#jackzimmermemes

The university of California at Irvine has an open lecture series! https://ps.uci.edu/content/openchemistry-lectures

Listen in my mind you're always gonna be That Famous Friend. Ever since Les Mis in Fresno.

I actually like the taste of them, it’s not a religious thing for me, but nostalgia, like Landjeager sausages and giant pickles from a barrel in a deli in Chicago, and the extraordinary oily salt of belly lox. (We get mostly nova on the west coast. It’s not the same.) I grew up eating Matzo buttered, with salt, and in dumplings in soup, and in gefilte fish, and in matzo brie. 

I miss saltines too, go figure. Anyway, religiously I describe myself as a lapsed Unitarian Universalist (that’s what happens when your parents are a lapsed Jew and a lapsed Episcopalian... the UU church is the one I don’t go to) so I have no great angst about the specific religiosity of the thing. We may do latkes, it’s just a hassle because I’m a spoonie and the mixes are all wheaty. Fecking matzo in everything I want to stuff in my gorble, so if we’re going to do potato pancakes, I’m going to have to inveigle someone around here to make them. 

My general salt about Judaism in general is that half of my genetics come from this great wandering path the Jewish people have taken. I would not exist but for Diaspora. And yet, whenever I mention my dad’s Jewishness, they say, “Oh, but you’re not because you’re mother’s not” like somehow that would save me from a Nazi or stop the teasing on the playground. To the rest of the world, I’m as Jewish as my last name, and to Jews... I’m not. That feeling of inbetweenness and not belonging may not be caused by that situation, but it is a feeling that has followed me as long as I’ve been alive, and I strongly suspect it will follow me the rest of my life. 

I’ve been othered about Judaism IRL within the past month. It bemuses me but does not surprise me to see so many people utterly shocked that their genetics indicate Ashkenazi heritage that they knew nothing about. To be told both that “Jewish is not an ethnicity” and that they can look in our DNA and see that wandering path is a cognitive dissonance. 

Um. Firstly I would like to say sorry

When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes. … How people go on, and how people don’t. It was almost a year before I learned that his brother was a pilot. I can’t help it, I love the way men love. —excerpt from Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limón

Bobby, grey faced and sleep-heavy, head in his hands in an overstuffed hospital chair, faint, pale light washing over him from a plug-in nightlight. “I ever tell you about the night we lost my dad?”

Alicia, hair tangled and halfway wild, says, “Yes.”

In the middle of the room—

In the center, she lowers her baby into his bassinet. In the center, she guides pudgy feet through first steps, soothes puffy eyes and bleeding knees, tickles a teenager until he can’t pretend to be too cool for her anymore, tucks a boy into a hospital bed, waits by his side in case he has nightmares. 

Bobby says, “It was a storm,” and she squeezes her hands so tight. He fiddles with the nightlight, says, “He always kept a light on when I was out. So I’d know he was there.”

She says, “Bobby,” and she means did we do this?

“The night he died, I was up with the babysitter.” His voice is soft and clear in the quiet, suspended between the machine beeps keeping their son alive. “And I remember — I’ll never forget, Alicia, how proud I was, because I remembered to leave the kitchen light on.”

And she — in the moonlight, her husband is a boy waiting for his father to come home and her husband is a man waiting for his son, stuck, one finger on the nightlight from Jack’s nursery, staring at the tiles on the floor. When he’d told her, he’d said drunk driver. I was nine. She hadn’t known that about the light. She doesn’t know if she can stand it. 

Her son’s father says, “Did I,” and stops, and then clears his throat and says, “Was I too,” and when his voice breaks she just can’t help it anymore, Alicia looks at her husband and the nightlight and their son asleep in the middle of the room and she can’t help it, she sobs against his shoulder.