Prayer Without God

Saturday morning often finds me in synagogue. I like the minor-key melodies, the music of the Hebrew, the ancient echoes of the archaic liturgy. I go for the comforts of ritual and community, and the subtle dramas that unfold across the seasons. Setting my life aside for those hours restores me, even as I spend much of that time wondering why I’m there.

What’s the point of praying when you don’t believe in God? That was the focus of a class I taught at my synagogue Tuesday night.

We began by considering the Amidah, a silent prayer that follows the form of a subject petitioning a ruler to grant wisdom, forgiveness, justice, and other good things. As a private meditation, the Amidah encourages personal interpretation. The praying atheist can make sense of it by turning it inward. Rather than asking an external power for forgiveness she might consider how to make right wrongs she has done, or cultivate her capacity to forgive others.

I closed the session by talking about retooling traditional texts to reflect one’s beliefs. I gave the example of the Sheva Brachot – the Seven Blessings at the center of the Jewish wedding – which we reinterpreted when my daughter got married. Rather than saying blessed be God for creating man in his image, we said blessed be compassion, graciousness, patience, kindness and truth—attributes the Bible ascribes to God, and values a praying atheist might strive for.

The prayer that generated the most discussion in class was the Mi Sheberach, the healing prayer. When it’s time to say the Mi Sheberach at my synagogue here in Providence, the rabbi invites anyone with a friend or relative who is ill to come forward and offer their name. Between a dozen and thirty people quietly walk to the front of the room and form a line facing the congregation. The cantor chants in Hebrew, May the One who blessed our ancestors—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah—bless and heal the one who is ill. There he pauses, as the rabbi walks from person to person, and each one inserts a name.

When the list is complete the cantor finishes the prayer, asking God to show compassion upon those who are ill, to restore, strengthen and enliven them, and to send them a complete healing—not just of the body, but also of the soul. Of all the prayers the atheist in me has trouble saying, the Mi Sheberach bothers me most. It just feels so, well, superstitious, to make such a specific request, about specific people who are not even there to hear it. And it gets worse when you consider the formulation used to name those who are ill. In just about all other contexts, my Hebrew name is Ruth daughter of Isaac (my father’s Hebrew name.) In the Mi Sheberach, I would be referred to as the daughter of my mother.

Why? One explanation is that it’s best to pray using the most definite facts available, and maternity is easier to verify than paternity. Another explanation is that the person who needs healing requires zchoot—merit—either by their own deeds or their parents’, and mothers are likely to have more zchoot than men, for reasons I won’t go into here.

Both these explanations point out problems, which Harold Kushner describes vividly in When Bad Things Happen to Good People. “Do I…really believe in a God who has the power to cure malignancies and influence the outcome of surgery, and will do that only if the right person recites the right words in the right language? And will God let a person die because a stranger, praying on her behalf, got some of the words wrong? Who among us could respect or worship a God whose implicit message was ‘I could have made your mother healthy again, but you didn’t plead and grovel enough’?”

These questions should trouble even committed theists. They certainly trouble me. But what troubles me more is how many intelligent, reasonable people, including respected physicians, participate in the Mi Shiberach. What troubles me most is that I do it, too. Help me figure out why I do it, I asked my class.

Because you’re feeling powerless, and feels like doing something,” someone pointed out.

“It reminds you to think about the person, and to consider what you might be able to do for them,” someone else said.

“The spectacle of all those people standing up there, worrying about loved ones who are ill, makes the whole congregation think about the fact that people need healing, and reminds us of the need for compassion,” a third person said.

I wrapped up the discussion with a third explanation I have seen for why we use the mother’s name in the prayer. We use it because the prayer addresses the Shechinah, God’s caring, nurturing and sustaining aspect. The mother’s name is also connected to the concept of mercy, which in Hebrew, rachamim, has the same root as womb. A theist praying the Mi Sheberach might picture God as a caring mother. An atheist might turn the prayer inward, and focus on his own role as nurturer and sustainer.

As a parent, I have plenty of experience soothing hurts. The connection between mothering and sustaining was most obvious when I breastfed my children. Anyone who has done this knows the sensation of “let down,” the chemical tingle as the milk begins to flow. It can be triggered unexpectedly, such as when you hear someone else’s baby crying. Even after I stopped nursing, I felt that tingling again from time to time. But it grew less and less frequent. Then, ten years after I weaned my younger child, my mother became ill. I called her hospital room, heard the helplessness in her voice, and felt my milk letting down. Nursing is nursing. The next time I feel moved to pray the Mi Sheberach, I’ll remember that moment.

Nursing My Diagnosis

“Are you writing this down?” my mother used to say, when I described something strange and irksome that had happened to me. My husband has since picked up the chorus. And when another writer tells me about some disagreeable experience, I have been known to say, “It’s all material.”

