Next Time Around

Last Sunday, we drove fifty-eight miles to Hayward, California to attend the annual Northern California Ukulele Festival. I wore my Kamaka Hawaii hat, and my colorful Kamaka Hawaii dress shirt, and I had bought both items at the Kamaka store on Oahu.  We try going each year to the festival and scour booths that sell ukuleles and Hawaii-themed items, and listen to ukulele music in the auditorium.  I use the day to inspire me to pick up one of my three ukuleles and start playing, when I get home.

I have two inexpensive ones in flimsy, cloth cases that I bought at festivals, and one very good Kamaka model, which tends to gather dust at times.

I have always felt a sentimental tie to ukuleles after I learned that my father courted my mother in a canoe on Belle Isle in Detroit in the early 1930s, while strumming away on his ukulele.

When I was in Oahu, Hawaii in 1988, I went to the Polynesian Cultural Center run by the Mormon Church, and was standing by a canal when a boat floated by with a man strumming his ukulele. I shouted, “What kind of ukulele is that?” and he answered, “It’s a Kamaka. The only one I’d ever buy.” “Where are they sold?” I asked, and he replied, “Over on South Street.”

When I left the Center, I drove to Kamaka Hawaii, Inc. at 550 South Street, and met Sam, Jr. and Fred, the two sons of the founder Samuel K. Kamaka, Sr. I decided to write an article on the Kamaka family for the San Jose Mercury News travel section. When it was published, I was paid $150 for my time and effort, which didn’t really compensate me for my air travel to and from California, my car rental cost, my hotel and meals. I had gone to Hawaii for a vacation and to visit friends, and not to write a story.

I also bought my Kamaka ukulele for $250, and that price included a solid protective carrying case. Sam, Jr. burned the following onto the front of my ukulele just above the sound hole, “Aloha! Sam Kamaka. 9/9/1988.”

Since then, I have bought ukulele song books, dozens of vinyl albums, cds, and discs by Hawaiian musicians, videos on how to play, taken a group lesson from one professional, two private lessons from another, check instructional videos on You Tube, and have attended ukulele concerts. I have also visited the islands many times.

In the nearly twenty-six years since I acquired my Kamaka, I may have played it fifty times, or about twice a year. I get frustrated each time that I try, for my finger dexterity is lacking, and I am loath to practice. I have taken an inexpensive model when we go on an extended driving vacation, and I play for five or ten minutes at the start of each trip, before the ukulele gets relegated to the back seat.

If I really wanted to, I could have been a ukulele virtuoso by now.

I have owned my Kamaka for 9,496 days, and if I had devoted just five minutes a day to playing the instrument, that would total 47,880 minutes. That converts into 798 hours, playing just a bit at a time.

If I really wanted to be a proficient ukulele musician, I could have been one. At times I really wanted to master the ukulele, but I lacked the devotion, desire, and dedication to do so. I also let life get in the way.

Instead of playing, I devoted time to family, teaching, researching, making presentations on my research around the US, Israel and Australia, traveling around the world and other places, playing table tennis, and living. Writing also consumed much of my time, and that’s what I am doing right now. I have spent hours trying to get this piece to sing, the same way I have done with countless other articles and blogs. I also spent more than 950 hours working on my first book The Oy Way, and am now working on my second book, My Incredible Odyssey. 

Although I have failed to learn how to play the ukulele, buying my Kamaka back in 1988 was a good move. After talking with Chris Kamaka at the recent Ukulele Festival, I learned that my Kamaka is now selling for $895. However, I have no intention of selling it for a profit, since there is still time to learn how to play it, if I really want to do so.

Face the Nation

The NCAA college basketball season is finally over, and the next hoopla comes with the NBA playoffs.

Then the sports scene will be dominated by major league baseball, and I will then no longer rush to the daily sports pages, nor anxiously await my weekly Sports Illustrated.

The NCAA tournament had one of the truly class-less team in the University of Kentucky Wildcats, made up of young men with basketball maturity, but some possessed limited social maturity or grace.

Kill the Messenger

Once the misguided media anointed them as the best basketball team ever, they became invincible royalty in their own minds. Their fairly classy coach John Calipari tried to tell his team, and the rest of the world, that they hadn’t accomplished anything yet with their 38 straight wins without a loss.

Wasted on the Young

However, their leading players were very young and of their sixteen players on their roster, four were freshman and seven were sophomores. Of the sixty-eight teams in the NCAA tournament, Kentucky was 24^th on the list of graduation rates.

