loss

I have lost my mother, and my computer too. Cut off from the world, I have only one minute to write a note to self here...self, oh... well... enough has been said

A Holy Rabbi in Brooklyn

"Once, there was a king who helped many people. He counseled the unfortunate, helped and encouraged and generally was constantly on call for his people and their needs. Now this king had a son who he loved very much. However, because of his own obligations to his people, the king had to send him out to be raised by someone else."
     The Holy Rabbi stopped and looked into the eyes of the person he was telling this story to... "do you see?" The rabbi then ran his hand over his beard and continued. "So, he searched around and found a young man who was in his kingdom who very very intelligent, and he asked him to teach his son. The young man was afraid to disappoint the king and said he would of course do as the king requested, but what should he teach the kings son?" The rabbi smiled and stopped again. Everyone at the Rabbi's table was silent and waiting to hear, most especially the person to whom he was telling the story to... "The king said, Teach him the Aleph Beis!"
     The Rabbi's Kiddish cup sat empty before him on the Shabbas table. The challah had been eaten, the dinner plates had been cleared away. Someone at the table picked up their tiny empty cup and  upended it all the way hoping to bring down the last drop but it would not yield. It had been the most delicious wine ever tasted.
     The Holy Rabbi said, "The Aleph is made of a Yud at the top and a Yud at the bottom. The top Yud points to God on high and the bottom to man and earth. In between the two Yuds is a Vav." All the time that he spoke, his face changed expressions, from happy to sorrowful, hopeful to chastising to instructive to questioning to mischievous to amazement. His eyes were sparkling, there is no other way to describe them. Lit up with joy and knowledge and divine truths. The long table ran down the length of the unadorned room. Along the walls were shelves of massive books; Talmudic exegesis and Rabbinical works, the Chumash and Sidders and other religious books all in Hebrew. Somewhere among them, the Zohar.
The Rabbi was not easy to understand, not only because of his mystical knowledge but also because of his accent which turned words in to other words to the ears of the english speaking guest. Sodom, of Sodom and Gomorah became Saddam, and a tale of a bed too short and a guest too long was at first mistaken for a joke, and when they realized the actual word and the meaning of the story, it became terrifiing and almost threatening. The Rabbi understood this was part of mysticism. To hear and then to rehear. To know and then to not know and to peel the layers of understanding and comprehension in varying order. Nothing is predictable. Nothing of value remains stagnant.
"It is the difference between a human being and a picture," the Rabbi explained. "A human being changes constantly, moving and altering expressions. But a picture stays always the same. You look at it once and that is all there is." Through story and revelation and illumination and even misunderstanding, knowledge becomes fluid. It rushes forward, like Abraham rushing to meet the Angels outside his tent, and then it recedes, this fluid knowledge, like the oceans tide, only to gain momentum again and again. 

The Eve of Simchas Torah

It was a dark and stormy night. You had a sinking feeling, like the evening was going to drop in to gloom and depression. Your apartment was a wreck, it had been days since you touched a broom. You chastised yourself over this. "What a no goodnik," you said to the bathroom mirror. But in truth you had not been completely idle for two days... you had been talking on the phone to a childhood friend. And there was a Torahmate lesson in there as well, by phone. Esther had finished the first Parshah, ending with Ugum and Chava, otherwise known as Adam and Eve.  "And so God punished the snake, by cutting off his feet so he would have to crawl on his belly. And Ugum he reduced in size. He HAD been a big big man. Huge, but after he committed sin he was only 12 feet tall." You had been stunned by that lesson.  All your life you had never known these odd facts. The snake had feet? God cut them off? You did not mention to Esther what it reminded you of... that awful thing that happened in your neighborhood. But maybe she remembered that too, and ended the conversation. "So next week we'll start going a little quicker, the stories are pretty straight forward now; Abraham and Isaac and Noah and so forth."
After you hung up, you had your late night Hebrew class on the phone. Esther the Hebrew teacher is much crisper than Esther the TorahMate, and she puts up with no questions or nonsense but gets right to work. "Read line five" she said almost immediately. "Ah. AwBa. Bah. Rah Raw."
"Good! Now line six,.."
"I wanted to ask you," you said, "If Hebrew was added to in the 1950's... if a Rabbi invented words in Hebrew for modern words that we use now... did that include the planets or did they already have Hebrew names? For instance, Mercury is Kaspit. or maybe it was Shel Kaspit. Was that a new word or was that an old Hebrew word?"
Esther the Hebrew teacher said she did not know. "This is not a linguistics lesson," she said.
"No," you agreed.
"This is a crash course in Hebrew so you can read the prayers. That's all. You don't even have to understand the words. You just have to be able to read them."
"I see," you said. "I did not know that. I thought it was to teach Hebrew."
"It IS to teach Hebrew. But it's not to understand every little thing. Look at your pamphlet. It is called A CRASH COURSE IN HEBREW. That's what it is." Esther the Hebrew teacher has no time for queries or interesting theories. She does not want to answer questions. She appears to resent you at times. She can often sound like she is ready to explode. This is not unusual, you have noticed. Several other Orthodox women have seemed very put out by your wonder and your wondering. You begin line six.
"Mi Ma Maw Abaw Baw." Then you tell Esther the Hebrew teacher that you are very grateful to her for teaching you and giving you so much of her time. She sounds somewhat molified and urges you to repeat the last line, and to make it sound like a question.
     It was a dark and blustery windy chilly night. It was the eve of Simchas Torah. You say the name of the holiday several times out loud to yourself while making a sandwich. "simchas Torah. Simchas Torah. Toi-rah. Simchas Toy-rah." It sounded like a character from a Beatrix Potter story. Simchas Torah the cat looked up and meowed.
The night was gloomy and you were afraid you would get unahppy if you stayed in your messy apartment. So you put on your jewish appropriate clothing: long skirt, stockings, long sleeved high neck shirt, green rubber rain boots, black long sweater, green long coat. And you drove off in the direction of the Bobovs which come to think of it you had just been reading about... And didn't you just watch a movie on YouTube of the Bobover rebbe? He had been praying and singing and crying. And the responses to it were mixed. Some Youtubers said he was faking it, and others were violently upset by that and wrote that he was a Saint and was NOT faking it. They all had Bobover YouTube names like "BoboHobo" and "RebbeGuy". Anyway, you had liked the crying Bobover Rebbe, only because he was so wonderfully peculiar. He sobbed when he prayed, and his voice caught and he couldn't go on, and then he would wipe his nose and all the black hats around him began to chant in unison. And yet, some of them checked their cell phones right in the middle of all that. It was very peculiar. You thought this was a heartfelt passionate yearning trance. But if one was in the throws of passionate prayer, was it possible to pull out your phone and see if anyone called during your ecstatic absence? Even so, the Bobover Rebbe was astonishing and you were amazed. You decided that maybe you were a Bobov at heart. "Maybe THAT'S what I am," you thought, feeling like Tigger in Winnie The Pooh.
The dark enveloping stormy night enveloped you as you drove down Ditmas and into the area of the flat hatted Hasidic community. The sidewalks were filled with women pushing double strollers and little girls walking beside their mothers in identical clothing. The men are beautiful, you think to yourself. The women are almost hidden in their appearance, and the children are absolutely darling. The little girls do not jump or dance about. But you don't want to feel sad on Simchas Torah so you push that thought out of your mind...the thought that the little girls long to dance and sing and are not allowed to. You pull up next to a Synagogue at a red light. You roll down your windows. Well, you did. You rolled down your windows, and the sound of joyful singing poured in.
So during the dark night, which was windy but not stormy actually, you sat outside a building and listened to the children and the men singing. After a while you saw a police car approaching and you worried they would ask you what you were doing, sitting in your car alone on a dark and windy night. So you drove on, back the way you came... crossing ocean parkway, and you came apon another synagogue and this one had the windows open and you could see the men dancing in their elegant mink hats, with their sons in their arms. You parked infront of a fire hydrant and stood on the seat of your car with the door open and peered in. And you became swallowed in the music and it went on and on, repeating the same lines until you learned it, and sang it softly outside. You stood there mouthing the words. A young woman came out and invited you in. You left your car and followed her to the balcony. You looked down into the great hall of the synagogue and saw all the men dancing and twirling and hugging the Torah scrolls.
"This is Simchas Torah. Do you see what they are doing?"
"Yes, they are dancing with the Torah Scrolls!"
"Yes they are."
"I see daddy...I want to go down..." You try not to hear that little girl leaning over the balcony in her small long black skirt . "I want to go to daddy..."
Don't we all, you said. But only to yourself.
"We are joyful and praise God for giving us the Torah."
"How wonderful!" you said.
"Do you know Hebrew?"
"I'm learning," you said. You told the young woman your name and she smiled.
"I'm Esther," she said, and you shook hands.

