Brief Encounters Read online

  What other churches might be objectionable because of the horrific acts of some of its members? Maybe we shouldn’t have Christian churches in the South wherever the Ku Klux Klan operated because years ago self-proclaimed white Christians lynched blacks. How close to Hickam Field, at Pearl Harbor, should a Shinto shrine be allowed? I wonder how many of our young people—notorious, we are told, for their ignorance of American history—would be surprised that Japanese Americans had lives and livelihoods destroyed when they were rounded up during World War II? Should all World War II service memorials, therefore, be moved away from the sites of these internment camps?

  Where does one draw the line?

  I just can’t believe that so many are willing to ignore the simple fact that nearly all Muslims were adamantly opposed to the actions and events that took place on 9/11 and denounced them strongly, saying that the Islamic religion in no way condones it.

  Our goal in at least one of our Middle East wars is to rebuild a government in our own image—with democracy for all. Instead, we are rebuilding ourselves in the image of those who detest us. I hate to see my country—and it’s a hell of a good one—endorse what we purport to hate, besmirching what distinguishes us from countries where persecution rules.

  I’ve tried real hard to understand the objectors’ position. No one is untouched by what happened on 9/11. I don’t claim to be capable of imagining the anguish, grief, and anger of the people who lost their friends and loved ones that day. It really does the heart good to see that so many of them have denounced the outcry against the project. A fact too little reported.

  And it seems to have escaped wide notice that a goodly number of Muslims died at the towers that day. (I don’t mean the crazies in the planes.) What are their families to think of being told to beat it?

  “Insulting to the dead” is a favorite phrase thrown about by opponents of the center. How about the insult to the dead American soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima and Normandy, defending American citizens abiding by the law on their own private property and exercising their freedom of religion?

  Too bad that legions oppose this. A woman tells the news guy on the street, “I have absolutely no prejudice against the Muslim people. My cousin is married to one. I just don’t see why they have to be here.” A man complains that his opposition to the mosque is “painting me like I hate the whole Arab world.” (Perhaps he dislikes them all as individuals?)

  I remain amazed and really, sincerely, want to understand this. What can it be that is faulty in so many people’s thought processes, their ethics, their education, their experience of life, their understanding of their country, their what-have-you, that blinds them to the fact that you can’t simultaneously maintain that you have nothing against members of any religion but are willing to penalize members of this one? Can you help me with this?

  Set aside for the moment that we are handing such a lethal propaganda grenade to our detractors around the world.

  You can’t eat this particular cake and have it, too. The true calamity, of course, is that behavior of this kind allows the enemy to win.

  AUGUST 20, 2010

  Dear Fellow Improbable …

  It didn’t sound like my cup of tea. In fact, it sounded like some kind of boring “think tank” thing, and I declined their nice invite.

  It was Teller—of Penn &—who told me that declining was a mistake. (Yes, Teller can talk, and so could Harpo.) Teller is a brilliant man—for starters, a former Latin teacher. And what I had missed was an annual conclave of brilliant people of all varieties.

  The next time, I accepted.

  It’s called EG (the Entertainment Gathering) and it consists of several days of one delightful talk, event, or astonishing demonstration after another. Hardly a day has passed in all these months afterward that I haven’t thought about something that happened there.

  It is held annually in Monterey, California, and dear Teller shot me an e-mailed tip just before I left: “Stay up late. That’s when good stuff happens.” This meant that after the planned events, you could find yourself in a pub hoisting an ale and chatting with a convivial circle including, say, the world’s greatest clarinetist, an entertaining astrophysicist, a great magician, the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, a dazzling computer artist, a juggling Karamazov Brother, a genius inventor, a most attractive woman (by trade, an astronaut), a compelling historian, and on and on; all apparently chosen for their extraordinary personalities. It seemed there was always at least one Nobel, Pulitzer, or Oscar winner in the group.

  One particular speaker stands out. Not only for his genial presence but for the astounding subject matter of his talk.

