Dear Mom -
Haven't written for awhile because there was nothing going on that I felt would interest you. I've kind of blown it with Carolyn - some mistakes, some misinterpretations, some things that fed into her own deeply held insecurities - and she isn't speaking to me, has told me to leave her be, she doesn't want to see me or hear from me - so I'm puzzling over how to convince her that I do love her, that I do want to do better, without disrespecting her wishes. I know you don't care about any of this, but you do care about me, so... I'll move on though. Oh, and I am evidently in trouble with Aunt Mitzi for not calling her on Yom Kippur Eve. I don't call anyone on Yom Kippur Eve! If I happen to be talking to someone that day I do wish them a comfortable and spiritually satisfying observance, but... we all know I'm one of the world's worst Jews. Why would that change?
Just read that Fyvush Finkel is doing a one man show in NYC. I thought of you immediately, because you did like him, and not just for his name! But the big entertainment news of interest to you is... Neil Diamond is on the nominations list for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! Frankly, I don't know why he wasn't selected ages ago, and no, I'm not sucking up (How do you suck up to the dead, anyway?)
Work is going very well. A couple of highlights: In Tudor/Stuart England one student asked me if Catherine Howard was "really a sleazebucket"? I told her that while CH was uneducated, unsophisticated and about as ready to be Queen Consort as my dog, not to mention having been barely raised, rather, left to run wild, she seemed to be absent any malice or calculation and therefore was more 'ninny' than 'sleazebucket'. And in Holocaust Studies I have a wonderful mix of students from all sorts of backgrounds - Fundamentalist Christian to Reform Jew to Agnostic and Exploring - who are remarkably open and eager.
So, with a few glitches in the road, things are going okay. I do wish that some of the people who love me also had respect for me - you would think that the two would be intertwined but it isn't always so.
Oh well. As Kurt Vonnegut Jr used to say, "So it goes..."
Love,
b
PS, The guy who invented the Segway died yesterday - evidently he rode it off a cliff or something. Weird but true.
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