The Seventeen Traditions, by Ralph Nader

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2. The Tradition of the Family Table



The Wall Street Journal once devoted an entire editorial to the subject of my mother. After another paper ran a story noting that she sometimes sent us off to school with a handful of chickpeas -- instead of candy, presumably -- and scraped the sugary frosting off of birthday cakes, the Journal took my mother to task for her "puritanical" ways. We did not take exception to my mother's attitudes toward food; in fact, the cake-scraping eventually became a family joke. For some bizarre reason, though, she evidently got under the skin of the hidebound reactionaries at the Journal. (Maybe they'd just run out of complaints against me.)

My mother was highly amused by the screed. She was so far ahead of them and their adherents regarding what food is all about. And what it's all about is not just food. For Mother, the family table was a mosaic of sights, scents, and tastes, of talking and teaching, of health, culture, beauty, history, stimulation, and delight. For Dad, it was a time to pepper us with questions, never thinking for a moment that they might have been over our heads. So what about the leader theory of history? he would ask. Do leaders make changes, or do they largely reflect dynamic pressures on the ground? Or: How did the Treaty of Versailles affect the economic conditions facing a devastated Germany after World War I? Much of our upbringing happened in our compact kitchen -- tucked between two pantries in our Winsted home and at our family table.

Mother invented a wide variety of recipes, using her own intuition and judgment, the way her forebears did. Our diet was heavy with different kinds of fresh beans, vegetables, fruits, grains, lamb, and fish. Among my favorite dishes was Shaykh il Mihshee ("the king of stuffed food"), a baked eggplant stuffed with minced lamb, pine nuts, and onions, garnished with tomatoes and served on long-grain rice with a tossed salad. Mother did not like fatty foods. She never fed us hot dogs, not because she knew they were bad, but because she just didn't know what was in them. She believed in serving a healthful variety of simple foods, and didn't like to fuss over food. She cooked quickly, washing her utensils as she went along, preparing food from scratch -- no canned foods or processed meats and grains. And she held to the rule -- everything in moderation -- even our morning cod liver oil (yikes!).

In the Arabic language, words of endearment are derived from the world of food. "How delicious you are," parents tell their children, or "How tasty," or "How tender." Sounds funny in English, but in Arabic such comments are ancient, routine, and heartfelt. As much as she loved us, though, my mother never asked her young children what we wanted to eat. Why? Because "young children don't know what is good for them," she observed after we were grown. "They don't have to like what they eat; they just have to eat it." We were expected to eat everything on our plates. "If children find out that not eating will bring lots of attention, men they will frustrate their parents by making a scene again and again at the kitchen table," she said. "Parents must not lose control here, or else they will have a scene often at dinnertime." But she knew that children also have an acute sense of fair play. "Parents should eat the same food as their children," she believed. "No double standard."

I think of those words of hers whenever I'm in an airplane or a restaurant and I hear parents ask their young children what they want to eat or drink. We've all heard the worst possible responses to these questions: "I don't want soup," or "No, I hate carrots!" or, far worse, "How many times do I have to tell you, I want a Coke for breakfast! Or a cupcake! Or donuts!" Many parents seem unable to put an end to such officious rejections, and all too often surrender to their children's demands. The kiddie-food marketers have taken control of these children, and there seems to be no level of reasoning capable of breaking their hold.

Even those moms and dads mindful enough to mouth a few nutrition-is-good-for-your-body platitudes are easily defeated by a few choruses of Why? from their kids. The intensity of contemporary mass merchandising, aimed directly at children, has dampened their respect for the adults around them, weakening their sense of parental authority. Our family table wasn't without the occasional bout of resistance, of course; after all, kids are kids. But my mother always had a response at the ready. She knew how much we were interested in history, for instance, so if we balked at a dish that was rich in vitamin C, she would tell the story of how the sailors of olden days grew sick from scurvy until someone discovered that sucking lemons on board ship brought salvation from the disease. Or how desert Bedouins could survive for a long time on a diet made up largely of dates or figs. Most of the time, though, she would lean over us intently, looking into our eyes, and answer our Whys with a firm "Because it is good for you." The underlying message, of course, was: I'm your nurturer and I want the best for you.

And when that didn't work, Mother was capable of cutting right to the point: "What does your tongue have against your heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys?"

The family table was an ideal place to teach us manners and respect, a task for which my mother drew on her endless supply of food-related proverbs and sayings. Some of them were simple rhymes, easy to remember: As the ship goes out to sea, I shovel my food away from me. Others were Arabic proverbs that applied to more than table manners, like He who takes too big a mouthful shall find it difficult to swallow (it sounds much more melodic in the original). She preferred not to reprimand us directly, which would have been humiliating. Sometimes a lift of her eyebrows conveyed her message eloquently. But we also knew that if we ignored her signals, she would make herself clear. We learned not to take food before the guests were served, and to respect our elders by behaving ourselves at the dinner table.

Mother paid attention to the flavor of food, and to its taste, texture, aroma, and appearance -- attributes that, to her, added up to its "bouquet." Her blend of tasty nutrition calmed us down and made us more receptive to the challenging conversations and stories that garnished our dinner table. Years later, when we persuaded her to write down some of her thoughts about family and child rearing -- along with some nuggets of wisdom and insight from my father, and a selection of recipes from our childhood -- the result was a volume called It Happened in the Kitchen. Phil Donahue invited Mother and me to talk about the book on his show in 1991, and we were pleasantly surprised by the response, both in the studio audience and from around the country. They loved the show's old-fashioned tempo, its plain talk, and the authentic common sense born of the experience of generations. Within days, the book had sold fifty thousand copies.

This connection was further strengthened when Aunt Angele, my mother's younger sister, immigrated to this country shortly after World War II. She brought with her the history of the twenty-five years since my mother had left Lebanon, and shared it with us at her new home near ours in Connecticut. Her hospitality and sumptuous tables were a centerpiece of our lives throughout the thirty-four years she lived there; it was there that we witnessed her love of the Arabic language, and the fondness for Arabic poetry, songs, and proverbs that she shared with her sister. At family occasions, such as weddings and birthdays, she demonstrated a distinctive talent for poetic expression herself, and further enriched our appreciation for the beauty of language.

It occurred to us that families all over our country could do the same thing we had done -- to collect the stories and wisdom of their parents, grandparents, and even their great-grandparents before they are lost forever. The resource of generational history is accorded little attention in our society, which seems ever more obsessed with making "new" and "better" synonymous. From my family I became aware of the importance of passing along wisdom from one generation to the next. Yet despite the increasing proliferation of digital recording and other communication technologies, we're passing on less knowledge today than our parents did through the oral tradition alone. We're drowning in photographs and videos, capturing every mundane moment of our birthdays, holidays, and vacations. Yet these can be no more than pleasant distractions, only scratching the surface of our real relationships.

I'm reminded of all of this when I think back on our maternal grandparents in Lebanon. My siblings and I have only a few pictures of them. But the times we shared on our memorable visit there -- harvesting fruit from their small orchard and garden, sharing stories around their large dinner table -- gave us a lasting sense of connection to them, and to each other.

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3. The Tradition of Health



Years after we finished our formal education, we asked Mother how she'd approached the challenge of teaching us about health, which most children don't take too seriously. "There are key moments when raising you," she said, and she knew how to strike when the iron was hot. "When you were sick, I gave you your lessons on health. There was no more receptive time than when you were in the middle of chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, and measles." As we struggled to fight off our childhood ailments, Mother's gentle admonitions about the importance of eating well and getting enough rest and exercise -- and "not doing anything foolish that would damage your health" -- fell on receptive ears.

