Addressing our Anti-Semitic Reality

These have not been two optimal years for Jewish Americans.  Hatred of Jews as people who stay separate dates back perhaps to Pharaoh, who addressed his perception of our communal power by implementing a slavery system, one created by our own successful immigrant ancestor Joseph.  Most of our history has us as a successful subset within a larger dominant population.  We created internal institutions in response to our circumstances.  Places of worship, a religious court system for internal disputes, economic wealth, enduring literature, effective educational systems.  Selected individuals or families would periodically gain prominence amid the majority culture.  But we experienced expulsions and massacres when prevailing cultural values shifted.

While America affords Jewish people our free exercise of religion, recently individual intruders have entered sacred spaces or targeted individuals at worship.  My congregation, and most others, have entrance monitors, often in police uniform, limiting access.  Doors are heavier, reinforced, and fitted with locks to enhance security.  We have had drills during worship, guiding us through a safety procedure for an active assailant.  When I travel, I email my intent to attend a synagogue as a visitor.  I miss the more open-door era, one where a synagogue welcomed all comers without challenge. Though my personal encounters as a Jewish target have been nil, I know people who were victims, including the doctor killed at Tree of  Life.

The American Jewish Committee released the results of its survey on anti-Semitism, seeking opinions of Jews and a broad representative sampling of Americans.  I was one of the Jews surveyed.  I do not recall my individual responses. There seems to be not only more American anti-Semitism, but it has been repackaged as anti-Zionism. And they know who the Zionists are and how to recognize us.  Have I ever personally experienced an incident?  No.  Or really Not Yet.  Do I behave differently?  In a minor way.  When I keep my tallis bag on the back seat of my car, I place it with the Jewish insignia side face down on the cushion.  Anyone passing by can only see a maroon velvet pouch.  I still wear my kippah wherever I want.  While I conceal my tallis bag to protect my insurance carrier, who would have to pay a vandalism claim, I do not hide my person.  If I need to wear my kippah, indeed want to wear my kippah, I do it without reservation.  Most of my sports coats have a lapel pin with American and Israeli flags adjacent to each other.  I've never been challenged, even at receptions where people in the gathering might start taunting me if I wore the same jacket to a university campus.  

I adamantly control my social media platforms, divesting myself of most of them.  As I try to be helpful to the participants of the r/Judaism forum, younger people post their own harrowing experiences pretty much daily.  They know no life without Facebook and its competitors.  Divesting carries a price for many.  Or maybe Twitter is the new nicotine, an intervention designed by experts to create and exploit addiction.  None of this will predictably ease off.  "Doc, they are tormenting me.  They have to change."  The introduction to many a Dear Therapist query.  And any skilled psychologist would advise that you only have the ability to change how you respond.  The discussion in the Jewish community has shifted to a blend of personal responses and communal responses to an adversity that, over a short time, has established a measure of predictability.

Our advocates exist, amassing ample resources and expertise.  I attended a local seminar, a class for seniors via Zoom at my state university.  The guest speaker was the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.  As she used her time to extol her organization's legacy and educational efforts to minimize anti-Semitism, two questions from the electronic audience stayed with me.  One viewer asked something to the effect of, "if you are so good at this and have been doing it for a hundred years, why haven't your results been better than what we encounter?"  Her agency and another of similar mission had each named new directors.  The previous CEOs had been statesmen of long tenure.  The new heads came from Democratic Party high profile backgrounds.  A Zoom viewer asked her how that shift from diplomacy to political bona fides had changed the agencies.  She did not have an answer to either question that would satisfy a room of retired successful professionals and executives.  Maybe they aren't so good at it.  Maybe our philanthropic representatives have tunnel vision.  Maybe they own the approaches that created their comfort zones.  That online meeting took place during the Covid pandemic, 2000 when people could no longer meet in a classroom or auditorium, places where we could poke the guy in the next seat to express our skepticism as the speaker displayed her Power Point Slides.  In the ensuing five years, we are now back in person, to be harassed as Jews even more mercilessly, both in person and through our electronic global media.

