For New Year’s we drove to New York to have a feast at Carol’s sister Connie’s house.  Carol’s Mom Anne was there, along with sister Lori, our cousin Matt, as well as David & Amanda and Jonny & Katie.  While eating I managed to share some stories with David about his childhood, some of which he only remembered by my endless repetition every year or so, but the later ones by direct memory.  Here are some highlights:

David was a competitor, even as a young boy.  One example of this was in T-ball, when a member of the opposing team would come up to the teed-up ball and hit it over second base into center field.  David’s team (and all other T-ball teams I have ever seen) responded to this by charging (every one of  them) into center field for the ball.  After a scrum worthy of a rugby or NFL game, a lone hand would stick out of the pile holding the ball.  This hand always belonged to David.  From behind home plate we had no idea what happened inside the scrum, we just felt a swell of pride that our son had gotten the ball, and was now loping home with it.

(Interestingly, another person with similar skill at retrieving loose balls is Jeremy…)

A few years later, when the game had advanced to coaches pitching underhand,  David made the all-star team.  This was not because he was a particularly enthusiastic or skilled player, but because of one thing:  he had watched his comrades bat and noticed that swinging for the fences usually meant striking out or topping the ball into a miserable dribbler back to the mound.  He decided to just make contact with the ball and let the chips fall where they may.  He managed to hit a ball in play about 80 percent of the time.  If it was hit to an opposing player, he or she usually dropped it and David was safe at first.  If the ball cleared the infielder’s head, the return throw usually missed its mark and David ended up safe at second.  In any case, David’s batting average was close to .800 in this manner, and on the strength of this,  he made the all-star team.

David recounts the reason he came to play left field, usually the most coveted and prestigious position on the field.  On the first day of practice, David could not locate his glove and was therefore the last player to take the field.  He had no idea where he was playing, so he asked his teammates where he should go.  “Over there” was the answer.  Left field.

Our family made plans to rent a friend’s rustic Maine house on a beautiful pond.  It was a good three-and-a-half hours from our house.  Unfortunately, the town of Waltham scheduled its all-star game for that Saturday.  After some reflection, we decided on the following plan.  The four of us would drive up together to Smithfield.  The next morning David and I would wake up very early and drive down for the game, then drive back up to Maine.  We went to sleep with a sense of excitement.

In the morning David donned his natty baseball uniform, except for sandals.  He carried his cleats separately until the last minute.  We had a quick breakfast (cereal I think), and Carol kissed us goodbye. (I think that we let Jonny sleep in.)  Then we drove the southbound trip, gabbing happily all the way.  As we approached Waltham, David put on his cleats.  We stopped at our house to use the bathroom, and then drove to the field.

There was no one at the field.  Furthermore, as we arrived, the sky, which had turned an ominous gray, began to spit large drops of rain onto our windshield.  After some hunting for a phone booth, I called the head of the program.  Yes, the game had been cancelled due to the impending storm.  David took off his cleats, and I turned the car to the north.  Three plus hours later, we were “back home” in Maine.

David tells me that the game was actually played the following week.  I have no memory of that game.  But I will never forget David’s and my adventure together driving to and from the rained-out all-star game.

My faithful followers will have noticed that I have not blogged in two and a half weeks.  The main reasons for this are 1) a miserable bout of pneumonia, and 2) getting caught up with Christmas preparations.

This was my third go-round with pneumonia, despite the fact that I have taken the “pneumovax”, the pneumonia vaccine, within the last ten years.  I have found that there is a kind of merciful amnesia that helps the memories of pain and discomforts to fade away.   The ailments that I remember are the most recent ones, namely the hacking cough that was so severe that I felt I had fractured a rib on the left side of my chest.  Even lidocaine patches and pain meds were not enough to fully control this pain.  Speaking of pain meds, one overly generous dose of cough syrup was enough to give me nausea, that sick feeling that makes one long for the pain to return…

There were joys as well.  David and Amanda and Jonny and Katie came to our house and stayed for two or three days, and brought energy and a sense of fun with them.  They especially enjoyed playing some new card games they had discovered, Sushi Go, Dixit, and Anomia.  The ones that required rapid perception and reaction left me and Carol in the dust, bemoaning the deterioration of our nervous systems with age.

