I am starting a new semester of online Hebrew classes, and I’m excited, but also anxious. I’ve been back in these classes since the summer, with renewed energy and purpose after a long break, and all of that effort has paid off, because I am moving up to Purple, the highest level. One of the things I love about Citizen Café, the school where I take my Hebrew classes, is that instead of offering three levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) like most language classes for adults, they are continually adding levels so that each student can start and continue in a class that is suited to their real abilities, without being too challenged or too comfortable. I cannot explain their color wheel, though, which starts with Red and Orange and, for now, ends with Purple, and makes stops along the way in Lime, Pink, and Turquoise.
I spent six semesters at the Indigo level, the second to highest level, where there are multiple semesters worth of content to help build vocabulary and fluency, but also a lot of repetition. During my sojourn in Indigo, I kept hoping that they would create a new level, between Indigo and Purple, so I wouldn’t have to keep going over the same material, or move up to the final level, which feels so, I don’t know, final, but no such luck. Eventually, my teachers decided that I was getting too comfortable in Indigo and needed to move up to Purple for a new challenge, and I agreed with them, but now I feel like I’m being thrown into the deep end without my water wings.
From what I hear from friends, purple level is a different animal. The content changes each semester, depending on what the students in each class are interested in, and there are people who have been at the purple level for a dozen semesters or more, to make up for not having anyone in their outside life to speak to in Hebrew. I’m one of the few students at the advanced levels at this school who has never actually been to Israel, let alone lived there, and I worry that I will be intimidated by my classmates who either live in Israel now or have visited many times in the past. At some point soon, I’m sure the school will figure out that if I belong in Purple, then there really should be at least one more level above Purple for the really advanced students. And then they’ll have to come up with a new color to add to their color wheel, like ultra-violet, or maybe chartreuse.
I’m sure that, originally, when they were teaching classes in person in cafes around Tel Aviv, they assumed their students would only stay for a few semesters, since they’d already done their official six months in Ulpan (when you move to Israel, you take a six-month Hebrew course subsidized by the government). They probably thought that all their students would need was some practice and fine tuning and then they’d be ready to get a job and continue to work on their Hebrew with their new Israeli friends, but the reality is that Hebrew is really hard to learn, and most Israelis are too busy, or too impatient, or too terrible at grammar themselves to be of much help. And most people want to be able to do more than just read road signs or buy cherry tomatoes at the Shuk, they want to be able to watch (and understand) the news, or read novels at the beach, or scream at their friends over loud music at a party and actually know what’s being said back to them. So, the school grew.
But something else also happened along the way. Once the school went online, during covid, they found out that they had a lot of potential students who didn’t live in Israel at all. Suddenly there were students from around the world who wanted to learn Hebrew before moving to Israel, or so they could speak Hebrew with their Israeli wife’s family, or chat with their grandkids over Zoom. And then there were people, like me, who wanted to speak Hebrew for a million reasons other than moving to Israel. There are a lot of us who are fascinated with Hebrew for reasons of culture, ancestry, community, connection, family and on and on, rather than just wanting to be able to navigate the bus routes from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
I am still, usually, the only person in my classes who has never been to Israel, though. And hopefully, someday soon, I will be able to afford a trip, but for now, I’m doing my best to travel there in my mind, and on Zoom, and it is bringing me a lot of satisfaction, and a lot of joy, and just a little bit of crippling anxiety.
“I understand anxiety, new Mommy.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my 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?
For Tzipporah, it seems, bed is life. When we come back to the apartment, from a visit to the vet or a visit to the backyard, she tries desperately to jump out of my arms, and once she hits the ground she runs straight to her bed. Safe. Once she’s recovered from her outing, though, she relaxes: stretching out, rolling on her back, sticking out her tongue, and dangling her head over the side of the bed.
But now, seven or eight weeks into having her with us, we’re getting worried that she only feels safe in her bed, and everything else is lava. When we are all together in the living room, she rarely leaves her bed; it’s only when the humans leave the room that Tzipporah is willing to walk away from her safe place for more than a second. There have been times when, seemingly, she hasn’t left her bed for half the day, not even to pee or get a drink of water from the kitchen. At night, though, she tends to wander around the apartment, investigating her new home, but when she sees any movement from the supposed-to-be-sleeping humans, she runs back to the living room and straight to her bed.
When she first came home, it wasn’t like this, she would sleep on the rug in her grandma’s room, or on the cushions in my room, or in her bed in the kitchen, or in either one of the dog beds in the living room, moving from one sleepy place to another throughout the day and night. So, I put wee wee pads in every room, and the hallway, to give her the best chance to learn that pee goes on the wee wee pad and not the rugs. When she peed near any of the wee wee pads, I would sop up the pee, place the wet paper towels on the wee wee pad, and then move the wee wee pad closer to the spot where she’d peed. And she would then, maybe half the time, start peeing on the wee wee pad instead. But as the weeks have passed, she has gradually decided on the living room as her home base, and on the one dog bed she likes best, and I’ve been able to remove the other wee wee pads one by one, and focus more on rewarding her for peeing and pooping on the wee wee pad in the living room, with some success.
Basically, she was doing well, but I started to get anxious about her bed-o-philia and worried I wasn’t doing enough to help her make progress, leaving her to calcify in her bed.
