Story of the Day 3/ 8/ 2012

You read it correctly. This story of from 2012, from last year.
I didn't post it, then, because it took me a few months to get approval, and when I finally did, I felt it was meant to be posted as a Purim Story of the Day. So, I have been saving it, until now.
I was also uncertain abut posting it.
Th remark , at the end, was a put down of a group of people- and I do not agree with it- but the setting and who made it ....well, it was surreal in a very Purim way. ( The same way that a photo of a father in Mea Shearim ( which has been making the rounds for a few years) is ....odd because he has his many children all costumed for the jewish holiday in Santa costumes, or some of the other odd things that get said.)

Happy Purim!


Story of the Day 3/ 8/ 2012

Today is Purim. It is a not-so-obscure jewish holiday which isn't a holy day, meaning we can drive around in our cars, use the phone and go shopping for a wrench.

Since my husband and I are are members of the We-like-to -sit -in-the -family room and read-on-our-vacation club...actually, we are charter members, my hubby has this wonderful , valuable thing called unused vacation days.
So he took one , today, so he can sit on the sofa in the family room and read.

He also got to attend the longer than usual ( because of the holiday) services at synagogue , this morning, AND deliver packages called " Mishloach manor"- gifts of food, around the neighborhood to assorted friends and relatives.
Okay, mostly friends, because most people will not admit to being related to us.

Delivering basket or bags of food is one of a few things that Jewish people do to celebrate this holiday.
They also dress up in costumes and get drunk.
Oh yes, and eat too much. As my friend Lynne will tell you, on Jewish holidays you either eat too much or you can't eat.
If you can remember which holiday is for which, you know most of the religion.

And , as a side benefit, my husband and I got to eat lunch together, since the meeting I attended ended on time.

While we were eating, my husband told me a a bit about his rounds delivering the food packages.
He had stopped in , while delivering the one to our cousins, and chatted with them.
He had stopped in at the nursing home and delivered three packages. One man was especially happy to be remembered.
He is not someone I know, but is in the Alzheimer's wing with someone else whom we have known for years.

My husband and my son, Aaron, would visit over there, regularly, while Aaron was still in town.
Aaron is the son who is ...tall, very very tall, and wears a button up shirt and a tie everyday, oh yes, and a kippah or yarmulke or whatever the beanie is called in your lexicon.

So, one day when my husband and Aaron were visiting, this gentleman asked my son, "So, are you the rabbi?"

Aaron replied, "No, I'm not smart enough."

To which the response was, " Well, then are you the Reform rabbi?"

Story of the Day 2/ 6/ 2013

I received a frantic phone call from my mother.
The phone call wasn't frantic, my mother was.
And my mother is NEVER frantic.

She had received a phone call.
The person had left a message. His name was something like "Aaron Goldstein" or maybe "Aaron Goldman".
But my mother was worried it was actually an Aaron Margolis-Greenbaum who had called.
My mother was worried that it was my son, her grandson, Aaron, and that he needed her.

I told my mother that this was unlikely.
It was 2:45 PM. My son was in Lawrence. Lawrence is a northern suburb of Indianapolis.
He was at his EMT class.
Yes, his car could have broken down ( it is a 1993 Honda Civic) , he could have lost his wallet, he could be hungry and thirsty.
But he was about 30 minutes from home. okay, maybe 35.
And he has a AAA card.
And a mother with a cell phone.
So, why would he call his grandmother in New York, a mere 721 miles away, if it was a real emergency?

Especially since he s deaf and cannot hear well on a phone.

My mother was still worried. Actually, very worried.
She was sure, somehow, that her little grandson, all 6'3" of him, might need her help.
I told her not to worry, that I would call my son and ask if he had called her.

I called Aaron.
It turns out he had called his grandmother.
But not on purpose.
He had somehow managed to butt dial her, and his voice message was what was left on her phone's answering machine.
My mother had been butt dialed.

As I called my mother back, to let her know what had happened, I realized that my intelligent and well educated , and normally very calm mother, was exactly the person who would send $1,200 to her grandson who had somehow gotten into trouble and ......I felt very lucky that no scam artists had her phone number.

Story of the Day 2/ 2/ 2013

It was my birthday, which it actually wasn't.
That is because my birthday occurred mid-week and none of us felt energetic enough to celebrate it ,even though celebrating birthdays in our home is always on the low energy output part of the spectrum.

