Goodbye Hello

When I was a Senior in High School, I took Visual Art as an academic course and made a huge collage of my ancestors in charcoal, crayon and ink. I worked on it all year, meticulously, and based the faces in the collage on photographs of people living in the Warsaw Ghetto documented  by the Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac. The collage was 7 feet high and 5 feet wide, and on a warm day in Spring, my father walked over to my school to look at it. I was so excited to see him! I counted the minutes until he arrived, and after he had seen it, we walked hand in hand by the East River, alternating between amicable gossip and intense debate about the value of creativity. Eight years later, walking on the same boardwalk, and having essentially the same conversation, I interrupted him and accused him of having an affair. I told him, “I know you are having an affair. No matter what you say, I know it.” He held his hands out in supplication, and replied, “what can I say when you get like this?” 

It turns out that I was both correct and incorrect about my father. He had been having an affair, but it wasn’t his only affair. He had been unfaithful to my mother at intervals during their long, and seemingly  marriage. They divorced when I was twenty-seven, and he moved to England with his girlfriend. I barely spoke to him for ten years after that, as I helped my mother navigate her grief. 

Recently, my husband commented that I seldom write about my father, and when I do, I paint a negative portrait of him. It is rare that Eric makes me cry, but when I heard his words, hot tears immediately poured from my eyes. I loved my father intensely, and yet was wounded by him. And so, to better understand my feelings, I decided to write about my father’s name.

My father was named Jan Alfred Shirokauer Hartman. He was born on May 23, 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, and he died on the evening of November 9th, the same night that Kristallnacht took place. He was only 68 years old. 

On Kristallnacht, Germans vandalized Jewish-owned businesses. The phrase means “the night of broken glass,” because so many shop windows were broken. The event was a precursor to the Holocaust. 

Because of Anti-Semitism in Germany, my father was born in Sweden, after my German-Jewish Grandparents fled. Luckily, they left in 1931, well before my father was born, the year of Kristallnacht, the year that the genocide truly began. 

His mother’s name was Rita. She left Germany when she was thirteen. Her family moved to Stockholm because my Great-Grandmother Alice (Rita’s mother), sensing untenable racism against Jews in Germany, had applied for visas to both Hungary and Sweden, planning to leave immediately for whichever country granted asylum first. Blessedly, Sweden processed their applications more efficiently. Had they moved to Hungary they would have been killed. 

Alice, my Great-Grandmother had to push her husband Willie, my Great-Grandfather, to leave. He deeply resented the disruption, and Alice and Willie’s marriage never recovered. The move to Sweden destabilized Willie, in some fundamental way that he couldn’t articulate but expressed in resentment against his wife. 

His three daughters, Lore, Lilly and Rita, were chased by Swedish bullies, and traumatized by the upheaval. Lore and Lilly, aged eight and ten, refused to speak German ever again, while Rita, my Grandmother and the eldest, refused not to speak German, and only spoke Swedish when interacting with her sisters, vastly preferring German and making it the official language of her own family after she married. My father was fluent.

My Grandfather, a red-haired orphan, was eighteen when he left Germany, alone. Rita and Robert  met and married in Stockholm, later moving to Mexico to get as far away as possible from the carnage taking place in Europe. My father was three at the time, and remembered the trip aboard an ocean liner, vividly. When he was standing on the deck of the ship with his handsome father, the stuffed animal that he was clutching was wrested out of his grasp and tossed into the surf. Robert Shirokauer, my Grandfather, felt that Jan, my father, was too old for such babyish comforts, and wanted to teach his son to be hard. But the lesson held no value for little Jan. He was never tough, and that was part of his beauty. He remained tender and awe-filled his entire life, loving sensual pleasure, marveling at great literature and playing beautiful classical music on his small, transistor radio all day as he wrote his plays and his novels. When he was dying, he gasped, sadly, “Oh! Oh! All the beautiful things I will never eat again! Roast duck! Prime rib!” I deeply recognize myself in so many aspects of him.