People in that audience and much of the American Jewish public have been through college.  We took courses in psychology and sociology, some requiring independent term papers.  Many of us have careers where we had to assess what the public might find appealing and what they would reject.  We assess efficacy commonly in our business activities, the medicines the doctors among us prescribe, how well our elected officials perform.  Failures and rebound are part of our experience, part of Jewish communal resilience that we grasp as our heritage.  If pouring massive donor funds into educational programs leaves us worse off, it does not take a lot of saichel to explore other options.  But that might mean schecting some very Sacred Cows.  One that cannot be removed is the centrality of Israel to our Jewish narrative.  It appeared in our daily prayers for all the centuries when we lacked sovereignty.  With sovereignty, we made that territory prosperous.  Ownership cannot be negotiated away.  Conquest has been attempted.  We not only have economic prosperity through effort but and effective military as a high priority of that sovereignty.

As Americans, we watch mostly from afar.  Like the Israelis, American Jews have built an imposing presence from very little, but mostly through a combination of staying within the bounds of American rules.  NY Times editor Bret Stephens recently offered an assessment of the situation.  In his highly publicized presentation, he basically advocated writing off the anti-Semites and anti-Zionists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QMTjVuo9dE  The communal parallel to putting our own masks on first in popular American travel culture.  We've already done the experiment.  Major cities have hospitals with Jewish names that medical students rank as top choices for their residencies.  They exist from an era when Jewish doctors of similar talent could not get appointments at the flagship university centers.  Our mega law firms carry the names of Jewish founders, as do brokerage firms.  People seek out entertainment of Jewish creation.  Cities have Jewish museums, or even secular ones with wings named after Jewish donors.  His theme, we have the talent, we have the track record of offering opportunities to Jewish people when others begrudged us.  More controversial than strengthening our own offerings to our people, was his suggestion to use the resources from ineffective, futile efforts to marginalize anti-Semitism through public education to expand our own communal growth.

Are we ready to write off our most enduring advocacy groups as ineffective?  Perhaps not.  While anti-Semitism in America, from tacit slurs to deadly shootings, has not disappeared, it was also those agencies that helped bring us entry beyond the niches we created for ourselves into the mainstream.  Jews have representation today in those academic centers, international corporations, and private clubs that once impeded our access.  Making anti-Semitism disappear through education may be a financial boondoggle.  Keeping us mainstream and prosperous, the people that other groups may envy as they promote their own prosperity gospels, still has immense importance.  Making Jew hatred less publicly acceptable remains a laudable undertaking.  Holocaust programs in public schools, Jewish donor names on cultural magnets, and public rallies have not accomplished this.  One track might be to see what efforts have better efficacy.  Faculty at several highly respected universities now have departments that study which initiatives have the most impact.

Ultimately, The Times editor set a correct priority.  The successes that Jews have had in America came from projects of self-help.  Seminaries, summer camps, Jewish schools from pre-school to university, synagogues based on denominational structure, publications of superior quality issued to Jewish audiences, Workmen's Circles at a time when Jewish laborers had vulnerability.  Some thrive today, others succeeded so well as to make their continuance obsolete. He suggested day schools as a foundation, which nobody would dispute.  But within the structure that we have now, a Big Tent model, not everyone finds a welcome.  We have significant attrition, too much of it for adverse experience or other cause.  We have to take great pains not to target our own as expendable, or worse, unworthy. 

What the editor did not include in his remarks is the untapped public goodwill that already exists.  Isolation with internal development offers a lot, but partnerships need a place in the communal agenda.  Can we make anti-Semitism crawl back under the rocks?  Our global platforms, where any malcontent can post with little adverse consequence and find adherents in the thousands makes that unlikely.  Refocus our resources, for sure.  Treat everyone as valuable no matter how challenging, a bit more of a project but within possibility.  Think fundamentally differently than a one-hundred-year ingrained legacy, big challenge.  Possible, high payoff.  High priority.  

OLLI Resumes

My senior program follows our state university's undergraduate calendar.  They afford their students a substantial winter break, enough weeks to do some serious traveling or volunteering.  These weeks also permit the senior division to hold minicourses, usually weekly for a few sessions, invariably online.  I have never attended, prefering control of my unscheduled weeks, usually with a few days travel.

