Day: February 13, 2015

My daughter is getting married this Spring, and she informed me on the phone the other day – she said it carefully and gently – that it was not necessary or desired for me to walk her down the aisle to be married. “You can if you really want to,” she said thoughtfully, “but you know, we’re not doing the Patriarchy thing. I’ll give myself away.”

I admit to being a little shaken at discovering I was part of “The Patriarchy,” that is never a hat I ever much wore or that fit me too well. I am never quite sure how to be a real strong man, although I like the ones I have met up here, I am still trying to fit in.

We were all feminists in my family, I think it is great that my daughter is giving herself away, I am happy to sit and watch and take it all in, I don’t need something to do. Emma also pointed out delicately that there was a question of dress;  few people there would be wearing jeans and almost all the men would be wearing ties. There was some silence there (I did mess with her a bit, and said I had no chinos, but Maria yelled at me to behave), I told her I would be happy to wear chinos, but I burned all of my ties years ago and would not be wearing one. Would it bother me, she asked, if I was the only man not wearing a tie? Not at all, I said, I would be happy and proud.

I hope I’m not being difficult, but she has her statement to make, and I have mine. It’s her wedding, but I have to keep myself intact too. Perhaps, I wonder, I am just being troublesome, as so many people in my life have told me that I sometimes am. I suppose I grew up fighting hard for my identity, and I am loathe to give any of it up.

The wedding will be in New York City, and I sometimes do get the feeling that there is some concern about how I will behave – what I will wear, look like, whether I have all of my teeth or will come in trailing hay and manure, or dance naked on a reception table. I suppose there is some justification for this. When they tried to make me to go my own Bar Mitzvah years ago in Providence, I broke loose and ran several blocks down the street before a posse of huffing and annoyed Jewish men in dark suits and yarmulkes caught up with me and dragged me back to the Temple.

During the rest of the service, I was flanked by strong men: the Rabbi held one arm, my  brother the other, I could barely breathe, let alone move. I’m not sure if I made it through the service or not, I don’t recall. My daughter has no sense of this period of my life, it has never seemed relevant.

My life here in Cambridge seems pretty humble to me, but when I am visiting New York City, I do sometimes get the sense my existence is incomprehensible to some of the people there. This is not true of the New York Carriage Horse drivers, they are strange and idiosyncratic too, I fit right in there.

New Yorkers are wary of the country. Too many animals, not enough theaters. Not enough movies, restaurants, Democrats, people with new clothes and exotic recipes, no gourmet markets or micro-brewing. My daughter is very polite, but she is not enchanted with weak broadband signals,  coyotes howling, deer running in the road,  quiet, darkness, donkeys or long drives for mediocre representations of ethic food.

I assured her that I had no need of being a Patriarch, but the very word evokes the Bible and the Kabbalah. Perhaps I ought to grow a beard and make some dark and meaningful pronouncements, give some orders. Then I could trim the beard as a gesture of my own evolution and sacrifice myself to the future. If I am a Patriarch, I wondered, why does no one (including my daughter) ever tremble at my proclamations and do as I say? Aren’t Patriarch’s forbidding and powerful?  I don’t feel I even deserve the title.

As it happens, I am proud to be helping the movement to dismantle the Patriarchy, I think it does a lot more harm than good.  I say good riddance and good luck. Just look at Washington. The Patriarchy is a dreadful, violent, outdated and angry mess.

My early life left me with a discomfort about ceremony, I have not been to a Bar Mitzvah since mine (or been invited to one). My Jewishness has definitely moved to the background of my life, when I moved to Cambridge, a farmer I had known for several years came down and slapped me on the back and said, “hey, my wife tells me you are a Jew! I never knew that, how about that? Isn’t that something, I had no idea! A Jew!”  He chuckled a bit, then said goodbye. “And not a thing wrong with that!,” he added, just for good measure.

My friend’s discovery made me a bit nervous, but I was relieved that he took the news so well, he was a big and strong man. I suspect he really is part of the Patriarchy. When he told people to do things they listened.

Still, my aversion to ceremony and ritual is my problem, not my daughter’s. I do have a pair of chinos somewhere up in the closet, I just have to ask Maria to cut some of the loose threads that are hanging down.

Happy Valentine’s Day to my love, Maria and to you and to anyone who values the power and meaning of love, a human right, a human need. On this Valentine’s day, I bend my knee in gratitude for love, I did not ever give up on it, and it came to me, it was right across the street. If you do not give up on love, it will find you.

 

“Should my heart not

be humble,

Should my eyes fail to see,

Should my feet sometimes stumble,

On the way, stay with me.

Comes the darkness

and the frost

I get lost,

I grow cold.

I grow cold,

I grow weary,

And I know I have sinned,

And I go, seeking shelter,

And I cry in the wind,

Although I grope and blunder

And I’m weak and I’m wrong.

Though the road buckles under

Where I walk, walk along,

Till I find to my wonder

Every path leads to Thee

All that I can do is pray

Stay with me,

Stay with me.”

Sung by Bob Dylan, lyrics by Leigh, Carolyn, Moss, Jerome.

There’s not a lot one can do for animals like donkeys in such brutally cold weather as is predicted for Sunday and Monday. One thing is shelter, of course – the forecast calls for 50 mile an hour winds – and the other is grain, which gives sheep and donkey strength and energy. The heated water buckets are an important source of warmth as well. Lulu and Fanny – I call them the “Sweet Sisters” – have been together their whole lives, they share everything, peacefully and graciously.

