Stephenrosen.info



Copyright ? 2013 by Stephen Rosen. All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the author.Disclaimer: This book is based on fallible?memory and many of the stories did not actually?happen the way I describe them; portrayals of individuals and events contain motivated misperceptions, selective recall, confirmation biases, irony, andinventive or imaginative recreations that make me appear wiser and more heroic or than I actually was or am. PROSPECT PRESS7 Prospect BoulevardEast Hampton, NY 11937 and35 West 81st Street, Suite 1DNew York, NY 10024Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRosen, StephenYouth, Middle-Age and You-Look-Great Stephen RosenDying to come back as a MemoirISBN: 1479382205ISBN 13 9781479382200Also by Stephen RosenCOSMIC RAY ORIGIN THEORIES (1960, Dover)FUTURE FACTS (1976, Simon & Schuster)WEATHERING (1979, M. Evans)CAREER RENEWAL (1998, Academic/HBJ) with Celia PaulYOUTH,MIDDLE-AGE,andYOU-LOOK-GREATSTEPHEN ROSEN!Dying to come back as a MemoirWhen George Gershwin asked to study composition with Maurice Ravel, Ravel replied, “Why be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?”***I much prefer that my own style be my own, uncultivated and rude, but made to fit as a garment, to the measure of my mind rather than someone else's, which may be more elegant, ambitious, and adorned but one that deriving from a greater genius, continually slips off, unfitted to the humble proportions of my intellect.? --Petrarch***“Is it true, Rabbi, that ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ summarizes all of the Torah’s wisdom, and all Jewish ethical and moral teachings?” –Astrophysicist“Well, let me answer your question with a question. Is it true that all of astrophysics -- stellar evolution, cosmology, supernovae -- is summarized by saying “Twinkle, twinkle, little star?” --RabbiEveryone knows that the insane interpret the world via their own peculiar logic; how can you tell if your own logicis “peculiar”, given that you have only your own logic tojudge itself? --Douglas HofstadterI did not invent human beings.--Saul BellowYOUTH, MIDDLE-AGE, & YOU-LOOK-GREAT STEPHENROSEN!Dying to come back as a MemoirTABLE OF CONTENTSI YOUTHINTRODUCTIONKernels of Truth in Grains of Salt1. A Man For All ReasonsThe sunshine man, from rags to riches2. On Being A Good PersonKindness and generosity3. Genealogical ResearchThrowing stones4. Exceeding My ExpectationsEight, sixteen, twenty-one5. Before You Were BornThings happened6. Deadly Hitch-hikeSaving three lives7. Geniuses, Wunderkinds & Stevie WonderRole models8. The Physics Years: Owego, Ft. Schuyler, & ParisA physicist travels9. Future FactsWhy a book?10. Measure Twice; Cut Once!Impulsive and inattentiveII MIDDLE-AGE1. My Half-LifeRadioactivity and other decays2. Tiresias & LonelinessWho enjoys love-making more?3. Rich Uncle, Poor UncleA couple of fraudulent bastards4. Urban BikingAn accident and a saint5. Driving A TaxiDown and out in New York6. A Volunteer In IsraelDigging sandbags and roots7. Mouse-traps, or Dead Mice?Mistakes8. The Sex Life of My Former Piano TeacherSex at ninety-three9. Chinese Water Torture & Christian ScienceBehind every successful man is a surprised mother-in-law10. Polishing The TurdShrinks versus the RabbiIII YOU-LOOK-GREAT!1. Nice Work & You Can Get It: My Finest HourSoviet émigré refuse-nik scientists as New Americans2. How I Met The Sunshine of My LifeShe made three conclusions3. Sol Paul & Dublin’s Jewish Lord MayorsShiksa fever4. A Person Of Interest: The FBI, The CIA, and The KGBWhat did he do to deserve this?5. Darwin, Darwin, and Self-FlatteryA stoic Ecuadorian comrade6. Passion-At-WorkMost satisfying accomplishments7. Anastomosis: The Tree-House and MarriageMeasure twice; cut once8. Comedy WorkshopA funny thing happened on the way to married bliss9. Singin’ In The BrainSongs my mother never taught me10. A Glamorous Dubious PastMy beautiful daughter, the charmer11. Oy Gevalt! A religious conversion12. Ironic AssemblagesWelded transformations13. A Tough Act To FollowCelia after Dershowitz14. The Road Less-TraveledAnother path15. Grand-Kids As A Reward Galway, London, Paris, Villefavard, Barcelona,16. Me Infinitesimal!Hard-wired for significance17. My ‘Rosebud’ and ‘The Table’Peripatetic mahogany18. Afterwords: Both and NeitherBoth and NeitherAPPENDICESA. The Difference Between Talent and GeniusThe author’s seventy-fifth birthday celebration -- with encomiums,criticisms, praise, witticisms, original songs, stories (some even true),introductions, and panegyrics.B. Rockefeller University Panel“Career Change Among Scientists”, Rockefeller University November 13, 1997 Participants: Joseph Atick, President and CEO of Visionics Corporation, and Rockefeller University; David Z. Robinson, Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and the Government; Stephen Rosen, Science and Technology Advisory Board; Celia Paul, Celia Paul Associates.C. Cosmic MessengersGifts from beyondD. What’s Good About Goodbye?You don’t have to break glass to get air; you can open the window.E. In Memoriam: Harding WillingerEighty percent of him was greater than one hundred percent of anyone else.F. Expertise As An AddictionThe perils of trained incapacityF. Heroes of Nine-ElevenUntimely deaths of people I worked with.G. Obituary Notice As Imagined by the AuthorWhat he thinks he wants to be remembered for. ####INTRODUCTION:KERNELS OF TRUTH IN GRAINS OF SALTIn the locker room each day after I swim, I place my wet swim-suit into a device that wrings out the water. It’s a small automatic spin-dryer whose centrifugal force flings the water out of my black nylon Speedo.The sign on the spin-dryer says: “This unit is self-timed and will shut down automatically at the end of its cycle. It will not reset.” I see these words every day after I swim …and it slowly dawns on me that this sign is an epiphany. An inert spin-dryer sign is communicating not only Instructions about a Device, but also a Decree and a Verdict on the end of my life.Hemingway put it differently: “For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”. The message I take away from the locker room is virtually the same: For whom the spin-dry cycle rolls, it rolls for thee. The end is near. My end is nearer than it’s ever been.Friends I haven’t seen in a while greet me with, “You look great!” But “Youth” and “Middle-age” have passed me by. So I conclude that You-look-great! is the third phase of my life. Sure, the end is near, but I prefer to call the period I now inhabit, the “You-look-great” phase of my life. Irony, tongue-in-cheek, grains of salt, kernels of truth…yes, all of these can be found in “You-Look-Great Stephen Rosen!”If I really do look great, it’s a peculiarly unfair and paradoxical compliment. Why do people expect me to have the memory ability, the physical agility, the quickness-of-mind, the word-fluency and vocabulary I had in my mid-fifties or mid-sixties, just because I may sometimes “look great.” I’m really an old guy now, or what-would-have-been-considered-old in my parents’ era. When my parents were my age now (late seventies) they had been dead for five years. Why can’t I look my age?People say, “What’s your secret?” I’ve got well-rehearsed, tongue-in-cheek answers: “First, you have to choose the right grandparents. [I did!] Second, you have to be happily married. [I am!] Third, you have to love your work. [Yes!] Fourth, you have to take naps [I do!]. And most important, you have to act immature. [Check! And Double-Check!]” I get weak smiles at these sophomoric lines. Occasionally, I quote them when someone asks why I look so young for my age. If I volunteer my age, a stranger may say, “But you look much younger.” This gives me the opportunity to utter these five grains-of-salt, these kernels-of-truth, about my still-youthful appearance. But I know I’m kidding-on-the-square, trying to deny the inevitable, making fun of old age and longevity because deep down it is serious sub-text to my every autobiographical thought. I’m dying (so to speak) to squeeze out (so to speak) – and to convey -- the defining stories of my life—my memories… before all the juice of life is extracted and wrung out of me. Like the swimsuit water extractor does to my Speedo.* * *So many Memoirs are in the air -- like avian flu, pollen, and humidity -- that I read them with a grain of salt (Pliny’s purported antidote for poison), and I suggest you do the same with this book, a work of autobiographical fiction, fictional autobiography, quasi-Memoir. But please remember there is a kernel of truth and tongue-in-cheek in every grain of salt. A famous line from the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam defines happiness as: “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou beside me”. My own definition: “A grain of salt, a tongue in cheek, a kernel of truth, and thou reading my Memoir". (Note the first two letters of Memoir are me.)How would I define me? With a grain of salt… as a buffoon, smart-aleck, wise-guy? With a kernel of truth… as a very sober still-vertical creature wanting to be taken seriously as a man of substance? With a tongue in cheek…as a jocular extrovert, a semi-hypochondriac? A friend says: “To know Steve is to be his friend.” Another says “Steve feels emotions more deeply than others.” A former colleague said: “Winston Churchill was an introvert compared to Steve Rosen.” But Winston said: “We are all worms, but I believe I am a glow-worm”. He was. Am I?Am I a sunset (at the end of my days) re-living a dawn (by celebrating the beginnings of my days)? Or am I simply a voluble candidate for that support group for people in recovery who talk too much, called “On-and-On Anon”?In this book I’m defining who I am from imperfections –experiences and events gleaned from each phase of my life. I am not aspiring to be a role-model. “Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set a bad example” (La Rochefoucauld) To the contrary: I can still set bad examples, but I try to avoid giving advice. I learned lessons that define me alone. I’ll get one chance only to make a first impression, so this quasi-Memoir is my only reincarnation.Who am I?What part of speech am I? A hyper-active verb? An adverb? A hyphen? A walking exclamation point! Am I bold-face, or italic? What class of number would I be…large, small, complex, transcendental, negative? (Three kinds of mathematicians: those who can count, and those who can’t.) What kind of painting would I be? A Cubist multi-faceted Picasso portrait of a wild-eyed clown looking in several directions at once? A lush romantic landscape by Pisarro? What kind of music am I? A Gershwin song? (Which one? “Nice Work If You Can Get It” is what I’d like played at my memorial service, please. I’ve sung this during lectures to audiences of lawyers at the Bar Association, scientists at MIT, and physicians at Mt. Sinai Medical School.) A Beethoven symphony? (Which one? The second movement of the Seventh?) A piano concerto? (Which one? The movement of the Beethoven’s that Leonard Bernstein lifted that became “Somewhere(There’s A Place For Me)” in “West Side Story”? When this theft was pointed out to him he remarked, “Talent borrows; genius steals”.) A sonata? (The Pathetique?) Has my part-of-speech, my number, my painting, or my music even been created yet?A baroque musician has left us instructions on how to write a sonata: First, find a sonata that you like so you can use it as a model by taking it apart; second, replace the treble-clef notes with a melody of your own, taking care to ensure it tracks properly and harmoniously with the original existing bass-clef notes; third, replace the existing bass-clef notes with your own original notes to harmonize with your new treble-clef notes; then, write it down, and voila…a New Sonata! My life-themes (physics, music, helping others) resemble the original Old Sonata with its old bass- and treble- notes; my new careers resemble those new bass- and treble-notes that replaced the old to create a New Sonata (changing careers, doing sculpture, writing songs). Yet the Old Sonata and the original me still dwell beneath the surface. Old and New resonate.But do I really have to define myself, dammit? If I’m to be re-incarnated in (or as) a Book, my experiences and circumstances, my adventures and mis-adventures, great happenstances and small occasions, my insights and outlooks, my foibles and fables, my immodest achievements and embarrassing mistakes…will all have to speak for themselves. Thus…After Beethoven had finished playing one of his newly-composed sonatas, a fan asked him, “But Sir. What does it mean?” Beethoven reportedly sat down and played the sonata through again, and when he had finished -- refusing to be defined -- said, “That’s what it means!”Pass the salt. Note the tongue in cheek. And the kernels of truth.As Gloria Swanson said to Cecil B. DeMille in the film “Sunset Boulevard”, and as I said to my na?ve young proctologist as he was about to insert a fiber-optic device into my lower colon to perform a colonoscopy, “I’m ready for my close-up. A drum roll, if you please. ####A MAN FOR ALL REASONSHe was born Moshe. His birth certificate says Morris. But his friends and relatives and my Mom all called him Mike.I called him Dad. I learned from his examples how to work hard and how to amuse people. But rarely simultaneously.In their 1932 wedding portrait, Dad is wearing a tux and top hat, Mom a lovely white dress. Dad looks formal with a slight ironic smile that came to be his trade-mark -- and a fond memory. He smiled that smile when he was about to ‘crack wise’ as he put it, or about to utter something preposterous, charming, or weird…“Is it as cold in the winter as it is in the country?” was a favorite quip of Mike’s. “Fish don’t perspire” is another one that his grand-daughter Lisa remembers fondly. “What’s heavier: a pound of lead, or a pound of feathers?” “You’d kick even if you were swimming.” “You’ll be late for your own funeral” “O/ Wa/ Ta/ Go/ Siam” (translation: oh what a goose I am).”Rich or poor, it’s always good to have money.” All of us laughed no matter how many times we heard these. I still grin, revealing a slightly ironic smile, mirroring his.There are few pictures of Dad with us children because he was always working at the restaurant before 1947. There’s one snapshot of sister Barbara and me and Mom and Dad (our brother Elliott wasn’t born yet), taken in about 1942 in the restaurant, called the Enduro, that he and his older brother Harry owned and operated. (The name derived from a brand of stainless steel they used.) In 2013, Alan Rosen, Harry’s grand-son, opened Enduro, a restaurant on the upper east side of Manhattan, in honor of Mike and Harry. Dad was nobody’s fool. When he was in the restaurant business, he had once discovered a waiter had printed up counterfeit restaurant checks, handing out one copy with the higher-than-menu prices to the customer, and turning in to Dad a copy with lower actual-menu prices—pocketing the difference. Dad noticed this and fired him.He was ever-scornful of waiters. He insisted that if one of his waiters was asked by a patron, “Pardon me, waiter. Can you tell me what time it is?” His waiter would say, “I’m sorry, sir, but this is not my table”. (That was a joke Dad enjoyed telling.)Dad used to carry a lot of daily cash receipts from the Enduro in the days before credit cards. As a result, he had obtained a pistol permit which allowed him to carry a concealed weapon in New York City. He was robbed at gunpoint. Stopped at a traffic light at six am when he was driving home after the night shift, he was jumped by two thugs who hopped onto his running boards. (These are ledges old-fashioned cars used to have outside each door, to make it easier to enter.) Each pointed a gun at his head. He would have been shot dead had he tried to use the revolver—one of the few tools he didn’t know how to use. They stripped him of his money and valuables, tied his hands to the steering wheel, put a gag in his mouth and a blindfold over his eyes, locked the doors of the car, pulled his Borsalino over his eyes, and tossed his car keys down the sewer. It was hours before anyone going to work saw him and called the cops. (I still have this Borsalino from the 1930s. People stop me on the street and ask where I got it. I usually say, “It’s spoken for”. Bela has asked to have it, so he has “first dibs”. Lisa, my-daughter-the-art-restorer, has refurbished it for posterity.)In Brooklyn in the late 1930s, where the Enduro, thrived, I remember hearing the Inkspots on the radio singing “If I Didn’t Care”(1939). Boy, did I care. I loved music. And so did Dad.Dad would spontaneously burst out into song, on occasion, singing “Stick Out Your Can, Here Comes The Garbage Man”, a song us kids did not believe existed until nephew Louie discovered it recently online. Spontaneously, he also sang, “Horch Che Chorn Ya”, and “OH Shittanya, OH Shittanya …If I Had My Way I’d Shittanya All Day”. I suspect the latter he made up himself, although further research might reveal he heard it in a vaudeville show in his Youth. Always with the tongue-in-cheek smile. He should have had it patented. It’s been especially valuable to me now that I feel and see where it came from. Dad would have loved the title of a 1911 song about adultery, entitled, “If You Talk In Your Sleep, Don’t Mention My Name.”Born in 1906, he was one of thirteen children, only five of whom survived, born to Barnet and Sarah Roskolenkier, who came from Lomza Goberna, a city that couldn’t make up its mind whether to be in Poland or Russia. The family name changed at Ellis Island to Rosen.Dad was -- depending on who you speak to -- an optimist, a good business-man, a friendly and outspoken guy, hot-tempered, somewhat shy, impulsive, a diamond-in-the-rough, very practical, scary, a bully, tough, generous, and every bit a charming maverick. He loved all members of his family; his business and making money (“money is honey”, he often said); gadgets and tools; cars; driving-very-fast; working-very-hard; people; the opera; fine watches and jewelry; puttering and fixing things; collecting junk; scanning the classified ads section of Sunday’s New York Times; and wise-cracks.Dad used to say that his business lost money every day—but he made up for it by staying closed on Sundays. He was a bundle of eccentricities and aphorisms: “Rich or poor, it’s always good to have money”. And he didn’t care what people thought of him. Sometimes, when I was embarrassed by his flamboyance, he teased me: “You worry about what people say”. Nowadays, following Dad’s example, I take pleasure in good-naturedly embarrassing my own children.* * *We moved to Flushing Queens in 1940 when I was six years old.The brand-new house was on a nice street with newly planted trees, with other similar houses, and very pleasant neighbors -- including some kids my age. Dad became friendly and popular with all the neighbors; they loved his generosity and genial personality.Dad loved to fix things around the new house. I was made his helper, assistant, and chief “gofer” (as in “Steve: go for a left-handed monkey wrench”.) He decided to install underground sprinklers so we wouldn't have to lug hoses around the back and front yards.The house had a vast number of plumbing fittings and pipe of all sizes left over by the builder. Dad taught me the names and sizes of each fitting so I could fetch them for him from the basement while he worked on his sprinkler project.I learned all that I could as a six-year old about brass pipe fittings: “elbows”, “unions”, “nipples”, three-quarter inch this and half-inch that. I loved watching my Dad join things together. I loved helping him join things together. I still love joining things together. In the afternoon of my life, I still join things -- ideas, words, books, and people -- together. I weld tools together into abstract shapes and animals. My love of tools and fixing things began with Dad. (“Thanks, Dad!”)Dad always had tools around the house. I still love tools... hand tools, power tools, garden tools, nuts and bolts and screws. I still purchase tools at yard sales and weld them into abstract sculptures and assemblages like Picasso’s sculpture of a bull, made of a bicycle seat and handle-bars. (See the chapter entitled “Ironic Assemblages”)Dad called me his “number one son" (meaning first-born, in imitation of Charlie Chan from a series of movies of that era.) As a kid, I followed Dad faithfully like a puppy and admiringly like an acolyte on his appointed rounds. Much later, after Mom died, I asked Dad if I was their favorite, and the answer was a strong “No”; but as kid, I felt like I was. Maybe good parenting makes us all feel special.* * *A year after my Bar Mitzvah, the Enduro was forced to close. It had become a famous restaurant that was frequented by Mafioso mobsters who came to hear Frank Sinatra sing at the Brooklyn Paramount across the street during World War Two. The Enduro had made a very good living for the two Rosen brothers and their growing families.Dad and Uncle Harry Rosen (Dad’s brother) declared the Enduro bankrupt. GIs were returning. Labor unions got strong. And maybe they gambled too much at the racetrack during the “fat” years of World War Two.Harry and Mike parted ways, remaining brothers in name only. The Harry Rosen and the Mike Rosen families socialized only rarely. There was some bad blood between Harry and Mike, in part because my father and mother both thought Harry was too big for his britches, too bossy, and too arrogantly self-important. He had a huge ego, was a “legend-in-his-own-mind”, and possessed what I now call “important-itis”. (More about this dreaded pathology in a chapter called, “Rich Uncle, Poor Uncle”.)So Dad decided to get out of the restaurant business where he was working 16-hour days on his feet. Instead he went into the car wash business and worked only 12 or 14 hours a day on his feet.Dad had bought large amounts of life insurance during the money-making years at the Enduro, when the restaurant was a gold mine. He borrowed against his life insurance, and invested in a car wash.When I was in high school (Bayside High School) from 1947 to 1951, I worked weekends and summers at the car wash alongside Dad and his very-low-income-all-black employees who got paid $0.75 an hour in those days.They frequently came to work drunk. They carried razor blades and knives for self-protection, used words and phrases unfamiliar to me, but exposure to them opened up my sheltered middle-class-bubble-life to a “liberal” education about life in the real world. The comfortable life I lived at Bayside High School, on 181st Street, and later at Queens College, was mainly possible because Dad overcame the immigrant squalor he grew up in on the ‘mean streets’ and in the ‘school of hard knocks’ of the Lower East Side at the beginning of the twentieth century. Dad said everyone he grew up with was poor, but “we didn’t know we were poor”. I guess fish do not know they exist in water.Dad was simultaneously a tough boss, a practical employer, a hard-working role-model, a worldly-wise mentor, and loving father. When he said I was “dragged up” (not “raised up”) he meant it as an ambiguous pleasantry …one of his ironic wise-cracks about life. He meant he was not going to coddle me. No son of his would be a spoiled rich-kid treated with kid gloves, even though my mother thought that I was a Jewish Prince.In the phrase “Flushing-by-the mud” Dad was saying, in effect: “Don’t think you live in Hastings-on-Hudson or Deauville-by-the-Sea, because like me, you come from humble beginnings; like me, you’re gonna have to work hard to earn my respect and your self-respect and anything else you really want.” This was Mike Rosen’s subtext, text, and super-text…his mantra…his Bible, his Shakespeare, his raison d’etre.Sometimes these roles conflicted, especially on those occasions when I thought I knew more than he knew (often); when I was being a rebellious teenager (often); when I was merely being a difficult adolescent and adversary (often); or simply being a wise-ass smart-aleck (very often). Mark Twain comes to mind: “When I was fifteen, I thought my father was an awful ignoramus; but by the time I was twenty five, I was surprised at how much the old man had learned in just ten short years.”I followed Dad around at the car-wash, and whenever he met people he knew from the car wash business… competitors, suppliers, his old grammar-school friends from the Lower East Side, and his new pals. I eventually went with him to monthly meetings of a trade association, a semi-social gathering of car wash owners—men like my father who were mostly un-educated, self-made “rugged individualists”.Some of them were very colorful. One guy, an Italian named Vito, looked like a rough-and-ready alpha male sent from central casting to be a Mob boss. I imagined he was well-connected to the Mob. I had seen a lot of Mob movies starring guys who looked a lot like Vito, and I had a vivid imagination. He may not have been “connected”.But Vito stands out in my mind because he explained how he saved his money. “So I take-a da silva dollas from-a da biznez, and I-a drop-a them into the 55 gallon steel drum buried under my concrete floor in-a the my basement of-a my house. No thieves-a could open it."Someone asked Vito, “So how are you going to retrieve the silver dollars when the drum was full?. He replied that a 55 gallon drum full of silver was going to be worth so much money that he could afford to use jack-hammers to dig out and get at the silver dollars, and a welding torch to open the drum. How much would 55 gallons of silver dollars be worth? A treasure. I hesitate to guess. An exercise for the reader. [Hint: how much does a 55-gallon drum of water weigh? One gallon weighs about 8 pounds. The density of silver is about ten times that of water. There are 16 ounces to a pound. The 2012 price of silver is about $40 an ounce. Some hint! Allow for spaces between the silver dollars, and the fact they are not pure silver. I get about one to two million 2012 dollars!]At these meetings of the car wash owners association were the Turk brothers, who ran the biggest car wash in Queens; they used to brag that they would wash 1,200 cars on a busy Saturday. My father was dubious -- but curious about it. So he paid my child-hood friend Justin McCarthy to watch from behind a billboard and to count every car that passed through their car wash operation from 6 a.m. to 6 pm. I brought Justin lunch. Those two “braggarts” had not exaggerated.Working alongside Dad and the employees, we washed 600 cars one day at two bucks a car. In the 1950s this was real money. No credit cards then, so this was what Dad called “green”.In the twenty-first century, the car wash we inherited (at 175-04 Horace Harding Expressway) is still a car wash now operated by a commercial tenant using modern equipment who, charging up to twenty bucks for a car wash, grosses about a million dollars a year.Dad drove himself very hard. He drove all his employees very hard, sometimes as many as twenty-five guys on a busy Saturday. And he drove me very hard. I learned about hard work by watching Dad work hard. I got to do each job at the car wash: vacuuming cars, directing traffic, washing, drying, supervising, managing, and depositing checks. Dad worked diligently and prospered. Our family lived well (at 64-26 181st Street, in Flushing, Queens) and Dad was proud to be a good provider and proud of his family. At times his pride veered into hubris: Mom said of him that he wanted (and achieved) success, but he didn’t know quite what to do with it when he had it -- although he loved cars and owned a series of unusual vehicles, including an apple-green Chrysler “Town and Country” convertible elegantly trimmed in blonde wood.In the middle 1950s, demagogues like Joseph McCarthy were persecuting anyone with left-leaning or Communist affiliations. Our former ally in World War II, the Soviet Union, and its Communist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ became our mortal enemy in the Cold War.My “social conscience” developed slowly. I began to think that those poor blacks I worked with at the car wash were being “exploited” by my Dad and by people like him.Dad noticed my new attitude, and asked if I was friendly to Communists and idealistic lefties. I gave an ambiguous answer. But of course at college, professors were fired for their leftist affiliations, party groups, or Communist “cells”.I was conflicted. My father was a successful businessman who had pulled himself out of crushing poverty. He had “made it”. We had a good standard of living because of him and his embrace of capitalism. Capitalism also embraced the hard-driving Mike Rosen. It was a case of mutual admiration.His employees, who owned no business like a car wash, were “wage slaves”. My father paid them the going wage. They earned their money. If they were “exploited” they certainly were no angels, these poor workers, and if they were lazy or drunk or belligerent brawlers...shame on them.Over time, while I was still in college and living at home, Dad gave me more and more responsibility on the job. He needed some relief and a vacation. He decided to put me in charge of the manager and keep an eye on him, so he and Mom and Elliott could go on a one-month cross-country car trip. Dad loved cars and loved driving. He could sit while driving, and could drive as fast as he liked. (“What seems to be the matter, Officer?”)Upon his return, Dad discovered that the manager was stealing receipts daily, right under my nose due to my naiveté and inexperience. Dad’s due diligence and street smarts led him to get the money back by making an offer to the manager he couldn’t refuse: either go to jail or sign a letter agreeing to pay back all his stolen funds. (He signed and paid the money back.)I was crushed and very disappointed in myself that I hadn't done my job of watching the family business properly. I am still displeased with my performance that summer when I “covered” for Dad….but didn’t “uncover” the leakage of funds.Dad and I clashed angrily from time to time. On one occasion, I did not show up for work as expected. When Dad came home to find me calmly watching television while he himself had put in a grueling 12-hour workday, he was furious at me. Impulsively, he rushed to accost me and stood over me and raised his hand as if to strike me, something he never did, and my reaction surprised even me.I found myself bounding out of my chair, and stood tall. I was a full head taller than him. And then I shouted at him, “You touch me and I'll beat the shit out of you!" I had no idea I was going to say this.Dad recoiled, surprised at my aggressive posture and words. My Mom was beside herself, pleading with us, trying to pacify both of us. Dad backed off. Neither he nor I apologized, but Mom made us make peace. Life returned slowly to business-as-usual. Looking back, I counted my assertive behavior as the beginning of my breaking away from the grip of the family business, dependence on Dad, and my autonomy.Dad was very proud of me even if he never told me. I heard indirectly that he would brag about my accomplishments to his friends.When I graduated Queens College, Mom and Dad came to my graduation and to a special ceremony where I received an award as the top student that year. I heard him cheering as I went up to gather the science books given to me inscribed by all of the physics professors: “To Stephen Rosen, awarded for Excellence in Physics.”Dad wanted me to go into the car wash business with him, but I wanted to study physics. After I left home to go to graduate school, Dad found a car wash partner, Tony Compagna, who was a few decades younger than Dad. They became co-owners of several car washes together. Dad was a trusted mentor to Tony and they got along very well together. (Unlike Dad and his brother Harry.) They really enjoyed each other’s company, hung out, and even went to the racetrack together.After I had children in my late twenties, and was then a young assistant professor of physics, I began to reflect on my relationship with Dad. I guess working for and with him for a few years, I picked up a lot of his mannerisms and attitudes. Like him, I joked with the customers. Like him, I worked hard. Like him, I exuded prideful confidence.This was during the 1960s. Miki (my then-wife), son Daniel, and daughter Lisa and I would visit Mom and Dad on a Sunday once every month or so, in Peekskill, in a lovely house, a hide-away love-nest in a glen with a stream running alongside, they had bought to escape the gossip of the old neighbors on 181st Street in Queens.As I thought about my new role as head of a growing family, and as a new father, and as a young upwardly-mobile professional, I realized that Dad was truly a very good role model for me. He was a good father, a family man, a very hard worker, generous to everyone, was amusing, had friends and colleagues who respected him, and was sought out by people for advice.I remembered Mark Twain's remark about his father, quoted earlier: “…surprised at how much the old man had learned in just 10 short years.” This seemed to fit my new circumstances -- except it took me longer than it took Mark Twain to realize that I was the one who had changed. I was in my thirties, teaching at the Maritime College at Fort Schuyler, and writing my dissertation.A friend, Stanley, whose father had died when he was only twelve years old, confided how much he regretted that he had never told his father he loved him. In his frequent dreams, Stanley was able to tell his dream-version father that he loved him, but these dreams haunted him regularly, even as an adult. I turned this story over and over in my mind, and one day decided to do something myself. My wife, children, and I were visiting Mom and Dad in Peekskill on a wintry Sunday. I suggested to Dad that we take a walk in the nearby woods together, just the two of us. I spoke to him about us and our relationship over the years: me as a kid growing up; me as a rebellious teenager; he and I working together at the car wash; me as a grown man with my own family.Then I said, “Dad: I’ve told you over the years how oppositional I was to you. But I never told you how much I loved you”.Dad burst into tears. I burst into tears. We stood there, among the frozen trees in the cold snow and hugged each other for a long time. It felt good. Dad was crying out of happiness and I was sobbing because I was able to say what I deeply felt, and it was a release.A stranger came walking along the path in the woods. He noticed us sobbing and hugging. He asked, “Is there anything wrong? Can I help?” Both Dad and answered “No thanks. Everything is fine”.* * *Don’t ever give a gun to a hot-head. In the nineteen fifties our Dad was the proud owner of a car wash. A car wash customer licked his finger and ran it over the finish of his car and then complained that his car was still dirty. Dad said, “We don’t wash our cars with spit”. The customer was not amused. He backed his car into the car wash, blocking all the cars that came behind him on the assembly line. Dad said, “Just bring your car around the front and we’ll wash it again”. The customer said, “Wash it again right here and right now”. So Dad got into the car and drove it out of the car wash so the cars behind, assembly-line fashion, could continue to pass through single file.The customer got into his car, and backed it up blocking the oncoming assembly line of cars. He locked the doors so Dad could not drive it out. Dad was frustrated, impulsive, and angry. He got twenty of his men, big bruisers built like football linemen, to lift the car and to carry it outside where it wouldn’t block the exit of oncoming cars. The customer unlocked his car, got in, and backed it right into the path of the exiting cars, blocking the exit once again.Dad still had a license to carry a concealed weapon. He pulled the gun out of his back pocket--and shot out the customer’s tire flat. (He went ballistic!) The police were called. Dad was taken to the station where I picked him up. He and the cops were having a big laugh about the whole episode. But he had his license to pack a rod revoked. He had to pay a steep financial penalty as well. Lesson: don’t carry a concealed weapon if you’re impulsive. (Dad said that the tire was flat—but only on the bottom.)***I helped him move out of the Peekskill house after Mom died in 1975 of complications from a stroke and cancer. The house was full of memories of their lives together, but there was very little, aside from a few neighbors, to console him and to take him away from his memories and his profound grief. His grief became my grief.Dad’s physician urged him to move to Florida to start a new life and to meet new people. I volunteered to accompany Dad to Boca Raton where Harry and Ruth Rosen lived “the good life” in a very upscale Jewish community called Woodlands.But first, I proudly brought Harry and Mike together for a meeting to reconcile any old differences, and so Harry could see how bereft Dad was about losing Mom, and how lonely he was. Harry was, after all, his older brother -- for better or worse. (I spoke about this re-union, tearfully, in the family archival recordings that nephew Louie generously put together.)Harry rose to the occasion. He was also in favor of his brother Mike moving to Florida. He was enthusiastic in his praise of "the good life" and urged a new start in a new place with new people.When Dad and I arrived, Harry and Ruth were very welcoming. Dad had grown a beard since his retirement and looked a little like a “hippie” -- a look Dad would have scorned when he was a successful businessman who always voted Republican. Harry took one look at the beard and said: “You have to get rid of that!"Though reluctant to part with it, Dad complied. He and I found a very nice gated community with a pool and lots of people his age. Most of these retirees were widows, outnumbering the men about three to one. Once he got over mourning Mom, Dad had his pick.Harry and Ruth tried fixing Dad up with some of the wealthy widows they knew. And Dad asked me to help meet potential female companions. While sitting on the chaise lounges poolside in sunny Florida he said: "Steve. I've forgotten how to meet women. It was so long ago when I did it last. I need help. You've been divorced a long time. How do I start speaking to a complete stranger?"I said: “Sure. I can help." I walked around the pool several times to scope out the scene of available ladies. I noticed a pleasant woman of a certain age, in good health, chatting amiably with her friends.I approached and introduced myself: “Hi. My name is Steve Rosen, and my Dad just moved here from New York. My Mom died and he’s lonely. He’d like to meet you, but he’s shy.”She said, “Which one is he?” I said: “It’s that very nice man over there”, and I pointed him out. She looked, and said, “Sure. I’ll be happy to meet him. But can I ask you a question?” And I said: “Yes. Of course".She said, (and I am not making this up): “Are you married?” I said, “No”. Then she asked, “Where do you live?” I responded, “New York City”.She smiled. “I have a divorced daughter who lives in New York, and I think you and she should meet each other.”I laughed, and brought her over to meet Dad. They got along famously, and all of us were amused about her wishing to fix me up with her divorced daughter. (I can’t remember if I ever met the daughter.)After a few years, Dad settled in to the good, slow-and-easy Florida life. He had a steady girlfriend his age for a few years.I flew down to see him where he had been taken on the previous Sunday: in the intensive care unit at the hospital. He was lucid as I listened by his bedside to what had happened. He said, “In the afternoon I had chest pains. I thought it was maybe indigestion or something routine. But after a few hours I realized it was serious and went to the hospital.”His doctor told me privately that Dad should have gone to the Emergency Room as soon as the pain started, and not waited, because damage was quickly done by prolonging the attack.I sat with him for a few hours the day I arrived, and reported his condition by phone to my sister Barbara and brother Elliott, and to Harry and Ruth. They suggested I stay with them, a rare act of generosity, since they had never even allowed their own children to stay with them.The next day I went to the hospital, accompanied by Dad’s girlfriend of record. We chatted with Dad. He looked weak and confused. He was able to speak with some difficulty.Shirley and I left the hospital to go out for lunch together. About an hour later, we returned to the hospital. The receptionist asked who we were. We explained that we had been in earlier, visiting Morris Rosen. She said, “Wait a moment”.A doctor approached and asked who we were. Then he explained: “Morris Rosen died of a heart attack half an hour ago. As his son, you may view his body if you wish.”I was thunderstruck! Only an hour earlier Dad was alive. I felt like a fist was squeezing my heart. I went to his room and closed the door.Dad looked peaceful. His face was as relaxed as I’ve ever seen him. I sat there holding his hand for long time. I recalled that when I was little, he would ask me to scratch his back. He had a mole on his upper shoulder. The mole was still there. I studied it for a long time, those memories of scratching his back when I was a kid, flooding my mind and filling the moment with grief. Dad’s was the first dead body I had ever seen.I called my sister and brother: “I'm sitting in Dad's hospital room with Dad. He finally looks relaxed and very peaceful. He died of a heart attack".I made funeral arrangements to ship his body to New York. I arranged for his furniture and personal effects to be sold. When I returned to New York I was depressed, exhausted, and came down with pneumonia.I was forty-four, the year was 1978, and had not yet re-married, so I was alone in my apartment. Recuperation dragged on for a month; I became breathless walking a few feet. My immune system must have completely collapsed. My sister Barbara brought me chicken soup, and I was very grateful. Then I knew what it meant and felt like to be “sick-at-heart”.That “sick-at-heart” feeling permeated my days from morning to bed-time. Every morning for about a year I would wake up fine. Then, after a few minutes, I would remember that Dad had died. This deep, tight, feeling, like a fist grabbing my heart, a squeeze-pain in my chest returned, invading my life. I was glad I had told Dad, well before he died, that I loved him.* * *Flash-back to the 1950s… Mrs. Edner was a busybody-neighbor-who-would-enter-our-house-unannounced. She did this regularly. Everyone else on 181st Street would knock or ring the bell first, of course. But she walked right in without knocking or ringing the doorbell.Dad cured her of this bad habit by purposely coming to the top of the stairs stark naked. He drew her attention to him by saying, “Can I help you?” Mrs. Edner looked up, saw the nude Mike Rosen, and fled in confusion and embarrassment. She never entered unannounced again. ####ON BEING A GOOD PERSON: EMMA ROSENMy Mom, Emma Rosen, was the eldest of four children born in the United States early in the twentieth century, of Russian-immigrant parents. If my ‘assignment’ from Dad was to work hard and to be successful, my ‘assignment’ from Mom was to be a good person.Her father Avram Katznellinson (“Zadie” to me) was an intellectual, an editor of a Hebrew-language newspaper in St. Petersburg, and a devout Zionist. He and his wife, both Zionists, came to America for the sole purpose of making and saving enough money so they could emigrate to the Holy Land, which at the time was called Palestine and now called Israel. Life did not work out for them as planned. His four children (Hy, Mom, Frieda, and Ellie) were born in New York, so it became difficult financially for the family to travel to Palestine. His wife died when I was three years old in 1937, and I have a dim memory of her bed-ridden and very frail.Zadie spoke no English and visited our family to teach me Hebrew before I was a Bar Mitzvah boy. Every Sunday he took public transportation from Bensonhurst in the bowels of Brooklyn, and spent two hours traveling to visit our home in Queens. I was his first grandson and he was eager for me to know Hebrew and to connect with him. I, however, was more interested in the chocolate reward he would give me after our lesson.Zadie was tall, with a lush beard, smoked cigarettes down to the nub, and smelled of tobacco smoke. He was from Babruysk (Bobruisk), in Belarus, a town south of Minsk. (For details, see and the next chapter, “Genealogy Research”.) Zadie was a writer, a philosopher, and later when he lived in St. Petersburg, he was the editor of a Yiddish language newspaper. However, in America, which immigrants called “The Golden Land”, the land of opportunity, he was a suit “presser”... a manual laborer. Zadie worked hard, and was a religious man, a “wage-slave” who never was able to save enough money, once the children were born and settled in America, to move to Israel.At my Bar Mitzvah in 1947, Dad decided to have the Enduro cater the post-synagogue-service celebration event at our home Flushing, New York -- and hired musicians to play. Over 100 family, friends, and neighbors crowded into every room in the house. Dad had hired a professional photographer to put together a huge photo album, which shows us mingling and visiting each other happily at the event.Grand-father Zadie gave a short toast in Russian or Yiddish; I didn’t understand a word. A photo from the event shows Zadie speaking into a microphone, and me standing alongside. But my eyes are closed out of boredom or incomprehension. That was not one of my finer moments. Zadie died a year later and his was the first funeral I ever attended. It was a very hot day. As they lowered Zadie’s coffin into the ground, I fainted…collapsing to the ground. So Zadie’s death hit me hard.The major Manhattan industry in Zadie’s era, the early part of the century, was garment manufacturing. This industry has since moved “offshore” where labor costs are very low. (An excellent documentary about the rise and fall of the garment (“shmata”) industry is, “From Rags To Riches To Rags”; a joke is told in the movie about a flasher -- a guy showing his private parts by opening his coat in front of women; he comes to the garment center of Manhattan during lunchtime when all the garment secretaries are out having lunch: one woman looks up and down, then side to side, at his open coat, and says “You call that a lining?”)* * *Mom grew up in a house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, near Sheepshead Bay. Unlike Dad, she finished high school, and got a job as a bank teller until she and Dad married. A wedding photo of her reveals a slender, attractive, fashionable young woman.Mom was an avid and voracious reader (she could assimilate several books a day), a skilled and fanatic cross-word puzzle addict -- and a lover of the theater and virtually everyone including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (especially Eleanor), Adlai Stevenson, intellectuals, ADA (Americans for Democratic Action), Leonard Bernstein and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and most family members. She was warm, emotionally accessible, open with her feelings, very intelligent, a good cook (though often put-upon by Dad; long-suffering because she did not have a career outside our home) and a very generous hostess.Mom liked Mrs. Roosevelt’s activities in helping those in need, in social welfare, in Negro’s and women’s rights, in what today we might call “politically correct” issues,…but most of all Mom sought to be – perhaps to a fault -- “a good person” and a kind and generous person --which she always was.She was never an activist. She was a liberal—as a friend put it—“a person whose feet are planted firmly in mid-air”. Her liberal and personal views were always heart-felt. Her feelings were very often expressed openly. She wept easily, and I must have inherited that from her. I joke that I’m so sappy “I cry at television commercials”.She raised us kids to be “good”, by which she meant us to respect others, to be kind, to be generous, to be courteous and polite at all times, and to help those less fortunate than we were. Her definition of a good Jew: “A good Jew is a good person.” This was her formulation of the “Golden Rule”.[Other definitions of a good Jew: from an Orthodox rabbi, “a good Jew is one whose grandchildren are good Jews”; from an Israeli, “a good Jew is one who lives in Israel”.]Mom was a very nurturing and supportive mother, and as mentioned a very good cook. When my father was not occupied as a work-a-holic, he loved to cook with her. Before he became a restaurateur, he had worked as a sandwich man (and then owner) in a luncheonette. My favorite photo shows the two of them in the kitchen making a turkey for us at Thanksgiving.All of the holidays were occasions for them to cook, and for us to visit together, especially later when I had my own family.Mom was a warm and friendly person to virtually everyone. She identified with the under-dog. She was overly trusting of people. She rarely said a bad thing about anyone. Two exceptions: she had only scorn for Harry Rosen and his “big shot” airs and because of his shabby treatment of her husband in business; she was also critical of the poet Harry Roskolenko, Dad’s youngest brother we called “Bob”, who she referred to as a “schnorrer”, meaning a guy always looking for a hand-out…Of course he was a starving poet, the “black sheep” of the family. More about them in the chapter, “Rich Uncle, Poor Uncle”.Dad, ever the businessman, was tough-minded and somewhat skeptical of people and politicians. As mentioned, Mom was tender-hearted, a cultured person, and a big consumer (a ‘culture vulture’) of ballet, the theater, music, books and books and ever-more books. She read books to a fault, and introduced us kids to books and the world of culture. Because she was a big fan of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green I came to love them, and still do.When she reached her menopause years, she often read trash, pulp fiction, and mystery stories—sometimes several a day to my father’s chagrin and dismay—ignoring her assigned role as “haus-frau” and kitchen slave to our father’s what-he-felt-to-be-justifiable demands for a hot meal on the table when he came home late after a 12-14 hour day on his feet.We usually waited for Dad to come home and invariably ate dinner all together. Table talk was hot and lively, what we did during the day, what was on the news. (It was at dinner that I first heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941; and at dinner when we heard that the first nuclear weapon devastated Hiroshima in August 1945.)Mom laughed and giggled if Dad said something even remotely amusing. She loved him, but was often brow-beaten by him. Dad expected Mom to be at his beck-and-call because he was a “good provider”, and he felt justified in his small-time bullying and frequently tyrannical behavior. Dad also had a temper--which Mom was afraid of. She was often rendered speechless by his anger and orders. We and some relatives were not happy with the fact that he bossed her around. (When I asked him late in his life why he did this, he said, “I was afraid of her”!)But when he was relaxed and in an expansive good mood, Mom would ruffle his hair, or kiss him—but we rarely saw the kind of demonstrative physical contact her death-bed confession (about which more below) would have indicated.Bed-ridden after she had had a crippling stroke, she was alternately irrational and lucid. Her periods of rambling consisted of intermittent free-associations, indecipherable nonsense, flash-backs to her early childhood, and injustices to her. This alternated with rational remarks about us and the world.(Why is it that memoir-writing brings out the death-bed scenes in all of us?)I sat next to her bed in the hospital…listening. She knew I was there. At several points she said my name. When she again became lucid, she said: “Steve. Your father has been the sunshine of my life!” I thought to myself, ‘This is news to me, given his dominant behavior towards her later in her life’. But somewhere, somehow, she still had something positive from him…his ambition and energy, his optimism and humor.Then, later: “Steve. My star. My star.” It is ironic to me that my doctoral dissertation dealt with exploding stars, called “supernova”, and how they generate cosmic radiation. (Please see “Cosmic Messengers” in the Appendix.) I suspect her comment was a coincidence, because my stars are different than her stars. But who knows? I didn’t pick the subject; it picked me.My theory is that Mom was an episodic depressive and an introvert—which explained her compulsive book-reading and cross-word puzzle-solving (she could do the New York Time daily cross-word in about ten minutes, and one in the Sunday Times in about 20 minutes flat). She had a voluminous knowledge of words, and I often asked her the meaning of words before checking a dictionary.There is some research that supports the notion that an angry spouse can bring a depressed spouse out of depression, but I doubt that Dad would have known that, although he might have ‘intuited’ it. After Mom died, Dad was devastated … truly a lost soul.My sister Barbara told me that while in the hospital listening to Mom ramble on, Mom actually once told Barbara that Dad had said something terrible to Mom, perhaps in order to get Mom to “snap out” of her depression and lethargy. He said Mom was “rotten to the core”, which turned out to be prophetic of the cancer no one knew (until an autopsy was performed) was destroying her every internal organ. I believe Barbara, but I wonder if Mom was playing to different audiences, and merely said what would “play well” to each of us. Of course the two apparently-different comments could both be true, which I suspect is the case. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, Barbara and I had different parents.But what shocked me even more than “Your father has been the sunshine of my life” – which makes some sense to the extent that his optimism and cheer could temper her depression—is what she said later on as I sat by her bedside, listening to her stroke-induced logorrhea, her loquacious ruminations.In the midst all her free-association jumble of words and memories she interjected “Dying is really hell!!”—which proved she knew what was happening to her—and then she dropped in these words: “Steve. Your father and I have had a great sex life!”I listened closely. I asked, “Mom. Why are you telling me this?” She said, “I just want you to know!”Perhaps Mom was presenting me with a great gift, telling me it was okay to be sexual, to experience full creature-hood, to obey one’s primitive urges, to be happy with a partner. I am glad I lived long enough for this gift to be fulfilled.I thought Mom and Dad were never physically affectionate in front of us kids, which was a norm in that era….but once they were alone—who knew? My brother tells me that he overheard Dad’s brothers talking about Mom and Dad’s very vigorous and lusty sex life. If Dad was “the sunshine” of Mom’s life, Mom was a sustaining presence of warm support—and, yes sunshine--in my life. ####GENEALOGICAL RESEARCHI didn’t expect my grandchildren while young to care about my ancestors because I didn't become interested in my own ancestors until my fifth decade. My parents mentioned their parents from time to time, but when we were kids this was of a lower priority than current events: school, food, stickball, books, movies, and joking-around-table-talk.Yet it was at family dinners that we heard the names of the villages our grandparents lived in and left to come here to the United States -- the "Golden Land" or the “promised land”.America was imagined by our immigrant-ancestors as a free country and land of opportunity compared to the desperate poverty and the autocratic czarist governments our ancestors faced and lived in fear of daily in Mother Russia.Russia had been ruled for centuries by dictators (Peter the Great, the Romanovs) whose word was law. Anti-Semitism was embedded in the Russian social climate, in peasant-mentality, and in the armed soldiers of the Czars, the Cossacks, who were cruel and ruthless in their oppression of our ancestors. Misery, squalor, and oppression were the daily diet of our Russian predecessors in Russia. Departure was their dream, emigration their future.If our ancestors imagined America as a "promised land", with streets metaphorically “paved with gold”, it was a romanticized vision of the real thing -- a land of equal opportunity for each citizen to make a decent living based upon ability to work hard.So too, was our vision of "the old country" somewhat of a fantasy.Yes, Mom and Dad spoke of their parents’ courage, survival instincts, their will-to-live, and their absolute willingness to endure hardship in order to leave a barren existence to arrive at a strange distant country, to speak a new language, and to embrace the risks of finding work. Mom and Dad described the living conditions in Russia as if their parents lived in "the shtetl" -- the regions of Russia reserved for impoverished Jews, inhabiting lands that the down-trodden could not own. This is one explanation for the rise of the professions and portable wealth among Jews. The diamond merchants and the bankers or lawyers or physicians might not own property because it was forbidden to Jews -- but they could carry jewelry, their professions, their knowledge of medicine, the law, science.***But our vision of "the shtetl" as told by my parents Emma and Mike at table talk resembled those scenes in movies like "Fiddler On The Roof", where the peasant Jews lived in mud huts with their farm animals sharing their meager quarters, and the Cossacks sweeping through these villages destroying the fragile lives of these, our shtetl-bound ancestors.The film itself was an idealized Hollywood version of poverty and oppression. Real life, for those disenfranchised Jewish peasants, was much worse. The book, “When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone” by Gal Beckerman, depicts in bloody detail how twentieth-century Jews dealt with the officially-sanctioned cruelty of Russian anti-Semitism.* * *In a New York Times essay, “The Stories That Bind Us” (March 15, 2013) the author of “Secrets of Happy Families”, Bruce Feiler, cites studies that demonstrate: ?“The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.” Writing my “family narrative” and these stories about my parents has immeasurably improved my own self-esteem, self-control, and satisfaction.Doing genealogical research is easy with the use of the Internet. If you know the family name of your ancestor and the name of the village or town where they live, you can "piggy-back" on the genealogical research of others, whose ancestors with the same name came from the same village.Thus, my mother's maiden name was Katznelson (or Katsenellinson) and they came from a town called Bobruisk(or Babruysk), south of Minsk, in what is now Belarus, the most oppressive regime and remnant of Communism in Russia today.So I entered "Katznelson” and “Bobruisk” into Google, and up popped a website operated by the Jewish Genealogical Society.I wrote e-mails to anyone who had researched “Bobruisk” and “Katznelson”. These people descended from the same people I was descended from…maybe. I was flooded with letters from people who thought we might be relatives.The letters told of Katznelsons past who had been: timber barons, horse-thieves, rabbis, scholars, physicists, and peddlers. Many told of being related to Beryl Katznelson, a Zionist who was one of the founders of the state of Israel and a hero, somewhat like George Washington is in the U.S., and he’s prominently featured in the Israeli history textbooks. Beryl was quoted in several of these letters from my far-flung correspondents and maybe-relatives.Beryl had said that there were so many Katznelsons in Bobruisk that "If you would throw a stone in any direction, you would either hit a dog -- or a Katznelson”.My mother's version of the name Katznelson: the ‘Katz’ part is a common Jewish name which comes from the Hebrew ‘Kohane’ meaning ‘high priest’, and ‘Tzadik’ meaning holy wise man. So ‘Katz’ means most holy wise priest. So much for the common name Katz.As for the ‘Nelson’ part of the name, my Mom insisted that some poor Jews named ‘Katz’ who lived in Bobruisk were so happy when Adm. Lord Nelson defeated Napoleon, that they added the Nelson to the Katz to commemorate the victory. Thus, Katznelson. As the Italians say: “Si non vero, e ben trovato” (“Even if it’s not true, it’s well invented, a good story, and should be true”.)Another theory about the name goes back to the great Rabbinic scholar Rashi who lived in the eleventh century in France. One of his six daughters was reputed to have married a man whose name was derived from a river called the Bogen; a bend in the river looked like a cat’s elbow, thus the name was ‘Katzenellenbogen’, or cat’s elbow. OK. If it’s not true it’s also well-invented. [“What has two legs and kicks cats?...two beats…Mrs. Katz.”]Some of the letter-writers were highly accomplished, and some were even neighbors in Manhattan.Ira Katznelson lives in the apartment building next to ours on West 81st St. in Manhattan. He is a well-known sociologist at Columbia University.Another Katznelson was a neurosurgeon in Boston who had hired a young graduate student from Minsk to do genealogical research in Bobruisk using local town-hall records of births and deaths. He also visited St. Petersburg every summer to teach neurosurgery to Russian medical students, and had visited Bobruisk. I decided to avoid Bobruisk when we were in Russia in 2006 because we saw depressingly grim-faced people on the streets of Moscow. No pedestrians smiled or made eye-contact. We realized that our grandparents had struggled in the extreme, risking their lives and those of their children, to leave. They must have had powerful reasons to depart. And we had strong reasons to depart as well. America -- the golden land – was awash in smiling faces.* * *Dad’s parents’ Russian name was "Roskolenkier”, and Dad said that they came from “Lomza-Goberna”, a village that was near or on the border between Russia and Poland; at times it was in Russia, and other times in Poland, depending on the politics and geographical climate of the times.My research into this combination of family-name-plus-village-name took a slightly different turn when I uncovered another method.This time, I placed a classified ad in the International Jerusalem Post. I specified the names of Dad’s parents, their village, and when they were born and died. I received a dozen letters from Australia, Europe, Israel and elsewhere.One letter stood out. It was from a young man, a social worker, who had just returned from a visit to Lomza-Goberna. We invited him for Sunday brunch of bagels and lox and ‘schmoozing’ (a Yiddish word meaning casual conversation or chitchat).He told us he had ancestors from Lomza and that it was not an impoverished Fiddler-On-The-Roof-mud-on-the-floor shtetl, but a thriving prosperous farming community -- much like those found in Iowa. This came as a shock to us because we imagined our ancestors living in complete squalor.The visitor also said that there were no Jews left in Lomza, but that there was a Jewish cemetery, which he visited every day. He observed that there were fresh flowers at the gates of the cemetery every day he visited, despite the fact that no Jews lived there since the Holocaust.A friend of some forty years, Howard Epstein, husband of Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, has ancestors who also came from Lomza. Over the years, friends have remarked that he and I look somewhat alike. Once we discovered our common heritage-connection to the town Lomza, we started calling each other “cousin”. His wife said we were “kissing cousins". “Howard and Steve may kiss”, Cynthia said, “but not on the lips”.####EXCEEDING MY EXPECTATIONS I was the only Jewish kid in Public School 163 and was skipped a full year, so that all of my classmates were a year older than I was. At grammar school age, one year makes a big difference in physical and emotional maturity. I often felt like a triple outsider, being skipped and being Jewish and being immature. This were my “issues”, and maybe still are. I make light of this issue by joking that immaturity is one reason I appear to be so young for my age.I was a skinny hyperactive kid. “Nervous energy” Dad called it. “Impulsive” I call it. If I was six years old in 2012, I would probably be diagnosed as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), a condition which runs, or gallops, in our family. This condition is treatable today with meds (stimulants like Ritalin) and they allow a hyper-kinetic kid like my nephew Neil is, and like I was, to focus and concentrate. This would have saved me a lot of trouble, since I practically had to strap myself into a seat belt in order to write the five books and the hundred articles I had written.I played stickball and touch-football in the streets. I was a fast runner. I read voraciously: Tom Swift adventures, Encyclopedias, books about inventions, science fiction, science, Relativity, philosophy… anything I could read, including porn, and junk novels, in addition to required literature in school.When I was a naive twelve- year old, I was invited by a fat older kid to meet him in the schoolyard after school. Not knowing better, I showed up – only to learn too late that he had challenged me to a fist-fight. He had a dozen accomplices, arranged in a circle like an arena, into which we two were shoved to spar. I had never been in a fist-fight before in my life (nor since), and didn’t know what to do or how to defend myself. I had no reason to expect I could defend myself or fight back properly. His pals tightened their circle around us, making a circular boxing ring, and he started slinging punches, landing a few good ones. Unprepared, I just started punching back, wildly… almost blindly. Luckily for me, and exceeding my expectations, a few landed. He started bleeding.His pals were screaming, egging him on. “Hit the Jew bastard back! Hit him hard!” But he began crying and soon enough (it wasn’t too soon for me) stopped punching as the blood ran down the sides of his face onto his clothes. “You said you could beat him up!” they chanted scornfully. He slipped out of the ring, still vertical, pride hurt, and gave up. I left, unmolested by the rabble, the toughs who tended to him. They could have ganged up on me in revenge, with disastrous results for me… but they didn’t, perhaps out of fair play or remorse.When I got home, my mother said, “What happened to you?” I said, “I got into a fight…I beat the other kid up.” Because I was not expected to be a fighter, and never fought again with my fists, this deja vu, misted with age and perhaps inflated with a pinch of salt and tongue-in-cheek, is a fond memory of growing up – surprising myself by rising to a challenge. This was an early challenge I met and conquered, but as I aged I was able to surprise myself again and again. Perhaps my hyper-kinetic qualities helped me triumph on this singular occasion. Thank God for ADHD? Or was this a lesson from Dad’s teaching me to “work hard, play hard”. And by extension to “fight hard”?If “surprise-able” isn’t a word, it should be…because in different venues and under different circumstances, I was repeatedly able to surprise myself and surpass my own expectations…and those of others.