But as Phil the Groundhog made his annual winter prediction, our classes reassembled.  My preferences did not go as well as last time.  Closed out of a course on enhancing drawing skills.  Closed out of a course on baseball that I would have liked to take.  Accepted to a course on what I thought was Guitar for Beginners.  It turned out to require a level of pre-requisite skill that not only did I not have but could not reasonably catch up on my own.  In the past I've only dropped one course, driven by disdain for the experience with the professor.  I will need to drop this one to make room for somebody else.

That leaves me with four classes, three in person lasting the full semester, the fourth by Zoom the second half.  All take place late morning, which allows me to complete treadmill exercise before heading off without having to modify my customary time or reduced a few minutes from a session.  

I drove to my first class.  Since the school's first time slot had gone to its midpoint when I arrived at the campus, I expected to find myself needing to park in an overflow lot.  There turned out to be ample spaces where I've parked in the past, though the handicap-designated lot adjacent to mine seemed full.  I pulled into a space a little farther from the entrance tha the specific space I seek out when I arrive for the early session, but not that many extra steps.  Usually, I take a thermos of coffee, but opted not to.  They offer coffee, but require students to bring their own insulated mugs.  Mine do not fit beneath the Keurig's dispensing mechanism, so when I take coffee, I make it at home.

Not many people in the lobby when I entered.  Tom the Officer who makes sure the  students, the frail elderly and more sturdy like me, make it across the roadway safely, must have been reassigned.  I walked inside.  Bitterly cold weather, though probably a few degrees warmer than what Phil the Groundhog encountered at dawn a hundred miles north of us, caused us to dress warmly.  I replaced my beanie cap and fleece gloves into the coat, pocket, hung it on a hook on the coatrack, then picked up my ID tag.  They changed the format slightly.  While I have lanyards from previous years, I took a new one.  The plastic sleeve that accepts the name tag now clips to the lanyard.  I found the previous safety pin unreliable.  Mine and many others would slip off, causing the lost and found employee in the office to chase a fair number of us down to return what had dropped onto their floors.  I think the current plastic clip will perform better.

Not many people in the lobby when I arrived, but morning classes were still in progress.  Once they let out, the central area filled with people.  Likely a mixture of those departing from their class, new people like me awaiting their first session, and a fair number who enrolled in two classes that morning. 

Still nearly a half-hour before my class would begin.  I sat in the library which has the most comfortable chairs for a few minutes.  Often I would stroll outside on the patio, sometimes venturing beyond to the small collection of gardens.  They had one doorway blocked off.  I do not know if their security staff thought the outdoors too icy for seniors.  The chill itself seemed adequate deterrent.  Instead, I traversed the lower atrium, then took the elevator to the second floor where my class would meet.  Chairs lined the upper corridor, many occupied.  I looked for an empty room with desks to maybe sit down and write.  None empty.  As I poked around, a former professor who ran a very worthy course, stood at the entrance to his assigned classroom greeting the new students entering.  We recognized each other.  Despite our name tags, I addressed him as Reverend, he called me Doctor.  His class would be new to him, but still philosophically based.  He opted for a short textbook rather than a series of Great Courses CDs, which have come to dominate many of the live OLLI sessions.  Some current students entered.  I moved along to my class, treating myself to a few moments in a chair in the hall before taking my seat in the classroom.

This professor had quite a lot of experience as a senior health care manager, just right for his course on American healthcare.  We received a list of topics for each lecture.  And for the most part, that's what they are, with selected audiovisual supplements.  The class engaged with each other about half the session.  I left content that at least one class will go well, after a few iffy offerings the previous semester.

Following the class, I walked downstairs, then across the parking lot to my car.  No problems exiting.  I could have driven home but opted to dirvert to the supermarket for a few staples.  Then home.  It had been a gratifying morning.

Making Dinner at Home

Every day I make an effort to read an article in The Atlantic.  I have a paid subscription, selected a few years ago.  The choices tend to be top-heavy with political themes, many reasonably compatible with my own world view, often assessing the boundaries of propriety.  Those are sometimes what I read.  More often though, I select the daily reading outside the political realm.  One on the evolution of family supper caught my eye.  My supper has evolved considerably over my lifetime, though not in parallel with the historical approach taken by the author.

