Papa’s got a brand-new blog!

Q: When is a Bar Mitzvah like a baseball game?

A: When everyone tells you that it will be too long and too boring, yet it turns out to be one of the most amazing days of your life.

It’s interesting that both the prospect of my first baseball game and my first Bar Mitzvah evoked the same general response: I was risking coma or death from depths of unimaginable boredom (my worst fear after death, and who knows, maybe death is in fact boring, making two fears in one!) from attending either event. Yet baseball is our national pastime, and Bar Mitzvahs have been celebrated for hundreds, or possibly thousands of years, so there must be something to them.

As we know, attending the ball game saw the birth of Sporty Suzy, and while attending the Bar Mitzvah didn’t make me convert from confusion to Judaism, it was one of the most moving and beautiful days of my life.

The guest of honor (Bar Mitzvee?), Samuel, lost his father to cancer five years earlier, so he wasn’t there to see his son’s coming of age. But pretty much all the rest of Sam’s family were, having come from near and far and filling the synagogue with more love than I ever felt in one room at one time. At one time or another during the ceremony, every immediate family member participated and was on the stage with Sam, supporting him and sharing the experience.

After the ceremony, there was a lunch of breathtaking lavishness. It was all kosher, all delicious, and all, if you can believe this, prepared by Sam’s mother. For almost 150 people. It was exquisitely presented, too, with cornucopias filled with fruit carved like flowers and swathed with ivy and real flowers. Every dish was labelled, from the bagels and lox to the five different kinds of cake. So yeah, there was cake!

The most moving moment - of so many - was when Sam stood in front of the room and made a little speech about some of the people he is closest to and who helped to get him there. After each little piece about the person, Sam invited him/her to come up and place a flower in a vase beside him. The final flower was placed in the vase by Sam’s mother, who said, “This bouquet is Samuel. He is made up of all these people who love him.”

Part of the lengthy process of attempting to make my computer stop its hissy fit was to bribe it with shiny new software. It turned out to be as ineffective as using this approach with a small child, but in my defense, I’m equally ignorant of both subjects, and in both cases, I think they can tell and (mis)behave accordingly.

The new software is thrillingly named Panther (though I don’t know why), and includes all this fascinating stuff which I will almost certainly never be clever enough to use: iPhoto, iTunes, iChat, iThis, iThat. Despite all these i’s, they are missing the most important one: iSuzy.

iSuzy would include things like iShopping; iSparklyThings; iWine; iTravel (really: iBeingSomewhereElseNotTheHorrorOfGettingThere. but that’s too long and not catchy enough); iArtGalleries; iJewelry and iSports (really, iBaseball, or to be totally accurate, iGiants).

What would iYou have in it?

My computer has been misbehaving to a melodramatic extent for the past few weeks. Friends and relations, as A.A. Milne’s Rabbit would say, all tried to reason with it, but in vain. I couldn’t email, and posting here was a nightmare, with nothing to say anyway except “My computer still doesn’t work.”

Finally, I located a guy who would actually come to the house and fix it, both solving the problem and indulging my inherent laziness. It took him three hours and two visits all told to get everything working, which, while a little pricey, was not only worth it, but it was also nice to know that the problems were that complex and clearly beyond the abilities of mere mortals. Yet another thing that should be left to the professionals, like cleaning.

So those of you who have been waiting for my response to your emails of the past several weeks can now either look forward to or dread getting them, as the case may be.

You may not be able to get a doctor to make a house call to see a human patient, but you can get one to see a computer. I guess it’s all part of how machines are replacing people. Pretty soon, this blog will just write itself!

Typically, I never forget a birthday or an anniversary, but this year has been atypical, because I have forgotten (or been late for) pretty much all of them. However, I am trying hard to overcome this and hopefully those special dates located later on in the year will get the attention they deserve.

One of the most egregious oversights of this recent character flaw was forgetting the third birthday of Mike and Jennifer’s fabulous son, Matthew. Poor kid didn’t even get a card, and today is his birthday. Fortunately, he’s still too little to remember this, so it shouldn’t scar him for life, and he’ll get even better gifts for the next few years until I stop feeling guilty about blowing it this year. And in celebration of his birthday, here are some of my favorite photos of him.

Happy Birthday to Matthew!!!!

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Even those of us who are normally immune to the charm of children can see this one is cute as a button. And here’s good news: the co-creators of Matthew are currently working on a second project, which will debut very soon. Unlike most sequels, I fully expect this one to be as good as the original.

Sooner or later, everyone wants his/her own room, and John’s getting his at last. So head on over and say hi, keeping in mind that there’s still construction going on, so there may be dust, stray nails, bad language, and other hazards.

For those of you who haven’t followed the story of my little blog since its birth almost three years ago, I wrote it alone until my father suddenly died. I then had to fly to England as fast as I could to deal with all the things that people do in such circumstances, so John filled in for me as a guest writer. He enjoyed it so much that after I got back, he and I shared it.

But my little site is running out of disk space and he’s ready to strike out on his own. Also, I have never been good at sharing or played well with others. And sometimes I even run with scissors.