Feedback Please

I don't mind giving positive feedback, and I value that people and organizations are interested in what I have to say. But please stop. Yesterday, I spent an hour on the phone convincing TIAA-CREF to release the $11,000 or so they have been holding for me for over 25 years since I left Hillel International. It took a month to get an online appointment. The adviser was thoughtful, providing in-depth guidance on my options. While I listened, a voice in my head repeatedly chanted the classic line from Jerry Maguire: "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" She said they could disburse it over a five-year period with monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual amounts. "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" I didn't say that, but instead stated that annual would be fine. She then disconnected from the Zoom call and connected me via a three-way phone call with the person who actually had the capacity to "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" That took another half hour. I was then required to fill out three forms and have my wife fill out a spousal release and have it notarized. An email arrived almost immediately after I hung up asking me to rate my TIAA-CREF experience. I demurred. Every visit to a physician's office is immediately followed up by an email and text message asking me to rate my experience: wait time in the waiting room, wait time for the physician, congeniality of the receptionist, comfort of the chairs in the waiting room, clarity of follow-up treatment options, etc. A side note here—I only had one negative experience with a receptionist. It was 7 in the morning, as I arrived for a colonoscopy. Having survived the 24-hour prep torment, I was not in the most pleasant of moods. I had no patience for the receptionist who asked, in a surly tone: "Are you clear?" I knew what she was asking about, but couldn't help myself from responding: "About what?" In retrospect, a response of "crystal" (citing a line from another classic Tom Cruise movie) would have been even more adroit. My barber wants to know how I liked my haircut. The restaurant wants to know how I liked my salmon. The coffee shop wants to know how I liked my latte. Under the heading of "no good deed should go unpunished," responding to a one-question assessment of a vendor on your mobile device will always take you to an evaluation form asking an additional 30 questions. I get a little annoyed when the service agent at the auto dealer implores me to give the shop a positive rating when Chevrolet reaches out to me via text message. Perhaps I'm being overly suspicious, but it's hard not to see this as rating extortion. "So, Mr. Raphael, we got a call from the big man at Chevrolet International. You don't anticipate any difficulty with your brake line or your steering column, do you?" I suppose it could be much worse at a physician's office when you return for your next colonoscopy. In short, one could argue that it's always a good idea to enthusiastically and positively complete the feedback evaluations sent to you by recent vendors—consider your next haircut, eggplant parmigiana, brake job, and colonoscopy. Ratings of ten across the board might be the best approach to ensuring your future wellbeing. Please rate this post on a scale of 1 to 10, with ten being the highest praise for my erudition and one possibly damning you to a future life of misery.

Basement Archeology

 

Basement Archaeology

    Cleaning the basement is somewhat akin to an archaeological excavation. Digging through layers of boxes, you can uncover relics from the past: coats you haven't worn for 50 years, baby announcements and Bat Mitzvah invitations for a daughter who is now over 40 years old, a game of Twister that at our age would present a very significant health hazard, yellowed copies of the New York Times from September 11, 2001, and one announcing the Israel Egypt peace agreement dated March 26, 1979.

    We found perhaps thousands of photos—mostly of our children but occasionally of travel experiences—the barges on the Amsterdam canals, vistas of the Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in fog, the cobblestone alleyways of the Old City of Jerusalem. I went through all the photos, throwing out the duplicates and the ones out of focus, and putting aside ones with special meaning: birth, B-Mitzvah, graduations, relatives whom I loved and who are now gone.

    For some reason, my mother passed on the family archives (broadly defined) to me: a copy of my diploma from SUNY Albany (1974), letters I wrote from camp when I was 8 pleading with my parents to take me home, aerograms from Israel in 1975 describing life on Kibbutz Maayan Tzvi, a photo of my father sitting behind a World War II B-17 bomber.

Perhaps the oddest item, and without question the one that impacted me the most, was my father's brown leather wallet. Opening it up revealed his Social Security card, New York State driver's license, and, within the translucent plastic pockets generally used for displaying photographs, four disintegrating four-leaf clovers.

    I have my father's Boy's High yearbook from 1941 and his varsity football sweater—a heavy black wool garment with a large "B" emblazoned on the front. But neither of these, nor the multiple photographs of him, had the emotional impact of his wallet and its contents. And I'm trying to figure out why.

    Unlike photos of special moments and objects representing his athletic skills, these were mundane items that accompanied him in his daily life. They were in his back pocket as he navigated the side roads of Queens and Brooklyn on his way to grind and mix spices at J. Raphael and Sons. He would have pulled out his wallet when he treated his children and their friends to Carvel ice cream on Bell Boulevard or when he and I had coffee and apple turnovers at the Scobee Grill in Little Neck. Perhaps they were in a drawer in his bedside table as he lay in his room at Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital in New York. The wallet also contains a check for $35 made out to, in my father’s handwriting, Dr. Robert Levy, who was, if I remember correctly, the Oncologist who first treated his Hodgkin’s Disease.