  But first, come back in time with me now and join me in my bathtub in Nebraska.

  I’m soaping, soaking, and contemplating a film I’d just seen.

  It was always fun when the teacher—in this case I must have been in about eighth grade—announced that we were “going to the movie room.” Fun, even though what we usually saw would be one of those sleep-inducing ERPI classroom films with unpromising titles like The Life of John Peter Zenger or Wheat Production in the Ukraine or The Romance of Anthracite Coal.

  But this one made everyone sit up. It was about sex. Most of us—with the suspected exception of Carolyn H.—were familiar only with the word.

  There was to be no giggling.

  I doubt that anyone blinked even once as we witnessed what unfolded on the screen, accompanied by the clunking of the aging 16mm projector. A few parents protested later, but most, and I suspect all, were surely relieved at being spared the chore of explaining, with weight-shifting discomfort, the facts of you-know-what.

  It is all as vivid to me now as if it were yesterday. Make that today.

  There was The Egg—a black ball in the center of the screen. Around it swam frantic little tadpole-like wiggly things competing to get inside. Until one did.

  I doubt that any of us had heard until that instant the word “spermatozoon.”

  That night, in the tub, the thought hit me: “Are the little wigglers all the same? Would each one of them have resulted in me?”

  I got up the courage to ask our doctor. I’ve never been good at admitting ignorance and probably began with “Guess what a friend of mine doesn’t know the answer to?” By this subtle ruse, I got the unexpected answer. It floored me. And still does.

  Back to Monterey. A genial, humorous, and brilliant geologist, and the kind of professor too few ever experience, is onstage. His name: Walter Alvarez, of the University of California, Berkeley. He and his Nobel-prized father, the late physicist Luis Alvarez, gave the world the “impact theory” that explained the demise of the dinosaurs.

  Near the end of his talk, he refers to you and me as belonging to a species called “astronomically improbables.”

  Hasn’t almost everyone, sooner or later, hit upon the realization that because you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on into near-infinity, you are related to practically everyone on earth?

  Here, for now, are just a few of Alvarez’s astonishers regarding this, which made everyone gasp.

  (Fundamentalists may wish, at this point, to switch to some other reading material to avoid distress.)

  He pointed out that each of us has millions of ancestors and that, at conception, your sex is determined randomly. If any single one of that galaxy of ancestors had chanced to have a different sex, you would not be here to read this. (Presumably, someone else would. Unless of course one of my millions of ancestors met with a mishap.)

  Keep that word “galaxy” in mind.

  Just how many of your forebears were there that the wrong-gender accident could have happened to, thereby snuffing any chance of your existence? Brace yourself.

  Alvarez led us gently to the wowing fact: An imaginary spaceship travels through our galaxy. Each of the millions of heavenly bodies in our galaxy represents one ancestor. But it gets better. (Or worse.)

  The ship leav
es our galaxy and journeys through the next. And the next.

  And

  Even typing this next bit makes me glad I’m sitting down. Not only does each planet, star, Milky Way, and what-have-you in every galaxy represent numerically a member of your family tree, so does each atom in all those galaxies. Every one representing a chance for each of us not to exist.

  Had any one of those parents died before maturing, or been sterile, or not met the wife by chance in handing her a dropped glove, or shared a woolly mammoth bone with her on a date leading to bed, or been carried off in the plague or killed by some forerunner of a New York bicycle rider on the sidewalk … the mind boggles. (Not to mention the near-infinite number of people who might have been born down through the end of time but weren’t—because your particular chain went on unbroken.)

  Can any mind this side of Einstein’s accommodate this thought?

  How many ancestors, going back millions and millions of years—each of whose specific wiggly was in each case the only one among millions that got through to make you … how many of those ancestors are there?

  Help me, math guys and gals. What’s the answer? What to the tenth power?

  There’s more good stuff on this.

  But for now, I have to lie down.

  SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

  Further Improbables

  What good, smart reading your comments are on my column about how unlikely our existence is.