* * *After Bayside High School in 1947, I went to Queens College in 1951.During the Korean War in the 1950s I was studying physics, then referred to as "a critical skill", and it was possible grounds for exempting me from military service.I applied to the local Draft Board for the deferment and appeared before the Board. I answered a few questions, friendly but to the point, and was granted a deferment. I did not have to join the U.S. Army then, and by the time my deferment expired, the war was over.However, I did have to take the Army Intelligence Test. I remember that it was interminably long, and excruciatingly hard, and had weird visual-puzzle-type questions -- like “how many blocks are invisible behind the blocks you can see”? I finished the entire exam with a sour taste and then forgot about it.Then one day, months later, after I returned home from classes; my Mom told me that Official Visitors had arrived … The U.S. Army. Two men in medal-bedecked uniforms had pulled up to our house in a khaki-colored official Army car.They introduced themselves, according to Mom's retelling, and asked to speak to Stephen Rosen (me). She told them that I was at college, and asked why they came.“Official Business,” they told her. “Your son has scored very high on the Army Intelligence Test – he may be a genius -- and we would like him to enroll in Army Officers’ Candidate school to become an officer in the U.S. Army.”They said they needed smart men, especially those who have extraordinary abilities as demonstrated by the results of the intelligence test. I later decided this meant I could count the number of blocks that I could not see -- surprise, surprise -- hidden behind the number of blocks I could see. Was I a genius? “My father would have loved the idea; my mother would have believed it”. (This from Robert Caro quoting Lyndon Johnson on being introduced with rhapsodic praise.) Mom told them she knew me very well. She said her son would not want to be a candidate for officers’ training because he wanted to pursue a doctorate in physics so he could teach. They thanked her and left some literature, and departed.I came home later that day. Mom told me what had happened. She seemed proud of me. I was proud as well, and flattered that they thought I had done well enough on the exam to consider me as a candidate for officer candidate school. Again, I surpassed my own view of what I was capable of.But Mom knew her son well. Stephen Rosen did not want to join the U.S. Army. He was not (and is still not) military material. This was demonstrated while in the Israeli Army. See the chapter, “A Volunteer in Israel”.* * *I spent my teen and college years Saturdays and summers working with and for my father (1947 to 1955) at the car wash he acquired after World War II, after he had left the restaurant business behind him.Dad often said that he worked eight hours a day for someone else so that he could save up enough money to go into his own business – and work sixteen hours a day for himself. In his own restaurant business, and after 1947 in his own car wash business, he worked very long hours, mostly on his feet. And he had varicose veins and other health problems to prove it.Whenever there was electrical work -- plumbing, concrete flooring, or anything that would influence the smooth operation of the car wash “assembly line”-- it had to be done after normal working hours: seven am to seven pm. I know that’s only twelve, but Dad came in early and left late. I was, in effect, earning my keep and getting a thorough education in the rough-and-tumble real world outside of college. Professors referred to non-academic reality as “the world of work”, a world my father knew as the only real world -- although he respected formal education.I often stayed late with Dad. This was my street education in the real world working alongside black laborers who carried knives or razor blades, had scars to show how tough they were, and often arrived drunk and late for work. They were my colleagues, my teachers, my antidotes to being spoiled rotten. And to college and book-learning.On rare occasions, Dad went home and I stayed late. On one memorable evening, I stayed late to help the electrician who was installing switches along the assembly line to control the conveyor chain at any point. The cars were towed through the car wash by means of a clamp attached to a moving conveyer driven by an electric motor.The electrician had run the conduit, a pipe, to contain the wires. He then snaked electrical cables through the conduit. I was busy doing some college physics homework.The electrician seemed to be taking an extremely long time to do the job. He finally came by to say “Good night….I have to get home to my wife and kids for dinner”. He continued, “I forgot how to wire the remote switches that control the 220 volt three-phase conveyor-belt motor. I know it's possible to make it work with only three wires in the conduit to turn the motor on and off from each switch station. I'll come back tomorrow night to finish the job".I sat. I thought. I ruminated. I knew it could be done because he said he’d done it once before. He had the wiring in place. I could steal some time from my homework and loved problem-solving, puzzles, and challenges. Could I surprise myself again?I made a wiring diagram. I sketched in the switches and the motor. I looked at the lines on the paper in front of me for quite a while. I thought, and thought, and thought. I tried sketching different combinations of wires and switches until I found – totally by trial and error and a bit of patience -- a wiring circuit hook-up that looked like it should work. On paper.I took the diagram to each switch and using the color-coded wires, hooked them up the way each switch should work according to my wiring diagram.It worked! I was very satisfied. Me, a college kid, trumped a professional electrician. I went home, and told my Dad. He called the electrician, and told him “my-son-the-genius” had figured it out and it wasn't necessary for him to come back.The electrician praised the young problem-solver and was pleased that the job was done. I was very proud of myself, of course, but I suspect Dad was even prouder. I have no way of knowing this, but I did hear (as already mentioned) third-hand that Dad used to brag about me to his friends.The fist-fight. The Army intelligence test. The circuit wiring. These early events surprised me and shaped me…they whetted my appetite and eagerness to learn, to accept challenges, to toot my own horn somewhat…and I see these behaviors in myself at age 78, and in my son Daniel and my grandson Jascha. Surprise-abililty! Not yet a word, but should be. Fast-forward to the year 2000. Celia and I are driving to Albany on the Taconic State Parkway to visit brother Elliott. This road is straight with long hills. In the heavy and comfortable Lexus, you can’t feel the speed. Like Mike Rosen, I enjoyed driving fast, and the State trooper who pulled us over for speeding said, ”I clocked you doing seventy-nine in a fifty-five mile-an-hour zone.” I replied, “Officer, I was doing eighty-four.” Stumped by my dumb confession (because speeders always say they are doing less than what they’re accused of) the officer asked, “Is there an emergency reason why you are speeding?” I replied, “My wife and I are having an argument.” Celia was sitting beside me looking angry. The officer, exasperated by my goofy responses, said “Get out of here!” Surprise! No speeding ticket. I did try this ploy on other occasions, but it never worked again. ####BEFORE YOU WERE BORN, THINGS HAPPENED You may find this hard to believe, but before you were born, things happened. Really. Before Television. I’m talking to you: Lisa and Daniel, Jascha and Tanya -- and my great-grand-children (I wish I knew your names.)Before YouTube. Before Facebook. Before Twitter. Before iPad, iPod, …. OHMIGOD. I can’t believe you don’t know this. In the 1930s and 1940s, all we had was books, magazines, newspapers…and radio. I read books and books and books. I listened to the radio over and over again. It’s hard to imagine communicating one-to-many via megaphone in the early twentieth century…instead of using Twitter and Facebook in the early twenty-first.The public library was my home away from home. I would go there every week, taking a bus from Flushing, Queens all the way to Jamaica, Queens. A long slow trip. (We did have automobiles, then. But I was too young to drive…14 years old.) The library was old, but it had a lot of science books, which I devoured. I had a gene for reading, just like my Mom, my son Daniel, my daughter Lisa, and my grandson Jascha. “Treasure Island” was one favorite. “ABC of Relativity” by Bertrand Russell, was another. I also read adult novels and science fiction…in pulp magazines, and anthologies that included stories by Isaac Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard (the charlatan sci-fi writer who invented Dianetics), and many others.Radio. There were weekly series, in which a character has wild and kid-friendly adventures, like the “Green Hornet”, “The Shadow Knows”, “The Lone Ranger”, “Dick Tracy”, “Superman”, “Batman”. Also weekly comedy series, in which a comic character spotlights episodes or does comedy routines: “Fred Allen”, “Jack Benny”. Sunday nights we listened to Walter Winchell, a notorious scandal-monger and gossip. Lisa and Daniel, Tanya and Jascha: You can check out these names on Google or Wikipedia and learn more. I have some recordings of these old shows. Ask me to play them for you; better still, you can have them to keep.If I had a chore to do, like painting a door, or cutting the lawn, I listened to “Your Hit Parade”, a radio program that played the most popular songs of the day, songs that were made popular by a movie or by Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, and many others. This was my “whistle-while-you-work” audio accompaniment, my sonic “wallpaper”. And my great joy.The large console radio in our living room was always tuned to classical music on the then-station of the New York Times, WQXR. I heard symphonic and chamber music when I came home from school, in the evenings after supper, and on weekends. Dad loved to relax, sitting in the easy chair beside the radio, listening to opera or other classical music. Often he fell asleep there, exhausted from a long day’s journey into repose.I can remember him listening to a broadcast recording of Al Jolson, a very famous entertainer who was known for singing minstrel songs in black-face ...”Mammy”, “Swanee” (written by George Gershwin when he was nineteen; this made him very rich, very young), and others you don’t hear anymore. But they had huge listening audiences in those days.Jolson was Jewish and was the star of the first movie that had sound in it, “The Jazz Singer”, in 1929. This maudlin, sappy, tear-jerker, three-handkerchief movie featured a young pop singer (played by Jolson) whose father is a dying elderly synagogue Cantor scheduled to sing in the synagogue for the holiest days of the year in the Jewish calendar – Yom Kippur. When he becomes so feeble that he can’t sing, he asks his son – who is by now on his way to stardom in the secular world as a pop singer -- to replace him. BUT the son can’t, because his secular Broadway debut is scheduled for the same night as Yom Kippur. Obviously this is about a clash of secular values: who has the best or the most? What does the son do? There are rivers of tears, which is why this kind of “three-handkerchief” movie was called a “tear-jerker”. This story plot was so popular, and I am not making this up, that there were eventually seven (7) movie versions of “The Jazz Singer” made. (One even stars Danny Thomas, who looked -- but was definitely not -- Jewish.)I can still recall my father sitting next to the console radio, maybe in the late 1940s. He is recovering from a long working day standing on his feet. On the radio is a radio-play version of “The Jazz Singer” starring, you guessed it, Al Jolson. (I actually have a recording of this twenty-minute version of the radio broadcast, yours for the asking.) My father is sobbing uncontrollably while the young Al Jolson has to decide…does he sing in the synagogue and please his dying father and all Jews and all of Judaism – or does he perform on Broadway and become a secular money-making super-star? My father wiped his eyes with a big white handkerchief. I watched, and couldn’t understand why he was so emotional. Dad was not usually so teary. He was tough.Now I understand why he was crying. When I listen to the recording of that radio broadcast (I purchased it at a yard sale in East Hampton), I find myself sobbing. It’s about my father. It’s about my own struggle between being secular and being religious. It’s about everyone’s conflict about the everyday world of making a living, and the eternal world of spiritual values, fidelity to one’s faith and to one’s family… I saw my father – not only as an icon of the conflict between success and faith…but also as a walking-talking-embodiment of this dichotomy. My father had come out on the side of secular success, but he still had his Jewishness alive and well inside of him.His mother, a one-armed matriarch, bore thirteen children and raised the five surviving siblings on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Today she’d be called a “super-mom”; in Orthodox Judaism she’d be called “A Woman Of Valor”; and on the Sabbath her Orthodox Jewish husband would sing her praises in a song entitled “A Woman Of Valor”, or in Hebrew “Aiches Chayil”). She had wanted Dad to be a Rabbi. All Jewish mothers of that generation had selected one of their offspring to be a Rabbi. That was their expectation; the others would make money. Instead, Mike Rosen made a worldly success of himself —but he never forgot the other side of himself.If I don’t stop, I’ll start weeping right here and now.But I started off discussing what the world was like as a twelve-year old in Queens in 1947, riding my bicycle through rain puddles after public school on my way to Hebrew school. The rain puddles were my insurance that when I got to Hebrew school, which I hated, I would be sent home by the teacher: “Go back home. You’re all wet!”Before television. Before computers.On sunny days in the summer we played stick-ball. This is similar to baseball, except it uses a tennis ball (a rubber ball coated with something like velvet flocking) or a pink rubber “spalldeen” or Spaulding that had air inside and bounced very high. The other part of stick ball is….yes… a “stick” or broomstick, which resembled a baseball bat.The game was played in the street, in front of our house on 181st Street in Flushing, Queens. The two sides usually consisted of the kids on the block who had come home from school…maybe eight or ten all told. The batter would stand in the center of the street in front of a manhole cover (which acted as “the home plate”) and take a swat at the ball pitched at him on one bounce by the pitcher. If the ball was hit far enough, say two or three sewer-covers-distant down the street, this was deemed a home run, scored for the team whose lucky hitter smacked the ball. The game was interrupted infrequently by cars passing through residential 181st Street; we simply had to stop everything until the car went through. Eddie de Martin, Bobby Serpe, Justin McCarthy, Billy McCarthy, Jerry Dickman, Seymour Radack, Henry Morderati, Paul Lepore, Jim Turner, Johnny Raible, and a few others participated. I’ll tell you more about these guys later (if I remember.)Pictures of our home reveal a brick two-story dwelling with brick steps leading up to a small porch and a driveway alongside. A garage filled with Dad’s ‘bargains’ was in the back. I remembered it as a very large house. In a visit a few years ago to show Celia where I grew up, I was shocked to see how very small my parents’ house appeared to me as an adult.I wasn’t much of a stick-ball hitter, but I was a fast runner. Mike Rosen attributed this to what he called “nervous energy”, which I now attribute to ADHD, attention deficit hyper-activity disorder.On rainy days in the summer, we sat under Eddie de Martin’s large porch overhang and played Monopoly, War, Knucks, or some other rainy day activity (like bull-shitting about movies we hadn’t seen, or sex we hadn’t had); many of these sessions we’d now think of as idiotic.In the winter, when there was no snow on the ground, we played “touch-tackle”, a mild form of what Americans call “football”. Teams were chosen from the cast of characters mentioned above. Instead of tackling someone as in regulation football, you merely ran after them and “touched” them. I was fast, but not a great player.* * *Bobby Serpe had two things I wanted: a pool table, and an air-rifle or bee-bee (BB) gun. His father was in the jewelry business, and their Italian family – his parents, brother, and a very old grandmother from the old country who couldn’t speak English -- lived on a corner house.When I would walk up 181st Street three houses north to his house to play pool or to shoot his BB gun, I would hear the same weird sound when I rang his front-door bell. It was a loud shrieking, keening, wailing…like a ghost. Actually, it was the old lady, the grandma. She must have been in her nineties, or so it seemed to me at my ripe old age of twelve going on thirteen. She always wore these long black flowing robes, or a dress all the way to the ground. She came from a part of Sicily where widows wore black after their husband died, wearing black the rest of their lives to proclaim their widow-hood. (There are still places in Europe and the middle-east where this custom continues.)This “black widow” was the source of the wailing whenever I rang their front-door bell.“What’s that weird sound?” I asked Bobby.“Nothing. Just nothing. Ignore it.” said Bobby.Pressing him, I said, “No. Really. What is it?”Bobby finally gave up and spilled the beans. It seems that the Italians who lived in that small town in Sicily where the black widow came from were seriously superstitious. They believed that Jews brought bad luck, bad news, bad fortune. The black widow was trying to get me to leave, or not enter, the premises of the Serpe residence because I was a bringer of bad luck!Bobby was kind enough to say, “Of course we don’t believe that any more”. Wow! That was a relief to know.BB guns were verboten in my home because my Mom thought that if you hit someone in the eye it would cause the person to go blind. (I guess she was right. If you hit them in the eye.) I argued that the eye was a very small target, and besides, I never aimed at the eye. But Mom said no, and so it was no BB gun for me. Advertised on the back page of comic books was the Daisy Air Rifle…and my lucky friend Bobby had one.So Bobby and I would stalk the wild turkeys or pheasants that inhabited the empty lots in the back of our homes…out there were marshes and low reeds and small streams that froze over solid in the winter. One freezing cold day, we fearless hunters, in hot pursuit of a wild turkey, were walking on the iced-over stream, when we started to hear ice creaking. It soon turned into ice cracking. Jagged lines appeared to radiate outward from our feet. Our combined weight was too much for the one or two inches of ice. Bobby and I watched in horror as the ice slowly gave way to our two bodies, and we sank into the stream…all the way up to our hips. We were freezing and wet. Somehow we pulled ourselves out of the stream and walked the embarrassing few hundred yards home to our dismayed mothers.As we got older, we did “older-person” activities. There was a huge golf course not far away, called Fresh Meadows Golf Course. We went there to find and to ransom golf balls from their owners. We would lie in wait a few hundred feet from the tee. After the golfer hit the ball, we would run out onto the fairway, and grab the ball. I remember the golfer yelling at us from the tee. “Hey give me back my ball!” If he was really angry, we ran like hell. This was our mature behavior.Another activity was to go to the fancy Bloomingdales store that was built after the golf course was torn down to make way for a vast housing development built by New York Life, also called Fresh Meadows. That store was air conditioned, in an era that didn’t do air conditioning. So on sweltering summer days—no school—we went to Bloomingdale’s to cool off until we were chased out of the store. This was really mature behavior.All this excitement before you were born!* * *Then we got old enough for cars. Cars! Cars! Cars!Cars were what grown-ups drove. Not bicycles. Cars! If you drove a car, even if you were only thirteen or fourteen or fifteen years old, you were a real grown-up. (Of course, at seventy-nine I’m still immature, not yet grown up…but HEY, that’s why I feel and look so young for my age. Just when I thought it was safe to be seventy-nine, along comes eighty.) Acquiring a Mini Cooper convertible at seventy-nine is another reason I still feel young.The legal age for getting a driver’s license in New York State back in the 1950s was eighteen years old. At sixteen years of age, one could get a “learner’s permit”, which actually allowed you to drive if accompanied by an adult. I actually drove for two minutes, with Mom sitting next to me, when I was thirteen. This was during the polio epidemic of 1947 when the children’s camp we attended closed down to prevent the spread of this dreaded disease (now conquered by the Salk vaccine). We drove to Montauk, and I pleaded and whined and begged Mom so much that she finally yielded and allowed me to take the wheel for those precious two minutes. Not the high point of my teen years, but “up there”.When we got to be sixteen, we were allowed to get our learner’s permits. Sometimes, we were not accompanied by an adult. But we never got stopped by a policeman, luckily…nor did we ever have an accident.When the big giant step into the world of “dating girls” began, cars were a huge asset. You could “park” together somewhere deserted, and “make out”, which was a euphemism for “necking” which was a euphemism for “petting” which was a euphemism for ….guess what? ....Kissing and hugging. That’s it! That’s all there was to do as a teenager in the late forties and early fifties. No kidding. (I know it’s very different today.)Many other things happened. Try Googling: The Wizard Of Oz. World War II. Food and gasoline rationing. The Atom Bomb. Ball-point pens. The Cold War. Elvis Presley. FDR, Churchill, & Stalin. First love. First men on the Moon. ####DEADLY HITCH-HIKE In the summer of 1955, after I graduated from Queens College, and before I started graduate school, I took a job as a camp counselor at a children’s camp called Camp Birchwoods in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains not far from the Tanglewood Music festival, near Lenox.John Shaffer, my good friend throughout college (and fortunately for me still a good friend) was also a camp counselor. We used to talk about our lives, our futures, our careers, and our therapists. (He started Harvard that fall, got his PhD in clinical psychology, and became a therapist/analyst.)Because the camp’s owners were highly thought-of and thus well-connected, and because the camp was unusually well-run and organized, the team of counselors and campers there included individuals who later became high-profile public figures, like Robert Rubin (later, Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration) and Herb Schmertz (later, Robert Kennedy’s advance man and Mobil Oil's vice president for public affairs).Counselors were responsible for seven children in each cabin, and my charges were about eight years old.After several weeks, counselors were given a day off. And this was how John and I and a young woman by the name of Anita, who happened to be black, had a day off together on the same day. We three decided to hitch-hike to Tanglewood Music Festival, which was an hour away by car.We hitchhiked happily, enjoyed the music concert which let out about 11 PM; so at that moment we were faced with the tricky task of hitch-hiking back to Camp Birchwoods in the dark along deserted mountain country roads.The three of us stood by the side of the road heading in the proper direction. We held out our thumbs, and eventually a guy stopped and says, “Where you headed?” We told him, and he said, “OK. Hop in. I’ll take you there.”He was sloppily dressed with a dirty shirt and worn jeans and work shoes. He appeared to be a blue-collar guy; his car was old and beat up, but appeared serviceable. It was our only choice. We accepted.So I sat in the front, and Anita and John sat in the back together. His name was Bill, and he started driving, and after five or ten minutes, I noticed that he had alcohol on his breath and that he was driving erratically. Fear rising, I began to get edgy first. Then I became uneasy. Sweaty. I looked around, and John and Anita in the back seat were scared.The more anxious we got, the more he seemed to enjoy our fear; the more erratic his driving became; and the more erratic his driving became, the more jumpy we got. (If we were astronauts, we would have said, “Looks like we have a situation here”.)This was very disturbing, because we were on dark mountain roads that were very narrow and curvy. The risk escalated, verging on dangerous, as soon as there were a few near-miss head-on collisions with oncoming cars on this two-lane un-lit mountain road. The more we said anything about Bill’s driving, the more he seemed to get excited and juiced about the danger he was thrusting all of us into. He even made sexually suggestive remarks about Anita being black, with lusty overtones and innuendo. Anita panicked.John and Anita started to get seriously afraid as Bill swung the steering wheel and the car back and forth into oncoming traffic on this narrow road. I could see the headlights coming towards us as he swerved just in time to miss crashing into each one of those oncoming cars.Then I was thinking, ‘This is the real thing; we could get killed’. I was, however, pretty calm and logical compared to my back-seat chums who were pleading with Bill from the back seat, making matters worse. Soon, I was both tense and strangely fairly cool-headed, because I thought to myself: this guy is an alcoholic and is driving like this to scare us, and maybe it wasn’t so dangerous because maybe I could do something quickly.My reasoning was along these lines: if Bill was an alcoholic, he probably has a very weak personality, no self-respect, and no discipline: I decided that if this picture was accurate, then maybe he would respond to a “voice of authority.” This was my thinking under intense and possibly deadly circumstances. Thank God for adrenaline when needed.Who, me? I knew I had no authority. I was barely 21 years old at the time, immature at that, and a tenor! for God’s sake, but I summoned from my deepest bass register a most authoritarian and stentorian voice I could muster. I think I hauled this voice up from the sacred depths of my kishkas, or my creature-hood, and my life-loving soul—rising up from my very toes.I launched these words at him: BILL! STOP! THE! CAR! … BILL! STOP! THE! CAR! I did not shout, because that would have told him I was in a state of panic. (Of course I was.) I spoke with false confidence….but in a low register.I hurled my prepared speech at Bill a few more times, and to my surprise he slowed the car, and then he stopped. Whew! I said to him “You seem to be a little shaky, a little under the weather”. (Under-statement?) “Hey. How about you let me drive, Bill?” -- again in my most authoritarian confidence-inspiring voice.And to my surprise he said “okay”. His voice registered resignation. He sat alongside me in the front passenger seat, and I started driving. Well, this went on comfortably for another 10 minutes, until he must have been ruminating about the situation while sitting there in his alcoholic haze; and I guess he then imagined – no, realized -- that I had removed the juiced-up danger to us he was seeking.So he rebelled against the new situation -- where I was in the driver’s seat of his car, and he had lost control. He decided to reach his left foot over to the driver’s side from where he was sitting on the passenger-side front seat, and lunging recklessly pushed my right foot down hard under his on the accelerator pedal. This made the car go much faster until I released the clutch, which dis-engaged the engine. (I had worked on cars during my teen-age years.) He obviously relished the panic, as if he wanted to destroy us all.The back-seat doom-sayers, John and Anita, were no help. I was very unhappy, though not panicked, but still able to think logically. I was not as nervous as they were. But I was nervous, and then scared.I considered the new situation for a moment, and I concluded that the only way for us to get out of this alive -- since he seemed hell-bent on killing all of us -- was to stop the car and run. So I slowed the car down by disengaging the clutch and braking it even though he was still trying to mash the accelerator pedal. He was unhappy. But I wasn’t. The car came to a full stop, despite his best efforts to accelerate.I put the car into reverse gear so it would be hard for him to run us over. I took the car keys, and flung them to the side of the road into the woods and I yelled, “John! Anita! Run!” So we ran like hell. I looked back, and saw Bill scrambling in the dark for his keys. While he searched, we had enough time to get away. Of course, he could have had a gun. Don’t rednecks carry guns? He could have looked for the keys after he shot us. Fortunately, this imagined scenario didn’t happen.It was a moonless spooky mountain road in a thick forest. There were no houses in sight for what looked like miles. But we three ran, breathless, until we found a house at the end of a dirt road branching off from the mountain road. Panting. Sweating. Scared.We knocked on the door. It was maybe midnight at this point, and we woke the people who lived there. We told them that some drunken maniac was trying to kill us. Could they call somebody to drive us to Camp Birchwoods in Pittsfield, about an hour away?They got on their phone, and called a few neighbors. We offered them all the money we had, and I think it may have been about $80. I was not happy about spending all that cash just because it was an unusual emergency, self-inflicted as it turned out to be. But we paid.That was how we returned to camp…with a story to tell: how we almost got killed by a drunken driver.I remember telling the story many times over, and proud of how surprisingly cool and collected I had been under fire – compared to how frightened John and Anita were. I was very pleased at exceeding my expectations of what I knew about myself, and may have even embellished the story a bit. Certainly I did. Are you kidding? I dined off this adventure in coolness-under-pressure over the years. It was not my finest hour – that was to come some thirty-five years later—but it was pretty close. I gained confidence in surpassing myself, and learned that I could get out of a tough spot if necessary. Surprise-ability.I was still reminiscing about the saga fifty-five years later. Among others, I related these events to a friend (Al Lewis) not so long ago, who is a psychiatrist. Al said, “You know, that is a remarkable story. It shows incredible insight and maturity and self-control and discipline and intelligence.” I realize that Al heard my version of the events only -- and I probably massaged and romanced the facts to make myself look heroic. But nevertheless…I said, “You bet”, and felt very proud of myself—for the hundredth time. Who said hubris is all bad for you? John, who was there, agreed that I was not boasting; that the facts speak for themselves. Yes -- the facts do speak for themselves, and – yes -- I am proud of my “grace under pressure” and that I could think and act quickly in a tense emergency; moreover, I correctly surmised Bill’s weakness. But I surprised myself, not suspecting I was competent to effectively control a sudden life-threatening emergency. Since then, I have never again risen to this level of calm-in-the-face-of-terror. No similar occasions arose. But I wonder if…Reflecting on the experience and the re-telling of it, I realized the scenario was very “iffy”: if I hadn’t sat in the front seat; if Bill had crashed the car or driven over the edge of the road (no seat belts in those days); if Anita and John hadn’t panicked…if I hadn’t thought quickly…without these “ifs” I wouldn’t be here today. But I may have gained enough confidence to face other emergencies later on…perhaps recklessly and to a fault. If so, I don’t remember putting myself in physical danger just so I could rescue myself. I did place future careers in jeopardy with impulsive self-confidence. (See the chapter, “Measure Twice; Cut Once!”)Apropos ‘quick thinking’, I must tell my favorite joke. Two guys are walking their dogs, a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua, in Central Park. The German Shepherd owner says, “Hey! Let’s have lunch at that nice restaurant over there, The Tavern On The Green.” The Chihuahua owner says, “You can’t do that. Restaurants in the U.S. don’t allow dogs.” The German Shepherd owner says, “We can both get in with our dogs if you just watch me, do what I do, and say what I say!” So the German Shepherd owner goes up to the maitre d’ and says “I’d like to have lunch here.” The maitre d’ says, “Sorry sir, but we don’t accept dogs in our restaurant.” “But that’s a seeing-eye dog”, says the German Shepherd owner. “Oh, in that case, you are most welcome; please come right in with the dog”, says the maitre d’. The Chihuahua owner having watched and listened, repeats the same exchange. The maitre d’, incredulous, says, “Sir. You have a seeing-eye Chihuahua!?! And the Chihuahua owner shouts: “WHAT? THEY GAVE ME A CHIHUAHUA?” I guess, as hero of my own quasi-memoir and hitch-hiking saga, I could say, “What? We got picked up by a drunken driver?”John still talks about the deadly hitch-hike experience when I saved us from tragedy by my quick thinking. He says, “Do you remember the time you saved our lives?”… “Do I? Are you kidding? You betcha life I do!” ####GENIUSES, WUNDERKINDS & ‘STEVIE WONDER’ We are all worms. But I believe I am a glow-worm. -- Winston ChurchillThere are two kinds of geniuses. One kind is just like us – only a lot smarter than we are. Then there’s the other kind, who seems to have such extraordinary mastery and scope that they appear to have come “from another planet”. Mozart is one example. A “glow-worm”, he could compose a symphony in his head while playing a game of pool; when he wished to copy it down, he would do so later at his leisure. When young, he was a Wunderkind.My childhood heroes—Albert Einstein and George Gershwin—were both the second type of geniuses. Each was in a class by himself. Each had an enduring, pervasive, and powerful effect on me and on my life. My admiration for Einstein led me into a career in physics; my admiration for Gershwin led me into a life-long love of his music -- and music in general. A real-life genius in my adult life was Herman Kahn, and knowing him led me into writing a book about the future, described in another chapter, “Future Facts”. Perhaps having geniuses as role models helped me reach beyond and surpass mundane expectations for myself.* * *Albert Einstein, another “glow-worm” and TIME Magazine’s “Man of the (Twentieth) Century”, was the founder of the special and general theories of relativity, the photo-electric effect, and the theory of Brownian motion. Einstein produced three masterly works in one year, 1905, each of which was worthy of a Nobel Prize.When young, I read popular books on relativity (“The Universe and Dr. Einstein”, by Lincoln Barnett; the “ABC of Relativity”, a masterpiece by Bertrand Russell available on youtube, and books by Einstein himself). I puzzled over these explanations, and tried mightily to comprehend the “meaning of it all”.I cannot say I was completely successful, nor can I say that I grasp it today as well as say, the English language, or calculus, or arithmetic -- despite studying with one of Einstein’s collaborators and reading many scholarly articles on the subject. And teaching it.I can, however, explain relativity at a dinner party (I’ve been asked to do so), and I’ve enthused about it to college undergraduates. (About which more later; see below) I’ve lectured to laymen at the Institute for Advanced Study. On a challenge, I’ve done a five-minute popular synopsis to a group of senior citizens during a physical exercise work-out. I have also written articles and papers that appear to present an understanding. Nevertheless, absolute comprehension is elusive. Not the “elusive obvious” of love, or beauty, or truth. But the “elusive obvious” of special relativity.After Einstein became famous there was a cartoon from a 1920s magazine that shows him leaning out of the window of a train passing a station, and asking those on the platform, “Does Oxford stop at this train?” And I love this true story about a reporter approaching Einstein while he was on a train (maybe the one in the cartoon?). The reporter says, “Dr. Einstein. You’re so famous, I’d like to interview you.” Einstein says, “I’m not Einstein; you are mistaken”. The reporter says, “But Sir, yes you are. I recognize you from your picture in the newspapers.” Einstein, exasperated, exclaims, “Who should know better? You—or me?”I was very fortunate to learn relativity from Banesh Hoffmann, a man who worked with Einstein, and who has his name with Einstein’s on a scientific article as a collaborator. (This paper introduced the Einstein-Infeld-Hoffmann (EIH) method, a way of deriving the equations of particle motion for General Relativity and similar theories, by finding approximate two-particle solutions of the field equations.)At Queens College, Banesh Hoffmann taught Special Relativity one semester, and General Relativity the next semester. He was a very pleasant, witty, short man who spoke with a marked British accent. He introduced himself by saying: “This is how I make my “x’s”, and then showed us two semi-circles intersecting at their mid-points, sort of like this: )(Step-by-step he took us through each of the dramatic and by-now-well-established results of experimental confirmations of both the special and general theories of relativity. This was tremendously exciting at the time…to see someone who had worked with the great man himself was thrilling to me. He showed us how Einstein himself had derived the bending of distant starlight as it grazed our Sun, and how he calculated the advance of the perihelion of Mercury.When later, as a graduate student, I met Banesh at scientific meetings, he was very friendly, and told a charming story about his working with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study. It seems that he and Einstein would work together regularly, sitting side by side, in Einstein’s office at the Institute in Princeton in the late 1930s.They were looking for certain solutions of the field equations of General Relativity for specific circumstances. There are 64 field equations, and solving some of them for physically testable measurements and conditions could be very taxing and difficult—even for Einstein. Whenever they got stuck, Banesh said, Einstein would get up from his desk, twist his long hair, pace the floor while remarking, “I vill a little think” in his German-inflected English. Banesh sat still at the desk while Einstein paced and pulled and twisted his long hair. After a few moments of pacing and twisting his hair, Einstein would say, “I have it”, then sit down, the impasse surmounted, and together they would move on to their next impasse.After Einstein died in 1955, Banesh said that whenever he was working on those same equations, and whenever he got stuck, he would get up, pace the floor, twist a lock of his hair the way Einstein did. “But”, he added, “it never worked!”I had my own “Einstein moment” years later when I was teaching a course in modern physics to undergraduates. On the day I lectured on relativity, I had planned to begin with first principles that Einstein began with (the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment that showed that the speed of light was –remarkably—the same for all observers), and then to “derive” the startling conclusion that mass and energy are equivalent, in the famous equation E=mc^2 What I hadn’t anticipated was that I would finish the lecture at precisely the moment the end-of-the-period bell would ring. Completely unplanned…trust me.What happened of course was a coincidence—but my students must have thought that I timed the lecture to arrive at the famous conclusion simultaneously with the ringing of the bell. (Shades of Einstein’s experimental definition of simultaneity.) The students cheered and applauded loudly, shocking me and making such a noise that those outside of the classroom heard and wondered what the caused the commotion.I remember this fondly, all the more so since it was unexpected and spontaneous. I believe it was on the basis of this exciting moment, and perhaps a few other show-stopping class-room enthusiasms of mine, that I was given this nick-name behind my back: “STEVIE WONDER”. I liked being known this way. I guess they meant I was capable of inspiring wonder in young students.Because I’ve always been excited by Relativity, when in Spain I bought a tee shirt with E=mc^2 emblazoned on it; beneath the equation are the words, “Espana = Mucho Calor”, meaning ‘Spain is Very Hot’. I think this shirt is Very Cool.Relativity is still a part of my life. One of my Russian émigré students, Moses Fayngold, a theoretical physicist, after he found a job as physics professor with my help, dedicated one of the two books he wrote on relativity to me, and inscribed the other: “From your former student, Moses”.* * *Another genius who influenced my life (he still does) was George Gershwin. We never met, but I was drawn to his music one evening as I was falling asleep when I was about 12 years old. Aunt Esther, my mother’s sister-in-law, was visiting our family, staying as a guest for several weeks. As it turned out, she was also a pianist and piano teacher. She was practicing, playing on our family’s piano, and she was ripping through Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue”. I had never heard the piece before. The sound wafted up the stairs, through my bedroom door, and “spoke” to me in a musical language of fresh sonorities, jagged rhythms, original harmonies, and ravishing beauty. It touched, and engaged, and absorbed me. It had a certain quality of “inevitability” and “originality”. (At a get-together a few years ago, the composer Lukas Foss insisted to me that “Gershwin was a much more original composer than Rachmaninoff”, and I had to agree because Rachmaninoff emerged naturally from a Russian tradition… Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff…but Gershwin came full-blown from his unique tin-pan-alley song-plugger tradition.)Later in life, the “Rhapsody” moved me, sometimes inexplicably to the brink of tears (remembrances of early childhood?), perhaps because of its jagged-happy rhythms, sharp iconoclastic brilliant harmonies. But to my twelve-year-old self, it spoke to me of jazz, sophistication, New York, ravishing syncopated melodies, and joy in living. It still elevates me.From that day forward, I sought out Gershwin music to listen to, and to play on the piano. I eventually worked my way up to playing Gershwin’s “Three Preludes”. I was especially fond of the second or slow, prelude. So simple. So elegant. I hear it now in my mind, with the left hand playing the accompanying “dum dah dah dah”, and the right hand doing the plaintive sonorous simple melody “da dee da dee da…” My piano teacher insisted I record the three, and I did, but alas I’m unable to find the recording.I have sought out and listened to virtually every composition Gershwin wrote. At one point in my adolescence, I even wanted to be like George Gershwin. He died too young of a brain hemorrhage, which added to his bittersweet mystique, and was to me a tragedy. Imagine what else he could have written.I’ve read every biography of him as well. I savored many of his life’s details and stories about him fascinate me. I’ve also read and listened to Oscar Levant’s life and music, and enjoyed his stories and songs as well. Lately, I’ve come to appreciate Ira Gershwin’s elegant lyrics.* * *Both Einstein and Gershwin pervaded my sensibilities early on; physics and music were my constant companions as the years rolled by, and cruising through my life they’ve been vivid and companionable inspirations.The Gershwins inspired me to compose songs for special family events -- birthdays, celebrations, anniversaries, wedding parties, children born. I jump in and find myself thinking of Gershwin as I write ‘pastiche’ or special material made for these occasions.At first, I wrote the melody and the words. I want to say that my musical themes were Gershwin-esque. But they are merely serviceable…reaching for the un-attainable, yet stretching myself. The words, I discover, are my métier. Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim got under my skin. I gradually stopped writing melodies, and started writing and re-writing old well-known melodies using my new and appropriate-to-the-occasion words.“Nice Work and You Can Get It” I’ve adapted to career change, and (believe-it-or-not) I’ve sung it at lectures I’ve given at MIT to PhDs, to Mt Sinai’s MD/PhD program, to lawyers at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York City, and at other venues. “I Got Rhythm” morphed into a tribute to my wife Celia (“Who Got Cee/lya?”). “Our Love Is Here To Stay”, Gershwin’s last song before his untimely death, I sing to Celia without changing any lyrics. The melody for Cole Porter’s “You’re The Top” I transformed into a birthday song for Celia, entitled, “Hymn To Her”. I sang it at a lunch in East Hampton on June 21, 2012 for Celia’s lady friends and it now resides on YouTube at… have written several dozen. Each was performed for a specific occasion, and intended to be sung only once—for that occasion only. Some, maybe most, have been on target, some in the style of George and Ira Gershwin, Tom Lehrer, or Cole Porter, or Sondheim. All have been fun and challenging to write. Some took weeks and months to compose—even if they took only a few minutes to sing.My voice is not very sonorous, but the content—often (so they tell me) wry, tart, amusing, ironic, on-point, engaging—is what prevents these efforts from being deemed merely trite or disposable. See the chapter entitled “Singin’ In The Brain”.* * *Now to the third genius in my life. Our career work and all studies of networking show that most professional jobs come about through contacts: speaking to someone you know who knows someone else, and so on. “You are only two phone calls away from your next boss,” is an aphorism we quote to our clients. But I have found that except for my first two jobs found from advertisements, all of my subsequent jobs (and there have been many) came about through a friend of a friend or a contact of a contact.In 1970, my career profited from this networking method and serendipity, or semi-serendipity. Through a social contact, I was hired as a professional staff member at a prominent think tank, or as they preferred to describe themselves, as a “policy-research organization dedicated to security in the nation’s interest”. The Hudson Institute was headed by a singular 350-pound genius named Herman Kahn, whose IQ was reported to be north of his weight. He was the from-another-planet kind of genius: using the same facts available to an ordinary intelligent person, he could create conclusions of considerable power. This could be disconcerting to mere mortals like me. His most influential and controversial books were: “On Thermo-Nuclear War” (1961) and “The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years” (1967). Herman was always provocative and interesting, even if some of his ideas were half-baked and eccentric. His book on the future had such a powerful effect on me that it inspired me to write my own book on the future, “Future Facts” (1976), described in a later chapter.Among the many policy studies done at the Hudson Institute in the 1960s during the Cold War was an examination of the anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) debate, the Viet Nam war, and detailed public issues connected to these and student uprisings. Herman briefed officials and executives at the Pentagon, the President, and many others.On one occasion I accompanied him, traveling together by plane to the Pentagon. He needed first-class seats and a special seat-belt extender to accommodate his great girth. Herman had a photographic (eidetic) memory, and showed me how he could read a book as quickly as he could turn the pages, and then tell me what line and page contained any words I called out from any book he had skimmed. He could also take any side of any argument, beat the opposing debater, then exchange positions and win the debate again. He could draw the most extraordinarily interesting (perhaps profound and bizarre) conclusions. Example: “Experts are the last person you wish to consult if you want to know something. You’re an expert on the subject of your spouse, but you’re the last person to know that the aforesaid spouse is having an affair.” I have summarized his eccentric thoughts in the Appendix entitled, “Expertise As An Addiction?” At the Pentagon, Herman gave a briefing to a roomful of generals seated at a marble conference-room table that I imagined to be the length of an aircraft carrier. The generals had vast numbers of medals on their uniforms—each one more copious than I had ever seen.Herman gave a briefing to these assembled generals on the emerging Japanese super-state (later, he wrote a book called “The Rising Sun” about how Japan would dominate the 21st century), on the situation in Vietnam, on the anti-ballistic-missile debate. He was brilliant and his ideas riveting to those around the table who hung on his every word.But every so often, when one of the generals raised a question about what Herman was saying, Herman would lapse into silence, and his head would loll forward, and he would start to snore. It was narcolepsy. Nevertheless, whenever the discussion about the points he had raised got interesting again, Herman would snap out of his narcoleptic interlude, pick up the thread of the discussion, and carry on with the briefing—seemingly without missing a beat, as if he had been heard and understood all the discussion while he was taking his catnap.As the generals filed out, I overheard one say to another, “You know Herman really is a genius”. And the other one agreeing, replied, “Yes he sure is. But how did you determine he was a genius?” The first one said, “You know, well, when the discussion got boring—that is when Herman was not speaking…Herman fell asleep”. Herman was always the smartest and most interesting guy in the room…and he knew it.But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me return to my life as a physicist – at IBM, at Fort Schuyler, and at the Institut d’Astrophysique in Paris. ####THE PHYSICS YEARS: OWEGO, Ft. SCHUYLER, & PARIS In 1959, as a very immature twenty-five year old on a blind date, I met Miki Gold and after a few months, we married. She was slender and beautiful with very high Russian cheek-bones. Miki’s mother Tanya (after whom our grand-daughter was named) was a public-school teacher; her father Abe a public-school principal and a dear man. Miki had studied Art History and eventually taught mathematics (a subject she hated) in a New York City public school when we returned after two years.I began working as a physicist at IBM in Owego, in upstate New York, south of Cornell University in Ithaca, in a region called the “Southern Tier”. Owego was then about a five-hour drive to New York City.Miki and I (being newlyweds) were able to take a two-week vacation several weeks after starting to work at IBM. That’s how generous the job benefits were back then. We went to the Virgin Islands, which was lovely and wonderful, and then returned to the real world of cold-war nuclear warfare. Even though my wife was a “red-diaper baby”, meaning her parents were left-leaning, I was able to obtain Top Secret clearance; at this location IBM Federal Systems Division was a defense contractor engaged in classified military work.We rented an old farm with about 110 acres of land some ten minutes from the IBM research facility. The facility was vast: it had several thousand people there, and it was set in wooded and bucolic land on what was intended to look like a university campus, and it was an “industrial campus”.We had two dogs. One, a beautiful rust-colored long-legged graceful Irish Setter, was named “Merry X” because she was conceived on a bet on Christmas Eve by the owner who gave her to us. The other was a friendly, slobbering, lovable white and liver-colored English Springer Spaniel, called “Ketuffles”. Both dogs roamed freely on the acreage, and both caught rabbits and other wild-life. We also roamed freely, taking long honeymoon-flavored walks with the dogs and each other as company. Weather was such that local folks, mostly farmers, said “Summer was a nice Tuesday last year” or “We have only two seasons here: snow and mud.”There was a very tiny grave-yard at the furthest distance from the farm-house on the property, which had been a farm a hundred years earlier, as the tombstone dates testified. Some of the tombstones told of small children who died of childhood diseases. One of the tombstones had the following inscription: “Dear Friend, as you pass by/Remember Me/As you are now/so Once was I/As I am now/ You soon will Be/ So prepare for Death/and Follow Me.”Rusted farm implements, like an ancient covered wagon with huge wagon wheels, lay about abandoned. I removed one of these iron-rimmed, wooden-spoke wheels that looked as if it had been to California (“Here We Come!”) and back. I decided the wagon wheel would make a charming rustic lazy-Susan out-door coffee-table, so I figured out how to convert its axle from horizontal (as it was on the wagon) to vertical, and it became a rotating coffee-table in our garden. I loved this creation of mine.But when it came time to move back to New York, it broke my heart to leave it there, so we brought it to the farm that Tanya and Abe owned about a hundred miles away. I ache to think it may have been discarded by them -- or worse -- burned as firewood. I would love to make another one now. The only thing stopping me is writing this memoir and racing against the clock to finish it before I pop off -- with the manuscript dangling in incomplete fragments. Well, there’s another thing missing: an ancient iron-rimmed wood-spoke wagon wheel that looks as if it had been to California and back.* * *Life at IBM was exciting. There were many professionals from all over the world, including a contingent of smart Jewish scientists and engineers. There was even an Orthodox Jew, Mo (short for Moishe) Shatzkes, who was able to keep Kosher because of the small Orthodox community in Binghamton.He became a good friend, a valued colleague, and together with another fellow, we wrote a paper entitled, “A Monte Carlo Calculation of Gamma Ray Transport Through the Atmosphere”.We tested electronic components to see if they would work during a hypothetical nuclear missile exchange. These computer components on U.S. missiles had to work properly even if they encountered intense neutrons and gamma radiation from incoming enemy ballistic missiles. So we were sent to the laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the original Manhattan Project culminated in development of the atomic bomb and eventually led to the hydrogen bomb.Our purpose: to expose missile components to a simulated nuclear weapon called “Godiva”-- so-called because it consisted of two “naked” fissionable-Uranium hemispheres, each of sub-critical mass.Godiva was an ingenious device cleverly designed to simulate a nuclear weapons explosion and to produce neutrons and gamma radiation—but no blast or sound or shock wave like a “normal” fission nuclear weapon would. As long as you were out of range of these neutrons and gamma rays, experimenters were safe from the effects of shock-wave “blast” of the sort that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[Here’s a simple explanation of Godiva….When pushed together, the hemispheres became a “critical mass”, meaning that they would produce on average more than two neutrons per fission, and therefore “multiply” rapidly, as in a nuclear fission weapon. However, these hemispheres were of such a size that when slapped together to produce a runaway multiplication of neutrons simulating a weapon, their physical size increased by thermal expansion due to the Uranium sphere being heated up super rapidly. The net result was that after a few nano-seconds, the assembly became sub-critical and the entire runaway chain reaction shut itself down -- instead of exploding as an atomic bomb does by exponentially producing super-fast fission neutrons.]It was very exciting to be at Los Alamos in the late 1950s, redolent of the memories and works of people like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Richard Feynman and other giants of physics who worked on the Manhattan project during World War II. I was in a special place where such giants cast long shadows. Echoes of their discussions rattled my thoughts. One such physicist was Robert Serber, a colleague of Oppenheimer’s -- later a professor of physics at Columbia University -- and the person assigned by the Editor to referee publication of part of my dissertation for the archival journal The Physical Review.* * *Miki desperately yearned to return to Manhattan so after two years I sought, and was offered, a position as assistant professor of physics at the State University of New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler in the east Bronx. After a year of teaching, our first child, Lisa, was born; and a year and a half later our son Daniel was born. These were deeply exciting events in our lives.When Lisa was about to be born, I spent the entire night waiting nervously, and so was unable to get to my first class at 8:00 am. I called ahead, and asked if it could be moved to 11 am. When I arrived for my lecture, my class apparently had been briefed on the reason for my lateness, and the entire group of some thirty students rose as one and sang “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” in unison. I almost lost my cool for a moment. I did not weep, but felt tears forming. I recovered, and wrote my daughter’s name on the blackboard “Lisa Jo Rosen”, and her weight, “6 pounds and 9 ounces”. The class cheered. I think they were so close in age to me (I was 25 years old, but looked much younger) and so it resonated with their youthful eagerness to mature.I was supremely happy to be a father yet immature in appearance and enthusiasm. I went to each of the academic departments, handing out cigars, and one of the professors of English literature remarked, “Isn’t it curious how fatherhood brings out the boy in a man.” I plead guilty as charged…a very happy youthful exuberant father.* * *After teaching at the Maritime College for six years and completing my dissertation, I was ready for a change in my career. I asked the chairman of the humanities department to write a letter of reference “To Whom It May Concern”. The following is what he wrote….April 29, 1965To whom it may concern:I would like to recommend my colleague, Professor Stephen Rosen, as a physicist who is capable of both significant research and fine pedagogy.Professor Rosen has rare ability and thorough-going knowledge. I base my judgment in part on formal indications, such as a Professor Rosen’s delivery of a lecture on cosmic radiation before our college’s Nuclear Science Club. Not only did he show a familiar grasp of his subject matter, but he was able to range from the limits of his immediate subject preparation during the rather enthusiastic question period which followed his talk. I mention this as a single instance, but I have seen many others which illustrate a highly desirable combination of thorough essential knowledge produced by careful scholarship and an ability to translate this material effectively for students.My association with Professor Rosen consists of five years at the Maritime College, a small college of fewer than fifty on the instructional staff. There are many opportunities for faculty interchange even outside one’s department. It has become clear to me during these years that Professor Rosen’s matter-of-factness and informality hide a surprisingly profound grasp of intellectual material. This is true not only of his own field, but of humanistic areas as well. He is able to draw from other disciplines in relation to his own field and to render more dynamic his specialized study. This is undoubtedly an important factor in his evident ability to interest and to activate his students. During the years, I have heard informal comments from students as well as teachers indicating that Professor Rosen is a teacher who almost invariably has marked and positive effects upon his students.I have been aware of Professor Rosen’s involvement in his doctoral studies, and it seems apparent that he has been applying himself with energy and imagination. I have no doubt that he will do creditable work and go on after he has earned his doctorate to develop measurably as a scholar and a teacher.Very truly yours.OSCAR B. GOODMANChairman, Humanities DepartmentI was very pleased and proud to have such praise from a man I respected who knew me and my reputation so well. I am delighted that someone – not me, a biased observer – could report on my work in articulate prose and in such glowing terms. I’m glad I saved his letter.While I was working on my doctoral dissertation for several years as my children aged through their single-digit years, I spent twelve- to fourteen-hour days disciplining myself to focus on my research on the origin of cosmic rays. I received a PhD in 1966, and our family of four celebrated with two months in Europe. The pictures of us enjoying the major cities—Paris, Rome, London, Amsterdam, and Liege (where I presented a paper at the 14th Astrophysical Symposium) show a happy mischievous four-year old Daniel, a happy engaging six year old Lisa, my then-happy wife Miki …and my then-happy self.At the Conference, I gave a talk on a portion of my thesis subject…the production of anti-protons in primary cosmic radiation. (More in “Cosmic Messengers” in the Appendix.) Many of the attendees were famous, but one was infamous -- physicist Thomas Gold, co-author (with Fred Hoyle) of the “steady-state” model of the Universe, which has now been discredited by the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation that led to the now-accepted “big-bang” theory of the origin of the Universe.“Tommy” Gold, as everyone called him, was a very smart and provocative scientist, and a penetrating skeptic and interrogator of my presentation. He asked a few tough questions I fudged answering, to my agonizing embarrassment. (I still shudder to remember this.)The next morning, as my family and I entered the elevator of the hotel where all of us conference attendees were staying, Tommy Gold made a surprise appearance by crowding with us into one very small European elevator. Out of nowhere, my son Daniel piped up, “Hello stupid!” to Tommy Gold. I was stunned because I hadn’t mentioned my embarrassing performance to my family, and yet here was my son insulting a man who had aggressively queried me. Pure coincidence, of course! But the real surprise that sticks in my mind was how Tommy reacted. He simply said, and I quote his words exactly as they were seared into my brain, “Hello stupid!” to my four-year old son.