Election day/Election night

We lined up this morning at the Presbyterian church a block down the hill from us. Two divisions vote in the social hall there, and it was reminiscent of the co-op line fifteen minutes before closing on the night before a big holiday. Lots of crowding, but people patient and chatting with neighbors, everyone in it together and anticipating a celebration.

Z. dressed in a blue-striped dress top and (finally, after more shouting than I want to recall), red cords, with my yellow Obama "volunteer" button on her dress. An Obama poll worker gave her another, which I pinned on her coat--parents, you'll understand what a godsend that was while we were still lined up outside in the (somewhat) cold.

The whole wait was maybe 45 minutes. Luck of the draw, A. had Z. when we got to the front, so I went into the booth on my own. Standing inside the privacy of those curtains, I had a hard time pressing the green button to record my vote. For long, long moments, I felt caught in something that I couldn't move out of before I'd let it move through me.

It felt like prayer.

Please, god, please, god. A new world.

Edited at 11:02 pm: NBC just called it. For Z., President Obama will be who she knows, how she grows up.

Fly, my baby girl. Fly.

Patio camping

At kids' services on Saturday, I'm told the kids' service leader read the under-5's this Sukkot story and Z. has been in an ecstasy of living out the details of the book since then.

Last night, we slept in the sukkah. It was Z.'s suggestion but I was the one who made it happen--there aren't many years when it comes together: a warm enough, dry enough night, no guests, and no school for anyone the next day.

Sleeping isn't one of my strengths, and last night reproduced the conditions of both of the two longest consistently bad stretches of sleep I've ever had: the nights I spent in shelters on the Appalachian Trail, and the months in Z.'s second year when I slept close enough to her to touch her and her every twitch had an analog in my dreams.

So it was more of an aesthetic experience than a night of rest. Crickets, airplanes, traffic, a kind of nighttime hum from all the houses around us. The full moon, corona'd with a slight haze. The shadows of the garden on the green walls of the sukkah. The rough surface of the sleeping pad beneath me, the contrast between the warm covers and the cold, moist air. Sleeping with a hat on.

The sukkah is where I use up my tree-trimming energy, so we have a couple of boxes of harvest-y ornaments I've searched out in the after-Christmas sales, and they ringed us in two tiers. Usually I hang them all on the strings of lights that light the sukkah at night, but this year I contented myself with putting up the glass ones and strung up a line of purple cotton yarn at Z.'s level for the wood and metal and dried-gourd ornaments.

She was so serious and careful, making sure there was a green wire on each ornament's loop, hanging them equidistant from each other in each section of the wall. There's so much more her fingers can do now, and so many more things she's considering at the same time.

She needed me to soothe her through her buzzing excitement when we first lay down, and she woke a couple of times in the night. Once she saw I was putting my hat on, and wanted to put hers on. Once she thought she wanted to put the extra t-shirt on I'd brought out just in case she needed another layer, but she changed her mind and decided she just needed to rearrange her covers. Both times she went right back to sleep with no coaxing from me.

Me, I drifted into dreams and back out of them. Our street is eerily quiet at 4:15. A car starting up at that hour echoes strangely. Our three-storey house looms, when seen from the ground twelve feet away.

We woke and pulled on fleeces and sweaters to eat our breakfast in the sukkah: oatmeal, cocoa. A. davenned outside, with lulav and etrog (alas, once again, the etrog smells like wax to me). And then slowly our indoor lives took over again--showers, DVD's. Dishes.

We're sleeping inside tonight, but there is something comforting to me about having touched base again with that kind of halfway-sleeplessness, where my sleep weaves in and out of the night itself.

Life and Woods

Back in the middle of December, I took a walk in the woods on a Saturday in the middle of the day, not my usual time and not my usual day. The woods were a very different place from what they usually are for me early on a weekday morning: there was a whole pack of people attached to a five year-old's birthday party, who were searching out snacks and party favors secreted in different corners of the path. There were friends to greet and people I didn't know greeting each other and stopping to talk at length. There was, improbably, a cyclist on a mountain unicycle, who stopped at the end of footbridge as I sat at my place on the bank, and bounced in place three times to hop onto the bridge. There were no birdwatchers and not nearly so many dog walkers, and on the two blocks I walk to and from the woods, there were far more people hurrying to the co-op and milling around the cafe.

