At the Waning of the Green Hour

my lovely absinthe, posing obligingly in the late-afternoon sunlight

From mindful repentance to sweet excess, in the space of a few words...

Yes I know she's just glorified herby grain alcohol, but indulge me anyway as I slip on my shoulder-length gloves, arrange my bustle, and settle myself onto the chaise; glass, spoon, and sugar cube arrayed on the low table before me...

I'll be back here at the waning of the green hour...

Turning

Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, fast approaches, and with it comes the opportunity for t'shuvah (repentance and return to a higher standard of behavior). The concept of t'shuvah is, as with so many elements of Judaism, both simple and complex. One can make t'shuvah in the most straightforward way possible--thinking of one's wrongdoing over the past year, ruing those wrongs, and then righting them, or at least resolving to make them right. Or one can be radical in the approach to this exercise.

This year, I'm going to try for a more radical approach to repentance and return. I've been thinking a lot about my family's consumerist tendencies, from the moral, psychological, practical, and financial points of view. We have a great deal--more than we need. We buy a great deal--more than we need. We don't have a lot of money.

Into the thick of my musings comes Hedgie, who is currently obsessed with something she read about with her bubbe in the NY Times, about a family resolved to spend "a year without shopping," in which they didn't buy anything they didn't need for sustenance and survival. Hedgie was caught up in the adventure of it, mentioned it so often this summer that I finally took a hint that I think she was giving me.

So we've decided as a family to do this ourselves. We held a meeting to decide how long (we voted 6 months to begin with), whether there could be room for cheating (yes--Hedgie's birthday) and of course the most important question: what do we consider strictly necessary renewables, what just plain old unnecessary shopping?

It has been actually sort of fun to figure this out. Most things are obvious--no new clothes, new shoes, makeup, perfume, yarn, jewelry (me); toys or geegaws like comic books or gumball machine prizes (Hedgie); guitars (!) and magazines and cds (Sarge). No more roaming the aisles of Target and leaving with a package of Pokemon cards, new nailpolish, and fancy little notebooks. No more Sephora or Fresh, for new lip gloss or scented soap. No more little souvenirs of our trips to Chinatown or the museum. No new party dresses for Hedgie or myself. No manicures, no new tagine (how much do I want one of those things). We're going to put off the furniture upgrades for our living room, and the new kitchen flooring too. No new cell phones or electronic gadgets or accessories. When I lay out these purchases so baldly here, I think they seem completely wasteful. We really do have enough already. So, starting in a week and a half, whatever gets spent, gets spent on groceries and bills. No more recreational shopping, from the tiniest to the largest purchase.

The sort of sad thing is that I think it is going to take some adjustment, that I am so used to saying "yes" when Hedgie asks for something, even if money is stretched tight (which it usually is, these days). I'm so used to saying yes to myself, when I see a little trinket I like, or a new dress. But I'm already feeling a little lighter, knowing that we're going to have to say no. Living outside of our means, even a little, has just become too uncomfortable. Unnecessary spending is a habit I'm thrilled to break. And I'm tired of contributing to the credit house of cards that America has become. Not spending is, to me, a bit anarchic, a bit like sticking it to The Man.

I realize as I write this that there is a certain hypocrisy, a certain amount of posturing in taking a stand like this. I mean, I'm lucky to have the option to decide whether or not to give up frivolous spending. Still, when all is said and done, I just don't see how it could be a bad thing.

One little addendum here before I shut up: I totally support the right of anyone else to shop and enjoy it! I would never pass judgment--this is just something I think would be good for us personally.

and p.s. do you think daily take-away iced coffee is shopping? I hate to say that I do, but if anyone thinks otherwise, maybe I won't have to forgo it for the next 6 months...

First Light

I was lying in bed with Sarge last night, having one of those conversations that people have, in bed, when they have been together a long long time and still like each other tremendously.

It was the kind of conversation that floats dreamily from mundane to teasing to serious to frankly existential. And then back again. The kind of conversation that begins with a query about whether the car insurance was paid, or what the hamster has been doing so secretively and industriously these past few nights, and ends with God or the finitude of the universe. The kind of conversation that might or might not last till first light, depending on so many things: how the threads are picked up and examined; whether provocative gambits are deployed and which ones gather response; depending on stamina--one might drift off while the other is still talking, a transgression always forgiven; depending on whether or not a light touch on a bare shoulder turns us from intellectual to purely corporeal and then helplessly to sleep...

But we have often over the years been surprised in mid-sentence by the first creeping tendrils of grey light, the first bursts of bird song.

"is it morning already?" I'll ask, amazed.

"We talked through the night!" he'll reply, and I can always feel a smile in his voice.

Filled up with a Feeling

At the dinner table yesterday, Hedgie was telling Sarge about our afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art.

