Frank is Emptiness

January 2nd, 2025

A few days ago, I attended the last morning Shabbat service (Shacharit) to be held at my synagogue. The shul will no longer offer religious services, which means that for all practical purposes the synagogue is inactive. The Jewish community at that site may reconstitute itself in some fashion, but the synagogue itself is done. It is part of the past.

The number of people in attendance at the shul yesterday was small. This was no surprise. The number of participants in the synagogue’s religious services has been dwindling for quite some time. This trend has been driven primarily by demographics. There have been very few young people coming to the shul. Most of the population is old, in many cases too old. Being that it is an Orthodox congregation, most members do not drive on the sabbath. People walk to the services. At some point, a person cannot make that walk anymore, and therefore they can’t participate at the synagogue. A number of long-time congregants have passed away in recent years. I can think of at least three funerals that I have attended during the last couple years. If the members of a group are dying, then so is the organization. It’s that simple.

The gabbai at the synagogue (the group leader) kept counting heads to see if there would be enough for a minyan. A minyan, a group of ten Jewish males, is required for there to be a reading of the Torah. The Torah reading is the focal point of the service. It’s a big deal. It’s the big deal. The rest of the service is beautiful but somehow lacking without the Torah reading.

Alas, we were short one Jewish adult male. Nine guys just don’t make the cut. As the gabbai remarked, “Yes, we have ten men here, but one of them is Catholic (me), and we have our rules.” The gabbai gave a brief talk to the group. It just happened to be about minyans and where the rule for them came from. He had done some research on Wikipedia to help him plumb the depths of the Talmud. The origins of the “rule of ten” are buried deep in the Torah and have been debated by the rabbis for centuries. The Talmud makes note of the decisions that came from these discussions, and it also records the dissenting opinions. Some of the dissents assert that to read the Torah, you need ten Jews, but not necessarily ten male Jews. However, tradition goes along with the majority viewpoint, so there has to be ten men.

As a Catholic, the whole affair reminds me of the Church liturgies. Catholics don’t worry about minyans, but we are very concerned with having a priest. Without a priest, a Mass cannot be celebrated, and the congregation cannot share the Eucharist. The Eucharist, like the Torah reading, is the focal point for the service. Everything in the Mass revolves around the sharing of communion. Oddly enough, the priest has to be a man (echoes of the minyan rule), and centuries of tradition based on selective interpretation of Scripture have enforced that regulation.

Are the rules concerning the minyan and the rules concerning priests and the Mass fair? Are they logical? Probably not. However, life in general is neither fair nor logical, so I guess these rules are normal in the human experience. In any case, both Jews and Catholics are burdened with traditions that seem to be set in stone, and we just deal with them.

The thing with a minyan is that, if a synagogue cannot scrounge together ten men once a week, it is a death knell for that community. Likewise, a Catholic parish without a priest might as well close up shop. Jews will go somewhere that has a Torah reading and Catholics will find a church where they can go to Mass. That’s the reality of it.

So, where will we all go? I don’t know. There are other Jewish groups within walking distance of the synagogue: WITS (Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study, Chabad, and Hillel. The remnants of our community will likely disperse to those locations. They will ease into another Jewish congregation.

For myself, the future is less clear. I have spent fifteen years with this particular Jewish community, and it took years for me to be fully accepted. Do I really want to start all over with a new congregation? Jewish communities, especially in the current political environment, are very leery of new people (in particular non-Jews) wandering into their midst. I can try to find a new home, but it will be hard to sell myself.

I grieve for this synagogue. Honestly, I can’t say why I feel this way, but it has been my home. It is one of the few places where I have truly felt like I belonged.

Even if I don’t count for a minyan.

December 29th, 2024

Have you ever noticed that no one of the male gender can talk about monster trucks in a normal tone of voice? Guys automatically speak in a deep baritone and start yelling about “MONSTER TRUCKS!”. It’s weird. It reminds me a lot like pro wrestling. Monster trucks bring out an inner macho and a sudden burst of testosterone.

Asher is a monster truck fanatic. Of course, he’s four years old, so that sort of thing is age appropriate. He is in love with huge trucks with loud, powerful engines, especially when these vehicles are doing stunts that are objectively crazy. Asher will watch endless numbers of YouTube videos of monster truck shows. He has acquired probably two dozen toy monster trucks. They are all different models, and he knows all of their names. He is appalled and amazed that I don’t know them too. When I display my ignorance, he expresses disbelief,

“How can you not know that this is El Toro Loco?”