One of the people I met that December day, at the beginning of my walk, was the artist who made this installation. She's not someone I know well, but she's a good friend of our neighbors-through-the-wall, and I knew her slightly when I had my first-ever full-time teaching gig, a quarter-long leave replacement I did nine years ago, at the same time I moved to this neighborhood. Neither of us has been at the school for years--it was not a school that was good for the soul--and since I was just a long-term sub with far shorter hair and far less weight on my frame, I'd be surprised if she remembered me from then, but I tend to hang on to details like that.

That day, we stopped and talked for the first time since we were both at that soul-strangling school, me because I hadn't yet said anything to her about the installation even though I had blogged about it, she because, well. She was grieving intensely and freshly, she needed to talk to everyone there was to talk to. She told me her husband had died the very day after the installation went up. He'd had cancer for months, but it was the chemotherapy that killed him, so it was in fact sudden, and the installation took on a meaning she hadn't expected it to have.

After I talked to her I went to those papier mache trees, melting and disintegrating into the loamy earth, and I watched the birthday party making its way through the live, leafless, hibernating trees, and I went home and revised the post I'd written a month earlier, adding a final sentence.


Today, A. and I took Z. to the woods after a naptime that we grownups had used to wear ourselves out with talk. Z. bopped along the path, wearing her Queen Esther crown, making up games, jumping over roots and picking up sticks and futilely commanding us to stop. At the footbridge, Z. ran from one end to the other while I sat and listened to the water in the creek. When A. was too cold to stand around anymore, we ventured down to the creekbed to pluck a dirty plastic bag from the rocks ("We did a mitzvah forw da wateuh!") and made our way home.

On our circuit of the woods, I made a detour to the site of the installation. The papier mache is gone. The ground is exposed, still dark and loamy. Five young oak trees are planted in a circle.

Edited: the artist has a lovely site up about the work, but I don't want to link and show up on such a well-publicized neighborhood site. But if anyone wants to see it, drop me an email, scallen3@aol.com, and I'll send it to you.

The benefits of a religious education

Despite a brief early foray into short reviews, I usually try not to name books on this blog for fear of coming up on publishing industry radar screens.

But Z.'s new favorite book is the hot-off-the-presses new edition of The C@stle on Hester Street, and it's really beautiful. The new illustrations are gorgeous and the story is a wonderful balance between the grandfather's tall tales and the grandmother's no-nonsense facts.

Here's what Z. said to this passage:

"Grandpa came on a boat, like I did. It was terrible. Hundreds of families were crowded together. Babies were crying. Bundles were piled over. The boat rocked so much, I thought we would drown. But in Russia, life for Jews was very hard.

"We couldn't live or work where we wanted. Sometimes we were attacked just because we were Jews. We had to leave Russia any way we could"

Z.'s response?

"Dat's just like PHA-roah!"


In related cultural capital news, we were talking with her about the teenagers who enacted the weird sister scenes from Macbeth, over and over, on our corner on Halloween. Did Z. think they were good witches or bad witches?

And of course this led to a discussion of Glinda and Dorothy. Z. has watched The Wizard of Oz exactly twice. But she told us dat Glinda asks Dowaty "Ah you a good witch ohrw a bad witch?" After two viewings! The kid's a queerspawn genius, I'm telling you.

Figs and strollers

Sorry that it's been quiet here, all. Time gets a little tight around our house during the Jewish Holidays, and we are still in the middle of them. Tonight and tomorrow are Yom Kippur, and Sunday we need to put up our sukkah in time for the beginning of Sukkot on Wednesday. Day care keeps closing, I haven't been getting enough time at work, and the evenings have been crowded with errands and back-to-school events. In the triage of focus that comes with the beginning of the year, blogland has lost out to the real world. I promise to catch up with everyone when things settle down ... after, oh, Columbus Day or something.

And, oh yeah, my head has been done in a little, too. I've had this one in draft all week, turning it over and working at it for really much longer than you'd think, given the end product.

Monday, I kept Z. home from school even though she was not sick. If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you'll realize that for me, admitting this is a little like someone in AA admitting to spending last night with a fifth of bourbon. Getting Z. to school on time, five days a week, every day she's fit to go, has been my marker of functional recovery since last Spring, and on Monday I blew it.

It was the Monday after the big school break for Rosh HaShana. And last year, on the Monday after Rosh HaShana, the first day back to school after that same break, I turned at the top of the garden steps and picked two figs.



