Watermelon in Winter

Posted on January 26, 2024 by advicefrommarta

When my daughter is home from college she likes to go to the grocery store with me. It’s something we used to do together when she still lived at home. Before Covid, I bribed her with a latte. I wanted the time to talk to her alone, away from her homework and her phone and her little brother. During Covid, a trip to the grocery store, navigating the one way arrows on the floor while avoiding other people, became the highlight of our week. Now, she is unapologetic that she likes to go because she enjoys choosing food she does not have to pay for. She plans elaborate dishes or baked goods and loads the ingredients and snacks into the cart and I gladly pay.

We bought 12 oz cups of diced watermelon for 99 cents each. In the summer, it would be foolish to buy diced watermelon. In the summer, the main quality of watermelon is refreshment. A slice provides more coldness than a pre-cut cube. In the summer, you sit on the back porch and you think of all the other slices of watermelon you have eaten. You think about being a little kid and worrying that the seed you swallowed will grow into a tree in your stomach. You think about the one party in high school where the boy you liked supposedly used a syringe to inject vodka directly into the watermelon and you couldn’t really taste it, but because it was summer and you were outside and he put his arm around your bare shoulders, you felt drunk anyway. When you eat watermelon in the summer you think about your own kids with juice dripping down their arms, feeding the rinds to the dog even when you tell them not to. A slice of watermelon in the summer tastes like possibility.

But watermelon in the winter is better in cubes. It is too sweet and too cold to eat an entire slice of watermelon in the winter. No one wants to roll up their sleeves and grab hold. Watermelon in the winter is like the dream you have where you sit and talk to your friend. At first, the conversation is completely normal. Then, you start to notice that it seems not quite right. You feel so happy that the amount of happiness doesn’t seem to fit the ordinariness of the conversation. Then you realize it’s because the friend is not supposed to be there. You know he died years ago and the chance to talk to him is not quite right, but you enjoy it anyway. You should feel sad, but instead there’s a sweetness that you didn’t expect.

Lately, so many things seem to be on the verge of slipping through my fingers. I have an urge to grasp on and hold tight, to try and wring every bit of juice from every moment with my children, with my parents, with this phase of my life. But watermelon in winter is its own thing, it is harder to hold on to but sweeter because of that.

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The Melameds

Posted on September 14, 2023 by advicefrommarta

This is Feige and Moshe Melamed.

Feige was the sister of my great-grandmother.

In the picture they are standing on the balcony of the hotel they owned in Kremenets, which at the time was Poland, and today is Ukraine.

The hotel may have been called the Bristol Hotel or it may have been called The Jewish Hotel or it may have just been called Melamed’s hotel.

In 1912, the Jewish author, ethnographer, and activist Ansky visited Kremenets and stayed at the hotel. There is an account of his visit in a memorial book about the town.

Hanokh Gilernt recollects that An-ski arrived in Kremenets accompanied by the ethnographer and musicologist Zusman (Zalman) Kisselgoff and the painter and photographer Solomon (Shlomo) Yudovin. They arrived on Friday, stayed at Moshe Melamed’s hotel, and the owner was surprised to see the Yiddish-speaking guests from St. Petersburg. Gilernt added: “Some strange Jews checked in and said they were from St. Petersburg.”

On Friday night, the streets were usually filled with young people; this time, they all gathered around the hotel and envied the group that was privileged to be inside. Meanwhile, Sender Rozental and Yashe Roytman, and Shlome the baker’s son, joined the group and were told by the hotel owner that An-ski wanted to visit a Hasidic kloyz on Sabbath morning. The hotel owner went to the caretaker, Peysi the blind, to let him know. An-ski asked for information about Hasidic liturgical rites and details about the Hasidim in town. He was quite astonished to hear that Hasidim in town lived in piece and that representatives of various Hasidic trends – Trisk, Stolin, Ruzhin, Husiatyn, Chernobyl – all prayed in the same synagogue and in the same style. He was not surprised, however, to hear the maskilim prayed with them. After a while, the young men took Kisselgoff and Yudovin for a short walk to the “mountain.” An-ski [did not] forget to greet them with “good Sabbath” and [reminded] them to behave properly, meaning that they should not smoke or speak Russian … in other words, they should behave in a Jewish manner.