The people who bring us the weather seem deeply attached to history. It is no longer enough to talk about storms, they are “Superstorms,” they must have names and dramatic stories. This weekend’s “Superstorm” is called Neptune, and we are now being told that this storm will not only bring “historic” amounts of snow and wind, but “historic” cold as well. Sunday, say the people who profit from predicting the weather (they make much more money on bad weather than good) will be the coldest day in decades in much of the country, -20 at least.

This storm, they say will bring 50 mile an hour winds to my farm and the Northeast, and wind chills, they say, that can freeze and burn skin in seconds.

Be frightened, be prepared. Be cold.

There is a partly comic, partly tragic convergence of events that is coming together this winter. First off, there is the very real, obvious and dramatic change in climate. I have seen many days and nights up here that were much colder than the temperatures predicted for Sunday. When I moved to the first Bedlam Farm, there were at least a dozen nights that were -30, since the animals and I didn’t look at the weather channel – they were just beginning to sniff the money in weather hysteria then, storms were not named – we didn’t know how cold we were, how much we were threatened, how frightened we ought to be.

It was just cold, we bundled up and went about our business.

Those few years have brought incredible changes in our relationship with the weather and Mother Earth.  And great changes in weather forecasting as well, the weather was once the province of meteorologists and nerds, there was not much money in it. There is now. The climate has changed drastically in the past few years, we have unbroken stretches of storms, snow and bitter cold. They go on for months, not days, and they are very real and severe. Elsewhere in the country, there is drought, forest fires, tornadoes, torrential rains. The weather calls to us to pay attention to the earth and what we are doing to her.

But we do not.  We will travail the globe to rescue puppies on a foreign beach, we won’t cross the street to save our own planet. Mother Earth is trying to get our attention. She is getting angry. We live in a country whose Congress has refused to allot one dollar to even study climate change and the way it will affect us. The head of the Senate Committee on the Environment tells us climate change is a hoax, I am sure that will be comforting news to the people in Boston, trying to find their cars and get to work in mountains of snow.

We have been left at the mercy of our new Corporate Weather Masters,  we can just wait for the Weather Channel to scare the piss out of us, reminding us for days, even weeks, that we are about to suffer great and unprecedented calamity. What kind of a country leaves our perceptions of the earth to a profit-making corporate broadcasting company, raking in millions at the jacked-up advertising rates and enormous traffic that accompanies each named Superstorm and the panicked audience that hypnotically flocks to it?

The weather channels are part news, part entertainment, party hype and marketing and how are we to sort out one from another? Perhaps it is true that the weather is becoming too important to be left to politicians or TV marketers.

We humans are delicate and ridiculous instruments, we are drawn much more to fear and worry than joy and hope.  The media companies count on it. And this kind of weather challenges us to consider all kinds of emotions. The storms are real, they are frightening, but we are likely to survive them and make it to Spring, just a few weeks away. How difficult for people to be bombarded with so many alarms in such graphic and hysterical detail, and still keep their feet and souls on the ground.

I have decided there is only one storm, I have named him “Pickles”, I don’t care for those puffed-up Roman names. Pickles is the new weather, he held a marketing meeting with the people at the Weather Channel and decided to go for a Perfecta this weekend – real storm, real cold, real tough winter, all in one package. It’s going to be a Blockbuster, the anchor people on the weather channel – I notice many of them are wearing fake glasses to look brainy and geeky, like their forefathers  – have shifted into Apocalyptic mode already, they are excited, and for good reason – bonuses this Christmas for sure, it has been a great winter for weather channels. The Dystopians are happy too, they are digging their shelters, storing cans of soup and ammunition for the inevitable day when the angry hordes from below descend on us to steal our food and shelter.

As for me, I have my white flag in the barn, I am not good at battling ravaging hordes,  I don’t wish to live in a bunker with my canned tomatoes, bow-and-arrow,  and sawn-off shotgun. I will go peacefully and quietly.

We are prepared for historic cold, sort of. Got some pet-friendly salt, we have grain for extra energy for the animals, shelter from the storm and the cold. We have a heated blanket we love dearly, a bar to have dinner in and yesterday I got two bags of popcorn laced with Himalayan salt. Two weeks ago, we canceled our TV service from the cable company. We just don’t watch it.

I don’t know what Himalayan salt is, really but it will be great for a bitterly cold night.

This weekend, I will be thinking of Mother Earth and the messages she is desperately trying to send me. I will hear them, pray on them, meditate on them and devote myself to loving the earth rather than fearing it, understanding our world rather than hiding from it. In the Kabbalah, God warns  his people to take care of Mother Earth, or he will turn his back on them and leave them to their fate.

Words are my livelihood, I keep thinking about the word “historic,’ now a staple of cable weather reporting. Something that is “historic” is well known and  important in history. I don’t quite see how winter storms cut it, unless you accept the idea that what is historic is not the storms but what the storms mean. We have all been abandoned by our leaders, left to figure that out for ourselves.

Perhaps I will talk to the God of the Kabbalah as well, this God is good and compassionate and honest. He is very much an environmentalist, he has trusted human beings to care for the planet he has created, he will hold them accountable for it. I will ask  him to give us wretched people – people like me –  another shot, another chance. We had the drive and ingenuity to wound our planet, perhaps we can help her heal. That would be historic, but I don’t imagine that it will be discussed much on the Weather Channel this weekend by those kids wearing fake glasses.