Hedgie: We had lunch in the cafeteria, and I had the children's meal, a peanut butter banana and nutella panini and apple slices. There was just the right amount of nutella so that it oozed out the sides but not too much. And there were three slices of apple, and they were very crisp and sweet. They really know what children like. And we saw an exhibit called "Waste Not."

(We described the exhibit to Sarge and then Hedgie was silent)

Hedgie: Mama cried from it, while we were walking through. It's so embarrassing when you guys cry like that! Like how you cried, daddy, when you showed me that part of "Diva" with the opera singer.

(more silence)

Sarge: Do you know why grown-ups cry like that, Hedgie?

Hedgie: No.

Sarge: It's because we're filled up with a feeling we have--

Hedgie: and you have to let it out?

Sarge: Well, no, it just has to come out, even if we try to hold it in. Like laughter, it's the same thing. Sometimes it comes out as crying, sometimes as laughing. Just two different sides of a feeling that has to come out.

Hedgie: Why do you have the feeling?

Sarge: I don't know. Sometimes with a song or a piece of art, maybe it reminds us of another time or place, or a person who isn't with us anymore...

Hedgie: I guess I can understand that. But it's still embarrassing.


Filled up with a feeling--I so often am. I long ago gave up trying to hide honest tears from Hedgehog. I couldn't anyway, as Sarge says--sometimes it just has to come out.





here's the art that made me cry: "Waste Not" by Song Dong; also an explanation of the installation on the MOMA site.

Beginning

With the fall of this year comes Hedgie's first cello lessons.

In my family this is one of the most important rites of passage, the day you play the first sweet and terrible notes of your very own instrument. I can barely remember the details of my first violin lessons--I was only five--but I do remember how timid and awestruck I was--the only feeling that has come close since was the first time I held baby Hedgie in my arms, afraid to break her. How heavy the quarter-size violin was in my little arms then, how amazing the alchemy of bow to string and then sound...although the little screeches and scritches must have been dreadful indeed to the ears of my patient listeners.

My violin has been with me on my journey for nearly 35 years now, a steadfast companion always, whether spurned or beloved, through all the times musically fallow and musically fertile. Its sturdy presence shielded me from the parodically cruel tendency of Emily, my second teacher, to discipline by rapping her own bow hard across my knuckles. It was the helpful wing-man in my pursuits of a proto-Severus, black-haired Peter with the glowing pallor, the first violin in my high school string quartet (how I quavered under his gaze as he reminded me, with a haughty little tip of his bow, to come in on the correct note). My violin and I spent long afternoons together in the music rooms of my college, and it never complained that I took frequent breaks to stare out the windows at the rain, at the trees changing to fall and then from fall to spring...

We have come all this way from our long-ago beginning. There it is in the corner now, waiting for the rosined bow and for me.

Fictional Ladies

Do you think it is harder to write a good fictional female character than a male character? I do.

I can think of about a gazillion male characters that I love and respect, and far fewer women. A few do come to mind--Olivia from "The Weather in the Streets," Elizabeth in "Pride and Prejudice," Molly Bloom in "Ulysses." Tolkien's Arwen Evenstar, Galadriel, and Eowyn. I dig Hermione Granger too, and Ginny Weasley (Rowling did a good job, although disappointingly her most fully-fleshed characters are boys and men). I can think of others, but it is far easier for me to come up with the simpering, the foils, the falsely plucky-can-do girls, the girls who are pretty with not much else to recommend them, the girls who are attractive because they are beautiful and disturbed (case in point, Caddy from "The Sound and the Fury), the ones with not a drop of humor in them (all Virginia Woolf's characters, I mean I love Woolf, but c'mon, never has there been a more overly self-serious set of characters)...I could go on. Both male and female authors are guilty of the poorly-drawn, stereotypical female, just as some of my favorite women in literature were created by male authors.

Anyway, I've been asking myself, what makes a strong, real, viable woman character in a novel? Who are your favorite female characters from fiction, and why do you like them?

I would love to hear what you have to say on this topic if you get a chance.

Our Friend Shecky

This is Shecky--a very handsome duck who has adopted us. He visits our dock every day, hops up and sits with us for several hours at a time. When Sarge brought his guitar down to the lake to serenade us, Shecky stood in front of him and stared, mesmerized.

I won't be around for a bit, am working on several projects. But I'll be back soon.

Hope everyone's enjoying the last bit of summer!

Festival

Although the summer days are long and hot, my thoughts have turned to the Jewish holiday cycle that will soon be upon us.  Beginning with Rosh ha-Shanah, we spend a week and a half turning inward to sometimes difficult self-reflection,  chanting our ancient, quiet prayers, and finally, fasting in somber repentance on Yom Kippur.   The Days of Awe are radically unlike any other part of my year.  Jews during this time exist in a sacred space that is part of the world, but also apart from it; it is always a challenging time for me, a Reform Jew in the modern world, a communal and personal moment of reckoning.  

