FLYING HIGH!! HOW HIGH?

Sometimes we don’t outgrow our ideas or sentiments. They last. Years back almost thirty years ago, I included a poem I wrote then into one of my books. (See below)

I also wrote several monologues for an English speaking drama group I led and directed. I am including one here. It recalled the suicide of my great grandmother.

MOLLY HERSHKOWITZ---- (82 years old)

To be played by an 80 year old plus, with a slight Yiddish accent:

Lying here, in my grave, I don’t have to worry and wonder who will take me in.

I am happy to be away from all the troubles. I don’t have to worry about being quiet and out of the way. Alright, the apartment was small. Hearing her husband shouting about how he wanted to see me stay with one of the step sisters-----how he needed more room----Nu? For what he needed so much room?

I used to light the Shabbos candles with my daughter. I don’t think she still does that after what I did. She only lit them because of me. She didn’t care about it any more.

She made good chicken soup with matzoh balls, but she always burned the bottom of the little diamond shaped cookies she baked for Friday nights. The stepsisters had big houses and big cars and fur coats on Long Island. We lived in a plain twp bedroom apartment in the Bronx.

So for Chana, my daughter, and my son Abbie, I  got married to a widower who had four daughters. We all come to America together---then my second husband dies too.

Nu, I was so afraid that I would have no place to live that I made up my mind to get out of the way. It was late morning, a sunny day, and I opened the front window of the living room and jumped out from the fourth floor.

I often wonder how everyone turned out. Did they talk a lot about me? Do they miss me? Were they mad at me for what I did? How do they explain it to the neighbors? Who showed up at my funeral?

Now, that I am that very age, I wonder if the world around me ---well, what will it be like? What will my absence recall? What will have been my message?

To conclude, the poem I mentioned above:

DON’T LIKE TO SEE LEAVES FALLING FROM THE TREES

I will rush away when my turn is up.

I’ll find untrodden corners and hide in the angles.

Someone I knew and spoke to last year is gone.

I knew her like my hands are known to me.

Bepiggled dumb earth to swallow up your dancers!

I wonder is there a far side and a near side to heaven?

Why can’t we choose our travel companions

So as to pack together and make ready the journey,

And send postcards along the way?

These are mere reflections----swiftly chosen this afternoon----why?

I am not sure.

Bidding you to read, MISS RHEINGOLD

Life is a Bungee Jump

Life is a BUNGEE jump! It goes up and propels you, which is what you want, but then it scares you once you are sent back down! YEAH. 

 

There are all sorts of meditation practices (my husband & I do one daily for half an hour), but they cannot dispose, it seems, of the really heavy blows. This past Friday, early afternoon, I googled obituaries looking for a very close friend of 52 years.

I knew he had passed away in all of my conscious mind, but my heart had to see it verified. It occurred suddenly January 6^th, a very short time after he informed me by email, not our usual vehicle of communication, about the discovery of cancer growth in one lung and a kidney.

We had been very regular correspondents of real mailed letters for all of the years my husband & I have been out of America for over twenty years. We last saw him while visiting New York in the year 2003.We had the warm privilege of staying with him and his wife Ellen on more than one occasion on visits to NYC. Losing a true friend is much like losing a part of your own life, a part that I, at least, will continue to attempt to recapture for the rest of my life. There remains a persistent refusal to accept the final absence as though a battery in a bedside alarm clock has failed you, suddenly, after counting on it for so long.

Danny’s death was sudden, although would not have been had his disease had some time to progress---radiation and the like, as he had written he expected to experience.

He will always be “Danny” to me, although Dan had been adopted a very many years ago. Danny Icolari: there has been only one and no other.

I would like to invite you to summon the memory of the last two or three friends whom you have lost. Close your eyes, remember a particular expression (without photographs) of their faces and particular expression: a smile, perhaps, or a laugh.

Death is perhaps simpler than life; you land with a bounce and sink into a dark unknown cavern, never to be seen again. 

Religion has tried with desperate energy and enforcement to soften the blow by creating all sorts of new horizons above (and below!): promises of reunions, re-creation of new lives to be lived here as well as beyond.

