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.

200,000 Miles

I've never had a car that made it to 200,000 miles before.  It was purchased with 36,000, either a returned lease or maybe a rent-a-car, but it has served me well for about ten years.  It made it to the aspired 200K.  It's still comfortable, cluttered insided, and to the best of my knowledge with all safety features functional.  If I want to be somewhere, it gets me there reliably.  And I don't have to budget for a replacement yet.  Cheers to my 2007 Honda

Two Americas Reaches the Doctors

Democrats and Republicans Aren’t Just Divided. They Live in Different Worlds. wsj.com I avoid political opinions on my blog but sometimes they are a chance to think an issue through.   Usually the WSJ boots me as an inferior non-subscriber but they let me look at this one on FB where an assigned FB Friend must have either posted it or commented on it. There have been a couple of popular books on this. Charles Murray's Coming Apart analyzed a 50 year trajectory of separation having to do less with political identification but more with economic circumstances. He was rather condescending to the underachievers, as I might anticipate from other writings that suggest colleges are too often attended by students not academically qualified to be there, but noted that economic distress also clustered with divorce, housing instability, educational underperformance, and jeopardized health that filtered over generations. Most of the analyzed 1960-2010 span did not have political divide as part of the cluster. Robert Putnam's Our Kids looks at similar data in a more sympathetic way. The economically stressed were looked at as displaced rather than as underachievers, but with the same bimodal result as the WSW article, complete with political division and with isolation of each group from the other. It's really a megatrend. In his book Tailspin Steven Brill notes that historically public officials anticipated this possibility decades ago and even debated protections to those who would be predictably displaced but those got sidetracked in the name of expediency.  And as America divides with a political, social, and economic intersectionality, one group does not readily cross over to the other.  Economic data from the WSJ indicates that prosperity follows Democrats while those displaced from their traditional niche default as Republicans.  The divisions are not equal by any measure, nor is the hostility equal. Doctors puzzle me a little in this framework.  Sermo has largely devolved into a right wing echo chamber though the physicians I would suspect are more personable in person than on an unedited screen.  They don't seem to be at the top of the medical food chain, often bitter posting individuals who never were granted the Hebrew chayn, which is best English translation may be grace.  They all have university educations, mostly high income, public respect, and mostly secure lives.  Yet they come across as pounced upon by the forces they cannot control, be it the government, the insurers, bosses who are less accomplished than themselves.  The optimism seems absent as does the joy that taking care of patients once created for them.  The divide in general may be economic.  The divide among the doctors may be one of perceived trajectory as well as whether the daily work brings gratification in sufficient amounts to overcome the annoyances.  They do good work but it does not seem to them to be its own reward.  Since the divide involves prosperous professions, it should include the sense of loss of security or future prospects as part of the intersectionality.  I don't detect that same bitterness from the senior physicians, either at work or at professional meetings.  Just as we don't seem to cross categories based on prosperity or struggle, we don't cross them based on personal bitterness or satisfaction either.  Irrespective of professional or economic circumstances, if you perceive yourself as trampled, you probably are.  It may challenge the medical workplace for some time to come.

Mid-point Assessment

Since my personal goals are established semi-annually, twelve per cycle, at new year and at mid-year, the halfway point on the current twelve has arrived.  I did a little better than average.  I wanted to purchase a new mattress as the current one sags enough to impair sleep.  This calendar year I have stayed at a few hotels and can tell the difference.  I looked casually at IKEA and a few other places, priced on-line options, but have not purchased.  I will after the yom tovim.  Clearing the basement is my biggest tangible project.  I have made progress but will need to hire help with clutter removal.  It is really part of a grander aspiration to have a single storage place for our things, eventually moving items out of our rented storage unit.  My energy to this waxes and wanes.  Time needs to be scheduled as I did for creating My Space, though with far less motivation.

Financial review has gone on schedule.  My goal has been to do it with no action needed.

My children live an airplane ride away.  I plan to visit each.  St. Louis done.  California by year's end.  It's a very tangible project with clear end points and a certain pleasure to its pursuit.

My personal efforts are also mostly more tangible and measurable than they have been in advance.  I read my assigned three books and then some.  I've seen two movies on TV, one of two in the theater, leaving one more to go in the theater, which I can do after the yom tovim.  I have visited two old friends from high school, both in metro NY.  My three day trips included the Galer Winery in Pennsylvania, the Nemours Mansion in Delaware, and the Rockland Bakery in New York, none of which I had been to previously.

