Envying the Rich

Matzah the poor man's bread

I don't remember my parents ever envying the rich, only enjoying their friendship-- my father, anyway. It made him feel rich, golfing with someone who had a medical degree (in his day medicine meant money) or playing poker with a man who didn't mind losing a few dollars by midnight, when the men went home to their wives and lied that they came out even. The night after a poker night would be a good time for me to hit my father up for pocket money.

My parents would return from a destination wedding and regale us with the details, simply happy to be a part of it. I do think that they were happy with their lot, that they were ash-rei b'chelko (rhymes with posh-tray-b'-well-tow, happy with one's portion), albeit ever striving for more. Both grew up poor. My father liked to tell me that he picked feathers and lice off of chickens at his first job in America, immigrating from Poland. (He had stories about being the new kid in class, speaking no English). My mother, born in Chicago to immigrants, describes not having a nickel to buy a coke at the local "drug store" like the other girls. She really was envious of them, come to think of it.

No matter. I'm more like my father, maybe, one of those people who marvels it what others have, what they buy, and think, This makes them happy? All I want is to have enough left over at the end of the quarter to pay the IRS. Someone once said to me, I love paying my taxes. Some of us get that.

How does one get to a a point of no complaint?

I don't know.

I liken it, however, to accepting things as they are, not exactly mindfulness, but surrender. The winter in Chicago, for example, simply having the wherewithal to get through it, this is the key. Then just when you think it is over, it snows in the last days of April, and you're not happy, but you do what you did all winter, get on with your life.

We just finished Passover, which is like moving out of your house then moving back in. You clean it first, top to bottom, everything, your ovens, refrigerators, remove every vestige of leavening agents or things that have yeast (or flour!) from your home and then settle into the holiday and eat matzah for 8 days. It is a tough holiday, tough on us physically, gastro-intestinally, too. We bring up Passover dishes and pots and pans from the basement and eat off of these for the week. Then we pack them all back up and bring them back down after the holiday, put the kitchen back with the everyday appliances, the food processor, toaster, coffee maker and microwave tray to get our lives back in order. During the holiday we didn't use them, wouldn't risk contaminating our unleavened food. A crazy holiday.

Exhausting.

Rich people go away to resorts and eat food that other people have cooked for them, supposedly under the close supervision of a rabbi. Friends of mine, rich or not, won't do this, fearful that the rabbi isn't watching very closely, fearful of breaking the law, eating something that perhaps isn't even kosher, let alone, not kosher for Passover.

The holiday accomplishes one thing, however, rich or poor It makes us happy for what we have. The matzah is what it is all about, the poor man's bread. It is emphasized in the telling of the story of Passover, and naturally, all week long with butter or cream cheese. In the biblical story, the Jews, running from the Egyptian king, the Pharaoh, who is about to change his mind about letting them leave slavery in Egypt, are commanded by their Higher Power to take their dough, not wait for it to rise (as I am doing right now) and leave Egypt immediately.

It turns out that unleavened bread, difficult to digest, is filling and would go a long way during that long trek from Egypt, the perfect camping food. The Jews would theoretically be going camping for a month before they reached their destination.

So much more to the story, but suffice it to say that matzah is and always has been the Poor Man's Bread, and the reason it has so much to do with Passover is that we are to be reminded, when we eat it, that not only were we poor, but we were slaves for over two hundred years in Egypt. Being poor, we are reminded for one week out of the year, having no real bread, is where we come from, all of us in my tribe.

We may feel like slaves every day as we head off to work early in the morning. We may resent those who don't have to work hard, who don't have to rob Peter to pay Paul, and for sure, we are likely to be envious of the heated sidewalks of acquaintances when we're forced outdoors, shovel in hand. But to a great degree we are free. We have free will. There is so much that we can do as our own boss to a  large degree.

Leavened bread, wheat bran

Why are some of us less content with what we have than others? I think it has to do with hope, more than anything. If we have that, if we can keep striving, trying, plotting, planning, creating, whether or not we think it will get us anywhere, we can dream, and take pride, and hope for a better tomorrow. It is when we lose that, when we cannot push on, that the things that others have reminds us of our ultimate powerlessness. And we don't like that.

Religion being a great equalizer, we can pray together, rich and poor, and connect, occasionally socially, work on projects for the common good. Some will even play poker, golf.

Last night FD swept up, but I just finished putting away the toys and vacuuming up the last of the crumbs of the holiday this morning. And I thought: I wouldn't trade a day it with family, with all of my children here at my table, or playing Chess and checkers, Mancala and Connect 4. That's rich.



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Pillow Talk

FD hates it when I do this, tell you what we talk about horizontal.

But it's usually not very interesting, and rare that I share. What we talk about, often, when it's just the two of us, is incompetency in the hospital (that can be the answering service) and very occasionally, the last patient the service had to call us about, woke us up about.

Here's a sample of the kind of ranting I get to hear early in the morning.*

FD will groan. Do you believe that guy? He tells them at ICU, No more, no thank you, I'm out of here. Then he stops the transfusion, gets dressed and checks himself out of the hospital! For this I've spent three hours talking to residents in the middle of the night, so he should walk out on a procedure that will buy him a few more months in the Land of the Living. You couldn't have slept through that.

Well, uh, no. I heard it all.

And continue to hear about it. Could have been an ER episode.
And that's okay, that he complains, lets off a little steam. It's healthy. And I'm a paid consultant. He gives me some of his stress, leaves it in the bedroom (not always the most romantic idea). He never uses names or identifiers, and since it's ER call, it could be virtually anyone, and is. If it's someone I might know, someone I'd actually want to hear about, he won't say a word, won't rant, but he might slam a drawer.

