Hazy Shade of Winter

"Hazy Shade of Winter." A Simon & Garfunkel song - my fellow baby boomers will know it. Mournful sky today, yesterday as well. Usually I love rainy, gray days, raindrops hitting the roof, trees bending to the wind, the fierceness of lightening and thunder and watching it all from the cocoon of our home.

Today and yesterday, not so much. Rough days. My husband Bill has Parkinson's and we both see it getting worse. Nope, let's write about something else.

I opened the Oxford Dictionary and selected a word at random: Jesuit. A member of the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic order. What first comes to mind ...

My Auntie (my mother's sister Blanche) and I once had a conversation about who I should and shouldn't marry. I was 12 or 13 at the time. Auntie said it was okay to marry a non-Jew if I wanted, but she warned me against marrying a Catholic. According to her, Catholics were fanatics, to be avoided at all costs.

Well, okay. I discussed the issue with my two (also Jewish) girlfriends. Amy declared she wouldn't consider marrying anyone but a Jew, while Teri insisted she'd only consider a man who wasn't Jewish. I didn't have to think twice about my answer, despite Auntie's warning: my future husband's religion didn't matter; his character trumped everything else.

I was a single mother when I met Bill almost 40 years ago. What do you know, Bill was a Roman Catholic. He stopped attending church in 2002, when the story broke about the Church's tolerance of rampant child sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese. 

Bill and I met at the end of October. When Hannukah came around, he came over with two children's books about Hannukah and read them to my kids. At Christmas, he brought over a Christmas tree, thrilling the children no end. (I grew up in a non-observant Jewish family - we had Christmas trees every year and left cookies and milk for Santa. Christ was not a part of this holiday, although Bill insists you can't observe Christmas without Christ. It remains an ongoing discussion.)

Christ was a very good man, but he wasn't God, my mother once explained to me. What matters most is kindness.