Breakfast at Kitchen Table

My treadmill appointment with myself has gone admirably well for an impressive time.  In order to keep on schedule, I have established set times which I've assigned top priority.  Success with this includes rest days, every third day.  On those days, my Daily Task List has included Breakfast Out, a reward to myself.  I never go, not for months.

At one time, going out for breakfast, while not a reward, had a useful purpose.  Originally, I would take a review book to study for upcoming Board Exams while I ate.  Later, it marked a weekend day off, one to sit at a counter with a familiar waitress serving mostly familiar men.  I could not duplicate either of my two customary orders, blueberry pancakes or poached eggs with shredded potatoes.  I would sample a variety of different places over time.  In retirement, those mornings, not yet pre-empted by a treadmill priority, would often frame my day.

Economics and shifting personal choices took their toll.  The place I gravitated to closed, but not before the expected waitress retired.  The IHOP next door never provided a good experience.  They didn't have a counter for solo diners like me.  Prices rose.  Another place that I kinda liked had me staring at TRUMP in a star in my line of sight, though they made simple eggs and potatoes quite well.  Other diners seemed to slather the toast with some kind of spread in place of butter packets of the real thing.  And my own coffee in my Keurig machine often surpassed what they poured from their carafe.

Despite Out for Breakfast on my to-do list periodically, I've largely opted to stay in My Space sipping some extra coffee or making breakfast in my kitchen instead.  Assembling a nutritious breakfast has gotten easy, thanks to corporate ingenuity and some planning on my part.  Eggs are one of nature's fast foods.  Even with outrageous price increases, they remain obtainable.  Cooking takes minutes.  The restaurants used to serving eggs Benedict poach theirs better than I do mine, and never break a yolk with over easy, but I can do the basics with few glitches.  Most, but not all, do hash browns better, but I can periodically find kosher latkes patties, which I can fry in the pan before adding the eggs at the end.  My refrigerator has real butter.  My bread supply usually includes English muffins or bagels, as well as reputable sliced bread.  None of that Wonder Bread in my house.  I invested in a good toaster.  Occasionally, I have something from Morningstar Farms to keep my kosher breakfast looking like it has a classic breakfast meat.   Once in a while I'll create an omelet.  I sometimes have mushrooms at home, usually have cheese in the dairy drawer.  The restaurants roll and fold better than me, though. Not professional, but filling and satisfying.

Making pancakes has gotten easy.  Mixes require a half cup powder, a slightly smaller amount of water, a fork to stir, a pan to heat the batter, and a spatula to flip.  They come out better than the ones they make at all the diners that have survived my favorite one.  In my refrigerator, I keep real maple syrup and a bottle of commercial pancake syrup.  The additives in the commercial mix, while probably best thought of as adulterants, keep my flapjacks fluffy.  I presume diners make their own batters, though maybe some also use a similar commercial mix.

Other delicacies I can only make at home.  When salmon goes on sale, I make gravlax.  It takes a few days to cure, with some personal but brief attention needed morning and evening.  Once made, I portion it to half pound sections, keep one refrigerated, freeze and then thaw the others.  I slice it adequately.  The price of smoked salmon has become prohibitive, even as lox pieces.  Restaurant prices exceed what I am willing to spend on breakfast.  When I have gravlax in the fridge, I keep bagels and cream cheese at home to make the classic sandwich.  Not as good as when I could buy real lox, and bagels came from a bakery instead of a mass produced source, but still a worthy breakfast, or sometimes lunch.  While I could put some of the gravlax with eggs, either a mixed scramble or an omelette, it never seems worth the trouble.

The food industry has made cereal easy.  I've not eaten cold cereal with milk in ages, and don't miss it.  But I like hot cereal.  Farina, oatmeal, sometimes Wheatina.  Farina and Wheatina I cook on a stove top.  Takes minutes, needs some attention as it cooks.  Then spoon into a cup, usually add a pat of butter and eat.  Oatmeal has gotten easier.  A variety pack often goes on sale.  One packet, half cup water into a cup, then microwave for 90 seconds.  This needs watching as the microwave needs to be stopped a few times as the mixture starts to boil over the cup.  Fast and good.  Minimal cleanup if I don't overflow the cup, nuisance cleanup when that happens.  Sometimes I have grits at home, rarely make it.  Occasionally order it out.

I'm not a juice enthusiast.  At restaurants, orange juice seems expensive.  At home, it needs to be purchased in an amount that will spoil before fully consumed.  I keep oranges at home frequently, but don't eat them with breakfast.  I usually have apple juice, but prefer to boil a cupful, add sweet spices, and drink that as a snack beverage.  Juice is not part of my breakfast.

The one item I cannot duplicate are buttermilk biscuits.  Pillsbury are expensive and lack the kosher certification I insist upon for home.  Trader Joe's are kosher but expensive.  I periodically make biscuits, using milk with vinegar as the liquid.  I suspect my baking powder is long out of date, though probably adequate for everything I bake except biscuits.  Mine just never become fluffy like the ones served at restaurants.  They must have recipes, good ingredients, timers, and experienced chefs.

Making breakfast at home never seems intrusive.  Driving to a diner, other than the one with TRUMP inside a star in my line of sight, mostly does.  Since I go alone, intending to sit at a counter, usually by myself since my default diner closed, there does not seem an element of camaraderie to offset the cost and inconvenience of getting there.  I will usually bring a pen, turn over the paper placemat to its blank side and jot notes to myself, but I could do that at my desk.  When will Go Out for Breakfast lose its place on my Daily Task List?  It probably won't.  On occasion, I just want to be someplace other than my house.  At one time that came in the early morning.  As I learned that the early morning offers my top energy and mental hours, I have become very committed to being either in My Space or on a treadmill those times, not in transit.  Might I grab lunch out instead?  A slice of pizza, a hoagie to eat one half out and the other later in the week at a park?  Might already be doing that.  Cannot duplicate either pizza or hoagie at home.  Food is only one component of where to dine.  But for breakfast, it appears that any incentive to seek out a diner for either food enhancement or escape from my home no longer applies.

Editing

Blogging has a serious downside.  The writer, for this one me, can type anything he wants, then after publication let the open market decide who wants to read the thoughts.  This has expanded to much social media where any hateful troll can share a paragraph with no regulation of content or suggestions of how thoughts might have been expressed better.  Moderators do not help much.  They act as gatekeepers but do not refine content.  Human editors have a more mixed role.  For their own reporters or writers they alter the sentences to make them more appealing to readers.  For free-lancers or Letters to the Editor they function primarily as arbiters of what readers might see but also will amend expression, though not ideas.

We enter a new age, that of AI editing.  One of my writing programs allows me one AI feedback every calendar day.  Pattern recognition has become awesome.  The judgments of the computer can be slashing at times, lacking any sensitivity that a professional might have in reviewing manuscripts or content.  The pattern recognition cannot regulate what is written but probably can make the writing more coherent.  It can identify tone, variability of sentences, and how well paragraphs flow in sequence.

Since my use is rationed, I am reluctant to copy and paste an article from an upper tier publication and see how they judge published writing already screened and selected by a human professional among competing submissions.  Perhaps the pattern recognition would critique those essays much as it does mine.

Still, I appreciate somebody, or really an emotionless program, taking a look at what my mind expresses.

Snow with Freeze

Winter's first snowfall arrived somewhat earlier than most years, about mid-December.  Our peak mostly arrives in early February.  My snowblower has not started for a few years, though I've not needed it.  Accumulation with this storm remained within my shoveling capacity, though the slushy consistency left each shovelful heavy.  Still, by limiting what I do to a few segments at a time, it did not take very long to clear the drift created by the street plow.  The rest of the driveway went easily, more pushing than lifting.  With my front yard facing south, I had much less snow than neighbors across the street.  Wind must have blown from the north, with my house shielding what accumulates.

While the driveway took only modest efforts repeated several times, the two cars posed more of a challenge.  Much more snow on each than on the driveway.  I keep a good snow brush in my back floor all year round.  Opening the back door took some effort but the wonders of an automated key fob made that easier that it had been earlier in my driving lifetime.  Just as the driveway and drift snow had a water base that made each shovelful heavy, the car surface, both metal and glass, had a water base.  Unlike the asphalt surfaces which kept the water liquid, the metallic and glass interfaces froze the water in direct contact with it.   I could scrape the windshields easily, the side windows less well.  Metallic surfaces remain covered.  Letting the front and rear defrosters run for seven minutes helped, though I've still not freed the windshield wipers on my car.

My state allows drivers on the road with metallic surfaces snow covered, the neighboring state barely more than a mile north does not.  And I've barely touched my wife's car.  A few significant errands will take me out today.  My wife needs to get to one of her doctors tomorrow.  Each vehicle will need to achieve ability to join the public highways.

Snow came amid a deep freeze, one expected to last another two days.  Retrieving the newspaper from the end of the driveway, as I do each morning, caused me to walk on a slick surface with rubber soled shoes.  The newspaper delivery vehicle managed to perform its rounds.  My development street typically remains icy until the temperature rises sufficiently for a melt.  Fortunately, it connects with a main road about a quarter mile away, one which has enough traffic to melt the surface ice by tire friction.  

The driveway and walk could clear with a few short efforts, none lasting more than twenty minutes.  I'll need to exert a similar effort for the two cars.

Hanukkah Shopping

One more gift to wrap before shipping.  It's an irregular one, more suitable for a gift bag than a box.  My tradition of holiday shopping transitioned after marriage.  As a youngster, my parents would get each child one gift and the children would choose one gift for each parent.  My wife's family had a different approach, one quickly adopted by me.  They would arrange for each person to open one token present with each candle.  Our Christian friends would call them stocking stuffers, maybe even less expensive than those.  A candy bar, a handkerchief, a book.  Something nominal each night.

When we married, we engaged in professional training programs that located us about 200 miles from my kin and 300 miles from hers.  It was impractical to get each person eight gifts, so my siblings and father, and hers, followed my tradition of one each for the holidays.  Boston had just begun to experiment with suspension of Blue Laws for the Christmas shopping interval.  I had most Sundays off, and my program gave us a variable holiday to allow a day off to shop for gifts.  Shabbos was never an impediment.  My wife got her eight, as did I.  Downtown Boston had endless retailers, some large, some small, as did Mass Ave in Cambridge.  

Training done, adequately paying jobs secured, permanent housing purchased.  Then expansion of our gift list by children and now grandchildren, with some contraction of parents and sibs.  The single larger presents largely stopped, the smaller gifts for household, or used to be household, continued, now approaching fifty years.

Shopping and shipping have also changed.  Blue Laws lapsed decades ago, leaving Sundays as a day available for whatever people wanted to do, including shopping.  Retailing changed.  Big Box stores and enormous chains dominate the retail landscape.  Those places to get cheap stuff: Zayre, Caldor, Woolworths, are all blessed memories.  Purchasing through e-tailing works well for substantial items, less well for tchotchkes that need shipping to multiple places.  We also no longer have those Main Street gift shops that once provided me with local, small-market craft items.  In its place came periodic craft fairs.  And I expect to travel once or twice a year.  While away, I look for an inexpensive item made locally that I can place in a drawer for a few months on returning home, then ship to a recipient for Hanukkah when the season arises.  My first Hanukkah purchase typically occurs in the summer.

Over fifty years, the transport of items has also changed.  The USPS has largely privatized, now competing with UPS and FedEx.  For my convenience, there are also franchises that will box and ship for me.  I prefer a small operation in a strip mall near me, but there are UPS Stores, Fed Ex, and Staples that make this convenient.  It allows me to bundle each recipient's items and pay a single fee.

But much like fifty years ago, the selection and wrapping remains a pleasurable annual task for me.  With my current recipient list of three young adults, two infants, and a wife, my share comes to 28 presents.  Over the years, I've learned to set categories.  Each can expect an edible, those items that cost a few dollars, come in a package that can be wrapped, and need no refrigeration.  The women can expect a bauble.  Earrings now come in so many variations that it's easy to make a sports team logo or image of a cat dangle from each lobe.  Team swag comes as mugs, clothing, or anything else clever admen can hire artists to create for mass production.  Things handed to my wife with each Hanukkah candle require no weight considerations.  Shipping by rail or air does better with candy, textiles, and jewelry as transport fees correlate with weight.  The shape of the item also matters.  I prefer rectangular that I can gift wrap.  Books, cloth items that can be folded and placed into boxes, either purchased or harvested from boxes of printer ink or k-cups boxes.  I have gift bags, most designed for giving, a few more in the style of a paper bag that can be made more visually appealing with a bow or decal.

Each year I can expect a few unique quirks.  These past two years, my edibles selections seem different.  Since I maintain a kosher diet, I would not gift to somebody else something I would not eat myself.  I think this is part of the ethical basis of our holidays and our personal relationships.  Until two years ago, I could expect a kosher marking on the wrapping of most sweets.  Not so the last two years.  Chocolates and baked products that had been part of my gift purchases for years often lack the certification that I seek.  Most anything made in the Mediterranean countries, Turkey, Greece, Italy, no longer contract with the rabbis.  Nor do the Belgian chocolates I used to give my wife or mail to my kids each Hanukkah.  I do not know why.  It could be innocent reasons like changes in ingredients or manufacturing sharing equipment with non-kosher products.  Or more sinister, countries that no longer want Jewish symbols on their packaging as a political statement.  In any case, the market share of kosher consumers is small enough that omission of the certification will not affect profits.  Or what was once a symbol of quality, divine approval of the product, has become an association of the manufacturers with misconduct.  Either interpretation, the selection of items has contracted for me.  So anything edible now comes from an international conglomerate or an American producer, where kosher remains a stamp of quality.

At the other pole, despite rising prices that have changed voting patterns, the price of logo items has not accelerated.  Stuff carrying local team emblems has proliferated.  So do corporate logos of snob appeal etched into glassware or imprinted on golf balls.  Cosmetics at discounters like T.J. Maxx remain plentiful.  Soaps, lip gloss, facial brushes, creams all remain within acceptable price ranges.  And most come in easily wrappable boxes.

While gift certificates are tempting, I only include one for my wife among my 28 selections.  The holiday should generate a certain gratitude.  Among mine are prosperity not only for myself but for children who each hold professional positions with large employers.  They have and fritter more than the $10 any gift card from me would afford them.  Instead, the challenge for gift selections now and fifty years back has been to assess the uniqueness of each person.  While they could buy themselves anything I might wrap for them, they likely won't.  A son who inherited my fondness for the kitchen can expect something to enhance his experience there.  My ladies who like occasional pampering can expect an indulgence or two among what I purchase on their behalf.  They are the recipients.  As the donor, I get to think about each of them as I move from department to department in a store or from table to table at a craft fair.  What might I run across that is not available to them?  A local craft with the image of their favorite childhood cartoon, a team that dominates where they once lived but has been overwhelmed by the teams of their current cities, an item taken from a vendor from a place I have visited but they have not.  Each person, even the two infants, needs their husband, dad, or grandpa to think about them.  For fifty years, I've given it my best effort.  Some elements now easier than they once were, others more challenging.  As each candle gets its flame for the eight days of Hanukkah, each person will have a moment of glee.  Less the product, more the kinship.

They Missed Something

 https://forward.com/news/785155/jfna-israel-education-generational-divide/

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/marc-rowan-declares-mamdani-our-enemy-at-50th-uja-federation-wall-street-dinner/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ_evTivC0I&t=1340s

Three items of note came into my awareness.  Different subjects but with a common interpretation.  The first two are traditional news articles.  The Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella group of many purposes, assembled its key people.  Over my adult lifetime, now half a century, the people allowed a seat at the table have become less of a cross-section of the wider American Jewish public than they once were.  Thousands might have attended.  My representation was not among them.  A variant of that gaining a feature in a philanthropic newsletter described a New York gathering of Wall Street's Jewish contributors.  American's economy made me prosperous, but not philanthropically wealthy.  They don't represent me either.  What I got instead of a bottomless supply of money to cast my influence preferences, was knowledge of Judaism's underpinnings, a fierce independence, an ability to reason subservient to none, and a willingness to schect the sacred cows whose poop becomes burdensome.  Reports of these two gatherings of Dominant Influencers, present on a lesser scale in my community and synagogue, conveyed an entitlement to manipulate.  My Way or the Highway.  Or at least the exit ramps.  A lot of people took that option,  It left the Jewish upper tier with funds but fewer people than they could have had.  Maybe even without the best people that they could have had.  Reb Tevye expressed his skepticism on Broadway, "when you're rich they think you really know."  First crooned the year of my Bar Mitzvah.  Still sung at high school performances two generations later.  Wall Streeters know they can vote their shares.  