Immediately after Yom Kippur, though, we begin to reenter the regular world with an eye toward the practical, as we celebrate the Jewish harvest holiday in the festival of Sukkot.  Preparation for Sukkot (which means "booths" or tabernacles in Hebrew, representing the little huts set up alongside the fields during harvest in ancient times) involves the quite literally grounding act of building a sukkah, whether in our own backyard or with our synagogue.  During the Days of Awe we engaged in quiet reflection; at Sukkot, we are busy giving thanks to God with hammer and nails!

Once built, the sukkot are decorated with photos of the ancestors, and all manner of colorful paper chains, tissue paper flowers, and magic marker drawings hanging from yarn--the provenance of the children of the family, who are thrilled to be included in the creation of what is, after all, really just a wonderful playhouse.

Sometimes prayer is an intangible, words that roar or whisper symbolically; but during Sukkot, our prayer is a solid little structure, a very real shelter built with our own hands. 

ופרוש עלינו  סכת שלומך

spread over us the shelter of Your peace

The permanent structure for the temporary sukkah we build upstate; the upper beams will be covered with pine branches, creating a roof that will allow us to see the stars, to feel the rain.

Ink and Paper

Today I have a favor to ask you.  If you don't do it already (and perhaps, like me, you have your coffee-buttered roll-and-a-paper ritual down pat), will you buy a newspaper? A real newsprint version, that feels crumbly in your hands and gets your fingers all inky? I don't care if it's a rag or the paper of record, if it has a liberal or conservative bias.  Just buy a newspaper.

This post is in response to a post on another one of my group blogs, where there was an incipient discussion, although it got somewhat nipped in the bud because of mutual politeness, of a particular news station on American television.  Some folks don't like this particular news station; being the radical that I am, I maintain that all the 24-hour news stations are equally dreadful.  I do not use these words, equally dreadful, lightly.  These stations, whether liberally or conservatively oriented, do not really report the news that matters.  Or they'll latch onto a story for a few nights, and then, whether or not it's still relevant reporting, will drop it for something a little sexier and sparklier.  I won't go into specifics, but suffice it to say, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world and we should be kept apprised.

As a result, I have long boycotted the t.v. news.  I mean, and this is the truth, I simply do not watch the news on television.  Ever, ever.  Not anymore.  This is not a difficult achievement, as I don't really watch much t.v. at all.  However, poor Sarge still tunes in occasionally, and I will stumble upon him tearing his hair out, metaphorically.

Rather, I buy three of our local NYC papers every day.  The paper of record (The NY Times), the liberal rag (the Daily News), and the conservative rag (The NY Post).   The NYTimes has let me down more than once because of its decidedly liberal bent, which makes me, a serious professional iconoclast, arguer, free-thinker and non-line-tower, a bit uncomfortable.  But I'll give them a free pass because they also have a commitment to covering actual issues of import, and there are some kickass staff writers.

I worry about the fate of the ink-and-paper news.  I have no evidence for this, only anecdotal knowledge of the path we seem to be taking toward digital media.  My favorite NYC paper shut its doors only this past year, and the Times has increased prices to an insane degree.  So I have taken this up as my cause--I promise to more mindfully, rather than just testily, boycott the television news, to continue making my daily purchase of the papers...and even to read them!

Voice

Here in the North Country, the woods and lakeshore are full of voices, if you know how to listen. The chipmunks, crows, frogs, and even the owls and coyotes all have their say.  Their voices tell their lives in a preordained way, the product of an inexorable pull toward evolutionary fate.

We're not so lucky that our very essence is foretold in this way since birth.  Or are we luckier?  That we are allowed to find our voice or maybe to invent it, and when we lose it to find it again and reinvent it, in as many incarnations, as many times and in as many ways as we please.

Perhaps "invention" is the wrong choice, though, at least for me, for it suggests duplicity, and I am guilty of everything under the sun save untruth.

Since I started writing here, two years ago, here and in the corporeal world I and my voice have been a work-in-progress, and it hasn't always been pretty.  I've been maudlin and quarrelsome, arch and egotistical.  I laugh at my own jokes, too often.  But my voice has always held some form of a truth about myself. 

My sister can't even look at this journal, for her horror at my utter lack of propriety; a dear friend who does read this says that I conceal more than I reveal; and Sarge said the other day, fondly or so I imagine, "Leah, you really are just a little bit of an exhibitionist, aren't you."  I suppose he's not wrong, in a way.  Then again, neither is my friend.  But somewhere in that vast and comprehensive region between exhibition and concealment may be found all the ever-changing bits and pieces that make up my voice, and there I am.

"Yukon Raven," by Gavatron, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons