Global Witness

Offered during services on Yom Kippur in Lenox, Massachusetts



We are lost, like small children in a dark forest, hungry, thirsty and afraid. We have wandered away from our wisdom...out of distraction, out of misdirection. The way forward is obscured by a lattice of hanging vines. The way back is littered with the fallen branches of our misguided attempts at self-improvement. The canopy above is so dense that the light only flickers intermittently and the floor of the forest is covered with rocks and fallen logs that impede the progress we think we should be making. At the new year, we are called to make teshuvah, to come back from our wandering and return to our true selves. But how shall we make teshuvah this year when the shrubs along the path are covered in poisonous berries and the wolf is howling?

We must first be still and reflect on our situation. In the silence, we can hear our heart beating and the music of our breath. In out. We recognize first that we are alive, as the fox and the anemones are alive, and this being alive is an unfathomable blessing. There's no understanding it. There's no explaining it. But we can discern that the rhythm of life is cyclical. It comes and goes. The forest has a season of growth and a season of quietude. What is this path that we're so attached to that suggests a march from here to there? Is it possible that we're trudging along the wrong paradigm? That we've been hoodwinked into keeping our eyes on a prize that's somehow out there, always receding?

Consider shabbat. It comes around again and again. Shabbat is spelled with the letters shin, bet, tav meaning to cease. The same letters in a different order, tav, shin, bet, yield the root tshuv, meaning to return. The word teshuvah comes from the root tshuv with an added hey at the end. Hey is the letter of breath. Hhhhhey. So when we make teshuvah, we are returning to our origins, to our breath, to the cycle of life, to all the forest, not just the path through it. We are turning on our axis like the earth itself.

Here we are rotating, spinning like dervishes, like dreidels, instead of trodding a linear path, always staring straight ahead. Now, we can see infinite distances in all directions. There are the trees heavy with apples for the new year and over there are the honeybees struggling against extinction. There are the crops exhausted from drought. Keep turning. There are the oceans rising, flooding the streets of our towns. But look over there, a little further, there are the oceans that my grandparents crossed when they were the immigrants. There are the children starving at the border and there are my children and grandchildren becoming, becoming against all odds. Everywhere there is life and everywhere there is death and I am the witness. You are the witness.

The Torah portion for Yom Kippur, from Leviticus 16, describes the purification rituals that Aaron must perform before entering the Holy of Holies after the death of his two sons. There is bathing, dressing in sacred garments, bringing a bull to sacrifice and then two goats, one also for sacrifice and one to send into the wilderness, the scapegoat. There is incense and there is blood. Then Aaron is instructed to lay his hands on the head of the scapegoat, confess the sins of the community and send the animal to carry the sins off to an inaccessible region. But here's the thing. There is no longer an inaccessible region where we can banish the culpability, our culpability, the suffering, our suffering. Greenland is melting. The Amazon is on fire. Sending the scapegoat into the wilderness is a fool's errand.

We know that in the tradition, prayer arose in rabbinic times to replace the ancient sacrificial rituals. In our time, I'm imagining a spiritual stance that might necessarily precede prayer. I'm suggesting that as we rotate, as we see as far as the eye can see in all directions and into our own hearts, returning to the rhythms and melodies of the earth, that we witness and apprehend that we cannot turn away, we cannot banish the outcome of what we've done to ourselves and to one another. There is no inaccessible place on earth. We are the earth. We are one body, rotating and revolving through space, a little dizzy from our efforts to understand and to love.

Please join me on Friday, October 25th at 5:30 at The Bookstore in Lenox for a reading from my book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement. The Bookstore is a great venue for writers and their friends. Hope to see you there.

I'm also delighted to invite you to another reading from Twilight Time at Rookie Farm Bakery at 10 Anthony Street in Hillsdale, NY on Sunday,  November 3rd at 11 a.m. Coffee and baked goods will be served!

Metronome

Since the publication of Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement this spring, I have a renewed interest in posting stories on seventysomething. It turns out, I have more to say that I hope to share with you. Please stay in touch by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com



"I have something very important to tell you." My sister, Roberta, speaking from her recliner in Berkeley, is 84, and has her own style of dementia-inflected communication. She rarely initiates a conversation, but she can be very direct and knows how to get my attention when she wants to.
"I had to break up with my piano teacher today."

