Happy Valentine’s Day.

Happy Valentine’s Day one day late.  Really.  I hope it was a hearts and flowers day for you—especially for you women and you women who are mothers, in the particular sense of putting your own heart, how good you are, how lucky the people around you are to have you—in the center of the frame all day yesterday.

My Valentine’s Day started with breakfast in bed from my daughter, valentines; one each bought and made—by me for my partner and daughter and a huge, mad rush to work.  I still don’t have this—get-my-daughter-to-school-and-have-myself-dressed-and-eaten thing quite down.  I’m supposed to be sitting at my desk at 9:00 a.m.  And not in my old tee-shirt and stretchy pants.  But I’m getting there and there hasn’t been much shouting at anyone.

So after the mad rush when it was too late to get down into and then up from the subway and still be on time—I got in a cab.  I take taxis more than many do, but certainly not all the time.  In my city (all U.S. cities now?) most of the taxi drivers are men who were born outside of the U.S.  I have a routine.  I talk to almost every taxi driver whose cab I get into and I learn a lot about them and some about their home countries and their families here and abroad and the circumstances under which they came to the U.S. 

Yesterday I got into the taxi and the driver was listening to the radio.  I thought NPR, he said, Pacifica.  We were listening to Story Corps.  It was interesting, so I delayed talking to him, other than to say hello and what a beautiful day it was and where I was going.  The stories were love stories—Valentines Day stories, I think—and we, taxi driver and I, were listening together.  I mean we weren’t just listening at the same time, but it had a particular quality of listening together. 

 I have the kind of memory where if the next thing that happened hadn’t happened, I could tell you the details of the first two stories we heard.  But after the first two stories ended, a third story began.  It was the story—short and simple—of a woman, now about 60, whose husband died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.  She said they had met when they were 16 and they married.  What she described was that on 9/11—he was up in one of the towers and it had been hit, and he tried to get out but when he knew he had no way of getting out, he went to a phone and he called her.  He knew and she knew, that he wasn’t going to make it out, so he called her and they talked until he couldn’t talk any longer.  As the woman talked about what it was like to be on the phone with her husband for the last time, and things he said to her, the cab driver—a big, booming, burly African guy, began to weep quite openly.  I couldn’t quite cry but I said things to him, the kinds of things you say to someone when you grieve together.

Then the story ended and I asked and he told me about coming from Ethiopia in 1992 because of the war there, and about his wife here and about his two children with his one wife—a daughter 18 years old and a son only 3 ½ , a blessing and a big surprise to him and his wife.  And the day was long and that was only the very beginning.  But for now, l’ll leave it like this.  I am well- loved at home and by others who have been mine and I theirs, a long time.  My partner sent beautiful roses to me at the office, creating a bit of a stir in only my second week.   But that man and our ride together—and his crying with me—he was my friend and my Valentine.

The report from day one

The report will be short.  Or short-ish.

Yesterday, I arrived like a school girl on her first day of school.  New sweater, old pants, old shoes, a small bag full of a few small things that make a desk feel like mine.  Y. who is my boss in one sense– greeted me, took me into her office, walked me around a little bit and gave me some instructions, some words of welcome and a sense of a start.  She is a black woman, younger than I am by a lot, a veteran by legislative staff standards (5 years) and someone about whom, after listening to her in my first interview I thought, ‘this is a smart woman, a principled woman.  I’d follow her leadership.  For real.’  The elected legislator who chairs the committee I was hired to staff is actually my boss– and I saw him later in the day.

One of the first things I learned yesterday is that the other lawyer in the office has resigned.  Don’t know when he is leaving.  I had all those feelings, interesting feelings of excitement–putting my mind to something new, trying something new, learning a whole universe (as legislatures of any kind are– even more so than your average workplace)– full of people and their layers of relationships, strengths, worries and compromises, rules, ways of doing things, of getting things done and of relating to one another.  The office is in a beautiful, old but refurbished, government building.  I love the building.

I’ve had a year and a half of being a stay-at-home mom.  I’ve juggled, driven, organized impossible schedules, gone, helped, observed and been present with my daughter in so many settings; I’ve changed plans on a dime, and made things work.  I’ve spent a lot of time healing about the many feelings about loss of my former job– and the many more feelings about what that job and workplace had been (not so good) for me.