 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/10/work-its-whats-for-dinner/599770/

Currently, American adults span a lot of variants.  I am an empty-nester couple.  My son is a well-paid professional with homemaker wife and infant child.  My daughter is a single mother with an infant child on maternity leave.  I live in suburbia; they live in central cities.  I have great fondness for my kitchen and what it enables me to do. So does my son, though he lives a brief stroll from a street with five restaurants on each block, all of which will deliver.  Other than an occasional pizza delivery, I've never ordered a prepared meal delivered to my home, let alone the ingredients to make it myself.  As a kosher consumer, my options center around availability.

In childhood, my home in the 1960s had a nuclear family.  Wage earner father, homemaker mother who took charge of meals.  We also had kosher takeout as a treat, living in an area of many kosher homes. Mother shopped, made supper, which we mostly ate together, though that was also the era of TV dinners consumed on snack tables in the family room. Supermarkets had far fewer selections than the megamarts of today. In that era, a few families became unexpectedly wealthy, or, more accurately, high-income from salary or commissions.  When profiled, they seemed to select eating out more as their reward for more discretionary income.  We rarely ate out, other than an occasional pizza or going out for ice cream.

College brought me mostly to student cafeterias.  In medical school I had an apartment with a kitchen.  Studies took a lot out of me.  Not having a car my first two years limited what I could obtain from a supermarket, though that expanded greatly in my more mobile junior and senior years.  I ate supper with other classmates at an affiliated hospital the first two years, then mostly my own kitchen.  Restaurants were rare, but not absent.  I took a particular liking to a vegetarian place near my apartment, often a Shabbos dinner treat.  

Upon marriage to a graduate student shortly after receiving my degree and beginning residency, her university offered us a small apartment with a kitchen nook.  I had income for the first time, not a lot but mine.  The major university sat near trendy shops.  In my wife's years there, she had collected her favorites, still within an easy walk from university housing.  Her schedule being more predictable than mine, she handled meal preparation, but I did the shopping as the one with the car.  Meals became hybrid, our kitchen mostly, a favorite evening out once or twice a week, depending on my call schedule.  My final year and beyond to me to apartments and soon a house with real kitchens and much less convenient access to alternative places to eat.  My schedule and my wife's had some predictability.  By necessity, she got a car.  Our two children arrived, changing meal responsibilities.  

Though our circumstances changed, so did the world around us. A few entrepreneurial types saw the opportunities that dual-income couples with much of their days out of their personal control might bring.  We never sought fast food, but casual eateries, Sunday brunches, pizza chains, and eventually brew pubs became part of our supper options, though we never compromised on eating as a family.  We made few exceptions.  Having to tend to critical patients or late consults sometimes kept me away.  Kids had rare school activities that kept them from our supper table, whether at home or an evening out.  Supper had been allocated as the time when we assembled, as it is today.  When we visit our children in different cities, supper remains communal in their homes.

As my children progressed through childhood and beyond, not only did options of where to eat expand, but what could be accomplished in my own kitchen also evolved.  I took a liking to preparing meals, designing from simple weeknight to elegant Seder for many.  Borders Book Store z"l had endless books on their discount tables that I purchased.  Cable TV entered my home during the 1980s.  I gravitated to the Cooking Channel or Food TV.  In its early days, the shows demonstrated master chefs or food journalists helping interested folks like me to get more creative and proficient.  The endless competitions that replaced them would not come until much later.  The internet brought food sites, Kosher and beyond, all searchable by menu, cuisine, ingredient, though they did not make cookbooks with explanatory chapters obsolete.  Meals became a gathering time, but also a challenge to assemble and satisfying when done.  Convenience came later, but I had already spurned fast food.  As my skill and interest in making my own meals expanded, and they kids moved to adulthood, the need to delegate meal preparation to somebody else largely disappeared.  And the few places I sought out, largely brew pubs, have gone bust.

Meals today for me, now a Senior, remain a home obligation.  My wife and me, who even in retirement spend our daylight hours pursuing our individual interests, eat together.  I do not have snack tables to eat while watching TV.   Indeed, as televisions have gotten grander and less expensive, and channel options exploded, my wife and I watch different televisions with very different shows.  But we assemble for supper, which I prepare most nights.  I shop for ingredients at a megamart and at Trader Joe's. I know I will need to have something a little special each Shabbos.  When I shop, I look for things that make easy weeknight meals.  Garden Burgers, pasta that can be boiled and doused with jarred marinara sauce and sautéed vegetables,  potatoes white and sweet that can get shoved into an oven with an hour's neglect, frozen soups that heat in boiling water, tomatoes or cucumbers for slicing, vegetables that can heat in boiling water.  I rarely depend on a microwave. Each night we have an entrée, a starch, and a vegetable of some type.  Rarely wine or soda.  Occasionally beer for me.  Simple meals, occasionally elaborate with guests.  Always with my wife.  She's the centerpiece.

