Meritocracy Gone Astray

Sometimes a single publication captures my full attention.  It's been a while since I devoted a single post to commentary on a single article but this one has already generated many offshoots, including videos on the theme by its author.  It comes from The Atlantic, written by David Brooks whose day job pays him as columnist for the NY Times.  He also has authored a few books, mostly non-fiction commentary.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/

The piece took me several sessions to read in its entirety, then a couple more evenings to ponder its components.  David, which is probably what I would call him if we met in person, as we are contemporaries of age though of unequal legacies, takes great pride in his classical political Conservatism.  He cites Edmund Burke of Tory England as a defining figure, one focused on individual and collective freedom, which enables individual and collective achievements.  And he recognizes its flaws and its misapplications to America's contemporary political landscape.  Basically when people of talent, like him, protbably to a lesser degree like me, are permitted to perform, they will rise to the occasion.  This article explores  one form of American entitlement  shifting to another form.  He focuses on what becomes of students who enter prestige schools.  In one era, money and legacy was the entry ticket.  And those elites generated a mixed legacy with the collapse of Wall Street but very successful FDR recovery programs, WW2 victory, and post-War economic expansion.  Key academics surmised that America could do even better if it sought out innate talent from wherever it emerged, irrespective of pedigree.  A post-war expansion with educational benefits to soldier survivors generated a new talent pool that the finest educational institutions could tap, with the end point being America leading the world in any activity that depends on universithy training.  He and I are both beneficiaries of that shift, Jewish kids once limited by quotas that gave way to high grades and test scores.  We entered top universities.  He became a journalist of international influence.  I became a worthy physician to appreciative patients but did not really advance the medical field.  He cites surveys to indicate that most of the grads of these schools are like me, solid performers.  The stars come from someplace else, but they still emerge.  The Nobels may not go to Harvard alums, but they do go to faculty at these places who often attended college elsewhere.  Same with our cultural advancements, technological transformations, social agencies, and diplomats.  Talent eventually emerges, but the Ivy admissions officers are not all that adept at identifying the exceptional as they are at ranking numerical data.  Moreover, while these graduates have done many worthy things to move our collective life experience forward, an undue number devote themselves to manipulating financial markets or using math abilties to take profitable guesses on where markets might trend without improving the companies themselves or the people they employ.  In effect, solid reliable talent producing less that the optimal public outcome that the admissions reformers of the middle 20th century envisioned.  This generation produced cell phones, medicines, diagnostics, sensitivity to once marginalized groups, opportunities for women.  But these Best and Brightest also generated market fiascos, ill-advised international gambits, undue value on people who can hurdle exams and join things at a young age, and eventually a divide between winners and losers that invites a strongman with dubious alliances to hit the reset button as resentment grows.

David divides his criticism into six categories which I copied.  He answered each of them quite extensively.  I will offer my observations while critiquing his.

1. The system overrates intelligence.

Securing admission to a top school was competitive in my day, even more so in my children's era, as we all attended the same university.  An Admissions staff will receive maybe ten times as many applications as they can accommodate.  Most of those hopefuls could navigate the curriculum requirements.  So they need to distinguish one person from another.  From my HS class I knew the few who got into the Big 3 Ivies.  They all had stronger academic transcripts and scores than me, except for our football quarterback, a wonderful young man of color in a school where the Jews dominated the classrooms.  Still, being a QB, taking challenging courses with decent performance, and having a father who served on the faculty of our regional Ivy made him successful.  But for the most part, the classmates with the best transcripts got into the most selective schools.  Those on the second tier, like me, attended the next tier school.  One from my tier became a superstar.  Everyone else still got to go to college someplace.  We produced doctors, lawyers, engineers.

Might my own school have been better with a different collection of kids?  Or might I have achieved more were I not up against kids who hurdled the requirements with the same proficiency as me?  No way to know.  However, fifty years have passed since commencement.  We know how everyone did.  That's not true the Millenial classes my children attended or the current Gen Z.  But people turned down by the admissions committees, as I was, still had an adult future to attain someplace else.

2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. 

My class in HS and university generated some very productive people, rewarded financially and with symbols of prestige in the form of titles and admiration.  The HS classmate who became an international CEO went to a small division of a state school.  A few very undistinguished students built very profitable small businesses.  We are economically and culturally successful.  That is not the same as being personally successful.  My marriage has endured an adult lifetime.  My children are worthy successors.  I knew to retire when I could no longer excel.  I have no idea how others fared.  Divorces are common as are blended families.  No doubt some had personal misadventures.  I never generated a lot of friends and chafed at working as part of a team where I would have to cede autonomy.  Some would regard this as failure.  Did I reach my potential?  Did my place on the Admissions committee hierarchy squeeze out another applicant who might have benefited more?  No way to know.  Since we make ample incomes, did we save prudently or announce Look at Me through our purchases?  Improper pretense existed.  People less generous with their treasure that their educations enabled also likely prevalent.  I think I have been successful at what mattered, my marriage, descendants, economic security, and a modicum of generosity in excess of what my less well-off parents were able to offer.

3. The game is rigged. 

Rigged isn't the right term.  Understanding the revised rules, acquiring experience with outcome, and setting strategies that achieve the outcome describe the process better.  It is not conceptually that different from prevailing at anything else from a football game to a retirement nest egg.  If the experience that graduates of prestige schools have lucrative, personally satisfying careers, preparing to attend one becomes a priority.  We know how Admissions Officers assess applications.  We know what they ask on the applications.  If they seek the Best and Brightest, those with credentials, then get the credentials.  And as in golf or bowling, there are handicaps to make up the difference.

Do some people have advantages?  For sure.  Tall people have an advantage being on the school's basketball team.  People with certain capacities create better art.  And both can be coached to surpass their inherent advantages.  My family could not afford to have me experience a summer in Europe or a tutor to get me over some calculus obstacles, or private music lessons.  I and many others made the best of what we had.  My classmates in the 1970s seemed of similar background.  We were people who took the challenging curriculum, had been successful with standardized testing since the Iowa tests of early grade school, knew how to write a coherent composition though less well than our future professors thought we should.  Within those classes, we had HS jocks who excelled at sports, a few physics nerds.  We also had kids less academically capable admitted to the class as it benefited the university in some way.  Some were scions of large donors that the school would need to offer its programs to everyone.  Others brought special talents, and some were kids of social disadvantage who excelled in their city or rural HS environment but would struggle in their new classrooms.

Rather than rigged, or offering unfair advantage to one group over another, I think the better criteria would be whether the classes that they ulimately assemble bring credit to the university that selected them among the excess of applicants.  For the most part they do.  And as they move on, becoming fifty-year alumini as I did and David will soon be, did we derive benefit from what our elite schools with its array of opportunities made available?  I think the vast majority did.  And do we accept people who fell at a different stratum in the college scramble in a dignified way when they become our colleagues or neighbors later?  I think we did.