This would be August 2019. "I didn't want to, but I had to do it, so I wrote her a letter about how I felt like a fraud all these years and couldn't continue lessons." This letter was mailed from the post office on 83rd and Amsterdam in 1951.

The piano teacher, a Viennese emigré with the mannerisms of a grand dame on her way down, demanded scales and arpeggios in the years after the War when New York was a city filled with European refugees struggling to survive on a diet of strudel and hot tea in a glass. There were lace makers and bookbinders, milliners and piano teachers, the last kept afloat by families whose class status depended, in part, on subjecting their children to private music lessons. Miss Schafraneck came to the house dressed entirely in black, the hem of her ankle-length dress kissing the top of her lace-up shoes. She wore an enormous hat decorated with silk flowers and long gloves that she drew down from her elbows and off her fingers as she sat down next to Roberta at the paltry instrument, a down-at-the heels, out-of-tune spinet. She was the kind of person who might have bumped into Freud unexpectedly at the bakery on the Ringstrasse earlier in the century. Miss S. was an independent contractor working in the orbit of a Russian conservatory teacher, one Mme. van Gerova, a woman I never met but who was reputedly so ferocious that my sister never failed to throw up on the morning of the recital.

Every week, Miss S. would open the yellow book of Czerny exercises, set the metronome and turn her powdered face toward Roberta in expectation, Tick Tock. And every week, my sister, a natural musician with an uncanny gift who never practiced, would stumble over the notes. Roberta had what we called in those days "an ear." If you asked her to play "Melancholy Baby," she would play "Melancholy Baby" and if you wanted to sing along but couldn't manage the key, she would transpose it up or down as required. If you asked her to play "Rhapsody in Blue," she would play "Rhapsody in Blue" and if you asked her to play something she didn't know, she'd make a game of it. Ask you to sing a few bars and take it from there. It was like a magic act. Something out of vaudeville or the side show at the circus where people got paid to swallow swords.

The lessons continued under protest through the forties until 1951, at which point Roberta, aged 16, refused to comply.

"She doesn't appreciate my gift. Tick Tock. She just wants me to move my fingers up and down the keyboard a certain way, her way. She wants me to be someone else. The music isn't in my fingers. I wanted to tell her that at my lesson, but I couldn't do it. I was too scared and of course mother and daddy were no help. They think I'm Paderewski. They want to dress me up and show me off, see me on the stage at Carnegie Hall. So I sent her a letter just yesterday, Miss Schafraneck. I don't know how she feels about it. What do you think? Do you think she's mad at me? Do you think I hurt her feelings"?

What I think is, give 'em hell, Harry. What I think is the Andrews Sisters are harmonizing on the jukebox at the soda shoppe. Girls are wearing bobby socks and saddle shoes. TV is just starting to give radio a run for its money. The backdrop is mid-century, but the fear and outrage and defiance are doing their chemistry on Roberta in the eternal now. She is staring me down, struggling to free herself from someone else's idea of what music is and I'm the six year old witness to her suffering. Who's to say it isn't 1951? Tick Tock.

"And another thing. I wanted to ask you something else."
"Okay. Shoot."
"When you were a little girl, did you like me"?



Please join me on Friday, October 25th at 5:30 at The Bookstore in Lenox for a reading from Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement. The Bookstore is a great venue for writers and their friends. Hope to see you there.

NEW BOOK RELEASE: Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement

I'm pleased to announce that my new book, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement has been released by Wipf and Stock. The book is a collection of short essays on memory, aging and mortality, many of which originated on this blog.

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Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement is available on Amazon. Reviews would be most welcome.

Many blessings, Susie Kaufman

So Long for a While

Flowering of imagination in winter

Today's blog is #50. After an erratic start, I took to posting on seventysomething every second Monday two years ago and have not missed an entry. I've always been drawn to round numbers and fifty has a satisfying ring, plus today is Christmas and my son's birthday. The day screams new birth. Under the weight of all that symbolism, I have decided to make this my last official seventysomething post....at least for the time being. Never close the door, especially on a process that has fostered creativity and discovery and might just generate more learning in a future I don't even know about yet.

