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"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

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Search Results for: grandparents

And Then There Were Three- Grandparents

November 8, 2007 by Jack Steiner 4 Comments

When my son was born he was the luck recipient of an enormous amount of love from five great-grandparents. Five great-grandparents did all they could to spoil him and his sibling and cousins rotten. And of course two sets of grandparents are guilty of aiding and abetting them in their efforts.

Part of my great joy at becoming a father was watching the joy in their faces as they played with him. When we would take him to see them I would often just sit and watch them interact. In some ways it was like revisiting my own childhood. They brought out the old tricks and games that they had stopped playing with me and share them with someone new.

And sometimes I’d close my eyes and listen and for just a moment I was ten and I could smell the smoke from my grandfather’s cigars. I could hear them argue about the best place to get a hot dog in Chicago…in 1934. And then I’d open my eyes and just be thankful that my son was able to get some time with them because I knew that it wouldn’t be that long.

And it wasn’t. When he was a bit short of three my grandmother died. He was too young to understand and too young for lasting memories. He recognizes her picture. He knows her name but he doesn’t really remember just how much she loved him. And his sister, well she never got a chance to meet her. Sometimes she asks why there are pictures of her other great-grandmothers holding her and not that one.

It has been more than 18 months since my grandfather died. Sometimes when she sees his picture she says his name and then mentions that he died. Death is a concept that is just beginning to take root, but even now it is little fuzzy for her.

Her brother is a different story. He is old enough to understand what it means and to be concerned about it. Sometimes he asks me very pointed questions about what kind of lifespan he should expect from the surviving three great-grandparents. I answer him honestly that I don’t know.

Tonight he told me that I should ask G-d. So I told him that I thought that he is big enough to ask himself. He told me that he already had and that G-d was ignoring him, but because I am bigger he can’t ignore me. I told him that it didn’t really work that way. So he asked me if there was a better way to talk to G-d.

I told him that we all have to find our own way to talk to G-d and that sometimes the best answer was found by just listening to your heart. For the moment that seems to have satisfied him, but I still found it tough to accept.

Or maybe it is the knowledge that so much can change in the blink of an eye. One of these days I am going to have to have another hard discussion with them. It is the price we pay for having been so fortunate to have them around for so long.

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Filed Under: Children, Life and Death

Nieces, Nephews, Sisters, Great-Grandparents AWWW!

August 12, 2006 by Jack Steiner 4 Comments

Just returned from a family trip to a secret compound in which I was given the pleasure of watching my children play with nieces, nephews and assorted family members. What fun.

Much of the time I sat and watched as they devised all sorts of crazy plans to con their aunts, uncles and grandparents into supplying them with enough junk food to place them all on a perpetual sugar high.

It is with great pleasure that I readily admit that they are smarter than I am, all of them. From the smallest to the largest they all best me. Fortunately I have a little life experience on them which enabled me to stay one step ahead of them.

Imagine for a moment one infant, one 2 year-old, one 5.5 year-old and a 6.5 year-old hanging off various parts of my anatomy (and that is just the boys) and you will begin to understand why my body feels like I just finished participating in the UFC.

Picture young girls with makeup and a desire to make an uncle look pretty and or beautiful and you might understand why I am reticent to go see La Cage Au Folles.

Consider what it would be like to have a room full of young children and adults listen in rapt attention to stories told by a 92 year-old great-grandfather about what his life was like in his younger years.

If you can picture these things you might have an inkling of what it was like.

I have more sisters than you can shake a stick at and for a brief time we were all together. For a moment we gave the spouses the responsibility of watching the children and we sat with our mother and father. The room felt empty. It was so very quiet.

I looked at the youngest and I looked at the middle sisters and wondered where the time has gone. It seems silly to say it, but last week we were stuck in a station wagon. I was 12, the only boy and it felt like my sisters were always bothering me about something.

Trapped in the station wagon the youngest let their older sister manipulate them and so they worked as a bloc. Together they complained to mom, “Jack is bothering us. Jack hit me, Jack poked me” etc.