I’ve built a couple of rock solid relationships– one with my mom-friend with whom I’ve shared a weekly meeting to listen to one another, laugh and cry together, strategize and keep ourselves on track– one of the most satisfying, effective and efficient relationships ever.  I built a small community of others who are free during the daytime and I tried a number of things.  I’ve worked hard on the many hopes and worries and struggles I have as a parent– on strengthening my relationship with my daughter, other mothers, fathers, teachers, administrators and many others.

I am a different woman in certain ways.  It is interesting to feel.  I’ve felt at times, increasingly fragile but I think I may have been developing secret strengths.  Secret, first and foremost to me.

What I hated about the first day was the dispiriting feeling that went with  9:00 6:30– which is how long I worked yesterday.  It is simply too long to be away from home, my daughter and the goings on at which I belong and want to be.  This week I will miss a school play in Spanish, where my daughter has her teacher blown away by how she aced her lines.  And I will miss the first (and possibly the only) basketball tournament game in which my daughter will play.  And she missed me too which is another story.

Here is what I loved.  After years of having and worrying about having my own office in various workplaces, we work in a space that is configured like this;  Two inner offices at the back.  The resigning lawyer and Y., the committee staff director, have those offices.   Then there is a big gangly L-shaped room with four other desks/ cubicles and a large table for meetings and assembling documents, a sofa-waiting-area and files and two closets, one of which serves as a small kitchen.  And in the midst of all this, in a big modular work station, is where I work.  As a woman who knows that the all-over-each-other-never-alone— is one of the biggest gifts of mothering, I loved working in a big room where people call out to each other, see each other come and go, bustle around each other and have a sense– if only because of the design of the workspace, that we are in this together.

More soon.

 

Last day as…

This is my last day as a stay-at-home mom.  For awhile.  I say goodbye to this sweet mothering life and goodbye to this one version of a self-contained writing life.  Goodbye.  And I am sad to say goodbye.  I may well love what I do next, and it’s a great opportunity and I am in agreement with friends who say I am brave to try something new like this– at this time of my life.  All true, but alongside those facts is the fact that I am sad to say goodbye to this life.  I do not yet have all the vocabulary to write for real about what I have learned and understood about the lives of women and the brilliance and struggle of women who devote themselves full time to caregiving.  I don’t think it is exactly all we want for ourselves but the undervaluing of the brains, stamina, planning, strategy and brilliance it takes to do this work– is one  enormous lie of sexism.

I lament the end of this time.  Truly. Truly. Truly. Truly.

A longstanding vulnerability has become a major sideline these past weeks. I’ve been mostly sleepless.  I’ve turned into part very old woman whose sleep is so fragile, she wanders the empty quiet apartment throughout the night.  And part toddler– buffeted by excitement, changes in routine and all the rest.  In short, in the past two weeks, I’ve had too many nights of three, four hours of sleep.  And I am tired.

I offer a small list of things I will especially miss.  Though you should know that there have been a number of distinct periods of time, distinct undertakings and different routines during this year and a half of unemployment.

1.  Getting my daughter to school in the morning.  Trying, despite lateness, grumpiness (much but not all of it mine) to make it a good send off in the morning.  I succeeded sometimes and not others.

2.  Doing nearly all the family’s grocery shopping.  Much of it during the middle of the day.  Doing my chores with other mothers of the world (and those women’s little babies and toddlers), old women, surgical residents finishing a double shift, and others who are not in offices during the middle of the day.

3.  The fact that my daughter has figured out a way to call me during the middle of the day.  I will miss being consistently available to answer her calls, talk to her and listen to her.

4.  After school.  The walk home, the ride home, the laughs, the complaints, the tears– her friends, her teachers.  All that goes on — on the front steps of the school at 3:20 and beyond.

5.  Making a huge plates of nachos for seemingly small girls and their enormous appetites.   And then another huge plate.  Listening to them talk while they eat.

6.  Studying many things including Hebrew and my Torah portion, reading stories, magazines, poetry.  I watched a movie about four times in the daytime, during the course of this time at home.  I got Prince of Broadway in a rare daytime showing.

7.  Wearing the same clothes two days in a row.  Well really three.  Sometimes four.

8. Driving, driving, driving, driving.  The interesting thoughts I’ve thought, the mundane worldliness of it, the beauty of fall days, summer days, winter and rainy days– late evening, early morning.

8.  My beloved partner’s unfailing, unwavering love and hope for me.  Her loyalty  and her good, good face and voice over the phone.

