As I keep adding to this post every year, and with cross-posting it and importing it from my old blog to this one, I suppose it gets a bit more ungainly each year. Well, that’s just the way it is. Today is The Wife’s birthday, and I’m celebrating. As always, new stuff added at the end of the list; also as always, I don’t edit what I’ve written before or revise anything that’s out of date. Think of some of that stuff as growth rings on a tree…part of the reason of this post is to preserve memories.
Happy Birthday, my love!
Today is The Wife’s birthday! Onward and upward, as always!
A brief slideshow of photos (some of which are already on this post, but I like them and it’s my blog, so there they are again!) follows. The song is “Live Forever” by Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, a wonderful band.
And now, my annual list of memories and things from our years together. (New items on the list are appended to Number 97, alphabetically. I do this because I’m too lazy to renumber all the stuff after that one every year.)
1. Her hand fits perfectly into mine, as though our hands were fit for each other.
1a. That said, there’s a good chance that she prefers the dog to me.
2. The first time she saw Star Wars was with me. And ET.
2a. The first time I saw Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were with her.
3. She used to keep an aquarium before a bunch of moves made us give up the fish. Maybe we’ll do that again someday. But when we started dating, she had two fish, named Ken and Wanda, named after two memorable characters from A Fish Called Wanda. When Ken went belly-up, she called a friend and solemnly informed her, “K-k-k-ken d-d-d-died.” (One of the movie’s running gags is Ken’s stuttering.)
4. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I’ve converted her from someone who hated coffee into a regular coffee drinker.
5. For reasons passing understanding, she has always found Erik Estrada attractive. She and I used to have arguments over who could best the other in a fight: Agent Mulder from The X-Files or Ponch from Chips. (I think Mulder would have blinded Ponch with the beam from those giant blue-beamed flashlights he and Scully were always toting, and then beaten him into submission with his eternally-able-to-get-a-signal cell phone.)
6. One of the first things we cooked together was Spanish rice, which is to this day a comfort dish of ours. The first time we made it together was also the first time she’d ever cooked with actual bulb garlic, as opposed to garlic powder. The recipe called for a clove, but she thought the entire head was a clove, so into the rice the entire head of garlic went. That was the best Spanish rice ever.
7. A few years ago she baked a Bundt cake for The Daughter’s birthday, but the damned thing stuck in the pan, resulting not in a ring but a mound. So she just mounded it up, glopped the frosting right over the top, and called it a “Volcano Cake”. Now, every year at her birthday, The Daughter says, “Remember the Volcano Cake?”
8. Our first date was to see Edward Scissorhands. So, Johnny Depp’s been there since the beginning, from Edward all the way to Captain Jack Sparrow and beyond.
9. We used to go out for chicken wings and beer every Thursday night. We didn’t even miss our Thursday night wing night when The Daughter was born: her birth was on a Saturday, and we left the hospital on Tuesday, so at the tender age of five days, The Daughter entered a bar for the first time. This may have made us bad parents, but I don’t think so. A girl’s got to know how to handle herself in a bar, right?
9a. She’s not a huge fan of when I post photos of her sleeping.
10. She insisted on breastfeeding both The Daughter and Little Quinn, which in both cases required lots of pumping. Especially in Little Quinn’s case, since he was never able to eat by mouth. Every drop of breastmilk that entered his body went in via the G-tube, so for as long as her production held up, she pumped six times a day.
11. I’ll probably never completely understand how much of herself she sacrificed in fourteen months to keep Little Quinn alive and progressing. It seems, in retrospect, that every free day she had was given to him.
12. That same instinct in her kicked in again when Fiona was in danger. She didn’t question the necessity or possibility of spending months flat on her back with her feet inclined, if that was what it took. If commitment was all that was needed, Fiona would be here today. (Of course, if commitment was all that was needed, Little Quinn would be here and Fiona wouldn’t have happened.)
13. We used to associate certain teevee shows with the snack foods we’d eat while watching them. NYPDBlue was always chips-and-salsa. ER, when we still watched it, was often good ice cream. Now, good ice cream has been transposed to Grey’s Anatomy.
14. “Our” first teevee show was LA Law.
15. Subsequent teevee shows of “ours” included ER, Mad About You, The Pretender, Profiler, CSI, Firefly, and more.
16. On our first Internet account, we set up our combined e-mail identity after the two main characers on The Pretender. We were “Jarod and Miss Parker”. People familiar with the show wondered what that said about our relationship, since Jarod and Miss Parker aren’t allies. In fact, Miss Parker was initially a villain but as the show went on her character became much more complex.
17. She started roller blading, got me hooked, and then promptly stopped roller blading. Now she prefers biking.
18. It was almost without warning that I met her parents for the first time. We started dating late February 1991; a couple of weeks later was spring break, for a week, so I came home to Buffalo. At the end of that week I tried calling her, only to learn from the old lady she was renting a room from that she wasn’t home because of a death in her family. I remembered her saying something about a sick grandfather, and that’s what turned out to have happened; her grandfather had passed away from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. When I got back out to school, her entire family was there. So I met the future in-laws on the spot. Luckily, I seem to have made some kind of decent impression.
19. Our first long trip together was from Iowa to Idaho, to visit her family, a couple of weeks before school began in August of 1992. She had already graduated college, but I was in my senior year. While we were out there, the infamous Ruby Ridge Incident was taking place twenty miles down the road, so all week there were National Guard vehicles on the roads and helicopters overhead.
20. I am forever amazed at her ability to take some fabric and create a garment. This skill of hers looks like magic to me.
21. Her first pair of overalls were a gift from me. She thought the whole thing was goofy – maybe she still does! – but she wore them for years until at one point they became too small for her, and then a short while later they became too big for her. We didn’t start wearing overalls together until we’d been dating for about a year.
22. Back in the 90s, on two different occasions, we picked out Persian kittens. Both were wonderful cats, both are gone now, and we miss them both dearly. The first was a beautiful tortoiseshell Persian named Jasmine; the second was a red Persian named Simba. Both died in the year preceding this blog’s launch.
23. Adopting Lester and Julio was The Wife’s idea. I’m still unsold on these two giant lummox goofballs.
24. The Wife also took The Daughter to adopt Comet, when The Daughter was only two.
25. Shortly after The Wife moved to Western New York to be near me, she adopted a cat from the shelter she named Lilac. That cat never really liked me all that much. Lilac died a few months after Little Quinn passed.
25a. She is directly responsible for all the animals with whom we currently live.
26. She loves to laugh, particularly at my expense. She is convinced I don’t think she’s funny, but that’s just not the case.
