Take Heart

Some of us see a dark future or no future, a lunar wasteland replacing the paradise we have only recently come to notice. Some of us see a renaissance, a flowering of art and justice replicating itself in all directions and dimensions like a hall of mirrors. And some of us can't make up our minds. We have good days when we inhale in common with the Chinese their freshly laundered air. And we have bad days when we're no longer certain where good retreats and bad advances. We have days that unfold in the paradigm of science - what little we understand - and days that unfold in the paradigm of metaphor, a more familiar territory. These are not points of view so much as personality types that come and go, even within the consciousness of one person. I can wake up a virologist and go to bed a metaphysician. In between, I scavenge for disinfectant. Some days, I vacillate wildly between thinking it's all random and knowing for an undeniable fact that it's my fault. I have eaten my fair share of BLTs.

Of all the words written since the beginning of the pandemic or, to be more honest, since the scourge, in a Marco Polo u-turn, reached St. Mark's square and the Campo de Fiori in Rome, the remarks of the Pope have given me the most comfort. Francis says, anticipating an end to the crisis..."Tonight before falling asleep think about when we will return to the street....Every second will be precious. Swims at sea, the sun until late, sunsets, toasts, laughter. We will go back to laughing together." I appreciate especially "return to the street." Francis, despite his clerical costume, has a novelist's love for the world.

Every day that the virus claimed more lives, new flowers appeared in Berkeley. I was there making my annual March pilgrimage to celebrate the birthdays of my niece and my sister, this year turning 85. There were California poppies the color of tangerines. Enormous bushes of rosemary smelling like leg of lamb and bursting with purple blossoms. Jasmine and camellias. My sister sat in her recliner and took it all in. On St. Patrick's Day, she and I performed our own arrangement of "Danny Boy," until we were undone by the Irish tenor high notes. We fortified ourselves with cashews. We did our trademark imaginary tour of upper Broadway, seeing if we could remember all the stores and all the shopkeepers from the fifties. Every morning, my sister read the dire headlines in the Chronicle. We explained that there was a virus like a wildfire in the Sierras spreading out of control all over the world and she nodded. You couldn't tell if it registered, if it meant anything. But then again what did it mean to us? No more Thai food? No more browsing and people-watching at the bookstore? It's not like a terrorist attack. It dawns on you slowly, this new day.

At first, I kissed her forehead each time I entered her room and each time I left, marking the coming and going as if my sister were a mezuzah holding a sacred text. And maybe she is and maybe I am and maybe you are. But in the last days of the trip, I was no longer kissing my people. We were communicating our love for one another virtually, sometimes in words, but more often in chaste adoring glances like shy Victorians. I put my hand to my heart and she put her hand to her heart. When I sat opposite her on the final day before heading to the airport in Sacramento with my N95 mask and my supply of blue plastic gloves, she was leaning back in her chair under a wool blanket. She reached out from under the weight of it and grabbed my pinky finger with her pinky finger. We made a pinky promise, the way schoolgirls do, and despite the potential contagion of her skin touching my skin, we promised to love one another no matter the wreckage of this broken world.


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by commenting here or writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Twentysomething

When in doubt, tell stories.


There they were, round and puffed up in their winter coats, standing in her doorway around the corner from Barney Greengrass, her mother and father. She often spent Sunday mornings in Barney's lox and bagel establishment, doing the puzzle, reading the wedding notices with a rich mixture of envy and contempt. Delaying the time when she'd have to return to the empty apartment. She fought tooth and nail for this, this barely furnished, drafty studio, four blocks from the slipcovers and cushy carpeting of the family home. Now, she was stuck with it, its provisional feel, the high ceiling echo of its loneliness. Backpedaling was not an option.

The shaming and blaming went on for weeks. They weren't a screaming family. Too decorous. They were more of a sulking family. When things got really bad, her mother would take to her bed with a Victorian lack of amusement. Her father made it clear he didn't think she could manage living alone, paying the rent, that he couldn't understand why she wanted to live three blocks north and one block east when she had a perfectly good room with a matching maple headboard, dresser and desk at home. In the end, she hung in and moved out, her greatest adult accomplishment to date.

