The Pandemic in Yiddish

If you had a bagel this morning, or lost work to a computer glitch, or schlepped your grocery bags up the stairs, you already know a little Yiddish. And is there a better language to kvetch about a world gone totally meshuggah?

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Ira WoodComment
A Merry Labor Day and a Happy New Year

Labor Day out here is when the excessive bacchanal of summer officially ends; when heavy traffic makes its final lurch over the bridges and hordes of summer people head home. But in the Year of the Covid? Nobody is in any hurry to leave.

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Ira WoodComment
The Shrink in the Backyard

The Washington Post found the physiological effects of the Trump administration to include headaches, irregular heartbeat, chronic neck pain, depression, and the list goes on. Besides voting, here’s what I do about it.

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Ira WoodComment
Garden Sex and Other Unnatural Behaviors

Going all the way back to the Sumerians and the Ancient Greeks (whose god of sex, Priapus, also presided over fruits and vegetables) gardening has had an association with fertility, which has been on my mind a lot this week since, for the first time ever, I’ve had to perform sex in the garden.

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Ira WoodComment
Who Was That Masked Man?

This morning I stood talking to someone for a full ten minutes without a clue who he was and as we waved good-bye all I could come up with was a phrase I hadn’t thought of in 50 years: Who was that masked man?

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Ira WoodComment
The High Cost of Tomatoes

Seeds, tools, fertilizer, and all the rest; add it up and divide by the number of tomatoes I harvest and ask me if the individual cost of each one is not absolutely insane. Just don’t ask me at lunchtime when I’m mournfully staring into the refrigerator. At that moment, I’d pay absolutely any price.

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Ira WoodComment