Stefanie Kalem

the nonsensical ravings of an overly verbal mind

Archives for June 2017

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Lots of fancy-striking (letters from my father, part 5)

It's my dad's yahrtzeit today. I don't know if that means it started last night or it's starting now, at 8:30 p.m. as the late summer day starts to stretch out its last. The app I have on my phone that tells me when it's the third day of the Jewish month of Tamuz doesn't tell me if it's erev or not. And I didn't buy a candle, anyway. They're getting harder to come by, it seems, so I buy three at a time. But now that Harv is gone, too, I go through them …

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“Show me a man who smiles all the time and he should be in an asylum” (letters from my father, part 4)

This letter was a little hard for me to transcribe. It's from 2011, when my dad was 79, still living on his own in his condo. His health would start failing soon after, and by the time we went to South Florida a year later for his 80th birthday, I believe he had moved up to Jacksonville to live with my brother. A year after that he was diagnosed with the cancer that he would beat back twice before it killed him in 2015. That said, this letter is funny …

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“For every hour he spends with mankind he needs 3 hours in his closet” (letters from my father part 3)

Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of Harv's passing. I thought about him a lot, and I thought about how he would like to be remembered aside from my sharing his wisdom with strangers and friends (which he might have only secretly enjoyed). Though this is a heavy week, no doubt my dad would have wanted me to enjoy myself and think of the good times. And so, in that spirit, I'm posting a sweet, pretty light-hearted little number; also in that spirit I …

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