Author: Rev. Joe Dirt

Posted on

A Southern, Jewish Tradition

My Yankee wife has cooked me another traditional Southern meal to bring in the New Year.  We had black-eye peas, turnip greens, rice and corn bread.  It took a while to get her to cook cornbread the “right” way.  First time she served me cornbread I thought it was cake. Now she makes it in a cast iron skillet with yellow cornmeal, and it is not sugary sweet.blackeyed_peas

Traditionally, black-eye peas are for good luck and greens are to bring wealth.  There are more than a few theories about why this combination.  The one I like best is “Eat poor on New Year’s, and eat fat the rest of the year.”

One I  did not know about is the tradition of black-eye peas dates back 500 years to the Talmud:

“According to a portion of the Talmud written around 500 A.D., it was Jewish custom at the time to eat black-eyed peas in celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It’s possible that the tradition arrived in America with Sephardic Jews, who first arrived in Georgia in the 1730s.”

And as Tevye would say, “Tradition.”  Southern, Jewish or otherwise, tradition makes the world go round and helps to keep us grounded.

New Year’s Day Tradition – Black-Eyed Peas and Greens

Posted on

So It Goes

kurt_vonnegutRobin sings in the choir at The Center for Spiritual Living here in St. Louis. They tend to end meditative/pray moments with the saying, “And so it is.” This sounded familiar to me and then I realized it is very, very close to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous saying, “So it goes.”

“Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion—and dismissal of emotion—it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There’s a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: “Shit happens, and it’s awful, but it’s also okay. We deal with it because we have to.”

~~ from an article by By Tasha Robinson, Kyle Ryan, Josh Modell, Noel Murray & Scott Gordon 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will

Posted on

Rev. Joe Loses His Tonsils

I’ve been telling this story off and on for years.  I told it again today then I started thinking about a deeper meaning to the story.  I decided it was really a story about trust.

At whatever time you are learning your multiplication table, I needed to get my tonsils taken out.  This was the T&A operation, tonsils and adenoids, which used to be so common to us children of the 50s. I do not remember a whole lot of explanation as why I was going to the hospital except it was to make me better.  I was checked in, and placed in a room with 4 other boys.  The young man across from me had some sort of condition that made him spasm frequently.  I did not know this, but what I did know was that he had just had his tonsils out.  In my child’s mind I made the intuitive leap that after my tonsil operation I would be like that spastic, little boy.

I have always told the story in regards to the silliness of kids and irrational fears.  Reflecting on it today I decided it was really a story about trust.  I trusted my mother, and I suppose I trusted the doctor to some extent that if I needed to be like the spastic young man to be better, so be it.  Of course, children have extraordinary trust in people in positions of authority. They have even more trust in those that love them.   Without it the human child would have a hard time getting to adulthood.  But still…

I do not remember when I told my mother of the fear that I had, a few days or few weeks afterwards.  Best I remember, she said something along the lines of, “I’m sorry you were scared.”   She then went on to pooh-pooh my fears.

So it goes.

Posted on

Minimum Wage Over Time

Comparing the value of labor over time is apparently not that straight forward. I was wondering about minimum wage. When I graduated high school in 1970 kennedy-half-dollar(gasp… yes) the minimum wage was $1.60. I dropped out of college after a year, and I went to work in a factory for somewhat more than the minimum wage. After a few months I had raises that put me up to $2.60 an hour which was nearly 60% higher than minimum wage. Even at that astronomical wage, even without a car to support, even with living in basically a slum apartment, I was having a hard time making ends meet. I had to be careful with every penny. I had a crisis back then that wiped out very quickly what little savings I had. I had absolutely no benefits. A medical emergency would have been a financial disaster.

Using data as calculated on the website, Measuring Worth , I came up with the following data:

Current data is only available till 2012. In 2012, the relative worth of $1.60 from 1970 is: Continue reading “Minimum Wage Over Time”

Posted on

Henry Ford a Socialist?

From “Henry Ford’s Own Story” by Rose Wilder Lane

Ford settled every problem by his own simple rule,”Do what is fundamentally best for everybody. It will work out for our interests in the end.” And always he was pondering the big problem of putting back into active use the millions that were accumulating to his credit. Every year the price was lowered on his cars, following his original policy of making the automobile cheap. Still the sales increased by leaps and bounds, and his margin of profit on each car mounted into a greater total.

“The whole system is wrong”, he says. Continue reading “Henry Ford a Socialist?”

Posted on

The Cookie Bowl

cookiejar Once upon a time, back in the day, when my kidrens were still knee-high to the proverbial grasshopper, my arm could still be twisted to get me to attend Sunday church services. My son, David, must have been around 4 which would have put my daughter, Keely, at 8.  We were living in Oklahoma City and we attended a Baptist church fairly regularly.   Sporadically before the main sermon the preacher would have a children’s story.  In the front of the church was a low stage with steps leading up to the pulpit.  He would sit at the front of this stage and ask the children of the congregation to gather around him.

This particular Sunday he did that, made his invitation to the children, and off rushed our two kids.  I do not remember exactly what the story was about, but it did involve a cookie jar and partaking of the contents unauthorized.

The preacher looked at Keely and asked her, “Do y’all have a cookie jar at your house?”

To which she replied, “No.”  Then she brightly added, “No, but we have a cookie bowl and Daddy gets into it all the time.”

The whole church burst out into laughter and turned to see me slinking down in my pew.

Posted on

Rewinding Life

From time to time I will hear or read an interview of some famous person.  One of the common questions asked is, “If you had your life to live over would you do anything differently?”  Almost invariably the answer is, “No, I would not change a thing.”   On hearing this, in my mind, I am screaming, “Bullshit.”

I look back on my life and there are so many things that I would have changed had I had the opportunity.  Maybe it is the programmer in me, but I see life as a imagesseries of decision points.  Like the traveler in Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, go one direction and the other path is usually lost.  I do not know a human alive, if they are being honest, that would not own up to bad decisions, to decisions they regret, or wonder what would have happened if they had taken the other branch.  I think it is part of the tragedy that is the quiet desperation of human existence.  The Buddha gave a way out, living in the moment.  However, that is much easier said than done.

One of my fantasies is to wonder what would happen if I could go back and change x to y.  What would have my path have been?  Continue reading “Rewinding Life”

Posted on

No wine for you, Cat

100_0380Robin’s cat, Booty Wang, is your typical finicky cat.  He is especially finicky about his water.  He prefers that it be from a running source.  A time or two or ten I have found Robin running the water at the bathroom sink and Booty lapping it up from the stream.

Given my attitude about the subservient nature of companions not of the Homo sapiens food group, I am not going to do this.  However, I do feel a responsibility for animals partially in my care.  We did start keeping a water bowl in the upstairs master bathroom as well as one in the laundry room.  He would not drink from the original bowl that I had purchased.  After a few weeks I wondered if it was because it was plastic.  So I changed it out for a glass bowl.  Voila, he would drink from that, BUT only if the water was fresh.  If the water had sat for more than a few hours he ignores it.   He will walk into the bathroom sit down in front of the bowl, and wait for a human to magically change it into fresh water.   Did I call him the subservient species earlier?

This morning that routine transacted, and he still just sat there looking at the fresh water in the bowl.  In exasperation I said, “Cat, I cannot change it into wine, deal with it.”  That is when I remembered I had not taken my meds.