Where did he go?

I last published a blog on August 14th of last year. Did anyone notice that I was gone? I’m honestly not sure that if I were you, I would have noticed. Life goes on.

Since Pauline died in 2017, I live alone. In the year after she died and when I was in the house alone with Kazu, the thought would occur to me that I could die, and I might rot in the house until my neighbors would call the police to complain about the horrible smell. I finally told my son, David, that he might want to give me a call periodically to be sure that Kazu wasn’t stuck in the house with a dead person starving to death and having to find a good place to do his business.

Life goes on.

Well, now that I’ve raised the issue of my absence, I’ve been busy.

Over the summer, I decided that I wanted to take a class in Yiddish from Ohio State. They offer an introductory course. I took a class in their Program 60 on Native Americans from the Ethnic Studies Department about eight years ago. I hadn’t taken a class since. When I tried to register for Yiddish, I found out that they changed their whole registration system in 2017 and everyone who didn’t reregister was lost. Then I was told that it was too late to register for the Fall Semester. I was a graduate student at Ohio State for ten years. The experience gave me unpleasant and so familiar flashbacks about the bureaucratic cesspool that is The Ohio State University. I wrote an email to the instructor indicating my interest, explaining the registration issue, and that I would be looking forward to taking it in the winter. He wrote back to me, letting me know that he was leaving the university after the fall and Yiddish would no longer be offered. It turns out that Sweden is developing a Yiddish program, and he was hired to be one of the faculty. I would get into why Sweden might be enthralled with Yiddish, but if I did, I would never get around to my beautiful photographs.

This very kind Yiddish instructor told me that he would be fine if I just wanted to sit in on the class. I was grateful. There were about eight of us taking the course. Only one person wasn’t a member of AARP, and he was the guy taking it for credit. Interestingly, he was a PhD student from Ukraine. After a class, I took him out for coffee and interrogated him about my family and what he might understand about any Jews who remain there, besides the president. I met some wonderful people in this class.

I was interested in taking Yiddish because language and culture are very much the same thing. I come from a family of Yiddish speakers, on both sides of the family. It was the first language for my grandparents. My mother and my aunt didn’t know English until they went to public elementary school. They grew up without Sesame Street (and televisions). I was ten years old when my Bubby died. We spent lots of time with my Bubby and Zadie. They spoke Yiddish to each other and to family members when we were together. My Bubby never learned English very well, so we heard her speaking to us in Yiddish when we were with her. When my Bubby and Zadie would talk about something they didn’t want their children to understand, they spoke in Russian.

I was immersed in Yiddish culture. My Bubby and Zadie brought as much of the shtetl culture with them to America as they could manage. Neither of them ever drove a car. Their family and the shul were the center of their worlds. I took this Yiddish class to connect with that shtetl culture.

This is my Altar Zadie (great grandfather) and Alta Bubby (great grandmother). This photograph was taken in Russia. These were my Zadie's mother and father. She made it to America. She came with my Bubby and an uncle. He was killed during one of the pogroms in Tetieve. One of the girls was my Zadie's sister; the other was a cousin. My Zadie's sister was also killed. They are one of the reasons I wanted to learn Yiddish. These aren't just relatives; I actually relate to these people. They are chronologically a few generations distanced from me. Culturally, they are very much a part of who I am.

These are my Bubby and Zadie. The girls are my mother on the left, and my Aunt Sally on the right. My grandparents lived through hell in Russia (what is now Ukraine). They are my more direct reasons for wanting to learn Yiddish.

Growing up in this world, I did know a lot of Yiddish. But I had such a cockeyed perspective on the language. My perception was that Yiddish was made up of lots of nouns and adjectives, many of them filled with sarcastic humor.  There was also an abundance of superstition embedded in the vocabulary. Every other phrase is an idiom. I had no conception at all about how all the words and phrases I knew might fit together into a language.

So, I excitedly entered the classroom expecting to learn some great new curses and swear words that I could fashion into full sentences. The next thing I know, I’m having to conjugate verbs in the present, past and future tense. I hadn’t thought about parts of speech since sixth grade. And then I’m faced with trying to understand what the hell nominative and accusative nouns are all about. And the nouns are feminine, masculine, or neutral and there’s no rhyme or reason as to how gender is applied. You just have to memorize them. The most useful knowledge I acquired from this class is that this 72-year-old isn’t memorizing anything, and I’m lucky to just remember the important things, like my street address and telephone number. I haven’t the slightest idea what any of my family members’ telephone numbers are. If I ever had to make a call to any of them from someone else’s phone, I would be screwed.