It was a perfect, sunny, cloudless, early-Fall day. You know the kind. Z. was standing behind her stroller. She was in a phase of pushing the stroller. She was too short to see over or around the stroller. She wasn't touching the stroller. The stroller was at the top of the steps, and she was behind it. I turned and walked three steps to the fig tree. I picked two, for her lunch. I turned back. Her stroller was beginning its first bump down the steps. She was flying in an arc through the air above it. Somehow I was back on the top of the steps. There was no way I could throw myself beneath her to break her fall. She fell head first. I saw her crown was going to take the impact. I saw her death about to happen in front of me, while I was trapped at the top of the stairs.

It wasn't so much I shouted as the words tore themselves out of me: "Oh, God, Z.!" I do not pray for things. I don't think that prayer works by intervention. I don't even capitalize "god." I don't believe there is a personality behind that word. But when my daughter's death was in motion in front of me, I prayed for something omnipotent to stop it from happening.

At the moment of impact, I did not close my eyes, and I did not turn away, and she did not come down on her crown. Somehow, she twisted. The sound of her hitting the sidewalk was the kind of sound you never want to hear, but it was her ribs and her arm that hit. In the final instant, she twisted towards me, towards the sound of my torn words. The thought of an interventionist god is as alien to me as ever. But maybe, maybe, I can believe in the fierce desperation of my love for her.

When I kept her home this past Monday, the Monday after the big school break for Rosh HaShana, I did not turn at the top of the garden steps to pick figs. There were, blessedly, no strollers in my day.

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?

L'Shana tova!

This evening is the first night of Rosh HaShana, the Jewish new year. I hope it begins a good and sweet year for everyone, and that if you're going to spend tomorrow grappling with the High Holiday liturgy of death, life, judgment, and repentance, you make it through the day with grace. Lord knows I'm going to need some myself. Or maybe you should just look for me on the playground.

So here's one for audience participation: when I turned eighteen, a friend of mine asked me the birthday question. Do you know it? It's simple, but it's a doozy. Since tonight is the birthday of the world, I figure we can all stand to think about it...

What have you learned in the past year?

Take your time with it. Go away and come back if you need to. Things are going to be quiet here on the Rhyming blog for the next few days. I'll be thinking it over, too, while I watch Z. run thrilling circles around the big play structure. I'm looking forward to reading what you have to say when I'm back online, and I'll let you know what I come up with.

Boycott

Check out this link for more info, but here is a case where progressive Jews can join the Orthodox in putting pressure on a husband who refuses to give his wife a get, or Jewish divorce. As long as he refuses, she can't remarry. There are better ways of preventing this situation from arising in the first place, but they aren't accepted in the Orthodox world. The boycott is.

Don't buy from www.succah.com.

(And please note that websites with other spellings of "sukkah" or "sukkot" are not related.)

Good news!

Anyone else out there doing a little dance about Karl Rove's imminent departure?

And, BZ posts about the recent National Havurah Committee Summer Institute that we just missed. He spreads the word that the NHC is making a commitment to financial accessibility, and I know this little non-profit pretty well. It is a huge fundraising project they're undertaking for an organization their size. I've talked the Institute up to some of you in the past--we couldn't make it this year for financial reasons, but it is a Good Thing and we'll be back next year if we can swing it. I'd love to seed it with friends in future years, and for some of you--like us--this project could make a difference. If you have connections out there in the Jewish world or the progressive religious world, and those connections have cash for this kind of thing, would you please buzz on over to the NHC site and let them know?

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.

The benefits of a religious education

Or: one last post before my parents get here. The computer's in the guest room so I may not be virtually around much for the next couple days.

Over the past few days, Z. has been asking us to tell her stories about Haman, the villain of the Purim holiday. Purim was nearly 4 months ago, yes, but she has recently unearthed her grogger, which she insists has Haman on it (it doesn't). This gets old--really old--after awhile, so starting with shabbat dinner, we declared a Haman moratorium, and no reading her Purim books, either.

So she moved ahead in the calendar:

"Can you tell me a story about Pharoah?"

What is it with the villains?

Anyhoo, Pharoah led to Miriam led to Moses, and this is what Z. has to say about Moses--in the pauses, imagine her putting her curly little head on one side and nodding repeatedly in sage agreement with her own pronouncements:

Moses had a STAFF! (pause to nod)

For raising over da water! (puts hands above head illustratively)

And he was a good, good man. (pause to nod)

And he said to Pharoah, oh listen, oh listen, please let my people go.
And he was a good LEEEE-der for saying dat.