The self-imposed structure of silently interviewing myself every two weeks to find out what was on my mind has yielded a rich harvest. I would post on Monday, then mentally wander for ten days, just observing what language was rising to the surface of awareness. On the Wednesday of the following week, I began to write, lost in a forest of words, not really knowing where I was going or whether I would find a way out. Sometimes, I'd comment on our treading polluted water in the political cesspool. Sometimes, I'd meander through the dreamscape of faded family memories. Often, I would engage with the subjects that are most present for me....mortality, spirit, the meaning I make out of my one small life. By Monday, I delivered an essay or memoir piece, sometimes with labor, but other times like those women who give birth in the back seats of taxis on the way to the hospital. I'm wondering now what it will be like to be a writer without that structure, a human body without a skeleton to hold the gut and the heart in place. I don't know the answer to that question, but the continent of unknowing is clearly where I'm headed, which is true of many of us at seventysomething.

A very gratifying aspect of the journey to date has involved curating the art of other older writers and visual artists whose work I've been posting on Facebook. The virtual community of gifted painters, photographers, ceramicists, writers of prose and poets that has emerged, lifts me out of the slough of despond and lights the way in and out of the shadows. Many people in the last third of their lives are doing remarkable, boundary-breaking work. Thrilling work. Recently, I discovered that a friend in Boston bought a painting from an artist in Toronto she knew only from seeing the painter's work on seventysomething. I was the schadchan, the matchmaker, a new role that thoroughly energized me. In this transaction, I was in it and not in it, there and not there. It reminded me of the way it felt when I served as a hospice chaplain, when I became an intermediary between a patient and her understanding of holiness. It resonated with that self-emptying that allowed me to enter other people's lives without getting in the way. This aspect of seventysomething has been magical. Please contact me if you are or know of an older artist you'd like to introduce me to. 

When I think more deeply about self-emptying in the service of entering other people's lives, I realize that what I'm doing is tiptoeing shyly up to the gate of enchantment that leads to writing fiction. I've made some forays in the past, but this time I feel more ready. Still, I will need a good deal more spaciousness to pass through that gate, less glibness, more willingness to fail, less self-judgment. I will need to get to know the people I am conjuring up in all their quirkiness, their humor, their anxiety and courage. I will need to understand that these characters are both me and not me. The very thought of inhabiting the consciousness of someone who is in some ways not me fills me with trepidation and desire. Yet, these are the conditions we all live in, writers and non-writers alike. This is what it means to live in this world and be part of the saga of interbeing. Writing fiction might be extending that condition more intentionally, exercising the capacity for empathy, using the tools of language to carve a golem of one's own invention. Wish me safe travels. I promise to send postcards from truck stops along the way.

seventysomething has its own Facebook page. I will be posting poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists there. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, or Facebook. 

Twilight Time

Biblical hillside with telephone cable

I'm huddling in the corner of the couch wrapped in a red and black plaid blanket. The blanket is from the fourteenth century and carries a scent that hovers between cozy and offensive, the interface of coffee and skunk. Still, I like it because it's very large and creates its own toasty environment. I guess you could say it's a security blanket. Winter is coming. My mind wanders in unexpected directions out from this comfort zone. I'm in hiding from the horror and wondering how to write about it. In keeping with this season of new life generated deep underground, I'm thinking about the creation narrative in Genesis. From my wintertime womb on the couch, I'm dreaming about the birth of the world.

Here's what happened on the sixth day according to the scriptural account. The land animals and wild beasts of every kind appeared. Then, man was created in God's image, male and female, and these humans were instructed to be fertile and increase, to fill the earth and master it; to rule over the fish, the birds and the living things that creep on the earth. The animals and the fruits of all the trees were given to humans for food. For purposes of storytelling, for the opportunity to reflect on the mythos of our situation in this wrenching moment, I am suspending disbelief and entering the biblical narrative. I hope you'll understand. Let's just say it's been a very, very long day and humankind is mired in it, exhausted by it. In the course of this sixth day, lies have been told. People have betrayed and enslaved one another. Species have become extinct. Oceans of blood have been spilled and it's not over yet. We are still slogging through this fetid swamp of greed and violence. When will it end, you ask? When will we get to the seventh day, the day of rest and gratitude? Are we there yet?

To help us grapple with the story, to keep us entertained in the back seat when we are really cranky, at the end of our capacity to tolerate fatigue and hunger, Jewish tradition speaks of ten things that were given at twilight on the sixth day, afterthoughts that just made the cut like last minute items tossed in the suitcase.