The name “Jan” is the Scandinavian version of the name “Ian.” The name “Alfred,” was the name of Robert’s father, my Great-Grandfather, who died before the Holocaust began. The name “Shirokauer,” was Robert’s surname, before he arrived in Sweden and changed it to “Hartman” to sound less Jewish. 

Anxiety over persecution permeated Robert’s psyche, though I never perceived this as a child. I just remember an old man with a big stomach and a jolly personality, who fed my sister the delicious Aladin-brand chocolates that he liked and ordered from Sweden. I didn’t like chocolate, so he invented a different ritual with me. In the evenings, after a Mexican supper of artichokes, tortillas, guacamole and limeade, he would put me on his knees and pretend to be a disobedient horse, who ran when I said to walk, and brayed loudly when given direct orders. I loved it, but his wild knee pumping scared me. I wrapped my fingers in his chest hair to stay aboard. He also let me bite his nails, so that I wouldn’t bite my own, and tie ribbons into his chest hair. My sister and I shrieked with laughter as we bedecked him. The maids who worked for my Grandparents came into the dining room to watch and doubled over in laughter as well.

The severity that Robert imposed on Jan was no longer evident in his gentle antics. But, he had been very stern with my father, beating him with a hairbrush and sending him away to boarding school at the age of fourteen. My father never really returned to his home after that. He went straight to college after boarding school, where he met my mother. They moved to New York, together, but visited Mexico for six weeks every summer. I never perceived any tension between my father and Grandfather, but it was there. 

My Grandfather, an orphan, was partially raised in a tough boy’s home in Berlin, and desperately needed coddling. My Grandmother doted upon him until my father was born. Then, my father became her focus and my Grandfather felt displaced. Perhaps that accounts for the cruel disposal of my father’s stuffed toy aboard the ship, the harsh spankings and admonitions to toughen up. But it could also be that my Grandfather was traumatized and unable to do better, letting the violence and intensity of his past roar out in rage against my father. By the time I was alive, he had mellowed.

A dear friend of mine, from South Sudan, is married to a man who survived the genocide there. Though her husband is steady and loyal, she told me that many South Sudanese men from the Dinka Tribe  (the unfortunately named “Lost Boys”) have difficulty remaining faithful to their wives. She said that she thought it was because they had been so traumatized as children that they couldn’t allow themselves to thoroughly bond with another human being. Infidelity became a way to maintain emotional distance.

I do not think that my father cheated on my mother for the same reasons, but I do think that he was deeply wounded by inherited trauma. His father Robert compensated for displacement to Mexico through tremendous ambition, writing philosophical treatise that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. It was as if, seeing an ocean of human beings extinguished, he could not risk letting himself be forgotten. And yet, he is not widely remembered anymore for his work.

My father worked tirelessly to be famous through his own writing. Now, they are both gone, and what I remember is  simple: their soft hair, their humor, their hands, their conflicts. I do not care if they are or were famous. They are a part of me, and I carry them into the future every time I am creative, or loving, or funny.

I met my Great-Grandmother in Sweden for the first time when I was ten. She was small, and round-faced, just like me, and offered her soft hand when greeting me. “Goodbye,” she said, smiling happily, “it is good to see you!” She had confused the words “hello,” and “goodbye” in English, and at the end of the evening hugged us and solemnly said, “Hello! Hello! Sleep well tonight!” That was the only time I ever met her, as she died soon thereafter, but I never forgot her inversion of salutation and embarkation.

In some way, I think my father left the family, and moved to England because he wanted never to be forgotten, to find the fame there that had eluded him in his life in New York with my mother. Like his father, he did not want to be one more forgotten soul, lost in a sea of history. But, like his Grandmother, he inverted meaning. We are remembered most vividly by our small acts of love, I think, not by our novels, our collages, our grand and great works, that often fade away. I cherish the fact that my father walked to my school to see me. I cherish the meals we shared of roast duck and prime rib. Writing this blog, I can perhaps see him more clearly, and, in this way, begin to truly forgive his mistakes. Life is so complex. It is difficult to live it perfectly, without misstep and pain. Hello dear Dad. Goodbye.