I obviously disappoint him. Not so his uncle. Asher’s uncle is planning to take Asher and another boy to a monster truck show in downtown Milwaukee. Asher is counting the days until the event. Asher’s uncle loves him.

A couple days ago, Asher was playing with his Christmas loot, most of which had to do with monster trucks. His uncle bought him a launch pad for his toy trucks. With enough oomph Asher can toss one of those vehicles halfway across the living room. I am waiting for him to hit a window.

While Asher was racing and launching his trucks, I was trying to play some music. I have a phonograph turntable. It’s old. I bought it in Germany forty years ago, but it still works. I have been reluctant to play any records while Asher is around. The turntable just begs to have a little boy fool around with it. I explained to Asher that I was going to spin some records, but he needed to keep away from the phonograph. His eyes widened and promised to keep his distance.

Yeah, whatever.

I dug out a dusty copy of “Tommy” from The Who. I found the track with “Pinball Wizard”, set the disc in motion, and turned up the volume. Asher was suitably impressed. He asked,

“How does it work?”

“The needle on the arm picks up the vibrations from the grooves in the record.”

I might as well have said, “It’s all magic.”

I walked away to grab a soda. When my back was turned, I heard the sound of the music slowing perceptibly. Without turning around, I yelled,

“Asher, leave it alone!”

He replied, “I’m not doing anything.”

I walked over to the turntable and readjusted the speed of rotation.

“Leave it alone. If you break something, I don’t know if I can get it fixed.”

He looked at me and said, “I didn’t do anything, and I won’t do it again.”

Good enough.

While the boy sped “Boneshaker” across the kitchen floor, I found an album from Pat Benatar and played “Heartbreaker” at a high volume. Asher found his boogie and danced to the song. He told me,

“That’s a monster truck song!”

It figures.

Then I located the double album from Derek and the Dominos. I found the track for “Layla”. I cranked that up. Asher perked up when he heard Eric Clapton and Duane Allman tear through dueling guitar solos. Asher said to me,

“This is a monster truck song too!”

Cool. I won’t be going to the show with Asher, but it’s comforting to know he will be listening to the classics.

December 23rd, 2024

It happened almost twenty years ago. It was on a day like today: cold outside and just prior to Christmas. I haven’t thought about the incident for quite a while, but somehow, it’s back in my mind.

Back then, my wife, Karin, was a teacher’s assistant at the Tamarack Waldorf School on the east side of Milwaukee. Karin helped teach handwork to the students. Waldorf schools put an emphasis on having the children learn to how to make things with their hands. It is an essential part of the school curriculum. Karin taught kids from each class how knit, crochet, and sew. She has always been creative with fiber arts, and she loves to show other people how to do what she can do.

When I had days off from my job, I would visit Karin at the school. We would go out for lunch, and then I would wander around the downtown area while she taught her class. When she was finished at the end of the day, we would go home together. I generally had a couple hours to just explore the city or walk down to the lakefront. I enjoyed doing that.

One of the places I liked to visit was the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, which is only maybe half a mile from the Waldorf School. The Catholic cathedral is a massive building with two sets of heavy doors at the entrance. Once inside of the church, the noises of the city traffic are almost completely blocked out, and the interior of the church is dark and silent. It’s an excellent place to think or meditate or just sit.

I liked to go there to meditate for a while. I had started going to a Zen group, and I wanted to spend more time sitting quietly. Some environments are conducive to meditation. The cathedral had a stillness that made meditation relatively easy. There were minimal distractions. During the week, the church was nearly empty, although on very cold days the pews in the back were occupied by homeless people looking for shelter. They sat bundled up in their clothes, often dozing off. The cathedral was one of the few places downtown where these folks could sit and rest. It was then, and probably still is, a refuge for poor and forgotten people.

On this particular day, I walked into the cathedral and found a seat in a row near the altar. I picked a place where I would be alone. I settled down and closed my eyes. I started to concentrate on my breathing. Then I heard noises. They got closer and closer to me. Then the sounds and the person making the sounds were right next to me.