The Guest

Tonight there is rain and I walked home in my rubber boots, humming a little tune. I passed pink formica tables inside the doorway of a take out place. I walked behind two Hasidic boys strolling the streets sharing a cigarette and speaking in what sounded like Russian. But maybe it was Polish. I don't think I have ever heard Polish. Brooklyn is quiet when I get to my neighborhood. Here, the Haitians and Carribean people have gone to sleep, it is just another day for the gentiles. But in the secretive mystical magical world of Jewry, there has been a camp-out all over town.

     Earlier in the evening I walked to Borough Park, passing houses with sheets hung up on their balconies making white tents of four walls. Inside them I could hear children laughing and people talking. Candlelight streamed from every balcony. It is a holiday called Succoth. 

  Have all things changed so suddenly as to reinvent my little existence? Was it the prayers at Yom Kippur, in the Ocean Parkway Russian synagogue, where the chandelier swayed in glittering domes and the men swayed beneath the high balcony from where I peered down, holding Prayers of the Heart in my awkward hands? Or was it the drive through the autumn foliage, on the winding twisting narrow Taconic Parkway, heading to the house of my childhood friend? We sat on the floor of her attic, each with our Madam Alexander Maggie dolls, and looked through the trunks of clothing she had made. My Maggie wore a gold silk suit I had created and my friend dressed her Maggie in a riding outfit complete with tall leather boots all sewn by her with no pattern. Neither of us use patterns, we just cut and pin and tuck and sew until it looks right. My friend always loved horses when we were little and we both had collections of hard plastic ponies and mares and stallions. Now she owns a beautiful bay, with glossy black mane and tail, and black boots on its feet. I stood by the fence as she opened the gate and let out her mare named ShyAnne, talking to her. "This is my guest for the week end. Say hello," she said. The horse snorted.  Then she brought out a homegrown carrot from the pocket of her jacket and showed me how to keep my thumb flat and my palm low so the horse could eat from my hand. ShyAnne took the carrot with her soft lips. Was that when I began to realize the enormous mountain moving aside?
Or was it when I was invited to a dinner on Succoth? Maybe it was then, when the day was still light and the rain had stopped, and I put on my black outfit and my green rain boots and went to Borough Park where the Hasidic and Ultra Orthodox communities live together. The succah was set up just off their back door.  A long table was covered with a white tablecloth and challah bread and wine and candles were already laid out in waiting.  After the blessings and the dipping of the bread in honey, after the kaddish and the candle lighting, after the meal was laid out before us, a gust of wind swept through the bamboo roof and their back door slammed shut. "The doors locked," someone said. "We're locked in!" someone echoed. Everyone laughed. It was true, we were locked in and the door was steel. "Do you know about the Ushpizin?" someone asked me. "It means guest... each night one of the Holy seven comes to the dinner. Tonight it is Abraham."
     It took almost an hour of balancing chairs one on top of another to climb to the roof and lift up the bamboo poles and call into the darkness for assistance before a spanish speaking man on a bicycle agreed to come through the house and release us. When I went home it was after midnight.
     Great soundless piles of rubble are swept aside and the air shimmers. I am trying to learn something. Sometimes I sit with a book in my hands and I can hear the wind from another century blowing through the pages. Sometimes I look up at the blue sky with white clouds and I see a man in a pointed hat creating a woman in the atmosphere. And at night when I lie down to sleep, I feel enveloped and lifted, as if I am being removed from the earthly and the squalor of life, and held up, as a guest, among the heavens.

