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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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 beenunwound.
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?
A friend from my synagogue suffered a loss recently and, of course, I needed to go to her house for a Shiva visit. Traditionally, Shiva (which means “seven” in Hebrew) is the seven days of mourning after the funeral, when people bring food to the mourner’s home and stay for services so the mourner won’t have to leave their house in order to say the Mourner’s Kaddish in community. In our progressive synagogue the amount of time spent in Shiva is usually shorter, often only one or two days, because seven days of sitting is a lot, and because the short time period makes it easier to be sure the house will be full of guests each night, instead of having nights when no one but the rabbi shows up.
“If they offered chicken treats they’d get a crowd every day.”
Shiva visits make me anxious though, especially if I get there too long before the evening service, and have a lot of free time to sit around and chat with the other visitors while waiting for a chance to speak to the mourners. There are people who are good at these sorts of things: people who know what food to bring, or if they should even bring food at all, and know what to say to the mourner, and where to sit, and how to offer help, and how to talk to whoever else is around. That is not me.
“Me neither.”
I have social anxiety (along with Generalized Anxiety and Panic Disorder and a few hundred other things), so the idea of walking into a private house, full of mostly strangers, is already a big deal. There are also, usually, a lot of family members I don’t know, and friends and neighbors I’ve never met, and fellow congregants who I may have seen once or twice before, and I’m supposed to be able to navigate through the crowd, making polite conversation, until I reach the mourner to say, what? “I’m so sorry for your loss” is the most common and reliable thing to say, and I am sorry and it is a loss. But I tend to feel like I should suddenly be the most outgoing person on the planet, and ease the mourner’s grief in some brilliant way, and offer insight and comfort and support and …. I expect a lot of myself. I think that’s part of why being a social worker didn’t fit me. I often got home at the end of the day of field work with a long list of things I hadn’t accomplished, or didn’t understand, or couldn’t manage, or didn’t have time to do, and the guilt was unbearable.
Given all of that, I felt a strong impulse to skip this Shiva visit altogether; to pull the covers over my head and pretend it wasn’t happening and that no one would miss me. And the fact is, no one would have criticized me, or even commented, if I hadn’t gone, but I knew I would feel awful, so I had to go.
To make the visit more manageable I went as close as possible to the start of the evening service, to limit the chat time. The prayer service at Shiva is pretty short and is mostly there to facilitate the saying of the Mourner’s Kaddish, but even those few familiar prayers can be comforting in the midst of all of that grief and pain.
In a regular service, at my synagogue, the Mourner’s Kaddish is said by those who are in mourning, or remembering a loss, and only the mourners will stand, but at Shiva we all stand, and we focus our attention on these particular mourners, in this particular house, rather than on mourners in general.
I like that idea, because then, at least for the first week of mourning, you can think only of your own pain and loss, and know that others are thinking of you and praying with you; and only after that week do you go back to seeing yourself as part of the community of mourners, all mourning different losses.
In the end, the Shiva visit went fine. The mourner hugged me as soon as I arrived, and when I asked about her loss she was able to tell me, and those around us, about the last days of her loved one’s life. She did all of the work; I just showed up, sat down, and listened. And I realized that I was proud of myself for just showing up. I didn’t change the world with the few words I said, but I was there for her and I said and did what I could. And that felt good.
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?
I’ve been binge watching Queer Eye on Netflix lately, ever since I ran out of episodes of the Great British Baking Show. I was a big fan of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on Bravo, where five gay guys make over one straight man, and I’d heard that they were doing a new version of the show a few years back, but I didn’t have Netflix at the time so I mostly forgot about it. And then, when I started watching the new version a few weeks ago, I was worried that it wouldn’t be as kind as the original, or as funny, but it turns out that it’s even better. They’ve expanded the original purpose of the show to include makeover subjects who are male and female, gay and straight, trans or nonbinary or whatever, and they’ve made the show more empathetic and more actively accepting of differences. And it’s wonderful!
I’ve been watching the seasons backwards in time, because that seems to be how Netflix works, so I’ve seen them in Austin, Philadelphia, Missouri, Georgia, and even Japan (!) so far, and I’m loving that they do a deep dive into each state, working with a cross section of people of different genders and ages and ethnicities and ways of life.
“What about dogs?”
