High Holidays 5786

 I always dread the holidays. I  don't fast on Yom Kippur, and the whole month upsets my careful algorithm of schedules and meals. My  therapist suggests  I'm OCD. This year is different, however.

My husband, Joe Hample, known as Rabbi Joe, is retiring next summer, so this is his last High Holidays at Tree of Life in Morgantown. We've been batting around what we'll do next, stay here or leave? Where would we go? We are bicoastal people somewhere in the middle of the country (but still in the Eastern Time Zone). Joe wants somewhere warm, maybe Florida. We have friends all over California, especially in Los Angeles and Long Beach and San Francisco. My closest first cousin and his children and grandchildren live in the East Bay. And many of our friends have retired to Palm Springs, a gay Mecca for old folks.

What actually happened this year was different from the past. At the Rosh Hashana evening service, the most popular one, because it's relatively short and people don't have to miss work or school, I looked around the room. I knew just about everyone there and I liked and respected them. We have very few friends in Morgantown who are not also congregants. In our thirteen years here, we've been with these people while their children grew up, through illnesses, deaths, marriages and divorces. As much as I miss my California friends, this has become my community.

Of course, it will be different next year. The congregation has begun the process of finding a new rabbi, and even if we are here, our position will be different. It will be awkward for us if we are members, and awkward for the new rabbi if we hang around, like ghosts from the past. 

I was talking to a couple in the congregation who are almost the only Jews in the county they live in, about sixty miles south of Morgantown. Their son was twelve when Joe became the rabbi; he was one of Joe's early bar mitzvah students. He's twenty-five now, has his own construction company. I was telling them what I was feeling, and I had to stop or I would have cried.

We bought a house ten years ago. It's mostly paid for, but we have so much stuff, it could take us a year to go through it. Our house is overflowing with books, records, CDs and tapes. There are boxes I never unpacked from when we moved in.We are friendly with our neighbors and we are on a quiet street. As we age, I worry that our house has steps, with our bedroom, and the second bedroom (my office) upstairs. Joe's office is in the basement. 

I'll be seventy-six this month,  in a family where men don't live past eighty. They are checking for four kinds of cancer: pancreatic (I passed that test last week), and thyroid cancer, which I had two years ago when they took out my thyroid. They'll check that Monday, October 6. They will do an MRI on  my prostate in December and a colonoscopy in January, since I failed a Colguard test. I have complaints about WVU Medicine, but at least they have people to take care of these things, even if one haas to wait weeks or months, and they take my lousy insurance, which pays them about twenty per  cent of what they ask. I know some places won't take that. I guess I worry that we'll go to a lot of trouble to move, and then I'll die. 

I do studies of cities and counties. I've visited in (mostly) alphabetical order over 150 counties in nine states since we moved here, within about three hundred miles of Morgantown. I'm going through them, including the rest of the alphabet that I haven't gotten to yet, and looking for where we might live. My idea is that we could come back to Morgantown for a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a funeral, if someone  asked. The best choices are between Philadelphia and Richmond along I-95.

The rub to this is the lawlessness of the present national administration. Will we be safe in a Democratic city? I don't want to be anywhere else. The one gay couple we're close to who aren't Jewish are looking at France as a place to go. In other times, I would have thought of Israel, but not now. Most countries don't want old people to move there unless they have a ton of money. We don't. 

The services were lovely-all of them. We have a guest soloist and others (including me)  sang some parts of the services. His sermons were more political than usual ("Are they going to fire me now?" he asked), but were well received. One woman in the congregation, who has a husband, said she was jealous of me, and wished that she were married to Joe. The congregants pitched in on everything from security to a break-the-fast-dinner after Yom Kippur.

All of it was beautiful. But we will all be in a different place, even if Joe and I are still in Morgantown next year. I wish everyone who reads this a healthy, prosperous 5786 Shana Tova!

Brian Wilson 1942-2025

 I've hardly been posting on here, but the death of Brian Wilson hit me harder than I expected. I was a Beach Boys fan before The Beatles hit America, and I can still listen to their old music and think "This is cool." Right now, I'm listening to "Surfer Girl" from a cassette by Time-Life called "The Beach Boys 1962-1967" from a set called "The Rock 'n Roll Era." I bought a complete set of these with a rack from a thrift shop. When I see someone's collection, whether the person gave it up or the survivors sold it, I feel like I have to keep it together. In addition to "Surfer Girl,"Be True To Your School" and "In My Room" were favorites of mine from the early days.

