The Sunny Side of the Street

My father, Sidney Rosenberg, with mustache, on one knee in the front row. 
My mother, Henrietta, hands on knees in white shoes.

Out of the blur of my childhood, I see my fundamental relationship to the world coming into focus. My witness to the famines, the refugee camps - from the end of WWII to the present - has somehow not altered my essential optimism.
The American Journal of Epidemiology reports that this may be good for my health. I'm not sure about that. On the contrary, a tablespoon of harsh reality taken once a day might improve my vision. But, insofar as the Journal's prognosis is true, I owe my conviction of well-being to my father. Last week, I observed his yahrzeit. He died on December 14, 1978. Lighting the memorial candle, I remembered him a little more than usual on 14 Kislev, the anniversary of his death on the Hebrew calendar. This year, the Hebrew and secular dates coincided on the 14th which is unusual, but then these are unusual times.

My father was born in New York and raised in the Yorkville section of the city where German was the predominant language. Too young for WWI and too old for WWII, he came of age in the '20s with no memory of trench warfare and no capacity to imagine the coming horror. He was an antiques dealer by trade, a clever business person, but also a man with any eye for beautiful things. He bought and sold objects made in Europe that became signifiers of culture to Americans who admired the filigree and gilt, the expert craftsmanship. It was understood that the merchandise in his dusty shop, an allergist's paradise, could not be arranged neatly in shelving and bins like so much underwear at Macy's. The display had to be casually profligate, haphazard, a commotion of cups and saucers. The customer was invited to wade through the stacks of dinner plates and tureens, wandering up and down the aisles, past the Meissen figurines and the Dresden dessert dishes, without a care in the world, without a thought of the real and very recent history of those places. This was the '50s, after all. My mother stood behind the glass showcase gossiping with the customers. My father cruised West End Avenue doing his best to acquire, at the most advantageous prices, the cherished valuables of widows with goulashy Viennese accents before the wobbly old ladies decamped for Florida. Like a surgeon, he extracted the heirlooms, polishing each piece with care so the old world tarnish would be removed. Then he re-sold the porcelain and sterling to shiny Americans, willfully ignorant of history. My father was a gentle, unmarked man. For him, Majdanek was like Aleppo. Something observed from a safe distance. Something that happened to someone else.

In our house, we took a sanguine view of things. We voted for Stevenson. We believed our country would one day embrace the Puerto Rican children my father lovingly tutored in English after school and the black people we saw on the IRT local, even the woman who came down from Harlem to clean, hanging her coat on a hook in the back bathroom off the kitchen. We were well-intentioned and criminally naive.

In our house, we were convinced that America would win the Cold War. That in the end, no country with a vulgarian head of state who banged his shoe on a desk in the sacred confines of the U.N. could come out on top. Poignant, isn't it? 2017 is the centennial of the Russian Revolution. We thought we had disposed of the Russian bear, but here he is again sniffing around the remains of our picnic. We continue to forage for the lessons of the last century. My father is gone, but I am still processing my grandparents' immigration and assimilation stories, the long journey out of the old world and into the new. We all drag our family stories around with us wherever we go, rarely setting them down long enough to listen to all the other stories. Your ancestors were brought here from West Africa in chains? Generations of the men in your family got their paychecks and their emphysema in the coal mines? It would shock my father and other shopkeepers in New York and Cracow and Budapest, where his parents were born, to discover that things could go bad and from there to worse. He provided my mother, my sister and myself a down-market version of the life of the wealthy family in the 1970 Italian movie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, all out on the court dressed in tennis whites when the SS came for them.  Like my father, most of us know what we know and not much else. I have friends whose fathers survived the Holocaust and friends whose fathers were blacklisted. Mine was neither. I am a child of optimism, raised in a household blissfully ignorant of rage and despair. I have no prior training in catastrophe.

A good place to begin is this piece by Timothy Snyder, originally a Facebook post: http://qz.com/846940/a-yale-history-professors-20-point-guide-to-defending-democracy-under-a-trump-presidency/

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The Great Awakening

Pottery by Ben Maisel

That was then, this is now. After the shock and awe of the initial assault on our sanity that occurred on election  day, we are now facing the daunting task of defending ourselves and holding our territory for the next four years. I try to avoid military metaphors, but there is a sense that we all feel embattled. We are partisans who will be fighting on multiple fronts, employing a wide range of skills and training. We cannot all be commandos.

Let's begin by laying a foundation of love in our own families and communities. You may have noticed that this is already happening. The energy of isolated iron filings magnetizing towards one another has been palpable from the onset. Love is strong. It empowers people to feel courageous and creative in the face of looming danger. It is the most potent antidote to despair. Love is a perennial weed. It blooms in unexpected places and defies all attempts to be tamed. Reach out to it and it will spread across backyards and fields where you live until you can no longer control it. Transplant it when you can and admire its beauty as you ponder how to contribute to the great awakening that needs to happen.

Fortified with a sense of connection to one another, to the Earth, we can begin to think deeply about how we came to be teetering on the edge of this particular precipice. Part of this process is the exercise of historical memory. I don't mean how the Clintons were tainted or how the press demonstrated its venality. I mean reaching back as far as we can to taste the rapaciousness of the western powers in the Middle East that flourished in the aftermath of World War I; the acquisition of vast resources for the purpose of lining the silk pockets of the already rich; the dominion of French, British and later American white men over millions and millions of brown people. Follow this juggernaut through a series of tyrannical regimes, the sputtering promise of Arab Spring, perpetual bombardment, the starvation of native populations, and the rise of ISIS. Congratulations, you have arrived at the refugee crisis. You are confronting a condition where virtually the whole of the western world is recoiling in horror as the people of color they have been only too happy to exploit arrive en masse at their doorstep seeking sanctuary. Enter Brexit, Le Pen, Putin and Donald Trump.

If you looked closely, you could see it coming and you could feel how this historical matrix would create a perfect storm of racism and xenophobia, set against a background of globalization-induced economic dislocation and environmental degradation. In our country, where the domestic presence of Muslims has up to now been less of a factor than it is in Europe, it's an easy sleight of hand to use the available raw materials to generate anti-Mexican or anti-Black rhetoric and violence, always bubbling just under the surface in the melting pot. The post-colonial tune is a theme with infinite variations.

Sitting with the weight of all this and being hammered day in and day out with the proposed appointments of savage ideologues, the presumed Health and Human Services secretary who doesn't believe in health or human services, the Education secretary who's never set foot in a public school, I feel on some days like I'm being force fed a banquet of barbarism and choking on it. On other days, I imagine a car that has stalled on the tracks. I'm in danger of being hit by an oncoming train. I can't go backward, I can't go forward. The only sane option is to get out of the car before it's too late, walk home and breathe deeply into the knowledge that I will only be able to exercise a narrow influence over events, but that when my influence is added to yours and yours and yours, the train will ultimately be stopped.

Some will march, petition, write to their congresspeople. Some will get involved with local efforts to sustain pluralism, resist growing income inequality, protect our land and water. Some will make art as Woody Guthrie did, as James Baldwin did, as Picasso did when he painted Guernica. And some will be charged with the task of holding the space so that there can be an ongoing conversation in the spirit of both/and. Both economic anxiety and racisim gave rise to Trump. Both understanding how the Democrats failed their natural constituency in the election and how in its aftermath we can and must resist the result. We are the only ones who can make change, inch by inch, row by row as we used to sing lovingly to our children. We are all at risk and we need each other desperately.

http://ncdd.org/22174  Check out the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation's program to "Bridge the Divides"

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Mourning in America

Collage by JoAnne Spies

It is astounding to me two weeks into this science fiction how much it still feels like a death. At first there was shock, disbelief. Then despair and an icy nightmare dread of the future. More recently, there has been anger and blame. The misdiagnosis, the FBI, white women. Someone must be held responsible. Hypervigilance is called for. If I forget for five minutes while I'm watching a Law and Order re-run, I am plagued by guilt. How could I forget? How could I forget? I have betrayed my country. I am a cheap date. The campaign was a long, protracted illness complete with remissions and periods of false hope. The election itself was a massive cardiac event, a failure of the heart. Now, in the aftermath, we are suffering from complicated grief.