So, as The Atlantic essay noted, meal patterns have varied with technology, culture, and personal obligations.  While mine have taken a trajectory over time and circumstance, it was not that large a trajectory.  My household's supper still has elements of my childhood suppers but its share of advancements.  What we eat has shifted in small ways.  Who shares the table and which table really has not.

Choosing Paid Substacks

Creative, learned people abound.  At one time, they competed with each other for space in publications.  Many make their living from what they write, so the sponsoring magazine either hired them on a salary or paid them by the piece.  Advertising subsidized the publisher who saw content as some blend of mission, resource, and expense.  A consumer like me would either subscribe to the publication for an annual fee or head over to the library's magazine section to browse their collection.  

Electronic distribution of what is basically intellectual property has upended this tradition, both for creators and for consumers.  An era not very long ago attracted bloggers, mostly amateurs like me, who got intrinsic satisfaction from what we could put out for readers, but generated no money.  The pros, people of real expertise either as journalists covering a specific area, professional writers, or think tank experts not only needed a forum but a means of generating revenue from their knowledge.  Thus, we now have Substack, a forum where people or groups become entrepreneurs, selling their own subscriptions to their content.  As much as I like reading many of these, the market seems flooded.  With an annual subscription to each running about $80, a certain amount of selectivity is needed.  That sum not only offers content but the ability to interact as a reader.  Many have become echo chambers, pitching ideologies mostly parallel to what the sponsor promotes.  Those subscriptions might be better spent on authors whose views expand your own rather than validating personal beliefs.  

Many, if not most, of the popular authors have kept their salaried positions.  I need access to very few, if any.  Their Substack sites mostly do not have exclusivity of what they put forth to the public.  So what the subscriber seems to be purchasing is membership in a community as much as enlightenment from the sponsor's ideas.

At present, I pay for one, $5/month, for which I get two articles each week and a chance to express myself.  I think I would be willing to purchase one more at a similar or slightly higher price.  I've already let one subscription lapse, one of the most widely subscribed to Substacks.  What was promoted as independent journalism became one more echo chamber.  With the many out there, I still look at the selection much the way I would in a public library's magazine nook.  Take a few issues, read them.  Subscribe to two, both with multiple contributors.  While the interactive feature attracts me, and has added immensely to the one subscription that I have, I rarely read other readers' thoughts.  Perhaps I've become jaded by open cesspools like Twitter.  There is much to be said for having an editor to screen what others get to read.  In another era, not too long ago, many newspapers had open comment forums, mostly now eliminated by experienced editors opting to have no comments rather than unscreened toxic ones.

Most internet forums have undergone some revisions in the two decades that everyone has had access to unlimited platforms.  Some would classify as enhancements, others as descents.  I would predict that as much as learned people should be able to make a few shekels distributing their thoughts, the price requires considerable selectivity for who to read regularly.  I'm not yet ready to move beyond the single subscription that I have now.

Tabulating Expenses

While an Osher Institute course on Excel did not materially advance my skills, its basic addition and searching capacity have enabled me to get control of my finances.  Good fortune has left me very comfortable on the resources side.  Still, I watch what I spend, though pay a financial advisor to watch what my wife and I invest.

Every month on or about the 20th, I go through bank and credit card statements.  Each expense has a category, though for individual outlays, the best classification can be debated.  If I eat out at home, it's Eat Out.  If I eat out on a trip, it's Travel.  Gas fill ups at home are Gas, while staying at a hotel away, it is Travel, whether I drove my car or a rental.  Tolls are Travel irrespective of where they occur.   Comcast's monthly fee gets called entertainment, even though the internet does not often amuse, the land line gets paid in that bill, and we get TV service.  It makes it appear that I entertain myself more than I really do.  Health insurance gets logged separately from auto and home and life.  I do my best to keep the compromises consistent.  