9.  Writing.  This blog and other things.  And revising and revising.  This post– the beginning of a new era, where at times if you want to finish something you must give up revising, and reworking.

10.  Being available to be with my nephew in his first semester of university here– occasionally during the daytime.

11. My own time at the gym.  I’ve not gone for weeks and need to return.  I know it will be harder now that I’ll be working, but I must.  I liked taking seriously the body’s need for good care and exercise.

So off I go, like your child going off to school for the first time.  I take a step away from a life I’ve been building and toward something new and unknown.

Prince of Broadway; Truth telling part two

Go out and rent the movie.  Prince of Broadway.  You may love it or you may not, but it is one of the more original, interesting, real things going on out there in the film world to which I have access.  I loved it.

It’s made by an independent filmmaker named Sean Baker and his vision and his sensibility– his openness to reality flies in the face of so much of what we are fed; from the kinds of multi-million dollar homes that are depicted as “an average suburban home” in any light Hollywood romantic comedy; to the lies and utter black-is-white and down-is-up distortions of the various Republicans duking it out for the presidential nomination.  In other words, I liked the film because it is truthful in some important sense of the word.  The plot goes roughly like this.

An undocumented immigrant from Ghana named Lucky works as a hustler in a counterfeit fashion sales business in Manhattan.  He has a girlfriend.  He’s getting by.  One day a woman, his ex-girlfriend, shows up with a baby, asks Lucky to hold the beautiful 18-month old boy she is carrying “for just a minute”– and when he does so– she announces that the baby is his baby and she needs him to take care of the child.  And she bolts.  Leaves.  She says she’ll be back in two weeks.  The rest of the story goes from there.  I don’t completely know why I loved this film so much though “authentic” and truthful is one big piece, though not at all the only piece.  It is also hopeful.  It is a film that is definitely deeply flawed in certain ways, but in my book it is a perfect kind of flawed.  And so much more worth watching that most of what passes for flawless.

The 18-month old boy who is the baby in the film is a boy with whom most of us, if we still have, as my partner often says, a pulse, will be hard-pressed not to fall in love.  I thought a lot about what it must mean to make a movie with an 18-month-old in the midst of adults shouting and play-acting the things that are depicted in the film.  It is not a terrible, violent story but it is a hard story.  Harsh things happen and the environment is harsh.

One of the biggest, and perhaps only big flaw of the movie, is the fact that the 18-month-old– whose existence and whose presence in Lucky’s life, is the center of the story– that 18-month-old does none of the things an 18-month-old would do under the circumstance of actually being abandoned by his mother.  Left with a man who is, father or not, a total stranger to the boy.  But I was willing to suspend judgement and let that fly– knowing that the actor was an 18-month-old and that he was, gladly, as he was being filmed, obviously not frightened or lost in the way he would have been if those things had actually been happening.

The film is about a world I don’t inhabit– a world where the confluence of classism, racism and poverty sits hard, hard on people and shapes things in very harsh ways.  And also in some very alive and loving ways.  It is about heavy stresses and pressures that are not the particular stresses and pressures I face.

But I think I loved this movie in part, because it is about the lives and the courage of parents.  Two parents in particular– and the challenges of parenting, under the pressures of racism, classism, poverty and other forces too.  In addition to the very hard, and the hardship– there are tremendous strengths among these characters; a clarity about rising to the occasion, a clarity about love and not abandoning our own– and in this film “our own” is not only about blood relations; and a vision of taking what life hands you and making a good life.   And those are certainly good life lessons for me and for all of us.

Farewell Charlotte; good, gentle, sweet neighbor dog

I’ve written about our upstairs neighbors in other posts, like Apartment House Snowball Fight; A Great Jewish Christmas Tradition.  It’s been just what I didn’t even know I wanted but did–that our relationship as neighbors with daughters about the same age in the building often means a blurrier and blurrier line between our households.  We live in the same tier as they– in the 3rd floor three-bedroom, directly below their identical 4th floor three-bedroom apartment.  Our girls wander in and out of our respective apartments.  Our neighbors often send a small bowl of cookies or something they cooked down to us; or they invite us to come for dinner at the last minute and we do the same.

Their sweet old dog, Charlotte is often petted by us and by others in the hall on her way out and then back in the building– before and after a walk.  In recent years, growing weary of the stairs to their top-floor apartment and growing more and more blind,  she would often wander into our apartment if our door was open.