When she was small, she liked to bury her face in her mother's fur coat, an unexpected encounter between otherwise unacquainted mammals. She'd seen seals, sleek and dripping, sunning themselves on the rocks overlooking their pool at the Central Park zoo. But the coat, though dead, was more approachable. In the doorway, however, her mother was not wearing the Alaskan seal and this was noteworthy given the bone-shattering cold of the February day. Her mother was more modestly dressed in a gray cloth coat with no color at the neck. Funereal, Randy thought, bordering on churchy. Her father wore his signature fedora, but that didn't mean anything since he never left home without it. She'd been dusting the New York soot off her bookshelves and wasn't expecting them. Damn, it looked serious. Grandma was already dead so it wasn't that kind of emergency. But it was clearly something.

What do you say when you're twenty-two and your parents appear unannounced at your door? Surely not "can I get you something," since Randy didn't have a thing to offer. Her fridge was stocked with the remains of last night's mushroom pizza, an ancient, shriveled grapefruit and a jar of stuffed olives. She looked at the two of them and they looked at her, not even taking off their coats. They had something to say and, apparently, they were going to say it.

Randy's mother and father sat down on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in some muddy brown synthetic material and settled their swollen feet on the orange-lollipop colored rug she bought at Macy's. Her friend, Joanne, wondered why she'd bought a rug when she wasn't even married.

"We got a call," her mother launched in with a blank expression on her face. "From someone named Leila Weiss. We don't know her. We had no idea who she was. She said she was getting divorced," and here her father chimed in so that the words came out in stereo. "She's naming you as the co-respondent in her divorce case."

Randy didn't know what a co-respondent was. It sounded like something you were responsible for learning about in high school, in algebra class or English, maybe a part of speech. Randy didn't know Leila Weiss either, had never met her. But the name registered, rang a carillon of bells. It was clear that the call had come from Mark's wife. Mark was her boyfriend.

She met him in the elevator of the office building downtown where she was working as the intake person for civil cases at the Legal Aid Society, the next best thing to finishing law school. She had high hopes for law school, how she'd eventually be sitting behind an enormous desk with a great many telephones. But law school was a fucking nightmare. Four women in an advancing battalion of male faces, the professor calling on them randomly to analyze cases. Property. Contracts. She tried to make herself even smaller than she was, willing herself invisible and it must have worked because in the six sleepless weeks she was there at BU she never got called on. Not once. She didn't exist.

At Legal Aid, she had an alcove at the front with a desk, not enormous, but all hers. Clients would come in and sit opposite her and she got to ask them all sorts of personal questions about their income, their domestic arrangements, the installments remaining on their kitchen appliances. Mostly, it was landlord-tenant or slip and fall. People were either being evicted for being in arrears on their rent or they were trying to sue the city for failing to repair the sidewalk outside the building where they weren't paying their rent, so that they could get enough money together to pay their rent. She was six months out of college and it was her first real job. She loved it. For some reason, it was a slow season for family law so she wasn't up on the pertinent legal jargon. Had never run across a client who was being named as a co-respondent. This was virgin territory although that ship had sailed a number of years back.

Mark was a forty year old married accountant, but kind of good looking. Jeez. They were both standing in the elevator holding cups of scalding, undistinguished coffee. He caught her eye and gave Randy a sheepish smile that felt empowering. She was needing that bad after she had to drag her father up to Boston to bail her out of BU back in October. The two of them were ushered into an office wallpapered with framed diplomas for an expensive and mortifying negotiation. The dean noted that women weren't really cut out for the law. He and her father didn't seem at all surprised that she was packing up and going home. Expectations fulfilled.