The remaining tasks may be harder to fulfill.  My weight would be better if about 10 pounds less.  I use weight as a measure, but it's really more of a process to promote my health.  Diet restriction has hit a lull.  I was eating breakfast every day for a while but gained a few pounds in the process.  I changed it to two meals a day which has gone better.  No snacks from 8PM to 6AM, based on research by a metabolism guru at U Colorado, has been reasonably consistent though not perfect.  Exercise was doing very well for a while, then sidelined following an appendectomy, then limited in the early morning by arthritic stiffness.  My consistency to moving it later in the day has been hampered by my OLLI schedule and I have not been able to recapture the intensity.  Still, weight remains the best objective surrogate of progress, even if the real but more difficult to measure goal is stamina and energy.

I had planned to do something beneficial for my synagogue, though I'm not convinced they want anyone other than the people already engaged to create anything new.  I asked the Rabbi in the past how I might advance the congregation.  He suggested I come to minyan more.  To be fair, I've hardly done dick, and counting in the minyan requires dick but his vision of congregational advancement seems much more shallow than mine.  I'll give it another go with the President and Rabbi and maybe some past Presidents after the yom tovim.

Then the two I probably won't do, develop a web site and write the book that makes me famous.  Writing has been on the list before in several forms.  And I do write well, but in spurts.  The web site got as far as initial inquiry.  I don't really have a good enough purpose for having one, though a more interactive blog with my own format could justify this.  Revisit by year's end.

So there's how twelve projects plod along, a little at a time.  All are doable except the Great American Novel, and even there if I believed in myself more I have the capacity to do that.  Some are done or almost done.  What interested me three months ago does not always sustain itself, so these are best approached as assignments rather than self-sustaining insatiable initiatives.  Most have a measurable end point.

As retirement makes the days more amorphous, the "should do today" list doesn't have any external imposition or any feedback other than what I offer myself.  Halfway through this cycle, doing OK.

Cuisines

Among my Osher Lifelong Learning Institute courses for this semester is one on the history or food, which is not what it is really about.  A more accurate description would be a list of recognizable cuisines from different geographic districts of Western Europe.  Thinking like an American, a Kosher one at that, makes the understanding of this more difficult.  I have no regional cuisine, as much as making an elegant dinner, as I did for Rosh Hashana, challenges me.  My 23 and Me profile has me unequivalently identified as Ashkenazic origin, as were my grandmother's culinary roots, but I have been imprinted by cookbooks and diverse availability of food.  Since my dietary restrictions keep me from sampling a lot of restaurants, anything of meat origin has to be made at home.  I make Hamburgers, meat loaf, clops from ground beef, chicken in every which way, steaks that would pass in Texas, and stew as cholent or hamin.  Desserts are usually baked.  I've made linzertorte with no idea of its Austrian origins, apple walnut pie and oatmeat chocolate chip cookies of Philadelphia lineage, and torta del rey from an Italian Kosher cookbook.  Baklava is a lot of work, but I've done it.  Apple strudel may be overdue.  Fish is what they have at Shop-rite which becomes gravlax, seared tuna or coulibiac.  They each have a regional origin, but importation of ingredients and availability of recipes has undermined any authenticity.

I suspect the regional European cuisines have similar challenges to authenticity.  In this era of Autobahn and Aldi's, to say nothing of German populations shifts of two world wars, I think my skepticism of what distinguishes Munich from Cologne is justified.  Borders have been historically fluid.  Is Swiss chees made in Switzerland really better than Swiss cheese made commercially in Wisconsin?  In America where about half the Kosher restaurants are Chinese, the proprietors and chefs are not.  I would expect that a German or French restaurant of the upper echelon in America would be founded and run by somebody who trained in those regions rather than a native.  And the people preparing the food are as likely to be undocumented people keeping a low profile as trained chefs trying to have their own place one day.

I guess there are some regional ingredients that survive.  Crabs from the Chesapeake, gooey butter cake which I've not seen on a menu outside St. Louis despite its ease of preparation, abalone that I have only seen on menus in California.  But mostly we have commercial agriculture and ranching, refrigerated shipping and rail cars, reality TV of megaharvests of whatever in the Bering Sea.  Purity of cusine is just hard to sustain.