27. Things with which she has a deft touch include: a pair of scissors, a needle and thread, a kitchen knife, the mixer, bread dough, a screwdriver, a lug wrench, and a shot glass.
28. It irritates her that The Daughter has inherited my tolerance for sunlight — I tan, whereas The Wife burns.
29. The Wife likes to read, albeit not quite as much as I do. She always has a book going, and she reads every day.
30. She never used to use a bookmark, until I finally decided I was tired of watching her flip through a book looking for a passage that was familiar to her so she could find her place. I bought her a bookmark.
31. She loves nuts – except for walnuts and pecans, which I love. This makes it occasionally difficult find good brownies and similar items in bakeries, since many people default to putting pecans or walnuts in their brownies or other chocolate cookies.
32. When I first met her, she was a huge Anne Rice fan and read most of what Rice wrote until she decided that Rice’s output wasn’t interesting her much anymore. Since then she’s read a lot of other authors, including a lot of unfamiliar names whose books I’ve plucked from the stacks of offerings at library book sales over the years. Interesting how obscure even the bestsellers of yesteryear eventually become, huh? Currently she really loves Gregory Maguire, the Wicked guy.
33. When we first met, she was a Washington Redskins fan. So of course, the first Super Bowl we were together was the one where the Redskins knocked the Bills on their collective arse. Oh well, at least she hated the Cowboys.
34. She prefers her KFC “extra crispy”, where I’m an “Original Recipe” guy.
35. Movies that are particularly meaningful or nostalgic to us, in addition to Edward Scissorhands and Star Wars are Dances With Wolves, Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, Singin’ in the Rain, and the James Bond movies.
36. For some reason we didn’t take any pictures when we were on our honeymoon or when we were on our vacation to Disney a year later. I think we were between working cameras at those points…but lately I really wish we’d have addressed that at the time.
37. Things we did on our honeymoon to Cape Cod, Boston, and New Hampshire: road a boat out to sea to watch the whales; visited the New England Aquarium; ate dim sum in Boston’s Chinatown; bought lots of kitchenware at an outlet strip (don’t laugh, we still have some of that stuff); visited the Boston Science Museum. While doing two days in Boston we stayed at a hotel about forty miles out and road the train into town; on the second day, on the way back, we fell asleep on each other’s shoulders.
38. Our first argument as a couple resulted from a common misunderstanding between people when one is from Iowa and one is just living in Iowa for a while. I told her we’d meet for dinner, so she showed up at noon and got annoyed because I wasn’t there. Well, duh! I said “dinner”, not “lunch”. Except, remember, she’s a native Iowan, which means instead of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner like most (ahem) normal folks, she ate breakfast, dinner and supper. Thankfully, I’ve converted her since then. Whew!
39. Our first wedding anniversary saw us spending a week at Walt Disney World. What a wonderful time that was! Even if she managed to rip her toenail out two days into the trip, thus requiring me to push her around in a wheelchair the whole time after that.
40. She had long hair when we started dating, and I had short hair. Now we’ve reversed that.
41. Before we started dating, I had a beard. When I became interested in her, I shaved it so I’d look better. Then, I learned that she likes facial hair. So I grew the beard back a while later.
42. Foods I’ve tried because of her: asparagus, squash, rhubarb, grapefruit, and more that I don’t recall.
43. She loves George Carlin.
44. She bought me my first cell phone, and my second cell phone.
45. When we were at the Erie County Fair in 2001, she wandered off to look at the Bernina sewing machines. When I came by ten minutes or so later, she was in the process of buying a Bernina sewing machine. I didn’t complain; I just stood there, kind of looking shell-shocked.
46. Leading up to our wedding, she rigidly adhered to the notion that the groom should not see the bride in her wedding dress until she comes round the corner to walk down the aisle. So I didn’t see her until she came round the corner to walk down the aisle.
47. Starting a family was her idea. Not that I was against it; I figured we’d get there eventually. She just picked the “eventually”.
48. She picked The Daughter’s first name, so I got to pick her middle name.
48a. And now, this:
49. Since Thanksgiving Break at college was only a four day weekend, I didn’t go home for T-giving my junior year; instead, I spent the weekend with her. We went to see her extended family out in Storm Lake, Iowa, which is on the other side of the state. Since she has family over there on both sides of the family, we ended up having two Thanksgiving dinners that day. Some part of me is still full from those two meals.
50. Iowa delicacies that The Wife and I share are pork tenderloin sandwiches and broasted chicken.
51. Some of our early dates were sufficiently cheap that we had to look for ATM machines that would dispense cash in five dollar denominations.
52. She bought Simba, the above-mentioned red Persian kitten, while we were on a shopping trip to Erie, PA. She fell in love with the kitten as soon as she saw him in the pet store; we then spent the rest of the day walking around the mall with me listening to her as she tried to talk herself out of buying him. (Persian kittens are pricey little buggers.) Finally, while we were at dinner at Red Lobster, she decided to pull the trigger.
53. Before Little Quinn, the most heartbroken I ever saw The Wife was the day we finally had to end Simba’s life. His kidneys were in failure.
54. Great gifts she’s bought me through the years: my current winter coat, a cupboard-full of drinking vessels of all types, candles, incense burners, the Star Wars original trilogy on DVD, my anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings with paintings by Alan Lee, my star sapphire ring, my current wristwatch, and many more.
55. The first thing she ever gave me: a stuffed bear, around whose neck she tied a lavender ribbon. I think she doused it with perfume. I named that bear “Bertrand”, after philosopher Bertrand Russell.
56. The first thing I bought her: a little two-inch high figurine of a laughing Buddha. I think this confused her a bit.
57. Despite my best efforts for a while, she’s never much warmed to baseball. That used to bother me, but these days that doesn’t bug me much at all. I’m pretty cool to baseball myself now.
58. For a few years we went to Cedar Point each fall. We haven’t been there in a long time, but I always found being there with her in the fall, in the cool air, pretty romantic. I loved riding the Giant Wheel after dark, sitting up there with her hand in mine, looking out over Lake Erie.
59. At Cedar Point, she decided that she liked this one coaster that does loops, so I stayed on the ground while she rode it. I’m terrified of those things.
60. Why don’t we play mini golf more often? We both love mini golf. The Daughter loves mini golf. What gives?
61. One day in 1996, we were eating lunch in Buffalo when we had “The Discussion”. Any guy who’s ever been dating the same girl for a period of time measurable in years will know what “The Discussion” is. So I agreed, it was time for us to take the “next step”. Later on, while she was having her eyes examined at LensCrafters, I bopped over to Penney’s to buy her a ring. I chose a nice emerald one that looked really pretty. Sadly, they didn’t have it in her size, so they had to order it, which would take three weeks. So I figured, OK, I’ll get the ring in three weeks and make this thing official. Yay, Me!
