Scheduling note

A note about the upcoming schedule at Pillage Idiot for the benefit of my small but devoted following:

This coming week, starting later today, I'll be celebrating my 25th anniversary with Mrs. Attila at a secure, undisclosed location. Our anniversary is actually in a couple of months, but I'm a proponent of partying early.

There might be some guest-blogging here in my absence, but I've pre-scheduled a bunch of "Best of Pillage Idiot" posts to make sure there's something here for you to read. These are re-posts of things you may have seen before, but I hope you'll enjoy seeing them again. It's possible, though I make no promises, that I may be able to post a few photos from from my secure, undisclosed location. (If I do, don't expect to see me or Mrs. A in any of them.)

A 25th anniversary, if you're as lucky as I am, is a time for celebration, but it's also a time for reflection. Basically, I'm still trying to figure out what Mrs. A saw in me. I think I know what she sees in me now, but I'm puzzling over what she saw 26 years ago.

The odds against a socially defective human being like me finding the woman of his dreams and having her think he's worthy of marriage are astronomical. The odds are even longer when you consider that the coincidences by which I found my wife were, well, flukish, as so many coincidences are.

I met my wife when she was sharing an apartment with a woman I went on a couple of dates (literally, two) with one summer. I'll call her X. The woman, X, was a year behind me in law school, and the year after I graduated, when she was a third-year student, I returned to the school for a few days to visit some friends. I accidentally bumped into X, and we had lunch. When she heard where I was living, she told me my wife was living only a few blocks away and advised me to ask her out. I already knew from having met my wife briefly when I picked X up at her apartment that my wife was smart and attractive and laughed politely at my jokes, so I didn't pooh-pooh the idea. But a socially defective guy doesn't just ask a woman out. He is tormented over the prospect for about six weeks before calling. Fortunately, in my case, my wife was expecting my call.

Now, it might sound odd in this day and age, but 25 or more years ago, when I was in my 20s, I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking for in a wife. I still think that when you're in your 20s, you should be evaluating relationships with an eye to whether they can lead to marriage, and not waste your time with ones that obviously cannot, but that's a topic for another time. My wife and I, in any event, had two long phone conversations before we even went out on a date, and by the end of the second conversation, I decided I was going to marry her. This is a true story. I don't recommend this strategy in general, because love at first sight, or second phone call, is usually a mirage. But in my case, my wife was way off the charts.

In the first month or two, there were a couple of missed signals that almost ruined my string of luck, but a year later to the day after our first phone call, we decided -- I should say she agreed -- to get married. And my life has been wonderful ever since.

I'm totally serious about that.

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On Fathers' Day

It's great to be a father on Fathers' Day when you have kids who are good and decent people. And when your wife, who's in a class by herself, makes a special dinner featuring a recipe for London broil that's so spicy she can't even eat it herself. Now, that's altruism.

But there's really no way around the fact that on this day, I think a lot about how I miss my own father, who died about two and a half years ago. Looking back on what I've written at Pillage Idiot, my one regret is not showing my father a few of my rare notable posts. My father knew a huge amount about the Jewish vote, and I regret that I never showed him what I wrote on that subject. I guess I was convinced that it wouldn't live up to his standards, but I'm sure he would have liked it, anyway.

In 2005, while he was being treated for cancer, I wrote a few things about the situation, and I'll link them here.

I'm back (briefly describing my father's hospitalization)

Driving in Manhattan (talking about driving him to his cancer treatment)

A few jokes (including his favorite joke, which I still think is perfect)

My father died in early January 2006, and I spent the next 11 months saying kaddish for him. I discovered a few things about the daily minyan, because I was going twice or three times every day.

Shiva

One-minute shacharit (how to shorten the lengthy morning prayers)

Memory (a rumination on saying prayers from memory)

Funeral fun (remembering how things didn't going smoothly at the cemetery)

Kaddish by the numbers (explaining how many times one says the kaddish during the 11 months; hint: it's a large number)

In the past year and a half, I've written less often about my father, but he's still constantly in my mind.

Thinking about my father (Thanksgiving Day thoughts)

Dreaming (seeing my father in a series of dreams)

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Dreaming

My father died two solar-calendar years ago this past Friday. His yahrzeit was last month.

On Friday night, I had my third dream about him in which he was alive. Or to be more accurate, he was dead in the dream but physically present with us acting as if he were alive. I really don't know what to make of it. I mean, it's not exactly seven good years followed by seven bad years.