Aba Ba and Bobov-Ville

In the past week I have stepped up my Jewish studies and am now learning Hebrew over the phone. Ok, in the modern world it is not exactly as it was...One does not go to another persons house and drink tea and learn something together. In the United States of America we do everything by cell. Einstein would be horrified I think to know we call telephones "cells", as if they were part of the great living breathing Adam Kadmon. But as everyone says, cells are safer. A person can get around with their cell and not fear aloneness. My cell is not unlike me; worn out and scratched and sometimes it won't receive at all. Sometimes it goes within itself and refuses to communicate with the world. I understand this. I too am a recluse at times. I too lose the signal and am unable to send out my longing or receive of wisdom. Yet it passes, and the phone rings, and it is my new HebrewMate from Baltimore calling to breathe with me on our cells. "Ahhhh" she says of Aleph, the first letter of the hebrew alphabet, with a small line under it. "Without the line, it is silent," she explains.
     "Why is it used then?" I wonder.
     "For the same reason we have a silent E at the end of many words," she says.
     I am learning Hebrew with an Ashkenazi accent. This was my choice because my illustrious ancestors were from Lithuania before the war. I found it disconcerting at first to be an ashkenazi, as I did not like the last four letters of the word. Infact, I consider them as a silent E and call myself an ashkan. Which in itself has its own poor connotations in english.
     I have learned how to read "my father is coming," which is ironic, as my father has been dead since I was five years old, and yet I still believe at some point he will return.  Aba Ba. Or, as we ashkans like to say, "abaw baw."
     The holy days of Yom Kippur came last week right after I began learning Hebrew by cell. My TorahMate Esther called me before sundown to remind me to try and get to a synagogue, and she had her neighbor call me who also said I must get to a service and even more important I must have a preYom Kippur meal to strengthen myself for the day of fasting. She invited me to her house. I drove over, taking her a book on the Yeshivah that escaped the nazis by traveling to Shanghai and from there to Brooklyn. "Maybe there is a picture of your mother in it," I said, when I sat down at her table. It is always surprising to me to see jews living in empty rooms without books. I grew up with intellectual jews who's houses were overflowing with literature. Bookcases lined every wall, even their kitchens had bookshelves. But the modern world is different. And perhaps religious jews are different now, too. They shun secular books for fear of being assimilated and they don't keep many religious texts in their homes. Of course I can only speak from what I have seen. So forgive me for that, will you?
     It was wondrous just to drive to the Lubavitch womans home and park on her street. Suddenly every dark shape around me was a Hasidic man in elegant hat and black suit with loose trouser legs flapping as they hurried to and fro. They give the feeling of wearing tails, lending an even more formal and elegant aspect to their clothing. In fact, they look everyone of them like grooms hurrying to their wedding. This misconception of tailcoats comes from their tallis flowing around them as they walk. The long fringes dangle and float out and their black long jackets billow out and their tall black hats are so striking in among the dirty sweatshirts and sneakers of the modern world. Inside her house, at the head of her table, sat her Hasidic husband reading his prayer book. The table was empty except for a plate with Challah bread.  Her daughter came in and began laughing when she saw me. "I've been hearing about you!" she said, laughing. "Look at you. Look at you!" and she touched my hat and laughed. "I am trying to dress right," I explained. "You are, I see you are! Look at you!" she repeated. "I am heading over to 770," she went on, "so I won't be able to stay and talk to you." I grabbed her hand.
     "Please can I go with you?" I asked. "I have always wanted to go there...."
    
     Today is the day before the beginning of Succoth. My TorahMate had a giant box mailed to me containing the willow branch and the esrog and so on. These are rather expensive things to be used on Succoth and I worry that I won't know how to perform their magic. Still, I peer in the box and take out the directions which are somewhat complicated. You have to have three rings on one stick and the branches of Lulav,Willow, and Myrtle are intertwined. This sounds easy enough, but as I read on, it says the willows are on the left and the myrtle on the right and the myrtle should be higher and both both should be attached to the lower end of the lulav, and the lulavs backbone should be visible above the tips of the.... at this point I stop reading and close the box. I am afraid to look at the Lulav with a backbone.
Anyway, I am about to drive across Ocean Parkway into Borough Park. I am going to drive down what is known as "the Bobov Promenade".
     The Bobov Hasidim are originally from Poland, and wear a slightly different hat than the Lubavitch Hasidim. The Bobovs hat looks velvet or of beaver, and is shaped more like a panama straw hat. The men dress to the teeth in their below the knee narrow black coats, their shiny long peyas dangling on either side of their bearded faces, and while I drive along 17th street I see many of them appear extremely thin. I spend an hour driving through the streets of the Bobovs, and by the time I figure out how to get back to my own shabby neighborhood, I am sighing and biting my lip. I see myself in my rear view mirror, an old grandmother with lines on her face and big sagging eyes furtively looking out onto a beautiful sea of confident, secretive, mysterious grooms. It is not that I want to be a Bobov woman. I see them too, and they are as disgruntled as the men are joyous. They are as unadorned as the men are adorned. No, what I would really like is to spend one day as one of the males. What secrets do they hear? Do they hearken to the whisperings of the Shekina? Is there some magical reason why they are so beautiful and the women are so concealed? Or is it only as the amazonian male birds of the rainforest, dependent upon their glorious plumage for survival?

The Nearby Synagogue

Let her tell you how a heart breaks. I can’t answer that. She would know. Meanwhile, I am on the phone talking with my Torah-Mate about Rosh Shashona. I am drying my long hair with a pink towel gently so as not to pull out anymore than what falls out copiously each day. I am trying to become more Jewish in these golden years. Well, people call them Golden years. Actually they are leaden. They are difficult years, but today is not a day to mention these things. Today is the Jewish New Year. It is Rosh Shashona and God is sitting on a throne while the human race parades past as clear and see through as glass.

     It was yesterday that I was on the phone with my telephone Torah helper. "Rosh means head," my friend explained. My friend, although I have never met her, is named Esther. "Because we consider this the brains of the new year. This is when all is decided. This is when you ask for a good year and eat only sweet things so your year will be sweet. Shana means year." 

In the sky, connecting the cell phones and writing notes in the great book, God sends out messages, brain to feet, not pausing to take a drink or chit chat with an angel. 

     I said to my friend Esther who helps me with Jewish study, "But where can I go to hear prayers? I kind of wanted to go to 770 Eastern Parkway, you know a Hasidic on the street said I could, but I don't know..."

      "Better you should go where you can walk. We don't drive on Shabbas or High Holidays," she answered me. "Let me have the woman across the street from me give you a call. She's a Lubavitch and her husband is a Rabbi in a Synagogue near you."

     Today, the day after, it is pouring rain. This could be a sign of displeasure, or it could be just another fall storm like the ones which have been flooding the east coast this year. I am inclined to think it is the former, God’s way of spitting on our transgressions. Sometimes I think it is buckets of tears. But that’s Her department. Today is Rosh Shashona. It started last night at sundown. I had gotten a call from the Lubavitch woman who explained again what Rosh Shashona meant, and how it would start at sundown. I pretended it was all new information to me. "We wear our nicest clothing to the Synagogue, of course," the woman said. Her named was also Esther. "Do you have a Sidder? Do you know what a Shofar is?"

     In 1940 in Lithuania, an entire school of Hasidic scholars decided to try to escape from the Nazi's who were inching closer every day. 900 people left Lithuania together, and trekked by bus and train and by foot across Russia and then by boat to Japan and then to Shanghai. For some reason they were the only Yeshivah in all of Eastern Europe that had the foresight and courage to leave. And every single one of them made it, although part of the group went to Israel and the other part to China. From Shanghai, after the war, they immigrated to the United States. "My mother was one of that group. I was born in Shanghai," the Lubavitch woman said on the phone.

