A heart I know by heart

Homesick

Last year, I joined Facebook, for the same reason that many of you did: Phantom made me. In the year or so that I've been on, it went from being a clubhouse to being an interactive address book. I still spend way too much time there, spying on you all, but I'm not flinging pies anymore the way I was in the beginning.

My friend list consists of a jumble of family, friends, and acquaintances. Among them are almost all of the small handful of people I would call if a true disaster struck (almost: ahem, Mom and E., when are you going to join facebook, again?), some are long-lost people with whom I have been thrilled to be back in contact, but most are everyday friends, or former everyday friends: people whom I liked well enough while we had proximity on our side, but did not hang onto as time and distance intervened. A decent number are simply acquaintances, shtetl folk, potentially useful contacts.

Friends and Acquaintances: it will not surprise anyone who knows me that I am a Rabbit on the Winnie-the-Pooh character quiz.

And I will now admit, there is one person on my FB list who I can't remember at all, not even a little bit, but we had so many college friends in common I felt I was in the wrong for not remembering him, so I clicked "accept" instead of "ignore," expecting that any day now, some dining hall conversation would surface in my memory. That hasn't happened yet, but from his facebook activity, he seems like a very nice gay man, of the sort I was often having dining hall conversations with.

A jumble. Like the real world, facebook is a jumble.

Today, though. Today, a friend who was a couple years ahead of me in high school set up a facebook group for people who went through my high school's extracurricular theater program, those of us who consider ourselves students of its director.

I do. She taught me English and Theater, and she was my advisor, a role that was a little like being an untrained shrink, at my school. I chose her because I was a techie, a set builder, in fact, and it was not something I can easily explain to someone who wasn't there, but it was serious, what we were doing there, at School That Saved Me High. We were in high school, and therefore prone to tearing each other to shreds, but what we created? It was professional, and obsessive, and joyous, and good. We had chutzpah, and we taught it to each other. We had no stage: we started with a black box and transformed it into whatever we wanted, making magic with things we designed ourselves on graph paper purchased for math class and built with power tools we mastered along the way. (I specialized in staircases, because I was good at trig.)

Of course, theater was a multi-grade activity, so in a very real way, my cohort at school is not my class at all, but everyone who did theater during my four years, from three years older than me to three years younger, and there were some legends still echoing from the classes that graduated immediately before I arrived. Scrolling down the group my friend created, it was like being at the virtual version of the high school reunion I've been longing for for at least 20 years.

Muffled

Outside the store's window, the snow is sedately filling the air above the street, melting the moment it touches anything. There are no customers today. Behind the register, I'm knitting a baby blanket in fine-gauge merino for an old friend's newborn, and letting my own stillness fill me.

My wall calendar, newly changed to February, says "excavate," and shows hands on a shovel flinging up dirt from behind a mound of earth. January was "fix," with strong fingers making a tool usable again. Flipping one page too many, I read "resume," in March, but I tried not to see the picture. Time enough when we get there.

My mother's gingerbread recipe

For Turtle Wexler and Phantom. This makes a sweet, cakey kind of gingerbread.

1/2 c. butter, softened--and soften up some extra for hard sauce, too
1 c. sugar
2 eggs, beaten

2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. clove

1 c. molasses

1 c. boiling water

confectioners sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 8 x 8 baking pans or one lasagna pan.

Combine all dry ingredients in a medium bowl and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream the sugar in the butter. Add eggs and mix well.

Add the dry ingredients with the molasses and combine thoroughly. (While you're mixing is the time to turn on the kettle.)

Add the boiling water last. I like to use the molasses cup to measure the boiling water and stir it a little, to get all the molasses into the cake. Mix until smooth.

Pour into pan(s). Bake 45 minutes, or until a sharp knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Set out to cool slightly.

While the cake is baking, prepare the hard sauce--this is not really optional, unless you are very silly about your priorities regarding calories and deliciousness. Real, actual hard sauce apparently involves alcohol, but this is how we always made it in our house:

Take some softened butter and a more or less equal amount of confectioners sugar. How much is up to you, but a little goes a long way, though, so I'd start with a couple tablespoons, and you can always make more. Mix with a fork until completely combined. Add more sugar or more butter, to taste.


Eating a bite of hot gingerbread with a dab of hard sauce is pretty much the best antidote to winter I can think of.

