The Raised and the Unraised

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The Raised and the Unraised. Mothers are presented in popular culture either as sentimentalized, often overprotective paragons or bitchy busybodies, rarely as the highly talented, results-oriented specialists they are when they are successful.

Scripted TV has lately taken to presenting fully grown women posing as “Girls,” the “New Girl,” and “Two Broke Girls.” It’s no wonder effective mothers, all of whom are clearly women, are so little noted.

My wife Maida is a hugely successful mother of four adult children. What she did was raise them. To understand that, observe the grown-ups around you (including those fictional TV “girls” for whom motherhood would be an unmitigated disaster). Many are simply unraised. Not poorly raised or dysfunctionally raised. Unraised.

First, they were unnurtured. No one looked out personally for their safety and overall well-being at each stage of their youthful development. They are now hard, self-centered, sarcastic, cynical, and ungiving. Kindness is for suckers, and you better grab all you can while you can. That’s how you turn out when you think nobody’s got your back.

Second, they were unvalued. No one told them their talents and personality made them special, made them full of exciting potential, made them unique contributors to a lush and wondrous world. They are now clinically depressed, eating-disordered, phobia-ridden nine-to-fivers whose burning issues involve the fortunes of DeSean Jackson of the Eagles, Honey Boo Boo on TLC, and their Facebook Newsfeed.

Finally, they were unchallenged. No one withheld any material gratification, demanded any accomplishment, structured any activities likely to showcase their emerging discipline, teamwork, or critical thought. They are now angry, unfocused losers, incapable of imagining a life imbued with purpose, and so they never test their mettle, never chase their dreams, never choose a path on which to grow.

Maida is a truly splendid mother. She nurtured, valued, and challenged her four children. It was enormously time-consuming, energy-draining, largely thankless work, for our culture doesn’t even know how to recognize the great mothers in our midst. You know their kids, though. They’re the ones who were raised.

They graduate high school and move on determinedly to college or other schooling, fiercely seeking the knowledge and competencies they’ll need to contribute to the 21^st century jobs in the real world. It takes years, and it takes discipline over those years. There is no substitute for targeted education, training, and preparation. People without that equipment simply will not find decent employment.

All our kids went on to higher education, masters level and above. The same with those they married. And if one of our children had decided to seek a career in construction, plumbing, theater, or landscaping, Maida would have steered them to the essential post secondary education, training, and apprenticeships that would prepare them to be the best and most employable in those fields. No short cuts; no easy money.

And they would have done it, because they were raised! Instilled in them were the self-confidence, the discipline, the work ethic, the patience, and the motivation to turn themselves into adults capable of functioning well, earning well, and, most important, living well in a world that rarely forgives lack of preparation and drive.

Watching my children’s Mom guide them, day by day and year by year, toward responsible and caring adulthood has been an awesome unfolding. If you pointed out to her everything that I’ve written here, she would stop and think a moment. Then she would shrug and say, “OK, but I only did what any mother should do.”

She would be right, too. Every mother should raise her children, as Maida raised hers. Perhaps, if every mother saw the fruits of all those years of dedicated raising, every mother eventually would raise their kids.

As a father, I’ve tried to participate in this astonishing process of raising. Perhaps I too have met some success in that department. Of course, I have been privileged to learn from the best.

Lance Armstrong and Cheating

Lance Armstrong is again in the news. Do check out my latest article in last Sunday's (October 7) Philadelphia Inquirer, the Currents Section.

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20121007_Cheating_is_everywhere__but_in_long_view__it_s_really_nowhere.html

Get Rich Quick...Or Slow

America has a schizoid perspective on the acquisition of great wealth. For convenience sake, we could call them “Get Rich Quick” and “Get Rich Slow” modes. Those who Get Rich Quick are characterized as anonymous, lucky, opportunistic, unreliable, annoying, likable, humble, arrogant, and unassuming. They are the ones who win the big lottery, have a jaw dropping fortune stuffed into their bank accounts upon the passing of a jaw droppingly rich relative, stay on Jeopardy for three years, pan for gold and hit the mother lode, or win so big in Vegas that they are banned from ever reentering the state of Nevada.

The Get Rich Slow folks are slugs like the late Steve Jobs, the not late Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey, who work very hard on an ingenious set of ideas or a fabulous talent for which the time was right to coax enormous amounts of money from the pocket books of people eager to partake of the fruits of those ideas and talents. This is called entrepreneurship, invention, wealth creation, the American Dream, or, statistically, something that happens to staggeringly few beneficiaries of free enterprise considering that it’s pretty much the main argument for it.

People opt for the Get Rich Quick method when (a) they see how few people get rich the other way; (b) they see how devilishly hard those few people work to get rich the other way; (c) they know they will never have a generous rich relative or an idea or a talent anyone will want to pay for, which is essential to the other way; (d) most likely, all of the above.