     I walked to the Synagogue from my apartment in high heels. It was a half hour walk and by the time I arrived at the iron gates, one of my toes was bleeding. To be honest, and after all it is Rosh Shashona so I am doubly bound, to be honest I drove halfway and parked my car on Cortelyou Street, but it still took half an hour to walk and my toe was really bleeding from the high heels. Outside the modest building which housed the synagogue, men in yarmulkes and black suits milled around talking. They were not the thin bearded black hatted men I see outside 770. These men looked like working class and they were speaking to one another in Russian. They were older than the jumpy holy Hasidic men that hurried up and down Coney Island Avenue during the week. These men looked as if they could have been in the war, could have survived that war. I stood outside the gates trying to look unconcerned, waiting for a woman to enter so I could follow her. There were two doors, one I knew had to be for women. But I was uncertain which one. What if they both lead to the Rabbi’s office or into a roomful of men? And there was a water fountain with a cup inside the gates... I didn't know if I should wash my hands with the water or if that was only for Shabbas. So I just waited, and the men came in and out one door but no women appeared and so I plunged through the gates and went straight to the unused door only stopping when I was entering, and then I turned slightly. I could see everyone staring at me in my long black skirt and black top which almost covered my collarbone which is required,  and my black stockings and black heels and my long hair hanging down beneath a big pink sun hat. I knew I looked out of place despite trying to dress as they did. I had no kerchief or wig, only a big pink hat to cover my head. 

     Upstairs in the balcony one Orthodox woman sat praying with two children. Dangling from the ceiling hung a giant gaudy but beautiful chandelier in the shape of the Czars Russian palace. Below, I could see the men, some standing, some sitting on benches facing the white brick wall. The rabbi spoke in Russian and the men chanted and responded, sometimes getting so noisy that people shouted out "SHHH!" 

     I took the only prayer book in english off the shelf of books in the balcony and sat down. It was called, "Prayers of the Heart". I remembered the title from a short story by Sholem Aleichem, the guy in it said his mother never let the book out of her hands. The story was set in Warsaw Poland and I kept wishing the family would hurry up and immigrate to America, but they never did. They went on marrying and carrying around Prayers Of the Heart and blessing their bread. I opened up Prayers of the Heart and leafed through. There were morning prayers and afternoon prayers and evening prayers. and different sets for Shabbos and for Yom Kipper and Passover and Succoth and on and on, hundreds of different prayers for different days. I finally found a page for evening prayers on Rosh Shashona. But was sundown the day before considered the actual event? It didn't matter really because the men were all praying in Russian and the Rabbi was speaking in Russian and I had no idea where they were or if I could even pray along. And so I sat with the book and listened, and peeked at the men below and watched the Czars palace glitter and sparkle above the white plain room of the Synagogue. And then there was a stepped up frantic chanting and suddenly they were drawing aside a curtain and unlocking a great box at the end of the room. Inside the box were three huge silver casks and one of these they unlocked and inside was an enormous parchment with writing on it. I realized this was the ark and the parchment scroll was the Torah. I had never seen one before, but I had read a lot about them, especially in literature about the war, and how the scrolls that were damaged had to be given a burial. 

      The crowd of men below me continued to sing and pray and then ceremoniously locked the Torah Scroll back up, and locked the box, and closed the curtain, and someone stood before the men and began repeating a phrase louder and louder. And then a man called out, "500 dollars!" and the man at the front repeated the number in Russian and went on repeating it until another said something, and the first bidder went up to 1500. and then higher. And each time the man went higher in english, the man in front would repeat it in Russian, and there was a flurry and it ended at 5000 dollars. But it remained a mystery to me in the balcony what was being auctioned in the middle of the Rosh Shashona services.

      Let her explain how a heart is broken. Let her do the talking. She would tell you of the losses, and the anguish, and the suffering in the world. She would know because according to the Jews, she suffers right alongside them. She is the Shekkina, Gods divine female side, and she too is in exile. She too is homeless within, and weeps at the wall in Jerusalem. She would know how Rabbi Nachman said all worldly goods are like Fools Gold... the only value is The World to Come. These Russian Jews who escaped and came to America and love Israel and refuse to give up their Jewishness, and who pray in Russian beneath a giant glittering dome of a Russian palace cry out with longing on Rosh Shashona, their long drawn out gasps are as blasts of the rams horn meant to pierce the clamor of so many cries to God. And their God on high sits on a throne of gold in a great fur hat and surveys his people with a severe love, each and every one of them, right down to the last babushka. 

Looking for What is No More

I came to New York 3 years ago intent on having the dreamy, strange experience that I had always heard so much about...the immigrants getting off the boats at Ellis Island, the crowded cozy victorian lower east side, the brilliance in the co operatives in the Bronx, all of it. I snooped around for a close knit Jewish neighborhood, and ended up living in the Shalom Aleikum houses in the Bronx, just a few blocks from Grand Concourse. I moved in with an 80 year old woman who's every other word was "nu?" but she was about the extent of the Jewish neighborhood. The big brick apartment buildings, named after the wonderful novelist who wrote Teyve the Dairyman and other great yiddish stories, now houses mostly the new waves of immigrating people, sadly none of them Jews. There were stories I heard now and then from people in the area, of where the Jews went...New Jersey, Florida, who knows, but the vagueness and unsure-ity was troubling. And so, despite the fact that the great Lithuanian artist Marc Chagall had stayed for a time in the bedroom just below mine, that the great fashion designers who's clothing I loved grew up next door; despite countless other stories of the Bronx jewish community, I decided after a year and a half of living in abandoned jewishness, to leave and find another area to fulfill my desire to experience the New York I had loved in stories. I went to Brooklyn.
Why not live in Riverdale, you say? Why not move to Manhattan upper East side? Well to be honest, I could not afford to live very many places. And so when I moved to Brooklyn, I found a modest studio apartment sandwiched between Kensington and Ditmas Park, on the edges of all sorts of amazing Jewish Communities. After a year of meeting no one, I squeezed in to an online Jewish group and got myself invited to the Catskills for a week end. Hurrah! Now I was on my way, was I not? "So you're going to the Borsht Belt?" my uncle asked on the phone. "Your grandmother used to spend summers in Tannersville I think...I have photographs of her there..." This then was it, the old jewish life, fun fun fun, a bee Gezint. Oh but the intellectual jews moved to florida or new jersey so they say, and I went to the catskills with an ultra orthodox group.
As I drove up route 28, I passed endless religious getaways, including Zen retreats, Baptist camps, Jehovah Witness, Christian, Yoga places, and finally came to the Jewish Condominium village set on lakes and nestled in the mountains. I realized I did not have on my modest clothing I had just purchased so I admit I threw the long black skirt on right in the parking lot, but I don't think anyone saw me. And besides I put it on over my slightly shorter skirt. I put a long black shirt over my teeshirt and added a long open front sweater over the ensemble. I was now ready to meet the group. It was 91 degrees that day and I had remembered to put on long black stockings before I left home, and frankly I was fainting by the time I crawled to the front gate and got my welcome package. The girl there looked at my sandals and I saw a flicker of horror cross her face. "Should I wear sneakers?" I said immediately. "Whatever you are comfortable with," she said, in a dubious tone. "But I don't want to offend anyone," I said, sweating profusely and looking down at my stockinged toes poking out of my sandals. The girl was speaking Hebrew to another girl and did not answer me. I pulled off my sandals and put my sneakers on and when she gave me directions to my room I rushed to it and collapsed in a modern chair by the twins beds. "Oh they don't sleep in the same bed," I said looking at the twin beds one in pink and one with a blue blanket. Well, neither did lots of couples. Anyway what was it to me? I was past the age of concern. The important thing was I was in the Catskills with a group of brilliant jews! I was going to learn Yiddish and Hebrew and study Torah and read Heschel and Abrahmson and all the other wonderful writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. I looked around the apartment, which was rather large and not at all a motel room as I thought it would be. I had a balcony overlooking a man made lake and the ducks rushed right over to me when I stepped out and began honking. If only I did not have to wear winter clothing in 90 degree heat!
For two days I wore my black clothing which was only just warm enough inside the buildings where they kept the temperature like a refridgerator. Although the grounds were beautiful I could not remain out for long before I began fainting from heat. We ate constantly, and washed our hands constantly. I could not keep up with the group. There was breakfast and then midmorning food and then early lunch and then real lunch and then midafternoon food and dinner and then real dinner with endless courses, and then evening food. And during all of this people washed their hands and prayed and then prayed and broke challah and then in the middle of eating the men would suddenly burst into song and one by one they got up and began dancing around the tables where the women sat feeding their numerous children. It took everything in me not to join in, but it is forbidden for women to sing or dance, as it shows a lack of modesty. So I clapped and I ate. I ate potato things and carrot concoctions and cholent and strange wraps filled with cheese and bread bread bread. And every so often when someone thought to include me, I drank grape juice for a prayer. But the very heart of the visit was exactly the praying. When the men gathered behind a partition and prayed it was like an extra terrestrial haunting sound... a humming as of a hive of bees, and then a calling of synchronized vocals. One night they prayed to the moon and I stood watching them in astonishment. It was like being in a movie, actually standing in the set and watching astonishing things and yet having absolutely no part to play and in truth not really being there at all, but only thinking yourself there. I had always wanted to watch the men pray and the Hasidics dance and sing and there I was among them, right there, close enough to touch their black clothing which of course one would never do. Right there and yet invisible. As a woman. As a non orthodox. Perhaps even tref. Who knows what one is labeled when one is not obeying their laws. I felt enormously grateful to have been allowed to see what I saw. And I felt enormously embarrassed for not being entirely correct, for making blunders like taking a photograph on the Sabbath, for not wearing a head scarf, for carrying my purse around.
And I was disappointed too. The books on hand were all in Hebrew and were Torah related. Only one of the group had heard of Elie Wiesell and no one knew of Sholem Aleichem or the Singer brothers. The rabbis spoke of the formost need to respect and obey authority. Even so, it was better than the blah world of living on the periphery. It was better than superficiality and indifference. And the old Borsht belt is gone, along with the grand Victorian hotels and the brilliant intellectual jews who read and discussed everything and created madly and were hilarious and who sang and who gave America the greatness of Eastern European genius.

