Date: July 27, 2010
Location: Plattekill, NY
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Here I sit with a pocket full of plans, and yet I am still inside my home, on the campground, and New York City is still beckoning from afar. Life is nothing if it is not consistently fraught with change. The only consistency we can count on is change. Or, more succinctly put, “We changed our plans and will not venture into the city today on the train.”
The pleasures of summer can often be punctuated by the visitation of a minor inconvenience called a cold or the flu or some other adult language names that all mean the same thing. A person becomes full of disgusting stuff that runs from every orifice in his body and all you can do is cough, hack and sneeze. Connie and I ventured down that road of phlegm and discomfort and now, it seems that the rest of the registration staff is trying to follow our lead. I realize that I shared my misery with my wife. But, that is what a husband is supposed to do. Now it seems that the other poor staff members have chosen to follow our lead. Again to summarize; it seemed that on our day off there would be very few if any people to man the registration desk; it seemed that the poor hard working young manager was going to have to be in seven places at once; and it seemed my wife volunteered our assistance on our day off. I guess we are going to work this afternoon.
New York will be there when we do get a chance to explore Ellis Island. I will get a day off sometime this year. And my wife makes points for being so helpful. I guess it is really a win win situation. Luckily we accomplished all of our house chores yesterday morning. We don’t have a lot to do today. And, my wife is going to be able to accomplish her ironing obligations as I sit on my fat butt posting my blog. Things seem to be pretty normal. Connie 1, Papa lazy and the world is still spinning. Into each life a little disruption must rain and I guess our disruption, today, is to postpone our exploration sojourn into the city.
It is a bit scary to realize that someone is actually reading this drivel. We have had text messages this morning asking why we are home when we had postulated about our long excursion into big city life. They even quoted back to us some of the phrasing I had used in my diatribe. You mean someone is actually reading this? Wow! Maybe I should think before I write. Maybe I should weigh the effect my uncensored opinion might have on the person that is actually reading the raw emotion that can, at times, flow from my fingers. Maybe I should be a little more adult about just spouting off on any topic and any feeling I am having at the moment that I turn on my PC and start pounding on these poor keys. Maybe I should, but we all know that is not going to happen. Each morning I place a few moments of whatever I have rambling around in my head on this blog and that is exactly as I promised. Sometimes it is funny, sometimes it is provocative and mostly it is me for better or worse and probably boring. As it is, today I will not get a train ride, I will not stand in line at the ferry and I will be working at 9 o’clock and not at some bistro in the East Village. I guess I will have to wait a little longer to experience the cosmopolitan life of the big city. Into each life a little change must rain and here I am without my umbrella. Oh, well.
By the way, Last night we met a cantor from near New York City. Not a big deal, there are more Jews in NYC than there are in Israel. We talked to him about our life style and how much he would enjoy it if he could convince his wife it was a good decision. Not abnormal, we talk about our nomadic life style to many people. His whole family has been trained in music at the Julliard School of Music and they all have explored professions in the field of music. He is a cantor, his wife sang at the Met for years and his son is the music director for Jersey Boys on Broadway. All of this is quite cool we were quite impressed with the gentleman and his family.
That is not the point of my post. We were impressed with his accomplishments, as well we should have been. But, he was impressed with our lives and accomplishment, much to our surprise. He told us that at a Jewish wedding when the bride and groom break the glass wrapped in linen it’s a symbol of the broken world and now it is incumbent on them to go forth and fix the world one piece at a time. He felt that Connie and I are actually living that life style one volunteer project at a time and praised us for having the driven soul to attempt to fix the world, one piece at a time.
I must say that his praise made us feel a lot better than we could have ever felt we deserved. I must also say that, in this world, there are a lot of people doing just what he felt we were trying to accomplish. There are a lot of people that are trying to fix this broken world, one piece at a time. They have no grand optimism that the world will be righted because of their individual efforts, but they do feel that a step in a positive direction is much more powerful and beneficial than no steps at all. If we can’t fix the world we can attempt to repair it one broken piece at a time.
I guess I will go to work with a new attitude. The poor scheduling supervisor will have all his positions covered; the flu stricken team members will have an evening to help recover from the summer ills; my wife gets another star on her broken world report card; and I got another paragraph in my blog. Plus we met a really cool canter, with a really cool and talented family. If a story ends happily it must be a good story.
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