We gathered our stuff about us and entered a steamy Budapest. I let a taxi driver adopt us as soon as our feet touched the platform. He grabbed our bags and claimed to speak English. Actually, we didn’t do so badly between his few phrases of English, occasional bits of German and much hand-waving. The will to communicate is everything and Hungarians have plenty of that.

I sailed through lesson two of Language in Hungary when we met our hostess, an elderly woman who rented her bedroom very reasonably. We chatted about her arthritis, the doctor, the shot she got this morning, her late husband, her children, their education and languages, and best of all—the grandchildren—all those things two women can talk about for half an hour with only about ten common words between them.

After a shower and a nap, two great friends of the traveler, we set out to find dinner in our neighborhood, a local business area with few foreigners. This was perfect for our style of travel. Now, what can I suggest to a ten year old with a travel-lagged stomach? As we come to the busy street, I can see a bright blue and white border around the large doorway of a building a few blocks down. mm—perhaps a Greek restaurant?

“You like Greek food, Honey. Remember the lemon soup with little round noodles, moussaka, circles of squid?” I talk it up, the way one does when trying to keep a ten year old motoring forward instead of complaining. “Only another couple of blocks.”

Greek food sounds good. Now, just one more block. The blue and white tiles continue their promise of good familiar food. And we’re both ready now; we can almost smell it. The sign doesn’t help or hurt; it’s in Hungarian, an impermeable language.

A deep breath says… perchloroethylene, not olive oil. People stream out with pants and skirts on hangars. Oh no! It’s a dry cleaner. How could this be? What a disappointment!

“I’m so sorry, Honey. I’m hungry too. How about pizza?”

Language in Hungary is a bit of mystery. The pizza was great.

That was only the early phase of The Aquisition. After so long in school my entry level federal pay check was consumed by pent-up demand. Silk blouses on sale soothed the pains of a questionable career choice and the years of ritual abuse of the baby lawyer. A duplex filled, a professional wardrobe hung. Electronics dazzled. Marriage gifted.

Then I had a child. More electronics, cooking gadgets, baby stuff. People unloaded their basements on me. Lucky me; lucky them. And all those little pink dresses were thoughtful gifts, to be sure, but the job of reviewing them, ordering them, remembering to put them on in that moment that they fit. That was my burden.

In the last fifteen years, death and disability have made the big deposits in my garage. It’s as if the hooded chess player rented a U-Haul. I have their stuff. The family: Aunt M’s tea set; Grandma’s impossible family portraits; Aunt E’s papers and photos; Dad’s yearbooks from Scott High. The books smell of mildew and I’ve nothing that would play his treasured Caruso 78s.

My Mother’s things took over the garage in three major installments as she downsized into a world of Alzheimer’s. They came largely unedited; my mind was on making sure her blood pressure got managed.

It exhausts me to just look at the stuff if my blinders should slip as I walk through the garage. It’s a huge sorting project I do over and over.

So I revisit my big stuff question. I know it’s a luxury to have this question—when so many people can’t even allow themselves to dream of having beautiful things. I never meant to be an acquirer. Many things have just dropped in on me. Stuff makes some folks happy. But I feel alternatively insulated and hemmed in. How do you know you don’t need it? Isn’t it reassuring to know it’s there…?

There’s the one year test—If I haven’t used “it” within a year clearly I don’t need it. It seems obvious that the boxes I’ve never opened after my last move shouldn’t make the next one. But my recent bouts of theatre remind me that anything can become a costume or a magical bit of set detritus.

That’s the wrong message.

One defensive strategy is to halt acquisition. I’ve done pretty well for a number of years. I’ve come to recognize and avoid one of my weaknesses—the desire to rescue a neglected bit of wonderment from the indignity of the sale table or cast-off status. It’s the bargain, the reverence, the rededication that could catch me. If I can avoid encountering the object, well, I’ll never miss it.

Sometimes the stuff pulls at me. It seems precious: gifts; the almost useful items, inchoate craft
projects. There’s stuff that could be useful given the precise planetary alignment that favors the
goddess of hoarding. Oh but the stuff weighs me down. It wants organizational schemes, clean-out, dust removal and space. It tries to trip me on my garage path.

On a good day, I can divorce the person from the item, the memory from the memento. Then quick, fill the boxes, call for the pickup and hand off those lovelies to brighten someone else’s existence. Now isn’t that a lovely empty space in my garage, my heart, and in my mind.