A typical birthday is celebrated by a slightly nicer than usual dinner with a cake or cookies following it, the opening of some cards and a few gifts- usually selected by the recipient and also ordered by them, and then given to the spouse or parent to wrap, which means tossing it into a somewhat crumpled-from-many-uses gift-bag.

Oh, we also sing or sign "Happy Birthday". Very pathetically. But we do.

At any rate, the rearrangement of the actual date happens rather regularly, so having it on Friday evening,a mere two days after my actual birthday, was somewhat standard.
So were the cards.
There was no cake in evidence, though.
I had looked over the options at Trader Joe's and the only things that looked good were not marked kosher. And the selection of kosher stuff at Kroger's was even worse.
My husband, however, had a chocolate bar he had been keeping in his car, and he brought it out- well, actually in, for the occasion.

Ely had sent a package ( I slit that and the gift from Lynne open before Shabbat) and at the bottom was another one of his fabulous books, and then my husband pulled out this gift to me- both of them, wrapped together in a box from some printer paper around which he had looped a ribbon from something else. Inside was a necklace I had bought on ebay for $6.54 including shipping, and a pair of pajamas. They were exactly what I wanted, since I had bought them on clearance at Target.

I thanked him effusively. I also tod him that I might have another pair of pajamas he could give me- this other pair purchased on clearance from Kohl's, but they were still in the bag, two weeks after I purchased them.

Why?
Sarah seemed to think them inappropriate for her mother to wear.
My husband raised his eyebrow, so I started to explain the problem with the pajamas.

You see, the top is black, but the pajama pants have a black and white zebra stripe print.
Sarah interrupted me ,at this point, to emphatically state to her father that they were " slutty".

My response was, "I find it hard to believe that pajamas that are made out of polar fleece could be classified as slutty."
Even if the print is zebra stripes.

Story of the Day 1/ 28/ 2013

It has been one of those days.
A long one of those days.
It started , yesterday.
No, it actually started the day before that.
Wait,what am I thinking, it started on January 23rd. Wednesday evening, January 23rd. I don't' know how I could be so confused as to when today's story started, but, as I said, it has been one heck of a long day.

On Wednesday, January 23rd, my husband came home and announced that his headlight was out.
He didn'H say that. he said his "head lamp" was out. The last person I knew who called it that was my grandfather. He died in 1973 at the age of 91. We think.
Okay, we are pretty sure that he was at least 91.
When he came to this country, he used his brother's visa.
My grandfather's mother, Fanny, was rather desperate to get out of Europe.
Her husband wasn't. He seemed to be rather okay with hanging around despite the pogroms.
But she wasn't.
So, Fanny put in for visas for each of her older sons. And when the one came for his younger brother, Fanny up and sent Eli off to America, with his uncle, who ( unlike her husband) also wanted to get out of Europe.
As a result, my grandfather appears to have been born 2 months before his next sibling......so, at the very least he was 91. But who is counting.
At any rate, my grandfather did have a couple of automobiles with headlamps.
Not his most famous one, though. That was his maroon Pierce Arrow with the beige fenders.
The car would not have gotten its picture in the newspaper just for being such a lovely combination of colors, especially since this was well before color photography. No, the car had its picture in the newspaper because of Virginia.
Virginia was a pony that my grandfather and his teenage son , Bud, bought for my father ( who was all of 4 or so) when they went to the fair.
It was a bit of an impulse purchase. They hadn't thought about how to get the pony home.
Fortunately, they were slim and trim and the three of them, Grandpa Eli, Bud, and my father in the middle ( this was well before carseats or even seat belts) shared the front, and Virginia rode home to Akron in style- with her head out one window of the back seat, and her tail out the other.
I am sure it was a "pleasant" surprise for my grandmother.
It - the car with the pony's head our one window and tail out the other, got its picture taken and put into the Akron Beacon Journal. One of those great moments of journalism.
At least, in our family.

At any rate, getting my husband's car a new headlamp is my responsibility.
There are two reasons for this.
The first is because my husband heads off to work in the dark and comes home in the dark, at least this time of year. During the summer, at least half the time it is still light when he gets home from work. But now is not the summer.
The other reason it is my job is because my husband is working during all of the hours that car repair places are open.

So, that was Wednesday evening.

Thursday morning, after dropping Sarah off at school, I headed over to one of the car repair places on Keystone.
I parked my car and waited.
And waited.
They were supposed to open at 7:00 AM, but someone must have overslept their alarm clock. Of course, they picked the day it was 5 degrees Fahrenheit. So, I spent about 20 minutes turning my husband's car on and off and on and off trying to keep from turning into a popsicle.