Anyway, I’m quickly learning that every other thing about Yiddish is an exception. You have to memorize them because there’s no discernible pattern; ergo, they’re exceptions. I kept thinking over and over, who’s big idea was it to allow the Jewish people to invent their own language. I’m envisioning 25 Jews in a room arguing to make their case as to whether a chair should be masculine, feminine, or neutral. It’s a miracle that a decision was ever made.

It is an old language and there are still about half a million people who speak it. And there are people like me who want to learn it. And fortunately, many of them are young people who can still memorize gendered nouns and a multitude of exceptions.

My teacher told me that no one in the class worked harder than me. I imagine that would be the case. It is my mode of operation in school. I was never the smartest guy around; far from it. But you couldn’t outwork me. When I was in elementary school, we were tracked, and there was no getting around the fact that I was placed with the dumb kids. None of us were confused about our status. All we had to do was look around. When we were in the sixth grade, all the neighborhood boys had crushes on two girls – Sally and Kathy. Interestingly, our crushes got tracked the same way we were categorized in school. At my 30th high school reunion, I asked Kathy if she knew that she got all the dumb boys?

In hindsight, it turns out that the dumb kids were actually the normal kids.

I digress. I am certain that there was no one in my Yiddish class that worked harder and learned less. Yiddish sucked up enormous amounts of my time. I did still find time to never miss a meal and I went out with my camera often to shoot the fall, my favorite season of the year. I did not have time to write blogs.

When Yiddish was completed and gobs of time became available, I had knee replacement surgery. I had been putting off the inevitable for years. The decay finally got to the point where I had difficulty walking or climbing stairs or riding a bike or using my legs for anything. I need both knees done and we started with the right one for no particular reason. I live in an entirely accessible home thanks to Pauline. I’ve actually cried thinking about Pauline going up the ramp in the garage while I limped up that ramp with my walker.

I did everything I could to prepare for the surgery. I moved my study from upstairs into Pauline’s study so that I could do any of the SRNA work that I needed to accomplish during my recovery. I arranged with Nancy the days she could take off work after the surgery to care for me. I increased the amount of effort I was putting into my leg exercises at the gym to prepare my knees the best I could physically. I also set myself up with a dozen projects that I wanted to get done while I was stuck in the house unable to drive.

The date arrived and Nancy drove me to the hospital. I was very anxious. I was going to get a spinal and the thought of it had me pretty wigged out. I had a spinal tap done when I was in eighth grade, but I had no real memory of the experience. Turns out, my anesthesiologist was great. He gave me something that immediately made me realize how it is that people become drug addicts. I purposely did not ask anyone what it was. They rolled me into the surgery room at around 10:00. I have no memory of any of it. When I woke up, I was fine because I had no feeling below my waist.

This is me post-surgery, totally anesthetized below the waist and looking quite stylish in my hospital gown and slip-resistant yellow socks. I'm speaking to my mother like a normal person, before the commencement of the vision quest. I am assuring her that I am okay, while being deceived by the anesthetic into a false sense of being okay.

The nurse told me that I would be able to go home once I was able to walk, go up and down a few steps and urinate. I was able to manage everything well except for the urinating part which took me a few hours.

As I was going through all of this, my mind kept returning to all of Pauline’s symptoms from TM. My abilities were going to return. She had to deal with all this crap for years. It just made me pretty sad.

I then spent the next two weeks in so much pain that all I could do was lie in bed staring at the ceiling, when my eyes were open. I did not sleep. I was given some exercises to do, and I was walking well. But the pain was horrible, and the narcotics made me so unwell that I had to stop taking them. My pain management experience has not been stellar.

The surgeon used a tourniquet on my thigh to limit bleeding through the incision. My blood pressure was so high that he had to tighten it more than he usually does to stop the bleeding. This is the bruise on my thigh. My thigh hurt as much as my knee. My whole leg felt like the surgeon had beat the crap out of it with a tire iron; and it looked like it.

Nancy worked really hard to keep me properly iced and to help me find whatever peace was possible.

The incision was covered for almost two weeks after the surgery. I was grateful. I didn’t want to look at it. If I had the stomach for these kinds of things and wasn’t tracked with the dumb kids in elementary school, I might have gone into medicine. The bandage was going to be removed during my first follow-up visit with the PA. I was hoping that I could somehow avoid looking at it, but that was an unrealistic proposition, as it was located in the front and middle of my leg and ran for a good 6-8 inches. It was gruesome.

The entire experience has been loaded with an abundance of unpleasant episodes. The latest has been a speckled red rash that runs from above my knee down into my foot. I have been on so many different medications. Some of them indicate the possibility of a skin reaction. Most fortunately, I do not have an infection.