I have been using this line on myself a lot lately, since I received the surprise of my bizarre diagnosis. It’s been a lot to deal with, physically and emotionally. But it also offers a lot of material.

For example, phlebotomists and nurses. I have been spending a lot of time with both, the phlebotomists as they draw relatively small amounts of my blood for lab tests, and the nurses as they draw a pint each week—standard treatment for my condition. Because I want to distract myself from those unpleasant needles, I like to talk during these procedures. And because as a writer I’m always eager to poke my nose in other people’s business, I mine these moments for whatever slices of human drama or character-defining details I’m able to extract. Because who knows when I might be able to use them?

So far, I have filed away:

–The nurse who claims, as she’s sticking me for my very first blood drawing, that she’s afraid of needles.

–The nurse whose husband complains that she spends too much on the novelty cakes she bakes for her friends’ celebrations.

–The two nurses at the office where they put in my PICC Line. One at my head and one at my feet, they roll my gurney to the operating room, a route that takes us down narrow hallways, around tight corners and through just-wide-enough doors. Throughout the journey, they gossip as if I’m not there—only, because I am, they talk around all the actual content.

“I’m not surprised she didn’t come back,” says the nurse at my head.

“Yeah? How come?” asks the nurse at my feet.

“Because remember what happened?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Right?”

“Right.”

“Sounds like a great story,” I pipe up from my prone position. “Wish I could hear the details.”

I’m not trying to scold them; I really do want to hear more. But they shut up.

–The nurse who comes to my home to change the dressing on my PICC line, dropping by on Saturday afternoon, between one son’s karate class and another son’s violin lesson. She’s a slight, sweet-faced woman, who talks to me tenderly and handles my wounded arm as gently as anyone has ever handled any part of me.

When I tell her that my condition is interfering with my running, she says, “You should take up kickboxing. I love it.”

“What do you love about it?” I ask.

“It’s a perfect workout,” she says. “Cardio and strength-training combined. Plus you get to hit people and you don’t get in trouble.”

–The phlebotomist in Boston who plays Gospel music and never cracks a smile. When I ask her to spare my big veins for my next blood-letting, she says, “If you’re doing this for the long-term they’ll probably put in a port, anyway.”

–The phlebotomist in Providence who smiles constantly. When I ask her to spare my big veins for my next blood-letting, she nods sympathetically.

“I’ll just use a butterfly,” she says.

As the tube fills, she says she likes the way my purple cardigan looks with my yellow t-shirt. “I wouldn’t have thought of putting those colors together, but it works!” she says. “I’m always wearing purple with green. My husband says they don’t go, but I like them.”

“They’re Mardi Gras colors,” I tell her. “It’s your inner party girl coming out.”

–The highly competent nurse who has been drawing a pint of my blood each week for the last three weeks, and who I hope will draw all my pints forevermore. She is kind, careful, competent, and so relentlessly serious that I feel compelled to make wisecracks, and chalk up a personal victory each time she cracks a smile.

“That’s where my garden attacked me,” I tell her as we survey my inner arms on my third visit.

Her face lights up. “You garden?” she asks. “Flowers or vegetables?”

I tell her about my salad greens and radishes, and she talks about her raised beds, her kale that wintered over, the volunteer arugula that sprouts in her compost, her favorite heirloom tomatoes, and this year’s asparagus.

“The first time I saw asparagus growing I thought it was a joke,” I say. “It’s like a kid’s drawing of how vegetables grow.”

“I know,” she says, laughing. “Right?”

Let It Bleed

I’m on the operating table at the Rhode Island Vascular Institute, getting a Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter (“PICC line” to its friends), installed in my left arm. It’s a quick procedure, done under local anesthesia, and Dr. A chats reassuringly as he works. I need reassuring. I’m a queasy wimp around needles and flesh. Especially my flesh.

I’m doing pretty well, though, until Dr. A says, “This vein isn’t cooperating. I’m going to have to go in again.”

“Okay,” I agree. As if I have a choice.

“Getting tense?” he asks.

“A little.”

“Do you want to talk?”

“Okay.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to talk about Boston?”

“Okay.”

It’s Friday morning, April 19. By “Boston,” Dr. A doesn’t mean Red Sox or Sam Adams or Faneuil Hall. He means the surreal situation unfolding as we speak—the whole area under lockdown as police search for the surviving suspect of the Boston Marathon bombing, a man described as, “armed and dangerous.”

“My daughter lives in Cambridge,” I say.

Sophie and her husband Henry are graduate students at MIT. The security guard shot dead last night died outside Sophie’s building. On the phone this morning, she sounded rattled and exhausted. She and Henry had been up until three.

“Crazy stuff,” the nurse says.

“Really crazy,” says Dr A.

And the procedure is over.

