Oskar Schindler & my persistent feelings of failure

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I always feel as summer winds down an odd kinship with Oskar Schindler.

Remember him?

He was the German industrialist who cleverly — and at grave risk to his own life — saved more than 1,200 doomed Jews from the Holocaust.

The connection seems pretty thin, I admit.

He did so much and was justifiably memorialized in what you could argue was Stephen Spielberg’s finest film, “Schindler’s List,” from 1993.

It feels like I have done nothing.

And that’s where Schindler and I become one.

To me, the most indelible part of the movie is the end when Schindler falls to pieces in the devastating belief he’d not done enough.

He looks disdainfully at a gold ring and says it could have saved another life. His fancy watch disgusts him; it could have saved a family. He is revolted by the Mercedes-Benz in the driveway.

How many more souls could that have saved?

It’s because of Schindler I always feel anyone who dies satisfied dies having not done enough.

To bust that analogy clear down to atomic levels, I believe I wasted an entire summer.

I did not do enough.

I feel this way, of course, in particular with the kids. They’re 14 and 9.

They won’t be that ever again.

I’ve scoffed at maudlin friends who say they suffer from empty nest syndrome.

I tell them I look forward to a day when I can watch what I want, eat what I want, and do it all wearing shabbily comfortable clothes that would cause my loved ones to roll their eyes in fashionable distress.

But when summer days begin to dwindle and we’re fully geared up to start school as we will on Monday, I become wistful for lost time.

I wasted so much of it.

Did I devote enough hours to the needs of our children? Did I by being their daddy do anything to enrich their lives or their memories of this summer?

I feel like a failure.

It’s not like I was working all the time.

As you may have heard — and I’m sure you did, it’s what this blog is all about — I don’t work.

Unlike most of the rest of the civilized world, I am untethered by occupational concerns.

I try and keep busy. I have a bunch of events booked for the fall and am anticipating a fruitful time.

But I have nothing to show for the summer.

A guy like me with so much free time on his hands should be fluent in French, Spanish, Mandarin, Latin and those made-up languages you hear on the floors of the Star Trek conventions.

Instead, I’m fluent in “Seinfeld” catchphrases.

With all the time I have on my hands, I should be a scratch golfer, a skilled ice carver or a baseball fantasy league savant.

I should be a volunteer fire fighter or do busy work at some senior center, a place full of dear people who ache all day to see just one friendly face.

I wasted my summer.

Have I wasted my life?

I sometimes feel I have offended God and mankind by doing so little with my life.

That’s not me.

That line is a paraphrase of what are purported to be the last words of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).

Maybe the most insightful man in human history died convinced he was a failure.

Yeah, just what did he do?

Oh, yeah, he painted the Mona Lisa, conceptualized the first flying machines, armored fighting vehicles, contributed to ground-breaking innovations in surgery, manufacturing and is remembered as maybe the most brilliant human being who ever lived.

I wonder if his office was above a friendly tavern.

I guess what I’m tying to say is if these two giants died feeling like failures, it’s okay if sometimes you and I do, too.

Every now and then we’re all going to feel like monumental failures.

At least we all have monumental company.

Related . . .

Daughter, 4, thinks Dad works too much

Marching on Gettysburg with daughter, 12

My career advice: Don’t be like me!

Vacation recycling near impossible

Hollywood’s best year ever? 1993

I am becoming left handed

Steve Jobs: American iCon

The still-glowing reaction to the retirement of Steve Jobs highlights what’s wrong with American entrepreneurship these days. Everyone said he’s a genius, our most creative thinker, a brilliant tactical leader.

What went unmentioned is Jobs should go down as one of America’s most colossal disappointments.

And that’s by even his own standard.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: “He was always thinking about those great people that drove humanity to a higher level. People like Shakespeare, you know, like Isaac Newton.”

Sorry. His contributions are more in line with the recently deceased Elliot Handler who died July 21 in Los Angeles. He was 95.

Never heard of him? He was the founder of Mattel who invented Barbie, Ken and Hot Wheels.

He was a toymaker.

That’s all Jobs is.

He devoted much of the last 15 years figuring out nifty ways we could increase the number of songs we carry around in our pockets.

Just about every word I’ve written since 1998 has been on a Mac computer. I love Apple. I love my iPod. I’ve had an iPhone for less than a year and whenever I have any problem my first thought is, “How can what’s in my pocket solve this?”

Much of the world shares my mania for this. That’s why Apple now has more money in the bank ($75 billion) than the U.S. federal government, ($73 billion).

That’s why for the last 10 years I kept thinking, “Okay, now’s the time to take some of that money and some of that genius, put away the toys, and go to work on solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.”