So, given her only-dog status, and my fears about her fears, I ordered a heartbeat puppy (a stuffed animal with an insert in the belly that mimics a heartbeat), and Tzipporah took to it right away, snuggling with it in her bed. When Mom wanted to see if Tzipporah could sit on the couch with us, to watch TV, I brought her and her heartbeat puppy (in her bed) to the couch, so she could feel as safe as possible in the new location. I tried to give her a treat while her bed was on the couch, but she was too anxious to eat it. After a little while, I returned her bed to its regular spot, and suddenly she noticed the chicken treat and ate it happily.
She’s made a lot of progress, when I look back at where we started. She’s now willing to stay in the dog bed next to me when I sit at my computer, instead of running away to escape the scary human monster, the way she used to. And she’s been getting used to being petted, and even having her hair combed, as long as there are treats involved.
She surprised us by doing well when her first “strangers” (aka my aunt and cousin) visited the apartment, in large part because my cousin brought a bag of freshly cut cheese and chicken cubes for the occasion (there were also salami slices, but even though Tzipporah gave them a lick, she wasn’t sure how to eat them).
Tzipporah also, finally, had her second visit with Kevin, the mini golden doodle, after weeks of everyone hiding inside because of the cold weather. She was still terrified of being on the ground outside, but she tolerated being sniffed by Kevin, and then she sat on my lap while Kevin sat quietly next to us, and I petted him, and then let Tzipporah smell my hand, and then petted her. Over and over. It’s hard to know if my completely scientific experiment worked, but Kevin certainly enjoyed it.
She still doesn’t talk much; she only cries at night when she thinks she’s alone, and she has only barked once in her sleep, but it was a very light bark, more like a yip. On the other hand, she has become more and more expressive with her eyes, staring at us as dramatically as possible to let us know she could use more treats.
The fact is, she is healing as fast as she can and becoming more herself every day. Really, it’s miraculous that Tzipporah feels safe anywhere, after four years in a cage in a puppy mill; that she can stretch out in her bed and show her belly, and not worry about being hurt, is a testament to how much she trusts us already. The only real problem here is my need for her to be all better right away. I have the same impatience with myself. I forget how much progress I’ve (we’ve) made, always focusing on how things should be, instead of recognizing the effort it took to get where we are. Maybe Tzipporah will be the one who finally teaches me how to celebrate how things really are, instead of always worrying about how things are supposed to be. Or maybe we’ll just bond over our shared love of treats (chicken for her and chocolate chip cookies for me) and be satisfied with that. We’ll see.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my 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 ideal next dog would be a Maltipoo (Maltese/Poodle mix), ten pounds or less (small enough for Mom to be able to pick him or her up), non-shedding and hypoallergenic (as much as possible), and healthy enough so that I would have him or her for a long time (because having less than five years each with Butterfly and Ellie was heartbreaking). Ideally the next dog would also be a rescue, but I may have to accept that the ideal dog for me will have to come from a home breeder again, like Cricket did, rather than a rescue organization.
My biggest anxiety, dog-wise, is the cost; because I’m not sure I can really afford a dog long term, and all of the vet care and grooming costs involved, on top of the adoption/rescue fees. I still have a lot of medical debt to pay off, and I’m afraid it’s selfish to risk getting another dog without knowing for sure where the money to take care of them is going to come from. And yet, I really need a dog, or two, to make life worth living.
Back when we got Cricket, sixteen and a half years ago, we were still recovering from the death of our Lab/mix, Dina, who had died half a year earlier, at sixteen years and two months old, after a long but difficult life. She’d had false pregnancies for years, and for the first eight years, while we still lived in my father’s house, he refused to let us get her spayed to relieve her suffering. Either as a result of that, or just along with that, Dina had a lot of fears: separation anxiety that made it very hard for me to leave her home alone; fear of children and other moving objects; and fear of bridges and water and all kinds of sounds and smells. I learned an enormous amount from Dina about how to care for my own limitations with more creativity and compassion, because she couldn’t just “get over it” the way people always insisted I should be able to do, but by the end I was exhausted, and I just wanted an easy dog, a small dog, a happy and healthy dog.
My Dina
I researched breeds and temperaments and sizes and on and on and decided on a Cockapoo, and we found a home breeder in New Jersey that we liked and went to see the puppies in person, and Cricket chose us. She turned out to be cheaper than we’d expected because she had an underbite, which, the breeder told us, meant that Cricket couldn’t be a show dog. Fine with me.
Except, I discovered quickly that I am a terrible groomer. I spent two years trying to teach myself how to manage her and her hair, but in the meantime, and then forever after, she needed regular professional grooming, an expense I’d never thought of before. And when Cricket was a year old she started to limp, and we discovered that she needed knee surgery, first on one knee and a year later on the other one.
But most importantly, Cricket, who was supposed to be our easy dog, ended up having all kinds of behavioral problems, most likely as a result of neurological problems caused by being the runt of her litter. She spent sixteen years teaching me how to love someone who is difficult, someone who is capable of biting the ones she loves over and over again, and someone who needs to be protected from her own impulses most of the time. She taught me that not all of the people who need your help will inspire your sympathy, or even be grateful for your help. And she reminded me that being smart (and Cricket was very very smart) does not protect you from struggling with even the smallest challenges in life. She also taught me that it is possible to be so cute that even the people who know you best will keep forgetting what a jerk you are.
