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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