Posts from — April 2009

The Third Part of the Trip (you can read the first part here and the second part here):

The final part of the story is about something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

Before the kiss at the end of a Jewish wedding, the couple stamps on a glass, breaking it. There are a lot of reasons given for the breaking of perfectly usable stemware (stemware that could be used to imbibe large amounts of champagne if not for now being in three hundred and forty little pieces–though trying to keep people from imbibing large amounts of champagne is not given as one of the possible scenarios for the act). The most common reason given ties in the destruction of the Temple.

But I think it has to do with something else. You know, because I’m a big religious scholar and have the authority to dismiss the ideas of 30,000 Jewish wedding books.

Still.

Judaism is too symmetrical a religion to bring in some tangential piece of history without it having a counterpart in the ceremony. Which is why I think the breaking of the glass serves as a bookend for the breaking of the tenaim. Tenaim means “conditions” and when some Jews get engaged, they write out their vows to each other–all the conditions of the marriage. Josh and I did this, writing out all the unique things we wanted for our marriage and I painted it on a piece of pottery (a cut-paper version remains in our house).

We had our mothers smash the ceramic version of the tenaim and then put a piece of the broken pottery in a glass box and sealed it with a knotted ribbon. The symbolism was obvious–just like the broken pottery, our lives and possibly the lives of our families would be broken–unfixable–if we were to go back on these vows and not fulfill them. We gave each person in our family a piece of the tenaim so that we wouldn’t have all the parts. It was the enormity of the commitment, but it was also a mindfulness as to what we were entering into by getting married. That once you start wrapping your lives around one another like that, it is heart breaking to rend the two lives apart. Do-able, of course, and sometimes necessary for the emotional health (or even safety) of the people in the couple. But it’s a fool who thinks that divorce is ever easy or entered into without thought.

Shattered things are, by their very nature, painful.

The glass we broke at our wedding was blue.

Something Old

We drove up to Vermont in the rain. I wanted to go to the King Arthur Flour store. It is somewhat a baker’s Jerusalem, a holy space with more meaning for me infused it in than a little store can handle. I have wanted to go there for many years–we are a King Arthur Flour house except for a few forays into Hodgson Mill (oh their vital wheat gluten; their vital vital wheat gluten). The ChickieNob and I love to go through the catalog together, moaning over the bread storage systems and specialty pans.

I’m not sure what I expected, but I had this buzzing in my spine that can only come from finally reaching a destination. It’s probably more pronounced, let’s say, for people who climb Mount Everest. But Vermont is a fair distance from D.C. and Norwich is a tiny town in Vermont–hardly a destination where you end up accidentally like New York or Chicago. You need to make a choice to go to Norwich, Vermont.

I ended up buying cautiously, keeping in mind the bags clogging the trunk from various stores we love in Massachusetts. I bought a bag of pumpernickel, a special rye blend, a rye flavouring, and a few bags of cake flour. Modest purchases with specific loaves of bread in mind. I just felt humbled to be in a space that I have loved from afar for so long.

Something New

Julie and her family met us at the King Arthur Flour store.

So why are the pictures from a Panera in New Hampshire? Because it also seemed like a good idea to play musical locations through two states.

This is what it was like finally meeting someone that I have read for so long. Actually, first let me explain my first date with Josh. Not that I’m planning on calling my mother at 11:30 p.m. again and waking her up for the second time to crow into the phone: “Mum! I just met the second person I’m going to marry!”

The best way I can describe my first date with Josh is that the conversation felt like standing in front of the flour display at the King Arthur store. I wanted everything there, by which I wanted to know everything about him. I had my first date with Josh several years after meeting him for the first time, therefore, I knew enough about him to know that it was worth investing the time in listening to his thoughts on everything from Ireland to sushi. With some first dates, you’re simply trying to decide whether or not the person is worth engaging in detailed conversation; whether it’s worth collecting and retaining all the small details that make up a person’s life. I knew from the moment I entered his car that it was worth my time to remember everything he said because what he said was important. Fine, fine, all words are important, but the people you honour and respect deserve to have their opinions and desires and stories remembered.