There was good news on the basketball front.  Although Jeremy Lin was demoted from the starting lineup, he played well enough from the bench to help the Lakers beat two of the best teams in the NBA, the Toronto Raptors and the Golden State Warriors.  It seems that Byron Scott and the coaching staff has come to agree with my view that Kobe’s ball-hogging low-percentage shootings ways have been hurting the team, and he was furloughed for two days, one of which led to the win over the Warriors.

I am going to wrap this up here.  There seems to be more to report, but it is not flowing to my pen (wordpress) right now.  In any case, I appreciate your reading, likes, and comments.

Till next time, your blogging friend Ed.

Assuming that you read “Stories about Habeb, part one”, here are more of the same, except that these stories bring in more of us Koh children, and our life together.

POLIO

Early on, Ha (short for Habeb of course) was quite concerned with his right leg, which had been affected by the polio which had attacked his spinal cord when he was an infant. He was given a cumbersome metal brace to wear, and in order to avoid muscle contractures he was given passive stretching exercises for his calf for which he needed a helper. Our dad became the person who twice a day for over an hour systematically stretched Harold’s calf muscles. In those days Dad was a “yeller”, someone who might nowadays be called a “Tiger Dad”.  However, interspersed with Dad’s seemingly constant shouting, he had moments of ease and even euphoria, usually sitting in his big chair in the living room reading the New York Times, and yelling “Guys! I’m PROUD of you!” With Ha and his leg exercises, this nurturing side came out even more, and I think Ha grew up the stronger for it.

THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

After the operation Ha came home in a full-leg plaster cast, which I found very upsetting. Those were the days of the Cuban missile crisis, and my anxiety level was high. Every day at noon the Civil Defense siren would sound, and we schoolchildren would climb under our desks to protect ourselves from a nuclear attack.(!) Meanwhile at home, our family belongings were largely still in corrugated cardboard boxes on the bare wooden floors of our temporary home; this also gave me an unsettled feeling. I feared what would happen in case of a missile attack, and I was especially fearful that Harold, hampered by his cast, would not be able to run away fast enough from the bomb blast.  And I was not strong enough to carry him! I remember kneeling by his bedside at night praying to God to keep him safe

We lived on a little block that had a playground embedded in the middle of it. Together with the neighborhood kids, we played stickball with a broomstick and a tennis ball, and kickball with a red rubber ball “salvaged” from our elementary school. Within a few days of coming home Ha was using his cast to kick the red rubber ball further than any other kid in the neighborhood! Perhaps God was trying to comfort me…

THE COLUMBIA RECORD CLUB

When Carolyn came into our lives at the age of twelve, she learned English in about two weeks and then took charge of a family of four brothers and a sister. Despite barely reaching four foot eight, she was a tough taskmaster. However, she did want to Americanize herself as much as possible, and so she enrolled in the Columbia Record Club, where you could buy twelve records for only one penny! (As long as you bought two records a year after that for exorbitant prices.) She started off auspiciously with the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver, then branched out to Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage… and Bookends. She also got the Four Lads’ greatest hits, which included a cover of Jimmy Dean’s immortal song “Big John”. All of these were rounded out by Peter, Paul, and Mary’s In the Wind, which included the song “Stewball”.

Years later, when impromptu entertainment was needed for Carolyn and Woong Kil’s wedding reception at the South Seas Polynesian restaurant, Howie, Harold, Jeannie, Richie, and I sang “Stewball” without rehearsal of any kind (we all knew it from the record). The opening lyrics were “Oh Stewball was a racehorse and I wish he were mine, he never drank water, he only drank wine…” In order to explain why we were singing a song about a horse who drank wine, the emcee Dr. Bob LaCamera introduced it as a “good old-fashioned nonsense song, and don’t even listen to the words!” For some reason (perhaps just being children), we were mortified by this.

DEBATING

When we were in school together at Hopkins, Ha and I formed a debating team. Ha argued first negative, and I was the mop-up person, second negative. The proposal was “Resolved: that Congress should establish uniform regulations to control criminal investigation procedure.” Our very first debate was against the powerhouse Boston Latin, who came out with a gambit that we had not even heard of: the “trick case”,  in this case gun control, an argument which no right-minded person could stand against. (This was in the decade of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King…) They mopped up the floor with us.