I tell him, throw shoes, pies, muffins. Save the furniture. When we recycled at the recycling center, we threw bottles. Now that was great.

It's nice if you have that capacity to complain, nicer still if you hold others captive to listen. (We'll get to nagging another day). As his consultant, had this been a real case, I would have told him that his patient probably came in looking for opiates and left the hospital looking for opiates.

So this morning I get up and don't even bother looking at the clock. I know it's somewhere between 4 and 5 and I'm telling my brain, Just go back to sleep, when FD murmurs, "Time to get up. It's 5:05." He's really telling himself to get up, not me.

"5:03."

I am up, so I excuse myself for a minute, but come back to bed. He's happy. Usually I don't come back to bed. "Why are you coming back to bed?" he asks joyfully.

"To be with you," I say. "I know you think our relationship is all about companionship, so I'm being a companion."

Immediately he launches into a complaint. "I can't get over that guy walking out of ICU the other day. If I ever see him again. . ."

I want to say, Get over it, it's not about you. But that's not therapeutic, you know. So I don't say anything, close my eyes.

Out of nowhere, total non-sequitor, I ask, "What percentage of your waiting room is composed of black people?"

I don't use the PC term, African American, because it's just we two and color, not ethnic origin, matters at this moment to my visual brain. Healthy skin is nice in any color.

"Some days it's mostly black."

"You're a magnet for people with soul."

"Must be. Or could it be the neighborhood?"

And then I tell him how happy I am that Barack Obama is going to be President, even though I was truly on the fence, and no, I won't tell you who I voted for. But I love the feeling of patriotism in America right now, love seeing Hope visit Washington, the White House, the national cemetary. I love that so many people came out to vote, that people, so many Americans, now feel that they are a part of the political process. It's been a long time.

"It wasn't only black people who elected the President," he says.

Right, right. But you know how it is. The Irish, when they weigh those choices for judge, vote for Irish first. The Italians vote for Italians. The Poles vote for Poles. The Jews vote for Jews. People do vote ethnic, I'm pretty sure, and when their candidate wins, it's a good feeling.

We had some company on Friday night, and in the haze of serving and clearing, picking at my tofu and stir-fry, here and there I caught some of the conversation. Someone mentioned this feeling, a ground-swell within the African American community. He thought it comparable to the wonderment within the Jewish community after the Six Day War, when the Israelis trounced the surrounding Arab nations. All of them.**

Triumphant, proud. People didn't like it, those who didn't understand, didn't mind so much the victory, as the pride.

Some of us are scared of people who get happy like that, people who strut, shout, celebrate a victory. It feels too much like power, face it. People are afraid of exhilaration when it's ethnic.

And yet we love those songs. Hold your head up, hold your head up, hold your head high.

Did anyone see Boston Legal the other night? Roe, 11/10/2008. If you didn't and you still plan on it, SPOILER ALERT. But I'll only spoil one plot, if that helps you any.

Jerry Espenson, (Christian Clemenson, simply brilliant) the attorney with Asperger's Disorder, is buying muffins and coffee with his dear colleague, Katie Lloyd (Tara Summers, I like her very much, too).

A smart-talking mortgage broker thinks the two lawyers are listening in on his cell phone conversation in line. The broker taunts them, calls them Mr. and Mrs. Snoopy. He makes fun of Katie's South African dialect and Jerry's tics. Jerry keeps cool, but he's getting visibly upset.

They finish their order, turn to leave, and Jerry accidentally bumps into the broker who subsequently escalates his insults, calling Mr. Espenson Dimento.

Katie takes her friend by the elbow to get him out of there, but Jerry has a moment of clarity. He glares at his nemesis, takes a muffin in hand, aims like a marksman (all in slow motion, just terrific work here) and deliberately pitches the pastry overhand, fastball, hard.

And whack! The muffin's on target, clips the guy's profile, smack dab on the cheek.

It gets wild, of course, and wonderful, and Jerry ultimately chooses to defend himself in court. He tells the jury that having had emotional issues and Asperger's since childhood, he has suffered abuse and bullying for forty years. He simply reached his max in that coffee shop, his passion, years of anger simmering inside, got the better of him.

He had to react, couldn't take another insult. He isn't sorry for what he's done, although he is sorry for celebrating with that little dance that he does.

There's more, and this is a great episode. I won't even tell you about the abortion subplot, which is almost as good. In fact, it's better.

The rise in pride in this country, surely muted by our economic woes, is not something we should associate with the rising frustration that drives someone like a Jerry Espenson to throw a muffin, although you could argue the similarity. These are very different tides. The political process is a constructive process.

Back to our pillow talk.

FD says, "You know, we're pretty much out of food."

"Yeah, I haven't been in the shopping mood so much."

"But just because you're not hungry. . . Okay, I'll go to the store after shul."

"No, don't. We have blueberries. That's really all we need right now."

This is a cue for me to make muffins. For some crazy reason, my goofy home recipe makes only 10 muffins. The pan with the first six went into the oven first, and I heard the timer, took it out in time. Perfect. Soft. Yum.

But the second pan, the one that went in later, I forgot about. And as I luxuriated in the shower, they burned, my first decimation of muffins since we got the new stove in April. It seemed a real waste and I felt badly, but the last four were hard as rocks. so I tossed them into the garbage.

FD thought they were salvageable, but you know.

These things can be dangerous.

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*Anecdotes about patients on this blog, medical or psychological, are always sheer fiction.

** Wikipedia says, 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Third Arab-Israeli War, Six Days' War, an‑Naksah (The Setback), or the June War, was fought between Israel and Arab neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The nations of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria also contributed troops and arms to the Arab forces.