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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Some Kind of Human Kindness

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I stood for seven hours in the freezing rain.

Perhaps it was dystopian. The clinic would exist for 24 hours, for a vaccine only just approved, because there was an apocalypse and the whole world shut down around us. Six thousand people huddled in the snow that day, with coffees and ponchos and rainboots. Perhaps in another life, we’d sit in some white plastic chair at our nearest pharmacy and be out in twenty minutes. Perhaps by now we’ve all done things we never thought we would. Perhaps even when the whole world ends, people still have coffees with them.
 
(We were discussing which celebrities we’d stand in that line for. A coffee date with Pink. Perhaps I’d stand in line to have brunch with Lady Gaga. I thought seven hours was more than enough time to make it back by shabbos. Ice water pooled up through our shoes; not even Gaga, at that point. I should have eaten breakfast. At 4pm they told us we’d be there long past nightfall.)

I turned to the woman who gave the announcement. Who had been coming by to check on us for half a frozen day already.

Um, pardon. If I have to be home by sundown for religious reasons…should I just leave now?

She scanned the line, and I felt like a fool.

Yes, she answers. You won’t make it.

Then she asks me, Are you Jewish?

I don’t know what exactly was going through my mind then, standing in the snow surrounded by a thousand strangers, telling her that I’m a Jew.

I understand, she tells me. I’m familiar with your religion.

She listed a church.

I’m sorry?

The church, she repeats, through the snowfall. Be there by 8am Monday morning. They’ll see you.
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The five strangers standing nearest stopped. Don’t leave, they said to me. We’ve come this far together, we’ll finish it together. We’ll all pull through this.

They then proceeded to ask me all the meticulous details of Shabbos, to help calculate the loopholes. I could turn my phone off. My friend would walk back all that way carrying my wallet. A whole halachic debate.

I left, in the end. I’d already promised Gd and my sister both, that I would not break shabbos for it.
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The uber quoted $40, so I just left on foot. Started crying at the corner, and in truth I was still crying a good 8 hours later, long after I should have been doing anything more sensible. I must have been a lunatic, in hysterics in the snow. Passerby were gracious enough to avoid me.

I missed shabbos by a minute. Too bad for the minute, I thought. I’ll still have that candle, because my mother gave me those shabbos candlesticks the day I left home. After a whole day in that line and a whole year away and then some, I could claim this one defiance.

I lit that candle three times and three times it blew out. Alright, I decided. Fuck it with the candle.

Perhaps it was the cold, or the shock, or all of it. Perhaps this was just the last thing, 11 months of calculating who I stood too close to and how risky standing was, of not going inside and not even touching the people I love most, because of how much I love them. I don’t know, but I couldn’t move. I teach combat for a living, and I couldn’t walk from my bedroom to the kitchen table. I did it clinging to the walls.

And amidst it all I kept repeating the same line over and again. ๐ผ ๐‘š๐‘’๐‘ก ๐‘ ๐‘œ ๐‘š๐‘Ž๐‘›๐‘ฆ ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ฃ๐‘’๐‘™๐‘ฆ ๐‘๐‘’๐‘œ๐‘๐‘™๐‘’ ๐‘–๐‘› ๐‘กโ„Ž๐‘Ž๐‘ก ๐‘™๐‘–๐‘›๐‘’ ๐‘ก๐‘œ๐‘‘๐‘Ž๐‘ฆ. ๐‘†๐‘œ ๐‘š๐‘Ž๐‘›๐‘ฆ ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ฃ๐‘’๐‘™๐‘ฆ ๐‘๐‘’๐‘œ๐‘๐‘™๐‘’.
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I decided I would trust her about the church.

We were out there for an hour before it started snowing. Swapping the snacks inside our bags, and the bags themselves to sit on when the ground turned too cold. The woman in front of me unpacked a blue beach chair; we watched the pigeons overhead and pretended they were seagulls.

I’d always wanted to see it snow on the beach.

I think I’m afraid of needles.

Oh no you ain’t, laughs the woman behind me. Because if you faint, we’re not holding up this line scraping your ass off the floor.
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They let us take refuge in the church through the snowstorm.
 
Perhaps we should have been in one of the main halls, but there was a funeral at the same time as the vaccinations. So they led us all into the chapel proper. Spaced six feet amongst the pews. We talked about religion, and where we were from. We talked about gefilte fish, in the chapel of that church, watching the snow fall.

I texted the rabbi. We should have pews at shul.
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We were gathered in small groups. Seated in a room, with cameras and doctors and twenty people at once. In truth I hadn’t been inside like that since a year ago.

I felt the needle but it didn’t hurt. I kind of missed the church. There were three solid inches of snow on my car by the time I got back to it.

I don’t recognize this world. I don’t recognize waiting in a chapel seeking shelter from the snow. But I’ll tell you, through it all, people are just beautiful. That’s what I’ve been holding on to.

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