Bring on 2009!

Hi, all. I didn't really want to check on how long it's been since I abandoned you the last time I posted, but then I checked anyway: it seemed like a million years, but it turns out it wasn't quite two weeks, which for me isn't that long of a gap. The good news hiding inside my tenuous grip on the passage of time is that it got so busy at the store that it felt like there would be no end to it--even though, alas, I knew to treasure every single $1500 day. We were slammed, crazy-busy with lines of people at the register at the high points in the day. I haven't run the numbers on the month yet (the store's closed today) but I suspect I'm going to find we're still down from last December: everyone is, all through retail, and I don't have any reason to believe we're different, but it wasn't for lack of customers. The month started slow, and we didn't have as many large sales, but I'm pretty sure we had at least as many transactions as last year. This is good, whatever financial stuff comes down the pike. We're doing something right, if people in the 'hood are choosing to bring their dollars to us when dollars are scarcer.

I'm not going back to last New Year's Day in any kind of archival way, but I suspect, without looking, that it sucked royally, and last January went downhill from there. This year, I'm feeling okay. It's been a better start, anyway. I've been living my life pretty intensely these past few years, and 2008 was up there for intensity. In the lows I was a furious, sobbing, wreck, curled tighly into myself, unreachable: the highs were like sunshine and chocolate and swimming a mile and the feel of your baby's cheek under your lips. The work I did getting from the first to the second was really fucking hard, not that I was doing it alone--well, that's the point, that's what I had to learn how to do, to uncurl and let myself be reached, to trust the love around me. It's harder than it looks, this trust business. I'm hoping it gets easier, though, that this year the direction is uphill, not down. I'm hoping, I'm hoping.

A recipe for Jane Dark

Here's the chili we made in our house tonight. It's based on one that AJ from JP made with us a million years ago on a vacation in Maine, but there are variations.

One onion, chopped
Two medium carrots, cut in coins

(The rest can be gathered and prepared while these cook)
1-2 slices jalapeno, minced
2 cloves garlic, pressed
1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp cumin

1/2 cup green olives, cut in half
two cans diced stewed tomatoes, with juice
one can chili beans--we use the kind that have black/red/kidney beans all in one can
2 tbsp. cocoa powder

a decent handful of sliced, blanched almonds
a decent handful of TVP

olive oil

Heat a tbsp or two of the olive oil in a skillet on medium. Add onion and carrots, stir to coat, then cover skillet and allow to cook until onion is translucent, stirring very occasionally. Add jalapeno, garlic, and spices. Sautee one minute. Add tomatoes, olives, cocoa, and beans, stir, and allow to simmer ten minutes: leave uncovered for thicker chili, but beware that the TVP will absorb some juice. Add almonds and TVP. Simmer 2-3 minutes.

One hundred and two

My mother loves finding patterns in numbers, so this is for you, mom:

Today is January 2nd, 01/02. It would also have been my grandmother's 102nd birthday. Mind you, she didn't want it to be: after her 90th birthday she often told people what a shame it was that "they made you live so long," but she hung on to 99. She started out at 5 feet, half an inch, and by the end she was a tiny, wrinkled person, still pronouncing a few words in a Scottish accent (shoogar) despite having spent most of seven decades in this country.

I think the thing she was waiting for was to know that all of her children were grandparents. A week before she died, my cousin's baby girl was born and so all of her children had grandchildren. I think after that she felt like everything was set and she could go if she had to.

My grandmother taught me how to knit. Not how to purl, just how to knit. I figured out how to make stockinette stitch on my own (that would be "flat knitting instead of bumpy" to all of you non-knitters out there) and she assumed I'd figured out purling. Eventually, I did.

My grandmother was also my first correspondent. I was seven, and she gave me stationery with my name on it, and sometimes she would send me stamps.

She gave me a way into yarn and a way into words, a way into art, though she would not ever have called herself an artist.

She was Presbyterian. I broke with Jewish tradition and gave my daughter her name. I consider it the best decision of my life.

Phone call

A. is on the phone to new mama, Z.'s Auntie Lo.


A. to Lo: You spell it in Yiddish. K-v-a-t...*

Z.: K! V! E! T!

A. to Lo: Oh, Z.'s spelling now, k-v-e-t.

Lo on the phone: Z., the end of that word is "c-h."


Go forth and Kvetch Out Loud...it's Wednesday Whining!