We got word Charlotte died today.  Earlier this week, when our friends had made the difficult decision and knew the end was near, they invited us to a pizza party–at which Charlotte was the guest of honor.  We humans ate pizza and Charlotte got all the crusts she wanted.  (A favorite of hers.)  We all gave her lots of love and petting —  which she had had throughout her life.

Our friends’ daughter, A. lives in the two households of amicably divorced parents; the household upstairs and one a neighborhood over.  She cried hard as she was leaving to go to her other house for the night and we were heading downstairs.  She wasn’t the only one to cry.  Goodbye, sweet, doggie neighbor, Charlotte.  We miss you.

At Charlotte's party.

Charlotte with pizza crust

Truth telling

I have a secret that is fast becoming not a secret.  I have a new job.  I haven’t started yet, but I’ll leave my good and very busy mothering-writing and thinking life– Monday, February 6.  I am honestly quite sad and fearful about leaving this extraordinary time with my daughter and this chance to write and to reflect and to do some other things.

I am a worrier.  I am not a worrier who argues that my worries and fears are justified.  But nonetheless, my brain is often occupied–  I was inundated somehow, early in my life, with certain Jewish patterns– patterns of fears and worry, and a hearty dose of sadness and loss.  A dose of “Oy, oy, the glass is half empty!”.

In other words, as scared as I’ve been about not having a job, I am that scared and then some about having gotten this job.  It’s a legal job; it’s a legislative legal job– which is to say I’ll be doing work on a particular set of issues with a legislative body and not with individual clients.  It’s a good job.  It lines up nicely with many of the things I wanted to do next.  I’ll tell more about it as time goes by or I won’t– but for now suffice it to say, getting this offer and then accepting it–has been a huge roller coaster.  Mostly a roller coaster that has felt as though I was on a downward, gravity-intensifying plunge.  And I didn’t know what to say, or how I could tell it– or whether it was prudent to tell as real decisions were being made.  So I went silent here for almost 20 days which is way, way too long for me.

But this silence reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

It’s about this kind of blog and what does one tell?  What does one omit?  How do I figure out those things and how do you, a reader, come to know what it all means?

In the course of my job search, one morning following a particular night of sleeplessness because the panic dial was turned up high–I emailed an old friend who I know from this city and with whom I was very close for many years– a long time ago.  Later, but still a long time ago, he moved to California.  We’ve had a few ups and downs in our friendship.  But I count him and I think he counts me, as a Good Friend– across the miles.  He’s a very good, smart, interesting, Jewish gay man.

So on the morning after the afore-mentioned very hard night, I emailed him and simply told him what a hard time I was having.  How alone I felt.  I didn’t do that often with many people when I was right in the thick of it.  It hadn’t occurred to me that he could help, but he wrote back immediately and offered up five old friends of his here–for me to contact.  He did some other important things for me too.  But the most important thing was that he rose to the occasion, put his brain in gear, offered some concrete help and that bad morning I remembered I wasn’t doing this alone.

I followed up on one of his suggestions pretty quickly and then my mother-in-law had surgery, my daughter was having a particularly hard time and some other things were happening but I hadn’t written about them here.  Partly I didn’t have time– and partly I didn’t have insight; I had complaints and worries.

Sometime after my friend offered some actual help and  I had done some follow- up with one of  his leads– and all the other things I just mentioned had been  taking my time and attention (mother-in-law’s surgery, partner gone, daughter having a tough time) here is what happened.  I didn’t blog about the hassles and upsets and I stopped emailing my friend for several weeks.  Not on purpose; the time just passed as things were happening.  Eventually, he wondered why I’d not followed up with him and with some of the leads he gave me.  He emailed, just wondering, was there perhaps something wrong?

I took his email as pressure and wrote something sort of defensive at best, but with a kind of “would you get off my back?” tone.  This– to my friend who had offered help in my time of need.  Then there was more communication and I  had the good sense to back up and explain at least a little about the mother-in-law surgery, the traveling partner, the daughter who battled about not wanting to go to school in the morning.  Then I  apologized.  I hope sufficiently.

But in the course of straightening it out he said something that I’ve kept thinking about.  He said “I had no idea things were so hard– I had even gone and checked your blog….and it sounded like all was well.”