A man like Jobs and his team -- and they all call themselves “geniuses” and have the t-shirts to back the boast -- shouldn’t be devoting their lives to improving the interface for games like Angry Birds.

If he truly aspired to greatness, he could have walked into a board meeting and said, “Okay, the technology behind the internal combustion engine is 160 years old, it consumes dirty fossil fuels that cost nearly $4 a gallon. We’re taking the next six months to invent a green iEngine that converts leaves and weeds into ozone that’ll float up into the atmosphere where it belongs. I want 10 ideas on my desk by noon tomorrow.”

He’d make a tidy profit on that, for sure. Or he could act like a truly great man and give it away for free.

Sound farfetched? Too socialistic?

Jonas Salk (1914-1995) devoted years of his life to creating a vaccine to wipe out polio, the most terrifying disease known to man. It could have made him a spectacular fortune. Instead, he gave it away.

For free.

“There is no patent,” he said in response to a question at a nationally televised press conference. “Could you patent the sun?”

Now, that’s a truly great man. A Pittsburgher, too. Like me.

Jobs’s health is a mysterious but clearly difficult situation for him. Certainly, he’s already faced thoughts of his own mortality.

Great men at the end think they haven’t done nearly enough.

It happens to famous artists, philosophers, scientists, musicians, architects, inventors and to the magnificent Renaissance man who was all those things rolled into one.

“I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”

Those were the last words of Leonard da Vinci.

To me the most compelling example of this poignancy was detailed in Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.” It’s almost too heartbreaking for me to watch again.

Oskar Schindler risked his life to deceive the Nazis that Jews at his factory were essential to the war effort. He saved over 1,100 innocents from certain doom.

Yet, at the end the film shows him wallowing in despair over what he did not do. His wristwatch, he said, could have spared two more; his car perhaps a dozen.

These were great men with humanity’s best interests in their hearts.

Do not dare include Jobs among that list.

He was smart guy who made a lot of money giving us the moronic diversions we crave.

The world’s going to hell.

Thanks to Steve Jobs, at least we’ll all be groovin’ when we get there.

I am becoming left handed

I may not be the best writer, but I’ll wager I’m the only writer who can do 10 regulation Army pull-ups and juggle.

Not simultaneously. Not yet.

It’s probably not the kind of boast you’d hear from writers like Stephen King or John Grisham, but it suits me.

If even hack psychologists diagnose I’m trying to compensate for so many professional shortcomings, so be it.

I like the fact that if I ever had to arm wrestle either of those two best-selling titans I’d have them both screaming uncle and racing back to their limos.

But that achievement will pale in comparison to my next great quest.

I’m becoming left handed. I’ve been willing myself to cease using my dominant right hand for all the menial tasks I reflexively summon it to do.

It dawned on me years ago the laziest part of my whole ever-loving lazy body was my deadbeat left hand. The right hand did everything and when it came to doing even the least of motor skills, my left hand never bothered to lift a finger.

It was unfair. It was like a marriage where the one spouse good-naturedly does all the work while the other one sits around and schemes of doing things like becoming left-handed.

But I digress.

So now I brush my teeth, shave, work the computer mouse and do things like button shirts with my left hand.

I  still wouldn’t trust the southpaw to toss darts when there’s a pregnant woman within 10 feet of the cork, but it can certainly lift a 12-ounce beer mug every once in a while.

Our over-reliance on our dominant hands throws our whole bodies out of balance.

It’s true. Ask any tailor. They’ll tell you our dominant hands are as much as an inch longer than the ones that do little more than dangle. Can you imagine how the progression of such natural atrophy could effect people who make sleeves?

My goal is pure ambidexterity. 

It’s just so cool not to mention, well, handy. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were ambidextrous and would paint with both hands, switching when ever one got tired. British artist Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873) was famous for drawing with both hands simultaneously -- a horse’s head with one hand, a buck’s antlered head with the other.

Benjamin Franklin was ambidextrous and signed both the Declaration of the Indpendence and the Constitution left-handed. That he didn’t think to sign one right handed and the other lefty is the only intellectual blemish on America’s greatest rascal.

This isn’t purely theoretical. Painful misadventure will result in many of us one day winding up in slings. Worst case scenario: What if during one of my midnight strolls I stumble into a bear with a palate so discriminating it consumes only right arms?

Much of my motivation comes from being a really bad writer -- and not the occupational kind, although skimpy professional accomplishments heave the subject into question.

It’s my handwriting. It is atrocious. Elegant penmanship is something I so admire. It’s a vanishing art I turned my back on in about the fifth grade when I saw Jon Logue writing in little block letters and thought it looked really neat.