4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system.

Social strata in America and globally predate contemporary times.  Across history, a certain amount of social mobility, upward and downward, existed.  Slavery was a global reality for much of history.  So were people who left the farm to seek fortune as soldiers or merchants.  There were physical conquests of warfare or colonialism that defined who people were and the opportunities they might have as individuals or as groups.  History also has its rebellions and its remodeling.  Rather than a caste system, which we think of as the model of India which is an immutable legacy, what contemporary America seems to show is loss of economic and social advancement opportunities that were once accepted.  That may be true but blaming it on the decisions of a few elite institutions probably isn't.

Social mobility in American history, as taught to me by some pretty astute teachers, came in waves.  Just crossing the ocean on a one-way ticket shut some doors and opened others.   The Africans brought here in chains had no freedom and the natives pushed aside by settlers lost stature from their starting points.  Over time, though, the consequences of doing this had a mixture of benefits and harm.  Policies by those in authority largely expanded economic upgrades to those of European ancestry, whether land for ownership, educational mandates for children, absorption of immigrants into an already established economy, or projects of philanthropy for public benefit.  After economic fiascos from monopolies to depressions, corrective protections were also put into place by those given rightful authority, with a blend of favorable and unfavorable consequences.

The Meritocracy era as David describes came in my father's generation.  The big state universities already existed, authorized and supported since the time of the Civil War.  Transportation already existed.  Manufacturing capacity sufficient to prevail in two world wars already existed.  So did financial institutions and taxation in its various forms.  What changed was expansion of who could access them.  The government committed funds to help my father go to college on their dime in appreciation of bodily risk he and many others experienced. And home ownership benefited the new owners like my father as well as the American economy.

All people who become newly prosperous have to decide what to do with the money they have but never expected to have.  Andrew Carnegie wrote of this as the Gospel of Wealth, but for most it was more personal prosperity.  And the people who are now well-paid, wearing ties to work, consumed some and invested some, including in their children.  So as David and I of the same generation learned, our expectations were rooted in economic security which becomes part opportunity, part safety net for when we fail.  We could access the top educational facilities, but also our state universities.  We could then take those degrees and the abilities to which they attest and offer them to employers needing people like us.  

Our generation that benefited from expanded access did not create the institutions that now welcomed us, though with some strings attached and rules that we needed to follow.  The Ivies had already achieved their acclaim, the corporations that bought us aboard were largely established, even the emerging broadcast industry, our federal and local governments needed civil service talent to serve the public.  We filled those needs, but with few exceptions did not create them.  And while Trickle Down Economics has been discredited for good reason, as we became economically secure, we did not abandon or undermine those who did not get the same economic attainment.  Instead, we traveled on highways designed by civil engineers but built by construction workers, purchased cars initially from Detroit but accepted a variant meritocracy when Toyota built more reliable vehicles, bought products transported to our stores by teamsters, and admired public parks maintained by less educated landscapers.  We wished none ill will.  Rather the mindset was more share our abundance.

Along the way, that social mobility and also interaction between economic strata got interrupted, though we were not the ones to do that.  What changed, in quantum steps methinks, are the interactions.  Starting with the draft, the ultimate in forced social mingling, at least for men, WW2 drafted Kennedys and ranch hands.  Vietnam did not.  And then for defensible reasons, a professional voluntary army requiring a certain literacy attainment to function excluded the school dropouts.  The universities became the next mixture point, one that has shifted from rousing success to troublesome as David outlines for most of his essay.  We have neighborhoods.  They have always been segregated by levels of prosperity along with ethnicity.  We have in more recent decades the decline of intergenerational hometowns, where at least everyone who lived there went to the same HS.  And we have decline of the churches, another place where people of different backgrounds met in the same place.  More recently, we have our devices, the ultimate in customized ME with grudging interaction with anyone else and disregard for who might take offense.  Those are the institutional failures that create strata, if not actually castes.  The evolution of who gets into what school over two generations reflects that.  I don't think it caused it.

5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. 

David and I progressed through our universities unscathed.  I think my kids did too.  The need to divert from your natural interests to jump through the various admissions hoops is worth it for some, but damaging to others.  Despite this childhood deprivation, a very real circumstance, David also acknowledges the long-term payoff.  Economic security that endures for most, with the opportunities for professional and personal growth that go with it, offsets the sacrifice of parts of one's childhood.  Better health, less divorce, less substance abuse, esteem from others.  All big long-term gains that are hard to attain by alternate paths.  Those seem to enhance the psyche.  Since to hurdle Admissions, childhood becomes more regimented than it might otherwise be, adapting to campus regimentation should be no harder or easier than is for other kids who enter young adulthood in different regulated environments like the military or many workplaces.  The campus experience has changed since my time there two generations ago.  I think political correctness is more enforced.  We certainly had our pressured conformities, be it Vietnam opposition or support for Candidate McGovern, though we retained our respect for professors who preferred Nixon like the rest of adult America.  I think that respect element has evaporated for a lot of reasons.  The professors outside the sciences are more ideological.  In my era, George Wallace was a much sought-after campus speaker.  We held up signs but did not interfere with his lecture.  People are too quick to cancel or even punish certain ideologies.  Some of what we absorbed as Derech Eretz, the Hebrew term for good interpersonal relations, has given way to shouting ME and playing Wack-a-Mole with you.  People of the Instagram era seem too focused on their flaws, but I don't think the upper levels of Academy caused that.  More likely that smartphone-internet driven blend of vanity and insecurity was created before the first college application got submitted and was imported to the campus with all its linkages.

Did the quest to attain that Fat Letter from the Admissions office, or now the congratulatory email, cause the fretful, often intolerant emerging adults who populate the campus?  No, it was imported to the campus.  And since these are the kids of needed talent, they will export more to our workplaces, civil service, and beyond in the form of litmus tests for what is acceptable thought, training programs that everyone has to take to make them as sensitive as everyone else in those workplaces.  Conformity has its place.  Our military might would vanish without it.  But harmful standards have a way of being propagated until reformed, which eventually they seem to be.

6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.

