At a wedding the other night, I saw another old friend. She and her husband, two unmistakable Jews from Chicago, sold their place, got an Airstream, and moved to Michigan. Not to Bloomfield Hills, mind you, where the diaspora somehow dispersed many of our ilk, but to western Michigan. Spitting distance from Chicago, or at least from the "Chicago Riviera" on Lake Michigan's eastern shore, but otherwise, well, Mars. The Beverly Hillbillies in reverse, I suggested, trading the stray bullets of Chicago for a smattering of loosely organized but well-armed militia groups. There were a couple of Biden-Harris signs nearby, they assured me. So no exploding heads. Well except if you piss off somebody with a gun and an axe to grind.
The wedding itself was a marriage of different cultures, a blending of evangelicals with Jews, of reds with blues -- the kind of thing that would have kept my mother's head in the oven permanently. The happiest wedding I've ever witnessed actually, an unadulterated celebration of joy and acceptance. Non-sectarian and multi-sectarian and blended-sectarian. A proud Jew by nature, I am never prouder of my heritage than when I watch Gentiles getting swept up into their first Hora.
My old friends, the ones who live in Memphis -- remember them? He is one of my most loyal blog fans, and this is for him, really, though a bit of much needed therapy for me as well. He told me, years ago, that what he enjoyed about my blog was never really knowing what it was about until the end. It's kind of like my tennis serve, actually, the erratic spinning thing that seems to have no trajectory at all. Like my readers and my tennis opponents, I too have no idea where things will land, until they do.
Some of us choose a path that's straight, and some of us choose a wild ride. Most of us end up meandering a least a little bit, even if it's not our first choice. We find ourselves in places we never imagined, in situations no one in their right mind would have planned. Where we think we don't belong. But we land, and on the things that are important, we come full circle, which means, I think, we never left at all. There are the people from whom we can be apart longer than we were ever together, yet when we find ourselves in the same zip code it's as if nothing ever intervened. We settle in, we remember who we are, whom we love, and what matters. The rest, it seems, is just noise.
