Well, right now I just feel like posting something. We have a dear friend staying with us who's enduring their own struggles but getting through them with a whole lot more equanimity than I've ever exhibited.
Not the point.
These days, the Census box I check is Taoist-leaning Jewish agnostic heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching, which doesn't mean much to anyone -- but it wouldn't surprise me if a few others out there are like me. JuBus, with a heavy dose of reading from the right kind of clients. A former, and late, client of mine was an inspirational speaker named Charlie "Tremendous" Jones. I had the good fortune of meeting him once when my wife and I were making one of our many descents south. His publishing house was a few rooms stocked floor to ceiling and wall to wall with about every motivational book ever printed. He was known for his saying, "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read." I really can't argue with that.
Also not the point.
Some years back, I decided to attend the only real Jewish synagogue around here, in Blountville, TN. (The area has a few messianic Jewish congregations. Don't get me started. The "rabbi" may be Jewish, but the congregations are Pentecostals looking for another day in church. IMHO.) The temple in Blountville has been around since the late 1800s, but there ain't many Jews around here, so they don't have a full-time rabbi, or haven't for most of the 23 years I've been living in Bristol. Every few weeks, as I remember, a rabbinical student would come down from the seminary in Cincinnati to do whatever needed to be done.
On one of my visits there, I ended up next to a gentleman who was the husband of the president of the Sisterhood -- in other words, the woman who runs the show. He was or is a retired professor from the East Tennessee State University School of Medicine, which probably isn't too bad a joint, despite the name if you're an ignorant displaced Yankee like me. But he was clearly heavily into his medications that night. We were separated by a seat, and he leaned over to me and asked, "So, are you Jewish, or are you just here?"
I answered, "Both."
Once he found out what this nice young Jewish man did (shanda fur de goyim, I am not a doctor or lawyer), he lit up.
"Would you edit my CV for me?" Sure thing, I said. No charge.
He emailed me a forty-page, single-spaced resume, most of which seemed impressive enough. At some point in his life, he probably had his shit together. Every damn thing he'd ever done was in these forty pages, but the show-stopper came on about page 38.
"Read most books: 3rd grade."
Well, now, all I remember from my third-grade year at Staten Island Academy was playing hangman in what passed for the English/verbal part of the curriculum. Supposed to be a spelling exercise, I guess. I stumped everyone, including Mrs. Bartlett, with the word "rhubarb." After getting the puzzled looks I would grow accustomed to later in life, I explained to the best of my seven-year-old ability, "It's a fight in baseball." I'm certain I didn't associate the word with anything to do with nature. Like "the tools of ignorance," I figured the term was common knowledge. And if you don't know what that term means, as Professor Yogi Berra once said, "You can look it up." Click the link.
But Professor Prescription's capper came when I asked him why there were so many people listed with birthdays in the temple's weekly program (maybe five or six for each day of the week), but every time I went to shul there, the congregation had about 15 people in it. His answer was a classic.
"You ever hear of the 82nd Airborne?"
"Yes."
"How about the 101st Airborne?"
"Yes, of course."
"Did you ever wonder what happened to the rest of them? We're the same way. We just keep counting them until they tell us not to."
Baruch shem kivod malchuso lay'olam vaed.
Some things never leave you.
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