A woman who has known me since 1934 when she was eight years old, who taught me how to tell time, who did ALL my homework when I was in elementary school, who invited me to her home every Thanksgiving from 1949 through 1984 (35 years) is about to die.
As always, the Master Architect has a blueprint that is too deep and convoluted for me.
Readers’ Digest used to have, and perhaps still has, a regular monthly feature called The Most Unforgettable Person I Ever Met.” Some day, there will be a regular feature about me with the slightly altered title of “Most forgettable” and via that avenue my claim to enduring fame will become established.
Once upon a time, I knew these two geniuses who graduated from Brooklyn College a year before I did. One was class valedictorian and today is widely recognized as the most prominent social psychologist in America. Call him Mr. Z. The other is a person I knew from the time I was thirteen years old. He went on to be the most famous classical scholar in the world. Call him Mr. K. During these college years, I see K about 330 days per year and we are also fellow assistants to the college Bursar. We hide out in the nooks and crannies together for fear somebody will want us to do some work.
For the three years that Mr Z and I overlapped as world class scholars, we were mates on the college track team. Mr. Z made a rah rah speech about me when we met our arch rival City College in his final year. It didnt do us much good but that is neither here nor there. [For all I know, being neither here nor there doesn't guarantee we are nowhere. Remember our old friend, tertium quid, from our school days.] Mr. Z and I also took a couple of courses together. It was a pleasure having him sit beside me every day because he confirmed what I had always suspected ever since I was eight years old, that being a splendid scholar while simultaneously being a hopeless moron is not an unusual combination. We drifted apart.
Nine years later, (1963), I was malingering in the hallways at N.Y.U. where I was ostensibly a philosophy instructor. One day I noticed Mr. Z’s name (which happened to be Z) listed in the college directory. Quickly I went to his office. I stood in the doorway and said, “Hi, Old Buddy, how ya doin’?” He stared at me and he was not feigning ignorance when he replied, “I’m sorry, do I know you?” “It’s me, Sid. Of course, you know me. What’s happening?” “I’m sorry, but you have me at a disadvantage. I just cant place you.”
For five minutes I did a song and dance, trying to revive him from his stupor. No luck. Humiliated, I apologized, said I think I made a mistake and crept away. This time we didn’t drift apart. It was a painful rupture.
Another ten years go by. It is 1973 and I am now a fabulously legendary person in my own mind. I am still in communication with the super great Mr. K, now a person of such eminence that I never let an opportunity go by to pigeonhole people and say, “Do you know that Dr. K and I are lifelong buddies?” One day, I tell Mr. K of the Mr. Z incident. He almost dies laughing and says, “Anybody who meets you and spends a couple of months with you but doesn’t thereafter remember you must be a total idiot.” I hurry to the defense of Z because I am convinced he is only a moron.
Fifteen years go by. It is now 1988 and I have one way or another wangled an invitation to dinner at the home of Dr. K whom I haven’t seen in at least ten years. It is in a crazy country called Connecticut. K strides into the living room where I am sitting with his wife and greets me warmly. “So, tell me, what have you done with your life? What college did you go to after our Jeff High School days?”
WHAT!!? Deja vu, al over again. This is unbearable. I fill him in. I am embarrassed; he is not. Genius has its privileges. For the rest of the evening, while K recites unnecessary proof of his greatness, I am mapping out a story to be called ME, THE MOST FORGETTABLE MAN YOU WILL EVER MEET.
You have just read it.
I had a 36 hour pass and since I was stationed at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, it was a quick bus ride home. For some reason, instead of going to my actual home, I found myself in an apartment on Howard Avenue in the heart of Brownsville. Believe me, I have no idea why. Five guys were standing around naked. One stood on a small ottoman, playing the Mozart clarinet concerto while below him a young woman was sucking on his penis with real vigor. I remember it was causing him some difficulty hitting all the right notes, and he almost fell off. I knew only one of these five guys and that fellow was singing his own version of the famous Neapolitan street song, Funiculi, Funicula popularized by Mario Lanza. Only this guy was substituting the words “stinky finger, stinky finger.” Granted that in this company, I was out of my depth so I stood there amazed, (astounded and astonished, too) for ten minutes or so and then left. Someone called, “Don’t leave until you first have some hits of mary jane (marijuana). Politely I declined, as I always did and still do. The episode was short but the memory lingers on.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJd-SHzqUC4 If you can sing even a lick [pardon the expression in this context] you’ll know when you should jump in with the revised lyrics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3EJqvKhYzY A half hour of your time well spent. That woman. What’s her name, who sleeps in my bed every night went to college on a full scholarship because she could play this damn thing like nobody’s business.
By EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH — In the Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2013. There, the article is titled FIND A MAN TODAY, GRADUATE TOMORROW.
In 2008, when I was a college junior, I went home to New Jersey one weekend to visit my family—and almost immediately regretted it. My mother seemed more interested in my romantic life than my academic life: “Have you found a boyfriend yet?”
I rolled my eyes and said no. With a healthy dose of young-adult arrogance, I explained that I was too busy studying, working on the college review, and helping out at my sorority. No time for men. My mother nodded, acknowledging that there was a lot going on.
Then she said calmly but forcefully: “You’re in college. You’re at Dartmouth. There will never be a better time to meet someone. I’m sure there are many interesting boys around. If you don’t find one before you graduate, you might not find one at all—so start looking.”
Related Video
Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on why Princeton alumna Susan Patton was right to suggest that smart women should try to seek out husbands in college.
Fast forward to today. A woman named Susan Patton is being pilloried online and elsewhere for giving young women the same advice that my mother gave to me. Late last week, she wrote a letter to the Daily Princetonian newspaper advising the school’s female students: “You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you. . . . Find a husband on campus before you graduate.”
Feminist attacks on Ms. Patton began immediately—the paper’s website was swamped with complaints, the Twitter crowd was livid, and writers lit into her at Slate, New York magazine and beyond.
To call Ms. Patton anti-feminist is misguided at best. She was the first woman in her family to attend college. In fact, she was in one of the first classes of women to graduate from Princeton after the school went coed in 1969, and she had to fight her parents to go. Her parents, who were Holocaust survivors, thought a woman’s place was in the home. Ms. Patton has spent the years since her 1977 graduation carving out a successful career in corporate America.
My mother, too, has blazed her own trails as a woman. Born in Iran to a middle-class family, she worked so hard in high school that she was one of only a handful of women admitted to the country’s most prestigious engineering university. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which drastically changed Iranian life, especially for women, she packed her bags and headed west—first to the United States, then to Canada, where one of her early jobs was flipping burgers.
She eventually started working as a chemical engineer and has, like Ms. Patton, enjoyed a successful career. My mom benefited enormously from the freedom and opportunities that feminism gave her—opportunities she would have been denied in Iran.
So have I. For my entire life, my parents have pushed me to work hard and be independent, to be capable of supporting myself emotionally and financially.
That is precisely why my mother’s advice five years ago stopped me in my tracks. If she, a strong, career-oriented feminist—who, with my dad, sacrificed a great deal for me to go to college—was telling me to pay more attention to my romantic life, then what did she know that I didn’t?
A lot. She knew what few, if any, feminists would tell young women today: There is far more to happiness than career success.
Before Susan Patton wrote the letter that went viral, she had attended a Princeton conference about women and leadership. In one of the conference sessions, Ms. Patton and her best friend since freshman year of college met with undergraduate women ostensibly to talk about their careers. As she explained in the letter, though, the undergrads were less interested in discussing jobs than relationships and other personal matters.
Ms. Patton wrote that one of the young women asked how she and her friend had sustained a friendship for 40 years: “You asked if we were ever jealous of each other. You asked about the value of our friendship, about our husbands and children. Clearly, you don’t want any more career advice. . . . You know that there are other things that you need that nobody is addressing. A lifelong friend is one of them. Finding the right man to marry is another.”
In a boardroom somewhere, Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg’s heart is sinking.
Career success and relationships are both undoubtedly important to women’s happiness, but many young and ambitious women value their personal lives more than their career aspirations. And that feeling intensifies over time.
In a 2009 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, David Lubinski and his team at Vanderbilt found that in a sample of academically gifted young adults, women became less career-oriented than men over time. As they approached middle age, women also placed more value than men on spending time with family, community and friends. These differences became more pronounced with parenthood.
