Chapter 1 - Family
I was born an only child in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 6, 1937. My mother, Ida, my father, Jack, and I moved to Wilmington, Delaware, when I was 6.
My parents
From what I hear, many people in psychotherapy explore how their parents influenced their current emotional difficulties and relationship hurdles. However, I do not remember ever blaming my parents for any of the problems that brought me off and on into 15 years of therapy. My childhood was challenging, like most, but not traumatic.
My father and I never had much to say to each other, but there was little animosity. I found him helpful and generally supportive. He built me a very useful bookshelf and desk that stretched across one wall of my bedroom. He installed a punching bag in our cellar to help me learn to defend myself. My favorite recollection was a very wise and supportive statement he said when I was doing extremely poorly in college. I told him I was giving up my plans to be a dentist. He said, “Don’t worry about it. There’s more dentists than people got teeth in their mouths.” His simple language resulted from his only going to school through the third grade. My father was a man of few words, as was I. He died suddenly at the age of 65 when I was 33 years old.
Our most troubling encounter occurred during an evening when I had just arrived home from college. My father wanted me to hang around for a while so I could say hello to his friends who were coming over for a card game. Instead, I wanted to go out with my friends. I was about to leave when my father said, “If you leave, don’t come back.” I was shocked, but I stayed because I knew my father could be resentful and stubborn. Although I had never personally experienced my father’s vindictiveness firsthand, I believed my father was capable of that kind of behavior, which I learned from some family history that took place long before I was born.
From what I heard, he had an argument with my mother’s sister’s husband. My mother had said that they wanted to set a wedding date. Her sister said, “You can’t get married until Papa says so.” My father said, “The hell we can’t.” My future uncle responded, “You can’t talk to my wife that way.” My father shouted, “I’ll talk to her anyway I want,” and provocatively picked up a chair. Although they were frequently in each other’s presence for the next 40 years, those were the last words they ever said to each other. I wrote a sonnet after my father died that referenced the event; I called it “Lamentation.” If you wish to read it, click here.
I didn’t have much to say to my mother either, which was regrettable. She had a way of saying things that were unique and interesting. When she was 84, while entering a nursing home to visit her, I heard her shout, “She’s treating me like a piece of wood.” The attendant was pushing her wheelchair on its back wheels. On another occasion, she was transported to my second wedding, which was very unusual. I asked her how she liked it. She said, “It left me cold.”
She didn’t like being in a nursing home. I would usually find her sitting in the ever-present procession of stationary wheelchairs. Almost invariably, the first words I’d hear as I arrived were “I want to go home.” I would generally say, dismissively, “You are home.” I didn’t take what she said to be a statement of preference. I heard it as an accusation that I had somehow failed her by getting her into a nursing home. I grew increasingly irritated by what I then perceived as her lack of appreciation for my getting her into what was considered the best nursing home in the area. I never spoke to her of my discontent, and I never learned of the depths of hers.
But one night, she was not sitting out in the hall. She was not yelling. She did not say she wanted to go home. She was lying quietly in bed.
“What’s up?” I asked as I entered her room.
“I’m going to die,” she answered.
“Of course, of course, we all die,” I replied.
“No . . . I . . . am going to die.”
“But you have so much to live for,” I said, my head tilting toward the family photographs on her wall.
She didn’t reply, didn’t even look up, but closed her eyes and began to hum, her fingers tapping and tapping and tapping the mattress to the throb of the Yiddish tunes I had put into the tape player next to her bed.
“Are you remembering the day we circle danced around your bed to that music?” I asked, but she didn’t respond.
“Don’t you remember?” I insisted. She shrugged.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“My father.”
“What about him?”
“I used to sing for him.”
“Yiddish songs?”
“He’d pick me up on the dining room table to sing”.
“Cool,” I said.
“He introduced me to his friends as the singer. Felt special.”
She returned to her humming and tapping. After a few minutes, she stopped, slowly opened her eyes, focused on mine, and for the first time in the lives we had shared, I heard her say, “I love you.”
I stared at her, stunned and speechless, until she broke the silence with a smile, closed her eyes, and fell asleep. I sat there, holding her hand, unable to stop the landslide of missed opportunities flooding my mind. My heart raced, and my shoulders stiffened as the words “I love you” continued to reverberate. How loveless I have become, I thought, as I listened to the music that had sustained her. Did she think I was her father? I wondered, or was she really talking to me? Did I ever make her feel special? She may have taken pride in my achievements. That was true. But had I ever done anything for her as her father did? Certainly not lately.
I sat with her through one more song and then had to leave. She died the next morning, just before the sun came up.
My first marriage and our children
I also had difficulty communicating lovingly with my first wife and with my children throughout many of their early years.