“I was adorable. It’s true.“
Maybe the most important lesson I’ve learned from all of the dogs I’ve had is that no matter what you think you are getting when you adopt a dog, each dog who comes into your life will teach you something you didn’t expect. You will be challenged and you will grow, whether you like it or not.
Butterfly, an eight-year-old breeding momma rescued from a puppy mill, taught me a kind of love I didn’t know I could feel. Even from the first time I saw her, dirty from the newspapers lining her cage in the shelter, and missing teeth, I refused to let her go, even though we’d gone to the shelter that day on a whim, with no intention of bringing a dog home right away. I learned from Butterfly that I can take care of someone else, very well, and with an enormous amount of patience, when necessary. And I credit Cricket, who was six years old by the time we adopted Butterfly, with making it possible for me to believe that I might be able to manage the challenges Butterfly presented, healthwise.
“I knew you were the one, Mommy.”
Then, Ellie came to us by luck, when Cricket’s groomer called us to say that she’d rescued a dog she couldn’t keep, because her previous rescue and the new one were not getting along. Ellie was four or five years old and had just been spayed, after spending years as a breeding momma at a home-ish breeder. I didn’t have the immediate “love at first sight” reaction to Ellie that I’d had with the other dogs, maybe because I didn’t choose her myself, but Ellie taught me that love can grow and become just as deep and strong, even without that coup de foudre at the beginning. I’m still too close to the loss of Ellie to take a full accounting of all of the things she taught me, but the realization that my heart can stretch and stretch, to sizes I could never have imagined ahead of time, is one of her gifts to me. And I also learned, in losing her, that a stretched out heart needs a lot of time to heal.
“Don’t worry, Mommy. Cricket’s keeping an eye on me.”
I have no idea what I will learn from my next dog, or how he or she will challenge me. I guess, first, I will need to learn how to feel like I deserve the next dog at all, and to believe that I will be able to live up to the challenges that come along with all of the love and joy and comfort. I hope that this part of the work doesn’t take too long, because life is pretty lonely without a dog.
“There’s always room for another dog.”
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?
I was slow to notice the excess peeing. We have wee wee pads by the front door of the apartment, despite taking the dogs out four times a day, and over the summer we noticed that the wee wee pads were getting filled faster than usual. But I couldn’t determine which one of the dogs was peeing extra, and it didn’t really seem important, except for the cost of the wee wee pads adding up.
But then there were tiny puddles, not even puddles, just wet spots really, on the dog beds, on the couch, and Cricket was licking herself clean more often, and Mom was getting concerned. So we moved up Cricket’s yearly Vet appointment from December to November and had the doctor check her out. He did pee tests and blood tests and checked her ears (both ears were infected after so long without the hair being removed) and her teeth (a mess), and her spine (she’s had lower back issues in the past). But the Vet said she was in good health and most likely the problem was incontinence related to aging. He made an unfortunate comment about females tending toward incontinence in their older years, but at least he was awkward about it.
“Rude much?”
He prescribed a medication to help relieve the incontinence, and cleaned Cricket’s ears, and told us to schedule a dental cleaning, despite her advanced years (she’s thirteen and a half). He also told us to keep her away from the groomer for ten days, because of the medicine he’d put in her ears, even though a haircut was clearly overdue.
We started Cricket on the incontinence meds, twice a day, and watched for any improvements, but if anything the peeing issue got worse. We finally got her to the groomer a few weeks later and by then her hair had to be cut very short, but more than that, the groomer said that her pee smelled bad and the hair in that area was discolored and it seemed like an infection. We called the Vet and he told us to switch from the incontinence medication to an antibiotic for the next ten days.
But again, nothing improved. The pee puddles got bigger and more frequent. We were doing an enormous amount of laundry and found reusable dog diapers at Petco, but they didn’t work (the pee leaked through the hole left for her tail).
We called the Vet again and he suggested a urine culture, more sensitive than a regular pee test apparently, once she’d finished the antibiotics. We made an appointment for two days after the last dose of antibiotics, but then the snowstorm intervened and we got a last minute appointment on that Wednesday afternoon, right before the snow was supposed to start, with one of the other veterinarians in the practice.
Cricket was anxious in the car, as she always is before going to the Vet, and shaking, but when the Vet Tech came to get her through the car window, Cricket went without a fight. They only needed a pee sample, so we expected the visit to be pretty quick. I wandered over to the CVS next door to get some colored markers and butter cookies, to get me through the snow storm, and I was surprised that Cricket wasn’t back in the car before I was. Mom was starting to get a little bit worried about the delay, but not too worried, yet.
The substitute Vet came to my window a while later, after the snow had started to swirl. I didn’t recognize her with her mask on, even though we’d met her once or twice over the years. She wasn’t acting like herself, though. She was sort of hysterical. At first I thought she was telling me that Cricket was a difficult patient, which I knew very well, and that Cricket had been anxious during the procedure, but then the Vet said, “I thought she was going to die!” and everything changed. She said that Cricket had peed all over the place, including all over her, and there was blood in the urine, and then she seemed to go into shock (Cricket, not the Vet) and, the Vet repeated, “I was afraid she was going to die right there!”
I was having a very hard time following her narration, because it was out of order and unexpected, and it seemed like the Vet was angry or scared or something else I couldn’t pinpoint, and I couldn’t make sense of any of it given that Cricket had only gone in for a urine culture. She told us that they’d been sitting with Cricket in the office, monitoring her vitals, and she was going to give Cricket subcutaneous fluids, and medication for shock, and then she could let Cricket sit with us in the car, as long as we didn’t leave.
