music: Tori Amos- Crucify EP
I am the oldest of ten cousins on my mom’s side of the family. When we were young we would go over to my grandparents’ house for Hanukkah. It was one of the guaranteed times of year when all of us would be in one place, and we would always look forward to the occasion. The centerpiece for the celebrations was a book that my grandmother put together each year, involving a series of stories and reflections about the Maccabees, the symbolism of the Festival of Lights, and the ten of us. I can remember sitting around after enormous dinners in some new article of clothing that matched each of my cousins and listening to Grandma read from the new Hanukkah book this year.
Since we’ve all moved away from Milwaukee, however, there has been no family Hanukkah celebrations. There have been no new Hanukkah books either, usually just a card from the grandparents. But this year, things are different. My grandparents have decided to sell the house they built and lived in for 45 years. The packing and cleaning are going on right now; no doubt my mom and aunt are beside themselves wtih the work and the emotional toll of cleaning out, boxing up, and emptying the house in which they grew up and the house in which the family had so many celebrations. This year, the Hanukkah card came with instructions: “Now, this December 2005, Seneca Road, our home, is being sold- and its your memories and thoughts that will go on forever. So, this Hanukkah, I want to gather in from you your pages for the Hanukkah book of the year of our Exodus from Seneca Road.”
I spent a good amount of time ruminating over this one-not having Grandma and Grandpa’s house as a family homebase anymore is a pretty big deal. And in stewing over the family transition that is taking place, and in thinking about it in relation to our yearly Hanukkah celebrations, I found myself thinking about my relationship with religion. Which is a rare event. Generally I think that religion is more trouble than it is worth, historically speaking, that more people have died or been persecuted because of religion than would make it worth practicing. Moreover, I tend towards the empirical and have a hard time with faith. But embedded in all of that is a cultural component to religion of which I often lose sight. It’s partially because the representatives of the latest modern American incarnation of my religion live in ways that run counter to many of my values and personal goals. But traced far enough back, I remember that I descend from a tribe of nomadic desert-dwellers, intrepid travellers, and stubborn survivors. The parallel to my family’s immediate transition is striking. My submission for this year’s Hanukkah book follows.
December 18, 2005It has occurred to me that in some small way, we cousins are retelling the story of Hanukkah in and with our lifetimes, and what’s more, the departure of our family from 8595 North Seneca Road is a crucial part of that story.
Allow me to explain.
The larger story in which Hanukkah is framed is one of building a home, losing that home, and finding it again many years later. The first time around involved a nomadic tribe of desert-dwellers (a scrubby and stubborn bunch no doubt) setting up shop on a small strip of barely tillable desert in between Africa and Asia. Despite a host of agricultural problems and mildly unfriendly neighbors, the tribe built an impressive civilization, and with it a pretty intricate culture, remnants of which we carry still. Then somewhere along the line that tribe-come-society lost their holdings in a handful of skirmishes and a couple misinterpreted dreams. Things were usually lost this way in antiquity, and suffering a misfortune such as this was probably commonplace. But the amazing thing was that the tribe didn’t disappear into obscurity. Those scrubby, stubborn nomads scattered to different parts of the globe, tucked themselves into every corner imaginable, and lived. For a couple thousand years, give or take. And more amazing still is was that aspects of that old tribal culture bound them, even at great distances, through political and social barriers and often against the wishes of those lands in which they inhabited. The tribe went with what came to them, did the best they could, had some good years and some bad years, struggled mightily at times, but they never disappeared entirely. After those couple thousand years of wandering through distant lands, and even settling in them long enough to call them home, the tribe seized upon an opportunity. The call went out, and the congregation responded. The tribe gathered in the desert once more, laid claim to that hot, dry strip of land sandwiched in between two continents, and over the past 60 or so years have been rebuilding their home. A great miracle happened there, as we say.
We cousins are that scrubby, stubborn nomadic tribe.
I don’t mean that we are all descended from the Canaanites and the Hebrews, which we are of course. That is far too obvious a comparison. I mean that we are all part of another sort of tribe, what we’ve come to know as a cousin’s club, and moreover, that we are at that point in the story where we are about to lose our homeland. It is a sad occasion from my eyes, one that I never really wanted to see happen, but one that I realize is a necessary part of the story. You see, we are now finished being children. We’ve all tapped our nomadic past, packed our bags, and left town. We’re all out there spread around the country, wandering distant lands in search of our fortunes and our place in the world, trying to find home. We have entered a familial Diaspora of sorts, not unlike our nomadic ancestors. It’s sad in some ways, but if we believe the larger story passed down to us, we realize that it is exactly what is supposed to happen.
My life as an adult in Boston is a far cry from what I remember my life to be growing up with you in Milwaukee. It’s a bit disturbing to me to remember too vividly where we all came from, and even more disturbing to think about the home that Max built in the past tense, but it is an important project. Remember the barbecues? The rotten apples on the back patio? The wicker basket of musical instruments from around the world? Matzo balls with hot dogs in the middle? An enormous green plastic bowl filled with popcorn? A wardrobe so big you could get lost in it? Penny grabs out of wooden bowls? A black chair that spun you around so fast you wanted to throw up? A light fixture that looks like melting ice cubes? Gold and silver pieces on a chessboard? Raspberries and mint leaves along the side of the house and a mysterious fenced-in vegetable garden? Midnight ice cream feasts where your choice was chocolate or chocolate fudge? An old dentist’s chair inexplicably placed in the garage? Pool and ping-pong in the basement? A horizontal rack of wooden coat hangers, one of which bore your name? Remembering these little things is this tribe’s culture, and is our way to find home once we are done wandering. I’ve only realized this recently, that where we are, and more importantly who we are, is a direct result of where we’re from. And all of us are from 8595 North Seneca Road. A great miracle happened there. Of this much I am sure.
