The Odyssey - A Triumph

  

Thanks to my friend Bob Liss, a Columbia alum, I got to watch the Odyssey Friday night on his dime at a private showing for Columbia grads at the San Francisco IMax. Man, what luxury -- reclining leather seats, and what sight and sounds! We have come a long way, a far cry from my youth at the Nixon theatre at 52^nd and Market in West Philadelphia, where pea shooters launched barrages of peas at the silver screen during the cartoons and ushers hustled down the aisles to find the miscreants.

This is clearly another major achievement for Christopher Nolan. His great career has earned him as much investment as he wants in his ever more monumental movies, locations, actors, production values up the wazoo. He loves to make movies, apparently, and we are the better for it. Movies are a triumph of capitalism, in the sense that because they are made once and then distributed, the cost/reward ratio is terrific, if a lot of people see it. Let's not forget economics....

Anyway, here's my mini-review.

 

I enjoyed it a lot.  It is totally made for the Imax - huge scenes, great evocation of time and place, the bronze age in the Greek islands and the Aegean. Not much technology back then, compared to now, but the ships were their magnificent technology, and their military organization as well.  I've never before been transported this convincingly.

This interpretation of the Odyssey is very American, but I didn't mind that, I liked it. I did enjoy American English being used, none of that very formal English English sometimes used for “classical” films. The setting is ancient and foreign, but the people and the language modern. OK, I'll take it.

It's a monumental movie, but at the same time approachable - I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t get best movie Oscar. The women of the cast that I enjoyed most were Anne Hathaway (43 years old) and Charlize Theron (50 years old.) The wonders of makeup made Hathaway believable as someone who had aged 20 years by the end of the film. Everything about this movie is first class. There is a lot of action movie in it, and the usual hero with godlike powers, clearing away a palace full of suitors.  For some reason it reminded me of The Count of Monte Cristo, who basically was an early Superman.   Nolan always uses music prominently – it sets the mood so insistently that it is a character in itself.  It was OK this time (as it wasn't in Dunkirk, for example), and I liked using old Greek instruments, which I understand is what they did.  I thought I caught a whiff of Interstellar music here and there.

I paid special attention to Jon Bernthal, the son of my friend Rick Bernthal, who was impressive as Menelaus - bringing his street-action attitude chops to ancient Greece.  He really played his role terrifically - he relates great to other male characters, clearly.  I haven't seen him enough to know how he does with females, but here he is great in an avuncular relationship.  Clearly a top-flight actor.  Vicariously proud of him!!  Go, Rick!

Richard Brody in the New Yorker laments that there was not more action with gods - they hardly appear, but are referred to a lot.  He also laments that the cruelty of the age was not featured, and there wasn't near enough gore, which there could have been.  Ancient people were a bloodthirsty lot. This catered to the audience, I think, made the movie more relatable.  So did the lack of magic, and the irreality that actual gods bring to a film I know what Brody means, but it was still OK for me.

I hadn't realized that using the Trojan horse as a ruse broke the accepted norms of behavior - like not treating a guest well.  This recalls the Iliad, where the treatment of Patroclus by Agamemnon breaks the established rules of the game, and sets off Achilles - I wish I remembered those details more clearly.  Damon relates later in the film that this breaking of the rules will lead to the overall breakdown of their civilization.  (I did appreciate the very modern and American explanation of the war by Damon to Penelope that Agamemnon was using the case of Helen to mount an attack that would break Troy's monopoly on the trade routes.  I can't recall that from the Homeric text.) 

Anyway, the historical fact is that after the Trojan War, there was a shifting of the center of civilized power to the Greek mainland after a couple hundred years, and then after 400 or so years the Iliad and the Odyssey are written, and then the city-states coalesce more, law and the courts are reformed, and finally, maybe 800 years after the war, the great plays are written. * That's a lot of time!  Does Damon as Odysseus foresee this?  It's intimated that he does.  We might as well sail into the sunset he says to Penelope.  BTW, the opening scene with him and Penelope, where he tells her what he's going to do, is as tender a non-sexual love scene as I remember seeing - although it does end with sex.  Man, who doesn't want a marriage like that?  They're both terrific, but while I give Damon an A+, I'd give Hathaway an A++.

Brody also complains that we don't see enough of Odysseus's wiliness.  Well, yes, he's not so tricky, but he's so much more intelligent than anyone else, so much deeper, that I'll take it.  Yes, he's "an American soldier," as Brody says, but he's more than that, so I guess I don't really agree with him on that.  And we do see him figuring out situations really fast, and judging the motives of others, and figuring out how to come home.  Man - I guess others have noticed that it's quite a story.**

Something I also appreciated was the commentary on the House of Atreus, Jon Bernthal's disgust at the assassination of Agamemnon, briefly but vividly depicted, and the sacrifice of Iphegenia, as the most powerful sacrifice is when the object is the most dear, and how Clytemnestra could not forgive that one. That belonged right there, and I thought it was place just right in this non-chronological recounting – which is the only choice of how to recount it, to my mind.

And I really loved the scenes with Calypso (Charlize Theron is 50 in real life, and so beautiful and alluring here), so moving, the knowledge of temporary nature of things so clear in her, the ambiguity of the situation, her ambivalence, but her love, her own need, and her judgement of a man so telling - time spent on these scenes must have given Nolan pause, wondering if it's too much interruption of action, but for me, this is he real action.  The "action scenes," kind of the original Adventures of Robin Hood movie amped up 100 times, or any number of action movies since, even say the great Jason Bourne movies, are fine and intense with it's being hard to discern who is who, they're OK, like the great panels of maybe Breugel -- don't know why that comes to mind, but all the details of the fighting. But as competently as they are done, well, meh, for me.

Also, finally (maybe finally), I think they did the classic monsters really great - Cyclops is terrific, that one eye, the huge body, picking up men and eating them, kind of like King Kong when he's angry, or better, Godzilla.  And the sirens are really well done, Scylla and Charybdis -- but I couldn't help thinking of our pacific passage of the Straits of Messina last year on our August cruise -- I had a good time, but didn't need to be tied to the mast, although I was friendly enough.  The depiction of the whirlpool was great.  And then I didn't know what that encounter with the huge, armed men of war that routes the Greek men was all about - was that in the book?  It must have been.  

