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....."