Not this year. I’d heard there was snow in the forecast, but not how much, so I was expecting the usual half-inch or so. Imagine my reaction, then, when I got up to answer nature’s call at 3:30 this morning, glanced out the window, and saw that the ground had gone from crispy brown (the leaves I haven’t yet mulched) to solid white. There was no wind, so no drifts, but more white stuff was falling at quite an impressive rate. I looked at the roof of my car and realized we already had at least 6 inches, with more piling up merrily as I watched.

The phone rang at 5:30, announcing a 2-hour school delay. And about 8:00, when my son the budding meteorologist went out with my metal yard/meter stick to measure, it was a bit over 9 inches.

It’s pretty much limited to this county and the one to the east of us; lake effect snow (in our case Lake Michigan) is like that. But the weather service is predicting that this will be a particularly snowy winter overall. If the start is any indication, that may be an understatement.

This is essentially a warehouse-sized store.  The back half was full of dishes, bakeware, pots, pans, linens, cushions, storage supplies and the like.  Not my pie plates, but certainly a lot of stuff.  The problem was that in order to get to the back half, I had to go through the front half.

The entire front half, an area larger than many grocery stores I’ve been in, was full of Christmas stuff.  Trees.  Ornaments.  Fake greenery.  Santas.  Inflatable snowmen.  Seven foot tall straw figures that I assume, from the costumes, were intended as either shepherds or wise men.  You name it and it was there, and the vast majority of it was cheap in both senses of the word - inexpensive and tacky. And of course, there was the music.  I never knew you could do Greensleeves as a torchy blues, and you know, my life would have been complete if I had continued in my blissful ignorance.

I did it.  I got back to the back corner, looked at the stoneware and glass bakeware, found full size regular and deep dish pie plates, but none that were tart or individual sized.  And then I fled.  I don’t think I’ll be going back any time soon.

This is our second cold snap, so he’d already had a pair out earlier this fall, which he could not find this morning.

“Mom, where are my gloves?!?”

We investigated the pockets of his bomber jacket.  No gloves.  We looked in his backpack.  No gloves.

“Mom, you’re supposed to know where my gloves are!”

“Since when?  Honey, I cannot follow you around all day to keep track of your gloves.  What am I supposed to do, hide in your desk while you’re at school?”

“Well, can’t you make a Glove Locator?” asks my son.

And then he wondered why I laughed.

So about a month ago Mom gave me a bag of kibble her little girl had turned her nose up at in disdain.  (This cat prefers freshly cooked chicken breasts, still slightly warm.  She’s not picky, oh, no.  Not spoiled rotten either.)  It had a little hole in the bag where the other cat (who, sadly, escaped Mom in a parking lot 1/2 a mile from home but has not been seen since) had clawed it, but that was all.

My girls took advantage of that hole, declaring the contents of the bag the Most. Delicious. Treat. EVER!  I didn’t have my camera handy, but I came in once to find a “headless” black cat - which is to say her body was visible from the shoulders out, but her head buried firmly in the bag.  So they learned that bags were not impregnable, and I learned that they liked this stuff a lot.

It was a small bag, and ran out fairly quickly.  Time passed, and the bag of their usual kibble also began to run out, so we got a big bag of the new stuff.  I saw one of the girls using it as a cushion, but she looked up at me with big innocent eyes and neatly folded paws, saying “I don’t have any designs on this.  I know what it is, but I’m waiting patiently for you with the opposable thumbs to open it for me.”

Yeah, right.  No more than 45 minutes later, I wandered by that way again.  And lo, a smallish hole had appeared in the end of the bag, just big enough to paw out a few morsels at a time.  Tornado was out, but Sophia and Cloud were both much disgusted when they saw me pouring that big bag full of Wonderfulness into a large plastic container.  They watched very carefully, too, both up on their hind legs to get high enough to actually see into the bin.

Oh, the not quite finished bag of the old kibble?  Still in the kitchen, and still unmolested.  I checked.

J., in his best little-kid voice “She says ‘Because I’m practicing to be a lion when I grow up, Mommy’ “.

Needless to say, I cracked up.

“Nope” he said, blushing.  “But that’s ok.”

And it is.

Then it was time to get dressed.  Of his own will, he chose a pale blue dress shirt and a yellow tie with deep blue diagonal stripes.  On the other hand, he also put a t-shirt on underneath it, so that when the photos were over he could take it off and just be a “regular kid” again.  I’m sure his hair is ruffled and his shirt and tie stuffed into his backpack in a ball by now, but I was incredibly proud of him as he walked out the door, looking very handsome and incredibly mature, completely comfortable and unselfconscious in his finery.

W, passing by:  “She’s watching the Food Channel.”