I’m here because I have polycythemia vera—my body produces too many red cells. (I wrote about it here.) Standard treatment is to withdraw a pint of blood once or twice a week until the blood count reaches the right level, and then continue to phlebotomize several times a year for the rest of your life.

“You’re a textbook case,” my hematologist said when she diagnosed me, ten days ago. I felt reassured.

The following Tuesday, I had my first phlebotomy.

“I’ll be your nurse every time,” Nurse B reassured me as she led me to my room in the infusion center. “I’m the only one here who does these.” One quick stick and 20 minutes later, she had collected her pint.

I felt the difference right away—less itchy after my shower, not as flushed in the face, fewer of those weird pulsing sensations rippling through my body as I lay awake at night.

Round Two, that Friday, took two sticks and 40 minutes. But that was okay. Nurse B and I discussed local restaurants. My hematologist dropped by, brought me more water, and hung around chatting until I was done.

I felt washed out for a few days. But my symptoms continued to improve.

Round Three got postponed from Tuesday to Wednesday, because Nurse B was sick. When I showed up on Wednesday, she was still out.

“I’ve done this before,” Nurse R reassured me as she settled me into my chair.

I was not reassured—and rightfully so. Three sticks and one hour later, Nurse R apologized profusely and sent me on my way. Both my arms were bruised, and she had extracted less than a tablespoon.

Driving home, I could already feel my face getting flushed. That night, the pulsing was worse than ever, compounded by heart palpations.

“It could just be panic,” David reassured me, and the palpations gradually diminished.

On Thursday, my hematologist called. “Your blood is so thick,” she said. “It’s really hard to get it out. The only thing I can think of is to put in a PICC line.”

Installing it would be no big deal, she said. They would simply thread a tiny tube through my vein. A cap on my arm would keep my vein permanently accessible. And once we’d gotten my blood count down, they would just pull the thing out. No more getting stuck! No more failed phlebotomies! From now on, I thought, blood-letting would be as easy as charging a laptop.

“What are the drawbacks?” I thought to ask.

“You can’t swim while it’s in,” she said.

Or shower, says the nurse at RIVI—unless I cover it with a special rubber sleeve or Saran Wrap, say, or the wrapper from the Providence Journal and Scotch tape. I absolutely do not want to get the bandages wet, because moisture breeds bacteria, and the catheter goes straight to my heart. Call the office if there’s swelling, she instructs, measuring my arm’s circumference just above the bandage. Call if the wound keeps bleeding. Call if it still hurts after a week. A nurse will come to my home tomorrow to change the dressing and teach me how to flush the line. She gives me a stretchy fishnet cuff to hold the cap (which turns out to be a two-inch nozzle) snuggled in place.

This PICC Line is a bigger deal more than I expected. But it’s worth it, because from now on, my phlebotomies will be a breeze.

The TV in the waiting room is tuned to Fox News. “Let’s see how those gun control people feel after this bombing,” someone in saying. I collect David and we drive around the corner to the hematologist’s office, where the TV is tuned to NBC. “They have defamed the entire Chechen ethnicity!” the Tsarnaev brothers’ uncle is telling reporters.

We watch that same footage over and over again as we wait for my name to be called. When someone finally comes to fetch me, it’s Nurse R again.

“B is still out?” I ask.

She smiles apologetically. “I’m trying to reach someone who can tell me how to draw blood through the PICC line,” she says. “I didn’t want you think we’d forgotten you.”

I have a roommate today, a woman young enough to be my daughter. She has the TV tuned to MSNBC, but has turned off the sound. The screen shows the face of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—disturbingly young and surreally innocent.

“Good looking kid,” I say.

“This whole thing is so crazy,” says my roommate.

She tells us about her illness and her job. Today is her second-to-last treatment, and a steady stream of well-wishers come to see her. The snack lady brings around juice, sandwiches and chips. More visitors crowd into the tiny room. I’m still waiting for my phlebotomy. Every now and then, Nurse R stops by and says, “Still working on it.”

My hematologist arrives. “I’ve got some calls out,” she tells me.

A second hematologist comes in. He shakes his head.

The problem has to do with vacuums. Standard phlebotomy needles have them, and that’s what starts the blood off. What we need is a plumber. Or a syringe, my hematologist suggests.

Nurse R is dubious. “We’d have to constantly pull on it,” she says.

“I’ll do it,” my hematologist tells her.

And she does. For the greater part of an hour she sits beside me, slowly drawing back on the plunger of one after another 65-cc syringe, and tossing the filled syringes into the trash can labeled “Blood Products.” We talk about our children. David’s work. The viscosity of my blood. The beautiful cakes Nurse R bakes for my hematologist’s sons’ birthdays. When Nurse R takes a turn, we talk about batter and frosting. “It’s a labor of love,” she says—meaning baking fancy cakes.

It’s almost 3:30 when we finally get home. My hematologist talked about giving me two phlebotomies next week, but I don’t have even one appointment. The scheduling nurse will call, I’m told. We turn on the radio to hear the latest on the manhunt in Boston. We turn it off again when it becomes clear that announcers are just filling air time as they wait for something to happen.

We call Sophie, who’s still on lockdown.

“My apartment is as clean as it has ever been,” she says.

Before the day ends, lockdown will be lifted and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be arrested. Before the week ends, I will have returned to RIVI three times – first to have them check on the bleeding, and then on what I will think is swelling, and then to see how soon they can take the PICC line out. By the time I make that last visit, I will have a new hematologist, with a crew of nurses who have lots of experience phlebotomizing people like me.

But none of that has happened yet. Right now, on Friday afternoon, April 19, everything is on hold, waiting to resume its normal flow.

Flushed

I took this picture on the Santa Monica Pier in 1987. For years it hung above my desk. I always wanted to work it into a story, but could never find one where it fit. I’d forgotten all about until last week, when it turned up among the hundreds of old photos I’ve been diligently digitizing, creating an archive for my family. Resurfacing when it did, the pun of “palms red” seemed like an omen, even though it’s not my palms that are red. It’s my face.

My face has been getting really, really red recently, as if I’m really, really embarrassed. Or sunburned. Or allergic. To wine? To those little green chilies from the Indian store on Hope Street? It was a mystery, and weird, and also a little, well, embarrassing, especially when it made everyone stare at me and start asking what was wrong. But it didn’t strike me as particularly worrisome. It certainly wasn’t the sort of thing I’d think to mention to a doctor.

I felt the same way about this other odd thing that’s been happening. About ten minutes after a hot shower, my legs begin to itch. A lot. Crawl-out-of-my skin itch. Lotion helps. Sort of.  But not as much as remembering that the itching will go away in about fifteen minutes, and that I should keep my feet and legs bare until it does.

I’m good at working around problems. Why call the plumber when you can jiggle the toilet handle? Why mend the hole in the elbow when you can wear your sweater with the sleeves pushed up? Why go to all the trouble of fixing something that’s not really broken, but just not working exactly right? You can probably guess where this is headed.

Last week I had some matter-of-course blood work done for something relatively minor and entirely unrelated to blushing or itching. The results came back…interesting. Come-back-for-more-tests interesting. Condition-you-never-heard-of-with-name-it-took-me-three-days-to-get-straight interesting.

They’re still not positively, absolutely sure, but it looks like I’ve got a thing called polycythemia vera. Basically, too many red blood cells. Poly as in lots. Cyt as in cells. Hemia as in blood. Vera as in true, as opposed to derived from something else. Meaning I was born with this. Each year in the United States, about 3,500 new cases of polycythemia vera are diagnosed. The condition is slow to develop. It usually shows up in folks when they’re between 60 and 80 (I turn 56 next month), and more often among Ashkenazic Jews (like me) than in the general population.

Too much blood isn’t good. Think strokes, blood clots, heart attacks. And so far no one’s found a cure. They do know how to manage it, though. Not by jiggling the toilet handle, but by pushing up your sleeve for periodic phlebotomies. I’ve never been too good about needles. But I’m about to get great at them. I get my first shot at it this afternoon.

It’s weird to think that I’ve spent my whole, healthy life with this mutation sitting there, waiting to be revealed. It’s like understanding, decades later, what the psychic advisor at the beach meant by her cryptic divination. Or like finding the crucial clue in the corner of the snapshot you took of something else. It’s finally figuring out that the disparate details you’ve been fiddling around with forever really do fit into the same story.

Embarrassment of Riches

I’m at the supermarket, loading my groceries onto the tabloids-and-batteries end of the conveyor belt. At the other end, a 40-ish woman is ringing up her order. It’s a small order, which is why I chose this check-out line. I’m not really paying attention to her. I’m reading a headline about Camilla Bowles’ drinking problem (who knew?) and I’m carefully arranging my purchases—the wild-caught salmon beside the milk, the skin cream with the razor blades and antiseptic lotion, the fresh veggies together, the fancy whole bean coffee near the parchment paper—when I realize that something irregular is happening at the register.

The woman is asking to have her total repeated. I’m pretty sure I hear the cashier say, “Seven eighty.” And then I see the woman reaching into one of her bags and handing the cashier two cartons of eggs. Neither the shopper nor the cashier makes a big deal of it. The shopper doesn’t act especially upset, and the cashier doesn’t seem particularly surprised. He just sets the eggs aside and punches in some numbers.

Then he holds up a coupon and announces, “This is expired.”

This time, the woman visibly sighs. “Okay,” she says. “Better put this back, too.” And she hands the cashier a small tub of cream cheese.