I’m not looking for power and control, but intimacy and companionship. The best times I ever have are with my daughter. And yes, maybe I do need to broaden my horizons as well. I’ve held on—not out of desperation or fear—but out of mutual desire to be together and connect. No one wants to let go of that. But lives get full, busy, geographically distant. Even sound desires can get mixed up in wrong-headed expressions and vistas.

When I spend time with her we laugh and laugh. We comprehend sentences that are missing their direct objects, verbs, nouns, sometimes all-but-the inflection, all without hesitation. We look forward to our times together and we see one another as the most important person in each of our lives. Those two legs won’t always be joined up. Other eminences will enter, especially her life—as well they should. Mothers yield the stage to lovers, best-friends, husbands, and children. Hearts defy the rule of percentages. They can divide and divide into many 100’s, each full and feeling. But all of our days are bounded by the rule of twenty-four. The grown-up timepiece fields many faces.

I’ve been lucky to have this long loving easy time: lucky to have it so long; lucky to notice it’s glister and hue while I’m chest deep in it. I was lucky at how the difficult times unwound into the better. I was lucky I recognized my own awful dilemmas in time and chose correctly.

Many of my parent-peers have already adjusted to less from their children. Some have hovered—soon the hovering will have outlived the student deferment. Parties and social swirl missed my daughter’s odd, ill high-school years. Off at college, who has to know? It’s an easier time for a parent. It’s seemed to me for quite some time, that timing was the only reasonable thing a parent could hope for in the realm of sheltering a child from the hailstorms of the culture. Not “I don’t want my child to have to learn how to deal with difficult things” but “could I hope to put some of them off until she more mature?”

Of course I only get to learn these lessons once—at least directly. One child, one shot at so many changes and ventures. More opportunity might mean I’d get it better the next time. Or maybe each time is so different the lessons of the last time fail. Maybe they’d just confuse or blind me through child two or three’s journey. Maybe I’d be too tired, or distracted and not “there” more of the time. And life demands and inserts itself: work, marriage, divorce, dating, illness, older parents—any one or two of which derail and consume.

I feel the current of transformation as I track the couch surfing, city-thinking, job-applying, follow-up, frustration, re-assessment and decision-making. I might be losing something but there’s probably a way to do it well. I can’t—I wouldn’t—avoid change. What do I want? Closeness and ease: simple goals not wrapped in too many facts. The hope I might dare have.

We rejoice in our liberation. We mourn the drowning of the oppressor armies sent to recapture us, just for a mite. We sit and recite the familiar stories and re-experience the events with our loved ones, our old friends, our new friends and the Stranger all over the world. We eat, we drink, we meet, we remember.

How might we offer a bit of patience to the simple son who asks—“what is this?” When we are children, this patience might seem impossible. Then we have children and undertake the task, learning the lessons all over again and for the first time, as we teach.

When we crawl out from our family’s protective shell we might be shocked at the many who have not yet encountered the measuring stick of Passover, or we might be those children ourselves. They do not even know how to ask—“what is this?” For them we must let this night flow full from our hearts so they can freely taste it and find inspiration in its universal and timeless message.

We redden with shame when we remember our disrespectful phase, so assertive in our alienation that we could not respect another’s devotion, caught in the cloak of the prideful wicked son. “What is this to you?” And so we own and enjoy our sentimentality, our traditionalism and even our sense of meaning. Perhaps we reach deep inside and out—to find love.

We are at our best, when we can—for a moment—suspend our judgments and be the wise sons and daughters who expand our table to include all these comers: the ignorant; the prideful; the uninformed and the stranger. Together we puzzle the days of our lives, and nights and days—or is it just the nights—reminded that to ponder, to wonder, to re-imagine and to offer time, food, laughter and acceptance, is answer enough.

Each spring we celebrate new-ness. We handle the egg, the lamb bone, and young greens. We identify with a new people, newly home in its new land, singing a new song and building a new life in freedom. We aspire to a world without bondage, joining hearts with those who suffer today. We long for so many freedoms: freedom from slavery; freedom from want; freedom from the tyrannies we impose upon each other and upon ourselves; freedom to celebrate a festival of freedom; freedom to be kind, to indulge, to listen, to love and to nurture; the freedom to know our own worth.

In the spirit of plunging forward towards a dream, I review the seeds I would nourish. I crave a place to be free from my quick complaint and criticism—slaveries I sometimes impose upon myself. In a tiny seed I might hear the wildest ravings of my heart; a freedom to yearn for the opportunity that may never be or the accomplishment that seems so unlikely. I won’t thin that start from my row of wishes. I’ll leave it grow a bit, meet the sun and hang from a stout stem although it drains away energy and looms a bit ridiculous. Perhaps it is impractical; maybe it’s even impossible.