Complexity will hunt you down if you give it the slightest opening. It will keep you awake at night and deliver florid dreams of your own complicity if you are fortunate enough to sleep at all. In the wee hours of November 9th, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, camps were already forming on the left. Some turned their rage on the power brokers at the DNC. Others railed against their own children who voted Green or not at all. People of color, Muslims, and immigrants woke up to a new and terrifying world. There is more than enough reason to fear the president-elect and his white supremacist minions. Those of us less likely to be immediate cannon fodder have a commanding moral obligation to join forces with the most vulnerable and stand up to emerging racist rhetoric and policy threats. Desmond Tutu said "if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you've chosen the side of the oppressor." No means no. Never Again means Never Again.

We arrived at this moment after months of unrelieved stress fed by the invidious pollsters. She's up by three. She has an 85% chance of winning. Some algorhithm that claims scientific validity, some mathematical hocus pocus that we are clearly not meant to understand, scanned the horizon and missed half the population. Sixty million people primarily in rural counties and small cities throughout the country voted for the Republican candidate. As Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic during the campaign "the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally." I remember, nostalgically, conversations I had before the election about how we (liberals, progressives, people who were convinced they had the moral high ground) would accommodate the rage and despair of the Trump voters after they were trounced. We had a faint glimmer of the degradation of life in those remote flyover precincts - the abandoned mills, the opiate addiction and what The Nation has since referred to with maximum snark as the "economic anxiety." Note the quotation marks. But we had no idea of the magnitude of the desperation. Now we know.

I'm reminded of a story I once wrote about a woman who is among the mourners at a shiva. She sits and sits, eats cake and more cake, but can't seem to figure out who has died. It's like that now. We don't yet know who or what has died. Is it the First Amendment, the equal protection clause, a snowball's chance in limbo that we'll be able to reverse the onward march of climate change? We're still in the remains-to-be-seen phase, but every day brings us closer to the dark side of the moon. People in northern Florida and western Pennsylvania who voted for him will not get better health benefits. They will not get jobs that pay a living wage. Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics, LGBT people, the disabled and, yes, Jews, will be victimized, while the people in power compete for the biggest pieces of pie like contentious family members at the reading of the will.

We, the survivors, are called to remember the rising tide of hope that carried us during the last administration, especially in the early years. The attempt to provide affordable healthcare, the efforts to regulate the banks, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the spectacle of someone like Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office. But to remember accurately without sanding down the rough patches, we will also have to call to mind the endless drone war, the growing horror of income inequality, the expansion of mass incarceration of inconvenient populations. The patient has been ailing for a long time. It is the daunting obligation of our citizenship that we maintain a panoramic awareness of the breadth and depth of the conditions that have led to this moment. We must witness with unwavering attention the hostile takeover of our country by a rightwing cabal that campaigned in a language that we do not speak and the anti-democratic forces that have since been unleashed. There will be a resurrection of the better angels in our wounded country, a renaissance of sanity, but we will have to fight hard for it. We will have to be patient and I am not always a patient person.

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They Can't Take That Away From Me

If you're anything like me, right about now you feel like everything you hold dear is imperiled. After tomorrow, we may be entering a new dispensation in which our president (God forbid) is intimate with both the KKK and the KGB. Your inclination is to focus on those things that give you solace, casting a soft glow on your life, inspiring gratitude and making you think of drinking pernod and listening to Edith Piaf. Writing in the second person gives you just the distance you need to escape the black hole of "it can happen here." So you go the second person route which you have not done since the very first blog post on seventysomething when you couldn't quite believe you were taking the plunge. You considered calling this piece "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things," but mindful that sentimentality is the flip side of violence, you determined that the treacly, alpine Julie Andrews lyric didn't fly. Instead, you went with Gershwin, 1937, Jewish New York, defiance in the face of brown shirts on the move. The following is a list, hardly exhaustive and in no particular order, of some everyday encounters, all virtually free of charge, that belong to you irrespective of the outcome of the election  and that fill you with tranquility, joy and amazement. So there.

Drinking coffee in bed. In the indolence of seventysomething, you don't generally rush out of the house in the morning. You can make a pot of coffee and pour a cup for yourself (black) and one for Frank (with milk). Then, you can get back in bed and read, letting the caffeine work its magic, orbiting other worlds. You can fly to Rome with Jhumpa Lahiri in the pages of In Other Words. Watch the remarkable Jhumpa, raised in Bengali and educated in English, as she surrenders to Italian. You can wander with Rabih Alameddine in Yemen, Egypt and Lebanon and tell him how much you admire his intricate novel, The Angel of History. You are hopelessly infatuated with books like a horny teenager. You can't live without them.

Lemons. You love their astringency, the perfume that floats up from the oil in their peel when it's grated over linguini. Lemons make everything taste better, cod, custard, cocktails. So Mediterranean. You love their color in a blue bowl, definitively yellow as if nothing else, no daffodil, no sundress could compete. The way they offer themselves up off the tree in your sister's backyard in Berkeley. You are grateful to lemons for their simplicity and their versatility, their willingness to make themselves useful.

Walking in Stockbridge. You never get tired of ambling in disbelief down Main Street from north of the library, past the Dutch roofed old town hall, past the gracious Riggs buildings with their charcoal shutters and matte blue doors separating the pain inside from the pain outside, all the way to the cemetery where your friend, Al, a wandering Jew, an interloper, ended up surrounded by legions of church people from old Stockbridge families. Nothing much changes in this town. The trees do what trees are called to do, leafing gracefully in the spring, exploding in cherry blossoms as spring becomes summer, turning pumpkin in autumn, letting go as winter approaches. You feel no need for a different walk. It's less than a mile down and back, but you see something new every day.

Words. English words inhabit your cells in densely populated housing projects. There are so many of them and each one plays different music. You love their roots in the classical languages, connecting you like ancient Facebook friends to Socrates and Virgil. Sometimes, they arrive in steerage or by caravan from the Arab world. Alchemy. Algebra. The history of language defies politics. Eighth graders in Indiana don't know they're engaging with the mathematics of the Arab world when they struggle to solve equations. They don't know that the word ojala, Spanish for hopefully, comes from the Islamic devotion, if Allah wills it. Words are sneaky. They don't carry passports. They vault over the big wall and set up shop. There are some that irritate and some that terrify, but truthfully, you love almost all of them promiscuously.

You will not be deprived of these pleasures no matter how far the armies of the night advance. You have read the history books and you know that the struggle to remain who you are in the face of the monster is crucial to survival. In the cacophony of the moment, you wish to make it clear that you
will not be bludgeoned.

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Not Yet

There is another hostage crisis and we are all captive. Waiting for the outcome of the political circus, the resolution of our deepest anxieties, much of the country is holding its breath. We are all trying to make it through these last few weeks of not knowing, craning our necks, watching the trapeze artists, the tightrope walker. Everything is up in the air while we wait for the advent of solid ground we can stand on. Ours is not a culture that rewards hovering in the in between. We abhor ambiguity, the shadows. This is a painfully uncomfortable neither here nor there moment and we are all in it. Yesterday, I saw a drawing at a gallery opening that perfectly reflected this condition. The caption accompanying the drawing said "the abyss yawns but it does not sleep." Looking up at the tightrope is dizzying. Looking down into the abyss is frightening. And there is no straight ahead. Not yet.

