I  couldn’t find the telephone number of the telephone company anywhere. Our phone wasn’t working.

Finally I found the number. A customer service representative told me to expect a visit from a repairman on Friday between 8 a.m. and 12 noon.  But nobody showed up at our apartment on Friday.

Late on Friday a woman called to say, “Oh, you don’t need to stay home for this. The problem is in our network cable out in the street.” I had already stayed home a couple of days due to confusion about this appointment.

Four hours later I received an automated telephone message. It said my problem had been fixed.

But that was nonsense. There was still static on the line, so our phone was obviously not fixed.

Also, a crew from the telephone company was still working outside in the street.

The company’s website said something different. It said my problem would be fixed by 23:15 that same night. For those of us not living on military time, that means 11:15 p.m.

A few hours later I received a second automated message. It said our problem had been resolved. I still didn’t believe it. Why should I believe such nonsense?

The next day was Saturday.  At 8:30 a.m. we received a telephone call from a repairman. He said he needed access to our apartment “within half an hour.”

Saturday is the weekend here, not an ordinary workday. In a rush, we finished breakfast and put on some clothes.

The telephone guy came huffing and puffing up the stairs to our floor. I told him everything again. I had already explained everything five times to two remote representatives and three computerized systems. So this was the sixth time I was explaining the same thing.

The repairman did not look at our telephone or the wiring for the telephone. Approaching our building that morning, he had spotted the work crew. In fact, it would have been hard for him to have missed those men, with their large, white truck and all their equipment outside.

Despite being out of breath from climbing all the stairs, the repairman was very cordial, indeed.

“After the work crew downstairs leaves,” he said, “if you still have a problem with your telephone, call us back.”

“Oh,” I exclaimed in surprise, “that makes perfect sense!”

Meeting an intelligent human being was  such a relief, after a long time of confusion.

Anyway, we still had a phone problem after the repairman left and after the work crew left. The problem was in a network cable out in the street, just as the first woman had said.

We had to be patient, but the issue was fixed in a couple of weeks.

Some Questions for Discussion:

(1)   Are you surprised that this company didn’t know the problem was out in the street, when they had a repair crew working in the street?

(2)   Are you surprised to hear that a communications company was communicating so badly?

(3)   Are you surprised they sent a repairman outside the scheduled time?

(4)   Where you live, would you say that you get good service with your utilities? When I say utilities, I mean your phone service  and your suppliers of electricity and cooking gas.

The photo above is wall art in New York City made by an unknown street artist.

Photo and Text © 2011     Barbara A. English     All rights reserved.

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It takes only 113 degrees F to kill them, once it’s determined that bed bugs are present. Researchers simply built a foam box around the furniture to be treated, using the simple 2-foot by 4-foot insulating panels that are available at larger home hardware outlets or lumber yards. They then placed a heater inside. A sealed, oil-based heater eliminates the fire risk. They raised the temperature to 140 degrees F. The bug infestation was eliminated. The entire process takes a couple of hours.

Clothing and bedding can be thrown into a clothes dryer. You do not have to wash the clothes. It’s the high heat of the dryer that kills the insects.

Rooms can be treated by raising the temperature.

For this research, Dr. Williams provided the following reference: Med Vet Entomol 09;23:418-425.

Some Notes on How Heat is Measured

113 degrees Fahrenheit is 45 degrees Celsius.

140 degrees Fahrenheit is 60 degrees Celsius.

In the Fahrenheit system, the boiling point of water is at 212 degrees above zero on the scale. The freezing point is at 32 degrees above zero.

In the Celsius system, the interval between the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water is divided into 100 degrees. Zero degrees represents the freezing point, and 100 degrees is the boiling point.

To convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, subtract 32. Then divide by 1.8.

To convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, multiply by 1.8 and then add 32.

Some Questions for Discussion:

(1) Where you live, is temperature measured in degrees Fahrenheit or in degrees Celsius?

(2) What is considered a nice temperature where you live?

(3) Where you live, how hot is too hot?

(4) Where you live, how cold is too cold?

Copyright (c) 2010           Barbara A. English          All rights reserved.

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When your boss calls you an idiot, you will react as if he had put a gun to your head. Brain-wise, social threats are as powerful as physical threats. You will go limbic. The limbic system is the part of the brain related to our emotional life.