There are so very many stories that I could tell. So many trips in the car. There are the stories about how we fought and some of them are pretty funny, but the pleasant reality is that there aren’t that many.

Most of the stories are about siblings who love each other, deeply. When I think about my grandfather’s funeral I have many memories, but one of the best is from one of the euologies.

The man who gave it spoke about fierce loyalty and described how my siblings and I have always leaned upon each other. He described this protective nature as a fierce loyalty that he wished he could see in every set of siblings

He is right about that. The old cliche is right, mess with one of us and you end up dealing with all of us. It is comforting to know that my siblings are always there to help me.

In a couple of days we are going to be split apart again. My sister will leave and the cousins my children love so dearly will go with her. The family will be torn apart. It is a little unfair to say it that way, but it is how I feel.

I wouldn’t stand in her way. She has a life outside of our hometown. She has friends and her husband’s family. The kids have a life their too and they would miss it if they had to leave it, but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t wish that they would move home.

Such is life. The most important thing that you can do is to love your family fiercely. Hold them and keep them tight.

My sisters think that I am a big tough guy. Do me a favor and try not to tell them how much I miss them, I’d hate for them to think that I am getting soft in my old age.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

My Grandparents, Stress and Stuff

September 23, 2005 by Jack Steiner 7 Comments

It has been a rough start to the day, things just haven’t gone the way that I want them to and I am finding it difficult to improve my attitude. I am trying to, I really am. I am working hard to tear away the moody mindset and focus on the positive but I am having limited success.

Given the chance I’d love to go workout on my heavy bag for a while and then spend a couple of hours running up and down the court but those are not options right now. I can’t ignore the things that I have to do at the office and yet at the moment I can’t get them done.

A salesman with a bad attitude is unlikely to get any sales and that is not going to help improve his disposition so the goal of this post is to try and spew out as much of this crap as I can and push myself into that happier place I normally occupy.

Last night one of my grandfathers cried his way through a telephone call with me. I have written about my grandparents and concerns about them many times. You can find links here, here, and here.

I even wrote a post about putting it all in perspective here and for the most part I have, but there are moments when it is harder and yesterday set me off a bit. My grandfather cried because he is 91.5 and his ability to cope with stress is being beaten down by age and time.

His greatest fear is losing my grandmother or perhaps it is better to say that he fears dying first and leaving her. She is the same age as my grandfather and she is slowly beginning to lose it. There are little cracks in the dam, memory issues that used to be infrequent appear more often and she is showing some confusion about little things here and there.

I don’t think that she is all that bad, but I agree with my grandfather that she is not as sharp as she used to be and neither is he. Part of the problem is that he knows it, he feels the edges getting duller and he is frustrated because his memory has always been outstanding and now it is getting harder for him to remember some things.

Physical ailments are taking their toll and though you can remind him of his age and how lucky he is those reminders are having less and less of an impact. More and more I find myself in role reversal mode. I prop him up. I promise him that he has no reason to fear being homeless or hungry and I tell him that if he dies I will see that my grandmother is taken care of. I make the promise as his eldest grandchild because I know that using those words will resonate with him.

And then when he tells me that every now and then he feels like giving up I stop in my tracks and consider the best response. I pause so that I can think for a moment about what I can do/say to keep his spirits up and to try and see that my mother has a father to look to for a little bit longer.

On the flip side of the fence I see my dad’s father slowly fading. The final march approaches and I cannot do much other than to try and make it easy on him. It is more than 2 years since my grandmother died and I can see in his eyes that a piece of him is still gone and I feel his sadness.

The arms that held me as a baby and hugged me as a child have all become so frail. I have seen the the three of them argue with each other and I have seen them share the joy of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I have held both of my grandfathers as they cried over the deaths of children, spouses and siblings. I have seen a lot and learned far more than I can share.

But I am not ready to let them go. I will not let them give up and I will use the various tricks I have learned over the years to keep their attention. And I see that my children spend as much time with them as possible.