After that inauspicious start, we regrouped and went on a tear. We formulated strategies while walking to and from school, carrying our heavy non-ergonomic bookbags over our shoulders while trying different versions of our introductory passages out on one another. (“Rocky” training music here…) Our act became finely honed. We did background research in the library (no Internet back then…) about cases like Mapp vs. Ohio and Miranda vs. Arizona, and distilled them into magical 5×7 file cards which we indexed into an intimidating gray metal file drawer, which Harold carried from debate to debate. Mr. Prentiss, our team adviser, looked on proudly as we grew into a formidable team. I developed a technique for showing point for point that the affirmative team had not met its burden of proof, which required not a shred of evidence on my part. Ha used a more conventional strategy: facts. He rebutted every fact that the first affirmative presented with an equal and countervailing fact. Better yet, he often showed that that speaker’s quotes were taken out of context by producing and reading the full quote. At the end-of-season Southern New England tournament, we beat the storied team of Bricker and Dolan from Fairlawn High. We had arrived.

At that point, though, our unbeaten streak was broken by a team made up of two girls from Brookfield High School. Ha was more than man enough to handle their first affirmative, but I was too stunned by their closer, Kate Hillenbrand to put together a cogent finishing argument. We were edged out by a point. (names altered)

Despite that loss, we still finished in the top spot overall, and even our opponents from Brookfield applauded our accomplishment. On the way home Mr. Prentiss drove through Burger King, where I got a Whopper meal and a large strawberry shake, which I consumed in three gulps. When we got home, Ha ran across the front lawn holding up our winning trophy shouting “We won! We won!” I, on the other hand, was a little overstimulated and ended up spraying my colorful shake all over that same lawn.

Now, when I hear that Ha has made an argument in front of the US Supreme Court, or the World Court at the Hague, or some other such place, I wonder if these experiences back at Hopkins had any part in shaping his debating skills. To the extent that they did, I humbly take full credit.

THE THUNDERING THIRDS

Howie and I played several junior varsity and varsity sports at Hopkins, including soccer and tennis. (I had a brief painful encounter with wrestling, which I will not go into here…) We were not standouts by any means, but we were able to stay in the middle of the pack. Ha was hampered at first by his right leg, which had much smaller calf muscles than his left. Try as he might, he just didn’t have the speed to make the JV. At that point, something great came along. Our spirited history teacher, Mr. Karl Crawford, became the coach of the Thirds, historically the leftovers after the varsity (1) and JV (2). He decided to make the Thirds into a real team, complete with team pride, cheerleaders, and a bright green tee-shirt displaying a colorful team logo . The team name: the Thundering Thirds! Thirds-mania took over Hopkins that fall, and Ha was the starting right fullback of the team. What he lacked in speed he made up in smarts and determination. To this day I can see him wading into a backfield scrum and clearing the ball high over the midfield line, using his right leg! The Thundering Thirds racked up a winning season for the first time in Hopkins history, and became the darlings of the school. And my brother again showed that there was not much that could slow him down…

HONG KONG

In the summer of 1970, following my graduation from Hopkins, Dad took me and Ha on a trip to East Asia. We flew by way of California and Hawaii into Tokyo, then to Hong Kong. At this point we were scheduled to fly Korean Airlines to Seoul, but when we arrived we were informed that we had not confirmed our reservation and were being bumped to a next-day flight. Dad was unusually accepting of this decision, but high school junior Harold was livid, and went into overdrive gathering information and ammunition. “Look” he said, pointing at the small print on the back of the ticket. “It says nothing about confirming your reservation! You just have to register once!” He looked over at the line of passengers boarding the plane. “Look, there’s a big group carrying bags with the same decal! It’s a tour group! We’re being bumped to make room for a big tour group!” He stormed back to the desk, and I saw him hitting the ticket and gesticulating toward the boarding group. He came back to us with a well-dressed man wearing a KAL suit. “I’m very sorry for the misunderstanding, sirs. We unfortunately cannot get you onto this flight, but we can make arrangements for you to stay at our flagship luxury hotel, Ricky’s Hyatt House.” And then the magic words: “It would of course be at our expense.” We looked at each other and tried not to grin too broadly. “I guess that will have to do…”

That night turned out to be the most relaxing night of our whirlwind trip. Dad had no appointments, meetings, or dinners planned, and the three of us were just “guys on the town”. We decided to go to a movie. The new American movie based on Arthur Hailey’s blockbuster “Airport” was playing in English with Chinese subtitles. The theater had plush purple seats. Harold and I were the only ones to laughed loudly at a few of the jokes, which we later realized did not translate well into Chinese. For example, there was one scene on the airplane where an annoying passenger keeps bugging the stewardess for peanuts. When the stewardess goes to the galley, she says to her colleague, “Nuts to the guy in 2B”. The other stewardess answers “You said it, sister!”

