And the question is on religion and science.
And the question is on religion and science.
Occasionally, it’s crossed my mind to wonder whether my parents would want me to say Kaddish for them after they died. I don’t think I could promise getting to a morning minyan every day for the full 11 months, but if it were important to them, I’d make it a regular practice. I know that for my own sake, I will light yahrzeit candles every year. Seeing one on the kitchen counter now and then kept the rhythm of the year, reminding me that my mother had her own heart-calendar. (I remembered exactly which dates of the secular calendar my aunt and grandmother died, but one marks the yahrzeit on the Hebrew calendar, and I didn’t know those dates. But Mom did.) Without ever consciously deciding, I’ve always known that I would have that candle for my family in time, a reminder and beacon for over 24 hours until it was entirely consumed. L’dor va’dor, from generation to generation, is a common phrase in Judaism, and lighting a candle continues a ritual that speaks to me and that each generation has observed before me. Kaddish is different, though, at least as it is usually observed: not in the privacy of one’s own home, but communally. It’s one of the prayers that requires a minyan, the quorum of ten adults.
Never having asked him while he was alive, I thought about it after Dad died last month, and was pretty sure that if we had talked about it, he would have made a dismissive gesture and said that he didn’t believe in that stuff anymore. Then he probably would have told a story about helping make up a minyan for the sake of a friend in the synagogue when they were saying Kaddish, or said something else to move the moment on. Or said that if it were meaningful to me, then sure, I should say it. I am still Jewish in some indelible ways, but since the Kaddish is famously focused on praising God (it doesn’t mention death), and since lauding a God I don’t believe in doesn’t bring me comfort, I haven’t said it for my own sake.
Today, though, I went to shul for the first time since my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah, as part of Neighboring Faith Communities, a program I’m co-leading in our congregation. We learn about. I’m teaching the adults and a few lay leaders are teaching a group of middle schoolers, and they make the visits together. I haven’t joined them so far because the visits have all been on Sunday mornings, but as soon as we set the date to visit Congregation Beth Am, on a Saturday morning of course, I put it on my calendar. I had never been, and it was enjoyable.
What I didn’t consider until a few minutes into the service, though, was that there would be a Mourner’s Kaddish at the end of the service and that I was a mourner. I quickly looked over the prayer to make sure I could still say it, as I know my Hebrew reading is a little rusty; the Reform prayer book has transliterations of everything, but I find them harder to read than the Hebrew script. (To be precise, the Mourner’s Kaddish is in Aramaic, but the script and pronunciation of the two languages are the same.) And I felt a strange frisson, to enter the world of Jewish mourners, visibly and audibly, and with members of my congregation around me to boot. When we got to that point in the service and it turned out that Beth Am’s practice is for everyone to say it together, the frisson was replaced by an equally unexpected letdown. But the rabbi asked us to call out the names of anyone we were remembering, I said “David Zucker,” as others spoke the names beloved to them, and then, as we began the prayer, I was back on the long, upholstered pews of Temple Beth Sholom, my father rising next to me to say Kaddish for his father. L’dor va’dor, no question. The tears rose, my voice dried up, and I had to whisper the beginning of the second paragraph: “Yitbarach v’yishtabach, v’yitpa’ar v’yitromam v’yitnaseh” . . . I managed to get my voice back by “b’rich hu,” but I was wrung out.
We’ll say the Kaddish as part of Dad’s memorial service in April. It’s an important part of my sister’s practice, and it seemed right to suggest it when she and I met with the (Unitarian Universalist) officiant, but I wasn’t thinking about what it would mean for me personally. Now I am.
I posted this on a social media site earlier today, but various important people such as my daughter don’t have access to it there. One of my most faithful readers and frequent commenters here was, alas, the person I’m writing about, and the fact that there will be no amusing or bemusing comment from him is another dull blow in my gut:
My father died yesterday morning at the age of 86. He had been declining sharply, and my sister E. and I were flying to Tucson this week–she is there now, I’m arriving tomorrow. But both of us too late to see him one more time.
I drift in a kind of numb disbelief, punctuated by waves of sadness. I know the feelings will keep coming and I’ll cry and laugh and write and draw about them.