Taking care of one's health from an early age was one of my mother's passions. "If you have your health, you have everything," she told us. "Without it, you have nothing." Mother had seen many health-related tragedies during her childhood in Lebanon, and she knew that the effects of neglecting one's health could appear with a vengeance years later, so she didn't believe in taking chances. Besides, we grew up in pre-antibiotic times, and our heightened awareness of the contagion of polio -- then seen widely as more fearsome than cancer -- made her health advice more acute and urgent. We wouldn't think of drinking out of other people's glasses, even within the family.

"Better than practicing what you preach," Mother always said, "is preaching what you practice." So she did. She ate what we ate, exercised and played ball with us, and made sure to get her daily rest, preferably in the form of an afternoon nap. But she worked hard to earn those naps: Mother used to clean her house on her hands and knees, and when she was done she would go to work in the yard and garden. We got the idea, all right. We all did our chores alongside her.

Mother had an intuitive sense of when not to rush to the doctor. Our parents always paid attention to which physicians in town were most skillful -- not just the ones who were more friendly or charming, but the ones who kept learning and which ones stopped learning, which ones encouraged questions and which took queries as mistrustful of their doctoring. She had a general practitioner, Dr. Roy Sanderson, who seemed to know which parents had enough common sense to handle their children's well-being on their own and which ones needed his closer attention. You can guess in which category he placed our mother.

Though my father owned a bar as part of his restaurant, alcohol was never a staple in our household. When guests came over my parents might serve wine, and my father liked an occasional taste of arak with his food, but that was about it. I don't recall any beer in the refrigerator until my brother came home from the navy. Smoking, too, was a generic taboo, except for Dad, who often held a cigarette between his lips while managing the restaurant -- although he didn't inhale, much to the amusement of his smoking friends. Nonetheless, he favored heavier taxes on tobacco products, and believed that doctors didn't focus enough on prevention. Society doesn't use doctors wisely, he contended, paying them merely to treat sickness, not to help people improve their health or prevent future illness. Doctors should be urging patients to eat healthier foods and conquer their addictions, he said over and over again. When he retired, he quit smoking, cold turkey.

Dad's most instructive lesson to us was his avoidance of extremes in his daily life. No matter how hungry he was, for example, or how delicious the meal my mother prepared, I can't remember a time when he said he overate. He used to tell us, especially at Thanksgiving, that the difference between a great dinner and a failed dinner was perhaps two or three mouthfuls too many. He didn't sleep too much or too little, didn't walk too much or too little, didn't try to shovel the snow too rapidly, drive too quickly, or spend too rapidly. He was the soul of moderation, and we could not help but notice.

My parents had a thousand little ways of bringing home the importance of nurturing our health. Even in this they made an example of the birds and squirrels around us, pointing out how they took care of their own. Once Pop made us laugh by reminding us that these animals were more careful with their health than the irresponsible teenagers of our area, who swaggered around as if asking one another, "Hi! Here's how I'm damaging my health. How are you damaging yours?"

Mother and Father were rewarded for their lifelong healthy habits by living into their late nineties. We never heard them make the merest complaint about aging. And when they could no longer be completely self-reliant, they received our assistance with ease and grace. For them, as well as for us, it was in the natural course of events.

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4. The Tradition of History



Our childhoods were livelier because my parents always put a premium on the lessons of history. Learning from the past, they taught us, was crucial for understanding the present and shaping the future. It was a rich journey Mom and Dad took us on -- worldwide, nationally, regionally, and locally. We relished their stories of the heroes of history, though not so much for what side they were on as for the stories of what they did or said -- the wise phrases of Lincoln, the gallantry of Saladin in his twelfth-century victory over the European crusaders, the liberational voices of Arab patriots against the French and British rulers, the frugal sayings of Benjamin Franklin, and, of course, the poetry of several long- forgotten poets. Mother often shared such stories at lunchtime, when we rushed home from school -- not just for the food but also for the next installment of her latest historical saga. And this storytelling approach to history whetted our appetite to read more on our own, including historical novels from the Revolutionary and Civil War to the tales of Genghis Khan.

When we children were respectively eleven, nine, seven, and three years old, my mother set sail with us for a year-long trip to visit her family in Lebanon just before World War II. While my father stayed home to tend to the restaurant, we made a voyage into history -- both our own family history and the history of our ancestral home. We took in the archaeological ruins of Baalbek, and the history of the Levant under the Ottoman Empire and then under the French colonial mandate. We learned of the struggles of my great- grandparents' generation, and absorbed the cultural history of custom, myth, folklore, festivities, food, humor, and religion. We learned to see history as geography, its contours mapped in the cities and villages and terraced countryside of our ancestors, and chronicled in the ancient lore of the luscious vineyards and orchards and the very rare small rivers. Along the banks of these small rivers people still sat together, sharing food and stories. Their conversations were sometimes delicate and nuanced, sometimes uproarious, and often full of reminiscences, tapping into the past for insight into the present. Even the local small talk here drew on larger spheres of reference, including colonialism and the rebellions of earlier periods. Even chronic Lebanese gossipers talked politics.

Back in Connecticut, we paid similar attention to our local history. With the imposing Civil War Veterans Monument nearby, and a wonderful library full of history books and materials around the corner, our part of northwest Connecticut came alive with the tales of its dairy, apple, and other farms, of its many factories, and of how the great natural disasters, floods, and gigantic blizzards were overcome. It was the time of the great U.S. melting pot, a time when immigrants came here to become Americans.

As is the case today, hometown history rarely came up in our elementary and high schools. We learned it from the old-timers around us, who shared their stories in town meetings and impromptu street-corner gatherings, in sandwich shops and bars. The bustling sidewalks and the local restaurants -- my father's included -- were places for talk and eating; their counters and booths lent themselves to passing conversations far better than today's fast-food restaurants.

Sometimes knowledge of the town's history got me into trouble. In the third grade, when my teacher referred to the "Beardsley Public Library," I corrected my teacher in front of the class. "Miss Franklin," I said, "The Beardsley and Memorial Library isn't a public library, it's a memorial library." My parents had always stressed the importance of charity, and I knew that our library had been established in the nineteenth century through the generosity of the well-off Beardsley family and other donors. My correction got me a trip to the dunce chair in the corner. It was a valuable memory for me, but not in the way Miss Franklin intended it. It taught me the difference between instructional obedience and critical education, though I did not quite phrase it that way at the time.

The local daily newspaper, the Winsted Evening Citizen, was another conveyor of local history. I was a delivery boy for a time, carrying a weighty 120 copies in a sack I flung over my shoulder. Needless to say, I read what I peddled from door-to-door, and as I did I began to marvel at all the parts of this town that escaped most townspeople's awareness. Mother once wrote a short article called "Touring Your Own Home Town," in which she suggested that residents visit our numerous factories, schools, town departments, farms, our reservoir and purification plant, the rivers, streams, lakes and woods, the country courtroom and local hospital, firehouses and local landmarks, and of course, the Winchester Historical Society. Just seeing how all the various products that fueled our local economy -- from clothing to clocks, from the common pin to electrical devices and household appliances -- were made would be an eye-opener for most residents.