62. The next day, she proposed to me.
63. Three weeks later I showed up to get the ring. They had it, but they couldn’t find the paperwork, so some poor guy at the pickup counter at Penney’s spent his entire lunch hour trying to find the paperwork so I could give my already-fiancee her engagement ring.
64. I don’t remember exactly when we picked out her wedding rings, but we each have an Irish wedding band, and each ring is set with the other person’s birthstone. So my ring is set with four amethysts, which is her birthstone; hers is set with four sapphires, which is mine.
65. For years I wore my ring incorrectly. Apparently there’s one way to wear an Irish wedding band that signifies being married, and another that signifies being single. I was wearing mine the “single” way. I was alerted to this by a guy I worked with at The Store; he said, “Yeah, you’re telling all the women that you’re available.” I replied, “Yeah, and I’m beating them off with a stick.”
66. On our honeymoon, it was important to her that she at least get to dip her toes in the Atlantic Ocean. So she did. The water was very cold, though.
66a. She replicated this moment years later when we took a trip to the Jersey Shore.
66b. We returned two years later.
67. It always bugged her mother that she saw Niagara Falls before her mother did. Later we took her mother to Niagara when she was out for a visit.
68. During the summer of 1991, when I was at home and she was still in Iowa, she came to spend a week with me. I took her to Buffalo and to Toronto, on the way to which we stopped to see Niagara Falls for her first time.
69. She was really confused the first time a Japanese tourist asked her to take his picture in front of the Falls.
70. At the time our beer of choice was Labatt’s. It’s pronounced “la-BATS”, but we had a family friend at the time who liked to say it “LAB-uhts”, which is how I said it at college just for fun and habit. So when she visited me that summer, we went to the bar where this friend hung out, and he was so impressed when she ordered a “LAB-uhts”.
71. Our favorite mixed drink in college was the sloe gin fizz. A few years ago I tried making these again, discovering that her tastes had changed and she now found them sickeningly sweet. I like them still, but yeah, they’re sugary. (And pink. When I told a friend at work who knows everything about liquor that I’d bought some sloe gin, he laughed and said, “Oh good! Now you can make pink drinks!”)
72. She taught me the right way to do laundry.
73. I taught her the right way to crack open crab legs so as to not mangle the meat.
74. Our first major mistake of parenting was taking The Daughter to a fireworks display on the Fourth of July in 1999. The Daughter was all of fifteen days old. This was the big display in Lakewood, NY, which is right on the banks of Lake Chautauqua. The Daughter did not respond well to the fireworks detonating right over our heads; the sounds were bad and for years afterwards The Daughter was very scared of loud sounds.
75. We always say that we should go camping. We never actually do go camping. We need to do more camping.
76. Once for dinner I made some frozen cheese ravioli with sauce, a favorite meal of ours that we hadn’t had in a long time. She said that she was looking forward to “eating some cheesy goodness”. Unfortunately, the raviolis were a bit on the old and tough side, and the cheese never got nice and melty, so after the meal, she commented, “That wasn’t really cheesy goodness.”
77. She likes eggs over-easy. I’m not a big fan of those, but I try to make them for her when she’s getting over being sick.
78. She makes fun of my over-reliance on boxed mixes in the kitchen.
78a. I’m much better about this now. Her main kitchen complaint about me is that I make way too big a mess when I cook.
79. In 1993, when Cheers aired its final episode, she bought pizza for my roommate and I.
80. She only swears when she’s really annoyed.
81. She is not happy that her nine-year-old, fourth-grade daughter is now the same shoe size as she is.
82. A while back she had her hair colored a brighter shade of blond than is her natural color. It was awesome.
83. Before that she experimented with red. I’ve tried talking her into doing that again, but no dice.
84. When my aunt met her the night before our wedding, she made a comment to the effect that I was to be commended for adding blond hair and blue eyes to our gene pool.
85. The Daughter has blond hair and blue eyes. So did Little Quinn.
86. I’m not sure there’s a variety of seafood she dislikes.
87. I love the way she looks when she’s just come home from work and changed into her PJ’s.
88. Adopting Lester and Julio was her idea, but she claims the upper hand on that anyway because she was helping out my mother.
89. For some reason, The Daughter and I like to bring up at the dinner table the fact that The Wife, as a kid, had to help the family out on Chicken Butchering Day. I don’t know why.
90. She thinks Orlando Bloom is really attractive. I don’t see it, myself, but you can’t argue these things.
91. For my birthday in 1992 she drove me to Dyersville, IA so I could see the Field of Dreams.
92. If I want to spoil her, all I have to do is buy her blush wine, cashews, olives and chocolate. Cake helps, too.
93. She spoils me by looking the other way when I go to Borders; by making me waffles or French toast or Spanish rice; by cleaning the kitchen after I’ve messed it up; by indulging my love of pie; and a thousand other ways.
94. “You want me to hit you in the face with a pie?” “Sure, it’ll be fun!” “Kinda weird, isn’t it?” “Well, yeah, but still fun, right?” “I dunno, let’s find out.”
It did take her a couple of attempts to nail down her technique, but she quickly realized she didn’t need to be super gentle with the pie. And really, folks, if you haven’t taken a pie in the face from the person you love, well…I’m not sure what you’re waiting for!
94a. We haven’t done this in a really long time. Hmmmm….
95. I know I’ve found the perfect girl for me when she describes our Thanksgiving in 2006 as being perfect because, after dinner, we went to see Casino Royale. In her words: “We had a big turkey dinner, and then we watched James Bond kill people.”
96. We both love laughing at David Caruso on CSI Miami.
96a. Sadly, CSI Miami is long gone, but now we thrill to the adventures of Team Machine on Person of Interest, of Castle and Beckett on Castle, and we enjoy Alton Brown’s delicious brand of pure evil on Cutthroat Kitchen.
97. One time when we were working out at the Y, and she got so engrossed in what she was doing that when I approached her, she didn’t recognize me at first.
97a. She loves lilacs.
97b. She loves sushi, so for a while our Saturday night dinner tradition was I’d buy her sushi at The Store, and she’d eat that while I had a “charcuterie” plate of my own. (I think we can all agree that “charcuterie” is the fancy-schmancy word for “cheese and crackers,” yes? Kind of like how “grits” turned into “polenta” at some point and started commanding $15 a plate?) But she’d eye my cheese and ask for a bite or two. Over time this morphed into her and I both having the cheese plate.