*A kvaterin is someone who agrees to be responsible for a baby's Jewish education.

Welcome to the world, Baby O!

Check out the comments (unlike me, you should actually read the comments before commenting. Flipper is here! Hooray to moms Lo and Co!

One will spread our ashes round the yard

Home again, finally.

After too much time spent on living room couches or in the car over the last five days, and after far too little time spent paying attention to my own thoughts, I finally squeezed in a late-afternoon walk over in my little patch of woods.

Since the last time I walked there, before we went up to A.'s parents' house, the trees have gone from mostly covered to mostly bare, and the leaves that were up on the branches have settled down on the ground in an inches-thick carpet of gold, red, orange, green. The little shallow creek at the bottom of the woods is covered over with leaves, too; in places it looks like little more than a wet ribbon in the russet groundcover.

I came to the spot where I usually perch on the creek's bank to let my thoughts wander along while the water flows over its shallow bed. The place where I leave the path for my spot lies between the footbridge and the fencing that keeps the erosion-control project safe from wandering feet and paws. It's a favorite place for dogs to get wet, and suddenly I realized what it was that my eyes had just barely been registering without taking in, as I'd made my way down along the path.

Fine, grey dust lying on top of the leaves. Fine and grey, but not uniform in grade or regular in shape. Fine and grey, across the leaves on the side of the creek. On top of the leaves that carpeted the creek itself. Settled on the bottom of the creekbed. As yet completely undisturbed.

I walked along from rock to rock for a few yards, respectfully, carefully. I found more fine, grey dust on the opposite bank of the creek, another place where pawprints are common.

I stood there on the rocks in the creek for a few long minutes and thought of Smartest Dog, whose ashes I spread in the St. Mary's River years before I moved to my house near the woods. I thought of Diva Dog, whose ashes are buried near the gate to our garden, who loved this spot in the creek. I thought of the Iron and Wine song, "Naked As We Came," that made me cry this morning while we were on our way to a shiva visit.

I thought of how much longer it is, forever, with people than with dogs. Decades and decades longer, god willing.

I thought of how little I know of how you get there. To forever.

Buy Nothing Day

Way-ell, I didn't buy nothing. I bought lunch for me and Z., and I bought McVitie's chocolate biscuits, sold at the corner store in my in-laws largely Irish immigrant neighborhood. (Alas, they only had milk chocolate, not plain. But I'll manage.)

However, the store was closed today. The Co-op on the Corner is closed the Friday after Thanksgiving, and so is everything else on the corner, so after two years of dismal sales we put up an Adbusters flyer in the window and decided to call it a celebration.

Thanksgiving at the in-laws--well, I had some kind of stomach upset that kept me from enjoying the morning, but A. valiantly braved the local supermarket chain just before it closed and got me ginger tea, which made a big difference. I did manage to eat some small portions of the meal. I'm much improved but not all the way better today--could be stress. I do okay with A.'s immediate family but I kind of shut down when her extended family is involved. I realized that I often need to just retreat from the scene--sometimes my body comes up with some physical thing, sometimes something else overwhelms me. Anyhow, worth keeping track of, I guess.


Here is what we veggie folks ate last night--this is my recipe, and I've made it in four states, the District of Columbia, and Mexico City.

Thanksgiving casserole:

Layer one:
1 1/2 c. lentils
1/2 tsp. ground sage, bay leaf
salt and pepper

Layer two:
olive oil
1 tsp ground sage
2 clove(s) garlic
1 red onion, finely chopped
2 apples (Fuji, Gala, etc.), diced
1/2 c. walnuts, chopped
1/2-1 c. dried cranberry
1/2 small jicama, diced (optional)

Layer three:
2 cups grated sharp cheddar

Preheat oven to 350.

Cook lentils w/ bay leaf until just tender.

While lentils are cooking, saute all ingredients for layer two, beginning with garlic and onion. Apple should go last.

Remove bay leaf from lentils, drain well, add sage and salt and pepper to taste.

Spread layers in a large, lidded casserole, in order indicated. End with cheese. Bake at 350 for 35 minutes, then remove lid and cook for 5-10 minutes, just so cheese looks more finished.

You can make this vegan by leaving out the cheese, but it's better with cheese. Though in my opinion, everything is better with cheese.

