Happy Hanukkah - The Eighth Night

All eight candles are lit.  The oil has lasted all through the holiday.. albeit in the form of colorful candles.  The mystery has been remembered, the story told, the blessings sung and the love flowed.

I admit it.  I was ensorceled. The giggles and the smiles multiplied and flowed like the miraculous oil, her little hand grasping my bent finger as we toddled..... as long as Mommy was on the other side. It's quite the love affair those two have going on, and, as happy as the oil makers there, in those days, in that time, my heart swells with joy as I watch our little one attach herself like human velcro to my little one's leg.

I was in awe of the whole experience.  My human had created a human, a human who can ask for more and crackers and milk and water and, believe it or not, for night-night when she's tired.  It's even more delightful because she is as pleased with herself as we are with her.

She's shaking G'ma's honeymoon maraca, dancing and squealing at the top of her lungs.  Food and fingers are all that she's mouthing these days, so we're not worried about the toxicity of a painted coconut shell, created in Mexico in 1950.  Instead, we clap along with her prancing and plie-ing, laughing at ourselves laughing.

It's pure, unadulterated joy, a joy I'm sure that parents have experienced ever since Adam and Eve. It's why Mattithias waged wars against the Selucids; he had seven sons and seven sons worth of grandchildren and he was concerned about their future.

I look at FlapJilly, on the cusp of a world with a female POTUS (a girl can hope, no?), born into a world with an African-American at the helm. There are opportunities available to her that were only a pipe dream to me, and to Ruth Bader Ginsburg whose Notorious RBG onesie is on backorder for my granddaughter.  As Little Cuter put it, FlapJilly has to know what's important.

And what's important is basically the same now as it was in the days of the Maccabees.  Safety, security, freedom to live your life according to your own personal North Star, a life without war, a sense of purpose and the opportunity to pursue it.  I wish for her that which I wished for my own children - happy, fulfilling lives, with love and comfort and support in abundance.

Hanukkah lights are different from birthday candles in that they don't come equipped with a wish. Still as she stood at my knee, watching the tapers blossom into flame, listening to the prayers and dancing with wild abandon next to her parents as we sang Ma'otzur, I closed my eyes and pretended that the wish was welcomed.

It's been a lovely holiday.  I'm so glad that I had the chance to share it with some of my family and all of you.

Happy Hanukkah - The 7th Day

Oh, my.

I must apologize.

I have kept my Grandma SO ensorceled that she is unable to write to you.

Oh, dear.

Please, forgive us.

Happy Hanukkah - The Sixth Day

It was cloudy, but the rain held off.

The zoo takes about an hour, and there were only two other families there.

We could get up close and personal with the animals.

 which sometimes was a terrifying experience.

 We spent a lot of time watching the long tongues of the giraffes.

 Wearing a sweater created by G'ma for Little Cuter, the great granddaughter enjoyed the flamingos and the elephants and wasn't that impressed with the bears or the rhino.

The grandparents just walked along and smiled.

Happy Hanukkah - The Sixth Night

Sometimes the best presents don't need wrapping paper.

Happy Hanukkah - The Fifth Night

We're on the downward slope.  There are more days behind us than waiting ahead, and the candles are stark reminders. It's the middle, and the special here-we-go-again feeling is starting to fray around the edges.

TBG and I are waiting til half time to light candles.

Light candles.  There ought to be a the in the middle, but that's not how my Grandma said it. It's like a glazel tay... my Zaydeh's tea in a glass mug, sipped through a sugar cube held between his teeth.  I never make a cup of hot tea without calling it a glazel tay in my head.  The drink starts to work its magic before it ever passes my lips; my grandfather is sitting beside me.

But, I digress.  That's not unusual this year.  The holidays are mostly about memories.  Is that a function of age?  Is it that my kids are adults and my grandkid is blessedly unaware of the importance of gifts?

Big Cuter and I shopped together for essentials-which-were-his-holiday-gifts and he took them back with him after Thanksgiving.  He's not concerned that there won't be anything under the tree; he knows me well enough to know that socks, at least, will be waiting for him.  But the days of towers brightly wrapped wonderfulness have gone.  We miss them, but feel no need to replicate them.

The kids were raised half-and-half, and I'm willing to collect tchotchkes and decorate at any season, but the time between the Saturday before Thanksgiving and the second of  January is special.

It's our Annual Holiday Celebration Tour: whenever any two parts of our family come together we celebrate the holidays ... any and all of the holidays on The Tour.

I have gifts for FlapJilly and her parents, Christmas boxes with Hanukkah cards and some combination thereof of tissue paper. We'll eat latkes and talk about Santa, because there are a lot of them in my house right now.  No one will be confused.  Everyone will smile. 