No one knows why, but later, in the 1920s, my great-aunt Faye (Feige) lived with the Melameds at the hotel instead of with her parents, Malke and Israel Segal, who owned a tobacco shop on the first floor.

When Faye came to the United States with her brother Joe (my grandfather) and their grandparents Etyl and Shlomo Zalman, and some uncles, the Melameds “adopted” her brother Elizear (Lou). According to Faye’s son, the Melameds were mean and she worked hard at the hotel. According to Lou’s son, the Melameds were kind and took care of him. Later, Lou was arrested for being a Communist and later still, Lou was freed from jail on the condition that he leave the country. And so, in 1938, Lou and his parents, joined Joe and Faye in the United States. By that time, Shlomo Zalman and Etyl had died and Joe was married to my grandmother, Bessie Katz. Bessie had been born in the nearby suburb of Vyshnivets.

In 1936, Bessie and Joe went on a honeymoon trip to Europe, they took this photo and many others of both sides of their family. They are the last existing photos of many of the people and places. Kremenets was destroyed during the War, bombed by all sides. After the war, the hotel was one of three remaining buildings. In 1966 a former resident returned to Kremenets and described what was left to his fellow landsmen. Among other things he said,

New houses have been built all the way up to Melamed’s hotel. The hotel still functions, and on the ground floor are stores (a photo shop and a shoemakers’ cooperative).

This is all we know about Feige and Moshe Melamed. We know that they owned a well-built hotel where they entertained people from as far away as St. Petersburg. We know they did not have children of their own, but took in the children of relatives. We know they chose not to leave their well-built hotel with the rest of their family. We know they were murdered. Some people believe it was not by Nazis, but by locals.

Once upon a time, Feige and Moshe Melamed lived, and they commented on someone’s accent, and they ran a business and participated in family life and took pictures and that is all we have. But we have it, and so, we must tell it.

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New Stories and Reruns

Posted on July 7, 2023 by advicefrommarta

My father has always loved Star Trek. He likes Spock more than Kirk and I think Picard more than either of them. Spock is not only undeniably Jewish, but the symbol for “Live Long and Prosper” is taken directly from the Levis, and my father, an egalitarian in every other sense has always been proud to be a Levi. But Picard is a captain who wants to be an archeologist. How could my anthropologist father not love that?

Next Generation is on every weeknight at 8. It is on an endless loop, one season after the other. You can watch Wesley Crusher go through puberty and Will Riker grow a beard over and over again. In college, my roommate and I watched Dallas reruns every night at midnight. We were stunned at the way people seemed to age so quickly, the way plots really didn’t hold together without the weeks and months of time in between to make you forget that the discussion had already happened, and the problem solved a different way last year. We were amazed at how repetitive the plots seemed to be. Someone was always having an affair, or lying, or being born, or dying. At the time, we did not know how realistic that was. We did not know that 35 years later we would still be having the same conversations. We did not know that you could start a fight in 1987 and still, in 2023 if someone said just the right word, it wouldn’t really be over. We did not know that we too would age in a way that didn’t feel quite real and that all around us people would just continue to be born and to die.

A few times a week I watch a Star Trek rerun. I like watching it on TV instead of streaming. On a streaming service you have to choose what to watch. On TV, you just put it on and maybe it’s one of your favorites, where Picard realizes an alien can communicate in stories. Or maybe it’s one of your least favorites where Troi gets thwarted in love again. You have no control. The people on screen are younger than me now. In reruns, even Picard, the same age as my father when I first watched it, is younger than I am now.

