"To sin in secret is not to sin at all." (Moliere)

.....Tonite is "erev" Yom Kippur" or Day of Atonement the last of the High Holy Days which began at sundown Sept. 8 with Rosh Hashana--or the new year--fifty-seven something. I can't keep track. These days are a time to examine one's life, repent of shortcomings and resolve to correct them. The service this evening features the Kol Nidre, a prayer set to medieval music. The prayer asks for release from "all vows" to God that have not been kept. That means the sins that you have indulged yourselves in all year. Then tomorrow, one must fast and attend synagogue services. The last service of the day is "Neilah" signaling the closing of heaven's gates and the sealing of ones fate for the coming year.

.....Rhoda has placed eight candle-glasses, on a tray, to be lighted this evening in memory of our departed ones: my mother and father, my step-father, Mike Kallman, her mother and father, Richard Higgins, Sabrina Ross, and a candle for all those in the world who have no one to light a candle for them (her idea!). And then Rho is off to temple, and I have to fend for dinner myself--because I don't have a ticket. You need a ticket to pray (not to "ride" as per Beatles). Actually, I didn't wish for a ticket--and that, perhaps, is my first sin of the new year; I can't handle the boredom--it's the same one every year, and I can't get up and sit down every few minutes as the service requires. Oh, well, why make excuses--which may qualify as my second sin of the year; I'm just not very religiously minded.

.....If one needs to look back on the past year and the major events in our lives, I suppose the one that is most memorable is the time I had to spend in the Whitehall rehab facility for five weeks after breaking my hip on a cruise ship late in December, 2009. My most vivid memory was being placed in a room with a very obnoxious "roommate". My daughter, Robin, who had come down to help Rhoda and me mercifully garnered me a private room. If RH+ is my angel, then Robin is my guardian angel. A couple of other significant events were Rho turning a year older and I reaching 86. 86! O my God! (I forget now and then that I'm not "religiously minded"). My God? Well, perhaps it's Zeus. Why not? I keep thinking of Wordsworth who wrote in one of his poems that the world was "too much with us, getting and spending" and wasting our powers, and that he would rather be a pagen "suckled in a creed outworn" so he might have sight of "Proteus rising from the sea or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

L'Shanah Tovah--Happy New Year.