I opened my eyes and looked to my right. Sitting next to me was a middle-aged Black lady. She had numerous plastic bags with her. She appeared to be a nomadic person who was carrying all of her belongings with her. The woman was missing teeth, and I could hardly understand her when she spoke. She talked to me, and I got the impression that she wanted something. I didn’t know what that something was.

During my visits to the cathedral, I was sometimes hit up for money. It didn’t happen often, but occasionally a person would ask me for help. I decided that this woman wanted some cash. I reached for my wallet and dug through it. I only had two singles on me. That seemed rather pathetic. I pulled out the two bills and handed it to the lady. She nodded and thanked me.

I closed my eyes again and tried to relax. It was pointless. The woman was scrounging around in one of her plastic bags. I heard her muttering and digging deep in the sack. I found it annoying, but I just tried to ignore her.

Then she tapped me on the arm. I looked at her and she handed me an envelope.

She said, “This is for you.”

Then she gathered her possessions and shuffled off. I sat in the pew and stared at the envelope. I opened it. Inside the envelope was a used Christmas card. I opened the card.

Inside of the card were my two dollars.

December 17th, 2024

A week ago, our friend, Rob, hosted a Christmas party at his home. We’ve known him for at least twenty years, and he has a get together every holiday season. My wife and I are comfortable with Rob. We know each other’s idiosyncrasies. However, we don’t know hardly any of his other party guests. Since we became Asher’s legal guardians and fulltime caregivers, Karin and I don’t get out much, and when we do, Asher is with us. It’s hard to socialize while watching over a four-year-old with unlimited energy. When we actually go to some kind of gathering, it usually feels awkward. It did last night.

I have a number of interests, but very few of them qualify as festive. So, it’s difficult for me to find appropriate topics of conversation for a Christmas party. My mind tends to settle into well-worn grooves, and even when I start by discussing relatively innocuous subjects, I wind up speaking about heavier things, like veteran’s issues. That doesn’t always play well.

The party guests made up a diverse group with the common denominator being that every one of them had some kind of connection with Germany. Rob has a deep interest in German history and culture, and the other people in his home also had that to some degree. My wife is from Germany, and I lived there for three years courtesy of the U.S. Army. The intensity of our feelings toward Deutschland have diminished over the years. We aren’t passionate about it. The German heritage is mostly background noise in lives at this point.

For a while, I sat at a table with a couple I did not know. Even now, after talking with them, I still don’t know them. They were the kind of people who are reserved and willing to absorb information from others, but don’t reveal much about themselves. By default, I talked about myself, perhaps too much. They asked me what I do, besides caring for Asher. I told them that I write for a veteran’s publication (this one), and that I tell stories (like I am doing now).

I talked a lot about our oldest son, Hans, who was deployed to Iraq with his Army unit back in 2011. I mentioned how hard it has been, even after all these years, for him to assimilate into the general population. I made the comment that Hans despises it when some random person shakes his hand and thanks him for his service. His attitude is basically, “Fuck you. You don’t know what I did, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He doesn’t mind if the greeting comes from somebody with a clue, but most people don’t have one when it comes to veterans.

The female member of the couple told me that Americans are treating veterans better now than they did during Vietnam. I disagreed. The public might not be calling the vets baby killers, but they still don’t give a damn about them. Helping a vet requires more than slapping a bumper sticker on your car that says, “Support the troops!” Giving a veteran a job would be more meaningful.

The male partner lost it at this point. He said,

“You’re telling us that everything we are doing is wrong. What if we can’t give them a job? What are we supposed to do? I’ve worked with these guys. They are angry at everybody. I don’t need that.”

Then he raised his voice and said, “It’s your trauma! You have to handle it! It’s not my problem!”

I couldn’t tell if he was directing his words at me, or at another angry bastard who exists in his memory.

Visibly upset, he asked me, “So, is there an answer?”

I was silent for a while. I replied quietly, “No. There isn’t an answer.”

Asher demanded my attention at that point. I went over to him. He was getting tired and wanted to go back home. My head swirled with thoughts, none of which I could verbalize at the time.

I remembered Dave, a guy I worked with for a long time. He was a Vietnam vet. He’d been in combat. He was a big man, often loud and obnoxious. He was easily offended. I had a short fuse. He and I butt heads frequently. It was like that for over twenty years. Then Hans got deployed to Iraq.

Overnight, our relationship changed. Every morning, when he came into work, Dave would yell to me,

“Frank, how is your boy doing?!”