Her parents had only met Mark once. It was New Year's Eve. The two of them had planned a big night, dinner out then maybe some music. But on the thirtieth, Randy woke up with a toothache so over-the-top that it dwarfed everything else in the world. There was only the toothache. It turned out to be an impacted wisdom tooth that had to come out immediately. If the dentist hadn't been her father's cousin, a grizzled person with medieval dental equipment, she never would have gotten an appointment right before the holiday. She probably would have been forced to kill herself. As it was, she had the thing extracted and crawled back to her parent's apartment, crushed, defeated and stoned on Percocet.

Mark came by at around eight with a dozen purple roses. Her mother was extremely impressed. He had taken off his wedding ring and just looked like an attractive Columbia graduate, which he was. A tad old, true, but charming and solicitous. Randy was lying on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in gold brocade. She was close to suffocating under a pile of blankets. Through the narcotic fog, she saw the two of them, Mark falling in age precisely between her and her mother. The scent of the roses mixed with the smell of her own unwashed body nauseated her. She mumbled a weak thank you and turned away.

Now, her father was looking at the orange rug. Randy could see that he was trying to make eye contact with her, but couldn't quite pull it off. "Just tell him you can't see him anymore," he suggested, sighing with weariness and resignation.

"Of course, we know it isn't true," her mother added, tight-lipped. "What this awful woman said. It's unthinkable that this Leila Weiss would lay this in our lap. Call us and say you were involved with her husband. Involved in that way," she added with emphasis. "Your father and I know you'd never do anything like that."

And Randy thought, I can't get credit for anything. Not even being a half-way decent bad girl.



Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Cotton Candy for Breakfast

One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever. This was a no-brainer for the author of Ecclesiastes but for us, forever has lost its distinction, its credibility. We can't count on it. It's become unreliable like snow in January. Forever, it turns out, is a scoundrel, a womanizer, an over-hyped Hollywood romcom. To say goodbye to this central illusion is to fall into a sinkhole. These days in New England, it sometimes snows in honor of Dr. King's birthday, but sometimes nothing falls out of the sky but freezing rain, daring me to walk down the treacherous steps to the driveway to scrape the frost off the windshield. And sometimes, it's sixty degrees in January and I get to wallow in the guilt of enjoying what I know isn't a good thing. Cotton candy for breakfast.

The loss of forever casts a dark, elongated shadow. It puts greater pressure on the present. It demands that I look reality in the eye in a way that I resent and resist. I can't expect anything going forward. I can't count on a damn thing. Neither good health, nor wisteria, tumbling purple over a fence, nor witnesses, standing red-faced before the Senate. All I have is now, sitting on a deck in Panama, one more gringo in Paradise, letting the winter do whatever it's doing back home while I hide from it. All I have is the company of words to encourage me when I fear for the future. Words are my friends. They make nice to me. They graciously allow me to twist them into unexpected shapes like animals made from balloons at children's birthday parties and bounce them around like ice in a cocktail shaker at parties for grownups. Even so, in my writing I am aware, that I long to skate backwards into a time that feels reassuringly less like a horror movie. This may be another flavor of cotton candy, another sticky confection designed to sugarcoat reality.

I remember how my mother looked lying in her nursing home bed with the railings raised, her eyes unfocused, her cheeks hollowed out. She would not allow me to tell her she was beautiful, shaking her wobbly head vehemently from side to side and tsk tsking. She didn't remember much by then, but she remembered beautiful. How she could weaponize her crossed legs and fluttering eyelashes to get things done. How it had been decades since she was that person. But I refused to see it that way. When I looked at her, I saw the grace of her earlobes and her narrow wrists and I thought this will go on from here to eternity. I embraced the illusion of forever even though she died five days later. If it's true, as I read recently, that a writer is someone who plays with the body of his [sic] mother, I must be Shakespeare's second cousin. I am avid for her, for her long life that appeared to go on and on and the stories I continue to tell about it.

It's curious that I'm pondering endtimes here on the southern edge of the continent, dense with jungle vegetation, an opera of birds singing, a nearby creek whispering. It may be the long days absent errands, appointments with the auto mechanic, the skin doctor. It may be the burnt faces of the indigenous farm workers descending the hillsides at the end of the day, exhausted. I can't tell if they are registering any variation in the anxious stink pouring off the American body politic. These people, the Ngobe, have harvested the coffee since pre-Columbian times. Every barista at every Starbucks in Seattle owes her job to them. This ancient way of life could vanish, a victim of climate change. What if there's not enough rain? Or too much?

As a hedge against extinction, I buy a bag covered in a geometric design made by the Kuna people from the San Blas Islands in Caribbean Panama. Later, online, I learn that the islands may be rendered uninhabitable from sea level rise later in the century. For everything there is a season, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote. This is the season of disbelief and the season of denial. As the sun revolves around the earth, there may come a time when spring will not follow winter or when all the seasons become confused and forget the natural order of things as we perhaps already have.


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Lost and Found

Anna, second from the right in first row
Photograph taken in Iasi, Romania in the 1880s

In the backward glance of time travel, grandmother Anna is reaching up to put her veiled straw hat on a shelf above her dark, crepey dresses. The bedroom in the back of our apartment fills with the acrid smell of camphor, her winter coat packed in mothballs at the rear of the closet. Anna has just returned from breathing her own allotted share of toxic fumes. She's been gossiping on the bench in the middle of four lanes of Broadway traffic. The whale-size Pontiacs and chubby Checker cabs drive by northbound towards Harlem and southbound towards the diamond district. Mrs. Mandelbaum's grandson has graduated from law school. Mrs. Ziegler's husband is at Mt. Sinai for his gall bladder. In the kitchen, mother is working on her beef Stroganoff. Mixing the sour cream into the flank steak remains a liberation. She has held her ground against Anna, insisting on certain expansions of the family diet, but agreeing to eat the mouthwatering outlier foods only at Shanghai Palace.

Further back, mother is a small girl with a piece of chalk and a key playing potsy in Mt. Morris Park on 105th street. Boys are marching out of the tenements, boarding ships sailing east to France. Mrs. Mandelbaum's mother has died very young of influenza. Anna is tasting the soup she prepared for her husband. It might be too salty. Louis doesn't like salty. But it might not have enough flavor. He wants it to have flavor. He wants this and he wants that. Anna tries hard to get it right. If she doesn't get it right, Louis becomes sullen, frightens her little daughter. He doesn't smack them around, but still they cower when he comes into the room. He leaves a sour taste. Louis is not the man Anna thought she would marry.

I can almost see her before she makes the crossing from Romania, the city of Iasi, where hoodlum Jew-haters threw rocks in their windows. Mrs. Ziegler's father has been attacked in the street. It's suddenly clear that this has gone beyond the usual threat. Everyone has to pack up and leave in a hurry, sailing west to New York. Anna has a suitor in Iasi, Chaim Greenstein. He plays the clarinet and speaks flowery, literary Yiddish. Long before she dies in the nursing home on Long Island opposite the woman who lies awake at night making shadow puppets on the wall, something dies inside Anna when she says goodbye to him, Chaim. Something gets left behind. This remnant struggles to breathe. It reaches for me, for my son and his sons. It wants us to love one another extravagantly to compensate for the love lost in transit, blown off the deck of the ship into the Black Sea. It wants us to create openings for love.

But these boys, my grandsons, are growing up so fast. They never get to meet Anna's daughter, let alone Anna. In Minnesota, all they have from long ago and far away is me when I visit, weak tea no longer served hot in a glass. They are wallowing deep in America, kayaking down the Red Cedar river, running the bases on humid upper midwest summer nights. I want to gift them with the old stories. Make them some good soup, not too salty. I want to say to them, look, here is this little girl in Romania studying French and here is her daughter skipping rope in the gutter uptown. Here is your great great-grandfather Louis, a sad sack, a sorry case. See him glowering in a corner, empty pockets, emphysema. Maybe they can take his mind off his troubles. In some back-to-the future science fiction, Louis is walking with the two of them down to one of their favorite fishing spots on the big river, the Mississippi. It reminds him of the Danube, one summer outing when his mother laid out a picnic of cold chicken and pickled beets while he and his father dug for worms. He overhears his mother singing and clapping her hands. There is his Anna the day he fell in love with her in the English for immigrants class downtown, her blue eyes, her hair swept high off her lovely neck. Louis looks these boys up and down. He's bewildered by the noise and lights flashing around them, all the things they've accumulated in their short lives. But somewhere under the commotion of their America, he recognizes them. They belong to him.