* * *In 1968 I was invited to stay a year at the Institut d’Astrophysique in Paris and the Centre d’Etudes Nucleaire de Saclay nearby. We had an apartment secured from a French astrophysicist who was on leave at Harvard that year.Lisa and Daniel complained every day and cried plenty about the French public school they attended. “They speak French.” “We can’t understand them”. “Take us out!”I mentioned this to my colleagues at the Institute. They insisted that we not move the kids to the American school where students spoke English only. My colleagues pointed out that our kids, at six and eight years of age, were at the best possible ages for learning a second language, and if they learned it then they would speak it the rest of their lives – without an accent! (This has turned out to be true.)Sure enough, after about five weeks, the kids stopped complaining about the language problem, but mentioned another problem: the harshness of the teachers. Thus, Lisa came home from school one day to announce that the teacher has punished her classmate, little innocent Jeanne-Marie, for chewing gum in class. The punishment would have been the grounds for firing a teacher in the public schools of New York (where my wife worked). The teacher ask the gum-chewer to spit the gum out into the teacher’s outstretched hand, whereupon the teacher proceeded to rub the gum into poor Jeanne-Marie’s scalp and hair! On another day, Daniel returned home from school to complain about the punishment received by little Jean-George, who was sent to darkest “Afrique”…that is, he was locked into a clothes closet.When I related this to my colleagues at the Institute, I was told that these punishments were even harsher than those dealt to children in the German public schools!When Danny and Lisa stopped complaining about French and began to be fluent in their new language, we suggested they speak French at home. Their smart-aleck answer: “No! Your accents are too bad!”The book, “1968: The Year That Rocked the World” is an excellent detailed retelling by author Mark Kurlansky of the many student riots and anti-war demonstrations that appeared in major cities all over the globe.Student demonstrators in Paris were extremely energetic and vocal in their denunciations of those over thirty, and there were violent confrontations between the gendarmes and students everywhere we looked.I happened to have been meeting in Paris on May Day (May first) in 1968 with my editor at a French science magazine (Atomes, much like Scientific American in the U.S.) We finished our work together at about 5pm in the magazine’s editorial offices in Place de l’ Odeon, a hub where six streets converged like spokes in a bicycle wheel. Jacques Richardson and I walked into a violent scene, which might have been mistaken for a movie were it not for real. Students streaming towards the hub from one spoke-street were pulling up five-pound Belgian blocks from the street and hurling them at gendarmes who were converging on the same hub from another spoke-street. The gendarmes had six-foot-high transparent plastic shields in one hand, and three-foot long hard-rubber truncheons in the other. With the shields they were blocking the paving blocks, and with the truncheons they were beating the hell out of students near enough to be beaten.We watched, fascinated. No one was bothering us. We were innocent bystanders, or so we thought -- until the tear gas started to spread. Heavier than air, tear gas penetrates everything and floats everywhere to a depth of a few feet above the ground, and causes copious tears. It also stings like hell, like jelly fish sting. We started fleeing the scene and came upon a nearby Metro station entrance. Down we went. But the tear gas followed us down into the bowels of Paris, and we wept and wept and wept until we were finally able to escape on a train. To this day, when Jacques and I meet, we still talk about the bond we formed on that day. ####FUTURE FACTS When my days at a “think tank” -- the Hudson Institute -- were over in 1970, I started writing a book inspired by what I had learned there under the strong influence of Herman Kahn who had written a very popular book in 1967 called “The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years”.The book I had intended to write was to be about the future of science and technology. The simple basic idea was that some of those products and services in the pipeline—that is to say, in research and development—in labs and universities around the world -- would someday become real products and services. They were embryonic developments that I anticipated would someday enter our lives…hence the title, “Future Facts”.The categories of these pipeline developments were: health, communications, transportation, entertainment, construction, materials, and so on. Helped by a bunch of hired graduate students, I was able to do a time-consuming and energy-intensive job of collecting vast amounts of data by organizing a carefully mounted campaign, reaching out to companies and universities, scouring the country and the world for those developments that met my criteria: (1) they had to be in the pipeline; (2) they had to be likely to succeed;(3) they had to be practical and useful to the ordinary man-and-woman-in-the-street; and (4) they had to be ‘interesting’ to read about. Consequently, I had to scrutinize and screen research lab output and sift through thousands of pipeline developments (the trivial many) to arrive at the few hundred (the critical few) that eventually made their way into the book.Here are examples from my research in 1975 of a few ideas that survived and eventually thrived in the Darwinian marketplace: age retardation, obesity control, wall-size television, invisible airplanes, computers and the internet, global communications from satellites…and a pill when swallowed that transmits vital data non-invasively from the interior of the body. (When I lost half of my blood in 2009 due to a gastro-intestinal leak, I was given an advanced version of this pill in a procedure now called “capsule endoscopy”, developed, by the way, in Israel).Since the research for the book was so demanding of time and labor, I had to write a proposal to sell the concept to a major publisher. My mother, of blessed memory, believed in me and the project enough to loan me some of her personal savings. The proposal itself was about three hundred pages, and was filled with examples of the embryonic developments that matched my criteria. The publisher who eventually acquired the book, Simon & Schuster, had an appropriate acquisition editor (Peter Schwed) who had previously acquired a similar book, “The Way Things Work”. I got what-for-then was a very large advance, repaid my mother, and was off and running in the world of what seemed like big-time publishing.I remember floating on air when I deposited the largest check I had ever seen. Great satisfaction swept over me after the long hard push to create and sell the book proposal. The elation lasted one day only…and then the really hard work began. (A question asked on obsolete psychology tests was: “Would you rather write a book, read a book, or sell a book?” Dad would have said, “Sell a book!” Mom would have said, “Read a book!” I am one of the few people I know who can honestly say “read, write and sell!” because I derive great energy from all three activities; as the need arises I can be an introvert in the morning and an extrovert in the afternoon.)The book, “Future Facts: The way things are going to work in the future in technology, science, medicine, and life”, eventually sold some eighty thousand copies (and was translated into Japanese, German, Portuguese, Italian, and British English). I was sent by the publicity department at S&S to promote the book on television and radio, in newspaper and magazine, and at speaking engagements to large audiences. My first experience on network television was on NBC’s “The Today Show”, with then-famous Barbara Walters.I arrived in their vast television studio on a high floor at Rockefeller Plaza, with sets, cameras, lively crew members hustling and bustling, moving equipment and people around. The NBC studio seemed about the size of a football field, but that perception was perhaps an exaggeration due to my state of shock and awe. The studio space and activity was unbelievable. I had been prepped and rehearsed and my prepared remarks vetted. I had only five or six minutes to convey the message that my book was important enough for some of the maybe ten million viewers out there to purchase a copy. I was deeply shaken and nervous, even though I had done public speaking before, but only to small audiences of classroom size and at scientific conferences. This was major league big-time publicity for the millions. ‘Uneasy’ or ‘skittish’ doesn’t do justice to my conscious state at that moment. I must have looked like Pale, Lips, and Trembling LLC because Gene Shalit (one of the on-air personalities at the time) came over and asked what was wrong. I said I was panicked about appearing on network television. He was very kind and helpful. “Just imagine you’re sitting next to someone on a plane, and he asks you to tell him about your book. That should relax you…By the way, you must be OK because you got this far.” I did exactly what he suggested, and it apparently worked, because I was booked all around the country on local and other network television and radio talk shows. My publicist at S&S also told me I had done well, although my parents who watched the show thought that I was hamming it up—being a show-off. I plead guilty, but with extenuating circumstances: eagerness to sell books to a mass market.Touring the country to promote my book at the publisher’s expense was a trippy adventure in TV-land, over-dosing on self-importance and an infinitesimal dollop of brief fame. I was put up at very expensive hotels, picked up and deposited at each appearance or booking by chauffeured limos, and treated as if I was the serious author of a serious book. In reality, I was a minor celebrity at the edge of the public eye for a few months. People came up to me on the street and said they had seen me on television. Fans flattered me. Women swooned. (Nora Ephron once described her own book tour as an exercise in acquiring a dreadful disease she called “terminal narcissism”). I probably caught the same disease during my book tour. Maybe even before.Staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a palatial Los Angeles hotel frequented by celebrities, I was waiting in the breeze-way to be picked up by my limo when I noticed a very short man with a familiar face: movie director Roman Polanski was also waiting to be picked up. I told him I was a big fan of his work, especially “The Vampire’s Ball”, which he dismissed as being poorly edited. I then ventured to say I had written a book, and added that maybe he’d like to look at it for possible movie ideas. And, by the way, I ventured further, “Here’s my card. May I have yours?” He then said in an arrogant way “When you’re as famous as I am, you don’t need a card.” And then he walked away. I guess he was the ordinary kind of genius: not a glow-worm, but maybe a worm. You can encourage a relationship with someone who’s interested in you, but not if he’s not. You can pull on a string, but you can’t push on a string. ####MEASURE TWICE; CUT ONCE ! “Hurry, worry, multitasking, stress — you might call them the four horsemen of the accident prone. But the biggest issue is multitasking. If you’re presented with a lot of stimuli you have to filter out what’s most important to you. If you’re chopping something with a knife, you have to take that seriously enough to stay focused on it. You can’t let loud noises or children or anything else disturb your train of thought. Meta-analysis … of the general population revealed that accidents cluster in individuals, and that this clustering is higher than the clustering one would expect by chance alone. A recent study in the British Medical Journal found a correlation between early injuries and children who were diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.” --MSNBCMy sister Barbara is three years younger than I am. My parents conceived her on a second honeymoon. So I must have been two years old plus several months then. Playing with building blocks was my passion.I was left in the loving care of Mom’s sister Frieda, who had no children at the time. She was very fond of me, and made a big fuss over me, which I loved. One day while she was changing my diapers, she went briefly into another room to fetch something, and when she came back, she saw that I had taken apart an antique alarm clock near the bed. Curiosity (not the Devil) made me do it. This was my first in-depth quasi-scientific exploration of the physical world of engineered objects. An early instance of impulsive self-endangerment. And my earliest vivid memory.There had been two wind-up keys on the back of the big-faced cream-colored alarm clock—one to wind the clock-spring, one to wind the alarm-spring. Un-spooling like a movie in my mind’s eye, the clock face pops into my head with its two hands and the tiny brass shafts sticking out the back. When Aunt Frieda returned, only one wind-up key was visible. Frieda asked me where the other one was, and I pointed to my mouth. She looked at it. No key. I pointed inside my mouth.She concluded I must have swallowed it and got very upset, because had been entrusted with my safe-keeping on her watch while my parents were away. She made a game for the two of us. She suspended a diaper across the toilet seat. After each and every poop we two peeked into the suspended diaper to watch for the key to come out the other end. A day or later, she got very excited -- and so did I! “Look! Look! Look! It’s right there!” This was a great lesson in anatomy and a memorable adventure. Yuk. So at an early age I was taking things apart, and trying to ingest parts of the world around me. “I am a part of all that I have met”, said Alfred Lord Tennyson. “Well, hello” said Stephen Rosen: “I am a part of all that I have et”.* * *Another troublesome event, this time a grim trauma, was dangerous, vivid, and painful. I have a very strong dramatic recollection, a video tape in my head, playing back the horror, the horror.I impaled myself on a steel picket fence when I was four years old. No, really. I’m not making this up. The memory is extremely vivid because of the intense pain it caused me, and the extreme distress to my parents.My sister was one year old at the time; the doctor was at our red brick attached house in Brooklyn examining her because she had a cold. My Dad hadn’t left yet for work. Fortunately, that was in the days when doctors made house calls, and the doctor who was attending to my baby sister was calm throughout the emergency.Here's the way it happened… I was wandering—no, scampering-- down the street about a block away from home with another kid my age, a friend. We discovered a cat up a tree and decided we had to climb up the tree to rescue it. We did not yet know that it has been proven conclusively by Fire Departments everywhere that cats eventually come down from trees. Proof: how many cat skeletons have you seen at the tops of trees? The cats climb to catch birds and then cats come down to earth where they belong. Cat skeletons don’t exist in tree-tops.We four-year-olds stared up at a cat in a tree. On impulse, my friend and I started climbing a steel picket fence that was next to the tree to help the cat. When I reached the top of the steel picket fence, somehow I slipped and fell onto one of the steel pickets. The triceps muscle on my left arm was pierced through and through by the rusty iron spear-like picket. I was skewered, hanging by a thread of muscle. I must've been in shock because I didn't realize it until I saw the blood running, streaming, down my body. I was frightened and crying and skewered and stuck there. I could not lift myself to climb down.A kind gentleman walking down the street saw me and lifted me off the steel picket. He asked me where I live and he walked me back to the house. I was holding my left arm away from my body, fearfully watching as the red blood galloped down my body. We arrived at the house, and he told my parents what had happened to me. They gasped at the blood rushing out and showed the wound to the doctor who took me in his car, followed by my Dad in his car, to his office and poured antiseptic solution on the wound. I watched it pouring in one side of the picket hole, and dribbling out the other. Eeeek! I feel squeamish as I write these words. But I have to tell this gory story, if only to show how impulsive I was. Am..The doctor calmly placed a tourniquet above the wound. He proceeded to sew twenty stitches at the entry and the exit wounds. Then, he placed bandages around the circumference of the four-year old arm. Then he prescribed daily rinses of Burrows Solution and daily dressing changes.“Tincture-of-time” helped, and Mom lovingly attended to the wound daily for several months. I was later told that the doctor was concerned they might have had to amputate the arm if it became infected. I still have scars from this on my upper left arm. Wanna see?* * *Another episode of impulsive self-endangerment. At age fifteen in college freshman chemistry lab, we were told to slip a glass tube into a rubber-hole stopper. (You’re supposed to wet the tube first, and not to push the tube where it’s bent and the glass is thin.)The glass tube shattered in my right hand, entered my palm, and severed the tendon connected to the muscle of my fourth finger. I was sent to the nearest hospital, Queens General, where my uncle Ellie, Mom’s brother, Dr. Louis K. Nelson (changed from Katznelson), found and rescued me at 2 am in a public ward -- minus anti-tetanus or anti-biotic shots. He was furious at the staff and told me to get up, get dressed, and to go with him to his office in Lynbrook. He cleaned the wound carefully then, noting that tetanus was starting to set in, and gave me the appropriate antibiotics.After several months, the wound healed. But the fourth finger of my right hand flopped back and forth like a wet noodle. No attempts by me to control its motion were successful since the finger was unconnected to the muscle coordinating its movement.Surgery was needed.The man chosen to do the job was a Dr. Littler. He had learned hand surgery in World War II, repairing hands blown apart by hand-grenades…either faulty grenades that went off prematurely before being thrown at the enemy, or those that the thrower held onto too long.He operated on my hand, and joined the severed tendon to the appropriate muscle. I was able to move the fourth finger, and to play the piano again. Of course, I was never planning to be a concert pianist.I’m not proud of these episodes. They strongly suggest a pattern, predictive or emblematic, of my early, yet still-present tendency, to impulsive and sometimes-dangerous accident-prone behavior. My painter friend Gerry Monroe says “Humans are pattern-making machines.” One pattern that defines me: accident-prone behavior. Memo to future self…Pay attention! Heed warnings! Plan. Think before you act; look before you leap. Focus, focus, focus! Measure twice; cut once!* * *But impulsive behavior is not my only imperfection. I also have a very short attention span.When I do chores around the house, I find that en route to one task, I am often distracted by two or four other tasks. This may work to my advantage, because I can sometimes be more efficient doing multi-tasking. But it can also wreak havoc on those around me, and sometimes I will catch myself doing a handful of chores simultaneously, and wonder, “What the hell did I start out to do?”So here I am writing on a rainy day in East Hampton, struggling to stay on point, and what do I see? An electrical outlet needs fixing. Do I sit still and keep my eye on the ball (the task at hand, which is writing), or do I fix the electrical outlet? Well, in this case, after writing a reasonable amount (five hundred words) I decide to get all the tools needed to fix the outlet.This means fetching tools from the disparate locations where they live. Now, maybe I place them in different storage spaces because that’s where they are convenient? Or that’s where there’s enough space for them? Or because that gives my distract-ability maximum scope?So while I got the tools to fix the outlet, I noticed that the sunflowers I planted a few weeks ago have sprouted, and need re-potting. Also, I noticed there’s a dead tree branch that needs trimming; and the compost heap needs turning and separating and feeding. Also, the car needs washing and waxing. So where was I? Oh, yes. The outlet. Well, fortunately I was able to fix it without the need for an electrician. But I did the job then with what-I-now-realize was irresponsible lack of impulse control: I didn’t shut down the main power to the outlet before working on it. I fixed it while the electricity was still “live” or “hot”. This, I again realize, was really stupid. I could have received a shock. But I didn’t; it was one of many shortcuts. “Do it right the first time”, my ten-year-old assistant, a neighbor’s kid, tells me. Corner-cutting can lead to accidents, and I’m certifiably accident-prone because of my impulsiveness and distract-ability.* * *I noticed this in college, when I had to study, to sit still, to focus on one subject for extended periods. It happened again when I was writing each of the (so-far five) books I’d written. It might be brain chemistry, lack of discipline, some inner compulsion to jump around among different ideas, topics, activities. I suspect that my father, nephew, son, and grand-daughter are genetically impulsive and distractible — just like me.Clinical symptoms of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) listed by the National Institute of Mental Health include: inattention to details, trouble listening or following instructions and organizing activities, avoiding lengthy mental effort, easily distracted, forgetting and losing items; also being fidgety, often “on the go” and acting as if “driven by a motor”, often talking excessively, interrupting others, blurting out answers before a question is completed.I believe I share many of these symptoms, and so does my friend Paul Greenfield. Yes, I have to work hard, very hard, to compensate for these shortcomings. But I soldier on.Friends have remarked that they find it difficult to understand how I could have written a doctoral dissertation in physics, written five books (including this one) and hundreds of articles, essays, letters, and memos …given these symptoms and shortcomings.But here’s another view. Consider the “Hunter versus Farmer theory,” a notion that hyperactivity may be an adaptive behavior, allowing those more adept at searching and seeking to survive (like Hunters) versus those more adept at staying home and managing complex tasks (like Farmers) to do agriculture. Well maybe I’m a Hunter, better at searching and seeking -- than as a Farmer staying put and managing complex tasks. (My beloved Celia is a Farmer, and I’m a Hunter…a combination that makes us such a great team.)If I am pointed towards a goal, say writing a book, it takes me some time to get up to speed and fully immersed in the project. But once I aim at the target, and attend to the process, my directed-ness and over-active consciousness leads me to vacuum up material from any source I happen to encounter.Sometimes I use virtually any idea, object, or person that pops into my head during the course of moving the book or project forward. These “pop-ins” almost always seem to have some intrinsic link to (or else I create a link to) what I’m doing. My total immersion creates ongoing intent. It’s called intentionality or about-ness.There is a sort of ‘critical mass’ of ideas and thoughts that keep the project percolating along, carrying idea “stuff” in its path, like a wind moving dust and tree-leaves along its way. At times, it feels more like a hurricane moving through. Is this ADHD – or Creativity? I see it when I put together my welded sculptures of randomly-found tools or assemblages.I’ve urged clients to get into this zone of total immersion, or complete focus when conducting a job search or a career change. I’ve found that keeping a journal or diary or jot-book helps stay on track. While so directed and engaged, almost every person or topic I am exposed to (even apparently-random events) may become of interest, and I can find myself swept up into the breeze -- or hurricane -- of intentionality or about-ness. It works for our clients who follow this advice. It works for me. ####II MIDDLE-AGEMY HALF-LIFE When I was over half my present age, I wrote a book, published in 1978, about the effects of the weather on our bodies, our minds, our moods, and our health. In the research for my book, called “Weathering”, I discovered a graph that changed my life and expectations. Looking back, I would now call the effect the graph had upon me as an ‘epiphany’ about the first half of my life…My Half-Life.The eight curves on the graph show how our body’s efficiencies change as we age. Not surprisingly, each curve rises steeply in youth, peaks at about age twenty, and slowly tapers off until the about the ninth decade of life.As a percent of maximum capacity versus average age of the population, these eight curves show:The volume of gas that can be breathed in 15 seconds when a person breathes as deeply and quickly as possible (Maximum breathing capacity)The amount of air that can be forcibly expelled after a deep inhale (Vital capacity)The volume of blood delivered to kidneys per unit time (Renal plasma flow)Flow rate of fluid thru the kidney (Glomerular filtration rate)Daily energy expended at rest (Basal metabolic rate)Speed of electrical signals thru a nerve (Conduction velocity, ulnar nerve)The blood volume per unit of time divided by the body surface area, in liters per minute per square meter (Cardiac index)The interstitial, intravascular, or tissue fluid (Intracellular water)Each of the eight curves on the graph has a similar inverted “U” shape. Up to five years of age, each of the above bodily functions rises steeply, as the immature child’s body builds up those important functions necessary to grow and develop. The vital capacity and breathing capacity rise very steeply through the teen years.After rising, the curves on the graph remain virtually flat until the fourth and fifth decade of life, and then they slowly turn downwards through the eighth decade of life. These curves represent averages for the general population,When I first contemplated these curves, I was forty-four years old, feeling very vigorous. I jogged four miles a day. I ate and slept well. I felt great -- until I saw these data. It was then that I realized that my health and well-being had a life, or more properly a ‘half-life’. …say, like a sample of radioactive uranium, samarium, or gadolinium, half of which disappears over a half-life about equal to my present age (~79 years = ~10^8 seconds…that’s a one followed by eight zeros). [Strictly speaking, half-life is the average time for the mass of an original radioactive substance to lose an average of half of its original mass, converting that lost half into a different substance.]Radioactive substances have unstable nuclei that (semi-) spontaneously emit energy plus one or more particles -- such as an electron, a neutron, or a proton, or a photon.The similarities between myself, as charted by these graphical curves, depicting body function and body decay, resembled what happens to a radioactive substance when it “decays”.Unstable entities. Aha! I was decaying as well. In my body, the inexorable progress of aging and decline of powers—physical, physiological, and by implication mental and emotional and sexual…was evident, not only on the chart. I began to intuit a gradual decay (I didn’t call it “aging”), slowly emerging into conscious recognition, even as it rose infinitesimally and inexorably from beneath the radar. The loss of function, though miniscule at the time, had a life on its own. A half-life.In a radioactive substance, unstable particles inside the nucleus, release energy as they re-arrange themselves -- by emitting particles and energy -- into a nuclear system of lower energy.In both cases (the nuclear and the Steve systems), the amount of disorder (called “entropy”) increases. Not only was I decaying. It sounds better to say my entropy was increasing.Imagine a snowfield on a mountain. The ice particles are held together by friction, but an outside disturbance could make this snowfield transition to a more likely lower total-system energy-state -- a higher entropy-state. In the case of the snowfield, a shock to the system caused by a blast of sound emitted by a human-fired cannon, or sound from a passing thunder-storm, could trigger an avalanche. I began to imagine I was a pre-avalanche about to happen….maybe about to transition to a lower energy-state.In my then-physical body--my infinitesimal universe—I resembled the snowfield. Inherently unstable. About to become an avalanche. This graphical chart became an epiphany that re-arranged my world-view and shuffled my personal priorities.Before seeing the chart, I was in no hurry; I had limited ‘passion-at-work’, limited goals; I was pathetically sleep-walking through my life. I was in mourning for my then recently-deceased parents, which is another way to say I was mourning for myself…my sad solitary unmarried state – like a ship without ballast, or half a pair of scissors.After, I was energized; I re-married; I became interested in a new life filled with meaning and purpose; I began the finest hour of my life, a prelude to the best (second) half of my half-life. I helped Soviet Jewish émigré scientists find work in the U.S. I began helping physicians and attorneys to change their careers and lives and, in so doing, to encourage them – and myself -- to develop a full, rich, juicy, and well-lived life. ####TIRESIAS & LONELINESSNovelist C.P. Snow observed that Einstein was a very sensual man. According to Einstein’s biographers, he was also a womanizer. As a teenager, I didn’t know about his sexual conquests, but he was one of my childhood heroes because I fell in love with Relativity. A mysterious but confirmed result of the Special Theory is that time passes more slowly within a body moving with respect to a stationary body.I mention relativity and sex together because of my favorite New Yorker cartoon. Albert Einstein is shown in bed next to a lovely young woman who’s smoking what is clearly meant to be a post-coital cigarette. She has a very unhappy frown on her pretty face. The caption, Albert Einstein speaking: “To you it was fast!” (Think about it.)* * *Another one of my heroes, Richard P. Feynman, was an extraordinary individual and a Nobel-Laureate theoretical physicist – who, like Einstein, also led a very active sex life, according to Lawrence Krauss in his beguiling book Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.After his first wife Arline died very young of tuberculosis, Feynman was depressed, lonely, and desperate. In his letters to her after she expired, he wrote: “You, dead, surpass anyone alive”. His desperation, ironically, took the form of pursuing women, even the wives of his friends and students. (I’m not approving his behavior, just reporting it.)He taught himself to become a facile, sophisticated, and successful womanizer, an obsessive seducer of women, perhaps to assuage his loneliness. He addressed the problem of meeting, and charming women into bed, as if it were a physics problem. He developed many approaches and methods to solve his needs for temporary sexual companionship. His charm, his brilliance, his intense concentration and rapid mind...all came together when he was in the midst of "chatting up" a candidate for his next conquest. His smile, his ability to listen, his quick wit, his warmth, and his “animal magnetism” supported his amatory pursuits.While reading about this part of him (he is mainly remembered as a giant of 20th century physics, indeed a legend, revered by legions of fellow physicists) I began to remember my own clumsy gauche fumbling to avert loneliness after my first marriage disintegrated in 1968 at the dawn of the sexual revolution.Timing is everything, and 1960s and 1970s was a time of social and sexual liberation for women as well as for men. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s I didn’t have any friends whose parents were divorced; in the sexual revolution, my own children did not have any friends whose parents were together. Experimentation and a new science to conquer, like Quantum Mechanics and Relativity …the divorced generation and beyond were no longer doing classical Newtonian science; they were exploring the receding limits. Not at the speed of light, but pretty close.Profoundly awkward at first, I realized I had to start a new life of my own, separate and apart from my ex-wife and our newly ex-friends.* * *When she was fifty-two, my daughter Lisa asked me to include in these memoirs a report about my own post-marriage womanizing because, she said, “All of my friends had parents who were getting divorced in 1968 when you left Mom, and those parents were enjoying the ‘sexual revolution’…so I want you to write about it, Dad.” OK. So she strong-armed me into doing this. Thanks, Lisa.One of the first inklings I had of this sea change in the mores and morals of liberated women occurred during a conversation in a bar started by a woman, a complete stranger.She said, “Do you mind if I smoke?” I loathed cigarettes, their smell, their dangers to health, and the complete lack of discipline they symbolize. (Of course, I used to be a smoker: thus my sanctimony.) My inner wise-guy answered her with an impulsive non sequitor. I said, “Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray”.The next moment, this stranger wrapped her arms around my neck, pulled my head towards hers, and proceeded to kiss me: a wet open-mouthed, lingering, smoke-flavored kiss. Reflexively, I tingled all over. She said, “Was that like licking an ashtray?” I was speechless. “Smoke gets in your eyes” was a song….but the smoke she blew my way got not only in my eyes…but everywhere. I was beginning to learn that some women actually liked some men. More research was needed.I decided that if I spotted an attractive woman anywhere -- on the bus, walking on Fifth Avenue, biking in Central Park -- I would attempt to start a civilized conversation. The sun was setting on an old era (my monogamous first marriage to Miki), and dawn was rising on a new one: my new life as a bachelor. Maybe an Einstein or Feynman womanizer. I learned a lot from them. Besides physics.At first, my opening gambits were laughably incompetent. I was new to this modus operandi. On the one hand, if I spoke up I could be rejected; and on the other hand, if I didn’t speak up I would miss a probably-rare opportunity for our paths to cross again, since the “target” and I were complete strangers. There were so many good-looking women all around – as numerous as waves on the ocean and leaves on trees … but so little time.The adventurous new man I wished to become argued with the old conservative me I wished to leave behind: if I had had only one chance at opening a conversation, I was obliged to take my best shot. I persuaded the new me that no matter how readily or harshly my advance might be rejected, I would not allow it to deflate me or to discourage me from trying again elsewhere. Rejection was the price of converting an approaching opportunity into an intimacy. Before Women’s Lib, Cervantes formulated it this way: “Faint heart ne’er won fair maid.”Armed with this attitude, and beset by severe loneliness and a voracious unsatisfied sexual appetite (one possible side-effect or co-factor of ADHD?), I persisted. I was resourceful. Yes, I had a number of rejections and dismissals from time to time. But I was dedicated to the task, and eventually my libido prospered. There’s a learning curve on many activities, and I was a diligent student. My approach was always adjusted, fine-tuned, and suited to the circumstance, the venue, and the occasion. “seize the day” was another motto I honored to a fault.Here’s my favorite joke about seducing women…. One guy asks his friend how to get a woman into bed. The friend says, “It’s really easy. You invite her out to dinner at one of those chic French restaurants, you know the ones with red-and-white checkered table-cloths and romantic candle-light. You order the food and fine wine in French. You hold your wine glass up toward her face so the candle is visibly refracted through wine, and you praise her beauty in French as a tear rolls down your cheek.” The guy who asked says, “I know about French restaurants, checkered table-cloths, candle-light, ordering in French, and praising her with the candle-light visible through the wine glass. But how on Earth do you get that tear to roll down the side of your cheek?” The friend says, “That’s really easy: you just pull a hair out of your nose.” (But I never used this method.)* * *My first success -- easy to remember because it was my first—took place in Woodstock, New York, with an independent-minded counter-cultural follower of Wilhelm Reich, a believer (now discredited) in the ultimate power of environmental “orgone”, or “orgasm energy”. She was already primed to enjoy a liaison with any man by virtue of her Reichian beliefs and her orgone-energy-box “accumulator”. I happened to be “any man”, or “the only man near her at present”. She was a willing leader in this encounter, and an experienced sexual partner -- and I was a willing and eager learner.I will not catalog the fine details of our times together since no matter how I explained them they would, perforce, sound like Casanova’s braggadocio and bravado. There truly is a learning curve on many activities, as I discovered by practicing this activity with diligence... following in the footsteps of Einstein and Feynman, my Nobel-Laureate heroes. Did physics (or heredity) make me a better lover?My own experiences were not merely my conquests of willing women. To be sure, I came to understand that many mature women actually like men, and enjoy sexual activity—“friendly lovemaking”, “recreational sex” -- as much I did -- if not more.A distant relative, who I am convinced had been a CIA agent, told me, confidentially, that he assumed that men were ready for sexual activity about 80 or 90 percent of the time, but that women were ready only about 20 or 30 percent of the time. He formulated the problem statement: “You have to find the mutually convenient time, and the best way to know, was simply to ask “Is this a convenient time?”The mysteries of women’s interest in love-making were unveiled to me slowly, since I had grown up in that era--the 1940s and 50s--when sexual activity was still embarrassingly “hush-hush”, still behind the scenes, not polite table talk, and certainly not discussed as readily and as openly and as matter-of-factly as it is in the 21st century. (A sociologist told me that 21st century people will talk more openly about their sex life than about their money.) The taboos and shibboleths were dwindling, and sexual freedom began to be emphasized as a woman’s right in the 1960s and 1970s, just as I was emerging from my monogamous marriage-cocoon. Lewis Carroll captured what I was feeling: "And, hast thou slain the Jabberwock? (My marriage?) Come to my arms (Those welcoming liberated women), my beamish boy (Eager me)! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! (Orgone energy?) He (Me) chortled in his joy (New-found freedom).”* * *Tiresias, one of the fabled demi-gods of Greek mythology, was an unusual creature, the only mythical Greek figure who had been both a man and a woman at different times. In the Tiresias myth, Zeus asks Tiresias, "Who has greater pleasure during lovemaking--the man or the woman?" Mythical Tiresias, having been both sexes at different times, was thus the only demi-god able to compare the two, and answered, "The woman, by ten times as much!" Zeus, being a man, was enraged by this answer, and turned Tiresias into a blind woman -- and as an afterthought gave her the gift of prophecy. She became the blind seer.I always enjoy this fable, not only for what it revealed about the Greeks’ knowledge of human nature, but also what it revealed to me about the eternal nature of feminine desire and perhaps even lust. I found its message to me, in my hours of need, to be gently encouraging. My epiphany: women got more pleasure out of sex than men! “Hello, woman.”So let me tell you a few examples of my being seduced by women -- all the while believing I was the seducer. They say a man runs after a woman until she catches him. I was caught many times while I was a bachelor.Still between marriages, I was visiting Israel for the first time, and on a tour bus noticed an attractive woman of a certain age, and invited her to sit next to me as we toured Masada and other important places in Jewish historyShe was Australian and very friendly. After some hours of conversation sitting side-by- side, I noticed her bare arm was in contact with my bare arm. I thought, “This is interesting”. Is this a subliminal or not-so-subliminal signal, or simply an accidental contact?At one point the tour bus stopped at the Dead Sea, a well-known tourist attraction, which had a very large very salty pool where, once we put on our swim suits, we were able to swim around. At one point, I called her name, and when she approached me as I was standing in the pool, I opened my arms toward her in a welcoming gesture. To my surprise, she did the same, came closer, and leapt into my arms, wrapping her legs around me and stimulating me to the point where I became very embarrassed. No other swimmers or anyone in the pool seem to notice, or to care. This was Israel, after all...the land of Sabras and macho men.When I showered and collected myself, and my excitement had dwindled and visibly diminished, I returned to our seats on the bus. We then sat very close together, arms in contact. Again! So it had been a signal.I asked if she might be interested in some friendly love-making, and she said “Yes”. (Timing is everything!) When we returned to Tel Aviv we went directly to her hotel room and enjoyed recreational sex for the evening, during the course of which she remarked in her lovely Australian-accented, voice: “You make beautiful love”. -- not, "You make love beautifully") Flattery?You bet. But a very welcome compliment to a sex-starved amateur in search of fulfillment and new friends. My first wife had never praised my efforts. So the Aussie’s review of my performance was a great gift. And a nod to Tiresias, Einstein, and Feynman. “To Life!”(L’Chayim) as Tevye sings in “Fiddler On The Roof”.I have carried this memory of her grammatically-inverted non-idiomatic compliment for some forty years; I still savor it and get a frisson whenever I recollect the scene of our encounter, unspooling like a film in my mind’s eye.As I discovered again and again, there is a learning curve on playing the piano, on skiing, on playing tennis, on learning physics and Greek--and on understanding what to do before, during, and after intercourse. I was on a steep learning curve.* * *I once dated Joan, an actress who was very friendly with Salome Jens, a beautiful actress of the 1960s who told my date that she, Salome, was having an affair with President John F. Kennedy, who was another notorious womanizer.In fact, in his memoirs, Harold MacMillan, the British prime minister at the same time Kennedy was president, mentions that Kennedy confessed privately to him that he, Kennedy, needed to screw a different woman every three days -- at the least. (An acquaintance of mine, when apprised of this, said, “Why so long?")Salome Jens, to show off her presidential affair to her friends, actually wore black for weeks after JFK was assassinated, as if she were the widow. Joan told me this was vulgar female braggadocio.Joan had lived in France, and was a very accomplished and elegant lover who taught me some of the French ways of love. She asked if I had ever had sex with men. “Why do you ask?” I asked back, shocked. She said that in her vast sexual experiences with men, “Most men are terrible in bed…clumsy, awkward, all thumbs”. Then she said, “Actually, you’re not like most men in that regard.” Wow! Another notch on my belt. Being a divorced free agent was an eye-opener. (And an opener of other body parts. Woody Allen famously said, “My brain is my second favorite organ.” I couldn’t agree with him more.) Nevertheless, Joan ended our relationship when she realized that I was not going to be husband material any time soon.But Joan’s French love-making reminds me of a joke… Everyone thinks that when astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, he said: “That’s one small step for a man, and a Giant Leap for Mankind.” In this joke, that’s not what he said. What he really said was: “That’s one small step for a man, and a giant leap for Manny Klein.” So you might wonder who is Manny Klein? I’ll tell you….Manny Klein is the husband of Mrs. Manny Klein, who for many years before the Moon landing had told her husband, “When men land on the Moon -- that’s when I’ll give you a blow job.”There are many more romantic interludes I enjoyed until my second marriage, but the theme is pretty much the same. I was better at this than I had hitherto been given credit for. And I was getting even better. Learning curves indeed. Exceeding my expectations.How do you get to Carnegie Hall? “Practice, practice, practice”There did come a time (“What took you so long, big shot?” I can hear my Dad saying) when I actually became over-dosed on this popular indoor sport…recreational love-making. It had become an obsession, a habit, a reflex...a way of avoiding intimacy.Then I met and married Celia, and my well-lived life began -- and thankfully continues to this day. ####RICH UNCLE, POOR UNCLE My mother’s admonition to “be a good person” was embedded in my brain from early child-hood. Such advice drove my life-long interests in teaching and helping others -- and made me a better person than I otherwise would have been had pursuit of money or of fame been the central theme of my life.But two uncles, brothers of Mike Rosen, exemplified the personal costs of their single-minded pursuit of money and fame. Each lived self-centered yet un-examined lives. Both grew up in squalid poverty alongside my Dad; Harry became a wealthy restaurateur, Bob a starving minor poet.Harry Rosen (HR) was my Dad’s older brother…older by two years, with super-abundant testosterone, aggression, over-weaning ambition, charm, wit, arrogance, and selfishness—enough to fuel half a dozen people like me…or my father, Mike Rosen (MR). They were business partners in a very successful restaurant, the Enduro, predecessor to the now-famous Junior’s (of cheese-cake fame) which HR founded after MR left the restaurant business in 1947. The current Enduro, as mentioned, lives anew on the upper east side of Manhattan, in an upscale cheese-cake-free restaurant founded by Harry’s grand-son, Alan.HR, like MR, never finished grammar school but HR was also a phenomenon and a force of nature—for better or worse. Perhaps for better and worse. HR smoked cigars. He was magnanimous to his inferiors, fawning to his superiors, and an inveterate gambler. Larger than life, he may have modeled himself on tough-guy roles from old gangster movies -- like Edward G. Robinson’s role in “Little Caesar” or Humphrey Bogart’s in “Key Largo”. He was self-made, and as they say, ‘a legend in his own mind.’HR was an amusing amalgam of charm, pugnacity, and Hollywood hubris. He died of prostate cancer at age 92, but he gave his prostate several lifetimes of use, for he was a compulsive womanizer during his life-long marriage to Ruth, who accepted him as he was. She must have known about what he called his “chippies” (his sexual conquests), but she knew he loved her as she loved him. They had a very strong marriage, but serious issues with one of their children.* * *Although he was my father’s “big brother”, he was often patronizing and often unkind to my father, who was his equal partner in their large, very successful, Enduro. He sought and acquired publicity as well as conquests. My Mom said he once told her that his children “Think of me as a God”. Mom said she laughed in his face at his hubris. One of them, Walter, rejected Harry’s self-deification, and ultimately Harry himself.Harry was a born gambler, a fancy-dresser, and an aggressive businessman who made and lost and made and lost money by the ton. Harry wore an expensive wig or “rug” to cover his male pattern baldness and to look younger than he was. In later life, he drove a new white Roll Royce with green leather upholstery. (Green was his favorite color because it’s the color of money.) The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce or his public-relations firm, driven by his self-importance, got a street next to Junior’s in Brooklyn named after him: “Harry Rosen Way”. I don’t know how he was able to pull it off, but his three-column obituary in the New York Times included his cherished (and simplified) recipe for the now-famous Junior’s Cheesecake… which always won the cheesecake competition in New York Magazine. I suspect that he (or his sons) had a publicist place the obituary in the NYT. But just imagine: HR was marketing from the grave!One of his sons, Walter (my cousin, and about my age) stopped speaking to him for the last decades of HR’s life. Apparently, Walter’s wife Sandy and HR clashed on many levels, and on many occasions.“Alphas” are creatures that dominate others in their group.HR was an “alpha-cubed” male, and Sandy likewise an “alpha-cubed” female. By “cubed” I mean to indicate that they were both extremely assertive and dominant personalities; Sandy and HR clashed from the very beginning of her marriage to Walter. For their wedding, HR bought them a very expensive house in the upscale neighborhood of Sands Point in Great Neck. For what at the time (early 1960s) was a considerable sum: a million dollars. HR apparently believed that his largesse meant that he had a claim on them, that they owed him obeisance or guilt or homage. Yet they never paid him the respect he demanded.When HR complained to Sandy that she didn’t obey him or give him his due, he reminded her that he had bought their expensive home as a wedding present, she said to him, “You want me to write you a check?” She had her own successful business at the time and was not to be pushed around.The other son, Marvin, a few years older than Walter or me, was a chip off the old block HR, in that he was a voracious womanizer, but Walter told me Marvin was also an alcoholic. Marvin used to ask me if he could use my apartment for his extra-marital trysts, or if I would act as an alibi for him (I refused) on his play dates with women who were not his wife Emily. She once complained to HR that her husband Marvin was unfaithful to her and was running around with other women. HR memorably said: “So. Your shit don’t smell?” How do you respond to that? Emily and Marvin eventually split up.HR bet and lost millions on the stock market, at the races, and in real estate investments, Walter told me. Walter and his children had virtually nothing to do with HR and his wife Ruth—until the very end of HR’s life, when he was dying of prostate cancer. They finally did come to see him to bid goodbye. He said to them: “NOW you come?” He was still trying to evoke major-league guilt and assert moral superiority -- even to the very end.* * *My other uncle was born Bob, which is what we called him. He took the nom de plume Harry Roskolenko (a variant on Roskolenkier, the original family name in Russia). He was an anti-establishment poet, novelist, essayist, memoir writer, a professionally-starving outlier – and a self-centered, self-made pretentious literary figure. His pursuit of fame resembled his brother HR’s pursuit of money. He wrote a narcissistic memoir entitled, “When I Was Last On Cherry Street” about growing up poor on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as one of five (out of twelve) surviving children of impoverished immigrants.Dad told us how impoverished they were: “When I was ten years old, I had to work to help feed the family. Because everyone we knew was in the same boat, we didn’t think we were poor.”Bob ran away from home as a youngster, but not before hocking my father’s cherished and hard-earned saxophone. Decades later, MR asked his younger brother Bob if he had pawned his saxophone, and was told: “You played very badly!” Bob always had justification for his selfishness.He rode the rails (like the hobo in the movie “Sullivan’s Travels”), met and was praised by Carl Sandburg, and married and lived in Paris with a descendant of novelist Pearl S. Buck; her name was Diana Chang, and she too wrote novels and poetry. A lovely woman, perhaps too good for Bob, she eventually left him. He was devastated. He was an adventurer. He lived the Bohemian life, was always in need of a hand-out and a meal. My hard-working businessman father was always generous to him whenever he showed up, often with a new girlfriend in tow. Bob was scornful of his bourgeois brothers HR and MR, although not too scornful to accept generous hand-outs.He traveled the world after Diana left, and wrote a book, “Poet On A Scooter” which brought him an infinitesimal iota of fame and a mini-micro-income. He was forced to write pot-boilers, sex and erotic novels and other non-literary books, in order to eke out a living and to pay the rent. Sadly, when he was down in the dumps later in his life in a moment of self-criticism, he confessed to me that he was merely “a hack” writer. I guess he wanted me to disagree; I demurred for the sake of kindness.He didn’t have children, except for a ‘free-love’ child he fathered, but never cared for, in Australia during World War Two, where he was stationed and settled for a while. I guess he had some regard for me because he asked me to be the Literary Executor of his Will.At his memorial service, the several eulogizers who spoke before me spoke of him with polite faint praise; he was “blessed with banalities”…until I spoke. I explained I was his nephew and knew him differently than all the other eulogizers; I said I was entitled to honor his memory by truth-telling. I proceeded to speak about him as I have already done above. I was not unkind, but I was straight-forward about his schnorring (a Yiddish word meaning “sponger” or “parasite”), his womanizing, his self-involvement.Harvey Shapiro, who was at one time the Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times Book Review, a well-known poet and literature teacher, was present. When I met him years later in East Hampton through mutual friends, he told me “Harry Roskolenko was a bastard”, and he remembered my eulogy because everyone who knew Harry/Bob as a writer and who spoke after me told “the truth” about Harry Roskolenko. I had broken the ice. Harvey said that the event was the most amusing memorial service he had ever attended.* * *What did I learn from knowing uncle Harry and uncle Bob?Not easy to say…Harry’s aggression, hubris, single-minded drive for money cost him a flawed father-son relationship with Walter. On the one hand, he greatly enjoyed making and spending money on material comforts and luxuries, and passed on those values to his children. On the other hand, his efforts to “deify” himself required obeisance from everyone around him…which distanced him from them and from authenticity. His arrogance immunized him from deeply-felt emotions. He was always “on”.Bob, on the other hand, was someone who wanted to be loved and admired for himself and his writing, although I found him difficult to engage emotionally…until the end of his life when he asked me to join him for a fateful visit to his personal physician. Bob told me before the visit, “Please don’t tell me what the doctor says about my medical diagnosis; I don’t want to know now if I’m going to die from whatever it is I have.” I agreed. After his doctor examined him, Bob asked the doctor to tell me his prognosis without revealing it to Bob. The doctor told me Bob’s condition was dire – terminal cancer -- and said he didn’t have long to live. I took this in sadly, and as he had instructed I did not tell Bob the diagnosis.After we left the doctor’s office, Bob said, “Tell me the diagnosis”. I reminded Bob he had asked me not to tell. Bob then insisted he really wanted to know. I guess he wanted to hear the diagnosis from a family member, or from me -- someone he cared about. So I reluctantly told him that according to his doctor, he was going to die soon. Not an easy message to deliver. We spent some time together absorbing this sad news. It was then I felt moved by the difficult life Bob had led…not knowing where his next meal was coming from, not having his own family, displaying bravado as compensation for his shortcomings in the face of a life not entirely well-lived. ####URBAN BIKING Living in Manhattan as a bachelor on a limited budget in the 1970s, I used a simple form of vehicular transportation: a bicycle. Reliable, exercise-generating, inexpensive, portable, and faster than walking, the bicycle was, and is, a wonderful invention. (One problem with bikes in Manhattan was that they are stolen by drug addicts who patrol the streets with chain-cutters and trucks, culling the best ones for resale to support their habit. I lost half a dozen, but Bill Cunningham, reporter-photographer for the New York Times who covers fashion and design on his bike, had twenty-nine stolen.)I regularly biked to business appointments, to meetings, to social events, on dates, at all times and everywhere (unless there was snow on the ground).On one occasion, I was biking South on Broadway in the 70’s, and I passed a double-parked taxi-cab—and the driver suddenly opened his door as I came abreast of his cab. My bike struck the inside of the open door, stopped, and I kept going, doing a double-loop somersault over the front handle-bars, and over the open door…landing on my lower back with a heavy dull THUD!Groggy, I lay there -- my head aimed North on Broadway, facing up, with my feet aimed South on Broadway. A crowd gathered. Police arrived. I was taken to a hospital, checked for internal injuries, and released.When I got back to my tiny apartment, I discovered I was experiencing intense pain which started in my lower back, and radiated down my left leg, ending at my toes. The pain was unbearable. Yet I had a job to do…supervising the research and writing my expensive opus that I imagined was going to earn me fame (like uncle Bob?) and fortune (like uncle Harry?). Not so soon: I could barely move without pain, described by one doctor as a ‘tooth-ache over half of my body’.I went to doctors seriatim. One after another told me, “It will go away”, or “It’s nothing”, or “Just wait”, or (my favorite) “Tincture of time”.Friends recommended one specialist, and another specialist, and yet another specialist…”the best in the city”. Physiatrists, physical rehab medicine experts, sports-medicine doctors, physical therapists, orthopedic surgeons, neurologists, rheumatologists, and so on. Nothing any of them did seemed to help…meds, injections, massage, exercise, and so on, ad nauseam.At the end of my tether, my wit’s end, in constant agony, I sought out and found a man named David Gourievitch, MD. He came highly recommended, as did all the others. But he had been Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal physician, and had traveled all over the world with her. He had even written a book about her and their travels together doing good works. (My mother had virtually idolized Eleanor as if she were a ‘saintly person’ because of her attention to humanitarian causes. When I asked, after we got to know each other, Dr. G was kind enough to give me an copy of the book autographed to my Mom.)I met Dr. Gourievitch in his office after a lengthy wait in his waiting room, which was filled with many patients, who appeared to be from all walks of life…the impoverished, the rich, and the famous (Isaac Stern and Bess Myerson among them).Dr. G was tall, slender, very handsome, and of a very gentle kindly demeanor. I could appreciate why he was so popular. (Patients in his waiting room told me I was lucky that I was able to get an appointment.)After listening to me recite my symptoms, by now a litany, which included my copious tears, Dr. G examined me. His touch was extraordinary. I felt a little better already. I remembered countless other doctors who touched my body as if it were a piece of lifeless flesh…a dead chicken or piece of raw meat.Dr. G had a gift. It was not quite laying-on of hands, but it was pretty close. I had never before been examined by a physician who clearly expressed his care and compassion through his touch; his long slender fingers apparently “connected” with me, with my being, perhaps my soul. I felt deeply connected and indebted to him.After the lengthy examination, he sat on one side of his desk, I on the other. I noticed his hands trembling. He noticed my glance, and without my asking he said, “Parkinson’s disease”. He didn’t say it was fatal or terminal, but I suspected this. Dr. G was in his seventies, and probably not long for this world, I thought.Dr. G began: “Let’s talk about you… We know very little about the lower back”. He seemed to gain stature in my eyes at that moment… any doctor who says ‘I don’t know’ deserved special respect. He opened my skeptical eyes and my heart to his charismatic presence.Dr G continued: “Since we don’t understand enough about this area, we have no one-hundred-percent-weapons against lower back pain. We have five-percent-weapons, ten-percent-weapons. So I’m going to prescribe seven of these low-percent-weapons, and let’s hope that they add up to enough to control, or maybe even vanquish, the pain.”“OK. I’m your patient. Let’s do them. When do we start?”Dr. G added: “But I want you to promise me this: if I don’t cure you within a month or so, I want you to leave me, and to find someone else to treat you.”BOING! I had never heard a physician speak to me this way! Suddenly, he grew metaphorically another few inches in stature. And he was tall even before he spoke.Over the next few months, I came to him for “trigger-point injections” (a mixture of Cortisone and Xylocaine shots in the lower back region), electric-shock treatments, pain-killing medications, muscle-relaxant medications, massage, heat therapy, cold compresses, physical therapy, and a few I’ve forgotten.Slowly, slowly, I began to improve. The tear-inducing pain started to subside. I was able to concentrate on my work again, instead of constantly thinking of, or dwelling on, my pain.I noticed Dr. G’s tremor getting worse and worse.After six months, we were done with his treatments. The pain had fled. Life went back to the default position…writing, research, organizing, supervising.Months passed. A year went by. I read that Dr. G has died of Parkinson’s. I decided to attend a memorial service for him at Central Synagogue, a vast reform Jewish temple, filled with what seemed like thousands of friends and current patients, and former patients like me. Bess Myerson was there. Isaac Stern was there. Other celebrities were there. Most of us non-celebrities came to honor this wonderful man and his charmed life healing others.The first eulogist was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a personal friend of David’s; both grew up together in Berlin. He described their childhood: how kind, considerate, and elegant David was – even as a child. Rabbi Prinz said that everyone who knew David as a youngster referred to him as “Beautiful David”, not merely because of his looks, but more so because of his temperament.People in the audience wept openly. Not me. Not yet.The next eulogy came from a young physician who worked with David at the same hospital, Columbia P & S. He described David’s enormous compassion, but even more, his great energy. David would work longer and harder than other physicians half his age, bounding up the hospital steps two at a time. Audience members wept openly. Not me. Not yet.The third eulogist was violinist Isaac Stern. He said, “I’m not a man of many words. I cannot speak of David in words. This is beyond my ability.”“But I can play music. I will pay tribute to David in the way I know best. I will play a piece in his memory that David loved…a Bach Partita for Unaccompanied Violin. It’s in a minor key.”Isaac Stern began to play. The mournful melody filled the synagogue. Echoing. Lingering.I looked around at the others. Everyone was weeping. “Not a dry eye in the house” is a cliché, but an apt description. Yes. I wept openly. I get teary as I write this. (I joke that I cry so easily, I cry at television commercials. I am one of the few men that enjoy crying.) My heart-felt feelings are often very near the surface. “What comes from the heart”, the Talmud (and Coleridge) says…”goes to the heart.” ####DRIVING A TAXI I was in my mid-forties and out of work. My parents had lived agreeable lives, and both died -- Dad from heart attack, Mom from a stroke -- in their early 70s.Unwelcome ‘guests’ arrived: depression, loneliness, male menopause. Dark feelings visited, and dread permeated everything I did. I was dysphoric, disappointed, and distressed -- wondering what to do with my life. I had written two books which generated a very small income, and had some savings…barely enough to eke out food and rent. My starving-poet uncle Bob must have felt like this.Somebody suggested that I get out of the apartment and do something useful -- like driving a taxicab. In fact, this challenge and a few others began to bring me out of my misery. I rose to the challenge to prove I could do it, took the taxi-driver license, and started driving a cab every day in ten- to twelve-hour shifts.There are many taxicab companies on the West side of Manhattan. I presented myself at one huge taxi garage, and was given the late shift, from late afternoon to after mid-night. I earned a modest amount of money, a percentage of the receipts, and the taxi company got the rest. I hated the work, the hours, and not a few of my passengers. But I learned.Here's what I found. People who were dressed as laborers, blue-collar folks, doormen, waiters, and others who identified with taxi-cab drivers would leave disproportionately large tips. On a ten dollar tab, they might leave as much as two dollars. (Nowadays, I can afford to take taxis and remember those days and leave substantial tips if a driver has done his job effectively.)But the well-dressed apparently-wealthy customers usually left none. I recall one night picking up Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (one could play Scrabble with all of her last names). She was dressed elegantly in a formal shimmering pale-blue ball-gown, escorted by two handsome young men in tuxedos. I picked them up on Fifth Avenue in the seventies at an excellent address, and drove them to Park Avenue in the sixties, also an excellent address. Their tip was zero. Goose eggs. Nada.On another occasion I took a well-dressed businessman to JFK airport. It was rush hour. He says, “Hurry up! I don’t want to miss my plane.” So I hurried up and drove stressed-out through bumper-to bumper traffic…moving as fast as I could and made it in time for him to catch his plane. The fare was twenty four dollars. The tip? Zero, goose eggs, nada.I had some other adventures. I picked up a very attractive well-dressed glamorous woman, and when she reached her destination she asked if I could change her hundred dollar bill. I said, “No. I can’t”. At that point I guessed that she was a prostitute because that's all she had. I asked her if I could change the large bill in a convenience store, because I was afraid that if she left the cab she wouldn’t come back. I came back with change, gave it to her, and she did give me a tip. A ‘working girl’, and a real ‘professional’.I remember an elderly Jewish lady who got into my cab on West End Avenue in the eighties. As soon as entered, she started barking orders at me. (Norman Mailer once described Bella Abzug as a “woman with a voice that would melt the fat off the back of a taxi-drivers neck”.) She started in by growling, “Go straight for three blocks! Make the light! Make the light! Then go left two blocks! Then…” I startled myself by shouting at her: “Lady! Get! Out! Of! My! Taxi!” She didn’t get it the first time. Perhaps no one ever talked back to an elderly bossy Bell-Abzug-type lady like her. Shaking her grey head, she finally got it and left, slamming the door. (Maybe she reminded me of my first mother-in-law, an assertive alpha female, whose questions were like Chinese water torture, wherein drop-drop-drop-drop eventually makes a hole in your head, heart, or a stone, whichever is weakest. About which more in the chapter, “Chinese Water Torture and Christian Science”.)It came to pass ‘in the fullness of time’ that a romantic interlude developed with a young lady who got into my cab carrying a large package. When she placed it in the back seat of the cab, occupying the entire space there, she asked if she could sit up front in the passenger seat next to me. When we got to her destination, she asked me to help her carry the package inside, which I did. I think she paid the fare and included a tip and asked if I would like a drink. “Yes, thanks!” Of course, one thing led to another.On another occasion, two guys who looked like they needed four shaves, got in and requested I drive to a very distant and deserted place in Brooklyn. I had decided that these two guys were Mafiosi. I don't know how I decided. They just looked like central casting’s movie thugs. When we arrived at their destination, an empty field, I imagined it was a killing ground. I was scared. I didn’t wait for them to pay their fare or to shoot me, whatever they were going to do. I scrammed. Yes, I did. Fare-less in Brooklyn.I eventually gave up driving a taxi because a guy punched me out. He must have felt I deserved it, but I didn’t. All I did was bump into his rear fender, a love-tap, when he stopped suddenly at a red light.My life changed. I received a grant from the National Science Foundation to attend a science conference in Tokyo, where I presented a paper, and toured Japan. I visited Nara, Hiroshima, and was treated royally by a friend of a friend of my sister’s. I returned home a new-ish man, met my future wife, married her, and built a juicy life and a very full career. “Time flies when you’re having fun.”“Time flies like an arrow”, said Groucho Marx, “I know why fruit flies like bananas, but why should time flies like arrows?” These are called “garden-path sentences”: they mis-lead you along one path …only to segue you imperceptibly into another direction. I must have been ready to make a smooth, almost imperceptible, transition from a taxi-driver for three months into a new and juicy life. I was “garden-pathed”.