So as I was saying Fall ended with Chanukah and because people lit lights everywhere, actual fire lights with candles, I don’t believe electric lights do anything but waste hydro, the days have started to get longer. This has little to do with temperatures however and two nights ago it was minus 13 here, i.e. 13 degrees below freezing. I went to my local butcher Max and his wife Joanne 3 days ago looking for beef, but I found out that they have not had fresh beef since they did turkeys for Christmas and then had a family holiday. By the time they sacrifice another beast and after it has aged(hung) for two weeks it could be weeks before we get fresh meat. Well, we have been making inroads on our 3 freezers so I went on a tour of Joanne’s freezers and found lots of goodies: shank bones, pastrami, roasts, jumbo franks, ground beef, and so on. She also offered me her stewing hens, former layers, and I felt very privileged as these birds are hard to come by and make the most superb chicken stew, what I learned to call Aunt Roseanne’s chicken. She was my first wife’s aunt and nobody made chicken like she did and she could get great hens in New York. This is the season of stews and soups, too cold to use the BBQ, so we think of such things and make delicious savoury comfort food.
Now what happens here is that if we run out of Freezer space indoors, after filling 3 freezers, we have about another half acre of freezer outside. Remember the bears have hibernated and the racoons have made themselves scarce by now. They do the most damage and simply have no respect for boundaries at all. Any way the outdoors being safe we can keep our ice cubes outside, the chicken soup is outside in a sealed pressure cooker, want cold white wine just sit it outside the door for 15 minutes, and just in case we keep a cooler out on the deck to protect some cooked or raw food.
I also have a part of me that is strongly tempted to hibernate. When we lived in Haileybury I knew one or two people who actually did hibernate. Fast Eddie who ran a permanent garage sale had fitted up his basement as a hobbit hole, the wood stove running full blast, home made schnapps always available and the whole place hot as an oven with carpets and plush textures everywhere. Eddie was always trying to get me to join him so we could share stories, drink his pear or apple schnapps until the world went fuzzy and I had no idea how to get home from his nest in Latchford. But I only did this once or twice for I could not stand the claustrophobic heat, the fear of being burned alive and the sense of hitting the street and sleeping on the sidewalk and so freezing to death. Is hell burning or freezing?
Have spent a lot of time recently dealing with a new Harper inspired wave of racism and Native bashing thus bringing all the Neo nazis out of the woodwork feeling that they have been given a new licence to insult and abuse. What a disgusting display of fulminating poison. And where oh where are my fellow Jews whose silence about all of this makes me extremely embarrassed and angry, for who should understand Native suffering if not we Jews. I thought that every year we are supposed to celebrate that we are no longer slaves in Egypt but it sure does not say “Forget it and have fun”. Somewhere in the Passover service I feel sure we are urged to use our racial history and experience to find empathy in ourselves for other disempowered people. I am an immigrant to Canada and I am living in someone else’s land but I am pretty certain this land does not belong to Harper, or even Mike Harris of Indian hating fame. Sure it is much nicer to be the beneficiary of someone else’s sacrifice’s but I am beginning to feel communally alone. Should we not be saying thanks and how can we help?