But she still loves the sushi, and I still have to buy it for her! It just becomes her lunch at work on Mondays. No escape!
97c. While driving once:
ME: Huh. HER: What? ME: I know I’ve heard this piece but I don’t know what it is. HER: [into phone] What is this song? [holds phone to speaker, then looks at phone] It’s the fourth movement of Mozart’s Eine kleine nachtmusik. ME: Wow, I didn’t know your phone could do that. HER: I’m pretty sure it’s standard now! Your phone can do it too! ME: Whoa….
See? She teaches me things.
97d. For years she worked in the restaurant biz, which meant working just about all of the major holidays and struggling just to use her allotted vacation time. Now, she’s in banking, so not only does she get the holidays off, she gets off all of them, including the ones I don’t! (I have to work MLK Day, Presidents Day, and the other “lesser” holidays that are still “No mail and no banks” days. She gets ’em off now.) She is not shy about gloating about this.
97e. She continues to make fun of my previous claims that I “am not a dog person”. To my recollection I never made any claims along those lines, just that I was unfamiliar with dogs, not that I disliked dogs. She just shakes her head and keeps on being amused at how much Cane and Carla like me. What can I say!
97f. Her, a few years ago: “Hey, there’s this event where people who own greyhounds all meet up in the Finger Lakes and then we all tour around to wineries and taste wine and have fun with our dogs! Wanna go?” We just got back from our fourth time on that trip the day before yesterday.
97g. This last year has been different, I’ll say that. We’re eating out a lot and staying home and watching movies in bed and so on. Aside from our not being able to go out to eat or to see movies, and the cancellation of several of our favorite festival events, this crisis really hasn’t impacted our lifestyles much at all. I’m glad she’s the one I’m enduring the pandemic with!
97h. Exploring Oahu with her at my side was wonderful. We both kept getting amazed by the same things!
97i. Sometimes it’s hard to find a teevee show that she likes, but when I do find one, it’s a blast as references from those shows will creep into our vernacular.
97j. We tend to get mutually weepy over the more emotional reveals on The Repair Shop.
97k. This last year has had some difficulties of its own, over and above the COVID struggles, but we’ve weathered all of it and continue to weather it all.
97l. Our opinions differed wildly on No Time To Die. Hey, it happens! Kinda like her distaste for coconut. (Which is weird, let’s be honest.)
New for 2023! 97m. She’s had a couple of surgeries in recent years that led to some recovery time and bed-rest, which meant she watched a lot of streaming shows. I didn’t realize what kind of stuff she was streaming until one night we were watching Saturday Night Live and she started laughing knowingly at this sketch. I asked, “Are you watching a lot of murder shows these days?”
97n. On weekends I usually get up before she does, so I’ll come downstairs and make my coffee and get hers set up to go. My signal that she is getting up for good is when she actually opens the blinds in the bedroom; when I hear that, I’m to get up and turn on the coffee. (Sometimes I’m listening to music on my earbuds and I don’t hear the blinds and then she comes downstairs and gives me the “No coffee?!” look. Fellas, try to avoid the “No coffee?!” look.)
97o. No, it doesn’t bother me at all that Carla prefers to sit with her on the love seat when we’re watching teevee at night as opposed to sitting with me on the couch. Harumph.
97p. If I could go back in time and make exactly one change to our wedding day? Yup. We’re all doing the “Rock the Boat” dance made famous by Derry Girls.
97q: Related to 97n above, I’ve been up for 45 minutes while she was trying to doze a bit more. This was thwarted by our cats, who decided to have rompies all over the upstairs, including the bed with her in it. As I write this she has just come downstairs, called the cats assholes, and is now making her coffee.
97r: Stay tuned, but she has started the ball rolling for adopting another greyhound. Yes, I’m on board, but this one’s going to have some pretty big pawprints to fill. (This weekend is a little bittersweet because this is when we’d be on our annual greyhound-meetup excursion to the Finger Lakes wine country.)
97s. Maybe I mentioned this above someplace, I don’t know, but I love how she has chosen to approach her dietary restrictions with a sense of adventure and discovery. We have found more great places to eat and discovered more terrific foods to cook in the years since her celiac diagnosis than we did before, and it’s not like we were dull sticks-in-the-mud in the food department to begin with! She’s always loved trying new foods and spicing things up, which is a real blessing if you’re at all familiar with the Monument to Blandness that is the usual Iowa spice rack.
97t. I’ve come to really like coming home from work, looking up as I pull into the driveway, and seeing her in her home office. Sometimes there will be a dog looking back down at me, which is also cool.
97u. Apparently she takes some of the chocolate from the home supply that I maintain to her desk at work, and some of her coworkers know she has a chocolate stash, so sometimes that gets shared around. I do the “I’m not feeding all the kids in the neighborhood!” thing, you know, the one where your kid wants to grab a dozen freezy-pops from the freezer for all the friends on a hot summer day and despite your protest you let it happen. Because hey, it’s chocolate and that increases the net happiness in the world.
97v. Our last cinematic disagreement came after watching Top Gun: Maverick, which I really liked (despite my general lack of enthusiasm for the original movie). She was distracted by the impossibility of Tom Cruise having perfectly brown hair at this point in his life. I’m hoping this doesn’t hurt our enjoyment of the upcoming Mission: Impossible flicks….
97w. We have developed a way of simultaneously groaning wistfully whenever an unexpected reference to Hawaii shows up on teevee, like the Netflix show we’ve been watching about American street food, and at the end of one episode the preview for the next said, “Next time: Oahu!”, with a big shot of Waikiki.
NEW FOR 2024!!! 97y. This last year was a struggle…my mom’s last months of struggles which played out amidst The Wife’s own struggles. Are things getting better? Who knows…but I hope so.
97aa. I’m just now realizing that I took zero photos of The Wife this past year. This is a big sign of what a rough year it was. It’s time to start turning that shit around!
97ab. No, wait! I did get a lovely shot of her just last weekend! Amazing that I own this great new camera and I haven’t taken enough photos of her yet. But anyway:
2025!!!
97ac. Her birthday present this year? We’re going to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at Kleinhans Music Hall, with the Buffalo Philharmonic doing the music. Yay! But that’s not until May 2. I always feel a little weird giving tickets to something a few months after the gift-giving occasion for the gift-giving occasion, but it’s still a gift!
97ad. Note to self: Order the cake for this weekend.
97ae. See below for new photos with her and Hobbes. This post has become sufficiently unwieldy through multiple updates over the years, and multiple versions of WordPress, that it’s just easier.
97af. Accommodating her celiac needs is sometimes a challenge, but on the upside, I now know where to get a good breakfast sandwich pretty anywhere between Buffalo and Syracuse!