So what does this Hanukkah’s Exodus mean for us, the wandering tribe of cousins? For the moment, it means that our place of origin is a place we can not revisit anymore, and that as we saunter away from our years as children we also move farther and farther into a Diaspora.
But remember the story: after years of wandering a homeland is re-established. We have not reached that point yet, and might not for some time. But it will come. And while that might not be 8595, or even Milwaukee, our cousin’s tribe will find a place to call home. The Maccabees of Hanukkah fame were too descended from those ancient nomads, scrubby and stubborn, exiled from their homelands, wandering. And like the Maccabees, we know these hills. And we’ve got a few good tricks up our sleeves. And we won’t go down without a fight. And we’ve got enough energy to keep the fires burning for longer than anybody thought possible. If we trust in the story we’ve been told, and the story of which we are a part, the tribe will congregate and we will find our way back home one day when the time is right. In these days of wandering and in this Exodus from our home faith in the stories of our tribe is all I can hold onto.
Great miracles will happen again, miracles unforeseen, but not now. Now is the time to pause in each of our respective wanderings and bid a farewell to 8595 North Seneca Road. Now is the time to wander to far-flung places, carrying with us that which we share from years past. And in doing so, now is the time to remember where we are from. We are retelling our people’s story with our very lives, you see, but right now we tribe of cousins are only in the middle of the story.
Grandma and Grandpa, I suspect, have known this all the while. I realize as I type deep into a Sunday night in a land far away far away from my home that Grandma, in her own way, has been singing this story to us for years:
Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullabySomewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come trueI very much look forward to writing future chapters of our Hanukkah book with all of you.
Love,
David
music: Grateful Dead- 6/10/1973, Washington DC
I was catching up with someone after a wonderful salmon dinner tonight, talking about this and that. There’s a guitar nearby, and he eggs me on to play a little. I tune the thing up, and out from the woodwork comes B. B. is somewhere in his 50’s, presents with impenetrable eyes and facial expression,sports long stringy hair and shaggy goatee and an ample round potbelly framed by old stretched suspenders. He shuffles around, partly due to a small cast or brace on one of his feet, but mostly because a lucid reality isn’t his forte. He smells a bit of old underwear, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He had shuffled back and forth once or twice over the course of the evening, and had probably been there and back more than that in a larger sense, but this last time he stopped in front of us at the sound of the guitar being tuned. He looks at me for a good long while, damn near half a minute, without saying anything at all, and not seeming like it was necessary for him to talk. Something clinically close to catatonic, were I to guess. I asked him, seeing his Jerry Garcia shirt, if he liked the Grateful Dead. He nods after another excruciating 10 seconds, still staring quite blankly at me and the guitar. I’m not sure if he blinked the whole time. I start running through some songs I know how to play, and halfway through the list he speaks up:
“Play Eyes of the World.”
So I do, carefully, and not too loud, not knowing exactly how this guy would react to it and not wanting to make too much of a spectacle. But as soon as the chords started, he breaks out with the lyrics, shouting his way through the lyrics, barely holding melody and rhythm together. And as soon as it began, though, B. was immediatlely transformed. An intensity came over him as he half-sang, a certain glow as well. Something in B. resonated and reverberated and amplified, he somehow was now awake, snapped out of his placid trance. It wasn’t good, but it was pure and honest. He hit most of the words pretty well.
I kept playing the tune for all my life, not quite knowing what would happen to this human being once the music stopped. When it inevitably did he fell silent, cracked an imperceptible smile, and asked: “Box of Rain?”
I didn’t know it.
“Ripple?”
That I knew. So we did Ripple, with B. scratching out the verses. There was something heartbreakingly human listening to him recite the lyrics almost as if they were the Gospel. In some very significant way, especially with the music of the Dead to a certain demographic, music takes on a highly spiritual quality, and B. was in church, testifying.
If my words did glow with the glow of sunshine, and my tunes were played on the harp unstrung, would you hear my voice come through the music? Would you hold it dear as it were your own?
We ended up doing Brown Eyed Women and Bertha before it was all said and done. He seemed pretty disappointed that we had to stop, but we’d made a bit of a scene and my fingers were hurting. The point, however, was made. Music is an incredibly powerful and moving thing, sometimes able to accomplish in a few seconds what years of therapy can not. It evokes something deepset and vital in even the most impenetrable of minds. A Ripple in still water.
(if I knew the way, B., I would take you home.)
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world
the heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own
Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings
The heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own
music: teenagers screaming in the hallway
So I have my arms full of books and papers and a mug of tea and i’m struggling to open the door. One of my students asks if I need any help. I issue a stock reply: “no, I can get it.” I’m thinking about something else. Meanwhile I still haven’t opened the door.
She looks at me, rolls her eyes. “Mister, why don’t you ever let anybody help you?”
Um.
I mean.
There are a million reasons that I give myself for choosing to live the way I do, and I believe strongly in most of those reasons. But she’s undeniably right.
These kids…honestly. Someone has to call me out; funny that it’s the people I work for.