I'm starting this post on 9:29 PM Motzai Shabbos. There are the beginnings of a hurricane underway in New York. This song comes to mind. Please G-d, all will be OK. It's amazing how nice the weather was the day before the storm - something profound about that.

I've started reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, after loving the film. The book, of course, has much more in it than the movie ever could. This is why I like reading the book after seeing a film, it's like a great peirush on the outline version you saw on screen.

I've got about thirty pages left in Beautiful Unbroken. I don't want it to end. Do you ever feel that way about a book? So I'm putting off the end. Do you ever do that? It is an amazing work. If you go here you'll find six excerpts from the first six chapters of the book. I decided to stop copying pieces. The other day I read a part to a friend and made her cry. It was about Mary Jane being with a man who was dying as his family gathered around him watching slides of his life. She really took in her life in a poetic way and gave the world quite a gift by putting it into a book.

I just came across a review of my book. Maybe for the next edition I'll include this lovely quote, "In the Field is an expression of a person's most inner thoughts. Neil, you seem a kind and loving soul." - Jane Reichhold, translator of Basho: The Complete Haiku.

I also came across a sheet which holds the sole source that I know of for an oft quoted idea today - that Rivkah and Yitzchak didn't converse much with each other. The Netziv writes on Breishit 24:65 (Parshat Chayei Sarah) that Rivkah covered her face as Yitzchak approached to meet her "out of of abundant awe and shame because she thought she was unworthy to be his wife." He says that this fear stayed in her heart and this is why she was never with Yitzchak in the same way that Rachel was with Yaakov and Sarah was with Avraham. When those women had something on their mind they were comfortable talking to their husband about it. This was not the case regarding Rivkah. (I basically translated till this point; for the rest, see it "inside.")

To the best of my recollection no-one has ever commented on the time of my posts. And yet I am self conscious about it. It feels like Motzai Shabbos, even though as I write this line it is technically early Sunday A.M. I'm going to have the post say 11:59 Saturday night, because it still feels like night to me.

The rain is pouring down harder than I recall hearing, or hearing about. According to the radio there are floods all around the city and driving is definitely to be avoided. Hurricane Irene is still getting stronger, winds could go up to 90 miles an hour. A newscaster is reporting from Times Square, saying it feels tropical and he wouldn't want anyone to go out there. It's a shame he, for some reason, has to be there. He says there's a lot of police cars and pretty much no other cars. There are people walking around, some are playing street hockey in Father Duffy Square. Central Park so far has three plus inches of rain. There may be a brief tornado in the morning.

I have eleven pages left in Mary Jane Nealon's remarkable Beautiful Unbroken.

It's now Sunday morning. Things seem OK in my home, but many have suffered a lot from Hurricane Irene. Jordana Horn put it this way, "Our town is flooded and will take a long time to recover. I am glad for those of you for whom Irene was nothing, but please be sensitive to people who have experienced real damage from the storm." A young man from Teaneck wrote, that he was off to grandma's house with his family because a tree smashed through their roof and that he wishes people who say the storm was nothing would just quietly thank G-d that they weren't affected. In a related note someone wrote, "That was no Hurricane! That was a Hurri-Joke. Nothing like Hurricane Gloria of the Eighties," to which someone else responded, "I think the dead woman in south Jersey might disagree with you."

I hope to write more about the passing of one of my favorite poets. For now here's just one of the most perfect poems ever penned - IMHO.

Now

By Samuel Menashe

There is never an end to loss, or hope

I give up the ghost for which I grope

Over and over again saying Amen

To all that does or does not happen--

The eternal event is now, not when