To everything, there is a season

This November thing selects for quantity over quality, doesn't it? Though it's also pushing me to put up more photographs out of deadline desperation, and maybe that's all to the good. It certainly livens up the place. In real life, I crave sunlight and brightness and I'm not sure why I continue to inflict this dark, melodramatic template on everyone, except that I'm still kind of delighted by the way my late-night fiddling with color turned out. Also, I'm lazy.

I chose it because I was mired in grief and depression when I started blogging, and this is the template you wind up with if you're mired in grief and depression, I think. Well, no one who's been reading for long will deny that those have both had their place here.

I'm heading into the toughest part of my year, Thanksgiving through my birthday (early April). Well, I'm usually doing better a few weeks before my birthday, but I've learned not to count on it, or I wind up depressed about still being depressed, and that's just depressing, if you know what I mean.

This morning was hard. I had a hard night last night, and woke up to grey half-light, feeling bleak and pointless. Like being me was pointless.

Tuesday is the day I'm most committed to swimming, so I swam, but I managed it only through the inertia of driving a route I've memorized. You know the way you drive yourself to work, say, or the supermarket, mostly by telling yourself that's where you want to wind up? After you've set the destination, some not-quite-conscious part of your brain takes care of the navigation for you.

Well, first I drove home from dropping Z. off, even though the only reason I drove those four blocks was to continue on to the pool. But I drove home because I was trying to stay depressed. Luckily, parking is tight on our block, and there wasn't a spot near our house. Instead of circling, I let that not-quite-conscious navigator take me to the Y like it was originally planning to, anyway, but all the while I was lining up excuses to turn back: I just washed my hair yesterday anyway; I didn't want to be wet on such a grey day; it was already nearly 9:00 and I had a meeting at 11:00; I hate the smell of chlorine; etc.

My autopilot is sturdy, though. I tuned back in to my surroundings and found I'd made it to the locker room. There was another moment where I told myself how comfortable my clothes were and how cold my feet would be if I took them out of my shoes and socks, but really, the locker room is plenty warm. I took my time stowing things in the locker. I took my time with the lock. I got in the water because wouldn't I feel ridiculous changing into my bathing suit and not getting wet? I swam the first lap because I might as well, now I was wet.

In the end, I managed my half-mile. It didn't pull me out of the depression of the morning, but maybe it gave me enough of a boost that chatting with a friend at lunch and playing with Z. in the afternoon and a gift of flowers from my sweetie in the evening let me climb out the rest of the way.

Running, Leaves

Z. visiting the park near her aunties Lo and Co, somewhere nebulously-identified in the New York metropolitan area. Edited: there are still more pix up at the Family O, including an adorable one of Z. with Teh Maggie!

Photos courtesy of A.

(Mama stayed home and played with iTunes.)

Pumpkins

Z. adores pumpkins. This is something that arose spontaneously in her, as though by instinct. Last year, the first Fall she had language, she was able to tell us about her passion, and gamely, we introduced oil pastels and glitter into our household, because how else would a one-and-a-half year old in a cast decorate a pumpkin?

Eventually, those fabulous pumpkins began to go the way of all things, so we moved them to a corner of Z.'s digging box, which is a raised vegetable bed that we just left unplanted the past two summers.

So the pumpkin vines that have been taking over our garden are not quite volunteers. If you put a giant native squash, full of seeds, on top fertile earth and let it rot there, and turn the earth over it when the resulting mess becomes unsightly, you cannot feign surprise when vines push their way up the following year. But we have been startled at how many vines, and how vigorous, our non-planting produced. We have thinned them, and pulled them out, and cut them back, and in the end, we were left with only one pumpkin, which is as many as we need, though not nearly as many as Z. wants.



This weekend, we took Z. to a Fall Festival at Nearby Arboretum, co-sponsored by The Co-op on the Corner. It was humid and in the upper 80's, but we rode up from the improvised parking lot in an air-conditioned shuttle bus with one of Z.'s daycare classmates, Articulate Girl with Perfect Braids, and when we got off at the top of the hill, the autumn smell of straw was in the summery air from the scarecrow-making booth, and the lawns were abuzz with parents and young children.

