The Year of Alchemy

From there to here, from here to there. 

I rang in 2018 anticipating all good things.  I dubbed it the year of life. The number eighteen in Hebrew means life. Numerology becomes a little less mysterious when the letters are numbers and the numbers are words.  From that to this, from this to that.

It turns out 2018 was indeed a year of life, at least in the sense that I am still alive, which is far better than the alternative. From there to here. I'm trying to take stock today, to see what else I have to show for 2018, other than breathing. I need to figure out where I've been before I figure out where I'm going, no? 

No. The year was a blur, and 2019 started out not much better, after I rang in the New Year with a mind numbing combination of, well, lots of stuff. I wonder what to dub this new year, so I Google the meaning of 19, in Hebrew. Nineteen, the combining of ten and nine, "denotes God's perfect order in regard to his judgment in the Bible." I don't know what that means, so I read on. "The names Job and Eve, if we substitute letters for numbers, add up to 19." Two imperfect people adding up to perfect order? Shit, who knows? 

2019. The year of creating perfect order out of imperfection. It's a mouthful, but I've got plenty of imperfection to go around, so it's a start. 

From here to there. Somehow, I need to figure out what to do with all this before I get to the next "there," to 2020, which, according to my sources, might very well be dubbed the year of redemption.  From "palm" -- an open hand. Well that kinda makes sense. 

Alexa, how do I create perfect order out of imperfection? My "Echo" cheat sheet told me I could ask Alexa anything. Alexa, tell me what I want to hear. Oddly, Alexa took that to mean "play some seventies music." Freebird came up first. If I leave here tomorrow. . . I'm as free as a bird now. . . And this bird you cannot change. In other words, you can run away, but you have to take yourself with you. Shit. 

From here to there. If I have any chance of taking flight, I need to lighten my load. I will stop watching MSNBC. I will block the contacts who stoke my imperfectness. I will give away the clothes that I never wear. I will eat less gluten, drink more water. I will be a better friend, a better daughter, a better mother. 

Last year, breathing. This year, a bit of alchemy, tinged with unrealistic aspiration. Next year, no matter what happens, an open palm. 

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.

Another Thanksgiving, Another Pound (or two) of Flesh

It's become so familiar it's impossible to imagine Thanksgiving without it. The New England-y inn with the Christmas tree all set up, twinkling boughs of holly lining the staircase,  extended families taking photographs in front of the fireplace, while their clothes still fit. The long anticipated prelude to the long anticipated day of stuffing ourselves silly.

At my cousins' house, we have heated debates over baked brie and crudites and pigs in blankets. Smoked turkey or fried? Whom does the newest baby resemble? (She is the only one in the room who can carry off a bald head and a double chin.) Is it appropriate to laugh when a two year old slips, mid-tantrum, in the puddle emanating from his own juice box? I anticipate and fend off the questions about my dating life the way my youngest daughter used to with questions about where she wanted to go to college. Is there a man in your life? No. What happened to. . . ? Gone. I thought you. . . . Once. No more. Never. Have I shown you a picture of my dog? 

The turkey hangover hits almost immediately, followed closely by the sharp pains and the bloat. After decades of the same routine, we have an epiphany. Next year, we will wear sweats.

In the New England-y inn the next morning, the extended families filter into the lobby again, far more interested in coffee than photographs. Everybody seems a bit more subdued as they sink into the chairs, recovering. I marvel at the ones who can eat the apple donuts and the other sugary treats. My jeans barely have room to accommodate my desperate gulps of caffeine.

Eventually, we disperse in a thousand different directions, vowing to never eat again, exhausted, but surprised, somehow, at how quickly it all seems to pass. Relief tinged with regret. Wondering how we can all do this year after year, wondering how we could not.

Back in Brooklyn, Through the Lens of History

As I remember it, my mother's uncle, aunt, and young cousin all perished in concentration camps. I remember it mostly because the young cousin -- whose name I may have once known, but have forgotten  -- was my mother's age, and looked just like her. It always made me think about how random life is, how being born in one place as opposed to another can be a matter of life and death.

My parents were both born here, in America, and their parents were all here long before Hitler marched through their homelands to exterminate all the Jews, having escaped hatreds of an earlier time. I grew up far removed from any first hand narratives, two generations away from anybody who actually bore witness. I have friends who, unlike me, are first generation Americans. Some know their family histories in intimate detail, from their parents. Some know little more than I do, because their parents had tucked the horrors of their childhoods neatly away; it was the only way they could move forward.

Even first hand recollections, whether told or buried, can become fuzzy, as fuzzy as the fraying photographs I've been sifting through all morning. But time (if you're lucky enough to have it) keeps the essential details in tact. Not so with re-tellings. Maybe it's human nature to revise, on purpose, or maybe it's just the way our brains work, to protect us. My son has become curious, as he always has been about all sorts of history. The stories we have been told, we realize, do not exactly match.