How many weeks can it hang there before I begin to accommodate its awkwardness? They say it takes three weeks before habits are formed. Sometimes the body is faster still. Sometimes the mind is slow and heavy. When I’ve gone the three weeks, what should I do about this impossible bloom? Prune the bush and restore order? Or is there something that calls for my time, my thought, the air and the water? I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone, out of the invisible. I’ve written, edited, spoken, shouted, swirled and sung. The blossom is fine. Now, I’ll look again for the seed.

When I was a child in Sunday school I thought this must mean bowing and scraping. I couldn’t relate to that. I was precocious in my sense of not being understood, putting up, shutting up, complaining and resenting. Not so much respecting. I knew this commandment must mean something, but I’d have to assume it would come clear at some future time. After all, I knew even then that these bold strokes of literature were meant for all ages: a large tale told against the tiny facts of my life.

Today I mostly take care of my memories of Dad and Mom. I find the bit of learning—the fond memory and the noble act—and I embrace it in the tale told. It can be a quiet, private thing. Sometimes I’ve made it a public thing, splashing it across my website and my stages. Is this what the commandment means? Remember, rediscover and perpetuate?

When my parents were still here for me, I asked and avoided, I listened and ignored. When I became a parent, all that programming poured from my firmware and wanted control. Would I live it or change it? Blindly, consciously, fearfully and carelessly I retraced those steps right down to the words and deeds that had made me shudder a few short decades before. “Take them back, that’s not me speaking.” Oh, but it was. Those words oozed from lymph and bile.

Now my baby is grown and my mother and father are shadows. To honor my father and my mother I am commanded from becoming them, either blindly or slavishly, even if that’s what it might seem that they wanted. They didn’t; I know that. Instead I must live into the opportunities my parents provided for me.

We are each marked by the hard knocks that have come our way. Some of those gashes are passed down to us and from us, genetically, emotionally and experientially. We yearn to leave the damage and the fear behind; nobody wants to pass those legacies. But our desire to protect our children recycles fear unto anxiety.

To honor, I would like to purge the scold machine, take the love and put aside the nagging. I won’t become you, Mother or Father, but I’ll be my best self. I will look into my heart to touch the memories you placed there and I will live now, both a part and apart

My mother’s hands were strong and rough.
They smelled from onions and chicken gizzards
just tossed in the soup pot.
They peeled band-aid wrappers impatiently,
And slapped them on hard and hasty.

She knew the world would smack me.
For a few years she’d hold it back,
glossed with half-forgotten songs.
I miss those strong, hasty hands now that they can’t comfort me,
hurt me, embarrass me or love me anymore.

“Och, gotenyu. What a smell. I can tell you need new socks, you little stinker.”

And so, all over the world, at Chanukah, children get socks to replace the old worn out and stinky ones from last Chanukah. So now you know! Now we understand our non-Jewish neighbors, who always like to borrow our traditions and adjust them just a bit, come to hang their stockings by the hearth. Their Great Bubbe goes in drag and has a yen for fireplaces. Do we have fireplaces? No. Who would chop the wood? Who would make the fire? But it’s good for the Goyim. So socks connect us all with a sense of the warmth of the season.

Chocolate, my children, we celebrate Chanukah to appreciate how good the world is when there are eight days in a row of chocolate at our table. We have chocolates to share, to give and most importantly to eat. We even have chocolate to drink-noch. We make chocolate into money and gamble for it with our dreidels. If we are very lucky we get many Gimmels. Gimmels are for great—a great miracle happened here. Of course I’m right—I just won all the chocolate. Ante up so I can spin again before my dreidel cools off.

And why is chocolate so important? It’s the most delicious thing of all. It is rich and warm. It can be wrapped in beautiful paper and please the eye, even the eye of a grumpy Shin spinner. It gives you energy. It’s energy and hope that make you spin again and again and eventually you might get at least a Hay and split the pot. Chocolate makes you sweet on the inside, which makes you sweet on the outside which makes the world sweet.

Nuts kinder, nuts. This is what we want on Chanukah. The earth has given us nuts of the season and we use these to play and play with our dreidel. Nuts of all kinds, with their pretty little wooden homes. Round mahogany homes for filberts, thin crowded pecan shells crammed with sweetness. Stout comfortable walnut shells so that walnuts may play Chanukah games before they serve as Charoseth next Pesach and even dark crinkly homes for Brazil nuts, full of oil, like our beloved lamp.