This is my new right knee. It's very shiny. I try not to think about all the bone cutting and shoving that was going on during this surgery. Feeling it is quite enough.

This is the front view of my new knee and why I need the surgery done on my left knee. There's no cartilage left, and this knee now hurts as much as the right one does.

I didn’t sleep for the first five weeks. The sleep deprivation made me mentally ill. I made an appointment with my psychologist in the sixth week. I hadn’t seen her since the end of 2018. This was Pauline’s psychologist who I started seeing after Pauline died. We talked about the role that sleep deprivation and pain played in the vision quest among many of the plains tribes. I was thinking that she only gets that kind of conversation with her mentally ill anthropologists or troubled Arapaho.

My psychologist gave me great advice for the left knee experience. It was wonderful to see her, and I was so grateful for her care.

One of the more interesting propositions out of this experience was that I stopped taking my routine gummy before bedtime. My medical marijuana prescription is for pain. I have a significant amount of pain from arthritis all over my body and the gummy definitely helps me sleep. I have been doing it long enough that I know how to dose it for myself. And I never take it until my day is completed, I have no chores left to do, and I can go mindless. I learned early on during college that trying to accomplish anything while stoned, beyond devouring ice cream, is sheer folly.

After the surgery, I was on so much medication. I stopped taking the gummies because I was already stationed in an altered state of consciousness. I was well on my way in my vision quest; and was in dire need of a spirit helper.  

My shtetl culture also had spirit helpers. Whenever I am speaking with my 98-year-old mother about relatives who have passed away, she will say to me, they should be a gutta beten. The loose translation from Yiddish is that they should speak or pray on your behalf.

It has been seven weeks since the surgery. I am driving. I can go to my office upstairs, but I limit the number of times I do. I am back in the gym three times a week doing my upper body routine. I am finally able to bend my knee (with pain) enough to do the recumbent bike. I was on it for a half hour yesterday. That was an accomplishment. My stamina sucks. I am still having difficulty sleeping, but it is slowly getting better. I have returned to my gummy routine. I remain open to a spirit helper.

And I am writing a blog.

The images I am presenting in this blog go back to the late winter and early spring of 2023. I have some catching up to do. As I’ve noted in the past, I would love to shoot landscapes if I had access to places that made those experiences possible. When I am able to travel, I seek out landscapes or seascapes. Living in central Ohio, in an urban environment, what I have the easiest access to is woodlands and prairie. I am grateful that we have a wonderful metropark system. So, I look for small scenes. As my work is becoming more about abstracts and minimalism, I shoot most often in as shallow a depth of field as my lenses allow and either closeup or macro. Shapes, texture, patterns, light, contrast, color. Bada boom, bada boom.

Inniswoods Metrogardens

March

A reminder - you can see full screen images in any of the galleries below, by clicking on the image. You can then scroll through larger images. I encourage it because I don't think the tiny images do them justice.

Hard Road Park

March

Walnut Woods Metropark

March

Inniswoods Metrogardens

April

Boch Hollow Nature Preserve

April

Wahkeena Nature Preserve

April

As much as I would love to live in lala land and ignore what is going on in the world around me, I haven't yet developed those powers. Unfortunately, I still care. I do have six beautiful grandchildren and a 98-year-old mother who come with caring.

I would vote for my 98-year-old mother for president against the orange emperor. I don’t care if Biden is old. I wouldn’t care if Biden were in a coma; I would vote for him against the convicted rapist, alleged traitor, convicted thief and fraud, obvious bigot, and misogynist with absolutely no moral compass and who denigrates those who serve and sacrifice as members of our military. He’s a mentally ill huckster and phony. That he has somehow captured the entire republican party is dangerous. I understand that they are concerned about alienating all his voters who just adore him (for reasons that are neither rational nor sane). But that they are such cowards and so enamored with their own power and position that they are willing to watch our democracy and our social and economic system go down the tubes, is demoralizing. That there are somewhere between 30-40% of the voting public who think they would be better off living in a totalitarian state where the orange emperor doesn’t care in the least how his subjects live is depressing beyond words. And they have four years of experience with this guy. No one with a brain or conscience wants to work for him. We watched them all quit during his administration, and then wrote books about him being toxic and dangerous.

Biden cares, he loves our country, democracy, and capitalism. He understands what makes America great, and he wants to keep it that way. Yeah, he’s old. I’m old. Given this choice, age just doesn't matter. My family escaped from Russia. My family has first-hand experience with why we should be concerned with Putin’s useful idiot and all the useful idiots who now make up the republican party.