  And all this having come about because of an enlightened Irving Junior High School (Lincoln, Nebraska) teacher’s decision to risk her job by showing us in eighth grade a facts-of-life movie—instead of playing it safe with the Bible Belt parents by treating us to one of those less-than-stirring ERPI classroom films like Hans and Helga Herd Their Sheep. (How we giggled at “ERPI.”)

  The might-have and the might-not-have-beens in all this can flood your mind.

  In thinking that you and I are one of Walter Alvarez’s “astronomically improbables,” it’s only a small mental step to realizing who else, specifically, had to be, too.

  Inevitably, Adolf Schicklgruber leaps to mind. (In fact, it was only his grandmother’s name.) Had any one of millions of other egg-sperm combinations chanced to happen, a Hitler-free world would be, to put it mildly, a different place. (How dark a mind-set would you have to be burdened with to think Yeah, and we could have gotten someone even worse?)

  Other names begin to crowd the head, in no particular order. Roosevelt. And Churchill. Tojo and Patton. Submit your own favorites to be grateful—or ungrateful—for.

  Think of the world with or without (I’ll type as they pop into my head): Jonas Salk, Orson Welles, Genghis Khan, Lincoln, Julia Ward Howe and her “Battle Hymn,” Groucho Marx, Saint Joan, Mark Twain, Frank Sinatra, Edith Wharton, the Mills Brothers, Mozart, Michelangelo, Brando, Jackie Robinson, Albert Einstein, Louis Armstrong, Laurel and Hardy, Stewart and Colbert, Garbo, John Lennon, R. M. Nixon, Bobby Fischer, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Picasso, Joe McCarthy, John Wayne, Charles Manson, Charles Dickens, Mohammed, Muhammad Ali, Plato, Edward Albee, Liz and / or Dick, Christopher Columbus.

  Sarah Palin and Curly of the Three Stooges.

  Not to mention the fathers of the atom bomb. (Were there mothers?) What if the atom were as yet unsplit? Think of it.

  What if all of them had been canceled out by our random selection? What might a whole other comparable set have been?

  Whoops. Can’t help noticing I haven’t put in that lad with no college education who nonetheless made his mark. The talented one from Stratford-upon-Avon.

  And good heavens, so to speak: What of Jesus?

  I can’t help wondering how, if there were a magazine called The Creationist’s Monthly, this astounding subject would be treated. My brilliant Old Testament teacher at Yale, the esteemed B. Davie Napier, said that Genesis can be read as a poetic expression by its author of God’s creation of the world as akin to the potter’s (loving) creation of his vase. A view that gets around the awkwardness of the seven days problem and the carbon dating—and those pesky fossils.

  One commenter confessed to being knocked over by the incalculable odds against his existence but able to come to terms with the theological implications by deciding that it was God who chose his particular bit of sperm over the millions available. (A touch of ego here?)

  Somewhere in the year after having seen the ERPI film, a troubling thought hit me: my conception took a single instant.

  When you’re a kid, your world is upended on that memorable day when you learn of That Thing Called Sex (possibly Cole Porter’s original song title for the more socially acceptable “What Is This Thing Called Love”?) and then you’re jolted by the thought, “Could this mean this thing was done by—oh my God!—Mummy and Daddy? In bed?” (Let alone the preposterous thought of Grandma and Grandpa breathing hard.)

  Then comes the whopping, forehead-smacking thought, which in my case was: “Does this mean that when Mom and Dad were, er, um, in the act of sexual congress…” (I doubt that I put it that way. As an adult, I much prefer the British “at it like knives.” Let me start a new sentence.) What if, during the act that gave the world me—and you—the phone had rung in the middle of everything? Resumption on the parents’ part later would have resulted in—not me, or you, but “not-me” and “not-you.”

  (I was thirteen and in the bathtub again—where thoughts seem to hit—when this one did; I recall that, for whatever reason, it made my legs involuntarily jump, causing a terrific splash. Can someone explain?)

