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RA was just here getting some raisins. "Ima, I know you don't like coconut, but would you like to taste just a little bit of the pudding anyway?" he asked. I love that he calls me Ima, that he knows I don't like coconut, that he wants to give me some of his coconut-raisin pudding anyway. Last night when E was out at a movie and I had to pick B up for a party at 10:30, RA came over to sit in the house while I went to get B. When R was falling asleep she said, "RA will be here, right, when I am asleep and you are gone?" I assured her that he would be here. On Saturday afternoon when B came home from the Bat Mitzvah on his bike, RA flew across the street. "I can't stay!" he said. "I just saw B on his bike and I had to come over because it reminded me of being 12 years old and riding my bicycle all day on the streets of San Juan!" He was so happy to see B do something B does every day of his life. I feel like the intimacy of it, talking to H every single day over the fence or through the window, breeds more intimacy.
Sean used to get that same look when he took communion at Mass and then came around the corner to kneel in the pew. There were a few years when I went to Mass with Sean frequently and I loved to see him turn that corner - deliberate and focused, just finished with something important - and I think of it as my private view of Sean, to know his face in the same pose in both of those places.
Many times when I tell people about our garden I feel the need to immediately amend with, "There is no way we could really live off the back yard," and it's absolutely true. We don't even get a sixth of what we eat that way. I'm sure someone on the internet has tried to live of what they can grow on a 5000 square foot suburban lot. It probably depends a lot on your climate. I'd imagine that here in Berkeley you could probably get all of your produce out of a garden if you really wanted to. We grow 12 months a year, here. But there are too many things we consume that we could never grow, wheat and spices and coffee and huge amounts of soy. I don't think we would have enough space to grow all that. Even if we did, it would be so much work to learn about all of those kinds of plants and tend them, I don't think we would have the time.
"Did I tell you what K said to me the other day?" E asked. She had not. They were on the mom bench at swim practice and K told E that they follow our example with parenting all the time. K and her husband live down the block. When we moved in they didn't have kids and now they do. Their son is in first grade and their daughter is in kindergarten. "I think of them as so WASPy," E said as if that was an explanation for why she never thought of us as parenting models for them. E said K talked about the freedom we give the kids, also the discipline and the chores. At the pool, K wanted more detail about when and how to give allowance money.
I had a similar thought that same weekend at our havurah retreat. In a larger institution you are in a group with families the same age, like B's Bar Mitzvah class. At the havurah, though, we are all in together and I have had the opportunity to see other parents and their older children. It has had a profound effect on the way that I approach B and, to a lesser extent, R. I feel like I have people whose values I share to use as models. At the end of the retreat, a new woman told me that she was watching me with B. Her son is in the fourth grade.
Parenting is so complex. There are so many intertwining crucial strands of education, emotion, feeding and clothing, values and discipline and fun and culture. I can't begin to parse or diagram everything parenting is. The idea that there would be a map is laughable, but I think it's possible to get the occasional single clear still picture.
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Today, though, at the end of the havurah retreat we sang our theme song. The group is called Or Zarua, after a quotation from Psalm 97, "Light will be sown for the righteous and joy for the upright of heart." I know several melodies for this text, and the one we use was written by a member of the havura. It has a counter-melody with English words, "We can gather all the seeds of light that scattered on the morning that the sun first shone. And if our hearts are true and if we justice do, we can harvest all the joy that was sown." The first line is a reference to the Kabbalist's story about creation, that shards of light were scattered at the moment of creation and that, by doing good in the world, we can bring them back together. Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world, is a key Jewish concept, and with that masterful English addition to the verse from Psalms, we can celebrate and remind ourselves of how our values are tied to our community.
We sing the English and the Hebrew against each other, around and around, switching sides and melodies and languages and singing partners. Standing in a circle with all of these people I like and feel close to, I just enjoyed it. When the song was over, some people talked about what they liked about the retreat. As I listened to them talk, the last line of the song kept looping in my head, "We can harvest all the joy that was sown." The good feeling that we get from being in community is, I think, exactly what St. Teresa was warning about and, for the first time in my life, I thought that she was wrong. There is nothing wrong with harvesting a little personal joy from a religious experience. It's not the only thing prayer is good for, but savoring a little of it isn't bad.