When the lights finally went on in the garage, I went over and knocked on the door, and waited.
Several minutes later, a guy came to the door and let me in.
The guy then took me into the office and pulled up on his computer which lightbulb fits which Honda program and decided he did have the bulb, but he wasn't sure they would be able to change it, because , apparently, in our Honda the grill has to be popped off to change the bulb.
And he wasn't' able to do that because he didn't have the tool, but he would take a look, anyway.

This seemed somewhat plausible, because the last time the bulb had gone out, my husband, who is very good at changing these things, couldn't do it himself, which is why I was dragging the car out to pay to have it done.

Well, the guy goes and monkeys with it and decided he can't change it, and then he closes the hood of the car.
And the light comes on.

He explains that it was probably loose, and I drive off, happy to have paid a big fat nothing to get this problem taken care of.

At 6:10 PM,my husband wasn't home yet, so , I get in his car to go draw.
Naked people.
Downtown.
And the headlamp doesn't turn on.

The next day is Friday.
My Fridays are busy. I go off to work, in the morning and then I rush home and desperately try to fix something edible for Shabbat and take a couple of swipes at the paper piles in the family room and on the kitchen table, and maybe brandish a broom at the more dusty areas of the house.
With my limited housekeeping skills, and with it getting dark early ( meaning that Shabbat starts early) there is no time to deal with a car repair.

Since the local places are mostly open on Saturday ( when we cannot do it ) and are closed on Sundays ( when we could), I found myself, today, taking my husand's car out to try to get the headlight taken care of.
Yes, the participle is dangling, but, at this point, so are a lot of other things.

I drove over to a car repair place that the first place said could pop the grill off.
A real car repair place, not just an oil and lube and bulb store.

And they didn't' have the bulb.

This guy explains that if I wanted it done, today, I could drive a little further down the road and buy the bulb at Auto-zone, and bring it back, and he could change it.
This sounded reasonable.

I drove down the road aways to Auto-zone.
They were busy.
There were at least three other people in line in front of me, so I waited.
The lady, a tall young black woman. Okay, everyone is young and tall compared to me, but anyway, was manning the register. When it was my turn, I told her what I wanted.
She came around the counter and walked down an aisle and got the bulb for me. She also pulled a small plastic envelope of bulb grease off a rack and told me I would also need that to change the bulb.
I told her, "Well, I am not able to change the bulb by myself, I am taking it somewhere."

She looked at me as if i had insulted the very nature of the Auto-zone experience.

"Joe can help you."

She rang up my purchases and then I waited about 10 minutes for Joe.
Joe was not as young and he might have been as tall, but it didn't seem as tall on a guy, and he was white. He also was named Joe- which is often a good sign, since that is the name of Lynne's husband.
Hey, take good signs when you can get them.

Joe told me it was very simple to change the bulb, except that you can't see what you are doing and you have to do it by feel.

I , however, don't. My feeling in my fingers is not great. One of the joys of having arthritis or carpal tunnel or a combo of the two.

He saw me cringe.

He took the bulb in his hand, and the bulb grease and walked me out to the car.
He asked me to pop the hood.
He pulled some white plastic thing forward,it was white, and plastic. I hope you are impressed with my descriptive abilities. It was also a lot smaller than a bread box.
Then he stuck the bulb in and told me to have a nice day.

Next time I need a full service station, I know where to go.

Story of the Day 1/ 16/ 2013 #2

My daughter has just taught me something, the problem is that I can't use it.

Most of my conversations are in English, spoken English.
If it was only learning how to finger spell it, I might manage, but I have no idea how to pronounce it.
It is a French phrase: L'esprit de l'escalier or l'esprit d'escalier
Literally, it means staircase wit.
What it really means is having a slow to fire brain, and coming up with a good retort, too late.

I explained to my daughter that it is a wonderful phrase, but since I have no idea how to say it, I will not be able to use it.

My daughter looked at me like as if I came in from the Stone Age.
You see, as she explained to me, there is a function on the internet that will teach me how to pronounce it. I can access that and listen until I have it down correctly.
I am, astonished.

Not that they have created this function of application or whatever.
But that my profoundly deaf daughter who neither speaks nor hears knows about it.

Story of the Day 1/ 16/ 2012

Have you ever wondered what the worst thing you could say to anyone?
Is it a curse? A vehement statement replete with foul language?

My daughter knows.
She told me that all Deaf people know it.

It is the phrase, "I will tell you later."