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.

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!

East Jewett, NY

Colorado Spring, CO

Syracuse, NY

Lofoten Islands, Norway

Cranston, RI

Upper Brookville, NY

Mountain Shadows, Colorado Springs, CO

Ninigret, RI

Cranston, RI

Cranston, RI

Washington Square, NYC, NY

Stillhouse Cove, Cranston, RI

Cranston, RI

Cranston, RI

Colgate Lake, East Jewett, NY

Pawtuxet Harbor, Cranston, RI

What I Meant To Tell You

Dear Josh,

Thank you.

I’m better at writing than at speaking, and better at showing what I mean by my actions than by saying aloud what I mean. You were an excellent reader – not just of texts, but also of people. So I’m pretty sure you got the message. But I’ll try to spell it out for you, just in case.

Thank you for being such an excellent friend, and for inspiring us to be the best friends to you that we could be.

Thank you for your stories, the stories that were true, and the stories that were truly stories.

Thank you for your extraordinary knowledge and your outrageous imagination, for you serious outlook and your superb sense of humor.

Thank you for your curiosity, and your eagerness to spark and satisfy ours.

Thank you for loving life so much, and so well. Whenever I drink Sancerre, see a play at the Gamm, jump the waves in Narragansett, listen to the Bach cello suites, or hear anyone mention the unexpectedness of the Spanish Inquisition, I’ll think of you.

Thank you for your staunch skepticism, and for your staunch loyalty to community and tradition.

Thank you for being so open, honest and articulate about the sorts of things the rest of us are too shy to be open, honest and articulate about.

Thank you for your politics.

Thank you for being such a sweetly and unabashedly devoted husband, and such a proud father and father-in-law.

Thank you for sharing our pride in our children, even when you had never met them.

Thank you for turning so many of our visits, this difficult last year, into small celebrations. By squeezing so much life and love out of these last months, you forced us to do the same. For as long as you were able, you made us leave your side feeling better than when we’d arrived. During lots of those visits, I laughed as long and as hard and as satisfyingly as I can ever remember laughing with anyone.

Thank you for weaving such a wide and strong network of friends, which connected lots of us to people we wouldn’t have met without you.

Thank you for enduring what you did for as long as you did, so you could stay with us for as long as you could, and for saying goodbye with such grace.

Thank you for bringing and keeping us close.

Class

My doorstop-sized Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines ephemera as “a genus of mayfly with shining transparent wings and strong functional legs.” But ephemera also refers to transitory printed material not intended to be preserved. Would letters from teachers to their students’ parents fall under that definition? Not in my family.

I recently came across my old report cards. They were inside an envelope that was inside a shopping bag, one of the two shopping bags I carried back to Vermont 13 years ago, when my siblings and I sorted the contents of our childhood home. The bags were stuffed with old letters and children’s drawings and marked-up drafts of documents and other papers I’d gleaned from my parents’ desks — as well as a crumbling cardboard folder I’d found in my parents’ attic, filled with the brittle, yellowed drafts of newspaper columns, funny poems and song lyrics my mother had rescued 40 years earlier from the desk in my grandfather’s dental office.

But about those report cards. They run from kindergarten through high school, 1962-1975, and come from three different school systems – the public schools in Montclair, New Jersey; the Hebrew School at Temple Shomrei Emunah; and the UNESCO-run Ecole Active Bilingue in Paris, where we lived from 1964 to 1966. That’s a lot of different teachers weighing in on my past. Their judgments are notably consistent.

I was a good student, but not great. Not surprisingly, I did best in reading and writing – although my spelling and handwriting were reliably terrible. I don’t remember Miss Wadman giving me that failing grade in Health Ed in the fall of 7th grade, and that’s a pity, because it probably makes a good story.

One story that does come through loud and clear, so to speak, is my behavior.

“Talkative in class!” my English teacher in France comments in October, 1965.

“A very pleasant student but still very talkative,” she notes one month later.

That same month, my main classroom teacher warns, “Attention aux bavardages!” – pay attention to chit-chat.

Back in the States, under “habits and attitudes,” I get top marks for things like good posture and working well with others. But I fall down on “practices self-control.”

“Although Ruth is doing highly satisfactory work at this time, I feel she should be more attentive and practice better self-control,” writes Mr. Chartofillis, my 5th-grade teacher at Nishuane School.

