That’s the title of this blog; now let’s get on with it. The Hanukah candles are lit by this atheist who respects the immense Jewish contribution to humanity. I can even say the prayers in Hebrew, 56 years after my bar mtzvah. Oh, the power of conditioning and how sweet it is and can be in certain instances. I am also writing a few paragraphs about snow for my Homage to K, a riff on Kafka trying his hand on writing about the Holocaust. (Oh, the grandiosity.) Can you just imagine what he’d have to say about the Holocaust, but I refer you to my last blog about him. I am entering emails of European scholars into a database, quite diligently, quite laboriously, for the next edition of the tetralogy which has been sent off to the printer. At least 3000 individuals will get a gander at my PR email which goes out in January. Hopefully the cover will appear here and other goodies as Jane is quite well versed in this cybershit I humor and hope never to master — why allow it to creep into my brain cells?
Jane Elizabeth Holt has decided that we will wed very early in January. Realizing that as a Jewish man and a future Jewish husband my ancestral instincts, an inflamed sciatic nerve, genetically tell me to take care of my new bride. She will now be covered by my medical plan. Given that she will pay in 2010 almost $300 monthly for her anemic plan, one without a prescription plan (!) at all but just a plan for dire circumstances, she will now be protected by my teachers’ plan which will provide ample coverage. (What altruism on my part.) I remove from her brow the burden of being poorly insured not to say that she finds the payments burdensome. And what do I get for all this? I get Jane, poor girl. She is my built-in hospice, literary editor, amanuensis, pragmatist, lover, jack Mormon who adores all things Jewish, especially Jewish men. She is delighted to find out that this actor or that writer is Jewish for she is one of the few people I have come across who are not darkly inhabited by prejudice.
She is studying to be a librarian which she recently acted upon and while engrossed in her studies I “meekly” prowl about the house unattended to, unloved, uncared for, doing my Larry David impressions. Jewish men need care: water us, feed us, schtoop us occasionally and we are contented cats. With a first class mind, I enjoy that at 51 she is cutting through her studies like a hot knife through butter. Our mutual dream is that she gets work so that we can finance a tour to Israel before I croak, visit the Wall where I will weep and collapse into terminal ethnicity. I enjoy these quaint atavistic traits I own. In any case we will pick one of those sleazy Vegas chapels and have some clerk in sleazoid fashion pronounce whatever jargon makes us a couple. We have been together three years and in effect, we are married, heart and soul — poor girl. What I keep telling Jane, although she has two masters, is that she should think beyond being a librarian, because in spirit she is a writer who will become a librarian. However, my sense of her is that she would make a very sharp therapist — sensitive, excellent memory, huge plasma webs of feeling, the ability to thread together random thoughts into a tapestry of a kind. Like a very good therapist, she would provide a superlative “hold” for her clients. And the best trait of all — a cosmic ability to laugh at herself. I enjoy the tinkling laughter she has.
And so this potpourri of daily living comes to a close.
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