"Are You Jewish, or Are You Just Here?"

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."

Sh'ma Yisrael adonai elohaynu adonai echod.
Baruch shem kivod malchuso lay'olam vaed.

Some things never leave you.

David Eisenhower? Stephen King? Some Other White Dude Who Came into the Cracker Barrel Last Week?

The consensus is apparently in. I'm now a lookalike for "Doc" from Back to the Future. There's no doubt that if I grow my hair out, it is Santa Claus white and, without any product application, sticks out perpendicularly from my temples. And I suppose what passes for my calm these days is something approaching Christopher Lloyd's crazed.

I still don't think I'll ever recover from the Bristol Krispy Kreme ladies all agreeing that I looked like Stephen King. And that was about 15 years ago. In retrospect, I'm pretty impressed that the staff could call up the image of an author, even one whose face should dissolve camera lenses.

Found this amusing piece on the S. Kings, though. I'm personally tired of being mistaken for every nameless hack who looks like me, and there are a ton of us out there, if a lifetime of my hearing it everywhere I go is any indication.

We All Look Alike, Too

A light moment amid a bit of a crisis. My dear wife is in the ICU with double pneumonia and sepsis. A young woman comes in today to take her breakfast and lunch orders for the next day. She looks at the three of us and says, "Where are you from?"

Our very good friend sitting with us is from Greenville, TN. Certainly in summer 1954, when he was born, it was pretty much country, and our friend can tell you tales for hours about it and makes a living at doing exactly that. My wife, three months older, is from Montgomery, AL, and Atlanta, GA. You don't get more southern than these two. The Virginia/Tennessee state line is the farthest north my wife has ever lived.

But hospital girl heard my voice, and that was all it took.

"Well, I've lived in the South for more than 40 years, but I grew up in New York and that'll never go away."

Her response: "I met people from Maryland once. They were mean."

Yeah, Maryland. Boy, what Yankees they are—that slave state during the War of Northern Aggression. That far-off land that happens to share a border with Virginia. For all I know, though, except for the part of Bristol over the state line (the hospital is in Tennessee, god help us), the young woman may never have ventured any deeper into the Commonwealth.

Back when mi esposa and I were dating, we were visiting my homeplace: the Mississippi of the Northeast. My father was a car dealer, and one time we needed to board a flight to return to Atlanta but my father was pressed for time to get us to the airport. Since I grew up on Staten Island, we'd fly out of Newark, NJ. My father corraled one of the young porters or mechanics to give us a ride--about 15 minutes. The young man averred that it was his first time off Staten Island. At the time, and still, I find that hard to believe, but after living in this part of the world for the last 19 years, it's far more plausible than it used to be.

And We Go on to the Next Round Robin

Hope 2019 has been OK so far. 8,752 hours to go, one at a time.

The following image is cribbed from the FB page of a local author whose short reminiscences of her horrific but probably not unusual childhood I am now rewriting. I am putting this work in place of three other jobs I'd rather not be doing just at this moment. 

In all honesty, I'm just killing time until I return to some self-prescribed catch-up sleep. The new year starts . . . mañana.

From a Neighborhood Close By, from a Neighborhood Website

Love the syntax. Use of "common" is not of this century, but it's Bristol, baby.

Christmas decorations stolen out our yard

I wanted to warn people of our area I'm at xxx xxxxxx Avenue and I enjoy decorating for everyone to enjoy and to show our Christmas spirit it's just so hard for me to believe theres some one around our neighborhood that's common enough to steal one of our very expensive light displays on side of our house. also I recently found my camper door opened at 5:00 in the morning I didn't notice anything taken probably because theres not much in there but I know it was locked so with all this please be on the lookout for suspicious people and watch out for your stuff I feel like with all the other stories on here theres definitely someone out there shopping around in our neighborhood.
And from one of the current projects—an index I'm almost enjoying. The book is set in two counties within an hour's drive of here:
Like Appalachia and the greater South, the Blue Ridge region has been perceived to have a strange relationship with modernity. Accounts of the region estimate that time was somehow warped there, yet its story mirrors that of much of the United States. As the ancestral home of the Cherokees, the Blue Ridge became a backcountry upon early European coastal settlement. It gained a reputation as remote even as it lay at the busy crossroads of early migration routes that transformed it from backcountry to frontier and then to backcountry again as settlers pushed further west. Men with money eventually turned up to exploit the mountains’ potential as a stage for industry. Missionaries followed, determined to redeem people who were already deeply Christian from the backwardness that the capitalists could not cure. By the twentieth century, folklorists had arrived to safeguard what they regarded as traditional culture, which was in danger of destruction by modernization. Government agencies declared a war on the region’s poverty in the mid-twentieth century, although they could not decide whether its backwardness or its exploitation by modern industry was to blame. Finally, environmentalists tried to repair the damage imposed by progressives of all kinds whose schemes had failed not just the people but the land as well.