For me, it's not just about learning this piece of liturgy which is central to Jewish mourning rituals. It's about learning the mourning rituals well enough to lead them. I don't know much about Buddhism at all, but I have an innate sense of the rhythm of a Buddhist funeral or memorial service. Those were the mourning rituals I went to in my childhood, and even the Christian funerals retained the underlying feeling of a Buddhist ritual, because they were at Japanese churches full of people who had grown up Buddhist. They wanted to mourn with a ritual that felt like their own childhood exposure to mourning.
I didn't go to a Jewish funeral or shiva until I was an adult, and then only rarely. So when RRZ sent the email on Wednesday asking for a leader for Thursday's shiva, I responded hesitantly. It wasn't just that I was going to have to learn El Malei Rachamim, but also that I don't have a sense, a feeling, of how the whole shiva service should go. At the end of the day, he called me to say that he'd found a rabbi to lead the Thursday service, but she wanted me to sing.
I went on Wednesday, not even so much to make the minyan but to watch RRZ lead the shiva service. I snuck into the kitchen to get a pen so I could take notes. He's so clear and accessible. It was easy for me to figure out what he was doing, how he was controlling the flow of the service with the music. All day Thursday I practiced El Malei Rachamim. It's been a long time since I have learned a new piece of text. I will learn new melodies to familiar texts, but I had forgotten how stimulating it is to pull apart new or unfamiliar Hebrew words - and to make new associations with ones I know from elsewhere in the liturgy. With my crappy Hebrew, I feel like the liturgy is a vast, complex, three-dimensional Rosetta Stone, and every time I can compare the way a word is used in two different places, it helps me decode the meaning.
And that is the end of my story. By which I mean that the most significant thing that happened to me on Thursday was not that I sang at this shiva, but that I learned to sing at the shiva. The place where I get the satisfaction is not in doing it (other than that I was happy to give RRZ a break) but in the study and practice part. People always ask me why I am "just" an editor, and don't I want to report my own stories? I don't. I just don't feel like I need to do that part to feel professionally accomplished. I didn't need to sing El Malei Rachamim at that shiva in order to fall in love with it. Had my co-leading rabbi shown up and said that she wanted to sing it herself, I would have been just as satisfied.
Sweet potato cake with spinach. I don't think I would make this often because it was so time-consuming and fussy. I caramelized onions and cooked sweet potatoes and mashed them together with olive oil, salt, pepper and some sorghum flour. I put a little bit down, put a little pile of raw spinach on it, and then sealed up the top with more sweet potatoes, then fried on both sides.
"What?" I asked.
"I'm going to practice for my Bar Mitzvah. Aren't you going to do it with me?"
"I already had my Bat Mitzvah," I said. "I don't have to practice." I thought it was a little interesting that he thought I was going to sit with him while he learned his Torah portion. I had no intention of doing anything of the sort. It didn't even occur to me that I might do anything remotely resembling that. I don't do his homework with him and I don't sit there while he practices the clarinet. I ended up doing it anyway.
"Oh, just wait," I said. "It's coming."
At then end of the service, the Bar or Bat Mitzvah kid gets to pick the closing song. There are the traditional ones (Adon Olam, Yigdal) which the kids never want. There are what I think of as new traditional, such as Od Yavo Shalom, and then there are a few songs they sing at camp which are mostly in English with a Hebrew catchphrase thrown in. This boy had picked one of those. The Hebrew phrase in it is "Kein Y'hi Ratzon" which means, more or less, "may it be God's will." I hate this song because it's a bunch of ridiculous jobber jabber that got thrown together because it rhymes. "From the mountains high to the valleys low/we keep alive the flame/bringing glory to your name/it's written on the stone/kein y'hi ratzon."
"Where is the stone?" I said to RZ on the phone. "There is no stone with 'kein y'hi ratzon' written on it! It just says that because 'ratzon' rhymes with 'stone.' You have to lead that because I just can't."
He laughed. "The one I hate it Betzelem Elohim," he said. "When we give the kids their options, I don't even list it because I hate it so much."
"Oh, right," I said. This song goes, "When I reach out to you and you to me/we become betzelem elohim." Betzelem elohim means "in the image of God," as in, we were made in the image of God. Except, of course, that is complete theological bullshit. The whole point is that EVERYONE was MADE in the image of God from the beginning, whether or not we reach out to each other or not. We don't BECOME betzelem elohim, as the song says. We ARE betzelem elohim.
RZ and I harshed on it a little longer and then I laughed. "I feel so much better now that we had this conversation," I said.
I hardly ever sing when there is a Bar Mitzvah, but events overtook plans and it ended up being me and RZ on the bima this morning. It went really badly at the beginning. I have a cold and he was sleep deprived, so I wasn't singing well and he wasn't all there. I realized, the second time he should have said something and he neglected to, that he really isn't used to leading a Bar Mitzvah service. Most of the time, he sings and gabbais while the head rabbi (E calls him "the big guy") talks. So there we were, both crapping it up on the bima. I felt bad for the family. The thing is that once you start messing up in a service, it just keeps going. There are no do-overs, so you have to try to change your momentum and turn it around. I'm not sure how it happened, exactly, but it did. By the time we got to the end of the service, it was all there. I even sang with RZ on the chorus of Kein Y'hi Ratzon.
"Why are you so invested in this cooking competition?" I asked B. It isn't until the end if the school year and he's talking about it every day.
"Cooking competitions always look like a lot of fun," he shrugged.
Right. He has been watching cooking competitions on TV his whole life: Iron Chef and Iron Chef America and Next Iron Chef, Top Chef and Top Chef Masters and Top Chef Just Desserts. We've watched them all and dissected them endlessly. Here's his chance, courtesy of no less than Alice Waters, to do it, too.
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"Wait," I said. "Don't you have to do this with a team? Don't you have to talk to the other people about what they want to do?"
"Oh, they will do whatever I say," he blew it off. He started describing them. "...and this guy, he's kinda gay."
"What do you mean, kinda gay?" I tried very hard to ask neutrally and not jump all over him. His tone of voice didn't seem to indicate that he meant "kinda gay" as an insult, but it was hard to tell.
"You know, he wears untied bow ties and slacks. Fancy shirts. Suspenders. He gels his hair high. Like Austin Scarlett."
"Oh, right," I said. "Kinda gay."
Tacos al Pastor, or "shepherd-style" tacos, are a Mexican taqueria classic made from thin slices of chile-marinated pork that's been tightly packed onto a vertical spit with layers of pork fat and then roasted... When the exterior is browned and crisp, thin shavings of the roasted pork and pineapple are carved off directly onto a warm tortilla and then topped with garnishes that contrast the rich meat: minced raw onion, cilantro, and a squeeze of lime....which immediately reminded me of Rick Bayless, explaining that the classic Baja taco is tempura fish in a Portugese cabbage slaw with salsa verde. It came together about a hundred years ago when a wave of Japanese immigration met the fresh fish they caught right there in Baja. I think of him every time I eat a fish taco (twice in the last four weeks - taquerias are cheap, delicious and B-friendly). Even though they are a century old, they come from a place that couldn't be more current: local ingredients cooked with a mix of influences.
It's an adaptation of the lamb shwarmas (themselves inspired by Turkish doner kebabs) introduced to Mexico by Arab immigrants in the late 19th century...
Which is to say that those guys in LA who made their Korean taco truck into the Next Big Thing a few years ago weren't innovating. They were paying homage to an old tradition. You can put just about anything delicious in a warm tortilla and it tastes even better.
I am in an email-heavy moment of my community involvement right now. For the synagogue I am trying to line up lay service leaders and Torah readers. It's a week and a half away from the havurah retreat, so I am emailing details and work assignments and still wrangling RSVPs. All these emails back and forth (along with my google docs and online calendars) are going to end up making many, many community events really rich because they are the mechanism by which I am bringing more people closer into community activities. I am just really sick of emails. I want to go camping and sing.
"There's a swarm of bees in your front yard," he said. "Don't go out your front door."
We ran through the house to the front. The bees were as thick as fog and we watched them through the window. We could hear them, too. "Shut the mail slot!" I said to B.
Our neighbor came around to the kitchen window. "You could call the cops or the city," he said. "They probably deal with this stuff."
I wasn't about to call the cops about a bunch of bees. I was more thinking of the biodiesel station a few blocks away. We get our chick feed there and they sell beekeeping supplies, too. I figured they would know someone who could come get bees.
Then the phone rang. It was our neighbor across the street. "One of the parents in my daycare gave me a phone number," she said. "It's a woman who keeps honeybees. She will come and take them if they are bees, but she won't take wasps or yellowjackets. I already called her and she's waiting for your call."
"Thanks," I replied. I had to call the number five or six times before the woman would pick up.
"I'm at work in the city. I can't come until after I get off around six. I'll have my friend come by on her bike to make sure they are honeybees," she told me and then we got cut off before I could give her the address. Eventually she called back.
Yet another neighbor came to our back door an hour later. "There's a woman in your front yard taking pictures of the bees," he reported. By that time, they were clustered tightly and clinging to the Japanese maple.
When the bee women finally came back after six with their bee suit and a big cardboard container, we all gathered on the sidewalk to watch. The woman I talked to on the phone shook the branch and they fell into the cardboard container.
"I was expecting something more dramatic," someone said.
We gave them eggs and they drove off in their Honda Insight.
It's not as dramatic as that sounds, but "wrong path" is the feeling I have, that I could be making better choices in my life, that there is some thing I should be doing more or better. I don't hate my career or my family or my communities. They aren't bad and I'm not about to change them. Still, I have this constant sense that there is more I should be pursuing. If only I would try harder I could make some better, deeper, more complete contribution.
This is how I feel: I should be doing more to repair the world. I have more capacity that I am not using. If I just worked a little harder at it, I would know what needed to be done and I would do it. It's a vague, blank emptiness in me that I should be using to fulfill some unselfish purpose. This isn't just me feeling some lack, it's me failing to notice the lack in the world I should be filling.
Fifteen years ago, E and I were crossing Columbia Road on a Sunday afternoon and we didn't have anything to do. "This is the space where the baby goes," I said to her. I didn't think about how a baby would take up way more time than a couple of hours on a Sunday.
"I think she's lonely," I said.
"I think she's more than that," E replied.
As far as I can tell (and we can tell a lot - our windows look right into each other's kitchens and living rooms across a narrow driveway, and there's only a four-foot fence between our yards, so at every moment of the day we can see which rooms they are in and what they are doing and vice-versa) they don't take her to play with other children at the park or have other kids over to the house. She spends a lot of time wandering around their back yard, unsupervised, while her father is inside and her mother is at work. I have never seen them play with her. When she hears us in the yard she immediately calls to us and says, "Come over? Come over?" every time.
We like our neighbors a lot. They are good people and good neighbors. When I cook something especially nice, I'll make them a plate and hand it through the window. Back when we didn't have any dairy in the house, H would call us and say, "Meet me in the driveway." She'd have a piece of cake and forks in a plastic container so that we could seal them up and return the dish and the forks dirty so we would not contaminate our house. We share garden tools and kitchen tools.
Perhaps it is because we like them - and because they worked so hard and so long to have this little girl - that it bothers us so much that they almost ignore her a lot of the time. We're not going to say anything to them. There isn't anything to say. But I knew that E was thinking the exact same thing that I was, even if it took us almost a year to talk about it.
I feel like that with the chickens. E and I are always talking about little changes: the new fence she put up, how I caught Midnight brooding, if we think the runt is going to make it or not.
I feel so blank. I don't want to be bored but I can't imagine what I might do to inspire myself to do anything else.