In the first dream, several family members and I were sitting on my parents' front porch, the way we did so often while my father was alive. My father was there with us. He was a few years younger than he was when he died, by which I mean he had not lost the weight and endured the disfiguring cancer treatment of the final year of his life. In my dream, my mother, my siblings, and I knew he had died, but my father seemed thoroughly unaware of this unfortunate fact.

I don't remember the second dream, but in substance it was more of the same.

The dream I had on Friday night shared much with the previous ones. I was lying in bed, and my father was sitting on a chair next to my bed, with his right foot on the chair and his knee raised in the air. He looked about the same as in the first dream. In the dream, I was thinking that this was not good, because his body should be straight for burial. My father opened his eyes, the pupils of which had the glassy look of someone who'd had cataract surgery, and he started to open his mouth, too. But he didn't speak, and I woke up. I really don't think it had anything to do with the secular anniversary of his death, because in Jewish practice, it's only the yahrzeit, based on the Jewish lunar calendar, that matters, and that occurred over 3 weeks ago. In fact, I didn't even remember the secular anniversary on Friday until the next day.

There must be a whole body of literature on this type of dream. I should do some research when I have a little time. Of course, if anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be grateful for that.

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Heightened incompetence

Family is in from out of town, so I'm off from work today. I just had to tell this story.

My mother uses a bank branch that's within walking distance of her house. The people who work there are very nice, but they have a collective IQ of roughly 85.

I have my mother's power of attorney, and I take care of most of her banking for her. I write some of her checks. I pay most of her bills online. So it's critical to me to have online access to her account. I gave the bank her power of attorney nearly two years ago, but recently the bank was acquired by another bank, and the online access suddenly disappeared.

I asked my mother to go into the branch and get online access set up again. After going in there, she called me to tell me the bank officer wanted my driver's license number and a bunch of other information. This made no sense, so I called him directly. I told him I had my mother's power of attorney on file with them. He said he didn't know that. But he told me he had given my mother the User ID for the account. My mother, when I checked with her, had no idea what he was talking about.

So today, a few days later, I finally tracked the bank officer down again and asked him for the User ID. To understand this story, let's say my mother's name was Martha Washington and mine was George Washington, Jr. Those are anagrams of my real name. (Only kidding.)

The conversation went like this:

Me: This is George Washington, Jr. We recently spoke about getting online access for my mother Martha Washington's account. You told me you gave her the User ID, but she doesn't understand what you mean.

Bank officer: OK, let me give you the User ID directly. Do you have something to write it down on?

Me: Yes.

Bank officer: OK, it's M, as in Mary, W, as in William, A, as in Alice, S, as in . . . [here, he paused to think of a name] as in Sam . . .

Me: It's the last name, right?

Bank officer: Yes, but let me spell it out for you.

Me (impatiently): HINGTON.

Bank officer: Yeah and there's 123 at the end.

Me (gritting my teeth): Thank you very much. (Click.)

******************

My sister asked the best question: Do you think it's safe to keep her money with those people?

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Thinking about my father

I think about my father a lot on Thanksgiving. My father used to read a psalm at the dinner table, and, as I mentioned last year, no one in the family remembers which one it was, and we've instituted a practice of reading Psalm 100 (mizmor l'todah, a psalm of Thanksgiving).

Last year, Thanksgiving was the second-to-last day of saying kaddish for my father, whose first yahrzeit fell on Christmas. (True story: When I asked the assistant rabbi at our shul, who has a dry sense of humor, whether to light the yahrzeit candle before going to mincha-maariv, or after coming home, he looked at me quizzically and asked, "Is it on Shabbat?" I said no, it's on Monday . . . Christmas. He replied, "Well, it's a custom. You can do it either way. Just don't put the candle in the window.")

This year, Thanksgiving is just Thanksgiving. I took advantage of the relatively late starting time (8 a.m.) to go to shacharit. I don't go to morning minyan very often, and this seemed like a good opportunity to become comfortable again in time for my father's yahrzeit, which comes in three weeks. The assistant rabbi, speaking at the end of shacharit, discussed briefly how we know turkey is a kosher bird, even though it's not included in the list of kosher birds in the Torah. (You can read way more than you want to know about the answer here.) Afterwards, I said that I know how we know turkey is kosher: I just bought a turkey at Kosher Mart.

Also, my father is supposed to have said: On Thanksgiving, the Jews have good reason to be thankful, because the Pilgrims arrived in America and didn't find a pig. I don't think I ever heard him say that, myself, but it's a pretty good line.

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