Cricket came out in the arms of the Vet Tech, looking listless and frail. She sat on my lap and seemed to weigh nothing at all. I kept talking to Cricket and petting her and trying to reassure myself that she was going to be okay, but I really wasn’t sure. I could feel the pocket of liquid under her skin from the fluids. Mom and I went over the things the Vet had said and shared our confusion. I was on the edge of tears, constantly rehearing “she’s going to die!” and Mom was trying to keep things together and stay calm, but it was rough.
Gradually, Cricket started to recover and look around. When she climbed behind my neck, readying herself for the drive home, I knew she was out of danger, but we still had to wait for an okay from the Vet before we could leave. She came outside as the snow was getting thicker and she checked Cricket’s gums, and looked in her eyes, and said we could take Cricket home as long as we promised to call in half an hour with an update, or else she (the Vet) wouldn’t be able to get to sleep that night.
“Grr. Times two.”
It took most of a day for Cricket to recover from her urine culture, but she did recover. We ordered new diapers, measured to fit Cricket’s shape and not just her weight, but with the delays in shipping for Christmas we had to make do with spreading towels everywhere for a while. It took five days to get results from the urine culture – positive for two infections – and a prescription for a stronger antibiotic. There was no explanation for the episode at the Vet’s office, though. And it was still unclear if the incontinence was caused by the infections, or if the infections were caused by the incontinence.
I kept thinking about my friend Teddy, the black miniature poodle, who died over the summer at age fifteen from a sudden onset kidney disorder. He was a little bit older than Cricket, and had a little more blindness and deafness going on, but still, his death was unexpected. I’m not ready for Cricket to be an old dog. The way she allowed me to put the reusable diapers on her scared me – normal Cricket would have tried to rip my fingers off for trying such a thing. She even let us wash her, occasionally.
Teddy and Cricket, a few years back.
The new diaper arrived, a light pink with Velcro straps, and Cricket let us put that on her too, though she made it clear that it was not her preference. There was only one diaper in the package, instead of the three we expected, so there was still a lot of washing and drying to do, with one memorable night spent hurrying the process with a hair dryer.
About a week into the second course of antibiotics Cricket woke up shivering one morning, similar to the way she’d done during her Vet visit for the urine culture. We sat with her and massaged her back and whispered to her until she seemed to be okay, and then we called her regular Vet. He said to take a video if she had another episode, but he wasn’t too worried. He was more concerned with her continuing pee puddles and he wanted us to start the second incontinence medication right away. Mom drove to the Vet’s office that afternoon and we gave Cricket the first dose of DES, a synthetic estrogen meant to tighten the urethral sphincter, with her antibiotic and hamburger, that night.
Within twenty four hours of starting the DES Cricket’s puddling stopped. It’s possible that the antibiotic finally kicked in at the same time, but the correlation with the start of the DES was convincing. Cricket got through a whole night with a dry diaper, and then a whole day without a diaper and without any accidents. We put the diaper on her for the next two nights, just in case, but she had figured out how to take it off and she would leave it, still velcroed closed, on the edge of Mom’s bed while she went to pee on the wee wee pad.
She’s feeling much better, and she thinks she still deserves hamburgers every morning and very night, despite finishing the second course of antibiotics. She’s back to peeing only on the wee wee pad and outdoors with no accidents. But, this was not the answer I was hoping for. I wanted so badly for this to be a one-time infection, because incontinence, while treatable, is a sign that she is really aging now. I want to celebrate and feel the relief that she is back to normal, or normal for Cricket, but I’m worried about what might come next.
Ellie has found the whole situation confusing. On the one hand there have been many more treats to go along with Cricket’s medications (hamburgers, peanut butter, chicken livers, anything to get Cricket interested), and Ellie always gets her share, but there’s also been a lot of extra attention going to Cricket instead of to happy little Ellie. For example, Ellie was very jealous of the diaper. For a while there she reminded me a lot of Dobby the House Elf, from the Harry Potter Books, desperate for a piece of clothing of her own. But then our neighbor found out that the sweater she’d ordered as a Christmas present for her brother’s dog was too small for him, and she offered it to us. Cricket, feeling much better already, refused to put her paws through the armholes to try it on, but Ellie was thrilled! Finally, a present just for her! She wore it for a night and a day and had her picture taken and celebrated with some zoomies out on the lawn. The only problem with the sweater is that it covers all of the places where she wants to be scratched and petted, and she eventually decided that scratchies were more important than fashion. So the sweater has been put aside, awaiting the next snow day, when she can wear it out in public and run around in circles and get all of the attention she craves.
“I have clothes!”
I’m sure Cricket will be fine with that. Maybe.
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 was getting very jealous when I started to see other dogs on Facebook posting their after-grooming pictures last week, so we called our groomer, thinking she might have a recorded message letting us know when she might be back in business. Instead, she answered the phone and told us that she had received the okay from the local fire department to re-open, on a limited basis, and she could give us an appointment in a few days. I continued my constant watch on Cricket’s mats, and sneak attacks with the comb and scissors, until Grooming day finally arrived.
“I looked fine, Mommy. I liked the way none of the hair on my face could move in the wind.”
Ellie, on the other hand, was ready for a trim.
