When I wear a short-sleeve shirt or roll up my right arm,  people often ask me what the bracelets mean, or why I have a tattoo with a pirate skull inside of a Jewish Star.

The bracelets and the tattoo have meaning for me. The bracelets have evolved and become something I wear every day.

Some are rope bracelets, made and worn by Buddhist monks to support peace, meditation, and tolerance. I’ve been wearing them for a while.

The brightly colored bracelets are Lokia Pride bracelets, created to support equal rights, gay, lesbian and trans people.

I got two, and have been wearing them since the latest assaults on trans gender rights.

The Lokia bracelets also called “cause” or “inspiration” bracelets each have two white beads in them, one contains water from the ice on Mt. Everest, the highest point on the earth, the other contains mud from the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth.

I like the symbolism of that, some of the proceeds also support the effort to clean up the garbage left on Mt. Everest by rich tourists climbing the mountain.

The sales of these bracelets support animal rescue, environmental, children’s welfare and other causes.

I tend to wear drab clothes, all blue and I find that I value having these bracelets on my writs. They help to keep me calm and grounded. They bring color to into my life, and although the colors I wear are boring, I love the colors.

The bracelets support causes and things I believe in. I give the rope bracelets to the Mansion residents and the refugee artists in Sue Silverstein’s art class. I like wearing my heart on my sleeve rather than in my mouth.

The pirate tattoo represents the grave marker for a Jewish Pirate named Moses Cohen Henriques, a pal of Henry Morgan, a notorious pirate. Henriques was a Jewish Jamaican pirate captain who famously captured a Spanish Galleon on behalf of the British Royal Navy (he found out the routes where these very secret ships sailed)  loaded with one billion dollars in gold without firing a shot – he talked the captain into surrendering –  and who quickly retired from pirating to offer consulting advice to other pirates.

He died in his bed and never killed a soul. My tattoo is a replica of the marking on his tombstone in Jamaica. Like most people, I was surprised to hear about Jewish Pirates, if I’d known about them my life might have been very different.

I was very happy to get this tattoo.

Sounds like Captain Henriques figured out how to do it.