97ag. On work mornings we’re both often making our coffee at the same time. I usually let her use the creamer first. Yesterday she gets her coffee all dosed-up the way she wants it, and then she hands me the container, saying “It’s all yours.” There’s about a quarter-teaspoon left in there. She was amused by this.
97ah. For Christmas this past year I gave her the gift of warmth: a knitted cowl to wear around her neck, a plug-in seat-warmer for her car, and an electric blanket. I guess you reach a point where warmth is the best gift.
97ai. On a sad note…if I had to learn that my mother had died from someone, I’m glad it was her.
97aj. I guess in the end it’s all about relationships, and how the friends you surround yourself with help get you through the day–oh wait, sorry. I slipped into “J.D.’s episode-closing monologue” mode there. We just completed a re-watch of Scrubs last night. Next we’ll probably start a complete rewatch of Letterkenny. Pitter patter!
98. Maybe this is a personal failing on my part, but I can’t bear it when she cries. It kills me inside. But I’m trying to get better at this, since as Gandalf said, “Not all tears are an evil.”
99. I wish we were living lives that didn’t include so many tears.
100. I love her more than I did last week at this time.
101. Number 100 on this list will be equally true next week at this time. And the week after. And so on.
102. She makes me happier than I thought possible.
103. She…oh, I guess that’s where I need to stop. I love you, honey!
I’m growing more and more attracted to the abstract, I’ve found. I think part of this comes from the greatly-increased amount of time we’ve been spending in art galleries and museums, particularly the Buffalo AKG Museum, with its amazing collection of modern art. But this interest in the abstract is also tinging my music listening. Works like the one I feature today are really appealing to me of late.
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards and commissions.
Awards include the “Academy Award in Music” from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition.
…
Mumford has taught at the Washington Conservatory of Music, served as Artist-in-Residence at Bowling Green State University, and served as assistant professor of composition and Composer-in-Residence at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Northern Ohio.
Mr. Mumford is published by Theodore Presser Co. and Quicklight Music.
I snipped out a long list of honors and accomplishments by Mr. Mumford, just to keep this post at a reasonable length, but do go read through it. He is a very accomplished musician.
This piece is called “a garden of flourishing paths”. From the YouTube page, I believe these comments are by Mr. Mumford himself:
a garden of flourishing paths was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Contemporary Music Forum/VERGE Ensemble to celebrate the 100th birthday of the distinguished American composer Elliott Carter. This work would also not be possible without the generosity of Philip Berlin, Otho Eskin, and Nancy Dodge. Special thanks also to composer Steve Antosca, Artistic Advisor of the VERGE Ensemble and Stephen Ackert, Head of the Music Department of the National Gallery of Art, for their vision and support.
The work is cast in eight short movements, each featuring a particular instrument or group of instruments.
The title for me evokes the space for which it was written (the West Garden Court of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). In addition, it refers to the expressive character of the developmental paths taken by the instruments in relation to one another.
It has been my pleasure to have known Mr. Carter for many years since being a student of his during in the early 1980s. I am pleased to add my small piece to the many that were written to honor this marvelous creative artist.
Hearing the work the first time, I found it striking in its blend of colors–just look at that combination of instruments!–and the way melodies and rhythms seem to briefly emerge, without ever taking over or forming a complete thought. The effect seems to me to suggest the kind of experience one has when walking a garden path: hints of color and splashes of sound, each obscured, each only perceived around the periphery. A brilliant blossom appears, but only seen through the branches of a tree in front of it; a snippet of conversation wafts from around the next bush, and so on.
You know what? Here’s another piece by Mr. Mumford. I love this man’s sound! This is “through a stillness brightening”. (Non-capitalization of his titles seems to be a thing he does, not unlike e.e. cummings.)
Not my best composition ever, I must admit…this is WAY too busy. We were sitting in a turn lane in Geneva, NY, waiting to turn left to go into downtown and visit a favorite breakfast place, and a train was rolling by. In Geneva the main rail line lies right between the downtown and US20, so sometimes you have to wait to enter the city. That’s totally fine! I love railroads and trains and I am firmly on Team MOAR TRAINS. What was pretty cool here is that my left-turn signal was obviously keyed to the railroad crossing, so I wasn’t tasked with turning into that little stub of street.
As for the photo itself, I wanted to capture the graffiti on that hopper car. I actually like graffiti tags a lot of time. Setting aside that it’s technically vandalism, there is often a ton of skill and artistry involved. I consider stuff like this “mobile public art”. In this case, I caught it (using Ophelia, my phone) as it was rolling past a big permanent mural on the back of one of Geneva’s buildings.
I really love the old train-towns of Upstate NY, the ones that grew along the rail lines that once provided the transportation infrastructure for the industries of the region. I hope they regain some of their former energy, someday.
Note: I have edited, and added to, this post several times since it went live. This is because my thoughts on this subject are a mess, and there’s a good chance they present as such in the material below.
GRADY: We’re trying to solve a problem here, Billy. BILLY BEANE: Not like this, you’re not. You’re not even looking at the problem.
–Moneyball (2011)
I haven’t written about the situation in Gaza at all, going back to when it all began with the horrific and unprecedented attacks by Hamas terrorists against citizens of Israel on October 7, 2023. Why haven’t I mentioned it? Mainly because I find the topic of Middle Eastern violence unbelievably saddening, and I have no answers to offer on the situation. It’s been that way since before I was born, and more than that, it’s been that way since thousands of years before I was born.
But maybe that’s not a good enough reason to avoid discussing it entirely. At some point one must offer a testimony to one’s humanity by noting the horrors we keep making for ourselves. (“We” is meant to refer to the entire species here.) I don’t know if powerlessness is a good reason for silence. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
I did make one post on Facebook about the events that have taken place in Gaza since all of this current situation began. One, in reaction to a single incident in the ongoing Israeli response. A friend of mine who is actually an Israeli Jew took me to task for that post, and I had to quickly admit that she was right. I took down the post, and we shared an exchange of messages about what’s been happening over there.
My starting point here is that I have never liked or trusted Benjamin Netanyahu. He is far too conservative and belligerent for my tastes, and I do not trust his motivations or goals in the way he is prosecuting the current conflict. I think there is much to justifiably criticize of his worldview in general, and the way it is manifesting in the way he is directing the current war in Gaza.