The Noise on Monday

There was a commotion outside this evening, down in the back alley below my apartment roof deck. I had been playing a scrabble game with the computer robot, Lex, when I became aware of incessant yelling outside the building. I went out to the back alley and saw a huge moving truck with mattresses tied to the top, and the street full of an enormous family. They were playing football in the middle of the street and the ball bounced on the roof of the car parked in front of mine. "Come on come on" it sounded like the large men were saying, but it was not english so I can't be sure. There were three young girls, a slew of young boys, and four or five grown men shouting at the top of their lungs. I had decided to move my car to the other side of the street since tomorrow was street cleaning and I had to move it anyway. But I was afraid to step into their fray...they seemed indifferent to any other people on the planet and were charging around the cars slinging this pigskin football. "Hey I am COMING THROUGH! DON'T HIT ME!" I yelled, but not a one of them even glanced at me. It's that way anymore, since I got old and wretched looking. I was once rather beautiful if you don't count all the years I was fat, actually I was very pretty and no one ignored me when I spoke. Now however, I am old and thin and I don't care what I look like I don't even dye my hair anymore, because I have become invisible. So when I went down to the football game going on just off Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn on a Monday evening, I was not surprised that they did not turn to see who was speaking, nor did they stop throwing the ball as I shot out into the street and unlocked my car. I thought, if they hit me on the head I might die, a person can die from being hit with a football. But what then? Would they stop their game and come over to view the body? Or would they just keep playing, me being invisible and all? The point was not my invisibility, but the family. There were so many of them and they were having such a good time. I moved my car to the other side, and watched them play for a while. It ended when the little girl ran backwards all the way down the block and caught the ball. The men collapsed into cheers and hand slaps and hugging. The moving van drove away. I went back in to my little room and sat down at my computer and continued playing scrabble with Lex the Robot.

The Wintering Back Then

My mother's sister and I once lived together for a winter. I mean, I moved in with my aunt when I was 22. I will never forget it though the details are mundane. My mother, the great beauty and the great philosopher, was in California for the year teaching. My sisters both lived in Boston with their boyfriends. And I was lost, as I often am in this world. My aunt said, "Why don't you stay with me?" And I moved right in. a year later, when I called her, crying, she said, "oh why don't you come home honey?" and I will never forget that either. I can hardly write about her, and it has been over 30 years since she died.
We were women conspirators sometimes. We drove to the store down the mountain in her Oldsmobile; she bought groceries for the week and I bought a giant Cadbury chocolate bar which back in the 1970's was the deluxe expensive chocolate in Vermont. She always stopped at the giant Hersheys bars and debated. "Should I get one?" she would ask the aisle, and the aisle would generally say OK, but once I remember she felt she couldn't. My uncle did not make a lot of money then, they were rather poor I guess, though they had a nice house and land in the country and they played golf right on their lawn. I didn't realize then....anything much. I know so much now and it is of no use. Everyone I loved is dead or grown up and far from me. But she turned to me that day and said,
"I better not. We can't afford it."
I took my candy to the register saying, "I'll buy it for you..." several times, but she said no no I should keep my money. Still, I recall she did let me, or she did buy it. Because we ate them together later, looking out at the bird feeder and all her flocks of grosbeaks.

There are no grosbeak flocks in Vermont anymore. In the 1970's, hundreds would gather around my feeders which I always set up like my aunt had, and they would feed all winter there. Mostly they were yellow grosbeaks, but some were rose. I took hundreds of pictures with my Minolta camera and developed them, but just as with memories, they never conveyed the powerful sight of enormous Canadian crowds hovering in my yard. It was Messianic. It was shattering and beautiful and with it came huge responsibility, something I was late to learn.