My father, who had a bottomless appetite for political news, viewed the events of history in cause-and-effect terms. To him, wars, tragedies, and elections were the result of preexisting social and historical conditions, and their consequences were all too often ignored by greedy powerful interests in favor of their immediate lust for domination and profits. This mindset led him to a political perspective that ran counter to nearly any prevailing party line. He also saw how the appeal of communism in Third World countries was nourished by callous and colonial corporate capitalism, whose political allies propped up dictatorships while the very rich oppressed the rest of the population. If the governing officials would only give a thought to the workers' desire for a decent life, he would say, "communism wouldn't have a chance." Having been born under the rule of foreign occupiers who wrote the self-serving history books the students in Lebanon had to study, he came to believe that history was written -- and revised -- by those whose interest it was revised to serve. Whenever he heard people say that Columbus discovered America, he would laugh and ask, "Didn't the people who greeted him on the shore arrive before he did?"

My father had an interesting take on how to accelerate the retirement of cruel dictators. As usual he started by asking me a question:

"Why don't dictators ever retire voluntarily, except to let a family member take over?"

"Because they like the power and the wealth and the adulation," I replied.

He countered by suggesting another reason: fear. Once those dictators were no longer protected by the military cordons that shielded them, they would be vulnerable to the many enemies their rule had created. Their years of brutal domination would make it difficult for them to have a second act.

But obviously there was an advantage to luring such figures out of office. So my father proposed an unorthodox solution. "Why not have the international community establish a retirement island for former dictators?" In exchange for agreeing to release the reins of power, they would get guaranteed security on an island somewhere in the South Seas or South Indian Ocean, where they and their extended families could tend their gardens or write their autobiographies. They would be forbidden to travel except for exceptional situations, and their communications with the outside world would be monitored. Since most dictators are already of an advanced age, the opportunity to escape the constant fear of reprisal might prove incentive enough to accept the invitation. Perhaps most important, scholars would be given access to them, interviewing them to learn just how they had maintained their totalitarian hold over millions of people -- a subject my father found critical if mankind were to forestall the emergence of future dictatorships.

Of course, Dad's idea raised all kinds of questions: Would exile on an island paradise really be sufficient punishment for these once-murderous rulers? How could security be ensured? Who would pay to maintain the facility? But when I tried to poke holes in his "solution," he waved them away, arguing that such details could be worked out once the general plan was accepted by the proper authorities in the nondictatorial community of nations. Besides, he had to get back to work. Easy for him to say -- but such conversations conditioned us to think in unusual ways.

My brother, Shafeek, shared my father's interest in history, which dovetailed with his own affection for geography. Shaf was convinced of the importance of having a sense of place -- so much so that he collected U.S. Geological Survey maps of our county and its towns, which he kept rolled up on his bookshelves ready to use on his regular tours. He read deeply in American history, and like my father he enjoyed pointing out its sugarcoated versions. One day, after prevailing on our parents to buy us a brand-new set of the Encyclopedia Americana (the 1947 edition), Shaf pulled me aside and read a passage from the entry on Hawaii. The article referred vaguely to "external influence" that had caused tumult for "the Kingdom of Hawaii" in the late nineteenth century. "These influences finally caused a revolution in 1893, deposed the reigning queen, Liliuokalani, and established a provisional government. A republic was formed the following year with Sanford B. Dole as President. Pursuant to the request of the people of Hawaii, as expressed through the legislation of the republic, and a resolution of the United States Congress approved July 7, 1898, the islands were formally annexed to the United States on August 12, 1898 as a territory."

Shaf looked up at me when he finished reading. "Do you know what really happened? The Dole family, other Anglo planters, and some missionaries engineered a coup to overthrow the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy. This was no 'request of the people.' it was simple colonial imperialism, secured by the U.S. Marines. The encyclopedia is whitewashing history." At the age of thirteen, I found this an invaluable lesson in skepticism: Even an established encyclopedia, I had learned, could contain a political agenda. By the time I arrived in college and law school, my critical faculties had been honed by years of such exchanges with my perceptive family.

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5. The Tradition of Scarcity



Waste was anathema in our household. Despite their comfortable middle-class income, my patents followed a policy of scarcity that went beyond even the calls for sacrifice that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made during World War II. My parents took wartime measures like rationing and recycling in stride -- and found that they provided an occasion to teach us the value of scarcity. My parents planted their Victory Garden and raised chickens during those years of food rationing, and during the war my father kept up his long-standing practice of saving string, winding it into ever-larger balls for reuse. He recycled paper and walked instead of driving, so that he could save his gasoline coupons for more necessary purposes. Mother could get more out of a bag of groceries than nature seemed to permit; she was a very imaginative kitchen manager. My parents kept the indoor temperature in our house between sixty and sixty-five degrees during the winter, to save on heating oil. Father wasn't shy about saying he didn't mind denying the oil companies a few pennies. The fact that we lived among thrift-conscious New Englanders didn't hurt.

We children learned early to shop for bargains. We watched our parents, who were both careful shoppers, and when it came time to spend our own nickels and dimes, we tried to follow suit. Of course, we did have one advantage over other children: Since Dad sold ice cream and candies at his restaurant, we never had to spend our own money on such things. When Dad opened up the spigot of his ice cream machine and let the freshly mixed chocolate or strawberry ice cream (made with fresh strawberries) spill onto our dishes, it gave off an aroma and taste I can still recall today.

Our parents taught us, in countless little ways, to control our cravings -- from children's toys to household utilities. We learned to keep the lights off unless they were needed. That way, they told us, we could have brighter bulbs when the lights were on. Careful use of resources was the rule even when it wouldn't have cost us to use more. Our town's municipal water system was abundant and cheap. There was a water bill, of course, but (in those days) no meter on the amount that a home uses; we could have let the faucet run while we brushed our teeth, or used a gallon of water to wash a dish or two -- but we avoided such waste as a matter of family habit.

A new toy was a special occasion, and most of them were the kind that could be used again and again -- tops, crayons, picture books, puzzles, and dolls. Today's homes are often overflowing with dozens of complex, often violent electronic plastic toys, and yet children soon grow bored with them and demand the latest upgrade or fad. Bombarded with dazzling advertisements and irresistible messages, they nag their parents to buy. The result -- to say nothing of what it does to our children's behavior and character -- is this avalanche of things, of stuff that's soon discarded or left to clutter basements, attics, and garages.

That was the point of my parents' emphasis on deliberate scarcity: It taught us to value things, to preserve things, to attach our imaginations to what we had rather than to the unquenchable obsession with more, more, more. Our tradition of scarcity encouraged us to be creative. My sisters busied themselves knitting some of their own clothes, and sewed other pieces of their wardrobe with my mother. In this they were following the tradition of our aunts in Lebanon, whose skills at sewing and embroidery showed such exquisite artistry that today they might make a modest fortune as clothing and linen designers. Scarcity is far less time-consuming than abundance. Saving time for creative pursuits is a continual dividend of not owning so many things that they eventually own you. More, we learned, was really less.

One day after he retired in the early 1970s, Dad observed that "thrift" and "thrifty" were words he used to hear all the time, but that he was hearing them less and less. Thrift and other related principles -- frugality, economy, scarcity -- were once a part of America's shared value system, and they were certainly part of our family's frame of mind. Today, however, millions of children are growing up with the opposite attitude, with a diminished sense of the work that goes into material things. And with such feelings grows a tolerance for wasteful economic systems, for wasteful technologies, for gas-guzzling SUVs, designer cell phones, and disposable products of all kinds.

