An imaginary conversation

B: Are those vitamins in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Me: I AM happy to see you, but yes, I have vitamins in my pocket.
B: Wow, that's a lot of pills. How come they're in your pocket?
Me: Yeah, I know it's a lot. I don't know if they help or not, but I figure they aren't hurting, and I have been in less pain since I started taking them. Problem is the multi-vitamins make me puke if I take them on an empty stomach.
B: Didn't you eat breakfast?
Me: Yeah, but it was like 2 hours ago now.
B: That's still an empty stomach?
Me: Apparently... Hey, should I be taking prenatal vitamins if I'm only thinking about getting pregnant?
B: I have no idea. I thought those were for when you actually ARE pregnant.
Me: Yeah, me too. The acupuncturist gave me these when I asked for a refill. I didn't notice that they were prenatal until I got them home.
B: Maybe your acupuncturist knows something you don't.
Me: No, I'm not preggers, yet. But she knows that we're sorta kinda trying.
B: How do you sorta kinda try?
Me: Well, you know, I'm not taking the anti-baby pill every day any more. But we're not, like, tracking my ovulation or anything. So, we're not trying NOT to get pregnant, but we're not actively TRYING to get pregnant, either.
B: Oh, okay, I get it. Hey, wait, weren't you thinking of having that surgery on your eye this summer? You can't do that if you've got a bun in the oven, can you?
Me: No, I don't think I can. I haven't scheduled it yet. I think maybe I'll just schedule it and see what happens. They'll do a pregnancy test before they let me into surgery.
B: Shouldn't you plan it a little? I mean, isn't your husband going to get new orders in a little over a year?
Me: Yeah, he is. We might end up in Norfolk or Jacksonville, or possibly Hawaii. I guess we should plan it a bit. I mean, I don't want to be due to give birth at the same time that we're meant to move.
B: Weren't you going to try to take a trip to Israel before you report to the next duty station, too?
Me: Well, yeah, we talked about it.
B: Sounds to me like you should sit down with a calendar.
Me: Well, yeah. I guess. I'm afraid if I think about this whole thing too much I'll chicken out altogether.

Things that are satisfying

In no particular order:

1. forcing a pimple to give up its disgusting prize.
2. going to make coffee in the office and finding it's already done.
3. peeling a banana.
4. accelerating up to 6th gear on open road.
5. interpreting a bit of Torah and then reading a respected exegete who read it the same way.
6. throwing a strike in bowling.
7. plucking eyebrows.
8. chocolate.
9. comparing myself to Sei Shonagon by making a list.
10. eating a really sweet cherry.
11. water when you're thirsty.
12. receiving the results of a marketing campaign that has made money.
13. finishing a workout.
14. waking up anxious, but realizing there are several hours left before it's time to get up.
15. the sound of a golf-ball falling into the hole.
16. climbing into clean sheets.

SL, UT (that's Salt Lake, Utah, to you).

I was in Utah recently. I went for a conference on a software I use regularly for work. We stayed at Silver Lake, 10,000 feet above what I now think of as "beloved" sea-level. Baltimore was a dreamy 80 degrees when I boarded Delta flight 1203 to Salt Lake City. It was 36 degrees and snowing when I deplaned.

My coworker drove the rented Chevy Impala up the impossibly steep mountain roads through blowing, swirling, drifting snow. I closed my eyes on the hairpin turns.

That night, I discovered I have a relatively reliable sense of direction, unlike the Impala driver. We went to Whole Foods--much better than the ones I'm familiar with--and I bought apples from Washington (Pacific Rose, delish), and a bunch of bananas, some cookies, a protein shake. Lucky for my coworker, I was in the car on the way back to the resort hotel, navigating our way through unfamiliar mountain roads.

The next day, after doodling through sessions about unique file output names and special rate cards for product centers, the high altitude punched me in the stomach. The celery root soup from the high-toned restaurant tasted better going down.