What You Can Do:

(01)   Name what happened and the emotion you are feeling—in a couple of words. For example: ‘My boss said I was incompetent. I can’t believe he insulted me this way after all my years of loyal service.’ Try to boil it down to just a few words. Never make a story out of it!

(02)   Make a list of your options. Avoid complaining about how horrible the other person is.

(03)   If you were scared by what happened, find a less frightening way of looking at it.

(04)   Tell yourself, ‘My reaction is average. If he talked to me like that, then he must talk to everybody like that.’

(05)   What is the most important thing you want to do today? Go DO that instead of thinking about how bad your situation is.

(06)   Take a different point of view. For example, if you are apprehensive about giving a speech in front of a group of people, visualize yourself as seated in the audience instead.

(07)   Do any activity that involves counting or measuring, like knitting, sewing, bookkeeping, carpentry, or counting the leaves on a tree. This kind of unemotional activity can serve as the re-set button for your brain. This is also a tried-and-true method for ending a panic!

(08)   Sit still or lie down for awhile. Take a class in how to meditate. In other words, learn how to stop your brain from thinking.

(09)  Try to remember if you said or did anything that might have contributed. Realize that events usually do not happen in isolation.

(10)  In going limbic, we are thinking that we are right and the other person is wrong. The funny thing is that every person on earth feels that he is right!—and that another person is wrong! Can you see the truth beyond right and wrong?

(11)  The latest brain science reveals that the brain is hardwired, as if it were a machine. Nobody changes easily. The realist says: ‘It is what it is’ and does not expect people to change more to his liking.

After going limbic, our only job is to calm down. Calming down is the way we rescue the brain.

Some Questions for Discussion:

• When there is a loud noise or someone yells, the body experiences the well-known ‘fight or flight response.’ The Stone Age man or woman needed to drop everything and run away from danger. In our modern cities we may feel we are in danger all the time, living day and night in a state of hyper-alertness. Do you think this is why people are always on their cell phones or checking their emails?
• When was the last time someone insulted you? Brain-wise, social threats are as powerful as physical threats. Did your face become red? Did you say something back? How long did it take you to calm down after that?
• Have you ever been fired with no notice? How did you react? Did you plot ways to take revenge on your boss? Did you feel helpless and hopeless?
• Successful athletes and soldiers develop mental toughness, and this involves not paying attention to insults and put downs. Is mental toughness a kind of deafness? What do you think?
• Some people say they ‘roll with the punches’ when they are not appreciated. Other people say they let insults roll off them ‘like water off a duck’s back.’ They keep an imaginary protective barrier around them. Do you think you can imagine you have a layer around you protecting you from harm?
• When someone hurts your feelings, do you tell other people about it, write it down, and try to remember it for a long time? If so, do you think it is humanly possible to overlook  hurtful words instead of recording them? What do you think is the very best way to cope with hurt feelings?
• Maybe a family member said something critical of you, and you ‘took it to heart.’  Words can be like arrows that pierce to our hearts and other inner organs, damaging us very badly. Primitive, tribal peoples have been observed to die after an authority figure pointed at them with disapproval. Do you know someone who uses harsh words?
• Parents sometimes get angry and curse their children. They say things like, ‘You’ll never make any money’ or ‘You could never survive on your own’ or ‘Who would marry a girl like you?’ Children often take their parents and authority figures too seriously. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘The truth is that I am okay in my own eyes and can decide for myself how to live my life.’
• Maybe the worst form of abuse is neglect– being abandoned or left alone. Children are often left alone these days because their parents are at work all day. Elderly people often live alone after their spouse dies. How do you think isolation affects the human brain?
• It is said to be a good idea to do a person a kindness or give them a gift, after they have hurt you. Why do you suppose that would be a good thing to do? Have you ever tried this? What was the result?

This report on the latest brain science is based on the  lecture, Taming the Animal Brain, given by Paul McGinniss and sponsored by the International Coach Federation, New York City Chapter. Paul is a workplace and business coach with www.response-ableconsulting.com. Other concepts in this article were inspired by the work of Dr. Abraham A. Low (1891-1954) , a neurologist, psychiatrist, and pioneer in the field of cognitive therapy. His work continues to assist people worldwide through Abraham Low Self-Help Systems. org.