My mother’s advice—Susan Patton’s advice—may not be right for every woman, but it was right for me. In the fall of my senior year, I started dating a brilliant man and we’re still together. If I were unattached today, I’m not sure what I would do. The post-college dating scene can be rough: Getting to know someone often means shouting across a noisy bar or scrolling through Internet dating profiles. Finding a partner in college is easier.
Mom was right.
Ms. Smith is an associate editor of The New Criterion and editor of the blog Acculturated.
Only a little more than a month ago we reached the darkest gloom of the year, the winter solstice, yet already we can sense a change in light. It is only 12.30 A.M. but I have enjoyed two and a half hours of sleep. I am ready to begin the day, but if we were merely approaching winter solstice I would surely write that I am getting ready to face the day. Such is the wonder of light.
It is no accident that the great horse, Silver, was gleaming white. The Lone Ranger must have started each day with a bowl of KIX cereal covered with plenty of milk and only then given his mighty cry, “Hi Ho, Silver, away.” Only then could the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse, Silver, strike fear in the hearts of evil doers. I believe that only in the brilliance of summer days could the Lone Ranger have awoken each morning with enthusiasm to face the day and the evils he had to dispose of.
Each morning I take note of the fact that the day grows longer and the night recedes. Strength wells up in me.
[I have taken the liberty of making several major modifications in the poem below to suit my own feelings.]
Light can be kind. Light can smell sweet. Light can be soft.
Light can be porcelain. Light can be silent. Light can speak.
Light can be romantic.
Light can be love. Light can be faith.
Light can be full of strength. Light can be pure.
Light can be free. Light can be wild.
Light can be blessed.
Light can be full of presence. Light can tell a story.
Light that is like no other!
SHANIA K. YOUNCE
I have just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C. that kept me away from this machine for five days. It was welcome respite for me and I suspect that my “readers” did not notice. It was a vacation and I spent all my time in the company of two friends. It strains plausibility, if not credulity, to report that they seemed glad to see me.
While I was gone, the world turned. A man in D.C. gave what he called “the State of the Union address.” It was shown on television but, of course, I did not watch. I may do him a disservice but I don’t imagine he knows what a union is. This does not matter. I suspect that in the time-honored tradition of American presidents, he groaned out a fairly upbeat account of what happened in 2012 but sternly warned us not to rest on our laurels because there is “work to be done.” He probably referenced his accomplishments and his plans for the next three years. The liberal press glowed and the conservatives expressed bewilderment. Thus is it ever.
I paid some attention to the sports sections of newspapers. I took note of the fact that two “NASCAR icons” expressed mutual respect for one another and ended a rift that had threatened to do damage to their sport [sic]. Naturally, I was pleased, delighted and thrilled. I read that the golfer Brandt Snedeker was tired of being a bridesmaid and vowed to end his long streak of 2nd place finishes in important tournaments and said he expected to be the #1 golfer in the world very soon. I was pleased, delighted, and thrilled. The Westminster Dog Show had its annual bark-down in Madison Square Garden. Banana Joe, an affenpinscher, held off hard-charging crowd favorite, Swagger, a sheepdog, for the all-important crown of Best Dog in the World. Needless to say, I Was pleased, delighted and almost thrilled out of my mind.
I watched two hours of Nancy Grace on TV as she seemed to express disappointment that some pretty girl who stabbed her boyfriend twenty-seven times, grew tired of it and finally slit his throat may not be fried for her misdeed. Nancy remains a wonder to us all.
I did a few other things during my sojourn to Washington, D.C. but mainly I was interested in talking, not doing, as is my usual wont. I flew home Wednesday afternoon and the trip was pleasant enough despite the fact that the stewardess was giving special attention and better treatment to those in first class seats. I hate this two-tiered system of royalty and serfs but can’t end it. I certainly wouldn’t join the ugliness even if somebody gave me $5 million to do so. In virtue of her disgusting display (in which she is joined by other stewardesses, I am determined never to call these people “flight attendants,” their desired sobriquet.
