I’m the victim of a collateral love experience.
The love that tears through the space around,
tries to connect and disassemble
people sitting around and
behind me.
I’m caught in the love bomb.
Irradiated.
Stabbed with shards
with melodies
that tear into my shoulder, my
back, my knees. The
walls buckle as the wave bounces.
My wife is there too. At my side.
And she feels it
burst through the room, along
with the singer’s smile.
She feels the love that wasn’t
meant for us
at least not just for us
the love aimed
at the back of the wall.
We collapse into it.
We break together.
As the theater lights
blink on.
It might be that my exterior melted a bit last year
that it’s shinier now, more like fiberglass, which I hadn’t noticed to be honest
until just last week.
That it’s a little more weather resistant, which is nice.
More sun proofed. Akin to the skin
of a sailboat — a sunfish sailboat like the one
my dad wanted to buy when I was a teen, and he was in his forties,
when we took that class about
tying knots.
I used to pride myself on my permeable skin.
I would chat with you
we would chat about this or that, and through our chat
I would find myself replenished.
My roots. My happy roots.
But now things bead up on me sometimes.
I look down at my legs, at my hands and I see water beads
I shake off those beads and I think
this is a way that I may have changed
a bit last year.
Eggs, today!
I like to make fried eggs — I like the experience, putting a little chilli on them, putting the cover on to cook them top down. I like flipping them and I like not flipping them. I find the whole thing much more pleasing than scrambling eggs, but don’t get me wrong. I also like scrambling eggs.
Anyways on this particular day — let’s call it “yesterday” — I cracked my first egg perfectly and put it in a small bowl. The idea was to keep it separate from the second egg in case catastrophe struck and I broke the yolk. Safety first, right?
I cracked the second egg in its own bowl, and — yoinks! Broken yolk. Sad but resilient, I tossed the second egg, and cracked the third, and double-yoinks on the third egg! I tossed the third. I cracked the fourth, and again, there was something off in my technique. Too much vigor? Ruined! Tossed!
And here, the twist: I reached into the fridge to get more eggs, to complete my perfect pair-of-soon-to-be fried eggs. And yet. And yet.
There were no more eggs.
Left with just one egg now — well who wants just one fried egg? Perhaps you do, and if so, I wish I had made you one. But not me. I’m all about two eggs. So I tossed my one good egg.
And here’s the lesson learned: Had I not tossed the second — perhaps just made a scramble, I would have had a lovely egg snack. Had I checked the fridge before tossing the second, and third, and yes fourth, I would have had a lovely egg snack.
But I had no lovely egg snack. Only two bowls to clean. And a banana, slightly bruised.
What just happened:
Some sections are easier to relate to than others. And then there was this week’s parsha. Two years ago there wouldn’t have been much to work with here. This year it read like a practical and super relevant how-to guide for people learning to live together, when living together means living with disease.
Since the first person figured out how to have a neighbor and not eat them, we’ve been trying to make this live-together-thing work. We’ve had better centuries and we’ve had worse ones. But show me another mammal that can live in 30-story buildings packed with neighbors above, below, on all sides, millions of souls going up and down elevators, shopping, making a nice brisket, and mostly not killing each other.
And don’t say poodles. Poodles are terrible at making brisket.
So what can we learn from Leviticus’ advice on living with leprosy, and perhaps more importantly, living with lepers?
Of possible note:
The Torah asks us to trust the Levites. Interestingly, they aren’t making religious judgments. They’re just… being trustworthy. Worthy of trust. Because having trusted leadership is not optional when people start getting sick.
It turns out that quarantining is a helpful option. Good to know.
We don’t burn the sick or blame the sick. And we don’t pretend the sick aren’t really that sick. If we think someone’s sick, we keep them away from the herd, to keep the herd whole.
And we ask the sick to do their part too — to the small things they can to stop or slow the spread. Because the basic idea is, we’re all in this together. And if we stay calm and kind, if we have trusted leaders, if each do our part, maybe we’ll all get through this together too.
What just happened:
This was a big one — the laws of kashrut (aka how to be kosher), including surprising news about bunnies and bats!
