Glimpses of the Week

I.
I had wanted to compose a post about food: how meal and wine make the symposium (sumpotēs 'fellow drinker'). The weekend had been convivial meals with friends. Two colleagues taught me of the courses they teach "Food and Culture" "Food and Politics." For me though it is "Food and Wine and Thought." Or maybe just "Food and Wine and Meeting."

II.
I had wanted to write about the weakness of my house: the trouble the builders found with its foundation, its lack of durability, the poverty of its enclosure. The outside has been breaking in, only we didn't know it. While we dwelled inside, we thought the house was strong.

I wanted to write about how I realized during these builder's reports the weakness of my childhood house, how a marriage that seemed happy remained happy, until I saw its grim now, aftermath and future. The weakness of the house: the trouble with the foundation, the poverty of its enclosure, not known until I looked.

The two had everything in common, even their desire not to be metaphors.

writing for the archive / another word for word

An admission behind my vow: my daily post arrives because words escape me. After four years of memos bulleted lists missives to donors MOUs, I don't find words easy to love.

terms appellations expressions designations names locutions vocables

The list of words for word in my thesaurus, its window ever open. I didn't want to use word twice in two sentences. I couldn't think of word's twin, I tried to find something as beautiful, I wrote terms appellations expressions designations names locutions vocables as the thesaurus suggested, nothing worked. I don't find words easy to love.

I don't know what has happened to my language. It doesn't want to breathe.

The Looming Bar Mitzvah

Alex has selected a song that absolutely will be on the playlist, probably as the last of the party.

Why? Look at the lyrics:

I feel stressed out
I wanna let it go
Lets go way out spaced out
and losing all control

Fill up my cup
Mazeltov

On the Way to School

K:  "Every time I put a sticker on myself it falls off."
J:  "That's a problem. Have you tried staples?"
K: "That would hurt."
J:  "Superglue?"
K:  "Then it would NEVER come off."
J:  "I could nail your sticker to your body."
K:  "You think you're very funny. You're not funny."

Future No Future

Advice for those who have asked about children.

I understand the dangers of the following: suburbanization, conformity, heteronormalization. I understand the violence of compulsion to replication of the same.

But I wonder if in worrying about futures that look like infinite extensions of now we don't grant too much agency to the present. Can anyone really fashion a child who is a self in miniature? Can anyone predetermine the shape of the years that child will inhabit? Can anyone persuade a child not to say no?

"The children are our future." What could be more maudlin, trite, wrong? They're not our future (who is this our?) but a future that unfolds regardless. To send a being into that unknown holds more risk than reassurance. Sacrifice, too, but not complacency.

I often think of the choice Wendy and I made to raise our children as Jews. I research antisemitism's long history. I know that times of peace are broken, suddenly. I wonder, sometimes, in my darkest moments what the consequences of this choice not theirs will be for them, for those who come after them.

And yet.

Crazy Hat Day

During Spirit Week, each day of middle school is given to an activity that makes students feel gathered in community: wearing the school colors, for example. Or donning crazy hats.

Alex labored this weekend to create the perfect chapeau, one that expresses his own personality while eliciting amusement from peers. What could be more fitting than a Platypus Hat? This work of fashion Alex created from a balloon creature that he taped to the remnants of a foldable frisbee. Both these objects were the gifts of a bank that opened over the weekend, a block from our Six Month House.

As I drove him to school this morning I watched as Alex note in silence that no one walking towards the place was wearing a hat. As he prepared to depart, he tucked the platypus under the seat, where no fellow student would glimpse the thing when he opened the door. Though he suggested I wear the hat at work today, the forlorn creature is sitting in my car at this very moment, in the cold of the university garage.

Future No Future

Advice for five who have asked about children.

To think the life of the present will be its life in infinite extension: the dream of idiots. Few are so.

Children are risk not replication. The future into which they never asked to be thrown, precarious. The span to come could hold possibility unimagined, all the tions and nesses of desire. Or cattle cars and gas chambers. Pretend that tomorrow is today only with flying saucers and what comes after microwaves. Hope that history wearied itself, at last, with repeats. The holiday of chaos has been infinitely extended, he's not coming back from St Thomas. Pretend, but the world is limned with catastrophe, and borders are centers after all.

The child you did not ask before worlding will ruin your life. What you had closes. Another begins, not yours alone, and you will mourn the loss of something that (let's face it) you never loved as much you do through retrospect, as if it was ever yours to love.

Habit and routine are the nemeses of innovation. The new collaborator will devise art from your ruin. You will hate and you will love. But you will not be one of those who believe that tomorrow is today, that the future is anything less than knifepoint, that you have sent a being forward into death.

And you will cease to be yourself, you will learn your smallness in a world not yours anymore.

Scholar with Fez

Good to be reminded that others share my passion for some silliness mixed with the seriousness.

Do zombies poop?

Two monsters haunt Alex's almost-adolescent mind, zombies and clowns. His fear is so intense that he's enabled me to realize that zombies and clowns are actually versions of the same nightmare creature.

Last night I descended into the creepy basement of the Six Month House to retrieve laundry. The stairs are ancient and creak. I could hear Alex behind, in stealth mode, attempting to startle me. I turned tables by quoting some lines from Night of the Living Dead that never fail to chill him ("They're coming to get you, Baaaarb-aaa-raa!"). I observed that behind the mysterious door with a black knob a zombie was likely lurking. "DAD!" he scolded, "NEVER SAY THAT BEFORE BEDTIME."

The door and its odd colored knob did suddenly loom with menace.

"Look," I offered, "I'll open it, and you'll see nothing waits inside." I pulled at the black knob gingerly. The door swung to reveal the toilet that sits inside the closet-like and uselessly placed powder room. "No zombies here unless they are defecating." To lighten the mood, I asked "They do poop, don't they?"

"They have to," Alex observed. "Otherwise what would happen to all that flesh they eat?"

Deluge / Calm

Incessant rain snakes the hole they've dug, widening basement or pool for mud. Work stops, too wet, but we can see the walls, and their top. The window through which I took this picture will be soon gone, and with it the stickers that pleased the children.

We are learning to live with our new companion. So many things gone wrong: the financing unsecured, the grade of the soil not right, old crawlspace and foundation built by men for whom a future was five years, maybe ten years, not sixty.

Something, though, about that gray wall where brown pit had been promises.

Cold Wednesday, wind and rain

Bite of wet cold.

Thoughts of my grandfather, and a lonely seder I once watched him perform; my father, who on the first day of his life was Alfred but on the second became Robert; childhood memories of bagels and rye, before these breads lost their ethnicity; Alex and his Torah portion, about the clean and the impure.

Doorway

גיור‎
Because this year is Alex's bar mitzvah year, Temple Micah has become a home. Not a dwelling of God or gods, not a metaphor or a heaven or a redemption, but home in the sense of mystery. A place of welcome that discomfits.

Can a doorway resist analogy?

Can I be so proud of secular, if I choose to stand before that door? Can an atheist linger at a portal, and resist the poetry of belief?

Yesterday at the threshold. The doors to the synagogue were locked, as they are when congregants and children do not crowd, when police are not at guard. Three times I pressed the buzzer. Three times the elderly man at camera's end sent a pulse to open the bolt. Three times I pushed at refusal. I knew the reason. I had seen the wood restained last week. Swelling and poor rehanging were my bar, not some act or mystery.

And yet. When after three tries the doors would not open to me, the old man I did not recognize rose from his seat. He led me to accustomed and unsettling welcome deep within.