Wherever You Go, There They Are

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  A few years ago, an administrator tracked me down to inquire if I wanted to make good on a pledge my father had made. Unbeknownst to me, I hadn’t been accepted into the program. I was a sophomore at the time, and students were supposed to be juniors. Knowing how much I wanted to go, my father intervened, promising a generous donation. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t attended that summer? Surely a domino effect of differences, maybe for the better or maybe for the worse. I’ll never know. Was my mother aware of this bribe? Probably, but in this instance her passivity worked in my favor. For so many years, I told myself that anything good in my life had happened in spite of them, but who’s to say that any success I’ve had can’t be traced back to their being my parents? And they will always be my parents. And they did always believe in me.

  “Always,” I repeat several times, mimicking my sister.

  We’re in our pajamas when we start surfing the Web for senior-living communities. We check out the website of the luxury residence Dad has e-mailed as a better alternative to today’s offerings: Villa Grande. It’s close to my parents’ doctors’ offices and it has a lecture series, high-end wine tastings, and shellfish! But it’s out of reach of their budget. There’s another enclave, Villa Even More Grande, that has cottages, town houses, and ranch-style haciendas to choose from. The layouts are named for artists ranging from Renoir to Chagall. The Michelangelo is the size of New Hampshire. Not only are the ceilings higher and kitchens stainless, the photographs hint at perhaps the greatest luxury of all. In the staged shots, a stylish woman contemplates a biscotti by a bay window, and on a couch in the background, in what looks like a galaxy far, far away, maybe even Delta Epsilon, a man reads the newspaper. They’ll need walkie-talkies or smoke signals in order to communicate. It’s an unmistakable message that the greatest luxury is to be able to put space between you and your spouse. It’s the perfect place for my parents.

  The seniors are dressed in someone’s notion of classy: ladies wear pearls and the men are uniformly outfitted in pin-striped shirts, expensive watches on wrists. What will the marketing be like when we, the punk rock generation, are looking for the “next place”? My new goal in life is to live long enough to see senior-living ads featuring aging hipsters sporting vintage Ramones T-shirts and to afford a Banksy.

  “Should we try to get them in there?” I ask my sister, knowing full well that we’d have to borrow against our own futures to get them into even a Pissarro.

  Our dilemma is just one more way in which the disappearance of the middle class is playing out in our country. There are plenty of choices if money is no option, Medicare subsidies for those without any assets, but the in-between barely exists.

  Companies are putting resources into the super-high-end retirement market, just like in the cruise industry. In fact, Villa Grande advertises with the tagline “When your ship comes in, why not make it a cruise liner?” and touts their services as unmatched by the top cruise lines. Forget a sponge bath; at these sanctuaries you could probably get a tongue bath if that’s what floats your boat. Places like Tel Aviv Gardens used to be the primary destination for Jews of a variety of income levels, but if families are monied, they go elsewhere. The Gardens doesn’t have access now to the donors who used to fund improvements, so it seems like steerage in comparison.

  When you add in the lessened mobility that age brings, a geriatric caste system is inevitable. Of the few lasting friendships Mom and Dad have made, the well-heeled folks have moved to areas of the country like North Carolina, considered a desirable retirement spot, where they’ll either hire expensive in-home care or be ushered into one of those gilded golden-year havens.*

  I get excited when I find a mid-priced community in the middle of Florida called the Villages, but our hearts sink when we read that the development is owned by a conservative billionaire and there’ve been reports of incidents of harassment of residents who aren’t in lockstep with the politics promoted by the Villages’ newspaper and radio station—dog poop on doorsteps and public shaming of Democrats. My parents would be in their element, but what will happen when Lisa’s and my families visit? There’s also a 0 percent Jewish population there, which would be unacceptable to my mother, and the hundred thousand or so residents of the Villages rarely leave the property, which sounds a lot like a senior internment camp.

  We search for a place like I read about in Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal.