-----------------------------------------
"The young and the old are linked in one long breath."....Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass

Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Seeing Clearly

One sweltering August day, my mother took her eye out. She was sitting on a folding chair under a luxuriant maple on my front lawn, but the sun was relentless. Not like today when the winter sun is shining crackling-bright even while the snow is falling. No, on that day decades ago, the air was heavy and suffocating. Mother's scalp was itching. The sweat was pouring down her neck. She decided it would be cooler on the porch, only three steps to negotiate. But, as in life, there was nothing to hold on to, no banister, no safety net. Her tiny feet in their backless, toeless Manhattan shoes, slipped out from under her, throwing her down so that her left eye hit the sharp corner of the middle step. I saw it happen in slow motion. By the time I got from the overgrown garden to where she lay struggling to get up on her own, the blood was pooling in her eye. I could only remember seeing her bleed once before. I was twelve and she was fifty. She had left home for an annual event in a midtown hotel all done up in tight-fitting ice blue satin. But she came home mortified with blood staining the seat of the dress. My mother was a powder blue and slate gray person. She never wore red intentionally.

The emergency room doctors at Fairview called the ophthalmologist in Pittsfield. It was a Sunday, but he rushed down to his office and we rushed up to meet him. I remember thinking it was a kindness. He could have been playing eighteen holes. The doctor explained that time was of the essence in these cases. He called Albany Medical Center to advise them that we were on our way. My mother, eighty-three years old, curled up in the back seat of the car like a small child after a tumble off the monkey bars...except she didn't cry. She didn't say a word.

At the hospital, wading into the great throng of diabetics, addicts and people with everyday complaints but no access to doctors, the seas parted for us. Apparently, this was not only a medical emergency, but a race and class emergency as well. My mother was wheeled on a gurney through the crowd of black and brown people like Catherine the Great on a sedan chair. Nonetheless, she lost her eye. She didn't misplace it, of course. She didn't lose it in the sense of disfigurement. She continued to look exactly the same, her hair swept up on top of her head and held in place by a large contingent of bobby pins, her cheeks rouged. There she is, a '20s beauty, an actual flapper, more than fifty years later. Nonetheless, she could no longer see out of her left eye and the books she read in the sixteen years she had remaining, would be reduced to what was available in large print. Romance novels, murder mysteries.

We stayed up waiting in an unsavory McDonald's in Albany when we weren't in the hospital lobby, an anthology of suffering. Then, we brought her home. My sister called to ask if I felt guilty. I guess about the missing banister. Maybe about the hot weather. But I somehow knew enough to realize it wasn't about me. It was all about my mother, who she had been, who she was becoming. I tried to shuffle alongside her in the present. I held her head back with my left hand as I dabbed her eye with a tissue in my right. I administered eye drops. Again, she was childlike, but patient, strangely undemanding. She seemed to revel in the attention as she had at the hospital. My mother was always a sucker for doctors. She developed intimacies with them. I thought....here she is. A six year old bravely standing up to iodine, a splinter in her foot. Or, a twenty-five year old with a sprained ankle smiling flirtatiously at a handsome medical student with a stethoscope hanging suggestively from his neck. Or, maybe the withered crone she would become when she could no longer see out of either pale blue eye, her smudged glasses really only a fashion thing.

Everything would be lost little by little, but everything would also remain, its lifespan beginning before memory, in a forever only hinted at by Hallmark. My mother took her eye out and I began to see her more clearly.

_________________________
Here's a link to Colin Harrington's review of my book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement that appeared in the Berkshire Eagle https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/book-review-twilight-time-is-reflective-spiritual,591980

Please share your thoughts regarding this story and Twilight Time by writing to me at
seventysomething9@gmail.com

Tin Pan Alley

The son never came to visit. If there was a son. A Catholic family like that you'd think there'd be a son, or six sons and maybe four daughters. But Teddy, Tadeuz, always sat by himself in a morgue-ish silence, last room on the left, the noise of the nurses pushing the med carts on the soundtrack of his dreams. You couldn't really tell what he was dreaming or thinking except for the occasional wry smile. Teddy didn't say anything, couldn't speak. He was a stroke patient. One morning, he was sitting on his porch in Chicopee yelling to a guy in the street he'd known for sixty years about how the Sox were bullshit and would never break the Curse. They didn't have it in them. They were losers and weaklings....when he just fell off his plastic lawn chair and started rolling into the gutter like an errant bowling ball. The ambulance came and brought him to Bay State where a team of doctors from who knows where worked him over, but in the end all they could do was stick a feeding tube in his belly and assure him he'd be well cared for at Rolling Meadows. This was four years ago.

He lay in bed until his aide, Aisha, a powerful Jamaican, lifted him out every morning and sat him in his chair.
"How you doin', T?" she asked him. "You dream sweet dreams last night? Pretty girls visit you when it get dark and nobody lookin'"?
She handed him a plastic bottle to pee in and wheeled him to the bathroom sink so he could brush his teeth and throw some water on his face. Teddy had the use of his upper body, his arms and hands, his head. So he could turn toward Aisha and smile. Then, he could do what he did every morning. Lift his right hand to his mouth in a charade of drinking a cup of coffee, his heart's desire.
"No sir, T. No way. You drink coffee, you could aspirate it right down the wrong pipe into your lungs."
Teddy had learned that word. Aspirate. One nurse or another, one aide or another was always using it to threaten him. His brain had forgotten how to swallow. He couldn't speak and he couldn't eat or drink. If he drank a cup of coffee, the sweet hot stuff would go down his windpipe. He'd end up with pneumonia and it would probably kill him. The only thing that could go in or out of his mouth was air, the stale stink of the nursing home.

After she served him breakfast, some beige slop that went through the tube in his belly, the aide propped him up and handed him the Herald sports section. Then, she sashayed out of the room into the hall where a small party of other staff, painted latinas, skinny white girls, Caribbean women with outlandish hairdos, was taking a spontaneous break. Telling affectionate stories about some residents, complaining about others.
"He keep pinchin' my ass."
"She used to be a opera singer."

They all loved Teddy. He must have had something before he got old and stroked out because they all flirted with him. There was a satisfaction in saying something a little racy or dancing around in front of him, getting his blue eyes to twinkle, making the corners of his mouth turn up a fraction of a millimeter. He hadn't been with a woman in so long. None of the men had except O'Connell who used to be in the bed on the opposite side of the room before he had a heart attack and got wheeled out on a gurney. O'Connell had a wife who came in Tuesdays and Fridays to give him a hand job. The other men listened. They looked forward to it.

There was a new aide on the floor. She couldn't have been more than twenty, blond with curls tied back in a pony tail. When she walked out of the room after she fluffed up the pillows on Teddy's bed and changed the sheets for his roommate, Kirby, Teddy watched her hips rock back and forth slowly. Sandy, her name was, and she was in no kind of hurry. He knew her name was Sandy because he read the little tag she wore, but he hadn't talked to her yet. Or, rather, she hadn't talked at him yet. After a while, a decent interval he thought, not all in your face like some of them,  she came by and asked.
"You a Sox fan?"
He nodded "Tough for you to be in here all cooped up and not even have a decent ball team to root for."
He noticed she didn't wear a wedding ring. There were so many questions he wanted to ask. Have you every been married? Do you have kids? How come a beautiful woman like you is all alone? Do you like to sing? She came in and out every day, helping him change out of his pajamas, sponging him down and getting him into a clean shirt in the morning and just visiting a bit in the afternoon before she left at 3. Teddy couldn't tell if he was special or if she was just a good person.