I met Judi Wuntch, my first wife, on the day we first entered New York University’s Graduate School of Social Work, both pursuing master's degrees. The course of study lasted 2 years, and a few days after we graduated, we got married.
Judi and I getting married
Thinking, talking, or writing about my first marriage still brings up a reflex to defend myself or assign blame. But the truest, most uncomfortable account includes my own limitations. Ours was not a very good marriage, and I share some of the responsibility for its failure.
During our marriage, I was focused on building a career, earning a doctorate, being engrossed in crafts, and committed to social activism, all of which preoccupied me and got in the way of developing a satisfactory relationship. She must have thought that our lives together were empty.
We lived in Chicago during the turbulent sixties. In 1964, I began working at Hull House Association. After only one year at the agency, less than three years after getting my master’s degree in social work, I was promoted to Director of Social Work Services. My career was taking off, and I was totally absorbed by it. I had little time and energy to devote to Judi, and I was not very attentive to Lisa, our first child, who was born in April 1966.
A month before Scott was born in October 1967, I began very consuming doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. I knew that Scott and Lisa needed my attention and affection, but, again, although I felt love, there wasn’t much time. Also, because of considerable stress and dissatisfaction with school, I was not fully emotionally available.
Then, in 1968, the protests during the Democratic National Convention took place in Chicago. Cami was born in December 1969, and a couple of months before that, the Conspiracy Trial began, which commanded my attention. As the Conspiracy Trial jury was just starting to deliberate, the judge sentenced the defendants and their two attorneys to lengthy prison terms for criminal contempt of court. I believed that the sentences were unwarranted, and even as I was still working to complete my dissertation, I spent considerable time organizing and participating in demonstrations.
After I got my Ph.D., the family moved to the Boston area, and that’s where we adopted our fourth child, Jeffrey, who was brought to us from Alaska. Being involved in my new job and new surroundings still prevented me from being the husband and parent I should have been. I was trying to live as if being considered valuable automatically meant that my preoccupation was worth the cost, and that’s a dangerous equation in family life.
But Judi was also emotionally absent from our relationship. Our 4 children were her top priorities, and I was a distant fifth, if that. I remember her once saying to me that the children were much more important to her than I was. Late in the marriage, she formed other attachments, which precipitated its end.
When Judi and I separated, Lisa was 15, Scott was 14, Cami was almost 12, and Jeffrey was 10. I first tried to remedy my inability to communicate effectively with them. A futile attempt to solve this distressing situation was to take each child out for dinner on his or her sixth and subsequent birthdays. I was unaccustomed to speaking with them directly, and our conversations were often stale. My regular dinner opener was to ask them to reflect on the year just past. I would start off with “How was your year?” That stilted question became a family joke, and the kids, now adults, often say that to me on my birthday.
Each weekend, one of them stayed with me at my apartment, so I saw each child once a month. This was a real challenge. If we had little to say to each other during birthday dinners, you can imagine what an entire weekend was like. One of my first troubleshooting steps was to start listening to “American Top 40,” hosted by Casey Kasem, a well-known disc jockey at the time. I wanted to discover which songs and which recording artists were connecting with kids. That was an act of love, however imperfect. I was trying to be loving, to enter their world. I was also trying to listen to them during those weekends to understand what was on their minds.
Although our communication improved a little, I was not living with them and, as adolescents will do, they began moving away, not only emotionally but literally. They grew up, went to camp, went to college, traveled extensively, and moved away. It was during these times that we grew closer. Ironically, I became more emotionally available just as physical proximity decreased. I guess “better late than never” applies here.
I took another significant step when my mother needed to go into a health-related facility, a step just before getting into a nursing home. The kids were then 21,19, 17, and 16. The facility asked for a biography so they could know who my mother was before she became debilitated. But her memory had diminished, and when I tried to fill in the gaps in her story, I realized I didn’t know very much about her. I was both shocked and sobered when I realized that, in a similar manner, my children knew very little about me. I wanted them to know more about me, but I also wanted to know more about them.
After some unsuccessful troubleshooting attempts, we started sharing family stories at birthday parties, focusing on the celebrant, and I recorded them electronically. I learned a great deal about what was essential to them and why. I learned the details of their relationships. And I heard about the “little” experiences they were proud of. For each of my progeny’s 50th birthdays, I produced an edited “This Is Your Life” audio, drawn from their birthday recordings. Listening to all the recordings repeatedly while editing, I gained a more comprehensive understanding of their lives. The last of these was produced in 2021, the year that Jeffrey turned 50. That felt like coming home, a home I had once lived in but never very well.