“Ruth is a bright girl who could easily be an outstanding student. It is regrettable that she doesn’t apply her abilities to her studies,” writes Mr. Schwartzmer, my 6th-grade Hebrew School teacher. He lists four actions my parents should take to bring me up to snuff, including, “Encourage to behave better in class – not to talk too much. Particularly not to talk back to teacher.” 

“Ruth would do well to avoid sitting next to anyone she feels she may want to talk with,” writes my 7th-grade Hebrew School teacher, Mr. Plavin.

Oh, what a pain I must have been! I was so much more excited about so many things besides what was happening at the blackboard.

But it wasn’t all bad. In the early elementary school years, the word “imaginative” comes up a lot. My 4th-grade Hebrew School teacher, Mr. Bordowitz, actually says that my “genial personality and sense of humor add to the pleasure of teaching” me. Thank you, Mr. Bordowitz! I think I loved you.

But the comments that make me happiest, all these years later, are from my 5th-grade Hebrew School teacher, Mr. Asekoff. First he says how smart and creative I am (what’s not to love there?), and he mentions my progress in Hebrew and history. Then he says this:

She participates quite actively in classroom discussions, quite often making important and insightful remarks. She is interested in the material dealt with, and often makes provocative remarks that influence both the other students and me.

What makes these comments different from all other comments? This is Hebrew School, remember. We’re discussing the Bible. And here is a teacher who obviously encourages discussion. Questioning. Exactly the sort of active engagement that brought me back to Judaism as an adult – the same attitude I tried to foster when I taught Torah at my shul in Vermont, when my own kids were well past the 5th grade. I had long forgotten Mr. Asekoff. But what I learned in his classroom must have stayed with me.

So who is this teacher? His note is signed with his full name: Stanley L. Asekoff. Most of our teachers at Shomrei Emunah were rabbinical students from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Guessing that he was from this group, I googled “Rabbi Stanley Asekoff.” And there he was – as of last year, the emeritus rabbi at B’nai Shalom, a “contemporary conservative” synagogue in West Orange, New Jersey. A few clicks later, I had his email address, and within a few minutes I had sent him a message.

Were you my Hebrew School teacher? I wrote in the subject line. Then I explained who I was, and quoted from the comments on that report card. I concluded, I want to thank the person who wrote this. I have mostly bad memories of Hebrew School, but have gone on to be active in my congregations in Vermont, and now in Providence. I can only think that someone who encouraged me to question and discuss religious matters when I was a kid must have planted the seed for my loving engagement with Judaism today.

I received a very gracious reply. Although he doesn’t remember me any better than I remember him, I had found the right person, and he appreciated my note, and was touched to learn that some of the seeds he had planted, taking it on faith that one day they would lead to good results, had had that result.

What do I take from all this? That one person’s ephemera may be someone else’s permanent archive. So choose your words with care. And that even a creature as transient as a mayfly may have shining wings and strong functional legs.

Looking Up

I had a not-so-great night last night. Woke up around 2, spent way too long trying to go back to sleep. Hormones? Humidity? A dear friend’s illness? The election? The fact that I got zero writing done yesterday? The fact that while I was getting zero writing done, a friend of a friend’s debut novel just sold at auction?

Whatever the cause, my lousy night left me feeling too washed out to go to the gym this morning. And the fact that at 10 am I would be talking to the friend whose friend sold her book probably figured into the equation. Despite what I would like to think about myself, the idea of this other person’s success was not sitting well with me.

So I made the bed. Took a shower. Folded the cold wash. Tried (and failed) to fix a leak in the soaker hose that snakes through the petunias. Then I tried something harder. I switched to a new dentist. And that turned out to be surprisingly easy. Two phone calls and it was done. When I told our old dentist’s receptionist where to send our records, she even said, “I’ve heard great things about him!”

I still had about 45 minutes before my phone call. I figured that conversation would be a more fun if I went into it from a position of writerly strength. So, buoyed by my dentist-switching success, I opened the draft of my new novel, and wrote. And that turned out to be surprisingly easy, too. I wrote about someone finding a squashed doll’s head in the garden, until the phone rang.

The conversation was great. My friend was so thrilled for her friend, and the story of how the book got sold was so interesting and exciting, that I couldn’t help but get happy and excited, too. “It means it can happen!” My friend said when I confessed about how I’d been feeling. “It’s good!” And of course she was right. And then something else happened.

