Shut in in Tel Aviv: Coffee

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In the last blog I wrote about making my bed. Why did I want to write about these homely details in the first place? What compelled me, in this isolation, to think on and write about such simple things? Can these everyday things broaden my world?  My answer is that if I look closely enough at anything and give it its due in thought or study, I’ll be off on a voyage through the world around me (or in my more professional writing, through the world I have created in my mind). For the duration of the pandemic isolation I have this apartment and what I do in it. I’m curious to know what I can learn here. The challenge given me is to face the mundane: to take a look at what’s happening in my small rooms.

There’s much to think about with a cup of coffee in your hand. The physical pleasure of holding this warm, sweet drink followed by a little jolt of vitality is enough, before all else, to raise a blessing on the tongue.

I look out the window, study the cumulus clouds ambling by on their way east and think of Jim Carrey’s morning musing:  “I wake up some mornings and look out at my beautiful garden and I go, ‘Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.”

From the kitchen table, which doubles as my writing desk, a giant palm rises almost as high as the 5 stories of our apartment building. From where I sit, I can watch the ubiquitous little green parrots of Israel play in this palm and the hooded crow (corvus corone!) flutter along the trunk. The trunk of the palm is so close I could, if I wanted, take the few steps to the window and reach out to touch the jagged bark. But today, holding my coffee, I stare out the window past the palm to the street below where early risers walk toward the store, their rolling shopping carts rattling behind them. Some are in masks, some barefaced, some wear gloves, some not. Beside some, children, oblivious to the dangers in a touch or handshake, dart back and forth, giggling along an erratic path only they can see.

From the kids, Bach comes to mind. In an unusual burst of secular creativity, Bach wrote The Coffee Cantata, a little comic opera.  In it a lively young woman loves coffee. Her father orders her to stop drinking it; she persists until he threatens he won’t allow her to marry unless she relinquishes coffee. She agrees, but secretly sends words to her prospective lovers that she won’t consider any one of them who doesn’t include in the marriage contract that she is allowed her 3 cups a day.

. . . .

Ah, How sweet coffee does taste,

Better than a thousand kisses,

Milder than Muscat Wine.

Coffee, coffee, I’ve got to have it;

And if someone wants to perk me up,

Oh, just give me a cup of coffee. . . .

J.S. Bach Kantate BWV211, ca. 1735

(To listen to the whole thing, go to openculture.com)

Coffee has a history of over 600 years replete with legends of its discovery, of travel, intrigue, slavery, seduction, betrayal, sainthood… much of this before it was even poured into its first cup in North America.

One legend says coffee was discovered around 850 by the Ethiopian goat herder, Kaldi, who noticed that his goats, after eating berries from a certain bush, “danced,” so he tried it himself, to the same effect. He then carried the beans to an Islamic monk in a Sufi monastery, who tasted the beans, was disgusted by their bitterness, and threw them into the fire. The aroma of the roasting beans filled the air, and the monk, in an epiphany and sudden conversion, quickly raked them out of the fire and threw them in water.

Ecco!  The first cup of coffee!

Other legends say the discovery of coffee was made by a Moroccan Sufi mystic, Ghothul Akbar Noorudin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, who saw that birds experienced an unusual vitality from eating the beans of a certain bush. Intrigued, he tried it himself. . .

And still other legends say it was his disciple, Omar, who, after being exiled to a cave in the wilderness without food, survived by chewing the beans of a nearby bush. Eventually, Omar was forgiven, brought back to town, and made a saint. 

Was he made a saint because of the coffee beans? I don’t know, maybe it helped.

Whatever mix of these legends is true, the first substantive evidence of drinking or knowledge of coffee is from a Sufi monastery in Yemen. And from Yemen the news and the beans travel fast, despite bans by Islamic leaders and the Catholic Church. The ancestors of the beans that make the warm liquid so many of us hold in our hands at the breakfast table were carried from Cairo, to Mecca, and by the 16th century, throughout the Middle East, South India, Persia, Turkey, Horn of Africa, North Africa, up to the Balkans, Italy, the rest of Europe, and to SE Asia.

Today thieves steal money; in 1719, thieves with promise of rich reward from the government of French Guyana, stole coffee plants from Surinam, and coffee beans were on the road again. A few years later, eyeing the success of French Guyana’s coffee trade, the governor of the Brazilian state of Para sent his own thief, young Sergeant Franciso de Melo to French Guyana to bring back some beans.