I slinked back to my ski-resort hotel room, switched on the fireplace and collapsed into bed. I missed my husband. It was exactly 4 weeks and 1 day since our tuxedo wedding. I remembered feeling beautiful and loved and happy and scooched further under the covers. I watched Sabrina (the new one with Harrison Ford). I wished my hair looked as good as Julia Ormand's, I cried. I called my husband. I asked him to say "poor baby." He did. He googled "altitude sickness," and read me my symptoms from his computer screen, 1800 miles away and 2 hours later. He mentioned that the sleeping pill I take every night can make symptoms worse.

I turned out the lights without taking my sleeping pill. I turned over. Again. I thought about how crappy I felt. I started running numbers for our new budget. I wondered about Mormon Undergarments. I decided if there were Jewish Sacred Undergarments, I would at least consider wearing them. I got up. Again. I took a bath. I ate some cookies. I wished I hadn't. I turned out the lights. Again. I decided WTF, I can live with worsened altitude sickness symptoms, as long as I get some fucking sleep. I took my sleeping pill. I slept.

I woke up exhausted, but better. More sessions, more doodling, another drive. This time we went to an "Indo-Persian" restaurant that was neither Indian nor Persian. I had the Saag Panir. It looked vaguely like Saag Panir I've had before, but tasted nothing like it. On the way to the restaurant, a bird flew remarkably close to the car. A big bird. Really big. Well, not as big as Big Bird, but still, a good 2 feet tall. It was black and white. It had a really long tail. It was pretty, but disconcerting because it was so close. I was particularly impressed when, another mile or two down the road, another one landed a few feet from the car. At the bookstore that evening (an independent that will surely be closed in the next two years), we looked it up in the bird manual by the front door. A black-billed Magpie. Non-migratory. They have remarkable ability to mock dogs and cats and even human voices. These seemingly fearless birds just chill at 9000 feet all the time. They're no snow birds, no fair-weather occupants of the mountain-top. No sir. Non-migratory. I wonder if they would find the air too heavy in Baltimore? Perhaps their avian lungs would balk at all of the extra oxygen.

More likely a neighborhood kid would use them for practice, with slingshot or .38, a magpie might make a good target. I wonder what a magpie might say if allowed to learn the lingo on the streets of Charm City. Then again, what do they say now, on those mountains with skiers and Mormons?

A few vignettes from recent days (in no particular order)

Missing the point:

I went to the gym on Sunday, looked at the elliptical machine and thought "Aww man, I really want to sit down for this." I rode a bike. A reclined bike.

********
Surreal:

Standing at the corner of 33rd and Charles, waiting for the light to change, I watched a starling drop down into the middle of the intersection. In that eye of the traffic storm, the little cannibalistic bird pecked meat from a chicken bone discarded by a wing-munching pedestrian.

********
Realizing I'm getting old:

Walking south on St. Paul to my apartment, I was forced to navigate around several undergrads out celebrating homecoming. Two of the young men wore no shirts. They were well-built, with defined abdominal, pectoral, and upper arm muscles. I thought to myself "Put a shirt on for God's sake!"

********
I chose the right one:

An orthodox friend asked me, a la Newlywed game, what my husband of 3 weeks would pray for if he could only pray for one thing. I answered that he would probably pray for a good duty station for his next assignment, or perhaps for the children he seems eager to father. My husband said quietly, "no. I would pray for your health."

********
I am a narcissist:

The professional photographer from our wedding posted all of the pictures he took online. There are nearly 500 images. Probably 50% of those have me in them. I've spent hours looking at them and sighing.

********
You can't go home again:

While Dave was out of town attending a funeral, I rented Ren and Stimpy cartoons. I remember loving the show when I was a tween. I remember lines from it "Not the history eraser button, you idiot!" and songs "It's log, log, it's big it's heavy it's wood." When I was 12, Ren & Stimpy was hysterical.

It just isn't funny anymore.