At home, I wrap myself in sweaters and blankets. I eat too much comfort food and watch baseball. It's been raining all day today, but not in Chicago where the Dodgers are playing the Cubs. During the unfolding of the postseason, I think about the rain. It's that rain that always comes when fall begins to lean into winter and the burnt sienna trees give up the ghost. It streams through the porous roof of the sukkah, a monument to impermanence. Here in New England, in the attics of our minds where we keep the wool socks, the thermal underwear, we are anticipating ice. We don't know it consciously and we don't know exactly when it will come, but soon enough we'll be standing outside the door sprinkling rock salt like confectioner's sugar down the front steps. But not yet. This is above all a season of not yet.

We have not yet fallen on the ice this year. Later, it will hide on the blacktop or under the snow, threatening us with its slippery lack of empathy. Sometimes, it will fall from a dark sky and cover our windshields with a brittle crust, daring us to get from here to there unharmed. It has its upside, ice does. It offers its slick, glassy surface to swan-like Russian skaters. But overall, ice is misanthropic, unloving. Better to crush it mercilessly and introduce it to Margarita.

When it melts in the spring, crocuses giggle, birds trill their free-spirited sing-song. Then, droplets irrigate the born-again grass, rivers rush headlong to meet the sea. Waves approach the shore, tickling the toes of small children building sandcastles with moats that empty and fill with the August tide. Once long ago when we were taking our two boys to Tobago for the first time, the airline lost our luggage. We arrived in the punishing heat dressed for the arctic, no sandals, no bathing suits. The very first thing we did was tear off our north country clothes and fly naked and unashamed into the Caribbean, after which, covered in sweat and salt, we stood rapturously under cascading outdoor showers that reminded us of the waterfall where the Konkapot meets the Umpachene. It receives us, water does. It cleanses us and slakes our thirst.

In another state, not red or blue, but scalding, hot enough to burn your hand when you drain the angel hair, water becomes steam. It whistles a happy tea tune. It creates an entire percussion section, making that deeply consoling knocking noise that tells you the radiators in a drafty New York apartment love you and won't forget you. It pours out of our mouths in winter breath, affirming for us that we are warm-blooded animals even as the air on the far side of our skin is below freezing. Water has its moods, icy and forbidding, steamy and evanescent, just right for swimming, for drinking.

Watching the rainfall, a lesson from nature arrives at my front door. It's the lesson of neither here nor there, the understanding that definite boundaries in time and space are often human conventions, designed to make our experience intelligible, tolerable. This not that. But what if the various material states of water are not boundaried, despite everything we learned in school about the boiling point, the freezing point, in Fahrenheit and Celsius? Our teachers admired specificity. They had no feel for those liminal intermediate moments when water hovers between solid and liquid, liquid and vapor like a blurry pre-dawn consciousness in between dreaming and waking. This is the existential situation we find ourselves in for another two weeks waiting for the election to be over. It's foreign to our way in the world. Still, here we are, the future of our country hanging in the balance, inhabiting a state of suspended animation, like water on those days when it freezes, then melts, then freezes again. Or those times when it refuses to boil, no matter how intently you stare at it.


For more on impermanence and the lessons of nature check out Aruni's piece below.
http://coacharuni.com/2016/10/the-lesson-of-leaves/

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Time Lapse

Today, I feel the need, I'm sure you understand, to retreat into a safe haven of my childhood. I used to love to sit on the blue carpet in the living room and rifle through the wide, shallow drawer at the bottom of the breakfront where photographs were casually tossed. This was before the iPhone, before digital files, when photos were both more and less important than they are now. Some black and whites were lovingly mounted with adhesive corners into leather-bound albums and labelled in my sister's hand...Susie 1947, mother and daddy behind the counter in the family antique store 1952. But I am captivated by the loose pictures in the drawer, the homeless. My father is wearing his corduroy peaked hat, recently inherited by his great-grandson, a fisherman. My grandmother Anna, laced up stiffly, poses for a formal Victorian studio photograph taken before she emigrated from Romania. My mother is impossibly 40s glamorous in Persian lamb. There are also pictures of me, many pictures of me. I invent narratives to go with the photos, especially stories about all those people cavorting around in pre-war America. Many images are unidentified. Who is that leering, oily charmer with the tennis racket and what about the woman in the skimpy one-piece with the wet hair sitting on a man's lap? I'm stunned by their open sexuality. Apparently, life was flourishing before me, without me. I can't nail down the slippery identities of these shadowy people. I want to be able to name names, connect the faces of the people housed in the drawer to one another, but at the same time, I relish their aura of mystery. Mine was a life that cried out for mystery.

There were also loose negatives trapped under piles of pictures. The negatives, white becoming black, directions reversed, conveyed the shadow side of their photographic subjects, their rejected identities. They defined people by what they were not, a common organizing principle for a worldclass non-joiner like myself. I specialize in rejected identity. I know who I am because I'm not the sort of person who eats lunch at Burger King or drinks martinis at the country club. I know who I am because I do not believe in American exceptionalism, especially not in this season of vulgar buffoonery. I am Jewish, but not that kind of Jewish. Not zionist, not orthodox, not tribal. Not, not, not. What happens when events conspire to force me to print the negative, to stand and be counted?

My husband has written a play. I am generally resistant to the idea that all women are sisters. I regularly consider and reject that sweeping generality along with all the others. But then a man I know socially approaches the two of us at a reading and asks me how it feels to be the muse of a playwright, muse being code for the woman behind the great artist who types his manuscript and provides encouragement and coffee. The first person I think of is Vera Nabokov and while I am thinking of the beleaguered Vera, the moment passes, the opportunity to say, wait a minute, wait just one fucking minute, becomes part of history and doesn't resurface until Donald Trump makes his porcine remark the following week and I say to myself. Mother of God, he's talking about me.

It's remarkable at this late date to be considering fluid identity, a poorly explored aspect of aging. A friend just the near side of seventy laments that she used to be the life of the party. Clever, witty, the whole Dorothy Parker-Nora Ephron thing. Now, she says, she feels more reserved, more introspective. The change in social metabolism comes as a great surprise. Much has been written about wrinkled skin, about sexual invisibility, but very little about the way for some people, aging involves a certain withdrawal, a tendency to want to give it a rest. I remember when I was much more gregarious. I remember when the idea of spending a protracted period of time alone was anathema. I felt a great dullness, a great heaviness that begged for distraction. I wanted to go out, out of myself, to see and be seen, to discover the identity du jour and attach to it. Being young seemed to be one long advertising campaign, one long broken record, designed to reach the largest audience, whether we believed in our product or not. When sales declined, it was a dark season.

Aging has lifted me out of that malaise. It has introduced me to myself, a previously unidentified image, and offered up a time-lapse photograph that has recorded my evolution from an uncertain girl, anxiously scanning the horizon for indications of social weather, to a grown woman, in love with her family, with spirit, and with writing. The images are emerging from the developing negatives.


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A New Year: The Path of Paradox

 Paradox is the beating heart of spirit. There is a tension between accepting what is and yearning for a better world. Contemplative practices bring us back to the moment, to the startling awareness that, really, this is the only moment that we have. The now carries a gratitude-centered spirituality. In Judaism, we say a prayer, Shehecheyanu, to mark beginnings, the first apple of the season, the first snowfall, the new year. The prayer gives thanks for the gift of being alive in the precious, unrepeatable moment of newness. At the same time, prophetic consciousness whispers in our ear, calling us to lean into the future.  It resonates with the suffering of this moment and dreams of deliverance from poverty, racism, environmental degradation, and war. It is animated by an aching desire for change, for a better life for all the world's people. Gratitude and yearning are the figure and ground, the yin yang of awareness. We wake up every morning in the light of this paradox. We eat it for breakfast.

This year at Rosh Hashanah, I am thinking about paradox and about a blue farmhouse with a wrap-around porch that I lived in for twenty years. The house was opposite an enormous barn. The woman next door owned the barn and all the land except the six acres around our place. She rented her acreage to a farmer who raised beef cattle. The air was pungent with manure and the airwaves carried the deep, comforting lowing of the cows. They made the best neighbors, never playing their music too loud with open windows in summer, never operating machinery early in the morning. They just mooed and chewed. They just stared at our strangeness, like the cows in a Far Side cartoon strip.