So, the good news is that I came home with my socialist virtues intact. Upon arriving home, I checked my email and found that about 150 messages had been sent to me. No more than thirty of these were personal notes from friends so deletion was quick, easy, and painless. Of course, I read it all because there may have been a company offer among them tempting me away from my socialism with an offer of $5000 if I agreed to do….[whatever]. Keith Carradine once sang a song in the movie Nashville, proclaiming “I’m easy,” and I know too well what that means. My soul is not worth $5000.
For the rest of the year I am embarking on a diet, trying to find lots of things not to eat. If all goes well, I will consume only water, watered-down lemonade, and coffee for the next twelve months. Combining that program with strenuous exercise and, God willing, I will lose 100 pounds. I may chew on something but I hope not for the next six months.
Wish me well.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuxSl_4yLz4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYSc7QzWtt8
A few years ago I wrote to several old Brownsville friends for their recollection of growing up in Brooklyn. I was expecting, and actually hoping, they would confirm and even supplement all that I found dreadful about our educational experiences. I could not have been more surprised than I was. Among the most exuberant letters I received was one from Sam Bonis who today is a retired professor of geology with a distinguished history.
Sam may well have been the poorest of the poor in my crowd. He lived in a low income public housing project, and his family may have been the only white one in the crime-infested building. His father held no job I remember and his mother was a chronic sufferer of mental diseases, especially paranoia. Yet they were lovable people and Sam may have inherited much of his good naturedness from them. For me, the Hebrew Educational Society (what we called the HES) was only a battered old building, two blocks from where I lived and three from Sam’s home, in which to play basketball but for Sam, who took no part in our games, it was cultural heaven. There he learned to play the piano and to partake of the Jewish festivities that were so ample for those who cared. It was all free and Sam knew how to use these gifts. While I idled my life away in high school, Sam garnered a NY State Regents Scholarship worth $350 per year, without which he could not have afforded to go to college. The scholarship paid for everything. At Brooklyn College, Sam knew how to be happy – a thing I thought to be profoundly impossible. Later, Sam trudged off to LSU for a Ph.D. and a career in geology spent mostly in Guatemala, where he married a beautiful Mayan Indian. Over the decades, we never stopped being friends. For me, losing his friendship would have been unthinkable and would also have been an embarkation on madness, but through the years, Sam laughingly tracked my depravity and amiably called my crazy episodes “interludes of delusions of grandeur.”
Poor as Sam was, he never tasted the iconic Jewish dish of lox and bagels until we became friends in our freshman year at Brooklyn College. So, then, he would come to my house on Sunday mornings and feast his eyes and belly on the goodies my father provided. I tell you all this for one reason: Sam knew how to make the best of his life. Sam harbored no resentment of those of his Brownsville cronies who had it better than he did. In fact, he says he didn’t think they had it better. So Sam lived – in the fullest and best sense of the term. I love him and have no envy, not even of the success he made of himself. [His daughters went on to greatness, too. One of them co-authored a book with him] Only now, in retrospect, almost 60 years too late have I come to see how jaundiced my view of Brooklyn College is. The dawning of good sense is Sam’s doing, whether he knows it or not. Why did I have no reason or small occasion to mention in my chapter about Brooklyn College that more of its graduates have gone on to earn Ph.D. degrees than any other college in America? Given its middle size, that is no mean achievement. Why did I have no reason to mention its long list of distinguished graduates (including Sam) but saw it only as a breeding round for misery?
It’s too late, now. I don’t want to revisit the past to alter it with a flourish of encomiums when they were not part of my lived experience. I need to live by what I wrote. That’s the only way. Still, how I wish…
With the title of this post, I am off to a bad start. I know you don’t want to read this post, and you shouldn’t. It is entirely meant for me, not you. In any case, as with most of my posts and most of my “readers,” [sic], there is the X-factor: “Sorry, I didn’t have the time to read it, Sid.” I won’t explore that one. This is a rambling post but with shades of thematic unity. The misery about which I write is mine.
Today, I enter the penultimate year of my 8th decade as a living being. In short, by turning 79, I am near to closing out my eighth decade. It is a venerable age and young folks offer me assistance as I walk by. Gladly, I accept.
