Wee Tales of my Life

Kikarun, er hat ayn pintel affen nas!

That’s what they said, the boys and girls next door, the religious ones, with their peyot flying and their tsitsit hanging out.  Look, he has a point on his nose.  That was me, with my blue dot on the side of my nose.

I don’t know why it fascinated them.  You could hardly see it.  I never thought about it unless people pointed it out, like those religious kids.

How did it get there?  Nobody else had one.  None of the boys in my class or the gang that played games on the street.  It didn’t matter to them. 

Not even my parents talked about it, or other relatives, like grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts or the close friends of my parents who were just like members of the family.  They had other funny stories about when I was a baby and a toddler.  But nothing about my blue dot, the mysterious pintel affen nas.

Though nobody talked about, I somehow knew why it was there.

I fell and almost poked my eye out, if the point of the blue pencil had just been a half inch higher and to the left slightly. 

Surely, someone must have noticed, if I cried out in pain.  My mother, all alone, since my father had departed for the war, would have panicked or called a doctor.  The next day or so someone surely would have given me a warning to be careful about such things. 

But only those religious children next door, with their melodious chant, kikaru, kikarun, they sang, er hat a pintel affen nas.

The Fatal Brew

I was studying for the end of term exams.  I propped myself up on the bed with three pillows, leaned over my books, read and occasionally scribbled notes on a large yellow legal pad, the kind I loved to use.  From time to time, I dipped the pen into the water-glass on the desk beside the bed.  On the other wise, the bed was empty, as my room-mate had gone home for the long weekend Thanksgiving holiday.  I had stayed behind to put in extra hours of study. 

Almost no one else was left in the dormitories, both male and female.  Anyone who might have changed his or her mind, well, they were out of luck.  The blizzard had come, and now the little village where the college nestled in its valley, was closed off from the outside world. 

I was able to concentrate completely, barely looking up as I dipped my pen into the water, shook it dry, and drew in some other colour ink.  I liked to vary the colours as I scribbled my notes.  No particular scheme for different themes or approaches.  Just to rbeak the page up.  Dip, shake, and draw in red or green or black.  Hour after hour.  Page after page.

Then I knew I was beyond drowsy.  My eyes could hardly stay open.  My brain seemed heavy and thick.  It was surely time for sleep.

I changed into pyjamas, glanced over the notes, and took a sip of water.

And another sip and lay down ready for sleep.

But suddenly my eyes opened.  What had I done?  I had emptied the glass on the desk, the mixture of various inks.  It must have been poison, though there had been no particular odour or taste.  A whole glassful of ink.

Instead of panicking or crying out for help, I relaxed.  No use fighting what was inevitable.  If this was to be my end, then so be it. 

Alone, isolated, out of reach of any aid, I lay back, closed my eyes, and waited for the final sleep to come over me.

‘Twas a Dark and Gloomy Night

The snow had been falling all day.  More than falling, it had swept across the road horizontally, occasionally from the side but often directly at us, with the windscreen wipers barely able to carve out a space through which to see.  My father insisted on driving, even though he no more experience of such conditions than I. 

He drove cautiously, slowly onwards, at 70 mph and then 65 mph and now 60 mph while around us, from either side, other vehicles and heavy trucks hurtled forward to pass our car.  They may have been familiar with these highways and driven through blizzards before, but still it was crazy, especially when the darker it became the more blinding headlights streaked up to us and then went by, making our car shudder with the pressure. 

We were somewhere in Ohio and heading towards Missouri.  It was late October and this was an early storm, unexpected, not warned in the AAA triptik maps we had received two days before.  The wind howled.  The snow fell.  The traffic kept coming at us and passing us, all out of the darkness.  It seemed a long time since there was any road signs, any indication of where we were and how far we might have to go to find a motel for the night or a café for a little hot food and a rest at least.

Neither of us said anything.  The tension, however, was palpable.  And the hours dragged by.  It would not be long, too, before we would need to find a gas station and fill up.

At the beginning of the trip I asked to share the driving but my father said no: he wouldn’t feel safe.  An insult, but he was my father.  I was only twenty-two.  He was taking me to Saint Louis to return to my first year of graduate school.  He insisted on driving me all the way, so he could see where I lived, meet my friends, and look around the university.  My mother was still too ill and weak to travel. 

Occasionally we would see a car or a small truck stuck in the drifts on the side of the road.  Then my father would slow down even more.  We had been driving all day, with one brief stop for gas and lunch.  We were now going at 50 mph, even 45 mph or less, and still traffic would zoom towards us or pass us, honking their horns. 