In the summer of 1965, I traveled to California by car with my friend Joel, his parents, and his cousin from Brooklyn. We had only t-shirts and shorts to wear, so we were surprised by snow on the ground in Wyoming, froze in San Francisco, and, 15 year olds that we were, we were stopped by the police in Los Angeles for being out at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles after curfew. We wondered why nothing was happening at this famous intersection. We made it Ensenada in Baja, hung out at the beach, and came home via a southerly route. We just missed the Watts riots. "California Girls" had just come out, and we thought it was about the coolest song we had ever heard. When we got home to Baltimore, we found out that our new favorite song had not yet been released on the East Coast.

I continued to listen to The Beach Boys, although my main love at sixteen was Motown music. I bought "Pet Sounds" when it came out. I can admit now that it was too deep for me. Like everyone, I was moved by "God Only Knows," but the song that hit me hardest was "I Guess I Just Wasn't Made For These Times." Even at sixteen, I was beginning to think that might be true, and that song continues to hold meaning for me. 

I continued to collect Beach Boys albums, particularly liking "Surf's Up" and "Holland." At the time I didn't know what was going on Brian's life, only that they were  no longer in the "my girl, my school, my car, my surfboard" era. 

Fast forward to 1985. I was living in Los Angeles, ironically, since my first trip there I hated the city. I was working for Social Security as a first-line supervisor, and although I was good at the job, I could see I wasn't going to stay there. I took a class at UCLA Extension called "The Career Exploration Seminar." I thought I might be an actor, starting at thirty-five. There was a gorgeous woman in the class, an actress who thought she was too old to get parts. She encouraged me to try acting. The last night of class, we all went out to eat later. She lived with her boyfriend at an address on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He was a therapist, handsome enough, probably fifty at the time, with a diamond stud earring. I said "You must be doing well to live on PCH in Malibu." He smiled at me and said "I actually only have one client right now."

That mystery lasted until I bought a Brian Wilson solo album, where the woman in class was listed as cowriter on some of the songs, and on the liner notes, he thanked his therapist, Eugene Landy, the man I met at that restaurant.

I tried to complete my collection of Beach Boys albums. "Beach Boys Today!" became a favorite, especially the song "Kiss Me Baby," a perfect expression of teen angst, and a gorgeous piece of music.

I moved to Morgantown, West Virginia with my husband (we met in 2005 and legally married in California in 2008). He is a rabbi and was hired by Tree of Life Congregation here. People encouraged me to go to Osher Life-Long Learning, since I had no plan to work here. I saw some of the classes people taught about music, and I started teaching about my favorite music. One of my first classes, which I later taught in a more expanded version, was about The Brill Building sound. I had a book about it. Like me, Brian was a fan of "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes, and cribbed some of his orchestration from Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound." 

I pretty much devoured the 2014 film "Love and Mercy" with Paul Dano and John Cusack as Brian. Eugene Landy was much better-looking than Paul Giamatti, who played him in the movie. When we bought a used Honda Civic in 2018, I showed the pretty blonde saleswoman the trailer. She screamed "Oh God, is that Elizabeth Banks? I love her." Brian married the car salesperson in real life. 

I came to learn about the split between Brian and Mike Love, grieved over the deaths of Dennis (my crush for longer than I care to admit), and Carl, who kept the group together when Brian was having issues. 

For my fiftieth birthday in 1999, I threw a "Soul Oldies Dance Party." I bought four tickets to see Brian at The Wilton Theater in Los Angeles. My friend Jeff and I went with a lesbian couple we knew. We were in the front row. Brian introduced a song he wrote in memory of his brother Carl. He was met with weak applause from most of the crowd. I could see how angry he was. He brought out an electric guitar and played "Barbara Ann." not an original Beach Boys song, but the Beach Boys' cover was popular. People jumped up and screamed, and I could see the look of contempt on Brian's face. 

I recently found a copy of the reissue of "Carl and  The Passions So Tough" and "Holland," of which I had a decades-old copy. I still collect solo albums by Carl and Dennis. I cherish my CD copy of "That's Why God Made The Radio." When it came out, I watched the video over and over. Thinking about it though, I knew no one drives on PCH when there is no traffic, no group of young people are all happy and skinny like those actors, and they wouldn't be excited to meet The Beach Boys. What The Beach Boys sold us was a fantasy of California, not necessarily the real thing, at least not often. 