The life-like sculpture of a female swimmer sitting cross-legged in the lotus position, a meditation posture,  is the work of artist Carole A. Feuerman.

Text and Photo © 2010        Barbara A. English        All rights reserved.

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A sign said that Queen Anne gave some land in my neighborhood to a church in 1705. How was this land hers to give away? In 1705, Queen Anne lived 3,000 miles away in England, across the Atlantic Ocean.

The answer is that Dutch traders had purchased Manhattan Island from Native Americans  in 1626 for trade goods worth $24. Manhattan Island was owned by Europeans after that.

Some say the island was not sold by the Manhattoe Indians who lived here, but by the Canarsie Indians, who lived somewhere else and only traded here. Was Manhattan Island sold by Indians who did not own it?

I heard that Europeans in various parts of the city bought the same land over and over from the Indians. There is no record that anybody thought this was odd.

I also heard that Native Americans believed that land was something that could not be bought, sold, or owned. Then why were they selling land? Is it possible they did not understand these land deals?

Indians used to be called ‘redskins.’  Maybe Native Americans were called ‘Indians’ because Henry Hudson’s ship, which sailed into New York harbor on September 11, 1609, was looking for a way through to the Indies in the Pacific Ocean. Henry Hudson never discovered the Northwest Passage, but Native Americans are still called Indians.

What about the idea that the land is our home and is not a commodity, a thing we can buy and sell? Maybe that concept has lost its meaning, because nowadays we frequently see space being bought and sold. We don’t live off the land anymore. We work, in exchange for which we buy food, a place to live, all other goods and services – and land, too. Houses and land are called ‘real estate.’

Adjusted for inflation, the $24 the Indians received for Manhattan Island is now calculated to be worth approximately $72. But according to a website called www.straightdope.com, land values in Manhattan have increased ‘from a half cent per acre in 1626 to $827,000 per acre today, an increase of roughly 17 billion percent.’ You would have to pay from $2,000 to $3,000+ per month to rent an apartment in Manhattan today. Most people don’t have enough money to live in Manhattan.

But the Native American population today in the United States is trapped in the most abject poverty, sometimes on reservations without access to education, job opportunities, and basic medical services. Mainstream Americans obviously lack respect for indigenous peoples, their religion, and their culture. Isn’t this discrimination a form of racial prejudice? You would think that this social inequity would have been redressed a long time ago.

I hear that about 400 Native Americans still live in New York City, the same number who used to live here in 1626. In addition to these few Native Americans, the population of New York City has grown to between eight and nine million people.

Some Questions for Discussion:

(1)   Have you ever bought land? If so, how much did you pay for it?

(2)   Have you ever bought a house? If so, how much did you pay for it?

(3)   Do you think it is important to own your own house?

(4)   Do you think it is important to remain mobile, able to come and go, or would you rather ‘put down roots’ by owning a house?

(6)   We hear this expression: ‘living in harmony with the land.’ The Native Americans lived in a sustainable way hundreds and even thousands of years ago. Why do you think they allowed the Europeans to take over their land?

(7) Commercially minded people do not think of living in harmony with the land. They want to develop the land. Do you think there might be any middle ground between these two points of view?

Photo and Text © 2010 by Barbara A. English            All rights reserved.

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Say this whenever you do not understand English: ‘Please repeat that, using different words.’ Say using different words so they will not repeat the same sentence you did not understand.

The six usual reasons you cannot understand English are:

(1) English is always changing. In everyday life we use idiomatic expressions most of the time. Nobody knows them all, not even native speakers of English.

For example, today I saw the poster above on a bus stop advertising a brand of liquor. The poster said: ‘R.U. Bot or Not?’ There is no such word in English as bot.

Bots, short for robots, is a noun. You will always see this word in its plural form, bots, never as a single bot. But in the sentence above, bot is singular, and it is an adjective, not a noun. These grammatical changes added to my confusion about the English on the poster.

In addition, the connotation of the word bots is mostly bad, of course. Most Internet bots are considered negative, because robotic programming is one way thieves steal information off computers that don’t belong to them. Badness was obviously a message the advertisers wanted to convey with this liquor ad: ‘Are you bad or not?’