The headlights provided nothing better than a few feet of vision.  The snow was more like long needles or arrows of ice.  We were inching along.  Crawling.  Then we stopped altogether.  Nothing could be seen at all.  A white darkness all around.  We sat and waited for something to happen. 

Eventually the night passed.

At the End of Time

In the movies, the elevator shudders, the cable breaks, and the car begins to fall: then the screen goes red.

On the radio, someone shouts, Stop! there is the sound of squealing breaks, then Whopp! and everything goes silent.  After a while, you can hear the murmuring of policemen and ambulance drivers.  Then silence again.

In the distance, there is a rumbling and a roar.  I feel a bump.  My mind goes blank.

An Afternoon in LAX: A Good Way to Waste an Afternoon

The notices on the flight board turn and turn, and the latest news is that my flight will be delayed at least another hour.  That means two hours to waste.

I walk down the long corridor again, stand next to the left luggage with its row on row of  boxes to rent, each with a key waiting to receive enough coins to give you some relief from carrying your luggage.  I lean against the wall.

Someone waves.  It is a middle-aged woman behind a counter marked Travellers Friend.  I walk up to her.  She smiles.  She tells me there is a bus that goes all around the airport, stopping at each airline’s building.  You can waste an hour or so, and you can sit down too.  Good chance to look around. 

What the heck, I think.

I get in the bus and sleepily look at the travellers who get on and off, who stand with their luggage, who check their watches.  The bus goes on, stops, and then moves around.

In the distance I hear sirens.

The sounds get louder.

We come around to the place where I first got on.  There  is a commotion.  Fire engines, police cars, ambulances.  Crowds of people standing across the road watching.

The left luggage compartments are twisted and black are blackened.  The desk where the Travellers Friend desk stood has broken into several pieces and is charred.  The woman is not there.

New Sayings for the End of the Old Year

Random Aphorisms, Apothegms, and Proverbs

I am here to keep the Christ out of Christmas, put the fun in Fundamentalism, and enjoy the sin in Synagogue.

Ecopalians have had the piss scared out of them.

A British publishing house should be established with offices on the Scilly Isles and in Gigglewick.  I would gladly work for it.

To improve the contents of your mind you need seychel, so go to the Seychelle Islands.

They’re all mishuggah in Michigan.

Mind the company you keep when your business goes into liquidation.

Never believe your enemy when he says he wants to kill you: he doesn’t mean it—it’s just rhetoric.  

Always believe the worst about your friends because you can’t trust them.  Why? because you know them too well.  Besides, my enemy’s enemy must be my enemy too.

They used to say that to be a Jew you had to know that the whole world was wrong in what it said about Judaism, even if it made you squirm to believe yourself paranoid.  But now we know the rest of the world is paranoid.  You have to squirm even more.

I thought you were dead years ago.  Now you emerge, it seems, from under some rock, where you absorbed the primeval sludge, and write such an anti-Semitic screed. Better you had stayed hidden.

No matter how far you run, you always take yourself along.  Sometimes, like a shadow at noon, it disappears in the bright sunlight, and at night, in the darkness, it hides in waiting for a single lamp or candle to jump out at us.  At such times, it is hard to know who you are.

Ordinary people make pious general statements about human nature and the evolution of moral customs, whereas they are at best describing a small group of their friends in the last several decades, or perhaps their own families when they were children.  They know little of how others lived two or three hundred years ago, let alone hundreds of thousands, and certainly not about the origins of human consciousness, language or society.  It would be foolish to try to correct them.

d sentences, as though they were reading scripts, and scripts translated from misunderstood foreign languages? One says that it is because it is to give an effect of the old-fashioned.  Another because people actually spoke that way.  A third because to our ears, unused already to formal speech and discourses adjusted to diverse levels of occasion, find ourselves estranged from the recent past of our grandparents and great-grandparents, as though they lived in another universe of ideas and feelings.

I do not remember young children squealing and screeching so much in the past.  Nor every baby you saw in the street had a dummy stiffed in its mouth sucking away like a mad creature. No wonder so many adolescents drink themselves into silliness at such an early age.

Once not too long ago, a bookshop held an Alice in Wonderland tea party in the afternoon.  M any young children were there with their parents; no one fussed or bothered.  A group of young adults, dressed in appropriate costumes, walked among them, passing out platters of sliced cake and cups of tea.  For a few hours, in a small space, the world seemed surprisingly civilized.  By the next day, to be sure, everything reverted to chaos and madness.

“Why do you write books?” she said, as she agonized over the page layouts.  “Isn’t the process too much at your age?”  I answered as best I could, unwilling to say I would be dead if writing were impossible. “You never get reviews. The sales are meagre. Only a few dozen friends send email to comment on what you do.”  “Yes, that’s it,” I said.  “I write for them.”  “Well, then,” she said, “next time, let me know before, so I can set everything up for you.”

