said that if we wanted the wood we should just cut it up. So we did. And for the next two years our fireplace had the nicest supply of white birch wood.

And lest you think that I only picked on my fraternity brothers, let me tell you this story. My girlfriend (now wife) Joy and I were lying on my bed watching the movie The Ten Commandments on TV. Shortly after Moses leads the Children of Israel out of Egypt the following conversation took place:

Joy: Was Moses married?

Me: Yes.

Joy: Do you know his wife’s name?

Me: Yes.

Joy: What was it?

Me: Mrs. Moses.

With that she shoved me off the bed. This might not seem significant but I had the top bunk of a bunk bed.

We tended to be very tolerant of brothers having “guests” spend the night. This tolerance, however, was pushed to the breaking point when one of them moved his girlfriend into the frat house. She was actually giving our phone number and address as her number and address. He, of course, denied that she was living in the house but she had several suitcases worth of clothes in his room. Oh, and did I mention she was the daughter of one of the university vice-chancellors? Well, when we had the infamous 5 AM TGIF that led me to run afoul of The Major, the other Little Sisters did not tell her about it. At the weekly brothers’ meeting, the brother in question raised the issue. Once again, always the lawyer, the following conversation took place.

Me: Let me ask you a question. Isn’t the purpose of the 5 AM TGIF to surprise people living in the house?

Frat brother: Yes.

Me: Well she was surprised, wasn’t she?

End of conversation.

Let me say this. I have never been a big fan of practical jokes. It is just far too easy for them to go badly and dangerously awry. But…my junior year, the national fraternity sent one of its traveling secretaries to visit us. Aside from the fact that the chapters in the northeast detested national because they detested us, this individual was particularly unpleasant…no, let’s be honest. He was an almost total asshole. When he visited us, he came down with the flu bug that was running rampant across campus. For reasons unknown to me, my big brother who was chapter president, allowed this yutz to take his bed for the visit. At the time, we had an alumni brother, Larry, going to grad school and who was living in the frat. The guy from national did not know him. As a “med student,” Larry looked in on him and I had told Larry to tell this detestable yutz about a weird strain of the flu they were working on and Upstate Medical Center. What Larry told him was that if your urine turned blue, it meant that the flu was fatal within days. The last day with us, he felt well enough to interact with us. One of the other guys got me some methylene blue. I had an eye-dropper full of it that I palmed into his black coffee when he wasn’t looking. Guess what methylene blue does to urine? We understood from our Cornell chapter that he never made it there. And they were quite pleased about that.

One of the last things I did in college involved the same two individuals who had been surprised by the TGIF. The frat house had been built in two stages. The back part of the house was built after the front part and had a separate furnace and the thermostat was upstairs where Barry and I and a few others lived. The brother in question was the house steward. (He got a discount on room and board by being the in-house repairman.) A window in his room was cracked yet he refused to fix it. Rather he would constantly whine about us not turning up the heat enough. (Syracuse, NY winters tend to get verrrrrry cold, BTW.) So, the first nice warm day in the spring, we finally felt very guilty about the heating situation. So we took the cover off the thermostat, packed ice on it…and cranked it to 90 degrees. The best part was we could hear him stomping up the stairs in enough time to pull the ice, replace the cover and hide the ice. This went on all afternoon until we determined that our heat debt had been repaid.

Like all good things, though college came to an end, so it was off the Uncle Sam’s Air Force. Stay tuned….

Confessions of a Class Clown

“You’d be bored and you’d figure, ‘Well, why not deprive someone else of their education.’” – George Carlin, Class Clown

For as long as I can remember, I was always tempted to be a smartass. It seems strange, in retrospect when you consider a couple of facts. One was that, near as we can tell, I was born with markers for clinical depression. The other is that I was always the kid who was afraid to get in TROUBLE. Remember that? Do you remember when “You’re in TROUBLE” was one of the most frightening things you could hear? Well, I do. I hated being in trouble but I also never learned to keep my mouth shut. It is a matter of historical record that my first day in kindergarten, that is to say my FIRST DAY EVER in school, I was given detention for talking when I wasn’t supposed to.

After way too much education, time as an Air Force navigator, then as a librarian and finally as a lawyer (in a variety of incarnations) I continue to be vexed by the question, “What do I really want to be when I grow up?” The smartass answer is retired and, honestly, that’s not very many years away. But the honest answer is I want to be a comedian. I always have. And I’m actually very good at telling jokes, I have a great sense of timing, a quick ability to find a humorous link between certain words and I do dialects well. Unfortunately, I can’t write my own material. I think of things on the spur of the moment, but to sit down and write a full bit is beyond me. (It’s a subset of the “I write well but I can’t plot so I can’t be an author” syndrome.)

