SHIFTING SANDS

“Hear O Israel
The Lord our God,
The Lord is One!”
--Opening Jewish invocation

“Thou shalt not kill.”
--Mosaic Commandment

I am a Jew; by birth if not by religious training. Getting off a Greek cruise ship to step for the first time onto the Holy Land, if only for an afternoon in Jerusalem, felt special. At customs, a beautiful slim, dark haired young woman in a green army uniform looked bored. I tried my only world of Hebrew—“Shalom” (‘Peace’), the universal greeting (Arabic: ‘Salaam’). Suddenly she transformed into a person, right before my eyes. “Shalom,” she replied, smiling, eyes sparkling with welcome. That’s better. She stamped not my passport, but a small separate yellow piece of cardboard I’d filled out with my I.D. info back on the ship, the size of a passport page. This was official, yet not being attached to the passport, could be easily hidden away, so that I could have plausible deniability...

"Mankind is asleep, and struggling to awaken."
--Georges Gurdjieff

"Putting the coal under the tremendous pressure of his super strength, Superman performed an act instantly that normally took millions of years to occur; he created a diamond."
--Superman, DC Comics

One weekend, instead of sitting bored and alone in my apartment, I pushed myself out to visit a major museum in the City. Sitting in the cafe after my visit and eating a snack, I was approached by two attractive and friendly women sitting at the next table. Could they join me? Oh, yes. They talked about investigating The Point of It All, and about a group where people met to consider a way to evolve out of the current human situation of alienation and disappointment. I would attend an introductory meeting at a place they told me about; and join their group, an Esoteric School which was based on the teachings of men like Georges Gurdjieff, (the son of an Armenian story...

"Did you ever see a dream walking?
Well I did.
Did you ever see a dream talking?
Well I did.
Did you ever see heaven right your arms
Saying 'I love you, I do?'
Well the dream that was walking,
And the dream that was talking,
And the heaven in my arms was you."
--song on a very old Maurice Chevalier vinyl record

The unconditional love that I got from my maternal grandmother and my mother was returned in kind by me, but they seemed to get little back from the rest of the world. On this sixth anniversary of my mother's death, I think of how they left this life unfulfilled in the sense of their expectations, those hopes which so often prove a trap to those who hold them. Today many people die in extreme old age, especially women, but often with a diminishment of facilities rather than closure or a sense of higher achievement.

My grandmother gave up even a rudimentary education to take care of her younger...

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again"
--children's nursery rhyme

A hospital is in emergency mode on three shifts, 24 hours a day, as a matter of course. And in an institution with a campus of 27 buildings, we had one designated for each letter of the alphabet and one more--from A to AA--the place was so big that I gave an orientation tour around them during one afternoon of the program that was now in progress. We had thousands of staff--with our own cafeteria, emergency back up generator, police force, and repair shops, and many of us carried personal pagers or early cell phones. Think Starship Enterprise. As a City hospital, we were a major community resource on the border of several poor neighborhoods. But today was different, and my several dozen "rookies" were about to get a lesson about emergency conditions that...

After years of traveling, one learns how to best enjoy a trip, and how to stretch a limited budget. In Richmond, VA, faced with the lack of a car, we used the elegant Jefferson Hotel's van to drive us on a few visits and pick us up from places like the Tredegar Iron Works, a Civil War site, and finally hired a private guide for a day trip to the trenches at Petersburg nearby. So besides transportation, we ate in a pretty woman's favorite southern Bar-B-Que joint, saw cool Civil War stuff we'd only seen before in books, toured the Petersburg museum, got period music, and learned local lore as we drove in her own van, down the famous avenue of statues, and stopping off at the Virginia Historical Society. It was a most enjoyable and profitable trip all around--even though we knew more about the Civil War than she did.

From there we graduated to an entire specialized tour on military history. We heard about a wargamer who also owned his own travel agency, and was smart enough...