Dad was funny, smart, curious, with a knack for defusing conflict with a bit of self-deprecating humor. He read voraciously and delved into whatever caught his interest, so that in recent years when we talked, he’d have something to tell me about his studies in ancient Greek or the paintings of Joan Mitchell. He really found his calling when he became an English professor, since he was a natural-born scholar and also a ham who loved to have the opportunity to hold forth on the stage of the classroom. He was very politically aware and liberal–not an activist except for the occasional bout of making phone calls for his Congresswoman, but he was proud that E. and I were. He was a poet, and later in life, took up abstract painting with abandon. He loved to travel, cook, and eat (“I love food,” he used to pronounce now and then).
Some of my sweetest memories of my father are gardening with him when I was very little, baking bread and learning how to shape the loaves, studying Pirkei Avot together when I was older and we were both devotedly Jewish, reading a book he had recommended or occasionally one he hadn’t (“Are you reading Sal Fisher at Girl Scout Camp AGAIN? The whole great world of literature all around you, and you’re reading Sal Fisher at Girl Scout Camp,” he said in mock-despair). Going to Mets games, especially one memorably cold Opening Day, when they made us just about cry by going into extra innings. “Do you want to stay?” he asked, clearly at least half-hoping I’d say no, but I said “We have to!” and he seemed pleased; fortunately, Gary Carter, in his first game as a Met, saved our freezing fingers and toes and became an instant hero by hitting a walk-off homer in the tenth. Traveling: to Israel for a whole summer when I was 12, to London and Paris when I was in high school, or just to someplace like the tiny Mohegan museum in Uncasville, an hour away from home. Countless plays–he did not actually know all of Shakespeare’s plays by heart, the way I thought he did (and matter-of-factly told friends) when I was little, but he loved the Bard, he loved theater, and he and Mom went to just about everything New Haven’s Long Wharf, Yale Rep and Yale Drama School had to offer, often bringing us along and requiring that if it was Shakespeare, we read the prose summary of the plot first so we’d know what was going on. The declaiming from Shakespeare at the dinner table, followed by a pop quiz: “What’s that from?” Eyerolling child: “I don’t know. Hamlet?” “Tsk. RICHARD THE SECOND!,” he’d say, clearly affronted that he had managed to raise children who were so ignorant, and overjoyed to have the excuse to jump up, grab the play off the shelf (he had two or three editions of the complete plays), and read us the whole passage. Day trips to Boston (Faneuil Hall, then a game at Fenway) and New York City (the Metropolitan or MOMA, then dinner at Tout Va Bien).
The grand adventure we shared at the start of the Blizzard of ’78, when he walked through the driving snow to get me at school and walk me home. His fiercely comforting me when I called to tell him that my ex-husband had died by suicide: “Now don’t you DARE blame yourself!” He and Joy’s dad, Marty, at our wedding, spontaneously rising at the end of our first dance so that Dad could dance with me and Marty with Joy. Holding Munchkin on his lap to read to her, and later, delighting in the poetry she wrote. His sitting in an armchair in the living room, reading, and occasionally saying “Listen to this” and reading something aloud to whoever was around. And the sound of his voice when he answered the phone–“Amy!”–as if nothing in the world could make him happier.
I love you, Dad. I’ll miss you forever.
A friend asked me this question about ten days ago. I said, “Hm, sounds like one for the column!” And here it is.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day has inspired me to look up art and music by indigenous people around the world. I don’t post photos of people’s work here because it makes it too easy for people to pick them up and disseminate them without credit, so please click the links to see them.
I knew nothing of Australian indigenous artists until I saw a museum show several years ago. Aboriginal art was having a moment (with that disturbing mix of overplaying and belated appreciation that we’ve seen so many times) and we were in Seattle during this exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. They were so, so beautiful, and taught me a lot as an artist: about assymmetry, for example. You can see a lot of the art via that link, though seeing them on a screen doesn’t do them justice. Until you get a chance to see an exhibit, here are a couple others I’ve found on the great gallery of the internet that I really love.
Untitled, Lily Kngwarrey Sandover
As a ceramic artist, I’m always blown away by the sheer technical brilliance of the pottery of Pueblo peoples. But of course it’s not just impressive in a “how do they DO that?” way, but expressively. From an exhibit this summer at the Metropolitan Museum, Grounded in Clay:
Jar, Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo
I was lucky to go to a college that had a strong ethnomusicology specialization, so I went to a lot of West African dance and music performances then, but I haven’t sought them out. Why haven’t I? Check out this gorgeous music from Beninois, Yoruba musician Taofique:
I’ve heard a lot of Lila Downs, who is one of Oaxaca’s most famous musicians, but I’ve never heard her specifically Zapotec music. She’s released other versions of this song under its Spanish name, “Flor Menudito,” but she has been recognizing how she was once ashamed of being Zapotec, and is now reclaiming that heritage and giving it its due. This is stunning:
Coming across the Gond people and their art was one of those many, many moments of realizing how limited my education has been. Not that we can learn about every indigenous group on the planet, or even come across their names–there are so many. But just to know that there is a whole world out there that I don’t know is a big shift. Like when I learned that we have probably only identified 10% of the world’s animal species. Except in this case, I was so unaware of the vast variety of indigenous peoples because those outside the U.S. were so seldom mentioned in any of my schooling (and those inside the U.S. were mostly written about in the past tense. They’re still here!).
My fall-in-love moment with Gond art was seeing the fish-shaped eye on the painting about prayers to Dharti Mata (Mother Earth) on this site. An eye! But it’s a fish! A fish! But it’s a person’s eye!
Mystery writers often have series with recurring characters, and we can well understand why. They can develop a character over many books of their career and many years of the character’s life; their readership builds a rapport with the character and is likely to snatch up the next volume when it is published; they themselves don’t have to develop a cast of characters from scratch with each book, but have at least a core figure or two all ready to go.
But the recurring character presents a realism problem. How can they account for the fact that crime happens whenever this person is about? Well, the easiest way is to make the person a private detective, a police officer, a coroner, or someone else who is presented with corpses on a regular basis, oftentimes as a result of apparent foul play. Thus they avoid the “Mayhem Parva” syndrome, as the mystery writer Robert Barnard affectionately called it (“Parva” is like “-port” or “-minster,” frequently attached to place names in the British Isles). He was a big fan of Agatha Christie, but all Christie fans know that you’d better stay away from St. Mary Mead if you value your life. For such a charming, small village, it has a hell of a murder rate, and the fact that Miss Jane Marple is there to solve the crime will be of little comfort to you and your grieving relatives. Maybe that’s why Christie wrote so few Marple mysteries: only 14 novels and 20 short stories (okay, “only” is a relative term, applicable in this case because Christie wrote 66 mystery novels and 15 collections of mystery stories in total). Miss Marple isn’t a detective; she’s just an exceedingly shrewd old lady with no illusions about human nature, her knowledge of which has been honed through decades of observant, gossipy village life.
Christie wrote far more featuring the private detective Hercule Poirot–30-plus novels and over 50 stories or novellas–even though she described him as “insufferable” and “a creep” and even (spoiler alert) killed him off in a book she wrote about 20 years into her career. She put it away in a vault and didn’t submit it for publishing until shortly before she died, writing dozens more Poirot mysteries in between. Maybe, as she said, she thought she had an obligation to keep giving the public a character they adored; maybe she just couldn’t hack the kind of pressure that Arthur Conan Doyle came under when he drop-kicked Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls, and knew that like Doyle, she’d end up bringing her detective back from the dead. However irritating his author found him, Poirot could encounter dozens of mysteries without stretching the credulity of readers, because solving mysteries was his job, and people brought him cases.
Except that that isn’t how most* of his cases come his way. Sure, people bring him mysteries to solve, as in Dumb Witness, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and Cat Among the Pigeons, but look at how many times a murder just happens to happen when he’s around:
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Death on the Nile
Murder on the Orient Express
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Peril at End House
Evil Under the Sun
Death in the Air
The Hollow
Murder in Mesopotamia
The Mystery of the Blue Train
I could go on. In fact, St. Mary Mead is an oasis of peace compared to the immediate surroundings of wherever Hercule Poirot happens to be. If you see his name on an airplane manifest or in the guest book of a hotel where you’re about to check in, change your plans. The man is a wrecking ball.
What is even the point of making your detective a professional detective if he mostly finds his mysteries by being in the wrong place–well, no, let’s say the right place at the right time? I think the origin of this amusing murder streak is that Christie really loved to write about places far away from London or (her other most common setting close to home) the southwest of England. In my opinion, some of her best writing comes into play when she describes locales in the Middle East, where she often accompanied her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan. Her descriptions of English villages are desultory, almost lazy; they practically shout “Oh, you know what it looks like, post office, vicarage, tidy gardens, now let’s get to the plot”–but put her in a souk in Baghdad or at tourist stops along the Nile, and she turns out to have a gift for description. (I ought to go find a couple of examples and type them in, but I’m too lazy to do it. Read Appointment with Death, They Came to Baghdad, Death on the Nile, etc., and you’ll see what I mean, and you’ll have a great time too.) For this or whatever other reasons, she didn’t want to leave Poirot in London. She sent him abroad, and disaster followed in his wake.
*I am not quite obsessive enough to count them all up, so it’s possible that more than 50% of Poirot’s cases are, in fact, cases brought to him by clients. Feel free to out-obsess me.
We are on a week’s vacation in Mendocino, where I have never been before. I’ve seen lots of stunning photos of the stunning coast hereabouts, and now I have seen for myself how beautiful it is and have taken my own.
Tomorrow we’ll go to MacKerricher State Park and actually get down to the beach to explore some tide pools. Thus far, we have viewed, heard, and smelled the ocean from the tops of the cliffs.
Yesterday we walked out to the lighthouse on Point Cabrillo. I used to fantasize about living alone in a remote and beautiful place, and lighthouses seemed particularly appealing. I would actually find such a life very lonely; I like living with other people. But someone could sell me on a short retreat in a lighthouse, for sure. Preferably with a few resident cats, and actual lighthouse-keeper duties to fulfill.
I love the shapes trees take under the pressure of the wind off the ocean–hence this drawing of the trees beside the historic house of one of the lighthouse-keepers. One can stay in it as a vacation rental. Not, alas, in the lighthouse itself.
During today’s exploration of the botanical garden, I thought I might like to draw the branches of this tree (bush?) sometime.
Today began with a solo hike through a redwoods forest down to the waterfall in Russian Gulch State Park, and so it is ending with an early bedtime and pleasantly tired legs. One of the attractions of the cottage we’re staying in is its proximity to the waterfall. It’s a lovely place, built by one of our hosts and full of pieces made by the other, who is a ceramic artist. Mookie says her bed is actually quite comfortable. It doesn’t spontaneously fold up and turn her into a taco.
All in my 5×7 sketchbook in graphite.
Thanks to friends of our family who owned a house near the Headlands in Rockport, Massachusetts, I got to visit this lovely town once when I was a child. All I remember from that visit is a house with circular rooms, the quality of the light in the house, and a feeling of complete delight.
When we got the chance to visit Rockport this month, I knew I had to find that house. It turned out to be easy to find online: my mother confirmed my memory of its being round, so I put “round house Rockport” into a search engine and was immediately taken to a vintage photo of the studio of Harrison Cady, who was a well-known illustrator in his day. I hadn’t remembered that it was once his house, or that he had lived in Rockport, but I knew he was related to our friends, so there you have it: that’s how they came to have a house here. Joy and I walked up to it on my first day here.
It’s right on the water:
The view from the place we’re staying is no slouch either:
From the Harrison Cady house, we went on to the Headlands, which looks out across the harbor and out to the Atlantic, which is located where an ocean ought to be. I’m sort of joking, since after 20 years living a few miles from the Pacific, I’ve stopped thinking of it as being on the wrong side, but it still feels more natural to have the water “on my right” as I face north.
Another difference between here and California is how much longer Europeans have been here in New England. You don’t see buildings from the 17th and 18th centuries in California.
This house was constructed more recently. In the period when our daughter had tiny imaginary friends everywhere, she would have loved it.
Also on my first day, we walked around the corner to the Unitarian Universalist Society. I didn’t expect it to be open on a weekday morning, but when I tried the front doors anyway, a man waiting in a car called out that he was a member, and could he help us? That question is used so often to mean “What do you think you’re doing?” that it’s hard to convey that he really meant it, but he really meant it. He and his wife had stopped by to take care of a couple of things, so they immediately gave us a tour. In the lovely, sun-drenched sanctuary, we discovered that, like UUCPA, they have a chalice shaped like a tree. Isn’t it striking? I like the nest for the flame.
They have beautiful rooms upstairs too, especially the tiny room for the tiniest children, with its windows on three sides giving views onto the ocean and town. We also got to see their solar panels, installed just last summer. Sadly, I am fitting this vacation in between Sundays, so I can’t attend a service. But it was great to meet a few UUs, who were as warm and friendly as could be.
This is as close to totality as we got in San Francisco. But at least the sky was unclouded. The “big sun” must be some kind of glare effect.
Listening to scientists describe totality, I want to see one before I die. Maybe I’ll go to Alaska in 2033, take in Denali and the Northern Lights while I’m at it. In the meantime, I’m watching it on NASA’s livestream right now.
Sermons in Stones 
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