By now, it begins to occur to me that I could do something for this woman. I could pay for her eggs and her cream cheese. And maybe I should. But how? Do I give her the money? Do I give it to the cashier? I don’t want to embarrass her, I tell myself. No one has so much as looked in my direction, so I would have to intrude on their transaction. Admit that I’ve been listening. What should I say? And how much does she need? My money is snapped inside my wallet, and my wallet is zipped inside my purse.

While I’m standing there, trying to figure out what to do, the woman takes her remaining groceries and leaves.

I step up to the cashier and he rings me up. My order comes to almost exactly ten times what the woman ahead of me spent. I swipe my credit card, hit “yes,” sign, and leave with my bags. As I drive up Warwick Avenue, I see the woman waiting at the bus stop.

Did I mention that all this takes place on the fifth night of Passover? Four nights earlier, I presided over my family’s seder. We raised the matzo and recited, “This is the bread of affliction, which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat.” When I was picking readings from various haggadahs, I’d made sure to include one that interpreted the Festival of Freedom as encompassing freedom from want, and another that reminded us that it’s our duty to help make others free.

As I drive home from the supermarket and put away my purchases, the irony weighs more and more heavily on my mind. I keep replaying the scene in the check-out aisle, trying to picture myself putting my money where my mouth is. But even in my imagination, I fall short. The problem, I tell myself, is that I don’t know the right words to say.

So I ask Facebook.

It turns out a lot of my friends have been in this situation – on both the giving and the receiving end. Some found it embarrassing, and some still feel bad about failing to act, like me. But lots of folks seem to find it pretty easy to help a needy stranger. The key, they all agree, is to keep it light. Talk about “paying it forward,” they advise. They suggest I claim that someone else once did the same thing for me—whether or not this is true. Or I could say nothing at all. Just give the woman a smile, and the cashier the money.

These are all great ideas. But will I use them? I don’t know.

I’m great at being charitable in the abstract. Write a check or fill in a form on a website, and I’m done. And if the woman at the supermarket had turned to me for help, I’m pretty sure I would have been glad to give her what she needed. But step forward, uninvited?

I told myself I was concerned about causing her embarrassment. And I was. But I’m pretty sure that I was also worried about the embarrassment to myself. The embarrassment of admitting to someone who doesn’t have enough that I have more than enough. And the more general embarrassment of crossing the invisible barrier that makes us strangers. Of not minding my own business.

If this situation arises again, at least I’ll have a script. I hope I’ll have the nerve to use it. And if I balk, I hope I’ll remember that as difficult as doing the right thing might seem to me at the time, it’s a lot harder to deal with the regret.

Next to Godliness

I cleaned my kitchen floor the other day. This may not seem noteworthy to you. But to me, sad to say, it is.

It’s not like we’ve been wallowing in filth. We don’t have kids or pets, and we take shoes off at the door, so we don’t track in a lot of dirt from outside. When we notice a major spill, we’re pretty quick to sweep it up. Sometimes I even take out the broom just for good measure, in case there’s something I’m not seeing.

Even so, the floor was starting to bother even me. But even if it hadn’t, I could tell by looking at the calendar that a cleaning was in the cards. Just not quite yet.

Passover is a little over two weeks away. I don’t prepare for the holiday by scouring my oven or covering my counters with foil, and we don’t have a special set of Passover kitchenware. But I do clear out all the foods we’ll be abstaining from during the holiday. And I give the kitchen its annual deep cleaning. The point of this cleaning isn’t pragmatic. It’s religious. I would clean before Passover whether the kitchen needed it or not. Not that the question has ever come up.

But now, two weeks too early for the ritual cleaning, the floor was starting to bug me. And then, while I was making breakfast, the juicer went crazy and sprayed orange pulp all over. And then, just in case I still hadn’t gotten the message, right when I was about to start my day’s work at my computer, the power went out.

The story I’m now working on is tentatively entitled “Beshert,” which is Yiddish for “destiny” or “intended.” I could have used my laptop until the battery ran down. And then I could have gone to a coffee shop or the library. Or written longhand, of all things. Instead, I decided the power outage was a sign that cleaning my floor now, ahead of my pre-Passover cleaning, was beshert.

I squirted the soap into a sink full of warm water, took the sponge-mop from its hook in the back hall, and began.

While I do my Passover cleaning, I have the holiday on my mind. I review the seder menu, and figure out my cooking schedule. I consider who will be at the table, and parcel out parts. Who will play the evil son? Who will ask the four questions? In a good year, I might get beyond logistics and pay attention to the spiritual intent of what I’m doing. I’m not just cleaning the floor, I’ll remind myself. I’m remembering bondage. I’m celebrating freedom. I’m welcoming spring.

Now I wasn’t cleaning for Passover. I was simply cleaning. But it wasn’t that simple.