After the movie as we ambled down the street, Dad characteristically several steps ahead of us, Ha leaned over and said to me “Do you think Dad was listening to the English or reading the Chinese characters?” I responded indignantly.”Dad has been living in the United States for twenty years! Do you really think that it would be easier to read the Chinese than to listen to the English?” At the next corner we caught up to him and asked him, and he stopped to think. “You know guys, at first I was listening to English, but about halfway through I got tired! And the Chinese characters just went SHOOOP! and came right into my eyes!”

IT’S ALL ABOUT ME…

Whenever I write something like this, my wife says the same thing: “This isn’t about
(person X), it’s about YOU!” I usually take this as a terminal criticism, and abandon the project.  This has happened any number of times in the last thirty years or so. (This is known in some circles as “chronic writer’s block…) Well, the truth is, it is about me. But it is also about my brother Harold, for in some ways we are inseparable. When we were kids he strived to measure up to me, and as adults I often measure my accomplishments by his. But, most importantly, we have grown from being older and younger brother to being colleagues, confidantes, and friends.  He was my best man in 1985, and in important ways he is my best man still.  Happy birthday, Habeb!  And many, many more…

When Michael Brown’s death came to light in the media, I did not want to write about it.  I was very upset about the Trayvon Martin case, and wrote several posts on Facebook, which received a light smattering of responses.  But when Eric Garner died in such a similar circumstance, and both of the cases have been thrown out by grand juries, I feel that I must speak up.

The cases of  Brown and Garner (or non-cases, as it turns out) are tragic replays of the Trayvon Martin case, with one big difference:  in these two cases, grand juries have decided that the policemen responsible for ending these young men’s lives did not even need to stand trial.  In effect, the grand juries have held the trials already, and acquitted the responsible (or irresponsible) parties.

Some disturbing facts about Brown’s death: 1) Brown was unarmed.  2) Officer Darren Wilson’s excuse for not using a tazer was that the department only owned one of them, and he did not feel comfortable using it.  He offered no excuse for not using a billy club.  3) Wilson killed Brown with twelve bullets.  It seems clear that Wilson was both poorly trained and terrified.  He said that he was intimidated by Brown’s size.  Brown was six foot five, and Wilson six foot four.  Even if  Brown was charging Wilson (the only  one to do it, as it turned out), he surely could have been immobilized by fewer than twelve bullets, in non-lethal places.

Garner’s death is in some ways more bizarre.  Again there is evidence of poor training.  Instead of compressing the victim’s carotid arteries, which would have led to a loss of consciousness and presumably ended the encounter in a non-lethal way, Officer Daniel Pantaleo compressed Garner’s trachea, leading to airway obstruction, hypoxia, and death.

Both deaths were unintentional and unpremeditated.  Does the term “manslaughter” come to mind?  For some ungodly reason the grand jurors did not want that possibility to ever reach the floor of a courtroom.

Q:  Are black males an endangered species?

A:  No, because endangered species are protected by the law.

Let’s see if the grand jury in the case of 12 year-old Tamir Rice will do any better…

Thanks for reading.

Today my younger brother Harold turned sixty years old!  In honor of that event, our nuclear family, their spouses, and one brave member of the younger generation (Stevie Koh) converged on Harold and Christy’s house in New Haven for a Korean dinner prepared (mostly) by my sister Jeannie.  We were asked to think up humorous stories about Ha.  I was the only one to take this task seriously.  Here are three that I presented yesterday, to a rousing response.

THE “RE-NAMER”

One of Ha’s most important contributions to our family was that he was the “re-namer.”  Thus, we went from the relatively normal names of Howard, Edward, and Harold to the ridiculous names of Howboob, Hebron, and Habeb.  Actually, I was the first to get my new name.  We were all watching an episode of the Twilight Zone where (unusually) they played a foreign adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”  Toward the end of the film, a delirious man stumbles down a dirt road calling “Hebby, Hebby!”, presumably a reference to his wife.  Well we all started saying “Hebby, Hebby!” to each other, and then the eight year-old Ha somehow made the connection to “Eddie” and I became “Hebby”.  The finishing touch came at Camp Winni, where Reverend Avery Manchester made a statement in one of his handouts that Jesus of Nazareth might just as well have been Herman from Hebronville.  Thus, “Hebron” was born. (It wasn’t too much of a jump to come up with “Howboob” and “Habeb.”)