Little dispute that we have divisions, including some element of backlash, or at least resentment.  Real financial capitalists of extreme wealth have largely been forgiven.  Knowledge capitalists, those top university grads of more attainable wealth, the very people the ultrawealthy need to run their enterprises, have taken the hit. Voting patterns reflect those alliances and resentments.  The coastal states most dependent on college-trained expertise vote one way, an ever-expanding American interior vote another.  Swing states were once Tennessee and Missouri, now they are Pennsylvania and Nevada.  Yet resentments have been ingrained into American history.  Control of the government shifts every few election cycles.  Dixie resented Reconstruction disruptions enough to enact Jim Crow Laws, then their Democratic congressmen who had reason for economic alliances with Northern Democrats, found backlash to Civil Rights legislation to flip parties.  Workers once depended on the economic benefits of unions, which could protect wages but not keep the plants on American soil.  They flipped, but not before seeing their wages of their auto and steel plants becoming the lower wages of retail workers.  Neither the Confederate nostalgics nor the displaced union members got what they sought.  Acceptance of public access of races to restaurants and state universities is accepted and demeaning references marginalized.  The union guys have not brought the jobs back from Asia irrespective of how they vote.  They are left to nurse their resentments.  Meanwhile, Smart America, those targets of resentment, continue to engage in the creative work that advances technology, makes their doctors more effective, and travel more accessible.  They resent the producers of these, but partake of what has been produced.

In some ways educated America functions as the social croupiers.  It makes no difference who controls the government.  As long as the expertise has value and scarcity, we will prosper.

Over a much longer time frame, useful institutions have been devalued, whether the government agencies, those very elite universities that David now critiques, what we see on our screens, the people we must hire to keep our cars mobile and our homes functional.  The respect that expertise or skill once brought has been targeted very successfully in exchange for resentment-driven votes.  I think its roots lay a lot deeper than the annual scramble for college acceptance decisions.

Moving past David's Six Elements Meritocracy's Flaws, his question of whether our systems generate the best leaders is a very real one.  I will site two offshoots, one a presentation by a Jewish thought leader who I much admire, the other a written reaction to David's column in her student newspaper from one of the elite schools that David bashes.

Bari Weiss graduated one of the Ancient Eight, securing a position at the pinnacle of journalism.  She gave it up to become an electronic journalism entrepreneur on Substack, while also writing and speaking extensively about the scourge of Anti-Semitism emerging from social margins to mainstream, particularly on our campuses.  Most visibility at the universities of David's essay, my own alma mater among them.  Bari gave a speech which I watched on YouTube.  She addressed what is called the General Assembly, a collection of the highest youthful Jewish achievers, the recipients of that stardust that displays how wonderful they all are.  As her litany of anti-Semitic incidents proceeded over the next few minutes, how they were the ones who had to act to reverse it, my half-century of Jewish immersion, Jewish experience flashed back.  Every one of those circumstances on her list occurred with the Best and Brightest of the Jewish community, the highest achievers with titles seeping over the internet, in place.  Just like Ivy League parents groom their children to follow them, the Jewish organizations engage in a similar form of institutional incest.  They get good people, but choose them as obedient proteges.  Those kids listening to Bari at the podium probably never had their Hebrew School teacher complain about them.  They made Honor Roll another designation where obedience overrides intellect, went to Ramah, held offices in Hillel.  Saluted when told to salute.  In the two generations where this constituted the most admired, or at least the most titled, the synagogues that form the core institution of American Judaism have lost membership.  Donors to agencies give more money to the treasuries because the ability to give large sums has expanded.  However, fewer individuals donate.  I could only think like David describing colleges, they picked people less capable than they could have had by setting inferior identification criteria and allowing compliance or affibility to become a surrogate for talent.  The price was high.

A student writing for  The Princetonian, an African-American woman, focused primarily on David's assertion that meritocracy created a rigged game. 

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2024/11/princeton-opinion-column-meritocracy-admissions-david-brooks-ivy-league

Despite her attendance at a school that did not accept my son, she conveys a blend of perpetual victimhood and ingrained unfairness that defies correction.  I don't know if she's right, but it's more productive to see oneself as the agent of moving forward in a better direction.  The Rebbe, z"l, used to receive people seeking his sage guidance.  Often they conveyed to him misfortunes, hoping his wisdom will create a path for more favorable outcomes.  Invariably, the Rebbe would respond to the petitioner in distress, that his circumstance was a Gift from God, a chance to hit the reset button, put the thinking cap on, reject inertia.  And the Rebbe would then make the first suggestion. Nothing is really doomed.  Not our politics, antagonisms, nor our impediments to giving each person their best shot to take.

The Hideaway

This nook of a place had been there a very long time, decades, maybe even longer than I've lived in the neighborhood.  I knew it existed though had never seen it, let alone sought a meal or a beer there.  It occupies land almost immediately behind the parking lot of my daughter's high school, with a small housing development thrown in.  At one time my vicinity had a horse racing industry, the sulkies.  It had been demolished to create a shopping destination, one of medium size with two clusters of stores occupying where the raceway once stood.  A dominant enterprise like the horses needs support.  The employees and others purchased housing on streets named with raceway themes.  And within this mostly housing development community, emerged a place for people to unwind.  Thus, The Hideaway.  It had a street address of a main road, though not visible from the road.  I needed my GPS to find it.

While waiting in line to vote a week early, two couples similar in age to me occupied adjacent positions in the queue.  Since it took just under an hour from arrival to casting a ballot, we had ample time to chat.  Not about candidates but about jobs, families, health insurance, and the neighborhood.  As a forty year resident I had by far the longest tenure.  The other two couples had lived elsewhere, one building a business in the DC area, the other living not that far north into Pennsylvania for most of his career.  They had relocated to housing developments just across the main road from where I lived.  One couple liked to eat at The Hideaway.  Walking distance from his house.  Live music.  Economical.  I made a note of the recommendation.

After casting my ballot, I returned home.  Like most modern restaurants, it has a website.  Definitely nearby.  The menu was not posted on the site but as a separate tab.  Definitely lower in price than the places I sought out for supper.  Next step, drive by.  I stayed on the main road, continuing behind the high school but saw nothing commercial.  Try another time.  When I needed to get away from my house, still daylight, I searched Waze for driving directions.  It was indeed in the development behind the high school though not on the street that contained its postal address.  I drove as the GPS directed me, passing an alcove with a large white clapboard building containing a discrete sign.  Its parking lot seemed more than ample, though empty at mid-day, and in need of repaving.  I drove on into the development but found no through road to return me home.  One cul-de-sac had a circle at its end, allowing me to reverse my direction.  The GPS directed me home along the same route it had guided me there.