All around me, or not too far away, are cherished friends, some of whom are even older than I am: Thirteen quickly come to mind. Others are not far behind. Will all of them survive to January 2014? It seems doubtful, merely as a matter of statistical improbability, having nothing to do with their current states of health. I don’t like this one bit. I am not one of those sensible people who say, “Well, death comes to all of us sooner later. It need not be tragic. Just defy the grim reaper and ask, ‘Death, where is thy sting?’” Good advice. I am not capable of taking it.
I ache, too. I ache a lot and my pains don’t match my conception of myself as a great physical specimen. People glibly say, “We’re all getting older,” and I guess that is intended as a soothing balm but I take no vicarious pleasure in the thought that people hurt. I suppose there are some cases for which I should be glad but I can’t get into the spirit of celebrating miseries. We have a President who is utterly mysterious to me. Upon receiving his Nobel Peace Prize, he boasted he did not have the luxury of being a pacifist. A strange moment to announce that, don’t you think? He bragged about the assassination of bin Laden and offered that up as a reason to re-elect him. A fine madness. I am not certain but I think the President is a high school graduate. So, did he never hear of John Donne? And if he did, is he so arrogant as to compare his own wisdom with that of Donne’s?
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Please, dig that man up from his grave and make him President.
I know unreasonable hate as well as the next guy. It is suffused in my bones. My hatred for Islamists (and for many Americans in public life) almost destroys my sanity but NEVER, EVER am I glad any of them dies or is near death. Even I, the master of craziness, draw the line at that point.
I don’t feel well. I think I eat too much dairy. Eggs, 2% milk, and cheese are a bad foundation for health. I eat too many chickens (what barbarians refer to in the singular as chicken, thereby hoping to disguise their savagery.) I resolve to eat more salmons, more fruit, vegetables and grains. Drop down from 2% fat in my milk to 1%. Switch to egg beaters. Maybe all that will improve my mood. More juice, more water. Maybe fewer cramps my father left over for me to inherit. MY FATHER! Ah, yes, I almost got to know him, Horatio.
We think, (my sisters and I), that Dad was born in Poltavia, a large railroad city in the Ukraine in 1894. We don’t have good evidence for that so I can’t say why. That’s the year of the Dreyfus Affair, and anti-Semitism was in high gear. Cossacks or their descendants were sweeping across the Ukraine, doing mayhem for the fun of it. 1894 is pretty close to the midway point of the Great Migration, (1881-1922), when Italians and Eastern European Jews were arriving in America by the hundreds of thousands. In 1922, American bigwigs got the bright idea to clamp down on the Jews, and that was that.
We don’t know when Dad came to our shores. A good guess is that he was escaping the pogroms of 1905 through to about 1910. Detailed records are obscure. Nothing at Ellis Island or other points of debarkation mention him. We know he had an Army registration file and there is a good chance he served under General Pershing during the general’s expeditionary force against Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata. I like the idea – it is exotic.
Although he came from the region known as “beyond the Pale,” where education quotas were strict, Dad knew many things: his arithmetical skills were better than high speed Hewlett Packard calculators and he knew Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish and English. He plumped down into the middle class very early and was a successful entrepreneur by the time he met the woman who became his wife in about 1922 – a Polack, perhaps from Warsaw, perhaps not. Dad’s restaurant came tumbling down with the stock market crash of 1929 and he was left with a ten and eight year girl to tend to while he was virtually penniless. Capitalism and WW II saved him. After a seemingly endless hunt, he found a job in a cafeteria in about 1940 and there he remained until death in 1963. His wife, my mother, had succumbed in 1953 to one of her many heart attacks that combined with her kidney disease, and he was friendless thereafter.
Like hundreds of thousands of other immigrants, my father was heroic. He had no life other than providing for the well-being of his family. His work was backbreaking. He worked what he called a half day on Saturdays – midnight to 10 A.M. He ached from the top of his scalp to the bottom of his feet. I never knew a day to go by without Dad screaming in agony from his nightly cramps. He left our apartment at about 10.30 P.M. most evenings and worked until 2 P.M, arriving home at exactly 3 P.M. He creaked his way over to a chair near a window and looked at the large tree across the street, the one that dominated the landscape of Chester Street. I think he was keeping guard over it. At 5 P.M. Mama served him his one meal – a boiled potato, a slice of rye bread and a glass of seltzer. It was easy to get Dad to his grave when he died because he carried only 80 pounds on his 5’5″ frame. I am sorry to say I never adopted my father’s distaste for food.