Oh but you must think I am silly to forget the star of the whole show, quietly waiting in the dark for me to notice—our humble and most-dear Chanukah friend—the potato. The potato gives it’s all for Chanukah, allowing it’s pale flesh to be shredded, and stirred with eggs and onion and ladled into hot grease, flipped on it’s back, splashed with sour cream or applesauce (ok, you can have both) chewed and swallowed and maybe even some day soon, digested. This gentle giant promises all year long, reminding us how much we love Chanukah for the excuse to make latkes, for the better excuse to eat latkes, and for all the oil we can consume with each latke. And this, this little potato, really this is the secret of Chanukah. How the perfectly ordinary, so common among us, shines with greatness in the lights of hope, happiness, family, food and song.

What? You say Chanukah is not the potato, not the nuts, not the chocolate, not the warm snuggly socks? You’ve got to be kidding. Not even the beautiful menorah all bright with her warm candles? Songs—are you sad because I forgot the wonderful Chanukah songs where everyone knows the first two lines and hums the rest slightly out of tune? Is that what you think?

Oh, no. You think it’s us? Me, and the children, and our friends, and the guy I work with, and my neighbor, all gathered around the menorah while I look for the matches, turn down the soup that’s boiling over, flip the latkes one last time and finally make the brocha. You think that’s what Chanukah’s all about? Well, maybe you’re right.

I’ve always loved animals but I’m timid with them. I wrote endless reports on animals in second grade. I learned my eagle-eye parking skills combing the curbside at Lincoln Park Zoo most Saturdays. I knew all the dog breeds. I longed for companionship—but I wheezed. A mynah bird was my heart’s desire.

First in the line of furless pets were goldfish—an unrewarding, often suicidal pet. I would make fish gravestones for the toilet seat. This at least kept my parents entertained. I graduated to turtles. They were much more interesting; they could be carried, raced, and kissed—if no one was supervising.

I had a series of little red-eared turtles, too insignificant to remember. But I had one rather more complex turtle. He was a little bigger and a little more feisty. There was no debating his name—he was born to be Speedy Gonzalez. He usually ran in the right direction and fast.

They told me I’d outgrow the allergies but I didn’t, so my daughter had reptiles too—lizards. Turtles were politically incorrect, by then. The reticulated skink arrived for her 7th birthday. This animal was perpetually terrified. It was hard to catch, let alone hold and play with. When we sat down to the Passover Seder that year and the youngest asked “why is this night different from all other nights” we all knew the answer was because Skinky lost his tail after the visiting family mobbed and grabbed at him. Hours later, after both hunger and the Red Sea were crossed, the lonely tail was still twitching.

We took in a friend’s skinks, which were much bigger and better socialized. They would sit on our heads and whisper in our ears—charming lizard tricks. They also chomped down crickets like t-rex taking on a subdivision. They terrorized our original skink. We bought peace with partition. Eventually, we needed something bigger on the cuddle factor.

Some people just cannot have rats—that naked tail gives them the creeps. That was my husband. But for the rest of us, the rat is the Cadillac of rodent pets. They’re smart. Our rats were never so highly trained as the rat-lady’s rats that we’d visit at the pet store. Those rats would do anything you wanted, after a little belly massage. Who wouldn’t? But rats like to be handled and played with and they are good parents. I for one, had no compunction about selling baby rats to pet stores for snake food.

Typically we’d get rid of the old pair and all but two of the babies. Once, we kept two boys and a girl. I felt obligated to the little gray fellow, after he escaped for two days and collapsed, near death, in the laundry sink. When that little gray rat birthed the second of our litters to arrive in one week— and the same week as every other domestic rat in the metropolitan area birthed—I knew that rat sexing was not my strong suit. The pet stores all turned us down and the population explosion was terrifying for all of us.My daughter had become totally bored by the whole little-animal-thing. It was time to be done with it. At 4:30 one Friday, when the Audubon society said they would take all the rats for their injured raptors, we loaded up the car and got the lead and the rats out. Pet free at last, at least until the killer bunny.

Kids today talk about focus—it’s a teacher word. When I was a kid “focus” was for eye exams. For all the stupid stuff we were told as children, at least we weren’t told to focus. Nobody explained focus, change, transition, or emotions—common chatter in today’s parenting books. Nobody explained much of anything at all, except how to color in the dots of the Scantron tests. They were new.

“Do not make stray marks.”