* * *In 1990 I created a program to help some five hundred émigré scientists from the former Soviet Union find jobs and careers in the U.S. (described in another chapter, “Nice Work: Soviet Emigres As New Americans”). Some (even those with double doctorates) were driving taxis like the former (single-doctorate) me. When they arrived, they needed to support their families any way they could. One of my own life’s ironies is that I also had driven a cab to support myself decades earlier.Fast forward twenty years. Celia and I are all dressed up, going to the Metropolitan Opera. We hail a taxi, get in, and I say, “Broadway and 60th Street, please”. The taxi driver says, “Doctor Rosen?” Whoops? I do a double take. I scrutinize his taxi license photo and name. It’s a familiar Russian face and name. Vladimir had been one of my students in the Scientific Career Transitions Program I had created years earlier.At first, when I recognized him, I was upset because even though I had taught him how to find a job in his scientific specialty, he was still driving a taxi after all these years. I told him I was sorry he hadn’t found a job in his field. He said, ”No. No. Don’t feel bad, Doctor Rosen. Tomorrow, my brother and I are opening our new consulting business, and we’re using all the methods you taught us in your workshop!” ####A VOLUNTEER IN ISRAEL I visited Israel in 1983 to join a program called “Volunteers For Israel”, developed by the former head of the Israeli paratroopers, General Aharon Daviddi, a tall, gangly, taciturn scholar-warrior -- who had a doctorate (which he called “a complete waste of time”) from Oxford.His idea of the program was to bring Jews from all over the world to Israel to work as volunteers in the Israeli Army for two months, doing manual labor or menial tasks that would release regular Army soldiers to do more important, critical, or dangerous tasks -- such as fighting. My job was to fill sandbags in the Golan Heights eight hours a day in the broiling Israeli summer sun.We lived on an Israeli Army base, just like the regular Israeli Army soldiers did. We slept in barracks on army cots. We ate the same food. We complained the same complaints. We became friends. It was a great way to see Israel for the first time…from the ground up. Masada, the Western Wall, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv. And exciting connections to my roots by discovering new parts of myself. (Please see my essay “A Volunteer In Israel”, in The Jewish Week, February 17, 1984, page 25.)I had a few adventures and misadventures. I was told to look up Shulamith Katznelson, the head of a language school teaching Hebrew, called “Ulpan Akiva”, based in Netanya, with whom I may have been related through my mother’s parents -- who had the same last name, and who came from the same village in Belarus, about 80 miles south of Minsk, called Bobruisk (Babruysk).Shulamith was a very strong, force-of-nature, take-charge, no-nonsense pro-Arab, peace-now, modern feminist. When I visited her, I explained that my mother was a Katznelson whose parents, Avram and Sarah Katsenellinson came from Bobruisk. Here’s an excerpt from her obit.Shulamit Katznelson, 80; Teacher of Arabs and JewsBy WILLIAM H. HONAN, The New York TimesPublished: August 07, 1999Shulamit Katznelson, who was awarded the 1986 Israel Prize for Life Achievement, her country’s highest honor, for bringing Arabs and Jews together through learning each other’s languages, died yesterday at her home in the coastal town of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. She was 80. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize….…Ms. Katznelson was born in Geneva in 1919, and her family immigrated to Palestine two years later. Her mother, Bat-Sheva, became a legislator in Israel’s Parliament. Her brother, Shmuel Tamir, served as Justice Minister, and an uncle, Zalman Shazar, was Israel’s third President.Nearly 100,000 people from 148 countries have studied at the school in the last five decades, among them ambassadors, Israeli Army officers and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Ulpan Akiva set up two branch offices in the Gaza Strip towns of Gaza City and Khan Yunis.* * *After telling Shulamith I was “a Katznelson”, she said:”Talk to me for ten minutes, and I’ll tell you if you’re a Katznelson or not!” So we started to converse, and schmooze. And schmooze. And schmooze. These wide-ranging discussions went on for about an hour, at which point Shulamith suddenly says, “Well, yes! You’re crazy enough to be a Katznelson. How would you like to stay here tonight, and visit a Druse encampment with me? We’re making peace with these nomadic Arabs, but don’t tell anyone back at the Israeli Army base, because they don’t like my peace-making initiatives”.“Sure”, I said. “I’ll do it!” So we visited the tent-camp of the Druse tribe, and ate with them, and slept at their camp overnight. The next day, I returned to the Israeli Army base. The commanding officer requested to see me. He was of a very high rank, like Colonel or General, and exuded a powerful “alpha” presence. He asked, “Why were you so late in returning to camp? You were supposed to be back here yesterday when your leave expired.”I said, “Well, there was no way to communicate. I was with a relative, Shulamith Katznelson, and she took me to an Arab village, where we ate and stayed over.”He was red-faced with anger. “WHAT! YOU DID WHAT?” He added, “You will have to be interrogated to tell us what you told these Arabs!”I was interrogated at great length by another officer, who was extremely aggressive in his questioning….”What did you tell them about our camp?” “How much did they know about our facility here?”I tried to make a joke about the situation, but He Was Not Amused. I left the interrogation room somewhat sadder and wiser, grateful that I wasn’t given KP, or put into solitary confinement, or worse... denied leave again.Before my next leave from the base, I called the Dviris. They knew Joseph Nellis, a Washington lawyer related to my Mom through her mother’s Misnevitch side of the family. We made a date to meet in Jerusalem, on Misgavladach Street, where they have an apartment over-looking the Western Wall. I showed up at the agreed-upon time and place in my Israeli Army uniform.“You look like one of us!” said Rachel Dviri, wife of Haim Dviri, the person my mother’s family was related to. “I am one of you! I’m Jewish!”Haim Dviri (the Hebrew word dviri means “destroyer” or “demolition”, or “building de-construction”) was in his eighties, very robust, and spoke barely-understandable English. He had walked from Russia to Palestine in the 1920s. He was an ardent Zionist. He had killed British soldiers during the occupation of what was then called Palestine. He had been with one of the anti-British extreme-right-wing ultra-nationalist heroes, Yair Stern, head of the notorious “Stern Gang”, when Yair was assassinated by the British for his revolutionary activities.Haim was an adventurer, raconteur, a lady’s man, and a great story-teller…or maybe a teller-of-tall-tales. He told of being arrested by the British many times and escaping many times. He was imprisoned in Eritrea with Menachem Begin and other well-known political figures. His mother, and my mother’s mother, were sisters…and we had a very old yellowed-with-age photograph from Russia that showed his parents and was confirmed as accurate when my mother identified her mother and his mother in the same photo. So I guessed this made him….what?...my great uncle?His wife, Rachel, spoke English understandably, and was a poet, writing in Hebrew. Her family had lived in Israel for seven generations, going back two-hundred years to the earth-quake in the holy city of Sfat.Rachel and Haim introduced me to their grown children, Yael, mother of two then-young daughters (Zohar and Keren) and their son Hidei.Zohar was about eight years old, and Keren was about twelve years old when I first met them. I had been advised to bring them gifts representative of New York City, so I brought them “tee” shirts of the sort found in Times Square tourist shops. Both shirts were very New York-ish, with our famous skyline and sky-scrapers emblazoned on their front and back. These two young ladies were delightful, and delighted to meet me, whom they called “Shlomo” (meaning “Solomon” or “Stephen” in Hebrew). Together they wrote and performed a play, a magic puppet show, for me, on a make-shift stage they built for the occasion. Their later careers were extensions of these performances. In their late teens, they arrived in New York City to get advanced degrees (Zohar in screen-writing; Keren in computer-graphics) and to be cared-for and watched-over by Celia and me for about ten years each. They quickly became assimilated into our New York lives, were introduced to our family members and friends, and in effect became our adoptive daughters. Both earned master’s degrees with distinction and “Bravas!” from us.Keren’s education became a strong asset to our career management business when she helped me create our websites ( and ) for lawyers, doctors, and scientists. She did the design and computer graphics, and I did the writing and content; the two of us worked regularly from six pm to midnight every day for some three months. The website is still live, and still generates new clients.Zohar’s thesis required her to write a dramatic play that had to be directed by a professional director and performed by professional actors before a live audience. We invited many friends and relatives to see this remarkable three-generation play about the first Gulf War in 1990-91, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq Al Hussein /Scud missiles were directed at and landed in Israel. Two Israeli citizens died, and 230 were wounded. Because the government feared that the missiles might carry the deadly nerve gas Sarin, gas masks had been issued to all Israelis.We were pleasantly shocked and made proud when, in the course of the play, one of the characters who complains about Iraqi missiles hitting Israel, suggests in-character and onstage, in front of our friends and relatives, that they “call the Rosens in New York” to see if they could stay with us to escape the missile attacks. The audience applauded and laughed at the topicality and reference to real life this theatrical moment captured. Of course, I wept.We had been concerned about our relatives once we heard that Israel was being attacked by Scud missiles in 1991. We had called the Dviris in Israel to make sure that they were all right, and hoped that they had not been hit by any explosives.Yael, mother of Keren and Zohar, answered the phone. “Are you OK? Anybody hurt?”“Of course we’re fine. We’re used to this. We live in a constant state of anticipation, protection, and defense. We’re really fine. Please don’t worry about us.” Thus Yael put our minds at rest.Zohar and Keren returned to Israel after finishing their educations in New York. Each married very appropriate and delightful Israeli husbands (Zohar a neurosurgeon, Yuvi; Keren a government official, Doron). We had visited them in Israel, and eventually they had two children each. We stay in touch with our much-loved adoptive “daughters”, their children, their salt-of-the-Earth mother, Yael, and her wonderful husband Asher, formerly a Colonel in the Israeli Army.* * *On Nine-Eleven (September 11, 2001) we were profoundly saddened by the intentionally murderous attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center. We were inconsolable. We wept every time we viewed the video replay of the twin towers collapsing and taking three thousand lives. We knew two people personally who died in the devastation. One was head of security at the Twin towers. The other, a former client, who worked at a very high level position in the Pentagon for the Director of Defense and whose office was struck by the plane that crashed into the Pentagon—was on that plane! (Please see the Appendix: “Heroes of Nine-Eleven”.)To get away from the tragedy, we drove to East Hampton to recuperate. On our return to 35 West 81st Street, we played our voice-mail messages. One was from Israel…from Yael. She recorded two words: “Be brave!” She was calling to tell us to be brave. She was also telling us that our New York family, and her Israeli family, are one and the same Family.We think of them often. When we visit Israel often, we stay near them, and see them morning, noon, and night. We watch their youngsters grow up…and we savor Keren’s and Zohar’s children as if they were extensions of ourselves. As if they are our “great” grand-children. ####MOUSE-TRAPS, OR DEAD MICE? A sadistic death-row murderer had brutally killed his girlfriend and then, cannibal style, ate her flesh. When asked to comment, he said, “It was a bad career move”. He used up his quota of bad moves instantly. My career mistakes were less dramatic, more spread out, and more benign. In writing my quasi-memoirs, I have become interested in scrutinizing my mistakes, making them explicit, and in the process trying to learn to avoid repeating them. I am not retailing advice; these lessons apply specifically to me. My own career blunders inspired me to change careers until I found the career that was right for me …and only then I was able to help improve other peoples’ career-matches. A client once said, “My career is a worthy expression of who I am.” I helped myself find a career that’s worthy of who I was – by helping others find careers that were worthy expressions of who they were.I earned wisdom incrementally, from my lifetime collection of semi-serendipitous job-switching, misleading and often poor judgment-calls, and “garden-path” transitions. a.. I worked at changing a job or career only when I was unhappy, waiting for opportunities, deferring decisions, intellectualizing options -- instead of adopting a long range plan. (I did this when working for an investment banking firm until I was fired.) b.. I allowed negativity and despondency to overwhelm my job choices and career decisions. (This happened after my parents died and I was under-employed.) c.. I imagined, prematurely, that I could read other people's minds without corroboration. (When I was in the academic life, I assumed my boss disliked me personally, when in fact it was me who disliked him…causing him to deny me tenure, which turned out to be serendipitous.) d.. I believed that success in one area automatically translated to success in every area, without the need for the same effort that led to the first success. (As a freshly-minted PhD, I assumed I knew more than I did; I had to learn anew in each new job.) e.. I aspired to be perfect in all things, setting my work standards unattainably high, comparing myself to others who were more accomplished, and accepting a discouraging contrast. (When I was working at a think-tank, everyone else seemed to be geniuses, and some were; I should have left before being laid-off.) f.. I worried about what I couldn't change (my smarts) -- instead of changing my attitude. (I did change: I worked hard and harder.) g.. I used to respond "Yes, but" to almost every positive thought, intention, or bit of good advice. (This caused me to ignore much good advice; I learned how to force myself -- without trying to criticize-- to actively listen. I’m still working on this one.) h.. I decided I must earn the same money, or maintain the same level of status, responsibility, or prestige in each career or job -- instead of pursuing what I enjoy doing well. (I never thought that helping Russian refuse-niks and American scientists – which I loved as a worthy expression of my life -- would ever earn me much money, but eventually it did.) i.. I expected my work-life to bring complete personal fulfillment.(Actually it came pretty close eventually; but marrying Celia completed me…my personal and professional life naturally and seamlessly merged.) j.. I burned my bridges behind me.(Getting fired several times finally taught me to leave before being asked... and not to burn bridges.) k.. I believed I'd be hired to do something only because I had been formally trained with a PhD. (There were always people better trained than me, and I could still wash a car, drive a cab, write and sell books.) l.. I stayed where I was for fear of failing elsewhere. (College teaching was a sinecure; I became a trapped drone; being denied tenure and leaving academia liberated me to see the world beyond.) m.. I ruminated on what I should have done in the past, instead of focusing exclusively on what I can do in the future. (Actually, I still mull over, ponder, and reflect on my past …but writing my quasi-memoir is my current future.)Everyone makes mistakes. Some smart people are able to learn from their own mistakes -- and some really smart people can learn from others’. I seemed to learn better from my own mistakes.* * *Well, I made some bad career moves (but never ate human flesh) and did leave jobs and change careers enough times to find a good fit to my personality and skills. What’s good about goodbye? If your job’s a bad match to who you are, and you say goodbye in order to find a good match – that’s what’s good about goodbye. I learned personal lessons by changing careers and jobs frequently, until I got things right: that was very good for me. It was a bit like trying on clothes of different sizes until the right ones fit, and different styles and colors until the outfit is “a worthy expression of who you are” -- or who you want to be.I was able to learn, by trial and error, to transfer skills I used in one career (public speaking, writing, communicating and teaching) into other careers (plugging books I wrote, career counseling and career management).I learned what I was capable of doing -- only by testing myself under very different but challenging circumstances. I didn’t know I could speak to millions of viewers on network television, or teach relativity, or swim a half-mile, or give a loving eulogy or toast, or marry happily -- until I tried it.It took me some time to realize that family dinner-time table-talk, working for my father, and my parents’ attention and love, high school and college and graduate school all provided role-models who became increasingly important later on.I was forced to sink or swim, to thrive, to become versatile, fearlessly resourceful, and a survivor. I discovered that whatever didn’t kill me made me more effective.I found that I was able to adjust and fine-tune many of my personal resources (ambition, aggression, a talent to amuse, analytical ability, eccentricity – all traits I got from my father) to many of the careers I inhabited. Maybe I performed well in spite of my idiosyncrasies.I learned that it’s Not True that if you ‘build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door’. People don’t want better mousetraps; they want dead mice. People don’t need electric drills; they want properly-drilled holes. ####THE SEX LIFE OF MY FORMER PIANO TEACHERWhen I reached three years of age, my parents decided that I was to take violin lessons. They loved music and they had been denied the opportunity to study because of their impoverished beginnings. Maybe they thought music lessons would introduce me to what they had missed, and perhaps they hoped to help make me a Better Person.I was given a very small violin, one-quarter the size of a regular violin. The violin teacher was a very old seedy-looking character. He appeared to need the work.I remember making a very scratchy-screechy horrible noise on this instrument. I was a terrible student. I hated the violin. I remember when he would say, “Rest 1234, rest one and two, rest one, rest ABC rest CBA rest” I realized that these were exercises that I had to learn in order to be the “genius” virtuoso violinist that this violin teacher pretended to believe me to be.However, unbeknownst to my parents, I was no genius virtuoso gifted violin player despite what this old geezer said to them. I was a three-year old who wanted out! But the violin teacher insisted, counter to the auditory evidence, that I was a prodigy…and as a result he continued to give me violin lessons so he could continue the revenue stream from this “gig”.After several months of this agony for me and what must've been agony to my parents --listening to my screechy violin -- they finally figured it out: This violin teacher was hungry and I was not a gifted virtuoso genius violinist. I was a little kid forced into hard labor at age three, a kid who made scratchy screechy horrible sounds from this one-quarter-size violin.Sometime later, I think maybe I was eight or ten, my parents decided to try piano lessons. This time it was better. Their idea paid off. The piano has fixed keys and fixed-length strings, so you can't screech or scratch like I did on the violin. So I actually took to the piano quite well and enjoyed it very much. I remember practicing one or two hours a day. (“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice!”)I started off with “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and moved up to Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony”, first with one hand, then with two hands. With my then-piano teacher, I played a duet: “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round The Mountain”. I played the melody and my piano teacher played the bass part. I can still hear it in the back of my mind.Mrs. Jeanette Goldman was a nice lady, my new piano teacher, and a very serious musician. She lived in Astoria, Queens. And I would take the subway to her house, starting when I was about 10 years old.She was educated at the Yale Conservatory of Music and had excellent training as a concert pianist and in the history of music. She was a very conscientious teacher and she liked me well enough and for about six years I studied with her every week; I would practice my scales and harmonies diligently for an hour or more a day at home. When I complained about this, my father said, “Someday you’ll thank me for insisting that you practice.” Of course, he was right and I did thank him as an adult.Gradually we moved into Chopin. I played the “Minute Waltz” and the “Revolutionary Etude” (which had three notes in the treble versus four in the base, and it was very very difficult.)We moved on to Bach’s two-part and three-part inventions which I loved. And I started to get better and better at the piano.Mrs. Goldman gave me music that I had never heard of: Shostakovich “Polka” from “The Age of Gold” Ballet. When I had heard Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” and told her I loved Gershwin, she decided to give me something that I could actually play, because the Rhapsody is a very very difficult piece, and requires a virtuoso pianist -- which I was not.So Mrs. Goldman gave me Gershwin’s “Three Preludes”. I fell in love with them! I believe Prelude Number Two is a work of genius – a very simple melody and unusually simple bass. In fact, I got so good at playing them that Mrs. Goldman suggested that I record the three Preludes at a professional recording studio, which I did.I wish I could find that recording now because I remember I was at my peak of pianistic ability. The Second Prelude was about two minutes…a very languid elegant melody, on one side of a 12-inch 78-rpm disk, recorded in a studio. The first and third Preludes were a few minutes each -- both very fast -- recorded on the other side. I have looked high and low, and low and high through my possessions for this disc…and I cannot find it. Maybe I left it behind with my first marriage.I ceased taking piano lessons from Mrs. Goldman in about 1955. Accidently, I met her daughter, Elena, in East Hampton in about 1993. Elena is a lovely woman, who also went to Yale. She invited Celia and me to a reception at her home. Lo and behold… who do I meet but her mother, Mrs. Jeanette Goldman!At this cocktail party, Mrs. Jeanette Goldman and I began chatting about music, and my taking lessons from her, some 50 years earlier. At first she didn’t recognize me, but then it came to her. She remarked, “Oh! I remember you. You had some ‘issues’.” (She did not seem to recall exactly what those ‘issues’ were since she had some fifty students a week back then. I knew I had been a difficult adolescent.)She was, at the time this get-together is taking place at her daughter’s, in her mid-90s. I was in my 50s and happily married to Celia. Jeanette told me that her husband, who used to work at the New York Times, had died some 10 years earlier, and she had moved to Florida to what some people call “God's waiting room" -- a retirement community.We were sitting off to the side of the other guests, having a very friendly confidential chat. She told me that she was 93 years old. She volunteered the information that she was still sexually active. I was startled by this confession, not because I thought that she was being flirtatious, because she was not. But I was a bit shocked because my memory of her from when I was 16 years old in the late 1940s, was that she was a very prim and proper piano teacher.But then, the conversation got stranger and stranger, as if we were entering “garden-path” territory. Mrs. Goldman segued into a hush-hush confession that down in Florida, in retirement heaven, she was having an affair with a gentleman caller -- her best friend's husband. Wow! She admitted this was not an ethical or moral activity on her part -- but she was enjoying the affair immensely nevertheless. I was shocked because it was out-of-character for her, and because it went against social standards…unless this was a norm for old folks’ retirement homes in Florida. (Gentleman caller, indeed! There’s an old Jewish joke about a husband who comes home to find his wife in bed with his best friend. The wife notices her husband and says to her bed-mate: “Here’s blabber-mouth; now everyone will know.”)It was shocking even to her that Mrs. Goldman should be having an affair with her best friend’s husband. But not only was she having this surreptitious affair, but she then went on to say that she really enjoyed sex and could not have imagined when young that she would be able to enjoy sex at the age of 93 with a 93-year-old man, who happened to be the husband of her best friend. (She swore me to secrecy: “Please don’t tell my daughter” she added. Her daughter was fifty years old, standing across the deck speaking to her husband.)Sex among the elderly was a revelation. I did not know that elderly people could have sex at such an advanced age. In fact, I received this information with some skepticism… but as I thought about it, a smile broke out on my face -- a big smile. And I said to Mrs. Goldman, "You have made my day! No, you have made my week! No, you have made my month! No, you have made my year! This is great news!"Now that she’s gone, I have treasured and visualized my piano-teacher’s happy misbehavior for a long time…and I hope and pray that when I reach 93 years old, if I do (and I hope I do) I will enjoy sex with my wife as much as did Mrs. Goldman with the 93-year-old husband of her best friend. Remember Tiresias? ####CHINESE WATER TORTURE & CHRISTIAN SCIENCEBecause I’ve had two wives, I’ve had two Mothers-In-Law, of blessed memory, may they both rest in peace. As it is said: “Behind every successful man is a surprised mother-in-law.”Tanya Gold, my first mother-in-law, was a public-school teacher at the grammar-school level. She was, like I was, proud to be a teacher. However, unlike me, she taught very young children, whereas I taught college students, graduate students, post-doctoral students, and seasoned PhD scientists.Tanya loved to ask questions. I believe she taught her young grade-school students by employing the method of asking leading questions, called “Socratic dialogue”. Thus accustomed to interrogating helpless young kids, she continued to do so all the time -- with me and with her daughter Miki, my first wife. Her questions were relentless. Text-proof follows.“Why do you think it was moral to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” “Why kill hundreds of thousands of people?” “Why do capitalists run the war machine in this country?” “Why is there socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor?” ”Why…why…why?”I forgot to tell you she was a Marxist. I forgot to tell you that she was inordinately proud that her father (or grand-father, I forget which) was in exile with Trotsky -- a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, a Soviet politician, the founder and first leader of the Red Army, and (on Stalin’s orders) was assassinated in Mexico.Well. Let me see how to put this. Leon Trotsky, Marxist anti-Stalinist, was never rehabilitated by the Soviet Union. And my Number One Mother-In-Law was never rehabilitated by me. She was never cured of asking those infernal questions. Over and over, and over, and over again. Puh-leeze.“Is that the best way to hold your infant daughter?” “Are you sure that you want to do that (or this, or the other thing)? “Is that food healthy enough for your children?” “Why didn’t you pick us up from the airport?”When my nephew Neil was very young, he, too, asked a lot of questions, like “Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green?” and when I tried to answer his questions as thoroughly as I could, he then would ask, “Why are you bothering to answer all of my questions?” he has the Rosen ‘wise-ass gene’, or the Katznelson ‘nut gene’ or both.Mother-in-law Tanya asked endless questions -- not only to me, but also to everyone else. I was always polite and did my best to answer them honestly. I never showed my exasperation, but I could have bottled my repression in wholesale quantities, and sold it on the street or to any one of her targets who needed more.In a moment of inspiration, discussing Tanya with people who knew her well, I described her questions as resembling “Water dropping on stone, which slowly hollows it out”. If instead of stone, the water drips on a person’s forehead, it’s called “Chinese water torture” -- a diabolical and painful method of slowly executing individuals, the randomly-timed drops driving the restrained victim insane while at the same time drilling a hole into the victim’s brain.I never knew when mother-in-law Number One, Tanya Gold, would begin drilling into my brain using her water-drop-torture style of interrogation torture. People who knew her well enough to have observed (or been subjected to) these interrogations remarked that “water-torture” was an accurate, apposite, and insightful observation.I readily confess that when I told her face-to-face my marriage to her daughter was breaking up, I strongly hinted that her twice-daily ‘instructional’ phone calls to her daughter were instrumental in my decision to leave her daughter. I also confess that I later sarcastically called that encounter “My Finest Moment”, which I am not now proud of having said. Nevertheless…In a bizarre coda to the marriage and divorce, my mother told me that years after I left Miki her mother Tanya had called my mother, asking her to “Make Steve go back” to her daughter. Mom later told me that she said to Tanya that she had no way of doing that since she never told the adult Steve what to do. I can only surmise that Tanya did tell her adult kids what to do. Was she a control freak? I could be wrong.* * *A few years after my second wife Celia (the best of two) and I were married in 1985, we helped her half-sister Katie move to Santa Fe, New Mexico with Katie’s then two-year old son, Jessie.Santa Fe, altitude 7,000 feet, is surrounded by stunning vistas, low-lying mountains, unusually clear skies with puffy painterly cumulus clouds in the distance. Inhabited by Hopi and Zuni Indian tribes, Santa Fe was also home to very wealthy Texans who had weekend homes -- plus artistes, writers, painters, sculptors, and tourists.My second mother-in-law then lived in Santa Fe. Aileen Phillips, ex-wife of child-movie-star Freddie Bartholomew, was descended from Scandinavian Baptists, but of late a Christian Scientist. This is a system of beliefs derived from Mary Baker Eddy, who insisted that Jesus heals all ailments through prayer and understanding, and argued that this made modern medicine unnecessary and physicians obsolete. Christian Science suggested that the Universe was spiritual: sickness was a lack of faith akin to a character flaw…the result of not believing in and praying to God. Earlier, Aileen had become interested in Unitarianism, a religion that (I say with tongue-in-cheek) believes there is at most one God.Aileen had met Sol Paul, who later became her husband, while they were both working in the broadcast industry. They divorced when Celia was five years old. Aileen’s next ex-husband was Freddie Bartholomew, former child-star-actor famous for “Captain’s Courageous”, “David Copperfield”, “Little Lord Fauntleroy”, and other films of the nineteen thirties. He was a wonderful step-father to Celia, and a lovely man brimming with stories of Hollywood in the old days, filled with actors he knew well….including Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, James Cagney, Donald O’Connor, Anthony Perkins, Roddy McDowell, and other Hollywood notables.Aileen had settled in Santa Fe after her marriage to “FB” (as we called him) dissolved. She was eager to start a new life with Jessie, her grandson, and Katie, her daughter by FB.Celia, Jesse, Katie, and I traveled all day from New York, changing planes in Dallas to get to Santa Fe. When we arrived thoroughly exhausted after this grueling ordeal, Aileen eager to see her two daughters and grandson (and perhaps her son-in-law), had prepared a meal of, ‘guess what’?Nothing. I’m not making this up.Aileen was a force of nature…pretty, slender, very quick mind, although beginning in her seventies to start to show signs of Alzheimer’s. She often repeated herself, was sometimes a bit scatter-brained, sometimes a bit of “a flake” (as Celia put it so eloquently)… and a lot of fun.But my biological Jewish mother was figuratively turning over in her grave. After three adults and an infant shlepped several thousand miles and some fourteen hours to see Aileen, to have not prepared a feast to celebrate our arrival…was nothing short of unacceptable treason to me…and to the Jewish concept of Motherhood and Hospitality. I decided to raid the refrigerator, but I hadn’t reckoned on getting a strong rebuke from mother-in-law Number Two. In our Jewish childhood, food was code for love, and love made for open season on refrigerators.“Get out of my fridge!” She pushed me aside. I couldn’t believe it. Jewish mothers (including my Marxist first mother-in-law) had an always-full fridge. “I’m going to make you your dinner!” she snapped. Aileen then proceeded to cook (I use the word loosely) for the five of us tiny portions of unpalatable food.I took sick. Maybe it was the travel. Crowded airplane. Germs in the air. No decent food. Aileen. My severe coughing, severe wheezing, severe headache, and severe sinusitis suggested pneumonia. Also sickness-inducing and severe mother-in-law ailment. Whatever it was, flu or upper respiratory infection -- it was brutal and debilitating. When I was a child, Mom would take good care of her little Jewish prince: sitting by my bed; cold compresses on my forehead; singing lullabies; comforting; honey in warm milk. Where was my Mommy (may she still rest in peace) now that I needed her?Aileen had no sympathy whatsoever. She, like many Christian Scientists, seemed to believe that “Sickness is a character flaw”. The corollary was “Ergo, sick Steve is a flawed character”. I knew I had a lot of flaws, but I had never been sick like this before.Now she didn’t actually say those words, but she acted as if she believed that my character was deeply flawed, and that’s what she implied my problem was. OK. But it wasn’t OK. I probably had pneumonia and a bad case of travel-fatigue and crankiness.I didn’t like her presumptive “evaluation”. It was a long way from Emma Rosen’s nurturing, care-giving, maternal tenderness… pampering and coddling. Chicken soup. Tea with honey and lemon. Hot milk with butter in it. I craved a Jewish mother—not a Christian-Scientist mother-in-law.Yikes!! What had I done in marrying into this meshugenah family? So I suffered, but not nobly. I suffered miserably and loudly—which drew no sympathy from Aileen.I decided on Shabbat to go to the tiny synagogue in Santa Fe where I could be with “my people”…the Jews! I was in alien territory with Aileen. Out-gunned in the Wild West. Oh… for New York, for Zabar’s, for mother’s milk.So I drove to the local synagogue Saturday morning. With a heavy heart and intractable symptoms. The small congregation was led by a middle-aged reform Rabbi who (I was told) played bridge weekly with Aileen. I sat in the back of the synagogue—feverish, a heavy cough hacking for minutes at a time—disrupting the service. The Rabbi stopped the service and came over to me. “Who are you?” Between coughs I got out “Aileen Phillips’ son-in-law”. “I play bridge with her every week. You’re not well, are you?”“No sir”, I managed. “Aileen seems to think this is a character flaw, but I think I may have pneumonia. She does not think I need medical attention, her being a Christian Scientist and all”.The Rabbi said, “Well, Aileen or not, I’m taking you to the hospital now!” He asked a congregant to continue the Shabbat service, and asked me to follow his car to the hospital for a complete physical.The radiologist thumped my chest, looked at the x-rays and listened to my lungs. “Looks like you have a touch of pneumonia”. (Really? A touch?) I breathed a phlegm-ish sigh: “I kinda thought so. It’s not a character flaw, is it?” ####POLISHING THE TURD “I am a part of all that I have met” is not merely memorable poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson. “I am what is around me” is not merely memorable poetry by Wallace Stevens. “The Universe is made of stories, not atoms” is not merely memorable poetry by Muriel Rukeyser. All of these remarks are consistent with my own personal experience.All my perceptions are inferences: I filter and interpret my sense impressions to try to impose patterns or theories on the septillion sense perceptions that reach me daily and over a lifetime. Reality-testing is necessary to check on whether my notions or theories are really valid, or whether I am imposing some sort of “order” on the incoming sensory data. Writing for me nowadays is a form of seeking patterns and making sense of my memories. Yes. I am, like most people, a “pattern-making machine”. When younger, I sought to form new patterns.In the old days before psycho-active meds, like many of my contemporaries I visited psychiatrists, psychologists, psycho-therapists.The first, when I was nineteen, was with Dr. Anchell, an MD who described our sessions as an “education about my emotions”. Dr. Anchell was a very kindly man, who listened attentively to?my post-adolescent gripes and over-sensitivities, and gently pointed out my somewhat wrong-headed opinions. I wasn’t dysfunctional; just na?ve and unfulfilled. I had read a lot about psychology, and had friends who were in therapy at the time, the mid-fifties…the hey-day of psycho-therapy and psycho-analysis. Freud had yet to be taken off his pedestal. (His fall from grace was accelerated by the discovery of flaws in his ideas and the arrival of psycho-active pharmaceuticals.)Most of my friends were “in therapy”, and most of them would often preface a self-revelation by saying “my analyst says….” Most of us had quasi-normal growing pains…who am I? why am I so sensitive? … what do I do about my attraction to the opposite sex?...what’s my purpose in life?Dr. Anchell “straightened me out” on a few errors of perception. I was not, as I thought, yawning a lot because I was “tired of life”. He pointed out that yawning was merely a way of rapidly taking in more oxygen. He also pointed out that “Women are to be approached sexually only insofar as they were willing to go, and no further”. (Wow. I didn’t know that.) When I criticized my parents for being parents, he tried to help me understand that my parents were not unpleasant people, but just trying to do their best as parents….something I would learn as a parent in the fullness of time. My son Daniel, when I confessed recently to him I wasn’t a very good father, surprised me when he said, “You did the best you could.”* * *My next sitting occurred in my thirties, while I was teaching physics at the Maritime College at Fort Schuyler (a unit of the State University of New York) and completing my doctoral thesis on cosmic rays. I was having some authority problems with the chairman of my department, which were related to rebelliously finding my own voice and personal identity as I came into my own. This was something of an “echo” of my coming into my own with my father when I was much younger. It’s not easy for me to realize now how difficult I then was to my then-wife and then-boss, but parts of me were (and still are) abrasive, arrogant, and pedantic. That’s not all I was (and am). It’s also obvious to me now that these were parent-child authority and autonomy issues being played out again, and again. I was emotionally immature not to have identified them as such, and not to have exercised mature control.Dr. Kronmeyer had individual sessions and group sessions, and the group was merciless in pointing out my inadequacies in both my marriage and my work-life. ?The group contained about a dozen others, most of them younger than me. Some were graduate students; some were in the theater; all were still struggling to find themselves. When I announced that my wife and I were going to separate, the group asked if I would bring her in so that “all of us together could discuss the separation”. This must sound bizarre to those reared on twenty-first century relationships. But she came to the session, we discussed my leaving her. She surprised me by sobbing uncontrollably, and even more surprising…she grabbed me physically to prevent me from moving. Everyone in the group had something to say, mostly based upon their own views of themselves, their own parents, and of us. The whole scene, playing back in my mind, appears as if it could have been a poisonous parody of psycho-babble, or a Neil Simon play or a Larry David episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. ?The emotional fireworks between us then eventually led us to separate, and for very good reasons. Dr. Kronmeyer was a psychologist who believed in mutually interacting cognitive and somatic influences. For example, if one could scream into a pillow and get very angry or fearful in somatic and physical terms, this often produced?cognitive changes as well: the artificially-induced anger or fear would generate remembrances of actual instances of real fear or anger that occurred in the past that could be examined, instead of being suppressed.These ideas were based on the then-existing theories of Alexander Lowen. I suspect they have been somewhat discredited by now, the way much of Freud has been. A new generation of meds that can affect brain-chemistry has produced anti-Freudians, some of whom laugh at the old Freud. They do it with humor. [Joke: After twenty years of meeting three times a week with his Freudian psycho-analyst, the patient finally got to the point where he could say “fuck” in front of his M-O-T-H-E-R.]* * * The third sitting of my therapeutic life occurred during a very difficult period, my mid-forties, when my parents died, I was seriously depressed, and had lost such confidence in my abilities that I couldn’t function well. I was out of work. Effective anti-depression meds did not exist then (the early eighties) to the extent that they do in the twenty-first century. The individuals in this therapy group were very highly-functioning professionals, such as therapists, research physicians, real-estate moguls, and intellectuals. ?They, too, were merciless in their probing and critical insights into my quirks, idiosyncrasies, weaknesses, and disabling attitudes and behaviors. Many of these valid criticisms of my arrogance and inactivity fed my insecurities and depression and drove me deeper into a steep depression. I was so despondent, I briefly contemplated suicide—“the sincerest form of self-criticism”-- but realized that was no way out. (I could hear my father’s voice, from beyond the grave, saying: “So after you killed yourself, then what would you do?”) However, a life-long friendship emerged from this group. I met a research physician named Bill Gutstein with whom I was very close until the end of his life. He died at age eighty seven in 2009, and he is missed. I was very vulnerable to criticism in this group for many reasons. For example, I didn’t have a job and was severely chastised for not working. The group and Dr. Burt Pollens urged—no insisted—that I do some kind of work, manual labor if necessary, or for God’s sake drive a cab. For crying out loud, do anything but feeling sorry for yourself is not a full-time occupation. ?So I did drive a cab for several months, but as described elsewhere, quit when I got punched in the face by an irate guy whose bumper I gave a love tap to when he stopped suddenly at a light.* * *My fourth sitting, which was necessary to recover from the group that (somewhat justifiably) beat up on me, was with a very supportive woman, Carol Katz. ?Carol was helpful in resurrecting my self- confidence, after I had been with a critical group of people who were highly successful and very functional emotionally. Carol did not do group therapy, thank goodness, but she did give me a needed lift. She praised me often, when justifiable. For example, when I summarized Heinz Kohut’s work by saying, “the Mother shows the individual who he/she is; the father shows the individual who he/she is going to be.” She thought this was a very succinct and accurate distillation of Kohut’s main idea. I also happen to think this idea applied to me. Mom reflected back to me who I was (soft-hearted, a bleeding-heart liberal) and Dad showed me who I was going to be (hard-working, conservative, assertive). To this day I refer to my blended self as a ‘bleeding-heart conservative’. Thanks Mom. Thanks Dad.Carol also helped me adjust to working at my then-new job with Robert S. Ehrlich & Co, a small investment banking firm. ?I met Robert and his wife Nan at Lincoln Square Synagogue, an Orthodox Jewish upper west side institution that provided me with a haven when I was suffering situational and clinical depression. (I’ve related elsewhere how, after Mom died, I helped my depressed Dad get settled in Florida.)I turned to synagogue attendance to properly mourn. I “shopped around” for a synagogue where I would be comfortable. The reform and conservative synagogues I visited did not provide me with the Sense of Belonging to a Family that Lincoln Square Synagogue did, even though the Orthodox emphasis on observation and ritual were at first off-putting. ?But gradually, I became interested in why the congregants felt so strongly about their rituals. (One Rabbi, Ephraim Buchwald, who was later to become a mentor to me, explained that he would be fully observant according to Orthodox Judaism even if someone could prove to him that God did not exist, because he acquired spiritual, ethical, and moral guidance -- “mindfulness” -- by strictly Orthodox ritual observance, a form of what might be called “behavior modification”.)‘Ephie’ Buchwald is an unusually effective Rabbi and explainer of Judaism, and Jewish history, and Jewish ethics and morals. The best compliment I can give him is that there is no difference between Ephie and Rabbi Ephie. I became very fond of him. When Celia and I met, Ephie had an unusual role in my marriage to her. In fact, because Celia’s mother Aileen was not Jewish (even though Celia’s father Sol was), Ephie told me: “You should give her three months to make an Orthodox Conversion, and if she does not convert, you should leave her.” I told Ephie, “That’s easy for you to say because you’re a zealot. But I’m not.” Happily, I didn’t listen to this advice, and didn’t mention it to Celia. I was attending Lincoln Square Synagogue “religiously”, was head of the “Hospitality Committee”, and had many friends among the congregation. I asked Celia if she would be interested in attending a class Ephie taught on Jewish history, and she agreed. The evening we heard Ephie speak, he remarked, “The assimilation of German Jews in Germany in the 19th and 20th century was responsible for the Holocaust in World War II”. Celia was so outraged she stormed out of the class, swearing she would never set foot again in any Orthodox synagogue.When Celia and I married in East Hampton in 1985, the Rabbi (David Greenberg) and service was at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, a Reform synagogue.Five years passed. Celia and I adjusted to marriage very successfully. We became members of Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue near our apartment. One day, as we’re walking along Broadway, we met Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, who greeted us with a warm, “Shlomo! We don’t see you at Lincoln Square Synagogue any more.?Why not?”So Celia explained to Ephie why she left his class…because of his remarks about “assimilation being responsible for the Holocaust”Ephie pondered this a moment, and said: “I said that? ?Give me another chance! Come back to Lincoln Square Synagogue!” Celia liked this, his attitude, and his willingness to re-consider his Earlier Views. Celia said: “Sure. ?We’ll give you another chance!”Thus began a very respectful relationship between Celia and Judaism. She took courses at Reform and Orthodox synagogues. She decided to become an adult “Bat Mitzvah” at Rodeph Sholom, and has opened us both to exploration of many different Jewish congregations of all “flavors”. Indeed, I like to joke that, “We are members of five different Jewish congregations. We’re Jewish -- in spite of the Rabbis”. Celia tells me not to say this because some folks might be offended. But I still repeat it.In retrospect, I would say that Rabbi Buchwald, by his passionate teaching and wholesome example of religious intensity and belief, has been a forceful and benevolent and timely influence on me, getting myself out of my own way and developing a positive narrative about myself -- probably even more so than did those therapists who tried to help me “polish my turd”. (Those sessions were filled with self-pity and kvetching-as-a-way-of-life.) Maybe my turd was ready to be polish-able.Writing my memoirs has allowed me to let my children and grand-children know more about me than they thought they knew. Furthermore, my quasi-memoirs have been an extra-ordinarily useful opportunity to present my foibles and idiosyncrasies -- to myself, to the world, and to the people I love -- in a well-thought-out positive and true narrative. ####<insert image Haym Dviri's Russian family; his mother and Emma's mother were sisters<insert image Sarah & Barnett Rosen, Mike's parents, surrounding Edna and Harry, ca 1905<insert image Mike Rosen, ca 1926<[KEEP FULL-LENGTH] insert image “Zaydie”: Avrham Katzenellinson, Brooklyn, ca 1930<[KEEP FULL LENGTH ]insert image Emma Katznelson & Morris Rosen Wedding, 1931<insert image “Stevie Wonder”, age one year, 1935<insert image L to R: Mike, Harry, Sarah, Barnett, Edna, Bill: Opening, Enduro Restaurant, 1935<insert image Dad, Steve, Barbara, Mom at the Enduro, ca 1942 <insert image Steve, Elliott, Barbara ca 1945<insert image Mike and Emma at their Surprise 25th Wedding Anniversary, 1956<[KEEP FULL-LENGTH] insert image Steve sketched by physicist Otto Frisch* at Astrophysics Conference, Texas, 1964 *With Rudolf Peierls he designed first theoretical mechanism in 1940 for detonation of the atomic bomb. Fellow of the Royal Society. <insert image Miki, Lisa, Steve, Daniel. Ski-house in St. Moritz, 1968<insert image Bela and Daniel. Peekskill, ca 1968<insert Steve, Sherri, Daniel, Barbara, Joe, Louie; Jennifer, Opa, Lisa, Bela, Annie, Oma, ca 1970<insert image Man with hammer by Daniel Rosen, 1974<insert image Manhattan by Daniel Rosen, 1974<insert image Danny by Daniel Rosen, 1974<insert image Steve by Daniel Rosen, 1974<insert image, Daniel and Basquiat, ca 1982<[REDUCE TO HALF-PAGE]insert image, Steve by Marilyn Church, 1982<[KEEP FULL-LENGTH]insert image, Steve in Golan Heights, 1983<[KEEP FULL-LENGTH] image “This Isn't A Dress Rehearsal. This Is It!” Celia and Steve Wedding, 1985<insert image Steve at NYANA, photographed by Volodya Minden, 1990<insert image Volunteers & Soviet emigre scientists* in 1991 class of Scientific Career Transitions *Volodya Minden, of blessed memory, is at upper right with his wife. <insert image Shovel fountain, East Hampton, 1995<insert image In Elliott’s Jacuzzi, Vermont, New Year 1996<insert image “El burro de Don Esteban”. East Hampton, 1998<insert image Tanya and Celia. Galway, 1998<insert image Jascha and Steve. Eiffel Tower, 1998<insert image L to R: Jascha, Tanya, Daniel, Steve, Neil, Elliott. East Hampton, 2000<insert image Tanya and Steve. Cork, 2000<insert image Hatchet head sculpture, 2001<[REDUCE TO HALF-PAGE] insert image Tanya, ca 2002<insert image Jascha, Heather, Tanya. Central Park, 2004<insert image Elliot, Barbara, Steve. Erin & Sascha's Wedding. New London, 2006><insert image Teapot, Wheels, Funnel. East Hampton, 2007<[KEEPFULL-LENGTH]insert image Placing a Mezuzzah on Steve's Tree-house, 2008<insert image At the American Museum of Natural History, 2009><[KEEP FULL LENGTH] image Daniel wearing suit he tailor-made from drapes. Berlin, 2010<insert image Lisa, Steve, Daniel after Lisa & Walter's reception, 2010<insert image Tree-house in the snow. East Hampton, Dec. 26, 2011<insert image Made by Steve ca 1990: Two mahogany tables and pergola. East Hampton, 2013<insert image Butterfly pins, hand-crafted by Steve. 2013<insert image Lisa showing off the painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat called “DANNY ROSEN” which sold at Christies for almost $4 million. 2013 ‘NICE WORK & YOU CAN GET IT’: MY FINEST HOURAs a teenager interested in Relativity, I read a book called Flatland; the Introduction was written by Banesh Hoffmann, the man mentioned in an earlier chapter (“Geniuses, Wunderkinds, and Stevie Wonder”) who worked with Einstein, and from whom I learned Relativity. Flatland is a novella that satires the social hierarchy of Victorian England by examining what a two-dimensional world would look like to three-dimensional inhabitants, and vice versa.Flatland is a fable, a parable about a two-dimensional world (flatland) and how its citizens might view their own limited universe, but more importantly how they would see us as virtually-inconceivable three-dimensional creatures (four if you include time as in relativity) and how we (almost God-like by comparison) would view them. Here’s the book’s dedication:“To: The Inhabitants of SPACE IN GENERAL…This Work is DedicatedBy a Humble Native of FlatlandIn the Hope thatEven as he was Initiated into the MysteriesOf THREE DimensionsHaving been previously conversantWith ONLY TWOSo the Citizens of that Celestial RegionMay aspire yet higher and higherTo the Secrets of FOUR FIVE OR EVEN SIX DimensionsThereby contributingTo the Enlargement of THE IMAGINATIONAnd the possible DevelopmentOf that most rare and excellent Gift of MODESTYAmong the Superior RacesOf SOLID HUMANITY”The ironic dedication of the book, the description of the place ‘flatland’, and the book’s wide readership and longevity suggest that it has resonances on many levels…conceptually helping us to ‘visualize’ higher-dimensional spaces, or to ‘imagine’ the limitations of a “flat” space or circumscribed social structure like Victorian England. It might also be taken as a powerful metaphor for under-dogs everywhere – like the “flattened” social and economic conditions suffered by the Soviet émigré scientists before Gorbachev unveiled glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s.Thus, when the émigrés came to the U.S. and faced our free-market economy, capitalism and open democracy, they may have felt (and many so indicated to me) their unusual feeling of entering into a ‘higher’ dimension—previously only dimly perceived from their drab colorless dowdy Soviet “flatland” limitations. These limitations have been well-described by Gal Beckerman in “When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone”, in the novels of George Orwell “1984”and “Animal Farm”, in “Darkness At Noon” by Arthur Koestler, and by others.But I was born and brought up and lived and worked happily for five decades (up to that moment) in the U.S. Then, in the late eighties, the émigré’s lives and mine intersected like two walls in the corner of a room.Perhaps not surprisingly, I too lived in my own “flatland” of limitations… almost entirely ignorant of the totalitarian “dictatorship of the proletariat”, of “religion as the opiate of the people”. This was the ‘world of my fathers’, immigrant ancestors who were courageous and ambitious early enough to leave Russia. They made my good life in the U.S. possible, but I took the good life for granted as my birthright. Their courage, ambition, and struggles (like higher or lower dimensions of ‘flatland’) were previously invisible to me.My slow-motion wake-up came through conversations with the scores of émigrés who kept coming to me through-out the late eighties and early nineties. I heard how they suffered deprivation, torture, food shortages, KGB interrogations (Greg Royzman, a Russian friend, was tortured by them), secrecy, conspiracies, social stratification (as Jews, as intellectuals) by the nomenkultura (a patronage system…the Communist party’s authority to make appointments to key positions), and much much worse.I didn’t personally experience any of these perverse realities growing up in the U.S. Oh, I did hear table-talk as a youngster about how my grand-parents struggled to become new Americans, and how they suffered enough to leave their homeland. I never went hungry. I was never arrested. I was free to choose a profession, a job, and the well-lived life I now enjoy thanks to my grand-parents and parents.* * *“[in June 1990] the Soviet economy was on the point of collapse. There were now chronic shortages of everything in the Soviet capital. Even cigarettes had become scarce, and there were minor tobacco riots in several cities. The longest queues were at photographers’ studios, as Muscovites were obliged to apply for identity cards for city stores to prevent country people stripping the shelves bare. Ration coupons were issued for clothes, shoes, and domestic appliances. Sugar was restricted to two kilograms per month per person. Butter was rarely seen. Flour and salt disappeared from the shops, and bread ran out daily. Meat was only available in expensive markets. Consumers were hoarding, making the shortages worse.”--“Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union”,by Conor O’Clery, Public Affairs/Perseus, 2011.This was the prelude to My Finest Hour.* * *The essay below is translated and adapted from an article by Vladimir Minden (who had a double PhD) that appeared in Russian in “Yevreiski Mir”, September 11, 1992.I am an émigré. I came to the USA this year in January. My family and I left Tblisi, in Russian Georgia, while there was fighting and shooting.I am a scientist, author of one hundred and thirty-five publications and eleven patents in various areas of physical chemistry, chemical metallurgy, environmental protection, applied thermodynamics of complex chemical systems. For many years, I was not allowed to go abroad to any scientific conferences. However, many things changed during “perestroika” [According to Gorbachev, “Perestroika means overcoming the stagnation process, breaking down the braking mechanism, creating a dependable and effective mechanism for acceleration of social and economic progress and giving it greater dynamism.”]In 1990, I came to a conference in the United States. In conversations with friends, and in reading newspapers and gathering information that I collected during my visit, I was convinced that for me a “market economy” for an ordinary member of Soviet society would bring an absolutely new relationship between employee and employer, a new language, and new ways of behavior.At the end of my visit, I understood that in a dynamic American society with its “market economy” the skills needed for searching for a job are perhaps as important as the professional skills required for a job. This insight appeared to me so important that I published a brochure in the former USSR entitled, “Job! How To Find It!”After emigrating to the United States, I tried finding a job using what I wrote in my brochure, but I failed. I studied job-searching in a course at NYANA which seemed fairly clear to me, but I failed again and again to find a job. When you get an answer that you are over-qualified – and the potential employer is fascinated by your achievements – you have virtually nothing to say.***I learned by chance about Stephen Rosen’s seminar for highly trained scientists and engineers, called “Scientific Career Transitions”. Moved by natural curiosity (and somewhat by my failures) I discovered that Dr. Rosen is a professional scientist, astrophysicist, and had published many scientific works including three monographs. I found out that he had been a consultant to such U.S. firms as IBM, Xerox, Honeywell, and others, that he was born in the U.S., and that his grand-parents emigrated from Russia early in the twentieth century.Later on, attending his free seminars for Soviet emigres, I also learned that he was providing these seminars because of an ancient Jewish tradition of “tsedaka”… usually translated as “charity”, but also “justice’ or “righteousness”. The highest form of which is helping people to help themselves.Generally, the aims and tasks of the seminars he led inspired by this tradition was to teach people to be useful to themselves, to help them help themselves, not to be subservient to “authorities”, but to be fully responsible for their own lives. (Indeed, an aphorism Dr. Rosen quoted often insisted that “If you give a person a fish, they will enjoy a meal, but that if you teach that person how to fish, she will never go hungry again”.)More specifically, his point of view was to teach former citizens of the former USSR to adopt successful job-search methods and successful patterns of American behavior applicable to the capitalistic system. All this important information I learned only later on. My initial facts, that he was a scientist, a consultant, and so on, was interesting…but nothing more. I missed his first lesson, but in the evening my more fortunate colleague called me and explained what I had lost. I did not miss any more sessions because the next few sessions explained very clearly what was wrong in my job search style and methods. The next sessions showed me how to improve my job searching methods. Perhaps the most important result was that I finally learned how to use the failures to improve my approaches to finding a job in the U.S.Now, I actively use what I learned.I’m happy with the progress I made, but was disappointed that I learned about his seminars only by chance. This is easy to understand: there had been no publicity about his seminars in the Russian language. Last year, some two thousand highly qualified engineers and PhDs came to the U.S., but they had no time to read old Russian language newspapers. Nevertheless, there was ample publicity and press coverage in the American media in English. The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal carried stories about his program. As a result, American businesses became familiar with the high level of skills and training possessed by the Soviet emigres during those years.So here, in this short article, I am not trying to paraphrase Dr. Rosen’s methods because…The method includes a basic forty eight hours (really twice as much) of training with him and his staff of volunteers, plus free manuals in English to work with at home and to use later on.Dr. Rosen’s method is really his method plus he himself. It is well-known that in many difficult areas of human activity, like learning to play the violin, people “learn by imitation” and “learn by doing” what their mentors do, as apprentices. He is a very attractive person with a good sense of humor. He uses various patterns of behavior—demonstrating them and urging you to follow his actions.Dr. Rosen’s methods include his procedures that he learned growing up in the U.S., plus -- as I said -- he himself, plus his group of volunteers. Each volunteer works or worked in some area of science or engineering or management in the U.S. All of them are doing this out of ‘tsedaka’: they come to help, often overcoming their own big problems—but you never hear about those except absolutely by chance.* * *There are other aspects of socializing with Dr. Rosen and his friends; it is an honor to know them, to observe them, their gestures, their speech, their postures, their dress, how to smile, how to be a very amiable interlocutor, as well as their good language to use to feel natural among native citizens of America, among professionals, among technically sophisticated scientists and engineers.What I have written here so far will hardly convince a skeptic or a pragmatist. But for this category of reader (and not only for them) I say: among one hundred people who attended his seminars and used his methods actively, fifty found a job in a month after his seminar ended, twenty found a job in three months, and ten were still looking eleven months later. I could give more arguments to show the usefulness of his seminars and methods. But it’s easier for you to simply call him, to tell Dr. Rosen who you are, where you are from and what is your profession, and ask permission to attend his seminar. You don’t have to tell him I recommended you or him. I heard that some articles, from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal [please see below] were later eventually translated into Russian and appeared in the former USSR, and the rumor among prospective emigres there was, “Call Rosen as soon as you land at JFK to see him and sign up for his seminar!”If your English language skills are above levels three or four, you will be told when the next cycle of the seminar series will begin. I have to point out that his seminar is open to all specialists, all nationalities, all ages, and both genders. You have nothing to sign, nothing to pay, nothing to fill out.You must arrive promptly at 9:00 am at the Workman’s Circle. Do not be surprised if on your way there, or in his conference room, you meet media representatives. During the sessions which I attended, his seminar was visited by the New York Times, by CNN, by NBC, and by Eurovision correspondents.Be ready to tell about yourself as a specialist. Try to be brief and optimistic, as Americans usually are. Being fascinated in 1990 by American optimism, I wrote in my brochure, “You can presume that Americans are optimistic because much is good in the USA; but you can also presume that much is good in the USA because Americans are optimistic”.At 9:00am then, punctual, smart, smiling, energetic Dr. Rosen and his friends will enter the room and begin what may be the most important lesson from you…the lesson of optimism.This essay certainly captures some of the essence, the spirit, and the flavor of the “Scientific Careers Program” I helped create. I am extremely proud of the results that flowed from those years, in the early nineties, working with hundreds of emigres who came from a place where “we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us”; a place where citizens had to “say one thing, think another thing, do a third thing”(meaning: you can’t trust anyone); a place where “only four obstacles stood in the way of agriculture and food production… spring, summer, fall, and winter.”* * *“That fall day when the Berlin Wall crumbled under the force of thousands of pickax-wielding Germans was a historic moment that occurred with astonishing speed. The known world flipped on its head in a few hours. By nightfall on November 9th, 1989, [the] Cold War was effectively over….By the end of the 1990s more than a million Soviet Jews had emigrated to Israel. Another half a million had gone to the United States.“…They were engineers and doctors, physicists and musicians, looking for a better life…They looked at the Soviet Union in its death throes and saw a place of great political and economic instability. Freedom had unleashed certain demons. For the vast – and until then, silent – majority of Soviet Jews, this was enough to convince them to walk through the doors that had been unbolted”. --“When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone”,Gal Beckerman, (Houghton Mifflin, 2010)* * *“Israel’s economic miracle is due as much to immigration as to anything. Today [2011] numbering 7.1 million people, the country has grown almost nine-fold in sixty years….Foreign-born citizens of Israel currently account for over one-third of the nation’s population, almost three times the ratio of foreigners to natives in the United States.…although Jews made up only about two percent of the Soviet population, they ‘counted for some thirty percent of doctors, twenty percent of engineers’ [according to Natan Sharansky]”.