Ellie’s Cough

Posted on July 29, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            A few weeks ago, maybe after the apocalyptic day in New York, when the skies turned orange and everything smelled of smoke because of the Canadian wildfires, Ellie started to cough.

“Are you talking about me?”

            It’s not that she’d never coughed before. In fact, she has a full menu of interesting coughs and sneezes to her name: including the how-dare-you-pull-on-my-leash cough, which sounds like a frog is jumping out of her throat; and the excuse-me-where’s-my-dinner cough, which is more like a whisper, with her head turned away for deniability. But this cough was something new. It sounded like she was choking on something, or suffocating, and then she’d sort of cough up whatever it was and collapse as if she’d run a marathon.

            The first time I witnessed this, I was afraid she was going to die right in front of me. I may have taken it more seriously as a result of the debarking surgery that was done when she was still a breeding dog, because the scar tissue from that surgery has made her throat more constricted than it should be.

            It was a few days before I witnessed another coughing attack, and I was shocked by it again, especially by the way she seemed almost paralyzed for a couple of minutes afterward, but then she was fine, and I was relieved. She started to cough more frequently after that, but with less seriousness, and I wondered if maybe it was just an allergy, exacerbated by the air quality, and, really, I was distracted. Cricket had been diagnosed with kidney disease and needed fluids every day, and we’d had a car accident and had to buy a new car, and I’d had to go to five or ten doctors’ appointments, and prep for my second oral surgery (the follow-up to last year’s surgery), and that’s only the top line of the chaos that was going on around here, and there was no way to keep up with all of it, so each time Ellie stopped coughing and seemed to be breathing and walking and eating okay, I just breathed a sigh of relief and let it go.

            But last week, when Cricket had to go back to the vet for a follow up blood test, and I was between medical appointments, it seemed like a good opportunity to bring Ellie in to be seen as well.

            Of course, as soon as we made the appointment for both of them, Cricket, who had been doing surprisingly well, had a downturn. She couldn’t eat and she was woozy, even without the calming meds, to the point where she allowed me to insert the needle for the fluids without a fight. We all went to bed that night thinking this was the end, and we’d have to leave Ellie home the next day, and bring Cricket in to the vet for the last time.

            But in the morning, my little phoenix rose from the ashes again, climbed up and down the stairs herself, ate her breakfast and demanded more.

“I’m hungry!!!!!”

            So we went, all together, to the vet, me as the chauffeur in the front seat, Mom sitting in the back with both dogs, so that Ellie wouldn’t have to sit alone back there (Cricket has never tolerated sitting in the backseat. When we would put her in a harness early on in her life, she’d escape within thirty seconds and make her way up to the driver’s seat). With Cricket and Grandma sitting next to her, Ellie got through the ride without crying once, though she was still breathing heavily.

            I carried Cricket into the vet’s waiting room, not wanting to have her walk on the hot ground (Ellie refused to be carried), and the vet took Cricket out first, to take the blood, and then focused on Ellie and her cough. I tried to reenact the cough for him, so he’d know what he was dealing with, and he gave me a look and said, “Can you do that again?” It took me a second to realize he was joking. If he has a sense of humor it is very, very dry. He checked Ellie’s heart and looked in her mouth and took her temperature (which she found horrifying), and he gave her an anti-inflammatory shot and sent us home with antibiotics and a cough suppressant for her to take twice a day, and he said to call him in a few days and let him know if she was coughing any less (because if not, he’d want to follow up with an x-ray).

            And we were free. This visit, which, for a few hours there had seemed like it would be the last time I ever saw my Cricket, turned out to be routine and quick. When we got home we were all ready for an afternoon nap, maybe me more than everyone else, to be honest.

“Oy.”

            Both dogs were thrilled with their treats (with their separate meds hidden inside) once the naps were over: Cricket discovered a great love for sardine juice, and Ellie discovered that she had no such great love and stuck with pieces of chicken.

            Ellie coughed less for a few days, though she became more and more picky every day about the treats within which we could hide her pills, but then the coughing came back, and Ellie was barely eating anything at all. We called the vet and he said to stop the antibiotics, because they might be causing her lack of appetite, but keep up the cough suppressants for a few more days and then call back.