Of possible note:
The gestures, the rituals, the blood, the burning — I had never thought of it this way before, but today it really struck me how much these directions felt like spells and incantations, a pinch of this and a dash of that… And of course, follow them to the T if you want to avoid the fate of Nadab and Abihu. (Spoiler: you want to avoid the fate of Nadab and Abihu.)
For a book filled with people who live in gray moral spaces, who are more human than paragons, the Torah sometimes draws awfully sharp lines. There’s the sacred and the profane. There are animals you can eat, and animals that are abominations. There aren’t many animals for example, that I wouldn’t recommend you eat, I’m mean they’re kind of gamey, but suit yourself.
Speaking of kind of gamey, who knew bunnies aren’t kosher? Clearly not my beloved Aunt Ruth. Likewise, who knew that bats were birds? Total curveball, that.
Curveballs aside, a wise fellow reader pointed out to me that all these rules, these details, create a life infused with reminders of the sacred. Which made me wonder what I might do to add a little more sacred to my day to day.
Fingers slow tonight from
extra age, blown into my hands.
The wind’s extra fierce tonight.
So I sat by the lid of the fire pit
after we switched it off
in the cold tonight,
sat in the dark tonight and watched
the fire pit lid go from
hot to not so.
I don’t want to be Mrs. Leary’s Cow tonight, I thought.
Or Mrs. Leary. I don’t want to be
the lantern the cow kicked over
or Chicago burning after Mrs. Leary
went inside to watch Trevor Noah.
So I stayed and sat and watched the lid tonight
watched while the wind
blew my fingers
back to 1871
a date I plucked from Wikipedia tonight
where I also learned
the whole Mrs. Leary story was a lie.
In Generic World you go to local
Hospital, and they say: “Welcome to Hospital,”
and you can feel that capital letter, like they
extra-mean it.
You have a problem with one of
your organs, and they say:
“Organ Problem!”
And you nod your head.
“Let’s get that taken care of,”
they say with Teeth.
Doctor tries to help you. Nurse checks Vitals.
You fade out, and Organ does too.
Afterward, you lie there in your bed at night
listening to your roommate share
complaints about his pain and
the uneven road
that got him here, in this bed, beside you
talking through this curtain late at night.
There’s nothing generic happening at midnight.
At midnight everything is very clear and specific,
all the way to the tips of your fingers, the rough touch
of the bandage you press against to figure out
if you’re healing well.
If they put you back.
Around 1:30, the conversation settles down.
You drink your juice.
You close your eyes.
He gave me back my hard drives today
by the pond by the geese
by the free-range 3-year-olds who
don’t even know what “pandemic” means.
By their moms who don’t trust the geese, don’t trust
the two old(er) guys at the picnic table
with matching gray streaked
beards handing
a box
between them.
Wordless very much
like the cold warriors
they are.
They are cold. We are cold.
It’s a cold day.
I want to shake the box and the hard drives
and let all the
photos and movies of my kids
as kids rain down, coat my hair
like pixel dust with their music videos and
the sound files we kept of their
toddler voices with
New York accents
my beloved
lost characters from
“Our Gang.”
We put our masks back on when people move close.
Slip them over, up over our mouths.
We talk about how we’re still
making time for creative projects.
He can’t help me with my drives.
He has to work on his script.
I can’t read his script. I need to work on my poems.
We both need to work.
We sound like two people talking about how
the stores are closing soon,
and if we want to buy that shirt
those slacks, that stylish hat
we’ll need to get it in gear and
head to the mall.
We’re out in the morning
driving down 8th street after the rain
looking for coffee in a favorite neighborhood
trying to figure out if this store or that cafe
made it through the night.
I’m expecting to see palm fronds in the street
sandy-colored mutts running at an angle
cars and cans tipped over
telling the rest of us to be quiet be quiet
while they try to
sleep it off.
A hurricane
came through town these last 13 months
there was a
hurricane in town, touching down,
and we’re out and about in the morning now
driving through the next-day sun.
The street’s wet from 13 months of
when’s it gonna end
and we’re looking around for coffee and
an old rhythm.
Looking down streets
and in windows
to see who’s still here.