(2) Confusion. Confusion is a hook to catch your attention. Advertisers use confusion to make you stop and look—and buy something. For this reason we see a steady stream of meaningless abbreviations and misspellings coming from advertisers and merchants.

(3) Slang. Another reason we see incomprehensible messages is because people are trying to be cool, to use a slang word. If you don’t know what cool means, type ‘What does cool mean?’ into your search engine.

Money Saving Tip: Never waste your money taking a class in idioms or slang expressions. By the time you have memorized a list of words and phrases, nobody will be using them anymore. They will be out of date.

(4) Accents. If he has a Spanish accent and you are Korean, it will be difficult for you to understand his English. Accents may cause his vowels to sound different. You simply may not be able to understand one sentence he is saying. Even native speakers of English have a hard time understanding people with heavy accents. For this reason, students of English may want to work with accent reduction tutors.

(5) You Cannot See the Person. Experts in communication say that 70% of the message comes from seeing the other person, the visual part. We understand each other best when we can see each other’s facial expressions, body, and hand gestures.  Making eye contact is also important to good communication.

Look at  this famous photograph, taken in 1932 during the construction of a building in midtown Manhattan. You will notice that decades ago we used to focus all our attention on the person next to us.  That changed with the invention of the cell phone and Internet technology. Now we prefer to communicate mainly with those far away.

(6) The Other Person Does Not Want to Be Understood. Communication is a two-way street. If you cannot understand somebody, maybe he does not want to be understood. If someone is speaking in a vague or incomprehensible manner, just try to understand the basic or essential part.

Some Questions for Discussion:

1. Many students have studied English for ten years in school but cannot speak it. This is true of all language instruction, because language teachers do not teach conversation. For example, I studied French for six years in school but the opportunity never came up for me to practice speaking French.
2. Many people who have studied English for a long time come to New York City but discover that they cannot understand English as we speak it here in everyday life. Does this describe you? What might you do to remedy this uncomfortable situation?
3. Do you think it is important to understand everything about another language, or is it okay to just be ‘good enough’—not perfect?
4. Do you think cell phones enhance or block communication?

The photograph at the top of this article is taken from an ad for Svedka vodka.

Also shown is a graphic detail from Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, a famous photograph depicting eleven construction workers seated on a girder eating their lunch with their feet dangling hundreds of feet above the New York City streets. This famous photograph was taken in 1932 by Charles C. Ebbets during the construction of a building in Rockefeller Center.

Photos and Text Copyright © 2010 Barbara A. English         All rights reserved.

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Hatred. We can hate places, foods — just about anything.

Example: I hate the color called lime green. I don’t care if it’s the fashion color this year. I can’t stand it and I won’t wear it.

Hostility, rage, fury, resentment, indignation, anger, a fit of temper, a quick temper, angry:

It seems that these words are used to define each other, but they all mean ill will. We don’t like something or someone. In practice, fine distinctions are often not made between the meanings of these words. They are just used in certain ways.

A parent may complain, for example, that her child was sulky and refused to eat dinner. Rebellious teenagers often appear sullen but don’t say anything antagonistic; that is, they don’t say anything to start an argument. Resentment is considered to be a particularly unhealthy emotion, because it is held in the body for a long period of time. A person can harbor a resentment secretly. Rage and fury are more explosive and outwardly visible. One speaks, for example, of the fury of a raging storm.

Anger is usually felt in the body as an increase in tension. Sometimes the face of an angry man turns red and sometimes it turns white.

Sometimes you will not see that the other person is angry, because he is hiding it. He is suppressing his anger.

Sometimes people are angry but don’t feel angry, and this is called repressed anger.

Mental health professionals consider it good when an angry person knows that he is angry and experiences his anger in his body. When he does not know that he is angry, this is one way of  “being out of touch with one’s feelings.”

Even though a person knows he is angry and is experiencing anger in his body, that does not mean he must speak in anger or act in anger.  We are all capable of self-control.

Often the angry person is seeing things from one side only, temporarily forgetting that there are at least two sides to everything. Often an angry person feels afraid or helpless, and it’s best to remember that.

Some Question for Discussion:

(1) When was the last time you felt angry?

(2) On that occasion, how long did you feel angry? Was it for one or more days? Was it for five or ten minutes? Or was it more like a flash of anger?

(3) When you felt angry, did you speak in anger?

(4) What happened then?

(5) Have you ever tried to count to 10 before speaking in anger?

(6) The angry person always feels he is right and the other person is wrong, isn’t it so?

(7) Do you think there is any point in arguing with a person when he is angry?

(7) What are some ways you calm down when you are angry?

The photograph is a detail from a painting by Rachell Sumpter entitled “Molten Kin.”

Copyright © 2009           Barbara A. English          All rights reserved.

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Electrons sometimes communicate with each other instantly even if they are billions of miles apart. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 inches or 10 billion miles apart. This was discovered in 1982 at the University of Paris by a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect. He discovered that communication can travel faster than the speed of light.

Such instantly communicating particles are not individual entities, argues University of London physicist David Bohm, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. He believes our universe is actually a gigantic super-hologram.

Working independently in the field of brain research, Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

The brain works as a kind of lens, translating the frequencies it receives from our five senses—sight, sound, touch, hearing, and taste—into what appears to be the concrete world of our perceptions.  Pribram believes the brain uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

The most interesting aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. If the solidity of the world is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram, selecting some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforming them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist.

As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion. Although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really receivers floating through a sea of frequency in the super-hologram.

This new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram’s views, is called the holographic paradigm. A small but growing number of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at so far. It may solve mysteries, psychological and otherwise, that have never before been explainable by science.

With the phenomenon of telepathy, for example, it is now much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual ‘A’ to that of individual ‘B’ at a distance.

Consensus reality determines what is called “bizarre” and what is called “normal.”  Consensus reality itself is formulated and ratified at the unconscious level, where all minds are infinitely interconnected.

In a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly make sense.

Aspect’s findings have opened the door to new ways of thinking. As all things we think are “really there” are revealed to be a sort of interference pattern, metaphysics is the new real.

Some Suggested Questions for Discussion:

1. We like to categorize what we see and have experienced, of course, but according to the holographic paradigm all the distinctions we have learned to make must be false, unreal, or artificial. Does this mean we must feel uncertain and confused about everything? Does this mean we must live in fear of the unknown? What does it mean?
2. Have you ever experienced a flash of insight or known something you couldn’t possibly know through the ordinary five senses?
3. Many married people can anticipate each other’s thoughts and actions. Mothers can sense many things about their own children. This is not considered unusual. Would you call this telepathy or mind reading? Or would you simply say that this is called intimacy?
4. Whether something is considered bizarre or ordinary seems to depend on the words we use to talk about it, doesn’t it?
5. Do you think most people become frightened when confronted with something they cannot explain?
6. Do you feel better when something scary has been explained by science? Or don’t you care about that?

Based on text supplied by an anonymous author at: http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#2oRiKk/www.thelovinggod.com/2007/09/holographic-paradigm.html/

Copyright © 2009    Barbara A. English        All rights reserved.

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I notice that the sea level is rising. I notice wars and poverty. I notice that I need a haircut. Having good looking hair is a social necessity. It’s like having pleasant manners and knowing when to say “Thank you.” And when I’m having a bad hair day, that means that my whole day is ruined, not just my hairdo.

Is my hair a trivial subject not worth writing about in an educational setting? Nothing could be further from the truth. Our external appearance is extremely important socially. We judge new people instantly upon meeting them, and these first impressions may not change for a lifetime.

I don’t sleep with rollers pinned in my hair all night, or use hairspray to keep my hairdo in place, but I always have to take care of my hair. I have seen women with blue crew cuts and men with red spikes sticking up from the top of their heads. Personally, I like a haircut that does not require much attention. Unusual hairdos that cry out, “I am different,” generally require a lot of time, money, and gel to keep them that way.

Like most women, I don’t cut my own hair. Every month or two, I visit a hair salon, where my haircutter decides what would look best.

I was born a strawberry blond. That means that my fair hair as a girl had tinges of red. By the time I was in high school, my hair had darkened to a medium brown. I started to go gray in my twenties, and I used henna products to color my hair and hide the gray. Henna is based on the color red, and for many years I was a red-head.

Later in life I stopped using any hair coloring, but some of my conversation students objected, saying, “You’re not an old lady! Do something about your hair!” After being a gray-haired old lady for a while, therefore, I followed their advice and dyed my hair blond, just as it was as a child.