If you think this was convoluted, let me tell you what he did with “Jeannie”.  At the time we lived next to a four year-old boy who was quite clingy.  Whenever he saw her, he would call “Jeannie, c’mere!” until it started to drive her nuts.  Ha came to the rescue by altering Jeannie’s name so that the kid could not pronounce it.  So he told him that Jeannie’s real name was “Jean-a-roonie”.  Unfortunately the kid learned to say Jeanaroonie quite easily.  So Ha lengthened it even farther to “Jeanaroonie-barrel a nika!” and told the kid that if he wanted Jeannie to come over he would have to say “Jeanarooniebarrelanika c’mere!”  That was too much for the kid, and he gave up and went inside.

Actually, we didn’t call Jeannie by any of these names.  We used another Habeb concoction and called her simply “Beanhead.”  In a similar way, Carolyn became “Canonun” and Richard “Dichab”.

WRONG LEG!

As an infant Harold was afflicted with polio which made his right leg shorter than his left and gave him a limp.  At the age of ten Harold underwent an operation to staple the growth plate in his good leg, to allow his right leg to “catch up”.  The morning of his surgery, his nurse gave him the “premedication”, a sedative cocktail of demerol and scopolamine given routinely as a shot about an hour before the operation.   As Ha was getting woozy, an orderly came in with a shaving kit, looked at Ha’s two legs, and began lathering up and shaving the smaller right leg.  In a growing haze, Ha said “Wrong leg!”  The orderly stopped and said “What?”  “Look at the chart!  You’re shaving the wrong leg!”  And then he drifted off into a narcotic sleep.  Even at the age of ten, Ha was able to protect himself from the vagaries of the adult world.

MUNIENTOS

Despite being high achievers, the three of us were procrastinators.  We managed to keep up with our numerous daily assignments, but always kept “English themes” and term papers till the very last minute.  In the meantime, we became addicted to Marvel Comics, which we cleverly hid in the top drawers of our desks so we could simply lean back in our chairs and read them, and come to an upright position when we heard Dad coming up the stairs.

When the deadlines inevitably came, we had a clever solution: munientos (another Habeb- inspired term).  Typically, the three of us would stay up well into the night.  After about an hour and a half, Mom, who was always up very late, would come up the stairs with a tray of tea and cookies, and we would take a twenty-minute break with her.  After she left, we would work for another half-hour or so, and then one of us (usually Ha) would get very sleepy, and say to the others “Hey, can you give me five munientos?” (a pseudo-Hispanization of “minutes”) We would let him sleep for about ten minutes, after which he would say groggily “Can you just give me five more munientos?”  We would oblige, after which we would be quite sleepy ourselves. “Ha, why don’t you give us fifteen munientos?”  We would go to sleep, and after about five minutes Ha would fall asleep too, and we would all sleep until we were awakened by the rays of the morning sun.  In a total panic, we would finish our papers in about ten minutes, dress, and race off to school. With few exceptions, we got A’s on these papers, mainly because of the “teacher psych” strategy, meaning that we would produce excellent papers at the beginning of the year, then slack off imperceptibly as the year went on.  Using these ingenious methods we grew the legend of the “Koh dynasty”.

THERE ARE MORE STORIES…

which at some point I will get around to writing here.  In the meantime, let us  join in saying “Happy Birthday, Habeb!!”

…Seasonal Affective Disorder, that is.  The sun is rising at 7:00 and setting at 4:00, a measly nine hours of sunlight, much of which has been marred by cloudy, rainy, and snowy weather.  Eighteen more days of this…I got the “get me to my solstice blues.”

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Jeremy update:  The Lakers are getting it together (“it” meaning defense and team offense) and last night won their fifth game (against twelve losses).  Last week they had a particularly good win over the Toronto Raptors, the number one team in the East.  They also lost squeakers to the strong Memphis Grizzlies and Minnesota Timberwolves.