Every year in September, the farmer would come over to ask if he could bring 'em over to our side of the road for fresh grass. He and his farmhands would put in temporary fencing with a gate along Division Street creating a large pasture on my side. When the fencing was complete, a date for the cattle herding would be set. The gates on the farmer's side and our side would be unlatched and the herd would cross the road like a group of very large, spotted kindergarten children on a field trip.

Often the arrival of the cattle would coincide with Rosh Hashanah. One year, my teenage son and I came home from services, changed out of our synagogue clothes and made ourselves tuna sandwiches on challah. We took our plates out to the back of the property and sat on the strip of grass just on the near side of the fencing. Several large cows came over to watch us eat. They shooed the flies with their tails and stared at us with loving incomprehension. After a while, there was a minyan and we felt deeply prayerful. We received the new year with gratitude and expectation.

There is value in remembering that the whole idea of a calendar with an annual cycle that begins at Rosh Hashanah is an artifact of the exodus, of liberation. As long as the Israelites were enslaved, every day was just like every other day. There was laboring and there was trying to stay alive in the midst of hunger and violence. The grammar of the calendar is grounded in choice, in an orientation towards the future. Today, I will feast.  Tomorrow, I will plant my garden. Today, I will shop for a new coat. Tomorrow, I will visit a sick friend. But, elsewhere in the world, not very far from the biblical backdrop, life has been reduced to its most primitive. It has come down to surviving another day, without the luxury of imagining a future.

Here in New England, where neither Bashar al-Assad nor Vladimir Putin is trying to kill me, where the American air force doesn't rain bombs down on me either intentionally or by accident, I drink green tea and read a novel entitled Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. I live my day as if everything were alright and then I watch Syria on TV. There are what the BBC calls disturbing images, followed in the next segment by Brad and Angelina in happier times. Carrying the disconnect between the goodness of life and the blood on the streets of Aleppo, not to mention Charlotte, is my greatest challenge as a conscious person. Giving the moment its due, lingering in the memory of bovine communion here, cannot crowd out my witness to the daily struggle there. Understanding that my comfort is an accident of history reminds me that I am here, but I might just as well be there among the hungry, the hunted. Every day offers me another opportunity to acknowledge the miracle of being alive and to hope for an end to injustice, the repair of the broken world.

On Rosh Hashanah in particular, the present is pregnant with the future like a mother and her baby. The gratitude for the present and the hope for the future are entwined in a rapturous caress that embraces the paradox of what it means to be alive.

Glitches in the transmission of my last post, Less Time, More Space have been fixed. Please give it another look.

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Less Time, More Space

 Posted on my 35th wedding anniversary

I remember exactly where I was fifteen years ago when I first heard a spiritual teacher use the word spacious. I was standing beside an enormous desk in a tiny room, more of a hallway really, talking on the phone to a rabbi in Seattle. I knew immediately that the experience of claustrophobia, of imprisonment, was at the root of all my struggles. Ventilation saved me. Not literally opening the window, but oxygenating the narrow capillaries of doubt and fear so that I might be able to see what's out there.

As a child, I experienced a dash of both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. I was visited by nightmares featuring enormous indoor spaces like the Metropolitan Museum of Art where there was nowhere to hide. At the same time, it was hard for me to breathe in small places, the filthy bathroom up the crooked stairs to the attic of my father's antique store. The comfort zone of my personal geometry originated in the five-room New York City apartment where we lived, neither vast nor cramped. It took decades to inhale and exhale into the world outside of that apartment, that family.

Even now, I am preoccupied with space. The outer space of nebulae photographed in the infrared and spiral galaxies in the ultraviolet. The inner space where, on the far side of the somewhat arbitrary boundary of my skin, my memories and intuitions lie in wait, as immaterial as the solar wind. In the middle distance, all the rest of it, the space between you and me, the space between my house and the one next door, the vast space across the Arctic tundra, the Gobi desert and, most remarkably, the subatomic space between particles. All that emptiness we can't even see. The great discovery turns out to be that what's out there is mostly nothing. No walls to close in on you. No fences to separate you from your heart's desire.

Time is a tyrant. It goosesteps through all this nothingness, staring straight ahead, a bit of a bully. Time makes things happen, whether you like it or not, while space just is. Without time, without decay and mortality, space is the Garden of Eden before the picnic. Growth, awareness, suffering, art are all a function of time. In this science fiction movie we call life, we are called to tango with time in empty space. The universe continues to expand. There is more and more space, but the number of chapters remaining in my particular book of life continues to dwindle. There is less and less time.

One way I manage that is to tango backwards, back through history and, better yet, prehistory, so that time is liberated from the hourglass, so that I can experience its elasticity. Human civilization has been around for a nanosecond, a sliver of space-time, only a little more than 5,000- years. Machu Picchu, Chinese porcelain, Venice, fish tacos. We are all infants in the light of geological time. Scientists tell us the Earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago. I swim in that temporal spaciousness when I go down into the limestone cave in my basement. My house, an 1884 two-horse barn, sits on a limestone shelf. The rock is what remained of the coral after the salt water receded in western Massachusetts. This part of the world, scenic with haystacks and church steeples, was once under the Atlantic Ocean. It was more like Buccoo Reef in Tobago where we snorkled at the turn of the millennium. The fish were chartreuse and aquamarine. The creatures in the basement are grey and brown. The ocean has retreated, leaving only the limestone and my amazement, the caress of the spacious.

Now, with the clock ticking on my sojourn on the planet, the practice of extending my vision in both exterior and interior space-time has become increasingly healing. I understand when a friend facing surgery goes to the beach to visit "the blue doctor." The ocean is ancient and panoramic. Like a Victorian consumptive, I breathe better in salt air. The distant horizon dissolves the artifical boundaries I have created. Going to the ocean is like breaking out of jail. But I don't need to get in the car to travel. I practice contraction and expansion, an accordion pleated way of being. Inhale. Exhale. I breathe in and focus on what is directly in front of me. Purple phlox. I breathe out and hear the prehistoric ocean rushing through my house. Both geometries stretch my awareness, opening me to the long view, backward and forward, and the wide-angle shot, this way and that.

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Talk to Me

I pray because it helps me to remember that I'm still here. Much of the time, I am wandering around in my life, daydreaming about missteps in the past or possible pitfalls looming in the future. If I find myself unexpectedly in the present, I am likely focused on explaining the origin of the stain on my skirt to the woman from Ecuador who works at the dry cleaner or concentrating very hard on cooking the pasta al dente. Prayer happens when I simply notice that I'm alive and spontaneously feel a boundless gratitude for this existential situation that I can't explain. I can't explain life or death. They are equally mysterious. I am just awestruck. To give the experience some shape, I sometimes begin with a prayer formula, like the Hebrew baruch atah adonai...I say, dear God, Holy One of Being, thank you for this day. Other times, I don't speak at all. I simply see pictures in my mind's eye, a place of vision that is not dimming with age.

Lately, I've been reflecting on Psalm 118:24, This is the day that God made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. The first phrase comes easily. This is it. This is the day. It will not come again. There is an awareness of mortality folded into this is the day. Every time I open my eyes to this knowing, I see that my days are numbered. A minor slip-up can catapult me out of life and into something else that I cannot be expected to understand. I can be taken by surprise. I can be taken. The Hebrew word zeh, or this, is one of God's innumerable names. This and this and this and this. Anguish and babies and elephants and grapefruit. Thunderstorms, Tolstoy and dog shit. All happening, all renewed in every sacred sunrise.