  “I read about a retirement community that has one hundred parakeets, four dogs, two cats, a colony of rabbits, a flock of laying hens, and after-school care for the children of the aides, and it shares a campus with a school. Some of the residents write up daily reports on the birds.”

  “Can’t you see Mom writing reports like, ‘Parakeet number 32 isn’t cleaning up after itself. Messy! Fat; halved birdseed rations today. Too much singing; annoying. Put a thimble of cheap Merlot in the aviary and it settled down fine.’”

  We can’t find anything like that in Florida. Just for kicks, I search for the place that Gawande wrote about and find that the minimum buy-in is six hundred thousand dollars, not including the monthly fees.

  Lisa and I talk about the money, how we can swing it. As I fall asleep I add up my savings, our son’s college fund, our retirement plans, and try to guesstimate how much I could get for the hand-painted Dolce & Gabbana skirt a TV network bought me once, but I can’t make the numbers work and my sister has two sons who are graduating college in an economy where entry-level jobs are hard to come by. My dad has squandered his and Mom’s money, for sure, but if their savings had been wiped out by a tornado, would that make them any more sympathetic? The Torah says the greatest charity is to give without judgment, and then there’s that old “Honor thy father and mother” commandment. It’s the first one. Oh my God, I don’t even believe in God, so why am I so Jewish? I would just like them to have something beautiful to look at.

  I’m mad at my grandfather Ike for not making more money, I’m mad at our dad for not making more money, but mostly I’m mad at myself for not making more money and at Atul Gawande because I wish I didn’t know about parakeet paradise.

  Our flights are scheduled to leave early in the morning and we try to reach our parents’ cell phones but they don’t pick up; we can only reach them on the landline. It’s been less than twenty-four hours and they’ve already given up on the new phones. My sister and I say our good-byes at the airport but we still haven’t made a decision. We just don’t want to pull the trigger.

  “Tonight,” we agree. “We’ll talk tonight.”

  I’m snaking my way through the long security line at Miami International Airport when the TSA screener pulls the citron altar fruit jar out of my purse and asks what’s inside. “Memories,” I tell him, which reminds me that I’ve neglected to buy my parents a new trash can.

  That night, I call my sister, but before I can say anything, she beats me to it.

  “Tel Aviv Gardens.”

  “Right. At least there are grand pianos. Lots of them,” I add hopefully. “There was one in the lobby of the rehab center, the hospital, both residences. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a piano in one of the bathrooms on the campus; those stalls are big enough.”

  It’s a point of pride for Jewish people to be cultured, or at least appear to be cultured. My parents had a piano in their home. I have a piano in my house even though none of us play it.

  I tell her I’ll break the news to our father.

  “Hi, Dad, this is your daughter, ann345mwx. I’m calling to tell you that Lisa and I feel that the Gardens is the best of all possible homes for you and Mom.”

  My father says he might be able to hit up a cousin for some money so they can go to Villa Grande.

  “Dad, I’m sorry, but I really don’t think you should do that,” I say, knowing full well that there’s no way he’s getting any more money out of our cousins.

  “Well, i
t’s best for your mother.”

  “Yes, it’s best for Mom,” I repeat. “And, Dad, I promise, I’ll get you a new garbage can.”

  We have no martyrs—we have no saints

  No cross to bear, but we still have some complaints

  —Penn Jillette

  and they shall enter singing the songs of mumford and sons

  When you let it slip that you’re not a believer, well-meaning friends will say things like, “I can prove there is a God.” Recently, the husband of a friend took up this challenge. Not only hasn’t he devoted his life to studying man’s search for meaning, but he’s untroubled by his lack of cultivated knowledge. “Go for it,” I said, harboring just the tiniest hope that he might be onto something. I’m not a “Hooray, there’s no God” person. I’m an “It sucks that there’s no God” person, but I am resigned. I’ll have a double shot of espresso and the latest by Sam Harris.

  “Okay, if there’s no God, why is the ratio of males to females in the world always in stasis? Even after wars where large numbers of men die, the numbers always return to the same level. It doesn’t make sense unless the hand of God has intervened.”

