Luke Ford

After nearly 12 happy years with the program, I gave up my Kaiser health insurance in March because I couldn’t afford the $420 a month premium. I went to pay cash for a prescription today for fluticasone propionate nasal spray (otherwise I can’t breathe through my nose when I lie down) and it is $70 for the generic. Used to cost me $10 thru Kaiser. And don’t even get me started on the cash price for levitra.

So I haven’t picked up a prescription anywhere but Kaiser for a dozen years, so I felt awkward this morning when I set out for a new pharmacy. I’d asked a doctor friend (once via email and once via Facebook) if he would phone it in for me. While previously he had offered to call in prescriptions for me that I didn’t need (for anxiety), the one time I ask him for help, he ignores me.

I hope I have a refill left on my Kaiser prescription from about eight months previous. I’m not sure if it will transfer over. How does the system work? I Google it but don’t get an answer to my question.

So I’m feeling big and awkward when I tower over my pretty asian pharmacist and she’s just so efficient, I fall in love. She tells me the cash price of $70 for the generic. I say fine. She asks me for the phone number of my Kaiser pharmacy. So that’s how the system works. I step away so I can Google it on my phone. I come up with the number for the Kaiser facility. She dials, gets the switchboard, asks for the pharmacy, and gets put on hold.

“Do you want to wait or do you want me to call you?” she asks. “Sometimes I can wait on hold for an hour.”

I want her to call me.

This is just the kind of Chinesy wife I need. She’s so efficient and strong. She’ll take charge. She’ll cook and clean. She’ll kick my butt and push me to be more than I am now. And we’ll make such sweet sweet love and we’ll produce beautiful babies. I wonder if she’s active in an organized religion? What appreciation does she have for Orthodox Judaism? Is she single?

I go home to my blogging and Facebooking and then she calls. My prescription is ready. I walk over after the Cowboys game.

There’s a new Asian pharmacist. This one’s chubby, not particularly cute. As I wait to pick up my prescription and to get my flu shot, my Asian doll walks by without her uniform. She pushes in the code to the door, walks into the pharmacy and puts on her white frock and quietly, efficiently goes to work.

Damn, I wish she’d go to work on me.

How great thou art. Oh Lord my God. When I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made. I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul…

On the walk out, I make sure to say hi to the cute asian check-out girl. I love shopping at this store on Sunday mornings because I get to see her smiling face. While my pharmacist was all woman, the check-out girl is all girl, just a friendly giggly perky teenager with crooked teeth and a beautiful soul. I want to ask her, “Are you a Christian?”

When I was growing up, I learned that whenever you encountered someone who was particularly nice, you could take it to the bank that he was a Christian.

It’s almost Yom Kippur. Growing up, I was taught that Yom Kippur was a primitive ritual for primitive people. God wants the heart. He wants you to simply accept and reciprocate His love, which He displayed by sending His Son to die on a cross.

I took up golf in my teens and I called my nine iron my “Yom Chippur.”

In late 1989, I decided to convert to Judaism, but living in isolated country areas far from Jews, I had to do things on my own for a few years. I’d find out the date and then abstain from food and drink for as long as I could (a few hours). That made the day seem different, momentous. I didn’t do much praying. Instead, I’d read something Jewish for an hour or two.

My first Yom Kippur service was at the Conservative synagogue Ohev Shalom in Orlando, Florida. My live-in girlfriend and I went for Kol Nidre in 1993. I was shocked. The service just went on and on. It was mind-numbing. I hated it.

We were both so exhausted from those hours that we spent the next day in bed and didn’t make it to shul.

My next Yom Kippur (and the three after that) were at Stephen S. Wise Reform temple. I saw all my friends. Everybody was dressed up. I dug the high heels and short skirts. The service was solemn but festive. The vibe was much more upbeat than I would’ve expected prior to falling in love with Judaism.

Since 2001, I’ve only attended high holiday services in Orthodox shuls. I’m tempted to say that these days are more significant, more momentous, more exciting in Orthodox shuls than non-Orthodox ones because the Orthodox take the day more seriously, but I don’t think I can say that. Every identifying Jew seems to take the day seriously. Those who do next to nothing Jewishly try to fast on Yom Kippur. In every synagogue I’ve known, it’s a big day. Every identifying Jew knows in their bones that there’s something uniquely powerful about the day, that for Jews in practice (though not in theory) it’s the holiest day of the year.

What are the biggest misconceptions non-Jews have about Yom Kippur? I don’t think they realize the upbeat joyful manly way we confess our sins. We’re not all down about it. We rejoice in this opportunity.

There are three days a year when I feel like the spiritual world is more powerful than the physical world — the two days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

I had this girlfriend who was raised in Modern Orthodox day schools but grew up to hate the religion. One year, I really wanted to spend part of Yom Kippur with her. She stroked me on but didn’t call me back to make final arrangements to meet until after Kol Nidre services began and I could no longer answer the phone. She wanted to test me if to see I would put talking to her before my religion. I didn’t. And a few months later, we broke up for the sixth and final time.

For me, it’s been 32 months.

* A former GF would say to me: “I just want to feel full.” Such a sweet way of putting it.

* I gave up my Kaiser health insurance in March because I couldn’t afford the $420 a month premium. Went to pay cash for a prescription today for fluticasone propionate nasal spray (otherwise I can’t breathe through my nose when I lie down) and it is $70 for the generic. Used to cost me $10 thru Kaiser. And don’t even get me started on the cash price for levitra. It ought be paid for by the government.

* A friend tells me: My writing mentor gives a great assignment, one you are allowed to repeat over and over: Write about the most humiliating thing that’s happened to you.

She says all the stuff people love you for in real life, they hate you for in your writing. Ivy League degrees, successful marriage, beautiful kids, stunning career: all alienating. People want to read about your failures, humiliations, degradation.

* “It bothers most men when I pay,” Holly Randall told an interviewer, “but somehow it never bothered Luke.”

* I have been shomer brit five months. A friend says: “Jesus you are a machine! I don’t know how you abstain from wanking like that, I honestly doubt I’ve ever gone a week since I was a kid. When I was 19 I almost cut a trip to DC short because I had no privacy and was going mad from lack of wanking. Would have paid exorbitant airfare and flown 3000 miles for the privilege of wanking.”

* “Great ideas don’t necessarily make you comfortable. Go with what is charged. Go with what makes you uncomfortable.”
“When you tell the truth, the air crackles.” (Terrie Silverman)

* “Make concrete what feeds you and how you work best. What keeps you going? What inspires you? How can you give yourself more inspiration?” (Terrie Silverman)

* I didn’t serve two tours in Iraq, crawling through the muck and the blood and the desert with machine gun bullets whizzing over my head, to come home and to be told to stay quiet in shul and to date women who are “age appropriate.”