We would talk about Hans. I would tell Dave what I knew. Dave would admonish me to be proud of Hans. I was proud of him. I still am.

Dave and I got along okay. We never became close friends, but we had mutual respect. Suddenly, we understood each other.

I remembered how, before Covid, I used to go to the local VA hospital once a week to hang out with the patients in the psych ward. I would listen to their stories. They would listen to mine. We understood each other and felt like comrades.

The guy at the party asked me if there was an answer. After thinking about it, I believe there is, but it’s not an easy answer. We live in a society where a person can look at a veteran and simultaneously consider that individual to be both a hero and a damn nuisance. It’s extremely difficult for a member of the general population to see a vet simply as another human being with all the struggles that everyone else has. The vet has to be able to trust a non-veteran enough to tell his or her story. That’s hard. The civilian has to be willing to put up the veteran’s anger and pain long enough to listen to the soldier. That’s hard too.

I can’t think of another way.

Just before we left the party, I went over to the guy whom I had upset. I told him, “I apologize for offending you.”

He made no response.

December 15th, 2024

Last night was rough. Our four-year-old grandson, Asher, wasn’t feeling well after drinking some warm oat milk. He was tired and his tummy hurt. I laid down next to him in bed and held him. He was close to falling asleep. Then he sat up and burped, but it was much more than just a burp.

Asher threw up on everything: on the bed, on the carpet, on himself, and on me. Within seconds the room was covered in vomit, and Asher was screaming his lungs out. There was a pungent odor of stomach acid and General Tso chicken. It was like a scene from “The Exorcist”.

My wife, Karin, quickly rushed in to help with the cleanup. She pulled our freaked-out preschooler into the bathroom and peeled his slimy clothing off his body. The boy sobbed loudly as she did that. I had the water running in the tub already. I stripped all the bed linen off and dumped it into the washer, along with Asher’s clothes. I had been wearing a pair of ratty jeans. I took my wallet and keys out of the pockets and just threw pants in the trash. I scrubbed the carpet next to bed and tried remove all the debris. After Karin got Asher into clean pajamas, she put on a new bed liner and fitted sheet. Asher calmed down.

Asher and I laid down again. He said that he felt okay. Then suddenly he didn’t feel okay. He vomited in the bed again. Karin and I repeated the cleaning cycle. This time we covered the bed with bath towels before we put Asher down to sleep. That was a good move because the boy still had a little more in him. The third puke fest was easily managed. I just had to replace one of the towels.

The third time was a charm. Asher curled up in my arms. As Asher relaxed, I thought about the evening’s chaos. Actually, what I thought about was how Karin and I would have managed all this if we were living in Gaza or Ukraine or Sudan. If Asher had become violently sick in place where there was no clean water available, how would we have washed him up? What if he had no clothes other than the ones he soiled? What if he needed a doctor? What if there was no place for him to rest, and no time for me to comfort him? I found that caring for a sick little boy was utterly exhausting. Could I have helped him if I was already worn out?

The fact is that Karin and I have all the resources we need to be Asher’s fulltime caregivers. Even when things are difficult, we can manage. Other people, probably millions of other people, cannot. I tried to imagine how it would feel to watch Asher suffer and have no way to ease that suffering. It hurt to even think about that.

Sometimes, like last night, caring for Asher feels overwhelming. I ask myself what I can do for some other caregiver somewhere else who has it worse. I don’t know. Pray for them? Give money to a charity? Probably the best thing I do is to love Asher as much as I can. My primary duty is to that child. God needs me to raise him. That might be all I can really do.

Before Asher finally dozed off last night, he said to me,

“Grandpa, I hear the rain.”

“Yeah, the drops are hitting the skylight. It’s good we are in here where it’s dry.”

Asher replied, “Yeah”.

Then he held me close and fell asleep.

December 5th, 2024

The following letter was written by me and published by the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, on December 1st, 2024.

Dear Editor: Donald Trump plans to start mass deportations of illegal immigrants as soon as humanly possible.

I considered writing about the humanitarian issues associated with this project, but then nobody would read this letter. Instead, I will concentrate on the economic problems that come with expelling an estimated 11 million people from the United States. People seldom care about morality, but they always care about their money.

I worked as a volunteer at Voces de la Frontera in Milwaukee for several years helping immigrants, some here legally, some not. The people I met were consistently hardworking. There are those who say that immigrants take away jobs from U.S. citizens. This assertion is manifestly false.

Immigrants take the jobs that Americans don’t want. Deporting undocumented immigrants from the U.S. will disrupt the operations of industries that depend on them (e.g., hospitality, agriculture, construction). Employers, if they can even find native-born Americans to do the jobs, will have to pay them higher wages to do the same work.

When the mass deportations begin, expect supply chain problems and higher prices in the stores. These expulsions are guaranteed to increase inflation. If you don’t care about human suffering, then think about your pocketbook.

December 3rd, 2024

I sat next to her at the dealership. I had been in almost the same position exactly one year prior, when I bought the young woman a Honda Accord. Unfortunately, she no longer owned the Accord. Two weeks ago, she had totaled the car in an accident. I don’t know all the details of the accident, and they don’t really matter that much. She wasn’t cited or arrested. However, she instantly became carless and in need of transportation. For purely selfish reasons, I agreed to go to the car dealership and help her to buy another ride. I was not willing to be her chauffeur, even for a short period of time. I told her that I had no intention of paying for the whole purchase. She had money from her insurance company, but it would not quite pay for a car, even a beater. I offered to cover what her claim settlement would not pay.

I despise car dealerships, passionately. I could try to describe this particular one, but they are all pretty much the same. The sales team is always composed of people working on commission, and they are either utterly bored or feverishly trying to convince a customer to buy a vehicle. I don’t envy those individuals. I could never do that kind of work. I would rather clean bathrooms. At least then I would still have my self-respect.

She had looked up a car online that she wanted. It was a 2012 Ford Focus. As expected, it was no longer there by the time we showed up. The sales rep looked on his computer for other cars in her price range, which was a rather low range.

He told her, “I have a 2009 Buick Lucerne for around $5K. It has 160,000 miles on it. There was only one owner, so it looks pretty clean.”

I looked at her. “You want to see it?”

She nodded to me with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

I glanced around the showroom. I noticed something odd.

I asked the sales rep, “”You have a gong here?’

He looked back over his shoulder at the large brass gong hanging in the room, with a mallet sitting next to it. “Yeah, we do.”

“So, do you hit the gong when you make a sale?”

He smiled and said, “The customer bangs the gong.”

I suspected we were not going to bang the gong.

The dealer went out to the lot to look for the car. That took quite a while. I have never understood how car dealerships can lose track of their vehicles. I worked for almost three decades at a trucking company and we always knew where every piece of equipment was. We made yard checks several times a day to keep track of the trucks and trailers. Years ago, I worked very briefly at a car dealership, and nobody there knew where their vehicles were. I remember walking around the lot for over an hour only to learn that the car I needed to find was offsite at a vendor for detailing. This place was very similar to my former employer’s.

At last, the salesperson pulled up in a black Buick. I let the young woman make the test drive on her own. She has frequently commented that I don’t know much about cars, so there was no reason for me to ride along. She came back looking unimpressed.

I asked her, “How was it?”

She replied, “The steering seemed…kind of loose.”

The salesman smiled and said, “It’s a Buick. It’s a soft, smooth ride. It’s like driving a sofa.”

Yeah, it is. As the young woman pointed out to me, it’s an old man’s car. It’s the kind of sedan that a guy would drive slowly to his colonoscopy appointment. Not really the type of vehicle for a woman who wants quick response and sharp handling.

I asked the salesperson about a warranty. There was none. The State of Wisconsin required the dealer to complete a list of safety checks, but that was it. As my dad used to say, the Buick had a “black top” warranty. Once the customer drives off the dealership’s black top and into the street, the warranty is null and void.

We closed the deal. The guy came back from his boss with the numbers. It came up to $6500. I stared at the paperwork, and I considered trying to bring the price down a bit. Then I thought,

“What for? Maybe I can haggle and get the price down a couple hundred bucks, but then this guy would probably have to look me straight in the eye and lie to me. I would have to listen to that. There’s not enough money to make that kind of abuse worthwhile.”

I wrote a check. Some guy from finance gathered us up and sat us down in his office. Papers were signed. Money changed hands. The young woman had a car, and I had smaller sum in my bank account.

The salesperson thanked us profusely. We shook hands. The young woman drove off in her car. I left in mine.

The gong was silent.