The list of ten things varies depending on the rabbinic commentary. Among the possibilities are the rainbow that appeared after the flood in the Noah story, the ram in the thicket that Abraham sacrificed in place of his son, and the manna that fell from heaven to feed the Israelites during the exodus from Egypt. All three of these saving graces were created just as the light of the sixth day of creation was fading and long before they were necessary in the unfolding of the biblical narrative. When they finally appear, they come unbidden when they are least expected to remind us that wisdom and generosity, understanding and compassion are ever-present even when they aren't manifest, even when we have reached the outer limits of despair.

You don't have to be a fundamentalist or even a believer to appreciate this redemptive plot twist. I see from my own experience that the way out of the dark tunnel of rage and hurt, judgment and guilt, already exists, even if it's so well hidden that I generally walk right by it. Out of nowhere, it falls from the sky like the manna. I share a bowl of it with a person who always talks at me incessantly. I want to get as far away as possible, but then suddenly, for the very first time, I see this person painfully imprisoned. I'm still irritated by the talking, but also miraculously and gratefully empathic. The manna tastes good and feeds us both. In another instance, people I love feel wounded by one another. My first impulse is to intervene with an outpouring of words to fix the problem, to step into the already dense mix of history and competing allegiances. Then I see the ram in the thicket waiting his turn. I step back into the underbrush to make space for them, hoping I won't become the sacrifice. Every occasion of grace carries a risk.

The rainbow, especially, speaks to me in these dark times. It appears after a storm when the raindrops and the sunlight intermingle at just the right moment. Like all the rainbows before it, the color takes me by surprise, opens my eyes. It reminds me that the repair of all that is broken comes not only from my small, fitful conscious attempts to make the world a better place, but also from the hidden threads woven into the fabric of existence at twilight on the sixth day, the sacred predisposition of life to flourish.

seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use.  

A Pebble of Regret

The old woman has been sleeping in her lounge chair all day. She wakes up periodically to eat cold leftover blintzes, but nods off after noshing and naps luxuriantly unless someone comes down to check on her. Her daughter, so devoted, asks if she needs something to drink, but my sister doesn't respond. She's breathing, but just stares into space and moves her mouth around. No words come out. It may be a mini-stroke. She's going to need a transfusion of new blood from charitable young people who have red blood cells to spare. She needs, as they say, a new lease on life.

I call her after the procedure to assure myself that she's still my sister, even with the blood of nameless college students and dental assistants flowing in her veins. I tell her that I'm coming to California and will see her on November 16th.

          "Do you remember what day that is?" I ask, in the infantilizing, self-satisfied tone of someone
          who already knows the answer to her own question.
          "Daddy's birthday," she blurts out with sudden alacrity.

There is something about her saying the word "Daddy" that fills me with an unaccountable joy. She is, after all, the only person in the world who can say that to me. She is the only other person in the world who had that relationship with our gentle, distracted father, almost forty years gone. It's an album of memory we share, even though we are more than ten years apart. Even though she was a Depression and War baby and I was a child of the American ascendancy. It was only after he died, during one of those long, gossipy coffee-and-danish storytelling sessions in the house of mourning, that I discovered that his father, our Budapest-born grandfather Ludwig, had died in 1935, the year my sister was born. I had always thought he died in 1945, the year I was born. I had always thought she had a grandfather I didn't have, the ultimate bigger piece of cake. But, as it turned out, we were both lost girls with no doting grandpa to buy us penny candy. There was comfort in that.

Between the two of us lay a vast windblown steppe empty of brothers and sisters, a no man's land where there was a family, but I wasn't in it. I have amnesia for a life I never experienced. I can't get a feel for it. FDR, war news, radio. Our parents young and hopeful. She in her Persian lamb jacket. He with his fedora at a jaunty angle. My sister learning her long division in the same classrooms of the same school I would much later attend. They seem to have managed just fine without me and this feeling imparts a yearning and produces a pebble of regret that precipitates out of the joy I feel when I hear "Daddy's birthday." All those birthdays before I was born. Ten years when it was just the three of them.