And that is sort of how I felt about meeting Julie face-to-face for the first time. I knew enough about her from her writing to know that she was someone I was going to like and it was well-worth my effort to take in all of those small details because there was a lot to learn. Josh and Paul took the four kids to the Norwich library (after we gave them an impromptu snack of baked goods at their own kid table which included scintillating overheard conversation such as “do you like cars, Charlie? Do you like computers? Does your mommy let you type on her computer? I like to do Garage Band.”) and we walked around the store, discussing everything from baking ingredients and cake disasters to other bloggers and writing in general.

It was an amazing convergence for me where the old–flour I’ve used for dozens of years–met the new, and both switched in a Freaky Friday-sort of a way. The store made me reex
amine what I knew about baking as well as the shortcuts I’m prone to take. And being with Julie, someone relatively new in my life, felt so old and familiar. I was entirely comfortable with her from point one, which is a huge statement since I am generally quite shy and awkward and prone to vomiting when nervous. I only wish we had more time to talk–I had one thousand questions and only so much time to ask them.

Julie is exactly what you’d expect from her blog: intelligent, funny, circumspect, thoughtful, kind, and warm. She knows how to walk that fine line of teasing without drawing blood; the sort of teasing that sets the other person at ease and makes them feel as if someone small aspect of their life has been noted, made important enough to tease.

Maybe a better explanation of Julie, again in a story:

One time I wanted to get this writer’s signature. He wasn’t signing books, in fact, he infamously almost never signs books. But he was on our campus and I knew that he was at a reception in this particular room, socializing with some of the professors before he spoke to a small group of writing students. I walked into the room and entered this circle that the professors had made around him, hanging back towards the edge, just listening to him tell this story. But suddenly, everyone noticed me and was staring at me. The story stopped and my professors were glowering and one asked what I was doing in the room. I remember standing there, trying to think of how I could back out of the room, and the writer leaned forward and took my book out of my hands as well as a pen out of his pocket. He gave a laugh and a wave to the professors as if to say that it wasn’t a big deal at all and they shouldn’t make it a big deal. “She just wanted her book signed. No problem.” He scrawled an inscription and handed back the book graciously. And then my professors made it clear that I was to leave immediately.

And that was what it was like to be with her. She held the graciousness of that author, the ability to make another person feel welcome. The ability to put others at ease is a gift.

And she is twice the writer of the unnamed author. I have a lot to learn by reading her work.

Something Borrowed

We borrowed a room in my aunt’s house. The last time I was up in Vermont was more than ten years earlier. My cousin–her daughter–and I had driven up to her parent’s house to get away from Western Massachusetts. We went swimming in the quarry. We made tomato sauce. We all ate out on the porch.

My cousin is my human harbour, more like a sister. She lived in Western Massachusetts at the same time. It is continued symmetry: our mothers were each other’s bridesmaids and she was one of mine. I had tried to talk her into meeting us at her parent’s house during the trip, but she had to work. Maybe I was trying to recreate the missing piece of taking back the area. How could I take back Western Massachusetts without incorporating the harbour that protected me emotionally those years? My cousin is my heart–then and now.

I told Josh that I wanted to go to Vermont for the flour store, but as we drove back towards Massachusetts, he asked if it subconsciously had to do with running away to the area I always ran away to towards the end of my time in Western Massachusetts. When I could no longer go out to study in Amherst or Northampton and risk running into people, I would drive up to Brattleboro and take over a cafe table up there.

When we drove up towards Norwich, stopping in Putney at the Sugar House, I felt a lightness. It was just like the lightness I felt when I drove up I-91, trying to escape even knowing I was going to return. Driving back down the highway after leaving Julie, the pit in my stomach returned once we exited onto Route 116 and we drove through my old town, the stretch of empty road to the school, the college buildings.

