ASK ME ABOUT letting go–going through your dead mother’s epic antique and vintage collection is a crash course in decision-making that forces you to slice through the illusion of sentimentality. There’s just too much stuff to hold onto that silver fork for too long before you decide that it was never important to any of you and decide to chuck it in the “donate” box. You can also ask me about vintage collections and obsessions, how I started with silver spoons and landed with a current obsession with playing cards, how those decks are a kind of tarot, we all know that.
Ask me about the Swahili coast—leaving home at the age of 33 and returning only because the world got sick and booted you back to your beginnings is a story you’re still trying to tell but if you ask me about the Swahili coast, I can easily tell you about the sea and what it meant to me, as a city girl who never learned to swim and yet spent a decade by the ocean. You can also ask me about seaweed farming, fish roasting, and octopus hunting, I’ll tell you what I remember.
Ask me about growing up Jewish against the shadow of the Holocaust—learning Hebrew in my high school classrooms taught by survivors with tattoos on their inner arms, memorizing a strange alphabet that I first encountered in holy books while preparing to bow on the bimah before god and my weary relatives! How I bled for the very first time on the exact day of my bat mitzvah and felt mortified to think, oh my god, maybe my people are right, I am a woman now! Ask me about how it feels now to be part of a pariah tribe—to be hated and slated as bad for having feelings about a land that appears hundreds of times in our prayer books.
Ask me about caregiving—or is it caretaking—and why can’t we ever figure out the difference between the two? You can ask me related questions about my daddy, infinite jazz piano-playing father of three, lover of homonyms and hot dogs, milk shakes and walks in the woods, leaf collector extraordinaire! How we’re still talking to him about the mysteries of Yahweh, how his mother was a Christian Scientist who believed in the power of positive thinking, how she loved her three boys and her husband, my handsome grandfather, Manny!
But you didn’t ask me about all that, you are asking me about caregiving—how I learned to anticipate my daddy’s requests for at least ten different beverages—he so loved to stay hydrated—how I learned to make him an egg salad sandwich exactly as he pleased, cut into four pieces, two on the plate, two on the sidelines, waiting like players on the bench. How I decided to move back home to hang out with him full-time, despite my reservations, and all the chatter about women bearing all the burden for our aging parents, so be it. Ask me how this was the greatest honor of my life—to let my daddy teach me the greatest lesson of all time, to die with grace, to die in peace, in a bed of pink sheets, surrounded by his daughters, my sisters!
Everyone says you need a “niche” on social media—pick a lane to stay sane—they say, find a message and repeat it. But I don’t have the energy anymore to separate these parts of the pie of “I,” or for that matter believe that any one of us is just one story, we know we contain multitudes, come on, already!
So when I start talking to the camera, you’ll hear me mention my daddy, and my love for vintage, and my years in Zanzibar, and my Jewish upbringing in Skokie, and why I love the woods, and how baking challah is not as easy as it looks, and which books I love, and you’ll hear me talk about consciousness and god because those channels, too, have always been wide open, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been talking to trees, listening for long sermons from the wind.
Ask me about vintage, I’ll tell you about grief. Ask me about Zanzibar, I’ll talk about love. Ask me about faith, I’ll talk about my father. Every story is about another story. So pick up a stick and tell a story based on its color: red, a place; yellow; a person; green, a thing; blue, a memory; black, a spiritual encounter. Shake the box of sticks, repeat.
Ask me about the Swahili coast—leaving home at the age of 33 and returning only because the world got sick and booted you back to your beginnings is a story you’re still trying to tell but if you ask me about the Swahili coast, I can easily tell you about the sea and what it meant to me, as a city girl who never learned to swim and yet spent a decade by the ocean. You can also ask me about seaweed farming, fish roasting, and octopus hunting, I’ll tell you what I remember.
Ask me about growing up Jewish against the shadow of the Holocaust—learning Hebrew in my high school classrooms taught by survivors with tattoos on their inner arms, memorizing a strange alphabet that I first encountered in holy books while preparing to bow on the bimah before god and my weary relatives! How I bled for the very first time on the exact day of my bat mitzvah and felt mortified to think, oh my god, maybe my people are right, I am a woman now! Ask me about how it feels now to be part of a pariah tribe—to be hated and slated as bad for having feelings about a land that appears hundreds of times in our prayer books.
Ask me about caregiving—or is it caretaking—and why can’t we ever figure out the difference between the two? You can ask me related questions about my daddy, infinite jazz piano-playing father of three, lover of homonyms and hot dogs, milk shakes and walks in the woods, leaf collector extraordinaire! How we’re still talking to him about the mysteries of Yahweh, how his mother was a Christian Scientist who believed in the power of positive thinking, how she loved her three boys and her husband, my handsome grandfather, Manny!
But you didn’t ask me about all that, you are asking me about caregiving—how I learned to anticipate my daddy’s requests for at least ten different beverages—he so loved to stay hydrated—how I learned to make him an egg salad sandwich exactly as he pleased, cut into four pieces, two on the plate, two on the sidelines, waiting like players on the bench. How I decided to move back home to hang out with him full-time, despite my reservations, and all the chatter about women bearing all the burden for our aging parents, so be it. Ask me how this was the greatest honor of my life—to let my daddy teach me the greatest lesson of all time, to die with grace, to die in peace, in a bed of pink sheets, surrounded by his daughters, my sisters!
Everyone says you need a “niche” on social media—pick a lane to stay sane—they say, find a message and repeat it. But I don’t have the energy anymore to separate these parts of the pie of “I,” or for that matter believe that any one of us is just one story, we know we contain multitudes, come on, already!
So when I start talking to the camera, you’ll hear me mention my daddy, and my love for vintage, and my years in Zanzibar, and my Jewish upbringing in Skokie, and why I love the woods, and how baking challah is not as easy as it looks, and which books I love, and you’ll hear me talk about consciousness and god because those channels, too, have always been wide open, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been talking to trees, listening for long sermons from the wind.
Ask me about vintage, I’ll tell you about grief. Ask me about Zanzibar, I’ll talk about love. Ask me about faith, I’ll talk about my father. Every story is about another story. So pick up a stick and tell a story based on its color: red, a place; yellow; a person; green, a thing; blue, a memory; black, a spiritual encounter. Shake the box of sticks, repeat.