There is no impediment to living your life either way. You can choose either without breaking any laws. OK, you can’t choose to inherit a fortune, but you can pretend you chose it. Lots of heirs do. There is a problem, though, with counting on one of those two Get Rich methods happening in your life. When neither happens, you will become sad, maybe angry, and you will despoil the contentment of people around you. You will vote for candidates who tell you to blame the people who vote for the other candidate. Blame them for what? For you not Getting Rich — quick or slow.

The easiest Get Rich Quick technique is also the least likely to succeed: entering the 200 million dollar lottery. There really is no object on earth quite like the lowly lottery ticket. You pay a dollar for it, but it will never be worth a dollar again. In fact, it will be worth (1) nothing or (2) 200 million dollars. The odds that it will be worth nothing are terrific. The odds that it will accrue many millions in value are approximately zero, about the same probability that you will invent the next billion dollar advance in digital technology. Or acquire a previously unknown aunt who will leave you $250 million. Or die in the next three seconds.

Yet we buy lottery tickets. Or we pack up and grab a wagon train to Sacramento because someone tweeted that there is a gold rush happening there. Or we stand in an enormous queue of disturbed would be entertainers in the hope of becoming the next American Idol. Or we answer emails that start, “Esteemed American Citizen,” and promise a large cash deposit if we send a small cash deposit first.

Somebody somewhere got rich quick, so lots of people hope the same for themselves. The fact that it pretty much never works is small deterrent. The fact that somebody somewhere hit it big (there really is an American Idol each year) emboldens that eternally springing hope.

Amid the fever of the gold rush or the iron man triathlon that is entrepreneurship, there thankfully exist regular folks for whom great wealth is a curiosity but not an obsession. These are the folks who wake up each morning grateful for the heater that works, the roof that keeps the rain out, the cupboard that isn’t bare, the car that chugs to and from work, and, most of all, grateful for relative good health or support when health fails.

They are the middle class, the ones content to be middle class, aware that their kind is something novel in human history, which, after all, is a centuries old story of a few big lottery winners surrounded by hordes of starving, destitute losers. The middle class, not the very rich, is the real creation of the American Experiment, the real gift of our nation to a sick and weary world.

Opera Justified

Opera Justified. Those of us who love opera are at great pains to explain ourselves. Not to each other, of course. We must explain to Bob, a friend 40 years past, who averred that opera sounded to him like people doing scales. Or Joanne, who filed opera fans under the tab that reads “snob,” right after museum-goers and before wine connoisseurs.

And, nerds that we are, we try hard to explain, sometimes haughtily, sometimes humbly, rarely succinctly, never convincingly, usually compulsively. The compulsion to explain ourselves can be downright embarrassing. Look at Richard Gere, the billionaire in Pretty Woman, who finds himself constrained to justify his love of opera to a prostitute! And what does he come up with? A threat: you better love it the first time you experience it, baby, or pffft! you won’t be able to love it the rest of your life.

I bet Julia Roberts wished she said the same thing to Richard when they had their first time. Talk about amore in franto (Google it).

Not that I am complaining. Pretty Women is one of the few mass appeal movies in the past 30 years to present opera as something the stars could love without irony or middlebrow condescension.

Gere’s “love it or else” caveat is wrong, that’s all. Sure, I loved opera the very first time I heard it. But that’s me. I’m Italian. My love of opera is probably chromosomal. I love Ella Fitzgerald today, but I didn’t like her much as a younger listener. I went to my first symphony performance at the Philadelphia Academy of Music where I heard Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was 10. I sat through it all but was not awake at the end.

Two years ago I went to hear the same orchestra — well, it was called the Philadelphia Orchestra, but they were probably different people, like with the Rockettes. The point is, I was not awake at the end. Much as I love opera, symphonic classical music puts me happily to sleep. OK, I do like that Lone Ranger theme, the first eight notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, and, if it counts, the Grand March from Aida, which probably doesn’t count because people sing in it.

Musically, when we start to love what we love depends on many factors and by no means always on a genetic predisposition lying in wait for that first exposure.

There are many doors by which to step into the thrall of opera. The music itself is one such portal. The greatest operas start as a dollop of black liquid in the reservoir of the composer’s inkwell. With only genius and a sharpened feather as weapons, the creator dips into the murky pool and tears from its depths the several discrete pieces of sound that will merge, blend, and communicate one with the other forging the melody that once brought into being upon the parchment cannot be erased from the hearts of those who drink it in. Imbibing ink may be a gimpy metaphor, but you get the point.