As I log each individual expense each month, I note which are on autopay.  It's quite a lot.  No insurance premium or utility bill will get overlooked that way.  Credit card payments also get taken out of my checking account automatically, though each card's carrier gives me a heads up a few days before.  My Medicare supplemental premium does not.

At the end of each quarter, I tabulate quarterly expenses by category.  The wizardry of Excel allows me to total the groceries column, the by dragging, the same formula calculates each other category.  I do this at the half year and as an annual summary.

I spent a lot of money.  Biggest chunk by far, taxes.  My investments did so well, at least on paper, that the financial managers silently cashed out periodically, leaving me with big bill to settle with the IRS.  I never saw much of this as income, just as an appreciation of my holdings, but one that required a transfer to my checking account.  Living expenses don't seem that extravagant.  Average $90 a week at the supermarket, purchases of Stuff from retailers or e-tailers totalled less than groceries.  My auto payments ended.  Maintaining my house ran $17K for the year.  Some big ticket items, a plumbing revision, heating repair, landscaping.  And cumulative smaller expenses from lawn mowing to biweekly house cleaning crew, an expense that essentially replaced the car payments that had reached conclusion.

We are pretty generous with donations.  Mostly small ones.  The larger ones come from my IRA mandatory distribution.  We try to share what we have and make a statement about what we value.  Travel came well below our means, maybe about half of what we should spend.  And dining out locally does not amount to much.  Like many others, the cost of each evening has crept upwards.  It will not affect our financial position if we went out more, but it's not worth the cost or the shlep back and forth.

So the numbers tell me that I live sensibly.  Could spend more on myself, but don't really feel a need for any more stuff.  Need to reassess the value of the biweekly housecleaning, some $5K over a year.  No need to rejoin the JCC, though reducing the cleaners by half would more than pay the annual fee.  Some kind of household repair becomes periodically inevitable.  And maybe take a major trip in the coming year.  And hopefully a much reduced tax liability.

Old Cartoons

As a grade schooler, 1957-1963 or thereabouts, my early mornings started with cartoons on days without pressure to dress for school.  Looney Tunes stood out.  Everyone knew Bugs Bunny and his associates, who eventually found their way to a US Postal Service series of stamps and swag.  My home TV for that entire era only delivered black and white, so the color Looney Tunes had to wait for matinée shorts at the movies or occasional reels run in school.  They weren't my favorites.  I took more of a liking to Flip the Frog and Farmer Gray aka Farmer Alfalfa.  To the best of my knowledge, those were never colorized.  Later, I would turn on Crusader Rabbit at 7AM every Saturday morning.  Farmer Gray had no audio dialogue, though occasional subtitles.  Flip the Frog spanned the entry to talkies but the skits remained mostly silent.  Music accompanied each, often the finest classics ever composed, though unknown to me as a grade schooler.

Democratization of cyberspace and YouTube enterprises have reconnected me to my old favorites.  When I watched them as a child I did not know when they had first been produced.  It turns out that Farmer Gray and Flip came to the cinemas in the pre TV era, early 1930s.  They each ran about seven minutes, making them suitable for a movie theater prelude to a main matinée.  On TV, they stood alone.  At the time I watched them, they were already about 30 years old, though my parents may have seen some in the original.  They seemed remote, already part of an obsolete screen history at the time I sought them out on television.  For perspective, my daughter watched She-Ra Princess of Power and my son the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Each series is older now than Flip and Farmer Gray were when I watched them, but neither registers as obsolete.  Neither do Looney Tunes of a slightly later time than Flip or Farmer Alfalfa.

Absence of dialogue posed a challenge for the cartoonists.  They had to make the pictures memorable.  Looking now, I find the plots and diversions witty.  Heads lopped off but easily replaced.  Emotions between a loving feline couple conveyed without words.  Modern cartoonists have become too dependent on accompanying audio to tell the story.

By the time of Crusader Rabbit, also initially in black and white, the stories became serialized.  Each episode lasted about five minutes, just right for selling sugared cereal to youngsters of my age, followed by another five-minute clip that resumed the story.  The cartoons stopped being stand-alone.  Their creators eventually moved on to Rocky and His Friends.  The Rocky/Bullwinkle tales also had brief cartoon installments of a longer story.  The Fractured Fairy Tales, Aesop, and Mr. Peabody took a standalone format.