Pretty quickly, though, it was clear that Ellie was getting worse. She was breathing heavily, leaving treats uneaten (where Cricket could easily steal them), and refusing to walk more than a few feet at a time. So we called the vet for an emergency appointment this morning and brought her in, and as soon as he saw her he said she didn’t look good at all. He took an x-ray and said her heart was huge and misshapen, and there was fluid collecting around her heart. He gave her a shot of a diuretic and told us he would send the x-rays on to a specialist and then let us know what medication she could take going forward. But, he said, she could collapse at any time. He couldn’t explain how she’d gone from having a little bit of a cough to being in heart failure within a week, but most likely the cough had been caused by the enlarged heart in the first place, pressing on her trachea.

Ellie’s home now, still breathing heavily, but peeing rivers, which will hopefully relieve some of the pressure on her heart. But my heart is overwhelmed. Cricket is oblivious: sleeping on Grandma’s lap, eating well, and barking her frustration at all of the attention her sister has been getting. And now we wait, to see what comes next.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Azazel

Posted on July 22, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

My first experience with the word Azazel was as an epithet in Hebrew – Lech LeAzazel, meaning, “Go to hell.” I don’t know where I heard this, though most likely from my father. And I’m pretty sure I confused it with Azriel, the name of Gargamel’s cat on the Smurfs.

“Did you say ‘cat’?”

            Recently in Bible study we came across the Azazel references in Leviticus 16, where it describes the ancient version of Yom Kippur, as opposed to the 25-hour fast and pray and self-flagellate fiesta we have today. In this ancient ritual, two goats of equal size and worth are chosen, and then, by lots, one goat is marked for God, as a sacrifice, and one is marked for “Azazel,” to be sent into the wilderness.

The goat chosen to be sacrificed to God is a familiar ritual, especially in Leviticus where we’ve just learned, in extremely boring detail, how animals are chosen and prepared and sacrificed to God on the altar by the High Priest. But this sending of a goat “to Azazel” is something altogether different. And before the goat is sent away, the High Priest lays both hands on the head of the goat and transfers all of the sins of the Israelite people onto the goat, so that the goat can take the sins away from the community with him.

            In English we translate the “Azazel” goat as the “scapegoat.”

            One interpretation of the word Azazel is that it was the name of a Pagan God, the God who goes beyond civilization, and so this goat would be sent to a demon God that predates the Israelite religion. This seems unlikely, given the constant drumbeat of God as the only God in the Hebrew Bible. But this idea of a god-who-goes-beyond-civilization made me think about how our vision of hell isn’t other people, as Sartre would have it, but as a life without other people in it. And what we call evil, or the devil, is what happens when we stop valuing civilization or mutual responsibility. Hell isn’t a separate place, it’s a different mindset that people can fall into, one that takes them outside of the human social contract.

“What about the canine social contract?”

            The other, and more common, way of interpreting the word Azazel is as two Hebrew words stuck together – Az and Azel – meaning, “the goat” that “goes away.” In the Hebrew Bible itself, the scapegoat is only sent away, though later commentators say that the goat was not just sent into the wilderness but thrown off a cliff. The reality, though, is that being sent out of community would have been a death sentence in itself in the Ancient Near East, with no one to provide food or water or shelter, either for a goat or for a human being.

            Maimonides, a Medieval Jewish sage (1134-1204), makes sure to remind us that you can’t really transfer your sins to someone or something else, and that this ritual is symbolic; and of course it’s symbolic, but it is a powerful symbol because it taps into some of our deepest feelings and wishes. We want to imagine that our sins can be transferred out of our own bodies and into someone or something else. And we really want to be able to blame someone else for what we’ve done.

“It was her fault.”

            There’s a lot of resonance for me in this idea of a scapegoat, because my father actively tried to transfer his own feelings of guilt and self-loathing, from his own abusive childhood, onto me. And that transfer was emotional, intellectual, and physical in nature. He literally put his hands on me, but he also tried to convince me of my own guilt with his words. He did a very thorough job of it, so much so that many years later I’m still dealing with the aftermath of all of the pain and mistrust and guilt he transferred onto me and created in me.

            I think, usually, when we think of a scapegoat we think in more societal terms, like African American slaves being made the scapegoats of all of the self-loathing and guilt felt by their white enslavers, so that the “master” class could feel superior and divorce itself from any of the feeling of helplessness or guilt or vulnerability they were feeling in the new world. Or when Jews were scapegoated in Germany, and blamed for the economic crises in the country, to the point where Germans really believed that if they got rid of all the Jews their lives and their economy would flourish.

            But I’m really interested in this idea that we can transfer emotions or deeds through touch, the way the High Priest puts his hands on the head of the goat and transfers the sins of the people through his hands. We tend to dismiss touch as every day and meaningless: we shake hands with strangers, and hug our friends hello without a thought. Even sex, in our culture, is often minimized and treated as a sport or a casual pursuit. But the Azazel ritual recognizes that when we touch each other we literally or figuratively leave something of ourselves in the hands of the other.

