Succumbing to Dismay

Today is Yom Kippur, and probably blogging is somewhere high up on the list of what you’re not supposed to do on Yom Kippur. In the Orthodox Jewish family of my childhood–if blogging or computers had existed–this very act would have broken a series of prohibitions. The use of electricity, for one. Writing, for another. Not to mention removing one’s focus from the holiness and importance of the day.

But I am actually thinking about the holiness and importance of the day. Last night, Michael, Jacob and I went to Kol Nidre services at a synagogue I’ve finally discovered in my search for a place to belong as a Jew here in Cheever country. It’s been a long (six year long!) road, but finally I have found a sanctuary where I feel spiritually at home. And because I feel so comfortable there, I found myself able to listen, to really listen to the “ashamnu” prayer which is central to the Kol Nidre service. This is the prayer that always scared me half to death as a child, and even as an adult. As God flips through the pages of the Book of Life and makes decisions about the fate of each and every person in the coming year, we beat our chests and admit our sins. The language of this list of sins is disconcerting: we have stolen, we have committed adultery, we have become violent, we have been contemptuous, we have rebelled. We have been wicked, stiff-necked, immoral. Last night, somehow, these words felt the way I think they’re supposed to. They were not necessarily my personal confessions, but the confessions of an entire people. An entire community, a world of humanity, admitting their frailty.

Finally, though, it was this sin that popped out at me: For the sin of succuming to dismay. If there was ever a moment to understand this as a sin, or a failing, it seemed a good time to recognize it. To feel dismay is not a sin. The sin is to succumb to it. I held the thought like a small stone in my pocket, fingering it, returning to it on the drive home.

But then we returned from services and walked into the kitchen to discover that Samson the Labradoodle pup had managed to pull the half-eaten challah off the kitchen counter, and had eaten the whole thing. Bits of saran wrap covered the kitchen floor. We called the vet to be sure the dog wasn’t in danger. And I tried not to succumb to dismay.

Fork in the Road

The other day, while messing around on Facebook (one of my new and most favorite forms of procrastination) I went on my husband’s Facebook page to see what was new with him, since we barely ever get to talk to each other any more because of 4th grade homework and the new puppy. I noticed that Michael had added a link to a video he had also posted on YouTube, called “Flying Qat into Mogadishu”. Qat being a plant found in parts of Africa which, when the leaves are chewed, apparently gives a person a mild, cocaine-like buzz. And Mogadishu, Somalia being the place that owned Michael’s heart before he met me. He was flying with his friend Josh on the small drug plane onto a dirt runway south of Mogadishu controlled by the son of an infamous war lord (is there any other kind of war lord?) because there weren’t very many ways for journalists to get into the country during that time. As I watched the video below–the laughing pilot, the tiny strip of dirt appearing below them, the men casually holding their assault rifles approaching the small plane–I noticed the date. It was August, 1996.

Michael and I met on the first day of November, 1996–less than three months after the adventure on the qat plane. He was still jet-lagged, having just returned to New York from Africa, where he spent most of his time as a foreign correspondent. We were introduced by a mutual friend at a Halloween party near Gramercy Park, we fell in love on the spot, and now we live with one child and two dogs in bucolic New England. This is what our lives look like now:

I’ll never be able to explain it. But that improbable meeting nearly twelve years ago has been the greatest piece of good luck in my life. Still, as I watched the video Michael shot as the plane descended through the clouds toward the dirt strip, my breath caught in my throat. Please land safely, I thought. Come home so we can start our lives together. Please.

A Very Good Idea

A couple of weeks ago, I received group email from the novelist Ayelet Waldman asking fellow writers to send her signed copies of their books for a Barack Obama fund raiser. Usually, when I know I need to send someone a book, it takes me a little while. I get daunted by the envelope (I never seem to have the right size of padded envelope no matter how many trips to Staples I make), the postage, the whole thing. I need an assistant and don’t have one, and probably never will. Sigh. Anyway, this time I was obsessed; I couldn’t get a copy of Black & White to the post office quickly enough. I also forwarded Ayelet’s email to a bunch of my writer friends, asking them to do the same. Before I knew it, writers as disparate as Jamie Lee Curtis, who sent her children’s books, and Jane Green, who sent her massively bestselling new novel The Beach House, also couldn’t get to the post office fast enough. And just this morning, I discovered that a website has been created: books4barack.com

Over 750 writers have contributed their books. And Ayelet is sending a randomly-assembled basket of goodies (there are Alice Sebold first editions, Stephen King, Tobias Wolff, Alice Waters, you name it) to people who contribute $250 or more to Obama’s campaign.