We should also mention Circe, depicted as a man-hater, a strange depiction by Samantha Morton, who is English, but comes across to me as a bitter woman from Brooklyn, or somewhere.  That's probably just me.  Still, not the entrancing type - but what an indelible scene as she literally turns the men into the pigs she knew they were inside.  Memorable, man, memorable.  And then Damon outwits her - that's the wiliness, Richard. He sees through everything. He's wily, man.

What was really good was the sense of sailing into the unknown, which Odysseus chooses to do freely, instead of taking the classical route home as Agamemnon and Meneleus do -- he's a risk taker.  He slides over his responsibility to get home to Ithaca and Penelope and Telemachus by saying "I bet we beat the others home," while they have an adventure.  Some adventure, it turns out to be -- 10 years.  7 of which, apparently, is spent with Calypso, the beautiful and alluring Calypso, eating lotus leaves.  The dream of life, life on a desert island with Calypso, dreams with lotus leaves, can't even remember the life before - as the rest of life has just been stripped away, even all the comrades in arms, and yet he remembers Penelope in the end and Calypso honors that.  Wow. Tears you apart.

So, OK.  See in in IMax format -- the evocation of place is really magnificent.  The way Lawrence of Arabia evoked the desert.  The Greek islands, all that water, all that sea, the mysterious islands and visiting the places they had only heard rumors about.  And then the movie-making of it all -- this is state of the art 2026, all the money you might want, the best actors and artists of make up and everything else I can only guess at, and I'm guessing a nomination for cinematography, without doubt.  How many total nominations will there be?  20?

Get ready to internalize images that won't be easily erased.

This one will stick.

Budd Shenkin

*

The Minoan Age (c. 2700–1450 BCE) was succeeded by the Mycenaean Age (c. 1600–1100 BCE). Following the collapse of the Mycenaeans, the region entered the Greek Dark Ages (c. 1100–800 BCE), which eventually transitioned into the Archaic Period (c. 800–480 BCE). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Here is how these successive periods defined the Aegean world:

• The Mycenaean Age (c. 1600–1100 BCE): After the explosion of Thera weakened Crete around 1450 BCE, the mainland Mycenaean Greeks took cultural and administrative control of the island. They were the first Greek-speaking civilization and are famous for their fortified palace

A Fine Day Of Shopping

   

Yesterday was a fine day.

The fog didn't come in so much, but it was overcast, and strangely warm and very strangely humid, for the Bay Area. Pleasant. I had my usual Monday on tap – do some computering, physical therapy Monday morning 10 o'clock, top that off with a visit to the gym until around noon, find stuff to do the afternoon and evening – there's always stuff to do.

The girl of my dreams is in town, leaving later this week on orders from immigration. Her trip curtailed from three and a half months to two weeks, mindlessly and gratuitously cruel, after about 24 hours of mourning and confusion and planning for an immigration lawyer, she staged the most resilient performance I've ever seen. She planned like a madwoman. She had planned to see her 25+ friends – she says she has more friends here in California currently than she has ever had, total, back in Germany. I think she becomes a different woman here, which is why she wants to be here.

So what she did was plan to see every one of those friends that she had planned to spend time with over three and a half months in just two weeks. I told her it seemed like when she packs her suitcase, and she agreed. And amazingly, in these two weeks, there has still been enough time for me. It helps that we live four houses away, and that she uses my washing machine and dryer, and that she borrows my spare car. But we also eat and shop and do things. All I really need is one hit a day and I'm happy. I'm transformed, too.

So, yesterday I got her text – we text pretty much every day. We leave each other saying “Let's keep in touch,” ironically and humorously, mocking closeness with words of distance. I knew this was the day her friend from San Diego – she had planned to go down there for maybe a week before she got screwed by immigration – was coming up. I knew I'd be seeing her for a fancy dinner in the city on Tuesday, so that was my current milestone, so I thought maybe a text on Monday, or maybe not. But it seems that she had a 3 o'clock meeting planned, and she had stuff to do in the morning, but there was a hiatus just after noon. That worked fine for me.

She has been in search of missing Birkenstocks – where have they gotten to? We don't know. She searched the suitcase and other stuff stored in my closet – where are they? Not just any Birkenstock – she shops with precision, she dresses with style and precision. We had searched for replacements down at REI – no go. But we got her some very nice other stuff there, she loves REI, she tries it all on, she is so beautiful. But, Monday after noon, we could search for those Birenstocks elsewhere – I had looked on the internet and identified the Walk Shop over in North Berkeley on Vine as a possibility. And she wanted to go to Saphora down on Fourth Street to get just the right blush. She is precise and very effective. We could go together or she could borrow the car. Guess what our choice was.

So we head out to Fourth Street first. It's usually a hassle to park there, and it looks like the old parking lot is unavailable from construction. No matter, just turn down Fourth and see what pops up. Is that a spot? Yes it is! Right on the street! I'll take it! There are a couple of others, she says, that one is easier to park in, up ahead. Well, maybe, but then two cars come up and pass me as I'm poised to back into spot number one, and the first car keeps going but the second one takes the sport we were contemplating. Rule number one when parking, I say, take the first spot. Unaccountably, I do a masterful job of parallel parking. I have admitted to her that I'm not that great a driver, knowing that she is ready to highlight my driving deficiencies as I scrape the car's wheels as I pull in forwards to the curb in front of my house. But then she has said back to me, you should be more confident of your driving, that's all that's wrong. I could just eat her up.

So we get out of the car and I take maybe four steps in the direction of Sephora, but she doesn't get even that far. The store we have parked in front of is one we weren't aware of, it's called Buck Mason. We walk in and Lauren, our young saleslady from Fremont, pretty girl, says to Jenny – I like the cut of your shirt! Yup, Jenny is stylish, linen shirts with a different cut, and oh so attractive when worn by Jenny. So she looks over the merchandise. It's a small store, with space to walk around, not that large a stock, but really nice. And there is music. On a turntable, with vintage vinyls on the shelf underneath. And they are playing Buddy Holly. Buddy Holly! They're playing Buddy Holly! This is my music, I say. Lauren has introduced herself to Jenny, Jenny has some stuff to try on – shirts; she doesn't need more jeans, and she got some nice pants when we were at REI – and I talk with Lauren and ask if she knows how Buddy Holly died. It's vague to her, of course, and she tells me I would probably like some of the other vinyls there, although she assures me that many of them are from before my time. Well, I look younger than my years, and I'm with Jenny, so yeah – but no, of course not. Sam Cook. It's true, there's some Nat King Cole, but I remember him on TV, and he was there on a movie the other night on TCM – I'm having trouble remembering just which one. Before my time? Not so much.

Jenny comes out of the dressing room a couple of times. She's like a model, everything looks great on her. We consult with each other – we are very practiced co-shoppers, it always goes well. Lauren has shown me their limited selection of men's T-shirts, which are nice. She tells us that their stuff is manufactured in Pennsylvania, and I ask where, telling Lauren that I'm from Pennsylvania, so exactly where matters to me. She's hazy on Pennsylvania geography, but Google isn't, and yes, Mohnton, where the mill is, is just outside Reading. Reading! That's where my first girlfriend came from! I know Reading well – the home of beer, pretzels, vice, and Albright College. Vice – Carol King, my first girlfriend, told me how their girls' service club delivered goodies of some sort to houses in the poorer area of Reading around Christmas time, and a woman at the door took the donations to the poor gratefully from the high school do-gooding girls and said, “Thank you! The girls will love it!” Reading. Vice in Reading.

Anyway, domestic goods. Nice T-shirts, I'm looking to refresh my collection. Lauren suggests a mauve and a brown, I tell her I need Jenny to help, Jenny comes over and says, no brown for him, he doesn't like brown, well, he always wants blue, and we go through a couple of possibilities and I take two to try on and she says – the blue one will look best on you. We're a couple out shopping. Lauren sizes us up and thinks that, since I said I was from Pennsylvania, we are on a trip together as travelers, and treats us as such. She says, what else are you going to do today? I smile a little and say, well, at three, she has to be in the city to meet another guy. Jenny says, yes, that's true. Lauren now doesn't know what to make of us at all. Who does?

We buy our stuff, put it in the trunk of the car, since we parked directly in front of the store by chance, although you have to wonder if it really was by chance, so much that we do together winds up like this, you really have to wonder if it's chance, and head off to Sephora, which was our destination. She gets something close to the blush she wanted, I ask her what foundation she uses, she shows me – not so clueless, me! A guy asking about foundation! She says, why do you want to know? I say, well, just because. We get back in the car and take off for the Walk Store. We find it and park – good parking spots just come up for us, all the fucking time, I swear. Like our first shopping trip together, to Dog Patch in SF, where we parked across the street from our target, a single parking space in an ocean of parked cars with no open spaces, and – this is true – as I'm trying to pay for a spot a parking meter guy comes around and asks us how much time we would like him to put on our meter for free! I'm not lying. That was such an amazing shopping trip where we got some leather goods from the distribution center of this company that doesn't have stores, and doesn't ship to stores, it's only on-line, except for us.

Well, anyway. We get out of our car around the corner from the Walk Store and a guy sitting in front of Peet's says to me, how much does it cost to change oil for a Mercedes at Jiffy Lube? Strange question, I think, and I say, what, $85? I don't know. We walk off and Jenny says, you should really have been nicer to him, if you're nice to people you … something or other. It's true, I was a little annoyed – I think it was being identified as a Mercedes owner – it was Ann's car originally, I drive it now without loving it much, but it's a good car. You're probably right, I tell Jenny, which I generally do say, and I think about everything she says, and I treasure her criticism, I take it for love, of a sort, and I wonder if there's anything wrong with my doing that, but then I think I don't care, maybe. If she pays close attention to me, I'm going to complain?

The Walk Store doesn't have exactly what she wants. Close. She needs narrow shoes, and the style that she wants doesn't have that in stock. She's been frustrated by this for over a week! Where are those shoes? OK, Budd says replace them, but that's proving hard. If only she had more time. Why is it she needs to find Birkenstocks in Berkeley, not back in Germany, anyway? She has some explanation....

We go back to the car empty-handed, and we engage in gentle conversation with they guy who wondered about the oil replacement. Jenny shows me how it's done. She really doesn't know how good I am at talking to people, I think. Maybe. Anyway, I love seeing her talk to people. She's proud about how she does it. She claims that she used to be an introvert. Something happened to her in Germany. I remember we did that getting coffee and pastry down at Baker & Commons, down on College Avenue, and the lady next to us agreed with all our opinions, a teacher in Berkeley, loved talking with us, maybe newly retired, and Jenny said, see?! Her new best friend. Which we also did when we got pizza at Rose Pizza over on University, and the couple next to us were a new couple, his wife had died, but they were very close with each other, clearly, and we talked for maybe an hour and then the next week we had extra tickets for the Giants and we invited them and had a great time. Doug and somebody, from down the Peninsula. They were nice. I wonder if they got married – I'm betting they're still together.

Can we go to REI and check out the shoes again, she asks. No, I say, you don't have time. It would take 15 or 20 minutes to get there, and you have to be in the City by 3. It could have been earlier, she says, but his plane was late getting in so he missed his Walnut Creek meeting and texted me that we could get together earlier but I had already made plans. We go back home and she takes about half an hour getting ready and comes back wearing a new outfit to pick up the car and it's already 3 o'clock when she take off. I ask her what they will do and she says he rides a motorcycle and they will motorcycle around the city and she loves that. I caution her about motorcycles and she says they wear helmets. She drives off and I stop myself from thinking about the rest of her day and I count myself so lucky to have had this couple of hours.