With my progeny
Linda
I met Linda Pieste, my second wife, in March 1986. We began living together full-time in January 1987, became engaged in July 1990, and got married in June 1991. I learned a great deal about intimacy and communication from my missteps with Judi and did what I could to improve in subsequent romantic relationships. particularly with Linda.
Here’s how we met: She and I were each asked to serve as judges in the selection of the Westchester County Volunteer of the Year award. I initially told the organization's director that I was too busy, a barely veiled excuse for not wanting any part of it. But he persisted and said that my co-judge would be “a really interesting woman.” That was inviting, and I almost asked him what she looked like. I pulled out my pocket calendar, pretended to ponder a moment, and then said, “OK, if it’s really crucial to you, I think I can work it out.”
Linda was interesting, and we had a great time judging. We laughed a lot and frequently lost our focus as we segued into various areas of mutual interest. Yet, we knew how much receiving awards for service would be to the volunteers, and we did our best to do a credible job. Nevertheless, laughing together seemed like a very good sign, and I let it guide my next actions.
After our session ended, we went out for coffee at a local eatery. Our conversation was free-flowing, and the director was right, she was definitely interesting. And besides, she was very good-looking. A month later, we had lunch at “Marty’s Mug and Munch.” I remember the name vividly, not only because of its alliterative nature but because of its meaning to me as part of the beginning of something marvelous. A few weeks later, we went kite flying and then got together frequently after that, including a day at Coney Island.
At Coney Island with Linda
Our relationship began to really blossom five months after we met, and it's always fun to describe how that happened. Linda was invited to a gathering with some of her colleagues on Long Island. She asked me if I wanted to come along and suggested we stop at a nude beach on our way. That idea created a stark dichotomy: I wanted to be with her because I was well on my way to identifying us as an us. However, I was experiencing deep apprehension at being seen nude. Desire pushed me forward, fear pulled me back, and it was difficult trying to reconcile the two. It was with colossal ambivalence that I decided to go to the nude beach with Linda. For a detailed description of our day at the beach, click here (Footnote: link to the memoir “The Nude Beach”)
Our day ended dramatically. When we were swimming, Linda got hit by a big wave, fell down, and couldn’t walk. At a hospital, it was determined that Linda had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee. She was fitted for a brace and given a pair of crutches. We stopped at the party briefly and then drove to my apartment. Linda was unable to operate the clutch of her stick-shift car. I said I would drive her wherever she needed to go, so she decided to stay at my place. That felt good to me, and although temporary, it really was the beginning of our living together.
I was very serious about Linda and often suggested marriage. She was reluctant to make that kind of commitment, and after many rejections, I finally said I was through asking. Linda welcomed the lack of pressure and began working to resolve many of the issues bearing on her decision. She did want to be with me, but wondered whether she would be comfortable with a man who had four children and was 18 years older than she was. She was pursuing a second master’s degree and redirecting her career. It seemed to me that I would have to settle for our living together. But then, one day, she said, “If you ask me one more time, I won’t say no.”
Proposal and Marriage
For the big ask, we got a perfect candlelit table at an Indian restaurant on 6th Street in Manhattan, with a sitar player softly performing in the window. However, an over-solicitous waiter wouldn’t leave us alone, constantly refilling our water glasses and asking if we liked the food. So it didn’t happen that night, but we decided to spend a couple of days in Woodstock, New York, where we both knew that the question was sure to be popped. We went there and, late in the evening, I asked her to sit down with me on a park bench, took her hand in mine, spoke of many things, but did not say one word about marriage, a benign retaliation for all those rejections. But when she woke up the next morning, I had placed on her pillow a poem I had written with a marriage proposal. As promised, she did not say no.
We spent a considerable amount of time planning our wedding. I am culturally, but not religiously, Jewish, and Linda has a Christian background. We surprised everyone by planning a ceremony in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. It still intrigues me that we chose a tradition neither of us followed for our wedding. Maybe that’s what marriage is at its best.
Most memorable for me. was the Bedeken Ceremony, which occurred just before the wedding. The basis for this ancient practice stems from the Biblical story of Jacob, who was in love with Rachel, the younger sister of Leah. After working seven years to earn the right to marry Rachel, Jacob was deceived by Rachel’s father because tradition required that his oldest daughter be married first. He covered Leah’s face with a veil, and Jacob fell for the ruse. The Bedeken Ceremony consists of lifting a veil covering a bride's face to symbolically ensure that a similar deception does not occur. Linda did not wear a veil. Instead, she created a mask, like the one worn by the Phantom of the Opera. Inside that facial covering were pictures of her at various stages of life. By removing her mask and discussing the photos, she revealed not only her facial features but also her background and character. She told us a great deal about the woman I was about to marry. I was overwhelmed with emotion, and some of those in attendance cried. She wasn’t trying to hide herself; she was revealing herself.