We handed the dogs off to the groomer in her parking lot – me on one side of the fence, wearing my red face mask and blue-alien-skin gloves, and the groomer on her side of the fence. The girls know the groomer well, so they were (mostly) okay about going with her. I, on the other hand, had to go home to a dog-less apartment. The echoing silence was so exhausting that I slept for most of the time they were gone.
The pick-up was basically the same in reverse, tossing the leashes over the fence in exchange for an envelope full of money. I was worried that we’d have to pay double for Cricket, given the state of her hair, but we paid the same price as usual. The girls jumped into the car as if they were fleeing the scene of a crime and then Cricket climbed onto my lap in the passenger seat, and then behind my neck, leaving a cloud of white hair in the air and all over my clothes.
“Oh, the shame.”
Poor little Cricket has had her worst fears realized. The groomer had to shave her really, really close to the skin; she’s not pink, but the film of white hair barely covers her nakedness. Miss Ellie, on the other hand, looks fine. I tried to explain the situation to Cricket – that because Ellie let me brush her hair and cut out her occasional mats, she didn’t have to be shaved down to the nubs. But Cricket couldn’t hear me. It’s possible that she still has hair in her ears, because only the vet has the courage to pull out that stubborn hair and risk murder and mayhem, but more likely Cricket just doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. She has very good selective hearing skills. She can even hear things that aren’t there.
“Can you see what they did to me?!!!!!”
Both dogs were starving when they got home, as if they were trying to fill up the empty space where their hair used to be. But then they were exhausted and slept through most of the afternoon and evening, barely noticing my Zoom meetings and only waking up to beg for more food and walks.
“I could eat.”
To cap off grooming day, we watched a segment of Stephen Colbert’s show where one of his producers let his ten year old son give him a haircut. First, the boy clipped off clumps of his father’s hair with what looked like kitchen shears, and then he moved on to the clippers. The Dad/producer ended up looking like a plucked chicken; kind of like Cricket, though she has slightly more hair left on her head than he did. Unfortunately, I can already see tiny mats trying to form in Cricket’s hair, so maybe she would have been better off if she’d been completely plucked.
I feel better now that Cricket doesn’t have any more mats on her face and belly, clumped with goop and food, breeding who knows what kinds of infections. Cricket, on the other hand, still believes that she was fine the way she was; and she’s sticking to it.
“Harrumph, Mommy. Harrumph.”
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?
During my last summer at sleep away camp, at age thirteen, we had a strange outbreak of mosquitoes. We weren’t allowed to go in the lake for two weeks, and the mosquitoes were in pretty much every breath of air we breathed. I don’t know if it was an early case of West Nile Virus or something else they didn’t bother to explain, but I had to sleep in jeans and a sweatshirt, in ninety degree weather, to try to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
“That sounds bad. I’m worried about this story.”
It was already a very, very bad summer for me. I’d begged to stay home, or better yet, go to California. I had this idea about California that wasn’t based on anything I can remember, except that it wasn’t home. I think my best friend at the time had been talking a lot about going to California for some reason, and she either went to California, or to Israel that summer, to visit family.
“Oy. It’s getting worse.”
I was deeply depressed, irritable, anxious, and uncomfortable 24 hours a day. I’d lost weight (this was pre-anorexia, so I was normal thin, not skinny yet), and had some pretty outfits, and I’d assumed this would make me happy, but it actually made things worse.
Sex was everywhere in camp. There were a lot of rape accusations (all true as far as I could tell, but not taken seriously by the counselors, who were eighteen and nineteen years old, or the administration, who had no excuse). There was a lot of dating and flirting and coupling. I would not have been able to tell you why it was all so awful to me at the time. I couldn’t explain why I felt so thoroughly under attack. I’d had some memories of the sexual abuse by then, in vague images and awful feelings, but I didn’t know what it was, or what to do with it.
My parents came up on visiting day and I was sure they were going to take me home, but instead, my father announced that they were going to Israel in a few days and wouldn’t be back until it was time for me to come home from camp. And I couldn’t go with them. I screamed and cried and he took a picture of me, inconsolable (he framed it and put it up in the downstairs hallway in our house, where it stayed for years).
“Told ya.”
After the mosquito drama, or before it maybe (time was confusing that summer), the counselors took my age group on an overnight campout on a hill. It was coed, with the counselors down at the bottom of the hill, out of ear shot. None of this had been made clear ahead of time. There was at least one rape that night, but I only knew about it because it happened to a friend of mine. I have no idea what else happened, but we were a group of thirteen year old boys and girls without supervision, so I can guess. Someone stepped on my hand in the middle of the night, and no one seemed to notice when I screamed.
No one listened when I ranted about the campout for the next few days, because everyone else seemed to think that a coed sleepover for thirteen-year-olds was totally fine. I was the prude and the hysteric. And the fact is, I couldn’t explain why I was so angry about it when no one else had a word to say, except for the girls who whispered in my ear about rape, on the hill, and on other days and at other times, but refused to go to the administration, or to let me go for them.
None of the rapes, or attempted rapes, happened to me. I barely even touched a boy all summer. But the lack of concern from the adults enraged me. The counselors suggested that my problem was that I was too mature for my age group, and that was why I was so uncomfortable. My opinion was that I needed to walk home from camp, even if it took the rest of the summer. But I was too afraid, and had no money, and that made me feel powerless.
When a twelve-year-old girl was sent home because she had accused two boys of forcing her to give them blow jobs – and no one believed her, because, How can you force someone to give a blow job, really it’s the boys who were raped – I realized I was never going back to that camp.