Like light from a distant star, let us rejoice and be glad in it has only just arrived in my awareness now that I am in my seventies. I am not being called to party which I was once very good at. I am not being asked to pretend that people in Syria are not being attacked with chemical weapons or that people I love are not suffering. The psalm is suggesting that I remember to rejoice in my aliveness, my witness. Beyond that, it invites me to join in the universal heartbeat. Let us rejoice...for better or for worse, we're all in this together. The witness is collective.

I wasn't brought up with prayer. Like many people, especially people from largely secular Jewish backgrounds, I found the idea of prayer foreign and disquieting. It felt like a form of propaganda designed to disempower me, to transfer my agency to some invisible, elusive, but at the same time all-powerful being outside of myself. Alternatively, I would worry....what if I'm just talking to myself when I think I'm praying? But over time, the border between my consciousness and the larger consciousness became porous. I now feel less earnest about prayer, more like a small child humming and telling stories to myself while I draw pictures with crayons or look for pieces to a puzzle. Small children are still connected to the breath of life through words, music and images. All of us project our individual experience out into the collective story that some people call God. We just don't call this prayer. Children understand how the limits of one person can dissolve into the enormity of all there is. When I come to that understanding, I can sing the truth of a particular moment, while washing dishes, walking in Stockbridge, drinking cold water on a hot day. Even if the prayer arises out of a sadness in my life, I lose exclusive ownership of it when I share it with all that is listening. The sharing is an act of generosity, a way of saying, here, take this piece of me, even the anxiety and the despair. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.


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The Persistence of Nature

Written after traveling in Minnesota and Wisconsin

Who are the people who feel what the earth feels? Who are the ones who do not position themselves outside of nature, looking on with varying degrees of empathy, but understand instead that they are embedded in nature, that their cells are the cells of dromedaries and daffodils. Without them, the weeping earth might experience an even greater sense of abandonment. But nature is persistent. It doesn't give up without a fight. So even as skyscrapers rise like towers of babel over the teeming streets of coastal cities, thrusting uninhabited penthouses into the clouds, and even as the sea rushes over the streets at ground level and the water we drink is contaminated, nature gives birth to certain people who are indigenous speakers of its original language. These people are here to translate the stories of tigers and typhoons to make them intelligible to the rest of us. They are here to bear witness from inside the integrity of the cosmos, to give testimony to its grief and its yearning to communicate. They travel incognito, like lamed vavniks, the thirty-six holy people of Jewish spiritual culture said to exist in every generation, who in their essence preserve and transmit sacred teachings without ever identifying themselves. It may be that they don't even know the purpose they are serving. Still, without them, the rest of us would stumble along messing with the syntax, missing the nuance. Most of us can't grasp the long arc of nature's narrative. We are still learning the vocabulary. We think that the suffering is happening somewhere else out there, that we aren't all breathing the same air. If we are fortunate and watchful, we may stumble upon a teacher who invites us deep into the forest. Meetings between generous teachers who have something to pass along and students who are hungry for learning are not arranged marriages. They arrive like thunderstorms, unexpectedly drenching us in awareness, lifting the veil from our eyes, and illuminating the murky, cluttered world so that we can see its heart.

My eleven year-old grandson is that kind of teacher. Here he is reaching out to caress a snake like an Appalachian serpent handler, familiar and unafraid but without the religious fervor. Here he is arranging his backyard vegetable garden according to the inclinations of the plants, tomatoes next to basil as if anticipating our human salad preferences. Standing knee-deep in the creek with his sun-bleached hair winding its way down his back, he is the kind of boy who says getting bitten by a snapping turtle one day in July was his best birthday present ever. It hurt, of course. But he respects the way of the turtle and rejoices in their meeting. He is the kind of boy who floats down the river in a kayak and stops for a long minute to make eye contact with a motionless deer who stares back at him in some kind of appreciative recognition. Somehow, he has inherited the gestures of the Ojibwa and Dakota, native to his home in Minnesota, and wakes each morning to the commotion of modern urban life, feeling somewhat displaced, unnerved. I imagine being born into the wrong time, the wrong sensibility, possibly even the wrong species, might be a little like being born into the wrong gender. He might be literally a fish out of water. To cross into the other non-human world, he will spend hours with his pole and line at the pond or the creek and wait for one of his fellow creatures to visit. Then he will carefully remove the hook and throw the catfish back where it longs to be. It's their brief time together that sustains him and that gives him the intimacy with animal life that he craves. He is continuous with the natural world, an intermediary between its infinite secrets and the hooks that the rest of us hang onto. Without him, I see the trees, but rarely the forest. To me, his city-born grandmother, he is a necessary link in the chain of being. Just a boy doing a boy's thing, but somehow also an adept, a messenger and interpreter from the great unclothed world.


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Each of Us is a Listening

I have been known to call myself the girl with the words. Language has always walked with me, the way some people know intuitively how to plant perennials so that they appear in just the right colors at just the right times and other people can throw open the door of a seemingly empty refrigerator and create a meal that will make your mouth water even as tears of joy pour down your cheeks. I am an amateur in the garden and the kitchen, but words colonize my brain and tumble out of my mouth, sometimes with mixed results. I can be a ventriloquist, speaking other people's unformed thoughts, but I can also be indiscreet, saying things that are better left unsaid. It is my observation that most of us discredit our gifts. Anything that comes so easily can't possibly have value. In that spirit, I have often worried that my love affair with language might be facile, immodest.....and here I am doing it again.

To mediate my self-doubt, I consider our mythic origins, the stories we tell ourselves about creation that add the dreamscape of consciousness to the irrefutable hard facts of science, for a certain balance. You don't have to believe the literal truth of scripture to resonate with its stories. In Torah, the world is created through speech...."and God said let there be light." The New Testament tells us "in the beginning was the Word." Language, this endlessly transmuting, shape-shifting opera of human and divine agency, predates the manifest world. Words come first. Speech is sacred. Sound is central. Sound is also the last sensory input to fade away when one of us passes out of this clamorous life into something more expansive and hushed. A dying person will fool you by appearing to be unresponsive. But even if you believe she is unconscious, she can hear your words and register their key, their intention. I mention this because I was too sick with the flu to fly to California when my mother was dying in a nursing home in Berkeley. My mother and I were sharing a virus the way we used to share a hot fudge sundae at the counter in Schrafft's. I called to say goodbye, to offer a prayer, but all I could hear was the whoosh of the respirator and the chatter of the nurses. I put loving words out into the world, but there was too much interference and I wasn't sure that they had been received. In my mourning, I reflected on the primal nature of listening, the ear that heard and continues to hear creation unfold, even at the very end of life.

Each of us is a listening. We receive the harmonies and cacophonies all around us, the stories the world tells, even when we are unaware of them. Each of us apprehends the surrounding sounds, speech, music and silence through our own receptors, unique as fingerprints. Running water. Scraps of Russian in the street in Brooklyn. Inshallah. Miles Davis. Mama dada. Hands up, don't shoot. What we hear depends on where we are in the world out there and where we are in the world in here, inside our awareness.

Hearing is symphonic in a way that seeing is not. We can only see what is in our range of vision, but we can hear many sounds coming from multiple directions and various distances simultaneously. Sitting on my porch, I hear the traffic on route 7 in the background. In the foreground, I hear birdsong. I know that for me sound has its prehistory in my mother's heartbeat in utero and will follow me to my final breath. I pray that the music I am playing in response is for the most part gracious, tuneful, and that I am making my best effort to hear the songs other people are singing.

I am not always successful. I was born listening, but I have so much to learn about how to understand the sounds I receive. I want to hear more of what other people are telling me, unadulterated by the interference of my own soundtrack, and I want to develop the ability to edit out the toxic static. Noise pollution. Political vitriol. Gossip. My own interior drumbeat of regret, judgment, worry.

When I am free of all that racket, I can listen to the world with the ears of a newborn. I can hear the onions frying on the stove, the breeze whispering. Sometimes, I can even hear the silence that precedes sound.