Story grabs some. Every opera is a narrative, always dramatic, melo or otherwise. Be it Mimi, Canio, or that other prostitute in Pretty Woman, Violetta (the one who wasn’t rescued in time), operas tell tales. I got the impression that’s what hooked Julia Roberts, and that’s what hooks a lot of people on opera. You enter, live, and leave a soul searing slice of someone else’s struggle with love and hate, joy and sorrow, derring do and tuberculosis.

In my opinion, though, what most frequently starts the neophyte on the road to operatic junkieism is bigness, plain and simple. The spectacle, the glitter, the crowded stage, the overpowering orchestration, and most of all, the very big notes of very big singing. Many of us remember the thrilling moment when we first heard Dame Southerland’s impossible resonance or Miss Sills’ preposterous flexibility, Björling’s exquisite precision or Lanza’s ear-popping power.

Those gatekeepers of old, from Caruso to Pavarotti, from Pons to Price, they had the key, the capacity to lure us through the doorway and startle us into a mesmerizing world of outsized talent, from composition to performance, a massive team enterprise whose sole aspiration is greatness.

It is a greatness achieved only rarely, in a searing and transcendent moment of unutterable alignment. The moment, when it comes, is always worth the wait. And never, ever, needs to be explained.

The Tester

In my first five years of elementary school, I can recall two great moments of learning. Both happened in fifth grade, under the tyrannical rule of Sr. Mary Clement. The first incident occurred on what began as a normal, uneventful school day. And then…

For some reason, Sr. Clement assigned us a project: to find something out about some adult’s job and report on it. It’s the only project I ever remember in grade school, in which homework always consisted of memorizing stuff or writing out stuff that was to be memorized. This was different, and I recall being motivated by it, a state no grade school teacher had yet induced in me.

I sought out the coolest adult I knew, my sister’s husband Dick. Dick was the first to enter my family of eight through marriage. He was not Italian, and he was tall. He was unfailingly kind to my little brother Art and me. All these attributes made him a huge, strange hero to me. He had also served a hitch in the Navy, where my older brother then languished, and he sported on his shoulder a tattoo of a sailing vessel, so the man was also incredibly exotic, tattoos being otherwise utterly unknown to me.

So, of course, I consulted Dick about his job. I knew it would be as fascinating, adventurous, and splendid as everything else about him. I was right.

“I’m a Tester,” he informed me.

I knew he worked for GE, but a Tester, whoa. “What do you test?” I asked.

“I test for breaks in electrical wiring,” he said.

“How?” I was enthralled. I didn’t know wires had breaks. I didn’t actually know what he was talking about. Dick sensed my cluelessness and prepared a demo.

He took a D battery out of one end of a flashlight and removed the little bulb from the opposite end. He acquired two small pieces of wire, hooked them up to the battery, and showed me how, by touching them together, the bulb would magically light up. He taped everything onto a piece of cardboard, then he taped the wires with insulating tape to preclude electric shock.

He then explained how one could test a wire with this contraption by simply spreading the two ends along a length of the wire. If the bulb lit up, that section of the wire was fine, and one moved the two testing wires down to the next length of wire. If the bulb failed to light up, the wire was faulty at that precise point. It could then be fixed.

For years after that there existed no more exciting job than Tester.

On the due date, I brought my testing contraption to school. I may have been the only one whose presentation included a demonstration. I remember that, as soon as I stood before the class, I felt outre, weirdly different from everyone else. But I persevered.

I dutifully explained the job of Tester, touching the ends of the wires together to illuminate the bulb, holding the ends apart and pretending to slide them along an imaginary length of wire until the bulb went out, at which time the Tester would know the wire had a break in it.

Sr. Clement looked at me in what seemed an ominous fashion. “Barone,” she said. “Go to Sr. Deshantall’s eighth grade class and tell Sister you’d like to give the class this report.”

I was horrified. Sr. Clement was stern and violent, but I never dreamed she would stoop to such pure cruelty. She meant for me to be mocked and jeered by the eighth graders. What other explanation could there be for such a bizarre instruction?

I arrived at the room of the eighth grade boys, knocked, entered, and tiptoed up to Sr. Deshantall. I told her that I was supposed to tell her class about my project. She said go ahead. I stepped in front of the group of over 40 boys, much bigger and much older than I, and got a few words out before breaking down sobbing. Sr. Clement’s punishment was effective.

Sister Deshantall called me to her desk and hugged me. I remember my tears staining her large white wimple. I remember, in the throes of great angst, worrying that I was messing up her wimple. She was mystified by my weeping. When I somehow explained that I believed this was a punishment for having such a lousy project, she expressed extreme disbelief and assured me that this was a reward for a terrific project.

She took me back to my own classroom, conferred with Sr. Clement, and left. Sr. Clement approached me ominously and chastised me for not knowing that she was rewarding me for an excellent project.

