a single month remaining

Today we set the move-out date, what office furniture will remain, what goes with me. My time as chair nears its limit.

Sad, yes, sadder than I imagined I could be, but also expectant, relieved.

paper guardian

Because decorating the Six Month House for October lifted our spirits, we spent last night with scissors. Colored squares yielded to the intricacies of unnatural snowflakes.

Alex, though, would have nothing to do with our storm god business. His endeavor: the Death Master, crown of spikes and sword of flame, paper guardian against anxiety's predation. He'll place it by his bedroom door.

clouds / motion

Playground, Livingston and Western. When Alex was so tiny I couldn't picture the young man who was his destiny, I'd stroll him here, thirty minutes maybe from our home. Now it's ten from the Six Month House, and I am with Katherine, seeing so much girl in her, the littleness of both children long departed. These bodies they live in now I am always learning to know too late. Time is motion.

Clouds scud, approaching cold front. The wind is unrelenting in the bare trees, but here we are on swings and monkey bars, running games. The sun so low that for a moment the sky holds fire. We stop, I take this picture, and then homeward into night, running all the way.

Thanksgiving

Dinner with friends. Leek and potato soup with thyme; salad with lettuce, clementine, cranberry, goat cheese; stuffing of baked bread, sage, onion, broth; roasted sweet and yellow potatoes with pineapple; homemade bread; macaroni and cheese; pie with chocolate, caramel, pecans; red wine and more red wine. Children loud and running, house filled with life. Slow end to the evening, kids departing by twos, divorced partners conveying them to second halves of the holidays. Happy to be nearing 20 with Wendy.

Tottenham Court at Charing Cross

July 2007
Alex beside me, reading a book of lands that never were. We're on Tottenham Court road, American chain coffee shop, across from the flat where Katherine sleeps and Wendy keeps the guard. The world's every language drifting. He is happy to be with me, though I'm lost in my notes from the British Museum, writing, eavesdropping French and then Polish. To watch my work and to have his book and to sit like an adult at a chain coffee shop, pleasure.

When the man rushes up the stairs yelling, I think city, ignore. He throws ice and water at a couple, slurs them for gay. All rise, I rise, and he is gone, the drunk. Water on the floor, ice not even close. Like ocean that closes round an idiot's yell noise returns. He was never there, even the couple cold glancing the cubes on the rug, back to their talk. Alex's eyes are wide. I know this evening's talk will be of hatred and life that continues all the same, Tottenham Court or Dupont Circle or in the histories my notebook failing to contain.

Thanksgiving

I'm not a big fan of the stench of cooking birds. I also don't love pumpkin pie. You will think I'm being a fundamentalist when I tell you that vegetables do not belong in desserts. Zucchini bread and carrot cakes are listed among the abominations in Leviticus for a good reason: placed within something sweet as a repast's final course, they become matter out of place. To eat them renders one unclean. And don't even get me started on beets, the only vegetable that, because it oozes blood, is actually a meat.

Happy thanksgiving!

[x-posted]

sick day

[paper anxiety warden, by Alex]

Sickness seldom seizes me. More often my body rebels from the day: stress I did not know I was holding, the clenching of the jaw that imprints headache. I wonder about yesterday, when ache and weariness kept me prone. Flu? Migraine? Or years of leading a department, slowly releasing their hold?

sick day

I'm on the sofa or the bed. Rain and chill wind. The funeral at the Armenian church gathers its mourners, black huddled against wet. One blue umbrella in the crowd.

Obsequies, and then they depart for whatever grave yard holds their dead. Back a few hours later, black coats slick and eyes downcast, and again the blue umbrella.

A meal I suppose or some other affirmation. They depart. The church is silent.

middle

Today I posted a brief history of In the Middle.

I'd composed a longer version of the darker events, but cut its long account to scant words, history not to be saved.

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.

Squirrels

Alex is fascinated by DC's black squirrel population. During a trip with his science class to the National Zoo, he learned that these ubiquitous rodents are descended from eighteen animals released during Roosevelt's presidency. Something about the steady infiltration of their gray cousins' stomping grounds hooks his imagination. A fascination with invasion is our payback for having a child with a namesake in Alexander the Great.

