happy birthday, sarina!, feb 2014
TRANSCRIPT
A ‘Sweet Sixty’
Celebration
for the world’s sweetest sister
When I was at Brooklyn College back in the early 1970s...
I was quite the tree-hugging environmentalist
Recycling was just taking off, and Savta...
...might recall that I would spend hours in the basement breaking up
hundreds of Tab, No-Cal, and other diet soft drink bottles because
breaking them up was the only way that I could fit a couple of
months’ worth in my little Renault R-10.
Ema, do you remember me crushing bottles? I often left a mess of
glass shards on our Torginol basement floor back on East 7th St.
The Renault R-10 was a tiny car and I must have stuffed dozens of
shopping bags full of crushed glass in it, all but obstructing my
view, schlepping the glass to one of the few recycling centers in
the city (located by the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge)...
so that I could carry a much larger load and keep these
time-consuming trips to a minimum. At the time, I was
also involved in the Sierra Club...
lobbying in support of the clean air act. I was also
involved in trying to enact bottle bill legislation.
But of all of these, the issue that I was perhaps most
involved with was overpopulation.
I volunteered with the organization Zero
Population Growth (AKA ZPG)
They are an organization that believes that the root of many problems
facing the world, including hunger, pollution, energy and water scarcity,
climate change, is in overpopulation, and that the solution for
overpopulation is to use persuasion and public policy to encourage people
to have no more than 2 biological children.
I volunteered for ZPG for several years during college, serving as
an office volunteer, writing letters to the editor, etc. In fact, I was
so passionate about the issue that I went to visit the Yeshiva of
Flatbush...
from where I had graduated several years several years
earlier, and I met with my old nemesis Rabbi David
Eliach...
in order to ask him whether I could speak to some of the
senior classes about ZPG. He politely declined. Many of my
friends and family knew about my passion, too.
Several years went by after I graduated college, and I
was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I was taking classes at the University of New Mexico
towards a Master’s degree...
and I was also working at the Inhalation Toxicology Research
Institute, studying the health effects of air pollutants
It was Thanksgiving of 1979...
and I was delighted to be getting guests: Harvey and
Sarina, for a pre-wedding visit!!
I picked them up at Albuquerque Airport
As soon as we got to the house, my sweet...
sister pulled me aside and told me the following: “Rafi, I know that
you decided you did not want to have any children due to your
concerns about the environment. Well, Harvey and I have been
thinking about it and we came to a decision.”
“Yes,” I replied?
“Well, we decided that we will have one less child than we
planned to so that you could go ahead and have a child.”
This little story says it all: My sister, the most generous,
big-hearted, naïve person on the whole planet!!
Happy birthday, Sarina, as you enter into this, the second half of
your life, may you always be as generous, as big hearted...and as
naïve as you were on that 1979 Thanksgiving day!!
We all love you!
Rafi, Elizabeth, Sarah, and Talia