New Proclamation! There is life, and there is death. There is today and tomorrow, and then oblivion ( a great little book by Josephine Hart, OBLIVION) No need to falsify and prolong in fantasy. 

Life is usually long enough to do and eat great things, to explore, implore, love wildly, make fumbling awkward decisions to set back progress, shop, travel, patronize favorite haunts(cafes have done it for me), and most importantly to make wonderful, intelligent, loving, humorous friends.

Danny Icolari was one of these. Gracias Danny!

MIND WANDERING AND WONDERING

I often get a chance to muse, and to let my mind wander freely  over the past few hours or days, or over years that mattered indelibly.I have no "bucket list"left----not one of any real significance any way.

I do have wishes and plans for tomorrow, however.I have come to love my daily routine---really! This is especially so when it involves activities with my husband, and we walk hand -in- hand.

I cannot get over how different Eilat is from anywhere in Israel or the rest of the world that I have traveled.

It lacks all manners of being! No manners,no modesty, no rules, a kind of end-of-road outpost for has beens, or more accurately, never wases! A loose hodgepodge of drifters and young families raising abundant children, in a muddle of languages, appear cell phone ridden, while a mass of (usually) young tourists mope or stomp by.

Our small airport is smack in the center of  our vacation town.It will soon be removed to a new location half an hour out of town.The oddity and experience of low flying planes right above your head will be gone!

There is little to rebel against here, except for the lack of culture.Ah, yes, after residing in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,Oaxaca,  France,Italy, and Argentina, New York, San Francisco,  Greece (island of Paros), even Jerusalem and Safed in Israel,it is remarkable to find myself, ( a self proclaimed snob), in a land of middle -of -the -road tourist spots offering middle of the road entertainment, to match the life styles of all the hotel workers and  vulgar visitors!

Almost two years ago now, I started a play reading group for which I alone make all of the selections to be read. It is a small, deeply committed and rewarding group which meets weekly on Sunday evenings .The group has become one of serious reading actors.We have made only one public reading, on high stools (a la Broadway) in costume: Apollo of Bellac., by Jean  Giraudoux.It had quite a bit of approval and appreciation.There is now a request for a second play reading to be presented.WHEE!!

This last attempt at filling up a deep empty space for CULTURE has me spinning on Sunday evenings. We are about to embark on a second venture----another one act play to put forth to the public.

Ages in the group range from 52-90 years old..Even number of men and women.

No one is obese for a once a week look around- in this group---this is an uncanny, remarkable scene for this city where there is enough body fat to feed all of the world's hunger! It is a striking contrast  to the human world I have come to know and recognize.

 

Purim is a holiday in Israel this week where we are commanded (as Jews) to imbibe, dress in costumes, reel at parties that can be endless--and thank Queen Esther for keeping us going! We were to be wiped out!!

It seems that nobody has been able to accomplish that,  but we are intermarrying at a rapid rate, so who knows how and who will represent Israel  in the not too distant future

I lived on a kibbutz in 1962 where there were scruples and a sense of belonging that was like none other. I picked grapefruits, took care of the children's house during their sleeping hours while eating gobs of halvah from their little kitchen! Oh, I also studied and learned Hebrew for three hours a day.

All that is gone, buried,and the Kibbutzim that remain are privately owned!

The one advantage is the free coffin at the end.Otherwise, it is free but pretty reduced in ceremony---into a linen bag you go, into a dirt space where others will be joining you!

Here's to life!

 

MISS RHEINGOLD

Return of Miss Rheingold!

 Remember the song:"102 eyes of blue"? I was impressed with that weight as a symbol when in my teen years. I longer for it so keenly, I began the effort to reach it at 19 while still in undergraduate school.

Lo and behold! I am now (and have been fro quite some time ) 99.2!

No effort, no sweat required, and I can eat pretty much what I want to!I have lost all consciousness of calories.

Once again whatever you really want DOES come to you, if you are willing to wait long enough.

Prosaic, perhaps, but a real discovery once it all comes together.

Some of my deepest desires have been pretty superficial ones, now that I look back.Although I do not judge the desires of others as well as allowing my own to flourish.Desire is personal and allowed to remain private if one wishes.

Today a woman whom I have sought to avoid stopped me short in the street and asked me abruptly in Hebrew,

"Are you an English teacher?" I replied  in Hebrew,"Yes" I added, “Also Spanish, French and Hebrew”

Then she cornered me to ask, "How old are you? "I stood silent. I asked her why it was important. Once again, "How old are you?"My silence felt awkward. I asked her why she wanted to know. She replied with the same question. Then she started to guess--abruptly:"Sixty?"---- I remained silent."Sixty?" once again.

 Finally, after no reply, she came forth with, "Eighty?"---I answered, "82"---and caught myself in the flush of an awkward embarrassment. I have not made my age public-----vanity, perhaps mingled with not wanting the age difference known between my husband and me. Awkward vanity,  I suppose.

I am beginning to accept the end of my days. Disappointments are at once more severe and more tender.My digestion is fraught with pain and problems. I am about to embark on some serious dental repair.

My flexible body still works like a charm. Regular advanced yoga practice has helped my breathing significantly!

OK why all of this personal, perhaps even boring, recounting?

Perhaps it is something to share that is so petty, it is significant!

Perhaps to encourage each of you to look deeply into your desires and your hidden secrets and open their envelopes wider, if only to yourselves! If you really want it, it IS important.

Ah the mighty cliché, "It is never too late."---can this be so?

HUH?? Mmmmm. Maybe not...... just maybe. May be.

MISS RHEINGOLD

Miss Rheingold Finds India Revisited

Hello--a rather bland word for reuniting or gathering interest, wouldn't you say?

All of you to whom I am addressing this week's BLOG know that my daughter's father hails from India. Southern India to be more exact, the State of Andrah Pradesh.

He is very dark skinned, very good looking, speaks Telugu.

He immigrated to the States to study at Columbia University before my daughter was born.

He became a professor of History and Foreign Relations. He remarried after his first wife passed away early in her 60's.They had a daughter together----who became my daughter's close half sister.

In all my years spent back and forth in Israel, I had never encountered nor interacted with any Indian immigrants here. Who ever knew that there were 80,000 East Indians living in Israel, and only 3,000 in India at last count?

It is very common here in Eilat to hear Indian tongues at most bus stops. I have often introduced myself and thereby entered into really interesting conversations about being a Jew and also and Indian----or the other way around!

I have engaged on quick bus introductions---once I see the Indian face or, of course, if I hear  their language being spoken. I have at times been mistaken and asked a Sri Lankan if she were Indian. Such an error is quickly dispelled!

My daughter was married briefly to a Sri Lankan lad, and I just learned that we were mispronouncing his family name. It as Wijawardina, a popular family name-----second syllable stress which we missed by pronouncing the third syllable! They married in China---or at that time independent Hong Kong----the ceremony in Mandarin,(not spoken locally---Cantonese is the preferred tongue). Ironically, my racially mixed daughter has often been taken for  a Yemenite Jew as well as a Hispanic or a black,

I had never met an Indian Jew before relocating to Eilat. I never looked for them during my month in India way back in 1986.No interest, I was learning about India and my daughter's heritage!

So, once again, a deeply hidden curiosity about Indian folks outside of my daughter's family (all Hindu) has come alive with unexpected vibrancy! It has been a highlight of my cultural discovery in the Eilat diversity!

One more time a wish fulfillment---comes into my love lap of cultural diversity---and I have a close Jewish friend from India who comes to Eilat for a few months every year from Goa. She is trying to settle in Eilat, but must sell her apartment there first.

Life has a turn round at a certain age, I have found-----I have been exposed to so many situations I have sought

to be a part of----without any effort on my part. Here I am a N.Y.C. Jew from the Bronx, happily married against all odds, looking and being taken for the actress I have always known myself to be!

Three HAIL MARYS-----and off I go.

MISS RHEINGOLD