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” I told him, wanting to do my due diligence before commenting. I asked the brilliant physicist Lisa Randall, author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, if she might weigh in.

  “What’s the statistical probability that Jeremy Wright, patent attorney in Los Angeles, has solved the riddle of the ages?”

  “That would depend: Are we talking about the probability using the amount of people who’ve tackled this issue since the beginning of recorded history or just in our generation? But for the real question, this doesn’t prove anything. ‘Intelligent design’ arguments invoke God to account for something someone doesn’t understand before exhausting possible scientific contributing factors such as birth rates for men versus women or a more detailed statistical analysis. The arguments also seem to often refer to robustness of men for some reason.”

  As a C-minus science student, I find the intelligent design argument faulty for a more practical reason. In a truly intelligently designed world, there wouldn’t be pedophiles, dictators, or the need to eat lentils. There wouldn’t be AIDS, Alzheimer’s, or athleisure. There would be equal pay for the sexes and a livable minimum wage, and people would stop saying, “It’s all good.” There would be eye creams that really lift, iPhone screens that don’t crack; politicians peddling falsehoods would be struck down by lightning, and booty shorts would be outlawed. If someone posited a theory that reflected a more realistic assessment of our world, I might be more inclined to accept it, but I’m skeptical that “God’s doing his best” design would be met with much enthusiasm.*

  Still, I never felt compelled to seek out non-theist fellowships until the day I got sucked into a video about citizen volunteers helping Syrian refugees ashore in Lesbos, Greece. I was jotting down the name of the sponsoring organization, intending to contact them about joining the rescue effort, when one of the volunteers turned to the camera.

  “I just want these folks to have a good experience with Christians.”

  Can we humanists ever hope to hit the ground running in the way that faith-based groups respond to disasters and crises? I wondered. Folks who identify themselves as unaffiliated, “nones,” according to Pew Research, are the least trusted people in America. “I just want these folks to have a good experience with secular humanists,” I picture myself saying as I grasp the hand of a refugee. Could I be a part of changing that perception?

  If I’d spent a little less time contemplating my past lives, I’d have known that greater minds than mine have been working toward organizing secular communities across the globe.

  A quick search on the Web lets me know the humanists in my part of town are outdoorsy types who like to hit the local hiking trails together. There is a healthy streak of humor running through many of their online meet-up profiles:

  I am an atheist because I like to sleep in on Sundays.

  I couldn’t go home for Passover because I had a yeast infection. If that’s not a reason to give up God, I don’t know what is.

  I’m an agnostic, satirist, writer and Rasputin impersonator. Check out my blog for shits and giggles, mostly giggles.

  Then I heard about Sunday Assembly Los Angeles. The Assembly movement was started in England by two British comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, who were looking for something that was “like church but totally secular.” “Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More” is their trademarked slogan, which has been adopted by the seventy Assemblies in eight countries that have cropped up since 2013. The Assembly website announces their intention to be “radically inclusive,” noting, “We don’t do supernatural but we also won’t tell you you’re wrong if you do.”

  They sounded like my kind of people, but it was their call for volunteers to make holiday care packages for the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, MAAF, that got me out of the house that Sunday morning. The lecture that week was also impossible for a sci-fi fanatic like me to resist. It was titled “Where Science Meets Science Fiction.” I invited my husband, who prefers to remain undecided if skeptical about the existence of a deity, noting that the service included live music, but he disdains anything that even remotely resembles a religious service.

  “Mark my words, they’ll play something by Mumford and Sons.” He despises their peppy, folky sound. Bands like Modest Mouse make his skin crawl.

  “For an agnostic, you think you know everything, don’t you?”

