Snakes and their charms

I envy snakes.  They shed their skins every year (or so).

Sidebar: I have no idea about timing, but I know that some snakes molt at some point in their life spans because I took enough science courses to meet the prerequisites to graduate from college.

Sider-bar:  I will confess to taking “Holes and Poles” (Human Sexuality) and “Oceans” (Oceanography) and, for the latter, doing a project called, “Songs, Jokes and Catch of the Sea,” where I played sea shanties, served the professor a gourmet lobster meal (purchased from a fancy restaurant) and, while he was dining (linen napkin and all), I told him jokes related to water. 

Sidest-bar:  As disgraceful as it is, it would be more disgraceful if I hadn’t been graduated from college and then my parents’ hard-earned money would have seemed like even more of a waste.

SIDEBAR uber alles:  Are you rethinking the importance of an Ivy League education?

[Oh, dear, I even digressed from sidebars!!!!  It will get worse, still, I promise.]

Snakes don’t get younger.  Their skins just lose the scars and damage of the year’s mistakes, fights and punishments.

And the snakes begin again.

Older, and

maybe wiser, and

surely as venomous or constrictive as the year before, but

certainly, EXFOLIATED.

And, when my skin is exfoliated (and, ok, throw in a collagen treatment, just for grins), well, there is NOTHING that this 50 year-old can’t do. (Except afford the next facial.) And I can dust myself off and try again to be all I could be.  

Ok, some boys and girls won’t understand this.  But, those who do, and YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, know that I am right on this.

Life Is Beautiful

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the immense joy in seeing my nephews happy and proud.  Never did I think I would have a child, much less adore him, warts and all.

Never did I imagine that I had warts.  (Ok, we ALL grow up.)

Never did I imagine that my brother-in-law would be my brother, too. Or that my sister-in-law, 7 years my junior, would evoke such respect, love and awe for her “male management” in the Shap Shack.  [I wish we were closer in geography, time and heart.]

Or that my brother and I, sometimes so diametrically opposed yet so alike in manner, in humor and in comic timing, would sit companionably at a table where he and my son were feasting on pork in a Jewish home.

Or that my brother’s son would come north and share sleep away camp with my son, his cousin.

These are the gifts of family.  Gifts of age. And, with age, the gift of perspective.

But most important, these are, yes, the gifts that make life beautiful and bountiful and safe.

The gifts that wait for us to grow, change, reject what was, and then, coming full circle, accept what was and, as a consequence, what is.

And the gifts for which, even in the moments of sorting out the affairs of the living and the dead (and those hovering in between), I am grateful.  Because it means that SOB, BOB and I will have each other. And, that, in bad times, in desperate times, in unfair times, we can rely on each other. 

Because no matter how far off any of us travels, or how bad things get, there is, at long last, the ties that bind. The door that is wide open.  Even more important, the loving arms that beckon us into a secure embrace.

And that makes life, indeed, beautiful and full.

[P.S.: I rented a Texas-size car for visiting day at camp.  Just in case SOB and HOSOB want to join the road trip.]

 

 

Saturday in the Park . . . .

I have been pretty overwhelmed by life and responsibility.

Then, as if from on high (ok, via cell phone), comes a booming voice:

“I read your blogs.  I have a few comments:  Schmuck, you are 50. Count them, I will wait.  [No waiting time] Ok, I will bottom-line it for you.  50 years old.  Are you going to spend the next decade in the dumps?  Because your father will live that long.  You know he will —”

“But,” trying to get in a word, “there was AROB and ULOB and —-“

“Done.  They are gone.  It is hard to clean up after people who are dead.  But you are not hurting them by selling their stuff and doing whatever you have to do. It is a job.”

Pause.  I am trying hard not to shriek, “You don’t f&^*ing understand!  It has been toooooo much these past two years!!!” But I didn’t.

I did seethe, however.  And think about my martyrdom.  I felt sooooo self-righteous.  And then I remembered I was Jewish and there is no sainthood.

And, then, I thought:  Really, [Blogger]? Are you kidding me?

Martyrdom? 

MARTYRDOM? 

MARTYRDOM?

Do ya read the newspapers?  [NOW, I am calling myself, schmuck.]

I stopped.  Mostly because I exhausted myself, even without uttering a word. And, I was letting stuff get me down which, if I stopped for a little perspective, is hard but so life-affirming.  I was getting stuck in a quagmire of details and legal issues and I forgot to be grateful for the lives my elders lived and my part in making those lives happy and secure at the most vulnerable times.

But, perspective can be tiresome and short-lived, especially if one is a self-indulgent, overly-consumptive New Yorker.  (Oops, that would be I.)

Still, even I couldn’t shake the idea that I need to think differently about a situation that isn’t going to change (until the BIG change).  Saturday was such a sunny beautiful day that it was hard to feel sad.

I decided walking to Dad’s house for lunch (at the you-know-where) was just the thing to put me in a good mood.

I walked the three or so miles there, through the city streets and Central Park.

It didn’t start out so well.

I heard a woman ranting at her boyfriend (possibly fiancé) about how much money he gives to his dead-beat dad.  The man didn’t even utter a word.  She just kept on responding to his unspoken answers.

I wanted to scream. Oh, please, shut up.  Did you ask what he gets out of it and what pain he avoids by doing this, even though you say he doesn’t want to give his dad money?

I heard two joggers disagree about whether helmets save lives.

Ok, thought for the day: it may or it may not, but what the hell, wear it.  I couldn’t hurt.

OK, this walk in the Park thing is — how shall I say it — no walk in the park.

Then, I heard one biker, who apparently had been cut off by another biker, yell, “Youw mothah is a man!!!” [English translation: your mother is quite unattractive.]

So unexpected in a City where, in fact, his mother could have transitioned from, or to, a man.  Such a throwback comment, ripped right from the urban playground where we born-and-bred New Yorkers cut our teeth in the 1960s and 70s.

I don’t know why, but I laughed so hard.  Maybe because it was a different kind of nostalgia — ludicrous one and so out-dated.  And the laughter made the sun felt brighter and warmer.  And I hummed all the way to Dad’s house, even skipping a little.

I think I will try to walk to Dad’s as many times as I can.

276 girls

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/09/world/africa/nigeria-abducted-girls/

How is this possible?  There have been decades of atrocities, unbreakable cycles of violence, the world over. Countless children sacrificed to the power struggles over land and its resources.  Nigeria has devolved into chaos.

Legacies of colonialization and Western arrogance.  And backlash.

This is the one case that is gaining international attention.  Because of the brazenness and insanity of the Boko Haram fighters.  How does a militant group, fighting in the name of God, kidnap 276 school girls to sell them into marriage and slavery?

These girls.  These poor girls.  Their poor families.  I cannot imagine what it is to have my child taken from me by lawless gangs who roam with impunity.

This massive kidnapping is about radicalism and the cheapness of human life, in general, and that of a girl’s life, in particular.

And the knowledge of the perpetrators that we, in the United States, will soon turn back to the results of the NFL draft.  And then they can do this again.  And again.  And again.  Until no child is spared from the war crimes.
Our souls, and our beliefs in the sanctity of human life and in the God-given right of a child to realize his or her potential, lie in the balance of our nation’s response to this crisis and others like it across the globe.  Let’s find these girls, airlift them and their families and share the bounty of our nation with them.  It isn’t fair to those left behind, but it is a start.  And, in Jewish theology, it is a person’s moral obligation to save even one life even if one cannot save everyone.

God bless and keep these girls, and keep them safe from more ravages of war.

#THROW BACK THURSDAY

I am a pop-culture idiot.

Early on in college, when the Soviet Union existed and the Cold War was the only threat we knew, my friends assumed that I was a Soviet spy.

Not because I spoke Russian when drunk, or could take down a lascivious frat boy with one hand as I drank beer with the other.  No, no James Bond movie scenario.

The reason was rather simple:  the lapses in my pop-culture knowledge could be attributable only to the lack of social osmosis that occurs naturally with kids growing up in the United States.

Ergo, I grew up in an opposite environment.  Ahhhh, the Soviet Union.  Somewhere between the truth and the propaganda lies the truth.  And painful disparities on so many levels between how we grew up here and how our peers grew up in many countries within CCCP.

So, the facts that I even know about Throw Back Thursday and know that there is even a hashtag #tbt ARE SO BIG.

SOOOOO BIG.

And it gives me a chance to show off my beautiful mom and handsome dad and adorable siblings when life was more simple.

And my pop-culture prowess. Because I know hashtags (thank you Janet2).

Except, please tell me, who on Earth are the Kardashians and why should I care about them?  (P.S.: weren’t they an alien species on Star Trek?)