And it was a terrible loss. The thing is, I’d never really been safe anywhere else. I was sexually abused at home and at my childhood best friend’s house. I was bullied at school. Camp was the one place that felt normal, where I could work through the kinds of painful experiences that everyone else had to go through too. It wasn’t a great joy, but it was a place where I had learned how to make friends, and set boundaries, and argue, and swim. But once sex became an issue, for me and for my peers, camp was no longer safe for me, with my abuse history. Maybe if they’d had better policies in place for how to handle problematic behaviors, or if the counselors were better trained, or if the adults had taken on more of an oversight role, things would have been different. But maybe not.
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
Usually Mom drove to camp to pick me up at the end of the summer, but this time she arranged for me to go home with another Mom from our area and two of her daughters, because of her late return from Israel with my father. I felt really sick to my stomach on the drive, but I didn’t know the Mom or the girls well enough to say anything. When I finally got home I ran upstairs and barely made it to the bathroom in time, throwing up in the sink. I kept throwing up for the next two days, and by the time school started a week and a half later, I wasn’t eating much at all. My body felt like it had been filled with poison, and I didn’t want to risk adding more. Within weeks I was basically anorexic, and that seemed to help keep the poison at bay. By then I didn’t just want to be skinny anymore, I wanted to be invisible.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Amazon page and consider ordering the Kindle or Paperback version (or both!) of Yeshiva Girl. 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 girl on Long Island named Izzy. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes is true. Izzy’s father decides to send her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, as if she’s the one who needs to be fixed. Izzy, in pain and looking for people she can trust, 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 is a biter. She has been a biter since she was a puppy, and now that she’s 12 years old, I don’t see it changing. We were warned that Cockapoos could bite – though the warning came after Cricket came home from the breeder, and from an unreliable source, so, not especially helpful.
She ate most of this pumpkin before we knew what was happening.
Cricket bites when she’s scared, angry, overexcited, etc. She resents any attempt to brush, comb, or clean her hair (though groomers have been able to do it, when she’s medicated). For her first two years, I worked hard at trying to condition Cricket to grooming at home. It was a long ritual, with lots of chicken treats and very gradual steps, and it was never, ever successful.
“You’re killing me, Mommy.”
“I kill you back!”
When the groomer left a small mat on one of Cricket’s ears, during a grooming visit a few months ago, I got nervous, because Cricket has very cottony hair, prone to knotting up if we’re not careful. I even took out the round-edged scissors to try to remove the small mat before it could grow. Cricket didn’t appreciate that, of course, and I decided to keep my fingers for a while longer. That meant that, at her most recent grooming, after the mat had grown and spread to both ears and her face, Cricket faced the indignity of being shaved down to the nubs. Her head is surprisingly small without all of the fluff, and she looked a bit like a tiny alpaca, with her naked ears and prominent nose, and big, wide open eyes.
Escaping from the groomer’s house!
The thing is, at this point, I’m done battling with her about her hair. I’m done risking life and limb to save her from another bad haircut, that she will, of course, blame on me. She is a senior citizen in the dog world, and this is the best she’s going to be. I may have better luck cleaning her up once she loses a few more teeth, though. That’s something to look forward to, and since she has resisted every attempt at tooth brushing, with every kind of special doggy toothbrush and chicken flavored toothpaste, she won’t keep all those sharp little teeth forever.
The immediate problem is that she has convinced Ellie that any attempts at home grooming are the equivalent of death threats, and Ellie has fluffy ears and a long fluffy tail that need regular combing to avoid mats. Ellie doesn’t bite, Thank God, but she does run away from me, or give me those puppy dog eyes that seem to say, Mommy, why are you hurting me? Aren’t I a good girl? Which really is worse than a dog bite in terms of long lasting damage to the soul.
“Cricket says you’re trying to kill me.”
I think we need to come up with something like a miniature carwash for dogs, where the dog is harnessed in and washed and brushed and dried without any human fingers put at risk. I mean, sure, the actual haircut would still have to be done by professional, but in between, the carwash could keep the girls from smelling like pee, and covering their faces with snot. And, I would be able to keep all of my fingers. Wouldn’t that be great?
“No, Mommy. I don’t think so.”
The poor miniature alpaca doesn’t think so either
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Amazon page and consider ordering the Kindle or Paperback version (or both!) of Yeshiva Girl. 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 girl on Long Island named Izzy. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes is true. Izzy’s father decides to send her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, as if she’s the one who needs to be fixed. Izzy, in pain and looking for people she can trust, 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?
For a year now, Ellie has struggled to jump up onto the living room couch. It seemed odd, since she can easily jump up onto my bed, which is significantly higher off the ground, but Mom pointed out that there is a rug surrounding my bed, and no rug next to the couch (because when Ellie first moved in she peed through the rugs in the living room and hallway to the point where we were afraid to replace them).
“Oops.”
But it’s been a year, and we were at Costco recently and saw a (very) cheap area rug that would fit right in front of the couch. It wouldn’t be a terrible loss if the flood of pee returned to wash it away, but, maybe, we thought, it could be the magic trick to allow Ellie to jump up onto the couch instead of needing the Mommy elevator (that would be me) every time.
I was not especially optimistic: one, because Ellie still pees on the exercise mat in my room on occasion, and two, because I didn’t really understand Mom’s logic about wood floor versus rug as effective transport up to the couch. But it was worth a try.
