Does anything really stay?

It is staggering to me that anyone can find satisfaction in a life's work that leaves behind nothing. I think people want to believe in God and a life after death because their own impermanence is simply too terrifying to contemplate. Absent a belief in a spiritual life everlasting, we need other intellectual constructs that provide protective padding for our consciousness. Some people believe that to be remembered is to live forever, and that impulse may drive those who spray paint their names on overpasses as well as those who seek to rule the world, even though no good end has ever come to one who has tried. Biologists will say our purpose is to procreate, to turn out descendants and if we are lucky we will live on through them, but we know that our children will never understand us, our grandchildren will remember us as doddering fools, and generations after that give us no thought at all except to make fun of our clothes and music and blame us for ruining the planet and saddling them with our problems.

I have always believed that the only really worthwhile life is that spent in some creative and artistic pursuit. But art is a human product, and nothing human really stays. Our concept of that which has been here "always" is so meager. Shakespeare is the Immortal Bard -- whose works are only 500 years old and can barely be understood today except with careful study and extensive footnotes. Chaucer is all but lost to us. Think of the poems and epics and songs and stories that must have been told in languages that haven't been heard on earth in 10,000 years. Think of the poems and epics and songs and stories composed on Commodore 64 computers, every bit as dead to us now. "Ancient" sculpture and architecture are only a few thousand years old and crumble around us. What we produce today begins to decay before it is completed.

Even our religion exists on a temporal plane. We speak of the eternal God but does this God know anything of the forgotten eternal gods who came before and now are lost with the people who told each other the stories of how the earth and sky came to be?

Ruminations on Astronaut Lisa Nowack.

In yesterday's New York Times article, there's a section addressing the question of how someone trained to deal with stress, and presumably screened for psychological fitness, could do this thing. According to the article, "Nick Kanas, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied astronaut psychology, said that the screening occurs only at the very beginning of the process and that once an astronaut has gotten through the front door, the formal psychological evaluations give way to evaluation of job performance. Psychological counseling is available but not mandatory, he said."

Which got me thinking that NASA must have really relaxed its standards since the 60's. Because as we all know, Dr. Bellows was constantly checking up on Captain Nelson, subjecting him to tests after every little mission, and always giving him the fisheye whenever Jeannie made some off-the-wall supernatural event occur in Cocoa Beach. Tony and Roger lived in fear of being tossed out of the program because of Jeannie's antics, but Nowack gets 30 days of leave for pepper spraying her romantic rival in an airport parking garage after driving 900 miles non-stop from Houston, packing a steel mallet, rubber tubing, gloves and garbage bags which she brought along in anticipation of a little girl-talk.

Hilarity ensues.

I'm an Agnostijew. I don't remember whether I ever believed that the Bible was written by (or "inspired by" although that sounds more like a TV credit) God. I'm pretty sure that I was the troublemaker in Sunday school who asked the teacher how we could be sure Moses didn't just sit up there on the mountain making up his own rules and carving them into tablets.

We moved from New York to Connecticut when I was 6, going into 2nd grade. I don't remember going to shul at all in NY, I just remember my parents coming home from services on what must have been one of the High Holy Days. I remember family Seders from those years, and that's the time of my Grandma Belle's ill-conceived trip to see Santa at Macy's.

In Connecticut, our town had no synagogue. Even in the next town over, a larger city, there was no established congregation. My parents joined a new synagogue that didn't have its own building. It rented space from a church. My earliest memory of Saturday services include staring at a large crucifix. I know Kay says she had Sunday school on Saturday because of a similar arrangement but I don't remember what we did, although I remember classes in the church basement. My more vivid memories are of the neighbor boys who walked up and down the street in front of our house singing "King of the Jews" to the tune of "King of the Road" (that's all, just one phrase, and why they found that amusing and why we found it threatening eludes me now); of telling my mother we should put the Hannukah menorah in the kitchen (back) window instead of the living room (front) window; of being pelted with pennies on the school bus; of being spat on in fourth grade by a boy I'd known since second grade who grinned and said something nasty I've forgotten but I remember that he did it because I was Jewish.

I remember memorizing The Lord's Prayer in second grade and saying it in unison every morning to start the day, two years after the US Supreme Court held that teacher led prayer in school was unconstitutional. I remember playing Parcheesi with the psychologist my mother took me to see every week or so in fourth grade, I think because the school wanted and explanation for my strange behavior, who told my parents that living in that town was the only real problem I had and his professional advice was to get the heck out of there.

We moved to New Jersey when I was 11, going into 6th grade. There were 2 synagogues to choose from, and my parents joined the newer one, larger one. My sisters and I started Hebrew school, but I was way behind, having only had Sunday school instruction before and no language and little liturgical instruction. I got some remedial Hebrew instruction, but I didn't apply myself and didn't have much aptitude. I was good in history (except for the part about being a cynic) but where I had been an outsider before for being Jewish, here I was an outsider for not being Jewish enough. Most of these kids had known each other from toddlerhood. Most of their fathers were doctors and local businessmen. My parents, new to town, didn't realize that the newer congregation had splintered off from the old synagogue when the wealthier members of the community decided they wanted a fancier building, a glitzier Hebrew school, a rabbi with a name. Their children had almost all already been to Israel (we were between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War). They went to Jewish summer camps. They all socialized together. They wore gold chai's and little mezzuzahs and Stars of David.

