Before his icy cold, who can stand?

Psalms 147  "He tosses his snow about like fleece-wool ... Frost like ashes .. Ice like little crumbs .... Before his icy cold, who can stand?"

I was writing about that guy in the woolen coat with his black beret pulled down over his ears ... yeah! The guy who can still shake his walking stick and kvetch at the same time. Sleep didn't come easy in the creaky old man's creaky old house and it didn't last. Sleep irregularities seem to be common in the Last Quarter and when the clock turned 4 AM and he could feel irregularities in his cardiac rhythm which bode poorly for continued sleep, he arose. Like Phoenix of his Ash-es ... (couldn't resists).

At least three grandspawn were to arrive after I was done with my visitors, today, and they needed to eat. 4 AM is as good a time as any to cook, especially when atrial fibrillation is doing its things ... one of which is making it hard to think.

So, just happens to be that this is the same guy ... walking in the aisles (hey! any of you Second Quarter types, try feeling for that peripatetic old man ambling with a slightly lost look in his eyes down -- or was it up -- aisle 4 in the Grocery Section. This is the same guy in his not-very-updated kitchen. No tiles sent through Prague. No Convcave Convex ovens ... no ice box big enough for the inlaws who are gone already, anyway.

Just me and what to cook. It's freezing cold? Ah, a cassoulet (Cholent, if you're from Minsk) to warm the two tweens, the adolescent and their parents. They're hungry? A potato, carrot, spinach, onion pudding (Kugel, if you're from Pinsk). Oh! And some hot cranberry, apple, lemon, orange, raisin compote (mashed hot fruit if yer from Selma, Alabama). Goes well with Vanilla Ice Cream for dessert.

Anyhow. As the Old Guy is standing and doing this and that (what did I forget? what should I add? What was my address in Toledo in 1957?), I was noticing how I made a point of completely emptying every sauce pan and dish that was to go into the final mix. Was I a parsimonious, skin-flinty kinda guy who needed to make certain I was getting every last potato-shred into the oven?

Any case? A memory came. There were some Wiseguys ... Scholars ... who live about 2,000 years ago. Their colleagues called them the Ten Waistrels or Time Wasters. They talked and disputed and studied all day. One of their ruminations came to mind, as, perhaps, a result of my thinking about Psalms at 4:00. They were trying to reconcile two passages.

"To God belongs the Earth and all that it contains."

and

"The Heavens? The Heavens are for God. The Earth (S)He gave to the Children of Mankind."

These scholars tended to get nervous ... freak out, if passages in the canonized Scriptures couldn't be reconciled. One of them had an aha moment.

"The first? the first is before making a blessing. The second? after making a blessing."

Ah, so I got it for the Old Guy, too. The first passage is before I totally scrape everything into the final mix ... and the second? you got the second.

Timer is about to go off on kugel.

Bye.... we'll eat at 6:00 in this Icy Northeast Corridor.