Howl

Growing up in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, being a germophobe was normal. I lived on 86th Street, in Yorkville, and it was seedy. At night, prostitutes waited outside German restaurants with heavy, oak doors, twinkling lights and white tablecloths. One restaurant, The Café Geiger, created alpine scenes in their front windows. I marveled at a tiny toy train running through a mountain covered in a facsimile of snow made of  dusty cotton balls. Once, a woman in heavy makeup, a pink wig and a Tam O’Shanter, joined me, pointing with a manicured finger in childish wonder. I was never afraid of her or the others, and marveled at their outfits. Once, I saw her wearing jeans with clear plastic pockets. The warmth of her butt cheeks fogged the plastic with condensation. 

It was the men who scared me, the pimps in fur coats with impassive, hard faces, the junkies slumped in doorways soaked in piss, the staggering drunks, the flasher who revealed his huge, disgusting penis to me when I was ten, the young man who pinched my chest when I was eleven. The streets were filthy with gum, squashed hot dogs, sticky patches of dried effluvia. There were rats on the subways, and the psychiatric hospitals had dumped their patients into the city. As a child, it all reeled around me, like a malevolent and fascinating snow globe. I often ran the last block home, too scared to endure another moment of exposure. 

Into the apartment I would race, kicking my school shoes off at the front door. The kitchen sink was my first stop, and I would scrub my hands and wash my face until I felt cleansed, not just of the city, but of human misery and the terror it evoked in me. I felt empathy and hatred in equal measure for the human beings who populated the streets. My washing routine was a way to delineate the peace and emotional order of home from the chaos of the city outside. Purity was love and home. Dirt was depravity, contagion and violence.

The dichotomy stuck, alas. When the AIDS epidemic subsumed the city, I was terrified. I saw an emaciated man covered in Kaposi’s Sarcoma on the subway, with nobody sitting next to him, a halo of empty air surrounding him on the crowded train. He bowed his head in humiliation. I wanted to be the kind of human being who sits next to him, doesn’t give in to fear, but I packed myself into the crowd, and kept my distance.

Another person revealed their HIV status to me as we ate from a communal plate of Ethiopian food. I was horrified, afraid that I had caught the virus from him. I stopped eating. Another time, some errant spittle from another friend’s mouth hit my eye. I didn’t reveal my panic, but it was there, a tsunami of anxiety and self-preservation that flooded reason and biological fact. It shamed me. 

At the height of the AIDS epidemic, I would see indigent, ill human beings living on the streets, cardboard signs propped haphazardly against them asking for help. Once, I saw a man who was unconscious and covered in grime, urine in a moat around him. Commuters marched through it and stepped over him resolutely, annoyed by the obstacle, especially during the morning rush, I felt sick with fear, and empathy. He had once been a baby. He could have had a passport. He was a human being, with a history, a story. How would it feel to be sick and so incredibly alone?

I think his plight, his filth, his inevitable lonely death, reminded me of how prisoners in Hitler’s death camps must have looked and smelled. I couldn’t separate myself from him in some fundamental psychological way that would allow me to step over him. He could have been my Great Grandmother, who died at Auschwitz. 

When history lurches violently in your direction and subsumes you or your ancestors, it becomes very hard to feel immune from ramification. I began to read constantly, memoirs of surviving the AIDS epidemic, memoirs by authors who had died. The stories resonated with me. My own Grandmother had been chased from Germany, called a pariah, as had the authors of the AIDS memoirs. 

And now we are in another pandemic, and I have been riven with a terror that remained suppressed until my husband returned home. He had been traveling in Asia, but decided to return when every country on his itinerary closed its borders. I carefully planned his homecoming. He could leave his Covid19 infected suitcase in the car. I could wear gloves and a mask, empty the clothes from the suitcase into a plastic bag, race to the laundry and wash the clothes on the sterilization cycle until clean. Similarly, he could strip in the entryway, remove his Covid19 bedecked travel garments, hurry upstairs to shower while I could sprint the pestilential clothing to the laundry as well, then mop the floor where they had touched the tile. All this seemed perfectly logical.