Jeremy’s numbers aren’t always spectacular, but he did rack up a double double the week before last.  More importantly, every game he makes several exceptional plays that make people sit up and take notice.  He has won over the formerly critical announcers, who now seem to enjoy saying his euphonious name (“Jer-e-my LIN!”)  He still passes the ball too much to Kobe, but nowadays Kobe is actually passing it back to him, often for a three-point attempt.  He is second on the club only to Kobe in three-point shooting, and the coaches are trying to cultivate this side of his game.

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We had a new bed delivered yesterday.  We are bequeathing our old Tempurpedic queen to the kids as kind of a “guest room” bed, and bought ourselves a new one.  Yesterday it was “frozen” having been in the truck all day, but some room and body temperature got it going.  Unfortunately the lounge-style (hospital-style) foundation did not fit up our old-fashioned winding staircase, so we had to trade it in for a split boxspring set.  The price of living in a hundred year-old house…

Thanks for reading, friends.

Last year on the day after Thanksgiving,  David’s father-in-law Larry took us all slot car racing, i.e. racing miniature electric cars on a curvy track.  We had a lot of fun.
This year on the docket was go-kart racing, i.e. racing full-sized race cars around a curvy track.  Larry and David had done this before.

Our first challenge was understanding the young attendant, who gave a breezy and semi-inaudible description of the procedure and the risks.  I asked him several times to repeat himself, because half of the time his remarks were aimed completely away from us.  The next challenge was getting fitted for helmets.  First the attendant handed out yellow head liners which covered all but our eyes.  I told him that I had a very large head and he pointed me toward the black helmets which are extra large.  They were too small for my head.  “Hang on a sec”, he said and got another black helmet.  That one fit, just barely.

Next, I climbed, with help, into the snug race car.  Then the attendant helped me to fasten the chin strap and told me to lower the visor.  The visor lowered with a click, and, satisfied, he walked away.

I got the panicky feeling that the visor was locked shut, but with some prying was able to open it.  I closed it again.  I reviewed my situation.  Here I was, sitting in a strange vehicle.  My head was effectively encased in a black helmet.  My nose and mouth were covered with a cloth liner.  A plastic visor was covering my face.  The race would be fourteen laps long, so once it started there would be no bailing out.  I felt a crescendo of claustrophobia.  I pried the visor open again and called out to the attendant. “I’m not doing this!”

“What?”

“I’m not doing this!  Get me out of here!”

I ripped off the helmet and liner and threw them to the attendant.

I had an odd sense of pride as I returned to my wife and friends.  This was dampened when I saw that Larry had pulled his liner down below his nose so that he could breathe better.  Maybe I should have thought of that.

We watched as Larry, David, and Jonny raced two races.  Larry and David drove easily and quickly.  Jonny drove cautiously at first, and then got the hang of it.

I felt the inevitable feeling of shame after the pride wore off.  I did not envy the racing experience.  After all, driving a car 80 mph on the highway must be as much of an adrenaline rush, I rationalized.  I did recall the time I got claustrophobic while getting an MRI done of my head.  (For you doubters, it showed that the contents of my skull were normal!)  The incident did seem to reveal some mental weakness on my part.  On the other hand, the pride came from the feeling that I did not have to do this, that I had nothing to prove. I found that last thought more comforting.

So another adventure from my adventure-filled life…

Thanks for reading.

Yesterday we went to see Birdman by Alejandro Inarritu, starring Michael Keaton and Ed Norton.  The movie came highly rated (IMDb 8.8, metascore 89) and was creative, funny, and original.  Nonetheless, I came away wanting more.

The movie is about a washed-up movie actor whose claim to fame was a stint as a superhero called Birdman.  He is now launching a new Broadway play, a psychological story about the interplay between two couples, and the production is beset with infighting and emotional dramas.  One gets the feeling that this is an accurate depiction of life in the theatre, which makes the movie appealing.  The story goes through several unexpected twists, which I will not reveal here.  The ending is enigmatic and provocative of thought, though not too much.

Michael Keaton is one of my favorite actors, Gung Ho (1986) being my favorite performance of his.  He is accessible as a “regular guy” who gets put into ridiculous, often humiliating situations and must somehow come through them with some shred of dignity intact.  The movie starts with him aged and with thin scraggly hair, going into his dressing room and taking off a wig which reveals even thinner, more scraggly hair.  I thought this was a hilarious depiction of someone fending off the aging process.