I was feeling the slide of the sponge on the linoleum. I was watching the wet progress across the floor. I was hearing the quiet. The no-hum of the refrigerator. The no-rumble of the furnace. The no-option of turning on music. And I was letting my thoughts flow where they would.

I thought about my dear friend Chris, who died three years ago. Hanging above her kitchen sink was a Buddhist teaching about washing dishes. I’m pretty sure it was Thich Nat Hanh, “While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.”

I thought about my good friend Roma, a California artist whose work explores intersections between the sacred and the mundane. Her contemplative images of hands loading a dishwasher and cleaning a toilet hang opposite my desk.

I thought about the saying, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” and wondered if it is.

I don’t believe in God, per se, but I do believe in godliness. That distinction, pointed out to me by my friend Rabbi Kaunfer, comes from theologian Arthur Green. The idea, as I understand it, is to approach religious practice (in this case Jewish practice) not as worship of an imagined divine being, but as striving to emulate the positive attributes traditionally associated with “God.” Those qualities include things like compassion, patience, kindness and forgiveness. Cleanliness? Not so much.

On the other hand, cleaning—or weeding or kneading, painting walls, splitting wood, or engaging in any number of mundane, necessary tasks—and doing it with the right mindset, can become a meditation. A way to resent one’s inner compass.

And even if the chore doesn’t produce any spiritual breakthroughs, when you’re done, you’ve got a clean floor.

Recalculating

Last week, David and I were in New Orleans. He was presenting a paper about disagreement and rational belief. I was being a tourist. And we both got to see a dear old friend from David’s grad school days. Back in the 1980s, we were all very close. He dandled our daughter when she was a baby, and David and I flew across the continent to be at his wedding. But we hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade, and have only sporadically kept in touch.

One afternoon, while David was presenting his paper, Martin and I went sightseeing. Since it was Martin’s first time in New Orleans and my third, he deferred to me. I suggested taking the St. Charles streetcar to the Garden District. David and I had done that the last time we’d been in town, maybe 20 years earlier. We had walked down leafy streets lined with beautiful old homes, and explored a cool old cemetery.

I kept my guide book and map in my bag, as Martin and I caught up. But as our streetcar rattled past stately houses that looked like the neighborhood I remembered, it occurred to me that I was the tour guide. After a quick check of the map, I yanked the bell, and we hopped off at the next stop.

Looking back at the map, it was easy enough to find the cemetery. There was a grey rectangle filled with crosses on Washington Avenue, just a few blocks away. We blithely headed off in that direction, happily chatting about my son’s job and his daughter’s high school.

But something wasn’t right. The buildings we were passing were much more modest than I’d expected. Paint was peeling. Porches sagged. Yards were strewn with litter. In another block, more and more houses were more than neglected. They were abandoned. One was boarded up, the plywood spray-painted with a black x. I remembered seeing photographs of those markings after Katrina. They were FEMA’s way of showing which houses they had searched, and whether they’d found bodies. But that was seven years ago. And now, between the broken houses, we were passing empty lots. And where were the people? Not a single car had gone by since we’d turned up the street. And other than one old man sitting on a stoop and a group of young men standing on a side street, we had hardly seen a soul.

“I’m not sure about this neighborhood,” I told Martin.

“It seems okay to me,” he said. “But I’m Canadian, so you’re probably more culturally attuned.”

When someone questions my instincts, my automatic response is to doubt my judgment. And I know that travel plays havoc with my instincts. Being in a new place, removed from my routine, observing my surroundings through the lens of my camera, makes the world seem romantic. Unreal. This air of unreality can convey a false sense of immunity.

So why couldn’t it also do the opposite—create an exaggerated sense of danger? Could I be unconsciously guarding against a  false sense of security by putting myself on higher alert than was justified?

And was something else going on here? Martin and I are both white, and the few people we had seen since turning off  St. Charles Avenue were all black. How much of my unease was being fueled by latent racism? This last question made me even more uneasy, and cast doubt on all my instincts.

“It’s just a few more blocks,” I told Martin, and we continued.

One block up and across the street, we reached a patch of green surrounded by a tall fence. A sign on the fence said Lafayette Cemetery #2. I tried to square what we were seeing with what I remembered. Had that chained link fence been there? With that barbed wire? Had the gate been padlocked? Was the grass that overgrown? The mausoleums that decrepit? The whole place such a wreck? Cemeteries are supposed to be sad. This was a whole different level of sadness.

We walked back toward St. Charles on the opposite side of the street.

“Are there any dominoes down there?” A man called from a balcony.

“No,” I called back without thinking. Then I noticed the men sitting around a table in the yard, and felt like a fool. But no one seemed to have heard me.

A few doors down, a woman said, “Excuse me.” She was sitting on a porch with a few other people, and she was definitely talking to us. “Would y’all like a dog?” Or maybe she said puppy.

