I'm not at all religious.
Yes, I'm Jewish. I have fealty toward the Jewish people. I recognize Jewish holidays, but frankly, more for the food, the tradition and the wishes of my wife than any obeisance to a non-existent or largely missing god.
God and I had a falling out more than half-a-century ago when I started reading about the holocaust. I mean, where the fuck were you--doom-scrolling?
Despite all that, yesterday evening my wife and I lit a Yahrzeit candle for my sister Nancy.
That's a candle that burns for 24-hours in commemoration of a loved one's death.
Nancy was a loved one.
She died on Mother's Day, in a motorcycle crack-up on 12th Avenue at 7AM, nineteen years ago.
The last time I saw Nancy was on a slab in the morgue. They had cleaned her up, but she was mangled and black-and-blue.
When I cab by the City Morgue on First between 31st and 32nd, I have to look out the opposite window. Still.
I don't need the flame of a small candle the size of a Dannon yogurt container to remind me of Nancy. I think about her all the time. Especially when I barbecue up in my little cottage on the Gingham Coast.
Nancy had a Lucullan appetite. I can practically see her with barbecue sauce on her face, grease on her hands and little pieces of corn in her hair.
Nancy also loved dogs. She would have spent her days up here, if she hadn't died, laying on the floor and hugging Sparkle, my two-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever. That would be a picture of pure happiness. Barbecue and golden retriever fluff. And Nancy's crooked smile.
We lit a candle last night at dinner.
It's a solemn thing, even if you're a non-believer. Jews have been lighting candles for thousands of years. Even though for most of Jewish history, deaths have out-paced paraffin.
I looked at the candle last night as I was moving food around on my Wedgwood.
Now that I'm old, I don't have much of an appetite anymore.
I looked at the candle and saw a line of five-point type.
"Product of China," it said.
A Yahrzeit candle made in China.
You have to think about that, really.
The economic incongruence of that.
Somehow even a $1.29 candle in a small glass enclosure that commemorates the death of a Jew must be made in China. This isn't anti-Chinese manufacturing.
It's about how MBAs' and their incessant ROI-ism have determined that everything in our lives and in every business, must cater to efficientism.
Their non-missing god is the god of margin. If you can widen the gap between the cost of making something and the price you can get for something, to their calculus, they've done something holy.
There's nothing materially wrong about a Chinese-sourced candle. But somehow I think things from candles to commercials, from cars to computers, from hamburgers to hula hoops, somehow I think things might mean more when they're made by people who care about them, people who believe in them.
Of course that includes advertising.
There I go again, harkening back.
You shouldn't outsource love.
No matter how prolific that outsourcing is.
No matter how many ducats are saved and no matter how much 'value' is returned to investors.
I ain't buying it.
Sometimes you have to believe, breathe and bleed.
There's more to life, or should be, than "the spread."
Like sisters you miss.
Because they died too young.
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