Dichroic Reflections

Quick note: Technically I’m talking about Chanukiot (plural of chanukiah), which have nine candles and are used for the holiday Chanukah. THe word “Menorah” can also refer to the seven-branched candleabra used as a symbol of Judaism, but it’s the more common term and we often talk about Chanukah menorahs, and that’s the term I’m more likely to use.

Some people have the tradition of letting each member of a family light their own menorah each night, but we (and everyone else I knew growing up) just had the one. Now I have three, though I only light one at a time.

First came the brass one I bought for my first apartment, for my first Chanukah on my own after college. It’s sturdy and solid, except that the edges of some of the candle sockets have sort of started to come off the rest of the metal. I’m not sure where I got it, because there wasn’t really a Jewish community where I lived and online shopping wasn’t a thing yet – probably I asked my mom to send me one. This one is smallish and easy to store, so it lives in the Hillsboro townhouse with us.

The other two menorahs are bigger and live on display shelves at the lake house. My favorite of all of them is the one I’ve probably used least in recent years, because I mostly haven’t had it with me. It consists of a big thick piece of glass with a picture of Old Jerusalem etched or incised into it, slotted into a wooden foot. There are metal discs along the top, upon each of which sits a ceramic candleholder with a magnet base. It’s a beautiful thing, but I didn’t take it with us during our expat years for fear of breaking it, and for the past few years, Chanukah has mostly been far enough ahead of our Christmas break that I wasn’t at the lake house to use it.

The third menorah is the one I didn’t need, but it jumped on me and declared it was mine. In the middle of a (somewhat miserable otherwise) 3-month business trip to Woostuh, MA, in the depths of winter, I drove up a couple of hours to visit a longtime online friend who lives just on the far side of the Maine border. She took me to Portsmouth, NS for lunch, and at a small gallery there I saw it. This was in 2001, when I was doing a lot of flying while not on business-trip Siberian exile – it was just three and a half years after getting my VFR rating. So when I saw a colorful menorah that was not only a biplane, but also had a pilot that could be taken to be female, I was hooked. But I didn’t need another menorah, and it was more $$ than I wanted to spend for a thing I really didn’t need. I was haunted by thoughts of it for about two weeks, until I caved and drove back up to buy it (and visited my friend again). I’ve never regretted that purchase, and it taught me something about going ahead and buying the thing, if you can afford it, and if it’s something that you really want, and might not be able to find again.

Maybe when we head down to the lake for our holiday break I’ll remember to post some photos. We’re probably not having a tree this year (because we’re spending Christmas itself with Ted’s parents) so it’s a good time to focus on Chanukah! Come to think of it, I need to remember to pack the small brass menorah to take with me to their house, since Chanukah begins on Christmas Eve this year. We had a Seder at their house once, so I’m sure they’ll be good with me lighting Chanukah candles. (By “good”, I don’t mean “they’ll allow me”, I mean, “they’ll make a nice space for the menorah and probably come listen to the blessings each night, with love for me and respect for my traditions”. I won the in-law lottery.)

Pursuant to yesterday’s dilemma, I returned the expensive beeswax candles and told them why. The guy I spoke to didn’t seem to be unduly concerned. He told me they rarely carried “petroleum-based” candles, but that the reasonably priced ones I’d bought there last year probably were petroleum based. Meanwhile, I note that Amazon prices for similar candles are more like $11–$16 – Whole Paycheck is living up to its nickname. (Amazon’s are not marked as being discounted from a higher price – I don’t think they’re undercutting prices here, because if they were they’d brag about it.)

Of the other local stores I frequent, I forgot to check whether Fred Meyer has any Chanukah candles, but if they do they won’t be the nicer looking ones. Meanwhile, New Seasons has done away with their Jewish and other “ethnic” sections – they still have the same products, just integrated with everything else. For instance, if you want kasha, you need to look with the other grains. I can see advantages to this – for one thing, it normalizes eating Jewish, Mexican, or Asian foods. On the other hand, it makes it harder to figure out where to find specialty or seasonal products like Chanukah candles or Passover matzah. If I see candles there, I might buy a box for next year – just to establish that there is a demand.