We recently got a new streaming service and so I have started to watch Picard, the Next Generation sequel. I find it sweet, and I find it sad. When I hear Patrick Stewart’s now weakened voice I think of my father and the way he sometimes forgets how to move his legs. The way he sometimes seems exactly the same, and sometimes seems completely different. Towards the end of season two, when Q admits that he secretly loves Picard, and Picard holds him as he dies, I understand. I understand how you eventually get to a point in life where you want to see and hold anyone who knew you when you were yourself. How even an old enemy can feel like a loved one, if once, a long time ago, they knew you well enough.

In Season 3, when Picard says that he cannot bear to watch Data die again, I don’t just cry, I weep. I have to pause the episode and I am glad no one is home. There comes a point where as much as you long for those you’ve lost, you don’t know if you can stand the same tragedy over and over again.

I visited my parents and we watched Strange New Worlds, the prequel to the original Star Trek. I know what will happen to Captain Pike, and Captain Pike knows what will happen to him, and yet I find myself getting invested in this character, a character who will die in tragedy. When the episode is over I ask my father if he liked it. “I don’t think I followed the whole thing,” he says to me. “I don’t think I understood it.” “That’s ok,” I tell him. “It’s a little confusing. But it was fun to see a different version of Spock.” “Yes,” he says “that was nice.”

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Wild Daisies

Posted on June 19, 2023 by advicefrommarta

The house I grew up in had a huge backyard. In the front of the yard, just outside my bedroom window, was a large oak tree. The kind of tree that you could imagine a kid or teenager climbing out of the window on to, if I had the kind of parents that required sneaking out of. Or, if I had been the kind of kid to climb a tree. Behind the tree was an old jungle gym, and beyond that, a dogwood tree and honeysuckle bushes. In the middle were two small rose bushes and when I was older my dog’s ashes were buried in between them. The back part of the yard, hidden from site by the oak tree, was allowed to grow wild. Our backyard butted up against other people’s backyards and at one point I discovered that you could go from our backyard to other people’s backyards and wind up a block or two away without ever seeing anyone else.

Next to an old, unused carport was a small patch of wild daisies. In my mind, it was an entire field of daisies. I don’t know if they were always there, or if they just sprung up one year, but I loved them. I was a dreamy child, raised on Neverland, Narnia, and the Hundred Acre Woods, I was always looking for a place of my own. A place where magic might happen, or at least, I might be special. Sometimes it was a yellow shelf in my walk-in closet that I was just small enough to sit underneath and read. Sometimes it was a puddle in the yard at school that lasted for weeks after a rain. It was a deep puddle with rocks and grass trapped underneath. A friend and I convinced ourselves that the bobby pins we stole from our mothers were actually magic keys to the kingdom trapped underneath. For a whole school year, every time it rained we rushed to the field at recess to try and enter.

There were also wild strawberries in our yard and I would pick the strawberries and the honeysuckle and sit on the jungle gym looking into the wild daisies, creating worlds in my mind.

My father was an inconsistent gardener. He claimed that his parents, immigrants who had been wealthy in the old country, disapproved of anything hinting at manual labor for their sons. Gardening was an act of rebellion for him, but not something he knew a lot about, or stuck to. Some years, he planted vegetables and flowers, some years, he barely mowed the lawn. One year, after we had seen formal gardens on a trip, he promised me that he would help me plant my own hedge maze. And one year, not knowing about the fantasy world I had created in the wild daisy patch, he mowed them down.

I cried when I saw the patch of grass where my daisies had been. When my father learned how upset I was, he promised to replant them. He bought seeds of some sort, but the daisies never came back. For years, this was where the story ended.

The other day, on a family Father’s Day hike my daughter and I saw wild daisies in a field. I told my daughter that I loved wild daisies and she told me that daisies are her favorite flower. I told her the story about the patch of wild daisies in my childhood backyard. Telling her the story, I could taste the tiny, gritty, strawberries and the honeysuckle. I could smell the dogwood trees.

