ADAM’S LIGHTNING
I am so proud of my offspring, and Joanne’s. They all grew with quirks and jerks to be remarkable people. What stories I can tell!
Lightning surrounded us more than once, sometimes hitting hard and hurtful, more often close but harmless or merely unsettling. The first, just after Fran gave birth to Stephanie, was a deadly thunderbolt which shook the heart out of us. You might say, Stephanie was born under a cloud. On the other hand Adam’s lightning skimmed harmlessly off his skin as he ambled through his teens and early twenties trying our endurance but always Adam himself escaping unharmed. Jed, nose to the grindstone, manufactured his own lightening, mostly frightening us for his life as he repeatedly tested his uncanny physical skills before settling down with a determination unknown to many to a life of unabated accomplishment. Joanne must tell of Liz and Jon.
And before recounting one of Adam’s notable strokes in my midyear era, let me talk about Stephanie a bit. It was, after all, through her magnetic charm that I came to parent Adam and Jed.
Although Stephanie’s birth to Fran and me on October 26, 1954 at Polyclinic Hospital in New York City was unremarkable, it was nevertheless not a propitious beginning. A few days after her arrival she encountered her first tribulation. Though she was hardly equipped to appreciate what was happening. Most babies are enveloped soon after birth in the warm arms of their parents and gushing relatives, sense touchy-feely love, hopefully taste a mother’s breast. Instead, for an entire month Stephanie was held captive in Polyclinic’s baby ward as her mother Fran struggled with a newly discovered cancer.
After a month-long recovery from an emergency operation, we finally brought Stephanie to her first real home, our 228th street seventh floor project apartment overlooking the clickety-clack elevated train running along Broadway, where Fran waxed and waned in and out of hospitals. Until twelve months later she died.
I cried and got on with life.
Grandmothers and nannies, and especially Fran’s warm hearted brother Wally helped me guide Steph through her second year.
Then through a stroke of good luck Connie came into our lives. This was a time for Stephanie to exert that magnetism. (And I, thus, came to parent Adam and Jed.)
Immediately charmed by Stephanie, Connie came to adore her during weekend walks and dizzying merry-go-round rides in Central park, and story book nights, and as they bonded Connie probably took a liking to me, reciprocating my new found love for her. Just after Steph reached her fourth birthday Jerome Nathanson of the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West and 64th Street officiated at our marriage. Connie adopted Stephanie and became her mother for all time.
Credit this beginning with forming Stephanie into an self-actualized activist living a roller-coast existence. We can’t call her a quiet person, quite the opposite, her presence is always palpable. But she is also a very private individual selective about what others may know, and only with her permission will I seek in the future to record some of those ups and downs. For the moment It’s sufficient to say she has repeatedly devoted herself to licking away wounds of the downtrodden and, at the same time, to successfully beating away one personal challenge after another in her own life. Today she is our family’s royalty. If anyone has conquered lightning it is Stephanie.
Adam and Jed, sons to Connie (now Majida) and me, were born successively September 28, 1961 and December 3, 1962. When Connie and I propelled them into existence we lived, the five of us, on Riverside Drive and 90th Street. Connie had quit her account executive position to nurture the three energetic youngsters, and continued to limit herself to volunteer activities for the next several years.
Middle class parents today seem totally engrossed in every minute of their children’s lives, though not so much about strict bedtimes. Back in stone age we tended to leave them more to their own devices as long as they adhered to rules about meals, chores, personal care, and the time for bed. It was easier to control for technology when all that was needed was to limit the hours in front of the TV and parents didn’t need to contend with the lure of smartphones and iPads and the internet. By design none of our children were encouraged or discouraged from observing a religion. We wanted them to develop their own values by experiencing how our beliefs and behavior structured their lives and ours. Perhaps peers also played a role. Perhaps the entertainment world. Maybe school.
Jump past the twenty three eventful years since Connie and I married. We had built a home near Princeton, New Jersey. Connie was now Director of the State’s Housing Finance Agency. Adam was living at home, working nearby. The others were off the nest, Stephanie, Simon and Schuster’s first woman salesperson, selling books in Michigan, Jed working day and night at Cornell’s School of Architecture.
I can’t say we reveled in Adam’s way of life. Nor he ours. He did not like our materialistic world, and from time, when we managed to lasso him into a conversation about the future, he would sympathetically explain that when he came of age he would live happily on some mountain, fishing, living off the land. He had disliked school. And schools did not like him. He had been invited to leave three secondary schools over the period of three years.
It was then, in 1981, that Adam and we were overtaken by his latest lightning stroke. I had lost my job. Whether the kids even noticed this I cannot say. Someday I’ll ask them. Adam was slaving away as a laborer in a nearby mattress factory. His non- working hours were devoted to drums, friends, and most likely pot. My position as Group Head and President of several subsidiaries of Macmillan, Inc. had been vaporized when the acquiring organization decided to divest itself, piecemeal, of my entire group. But that’s another story. What’s pertinent here is that I had a nice new company car which the corporation didn’t need. I was offered its purchase at a nice price. Thus I was left with something from my job that I could still touch, something immediately tangible beyond the severance pay check and pension which would kick in someday in the future.
A week after registering the car in my name Adam asked to borrow it for an evening out and we agreed. One of his lightning bolts struck. He came home without the vehicle to tell us it was no longer whole. Recently I asked him to recall what happened. Here are my questions and his responses:
• Me: What was the accident, What collided with what? Or who with who? Or did you run into something, or just skid off the road? If I’m right you were on route 27. Adam: Yep 27. It was an icy road with fresh snow on the fields. There was a friend in the car, although I’m not sure who. I was fiddling with the radio when I looked up to see a sedan turning left into the garden apartments just north of Kendall Park. I braked but it was too icy and I slid into her rear.
• Me: Were you hurt? If so, what injuries? Adam: Nobody was hurt, the other driver assured me, but after the police arrived she began to say that her neck hurt. I doubted it, but never heard anything about it. I think My arms were sore from bracing against the impact but that’s all.
• Me: How severe the damage? Adam: Your car was totaled. The entire front end was smashed in. Hers was drivable but I don’t know the extent.
Me: Were we outraged, sympathetic, what? Adam: You were pissed, but I think the relief that I wasn’t hurt far overshadowed any anger. You didn’t seem to dwell on it or punish me. I was relieved to be alive, and ashamed that I’d wrecked your car. I felt terrible, and probably was afraid of your initial reaction.
Here’s something neither Adam nor I mentioned in the recent interchange but I remember vividly for it’s dark humor. In the aftermath of the accident Adam proudly announced as we sat glumly around the table in our dining area that immediately after the collision and before the police arrived he had had the great foresight to throw the marijuana cigarette he was smoking out the window into the snow piled up along the road. I wonder whether we laughed or cried.
Preamble to Adam’s next lightning stroke: Related to the accident or not, a few weeks later he turned his whole life on end by becoming a Born Again Christian. How we coped and, more important, how he progressed, makes an interesting story.
12/2/2015
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