Sparrows flutter in the branches waiting for me to throw them bread.  I crumble several slices and toss it out on the grass.  They flutter down.  One or two start to chew away small bits.  One or two fly off with their morsels. A cluster hop from crumb to crumb, not sure where to turn and peck.  Three black birds dance around, back off, dart in to take their share.  Three white eyes sneak in undeterred.  When everything is almost gone, the tui swoops down, takes his portion and returns to the tree.  After they have disappeared, I put off the litter from the kitchen floor and watch a few brave souls come in for a late breakfast.

Everyone, it is said, believes he has made the most important discovery which for some reason or other everyone else missed out on, and worse that no one dares to recognize.  Even those whose work leads them to fame and fortune are supposed to wonder if they are not shams and why everyone else is foolish enough to take their explanations seriously.  It would be better, the pundits aver, to wait a few hundreds of years to see what posterity will make of us all.  The trouble is, not that we will never know, but that we actually do: since why should the future treat us differently than we do the failed great thinkers and the would-artists of today?

On the dumbing down of society: I don’t know what it means? There is too much clatter and squeaking to understand what they are saying. 

The destruction of Palmyra: evil, pure and simple.

There are four calamities and five miracles in life.  The four calamities: (1) the realization we cannot have everything we want; (2) the shock of seeing that we cannot become all we want to be; (3) the disappointment when those closest and dearest do not understand your hopes and ambitions or your disappointments and frustrations; and (4) the acceptance of your fate.  The five miracles: (1) the joy of being alive, (2) the understanding that the sun will probably arise and you will be awake and conscious the next day; (3) the acceptance that most pains, humiliations and unfulfilled dreams will fade away in the course of time; and (4) the pleasure in knowing that everything you suffer eventually comes to an end; and (5) the knowledge that no matter what anyone else says, they too will be forgotten.

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When they push you in the ovens, said my grandmother, they don’t give you a quiz on the laws of kashrut: for I had asked what we believe as Jews.  Now when they run you down in the streets of Jerusalem, they don’t ask your views of Maimonides’s commentaries on Holy Writ, nor do they inquire whether you attend synagogue regularly or at all. But when you attempt to speak at a politically-correct university, they investigate your views on the Palestinian Question, and then exclude you anyway because you hesitated to agree to your own murder.

Flowers and wreaths were placed for memorials of those who were once loved and honoured, but now balloons, pinwheels and little fluffy dolls, as though our grief and sadness has been dumbed down.  Mourning has become infantile.

Morose, stodgy and implacable in his ideas, Schopenhauer cuts a sad figure, hardly worthy of our respect. The more I read about him the less I find to pity.

Cobalt and indigo make wonderful shades of blue.  But nothing is evident at the beginning in the ore or the plant, and only long and complicated processes prepare the colour for use in the making of cloth, porcelain or anything else.  How did our ancestors discover what to do?  Did the ritual use and mythical meaning of such blues arise in the alchemy of their preparation, or were they first dreamt as premonitions of beauty and spirit?

When the eyes in a Classical or Renaissance painting stare out at us from a museum wall, obliterating centuries and great distances, do they envy our nonchalance and misunderstanding?

In the Dominican Republic, there is a village where virtually everyone is born a girl, and only later in adolescence do the signs of manhood appear in some.  It happens without choice but by now not unexpectedly.  For some of the adults later their female names continue, as well as sensitivity and softness, but not homosexual desires.  For some perhaps there is a nostalgia for the original condition.

I keep noticing how birds behave in the yard when I throw them crumbs of bread.  Some sparrows bounce about unable to find what they know must be there by past experience.  Sometimes they stand on the bread unaware of what is going on.  They wait until some other member of the flock begins to peck and only then recognize the object as food.  They push aside their fellow and start to eat.  Others have learned to fly away with as large a piece as they can handle, hide under a bush, and eat alone.  Smaller birds, like white eyes,  come later and search for fragments in the grass.  Last of all, the big black birds hop up the kitchen door to remind me I should service them as well.  Do they wonder what happens in the big nest I live in?

A line of elephants crosses the plain.  They pass a jumble of bones.  The larger, older elephants surround the skeletons, gently run their trunks on the bleached bones, and seem to dream in a sad way.  The naturalist tells us they recognize their ancestors, as though they had memories revived by the sight and feel of these ancient remnants.  Memory of the past is one thing, to be sure: the momento mori as a sign of death.  But do these elephants see in their own selves and fellows something under the surface of their skin?