“Moon, you glisten and you hide, you suffer, you scream, you cry. You are blue and you shine.”

—Poem written earlier this year by Harlem twelve-year-old Nicole Suriel, who was swept out to sea and drowned on Tuesday during a school trip to Long Beach, Long Island.

I was listening to an old favorite yesterday morning, Randy Newman’s Twelve Songs album, we while we were getting the kid ready for school. I was packing his lunch box into his backpack when he came out into the living room and asked me, “What song is this?”

I had to pause. The song was called “Yellow Man.” It’s a satirical song, a send-up of a less than well-educated American viewpoint around the time of the Vietnam War, when it was recorded. It’s sung in the voice of a less than well-educated American.

It’s catchy, though, and simple, and I quickly imagined the kid singing the chorus in his kindergarten class, sitting next to Lungta or Lian or Leila or any of his other non-white classmates. “Got to have a yellow woman/When you’re a yellow man,” it goes. Every second of every day of parenthood is complicated.

But I decided to tell him. “It’s called ‘Yellow Man,’” I said.

“Yellow Man?!” he said. He liked that. “That’s silly.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He went to school and came home and we haven’t heard more about it. Which is good. A friend of mine recently got a phone call home about the upset her son had caused in his second-grade class by using a black crayon to color in a picture he’d drawn of president Obama’s face. What a bummer of a talk to have to sit an eight-year-old down for: that because of history and the unfairness of society, the color of people’s skin is a subject to be careful about. He cried, she said.

Sad truth, certainly. But in that, important to impart. I’m sure there’s a similar conversation in my future. Up to this point, my wife and I have just tried to teach the kid that it’s not nice to talk about the way people look in general. This after the time a couple years ago when he pointed at a Hasidic Jew with sidelocks on the subway and said, “That man has funny hair.” (A common occurrence in New York, to be sure.)

I learned my first lesson about race when I was four. I’d just sat down at the dinner table with my parents and I decided to tell my father a joke an older kid had told me that day at school. I held out my hand to him, palm up. “Slap me five,” I said. He did, smiling.

Then I turned my hand over, so my palm was facing down. “Nigger side,” I said.

My father’s eyes went wide. I remember the disappointment I felt when his smile turned into a frown. Then, without warning, he grabbed my fingers tight and slapped the back of my hand hard enough to make me burst into tears, jump up from the table, and run screaming into his office. He didn’t hit me as a practice. He’d spanked me only once before then, on my butt, after I’d bit my mom hard enough to draw blood. So my tears were as much the result of shock as they were pain. I felt betrayed.

I didn’t know what the word “nigger” meant when I’d told him the joke. I was simply repeating what the older kid—who was just a kindergartener himself, the same age my son is now—had told me. I suppose I thought it meant the backside of one’s hand.

My father let me cry in his office for a minute before coming to find me. Then he knelt down and told me to look him straight in the eye. “Do you know why I hit you?” He asked. I shook my head, still crying. “I hit you because I want you to know that that’s what happens if you say that word. If you say that word, you get hit. You get hurt. So I wanted to teach you that. I never want you to say that word.”

I told him I didn’t even know what the word meant. And that it wasn’t fair that he’d hit me so hard. He explained what it meant and agreed that it wasn’t fair. But he said it was an important lesson he wanted me to learn.

He was right, I think. Beyond the history behind it, and the politics, and the deeper stuff that’s too complicated for kids my kid’s age to understand, that’s a good first thing to learn: Some words are different from others. Some words carry a bigger price. Some words hurt.

An historic moment in parenting occurred Saturday at the Mallard Island Yacht Club in Manahawkin, New Jersey, where Kandar Taylor married Kahdijah Tavia Bell. Bell’s father, Ronald, is a founding member of Kool and the Gang. As the Times reported Sunday:

Kool and the Gang did not perform at the reception. But as with so many other couples before them, a recording of the band’s trademark song, “Celebration,” of which her father was a writer, was played as the couple was announced on the dance floor along with members of the wedding party.

“My father wrote the song back in the 1980s for people everywhere to celebrate good times in their lives,” the bride said. “For us to come full circle by having my dad walk me down the aisle and having his song played at my wedding is a tribute to him and to all of the hard work and sacrifice he has made for his family,” she added. “This is exactly why he wrote this song, for moments like this.”

That’s pretty awesome. Coincidentally, another song co-written by Robert Bell was the last song played at my own wedding, nine years ago. Here it is as a youtube clip:

My grandfather was a member of the Jewish resistance movement in Germany during the holocaust. He left the country in 1936, before things got super heavy, though the Nazis got his brother. He was a great guy, my grandfather, funny and smart and talented in lots of ways. But he was peculiar. For example, he had a thing about keeping plastic Tupperware and rubber bands. He was something of a hoarder, I suppose. Not as bad as the people on that TV show, but it was more than just recycling. He could not bring himself to throw these things away. There were Tupperware and rubber bands in drawers and cupboards and closets all over the house. Stacks, piles, heaps of them. My grandmother had to search out his stashes and secretly throw the stuff away.

My father told me this idiosyncrasy was the result of living as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. My grandfather’s father lost his pharmacy business, and laws were passed to keep Jews from earning a living in other ways. So everyone got into the habit of saving things for the rainy days that looked sure to be more and more frequent, and rainier and rainier under the Third Reich. (Even things other than money, I mean—that stereotype, of course, predates the holocaust.) Apparently, the habit was a hard one to break, even after my grandfather moved to America, even after the war. My grandfather was never able to feel sufficiently comfortable in the world to be able to throw away certain types of trash, he was never able to feel safe enough, to trust that he wouldn’t one day need the stuff again. He was a survivalist.

