Everybody knows about the tzaddik’s cars. They were fairly famous. His vehicles impersonated him. They imprinted on him. Everybody remembers particular stories about his cars. Only I don’t know all of the stories. And that really bugs me. I guess what I really want is to know everything. Collect everything. Every shred of memory. I…
Category: essays
Mira and Erin writing on themes of death, dying, grief, ritual, music, listening, Kaddish, Lev Kogan’s “Kaddish,” and so on.
a good enough mother — or not
I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents. Not just my mother’s illness and my father’s death, but also about parenting altogether. How are we with our pups? How are we with our own children? How are we with the next generation, and the one after that and after that. The do-we-say-I-love-you post is part…
the end of memory
It’s a very simple proposition: what if we forget? What if we forget the details? What if we forget their faces? What if they become reductionist cartoons, selective memory, fixed inside our stories, unverified by outside confirmation? What if they were not at all as we remember them? What if we got the stories wrong?…
secrets of the tzaddik
He wanted it spelled ‘poppa’ not ‘papa.’ He was definitive about that, but not about much else. I always wondered why. It seemed anachronistic, that spelling, but maybe that’s the point. He was from a different era. How could he not be? Maybe the word ‘poppa’ made him feel warm and fuzzy, and maybe ‘papa’…
body, mind, and spirit or wobble, falter, and fall
There’s a class that I teach called Body, Mind, Spirit. Pretty funny, actually, to call it that but I couldn’t name the course what it really is: Integral Transformative Practice. I mean, nobody knows what that is, right? And what would that look like on a university transcript? But Body, Mind, Spirit is a reasonable…
daily kaddish: getting back to the kaddish
It can’t be right to say I’m enjoying getting back to mourning, but that’s almost what I’m saying here.
a kaddish for the end of summer
It might not look like the end of summer to you, but it does to me. The Department secretary sent everyone an email saying that syllabi are due asap. Are mine done? Not a chance. But I’ve been thinking about it. Preparing to prepare to write them up. What have I done in preparation? Well….
precious daughters: a kaddish for Amanda Simmons
I was writing about books. Letting go of books. A preemptive kaddish for books turns out I couldn’t part with. The occasion was my daughter’s return from China. And driving up, by way of the Coast, from L.A. where her flight landed to S.F. for a short visit before heading East. I already wrote this…
a kaddish for old friends I’m ready to let go of. I think.
This isn’t my fault. Usually I take the blame for everything. Anything. But this one just isn’t my fault. I think. It’s clean up time, quick before the summer disappears. And I’m trying to prepare my precious daughter’s room for her ten-second visit home. Trying to make it special. Trying to make it serviceable beyond…
the man in the pink suit
When the family lived in Los Angeles, the tzaddik showed early signs of what was to come. Only it was a bit more theatrical down there in Southern California. The tzaddik produced an opera, believe it or not—the opera David, by Darius Milhaud—at the Hollywood Bowl. He even borrowed back the bible story engravings that…