December 1st, 2024

Our grandson, Asher, will be four years old tomorrow. At times, he seems much older than that. He often acts like the preschooler that he is, but sometimes he surprises me. Years ago, when our youngest son, Stefan, was as old as Asher, the pastoral associate at our church described him as having “an old soul”. Stefan had a maturity and confidence (sometimes cockiness) that was unusual for a boy his age. Asher is like his uncle in that respect. They both are wise beyond their years.

Asher can be a handful. He needs things to be a certain a way, and he freaks out when they aren’t. It might be how I set the table for a meal. It might be how I slice him some cheese. It might be how I move his toys out of my way. Asher has had four years of chaos and instability in his life. I think that he gets upset about minor changes because he needs some kind of control over his environment in order to feel safe. Still, it can be infuriating to me when nothing I do for him seems to be right. I rapidly run out of patience with the boy. When I do so, he has a meltdown, and only calms down after he tells me with tears in his eyes,

“Grandpa, pick me up!”

I do, and he slowly relaxes in my arms. I start to relax too. I’m old, and it takes my body quite a while to let go of negative energy. The last time I held him after we had a confrontation, he looked at me and asked,

“Grandpa, are you okay?”

I thought for a while, shook my head, and replied, “I don’t know.”

Then he asked, “Are okay a little bit?”

I sighed. “Yeah, I’m okay a little bit.”

I held him some more. He rested his head on my right shoulder. Then he said,

“Grandpa, I like you.”

“I like you too.”

Asher told me, “I like you as much as I love you.”

That stumped me. I never had a little boy say that to me. I’m not sure I ever had anyone say that to me. I didn’t say anything. I just held him a bit tighter.

Asher is wise for a four-year-old.

November 29th, 2024

A few weeks ago, my wife, our grandson, and I were visiting family in Texas. We spent the vast majority of our time hanging around with our three Texan grandkids and their mom. While little Asher played with his cousins and Karin knit, I talked with our daughter-in-law, Gabby. She was always busy with washing clothes and chasing after her toddlers. At some point in the day, she started cooking supper. One day she decided to make corn bread and pinto beans. She told me that it was one of her favorite meals from her childhood.

That made me think. Why did she eat corn bread and beans as a child? The short answer to that question was that corn bread and pinto beans were cheap, and her parents had an extremely tight budget. Gabby also said that they ate a lot of Hamburger Helper. I assume that they could afford hamburger that required help. She mentioned that she and her siblings ate a lot of ramen noodles, cereal, and grilled cheese sandwiches.

I asked Gabby if she ate fried bologna when she was young. Her answer was “yes” to that. I also ate fried bologna as a child. Her answer made me remember other foods that I ate when I was kid. Most of them I don’t eat any more, but I still recall what they were. I have a good idea why my family ate what they ate. It wasn’t necessarily because they liked the food.

I am convinced that in many instances a person’s choice of diet is dictated by money, or lack of it. It was like that in my family of origin, and it was like that in my parents’ families. They had to make the weekly paycheck stretch, and they looked for bargains. What showed up on the kitchen table was often the result of making difficult economic choices.

For instance, corn bread is cheap to make. My mom didn’t make cornbread, but she made polenta, which is a boiled cornmeal dish that she served in the form of a loaf. Polenta is an Italian food, but we weren’t Italian. Our people were originally from Slovenia, which is a tiny Slavic country right next to Italy. So, in our house we ate foods that were from Slovenia, or from the neighboring ethnic groups (Germans, Hungarians, Italians and people from the Balkans). With rare exceptions, these dishes were meals that peasants would eat.

I had six younger brothers, so whatever my parents cooked needed to plentiful. Stews and soups fit that criterion. We had goulash. We always had pea soup right after Easter. In the spring, my mom would put in the pot whatever scraps were left over from the Easter ham, along with the bone, and let the soup simmer until every particle of protein was dissolved in the soup. We ate sarma, which consists of ground meat of some sort mixed with rice and wrapped in sour cabbage leaves. We ate sausages and potatoes and sauerkraut. Regardless of what was served, there were rarely if ever any leftovers.

My dad’s family took the strict budget diets to the next level. They used to eat “paprika speck”. “Speck” is the German word for bacon. Paprika speck was lard, plain and simple. It had microscopic pieces of bacon embedded in the fat. They ate it like butter. They spread it on bread and sprinkled a spice, like paprika or pepper, on it. That was lunch for them. Lard was also used for any kind of frying. There were no cooking sprays. My mom had three big containers in her kitchen. One was for flour, one for sugar, one for coffee, and one for lard.