The third presents a podcast with historical underpinnings.  It displays a series of remarkable color drawings and just over a half-hour of commentary. The artwork moves sequentially with themes of the talk.  The history conveyed timelines.  It described moments of glory, institutions led by people whose personal achievements in commerce, science, and public affairs gave them an admiration, even an authority, that could be transposed to Jewish agencies.  Nobody challenged the legitimacy of those high achieving men.  Institutions already existed, many formed in the World War 1 era amid formation of unions, the Scouts, Workman's Circle, burial societies, nascent Jewish advocacy groups.  Visionaries transformed these grass roots banding together to institutions that could maintain a legacy.  Many promoted unity as the path to successfully achieving the element of power needed to secure each group's interests.

Indeed American Judaism did thrive, but in a less idealized way than the podcast suggested.  My Bar Mitzvah took place on Shabbat HaGadol, 1964.  My tallit, which I still wear twice a year, was woven of silk and was crafted in Israel, displaying the shade of blue that Israelis display on their flags.  The Six-Day War would not happen for another three years.  Jews did not yet have access to our most sacred historical structures.  In America, Jews had emerged from World War II.  Our fathers served in Europe or the Pacific, let Uncle Sam subsidize their college degrees that they never expected to have, and relocated us to suburban tracts with great local schools and nascent synagogues which promised to process every school age male through to Bar Mitzvah, leaving something for the daughters too.  We had institutions.  My Rabbi graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary.  Across town, the Reform Rabbi had his ordination from their flagship seminary.  Other American rabbis received their training in pre-war Europe, displaced by the conflict, sometimes by the concentration camps.  A growing American synagogue structure offered stable, though not always lucrative employment.  Our congregations also had its share of native Europeans.  Most, like my grandparents' generation, arrived in New York before the restrictive immigration laws.  Others settled as war refugees.  

Those people created American Judaism, the world of summer camps, Hebrew School, USY Bowling Leagues.  But also an alluring secular world.  They attended City College or state university.  I could set my sights on the Ivies, provided I remained diligent in public school.  Israel had a mixed identity.  Our teachers taught us about it in multiple dimensions.  That land had been promised to us and after a long absence, Jews regained sovereignty, but an insecure one.  Its inhabitants included idealists from Eastern Europe but also people seeking refuge.  We learned of Holocaust survivors, and an obligation to offer them a piece of our American prosperity.  The distinction between gifts, as donations to plant trees, and loans as Israel Bonds, did not seem part of our curriculum.  Nor did the real population swell that overlapped with many of our birth years.  Those inhabitants of Muslim lands who experienced retribution from their native countries because a place of Jewish sovereignty had become a reality.

The creators of the podcast express the same contemporary issue, though in different ways. Superimpoosing the news items with the podcast, I think the themes unite in an important way.  Each deals with fragmentation of the Jewish base of support for Israel.  For decades, at least since a need to address Holocaust devastation of Judaism from its base in Europe, the need to have a refuge, a place on earth with Jewish sovereignty.  has been a cultural imperative.  Whether it served well as an anti-dote to anti-Semitism, globally and in America, can be debated from numerous perspectives.  But when Israel came under attack in 1967, the outpouring of support and funds crossed all Jewish perspectives.  It came at a time of rising economic and social standing of America's older Jewish immigrants and younger native born. People of my generation knew Holocaust survivors personally in America and understood that Israel provided a refuge to whoever sought their protection.  We did not forget useful, maybe even essential partnerships. African-Americans, as their identity moved ahead from Negroes to Black to current language begun in that era, welcomed Jews who could relate to their own struggles.   Lobbying for repressed Soviet Jews had just begun.  It was an era of goodwill, at least in part.  It was also an era when communal leadership earned the respect due to individuals who had made the most of their difficult circumstances.

This took multiple forms.  Immigrants to early 20th century NY City, which included my grandparents, had little choice but to look out for each other.  Though my maternal grandparents would survive another half century, people of the community would purchase burial plots so that everyone could have a final resting place.  My grandfather and extended family subscribed.  When I visit Adolph Ullman, a small tract amid a vast Beth David Cemetery, I can wander through the stone gate and locate not only my mother and grandparents but their siblings who met a few times a year in a rented hall in Queens.  Beyond my own family, Jews banded together for common benefit.  Out of the effort came labor unions and Workman's Circles, a benevolent form of socio-economic safety net.  Largesse did not only come internally.  My parent's generation attended City College and its divisions.  They fought for the American military, some in each of the two World Wars, and others in Korea.  At my Bar Mitzvah, between wars, some men sat in the sanctuary and reception tables in Air Force and Army uniforms.  These men, and their new wives or betrothed but not yet wed, were too old to be my older brothers but too junior to be my parents.  We had a continuum.

While making institutions secure, litmus tests emerged, along with influencers who thought they could enforce whatever path leadership directed.  The following sixty years, whether the historical timeline of the podcast or the news reports of who gets to attend meetings where the Who's Who present their vision to their echo chambers, showed limitations to that authority.  Intermarriage publicity starting with Look Magazine's The Vanishing American Jew cover story generated a shunning stragety with threats of adverse consequences to resistors.  Authortity cannot mandate demographics, nor can it temper resentment.  Eventually those mostly self-made leaders hired professionals to create programming and influence policy decisions of whoever American voters elect.  Much investment went into creating leadership, one which socialized proteges more than it nurtured the independence and vision that created each legacy institution.  Oppose the mandate and you could be shunned, just like the intermarried were.  This has some very negative consequences.  People feel unwelcomed, even marginalized.  They don't want to tilt at windmills or carry unending minority views.  They don't take kindly to ranking as inferior, either by more modest wealth or by ideas that diverge from the banner each agency's poobah's demand everyone unfurl in the illusion of unity.  The ability to impose on people that way, to mistreat many, including myself at times, along the way, presupposes that they have no recourse and must therefore maintain allegiance.  Ironically, the efforts of the the original visionaries, those mostly men who help eradicate public anti-semitism in my young adult years, gave us a lot of alternatives.  Instead of licking our wounds as our children acquired Christian spouses, we could stay home from synagogue.  Our medical, legal, scientific, and commercial opportunities gave us forums to belong to worthy organizations that valued us with fewer conditions than many Jewish ones did.  Our synagogues are smaller and older.  As our Israel homeland has become more secure, our willingness to excuse every policy in the name of Jewish unity has acquired more boundaries.  When unwelcome, as many of us perceive ourselves to be, we can divert our synagogue dues and Jewish agency charitable dollars towards our alma maters and our secular institutions that have more successfully nurtured our loyalties.  The proteges of the founding leaders dealt with the autonomy that many Jewish Americans have aquired rather poorly.  The keynote speakers at a gathering of 2000 Wall Street demanding loyalty to them as leaders will probably keep those moguls or wannabes aboard.  They need a bigger fraction of the other five million American Jews and their talents than what those on the podiums declare as their entitlement.  

Judaism needs Kehillah, or community, as a core principle.  Our Torah describes leadership in many ways, not all of them flattering by modern standards.  As the video outlines, we started off with endless potential.  It become too selective, too demeaning of challenges.  What the two advocacy meetings really portrayed were the recessive genes of inbreeding expressed as the norm.  Functional, but without the allure that the icons of my grandparent's generation envisioned as where American Judaism might not only reach its Golden Age but keep it moving upwards indefinitely. 

One of my alma maters, an honorable Jesuit university, installed its latest President in a podcast ceremony.  In his featured remarks, he noted that the school he now leads benefited from its share of misdeeds.  The thirteen Jesuit founders brought sixed enslaved men to help them.  I could walk through an expanded campus in the 1970s because the school had claimed domain to the surrounding neighborhood, displacing a poor community less than just compensation.  Things that brought public benefit, but now seen as with some insensitivity to the victims.  My Jewish world has its element of benefit from its share of overpowering some people's vulnerability or lack of recourse.  The new University President claimed ownership all aspects of my alma mater's legacy.  My Jewish institutions generated a leadership that approaches those left behind, or often treated contemptuously, as deserving nothing better, not then, not now.  Two thousand of them from Wall Street.