Katherine, meanwhile, has taken to placing grape tomatoes in her month in such a way that the squirrel has become the animal she most resembles.

Behind her, by the way, you can see my birthday gift to myself, perched atop the piano. When we moved to the Six Month House we donated our stereo system to charity. CDs are so 1990s. Our strangely silent new home yearned for music, and now we live with a soundtrack again. Aural furnishing, we have discovered, is just as important to a sense of place as any coach, rug, or piece of art.

Masala

मसाला
Carlos spent his first ten years in Mexico, then Paris. When his father was assigned a World Bank posting in Washington, the family relocated to our neighborhood. They live a few blocks away from the old house.

Carlos spoke little English upon arrival. A determination to read every Harry Potter book in its original drove him to quickly master the tongue, and remove himself from ESOL classes.

Alex and Carlito (as we call him) are best friends: at times they cannot see enough of each other, at times they are sick to death and need a break. Carlos is a fussy eater, perhaps because his mother is so good a cook: because of her, Alex craves cactus in his quesadilla and I have learned how ceviche should really taste. Carlos spent the day at our house. We asked him to choose the kind of food we would have for lunch. Indian, he stated, for no reason other than years ago in France he had eaten at an Indian restaurant.

I had seen Masala Art open in Tenley recently, so we walked. Because the restaurant was not even a week old, the owner introduced himself. His daughters played at a nearby table. His family came with presents and good wishes. Something touched us about being part of that unfolding -- the fragile moment when a dream for a life that might be stands on the threshold of becoming real. The samosas, chana masala, baingan bartha, dal were extraordinary. We were not sure if it was the cooking, the company, or the lives into which we had wandered.

Walls

When I first entered what had been a home and saw its walls smashed to dust, I was not sad. I expected melancholy, nostalgia, all those vices to which I'm prone. But the house has never meant as much to me as its habitation. Not charming, not built with special care, holding no history other than a dull story or two of former occupants. What past have we bequeathed? Yes, here K. and A. grew from babies. The walls have seen small adventures, sickness, danger, celebration. But I don't love them. I was unmoved to see them fall.

While awaiting movers, Alex had enjoyed a pursuit twelve years denied him. We gave him a marker and let him play Michelangelo to the wall canvass. His ephemeral art made them easier to destroy. Writing across surface supposed to stay blank was a nose-thumb, a way of not saying farewell. The crew surely smiled while they hammered his masterpieces to bits.

The house is derelict now: pits and mud, every effort obliterated from former gardens, ceilings in dumpsters and nude pipes.

Writing on the walls and snubbing the past we had there seem bad ideas. We are waiting for a future to inhabit the place, but we can't picture that arrival very well.

House Worry

A pit gapes. Dirt mounds ruin the yard. Few walls remain on the first floor. Dust and mud cover all. The house that was a home is ruined.

We're anxious. Troubling enough to have a space once lively uninhabitable. The problems are arriving: the original foundation never sealed. The crawl space beneath the ancient addition not up to code. The pipes corroded beyond salvage. The upstairs, sealed and stacked with the belongings we left needs to be opened. Its walls will be punched with holes. Worst of all, the financing for the addition is in unexpected jeopardy. An appraiser's errors might prove beyond correction. We are still waiting for this adventure to be fun.

common place

Small dread of 45, predictable reasons: more than midlife, rounds to 50, life expended exceeds life remaining, stink of mortality, promise of catastrophe, approaching loss.

Cheerful.

The day was ordinary: routine of laundry, email, book stacks. Yet something more. I don't believe I've had birthday wishes number my age since I was a child. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter and email and cell phones the day broke its patterns while remaining still itself. An ordinary day, verged with future sorrow, became instantia for the archive, to keep for as long as I can grasp.

45 / Doorposts

מזוזות

I.
At lunch yesterday with an alumnus. "I'm not religious," he stated more than once, preface to moments that seemed religious. Or were they simply transportive? In Cuba, he was hanging a mezuzah on the door of an elderly Jew. The man dwelled far from Havana, in that countryside tourists seeking the Buena Vista Social Club are satisfied to ignore. Both men cried at the sound of the hammer, at the yielding of the wood. Not because the sh'ma on the parchment meant all that much. I do not believe that either reads Hebrew, or cares about reading Hebrew. Something about the improbability of this Jew of no faith having arrived in rural Cuba, his mission to affix mezuzot to forlorn doorways, something about the utter necessity of this useless ritual moved both men profoundly. And moved me to hear it.

