In kindergarten, I was the keeper of the rabbits. During winter break, I carried the twitchy-nosed pair home in their metal cage and took care of them for two weeks. I always think it’s because I was the tallest person in my class that made my teacher entrust me with the rabbits. And I also trace this moment back to my earliest memories of hitching my worth to how well I could handle my responsibilities.
This snowballed into intense anxiety about getting good grades and excelling in school, eager to please my teachers by anchoring the line, turning off the lights, stepping up as the companion to kids bullied by everyone else. I spent the entire day at an amusement park with Galit for this reason. She needed a friend and my teachers assigned me to her as a companion. It was a long and lonely day with way too much sunlight on my freckled skin.
To this day, I aim for straight A's and 5-star reviews. So ridiculous. Triste mai vrai.
Yes, I pressed pennies on the train tracks and hung out under the viaducts, waiting for boys with wallet chains and cigarettes to appear like saints in the parade of my middle-school fantasies. I puffed on a few cigarettes and curled up in the dark with one in particular, his parents were going through a difficult divorce, which made it feel like neither of us had parents, mine bickered and then they went silent. I spent a lot of time at parks in the summertime, lugging around 19th century poetry books to impress myself and any kind of god watching down on me.
Our whole lives are spent in translation, converting words, turning over stones, transferring the water of our memories from one bucket to the other. I learned to decode Hebrew in a dingy basement synagogue but it wasn’t the kind that led me to modern poetry, only to the burning bush. I spent hours pacing the desolate parking lot in the freezing cold winter, waiting for my father to pick me up. He was often late, but he came with sliced challah from the local bakery. Italian beef sandwiches steaming in a yellow basket was another version of a formal apology.
The first time I read real literature in translation was in high school. Milan Kundera: “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “100 Years of Solitude.” Just the titles alone made my heart seize up with longing to find a new language for my budding pain! I’m so glad my teacher Ann Goethes assigned these texts to us. Bumping into her at a pro-choice rally downtown when I was 15 felt like an initiation and a pact with a feminist future. I felt seen.
Around this time, I read the bible from cover to cover. I was raised in a reform Jewish home in Skokie, with parents whose holy spaces were more prairie and flea market than temple. But I took a class on the bible as mythology, taught by a man named Barry Deardorf, who used to be a reverend, and we read through each and ever miracle and mishap as myth. I didn’t realize how radical this teaching was until much later, when it was much easier and more obvious to question everything.
Transit Slips, #11
This snowballed into intense anxiety about getting good grades and excelling in school, eager to please my teachers by anchoring the line, turning off the lights, stepping up as the companion to kids bullied by everyone else. I spent the entire day at an amusement park with Galit for this reason. She needed a friend and my teachers assigned me to her as a companion. It was a long and lonely day with way too much sunlight on my freckled skin.
To this day, I aim for straight A's and 5-star reviews. So ridiculous. Triste mai vrai.
Yes, I pressed pennies on the train tracks and hung out under the viaducts, waiting for boys with wallet chains and cigarettes to appear like saints in the parade of my middle-school fantasies. I puffed on a few cigarettes and curled up in the dark with one in particular, his parents were going through a difficult divorce, which made it feel like neither of us had parents, mine bickered and then they went silent. I spent a lot of time at parks in the summertime, lugging around 19th century poetry books to impress myself and any kind of god watching down on me.
Our whole lives are spent in translation, converting words, turning over stones, transferring the water of our memories from one bucket to the other. I learned to decode Hebrew in a dingy basement synagogue but it wasn’t the kind that led me to modern poetry, only to the burning bush. I spent hours pacing the desolate parking lot in the freezing cold winter, waiting for my father to pick me up. He was often late, but he came with sliced challah from the local bakery. Italian beef sandwiches steaming in a yellow basket was another version of a formal apology.
The first time I read real literature in translation was in high school. Milan Kundera: “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “100 Years of Solitude.” Just the titles alone made my heart seize up with longing to find a new language for my budding pain! I’m so glad my teacher Ann Goethes assigned these texts to us. Bumping into her at a pro-choice rally downtown when I was 15 felt like an initiation and a pact with a feminist future. I felt seen.
Around this time, I read the bible from cover to cover. I was raised in a reform Jewish home in Skokie, with parents whose holy spaces were more prairie and flea market than temple. But I took a class on the bible as mythology, taught by a man named Barry Deardorf, who used to be a reverend, and we read through each and ever miracle and mishap as myth. I didn’t realize how radical this teaching was until much later, when it was much easier and more obvious to question everything.
Transit Slips, #11
