The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for February 2008

Lithuanian Bigotry on Display

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The Forward has a very sad story about a terrible custom in Lithuania. Much of my family once lived there so I cannot help but wonder if they witnessed this. This sort of behavior should never be tolerated.

“in this city, once known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania because of the breadth and piety of its Jewish community. During Carnival — or Uzgavenes, as it is known in Lithuania — Catholics from around the world congregate for a feast of foods prohibited during Lent. The festival usually involves a parade or circus, with attendees in masks and costumes. But in Vilnius — commonly known to Jews as Vilna — participants traditionally dress and act “as Jews,” a feat that generally calls for masks with grotesque features, beards and visible ear locks and that is often accompanied by peddling and by stereotypically Jewish speech.

Perhaps even more shockingly, the “festivities” extend beyond the parade itself and into a Halloween-style trick-or-treating. When Simonas Gurevicius, the 26-year-old executive director of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, opened the door to his house during last year’s Uzgavenes, he was greeted by two children dressed in horns and tails, reciting a song that translates as, “We’re the little Lithuanian Jews/We want blintzes and coffee/If you don’t have blintzes/Give us some of your money.” (It rhymes in Lithuanian.)”

Coping With Sick Parents

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“DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”

Death Be Not Proud-by John Donne
(1572-1631)

One day we’ll all wake up and find out that mom or dad have died. It is an uncomfortable reality…dying. For most of us it doesn’t matter what our spiritual beliefs are, the loss of a parent is hard. Be it at 16 or 60 it can be a very profound experience that impacts the rest of our lives.

Since no one has figured out how to email, Skype or receive blog posts from death it carries a certain weight of finality. There is a reason it is called the final goodbye. And maybe that finality and sense of loss is why it can be so hard to deal with sick parents. It is that underlying fear that one day mom and dad won’t be there.

I remember when I was in grade school there were a few kids who had lost parents. It didn’t make sense to me. At ten years old I couldn’t conceive of a time when my own would be gone. It just wasn’t real. In the years between then and my graduation from college there were a handful of losses. But it still seemed impossible that one day it could happen to me.

That changed a while back. When my father had a major heart attack and teetered on the brink it became very clear that things were different. Thankfully he survived, but it was close.

I won’t forget what it was like in the hospital. The beeps and whirs of the machines and the knowledge that a ventilator was helping dad to breathe. That was really the moment when I realized that he was truly human. It was rough because I really had come to realize how much I leaned upon him.

Maybe it wasn’t daily. I didn’t need him to tell me how to do my job, raise my kids or lead my life. I had already learned the basics from him. Still, there were always little situations that would come up. Most of the time I knew how I intended to handle them, but it didn’t mean that I didn’t want to talk it out.

It is kind of funny. Every day my children come to me and ask to watch as they show me what they have learned. What that moment in the hospital taught me was that I still like doing that too.

And now here we are several years later and I find myself in discussions with more friends about sick parents. Some of them have lost their mother or father, in some cases quite suddenly. And in others they find themselves in a position in which one or both of their parents have become quite frail and or ill.

Intellectually you know that these illnesses are a sign that their journey may not be much longer, there is only so much sunshine left in the day, but emotionally it is harder to get prepared for the twilight.

It is a bit disconcerting, these talks about parents with John and Kim or Mike and Michelle. It was only yesterday that they were telling me about the new guy/girl or the great job they found. Then it became stories about kids and family vacations. And one day the new topic entered, mom/dad are sick, they are dying, what are we going to do. How am I going to explain it to my kids. They were so strong….

In the distance I hear a school bell ringing, marking the end of school. There is a loud rumble accompanying it. It is the sound of a thousand kids running out the door and heading home. A door slams and you can hear the sound of someone saying “Mom, I am home.”

The Challenge of Digital Photography

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The desk my parents got me for my childhood bedroom is located inside my garage. Wrapped in shrink wrap and a blanket it does a fine job of occupying space against the wall. Inside the desk are any number of treasures from youth. In the bottom drawer are a couple of baseball mitts, some folders with various papers and some other odds and ends.

In the middle are drawer are my old Kodak Disc camera, another camera that used 126 film and the first 35 mm I owned. At least I think they are. Truth is that I haven’t looked inside the desk since we moved into this house way back in 2001.

That is ok, because around the same time that we moved in I stopped using film cameras. Digital seemed to make more sense. You didn’t have to worry about taking bad shots. You no longer had to be stuck paying to develop shots that were out of focus or ones in which the subject wasn’t paying attention.

Digital photography was supposed to be the promised land, especially for parents. I suppose that you could say that goes double for new parents. If you ask my middle sister double stands for the number of pictures I am in compared to her. I used to tell her that it happened because mom and dad liked me better and I was much better looking. Not to mention much more humble.

Anyway, when we got our first digital camera I was quite excited. I was excited because like my father I love gadgets. And I was excited because I thought that it was pretty damn cool. For a while I used a film camera alongside the digital. That 35 mm Olympus did the trick and I took some pretty good photos with it. It didn’t suffer from the lag time in shutter speed that the digital one did. That made it easier to catch the constantly in motion children and thanks to one hour photo at Costco I didn’t have to wait long to get them developed.

In time though I just kind of stopped using the Olympus. Digital meant that I didn’t have to pay for film and that I could develop them individually or collectively. Sure, there was the challenge of the lag time, but as technology improved the price of the better cameras came down and some of those issues disappeared.

Still, I have one challenge that I seem to be stymied by. For some reason I am just not good about developing the photos on my memory card with any sort of regularity. I don’t know why, but for whatever reason I just seem to wait until the card is almost full.

It is not a smart way to go. Do you know how many photos fit on a 1 GB card. Not only does it get a bit costly to develop 1,298,986 pictures at once, it takes way too much time. And then there is the album dilemma. When you print out 36 or even 72 pix it is easy to see that they all get filed in an album, but 1,298,986 pictures is an entirely different story altogether.

Last week I asked one of my buddies what he was doing about this. He told me that he had a system. He takes his photos and uploads copies of all of the photos to his iPod and then backs it up on his computer and an external hard drive. He claims that this saves him a lot of time and money on albums that would just get dusty.

But if you ask me there is something nice about being able to hold a photo or flip through an album.

On a related but somewhat separate tack I have to blog about what happened to all of the Super 8 my folks took of us and the status of the home movies of my own children, but I’ll save that for a different time. For now I think I’ll call it a night.

See you all in the A.M.