We drove up to New England yesterday morning to take home what was left in the house of my wife’s departed parents before it is cleaned out for the new people.

She had an accident, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and is unable to get around hardly at all. So the drive was hard on her, and when we got there, and got her into the place, and fired up the heat, it was left to me mainly to rummage around per her instructions and those of her brother — he and his wife had already had ample opportunity to make their rounds, but he had seen certain things that he thought his sister would want to at least consider — and to make too many of the evaluations about what to take, what to leave, what is best forgotten.

Maybe this made it easier for both of us, though, tiring as it was for me.

Her parents were older, and in fact her father, who was old enough to be her grandfather, was himself the youngest of many siblings, so my middle-aged wife has first cousins who have long passed on from old age, an odd concept to me. The family contours are odd for other reasons; her father, Mauricio Golberg, a brilliant surgeon, emigrated from Argentina in the 1950’s and married a New England girl, and a boy who grow up speaking Yiddish and Spanish, like my Cuban-born Polish Jewish mother, made Rhode Island his home.

So, as among the papers of my grandparents of which I have become a custodian, there were all sorts of odd-shaped passports in Spanish, though unlike my tailor grandfather my father-in-law was a learned professional, so there were diplomas, certificates. Read the rest of this entry »

Waves of everything are washing over me these days! This is one of the most intense moments of my life. And if you had asked me a month ago what would contribute to my saying such a thing, I would probably put my blog-related activities quite near the top of the list. Oddly enough, although I am trying to post often enough to keep the blog honest, it’s been hard, and the compulsion has not been great.

My other blog, of course, which is of some commercial urgency to me, I have with God’s help managed to keep fresh and creative. It helps that there’s always some kind of intellectual property news breaking off which I can riff. But the broad gauge of Likelihood of Success makes it hard to focus on it. Ironically, though, it is precisely because of that likelihood, please God, that its virtual namesake is experiencing the neglect.

True, here there’s less pressure for “Fresh” and “Creative.” And more liberty for both. The only reason I can write now is that something’s wrong with my real computer, so I am using this other computer at this other desk in my rather odd office which itself now makes a lot more sense than it did a short time ago.

I told you last week about the medical adventures. That makes everything crazier for me, the non-patient (I didn’t say impatient! There’s medicine for that) of course; for two adults supervising youngish children, three healthy feet is not enough. Unfortunately, there are more; another close family member is now going through a bit of a scare that is not yet resolved in terms of how scary, and expecting at least emotional support and engagement. Intense, yes.

But professionally and personally, I don’t know, it’s like everything’s falling on my head at the same time — in a good way, in this case, though I am puzzled by the juxtaposition of health problems in two people who are very close to me. Perhaps, on my account, it is in order to provide me with the opportunity to do certain kinds of kindness, which do not always come naturally to me; but of course other people do not get hurt in order to provide me with spiritual opportunities.

Besides this, though, about a year ago, it was almost exactly the opposite in the strictly personal and professional spheres. That is when I went to Israel for advice, blessings, perspective. Let’s keep the really personal out of it, as a matter of Internet hygiene. Professionally, I am swamped, really with as much work as I can handle; I brought on some help and the help is both executing brilliantly and generating more work! How does that happen?

Even opportunities to open doors, a crack here, a half-a-jamb there, for other people have met with sparkling success.

And the work — it is almost entirely work I want to do which, we have learned the hard way, is the only kind of work this particular cowboy will do well. This is a great blessing. Making a living has been the bugaboo of so much of my life until now — never quite hitting the mark professionally despite mostly looking great in the process. I don’t want to bring on any more evil eyes, you know, but hey, only my friends read Likelihood of Success. It’s just a lot better. And despite everything I’m able to focus on it; this, another change, thanks in part to a friend’s suggestion as to my mental approach that has itself been transformative.

All kinds of waves are crashing on my shore. Not all of them get to be written about. The black-and-white and the passionately-hued, the inspiring and the inspired, the cold, the warm and the melting — is so obviously Providential to me right now. The choices, gambles; directions, connections; departures, arrivals… a panoply of moments, a complex matrix of vivid life is just unfolding within and without.

So who has time for blogging! 😉

My thoughts this morning on a Jewish religious discussion blog — sometimes I think of something original, or an original way to put it, and I think I hit on something today:

It is much easier to dedicate oneself to [spiritual / social religious goals] when working from a position of “strength” in terms of the [good fortune] and [blessings] that one is working with in life. God forbid a person who comes into the world with superior endowments — and these can take many, many forms of course — judges another person without realizing what [burden] that other one is carrying.

On the other hand, I think, woe to him who does have “everything” — and this, too, can be something very different from what an adolescent might consider a “fantasy life”; quite a little thing could, for the right person, be “everything” — and squanders the chance to be what he can be. The shadow of wasted potential hovers over so many of us, including those of us who can do just a little for someone else to give them, perhaps, the “everything” they have only ever needed…

One of my burdens in this life is a lack of humility. I kept going back and reading this today, like Narcissus in his mirror. Frankly I could have broken out the syntax a little more artfully; it is not the prettiest thing I have written in the last week.

But I really do think I hit on something here.

There is something thing worse than your own wasted potential which, after all, can take tremendous efforts to overcome. It is standing by watching someone else spin his wheels, and you can, with very little effort, help him out of the ditch. Your friend’s beast collapses under its burden? Surely you will help him raise it. This a moral obligation.

That I believe this, of course, is the reason I am not a libertarian, or anything like it.

Are these sentiments merely a sop for my own guilt over my natural, and unseemly, self-regard? Perhaps — but whatever it takes. Whatever it takes to make you feel it. Whatever it takes. As I said, that is the burden I have to bear, and that’s what I choose to make of it, and of myself.