What were stray marks and why were they so bad? They were definitely worse than lying, cheating, and chewing with my mouth open.

When you’re learning words and other new stuff so fast, you’re also learning about how to learn these things. I was pretty young when I discovered the inky learning of night:  third grade multiplication tables. My first all-nighter was the eights at eight.

Sixteen, twenty-four—oh that’s easy—music time. But how would I ever remember a number like fifty-six. How does that fit into anything. Seventy-two was a strange number at first but I liked that it was twenty-seven backwards—my birthday date. Once I got used to it, it made a great landing pad for my nervous chant through the eights. “Seventy-two, my old friend. I’m almost there.”

Adults have different problems with multiplication. For example, divorce times backstabbing times sick child, times crazy boss, times stopped-up toilet equals chest-pounding tremors. Nobody prepares you for this kind of multiplication. When you lose the numbers you lose all kinds of certainty. For one thing, there’s no way to check your work. And no one wants to see your miserable little on-the-fly-process, except the doubt-mongers and second guessers. You’ll be re-assembling incomplete records forever if you start listening to them.

But if you think adult multiplication is hard, wait till you get to Division. Everyone, even the teacher, agrees that division is a terrible word.

In print

Yes, this is the astonishing thing—or is it one of those “astonishing things” that is perfectly apparent and mundane? Perhaps the amount one considers family members in daily life is in inverse proportion to the amount of family one regularly sees. I’m not representing this as any kind of principle or even as a belief I actually hold. I’m just testing it out. But if Suzie Psychologist wants to cook up a research project using this thesis, she ought to interview me.

The other odd thing about the space, time and thought I devote to my family is that I gave them little thought or interest throughout most of my life, when they were alive. Again maybe this is one of those perverse—oh excuse me—inverse, relationships, or maybe that big old fat subconscious just plays these tricks on us.

I certainly didn’t consider my family’s well-being when I was a younger person. I didn’t miss my parents or long to see them. In fact I took my first obvious opportunity to get out and I never much went back—even when it would have made sense to do so. I just booked cramped obligatory visits designed to disappoint. Perhaps family is one of those “don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” kind of things? Or perhaps we simply cannot overestimate our parents’ power over our unconscious processes. Somehow with all the bumps and bruises this power slips out into my more-conscious substrate.

Let’s take a little inventory here—who exactly is my family? I am an only child—so siblings are out. I’m divorced, so although I have one “outlaw” I still connect with, when the official “in-law” family stampeded in eager renunciation of me, I kissed good-by the obligatory holiday visits and such with no regret.

My Father died almost twenty years ago. He was the youngest child of a youngest child—both families were large. His grandparents and aunts and uncles were all dead before I was born. His cousins were elderly. My youngest first cousin is sixteen years older than me and the removed’s—while quite connected among sibling groups—have only limited contact with me. Ah, the removed’s… Why was I so good at figuring out the proper name for each and every type of cousin?

My Mother and Father were both the children who moved far from home—an admirable trait I emulated. But we lost a lot of connections in the process. Hitler did in most of my Mother’s family almost seventy years ago and time has taken the rest.

So family is me and my daughter—my pride and joy, the object of day-to-day thoughts and no weight upon my sub-conscious, I think. Thank goodness.

I remember consciously instituting a practice to try and remember my parents and the experiences we shared. I had become concerned that pressure, shame, and my own psychology had caused me to lock chunks of my life behind large steel doors in my head. I wanted to share the old and almost forgotten worlds of my family with my daughter.

It may be true, for the sake of argument, that I missed much of my own life and neglected or suppressed the important intersections with parents. Maybe I failed to express my love or enjoy theirs. Maybe I misconstrued their lessons and behavior. Maybe there was something more to be gotten—or something less. But I’ve opened, dredged, written and remembered. I no longer worry that I simply missed these things. I’ve done yeoman’s duty recording, sharing, and paying homage.

I’ve been told I know a remarkable amount about my family members. My parents were very verbal people and I was a captive audience. I was never dismissed to the “children.” I was clutched in the mainstream of my parents’ lives. They consciously shared the bygone worlds they were raised in. They understood these worlds that had vanished and they held them, often tenderly for one another. They passed these memories on to me.

It’s taken me this long to actually see and place the old neighborhoods firmly enough to let go and leave the room. But now that I’ve put so much of this memory through my own process, I feel lighter and freer from
the certainties and uncertainties. Good by to all—well, some—of those thoughts, traditions, intolerances, confinement, chiding, reproach, and shame. I’m going to close the door on the archive for a bit.