As I reconnect to Flip and Farmer Gray, there seems to be something timeless, though both series lasted only a few years each.  They remain entertaining today.  They also leave me with admiration for the wit needed to produce them in the absence of words.

Under the Bed

Some semi-annual projects carry over.  Progress without completion in the first cycle but visions on an end point with just another six months.  Repurposing my son's bedroom to another use twenty years after he vacated it has gotten my attention.  It's a big project, though one that probably could go to completion with some professional input.  It would not be fair to call him a hoarder.  He accumulated stuff gradually over a long time.  I had tried to make his room function for him, providing him a desk, workable chair, adding shelving to his closet.  But organization never captured his attention.  My father transported my dresser, nightstand and bed when he moved south in 1988, his grandson reaching the transition from crib to bed at the time.  Now I find myself not only with the furniture but a cluttered floor.  Over six months I hacked away at surfaces.  Thrift agencies got generous donations of clothing, though I separated things my son might find sentimental.  Those went in a drawer.  Paper got recycled.  Awards and correspondence from people and agencies important to him went into a secure case with a zipper.  Some drawers got purged.  Nothing has yet been relocated to a different part of my house, nor has anything been transported to his rather spacious home some five hours away.

His bed served as a flat surface to put things as I worked.  Eventually, though, that would become the centerpiece of the room, even if nobody else ever sleeps on that bed again.  Its mattress was my mattress, now 70 years old.  The mattress and box spring probably would not be sold today as too shoddy for a good night's sleep.  As a teenager, my father had to place a sheet of plywood between the mattress and box spring for support.  The bed frame had moved from its wall, needing to be repositioned.  The plywood and box spring had also shifted from their best sleeping position.  And what might have come to rest beneath them challenged my imagination.

Moving everything seemed a two-person job, though perhaps a younger, more muscular he-man could have managed it.  I made a date with my wife to do this.  Mattress moved into an adjacent hall. Slight slit in my left pinkie but no splinter moving the plywood.  Box spring had a plastic coating on its upper surface, a wise addition for the two year old who slept on it.  Its lower surface had a gauze covering stapled to the wood frame, now mostly separated making the inner coils of that box spring readily visible.  They seemed intact.  That ant the plywood also took their place in the adjacent hall.  Then I removed the three supporting slats, screwed their by my father after many episodes of my childhood where they dislodged. leaving one side of the mattress and box spring to slide off the frame.

With the floor exposed, likely for the first time in 38 years, I could see what accumulated.  My son had a feather comforter.  Earlier in the project I had harvested this.  Its duvet cover removed for washing, I could see considerable feather shedding from the blanket.  After washing the cover, I inserted the comforter back in with some difficulty, not noting any torn areas that might allow feathers to escape.  The floor beneath the mattress, though, looked something like a white bird mixed with a lot of other things.  I separated the objects into three basic categories:  paper, cloth, other.  The following day, I went through the paper, recycling most, tossing some, saving the photographs, letters from dear people, greeting cards.  Textiles mostly went into the trash with a few items harvested.  I found water and soda bottles suitable for recycling, writing instruments, an obsolete disposable film camera, coins, two light bulbs, a plastic cup from a casino, and a CD Walkman that probably still works.  Some to trash, others put in a plastic bin for later sorting.

Now the vacuum.  The upright Shark worked fine, though it sucked up its share of coins hidden within the feathers.  This machine does not do edges well.  I could not find the vacuuming toools but my wife did, so I can finish the job shortly.  The bed frame now sits flush against a far wall and a side wall.  Replacing the slats, box spring, plywood, and mattress remains a two-person job.  Then install the new mattress cover, make the bed with one of several twin sets that I came across.  The feather blanket should be tossed.  I have extra pillows.  Then buy a new bedspread.  Finally, declare that surface off limits for piling stuff upon it.  I probably have twin blankets somewhere, but if not, I can buy one of fiberfill.  Better to just discard the feathers.

Some projects need an inflection point.  My son's bed, inherited from me, provides that key element of his room's restoration.  It is unlikely anyone will sleep there, as my daughter's old room has remained tidy.  It contains a much more functional mattress, though no headboard.  My son's bed in position and declared off limits for clutter, the remaining contents of the floor's surface, less that feather-shedding comforter, should organize more easily.