In the context of his early death, the desiccated four-leaf clovers struck me as ironic. But perhaps they were a message sent to me from beyond the grave: Luck is how you define it. Yes, he died at a young age. But his life was blessed with a wonderful family who adored him. He had friendships that lasted a lifetime. "The crown of a good name is above them all[1]." He was recognized as an honest, caring, and decent man. His work, as I have been told, was a difficult burden for him. But he persevered. He got up every morning at 5:30 am, navigated an hour's worth of traffic, spent 9 hours mixing, grinding, and packaging spices that would provide the flavoring for most of the meatpackers and pickle makers in New York, and then spent another hour in traffic. If God was looking down on him, and if there is a heaven, I think he has earned his luck.

 

P.S. On a lighter note, my father handed down this tongue twister that I now share with my grandchildren causing delightful giggling.  Try it:

 

One smart fellow, he felt smart.

Two smart fellows, they felt smart.

Three smart fellows, they all felt smart.

---

[1] Ethics of our Ancestors, 4:17—"Rabbi Shimon said, there are three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of kingship. And the crown of a good name is above them all."

 

A Buiding, Room, Road, Bridge and Disease by Any Other Name

 

You will find Bernie Marcus's name on buildings throughout Atlanta and cities around the world. The Marcus Autism Center, The Marcus Hart Valve Center, the Marcus Trauma and Emergency Center, all in Atlanta, and the Marcus National Blood Center, in Israel. All these facilities are testaments to Bernie's commitment to humankind. The Trump name is also on buildings around the world. All these edifices are testaments to Trump's narcissism.

 

Naming buildings can be tricky business. When we built the Hillel building at Johns Hopkins University, two donors made impressive naming gifts. One got the building name, and we named the Hillel Foundation after the other. That was the easy part—designing the signage on the front of the building so that each name got equal billing was far more complicated.

 

Rooms get names as well. At a Hillel Foundation in Boston, there is an elevator named after a donor. John Waters dedicated the "John Waters All Gender Restrooms" at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This works on many levels. In Europe, these would be the "John Waters Water Closets."

 

Public work projects also have names. I love the renamed Thurgood Marshall Airport in Baltimore, hate Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington, think John Wayne Airport in Long Beach, California is a hoot, and am not surprised that Charles De Gaulle in Paris is difficult to navigate. Fiorello La Guardia has stopped rolling over in his grave now that the airport named in his honor is not a traveler's disaster area.

 

The George Washington Bridge was named after our first president, whose military leadership led to a series of defeats in the early years of the Revolutionary War, handing the British control of what are now all five boroughs and much of Westchester. He retreated to New Jersey—perhaps just below where his eponymous bridge now stands. The old Kosciuszko Bridge linking Queens and Brooklyn was an abomination during rush hour. The new one is beautiful. Unfortunately, there are only 12 people in New York who know who Tadeusz Kosciuszko was and 6 who know how to pronounce his name (Wikipedia is less than fully helpful in this regard: /ˌkɒziˈʊskoʊ, ˌkɒʒiˈʊʃkoʊ/ KOZ-ee-UUSK-oh, KOZH-ee-UUSH-koh). The Holland Tunnel in NY was not named after the country—otherwise it would have been the Netherlands Tunnel, hardly an appropriate name for a tube buried deep beneath the waters. It was named for its chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, who died before the tunnel's completion. His successor, Milton Freeman, died five months later. Certainly, an inauspicious start.

 

Here in Atlanta, highway overpasses and road intersections are named after people. The Tom Moreland Interchange is colloquially known as "Spaghetti Junction." Moreland was, according to Wikipedia, "one of the United States' leading road building experts." Those of us who have traversed Spaghetti Junction find this difficult to believe.

 

I wonder about medical conditions named after people. According to Wikipedia, there are 605 diseases and syndromes named after people—both the physicians who identified them and the patients who suffered because of them. Anybody who actively follows baseball knows about Tommy John surgery. Nobody who actively follows baseball knows what Tommy John surgery is. Further, my guess is that there are fewer than 15 orthopedic surgeons around the world who know who Tommy John is. Valentino's syndrome, named after Rudolph Valentino, is "pain presenting in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen caused by a duodenal ulcer." Valentino ultimately died from complications of this condition.

 

Not all the owners of these eponymous conditions were real people. For instance, there is a psychological disorder characterized by delusional jealousy known as "Othello Syndrome." There was no real Munchausen, but rather a literary character, "Baron Munchausen." This psychological syndrome, also called "factitious disorder imposed on self" (FDIS), is one where "individuals play the role of a sick patient to receive some form of psychological validation, such as attention, sympathy, or physical care" (Wikipedia). It is also known as "Kvetcher's Syndrome."

 

Not that it will be an issue, but I think about a disease named after me. I have coined the term "food blindness"—a condition where a person cannot see the Tupperware container of tuna fish in front of one's face in the refrigerator (a condition unique to married men). I'd be honored if that came to be known as "David Raphael Syndrome." Other than a caring spouse, there is no cure for this heart-wrenching condition.