I’m about two-thirds done my share of our holiday cards. This has been a very boring year for us, so much so that our holiday letter was a very short one this year. Sad when you can’t think of much to say about a whole year!

Tin soldiers and Trump is coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This winter I hear the drumming,
More dead in Ohio.

I think it’s time for Neil Young to do an update. When I was in college, I had a button that read “Pro-abortion … or amateur abortion?” with a picture of a coathanger. I stopped wearing it because it grossed out even my most pro-choice friends, and I probably wouldn’t wear it now on the theory that wearing buttons doesn’t do much good anyway, but I wish I still owned it.

In other annoying news, today I spent $26 (!) to buy Chanukah candles at Whole Foods, the only one of the local supermarkets that reliably carries them (or used to; I had to ask for help finding these, as they were tucked in back of a display full of other kinds of candles. I haven’t decided whether I should return them and buy cheaper ones from Amazon, or keep them to demonstrate there *is* customer demand for them out here.

It feels deeply weird to me to have Chanukah so late this year. It’s also harder, because my mom and brother have birthdays in Early December, so though I generally try to give separate presents for each thing, I can usually do them all at once. This year, I need to handle them in two lots. Ted’s birthday is always right near CHristmas, but I’m not sure that’s good either. (For one thing, I don’t need to ship his presents!)

Still, I’m in decent shape holiday-wise. I have the ‘thing’ part of Mom’s gift and just need to figure out what to do for the donation part (I don’t usually do both, but a) it’s a milestone birthday and b) this year it feels particularly important to support charities that support those who will be hit hardest by the recent US election. I’m trying to decide between Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Rescue.org (International Rescue Committee, or maybe something Jewish. The Chanukah gift for her and my brother’s family is tickets to go see a musical aimed at kids (Elephant and Piggie) in the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia – I think they’ll all enjoy that.

My brother is accounted for – I knit him something last year that took way longer than expected, so he’s getting it this year plus a few other things. He’s got enough enthusiasms to be easy to shop for. (His wife is much harder!) I just need to get his box packed up and shipped this weekend.

Ted’s becoming harder to buy for, because we really just. don’t. need. more. STUFF in the house!! But a friend had recently asked if I’d mind if she painted a picture based on a photo of mind, and sent me a photo of the finished piece yesterday. I loved it and hope he will too, so I asked her if I can buy it. Luckily she was businesslike about it and just quoted the price she normally sells for, so we didn’t have that awkward friendship dance – I prefer to pay what art is worth, if I can. (Though it’s true that we have three other paintings in the house needing to be better displayed. One was a gift from another friend – it’s displayed but just sitting on a bookshelf, unframed; the second was a gift someone gave Ted when we left Taiwan – not someone we were close to and I don’t love it; and the third Ted painted himself at one of those painting group events. The first one of those, the gift from a friend, is the only one I really care about, and we probably should protect it with a frame.

He takes care of his side of the family (aside from some socks I’m almost done knitting and a couple dishcloths I need to do), so a couple things for friends and one knitting gift exchange, and I’m about done.

I promise not to talk about the Electoral college in this one, or even about the election itself except obliquely.

I’m going to have to go back to my doctor, I think (my GP). Lately my blood pressure has seemed to be up, when it was taken at the dentist, my work physical, and today at the dermatologist. It had been high for a while and my Dutch doctor put me on meds; then when we came back, my doctor here didn’t think I needed them and took me off them, and my blood pressure indeed seemed to be lower. I thought it was probably due to changing from oral birth control to Implanon or possibly to coming back to a country where I mostly understand what’s going on around me. Now I’m on Nexplanon, not Implanon, but I don’t think they’re chemically different; my diet and activities haven’t changed much in the last couple of years. The only things I can figure are either that the Lisinopril built up in my system, and worked for a long time after I stopped taking it (which it’s not supposed to do); the thyroid meds this doctor put me on have raised my blood pressure (which it’s not supposed to do); the marathon training has resulted in overtraining (which I’m not seeing other symptoms of) … or the election. I’m wondering if restricting my Facebook diet would be therapeutic.

