Sorry to have been away so long. I’ve been too busy making excuses. The stack under the hall table is long gone. All the books are downstairs in the old rec room, which I’m planning on turning into a library/study. Spent yesterday evening tearing away about a third of the wood paneling that’s been on those walls since before I was born. I have visions for what to do with this great space, but no expertise. I hope I’ll be more diligent about it than I’ve been with this blog.
The Immensity of the Here and Now is at the print-on-demand company. I should have 75 review copies pretty soon (another week). Website to follow, provided my buddy John’s able to update voyantpub.com.
Got to show off my lack of Jewish observance, the past two weekends. First, I was invited to Sabbath dinner two Fridays ago by the family that hosted me on Passover. The father’s an American-Israeli rabbi; the mother’s Yemeni. They have 5 kids. Their Judaism is an ecstatic process, filled with impromptu singing and a love of God.
The mother seems to be obsessed with “making an honest Jew out of me;”thus the invite to Shabbat. I warned her that I’m not a very good Jew. Though I can transliterate, I can’t read quickly, and don’t remember very many prayers from my childhood at Hebrew school. More to the point, as I said to her, “There are much better ways to start a 25-hour period of rest and contemplation than by going from New Jersey to the upper east side on a Friday night.”
But I went, met some eligible women I wasn’t too interested in, bantered wittily, prayed, and ate. It was a lovely evening, but I felt like an alien, just like I did at Passover. Not because of anything they did, but because of a certain social ineptitude that I have. I have this real problem with just Letting Myself Go in company. When the people broke into song, slapping rhythms against the long wooden table, I found my back growing stiff and I felt out of place.
This isn’t only a function of being around devout Jews. Last fall, at my friends’ parents’ farm-house up in Granville, NY, I found myself weirdly withdrawn when the other 5 or 6 people at the house began “percussing”with all manner of drums and other instruments (NOT in a Robert Bly drum circle kinda way, mind you). They fell into each other’s rhythms so easily, I was flummoxed as to why I couldn’t get into it. And, of course, the moment you start thinking, you start over-thinking. (One of the few times, in fact, that I was able to get over this stuff was at a party held by the same friends (John & Liz), where I got wrecked, and bongo-ed my way through a couple of songs on Stop Making Sense. Who needs to think when your feet just go?)
This Saturday, I was invited over to a Shabbat/Shavuot lunch, at the home of a girl from high school, whom I’d only seen once since 1989. A far-left, non-religious, suburban Jew back then, she had transformed in the intervening years. At our 10-year reunion, we learned that she’d become an observant Jew (I hesitate to use the word “orthodox,”as it conjures stereotypical images of black hats) and wouldn’t be showing up that Saturday evening until an hour or so after sunset.
(I should point out, by the way, that I LOVE reunions for exactly that reason. It’s not simply the catching up with old friends that I enjoy, but the completely unexpected curve-balls you get thrown at you, like Dorothy becoming Devorah, or Greg the football thug becoming a hypnotherapist. I don’t think my career is particularly shocking to old acquaintances (everyone assumed I’d be “a writer,”), but my willingness to live in a quiet suburban world might freak them out a little.)
Anyway, Dorothy/Devorah invited me to her Shabbat lunch, where she and I talked for probably the first time. We didn’t get along back in high school. We corresponded a few times, following the 10-year reunion, but not extensively. So, when I began telling my stories, revealing the curious histories of my family, she was surprised. It’s a cliche, of course, to think that your life is completely normal, but I really did go many years assuming everyone had tales of immigration and “old country”stories that entailed six or seven old countries. It’s only been in recent years that I’ve realized these stories are exotic little treasures for average Americans.
What happened to the immigrant spirit? The more time I spend in that aforementioned quiet suburban world, the more it seems like people only have stories of their own pasts, that they’ve lost the stories of ancestors overseas.
Maybe it’s part of being a first-generation American, but I can’t really get in the mindset of people who had American parents. It’s a foreign experience to me (ha-ha), not having people who Came Here. But then, that’s sorta why our family went to see the Cosmos, not the Yankees, when I was a kid.
I’m rambling, but any of you who’ve ever spoken to me know that this is pretty mild, as far my rambles go. I’ll go into more details of Saturday’s lunch later.