Check out the website. And go Ayelet! I just love when a brilliant idea takes off.

Tefillin

Lately, I’ve realized that experiential non-fiction books can be divided into two categories: in the first, a writer sets out to experience something in order to write about it. And in the second, a writer has always wanted to experience something, but is frightened/resistant/anxious/doesn’t feel she has any right (or all of the above) and so goes out, gets a book contract, and no longer has any choice in the matter. This is the category into which my new book falls. I have been on some version or another of a spiritual quest since the day I fled my Orthodox Jewish upbringing. But these quests of mine always stopped short. Or rather, I stopped them short. Given the pure, undiluted dose of religion that governed my whole childhood, anything that smacked of organized religion made me wary. And anything that didn’t (yoga, meditation, chanting, twelve step programs, you name it) struck me as not my territory. I couldn’t be Orthodox, and I couldn’t be otherwise. Which left me exactly nowhere.

Ever since I’ve embarked on this internal journey, I find that I recognize my teachers when I meet them. I also find that I stumble across potential teachers more frequently, because I’m on the lookout. Stephen Cope, Sylvia Boorstein, Burt Visotzky. These extraordinary thinkers and teachers have crossed my path because I have allowed myself to be on a path where I might meet them. And in my openness to them, they have been open to me. An extraordinary piece of luck on my part. Would I ever have had the nerve to get to know these people? Would I ever have felt that I had the right? Would I have been willing or able to accept their grace and generosity towards me–without the handy excuse of a book I’m writing? I would like to think that I might have. But I know better. This book, much like the New Yorker piece I wrote years ago about my father’s secret past, is something I have been desperate to do, but too afraid to find out what would happen if I opened myself up to the possibilities.

At the beginning of the summer, I joined Rabbi Burt Visotzky for coffee on the Upper West Side. We met at Cafe Edgar, one of my favorite haunts and the place where, many years ago, I used sit for hours and hours talking about writing with one of the people who saved my life, the novelist Jerome Badanes. Jerry died suddenly and tragically of a heart attack in his mid-50’s, and every time I am in Cafe Edgar I think of him and his profound influence on my life. So there I was with my new Rabbi friend, and he was asking me about Devotion. It felt like layers of my life were in that room.

Devotion is part-memoir, part-journey, I said. A bit like a puzzle, or a quilt. I’m writing about where I come from, and how my Orthodox childhood impacted my life and coming to terms with a relevant, realistic, meaningful way of incorporating all the complicated bits. For instance, I just wrote a short chapter, a childhood memory about watching my father lay tefillin each weekday morning before he said his prayers.

Do you still have your father’s tefillin? Burt asked.

Yes, I said. Picturing a midnight-blue velvet pouch somewhere in my basement.

Have you ever put them on?

WHAT?

I felt like Burt had suggested something heretic. Something boundary-crossing and impossible. Put on my father’s tefillin?

But I’m a woman, I said. Stating the obvious.

Women have worn tefillin throughout history, Burt said. It’s written in the Talmud that Michal, wife of King David, put on tefillin and the sages did not rebuke her.

And so Burt made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

If you want, I will teach you, he said. And so, a few weeks later, in his small, book-lined office in the Jewish Theological Seminary, the brilliant Rabbi took a couple of hours out of his day to teach a spiritually yearning, still-grieving daughter to wear her father’s tallit and tefillin. I wrapped myself in the shawl of my father and said the blessings I had heard him say every morning of my childhood. I cried as I breathed in the musty scent of the fabric not worn in over twenty years. And though I knew that my father would be slightly horrified at a woman wearing a tallit and tefillin, I wondered if maybe he might also be just a tiny bit proud of his daughter, trying to find her way.