An illegal act. What could de Melo do? 

“Baby it’s you. . .you’re the one I need. . .” sings Beyonce.  It could have been de Melo’s song.

The wife of the governor of French Guyana succumbed to de Melo’s charms and at the moment of  their sad goodbyes the distressed wife of the governor offered de Melo a big bouquet of flowers with a coffee-bean plant tucked discreetly in the center. Anticipating his reward from the governor of Para, basking in the memory of the wife of the governor of French Guyana, and salivating in anticipation of his first cup of Brazilian coffee while sitting on his porch in the cool morning air, de Melo returns to Para, bouquet in hand.

Thus begins Brazil’s coffee industry.

It took a while from the days of the love affair to the year 1852 ,when Brazil became the world’s largest producer of coffee. In the meantime, Saint Dominique had edged in, and by use of brutal slave labor to plant, raise, harvest, and export coffee beans, was supplying one-half the world’s coffee, retaining power over the market until the Haitian Revolution.

Today, I understand that this is no simple brown liquid I hold in the cup in my hand. A thousand stories wait in every sip.

Next: Keeping the mind ramped.

Shut in in Tel Aviv: Make My Bed

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One Writer’s Daily Schedule for Living in Isolation

In the last posting, I wrote about being stranded in Tel Aviv because of COVID19 and my necessity, as a writer, to handle being isolated in the apartment.  My answer was to make a strict daily schedule. This post begins an outline of that schedule.

William H. McRaven, (ret’d) a four-star navy admiral, expert in counterterrorism and strategy who oversaw and executed Operation Neptune Spear said: 

“If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed, will have turned into many tasks completed.”

His reasoning makes sense to me, and I like the idea of a four-star admiral advising us to make our beds. So, the first item on the daily schedule is to make my bed. 

The days pass.

I get up and make the bed. 

The general was right. Even before I’m out of my pajamas, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. And after making the bed, it seems natural to follow with other small tasks. I pull back the ceiling-to-floor curtains that enclose the porch, and then open every window in the apartment. 

What difference does it make to me, as a writer, to have a schedule, to organize my day, to be orderly? What is the admiral trying to say?

This is what happens:

Cross currents of cool morning air come rushing through the rooms, ushering in the squeaky voices of children and the gruff barks of dogs from the street below. (People with dogs and children or both are allowed outside.) One parent or the other parents other strolls along, coffee in hand, patiently attending to their child’s running commentary about the sticks on the sidewalk.)

A gentle breeze stirs the curtains, glides over chairs and couch, along the television, over the books and wraps itself around my shoulders. Living now in an aura of fear, I take great pleasure in this river of air flowing over me. Here is an invisible gassy mix of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, a little water vapor, and a tiny percent of other gasses rushing in the window refreshing me after a night’s sleep. And here are my lungs, threatened by COVID19, but for the moment, capturing the air, the oxygen, and expelling CO2 for the plants.

In bringing concentration to simple tasks, I discover that I start the day not just with my bed made, but with conscious attention to detail. This apartment and my journeys within it provide me with a much bigger world than I have ever acknowledged.

In the next blog, I get coffee, Yeah!! And I discover that this warm, sweet drink has a mottled history of adventure, seduction, and betrayal.

Shut in in Tel Aviv: Introduction

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How it happened   

COVID19 came on fast. Steve and I were packing for the trip back to the United States for Passover with family and friends when PM Netanyahu announced the first restrictions on movement:  the drivers of busses were cordoned off from riders, stores selling unnecessary goods were to close, and with the exception of health care and other essential workers, all people were to go into mandatory isolation in their homes. 

We thought, “Well, we’re leaving soon so we’ll be confined for a only few days in our apartment on Sokolov Street.”  I continued packing, cleared out drafts of a recent mystery I’d sent off, organized files on the computer and made new files for the small amount of hard copy I had brought with me to Israel months ago. 

We soon realized it wasn’t to be just a few days. Not long after Netanyahu’s announcement, Delta sent us as email to say our flight was canceled.  We tried to call the Delta office; it had abruptly closed. An email from Delta said they would reschedule. 

I continued to think some flight would turn up, the crowding and herding of people in the U.S. airports would be solved, everyone would be careful, and the crisis would disappear. 

Then the dominos began to fall.