The day before his return, I had purchased food, sweating in a mask and gloves. At home, I hauled the bags of food to the kitchen, filled the sink with hot water and Lysol, and dipped each packaged item into the cleansing solution, sweat from anxiety streaming down my face, a strange, obsessive mantra repeated out loud, rhythmically and crazily as I worked. “Quick dip!” I plunged the can or bottle into the sink, and lifted it streaming onto the counter, “Quick dip! Quick dip! Quick dip!” I was frantic. 

And then Eric arrived, an insouciant and irrepressible life-force, filled with opinions, a dark, Thai mask obscuring his pink, sensuous mouth. I told him my plan, shrilly, the urgency in my voice irritating him. “We are not doing that,” he stated. “No.” 

And thus, he carried his Bubonic plague bag up our pristine stairs, and plunked it upon the floor of our sacred bedroom and unpacked, while still in his pestilential, malarial plane clothes, allowing me to place his dirty laundry in a plastic bag only after much negotiation, and wandering serenely around the house, touching everything and shedding virus everywhere, until I shrieked in a voice I have almost never heard, as it came from my deepest fear of death and was shattering with its intensity and animal terror. “ERIC! GO SHOWER! PLEASE! PLEASE PLEASE!” My words were brittle, sharp, jagged. As I shouted them, I knew I would scream if I were tortured, knew I would keen and wail if I lost him, knew I could kill him, knew I was the murderer and the victim, the prostitute and the homeless man. I  knew that we all are.

It took me two days to unwind, to settle into him being here, being a force of intelligence and beauty, free will and obstinance. I cannot control his reaction to this pandemic, nor can he control mine. But, my howl of fear is a moment I will not forget, now, as I sit in relative tranquility in my beloved, red chair, writing, and looking at two packages that I asked him not to bring inside, but that he brought inside anyway. I will not forget my fear, because for me it is worse than being sick. I will not forget it, because inside the fear, I was utterly alone, afraid and blind with anxiety. The most common phrase repeated throughout the Bible is, “be not afraid.” I think that this is so because fear is what separates us from our highest nature, which is love. I think that it is fear, more than any other feeling, that incites violence.

I don’t think that I can go forward now without fear, but I think that the raw sound of my own terrified shriek is a warning to myself, not to get lost in the terror that will always be there, pandemic or not, the knowledge that we can control very little, least of all death, and certainly not another person, who has different ideas of what is safe and what is reckless. But when I can just be, without crippling alarm, and accept that I am afraid, even of mail, even of air and my dog’s kisses, and that a part of me always was and always will be, I can surrender to the moment, and go upstairs to sleep, one leg warm under the covers and touching Eric’s, the other in the cold air, that is refreshing, and balances the heat.

A Classmate's Death

A classmate died recently. I hadn’t known her well, and we hadn’t stayed in touch. 

I didn’t like her, but the reason for my enmity had everything to do with me and nothing to do with her. I was tight, judgmental and mean back then, constricted by ambition, a binding garment that made me  unhappy.

Her name was Orleigh Epp, and she resembled the actress Ellen Barkin, with an asymmetrical, rough face, that was both beautiful and ugly, sexy, raw and expressive. I watched her closely and came to conclusions about her in my imagination. She was everything  that I was not—at ease in her body, her slightly bovine hipbones lifting her frayed jean skirt in alluring undulations, her matted hair proof of long, voluptuous nights, her drooping eyelids further evidence of an abandon and comradery from which I exiled myself. She often went barefoot, and her narrow feet and arched toes annoyed me because they were so dirty. I found her unclad feet an affectation. Most of her was an affront to me, because I went to bed early and alone, a novel on the bedside table. I called my parents every day. I wore unsexy shoes, showered regularly and was shy, and yet none of this made me a better painter than she was. In fact, quite the opposite. She dashed and dabbed paint in an easy and messy manner that added up to splendor, whereas I was tight and vaguely panicked, afraid that each assignment I completed would reveal that I wasn’t actually an artist at all.