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Americana

Sometimes, you have to take a vacation. You don't actually have to leave the house to do this particular type of traveling. No packing, no tickets, no delays and cancellations, no sciatica from sitting in the same position on the plane for hours on end. This kind of vacation - let's give ourselves permission to plagiarize Ferlinghetti - is a coney island of the mind. It originates in the decision to give it a rest. By it, I mean all the slime of public life in this election year, as well as Orlando, Istanbul and Dhaka. I'm thinking of the pictures of children in Caracas standing in front of empty refrigerators, a shelf with one mango. I mean the feral rightwing populism spreading like mad cow disease in our country and throughout Europe. I mean the reality of climate change, right here, right now. To the anguished verse of this dirge, I'm adding a chorus of all the very real life struggles, my own and those of all the people around me, all the people I care about. Today, in the face of all that, I'm singing a different song. I'm going rogue, re-inventing myself as a person who is not exquisitely attuned to every ripple of suffering near and far, making space for celebration. Just for the Fourth of July.

Understand that growing up in New York in the '50s with the family name Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel in the news every morning, I was not brought up on patriotic overtures. We did not see ourselves as Americans in that fireworks, picnics and parades kind of way. My mother and father, well-spoken and beyond reproach, liberal Democrats by profession, were themselves raised by immigrants and had not yet acquired the full complement of native mannerisms. The next generation, of course, learning its lessons from Hollywood, from Dick and Jane, became more acclimated to the cultural landscape. We became more fully at home in our home. Now I live, literally, in a Norman Rockwell town, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the artist lived and used local people as models for his paintings, a cop and a young boy at a lunch counter, a family gathered for Thanksgiving. I know these images are sentimental. I'm not entirely delusional and I'm disdainful of American exceptionalism. But just this once, I've decided to make a random list, in no particular order, of aspects of life in our country that give me pleasure. Just this once.

I love the oceans, one on each side, framing the prairie and the mountains; the approach on the dunes at Marconi beach in Wellfleet where I drag my clammy canvas bag stuffed with towels, sunblock and those books I look forward to eating for lunch. I am all expectation advancing along the walkway, rose hips and and beach grass growing courageously out of the sand, until I see it, the Atlantic, and it disrupts my breathing. I love the Pacific at Big Sur, more enormous than the imagination, where I went to prepare just before my mother died. The sea stretched endlessly before me beyond the cliffs and the sky glistened overhead. I felt safe entrusting her to their care, my mother as I remembered her, breasts escaping her skirted floral suit, her hair stuffed into a pink bathing cap. In recent years, I have fallen in love with the Mississippi, doing its Mark Twain thing through the humid Minnesota summer air. Habits being hard to break, I find myself thinking about slave ships and steamboats bringing their human cargo downriver. But I catch myself in the act and wag a finger. Not today.

I'm listening, instead, for the sounds coming up the river and filtering into the aural awareness of people up north and all over the world. Gospel, spirituals and bluegrass, the indigenous music of the American outback that mothered the blues, jazz and rock and roll. I'm hearing all the sweaty, raunchy, gravelly, unschooled, uneuropean music that I listened to and danced to when I was young. Girl groups in slinky, sequined dresses, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore East, come to mind. This was the soundtrack of our newfound sexuality and the rhythm of protest. We stopped for grilled cheese sandwiches off the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to the March on Washington in 1963 and put some coins in one of those juke boxes right over the table so we could hear Little Stevie Wonder do Fingertips Part II. Stevie was 13. I was 18 and teetering on the edge of understanding.

Still, this is a frenetic pace. I need America's pastime, a drowsy ballgame to rock me into dreams. I love all forms of baseball, major league at Fenway and Camden Yards and the Oakland Coliseum, vendors tossing bags of peanuts in their shells through the air; minor league parks like Wahconah in Pittfield and especially little league fields. Watching an eight year old take on those ritual moves, fading back to make a catch in the outfield, practicing a menacing batting stance, my optimism is restored. Baseball is a reprieve. When I'm tired, overburdened by pointless suffering that I can't remedy and need to give it a rest, baseball creates just the right level of white noise for a luxurious and unapologetic nap in front of the tv on a holiday afternoon. With any luck, there will still be a measure of well-being in the world on the Fifth.

Fragmentation

I have not been able to write since Omar Mateen walked into Pulse early last Sunday morning. There did not seem to be anything I could contribute to the keening over the bodies of the mostly young, Latino, gay men who perished in Orlando, even though I was feeling it in my cells. Even now, I certainly have nothing to add to the shameful, deafening second amendment brawl we are forced to listen to. I feel unworthy. What can I say in my state of secondary bereavement that could possibly comfort the mourners, allay the fears of people in communities under siege, gay people, Muslims in this country who are not extremists or psychopaths? I understand, quite suddenly, the awareness suffered by the children of Holocaust survivors. You experience the horror deeply, but at a remove. You weren't there.

At the same time, I am weighed down by the suspicion that things are going to get much worse before they get better in this homeland holy war. America, smugly distant from the rest of the world, an ocean away from the fighting in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe, is eating itself alive. A daily fusillade of hate rhetoric rises to a pitch until it explodes into real automatic weapons fire, the whole country a fragmentation bomb. On the Right, there is a story that people tell each other about good guys shooting bad guys. In this fairy tale, a salsa dancing reveler reaches for the gun strapped to his ankle and takes down the terrorist with the AR-15. Never mind that under other circumstances these same second amendment junkies would probably not be in a hurry to defend the rights of gays or brown people. They just want more guns. They can never get enough guns. On the Left, there is another story. In this beloved sentimental fiction, a tragic event, the slaughter of twenty children or forty-nine Latin music fans, proves to be the tipping point, the moment when sanity finally prevails and the culture begins to dress its wounds. Never mind that gun sales go up dramatically every time there's a mass shooting. Never mind that several bills proposing minimal attempts at gun control have already failed. You know I want to believe the redemptive vision, but some days, forgive me, I just don't. If Chris Murphy isn't standing on the Senate floor day and night, I waver. I seem to be a person of little faith.

You can see why I've been reluctant to write this past week. The day before the assault in Orlando, I was sitting up in bed trying to read Don DeLillo's latest offering, Zero K. The book is a chilling, kafka-like fable about mortality. Out of nowhere, my eyesight became fragmented, as if the normal optical mechanisms had gone on vacation. Objects in my field of vision were shattered like the pixelated images on TV of criminal associates in the witness protection program. Everything looked like broken glass, nothing cohered. It was an ocular migraine which passed in a half hour, but during that time, I recognized clearly that things fall apart. I understood that this fragmentation is one aspect of both the natural order and its poor relation, the social order.

It is easy from this point of view to become a teller of the third tale, the one that takes place in a despond of cynicism, a place to be avoided if possible. So far, I have encountered two living artworks that have had the power to rescue me from this swamp. The first was the sight of a woman I care about deeply beaming at me from twenty-five feet away in the produce aisle near the strawberries. I beamed back. We never spoke. Our connection was a bridge of endearment, not engineering. Chris Christie has no authority over that bridge. The second was the discovery of a sheep farm on Seekonk Crossroads in Great Barrington. I haven't been on that road in a long time and apparently missed the arrival of more than a hundred sheep, milling around in all their biblical wooliness, making their consoling, reassuring sound. It turns out that sheep have a bad rap. These sheep were not falling in line, mindlessly conforming to expectations like Republican congressmen. They were a peacefully congregating community of equal beings, absent any scent of blood lust, the living antidote to cynicism. Meeting them unexpectedly allowed me to breathe. I exhaled fear and inhaled hope and remembered for a moment, as Howard Zinn has written, that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. It is all those things.