It makes me very sad to think that my daughter may not have any memories of them, but I know that my son will and we will all take whatever time we get be it months, years or millenia.

All I want for them is a good quality of life and for them to feel happy. If I can help to provide that then I will. It is not so much to ask.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Can I Root For The Cubs?

October 25, 2016 by Jack Steiner 8 Comments

Sometimes when people hear me speak they say I have a hint of an accent.

Usually depends where I am at and who I am with, but every now and then someone will say something.

“Chicago, you grew up in Chicago right?”

I smile and make some crack about how you can’t find decent pizza or a good steak there.

Sometimes they realize I am messing around and sometimes they push back so I talk about awful weather and make fun of the Cubs or something like that.

If the conversation has any depth or legs to it we usually reach a point where I tell them about how I am technically not from there but in many ways the city made me.

Can I Root For The Cubs?

My paternal grandfather took me to my first baseball game.

It was in the early 70s at Dodger stadium and I couldn’t have been more excited because I am an LA native, born and bred there.

I bleed Dodger blue.

Grandpa was a Dodger fan too, but if you asked him to name his favorite baseball player he always said Hack Wilson.

Hack was a short fireplug of a man who played for a bunch of teams, including the Cubs.

He signed on with them in 1926 when grandpa was 12.

Grandpa used to tell stories about how he and his friends would sneak into games to watch Hack and the boys play.

****

Grandpa also used to tell me stories about how his father, my great-grandfather helped start unions in Chicago and about how sometimes he would fight with cops.

“My father was blonde, had blue eyes and was 6 feet tall.

In those days he was big and no one saw Jewish guys that looked like him. People used to think he was a cop.”

I loved hearing those stories and since my great-grandfather died when I was about 7.5 I do remember him.

I remember his eyes because they were like grandpa and my dads, but mostly I remember him smiling when I saw him.

The tales of his temper were legendary as were tales of my grandfather and so many of those tales were about things that happened in Chicago.

Both Sides

My father was born in LA and lived there until grandpa moved the family back to Chicago.

Dad went to kindergarten on the south side and lived in Chicago for about 8 or 9 years, long enough that he learned to love the city.

Mom was born and raised in Chicago and didn’t leave until she went to college.

Both of her parents considered themselves Chicagoans, in spite of technicalities.

The technicality being my maternal grandpa was born in Canada and didn’t move to Chicago until he was five.

But if you asked him where he was from it was always Chicago.

And if you talked to me as a kid and asked me to tell you stories about my family it was always Chicago…mostly.

That is because we were in LA and though we had some relatives who lived elsewhere, everyone I heard about seemed to be in Chicago.

That city became mythical to me, a place I heard about always but never saw.

A place that my parents and grandparents would go for family affairs but not one I got to see, not because they didn’t want to take us but because of financial reasons.

Chicago belonged to my family and we belonged to it or so I was taught.

Business Trip

A dozen or so years ago I flew to Chicago for a business trip.

It wasn’t my first visit but it sticks out for a variety of reasons.

I stayed at the Hyatt Regency on Wacker and walked all over the city.

One of my most vivid memories is calling both sets of grandparents to talk to them while I walked down Michigan Avenue and to get directions to places I should visit.

Memories of family dinners floated back in which I could hear my grandfathers argue about the where the best place to eat was in 1938 and the stories they shared about their neighborhoods.

I was old enough to understand I wasn’t going to find most if any of those things but I felt like if I walked the streets and listened I might grab some hint of whatever they experienced.

Mom and dad didn’t know each other when they were living in Chicago and as far as I know chances are their paths didn’t cross, but there were moments where I wondered.

Moments where I wondered if maybe they stood close together and watched the U-Boat sail up the Chicago river or if maybe they were at the lake at the same time.

Stranger things have happened.

I Wanted The Dodgers To Win

I didn’t want the Cubs to win.

I wanted my boys to get back to the series so that I could share that moment with my kids. I didn’t want another year of telling my son I remember what it was like to lose in 74, 77 and 78 and how sweet it was when we won.