You know how in the Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast,” after Belle decides she loves the Beast for his inner beauty, he magically transforms into a Rod Stewart look-alike, so she doesn’t have to marry a beast, after all?  That ending has always pissed me off. What kind of lesson is it teaching when her reward for not being shallow is the very thing she would have wanted if she were shallow? I mean, come on, folks! Well, what happened to me next was sort of like that.

Just as I was feeling good about my friend’s friend’s success, and feeling even better about myself for feeling so good about my friend’s friend’s success, the Fed Ex truck pulled up in front of my house. I never get things from Fed Ex. But this time, I did. It was 10 contributor’s copies of Lilith magazine’s Summer 2012 issue, in which my short story, “Letdown,” appears as the third-place winner in the publication’s annual fiction contest.

As my friend continued recounting her happy story, I quietly sliced the box opened, removed the packing paper, pulled out a copy of the magazine, and found my story. It looked great.

And that wasn’t the end of it, either. After I got off the phone, I returned to my writing, buoyed now not just by my dentist-switching success, but also by my friend’s friend’s publishing success, and by seeing my story in Lilith.

I lingered deliciously over the details of the squashed doll’s head’s appearance. I described the hell out of my protagonist’s delight in her find, and I compellingly explored her ambivalence about sharing her discovery with the woman she would be meeting for lunch later in the day, someone she was just beginning to know. Would her new maybe-friend understand her fascination with disembodied doll parts? And if not, what would that mean about the future of their friendship? I was brilliant.

And then the last thing happened. There I was, writing like nobody’s business, when the UPS truck pulled up. WTF? Two deliveries in one day? Who could it be from? And what could it be?

It was from was from a guy I have been friends with since the fifth grade, when we went on an ice-skating “date” in the park. We were closest in high school, which was when I started collecting disembodied doll parts. He was there for my sixteenth birthday, when my cake was decorated with a doll’s arm holding a molar with its braces band still attached. He baked the cake for my seventeenth birthday, which was decorated with an icing portrait of Jerry Garcia. We haven’t seen each other in years, but we have renewed our friendship through Facebook. He is a sculptor now, living in Los Angeles. One of his recent pieces was an enormous hand – basically, a gigantic, disembodied doll part. He had sent me three baby dolls’ hands and two feet, the models for his latest project.

My hormones are still incorrigible. It’s still way too humid. My dear friend is still ill. The upcoming election still scares me. And my first novel is still out on submission. But publishing success is possible. Thousands of readers will find my short story in Lilith. And my good old friend knew exactly where to send his doll parts.

Home is where

Yesterday was the last Shabbat my good friend Joel spent as a rabbi at my synagogue. It was a sad morning. Sad to sit in my usual seat, going through the same order of prayers and rituals and readings – sit down, stand up, sing, listen – knowing that each predictable step in the service was bringing us that much closer to closure. I could only imagine how it was all hitting him, sitting up there in his chair beside the ark, looking out for the last time at the community that has come to love him in the four short years since he arrived.

By the time he had finished delivering his farewell sermon, half the room was in tears, including Joel.

But it was more complicated than that. Sure, the Seltzers are moving away. But they’re going to a place they know and love, and starting a new professional adventure.

They’re giving up a sure thing in order to grab a chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Sort of like what David and I did five years ago, when we gave up our comfortable life in Vermont to try something new in Rhode Island.

Though, in our case, we weren’t going to a place we already knew.

I remember finding my way around my new neighborhood, taking it on faith that one day each storefront and house would be so familiar I would hardly notice them. I remember how proud I was the first time I managed to drive to the mall and back without making a wrong turn. I remember seeing two women chatting in a coffee shop, and telling myself, one day that will be you.

I knew this wouldn’t happen on its own, though. Sure, we’d managed to make friends in the other places we’ve lived. But this time it would be harder, especially for me. Our kids were already out of the house, so they wouldn’t be finding other children with parents we could bond with. And I didn’t even have a job to go to. How do you become a part of the community if all you do all day is sit at home, writing? This was one big reason why we started showing up regularly at synagogue.

And it worked. I remember looking around the sanctuary, being struck by how all those strangers seemed to know each other. Within a few weeks, we were recognizing people. Driving home, we would rehearse the roster of who had been there, identifying the different Rhode Islanders according to which Vermonters we had initially mistaken them for. (It’s uncanny how many people resemble other people.)

