4/24/2023

 Monday, April 24, 2023

In bed at 9:30, awake at 5:25, up at 5:35, with muddled thoughts.  33℉, high of 46℉, sunny morning ahead, cloudy afternoon and evening, W wind at 7 mph, gusts up to 13 mph.  Sunrise at 5:55, sunset at 7:45, 13+49.

Dinner last night was leftover rice pilaf with diced lamb.

Ice and Snow: Last night, as I walked our trash cart down our sloping driveway to the street for pickup this morning, I thought to myself we've made it through another winter, another season of high risk from ice and snow.  Phew.

Jack by Marilynne Robinson.  I'm only about 10% into it, but it's sure a slow start: a meeting between Jack Boughton and his beloved Della Miles in a cemetery.  I can't tell yet how this meeting came about or where Jack and Della (or the author) are heading.

Tree of Life trial begins today, 4 and 1/2 years after the gunman killed 11 at the synagogue.  The killing occurred on October 27, 2018, Shabbat.  On November 5, 2018, I wrote: "I read that the Squirrel Hill terrorist wanted to "kill all Jews" even as he was wheeled into the ER at the hospital where the doctor and nurse who treated him were Jews.  In BadDreamLand, I had a vision of the murderer's wish being granted.  Suddenly his treating physician and attending nurse disappeared. Then all the Jewish doctors and nurses that treat and have treated me and my family through a long life disappeared.  Poof.  Then I recalled Itzhak Perlman on the Steven Colbert Show playing "Someone to Watch Over Me" and Itzhak disappeared as did the song's composer, Jacob Gershvin a/k/a George Gershwin,  and the beautiful song itself, along with Rhapsody in Blue and everything else that Jacob/George created to share with the world.  Poof.  Then I thought of Israel Beilin a/k/a Irving Berlin vanishing along with his gifts to the world God Bless America, White Christmas, and hundreds of others.  Gone.  Then I hallucinated Robert Allen Zimmerman a/k/a Bob Dylan disappearing with Blowing in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin', and so much more.  Then Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Billy Joel, Piano Man, My Life, Uptown Girl, Carole Joan Klein a/k/a Carole King,  So Far Away, It's Too Late, Tapestry,  Neil Diamond, Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show, Sweet Caroline, Barbra Streisand, People, The Way We Were. All gone the disappeared Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler. Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, Benny Goodman, Ziggy Elman, Herbie Mann, so many musicians, so much soul-expanding music - gone. And all those humorists who brought so much joy and laughter to my life - Gilda Radner, Gene Wilder, the Marx brothers, Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Larry David, Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Benny, Mort Sahl,  Lenny Bruce, George Burns, and Al Franklin - so many humorists, so many smiles, chuckles, and belly laughs, taken away - poof.  And all those great scientists, like Abram Saperstein, a/k/a Albert Sabin who gave us the oral polio vaccine, Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, Paul Ehrlich who developed the first cure for the worldwide scourge of syphilis and who helped cure diphtheria, Albert Einstein who showed us E=mc squared, relativity and black holes.  Then my frightening dream became even more nightmarish when I saw disappearing all the many Jews who have personally enriched my life with their friendship, those I worked with and those who share and have shared their homes and their hearts with me and my family, who have lovingly shared their wise counsel with me when I most needed it, who have shared their marriages, funerals, britot, b'nai and b'not mitzah, Shabbat services and seders and who have accepted me despite my faults and failings, my spiritual and emotional mishpuchah.  As my nightmare took all of them away from me I couldn't take it anymore and woke up trembling and repeating don't go, don't go.  And though I'm not a pray-er, I found myself saying Please God - no, never."  I could have added so many more to the list, like a favorite chanteuse of mine, Jane Olivor, born Linda Cohen in Brooklyn.

Fredi Miller, Geri's dear friend and her longtime roommate when they traveled together on law school recruitment trips, has had a home in Squirrel Hill for many years.  Fredi is Jewish but was not a member of any of the 3 congregations who had Tree of Life as their home shul.  I remember Geri on the telephone with Fredi that terrible day.

