Welcome to You Are Journey

At the start of last November I posted "The Way Back" after a long absence. In between that date and now there are four drafts here, never published. No posts. No marked path that would offer a way back, let alone the way back. But a full journey around the sun, or just about.

A friend who moved from Vermont to the country (this is a theme I love, like in J. Courtney Sullivan's Friends and Strangers and Elise Albert After Birth [wait, was it in After Birth that she left NYC? or did Elise Albert just write about leaving in Goodbye to All That?.  That one, the goodbye book,  I gave my first NYC roommate years after we arrived here and twice lived together, once on the Upper West and once in Brooklyn. Friends from college, we moved together into a one bedroom on West 87th with no kitchen owned by someone who played in Ghostbusters. This was when we just said hello to all this, to Bethesda Fountain, Max Fish, Columbus Bakery, dumplings on Mott street, wine on rooftops, bands in Brooklyn and a million other things. This August this friend said goodbye and moved so close to where I spent so many of my most memorable days)]).

Wait - the friend who moved to Vermont. What about her? She moved from NYC to the country and now raises chickens. A few weeks ago asked me about this blog. She said she'd just reread my last post and asked when I would write again.

Tonight? The kids—3rd grade (the younger!) and 8th grade—started school September 13. The 8th grader is not serious about applying to high school, which he needs to do this fall, because we have so far not said goodbye to all this, that is New York, and all its craziness. I barely had middle school! he whines. Why should I have to worry about high school?

Both of Catherine Newman's kids are out of the house. This stuns me. The youngest one is in college. It was already a shocking thing to discover, after reading about her toddlers in Catastrophic Happiness, that her kids were teenagers. But now Catherine and her husband are taking night walks alone? What they dreaded, what they knew would happen, what they couldn't stop from happening. Is it absolutely ludicrous to be so tied to— almost merged with—your children that you're devastated, like Catherine, to see them go? Many commenters on a recent New York Times article about the subject say is not a sad moment. It is what you have worked toward. The right outcome. 

But can't the right outcome also be sad? Can't being too old for the playground, or trick or treat, a developmentally appropriate passage, also be sad? (Did C.S. Lewis really put away childish things?) At weddings, are people always tearing up because it's just all so beautiful and wondrous or is there also something painful about all you're leaving behind?

Not tragic sad, not sad like the evening in September we stare downtown at the still surprising skyline and listen to Verdi's Requiem and remember. But still.

Each year, each new renewal, there is a lot to say goodbye to. For the first time at Yom Kippur this year I found this song "Kol Nidrei" (Aramaic for "All vows"). Listen to it here. Scroll down on the page. But before that, before the time for atonement, was the time for reflection on the year that has past. For Rosh Hashanah we generally go to my sister's apartment in Brooklyn and eat kugel, mashed potatoes, green beans and a gluten-free zucchini pie the recipe for which I discovered a few years ago and have somehow lost. Oh and challah with honey and apples and apple cake. This year, like last, we did not go to her house because of Covid.

But we had a similar meal here. Less elegant. We drank red wine and the kids had sparkling lemonade when I remembered Manischewitz is actual wine and not kid's wine. The joke about it is that it tastes like grape juice, not that it is grape juice, which wouldn't be a joke.

Then Alex said he was going to the studio.

But you're going to miss the river, I protested.

I had decided we were going to do Tashlich. I had not known about or ever heard the word Tashlich seven hours earlier. I read about it that morning. You throw bread crumbs into the river, if you're lucky enough to live by a river, which we do. "Right and left, the streets take you waterward," wrote Melville of "the insular city of the Manhattoes." But now the recommendation is for something better for fish like oats or peas. Those oats or peas represent aspects of yourself over the past year you want to cast off. I mean maybe some people would call them "sins" but I'll say things you want to change. 

But that was never a tradition, Alex insisted. The river was never part of it.

He was right, of course. He packed up the bass, my bass, the one I haven't played in over a decade, and headed to the studio. The apartment had that after-dinner quiet, after tense-ish conversation quiet, am-I-really-going-back-outside after a long day, a big meal, just me and the two kids for a tradition that was never a tradition quiet. (Like The Quiet Book by Deborah Underwood but for adults who drank wine and still had a lot to clean up.)