The Beach Boys were faves of mine from the time I was twelve, and I continued to love their new music long after the end of Motown and the breakup of The Beatles. 

I'm not the kind of genius who can write and arrange music, and I was never a great actor, but I can appreciate great art, like Brian's songs, and also how hard life can be, and how we deal with our difficulties, even when we are materially well off.

The great musicians we loved as teenagers in the 1960s, if they managed to live past thirty, are all in their eighties now, and like Brian Wilson and Sly Stone this week, may not last long. At least they've left us an enduring legacy that I hope we can pass on to the next generations.

The Plan

 I wrote my end-of-year piece this year after Rosh Hashana. Looking back at this blog, and the pieces I wrote for the end of  the year in 2014, 2017 and 2019, I can see a progression. In 2014, I felt homesick for Los Angeles, although we'd been away for almost five years at that point. By 2017, I had been elected to Morgantown's City Council and started to make friends and have some influence, and we had bought a house. I was more comfortable here. After we had been here two years, Tree of Life offered my husband Joe Hample, aka Rabbi Joe, a five-year contract, to July 2019. Joe asked me if I wanted to stay here after that. I said I wanted another two-year term on council, just to prove my election wasn't a fluke. The congregation then offered Joe another five-year contract, to July 2024. At the end of 2019, I was beginning to feel satisfied with our life here. Last year, he asked for a two-year extension, because he will turn seventy in 2026, and plans to retire. The congregation agreed to that.

The question is, what do we do then? We're here, we have a house, I have medical issues and get care through West Virginia University Medicine, and we know more people, in and out of temple, than ever. We were featured in AARP Magazine, as a couple who relocated later in life.We presented a positive view of our lives here. I don't want to betray that.

On the other hand, I miss our aging friends in Los Angeles. Joe has college friends in San Francisco with whom he keeps in touch. I have childhood friends in Baltimore and Washington, and, until March, a sister in Maryland. Joe's sister, a first cousin, and an aunt and uncle in Memphis.

We were in Maryland, in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Memphis this year. We're worried about affording California at this point, and although I miss Los Angeles, when I was there, I was happy to leave with Joe as he embarked on his rabbinic career. This year, I reconnected with a cousin in Florida, who invited us to visit in Boca Raton. Joe hates cold weather, and is anxious to visit South Florida. We are both political junkies, and Florida as a state is as bad, or maybe worse, than West Virginia. Today (January 6) we are snowed in. Morgantown schools were closed today and will remain closed tomorrow. 

I often do studies of cities, and I've embarked on a study of the first 256 counties of 100,000 or more in the United States, one a day, getting larger each day Today, I finished the 128th, Clark County, Ohio, which includes Springfield where they're (not) eating the dogs! They're (not) eating the cats! I've been there on my journeys to counties within 300 miles of Morgantown. I divided the 128 counties into groups of 16. First I eliminate the eight most likely to have voted for the incoming President (I had to update for the 2024 election). Of the eight remaining, I delete the four with the coldest January average temperature, then the two in states less-than-friendly to LGBT people, and finally. pick the one with a lower housing cost. At the end, I'll have sixteen winners, and I'll pit them against each other. Logical? Maybe.

My picks halfway through the study:

1. Wicomico County, Maryland (Salisbury)

2. Monongalia County, West Virginia (Morgantown)

3. Kankakee County, Illinois (Kankakee)

4. St. Mary's County, Maryland (Leonardtown)

5. Wayne County, North Carolina (Goldsboro)

6. Clark County, Indiana (Jeffersonville)

7. Skagit County, Washington (Mt. Vernon)

8. Wood County, Ohio (Bowling Green)

So far, I don't think this  is working out. The only county where a majority of citizens voted Democratic for President in 2024 is Skagit County, Washington, the most expensive of the counties I picked. Our county (Monongalia) is the second most Democratic county, giving the Democratic candidate for President 48% of the vote last year. Our county was the only one of twenty-seven in our Congressional District to give me a majority in 2022. The two counties in Maryland are the only two, other than ours, that has a synagogue. 

It looks like our choices will be A) to stay here B) to get rid of 90% off the things in our house and move to Memphis,  Tennessee, Long Beach, Palm Springs, Los Angeles or San Francisco in California, or somewhere in Florida. Boca Raton is the most Jewish spot; Fort Lauderdale is the gayest. 

I'll look for eight more cities in the current study, and see what turns up.