I love to see springtime in Kentucky. It is our most beautiful season, with blooming trees and flowers appearing seemingly overnight. At that point, we tend to think it is here to stay –– we rejoice and start poring over seed catalogues, planning but not planting yet. Spring always has a couple of surprises for us, and they have nothing to do with global warming; it always happens that we have a couple of leftover cold spells, possibly even snows, after the first signs of spring. You’ll need sweaters and jackets off and on until June, and sometimes later.
Then there’s Derby and the Preakness, the Belmont and maybe a Triple Crown winner.
This is a primary election year, so we are not permitted to skip the extravagance of commercials about the frequently overblown qualities of the people who want our votes. We learn by loud ads about how great the candidates are and how dreadful their opponents would be, if we should be so misled as to vote them into office. I would like to think that there are off-years with no elections, but they clutter up the listening space so badly that I always find them ubiquitous –– always here spring and fall. Very good for purveyors of radio and TV time, so assures me my nephew who runs TV channels –– he bought a house in Florida with his cut of the profits from last presidential election. I’m hating them this year already, and these are only primaries!
On the other hand –– and there’s always another hand –– the flowers in the cemetery have never been lovelier. They are to me a memorial to Dick Allison, our long-time superintendent of the cemetery. Though he is long-gone, the work of his hands survive.
This year the changes carry a personal sting for me. My favorite rabbi of the nine I have known at the temple is going to another pulpit. I found Rabbi Kline the smartest of a smart lot, a splendid teacher and inspirer and well-informed on many subjects I studied with him. In fact, the only other rabbi who moved me to identify with him as much as Kline has was the rabbi who confirmed me at age 14, the rabbi of my teenage impressionable years. I thought him without fault of any kind, and I haven’t been that naïve since he left.
Finally, my brother and sister-in-law who have lived in Louisville for a long time, have arrived at that stage of health that requires they live close to their children. They are both 10 years younger than I am, and convincing my brother of the truth of that situation was difficult. Their daughter, Cathy, lives in Florida, and their son is in upstate New York (where the snow is). Jay and Jo Anne will be departing Kentucky for Florida early in June. It isn’t that we saw each other so often (a few times a year), and it isn’t that this isn’t the best for them –– in fact, I helped persuade them that Cathy was correct in suggesting that they ought to go. It isn’t that most of their friends are no longer able to take the place of children, or that I am not able to play the big sister role any more.
Their leaving seems like a dissolution of our family. My parents are dead, my sister is dead, my brother is moving, all my relatives who were older than I am are dead, and I am holding up the family that used to live at 432 Hollywood Drive and 315 Queensway Drive. Isn’t emotion ridiculous? As if planes didn’t fly, and telephones didn’t exist, and we hadn’t communicated by email for year. cc