Such designed-in waste may be profitable for manufacturers, for fuel and electric companies, and for retailers. But it hardly benefits our families, who every year hand over more of their money to the disposable economy, even as their children grow more distracted and more demanding.

As the household goes, so goes the nation.

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6. The Tradition of Sibling Equality



During our appearance on Donahue in 1991, Phil asked Mother how she responded when her children asked, "Which of us do you like best?" Mother replied by recalling how Bedouin mothers answered that question: "I like the one who is farthest until they are near, the youngest until they grow older, and the sick until they are well." In other words, It depends on the situation. Children understand that, in any given circumstance, their parents might need to show one of their siblings special treatment. What they can't accept -- what can scar them for years -- is when a parent shows repeated favoritism. This can lead to terrible consequences -- withdrawal, chronic sadness, shattered self-confidence, and bitter resentment.

As the fourth of eight sisters in Lebanon, my mother learned from childhood the importance of treating every child equally. When the eighth sister was born, some neighbors and friends came to commiserate with her parents for having all girls and no boys. My grandfather was having none of it; before the Turkish coffee and sweets were served, he shooed them away with a friendly "scatter from here, scatter from here!" He would not entertain such regrets for a moment. Both of my mother's parents were champions of equal treatment for their children, and for them having eight girls was no less a blessing than having eight boys.

Children early on do sense unequal treatment by their parents. Not surprisingly, this was one of my first awarenesses as a little boy -- my mother especially went to great lengths to ensure that her four children never felt they were being treated or spoken to as inferior (or superior) to one another. How did I discover this? Simple: Whether she was admonishing or praising me, she never measured me against my sisters or brother. Not once do I recall her saying, "Look how much better behaved they are," or "He's so much smarter than you." Nor did she set rules based on the idea that one of us was more or less capable or deserving than another. The only exception had to do with age: Mother did insist that the younger children should show respect toward their older siblings. As the younger brother she very much wanted me to learn from my older brother and sisters. That sibling hand-me-down learning process, she believed, would be an important source of nurturing during our upbringing. It also saved her time. Mom and Dad even welcomed my eight-year-old brother Shaf's offer to name me himself, saying that I would be his new companion.

This equality of rearing extended to the level of daily detail. That was what made it routine and therefore normal. None of us received special gifts denied others without understanding why. Similarly, at a time when more boys than girls went on to college from immigrant families, my father and mother expected us all to obtain a higher education; my two sisters each obtained a Ph.D., and the boys went on to law school after college.

As a result of this equitable treatment, we children grew up with little envy or egocentricity to come between us. The older ones helped the younger ones when we needed it -- and, oh, do I remember one time when I needed it.

For my eighth-grade graduation, I was chosen to make a speech before several hundred parents and friends in the school auditorium. But as I sat in the living room a few hours before the evening festivities, I developed a terrific case of stage fright. I had planned a presentation on the life of John Muir, the great American naturalist responsible for the creation of Yosemite National Park in California. My brother, Shaf, had recently returned from the navy, and he came over and asked what was wrong. When I explained, he sat down next to me on the sofa, and put his arm around my shoulder.

"Have you ever heard of Stravinsky?" he asked.

"Who?" I replied.

"Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer. He wrote The Rite of Spring," he added. This piqued my curiosity, so I perked up, and he continued.

"The Rite of Spring was a very unusual composition. It opened in Paris in 1913, before a large and skeptical audience. Three or four minutes into the symphony, the crowd was grumbling; some of them started expressing their revulsion out loud. Soon there were catcalls, and that led to shouting, and then a few people even started throwing debris onstage. Others rose and stormed out of the hall. The orchestra found it impossible to continue.

"Now, Ralph, when you stand up and start describing the work of John Muir before your classmates' families and their friends and neighbors, no one is going to grumble. No one is going to speak against you. There'll be no catcalls, no shouting, no throwing tomatoes. And, certainly, no one is going to march out of the room. So what are you worrying about?" With that he rustled my hair and left the room.

Was I nervous when I finally spoke that evening? Sure. But Shaf was right: There were no catcalls, no jeering, nothing but a respectful audience and one relieved speaker when it was all over.

Was it all harmony between us? Not for a day. We argued and kidded and cajoled each other all the time. But our parents had taught us to respect each other, and we did -- every day.

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7. The Tradition of Education and Argument



One day, when I was about ten, I came home from grade school. When my father saw me, he asked a simple question: "What did you learn today, Ralph? Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?"

For some reason, that question was like a bolt from the blue. It has stayed with me ever since as a yardstick and a guide. In my adult life, I have thought back on it countless times: Is this new movement or politician trying to make us believe, by using abstractions and slogans or advertising gimmicks, or inviting us to think through the issues, using facts, experience, and judgment? It has helped me to interpret people's styles of persuasion in normal conversation -- whether they are sharing how they think, or merely what they believe. And it has helped me find weak spots in countless arguments I've entertained through the years -- whether in real-time debates on radio or television, or in the more thoughtful forum of the printed word.

This is not to discount the importance of belief, without which, after all, we couldn't hold to the principles and ethics that shape our daily lives. Rather, my father's point was that we should reach our beliefs by thinking them through. In public school we received instruction, which was largely a matter of belief; it was at home that we received our real education, which had more to do with thought. There was nothing wrong with this combination: Both instruction and education were the better for it.

For one thing, our parents did not draw strong boundaries between the two spheres. Over dinner, they often asked us how school had gone that day, challenging what we were learning by posing broad, open-ended questions, rather than quizzing us on matters of fact. Once, my mother and father were in the backyard with my two sisters and me. When Mother asked us how much a dozen eggs cost, or a bushel of apples, a dozen bananas, a head of lettuce, a pound of butter, and so on, we knew the answers -- as children of a restaurateur and former grocer, we had a head start. For my mother, though, that was merely the foreground for her next set of questions: What is the price for the clean air today? she asked. What about the sunshine? The cool breeze? The songs of the birds and the shade of the trees? Each new question was greeted with silence, driving home her lesson -- which was that what is so valuable in nature has no price, and therefore is not for sale. Later we were to learn the importance of ensuring that other elements of a just society -- such as politicians, elections, and even teachers -- should never be for sale either.

Such exchanges, however brief, honed our minds to be more mentally alert, to go beyond the ordinary challenges of our rote learning in school. From time to time, though, my teachers reinforced my parents' lessons. For instance, our parents were always warning us about procrastination, putting off chores that should be done on time. Then one day I walked into my fifth-grade classroom and saw my teacher, Ms. Thompson, writing something on the blackboard in her big, bold chalk letters:

LOST: 60 SECONDS
DON'T BOTHER LOOKING FOR THEM
BECAUSE THEY ARE GONE FOREVER!

Wow! That's about the most memorable episode of my entire fifth-grade education -- and of my sixth-grade education, for that matter. Though I surely lost many sixty-second periods in the years that followed, never to recover them again, those words on the blackboard never left me.

