March of the Living, Warren Buffett and the Meaning of Life

My daughter went on the March of the Living a number of years ago when she was in High School (grade 10 or 11)

The March takes kids from all over the world to Poland and on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) thousands march from Auschwitz to Berkinau to commemorate the six million Jews and millions of others killed by the Nazis. They then travel to Israel to see what arose from the ashes of the Holocaust and to celebrate Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israel's Independence Day).

Stacey, my daughter, reports, like many others that have been on this trip, that the Poland portion seems surreal, a fantasy, unreal and unbelievable in many ways. Poland is seen in Black and White.

Israel, on the other hand, is filled with colour. The fantasy sense remains in some ways but the fantasy is of life and promise, optimism and vigour.

I am on my own March of the Living this week. Sadly, I am in the Poland part of the trip. Winnipeg truly is black and white. There is a lot of snow here and to me the snow always seems black and dirty in the Winnipeg winters - in some ways a reflection of my overall experiences of Winnipeg.

And the the fantasy part............

From the self created fantasy that my mother in law lives to the fantasy that sustains my own mother's life this is a surreal, unreal and unbelievable scene.

My mother is on a trip with her friend and will be going home soon.

She is, in reality, in the Simkin Centre of the Sharon Home, an excellent facility for seniors like my mother who has dementia. The care is wonderful, the security is sufficient and our (my sister and my own) need to be ensured that our mother is safe and well taken care of is more than satisfied.

But my mother is on a trip and will be going home soon.

When I walked into the room last night she immediately recognized me, called my wife by name and asked about the children. It was after her medication and at the beginning of the conversation there was no sign of the agitation that frequently grips her. We talked about the kids, showed her pictures of our new granddaughter and had a pleasant, relaxed time.

She then started to tell us that she would be going home in a few days. We've had these conversations regularly so our response was to assure her that when the right time came she would go home but for the time being she should enjoy where she is - she agreed.

We figure that except for a few things (like knowing she has children and grandchildren) she is back to the time when she was 24 or 25 years old. She speaks of her parents as if they were alive and have just stepped out of the room for a few moments. She talks of her brother as a young child and she rarely if ever mentions my father.

Surreal, fantastical, unreal and totally unbelievable.

I am reading The Snowball, Alice Schroeder's book about Warren Buffett. This is one weird man but I am finding the book fascinating. There are many lessons to be learned (the magic of compound interest is the topic of a future entry to this blog - I wish I understood the magic when I was young!)

I am reading the section of the book, close to the end, where his wife has undergone a very drastic operation for cancer of the mouth. Buffett, who does not handle these things very well, is clearly deeply affected by the situation.

During this time he makes a speech to a group of students at Georgia Tech. He is quoted in the book as saying:

"Basically when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you."

He goes on to say:

"If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don't care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster."

"That's the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The trouble with love is that you can't buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. You can buy pamphlets that say how wonderful you are. But the only way to get love is to be lovable.(emphasis is mine) Its very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: I'll buy a million dollars' worth of love. But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.(emphasis is mine again)"

Buffett is good but I prefer the Beatles: "And, in the end, the love you take/ Is equal to the love you make."

I look at these two older women in my life - my mother in law and my mother and I wonder how much better their lives would have been, then and now, if they would have understood and live by either Buffett's or the Beatles' words.

Our experiences with these women are a lesson - a life lesson - that needs to be learned for our own happiness and for the happiness of anyone that we love and who we care about whether they love us.

But the March of the Living has two parts - the black and white, painful part and the vibrant, colourful living part.

If you've read the previous entry you will guess that after the Winnipeg part of this trip we'll be moving on to Winston Salem where there is optimism, colour, celebration, happiness, delight, miracles and baby smells.

Other than the baby smells the list above could apply to all of my children - biological and "in-law". I am filled with optimism for them. They are all on life paths that are meaningful and productive. And more importantly they are all, each and every one of them, decent people - its hard to ask for more.

But no matter how much I love all my children the trip to Winston is special. Riley lives there. Jay and Dori are on the brink of defining their lives - careers, home, family, relationships, and all that goes with being young and on your way - it is exciting and a pleasure to watch.

But Riley is this bit of human joy - babies have unlimited potential - they are the receptacles for unending love - they create love where a person might have thought their love generating machine had been pensioned off.

We will go to Winston - like the kids on the March of the Living - to immerse ourselves in the surreal surroundings of hope and love - much different from the surreal surroundings of Winnipeg and the Sharon Home.

And we will start Riley off with where Buffett wants to end - with the unconditional, unlimited love that we have always offered to our children and family.

She has earned that love.

I'm back

I'm back - well I wasn't really gone - my computer has been with me all the time as usual but I just haven't had the time or the energy to write decent entries here.

Its been just about a month since I made the last entry - which was about who reads these entries - I want to thank everyone that responded through comments here or directly to me by email - I hadn't realized quite how many people read these thoughts of mine.

Much has happened since I last wrote here and I am hoping that I will be able to write about each of these adventures. I have been to Winnipeg to finalize the sale of my Mom's house, to Denver to attend a conference on Economic Education, to Twentynine Palms, California to attend a wedding and am about to go to Montreal to buy soapstone and then to New Orleans for two conferences - back to back fortunately.

I am tired and I think I will be even more tired before the end of this semester.

Enough complaining.

In the next few posts I will record some of my experiences and thoughts about these conferences and trips and will also talk about some of the issues facing our teacher education program.