My father is not well. He is not 100% himself these days. But when I told my daughter the story of the wild daisies I could see him as well. I could see his collection of inconsistent hobbies, the way he threw himself into things like woodworking and gardening, never quite mastering them. I could hear his lectures on subjects he knew and didn’t know. I could hear the way he swore when upset, and see the smirk he gave when amused. I could see his love in the fact that after mowing down some weeds, he tried to replant them just to make me happy. The important thing isn’t that my father mowed down the daisies, it’s that he tried to replant them.

For years, somewhere in the back of my mind, I have regretted the loss of the wild daisies. But the other day, I realized that if the daisies hadn’t been lost, I wouldn’t have found them again decades later, in a different place. Not everything that is lost can be found, but not everything that is lost is truly lost either.

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How to Make a PB&J

Posted on March 8, 2023 by advicefrommarta

I have heard that a frequent job interview question for engineers is to explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Although I will never be an engineer, I do know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The first thing you should know is that there is not one way to make a PB&J. There is the way you make it for yourself when you are hungry and tired and you cannot think of anything else to eat. When that is the case, you make it quickly. You spread peanut butter haphazardly on a piece of bread, top it with jelly and then fold it in half. “I’ll just eat half a sandwich,” you think “then make something better.” But the truth is, once you start eating a peanut butter & jelly sandwich you realize there’s really nothing better and so you do it again, this time more carefully.

There is the way you make it when you are broke and busy and you stand at the sink eating first a spoonful of peanut butter, then a spoonful of jelly because you forgot to buy bread and you are trying to avoid going to the store until you get paid because there is too much else that you need. But for a minute, with that spoonful of peanut butter in your mouth, everything feels good.

There is the way you make it for your daughter who takes it every day for lunch, grades K-5. You take two pieces of cinnamon raisin bread and carefully spread the peanut butter on one piece and the jelly on the other and put it in a sandwich bag all while finding lost shoes, pencils, and mittens.

When you make a PB&J everyday, you and your kids begin to discuss opening a restaurant that only serves peanut butter and jelly. You decide to have different kinds of bread, different kinds of peanut butter, different kinds of jelly and toppings. Customers would be able to come in early and grab a bagged lunch on the way to work. One summer day you explain this plan to your friend, an art teacher. You are on the beach in back of his apartment and he lays out rocks to illustrate the store plan. He has long, curly hair and even though he has it tied back, as he always does, little pieces are still blowing in the wind. Just like your daughter’s. Your friend wants to know if you would cut the sandwiches made to order, and he says, “You could cut it across from top to bottom, or side to side, or corner to corner,” and your daughter says, “You mean diagonally?” And he laughs at himself for not thinking she’d know the word. Later she holds his hand as they walk up the stairs to the apartment, and it is rare for her to hold the hand of anyone but you. Then, that fall, he steps in front of a train and no one knows why. After that, when you make the sandwich you cut it diagonally, and think of the way his hair looked on the beach, just like a child’s and the way he laughed.

Sometimes, when your kids are little you make a peanut butter and jelly the normal way, only you use really good bread and you put it in the panini press because the thought of making dinner only to have it rejected is too much for you that day, but if you make it into a panini, it counts as hot food. Then, when they are older you still make it for dinner and pretend you’re nostalgic, but really, you just like it.

There is also the way you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for a child who is really old enough to make their own sandwiches. First, you complain. You tell them that they really should make their own sandwich. You say this while taking out the bread and the jelly. Then, you spread the peanut butter all the way to the edge of the bread. You top it with jelly, not quite to the edge of the bread, because that would be too sweet. You cut the sandwich in half and hand it to the child on a plate. You spread the peanut butter and jelly just so because there is really not much else you can do for this child. They are at an age where nothing feels quite right and everything seems too hard. The child has told you that even their friends say that you make the best PB&J, because of course, you’ve made sandwiches for their friends. You know it’s probably not true. But sometimes you think maybe it is. Maybe if you make the sandwich just right, your child will feel loved and treasured. You think maybe if you make enough sandwiches, they’ll have what they need to get through the day, the week, being a teenager.