What Slips Through Your Fingers

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life
                             
                             Wu-men, 13th century


Everything that matters to me is evanescent. Infancy, twilight, serenity. Sound, taste, color. I know I'm on to something holy when I try to grab it and it slips through my fingers. Even great art can't corral it. Matisse applies paint to canvas and leaves me something that makes a reference to permanence. But color itself can't be made material, can't be hung on a wall or worn around my wrist. It's a wavelength that enters my consciousness when I allow it in and sometimes grabs me by the neck and demands I pay attention to its fleeting hereness. Look at me, damn it. Look at the way crabapple blossoms send out beams of raspberry mixed with grape juice stain. I dare you to snare that shade and deposit it in the bank.

Everything begins with green. Green in spring and summer is so pervasive, so customary in the northeast that I take it for granted. I would be a different person if I woke up to the cream-caramel-pink of sand. I would be a different person if spirit had chose day-glo orange as the woodland wallpaper. Unimaginable. I rejoice at the return of green after the white-grey-brown winter and I want to write devotional prayers and love poems to it. But green is unimpressed. It just is and then it is not.

Set against the green outside my barn red house right now is a purplish rosy palette of magenta centaurea, cranesbill geranium, lipstick weigela and two different baptisias, one lilac fading into an aristocratic grey. An arrangement of blush, fuchsia and watermelon-colored Japanese primrose in the back garden is now past its season after sprouting up from seed donated by a friend. How do they do it? How do they grow and send out their own particular flavor of holiness, their own now-you-see-it-now-you-don't wavelength of the forever white light? The finite, the fleeting, the mortal arising out of the infinite.

Life's like that. Color itself, so defiant, so resistant to capture, makes a worthy object for contemplation. I'm aware of turning to it when I need a break from the effort of struggling with myself. Who else, after all, do I know well enough to struggle with, who else puts up such a good fight? I allow my gaze to settle on something in my field of vision, anything at all, a coffee cup. I say, look at the blue decoration on the cup. Blue. I make a mental note of it and somehow know that it's only passing through. Like my mother very late in the day of her life, sitting on a bench with me in Berkeley just before nightfall, looking up at the midnight blue of the California sky, the first stars flickering.

Lately, I find myself more than usually transfixed by babies and small children. The perfection of their feet, their lack of guile. These are not my children or grandchildren who all carry complex narratives of my invention. They are just centers of radiating warmth in little buttercup yellow dresses monkeying their mothers at the Coop. They are the small children who watch in graced unknowing as the wrinkled veterans ride by in the Stockbridge Memorial Day parade. That's the thing about babies and flowers. They wear their evanescence well.

Read some further observations on the miracle of the ordinary www.suzibanksbaum.com/blog/

Mix It Up

Veterans wearing red poppies
Remembrance Day London 2011

Despite the fact that I have been living a pastoral idyll since Nixon trounced McGovern, I am at my core a city girl. Or rather, I am a person with certain urban assumptions, grateful to be living in a place with almost no gridlock or garbage. These assumptions, the city person's habits of being, have nothing to do with cultural opportunities, although the benefits of late night jazz and Thai food cannot be discounted. I'm referring to the miscellany of human life that I encounter walking down one block in, say, New York. There's an exhausted young father pushing one of those ungainly two-seater strollers. One child throws his head back to guzzle his soy milk. The other wanders blissfully through baby dreamland. Behind them, two Dominican teenagers paint the sidewalk with fancy footwork, music surfing their brain waves through tender ear buds. Turning the corner, a massive black woman, diabetes in tennis shoes, drags her shopping bags home. The woman has a few choice words for the twelve-year old on a skate board who careens around the corner, almost knocking her down. One bags turns over sending pie apples rolling down Broadway, but they are retrieved by a fast-acting samaritan in a three-piece suit and a turban. As Joyce famously said, here comes everybody.

At home in the southern Berkshires, I've learned to make do with a more limited cast of characters set against an astonishing backdrop, green then russet then white, sometimes many shades of gray. Lines of well-mannered pre-schoolers on their way to story hour at the library. The annual Latino Festival in Lee, empanadas and salsa dancing on Main Street. I satisfy my craving for salty, spicy food at the Vietnamese and Indian restaurants, but, in the end, I know I'm living in a place primarily reserved for white people. Many of these people are either older and retired like myself or can afford to set up house far from any job market. Most of us who moved here from the city have traded the 24-hour urban buzz, the peacock plumage of costuming in the street, for a quieter, gentler, more predictable life where from one day to the next you see the same people, or at any rate people who look the same, when you stop at the Farmer's Market for fiddleheads in the spring and macouns in the fall.

The idea of having to give up living in the world, even this manicured version of the world, is anathema. Who was the greedy corporate con artist who first thought of putting all old people in one warehouse and calling it Pleasant Acres? Where is the recognition that these Senior Living arrangements are sinister ghettos that separate people from the texture of life lived in real communities? When you visit your Aunt Mildred in one of these places, you know in your gut that the incentive for herding the old under one roof is the same as the motivation behind prisons and factory farms. Let's round 'em up so we can manage 'em. We'll seat them at assigned tables in the dining room and feed them portion-controlled salisbury steak with canned green beans. We'll distract them with golden oldie sing-a-longs and holiday galas with party hats and noisemakers. They'll be fine. After all, it's not as if they have plans, divergent interests, deep personal histories that seek expression.

Don't send me to Senior Living. I'm not talking about a nursing home which admittedly I'd also prefer to avoid. I understand, I really do, that at a certain point I may not be able to manage my ADLs. That's Activities of Daily Living for the uninitiated. Bathing and dressing and getting the spoon from the bowl into your mouth. I may require nursing care even, if I can still carry out my own preferred ADLs, daydreaming, reading, praying. I may require someone to tie my shoes. But as long as I'm still able to decide between egg salad and pea soup for lunch, while I remain disdainful of bingo and would rather read Don DeLillo on a rainy day, have mercy on me and let me live in the world. I'd rather sit on a park bench covered in bird droppings than slouch on an upholstered recliner in a cavernous sitting room where a sprinkling of other residents are nodding in the middle of the afternoon.

I want to hear babies crying. I want to witness the struggles of the young and listen to their dance music. Give me my own little spot with a few strategically situated handrails and not too many steps and I'll take care of the rest. A little public transportation wouldn't hurt. Like I said, I'm a city girl. I came of age on the Broadway bus.

Tomorrowland

photo by Peggy Braun
courtesy of Sohn Fine Art

Our President, the one we still have, remains audacious about hope. A few days ago, he advised the citizens of Flint, Michigan not to communicate despair to their children. This is the kind of nuanced suggestion we have come to expect from Barack Obama. It implies that he understands the anguish experienced by the people of Flint as they check in to motels in neighboring towns once a week to shower.....but that he also appreciates the corrosive effect that despair can have on young people. He knows that children need hope, even if giving it to them involves a certain amount of bearing false witness. The incident in Michigan makes me think back to the unwarranted optimism of the postwar years when confidence in the future was impressed upon me. I like to say that I was born in the last four days of the pre-nuclear age, August 2, 1945. Of course, as an infant, I was ignorant of the more than 50 million people who had just died in World War II, including the Holocaust and the bombs dropped on Japan. But it wasn't just me. Throughout grade school in the Eisenhower years, unless we were red diaper babies, we all continued to cling to a scrubbed version of reality. Where I came from, we were spoon fed progress with our Gerber's baby food. It was, as the pre-presidential General Electric spokesman, Ronald Reagan pointed out, our most important product.
We all wandered wide-eyed in Mr. Disney's Tomorrowland, flying to the moon, curing cancer. We were hoodwinked into believing that the epic violence at mid-century was an aberration, that the country would outgrow its racism. We watched as the new cars came off the assembly line and the women waxed their floors on TV and we held fast to the illusion of a future.