--“Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle”,Dan Senor and Saul Singer (Council on Foreign Relations, 2011)* * *A short history of My Finest Hour begins when a Russian scientist, sent by a mutual acquaintance, came to my office in 1990. In Russian-accented English, Dmitry asked for my help in finding a job in the United States. Like Vladimir Minden, he had a double PhD from impressive institutions in the former Soviet Union, had arrived only a few months earlier, and was driving a taxicab to support himself and his family.This was the era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), policies introduced in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and partially responsible for the break-up of the former Soviet Union.Dmitry was one individual among a wave of émigrés departing the former Soviet Union. He and over a million others were Jews, fleeing persecution, and brought here by Jewish resettlement agencies who loaned them money donated by American Jews.Once here, the agencies helped them find jobs and housing so that as welcome visitors, they could eventually be permanent citizens. Officially, they had to provide the names of U. S. relatives who lived here, and who would vouch for them…that is to say, who would prevent them from being a burden to our U.S. federal and state and city governments. Perhaps two thousand of those who arrived in the U.S. were high-functioning scientists, physicians, engineers. Dmitry’s specialty was marine biology, but others had done research in metallurgy, aeronautical engineering, solid state physics, low temperature physics, rheology, piscatology, strength of materials, pure mathematics, applied mathematics, computer science and engineering, satellite design, and many very narrow specialties, some of which did not yet even exist in the U.S. A few were geniuses.In fact, if these Jewish professionals were talented enough, in Russia they were asked to work on classified military projects in applied science or engineering in addition to their academic work in the pure sciences… even though they were Jews, who were normally discriminated against for centuries in Czarist eras until the present. This military work, while beneficial to them when living in Russia, actually made it very difficult for them to get permission from the Soviet officials to leave. Some, however, were allowed to leave if classified projects there they were working on were not essential to the Soviet military.Dmitry got a job within a few weeks of visiting my office and told his friends -- other émigrés -- about me. Many emigres lived in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, in Forest Hills in Queens, and other convenient housing locations that the resettlement agency had found for them to live.Dmitry’s friends started to call me or turn up at my office (sometimes there was a long line), asking for job-search help. Here’s the short version of what happened next:(1) I formed a non-profit tax-exempt foundation whose mission was to help émigré scientists find appropriate work in the US;(2) I began a series of lectures to the ever-increasing numbers of job-hungry émigrés; these talks morphed into a practical workshop with a full syllabus; (3) I was visited by a reporter from the New York Times, Deborah Sontag, and she wrote the following factual and very positive article about our activities…Capitalism for Emigres, in 12 Steps; Scientists From the Former Soviet Union Study an Unusual Subject: How to Get a JobBy DEBORAH SONTAGPublished: May 21, 1992, New York TimesOne by one, the emigre scientists -- specialists in ichthyology, pisciculture, biomineralization and more -- rose to present themselves."I am Bril," the first man began. "I come here two months ago from Minsk."Then the next: "My major is fracture mechanics. I have 20 publications in international journals."And a graying engineer: "I was a supervisor," he said. "I have 30 certificates. Now, sadly, I am rather old."It was a touching exercise, but awkward, like a bad "Saturday Night Live" skit snapped to life in a conference room on East 33d Street. Dozens of scientists and engineers, many of them stars in the former Soviet Union, had come together for a post-doctoral lesson in "the American mentality." Their goal, more bluntly: jobs.Eye ContactIt had been but a few months since most of them had arrived from Russia and Belarus, but the eager students had already found their way to this "crash course in capitalism" offered by an American-born astrophysicist and career counselor, Dr. Stephen Rosen. INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET Their capitalist re-education, which will take 12 sessions at no charge, began early this month at the Workmen's Circle, a former bastion of Jewish socialism, itself re-educated into a fraternal organization. With the ready humility of immigrants, these dozens of Ph.D.'s from St. Petersburg University, Moscow State and the Steklov Mathematical Institute arrived prepared to study concepts like eye contact, thank-you notes and the buddy system."I know about eye contact -- you have to maintain it -- but I have bad knowledge in many areas," Dr. Vladimir Faynberg of Kiev said, his glasses slightly askew. "For instance, must you really wear only a blue suit to a job interview or is brown acceptable?"Dr. Faynberg may well be a physicist specializing in the nondestructive testing of semiconductors, but that and 50 cents, he has learned, will get him a cup of coffee in America. Neither he nor the others have any desire to take a typical first job for immigrants, like driving a taxicab. Why watch a meter tick when you could be tinkering with a carbon buckyball?So, referred by refugee-resettlement agencies, former capitalism students and Russian-language newspapers, the emigres have found their way to this workshop, which will initiate them into such alien activities as networking, interfacing and looking for a job. It's a hazing they're willing to endure, considering that many are already suffering what they hope will be a temporary indignity of depending on public assistance.Dr. Rosen estimated that more than 4,000 scientists have migrated here from the former Soviet Union in the last two years in what he calls a brain gain. His nonprofit program, Scientific Career Transitions, which is supported by grants and donations, grew from a marriage of his vocation in career counseling and his avocation, helping Jewish emigres. Exploitation and CapitalismStanding before a hand-lettered sign that said, "Either Network or Not Work," Dr. Rosen, whose grandparents came from what is now Belarus, gave them their mission: "The job that you have to do is to persuade or convince an American employer that you can bring in more money than they pay you. In the Soviet Union, this was called exploitation. In the U.S., this is called capitalism."As would any self-actualization teacher worth his ego, Dr. Rosen introduced a success story, Dr. Aleksandr Salman, a once-nervous geophysicist from Moscow, who, after participating in the workshop, landed a position in soil mechanics at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn.An elegant bearded man, Dr. Salman offered a testimonial. "I came over a year and a half ago," he said. "I figured out it's rather impossible to find a job here in my field, earthquake prediction. But I didn't give up."We must learn small things, for example, keep smiling," he said, his face impassive. "How to feel yourself comfortable when not comfortable. You must start making telephone calls. You must be in the right place at the right time."Dr. Salman, after placing himself in the right place at the right time, discovered -- right in Brooklyn -- a project that could benefit from his knowledge of seismology. He is studying the vibrations shaking the historic town houses above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Resumes and Vodka at Lunch"Many people are proud of themselves because of their former achievements," Dr. Salman told his colleagues. "You must forget about that. You must accept anything you are offered."Spouting aphorisms and jokes, Dr. Rosen, in "Topic A: Orientation," offered his dos and don'ts of looking for work in America.Don't send out resumes randomly, rely on classified advertisements, wait for the phone to ring, arrive late or depressed for job interviews, smoke, photocopy cover letters or wear wrinkled brown suits."Class, is it O.K. to drink vodka during an interview lunch?" Dr. Rosen asked. There was a pause."Maybe a little?" one chemist ventured. Einstein Never Wore a TieDo be succinct, ask your interviewer questions -- "Don't let it become a K.G.B. interview" -- search the Science Citation Index for those who have cited your research, call people in your field and engage them in shoptalk. And get a haircut.Dr. Rosen nodded at another workshop graduate, Dr. Gregory Pelts, who has secured a research position in the high-energy physics department at the Rockefeller University. "Notice that Gregory does not wear a tie and jacket and has long hair. He fought with me. He said Einstein never wore a tie. Well, Einstein stopped wearing ties once he landed a job in the United States. Your absence of a tie does not imply you will be an Eiinstein. "Dr. Pelts, however unkempt, was an exemplary networker. "I just called up Rockefeller University, and said, 'Good day, may I speak with someone working in string theory? ", he explained.Russian-style bluntness can, however, prove clunky. Dr. Faynberg offered an example. He had gone for a chat, not exactly a job interview, but an opportunity nonetheless, at a laboratory in New Jersey. The topic was semi-conductors, and Dr. Faynberg's interviewer ventured an opinion, to which Dr. Faynberg responded, "You are wrong.""His jaw dropped, and he looked at his watch and said, 'I'm in a hurry,' " Dr. Faynberg recounted. "It was a very unhappy occurrence."####About a month later, a Nobel Laureate, Roald Hoffmann, wrote an essay at my urging for the Editorial Page of The Wall Street Journal, reprinted below.Soviet ?migré Talent: A Windfall For U. S. Employers (WSJ June 24, 1992)By Roald Hoffmann*Soviet scientific talent is now streaming westward. About 40,000 Soviet Jewish émigrés arrived in the U.S. last year, and a similar number are expected this year. Some 20% of the new arrivals are engineers, and about 2% are professional scientists.This wave of émigré talent is an extraordinary windfall for the U.S economy, for U.S. science and technology, and for our academic, research and corporate communities.The periodic table, Sputnik, and surgical staples are striking examples of Russian and Soviet genius in science and technology. Hundreds of recently arrived scientists are eager to follow in Mendeleev’s footsteps; some perhaps are future Nobel laureates: superb agricultural botanists, bio-technology specialists, biochemists, geneticists, virologists, ichthyologists, physicists, petroleum and hydro-geologists, neuroscientists, engineers, mathematicians and technicians. Many have dozens—or even hundreds—of journal articles and double doctorates. Rafail Kushak, for example, is now at Harvard doing research in physiology and nutrition; Vyachslav Kuteyev, an applied mathematician, is doing actuarial work in biostatistics; Semeon Tsipursky, a materials scientist is working at a leading research laboratory; Alexander Salman is a geologist examining the civil engineering consequences of earthquake forecasts; German Laufer is a neurophysiologist doing research at Mt. Sinai Medical Center.These individuals were lucky. They found jobs in their fields just a few months after their arrival here through an imaginative, energetic and successful program, Scientific Career Transitions, at the Workman’s Circle, created by American scientist Stephen Rosen, supported by a dedicated volunteer staff [italics added] and using facilities donated by Richard A. Eisner & Co., a new York-based CPA firm with scientific and engineering companies as clients. But many other émigrés have not yet learned the American methods of self-marketing, networking, job interviewing and outreach.U.S. corporate executives, research directors and science managers now face industrial-strength opportunities to hire such highly qualified, cost-effective talent with hands-on experience in science and engineering—people who can really “get the job done”. What should a prospective employer look for when evaluating a Soviet immigrant candidate?--Capitalism—What’s that? Being a Soviet research scientist or high-level engineer is no guarantee of ignorance about capitalism…but it sure helps. New émigrés are uncomfortable presenting their most “bankable” talents up front, with “networking” their way into the U.S. economy, and with asking for advice before applying for jobs. Make allowances: their interviewing skills are not on a par with their substantive technical knowledge.--Credentials. The Soviet Union has two different Ph.Ds. One, the “candidat nauk” is almost the equivalent of a standard U.S. Ph.D., requiring an original and publishable piece of research like the U.S. doctoral dissertation. The other, the “doctor nauk”, is bestowed after prolific research output, years beyond the U.S. doctorate. Ask to see credentials, stamped with a special Soviet Academy seal, or a U.S. certified equivalent. Ask to see a candidate’s list of patents or publications, with titles and citations in English, so they can be checked. Invite the candidate to tell you about his work. Then listen critically to the caliber and quantity of accomplishments.--Depth of knowledge. Many émigrés have highly specialized capabilities in unusual-and multiple-market niches. I know Soviet émigrés with Ph.Ds in printing technology, foundry casting, friction, digestion, engineering cybernetics, and other specialties that U.S. markets have not identified—yet.--The language. Published émigrés have good English writing and listening skills but may require exposure to converse in fluent, idiomatic, functional English. ?migré scientists and engineers who go through Scientific Career Transitions have learned English quickly and easily.--Compensation. Many émigrés can be hired at entry-level positions until their language and marketplace skills are up to speed. A responsible manager understands that émigrés are often eager—even driven—to prove themselves on the job with diligence and dedication. After a few months at work, their true value emerges.--Entrepreneurs and innovators. In the Soviet Union, these people were among the best and the brightest. But the stodgy, corrupt, bureaucratic system did not allow them to put novel, productive ideas into practice. After they become acclimatized, ask them to suggest innovations, to invent.--Temporary work. Many Soviet scientists and high-level engineers will not find their “dream job” in the U.S. immediately, and may be content to accept short-term assignments. If you offer this kind of work, be prepared to see an émigré-employee depart promptly once that “dream job” comes along…or to promote that person when justified. You may even consider a brief test assignment to prove the candidate’s “can-do” attitude and competence.--Contacts. If you cannot make a job offer, can you think of a few professional colleagues or personal contacts who might advance the emigre’s job search? In so doing you might also, just incidentally, advance the U.S. economy.Because emigres come to the U.S. to escape persecution, they are highly motivated to succeed in their new country, their new life. They are among the most courageous, hard-working and future-oriented people on earth—new Americans at their best. ###*Roald Hoffmann, 1981 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, was himself an émigré from Russian-occupied Poland, arriving in 1949 in the U.S.(4) I used the publicity from the appearance of both The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal articles to raise money for what became a six-week Program, called “Scientific Career Transitions”;(5) I was visited by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which made generous grants to our fledgling non-profit organization in the belief that what we were doing with and for Russian scientists was also needed by US scientists;(6) Celia and I were commissioned to write a book, “Career Renewal”, based on our six-week Program on how to address career problems of US scientists. (7) I was also visited by government intelligence agencies (about which more in the chapter, “A Person Of Interest to The FBI, The CIA, and The KGB”).The most rewarding part of our program for the Russian émigrés, they told me, was that they had their first face-to-face contact with an America Jewish scientist of Russian extraction who understood how to get professional and science jobs in US. (The fact that I was somewhat eccentric and amused them was a bonus, and became a source of lasting friendships.)They told me they came from a very strange place, the former Soviet Union, where as they put it ironically, the Soviet Union officials had all the ‘ethical and moral principles of slime mold’.I met the emigres face-to-face and heard first-hand their unvarnished views of the former Soviet Union (so to speak from the bottom-up). I found that their candid opinions unveiled a very negative version of the “workers’ paradise” and of Marxist Theory I had read about in learned college textbooks (as it were from the top-down), and had heard about from my left-leaning college chums. I was being educated in real politics. When I was invited to emigres’ homes for dinner, we drank vodka -- bottoms up! – to toast their new-found capitalist freedoms.I also began to appreciate the sacrifices and courage of these stalwart and gutsy survivors, with their true-grit ambitions and robust powers of endurance, who wanted their children to grow up in a better place than they and their parents had inhabited. Since then, my admiration for them and for my own ancestors and parents has only increased. As mentioned earlier, Bruce Feiler cites studies that show: “The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.” This resonates deeply with me. The early chapters in these memoirs about my parents and my work with Russian emigres demonstrate how monumentally important my own rich “family narrative” has strengthened my own self-esteem and self-control.Not only did I help emigres help themselves change their lives, but they helped to immeasurably-improve my own life. I acquired the confidence to begin helping US scientists, lawyers, and doctors. I became a full-time career counselor. They helped me more than they knew, and much much more than I helped them. ####HOW I MET THE SUNSHINE OF MY LIFE In 1984, Celia Paul was a forty-year old social worker, divorced, and very attractive. Some contemporary women friends of hers were complaining that they couldn’t meet “appropriate” men. Since these were accomplished attractive professional women, they probably wanted to meet accomplished attractive professional men. Marriage-able men. Interesting men.One of them suggested that they organize a reception and invite men with whom each of them had gone out before, and had liked—but didn’t love. It was later described facetiously as a “recycling” or “roll-over” party. Get it? The process reminded me of an Irving Berlin song, “Won’t You Change Partners And Dance With Me?” popularized by Fred Astaire.This speed-dating event took place in a very pleasant upper-west side apartment on a very pleasant Sunday afternoon in September. About ten women appeared, and each had brought appetizers and snacks. Each of the fifteen men brought wine. The odds were in favor of the women, of course, since it was their idea. I had dated one of these women once five years earlier; no romance had developed between us, but she remembered me well enough to invite me to this male-candidate-recycling event.I was munching on some appetizers and dip. I said to the lovely stranger standing next to me to my right at the table, “This is delicious! Let’s see, what’s in it? Ah ha… Yes….Coriander!”The stranger to my right said, “I made that dip!” Not much later, when she became my wife, Celia Paul and no longer a stranger told me: “I formed three conclusions about those few remarks of yours. One, ‘He’s generous with his compliments’. Two,’ He likes to eat’. And three, ‘He must be sophisticated, because he could identify Coriander’.”We exchanged names and chatted a few moments, and then I said: “Please excuse me. I’d like to circulate.” Off I went to meet and chat up all the other women there. That was the purpose of the event, wasn’t it? I circulated conscientiously, gathering as many business cards from the other nine women as I could.Then, Celia – the Coriander lady – approached. “Would you like to go out for a cup of coffee?” she asked. Now that I had collected all my contacts, Celia and I both knew I was free to leave. “Sure!” Once we were outside, she said, “How about coming for coffee at my apartment. It’s very near.”… “Sure!”.After entering her apartment, Celia proceeded to offer some wine. One thing led to another, and we got closer and closer and closer…until we were very very close. There are two divergent scenarios of what happened next: mine, and hers.MINE. I remember my version clearly. The next morning, according to my memory, Celia proposed marriage to me. I am not making this up.HERS. Celia remembers her version clearly. She recalls saying, “That was great!”, and me proposing marriage a few months later. We’re both sure each of is right. Steve’s ego survives the two versions intact -- and maybe both versions are true. It really doesn’t matter now. (The Gershwin song, “Who Cares” has a lyric couplet that says “Who cares if banks fail in Yonkers... Long as you’ve got a kiss that conquers”). She did.However, there were a few bumps ‘On the bumpy road to love’ -- which happens to be the title of a song sung by Judy Garland in a 1938 movie that co-starred Judy and Celia Paul’s step-father Freddie Bartholomew…a lovely man who loved Celia and me like a father. The bumps were minor. During our six-month courtship we tested each other by separating for two weeks -- but re-united promptly. During Christmas and Rosh Hashanah we disagreed briefly about religious observance, but that was merely another brief trial-of-wills that ended well.What did I like about her? What made us a good match? I loved looking at Celia. I loved our conversations. I loved being with her. Celia is a practical and brilliant thinker in every way, a leader in her profession…career counseling lawyers. (I often said she was ‘too smart to be a lawyer’). Celia’s “just too marvelous…too marvelous for words…” a Johnny Mercer/Richard Whiting song which Ella Fitzgerald performs at watch?v=m5kiqbcbrOoShe had a record collection (chamber music mostly) that dove-tailed, completed, supplemented, and complimented my own record collection (symphonic music and jazz). We both accepted this as a powerful metaphor for the many other ways we completed each other: me theoretical, she practical; she a people-person, me an often-self-centered type; me spontaneous and impulsive, she focused and goal-oriented. We have learned to honor our differences. Both of us love entertaining and cooking together, traveling together, and making new friends. I wrote admiring songs honoring her best qualities for birthdays and special events; see the chapter “Singin In The Brain”.In 2013 we’ve been married over twenty-seven years – and she still treats me AS IF I WERE HER EQUAL. The best of two marriages. The kiss that conquers. The wisest decision I ever made. Celia is “the sunshine of my life”. ####SOL PAUL & DUBLIN’S JEWISH LORD MAYORS My new father-in-law in my new second marriage was Sol Paul. He was a bow-tie-wearing gentleman of the old school, loved to laugh, and was a very well-known and highly respected publisher of a trade magazine (Radio and Television Age) that circulated to executives in the radio and television industry.In fact, Sol had been a pioneer in the television industry back in the 1950s when television was in its infancy.Saul loved women. Especially beautiful women. He and Aileen Phillips, Celia’ mother, had one child together, and then their marriage broke up, sadly, when Celia was five years old.Sol was a bon vivant and a great story teller. He loved to talk about his old girlfriends back when he was in college, at Georgetown University in the 1940s in Washington DC. At one time he was dating the daughter of the man who was the then-Irish-Ambassador to the United States. The daughter was Maeve, a lovely Irish lass, whose name still brought a smile to Sol’s face decades later whenever he spoke of her.After Maeve and Sol had gone out a few times together, Sol was returning Maeve to the Ambassador's residence one evening. As he was saying “Good night”, he was greeted at the front door of the Ambassador's residence by the Ambassador himself.The Ambassador said: “Mr. Paul…how nice to see you. May I have a word? Would you mind? Please step into my study.”Sol complied and when they were in the study, the Ambassador closed the door and said the following: “Mr. Paul. You seem like a very decent man. However, you are a Jew. Is that correct?” Sol said “Yes sir.” The Ambassador continued, “Well as nice a man as you are, I will not have my daughter marry a Jew.”The Ambassador continued, “Mr. Paul, you seem to have an eye for Irish beauty, and I can help you find some Irish beauties who happen to be Jewish. A good friend of mine, Robert Briscoe, is the Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin, and he has four beautiful Irish girls who also happen to be Jewish. I would be pleased to introduce you to him so you could meet his lovely Irish Jewish daughters.” Saul said, “Thank you very much sir but I don't think that will be necessary”, and withdrew from the study and never saw Maeve again.* * *Fast forward forty years.When Celia and I married in 1985, Sol told me this story about Robert Briscoe. In the late 80s, I visited Ireland to see my son Daniel and Daniel’s then-wife Heather. During my visit to Ireland, I planned to call on Ben Briscoe, the son of Robert Briscoe, formerly active in the Irish Rebellion as well as Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin.Ben is also Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin, his father having died, and he was elected to this position, which is an honorific title that allows him to travel the world as a Jew representing Ireland. This is unusual, since there are only some five hundred Jews left in Ireland, most having fled to England or Israel to find suitable mates. Ireland has about 3 million people and has absolutely no anti-Semitism there (maybe because there are so few Jews).When I arrived in Dublin I looked up Ben Briscoe in the telephone directory and I reached him at the Irish House of Parliament.The conversation went like this… “Hi! My name is Steve Rosen. I’m from New York, and I’m Jewish." Without skipping a beat, Ben Briscoe says, “Come on over!”So I went to the Parliament and met Briscoe, and we had high tea, around 4 PM. We got along very well. Ben Briscoe is very genial, jovial, jolly, and has lots of jokes -- just like politicians everywhere -- and I have a few of my own jokes. We had a great time together and become instant friends…sharing Jewish jokes and Irish jokes.Here’s one of Briscoe's best jokes: It seems that a criminal has left the United States and was believed by the FBI to have gone to Dublin to escape. So the FBI agent in charge sends a fax to the Dublin police. The fax showed the culprit in three poses like wanted posters do… full-face (in the center of the poster); left side profile of the face (on the right side of the ‘wanted’ poster); and right side profile of the face (on the left side of the poster).The poster says: “This man is wanted. If you see him please notify the Police. Do not attempt to apprehend him yourself. He may be armed and dangerous.”Weeks went by, and the FBI agent in charge heard nothing from the Dublin police. He got tired of waiting, and finally calls his counterpart at the Dublin police. The FBI agent says to the Dublin Police Chief, “Did you get the fax we sent you about that escaped criminal?”The Dublin police chief says, “Yes, sure and bejesus we got the fax.” So the FBI agent says, “Did you catch the criminal?” And the Dublin Police Chief says, “Well, we got the guy in the center--but we couldn't get the other two guys on each side of him.”These jokes helped both of us relax, and then I remembered the story about Sol and Maeve, the daughter of the then-Irish-Ambassador to the United States forty years earlier… including the part about the Irish Ambassador offering Robert Briscoe's daughters (Ben’s sisters) as models of Irish-Jewish pulchritude.So I related this whole story to Ben Briscoe, who was obviously the brother of these four daughters, as well as the son of Robert Briscoe. And I explained the Ambassador's offer, some forty years earlier, to introduce Sol to Ben Briscoe's four “beautiful” sisters. Ben Briscoe’s response: “But my sisters are really ugly!”#### A PERSON OF INTEREST TO THE FBI, CIA, & KGB Jews did not have a happy history in the USSR.When the Cold War warmed up, the US was able to negotiate an orderly departure of those Soviet citizens who wished to emigrate to the US and European countries, provided that American and the Jewish resettlement agencies finance the transitions. As mentioned, about a half a million Jews came to the U.S., and about a million went to Israel. Thus it came to pass that only if you were Jewish were you allowed to leave the USSR. In fact, one of my émigré scientists ‘confessed’ that she lied about her religion in order to depart Russia. She pretended to be Jewish. The irony is that while Russia persecuted Jews for centuries, many Jews pretended to be not Jewish.Here is a story circulated at the time by the émigrés: Gorbachev asks his deputy, “How many Jews are there still left in the Soviet Union?” The deputy says, “Two million.” Gorbachev says, “Well, how many Jews want to leave?” And the deputy says, “Four million”.* * *In 1990, as mentioned, I created and directed the Scientific Career Transitions Program, especially for Jewish Soviet émigré scientists from the former Soviet Union. The New York Times sent a reporter to visit us. The Times reporter, Deborah Sontag, was a very capable and diligent writer, and she wrote a wonderful piece that gave us much-needed publicity. Included in the chapter entitled, “Nice Work and You Can Get It’, the article “Capitalism for Emigres, in 12 Steps; Scientists From the Former Soviet Union Study an Unusual Subject: How to Get a Job” (May 21, 1992) is also available online.Because of the very favorable publicity that followed the New York Times article, I was able to use it as fund-raising tool. It was, in effect, a testimonial that drew a lot of attention to the problems of refuse-nik Jews in the former Soviet Union, their eagerness to depart the “workers’ paradise” and to find a real life elsewhere. Even though I had never raised money for a worthy cause (although I had given money to worthy causes) I was able to teach myself how to parlay this publicity into funding for the Scientific Career Transitions Program.But not only did we get publicity from the Times and funding from wealthy donors and friends, from New York State, from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation -- and were offered a book contract from Academic Press -- but we caught the attention of the FBI, the CIA, and the KGB.An agent of the FBI called one day and asked if we could meet. I asked how they found out about me and our Program. The caller said, “Because of the article in the New York Times”. I replied, “What took you so long?”Central Casting and Middle America sent two clean-cut, crew-cut, straight-arrow FBI agents. This was at the tail end of the Cold War between the USSR and the US; the two countries, formerly mortal enemies, were still suspicious of each other. The agents asked me to tell them about any scientific and technological developments that these Soviet émigrés had worked on in the former Soviet Union.Many of these émigré scientists were professors or researchers at premier institutes and only a few of them had been engaged in classified military research because Jews were considered a security risk.However, if a Jewish scientist was truly outstanding, she was allowed to do military research for Mother Russia. A number of these talented individuals attended the program and were participating in the workshop as students of the job-search. So the FBI agents asked if I could keep them informed of any promising newcomers who might bring valuable information or technical developments to the United States via this émigré channel. The officials in the former Soviet Union, of course, would always try to screen the emigres before they granted exit visas so that no secrets would depart.The émigré scientists began calling me as they arrived in the US; they would have found out about the program via the émigré grapevine, the gossip network, or via the New York Times article -- which remarkably had been picked up by Russian-language newspapers in Moscow and in New York.When they entered and joined our program, they furnished me with their resumes and lists of publications and patents in English. Of course, I would scour these documents for hints about their research and whether anything they worked on might possibly be of interest to the FBI.In the 1980s, the United States was ahead of the Russians in most technical, scientific, and engineering specialties. But there were a few fields where the Soviet Union surpassed the United States.One such field was metallurgy, and how to machine Titanium, a very strong very light-weight metal used for military purposes in supersonic aircraft and other classified applications. One of “my” émigrés (I became very protective and fond of them) had developed effective ways of working with Titanium, a very difficult substance to machine and deal with. I informed the FBI of this and of other developments that I thought they would like to know about.In the space race of the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Soviet Union appeared to have drawn ahead of the US when they launched Sputnik into orbit and sent an unmanned rocket to land on the moon. The United States was caught flat-footed, and this embarrassment was ultimately responsible for John F. Kennedy announcing that we were going to send a man to the moon and bring back him back alive by the end of the decade. Our vast and expensive Space Program and NASA were created to meet the Soviet challenge.Our space satellites were powered by solar panels. But the Soviets had developed long-lived power sources for their many Earth satellites using their advances in metallurgy. As energy sources for satellites, they used highly radioactive substances that were not only extremely “hot” (radio-actively speaking) but were also at very high temperatures; this powered their satellites using the high temperatures to generate electricity by means of the “thermo-electric effect”. They built metal containers that would not melt even if they held such substances at very high temperature for years of satellite operation.This energy source had been designed by one of my emigres, a program participant. I remember speaking to high-ranking officials in the government about machining Titanium as an area where they were possibly ahead of the US.I also collected from other program participants many science and technology ideas that might be candidates for start-up companies or for commercial development in the US. Many of the emigre scientists came to me with their ideas, and then we met with venture capitalists and Goldman Sachs; eventually we came up empty -- although through this quest I met some very interesting scientists and financial investors.* * *An agent of the CIA also called after the New York Times article to see what I was up to, and to investigate whether any of the émigré scientists might have been planted here by the Soviet Union to spy on us. I don’t know how they scrutinized the émigrés, but they found nothing suspicious…or didn’t tell me if they had.In 1992, I got a visit from a very suspicious guy who was later identified to me by the CIA as a very dangerous person connected to the KGB. He was introduced to me by one of my former students (how very clever of him), and I met with him, the former student, and a translator he requested (another of my protégés), in a conference room at 575 Madison Avenue in the offices that were donated to our non-profit organization by the accounting firm Richard A. Eisner and Company.Ivan had a very elaborate business card, with lots of degrees and initials after his name, and was ostensibly visiting the U.S. to sell Russian Art. But I think this was a flimsy cover story.During the course of a two-hour meeting with him, I noticed that he was very short-tempered and hot-headed and got impatient with my translator. At one point he yelled at her that she was not doing a good job of converting his words into English.At that point, I realized that he spoke English very well. Perhaps he wanted to hear everything that transpired during the meeting twice. I photocopied his “business card” and I sent it to the CIA. They researched him and urged very strongly that I have nothing to do with him because he was “very dangerous”. And that was that.* * *However, many years later I was contacted by a reporter for the Chinese language newspaper, Science & Technology Daily. He told me in broken English that he was the New York and UN Bureau Chief, and wanted to interview me.The paper, he said, had a circulation of something like a half a million people a day (!) The largest-circulation science periodical in the US was only about 300,000 a week. The general population of China is so much greater than the population of the United States that China has a correspondingly higher (much higher!) population of scientists.“Jimmy” (as he called himself…admittedly a nom de guerre) asked to meet me and to talk about science and technology in the United States and what I knew. He said that he was specifically interested in, and wanted detailed information about, advanced technologies that are being worked on in the United States. He specifically asked about electronics and aircraft development, and other high-tech fields. So I got a little suspicious and called my FBI contact, and he came back with the result: “This is a person of interest".I guess a “person of interest” to the FBI was somebody who was “fishing” for critical information, and maybe potentially even a spy. I had read an Op-Ed article in the New York Times at the time that indicated the Russians and the Chinese had different methods or ‘styles’ of spying. The Russians would find an American who had access to classified material, and then they would offer her very large sums of money to “turn” the source into a spy.But the article pointed out that the Chinese have a very large population, and suggested that their vast number of citizens would scour sources of information in the open literature in the United States. Graduate students, visitors to China, and the newspapers and technical journals were always examined carefully for what they contained. The Chinese relied on people working in the U.S. who were research-informants, fact-collectors, or spies to give them the information that was unclassified – and that they could then piece together the small information ‘tidbits’ using large teams of shrewd analysts back in China, and assemble these into “a big picture”.I was asked to cultivate and befriend this person and his wife and child, which I did with my wife’s help.He and I had lunch regularly over the course of five years. They made a Chinese dinner of twenty different dishes for us in their apartment, and eventually visited and cooked for us in East Hampton. It was quite different than the food in a New York Chinese restaurant... although we and they did eat together in Chinese restaurants and elsewhere. We socialized often, visiting museums and parks with them and their young son. Jimmy even asked me for career advice: he wanted to be a professional photographer and designer once he returned to China.Jimmy asked me to introduce him to scientists and high-level people I knew. I did this but always told these targets about his background, and urged them to be careful in what they revealed.After years of developing our relationship, the FBI agents said that they wanted me to try to “turn” him, which I understood to mean that they wanted me to try to get him to spy against his own people on behalf of the United States. I thought this was a very bad idea because I suspected that Jimmy would decline, and that my effort would sour our friendship permanently.Nevertheless, I accommodated the agents’ request. I was very uncomfortable with the whole idea, and with the “wire” (an incredibly tiny recorder) I was asked to wear and felt the entire exercise was based upon the FBI’s benign misconception…that he would convert his loyalty to the US merely on the basis of our friendship and his admiration for our system.At one of our lunches, I discussed Jimmy’s new camera, and everything and anything else I could think of. I felt edgy, and Jimmy must have suspected the occasion was different from our regular meetings. I told Jimmy that I wanted him to meet with some people who wanted to talk to him. But he said, “No. It is not necessary.” I guess he figured out that we were going to try to recruit him. He was clearly not interested. This ended our relationship and eventually he returned with his wife and son to his family’s homeland. I still wonder if he left journalism and became a photographer, or if he was sent from China on other similar missions elsewhere. ####DARWIN, DARWIN & SELF-FLATTERY The first of four sons that Luis brought to East Hampton from Ecuador was Darwin. Luis -- a quiet, dark, stocky, very muscular man -- worked in East Hampton helping with our gardening and heavy household chores for about ten years. Luis spoke little English. He was a very hard worker; slow and steady, strong and quiet. He would toil all day; he needed the money and insisted on working sometimes for twelve hours straight. When I had the energy, I enjoyed working alongside him: but I would quit from exhaustion long before he even needed a rest. He…like the fabled tortoise that won the race against the nervous excitable hare…me.Luis had worked in an Ecuadorian rock quarry – hence the muscles and the twelve hour work-days -- making the equivalent of $30 or $40 a month there. The economy of Ecuador was so dire that the government was often unable to pay salaries to their own government employees. Luis had a wife and six children in Ecuador, and had come to East Hampton as an illegal immigrant like many of his compatriots to find work.Luis not only sent money home and phoned weekly, but he arrived one day with a video camera—to send home images of our house, our gardens, my sculptures-welded-from-rusty-tools, and us. He referred to one of my assemblages as, “El burro de Don Esteban” (Sir Stephen’s donkey). Nobody had ever called me Don Esteban. Or Sir. It sounded like a character from Don Quixote. We were moved by his eagerness to show his family-back-home where, and with whom, he worked. A heart-warming gesture that made us feel he was not merely a hired hand.We loved Luis. And maybe he even loved us. When he left after ten years to go back to Quito, he smiled that dark handsome shy missing-tooth smile when we gave him a farewell party and a going-away present. He had been sending money home, as many immigrants do. When he was ready to return to Ecuador, he planned to use the money that he had saved up to buy a candy store. After Luis left, his son Darwin came to work for us.* * *Men or boys in Ecuador are named Darwin because when the first one whose last name was Darwin (Charles) was writing his famous diary on the voyage of the Beagle, he visited the Galapagos, islands off the coast (and part) of Ecuador. There Charles made detailed observations of the flora and the fauna, and kept notes of all conversations he had with natives and other travelers. He was a national hero.I read both Charles Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle” and his masterpiece “The Origins of Species” on a trip to Patagonia. Extremely impressive was the wealth of deeply-detailed observations he recorded on paper while still a twenty-year-old, and a yet-to-be-declared genius. Charles Darwin’s writings virtually defined the phrase, “powers of observation.” I envied his ability to objectify reality in such rich detail. (Would that I could see less of myself in the world outside of me, and observe more of the world-as-it-is. Sometimes I feel as if I were a fish unable to sense its liquid environment.)Charles Darwin observed the facts and data in his diary that would lead him decades later to his theories on evolution and the descent of mankind from earlier life forms by a process of “natural selection,” or “survival of the fittest.” In the Galapagos Islands he first observed features of birds that led to his discovering natural selection.It was not only the citizens of the United Kingdom and the rest of the World, but also the Ecuadorian people, who realized his great accomplishment. Ecuadorians like Luis honored Charles’ memory by bestowing his last name as a first name on male offspring.Like Luis, son Darwin was taciturn and strong. He worked steadily, efficiently, and effectively for many hours. He was very quick-witted, with a strong native intelligence, and could solve practical problems instantly. Unlike Luis, he spoke English.* * *After working for us for three or four years, Darwin invited us to his wedding. He had met a young Puerto Rican woman from Brooklyn on an internet website, a Pentecostal dating service.We met Winnie, who was an American citizen, peppy and petite, and who we liked...until we didn’t. (You’ll see why momentarily.) We were pleased to learn that Darwin would be able to stay in East Hampton and continue to work for us as he had done previously.Not only did he ask us to come to the wedding, but he Asked Me To Be His Best Man! Yes, this was a big deal I flattered myself to believe. I had no suspicion that he might be setting me up to give him a very large gift, but (as we later learned) he had no such ulterior motive. I was required to wear a tuxedo. Celia was required to wear a purple dress, according to Winnie, so she could match all the other bridesmaids in the service. Celia had become a Bridesmaid.The wedding was held mid-Island in a very small, very modest Pentecostal church. There must've been some three hundred Ecuadorians at this wedding. Celia and I were the only Caucasians -- or as they say “gringos”-- and we towered a head above the Ecuadorians.The food was not catered, but cooked and brought by the guests. There was a lot of rice. A lot of chicken. A lot of economizing and warm family togetherness.Pentecostals do not believe in alcohol, dancing, or smoking. So there was none of those. Instead, they had a Bible quiz and the winner won… a Bible.I was asked to give a toast. I speak Spanish, and gave the following toast in Spanish: “I am very happy to be here. I am happy for Darwin and Winnie, and here is what I wish for them… I hope that they will be as happy twenty years from now, as my wife Celia and I are today. Very happy.” I got a huge round of welcoming and enthusiastic applause. Celia and I talked about the wedding event for weeks thereafter, because we felt honored to be a part of this Ecuadorian community.The wedding itself was a strange event. Winnie's divorced mother was inappropriately dressed and beyond eccentric. She was in her late 40s and her boyfriend was a 21-year-old moron.The wedding couple had hired limos, which were very expensive, and which we tried to discourage them from doing, but they insisted. There was a disturbingly odd note on the printed invitations, which had an asterisk next to the location and date, and the footnote to this asterisk at the bottom of this printed invitation said “If you are planning to give us money, please give it in CASH”. Apparently this was Winnie’s idea, not Darwin’s. We did give them cash as a wedding gift.Darwin continued to work for us for several more years. He was extremely practical and youthful, appeared to be happily married, and was a very effective handyman and gardener, doing odd jobs and chores around our property. We referred him to others since we wanted him to increase his revenues, and to do our friends the favor of passing on a very good worker.Several years passed, and Darwin tells us that Winnie has left him for another man. He is devastated, moody, depressed. He is unable to work. He simply stands around moping. And we needed work done and we’re very disappointed and unhappy because we were present at his wedding. I tried to cheer him up about Winnie by pointing out that Winnie had some genetic abnormalities probably inherited from her emotionally-disturbed mother. He agreed with me that it was better that Winnie and he had not had children.Darwin visits and works for us occasionally, has a girl-friend, and a daughter and son. He seems is happy and well. However, this story has an unhappy twist. We heard through Darwin’s brother -- not through Darwin himself -- that Winnie had perished in an apartment blaze; her mother survived. Darwin will not discuss this matter.In 2012, Darwin returned to work for us again, and showed off his lovely daughter. He is very much a proud father. He’s put on a few pounds of prosperous maturity, and is once again a warm, friendly, and trusted all-around professional handy-man. By 2013, he built us a superb mahogany deck, re-married and has three children. ####PASSION-AT-WORK Celia and I wrote a book, “Career Renewal” (1998), which emerged from our collaboration helping Soviet émigré scientists. The book was commissioned by Michael Teitelbaum, a Program Officer the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who realized that what we were doing for Russian emigres needed to be done for US scientists.In our work together with scientists, doctors, and lawyers who have trouble deciding which career directions they prefer to follow, we administer some paper and pencil tests, or as we prefer to call them “exercises”. One of these is called “Most Enjoyable Skills”. We administer it to our clients if they’re clueless about their careers, and if (even as adults) they ‘still don’t know what they want to be when they grow up’.The exercise asks a client to name twelve most-emotionally and deeply satisfying accomplishments, both personal and professional. For example: writing an article, building a tree-house, giving a professional talk, acting in a school play, working on a legal matter, doing research, healing a disease, solving a problem, building a relationship, and so on. The choices need only be very specific accomplishments that evoked passion in their performance, what I call “passion-at-work”. These twelve are reduced by triage to the six most-salient accomplishments, and then matched against a list of 172 specific skills. It often turns out that many of the accomplishments share the same or similar skills. For example, if “teaching physics” and “writing a novel” are two emotionally-satisfying accomplishments, then a general skill clearly common to both accomplishments would be “communication skills”.As I was interpreting this exercise with a recent client, I realized I hadn’t done the exercise myself. So I set myself the task of being my own career counseling client to see how I would learn something. What career at age 79 in the year 2013 would I be suited to? What do I want to be if and when I ever grow up?* * *So here’s a lifetime list of my proudest, most-satisfying, emotionally-fulfilling accomplishments… ranked according to their importance to me (10 is the highest). The different typefaces and numbers and letters in brackets are explained below.1. having and raising kids [10; M, D]2. creating a successful marriage with Celia [10; F]3. having relationships with my grandchildren[10;C]4. building the tree-house [10; D, F]5. counseling lawyers/doctors/scientists[10;C,M,D,F]6. creating programs for Russian émigrés[10;C]7. attending my 75th birthday celebration [10; C, F]8. reading outstanding books [10; M, F, T]9. meeting & charming women [10; D]10. going to yard sales; negotiating purchases[10; D]11. appreciating great music [10; M]12. swimming and exercising [9; F, T]13. repairing items around the house [9; D, F]14. teaching physics [9; F, T]15. cultivating friends [9; C, M, D]16. doing sculpture [7; D]17. writing five books [6; M, T, F]18. selling my book proposals [6; M, D, F]In brackets, I have added a ranking number next to each item on the list that indicates its importance to me on a scale of one to ten (where ten is the most pleasurable accomplishment). Those at the end of the list in the normal text’s typeface (items 16, 17, 18) reflect ‘normal’ enjoyment; those in italics reflect greater enjoyment(items 12 through 15); and the most salient and satisfying accomplishments are in boldface (items 1 through 11). I consider myself wealthy in enjoyable accomplishments.I have also added a letter in brackets indicating which parent [M for Mom, D for Dad], teacher [T], friend [F], Celia [C], or other [O] was influential in developing each pleasurable accomplishment. Moreover, it’s clear from these satisfying accomplishments, I was positively influenced by these people in my life: Mom (seven accomplishments), Dad (eleven), teachers (six), friends (eleven), Celia (four).“No man is an island”. Most of us are peninsulas. A few are archipelagoes. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, Newton famously said. I guess I’m standing on the shoulders of giants I have met…and they are probably standing on a continent.From this specific list, I’ve also derived those general skills that I employ when engaged in each accomplishment. I notice that one ‘skills theme’ that’s common to several accomplishments (reading, teaching, proposals, selling, creating, writing books/songs, etc.) is “communications”. Another cluster of accomplishments (fixing things, welding sculptures, building the tree-house) draws upon my manual dexterity and tactile abilities. Another ‘skills theme’ is a sense of the visual…as in my propensity for photography, sculpture, appreciating lovely paintings -- and admiring feminine beauty.Using one’s “most enjoyable skills” are like “exercising favorite muscles” (See “Expertise As An Addiction” in the Appendix.) The more the skill is used, the stronger it gets. This is fine when the skill is exercised in a job or career one loves. But it’s possible to be good at work you don’t enjoy… I hated driving a taxi; I got burned out after six years teaching; I dreaded working at the car wash; experimental research bored me. But I was good at all of these, and didn’t find that kind of work “a worthy expression of who I was” until I began counseling Russian émigré scientists -- and later on American scientists, lawyers, and doctors. Another way to view “exercising favorite muscles”: excessive use of your strength or virtues may become a weakness or a disability. For example, Harry Rosen over-used his strong ability to make money, but in so doing he atrophied his humility and humanity. Suppose I ask what career or careers I might enjoy now, if I were to start over again? Career counseling might be one career I would enjoy doing. However, that’s partly because all the different jobs and careers I inhabited -- teacher, author, lecturer, car washer, management consultant, camp counselor, research scientist, taxi-driver, physicist – gave me the scope and breadth to understand the broader job market, the economy, and how to present myself to employers. These invaluable work experiences made career counseling a virtually ‘inevitable’ choice for me in the last few decades.But what career would I attempt if I were a young man starting over now? (Clearly an academic question.) The easiest answer, but perhaps not the best choice, would be physicist and teacher, if only because I like too many things besides physics, and I was a good but not a great researcher. How about lawyer? Well, I did have communications, writing, and speaking skills even early in my life…but those had to be challenged, tested, sharpened, and improved over many different projects for many decades. So could I have been a decent lawyer? Maybe. Would I have had as much fun? Perhaps. Cultivating my communications skills as a lawyer would have produced a different set of competencies than I now possess. How about rabbi? Well, again, my communications skills could have been tested and sharpened, but would my heart have been in that choice? I doubt it. How about doctor? Well, maybe a better choice, but some of my self-diagnosed attention-deficit problems would have made me a careless physician—something I wouldn’t want to be. Inventor? I remember thinking this as a kid, admiring “Rube Goldberg” type ‘inventions’. (My Dad’s father “invented” an automatic shut-off using an old alarm clock pre-set to shut the light off on Shabbat.) When I came to understand that an investment in marketing a new invention exceeds the cost of inventing it by three or four orders of magnitude, I decided “inventor” was a non-starter. Entrepreneur? Dad wanted me to go into business with him, but I knew that wasn’t for me because I saw how physically intense and exhausting it was for him. I was beguiled and enchanted by science.I now know too much about the career problems of lawyers, doctors, and rabbis to choose retro-actively one of those careers—even hypothetically. At seventy-nine, I realize that career counseling was a great – and even an inevitable –choice for me. But at age thirty could I have imagined what would have appeared to me at age fifty an inevitable career choice? Are these ideas useful to others who are young, who are going through agonizing career considerations and circumstances? Great grand-children? Are you there? Are you reading this? I’m not giving advice; I’m telling what worked for me. But here’s some wisdom I found practical and inspiring. In 2013, Diana Nyad became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a protective cage, swimming to a Key West beach nearly 53 hours after jumping into the ocean in Havana for her fifth try in 35 years. Through it all, she held her mantra close: "You don't like it. It's not doing well. Find a way." "I got three messages," an exhausted and happy 64 year old Nyad told reporters.?Her face was sunburned and swollen. "One is we should never, ever give up. Two is you never are too old to chase your dreams. Three is it looks like a solitary sport, but it's a team," she said.I have embraced her mantra in the physical projects, intellectual efforts, and emotional relationships I cultivated. If I were to come back and start life over again, I would do the same…and work with more energy and passion. The plain truth is: I won’t come back as anyone, because I can’t come back—except as a memory in the minds of family and people I influenced (friends, colleagues, people I mentored…Russian scientists, clients, students). Or in a photograph. Or on a video-tape. Or as a book. This book, for example. ####ANASTOMOSIS: THE TREE-HOUSE & MARRIAGE In 2008, I built a tree-house, described below, on our property in East Hampton. I built it with my own hands as a challenge to my wood-working, engineering and physics skills, and because I’m still a kid at heart. After I completed building the tree-house, I realized it was a metaphor for building my marriage.Its inauguration became a special and unorthodox event that was attended by some fifty friends and family.Songs were written and sung. Musicians performed. Harvey Shapiro read one of his poems. Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman and Cantor Deborah Stein of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons presided. The rabbi blessed the tree-house. I made and mounted a Mezuzah. It’s still up there. The Cantor wrote a song to the melody of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” as follows: Bei mir bist du schoen/ Will someone explain?/ Why Steve built a tree-house on his land? The Rabbi compared the tree house to King Solomon’s Temple. (My name in Hebrew—Shlomo—means Solomon.)I wrote a Guestwords essay for the East Hampton Star (“Out On A Limb”, April 10, 2008) celebrating the origin, the evolution, and eventual unveiling of the tree-house.The tree-house -- as a centerpiece for our family and friends, children and grand-children of friends, and for many guests -- has since been visited, climbed, and found “uplifting”. Just like our marriage. One youngster from the UK declared the tree-house “The high point of my trip to the US”.In 2010, when my wife Celia Paul and I shared our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in the same East Hampton locations –at our home in the Northwest Woods in the shadow of the tree-house, and at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons—with many of the same friends and family originally in attendance twenty five earth-orbits-of-the-sun previously. Happily, many of those at the tree-house inauguration were also present. The day was filled with sunshine and warmth.My wife is the sunshine of my life, and as I thought about the special occasion of our anniversary, and about building my marriage and building my tree-house, I realized they shared many elements in common.In building a marriage and a tree-house, I had to risk going out on a limb. Both demand an investment of great care, thoughtfulness, caution, high-level planning, and attention to detail.And yet, both share a certain impulsive exuberant spontaneity. Both marriage and tree-house inspire a form of transcendent and spiritual intimacy. Both demand a high tolerance for error (especially mine). Both marriage and tree-house have a lot of ‘moving’ parts: “Honeydew this, honey dew that”; domestic errands; carrying tools and lumber up and down; emotional ups-and-down-moments in marriage. Both also offer splendid views: of other tall trees; of forest flora and fauna; of other happy marriages, and of each other.And from two marriages and one tree-house creation, I learned “Measure twice—and cut once”.* * *The tree-house is erected upon two stout vertical oaks spaced about three feet apart that grow parallel to each other for upwards of sixty feet. These form a sturdy natural armature. A raunchy locker-room friend called it “your erection”, but I promised not only my wife but also a few people I wouldn’t “go there” verbally, so I won’t mention “my erection” again (Ooops.)Two two-by-six inch beams of treated wood, each eight-foot long, were bolted through --and perpendicular to -- the two oaks, and are thus parallel to the ground twenty feet below. I bolted four more of these beams to the same two oaks, perpendicular to the first two beams, resting upon them, also parallel to the ground. Thus, voila, a horizontal frame suitable as a platform.Specially treated two-by-fours were fastened with zinc-coated deck screws to this frame, creating a rigid eight-foot-by-eight-foot square deck, an elevated platform.Our great good friend, next-door neighbor, and brilliant architect Richard Lavenstein, concerned that the platform might not be entirely stable—that it could ‘rack’ or tilt when occupied -- suggested I reinforce it. I connected steel struts to the four corners of the platform at 45 degree angles to each of the two oaks. This provided enough rigidity of the entire structure to accommodate the weight of eight people simultaneously aloft.Railings, banisters, and balustrades enclose the open platform, which is entered through its center between the two oak trees through a rectangular slot: its length dimension is equal to the distance between the two oaks, and its width is equal to the one-foot diameter of each tree. A snug passageway. Ascending and entering is not for the faint-of-heart or the large-of-belly.These two parallel trees are bound up together in space and time. Connected, they support a common serene space and pleasing patch of time. Just like our marriage. After twenty-eight years, we saplings have become trees supporting an elevated arena for meditation beyond and above our normal cares ... promising unique adventures, clear vistas, and glad anticipation. We are ‘an operative union of two structures’.I am speaking of my marriage: created from two former saplings, now sturdy oaks, linked together with care, mindfulness, space, and love. Just like our tree-house.* * *An interconnection between any two objects -- channels, passages or vessels -- is called, in medicine, “anastomosis”: “The connection of normally separate parts or spaces so they intercommunicate”.Anastomoses may be naturally occurring (our marriage) or artificially constructed (tree-house) and may be created during the process of embryonic development or by surgery… the term "anastomosis" originally referred to an opening or junction through a mouth, as of one body of water with another. It has been in medical usage since the Greek physician Galen (129-200 AD) used it to describe the interconnections between blood vessels. Yes, an operative union of two structures.My wife and I, our marriage -- and our double-tree constructed tree-house—are interconnected, as one body of water to another, as one blood vessel to another, as one partner to another, as an “anastomosis” and, well…despite an occasional bark and sappy metaphor…yes, our tree house is built like our marriage.Oh. I almost forgot those aforementioned songs. For the tree-house consciousness-raising event, I re-wrote “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” which became, “Way up/ There in my tree-house/ When winds blow/ Trees sway like ships at anchor/Am I afraid?/ Oh, no// She said ‘don’t build a tree-house/ What’s it for?’/ I said ‘If I don’t build it/ I will be Steve no more”. For our twenty-fifth anniversary event, I re-wrote “How About You?”-- which became, “How About Us?” ####COMEDY WORKSHOPA few months after Celia and I were married in 1985, she was cleaning out our closets when I noticed that she was weeping. I asked, “What’s the matter?” She said, “I was just thinking how I would feel if I lost you”.In my fog of newly-wed bliss, I hadn't realized that I meant as much to her as she meant to me. This happy memory makes me smile even now. Our feelings for each other are reciprocal and symmetrical. I feel very fortunate that this marriage to my best friend, now 28 years old, has been the best and smartest thing I ever did.I used to joke that “we are two people with one brain” because she can remember things that I can't remember, and symmetrically. We can anticipate each other’s comments before they are spoken. Thus, our Israeli families refer to us as “Stevia”, a combination of “Steve” and “Celia”; stevia is also an herb that is sweet. My old friend, Malcolm Pennington, once said that he was responsible for acquiring knowledge (knowing) and his wife was responsible for retaining knowledge (remembering). We’re like that -- only more so. We work together side-by-side daily, 24/7, and although I never tire of her, we do respect our boundaries. (Most of the time.)When the two of us give lectures at professional events, I refer to myself as the “trailing spouse” of Celia Paul. I mentioned at one of our anniversaries that even though we've been together for all these years, my wife Celia “still treats me as if I were her equal”. A friend has said that she's too good for me, and sometimes I think that's true. Yes, she still is “the sunshine of my life”: she notices when I'm depressed, and is concerned about it; she wants only good things for me. If I am morose or down she cheers me up, and I strive mightily to be as good for her as she has been good for me. She makes me want to be a better person...and sometimes I succeed.About a year or so after we were married, she suggested that I join a workshop on stand-up comedy, “Because”, she said, “you’re pretty funny already, and you could get better at it if you worked on it”. She is a career counselor, even to me.I found a comedy workshop called the Manhattan Punch-line, on West 42nd Street led by a professional comic; I signed up for it and there were a dozen other people in the group… actors and actresses trying to hone their comic skills. But there were also a handful of lawyers. I guess they were trying to learn -- not how to be Funny In Court, but how to Improvise.The workshop met once a week for three hours each session. Our assignment was to develop five minutes of original material for presentation at one of those standup comedy clubs in Manhattan by the end of twelve weeks.The workshop leader explained the modern idea of comedy: humor should flow from a person's character and style in the same way that Woody Allen's humor (“It’s not just dog-eat-dog world; it’s dog-doesn’t-return-other-dogs-phone-calls world”) emerges from his character; Seinfeld’s humor emerges from his characters (Cosmo, Elaine, George) and their ordinary situations (“more milk than cereal? more cereal than milk?”); and similarly with Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm”(“Your dying mother didn’t want to bother you because she knew you were busy”).The old-fashioned model for comedy….