I thought a lot about that.  The difficulty and strangeness of the possible answers ran through my head.  Should I say, “Well you can’t really expect to find out what’s actually, truly going on with me here can you?”

Or worse, “Well, you never know, sometimes I reveal a lot of what’s happening with me here, but sometimes I just can’t write the hard stuff and you just don’t know which is which as you read”.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since.  What is the blog anyway?  It’s not a short story.  It’s not a poem.  It’s not a how-to book.  Maybe an essay from time to time.  But it’s not a diary or a newspaper either.  It’s intimate but it’s also not a comprehensive account of anything.

It made me think about the questions–what is worth telling; what do I choose to tell; what do I omit and how does a reader piece it all together?  I have many strengths and many failings and fears to deal with– but many of those are too embarrassing or too private (whatever that means) and many of them are just not interesting.   What can I or should I in good conscience tell when it involves telling on someone else?

As a woman who wants justice in this world, a woman who thinks good stories and poems and songs are part of what will help us get there– and as a mother, my business is the business of the Jewish-mother- of- a- daughter- of-color-who- came- to- me- by- adoption and a woman-writer-blogger.  And in my business figuring out how to talk truthfully is a pretty important thing.  My business is about raising a child, as Grace Paley once said, “righteously up”; about talking as straight as I know how about adoption, and about myself and about race and Jews and gentiles and sexism and homophobia and now at my daughter’s age, about bodies and women and fairness and a lot of other things.  I do subscribe to the old saying I heard long ago– that two half-truths make one whole lie.

But truth-telling is a wide open field and very general as a guideline.  The rest I have to figure out, week by week, word by word, blog post by blog post.  As for you, in the name of full disclosure, I’ll offer advice.  If you want to know reliably whether a particular day or week was one where I soared or hid under the covers– whether I laughed a lot or cried or just got by– you should call or email.  Because to be truthful, I’m not always telling all that here.

 

Nikki Yanofsky rocks the Beatles

It is almost exactly one year ago that I discovered (for myself) and posted about Nikki Yanofsky– a young Canadian, Jewish woman, who is a remarkable singer.  I especially love her interpretations–as a young, Jewish woman, of songs I associate with my life at her age.  I like that thread of connection.  Yesterday my daughter and I were again trolling around YouTube and I found these. She covers two Beatles songs.  I’m loving and appreciating the Beatles as much as ever– more than ever– which is to say a lot– these days.  My daughter’s school does a “Peace Concert” in the winter and I cried a little this year when they sang “Imagine”.  I laughed too– I hope John Lennon was laughing too– right along with me.  All the controversy surrounding around him and Yoko Ono back then– about nudity and the not- so- subtle subtext about a mixed race relationship and their different ages– not to mention their anti-war views.  Now his songs are the stuff of public elementary school assemblies.  Which is as it should be.

Nikki Yanofsky does something marvelous with each of these songs.  And to the first, song, my daughter, who doesn’t know the original songs, said simply, “I love her dress”. So do I.  And I didn’t argue with her, but I knew– it’s not really the dress– it’s her; her voice, presence, energy, spirit. She is what/who makes the dress look great.  So here’s my January 2012 toast to music and songs, the Beatles and young Jewish women.  Enjoy.

Growing up and the mama shield

I have a little knot of thoughts and recent memories stuck in my head– seemingly unconnected things; details from daily life– but which, stepping back a bit, paint a picture for me of the tugging in both directions– the tugging that is part of growing up.  If one is lucky enough to have an adult or two who has the time and attention to help out– this pulling away, then pulling in close– seems to happen.  (Though we must remember that having a parent or two with time and attention isn’t the situation for so many young people throughout our community, the country and the world– through no fault of theirs and no fault of their parents either).  But in our case, in our household, growing up seems to involve some pulling away and then pulling back in towards home, safety, reassurance.

Three unrelated things from this past week are strung together as a small narrative in my mind.  Growing up.  (As if the mere size of my daughter’s body and the frequency with which we discover that once again a whole new wardrobe must be found and the old one set aside, washed, packed up and given away– weren’t reminder enough).

First is that while in New York, late in a couldn’t-quite-mobilize day– my daughter expressed definitively that she wanted to go to a show, preferably the Abba musical– Mama Mia.  I know this idea came from her because though I really like to get out, I would happily have lived out our vacation in New York and my entire life without ever seeing Mama Mia.  Her expression of a strong desire to go was a huge change because she has always had issues with loud, with dark with certain kinds of crowds– thus making movie theaters, Broadway and other stage productions and large street demonstrations (which I often love)– less than appealing to her.

