Man Plans And God Laughs

After a pause we are back

Greetings:

I have not posted on Substack since the end of 2023.  It’s time to tell you why. 

When I first imagined writing a novel about a Jewish boarding school in the deep south I had hopes and dreams for the novel that probably aren’t unusual, especially if one is a new writer. Among them: best seller status, and a movie that ends with the words “based on the novel The Academy of Smoke And Mirrors: A Boarding School On The Brink.”

When those dreams took form I had not yet tasted of the self-publishing world’s frantic, endless quest for attention.  And I was ignorant of the fact that self-promotion is the equivalent of breathing for the self-published author—stop and it’s over.  Protected by my inexperience, I permitted myself to dream. The book would be well written—it is!—and tell a unique story—it does!—and those were my answers to the inner voice that counselled a deflating realism. What’s more, those dreams helped me finally get to the ever-receding finish line of publication.

In the novel’s afterward, I likened the experience of writing Smoke And Mirrors to hiking up and down a two-mile high mountain. Unfortunately, the path down took an unexpected turn. I was moving ahead confidently on solid rock, when suddenly the trail crumbled, leaving me (and my wife, as I shall tell) scrambling madly to grab onto something.

            Man plans and God laughs—that old country proverb, which rhymes in Yiddish, concisely captures the human condition.  We make our plans, we dream and do, falter and fulfill, but in the end something far beyond our ken picks our path and nudges us along it.

            And so it was for my wife Dale and for me.  Five years into the writing of Smoke And Mirrors Dale was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A small and innocuous spot had turned into a mortal threat.  Nothing has been the same since.

The plans I had to promote Smoke And Mirrors seemed unjustifiably time-consuming. Our diagnosis started us on another journey, one through the health care system with its many by-ways and detours. In college Dale was a political science major and I studied economics. We both went to law school, but now we are rushing to learn as much as we can about treatments for her particular condition.  This requires knowledge of oncology and immunology and biotechnology and genetics and statistics, not to mention many other disciplines.  It can be overwhelming.

I have two friends who have advised me about how to proceed.  One, whom I will call Tony, is a friend from elementary school.  Tony, a self-made businessman, shrewd and tough, is a survivor of pancreatic cancer. He was never a scholar, and, true to himself, he told me not to read the Internet.  “It will just depress you, and by the time you see it it’s out of date.”

David, on the other hand, is a doctor, a lawyer, and a lifelong learner. He’s always reading. “You’ve got to read everything you can, read until your eyes ache, and then keep reading until you know as much as the doctors treating Dale.”  Both approaches, I have learned, have their merits.

Tony told me his doctor had asked him if he “was a praying man.” The doctor went on to say that, in his experience, those who pray do a little better.

We’ve taken that to heart.

It is the season of spring: Easter is days away, Passover less than a month.  Both are holidays of rebirth and renewal, the promise of which keeps us going no matter the circumstances. This year Dale and I are living in the land of sickness. Next year may we be in the land of health.

I wish everyone a happy Passover or Easter.