I ate a late meal at midnight last night then tried to drink enough wine to make myself sleepy to go to bed early enough to get up early, and do my taxes. At least I practiced a few pages in my Reading Hebrew book and practiced a bit on the shofar. It's too small to be a "serious" shofar, and I'd like to get a nicer one, but this one is good for now and good for practicing on because it's trickier than a longer one.
Instead, I woke up around 11 or 11:30, feeling awful, and around 1:30 so 11:30 Hawaii time, I called my brother in law, the lawyer. He's got a very impressive web page and two assistants so he must be doing pretty well. I talked to him because, unlike my older sister, I have his number and he'll talk to me. I managed to convey that I want to be in communication with her again, that my cutting her off feels like I'd cut off one of my limbs, that we're not getting any younger and anything could happen to either one of us. He took down my phone number and email address and I gave him the address of the shop because letters get here just fine. It'll be up to her if she wants to get back in contact.
By this time it was getting close to the time the rabbi was scheduled to call me, and he did. We talked about where I was born, and where I grew up, and family, and schools and all kinds of things. It's amazing how much we fit into that call. I'm glad we got this talk in, because a lot of it was things you can't talk about in casual small talk like when be bump into each other on Friday night, and the result is that he knows a lot more about me now, and I know that we were born in places maybe 20 miles apart at most. Maybe even in the same hospital - I'll have to ask him sometime. So I am "in", welcome with open arms.
I've been Doing The Things(tm) which is pretty much how conversion works. In Reform Judaism you have to take classes too, but it turns out all the classes are on Tuesday evenings. And the classes don't start until around October. Meanwhile, I'll do the Friday night services, and I'm signed up for the Jewish music appreciation class that's coming up.
That phone call to my brother in law was hard to get myself to do. Last night I watched "N Is A Number" about Paul Erdos and as always it made me sad and it motivated me to make that phone call. I am sick of being out of communication with my older sister. The rest of my siblings I don't care about, as I don't think we have any interested or viewpoints in common. But my older sister and I were close as adults. I'm going to assume she'll wait a week or so to think about it before communicating, if she does.
My other Hawaii friends are kind of duds. Dave's a wingnut, Pat's nice enough but pretty much useless, and my ham radio/tech friend is pretty old and probably only interested in making radio contacts - I think he's a co-owner of a huge ham radio "antenna farm" that's not far from one of my childhood homes and the callsign of which was close to the callsign I had in Hawaii, with the result that I'd get some of their QSL cards sent to me.
If I end up going back to Hawaii, I will go through my conversion process here first.
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