Somewhere along the line, while our contemporaries fought in Vietnam, or protested the war at home, or spent those years exiled in Sweden, we lost our innocence. Now, we are confronted with a Candidate who advertises his authenticity, his fervor for "telling it like it is," who gleefully brings the widespread simmering fear of women, people of color and immigrants to a boil. The Candidate serves up a toxic soup - promising to make America great again by playing to a nostalgia for a simpler time that never existed - seasoned with a reality show hot sauce that leaves us desperate for a cold glass of water that doesn't come from the Flint River. What goes around comes around. Some months ago, I saw a post on Facebook that featured a head shot of Hitler next to Trump with a list of characteristics common to both of them. I immediately shared it. Ten minutes later, I frantically took it down, thinking I had gone too far, crossed the line. This is the hopeful child in me, crouching under her school desk in the ludicrous belief that this posture will save me in the event of a nuclear attack. I am a grownup now and can't afford to be so naive.

But what will we tell the children? It depends on our willingness to absorb some portion of the pain of the world, even when it keeps us awake at night or causes us to burst into tears for no discernible reason. Confronting the reality makes it possible for us to know what's at stake when our children ask us difficult questions. The best answers come when we stare down the demons, let them know that we are on to them and will not allow ourselves to be deceived. If we fall for the magician's sleight of hand as my parents and teachers did in the '50s, we will lapse into habits of denial and avoidance. Children know the difference between adults who are carrying a great burden of truth, feeding it to them in digestible bites, and adults who are not paying attention. Children, if they are loved, will ask to be citizens of this fractured world in small increments and sometimes they will see things, like hungry people on street corners, that adults have become inured to. Then, they will be our teachers. We will learn from them that one answer, a first response, to the man's hunger is to give him your sandwich.

On Drowning

We used to go to Montreal for long weekends, shooting straight up the Northway from Albany and finding ourselves, four hours later, in an actual foreign country. One September, we saw Tim Raines at the end of his illustrious speed demon career hit a line drive double to right field in an Expos 4-2 win over the Phillies, play by play in French. We were delirious, despite the anemic size of the crowd and the reprehensible astroturf. That night, we ate a tajine that made us weep for joy and the following day, a Saturday, we explored the Arab quarter around Rue St. Denis and bought our own clay pot so we could recreate the flavor of North Africa in the Berkshires. Montreal felt so international, so open. In an Ethiopian diner where we went for lunch before making the return trip south, a waitress demonstrated the proper method for eating the spongy bread called injera by tearing a piece off the aluminum tray on our table with her hand and stuffing it directly into my mouth. We were lit up when we arrived home late in the evening of September 9, 2001.

Now, these neighborhoods and similar areas in London, not to mention Paris and Brussels, seem filled with threat. I am not speaking here of the low probability of being caught in the crossfire or the eurocentric concern about bombings in familiar places as against the same bombings in Iraq or Pakistan. I'm not speaking about the origins of radical Islam or the role of the West in aggravating Muslim grievances. I am speaking about that fear that has grown in us over the last several years and the fact that my sense of who I am is offended by this fear. What happened to the person who cherished and defended the idea of a common humanity? Was this person an artifact of a period when the official enemy was summed up by the vaudeville clown Khrushchev banging his shoe at the U.N.? The cognitive dissonance gives me a headache and the headache has gotten worse.

It was only five years ago that we spent an afternoon meandering around Brick Lane in east London, inhaling the fragrance of curry and zatar, admiring the Indian women in their pink and green silk saris and the Muslim men in their loose white kaftans and taquiahs, indistinguishable to me from the 

kippot worn in synagogue. We were such innocents abroad that we walked up to a group of these men, standing outside of a small mosque, and asked if we could go inside and look around. You know, like tourists. One man asked, "are you Muslim?"

No, I am not. I am an older American Jewish woman living in a tranquil preserve in western Massachusetts, far from the current suffering, far from the bombed out wreckage of Aleppo, far from the capsized boats crammed with smuggled refugees drowning in the Adriatic. We have seen these pictures, but we have also been assaulted by a constant barrage of fear-mongering images and rhetoric, not only from the usual suspects, but from the empire of entertainment. We have been 

homelanded.

This year, as I prepare for Passover, my teeth are on edge, filled to capacity with a volatile amalgam of anxiety and sorrow. I consider what it meant to be stranger in the land of Egypt, what it meant to be enslaved. I picture the Israelites, desperate to be free, rushing toward the sea and the sea in its turn swallowing the pursuing Egyptians. It is an accident of history that those of us gathering for seders in the carpeted comfort and apparent safety of our homes, time zones away from the bloodshed, only imagine that we are drowning in our own anguish. It could be otherwise. Sometimes, the sea doesn't part and the drowning is real.

This Passover, may we keep our heads above water so that we can be grateful for the goodness of our lives, the idle ballpark days and memorable meals and, at the same time, help one another develop the capacity to witness the terrible upheaval of humanity all over the world that understandably frightens us and rightly breaks our hearts.

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Tales Out of School

Tales Out of School

Susie Kaufman

It is not true that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Every new passageway that clears in the subterranean sludge of my brain - even if I have no idea where it's leading - just might illuminate some gritty, trash-strewn corner that's always been in the shadows. A little learning, the dawning of an unfamiliar day, is really only dangerous when I conflate the beginning, the dazzling spark of the new, with the end of learning....When I believe in my own born again expertise, and, even more so, when I delude myself into believing there actually is an end to learning. If I convince myself that I've arrived, I am in serious trouble. I have not arrived. I once got a fortune cookie that said - going straight for the jugular - pain is the privilege of the living. Arrival is the destination of the  dead.

When I open my awareness to the possibility of something new, it is a miracle in nature, like a snake sloughing its skin or the sun reappearing after a winter's half-day of darkness. Anything can happen. Stepping into the river of new learning, I wiggle my toes to determine if any rocks or spiky creatures are buried just below the surface and I wade in cautiously up to my knees, up to my belly, to get used to the chill. But, in the end, I have to be willing to be uncomfortable. There's no way around it. I have to be a beginner.

There are successes and there are failures. Studying Spanish was not the healing I had hoped for. I imagined that I could in some small way redress the grievances of all the unrecognized Puerto Rican children I went to school with uptown...All the children struggling to learn American history from deadly textbooks written in English, a history that did not include the part about sugar barons making a meal out of the island. Instead, Spanish made fun of me behind my back. Irregular verbs confounded me with their stealth discrepancies. They were like so many mosquitoes, buzzing around, evading capture. Not enough memory left to learn a foreign language. Just enough to understand how hard it was for the children I didn't make friends with in fifth grade, a learning of a different kind.

In school, we were served a cafeteria tray of the basic information food groups - spelling, arithmetic, geography - whether or not they appealed to us or satisfied any particular hunger. Now, in one of the great unheralded benefits of aging, I am old enough to decide what I want to know and what offbeat flavors I might develop a taste for. Every novice encounter in the physical world signals a deepening appreciation for the patience and devotion to practice, the willingness to stumble, that are part of becoming newly skillful. 

I want to make pie crust, don't ask me why. I want to cut the cold shortening into the flour to make that coarse meal they talk about, then add the ice water, mixing it together until it miraculously coalesces into a ball of dough. I want to cover the ball in plastic wrap and roll it out on a floured board so that it forms a large, uniform, thin circle of pastry and I want to sing Summertime while I'm cutting, mixing and rolling. You will not be called upon to sample my leaden early efforts. Eventually, the pie crusts will become lighter, flakier, easier in the making and the eating. The blueberry filling will drip down my chin and I will be saved. Until I remember that I need to bone up on compassion and gratitude, the perennial course of study. And here I will stumble, just as I did wielding the rolling pin.

One friend will entice me with another friend's shortcomings and I will fall into the despond of judgment, adding my own seasoning to the gossipy mix. I will harbor uncharitable thoughts and I will be greedy for attention. Arrogance will make a pass at me and deceit will pretend to have my best interests at heart. It can be disheartening, this serpentine process....Always slithering around on my belly in the underbrush, never moving forward in a straight line. But because I am in love with learning, because learning is the greatest aphrodisiac, I sharpen my pencils and remind myself that every moment is an opportunity, a new beginning, the terrifying, exhilarating first day of school.

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