The reschedule never came, and one by one alternatives disappeared. Delta stopped flying to Israel, United flights became sketchy, uncertain. Flights to the U.S. from Europe were prohibited by the U.S. so we couldn’t go that route; Turkey shut down.  Doors were closing; our sons in the U.S. urged us to stay in place because the U.S. was not handling the situation well. Each state was making its own restrictions, and the federal government was sluggish in its response to the needs of the states. The U.S. appeared to be a nation confused.

Since we were stuck, I decided I’d use the time to get more writing done. I could pretend I was in a comfortable prison with lax restrictions that allowed me to walk 100 meters from my “cell” and to go to the grocery store or pharmacy when I needed. 

But, there were problems. I could no longer escape the particular distractions of working at our apartment kitchen table by running off early morning to my secluded corner in the café on Arlozorov. 

I needed to make a new schedule that would suit both my husband (also a writer) and I. It turned out to be a good idea, and it turned out we would be following the new schedule for much longer than a week……

In coming postings, I’ll be outlining 

One Writer’s Daily Schedule for Living in Isolation 

A Whole and Divided Heart Who Am I Now?

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I’ve been thinking about what different people we become when we speak different languages.  How does character manifest differently say, when you switch from English to Hebrew? Or from Italian to Arabic? Or from German to Swahili, or from Swedish to Njerep?

I know that in English my outgoing, mildly assertive side stands in front of me happily being the person I think I am. I admit that flapping in the breezes just at my shoulder are remnants of the high school girl’s fears of dating because she was too shy to eat with anyone but family members, but English Ona’s language runs to her tongue like a world class sprinter; verbs drop from the air as lushly as leaves in fall, prepositions shuttle into place at precisely the time they are supposed to – just like a train pulling into the station.

But who is Ona, in Hebrew, this woman studying Hebrew 5 hours a day plus 3-4 hours of homework?  Who the immigrant Ona, who even has a different name in this other language?  Where is assertive Ona, when Libi is shame-facedly pulverizing verbs at the stationary store in an attempt to buy a notebook?

Is this Libi an idiot? A sit-in-the-back-row sort of a woman who’s never done anything interesting? A dullard…?

In English, I was creating my language-self from the time I learned to talk. In some ways, I made myself by my language, and like an expert actor, I practiced and practiced, growing into me, becoming more and more the only one who could ever play the role with any expertise, who could ever get the accent just right, who could ever choose the word Ona would choose.  

Who was I when I learned Italian? Who will I be now, learning Hebrew. In Italian, did I become a luscious Italian beauty with a slightly mysterious accent and some sexy little turns of  prepositions that made handsome waiters return to my table time and again to lean close and ask, “Un altro bicchiere di vino, signorina?” 

That didn’t happen. But I did learn about Italians and Italian culture. I did get a bigger mind; stereotypes did fall away. I changed. Still shy at times, still assertive when need be, I grew. In Hebrew I’m hoping as well — to paraphrase Don DeLillo — to ride the sentences I’m beginning to understand into new perceptions.

A Whole and Divided Heart Adjectives

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The reality for me, an immigrant, is that whatever sophistication of language I have in English will manifest itself only erratically in Hebrew.  As much as I might want to speak to my friends here in Israel in their native tongue, to relate to them with all the complexity of thought and emotion their lives and mine hold, as an immigrant, I’ll only ever get partway there.

This is something I never thought of when I was younger and going off to live in West Africa, in Afghanistan, in Italy – not as an immigrant, but as a resident of some length. In the egotism of my youth, I rattled along in those languages, feeling perfectly fluent, oblivious to the look of puzzlement / bemusement on native faces.

That was youth. Older now, more aware, and an immigrant, I think of all the immigrants to the United States, to Israel, or elsewhere, who have crossed one ocean and, having landed in their new country, face yet another: the ocean of language, lying vast and daunting in front of them, replete with slippery creatures behaving in confusing ways.

I’m working hard to put what’s in my mind on my lips, and I know I’ll keep trying even given the odds. I also know I can’t complain; I have the good fortune to have as a mother tongue the lingua franca of the era.

Given I could get along in English, what’s the purpose of even trying to learn?  Our mother tongue is fundamental to our sense of the world, to whatever it is that forms our character, our vision, so why jump into a current where I’m fated forever to swim upstream?

My reason: Learning a language allows me in a modest, but exciting way, to let go of certainty. I used to find this adventure and stimulation by mountain climbing in the Tetons, by running marathons, by riding on top a load of peanuts through the savannah and jungles of Nigeria, by taking a Pakistani army truck to Hunza along the steep cliffs and alluvial fans of the Himalayas….