This is how you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

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Elon Musk Is Everyone’s Bad Boss

Posted on November 19, 2022 by advicefrommarta

Once in my early 20s I quit a retail job because my boss called a mandatory staff meeting on an evening that I had a date. When I think back on it, I realize how privileged and possibly foolish it was. But also, I’m not mad about it. Announcing a last-minute mandatory meeting is a jerk thing to do. I didn’t want to stand for it. It doesn’t hurt that my boss did not actually fire me, or even yell at me, for missing the meeting.

I was thinking about that job recently because of Elon Musk. I haven’t been a big Twitter user in years, but like many people, I am fascinated by the situation at Twitter. I am following every mass firing and mass resignation and potential crisis as though it actually mattered in my life, and I think I know why.

Elon Musk reminds me of every bad boss I’ve ever had.

The boss who demanded things of workers without any awareness of how their financial situation differed from his own. The boss who thought he was a funny genius and thought that absolved him of actually listening to people. The boss who came in from the outside convinced they knew how to save the situation and made everything worse. The boss who let petty grudges guide his management decisions. The boss whose financial actions were misguided at best, illegal at worst.

The thing about all of these bosses is that nothing every happened to them. Good people left jobs they were good at to avoid them. Or, the bosses failed up into even better jobs where they caused more havoc. For so many of us, Elon Musk reminds of us of these bosses. We are watching and waiting because we hope that a bad boss might be made to pay.

The truth is that even if Twitter fails, Elon Musk will probably not lose as much as those who work there, or those who depend on it for their livelihood in other ways. But it will still feel good.

There are no leadership lessons to be learned from the Twitter fiasco. Managers who would attempt to lead the way Elon Musk does aren’t going to learn from this. But maybe, there are some worker lessons to be learned. Maybe one or two people will see the people who say no to Elon Musk and know that they can do so, too. Even if it’s just for a date.

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It Tolls for Thee

Posted on September 12, 2022 by advicefrommarta

I did not have strong feelings when Queen Elizabeth II died. I understood the people who celebrated the end of the last remaining vestige of the British Empire. I understood the people who mourned the end of an era. But I did not have strong feelings of my own.

I do not believe in Monarchy as a form of government, but I don’t see a huge problem with it as a form of entertainment. Obviously, the idea that someone is better or more worthy because of their birth is a problem, but it also seems baked into us. Why else do we care about the children of celebrities? Why do so many people feel so strongly about their biological roots? Why are so many democratic-minded people members of Ancestry.com? The Queen of England was a celebrity for almost 100 years, and now she’s gone.

My own grandparents died in their 90s and there is something disorienting about having someone that old die. You almost forget that they can die. For almost a century someone survived. They survived two World Wars, Depressions (both Great and personal), deaths of loved ones, and miscarried children. In my grandparents’ case, they survived the complete destruction of their homelands. They survived crossing the ocean. They survived the systemic murders of their extended family members. It seems unbelievable that something as basic as old age could eventually kill someone who survived everything else.

About two weeks before the Queen died, a man I knew died. Actually, he wasn’t a man I knew. He had been a boy I once knew, or sort of knew. A guy I went to grade school and one year of middle school with. He had bright red hair, and something about him that in my memory was rough. Not mean, just rough. Once, in 8th grade, he and my best friend were at a party and they played spin the bottle and that was my best friend’s first French kiss. If you knew either of them, you would know how unlikely the kiss was.

He was a National Merit Semifinalist. He dropped out of high school before graduation. For years, that’s what I knew about him. He was a little thing I knew about my friend that other’s didn’t. He was a cautionary tale about what happens when someone is too smart and too bored.

When he died of a heart attack in his 50s, I learned that he had been a chef and then a lawyer. I learned that he knew a lot of the same people I know. When I wrote my best friend to tell her that he had died, we talked about the weirdness of it all. We do not know him. We can’t miss him, but we are still so sad that he died.

Somewhere in between this man’s death and the Queen’s death Luke Bell, one of my son’s favorite country singers, died. He was 32 years old. I know even less about Luke Bell than I do the man I once went to school with or the Queen of England. But I find myself thinking about him.

