Sent to Roy by one of his employees, with the disclaimer, “I swear I was forced to do this…”
Dear Ari September 14, 2008
There are a couple of things I forgot to say to you (and to everyone else) at your brit milah about my Abba, Ari. I need to share them, or I won’t be able to stop thinking about them.
It’s fitting that you were born in San Francisco: before there was such a thing as an “early adopter,” your Saba Ari was buying every gadget in the stores. He had a modem before most people had a computer, he put me into computer programming classes before I was 10 (wish I had stuck with that), he was always up to his elbows in duct-taped devices trying to invent new ways to make our lives better (like the intercom we used to communicate from one end of our New York apartment to the other). He bought our first computer, a Commodore VIC-20 which had only 20kb of memory, when the only way to store data for that computer was to use an audio tape. I think about how happy he would have been today, with all the new technologies emerging. I hope you’ll be at home, as he was, in enjoying the new.
He was also comfortable in almost any setting: his architecture was for everything from fancy offices for advertising agencies, to homes of rich people (there’s a rumor he designed a wing in Stevie Wonder’s house), to Episcopalian cathedrals converted into nightclubs. I hope you’ll be as easy moving from one world to the next, and never accept boundaries anyone tries to impose on you.
And, for now, that’s the last of the hopes I want to express of things that you’ll take (and reinterpret) from your namesakes. Now you’re you… and you’ll begin your own traditions, and be your own man.
Ari’s brit milah September 13, 2008
On September 5, the former Barack Hussein B. became a Jew, by trading a piece of his penis for a new name.
