Harry & Peggy

Sorry to have skipped a day yesterday, Bush. It hasn’t happened more than two or three times since last November, and it was Sunday, after all, so I don’t feel too bad about the omission. I admit to having something of a superstition around the daily practice, though. As with meditation—which I also skipped yesterday—there’s a feeling of somehow breaking the chain of continuity, and with it something like a spell. It’s absurd, perhaps, but I get the feeling that there’s a breach of promise, a kind of infidelity that risks meaning that it will never be quite the same again. As in a marriage, Bush—that first infidelity. If you know what I mean. Perhaps you don’t.

Anyway, here I am, back again, to do what I can to mend the breach. And speaking of marriage, today would have been my parents’ anniversary, had they lived so long. They must have been married in the very early 1930s, by my calculation. After the great National Strike (in the late 20s—my father was a student, drove a bus to help keep the country going…) and before the worst years of the Great Depression. In the early days of their marriage, my father was a curate in the slum parish of St. Cuthbert’s, Newcastle-on-Tyne, then a coal-mining center in the very north of England. In the family album that my mother kept, there’s a picture of him sitting at the jigsaw in his carpentry workshop (his great hobby, Bush: he apprenticed as a pattern-maker before taking holy orders) with the caption: “Hungry, Desperate, for Want of Two Shillings and Sixpence a Week.” The reference was to the working families in his pastoral care, but my father is the one who looks hungry and desperate in the picture. He was always the champion of the poor and the defenseless.

My mother came from a clergy family, too. Her father, a Welshman and an Anglican minister like her husband (she always swore, as a young woman, that she’d never marry a clergyman!) also had a slum parish populated by the poorest of the poor. His, though, was in the East End of London, where my grandmother grew up. Before marrying, she was an Isaacson—one of the “non-Jewish Isaacsons,” she always insisted, even though the East End was at that time the Jewish quarter of the city, and among her family possessions was a beautiful little table inlaid with Hebrew lettering.

Anyway, had she been a Jew—as she surely wasn’t, right?—that would have made my mother Jewish, by matrilineal descent, and therefore myself, too. Quite a thought, in the week of Passover. My Anglican father reminded me, with every sign of good cheer, when I first announced my intention to marry Ellie—the daughter of a Los Angeles Jewish family—that our children would be Jewish. He knew about the tradition of matrilineal heritage.

Ah, all this family stuff. I tell you all this, Bush, so that you should understand a little more where my liberalism comes from. Being born in Newcastle makes me a Geordie, a heritage of which I’m inordinately proud, even though I spent only the first two years of my life there. In those days, in England, socialism was not a dirty word, and my father was always a proud socialist, a Labor voter, a defender of the interests of those less fortunate than himself. It was those values he passed on to me, and I guess they’re in the bloodstream, in the genes. It’s the way I live and breathe. I do try very hard to understand the values on your side of the fence, Bush, but I just don’t get it. I look at your folks, these days, and I see nothing but knee-jerk promotion of individual rights, support for the wealthiest and least needy, neglect of the health and education of the less privileged, and isolationist belligerence toward other nations. Worst of all, I see the faith to which my parents devoted their lives abused by the self-righteous, and turned into a weapon to flagellate all those who choose to disagree. My parents' Christ was the one who said the meek would inherit the earth. As I see it, your folks have reinvented a Christ to justify their arrogance.

Happy Anniversary, Harry and Peggy! And thank you for your gift of tolerance and your love of social justice. I just wish there were more of your kind around today.