On Friday I was able to list 10 things, take some packages to the post office and FedEx, get cleaned up and have some time to stop in at Whole Foods to eat a beef stick and have some coffee, use the loo, etc. and get to the temple in time.
The attendance was low because earlier there had been a Tot Shabbat so anyone with kids would have gone to that one. We had a few new people as always, the most notable being a tall Black guy in a sort of trench coat and boots and black Stetson type hat, lots of jewelry.
So we sang our cowboy songs and did our thing, then afterward was the bread and wine and snacks and schmoozing. I ended up talking a lot with a gal named Dina who was original from Mexico City and whose father was a rabbi. She'd lived in Long Beach for some years so I was able to talk with her about Long Beach a bit, then other things.
The black guy talked with various people, and at one point he was sitting alone at a table so I said something like, "Great hat, is that a Stetson?" and he said in fact it was. Then he started in asking me if I was into kabbalah. I had to explain that I wasn't and in fact most of us are not, and in my own case I have much higher priorities like studying each week's Torah portion, keeping Shabbat, and eating at least Kosher style, since I don't 'have a Kosher kitchen I can't call it Kosher but it's at least Kosher style for instance, since I'd eaten a beef stick before coming, I wasn't eating any of the cheese but only parve things.
The guy claimed to hold a doctorate in anthropology and also "African studies", but he was awfully flashily dressed. Maybe he'd heard that you wear your best clothes on Shabbat and some temples do so but we dress from "business casual" to a bit more casual than that. He seemed really interested in whether we did anything strange or exotic like kabbalah. If he's spying for some group, I hope he went back to them and told them how boring we are.
I stopped by Whole Foods on my way home for a few things, got back here, had my dinner and night-night.
I woke up and among other things, something I've been pondering lately came to mind. I've recounted how I remembered my mother meeting with an older lady, who was from Austria, my five-year-old self being told that's not the same as Australia where the kangaroos are. And the lady talking about Israel, which I made a little memory device for myself by saying it "Is real". Being only 5, I didn't know to look for a number on the older lady's arm.
But I wonder if there's a time line where my mother was talking with this lady, during the day when my father was at work, about our perhaps being Jewish and my mother decides to escape the failing marriage by moving, with us, to Israel. And I wonder if in this time line, my father hustled us off to Hawaii which would be even harder to get to Israel from, and which might save the failing marriage (or at least get my mother less stink-eyes for being as brown as she was).
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