I think sometimes that we try to limit acceptable grief. We look askance at people who mourn a pop star or a problematic symbol of the 20th Century. When I taught English 101 my fellow grad students and I joked about the inevitable Freshman Paper about the death of their high school best friend and how it changed their life. When you talked to the students you found out that it wasn’t actually their best friend, as their papers claimed, it was a kid they barely knew. It was the real life equivalent of Scott on Beverly Hills 90210. As disorienting as it is to lose someone in their 90s, it is more so to lose a teenager, even someone you barely know. But because we have no language for losing an acquaintance, especially as a teen, these deaths take on a new meaning.

I have not thought about the red-haired boy in years, possibly decades. I have thought about him every day since I learned he died, and here I am, writing the equivalent of a Freshman English essay about it. I think I’m ok with that.

To quote John Donne, as any good English 101 student will, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

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Bearing Fruit

Posted on July 27, 2022 by advicefrommarta

Once, when my grandfather was a little boy, he walked with his grandfather, the exquisitely named Shlomo Zalman, from one shtetl to the next. On the way there, Shlomo Zalman gave my grandfather half a banana and then carefully wrapped up the other half. On the way back, he gave him the other half.

Eighty years later, sitting in a condo in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, my grandfather still remembered this story. He didn’t remember where they were going, or why, but he remembered the sweetness of the fruit and his grandfather’s gift and so he told me the story. I do not know what color hair Shlomo Zalman had. I do not know what he thought about any political issues of the day, or even what his wife’s name was, but I know that he was the kind of man who, living in an Eastern European shtetl, would give his favorite grandchild an entire, rare banana.

I think about Shlomo Zalman as I mindlessly toss banana slices and blueberries into my oatmeal. I offer my daughter half a banana and she refuses, she doesn’t like bananas. I would offer her blueberries, but I know that she is bothered by the “inconsistency of berries.” She told me this several months ago, maybe even a year ago, and I have kept the phrase ever since. “The inconsistency of berries.” It rolls around in my head like the name Shlomo Zalman. My daughter does not like how sometimes you buy berries and they are great, and sometimes you buy them and they are not. She does not like how you can reach into a box of berries and you might pull out a sweet one, but also, you might pull out a sour one – in the same box.

Once, I showed her that you can generally judge a berry. The darker and plumper they are, the sweeter they are. But still, she avoids them. She leaves for college in two weeks. I find myself telling her odd little “life tips” in the hopes that when she needs to know how to introduce two strangers, or to revive stale bread, or get a wine stain out, she will remember them. I am pouring as much information into her as I can.

But the inconsistency of berries is real. You never know what you will pull out of a box or what you will need. In the end, all you can hope for, is that one small act will reverberate across generations and geographies, that something will bear fruit.

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An Early Summer Night’s Dream

Posted on June 17, 2022 by advicefrommarta

(fiction)

There is a kind of summer evening, just after the sun starts to go down. Children run around looking for fireflies. Neighbors slowly move away from their airconditioned houses, eager to feel the air while they can. They sit on their porches and in their yards chatting about nothing. “Honey, five minutes until bedtime,” they yell to the youngest children, without moving. They don’t mean “five minutes” they really mean “Can someone get me another beer?” and usually someone does. The children know this and do not argue or pretend to come inside.

“Five minutes”

“Have another beer?”

 “OK”

It goes on for an hour, or two, if everyone is lucky.

The teenagers begin to move back to the playgrounds and schoolyards of their childhood. They use the playground equipment ironically now. “In second grade, I broke my arm on here” a boy tells no one in particular. They all know, they were there.

They remember both the excitement and the fear when the ambulance came to take the boy away. What if he died? Only one of them had ever been to a funeral and it was for an older relative that he barely knew. What if their friend died? Would they get out of school for the rest of the year? Then, a few days later, when he returned to school, they greeted him with a small sliver of disappointment and a little more unnamed guilt. For a week or two, they vied to sign his cast, to carry his books, to sit with him during recess. They became a little jealous of the attention and a little bored with sitting at recess and life went back to normal so thoroughly that no one even noticed when his cast came off.