I see now that it was an excellent project, better by far than anything my classmates came up with. Dick wouldn’t let me down and he didn’t. What I did was, I began to learn how to decide for myself what was a bad idea, a good idea, or a great idea. That’s an important event, the moment we construct a useful yardstick to measure the value of the projects we choose to undertake.

Up Straight! Hands Folded!

On May 26, 2012, the fourth of my offspring — and first son — got married. Since I have four kids, that’s probably it. Our family is compulsively monogamous. It was till death do them part for my parents and those of my spouse. Maida has somehow managed to keep her vows to me for 42 or so years, and my three daughters too seem to be in it for the long haul. While this is not nearly as interesting as Kate and Will making it for an entire year or Kim Kardashian not making it to day 73, it does induce me to reflect on a particularly relevant topic: discipline.

I learned about discipline in grade school. It meant a couple of things. As a noun, it meant sitting up straight and silent at my desk, hands folded, for several hours. As a verb, it meant the horrible pain that would be inflicted upon me if I did not. I either had discipline or would be disciplined. The word was not among my all time favorites.

In later years, my respect for the term would rise. Discipline, I came to realize, is not the reason people start great things, but it is the reason people finish them. That 99 percent perspiration Edison talked about is the difference between the idea of a light bulb and the little globe that actually illuminates when you hit the switch.

The great tenor Enrico Caruso, who single-handedly popularized another Edison brain child, the phonograph, was asked the secret of his great success as a singer. His formula? “Work, work, and, again, work.”

The Beatles, who also took advantage of the phonograph player, separated themselves from the plethora of Liverpool boy bands of their era when they went to Germany for many months and were forced to hone their craft with endless sessions of practice and performance, 10,000 hours in the happy mantra of author Malcolm Gladwell, who documents the power of disciplined effort in his book, Outliers.

We speak often of a loving relationship but seldom of a disciplined one. I mean, who would rush off to the Cineplex to see “Discipline Is a Many Splendored Thing,” “Discipline Story” or “Discipline, Actually”? Yet marriages full of love but lacking discipline rarely survive. Marriages end for a lot of reasons, of course, and separation can certainly be the best course of action in a given set of circumstances. My only wish here is to explore the role of discipline in happy, long-term marriages.

Ryan and my daughter Marisa married 13 years ago. They have two objectively gorgeous sons, Cai and Landon. I have watched these parents parent, and I have been amazed.

Marisa had a good job as a deaf educator when Cai was born. She took one look at him and quit her good job to become a good mother. She now works part time. Ryan is a hugely successful management consultant, Naval Academy Grad, and just last year an honoree as one of the finest young business leaders in his region of the country. All of this took great discipline.

However, if you asked him about his greatest accomplishment, he would point to his sons. I have seen him arrive home from a hard day’s work (isn’t that a Beatles song?) clearly yearning for an inviting mattress and total silence. Instead, he sits with Cai and Landon for a couple of hours, playing, reviewing their respective days, being with them. He helps with dinner and takes them to bath, bed, and beyond. He does this daily and on weekends. His motto, one he lives and transmits to them daily, is “love and respect.” I love and respect Ryan, a loving and disciplined father to my grandsons.

Glen married daughter Cari two weeks after Ryan and Marisa wed. They have three children. Cari opted to remain a college professor with her husband. At Misericordia University, they built a Speech Language Department literally from the ground up, and it is today a superlative program gaining a deserved international reputation. I have observed the chair, Glen, chauffer his children to and from school every day, then chauffer them to ballet and soccer in the evening and on weekends. Without discipline of a high order, it is doubtful the family would have access to more than one meal every two or three days.

Chris married Tanya a few years ago. He works hard as a senior supervisor for a major pharmaceutical firm, doing double shifts and often going all night. He arrives home, takes his little Enna and Lila from their Mom, and showers them with the love only a father can bestow. Tanya has taken a hiatus from her job as a high school counselor to care for Lila, but she will return full time in September, and she and Chris will succeed because both have the discipline to do so.

Nick is the one getting married. Talk about discipline. He has been repeatedly diagnosed with ADHD and, after receiving a BA from Pitt, he worked for nearly a decade at a number of jobs before deciding, stunningly, to become like his sister a speech pathologist. It took almost four years of dogged determination, enormous sustained effort, and constant battle with his disorder, but he graduated in December.

That was plenty, just not enough for him. With straight A’s, he won the state award as top grad student in his field and a prestigious national award from his professional Association. He will study for his Ph.D. at one of the most renowned programs in the country. He is my son and my hero.

He met Amanda in grad school. They plan to be researchers and professors together. And parents together. To be sure, they will need an excess of love, the inner drive that seeks only the good of the beloved, that binds a couple together in a sublime and exciting life adventure. But they will need more. Love will get them started, but something else will see them through. It is that inner ability to create a goal and not rest until the goal is achieved.

Discipline, actually.