So not being able to write my own material, I took to stealing from others, one of whom was Bill Cosby. I had several of his comedy albums and I would listen to them so many times that I could repeat them word for word. How many times did I have to listen to my mother say, “Well! If you learned your school work that well you’d be getting better grades!” Woody Allen was another of my comedy inspirations. I mean, a short nebbishy, curly-haired Jewish guy from New York with an inferiority complex. What were we? Twins separated at birth?

I think the class clown stuff really started coming out in Hebrew school. Why you may ask? Well, I suspect it was a combination of factors. For five years, from ages 8 to 13, I and a bunch of the other unfortunate schmendriks were subjected to two hours of school twice a week AFTER regular school plus another two hours on Sunday morning. And don’t even get me started on Bar Mitzvah lessons on top of all THAT! So, there I was, a captive in the synagogue (where my mother was the bookkeeper, by the way), six hours a week. And what’s better to make fun of than religious stuff? In fact, doing it in Hebrew school had the double advantage of being both school and religiously oriented. And we all know that getting suppressed laughter where everyone knows you’re not supposed to laugh is the BEST. I was aided and abetted by my friends Andy and Matthew who were in the same class as me. My father took to referring to us as “the unholy three” because we seemed to find humor in the most solemn of things. Like George Carlin said, getting people to laugh at inappropriate times was the best. (More on the necessity of being badly behaved at religious observations later.)

Most of the things I said in class were of the smartass variety. The one I particularly remember was in Torah class. (Just in case you’re not sure, the Torah is the first five books of the bible.) We were up to the part of Exodus where Moses gets his marching orders from God to set the Israelites free from slavery in Egypt. When the Mose-man asks how he should identify God to the Israelites, he is told “Tell them that I am that I am.” (Exodus 3:14) Of course, without missing a beat, I chimed in with, “That’s all that I am. I’m Popeye the Sailor man. (too-toot).” (Yes, I added the toot-toot. In for an inch in for a mile.) After having to explain that one to the Hebrew school principal, I got to explain it to my mother. But, OH, it was worth it.

And lest you think that I was only a smartass in schools of various formats, let me tell you about a couple of things I did to my grandmother. I spent more time with Grandma Fanny and Grandpa Joe, my mother’s parents, than I did with anyone other than my parents. My mother was the younger of two. I was an only child and I was the first grandchild on either side of the family. Yes, I was the golden child. And the truth is that Grandma Fanny adored and doted on me. Now, Grandma came from Poland. And let’s all not forget that I am one of the pickiest eaters on the face of the earth. As a kid, I seldom finished everything on my plate. Grandma would lament, “Children in Poland are starving and you’re leaving food….” Somewhere when I was still in single digits of age, I had heard that once too often. I turned to her and said, “Whether I eat it or not, they’re still gonna starve. So what difference does it make?” And that was the last time I heard of that particular phrase.

The other thing I did to her took longer to come to fruition. My grandparents and parents were fluent in Yiddish. Whenever I’d tell Grandma that I was bored, she would say, “Geh shlug zich cup in vahnt.” Very early, I learned that meant, “Go bang your head in the wall.” After years of hearing this, one day (I believe I had made it into double digit age by that time) I said I was bored. We were in the kitchen at the time and she gave me her usual answer. I said, “Okay” and went into the living room and started banging my head in the wall. Now, these were sturdy plaster walls that did not resound well, so it took a while of some fairly hefty head-banging for her to hear me. When she finally came in to see what the noise was, she was horrified. That was the end of that phrase until…I started saying it to my daughter whenever she would tell me that she was bored. The best part is that she uses it on kids, too. (She’s very careful about it, though, because she teaches special education and some of those kids really are head-bangers.)

High school was a glorious time. It was the sixties. Flower power was in bloom. Kids were just starting to grow their hair long. And my two best friends were also class clowns. Now Andy, who wanted to go to medical school, was a bit more conservative in his clownishness than I was and Tom, who was a good bit ballsier than I, was a bit more extravagant. Together, though, we were a devastating combination. This was exacerbated by the fact that we were smart (I was the least of the three of us, but all our classes were Level 1 or higher.) Bored and smart is a dangerous combination.