Our teacher that year was a tall man with a thick mane of white hair and a patrician manner. I remember Orleigh arriving a bit late to class, a self-portrait on a haphazardly stretched canvas dangling loosely from two fingers, which were bedecked with heavy, ornamental rings and dusted with black charcoal residue. I had been waiting for his attention, was proud of my work that week, but he rushed over to Orleigh and exclaimed over her thick, wet image, holding it up for the class to see while she folded herself onto the floor and assumed the lotus position, not even smiling, just listening and nodding intently, eyes at half-mast. 

And so, I villainized her silently, making fun of her in my imagination, naming her clothing “pelts,” because they seemed so skin-like, loathing her tinkling ankle bracelets, hoping that she would lack the driven tenacity to keep painting, launch a career, succeed. Which is what I tried to do, pushing myself to work ever longer hours, getting accepted into a prestigious painting program, silencing my desires to leave it, become a minister or a social worker or a therapist, dismissing those thoughts as false, when they did in fact represent very real components of my temperament. 

At times, I tried to find Orleigh online, but never succeeded. She had made a lasting impression on me, but I attributed my desire to learn what had happened to her to have origins in jealousy and malice.

And then she appeared on my college’s Facebook page, her face in close-up, tanned and creased, but familiar, text beneath the photograph asking to please help Orleigh Epp to raise money for her son Roo, who was just sixteen, and had lost his father to illness three years previously. Now, Orleigh was fighting cancer. The story unfurled. She had been diagnosed the year before with an unspecified cancer. There were photos of her and Roo on the beach, arms entwined, his head unselfconsciously leaning on her shoulder. A year after remission, an Emergency Room visit revealed that her cancer had surged back. She was in hospice now, waiting to die. There was a photo of her in a beanie, her baldness covered, her expression frank and accepting, staring directly into the camera. 

She lived in Albuquerque and was active in the art scene there, attending openings, hosting happenings, making work constantly, that ranged from figurative murals to huge, fire-belching sculptures. She had loved her husband fiercely, and was a devoted mother to Roo. Art, community and family were important to her, and she contributed generously. 

Two days later, it was reported that Orleigh had died. One comment said,  “Orleigh is gone now. Flying free.” 

“Or just profoundly in non-being,” I thought, uncharitably, “which may or may not be free. None of us knows.”

Nobody’s life is uncomplicated, and the Orleigh that I describe is not the real Orleigh at all (and I have changed her name and some details to protect her identity). I did not know her, never actually spoke to her, and so she is just a figment of my own psyche, no different than a character in a memorable dream. But what I do know, is that I overlooked something essential that I attributed to her, and impugned it, when it fact it held value and could have taught me lessons that balanced my own emotional rigidity.

I judged Orleigh for an unmitigated response to being alive. She walked barefoot on concrete in late fall in New England, and moved to New Mexico, where videos exist of her laying on an enormous canvas and moving her arms and legs like a snow angel. She made art her whole life, but also raised a child and lost a husband and knit herself into a community. Her various bodies of work do not match cohesively but instead flowed out of her and were expressions of what she felt at the moment. 

One of the last communal interactions that she participated in was held at the hospice. Orleigh is in a wheelchair, a thin smattering of bright white hair covering her fragile skull. Roo is by her side. Many of her works of art hang on the hospice walls and some are presented to her. Her thin face creases into a bright grin and she waves to the camera and then claps.

Seeing my own work presented to me in a manner that speaks of finality would not make me smile, but weep, for my smallness and for my finitude. Orleigh’s gaiety, whether feigned for Roo, or genuine, is courageous, as is the fact that she made art all her life, and appeared to love people deeply. It seems like she made her contribution, and accepted its parameters. She said that she didn’t want to die, but confronted with death’s inevitability, she was present for it, and, it appears, serene.

Fragments

My fear of  illness and dying ebbs and flows with circumstance, but a baseline awareness and dread of loss is a part of every one of my days. Sometimes, when Eric falls asleep in his chair, I gaze at him, and think about how frantic I would feel seeing him in a coffin. I imagine videos of service dogs scampering frantically around the open caskets of their deceased owners, and can easily envision myself darting and crooning in confusion and grief. The difference is that there would be no videos of the event posted on social media, with enthusiastic offers of adoption, and multiple “crying face” icons indicating “empathy.” There would instead be horror and repulsion, because one is still supposed to hide one’s terror of death and separation. It is almost a civic responsibility. Hence, I have learned to feign calm at airports, kissing Eric chastely, the way “normal” people do, and driving away from him, suppressing thoughts of him encased in a metal capsule and hurtling at 500 miles per hour across treacherous ocean waves, away from me and my imaginary capacity to protect him. 

Soon, Eric will leave again for Asia to travel for four more months, and I will drive him through a landscape of wintery and barren trees and huge, concrete franchises to the airport, where I will “pop the trunk” of the car, marveling at my capacity to do so, after having learned to drive at age 32, and help him with his backpack, and then he will be gone and I will be alone in Kansas. People will congratulate me on my generosity in allowing him to travel, and in “being so independent,” and I will resume my single life, which is peculiar indeed but not without its pleasures.

In the mornings, I will brew tea in the small, Polish teapot decorated in floral motifs, and I will read the paper in blissful silence, with no one to interrupt with comments on what they have just read, or discourses about what is wrong with academic administration or anti-vaxxers. In the evenings, I will be profligate, and order in three dishes and an appetizer from the Indian restaurant, and eat them until I am sick of them, and then throw them away, carelessly and with scant guilt, my fingers stained yellow from turmeric. At night, I will fling my arms akimbo, while lying on Eric’s unwashed pillow, enjoying the last hints of his scent while luxuriously allowing myself to stretch out. It is a mixed bag, having him gone, and yet it scares me, because I vastly prefer him to be there. With me. Loud, and messy and beautifully warm. And this state of affairs makes me think about death, and loss, and its inevitability.

I lost a first husband to mental illness. He didn’t die, but became increasingly verbally abusive and erratic, insisting that people were intentionally trying to make his computer malfunction, spending days in bed when he wasn’t scrubbing the kitchen floor with a toothbrush, and sometimes threatening to kill himself. After I left him, I was broken, but relieved. Often, I sat in silence in my soulless rented townhouse, watching the light play across the wall. What is odd, is that though I was in grief, I still enjoyed being alive, enjoyed my deep armchair, novels and my dogs. The loneliness was profound but so too was an awareness of details. I would walk the dogs in the huge, rustling prairie grasses, and be filled with wonder at the infinite range of grey hues on winter bark, how the veins in a dry leaf look like aging hands , how beautiful patches of green grass look emerging from melting snow. It is as if in the loss of a beloved human being all distractions to life’s essential meaning and grandeur are cleared away, allowing us to experience awe. Eric’s decision to travel, and my decision not to travel comes from the experience of mystery that is the positive facet to fear of death.

Eric saw his father die, diminishing for two years before the common narrative of pneumonia, the ICU and the call to hospice commenced. Many of us in Middle Age are experiencing this story with our parents, and the shock of the final loss, the moment when the spirit actually leaves the body and the discarded carcass of a parent confronts, shatters all illusions of immortality. And so, we are left with the question of how best to use these last shining seconds on planet earth.

Last night, Eric and I drove into Kansas City and ate dinner at an expensive and extraordinary restaurant with friends. The restaurant was dark and shiny, with lush, deep booths and a cacophony of noise. In the bathroom, I encountered two drunken women, with blond manes of colored hair streaked with highlights, open-back tops and spiky heels. They were gossiping together, their heavily outlined eyes squinting in malicious delight over the savory tidbits of human interest. At the table, focaccia was served, its pillowy center soft and white, its crust ornamented with herbs. A couple sat across from us, and when they stood to leave I saw that the woman was wearing a hot pink coat and thigh-high boots. I imaged the outfit displayed in the showroom of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with a placard next to it that read that in our lost culture, when women wanted sex, they wore this outfit to dinner. I won’t forget her. Nor, will I forget sitting next to a broad-shouldered Belgian man with a rich, chestnut-brown moustache on a flight to Sweden, who told me he was a Communist and then we slept, our arms pressed against each other in the small space companionably. Watching human beings being human has always been one of my life’s great fascinations, though I do not know what to do with what I record, other than to preserve it in the ephemeral and fragile space of my mind. And Eric is doing the same on his travels, marveling at the experience of a long train voyage in Central Asia, the woman who flirted with him, the Chai sold by vendors in empty Vodka bottles.