And as we go backwards in time, I learn more and more about the difficulties each of the Fab 5 has been through in their lives and how they’ve coped, or not, and what they’ve learned that got them to this point in their lives. I love Jonathan Van Ness, the grooming expert. I never thought I could get used to someone with a beard who wears high heels and dresses, but the look just seems so right on Jonathan, with his/her/their childlike joy and sweetness. It’s clear that they’ve been through a lot, including being bullied as a teenager, but all of that seems to help them be present and generous with the makeover subjects in their own grief and pain.
Then there’s Tan, the fashion expert and Englishman of Pakistani descent, who seems so posh and above it all on the outside but is willing to be vulnerable and talk about his own difficulties coming out to his family, and his fears and excitement about welcoming his first child with his husband. He can also just be silly and playful with the rest of the guys, as long as it doesn’t mess up his absolutely perfect hair.
And Bobby, the interior design maven, has talked movingly about his Christian upbringing and being homeless as a teenager when his family couldn’t accept who he was, and Antoni, the food and wine guy, has talked about his difficult childhood and his broken relationship with his mother, and Karamo has talked about his life as a child of immigrants and a father of young men, and all of it is brought to the table to make the makeover subjects, and the audience, feel more comfortable, instead of intimidated by the gorgeousness and the abilities of the five guys who have come to be of service.
The fundamental theme of this new version of the show isn’t, “you need to dress, act, look, a certain way to have a better life,” instead it’s “you deserve the help we can offer you, because no one can do it all by themselves.”
It’s also a lot of fun, with dogs, and dancing, and playfulness and, oh yeah, there was that one time when Michelle Kwan showed up to help a ten year old girl and her father bond over figure skating!!!!!!!!!!!
“I would be a great figure skater!”
So, of course, after watching a few seasons of the show, I started to think about what an episode about me would look like (though I should probably go on a medical mysteries show first, where they could figure out what’s wrong with my health and get me to a place where I’d actually be able to make it through a whole week with the fab five). I don’t know how my neighbors would react if an SUV rolled up and five fairy godparents rolled out and stomped up to our door. We’d probably get noise complaints. I’m also not sure there would be room for everyone to be in the apartment at one time, especially with Cricket barking her head off and trying to bite their ankles.
“That sounds like Cricket.”
On each episode, the fab five comes up with a goal that the “hero” (what they call their makeover subjects) can reach by the end of the week: building a man’s confidence so he can propose to his girlfriend; preparing a man for the new baby that’s about to arrive; helping the trans woman feel ready to welcome friends and family to her home and especially to reconnect with her father. But I’m not sure what the goal of my makeover could be. I’d love to have help figuring out my hair and skincare and makeup with Jonathan, and my wardrobe could use a lot of support from Tan, and it would be great to have Antoni help me get back into cooking, and Bobby could redo the kitchen/dining area and make it possible for more than one person to be in the kitchen at a time without playing human bumper cars. But none of that is a cohesive goal, and that’s where Karamo comes in. Karamo’s area of expertise is called “Culture,” but really he’s like a therapist or social worker, there to help the makeover subject find more confidence or recognize what’s missing in their lives. And he’s great at it. He’s the kind of social worker I wanted to become: confident, thoughtful, imaginative, energetic and outgoing. But I don’t know which of my many limitations he’d want to tackle, and I’m afraid I’d fail to live up to his expectations, and I’d end up crying and screaming and hiding under the bed, and the director would yell cut and all of the loving and helping would just disappear.
I wish, so much, that the Fab Five could have come along when I was a teenager; they could have helped Mom get the divorce agreement she deserved, including the house, and then they could have redecorated the house to wipe the darkness away and made it into a place where we could thrive, so I could have started my adult life on an even keel, instead of having to spend decades shoveling the shit out of the way before I could even breathe fresh air.
Because, really, a haircut and a new wardrobe and a nice big kitchen would be lovely, but they wouldn’t be enough. There’s too much structural damage underneath, inside of me, and even a week full of hugs and reassurance that I’m okay the way I am wouldn’t be able to fix all of that. And that makes me so angry!
But as it is, the scope of the show doesn’t allow for helping people like me, with more complicated problems that take longer to address and don’t wrap up so nicely at the end of a week. I wish they could have a “special episode” every once in a while, or a spin off, where they could spend six months to a year checking in on someone, building the relationships over time, and problem solving when the first idea for how to help doesn’t quite work.