            We rely on each other, for basics like food and shelter and protection, but also for human touch and connection. And if there’s anything this scapegoat ritual tells us, it’s that the worst thing that can happen to us, or that we think can happen to us, is to be sent outside of the community to survive alone. It’s not death that we fear most, but excommunication and isolation. Even today, when it’s much easier to move from one community to another, and to leave a family of origin behind in search of a family of choice, we still feel these cutoffs viscerally.

            I am still very sensitive to touch, very aware of it and resistant to initiating it. I don’t hug easily. I don’t even shake hands easily. And with my dogs, I can see how important touch can be in creating a shared emotion, in communicating love and security and care – or inspiring fear.

“We prefer love.”

            I wonder what it was like for the goat who was sent to Azazel, if there was a sense of freedom at first, before the reality of exile kicked in, or if he felt the burden of the sins on his head right away and understood his fate. I hope he didn’t understand. I hope that for as long as possible, he believed that he was the lucky one, the one who got away.

“I hope so too, but I’m skeptical.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?   

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Cricket is the Most Stubborn Person I Know

Posted on July 15, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            A few weeks ago I was afraid Cricket was on the edge of life, diagnosed with kidney disease, struggling to walk, knocking into things. We started giving her subcutaneous fluids on the off chance that it would help extend her life, and it’s actually working. Though in order to give her the fluids we have to medicate her with a combination of gabapentin and ACE, which makes her woozy for hours. At times, she seems like a wraith, her feet slipping out from under her, not even protesting when the needle slips under her skin.

            Ideally, she would have gotten used to the whole procedure by now, and she wouldn’t try to pull off the muzzle, or lift up her head to get away from the needle. Ideally, I’d never have to give her any calming meds at all and she would just accept the fluids as a necessary evil and get it over with and get back to living her life. But then she wouldn’t be Cricket, and all of this effort is to make sure she gets to be Cricket for as long as possible.

“Oh, I can be even more Cricket-y. Just wait.”

            Every day, at the beginning of all of this, I was afraid she was going to die overnight, and when she actually woke up in the morning, and ate her breakfast, I was surprised, and afraid to be hopeful. But with each day she seems to improve a little bit. The meds make her into a rag doll, yes, but then the next morning, after she’s slept it off, it’s like she’s been brought back to life, refilled with her fluids and her spirit, and ready to sniff the whole world again.

            It’s still nerve-wracking to watch her skin fill up with the fluids. I even worry sometimes that her neck is going to explode (I’ve seen too many movies), and I worry that I’m going to put the needle in the wrong place and puncture something vital. I was worried for a while that I was inserting the needle the wrong way and causing scar tissue to form because I could feel these quarter-sized bumps under her skin and I was afraid I would run out of loose skin and not be able to give her the fluids anymore, but then the bumps started to dissolve, and that worry, at least, went away. So much of this is trial and error and the circumstances seem to change every day. It feels like a magic trick each time she wakes up in the morning and walks and barks and eats and acts like herself, but a magic trick that is unreliable and hard won.

            I’ve been thinking about my friend Teddy, the miniature poodle, who died from kidney disease a few years ago. His death came as a surprise, at least to me. He hadn’t been diagnosed with the disease ahead of time, and by the time they caught it he was too far gone to be helped by fluids or anything else. When Cricket was diagnosed I was afraid it would be the same thing, and every day, even though I knew her case was different, I expected the same results.

            Some days are better than others. Every once in while she has a bad night, her breathing is shallow, she pees on the floor because she can’t get to the wee wee pad in time, or she’s not up to climbing the stairs, but other days she seems to be getting better, growing stronger, and enjoying her life.

I was telling myself that I just needed Cricket to reach her sixteenth birthday, but now that she’s accomplished that goal, I need more. I need to feel like I did everything I could possibly do for her. I need to not have any regrets, and not feel like if only I had been stronger or smarter or kinder or more loving, she would have lived longer.

I’m also doing my best to make sure Ellie doesn’t feel left out, and gets extra hugs and scratchies and treats to make up for all of the attention her sister is getting. But when Cricket feels better she goes back to taunting Ellie, so then I feel guilty for taking such good care of Cricket and, at the same time, I feel guilty for not taking good enough care of her.

“If I keep my eyes closed she won’t bother me. Right?”