When she came in the morning, he did his coffee charade just like he did with all the other aides. Sandy didn't tell him he was going to aspirate it. She just got this plaintive look on her face and shook her head.
"I'm sorry," she said.
When she came in the afternoon, she sometimes read to him from the paper. He'd already read it all by that time, but that didn't matter. He loved to listen to her read and make comments about the Sox or the Patriots, depending on the season, or about the crooks in Boston, the ones on the street and the ones in the mayor's office.

One day, she was just kicking back turning the entertainment pages before heading home when she started humming "Summertime." Sandy loved show tunes. Teddy chimed in. "Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high." She looked up from the Herald and stared at him, but she didn't say a word. Didn't make a big deal out of it. Just went on singing. They sang together "Your daddy's rich and your mama's good lookin'...hush little baby, don't you cry."

Teddy couldn't talk, but it turned out he could sing like one of the old crooners, like Sinatra, like Tony Bennett. Nobody knew that but Sandy. She looked it up on the internet. Found out that the music comes from a different place in the brain. Even the words in the songs. The words in the songs were coming from a secret place where they lay in wait hoping for a chance to come out.

It was hard for Teddy to pick out a song, but if Sandy started singing, he jumped right in. They both knew all the words. "The falling leaves, drift by the window, the autumn leaves of red and gold." For a while now, he had stopped doing his coffee charade when it was Sandy's shift. He didn't want to repeat himself with her every day the way he did with the other aides. He wanted to feel the freshness, the newness every day. Teddy could see out the window that winter had come to Westfield even though it was always the same inside Rolling Meadows, like a casino in Vegas. Outside, the trees were bare. Flurries fell from a mean sky. How he would have loved that hot coffee warming his hands, his throat and his belly. And another thing. Sandy wanted to sing Christmas carols, but Teddy wouldn't have any part of it. She didn't know why, but she didn't push it.

Don't give me baby Jesus and all them kings and lambs hanging around, he thought while he shook his head no. Jesus doesn't give a shit about me. Didn't bring back my legs or give me a ham sandwich for lunch. Let's stick to "Winter Wonderland." "Sleigh bells ring, are you listening." Sandy listened. She tried to get a feel for what songs Teddy was in the mood for. Some days, he seemed to want upbeat. "The Sunny Side of the Street," as if he was feeling some gratitude for the life he had, even if the pleasure wasn't enough to fill a shot glass. Some days were dark, dead of winter dark. It was January now and Donder and Blitzen were coming down from the windows. Next thing you know, they'd be putting up the Valentines. Wives would be coming in with boxes of chocolates for the old guys, even if they were sons-of-bitches before they ended up in Rolling Meadows. Teddy's wife had left him one January. One drunken brawl too many. He didn't look up at Sandy when she came in at the end of her shift. She was singing "Unchained Melody." He kept his eyes closed while a tear came down his face. After a few minutes, she squeezed his hand and turned to leave for the day. The next morning, after she got him up and into his recliner, he raised his right hand to his mouth and threw his head back to drink his imaginary cup of coffee.

She asked "milk?" Teddy nodded yes. "How many sugars"? He raised two fingers.
She went out and came back with a steaming white mug. It was early and no one else was awake in the room. No one was working the floor. It was just the two of them. Teddy took a sip of heaven and beamed back at Sandy. He felt the heat and the sugar and the caffeine and the love. Teddy coughed as she was walking out of the room. Sandy wasn't sure she'd done the right thing. He might aspirate the coffee, but he might not.



To comment on this story or my recent book, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, 
email seventysomething9@gmail.com.  Thank you for your continued interest in my writing.

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!