Maybe it’s the liberal leftist peacenik in me, but I have found myself sympathetic to the throngs of people decrying the violence being visited upon innocent people in Gaza who have had Hamas thrust upon them for too long. Hamas is, after all, not a legitimate governmental body but a terrorist organization, and one of the most militant and violent, to boot. They have taken root in Gaza and assumed control of that region not through any legitimate means, and many Palestinians living in Gaza really are caught between awfulness on one side and a rage-filled response to that awfulness on the other. My sympathy was frustrated in the last American election by people who insisted that they would not vote for the existing administration under the assumption that there was some single act, or small selection of acts, that Joe Biden could have undertaken to end the violence entirely.
Those sympathies were real, but they had limits. And I’m not sure my limits were in the right place.
The Jewish Israeli friend I mention above, and another Jewish author friend, continued to decry what they saw as antisemitism on the part of people who protested the war. This I did not understand, for a long time. I did not see how disapproval of this war was also emblematic of disapproval of Jews in general.
But then, something clicked, during discussions over the last few days on Facebook regarding a recent release of Israeli prisoners by Hamas. One man, held since October 7, 2023, is reported to have stated eagerness to see his wife and children again, not knowing that his very captors murdered them that same day.
That was a brutal reminder that wars don’t happen in a vacuum, and there is never just one set of moral actors in any conflict. And someone, either one of my two friends or someone in their comments, noted something that stopped me in my tracks: Why did all the people who have condemned Israel’s response so stridently said nothing about anything that Hamas has done?
I’ll circle back to that in a minute. First, a literary memory.
(Yes, it will be relevant.)
There was an author in the 20th century named John D. Fitzgerald who is best known for a series of children’s books he wrote, called the Great Brain books. There’s no name for the entire series, but they start off with The Great Brain and those words feature in all the titles that followed. The books tell the story of a Catholic family living in rural Utah in the 1890s, and they are based on real events and experiences from Fitzgerald’s own life. The books are wildly entertaining, though they have admittedly not aged all that well in the nearly sixty years since the series began. As noted the books are loosely (very loosely, I later learned) autobiographical, and Fitzgerald writes them from his own viewpoint, but the main character–the “Great Brain” of the series–is his older brother Tom, who is incredibly intelligent and who never lets anybody forget it. He also has what Fitzgerald, writing as “J.D.”, his younger self, calls a “money-loving heart”. Thomas spends the books cooking up one scheme after another to move money from his brothers’ and his friends’ pockets into his own, and a lot of it is straight-up con-man stuff.
The books also depict what life might have been like in a small Utah town back then. I do not remember if the books take place just before or just after Utah was admitted to the Union, but relationships with Mormons form part of the backbone of the stories, along with the trials and tribulations of young boys growing up in that environment. The depiction of masculinity in these books is admittedly not the best; corporal punishment is routine and accepted, and backing up one’s boasts with one’s fists was always necessary. It’s the kind of world where no dare could be ignored and no fight backed away from.
In one of the first couple books–I don’t recall which one–an old Jewish man moves in to town. His intention is to open his own general store and make his living that way. I honestly don’t remember much about his story, except the end. His name in the book was Abie. Somehow, it’s discovered that Abie is very ill, and it turns out that he’s very ill because he is literally starving to death. His store has failed miserably, he has no money, and he has no food. The Fitzgeralds gather around Abie to try to revive him and give him food, but it’s too late and Abie dies.
Later on, they’re all wondering why Abie never said anything, why they didn’t know that this nice old Jew had starved to death right in the middle of their own community where everyone theoretically cares about everyone else. Fitzgerald’s father, who runs the local newspaper and is often depicted in the books as the smartest man in the town, provides the answer: it’s precisely because Abie was a Jew.
I don’t have copies of these books at all, so I can’t quote them directly, but the reason no one noticed a starving Jew in their own neighborhood was horrible and blunt (and honestly shocking, coming in the middle of a book that’s mostly an entertaining story for middle-grade readers). This isn’t anywhere near the way Fitzgerald has anybody say it in the book, but it boils down very simply to this:
Nobody cares what happens to a Jew.
I’ve thought about that passage off and on for many years. I read those books, several times, each, when I was a kid. I never understood it, not really, or why author Fitzgerald chose to put such a sad and stark lesson right in the middle of a children’s lit novel. And I still don’t, but Fitzgerald was himself a journalist and writer for a time and he wrote his novels in the 1960s, when knowledge of the Holocaust was still pretty new.
I haven’t understood it. I have to be honest about that. I took that anecdote, which stands quite alone in Fitzgerald’s books, to refer to our failure to address with concern the needs of people who are strangers to our community, to people who are “other”. There’s a lot of truth to that, yes. But I suspect that anyone who is a Jew who read those books recognized a different lesson loud and clear: it’s not just an illustration of general suspicion of people who are “other”, it’s that throughout just about all of human history during which Jews existed, Jews have always been “other”.
Back to the main problem, then.
That quote at the top of this post is a useful one, I think. It comes from a movie about baseball, but it’s absolutely true that you can’t hope to solve a problem unless you’ve at least actually identified the problem.
So what is the problem here, today, in Gaza and elsewhere?
It’s a problem with a lot of horrible facets, that much is sure. Can it be reduced to a single sentence? Here’s one way Aaron Sorkin summed it up in The West Wing:
PRESIDENT BARTLET: Ellie had a teacher named Mr. Pordy, who had no interest in nuance. He asked the class why there’s always been conflict in the Middle East and Ellie raised her hand and said “It’s a centuries old religious conflict involving land and suspicions and culture and…” “Wrong.” Mr. Pordy said, “It’s because it’s incredibly hot and there’s no water.”
Is that all it is? I honestly don’t know. That’s probably a bigger piece of it than many prefer to admit, but…well, come on, now. I have no idea what Sorkin was getting at when he wrote that. Yes, there’s a lot of hot and arid country in that part of the world. There are also several great river valleys that saw the rise of some of the greatest early civilizations in the history of our species.
All the other stuff can’t be discounted. Ancient religious hatreds can’t be ignored. (And lest I turn this into a screed against Aaron Sorkin, it baffles me that he takes this route here, because in the first season he dramatized a conflict between India and Pakistan that he directly attributed to “the Subcontinent’s religious malevolence”.) But when we look at the current events in Gaza, and when we’re confronted by people who are rightly horrified by the suffering being visited upon the Palestinians in that land, there’s a question, or a series of questions, that my Jewish friends, and only my Jewish friends, have asked:
Where is the similar condemnation of the attacks on October 7, 2023?
That question leads to others:
Are the Israelis to ignore those attacks? Are they allowed to make response to that level of unprovoked viciousness? Are they supposed to just…accept it? Take it?
And those questions lead to more, which ultimately boil down to one question:
Why is the suffering of Jews just a thing that’s to be accepted in this world?