My vision of what constitutes adventure, has broadened, has moved into a new adventure in learning. And I have found that language learning packs the same punch you experience when you first learn to read, when the symbols come alive on the page. Do you remember how exciting it was to be called on and be able to read: “See spot run.”?

Learning a new language has always compelled me outside myself. Peoples’ lives are embedded in their grammar, their nouns, adjectives and prepositions.  I need to be extra aware, to let studying Hebrew open me to note my surroundings with new eyes. Out of the rut of my own comfortable language and reading of the world, I travel to a stance where I always should be, but mostly am not:  that of struggling to understand the people and the world around me, never vacant even during the simplest experiences.

Adjectives wink at me, verbs box me in the ears, laughing, “I’m different! You never met anyone like me before! Hang out with me and we’ll go places.”

A Whole and Divided Heart Airport to Airport

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At the airport in Newark, while we waited to board the plane for Israel, I understood that it would be impossible to describe an “average” American oleh (immigrant to Israel). Steve and I were early, so we had the advantage of seeing the other 71 olim hadashim (“new immigrants” to Israel) as they arrived.

There was a woman and her husband from West Texas with one big dog and one little dog; a single man in his late 70s; a few single Orthodox women, one in simple headdress, plain gray skirt, olive sweater and gray shoes, another in brilliant black and white patterned dress and striking black headdress ; a family of tall father, short mother, and three medium-sized teenage girls; a modest young couple in their twenties; another young couple with a baby just a few months old, a young Hasidic family . . . The list goes on, with no clear pattern.

To emigrate from the United States today is not to be as an immigrant coming to the States in the late 1800s, the early 1900s, or during/just after the Holocaust. We were not ragged, not hungry, not penniless. As far as I can know, most of us in the airport that day were going to a new life, not escaping from an old one of poverty, famine, or deadly anti-Semitism (though perhaps anti-Semitism of a less immediately lethal sort?).

In a logical and efficiently organized process, Nefesh b’Nefesh had guided our initial Stateside immigration steps, and that efficiency continued at Newark airport. Every question was answered, every help given. It was a foretaste of what our welcome to Israel would be.

We olim were traveling that day with a group of young people from Birth Right, the ten-day trip to Israel for Jewish young people from 18 to 26 who have never been or who have spent only short vacations in Israel. I noted in the Birthright group the great excitement youth-on-a-new-  adventure generates, and I contrasted their liveliness with my own oddly-reserved spirit.

I was emigrating; why was I feeling reserved?

I think there are three reasons:

First, I have traveled so much for so many years, I have come to feel the excitement of travel as an internal hum rather than a burst of song. When I left home for Africa at age 19 I had never been on an airplane. I remember the emotional pandemonium of watching the earth slide away below me and running images of Africa through my mind.

In the ensuing years I repeated the experience through Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia, Canada, the U.S…. and I seem in retrospect to have been constantly ascending and descending to and from planes, trains, busses — or hiking, or riding horseback. I became an itinerant, practiced at moving (and resigned to current airline travel in cramped seats and with diminished service. — Hiking and horseback-riding has stayed fun.)

Second is that making Aliyah has come, like I mentioned above, in steps, not just in the final process, but as I moved through life.

I was 19 years old, living in West Africa and had several Israeli friends when I first thought of moving to Israel. The next time I came close to immigrating was when I was 24, living in Afghanistan. The next time, it was the Yom Kippur War; Steve and I had our passports and were ready to go, when the Israeli government began asking people not to come. From then Steve and I often spoke about immigrating, but we entered the flow of American life: graduate school, professional work, three sons. Still, we made trips to Israel, and for the past 11 years I have been going every year to volunteer with the IDF.

The third reason I was more reserved during immigration is one I’ve talked about in an earlier blog. When you leave a place, you leave people as well. Just as when you arrive, you arrive to people as well as to place. Such loss and joy will always be tangled. I am a fortunate immigrant in that, G-d willing, as long as I am healthy, I can travel back and forth. I can float in the river that runs two ways. But I also must live as one who, if she gains months here, loses months there. A whole and divided heart:  children/grandchildren/friends on both sides of the world. Loss and joy will always be tangled and one becomes more reserved with that braided blood.