            The thing is, Cricket isn’t giving up. She doesn’t think sixteen years is enough, even if each day is a little harder than it used to be.  And if she’s going to be this stubborn, then I guess I’m going to have to be stubborn too.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Another Summer of Hebrew

Posted on July 8, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I started a new online Hebrew class for the summer, and my new Hebrew teacher is down to earth and clear and friendly, so I am hopeful that the class will be good and productive. But this is going to be my last Hebrew class for a while, because it’s expensive, and with another oral surgery coming up, and the pause on student loan debt repayment ending in August, I need to keep costs down; but also, I feel like I can’t focus on the classes during the school year anymore. I need more rest days, in order to recover from my work days, or else I won’t be able to work much longer.

“You should just stay home with us all the time.”

            I still love learning Hebrew, and I’m hoping that this last class will give me more confidence to continue learning new vocabulary on my own. Maybe I’ll even start writing in Hebrew and see how my voice translates.

            Writing in Hebrew is one of the few things we haven’t worked on in these classes from Tel Aviv, where the focus is on conversation skills and reading newspapers and watching TV. I think I would write poetry in Hebrew, because the language is so conducive to poetry, with all of the rhyming words and onomatopoeia and the leanness of the language overall. I gave up on writing poetry in English after too many discouraging teachers telling me to write like someone else, but maybe with Hebrew I could start again with a blank slate.

            I still want to become fluent in Hebrew, but I think if I take more classes I’d like to move towards Jewish learning in general, rather than Hebrew in particular. The focus in these classes has been on how Hebrew is spoken in Tel Aviv, with very little discussion of things that are recognizably Jewish, rather than Israeli. For me, Hebrew and Judaism are deeply intertwined, but Modern Hebrew has become a secular language, used for every mundane and profound purpose in daily life in Israel, and it feels like, as a result, some of the meaning has been stripped away.

I still want to learn more vocabulary, but I wonder if the words I really want to understand are the ones in the Hebrew Bible, or in the prayers, so that I don’t have to rely on someone else to tell me what they mean. I don’t want to lose sight of Modern Hebrew, and the way it has embraced so many different cultures and absorbed words from Arabic and English and French and Russian and more, I just want to re-invest in the connection to the past, where it all comes from.

I’m still not sure where all of this learning and exploring will take me, or how, or if, I will make use of it in my writing or my teaching, but sometimes learning is worth the effort just for its own sake, for the way it challenges our perceptions and widens our vision of the world and ourselves.

And maybe next summer, or when/if I start feeling better and have more energy, it will lead me to something more.

“Just make sure you take us with you wherever you go.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Cricket and the Big Needle

Posted on July 1, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Cricket has kidney disease. She had a really bad day recently: she fell down the stairs when she was coming in from a walk, and had to be carried up and down the rest of the day. By the next morning, she was back to herself, climbing the stairs and eating her breakfast and barking at the UPS guy, but we took her to the vet anyway and he checked her out and took blood and the next morning he called to say it was her kidneys, but he’d need a pee sample to know if she also had an infection. I had to follow her around all day with a ladle, collecting a teaspoon of pee at a time and storing it in the fridge until we had enough to bring to the vet. Thank god, Mom didn’t take the picture she threatened to take of this particular activity. The results: no infection, but very watery pee, confirming kidney disease, so we’d have to go back to the vet and learn how to give her sub-cutaneous fluids once a day. With a very big needle.

“I hate needles!”

            Cricket only weighs 9.5 pounds now, down from her original 14 pounds, and she looks like a naked chicken from the neck down, but she still has her rebellious spirit. So as soon as I knew I would have to put a needle under her skin every day, I started searching everywhere for her muzzle. We’d never actually used it before, but we had it somewhere, just in case, because she is a biter. I finally found the muzzle hidden behind her old harnesses and winter sweaters in the hall closet, and she let me put it on her, for a moment, before she started trying to pull it off.

            At our next appointment, the vet demonstrated how to hang the fluid bag on the door, and hold Cricket still, and pull up the extra neck skin like a tent and insert the needle, and Cricket calmly let him do all of this. We watched her neck swell up like a balloon, which he said was totally normal, and then he removed the needle and pinched the skin so that the fluid wouldn’t spritz out. Then he showed me how to change out the old needle for a new one, easy peasy. By the time we got home, Cricket was feeling so good that she skipped down the lawn on her way to the front door.

            My first attempt at giving her the fluids myself, the next morning, went almost as easily as when the vet did it, even with the big needle and the bite-prone Cricket, but on the second day, she rebelled. She bared her teeth at me, and pulled away from the needle, and then she bit me, three times. I tried again later in the day and managed to get the needle under her skin and a small ball of fluid in her neck, before she bit me again.