(pause to nod)

And dere's a book about him! (grins triumphantly)

I'm not sure what she'll do about Shavuot, which was just a few weeks ago. In a month or two more I may find out.

For a reason

There was a time when I made an inchoate prayer out of finding small objects, things that winked up at me from the sidewalk. Inevitably, a lot of these things were toys children had lost--a rubber stamp showing Piglet with a balloon, a 1-inch pinched-clay teacup, marbles. Some were more grown-up: a miniature leather jacket meant as a key chain, a shrink-wrapped sample bottle of lubricant.

These are still arranged on my dresser with other bits and pieces I've accumulated. A piece of driftwood from a childhood beach, a rusty horseshoe I found in a creek when I was seven, a piece of rock my uncle claimed was from the petrified forest. A turks-head bracelet a friend made for my teddy bear, a wristband from the Michigan Women's Music Festival, the only year I went. A pin from the Red Cross for swimming 50 miles, most in a single summer. A clay pipe, never used, given to me by a ceramicist friend when I was coming out. A school token for the DC Metro, now out-of-date nearly thirty years.

I never fully thought out why I had these found objects, let alone put them in pride of place with other things that had clear sentimental meaning. It was consciously a gesture of mischief, of honoring chaos and attention as much as sentiment and history. I would say to people that I believed in a god of coincidence, and these were the traces I followed. There were series of findings: in my mid-twenties, I found playing cards. In my late twenties, I found bolts and screws. Both were remarkable in their diversity. Since I moved out here to the residential reaches of the city I walk less, and so does everyone else. There's less lost on the sidewalks, waiting to be found. And I think I have also stopped paying attention because the game doesn't really matter to me anymore.

I don't see god that way anymore, as an absent trickster. There was a time when I saw god as akin to an animating force, the purified essence of being, a Platonic ideal of existence. As I write this I'm understanding how hard it is to do theology, because what I mean keeps slipping away from the words I try to pin it down with.

Today my therapist told me she thinks everything happens for a reason, so that we can learn and grow. I admire her as a spiritual seeker--she has committed much more of her life to finding a path than I ever could--but this is not theology I can accept or use. It's self-evident that people do learn and grow when bad things happen, that is, if they don't self-destruct or tear their worlds apart or pass the legacy of bad things on to their children. I would be much more comfortable with leaving the intentionality out of it: okay, this bad thing happened, and learning and growth are the best of the shitty options available to us in our traumatized state. Let's see if we can make our way there.

I had a kind of a rockin' history teacher in tenth grade. I didn't appreciate him enough at the time. One of the things he laid out for us was the dilemma of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent god. You can't hang on to all three in the face of the truly bad things. I choose to hang on to benevolence. This is akin to the Belarussian beekeeper's small god. An omnipotent, omniscient higher power that is using the complex chaos and misery of this entropic world in order to dole out challenging life lessons is not benevolent. Yes, I know that free will has a place in any argument about divine omnipotence, but if we assume things happen for a reason than we have already assumed that free will is limited in that the will that apparently was operating freely was following a divine plan.

I would prefer to find divinity in the networks of people who help each other in times of crisis. This is why it is so powerful to me that the kaddish (mourning prayer) is responsive, requiring the presence of a minyan of ten adult Jews. A minyan is not actually such an easy thing to put together--you need a large community or a very dedicated one. You need a web of relationships to drawn on. You need to work against entropy to maintain them over time. This is mundane, limited, Sisyphean, and human--and also transcendent and holy.

From Pirkei Avot: It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

Now our life will change

There is a new play structure in our neighborhood, not half a block from our house, in the back of the parking lot of the public school at our intersection. I was surprised to hear about it: the school's play yard is all asphalt and slated for major remodeling. None of that work has started yet and I'd have thought play equipment would come last in a big project like that, but I guess this corner of the parking lot isn't being torn up.

We were over in the parking lot yesterday trying out Z.'s new trike and playground ball. The structure is so new that it's still wrapped in caution tape, but someone who sounded authoritative told us it was fine to play on, and in fact it was. It's really beautiful, all enamel over metal in primary colors, with a bouncy bridge, a couple of ladders, a set of drums built in and another of bells, a twisty slide and a double straight slide, and two different things big kids can use to grab onto and dangle. There are nice, thick rubber tiles under the whole area, too.

Two neighbor kids and their parents joined us playing on it. The day was a lovely, almost-spring one. It was a very nice pre-nap shabbos adventure.