I love the blank slate of it and the way you can slowly start to fill in the grids with all the random pieces of knowledge you’ve accumulated over the years. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote Cats, which was based on poems by TS Eliot, who was originally from St. Louis. St. Louis is not the capital of Missouri, Jefferson City is. A vandyke is a kind of a beard, Dick Van Dyke was in Mary Poppins. A Bora is a type of wind and Mount Otemanu is in Bora Bora. All of the hundreds of useless facts you know are not useless if there is a crossword puzzle.
Maybe you do not know what movie had 12 Oscar Nominations in 1996, but then you fill in one or two letters and you remember not only the English Patient but the Seinfeld episode where you agreed with Elaine. You can look at the same clue and the same letters over and over again and then suddenly, out of the mist, Katmandu becomes clear. Sometimes, you look at a clue and you do not know the answer and then, when you come back to it, you realize that it was the clue itself you were misreading. One day it takes you three letters and fifteen minutes to come up with Batik as a dying technique, but then a week later you know it right away.
Certain people, like Esai Morales and Yoko Ono are way more popular in crossword puzzles than they are anywhere else. If Ada Oklahoma were visited as often as it appears in crossword puzzles, it would be a major city. Everyone I know who does crossword puzzles has their own way of doing them. Some people do all the across, then all the down. Some people do a section at a time. I like to go as much in order as I can – one across, one down, two down, three down, four down, five across … Crossword puzzles move in logical, if quixotic, ways.
My father taught me to do crossword puzzles. For most of my life, he made time every day to sit with a pencil and a large eraser and work on a crossword puzzle. He didn’t mind if I filled in answers, but I had to use pencil. Sometimes, if I am doing a crossword puzzle my son will come and fill in the answers he knows, but he doesn’t have the patience to do the whole puzzle. When he was little I dreaded handing him the pen and letting him mess up my puzzle, but I did. The answer I associate most closely with my father is “oleo.” It’s another word for margarine and you don’t see it much any more. But my father used it on grocery lists and crossword puzzles.
Once, just after college, I was at a boy’s apartment. We were snuggled in bed and he decided we should do a crossword puzzle. He found a pen on the floor. “What if you make a mistake?” I asked. “What if I do? You’re allowed to make mistakes, Marta. It’s just a crossword puzzle.” I was deeply in love with him and our relationship was complicated and took a long time to sort out. I have forgotten what made it so complicated, but I have never forgotten my shock at realizing that I had spent years being afraid to make a mistake, even on a crossword puzzle. It would be many more years before I got over that fear and I am really not over it yet. But I do crossword puzzles in pen, because I would like to be.
My father can no longer do crossword puzzles. Sometimes, when I talk to him and he travels between time periods and languages I long for a grid where I could put the random words and pieces of information he is sharing. I think if I only had the right grid, I could organize it and make sense of it. But I cannot. So I continue to fill in tiny squares and wonder about Mali and Borneo and oleo.
My father, a professor and a poet, has dementia. Over the years he must have written dozens of articles and poems. Occasionally for money. Yesterday, he received a royalty check for .78. He obviously has no memory of what the check is for. My mother also has no idea. Maybe it was a scholarly article on the cultural implications of masculine identities. Maybe it was a poem about traveling. Maybe it was a chapter in a text book.
There is nothing less real than a .78 check. It cost more than .78 to write and send the check. It will cost more than .78 to deposit the check. It will cost more than .78 for the bank to process the check. This check is not real.
Yesterday, I asked my father what he was thinking and he said, “shum davar,” Hebrew for “eh, nothing.” Neither my father nor I speak Hebrew.
“With the year ending,” he said, “It’s important to remember that a new year always starts. That’s the important thing.”
He said it in his professor voice. It sounded profound. If we were anywhere near the end of the Jewish year or the calendar year, it would have been profound.
My father is retreating into his mind. He lives in a place where he picks up bits of languages he once studied, where what he ate for dinner is more of a mystery than a car he drove 30 years ago. He lives in a place in his mind where every deep thought he ever had mixes effortlessly with fantasies about a garden he thinks he planted at work. His life’s work sits in notebooks and boxes in a house where he no longer lives. A house where sometimes, randomly, a .78 check shows up.
There is nothing real about a check for .78.
Except that once, long ago, my father wrote something that someone bought. He wrote something that someone paid for and now 10? 20? years later, someone is still finding value in it. Even if that value is only .78. It’s not nothing.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