The Osteopath

Several times over the past six months, I’ve driven nearly an hour to the sweet little town of Sharon, Connecticut to pay a visit to an osteopath. I didn’t even know what an osteopath was (bone doctor?) but a friend of mine told me I had to go see this guy. I was waking up in the mornings with my jaw aching from clenching my teeth in my sleep. (Tension, anyone?) My friend promised me that the osteopath would cure me.

Here’s what happens during a typical visit. I lie on a table, and the osteopath holds my feet. Then, after about five minutes, he moves his hands–sometimes to my sacrum, or the middle of my spine, or my pelvis. Eventually, he ends up cradling my head, manipulating my jaw with a barely discernible pressure. And as I lie there, I fight my own resistance to the process. What is he doing? How can this possibly help? Hokum–pure hokum. Some kind of weird placebo effect. But then, after my cynical mind shuts up, I become aware that I am floating. Feeling…sort of amazing. Almost euphoric. Deeply relaxed. The rock-hard tension in my jaw has evaporated.

The other day, after he had finished working his magic, I asked the osteopath how it had happened: how was it possible that by lightly touching my feet, or my spine, or my head, he had cured me? It had been months since I’d woken up in the morning with an aching jaw.

Things get stuck, is what the osteopath said with a small shrug. All I do is guide the body to un-stick them.

Things get stuck. What a beautiful, perfect understatement. In all the reading I’ve been doing, and in my yoga practice, I know this to be true. Things get stuck in the body, and then we need to find ways to release them. Grief, memory, trauma, pain never go away. Our histories are alive inside of us, flowing like the tide. Just yesterday, Michael has been cleaning his office–years-worth of papers and letters and old photos surfacing–and he pulled out an envelope stuffed with the awful, tortured correspondence I had with my mother in the last years of her life. I started looking through the page and pages of faxes (yes, my mother communicated with me by fax) and letters, and felt it all going somewhere inside of me–to a place where all that lives. It’s not that I think of it every day. I don’t, not even remotely. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.

The Process

Sometimes a student, or a beginning writer, will tell me that she only writes when she feels inspired. I’ve given this a lot of thought–and practical application–over the years, and have come to the conclusion that if I only wrote when I felt inspired, I would have written, at the very most, one extremely slim volume by now. No. From the beginning, I have kept regular hours. Monday to Friday, 9-5, more or less. Weekends and holidays off. The idea of working in the middle of the night, or on a sunny Saturday, or on a holiday, makes me feel too out-of-step with the rest of the world. And, as a writer, I already feel out-of-step enough.

The process of writing Devotion, though, has been different thus far than any of my previous books. It’s very stop-start, push-pull. It’s by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Friends tell me that I say this about every book, but this time it’s true. The nature of this memoir/journey dictates that I be extremely solitary and quiet in order to do the writing, but at the same time live in the world and experience life to its fullest. I feel excruciatingly open–as if I have one less layer of skin than everyone around me. Sensitized, quivering, alert to every nuance. It’s sort of a great way to live, though some times it gets a bit too intense. But again, that’s the nature of this book. I’m traveling inward, diving deep into the middle of the middle of life, then trying to articulate what it is that I find there. Whoever said that’s supposed to be easy?

John Gregory Dunne once described writer’s block as a failure of nerve–nothing more, nothing less. Nothing mystical about it. When we write, it means that we have overcome our own fears, our own inner censoring voices, if only for that minute, that hour, that day. And then the minutes and hours and days pile up, they accrue, sticking to each other as they become weeks, months, years–stories, poems, novels, memoirs in the making. In writing Devotion, I am learning that anew. Each day, I overcome my resistance. I watch the self-defeating questions float through my mind: why me? what right do I have? why do I think I have anything to say about this that hasn’t already been said? On good days, I treat these questions the way I treat random thoughts during my meditation practice. Oh, yeah. You again. Okay. Thanks for sharing. Now go away.