“You bit me first!”

            On the morning of day three, we tried giving her food during the procedure, to keep her distracted, but she turned the bowl over and spread the food all over the floor and hopped over it to get away from the needle. So, in desperation, we gave her a quarter of a doggy valium, and waited. An hour later I was able to put the muzzle on her, and insert the needle under her skin, and give her the rest of the fluids she should have had the day before. The only problem was that we had no more doggy valium. So off to the vet we went to get more medication, and incidentally, to make sure it was okay for her to take it every day. It was, but even that small amount of ACE (the doggy Valium) made her stumble around and wiped her out for the rest of the day.

“It helps to have somewhere to put my head.”

            A week after starting the fluids, we took her to the vet for another round of blood tests, to see if the fluids were helping, but when the doctor called the next morning, it turned out that her kidney numbers were worse. He told us to keep doing the fluids, with some added B vitamins, and he gave us Gabapentin to try instead of the ACE, to see if the combination would give her more good days. He had no prediction for how much time she has left. He just told us to keep an eye on her eating habits, and if she doesn’t eat for three days in a row then that would mean she’s suffering and it will be time to let her go.

            We tried the gabapentin to no effect, so we went back to the ACE, but decided to give it, and then the fluids, at night, so that she could sleep it off and wake up feeling better, and that seems to be working better for her.

            I don’t have high expectations, but I’d like for her to enjoy the end of her life as much as possible, and I’d really like to have a little more time.

“Where’s the rest of the chicken?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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The New Car

Posted on June 24, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            We were in a car accident a few weeks ago. I didn’t write about it at the time because Mom was shaken up and didn’t want her aunt to worry.

            Mom has been losing feeling in her feet for a few years now, and going to all of the doctor visits to try to figure out why and how to stop it, but nothing has worked. It has mostly impacted her balance, because she can’t feel the ground as well through her shoes, so more often than not, when she takes the dogs out for a walk, she goes out in her socks or bare feet.

“We go outside barefoot all the time. What’s weird about that?”

            For some reason, that evening, on our way to synagogue, she wore a pair of shoes she hadn’t worn in a while, and very early in the drive she realized her mistake, because she was having trouble feeling the brake pedal, but when I suggested that she pull over and let me drive, she said no, she was fine.

            But she wasn’t fine, and at a crucial moment, when she thought she was stepping on the brake, it turned out that she wasn’t.

            She could have had another career as a race car driver, so even without brakes Mom was able to maneuver through traffic to get to safety, with only minor damage to another car, but our little red Honda was basically totaled, not so much because the accident was terrible, but because the car had so many miles on it that the insurance company thought it wasn’t worth doing all the necessary repairs.

            Mom was in a daze after the accident, overwhelmed that she’d been the cause of it and frightened that the numbness in her feet might take away her independence. But as the days passed she decided that it really was that one pair of shoes, and with thinner soles she could still feel the brake pedal and drive as well as before. At least for now.

            We were both fine, physically, and to my surprise I really didn’t have much of a post-traumatic stress response like Mom did, so I did most of the driving, and emptied all of the gardening tools and grocery bags and random detritus out of the old car before the garage took it away. Thank God, Mom was up to making all of the phone calls with the garage and the insurance company and the rental car company.

“I hate phone calls.”

            As soon as we found out that the insurance company didn’t want to repair the Honda, we started to look for a replacement, and since Mom has been wanting a car that’s easier to get in and out of for a while now, she had a good idea of what she wanted. We went to the nearby Subaru dealer and found a lightly used charcoal grey Subaru Crosstrek, which also has some safety features we didn’t have in the Honda. It’s a good car, and comfortable, and has lots of trunk space, and the driver’s seat can be maneuvered every which way, to give Mom the best possible control over the pedals and view of the road, but it’s not red.

            And there’s this deep sense of loss. The little red Honda Civic has been part of our family for a long time, and I’m used to her. Switching to the rental car, a white KIA, with a push button start and rearview camera and lots of bells and whistles, took some adjustment, and the car didn’t smell like dogs and wet dirt from Mom’s gardening adventures, so it really was a stranger.

            I’m pretty sure the trunk of the new car will be filled with gardening equipment within the first few days, and there will be dog treats stuck into the cushions, and it will start to smell right. And it will be a relief to know that Mom can keep her independence and feel, and be, safer. And the car only has 25,000 miles on it, so we’ll probably be able to keep it for a long time, until it too becomes like family. But the loss is real. Things are changing.