Stay tuned

Sandwiches and New Beginnings

When I was 5 years old ( a very long time ago) my family moved into a house in the north end of Winnipeg - West Kildonan to be exact. My mother has lived in that house ever since. When my Dad died and occasionally for years after my sister and I suggested that my Mom move out of the house and move into somewhere that would provide company and assistance. My Mom always refused saying she was happy in the house which was full of memories, that she was capable of living independently (just last week she mowed the lawn herself - she is 93!) and that she enjoyed her privacy and whatever contact she had with her friends and relatives.

A few weeks ago - after enjoying the hubbub surrounding Jay's wedding and visiting my sister in Montreal - and then experiencing being alone in her house again - my Mom asked me and my sister to investigate a retirement residence for her.

To put it mildly my sister and I exploded into action.

This week we are traveling to Winnipeg to move our mother into the Portsmouth Retirement Residence in Tuxedo. Not only is she leaving her home of 50 odd years but she specifically asked to leave the north end - a place she has lived for 85 years!

She will enjoy her new surroundings. She has a one bedroom apartment with a balcony. Her meals will be taken in a dining room. There are activities and a wonderful park nearby.

But first the move - packing and saying goodbye to an old lifestyle

Winnipeg, koldres and really, really cold weather

I've just come back from a few days in Winnipeg where I visited my 93 year old mother. She still lives in the house I grew up in where she has lived for over 50 years. She says there are memories in every corner.

This picture is of my maternal grandparents. The picture was in a frame that was broken so I brought it home to restore, digitize and then put into a nice frame to send back to my Mom. I'm not the greatest photographer.......yet.........so please excuse the flash over my grandfather.

It was very, very cold in Winnipeg and I slept in the 'attic.' This house is a storey and a half. The second floor has slanted ceilings and my sister and I had our bedrooms up there. When this half storey was built I am sure they never heard of insulation!! In the summer it is sweltering and in the winter it is frigid. This time it was frigid.

But I slept under the koldre.

One of my cousins, Judy Gerstel, is a columnist for the Toronto Star. Her mother died a few years ago and this is part of the column she wrote about that trip to Winnipeg

"When I went to Winnipeg for my mother's funeral not long ago, I stayed with my aunt. She's the widow of my mother's youngest brother and the only one of that generation in the family still alive.

My aunt lives in a little house near where I grew up. She moved in when it was new in 1951. She still has some things that I remember from childhood: a china tea pot shaped like a fat lady, rounded bedroom furniture, photos on the wall of old people in the old country and of babies who will soon be grandparents.

Among the things that have not changed is the lack of heat in the upstairs bedrooms.
The upstairs is really a large attic. It was left unfinished but later made into bedrooms for my cousins when my aunt's parents came to live with them.

The renovation was not done right, my aunt says. The heat never came through. The insulation, if any, is ineffective. When my cousins woke up in winter they "flew down" to thaw in the kitchen.

But I was there for my mother's funeral, not for luxury. Besides, my aunt's company was better than all the amenities at a Four Seasons. (Her upstairs is a Two Seasons: torrid or frigid.)

Still, she worried about my being uncomfortable (read: flash frozen and frostbitten). And so she hauled out the armamentaria. First, a hot water bottle filled from the electric kettle. Then flannel sheets. Next, the four-point Hudson's Bay blanket.

The coup de grace was the koldre.
What, you may ask, is a koldre? Well, I don't know exactly. But it's a word my aunt uses that was used by her mother and her grandmother.

There are a couple of theories. First, that it is the Ukrainian word for "cover." And secondly, that is a Yiddish word for "blanket." To my e-mail query, Philip "Fishl" Kutner who maintains a Yiddish website (www.derbay.org) replied, "As a kid, we used the term for a feather down quilt."

All these explanations are plausible since the origin of my aunt's koldre (indeed of my aunt) was a village in what was then Roumania on the banks of the Dnister river across from Odessa.

But my aunt's koldre is not just a cover or a blanket or even a quilt. My aunt's koldre is sui generis, a creature unto itself.

First of all, it weighs a ton - all feathers.
Whoever coined the phrase "light as a feather" never slept under my aunt's koldre. It is heavy as lead. It forbids movement. You may sleep on your side under down duvets, you may twist and turn under fleece, but under my aunt's koldre you sleep paralysed on your back, pinned to the mattress.

The koldre also traps body heat so that the temperature of the space around the body is much higher than the climate encountered by any body part foolish enough to stray a few centimetres. To move a foot slightly to the left is to go from Miami Beach to Iqualit. And so, not only the possibility of movement is obliterated but even the desire for it.

All this - heat, pressure, density - concerns the body. More important is what my aunt's koldre does for the soul.
The koldre began, as these things do, with poultry. In 1910, when my aunt's parents were to be married, her relatives went to the butcher and plucked feathers ("flicked chickens") which they were entitled to keep. These feathers filled bed pillows for the bride and groom.

When the couple came to Manitoba, they brought the pillows. After all, what else did they have to bring? asks my aunt.
When their daughter married in 1940, the pillows were dismantled. The feathers were used to stuff a koldre for the newlyweds.

Though my aunt took the koldre to be cleaned and refurbished from time to time, she stored it away after awhile. It was old-fashioned.

But when my cousins returned as adults to visit from Regina and Montreal and to stay in their old cold bedrooms, the koldre was hauled out. Sleeping under it was a compensation, and then a reason, for returning to Winnipeg in winter.

Now my aunt wonders how the koldre will be divided after she is gone - whether it will travel between Regina and Montreal.

In the meantime, the koldre was a gift to me for a few nights. It enveloped me and kept me warm. It felt like family and home. And it imposed surrender - to stillness, to peace, to sleep. "

For a few nights I slept under the koldre.