The other thing the election has done for me is to make me realize how much of my personal moral system is built on my childhood reading – I think Little Women is probably the best example and biggest part of that except for the very few places where it directly contradicts the Jewish morality I was taught (which is, literally, about two places in the book – the reference to the “best life ever lived” and Jo’s vision of immortality as a “blessed truth”). I do truly believe that any individual should be continually trying to make herself a better person – “better” in the moral sense. That’s a fairly wide category for me and probably slops over to the physical: stronger, tougher, more practical, more capable, kinder, more honest, more reliable. I believe in the value of work and the importance of duty (luckily, the 1970s milieu in which I grew up rescued me from ever thinking I had a duty to be conventional or ladylike, no matter what Jo March was told. And I believe in the duty to make the world better around you, as agreed by both the Jewish tradition and Alcott’s Transcendentalist thought.

All of which is what’s pissing me off with a lot of Trump supporters, because “I got mine and nothing else matters” or “I’m good enough as long as I’m not actively causing harm (I myself, with no responsibility for my friends or fellow travellers or allies)”. They’re affronting not just my specific moral beliefs that human worth is not dependent on the color of your skin or who you love, how well all your parts work, which specific parts you have, or what God you believe in, but also my whole moral code.

I wanted to check my feelings, so I had that discussion with my husband the other day (not a Trump supporter either – I don’t think I could bear it if he were). He doesn’t believe at all in the imperative to make yourself better, just to avoid causing harm to those around you, though he does agree that maybe people to have a responsibility to improve the world around them. So apparently I can live with that in at least some cases – as long as the person is NOT actively causing harm, or allying himself with those who do.

Little Women wasn’t the only book that formed me, but so many of the old children’s books seem to have similar morals, even as they put slightly different stamps on them (E. Nesbit’s Socialism, for instance). And maybe it’s because I get so many of the moral from children’s books that I don’t think fighting a good fight should be drudging or dreary. (It’s symptomatic that the English ones definitely tended to favor the Cavaliers over the Roundheads! Wrong, but Wromantic.) Anyway, the best idea I’ve seen yet to get rid of the divisions that led to Trump’s getting votes from close to half of the people that bothered comes from Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Just widen the focus a little; he’s talking specifically to young men who want to enter Parliament, but this applies to men and women of all kinds, not only wannabe politicians.

I’ll tell you what to do now: instead of all this trumpeting and fuss, which is only the old parliamentary-majority dodge over again, just you go, each of you (you’ve plenty of time for it, if you’ll only give up t’other line), and quietly make three or four friends—real friends—among us. You’ll find a little trouble in getting at the right sort, because such birds don’t come lightly to your lure; but found they may be. Take, say, two out of the professions, lawyer, parson, doctor—which you will; one out of trade; and three or four out of the working classes—tailors, engineers, carpenters, engravers. There’s plenty of choice. Let them be men of your own ages, mind, and ask them to your homes; introduce them to your wives and sisters, and get introduced to theirs; give them good dinners, and talk to them about what is really at the bottom of your hearts; and box, and run, and row with them, when you have a chance. Do all this honestly as man to man, and by the time you come to ride old John, you’ll be able to do something more than sit on his back, and may feel his mouth with some stronger bridle than a red-tape one.

Just address a wider audience and substitute more modern concepts of diversity – race, sex, religion, orientation, ability, etc – for “the professions and the working classes”, and you have the seeds of a real solution. (When he says ” riding old John”, he means John Bull, as personification of the government or the nation, and isn’t talking about ruling individuals that way. I think.) And it’s fun! Become a better person just by making new friends – and listening to them. How pleasant a study is that?