The boy remembers that time fondly. He does not remember the pain, or being afraid in the ambulance. He does not remember the persistent itch under the cast, or the boredom when his friends grew tired of sitting with him at recess. He remembers the feeling that he was special. He remembers the soft way his mother looked at him and getting all of his favorite foods. Earlier that year he told his mother not to tuck him in anymore and instantly regretted it. But he remembers that after he broke his arm his mother would come into his room when she thought he was asleep and smooth his hair off of his forehead and he would pretend to sleep.

Now the boy walks on the ground and lifts his arm very slightly to touch the bars where he once fell.

As the night goes on some of the boys will go home to video games and TV. Still others will come bringing beer, cigarettes and pot. Girls will come and they will divide into couples and find shady spots to make out. One couple sits on the baseball field. The boy kisses the girl and says loudly “Looks like I’m getting to home base tonight boys.” She slaps him lightly on the arm and with the pressure to perform, to go farther, to do more removed, they both sit quietly and look at the stars.

As soon as I stepped outside last night, I knew. I knew when I passed the first group of neighbors gathered on lawn chairs, before I even saw the first firefly. I knew that I’d dream of you.

I always think of you in the summer.

Once you had the idea to bring a kiddie pool up to the roof of your apartment building. Your apartment was small and we slept on a mattress on the floor. Before you thought of the pool on the roof, sometimes we sat in the bathtub to drink. We filled the pool with ice, then put the beer and our feet in the ice. “We’re going to do this every night this summer. I’m going to make a mix-tape just for the roof,” you said. “Yes,” I said, because I always said yes. Because that summer there was nothing I wanted more than to sit with you, drinking beer, and listening to your music. I said yes, because at that age I still believed that the more often you said yes to someone, the more they would love you.

But then there was a night where you, several beers ahead of me, almost fell off the roof. The next night I found an excuse for us not to go on the roof. Maybe I talked you into a movie, or we went over to your friends’ nicer apartment to play cards. Every night I had a new excuse, and you never noticed. One night, when you were asleep, I got rid of the pool. We bought a window unit and drank beer in front of it. When we blew a fuse, we moved back to the bathtub.

I always think of you in the summer. Especially in the beginning of the summer, when the air feels like anything is possible.

Even though your children are grown, in the dream you had a baby. I was mad, because I knew who the mother was. But still, when you asked me to take her, I did. Because I always said yes.

I took your baby and went to a coffee shop and, in the way of dreams, the waiter was another boy I used to love. He asked me what the baby needed and I said “I don’t know, it’s been so long since I’ve had a baby.” “What are you going to do?” He asked me. “I don’t know,” I said.

In the dream I imagined raising your baby. I imagined being eager to put her to bed on hot summer evenings, so that we could get outside and breathe fresh air. Watching her catch fireflies, telling her not to stay out too late, wondering if she was sitting on a roof drinking beer with a boy.

Even in my dream, I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew I would keep saying yes and you would keep trying to fall off the roof. In the dream it made me sad. But not in real life. In real life, we are still friends. We know each other’s spouses and children. In real life, we pretend. We pretend that we have always been friends just like this. We pretend that we were never the people drinking beer in a bathtub. Mainly, we pretend that it was all so long ago. We pretend that on a summer night, we never wish we were back in that apartment. We pretend that none of it mattered.

But I always think of you in the summer.

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Leaving

Posted on April 8, 2022 by advicefrommarta

The other day my dentist asked me if I had plans for the summer. I told him I’d be driving my daughter to college in upstate New York, by myself. He told me that his daughter went to college in DC. They shipped her stuff ahead of time and dropped her off at Midway Airport. He described the experience as surreal. “We just went to the airport, and then she didn’t live with us anymore.” As I was leaving the office he said, “Listen, if she starts being difficult, even mean, don’t worry about it. She might need to pull away a little before she leaves, so it doesn’t hurt so much.”