I feel younger now, simply knowing that other people think I look better.

Some Questions for Discussion:

(1)   Do you ever want to change the color of your hair? Why?

(2)   How often do you get your hair cut?

(3)   If you tell your haircutter you want your hair a certain way, does he or she listen to you and follow those instructions?

(4)   Do you like going to a hair salon?

Photo and Text Copyright (c) 2009      Barbara A. English          All rights reserved.

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His name was Angelo. Angelo climbed the stairs backwards on his buttocks every day after work to get to his apartment on the third floor. He was in pain and there’s no elevator in this building. He worked for the bakery downstairs. Angelo was born in this building. His mother had immigrated here  from Italy.

If you walked past Angelo’s door any time of the day or night, you’d hear him crying out because of his arthritis. That’s what they said he was suffering from. A neighbor told me that Angelo could have gone for medical treatments for his arthritis, if that’s what it was, but he didn’t trust anyone trying to help him.

I saw Angelo on an ambulance stretcher in the hallway one day, after the bakery had been closed for a couple of years. I wondered what Angelo had been doing inside his apartment alone all those years, since his mother had died a long time ago. The policewoman and emergency workers said nothing to me, so I said nothing, too. If I had known Angelo at all, I think I would have asked, “Where are you taking him?” I would have asked because, as far as I know, Angelo had no family in New York.

The police department stuck a bright green notice across the door of his apartment in the summer of 2009, when Angelo died. The green paper sealed that door tighter than any lock or steel latch.

A neighbor confirmed that Angelo was dead. Months later another neighbor said he doubted that there had been any memorial service for Angelo.

Today there was a bucket of soapy water and a long-handled mop outside of Angelo’s apartment. The handle of the mop was lodged diagonally in the doorway, barring all intruders. Some workmen had disposed of the contents of the apartment into huge, black garbage bags. About a dozen of these were stacked on the first floor for pickup by the sanitation department.

Two work orders were taped to the glass door near the entrance to the building. They said that the Greenwich Village Historic District had authorized construction work on the third floor of the building. The landlord was apparently ready to renovate apartment 13.

The apartments are pleasantly rectangular in that line. I mention this because in our building the apartments are usually oddly shaped. This row of buildings was built to house the influx of workingmen arriving from Italy in the early 1900s. The best guess of a neighborhood historian was that this building was built around 1911. The original architect’s floor plans were lost long ago.

When the crew is finished renovating apartment 13,  it will have new blond wood flooring. It will have a tiled bathroom. Each of these apartments originally came equipped with only a john and no place to bathe. A john is a small room with one toilet, but no sink for washing the hands and no tub for taking a bath. Maybe there were bathhouses in the neighborhood then. I don’t know.

The renovated apartment will have in addition a beautiful kitchen area with a sink, stove, refrigerator, counter space, and wooden cabinetry. The horribly cracked plaster walls will be removed, and the new sheet rock walls will be painted bright white.

They’ll probably make it into a one-bedroom apartment with a separate living room and even some built-in closets. These rooms originally had no closets, just three broad rough hewn shelves above the kitchen sink. The renovated apartment will have air conditioning outlets in both the bedroom and the living room, and many other sockets in the kitchen for appliances. When Angelo’s mother first rented the apartment, this building was dark, not electrified.

When I moved here in 1971, the majority of the apartments were occupied by elderly Italian women wearing black dresses, stockings, and shoes. They were widows, born in the old country, afraid of the landlord and called him “The Boss.” I was just a young woman then, 22 years of age, a recent college graduate. I passed them on my way upstairs, and never once did any woman in black turn to welcome me or talk with me. In their view, I should be married, not working. The Italian immigrants thought women who lived alone were up to no good.

This whole area, so trendy and upscale now, was in those days a poor section of Little Italy. The community was clannish in nature. They clung together and excluded all others.

They rejected Angelo as well, even though he was Italian. I heard from a neighbor that when he was a boy, everybody liked to pick on Angelo. He was yelled at by his irascible mother, a Mammy Yokum type (a cartoon character from the old L’il Abner series, which was published in the newspapers in those days). Angelo was bullied at school. The people at the bakery never gave him any peace when he grew up, either. He never married.

In the meantime, the whole world changed and this neighborhood was certainly no exception. The Village is now one of the most desirable sections of the city in which to live. Most of the young people in this building are paying very high rents.

The tenants usually do not speak with me in the hallways when I see them, even if I say hello to them in passing.  They walk down the stairs with wires plugged into their ears. My neighbors are transients, and they probably see me as a throwback to a bygone era, just as toothless Angelo always was to me …

Divisions between people come in so many different varieties …

I want to say that I don’t know the dead man any better than you know him. I shouldn’t even be writing this, because I am not in possession of all the salient facts. Since the Village is an historic district, however, I thought I would tell you a little history, all that I know about Angelo, who lived in this neighborhood his whole life.

I used to see Angelo every day pushing down the street a cart filled with bread for Zito’s Bakery. Zito’s Bakery has been closed for many years now.

I never once said hello to Angelo, and he never once turned his head to look at me, even though Angelo and I lived in the same building for 38 years.

As soon as Angelo’s apartment is renovated, it will most likely go on the market for over $3,000 per month rent. I do not exactly wish to put it this way, but as I’m sure you know from reading the above, the dead man himself was worth nothing.

Angelo is survived only by his apartment, located in the heart of quaint, old,  Greenwich Village.

You may be wondering why I started talking about Angelo and ended by talking about Angelo’s apartment. It is a peculiarity of human nature that apartments are often seen as more interesting and valuable than the people who live in them. Maybe this is because we cannot change human beings, but an apartment can be renovated in a few weeks, given a work crew and enough money.

By the way, it bothered me for a long time that Angelo was suffering so much and nobody could help him. Maybe he did not know how to ask for assistance or say what was wrong.

Questions for Discussion:

1. Not all cultures exclude outsiders. Individuals can be clannish or cliquish, too. A clique is a smaller faction that forms within a larger group. Have you ever experienced rejection by a clique?
2. Have you ever had the experience of being rejected for social reasons; that is, reasons that had nothing to do with you as an individual and your personal qualities?
3. Where you live, do you feel like an outsider? Or do you feel at home there?
4. If you are unhappy where you live, do you ever think of moving to a place you might like better?
5. I never saw Angelo speaking with anybody. Isn’t that strange?

© 2009 Barbara A. English      Revised in 2011.      All rights reserved.

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People talk about the danger of the spread of contagious diseases. What about the spread of contagious desires?

When I feel bad because you have something I don’t have, that’s called envy. Envy keeps the juices of modern commerce flowing.

When my co-worker has just bought a condo, while I’m still living in a small rented apartment, I might feel envy. It’s a kind of hatred or bitterness that arises when I think, “I’m the one who should have a beautiful condo. I’ve always been a better worker than she is. She doesn’t deserve that condo.” Envy is a form of anger connected with our possessions.

The word envy seems to be dying out of the English language. It is being replaced by the word jealousy, but envy and jealousy do not have the same meaning. Jealousy is when I see my husband joking around with another woman and I think, “He likes her better than he likes me.” I suspect I have lost his love and our relationship. Jealousy has to do with our affections.

Envy makes barriers between people, but I have noticed that all forms of anger sometimes make us feel protected. For example, I feel protected when I march down the city streets in a very angry state of mind. Beggars don’t dare ask me for money. People step out of my way.

But we have an expression: “Live by the sword; die by the sword.” This means that angry, bitter people are always asking for trouble.

Personally, I know that an envious man or woman cannot possibly be successful or happy. I know that any kind of anger, envy, or greed binds me to my enemy, or to the job I dislike, with chains of steel. In addition, many people hang on to unwanted situations in life because they are unconsciously waiting for their revenge. Or they think that somehow they are going to be compensated for their misery.

If we value our freedom, which most of us say we do, we’ll need to learn how to rid ourselves of envy. If we weren’t full of envy  and greed (which is a desire for more), we could be free.

But we think, What could be wrong with wanting what everybody else has or wants? What could be wrong with criticizing everybody and going around with a lot of hate in our minds? Doesn’t everybody do that?

Some Questions for Discussion

(1) Is there anything wrong with wanting what other people have?

(2) Have you ever felt envy most strongly? What were the circumstances? What happened then?

(3) What do you think is the best way of ridding yourself of envy?

Text and Photograph Copyright © 2009 Barbara A. English All rights reserved.

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