Is there an inevitability to what happens in our lives?  I can’t answer it with any true understanding or rationale. But in retrospect I can see the steps, can see the way I was headed, although I couldn’t see it at the time. There were reasons I didn’t come to Israel those first times I thought of coming. Good reasons? I can’t tell; at midnight, I sometimes wonder what would have been. It’s human to do that, and I may sometimes yearn for the people who have been lost in death or in the obscurity of time, but when morning comes, I think of my family and friends, and experience a sweet ache at all the gifts I’ve been allotted.

So I like to think that now is the right time, that now, if my earlier reasons were wanting to come were selfish, now they are less so. Now, coated with a thin patina of cynicism, I can live in the reality of Israel, not in the dream of it. I like to think too that now I have the ability and understanding to carry two passports at once. I hope so.

The last step of immigration happened in an instant. We received our identity cards as soon as we landed. We were citizens. Hundreds of people outside the baggage hall were waiting as we stepped from the confines of the airport to the reception area.

“Baruchim Ha Bayim!!” (“Welcome home!”), People shouted and sang to us.

I felt as if I were swimming in a river of history.  Even as I write this, over two weeks since it happened, I am emotional. Where but in Israel?

 

 

 

A Whole and Divided Heart New Language

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I had planned to post blogs according to the chronology of our move here, but I need to interrupt myself. “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you….” an alert:

Today is the birthday of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922)!

Who was Eliezer Ben Yehuda?

A Jewish lexicographer, a newspaper editor, and the driving force behind the revival of Hebrew in the modern era. He would have been 158 years old this month. When he came to what is now Israel in 1891, his motto was “Hebrew in the home, Hebrew in School, and words words words!”

I won’t make a foray into the whole history behind the development of modern-day Hebrew, but for just one aspect of that history, think of what it meant (and still means) to create new words for a new language, not just for new technological terms of the era, but even for everyday words like “clothes-iron” (mag-hetz), “ice cream” (g’lida), “furniture” (rihut) and “k’ruvit” (cauliflower). Of course other languages had to go through a similar – if not quite as daunting – process; they would have had the everyday words, and they would have already had hundreds of thousands of speakers.

As Wikipedia says:

“The process of Hebrew’s return to regular usage is unique; there are no other examples of a natural language” without any native speakers subsequently acquiring several million such native speakers, and no other examples of a sacred language becoming a national language with millions of “first language” speakers.”

A Whole and Divided Heart Emigration

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We started the first step of Aliyah, the trip to the airport from Logan, on 25th December 2016. During the night a heavy snowfall dumped ten inches of wet snow. I went out just before sunup to shovel our driveway and sidewalks, and after, learned our flight would be delayed at least three hours because of the weather. If not exactly at the time planned, we were to go from heavy mountain snow to Mediterranean breeze.

Both tension and excitement, joy and sadness accompany travel, even more poignantly during emigration. I’ve wondered at the way the last minutes before a departure endow clarity. In those fleeting moments at home in Logan, when I stopped to lean on the shovel and look up at the snow-covered mountains, breathe deeply of the crystalline air, I realized with new eyes my children, grandchildren, and friends were nearby and other family and friends were at least in the same country. Replete with gratitude and yearning, I longed in those moments to be in two places at once. My community in Logan and my sojourns/previous stays in Israel seemed to have fallen on me through no credit of my own. As a poet whose name I can’t remember said, “[it felt] like a miracle come down on the breakfast table”.

Love and amity:  a gift.

In the same moment of thankfulness, I knew I had at least two homes. I knew that in Israel I would yearn toward Utah, to be with our middle son and his wife and children, with the widow of our eldest son and their children, with friends, and within fairly easy reach of other family. And once in Utah I knew, in turn, I would yearn towards Israel, our youngest son and our many friends in cities, on kibbutzim, in towns and in the army.

Utah. Family dinners, days with the grandchildren and children; Shabbat studies with our havurah; snow!; visits with our good and generous neighbors, hiking the Bonneville trail, Brith Sholem nearby . . .

Israel. Sharing our youngest son’s life; visiting the Kotel where, with thousands of other names, all our children’s names rest in hope for safety, with thanks, and, for the lost one, in grief. Israel, where the land meets the sea and reflects the restless stability so much a part of almost any human’s existence and the sweet moist air softens the skin; where Friday, Shabbat, and Sunday dovetail in a triumvirate and more of beliefs, and we spend the weekend with friends on the kibbutz. Israel, where everywhere I turn, Hebrew, which I work so hard to recall from deep in my memory —

all of this, I’ll leave it too and I’ll feel the same gratitude as I felt leaning on my shovel knee-deep in the snow of the Bear River Range.