Between personal recommendation, proximity, and cheap, a dinner went onto my low-priority to-dos.  Before long an evening to avoid cooking in my kitchen arrived.  We only needed a few turns, one right, one left, another right, another left, spaced over about a mile to bring us to the parking lot I had checked out a few weeks earlier.  This time, after returning clocks to Standard Time, the roads were dark and the parking lot only lit by illumination from the restaurant nearby.  While the lot seemed abandoned in the daytime, at 6PM only spaces a significant walk from the building remained.  As the fellow voter advised me, they engage musicians even on weeknights.  Loud music.  Two guitars and a baritone churning out country style sounds from another geographic center.  While the parking lot appeared dim, the restaurant's interior had ample lighting.  The only vacant table we noticed, despite the early dining time, was one in a corner near the door and the music's amplifiers.  We waited for a hostess.  None came so we sat at the vacant table.  On the wall next to us hung the menu in big print.  From our table we could see a chalkboard with entree and dessert specials, as well as drink specials.  Explorer that I am, I walked past the oversized wooden bar along the right wall, where they posted their transient beer offerings in chalk.  I found the music too loud.  By the time a waitress acknowledged us, we had read the posted menu and made our selection.  She left us with a standard menu while requesting our drink preferences.  I asked a list of drafts which she provided from memory.  Not wanting to risk another substantial delay, my wife and I each selected craft brews, hers an Allagash, mine from a more obscure provider in Cape May.  We had already decided dinner, but looked the written menu over again.  Our beers arrived and we ordered dinner.  

Despite the music and table arrangement that offered clear floor space, nobody left their plates or the bar to dance.  In addition, as we had come early, I had expected more diners to trickle in as the clock reached a more customary dining-out hour.  Few new people came in.  A hostess never needed to seat people, nor did a line form.  Our dinners arrived.  Disposable plates and utensils.  Only the pint mugs of glass with painted beer brand logos would need washing.  The entrees seemed large and cheap.  My fish and chips likely had been frozen, thawed and placed in a frying basket.  Undistinguished crust, fish filet of supermarket texture, fries standard.  My wife's fish sandwich overfilled its bun.  And my niche brand beer tasted quite refreshing.

While they had a dessert menu, the waitress never asked us if we wanted to try any of the offerings on their blackboard.  My wife didn't.  I might have.  Instead, she returned to our table with the check, a very reasonable amount considering what we had eaten.  Credit card offered, taken, and returned.  Back to the car for home.

Would I go again?  Probably.  The music could have sounded more subdued but it was live entertainment.  The other people dining seemed mostly my generation, probably late career like the two couples on the voters line who recommended this place.  Food undistinguished, service maybe slow.  Beer selection imaginative.  I could see going myself late one afternoon, taking a seat at the bar and nursing a specialty brew while I make notes in a pad or dictate into my recorder.  A place run by owners, maybe the type of personalized establishment that could appear on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.  Definitely not a yuppie national franchise with programmed menus for mass consumption.  I understand why my new acquaintances gravitate there.

Game Plan

Entering Thanksgiving week.  I serve as chef and host. Fewer guests than a year ago, just four.  None able to assist.  Dinner set for 2:30PM on Thanksgiving Day.

As with other centerpiece dinners, I crafted a menu by making a grid of food courses.  While I usually tap my cookbook collection and search for recipes online through a variety of keywords, this year's meal comes entirely from cyberspace.

1. French Bread for Motzi
2. Kasha Knishes for Appetizer
3. Butternut Squash Soup
4. Cucumber Salad
5. Roasted Half-Turkey Breast
6. Crock Pot Stuffing
7. Mediterranean Sweet Potatoes
8. Vegetable to be Determined
9. Citrus Cranberry Relish
10. Apple Strudel from Puff Pastry
11. Sparkling Cider

All recipes printed.  Shopping list assembled with acquisition in three stages.  I've been to Trader Joe's for staples best purchased there:  olive oil, eggs, butternut squash, turkey breast.  Shop-Rite supplies most other needs.  My current pantry holdings have been inventoried against the recipe ingredients.  Sprouts has the most appealing produce offerings, though at a slight premium to other places.  And sometimes they have gourmet coffee beans reduced, which I can grind to my needs on their grinder.

Meeting the dinner time deadline takes serial execution, multiple coordinated steps.  Shopping is under control.  Two essential items, the turkey and puff pastry, need removal from the freezer to thaw.  Figure Monday to prepare Thursday.  Most of my dining room creations, Seder, special birthdays, Mother's Day. Shabbos guests, all get served as late suppers.  I need those late afternoons for special touches.  Thanksgiving needs completion by mid-afternoon.  That means doing as much as possible in advance.  I set each printed recipe around the perimeter of the dining room table.  A few days in advance, I take out all non-perishable ingredients, placing them with the recipe for which they are most essential.  I try to take out the measuring devices, cups and spoons, to put on the table, along with the cooking implements that will be needed.  Five of the eleven items require the oven, so timing and bundling what can be baked together provides its own challenge.  Knish filling can be made the night before, as can the dough.  Then assemble in the morning until ready for baking.  The soup ingredients can be roasted the night before, then measured and assembled. Make salad 

By Thursday morning, early in the morning, I want to be assembling and heating.  Bread starts early as it needs time to rise.  Knish filling and dough can be made the night before, leaving me time to wash the mixer in anticipation of needing it early in the morning for bread.  That means my sink needs conversion to fleishig on Wednesday afternoon.  Then while bread rising, assemble the knishes, baking them either with the bread or with the turkey, depending on the oven temperature needed. 

Ingredients for the soup can be prepped the night before, assembled in the morning then cooked on the stove top where it will keep on a simmer indefinitely.  Cucumber salad needs marinating.  Best made the night before or very early Thursday.  Certainly, the components should be cut the evening before.

Turkey poses a challenge.  It is very easy to make.  Some celery and carrots around the perimeter of the bake pan, dry off the bird, oil it with olive oil, season with some type of poultry mix and black pepper.  Pop into oven for 90 minutes and set timer.  It will need to rest for about a half hour.  So to serve at 3PM it will need to go into the oven at about 12:30PM.  Other baking must work around that, including the bread and knishes and sweet potatoes.  The strudel, however, assembles and bakes early in the morning.  

I do not know which vegetable to make.  It is virtually always boiled for a few minutes, except beets which need roasting for about an hour.  I am the only one who likes beets, so I'll look for something green.  Sweet potatoes need some assembly.  Prep vegetables the night before.

Stuffing has to start the night before, as the bread needs cubing and drying in the oven.  Prep other ingredients like vegetables that will need inclusion.  All into the crockpot early in the morning.  Cook on high for an hour, then reduce to low and benign neglect until needed.

Cranberries are easy to make.  Citrus, sugar, water, berries.  Boil until popped.  Put lid on saucepan, then into refrigerator.

So that's the food.  An elegant, infrequent dinner involves more than food.  It requires presentation. Each table setting with fleishig utensils, dishes,  cloth napkins, and stemware.  Each food item attractively displayed.  Platters, tureens, salad bowls, salad -tongs, and other serving implements.  Set out in advance, which limits how I might use the dining table for preparation.

And when all is completed, cleanup. It typically takes me until Sunday to restore my kitchen to its pre-Thanksgiving condition.  Leftovers go in part to the guests, in part to microwavable containers.  Shabbos follows Thanksgiving.  The dining table needs to be repurposed, as does much but not all of the food.  Then my wife's birthday gets a special dinner the following week.  Cleanup in a steady efficient way takes some attention.