Commotion

Samson arrived yesterday–twenty pounds of soft, furry puppy energy let loose on our usually calm home. We all seem to be adjusting. Michael was up at 5:30 in the morning walking him in the first light of dawn; Jacob and I were up at 7:00, walking him again; and Zeke doesn’t quite know what hit him.

On top of which, today begins the process of our driveway being redone–all quarter of a mile of it. That is, if the guys show up. This is perhaps the single most unsexy way to spend a lot of money–up there with re-doing a septic system. But the small bit of crumbling gravel in the center of our driveway has grown larger with each passing year, and has now become a man-eating pothole. So we have to do it. Instead of…a tennis court. Instead of…those mid-century modern chairs I’ve been keeping my eye on, we’re getting a quarter mile of asphalt. Here’s the driveway. If you look closely you can see the pothole, along with a deer.

All of which is to say, it’s probably not going to be much of a writing day–or a writing week, for that matter. The holiday weekend is coming up, along with its parties and house guests and barbecues. Not Writing is usually an incredibly frustrating state for me, and so I’m resolving to live my life and enjoy these moments: a new puppy, a new driveway, a healthy and thriving family getting ready for a new school year. As I am always aware: it could have been otherwise.

Friends and Animals

I have quite a few writer friends, and quite a few blogger friends, but the ones who really put me to shame are my writer friends who regularly keep up their blogs. I know, I know, I’m working on a new book. But so are they! I know, I know, I’m also a mother trying to get her kid ready to go back to school–but so are they! This morning, as I paid my usual visit to their witty, up-to-the-minute blogs, I resolved to blog more often myself. Really. I know I’ve said that before, but I mean it this time.

Jacob’s back from camp. During a single bout of homesickness midway through the two weeks (it turns out that there’s a reason camps don’t like parents to call or visit) I had what felt like a eureka moment. It went like this:

“Honey, would you like to take Fudge, the bunny, home with you at the end of camp?”
Jacob turned to me, a smile lighting up.
Michael stared at me over Jacob’s head, as if to say excuse me, but what-the-&%$#-are you thinking?

Here is a picture of Jacob right after we promised him Fudge, the bunny. In the upper right hand corner, you can see a little bit of the bunny’s behind.

After returning home, my eureka moment faded. A bunny? What was I thinking, indeed. We have a terrier. Terriers are bred to kill small, rodent-like creatures. And besides, in the words of my most animal-loving friend, bunnies suck. So I thought and I thought. I had promised Jacob the bunny, hadn’t’t I? How could I break a promise like that? I needed to come up with something better, something bigger than the bunny. And so, the second week of Jacob’s stay at sleep away camp, I spent a lot of time on the internet looking up various other possibilities. The end result? Well, we’re picking him up tomorrow. Meet Samson. The newest addition to our family. And here’s hoping that Fudge the bunny has found a happy, terrier-free home.

Bittersweet

So my son Jacob, age 9, has now been at sleep away camp for a full week, and I have been on an emotional roller coaster. On the one hand, yippee!!! It has been fun, kind of exciting, to be able to go out in the evening (or stay home) without a ticking clock. We’ve stayed up late, watched movies, had dinner out with friends without even a downward glance at a wristwatch. And mornings have been lovely. I’ve never been a morning person, and motherhood did not change that. It changed my habits, but not my nature. Waking up in the quiet (as opposed to being shaken awake to hear the news of last night’s Red Sox scores) has been a bit of a vacation. And one more thing: this newfound space in my head has been very good for my work. I’m writing like a demon, and I feel like I have my book in my grasp. A fantastic feeling, and one I haven’t felt in a very long time. I’m holding the whole thing in my head. I can’t hold my child in my head and my book in my head at the same time, so my brain is usually in a state of whiplash. Child, book. Book, child. But knowing that he’s at camp, that he’s having the time of his life on someone else’s watch, has made my brain settle down, like sediment floating to the bottom of a clear glass of water. Book, book, book.