One of the things that struck me about the crime was the ages of the victims: Joyce Fienberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65; Rose Mallinger, 97; Daniel Stein, 71; Melvin Wax, 87; Irving Younger, 69; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; the couple Bernice, 84, and Sylvan Simon, 87; and the brothers Cecil, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54.  To have lived so long, to have died so horribly.

Another thing that struck me was that Tree of Life housed 3 separate congregations, reminding me of the joke about the Jewish man stranded on a mid-ocean island who built 2 synagogues, one to worship in, the other 'I wouldn't set foot it.'   How religion calls us together but also sets us apart from one another.

I am a bit surprised that Merrick Garland has authorized his DOJ attorneys to seek the death penalty in this case, but perhaps I shouldn't be.  If any situation calls for it, Tree of Life is surely one of them, but the DOJ rarely pursues capital punishment.  DOJ justifies it here because of the defendant's long history of anti-semitism, pre-planning, etc.  I can't remember a time in my own life when I have favored the death penalty, regardless of the heinousness, the ruthlessness of the crime(s).

Our Tree of Life mezuzah

Merit Ultralite Menthol 100s, please.  I started smoking, surreptitiously, when I was 15 years old.  The brand name of my first pack of cigarettes was "Spud."  The cigarettes were mentholated.  Wikipedia: "Menthol cigarettes were first developed by Lloyd "Spud" Hughes of Mingo Junction, Ohio, in 1924, though the idea did not become popular until the Axton-Fisher Tobacco Co. acquired the patent in 1927, marketing them nationwide as "Spud Menthol Cooled Cigarettes". Spud brand menthol cigarettes went on to become the fifth most popular brand in the US by 1932, and it remained the only menthol cigarette on the market until the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company created the Kool brand in 1933."  When I was 16, I worked up the courage to ask my parents, both smokers, for permission to smoke.  They gave their permission with the warning that it was habit-forming and 'unhealthy' and expensive.  I don't recall ever smoking at home.  As an adult, I quit smoking once for 3 years and I don't remember why I took up the habit again.  In any event, before I finally quit in 1994 at the age of 53, I smoked a pack a day of Merit Ultralite Menthol 100 cigarettes.  The first U.S. Surgeon General's Report on smoking and lung cancer and chronic bronchitis was issued in January of 1964, confirming what just about everybody already knew, i.e., that smoking can kill you and I worried from at least that time until I finally quit in 1994 that I would get lung cancer.  As it has turned out, at least so far, I haven't developed that disease, but my dear sister, also a smoker (of Pall Malls, my parents' brand) came down with and ultimately died from COPD caused by those cigarettes.

I'm thinking of this history because of the story in this morning's NYT that New York's governor is trying to ban menthol cigarettes in the state of New York and the effort is causing a ton of controversy.  According to the news item, the effort is an attempt to reduce the incidence of lung cancer among Blacks, especially Black men who have the highest rates of lung cancer and who favor menthol cigarettes. California and Massachusetts already have banned menthol cigarettes as have the EU, Canada, Brazil, and the UK.  This issue regarding menthol cigarettes seems so emblematic of the divide between Reds and Blues in our country.  There is no 'right' answer.  One of the many arguments against the ban is fear that banning a consumer product used so much by Black men will provide another occasion for police officers to engage in oppressive behavior against Black men.  It reminds me of course of Eric Garner and the stranglehold that killed him when he was arrested to selling 'loosies' on Staten Island.  There are broader public health and liberty issues of course, including encouragement of a black market and paternalism, protecting Black men from their own otherwise lawful behaviors.  Meanwhile, I think to myself every now and then, especially while watching films in which the characters do a lot of smoking, I miss those Merit Ultralite Menthol 100s.

Starting a painting of Trump in the Dock. From the New Yorker cover art.  Started with grid lines and a rough sketch.

LTMW at 7:35 p.m.  A solitary wild turkey has come to the bird feeders to glean whatever is available on the ground underneath.

Geri is tending Ellis and Cocoa while David returns from Portland, OR and Sharon is also out of town. Geri texted at David will be in at about 9.