  Resumption on the parents’ part would have meant an entirely different configuration of those eager little wigglers assaulting Mom’s egg. Who, I wondered, would be in this tub now? Followed by the unsettling thought, “It might even be a girl.”

  Troubling thoughts swarmed. My best friend, Mary, could have been somebody else. And my favorite uncle, Paul. And Hopalong Cassidy. And the old sod who fondled my naughty bits in the movie theater. Every single person in my life could have been somebody else. Including, happily, Mrs. G., my sixth-grade teacher …

  Now hear this lovely tale from Walter Alvarez’s talk on this subject at the EG conference I mentioned last time. It bears the unfortunate trait of being true.

  A man and his fiancée boarded a plane from New York to California. They had two tickets (of course) but only one was first class. The fellow, perhaps feeling he couldn’t afford to be seen in coach with lesser folk, assumed the first-class seat. His mate-to-be sat in coach.

  This random world had placed next to her a man. Midway through the flight, her fiancé came back from first class to check on her and found her, and the man, laughing merrily. And cozily.

  Can you guess the rest?

  I wonder if she chose the moment of claiming their luggage to inform her until-that-moment fiancé that he would be spared the expense of a wedding ring. She had found her man.

  In light of what we’ve been talking about, think what the one fellow’s selfish act did to the possible children of his that might have issued, had he sprung for another first-class ticket. Or merely been a gentleman. And those probable children of the woman and her attractive seatmate.

  And the broken chain of ancestry in the one case, and the probable new chain of descendants down through the ages.

  Might the “new” chain produce a cancer curer? Or might the other have?

  Whew!

  SEPTEMBER 24, 2010

  The Titan and the Pfc.

  Eddie Fisher dead at eighty-two.

  I was not much of a fan of Eddie Fisher’s and his death didn’t mean much to me, but he’d been on my mind thanks to the remarkably hard-to-put-down (in the physical sense) new book about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Furious Love, by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. And the punishing role Eddie played in their lives.

  Something about his death rang a faint bell. But about what? I needed a memory hearing aid to detect the distant tone. Had I had him on a show and forgotten? (Anyone who’s done five ninety-minute
shows a week for even one year can tell you that that can happen. As when you bump into a celebrity and say, “I’m sorry we never did a show together”—and his face falls, and … it’s too awful to think about.)

  Then, suddenly, with nothing apparent triggering it, the answer appeared. The name George S. Kaufman glimpsed in a bookstore window did it.

  It was one of my favorite early-days-of-television memories and I had written about it once in an introduction to a book called By George, a collection of the great playwright, director, and Algonquin wit’s writings and sayings. I can’t find the book and I can’t forget the story.

  Groucho always referred to Kaufman as “my personal god.”

  In the years I was lucky enough to know Groucho, there was one trait of the elderly that I, at least, never experienced in him. The one where you have to pretend to be hearing an oft-told joke or story for the first—rather than the seventh or eighth—time.

  With one exception. Kaufman had known and written for the Brothers Marx—the original Fab Four (then three)—and Groucho worshipped him.

  It went: “Did I ever tell you the greatest compliment I ever got?”

  I said no the first time and also the four or five times thereafter over the years. I can hear Groucho’s familiar soft voice in my mind’s ear: “The greatest compliment I ever got was from George S. Kaufman.” I expected a joke.

  “George said to me once, ‘Groucho, you’re the only actor I’d ever allow to ad-lib in something I wrote.’ And that’s the greatest compliment I ever got.” (Each time, he teared slightly.)

  I loved hearing this treasured story repeated. It was no trouble pretending to hear it for the first time.

  And now to our story.

  Kaufman was one of three panelists on a live black-and-white TV show called This Is Show Business. A performer would come on, tell the panel a problem of his, perform, and then return to sit before the panel. Each panelist would then comment on the person’s “problem.” (There is a tantalizing glimpse of the great man on this show, on YouTube.)