She gets back about 11:30 at night and I hear her lock the car in the driveway and I step outside and call to her – I'm up because I took a nap and when I do that I stay up late, working on the paper I said I would. She had asked me what I was going to do and I told her I had some writing projects and she made sure I was going to do them. I lazed around, actually, watched Slaughterhouse 5 which I had seen some of a couple of days ago and had saved, and I really liked it, Vonnegut is a very favorite author, I don't know if Jenny reads him, I think she read one of his books a while ago, I did buy her a copy of The Years by Annie Ernaux and I hope she read that because both she and Annie view their lives as adventures. So Jenny said she had had a good time and was tired and will text me tomorrow.

Budd Shenkin

PS – Then, two days later, the day after our fancy dinner at Acquerello in San Francisco, she actually located the Birkenstocks she was seeking down at REI, I called and they reserved them, and we managed to pick them up at REI without buying anything more. Mission accomplished.

 

Podcast - Idealism in Medicine

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/md67/id1896943610
"Without idealism, medicine is lost."
Dr. Budd Shenkin graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1967 and spent over thirty years building and running a successful pediatric practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Shenkin believes, from his experience as both a patient and a physician, that medicine grounded in a humanistic approach is essential in the face of corporatization. And, he says, when it comes to profit-driven plans like Medicare Advantage, "insiders say no." 

Jews in Disorder

  

As a history major and a believer in history, I look at the current splitting of Jewish opinion between the Zionists (not me) and the liberals (me), and I'm conscious of how my family's Jewishness has always been of a sort different from the Temple attending traditional Jews.

I was circumsized at birth, but that was about it for Jewish indoctrination. I was not bar mitzvah, we never went ot services, I went to two years of Sunday school to learn some rudiments of tradition and Hebrew, we had holiday dinners, but that was it.

What I suspected now finds new explanation in a book by Molly Crabapple: HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY: The Story of the Jewish Bund. It is well reviewed by Adam Hochshield in the NY Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/. And also in the NY times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/books/review/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-molly-crabapple.html.

To reduce the idea to a sentence, there was a split among Jews jusrt over a hundred years ago in Europe, among Zionists who thought Jews would only thrive apart from common society in a country of their own, and those Jewish Labor Bund unionists who advocated socialism in Europe and cooperation with other groups. That's a one sentence summary of a 453 page book, so some details are missing. But the point is this: Even though my family was not working class as were the Bundists, they must have supported them. Me, I wouldn't be comfortable with them. They were working class unionists, and although I agree with many of their concepts, I am irreducibly middle class and intellectual elite.  Nonetheless, I think that we are seeing the continuation of that fight now with the dire split among Jews, at least here in the US, where the zionists elevate Israel to sacred status, and the descendants of bundists insist that Israel should be a liberal state, not a repressive and cruel one. Israel's claim to fame should not just be that it is Jewish. Israel is exhibiting is that it is Jewish, the wrong kind of Jewishness, it's the nationalistic Jewishness, rather than the internationalist Jewishness based on values that we endorse.

I see what has happened to Israel as more or less what has happened to the Department of Justice.  DOJ used to be righteous, and being so, the courts gave it deference, the default being that DOJ would do the job right.  Now, that's changed, since Trump corrupted it.  Likewise, we used to be able to have support of Israel's position as our default, knowing that even if they made mistakes, they were trying their best, guided by righteous ideals.  Now that Likud and Netanyahu and his henchmen have corrupted Israel, that country no longer warrants default approval.  Rather the opposite.  If they are accused of murder, that accusation is probably correct.  When they say they will be investigating it, that's probably a lie.

I can understand the traditional Jews' hanging on to Israel as an ideal. It's almost impossible to stop believing in something that you have been taught to regard as sacred.  Israel to many is a guiding lighthouse in a sea of fear.  To give up that light is to be bereft.  Moreover, for many, just as with many causes, belief in Israel has become their profession, their source of income.  If you have gotten an email from me, you might remember my tag line there: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."  -- Eric Hoffer I would say that AIPAC has become the kind of racket that Hoffer warned against.

Traditional Jews are caught in a trap.  They cannot easily leave their traditional beliefs, Next Year In Jerusalem.  Jews who know about the holocaust through their own family ordeals cannot abandon the one source of succor that their family needed, when other countries turned their backs, or worse, collaborated.  Where is one to turn?  The USA of Trump?  Europe?  Where?  It's a complete dilemma.  So, the good-hearted traditional Jews continue to support Israel, some hoping for reform there, and others just saying, no matter how iniquitous it becomes, how racist, Jews will always need someplace to go.  It's a dilemma without an easy solution.

Many bemoan the rising tide of anti-Semitism. I'm unhappy about it, too, but I ask – who is responsible? It doesn't come from nowhere. There is the increasingly repugnant nationalism and illiberalism of Israel for the last 25 years under Netanyahu, Likud, and the right. Israel is now so truculent, and AIPAC and ADL and other groups are so aggressive and abhorrent.  Have they never heard of the virtues of charm, let alone liberality and humanism? Of course their actions are going to raise opposition, and of course people will generalize from Israel and the Jewish Right to all Jews. That's especially true when they all claim to speak for all Jews. They invite the world to be anti-Semitic.  And by so doing, they separate Jews from the general population - the white world, maybe - so that they stand alone, which is exactly where we don't want to be.  But of course, this is exactly where Netanyahu and his ilk do want to be, heroic isolation, it's me against the world!  How unfair!  How brave I am!  Or something like that.  Free to break international laws, free to be nationalistic, to expand, etc. What more could they do to incite anti-Semitism? They're doing their level best.

As someone who was never inducted into the Israel as a savior and an ideal mode of thought – a family of Bundists, I'm guessing -- I am left with thinking, hoping, and believing that the US will in the end continue to be the best country for a Jew to live in in the world.  If it should go full fascist and turn on the Jews, I will still die in this country, and my descendants, all of them being only half-Jewish and none being a member of a temple, will assimilate somehow, as they have pretty much done anyway, although they still identify as Jewish, if asked.  Other families who maintain a stronger Jewish identity will have a harder time. Part of the harder time they will have will be the decrepitude of the official Jewish organizations, not to say their obnoxiousness, their insistence that their way and their beliefs are the only credible ones.  What do you do when the official organizations are so uncomfortable for you?  I don't know, but I won't be around to find out.