My mother joined me on the floor by her father's old desk, where the old photographs have been stowed, helped me to identify the people I never knew. My own grandfather, his parents, my grandmother's parents. Some I could recognize from memory, even though they were gone by the time I came around. All these people, who helped shape the ones who shaped my mother who, for better or worse, helped shape me. I want so much to know what they were like; I wonder what they would think of us, of me, the way we all turned out. I wonder what they could tell me about life when people like us were hunted down like vermin, when anti-Semitism drove the fortunate ones across a vast ocean, to start over again in a strange place, a place where they would always be safe. Where the ones who were here, in the late 1930's and early 1940's, never really grasped what was going on over there. How could they?

My mother is certain, now, that my grandfather's brother sent his wife and his little girl to Sweden, while he stayed behind in Warsaw. She is certain, because she remembers when the letter arrived, that her uncle was killed in a camp. She is uncertain about what happened to her aunt and her cousin. My guess is, and my recollection is, they did not survive. Otherwise, we would know. My son is curious, and so am I.

It was mostly pictures, in my grandfather's old desk, but I also found my nana's glasses, and a change purse she carried, filled with coins and a "Chai" key chain. Life. I am taking the small artifacts home with me. The lenses in the glasses are too powerful, and the frame, on one side, is cracked. I will put my own lenses in, fix the crack, and keep searching.

City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love

I haven't been to Philadelphia since the spring of 1976, when I had thought I was going to college there. That was before I changed my mind -- or, more accurately, my mind was changed for me -- and I ended up, somehow, in the wilds of upstate New York. I've always thought the decision was a bad one, but one I would never change. Everything about my life would have been different, and there are certain things -- three living breathing things in particular -- I could never pass up. Not for all the brotherly love in the world. 

More than forty years later, here I am, somewhere along the fabled Main Line, sleeping in a room filled with the vestiges of young girlhood while its permanent inhabitant finds her wings in New York City. I feel as if I have gotten to know her better, from the collage of pictures on her walls, the lotions and such in her bathroom, the bundles of hair ties hanging from a hook on the wall. I moved her well worn stuffed animals off the bed, but the Siberian cat has sought me out, draping herself over me for two nights in a row. Her purring is a comfort. Suddenly, I think I like cats. 

I am here mostly on the way to somewhere else. My friend's sister hosted a fundraiser in honor of my friend's son, now gone almost three years. I was surprised at how much at home I felt here, among all these people from another place, people I had never met. Many of them had heard stories about me -- the friend's sister's friend -- though I could not imagine why. The friends of my friend's sister are warm and boisterous and generous. I tried my best to remember all the names, knowing full well they all had a slight advantage, having only to remember one. I flubbed several, but nobody cared. 

My friend had to speak, and she was nervous. Not just because she had to speak in front of so many people, but because she had to speak about why she was there, about why they were donating money and, hopefully, time, for a cause in her son's name. Just talk about Adam, I told her. The rest will come. 

It was mesmerizing, not just for me, but for all of us. It's not easy listening to somebody who has suffered the unimaginable, who inhabits a place nobody should have to inhabit. My friend will mention Adam, in passing sometimes, or when we reminisce about something funny. But here she was, explaining who Adam was, to this group of people who never knew him, to me, to her sister, to her brother-in-law, to Adam's own grandmother. To herself. She brought him to life, again. 

In Philly, this week, more than four decades since my last visit, when I had no idea who I was or where I'd be or how three children, one day, would teach me how to love in a way I had never known, I was re-introduced to a place. To a young girl who grew up here. To cats. To my friend's family. To my friend, who lit up in a way I'd never seen her light up, and who lit up a room full of strangers who are no longer strangers. And I was re-introduced to Adam, who still has many secrets to reveal.

Falling Back, Stumbling Forward

For some people, the end of daylight savings time means an extra hour of sleep. For me it means staring at the ceiling, wide awake, waiting an extra hour for Starbucks to open.

As if to herald the coming darkness, my backyard was strewn with leaves this morning, leaves that only yesterday were on the trees. I turned on the television, though, and nothing had changed. The polls say blue, the polls say red, depending on whom you ask. Even if you don't ask. I opted for tennis. Nothing new there, either, except Federer and Djokovich are far easier on the eye than your average politician or pundit.

Speaking of darkness... I admit I've been worried about the upcoming election.  Not just about the real possibility of the House staying red, but about the equally real possibility that it will go blue. What if it goes blue, but the dysfunction remains the same? Reading my mind, I think, a Starbucks buddy informed me that you don't have to be a member of the House to be Speaker of the House. I was skeptical, especially when he told me he remembered learning it in college. He's even older than I am, and I remember nothing.

It's true, though. We verified it on his phone. My buddy planted a happy thought in my head on this gray November morning, the idea that there is an infinite pool of candidates for the job. Hmmm. Obama? Biden? Oprah? One of my really smart friends? A girl can dream, can't she?

Come to think of it, I do remember something from school, back in the day. Pyrrhic victory. A victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. It was my fear for Hillary, and it's reared its dark head, again. Especially these days, when politics has become less about doing good than about pointing fingers. Especially these days, when things seem so broken it would take a miracle to fix them. Mere mortals would fail. Average politicians will fare far worse.

Back to the leaves. They had fallen, but they were still bright and colorful, not yet crunchy enough to disintegrate beneath my feet. And I can still occasionally remember something I learned in school, even if it's useless. There's hope.