Peace and Quiet v. family commotion

The first thing I want today’s blog to say is Happy Birthday. My cousin, with whom I grew up, and with whom I have shared many many birthday celebrations, is having a birthday today. We couldn’t be together yesterday as we planned, because it just didn’t work out, but tonight, I think that I will raise a cupcake to my cousin’s birthday, right after I call her to wish her a very Happy Birthday. Since I was planning to write about family commotion today, certainly birthdays can qualify. In my very early life, I lived in a multigenerational household, the youngest of four children there, and enjoyed the commotion that accompanied a group of nine people, speaking two languages, an autocratic patriarch who I adored, a sweet, smiling, but sickly grandmother, two sisters sharing the chores of a large household with an invalid, and none of the labor saving devices that we take for granted today. We children couldn’t be parked in front of the TV to keep the noise down, because there was no TV. We played outside until dark, all up and down the street with the other children on the street. We climbed trees, dug in the yard and buried treasure, played hid and seek, and busied ourselves. There were no lessons, or organized classes, or after school activities. The older kids walked to and from school together, unsupervised, while I waited at the front window for them. I can’t speak for everyone, but I remember that part of my childhood as very happy. In the evening, we sat around the console radio that was four feet high and three feet wide, and glowed green from the display dial with it was on, and listened to serialized stories, like The Shadow. Mom and Aunt couldn’t cook meals ahead or take frozen veggies from the freezer, because the freezer was about half the size of a breadbox, and held only a couple of ice cube trays. We had to eat in shifts because there wasn’t enough room at the table for all of us at one time. If we were lucky enough to have a couple of bottle of soda as a rare treat, there was endless negotiation over who would share—two to a bottle. Cooking for upcoming holidays was a whirlwind of activity, and we kids were smart enough to stay out of the way. A tiny house, probably half the size of my present home or less, housing nine people of three different nuclear families, one bathroom, close quarters at best, yet always a place of welcome to visitors. Today I wonder, I analyze, I question “how did they manage?” It was lively in the best sense of the word: full of life. We had no pets, there was little money, and certainly none to spare, but the values of family allegiance, closeness, love and loyalty, adherence to a belief system and the passing on of a shared and loved history were all there in that tiny house. My parents, brother and I all shared one bedroom that we slept in, but there I learned the value of privacy, and the fun of sharing a small space. I remarked to someone this week, that the first time I had my own room was when my brother moved away to go to med school. And I realized that the love and closeness that we shared all our lives came from the experience of sharing, that necessity forced on us. My fondest memories of my brother teaching me to tell time (on an analog clock), of listening together to the Sunday morning broadcast of the “funnies” on the radio, of playing “Mother, May I?” in the concrete backyard nest door with the neighborhood kids. I didn’t learn ‘peace and quiet’ that I value today in those walls, but I learned the valuable lessons that family commotion were so good at teaching. Happy Birthday L.

New Beginnings

We think of Jan 1 as a new beginning, but today I was thinking of how many more new beginnings there actually are.Today I am making a new beginning in staying true to spending some time blogging every day. Certainly, Spring is a new beginning, with the little green buds peeking out of bare branches, and the leafing of trees, but each season has its own new beginning as well. In the Summer, we begin to have longer days, we begin to think of vacations, we start to harvest the crops that we have planted earlier--even urbanites have pots of tomatoes that are delicious right off the vine. In the Fall, the kids start back to school for a new school year, a new beginning to make a good impression on new teachers, new friends. There are new schedules and new arrangements. My cousins just took their oldest son to college and got him settled in, while the kids at home are beginning to see how life will be without their oldest brother there. The college boy is beginning life without his parents to consult every day; he is starting the most independent part of his life, and he is beginning to see what life is like without his two siblings close by every day. The kids at home have more room, and the kid away has the world at his feet. For us Jews, although it is the seventh month of the year, it is a new year, the season when our Torah is wound all the way back to the beginning, and we begin the cycle of reading all over again, so that with maturity, we may gain new insights. Each year, when we begin again to read the words “In the beginning”, I feel chills run up my spine. It is a new beginning: A new year in which to do a better job that the one we did last year, a year in which to be more aware, more helpful, more grateful. We will be passing through a period when people send each other cards that say “May you be inscribed for a good year”, because the imagery is that G-d will write your name in the book of health and life and wholeness, or not. There are ten days between the opening of the holiday, and the time when we say that the gates are closing. Those ten days are, or should be, days of contemplation, days during which we reflect on promises not kept, on behavior that may have been dishonest or hurtful to others, and on the asking of forgiveness of those we might have wronged in some way. Another new beginning, yes? So we reflect and we pray, and there is a new day, each day to do a better job than we did the day before. But in order to begin again, we must rest and regenerate and reinvent. In the same way Winter is the way the world rests, we sleep. It too is the beginning of new thinking, of the creation of new cells that we need to live and be vital, for if we never rested, we would always be in a tearing down process. The most delicious apples need cold nights to be sweet the following harvest, so even though I have lived in California most of my life, I know that there are crops that need to be buried under a layer of snow for a time to be optimum during their new beginnings. Every day we humans have the opportunity to call the moment from which we open our eyes a new beginning. And surely there is something that we can find in every day for which to be grateful. And that in itself is a new beginning.

Un-intensions

It was never my intention to take the summer off, mainly because I don't view writing this blog as a task, but rather as a pleasure. But I have found the summer to have undone me in so many ways. I have had a bit of illness, never pleasant and always a surprise, and I have gotten very busy with some committee work, which was somewhat more time consuming than I originally anticipated. The illnesses are gone, thank goodness, and I hope never to return, and the work for the committee, which has been to honor some very deserving people, is drawing to a close, at least my part of it which has been to do the advance stuff, like invitations and letters. Committee work is always a challenge, because, it is necessary to depend on others, their own timetables, and the vicissitudes of the lives of more than one person, and everyone has them, whether it is one's car on the fritz, or visitors from out of town who require attention. Some of the interruptions are more pleasant than others, but we all have them. As a result of my unintentional absence from the blog, I am just stuffed with things I want to say and to share. All summer long, I have been thinking about life in all its different phases, ages, and how we travel from one to the other, revising our thoughts, rearranging our ideas, reinventing ourselves, and adjusting to the things that we have no control over. And all those things are good things. Wouldn't life be boring if we continued to think the same thoughts, have the same ideas, and never be open to the new, the challenging, the fresh, the exotic. Now that the whole world is open to us via the internet, easy international travel, extensive television coverage, we are party to all that goes on (whether we want to be or not). It makes me re-evaluate what I might have thought yesterday and a week ago, in light of new information. It also makes me realize that there are parts of my thinking that I really have to get to work on and bring up to date. This morning, I reflected on the fact that every morning, I awaken with excellent intentions of what I am going to accomplish that day. Some days I go to bed with a sigh of satisfaction that I have met my goals, and accomplished the many things I had set out to do. Other nights, I resist going to bed in the knowledge that I have been thwarted in my goals but a myriad of things, unanticipated traffic jams, allergies, someone at home needing our attention, phone calls, and a hundred other small and large annoyances. At this time when we are preparing for the New Year, we Jews are re-evaluating what we have done in the past year, and how we cane be more worthy in the new one. I was happy to attend a lecture on Saturday, where we discussed the sounding of the shofar, the ram's horn, and what it has meant to us. It is a clarion call that means many things to many people, and the Rabbis through the ages have interpreted it and explained it many times in many ways. For me it is the signal that there is a chance at renewal. It is the sound of the roundness of our lives, the sea ebbs and flows, the moon waxes and wanes and waxes again, the years come and go around, another fall, another spring, but we humans march in a single direction, ever aging, but with the chance to make our lives better ever day by our deeds, our thoughts and ideas. So as we await the sounds, the sights,and the tastes of the new season, the new year, let us also join in the renewal of this season, and re-create ourselves in a new way, re-invent a better self to share with the world, and not let our un-intentions take over. To live with the intention each day to find the good, the positive, the enlightening, and to live our lives looking for those things is to have something to be happy about every day.