My aunt and I had things in common. We were both short, we were both the youngest in our family, and we both suffered at the hands of my mother, the great philosopher and beauty. We also both smoked cigarettes and were both chided constantly by my mother.
"Oh you're going to die of lung cancer," mother would tell her sister. "It makes you look OLD. It ruins your skin. It isn't pretty it's ugly."
My aunt would nod her head and rub the floor back and forth with her foot, nodding and saying "I know. I know."
"Why can't you quit? I smoked for a year and then one day I thought, 'hey I don't need this!' and I quit, bam, just like that. Can't you quit? Please? For me?" My aunt would nod, and finally mother would find something else to say. "Hey did you know I won a Gugenheim?" she would ask.
My aunt congratulated her. "Now save your money this time. Don't go giving it to your students or your kids like you always do. Save it. Because" but my aunt never got to finish what she began with mother, because mother had so much to say and was so enthusiastic.
"I have a present for you," mother would interrupt, "well, it's just a book... an anthology of women philosophers. I'm in it."

My aunt smoked Camels and I smoked Marlboro's. She bought one carton of Camels and one carton of Lucky Strikes each week. My uncle smoked Lucky Strikes. I bought mine by the pack. Not because cartons were expensive, they weren't back then. Only because I planned on quitting before I smoked another ten packs. But of course I never did. My aunt quit when she was dying of lung cancer.
When they were young, my mother says my aunt got pregnant and my grandmother made her marry my uncle. I don't know if it is true, but mother says she remembers clearly how her mother got on the train with my aunt and took her out to wherever it was my uncle was stationed before the war and insisted they marry. My grandmother was a tall imposing woman with red hair that became white and which she wore piled on her head in a bun. When she took it down at night it was longer than my mothers. The only women who ever cut their hair in my family were my oldest sister and my aunt. The rest of us still have long hair to our waists, and we all dyed it red or brown when it grew in white. But my aunt for some reason kept hers shorter and curled it.
When the husbands of the sisters returned from world war two, my aunts husband was injured. But he lived and he stayed married to my aunt until the day she died. My mothers husband, my father, died abruptly at the end of the 1950'a and she never remarried. This was the only thing my aunt trumped my mother on. My mother did not get along my uncle.

I was 22 when I lived with my aunt and uncle and it was the first married couple I really saw being married. He got up early in the morning and went to work every day, and my aunt fed the birds and swept the house and did the dishes and prepared dinner. They were the model couple of the 1950's era and they slept in side by side twin beds just like Dick Van Dyke and his wife on TV. They always had black short haired dogs that barked whenever someone drove in the driveway to visit. They had a big TV and my uncle sat in a lazy boy recliner. Every night, when he came home from work, my aunt would set the round wooden table for dinner. It had four matching chairs and was in a nook off the kitchen. And every night my uncle would groan when he sat down and say, "We're having that again??" to whatever she cooked. Each meal began with little round wooden salad bowls full of head lettuce and shredded carrot and there were several different bottles of Viva! dressing on the table to choose from. Blue cheese, Ranch, or Italian. Then she would serve us each a plate with kilbassa sausage and creamed corn or potatoes au gratin or some similar packaged delight from the Grand Union. We could have been the Cleaver Family except that my uncle made hilarious sarcastic jokes all through the meal and my aunt only half smiled and sighed. I was their audience and I laughed and clapped with enthusiasm.

At the end of the winter, I moved out, and met a man and fell in love. It was only a year or so later that my aunt found out she had lung cancer. I was pregnant and living near by. Sometimes I would walk down to see her... it was about two miles and I remember making the trek once in a blizzard. When I got there, she had moved down to the guest room and I was shocked to see she wore a wig and there were red numbers high on her forehead, though I don't know why...it must have had to do with the radiation treatment. One time I offered to cook her an egg. "She won't eat," my uncle said.

I still eat giant chocolate bars, though now they are gourmet chocolate. I smoke organic cigarettes. And I still play the same two deck solitaire card game that I taught my aunt. We would sit at her round wooden table with the matching chairs in the kitchen nook overlooking the bird feeder where hundreds of grosbeaks were feeding, and we would each play our own game. We concentrated very hard on our games and often an hour would pass before we would move a single card, but we almost never lost. The snow would fall outside the window, my aunt would add a log to the fireplace, the tea kettle was always whistling, we were always drinking Salada tea and reading our fortunes on the little white cards that dangled from the tea bag. We never spoke of my being lost or her being lost either. We just concentrated on winning the double deck card game. We just smoked, and concentrated, and our souls danced together in that place where souls are free.

But This is a Wasteland Now...

Awful days in Brooklyn

Now my last post seems prophetic in a way, or at least invasive. I love the Hasidic community surrounding my little area in Brooklyn, where I sometimes just wander with my granddaughter, or by myself, purchasing bagels, buying some fabric, peeking out of the corner of my eye at the beautiful Hasidic men and their wives in disguise. I have written so much about them, and read so much about them...though I know I would not be accepted among them, I still like to be there where it feels like the victorian era, or the old world. But this week there was a terrible tragedy, a tragedy so peculiar that surely God had a hand in it. A little lamb of a boy was walking home from summer study school. It was his first time walking home alone and his parents had shown him the route and were waiting at the end of it. Yet he got lost. He turned when he shouldn't have turned, and who did he ask for help? He asked a murderer for directions. A murderer with the same first name as the little boy. How could that be? How could that possibly happen? Is every man a murderer? Are there so many on the street that this one little angelic boy would happen upon one on his first day alone, in the first moment alone? Or did some terrible force that is beyond our ken reach down and make that happen? I cannot bear the thought of a brutal God. I cannot stand the thought of human beings so brutalized themselves that they are able to destroy such goodness.
Just yesterday morning I had thought it was a good week. You know, I never saw a poster or realized what was going on. I came home tuesday evening from the park and there was a Chabad bus parked outside my building. I thought that was a good sign. I sang a little song about Elijah being around, and something in the air, and then I heard what was really going on, and it turned out to be a terrible sign. I want to believe in good. I want to believe in love, and life, and joy, and dance, and adoring God. Last night I broke my promise never to cry again, and I cried for the agony of the little boys parents and for the poor little boy.
It feels as though the end of the world has come and gone, and we are all lost, all.

Pardon me, is this the way to the Pardes?

One day an angel said, "you may ask one question." This meant I could ask God one burning thing on my mind and so I asked,
"Why did you let the holocaust happen?" And from there all spiraled downward.
I did not know about the four scholars then; they had gone to the orchard of forbidden knowledge and had seen the answers. One died, one went mad, one turned away from religion, and one went away content. When I think of them now, my empathy is complete. I too heard and saw and it drove me from religion and made me a believer and I died and went mad. It makes you wonder if the four scholars from the Talmud were the warning, which I read too late. But what should I have said to the angel? Better to have asked something benign rather than combative. Does God love me? Will I be rich and famous? Is the world real? Something God could have smiled at and answered in the usual cryptic code. But instead I asked why did the holy one allow such evil, was the holy one helpless to stop it? It is like my son who used to ask,
"Why did you have to yell at us so much?" negating all the good and all the love and leaving me wondering, "yes, why did I have to display such anger? Why did I yell so much?" It closed the door on a lot, it left me justifying my single parenting rather than... oh rather than smiling benignly and patting the creation on the head. "There there," I could have said, "All will be revealed soon enough. Wait till you have children."
Shimon ben Zoma said that a person is rich if they have all they want. If all they have is all they wish for. And so my mistake when the Angel called out to me, "You may ask one question," was to ask for anything at all. Better I should have remembered Shimon ben Zoma's remark and said nothing. But I did not know Shimon ben Zoma then, I only learned about him this year when in my search and study I came across him and his three companions. They were wandering in the orchard and they told me their story. I saw right away ben Zoma was the mad one. "We are alike, you and I" I said to ben Zoma. "We longed for understanding and wisdom in a mad tea party world and went mad with the knowledge."
Rabbi Akivah turned to me and said, "The cost is very, very high." I nodded assent. Overhead, a monarch flew by, its enormous wings bright as sunlight. Which reminds me, I did not see an angel, I only knew an angel. I mean to say it is like they say of the people at Sinai. "They saw the voice." I cannot explain it better than that.