My parents put a premium on our education, both at school and at home. One of the reasons my father moved us to Winsted was that the schools and library were just a few minutes' walk from home. My mother, who'd been a teacher before she married, knew full well that the likelihood of getting in trouble increased with the distance from school and home. She also liked being near our teachers. If they ever complained about our schools, their concerns focused on how much progress we were making and what our teachers thought about our performance. Were we attentive in class or distracted? Helpful or unruly? Our parents were not interested in putting us under undue pressure, or in monitoring us too closely, but they were keen to be kept informed about more than just our grades. As my father once said, "One reason so few educators pay attention to the quality of our children's education is that quality doesn't cost enough." In other words, money alone can't ensure a quality education; only deep care taken by the teachers themselves can make the difference. (Those were the days before constant multiple-choice standardized testing began restricting teachers' judgment, forcing them to "teach to the test.")

The Beardsley and Memorial Library was the perfect complement to the educational encouragement we received at home. We almost devoured that library, with its enticing variety of books, its so-appealing open stacks with their musty smell, and its helpful librarians. We could borrow three books at a time and they were treated with something close to reverence until we finished reading them and returned them for another lot. "Imagine what a bargain books are for readers," father once observed. "The author spends months or years writing a book. You reap the benefit of all that effort in just a few hours." I liked books about the Wild West and the struggles between colonizers (the pioneers, as they were called) and the Indians (whom even our esteemed Declaration of Independence referred to as "savages"). History books, books on geography, on the great inventors (Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Edison) and explorers, ancient plays from Greece and Rome and modern classics by the legendary American muckrakers (Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and Ferdinand Lunberg). These books weren't assigned by our teachers; Shaf read them all on his own (at fifteen, Tarbell's book on Standard Oil was tough going), and I followed suit. There was school time and there was library time, and not until high school, when we went to the library to research our papers and work on class projects, did the two come together.

We were not shy about bringing our newfound knowledge home, including the difficulties we had with some authors. Our father had a different take on things. If we ever came home saying we couldn't understand a certain writer or philosopher, he would respond by suggesting that perhaps the authors themselves weren't writing clearly. He was not making excuses for us, he was merely making a perfectly plausible observation that our teachers never mentioned. Excuses were a subject of passionate aversion for my mother, who was always bothered by the sight of parents trying to explain away their children's misbehavior. She always advised her friends not to make excuses for their children, for she felt that making excuses deprived children of the incentive to improve. My father used to say, "Your best teacher is your last mistake." This was a bundle of wisdom we took to heart: Like all children, we made plenty of mistakes, so therefore we had lots of teachers.

We were never able to impress our parents with the number of books we read. They were interested in what we derived from their pages, not just how many pages we turned over. They were too busy to dote on trivial benchmarks or childish academic bragging. When it came to teaching us, Mother preferred indirection to lecturing, but she wasn't above issuing a direct riposte when needed. The moment one of us began showing signs of overconfidence, she was ready with her response: "You better be a genius, because you've clearly decided to stop learning."

Many of our dinner-table arguments concerned matters of social justice at home and abroad. Often these conversations were kindled by our parents, and we were usually eager to take the bait, raising some controversial issue for discussion -- such as, were unions paying as much attention to consumer prices as they did to wages? Some of these points of contention were evergreens, none more so than my father's idiosyncratic proposal for a just society based on what he called the "limitation of wealth."

For many years my father wrestled with the tension in American society between greed and need. To address the problem, he proposed a system of unlimited income with limited wealth. Under his proposal, anyone could make and spend as much money as he or she was able, but whatever money they accumulated in savings, above a threshold of $1 million per person (in 1950 dollars), would be taxed, after a reasonable homestead exemption. To my father, this system was a reasonable way to maintain a prudent balance between economic incentives and economic justice. The very wealthy would become more interested in donating their money to community betterment (after all, how much could they consume?) or spreading the wealth among more people. Together with a progressive sales tax (with exemptions for the poorer classes) to fund governmental services, my father's wealth-limitation plan would have redirected people away from accumulating wealth toward community generosity.

Whatever their actual merits, my father's ideas had one inestimable side benefit: They kept us debating. We children spent years challenging him on its particulars, speculating out loud about how it might be made to work or why it was doomed to fail. Isn't it too idealistic, Dad? we would ask. Couldn't rich people avoid the taxes by taking their wealth abroad? How could such an idea ever get through Congress? What would the limitation of wealth contribute to the resurgence of communities? Would it cause people to have warmer feelings toward one another? There would be fewer spoiled-rotten descendants of wealth, we felt sure. Would this increase private investment? Savings? How much would the surge in private community giving reduce public spending? If it's so logical, why hasn't this idea caught on with some honest politicians? Or national citizen groups? And how do you define wealth, anyway -- sure, it should go beyond cash savings to include land, buildings, stocks and bonds, but what about jewelry, rare collectibles, insurance policies? How would the progressive sales tax work?

Dad always took our responses seriously, and we would respond to his answers with new questions. But he always focused on the bigger picture -- that history shows that economies with more equitable distribution of wealth were far more prosperous, with bigger markets. They were more prone to deal with the needs of tomorrow, not just today, like healthful surroundings and a better future for our children and grandchildren. "Either we spread the wealth in a country where millions of humans go without," he would say, "or we spread the misery."

In retrospect, it was like arguing with an ever-resilient law professor. He took great enjoyment from these tangos of minds. Father's limitation-of-wealth idea offered us a constant flow of discourse; like Aladdin's lamp, it needed only to be rubbed to work its educational magic. And it wasn't just at home that he would put forth these ideas, but in the workplace and anywhere he thought there was a possibility for discussion.

You may be wondering: Was there any plain old small talk in our family? Sure, there was plenty. But it was put on hold whenever we got into one of these serious discussions. At home we had the sense that there was a time and place for everything. Somehow we were never bored. When my parents had guests over, we would sit on the rug on the side of the living room and listen; every so often one of the grown-ups might make a passing reference to us, but these adult gatherings never centered on us preteen children, who were usually to be seen and not heard. By the same token, we never expected to perform or preen for the guests; instead, we listened and learned a lot about worldly matters. Looking back on these get-togethers, I marvel at how wide-ranging and informed the conversation always was: My parents and their friends traded political opinions on world and national news events, historical allusions, proverbs, and even poetry.

That was the way our "education" went: Our work at school was supported by what we learned at home, and vice versa. When I got deeply interested in stamp collecting, it was because it helped me remember the names of countries all over the world. And when I got deeply interested in my classes, it was because of a special teacher who valued spontaneous discussion over rote memorization. Many of our teachers were from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and they took their lifetime work quire seriously. There was no "gifted students" category then that allowed advanced students to take their own courses. All the students were in the same category, which in retrospect only helped our socialization as a group, while still allowing the more energetic students to excel. (On the other hand, our school buildings had no accommodations for students with disabilities, who were thus prevented from attending their area public schools. In some ways, those were years of low institutional expectations.)

Many years later, the prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, who lived in Winsted as a youngster, wrote a feature article about these teachers for the Boston Globe; his piece did not reflect well on contemporary urban schools by comparison. Around the same time, I was rereading John Dewey on moral education. Eureka, I thought: That's what my parents had given us at home. At school, we had learned facts. At home, my parents had taught us "character," which the ancient philosopher Heracleitus called "destiny." For us, they gave new meaning to the word "homework."

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8. The Tradition of Discipline



My siblings and I were raised to have respect for our mother and father -- a respect born of our generations of family tradition, but also earned on a daily basis by their example. Yet of course we got into mischief, as all children do. And when we did, there were consequences.