It was a little dog, on a leash. Schnauzer? Terrier? The kind of dog a certain kind of person carries around like a fashion accessory, and dolls up with an argyle vest or a silly bow. This dog wasn’t dolled up. Its fur was matted and filthy.

They had found the dog wandering around, and couldn’t keep it, the woman was saying. Would we take it?

We couldn’t. “It looks like a nice dog though,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s alright,” she answered. She may or may not have told us to have a nice day. Either way, I felt as if she had.

When we reached St. Charles Avenue, we figured out our mistake. The cemetery we’d wanted, the one the guide books promote and tourists flock to, is also on Washington Avenue. But on the other side of St. Charles. Literally, the other side of the tracks. We had been looking for Lafayette Cemetery #1, and had found Lafayette Cemetery #2.

Back in Rhode Island, I did some research. The neighborhood where we’d been walking is called Central City. “In mid-2006,” I read, “the area was considered the most dangerous part of the city.” After Katrina, I learned, Central City became notorious as a place where rival gangs and drug dealers exchanged gunfire in the streets. The crime rate has gone down since then, but Wikitravel advises that the neighborhood is still “not recommended for casual visitors.”

So my judgment was correct. But was it justified?

That afternoon, I didn’t know anything about crime hot spots. I just knew that after we crossed St. Charles Avenue, we entered a different world. Lush trees lined the streets. Impeccable gardens surrounded stately homes. Everything was opulent, clean and well-kempt. Cars and pedestrians quietly came and went. Just about everyone we saw was white. And I felt perfectly safe.

Artsy in New Orleans

We just got back from New Orleans, where the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association was holding its annual conference. While David attended his important philosophical sessions, I wandered around town, taking pictures. When David didn’t have any important philosophical sessions, he wandered with me. Our first time out, of course, we visited the French Quarter. The next day, we went to the Warehouse District—which local boosters now call the Arts District, and Forbes calls America’s tenth best hipster neighborhood. Because David and I might be too dorky to stay out past 10 pm to hear live music, but that doesn’t mean we’re not… Never mind.

Anyway, we liked the abandoned, century-old industrial buildings, some of them reclaimed as museums and galleries and groovy restaurants, and some still waiting in shabby-chic suspension. We stopped into three or four galleries, where we saw colorful balloons carved from wood, a wall covered with ceramic blossoms, acrylic close-ups of glistening oysters on the half shell, and detailed feathers rendered in silver on black, which were either gorgeous or tacky, but probably both.

More than once, we crossed paths with a pair of art handlers, wrapping paintings in quilts and loading them onto their truck. In one place, quilts were piled on the floor and paintings were leaning against the wall. In another, a woman in black was checking just-hung artworks with a digital level while a man and another woman, both of them also dressed in black, stood back assessing, fingertips to their chins.

The sign on the door of an auction house said the items inside would be available for public viewing at the end of the week. But the door was open, so in we went. Room after room was crammed with stunning antiques. We saw carved sideboards with inlaid wood, over-the-top mirrors,  paintings so huge they could only fit in mansions, and a collection of life-sized religious statuary. What we didn’t see were any actual people.

We kept expecting to encounter someone—around the next bend, in the next room, behind that 150-year-old armoire. I had my line ready. “Oh. I’m sorry. We didn’t realize. The door was open.”

But the only indication that we weren’t alone was the woman’s voice suddenly asking over an unseen p.a. system, “Could someone bring some shelves upstairs?”

We decided not to go upstairs.

 

Wrecked

My first thought was that Zeus had knocked over the refrigerator. The crash was that loud, and my sister-in-law’s dog is that big. But the only sound that followed was the jingle of Zeus’s tags as he resettled in the bedroom above us. I tried to resettle, too, but was jolted back awake almost immediately by the sounds of barking and honking. The clock read 1:30.

“Better go see what’s happening,” David said.

Upstairs, we found David’s sister at the kitchen window, on the phone with the 911 dispatcher. “I can hear a woman shouting, ‘Help me,’” Sarah was saying, “but I’m afraid to go outside.”

David and I got a better look from the front bedroom. David’s parents’ Honda, which we had driven from their condo and parked in front of Sarah’s house, had been shoved askew, its front end smashed. Nearby, a second car was on its side, with a woman trapped inside.

David pulled his coat over his pajamas, stepped into his boots with bare feet, and hurried out to help. I found jeans and a shirt and followed, expecting blood. But the woman seemed to be okay. She was standing with her head and shoulders sticking up through the passenger-side window.

“Can you help me get out?” she was saying. “I’m claustrophobic and I’m having a panic attack.”

David helped her get her leg through the window, and then spotted her as she climbed down onto the street. “Would you like to come inside where it’s warm?” he asked.