There was a plethora of signs in Indianapolis when I was down there as well.  I’m kind of out of that loop already, though I recognized some of the names.  What I found noteworthy there were the lack of signs for the current governor - I haven’t seen any up in this corner of the state either - and the presence of Obama/ Biden signs thickly strewn in neighborhoods where I know that Democrats have been an endangered species in prior years.  I remember voting once and hearing a precinct judge comment that all three of the registered Democrats for the precinct had voted.  I laughed a little at the time, knowing that all three were in one household.  But in that same area, it seems like Obama signs are in every other yard.  It wasn’t like McCain signs were in evidence, either.  I think I saw two in a couple of miles.  Indiana really is split between the candidates this time.  I can’t remember when it wasn’t so solidly Republican that the candidates felt no need to spend more than a minimal amount of money here.  Change indeed.

Today is our son’s 11th birthday.  I got an e-mail recently asking if I could meet with the rabbi in early November, as it’s time for him to begin bar mitzvah training.  This seems incredible to me.  When he was smaller, I figured he’d become a bar mitzvah, but that it would happen a year or two later than is usual.  Most kids start Hebrew School in pre-school, but at that time he was still in therapeutic pre-school, and there was no way he could have handled Hebrew School.  He was still having enough difficulty learning to speak English.  He really wasn’t ready to add an additional stimulus until he was in second grade and nearly eight.  Here the congregation was several orders of maginitude smaller, the teacher worked with autistic kids as her day job, and he did so well that she thought I’d home-schooled him.  (I hadn’t.)  Everyone involved is taking it for granted that of course he will become a bar mitzvah on Shabbat after his thirteenth birthday.  I can’t take it for granted.  I remember when it seemed impossible too clearly, and I am in awe of what he’s accomplshed.  When we first got a diagnosis of autism, a psychologist told me that the only limitations on what he would be able to do would be those we put on him because of our own expectations.  I have worked hard never to say “you can’t”….and he is proving, in ways both small and great, that he can.

He’s had a fabulous birthday.  He asked for and got his very own MP3 player, which he has been listening to much of the day.  He had a cake at Hebrew School, and another in the afternoon for a small birthday party at McDonald’s.  He got toy, books and clothes, and was delighted by all three.  He got to run and play with his friends, and has spent a fair amount of time during the pauses in the day reading interesting statistics to me from some of his new books, and handing me one of the ear-buds for his MP3 player so I could hear a super special song.  We heard him at 3:00 a.m., cheering quietly from his room.  “It’s today!  It’s my birthday!”  That pretty well sums it up.  It’s your birthday, boychick, and you’re the best gift I’ve ever been given.

I already had that sort of self-examination in mind when I started reading my usual list of blogs this afternoon.  In them, I found discussions of a thing that evidently happened last Friday.  Someone sprayed a chemical irritant into the room being used to care for the youngest congregants in a house of worship.  A number people were treated for chemical irritation to skin, eyes and throats; some of the children needed oxygen because they’d gotten a lung full of the stuff and were so small that it sent them into shock.  Several mothers and children were taken to the hospital for emergency treatment.  Thankfully, no one was so seriously hurt they had to stay, but the congregants were badly frightened, and with good cause.

It clearly fits any reasonable definition of an act of terror.  It is pure luck that no permanent physical harm was done.  It was totally reprehensible.  Nothing exucses a random attack on a house of worship.  Nothing excuses an attack on innocents, and no victims are more innocent than babies.  But this didn’t happen in Pakistan or Iraq.  It happened at a mosque in Dayton, Ohio, in the middle of United States.

Now, I have heard how “they” all hate “us”, where “they” are Muslims.  I have heard that it is “they” who perpetrate the violence.  I have had friends hurt in cross-border raids in Israel.  But my own observation is that fanatics of any and every stripe perpetrate violence, that it accomplishes nothing save to breed fear and vengeance and further violence, and that when “they” are babies and their mothers, nothing can justify it.  I don’t care who is doing what to whom in Afghanistan, or Kurdistan, or Iran or Iraq.  Babies in child care to allow their mothers to worship in peace here, in this country that is supposed to carry the banner for religious freedom - especially here - should be safe.

I’ve studied religiously-prompted violence, both in the course of learning my own religious history and in college.  It leaves marks not only on those present, but marks on cultures that can last for generations or even millenia.  We still celebrate the failure of a plan for destruction that occurred 2600 years ago.  (Purim, which has been summarized as “they tried to kill us, it failed, let’s eat.)  Kristalnacht did not only mark Jewish culture and memory; it has marked German culture.  This isn’t on anything close to the same scale.  It isn’t institutionalized, is not government sponsored or sanctioned.  But it’s still an act of hate, carried out against those who could not possibly have done harm.  It’s still an act of terrorism, the sort of thing we see reported as occurring in places like Islamabad or Belgrade.

Not here.  Not in America.  We’re better than that.  Except it did, and we’re not.  I am ashamed for my country, for a government that has intentionally fed people’s fear and xenophobia so that someone thought it made sense to attack children.  And I’m thinking that what we need now is to learn to think of those little ones not as “their children”, somehow distinct from “our children” - but of all of them as everyone’s children.