Senior year, the one class that all three of us were in together (other than gym) was English class. We actually liked our English teacher, but she had an unfortunate hair style that poofed out in the front, resulting in the less than complimentary name “Tumor Head.” The fact that her last name began with a “T” made the alliteration even more appealing. Yes. I admit it. It was cruel but we never actually called her that to her face.

I forget what book we were going to read but it was not one that was part of the normal curriculum. She decided to ask if we minded paying a dollar for a copy and the entire class agreed. Well, almost the entire class agreed. I exercised my right to say that a teacher could not compel us to spend money on school materials. (Trust me. A lawyer even then, I checked the school regs and knew I was on strong ground.) I refused to pay for it. Knowing I was actually within the letter of the law, she gave me a copy anyway and dramatically said that she knew eventually I would pay for it. Flash forward to the end of the year. We had written short stories as 70% of our final grade. I had gotten an A on that so I knew no matter what happened on the other 30%, I would pass. The day of the final, I walked in with my hands behind my back and apologized for having been so obstinate about paying for the book. With a look of joy on her face, she thanked me for having seen the light…until I dumped one hundred pennies on her desk from a paper bag.

An unfortunate thing did happen to her in the middle of that school year. She had been mugged in her apartment building and was out for about six weeks. The school made the mistake of having a different substitute teacher each week she was off. Now, substitutes are notorious for receiving, shall we say, a less than appropriate amount of respect. Well, at least notorious among us. One of them was attempting to get us to read poetry…out loud. So when Tom was called on to read Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, Andy and I stood up on either side of him, raised our arms and swayed in the breeze. With another substitute, the three of us imitated a steam calliope by alternately standing up and down in our seats and making calliope-like sounds. That one decided she didn’t need to put up with us and asked us to leave. We shook her hand and thanked her as we filed out.

French teachers were among my favorite targets. I’m not entirely sure why, but my goal was to push them to the edge of a nervous breakdown without pushing them over. Now, I had scraped through French class since the fifth grade by getting just enough to make it through the year. This was not because I didn’t want to try. It’s because my inability to learn foreign languages is exceeded only by my inability to learn mathematics. So French class was truly a case of being bored and depriving everyone else of their education.

In ninth grade, my seat in French class was in the front row. As a result, it was very easy for her to see the look on my face. The look on my face was often one of confusion. For the first seven months of the school year, whenever she saw that look on my face she would stop and with all teacherly concern ask me if I understood. Inevitably I would take a moment of thought then say, “If you say so.” Finally, some time late in the winter, she had heard that one too many times and she detonated. So from then on, whenever she asked me the same thing, I just said, “Okay.”

My senior year French class was French literature. The teacher was a charming little woman whose name happened to be Bella Friedman. Whenever we would read a play, we’d all take a part and read out loud in class. She would really get into the part and emote like a ham. After several months of this, one of the girls in glass gushed, “Oh, Miss Friedman, you should have been an actress.” She just glowed and said, “Yes. Some day my name will be up in lights.” At which point I piped in with, “Yeah, flashing on and off, ‘Bella’s Bar and Grill.’”

The final high school class clownery in which I was involved was in the nature of being one of the instigators. In my school, there was a tradition called Senior Dress Down Day. On that day members of the senior class could wear anything they wanted. OUR senior year, they did away with it because they said that the student body had taken to dressing down every day so there was no need for it. Tom, Andy and I were talking about it and Andy jokingly suggested someone should walk naked to protest. I said that wasn’t practical but how about wearing nothing but a jock strap (a/k/a athletic supporter)? Tom looked at me and said, “How much?” I said, “$10.00” and Andy said he would match it. Now, in 1970, $20.00 was a tidy sum and Tom needed train fare to visit a girl so he took the bet, with the condition that he could wear a shirt that hung down in the back a bit. We agreed. The morning of it, he went to the boys’ locker room and came down wearing a shirt, his jock and sandals. He made it halfway down the hall of the second floor before he was apprehended. It was one of those things that were just too outrageous to be punished for. The principal said to him, “Son, you may be crazy, but I have to admit, you’ve got balls.” The only repercussion was that Tom was stripped of his office as president of the school’s chapter of the National Honor Society.

College awaited, but that stuff will have to wait for another day….

