Fly Away Bpm

[Endike Baur]

Curiousif there were surprises in my past, I sent saliva to a DNA site and received a message from a stranger named Ruth, saying, "My grandfather Sam was your biological father." Clearly, she was trying to prepare me, as this was preceded by several messages that were less candid.

Devastated, I needed the mother I'd lost years ago more than ever. She'd helped me through many crises. "You do the right thing," she would hug her toddler daughter after a hurtful incident. "It's his loss," she'd insist to me, the teenager whining over a guy's rejection. To end my agonizing at our wedding that the caterer used the wrong chairs, she whispered, "Nobody cares." The words were unconvincing, but her desire to comfort me had been a panacea. She was my rock, the one I counted on to bandage every wound.

My father, hearing impaired because of a childhood case of scarlet fever, showed his love with his eyes. He died eight years after she did. Anyone who might have been aware of the situation with Sam was dead. I was on my own to cope with this.

I took a second, more careful, look at the genetics report, scrolling down to where it showed that the 11.49 percent DNA Ruth and I shared was meaningful and that of the over a thousand relatives linked to me, not one was an "Adelman," my surname, two findings I'd ignored.

"The tests showed that my father wasn't my biological dad," I told my husband Martin. He pointed out that Joe and Jack, my brothers, fraternal twins eight years older than I was, looked like my father while I didn't. "Are you sorry you know?" Martin asked.

"I'm sorry I don't know more," I answered, frustrated that my questions would never be answered. Ruth and I started exchanging messages, hoping to make sense of this. She mentioned seeing an online video of me, noting some resemblance to her family, adding that she and I had both worked in television and that our sons had physical features in common.

She lived two hours away and agreed to come to dinner with her husband. "Do you think your father knew your mother was having an affair with Sam?" she asked. I shrugged. That was everyone's first question and my biggest fear. "Now that you've found out," my newly acquired half-niece wanted to know, "can you recall anything that would have been a clue?"

Long before this story surfaced, my mother said something that struck me as peculiar. Recovering from abdominal surgery in her late seventies, she'd told me, "The problem might have resulted from my carrying twins." Maybe because it was our first adult conversation, I seized on the opportunity to ask if my brothers and I were her only pregnancies though I had no reason to imagine she had any secrets. "Let me think," she said, avoiding giving me an answer. A woman her age forgets a name or where she left her eyeglasses, but not a pregnancy. Her response was so weird, I repeated it to Martin the moment I got home.

Speculating to Ruth, I said, "What she said puzzled me. Now it seems likely my question triggered her to think about the secret she'd been keeping from me and consider confessing, then decided not to." DNA wasn't an issue during her lifetime, so she didn't expect the truth would surface nor did she appreciate the relevance of one's medical history.

Wasn't I entitled to the truth? I've wanted to scream in the three years since the disclosure, but my mother wasn't around to hear it. It's conceivable she wasn't certain whose child I was, but she could have been honest about that. What this changed eluded me though it was unnerving and raised trust issues. I was indignant and self-righteous though eventually I conceded it would have been far worse for everyone if I'd heard this at an earlier age from my mother. Whatever the explanation, I'd have been burdened with a staggering amount of anger or compassion. I'm sure I'd have probed and likely created a family crisis.

Martin wanted to know what I'd have done in her situation. I had to admit I'd not revealed to her that I was dating someone of a different religion or that another boyfriend was twenty years older and certainly didn't let her know that the guy she said would be a good husband was cheating on his wife. Okay, so maybe honesty can be tempered by discretion. Living with a monumental secret couldn't have been easy for my mother, who wasn't in the habit of thinking before she spoke. She might well have been protecting not only herself, but everyone else she loved. The resentment I'd been harboring was replaced by gratitude.

Trying to come to grips with the new reality, I felt I was channeling my mother, whose resilience I was lucky enough to get. I also attributed my gregariousness to her and the ability to return items, like bathing suits, that aren't returnable. Determining whose genetics I'd received was now more complicated though my love of comedy surely came from my father. He liked nothing better than a hilarious joke.

Sam may have been responsible for my fear of heights or distaste for cilantro, but it's also conceivable his genes made me bold enough to pursue a career as a comedy writer when it was impossible if you weren't named Mel, Mort or Mickey. To make me comfortable about his part in this, I chose to see him as the poodle who'd contributed some genes to the breeding process.

Sybil Sage is working on a book about being one of the first women to break into scriptwriting. Among her credits are The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, Alice, Barney Miller, Growing Pains and Northern Exposure. She received an Emmy nomination and Writers Guild of America for a special starring Lily Tomlin. Her essays have been in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Forward, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, The Paris Review and many other publications.

I believe Hamas is a terrorist organization, and their actions consistently and predictably pose extreme threats to peace in the region. They continue to put the Palestinian people in danger by using civilians as shields.

I believe the sadistic violence perpetrated on October 7 against innocent Israelis and the taking of hostages is unjustifiable and indefensible, and all hostages should be returned. I can only believe that Hamas knew that their actions would be filmed and shared. The goal had to be to quash any hope of peace and to sow as much hatred and fear as possible.

I do believe that people have the right to defend themselves, AND I believe the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the killing of thousands of innocent Palestinian people in response to the Hamas attacks is an unacceptable human rights violation.

I believe in the evidence that demonstrates that all human atrocities across history start with dehumanization. I believe that antisemitism in all forms is dehumanizing, and I stand passionately against it. I believe that Islamophobia and anti-Arab language in all forms is dehumanizing, and I stand passionately against it.

When we see the death and desperation of innocent Palestinian people, what do we have to tell ourselves to be OK with that?

When we look away from the pain of any people, we diminish their humanity and our own.

Ideally, a proportional amount of money is invested in maintaining this invisible city in such a way that it keeps pace with whatever is taking place aboveground. As the population grows, so, too, must the sewer network. As the rains change, becoming rarer, or else more brutal, so, too, must the stormwater system keep up, with storage designed to compensate for the deficits of the dry season, or more expansive pipes to accommodate the assaults of the wet. In some places, these two systems, circulatory and digestive, are combined, both supplies detoxified by the same organ before being released. In others, where they are not, their networks must be kept strictly separate throughout, and any rupture can be as serious and poisonous as poop getting into your bloodstream. Ideally, in both cases, the treatment plants actually work, and the sewage is not just dumped as is into the sea.

One night we took supplies of wine and beer down with us, as so many others did. Drunk, we ran into the waves stripped down to our underwear beneath the moonshine sky. I remember splashing around giddily, then leaping away, screaming nervous laughter when I imagined something might be brushing against my legs.

Sometime later an architect friend showed me a satellite image that had been taken of Beirut, in such high resolution you could zoom in on the dense patchwork of tightly packed blocks and see the individual rooftops of buildings, see who could afford satellite dishes and who still kept pigeons. The image had been taken from space, and so from space you could see the two dark lines on either side of the Ramlet el-Baida beach extending out beneath the deep blue of the sea. Outfalls of raw sewage flowing straight into the water; you could literally see our shit from space. When I swam there, I had been afraid of sea monsters lurking beneath the waves. I did not know that the things I should have feared were much, much smaller, measured in parts per million: monsters of our own making.

The reconstruction did not stop at the downtown area, it did not stop at reconstruction. More and more buildings are being torn down to make way for towering leviathans that have made the city unrecognizable. There is less of the sky (they cast long, stifling shadows), less of the sea (they block all views, often all access), less of the earth: none of the plans for this new city include parks, or public squares, or spaces for those who cannot afford entrance fees to the private, exclusive luxuries being built all around us. The streets are filthy with construction debris; the din is constant, maddening.

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