I think about the “fight” we had a few weeks ago.

She was cleaning her room. In her view, she keeps her room clean. In my view, not so much, but she keeps the door to her room shut and so we rarely discuss it. On this day, she went deep. She pulled the trundle bed out and vacuumed not just underneath the bed, but the trundle mattress itself. She asked to get rid of the trundle. She declared the trundle the reason she is congested. Because she can’t see the dust trapped by the trundle, it sits there and makes her nose stuffy. She isn’t wrong about that, but we have a difference of opinion on the reasonable solution. My solution is to clean her room more often. Her solution is to get rid of the trundle because when she needs to clean, she has to move things around to pull it out and that is ridiculous.

I pointed out that she might also want to do something about the very visible dust on top of her headboard, the dust that doesn’t require her to move furniture. I pointed out that her light fixture was also kind of gross. I pointed out that we had no place else to store a trundle and mattress, and no way to give away or sell a trundle and mattress without a bed, and that she was moving in 6 months and could probably deal with it. She pointed out that I was in her room and should leave. When I think about the fights I had with my own mother, the fights I hear that my friends have with their teenagers, I know I am lucky. This is what passes for a fight with us.

Later on the same day as the dentist appointment I too was coincidentally at Midway airport waiting to go to DC. A young man sat near me and asked me questions about boarding. “I’ve never traveled without my parents,” he said. “I just want to make sure I don’t miss anything. I already had to throw out my toothpaste because I didn’t know you couldn’t bring a full-size one.” He was a college student going to a conference. I walk him through the boarding process and make sure he knows how he’s getting to his hotel once he arrives in DC. I tell him my daughter will be going to college in the Fall. Although I don’t say anything else about her he says, “From March to May is SOOO hard. Just tell her to push through, she’ll be so much happier once high school is over.”

Waiting in line to board the plane an older man makes small talk with me. He is wearing a large belt buckle with four turquoise stones in it. It is the kind of thing my father used to wear. My father had a serious fall recently and is not wearing pants with belts much these days. He wears sweatpants and pajama bottoms. The last time I was home I reorganized his dresser so that everything he can put on easily was easy to reach. He fell again last week. I tell the man that I like his belt. “Did you buy it in New Mexico?” I ask. “No, a little store in Pittsburgh. You know, I saw it one day and liked it, but I noticed it had this spot on one of the stones, so I didn’t buy it. Then I saw it again a few weeks later, but I still didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy it until the third time I saw it and I’ve been wearing it for 30 years now.”

He asks me if I’m going home and I tell him I live here and am going to DC for a meeting. He tells me that he grew up in walking distance from Midway. He met his wife when they were sixteen years old and he used to ride his bike to her house through the neighborhood. They got married when they were 21. They live in Maryland now. He has a son in the Chicago suburbs and when he’s in town he likes to go back to their houses and make sure they’re still standing. The way he talks about his wife, I’m not sure if she is still alive. I’m relieved when we board and the flight attendant says “It’s open seating you can sit anywhere,” and the man replies “Can I sit by my wife?” “Well, if she’ll have you,” the attendant replies. “That might be an issue,” he replies. His wife is waiting for him a few rows back and I am unexpectedly happy to see her.

After my daughter and I fought about her room I told her that when you are ready to go, ready to move, ready to change, it is painful not to do so. I told her that the bed was not the problem. I told her the dust was not the problem. I told her that I am not the problem and she is not the problem. The problem is that she is ready to go. She cannot shed her skin fast enough and so it grows tighter and tighter around her feeling more and more uncomfortable. She said yes, but she should have gotten a full-size bed from the beginning. I told her she didn’t know that when she was 10 and also, I lived in a room with rainbow wallpaper until I left home at 17. My bedroom is now my mother’s study. She has re-wallpapered it, but a rainbow decal still clings to one window.

What I did not tell my daughter is that leaving doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in stages. There are only two stories in the world, someone is arriving and someone is leaving.

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