Myt father read the NY Daily News and the Jewish Forward faithfully and was definitely a man of the world. All the worst for him because he had only his egomaniacal son to share thoughts with, and I was not exactly good at that. My father and I exchange about 100 words during our overlapping lifetimes until Mama died when I was nineteen. Then he opened up. He poured out the story of his love for my mother, told me that without her his life was as good as over. He had no regrets whatsoever about making his family the focal point of his existence although he had whatever it takes to have made an entrepreneurial comeback. Only after my father died and I was close to having my Ph.D. did I come to appreciate and understand my father’s greatness. I am whatever I am because of him, and the many vices I have are despite him.
My sisters had already marched off well before my mother died, having families of their own but after my father died, we all realized that an epoch had ended. Dad moved from Jew-deserted Brownsville to Queens in the mid 1950s, along with thousands of Jews but never made a new life for himself. Some day, I might meet him in a heavenly place and I will watch him standing guard over his heavenly tree. Finally, I will say “Thanks, Dad, for sacrificing your whole life for the betterment of your children’s, thanks for never asking any of us for anything in return, thanks for coming to America.
I grew up in a world where X-mas was just a vacation from school. Today, it is much more than that. I am surrounded by Christians, mainly Catholics, who have taught me you don’t have to accept Jesus as your savior to enter into the spirit of the season. For many years I have been joining my wife and her children and her children’s children in a delicious routine of exchanging gifts. It really is true that it is better to give than to receive.
The season began, as it has often done before, with my receiving a Greeting Card from my favorite professor, Elmer Sprague. It is always a special card that has meaning for the two of us beyond what it would have for most people. Elmer has two virtues – he is wise and is one of the best persons on Earth. What a joy to have him now as friend as well as mentor. I get a lift from the arrival of the card that sustains me for two days.
Friends are a special joy for me over and above what they usually are. They surround me with love. It is hard to understand why I should inspire love in anybody and maybe it is because they, too, are imbued with the spirit of Christmas. Whatever.
After a family-oriented week, I will take off by myself for a month in Boca Raton, Florida. I will have the pleasure of seeing a new army of old friends: Lee Alperin, Larry Dayton, Ed Erwin (I hope but located a bit far from the Boca area), Ronnie “Jump shot” Mazilli, Harvey Weinstein, Ron Ross, “Big Nick” Gerstman, Donnie Rosenbloom, Mimi Paris (I hope), and others, too. If I have forgotten a few names just now, I apologize. I will have a laptop computer with me and will continue my rants and raves. I will soak up sunlight, do lots of reading and listening to music. The good mood of the Christmas season will not be left behind. I probably won’t have a car so I will depend on the kindnesses of visitors. I am confident of the result.
In two hours, we are going to a pre-Christmas lunch at a senior citizen’s facility to enjoy the camaraderie of Fred Anderson and his wife Barbara. In the early 1970s, Fred cast a deciding vote against my getting a promotion from associate professor to professor. I nursed a grudge against him for more than a year, even refusing to nod a “hello” to him when I passed him in a hallway. Eventually, the madness of it dawned on me. I walked up to him one day and said, “Let’s be friends.” One of the wisest things I have ever done. I finally understood that resentment and hostility gets no one anywhere. My heart lifted. I haven’t always been smart about this. For example, I have had a stormy relationship with Barry Fish. I detest myself when we are on the outs with one another. I am not going to allow this to happen again. It’s got little to do with the good feelings X-mas produces. Maybe when I get back from Florida, Barry will call and say, “Let’s you, me, JoEllen And Thea go to dinner..” What a fine way to start February that would be. We almost did it last year. I don’t know what went wrong. It doesn’t much matter if we make it better this time around.
I am looking forward to a great year, full of gemutlichkeit and health and prosperity for everybody I know. That includes all readers of my three sites. There are three now, in case you don’t know. I have added one on sports. Take a peek and let me know if you want to subscribe. Try athleticsandsports.com.
BE BLESSED, EVERYONE, JUST AS I AM.