Sometimes I drive through orthodox neighborhoods looking for wisdom. I don't know what I think I can absorb driving by in my car, but I go anyway, and I look out with longing at the people walking with great purpose through their streets. Do they contain the truth?
Some afternoons I walk to the park and sit on a bench and read about the Baal Shem Tov or about Hillel or sometimes I just wait and listen, hoping the voice will materialize again.
One time I drove through a Hasidic neighborhood on Shabbos night and a car with very bright lights followed me where ever I went. Someone said the neighborhood has their own police and that I was violating their laws. Once my uncle told me he threw a rock at a car driving on Shabbos in Jerusalem. I was shocked. He is 90 years old and he too went the way of Shimon ben Zoma only he did not go the orchard, he just got wrapped up in the Mishna.
I used to babysit for a little orthodox girl who's name was Gabriela. I told her, "that is the name of an angel." And she said, "Jews don't believe in angels."

If I had been that angel, and that angel me, I would have said, "Ask away, but stay away from the questions regarding good and evil, for that orchard belongeth to God alone." But when a human being is offered the curtain or the box, they will always ask for what is behind the door. We are Eve, and Pandora and the four scholars. We long because we long. If we were not vessels of anguish and longing, perhaps we would not seek the great cure. Is it our fault afterall, that we want to know and know and know more? My children used to sneak through the house before Christmas (sorry to admit we celebrate everything...) to peek at what I bought them. Under the bed, in the closet, high up on shelves. They would find it. One year I put everything in to one mostly unused room and taped the door. "Don't go in there!" I said with fear on my face. "There is a wild animal in there and I am trying to catch it..." They were so afraid that they never once peeked that year.
"If you eat that apple you will surely die," God said. "If you go in to my orchard you will go mad. If you peek one more time....."

Illness at Teshuvah Academy

My granddaughter visits me today with her mother, my daughter. They come in from the rainstorm damp and cheerful and carrying containers of soup and pastries. My granddaughter unwraps her long stylish scarf from around her tiny neck and throws it on the floor. "Nonna we brought you lemon tarts. Sweet Melissa is the best bakery in the world," she says in her passionate voice. She is going to be five next week. That was the age I was when my father committed suicide, but who's thinking of that? I am too ill to be held accountable for what I say anyway. Having caught a cold from my daughter and her daughter last week, I spiraled instantly into pneumonia mode with my lousy lungs. Even so I smoke while I choke. But so what? My little life is not worth a fig in this world now anyway. But that is just the sick person speaking. You can't blame me for what the high fever speaks. "Nonna here is vitamin C," my granddaughter continues, while her mother puts the groceries away in my kitchen. Bags of garbage hang on the door knob. I'm too sick to waddle down the hallway and throw them out. The most I can do day after day is to climb out of bed and make a cup of tea and climb back in with my laptop. I play scrabble online with strangers and lose badly but there again, it is because I am so dizzy and unfunctional that I cannot think of words that contain the letters D V A C O A and O.
My granddaughter takes a handful of large vitamin C disks out of the bottle and holds them out to me. "Here," she says. "Take some."
"Have you ever had one of these?" I ask. "They are so good. But I already had 2 thousand milligrams today so I better wait."
"No I never had any before," she says, and her face lights up with the good idea.
"Wait," I say. She is about to put one in her mouth. "Maybe you should ask your mommy first... Actually they look like checkers," I tell her. "We could play checkers with them..."
She looks around my small room for the checker board. Toys are still scrambled around on the floor from last week when we set up a tiny pizza shop for the little people we play with... We have a whole village of small characters and the town they live in is called Chester-Land. Chester is the main character, a farmer made of resin that I bought at a farm supply store in Vermont, along with a woman we named Maria and another bag-lady sort of woman we named Mrs McConkle. Mrs McConkle is their neighbor and she babysits for their children. Maria and Chester are married but their marriage is shakey, Chester who is exclusively worked by my granddaughter, is always running off and living somewhere under my bed or in my mystical-books-bookshelf. He also has a habit of flying, which at first I tried to discourage in favor of realism, but my granddaughter insists that Chester can fly and so it became part of the towns history, Chester the magical resident of Chester Land. Maria does a lot of screaming for him. I work Maria, and she is always shouting "Chester! Chester where are you? Dinner's ready!" And he hides from her. They have a son named Jimmy who I also speak. He is a blue plastic guy who is perpetually in a sitting position. He used to ride the tractor when they owned the farm, but now that they run a restaurant, an ice cream parlor, an amusement park, and a pizza take out place, Jimmy often is sitting in one kitchen or another or riding atop an elephant or carousel horse. But here I am rattling on about an imaginary village when I meant to explain the secrets of the universe.
My apartment, a one room studio in a grim enormous project-like building, is the setting for the imaginary school my granddaughter and I invented. There is a sign hanging on the wall that says the name of the institution, "Teshuvah Academy". I named it that as an inside joke, as I live on Returner Avenue and To Return in Hebrew is Teshuvah, although it really means to return to God, to repent. I named it that because I had moved here to repair my parenting mistakes by being a good grandparent. I moved here to be forgiven, but in truth I am not forgiven. Yet my granddaughter loves me and I love her, so it has been a good experience. At Teshuvah Academy (on the days her mother is at work), we study art and math and reading and religion. I have taught her about many religions and she tells me her favorite one is Hassidism because she loves the stories of the Baal Shem Tov and the flaming sword that points the way to the Garden of Eden and the Promised Land. "I like the story of Jesus too," she says, as we ponder together while eating peanut butter sandwiches on the bed. "I'm Jewish but I believe in everything."
"Me too," I say. "It all seems right, except Buddha. I don't believe in Buddha."
"Why not, Nonna?" she asks me. She looks worried.
"Well," I say, "Buddha doesn't like anyone to have an ego. And I like my ego."
"What is an Egor?," she wonders. I laugh and explain as best I can to her. "But I like Buddha because I believe in reincarnation," she says when I finish.
"Oh yeah, I forgot about that," I agree. "Wow you have quite a good memory."
"I remember everything," she agrees. "Even this. I remember this already happened."
My granddaughter is going to be five in a week and I am so sick I cannot climb out of my shell long enough to buy her a present. My illness sweeps over me and I shake and sweat and want to sleep but am too sick to sleep. After my daughter and my granddaughter leave, (they were off to a french lesson) I eat the soup and the rolls and the candy bar and some chips and an avocado and just when I am about to pass out from breathlessness and stuffing myself, I rise up in bed like a spirit detaching itself from a useless body and stagger to the laptop where I quickly type in my word on the Scrabble board.... AVOCADO, a 7 letter 100 points word. I can't claim to know how these things come to me. I give all the credit to this crushing illness.

