Dwelling in Possibility

Crying Weather and Crying Times

I am living in a Facebook moment this morning.  Many of my friends are posting tributes to the lion of the folk world, Pete Seeger, who died last night. It is clear that my FB friends and I are cut from the same cloth – a cloth in which we were weaned on Seeger and the Guthries and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Dylan … the list goes on. It was music that could lead you to think, to act, to protest. Pete Seeger was one of the first musical voices of my youth, and he made me think I could make the world a better place.

I am having a hard time concentrating, because all I want to do is sing “If I Had A Hammer,” and “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” over and over again. And cry.

But there are actually many other reasons why my concentration is shot.

It’s 10 degrees out – again – and I am once again wrapped in layers of wool, feeling trapped inside and as blue as the sky is gray.

It has been a really trying couple of weeks, with illness and death perching on my front steps over and over again. Within the course of a week, both my husband’s father and my father have been hospitalized, with near brushes. We are feeling nervous, vulnerable and unable to predict the future.

The mother of a close friend died last week, and I was unable to get to New York for the funeral and shiva. Her mom was one of the people who, in my teenage years, reached out to me and held me in her embrace with love and affection, when it felt like my family was falling apart. I haven’t seen her in years, but I miss her already.

Someone we’ve known for many years – who is our age – has fallen ill and is now undergoing chemo. We are saying prayers, but with no trust in their impact.

My sister had a clean scan – always a cause for a small huzzah. After two bouts with early stage breast cancer, she is a survivor, and for that I am grateful. But each year it lurks, taunting us, making us wonder if there will be something more chilling to fight down the road.

Loehmann's Lament

(Yes, another paean to that discount designer clothing mecca in the sky.)

My first Loehmann’s memory is of the scary communal dressing room – isn’t everyone’s?  Florescent lights highlighting every lump and bump of the enormous Russian ladies from Brighton Beach tugging themselves into skintight dresses, with their tummies overhanging their girdles and their girdles sitting sausage-like on their thighs, which were rolling onto their knees.

Then there were the Caribbean and the African women, their dark skin a stark contrast to the pasty whiteness of the beach crowd (who clearly had only sat in the shade under enormous umbrellas at Brighton Beach Baths and clucked their tongues at anyone who actually wore a bathing suit to the beach.)

The Caribbean and African women could mostly walk to Loehmann’s; it sat centrally in the neighborhood that had long ago given up its Jewish roots and became a hodgepodge of working class people of all colors. These women liked to wear color! Festooned with bright, festive dresses, they would twirl around the mirrors and talk to each other in rapid patois and high, lilting voices.

Then there were the Jewish ladies. The ones who remembered the Loehmann’s of their own youth, whose battle scars from the dressing room were hard-earned and long-worn. They traveled in from the Island, and maybe even Westchester, before Loehmann’s became a chain. They knew where to get an Oleg Cassini suit at half price; an Yves Saint Laurent jacket a third off. They would hold onto their precious cargo for decades, toting them out for the requisite bar mitzvahs and weddings in Great Neck.

And of course, who could forget the husbands?  The poor husbands, of every shape, size and color, sitting in the front of the store, in the comfortable chairs Loehmann’s had generously provided for them, wishing they were anywhere but there.

Philosophy 101 at 50

I’m no philosopher, but I’ve found myself pondering questions of great consequence of late. Not sure if it’s middle age agita, which, while a lifetime away from teenage angst, is still rife with questions that seemingly have no answer (you’re just not as likely to write maudlin poems about them.) Or if it’s merely watching my children grow, sprout wings and suddenly leap, learning how to fly along the way.  In either case, I am consumed with the great questions of life these days. 

What is my purpose?

What happens next?

What will I accomplish before I die?

The death one is particularly loud and penetrating in my ears. Maybe it's because I was weaned on Woody Allen, but I have found the question of my own mortality to be clinging to me almost constantly. Not so much in a morbid way, but as an almost-constant companion, a prism which overlays much of what I do and see. As in: I will not always be here; I must appreciate the quotidian moments of life.  The lines from the Mary Oliver poem, “Mindful,” describe it perfectly:

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight

This is how I want to live each day.  To be killed by delight. I like its oxymoronic ideal.

I attended a synagogue service today. The rabbi gave a sermon on the existential issue of fate versus destiny, and how free will impacts them both. She concluded that fate is the hand we’re dealt – into what time and place we are born, our gender, our parents, our physical characteristics – while destiny is what we choose to do with it.

Choose life, she implored. Free will is our ticket to life on this earth.

Heavy stuff, especially for the bat mitzvah girl that morning, who was probably thinking more about her friends and her party. Never the less, it made me ponder my choices over the past year, all of which have changed my life and the lives of those around me dramatically.