It was our last night, the day had been slow-moving, but we decided not everyone needed to go stand in line, so my partner left to get tickets while my daughter and I stayed home.  Then my partner called us saying she had braved the cold, the crowds, and the line and had scored three tickets but with one glitch.  No two of them were together.  I thought she was completely out of her mind to have done this, but we left that go completely, had no argument or unpleasant words and moved on.  Though I really had to think this through.  I neither thought this would work for my daughter, nor did I think, independent of whatever she might think, that sending her to sit by herself in a crowded theater in Times Square– made any sense at all from a safety point of view.  But there we were with three tickets, money spent and at least two of us (the two of them) who actually wanted to see the show.

To make a logistical story and a long internal emotional, relationship story shorter–after several cell phone calls back and forth with my partner I decided that the way to handle all this was to just all meet at the theater and with tickets in hand, to check it out.  We’d see if we could make a trade along the way, but I declared that the adults in particular needed to be fully prepared to just walk away and “waste” the tickets if the scene didn’t look really safe from my point of view and fun and emotionally workable for my daughter.  After a false start– with an empty seat directly behind her, but that someone claimed as the music began– my daughter did sit alone, said she felt ok about it, though seemed to feel not so ok, but not terrible, for the first act.  She was, the whole time, within my sight line so long as I had my head turned sharply to the left–away from the stage, which is exactly how I sat for most of that act.

During intermission I brokered a trade with one of a group of young Japanese tourists– sitting behind me.  One of them moved away from their group and took my daughter’s seat, then the rest of them all moved over one seat to the left and my daughter moved to sit directly behind me– with me contorted in an odd position so she could hold my hand for the second act– which she asked to do.

The next piece in my head is that she decided Monday, and we went, to get her ears pierced.  Again (not unlike seeing Mama Mia), something that I have had no investment in her doing and something that took a certain inner strength on her part.  She decided that morning she wanted to do this.  Then she said she was really scared and nervous for the next hour but she insisted she wanted to go ahead and we did, with many opportunities offered for her to change her mind.  She was enthusiastic about it at the several points along the way where she could easily have backed out and the moment came and they did pierce her ears.  I don’t care a bit that her ears are pierced, but I did love seeing her tackle a decision that was a stretch for her and I loved being with her and loved, for once, being a parent who was so fully free of any judgement or agenda for the outcome.  I was free, for once, to just follow her mind, listen to her fears, and follow her lead.

Before

Choosing which earrings

Anticipation

Done!

Amidst these things, these outward growing up things– she hangs on tight to us.  Which is very good.  I don’t remember which night recently she was in our bed, asleep.  And I woke up in the middle of the night to roll over or to pee or something and she literally turned to me in her sleep, looped her arm through mine, lifted her head and laid it on my chest and holding very tight smiled in her sleep and said very plainly, “You’re my shield.” She then patted me once and continued sleeping.

Birth and growth, though all around us, are in some ways beyond our ability to really comprehend.  Such a miracle, seemingly impossible, they just happen.  I have many complicated feelings about being a mother whose daughter is growing up.  But in her wisdom, she has given me a reminder of a good and satisfying and important role in this time of our lives together.  I am the mama shield.

2011 Last Post

This is not a summary of the year, nor the bests and worsts, nor a list of pithy hopes for the coming year.  I do always and more and more hope for more justice and more peace among human beings in the world, for the courage and strength to act more and more on my principles and for a good year– in the real, most broad and far-reaching sense of “good”– as in not just for me or my small circle in particular but for the common good of us.

I had wanted to write a post a day, starting back a week and half ago or so, when I wrote for the first time in weeks, but I missed that call, so this will have to suffice.

We were in NYC most of this past week with many highlights for me; being so much with my parter and especially with my daughter while she is out of school and just herself; seeing a klezmer musical in New York City, called Shlemiel the First, a klezmer musical based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer tale that is one of, or in the tradition of, the Chelm stories (which I will have to explain another time if you don’t know them– they are an amazing part of my Jewish literary tradition)– going yesterday morning, to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and touring and getting a talk about an Irish immigrant family in the mid-1800s.   The other highlights were being with my college friend Esther and her husband and two sons (two of her three children) and the sense of happiness and well-being it gives me to spend time with her.  From my perspective my friendship with her is one of the rare friendships in which we have grown stronger, easier and more compatible as friends, as we’ve grown older– and we were really good to begin with.  I loved spending time with our hosts, our NYC boyfriends, and with our friend from home and her daughter– a close school friend of my daughter.  Lucky us to have been in New York at the same time.