I have no answer to that. I’m not sure an answer exists that satisfies. I mean, there is an obvious answer to that: it’s just good old garden-variety as-old-as-the-hills anti-Semitism.
So my question ends up being, Why in the world is anti-Semitism so permanent? How is it still a thing? Because I have to conclude that this is very much a part of the constant and ongoing discussion. After a year and a half of listening to folks online and off decrying this war, and as saddened as I am by the war and by my new President’s insanely unhelpful statements about what’s to come, I do have to wonder why it really seems as if the general idea is that the people of Israel, and by extension the worldwide Jewish community, are just supposed to suffer in silence. The suffering of Jews is just factored in, it seems. It’s the cost of doing business.
It saddens me that I’m just now seeing this. My Jewish friends have seen it all their lives, and their parents saw it, and their parents saw it before them. And their children are seeing it.
I’ve seen many protests on behalf of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza, but I haven’t seen any on behalf of the innocents on both sides of this horror, and that has to include Israelis. It has to include Jews. October 7, 2023 was one of the most horrific days for the worldwide Jewish community since the Holocaust itself ended. Were they really to make no response to this? Or have they made the wrong response? If the latter, then…what is the right response? I’m not seeing any of these questions being asked, and it seems to me they need to be. I understand the impulse to center the suffering of the Palestinian community in Gaza as everything has been unfolding, but too often that kind of commentary has shaded toward the idea that the Israelis contributed to the problem in the first place. And as a historical matter, there is absolutely some truth to that, because there is always some truth to that. Events like October 7, 2023 don’t happen out of nowhere.
But we have to be very careful about that line of thinking, because it’s really easy to frame that argument in such a way as to grant the premise that Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023 were a reasonable and justifiable response to something Israel did previously. And I am unwilling to go that far.
I don’t know what the solution here is. I don’t know that endless war, and a concurrent and constant turning up of the heat, is ever going to accomplish anything. But I think that any movement toward any kind of lasting peace in that region must start with a rejection of the idea, subconscious though it may be, that there exists in this world a population of human beings whose suffering is just baked in to the whole affair. We really do seem largely accepting of the suffering of the Jews, and I don’t believe any of these issues can be solved without acknowledging that. Without looking at the whole problem.
Comments are off for this post. Also, I feel it necessary to note what is screamingly obvious: I am not a Jew, so these thoughts are those of an outsider who cannot ever fully grapple with this entire problem the way someone who is actually IN that community can.
It’s always struck me as a shame that as the trumpet became a fully chromatic instrument in the 1800s, with the invention of valves, it still languished in the back of the orchestra, getting few opportunities for feature solo work. Here’s one such piece, actually written for the cornet and a virtuoso of that instrument, Jules Levi. Jacques Offenbach wrote this, and it’s a pleasantly fun and lovely piece. A deep work it’s not. Depth in concerted music for the trumpet would have to wait until the 20th century, unfortunately.
Here is the American Eagle Waltz by Jacques Offenbach.
No answers….
Note: I have edited, and added to, this post several times since it went live. This is because my thoughts on this subject are a mess, and there’s a good chance they present as such in the material below.
I haven’t written about the situation in Gaza at all, going back to when it all began with the horrific and unprecedented attacks by Hamas terrorists against citizens of Israel on October 7, 2023. Why haven’t I mentioned it? Mainly because I find the topic of Middle Eastern violence unbelievably saddening, and I have no answers to offer on the situation. It’s been that way since before I was born, and more than that, it’s been that way since thousands of years before I was born.
But maybe that’s not a good enough reason to avoid discussing it entirely. At some point one must offer a testimony to one’s humanity by noting the horrors we keep making for ourselves. (“We” is meant to refer to the entire species here.) I don’t know if powerlessness is a good reason for silence. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
I did make one post on Facebook about the events that have taken place in Gaza since all of this current situation began. One, in reaction to a single incident in the ongoing Israeli response. A friend of mine who is actually an Israeli Jew took me to task for that post, and I had to quickly admit that she was right. I took down the post, and we shared an exchange of messages about what’s been happening over there.
My starting point here is that I have never liked or trusted Benjamin Netanyahu. He is far too conservative and belligerent for my tastes, and I do not trust his motivations or goals in the way he is prosecuting the current conflict. I think there is much to justifiably criticize of his worldview in general, and the way it is manifesting in the way he is directing the current war in Gaza.
Maybe it’s the liberal leftist peacenik in me, but I have found myself sympathetic to the throngs of people decrying the violence being visited upon innocent people in Gaza who have had Hamas thrust upon them for too long. Hamas is, after all, not a legitimate governmental body but a terrorist organization, and one of the most militant and violent, to boot. They have taken root in Gaza and assumed control of that region not through any legitimate means, and many Palestinians living in Gaza really are caught between awfulness on one side and a rage-filled response to that awfulness on the other. My sympathy was frustrated in the last American election by people who insisted that they would not vote for the existing administration under the assumption that there was some single act, or small selection of acts, that Joe Biden could have undertaken to end the violence entirely.
Those sympathies were real, but they had limits. And I’m not sure my limits were in the right place.
The Jewish Israeli friend I mention above, and another Jewish author friend, continued to decry what they saw as antisemitism on the part of people who protested the war. This I did not understand, for a long time. I did not see how disapproval of this war was also emblematic of disapproval of Jews in general.
But then, something clicked, during discussions over the last few days on Facebook regarding a recent release of Israeli prisoners by Hamas. One man, held since October 7, 2023, is reported to have stated eagerness to see his wife and children again, not knowing that his very captors murdered them that same day.
That was a brutal reminder that wars don’t happen in a vacuum, and there is never just one set of moral actors in any conflict. And someone, either one of my two friends or someone in their comments, noted something that stopped me in my tracks: Why did all the people who have condemned Israel’s response so stridently said nothing about anything that Hamas has done?
I’ll circle back to that in a minute. First, a literary memory.
(Yes, it will be relevant.)
There was an author in the 20th century named John D. Fitzgerald who is best known for a series of children’s books he wrote, called the Great Brain books. There’s no name for the entire series, but they start off with The Great Brain and those words feature in all the titles that followed. The books tell the story of a Catholic family living in rural Utah in the 1890s, and they are based on real events and experiences from Fitzgerald’s own life. The books are wildly entertaining, though they have admittedly not aged all that well in the nearly sixty years since the series began. As noted the books are loosely (very loosely, I later learned) autobiographical, and Fitzgerald writes them from his own viewpoint, but the main character–the “Great Brain” of the series–is his older brother Tom, who is incredibly intelligent and who never lets anybody forget it. He also has what Fitzgerald, writing as “J.D.”, his younger self, calls a “money-loving heart”. Thomas spends the books cooking up one scheme after another to move money from his brothers’ and his friends’ pockets into his own, and a lot of it is straight-up con-man stuff.