Mother and Father followed a finely calibrated series of parental reprimands, a system that we learned early and became accustomed to heeding. It started with a sudden stern look -- and often that was enough to change our young minds before things went any further. When the look alone didn't work, they relied on a sequence of three Arabic reprimands. The mildest was skoot or skiti (male or female), the next stage was sidd neeyak or siddi neeyik, and the third level was sakru neekoon. Translated loosely, these meant "hush your mouth" in varying degrees. If that didn't work, we might be told to leave the dinner table and/or go to stand in the corner by the sewing machine. Or we might be assigned a chore, to drive the point home in another way. Our parents rarely spanked us, and when they did, it was no more than a gentle smack on the rear. Then as now, too many children have been picked up and shaken -- as toddlers, even infants -- or beaten by parents losing their self-control and abandoning themselves to rage. My parents were horrified by such behavior.

But they knew the importance of enforcing their commands around the house. As my mother was known to say, "If parents don't discipline, or they're indecisive about it, their children won't respect them." It wasn't enough to issue a reprimand, in other words -- not if the parent merely unravels it a few minutes later by apologizing (even tacitly) and fawning all over the child. Any child who's treated that way is being trained in the ways of manipulative behavior. "Children are clever," Mother said, "they watch their parents and can take advantage where they see weakness."

Instead, my parents chose to show us where we had gone wrong, and they often did so by relying on traditional proverbs. The supply of proverbs at their disposal was countless, and they wielded them effortlessly. These sayings, which came from a rich oral tradition, drew on the imagery of the past to reframe all manner of human behavior for the generations of the present and future. The villagers and peasants of their Lebanese mountain towns would have known hundreds of these proverbs; our Aunt Adma knew more than a thousand. (Think a moment: How many proverbs can you call to mind, beyond Benjamin Franklin's homilies -- ''A penny saved is a penny earned" or ''A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"?)

My dad, who worked seven days a week at the restaurant, used proverbs constantly. To a child talking silly, he would say (in Arabic), "Jokes are to words as salt is to food" -- that is, don't overdo it. To a child who'd put off his chores too long, the apt and famous proverb was, "Wait, oh mule, until the grass grows up." When generosity was called for, he would say, "Empty hands are dirty hands." Such proverbs were admonishments, to be sure. But they also managed to teach and uplift our horizons at the same time -- far more than the staccato barking of parents who shout, "Stop it! I said stop it!" or "Cut it out, now, or you'll be sorry," and then have to repeat themselves over and over while the child ignores them. Dad was a devotee of the Socratic method; he loved nothing more than to pose a provocative question and then let it hang in the air. Once, when he noticed a bunch of teenagers in his restaurant laughingly pouring pepper in the sugar bowl, he came over to them and quietly asked, "Why are you insulting your parents?" as he took away the sugar bowl. Instead of asking them to leave, he merely walked away, leaving them to ponder over his words.

Both my father and my mother were highly sensitive to the weakening of parent-child relationship in modern society -- to the threat the marketplace posed to the concept of parental authority. Even back in the 1930s and 1940s, my mother noticed that some caring parents were afraid of their children, afraid of how they might react if they were disciplined. She noticed even more fear as she grew older, and often commented that ''Americans are afraid of their children." She believed that children who see that their parents are afraid of them will try to control their parents, who will then begin to lose their parental moorings as a result. We were always astonished to heat a classmate slinging harsh words at his parents. To be sure, we weren't always privy to what provoked such outbursts; we just knew that in our family there were lines you never crossed. (Only later did we realize that such behavior could be symptomatic of child abuse behind closed doors -- though the parents we observed never treated their children brutally, at least in public.)

When we ran afoul of our own parents, did we get a chance to argue our case? Not in trivial, run-of-the-mill situations, but when there was a meaningful disagreement at stake, yes. "When my children would explain [themselves] to me," my mother once said, "I would sometimes find that they were tight, but I also explained my position." Mother believed that a child should understand why he's being told no, or yes. She always valued a good argument on a worthwhile subject. But she also believed that a child shouldn't be allowed to argue for argument's sake.

As we grew into our teenage years, our parents were more willing to engage us in back-and-forth dialogues on our little domestic controversies. But they also had subtle ways of reminding us how much they labored for our well-being, and how many years of knowledge had gone into their positions. We often, if not always, gave them the benefit of the doubt. We respected their authority, never calling them by their first names no matter what our age. But we never became overly dependent on them, either. Their unassuming confidence only enhanced our own self-confidence -- until we began to seem overconfident, in which case they were quick to reply, "So, since you've got all the answers, you don't have any more questions, eh?"

There was one respect in which Mother and Father showed absolutely critical self-discipline, and that was in their interactions with each other. As children, we were aware of occasional friction between our parents. We could sense the mood changing when that occurred. But the conflict never spilled out in our presence, for our parents believed that any such display would have reduced our respect for them. They were able to keep their differences very private from us and from their friends, in part because the differences between them were mostly ordinary tensions that worked themselves out in the course of daily life. For them, the well-being of their children, which took priority over petty disagreements, served as a kind of universal solvent, dissipating any lingering tensions.

This mutual self-respect came home to us whenever we were at our friends' homes and witnessed sharp exchanges and vitriol between their parents. Sometimes, just walking the residential streets, we would hear shouting from one home or another. Once, as I was walking downtown to do an errand for my mother, I saw a door fly open, and a husband rushed out shouting curses, with his wife right behind him throwing miscellaneous pots and utensils at him along with a stream of invective. There was nothing like that kind of spectacle to help a boy appreciate his parents' efforts to preserve their emotional self-control.

As my mother often said: "If you make something bigger, it becomes bigger; if you make it smaller, it becomes smaller."

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9. The Tradition of Simple Enjoyments



Ask yourself, when do you laugh the hardest and the longest? When you're watching a situation comedy, a reality show, or a comic on late-night TV -- or when you find yourself in hilarious situations with friends or family? No contest. Those bellyaching laughs come faster, and last longer, when you're with friends or family. The television shows are part of the market-driven manufacturing of laughter. Friends and family are a gift, and those personal relationships engender deeper, more truthful mirth.

We grew up in an environment of simple enjoyments, a world largely separate from market entertainment and almost wholly diverted by family entertainment. The ways we enjoyed ourselves might appear impossibly quaint to today's youth, who've grown used to nonstop commercial entertainment so fast-paced that anything slower is greeted as BO-RING. Theirs is a video-audio, sensualized, commodified world that has displaced simple homemade pleasures, driving them down the rungs of attraction so that only the youngest children are expected to embrace them.

In our town there was one movie theater, the Strand. It had Saturday matinees for children, and we were allowed to go to the movies about twice a year. More often we headed to the Soldiers' Monument grounds, where we ate delicious sandwiches while feeling the coolness of the stone seats on our legs during a hot summer day. On Sunday afternoons we took our bikes on exhilarating rides down the tree-lined road to the nearby village of Colebrook. I can still feel the thrill of the breeze as we cruised down the long hill on our way home. Roller-skating on a neighborhood sidewalk was perfect for sunny days, but the rain didn't stop us: We just headed downstairs and skated in our basement. I even shot basketballs in that cool basement, into a bottomless apple basket hung on the staircase.

Our daily lives were full of these simple pleasures, no matter how old we were or what time of year it was. Running up to the garden to pick tomatoes or squash or beans, then back into the house to help prepare them for dinner, made us little ones feel we were part of a big act. Climbing up the venerable apple tree was a blast, and plucking the insect-scarred apples left us with small but very juicy bites. (Nobody had to tell us the apples were "organic"!) Just the thought of eating Mother's homemade pastries, whose aroma wafted from the oven to the kitchen table, made our mouths water.