Emigration/Immigration is a choice, a difficult choice because when you arrive, you have also left and when you leave you also arrive.

Many don’t understand, but it is your life to love Utah and to love Israel, and you travel, ever thankful, ever aware a person may have more than one home, and so, will carry them always on the compelled journeys of a whole and divided heart.

In the poem “Renascence,” Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote:

. . .

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide.

Above the world is stretched the sky –

No higher than the soul is high.

At the edge of the World

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Mid-August was the height of the Perseid meteor showers. The showers happen when the planet Earth is crossing the orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle. Or, if you are mythologically inclined, these meteors commemorate the visit of Zeus in a shower of gold to Danae, the mother of Perseus.

Each year my husband and I check the computer for the best date to watch the Perseid meteors plummet across the skies. It’s a 30-year tradition in our family, and we approach the day with anticipation, almost as if we had tickets to Tasmania.

The evening before the showers, we pack the car: lawn chairs, blankets, heavy coats, and money (for the donuts after). When the alarm, sounds somewhere between 3 and 4 a.m., we wrestle into winter clothes and drive along the empty streets to a wide-open spot up Green Canyon.

We started this tradition when our kids were little. In those early days, they must have wondered why first we told them to go to bed early and then, just a few hours later, dragged them from their deepest sleep and hauled them into the mountains, only to put them back into sleeping bags.

Still, it didn’t take long for the adventure of it to catch on with our sons:  the eccentricity of getting up in the middle of the night, the naughtiness of being outside in pajamas, and the sugary pleasure of eating donuts before dawn were a distinct draw.

Sometimes when the alarm rings, I wonder why, now that our kids are grown, my husband and I still get excited about the meteor showers. The loss of sleep catches up with us later in the day; donuts give us a sugar high and then the concomitant low. And what are meteor showers, anyway? Space debris, bits and pieces of a parent comet’s rubble slamming into Earth’s upper atmosphere at 130,000 mph – then disappearing so fast you get whiplash trying to catch the sight of those fleeting, radiant lights before they are extinguished.

What is it that continues to attract us?

I know the answer: it’s our children. They are far afield, across countries and the universe, but on the nights of the Perseid showers we are all joined anew. Wherever we are, each of us sets an alarm, dresses, and heads into the dark.

One son walks into a desert in the Middle East, one son carries his daughter to the car and drives up Temple Fork, and one son, lost to this earth, watches from his ring-side seat in the other world.

If the other months of the year our children are away from home, out, as they should be, “fulfilling life’s longing for itself,” the night of the Perseid meteors, we make a place together at the edge of the world and gaze upward, all of us together, taking our infinitesimal part in this August mystery.

 

 

 

 

His Feet Were Wings, His Beautiful Head a Compass*

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I usually think of travel as getting in the car or boarding a plane and going away from home. Recently, I’ve found those journeys, however long, are never as far-reaching as the inward ones. This year, out of habit and to find new perspective, I traveled again to the Middle East for another two-month volunteer stint. There, working, I continued on another journey, the longest I’ve ever undertaken: an exploration of the inner country of grief, caused by the loss of our son to cancer.

Some months earlier, on a late morning during shiva, just a few days after Dov’s death, I lay in the grass in our backyard eye level with the splash of spring violets across our lawn. Among the flowers, little bees I’d never noticed before flitted from blossom to blossom. Watching them a question rose and circled round and round in my mind: “Where are you, Dov?”

Witnessing the bees with the gentle astonishment nature often elicits, I sensed Dov’s spirit linger, hesitant to let go of earth, and I thought he might answer. He hasn’t answered, at least not in any way I anticipated, but as time passes, I hear the answer almost everyday.

After shiva, I spent a year in study, reflection, and therapy, and I began to realize that the question, “Where are you, Dov?” was more important than the answer. In the struggle of those months, I had to accept that neither I, nor anyone else, can answer it; and, as time passed, I realized that “Where are you?” inevitably leads to “Where am I?” Dov, in the newfound wisdom he must now have wherever he is, would laugh aloud to know I was figuring things out.