I told the story teller he had given me a gift, that I was in his debt.


II.
"Given the senseless of this world," a friend asked, just after the lunch of the story that was a gift, "how do you hold to optimism?"

How can anyone grasp anything that flees so constantly? I have no answer. But I did say, by choice. The last few days have been limned by stories of catastrophe. The world bears sadness to the people I love. It is possible, it is easy to yield to despair.

Small things mend. Last night, the end of a long day, Katherine and I alone. We were ready to depart the car. Wendy was at the PTA, Alex at Hebrew school or fencing practice, tiredness urging me to think of nothing more than putting my daughter to bed. We sat in front of the Six Month House. She climbed over the seat and into my lap, and we listed to her favorite song in crescendo (Semisonic, Closing Time -- but every song that Katherine knows is her favorite song, while it plays). We "accidentally" blew the horn and turned on the wipers. Small moments, little whiles of being together even on dark cold weary nights: for these I hold my optimism. But not securely.

Oneirocritica

Small sobs creep as nighttime patter and find their way to my ear. She wakens me at three. Besides this quiet scurry, the house is heavy in its silence. All else in slumber.

In her room the nightlight green, and shimmer of tears on cheek. "I had a bad dream." She does not open her eyes. Arms reach, knowing where I stand. "It's OK," I say. "I'll tuck you in. I'll kiss you. I'll rub her back. Are you snug?"

She is asleep before I leave. Her brother moves in a solitude of dreams, her mother rustles, the dog is snoring. I wonder why no one heard those small cries.

Nightmares do not visit Katherine. Her brother is their frequent favorite, with his visions of schoolyard apocalypse, bridge breaks and supernovas. Quotidian catastrophes. Katherine does not know worry. The world is for her.

I think she caught the ripples of my own dream. When the patter and the scurry of her sadness came, I was trapped in a small space, a classroom or a cabinet. Someone who long hated me had come, and this was going to be the end. My friend turned secret enemy, he who had studied every word and nourished his hurt, stalker and messiah, his promised time arrived.

If you die in your dreams you die. I know those words too well. My son repeats them. I was not going to test. I was not going back to sleep.

Take Your Son to Work Day

Today is what the local school system labels a Professional Day: teachers are relieved of their classes so that they have time to compose report cards. Alex has been dragged to my office, and you can read from the photograph his thrill level. His latest Facebook update: Help I am a prisoner in my dad's office.

Over a breakfast of asiago cheese bagel, he confided to me that he actually looks forward to such days, an interruption of schedule, a chance to eat his favorite foods, a day when he can hang out with people who are "not all that stuffy" (his words). Right now I am thinking how different this young man sharing my office is from the boy who, almost four years ago, helped me to move into this very room. He took an enormous cardboard box and positioned it by the main door, a sort of guard's booth that he dubbed the Fortress of Solitude. He demanded a password from all who sought to enter, and shot with a Nerf gun those who did not utter "pickle juice." A senior colleague was not at all amused to have her access to the copy machine be denied, but most others went along with the game.

At Breakfast

I watched Katherine seat herself next to her mom with a bowl of oatmeal, watched her eat lost in her own merry thoughts. Her eyes wandered to mom's laptop and the baffling lure of the New York Times.

Katherine's spoon became a plaything, tracing circles in the breakfast bowl. She looked to mom, who looked still to the Times. Katherine made a ghost of her napkin, and the ghost soared and swooped. She looked to mom, who looked still to the Times.

A new strategy: a milk glass became a truck, the tablecloth a construction zone. She looked to mom. "Katherine, please eat your breakfast."

She smiled and returned with gusto to the oatmeal she wanted to eat.

"So that's what you do?" I asked her. "You don't eat even though you're hungry, because you want to make mom to talk? That's your strategy, your game?"

She smiled with pride not guilt. Me, too.