It's not you, it's me

Have you ever been dumped by a platonic friend? I've dropped girlfriends who were toxic to me or themselves. One woman I dumped after she went back to an abusive boyfriend. Some former friends became former because I just didn't have the energy for their negativity any longer. I've never been the dumpee before now.

I have (well, had) this friend. We've known each other for years, and we weren't super close, but you know, sort of email friends, but lately he seems to be avoiding me. I'm not sure what I did wrong. I know that individuals rarely can tell when they themselves are being annoying, and I'm open to the possibility that I am abhorrently annoying to this former friend. I wonder, though, if what I've done wrong is to meet and fall in love with David. My friend doesn't know Dave, and wasn't interested in me himself, it's not that. It's that I think I may have been more interesting when I was looking for love. I say this in part because I have another friend (they don't know each other) who recently got a girlfriend, and I find him SO boring now, I hardy want to chat. He was much more interesting when he was lonely. Now all he wants to talk about is his girlfriend and how good the sex is. It's not that I don't want him to be happy--I do, it's just that he's less fun to talk to when he is. It's the classic indie rock star phenomenon: Liz Phair was fascinating and compelling when she sang "Fuck and Run," this whole happy pop song shit since she got married is just plain boring.

Is that my problem? Am I too happy? Is that why I've been dumped? Because honestly, I don't feel too happy. Part of me says I should contact my former friend and ask what's up, but if I'm right, he'll never admit it. I wouldn't.

Writing Assignment #3

The Kotel

In the late eighteenth century, the Jews of Europe were poised to receive full citizenship in the countries in which they lived. For the first time, they were allowed to practice any trade they chose, fraternize with non-Jewish neighbors, and live outside the walls of the ghetto. For the first time, their non-Jewish neighbors thought maybe, just maybe, Jews could be countrymen. This possibility was intoxicating. Men and women embraced secular learning, styles, and occupations with the passion and hunger of generations of denial. They longed for the full acceptance citizenship would signal. They wanted desperately to be a part of the Enlightenment that surrounded them.

Out of this context of learning and acceptance grew a movement known as the Haskalah (“Enlightenment” in Hebrew). Proponents of the Haskalah, maskalim, were advocates for their coreligionists, urging them to move toward integration. They lived by and promoted a simple motto. They asked of themselves and other Jews that they be a “Jew at home and a mensch (person) on the street.” This motto pointed toward the maskalim’s desire to transition Judaism, or Jewish-ness, from what it was in the middle ages—a civilization, nationality, and ethnicity—to what they believed it could be—a religion like other religions. The maskalim dreamed of a day when Jews and non-Jews would live as neighbors and friends, equal in every way, save which house of worship they attended.

In some ways, my life has epitomized the dream of the Haskalah. I attended public schools with Jews and non-Jews, played and learned and grew up with people of all different religious and ethnic backgrounds. I never worried as a child about things I could or couldn’t do because my family was Jewish. But something happened in this post-Enlightenment reality that the maskalim could not have foreseen: I have lived the inverse of their motto, as a mensch at home and a Jew on the street.

Despite the promise of the Enlightenment (the same Enlightenment that informed the United States’ “All Men are Created Equal”), contemporary American culture has a decidedly Christian bias. The house of worship is not, in fact, the only differentiator between religions, nor could it be. Different faiths observe different holidays, consider different things sacrosanct, and sometimes even eat, dress, or speak distinctly. My best friend when I was 11 years old was Catholic. She attended religious school, she called it “CCD,” on Wednesday evenings. Sometime that year, her CCD teacher must have taught a unit on other religions. My friend came to me one day and told me that she knew I was Jewish, but that she loved me. She said that she would pray for me. The details of the conversation have become fuzzy with age, but more than two decades later I remember understanding that in her mind she and I were different, and that different was bad.

That first recognition of perceived difference would blossom over the coming decades into first a sensitivity and then what I can only describe as a defiance. As a graduate student I complained bitterly to the dean when classes were held on the Jewish high holidays and no accommodation was made for Jewish students to make up the work. As a young professional, I would set my jaw and fume with frustration at the company “Holiday” party where the meal was a Christmas ham (forbidden in Jewish kosher laws), the decorations lacked any Jewish (or even non-Christian) symbols, and the entertainment was karaoke Christmas Carols.

I became obsessed with the ways in which secular America was in fact Christian. I felt the need to let strangers know that I was Jewish, as if it were some sort of badge of courage or honor or perhaps entitlement. But I did not live a Jewish life. I was a mensch—not a Jew—at home. I gave minimal attention to Jewish holidays, customs, and laws. I felt I had to tell people I was Jewish. Perhaps I had to tell them because my word was the only evidence of the fact.

In 2001 I went to Israel. I was a graduate student in Religious Studies. I had a great deal of book-learning about Judaism, though I was still just a mensch at home. I knew all about the second Temple and its destruction in 70 CE. I had read the Hebrew Bible, its commentaries, and supplemental stories. I came to Israel with an academic, historical expectation. I knew how to say, “the King’s horse is black” in Hebrew, but not how to ask for the bathroom.

Jerusalem surprised me. It looked like an American city with Hebrew-language billboards (none of them mentioned the king’s horse). The people mainly looked like Americans—fashionable Americans. There were fast food restaurants and boutique shops. And almost to a person, everyone was Jewish. There was no need for me to tell people I was Jewish—they already assumed it. My definition of my own Jewishness—that is, “not Christian”—wasn’t enough anymore; everyone was a Jew on the street.

On a trip to the old city—the remains of the Biblical, walled city of Jerusalem—I visited the kotel. The kotel, or Western Wall, is all that remains of the Temple compound. The rest was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. An Orthodox woman stood near the modern-day entry to the wall, handing out large pieces of fabric to be wrapped around women’s bared legs—or even pants—to serve as a skirt, for smi’chut, modesty. The length of the wall was divided into two unequal halves with a mechitza, or partition, that keeps the men on one side and the women on the other. Pilgrims come to the wall with their prayers written on a slip of paper. They work the prayer into the spaces between the giant sandstone blocks that make up the wall. In the absence of the literal sound of God’s voice (according to the ancient rabbis, prophecy ended thousands of years ago), the kotel silently receives pilgrims and penitents, their hopes and fears pushed into its very structure—scraps of paper between ancient stones.

Though I was with a group of friends, acquaintances, and strangers, I felt as if I made this trip alone. I wrapped the provided skirt around my waist, hiding my shorts and legs to the ankles in the dry desert heat. I covered my shoulders with a scarf. I walked down the slight cobble-paved incline along the roped off women’s path. The wall is huge, about 60 feet tall. Above about 6 feet—a human being’s reach—caper bushes grow haphazardly from the cracks in the wall. From the mountain to the west, you can see the golden dome of the Al Aqsa mosque on the level above. From the ground where I was, there is only a giant pale dirt-colored wall with green bushes sprouting from it, an Israeli flag flying out front, and a random collection of people standing with their faces nearly pressed against the stone.

As I got closer to the wall there were tables and chairs scattered on the ancient stone pavement. The tables held prayerbooks. The chairs were mostly empty. There were other women approaching, leaving, praying at the wall. I barely noticed them. I found a spot near the wall and stood as close to it as I could; my toes were touching stone. I placed my palms flat on the wall. It was cooler than I expected, shaded from the sun by the hillside and another wall to my right. I knew that millions of Jews had stood in this spot and hoped and prayed. I knew that thousands of Palestinian Arabs became refugees when Israel reoccupied the area after the 1967 war. I knew that this spot, this wall, was special. I wanted desperately to touch the divine that my coreligionists identified with this wall. I wanted to be a Jew at home, and I knew I needed help to get there.