Clay Feet

At the age of five in 1957, I discovered the game of baseball. How I came by this discovery I’m not quite sure. I was an only child so no older brother introduced me. My father (I learned years later after his death), described himself as the last kid chosen when sides were chosen and was the kid everyone argued the other team had to take. As a result, he had no interest in the game. I’m guessing it had to do with the presence of baseball on TV and maybe the influence of my friends. Living right outside of New York City, it came as no surprise that my affections should settle onto the New York Yankees. The Yankees of that period were in the middle of the greatest run of any baseball team in history. Between 1949 and 1964, they appeared in the World Series fourteen times, winning ten of them. It was very easy to root for them.

Having become a Yankees fan, my fondest affections settled on their best player, Mickey Mantle. There was something so right about Mickey from the number 7 on his back to the monstrous home runs that he hit from both sides of the plate. Whenever I would catch a game or part of a game on TV, all I lived for was Mickey’s at bats. If he got a hit I was thrilled but if he made an out, especially if it was a strike out, I was crushed. The outcome of the game was almost secondary to what Mickey did at the plate.

I’m not sure when I read the first biography of him but I’m quite sure it was a children’s book about him that I got out of the library. I gobbled up everything I could find about him. I learned about his hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma, his osteomyelitis in high school, his knee injury in the 1951 World Series and all the other details of his life and career. I studied his batting style and could imitate it. I began swinging imaginary bats both right and left-handed so I could be like my hero.

At the time, my friends and I did not understand why he batted left-handed so often (more right-handed pitchers) because he was obviously a better hitter right-handed. We would rail at him when he failed to live up to our expectations, especially batting left-handed. But at the end of the day, we forgave him and loved him with the idol-worship that only young boys have for the sports heroes.

I bought my first pack of baseball cards in 1960. (Don’t get me started on what became of them. That’s still a very sore subject.) I remember the ecstasy when I opened the pack and found a Mickey Mantle card! Talk about a card I would NEVER have endangered in a card-flipping competition. It was also the first year I ever went to a baseball game. My father and I went to Yankee Stadium and saw the Detroit Tigers and Yankees go into extra-innings with Johnny Blanchard winning the game with a single in the bottom of the fourteenth. But it all paled by comparison to seeing Mickey Mantle in the flesh. Sure, he was a distant figure from where we were sitting but it was still HIM! I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember what he did that day.

The next year, 1961, the Yankees were the greatest team I have ever seen play baseball. More important, it was the year of the epic battle between Mickey and his teammate Roger Maris for who would surpass Babe Ruth’s single-season home run total of 60. That summer at camp, my best friend and I made believe we were Mickey and Roger (guess who I was) when we played our whiffle-ball version of Home Run Derby (if it’s not a home run it’s an out). I knew all about Mickey’s many career injuries and I was devastated when in September, he had to drop out of the race because of a wound on his hip. The Yankees winning the World Series in five games was almost an after-thought after that season.

As the years passed, I knew I was getting older but somehow I could never believe that my hero was aging, too. Oh, sure, there were more injuries and more home runs and I realized that he couldn’t run as fast or throw as hard. But, hey, it was still The Mick, my hero! How could he be slowing down? Even when the Yankees had to move him to first base because he could barely run, he was still Superman…at least to me.

I’m not sure when I first learned that my hero might have had a drinking problem. I can’t actually remember ah ah-ha moment when all of a sudden the blinders fell from my eyes. It was more of a gradual process. But what did that matter? He still gave it 100% on the field. It was only later that I would learn about the days showing up so hung over that he could barely play. But he was STILL my hero.

After Mickey retired, my parents bought tickets for my dad and me to go to Mickey Mantle Day in 1969. Every time I see pictures or films of that day I swell a little with pride that I was one of those fans in the ballpark honoring MY hero. And for years afterwards I’d go to Old Timer’s Day just to be able to see Mickey on the field again.

It was in the 1980s when baseball and I had moved on from our innocence when I realized just how much of a problem Mickey had with alcohol. It was after Mickey Mantle’s restaurant opened in New York. Don Imus, who had the morning radio show on WNBC-AM, repeatedly referred to Mickey’s table where Mickey was drunk under it. (As it turns out Imus was no one to talk, being an alcoholic and drug user himself.) But I could no longer deny the truth that the man I idolized suffered from alcoholism and probably had throughout his career.

And when Mickey finally sobered up but had to receive a liver transplant after having destroyed his own from drinking, I had a crisis of conscience. How could I continue to love this man who had proven so fallible? How could I have defended him to friends and acquaintances as being the best player in baseball? Was there something wrong with me that I rooted for such a flawed individual? And when Mickey, in the last few weeks of his life, came clean and warned kids to use him as an example of what not to be, I had my answer. He was and would always be my idol, clay feet and all.

