Ghosts of Christmas Past, Redux

It seemed clever but familiar to me, to call this post something like "Ghosts of Christmas Past." I was correct, at least about the familiar piece. Seven years ago, a year before my divorce, but my second year back into the world of Jewish Christmas, I used that exact title. I was still getting accustomed to the notion that I was no longer a part of something.

I suppose you never really get accustomed to not being a part of something when you were once a part of it, even when it's just a small something that comes and goes quickly, once a year. When I was little, my father used to drive us by the single block on Ocean Avenue (not to be confused with Ocean Parkway, my street) where a row of large single family homes (unusual in and of itself on a main drag in Brooklyn) was lit up like, well, a Christmas tree. An essential part of our holiday tradition, I suppose, along with Chinese food and a movie. In my mind, those houses are still lit up, the same families still inside.

Back in those days, it seemed that very little was expected of me except that I go to an Ivy League school and one day marry a Jew. In that order. It seemed reasonable, just as it seemed reasonable that I would have the attention span or the drive to meet my own expectations of myself and eventually go to medical school and become a doctor and go into practice somewhere on Park Avenue with my brother, who really would have liked to be an architect but there is, after all, a hierarchy of expectations and some are simply not optional.  He is a doctor.

So I married a Gentile, which never struck me as a viable option but somehow I got away with it and my mother eventually pulled her head out of the oven, if only because grandchildren (Jewish grandchildren, to boot) are irresistible. I had always known that the world wasn't really like where I grew up, where my father had to put us in the car and drive for 15 minutes so we could see a bunch of houses lit up like Christmas trees. But becoming a part of that world, that was different.

I enjoyed my years of celebrating Christmas, even the years when I would trudge off to Midnight Mass with my in-laws and choke on the incense and feel a little out of place when everybody was kneeling (I thought those things were foot rests). I liked being a part of their holiday, and the music was so pretty. I liked the last minute Christmas Eve day shopping. I liked ripping open presents I didn't need, and watching my kids do the same. I liked the smell of bacon frying in the morning, loved the taste even more. I liked my runs through the snowy and eerily quiet neighborhood. I liked sitting around in a food coma watching an endless loop of "A Christmas Story," the movie that has forever saved me from the agonizing pain of licking an icy cold flagpole.

It's been almost a decade since I was a part of Christmas, and a lifetime since I marveled at the lit up houses. The ghosts of all of it haunt me but still make me smile, as I struggle to create future ghosts.

A Wandering Jew

As a traveler, a friend told me recently, I could be described as a flaneuse. Everything sounds better in French, and this is no exception. Flaneuse makes me sound far less haphazard than, say, aimless wanderer. It's "a thing," flaneuse. "Un chose." A meanderer with a purpose.

In travel, as in life, I have always been content to let others do the meticulous planning, perfectly happy to stumble around without an itinerary. I have been known to wile away the endless hours on a plane ride home poring through tour books, reading about what I have already seen. It may seem ass backwards to some, but I love the "eureka" moments. Ah yes, I've been there. Now the sights have  context, and the memory seems richer. If I am lucky enough to revisit, even better.

A few months ago, I traveled to Japan, for the fifth time. My friend, Ellen, came with me, well warned that, despite the long journey, my visit was more about spending time with my son than sightseeing. Tokyo was out of the question for our brief stay, but I guaranteed plenty of wandering and a smorgasbord of shrines and some good eats in Kyoto and Kobe.  Ellen is the opposite of a flaneuse; she researches beforehand. We walked together, the accidental and the purposeful tourist, through a Kobe neighborhood where I had wandered countless times. I had never known about the Jewish temple sitting so comfortably within the Japanese cityscape. Were it not for Ellen's research, I would never have experienced the odd sensation of standing before a bima flanked by a Japanese flag on one side and an Israeli flag on the other. Flaneusing isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Since that visit, thanks to my son, I have learned a little more about Jews and Japan and, I suppose, wanderings. He had just traveled to a small port town, Tsuraga, where there is a museum commemorating the arrival of thousands of Jews escaping the Nazis in 1939. They arrived there, after an arduous journey from Lithuania through Siberia, thanks to a largely unsung Japanese hero who defied orders and hand-wrote thousands of visas. They arrived there, entire families, hungry and filthy, and ethnically different from the towns' residents, and they were taken in. Their caravan was the Trans-Siberian railroad and then a boat. There were no walls. Nobody told them they should not have risked their childrens' lives to make the journey. Thousands of Jews are alive today, thanks to the humanity of one man and the people of a small port town.

Another friend is heading to Japan tomorrow with her family. Everything has been mapped out, and she just called to see if I had any last minute tips. What to wear, what to see, whether to bring an adaptor. I told her to just enjoy the sights and sounds, take it all in without sweating the details. To be a flaneuse. But I also told her about Tsuraga, a town I have never seen, would not have heard about had it not been for my son's curiosity. Flaneusing aside, I will just have to stumble over there,  accidentally on purpose, the next time I go.