What A Piece Of Work

Oy - last night I watched Schindler's List for the first time. I have no real problems.

Woke up this morning and didn't want to get out of bed, dreaded coming in to work, it was raining - but then I imagined lying in a hard bunk in a thin shift, hungry, and having to get up and do humiliating hard labor under threat of death, no autonomy, no comfort; it was horrifying. I have nothing to complain about.

Then I thought of my grandma who is having surgery today (at 91). She was bright and talkative this morning, even though she wasn't allowed to have breakfast, whilst I struggled through my scone. I am doing fine. But I wish I had her esprit.

I used to have dreams, when we'd had Holocaust survivors speak to us in school, that the trucks were coming for my friends but I couldn't fit them all in my basement. In one of them, Brookburg got in the truck with her parents because we couldn't hide them all.

How did those people survive and how are they not all crazy? One likes to think one would have survived the Holocaust, and that one would have acted honorably to one's fellow humans if, God forbid, one had been a German or a Pole. But would I have been that strong? I can't know - I pray I never have to know.

I also had a dream a long time ago which I can't quite remember about a pink blanket. It represented something special but I only realized it after I'd had it for a long time, slept with it, torn it . . . Today I am feeling ungrateful and ashamed. My bench is messy and I have tough work to do but all things considered this is not such a hardship.

I went to church on Christmas Eve and the priest who we don't like gave a terrible sermon. It was based on one of the more boring, but interesting for all the cool names, passages of the New Testament: the lineage of Joseph, tracing from Abraham through David and on down. ("What the hell does that matter," I hissed to my mom, "unless Joseph and Mary were cousins, if Joseph wasn't biologically Jesus's father?" My mom pointed out that very likely everyone in the town was related somehow. And I said I suppose Joseph adopted Jesus legally. But still. Gaping great hole in the logic, there.)

The priest we don't like babbled on about how Jesus's lineage having various sinners in it was supposed to mean that he was just a regular guy like us, but that wasn't the point of that passage at all. I think the point of the lineage recitation (14 generations, from Abraham to David, 14 to the Babylonian exile, 14 to Jesus) was to establish Jesus's street cred as Messiah. To convince the punters he was the real deal, not just some hippie schmuck with wacky ideals. Who, by the way, never sinned. Not even once, just to see what it was like. You know, like that guy in college who never smoked pot because he wanted to run for office one day.

But lineage, schmineage. You expect us to believe in a Messiah without some miracles? Ha! So the priest we don't like told us again about the miraculous virgin conception - a fishy tale if ever I heard one. We can't have our Messiah being too common, now, can we?

The connection I am trying to make is this: when I heard that sermon it made me cross that we were so . . . spoiled . . . that we couldn't just follow a great teacher without him being supernatural. That it wasn't enough that a child was born - he had to be concieved by a "golden shower". It's not enough that we are alive - we want more. Is that the best you can do, God? Change my water into wine!

So this year, my resolution is to try and be more appreciative of every day, of the commonplace miracles of opening my eyes in the morning, of my noisy neighbors, of the fact that proteins are folding every second in my cells, of having a body to complain about.

This great o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with gold fires . . .