We got home from Costco too exhausted to set up the new rug (this is a constant. I always look forward to going to Costco and I always come home feeling like I ran a marathon in cement shoes), but later in the day Mom set out the area rug, trapping it in place under the coffee table (or whatever you call a low table on wheels that sits in front of the couch and holds all kinds of miscellaneous tchotchkes).
At first, Ellie didn’t seem to notice the new rug. She saw Cricket sitting up on the couch and came over to me, as usual, with her front paws up in the air, asking for the Mommy elevator. But Mom said not to lift her up. “Encourage her to do it herself,” Mom said, sounding loving and sweet despite the horrible cruelty she was asking me to carry out.
“But why, Mommy?”
I got distracted by something (dinner, TV show, news alert, whatever) and then noticed that Ellie was stretched out next to me on the couch, with Cricket looking extra grumpy next to her.
“Harrumph.”
And that was it. The magic carpet had done its job! Ellie has been up and down, with no help from me, dozens of times since then. She still can’t figure out how to jump up onto Grandma’s bed – which is no higher than mine and surrounded by a fluffy rug – but I think that has more to do with Cricket’s dirty looks. It is, after all, Cricket’s bed. She kindly allows Grandma to sleep on it, out of noblesse oblige, but that courtesy clearly does not extend to her sister.
There have been no pee puddles on the new rug so far. It’s possible that Ellie has finally figured out that wee wee pads and carpets are not the same thing. Now if only that knowledge could extend to exercise mats…We’ll have to see how things develop.
I might also have to carry a piece of rug with me to place next to the car, so that Ellie will remember that she can jump onto the backseat by herself. Usually she only jumps in after she’s seen her sister doing it, but maybe the rug could work its magic there too.
In the meantime, I started to think that this metaphor might fit me too. Just like Ellie only needed one extra, small step to allow her to make a big step forward, something to help her feel a bit more secure and supported, would the same trick work for me?
Will it work for Platypus?
I’ve been struggling with the social work job search ever since I passed my licensing exam in the spring. I’ve written cover letters and sent out resumes like a good girl, but inside I’m terrified that someone will actually offer me a job, or even an interview, and call my bluff. This next step just seems too enormous to me. Internships and classwork and graduation and the licensing exam were all big things, but they seemed doable. This next jump feels more like jumping off a cliff.
But after watching Ellie’s transformation into a jumping bean, I started to think about what could serve as my area rug, or magic carpet, to make the next step in my life seem more possible. And then I got an email from one of the rabbis at my synagogue, asking if I’d be interested in teaching in the synagogue school this fall. They’d only need me for two hours a week, to teach Hebrew language and Jewish holidays, and I thought about it, for maybe a second, and wrote back: Yes!!!!
“Yes!”
I couldn’t believe I’d written that, and I was even more shocked when I went in for my meeting with the rabbi and couldn’t stop smiling. Teaching? Me? Children?
It’s only two hours a week, so that explains some of the doable-ness, but I think the real magic is that the job is at my synagogue. That’s my safe place. I’ve always been able to do things there that feel impossible everywhere else.
Of course, after I accepted the job, the anxiety flowed in and I started feeling like I had to write out all of my lesson plans for the year within the first twenty-four hours, and all of my internal monsters had to have their say: about what could go wrong, and how badly I could fail, and who would hate me, and on and on. But, surprisingly, but I still wanted to do it. How strange!
“Very strange.”
It’s possible that some part of me is thinking that this two hour a week job will be instead of a part-time/twenty-hour a week job in social work, but I think it’s more that a deal has been struck internally, if I can have this, then you can have social work. I didn’t even know I wanted to do this, or that I could do it. Just like Ellie didn’t know she needed an area rug to get up onto the couch.
I don’t know where any of this will lead, and it’s possible that I will need a few more metaphorical area rugs to get to the long term goal of becoming a therapist, but now I think they might actually be out there, waiting for me to be ready for them, or waiting for me to imagine them into existence.
We’ll have to see. But for now, I really need to memorize the Alephbet (Hebrew alphabet) song, and practice my Hebrew print writing, and figure out what a lesson plan might be. Wish me luck!
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Amazon page and consider ordering the Kindle or Paperback version (or both!) of Yeshiva Girl. 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 Izzy. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. Izzy’s father then sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, as if she’s the one who needs to be fixed. Izzy, in pain and looking for people she can trust, 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?
The summer when I was ten years old I lived in the bunk behind the bunk, at my sleepaway camp. My bunk was added on behind the popular girls’ bunk for our age group; they had a lot of light and windows and a porch facing the public, and we were hidden in back, invisible. There was a thin wall separating the two bunks, and we had to listen to the soundtrack of Footloose all summer long through that wall.
There was a girl in my bunk who was sort of my friend, but mostly not. She was the one I’d made fun of the summer before, in my aborted attempt to fit in with the popular girls, and our friendship was on a teeter totter. She was pretty, but strange, and from different evidence over the years – promiscuous behavior at a young age, severe memory lapses, a changeable personality – I realized later that she was a sexual abuse victim, like me. That could explain why I was drawn to her, even though she was often mean to me. She could say awful things, or ignore me for large swaths of time, despite the itsy bitsy size of the bunk we lived in together, and I still accepted her friendship when it was offered.
“I understand.”