Soon we were attaching names and salient details to the faces. I started occupying myself during services by counting the number of people I could identify. Pretty soon, I realized I wasn’t just picking out the people I recognized. I could also tell who was new, or only showed up occasionally. Around that same time, I started forgetting to count.

Five years later, I’m still a newcomer here. And I still miss Vermont and our friends there very much. But this is home in a lot of ways. How? The perennials we planted are filling out. We have favorite beaches and restaurants. I don’t patronize the Stop and Shop on Warwick Avenue because it replaced a plant nursery I loved.

Most important, this is home because the people we used to identity by a few surface traits, and were able to recognize because they looked like other people, have become our friends. They’re people we share running jokes and disputes with. People we could call in an emergency. People whose celebrations and sorrows we have shared. People who look like nobody but themselves.

And now, as we wish Joel and Eliana good luck in their next chapter, there’s this. Home is the place where you stand when you wave goodbye .

Making Up Stories

One of my favorite games when I was a kid was making up stories. Using plastic figurines or dollhouse dolls or myself as the actors, either talking aloud or inside my head, I would narrate – what? Not exactly stories, now that I think about it. I can’t remember very many actual plots.

Making up stories about myself was more like adding an authorial voice-over that commented on whatever I was already doing. The joy of the game was that it turned the mundane act of walking down the street or taking a bath into something fascinating. Something you might read in a book by Sydney Taylor or Eleanor Estes, or maybe even Joan Aiken.

With the figurines and dollhouse dolls, it was about creating characters in relationships – families, neighborhoods, friendships. These characters rarely did much. But the personalities and jobs and back-stories I invented for them suggested all sorts of possible stories, if I ever got around to making them up. Only I never did. As soon as I had figured out who everyone was, the game was pretty much over. And the next time I took the toys out, the joy of turning them into a whole new set of characters was impossible to resist.

When I was around 10, someone  (my aunt? my sister?) gave me a box of cards designed by Charles Eames. They have notches that let you hook them together and build with them. But what’s really great about them is that each one has a photograph of some small object or set of objects – ordinary everyday objects like spools of thread, pills, vegetables, eyeglasses, and less familiar objects like a katchina doll or an abacus.

The set is meant to convey a multinational, we-are-all-one message, something like, all of humanity shares a single home. Which is great. But what interested me more were the different personalities the pictures suggested. The pills might be a sickly old woman, the eyeglasses a professor, the hard candy a happy child. Each time the cards were shuffled and sorted, a new set of family units emerged. The challenge was to assign the cards in each set personalities to construct a plausible household. Again there were no actual stories. But the process of creating a story-esque aura was an indescribable pleasure.

At some point, I started writing the stories down — first in spiral notebooks, and then at the typewriter, and finally on the computer. You might think that committing words to a page would force me to quit fooling around. And I have managed to  complete a bunch of kids’ books, some short stories, and one rather ambitious novel. But for each completed story, there are at least ten that I have abandoned in various stages of incompletion, because I got bored or frustrated or, most often, because I started writing in hopes that a plan would unfold, and it never did.

How do people manage to write stories? Even though I have done it myself, each time I start anew, I’m at a loss. Should I figure everything out in advance, or just start writing and see where it goes?

Right now I have what feels like a very promising idea for a new book. I know my protagonist and what her situation is when the story begins. I know what the event is that’s going to throw her life into turmoil and make her question everything she thought she knew. I know how she will respond, and how she will be changed, and I’m pretty sure I know how it will all turn out and where the ending will leave things.

I know where and when it takes place, and who the subsidiary characters are, and I have a pretty good idea of what motives them, and how they will be changed in the course of the book. I know how long the book should be, and how the narrative arc should flow from one chapter to the next.

But there’s so much I still don’t know. For example, what all these people’s jobs are. And where they grew up. What they look like. What sort of music they listen to. Whether they believe in God or read books or know how to cook. Do they wear glasses? Get along with their parents? Have speech impediments? Follow sports? Vote? There are so many questions, and so many possible answers. What if I get it wrong?

Maybe what I need to do is stop taking the process so seriously. Maybe I need to forget that I have a finished book and an agent who’s shopping it. Forget that being a writer is my only job now. Forget that I’m trying to start a new book. Maybe I need to remember the fun of making stuff up, and just let myself play.

Wish me luck.

(These aren’t my toys. They’re my kids’. But you get the idea)