After the wedding, we had a reception at a nearby restaurant. To get there, everyone at the wedding strolled through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which was packed because the annual Welcome Back to Brooklyn festival, attended by thousands, was taking place that day. Many onlookers, seeing Linda in her gown and me in my tuxedo, clapped and cheered, wishing us well. A motorcyclist allowed us to sit on his bike for a photo. It was so exciting and touching to be connected with that crowd that seemed to want good things for us.
After the wedding in the park
Honeymoon
We honeymooned in Spain. On the first day, some drama set the stage for a promising future. Linda and I were waiting for a train at a Barcelona Metro station. When it arrived, I got on, but Linda was still on the platform as the door began to close. I thought that blocking the closing door would cause it to reopen, as it does in New York City. But it didn’t. I couldn’t get out, so I pulled my aching arm and shoulder back into the car. I was frantic, separated from my wife in an unfamiliar, foreign city. I began shouting “Mi esposa. Mi esposa,” as fellow passengers gawked, some giving me suggestions in hurried, incomprehensible Catalan. Linda stood on the platform, shocked and dismayed, as the train pulled away from the station. Although there were a variety of possibilities for reconnecting, such as proceeding to our destination or meeting back at the hotel, we were of one mind. I got off at the next station. Linda took the following train, got off at that same station, and we were reunited. That was a very good sign.
Building a life in Brooklyn and East Taghkanic
Our first permanent residence was a three-story brownstone townhouse in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. Linda was co-owner of the house with her brother, Jim. A large family moved out, and the whole second floor became available. We moved into that vacant space. The house was in serious disrepair, and as other tenants began moving elsewhere, we began renovating it. The process began with gutting the third floor. By carrying the debris through and out of the house, I ended up with five hernias. After the third floor was rebuilt with some local help, we decided to restore the rest of the house. We bought Jim’s share and engaged a wonderful architect, Margaret Salamone. We then set up a woodworking shop in our cellar and hired some skilled craftsmen. Linda created an exquisite 20-by-40-foot garden, which reflected her extraordinary sense of design and the knowledge she gained growing up in a rural community. We accepted the ongoing disruption because we believed in the outcome. The hernias were a part of the physical price, but we were willing to live with constant challenges in the service of a shared vision, an essential component of a satisfying partnership. Finally, after living for 19 years in what was essentially a construction site, requiring several relocations of our bedroom and kitchen, the complete makeover was complete. We lived in that house for a total of 32 years. To see how the Brooklyn house and its backyard changed, click here (Footnote: link to Photos -à Brooklyn Brownstone Restoration)
Linda grew up in East Taghkanic, New York, an agricultural community in southern Columbia County, which we thought would be a good place to retire. She owned a share of the house, and we bought the other shares from her brothers. We thought we would rehab and expand the old house and engaged the same architect we used in Brooklyn. But rehabbing the house turned out to be impractical, potentially costing more than building new with a far less satisfactory outcome. We began the arduous process of working with the architect to plan a house that would meet our needs and wants, obtain approvals from the Town, demolish the old house, and construct a new one in its place. We were lucky to find an extraordinary general contractor, Don Hoysrad, to make it work. Linda knew every inch of our property, having meandered through it from childhood through adolescence. That sensitivity, love of place, and sense of design produced a wonderful landscape. To see the new house and the surrounding land, click here (Footnote: Link to Photos -à East Taghkanic Homestead -à Current). Like our wedding ceremony, working on that house and its surroundings helped us feel hopeful. My contributions to the endeavor included mowing, weeding, weed whacking, and digging. An entire 48-foot-wide, 4-foot-tall retaining wall in our garden was built with the rocks I extracted from the land.
The Retaining Wall
As I became more comfortable with country living, I replaced some of my black New York City-style sweatpants and T-shirts with clothes of many colors. I didn’t just move to the country; I let it work on me.
A Country Boy
What Now?
As I was writing this chapter, what came to mind was the old expression "Live and learn." I made plenty of mistakes with my parents, my first marriage, and my early relationship with my children. I found all of that regrettable and modified my behavior in my second marriage and in my children's later lives. I understood what went wrong and grew progressively wiser. Unfortunately, I came to understand the problematic nature of my communication with my parents too late. I wish I had been able to do better with those relationships.
What I have learned about my past is that I have made, and will continue to make mistakes, not just with family but in all aspects of my life. I believe that all mistakes are simply lessons, from which, with patience, humility, openness, acceptance, and effort, I can grow wiser and become a better person, the best I can be.
So here’s one of my lifelong guiding principles: live and learn, if possible.