So This is Yom Kippur...And What Have You Done?

So Wifey and I, like last year, are sitting out the Shul thing. I'm fasting, and she's not, and we fetch D1 later to take her to her friends Sari and Mike's place for a break fast. My "last supper" was a big sushi platter at Sukura... I was reading a lot about the holiday, and learned, for the first time, a crucial thing: the pleas for forgiveness during the prayers are plural, not individual. The congregation asks God to forgive US, not me. I guess that's why the rabbis want everyone in the community there. Well, I went by my fish pond and tossed in the sins, and spoke to the Big Man, as I do several times per day. If He decides to smite me for missing the fashion show at a Reform place, or the group of guys at the Orthodox one, so be it. Yesterday I went to the office to personally apologize to my partner Stuart, for always riding him about his work habits -- he rarely arrives at the office before 11. I was unsuccesful -- he didn't arrive to the office until 11:30. But forgiveness IS essential -- and so hard for some people. My mother in law and her best friend, Dobka, aren't speaking, over failures to visit (my mother in law skipped Dobka's husband's funeral, and Dobka hasn't visited my father in law in the nursing home). Both of these women are 90, and survived the Holocaust together, as well as the pioneer days of Israel, but can't forgive social slights, and so will live their final years apart. I was just fetching the mail, and a fellow had a truck blocking my driveway. He apologized, and asked if I needed to get out --no, I told him, block away. I asked what he was doing, and he was in the final stages of removing our neighbor's huge banyan tree. It had rotted from the outside of the manifold trunks, and was a danger of toppling over. The arborist told me it was well over 100 years old -- here before Miami was Miami, just about, and surely before our tropical hammock hood had any people (the first house, still standing, was built in 1925). So even the mighty, ancient trees must die, and move on. We are of course even more fragile. I guess that's what the Big Man wishes -- a day for us to take that to heart, to forgive, to realize we won't be here too long, and therefore to give and to love. A big T Storm is rolling in -- I feel badly for the orthodox who will be walking home soon, before walking back for the evening prayers and the blast of the shofar, to mark the end of the holiday. I sure hope my family, friends, and I made it to the final, greatest of all Year Books, the Book of Life, for another good year. This is the time of year my Peeps reflect, and repent, and try to figure out how to have better lives. I'm in for that, even though I'm out of the synagogue...