Winter brought the crunch of a white Christmas, even as we walked to midnight service, at the Episcopal Church. Mother would take us outdoors and teach us the alphabet by carving letters in the snow. As we grew older, we sledded to school on snowy mornings. Then, come Easter time, my mother would hard-boil dozens of eggs with onion skins, staining them dark red. After they were all hidden, we would go running around finding them -- and then compete to see which egg would survive what we called the "cracking competition." Each of us would make a wish, and then crack our egg up against one of our siblings' eggs. We looked forward to the cracking competition for weeks.

Summers were an exciting time; we all looked forward to a change of pace. When we were little children, Dad would take us up to Highland Lake, where we'd go driving over the spillways between the lake and the spill of water down the valley into the Mad River, cruising through half a foot of moving water. "Wheee!" we'd cry. "Turn around and do it again, Dad!" Then he would take us up to Crystal Lake, the bucolic town reservoir, where we would look out over the water with a kind of reverence. Coming from the Middle East, where water is scarce and deserts plentiful, our parents taught us to view abundant clean water with gratitude.

We spent our summer vacations with our Aunt Adele, my mother's older sister, and her six children. She and her husband, Selim, lived in Toronto, Canada, and we alternated summers with her family, spending one summer in Connecticut, the next in Canada. Our age-matched cousins were like another set of brothers and sisters, and our aunt and uncle stepped in as surrogate parents. Our families were not only extended but amplified by the sheer variety of personality and experience our cousins brought to the mix. Their lives were different from ours in a hundred small ways: They wore school uniforms and we did not, followed hockey where we followed baseball, pronounced English words differently -- and such differences made for endless hours of fun and argument.

Though our parents had ten children crammed into our relatively medium-sized house during those summers, I never remember hearing the mothers complaining about the extra work, or even saying they felt especially tired. The older children helped them with the cooking and cleaning chores. And having two sets of parents certainly helped preserve order: When it came to being disciplined or taking instructions, we listened to and obeyed our aunt and uncle as surely as we did our own parents.

Our house had a screened-in porch upstairs, with room for three or four beds in summer, another memorable setting in our childhood landscape. Even the children of the next generation, beginning with my sister Laura's children, always relished the chance to sleep on the exalted porch. It was seen as a first-class treat. At night we could hear the crickets, see the stars and the moon and the clouds, tell stories, engage in horseplay, laugh, while my mother and her sister were visiting downstairs, entertaining each other with their own stories of childhood, and news from home. They would tease each other, and the gales of laughter would come wafting through the windows. Now and then, when it sounded as though we were getting too boisterous up on the porch, one of the sisters downstairs would say, "That's enough, children. Go to sleep." That would usually quiet us down -- but not always. Then they had to come up to the porch to enforce this point.

Our mother and aunt each felt free to compliment or admonish any of us as they saw fit, and this had the effect of reinforcing many of our family's traditions. Whenever we came to them to settle a conflict that cropped up among us, they were both equally likely to offer up one of the sayings they learned together in childhood: "It doesn't hurt to be generous," or "Don't judge until you know the whole story," or "If someone does you harm, do him some good" -- advice we'd all find useful throughout life, and all passed along in a way that was memorable, short, and sweet.

When it was our turn to travel to Canada, we usually joined Aunt Adele's family in a cottage on Lake Simcoe or Lake Couchiching. The routine would be less varied than when we were together in town. But those weeks we spent together were more attuned to nature. They were shaped by our closeness to the water, by afternoons spent swimming on a beachfront just down from the cottage, by boating, fishing, hiking, picking berries, games of hide and seek in the woods. My mother and her sister knew how to delegate responsibility to the older children, trusting our older cousins to keep an eye on us when we went to amusement parks in Toronto.

As we grew up and went to college, these joint summer vacations became less frequent. But we all remember them fondly, and in the 1980s Shaf organized several summers with our cousins and their families at Georgian Bay, so that a new generation of children could get to know each other in the setting that had meant so much to us when we were youngsters.

Amid all this, though, I must confess that there was one commercial enjoyment I never tired of -- one that lasted well into my teen years. That was taking an early morning train from Winsted down the Naugatuck Valley into Grand Central Station, and then transferring onto the subway to Yankee Stadium to watch my favorite team clobber the opposition, especially the Boston Red Sox. You see, our town was divided right down the middle, half being Yankee fans and the other half being patient Red Sox fans. My boyhood hero Lou Gehrig, the "Iron Man," had recently retired from the Bronx Bombers, but he was still fresh in everyone's memory, particularly after his tragic illness. Returning from a ball game at Yankee Stadium meant hours of banter, joshing, and tireless arguments with the misguided Red Sox fans in the neighborhood.

Of course, all these and innumerable other simple pleasures are available to many youngsters today. But the screens and earphones are taking over -- the video games and iPods and television and all kinds of salacious websites. The only electric distraction we had was the radio, and that was offered to us as a reward, not surrendered to our control as a daily routine. Instead we contented ourselves playing kick-the-can in the backyard, or hitting fungo balls to each other on the sandlot baseball field, playing marbles, or hiking along streams in the woods. It was certainly cheaper than the ceaseless parade of gadgets parents are obliged to purchase today, and you could play the same game again and again without being bored or demanding an upgrade.

There was something about playing with the same building blocks that invited encore after encore. What was that something? My guess is that it was the fact that we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines. We were tapping into the infinite richness of human senses and emotions, challenging our imagination and human competitiveness, rather than the staccato rhythms and predictable rewards of preprogrammed games. This blend of the familiar and the surprising gave us all the joyful feeling that we were making our own pleasure -- not relying on structured "playdates," but having our own fun.

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10. The Tradition of Reciprocity



Out of the confluence of these previous traditions grew a subtler, deeper tradition, a second-generation tradition that ensouled our family to the present day. It was more than mutual respect. It was more than mutual aid. I think of it as the tradition of reciprocity.

Underlying the help and comfort we extended to each other, as needed, was the fact that we all cared deeply for one another. I felt this caring in a variety of unexpected ways. One day, when I was five years old, my father took me by the hand and walked me down to the Fourth School, the local elementary school. My father knew that I'd already moved beyond the kindergarten level, and he convinced the school that I should skip kindergarten and enroll as the youngest pupil in Miss Root's first-grade class. I overheard the case he made, and when I realized how much he believed in me, I became utterly determined not to let my father down in front of other people. Within days I was Miss Root's assistant, helping some of the students with their lessons. (Decades later, when she was in her eighties, Miss Root recounted this story to a television magazine show.) In class after class, through high school, I would look back at the class following ours and be so grateful that my parents had cared enough to move me forward. Whenever the work grew challenging, that awareness would inspire me to work even harder.

My parents always saw their relationships with their children as mutually rewarding. They raised children who could teach their parents in turn, sharing their own experiences and insights. As young adult immigrants (both came over at the age of nineteen), my mother and father knew that learning shouldn't end with childhood; they spent years absorbing a culture, a host of new technologies, and systems of private businesses and public institutions -- all in a foreign language. This has never been an easy process for newcomers to our land -- even after finding work, they often don't have it easy. So-called generation gaps are especially common among immigrant families; these gaps can produce anxious and unpleasant tensions, and sometimes lead to nasty ruptures or chronic conflicts. Many children of immigrants feel embarrassed at their parents' "old ways," their accents, their native language being spoken in their friends' presence. They have little patience with parents who don't keep up with teenage fads, rejecting the elements of their traditional lifestyle in favor of the easy social bonding of commercial culture. The parents, in turn, sometimes feel rejected, isolated, and worried. Some grow so disconsolate that they return to their home countries.