But none of this was a tradition, I thought as I rinsed a few dishes. I didn't grow up with Rosh Hashanah. We didn't take off from school. Once I moved to New York, my sister and I would show up with kosher wine at my grandmother's apartment for matzoh ball soup and, for those who ate it, gefilte fish.

But out to the river we went. Petra (the almost 3rd-grader) took her scooter. Wally, the fairly recently-minted teen, trailed us. 

It was brighter by the river. The sun that you think is gone over on 9th ave still dazzles over Jersey. 

We each took a handful of Irish oats. (We'd had just a little oats left in the box, not enough to ever cook, but too much to throw out or even compost. A random "I'll deal with that someday" amount.) We each, I hoped, thought about what we wanted to cast off and then we threw our oats into the river. They blew right back up at us.  The wind was heading East, blowing in our face. We needed to go out on a pier and throw with the wind at our backs. A nice Irish blessing.

The wheel of time! At the end of Pier 66. That would be perfect, I thought. I ushered the kids down the walkway and out along the pier to the edge. We passed the kayaks and the anchored sailboats. Only two others were out at the end. Imagine all the people without a river nearby reading the rules for Tashlich and having to make do with water from the faucet. 

"The wheel of time," I said again. Then several more times. It seemed so fitting, even though it wasn't the right name for the piece I realized as I got closer and read the plaque.

It's actually called "Long Time."  

So finally, buzz lifting from the too-early-in-the day wine, there by the "Long Time" waterwheel designed by Paul Ramirez-Jonas, born in Pomona, California, we threw the Irish oats East back toward the direction we had come and they landed in the water and we hoped they were safe for the fish and the seagulls likely got to them first.

A week later, our neighbor from China taught us about the Moon Festival. She gave us Mooncakes in a beautiful red box. I think inside was red bean paste. I had pictured sponge cakes we'd had many times at Kung Fu parties. But those are not at all like moon cakes, I found out on Yom Kippur. With the kids off from school, we spent hours in the playground.  After four hours, the neighbor said she was going to take her daughters to the river. We parted ways. The river. I didn't think much about it. People go to the river all the time.

The next day she told me they'd gone to the river to carry out the tradition I'd taught her, the one I'd only learned about a week before. Tashlich. She described family reunions for the Moon Festival. And I'd described the ritual by the river, the moment of reflecting on the past and turning toward the future.

Imagine that. A woman who grew up in the town of Yitong, 600 miles northwest of Beijing, bringing her girls to the Hudson River in 2021 to perform a tradition from the 8th century BCE, recorded in the old testament by a minor prophet because I'd read about it the morning of Rosh Hashanah because we couldn't go to my sister's because of Covid. 

I'll be damned, I would have said, in my head, if I was the kind of person who used expressions like that. I'll be damned.

Her openness. Her curiosity! Those are qualities of mine I've come to see as liabilities, or at least massive time sucks that have possibly derailed years. But on the other side of curiosity, observing it, I marveled.

* 

There is so much to marvel at now with a teen and a 3rd-grader. I am fast on the heels of Catherine Newman's flight. (If you don't know who she is PLEASE read some of her essays immediately, like this one.) 

This teen of mine wanted social media and that made the 3rd-grader want Facebook messenger. They created a decorated path through the house with posters leading us from room to room and finally to a performance meant to persuade us social media would facilitate more real-life meetings. At the start of the path was a vibrant poster greeting with the words: "Welcome to you're journey." 

You're with an apostrophe? You are? Who wrote this? I called out from the back hall when they were in the living room preparing the opening dance that would precede persuasive skits about why they should both suddenly have access to social media. 

You wrote :Welcome to You Are Journey." I repeated that throughout the evening, hoping to bide my time before giving an answer to their plea. We were supposed to have an answer by the end of the show. The phrase was starting to grow on me. I had no idea what to say about social media. What if everyone you know is on it and that's how they stay in touch and you're not really big on video games so this is a way to stay in touch and not be out of the loop? 

But loops can be bigger than you think. They can be looming, like the opening chapter of Moby Dick. They can turn like wheels of time, disappear like the rings made from the gossamer landing of Irish oats in water, shine like a full moon looming over the autumn harvest on the other side of the earth.

Welcome to You Are Journey. 

Maybe that's the way we should say it. Maybe we should accept that we not only take a journey, travel it, but inhabit it, too. 

You're still here, I think, when I realize where I am, the same place as so many years ago. 

But so far away.