Today, it’s impossible for me to writing anything in cursive beyond my own name, a pathetic scrawl that.

So I’ve for years been resenting my right hand. Even what little I ask it to do, it does poorly. If it were a second baseman, I’d yank it from the line-up and give the new kid a shot.

That’s what I’ve been doing with my left hand.

My goal is to learn to sign my name left handed in a more stylish flourish than I do with my right. That’d be a good gauge of success.

Studies show a direct correlation between involvement in motor skill exercises and brain growth. Our brains sleep walk through routine tasks, but comes alive when we challenge it with unfamiliar tasks.

My ultimate goal is the increase my brain power to a density sufficient enough to differentiate between foolhardy tasks and ones that might lead to actual income

And I hope observers will one day be able to detect results more tangible than equidistant arms that look snazzy in sleeves.

Being known as someone who writes badly with both hands would be professionally unwise for an otherwise even-handed guy like me.

Keep me safe! Touch my junk!

In “The Sting,” the outstanding Paul Newman/Robert Redford 1973 film, Redford and a crafty old con man target a mob numbers runner for larcenous deception.

The old man and another insider stage a knife fight to lure the eager mark into taking the loot.

During a clever swap, Redford’s Johnny Hooker tells the mark to put the money way down the front of his pants to avoid detection.

“The toughest guy in the world won’t frisk you there,” Hooker says.

I was thinking of that scene the other day as I stood, legs spread, in the security vortex at Greater Pittsburgh Airport.

The TSA agent didn’t look like the toughest guy in the world. In fact, I figured I could have kicked his butt had I been indifferent to spending the next five to 10 years in a federal penitentiary.

He had a job to do. I doubt he sprung of bed each day all chipper and thinking, “Man! I’m the luckiest guy in the world! Today I get to run my hands all over nearly 300 sullen strangers! Yippee!”

He sure didn’t look happy about getting what I guess you can call “frisky” with me.

My arms were spread and I’m sure to the lady operating the full body scanner I resembled the Leonardo da Vinci sketch of the naked Renaissance man, only one with a modern middle age paunch.

He did the arms, the chest, then knelt down to my ankles and started working his way north with a series of squeezes what in other circumstances could have been called affectionate.

 “Okay, now I’m going to come clear up to the bottom of the torso.”

I’d never heard it called that before. It’s a perfectly bureaucratic phrase. I’m sure the rest of us civilians can instinctively come up with one or two mono-syllabic words to describe the region he was duty bound to secure.

Did I feel violated? No.

Did I want express outrage? No, but I did make a mental note to place an industrial-sized whoopee cushion near the bottom of my torso next time I fly.

And the worst way to travel somehow manages to make itself even more irksome and degrading.

Few people remember but one of the biggest stories of the summer of 2001 was the push to pass an airline passenger bill of rights.

Why, passengers were tired of being treated so rudely. We’d had it up to the tops of our torsos with such shabby treatment.

Remember what bumped that story off the front pages?

Sure you do. After the terrors of 9/11 we were all willing to submit to any indignity that would ensure our planes were safe.

I guess the hyperbolic outrage over these invasive pat downs is a sign of how complacent we’ve become.

What’s amazing to me is there has been actual attempted bombings that involve every invasive security measure that have us literally so up in arms.

We had a shoe bomber so we all had to shuck their shoes.

We had a bomber with explosives in his underwear -- and you’d think there’s a dandy pick-up line in there somewhere -- so now we’re getting grabbed in places once reserved for intimates.

No one can argue the whole system isn’t utterly insane and wasteful. In 10 years, we’ve had fewer than a dozen young men of Middle Eastern descent try to board planes with bombs, yet every single passenger from toddlers to grannies is suspect.

I take a back seat to know one in regard to civil liberties, but the current system makes no sense. Yet, who’s to argue it’s not working?

For me an even more egregious incident than the invasive pat down happened on the way home.

I was given bottle of fine cabernet and thought it would be safer if I returned it home in my carryon, rather than risk getting it smashed by the gorillas in baggage handling.

It was corked and waxed. I would need banned weapons and a good reason to celebrate to open the thing in flight.

Never occurred to me it was a liquid and thus eligible for confiscation. They told me I could go back and check it, but I didn’t need add yet another layer of hassle to my trip.

I said cheers, boys. This one’s on me.

So you know what I’m going to do?

I think I’m going to spend the day searching the internet for a Patrick or a Patricia Downs to ask them if they’re invasive by nature or upset that people are hating all these pat downs.

I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.