Being the only one awake
life stands still;
I am timeless with no company, no measuring stick of kitchen or toys.
It’s now about whatever I can push
into the empty closet of two a.m.,
in a house full of little (and one big) boys.
Today, in the Jewish world, there is plenty going on. Tonight we begin a week of Passover with the Seder, an annual remembrance of the Hebrews' freedom from Egypt, emancipated by no less than G-d, which we commemorate, roughly, by slaving in the kitchen (after having cleaned our house thoroughly during the previous week) and collapsing into our soup. This is not intentionally ironic, unless there is more sense of humor at play in our religion than I imagined. We ARE a funny people, they say.
And then there is the sun.
"I'm going on record right now, that was my last kiss hello. I am getting off the kiss program with her."
"Why?"
"Well, frankly, outside of a sexual relationship, I don't see the point to it. I'm not thrilled with all the handshaking either, but one step at a time."
- Jerry and Elaine, in "The Kiss Hello" (Season 6: Episode 103)
What is UP with the kiss hello? Am I waking up a decade or so late on this?
Our Lady of Compromise
- at the Corner of
Stability and Main -
invites you to a
Sisterhood Brunch
in Honor of
Everyone Being the Same.
Of course, there was no way around it. I was going to have to read The Book. Not just because I am one of those hopeless voyeurs of pop culture - - long after I've popped, and despite being an outspoken literary…well…snob. And not just because I AM sort of a vampire myself, feeding on the lives and experiences of others to bring energy to my work. (Hopefully, the victims feel no pain.)
I was going to read The Book because it was about young women and desire, about unattainable longing. About wanting something that's bad for you but wanting it anyway. It was about the birth of self-knowledge, when you realize you have the power to evoke something crazy and wonderful in someone else. It was about the nostalgia of discovery.
Motherhood, like all good dwellings, comes with a basement, by which I mean a place to store the boxes of things which make us sad (or scared) to look at, or which simply crowd the main floor. We don't unpack them, for the most part. Instead we appear generally preoccupied, until we remember not to, like when our son says, "Look! I drew you smiling!" as if this were a terrific artistic leap on his part.
What's in my boxes?
Back in the day, before we were virtual, we used to keep postcards and letters in shoeboxes. The girls would write on stationery, cool yellow sheets about the size of a paperback. Sometimes cute white dots would frame the page, matching in a profound way the very round, bubbly handwriting of the girls whose notes you copied.
The boys scribbled and drew cartoons right in the middle of sentences. They were Vonnegut-style letters, before any of us had ever read Vonnegut, disjointed and scrawled and somehow fitting together into a personality, if not a coherent series of thoughts.
I have a serious coffee habit, and, as a consequence, a favorite mug is a serious matter for me. It becomes my companion for the workday, sitting alongside my cell phone, my water bottle, and my day planner, the objects which form the court in service of my reigning laptop. I refill early, and refill often. My mug gives me a reason to walk around a little. It needs frequent attention.
The emptiness of being full,
when hunger is the only good muse I’ve had in years.
(Remember the joy of jagged yearning?)
I watch fulfillment share its lazy bed with sleep - -
warm with babies and stability,
stuffed with calories, consistency and compromise.
You want:
to be everything you ever were
- who made you pick
a story and stick
to it? –
and let the others just sift their way
through
you.
And More:
My amazing grandmother, Esther Klein, is turning 91 next month. She was in her mid-twenties when she was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross from an aimless, endless transport, after having spent several nearly lethal winter weeks in Ravensbrueck. Before that, she'd "worked" for several months in Auschwitz, after having lived for a very short time, along with her elderly parents, in a temporary tent city near her hometown of Seredna, constructed right along the railroad tracks, the better for the Jews to wait for their "ride."
Before that, Esther Herskovitz was a bright, active young woman with bad hay fever, living near the Czech border in a small town in a big house with an orchard and a vineyard and a large, warm family, all of which have since vanished, literally, into thin air. Except the allergies… and my grandmother.
The Social Well
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