The Festival had a great, great many pumpkins, all of adorable size, all waiting eagerly to be painted and beglittered. Z. chose one of near-perfect roundness, with a marvelous stem, and set to work. Another daycare classmate, Exquisite Girl with Long Straight Hair, set up her pumpkin next to Z.'s and they daubed tempura and sprinkled mylar with absolute concentration for longer than you would think possible. Z.'s technique was to incorporate each sprinkling of glitter in with a new application of paint, which resulted in a muddy, purplish effect and was not easy on paintbrushes.



I just plain like that muddy, sparkly little pumpkin. Even indoors in the dark evening, relegated to a Safe Place on top of the broken stereo, that little pumpkin shines.

Generosity

S: Hey, Z., do you know what we're going to do today when the stores open?

Z.: (looks expectant)

S.: We're going to run some errands!

Z.: We're going to get new play-doh!

S.: And we're going to make a package for Charming Boy and take it to the post office. It's his birthday in two weeks. Not even two weeks. Do you know how old he's turning?

Z.: Two!

S.: No, Three.

Z.: (in tones of awe) Thrwrweeee! We can get him a thrwee.*

S.: Should we get him a three?

Z.: Yes! And he can hold it tight!!! in his hand so it won't get brwoken.

*a three-shaped candle.

Triggers

Today, the dog bite on Z.'s left hand is pretty much healed, and it's her last day on antibiotics. She may not even have a scar, when the redness fades.

Oh, yeah, her left hand: the same arm that was broken last year. It didn't make me happy to see her favoring it again, though she only favored it for a couple of days. And it shocked me back to the NICU to smell antibiotics in her diaper--the first diapers she ever wore in her life reeked of amoxicillin, too. Not that I was allowed to change those, since they were still attempting to get a urine sample from her at the time and it was very easy to dislodge that little bag, but I smelled them when the nurses took them off. I recognized the smell last week from how it smelled 2 1/2 years ago. I recognized the smell then from my own pee earlier that morning, in the maternity ward across town where I'd given birth and she'd been taken from me. Those needless chemicals passing through our bodies and our separation were just two of the long list things that I hated about having wound up in the hospital to birth her.

And the dogbite itself, well it flipped my mother out, thirty-odd years after I was bitten as a toddler.

It was a week like that. Everything and everyone set on edge. I've been seized by an irrational need to hold Z.'s hand everywhere we walk.

So when I was riding in a friend's car this weekend, and I watched the sequence unfurl as we were hit by another car turning left? It was just the next shoe dropping, you know? It was the thing I'd been expecting from the moment I got in the car, the thing I expect whenever I get in any car. The only thing surprising was that when we looked for damage, there was hardly a mark to be seen: the fender had done its job well.

I only wish every collision left so little to regret in its wake.

Heading North

See y'all after the weekend!

Answering the birthday question

This year, I learned that chiropractic works. I learned how to knit with fishing line and beads. I learned a pomegranate tree will survive and break dormancy in my front storeroom. I learned how to take care of curly hair. I learned what an airbag looks like after it's gone off. I learned a good therapist is worth almost anything, and so is a good events coordinator. I learned what a failing transmission sounds like. I learned how to order books from publishers electronically. I learned what pwned means.

To my surprise this year, I learned I am a writer. I thought I was a reader, a teacher of writing, and an editor of other people's work, but writing itself was not something I claimed. Now, thanks to some of you, I do claim it.

I learned something I had been taught but had not understood: that writing is in its essence an art form of connection. My words on this screen are nothing but pixels until you read them. But once you do, the words I was hearing in my head, you are now hearing in yours. Few connections are more intimate.



And this year, I learned that the hits can keep coming. There's no upper limit to the number of things that can knock you over, and no lunch break guaranteed in your contract. I re-learned that in an instant a life can be gone with no bringing it back, and there's no limit to the number of bad things that can happen in a month, or six months, or a year. There's no limit to who is vulnerable in your life. If you love, you are vulnerable beyond the limits of your own body. If you even just connect, you are vulnerable.

Nevertheless, I learned connections are the only way to heal those kinds of injuries, so I am trying to figure out how to live, connected and vulnerable and open.

(Wish me luck, people. And help me out, okay?)

And you--did you take some time to think about it? This past year, what did you learn?

Saturated*

I promise I'll make it back when the summer has warmed me awhile

A few weeks ago, on a shabbat morning while A. and Z. were at services, I walked down to the trickling creek that emerges three blocks from my house, in a bit of woodland that is a vague approximation of wild. Wild enough that my dogs once found a deer leg there, anyway, even though if you look you will see that below your feet, the rocks of the main path are actually the tumbled bricks, chunked concrete and asphalt of construction fill, as much as they are the mica-sparkling local schist that provides the stone for so many of my neighbors' houses.