What prompted me to write this is that I just finished reading Jane Leavy’s biography of Mickey, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. I have read as many biographies of Mickey Mantle as I could find. This one was very tough to read. Not only is it the most honest about Mickey’s failings as a player and a person but it traces his life through its end. While it conveys the many successes of his career, it shows him to be the flawed genius that he was. When I finished reading it I had tears in my eyes.

I have come to accept the fact that the man I have idolized from early childhood and who will always be at the apex of my pantheon of heroes was a very flawed individual. That doesn’t alter how I felt and still feel about him. If anything, his humanness makes him even more endearing to me. If I can grieve that had he taken better care of himself he might have had even greater successes and achieved even greater heights, I can rejoice in what he accomplished despite his flaws. In his poem, The Art of Catching Trains, Rod McKuen has says “Small boys need encouragement. The freight trains in their minds will only take them just so far. Be kind, for small boys need to grow.” This small boy did grow. But there will always be a special place in my heart for number 7. He will always be the golden-boy centerfielder who could do no wrong and will always be young and strong in my mind’s eye.

Losing My Religion; or Why I'm an Atheist

“That's me in the corner. That's me in the spotlight losing my religion.” – R.E.M.

I make no bones about the fact that I am an atheist. I am not agnostic. Agnostics believe in the existence of some sort of deity or over-arching creator and/or controlling force in the universe. No. I am what used to be described as a secular humanist and believe that the universe functions all on it's own with certain immutable scientific laws all of which are amenable to objective proof a/k/a the scientific method.

To give the background context, I am the child of Jewish parents. I was brought up in the Jewish faith (at least they tried). I was subjected to five years of Hebrew School (two hours two days a week after regular school plus two hours on Sunday mornings) along with all the stress on attending Saturday morning services, either upstairs with the adults or junior congregation. Hoo-boy did I resent those six extra hours a week along with the extra school work for which I was held responsible. This was made even worse by the fact that the Catholic kids got time off from regular school every Wednesday afternoon to go to catechism class. But my reasons for losing the faith really did not relate to the extra burden of work. It was deeper and predated Hebrew School

One of the first books I had was a little Jewish prayer book for kids, I suspect from my maternal grandfather. In it, there was a stylized picture of e good lord (which flew in the face of the 10 Commandments thing about graven images, but I digress). It showed an old bearded man. From the time I was old enough to understand the concept of the Judeo-Christian deity, I was taught that He was all powerful and omniscient and perfect. Well if He was all powerful, why couldn't he make Himself look like a young guy? When I asked that question, my grandfather told me I was being disrespectful. I was somewhat chastened by that answer but I also noticed that I had not received an answer to the question I had asked.

The second thing that the prayer book did was it taught me the prayer to say every night before I went to sleep. For years, I said that prayer as I lay down to go night night with my stuffed bunny rabbit. Then, one night, it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if I DIDN'T say my prayer. So I skipped it one night, laid down with Bunny...and woke up the next morning feeling NO worse for wear. That was the end of worrying about saying my prayer before going to sleep. When my mother asked me about it I just said I didn't need to say it anymore. She had no good answer other than that I SHOULD keep doing it. No explanation why, just that I should.

Early in my Hebrew School ordeal, I asked the following question. "Why did God speak to people in the bible then suddenly he stopped talking to people?" The answer from my teacher was something along the lines of, "Well, because those were biblical times." When I persisted in attempting to get an explanation of what that meant, I got sent to the principal's office for showing a lack of due respect. That was compounded by the fact that my mother worked for the synagogue so I was in double immediate deep kimchee. (Years later when I heard George Carlin talking about Catholic school and getting answers along the lines of "Well, it's a mystery," I was reminded of this incident. As he put it they made questioners out of them and it made them lose the faith.)

So I was well on my way to losing the faith by the time of my bar-mitzvah. The important thing about passing that milestone was that it meant the end of Hebrew School. When my mother made the hideous suggestion that I continue with Hebrew high school, it was one of the VERY few times my father ever said no to her after I had already expressed my vehement opposition. Hebrew School was like hitting myself in the head with a hammer. It felt so good when I stopped.