“We don’t like change, Mommy.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Longmire

Posted on June 17, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

My latest Netflix binge is a show called Longmire. It first aired on A&E (a basic cable channel in the US) and I really liked it back then, despite being anything but a Western fan, which was the genre the show seemed to fit into, though it’s also a crime drama. Walt Longmire (based on books by Craig Johnson) is a Sherriff in the fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming. His wife died the year before the show starts, seemingly of cancer, but we find out that no, she was murdered. We meet his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, from the nearby Cheyenne reservation, and his daughter, a lawyer, and his deputies, and we learn about the kinds of crimes that a Sherriff in Wyoming might have to deal with, and the politics, and so much more.

“Any dogs in the show?”

            After two or three seasons on A&E the show was cancelled, for having too old of an audience supposedly. I don’t know if I realized at the time that Longmire had been picked up by someone else, but since I didn’t have Netflix back then it was over for me, and I mourned the loss.

            Maybe I’m an old soul, as I have often been told, but a lot of the shows that have been designated as being for older people have been favorites of mine since childhood – like Murder, She Wrote and Matlock and Law & Order. The assumption that we all only watch shows that reflect our current age and situation in life is silly, and something that, if true, should be challenged.

            The sixth and final season of Longmire aired on Netflix back in 2017, so there’s really no hope of them going back and doing more seasons now, damn it, especially because the show’s final episode wrapped things up in a way that kind of cuts off the blood supply for possible future seasons. But all of those knots could be untied – like when you knit a sweater and realize it’s too short, so you pull out the last row or two and add on – and it could be done seamlessly. Almost. But for now, I only have these six seasons to watch and re-watch to try to figure out why it burrowed so deeply into my psyche in such a short amount of time.

On second viewing I’m noticing more details, more places where they foreshadowed the future plot twists, and how they used music to create tension, and how they developed certain themes on a slow burn. I thought it might be too soon to watch it all again and that I would get bored, but that just hasn’t happened. I feel like I’m getting to know these people better, and seeing how much more detail was there in the first place, helping me to understand how their minds work and where they are strong and where they are weak and what they know about themselves and what they don’t.

The relationships between the characters are so deeply explored, often through just the tone of voice or a look between two people. And I love that every strong character in the show has weaknesses and grey areas and confusions over what is right and wrong. And even the best of friends disagree about what’s right in any given situation.

I love Lou Diamond Phillips in his role as Henry Standing Bear. He’s able to capture the easy charm of a bartender, and the deep loyalty of a best friend, and the spirituality and anger of a Cheyenne warrior, all without seeming to pivot from one part of himself to another. And Vic, the female Sherriff’s deputy from Philadelphia who goes from flirty to sarcastic to frightened to defiant to deeply loyal with the same seamlessness.  

“She sounds like Cricket.”

And then there’s Walt, the strong, silent Sheriff, who can be childlike and confused and then strong and formidable, and whose moral compass is in constant motion, not always leading him in the right directions but showing us that he is always searching for what is right. His bravery and endurance feel almost unbelievable, the way he pushes himself to the brink to help other people, but we get to see all of the damage it causes and all of the pain he’s trying to hide and all of the disappointment and the fear, so that his strength seems deeply human after all.

Nothing is simple on Longmire, but instead of the last minute plot twists of a show like Law & Order, each surprising development in the plot has been laid into the fabric of the show and feels believable and even inevitable, though still shocking.

I love that I’m addicted to a show set in the cowboys and Indians world of Wyoming, a world I wasn’t really curious about before this. I can’t find myself in these places or these people and yet their stories resonate deeply with me, maybe because, bottom line, I trust their values. I trust them to care about me. I believe that Walt and Henry and Vic would care what happened to me, and find ways to protect me if I needed protection. Despite all of the violence and tension in their world, I feel safe with them.

            I wish I could write like this. I wish I could write the next season of the show and make the actors come back to shoot it. But maybe most of all, I want to be strong the way these people are strong, while always still acknowledging my fears and weaknesses and confusions. I want to be clear about my values and goals, while still being open to learning something new about the world and about myself. And I want to be able to stick to what is true for me, even while respecting what is true for someone else, unless they’re delusional, in which case, fuck them.

            I think Walt would agree.

“Watch your language, Mommy.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Disarray

Posted on June 10, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            I’m so disoriented. The synagogue school year ended and that means I can focus on my writing, so of course I’m at loose ends. Generally I need to spend a few weeks tying up those loose ends before I can find my footing, and maybe this is just the same as always, but it feels even looser than usual. My brain feels like a kaleidoscope, but the colored pieces of paper never land in any particular shape, they just keep swirling.