“joke, laugh; joke, laugh”…. like Henny Youngman’s routine, is as dead as the dinosaurs, and as dead as Henny Youngman -- who once said, “I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need if I die by 4pm today”. Joke, laugh.“Did you hear about the biology professor whose wife gave birth to a set of twins? He baptized one, and saved the other as a control.” Joke, laugh.“The scientist’s wife told him that if he broke wind in his echo chamber he would never hear the end of it.” Joke, laugh.“The difference between sex and the law: the law, even when it’s good it’s bad; and sex…”“Sex after ninety five is like playing pool with a rope.”So no “joke, laugh” was going into my routine. But wait a minute. I have one more…A Jewish man, a Frenchman, and an Italian are discussing how they make love to their wives. The Italian says, “I gently rub her body with the first pressing of olive oil, I touch her everywhere, and she screams with pleasure for three minutes. The Frenchman says, “I erotically rub my wife’s body with fresh sweet butter, I touch her everywhere, and she screams with pleasure for ten minutes. That’s nothing, says the Jewish guy: I rub her body with chicken fat and she screams for TWO HOURS! The other guys are incredulous. Both want to know how is such a thing possible… The Jewish guy says, “Well after we make love with the chicken fat, I wipe my hands off on the drapes.” Joke, laugh.I struggled for a couple of months to develop five minutes of character-driven or personality-based Original Comedy Material. Not joke, laugh. I would focus while jogging, or at random moments during the day. It was extremely difficult! I came to respect professional comedians because I saw how hard it was. “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”I am fortunate to have had a father who was witty and eccentric. (He takes after me; I take after my son Daniel and grand-son Jascha). So I had a base to build upon. His smart-ass comments are mentioned in the chapter about him, “A Man For all Reasons”.There’s a wonderful movie called “The Aristocrats”, a documentary about forty professional comedians telling the same joke forty different ways. I’m smiling as I remember it: A man-and-wife comedy team present themselves to a booking agent who asks them to demonstrate their act for him. They proceed to strip naked, to fornicate in front of the agent, to beat each other up, to urinate and defecate on the floor, and smear each other with fecal matter. The agent says: “Interesting act. What do you call yourselves?” The couple answers simultaneously: “The Aristocrats”.Each comic told the same joke, and each comic did it in a completely different way. It was a powerful lesson to me in practical comedy, comic theory, comic delivery, comedy style, and comic timing.[Here’s a joke about timing made up of two questions: “Question One: “Is it true you’re the World’s Greatest Polish Comedian?” Polish Comedian Answers: “YES!” Question Two: “And to what do you attribute … Polish Comedian Interrupting Question: “TIMING!”… your great success?”]I was developing my own style, of course, which reflects my role-models Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Buddy Hackett, Steve Martin, and a few others. I still remember some of the material that I generated in my standup comedy routine, so here goes:“After I was married to my first wife, I discovered that she was a Marxist and an atheist. This meant that she believed that “religion is the opiate of the people”, and “religion was for ignorant people and those people who believe in black magic and fairy tales”.“Not for her. She was a proud hard-nosed realist. However, I did notice that during intercourse when she was having an orgasm, she would shout “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”“Later on, I pointed out to her that she must have believed in God -- at least during orgasm. She was not amused. [Please don’t tell I worked her into my comedy routine.]“However, I began to think that if I could convert an atheist like her into a believer, just imagine what I could do if I was a Rabbi and I had an entire congregation to convert. So many women. So many orgasms. So much religious fervor.Continuing the comedy routine…”In my new marriage, my new wife (and best of two) treats me as if I were her equal. I worship the ground above which she floats. She thinks I'm a hypochondriac because I'm always worried about my little ailments. But I tell her that the epitaph on my tombstone will be, “Finally! I told you I wasn't feeling well!"When I presented my five minutes of original material at a standup comedy club (this is only a fraction of my comedy routine) there were about 200 people in the audience. Celia said I was “a hit”, so I tried to include what I had learned about stand-up comedy in my lectures and my day job. A couple of my friends who attended liked it, and the professional comic who led our workshop told me that I had “promise” and that I should keep working at it.I said, “I'm keeping my day job”.I still have my day job. But I learned from the leader and the workshop experience to try out new material, to make the humor immediately relevant to whatever subject is being discussed, to draw upon my idiosyncrasies, to adapt personal experiences and everyday life. I avoid dropping jokes into dinner-party conversations—unless they connect to the topics of conversation. When I lectured to the Russian scientists, I used humor to good advantage. For example: Question: “What directions do I need to get to Carnegie Hall?...Answer: Practice, practice, practice!” (The joke’s sub-text is that the émigrés needed to practice their job-interviewing skills.)I now incorporate these valuable lessons learned into my speeches, lectures, toasts (see the chapter “A Glamorous Dubious Past”), eulogies (see “In Memoriam” in the Appendix), conversations, and even into the songs I write for special occasions.(See next chapter, “Singin’ In The Brain”.)I have not yet figured out how to work some humor into my “Obituary Notice As Imagined By The Author.” (See Appendix.) But maybe that’s because obituaries aren’t funny. Maybe my original material isn’t as funny as some “Joke, laughs”. ####SINGIN’ IN THE BRAIN Singin’ in the brain. That’s what happens to me. Whenever I do anything—reading, writing, talking, walking, sitting, shitting, lying down, standing up, and going out—I’m filled and thrilled with song. I’m going to rhapsodize about music.Aren’t I lucky to carry music inside my head with me anytime I need it? Most of the sounds derive from music recently heard…like Khatchaturian’s “Violin Concerto”, or Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”, or Sondheim, or Bach, or Kapustin, or music from the synagogue.Of course, the movie musicals speak to me: “Singin’ In The Rain” is my all-time favorite,, followed, by “Royal Wedding” (especially Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling singing “You’re All The World To Me”), “Bandwagon”, and “Love Me Tonight” (especially Maurice Chevalier singing “Isn’t It Romantic”; see below), and “Babes On Broadway” (especially Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney singing “How About You?” in the 1940 film).My famous nephew, Bela Fleck, a professional musician, tells me that he has music inside his head all the time. He considers it a blessing and I agree. There’s one exception: an “ear worm”, which occurs when I can’t get a silly tune or mundane musical phrase out of my head, day after day. As a young kid, I could not shake “Mairsie Doats” loose from my brain. It took up residence deep down, for too long, like a mouse hiding in the house….you know it’s there, but you can’t get it out. I worried, would it stay lodged there forever? Or would I be able listen to my own inner voices and generate my own thoughts?Exception noted, emanating from a live performance or a recording or the radio, these internalized melodies trapped into my cranium make me feel happy. Certain pieces, already noted, charge me up. My pulse races. My spirits rise. The music makes my day. Hearing Beethoven’s sublime Third and Seventh Symphonies makes me tingle. It’s also inexpensive.But what I enjoy even more than hearing and listening to music is writing songs. I used to write both the music and lyrics. I sat in on a song-writing workshop at BMI filled with young, eager, and talented song-writers. But I became jealous when I saw how fluent the workshop leader (Maury Yeston) and the kids were. I marveled as Maury improvised lyrics and music simultaneously, vastly improving a song he had never previously heard.I’ve seen Marvin Hamlisch ask a live audience to suggest an idea for a song, and then he composed the music and lyrics instantaneously. And then do it again and again, maybe ten more times. I shouted out a suggestion that he use the word “inevitable” in a song, and he proceeded to do so after noodling around for all of ten seconds. I was shocked at his mastery and fluency of the improvisation in a language which has taken me years to acquire—and it’s still not comparable to his genius. Not everyone can walk in the Seven League Boots of Genius.My labors are long and intense over the words and music, to get the scansion and prosody right. (Example of prosody a la Tom Lehrer via Dave Robinson from “Guys and Dolls”: “You pro/mise me this, you pro/mise me that; You pro/mise me eve/ry/thing un/der the Sun….dah dee dee dee dah…)Cole Porter told people that it took him merely minutes to write his most famous songs, like “You’re The Top”—when it actually took him weeks, as it does me. He wanted folks to think that he wrote these songs effortlessly. And they sound spontaneous and inevitable…as if the lyrics and melody were made to fit. On the other hand, Rodgers and Hammerstein said they wrote “Oh! What A Beautiful Mornin’” in the amount of time it took to sing it. I believe that.I work diligently, and struggle mightily to write songs that honor special people and important occasions, and to amuse those being honored. I have, as Noel Coward had, “a talent to amuse”. (Not a bad epitaph for my tombstone. Better than “I told you I wasn’t feeling well.”)Each of the songs that follow has a story and a back-story. ####This was my first song for which I did both music and words. I have a video of me singing it, accompanied by Jane Hastay. I had to do extensive research to find the last words of famous dying celebrities. Some of the jocular “swan songs” are hypothetical, but as you can see, I was thinking of my own mortality, and of going out with a laugh… SWAN SONG (Last Laugh Epitaph)Words & MusicBy Stephen RosenVerseWhy not live a life that’s fine; Exit with a fine punch lineAn Epitaph has got to zing; Here’s some swan songs others singRefrains1.)Groucho Marx’ final question was this: Am I deceased--or has my watch stopped running? His Epitaph was a jest; Thus, the last words he spoke were best2.)Oscar Wilde said, on his shabby death-bed:“Either that wallpaper goes--or I do”;His last words he spoke in jest, Yes, the last words he spoke were best.ReleaseDon’t waste words now; Plan your EpitaphLeave your dear ones words that pack a laughEnjoy yourself, it’s later than you think;Enjoy yourself, joke well upon life’s brink (~~~tremolo~~~)3.)Comic George Burns, before eaten by worms, said:“I can’t die now—I’m all booked up”;His last words his Epitaph, Yes, his last words were his last laugh4.)Marilyn Monroe, before she expired, said: “Who do I kiss[....] to get out of this movie?”Her last words her Epitaph, Yes, her last words were her last laugh.ReleaseDon’t waste words now; Plan your EpitaphLeave your dear ones words that pack a laughEnjoy yourself, it’s later than you think;Enjoy yourself, joke well upon life’s brink.5.)Before they die away, hypochondriacs say,“Told you I wasn’t feeling well;”I’ve asked that this be inscribed, On my tombstone when I’ve died.Copyright 2001 by Stephen Rosen. All rights reserved.I wrote this next one for Celia…Love SicknessMusic & Lyrics by Steve Rosen (2002)When head-ache strikes, I take asp-rinAnt-a-cid for much too much foodFlu shots I get…be-fore the flu-o-o-oohBut I’m still real sick o-ver yo-o-o-ou…ooh!For con-sti-pa-tion there’s bis-muthFor flat-u-lence of course char-coalWhen I’m blue, cer-tain-ly Pro-zac’s trueBut there’s no drug that cures me of yo-o-o-ou…ooh!ReleaseI can’t rhyme hyp-o-chon-dri-a-sisUn-less it’s with el-e-phant-i-a-sisOr an oc-ca-sion-al bout of psor-i-a-sisFor hon-ey-moons it’s Ni-a-gra?For im-po-tence how ‘bout Vi-a-graCaes-a-ri-ans for ba-bies new-o-o-o-oohBut I can’t take no-thin’ for yo-o-o-ou…ooh!For mus-cle weak-ness I work outI di-et when I’m o-ver-weightIn-tox-i-cat-ed I cry out “Oh poor me…please cure me--of yo-o-o-ou….ooh!”* * *The next song was an experimental effort to write physics into a love song….RepulsionWords & Music by Stephen Rosen (2001)AThere is Something that’s coming between usAnd I don’t mean the symptoms of LoveRead about it in all of the papersIt is coming from the heavens aboveBIt’s not revulsion dear, It’s repulsion dearThat drives me away from youIt is dark energy, anti-gravityNot the voodoo that I do to youAI admit that it’s tiny—minuscule!But it’s pushing us further apartA force growing much larger and largerOvercoming our love, my sweetheartBAnti-gravity, it’s a mysteryWhat’s a body to do?Isaac Newton tried, Albert Einstein triedTo make some sense of gravity’s glue,True glue, Cosmologically trueAOur love has much stronger attractionThan repulsion they find out in spaceIf you’ll just jump in to actionOur love will fall right in to place.Don’t let negative gravity force usEach body to move far awayDon’t let these weak forces divorce usPlease let attraction have it’s say.Copyright ? 2001 by Stephen Rosen. All rights reserved.The song below I composed in the former Soviet Union on a sea voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow with Stanford University’s Alumni Association, led by William Perry…who asked me to write a song for the July 4th amateur night event.MOSCOW NIGHTS(Journey’s Heights)Music by Solovyov-SedoyLyrics by Steve Rosen (2004)(with critical contributions byDave & Nan Robinson and Celia Paul)(a)Expectation lasts nine months a year we’re toldDisappointment is winter’s cold, Red(b)Defines beautiful, across this wondrous landBut under Communism, Red got out of hand!(a)Onion domes are not what you think they areThey are really flames from afar. Our(b)Guides have told us so, so has Doctor Bill,A guy of whom you never get your fill.(a)Those canal locks Yesenin passed lake to lakeWater flows like new friends we make. But(b)On our ship’s sun-deck, it’s hard to stay awakeAnd with lox we need some bagels – – not cake!(a)Long ago and far, far away, away; far from good old US of A(b)Ten gilded palaces, Rasputin’s malice–isThat’s history, Czarist history.(a)Let’s all pledge our snap shots to share, to share Even those of us with no hair. But(b)When we think of this, Russian friends we’ll missCameraderie, and vodka’s kiss.(a)Cameraderie’s a word so hard to rhyme.Rhymable by next Christmas time. WeRode on hydrofoils, bought Matryoshka goilsWe’ll adore our warm esprit de corps.(a) “Moscow Nights”, a song all Russians sing and sungEspecially in places far flung. But(b)When this trip is done, and we’ve had our funWe’ll still be singing this song called “Moscow Nights”(b’)But when our journey’s done, amidst the setting SunWe’ll still be singing our song called “Moscow Nights”!!!NB: No force on Heaven or Earth – – not gravity, not electromagnetism,not nuclear – – can resist the passionate urge to alter another person’s draft. So I did.Copyright?2004 by Stephen Rosen. All rights reserved.The next song is another Valentine to Celia.My Sweet MeringueMusic & Lyrics by Stephen Rosen (2001)VerseMousse means “foam” to a gas-tro-nomeSouffle’s French for “blow under”Spuma’s foam as in Naples, RomeEgg whites whipped may go under.Refrain 1You’re light, you’re fluff, not chromeYou’re air, you’re puff, love’s foamYou’re love’s foam, you’re the whole she-bangYou’ll always be my sweet mer-ingue.Refrain 2You’re not tart, you’re a sweet sweet heartDon’t collapse, before we startThis affair seems like whipped creamYou’re more creamy than you seemRefrain 3You’re white caps froth on the seaYou’re champagne bub-bles to meYou’re the froth in life’s cappuchinoYou’re my sweet mar-ras-chi-no.####When Bela turned fifty, he had a large party in Nashville, and I wrote and sang the next song, accompanied by Tony Trischka, Bela’s banjo teacher. It was a hit! A big hit! I got a standing ovation….but since there were no seats, everyone was already standing.THERE’S NO BELA LIKE OUR BELAMusic: Irving Berlin(There’s No Business Like Show Business)Lyrics: Stephen Rosen(2008) for Bela’s fiftieth birthday1.There's no Bela, like our Bela, of all Belas we know...Not even the great maestro Bela Bartok,Not even Dracula Bela Lugosi,Not even Bella Bella Donna, whoever she is--she isn't he.2.He's now fifty, ain't that nifty?Goes on strumming so sweetAlbums such as "Bela Fleck and Flecktones"With "Tony Trischka", "Drive", and "Cosmic Hippo"Just the ice-berg's tip-OH, that put out heat.3.There's no banjo like his banjoWhen he's on he's a treatPlucking on your heart-strings 'til your heart would acheWhen he's playing -- just takes the cake*Go on, Bela, go onNever take a breakGo on plucking go onGo on plucking go on.*Birthday cake was nearby4. Release [Spoken]There's much more, there's much moreBeyond this, to say, but I am getting too old to say moreThere's Abby, there's Barbara, there's Louie, Joe, SaschaOpa, Oma, friendships, by the scoreThere's concerts on the road, travel on the busThere's sound checks and rehearsals--and then there's us.5. RepriseThere's no banjo like his banjo, when he's on he's so sweetPlucking on your heart-strings til your heart would acheWhen he's noshing he takes your cakeGo, Bela, go onGive us all a breakGo on, plucking, go onGo on, plucking, go on.####* * *The following lyric, derived from “Isn’t It Romantic” by Rodgers and Hart, was introduced in the 1932 film “Love Me Tonight” was sung by Steve for Abby and Bela’s Nashville wedding (watch it at or search YouTube for “Homage to A & B, 10 May 2010”). I was accompanied by very talented young Noam Pikelny on banjo. Bela reported that the musicians present told him afterwards that the song was “unexpectedly unpredictable”; he says they’re still talking about it in 2012.1. Aren’t we ecstatic?Abigail and Bela now are truly oneAren’t they authentic?Now she does not have to be, to be, a NunBanjos playing all togetherMorning, noon, and nights like thisIsn’t it gigantic…A Prelude To A Kiss2. Isn’t she enchanting?Even when she’s not playing in BeijngCan we be rhapsodic?Abigail Washburn is really the real thing!Banjos dueling togetherYou bet, you bet, they’re always setThere’s Bela, KC, Abby…that’s the Sparrow Quartet.3. Isn’t it romantic?On a moonlit nightShe’ll cook him onion soupKiddies are romanticAnd if they don’t fightThey soon will have a troupeThey’ll help grow the populationIt’s a duty that always comes with pantsIsn’t it Romance?I S N ‘ T I T R O M A N C E ? [Ritardando]* * *I wrote the following for my seventy-eighth birthday.RAISING SELF-EMBARRASSMENT TO AN ART“HAPPY AS A CLAM”(formerly “Singin In The Rain”)New lyrics: Stephen Rosen1. I’m gettin’ on in yearsWith a minimum of tearsAging is swell when embraced by all m’ dearsI’ve none of those fearsWhile changin’ my gearsImmature…but gettin’ on in years.2. I’m happy as a clamHappily I amI’ve a smile on my faceFor the whole human raceI never can go wrongWhen singin’ my songHappy, just happy with my clan.3. Sevn’ty-eight is no jokeThere’s heart attack or strokeAnd you can always chokeOr fall down from a pokeEv’rythin’ is OKEI cant really go far wrongLong as I’m singin’, jes singin’ my own song!4. I still have all my hairNone extra can I spareCelia and Steve are happily a pairWe both of us still careWe visited France and SpainSang an old refrainI’m still singin’, jes singin’, I’m inane.* * *The following was written on the occasion of the seventieth birthday celebration of our good friend, John Goldman.THAT’S OUR JOHN GOLDMAN (THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT)Music: Arthur Schwartz, 1952; Lyrics: Steve Rosen, 2010On a sail, he can come about fastNot so pale, he’s a man with pastHe’s not Yale, in a gale he’s half-assedTHAT’S OUR JOHN GOLDMANIn a pinch, he can be very niceGive an inch, and he’ll give more than twiceHe’s a cinch, to BE Jesus ChristTHAT’S OUR JOHN GOLDMANHe is droll, lots of laughs, he’s a very fun guySome times, in fun times, he’ll reach for the skyBut he is wry, and he’s dry, as am IWhere a fella, a capella,Sings a Happy Birth Cry! MY! OLE!He’s a King, owns real estate grandThat’s his thing, it’s his beat, his right handHe knows Greek, but would sell you some landIf you need it, or not, he will give you a hand.Big of brain, maybe other parts tooGive him this, give him that, it’s his dueHe can SELL, you three bridges or twoTHAT’S OUR JOHN GOLDMAN…THAT’S OUR JOHN GOLDMAN…THAT’S OUR JOHN GOLDMAN…THAT’S YOU!!!!Here’s another musical expression of enthusiastic praise and rapturous joy to my best friend Celia:CELIA*(formerly “Laura”)1.CELIA… IS A BEAUTY BOTH INSIDE OUTEXALTED, ADMIRED BY ALLCLASSY… A WOMAN OF VALOR TOOSUPERIOR IN ALL RESPECTS, THAT’S TRUESO WHEN I WORSHIP, THE GROUND THAT SHE FLOATS ABOVESHE SMILES AND ACCEPTS ALL MY LOVECELIA…A BEAUTY BOTH INSIDE OUTSHE’S CELIA, SHE’S MY SHINING LOVE.2.CELIA… NO ONE ELSE CAN COME QUITE SO NEARCELIA… YOU ARE MORE LIKE CHAMPAGNE THAN BEERYOU TREAT ME AS IF I WERE YOUR PEERWHEN I AM MERELY MERE, THAT’S CLEARSO I SAY, LET’S ALL GIVE A BOISTEROUS CHEERBECAUSE SHE’S SO DEAR, DEAR DEAR DEARSHE’S CELIA, A PEER NEAR AND DEAR*Music by David Raksin from the 1944 film “Laura”; Lyrics Copyright ? 2012 Stephen Rosen. ####HYMN TO HER*(Formerly “You’re The Top”)1.) You’re the top, you’re my best friend ever…You’re ma femme, certainment you’re cleverYou’re my shining star, and better by far than meYou’re my Valentine, you are sublime—a sym/pho/ny!2.) You’re the Queen, of our empire tiny…You’re so clean, and I love your heinieYou’re a breathe of air, you’ve a precious pair—of eyesYou’re one hot potato, a ripe tomato—and very wise.3.) We enhance, each other’s egosOur romance…we’re amigos’…amigosHere is fulsome praise, you are sunshine’s rays….cuisine Tex-MexYou are lox and cheese…and if you please…a google-plex4.)You’re the best, of all wives I’ve marriedHow I wish, I had never tarriedYou’re a knish delish, a dish of ruggelach……and if baby I am Gershwin, you are Bach!*Music: Cole Porter; Lyrics: Steve Rosen####The following song was written and sung for the seventy-fifth birthday of Dave Robinson, my great good friend.A Panegyric for DaveLyrics by Steve Rosen, in the Spirit of Tom Lehrer, Gilbert & SullivanDave is the ve’/ry mo’/del of a mo’/dern gen/ral/iss’/i/moHe’s mo’/dest and he’s loy’/al, and he speaks in pi/an/iss’/imoHis mind’ is nim’/ble and it’s deep’, and thinks’ at speeds pres/tiss’/i/moWe all ag/ree’ that he de/serves ‘a vi/gor/ous bra/viss’/i/mo!Dave does per/sist’, as phys/i/cist’, knows Ein’/stein’s rel/a/ti’/vi/tyThe par’/a/dox of twins’ are in his fam’/i/ly’s prox/i’/mi/tyWave func’/tions are his friends and so are mech’/a/nics stat/is’/ti/calAnd ev’/ry one who knows him says he’s ne’/ver e/go/tis’/ti/cal!He says he’s klut’/zy, but un/just’/ly, watch him on the ten’/nis courtAt po’/ker, bridge, golf, pol’/i/tics he shows’ him/self as quite a sportM Gell’ Mann loves him at the Inst’/i/tute in San’/ta FayWhere gen’/ius/es think cha’/os thoughts in/cred’/i/ble com/plex’/i/tayDave al’/so is a pa’/ra/digm, a gen’/tle/man, a Che’/val/layHe’s em’/ble/ma’/tic of a guy who’s tray’-tray-tray, tray dis’/tin/gayHis birth’/day is a cause cel/ebe’, point se/ven five one cen’/tu/rayDrinks Beau’/jo/lay, or Char’/don/nay, or Mon’/tra/chay, or Ca’/ber/nay.Dave’ and Nan’, and Nan’ and Dave’, a cou’/ple in/div/is’/i/bleThey quest’ and quest’, and quest’ a/gain’, both tea’/ching what’s trans/miss’/a/bleA mar’/riage made in Har’/vard Square, a mar’/riage ins/spi/ra’/tion/alBrought them and us this hap/py day, a/part’/ment re/no/va’/tion/alOf course these words, are solely based, on data, facts em/pyr’/i/calThe fact they rhyme at all’s an ex/tra/or/din/a/ry myr’/i/calBut seriously folks they’re not meant to be sat/y’/ri/calLet’s sing Dave’s prai/ses ab’/so/lute,in phra’/ses pan/e/gyr’/i/cal.####When Dave reached eighty, his son Eric invited about sixty of us to a celebration for Dave at Eric and Sally’s new brownstone in Manhattan. Tom Lehrer and Mort Zuckerman attended, and so I worked extra hard to make the song appropriate for those gathered. Afterwards, Mort asked me if I would write a song for his eightieth. I hope we’re both around then.Another Panegyric: Dave-Zee at Eight-eee*We love our Dave all year, How about you?We love his great good cheer, How about you?We love his family, relatives & friendsAnd?his belov'd special NanOn whom he depends. Dave's grand-kids worship him, That’s no surpriseHe has ser-en-i-ty, and he’s so wiseAr-che-o-log-i-cal tripsEd-u-ca-tion-al tipsMaking a pun,Dave always knows how to have fun.?Dave's got a high IQ, Higher than youPar-ents and good genes do, Give that to youDave’s done much with his giftsCar-ne-gie, N-Y-UAdviser to, you know whoBoo Hoo it’s not ?you.Temp/ra/ment counts a lot, just look at Dave'sEth/i/cal, life-well-lived, how he behavesNo ands, ifs or buts... Self described a klutzLoves hu/man/i/ty,??We salute Dave at eight-e-e-e!?####* Music by Richard Rodgers, “How About You?”(1940); Lyrics by Steve Rosen***The following song was written, with important help from Richard Lavenstein, to celebrate the eightieth birthday of brother-in-law Joseph Paladino, of blessed memory.JO/SEPH PAL/A/DI/NOHOW WE LOVE YAOriginally SWANEE*VERSE 1IT TAKES GREAT SKILL TO GET TO EIGHTYJOE PALADINO IS THE PROOFGIANLUCCA AND COLETHEIR ZAYDIE HIS ROLEJOE P IS NOT ALOOFWE LOVE THE WAY YOU PLAY THE CELLOTUNES FROM YOUR HEART ARE SWEET AND MELLOWLOVE YOUR VIBRATOAND YOUR STACCATOAND HOW YOU SAY HELLOW-OH-OH-OH!.CHORUSJO/SEPH PAL/A/DI/NO, HOW WE LOVE YOU!WE SING TO JOE PWE’D GIVE THE WORLD TO SEEYOU REACH THE AGE OF N-I-N-E-T-E-E-EJO/SEPH, NOW YOU’RE EIGH/TY,’TALIAN ZAYDIEOUR SWEET KIND JOE PWE LOVE YOU MORE THAN OUR WORDS CAN SAYEV/RY DAY BY DAY BY DAY!VERSE 2THE KIDS ARE FAR AWAY, IN DU/BLINYOU MISS THEIR FUN AND JOY AND MIS/CHIEFYOUR LOVE, THEY FEELYOUR LOVE IS REALDUB/LIN, IS CALLING JOE (“Hey, Joe”)THE KIDS ARE SINGIN', IT IS BED TIMEERIN AND SASCHA HUMMIN' LOWWE KNOW THEY DOYEARN FOR YOU TOOJO/SEPH THEY’RE CALLING YOU-O-O-O !CHORUSJO/SEPH PAL/A/DI/NO, HOW WE LOVE YOU!SING OUT TO JOE PWE WANT THE WORLD TO KNOWJOE PALADINO IS JOE PALADINO-O-O-OJO/SEPH, NOW YOU’RE EIGH/TY,‘TALIAN ZAYDIEOUR SWEET KIND JOE PWE LOVE YOU MORE THAN OUR WORDS CAN SAYEV/RY DAY BY DAY BY DAY!CODA: DUBLIN, DUBLIN, YOU’RE GOIN’ BACK TO DUBLINNEW YORK, NEW YORK YOU’LL SEE THOSE TWIN KIDS AT HOME.*Music: George Gerswin (1919); Lyrics: Steve Rosen & Richard Lavenstein (2013)On youtube, accompanied by Neil Rosen and Bela Fleck… , Joe died in August, 2013. He is missed.The following two songs I wrote and sang, accompanied by Bela, for Abby’s baby shower in April, 2013. See us performing at SHOWERS*AT BABY SHOWERS, THEY TALK FOR HOURS/ABOUT THE BABY/ HEY ‘WHAT’S HIS NAME?’AND WE WILL ALL SAY/HE LOOKS LIKE WHO?HIS EYES HIS NOSE HIS MOUTH HIS TUSHHIS BEGUILING PEEK-A-BOOSO WITH A DRUMROLL FOR HIS BIG DAYWE’LL LISTEN FOR HIS CRY [W-A-A-A]WHEN HE ARRIVES WE’LL SIGH & SIGH & SIGH. . .AND WE’LL KNOW WHY*Lyrics: Steve Rosen; Music: Louis SilversMY FAVORITE THINGS**LIAM & NOAH & JACOB & JACKSON/MATTHEW & JASON & JAYDEN & JAMES/MICHAEL & HENRY & GA/BRI/EL/THESE ARE A FEW 21ST CENTURY NAMES.BOTTLES & DIAPERS & BOTTLES & DIAPERS/ HOODIES & TEE SHIRTS & TEE SHIRTS & HOODIES/ BREAST PUMPS & SCREAMING NO SLEEPING AT NIGHT/ IS THIS THE KID WHO WILL GO FLY A KITE?IN THE OLD DAYS/THEY HAD OLD NAMES/SOME OF THEM CAME BACK/LAURENCE & IVER & DENNIS & LOWELL/SHLOMO & MOISHE & SHMUEL & JACK/ROBIN & ROBERT & RUPERT & DJANGO/SAMMY & SHERWIN & SIGMUUND & RINGO/ARNIE & AMOS & ANDY & AL/WHATEVER HIS NAME IS HE’LL BE OUR NEW PALWHATEVER HIS NAME IS HE’LL BE OUR NEW PAL**Lyrics: Steve Rosen; Music: Richard Rodgers####I woke up one morning recently with a melody in my head which I couldn’t identify or erase: an “ear worm.” By asking many song-writers I found one who was eventually able to identify the tune (dropped from the movie version of CABARET) as “Perfectly Marvelous” by Kander & Ebb. It was serendipitous because Celia’s birthday coincided with its arrival in my brain. Why did this apt and lovely melody choose me? Why did Celia choose me? Just two more of life’s many mysteries.My Beautiful & Brilliant Wife*I met this perfectly marvelous galIn our New York that wonderful townAs I tasted her hors d’ouerves and her Coriander PatéBefore I knew she selected me for A/rou/salNext moment I’m no longer alone,Let’s say I’m Spous/alI made perfectly elegant jestsIn my Jewish-American wayHow she dazzled my senses?Was truly no less than a crime.Now I've this perfectly marvelous girlWith our perfectly fabulous friendsAnd we're living togetherAnd having a marvelous time.I tell her perfectly marvelous talesOf my thrill/ing/ly scan/dal/ous lifeWhich I'll probably use?As a chapter or two in my book.And since my object in life was to seek Stim/u/la/tionWhat luck to fall on a fabulous sourceOf Ex/al/ta/tion. And perfectly marvelous, too,Is her perfect agreement to beJust as still as a mouseWhen I'm giving my memoirs a whirl.Yes, I've a highly agreeable lifeWith my brilliant and beautiful wifeShe’s my always ex/hu/be/rantPerfectly marvelous, girl. [PAUSE]CODAI... met... this...Truly… remarkable… girlIn this really incredible town,And she skillfully managedTo talk her way in to my HEART.####*Lyrics: Steve Rosen; Music: Kander & Ebb, from CABARETA GLAMOROUS DUBIOUS PASTWhen the children in daughter Lisa’s grade-school class were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, most of them answered, “Nurse”, “Secretary”, “Teacher”, and so on. These were the days before women were executives. But Lisa, who admired a glamorous woman publisher, shocked her teacher by answering, “Senior Vice President of a giant publishing company”.Lisa, who has great charm and a highly-developed visual intelligence, was always attracted to glamour and to good taste. As a photographer’s model in London and a Chanel runway model in Paris, she lived a high-speed show-biz life of exciting parties and celebrities … until she moved to Rome to become an art restorer. A New York Jewish girl restoring Art in The Vatican.In 2005, the New York Observer featured a flattering profile of Lisa, a Valentine to her alluring “dubious past”, which vividly captures the style and essence of her multiple careers.An Art Restorer With a History of Her OwnProfile: Lisa RosenBy MARTIN EDLUNDFebruary 24, 2005 THE NEW YORK OBSERVERArt restoration is, for the most part, quiet, contemplative work. Removing varnish. Patching holes. Researching ancient methods and materials. That sort of thing. There's little glitz or glamour.But when Lisa Rosen began getting press requests last year after restoring the Stations of the Cross murals at St. Ignatius Loyola, the spectacular Catholic church on Park Avenue at 83rd Street, she found herself in a familiar spot.In the early 1980s, Ms. Rosen was an "it" girl and everything that vague appellation implies. She was a jet-setting fashion model for the likes of Chanel and Dior. She was a core member of the downtown art-and-music scene that grew up around the Mudd Club, which produced Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lurie, Debi Mazar, and Jim Jarmusch, among others. She was one of those mysterious creatures who, through some alchemy of charm, will, and chance, comes to symbolize all that is cutting-edge and hip.When I visited her recently at the enormous townhouse she rents in Brooklyn Heights, Ms. Rosen informed me that my timing was good: She has just decided to talk again about her "dubious past."In part, this is because her past is once again in public view. Ms. Rosen appears in episodes of Glen O'Brien's "TV Party" variety show on display at the "East Village, USA" exhibit now at the New Museum, and she is part of the ensemble cast of "Downtown 81," the long-delayed cult film starring Jean-Michel Basquiat that serves as a kind of video family tree of the bygone art scene.In photos from that period, Ms. Rosen looks like a new-wave Liza Minelli: jagged hair, pale complexion, expressive mouth. She appears equally comfortable in couture and the grubby "Willy Mays" sweatshirt painted for her by Basquiat (which she keeps in a drawer).Now 43, she's still handsome and confident. On the day we met, she was wearing a rust-colored jacket, matching knee-high boots, and white pants slightly smudged from work. When she left the room to retrieve something, I found myself primping my hair in a giant antique mirror on the wall of her studio.Her experience as an "it" girl was, in actuality, just a long diversion from her interest in art restoration, which began when, at age 13, she visited a friend in California whose sister was working in the laboratory at the Getty Museum. She spent the next summer cleaning shards of Etruscan pottery in the basement of a Danish art museum with a toothbrush, and, at 17, she was admitted to New York University with the intention of studying history and applied arts.That lasted only a semester. The siren song of the Mudd Club was too alluring. "The thing about the Mudd Club was that you walked in, and you wanted to know everybody in the place," she says. "They all looked fascinating, completely fascinating." She dropped out of NYU and enrolled full-time in the club's social scene.Ms. Rosen describes this entire episode in her life as a dizzying vortex of fascinating, famous, and fabulous people and places. Her recollections unspool in lengthy narratives that sound like vivid, name-dropping dreams."I took a month off from the Mudd Club and was lent a one-way plane ticket to Paris by Patricia Field. She had a shop on 8th Street then, but now she's very well-known as the clothing designer who creates the clothes for 'Sex and the City.' I was gonna meet my girlfriend to go to an art opening where there would be food, so we could actually eat that night, and I picked her up and she was having her photo done by Pierre and Gilles - art photographers, they're quite famous now - and the editor of Marie Claire was there, and she asked me had I ever modeled, and I said 'No.' She asked if I had any photos of myself and I said 'No.' She asked if I could come to the office tomorrow and I said 'Okay.' She was really nice. She took a Polaroid, and that was that, and I left."A few days later, the House of Chanel called. They had seen my Polaroid and they asked if I was available to do a publicity shot next week. I remember I had to put my hand over the receiver because I gasped, and I said, 'Yes, sure,' and I did that shot. With that shot, they asked if I had ever done a fashion show, and I said 'No.' They said, 'There are 12 girls going to Cannes next week, and I'd love for you to do it.' I didn't have a French Social Security number and I didn't have an agency, so they said, 'Which agency would you like?' - and that was another 'Could you wait one minute?' and I ran to the phone, 'What's a good agency?' - and I was accepted to an agency. As soon as I was with an agency and was with Chanel, I got everybody. I did shows for Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Kansai Yamamoto, blah, blah, blah."Retrieving a folding table from the closet, Ms. Rosen produces her modeling book. Her catchall "blah, blah, blah" encompasses the biggest designers and photographers in fashion. Flipping through the pages: There's a still from a Chanel perfume ad directed by Richard Avedon and choreographed by Twyla Tharp; pictures of her wearing inflatable pants by Issey Miyake ("two very small Japanese women on either side pumped it with air, blowing into either side"); a picture of her outfitted in an ensemble of tea-strainer earrings and tomato-sauce-can bangles by Jean Paul Gaultier; a photo by Mario Testino ("You'll find he's like God now"); John Galliano; Italian Vogue; Marie Claire; a John Cage record cover; Betsey Johnson.After six years, at age 25, Ms. Rosen dropped out of fashion as abruptly and nonchalantly as she'd entered it. Visiting Rome on a two-week vacation, she thought she might like to live there. "I mentioned it to somebody and they said, 'I've got an apartment there you can borrow,' and I packed my bags. Mario Stefano, the famous painter, asked me what I wanted to do in Rome, and I said, 'I always wanted to be a restorer,' and he said, 'Why didn't you say so?' and he makes a phone call and I had an appointment the next day to meet Cecilia Bernardini. She was at that point doing the Trajan Column, and I started the next day as an apprentice."Ms. Rosen began at the bottom, doing the dirty work -- carrying water buckets, climbing scaffolding -- all the while learning the craft. In 1992, she branched out on her own.In Europe, her clientele consisted mostly of royals. "The families still have things intact," she says. "You go from prince and princess to the count and countess and so on."She restored damaged art and sculpture at La Reggia di Caserta near Naples, a royal hunting lodge that had served as headquarters for American forces during World War II. ("The boys used to play tennis against the frescos; they would drive jeeps through the halls.") She did a six year stint with Prince Prospero and the Colonna Family, during which she discovered an enormous Paris Bordone painting that had gone unidentified in the family collection. She helped repair the work of Carlo Maderno in the Cardinals Corridor at the Vatican for the 2000 Jubilee Celebration.Since moving back to New York in 1999, galleries, museums, and churches make up the mainstay of her work.Like a highbrow version of a diet brochure, Ms. Rosen's restoration portfolio contains numerous before and after process shots. The transformations are remarkable. When she restored a test patch on the mosaics at St. Ignatius Loyola, visitors mistook it for a brilliant ray of light coming in through the windows. Having completed the mosaics, she says she's now "dying to do the statuary."These would hardly seem like thrills when compared to the stuff of her former life. But thrills are where you find them, and for Ms. Rosen, nothing compares to the excitement of seeing a work restored to its original vibrancy. "It's instant gratification. It's there right in front of you," she says. "You're the first one to see it, and it doesn't get better than that." (continued at a link if you go to Google -- citing the publication, date, and article title).* * *She learned much of what she now knows about restoration of fine art from her years in Rome with then-boyfriend and mentor in art restoration Tony, and from the projects they worked on together at the Vatican and the Colonna palaces, and by inhaling the atmospherics of ancient history. She also learned to speak Italian (a beautiful language) fluently.In 1992, Celia and I were planning to visit the Greek islands, Rome was en route, and Lisa invited us to see her and Tony. Tony was sweet-tempered, very Italian -- darkly handsome, short, slender, with very long artistic fingers and eyelashes, and spoke almost no English…but understood everything, including father-and-daughter emotions, which were running high because this re-union was long overdue.We dined in Rome in a restaurant Tony and Lisa chose. A photograph of this important meeting shows us seated at a table surrounded by other patrons going about their business consuming their meals. Moments before this photo was taken, Lisa and I were copiously weeping, sobbing, crying, and wiping our eyes…both of us grateful and glad to see each other after so much time had passed.But Italians, being Italians, were ignoring us completely; as I said, going about their business. They didn’t notice anything unusual because All Italians Cry In Restaurants, don’t they?* * *My daughter Lisa and I had not spoken to each other in years because The Divorce had been very acrimonious, and her teen-age years were tumultuous. In 1968, her mother Miki and I had been married nine years; Lisa was eight, Daniel six. Lisa wept when we told her; Daniel said “I don’t care”. I concluded that Lisa was eventually going to recover from this painful chapter in our lives, but that Daniel was going to have a much more difficult time. This turned out to be prophetic. After many years of keeping her distance, she eventually made peace with me. Daniel took longer to come around, remains very independent, and is pleasant to me. Mostly.An article about my work with the Russian scientists had appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune in 1992. Lisa told me she read this by chance in Rome while Tony was driving. “Pull over!” she ordered. Because of our estrangement, she hadn’t known what I was doing then; only recently (2012) told me she had devoured the details. She wrote to me. I was ecstatic to hear from her since I believed she, her mother, and brother had blamed me for the break-up – and I feared that we’d never communicate unless I lived long enough to reconcile. I have lived long enough, and -- yes -- we did.Both kids avoided me during their adolescence. This was very painful because I believed at the time that I had no way back into their hearts. My attempts to reach out were rejected time after time after time. A friend said, “You’re a glutton for punishment.” for reaching out. But another friend said, “It’s your job, being the presumptive adult, to absorb the rejection and to continue reaching out despite the rejection”.I call this my “giving-love-and-getting-shit” theory of victory (short version: love for shit), which I have now adopted as my way to conquer rejection. Some day, when I’m a real adult instead of a presumptive adult, I may leave my “you-look-great” phase, and become a genuine and appropriate grand-parent to make up for my inadequacies as a parent. Although I have been given another chance through Daniel’s children Jascha and Tanya, I’m not always up the high standard expected of me. I’m not perfect and I never will be. School children (and I) should recite this every day.* * *Let’s go back to a time to the 1970s, shortly after the breakup of my first marriage, when I would see Daniel and Lisa regularly several times a weeks at first, then once a week, then once a month, then hardly at all -- as they entered rebellious adolescence and the difficult oppositional years of anger and impossible behaviors. Truth to tell, I was – sadly -- not a very good father during those years.I was focused on cultivating a new life (meeting women) but largely on my career; I had been working to develop a book, which was later bought by Simon & Schuster and eventually sold some eighty-thousand copies. But I’m getting ahead of myself.I would discuss the idea with anyone who’d listen, including book publishers, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. One of these was a well-known woman in the New York publishing scene I will call Emmy. A force of nature, she became my friend, and a bit more for a brief time, until we were no longer friends -- because of an offensive, disturbing nuisance law-suit that emerged from our relationship.In many ways Emmy was an admirable and accomplished woman, but an enigmatic one. She was very highly regarded in the New York publishing scene, and knew many famous authors well, and the many power-people in whose shining orbit she moved, like a star in a galaxy of stars. Emmy gave great literary parties, and everyone was eager to attend. I brought Lisa and Daniel along when they spent two weeks with me in East Hampton, and Lisa formed an admiring attachment to her, which Emmy encouraged.Emmy was especially admired by her married boss, another famous force of nature. It was only recently that I was told she and he had an intimate relationship, but she always presented her relationship with him as purely professional and mutually respectful and admiring. This was a form of social-cheating, I now believe, because it gave the general impression that he regarded her highly because of her professionalism only, by her deviously subtracting out the sexual component.When my two-hundred-page book-proposal landed on her desk, she later told me one of her secretaries commented, “Emmy sent the proposal on to the editorial people, but kept the author.” As if I was a kept man. Her glitterati friends may have thought I was her dumb na?ve distant cousin -- since I must have seemed clueless about book publishing. Because, at the time, I was. But I learned.It is my custom to get opinions from people I respect. I used to joke that I always took the advice only from the most recent person I had spoken to. (The most recent person’s advice was best because it was easier to remember.) Emmy was an opinion-giver, an opinion-maker -- and on occasion a scold. I consulted her frequently about the contents, the style, and purposes of my book. She was very encouraging, trust-worthy and helpful – insightful and astute in the ways of publishing – until she wasn’t. At those times she became annoyed and would say “I can’t teach you everything about publishing or explain the reasons for my opinions; you just have to trust me.” (There was a joke going around at the time that “trust me” was the way Californians would say “fuck you”. This turned out to be a hint about our future together.)Eventually, I was able to auction the book to Simon & Schuster for what was at the time a large advance. When Emmy heard about this through the publishing grapevine, she and I were no longer friends. Worse still, she laid claim to having a proprietary interest in the financial investment S&S had made in my labor of love. In other words, she instituted a law suit against me (later dismissed as groundless), which severed our friendship. True, she had made a few good suggestions about the book to me, but I had labored mightily for many months to create my two-hundred-page proposal, which earned my large advance and justified my earnest faith in the commercial appeal to a large audience of a practical book about the future. I was shocked and disturbed by this sea-change in our relationship, and I actually wept during our final phone conversation. The suit was eventually judged to be frivolous, but not until I had to hire a brilliant and expensive intellectual-property lawyer to defend myself against her false assertions of co-authorship.* * *When Lisa returned to New York in 1999, she got re-acquainted with Walter Robinson. In 2010, they married at New York’s City Hall, and had a reception for about a hundred friends from the art world…collectors, painters, sculptors, gallery owners, and publishers. Here’s an excerpt from a 2012 article in the New York Observer about Walter…Ask anyone about Walter Robinson, and they mention three things. The first is his art: the skill in his figurative work; the audacity of his spin paintings; his quasi-disappearance from the art world. “He is one of the most underrated, unknown, undervalued artists of the late 20th century,” Barry Blinderman, director of Illinois State University’s galleries and one of his former dealers, said.The second thing that comes up is his wife, Lisa Rosen, a tall, slim brunette. In the ’70s, she met Edit deAk, a onetime friend and collaborator of Mr. Robinson’s, at the rock club CBGB and visited the loft Ms. deAk shared with Mr. Robinson—“We used to roller skate in it, it was so enormous; it was fabulous,” Ms. Rosen recalled. She left for Europe, worked as a model and learned art restoration. After returning to New York in 1999, she ran into Mr. Robinson at a Julian Schnabel opening. They married in 2010.The third thing people mention is Mr. Robinson’s omnipresence as a journalist. “I wouldn’t say he’s a gossip but he always knows what’s going on,” writer Glenn O’Brien said. “He’s so likable that people like to talk to him, and he’s pretty discreet.”At Lisa and Walter’s Wedding Reception, Miki welcomed the guests. For several weeks prior to the reception, I thought about what I was going to say that would be brief -- appropriate to the occasion, venue, and to the glamorous art and publishing world worthies in attendance, some famous and brilliant. I was urged by Lisa not to embarrass her in front of her friends. She insisted, “No songs!” Okay, no songs.So I simply reflected carefully on appropriate discourse, and prepared a proper, formal, and what-was-later-deemed “warm and witty” toast by a New York Times columnist present at the occasion. Lisa insisted on hearing what I was going to say in advance in order to make my toast embarrassment-proof, but since I was paying for the event and resisted her efforts at censorship, I was given the go-ahead by Lisa if – and only if -- Celia (whom she trusted) vetted the toast beforehand. Here’s what I said…A TOAST TO LISA AND WALTER 04-01-10 Stephen RosenINTELLIGENCE IS THE ABILITY TO MAKE OTHER PEOPLE FEEL GOOD.LISA AND WALTER MAKE ME FEEL GOOD.ALL OF YOU HERE TONIGHT MAKE LISA AND WALTER FEEL GOOD.I GUESS THAT MEANS WE’RE ALL INTELLIGENT.MY NAME IS STEVE ROSEN, AND I'M ONE PART OF THE TEAM THAT BROUGHT FORTH LISA ROSEN. SHE GOT HER ‘YARD-SALE’ GENES FROM ME, AND HER ‘ART’ GENES FROM MIKI ROSEN, LISA'S MOM, ANOTHER TEAM MEMBER.AND WALTER BROUGHT HER HERE TONIGHT.BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT MEMBER OF THIS TEAM IS LISA ROSEN HERSELF.LISA IS? UNIQUE...IN HER DEDICATION TO?ART, TO HER FRIENDS, TO HER JOY IN LIVING, HER SOPHISTICATION,??HER VISUAL INTELLIGENCE (JUST LIKE HER MOM) -- AND THE RADIANT SUNSHINE AND BRILLIANCE SHE BRINGS TO HER ART RESTORATIONS, TO HER FRIENDS, TO HER LOVED ONES...JUST LIKE THE SUNSHINE TODAY.WALTER HAS WRITTEN AN ELOQUENT BOOK ON ART HISTORY. I QUOTE A FEW LINES…INSERTING THE WORD ‘MARRIAGE’ WHERE THE WORD ‘ART’ APPEARS. (my apologies to Walter)“IN EVERY SOCIETY, ART (MARRIAGE) HAS A?SPECIAL PLACE.? IT IS PART MAGIC AND PART SCIENCE, PART TRUTH AND PART? IMAGINATION.? ART (MARRIAGE) HELPS DEFINE MORALS, HISTORY, AND BELIEFS.? ART (MARRIAGE) HELPS DELINEATE THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY, OF COMMUNITIES, AND OF FAMILIES. A FORM OF COMMUNICATION THAT GOES BEYOND LANGUAGE TO FORGE MYTHICAL LINKS WITHIN THE TRIBE, WITH THE GODS, OR WITH THE FORCES OF NATURE”SO MY TOAST TO LISA AND WALTER?IS ALSO TO ART & MARRIAGE...-- BOTH HAVE A SPECIAL PLACE…PART MAGIC, PART IMAGINATION-- BOTH ARE ELOQUENT FORMS OF COMMUNICATION-- BOTH ARE FORCES OF NATURE-- BOTH REPRESENT "LOVE MADE VISIBLE". ####I was very proud of the audience reactions to my toast and many compliments I received after this toast, to say nothing of the rousing ovation it generated. But the most delicious compliment came from my ex-wife, Miki, who was rarely generous to me with her compliments. She said, “That was a very good toast, Steve. Oh, and by the way: Thanks for making this event possible.”####OY GEVALT!My best friend, Paul Greenfield, had a very religious Orthodox-Jewish father who died at a ripe old age. A traditional Orthodox funeral took place at an Orthodox cemetery, attended by many Orthodox Rabbis and family and friends. I was asked to be a pall-bearer.After the funeral, as we were getting ready to drive back to Manhattan, Paul asked if anyone needed a lift. One Orthodox Rabbi joined us. He looked like central casting’s idea of an Orthodox Rabbi…long white beard, black suit, tzitzses (woven strings) sticking out of his shirt, a tallis (prayer shawl) around his shoulders, and -- of course to top it all off – a yarmulke or kippa (skull cap) on his head. He sat in the passenger’s seat next to Paul, who drove. I sat in the back seat with Paul’s wife, Hilda.During the course of the drive, the Rabbi turned around to ask me, “What do you do?” I said “I was trained as a physicist.” “Oh!” he says. “Are you Jewish?” When I answered in the affirmative, he said, “Many physicists are Jews”. I agreed, and mentioned Einstein, Oppenheimer, Szilard, Teller, Wigner, Feynman, and other well-known physicists who were Jews. Some one-third of physics Nobel Laureates are Jewish(!), a percentage disproportionate to the percentage of Jews in the general population. I pointed this out to the Rabbi, and he said he was a member of an organization called the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists (AOJS).Then I remembered John von Neumann, one of the smartest mathematical physicists of all time. Physicist Edward Teller had referred to him as mentally superhuman, with an inexplicable “neural superconductivity”.I said to the Rabbi, “Did you know the name John von Neumann?” He said, “Yes. He was Jewish too?”I said, “Well. He was born Jewish. But he believed that although Catholicism was a very tough religion to live in, it was the only one to die in. It isn’t widely known, but on his death-bed he asked for a priest and to the dismay of his Jewish friends, he converted to Christianity”.The Rabbi took this information in, sitting quietly, stroking his long white Biblical beard, ruminating on the news. I watched him in the front seat, clearly mulling this news over for several moments.Finally, he spoke up:“OY GEVALT! IS HE IN FOR A BIG SURPRISE!”I don’t think this needs an explanation to most people, but here’s my ’take-away’…”Oy Gevalt” is Yiddish exclamation of surprise, incredulity, exasperation. It’s somewhat equivalent to “Good Grief!” The Rabbi must have believed in an afterlife, and thought that a Jew who converts to Catholicism is going to have a big surprise after he dies because the God of Moses is happier greeting dead Jewish souls than dead converts from Judaism to Catholicism. But the explanation drains the anecdote of its assumptions and surprises – and its humor. Maybe you had to be there. I was. ####IRONIC ASSEMBLAGESWhen I go to yard sales, I buy old scrap metal…rusty hand tools, garden tools, and small snippets of iron, and then I weld these familiar-looking items together in unfamiliar ways.I have taught myself how to negotiate at yard sales by asking the seller, “Would you be offended by an insultingly-low offer?” It works most of the time, but on at least one occasion I was told to get lost. (Actually, the vendor said, “Go fuck yourself! ”.Yard-sale-bought raw materials, in my hands, become creations, called “assemblages”.I was inspired by a famous Picasso sculpture (Bull’s Head, 1942) consisting merely of bicycle handle-bars welded to a bicycle seat. It has a witty and whimsical resemblance to a bull…with the handle-bars doubling as the horns of the bull, and the bike-seat representing its head. Here’s what art critic Eric Gibson (Wall Street Journal) says about Bull’s Head…At once both childlike and highly sophisticated in its simplicity, it stands as an assertion of the transforming power of the human imagination…Consisting as it does of only two elements, "Bull's Head" is Picasso's sparest sculpture. And it is unique among his assemblages for its transparency. There is no attempt to play down the real-world identity of the constituent parts. Indeed, the sculpture's …simplicity draws attention to them.I aspire to such simplicity, transparency, and duality. My assemblages are sculptures made of rusty saw blades, garden shears, hammers, rakes, gears, angle iron, or even simply scraps of weld-able metal. I make familiar tools simultaneously look like familiar creatures. My aspiration is to create a new object that is familiar in its new entirety -- at the same time as it is familiar in its old particularity. I am re-cycling scrap into a re-incarnated solid that is both new and old.For example, I welded two sets of old hedge shears to a horizontal scrap of iron, so that it resembles an animal, which (as I already mentioned before) our Ecuadorian handyman Louis referred to as “El Burro de Don Esteban”… the donkey of Sir Stephen. (I like the ‘Sir’ part; nobody calls me ‘Sir’, except when I’m offered a seat on a bus by a wholesome, respectful youth. I’ve always got mixed feelings…do I look that old that I need a seat? – remember that the title of this memoir includes the phrase “You Look Great Stephen Rosen”)I have welded ten hammers to a vertical iron shaft made of concrete reinforcing bar (called ‘rebar’). These hammers are in such various angles of repose with the vertical rebar that they look as if they were a stroboscopic photo of a single hammer falling.From rusty old shovel heads I have fashioned a “shovel fountain”, in which the falling water moves in a cascade from each down-ward-pointing shovel-head to its opposite number, going back-and-forth in a vertical zig-zag pattern. This looks especially sparkling when the sunlight strikes the water from behind, back-lighting the ripples and turbulence of the trickling stream.I have made dozens of iron butterflies from circular saw blades. Using a tungsten-carbide blade, I slice the circular saw blade into four quarters, with the scalloped portion of the blades on the outside of the quartered blade shape. The center of each quartered blade I weld to the center of another quartered blade shape, with the two planes of the blades at an obtuse angle to each other. The scalloped edges of the welded blades resemble a butterfly’s wings. I paint designs on these assemblages to complete the resemblance, and have given them away as gifts to friends.Recent additions to my iron butterfly menageries are ladies’ wearable butterfly pins. Here’s how I make these. I find beautiful color images of butterflies in books, catalogs, on wrapping paper, and in Museum brochures (especially those at the American Museum of Natural History, which also has living specimens in their temperature-and humidity-controlled “Butterfly Conservatory”). I cut out the paper butterfly images. Then I mount and glue these images to thin sheets of shiny copper sheet. I coat the copper-mounted images with a clear two-component epoxy, which stiffens the assemblage, and makes them appear to be enameled. Finally, I mount safety clasps on the side opposite to the image….and voila … a butterfly pin. I have made and given away dozens of these – to my wife, my daughter, my sister, and all the other women in my life. (Abby Washburn, Bela’s wife, called it her “good luck” charm and wore it on stage!) This reminds me of a butterfly joke…An international scientific conference of butterfly experts (called “lepidopterists”), meeting in Rio de Janeiro, are having dinner together. An American lepidopterist remarks, “BUT-TER-FLY! Isn’t that a lovely word? It sounds just like a butterfly…it’s onomatopoeia.” A French lepidopterist then says, “PA-PI-LLON! That’s our word for butterfly in French. Isn’t it a ravishing word? It sounds like it is. Can’t you just hear the butterflies’ wings whispering as it flits from here to there?” The Spanish lepidopterist adds, “MAR-I-POS-A! MAR-I-POS-A! Listen to the trilled “R” in MAR-I-POS-A. Can you believe how beautifully that word sounds like a butterfly?” Pause. Two beats. At last, the impatient German lepidopterist can take it no longer. Finally, he shouts, “Und vas is wrong mitt SHME-TER-LINCK!?!?”I also created a collection of assemblages as a long line of stylized animals-from-welded-tools marching side-by-side, two-by-two, up a ramp onto a ship -- designed to evoke “Noah’s Ark”, which was exhibited at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons.Why do I make these assemblages, these visual puns, these three-dimensional double entendres? Perhaps to satisfy my yearning to do something with my hands. To exercise my non-cerebral muscles…and to avoid using those enjoyable verbal skills I use daily in my writing and work with clients. Maybe I’m eager to re-make a small part of the world – I hesitate to say ‘in my own image’ –but there it is. Of course, these sculptures don’t look like me at all. But they are an extension of me, a projection onto a welded object of some ephemeral essence of my father’s genetics, my tactile personality and busy hands -- or my urge to live on in iron and irony. On the other hand, I could be (as my son Daniel so eloquently articulated) “full of shit”.Maybe collecting tools at yard sales and assembling them touches long-ago dimly-familiar memories of helping my father, working together, me fetching hand tools, as we installed the underground sprinkler system when I was six years old, mentioned earlier. Maybe it resonates with working alongside my father at the car wash. I inherited his love of gadgets and no doubt passed some comfort-with-tools along to Daniel and Jascha. Dad referred to himself as “mechanically inclined”: adept at working with tools, equipment and machinery -- building things, repairing things, being able to figure out how things work, grasping mechanical processes. Or, ironically, someone who knows which end of the screwdriver to hold, and which end does the work.But, I went to college. And I knew “mechanically inclined” is un-grammatical. It does not mean an inclined mechanic; what does an ‘inclined mechanic’ do? “Mechanically” means impersonal or machine-like, mechanistic, or without feeling. Dad was none of these; he was more their opposite -- emotional. I haven’t heard the phrase “mechanically inclined” since the 1950s when Dad – who did not go to college -- used it. Un-grammatical as “mechanically inclined” is, and grammatically superior to him as I imagined myself to be back then, this phrase brings Dad back to me in sharp focus…and I see him “mechanically inclined” in all of my sculptures. And I miss him very much. ####A TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOWIn 1992, my beloved brilliant beautiful wife Celia was invited to speak at Harvard Law School on Alumni Day about the career problems of lawyers. (I was invited to speak at MIT on the same date about the career problems of scientists.) About three hundred Harvard Law School alumni were in attendance. Even Harvard lawyers have career problems: “We teach them how to climb the mountain, but not how to come back down,” according to Harvard’s director of career services. Celia helps them become grounded.Alan Dershowitz was the person who spoke just before Celia.Mr. Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard, has a well-deserved reputation for brilliance, for his ability to engage audiences who listen carefully to anything he says. He has successfully represented celebrity clients such as O.J. Simpson, Patty Hearst, and Claus von Bulow. In television interviews he is effective even if not entirely charming when he promotes his latest book (of which there have been many). His TV persona is abrasive, pugnacious, memorable, and controversial – all of which helps to promote and sell his books.However, speaking in front of graduates of Harvard Law School, he was formal, dignified, and compelling as he described why the jury had voted the way it did (acquittal) in the first O.J. Simpson trial. The vote had been difficult to understand by many white people because they thought O.J. was guilty.Dershowitz explained to us that the jury was convinced the police had framed O.J. The court-room evidence: spattered blood on a pair of socks. He went on to demonstrate to us how the jury arrived at their bizarre conclusion.On the lectern, Dershowitz had a glass of colored water, and two handkerchiefs…one suspended vertically, the other horizontally. On the vertical handkerchief, he splattered water from the glass with his hand. He also splattered water on the horizontal handkerchief. He pointed out that the spatter pattern on each handkerchief was different, as it would also be the case if the water was blood spattered on a pair of sox.If the blood on O.J.’s socks was the result of a horizontal spatter pattern, that implied that the blood had been placed on the socks while they were horizontal, on the floor, and this suggested that perhaps the blood was placed on the socks by the police in an effort to “frame” O.J. This hypothesis injected “reasonable doubt” in the minds of the jurors, and they found the defendant “not guilty”. (Most white people today think O.J. was guilty of killing his wife, and some deranged zealots even sent death threats to Dershowitz for defending a presumed murderer.)The audience of lawyers was very receptive to Alan’s talk because it defended the defendant brilliantly, clearly, and melodramatically—even if they thought O.J. guilty. Alan spoke well beyond his allotted time of a half hour, and the audience ate it up. However, Celia was scheduled to speak after Alan. And he ate up some of her allotted time.