But…and you knew there was a but coming by the title of this post…it’s a bittersweet feeling. I suppose this is what motherhood is: an endless series of leave-takings, of two people learning to let go. From the moment he left my body, he has been letting go and I have been letting go. First, weaning him. Then, leaving him with a babysitter for the very first time. Pre-school. Kindergarten. Sleep-overs. And now, two weeks where he is on his own. Is he brushing his teeth? Showering? Is he as happy as he sounds on the phone? Have I taught him well enough to make his way in the world of sleep away camp without his parents hovering?

We’ll see in a little while. We’re going to visit him today, half-way through his two weeks. We’ll bring candy (upon pain of death), we’ll see what he’s been working on in this creative arts camp, we’ll have lunch with him–and then we’ll hug good bye. Michael and I will drive away, back down the dirt road. We’ll be happy and sad. Excited for him, nostalgic, but with a twinge of unease. Keep him safe, I will think to no one in particular. Have fun, take care, be well.

When I get back home, I will stand in the doorway of his empty (neat, clean) room. I’ll take a deep breath, wipe the tears from my eyes, and then I’ll walk through our quiet house, both relishing the quiet and longing for the sound of small feet running.

A Room of One’s Own

Since this blog is named after a favorite Virginia Woolf book, Moments of Being, and since so much of what I understand about life I learned from the great VW, I find myself moved–not for the first time–to consider the importance of a room of one’s own. Mostly because, at the moment, I don’t have one.

Crazy, I know. I think that my single best writing situation was during the writing of my first novel, Playing With Fire. Just as early success can be a curse, having the perfect writing room at the age of twenty-six can also be its own kind of curse–since that particular writing room (or anything like it) will probably never again exist in my life. For six years, I lived on the top floor of The Dakota, famously on the corner of Seventy-Second and Central Park West. (My reasons for living in The Dakota are too surreal and unlikely to chronicle here. For the curious, it’s all explained in my memoir Slow Motion.) Anyway…the top floor of The Dakota had once been the servants quarters of the building. I recently heard that these rooms are selling for literally millions of dollars. But back in the 1980’s I lived in a string of such rooms, approximating a railroad flat, with my little Yorkshire terrier Gus, and a very nice struggling actor-waiter boyfriend. A friend of mine, owner of a palatial apartment on a floor down below, happened to have an extra room (an extra room!) on the top floor that he had forgotten all about. He lent it to me. It was perhaps twenty paces down the hall from my apartment. Every morning, while still in my pajamas, I trotted down the hall with Gus, coffee mug in hand, and settled into my spartan room, furnished only with a desk and a chair. There was no internet–or if there was, I didn’t yet know about it. There was no phone. I didn’t yet have children, and so saw no need to be reachable at all times. The window overlooked the interior courtyard of The Dakota, a glorious, cavernous space unlike almost any other in the city. Across the courtyard, a man who kept a similar schedule to me also worked in his warren on the top floor. He kept his window open in all but the most freezing weather, and his cigarette smoke drifted outside. I never met him, or knew his name, but in his own way, he kept me company.

Leaving home, walking a few steps away while still in pajamas, to a blank slate of a room with no possible intrusion of the outside world–it was a little bit of bliss I was too young to appreciate. Now–a scary number of years later–as I write this, I am sitting in Starbucks in Southbury, Connecticut. Around me are other people working on laptops, as well as moms with young children who make me all too aware that I am not, at the moment, with my own child. The music is okay–not too intrusive. But lord knows, it isn’t a room of my own.

Of course, I could rent an office. I have rented offices in the past. In fact, Michael and I have a two-bedroom apartment in the town near our house where he works, and where theoretically I should be working too. But the truth is, it isn’t a room of my own. It’s a room with my husband with whom–love him as I do–I cannot share work space. The place I work from–the blank slate–requires a kind of anonymity. It doesn’t necessarily require silence, or even solitude. But I do need to be able to forget that my domestic life exists, even for just a few hours. Strangely enough, lately I have been working quite well at home. I’ve cleared my desk so that camp/doctor/school forms are not in direct view. I have moved the pile of invitations and correspondence to the side. So when I sit at my desk, I am closer to the blank slate, and with a little bit of luck and tenacity, usually I can push myself to the place I need to be.