While the process of planning, execution, and restoration evolves over weeks, each component boosts my assessment of my own capacity.  I can begin with an idea, organize steps, visualize a final coherent event, and experience its glories.  No better satisfaction.  A process adaptable to creating many other forms of personal accomplishment.

Home Pizza from Scratch

Seventh Grade.  Kakiat Junior High School.  The Board of Regents of the State of New York assigned all boys to a half year of wood shop and girls to Home Ec, food preparation skills.  We traded notes.  Each course had its central project.  I made a note roll dispenser of no utility.  The girls made a pizza of transient utility.  A much better roll paper dispenser can now be had for a pittance from a store that sells tchotchkes manufactured in Asia.  Pizza could be had then from the local pizzeria, now from megachain enterprises that are as much high-tech conglomerates as they are sources of sustenance.  Neither the wooden curio nor the girls' pizza really required that much skill.  For some the electric saw or the manual cheese grater in that pre food processor era would offer a respite from more tedious math classes.  For a few, the shop or kitchen would emerge as livelihood.  For most of us as adults, it became a means of coping with home repairs or daily nutrition.  For a subset, myself among them, a valued recreational outlet, though my XY genetics forced by into less desirable and enduring shop classes.

I had last made pizza in my own kitchen in the mid-1970s.  As a medical student with my own kitchen for the first time, meals needed to be cheap and quick.  The National Supermarket where I shopped offered pizza kits from Chef Boyardee  It came with a flour mix.  Put that in a small aluminum saucepan, which I still have, add a measured amount of water, let it sit for a while, then stir into a dough.  Not a lot different than quick-crust quiche dough that I make now.  When a little elastic, spread it on a pan.  The kit came with a small can of seasoned tomato sauce.  Spread it on the flattened dough.  It also had a little paper packet of grated cheese.  Not mozzarella, but the kind of romano or parmesan that people would shake over their spaghetti.  I added that, but after one or two tries, f igured out that adding a slice of sandwich cheese enhanced the pizza.  My interest in Chef Boyardee home pizza faded very quickly.  Frozen home pizza was easier and better.  Later toaster varieties.  And the chains for quick access to slices were starting to emerge.  No reason to make your own, when the Best and Brightest university graduates can create the ultimate sensory taste blend in a lab and offer it to you.

When our kids were little we would occasionally keep a frozen pizza in the freezer.  I've not bought one in years for several reasons.  Going out with my young family offered an economical treat.  We had our favorite place, and a secondary option or two, now mostly blessed memories.  I preferred small regional chains to national ones.  The outing would invariably entitle me to a frosted mug of beer, usually a national brand.  As the kids went their own way, whether camp, university, or self-sustaining, there were occasions for pizza nights out as a couple.  Still are.  As technology and innovation advanced, pick-up and delivery replaced many of those quiet evenings out.  The frosted mugs with a handle got replaced by craft beer in glassware shaped to enhance the sensory experience of the more styled brew.  As a personal respite, sometimes after making late rounds at the hospital, other times when on a day trip, some pizza establishments would have all-you-can-eat pizza buffets.  For a nominal price, I could sample standard fare of many varieties, one slice at a time.  Whether dine-out, pickup, or delivery, there was still no reason to make my own pizza in my own oven from its raw components.

Temptations to try home pizza cropped up periodically.  Several years ago, places that I shopped commonly included pizza stones in their print advertising.  I did not know what a stone was, only that my oven never duplicated a pizzeria pizza from my frozen one, partly why I stopped buying them  The stones were made of earthenware.  I bought one for about $10, the commonly advertised price.  Its box got promptly recycled, while the earthenware disc found a longstanding home on a shelf beneath the microwave, supporting more frequently used springform pans of different sizes.  It went unused for years.  However, its availability and publicity for purchase suggested others also considered either trying to make their own pizzas or enhancing their frozen ones.

Next came an evolution of interest in one's personal kitchen, something that captured me in a big way.  I had always amassed cookbooks from various sources.  With a substantial annual bonus, I arranged to remodel my kitchen cosmetically, though did not change the appliances.  As the internet expanded, access to recipes done with targeted searches and general categories became available.  Most of my elegant dinner creations now include menu components both from traditional books and online.  More recently, my two principal supermarkets began offering premade pizza dough, which I could freeze until needed.  So now all components in place.  An oven, a stone.  Dough that was probably better than what Chef Boyardee sold decades earlier.  It needed only thawing and shaping.  Mozzarella cheese goes on sale in some brand pretty much every week, as does spaghetti sauce.  Figure $2 for dough, $1 worth of cheese, a nominal cost for a couple tablespoons of jarred sauce, a tad of oil, a shake of oregano.  A small fraction of the cost of getting one from Domino's.  I had to give it a go.  I did.  What I neglected to do was read anything about using a pizza stone in advance.

Start simply.  I have a granite pastry board that I use frequently.  Preheat oven.  I know pizza needs a hot oven.  Put stone on top of the range.  It has two sides.  On is a flat surface.  The other has ridged circles to indicate the diameter of the pizza place on top, if properly centered.  I used the measuring side.  Next flatten the thawed dough.  Not difficult.  Less elastic than I anticipated from other experience with yeasted bread dough.  Pizza dough needs stretching.  The guys on the pizza videos transfer the dough between their fists to get it to spread evenly and thinly.  Others toss and catch their dough, thinning just a bit more with each updraft.  Transferring between fists seemed safer.  I found it more tedious than expected, and not terribly effective at generating that thin disc that the pizzerias create.  Instead, I ended up stretching gradually.  Final shape more a polygon than a circle.  Put it on the pastry board.  Having made macaroni and cheese not long before, I still had ample mozzarella which had not been used.  It had developed a small crust, easily cut away.  I grated the rest with a hand grater.  At this point I transferred the disc of dough, with its freeform shape, to the cold stone, creating a ridge around the edge.  Next, extract some jarred marinara sauce from the fridge.  It had been opened a few weeks before to enhance frozen then boiled cheese ravioli.  No hint of spoilage.  I took a tablespoon, placed enough sauce to coat the surface of the dough, smootjing it with the back of the spoon.  Next spread the freshly grated mozzarella.  I have shaker type parmesan but left that in the fridge.  Dried oregano occupies my pantry as a culinary staple.   A few shakes of that.  Then into the 450F oven, with timer set for twelve minutes.  Then surf the web on the smart phone until the timer signals.  At twelve minutes the pizza looked underdone, at least the crust appeared too pale for a pizzeria to serve and the cheese had not yet fully transformed.  I added another five minutes, this time on my smart watch timer.  At the wrist buzz, I reopened the oven.  Its appearance to my liking, I removed the stone with two pot holders, put it back on the range top, an older electric model that had steel induction coils as burners.  Then I thought it should rest a few minutes.

