CharcBites

A small box of matzoh with a Passover pamphlet and nice note from a neighborhood rabbi was left at my front door. They must have really culled their list. I haven’t been an active member for years, but somehow they found me.  Like many Jews I’m comfortable with the dichotomy of being Jewish and something else or nothing else - like a Chinese food menu in a column a or a column b kinda way. My mother has been deceased for one year and there was no one to nag me to “make Passov

I can hear my father’s disdain echo in the afterlife from a question he would never dream need answering. An electronic ignition gas fireplace to the man who built a double A-frame in Vermont with one “real one” on every level, would be sacrilege - the same man that insisted on building my character by stacking his wood piles, one cord at a time. Maybe his disdain would be warranted. Contemplating an automatic fireplace made me feel like I was giving up on myself a little - a

We smuggle them quietly into conversations like mistrustful refugees, over state lines and country borders, into friend’s houses where...