The Kentucky team’s social immaturity was on display after they lost their first game in the semi-finals against the University of Wisconsin. It has been a custom in these games, that the two teams and their coaches line up, and shake the hand of the opposing team’s players. The only UK person doing so on national television was Coach Calipari, as his dejected, immature players sulked as they dejectedly walked off the court with nary a handshake.

Of course, they are young, and understandably feeling down after they had become the designated champions, before they won the title.

What He Said

The most class-less of them all was one of the African-American Harrison twins, sophomore Andrew. He and the team couldn’t avoid the post game media gathering, where players sit at a table and answer questions. When their outstanding 6’11” African-American freshman center Karl-Anthony Towns was asked about defending against Wisconsin’s 7’0” White senior Frank Kaminsky, Andrew, who was sitting a few feet away, didn’t know that has microphone was open, and muttered into his own mature remarks about Frank.

The straight, Puritanical media couldn’t put Andrews actual words down, so they printed, “F - - - the N - - - - - A media uproar ensued about what Andrew had said, and afterwards, Andrew first tweeted that he wanted to apologize to Frank, and then he called him.

Frank, the mature senior, said, “He apologized to me, we talked about it, we’re over it. Nothing more needs to be made of it.”

What He Meant

Can’t understand what the fuss is all about, and why didn’t Andrew just tell Frank to appear on “Face the Nation?” Isn’t that what Andrew meant before the media inserted all of those dashes, instead of letters, into his quote?

Obama in Black and White

First-term GOP Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, having accumulated nearly two months experience in office, convinced forty-six other Republican Senators to sign a March 9 letter to Iran’s leaders. This letter was specifically designed to undermine President Obama’s actions to deter Iran’s nuclear capabilities through negotiations.

In February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Republican Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said, “President Obama has disqualified himself and shown himself incapable of being our commander-in-chief.” He went on, “This president is bankrupting our country financially, morally, our international standing.”

In January, Marco Rubio, a GOP Senator from Florida, questioned Obama’s planned actions on slowly lifting the total embargo on Cuba, as part of the President’s plan to establish diplomatic relations with that country. Rubio was quoted on CNSNews.com, “Given existing U.S. laws about our Cuba policy, this slew of regulations leave at least one major question President Obama and his administration have failed to answer so far: what legal authority does he have to enrich the Castro regime in these ways?”  Wonder if Marco had his Cuban-American, South Florida constituents in mind when he says this, or is it part of his upcoming platform in his path to the presidency?

Last November, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas spoke about Obama’s immigration policy to radio host Mark Levin, "It is one of the most profoundly troubling aspects of the Obama administration, is the degree to which this is a lawless administration. ”When Cruz spoke to Megyn Kelly on Fox News, he stayed the course, and reiterated, "We are unfortunately witnessing a constitutional crisis. What President Obama's doing is he is defying the law, he's defying the Constitution," Was Cruz thinking about his own possible Presidential run, or just trying to keep his Texas faithful, faithful?

Alabama’s two Republican Senators, Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, are also out to set the public straight on Obama’s deviant political actions. After the President’s State of the Union address in January, Sessions couldn’t find anything remotely positive in Obama’s words to the nation. “On the national security front, President Obama has once again failed to deliver a clear vision for combating the threat of ISIS and Islamic extremism.” He went on, “On immigration, the President remains wedded to a lawless policy that serves only the interest of an international elite while reducing jobs and benefits for everyday Americans.”

Shelby joined the GOP’s anti-Obama chorus, stating “The President’s address tonight did not include plans to rescind his decision to circumvent Congress and unilaterally grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. It failed to outline a way to provide the American people with relief from the destructive impacts of Obamacare. We also did not hear about his plans to enact policies that will reenergize the private sector and encourage job growth.”

In January, one of Kentucky’s GOP Senators, Rand Paul, also a potential Presidential candidate, told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren, "What Obamacare did was take some of the things we did for the poor and expanded the government to basically the whole marketplace. That I think will ultimately bankrupt the country and then nobody will have good health care."

Before the 2012 Presidential election, Kentucky GOP Senator Mitch McConnell, who is now the Majority Leader in the Senate, bluntly declared to the faithful, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. “

It didn’t quite work out that way for the “we,” (“we” being the GOP) so Republicans in the Senate and the House tried, and are still trying, to get even by not working with the President on hardly any issue. In all fairness, neither is Obama intelligently working with those “across the aisle.”