I leaned in and filled my vision with the ivory past. I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent of sand and prayer. I literally touched others’ prayers as I pressed my palms against the stone blocks with their mortar of notes. I remembered my note and pulled it from my pocket. I unfolded the paper and reread it: “Hineini” in Hebrew. The combination of the words “Behold” and “Me,” “Hineini” is usually translated into English “Here I am.” It is the answer the patriarchs and prophets give when God speaks their name. With some difficulty, I managed to shove my “Hineini” among the rainbow of folded paper already present in the wall. I took a deep breath. I turned and walked away.

In America, I was busy being defiant, being a Jew on the street. Israel made me realize the maskalim and I were both wrong. With the haskalim, Jews stepped forward and said to the world, ‘I am a person.’ With my contemporary secular-American Judaism, I said to the world, ‘I am a Jew.’ In Israel, I learned to say simply, ‘I am.’

Writing Assignment #2 (Commentary on Modern Life)

More than a hundred stars

Franz Rosenzweig wrote most of his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption, on postcards mailed to his mother from the Macedonian front in WWI. I can only imagine what it was like for Frau Rosenzweig, sporadically receiving scraps of genius from her son. I expect that she hoped, even prayed, for every postcard she received. I imagine her daily trip to the mailbox. It must have been filled with hope and anxiety—that one chance a day to learn if Franz was, for now, alive and well.

My fiancée is in Baghdad. Petty Officer Decker is stationed in the Green Zone. He’s a computer specialist, on an assignment whose details I’m not allowed to know. Unlike Frau Rosenzweig, I don’t have to hold my breath for the contents of the mailbox every day. Unlike Macedonia, Baghdad’s Green Zone is equipped with Internet connections. There are those who decry contemporary technology. They claim that by connecting to the Internet we are in danger of disconnecting from real, in-person relationships. Currently, that threat to personal relationships is my surest connection to the most real relationship I’ve ever known.

Almost every day, David logs onto gmail.com around 3:30 PM Baltimore time (10:30 PM in Baghdad), and we “chat.” It’s not as good as having him here, obviously, but gmail chat is real-time communication. He tells me about what he’s been working on, I tell him about my day. Recently, he spent some time typing about how much he misses our dog and our daily trips to the park with her. (The dog park serves as our workday decompression time. Every day we three trot off to the Wyman Park Dells where the dog runs and wrestles and we gossip with the other dog parents. We got engaged there. It is a comfortable place. It misses him.) That evening I took a camera in addition to the regular water, dog treats, and tennis ball. The next day, photos of the dog romping with her friends greeted him from his email inbox.

David uses photography to express observations for which he can’t always find the words. I accepted his first dinner invitation in part because of the depth and sensitivity I saw in his photos on myspace.com. He recently posted a few photographs he’s taken in and around Baghdad. I was struck by the beauty and nuance he captured in his images of destruction. Being able to see those photos from my living room, and to share them with friends and family, made the distance between us easier to bear.

Before he deployed, David kept me in flowers. There were always fresh flowers on my bedside table, and as soon as one bunch started to fade, he replaced them. Recently, I mentioned in a chat that I had bought myself some flowers, because they reminded me of him. About a week later, a florist’s truck stopped at our door. The card on the bouquet read “A little something to brighten our home. Love, Your David.”

Franz Rosenzweig could not have sent his mother flowers from the front. I wonder if he would have written the Star, if he had access to myspace.com and gmail.com, or even a telephone. I wonder if the scraps and postcards written in trenches during stolen moments were somehow integral to the creation of the masterpiece. The Star is a remarkable piece of Jewish theology, influential to nearly every Jewish thinker to follow. Could it have been written if Franz had, as David does, a comfortable room with air conditioning and a television? Is David’s ease of communication denying the world some great artistic or philosophical masterpiece? I don’t care. I wouldn’t give up the Internet for a hundred Stars. The Talmud teaches that to save one life, it is as if you save the world. If that is the case, then this life, my life, is equal to the world. The World be damned, this world needs David more.