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Showing posts from May, 2020

First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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The Echoes Letters Left

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Here is a picture of my schedule from before the world ended. It’s been on my fridge almost a year, beside a wedding invitation and that photo of my friends from Texas. A testament to the things I’d 𝑏𝑢𝑖𝑙𝑡 one moment at a time, to the knowledge that I had a place here in this city that I chose, a place I forged. Even after the world closed around us I couldn’t take it down. I squeezed phone interviews beneath the names of my students. Wrote Zoom schedules between the lines. I spent months scribbling new fragments in the space between old Shabbos dinner invitations, scrawling frantically outside the margins. I scrubbed it clean today, and it did not come easy. The letters clung. The schedule refused to be erased, echoes of words like 𝑀𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑦, and other useless things shadowing the space. I chipped two nails doing it. I chose a city I had never been to. I packed a bag and packed my car and I left one day. I could tell you stories about churches in the snow and meals by tik...
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To New Beginnings

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I found this quite by accident. It is a post titled All Beginnings are Hard, that I wrote in some dazed state in my first two weeks in this city. 𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑎𝑦 𝑒𝑥𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑙𝑦 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟. 𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑎𝑢𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑐, 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑓𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑓𝑓 𝑎𝑠 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝑙𝑢𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝑖𝑛 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑝 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑠. 𝑊ℎ𝑦 𝑑𝑖𝑑 𝐼 𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑃ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑎? 𝑇𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑎𝑡 𝑃𝑒𝑛𝑛, 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑟, 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑙𝑘𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑗𝑜𝑏𝑠, 𝐼 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝐼 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝑏𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑛 𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙. 𝑊ℎ𝑦 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒? 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑡ℎ 𝑖𝑠 𝐼 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑎 𝑚𝑎𝑝 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑈𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐼 𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑑 𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛. 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑡ℎ 𝑖𝑠 𝐼’𝑚 𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎 ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝐼 𝑠𝑎𝑤 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚, 𝐼’𝑚 𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑐...
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Strawberries

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I never thought I'd feel nostalgic about strawberries. I didn’t when we left that house in California where I grew them from the balcony. Not even in Ohio, the place I loved the most, where they grew wild in the courtyard beside more garlic bulbs than we ever knew what to do with. In fact, I had forgotten them until this moment. I used to bring strawberries with me to Shabbos meals. With chocolates and whipped cream. I have never once purchased a box for myself and I never realized it. Not until the grocery store boasted its familiar sale, and I reached for them out of instinct. When I forgot, for a moment, that I had a mask on. That I was balancing the boxes on top of sale-brand toilet paper and three bags of frozen dinners, because if I carried everything at once I wouldn’t have to touch the carts. When I forgot that one person really has no need for boxes of strawberries. By the time I remembered it I had already stacked them underneath the spinach. I had already committed to to...
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Fire Through the Wreckage

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They cancelled the conference. The first time I went was my first weekend in the city, when I knew that I would live here someday. The next was the first time I gave a presentation from the pulpit. The day I redefined that dress. The day I really learned what love means. What does it mean that it’s all put on hold, when I finally found it? What is left in place of the year that was stolen from me? I find I’m working twice as hard to make the same ends meet. Where does the motivation comes from, when I can’t see the people who used to motivate me? It is there intrinsically, the desire to build something useful through the hell and the chaotic. This is my defiance, this is how I fight when I don’t have a solid target. Is it strange that I am teaching kids to fight on screen? It says something about their resilience – they have learned to adjust the camera and type questions and say hi to classmates from 1500 miles away. They have learned to spar with people they never met face to fac...
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The Choice of Transformation

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𝐼 𝑓𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑚. 𝐷𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑝𝑢𝑡 𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑛 𝑎 𝑝𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑙. 𝐼 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑚𝑦 ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠. 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑜𝑜 𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡. 𝐼 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑟𝑢𝑛 𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑚𝑦 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑙 𝑏𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑒 ℎ𝑖𝑑𝑑𝑒𝑛. We all keep trying to return to the way it was. Aren’t you desperate? Desperate to drag yourself out of bed at 6 in the morning, to reteach your hardest classes and stare down the days that once had you questioning your profession to begin with? Haven’t-swept-the-floor-since-Pesach, sleeping-in-work-uniforms-because-by-G-d-I miss-it? Desperate to relive the beauty in the bottom of your third cup of coffee, and all the other things we all took for granted? It isn’t enough, just to go back to it. If we just return to the way it was, we lose the point in all of this. Take an Advil, and glory in the marvelous release from pain for a moment. Whe...
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