* * *Eight years later, Celia and I were guests of Robert and Dale Mnookin at their lovely summer house in Martha’s Vineyard. Bob and Dale are lovely people we met on our Stanford-sponsored trip to Russia. Bob is the Williston Professor of Law at Harvard, and specializes in conflict resolution and negotiation. The Mnookins threw an elegant party for their friends and colleagues. Most of the Harvard Law and Harvard Business School faculty were present, including Alan Dershowitz.Bob introduced Steve Rosen to Alan Dershowitz. Steve smiled, shook Alan’s hand, and said: “Mr Dershowitz. I have a bone to pick with you.” Dershowitz squared his shoulders as if ready for a legal debate….or maybe a fist-fight. (Dershowitz, as mentioned, is known to be pugnacious.) Steve continued: “About eight years ago, at Harvard Law School Alumni Day, you gave a brilliant talk on why the jury voted as it did in the O.J. Simpson case…You were fascinating. The audience of lawyers ate it up. But you went over your allotted time, and you cut into the talk of my wife, who was supposed to follow you. You’re a tough act to follow, of course, but you took time away from her talk.”Dershowitz smiled and said, “Is she here tonight?” I said, “She’s that beautiful woman standing over there.” Dershowitz says, “Please introduce me to her”.Together, we walked over to Celia. I made the introductions. Dershowitz made a very gallant and heartfelt apology to Celia. “I’m so sorry I cut into your talk at Alumni Day. Please forgive me. I must have gotten carried away.” ####THE ROAD LESS-TRAVELEDAlthough my beloved son Daniel, when young, was not interested in money, material possessions, the ordinary physical comforts and amenities of life…he nevertheless has worked very hard at a wide variety of occupations, mostly blue-collar jobs. He has been a chef, a house painter, a commercial fisherman, a baker, an artist, a sailor, and a jack-of-all-trades. He is an extremely well-read and avid devourer of books. He dislikes the U.S. and capitalism, and has chosen to live in Ireland where he has made and sold potato chips (“crisps”) crepes, and donuts in the open air market in Galway. He’s been called “eccentric” (so have I). We travel the road less-traveled.One of his art teachers said that Daniel was “the greatest talent he had seen in some thirty years of teaching art”. His line drawings, done at age fourteen, in my opinion rival Picasso’s early drawings. Daniel’s high visual intelligence (inherited from his mother) allowed him to create strong simple lines and negative spaces to pull the viewer into his imagery and world-view to connect emotionally with the subject. I treasure my collection of these drawings: one shows Manhattan skyscrapers; another reveals an individual appearing to lecture pompously (probably me); another evokes a massive locomotive coming out of the page directly at the viewer. I love Daniel’s art and his rare sensibility.Daniel grew up surrounded by famous artists like James and Myron Lechay, his mother’s gifted uncles, whose paintings hung prominently in museums, our apartment, and Madison Avenue art galleries. Art was in the air he breathed growing up. Daniel himself knew he was vastly talented at art but rebelled against normal curricula in ordinary schools.Daniel met Jean-Michel Basquiat at City-As-School, a specialized public high school in the West Village of Manhattan in New York City, unique in its focus on experiential learning and respect for individuals’ differences.They became close friends and often painted together. Basquiat was a gifted artist, a prodigy from the age of four. Sadly, his death of a heroin dose at age 27 was probably responsible for Daniel’s decision to cease painting, despite his great talent. Daniel feared that he too would succumb to the drug culture widespread in the world of New York artists. Basquiat’s paintings now sell in the millions of dollars.During a painting session together at my ex-wife Miki’s apartment, the pair, occupied creating works of art, had thoughtfully spread newspaper on the floor to prevent spills and stains. When Miki came home she said, “Clean up this mess! Pick up your things! Throw that stuff away!”Daniel and Jean-Michel did as they were told. When Basquiat became famous, and especially after he died, his paintings became worth a great deal of money. (One abstract portrait of my son by Basquiat, entitled “Danny Rosen”, which I have seen on display at a well-known art gallery in New York, recently sold at Christie’s for almost four million dollars.) Although trained and talented and immersed in art, Miki later made fun of her own demand that the then-unknown Basquiat discard his early work. Those Basquiat works, had they been saved instead of trashed, Miki claimed ruefully in retrospect, would have been worth many tens of thousands of dollars.Maybe Daniel thought that if he had continued to play in Basquiat’s world -- of punk, of drugs, of fast living, of dedication to high art—he might have ended up like Basquiat. Daniel didn’t follow Basquiat’s path; he quit art (the art world’s loss) and kicked his addiction (our gain and his).As far as I can tell, Daniel’s world-view embraces free-spirit, counter-culture values, hard “honest” work, autonomy, unusual empathy for the under-dog, authenticity, the un-importance of money, and sturdy stoic individualism.I like this parable, as told by George Vaillant…“… of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s stocking a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”Perhaps Daniel is the boy who’s looking for his pony; and I perhaps I would have to be the traditional one wondering what to do with an expensive fragile watch. (Maybe it’s the other way around.) We are different in many ways….and similar in some. We are, enigmatically, both and neither of the boys in the parable who are given the manure and the watch.Daniel has many friends in Ireland who share his values. He lives according to his own rules, which (despite my own eccentricities) are at great variance with my more traditional rules and values.* * *Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote “The Social Contract,” in which he spelled out the idea that every citizen should exercise her social conscience and empathy in helping to determine the general will of the people. It was Rousseau who famously said, “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains”. Daniel would almost certainly agree with Rousseau, although he might debate the issues brilliantly. At one time when Daniel was helping a friend who didn’t have legal representation, Daniel went to court and won the case. Not only is Daniel not a lawyer, but (like the Beatles and his son Jascha) he never attended college.Fascinated by Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and based on their writings, I created a comparative dichotomy emblematic of their opposing world-views in the table below. Daniel and Jean-Jacques Rousseau philosophies would live very well together. I and many friends would be very comfortable in the presence of Benjamin Franklin, one of my heroes.THE 18th CENTURY LEGACIES OF ROUSSEAU & FRANKLINROUSSEAU: THE SELF FRANKLIN: THE CAREERGetting in touch with our true selves; Being what we were meant to beCommitting ourselves to our careers; Striving to be team playersChallenging ourselves to make a journey into the selfConstructing a public life for ourselvesRecovering the true by getting rid of the habits that social life calls forLearning from those habits that social life calls forOur mistakes are patterns revealing deep aspects of the self; every setback is an insight Learning from mistakes (‘errata’), and correcting them; every setback is an opportunity to turn a liability into an assetTransparent inner life; individualisticOpaque inner life; wearing a maskBeing aware of our most secret feelings; allowing them to surface; penetrating to the most hidden motives of our conduct and actionsSuppressing ulterior motives and feelings; disciplining ourselves to serve a larger and mighty purpose;Unflinching public honesty even in defeat or disgrace; vulnerability; open, spontaneous in publicAllows the public to see only what is acceptable, good, and appropriate; ‘well-defended’; guarded Subjectivity gives us authority and depth; the only true vision; uncompromising Objectivity gives us authority and depth; avoids all self-indulgences as unprofessionalThe novelistThe scientist‘To thine own self be true’ ‘Vanity, vanity, …all is vanity’“Always be yourself…”“…unless you’re un-presentable, in which case you should be someone else”Something to live onSomething to live for I suspect Daniel would agree with all or most of Rousseau’s set of values and priorities. I have tried to live by Franklin’s values and priorities although I confess I do share some of Rousseau’s. Daniel showed his creativity in ways other than his extra-ordinary drawings. In 1966 in Barcelona, Spain, when he was four years old, all of us visited an astronomical observatory. We were allowed to gaze through a very large optical telescope at the Moon. Each of us had a turn looking. You could see the craters, the mountains and valleys, the sharp shadows at the “terminator”. The entire image, however, quivered and shimmered because of the Earth’s heat rising through our atmosphere, causing alterations in the magnification. Daniel took one look and pronounced it appeared to be ….”Jello!” His observation revealed a very high order of visual intelligence, putting two disparate images together into one.When he was in full adolescent rebellion against me and social norms, I tried to “understand” his oppositional behaviors. I patronized him: “Daniel. I know why you are angry. It’s Mother Nature’s way of refreshing the human race, questioning everything that existed before you. It’s Darwinian competition of the old and the new.” Daniel does not suffer fools gladly, especially me. As I deserved, he gave it to me straight: “Dad. You are really full of shit.” ####GRAND-KIDS AS A REWARDMy charming grand-daughter Tanya, Daniel’s daughter, has read a few chapters of this memoir, and said she “thoroughly enjoyed” them. She asks, “What are you going to write about us once we come into the picture?”Good question.Here are my first memories of Tanya and her brother Jascha. When Jascha was an infant in 1990, he was brought to our apartment un-expectedly on a Saturday evening by his mother, Heather. Oddly enough, we were home and had no plans. Heather had gotten our address from Daniel (who was then not speaking to me or Celia). When she entered our apartment, she said “Here is your grandson.” I can never thank her enough for her courage and kindness. She needed such great courage to visit us because her husband was virtually alienated from me, his father, and was against any relationship between me and his infant son Jascha. (We are now very connected to Jascha since he moved to New York in 2012 on his way to seek his fortune.)As the impulse moved him, Daniel had been warm and friendly – and then cold and angry – at different times. I could see no rhyme or reason to his hot and cold spells, but Jascha as an adult suggested to me that Daniel’s fluctuating feelings toward me reflected his deep unhappiness with my absence as a father during my separation and divorce from his mother, starting in 1968 when Daniel was six years old. I plead guilty to being an absent and to not being a very good father. Excuses don’t count for my abdication of parental responsibility, and I cannot make up for my past dereliction of duty -- although to this day I persist in trying to repair the damage, sometimes becoming a glutton for Daniel’s toxic punishment. I was suffering soul-shattering experiences, depression in my personal and professional life -- such as the death of my parents, disastrous love affairs, suicidal fantasies, and being temporarily unemployed. Excuses? Mitigating circumstances? Both? Apologies may not help Daniel, but yet: “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” These circumstances remind me of an old New Yorker cartoon from a depressing epoch (albeit brief) in my life. (If you have a lemon, make lemonade.) An author is facing what appears to be his literary agent seated at his desk. The caption, author speaking: “Well I’ll tell you…It started out as a one line suicide note. But then I decided to add a sentence or two about my dismal life. Then I added a few paragraphs about my rotten business, my empty bank account, my unfaithful wife, my rebellious ungrateful children, my affair with a famous actress, my second marriage and divorce…and so on…and never once did I suspect that I would be sitting here with a high-powered agent like you – discussing paperback and movie rights!”.But I digress. Years later, when Tanya and Jascha were old enough to talk, and Daniel (to his great credit) forced himself to have a decent-but-strained relationship with me (to my surprise), Celia and I visited them in Ireland. We had swapped our apartment in New York with Brian and Katherine Gallaher whose lovely house in Athlone we obtained through an exchange agency. Photos of that visit show us in front of their house, all five of us (except Daniel) smiling.We had rented a car and, like most Americans accustomed to driving on the “proper” or right-hand side of the road with the driver on the left side of the car, I had plenty of adjustments to make. Driving through Galway, for example, I couldn’t get used to making turns from what-to-me was the “wrong” side of the road. I got very confused about the whole process, and drove awkwardly. Jascha was perhaps six at this time, and like now, had a quick and sarcastic wit, somewhat like Daniel, somewhat like me, and somewhat like Mike Rosen. (What a coincidence, huh? Is this genetics, or Darwin, and if so, what survival value does this have? I know not.)“Sweating bullets” (a phrase my father used often to indicate hard work or extreme nervousness), I swerved to miss oncoming cars, and made clumsy anxious turns, hoping against hope that nothing bad would happen to our precious cargo while in this tiny tinny stick-shift rental car.Jascha piped up, “I’m much cleverer than you, Steve.”“Oh really?” says I. (That’s the way some people speak in Ireland. There’s a lot of “sez I” locutions there.) “That may be true, Jascha, but how would you know this?”“Because”, Jascha chimes in, full wise-guy mode, “you’re making all kinds of mistakes in driving.” Of course I was, for chris-sakes. I needed some experience. We all laughed. Score one for Jascha.Tanya was and still is cute as a button, with her green-eyes (like mine) and golden hair, much like Heather’s, and her lovely sweet smiley face.The two kiddies played very well together, and of course they were adorable. Wholesome. Innocent. Beguiling. We were able to arrange more visits over the years by exchanging apartments and houses, and by the on-again-off-again truce between us and Daniel.Cork, Galway, Saltaire, London, Paris, Villefavard, Barcelona, Manhattan, East Hampton…these were the venues where the five of us visited, romped, loved, and fought. Each one brings back sweet and bittersweet (occasionally sour) memories of our times together…meals (some fabulous, some barely edible), museums (some exquisite, some boring), lush parks, incredible hotels, inns, swell and awful apartments, and swapped houses.In Cork, the guy we swapped flats with was, as Daniel described him, “queer as a three-dollar bill”. In fact, he had only recently left his wife and three kids to live “the gay life”, in both meanings. He was very helpful and friendly, and Cork was a new experience for all of us. We made a bare-bones-basic Passover dinner at his apartment, and of course Tanya was the Queen of Egypt. (That role doesn’t exist in the Seder, so we had to hastily create a costume for our royal grand-daughter, who fit the part like a glove.) I joked that Tanya would someday make a great Queen of England or Ireland or a place to-be-announced. Daniel had to repair to Galway for a day to run his market stall (as noted, he made crisps, potato- chips) leaving Jascha and Tanya with us. Tanya had a few crying jags, or tantrums, in Daniel’s absence, for no apparent reason. Celia and I were worried that she would complain about our stewardship and supervision methods when Daniel returned, but she didn’t say a word. This suggested to us that she had a tendency to sudden tears with no rhyme or reason, in episodes that soon passed over, like a small cloud dropping a few raindrops. In psycho-babble terms, this fairly common condition is called a ‘labile personality’. We learned, as she has had to, to live with the condition.Tanya, laughing, told us recently that she exploited her ability to start crying spontaneously when she came through Irish customs and the Inspector said she didn’t have the proper documentation. She burst into copious tears instantly, and the inspector shaken by her passionate and genuine outburst, let her enter the US without further ado. (Sweet are the tears of adversity.)In Paris, we swapped our Manhattan apartment for an elegant apartment on rue de Fleurus, the very same street where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived in the 1900s, playing muse and grand dames to Picasso, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Dos Passos, James Joyce, Salvadore Dali, and all the luminaries she assembled at her famed soirees. (Many of them appear in the charming Woody Allen movie, “Midnight In Paris” as look-a-likes and character-parodies.)Flynn, one of Daniel’s lady-friends at the time joined us, and she won me over as we were looking in the shop window of an infant-wear boutique, by remarking to Daniel, “If we gave Steve another grand-child, we could buy That Toddler Outfit.” I was thrilled that she would contemplate such a wonderful ‘gift’…but, alas, this was not to be, for a few months after our time together she and Daniel ceased seeing each other. Too bad, because she was one of the wonderful ones of all the dozens of young ladies he courted and conquered and dropped. (Sounds familiar? I did much the same find-‘em, fool-‘em, forget-‘em routine between marriages. A case of not being emotionally ready for a serious commitment. Fear of mature intimacy? Thank goodness those days are long over for me.)Paris with Tanya and Jascha, and Paris with Celia, and Paris with Daniel, was…PARIS! Each of us had our own Paris. Celia and I had the romantic-and-gourmet-meal Paris. The kids had the parks-and-playgrounds-and-museums Paris. Daniel had the Paris familiar to him when he had worked for Gilles Ebersolt, an extra-ordinary architect who designs and builds huge inflatable rubber rafts that rest upon the African and South American jungle tree-top canopies for scientists to camp out upon for months at a time while studying the flora and fauna. (National Geographic has a series of gorgeous color photos and an essay about Gilles and his unusual work.)Gilles and his wife have a huge apartment in Paris (which we stayed at years later to celebrate the golden wedding anniversary of Norman and Shelly Dinhofer) -- plus a chateau, an estate really, in the South of France, in Villefavard, near the town that makes elegant China, Limoges. We were invited, the whole lot of us, to visit them there. We trained down, rented a car at the station, and drove to the miniscule town, searching for their estate. We stopped a man walking alongside the road, and in heavily-American-accented French asked where the Ebersolts’ place was. He said in perfect English that he was the Mayor of Villefavard, and that he, the Mayor, would personally escort us to our destination.The estate was vast, with rolling hills, a man-made lake, five ancient buildings, lovely gardens, farm animals, and many other guests. We were treated as if we were royalty, given our own rooms, and fed by Gilles’ wife Regine, who looked so utterly casually glamorously elegantly French, with her simple silk scarf and chic attire, as she bustled about the kitchen cooking delicious French food for us and the numerous “drop-ins”-- neighbors who just happened to show up at all times of day and evening.Jascha and Tanya were fortunate in that the Ebersolt children were about their age and spoke only French… Jascha and Tanya (whose father Daniel and his sister Lisa had learned French in a public school in Paris in 1968) were conversing fluently within days. The four of them hung out together as if they had known each other forever. On Halloween, the foursome went around the other estates and neighbors and introduced the French to our silly custom of “trick or treat”. Actually, Halloween was beginning to gain traction in all of Europe at the time.The visit lasted almost a week, and we felt like the time was too short. We speak of that time longingly, when everything and everyone seemed charming, and European, and beguiling, fun, and loving. We had hoped to return someday, and that someday arrived in 2012 when Gilles’ daughter Manon and her boyfriend Benjamin (both medical students in Paris) came to visit us in Manhattan and East Hampton. In October -- on a special trip to London, Dublin, Paris, and the Dordogne -- Celia and I visited Villefavard and again enjoyed the Ebersolt’s generous hospitality. Gilles built a bonfire to celebrate Halloween. Regine cooked. Then we went on to visit the cave drawings. Jascha and Tanya were too busy to join us.* * *Barcelona was another world altogether.Lisa and Daniel were four and six in 1966 when Miki and I first visited Madrid and Spain and Barcelona during the reign of Franco. But this time, 2002, the Spanish people were free of Franco, and Barcelona was Catalonian.In 1966, I had taken pictures of Lisa and Daniel inside huge cups and saucers in the playground Tibidabo on the mountain top that overlooks the beautiful city. As mentioned in the chapter on Daniel, on our way back down, we had noticed an astronomical observatory telescope dome, and of course I couldn’t resist a visit. An elderly sleepy watchman came to the door, and in my passable Spanish, I told him I was a “professor of astronomy” (I left out ‘assistant’) in New York, and that my children and I would like to have a look at the stars through his telescope. He said that we should come back at three o’clock in the morning, which we did, bleary-eyed, and he welcomed us and allowed us to look at the Moon through what appeared to be a turn-of-the-century-French-made half-meter reflecting telescope. (The French had a great well-deserved reputation for their expertise in optics and astronomy.)I had never looked through a telescope this size before (nor since, although I did own a Questar folded-optics reflecting-refracting scope for a few years, which I used in teaching astronomy and in explaining astronomy to my children). Daniel and Lisa and Miki and I peered into the device one at a time.In 2002, Jascha and Tanya and Daniel and Celia and I were in this beautiful city and eager to devour everything…Las Ramblas, Tibidabo, Gaudi buildings, the cuisine, the museums, the art, and of course to be charmed by the wonderful Spanish people.I wanted to revisit Tibidabo, but we got near the top and found an extraordinary restaurant at about siesta time. We started eating at about two pm, and didn’t finish until about five pm. I can’t remember what we ate, but I can remember that it was fabulous Spanish food. I wonder if Jascha, Tanya, and Daniel remember. Celia remembers. We were so full we had to walk it off, and slowly descended the mountain-side until we came to a very modern science museum, which was filled with “hands-on” physics and science demonstrations, like the sort developed by Frank Oppenheimer (J. Robert’s brother) at the San Francisco “Exploratorium”, which Lisa and Daniel and Miki and I had visited when the kids were tiny, back in the sixties. I was excited by the demonstrations, and wanted to show off what I knew about these imaginative re-creations of Frank Oppenheimer’s, but the kids were bored, to my dismay.With a lovely young married couple, both journalists, we had exchanged our Manhattan apartment for a Barcelona apartment and at the same time our East Hampton house for their Costa Brava house—the equivalent of a Grand Slam! Both of their dwellings were spacious and elegant.I have photos of Jascha and Tanya dancing the tango to CDs found in the apartment, and I have photos of Daniel and Jascha and Tanya taken from the balcony appearing to show them standing on top of each other’s shoulders. (What they had done, cleverly set up by Daniel, was to lie stretched out horizontally on the ground, with Daniel on the left his head pointed to the right, Jascha to his right lying so his feet appeared to be on Daniel’s shoulders, and with Tanya to his right with her feet appearing to be on Jascha’s shoulders. When the photo, taken from the balcony above looking down, was rotated ninety degrees, a quarter turn, counter-clock-wise…hey presto…a complete illusion of standing vertically on each other’s shoulders upright.)* * *London. Ah London! In 2004 we had swapped an apartment on Great Portland Street, near the British Telecom Tower. A spectacular location, convenient to almost everything London had on offer.Jascha and Tanya had been pried out of school against Miki’s wishes, but it was May, the weather was lovely, and to Daniel’s delight and our dismay, an anti-Capitalist revolutionary May Day anti-Monopoly-like demonstrations had been planned for London in 2004, much like Occupy Wall Street invaded New York in 2012.Only unlike the US, the clever Brits had a counter-plan, brilliant in its simplicity, and we had a grand-stand view of it all from the high floor of our flat overlooking Oxford Circus.Here’s what the friendly-sounding British Bobbies had arranged. When all of the demonstrators had gathered in Oxford Circus (and other well-known demonstration areas) the police lorries were brought in to block each of the spoke-like streets radiating out from the Circus hub. The lorries were placed perpendicular to the axis of each street, from wall to wall, so it was virtually impossible for a pedestrian to depart from the crowd gathering in the central hub. Bottled up as they were, their attention was directed to the zealous anti-capitalist bull-horn-wielding speakers. How long can tens of thousands of people stand listening to speeches they had heard before, speeches lashing out at the “system”, repetitive pontificating and speechifying, and exhibiting what’s called “confirmation bias” (exposing oneself to opinions and facts that only agree with their own)? One hour? Two hours? Three hours? How long before a demonstrator got hungry or had to use a WC? Four hours? Five hours?Try seven hours!!!That’s what the clever city officials had counter-planned. The demonstrators were bottled up for seven hours. I understand from our great friends and British neighbors in East Hampton, Chris and Peter Sephton, that this method has been well-established in England, and it’s even got a name: “kettling”. The protesters were completely fatigued and tired of standing. Of listening. Of protest. Of being speechified to. Finally, then, the officials let groups of twenty demonstrators at a time very very slowly depart the Oxford Circus at each radiating street, accompanied by a phalanx of twenty Bobbies in front and another twenty Bobbies in back of each departing group, moving with all the speed of an artic glacier. There were no incidents. No violence (not enough energy left). And no arrests I knew of.Daniel was in revolutionary mode, sympathizing as always with under-dogs like himself: the demonstrators were not quite sure what to make of the counter-plan. I was completely on the side of law and order, having righteously accelerated past my revolutionary days years earlier. Tension between Daniel and me was palpable, unpleasant -- for me, completely unnecessary –and redolent of enmity and anger. Daniel must have been torn between his natural affinity toward toxic rage, and his eagerness to enjoy London (on our dime, another source of his ambivalence). The kids were bull-dozed by Daniel into going along with his anti-establishment anti-Steve vitriol, which detracted from my enjoyment of the visit. I wonder how Jascha and Tanya remember this visit.However, Celia had planned ahead, as usual. All of us went to see the opening night theatrical performance of the comedy “Noises Off”, a brilliant play by Michael Frayn (the guy who wrote the play “Copenhagen”, and the novel ”Headlong”.) We had great seats. The play was a delicious conceit. Here’s the The Premise: a play within a play within a play.The first act opens on a regional amateur acting troupe rehearsing a feeble comedy. The director is actually sitting in our real theater audience barking his orders to the bumbling stage actors. In the second act, we are viewing the back of the stage when the first act was proceeding, with many people behind and in front of the curtain speaking over each other, cross-talk, and silly coincidences. In the third act, we see the actual bad play being performed not only badly, but on beyond badly to hysterically badly, with anything that could go wrong going wrong. Celia and I were giggling and laughing so hard the tears were streaming down our faces in torrents. Jascha was getting it, but Tanya didn’t get all the double entendres and cross-talking. Even Daniel, as angry and toxic as ever, was laughing. We were perhaps the only Americans in the audience, and the audience was roaring with approval. A hit! One of the funniest theatrical experiences of my life, dimmed and marred only by the smoke pouring out of Daniel’s ears.Daniel was not amused when I spouted the aphorism, “Grand-kids are the reward you get for not murdering your children”. ####ME INFINITESIMAL!“We seem to be hard-wired to find that what happens to each of us naturally appears to take on special significance and meaning, even if it is an accident. We have to guard against this, and the only way to do so is by adhering to the straight-jacket of empirical reality.” –attributed to Richard P. FeynmanHumans, as my friend Gerry Monroe says, are “pattern-making machines”. We endow facts with meaning, despite our own insignificance and the facts that are frequently indifferent to us and our ideas.From my study of cosmic radiation and astrophysics, I learned about my own insignificance. Even though I think my life has meaning and purpose (derived from my work, my loved ones, and my friends), I am infinitesimal in a vast Universe. Please indulge me in a bit of pedantic astrophysics…The visible Universe consists of about 100 billion galaxies. Give or take. Each galaxy is a cluster of stars, held together by their mutual gravitational attraction, and the number of stars per galaxy is about the same as the number of galaxies. Give or take.So the total number of stars visible to our best telescopes, like the Hubble, is the product of these two numbers – 100 billion times 100 billion -- or one with twenty-two zeros after it.Let’s say that the Earth has six billion people living on it. Give or take. Round up to ten billion, or one with ten zeros after it. If -- a big if -- each star has, say, as much as ten planets orbiting each star (probably unlikely, but bear with me a moment), then multiplying all these “guesstimates” together, we get a huge number (one with 33 zeros after it) or a Billion Trillion Trillion. This is perhaps an upper limit on the number of potentially humanoid creatures in the Universe.I’m merely one of those creatures, an insignificant human. I’m profoundly infinitesimal in the larger scheme of things, the bigger picture, the meta-Olympian view.Nevertheless, as Feynman and others point out, I am (like you) hard-wired to believe that what happens to me naturally, in the course of a life-time of human events, has special significance or a “pattern”, even if these events are random, serendipitous, semi-serendipitous, or brought about by what we might like to think of as our own autonomous actions, or our Free-Will, or our code of ethics and moral behavior…or all of the above. After all, each of us consists of some 10 to the 26th power (a one followed by 26 zeros) atoms….insignificant compared to 33 trailing zeros. (Religion teaches us—not how to count numbers—but how to count as ethical and moral beings who matter to each other. We Jews are “chosen” to the extent that we believe we are here to repair the broken world and to repair our broken selves.)Some of us believe that, because we were thinking of a friend a moment before she calls, such a coincidence has meaning and purpose….maybe telepathy. But the “straight-jacket of empirical reality” tells me that every day, billions of coincidences occur to each of us—most of them are below our observational radar. But when a stray coincidence rises to one of high salience, then we -- hard-wired-to-see-meaning-around-us –attribute people-significance, fate, clairvoyance, or a cosmic designer to what is really just another random coincidence.“I’m unique—just like everyone else”, I keep reminding myself and those around me. I toggle back and forth from thinking I may be the most boring and insignificant individual in the entire Universe (see the vast numbers above) to thinking I may be the most interesting creature I know…and I do know a lot of interesting people.To say that ‘the truth lies somewhere in between’ is dopey, trivial, unremarkable, and approaches the inane. To say that I have lived a full, rich, and meaningful life is to see myself from the inside looking out…which is the only me I know, except for what others have told me that they observe about me. “To know Steve is to be his friend”, Dave Robinson said of me at my seventy-fifth birthday. What a great guy he is!Here’s a way to think about how others see us -- strongly biased by our eagerness to think we are significant. When we’re in our twenties and thirties, we wonder and worry about what other people say and think of us. In our forties and fifties we don’t really care what they think and say about us. We reach our sixties and seventies and we discover that they haven’t been thinking or talking about us at all. (We are really insignificant.) By the time we reach our eighties and nineties, we can barely see anything, or hear a thing they’re saying. I can now vouch for the accuracy of this observation.“Youth may be wasted on the young”, George Bernard Shaw told us; but old age may be wasted on the elderly. I don’t want my old age, reckoned politely as the ‘afternoon’ or ‘evening’ of my life, to be wasted at all. Like you, I want my life to mean something to somebody besides myself, even though “I am unique -- just like everyone else”.I am also unique—unlike everyone else.I decided to mention to my grand-daughter Tanya, when she was nineteen years old and had a lot of things happening in her life to think about, that I was writing some stories about my life. I told her that I didn’t expect her to be too interested or excited about my memoirs because her interest lay elsewhere; her plate was full. “But”, I added, “when I have great-grandchildren, they may become very interested in my ancestors, my roots, my genetic make-up, my gene-pool”.Tanya said, “Steve. Don’t I have to have children first?” ####MY ‘ROSEBUD’ AND ‘THE TABLE’The great Orson Welles movie, “Citizen Kane”, was modeled on a super-rich publishing tycoon American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and ends with the cremation of an old sled named “Rosebud”. Kane was…“…a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe “Rosebud” was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. In the ending of the film, it is revealed to the audience that “Rosebud” was the name of the?sled?from [his] childhood?– an allusion to the only time in his life when he was truly happy. The sled, thought to be junk, is burned and destroyed in a basement furnace…”I have a “Rosebud”: those small, oaken building blocks I joyously played with alone as an infant for hours on end. They came in various shapes: square, oblong, circular, round and square pillars…and I feel happy just thinking about them now, because they happily led me into visualizing three dimensions easily, into physics, into making butterflies and sculptures. And into making The Table.Unlike Kane and William Randolph Hearst, my “Rosebud”, my happy-remembered building blocks, led me into a sweet and juicy life. I am going to talk about The Table, a table I built that followed me for fifty-three years from Owego to Flushing to Manhattan to East Hampton, through two marriages and six careers. An important table.I designed and built The Table out of marble and mahogany in 1959 in Owego, New York when I was a physicist at IBM Research Labs there doing classified military work on anti-missile defense.This was my first marriage, my first professional job as a physicist, and my first adventure in living together with a woman. We had rented a 110 acre unused farm ten minutes from the Lab. I enjoyed that brief commute, the sense of a new direction in my life, the freedom and time to walk the rambling wooded hills with our two dogs, and spacious land stretching out to infinity in all directions. Merry-X was a sleek rust-colored Irish Setter, and Max was a liver-and-white English Springer Spaniel—fond companions on our bucolic walks.For entertainment in farm country, I created projects to work with my hands. One was a wagon-wheel I converted into an outdoor table, a lazy-susan. Another was The Table.A local hotel had closed down and was selling its furnishings, including slabs of white veined marble slabs from the hotel bathroom walls. I bought a slab about five feet wide, two feet across, and three-quarters of an inch thick. Must have weighed about thirty pounds. Solid marble. I had to figure out how to mount it, and a colleague at the Lab suggested I purchase mahogany. He had a woodworking shop at home and offered to mill mahogany framing pieces so that they had three-quarter-inch slots. When assembled, the mahogany formed an elegant, trim picture-frame embracing the marble slab, which began to look like a table top. It lacked only legs.I constructed a rectangular assembly to support the framed marble, resting on the rigid frame to which the mahogany legs were affixed by glue and screws. I was very proud of my creation, my Marble and Mahogany Table.We moved back in 1961 to New York to a small apartment in Flushing, and of course The Table came with us. I started teaching physics at the Maritime College at Fort Schuyler on the Bronx side of the Whitestone Bridge; the Throgg’s Neck Bridge was under construction, a marvel to watch the pieces fitting together like a huge erector set-- just like the way my Table and my childhood building blocks came together.At the same time, I began studying and working towards a PhD in physics. I sat and studied at this Marble and Mahogany Table every evening and weekends, coming to know its contours and textures intimately. The marble was smooth. The rich-hued mahogany reminded me of the rust-colored Irish Setter we had to leave behind. As I focused more on my studies and grading test papers, gradually, imperceptibly, the Table receded into the background, especially after our beautiful daughter Lisa and handsome son Daniel were born …and they became the centers of our attention. And our lives.We moved to a large apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and the Table moved with us. My dissertation papers were spread on the Table, and that soon became my major pre-occupation and focus until completion in 1966.In 1968, we moved to Paris for a year while I worked at the Institut d’Astrophysique, and when we returned, I moved out of the apartment, sadly ending our marriage. I rented a bachelor studio apartment nearby, so I could visit Daniel and Lisa regularly.I brought The Table with me, and it became the platform for writing articles, and my book, “Future Facts”, published in 1976, and then “Weathering”, published in 1979. I endowed The Table with special meaning -- huge chunks of my writing and reading life were connected, as were personal memories mingled with nostalgic feelings.In 1985, Celia and I married. I sold my bachelor studio co-op, and I moved into her apartment in Manhattan and her house in East Hampton. The Table came with me, and it ended up residing in a shade arbor, or pergola, I had built as its new home out in the back of what is now our jointly-owned property.The Table had weathered the storms and uncertainties of moving, as I had, but required repairs and maintenance, as I do. Not quite surgery, as I needed -- but serious attention, as I needed. I re-glued the loose mahogany frame securely to the marble. I re-enforced the wobbly mahogany legs. I re-finished the marble and mahogany surfaces with modern preservatives to protect against the elements. Eventually the marble was replaced by mahogany.I guess like The Table, I myself have been re-finished (by my marriage to Celia) and I’ve become preserved by the preservatives…modern medicine and a life well-lived.In East Hampton, when I pass The Table en route from our back bedroom to the compost heap, I admire my handiwork. When we have visitors seated in the pergola, The Table becomes a side-board upon which we place food we cooked together and wine waiting to be served – plus flatware, serving dishes, beverages. These guests are seated at another much-larger table I constructed entirely from very expensive mahogany acquired (at a bargain, of course) from the yard sale of a retired elderly carpenter.If they could speak, the two Tables might tell stories of articles and books written, of dinner-guests visiting, of stimulating conversations ping-ponging back-and-forth across its surfaces. They also appear to frame, and to book-end, my life. ####AFTERWORDS: BOTH AND NEITHERHere’s a happy and sticky thought…a simple way I think about my ancestry and development. Each of us is made of three parts: the part of us that comes from our father; the part of us that comes from our mother; and the part of us that comes from neither.The neither-of-our-parents part emerges from what we do -- once we are endowed with the both-of-our parents parts. Like cosmic rays emerging from supernovae, we travel through space and time in straight and zig-zag paths until encountering a serendipitous interaction or planned destination. That destination is logical only in retrospect. I couldn’t have predicted the destiny of a specific particle, or of my own world-line, but looking backward it can be determined to have been a logical or inevitable progression I endow with a theme, a “pattern”.Mathematics can describe -- but cannot predict -- the existence of physics. Physics can describe – but cannot predict – the existence of chemistry. Chemistry can describe – but cannot predict – the existence of biology. Biology can describe – but cannot predict my existence. And so I can describe – but could never have predicted – the experiences, adventures, and vignettes recorded here.I didn’t want to leave my biological embodiment without my loved ones knowing my stories, experiences and adventures …and what I felt like when being alive and inhabiting my own creature-hood.“The hardest part of writing”, said Nora Ephron, “is writing.” In writing these quasi-memoirs I have tried to avoid giving Advice. I have not written an Ethical Will. I am not writing Literature. But surely, as I’ve said before, “I am a part of all that I have met” (Tennyson). And maybe all that I have met has parts of me in it, as connective tissue joining my past to other futures, when nothing about me is left to remember except my memoir and stories.But with great effort I can sometimes remember, and by writing, I can slowly record my own impermanence.* * *On my seventy-eighth birthday (May 3, 2012) Celia and I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York to see a show by an extra-ordinary artist, Cindy Sherman. The ironic images she creates are so very powerful that after the exhibit they influenced how we looked at people. An art critic and reviewer said her paintings of herself reveal…“…the fact of her aging and the struggle against it. The decay of the body and the race against death became her great and enduring theme[she appears] trapped in personae, frenetically aware of the passing of time.”--Richard Brody, 30 April 2012 New YorkerAs I reviewed her images later in the day, a day we tried to make ordinary (just another ho-hum day in Paradise), her images stayed with us, burrowing into our awareness along with the other sub-texts of getting older and sadder, maybe wiser… faculties dwindling and appearances decaying -- “you-look-great” notwithstanding. My friend Malcolm Pennington said: “The nice thing about getting older is that even though our memory vanishes, every morning you meet the nicest people!”The title of these quasi-memoirs is “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great Stephen Rosen” But after seeing her Art, I half-joked to Celia that my next volume of memoirs (if any) should be called, “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Don’t-Look-So Hot-Anymore”. ####APPENDICESThe Difference Between Talent and GeniusThe author’s seventy-fifth birthday celebration -- with encomiums,criticisms, praise, witticisms, original songs, stories (some even true),introductions, and panegyrics.Rockefeller University Panel“Career Change Among Scientists”, Rockefeller University November 13, 1997 Participants: Joseph Atick, President and CEO of Visionics Corporation, and Rockefeller University; David Z. Robinson, Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and the Government; Stephen Rosen, Science and Technology Advisory Board; Celia Paul, Celia Paul Associates.Cosmic MessengersHow much I used to know about cosmic radiation. Mars icecaps, X-raying volcanoes, Higgs Bosons.What’s Good About Goodbye?You don’t have to break glass to get air; you can open the window.Heroes Of Nine-ElevenUntimely deaths of people I worked withIn Memoriam: Harding WillingerEighty percent of him was greater than one hundred percent ofanyone else.Obituary Notice As Imagined by the AuthorWhat he thinks he wants to be remembered for. ####THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TALENT AND GENIUSTRANSCRIPT: TRIBUTES & ROASTS, STEVE’S 75TH B-DAY Event: 26 April, 2009 @ 35 West 81st Street, NY NY 10024(Actual birthday is 3 May)CELIA PAULWelcome everyone….our wonderful dear friends and relatives who have joined us to celebrate Steve’s 75th Birthday. I am so happy I married into this wonderful family, and I’m so proud of Sascha, Bela, Louie, and the movie “Throw Down Your Heart” at the International Film Center. It’s been a beautiful day and a weekend for the family get-together on the roof and here in our apartment.I also want to say how much I appreciate everybody’s support when Steve was sick, that so many people called to see how Steve was when he was in the hospital, and how many people called to see how I was doing. That was lovely. I was very appreciative of that.It’s been a wonderful 25 years—not just Steve’s 75th birthday, but also our 25th anniversary. I can’t believe Steve is 75. We’re going to hear the ‘ups’ and ‘downs’, mostly I hope ‘ups’. I’ll turn this over now to Sascha.SASCHA PALADINOSteve has asked me to host today. Celia has asked me too. I want to start off by saying that over the course of his 75 years, Steve has been called a lot of things…you know…father, brother, uncle, scientist, husband, friend, writer, career counselor, Jew, New Yorker, …hypochondriac…and he’ll be called a lot of other things today. I want to begin with a musical number I wrote especially for this occasion. So here is Abby to sing, and Bela to accompany her on the banjo…BELA FLECK…playing riffs and intro to the tune of the Muppet Song…accompanied by Abby singingABBY WASHBURN“It’s time to get things started/ It’s like a cabaret/ It’s time to greet Steve Rosen/ on his birthday// It’s time to stoke his ego/It’s time to make his day/ It’s time to get things going on Stevie’s Birthday/ It’s time to raise the curtain/ If we don’t get things started/ This thing may take forever/On this most important day…If we don’t get things started on what we call the S-t-e-v-i-e s-h-h-o-w-w-!”BANJO RIFFING, APPLAUSE. LAUGHTER.SASCHASince Steve is the guest of honor, we want to make that clear. So here’s a crown, or is it a barrette. [Steve puts on barrette and says, “I already have a few of these” to LAUGHTER] And we have a special present for Steve, which we sort of hope will set the tone for today…[Sascha holds up a book, ‘STOP TALKING…A GUIDE TO LISTENING!’ which Steve holds up in front of his face, and says, ”I have about ten of these and it hasn’t helped! But I’m joining a support group for the loquacious: On-and-On Anon.” LAUGHS]So first I would like to call up my father, Joe Paladino, Steve’s brother-in-law. APPPLAUSE.JOE PALADINO *In one of the little ironies of life, I—unaccustomed as I am to public speaking—have to say something about Steve, who is thoroughly accustomed to public speaking. I can tell a little bit of a story, which goes way back to 1953. You all know Steve’s accomplishments in various fields…of course science, career counseling, and all of that professional stuff, and you also know about his achievements in the arts—the visual arts, namely, his metal sculptures with found objects, and his photography, …and then there are the performing arts. Steve as you know is quite the lyricist. He writes songs for special occasions. But I go back a long, long time with Steve, and it was also in connection with the performing arts. When we were students at Queens College, I was conducting a Gilbert & Sullivan opera, called “Patience”. Now Steve was one of twenty Dragoon Guards, God help us. Now let me introduce a few little gestures. [Rises and makes believe he is pulling a sword out of a scabbard, mimes raising it and lunging upward with the sword. LAUGHTER And sings, from Patience, “The en/e/my of one the en/e/my of all is”] So that was Steve’s role in the Dragoon Guards. The story is, that at one rehearsal, nineteen Dragoons went [lunges sword upward again] and while Steve went [mimes Steve inserting his sword into his make-believe scabbard] singing, “the en/e/my of one, the en/e/my of all is”. LAUGHTER. Why he would keep doing that fifty or sixty years later, I have no idea. Eventually he’s going to be asked to sing as a Dragoon Guard in another production of “Patience”…and that time he wants to get it right!*Of blessed memory (1933-2013)SASCHA PALADINONext we’d like to ask Paul Greenfield to come up. Paul and Steve are friends for some forty years, and Paul is the model for Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman) in “The Odd Couple”, to Steve who was the model for Felix Ungar (Tony Randall). According to Lisa and Danny, Steve resembled very neat Felix Ungar—except once he married Celia, when he became the slobby-slob-like Oscar Madison, and Celia became the very neat Felix Ungar. And also Paul’s birthday was this Sunday.PAUL GREENFIELDI’m a little bit older, but not by much. It’s difficult to recall and remember all the things we were involved in, in all these years, but one of the things I’ll remember was our first meeting. We both came from similar backgrounds, recently both getting divorced. And what do two guys do when they meet and are divorced? ….They run! And so we would meet at 5 am and jog up and down West End Avenue. And we wondered why nobody else was doing this. And then we realized that we were the leaders of the whole city in jogging and running. Nobody used to run. And then everybody caught on to it. I don’t think anybody has followed me since. Nobody ever listened to anything I ever said or did anyway. So that’s how we got together. We had various and similar interests. He had a much more interest in women than I did. He was much better at it than me…I could never follow his lead….I envied him, but that’s life.One of the things we used to do was to go skiing a lot. It was a lot of fun, and we took his children. I didn’t have any children then. I took my nephews. I didn’t have any nieces. We used to go skiing with them a lot. But now I can’t go skiing with Steve anymore, because we have only one set of skis for the two if us….and one set of boots. We are the same size, so they fit us both. One of these days I might get to use them.And then we used to have adventures and misadventures. One of the more memorable adventures, which turned out to be a very serious misadventure… One of my brothers had a house and a sailboat on the North Fork of Long Island. It was a glorious spring day. Just the two of us were there. There was a small sailboat that had a motor on it.Steve said, “Why don’t we go out sailing?” I said, “I’m not sure. It’s very windy and dangerous. There’s no one around, in case we get into trouble”. But Steve said, in his own inimitable way, of getting his way, he said, “We’re gonna go!” And I said, “How about we leave the motor here?” Steve said, “NO! WE HAVE TO TAKE THE MOTOR TOO!”So we go out into the ocean or the Great South Bay or the Sound, whatever it is, and the wind was overwhelming! And sure enough, we capsize in this cold cold water! Maybe 40 degrees. I pictured the end of my life right then and there! Luckily, there was one person on shore observing us two idiots out there not knowing how to sail….and he came and rescued us.Because the motor fell off the capsized boat and into the ocean, my brother never forgave me for losing the motor. Luckily, we are here today only because that guy saw us and rescued us. We never got his name.And we had a lot of good times together, like the tree-house! Has everyone seen the tree-house? APPLAUSE.I had children. He had grand-children. We saw my children and his children and grand-children develop. He took me to Ireland to see his grand-children…one of the best trips of our lives! My life, at least. [Paul’s wife, Hilda, interjects, “Paul!” and Paul says “Sorry, Hilda”] Beside the trips with my wife. LAUGHTER.I had no responsibility; Steve ran the whole trip, which he does run everything anyhow. And we had a lot of wonderful experiences, and I’m so happy to have been his friend all these years! APPLAUSE. [Steve rises to hug Paul, saying, “Paul doesn’t like to hug, but I’m hugging him anyway.”]CELIAI just want to add about the skiing. We went to this very fancy ski shop, the Scandanavian Ski Shop…and we said here are two guys and they both want to use the same boots. And the salesman, says, “What? Are you CRAZY? The same boots for different feet?” So we told him that they are the same size, and they both use these boots.STEVEPaul forgot to say that he and I are exactly the same size…suit size, pants size, inseam, shoe size, jacket size, hat size…and in my Will I’ve left him all of my clothes, and I think he may have done the same thing for me.SASCHAThank you, Paul. Next, we have Dave Robinson, Steve’s friend, mentor, advisor, big brother,…a PhD in physics from Harvard at age 22, room-mate of Tom Lehrer, science advisor in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration, Academic Provost at NYU, Senior Vice President of the Carnegie Foundation.DAVE ROBINSONThank you. First let me tell you how Steve and I met. I met Steve exactly half his life ago, when he was 37.5 years old, and he has gracefully matured, since that time, I must say. I met him when I was then at the Carnegie Foundation, and he wrote an amazing Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, which was also amazing that they would run something like that.What he did was he looked at book titles, and found how many titles were in different categories, like cook-books, fiction, sociology, history, detective stories, for example, of each type—and how many titles in each category came out each year. He found there was a tremendous range…some years there were many Sociology book titles or fiction titles, say 15 thousand, and other years there were much less…and he tried to correlate them (whispering: he didn’t do that very well), but he tried to correlate them with what was going on in society then.And I just thought that was ingenious. And then my colleague Margaret Mahoney, the President of the Carnegie Foundation, introduced us to each other. I invited Steve to lunch, which is what Foundation officers do, at the Harvard Club, and here was a guy who was a physicist as I had been, and had moved to other fields as I had moved, and with an enormous range of interests. He had worked for Herman Kahn, the “Doctor Strangelove” of our society. Herman Kahn, Steve will tell you, was a genius. [Steve interjects “mega-genius”]But I will tell you that when I worked in the Kennedy-Johnson administration on the President’s Science Advisory Committee, we sat in on discussions of who should be the next member of the committee…you know, working with all these Nobel Prize winners. And at one meeting, somebody mentioned someone’s name, and someone else said, “That man is a genius”. And I. I. Rabi, the Columbia University Nobel prize winner, said, “Genius is easy to find. Judgement is very difficult to find”. And Herman Kahn fits that. Perfectly, in my view. LAUGHTER.In any event, Steve has an extra-ordinary range of intellectual interests. But what really brought me to admire him in one two-hour period occurred when he was dealing with the Russian scientists.And what I saw was not only the enormous skill with which he was helping these Russian scientists, but the care he showed by coming to this community, and helping them, and encouraging them to go out and get jobs in the US economy…and how to do it in a culture that they didn’t understand.But what was clear was the enormous affection he had for them, and the mutual affection they had for him. Once you know Steve, you’re an instant friend with Steve. I was extremely impressed by his ability to connect with people, with Russian scientists. Which I had realized when he connected with me. He still has friendships with Russian scientists he helped.He called me one day, and said he was engaged to Celia, and would like me to meet her. So I said, OK. I’ll take you both to lunch at the Harvard Club. And we sat down, and I spent about three-quarters of an hour to an hour quizzing Celia. And at the end, I pulled him over, and I said, “She’s much too good for you!”. LAUGHTER. “You better marry her fast – before she recognizes this!...and he took my advice, and…I think he would have taken it even if I hadn’t given him advice”[Steve interjects, “What he really said is: ‘You’ve done very well!” LAUGHTER]Dave says, “Yes. That is true. And of course Celia has been a fabulous friend, companion, and influence on Steve these twenty five years.”Steve, as you know, is a very talented song-writer and lyricist.My problem is that, in 1944, when I was a sophomore at Harvard, I lived across the hall from a genius named Tom Lehrer, and we went through undergraduate and graduate school together, and drove across the country, and we sang together. We put on a great show at Harvard, called “The Physical Review”[also the name of the premier scientific journal of physics] . One thing was clear in our group. (Another guy there then was Lewis Branscomb, later head of research at IBM) What was very clear: there was a great difference between talent and genius….and Steve is really talented! Tom Lehrer, on the other hand…is, in fact, a genius.Steve asked me to sing a song by Tom Lehrer….But there’s a story that goes with this song.Danny Kaye, whose wife Sylvia Fine wrote his songs, used to sing a song…one song he did was called “Stanislavsy”…and in the song it says, the secret of acting success is “you must suffer. In Russian tragedy, everyone dies. In Russian comedy, everyone dies, but they die happy!” So for the show Tom decided to write a song based on Stanislavsky, only he wanted to use a famous mathematician, called Lobachevsky instead. Nicolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky. The nice thing about this song is that it is sort of parody and plagiarism of Danny Kaye’s song “Stanislavsky”, of course with his permission.Now this song requires audience participation. Now, every time I say ‘Nikolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky was his name’, you say “Hai!”DAVE ROBINSON sings “Lobachevsky” by Tom Lehrer“Who made me the genius I am today/ The mathematician that others all quote?//Who’s the professor that made me that way?/ The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat?”….You can find Tom Lehrer himself singing at JEFFREY MORRISThis may be a little more personal than Steve would like. As many of you know, I’m a physician, and Steve would often consult me. After he consulted all the biggest experts in Manhattan, he makes me feel honored that he wants to talk to a plain country doctor like me. And I always enjoy doing it whenever he needs medical advice, which is fairly frequent. I’m going to make my remarks suitable for everyone over twenty-one. A little salty.Aside from Steve’s great intellect, as we know…and now we know that he’s more talented than genius, he is also very proud of his certain physical prowess. [Steve, in an aside: “How do you know about that? LAUGHTER]I hope none of this will be a violation of medical confidentiality. So one of our consults had to do with ‘How often Steve gets up at night’… (i.e. his prostate) Let’s just say that it involved “rivers and streams”.So Steve was not happy with his ‘streams’ his ‘flow’, his ‘frequency’ [of urination]. So Steve did his research, consulted world experts, had a “laser vaporization of his prostate” and called me to tell me he was very happy with the result. There was no examination on my part. But at one point right after his (prostate) surgery, he was so happy with the result, we were at Longwood Gardens, where they have a lot of fountains, spraying streams very high in the air. And Steve was really enamored with these fountains… he felt a kinship with these high-stream fountains. They went up to fifty feet in the air. Not only that, he took pictures of the fountains….and decided at one point to e-mail these photos of streams and fountains to his surgeon who did his (prostate) procedure, and to say, “I’m thinking of you!”And people wondered why he was so happy to see these fountains, and the good part is I never had to see his own fountain.SASCHA PALADINO.And now a song, a favorite song of Steve’s, “You Make Me Feel So Young” sung by Neil Rosen, accompanied by Bela Fleck…NEIL ROSEN sings…You make me feel so youngYou make me feel like spring has sprungEvery time I see you grinI’m such a hap/py in/di/vi/du/alThe moment that you speakI want to go and play hide-and-seekI want to go and bounce the moonJust like a toy balloonYou and I, are just like a couple of totsRunning across the meadowPicking up lots of for-get-me-notsYou make me feel so youngYou make me feel there are songs to be sungBells to be rung, and a won/der/ful fling to be flungAnd even when I’m old and grayI’m gonna feel the way I do todayCause you make me feel so young.STEVEWow! Great singing! Thanks! Neil…you make me feel so old!SASCHA PALADINOThe next person to speak is Richard Lavenstein, Steve’s favorite neighbor in East Hampton, fellow-song-writer, yard-sale pal, brilliant architect, designer of Steve & Celia’s apartment kitchen in New York, their living room in East Hampton, and consultant on the Tree-house project, which he told Steve not to build unless he strengthened the platform with steel struts…RICHARD LAVENSTEINI didn’t write a song for this occasion, because I thought there was too much competition. I have a very short story to tell you.When I bought my house, the people who sold it to me said, “We have only one piece of advice for you…Stay away from your neighbors”. I didn’t take their advice….and the best thing about my house is that Celia and Steve are my neighbors.SASCHAThe next person to speak is Steve’s cousin Kiki.KIKI NELSONWhen I was a little kid, the Rosens lived in a great house in Flushing. It was beautifully decorated….and it had a rich green wall-to-wall carpet. And in the corner was the grand piano and the piano bench…. They also had a little dog named “Suzy-Q” , a black and white toy bull-dog. Suzy-Q had peed a few times on the green carpet near the piano bench. One day, my cousin Steve started to tickle me on the floor near the bench. I think I was five, and that would have made Steve twenty.Well, I peed on that floor, right where Suzy-Q peed. [Elliott interjects, “And the dog took the blame?” LAUGHTER] I don’t remember what happened after that. But I was embarrassed. You had embarrassed me. [Steve interjects: “Do you have bladder control now?” LAUGHTER]SASCHANow I’d like to bring up Elliott, Steve’s brother, the best man at his wedding…and still his best man.ELLIOTTWe were best man at each other’s weddings…and both weddings “took”… we’re all still happily married… THIS TIME! You all know I’m nine years older than Steve. [Crowd shouts “YOUNGER THAN STEVE!”] And fortunately I’m still nine years younger than Steve. Being a little kid, I was probably a nuisance to Steve. [Steve shakes his head NO]We had to share a bedroom, Steve and I. Barbara had her own bedroom. I’m not going to talk about the stream. I do remember hiding under the covers when Steve had girlfriends over in our bedroom. [Steve says: “That never happened.”]I remember I had my little rubber duck in the bath-tub, and you took it away from me. Remember? But I don’t hold it against you.[Steve interjects: “Elliott called it his ‘fubby duck’, not his rubber duck. And I did not take it away! I just needed it for something else!]As you know, our father owned a car wash a few blocks away on 181st Street. Steve, being older, was asked rather forcefully by Dad, when Steve got old enough, to work for him at the car wash. I did also, later on when I got to be of age. Steve didn’t really want to work at the car wash.The same piano Kiki brought up earlier…I hid under neath when Steve and Dad had a big knock-down drag-out fight over working at the car wash. Mom was away. And I hid under the piano, and maybe that’s what you were smelling…not Suzy-Q’s pee. Mine.We had to clean up the place before Mom came home…Our father was also a bit of a car nut. Steve’s first car was a junker, a 1938 Chevvy, falling apart. You could hear it coming up the street because the muffler was broken. Steve and Dad and I got under the car and fixed the muffler with old juice cans, that were made of tin, and Steve wrapped the cans around the muffler with these juice cans, the ends of which you cut out, and tied to the muffler with insulation and baling wire or coat hangers. I was very impressed.It’s interesting, Paul, that you mentioned the story about the sailboat. My last story is similar to your sailboat story, Paul. In my first marriage, we rented a house in Bayville, on the great south bay of Long Island. I bought a little day sailor. Remember?Steve came out one weekend and said, “Oh. I know how to sail”. So we took the sailboat out. It must have been the same windy day like you and Paul went out on. The same thing happened to us. It was windy and choppy and the motor fell off -- and went right down to the bottom. I’m still making payments on that motor. But it was another adventure.SASCHANow, a special request from Steve…a song by Abby and Bela.STEVEI want to tell you about this wonderful woman Abby Washburn …the newest youngest member of our family, shortly to be married to Bela. We’re very happy that they chose each other. She’s a big big talent. LAUGHTER.She spends a lot of time in China. She’s fluent in Chinese. She sings and plays in Chinese. She’s gorgeous. The two of them were at the Olympics in Beijing, by invitation! (They open for Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday Celebration and Gala at Madison Square Garden this Sunday!)ABBY AND BELAPerforming and singing “Everybody’s Doin’ It Now, Wont You Tell Me How”Hear that mu/sic nice and sweetCome on ba/by let's warm our feetEverybody does it now, come on let me show you howWork it Ms Fanny, everybody does it nowWent upstairs to drink some ciderSeen a big bug lovin' a spiderEverybody does it now, come on let me show you howYou'll get real freakish, everybody does it nowDoctors, lawyers, gigolos, copsall come here to heat their chopsEverybody does it now, come on let me show you howDon't get 'dicted, everybody does it nowGrampa Jarrell lay me lowI'm putting new tunes in this old banjoEverybody does it now, let me show you howWatch'em do the shimmy, everybody does it nowTwo time mamas all in dutchOut the backdoor, men too muchEverybody does it now, let me show you howTry to catch 'em at it, everybody does it nowMamas keep their papas brokeand lose them because they lost their strokeEverybody does it now, come on let me show you howYou really can't blame 'em, everybody does it now.SASCHANow, Bela’s going to speak.BELA FLECKGood judgment. Taking Louie, Danny, Lisa, and me to see the Marx Brothers movies…all of them.Bad judgment. Taking Louie and Danny and Lisa and me, and showing us that you could drive at sixty miles an hour without your hands.