It’s not up to me to know what I can’t know, although I continue to think about an afterlife; but it is up to me to know where I am. Where do I stand now? What am I doing with the grief, with the memories, with the longing for a son I won’t see again as long as I live?

How has Dov’s death changed me? If I look in the mirror of grief, what do I find of use to this life, besides a bereaved face? How do I continue carrying the sorrow, not trying to recapture my lost son, but living in a way that honors his life? How do I make memory a catalyst to action in this world.

Dov and I talked together and wondered together about the afterlife, particularly during long, wakeful nights in the hospital. From childhood on, and even more intensely during the progressively difficult years with cancer, Dov’s answer to the question ‘Where am I’?  was without fail, an exuberant “HERE!” The same as when he was a boy.

To use the hackneyed phrase, he lived in the moment. If that led to a certain chaos of distraction, timing, and scheduling, to minor frustrations for those around him while he grasped the tail of each minute and ran with it, the annoyance was balanced by seeing such joy for life, which many long to have, but of which few are capable.

While many choose to sit and think about what’s next on the calendar, Dov was stopping to thank and chat with the janitors working in the hallway at the infusion room, or was telling a joke to the clerk at the front desk, or recognizing that the pamphlets a dismayed young woman was carrying signified it was her first day on the cancer ward and he could help alleviate her fear. He explored every encounter to find a laugh, a bit of fun, a meaning, a discovery of shared humanity. This habit of seeing riches dispersed in every minute stayed with him to his last breath. From his life-threatening, premature birth on, he used the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years with a dizzying intensity.

I don’t mean to draw a Pollyannaish depiction of Dov, and he would not want me to. He spoke to me of the unease he felt when people made too much of him – even though paradoxically, he loved being the center of attention. He knew his intensity for the moment could be enticing and trying, that his great joy in life, his insistent expression of it, demanded time or effort others could not always and did not always want to give.

Simply, he stood in thrall to love of life, to his comedic gifts, which he spent his youth developing in repartee with his brothers and father, all of whom matched him for wit.

As he aged he continued to channel his delight at living through laughter and stories, sometimes, in his generosity of words, augmenting reality. I think his genius was in carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. It was his sweet remnants of narcissism joined to his readiness to take on the rough work of dying that made him the man he became in adversity.

With cancer close behind, shoving him in the back, Dov brought his gifts to fulfillment. If his laughter fluttered at the edges with anger, fear, fury, pain, that was okay. He realized in full, like his folklorist father taught him, humor can be a two-sided coin. We laugh about the things we take most seriously. For Dov, and for other cancer patients – no matter how graciously they skim over or belittle their suffering to put others at ease, behind the smiles and the self-effacements, and the I’m-doing-okays,  the torments of the illness are there in spades, and the concern is how to deal with them.

More outrageous and edgy every year, Dov’s comedic gifts transformed from a private genius for his own joy-pain, his own afflictions and those of close friends and family, to a gift for a whole community of patients, medical staff, caregivers. Dying of cancer, Dov gave life the complete attention of his complex character, shed of any desire for recompense. He opened his Facebook page to encourage communication; he sent his fine poems to everyone and anyone, he told stories, and when he was able, entertained wherever he was asked. He approached strangers to learn their stories, to create a tie, to say “we’re in it together”. He made community where it hadn’t existed. If he offended people with his FUCK CANCER shirt, I like to think the offense lasted only as long as it took them to realize which of those two words was the most offensive.

It was this flagrant, brazen laughter, shared and developed first with his father and brothers and then with others, that led him to the ultimate wisdom of love. His was a tenacious, resilient behavior: love as a force, love that ran headlong with abandon, love enacted with the brave elan of one jumping from a high cliff into the river below, yelling with a hoot of joy for being alive. If his hoot of delight was barbed by the gravelly sound of grief knowing he was leaving life, it meant not that he was diminished but that he was a complete man. It’s easy to see this kind of strength in the movies; it’s another thing to live it.

Where are you, Dov? Sitting in my office, the question, and the agony, come again, and again, I break down. I won’t stop wondering or crying until I die — and then, just maybe, I’ll find out. I hope more than anything I get to see you again, my son, some place where you exist beyond pain and yearning.

Until then the question will gnaw at me, and I know that just after it comes to mind, I’ll catch a fleeting vision of your smile and an echo of your laugh, and I’ll remind myself that today, on this earth, I have to ask not Where are you, Dov? but Where am I?

 

* Paraphrase from Roman Payne