Friday Dispatch: "Update"
Look for the small spaces
Friday greetings,
A middle-aged woman sits at a table made of old doors.
A door can become a table.
Something vertical and hinged becomes something horizontal and unmoving.
A writer forgets how to write.
A mother hears the word “update” and doesn’t know what it means. She hears two words: “up” and “date.” She hears “up” as an adjective. Some new-fangled Gen Z kind of date?
“What is an “up date?” She asks her daughter, who repeats, “update?” ending in a question, unclear as to why the mother doesn’t understand. Then it clicks. “Oh, not up date. Update!”
Is this the beginning? Or just a quirk of her mind, which has always had a unique relationship to sound, language, and meaning?
Is it neurodivergence or a sign of a neurological disorder in its earliest stages?
A door is a door.
A table, a table.
An update is an update, not a kind of date.
A date is a fruit, and also a marker of time.
We have a phone date on February 1. I put it on my calendar.
The fruit kind of date grows on a date palm. I have never eaten a date fresh from a tree.
When we were children, our mom made nut and date bread, small loaves wrapped in tinfoil with a ribbon tied around them, every December. She gave them to the mailman, who was always a man back then, and each of our teachers at school.
When my children were children, I replicated this tradition.
Nut and date bread tastes like my childhood, especially with a smear of cream cheese.
A writer writes in third person, then switches to first person, then back to third person. Why? She sips her coffee. The heat hisses and clinks. The oil tank got refilled yesterday, just in time for the deep freeze. Winter slows to a standstill, but time keeps moving. She can’t see time moving but she can see that the birthday roses her wife gave her last week need water, which is a way of seeing time. She refills the vase and breaks off the dried leaves, inhaling the scent of the rose.
A rose is a flower, and also a marker of time.
The door is a table is a threshold is a place to gather.
The dog snores. She is an animal, and also a marker of time. Her eighth birthday is coming up.
A deep freeze is coming. A big storm. A big storm has come already, in the form of scores of undertrained, over-testosteroned men with guns and total immunity whose anthem is “We’ll have our home again.” City streets look empty but if you look more closely you will see dread and fear permeating the air.
The storm is moving, spreading, mutating. It is a virus. It is a hostile takeover. It is a wall, not a door. It is the antonym of a gathering place. A tool of terror and displacement.
A writer who forgets how to write is a lonely tree.
The writer’s neighbors planted a tree lilac in their front yard when their baby was one. Now the baby is two. She waves hello from the driveway. The tree is taller. The baby is a toddler who is taller every time the writer sees her. The tree is a tree and also a marker of time. The toddler and her father go into the backyard after the storm. They make a snowman. The snowman doesn’t wear any armor, only a scarf and a hat. The snowman is exposed, vulnerable. The snowman doesn’t need protection. The snowman will melt eventually. No one will grieve the snowman when it melts.
The woman saves screenshots of headlines as if it will make them sink in. Things like, “Trump’s E.P.A. Has Put a Value on Human Life: Zero Dollars.” She looks through her camera roll. Fried eggs, squirrels, tupperware, a father, a son, a daughter, a dog. Graffiti and Tarot spreads and frozen ponds. Bird tracks. Ice. Blue sky. A bimah. A bright star. The camera roll is a collection of images, and also a marker of time. It scrolls and scrolls and scrolls like so much evidence.
The evidence is thrown out. Ignored. Distorted. Twisted. Disgraced. Zero value. Zero dollars. A human life. A man in his slippers. A woman in her minivan. A child in a classroom. Neighbors bringing groceries to those too scared to leave their homes. Neighbors planting trees, such a hopeful act. The writer can’t remember how to write without cliches. Her blood runs cold, things like that.
How else can she say it?
She scans for updates. Youth these days, with their up dates, their kikis, their words for things she can’t understand that turn out to be words she already knows.
Is it a storm or a season? Is it fleeting or here to stay? Is it a door or a table or a cliche?
She has always looked for the small spaces between that can change everything. “Nowhere.” “Now here.” A breath, a foot wedging open the door, a foot that is also a word for “no,” for “I’m here,” for “listen,” for “stop.”
The woman’s eyes are wide like a deer’s. She wants to believe she would be unmoved, unafraid, unwavering, unwilling to comply. But maybe she would just be the “un” part, the way “up” became just “up,” detached from its word partner that makes it whole. She imagines a retina lifted away from the eye, torn away from its home. Flares and flashes and darkness follow.
She will not be ripped away. It is easy for her to say this as she sits at her door-turned-table with her nice snoring dog next to her and the heat rising through latticed radiator covers. It is easy to be brave when nothing is at stake.
But she knows. Everything is at stake. And everything is too big. It needs small spaces. It needs to be broken apart like ice. She hopes her words can be mallets, hatchets, hammers, creating small fissures, weakness. She wants to keep the retina attached to the eye and also to break open the wall of ice, the wall of men.
The pen is all she has. It is a writing utensil and also a marker of time. Her way of trying to say, “now here,” and “listen.” Her way of planting a tree, of buildingw a snowman, of buying groceries for frightened neighbors.
She fears it is nothing, though.
But what if “useless” can become “use less” and the space can be a doorway she walks through into the rest of the day, where she can use less energy on things she cannot control and use more energy on small acts of hope?
Shabbat Shalom and love,
Jena
In other updates…
Wondering how M.J.’s surgery went? It didn’t (yet). Here’s their update.
Read my MLK Day reflections on the Times of Israel blogs.
A Wonderful (Local) Opportunity
For readers local-ish to Western Mass, on February 7, my friend Jana Lussier is offering “Cultivating Aliveness, Vitality, Consciousness and Embodiment,” an Introduction to Tantra class.
Jana has been practicing Chinese medicine for 25 years. She is also a trauma-informed Sex, Love & Relationship coach – and a wonderful human being and teacher! Learn more and register here.
Useless becomes “use less”
Wow!
Beautiful writing
Oh gosh I totally relate. I, too, have misunderstood common words by suddenly, for some reason, seeing them differently and not understanding what they mean. I've wondered what this is about, and decided that maybe it means I am working on being less judgy, making fewer assumptions, my mind is opening up, looking at familiar things differently, accepting possibities? I have never told anyone it happens to me, so thank you Jena for articulating and grappling with it in this beautiful piece. Shabbat shalom.