You can look at the young Jews who protested in favor of Palestinians as those looking for Israel to be just.  It's a pretty stupid step to take, I think, but that's what they did.  There is no organization as strong as the traditional Jewish organizations that would represent their point of view without going whole hog extremist Palestinian supporter.  Somehow, J Street didn't measure up.  Individual Jewish leaders did speak up, some terrific liberal rabbis, I think, but they didn't have the money and the organization to consolidate that alternative movement.  Maybe they will coalesce.

Meanwhile, for me, if someone is to say, Next Year In Jerusalem, as is traditional but never was in my family, I'll say, OK, Next Year is fine, let's eat together next year – but not in Jerusalem. That's gone, man.

Budd Shenkin

A Teenager Down The Shore

 

 

 

When I was young, but when I had been in puberty for a few years, I was by necessity very inexperienced and yet very needy. I hardly knew what I was needy of, but of course I knew in general. What I was in need of was a girl. But not just any girl, or at least at first not just any girl. There seemed to be girls who were attracted to me, but that was not enough. I had to be attracted to them, but I also had not to be scared of them. In other words, I think I needed a good looking girl who was attracted to me but was friendly with me so I wouldn’t be frightened, nor repelled. It was a tall order.

In the summers we went down the shore, on Long Beach Island, in New Jersey, an 18 mile long skinny island just over a Causeway of maybe a mile from Manhawkin on the mainland. The Causeway – a word that was only used for this specific connection as far as I knew – consisted of three little trestle bridges and a longer bridge connecting Manahawkin to Ship Bottom via three little islands. Right off one of the bridges on one of the tiny islands was a restaurant called Dutchman’s where they served pizza with clams on it. A kind of exotic favorite, we thought.

Anyway, once you got to Ship Bottom, right in the middle of LBI, you hit a road that went end to end right down the middle of the island. if you turned right, there would be the bay – called Little Egg Harbor here – on your right, and the Atlantic ocean on your left, just over the dunes a couple of blocks away from the central road. There was enough breadth of the island there in the middle for there to be several streets parallel to the central road. Six miles down that road brought you to Beach Haven, the main town on the island, and probably the area with the most breadth. We went there in rented summer houses at first, before I was in puberty. Sometimes my mother would drop me at one of the docks on the bay side and I would fish for hours, with men standing around me. I can’t remember their talking to me, maybe some little jabber, and I can’t remember catching any fish, although I must have, I guess. The sun was comfortable, I hardly wore any clothes, and I had already tanned for the season.

Once wading in the bay I stepped on something, maybe glass, although I was sure it was a crab that bit me, I got a substantial laceration in the ball of my right foot. I was taken to Dr. Dodd’s office, a combined office and residence on the corner of a street in Beach Haven, and he stitched it up. As I remember it, the wound then became infected and I had to be taken back to Philadelphia where I was admitted to the Graduate Hospital for treatment with a new and powerful medicine, penicillin, delivered in crystalline form with injections that hurt like hell every four or six hours. My mother sat with me. She finally convinced me to stop bawling when the nurse came in with the syringe and just turn over to expose my rump, because, she told me, I’m going to get it anyway so I might as well cooperate. Imagine the nurse’s surprise when this change in behavior presented itself. I remember the look of shock on her face, and her saying, well, that’s a change! I suppose my grandmother and maybe some great aunts kept charge of my three younger siblings down at the beach house in Beach Haven while my mother was with me.

But if you turned left when you came off the Causeway, you would travel through Ship Bottom and Surf City – where Sam Alito now lives in the summer, to the everlasting shame of the island – and then through Harvey Cedars and, just before you got to the end of the island and the iconic phallic Barnegat Lighthouse, with Barnegat Bay on your left and the Atlantic ocean on your right, there was Loveladies, name for Sir Thomas Loveladies way in the past, so much in the past that no one could recite exactly how Sir Thomas’ family obtained their surname. Loveladies was at the skinny end of the island, where, after renting usually in Beach Haven and then one year in Harvey Cedars for the summer season, my parents bought a lot on the bay side and built a modern ranch style house, rather than the Cape Cod style houses elsewhere on the island, designed and built by the firm Ullman and Silvermaster, who it turned out were accused of being Soviet spies in the McCarthy era, although they were never convicted. The island was so skinny here that there was no room for roads parallel to the central road, so if you turned left you hit the bay in a couple hundred yards, and if you turned right you hit the ocean in maybe 400 yards over the dunes. My parents had the lot filled with sand that was dredged from the bottom of the bay, thus not only making the lot buildable, but also creating a deeper hole in the bay where you could have a dock with a boat and where you could swim. Then they had gravel put on top of the sand on the lot, and then a house built close to the bay with a big picture window looking out at ground level, with a new window product called Thermopane to look out from the living room onto the bay. Thermopane had two sheets of glass separated by air and it wasn’t supposed to mist up, which it usually didn’t. On the outside of the Thermopane window was a wooden deck, where you lounged on redwood furniture and from which you walked down to the bay if you wanted, and out onto the short dock that my folks had had built if you wanted, and if was winter you could walk out onto the dock and see loads of aboriginal horseshoe crabs with their metallic-appearing carapaces and ancient look scurrying about. There was a little spit of land just on the right of us jutting into the bay that had a house on it and telephone poles, where there were the hugest osprey nests, and where planes came periodically to spray DDT. The whole family marveled at the nature of LBI which we didn’t have much of back in Philadelphia.

My parents also built a black top tennis court between the house and the central road, the only tennis court on our side of the island, north of the Causeway. It must have been a landmark, because everyone on that side of the island had to drive past it all the time, but I actually never heard it referred to.

People used to stop by the house. My parents had lots of friends, mostly Jews from Philadelphia. In those days life was pretty segregated religion-wise. We four kids and my mother would be on our own during the week, while my father worked in the city. He would come down Friday night – much anticipated – and the pace of life would pick up over the weekend. There would be tennis, and the friends would come over.

Just the other day my sister Kathy recalled for us kids that periodically we would receive visits from the Bookmobile. Excitement! It was a traveling library, an RV back when they didn’t have RV’s to my knowledge, and book lover that my mother was, we were whipped into anticipatory excitement as the time approached for a Bookmobile visit. Imagine that.

So it was in this house in the summers that I first experienced puberty. It wasn’t a very insistent puberty at first, just pubic hair, and an enlarged penis, and erections. It was vague. No one said anything. I imagine I was watched. The oldest kid is always the first one to be experienced by the parents, obviously, and while it was a blessing to be the first, and in some ways therefore the most important one, it was also the one to be experimented on. So I guess they watched me.

Once my mother and father took me aside to tell me that one of the daughters of the friends, maybe her name was Stephanie, maybe, was smitten with me. I hadn’t noticed anything. My mother informed me, and my father backed her up, expressing some disgust that I hadn’t noticed anything. They told me to notice that she followed me around. Me, I didn’t feel anything about it, she wasn’t really very attractive to me although she seemed nice, and I didn’t know what to do about it, but I responded to my parents’ instructions. There was a group of us kids who usually stayed together in a group at our house or at the Finkelstein’s house and I asked this girl if she wanted to go off alone for a little, just the two of us, and she said no, and that was that.

Some years later, it must have been, a year or two anyway, other things turned up. The younger girl from next door put her hand down under my bathing suit when we were alone in one of the bedrooms of he house and felt around and said, what’s that? I was afraid to even tell her. Later on in the water out by our raft that we had all made together and that floated in the area the sand had been excavated from, she and I went to the side of the raft away from the shore and she ducked under the surface and looked between my legs and I pulled my bathing suit down as she wanted, so that she could see, but I was shy and pulled it down, but only so far.

Then one day there was Lucy. Lucy Solomon was tall and lean, with striking dark straight hair that she wore long and she was a bit distant, actually, but she was good looking and I heard my Aunt Bea tell one of her sisters that Lucy had a very nice figure, is the way she put it. She did. We kids nick-named her Looie, I don’t know why, but it was affectionate. She and I were alone in the car one day, as whoever the others were there with us were outside somewhere, and I proposed the Lucy that we make out or something. She was much more an equal than the other girls were, and she went to Baldwin School, and I think to Bryn Mawr later on, and she was smart and poised. She turned me down. She said that her mother, a very pretty lady herself, had told Lucy that once you start you can’t stop. I hadn’t heard that before. I just accepted it, although I thought that she probably wasn’t attracted to me. Good try. Lucy was not actually the daughter of her father, Irv, but as it was told to us, her mother had been married before, and Lucy was the product. I don’t know if they had actually been married, but in those days you didn’t say “a prior relationship.” I wonder what the connection was between Lucy’s origin and her mother’s advice. Many years later I heard that this beautiful woman died of breast cancer in her 30’s.

Then the next year another one of our friends, Judy Wolf, told me she had the perfect girl for me, Laurie Colwin, whose family was visiting LBI from Chicago. This one was younger, I think she was 13 and I was maybe 15, and I took her to the movies and tried to feel her up but she had hardly anything there. Her blond sister Lesley, who was maybe 16 or 17, was more interested and interesting and taught me to drive on gravel in a driveway by their rented house and told me that she hadn’t had sex with her boyfriend Steve and I intoned “good,” as though I were a judge. She shouldn’t have been teaching me just to drive. She really liked me and I really liked her. Later on, I went to the movies with Judy, who had tried to set me up, and I asked her if we could hold hands and she laughed at my awkwardness and said sure. As everyone knows, Laurie went on to become a famous writer and died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 48 in New York.

Then the next year there was this stacked blond girl from Rahway New Jersey who had a boat over at Loveladies Harbor near the Finkelstein’s house, and who wasn’t Jewish, and I took our 15 foot Correct Craft speedboat, The BuBob, and drove over there and picked her up, and we used her lightning class sailboat to race in the bay one Sunday and we almost won but I forgot to put the centerboard down as we tacked and we lost our place out front. When the Finkelstein’s were over at our house the mother, Leah, said to me, I see you have a new girl friend. I say murmured yeah and later my mother said she could kill Leah Finkelstein for saying something like that. Maybe that was the same girl that I went to a beach party with and she said do I want to take a walk and I went with her and another guy and girl and we were in the dunes and we made out. I might have tried something more and was rebuffed. I think Leah Finkelstein had some vicarious interest, actually, which was strange, because she was rather plain, but she was lively.

Then there was that time when I was out somewhere with friends and my mother called and said Lee Brown, an old friend of my father, was visiting and he had a daughter and her friend and could they join us. How old are they, I asked, Mr. Sophisticate. My mother said with her trademark sarcasm, kind of like Eve Arden with that intonation I hated, that the girls were “the right age.” When they came over I was bowled over with how sexy these two blonds were. And they were out for boys. Joanie was the friend, and she assumed I would be with Lee’s daughter and she said, where is someone for Joanie? She told me about how great Lee was, about how she could go around the house in bra and panties, and how she could tell in her high school classroom what the teachers’ reactions were to her when they stood up and had to use their hands to straighten out their pants. I liked Joanie, although she was maybe a little scary, and didn’t understand how I hadn’t been paired with her.

This is what they are talking about when they say, if I knew then what I know now. As it was, I knew nothing, I was interested but shy, didn’t have any good models to learn from, and was constantly frustrated, I guess, and I hadn’t yet learned to masturbate – I guess I wasn’t much of an experimenter. One day on the basketball court the subject came up, somehow, and my friend Ed looked at me with disbelief and said, you ought to try it.

Now, I think that our social order doesn’t match up well with our biology. Sex is a constant item of deprivation. In other societies, at a certain age they take the boys to the whorehouse to learn, to be taught – teach him, Madelyn, says the father. There are other ways that teenagers learn. Older men and younger women sometimes get together, for sure. Are there societies where older women teach younger men? You would think one of the mothers might say, hey, would you like me to teach you a thing or two, help you get started? I was talking to a friend the other day, and he recounted how his mother tried to teach him about sex, and what a fiasco it was. Me, my mother handed me two books to read and used the word “intercourse.” One night my father told me to always use a rubber. That was kind of it, before sex ed. Our social structures and processes don’t meet our biology, still, I think.