That is the problem with borrowed things–you always need to give them back.

Something Blue

I have always been a blue person. When I think of myself as a colour, I think of myself in hues of blue, even though orange is my favourite colour. My blueness has always been something that felt like it needed fixing, much like Western Massachusetts. Who wants to be blue? Who wants to be sad? It is something we strive to fix in this country.

When we drove back into Amherst, the sky was finally blue again after a long period of greyness. Not just figurative greyness, but the literal greyness of rain and clouds. I put on my sunglasses for the first time in 48 hours.

We went to the Eric Carle Museum and learned that we had the closing time wrong; there were fifteen minutes left in the day. The woman at the desk possibly could sense how much it meant for us to check our final item off the list. It might have been my voice cracking as I explained that we couldn’t come back, we were returning to D.C. And that this final piece had to happen.

We ran through the exhibit as best as one can do with fifteen minutes to see multiple rooms of amazing illustrations. At first I tried to teach the twins Eric Carle’s form of cut-paper art, but finally gave up and just let them enjoy the images.

My favourite pictures in the museum aren’t actually in the exhibit. They’re in the hall before you enter.

The canvases are enormous, demand attention. And they create a mood for the space. It is lighthearted, it is visual, it is joyful. The museum is just as much a showcase for the images as it is a celebration of illustration in general, the act of creating a picture.

Blue doesn’t always have to be a sad colour. It doesn’t always have to be a negative, something to fix. Blueness also brings with it other positive traits that other colours lack–a calmness, a slowness. Blueness, the waters, gave life to everything on earth. Blue is not necessarily a terrible colour to be if one needs to be a colour.

Because the problem with a synecdoche is that it dismisses so much of the heart, the fact that there is a convergence in most aspects of life, a symmetry. The yin and the yang. Hues of blue are not just a colour of sadness, but also great joy. Things that are old can become new with a visit and things new can feel quite old, as if you have known them for twenty years. The breaking of the glass bookends the spectrum of the betrothal–from engagemen
t to the chuppah. A symmetry.

I learned from this trip that things that have shattered probably can’t be repaired. But sometimes, things that you think need fixing are fine on their own. You can’t take back a space and you can’t repair a broken glass, but you can return, again and again, putting yourself into those terrible feelings because something beautiful can grow out of them as well.

And now, the story is complete.

Forgive the frizzy hair–it was a long day with many side trips into the rain. Also forgive the early-90s look of a t-shirt layered over long underwear. It was just that sort of a day. And forgive the glazed expression. It was probably close to midnight when we took that picture.

My first copy of the book arrived in the mail yesterday. So I guess this is really really real.

Also note that the publication date has moved up on Amazon. It’s now May 1st. You know, just in case you were waiting to get your copy of the most scintillating read about infertility, adoption, and loss ever written. And I will be posting a tour/reading schedule once I know it because I want to meet all of you and this seems like the best chance.

A proper thank you to everyone who helped me with this by providing their story coming soon. But a pre-thank you before the formal thank you. I could not have done this without all of you.

The Second Part of the Trip (you can read the first part here):

You were correct that I spent the day with Julie, but you’ll need to wait until the third part to hear that story because currently, my mind is back in Massachusetts.

I am not a fan of punishments, have never believed in them. We don’t punish the twins, regardless of the act. But we teach consequences. If you don’t eat your dinner, you’ll be hungry. If you take too long to get ready for bed, you’ll miss the twenty minutes of your movie. If you throw a tantrum in a store, you’ll lose my trust and I might not take you out in the future.

The consequence follows directly from the act—if we can’t connect the two events, it makes no sense. I mean, how does not eating dessert connect to not picking up your toys? It just doesn’t make sense and I think children are left focusing on the lack of connection rather than learning the lesson. So…basically, I’m a fan of consequences; not such a fan of punishments.

Except that I left Massachusetts with a desire to have consequences dolled out and if consequences didn’t neatly exist, I was absolutely fine with punishments. I wasn’t fine with the fact that the people who transgressed were unscathed and yet I had lost a great deal. In other words, I was essentially being punished–and not just by fate, but by actual people.

