A delighted, jubilant kaddish using a cleaned, oiled, adjusted, polished horn.
a good enough mother — or not
I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents. Not just my mother’s illness and my father’s death, but also about parenting altogether. How are we with our pups? How are we with our own children? How are we with the next generation, and the one after that and after that. The do-we-say-I-love-you post is part…
daily kaddish: horns still apart
For the first time, I attempted to read just the Hebrew/Aramaic column. I tried not to look at the transliteration and mostly succeeded.
the end of memory
It’s a very simple proposition: what if we forget? What if we forget the details? What if we forget their faces? What if they become reductionist cartoons, selective memory, fixed inside our stories, unverified by outside confirmation? What if they were not at all as we remember them? What if we got the stories wrong?…
secrets of the tzaddik
He wanted it spelled ‘poppa’ not ‘papa.’ He was definitive about that, but not about much else. I always wondered why. It seemed anachronistic, that spelling, but maybe that’s the point. He was from a different era. How could he not be? Maybe the word ‘poppa’ made him feel warm and fuzzy, and maybe ‘papa’…
daily kaddish: horns apart
With my horns down to parts and my brain too fried to attempt a piano harmonization, I figured I’d better read the text.
daily kaddish: Akio’s grampa
Akio’s grampa witnessed the reigns of three emperors, Expansionism, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Western occupation, Japan’s rise to becoming the world’s second largest economic power and the crash in 1991, and in his last months, an 8.9 earthquake and 10 meter tsunami that were followed by fears of a nuclear disaster.
daily kaddish: Arthur Fromer
On Saturday, Mira got a phone call from a cousin. Her uncle Arthur—her cousin’s dad—had just died.
daily kaddish: for a kitty
Somebody’s cat had died. I can’t remember whose. I’m appalled.
daily kaddish: soothing?
I decided to try to play Kogan’s “Kaddish” in a soothing style.