I write this because I think there’s an analogy to be drawn in light of the Israeli government’s attack on the Gaza aid flotilla last week. Jews all over the world are brought up to “never forget” the holocaust. It’s understandable to me that Israel, as a country, is by far the most defense-minded country I have ever visited. (I’ve spent three summers there with another branch of my grandfather’s family.) It was formed as a haven for Jews against a world that surely seemed very much out get them. Vigilance is in the national DNA, as well as, I believe, the collective belief that Jews were too passive and acquiescent, despite famous incidents like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, during the holocaust. (This notion provided fuel for the revenge-fantasy gore in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, right? I still need to see that.) It goes beyond “never forget” into “never again trust anybody else in the world,” into “hit first and hit harder, so the world will know to never hit us again.”

This is maybe too simple. Armchair analysis of an entire group of people is dangerous enough without then trying to diagnose the foreign policy of another country. And I certainly acknowledge the problems inherent to writing this from so far away. But the attack on the flotilla was wrong. Terribly so. And even from the most pro-Israeli stance I can imagine, so very self-defeating. The same could, and should, be said for Israel’s heavy-handed oppression of Gaza and the Palestinians in general. And it all comes from a way of way of looking at the world that is, while perhaps understandable at its roots, pathological. Jews shouldn’t forget the holocaust. But they should learn to trust other people in the world again. Even if only for their own sake, so they don’t have to keep finding new places to hide their stacks of Tupperware and piles of rubber bands. That’s no way to live.

I remember one time when I was maybe fourteen or so, coming to the conclusion that there was no such thing as altruism. I didn’t know the word “altruism” at the time, I don’t think, so when I walked into my dad’s office to challenge him with the idea, I phrased it something like this: “Everything that anybody ever does is selfish.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well.” I had been thinking about this for a while. “People control their own actions. We choose what we do. And even when we do something nice for someone else, we get something in return. We’re rewarded for doing the nice thing. And that’s why we do it. Even if the reward is just a thank you. That makes us feel better about ourselves, so that’s why we do it. Even if the person you help doesn’t say thank you, you still get a reward. Even it’s just a smile. Or even if it’s not a smile. Even if it’s nothing you can see. Just knowing you helped someone can be the reward. It feels good to help someone. When I do something nice for someone, something that makes someone else happy, or feel better or something, that makes me happy. It makes me feel better about myself. I know this and that’s why I ever do anything nice for someone. To make myself feel good. I choose to do it, to get something, this good feeling, for myself. So it’s really totally selfish in the end.”

He considered it for a minute and then disagreed. “No, I can think of times where I do something totally for someone else,” he said. “For you. And your sister. There are times where I do things for you not because it makes me happy to do it, but just because it makes you happy.”

“But making me happy makes you happy,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t do it. I mean, you choose to do it.”

“No, there’s a difference. And I don’t expect you to necessarily be able to understand it. But there are times when I do something that I really don’t want to do, just because it makes you happy. But not because it makes me happy to see you happy. It’s something else.” He cited giving me money to buy expensive clothes. It was the ’80s, and I’d developed a taste for Polo by Ralph Lauren. “It doesn’t make me happy to see you happy about something like clothes. But I do it anyway. It’s hard to explain. It has to do with being your parent.”

I didn’t like this answer at all. I didn’t like him making a claim to some mysterious secret knowledge that I didn’t have access to.

Thirty-five years later, with a kid of my own, I found myself thinking about this recently when my kid told me that he didn’t have to listen to me or his mother or his teachers. “I listen to my brain,” he said. “My brain tells me what to do.” Great, I thought. But I couldn’t very well disagree, and resigned myself to years of what is so often the futile system of reward and punishment we use to get the human lab-rats around us to do what we want.

But I think I understand more of what my father was talking about now. I think he was talking about the difference between seeking happiness and fulfilling parental obligation—and I agree there’s a difference, and one I could not have known about before my kid was born. As I’ve written here before, the feeling of living more for the kid than for myself was a revelation I experienced upon first looking at him in the delivery room. It’s held up to a large degree, and like my dad had said, it is not always happy-making. I can’t cite anything as concrete as buying the kid something even though I find the joy he finds in it distasteful—that seems like a more advanced parent-to-teenager type of misery than I’ve yet discovered in these first five and a half years. The most selfless obligation I can think of is probably more like carrying the kid up three flights of stairs and the two blocks home from the subway just because he’s fallen asleep on the train. I’ve done this a number of times, and not because me happy. In fact, it makes my back hurt. And it’s not for pleasure I might get out of making the kid happy. It doesn’t make the kid happy; he’s asleep and doesn’t know any difference. Is it the pleasure I get in the avoidance of making him unhappy? Like, it’s easier to carry him than deal with his crankiness upon waking. That would be a form of seeking happiness, I think, seeking relative pleasure. But I don’t think it’s that, either. He’s usually not so grumpy in such a situation. And even if he was, I wouldn’t mind it more than the sore back. It has to do with the obligation I feel simply to let him sleep. Because sleep is good for him. And I feel a strong and ever-present pull to do what I think is good for him. I guess you could wrap this around to something like: Submitting to this pull, the fulfillment of this obligation, does in fact make me feel happy, or some vaguer form of positive emotion. Or, at the very least, it avoids the bad feeling that would come from not fulfilling the obligation—and that’s a grade of comparative happiness. And in that regard, I guess I’m back to my original 14-year-old assertion that there’s no such thing as a selfless act. It is my brain, after all, that’s telling me what to do. But I think there is actually something different and more complex going on. Because the way it feels, when my back is hurting as I carry the kid up on the elevator and into our apartment, it’s almost as if it’s not my brain telling me what to do. It’s something else, it’s for him.