            I’ve started six or seven blog posts in the past few days and each one has ended with balled up paper in the garbage can (yes, I still write longhand on legal pads). I’m not quite sure why each essay self-destructs, sometimes it’s because I thought I had a new idea and two pages in I realize I’ve said it all before, and sometimes I get two paragraphs in and realize I really don’t want to look in that particular dark corner right now. Part of it is probably that I have a very long to-do list for the summer and I can’t figure out what to focus on first, or why. But really, I can’t focus at all. Usually, when I’m writing an essay I feel like I can find an invisible container for it in my head, and with palpable edges, so that I can write and edit within that general area, without feeling too overwhelmed.

“You should try pee mail, its the best form of communication.”

            But suddenly there are no available containers, or I forgot how to create one, because I feel like I’m just aimlessly writing words on a page, and I can’t sense the parameters of the idea, and the sentences just go on without shape or purpose. And if I can’t shape an essay, how can I even imagine shaping a novel, which requires a container bigger than anything else.

            I know I’ve felt this way before, but I don’t remember when, or why, or how I got out of it.

            I feel like I need to prepare for the next school year right now and solve every problem that came up over the past school year in order to think clearly, but I’m also taking another online Hebrew class, and going to new doctors, and planning for another oral surgery, and I feel like I should get back on track with seeing the eye doctor and foot doctor and dermatologist, which I’ve been putting off as non-essential for the past few years. And I have a pile of books that I’ve read over the past year, filled with little pieces of paper marking sections I want to read over and take notes on, and I have a new pile of books to mark up, and I need to get back on track with exercise, and go to choir practices to prepare for the high holidays, again, and I want to keep up with blog posts and therapy appointments, and all of that seems to come before working on the novels I expected to have finished by now.

            I can feel the looseness coming over me right now, and with it the desire to rip up pages, but I can’t keep writing and ripping and writing and ripping all the time. I need to land somewhere, so I am forcing myself to keep writing this essay, even if I can’t imagine the shape it will ultimately take. I am not comfortable in this state of mind, but I have to keep persisting and doing the work and writing the sentences I can write, until the shape and texture and purpose of the essay comes into being, or else I’ll never be able to move on to the bigger projects that are swirling in my brain.

“We’re going to rest while you do that.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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The Oral History Interview That Wasn’t

Posted on June 3, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            A few months ago, I was asked to be one of a small group of people to do oral history interviews for my synagogue, in order to capture the history of the synagogue, especially with so many of the founders already gone. I’d done a few historical articles about the founding of the synagogue for the monthly newsletter, a few years back, so I thought maybe they’d want my notes, or that they’d want me to tell the stories I’d been told. But it turned out that they wanted my own stories, whatever I wanted to focus on, from my eleven years as a member.

“What about me? I have stories too!”

            I was honored to be chosen, and overwhelmed with too many ideas of what to say, and scared to be on camera, but I was also busy teaching, and going to doctor visits, and I didn’t have time to wade through all of my ideas and come up with something to say at that moment, so I asked if they could wait until synagogue school was over for the year, and they said certainly, we’ll reach out in May.

            But when I got a follow up email a few weeks ago, it wasn’t to ask me when I’d be available to be recorded, it was to announce that they’d finished the filming and I could press on this link to see the videos. And, of course, I felt hurt. And relieved. And disappointed, and angry, and confused. For some reason I can’t have only one clear feeling at a time. It’s exhausting.

“Tell me about it.”

            I’d been gradually working through my ideas for what to say, in essay form, writing up each story to see which ones felt the most important, or the most tolerable to tell. Should I talk about being an unmarried, childless, disabled woman in a synagogue where young, wealthy families are the most coveted demographic? Or about the ways the synagogue has helped me to grow and to try out new roles and ideas in a safe place? Or should I talk about teaching in the synagogue school, or about learning with the clergy, or about how it was the older members of the congregation who embraced me from the beginning and it’s been so painful to watch them dying off or receding into nursing homes, or zoom? Or should I focus on the joy of the music and the consistent comfort of Friday night services, or about the frustration and disappointment I felt when it was the women in the synagogue who most rejected and dismissed the Me-Too movement, despite my efforts to let them know that I was a survivor of sexual abuse and needed their support?

            I had a lot to say. And a lot of fear of saying it on camera, and being seen, or being edited out, so I guess I’m relieved to be able to put it off.

            And, really, it’s possible that they decided to just go with the people who were ready to film right away and forgot to tell me that they wouldn’t need me. Or maybe they’re planning to do a second group later on, and assumed I’d figure that out, or that I’d been told. I don’t know. This oral history project is clearly still a work in progress, which is something I can relate to.          In the meantime, I’m still working on my essay version of what I’d want to say in the video, cutting and adding and organizing, so that, just in case they still want to hear from me, I’ll be ready with something to say.

“We’ll be ready too!”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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The Mother’s Day Mushrooms

Posted on May 27, 2023 by rachelmankowitz

            Mother’s day traditionally marks the beginning of the gardening season, even when the gardening has already been going on for a while, and most years Mom and I spend Mother’s day morning at a gardening store, filling up the trunk of the car with all of the plants and seeds and mulch and tools she might need, at least for the next week or two. But for Mother’s day breakfast this year, my brother and his eldest son came to visit, with bagels and cream cheese and lox, to celebrate Mom. My brother brought a bouquet of colorful yarn, and my nephew brought a big box of mushroom starters: three huge white blocks, one for Blue Oyster mushrooms, one for Lion’s Mane, and one for something called Piopino, each in their own bags, with a special instruction booklet.

The yarn bouquet, after some of the yarn had already been unwound.

            When my brother’s kids were younger we used to go for nature walks all the time, with Mom in the lead, and then the kids, and then me. We’d walk down by the river near their house, and the kids would climb trees, and collect rocks and leaves and whatever else they could find, unless Grandma warned them off of something yucky or poisonous. And when it was too cold to be outside, she taught them how to make little boats out of empty walnut shells and float them in a bowl of water; just because. As a result, my oldest nephew has his own vegetable and herb garden, with birds who call it their home, and for Mother’s day, he thought the best gift he could give his Grandma would be the chance to watch mushrooms grow, and he was right.

            And after breakfast, my nephew and his Dad braved the woods behind our building, and the uncertain ground under a huge fallen tree trunk, to pluck two giant mushrooms, still connected to each other, just so Mom could see them up close and then put them in her garden, to inspire the other plants to grow big and strong.

Mushrooms on the dead tree trunk

            My Mom’s love of gardening came from her father, whose yard was filled with flowers, and birds, and dastardly squirrels, and contraptions to keep the squirrels away from the bird feeders. But she didn’t do much gardening at the house I grew up in, partly because she was busy working and doing other creative things, but also because it just didn’t feel like a place where good things would blossom. Almost as soon as she divorced my father, and we moved to a new home, she started to garden. She planted her father’s lilies, and then strawberries and tomatoes and marigolds, and one year she planted pumpkins that took over the whole yard. And now she gardens all year long, planting seeds indoors and seedlings outdoors, and if she’s not planting, she’s weeding or preparing the ground for more planting later on. And she loves it! And Cricket loves it! And Ellie and I sit on the bench and watch them, and listen to the birds, and shrug, happy for them, though mostly bewildered.

“What’s your problem?”

            Within days of the Mother’s day visit, the new mushrooms were sprouting, magically, from those plain white blocks, and our neighbor was deep cleaning her bird bath to accommodate all of the birds returning to the yard, and there were pink and orange tulips, and magenta rhododendrons, and purple irises, and red azaleas, and green everywhere, including on the pawpaw tree.

Piopino
Lion’s Mane
Blue Oyster

            We are now in pawpaw counting season. First the red flowers had to appear on the tree, and darken to crimson and then to a reddish dark brown, and then, as the flowers died and fell away, the baby pawpaws appeared from the wreckage. So now starts the long summer of watching the pawpaws grow, and worrying that they will be eaten by passing birds, or squirrels, or that they’ll fall off in the rain, or die off for lack of nutrition. The counting becomes even more difficult as the leaves grow to their full size and obscure the growing pawpaw fruit, but I try to accept it, because the leaves are doing their best to protect those baby pawpaw fruits from disaster.

Baby pawpaw fruit

            It’s funny, just as Mom spends her summers tending her garden, I kind of do the same with my writing. We plant our seeds and nurture them and weed out the overgrowth and anything that’s getting in the way, and hope that something comes of all of the worry and the work. And each year we overplan, and barely get through half of what we hoped to accomplish. I can’t make the summer expand to give me the time and patience to do everything I want to do, just like Mom can’t use the whole yard, and then some, to plant all of the flowers and vegetables she dreams of harvesting in the fall. But we do what we can do.

“Isn’t it nap time yet?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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