I learned all about the melting pot that is my version of America when I was in 4th grade.  We all brought something to the stew, and together we blended into Americans,  There were no History Months celebrating our differences; there were Thanksgiving Feasts celebrating a commingling of cultures.  

I like to think that FlapJilly is the latest and tastiest serving of our fondue yet.

Fondue, heated over flames.... and I have somehow managed to bring this back to the Hanukkah lights.  

*****

I'll be posting all through the holiday, so don't forget to come back on Saturday and Sunday, too.

Happy Hanukkah - The Fourth Night

Half the menorah is filled.

It looks vaguely unbalanced, and I am tempted to put the candles in pairs on either side of the shamash.  I like the image it conjures for me, that of the oil slithering down from the tip of the flame through the body of the beadle and out into the other receptacles, out into the world, spreading a message of hope and accomplishment and miracles and light.

As the political scene begins to unravel, as xenophobia becomes the new black, as a contender for the Presidency of the United States can suggest badges and banning and be taken seriously, I come back to these lights.

I'm gonna let it shine, this little light of mine.  Let it shine.  Let it shine.  Let it shine.

I've been repeating that to myself all day, as I cringe through Facebook and the local paper and Slate and The Huffington Post.  By moving Trump and his antics from the front page to the entertainment section, The Huff Post made a statement that I wish other news outlets would emulate.  Yes, he's the leading candidate on the Republican side, but that doesn't mean that he deserves on air promotion.

Couldn't the anchors make oblique reference to Trump's hateful speech and then move  "In New Hampshire today, Donald J Trump continued his outrageous and un-American campaign for the White House.  Because our network has a conscience, because we have read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, because we have studied history and understand the basic underpinnings of our country's birth, we will not be publicizing his rhetoric.  His words do not represent our better angels, the angels President Obama urged us to embrace back in January, 2011."

A girl can dream, can't she?

Did you see Tom Brokaw last night?  I tried to embed the link, and failed.  You can click through here, though, if you want to see a thoughtful presentation of hatred over the years Mr. Brokaw has been on the planet.  To his Hitler, Joe McCarthy I'd add Father Coughlin and FDR and the Japanese internment and sending boatloads back to Germany and the more I think about it the angrier I become.

I don't want to be angry. I want to take the time I'd spend on rage and direct it toward the Syrian refugees who will be arriving in Tucson later this winter.  I don't want to focus on the ugly side of America; I want to think of it as the kind of place the incoming refugees imagine it to be.

Humans of New York shows us that piece.  The tree in the Florida sunshine for a 10 year old's between-the-branches-adventures.  The peace to think only about milk and diapers.  The streets are not paved with gold, but they are not inlaid with IED's.... at least not yet.

I do not want to go there.  I do not want those thoughts in my head.  I want the Christmas pillows and the Hanukkah lights and the love of the season and my soon-to-be-arriving family to be bouncing around in my brain.  And so I bake brownies and hand them out to teachers and therapists and the homeless-and-harmless (or so his sign says) young man on the corner.  I wear my snazzy boots and smile at the compliments.  I walk around in a reindeer adorned sweatshirt and giggle back at the little ones who point it out to their all-too-often-too-frazzled-to-notice grown-ups.  

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

It's all I can think of to do.

Happy Hanukkah - Third Night

Two menorahs (menorot if you are being technical, but I'd lose nine tenths of my readers with that one).  Three candles on the right side of each candelabra... or, to be precise,  the right side if you are on the living room side of the ledge.  From the hallway side, it's the left.  

This seems to be a theme.

The candles were refusing to stand upright; would it be too much to ask for some standardization between receptacles and Chanukah tapers?  I come to this conclusion, albeit in this era of anti-big-government-and-regulation, after spending much too much time, in two separate hours of the day, encouraging the damn things to assume the position the candelabra was suggesting but not really insisting upon.  Nor was it helping the situation; the holes are uneven in both diameter and surfaces.

That little vial of oil didn't have these issues.  It just sat there, glowing, neither diminishing nor growing, just doing its job while the Jews did theirs.  The oil had it easier; the Jews had to do the heavy lifting, creating an ongoing supply.  I wonder if the ever-burning oil felt just a little smug.

I think I am anthropomorph-izing the whole thing just a little too much.   

Happy Hanukkah - 2nd Night

Two candles, and the shamash.  Nested next to one another, commemorating the hours that small vial of oil continued to shine brightly.

I've been holding that image in the front of my brain today.  There's so much to do, so much I want to do, so much that's going to happen, and I'm only one small person trying to tackle it all.  Little Cuter is in the same predicament; although she is marginally larger than I am, her responsibilities are more pressing.

No one is paying me to show up at 8am, no one expects me to sing her to sleep, no one has any call on my time at all, really.  And yet, the Brownie List beckons, the Stroll and Roll looms, and the stack of library books tempts.  My responsibilities trumped my desire to curl up in the sunshine with Kay Scarpetta.  I cancelled Pilates, I begged off Mah Jongg.  I sat at the dining room table and packed and labeled and stickered to my heart's content; then TBG played Rudolph to my elf and drove the big bag of boxes and me to the post office.

There's a contented sigh, and then, it's back to work.  There are dozens and dozens of boxes yet to fill.

Did the oil in the lamp worry about endurance?  Did the oil feel tempted to just slither away?  These are the thoughts one has while cutting brownie squares.... over and over and over again.

Happy Hanukah - 1st Night

Two candles.  The shamash, the beadle, the one who lights the others and stands over them, and another, over there on the left, or the right, or the middle if you've got a round menorah and I laugh at myself every year.

My father would be proud that I am lighting the candles at all.  I imagine him agreeing with the choice I made tonight: I started on the left, TBG started on the right.

Big Cuter called several times during the day, discussing football with his father, but as the sun set and the first star came out he called to say Happy Hanukkah ... and to wonder which side of the menorah....  it's the magnetic menorah he has on his refrigerator all year long, but which, for 8 days, is more than just wallpaper. It is significant, its magnetic flame should be properly placed.

Daddooooo is grinning from ear to ear right now.
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No matter that this is an historical holiday, not a canonical Biblical one.  Purim and Queen Esther made the cut, but Matithias and the sons and the elephants and the caves were left out of the books the rest of the world calls the Old Testament.  It gets much more attention than it deserves.

It's a pretty cool miracle, though.  The vial of oil outlasting everyone's expectations... the little light that could.

The Light as a topic has been swirling around me.  My Professor described The Light as that which his missionary parents brought to China, that which the Gospels brought to the Galatians, that which art and theology represented in the examples on the screen. A Play Group pal wished that I might find the light after the Planned Parenthood massacre.  And now, it's Chanukah, with all those lights.

When it's right, it's right.

I Have Nothing New to Say

I wish the talking heads would stop saying the names of the shooters.

I know that their ethnic sounds are code for Radical Muslim Terrorists, or whatever the hell else the Republican candidates are worried about, but to the lonely white-boy-with-a-hoodie and a grudge and a gun, the notoriety must feel pretty sexy.

I wish there wasn't the presumption that He was in charge and that She was merely his wife. 

The talking heads are repeating his name and his wife instead of calling them The Shooters and leaving it at that.  By separating them into individuals, it's hard not to conjure up a little bit of sexism in the assumption that it was all his idea.  Women can be evil-doers, too.  

Yes, I agree, this is a strange thought to be having.

But the fact of the matter is that there is nothing new to say.  I can only follow my mind as it wanders on the edge of the abyss.

Did you know about Prayer Shaming?

The New York Daily News splashed it loud and clear on the front page, and is standing behind it despite the backlash.

Apparently, the Republicans and the Anti-My-Not-Getting-Shot-Again people are furious that the power of prayer is being disparaged, while missing the point, entirely

The Daily News and I agree that it should be possible both to pray and to pass laws preserving my right not to be perforated.  The newspaper wasn't saying Don't Pray; they were demanding that the cowards DO MORE. 

Isn't it possible for the Republican candidates to worry about Radical Muslim Terrorists invading our shores while at the same time attempting to make it more difficult for them to stockpile guns and ammunition once they are here?  

As I warned you, I had nothing new to say.

Living.... On The Edge

It's the best description I can conjure up for what she's doing.

She's battled breast cancer.  Twice.  She had ugly-scar-leaving surgeries.  She is terrified by the prospect of dealing with it again.  So, she's chosen ignorance over knowledge.

She knows the disease can return.  She knows the odds are stacked against her.  She has decided not to care.

I get it.  Completely.  Without reservations or explanations, I understand what she's doing, and why.

There's something about staring death in the face, about watching someone else pass over to where ever it is that souls travel, about being with those who've died with dignity and without fear (cf. G'ma), about coming close to the precipice and then, mercifully, retreating, that changes you.  She feels it jsut the same way that I do.

We aren't scared.  We aren't particularly surprised that more crap can fall on our heads.  It won't be surprising or unsettling or unexpected, although neither of us hopes for bad news or wants bad news or needs bad news.  We are happily enjoying the fact that the sun came up this morning and we were here to see it.

If the shit is going to hit the fan, the shit is going to hit the fan.  Certainly, Christina-Taylor's mom and I didn't know that bullets would fly when we made the plan for me to take her to see Gabby the next morning.  No one lives life expecting the worst...... well, no one with whom I want to spend any time, anyway.  And that, I think is the crux of the matter.  As G'ma replied, whenever she was asked how she kept her sunny attitude amidst memory and physical failings,, "Who wants to be around a cranky old lady?"

The answer is No One, not even the cranky old lady herself.

And that, I think, is what my friend and I are confronting, head on.  She knows the consequences of another diagnosis.  She's not interested in the fixes.  Been there.  Done that.  She wants to live until she dies and that includes not worrying about what might be.  Dying doesn't frighten her; pain and worry do.

For the pain, there will be medicine.  For the worries, we're on our own.  After the therapists and the friends and the family members have gone to sleep, we are alone with ourselves.  That has to be a comfortable spot.  There has to be a neutral center where calm prevails.  Or, as she says: I have to choose to be happy.

The edge is an uncomfortable space.  Neither of us chose to inhabit it, yet here we are.  Finding someone who understands, who accepts without judgment, who agrees with the basic principles underlying what seems to the-blessedly-uninitiated as willful denial, is a gift worth savoring.

Accepting this viewpoint requires trial by fire, I think.  For those of you who are having a hard time embracing the possibility that this is more than giving up, that this is truly valuing each day and not giving in to demons, that this is refusing to allow the disease to govern the time she has on this earth, that each and every moment will be filled with things that make her smile, that there is no putting off til tomorrow.... be grateful.

Be very, very, very. grateful

Standing on One Leg

I haven't written about my rehab in quite a while.  As the changes become more gradual, as the impairments become less intrusive,  I notice it less and less.

When Scarlet wonders if my boots are comfy for walking, I am reminded that this is the first year in five years which has seen me wearing boots everyday.  When I scoot out of the Uuvula without raising the steering wheel or moving the seat back or thinking too hard about the transition, I often find myself smiling.

It's the subtle things that being perforated took from me which impacted my life on a daily basis. They poked my heart, reminding me of Christina-Taylor's loss and Gabby's infirmities and my own achy ass. As the twinges become less frequent, January 8th becomes less relevant.

It doesn't become less painful to think about.  It doesn't heal the permanent hole in my heart.  It doesn't lessen the terror that skinny-white-boys-in-hoodies create in my soul.  It doesn't let me sit comfortably in the middle of a crowded auditorium.  I'm still concerned about security when I'm in public spaces, it still takes me forever to cross a busy street, but it's not always there.

That's a mega-change.  When asked, I'd say that I thought about getting shot and its consequences  "all the time."  Today, I have to say that I can sometimes spend an hour or two without remembering the bullets flying and Christina dying.  I spent a delightful Thanksgiving with JannyLou and Fast Eddie and not once did sorrow darken my enjoyment of the festivities.

It's not that I have forgotten my little friend.  That, I am sure, will never happen.  Nor have I forgotten the fear and the angst and the pain.  It's just that they are moving a little bit to the side these days.  I can hold other thoughts front and center without January 8th creeping in from the edges.

Our shooting was still big news when it happened.  Now, it doesn't even make the list of Recent Mass Shootings.  There have been so many.  There has been some change; gun safety is an issue in the Presidential campaigns. Sensible candidates have been elected, and their recalls have been held off.  The NRA is not quaking in its boots quite yet, but our side is gaining traction.  The cultural changes are still lagging sadly behind.  Does NCIS have to show every character pointing a gun at me in the opening credits?  Their cast sent us a signed photo and a ball cap after the event.  I wish they had taken a look at what they could have done closer to home.  I have to fast forward through the music now.

I stood on one leg while moving the other today.  I balanced and exercised and didn't fall over.  I was scared, but I did it.  When the larger world's reluctance to recognize the enormity of the gun safety issue begins to impinge on my sanity, I remember things like standing on one leg.  I remember that I can do a plie now, without hiking my hip or hearing crunching and crackling from my joints.  Big Cuter's comment that I have more endurance and energy is one that I hold close to my heart.  He wants his mommy to be safe and whole, but I'm close enough right now for him to relax and stop watching me out of the corner of his eye.

It's a month short of 5 years since my life was upended.  I still have miles to go.  I am in pursuit of a fluid gait.  I've abandoned the wheelchair and the walker and the cane and the two hiking poles and the one hiking pole and I lost the Disabled Parking Placard and feel no need to replace it.  I still can't sit for an extended period of time, but nobody should sit still for an extended period of time.  I'm upright and moving under my own power.

For now, that feels pretty good.

Squandering Talent

All those trophies the kids got because Mom and Dad paid the league's registration fees.....

All those tests re-graded because there was a game on Friday night......

All those assemblies where Feeling Good About Yourself was the theme......

All those kudos for achievement on the field without regard to behavior in the real world.....

All that emphasis on the story, not the spelling or the grammar.....

All the understanding and the individual differences and the emotional learning......

If it's not tempered by realistic expectations and consequences when the boundaries are crossed .....

You get Johnny Manziel.