I feel like every spring there is a day when the colors in my neighborhood are so vibrant I want to dance … and then, a week later or so, it vanishes …
After I recorded this video last month, I started meditating on how each of those spring days is really unique, how it’s not one day but a few weeks, and completely different in different places on our shared planet. But as memory the years mostly blend together, like one of my childhood watercolor paintings.
Following this idea that what we call “memory” ritualizes, simplifies, and connects moments that are much more distinct than we tend to remember, whenever I felt myself experiencing something in an almost ritualized way this week – like I’d done it often, and the specific moments all ran together – I paused to think about that one moment I was in and how it sat in relation to other, similar but unique moments.
One of the moments I explored in this way was my once-a-month meal with my friend Robin. We usually meet around 4:45 pm, so we can walk in and get a table wherever we want around 5pm … go ahead and steal that NYC restaurant hack next time you’re in town!
But this time Robin and I met at 12:45 for lunch, and that is the very worst time to walk into almost anywhere popular in NYC and get a table if you don’t have a reservation. Quite amazingly, the host opened at Via Carota up the long communal table in the back room and let us stay for two and a half hours.
The crazy thing about that lunch was that I was sitting exactly where my daughter had been sitting at her birthday party in 2019. Two days later, something happened that changed all of our lives … and a few months later, COVID-19 rocked us again.
The whole time Robin and I sat in that back room, eating lunch on a beautiful spring day, my body was shaking as I remembered the first time I was there, in late autumn, and all the events that flowed downstream from that one birthday party: Jed and I took our daughter and three people we barely knew into our house for the first 17 weeks of COVID; we created shared rituals for shopping, cooking dinner, and cleaning up as an extended family; and we started lighting Shabbat candles together on Friday nights, which Jed and I are still doing over five years later.
When Robin was talking I forced myself to listen to her actual words, repeating them to myself and then losing track of what she said next. Even though we were discussing my new book, Story Medicine, and how I just found an agent to help me publish it … she was saying things I wanted to hear, but I was not really listening; my mind was not taking it in. As I write this, I see her face talking, but I do not remember her specific words. The notes I took that day are like headlines in a language I don’t know, flat and blocklike, closed.
When I was talking, it was even worse: I watched my thoughts dart from one thing to the next mid-sentence, like a little bird. And then I pulled my arms around my stomach as if holding myself together so I would not explode.
***
The first time I met Robin was at a memorial service for a dear friend. I noticed her gliding around the outside of the event, not really part of the core group of friends who had known one another for years. I walked up to her and thought of saying, “I feel like an outsider,” but stepped back to “I really liked your dress,” noting how the orange and cream fabric shimmered in the light.
Later, when her boyfriend started hectoring me about my published writing on Israel and Palestine (you can find the first of those articles here), she told him to stop. She actually told him two times, and when he still didn’t stop, she pulled him away.
***
Nearly once a month for over a year, Robin and I have been talking about all of that – men and women, death and life, being Jewish during Israel’s decimation of Gaza. Though we land in different places, Judaism informs how each of us thinks about all of that. She is a member of the chevra kadishah – the group of Jewish women who wrap and tend the dead person’s body until it is buried – something that informed my grandmother’s Jewish identity and which I have often thought of doing.
Ever since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing over 1200 people and taking 240 hostages, and Israel retaliated with massive bombing, ground invasions, and blocking food, water, and medical supplies from entering Gaza, I have been leaning into the complexities of my Jewish legacy. I see how generations of surviving have made us, collectively, both kind and cruel to people who are not Jewish. So much grief in that history … I will be sifting and sorting it the rest of my life.
Back at the communal table with Robin, I finished my salad and she finished hers, and we ordered espresso and madeleines for dessert. Sitting in the same place, but everything is different.
Here’s your prompt to explore something that has become ritualized in your own memory, to clear a space for one specific instance of something like a family meal, your weekly walk in the neighborhood with a cherished friend, or cooking with your grandmother.
What’s something you do a lot and remember in a way that the instances seem to blur together? Pick one instance – the first one that comes to mind is great – and write down everything you remember about that one time –
- When was it?
- What season was it, and what time of day?
- Who else was there?
- What did they say, and what did you say?
- Where were you?
- How did the moment begin, and how did it end?