A few years after I left Western Massachusetts, I googled this man who had been the reason I left and discovered that while it was several years too late, consequences had finally been doled out. It still didn’t feel like enough. Doesn’t time do that? Make you feel as if the consequences or punishments should be more enormous, more elaborate if you were made to wait for them?

In googling him, I found his blog, which is now defunct, and read a story that gave me pause. When he was a boy, an accident happened and his brother died and he had witnessed the event. It was a terrible convergence of finally feeling vindicated mixed with a human impulse to understand how someone could become a monster after witnessing something so terrible so early in life.

But even knowing that, I didn’t want to forgive him.

The course of his life was changed, but so was mine.

Being up there made me wonder if it is right for us to crash into each other like this, affecting each other’s lives so deeply. On one hand, you have the connections such as the ones that arise out of the LFCA daily. We are crashing into each other’s lives in such a positive manner, affecting it for the better, that you can’t see anything wrong with stepping through social barriers to make a connection. And on the other, the darker side is that we also have the power to completely derail another person’s existence, set them on a different path, one they might not have wanted to choose.

And this is not to say that it isn’t a case of all’s well that ends well. I am quite happy with my life and I’m not sure I would have been quite so happy with the path I intended to take. By which I mean that I was on a path that I thought would make me happy, but in retrospect, probably would have made me miserable in the long run. So did he do me a favour by accident?

These are the things I thought about as we drove past the empty fields.

It feels a bit anticlimatic to go through the minute details of the trip once you have gotten the overarching sweep of the emotions that came from traveling back to Massachusetts, but I write this anyway because I need a record of the events; I need to process these thoughts. And frankly, I’m not sure if I can explain the end of the trip, which includes Julie and so, by extension, all of you, without talking about the first half of the trip.

A lot of the trip was about regaining muscle memory. I couldn’t give directions when we’d turn on the car, but we’d be driving and my arm would shoot out at last minute, point at a turn off and I’d shout, “there!” Josh spent a lot of time turning around the car.

Being there was like viewing the life not taken, like meeting an exboyfriend with your husband and kids in tow. When I was 21, I thought that after graduate school, I would get married and have children and move into a house in Leverett. I’d teach, go to shul in Northampton, volunteer on a farm. I couldn’t imagine anything better, anything different. I was exactly where I wanted to be and I was so certain of this fact, that I once went to a realtor to look at housing prices in the area. My father warned me not to buy, saying it would be too difficult to unload the property if I changed my mind after two years. And he was right, it was good advice. I wouldn’t be there two years later, it turns out.

So as we drove through Leverett on the way to the Peace Pagoda, I tried to imagine how different my life would be in a small clapboard house by the river.

The Peace Pagoda was for me, though we told the twins that it was for them. Isn’t that the hallmark of a bad mother? We started up the path, pausing to pee in the outdoor urinal behind the nuns’ house (the Wolvog was extremely impressed with the idea of peeing alfresco and said, “I just love this!”). The ChickieNob wanted to know why we weren’t going into the nuns’ house and I didn’t have an answer. Shyness. I haven’t been inside in almost ten years. It is difficult to knock on a door, barely remembering anyone’s name and say, “I’m here.”

They loved the incarnations of the Buddha (though out of habit, I told them that the Buddha was sleeping when we came to the gold encrusted depiction of his death and then couldn’t gracefully retract that statement and mention that they were seeing his death) and we went through the story of his life.

They climbed on the stones by the pond and talked to the fish in the water. When we walked back down the path, I kept thinking to myself, “this could be your last time doing this. You may never come back here.” And then I’d catch myself saying, “you never know when anything is a last time. I mean, that could have been my last bagel this morning. You just don’t know.”

And that’s how I put things in perspective. You know, berating myself.

