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Showing posts from 2022

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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Every Beautiful Thing

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Are you prepared for Rosh Hashanah this year? Less than I ever was. This year I stand before you in the throes of everything I did not have time to fix, and somehow scared of everything. This year I return home covered in construction dust. This year I stand before you exactly as I am. The ceiling is still broken, exposing all the wires and rubble. I had hoped, by Rosh Hashanah, the ceiling would be fixed. I had hoped a lot of things would be neatly tidied up, and I would not have to relearn to tie the ribbon of my nicest dress while sweeping up the shards of things. There are special prayers that we say for healing. For years I said these prayers with specific names, friends or friends of friends or requests from strangers. Now I say them with my mother’s name. Every single time. Here is a story about my mother’s diagnosis. My siblings and I all travelled home for her birthday, converging in Houston from three separate cities. She fell, my father told us. What do you mean she ...
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My Mother's Eyes

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I’m sitting in the windowsill because this tastes like travel coffee, like the kind I used to drink right out on the fire escape of those Chinatown hotels, and I don’t know where I’m going. -- She teaches self-defense? A client, perusing my website. I remember when I took the photo she is looking at; I was teaching in a park and I’d smeared mud across my face on purpose, two bold lines in defiance of all that the pandemic was. But she’s so small. In response, my friend smiles. Look at her eyes. -- I am back in New York. A letter to a rabbi I did not intend to write. Pages upon pages, scrawled in the back corner of his cemetery. They must be quite familiar with the things that people ask for here, sitting in this room. A box of tissues placed right beside the pens. Pots of coffee down the hall. Someone must have known. My mother wrote a letter once, for her mother who is buried in this cemetery also. It explained the diagnosis. What would she say to us? I read her letter at ...
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A Single Word

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I never believed in writing letters to dead rabbis. Didn’t need another man to pray on my behalf. Well, I’ll write him a hundred letters. I’m believing in everything. I go through the refrigerator, this is two weeks old, that can’t be good anymore after all this time. So much damn time. I made that meal the day she was diagnosed. Years. I count on my fingers to know how many years it was, how long sliced bananas sat on the shelf, and when I last made mushroom stir-fry. The day my father called and said that she has cancer. That was three days ago. How long were the last three days. So I got in my car. At some point I must have ended up in New York. Missed the exit for the George Washington bridge and just watched the planes take off. Stared up at the sky and looked G-d in the eyes. Don’t you dare. And all the others, they must have figured out something I haven’t figured out yet. When they tell me to drink water, or pack lunch for the layover, or go to work. The airport in Atlant...
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Breaststroke

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I know you don’t know me. I know I don’t look like you. I suppose, every once in a while, amidst the black hats and long coats and sheitel-wearing-women, there is someone who doesn’t look like you. My sleeves are rolled up, on purpose. My skirt is too short, on purpose. My grandma would be proud. You’re sorry, today you don’t have a map of the graves. It’s alright, I remember. I walk off on my own, a left at the end of the narrow white road. An oasis in the middle of congested New York. It’s hot today. Strange, my father always said that graveyards were peaceful, but I’d never understood what he meant until this moment. Until I built a life of getting dressed while driving with a sandwich is my pocket, late before I’d left, one moment, too much. Time doesn’t matter here. The emails I forgot to send or the errands I have yet to run, they all stand still in the sunlight. I’d been here before as a little girl (I’d cried and left a letter on my grandma’s headstone, the way children do)...
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Crocus

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I was taught that, on holidays, each of us can access all the power and grandiose beauty of that holiday’s inception, weave it into our personal lives and reap miracles. Any miracles. All of them.   When I wrote this piece, I expected it to be some panicked articulation about what to even do with the grandness of that gift (which is was), that got increasingly more panicky the longer I kept writing (which it definitely did). But at some point the narrative shifted - and I realized I’d begun answering myself. Crocus Dearly beloved religion that was, what were you thinking when you let the world change you? I liked you best the way you were. *** You tell me to change everything. The way I cook, the way I clean. To collectively rework the redemption of my people by burning breadcrumbs on my stovetop and debating with my Jewish neighbors down the block over different brands of bleach. I never understood it. Grant me something grand. An entire nation all captive in one place, re...
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Needles

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I pulled boxes of hamantaschen from my car last night, and stacked them on the kitchen floor. Laughed, because dozens of needles whispered across the tiles. Firs and juniper leaves.  I stepped into my students’ house the other day. Their father was in the room; instinctively he brought his hands to cover his face. I literally don’t care, I told him. He smiled. I’ve known you two years, he said. And I don’t think, in all that time, I’ve ever seen your face. I could pass you at the grocery store and not recognize you. You’ve never seen my face. But you lent me your ladder last year, and access to the evergreens when my shuls needed schach for sukkos. You let my take the hedgers, climb twenty feet high and trim them between classes. Apparently my car is still filled with pine needles. I hope it always will be. I stepped into my student’s house the other day. His mother was in the room, preparing for a yoga lesson. A black cat I didn’t know she had perched on the windowsill, beside the...
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