Month: June 2024

Happy Anniversary

/ howardshapiro / 19 Comments

 

Dear Gentle Reader,

(To borrow a phrase from Lady Witherspoon of Bridgerton fame.)

You might remember my finding a stack of sermons in our storage unit all typed (like on an electric typewriter) on 5 X 7 cards – mostly green, some blue, all of them pre-word processing days from the mid-70’s to the early 90’s. They are mostly High Holy Day sermons and tend to have some common themes.

Here are some general impressions. They are too long and tend to be repetitive. They are inconsistent but some are brave, and some are foolish, and all try really hard to be relevant, some succeed. They are also incredibly “chutzpadik”. Who am I to be saying these things? Who am I?

Take the one about “Love and Marriage.” I didn’t date a lot of these sermons but in researching the books or articles I quote I think this one is from the mid-70’s. That means I was in my mid-thirties and had been married for maybe ten years. What the ……. did I know about love or marriage?

But it did begin with a great Chasidic story about two boys who used to like playing Rebbe when their father (the Rebbe) was taking a Shabbat afternoon nap. They would take turns and critique each other’s ability to model their father when he counseled people who came for advice. This time the congregant was asking his Rebbe about marriage as he recounted the quality of his relationship with his spouse. At the end of the play acting, the son who was playing the Rebbe asked his brother to critique his “performance”. His brother said: “You did great, and you said all the right things, but you forgot the most important piece of any Chasidic session. Abba (dad) always began with a sigh – all Chasidic stories must begin with a long, slow, deeply felt sigh.

And so it is. Today is Eileen and my anniversary. And I think a sigh is appropriate – the sigh that slows us down and invites us to reflect on the days and years of our marriage. The sigh that admits not every day was perfect but year after year we turned our challenges into blessings. 

Sighs come in many variations. There is the sigh that says: here we go again. Life has a way of repeating lessons unlearned. And it is hard to change; it is easy to fall back on old habits and ways. It is easy to point your index finger at and forget that there are three others pointing back at you. It is easy to forget the word of the day in a marriage is “us”.

You are probably getting the wrong impression here. Another sigh. We have and we are blessed. Not only with children and grandchildren who are a constant source of joy and pride. Not only with relatively good health given our years. Not only with affluence and influence and meaningful roles we played in society. Not only with people who love us and people we love. Not only with laughter and joy and even sorrow and loss – but most of all, we are blessed with each other in good times and bad times, in the work we do when we say: I love you.

 

                                                                                                   

 

Father’s Day

/ howardshapiro / 4 Comments

I decided to get my walk in early this Father’s Day morning and let Spotify create a playlist for me. The computer decided “Forever Young” would be a good first song and did it know how ironic the choice was? This is the saying amongst my peer group: “Growing old isn’t for cissies.”  Ain’t that the truth, though I am blessed to be relatively healthy at this moment of my growing older. (Not that you would know it from the number of pills I count out each night and morning.) When I ended my hike, the algorithm had me at “Papa Was A Rollin Stone.” If you don’t know the song, it is about an absentee father, “wherever he laid his hat was his home and when he died, all he left us was alone,”

It got me to thinking about my father. His name was Charlie and when my mother and he were having a loving moment, she used to call him Sir Charles and he called her, Lady Marilyn (her middle name). In my memory, those moments weren’t as many as we would have liked them to be. My father worked hard all his life. He was a pharmacist who had his own drug store before I was born and then worked as a pharmaceutical rep and subbed several nights and weekend days in a drug store in Waltham, Mass. I remember him compounding meds and measuring potions with great care. I also remember him letting me play at being a soda jerk at the fountain where I made a great Lime Rickey. He catered to my mother during her illnesses. But after his car accident on the Maine Turnpike which put him in the hospital in a coma in Lewiston, Maine where we spent an upside-down Passover waiting to see if he would regain consciousness, there was an angry side of him that surfaced.

They say you are supposed to be slow to anger and quick to forgive. He struggled with that, and if I am honest, so do I (the quick to forgive part.) But I’m not going to talk about me – I’m going to remember the moment before my father’s funeral when we were alone in the chapel and Eileen took out three cigars from her pocketbook and placed them inside his coffin. You see my father never went anywhere without a cigar. The smell of cigar smoke, no matter what quality, brings me right back to him. And to the affable, personable salesman with a trunk full of samples that he felt were meant to be shared.

I took the picture above early in my walk this morning. The Lake is calm; the bullrushes (is that what you call them?) are straight and strong. The waters and the sky reflect each other in peace. So may it be with us.

What a World

/ howardshapiro / 3 Comments

I don’t know why or how I got hooked on Rufus Wainwright’s music. Maybe it’s because he covers a lot of Leonard Cohen. Yesterday morning on my almost daily walk, I really listened to the words of Wainwright’s “Oh What a World.” It fit my mood as I tried to keep my mind from wandering away from the beauty and serenity of the world I was walking through. But it didn’t really work. (My mind that is.)

“Oh, what a world it seems we live in. … Why am I always on a plane or a fast train. Oh, what a world my parents gave me ….  Always traveling but not in love … Men reading fashion magazines … Wouldn’t it be a lovely headline? Life is beautiful on the New York Times….

We are home from Israel, and it is time to make a photo book that tries to capture the deeply touching experience of being there in these days and at this time. Everyone has put their favorite photos in a shared album and Sammy, and I are tasked with selecting those which will make it onto the pages of the book. There are all kinds of decisions to make: size; matte; glossy; lay flat; design by computerized algorithm or do it yourself or pay an extra fee to have a personalized live human consultant or even a hybrid where you use their templates. We are hybrid all the way although there is a great chat option where you can ask a real human how to …..

Which brings me back to “Oh What a World.” Sometimes I think we are on a fast train to destruction, and I wonder what kind of world we are giving to our children and grandchildren. Sometimes as I listen to the news or watch the network half hour, I say the last five minutes of “America Strong” isn’t enough. The plane we are on flies so high we can’t see that the grass is green and that green isn’t just one color. We call them shades cause I think we need to categorize everything. Trying to make sense of the beautiful chaos of nature.

And then this morning – “Four Hostages rescued alive in Gaza operation, Israel says.” (That’s The Washington Post.) Or “Israel’s Military Says It Rescued Four Hostages.” (That’s the NYT.) Maybe I am prejudiced (I am). I don’t see all the qualifiers when it comes to reporting how many died in an Israeli strike on Gaza. It is always a UN School but you have to read below the fold to find out that it was a haven for a Hamas unit.

I know I am rambling. I guess the theme is “Oh What a World.”

But right now, I am sticking with the rescue and return of the four hostages. That’s a photo for our book and another reason to love Israel.