We went to the Book Mill, my favourite book store in New England. They have a bumper sticker that says: “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find.” I think anyone who loves books should make this a vacation destination. Seriously. I’m not sure you can get better than a used book store next to rapids in a river, with a café and restaurant on the property. It is not only a full day excursion, but a multi-day excursion. Plus, the rest of the area is so lovely.

We had some time before dinner so we swung by the campus, knowing it would be difficult to park the next day once classes were in session. The campus was quiet, we only encountered a few students walking towards the library and campus union, a few town people exiting the theater.

The ChickieNob wanted to see my office and I told her that I wanted to take the stairs. The reason was simple. Before I left, I had stopped taking the main stairs and only took the elevator to avoid running into certain professors. We climbed the four flights to the top floor.

And then the ChickieNob saw that I was crying.

And she wanted to know why.

She seemed appeased with simply knowing that I was so unhappy in this space. We paused in front of each office and classroom and she asked me questions. Was this person nice? Well, no, they weren’t. They were only helpful once they stood to get in trouble for not being helpful. Was this person nice? Yes, she gave me some of the most important advice I received while I was there. Where did I sit when I was in this room? I couldn’t even say the words. I just pointed to the red chair where I sat for workshop and the brown one where I sat for Shakespeare. It was the same room for both classes.

She wanted to write on the board and she took the chalk and just wrote the word “sad.” I’m not really sure why but it seemed like the right thing to do so I didn’t erase it.

Josh asked me what it was like being there and honestly, it felt like entering your bed again after a nightmare. It felt like even though I knew nothing bad could happen to me, the people who hurt me were long gone, it felt like I shouldn’t be there, that I was stepping into a dangerous space. And that was silly. Just because you had one nightmare doesn’t mean you’ll have another if you return to bed. And being there, it was just a building. But I felt the same way as we drove down certain streets. I would twist my neck to watch a house now void of its former occupants, my heart pounding as if I expected to see him out of his lawn even though I knew he was miles away. It just felt risky.

On our last night, we discovered that the museum we wanted to see would be closed the next day so we researched maple farms in the area. In the morning, we woke up to the rain and decided to go regardless after I spoke to the kind farm owner on the telephone and she told me to bring the family over, she’d “get one of the boys to explain the whole thing even though they took down the buckets that morning.” We swung by the local burrito place to eat one last time before we got on the road.

I took the ChickieNob to the bathroom, reading the new graffiti that had appeared since the last time I ate at the restaurant, long before the twins were born. It’s a college town–I obviously couldn’t read any of it to her, but I explained that it was a series of proclamations. After I walked her back to the table, I returned to the bathroom and took out my pen. And wrote the obvious. Knowing full well that while it wasn’t clever and it wasn’t going to even be noticed amid some of the brasher statements, that it was the truest thing I could say in the moment and an important point to leave behind as we drove up I-91 and into Vermont.

Have you ever returned to the place which was the source of a tremendous amount of emotional pain–returned to the same clinic, returned to an area, returned to high school? How did returning affect you? Did you feel as if you had taken back the space or approached it differently the second time?

Part Two fini; the final part coming soon…

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin. Children are seen in this post in case you want to skip down to Mr. Linky and add your own without reading mine.

I have another guessing game. I spent the day with a fellow blogger. You get to guess who it is and then I will tell you the story. While I haven’t seen many pictures of her on her blog, the baby has been featured. So that is your best clue if you don’t recognize her. Here are your other clues: she is brilliant, she is funny, and she is a baker extraordinaire–and I’m not sure which fact makes me admire her the most.

And just to be completely immodest, several pictures of myself.

These three pictures were taken at three different points on the same day of the trip: at the Peace Pagoda, the Book Mill, and outside my old university building. They correspond to the places I showed last week, with the exception of Shelburne Falls. When we arrived, the entire area was closed off and under water. It seems fitting that I post instead a picture taken outside my university building, a place where I often figuratively felt underwater.

Laughing at the Peace Pagoda

Outside the Bookmill

On the wall outside my university building

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.