Long Beach Island was a beautiful island that I remember fondly. We would eat lunch and take the mandatory one and a half hour postprandial rest and play board games and read. I would underline some of the words I didn’t know, knowing that the college boards would be coming up. We went to the ocean with rafts to ride the waves. We went boating and waterskiing and sailing. That’s what we talk about now. The rest of it, being a teenager, we talk about in general terms. I kept a calendar on the wall, counting down the days until I would be 16 and would be able to drive and would at last be able to be alone in a car with a girl. I must have started with 450 days to go. I think the other three kids, being younger than me, spent their puberty years away at camp. So I guess their memories are different from mine. So many girls, so little knowledge.

 

Budd Shenkin 

Voting in the California Primary, 2026

   

Yesterday, I voted. I walked down slowly to the library – my left hamstring is being so uncooperative – and then I sat down on the low brick wall next to the vote deposit box and just sat and watched. Slowly, one after another, people of no particular description walked down the street, looked for the vote deposit box and then spotted it, and with little fanfare put their voting envelope into the depository. The box is a little bit confusing. There is a slot to push your envelope in, not complicated, but for some reason just below the slot there is a one of those drawers that swivel open to take in boxes in a mailbox. Obviously, it's there for no reason – probably left over mail boxes now repurposed. So all of us south Berkeley voters put the envelope in the obvious slot, and then some of us tried to open the package drawer, which didn't open, and we had quizzical looks on our faces for a few seconds and then wandered off, job completed.

As I sat there, there was never any line, but the flow of voters was steady, some in pairs, some singles. We were all doing the same thing. Everyone had the same envelope. Everyone was very casual about it. Everyone was dressed very casually. But at the same time, we had to feel that we doing something serious.

I used to vote in person on election day, and I found some solidarity in the familiarity of going to John Muir School and signing in and filling out the ballot in one of the stations they set up there. I thought I would miss that in switching to the mail-in ballot, but I really haven't. There has been a different sort of solidarity with mail ballots. Sometimes neighbors let neighbors drop off their ballots. And this time I was one of the thread of people drifting down to the library.

When I got home, since it was a Tuesday, my housekeeping gardening couple of 30 years, Jose and Antonia, were there to greet me. Antonia is a citizen now – she's more adept with language, etc., than Jose, so he hasn't taken that final step. I asked her who she had voted for for governor. I thought she might have voted for Becerra, since they had Mexican descent in common. Antonia said that, despite the fact that she is a citizen and Jose isn't, she had relied on his advice. She said that she is always busy with family stuff and the house – they live with their daughter and her family in Oakland – and that Jose keeps up more with politics. So she said that, on Jose's advice, she had voted for San Jose mayor Matt Mahan.

I was surprised – Mahan? He was polling at about 5-7%, I think. What an interesting choice! I asked Antonia, why him? She said, I don't know, we'll have to ask Jose.

So we went out front to where Jose was doing some gentle pruning. I asked him, why had he advised Antonia to vote for Mahan? Jose was very decisive. He said that it was because of his family background. His mother had been a housewife, and his father had been a letter carrier. Jose said that he felt that with that background, Mahan would be a solid governor. Interesting! He was voting on the basis of family background, which is like voting for character. He didn't look at individual issues, etc., he wanted a good, solid man, and would trust him to make good choices.

That reminded me of my Maui Uber driver last March. He was a 63 year old Filipino man who had been in construction, and now had semi-retired. I forget how we came to talk about it, but he said that the thing that most disturbed him about Trump was the ballroom. That's the people's house, not his house!, said my driver, with some feeling. Like Jose, he had zeroed in on character, maybe a little idiosyncratically – with Trump, there is no shortage of character issues – but that is the one that stung.

What unites a country? I've always said that sports is an underrated factor. But this process of voting is really so central. We consider things separately, we vote separately, but we discuss collectively along the way, we consult public sources to get our information, and we vote collectively. Separately, but collectively. It just gives us an aura.

It's kind of funny in a way. Voting is built on competition, of people and of ideas. Voting is done by each person individually. But from this competition and this individuality comes a sense of collectivity, something we all do together. That is so important for a country – we all do it separately, but together.

Budd Shenkin

Grossie

We were living is West Philadelphia, and the story goes that my parents went to a parent teacher conference with my fourth grade teacher, Miss Ousey. (“Don't call her Miss Lousy,” my mother warned, “you'll forget some day and call her that in person!”) “He's doing very well,” she assured my parents, “definitely college material.” That was high praise in her eyes, but my parents thought, such a low bar! And with that, all of us kids were enrolled in Friends Central School, one of the numerous Quaker schools in Philadelphia, this one out on City Line Avenue, about 30 or 40 minutes away on city streets, depending on traffic, and an hour and a half for me coming home on bus to 69th Street Terminal, el (elevated subway train) to 44th Street and Market Street, and bus to home at 47th and Osage Avenue. For those who are interested in some down and dirty, the 69th Street Terminal had some temptations – mostly glazed doughnuts where kids who wanted to be down and dirty assembled, and the 46th Street station was half a block from the studios of WFIL, where American Bandstand was located in the afternoons, so I do to see the kids lined up waiting to get in. Me, I just went home. 

Going to Friends' Central in 5th grade was quite a change for me. In fourth grade at the Henry C. Lea Elementary School at 47th and Spruce, I felt as though I were king of the hill. I was the smartest kid in the class, probably the best athlete, our class's representative to student council, we played all sorts of sports in the concrete schoolyard, I had a ring of best friends, and what could be better? FCS,however, was quite another story. Whole new suburban experience, my mother claimed there was a fair amount of anti-Semitism – I imagine there was, but mostly it was a set of kids who had their friends and their social order set before I got there, and new ladders to establish order – was I the best athlete anymore, the smartest, the best card flipper, or what? And yes, there were Jewish kids and WASP kids, and there was a real difference. 

And that's where Jonathan Gross enters the picture. He was one of the Jewish kids, as his name implies, and both of us expected to be the smartest kid in the class. He had come to FCS the year before me, in 4th grade. I guess he already was the smartest. I didn't think about it much, I was more interested in competing in sports, I think. But you know what? As I look back on it now, even though it was all pretty unconscious then, and I always try to downplay it – the truth is, I've always been pretty competitive. Not overtly, maybe – it was just starting to be the age of cool in American society, but I was right in there with it early, cool, be cool. No big celebration when you scored your touchdown, just drop the ball as if that's just doing the expected. Cool. I note with great interest that now, maybe 70 years later, as I'm learning French, one of the common words in French remains “cool.” Which I think is cool as hell. 

I was probably the best athlete in the class – Bob Hall was pretty good, but as time went on, I played shorlstop, I was the best hitter, I was the best basketball player, and I played halfback in football. The first time I set foot on the touch football field in fifth grade and the PE teacher, Frank Grof, threw his pass and I grabbed it and went for a touchdown, I saw him look at me. OK, the new kid looks pretty good. So I was right where I wanted to be in sports. 

Gross sat with me in the gym at the start of 7th grade and we were choosing sports, and he tried to get me to go with him to wrestling. Jon was strong, but slow and not terribly well coordinated. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but when the young PE part time instructors saw me dribble and shoot, they smiled with relief – Here's someone who knows how to play, they said. No wrestling for me. 

We moved to Wynnewood after four years at Friends' Central and even though we were closer now to FCSl than when we lived in West Philly, the public schools in Lower Merion were quite good, so my parents stopped paying four private tuitions, and I spent 9th grade at Ardmore Junior High before moving across the driveway to Lower Merion High (years later, this was Kobe Bryant's high school). Imagine my surprise when I found that one of my new classmates at LM was Jonathan Gross. Our class was strong, and I can't say I was the smartest, but neither was Gross, although we both contended. I remember we were in chemistry together, it must have been 11th grade, and we had a standing test like a spelling bee, and if you made a mistake you had to sit down. Jon and I were the last ones standing. Who was smarter? Hard to tell, but I think I always thought that I was. Jon was definitely math and science, but I was across the board. 

But I should also mention this. Gross and I were sure we were the smartest in our FCS class, and no doubt we were, no doubt. In 7th grade we had a new kid come into the class as we moved to the Upper School, a little kid with a big blondish pompadour, Barry Sharpless. My Dad knew Sharpless's dad since they were doctors together in Philadelphia. Their family was of Danish descent. Sharpless was smart enough, but not enough to dethrone Gross or me. He was always playing around with a chemistry set over in the corner of our classroom. Some years later in 2001, it was a shock to both Gross and me when Sharpless, then at Scripps in La Jolla in southern California, his pompadour long gone as he had gone bald, was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. And we were surprised as well when he won his second Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2022. Which just goes to show you how corrupt the Nobel Prizes are, when they can't even tell who is the smartest one in the class. 

 “Known for his groundbreaking work in stereoselective reactions and click chemistry, he is one of only two scientists in history to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry (winning in 2001 and 2022).” 

But to get back to the main story here, after Lower Merion I went on to Harvard, and Jon went down the banks of the Charles to MIT. We saw each other sometimes – Jon was not a particularly romantic fellow, it seemed, but somehow around our junior year in college he had gotten the very pretty Sally Ann Ford, daughter of the Penn athletic director Jerry Ford, pregnant and they had gotten married. Amazing. Jon went on to get his doctorate in math and wound up professor of computer science at Columbia, and I wound up going to Harvard Medical School. Somehow, since I was much the better athlete and the better writer and general humanities student, although I had to concede he was far better at math, I thought I still had the high ground, and he probably felt the same way about himself. I really don't know. 

Here is his retirement summary from Columbia – I have to say, it's so much more impressive than anything I could claim for myself. https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/jonathan-gross-retires/. It's so unreasonable that I should hold myself superior in any way – yet that's the way I feel. He has really been amazing in math and as a professor. Such a devoted teacher. Or maybe it's not a competitive thing at all. I have a tendency to assume a role of a father figure. Jon is so naive in so many endearing ways. Maybe that more faithfully describes our relationship. Maybe I'm being unfair to myself. And after all, Jon had so much of a tougher time than I did with family disruption – I won't go into it, except to say that his father acted very badly toward their family, and our mutual friend John Raezer's father helped out by going over to Gross's house and threatening that if his father did some of his shit again he could come over and beat the shit out of him. I think that was the way it worked. 

Our Lower Merion class has stayed in touch over the years, especially since the onset of email, so Jon and I have stayed in touch. We now realize that we are among our oldest friends. Of course my brother and sisters are older friends to me, and Bob Levin, who was my classmate at both Lea School and Friends' Central, and maybe our mutual friend John Raezer who I actually met first in nursery school and who was president of our high school class at Lower Merion and my college roommate for four years and has remained close to both me and Jon for maybe over 70 years now. But other than that, we are each other's oldest friend. And, inevitably, competitor.

He lives just outside of Philadelphia and will soon move to Princeton in New Jersey, but he has come out here to the Bay Area a couple of times to help his daughter when she had a baby a year or two ago, and I drove down maybe twice to visit him and his lovely wife. We correspond on email and he keeps me up on his health. He has Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, the most common inherited neuropathy, which has led to his using a walker for many years. He does very well with it, considering. 

So, a complicated relationship. Elements of collegiality, competition, nurturing, all of it. Getting older together. Remembering the past. 

And then, a couple of days ago, I got an email from Grossie, as I now call him affectionately. He said, 

Hi Budd, We are both on today’s amethyst Duolingo ladder.  I see that you’ve been addicted to Duolingo for two years more that I have.  Most of the time I’m doing Hebrew.  Sometimes I do German.  What languages do you do on Duolingo?  —Jon  

I wrote back: Budd Shenkin Mar 17, 2026, 10:02 AM      to Jonathan Grossie - I cannot believe that we turned up on the same list - with you ahead of me, naturally.  I can't believe it.  75 years later, and still at it!! Yes, indeed, we are on the same ladder this week! He is at the top, and I am at number 6. Shit! How did he do that? I can't have Gross ahead of me! Can I now? 

Budd Shenkin