One of the reasons I wanted a house here, in this little corner of my neighborhood, was that I could walk to those woods with ease: one block up and one block over from my door, a broad path bounded by escaped ivy leads into young beech and maple forest. It joins the main path about a block-length in, and at the intersection there is almost a plaza bounded by roots and capped high above by green canopy on these late-summer days.

I usually head through this crossroads to a little oxbow of path that meanders along parallel to the main one before rejoining it where Anonymous has placed a bench honoring an anniversary. I like that: the public gesture, the private identity.

On the oxbow path, the terrain is more uneven, the path slicker with leaves in fall and winter, but I have walked it often enough that my feet know the roots and the dips in the forest floor. In the nine years I've been walking these woods, efforts have been made to close off the most eroded routes downhill, so there are barriers made of branches and logs along the sides of the path from time to time, and beyond them you can see where the forest is beginning the slow work of undoing the damage we've inflicted on it. Who knows how many years yet before all the traces are gone?

That bench that faces me when I return to the main path is where A. and I had one of the toughest conversations of our pre-dating history. While we were sitting there, almost seven years ago now, a couple I know came by, walking dogs who have since died. They made idle chit-chat with us while we pretended not to be screaming with tension. For years, we made it a point to sit on that bench whenever we could, to layer it over with happier associations.

And we have always been friendly with that couple without quite crossing the line into friendship, but now they have a little girl three years older than Z., and we recently joined their babysitting co-op, and they are staunch loyalists of my store. They have invited us to their house for a yet-to-be-confirmed day during the Jewish holidays--about to finally cross that line and find ourselves friends, I hope.

The first time I babysat for them, a young person dropped by their house looking for them, a young person who is the sibling of one of my former staffers, a child who grew up at the same street number where I live but one block north, someone I first knew as a sixteen-year-old frustrated with the limitations of the school where A. now teaches, and who--while we were chatting that evening--conceded to me that it will be impossible to maintain a genderneutral presentation in nursing school. But I am giving it my best shot here in blogland.

Layers upon layers. My staffer, this young person's sister, would have lunch with their mother every week, a butch woman of many talents, and I would chat with her while my staffer got her things together. A few years back the mother was the inspiration behind an all-woman, mostly-lesbian production of Grease in which A. played the part of Kenickie, and the mother took the Frankie Valli part ("Beauty School Drop Out"). When the Israel-Palestine peace group that A. and I were briefly involved with got into a tangle with a local rabbi, the mother, who's a mediator, came and helped us sort it out. That rabbi is the step-parent of my friend who got married at the end of June and moved to Boston, which freed up her apartment for a neighbor who teaches at Z.'s day care to move in.

Living here is living in a web of intersecting lives. The longer I'm here, the deeper and more layered they become. I live only a few dozen yards from the co-op that is the heart of my shtetl. I shop there daily, and I pass the bookstore on my way. It is rare for me to walk that handful of houselengths without seeing someone I know at least to say hello.


But on that Saturday when I returned to the woods and walked down to the creek, I saw no one else. I listened to the intent buzzing chorus of cicadas as it rose and fell, and heard the wind high above me, but no dogs, no people. I found my way down the hill at the end of the main path, to where a lower path rounds the wetlands and cozies up to the creek. It seemed like saplings were crowding in where there used to be more erosion. The woods are healthier than they were nine years ago.

The creek, never very big, was gentle and contained in the center of its course. I walked along looking for a place to settle and write--I made my way down into the creekbed eventually and, figuring my sandals won't make it til next summer anyway, I just walked in the shallow water for awhile. None of the logs that rested across it looked trustworthy, so I found myself at the footbridge that crosses the creek at the edge of the meadow. It had been my plan to settle in there if I couldn't find anywhere better, but when I sat, I found that just a little ways down was a solid tree whose roots grew down and along the bank, reassuringly solid and perchable.

The creek was maybe 2 or 3 inches deep there, moving through the rocks with eddies so small they were just dimples. Where the bottom was smooth, a half-dozen water boatmen jumped and danced on the surface, making delicate circles of ripples that jittered into each other over and over again. The leaves flashed back at me from the surface of the water, grey and green, with blue sky flashing up between them, and their shadows layered onto the rocks of the creekbed, splitting and doubling the patterns there.



