Uncategorized – Joshua L. Weinstein

by Joshua L. Weinstein August 17, 2023

As time goes by

Today – Aug. 17 – always was special in my family. A day to celebrate. On this day in 1958, my parents married. Every year on their anniversary, I’d ask my dad the same questions my brothers and sister did.

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Today – Aug. 17 – always was special in my family. A day to celebrate. On this day in 1958, my parents married.

Every year on their anniversary, I’d ask my dad the same questions my brothers and sister did. “How long have you and Mom been married?”

“Hmmmm,” he’d answer. “How old is your brother?”

“40.”

“Then we’ve been married . . . 39 years.”

Then I’d ask, “You ever think about divorcing Mom?”

“Divorcing her?” he’d ask, shocked at the notion. “Noooo!”

A pause.

“Thought about killing her though.”

Don’t even. He was joking. It was a different time.

And then he’d follow up with a story about a time Mom got exasperated and told him she was going to leave.

“That’s OK,” he answered her. “I’ll go with you.”

None of these are great jokes, but they got better every year. With time, they morphed from corny to comforting. I looked forward to calling my parents on their anniversary and going through our annual schtick. I looked forward to hearing my mom roll her eyes – she has really loud eyes – at it.

Even now, I smile when I think about it.

And I miss it.

Dad died almost seven years ago, and the meaning of this day changed. It’s still something to celebrate, but it’s tinged with sadness.

For all my life, August 17 meant one thing. Now it means something else. Strange how that goes, how something as permanent as “meaning” can change, and how dates that have no particular meaning suddenly become fraught. December 7^th, 1941 meant nothing on December 6^th. And 9/11 meant nothing on 9/10. Only in America does the Fourth of July matter.

(My father, incidentally, was born on the Fourth of July, so Independence Day always had two meanings in my family. Now that day, like today, like Father’s Day, has another. And October 12, the day he died, has a significance it never did. A different kind of anniversary.)

There’s this cliché about time healing all wounds. I don’t think it’s true. Time changes the way wounds feel, just like time changes the way celebrations feel. One year I don’t like what isn’t, another year I don’t like what is. One year I like what isn’t, another year I like what is.

I’ll call my mom today, as I do every day. We’ll talk about Dad and his silly jokes. I’ll ask what she’s doing and I’ll hope she’s spending at least part of it with my sister, who lives nearby and who celebrates her own anniversary today.

I sent my sister a text message a little while ago.

“How long have you and Jon been married?”

She answered:

“How old is Ben?”

Eight years later

Seven Years Later

A Very Important Halloween Message

by Joshua L. Weinstein December 21, 2019

The darkest evening of the year

I would have liked to have been born in my beloved Maine, but to paraphrase a friend, my mother was in Miami at the time, and I thought I should be with her for that particular event. So I grew

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I would have liked to have been born in my beloved Maine, but to paraphrase a friend, my mother was in Miami at the time, and I thought I should be with her for that particular event.

So I grew up in Miami, donning sweaters when it was 65 degrees and ski jackets – we didn’t know of parkas – at 60. To me, snow seemed exotic. In Miami in the 1970s (I’m old. Shut up.), the elementary school English textbook was called The Roberts English Series. The first poem in the first of the series – at least the first that I remember – was Robert Frost’s magnificent Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I memorized it immediately. Someone had told me that poetry wasn’t to be taken literally, so at 7 or 8 years old, I decided that poem was about death.

It’s been a long time since I was 8, and I now like to think the poem isn’t about death so much as it is about, y’know, stopping by woods on a snowy evening. I picture the woods in Maine, even though Frost published the poem in his New Hampshire collection. Even Frost couldn’t get everything right.

I lived in Maine long enough for it to seep into my soul, and I plan to return one day. I cannot call myself a Mainer, although perhaps my friend Janet, who has impeccable Maine credentials and whose wonderful family embraces and embodies all that is good about the state, wouldn’t mind if I considered myself at least an honorary Mainer.

My years in Maine made me reconsider snow. It is no longer exotic, but it’s still magic.Winter, which toughens Mainers and brings them together, fortified by Leon Leonwood Bean’s boots against a common adversary, begins today, the solstice. Frost, of course, phrased it more elegantly: “The darkest evening of the year.”

Here’s to the magic of this season, wherever you experience it.