“I just need to sit down,” she said. She was very shook up and awfully young, wearing a puffy winter jacket with squiggly designs that looked like something you’d see on a high school kid, or even someone in middle school.

“I’m sorry. I’m such a fuck-up,” she kept saying, as we sat on the wall in front of Sarah’s house, waiting for help to arrive. She told us she’d been drinking. She’d had a fight with her boyfriend, and decided to go for a drive and cool off. Her name was Jessica. She was twenty-four. Sam’s age, I thought.

We could already hear the sirens approaching, and one by one they arrived—fire, ambulance, two or three police cruisers, vehicle after vehicle converging on the narrow residential road, a crowd of uniformed personnel shining flashlights and asking questions, a confusion of red and blue lights pulsing through the black night.

“Have you consumed any drugs or alcohol?” a firefighter asked.

“No,” Jessica answered.

“She told me she’s been drinking,” David volunteered, and I found myself thinking, Really? We’re ratting her out? And then, Why would I cover for her?

“Anything to drink?” the firefighter repeated.

“I had a couple of beers earlier,” she said. “I won’t lie to you.” And I thought, That’s okay then. Just a couple of beers. And she’s not underage. It didn’t occur to me that she could be—probably was—lying. That I had just considered lying, myself.

A second firefighter pricked her finger. “Your blood sugar’s too low,” he told her. “Are you diabetic? When did you last eat?”

“I had a fried-egg sandwich at lunch time,” she answered.

He held out a little tube, like a travel-sized toothpaste. “Squeeze this into your cheek,” he told her. “It will raise your blood-sugar level. It tastes pretty bad.”

A baby-faced cop wearing only short sleeves, even though the night was frigid, walked right up to Jessica. “You’re supposed to be in bed.” He said it in a sing-song, condescending way, the sort of tone that pisses me off when people use it to talk to pets and toddlers. How dare you speak to her like that? I thought.

But Jessica just answered, “I was upset. I had to get out, so I thought I’d drive around,” as if they were simply continuing an ongoing conversation. The baby-faced cop told Sarah, separately, that he had seen Jessica earlier that evening, when he was called in to break up a domestic dispute. Jessica and her boyfriend had agreed to sleep it off in separate rooms.

“She doesn’t have any insurance,” a second police officer told me, after Jessica was sitting in back of one of the cruisers. “Her car has Oregon plates, but the person it’s registered to lives in Washington, and has a Hispanic last name. Neither Jessica nor her boyfriend is Hispanic.” This second cop was a tall, handsome woman. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry this has happened,” as if the whole mess were her fault.

A tow truck came. The driver tipped Jessica’s car back upright, hoisted it onto its flatbed, and drove it away, impounded. We cleared David’s parents’ stuff from the Honda—sunglasses, Benny Goodman CDs, Werther’s caramels, Whole Foods canvas bags, an armload of hiking sticks. Then we sat in Sarah’s living room, sipping Armagnac and debriefing, while Zeus dozed at our feet. By now it was after 3.

“That lady cop told me she couldn’t believe how well we were taking it,” Sarah said.

“I guess most people she sees are angry,” David said.

None of us was angry.

“I kept thinking, She’s somebody’s daughter,” I said.

In the morning, we called the insurance company and arranged for the Honda to get towed to a body shop. Then we called David’s parents and told them what had happened to their car. While we waited for this second tow truck, we looked around, seeing what we’d missed in the darkness and confusion of the night. We found the wrapper from the swab the firefighter had used before he’d pricked Jessica’s finger, studied the skid marks on the road that showed where Jessica had turned too fast and too sharp, saw the strewn bricks, where Jessica’s car had hit Sarah’s retaining wall and skimmed it before it tipped on its side, surveyed the pile of broken glass and plastic shards where she’d hit the Honda and come to rest.

She was lucky she’d hit the Honda, instead of turning completely over. Lucky the Honda wasn’t occupied when she hit it. Lucky that when she’d stormed out of the apartment and climbed into the car, she’d remembered to buckle her seat belt.

All that was clear, but there was so much I didn’t know. Who was her boyfriend? What had they been fighting about? What were they doing in Colorado Springs? How did she come to be driving that car, with its shady history? What would become of her? Who were her parents? Did they know where she was? Did they care?

The day before, we had walked up Red Rocks Canyon Trail with David’s parents. I had lagged behind, as I tend to do, taking pictures. I’d been focusing on the patterns of snow melt, fascinated by the way each stone and stick preserved, within the cool of its small shadow, a smaller residue of snow. It seemed like a metaphor for something, and I fallen asleep wondering what.

Now, as I studied the damaged Honda, I pulled my camera out once again. I focused on the layers of plastic and metal and tubes and wires that had been peeled apart and exposed. This was damage, yes. But it was only the residue of a greater disaster, whose nature and extent I could only begin to guess at.

Happy New Year!

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