The books also depict what life might have been like in a small Utah town back then. I do not remember if the books take place just before or just after Utah was admitted to the Union, but relationships with Mormons form part of the backbone of the stories, along with the trials and tribulations of young boys growing up in that environment. The depiction of masculinity in these books is admittedly not the best; corporal punishment is routine and accepted, and backing up one’s boasts with one’s fists was always necessary. It’s the kind of world where no dare could be ignored and no fight backed away from.
In one of the first couple books–I don’t recall which one–an old Jewish man moves in to town. His intention is to open his own general store and make his living that way. I honestly don’t remember much about his story, except the end. His name in the book was Abie. Somehow, it’s discovered that Abie is very ill, and it turns out that he’s very ill because he is literally starving to death. His store has failed miserably, he has no money, and he has no food. The Fitzgeralds gather around Abie to try to revive him and give him food, but it’s too late and Abie dies.
Later on, they’re all wondering why Abie never said anything, why they didn’t know that this nice old Jew had starved to death right in the middle of their own community where everyone theoretically cares about everyone else. Fitzgerald’s father, who runs the local newspaper and is often depicted in the books as the smartest man in the town, provides the answer: it’s precisely because Abie was a Jew.
I don’t have copies of these books at all, so I can’t quote them directly, but the reason no one noticed a starving Jew in their own neighborhood was horrible and blunt (and honestly shocking, coming in the middle of a book that’s mostly an entertaining story for middle-grade readers). This isn’t anywhere near the way Fitzgerald has anybody say it in the book, but it boils down very simply to this:
Nobody cares what happens to a Jew.
I’ve thought about that passage off and on for many years. I read those books, several times, each, when I was a kid. I never understood it, not really, or why author Fitzgerald chose to put such a sad and stark lesson right in the middle of a children’s lit novel. And I still don’t, but Fitzgerald was himself a journalist and writer for a time and he wrote his novels in the 1960s, when knowledge of the Holocaust was still pretty new.
I haven’t understood it. I have to be honest about that. I took that anecdote, which stands quite alone in Fitzgerald’s books, to refer to our failure to address with concern the needs of people who are strangers to our community, to people who are “other”. There’s a lot of truth to that, yes. But I suspect that anyone who is a Jew who read those books recognized a different lesson loud and clear: it’s not just an illustration of general suspicion of people who are “other”, it’s that throughout just about all of human history during which Jews existed, Jews have always been “other”.
Back to the main problem, then.
That quote at the top of this post is a useful one, I think. It comes from a movie about baseball, but it’s absolutely true that you can’t hope to solve a problem unless you’ve at least actually identified the problem.
So what is the problem here, today, in Gaza and elsewhere?
It’s a problem with a lot of horrible facets, that much is sure. Can it be reduced to a single sentence? Here’s one way Aaron Sorkin summed it up in The West Wing:
Is that all it is? I honestly don’t know. That’s probably a bigger piece of it than many prefer to admit, but…well, come on, now. I have no idea what Sorkin was getting at when he wrote that. Yes, there’s a lot of hot and arid country in that part of the world. There are also several great river valleys that saw the rise of some of the greatest early civilizations in the history of our species.
All the other stuff can’t be discounted. Ancient religious hatreds can’t be ignored. (And lest I turn this into a screed against Aaron Sorkin, it baffles me that he takes this route here, because in the first season he dramatized a conflict between India and Pakistan that he directly attributed to “the Subcontinent’s religious malevolence”.) But when we look at the current events in Gaza, and when we’re confronted by people who are rightly horrified by the suffering being visited upon the Palestinians in that land, there’s a question, or a series of questions, that my Jewish friends, and only my Jewish friends, have asked:
Where is the similar condemnation of the attacks on October 7, 2023?
That question leads to others:
Are the Israelis to ignore those attacks? Are they allowed to make response to that level of unprovoked viciousness? Are they supposed to just…accept it? Take it?
And those questions lead to more, which ultimately boil down to one question:
Why is the suffering of Jews just a thing that’s to be accepted in this world?
I have no answer to that. I’m not sure an answer exists that satisfies. I mean, there is an obvious answer to that: it’s just good old garden-variety as-old-as-the-hills anti-Semitism.
So my question ends up being, Why in the world is anti-Semitism so permanent? How is it still a thing? Because I have to conclude that this is very much a part of the constant and ongoing discussion. After a year and a half of listening to folks online and off decrying this war, and as saddened as I am by the war and by my new President’s insanely unhelpful statements about what’s to come, I do have to wonder why it really seems as if the general idea is that the people of Israel, and by extension the worldwide Jewish community, are just supposed to suffer in silence. The suffering of Jews is just factored in, it seems. It’s the cost of doing business.
It saddens me that I’m just now seeing this. My Jewish friends have seen it all their lives, and their parents saw it, and their parents saw it before them. And their children are seeing it.
I’ve seen many protests on behalf of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza, but I haven’t seen any on behalf of the innocents on both sides of this horror, and that has to include Israelis. It has to include Jews. October 7, 2023 was one of the most horrific days for the worldwide Jewish community since the Holocaust itself ended. Were they really to make no response to this? Or have they made the wrong response? If the latter, then…what is the right response? I’m not seeing any of these questions being asked, and it seems to me they need to be. I understand the impulse to center the suffering of the Palestinian community in Gaza as everything has been unfolding, but too often that kind of commentary has shaded toward the idea that the Israelis contributed to the problem in the first place. And as a historical matter, there is absolutely some truth to that, because there is always some truth to that. Events like October 7, 2023 don’t happen out of nowhere.
But we have to be very careful about that line of thinking, because it’s really easy to frame that argument in such a way as to grant the premise that Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023 were a reasonable and justifiable response to something Israel did previously. And I am unwilling to go that far.
I don’t know what the solution here is. I don’t know that endless war, and a concurrent and constant turning up of the heat, is ever going to accomplish anything. But I think that any movement toward any kind of lasting peace in that region must start with a rejection of the idea, subconscious though it may be, that there exists in this world a population of human beings whose suffering is just baked in to the whole affair. We really do seem largely accepting of the suffering of the Jews, and I don’t believe any of these issues can be solved without acknowledging that. Without looking at the whole problem.
Comments are off for this post. Also, I feel it necessary to note what is screamingly obvious: I am not a Jew, so these thoughts are those of an outsider who cannot ever fully grapple with this entire problem the way someone who is actually IN that community can.