’81 and ’88 live large in memory and I wanted a new one.

But I suppose given my deep Chicago roots I’ll have no problem cheering for the Cubbies.

A hundred some odd years is a long time to wait for another World Series championship.

Filed Under: Children, Life

Am I Killing Twitter?

October 20, 2016 by Jack Steiner 2 Comments

I am another white guy listening to NWA’s Straight Outta Compton thinking about how I have run into Ice Cube twice.

Both times were at the same IHOP but we exchange greetings or acknowledge each other either time and it is not because we went to rival high schools.

Ok, that is not entirely true, we nodded heads at each other, me as I walked towards my table and he as he walked out of the restaurant.

tastelifetwice

Funny thing is when a neighbor asked me last week if I ever saw celebrities in LA I forgot to mention Ice Cube.

Didn’t think of the time I saw Bruce Springsteen, Tom Selleck or Diane Keaton.

The list is far longer than that and not made up, it is just proof  I don’t spend much time thinking about celebrities.

There are relatively few I really have significant interest in and most of the time I don’t feel like I am entitled to go insert myself into their world.

Where Are You Now?

I got some news today about stuff going on back in LA that reminded me that moving to Texas would present some challenges.

News that reminded me that while Ma and Pa Steiner aren’t old they aren’t young anymore.

There are things going on with them that reminded me of conversations I heard my parents have when they were around the same age I am now.

Makes me wonder where my grandparents are now and what sort of conversations we would have.

The past bubbles into the future and I hear my grandfathers telling me to do exactly as I have done, their advice no different from the words my parents shared with me when I told them I was going to take this position.

But I don’t think they would have appreciated my concerns about being part of a sandwich generation so I didn’t voice them.

Didn’t say that while I was obviously concerned about my kids I worried about them a bit more because they aren’t getting any younger.

Am I Killing Twitter?

Twitter and I were really tight.

We spent a lot of time together and I looked forward to my time there because I knew Twitter and I would have a lot of fun together.

But time passed and things changed and it wasn’t quite as it was.

I never did figure out if it was me or Twitter that changed.

Might have been both, but man from 2008-11 we had a lot of fun together. Hell things were probably still good in 2012, but the impact of whatever changed finally had its way with me.

Hell things were probably still good in 2012, but the impact of whatever changed finally had its way with me.

I started spending less and less time there but because I didn’t want to disappear I used automation to maintain a presence and to make sure my posts were still promoted.

Sometimes I jump on Twitter and I see sparks of the past and for a while I am live and around. I make comments and engage in conversation and it feels like it once did.

But eventually I get pulled away and I leave but the automation stays and I wonder if I am part of the problem.

lonelyhouse

My windows ache and there is a part of me that has gone missing. One day it will return but I don’t know when that will be.

****

Sometimes I forget how old I am and how much life experience I have.

It doesn’t occur to me that I have lived through John Lennon’s murder, the attempted assassination of President Reagan, two space shuttle catastrophes, a series of wars, terrorism, Rodney King, the LA Riots and OJ.

That is not a complete or comprehensive list either.

I suppose I could say I have lived through eight presidencies and am about to hit my 9th but I am not sure how significant that really is or isn’t.

Maybe what this really means is that I am working on getting my rhythm as a writer back.

Maybe it is because it is time to return to certain stories.

I am not  a priest or a rabbi but chances are good that just as many people look to me for absolution of their sins. Hell, probably more because I get the agnostics and the atheists too.

Don’t ask me to tell you when it started or how bartenders got a reputation for being the person you can spill your guts too because I don’t know and if I did it is probably not something I would talk about either. It would be like a magician telling you how he saws the girls in half- some things are trade secrets.

What I can tell you is a good bartender is more than someone who knows how to make the best Martini or the latest cocktail fad drink. A good bartender knows how to listen and when to speak. Sure, alcohol helps loosen the lips of the customers and makes it easier for them to tell us about whatever is on their minds, but that is not all.