Towards the end of many of the episodes I start to feel anxious about what’s going to happen to this person once the five guys leave, because they’ve clearly built relationships and trust and dependence over the week. And that’s when the tone of the show changes and the guys go back to their headquarters and sit on their couch and watch, and judge, a video of how the makeover subject handled their end of show challenge (cooking something, choosing an outfit, coming out to family, proposing to a fiancé, etc.). I think the intention, or at least the impact, of this physical and intellectual distancing by the five guys, is to create more emotional distance for the audience, so that saying goodbye doesn’t feel quite so painful. And I understand the need for that distance, but there has to be a way to create it without being so judgmental, and without making the participants take a kind of final exam at the end of the episode to prove they deserve the help they’ve received.
I wish there could be less emphasis overall on how much this particular participant deserves the help, and more focus on just how much we all need and deserve help and kindness. I think that feeling of generosity to ordinary people shined the brightest in the Japan episodes, where they didn’t know all of the cultural hierarchies and therefore were able to see each individual for who they really were, without prejudice.
It’s unlikely that the show will be coming to New York anytime soon though, given how many other states still need their attention, so maybe by the time they get to me the show will have become even more compassionate and I will have become more ready to embrace all of the wonderful things they have to offer, most of all their kindness and attention.
“We’re waiting.”
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?
When we all go outside together for an evening walk (me, Mom, Cricket and Ellie), Ellie has taken it as her job to escort her grandma. She won’t leave the apartment until Grandma is with her, and she won’t go down the stairs until Grandma takes the first step, and often, unless she really, really has to poop, she’ll walk next to her Grandma at a leisurely pace, while Cricket drags me up ahead. It’s a lot of pressure for Ellie’s small shoulders, but she seems to have accepted her role as “the good one.” She really had no choice, though, with Cricket as her sister.
“Are you talking about me?”
Ellie comes when she’s called, even when she’s busy chasing a squirrel (she came to us like this, that’s why we kept her original name instead of choosing another insect to name her after). And she will give up on a barking campaign (for food, attention, or outings) as soon as she realizes that it’s not helping her get what she wants, whereas Cricket will shriek endlessly no matter how little response she gets, and no matter how little she actually needs whatever she’s begging for.
Ellie will gladly eat kibble for breakfast, as long as there’s something tasty sprinkled on top to get her started, whereas Cricket will eat off the cheese, from both bowls if possible, and leave the kibble behind (Cricket will finally eat the kibble in the middle of the night, when she thinks no one notices, but we can hear her tags hitting the bowl. Shh.).
Ellie tolerates me wiping off her eye goop on a daily basis, as long as she then gets head scratchies and a back massage, whereas Cricket will growl and bite if I go anywhere near her eyes (to be fair, Cricket’s eye goop is much more like concrete than Ellie’s softer goop).
Ellie was a breeding dog for the first four and a half years of her life, and once she got spayed she was thrilled to be done with all of that. So when Kevin, the mini-Golden Doodle, is out, and Cricket hops over to him like a baby goat, Ellie speed walks back to our front door and waits to be let back inside. I think Kevin’s enthusiasm and energy and curiosity freak her out, even though he’s a much nicer and more empathetic dog than Cricket would ever want to be.
Cricket’s favorite activity, aside from punching Kevin or barking at Grandma, is sniffing the grass (Mom recently found out that Cockapoos in particular need to do a lot of sniffing, for the intellectual stimulation). And Ellie, sweet as she is, has really tried to get interested in sniffing, for her sister’s sake, but it’s just not her thing. She prefers to chase cats, zoom around the yard in figure eights, and then sit and rest with her people until it’s time to go back inside and sleep. Or eat.
There are times when I worry that Ellie might be missing out on things because she’s so careful to be a good girl, and to please her people, and especially to avoid annoying Cricket. And I worry that having Cricket as her sister has kept her in second place, as the easy one and the good one and the sweet one, and never as the squeaky wheel that gets all of the grease.
On the other hand, maybe this is who she really is. She loves to stretch out in her own space and rest; she loves to eat; she loves to run; she’s shy around other dogs and people, but has learned how to share space with Cricket and even to cuddle with her people a little bit.
In fact, Cricket’s the one who taught Ellie how to bark for what she wants, and to try new foods, and to run, and to cuddle. Cricket, who can be a terror, and standoffish, and stubborn, has now made a safe home for two rescued breeding mamas (Miss Butterfly was her first), teaching them how to be dogs, and how to lean on their humans, and how to enjoy snacks and scratchies and always ask for more. Not a bad record for such a curmudgeon. I think Miss Ellie would even agree with me about that, though she’d throw in some side eye too, because Cricket has taught her the joys of sarcasm on top of everything else.
Oh wait, that might have been me.
“Yep.”
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?
rachelmankowitz 