As you may have noticed, all eight of these men have three common attributes. They are all members of the Republican Party, all of them are from the South, and all of them are White.

Could the anti-Obama feelings among these eight Southerners and others, be because he is referred as the First Black President? African Americans also push that label, but do so with pride. However, with a White mother and a Black father, isn’t Obama, in fact, the First Multiracial President? When I was young, the term Mulatto was used, which was defined as, “A person who is born from one parent black and one white parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed white and black ancestry in any proportion.”

Barak Hussein Obama will leave office in twenty-two months. Depending on the 2016 Presidential election results, either the GOP or the Democrats, will have a new President to fervently complain about, regardless of that person’s color or gender.

Dying to Stay Home

Give Aways

Twice a year, I look through the more than twenty-two hundred books on my shelves, and select those that I either have read, or haven’t read and would never read.

This endeavor helps me decide which books to donate to the local library for their semi-annual sale, or to organizations that could possibly use them.

When I taught a class on the Holocaust and the illegal Japanese American Internment, I bought as many books as I could on both of those subjects, including dozens on WWII. I will hold on to some but donate others to the Japanese American Museum in San Jose, and to the Northern California or Michigan Holocaust Centers.

Then I came across a 122-page research study put out by the Commonweal Institute entitled, “Responding to the Attack on Public Education & Teacher Unions.” Although I never truly read it, the book was written by a good friend of mine Leonard M. Salle, whom I had known since we were fraternity brothers at Wayne State University in the mid-1950s.

Another Point of View

He, and his wife Kate Forrest, founded the Commonweal Institute as a think tank. It was an unabashedly liberal organization where its members actually spent time to think, offer solutions to problems, and help the uninitiated learn another point of view.

In 1981, I finished my 488-page doctoral dissertation, spent 963 hours producing my first book The Oy Way, and am diligently working on my second book, a memoir. I am aware of what effort goes into researching and writing, and Lenny’s book contained 240 Notes and References, along with brilliant analytical writing, albeit from a liberal point of view.

Death Is Part of Life

Lenny died nine years ago, and Leonard Nimoy just died at the age of eighty-three. My wife and I have been trying to decide what to do with our remains after our lives are over. In the last few weeks, I have spoken to fifteen people of my age around the country, both family members and friends, and not all of them have decided on a final resting place, nor how to get there — burial or cremation.

We have visited all of the Jewish cemeteries within forty miles of here, as well as “neutral” sites. If you haven’t checked out availability and other financial considerations, you might plotz when you look at the cost of the plots.

On yesterday’s trip to Los Gatos Memorial Park in San Jose, we rode on a golf cart around the massive cemetery. Actually, there were several cemetery portions within, including an Asian-American one, a Catholic one, and Shalom Gardens, reserved for members of the Jewish faith.

Dying Is Costly

Our tour guide’s business card listed his title as “Preplanning and Family Service Specialist,” and the pleasant man is on commission. After the ride, we went to a conference room where he calculated an estimate for a single site at $11,147.56, and for a double with discount, at $16,213.87. Those prices include internment (open and close), burial vault, endowment care, survey and development, documentation fee, and tax. This does not include mortuary costs, preparing the body, the use of a hearse to deliver the departed to the cemetery, a casket, and someone to deliver a eulogy. I prefer pre-taping my own.

We have alternatives to consider, including plots we just bought in a Detroit-area Jewish cemetery where all of my relatives are buried, that cost only $1,400 each to start with. Then there would be the added cost of about $2,000 to ship a body back. Over the phone, I told the woman at the cemetery office that we have over 300,000 frequent flyer miles, so that shouldn’t be a problem to fly first class. She paused for a moment, and then solemnly said that we would have to fly cargo.

Another problem with residing in that cemetery during our afterlife is that it would be expensive and wearing to fly back to visit the site by the partner who was still around, on this side of the grass. Besides, Carmen is unenthusiastic of being buried in Michigan, especially after there was recently a wind-chill factor of -24 degrees.

Alternative Ways  

We have also checked with a local taxidermist to find out the cost of being stuffed. If we went that route, Carmen would be placed in the back yard with a small shovel in her hand since she loves gardening, and I would end up in the garage in front of the table tennis table holding on to a racket.

The easiest solution is to keep on living for as long as possible, and that is our plan for now.