My Lovely Dwelling Place

  59 59 is the 17 th prime number. It is an Einstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n-1… whatever that means! A regular icosahedron has 59 stellations… what? It’s the last minute in a given hour and the last second in a given minute… which sounds rather profound therefore I like it. It’s the approximate number of days in 2 lunar months – not that we use lunar months – it just sounds long. It’s the atomic number of praseodymium – a rare earth metal we rarely talk about… and a word we can likely not say 3 times fast. 59 may also be the title of a future Adele album… And it is too darn many candles to put on a cake without starting a fire. In the last 59 years – my lifetime - we’ve seen the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK assassinated, the beginning of Medicare and other social programs, Civil Rights, Mao’s Cultural Revolution – where between 500,000 to 2,000,000 people were killed for not agreeing with the “party line”. Israel’s Six-Day War, MLK ...

  “Uuh Got” A phrase my mom used to say – It’s actually “Oh God” in a French accent with a hint of despair, resignation, and inevitability wrapped up in two words summing up life in the moment. It’s really quite French if you think about it… It’s amazing how apropos this two-word phrase from the annals of my murky memory have become. I can hear her saying it – and I say it like she did in memory of her. I view it as a prayer – sometimes it’s the best prayer I got. Many a time there are literally no words – if I can say literally. Things have been heavy lately – personally, professionally, in the world at large. You know, life isn’t easy on a good day – and it seems there has been a concerted effort to make everything more difficult. I’ve been getting comfort from Psalm 62 for the last few days. It was written by David – not sure when. It might have been when he was running from his son Absalom, who was stealing the kingdom and planning to kill him – mighty big fail an...