I knew that I could not possibly buy into the whole story of Jesus from the virgin birth right through the whole resurrection so Christianity held no attraction for me. Judaism, at least, made some objective sense in that, other than the whole God thing, most things had some reasonable basis. I continued to think of myself as a Jew. Before we got married, my wife converted to Judaism and we were married by a rabbi. Part of that was sheer cowardice on my part in not standing up to my parents and insisting on a civil ceremony. When our daughter was born, we had her named in a Jewish ceremony. But we raised her with an awareness of both religious traditions. We told her that religion was her choice and when she got old enough she could decide for herself. We had a Christmas tree at the same time we lit the candles for Channukah. (And, yes, it's always been a Christmas tree, not a Channukah bush.)

My father had died when I was in high school and for a year, I went to services at least once a week to say Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead). I didn't believe in what I was doing but I felt guilty to NOT do it. When that year ended, I basically had had it with going to services. My mother remarried when I was a college freshman and the family into which she married was very into Judaism. I just could never feel a part of the scene and the alienation increased. Not only was I the one who had lost the faith, I had even married someone who was not born into the faith. Subtly, I always felt like the black sheep.

I'm not sure where I drifted into flat-out atheism but I went through a period where I experimented with Zen. What I liked (and still like) about Zen is that it is independent of belief in a deity although belief in gods is part, hence my having drifted away from it.

I think the final recognition of my total loss of faith came when I was watching an episode of Carl Sagan's classic TV series "Cosmos." In one episode, he said, "We are all star stuff." When I understood that he meant that everything around us with the exception of hydrogen and helium had been created in the hearts of now dead stars, I was blown away. That answered the question for me as to where did I come from. At some point every atom that is "me" was created by the cataclysm of a star exploding. There was the scientific explanation...and there was the final rupture for me and religion. I had become a secular humanist.

Since then, I have recognized that the universe works by immutable laws. Whether or not the Big Bang is actually the scientific explanation for how the universe began, there is a scientific explanation for everything around us. I don't understand mathematics beyond one and one making two, so I can't prove these things myself. But I have learned enough about cosmology to understand the nature of the laws of the universe. I have learned enough about quantum mechanics to understand that Einstein was wrong when he said that god does not shoot craps with the universe. He was wrong in that quantum mechanics teaches that at the sub-atomic level, random chance operates. If we accept the omniscient and perfect god of Judeo-Christian belief, random chance has no place because he has predetermined everything. Sorry. Nils Bohr, yes; magic sky-person, no.

I find Richard Dawkins to be most illuminating. His book “The God Delusion” has provided me with another favorite quote. “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” If a person believes in any particular deity, whether it be Odin, God/Allah, Vishnu, Zool, he or she, by definition, rejects all other god-beings. Therefore, everyone is atheistic about all those other gods.

If we accept the concept taught in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition that God/Allah is a perfect being, I have several questions. Why did a perfect being find it necessary to create something? If a being is perfect unto itself, it should have no need to create anything. Next question. If said being is perfect, how could Satan have rebelled against him? Rebellion implies displeasure and how can a perfect being do anything except be perfect? Finally, if a being is perfect, why does it need prayer from its creations? And a related issue to that last question is how can a perfect being get mad? Oh, and on the subject of creation, it implies a beginning and an end which flies in the face of the everlasting and always was god being.

I touched on quantum theory earlier. The basis of quantum theory is randomness. Accepting that, there is no way for a being to know everything that is going to happen where everything is subject to random behavior. This explains why a pair of literally identical twins, raised with identical experiences will still turn out different. Random behavior at the sub-atomic level will, inevitably cause a divergence at the microscopic level which will eventually translate to the macro level.

I also believe that humans are only one of many sentient species in the universe. It is estimated that there are as many as 200 billion galaxies in the known universe. Each galaxy has between 10 and 200 million stars. Who knows how many planets orbit all those stars. But, to me, it is inconceivable that we here on our little spaceship earth are the only beings who happened to have a planet that was just right for life to evolve. (Yes, I said it. I also believe in evolution.) Therefore, unless every single sentient race is identical to humans down to the molecular level, how could we have been created in god’s image? It’s impossible to prove, but statistically it just does not wash.

Now, having said all this, I do not begrudge anybody their individual beliefs. To try and force my lack of belief on them is as unacceptable as it is when I find believers trying to force their religious convictions on me. Belief or lack thereof is an intensely personal thing. I may disagree with your belief but I will fight for your right to practice what you believe as long as such belief does not impinge on me or the government. I take the Establishment Clause very seriously and recognize that it protects atheists as much as Jews, Christians of all types and all the other religions out there.

