The Way We Were
The 1973 film by that name starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand was impactful to me for many reasons. To begin with, the author of the script and the book on which the movie is based, Arthur Laurents, was a Cornell University graduate who was a contemporary of my mother. He was born about 10 months after my mother, so he was probably not Class of 1937, but he wrote his story about Katie Morosky and Hubbell Gardiner, who were graduates of that class. That was my mother’s class at Cornell and while she was not from an Orthodox Jewish family from New York City, she did look a bit like the young Katie in the movie. One of my mother’s good friends and eventual husband some 55 years later was Irving Jenkins. Irving was a Golden Gloves heavyweight boxing champion and a member of the Cornell heavyweight crew team. In many ways he was Hubbell Gardiner as the athletic scholar. He even belonged to the Sphinx Head secret honor society. The big difference was that Irving was not the patrician WASP that Hubbell was, but a big scrapping guy from the Lower East Side of New York City, who grew up with a union organizer father and a fervent belief that despite carrying the name Irving Aaron Jenkins, that he was NOT Jewish (something I tend to seriously doubt). Irving and my mother went off in their own directions after college much like Katie and Hubbell did, except their reunion did not happen for 55 years.
The poignancy of the story The Way We Were is that of people who shared similar values, but came from different places and ended up in different places even though they shared a small and meaningful part of their lives together. When they are reunited in the final scene in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, you can’t help but feel that they were each other’s one true love even though they were still going their own separate ways. We are left to wonder how that can happen. We all have trysts or relationships that fade into distant memories, pleasant or unpleasant, but there is a sadness about people who should be together not being together. But the truth that the movie tries to show us is that there are some people who love one another deeply, but just shouldn’t be together. They are best left to live their lives as they wish and reminisce about the way they once were.
I am very fortunate. I did not meet the love of my life until I was 51 and she, then 46 years old, had not met her soulmate either. I spent my adult life thinking that I could make a life with any number of women and that soulmates were more of an idealization than a reality. I loved both of my first two wives to be certain, at least as I thought love to be. And I do not regret anything I have done in my life and certainly not tying myself to either of those two women, as I did, but when I met Kim I suddenly realized that the idea of a soulmate was not so much a concept any longer. From the first night we met, I sensed something dramatically different about Kim and about the relationship we could have together. Since then, all of those things have come true and every day I marvel at how much she and I are meant to be together. I have never once wavered from that thought, even for a nanosecond. We have been through good times and bad times with each other and certainly have shared some sickness and good health. But we remain resolutely committed to one another and, I expect, will always do so.
One of the things we share in common is that we were the youngest of three children and we were especially close to and raised by our mothers. I have come to understand that to be very much at the core of why we have such mutually shared values. Our mothers were, in their own and very different ways, very strong and principled women who cared about others and kept kindness and goodness at the center of their existence. They were born to rural families and they each put people and community as their primary benefactors of their efforts.
Yesterday I happened to watch a movie that I had never before noticed. It was called Good and it stared one of my favorites, Viggo Mortensen. It tells the story of a German academic that gets wooed by and caught up by the Nazi phenomenon of the 1930s and inadvertently becomes a member of the SS with its skull rings and special privileges afforded by Heinrich Himmler to the elite protectorate of the Fuhrer. The overarching theme is about how good people (Mortensen’s character was raised by his then ailing mother) get perverted by bad systems and how their weakness and sense of “practicality” can cause them to lose sight of the good that is central to their value system. It seems that Viggo Mortensen has lived a life that strangely parallels a blend of Kim’s and my lives. He was born in 1958 like Kim and into a family of Scandinavian descent. His father took him to Latin America to raise him and yet he and his two siblings were taken by their mother, after divorce, to live in her home in rural upstate New York (much of which parallels my upbringing).
The common theme I take from that movie and Viggo’s life story is one of the importance of the value systems that get instilled most often by our mothers and form the core of our existence and goodness. It is interesting in the wake of the recent DNC to read many interpretations of what is happening in our national politics that is starting to resonate with so many people and bring hopefulness and a sense of goodness back into the picture of what governance should be about. It is particularly interesting to note the decidedly maternalistic air that it all seems to embody. Countless speakers at the podium, including and notably Kamala Harris, invoked their upbringing by their mothers and how that led to a sense of the centrality and importance of community and collectivism. It should not be lost on any of us that this is something new and meaningful in modern American politics. It is not just a return to the New Deal values brought forth by FDR in the 1930s and recreated over the last four years by Joe Biden. It is something new and very special. I’m not sure there is a name for it just yet, but it feels like it is sweeping the country up almost as a backlash to the autocratic and self-interested ways of the nationalistic MAGA wave that has gripped a large part of our country of late.
In Good, we can see the way good people became corrupted to the ways of National Socialism and how they assumed the bad elements would filter out and there would be left the best of the idealism. Of course, that didn’t happen and the bad ran rampant and perverted even those who were fundamentally driven by what they thought was a good program. That movie really captured the essence of where we seem to be in America today. It also captures the cause, strangely linked to the demise of maternal influence at that critical juncture.
I am glad that Kim and I can lean on one another and remind each other in subtle and subconscious ways of the importance of our maternal influences. They are the root of most of the good we each possess. As pointed out at the DNC podium, it is that same root of goodness that seems to be creating this storm of goodness and joy in the presidential campaign. I feel very strongly that both Kim’s and my mothers would be standing strong beside the Harris/Walz ticket and would be watching to see that their youngest would stand tall and do the right thing in support of those ideals that most closely resemble the way we were and the way we should all be.