I did what they did, but I never did it quite right. My sense of humor was different and my jokes didn't go over. I tried too hard. And honestly, some of the stuff that they did bored me, but I kept on doing it. Watching the boys play Kadimah basketball? I still don't get it, although that David kid was cute. And the things I thought were important, they thought I was just making a stink. Like postponing my bat mitzvah for eight months so I could have it on Saturday morning instead of a Friday night, because no one was going to tell me I couldn't read from the Torah just because I was female, or that I couldn't call women to the beemah for Aliyahs, for that matter. The synagogue decided to change its policy, but not in my year, so I waited. Or how I insisted that Mrs. Felder could not put that line in the temple bulletin "Sharon intends to continue her Hebrew studies" in my bat mitzvah article,as she did in everyone else's profile, because I most certainly did not. No one else did either, but she always put it in there. So instead of saying I did not intend to continue, the article was silent on the subject. Hey, I thought it was a victory.

I think I know where I'm going with this. It's all part of how I never felt as if I fit in anywhere, and still do. Still don't? Part rebel, part misfit, part iconoclast, part earth mother.

Things you've never done and know you'll never do.


I never wore a "Baby on Board" t-shirt. I never will.

I've never bared my breasts in response to someone shouting "Show us your tits!" I never will. I thought of that because my secretary told me that her husband's ex-wife, a woman in her 50's, proudly shows visitors to her home her collection of "booby beads" which she's been garnering since she got her implants a couple of years ago. Seems she's happy to comply with this request.

I never went to a Mets game at Shea Stadium with my dad. I never will. And he was surprised that over three decades later I remembered how he refused to take me with him when I was five and he even admitted that he probably would have taken me if I was a boy. We did go to games together, but at Veteran's Stadium when the Mets played the Phillies because the traffic was easier. And now he's gone.

Do blogs wither and die if you don't feed them regularly? I guess they do, metaphorically, from lack of interest. If I'm not interested in what I'm thinking why on earth would anyone else be?

It occurred to me this morning that perhaps the reason I was so reluctant to come back and put up another post here is that I have not yet ruined this blog. It's hard to think of many other things in my life that are in as pristine condition. Not my house, which is in great disarray. Not my car, with the "service engine soon" light importuning me to pay heed as it has for months now, "soon" being far too indefinite a term to be taken seriously as a dashboard warning. Not my law practice, where my case management software chides me that I have not looked at my "to do someday" in more than two weeks (or ever, let's be frank, here) and that my "to do" list may be a wee bit unmanageable. Well, yes, I suppose that when some of the items have been pending for over three years I can accept I may have allowed it to get a bit out of hand.

But this -- it could be anything. I could think deep thoughts about the great issues of the day. I could get back in touch with that part of me that used to be able to write something more than a Chapter 13 Plan or a Motion for Relief from Stay. I might find that I have something to say beyond giving snippets of advice on a message board to virtual (or Virtual) strangers.

Or it could be that there is no there there. Maybe some day I'll get a quiet hour to put some thoughts together and I can find out.

Along with this blog, I got a Napster account. Accidentally, of course, and just so that I could listen to the song Becca had linked to on her blog, which was a perfectly nice song, something maple, or the band was something maple.

Yes, it was the first time I ever went to Napster. No, I am not over 80. I'm just not very good at being into music. And when I signed into Napster and tried to browse genres and the only thing that appealed to me was "Vocal/Nostalgia" I realized that Napster was going to know that I wasn't their kind of people. Sure enough, it crashed before I could select anything. I tried again. And it crashed. Napster and I went through this little charade about five times before I withdrew with what small amount of grace I could muster.

So, Napster, you win this round. I'll let the hip music people pick out the good music people and set links on their blogs and I'll have my Napster account so I can listen to what I'm told to listen to.

(Do we still say "hip"? I'll bet we don't. There's undoubtedly some other word; I'll ask my 12 year old. She's the cool one. Or whatever -- you know what I mean.)

I like music with intelligent lyrics and strong melodies. I like songs I can sing along to. Broadway scores, older rock & roll, big band vocals. I don't run into many people whose musical tastes align with my own. Wait, I take that back. Sometimes I'll meet a man who shares my taste in music, but then he will invariably turn out to also share my taste in men.

I used to I loved going dancing in gay bars and I had lots of harmless flirtations with guys I met. Good times.

The ones that stick in my craw are the ones who were not openly gay but would come out later, usually with a speech that went "I feel so close to you; I've never felt this close to anyone in my life as I feel to you. That's why I feel like I can say this -- I've never been able to say this to anyone before, ever. (Big pause) I'm gay." After the first few times I stopped expecting the end of that speech to be "I love you" and recognized for what it was, but the first couple of times it was a killer. And then, later, I realized that I should have known it was coming when whatever the guy in question owned more albums of Broadway shows than I did. You live, you learn.

I should have called this "accidental blog." All I wanted to do was post a comment on Becca's blog. Really, I thought I was just creating a user name and the next thing I know I have a whole blog. This is how some people become parents or countries go to war or something.

What ifsomeone actually reads this. I have an overwhelming sense of responsibility.

Oh. Just got a message -- "could not connect to Blogger.com, saving and publishing may fail." Whew! Dodged that bullet!


Or not.