Some people are worriers, other people regret. Worriers are oriented towards the future and all the dangers that are lurking there, the plane crash, the diagnosis, all the catastrophes to come. We regretters are vulnerable to sadness and self-blame. We are magnetized by the past, the missed opportunities, the cruelties, all the failures already in the bank accruing interest. The man I live with is inclined towards worry. He sees possible losses driving in his direction on the wrong side of the road, coming for him. I am a regretter by trade. I encounter loss bushwacking my way through the past. He and I try to meet for morning coffee in the parlor of the present. When he gets too far out ahead of himself, I try to call him back to now. When I retreat into an unforgiving black hole of self-recrimination, he invites me back up to the fresh air of this moment before 8:24 becomes 8:25 and I miss the whole thing.

          He says, "I got my worry from my mother. Where'd you get your regret"? I say, "I found it all
          by myself in the empty space between my sister and me, the virgin terrain."

I wonder...what questions can I ask when I see her in California next week? What details can I fill in while there's still a chance? Maybe...what did you talk about at the dinner table when it was just the three of you eating the pot roast?


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use. 

Melancholy, Baby

All through October, we were disappointed. The leaves seemed to be heading straight to brown without stopping to rest at flame red, burnt orange or gold. Everywhere I went for weeks, people were commiserating with one another. "It's a bad year for color," people said, evaluating the state of nature in relation to how much pleasure it gave them. Too much rain or not enough rain or the nights weren't cold enough. There was a disturbing silent subtext to these conversations. What if climate change had come in the night to wrest the spectacular reds and oranges out from under us? What if the party was over? Fall color is not just an annual reunion of maples and birches dressed to kill. We rely on it to maintain our sanity in New England, an immoderate binging before the deprivations of winter when the walls close in on us and we're stuck looking at our aging faces in the mirror.

Still, in the end what color there was came on slowly and lasted much longer than usual. Like an old friendship, it had its own faded loveliness. The whole landscape was over some hill, a woman, gone grey but still beautiful. The end of October rains came, giving it all a washed out late empire look. We didn't get the scarlet jolt we were longing for, the kind that endangers your life when you swerve off the road gawking at it. The long-anticipated peak never came. Autumnus interruptus. What we got instead was late-breaking spikes of color like flames shooting up from candles about to go out. It reminded me of America.

The country is indisputably in decline and many seventysomethings are watching in horror as the spectacle unfolds. The bridges are crumbling. Oxycontin is killing off whole towns. Torchlit armies of furious white men in Klan regalia have marched in Virginia and the stories we learned long ago in school no longer ring true. The lullabies we sang to ourselves about our great democratic institutions, checks and balances....that sort of thing....are painfully out of tune. They no longer seem to have the juice to inoculate the culture against an epidemic of pervasive, tubercular greed. They seem helpless to protect us from the grasping of the insatiable rich emboldened by the rage of the nativist
left-behinds.  Now in New England, the wind is coming, knocking the remaining color off the trees, leaving us all exposed to the approaching winter, the tax bill, the military posturing, the flood of hate speech and on top of it all, we are entering the November of our lives. If we expected a safe, rocking chair old age, no can do. We are in for a rude awakening. Just when we thought we could take a nap, we are being called to scrape off the old paint of American exceptionalism and face the unvarnished truth, the depth of the river of inequality, the omnipresence of injustice, the reality of climate change.

A friend posts on Facebook "the world is breaking my heart" and I am grateful for the invitation to go there with her, at least temporarily. This is not like me. I'm usually ashamed of despair, a weakness of character, I think. I'm attached to the spiritual imperative to rejoice in being alive. But I can't maintain the effort of hope all day every day. Not when a photogenic, grinning woman on tv is advertising portions of "delicious emergency food," a grisly new business opportunity. Not when the families of the Las Vegas victims are being accused of some kind of macabre conspiracy against gun lovers. I need a day like today, showers starting in the morning and gathering into torrential sheets of rain and wind, the better to reflect my mood of retreat.

I decide to stay close to home, reading my mail, checking my feed in a flat, diminished frame of mindlessness. After a while, I pick my MacBook up off the couch to plug it in to the charger. Out from underneath the body of my cherished writing, my love affair with self-expression, a monstrous insect crawls out of prehistory and stares up at me from the frayed seat cushion. His is an unexpected and eloquent Darwinian visitation. This insect has seen fall color come and go, the first white men descend upon the virgin continent, the rise and fall of America in the intervening centuries. This insect, who has been living under my life in language, under my alternating bouts of hope and despair, will be here long after we're all gone, a thought both terrifying and comforting.


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. I have recently updated the comments function and hope it is easier to use.