There is no answer to what gives life meaning, as the answer is as varied and inconclusive as the manifold ways we chose to live, but I do know that when the distractions clear, and I can notice each detail—the reflection in my dessert spoon last night, the one, thick hair that sprouts from the mole on my dog’s chin, the way a tiny current of anger runs through a person’s voice when they speak of something supposedly happy—these moments add up to something that feels like beauty. And because Eric will leave again soon, I am back to being observant, and it is the gift of imminent separation.

I do not really believe in a God of intention but I do believe that there are brilliant realms beyond our capacity to comprehend, encased as we are, in meat. And those sacred and mysterious places are filled with compassion. There is an order there that scatters here, and breaks into a million beautiful shards, and we gather as many as we can, before we return.

What Eric's Trip Means To Me

Originally, Eric and I were planning to travel the world when we retired, despite the fact that I had uncertainty about a year in transit through foreign environments. My stomach is so weak that I always end up taking Cipro when I am abroad. Often, I  am clenched in anxiety that I will vomit in an inopportune spot—for instance-- in the middle of a long day bobbing on a ferry in the Mekong Delta, or in a shared taxi zooming through the unpaved alleys of Accra. Worse than that by far would be spumes of uncontrollable and shameful diarrhea soaking my stylish, linen travel pants, and no available toilet. All of these fears create a second reality, lurking ominously beneath the beautiful temples and exotic, spicy food. Will it happen? Will it? What if I end up in a hospital, an unsterilized IV dripping parasites into my vulnerable arm? No, I am not intrepid though I yearn to be! Often, when I finally board the airplane, I feel a sense of triumph, that I did not get sick, did not die, can see my home again. And yet, I do so love to travel. I cried when we stepped from the airplane onto the hot tarmac of Ghana’s international airport. I was finally in Africa! This ambivalence about travel is a conundrum that pains me.

Often, when I travel, I am mildly homesick, and miss the doggies, longing for their heavy heads on my thighs as I sleep, their fetid breath condensing on my pajamas during the night, dampening them but making me feel a deep sense of belonging and connection. When I wake during the night, I recognize the quality of the darkness as being specific to home, and can easily guess what time it is by the silence, or the blush of bruised purple permeating the early dawn light, letting me know that I am home, blessedly home, the three windows in the bedroom predictable and comforting.

I love my red chair, worn and reliable in the corner of the living room, and can travel inwards all day, soaring through the vast terrain of self without ever moving a muscle. Nonetheless, I applied for a sabbatical, to be abroad, with Eric, during the Spring 2020 school semester. I wanted to write about Southeast Asian artists in Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. My hope was to actually live in those countries rather than to visit, establishing a home and a routine and an immunity to street food, so that I could be at ease and let the beauty of other cultures saturate and uplift my tremulous soul.  I received the sabbatical, but then rejected it, lured by the unexpected opportunity of being the Chair of the Department of Visual Art instead. Why would I want to do that hellish job, rather than traveling? Certainly, it had to be more than the soothing proximity of the bathroom to the office I would inhabit. Why send Eric to journey alone, when I could have been with him? I didn’t understand my own choice. 

Thus, I have been trying to figure out what Eric’s trip means to me, because I chose to stay at home. He is home now too, after traveling from August 19th until December 19th. He went to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, the Republic of Georgia, Turkey, Hungary, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Portugal and Boston. Soon again, in February, he will leave to travel throughout Southeast Asia. Why am I not anguished to stay at home, doing a job anyone would deem banal? Why am I supportive of his wanderlust? What does he seek as he moves through space and time? What do I seek as I sit stock still, and write? These are questions that interest me, because in answering them, I may come into knowledge of myself as a middle-aged woman, and see a path forward through a thicket of uncertainty that has begun to thwart my belief in achievement and ambitious endeavor.