They share with us because we don’t share what we hear and we don’t judge. We are like the Swiss bankers except our currency isn’t traded on Wall Street.

Some stories provide answers to questions and some stories just raise more questions.

When your windows ache and your doorknobs throb you always know it is the latter.

Don’t blame me for Twitter but don’t release me of responsibility either. The search for absolution is never so simple.

Filed Under: Writing

Are Fathers Better Lovers Than Mothers?

August 8, 2016 by Jack Steiner 6 Comments

The mix of music on my iTunes has already played its way through The Long & Winding Road, Come Together and somehow made its way to the Fiddler On The Roof soundtrack.

It is a good combination of tunes for a day that feels twice as long as eternity.

Four cups of coffee, a Double-Double from In-N-Out and exhaustion is enough to get me dancing with Tevye around my room…sort of.

Sort of means there are boxes and things everywhere but none of those obstacles are enough to prevent me from singing Tradition to the empty room.

That is cuz the tradition in this house is that dad stays alone the night before the movers come so that he can manage the move unencumbered of parental duties.

Strange & Surreal

It feels strange and surreal to know our time living in the townhouse I never wanted to live in is…done.

The silence I normally welcome is deafening and the excitement I feel about moving towards a better future is tinged with a bittersweet taste.

This move is being broken up into two pieces, not by my choice but because it is how things worked out.

It means for a couple of weeks I’ll live in temporary housing and then make a bigger move to find new housing again.

The bigger move is the real step into creating the future I see us moving into but it doesn’t come without sacrifice.

workforprize

I figure if my great-grandparents had the courage to leave all they knew behind for a shot at a better life this should be easy in comparison.

Old Jack Steiner speaks, reads and writes English, has a great job and is a citizen.

That is more than the aforementioned ancestors had and it doesn’t cover the ease with which technology shrinks the world.

A couple of clicks and I can communicate with friends and family or if need be I can hop on a plane and be back within a few hours.

And the thing is if I want to do more than Tevye and sing about becoming a rich man than I need to take advantage of opportunities when they are presented.

The thing is, when this one showed up I didn’t hesitate to do my best to make it my own and well now I get to find out what happens when you get what you asked for.

Are Fathers Better Lovers Than Mothers?

A few people heard about the new deal and offered unsolicited advice and criticism of my plans but I ignored them.

It is easy for people to tell you what they think you should do, especially when they won’t suffer the consequences of said advice.

I don’t wear a sweater when others are cold so why would I listen to their fears and commentary.

Doesn’t mean I won’t or don’t ever listen to what other people say, just that I am selective about it, especially when someone tells me a mother would never do that.

Gah, only an idiot tries to distinguish whether mothers or fathers love their children more.

Parents love their kids, the end.

GQ3TV02RS6

The music in my ears never stops playing but even if it did I know the parade of images inside my head wouldn’t end.

Some hours earlier my 12-year-old daughter accompanied me on a run to get more boxes and take care of more errands surrounding the move.

Our conversation wandered through a variety of topics and ended up on jobs and marriage.

I told her my sweet girl I wanted her to get a great education, to study hard and work towards getting a good job.

She asked me why and I told her I wanted her to be self-sufficient and to not put herself in a position in which money dictates every choice and decision she has to make.

And now hours later the conversation replays in my head and I hope I did a good job of explaning and expressing my thoughts.

I hope she understands the point of the conversation is I want the best for her and I want her to live her life fully and completely.

I don’t want her to feel like she has to get married or to become a mother because society expects it. I want it for her if she wants it.

I want her to take advantage of all her potential.

The thing is I am working on about 9 hours of sleep over the past few days so I know I am beyond exhausted and I might not be as eloquent or clear as I want to be.

The Cries of The Unpacked

The movers will be here tomorrow around 8 so I must go.

I must go because of the awful cries of the unpacked possessions are haunting me the way Frume Sara haunted Tevye.

Tell the kids I love them, dad is off to make our future.

Filed Under: Children, Life

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