Each of the aforementioned things; the Tenement Museum, the experience of the    Jewish musical based on old Yiddish stories and an Eastern European, Ashkenazi storytelling tradition, being with Esther again and our friendship after so many years– and the rest– each is worth a post in itself.

And, I will slip this in, I have a very interesting development on the job possibility front.  There are many things to figure out about the possibility that has presented itself and I may not ultimately be offered, or I may be offered but may not accept the job that may be offered, but it’s an interesting and a good development for the very end of a calendar year.

I will say that I have come to love many things about this year, despite its many hours of anxiety and even terror about my future, and I am truly happy I have had this year of no paid work and lots and lots of other work. I have had time to deeply love so many things that I deeply love; my own particular beloved people, writing and reading and many minds of people I’ve never met, and the hope for a better world– the possibilities before me and all of us.

I have not done certain things.  Gotten into great shape and lost some pounds I should lose (I gained about five); exercised three times a week; I have not written a book of poetry or other reflections (but still would like to) and I haven’t even completely finished cleaning out two of four closets I tried to tackle.  (Though if you do the math, I did finish two.)  But here is the thing.  There really is, happily, next year.  Now for a few photos from a wonderful walk on Christmas day and we can wrap this up.

Apartment house snowball fight; a great Jewish Christmas tradition

Snowball fight #1, December 24, 2011

As a Jewish woman, I have great ambivalence about Christmas.  There are things I love about this time of winter, about the hustle bustle of people getting ready for their holiday, the lights, other things.  At some point in the season, usually Christmas eve day or Christmas day or in the planning for one or the other, I completely fall apart– angry, hurt feelings, lonely– one thing or another, but never good.  It’s situational– which is to say, whenever it happens– when a new day comes along, or sometimes after two new days, I feel different, better, much.  Nonetheless, Christmas seems hard, at times, on each one of us, and I try to plan for things that will work well for us to do and for some down time for us.

One great thing that we’ve found to do, or rather it found us, is our upstairs lesbian neighbors’ annual Christmas Eve open house.  And though it has a number of things to recommend it, for starters, what  could be better for a woman ambivalent about Christmas, than a party which doesn’t involve a coat or parking?  Nothing, that’s what.

My neighbors have a daughter (a stepdaughter to one of the two women) who’s here about half of each week.  She is a grade ahead and about eight months older than my daughter and the two girls are good friends.  Our shared hall and stairwell have meant many impromptu visits– sometimes in pajamas early in the morning or last thing at night– which have been a wonderful part of apartment living.

The two women are good friends and also the kind of neighbors a person dreams of– helpful, generous, welcoming.  R. is a marvelous artist whose actual artwork is interesting and ever evolving, and she brings a love of community art to every event of the social variety.  Several years ago, there was a pretty big pack of kids at the party and somehow they started throwing crumpled paper or packing material at one another– and R. came up with the idea of a “snowball fight”.

The next year R. and her stepdaughter and our daughter worked together making snowballs for the party– there are about 100 snowball sized pieces of wadded up newspaper, spray-painted with white and glittery paint– to about the shape and weight of a snowball.  You don’t get that bitter cold sting when it hits you in the face, nor the wet puddles afterward, and most importantly you don’t have to have snow on the ground to have a great snowball fight.

At some point in the party, we get the signal and all who are up for it– usually a group of younger adults and of young people–head for the hallway and a snowball fight ensues.  With teams.  Last night the way it lined up was girls against boys with about four young adult guys and one 11-year-old boy on the landing between third and fourth floors and with my daughter, our young friend upstairs, me and several other women working together from the 4th floor landing to pelt the guys.  The fight is vigorous and yet the spirit is undeniably sweet and good-natured– but with a killer streak to it too.  No one gets hurt, there is screaming and laughing and yelling, and team spirit though there are no particular rules.  The halls grow noisy, there is no scoring system and everyone has a really good time.

Snowball fight #2

Our opponents

Taking aim

Look Out!!

just a few of the apartment house snowballs, soon to be packed up for another year