Posted by eli newberger on November 17, 2001 at 18:40:11:
In Reply to: irked about parents posted by Julie on November 16, 2001 at 23:28:15:
Dear Friends, Here's the irksome story of my dad, my teacher William Bell, and one of Bell's horns. This act of generosity has always inspired me, but there's also a larger philosophical point that's worth keeping in mind.
Eli Newberger
From "The Men They Will Become: The
Nature and Nurture of Male Character"
(Perseus Books, 1999)
An excerpt from Chapter 8, "Sharing," on William Bell's generosity:
"Rules may be very helpful in causing a certain amount of sharing by the preschooler, but I don't think they will inspire sharing behavior as much as will his seeing the older members of the household be very sharing with each other, with others outside the household, and with him. Sharing is contagious behavior.
During my childhood, my father, even with two jobs, made barely enough income to pay for the essentials. By the time I was a preschooler, my parents were quarreling regularly about money; that is, my father frequently complained about what my mother spent. My mother had an old piano, on which she occasionally played Beethoven's "Fur Elise." When I begged for piano lessons at age five, and a teacher told my mother I had enough talent to justify having a good instrument at home, she, without consulting my father, upgraded the old piano to a Steinway, signing a contract to pay for it in installments. My father was predictably furious, but after his outbursts he would eventually subside.
Looking back, I realize that my parents were playing out the normal middle-class division of labor of that time; a wife stayed home, took charge of the household, and raised the children while her husband earned a living for the household. When such a conventional marriage was not a true partnership - as was the case with my parents - it was easy for the breadwinner to slip into the resentment of thinking his wife was merely a consumer devouring his earnings, and an insatiable one at that. To me, as a preschooler and schoolboy, it often looked as though my mother was caring and giving, to the extent of her ability, and that my father was ungenerous toward her and his children.
In my high school years, when I was earning money playing gigs as a jazz pianist and giving it to my father to save for my college expenses, but also making the tuba my principal instrument, my renowned tuba teacher, William Bell of the New York Philharmonic, offered to sell me one of his favorite horns that he had already loaned me for three years - a Conn pitched in the Key of C - for the giveaway price of two hundred dollars. My father refused to release any of my savings to buy the tuba; he said it was a foolish idea. I went off to college without my own instrument. Though I now have four tubas at home and have given several others from my collection to museums over the years, I yearn to this day for the one that belonged to a teacher with faith in me.
From our household's struggle over finances, I grew up determined to be generous toward others. Yet the legacy of my childhood experience is that I do sometimes find myself calculating the cost of being generous: What is it going to take out of me? When I'm really tired or upset or under pressure, one of the things I do is get very uptight about money. My childhood comes back to haunt me, to remind me of the tremendous long-term power, for better or for worse, in the parent-child relationship.
The character strengths we treasure and foster in ourselves are in dynamic tension inside us with their very opposites -generosity and stinginess, courage and timidity. Under stress we risk becoming the very opposite of what we most aspire to. In the first century, Paul of Asia Minor described this struggle: "The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will." The qualities that we try to cultivate within ourselves do not come from a textbook or from "character education." Each one reflects a problem or challenge in our lives, against which we try to construct an inner strength to cope with it." (pp. 106-108)