So there it is. These are the reasons for my atheism. It started with my asking questions for which no reasonable answer could be provided. When I began comparing the ideas of simply “believing” or “having faith” with the logic of science, science won out hands down. And I don’t apologize for it any more than I expect you to apologize for your own belief. We are all passengers on spaceship earth. Peace.

Owning a Cat is an Oxymoron

“Once was a time, in New York's jungle in a tree, before I went into the world in search of other kinds of love, nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.” – Rod McKuen, “A Cat Named Sloopy”

The first pet my wife and I ever owned as a married couple was a cat named Gremlin. Actually, his full name was Gremlin Meshugina Kittums. (For those of you not fluent in Yiddish, “Meshugina” means crazy.) With only two breaks, we have always been owned by at least one cat. Notice I said that we have been owned by cats. I first encountered that concept in Rod McKuen’s poem quoted above. (By the way, the full text can be found here: http://www.why-not.com/cats/sloopy.htm and on his album “At Carnegie Hall.”) But until I finally lived with a cat, I never really understood it. You may buy or acquire a cat by other means but it is the cat that chooses who it will own. An axiom is that “Dogs have owners; cats have staff.” And once you accept the fact that you are a life support system for the cat that owns you, you have truly understood life with a cat.

I came to be a cat person quite accidentally. The extent of my pets while growing up was a couple of turtles and a couple of goldfish. We lived in an apartment house and the excuse was always we didn’t have the room. I was also aware that my parents actively disliked cats. I recall my mother disparaging them and my father once kicking one at my uncle’s house that sprang out of nowhere to attack his foot. My fraternity decided to adopt a stray named Ralph with only two dissenting votes, mine being one of them. As the medical bills piled up, those two dissenting votes proved to be prescient.

So, it came as a bit of a surprise, when we acquired Gremlin that he became a source of unending amusement. He had two favorite activities. The first involved the cocker spaniel we also acquired. He would lay in a chair in the living room. When the spaniel walked past, he would leap, wrap his fore paws around her hind paws, tackle her, then bolt. The second was the result of the apartment’s architecture and shag carpet of the 70s. It was a two-floor apartment and the steps were open with no risers and were carpeted. Gremlin would latch onto the carpeting and climb up the underside of the steps, emerging through the one at the top, run down and start the process again. Unfortunately, when we moved from California, we had to leave him behind.

Our daughter Sara’s first cat was a gray long-haired female kitten that we named Kitty because that was a word she could say at the time. Kitty was one of the few we ever bought. She was also one of the sweetest cats we ever had. We have pictures of Sara carrying her by holding her around the neck. The poor animal’s eyes are bugging out and her tongue is hanging out but she never once scratched her. She was also the first cat that took ownership of me. I didn’t recognize it as such because it was an unfamiliar concept, despite having known McKuen’s poem for years. She would wait until I was sitting in a comfy chair or on the couch and drape herself over my shoulders, purring happily. She may have been Sara’s cat but I was her person.

Kitty had died not too long after we moved in with my in-laws while I went to grad school. My in-laws had a black, long-hair named Itsy-Bitsy whose name was shortened to Bitsy because it was easier for Sara to say as a toddler. It amused me that Bitsy seemed to be wherever I was. I still did not understand the concept of being owned by a cat. After we moved to West Virginia, we were without a cat because our landlord would not allow us to have any pets. But whenever we came home, there was Bitsy, attaching herself to me wherever I was. It was a source of never-ending wonder and surprise because I still did not picture myself as a cat person.

When we returned from WV, one of our first acquisitions was a condo and a Himalayan female that we named Kaitu (Like the Himalayan mountain, K-2… get it?). For whatever reason, she took an active dislike to Joy. She didn’t last long and she never really fit in.

There followed several less memorable cats and then came NoNuts. NoNuts was a fairly good-sized buff-colored longhair male who my mother-in-law had acquired. She never really seemed to settle on a name for him alternately calling him Buffy, Tuffy, Scruffy, Muffy or names of a similar sound. They decided to have him neutered and dropped him at the vet the day they were leaving for Florida for the winter. They told us to pick him up and keep him for the winter and they’d take him back when they came back north. As a joke, we started calling him NoNuts, for obvious reasons. By the time they returned from Florida, he only answered to that name and he would not let them anywhere near him. so NoNuts became our cat, one of the very few males we ever owned.