That Saturday was my first trip, alone, to the woods, in years. I had gotten out of the habit of going at all, because going was a production. It involved dogs, and kid, and spouse; leashes and stroller and plastic bags and tennis balls and rinsing off the poison ivy oil from the dogs' coats later. All the layers of home coming right along with me. Why bother?

But a friend and I made a pact to walk for morning sunlight this fall. We both suffer when the sun starts coming a little later and a little later every day, and leaving a little earlier, and if that's how you're wired, too, you know the best way to stave off the blues that creep up on you and the weepy days that pile on in December is to soak up as much light as possible as soon as you can manage it after waking. So we walk in the mornings, in our different hometowns, and check in online later.

That's what I've been doing in the two weeks since Z. started school. I drop her off as early as I can manage, and I head to the woods: all on my lonesome but fulfilling a promise to a friend. It's not as much sun as if I stayed on the sidewalk, but the green all around me eases my jangles and the earth and rocks and roots under my soles keep me focused on the living world that we try to cage with our grids and our masonry and our asphalt, and my online world is layering onto my physically present one. And that little creek at the bottom? Well, I know where it goes. I know the way the storms make it swell and the drought thins it to a trickle and I know the path it follows to the ocean as the water keeps cycling round and round in our saturated world.


*Isn't that the opposite of wrung out?

Betwixt and between

I went to shul today. It used to be that I wouldn't have needed to say that--I'm in town, I'm fit to leave the house, of course I would be in shul on a Saturday morning. But I've, oh, I could say I've gotten out of the habit, but that would be a lie of ommission. I'm having a crisis of faith, if you can use the word "crisis" for something that's been going on for a year or so. I'm having a crisis of worship, too. Last High Holidays I had to leave in the middle of the first evening of Rosh HaShana because the liturgy reduced me to a weeping mess. My dog had just died; my water table had been a little high ever since Z. was born; all I could do was contemplate the faces of people whom I might have to mourn in the upcoming year. These are two names that didn't occur to me:

Helen Hill
Lana Schwebel

Both of them much too young. Both of them suddenly, through the wreckage of coincidences piling on coincidences. Both of them people I had not seen in years, but whom I was, in some basic way, trusting the universe to take care of, in the way you do when old friends are out of touch.

After Helen died, I heard pretty much immediately and after steeling myself to do it for a few weeks, I made it to shul just in time for the closing prayers, stood for kaddish, sobbed my way through, left immediately.

I guess I'm in better shape now. I heard the news only two days ago. I made it in time for the Torah service, took Z. and spent a little time with the other parents in the playground minyan, came back for closing prayers, stood for kaddish, did not cry, left immediately.

I've been Jewish for fourteen years. It's still less than half my life. In that time I've said kaddish for a lot of people, though thank god, none of such a close degree of kinship that I would be required to do so.

In saying kaddish for Lana today, for the first time in my life I formally mourned another Jew.

The kaddish is a responsive prayer, which is the source of its power. It's not alone in that: there are a few other prayers that also require a minyan (they are all responsive) and if you don't have ten Jewish adults, as jarring as it is to skip them, there is not a lot at stake if that happens for a week here or there. However, if you have lost someone sufficiently close to you, you are required to say kaddish for them daily for eleven months. If you undertake this obligation, you must join a minyan every day for that time, and synagogues struggle to gather minyans for mourners. It's a powerful connection to community.

It's not the mourning ritual of anyone on either side of my family. It is almost nonsensical that I would have said this prayer for the three of my four grandparents who died since my conversion. None of them would have counted in a minyan. But the other aspect of the kaddish being responsive is that you when you say it, you are leading the congregation in prayer. This is, in itself, considered to be a Good Thing, reflecting well on who you are and therefore on the people who raised you and influenced you. In saying kaddish for someone, you are showing the community and god that this person made you a better person. It is supposed to help the person with god during the year that their soul is being weighed--and that's why you stop after 11 months. You don't want to imply that god needs to take the entire year to make up god's mind.

Lana is the first person for whom I said kaddish who would have known all of that without my telling her. It was the first time I said it without also imagining the explanation I would need to make to the person I was grieving.