Jokes at the Hospice Volunteer Meeting

I have begun to volunteer at a hospice residence. Volunteers meet quarterly and tonight I attended my first. An elderly Jewish man, much experienced in sitting by patients at the hospice at end of life and the only other male there -- though my training class was almost half male --, said Metamusil plans to introduce a kosher version of its product during Passover. Its marketing slogan will be "Let my people go." This led to another volunteer telling of the bank robbery that went terribly wrong, with the nervous robber gunning down everyone in the bank except for three men. He stalked over to the first and asked, "Did you see what I just did?" The man stammered, "Yes" and was promptly shot. Same thing for #2. The third guy, having taken this all in, heard the same question and replied, "Not me, not a thing, but my wife over there, hiding behind that desk, saw it all." And on the subway home, reading the NYT Sunday magazine article that apparently found it astonishing that the wife of a Baptist minister, who home-schooled her children, and believes in the healing power of Jesus Christ could also be a wildly popular comedian with a You Tube viewed millions of times -- link below -- (and could I just add here that you don't have to be believer to believe that 'tude says more about the Times than the article sheds light on the comedian. It's finally her husband who clues in the writer, "Funny is funny.") Anyway, she, telling of her Baptist upbringing, repeats this oldie but goodie: Why don't Baptists engage in premarital sex? Because it might lead to dancing.


http://youtube.com/watch?v=anSpBUxsgAU&feature=related

Funny is funny.

Snow Day Jottings

February 22, often a good day for snows in NYC and, when we lived there, the DC area. Good defined as major storms, and today's will leave 6-9 inches in New York. It's coming straight down now after blowing in wind gusts earlier and from the window I'm watching it pile up on car roofs. Would get over to Central Park, but today gets busy in the afternoon, my first time with patients at the hospice, then Bianca's opening at 5:30 and finally Otello at the Met at 8 PM. If it's anything like Macbeth was, it will be powerful and seeing it sung will add new dimension to the play itself.

I've been thinking lately -- triggered to some degree by the hospice training -- about the transition from baby to child to adult and, if one lives long enough, for most of us, back again. I suppose it even started with riding a bicycle (the best way to get around NYC, but that's another subject) regularly again, meaning it started a long time ago for me, but it is the gift of time and choice, to do only what you want to do -- and your finances permit -- and to do it when you want to do it, with others or alone. It is, in short, play, including serious play. A city is a good place for play. This city is perhaps the best place for it, where children and adults who are out of adult uniform pretty much go about their fun unobstructed -- so long as the fun is not bizarre behavior -- and, even better, unnoticed. No one sees, no one expects. You have the run of the city.

Valentine's Day at the Butterfly Conservatory

The butterflies are back at the American Museum of Natural History and the link below takes you to the butterfly cam there.

Yesterday's visitors during my noon to two volunteer shift included a stylishly dressed, mostly in black, young couple, as if they'd just come from or were off to lunch at an upscale restaurant somewhere in the city. She Asian, he Hispanic or Filipino, not much taller than she was and, from overhearing, pretty knowledgable about butterflies. I didn't pay them much attention. Although it was a slow shift, there were still a few kids who wanted to watch the owl butterfly feed from the orange slice in my hand or have their photo taken in front of the huge Atlas moth spread across a plant trunk. The couple was standing near the glass cabinet where we keep the native species butterfly pupae so lucky visitors can sometimes see an adult butterfly emerge. The guy asked a co-volunteer if he would take a picture of them and handed him a camera. Nothing unusual; happens about a dozen times a shift, but rarely does the requester say "But just wait a second." More rarely still does he reach into his pocket and take out a ring case, still more rarely does he go down on one knee, open the ring case and ask his astonished and completely surprised girlfriend to marry him. In fact, in a shift that had already been spectacular for the wildly active blue morphos darting and flirting throughout the enclosure, I'd have been inclined to say it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment, except that the third volunteer on shift, a ten year volunteer at the conservatory, said later, "I'd only seen that once before."

Can't see their future, of course, but it got launched in great style.

Only?

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/butterflies/cams.php

UNO!

Well, it wasn't quite the Super Bowl, but we cheered at our big screen last night when Judge Jones picked Uno. The kids' beagle is here while they're at work today and sleeping on her pillow now. I've taken to calling her "Champ" for she can bay and jump around with the now best of show.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080213/ap_on_re_us/dog_show

Winter...At Last

The snow began sometime around ten this morning. I've been watching it through the apartment's windows since then. May go jogging in it later. The cars are starting to lose traction. It won't be much, an inch or two, and it won't last long, but at last it's the brief rationale for spending winter in the city, as the flakes muffle the street noise and for a just a bit cover all the less inviting street debris in white. My winter clearance sweater from Eddie Bauer -- $19.99, a great deal -- got delivered with the snow and I wore it and my Yankees knit cap (pitchers and catchers report to spring training this week. To paraphrase Barack Obama, who injected who with what is the past, Opening Day is the future.) to our neighborhood restaurant where Bianca and I had lunch, half a carafe of wine, adding to the trance of the tumbling flakes, and mocking the couple of passersby who bore their open umbrellas against the snow. Where are these people from anyway??

RIP Tom Lantos

The northern California Congressman, quoted here a month or so ago -- in the midst of his incurable cancer -- on what the United States had given him, died yesterday at 80. He knew a human rights violation when he saw one, regardless of its ideological provenance. The times need more like him; instead there is one less.

The Giants

New York might return to its normal snappiness sometime this afternoon, but for now -- on this unusually mild primary election day -- as the floats parade up Broadway toward City Hall, we are all still cheerfully in the clouds where the Giants put us Sunday evening around 10 PM when Plaxico Burress caught Eli Manning's 13 yard pass for the go-ahead and winning touchdown. Fox's high camera had the moment before it actually happened, the ball out of Manning's hand and Burress breaking free from his defender, the perfect pass headed straight for his break and time enough for the impossible thought "The Giants are going to win the Super Bowl" to lodge in my brain the instant before the ball settled in Burress' arms. It's still pretty amazing. Fox had a good producer too, who almost immediately cued up footage of Manning throwing virtually the identical pass to Burress in pre-game workouts.

And we'll be watching the Eli elude and Tyree catch play for years of YouTube and highlights, just like The Catch in 1982 when Montana to Dwight Clark beat the Cowboys in the NFC championship game.

A game for the ages, as -- in fact -- the Giants win over the Packers also was.