NoNuts was a tough guy who preferred spending time outside but he also took ownership of Joy and was devoted to her. When we moved to a new house, he went out one day and never came home. We were devastated because we had lost three other cats in a similar manner shortly before that. When we were finally able to sell our old house, the night before the closing, we did a walk-through. From the back yard I heard a cat crying. I opened the door and in walked the scrawniest, filthiest, skinniest version of NoNuts you can imagine, with one paw stuck through his flea collar. He had gone out that day and gone where he thought home was. He had lost about half of his weight and had existed by eating the small frogs around the swimming pool. About a thousand dollars in vet bills later, he had become the golden cat. But he was home with us. He stayed with us until he was over nineteen years old, apparently healthy right up to the point where he was suddenly unable to care for himself. We let him go and allowed him to be put down because it was his time. We, especially my wife still miss him.

To me, the gold standard in cats was Butter. We adopted her from the vet. She was a long-haired gray kitten. On our way home in the car, she lay like a lump in my wife’s lap. As soon as we got her into the house, she ran for the darkest corner of the kitchen and would not come out. We left her alone and put out a dish with food and water. Eventually she came out. We were unsure of what to name her but I settled on Feather. That was until she got comfortable around us. She was one of those cats who would repeatedly and strongly butt her head against your hand until you pet her. Thus, the name Butter. The week we got her, my wife had to suddenly go to Florida because her mother was hospitalized. She was gone for almost a month. In that time, Butter started sleeping next to me and attached herself to (well, took ownership of) me. She would drape herself over the computer monitor when I was sitting at the computer and would let one paw hang down in front of the screen. Sometimes, she would crawl into my lap and refuse to leave while I sat at the keyboard. She was one of the cats that went out one day and never came home. I still miss her.

We had three cats that came from one litter: Pyscho, a long-haired black, female, Tribble, a tuxedo-colored short-haired male and Trouble, an almost identical slightly smaller female. Psycho was laid-back and gentle once she grew up. She earned her name as a kitten by climbing the drapes and walking along the curtain rod and by laying on the top edge of a doorway to the half-bath off the family room. Trouble and Tribble wound up being renamed Baby Boy and Baby Girl because we kept mixing up their names. They were just sweet cats. Psycho was also unique in that she was allergic to her own cat dander and had a constantly runny nose. All three of them, at various times, went out and never came home.

After Butter disappeared, we adopted another long-haired gray female I named Suvwi, the Klingon word for “warrior.” When we got her she was a tiny kitten but she faced down my mother-in-law’s French poodle. Okay, the poodle wasn’t very large but he towered over her and she stood her ground. She quickly took ownership of me and was another who would sit in my lap while I was at the computer. I had decided, by then, that the cats were no longer going to be allowed to be outside cats. We had lost too many already.

Sara had a couple of cats that she raised as kittens, April and Trinity. She brought them with her when she moved back in with us for a while. April is a long-haired female calico tabby who is dumb. If T.S. Eliot had written about her in Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, she would be April, the cat of the Short Bus. Trinity was a gray long-haired Tabby. Sadly, she lost her tail due to a wound and something went wrong inside her and she could not eat. In mercy, we had her put to sleep. April is still with us. Her favorite thing is to pull a pair of socks out of my drawer, carry them downstairs in her mouth, then yowl as if she has had a kitten. Like I said, April’s not too bright. In fact, she’s as dumb as a dog.

A friend of Sara’s had a tiny short-haired white female with colored spots around her ears and a calico striped tail. Her name was Rascal or Cally for short. The friend’s younger child turned out to be allergic to cats so Sara brought her home to us. She was tiny, even by small cat standards and we quickly renamed her Little Bit. For the longest time, we could not figure out why Suvwi was constantly beating her up. When Suvwi disappeared, Little Bit was suddenly attached to me. Then it became clear. Suvwi had been guarding her turf and her ownership of me from Little Bit. Now that Suvwi was gone, Little Bit owned me 100%. I have never had a cat as devoted as she is to me. If she had her way, she would be touching me 24/7, 365 days a year. She literally follows me around the house when I get up to do something. If she is awake and I’m home, she is wherever I am. And she’s still tiny. And neither Little Bit nor April are allowed to go outside. At all!

I have long said I will never own another dog with the possible exception of if I was ever to need a seeing-eye dog. But I will never be without a cat. I am a cat person, lock, stock and barrel and will always be. Who knows, maybe I WAS a cat in a past life.