My parents, on the other hand, were quite practical. They sensed that their children were becoming a part of this new world, and set about following their example. Who better to teach them about America, they reasoned, than their children, who had never known anything else? My older brother, Shaf, was my parents' most conscious interpreter. He always had a bent for anthropology and cross-cultural awareness, even during his teen years, and when it came to American culture the child became the teacher and the parents became the students (until it was time to say "yes" or "no" or "be careful," that is). Sometimes the teaching went both ways, with surprising results for both sides: When my sister Claire tried showing my mother how to dance the Charleston, Mother responded by singing a song about the Charleston in Arabic and English that was popular in Lebanon in the 1920s.

From time to time Shaf ran into resistance, as when he tried to persuade my mother that some new movie at the Strand would be all right for his younger siblings to see. Like many parents today, Mother was wary of Hollywood and its sexy movies embarrassing her early teenage children. (She never for a moment worried that they could actually corrupt us, only that we'd be made uncomfortable.) To her, sexy and violent movies were demeaning and wasteful, and she wanted to spare us from enduring them if she could. Obviously, there were times when we disagreed, thought her too protective of us, but we never did anything that showed disrespect toward her final say on the subject. Some time ago I was pleased to learn that this feeling had moved to the next generation, when her grandson Tarek told me that he'd decided in college never to do anything he would later regret.

My father even extended such reciprocal relations to his customers. The one day Dad's restaurant was supposed to be closed was Christmas Day. But my siblings and I soon noticed that every Christmas morning he would go down there at eleven o'clock and spend three hours serving a few longtime customers -- elderly renters who lived by themselves and relied on him for their daily lunch.

That was the example both our parents set for us, and in their final years their kindnesses were returned in their moments of need. My mother had always been one of the most self-reliant and independent people I'd ever known, but by the time she was nearing her one hundredth birthday, she finally needed help to get around. My sister Claire was there to care for her, and she treated the responsibility as if it were a privilege to extend her hands to embrace our mother's needs. Claire rejected the bureaucratic term "caregiver." To her it was a much simpler matter: "She is my mother," she would say, "and I am her daughter and we respond to each others' needs."

As the weeks passed, and mother needed more assistance, not once did Rose Nader ever suggest that she was a burden on her children. She had cared for us all during our infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Of course, we would be there for her at the very end of her life. She viewed her life as a state of oneness with her children and grandchildren. And oneness cannot be a burden on itself.

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11. The Tradition of Independent Thinking



"Turn your back on the pack," I remember my mother telling me more than once during early childhood. Simple words, but they carried a few meanings in a very concise way. If we wanted to be leaders, we were taught -- if we wanted to think boldly, and to excel at what we did -- that we would have to be willing to be different. My mother took a continual interest in who my friends and acquaintances were from year to year. She encouraged us to bring our friends home, and when we did, she would engage them in conversation about school, their families, or the aspects of their lives that mattered to them. Even in those relatively quiet, unfrenzied, drug-free small-town days, she was keenly aware that peer groups were her competition in rearing her children. A child's peer group could be very influential, and the wrong group could dash years' worth of attentive child rearing and proper behavior. Peer pressure could be nerve-wracking for children, especially when it involved coercion, as it often did when there were age differences in "the pack." My mother's saying I believe its you! always comes back to me in this context: She taught us early that we couldn't pass off on others responsibility for our own behavior. "Respect yourself," she taught us, "and others will respect you."

Well, as children will, we understood our parents' words, but still listened to our classmates' taunts, and we weren't immune to them. I was eight years old before I finally confronted my mother about the fact that she still had me wearing short pants to school every day. She believed I was too young to wear long pants, unlike the other boys who wore them. The boys in my class thought short pants were babyish, and I agreed. So one day I brought my odd-boy-out lament home to my mother. After trying out all kinds of practical arguments to shuck the shorts and wear the longs -- such as protecting my knees from scraping falls or being warmer in the cold winters -- I realized I was getting nowhere. So I brought out what I perceived as my trump card. "Mother," I entreated, "their mothers let them wear long pants!" To which mother replied: "Well, they have their mothers and you have yours. Besides, why are you worried about being a little different?"

Word gets around quickly in a small town. Before meeting these youngsters, Mother would inquire about their parents and their older siblings. She had a short list of children who were absolutely off-limits, but generally she let her opinions be known, and we followed her lead. Other mothers did the same for their children -- and sometimes to our detriment. One mother disapproved of her blond son walking to school with me because of my "darker complexion." Winsted, like many New England factory towns, was by then a multiethnic community; the nineteenth-century influx of Irish and Italian immigrants was followed by Eastern European, Greek, and Levantine families. In the town's restaurants and bars, ethnic jokes were common currency; such mutual ribbing probably helped to reduce some tensions, inasmuch as they teased each other face to face. But there were some prejudices manifested in terms of social distance and less occupational mobility for the newer families. The Yankees still held the economic power in Winsted, but Irish Americans and Italian Americans were beginning to play a part in local politics, where there was a strong perceived division between Protestant and Catholic families.

The smaller ethnic groups felt the most discomfort. Our family could have been in that category. I say "could have been" because our parents were predisposed to ignore such pressures, joking about them while shoring up our identity and self-confidence by condemning prejudice itself. Having the largest restaurant in our small town didn't hurt, either: Food can be a great leveler, and the easy interactions in a bustling eatery -- which served American food, by the way, not ethnic fare -- made for a forum where politics and sports were all debated on an even playing field.

My father had come to realize this years earlier, during his time in the melting pots of places like Newark, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Danbury, Connecticut. "What is the true value of ethnic identity?" I remember him observing once. "Culture, humor, variety and a common sociability for facing life. And, of course, the pleasure of having one's own cuisine. When it comes to politics, though, a broader humanity should replace ethnicity."

So how did this play out on the children? Ethnic slurs bounced off us because we knew who we were, where we came from, and generally where we wanted to go. From time to time, we heard someone use a phrase like "camel-driver" -- as some anti-Arab voices still do in America today. But such language only singed us when it was associated with rejectionist behavior or tied to social distance. Fortunately, such moments were infrequent. Our teachers were quite even-handed, and we played sports and did odd jobs around the neighborhood with no complaint. The simple fact that we spoke and understood Arabic did, of course, make us different. But our parents' accented English only gave us something in common with the numerous Italian, Polish, European, Jewish, and the few immigrant Lebanese families in town.

Given all this, our parents were remarkably easy in the saddle. They never became overwrought about perceived peer-group pressure or bigotry, and even seemed to understand the old-time families' sensitivities toward the unfamiliar newer immigrants and their customs. The public schools and especially the churches helped newer families like ours assimilate into the community; our family had been embraced by the Methodist Church, even though we came from the Eastern Orthodox division of Christianity. Ultimately, as my father understood, our ethnic differences tended to shore up our defenses against prejudice and temptations. We knew the value of our history, and relished the elements that came with it -- the food and humor especially.