The pizza stone came with a pizza cutter, which I had placed countertop in an old coffee can with other implements.  I took it out, making a valiant attempt at four slices.  My pie was neither rectangular nor round, but closer to rectangular.  Thus my effort yielded two larger slices and two smaller slices.  All adhered to the stone, despite my having prepared it with a dusting of flour.  I scraped the pieces as best I could with a metal spatula.  One large, one small piece on each of two plates, one for my wife, the other for me.

Not a crisp, professional crust but still with good taste.  I found it hard to handle, requiring a knife and fork, though I've experienced this with pizzeria pies as well.  Sauce more than adequate.  Cheese perhaps a little better than I am used to with take-out.  I used good commercial mozzarella, making me wonder if the large chains that create their own blends have additives or other preservatives that my store-bought mozzarella does not.  It melted just right, also just right.  No salt, no black pepper this time.   And the amount produced seemed ideal for two diners without ravenous hunger.  Maybe that same level of accomplishment that my 7th-grade young lady classmates had when they gobbled their creations in Home Ec class, now sixty years ago.  They had an advantage over me.  A certified teacher guided them.

My learning curve on making a pizza comes with more difficulty.  After the stone cooled, I tried to scrape off the residual crust with a spatula.  Only a few shards separated from the stone.  Maybe soak it.  I put the stone into the dish tub, filling it with water and a generous squirt of emerald green Palmolive dish detergent.  It covered just under half the crusted surface.  The following morning, I returned to the kitchen to discover that the overnight soak had transformed the adherent crust to slidable pap.   A quick wash, then rotate the earthenware disc to soak the rest.  The same result a few hours later.  Unfortunately, much of that now dissolved, really mushy residual crust found its way to my sink strainer, clogging it.  Water in the sink filled up around the tub.  I removed as much as I could by hand, then removed the strainer, dumping the off-white blob into the kitchen garbage can.  The sink drained with the help of a few seconds with the disposal running.  Stone cleaned, I let it dry in the dish rack for a few hours before returning it to its assigned place, supporting my spring form collection.

Only at that point did I do what a person with multiple university degrees and considerable kitchen experience might have done in advance.  I did a Google Search on how to use a pizza stone.  Apparently, it goes into the oven while it is preheating so the pizza goes directly onto hot earthenware when assembled.  I learned why the guys at the pizzerias all have wooden spatulas with very long handles to transfer and shift their pies in their commercial ovens which get hotter than mine.  Users of frozen pizza, which I am not, either use a baking tray, which compromises the crispiness of the crust as I learned decades ago,  or they place their pizzas directly on the preheated wire oven racks.  I do not have one of those properly designed spatulas.  However, instead of using a pastry board, I can assemble the next pie on an inverted baking tray. This should allow me to slide the pizza onto the stone without undue injury risk.

That assumes I might want to have a second try.  It did taste good.  I benefited from the challenge and the learning.  Saved a few dollars over delivery or going out.  Created a valued sense of ownership, both of the creation and the kitchen as my domain.  I do not know if the alumnae of Kakiat Jr HS Home Ec ever went on to make subsequent pizzas or if any parlayed that young teen experience into a livelihood.  For me, it remains suitable recreation.

Thanksgiving Table

Two weeks should enable a notable holiday.  While American in origin and practice, a Jewish element also has its place.  Rabbis in America, maybe elsewhere, debated whether turkey qualified as a Kosher bird.  It did, though I do not understand the uncertainties.  Then could Jews adopt the day as special?  It was not of pagan or idolatrous origin.  We did.  Its placement on Thursday also has a convenience.  Torah is read Thursday mornings.  In the era of automobiles, driving is prohibited on shabbos.  Many families arrange Bar Mitzvah celebrations on Thanksgiving, and now the Monday legal holidays, so that guests who would not be able to drive to the synagogue on Shabbos can attend on a weekday.  Having those days free from work also facilitates travel.  Moreover, appreciation, called Hakaras HaTov, recognition of The Good, unites Thanksgiving with a core Jewish value.

It has long been a demarcation holiday for me.  As the one who took medical call every Christmas to enable my colleagues some special time with their families, I could guarantee having Thanksgiving with my family. Once established as a kitchen maven, I could create a meal, part traditional, part surprise, that the others could not duplicate.

Now, we are empty nesters with minimal surviving family or at least readily accessible family. I anticipate only three or four at my table—three or four special people with their own preferences and idiosyncrasies.  Something special for them elevates them and challenges me.

As with most elegant kitchen intentions, I made a grid, this with twelve boxes instead of my more typical nine.

1. Motzi
2. Appetizer
3. Soup
4. Salad
5. Dressing
6. Turkey
7. Stuffing
8. Sweet Potatoes
9. Cranberry
10. Vegetable
11. Dessert
12. Beverage

I bake a bread at home.  I have my favorites.  Last year I made bialys.  This year, something in a loaf.

Appetizers challenge me.  An elegant one last year with beets, herring, and potatoes.  Simpler in presentation this year, though not necessarily in execution.  Soup and appetizer at the same meal, I rarely do.  But Thanksgiving warrants a special effort.  There are many options.  Traditional like mushroom-barley.  Seasonal like butternut squash.  Ethnic like harira.  I serve it with some elegance in a white tureen with porcelain ladle.  Salad tends to be simple.  Sometimes green, sometimes Israeli.  I gravitate to marinated salads like cucumber with red onion.  The dressing is usually incorporated into the salad recipe except for the green salad where I make the right amount of herbed vinaigrette.  Turkey depends on attendance.  For just a few, a half-turkey breast works well.  Olive oil, seasonings, roast 90 minutes, slice with an electric knife after resting.  It yields enough for me to give some to a guest for Shabbos and have some left for me the following night.  Stuffing I vary each year, though always with a basic foundation.  I find commercial stuffing cubes overpriced.  Instead, I cube my own bread, dry it in an oven, and assemble it with other ingredients.  Often I make it in a crock pot, as my oven has competition from other courses.  I've not yet tried the Instapot.  Sweet potatoes, cranberries, and apples appear in some form, either stand-alone or incorporated into something else.  Cranberry sauce with a citrus additive is simple to make.  Since it is served cold, I can make it on Wednesday, then refrigerate it.  I don't focus a lot on vegetables.  I happen to like beets, but few others share the fondness.  Easy to roast, goes well with everything else, adds unique color.  I might consider squash.  And there's green stuff:  broccoli, asparagus, haricots vert.  Cauliflower looks too pale on the plate.  Orange like carrots, my most common side vegetable, gets overwhelmed by the sweet potatoes.  Visual appeal matters here.

Desserts usually appear as a cake.  Polish apple cake is pareve.  I have recipes for puff pastry apple strudel.  Baklava is always among my favorites, though phyllo expensive and the process too tedious for other meal tasks.  

I am the only one who likes beer, but for Thanksgiving there are better options.  Many families splurge a bit on wine.  My guests shy away from alcohol.  Sparkling cider seems a compromise with something my guests would probably not buy for themselves.

There is food, and there is experience, both for me and for my guests.  Choosing them is straightforward.  Getting non-drivers to my home takes some planning, effort, and patience.  Elegance gets incorporated in different ways.  I have fine china but don't use it.  Instead, I set the table with ordinary fleishig dishes and utensils.  Bread on a tray, sliced with a serrated knife.  Appetizer on small plates.  Soup served in tureen, ladled into bowls. Salad onto the main plate, in an elegant bowl, served with either silver or wooden sets.  Turkey on a platter.  Stuffing in a bowl.  Sides in appealing bowls, plate or dishes.  Cake on a platter, served on dessert plates with dessert forks.  Stemmed goblets for the beverage.  Tea cups with saucers.  And energy reserved for the following day to wash the dishes and create a Friday night meal suitable for shabbos. 

Always worth the effort.  Planning, executing, concluding.  Many steps.  Me at my very best most of the time.

Postponed Trip

Among my most valuable senior discounts has been regional rail travel.  I have a travel free card from SEPTA, the system that operates near my home.  In my wallet, I carry an MTA card which discounts NYC transit by half.  NJ Transit which connects the two will accept my Medicare card for half off.  That makes home to NYC a no work proposition.  Drive to a SEPTA station, authorize $2 from my credit card to park, and I'm off for a cheap afternoon in Manhattan.  If I really wanted a lot of time in the Big Apple, I would either take Amtrak which will set my credit card back a lot more, both for transit and for local parking.  I could drive the NJ Turnpike to near NYC and finish the trip on the PATH commuter train or NJ Transit.  Driving seems a chore, EZ Pass gets debited each way.  I will need to park in NJ.  A lot of irritation, but more time exploring NYC attractions.

I opted to go cheap and easy, at least one time.  My miserliness comes with a significant downside.  Schedules are limited and inflexible.  SEPTA has a direct connection to NJ Transit at its main transfer point in Philadelphia.  To get there, I would have to leave home at 7AM to get a regional commuter train to Philly, then a half hour layover once in Philly, then transfer to SEPTA Trenton and a short walk from there with minimal layover to NJ Transit Trenton.  Same returning.  Easy to get back to Philadelphia from NYC, but big layover there until I can get onto the commuter train home, the penultimate one for the evening.  And winter standard time puts much of the trip home, and at the end of NYC, in the dark.  I would arrive home around 9:30PM.  So, fourteen hours in transit for about six hours of amusement in the Big Apple, or maybe even a little less.  Hardly worth it as tourism.  It may be worth it as an experience, as a challenge to convince myself that it is possible.

Travel of all types has its unproductive times.  Airports require a lot of preparatory effort.  Getting there by car, either my own with an expensive parking fee or by Uber.  Lugging stuff.  Lines at check-in and TSA screening.  Sitting at the gate.  Retrieving luggage at destination.  Finding ground transportation.  At least the distance traveled justifies a multi-day experience at the final stop.  Road trips are also multi-day, though sometimes that means an overnight stay for each day's drive before even arriving at the desired location.  And at least public conveyances allow the passenger to bring items to occupy or even advance himself during waiting time and transit.  Don't think I want to tool around NYC with a laptop in backpack.  My travel cross-chest carrier would allow a tape recorder, radio, cell phone, pens, and pads.  Books and my magazine subscriptions are now portable.  So if I travel for eight hours to get six hours, the transit time has useful possibilities.

Rain forecast.  If confirmed the day before travel, that would postpone the adventure.  The rails are mostly indoors.  NYC attractions usually require some emergence from underground.  Postponed, but not fully shelved.

Vacuuming

Floor surfaces in my house could use some attention.  I mopped the kitchen's synthetic tile floor.  A two person job with furniture repositioning.  Most of my floor surfaces, though, are carpeting.  Sturdy synthetic nylon.  Most installed when we moved into our house in 1981, with a few more recentm additions.  By the advise of most experts on home maintenance, once in book, now online.  The vacuum with rotating brush head should be allowed to clean and restore this flooring weekly.  I use my bedroom and part of the living room and the exposed parts of the family room's Berber carpet daily.  As a reward to myself for passing Endocrinology Boards I treated myself to an elegant round rug for my office, since relocated to My Space with retirement.  I step on it daily.  About once a week I do my various loads of laundry, taking the dried clothing to the living room for folding.  Residue from the carpet finds its way to the surfaces of the clothing I had just laundered.  So I got out the vacuum cleaner to make long overdue amends.

It is not like the carpets never get cleaned.  In anticipation of Passover, we arrange for formal carpet cleaning of the living room, dining room, upstairs landing, and stairs.  In order to do this, the cleaning service has to vacuum all the surfaces first.  The bedroom and My Space have neglect exceeding one year,  I made the vacuum cleaner, a modern Shark Model with YouTube access guiding me in its use, fully functional.  Empty bag.  No suction without an empty bag.  Learned how to put the rolling brush in carpet mode.  Create Zones.  Easy:  upper landing, always kept clear, and my special area rug.  Hard Zones:  my half of the bedroom which needed subzones as I moved stuff covering the floor to expose carpeting, then vacuumed, then moved some selectively back to expose another section of the royal blue velvet pile.  Did this three times.  Slightly winded but done.  Wife's side of bedroom a lost cause, no carpeting exposed beneath clothing, books, and assorted surface priorities that she has.  Still, one-person job.

Living room: two-person job.  Moving and replacing a lot of furniture, creating sub-zones.  The area near the room's entrance had its carpeting tamped down daily with contributions of outside walking ground beneath the carpet's surface to its lower pile.  I vacuumed each zone in two directions.  Between the moving and replacing of furniture, negotiating the vacuum's excessively long cord, and long swaths of surface, each cleaned in two directions, I found this unexpectedly tiring.  But accomplished in a way that I could discern an improvement when this part of the project was completed.

That leaves me with two more sections.  The dining room will be fairly easy.  Mostly chairs to move and replace.  Finally, the stairs, walked upon multiple times daily.  This one needs the tools.   I found most of them.  Family Room judged lost cause.

Those are the carpeted surfaces.  There are other surfaces, including our tiled entry hall.  This might be better cleaned with a Swiffer Kit, which I own but need to make functional.  Laundry Room with kitty litter dragged by Priscilla the Cat into the adjacent powder room and across the living room surface.  Vacuum without the brush beater, followed by mop or Swiffer.

Having done this, and also recognizing some exceeds my capacity for doing more than on rare bursts of determination, I will need to engage a professional cleaning crew.  And sooner rather than later.

My Food Is Your Food

Well, maybe not.  One of our regional heroes is an obscure Franciscan monk in the modern lineage of St. Francis of Assisi.  The current Pope adopted his name, though like all Popes he lives in splendor.  Our regional Brother does not.  He wears a hooded brown gown.  He lives simply.  But for more than forty years he has created, headed, and expanded an agency that centralizes our reach to the city's poor.  His agency provides a small amount of child care and default housing, but its central mission has been to offer meals.  For 2022, they served more than 100,000 meals.  I had the pleasure of meeting this friar many years ago when a departing medical executive opted to have his farewell reception at the agency's dining hall.  My children's Bnai Mitzvah generated sumptuous leftovers, which I transported there the following Monday.  For the Brother to accomplish this, he needs generous partners.  No group has adopted mandatory sharing of our prosperity than our Jewish community.  As community groups are solicited to take their turns providing meals, my synagogue has three sessions scheduled in the late fall every year for decades.

While this initiative should generate overflowing support from dozens of members, it doesn't seem to.  Instead, it reinforces our congregational culture, consisting of a series of fiefdoms or cliques run by and content with its few dedicated participants.  If we have good, we need not seek more than good, that view illustrates.  We can get the food cooked and served with the people we have.  They announce from the sanctuary and newsletters a few sabbaths in advance that they could use some baked goods.  I make a contribution, Kosher and in my oven, for two of the sessions, but have never been invited to join the other ladies in the home kitchen of the chairman.  

Maybe the Brother would not want me there any more than the event chair or perhaps even our Rabbi and Rebbetzin would.  There are cultural divides, perhaps even theological ones.  When I host an event at my home, kitchen experience displayed to the max most times, my kitchen output is always plentiful and elegant.  Take as much as you want.  Since we have two Challahs for Shabbos, the guest takes one home. Understandably, the friar feels this approach detrimental.  His dining center is a place of default, not celebration.  The goal for him is part rescue of an immediate situation but also a look to a future where his current consumers can become prosperous donors, able to create, enjoy, and share their own abundance.  My food is your food, eat what you like that prevails in my dining room, does not always serve people dependent on others in the best way.  The friar limits portions.  He looks at his project as a means of temporary subsistence.  While friendships and camaraderie among regular patrons likely develop, he stops short of full satiety, fearing dependence at the expense of personal growth.

While my synagogue and I each place a high value on Kosher, that same stringency is not required for the non-Jewish residents of our city who depend on the dining center for their daily, or even periodic, lunch.  And we are told that congregational members contributing food to feed these people do not need to maintain Kosher in any way.  Much of the food is prepared in the chairwoman's kitchen.  I never inquired about its kashrut.  The food is acceptable to the recipients who need it.  Yet when I contribute, the food meets the standards of my Kosher kitchen.  Should I be willing to serve a hungry person food that I would not eat myself?  Probably not as food.  Were I to give a financial contribution, there would be no restrictions on what the recipient might opt to purchase.  As a practical matter, the mission of the assigned sessions is to provide nutrition on the terms of the recipient.  It would probably not be good congregational policy to restrict baked goods donations to those made in Kosher ovens, or even with Kosher ingredients.  My food is your food, with strings attached.  Your food is not necessarily my food.  Sometimes I am the caterer, maybe a server.  Not the diner.

Our tradition has a tale of some Smart Alec asking the sage Hillel why Hashem permitted poverty when an omnipotent God could have provided adequately for everyone.  Hillel responded that God did that so people could rise to the occasion by sharing part of their larger portion.  So that is what we do as a synagogue and I do as a peripheral volunteer for that project.  Judaism seems to prefer middles.  I bake something Kosher, varying the output.  It is always created at my peak ability.  Always something that would be a little pricey for people at economic fringes to purchase from a bakery.  Always something that I've had before, both from my kitchen and high end commercially, that I especially regarded as a treat. So I share some food, restrained by the Brother's judgment on keeping his project one of nutritional default.  But in absentia and with anonymity, I also share a piece of me.  Imagination of what to offer.  Experience as a limited foodie.  The Brother cannot restrict that.

Scouting November

Must dos.  Should dos.  They are not the same.  While totally bored at a volunteer activity Halloween morning, I took a multicolored pen and writing pad out of my cross-chest carrier, then headed to an unoccupied room with desks and chairs on the second floor.  Setting the pen to its green option, I began jotting down all the tasks for the month that would commence the following day.  Twenty-two items with three added later.  The only truly mandatory on the list seems to be keeping a cardiology appointment made more than six months earlier.  I think I have symptoms to discuss, and never leave the exam room without either the doctor or her NP thinking I should return for a test of some type.  Changing the clocks to Eastern Standard Time probably counts as mandatory, assigned to a single night.  I suppose Thanksgiving is another fixed appointment that cannot be changed, though I did cancel dinner on short notice two years back when my wife took ill.  Other things have deadlines in November.  A synagogue dinner.  A short-story writing contest that I am willing to fork over $25 to have my submission turned down.  Baking a treat for the charitable organization that my congregation supports.  My wife's choral group has a concert I need to attend.  Some things will happen irrespective of my participation.  The Election.  I voted early and will know who got elected in due time.  Flu shot would be a good idea.  My Osher Institute classes continue through November.

Mostly, though, things that I want to do dominate the list.  I will need to withdraw the minimums from my two IRAs, but it does not have to be in November.  I've not had a big snow accumulation in a long time.  My dormant snowblower could use a revival, but if that does not happen, I could hire somebody with a plow.  My gardens ought to have the seasonal vegetables uprooted in preparation for next spring.  Not much happens if I neglect that.  I've scheduled a platelet donation, one of those fulfilling tasks put on hold for two months due to illness.  Some travel:  Philadelphia and NYC.  Nothing happens if I stay home.  I'd also like to take a not too far overnight trip in December.  Could make choose a place and make reservations.  Hanukkah comes late this year but I still like to have gift selections made before Black Friday.  The Jewish community is running a course for which I have registered.  Two of the four evenings are in November.  I'm surprisingly indifferent to the curriculum.  

And then I have things that I aspire to accomplish, though nothing happens if I fall short.  I need to submit some of what I have produced for publication.  An Osher course teaches how to build a Web Site.  I always wanted one. Launch by Thanksgiving.  Home upkeep has exceeded my capacity and my wife's interest.  I convinced her we need a pro.  Now to find one.  And I've not used my fireplace in many years.  This winter.  And we won a raffle.  My wife and I need to select non-profit recipients by year's end.

While not showing up for the cardiologist appointment or my wife's concert would have some negative consequences, as would the penalties for neglecting my IRA, nearly everything else registers as elective.  Enriching to me in different ways, worth pursuing.  A month to do these things seems ample.