  I was welcomed into the Assembly by two super-friendly male greeters. The guys were in good enough shape to be confused with personal trainers—we were in Hollywood, after all. If I wrote a scene in a movie in which one greeter revealed that he was an emergency room EMT and the other that he was an alcohol sales rep, and both said that after seeing drunken carnage all week, they were looking forward to something uplifting, any skeptic worth her salt would say that was too great a coincidence, but that’s exactly what brought both of them into Sunday Assembly. The alcohol rep also said that after growing up in a churchy community, he felt “orphaned” as an unaffiliated person, a word I will hear numerous times during the day. I have an innate distrust of too much cheerfulness, so I almost turned around and left, but when I saw that the refreshment station was serving espresso drinks, not your typical tepid institutional brew, it seemed like a sign that I should stay.

  I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising upon entering an auditorium of self-professed freethinkers to hear, “NPR is not leftist enough for my taste.” There were about two hundred people milling about, families with young children and a smattering of vintage Woodstocky types. It was refreshing to see that there wasn’t a recognizably famous face in the crowd, which is unusual for Los Angeles, though if the celebrity Twittersphere is any indication, Hollywood is almost as churchy as my hometown of Mobile, Alabama. Tweets regularly teem with invocations of blessedness and gratitude and shout-outs of thanks to God.*

  So many of the male Assemblers were on the younger side that we might have been confused with a ManBunCon. The varietals of hair bordered on the miraculous, some designs as improbable as an immaculate conception: man knots, man buns, the “hot crossed buns” (a double bun), the “bun run” (a vertical row of buns), “the debunoir” (a slicked-back bun), and the “I can’t believe it’s not butter bun” (this style aims to fool you: it’s got shaved sides like a Mohawk, but wait, there’s more—there’s a bun back there). And most of the men had beards. I found it strangely comforting that though unwilling to embrace religion, these men were not agnostic about all things. They were deeply committed to the grooming and maintenance of body hair.

  We non-believers are funny! Someone in my row sneezed; I said, “God bless you—oops, gesundheit,” and shared a titter with those seated on either side of me. An announcement over the PA system let us know t
hat the event would be live-streamed and that the (all-volunteer) staff was checking the audiovisual hookup because, as we know, you can’t leave anything to chance. Thinking I’d gotten the hang of this secular gathering, I made a kind of inside joke about how that’s because we live in a random universe. My entire row chuckled. We’re hilarious!*

  The first order of the day was the “ice breaker” moment, meant to spark conversation among strangers. Instead of wishing the person next to you a blessed day or Shabbat shalom, we were instructed to turn to the person next to us and observe a moment of silence. I embarrassingly interpreted this to mean a theater exercise where you stare at your partner in an attempt to learn as much as you can through silent, probing observation. After two minutes of enduring my unflinching gaze, my neighbor cleared her throat, shifted uncomfortably, and turned away. The people around us were conversing casually, probably conspiring to politely freeze me out of the Assembly.

  A song whose lyrics appeared on the screen in front of us blasted out from the speakers and we were encouraged to stand up and sing along with “I Will Wait” by Mumford and Sons, followed by “Float On” by Modest Mouse. It wasn’t the second coming, but I was in heaven; these are two of my favorite peppy, folky tunes.

  After the musical interlude, Assemblers were invited to stand up or call out milestones they were marking this week. Someone was celebrating thirty-five years of marriage, another got an A on a college exam, a kid won a national prize with the Boys and Girls Clubs, and one little girl announced that she felt awesome. I was so charmed, I almost yelled out, “I’m experiencing a genuinely heartwarming moment without judgment, although I will write about it in a manner that is laced with sarcasm,” but reason won out and I resisted the temptation.

  The featured speaker was Dr. Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, a fellow at the London School of Economics and professor at one of the UCs in the philosophy of probability. He was impossibly good-looking; it seemed unlikely he didn’t have a degree in handsomeness. He told us he’d be speaking on a concept that was a lot like the premise of the TV series Fringe. That show followed the chaotic disruption caused when parallel universes overlapped.* I was such a fan of the series that I stayed awake once for an entire cross-country red-eye because one of the show’s stars was on my flight and I felt compelled to watch as her chest rose and fell with each breath while she slept, which qualifies as stalkery in any universe. I took notes: