Next Holiday: Thanksgiving

My two favorite holidays, Pesach and Thanksgiving, center around elaborate dinners.  Most people think that it's the people gathering around the tables that make the festivities, but the last few years have posed a few challenges.  Toxic divisive public figures promoting confrontation bring people seeking confrontation to those dinner tables.  The holidays reflect a different view but the people who I would ordinarily invite are steadfast, so like many of us I have to choose between people and holiday.  For Pesach I've chosen people, for Thanksgiving I've chosen holiday.  While animosities can be set aside, justified disrespect has this aftertaste.  The purpose of gathering around our table must advance the holiday.  When it undermines it, the holiday stays, the people are sent into exile to repackage their own holidays.  Not a whole lot different than Hagar and Ishmael being unfriended or Lot selecting Sodom for its bounty.  They'll claim their turf. I won't challenge theirs but I will defend the sanctity of mine.

Covid changes the reality as well.  The risk of travel, particularly by car, may exceed the risk of hospitalization or death from the virus.  Travel we are used to and accept the risk, a lethal virus in our midst seems less acceptable.  My dinner table can be adapted to fewer people very easily.

So I'm back to food, though not exactly food as much as the pleasure I get from designing the meal and assembling it.  I've been through recipes, some familiar, some a new adventure.  That glorious roast turkey which can be eaten to gluttony, segmented for guests to take a portion home for shabbos the next evening, with a remaining carcass for soup later has given way to the more practical half turkey breast.  It is easy to prepare, though this year I think I will use a thermometer instead of depending on my timer.  I like crock pot stuffing but my crock pot lid needs replacement.  A barley kugel looks like the way to go.  For a salad, red cabbage and pears.  I hesitated on my preferred recipe as it calls for small amounts of port and red wine, but I can drink whatever we have leftover a little at a time.  Sweet potatoes have not yet gone on sale.  I have a recipe for a baked givetch vegetable medley.  And my synagogue assembled a cookbook about 20 years ago that offers a few cranberry options.  For dessert, something I've made before, a cranberry apple oatmeal torte.  And I think I'll try making some minestrone soup.

So the people have lost their centerpiece, replaced by my creativity and dedication.

Unexpected Repairs

There is a reason why we retirement geezers find our fondness to our homes and communities fraying as we age.  In my home, I work at my desk and sit in my recliner next to the desk essentially daily, watch the big screen TV most days, though my interest has been waning.  I use about half the bedroom and the adjacent bathroom.  In the living room I recline on the couch.  Fleishig is eaten at the dining room table.  The Family Room has a nook for my treadmill, to which I have been faithful to a set schedule.  I do my laundry when it needs to be done, use the powder room when I am downstairs, and regard my upgraded kitchen as a destination.  Parts of the house that I don't use comprises a lot more floor space.  Could duplicate all with 2 bedroom condo, though a little tight with a mobile home.  Stuff not used goes to yard sale.  I'm not the first senior to think of this.  And then there is where.  I like where I am.  State of Delaware may need to rename itself from The First State to Conscience of America as our voting pattern was one of the few to reflect concern for Derech Eretz and kindness in a meaningful way.  But having driven through Trump pockets of three states this month, there is something appealing about their spread out nature with space between neighbors. Rhetoric about protecting us from those neighbors, or from the people like me from elsewhere has less appeal.

But changing housing and location by seniors also suggests that time to be Lord of the Manor has come and gone.  I have a nice yard, but it wouldn't be a nice yard without a lawn service.  I do the garden myself, never taking a disappointing harvest that could have been improved with better attentiveness as a personal failure.  But as my FB friends nudge themselves to city condos or planned 55+ communities, it seems less about space and more about divesting themselves of maintenance responsibilities.

Got an unexpected jolt of kitchen maintenance last night.  To manage a Kosher kitchen amid my interest in using the kitchen, I needed more easily accessible storage space than my cabinets had available.  Many years ago I found a pair of wire grids at a small department store, long since defunct, and installed them on a dominant wall.  Using S-hooks one became fleishig, the other milchig. It remained static and trouble free for decades.  When I remodelled the kitchen I took them down to enable new wallpaper, but the brackets back in the original holes and reattached the grids.  It took minutes.  Suddenly my wife comes upstairs late at night to inform me that the fleishig side had collapsed, scattering pots and pans everywhere.  On inspection, there was surprisingly little serious damage.  One of the screws holding the upper left bracket had dislodged.  I figured an easy repair, just insert a plastic anchor and screw the bracket back on.  However, the plastic anchor did not go into the hole evenly.  When I tried to hammer it in a little farther the bracket that held the grid snapped so I would need new brackets.  Finding one proved impossible, both at local big box and hardware stores and and online.  Instead I got a new set, one with premade drywall anchors and installed those, but in order to do that I had to hunt my basement for a drill and a 0.25 inch bit.  Not as easy as it looks but done and should be adequately secure.

And it's leaf time.  The bane of my existence in my young parent years.  Delegated in my empty nester years.  Need to clean gutters too.  Reputable contractor came, gave an estimate for about twice what I think it should cost.  Thanked him for coming by then got more estimates, settling on one from somebody we hire for other outdoor things for $200 less.  

And there is all that stuff that will one day find its way to a clean-out service which parcels some to an auctioneer for the estate sale, the rest to landfill, and the structure to a realtor, all to do what may have been better to do myself while I still had the vitality to do it.

The rack has been rehung.  Not exactly what it was before but serviceable.  There is some cleanup in its wake to restore the kitchen to its previous function.  Just need to set my timer to the estimated time needed and do it. 

The question of setting an endpoint for these responsibilities drifts along, to be reconsidered at the next event.

Three Punks of Yore

It's been a tough political cycle with no end in sight.  Everyone who faces opposition puts on their armor, bears a grudge.  We saw mobs descend on the opposition's vehicles and attempt intimidation with a real or at least credible threat of violence.  One of my most respected authors, a journalist by profession, Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press issued an editorial on election day that came to my local newspaper post-election day, pre Presidential determination, that the results don't matter if the behavior remains static.  https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2020/11/01/mitch-albom-2020-presidential-election/6102179002/

As I looked at hoodlums in the making, I thought back to the punks of my own teen years coming up with three who literally attacked me, something of a nebbish that perfect target that any worthy predator could pounce.  None got reported though one would have been had I needed medical care for the three fingers he hyperextended.  I let the torn shirt go.  Generally reporting as a victim made you an easy target.  We have that today when women in our Orthodox communities seek their Rebbe's guidance on spousal abuse.  Usual question, what did you do to provoke him?  No, in the absence of needing medical care, none got reported.

It's now more than a half century later, more than ample time to assess outcome.  Mine has been pretty good, stable career, nimble mind, stable family, nachas from children.  As I drove around Trump Country on two day trips pre-election, looking at the election signs on the lawns and farms, it was obvious that my personal and usually financial assets exceeded theirs.  Any good Social Darwinist can make that assessment.

I didn't know how the three teens, two classmates, one from an organization, who actually attacked me fared.  One seemed superficially respectable, the other two had their daily attendance taken in the principal's office instead of the homeroom.

Those same fifty years allowed electronic retrieval systems and cataloguing people, mostly for free and usually with little effort.  None of the three had ultra-common names so name and estimated age made identification easy.  Two of the three had obits, one more a death notice with burial site. 

The first actually made a friendly overture to me later. He had some psychological problems but it would take me through my medical school psychiatry rotation to be able to define people like that with better specificity than just not right.  He physically harmed me but was physically and to a lesser extent verbally aggressive in our encounters.  He was about my weight, muscular, pinning me faster than a prom queen in a legitimate gym class wrestling module.  But he was volatile.  He lived to his mid-40's, lies for eternity at a veteran's cemetery in California with a notation that he served during the Vietnam conflict.  There are no notations of what he achieved or cause of death at a young age.  I also came across a far more detailed obit of his mother who lived to age 97.  She sounded like a sweetie.  Her son was named as pre-deceasing her.  She had several children and worked as a waitress at a time when mothers tended to stay home or do teaching or nursing.  I suspect that finances may have been strained.  This son must have been a handful in the days before the principals or deans of discipline could set their phones to speed dial selected parents.

Second person from school is still alive.  He is identified by Google searches which lead to directories rather than individual entries that mark his achievements in business or identify him as a property owner or even a linkedin occupational entry.  He has lived in a lot of places, none for very long.  And he does not seem to settle in major population centers. I did not check any of the geographic identifications to see which have a correctional center.  Of note, when the search scans for court contacts, they identify that there are 19 records.  Were I willing to pay a fee the search site would identify them, but I had no inclination to spend money on this.  I would be a little critical of our HS Reunion 50 year committee for not taking the initiative to pursue his whereabouts and contact, along with most others whose location capture would not come passively.  If they are alive, they probably had some relations more endearing than the one with me.  I never wore the torn shirt again.  My mother never asked how it got torn.  And within two days I had full recovery of range of motion to the hyperextended fingers without needing xray, immobilization, or analgesics.  There was something wrong with him, but even as an alumnus of our psychiatry course, I cannot identify what.

Our final acquaintance was a hellion, a generally hostile person who strived for dominance but lacked the social skills to gain acceptance voluntarily.  Hostility to me was pretty much every encounter, laying of the hands only twice that I remember, at least one provoked .  By age 15 he was already a smoker, either a quest for attention or social acceptance in those days, but at age 15 still a measure of deviance.  Since we went to different schools, my summer with him ended, but I remembered his name and what he did to me indefinitely.  He didn't have a terrible outcome.  Eventually he married in his hometown of Suffern.  He had served in the military and had a stable family.  He also had an identifiable occupation.  Settling in Pennsylvania, one of the parts that doesn't vote like me, he worked in quarries as the guy who hosed down the fiery rocks, which I assume is part of the extraction process.  He lived to his early 60's, wife predeceasing him by a few years, and with children survivors.  Certainly within the mainstream at the end, though a troubled beginning.  The Army still has a way of making people responsible.  We read about veterans who remain aimless after their service, but this fellow of unstable and volatile underpinnings seemed to have lived a mainstream adult life.  

In the fifty or so years since they threatened or in one case physically harmed me, I did not think about them but never forgot their names.  As I see their next generation banding together to intimidate, I am grateful that these three acted mostly alone, I think, to identify a vulnerable target, maybe many, though not as a mob.  Today, would I report it?  Victims of bullying are treated more sympathetically now and the bullies are offered assessment in addition to punishment, so probably yes.  As an experienced physician, I regret not having my hand x rayed, though it would not have shown a fracture.  A medical exam might generate an MRI with identification of injury.  Had it not been self-limited over a few days, medical care and report of an attack would have been mandatory.  Do I hold any personal animosity? No.  Do I gloat in any way that my outcome surpassed theirs?  No, I would have expected that.

But the punks now are more threatening than these three turned out to be.  And my prediction for their long term underperformance runs parallel to the three outcomes Google searches have revealed for me.

New Friends Amid Covid-19

Making friends was among my semi-annual initiatives, something pursued half-heartedly.  Ordinarily friends evolve from direct personal contact.  You join an organization, select somebody from it, share a joint project, have coffee or come over for dinner.  Facebook creates the illusion of friends, people who are really contacts, people who express themselves but never really converse. Osher Institute's value for seniors like me has been to create personal immersion as will as challenging intellect.  There are chairs in the lounges, round cafeteria tables far too large to eat alone at peak times.  Yet, there is also a book on one of my college reading lists called The Lonely Crowd.  It reviewed the evolution of the other-directed person, one who buys what is advertised, votes with the majority, attends religious gatherings more for the comradery than the elevation of inner spirit.  This has dominated culture but at the price of inner development.  Personal friendships offer a bridge between conformity to achieve acceptance and the development of inner strength that justifies the friendship.

Covid-19 has forced social distance, with a screen via Facebook or Zoom as a rather poor surrogate.  Ideas in real time get exchanged. but not as immediate verbal offer and respond.  Interactions via classes or seminars are structured.  We can drink coffee while we are doing this, but we cannot share coffee.  Attending Holy Day services and one shabbat service in person affirmed that the formality could be preserved but it also exposed the importance of kiddush or brief agenda-free chats while walking to our cars.  We still encounter cashiers in the stores, maybe medical staff when we get seriously ill, but rarely peers.  We have become The Lonely Crowd.

Mincha? Not My First Choice

It's been an ambivalent relationship with my synagogue, which reflects a great deterioration from the enthusiasm of arrival and many elements of participation and contribution in the ensuing 23 years.  But this week, for the month of November which has 30 days, I declared them Snoozed in the manner of Facebook.  The monthly bulletin arrived in the mail yesterday.  Headline, breaking news, they established an outdoor Covid compatible Mincha service once a week.  Flashback of Hebrew school where we also did mincha.  Of all that Judaism puts on the menu I don't think I would select abbreviated worship as a focus, whether it would be Zoom Hallel on a day when Hallel isn't recited in anticipation of a day when it is, a parsha class where people take turns reading from the portion, and other expressions of group mediocrity.

None of this engages me for a number of reasons.  I had no role in its design or in any decisions.  When the various Nominating Committees meet, they have vacancies on the slates.  Not being invited, the logical conclusion is that Nobody would be a better congregational asset than me.  There are committees.  We even have a list of them published every Yom Kippur.  I have never seen a committee report since I was last on one some time ago, have no idea if they meet, if the chairman has invited anyone on it, if their are agenda items other than repeating what was done before.  Institutionalized mediocrity, expected by the increasingly inbred governance, and not challenged in any visible way by the Rabbi who presides over a dwindling unengaged membership.  And to be blunt, with a measure of resentment on my part.

Easy to kvetch, particularly when I have no influence on outcome. A little harder to replace what is there with something better.  No, I don't want to go to Mincha in a parking lot or recited Hallel from the screen.  Neither do most people which the Zoom attendance tallies or the size of the gathering in the parking lot attest.  The congregation, ours or any other, is about getting people to identify with it.  Making it a restaurant where people read from a menu and select will send it the way of other restaurants dropping like flies in a Covid era.  It's about interaction, it's about writing the menu, it's about that invitation to a seat at the table and solicitation of your thoughts once seated there.

This has been created in the past.  In my childhood shul, the Rabbi would invited kids returning from college break to his living room.  No planned lectures, just a few questions opened to the group and conversations.  Real conversations, not a line of people waiting for their two minutes at the microphone like our meetings.  Our congregation has had brainstorming sessions modeled after a DuPont idea mining process.  People were discussing what they thought.  No designated leaders.  Everyone had their seat at the table.  It is that table that needs construction, not another trough nailed together by people of title to fill with what they think everyone else will immerse their snouts into.  The members have decided that about 15 of them will want to be there for mincha, at least a third of them the designers of that mincha.  

If there were a Covid friendly chat room with a subject, I might go.  Assign Board Members to man it at designated times.  If there were online Rabbi Office Hours, might attendance exceed what mincha in the parking lot generates?  And why mincha or any other Hebrew School surrogate?  Why not shabbos?  That why not has disappeared for congregational conversation.

But for now, being on the periphery when there should be no periphery, Snooze Congregation for 30 Days at least gives me a chance to intercept my own response to what has become an increasing unwelcome experience that needs a better alternative.  And the alternatives are out there, but generally external to the business as usual ruts the Executive Committee and Rabbi seem to find comfortable.

National Park Maybe

I've been an enthusiast of America's National Parks since I first made Zion and Bryce a destination.  Once I became eligible, for $10 as an entry level Senior, I purchased my Park Pass which has gotten me to Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and Rocky Mountain Parks.  All spectacular.  I've only been to one eastern park, Shenandoah which I visited as a side trip from Charlottesville.  I'm sure it was more spectacular than I realized, though travel limited to the Skyline Drive main road and few minor offshoots.  No mammals seen, don't even remember road kill.  It had been my intent to detour from St. Louis to Mammoth Cave last year, a project undermined by airline delays that made a long round trip unrealistic.

It's time to go again, so much so that I designated it a semi-annual initiative, even amid Covid-19 restrictions.  These parks are big.  Having the summer depleted, I can no longer head north to Isle Royale or Acadia.  There are some southeastern options.  Mammoth Cave is a little farther than I want to drive.  Great Smokies seems the closest beyond Shenandoah, about a 10 hour drive.  It is the most visited of the National Parks, but seems a lot like Shenandoah.  It was cobbled together by mass purchase of farmland or privately held forests.  There are hotels nearby and side trips to either Asheville or Knoxville, in different directions, that have a few attractions of their own.  This seemed the best option.

However, I looked at the Everglades, which I have seen from the air.  It's geography is less familiar to me, wildlife easier to find, Florida weather has an advantage over the Appalachians in December.  After checking on logistics, airfare and hotels are far less expensive than I would have predicted for Florida in their high season.  Being economically dependent on snowbirds and other tourism, they must have taken a very big hit from the virus.  The hotels are a bit farther from the park than those of Great Smokies.  Still there is a lot more to do in Florida than in North Carolina at the onset of winter.  I even know people who live within a drive of there, though I don't know about the willingness of old friends to have people stop by, even with precautions.  

Given the options, I'm leaning toward the Everglades, but will see if anyone else has experience with these two parks and their surroundings.

Roaming the Costco Aisles

My wallet contains an expired Costco card which gets me through the door but not to the checkout line.  When I had my own medical practice, I paid extra for a premium membership which qualified me for their credit card services.  After leaving, reduced my membership to standard every two years.  I needed bifocals and Costco's Optical Department was the best option for bypassing an Italian Mamzer who cornered the lens market, inflating prices and not really disclosing what he actually controlled.  So it was one year on, one year off.  The savings on the bifocals would more than offset the membership fee.  And I took advantage of it.  There were a lot of good buys at Costco, which must be run by college psych majors who know how to generate wants.  This was a bifocals renewal year but the prescription change was small enough and my need to enjoy maximum visual acuity in retirement did not justify the expense.  But I needed my eyeglass frames refitted so I went. 

Not having an active card defined me as a window shopper.  I'm not much for prestige items.  Have enough TV's.  Mattress OK.  As much as I covet those high end gas ranges that the professional cooks have, I don't need one, especially when it means getting a plumber to run pipe from my gas furnace into the kitchen.  But there are petty indulgences.  Cookware, maybe an indulgent office chair, always clothing that I might buy out of artificial want more than need.

And I like specialty food.  Cheeses with acceptable hechshers.  Gravlax.  I didn't see any herring this time but didn't do a thorough search.  Frozen kosher tiramisu, I assume still in the freezer section which I did not explore. Their warehouse sized bags of kettle chips which I've banned from my house.  Don't know what I would have gotten today with an active card.  Better off without an active card.