They also ate cheap cuts of meat: hearts, livers, kidneys. They had a garden and ate whatever was in season. In early summer, they had big lettuce salads with oil and vinegar for a dressing. Later in the season, they ate whole tomatoes like they were apples. My grandparents and my mom did a lot of canning. They bought fruits and vegetables when they were plentiful and cheap, and then they preserved them for the winter. My dad made sauerkraut in the basement. It smelled like an animal had crawled into the house and died in a corner.

My family had a root cellar to store potatoes, onion, and apples. My dad hung chains of sausages from the ceiling in the cellar so that they would dry out. Our family was not the only one to do that. I had a friend whose family was from Sicily. His folks would hang up pepperoni and salami to dry and harden. My friend joked that you could tell if a salami was hard enough by testing it. If you could drive a nail into a wooden board with it, it was ready. When sausages were rock hard, a person could slice them paper thin and then put them on a piece of bread. That’s how you made them last.

Would I eat these foods now? Some I would. Like pinto beans and corn bread are for Gabby, there are some childhood foods that I remember fondly. I like to eat fresh tomatoes. I like pea soup with ham in it. Food links a person to their history. Maybe that is the important thing.

November 27th, 2024

Our three-year-old grandson, Asher, is sitting at the kitchen table, watching YouTube videos about monster trucks and eating a slice of raisin bread. He seems to be in a good mood. He’s looking healthy today. Two days ago, he wasn’t.

Two days ago, we took the little boy to his pediatrician. Asher was hurting. He had been having bouts of diarrhea and abdominal pain for ten days, and nothing seemed to make him better. Over the course of the ten days, my wife and I had taken to boy to the ER three times. The first time we went there because we had no idea what was causing the ailment. The doctor told us during that visit that he probably had a wicked stomach virus, and it would have to run its course. Three days later, we were at the ER again because Asher had blood in his diaper. The doctor at that time told us that his repetitive explosions of poop had caused an abrasion on his rectum, and that it would heal quickly once the diarrhea stopped. They told us to buy some Ibuprofen for the pain, and we did that. Two days later, we were at the ER one more time. This time we were at our wits end. I had been up all night with Asher because he had an endless series of tiny bowel movements. I changed his diaper probably twenty times. The third ER physician also assumed that Asher had a virus and told us to get a medicine to slow the flow of diarrhea down. We did that too.

Nothing helped. Asher was in pain every time he excreted. I was exhausted from getting up at night with him repeatedly. The whole experience was getting scary. As Asher’s fulltime caregiver, I was worried. Worry was gradually turning to panic as he cried every time he had to go.

Two days after the last ER visit, we saw his doctor. Asher was in a bad way. He cried and screamed during the entire time. His doctor is on the staff of the local children’s hospital, so he wasn’t bothered by that. He examined Asher and asked us about his symptoms. Then he immediately ordered an x-ray of the boy’s abdomen. He told us,

“I think I know what this is, but I have to be sure.”

Asher had his x-ray made, and the doctor showed it to us. He asked us,

“Do you see the dark areas?”

“Yes.” (There were many dark areas.)

“Those are places where the bowels are full of stool. He has an obstacle made of hard stool in his rectum that is blocking everything but the liquid feces. It seems like he has diarrhea, but he doesn’t really. Actually, he has constipation. There is name for this, encopresis.”

The doctor prescribed an industrial strength laxative for Asher. It was like what I took when I had my colonoscopy. He also prescribed Ex lax to get things moving. We started giving Asher the meds that afternoon. That night, after he went to bed, the dam broke. I spent almost all of the night changing Asher’s diapers. It was literally a shitshow. We will keep giving the meds for the next several days to ensure that he gets his bowels cleaned out. He seems emptier already.

He’s been sleeping quite a bit since he started on this protocol. It literally takes a lot out of him. He crawled into bed with me to take a nap this morning and I held him close. He won’t sleep unless he rests his head on the bicep of my left arm. He got comfortable and slowly closed his eyes. His left hand reached for my right. He didn’t want to hold my hand. He just wanted to touch it. Then he fell asleep.

We were both at peace.