The rest of the cast performed admirably as well.  Ed Norton as the egotistical jerk Broadway star, Emma Stone as Keaton’s rebellious daughter, Zach Galifianakis as his producer and lawyer.  All of their characters were cleanly and humorously portrayed.

My problem with this movie is that I saw no message.  Themes like the chaos of the show business world, dealing with aging, and the ridiculous egotism which comes with fame are explored skillfully and with a light touch, but when the final surprises are unfolded there is a “so what” feeling.  All of the show’s assets do not add up to a revelation, a lesson, or a moral.

Of course, not all stories are required to have a moral.  But somehow, this one seems to promise one, and then not deliver it.

It’s worth seeing.  Perhaps it suffered from its high marks.  I would give it a 6.5.

…and it was scary.  But 1) in the fifties and early sixties everyone’s dad punished them, and 2) in retrospect the punishment, although physical, was almost laughably mild.

Before I continue to rationalize, let me state that my dad hit us.  (I was going to make this the title of this post, but found it too damning.)  His typical punishment was a milder form of one used by the Japanese who occupied Korea during his teenage years.  He would line us up side by side and make us stretch our arms out and leave them there.  As we tired and let our arms droop, he would swat our legs and yell at us to hold them up again.  Sometimes he would pull up our pant legs before swatting us, acting like he was incensed, and this we found especially scary.  But, with forty-five years of retrospect, I realize that his punishment did not hurt (except for the lactic acid which built up in our arm muscles).

One of my siblings has bitter feelings about what he calls “abuse” at the hands of our dad.  I do not fully share in his feelings.  But to be fair to him, his fear at being punished was not shared, but endured by him alone.  Another one of my siblings tried using the lactic acid punishment on his own kids until his outraged wife stopped him.  To my knowledge he did not beat his kids.

My own feeling is that one should not hit his kids, unless he wants to teach his kids to hit others.  If the lesson is that “might makes right”, a parent can expect to be hit by his own kids when they become bigger and stronger than him, which often happens in their teenage years.  Many people will admit to “spanking” their kids, as if spanking is not hitting.  But it is, given that it is an assertion of control by the stronger party over the weaker one.  Have you ever seen the look on a child’s face when they have just been hit?  His face is screwed up in a turbulent mix of fear, humiliation, and hatred.  It is not a pretty sight, but it is one that you have created.

What about my well-meaning but “abusive” dad?  I don’t wish to judge a man in the 1960s who was brought up the object of corporal punishment, trying to control a household of six children while under professional and career pressures.  It was fashionable to have large families back then, and many parents did not know how to handle their kids.  It is not an easy task, especially when you are outnumbered.

But here in the year 2014, I feel that parents should have a clear idea of what kind of person they would like their child to become, and model that for him as well as they can.  If that includes using force to control others, then you can expect to take the credit, and responsibility, for the adults they become.

…to criticism of any kind, from any source?  At work two days ago I made a mistake in my paperwork and was roundly criticized for it.  On top of the criticism was heaped more criticism for an unrelated subject.  I felt kicked while I was down.
Well there are many persons who could shake off an incident like this in a short time,  but I am not one of them.

To return briefly to basketball, this is one reason I relate to Jeremy.  I have noticed that for a jump shooter to make his basket he must have a certain threshold amount of immediate self esteem.  When Jeremy feels that he  is not valued by his coaches,  he tends to miss.

The same is true of me.  I feel that I have some modicum of long-term self esteem, but when I am  criticized I suffer a momentary (two-day long) loss.  To this I would add seeing the relative success of my friends and loved ones.  I have to somehow remind myself that what I achieve is significant too.

For me, my anesthesia cases are my jump shots, although I can give good anesthesia even when I am feeling shaky in my self-esteem.  This has been the product of a lot of work and experience, and two-day (or more) periods of mulling over my mistakes.  So maybe my sensitivity is adaptive in one way, in my learning from my mistakes. (Can I apply this to my daily life as well as my life as a clinician?)  Yesterday I was able to give my patients attentive, excellent care (one was a retired nurse).  A nurse friend at work consoled me while I was licking my ego wounds, saying, “Oh come on Ed, you’re a great doctor.”

So maybe fishing for compliments isn’t so bad either.