Units of Quantification
I got older this week and the universe delivered.
Look at this extraordinary sunflower I saw outside my public library branch. Regard the exquisite and fine detail. It reminds me a little of an artichoke heart.
I had a thought earlier today, when I was watering my little garden patch. My tomato plants are thriving, after a fashion. They’re tall and strong for the most part, sturdy and rooted. But they’ve yielded very little fruit. The two plants of cherries appear en route to providing a handful of produce, but the plants that tower over them that are supposed to yield heirlooms of some sort or other seem barren.
Is it a metaphor for my job search? I apply. I tell people who might know someone. I float in the seawater and beseech the universe. And I get…a rare note that I’m in contention only to be followed by silence. No news in this case is no news, indifferent and not good.
The morning after my birthday I gingerly walked into an inlet at low tide in Gloucester with two friends. They swim regularly in the mornings. It wasn’t yet 8 am and predictably we were alone there on the pebbly shore. The water was brisk but it was energizing and invigorating, leaving my bones vibrating in a cooling echo for a while after we got out. The water was so clear, too.
That was Tuesday. Monday, my birthday, we’d walked out to a little jetty about a hundred feet from the house in the neighborhood of Lanesville as the rain abated. When we arrived there was a strong, decisive double rainbow. The jetty was made of massive stones and protected the little harbor, with a red-painted boathouse that had served for some exterior shots of Widow’s Bay.
I’d driven down to the North Shore from Maine, where I’d spent a glorious weekend regarding the natural wonders of New England, by which I mean the way the light plays on the water and how the reflection of the surrounding thicket of trees makes it all seem like you’re living inside an emerald. We paddle-boarded and I kayaked and ran and we sweated in the sauna and then dipped into the harbor and I ate delicious food and slept deeply and without distraction.
In the car, as I drove north, I started listening to London Falling; it’s fascinating and sad and I still don’t quite grasp how the police were so negligent in their investigations of the death at the center of the book. How much money they left on the table, by which I mean how few people they interviewed whom they absolutely should have questioned. I did a lot of thinking, too, about time and getting older and trying to remember how vital it is for me–not being prescriptive here, I’m only speaking for myself–to make the choice always to participate.
Sometimes when I think about myself–my age–I feel so unaccomplished, like I’m play-acting at adulthood. The lack of work right now getting to me, to my psyche, making me wonder about my worth and if I’m deluded. How did my mother become a dean? My father so professionally accomplished? Did they have such thoughts? It’s too late to ask either one of them.
Yesterday I started in earnest a project I’ve had on my plate since earlier this summer of going through my father’s books to figure out who wants what and if nobody wants something, what to do with it. Mostly these are scholarly works having to do with Medieval philosophy–the influence of Aristotle on Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes), of Ibn Rushd on Maimonides, and the like. But there are also liturgical books, Old and New testaments, some popular histories, art books, a few social work journals with articles written by my mom. There’s a yizkhor book from Suvalk, sometimes Suvalki, the town in Lithuania or maybe it was Poland or perhaps both at different points, where my great grandfather was from. This yizkhor book tells the story of the town and includes names and photos of families and people killed in the Holocaust. All these stoic faces, stoic not in portending but because gravity was then in fashion when being photographed. I looked at them all yesterday, those images, and tried to find familiarity. For the most part, my family was spared, having left before that colossal catastrophe, though they were victims of anti-Semitism certainly. There was a pogrom at one point during which its participants set fire to an inn run by my great-grandmother, I think that’s how the story goes.
The book is in Yiddish, which I don’t speak, but there’s overlap with Hebrew and I got the gist. You’d have to be willfully ignorant not to.
(Harmon’s harbor at night; isn’t it captivating?)
The other day, when I was still in Massachusetts, I met a college friend for lunch not too far from where I grew up and decided I’d stop to see my childhood home. GPS took me from Weston through Waltham on the way and as I drove I suddenly realized I was on the route my dad took biking to work–along Derby Street and under that brick bridge by the river and then he’d have taken a left up that big hill to Brandeis. I hadn’t thought of that bridge in probably a good 45 years. I passed Franklin Elementary, where Jessie went and walked out of in fourth grade, having felt angry at her teach Mrs. ___. I got to Randlett Park, our street, and marveled how each house was so geometrically plotted in the center of their little lawns. A little Levittown where a golf course once had been, There was a woman with a dog coming out of the Brodericks’ old house across the street, and I asked if she was related by chance. No, but she’d met Julie, my long ago neighbor and friend, and said the church now owned my house, which means it hasn’t changed hands since my parents sold it in 1990.
They did paint, though, the exterior a rather drab olive color. I looked through the front window. The foyer seemed ugly, sad, and unadorned. The light fixture was the same. There was still carpeting on the stairs; what a design misstep that is. I rang the bell and knocked and walked around to the back in case someone was there gardening and didn’t hear my call. There was no garden, though, not where we had our aspirational strawberry patch or our tomatoes, if we had them at all. I don’t really remember. The place was empty. No more basketball hoop. No bird feeder.
It’s bonkers how the world is burning, literally, in front of us every day. When Jess and I were on a road trip in July to Charleston we stopped in DC for two days and went to the Smithsonian. Why every building down there does not have solar panels is a mystery but not really a mystery when you consider the misanthropic narcissists in charge. So much sun power that could be captured and it’s so goddamn late. My skin itches when I go outside right now–the heat, the humidity. It’s such a trifling thing–that, compared to what people who evacuate have to endure. Too many homes now but ashes.
(My friend’s 15 year old son wrote this for me as a birthday gift. I love it.)
Isaiah comes home from camp this weekend. He’s been having a ball from what I can tell. Every picture I see him in, he’s with friends, making some kind of hand gesture that’s a foreign language. He wrote me but once requesting Pokemon cards which I said I’d send and then failed to. His soccer pre-season starts next week. He has one babysitting gig on the docket and one archiving project, too, and some summer reading he has to do in advance of high school. You heard me: HIGH SCHOOL.
I’m not ready. I’m so ready.
What else will he do for the next four or five weeks? School doesn’t start until the 10th of September. That’s a long while when the unit of quantification is teenage idleness.
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