[Steve: “You remember that? I don’t remember that?]Steve was always taking us to see and hear all that old music…”Rhapsody In Blue”…and those kinds of movies and music.There’s lots of other bad judgment, but I can’t remember it all. Taking me skiing…and abandoning me on the beginner’s slope, so you could go off and ski. I was able to get on the lift myself. [Steve: “I don’t remember this at all.”]But I have to say the good judgment outweighs the bad judgment for me. The stuff that I learned about music and what came before, were worth all the bumps and bruises. I love you very much.SASCHAYou know that Steve and Celia have helped a lot of people with their career counseling. We could actually have a group counseling session right now. So I kind of adapted a few things from your book [“Career Renewal”]. I want to read some portions to everyone now, related to Steve …So you can figure out a few questions for him…Would you describe Steve as an introvert or an extrovert?What are his strengths? Jogging. His weaknesses? Lack of concentration? Not listening? Vanity?So what are the things you love the most about him? Intelligence. Good looks. Hair. All of the above?Well, based on all of that, according to this here book, “Career Renewal”, you should be –guess what -- a career counselor!STEVEI want everyone to know that Richard Lavenstein gave me this great gift…a cover of Life Magazine, circa 1949, showing J. Robert Oppenheimer on the cover, and it’s signed by the great man. Richard wanted me to know that he bought this great gift for me. He’s been telling me this for six months now.KIKIWe have a present for you. Special. A photograph of Albert Einstein from the archives, to be returned when the recipient reaches 120 years old. Very valuable.STEVEOpening the gifts. “I always admired Einstein the physicist, and the person, and I discovered pretty late that there is a difference between talent and genius…and I wasn’t it.” “That’s a great shot of Einstein!” “Beautiful” “Einstein in Jerusalem” limited edition….never published…”Thank you!”Lisa brought me a photo of Oscar Levant about nine months ago, assuming I was going to be alive today, which I am. [Despite my stroke and GI bleed.]I greatly admired Oscar and George when I was a kid. The difference between talent and genius: Oscar and George were to perform at a concert in Pittsburgh traveling by overnight train, and they discussed who gets the upper berth. And Gershwin said, he did, because there’s a difference between talent and genius.SASCHAWhat better way to demonstrate that difference than to have Steve sing one of his songs.STEVEIf you get bored you can leave.I’m going to sing a love song to my wife, because the best way to celebrate my existence is to celebrate hers….This song used to be called “You’re The Top”, by Cole Porter, but now it’s called “Hymn To Her”, words by Steve Rosen. [See the lyrics in the chapter, “Singin’ In The Brain”.] (Performance available on Your Tube sung by Steve a capella at a lunch in East Hampton at Watch?v=586LyHMuqOE&feature=youtu.be )And now: A few, very few, words. I promise to keep this short…There was a nineteenth-century general who said “Today, we stand at the edge of a deep dark abyss; Tomorrow, we take a giant step forward.”Well, I stood at the edge of a deep dark abyss about a month ago, (when I nearly died of a stroke) and I did not take that giant step forward, in large part because of Celia’s care, and excellent doctors, and I feel very fortunate to be still vertical, as my childhood friend Justin McCarthy puts it.I’m still vertical, and I’m very very very happy to be here with my favorite relatives and friends celebrating my 75th. ####“Career Change Among Scientists”Rockefeller University November 13, 1997 TRANSCIPTPanelists:Joseph Atick, President and CEO of Visionics Corporation, and Rockefeller UniversityDavid Z. Robinson, Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and the GovernmentStephen Rosen, Science and Technology Advisory BoardCelia Paul, Celia Paul AssociatesJOSEPH ATICKGood morning, everyone. Thank you for coming. My name is Joseph Atick. I'm the head of the Computational Neuroscience Lab at Rockefeller University. You are here today at the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology for a really special event. I’m actually very honored to be hosting this event. This is something I’m very passionate about: Career Renewal.We have with us today the two authors, Steve Rosen and Celia Paul. And of course, David Z. Robinson. I’d like to say just a few words about my own career renewal, then give the ?oor to David, and then give you a chance to interact with the authors -- who will answer any questions you may have.I used to be a high energy physicist many years ago. I went to Princeton full of enthusiasm for a subject called string theory, a study of how all forces in nature can be uni?ed into a single theory. One of the things at that time in my career that I recognized was our inability to make a connection between what we were working on and experiments. At that time, I perceived a strong meaning for career transition because I felt the thing that drove me to excitement with the ability to understand... as a scientist was something that was going to be. And since we could not do experiments, I could not stay in that subject.At that time, being in the hot and fashionable subject like high energy physics and making a career move was taboo. It was frowned on. What made it worse for me was the fact that the colleagues around me, as I made the transition, were very discouraging. This is like a personal relationship when you break up. When you break up, you’re somewhat in limbo; you have not made the transition. People say, well, you’re going to go back, get together again, and return to your original field.I basically burned my bridges right away because I knew if I did not, they were going to pull me back in. All along, the physicists were very negative about that, and that made making my career transition very uncertain, very difficult. For a period of two years, actually, I could not get a single paper published. I came from a field where in physics only one paper out of two dozen that I wrote came back with a request for revisions. I went into a new ?eld, I was totally unknown. It was exciting that I walked into conferences and nobody knew anything about me. And so I could say things that were dumb; but at the end of the day, I did not care about that. In the meantime, since I was not known, I was not publishing, there was a point in my career where it was difficult. You look back and on one side (my ?rst career) those people are angry at you and the other side (my second career) those new people have not yet accepted you. And it‘s very sad because science should not be that way. Science should allow an open transition from one field to another, and allow people to take their ideas from one ?eld to another. What I really liked about this book, “Career Renewal”, is that it’s ?lled with wonderful testimonials from people who struggled with these experiences. Steve and Celia have done a wonderful job in taking those experiences and deriving lessons that are very useful to anybody who is contemplating a career change. So, for me, I really wish this book would have existed ten years ago because it would have made my life a lot simpler. But even for someone who is not contemplating a career change, this makes for wonderful reading. I enjoyed reading about people who have gone through similar things that I have gone through, and who came to understand how they ended up making their own career transition. So, I’m really honored to have the opportunity to be able to sit on a panel with these distinguished people. So, without any further delay, I’d like to introduce David Z. Robinson who is the director of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and the Government.DAVID Z. ROBINSONSteve asked me to say a few words about my ?ve careers and how they happened. Most of the time, my career changes happened to me with more or less serendipity. I didn’t really have a conscious plan. But I do like the term “career renewal,” which is the title of the book, because I think career renewal is important. And you can have career renewal sometimes in the same job by doing, starting and doing, totally new things and advancing.I started out as a bench scientist. l got out of graduate school in 1949, as a physical chemist. This was right after World War II and the universities had expanded tremendously to take care of the veterans that came back. But then after three or four years, the veterans had graduated and the universities were shrinking and there were no academic jobs. I found a job-—l had done work in infrared spectroscopy—and that was the ?rst job I really looked for, in a company that made optical, electronic, and infrared instruments.I went to work for the company that made the same instruments that I worked on in my graduate work. I spent ten years in the lab. I was sort of a theoretical experimentalist. That is, I could ?gure out good experiments to do, but I was sort of a klutz in terms of actually doing them. Fortunately, they gave me a couple of assistants. Whenever I was working with my experiments, if something would go wrong, I would start to move towards the spectrometer to ?x it. All of a sudden I’d ?nd three people standing in front of me pushing me back. They‘d say, “OK, Dave. We’ll ?x it.” I got my machines ?xed before anyone else because they knew if I had come close to and started to ?x it, they would have to spend another two weeks ?xing it instead of just a couple of hours.When you’re working in industry, you can’t take a sabbatical, but I thought I needed a sabbatical. I had known some people in the Office of Naval Research and I said, “Do you have a London branch?” And the Office of Naval Research has a scienti?c liaison that lets scientist go over and visit laboratories. This was after WWII. There wasn’t the same kind of connection between European science and American science that it has become, because the war just separated the people. So I said, “Do you have a spot for me?” And they said, “Yes. We’d love to have you." So, I quit my job and went over to England and became in effect, a science journalist.I went to scienti?c meetings. I had been active in the Optical Society and I knew a number of these European scientists, some of the leaders. So, I could visit their labs, and so forth. By chance, I had an opportunity. And it was very interesting. I told a lot of European scientists what was going on in the United States before it was published and was able to write back to American scientists and tell them interesting people they should visit when they went to Europe. It was a wonderful experience. And it's nice living in London, too, particularly on an American salary in 1959 and ‘60.I had happened to meet somebody who was working for the President’s science advisor. George Kistiakowsky was Eisenhower’s Science Adviser. I thought had a job offer to work in the White House. And, so I decided not to go back to the company that I had gone to, and decided I would go to the White House. Unfortunately, I was the ?rst person turned down by the White House because I was an active ADA Democratic in Massachusetts before I had gone over to England. The Republican administration didn’t think that I could be very useful for the Republican President of the United States. Kistiakowsky was science adviser whom I knew because I had done my graduate work in his department. This was 1960 and he didn’t know what was going to happen, so he said he couldn’t ?ght for me. I said that was ?ne; the President should only have advisors that he likes. So, I went back to work to my company.Two to three months later, in the election of 1960, it turned out that being an ADA Democrat from Massachusetts wasn't too bad. The Office of Science Advisory continued and I went to work for Jerome Weisner, later the president of MIT, who was Kennedy's Science Advisor. So, I went from being a scientist to facilitating science work for people. I took a two year leave from the company. I found that I still went back to the Optical Society meetings, but the first year, I was going to the ten minute papers, detailed papers, and I was arguing about should they put choppers in front of the exit slit instead of the entrance slit. Things like that.Then the next year, I found that I was going only to the invited papers, the 30 minute papers. George Wald would talk about the eye and how it worked and so forth.The third and fourth year, I found that I was spending most of my time standing in the corridors talking to my friends and not going to the papers at all. What I was doing… I was sort of a -- I was working in communications and general science and I worked on the future of high-energy physics so that Joseph Atick here could have something to do 30 years later.I got all kinds of letters. All kinds of people wrote to the White House. A professor from Swarthmore wrote the White House at the time of the space program and he said, “You know, there is a lot of radiation in space and that can cause damage to future generations. And it’s lonely up there in space and I think you should send Trappist monks in space because they're celibate, and they’re not going to have any children and they don‘t talk.” So, I was given this letter: Respond to this letter. So I started out by saying, “You know, it’s really great. After you put chimps in space, we’ll put monks in space.” That was a lot of fun… writing that letter.But I did learn that you can‘t get anything done in Washington in two years. And so, I extended my leave. For those of you who are scientists, I ?gured my “time constant" was about two years of declining scienti?c competence. After four years I was one over e-squared, which is 14% of my capability, and I didn’t know what my recovery time was going to be. So, I stayed on in Washington.And by chance, NYU was looking for a Vice President of Science, and when they offered it to me, and I heard the Vice President of Social Science and Humanities was going to be the president of Clark University, I said if they combined the two jobs and made it Vice President of Academic Affairs I would come up.So, I found myself, after worrying about 14 billion dollars worth of research that the government was doing and then worrying about approving the hiring of a new professor at $12,000 a year in 1967, which is what the salary was at that time. Going from huge things to detailed things.In a few years, I went to the Carnegie Foundation and nine years ago we started a Commission on Science, Technology, and Government. I went back and (Nobel Laureate) Joshua Lederberg, who was the co-chair, and Bill Golden asked if I would be willing to be Executive Director of it. I went trying to manage a big foundation -- I was Vice President and Treasurer of the Carnegie Foundation at the time -- to trying to put together all of my former careers in one, because the Commission tried to deal with how the government could use scienti?c information more effectively.We looked at the White House in the ?rst report, then to Congress, then the judicial system. I was just at a meeting yesterday at the National Academy of Sciences trying to deal with the judicial system. I think that the key, to me at least, has been having interests in outside areas and try and follow up in areas where I had interest. Even politics; I was interested in disarmament issues when I was working in industry, and I worked evenings at those kinds of questions and political issues. So, I get a chance to get to meet and know people in other areas, and to keep active as a scientist and to keep active in my profession, being willing to try… and being interested in other things.In any event, I didn’t have the bene?t of reading “Career Renewal” and I wish I did because I got where I did by serendipity and good luck and people happened to come by that I had been involved with in other areas. But, I think others will have the bene?t of the exercises and the disciplined assessment process in the book, and I’d like Steve to tell you about itSTEVE ROSENThank you, Dave. Our book wasn’t around when these guys wanted to change their careers. But, I have to tell you that neither of these guys needed this book, nor do they need the book now because each of them invented, and reinvented, themselves on their own. They are two examples of a class of maybe a hundred individuals who were interviewed for the book whom we have come to call “career change champions.” The simple reason is that they changed careers on their own with no outside help. They say, and I believe them, that each career was satisfying to them and that they were able to be successful. One population that inhabits the book are the career change champions. And what it means to be a career change champion is discoverable by interviewing these people and hearing them talk. Joseph and Dave are walking, talking case histories, and there are many more in the book. When you talk to them and listen to them carefully and read their stories, you understand that careers are very complicated. Career changes and turning points and career-decision making patterns are very complicated. It depends on how old you are when you do it--you notice we have an age spectrum of career change champions here. The idea of career well-being based on physical health as a metaphor came to us when I read that Hippocrates 25 centuries ago said that what’s more important than what ailment the person has is what person has the ailment. And so in career terms, we think and we‘ve observed thousands of individuals, examples of what person has the career, what career the person has--and these examples inhabit the book, a population of people who need help, who ask for help. Very often, scientists find it’s very hard for them to ask for help--largely because of their training--and Celia will say a little more about that. I am part of the book too, somewhat hidden, but I myself have made a few career changes which I will briefly mention.I worked for IBM as a research scientist, I was an academic physicist, I did research in the origins of cosmic radiation, creation of proton and anti-proton pairs in interstellar space--something that was not going to make me rich. I ended up doing industrial research for a large corporation in New Jersey and then I met Herman Kahn -- the so-called ‘evil genius, Dr. Strangelove’-- who was the head of an infamous organization called the Hudson Institute, and had written several very provocative books. One was called, “On Thermonuclear War”, probably the most unusual book on the subject since Von Clausewitz’s book on war a century earlier; and another book called “The Year 2000”. I ended up writing a book inspired by “The Year 2000” called “Future Facts”. The next thing I knew I was in the book publishing business.I migrated from that to investment banking and about seven years ago I started a non-pro?t foundation called Science & Technology Advisory Board quite by accident. A Russian refugee-scientist who had come here from the former Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War -- and there was a whole ?ood of them during Glasnost and Perestroika -- came to ask for some advice through some mutual acquaintances. He had a double PhD and was driving a cab at that point. I helped him to get a job in his original specialty, rheology, and he must have told his friends where he lived in Brooklyn -- Little Odessa they call it, Brighton Beach. The next thing I knew… there was a line of Russian emigre scientists outside our door asking for help.So I went to some wealthy friends and a couple of foundations and we started a non-pro?t organization and eventually helped some 400 Russian refugee scientists to find jobs here in their original specialties. Incidentally, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation came along and observed the program and pointed out to me that what we were doing for Russian refugee scientists had to be done for American scientists as well. The end of the Cold War had not only diminished the job opportunities for Russians in Russia but for American scientists in America.When I look back at my own career decision-making patterns in this recitation of six or seven different careers, I see that the simple pattern of my career changes was that I had a short attention span. Each of those jobs that I described lasted for only a couple of years. Each person has their own career decision-making pattern which they’re not always aware of until later, sometimes when it‘s too late, only later when one looks at it in retrospect. The reasons we decide on a given career when young are often shrouded from our own view, often until much later when we can look back with some perspective.We have an exercise in the book that allows one to look at the major turning points, the major branches, the major forks in their career trajectory: Such as what high school you decided to go to, what college you decided to go to, what major you decided, what graduate school you decided to go to, what specialty in graduate school, what mentor you decided to work for, your ?rst post-doc position, your second post-doc position. At each of those junctures, and the exercise in the book shows how to do it, you are asked, “what were the choices open to you at the time, what were the alternatives at the time, what were your rationales for making the choice that you made at the time, and ?nally, in retrospect, how did it work out and would you do it again differently.” (Yogi Berra, that famous scientist said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.") It‘s not so simple.Now, because of the patterns that are a function of our personalities -- the person we are not the career we have -- it’s possible to make systematic mistakes. Or, it's also possible to make one mistake and maybe it’s a little mistake and maybe it's early in your career, before you have a chance to know yourself well or the ways of the world well. But, unfortunately, we’re called upon to make these career decisions very early. In chaos theory, there is an effect called the “butter?y effect.” a metaphor created by Edward Lorentz that small errors amplify: A butter?y flapping its wings in Iowa can produce a monsoon in India, in principle. In career terms, a small wrong turn in the road now can get you very lost later on. The question is: How do we know that we’re making a ‘wrong turn’ when the trees obscure the forest?In my own case, I can say, in retrospect, all of those different careers that I just described to you made me an expert in “career change”. I also discovered later in life that I really like to help people. To me, at this point in my life -- I‘m 63 -- I made the most inevitable career choice in the last seven years, but it didn‘t seem that way along the way. Very often I would wake up and say, “Investment banking?” But now I wake up and say, “Gee, this is really great. I’m looking forward to the day."Let me tell you, a wonderful story about George Gershwin; when he went to Paris he visited Maurice Ravel. He asked if he could study harmony and composition with Ravel, and Ravel said, “Why be a second-rate Ravel, when you can be a ?rst-rate Gershwin?“ So, all of us would like to think that we can be the best person we can be, the most ful?lled, and use to the maximum those skills that we most enjoy using. Let me quote some of the comments that we’ve excerpted from an inventory of what “career change champions,” say were beliefs and activities they felt were instrumental in helping them help themselves change career directions. These are some of the hallmarks. They are exact quotes. I'll read only a few of them....“My work is worthy expression of my life.”“I know who I am.”“I think about how my career changes me as a person." “I lead a balanced life.” “I have a sense of my intellectual capacity.““Logical, systematic, and scienti?c thinking is useful in many venues.” “I am uncomfortable if large aspects of myself are undeveloped.”“I do whatever has the most positive impact, given my abilities."Some of these are from the same people; we’ve got a hundred ease histories like this.“I’m intense about my family my friends and my work.”“I feel satisfaction when I help others.““Being right is the scientists’ disease.”“My career is ?lled with fortuitous events and serendipity.” “I learn by imitating my betters."“Most of my jobs came to me."“I solve my bosses’ problems, not my own.”“I shrug off adversity with ease and good humor.” “I have had many good mentors.““I know what’s important to me.““I view my career as an activity embedded within the ?ow of life.”“My intelligence is a way to make others feel good."I think you'll agree that people who believe those statements -- and Joseph and David are excellent examples of them -- if they were to go through these questions, they would score at the uppermost right tail of a normal distribution of people. People who live and really believe those statements don’t see them as platitudes. They actively believe and act upon those beliefs. And so, they have a constellation of career behaviors, career attitudes which we have been able to identify and as a gold standard against which we can compare ourselves. And that leads us to the Career Well-Being Inventory. A short version, Career Health Lite, you will ?nd on the handouts. And if you‘d like to try your hand at comparing yourself to the “gold standard” of “career-well-being” which occurs when you change careers until you find a good or the best fit to who you are, answer the items and let us know your results, we’d be happy to interpret them for you.I want to tell you two more stories. David McClelland is a sociologist who studied the sociology of science, and found that among scientists there is a need for achievement. Among scientists, he found that it is very common for scientists to want to work in a community of great men and great women. He also found that scientists tend to have a belief in their comparative failure as scientists, obviously not unrelated to the desire to work in a community of great scientists. These are hindrances. These are hindrances to careers, straight path careers, and career changes.I want to tell a story about Thomas Edison, who invented the incandescent light bulb among other items. He was trying to ?nd the correct substance that would make an incandescent light bulb light up, while enclosed in an evacuated, glass enclosed envelope, and would stay lit. Nowadays we use tungsten, but they didn’t know that. At three o’clock one morning, after years of trying one substance after another, he came upon a substance that worked. The bulb lit up and it stayed lit. And of course he shouted, “Eureka!” which means ‘I have found it’. And he wanted to run to tell somebody; he was very excited. The only person around was his wife who was sleeping. So he went to her bedside and shook her shoulder and he said something like, “Honey, come see what I’ve done!“ And she rolled over and woke up and said, “Tom, why don't you just turn out the light and come to bed!” Now sometimes I feel like Thomas Edison, and sometimes my wife Celia feels like Mrs. Edison.To get practical, when you’re looking for a job and looking to change your career, you create your resume. This representation of you, your resume, is almost like Edison‘s comments “look what I’ve done." But, you give your resume to people who are like Mrs. Edison: “Turn out the light and come to bed." This is merely a piece of paper. “Turn out the light.” Your resume is never as good as you are.We have discovered through trial and error that it’s strategic not to give out resumes -- and a lot of error -- and we teach people who are going to change careers that they‘re going to make a lot of errors, and so we urge them to make their errors quickly, since everyone is going to make errors. The resume should be the last step before one gets a job or before one changes careers. The simple reason is, the subtext of a resume is “I want a job; give me a job.” It’s almost begging, although it may not seem like that. Because if you receive a resume, you automatically assume that whoever is submitting this resume, even if you get it second-hand or third-hand from someone else, that someone needs a job, wants a job, is desperate. And so that’s not the best way to present yourself. What we have found is much more useful, is a one-page biography which can be shaped individually to each job opening. Nevertheless, employers ask for resumes. You have to be very clever to avoid giving then one because, and one of the things we urge candidates to say when asked for a resume is, “My resume is not yet as good as I am.” That’s always true, because it‘s only a piece of paper.We have a resume for Horatio Admiral Lord Nelson, which I didn’t include in the book. It shows how foolish resumes can look, in a humorous way, because it starts off by saying how he was educated in the Royal Navy midshipman school and that despite the lack of one eye and one arm, he can row a boat, shoot weapons, climb masts, and govern a Navy. Of course, knowing his accomplishments in this light, makes his resume seem super?uous.I think I’m lucky in that I get to use, if not all of the skills I’ve acquired over the life I’ve had, then very many of them in my present career. And I’d wish the same for everyone. It’s easier in retrospect to see how “inevitable” my current career is; but in prospect -- if you can ?gure out, and the book tells you how to do this -- you can ?gure out what in retrospect would appear to have been inevitable…then, that’s your career! Now, here’s a woman who has treated me as if I were her equal for 12 years of marriage, and a year or so of writing this book, herself a career changer. She‘s probably the country’s leading expert on the career problems of attorneys and physicians: Celia Paul.CELIA PAULThank you. I always ?nd it a little frustrating to try to speak brie?y about how you go about a career transition because the best way to get involved in the process is really to get involved in the process—which is to begin to do exercises. If we had more time, particularly for the students who are here, we would begin the process for you, but because we want to keep this short--we know everyone has a busy day and we appreciate your coming early in the morning--I’m just going to make a few remarks about what I see is the most important aspects of any career transition.Actually, I'm going to focus on one aspect, because in thinking about the difference between the “career change champions” and the people I see daily who need help—I guess for me, one of the most challenging and satisfying parts of the book was interviewing the people who had made successful career changes with Steve. In my own work and practice--basically I see people all day long who are having difficulties with their careers. That’s why they‘re coming to see me. So, it was really a very satisfying experience to talk to people who had been so successful without seeking my help. And looking at what was the difference between where they were, and where the people who are coming for help are, I think we still don’t have all the answers to that -- and it’s going to be an ongoing process that we've begun by developing this inventory on career well-being.But, it seems to me that one of the most important ingredients for the career-change champions is that they had con?dence that the skills that they had could be transferred to many other ?elds. On the other hand, with clients that come in for career help, it’s very difficult for them to have the con?dence that the skills that they have right now can be used in other ways.And I think, particularly being a specialist or a professional, means that your training is very speci?c and deep, and the way you become successful as a lawyer, as a doctor, as a scientist, is by focusing on a very speci?c area and working very hard to master that area. And the idea that these skills can be broadened to be used in a totally different area, and having the vision to be able do that, and the con?dence to do it, I think is very difficult. Perhaps, I haven‘t really proved this, but it would be an interesting hunch to test out that people who are highly credentialed -- as Steve refers to them as “educated beyond their abilities to market themselves"—-perhaps people who are less educated may have less dif?culty seeing those connections to other fields because they may have broader viewpoints. I’m not sure; that’s just a hunch. And we hope in our future work to be able to do more research on the Career Well-Being Inventory and to test it out with other groups. So, we’ll see how it works out.To me, the most critical element in making a career transition is to look at your values: what‘s important to you in your life, what kind of trade-offs are you willing to make when you make a transition. Maybe you’ll get more money in a particular job, maybe you’ll have more independence in another, maybe you’ll be able to take a sabbatical in one, and you won’t in the other. So, by the way, in interviewing the “career-change champions" also, as you can see from the two people besides us who came today, is that they're very humble people, and it's often hard to get them to talk about what they actually did. And they will often, not just David and Joseph, but a lot of the people who were interviewed, would often say it was luck or circumstance. Now obviously, luck plays some part in that, but Louis Pasteur and career counselors say, “chance favors the prepared mind.” So, people who are in the right place, but also ready to make that move and have the con?dence that they can, are obviously going to be more successful. I‘ve seen many situations in my own work where clients have had an opportunity almost right in front of them and they don’t see it because they’re in a mind-set that they think that they can’t do that. If you think you can’t do something, you probably can’t.Another aspect of career change...there’s a very extensive skills inventory in the book which is a good way to derive your most enjoyable and transferable skills by extracting them from your most enjoyable accomplishments.Don’t take “accomplishments” too literally; professionals are always saying, “That isn‘t really an accomplishment.” “I went to Harvard Law School but I didn’t have to work that hard to get in there.” So you want to, really, look at things you’ve done that are important to you, personally, and analyze those accomplishments or achievements, and see what skills you used in order to accomplish them. This exercise helps you do that, and you will then be able to see a cluster of skills that you have that you can use in another or different area from the one you wish to leave. And the good news about professionals is although their training is narrow or speci?c and deep in particular areas, they do have a lot of the skills --sometimes a bushel basket full -- that are necessary to make successful transitions.One of the things that I ?nd very satisfying about my work is that the people I have helped, once they have a focus and a sense of what they’d like to do, and what’s going to work for them -- they are able to do it. They have the “follow-through skills,” they‘re organized, they’re intelligent, they know how to work with a lot of different data at the same time, so that they are able to really follow a path that they have selected and persist in making the transition.We also encourage you to look at the skills that you have that you enjoy using. Skills that you don’t enjoy using are often called “killer skills," skills that you have developed in your ?eld because you’ve had to develop them because you needed them in order to succeed in that ?eld, but you don't really like them and you want to do something else that meets your own personal values and that uses skills that you ?nd rewarding.In addition to the “career-change champions“, there are examples in the book of people who have gone through the process that I’m describing to you. There’s one, particularly, that I’ll refer you to whose name is Donna Ferrandino who talks about how she didn’t have a good sense of direction until she worked through her skills; but then she didn’t have a good sense of where they would fit. She describes the process in our book that she goes through to ?gure out how she can use those skills to work at a different career.Lastly, I just want to say that I ?nd a very important aspect for people to focus on is that the process of career transition sometimes seems very daunting and you’re over “here,” and you want to go over “there.” Not only do you not know what “there” is—so it feels like an abyss over there—but you also feel like, “How am I possibly going to get from this point to that point?” And you can even feel that way once you have a sense of direction. “That’s so far away from what I’m doing now. How can I possibly do that”? And then you become paralyzed, you can‘t move and you stay where you are because you can’t ?gure out the steps that you need to take. What I ?nd is helpful is that you focus on taking small steps—we sometimes call them “baby steps"—and just taking one step at a time, and doing one thing every day. Or, however it works for you. But, that will help you get into motion. There is a saying, “Imperfect motion is better than perfect paralysis." Sometimes taking a little step, or taking a job which isn’t exactly what you want but it’s going to lead you in the direction that you want to go, is important to get you moving. I don’t want to take too much of your time. We want to allow some time for questions. I thank you all for coming.AUDIENCE MEMBERAbout how much time do you think one person should allow to get from where they are currently in their career to the next phase? I mean, you talked about little steps, but to get from where you are to where you really want to be? How much of a time frame are we talking about‘?ROSENI often say that’s like asking the question: How long is a string? And the answer is: It depends. It depends on how many hours a week you’re willing to invest in the change. It may have taken you a good many years to get where you are. And to get to where you’d like to be can take years, a year, six months, and sometimes less. Celia just mentioned the abyss. There’s a Brazilian general in the 19th century who said, “Today we stand at the edge of a deep abyss. Tomorrow we take a giant step forward.” CELIA PAULAnother thing it depends on is how far it is from what you‘re doing now to what you want to do. So, if you want to get another job in your own ?eld, for example—if your job isn‘t working out and you want to get another job in that ?eld—that‘s going to be the least time. If you want to get another job in a related ?eld, that will be a little more. If you want to change to something which uses very different skills, and you may have to go to school and add things, that’s going to be even more. I always ask people who’ve made transitions, when they speak, to talk about how the process itself—because sometimes, when you read books, and I think you’ll ?nd in this book we tried not to do that, it looks as if one day someone was a lawyer, and the next day they’re a graphic designer. You don’t really get a sense of what they went through. On the average, with the attorneys who are probably one of the largest groups of career transition professionals that have been studied, it's anywhere from six months to a year, year and a half. And that’s probably an average. And that’s from the beginning thinking stages to the employment and the new position.AUDIENCE MEMBERIs it better to be in a position and feeling your way toward new ones? Or say, shucks, I’m not interested in this one, and go off and have a lot of time to do your resume which is not going to be helpful. I have found that it’s much easier to make a switch if you are working somewhere where they’d like to keep you.ROSENWhere they know that you want to leave? Joseph had the luxury of the ?ve year post-doc.ATICKYeah, that was an opportunity. I knew. But I also knew that I had to make the transition as fast as possible. I had to burn my bridges [back to high energy physics]. It’s very important not to look back because if you know exactly where you want to be--the problem that I ?nd with a lot of people--when they see it as an uphill struggle, they roll back. I had to burn the bridges. This reminds me: when the Arabs invaded Spain. There was a warrior who led the invasion, and the ?rst thing he did when the landed on the shore...he ordered all the ships burned. He burned the entire Armada. And his people said, “You must be insane. Why did you do that?" And it was very clear that there was no option for the invaders except to move forward. And at least for me personally, burning my bridges was a very good decisive motivation. If I left my bridges up, I would still be in high energy physics doing things that have nothing to do with reality, unfortunately.ROSENDave was at Harvard with Tom Lehrer, with whom I did an interview for the book. I hope you know who he is: a mathematician and well-known satirical song-writer. Tom said if he had ?nished his Ph.D. in mathematics he’d be an assistant professor of mathematics in Iowa farm-country someplace. Now, instead of that he is an accomplished writer-performer and famous satirical comic, in a completely different career. Among his best known songs: “Werner von Braun”, “The Vatican Rag”, “The Elements”, “Lobachevsky”, “Hanukah in Santa Monica”.CELIA PAULI think that for a lot of professionals, it’s difficult to work and at the same time conduct a really effective job search, because their days are very long and ?lled with demanding projects. The job search requires a lot of networking and seeing people, contacting people, and especially seeing people on their own time-schedule, and of course they’re doing you a favor by speaking to you. So, if you have a very demanding position, it may be difficult to do both. It’s really an individual decision. A lot of it has to do with the attitude that the person making the career change has. If the changer feels positive about their change, when they’re not working they can project a positive image and explain why they’re not working, it’s ?ne. But some people, when they’re not working, may lose their identity. If you feel at loose-ends when you’re conducting a job search or career change and you have to project a positive image, then you’re going to have a problem. A lot of this issue is, I think, individual personality.AUDIENCE MEMBERDon‘t you ?nd also that people can be much more creative in terms of creating space, either asking for a three-month leave, or doing something in between having to totally let go of your identity as a whatever. I don’t know that everybody is good at burning the ships. Sometimes you can be creative and ?nd things in between “having to burn your ships” and “not having time.”CELIA PAULThat’s a good point.JOSEPH ATICKActually, from my experience, I have to say that this is right because right now I’m going through another transition. I‘ve taken a leave from Rockefeller University for a year -- a sabbatical for exploring another direction. That’s precisely what I did instead of doing what I did at the Institute. That’s a suggestion.CELIA PAULAgain, it’s prudent to be “taking small steps."... instead of trying to do things dramatically.DAVID ROBINSONWell, I quit my job, if that’s how you do. Usually you get a sabbatical. I was reasonably con?dent they would offer the job back to me in a couple of years.####COSMIC RAYS AS EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL MESSINGERS How to find ice on Mercury, X-ray a Volcano and create Higgs bosons.I wrote the following essay for the East Hampton Star (Guestwords column, 13 December 2012). It was a challenge to write simply enough for anyone to understand. One friend said it elevated the Star. Not their normal Guestwords column, but the only reason they ran it: I agreed to write a review of Dava Sobel’s book on Copernicus – if and only if they ran it. They ran it.COSMIC MESSENGERS: Gifts from beyondStephen RosenYes, Virginia, Santa’s North Pole is covered with snow and ice. But THIS JUST IN: trillions of tons of ice really exist at the North Pole of Mercury, our Sun’s hottest companion.NASA’s Messenger Spacecraft recently detected the nuclear signatures of water ice using galactic cosmic rays as probes. On other NASA missions, cosmic rays helped discover water on the Moon and Mars. Cosmic rays probe and “X-Ray” volcanoes to predict when they will erupt. Very high energy cosmic rays also generate recurring avalanches of nuclear particles, even Higgs Bosons, everywhere in our atmosphere. These “cosmic showers” rain down over square miles of the Earth’s surface penetrating our bodies, for the most part, harmlessly. Cosmic rays are the only samples of matter that arrive on Earth from outside our solar system, and we now know that they are very energetic extra-terrestrial protons (nuclei of hydrogen) and nuclei of heavier elements. Some low-energy cosmic particles originate in the Sun; high-energy cosmic rays come from stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy; and very high-energy cosmic rays come from beyond our Galaxy.The highest energy cosmic rays observed, if somehow converted into useful work, could probably lift a locomotive—but there is no simple way to harness this immense deluge of energy constantly raining down on us. (Very sad, really, when you think about how much oil and gas we consume…and how expensive electricity is on the East End.) Astronauts sent into space are exposed to the primary or extra-terrestrial cosmic ray beam, and can experience serious health consequences if they are unshielded on long voyages. At the bottom of the atmosphere where we reside, we are mostly protected by the blanket of air above us, except when a rare energetic particle strikes a chromosome. Genetic changes may ensue; fit mutations will survive.Some cosmic rays come from the core or nucleus of our Galaxy where stars are born -- and a giant black hole lives. NASA’s Space Telescope has recently detected huge bubbles there emitting gamma radiation and X-rays. Cosmic rays are messengers carrying scientific information as gifts from beyond.The information content of cosmic rays tell us their energy, their origins, their age, the directions from which they come, and what they passed through on their way here. Evidence comes from very sensitive sophisticated scientific instrumentation on mountain tops, or sent aloft in special balloons and satellites. Data also come from the International Space Station, Mercury’s recent visitor the Messenger Spacecraft, and the Mars Rover Curiosity.The most energetic cosmic particles striking nitrogen and oxygen air molecules at the top of our atmosphere generate a cascade of nuclear reactions, fanning out over thousands of acres by the time they reach the Earth’s surface. These “cosmic showers” are an avalanche of nuclear air-molecule fragments sharing the high energy of the initial incoming cosmic ray. Vast arrays of nuclear particle-detectors placed at ground level are set to count only those nuclear events which occur simultaneously. This says the original triggering cosmic ray came from interstellar or intergalactic space. Cosmic particles come from all directions in the Universe uniformly. The cosmic ray beam is roughly constant in time. The lower-energy particles are more abundant than the higher-energy particles.Another source of information about the constancy of the primary cosmic ray beam over time comes from observing the composition of meteorites that have been traveling around our solar system for millions of years or more. Modified by cosmic ray bombardments, they act as if they were cosmic ray “dosimeters”, showing that the primary galactic cosmic rays have been constant in intensity within a factor of two over a million years, and constant within a factor of three or four over a billion years.Where do cosmic rays come from? The most likely sources are supernovae…stars that have reached a stage in their evolution when they become unstable and erupt in a spectacular outburst of energy in the form of light, x-rays, gamma rays, and nuclear particles.Supernovae may be visible to the naked eye for months: the Crab Nebula (seen in 1054 AD); the Tycho Brahe supernova (seen in 1572); and the Kepler supernova (seen in 1604 AD). Similar spectacular events have been documented in ancient annals and astronomical observations from China and Japan. A supernova flares up in our Galaxy every fifty years or so—but there are 100 billion distant galaxies in the Universe that contribute their share to the primary beam of ultra-high cosmic rays finding their way to us.The relative constancy of cosmic rays in time and space says that these sources of cosmic rays are also distributed uniformly in space and time. Magnetic fields bend the paths of positively-charged cosmic rays (mostly protons) so much so that there is no obvious correlation between the directions they arrive from here…and the direction they had at their source. Light rays move in a (mostly) straight line-of-sight to us from distant stars. Unlike light rays, cosmic rays move in a sort of “random walk”, “drunkard’s stagger”, or “pinball’s path” before they reach us, disguising their source’s origin, and suppressing any variations in space or in time. Imagine the Earth bathed in an immense reservoir or rippling “sea” of cosmic rays.Our Galaxy looks like a flat pancake (the “disk”) with a scoop of ice cream at its center (the “core”); our Solar System is located about half-way out within one of the many spiral arms in the disk. Cosmic rays may be “stored” by bouncing around in our Galaxy in the sense that a pinball bouncing from obstacle to obstacle is “stored” in the pinball machine. Some cosmic rays bounce off light nuclear targets and are deflected slightly. Others strike heavy nuclear targets and are deflected a great deal so the original particle source-direction is not preserved.How could the cosmic ray particles from exploding stars be accelerated to such incredibly high energies—energies not even remotely available in terrestrial nuclear particle accelerators? An unusual acceleration mechanism was famously suggested by the great physicist Enrico Fermi.Imagine a tennis ball bouncing up and down on a flat horizontal surface. Visualize a tennis racquet placed above the ball parallel to the horizon moving slowly downward. The vertical bounces of the ball between the two approaching flat surfaces will increase rapidly. Rather slow motion downwards of the tennis racquet results in a rather surprising rapid increase in the speed of the bouncing ball, as the frequency rise of the audible bounces would indicate. Imagine the ball represents the cosmic ray particle, and the two approaching flat surfaces represent reflecting “mirrors” or reflecting walls. A high magnetic field can act as a “reflector” of charged particles. Of course, these are simple analogies, and conditions in interstellar or intergalactic space are what they are.Physicist Karl Darrow said that cosmic radiation “is unique in modern physics for the minuteness of the phenomena, the delicacy of the observations, the adventurous excursions of the observers, the subtlety of the analysis,…and the grandeur of the inferences.”The cosmos is extremely generous, showering us with cosmic messages and gifts of grandeur. Happy Holidays! ####Stephen Rosen, author of “Cosmic Ray Origin Theories”, former research physicist at the Institut d’Astrophysique in Paris and at the Centre Nucleaires de Saclay, lives in East Hampton and NewYork.What’s Good About Goodbye?By Stephen Rosen and Celia PaulOctober 13, 2011 - East Hampton Star??? With the economy hesitating to recover, is it time to think about finding or changing jobs? Normally, about one person in 10 changes occupations per year. Nowadays, about twice that number contemplate switching. What’s so good about saying goodbye to a job or career? What’s good about being fired??? ?Finding a new job and changing jobs, careers, or occupations can lead to job satisfaction. Many studies (and our personal experience) show that job satisfaction is an important predictor of job performance. A happy worker is a productive worker. So it’s not surprising that changing occupations led us, and can lead you, to career satisfaction. But how do you find your true calling, your passion-at-work??? ?Some of us acquire practical job satisfaction by changing careers repeatedly until we find what’s right for us, sometimes through chance encounters. (Louis Pasteur, who discovered penicillin serendipitously, said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”)?? ?But our studies of thousands of downsized employees and job-changers prove that there’s a special population who learn how to find or switch jobs naturally, easily, and freely. They find new ways to direct themselves in new avenues, to use their skills and strengths. They figure out how to find a job that dovetails with their skills. They arrive at a kind of inevitable match to their work. Their skills fit their work like a glove. They are invigorated, not exhausted, by work. They fully enjoy the exercise of their signature talents and their strongest and most enjoyable skills. One of these rare individuals put it this way: “My work is now a worthy expression of who I am.”?? ?Parents or well-meaning friends may suggest to career-bewildered youngsters, “Become a lawyer or a doctor, and you’ll never have to worry about making a living.” We find that many lawyers and doctors later in life, after following this advice, actually experience a rude awakening: They have a mortgage, a lifestyle, and a family to support and realize they’re doing what their parents wanted, not necessarily what they want.?? ?Career changes late in life, now common, are difficult: Is perfect paralysis better than imperfect movement??? ?The workplace is filled with those who do find satisfaction. A landmark study of young people by Eli Ginzberg, a Columbia University economist, found that as adults almost two-thirds had moved in a “straight-ahead career path,” entering and remaining in one field. Almost a third pursued a “broad career pattern,” shifting fields within their occupation. The rest (some 13 percent) zigged and zagged in a “variant pattern,” changing career directions completely.?? ?The study concluded that achieving career satisfaction is not a fully conscious process but had to be learned from the alternatives encountered — by trial and error. Those people who switch jobs or careers (by getting fired or quitting until they find the right fit) tend to be productive and satisfied in their work . . . eventually. Hard work, years of random or systematic job-changing, and even floundering may be necessary.?? ?Compared to other countries, the U.S. labor force works the most hours annually and has the shortest period of unemployment benefits and the shortest vacations of any capitalist democracy. Charles Darwin observed that variability of offspring “coupled with the energetic searching for a niche” produce hardened survivors. Layoffs and career-changing help give us a productive American economy because of the variety and energy in our work force, in our start-ups, and in our established companies.?? ?Changing jobs or careers lubricates and smoothes the operation of the economy. “Free movement of workers between occupations,” according to economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “can be beneficial to both the individual and the economy.”?? ?The global economy drives local labor supply and demand in the U.S., making rapid competitive responses essential. For example, FedEx keeps cargo planes in the air half-empty so they can mobilize promptly in response to changing demand conditions.?? ?Similarly, workers can mobilize their dissatisfactions as motivation to change jobs, occupations, specialties. So work force versatility and even employee unrest or layoffs become a resource waiting to be used — a virtual national asset. The U.S. economy can, in effect, turn on a dime when necessary by allowing versatile, talented, and productive workers to shift jobs or careers with ease and alacrity, as facilitators to the survival of the fittest. This is as true for laborers and tradespeople as it is for lawyers, business executives, or doctors — no matter what color collar they wear (white, blue, plaid, pink, or gold).?? ?We do work harder and more efficiently when we work at jobs or careers we like. “The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface,” Darwin wrote, “with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.” Individuals striving to find jobs or penetrate an economy (a face of nature) are similar to sharp wedges. The incessant blows that move us forward are our confident refusal to accept job loss, our energetic persistence, our struggling to the utmost, our willingness to push ourselves.?? ?Getting fired and changing jobs or career directions may not only turn out to be good for us, but may also be good for the economy. Saying goodbye to a job layoff or career mismatch can provide a new lease on life and lead to genuine career satisfaction. Isn’t imperfect movement better than perfect paralysis? You don’t have to break glass to get fresh air. You can open the window.??? Stephen Rosen is chairman of Scientific Career Transitions, which specializes in the career problems of scientists and physicians. Celia Paul, his wife, is president of Celia Paul Associates, a New York City-based career-counseling firm specializing in lawyers. They live part time in East Hampton.? HEROES OF NINE-ELEVEN R.I.P.Bryan Jack came to us because he wanted to change his career. He was a budget analyst, a director of the programming and fiscal economics division, Defense Department. Dr. Jack was responsible for crunching America's defense budget. He was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, bound for official business in California when his plane struck the Pentagon, where, on any other day, Jack would have been at work at his computer. This meant that Dr. Jack would have died whether on the plane—or at his desk.Carla Tighe, a fellow Pentagon economist, said Jack was a brilliant mathematician and top budget analyst who translated policy decisions by the defense secretary into hard numbers. Colleagues wondered how they would fill the personal and professional void."He was so mathematically gifted," Tighe said. "We're still reeling with how we compensate for what he did. He was really responsible for overseeing the capital budget.”Jack, a Texas native who graduated from California Institute of Technology in 1974 and from Stanford Business School, headed the Defense Department's programming and fiscal economics division.He told us he wanted to leave the Pentagon and transfer his financial and budgeting expertise to the private sector. We had met him through his wife, an artist, at an art gallery near our office. Bryan and I worked together for several months, addressing his eagerness to work for a large public corporation, perhaps as a Chief Financial Officer or as an economist. His sudden death prevented us from implementing a transition out of the Defense Department…a transition that might have preserved his life.According to Barbara Rachko, Bryan’s wife, "We were together for 15 1/2years before we finally got married. Bryan for years had said we ought to get married, but I was very non-traditional. We finally did on June 16, 2001. We were married a grand total of 87 days. Bryan was wearing his ring when he was killed [at age 48]. I was contacted by the Army and told that certain items had been recovered from the crash site. If there was one thing I hoped they would recover, it was that ring. It was a one in a million chance," Brian was known for baking pecan pies at Christmas. (Michael Laris, The Washington Post)* * *John Patrick O’Neill was a top anti-terrorism expert at the FBI, and then Kroll Associates’ head of security at the World Trade Center until his death at age 49 there on September 11, 2001. He was responsible for capturing Ramzi Yousef, the leader of the earlier 1993 plot to destroy the WTC, and while at the FBI was on the trail of al-Queda and Osama bin Laden.John also investigated the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing and the 2000 USS Cole bombing.In 2002, O'Neill was the subject of a Frontline documentary named "The Man Who Knew.", and cast as the main protagonist in the television miniseries “The Path to 9/11”.There is extensive coverage of John O'Neill's anti-terrorist work at the FBI and insights into his colorful character and his double private life in the book “The Looming Tower” (2006) by Lawrence Wright. He and I met while I was involved in a matter so confidential that if I revealed it to you, I would have to kill you. So I won’t do either. ####Expertise As An Addiction: The Perils of ‘Trained Incapacity’One or more of the following factors may limit expert knowledge or make specialist logic counter-productive… (1) Experts may sacrifice common-sense insights to the intensity of their experience in their special field.* (2) Experts may have a marked aversion to new ideas.** (3) In taking the subject of their specialty as the center of importance (the trees), experts may not always see things in their entirety (the forest). (4) Experts may often feel a superiority that is likely to be associated with their position of authority or the loftiness of their expertise.*** (5) Experts may tend to have strong identification with fellow specialists, so that evidence and arguments marshaled by non-experts may be viewed by experts with suspicion or skepticism. (6) Experts may be likely to confuse (on the one hand) the importance of their knowledge and facts, with (on the other hand) the significance of what they recommend to be done with them. (7) The specialist may be awkward, or act inappropriately, in dealing with human affairs. (8) Excessive use of an expert’s strength may become a weakness. * The building code in Los Angeles was reputed to require flat roofs to support two feet of snow at a temperatures well above the boiling point of water -- because expert engineers built in “safety factors” based on the highest historical air temperature ever recorded in LA, combined with the heaviest historical snowfall ever recorded in LA.** When he was Secretary of the Navy, FDR, speaking as an authority on ships, said, “airplanes will never be able to bomb ships at sea”. *** “To punish me for challenging Authority, the Fates made me an Authority”. --Albert EinsteinHARDING WILLINGERIn Memoriam, 2 February 2009Ten years ago, after I spoke at a memorial service for my father-in-law, my friend Harding came up to me afterwards, and asked if I would do a eulogy for him when his time came. Well, that sad day has come. That’s why I’m here today. I’m honoring Harding’s request, and honored to help you remember and to celebrate Harding’s truly wonderful life.Intelligence is ‘the ability to make other people feel good’. Harding made everyone feel good. “What comes from the heart…goes to the heart” it says in the Talmud. Harding always spoke from his heart…and was able to reach into our hearts.“When I was young, I admired intelligent people; now that I am old, I admire kind people”. Harding was both intelligent and kind. I never heard him say an unkind word about anyone—unless it was politicians, especially Republicans.Harding was kind, generous, considerate, smart, and authentically charming. He loved people—and they loved him back. He loved Kate and Karen and Jill. He loved Jan, who made him very very happy, and he told her so…often.Harding was a very talented and successful man—in business, in his family life, his social life, his emotional life, and in his entire personality. Harding had an extraordinary fulfilled life well-lived--and was a very balanced and complete person. He admired the accomplishments of his family members, his friends, and others. He respected learning, wisdom, and thoughtful opinions. Harding admired his brother Alan, and was proud of Alan’s ingenious patents. His cousins Lowell, and Marty…extremely proud of them. He was rightly proud of his own very impressive accomplishments. He often told how he and Alan had built up their enterprise, how he’d found a tool-and-die-maker in Europe by happenstance, and was able to beat the competition, who couldn’t figure out how the Willinger Brothers were able to produce such high quality products… fish-tank pumps at such attractive prices.Celia & I met Jan & Harding about 24 years ago, and over the years we had some wonderful experiences together—skiing in Deer Valley, visiting them in the south of France, sailing, and many, many meals together. (Jan loved to cook extremely good meals.) I was re-building the deck of our house in East Hampton with my own two hands, and Harding came over to ‘supervise’, to kibitz, to criticize my handiwork. With that sly and mischievous look of his, he said, “I think I can get you the contract to re-build the Boardwalk at Coney Island.”Harding loved to tell—and to hear--jokes. He really loved to laugh. In honor of Harding, please indulge me to tell a joke he loved hearing. In the past year, I could tell Harding the same joke over and over, because his memory was slipping. As I told Jan, eighty percent of Harding was a better person than 100 percent of most of us [[If a tree falls in the forest, and my wife is not there to hear it, is it still my fault?]]For many summers, Harding and I used to take long walks on the beach outside of Sag Harbor Sunday mornings, and gab and gab like a couple of yentas. We talked about everything, and I must say some of the conversations were very intimate, like brothers. We always hugged and kissed when we met and parted—Harding was a big hugger--and I often thought that Harding & I were about as close as men ever get without being brothers. Harding was a great listener and would hear my problems, and always had something positive and useful and wise and loving to say.Also, for many summers, there were these “Food-For-Thought” breakfasts of a bunch of Palm Beach guys at Pierre’s to discuss politics, to schmooze…many are here today. Each of these guys was very accomplished and smart and respectful, like Harding. He was very pleased, as I was, to be included at these round-tables. As I say about my wife, even after 25 years of marriage, Celia still treats me as if I were her equal. Harding always treated me as if I was his equal.I had a high-school teacher long ago who said, “If, at the end of your life, you can count on the fingers of one hand, truly close and dear and deep friendships, consider yourself fortunate”. Like all of you, I consider myself more than fortunate to count Harding -- a real mensch -- as one of those. My life was much fuller – and blessed --for having known Harding. “I am a part of all that I have met”. We are all a part of Harding.I was trained as a physicist, and science teaches us that matter can be transformed into energy, energy like light -- that radiates in all directions. Harding was matter. He’s now energy, and light, and memory that still radiates in all directions. About memory: I have lapses these days, increasingly, and as I watched Harding’s, I remembered what another good friend said about getting old and losing his memory, and not being able to recognize everyone. “Every morning, when I wake up, I meet the nicest people.” Those people are here today. They are you. ####Obituary Notice Imagined by Stephen RosenStephen Rosen, who helped some 500 Jewish émigre scientists fleeing the former Soviet Union to find work in their specialties in the US, died in his sleep. The cause of his death, according to his wife and business partner, career counselor Celia Paul, was stroke.Ms. Paul was also co-author with Dr. Rosen, a physicist by training, of their book, “Career Renewal” (Academic Press, 1997). Together, they gave workshops and seminars at Bar Associations for lawyers, at Medical Societies for physicians, and at Mount Sinai Medical School of Medicine in their MD-PhD Program, at Rockefeller University and MIT for scientists, and at the US National Academy of Science.Dr. Rosen founded the Science & Technology Advisory Board, a non-profit organization that pioneered developing new methods of career management for scientists and engineers. Previously, he wrote on the origins of cosmic radiation and high-energy cosmic-ray anti-protons. In 1968, he was at the Institut D’Astrophysique in Paris, and the Centre d’Etudes Nuclaires de Saclay. In 1970, he was Senior Professional Staff member of the Hudson Institute, working on national security issues and technological forecasting. His book, “Future Facts” (Simon & Schuster, 1976) drew attention to several hundred embryonic developments in science and technology; many became true.Earlier, he was a young Assistant Professor of Physics at the State University of New York Maritime College, where his colleagues and students said he was an inspiring, witty, and admired teacher. Dr. Rosen had been a student of Einstein’s colleague Banesh Hoffmann at Queens College of the City of New York, from which he graduated with honors in physics in 1955.He was a familiar sight in East Hampton at yard sales, where he and his wife Ms. Paul had a home in the North West Woods, and where he single-handedly built a tree-house blessed at a special ceremony by Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons.Rosen was a serious amateur photographer and sculptor, and a writer of songs and lyrics for milestone events in the lives of his many friends and relatives.He is survived by two children, Lisa Jo Rosen of New York, and Daniel Marc Rosen of Galway, Ireland from an earlier marriage to Miki Tekla Gold, which ended in divorce. He is also survived by two grandchildren, Jascha and Tanya, a brother Elliott Jay Rosen of Albany, a sister Barbara Fleck-Paladino, and nephews Bela Fleck of Nashville, Louie Fleck of New York, Sascha Paladino of Dublin and Connecticut and Los Angeles, and Neil Rosen of Albany, New York. #### ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download