The Randomness of Being

Costco, the Partition of India, 

a Bat Mitzvah, and a Box of Clothes

                                                                                                                        

I keep saying I'm going to keep these posts short, but they're not.

I have, as of five minutes ago, finally finished the endless freelance project that will, I hope, pay some of my bills and, more likely, cover the expenses of my daughter's upcoming bat mitzvah.  Which is, like, NEXT WEEK.  

But before I put this curriculum-writing-induced migraine to bed so I can wake up fresh and make a round of phone calls to find a karaoke machine, a chocolate pudding cake, extra queen sized sheets (where ARE they? I know we had more), unemployment benefits, cat care appointments, and nice looking ceramic containers for the centerpieces, I had a few things to mention.

Barbara Gerson, a terrific sociologist (whose book about work I read in ancient times as an undergraduate), points out that one of the problems in the modern global economy is that with piecemeal work and a lack of company loyalty, more and more of us do not really belong to anything.  We're marginal (my favorite descriptor these days), which is no surprise, but whenever I hear Gerson describing this in her familiar New York accent (as I have heard her, maybe twenty or thirty times in the great video Fast Food Women), I always feel a pang of recognition.  Probably doesn't hurt that she puts adjunct faculty in the same category as minimum wage workers who could be fired at any minute.  We are not serfs, but migrant workers.

I feel a new piece of this now that I am less and less connected to a job site (or an imaginary career in a future job site) or even a job  -- fragmentation. compartmentalization.  Things that shape my day, keep me interested in this less-than-perfect world, are spread out across a weird little universe.  

For example, I swore this blog entry was NOT going to start with a story about the dog.  And I have about four new ones, but dammit, I do have contact with real people, too.  It's just not as consistent as walking the dog.    But when you live like this, it's hard to connect all the dots and make a coherent whole, a well connected life.  Here are the random bits that come together for me this week:

1. Costco.   For some reason, Zack and I decided, after years of not really bothering with even department stores, that we would go to Costco and get a membership because we could get paper plates and chicken and other stuff we need for this bat mitzvah that we are doing mostly on our own.  And, well, there's no "Deals and Steals" here like there is in Northampton, this weird combined shoe store and discount food and cosmetics and socks and organic remainder place that is in a brickfront building on one of my favorite Northampton streets.    Costco is about a million cultural miles from that, but somehow that was what sent us to the big big box on a Sunday afternoon, no less, in Cranberry PA, affluent suburb of Pittsburgh.    I'm not sure I have a reaction yet, so when I go back there this week I hope  I can  actually tell you something about it.   I think it was overwhelming and my slim wallet kept me from succumbing to a kind of Depression era purchasing mentality ("sport socks! we need sport socks! they come in batches of 25!" "oh look, CHEESE, we can buy a giant tub of GREEK FETA CHEESE.").    

2. The Partition of India.  I finished the freelance project just a little while ago. Did I mention that?  Did I mention that it was driving me crazy?  More on the stupidity of de-centralized hierarchies another time, but just so you get an idea of my mental state: mixed in with the super-hyper-overabundance of Costco, I have consumed information about world history from the Russian Revolution through the rise of Fascism, the Holocaust,  the Cold War, the Partition of India, African Independence movements, the Middle East Mess, global migration, environmental geography, and well, on to the stuff I do normally, like globalization and gender. Part of it has been fun (sneak in some Franz Fanon and Emma Goldman and Salman Rushdie). 

But as a good friend of mine once said after watching too much tv, "my brain hurts."    And I am sure to dream of midnight's children or Stalin smirking for the cameras with Churchill or Nkrumah speaking at the UN about Ghanian independence.    And it will somehow involve a big vat of feta...

3.  Perhaps the thread here is  the bat mitzvah, that my Zoe is about to turn 13 even though she promised me she'd stay little forever. I'm not too sad, as I really like her in all her ages and stages (yes, even when her adolescent head spins 360 degrees from love to annoyance).    The one thing I wanted to point out is that we are all walking around the house singing songs from Friday night services.  We have a "no singing in the car" rule, as some people hum all the time and others find it grating.  Others of us whistle to relieve stress while the one sitting next to them finds that stressful.  So it's kind of funny that all four of us can't stop singing the songs from synagogue.  I don't even know what they mean, but the melodies stay with me all day.  I'm sure we'll slack off as soon as the bat is over and I'm sure the songs will settle back into an occasional obsession, but right now the soundtrack to our lives is definitely in Hebrew.   (just a side note: as I'm back editing this in the morning, Esme is walking around singing Christmas carols and Hebrew songs and her violin music.  Some of us have richer inner musical lives than others...)

4. And finally, yesterday a big box arrived in the mail from my friends Arlene and Martha.  Leah, their daughter, passed away in June and they had gone through her clothes and sent me some wonderful things that they thought the girls and I might want.  Leah and I were close to the same age and had a lot of  things in common, even though on surface you wouldn't imagine it to be the case. Mostly we just understood each other.  On a daily basis, I miss her so much, but I don't talk about it.  Over the summer when we were in Massachusetts, I could share with Arlene and Martha, mostly at Martha's yoga classes, (which, by the way, saved me from anti-anxiety medication, department of social service phone calls, and the suicide hotline.)  But mostly when I was with them, I could talk about Leah and not have to explain who she was to me.  

Back here, in the land of busy and Costco and curriculum development initiatives and book proposals, I talk to Leah in my head.  I imagine she is reading this and giving me a hard time about my sloppy prose.  I think she would laugh at things that Esme says that I keep missing because I am so caught up in whatever I am doing right now.  I think she'd say something wonderful, not insipid, about the Hebrew Prayer Soundtrack in our heads.   In these conversations,  I have to invent whatever I think she might have said.  Talk about fragmentation and not really belonging to anything.  

Anyway, I keep savoring the box of clothes, not wanting to wear any of it, definitely wanting to wear all of it,  imagining I can conjure her words by staring hard at the black skirt with pink skulls.   Maybe I'll be brave and wear it tomorrow when I go to Costco. Chances are I'll be singing in Hebrew too.