This year, I grappled with the fact that I am not a famous artist, nor shall I ever be. And Eric is not the CEO of a large company, nor shall he ever be. We are both younger siblings, conflict averse and sensitive. We are introverts, though Eric thinks that my bubbly persona is proof of an extroverted nature (it is not, though I do fear loneliness, more than any other feeling). We have each seen parents die, sitting by hospital beds in alienating and sterile rooms while they labored towards oblivion. We have grieved them, each in our own way, me, waking nightly for over a year with one word caught in my throat and hot tears pouring from my eyes, “Mama!” Eric, by going to the gym, and often driving mile after mile listening to podcasts, thinking about the meaning of things. Yet, neither of us knows the meaning of things. It is very hard to know anything at all, having seen a parent die, because seeing a parental corpse in a bed, devoid of some inchoate but now very absent animating spirit, forces the realization that one day that corpse will be you. So, what matters? What is of absolute value now?

At Yale, during the first scalding semester of study towards an M.F.A. in Painting, I took a survey of the Old Testament at the Divinity School. Three times a week, I walked uphill, up, up, above the tormented city of New Haven, riven as it was by racial tensions and economic disparity. I would stop to look at things that were beautiful—porticos on old buildings, red, sticky berries on ornamental autumn bushes. The school was painted white and the class took place in the airy chapel. I really loved that class, because it was about the meaning of things. It emphasized that fact that none of us know the meaning of things. That is why the Bible was written. To try to figure life out—through stories.

My teacher was a woman named Ellen Davis, and her lectures were riveting. She had a radical, literary and unconventional view of the world that suffused her scholarship on the Old Testament. On weekends, I studied for the class with my friend Ramon. We met in a McDonald’s in a part of New Haven that was mostly African-American and laughed and studied and argued and ate terrible hamburgers. He became a minister and moved back to Alabama. I stuck it out in art school and became an artist. I don’t know if the doubts that I felt about making art ever disrupted his vocation to be a preacher. I do know that I almost transferred to the divinity school but I didn’t have the nerve to do so, because my identity was merged with being a painter, because I was Jewish, because I wanted to be a famous artist and the Yale School of Art is a first step in realizing that spurious ambition.

Now, both of my parents, who cared so deeply about art, and were so ambivalent about Jewishness, are deceased, and I am free, in some ways, to explore other ways to be in the world. Yet, I do not know what I want. But I do know that when I am in the studio, and I have to make decisions, and destroy months of intensive labor to unify the whole of a composition, and rely solely on my imagination to lead me from a feeling to an action to an object, I know that at these times I am intrepid. Just as Eric is intrepid when he navigates a night train from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, alone in the world, but guided by a feeling that he has that he must do this act now, travel and see and think, before he is too old to absorb the potential that the world offers.

So, how do Eric and I want to be in the world, now that we are middle-aged, and in many ways, unremarkable (unless everyone is remarkable, which I would like to believe). Eric wants, I think, to notice everything. He looks closely at bridges and buildings and engines and art. He looks less closely at human faces, the gesture a hand makes in confessing a secret, the jolt of recognition on a dog’s face after a long time separated from its human. These are the things I notice. Eric wants to be present in sensual reality, to feel the wind from the bay, taste the scallop’s pure simplicity, to be present in the saline uplift of the Dead Sea. I think he wants to experience as much as he can, while he is here on planet earth, and to have that be enough to give his life meaning.

And what do I want, as I sit in my office and run an art department at a midwestern university? I am not sure. I do want to make learning about making art be accessible to all people, regardless of financial capacity. I do want to be kind and attentive to the soul of each human being who crosses my path, though it is difficult to do. But I also yearn to know more than what is tangible. I want to know what I am supposed to be doing here! And, for some reason, I feel I will find an answer to this unanswerable need more by sitting in my office at work, listening to the often tattered needs of other human beings, than by traveling to far-away kingdoms. I  know I am afraid to do what Eric is doing, and feel tremendously proud of him. But I also know that I too, am seeking something, am traveling. I just don’t know where, or how long I will be on the journey.