Empty Nester Shabbos Dinner

We have some semblance of supper most days.  Even on the two major fast days, a meal precedes the fast.  And I have been fortunate to prioritize supper with my family most nights, as did President Obama who had more pressures on his time.  Once a week we have shabbos dinner, never leftovers, virtually never eaten out unless traveling.  It surpasses caloric sustenance.  We have kiddush, sometimes delayed if sundown arrives after our usual suppertime.  We have challah.  Often that meal has more than one course, though not always.  It is elevated above supper on the other days.

Ironically, my very favorite shabbos dinners took place my final two years of medical school.  I ate alone.  There was a vegetarian restaurant that I liked within walking distance of my apartment.  It is unusual to be able to select from an entire menu so this was a special destination reserved for the onset of shabbos.  And I always ate alone there, enjoying the creativity of the chef and the folk music of a guitarist.  But that dinner is only eaten alone out of necessity.  Once I married, that was allotted time for my wife, unless my residency schedule had me on call Friday night, and with children, we all assembled unless a parent was away at conference or a child at camp.

Shabbos dinner remains a designated highlight of our week, though the children are long on their own.  When working, I had to cook chicken, our usual entree, very early in the winter, when shabbos would commence long before I arrived home.  Now as retired people living as a couple, we have more flexibility.  Chicken still dominates, kiddush and challah remain.  Gefilte fish is long gone, though I have a few jars in the pantry which serve more as a snack.  I try to have some pareve munchee on hand.  Kosher beef has gotten expensive since the Rubashkins were shut down and some hauled off to the Otisville Minyan so crock pot beef stew has gotten less frequent.  And we were never singers of zemirot.

Despite the special occasion, we rarely extend or receive an invitation from other families. While we are empty-nesters, a look around the sanctuary at shabbos morning services reveals quite a lot of people who have been widowed.  I never queried whether or how often they invite each other or get invited as guests.  And as my experience as a medical student attests, the dinner can be made a week's high point even eating alone among strangers. But that's not the intent of our tradition.  I assume, perhaps wrongly, that our Rabbi has the pulse of how those who now live alone introduce the weekly shabbos to their homes.  Maybe it can be improved.  Maybe we should be the ones to try.

Sleep Hygiene

Getting a continuous long duration night of sleep has been elusive, probably since my residency days when after being up all night on call, I would return home, assuming a supine position and dozing off as my due reward for my dedication to the rigors of medical training.  Such hazing is no longer permitted but those restful catchups have never been duplicated for me.

In more recent years, sleep has gotten far off schedule, even unscheduled sometimes.  I go to bed early, not always tired, and wake up for one reason or another while still in the wee hours on the clock with the red numbers.  I had a four pill sample of Ambien a long time ago, used them sparingly, but each time however they proved highly effective.  OTC diphenhydramine works as well, with a hangover the next day.  That hints of something chemically causing this which can be corrected in a pharmacological way, as unappealing as that is.  Since I no longer need to keep a work schedule, sleep deprivation, at least to the most restful stages, has not been a handicap and I am still pretty productive in my waking hours.  I wish I felt better and I wish I were less guilty about my naturally haphazard sleeping hours.  If I were incapacitated, I'd seek a sleep lab but since I'm not, the sage expert advice from cyberspace or the NEJM review should suffice.

I am familiar with clinical sleep hygiene advice, which I violate regularly.  I have set times for lights out and no computer screens, which I follow.  The bed is a refuge for reading.  At one time it was a refuge for television but since I got a super screen 55-inch model for My Space, I rarely watch the bedroom 24 incher from bed.  I bought a lounge chair which until recently has gone the way of all flat surfaces in my house.  Now cleared and used and off limits to piling random stuff atop the seat or footrest, I have an alternative to bed in my bedroom, and I'm starting to take advantage of it.  Coffee usually stops at noon or shortly thereafter.  Never drank much alcohol.  A Hot Toddy never served me well as a liquid hypnotic agent.

This summer I started working on keeping the bedroom cooler.  I had bought a room air conditioner as the central air conditioning never cooled the master bedroom as well as the lower rooms of our house.  It made a difference, not only for the ambient comfort but the background sounds seemed useful as white noise.  I have tried binaural sleep sounds, a sleep sound unit with waves or rain, blindfolds to create true darkness.  None are on the standard sleep hygiene suggestions, probably for lack of efficacy. 

And the bedding.  Mattress overdue for replacement.  A priority this fall.  Other bedding is fine but down comforter with duvet in the pattern of a black cat tends to be uneven, though warm.

Blue emitting light from screens is everywhere.  My smart phone with internet access is my connection to the world.  I have set a moratorium from 11PM to 5:30 AM which I have maintained with very rare minor lapses.  It may be better to shut the screens down earlier.  And the alarm clock, which I almost never use as either an alarm or as a radio though often as a clock, has those red numbers.  I have tried turning it around or covering the numbers with a washcloth with little discernible benefit.

And there's always Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  I'm not that desperate.

Storage Rental

One of my more inane monthly expenditures has been a small storage unit.  When first rented following the closure of my office nine years ago, it seemed a necessity.  I had financial records, employment records, books, more office supplies than I could give away, a large photocopier, a tall cherry red bookcase from Ikea, oodles of books.  And then I retired from the job that followed, with contents of desk drawers that belonged to me, not the hospital.  Some $18K in fees later, I am paying monthly to house stuff that I don't want.  The statute of limitations on financial records has lapsed, not that I could find any if requested.  The medical records were stored elsewhere and destroyed when the required storage time elapsed.  It's time to divest of the storage fees.  The only item that I know I want is that bookcase which will house quite a lot of books in my bedroom.

In the meantime, I have emptied most of my home files and made a commitment to myself to clean the basement, partly to have a single storage area in my home and partly for a form of end-of-life planning so my survivors do not have to pay somebody to do this. 

At three boxes a week, I can now see the floor of that storage unit.  Much has gone to shredding.  Office supplies need a home, which for now is two baskets in the lower hall.  My Franklin Planner accumulation has gone to a mixture of shredding and paper recycle.  Diplomas of various types have just come home, a closet to be identified for their indefinite storage.  I remain on schedule for the end of the year.  What to do with the money saved?  It will be something celebratory.

Cleaning the Basement

One of the challenges of my year in retirement has been using very large blocks of time purposefully.  I have had the good fortune to look ahead a lot, putting money away for retirement, investing in a house, buying insurance, writing a will, doing some estate planning.

At retirement I find myself at the junction of harvesting the efforts and arranging for end of life planning.  Basically my house is cluttered, and for a lot of reasons.  We don't quite make the hoarding shows on TV but fall a notch short.  Our possessions are the artifacts of how we lived, no different than the pottery that excites archaeologists but more of it.  Now that I am home a lot more, the role of my house expands from a dwelling to a place to live and produce.  Eventually what is here goes to my children to dispose of unless I do it first.  As a consequence, my approach to the house has become more purposeful.  The kitchen was made functional and attractive a few years ago.  I now enjoy being there.  Not long after retiring, I needed My Space and made it happen over seven months.  Each day now I sit on either a recaptured recliner with slip cover or a somewhat battered swivel chair with horrid nauseous green upholstery but comfort unsurpassed by any other desk chair I have ever had.  The stereo bought for $80 sits atop the file cabinet to my left and the new 55" TV with more options than I know how to use lies against a main wall.  There is still more to do here but not now.

In order to finish the rest of the house, I need to define storage space, preferably a single storage focus, which will be the basement.  I pay a good deal of money each month for an outside storage space, initially to house excess from my old office.  But I've paid some $18K over ten years to house stuff that mostly I don't want and certainly haven't used.  That doesn't make a lot of sense.  So if I can find an area that size in my basement, the money savings would pay for a lot of things, including a couple of vacations to escape from the house.  No other clutter around the house can be moved either until there is a defined space to move it to.  That makes the basement high priority.

As Tracy McCubbin notes in her book  Making Space, Clutter Free,  most of what we have accumulated stays here based on some psychological impediment to more rational disposal.  I like my past which has been one of achievement.  I don't need my college and medical school texts, though.  There's a certain amount of what might have been or what I aspired to.  I have two sets of yard sale golf clubs, some tennis rackets, in-line skates.  Or somebody could use this some day.  My IKEA bookcase could be quite attractive.  Unfortunately, I could buy another with what I pay for two month's storage.  Stuff is comforting, though rarely rational.  All that baby stuff could be offered to homeless shelters.  I learned this week that they can no longer accept them as safety regulations have changed since my children used them 30+ years ago.

I have a plan of attack, though.  First, create floor space.  My wife's papers fill multiple boxes.  magazines, put the stuff with handwriting into new boxes and line them along a discreet wall.  Move any shelving to another wall once I can get open floor space.  Make a deal with trash hauler for the baby stuff.   If I am going to give something to Goodwill, do it the week of harvest.   My storage unit has about 20 more boxes.  Take three a week home.  Anything electronic goes to electronic recycling at the state landfill, which also takes two boxes of paper a month for shredding.  Old paint has a disposal center, though those cans line our crawl space where they do not take up a lot of useful storage space.  When the kids moved, they created a fee-free storage space for themselves.  They live far away and will not use this stuff again.  Donate.  Stay scheduled.  Stay purposeful.  Stay relentless.

Hebrew School Flashbacks

Simchat Torah.  The Festival that transformed from my favorite to my least favorite over a lifetime.  Childhood:  Marching with Torah Scrolls, flags, and singing in the evening with a candy apple distributed at the end.  One of those red hard shelled confections that probably still exist but I've not seen in years.  The following day we got off from school, public school some years, Sunday Hebrew School if weekend yom tovim that year.  Hijinx continued with some kids bringing pistol facsimile  water guns, not the super soakers they have now, and tying the tzitzit of the ba-al tefiloh together as he davened musaf.  Torah reading would take a long time since everyone got an aliyah and at the Orthodox congregations a lot of adults came.

Moving on to college, Simchat Torah remained festive but at a different level.  Sure there was singing and dancing with the Hakafot.  But a bridge developed with the Soviet Jews as well.  Despite targeting Jews for religious suppression and identifying them on their state issued ID cards, the authorities always looked the other way on Simchat Torah.  Russian Jewish youth, the parents of those who make Tzahal function today, would assemble in droves for their annual display of their heritage.   It may have been the beginning of twinning, where Bat Mitzvah girls in America would identify and share their simcha with a girl in the Soviet Union.  But on Simchat Torah, we did that in a communal way.  Our University services were festive, but not nearly as festive as the city-wide gathering in a large public space with hundreds or even thousand participants.  While the mass emigration of Soviet Jews has been a good thing, we may have lost the revelry of Simchat Torah as their special day, and our special day, in the process, along with that important ideological achdut.

For me, that is where the inner joy of the occasion stopped.  I do not remember much from my residency days.  Maybe I was on call each year.  After relocating to my current town, the Conservative synagogue had a bimodal celebration.  Adults would gather in one place at about sundown for tefiloh.  The festivities were for the kids, sans any Torah reading at night.  There would be Happy Songs of ten words or less, probably the capacity of the parents as well as the children.  I took my children each year.  The next day I was often Torah reader which gave me a challenge.  Even without the kids, who mostly went to school, the songs were almost the Hebrew School musical cliches.  Guys:  I graduated.  They even gave me a certificate.  This was Hebrew School, the greatest invitation to Jewish attrition of my generation and that of my children.  No way do I want that experience.

Onward to my current shul.  We no longer have the bimodal child/adult events.  A diverse crew came at night, more adults in the morning.  For the last few years, our supply of children has metastasized to other communities where they are junior contributors.  We have only adults now.  But the processional retains the sounds of our insipid Hebrew schools, places that achieve minimalist identification with no capacity to have a song longer than ten words.  Don't sell the kids short.  "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" each have twice that.  The services are not nearly as long, particularly in the morning, as attendance totals less than 20 men.  The women at our congregation have their own Torah reading, though no single woman can read more than one aliyah.  Even Creation is divided among seven readers.

I am left with a lifetime of progressive atrophy, multifaceted affecting interest, ability, and challenge to excel.  Instead we get by ritually and have replaced solidarity with our Soviet brethren with a mere chewy caramel apple replacing the one with the red hard shell as the highlight of attendance.  We have attrition over my lifetime.  We deserve it.  To what extent I contributed to what is clearly a sour attitude, we can explore, I suppose.