And then came Tisha B’Av. The Ninth day of the month of Av, on the Jewish calendar, commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE and 70 CE. Over time the fast day has come to represent a long list of catastrophes in Jewish history, maybe because we need more relatable grief to hold onto, like method actors, in order to effectively mourn the loss of two temples we’d never seen, and a kind of life that none of us had ever experienced, with high priests, and animal sacrifices, and all Jews living in one place.
Tisha B’Av is regarded as the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, but generally goes unnoticed in the liberal Jewish world, except in Jewish summer camps, like the one I went to for five summers as a kid. For one full day, from sunset to sunset, we were prohibited from eating or drinking, washing or bathing (aka, no swimming). Fasting is a tool used by all kinds of religious and spiritual practitioners, because it works; depriving the body of food starves the brain of needed Serotonin, creating a neurochemically induced state of depression. Kids under thirteen are supposed to be excused from fasting, but most of us did it anyway.
The summer when I was ten years old, we trekked to the other side of camp and to sit on the basketball court in the dark when Tisha B’Av began. We sat on the ground, by bunk, with a single candle in the middle of each circle, and we listened to the older kids chanting the book of Aicha (Lamentations) in Hebrew. It was haunting, and sad, even though no translation of the text was offered. The next morning we went to services again, all together as a camp for the only time all summer, but then the rest of the day stretched out before us with no distractions, no food to eat, and no activities to keep us busy. Our counselors were felled by the fasting and most likely by the lack of caffeine, because no food or drink also means no coffee, and they didn’t have the energy to sit with us and talk with us and offer comfort.
That year we were all hanging out in our tiny bunk, to escape the heat, bored to death. All of our negative feelings were let loose in the bunk with no safe place to lock them away, and we just lived in the undifferentiated soup of our emotions for hours. Maybe that darkness, and the desperate desire to do something to disperse it, explains what happened next.
I don’t know where our counselors were, but the girl in my bunk who was sort of my friend and sort of not, decided that I needed a haircut. That was the summer when one of the girls had brought Judy Blume’s Forever to camp, and let everyone borrow it. It was the first book we’d ever read with a sex scene in it, and people were reading it in hushed voices, after dark, with flashlights. The brink-of-puberty thing left me open to a lot of criticism: for my bland clothes, my plain brown hair, my lack of makeup, etc. For some reason, this girl focused all of her frustration on me that afternoon, and offered to cut my hair, to make me look presentable. I don’t know if it was hunger, fatigue, or humiliation, but I agreed to stand over the sink in the bathroom while she parted my hair into bunches and started chopping inches off from the bottom.
“Eeeek!!!!!!”
Our senior counselor appeared at the entrance to the bathroom when only one bunch was finished. She screamed at both of us, outraged that we would do such a thing on a holy day. Haircut Girl dropped the scissors and walked out of the bunk with a shrug. I stood still, looking in the mirror, feeling guilty for not knowing all of the rules for Tisha B’Av, and guilty for going along with something I didn’t want to do, and guilty for accepting Haircut Girl’s assessment of me as so far below her. Guilty and ashamed and lonely and depressed; it all seemed to resonate with the character of the fast day, and the shame and guilt of the Jewish people for so upsetting God that he would have to destroy our Temple, twice.
My counselor sat me at the picnic table outside of our bunk and put my uneven hair into a French braid to hide the damage, somewhat, until she could finish the haircut herself after sunset. She had to have known that there was an element of bullying in the haircut, but I think she was also confused that I’d gone along with it. She didn’t understand why I’d say yes to such a thing, and I couldn’t explain it without humiliating myself even further. It matters that the girl cutting my hair was the one I’d made fun of the previous summer, mimicking her in front of the popular girls before I realized I never wanted to do that again. Maybe I felt like I owed her the chance to humiliate me in return, except that she didn’t seem to remember any of it. She barely remembered that we’d lived in the same bunk the previous summer. Or at least that’s what she said.
Towards the end of that summer our age group had a talent show, and Haircut Girl asked me to do a dance routine with her. I’m pretty sure I was a last minute replacement when her preferred dance partner dropped out. She would have looked around our tiny bunk and reluctantly accepted that I was the one most likely to agree to do it, because I loved dancing. I would have gone to dance classes every day in camp, if they’d given any dance classes at my camp. I danced unconsciously most of the time, instead of walking, and it’s possible that that played a role in my less-than-cool reputation.
We did our dance routine to “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” from Footloose, since we’d been listening to the soundtrack all summer. I don’t remember the performance itself, but I do remember the magic of being able to match my steps to her steps as we rehearsed next to our bunk. Did we sing out loud? Or lip sync during the performance? I don’t remember. Were we better friends when it was over? Nope. But for a couple of days we were dancing to the same music, and even smiling at the same time, though probably not at each other.
And yet, I prefer to remember the fast day, despite all of the pain involved. For that one day, each summer, everyone was more real, with all of their light and all of their darkness visible. It wasn’t comfortable, or fun, but it was cathartic. If a fast day hadn’t already existed in the middle of the summer, we’d have had to create something like it ourselves, just to relieve the pressure of keeping up appearances, if only for a moment.
“Phew.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Amazon page and consider ordering the Kindle or Paperback version (or both!) of Yeshiva Girl. 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 girl on Long Island named Izzy. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes is true. Izzy’s father decides to send her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, as if she’s the one who needs to be fixed. Izzy, in pain and looking for people she can trust, 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 