Category Archives: Uncategorized

birdman by topinaris, flickr

My father is a birdman. By instinct the birds know him as a living man and not a statue and so they hover near his still, sitting frame, standing on their little bird legs, perching on his shoulders and knees, poking their heads into his pockets looking for seed.

My mother declared him petrified, useless. That was before she left him, she a bird herself flown from our little yellow kitchen of continuous spaghetti dinners and fried bologna sandwiches.

My father is quite an active man though as I grew I came to understand just not active in the direction desired by my mother. “Son,” he says to me, “Every bird in the city will be fed by sundown, he says, every bird will get their taste of my cones.” At night he coats pinecones with peanut butter and rolls them through birdseed.

He teaches me what…

#MyFirstBlogPostRevisited
(hold tight the riders)

Thank you very much to Jeff of Eclectic Music Lover (great site) for nominating me for the prestigious My First Blog Post Revisited challenge.

Here are the rules for this challenge:

• No cheating. (It must be your first post. Not your second post, not one you love…first post only.
• Link back to the person who tagged you (thank them if you feel like it or, if not, curse them with a plague of crickets).
• Cut and paste your first post into a new post or reblog it. (Either way is fine but NO editing.)
• Put the hashtag #MyFirstPostRevisited in your title.
• Tag five (5) other bloggers to take up this challenge.
• Notify your tags (don’t just hope they notice a pingback somewhere in their spam).
• Feel free to cut and paste the badge to use in your post.
• Include “the rules” in your post.

The…

I feel like I want to take a pass on Passover this year. I’ve done it before. I tried to do the whole thing last year – closing up cabinets and shopping for matzo meal and gefilte fish and kosher for Passover candy. I spent an inordinate amount of time looking up articles about kitniyot (some Jews say that beans and corn and rice are fine for Passover, others say no, based on which crops used to grow next to other crops way back when). It is, of course, a fascinating debate. I made a double recipe of Sephardi Charoset (dates and figs and chestnuts and wine and on and on) and resolved to think Passover thoughts for the whole week. But, I didn’t have a Seder to go to, and I hate (really, really hate) Matzo.

Sephardi Charoset on Matzo is much yummier than it looks (not my…

Recently, apropos of something else, my Rabbi mentioned that there is a custom in Jewish life to try and say one hundred blessings a day. Of course, I had to look this up right away. Despite a childhood in Jewish day schools, I had never heard of this one – which means nothing, really, because there’s too much for any one person to learn in a lifetime, let alone in elementary or high school.

There are text-based reasons for the choice of one hundred as the magical number of blessings, but that’s not what interested me. I tend to think you can find text based excuses for anything if you try hard enough. But the idea of one hundred blessings sounds whole and beautiful and challenging enough to encourage the kind of gratitude Oprah used to talk about with her gratitude journals. Saying a blessing is more than just gratitude…

We live in a world where truths are twisted and lies become the truth, people are getting dumber while phones are getting smarter.

We live in a world where food is becoming a luxury and chemicals are piled up at our grocery stores.

We live in a world where humans are cutting down and destroying the trees to write down “Save our Nature” while they are making paper of those fallen stomps.

We live in a world where animals are getting captured, hunted and slaughtered for mankind’s enjoyment instead of our need for hunger.

We live in a world where Our clouds are disappearing, chemical trails now appearing.

We live in a world where people are drinking poison as water and they do the ice bucket challenge with the pure one.

We live in a world where people are more interested of a naked body than a corpse of an…