The Brooklyn Library

Putting the palm trees out on the back roof top, though the temperature might drop to 32 again this week. Even so, the mild rain and the sun will help revive them after a winter of heater air and dim window light. There are rain puddles on the roof. A few trucks pass on Coney Island Ave, but mostly it is a quiet day, like a sunday, soft and very quiet.
The rain here in Brooklyn is soft today, falling on the palm fronds that have been saddened by six months of winter light. Now spring is shaking its new tender head. Winter is giving in, receding like tide pulling back. Still it retains the right to blow cold in the coming nights ahead. It reserves the option to freeze the sprouts and shoots pushing their way through the dead leaves. On the back roof deck, the tunnel of wind usually knocks plastic jugs around and throws toys across the length of the roof. But today all is still.
This is April, Poetry Month. At the Brooklyn Library on Grand Army Plaza, which my granddaughter and I call Bozo Circle (because of the crazy drivers and the crazy light system), I hear an announcement for Poetry Month. This is Brooklyn's biggest library. There is a children's and young adults room, a giant magazines and videos room, a long multilingual room with computers, and huge vacant spaces to stand around or stand in line to check out your findings. If you want say, an older book, you must first find it on the computer, give it to the librarian at a desk, and she will order it for you from the basements below where they now keep all the books. No longer can you browse the libraries. "We don't have the room" they tell me. But most of the vast library space is empty...giant echoing spaces with three tiny desks against one wall where you may check out your videos or magazines. Oh I am not complaining. People probably don't remember when you went in the library to browse stacks.
"I would like to find some books by Shalom Aleichem," I said to the librarian.
"Spell it" she said. I spelled it wrong and she said, "We don't have any".
"But that's impossible" I said. "One of the most famous Jewish writers of the 20th century? He lived in the Bronx! He wrote Fiddler on the Roof, well sort of...He wrote the story they used for the musical."
It took a half an hour but she finally located Shalom Aleichem on her screen. "Which one do you want?" she asked.
"How many are there?" I answered.
"Lots" she said.
"Can you read me the titles?" I asked.
"I don't have time" she said. "I'll just order up 3 titles, all right?"
I agreed.
"Do you want Fiddler on the roof?" she asked.
"NO!" I said. "I mean, he didn't actually...well, no I don't want that one. Any others."
But the system was down and the librarian said she would not be able to contact the deep recesses of the basement to call up the books. "I can put you down for an order and you can return in a week and pick them up" she said.
"Are you KIDDING?" I asked.

When I am driving my granddaughter home from school I pretend the car is an airplane. "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are flying today in blue skies and a light drizzle... we will be approaching Bozo Circle in about ten minutes. Please be sure that your seat belts are securely fastened and your trays are in the upright position. Thank you." I say this with one hand cupped around my mouth like a loudspeaker and my granddaughter smiles from her car seat in the back. "Captain roll down the windows so we can hear the bozo's beeping!" my granddaughter calls out. We sail in to Grand Army Plaza where everything is circular and there are so many veins running out of it... Eastern Parkway and Prospect Park West and Union Street and Flatbush Avenue and Vanderbilt and a few that seem to have no name. If you are heading for Vanderbilt for instance, good luck and prayers to you. Fu is what you need. Fu in Chinese I think might be the word for great luck. Vanderbilt is one of the streets that is not accounted for in the traffic patterns and light systems of Bozo Circle. "Right lane for Vanderbilt", the sign says. But the right lane has giant busses in it, stopped and letting on passengers, so I go to the next right lane which is right middle. Now I am set up to sail straight and head down Flatbush. But I need to go right, so I do, when the light turns green and five cars behind me begin instantly beeping and shoving I race out and right. But now I am at a red light...is it MY red light or is it the row now behind you who are waiting while you have the green from the other street? I wonder this, but no time no time, I plunge on, there is another red light but it is not so much in front of me as beside above me... I plow on, almost like I am inventing the road, and yes, there is Vanderbilt up ahead on the right. Above my head glowing red video cameras are filming my car charging across the valley of Grand Army Plaza, alone, absolutely alone, while snorting vehicles wait in the circular pattern all around. I am alone in this endeavor because all other cars have gone the way of Flatbush and Eastern Parkway. Only my car has opted for Vanderbilt. It is not a popular choice here at Bozo Circle. In the backseat, my granddaughter listens to the beeping and sighs. "What bozo's" she says.

It is April, Poetry Month. At the Brooklyn Library they announce this over the loudspeaker. Most of the people today are lounging in the video magazine room. I have a stack of video's to check out. After all, they are visible and browsable! I would be getting books but there aren't any. Not really. I am not interested in brand new this year just published books. I like old books, from dead authors who think the way I think. These are hidden in the dark tunnels beneath the elegant entranceway. What is available are new best sellers, childrens books, magazines and DVD videos. But I am not complaining! I am grateful to Brooklyn Library. When I lived in the Bronx there weren't any books in their library at ALL. Only movies.
At the information desk I inquire about Poetry Month. "Which poets will be reading?" I ask. The man searches through the log but can find none. "There is a teen writing group on wednesdays," he tells me. He gives me the sheet on April and I leave.
Walt Whitman was born in Brooklyn. And after all, isn't New York the hub of the world? Shouldn't all the libraries here have readers and books first, and movies second? The new world squeaks with spring. It is wet and new and just born and ignorant. I consider calling the director of scheduling for the brooklyn library, but I have not so far. What can I offer? "You can sign up as a volunteer" the man at the information desk said, and he gave me a form to fill out. "Would you be willing to be a Welcome Ambassador? A computer coach? A shelf organizer?" the form queried.
I did get the wonderful books of Shalom Aleichem, but after that I found buying paperbacks online was easier than trying to get books from the library. At least you can look inside the books on Amazon before getting them. Still, it is a shame that people can't wander the stacks anymore sitting among obscure books and finding new treasures. If we cannot find our own Great Books, are we doomed to trust the best sellers lists? Who will ever read my own published books now that they are out of print and lost in the caves beneath libraries? Indeed, now that bookstores are hard to find and libraries carry mostly movies, who will love to read at all? And then how will one be able to describe or speak? How will we know spring if we have never heard,
Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen...