Badbadbad

On the morning of the day we left New York City, as I was stuffing the last forgotten objects into already overstuffed and over-numerous suitcases, my daughter wrote on her hand BAD BAD BAD with an inky blue ball point pen.  “That’s what I am,” she told me, “Bad.”  If I had to describe what happened to my heart in that instant, it would be something between an avalanche and a panicked freezing over, as if I’d been suddenly dipped in liquid nitrogen. You must have seen what happens when you freeze something soft and delicate that way.  Tap it even gently and it shatters into billions of icy shards. So there I stood, at dawn, with a toddler attached to one leg, talking about trains, and the taxi waiting five flights down, and sweat pouring down my back in rivulets because I’d turned off the air conditioner and closed all the windows, since we were, after all, leaving, and not coming back, and there was my daughter in front of me, my beautiful daughter, who was breathtaking in early light, all pale glowing skin and wide clear eyes, and etched into her hand her evidence, which she held out to me as a warning, as a sign, as a question, as a great dark bird winging between us. That bird landed softly on my heart and smashed it. 

 

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Loving Hut

Lately, a little voice inside me persists in suggesting, gently but firmly, that it’s time to become vegan.  The voice sounds, in fact, a lot like Zvi, my yoga teacher in Jerusalem, who loves to lecture anyone who cares to hear about the value of cutting out fat, sugar, spices, chocolate, alcohol and every other yummy thing from one’s diet.  And truly, if you look at him, you can see the effects of a life of diligent healthfulness.   On the other hand, having no body fat makes him feel chilly all the time, and since I now live in Canada, it would be unwise, I think, to put myself at increased risk for hypothermia.  Still, the voice carries on while I make an innocent cheese sandwich, or poach some Salmon for the family dinner. It may also be my succeptability to cult propaganda at work.  I’ve been frequenting the Loving Hut restaurant near work, one of a chain of (delicious) vegan eateries established by the Vietnamese cultess Chiang Hai, where “Supreme Master TV” is streamed in on two screens with subtitles in about twelve languages, praising the Supreme Master’s good works, pleading the case for suffering animals, and providing both sensible and nonsensical explanations for the ways that veganism can solve the world’s worst problems.

But above all, I think that since my father’s death I want to remove myself as far as possible from all dead things.  A friend pointed out to me last night that vegetarianism deals with the problem of dead things fairly well.  But I have been vegetarian (mostly) for nearly twenty years, and suddenly I find that I in putting on a pair of leather sandals, washing with soap, grating parmesan onto my daughter’s spaghetti, I am haunted by a ghostly reel of images, cows standing flank to flank in a vast warehouse made of corrugated metal, every article I have read about slaughter, about bunnies in laboratories with infected eyes, about the extinction of the planet’s insect life.  The last straw was the robin who broke its neck against the children’s bedroom window in the full light of afternoon, and heaved its last diminishing breaths on the back patio while my children and I ate our early dinner.  Seeing that tiny body struggling into stillness I could feel the dam that holds back of a river of grief, of infinite tiny griefs, preparing to break, to spill out right there, over the white ikea table, and the applesauce-spattered floor, and the children and their visiting cousins, and all the toys and furniture, out through the screen door, over the robin’s broken neck, the sickly plants on the balcony, the sheared lawn, the brambles and weeds in the back of the garden, the endless crisscrossing fences of the hundreds of housees and streets stretching out from ours.  I could feel it all about to go under and I knew then, at least for a moment I knew, that I cannot bear to kill, directly or indirectly another living thing.  That if I keep on doing it, the floodwall will not hold.

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in focus

All this time I have been half-thinking of home,making half-plans, feeling half-present, planning two simultaneous lives, one here in Jerusalem and one in North America.  I ought to have known that a person can not live doubly, that eventually, if you do not make your own choices, the world chooses for you.  All at once, with a click, with a quiet devastating click, what was doubled has come into focus. So while the electrician disassembles the dryer in the middle of the kitchen floor, while the birds profess their love to one another in the shrubbery outside, while the sun creeps across the pale pine table, lighting now four bananas balanced in a bowl, now a tower of red legos, now an empty glass, I can only see the suitcases that need packing, the long night of travel, the cold weather waiting, the children’s boots that will need buying, and everything afterwards, still blurry and distant, but in the way of a horizon on a long voyage, inevitable, in wait with its secrets and its promises.

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bird in the house

Recently we discovered a bird living behind the dryer.  It comes in and out through the slats of a window we cannot reach to close.  Behind the dryer there is a warm private birdy life. The bare necessities. A little ledge, a blast of warm air whenever the dryer runs.  A private entrance. The bird keeps to itself.  As far as I can tell, it makes no forays into the kitchen.  The feathers I’ve found scattered here and there are the fallen tails of the decorative birds my daughter and I tied to the legs of the kitchen chairs. At first it bothered me, this fluttering tenant, its soft coos, the idea of its hidden heartbeat, its silent defecations, its unmonitored comings and goings.  But a home, a life, is always full of such unplanned additions. Not just the living things, the inevitable wildlife, and, let’s be honest, the children, who still feel to me like impossible apparitions that do not fade.  (When I think about them, I am breathless.) But also all the other scattered objects, the marbles and beads and sequins that my daughter secrets home in her pockets, the gifts from friends, the things that other people leave behind, a little flashlight a house-guest has forgotten on the kitchen table, a frozen package of beef kube that the landlords didn’t take with them, and that I don’t want either to throw out or to cook, scraps of mail for other people who used to live here, the business cards my husband collects like a kind of lint, that flutter out of his pockets and hide themselves under cushions and behind furniture.  Our homes are porous.  Our homes breathe. The world rushes inside, seeps out, leaving it’s sediment.   So, for now, the bird stays.  The bird is this moment’s unexpected gift.

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