Golden Calf

Last night we had another Torah session. The section continues to outline the specifics of the sanctuary God wants Moses to build. But meanwhile, down the mountain, Aaron is apparently being terrorized by the impatient people, who have given up on Moses coming back down from the mountain. Moses spends an extra day with God, and the people decide he isn't coming back. They need a concrete emblem of the deity to worship. The thing is, if they could have waited one more day, that's exactly what God was hammering out with Moses in the form of the Tent of Meeting.
A member of the group commented that God seems so surprised that the people could do this. Yet God is supposed to be all-knowing; plus, God made these people in God's own image. Shouldn't this be old news? We discussed the conundrum of free will, which is always interesting to think about, and the way that Moses so deftly keeps God from snuffing the people out by appealing to God's desire to maintain a good image among other nations. How would it look if God were to save these people, only to wipe them all out down the road? God doesn't put up an argument. Yet instead of God wrecking havoc among the Israelites, it turns out that Moses does it.
First Moses "hurls" the tablets that God had written out. Some commentators, we were told, claim that he doesn't so much throw them in anger as drop them because God's words have flown back to their source, leaving the sheer weight of the matter that encased them so heavy that Moses can't carry it anymore. But in any case, Moses has to hew out new tablets himself for the second, more complete edition of the Torah. The shards of the old are encased in the Ark of the Covenant.
Then, feeling the same threat Aaron had felt from the mob he meets below, Moses sics the Levites on them, and they engage in a killing spree, murdering thousands of their own kinsmen; meanwhile, Moses melts down the calf, making the people drink the resulting brew. The passage that follows is interesting for its ambiguity. The Levites now either will be rewarded or will have to atone for their action. In any case, it isn't enough to prevent a plague that God sends down to punish the rowdy group for their misdeeds.
We noted that Moses and God often seem to be twins, or at least alter egos. They both can be cruel and capricious in similar ways.

Writing

I have written more in the past year than perhaps any before it. And part of that is that I am thinking about books I want to publish, and even coming up with titles for them. The problem is that it will take a long time to get enough to actually make a book. The autobiographical fiction/nonfiction collection I want to call Among Others. The poetry I want to call The End of a Line. I figure I need about 25 short pieces at least for the first collection, and maybe the same amount for the poetry.
I don't know where I would send them... probably I'd start with mainstream university presses, and then try the really small places. But I need to do the rest of the work first.

First day of the semester

Today was the first day of the semester. It really was. But I, for some darn reason, didn't know it for a long time. I thought the semester started on Tuesday, tomorrow. So I changed my syllabus last week, and I emailed my students to tell them to pick up the syllabus on Blackboard and I'd see them Tuesday. Only one wrote back and said "Huh?" and I still thought it started Tuesday. This morning about 7, I sent another emergency email telling them "Nevermind." But the student who asked didn't check her email till late. She got to class just as the students were starting to write their diagnostics, and she joined them.
After all that, after I got someone to take my dad to UCIMC for his MRI and chest X-ray, they didn't give him the X-ray, and I'll have to take him back. ANd now he is complaining that they are acting strange and not feeding him well and he wants to go somewhere else.
When on earth am I going to go looking for somewhere else for them to live, just when the money is getting slim anyhow? I don't know how I am going to do this.

4th

It was old home day yesterday at James' and Anne Grey's. Just as we had for years and years, we got together for a holiday party and fireworks in the evening, a day of eating too much, sitting in the sun, and laughing with old friends. For many years since our arrival in 1980, we have spent the 4th that same way.
When we first arrived in August of 1980, a couple of months before I was to begin the MFA program at UC Irvine, we knew no one here. We had used up all our money getting here, and our car was about to die.
All the way out from VA, it was overheating, and no real surprise either because it was in the middle of a huge heat wave. Our car was laden down with every kind of crazy stuff, including parts of a wire storage unit we had used in our most recent place, which had been short on storage. We felt like the Joads, shlepping across the country in our old white Datsun. On top of everything, we were camping out in a tent. If you know me well, you know I'm not exactly the camping type... ditto for Richard, although he was born and bred in the country and had been a boy scout as a kid. I was so green at camping, I thought I could cook falafal at the campfire. Don't ask! What a disaster. We ended up accidentally packing up in the middle of the night out in the desert because my watch has no numbers. I thought 12:30 AM was 6:00 AM. But it worked out because it helped us escape the heat of the day and to drive in the cool darkness for a few hours.
When we got to CA, we didn't know anything about where we would stay or which neighborhoods it might be a good idea to avoid. We didn't know how to recognize a SoCal hood. Everything was so landscaped and green, it all looked expensive to me. And it was expensive, as far as rents were concerned, compared to places we had lived. We weren't sure how we would manage to pay first month's rent, but after staying on the couch of someone in the English department for a month or so, we finally found a place in Costa Mesa on 19th St., just down from the DMV.
It turned out to be a pretty bad place, with gangs and drug deals going down outside our window. But it took a while to notice that. Meanwhile, I liked the taco joint down the street, and the bus was handy.
Richard had to find a job. We were so desperate, he thought about cleaning out nuclear power plants. To keep him from doing that, I scouted around on campus for jobs, and found one listed at Learning Skills. Helen Romera was the director. I made Richard's vita, and went to the interview myself; he was working a temporary job that day. She hired him sight unseen.
He still works there to this day, though Helen and her sister Betty, who had been the administrator, have long since retired. She and Betty were there yesterday, and we were laughing about other holidays we had spent around the same swimming pool, and the many and varied characters that had passed through the Skills.
People still made their same dishes. Susan brought the wings, as usual, though she had run out of tabasco, so they were a tad sweeter than in the past. The same chips and guac graced the table, and the grill was fired up and turning out Italian smoked sausage. Ann Grey still disappeared into the kitchen to organize and to gather folks from across the way to share in the food and the company. She's the best organizer I know, the only one who manages to resist the temptation to sit down and enjoy with everyone else. Her years in the restaurant business are evident at parties, and her generosity extends to her yoga students and the cats she rescues. There was a new one there yesterday, who had offered himself at her door. He knew a good thing when he saw it.
We decided to get together for R's 6oth birthday, which is this week. He hates parties and gifts, but he agreed to go out for breakfast next weekend, if the old crowd would come too. More on that another day.

Farmer's Market Friday

Today was the wonderful farmer's market at Laguna Hills Mall. After a fabulous yoga class, I met Liz at the market and bought summer fruit for a fruit crisp I want to make for tomorrow's party. Coincidentally, Liz was thinking about making the same thing for her party! Actually, with the gloriousness of those gorgeous summer stone fruits, it's a no-brainer, isn't it? The peaches were the color of sunsets one might only dream about, and today, for the first time, I was introduced to a new fruit, the red apricot. It was glorious.
I should say that I love fruit, and used to spend whole summer days sampling it, till my gums were full of ulcers from their acidic juices. That's heaven, to me, so I loved the market today, with its unlimited samples of red pluots, yellow cherries, and yielding nectarines. Yum.
I also bought some charr, a first for me. It looks rather like salmon, but tastes very different. I pan fried it with pine nuts, butter, shallots, and dill, with a little squirt of lemon.
Then I came home and graded all the rest of the exams, and now I am quite done with first summer session! YAY!

Growing Up Me

Apropos of a call for submissions (an essay contest at a popular magazine) on the topic of when and how I reached maturity, I wrote the following:

I stood at the peeling green door, the color of waxed cucumbers, and pushed at it tentatively with one finger. Here I was standing again, despite every impulse in my body, in front of my childhood home, on a seedy side street in Northeast Philadelphia, wishing I were somewhere else.

I was only here because I had to be. My dad, 88 years old, had just had a stroke, and he and my mother were in a rehab center, where they would stay until my dad was ready to be transported out to California, where I live with my family, having fled as far as I could go, to the other end of the continent, in a vain effort to escape my past.

For a few yeasrs, I managed to pretend it all never happened, my time growing up in the neighborhood where my parents, and by extension, I , were regarded as such oddities. It is true that we were all odd enough. My dad came in only two speeds: on one hand, he had always been prone to fits of rage so violent that I feared he would explode. His face would swell with anger, his veins bulging, blue as balloons. And he acted on this anger too, unpredictably. Sometimes I would be beaten for particular errors, such as getting a bad grade in math, and at others, I would be given ice cream instead. I felt like a hapless rat in some experiment somewhere, purposely being conditioned to produce an anxious and fearful response. Yet at time, she was as full of energy and joy as a kid. One time, I recall, he lined up all the children in the neighborhood and electrocuted hotdogs for them. It was a home made device, constructed out of some wire and an on-off switch, and the hot dogs swelled and sputtered. The children giggled and lined up again for seconds.
On the other hand, my mother was, by all appearances, a fairly average mother, except that she was from South Africa, and consequently, had an accent the other children loved to mock. Even I was fairly good at mocking it. However, it turned out to be she who was truly responsible for the problem I most dreaded. A lifelong hoarder and compusive shopper, my mother scoured the ads for sales, and would buy multiples of whatever was cheap. The spare room waxed as I grew with unneeded shavers, toothbrushes, pen refills that would fill the drawers and counters, collecting dust, and eventually piling up into dizzily leaning stacks of bags and boxes that drastically reduced the space in the room into a claustrophobic square composed mostly of the bed. There were carbon copies in lots of 20 of old letters written in the 60s to manufacturers of forgotten products or long defunct insurance companies, and try as I might, I couldn't get her to throw even one of these away.
Even I, I suppose, was a bit of a specimen myself. I practically lived at the library across the street, reading everything in it by the time I was about 12. I was short and scrwny with knees like a chicken's, had a math disability that made it impossible for me to do the problems my teachers asked me to write on the board, wrote a backwards left-handed scrawl, unintelligible to most, and collected insects. So this made me a bit different in a neighborhood where the other girls seemed to be cookie cutter versions of one another.
It wasn't just my parents I wanted to escape, but the experience of being the neighborhood freak, mocked and worse at school and at the playground. And yet here I was again, back in this same old place, the place I had tried to deny and to outgrow.
It was just that I had no choice. Everyone in my extended family agreed that as the only child, I was the one to come back to my parents' three-story home and clean it out, preparing it for sale. For years, the place had been an eyesore, filthy, infested with vermin. Swollen can goods lined the shelves, stored since I was in elementary school. One day I was sure some would explode, sending a can up into the ceiling like a bottle rocket, the way the pressure cooker full of split pea soup once exploded in that very kitchen when I was small. For years, I could see the stain on the ceiling like a green askerisk.
I couldn't talk my dad into giving the place up. To him, it represented his independence. None of the brochures of palm trees and beaches could lure him to Claifornia, where he could spend more time with me and with his grandson. Short of having him declared mentally incompetent, there was nothing I could do, despite the fact that my mother's dementia was growing worse daily, and my father was showing himself entirely incapable of caring for her and for the house. If he had only agreed to move willingly, he could have disposed of his things as he wished, but now, he had left it all to me, with only three days between semesters between semesters at the community college where I taught, to clean out the house and get rid of everything. Now, the day I had dreaded had come, and the whole thing was up to me.
The door swang open, unlocked, as my ather had feared it would be. When he had his stroke, he yelled that my mother was not to call 911 because the paramedics would steal his money, that is the money he had buried in envelopes all over the house, all $11,000. of it. Yet it was actually all still there, under all the junk, as in some nightmare scenario I had concocted in my worst of dreams.
I smelled the place before I saw it. There were two fridges full of rotting food in that house, and nowhere to dispose of it. My cousins, friends, and I tied bandanas around our faces and tried not to gag, burning sage as we tried to dispel the miasma. Rats ran out of boxes and roaches the size of mice skittered across the floor.
Somewhere underneath all that clutter and junk were the layers of our lives, distributed like the strata of the geological record. Like a paleontologist or a spelunker, I excavated these deptths, uncovering my mother's old passport from 50 years before, my kindgergarten drawings, my first poems and stories, the diaries I had scrawled, then abandoned, in my teenage years. And I discarded much of this. No room for sentiment all this sediment.
Two days later, my friends, cousins, and I had filled a dozen boxes with indispensible clothing, records, and valuables (those we could find). In the depths of her dementia, my mother had taken to burying things she thought of as valuables, though they were in actuality an assorted lot. Gone was her Social Security card (it would take another 2 years to get another) and her mother's diamonds. But I found some of her stash, a melange of meaningless crud. I brought some of what seemed most essential to my parents, gave some to relatives and friends for storage, and sent some stuff home by mail. It was to take 5 years to sort it all out for good.
The irony of all this was not lost on me. Here I had gone thousands of miles to avoid or deny my past, my family's uncomfortable peccadilloes and genetic ailments, but there was no way to escape them: in the end, I was forced to pick through the remnants myself and to deal with them, piece by piece, facing up to and acknowledging them as part of who I am.
Although at the moment, stunned as I was by the enormity of the task, I was not really able to take it all in, in the months and years that followed, I realized that this had been my moment of reckoning, the instant that I became an adult. Multiple graduations, the age of consent, marriage, childbirth had all come and gone, and they did not really make me an adult, but those three days of standing in judgment before that accumulated mass of three lifetimes had made me one, forcing on me decisions that would affect all of us for the rest of our lives. I stood alone, and charted the way.

Last day of class

Well it's over, all but the exam. Tomorrow is the last day of the semester. I will miss my very fine writer and several other extremely extremely bright students. All who stuck with it have improved, some a lot.
When I came home, ready to prepare the final for tomorrow and grade and comment on last minute homework, I was greeted by hysterical cats, frantic to be fed, my cellphone, home charging on the counter, beeping in its annoying way, full of urgent messages, and my son, starving, asking what was for dinner. Then my dad called, telling me that the pain the nurses at the Center had apparently been calling me all day about was not so bad after all. They even called the secretary in the English Department and my husband at work. None of them got hold of me, so when I came home, it all unloaded on me at once.
The nurse at the Center apparently told my dad that she suspected he might have fractured a rib when he fell in the bathroom a few days ago. But I don't think so. He isn't having trouble breathing, and he often complains (sometimes a lot) when I drive over bumps. That's what started this whole thing, the access bus driving over bumps. Add to this the fact that the nurse at the Center sometimes has given my dad dubious medical information in the past.
All the same, I called the doctor's office and asked what I should do. They're going to call me back tomorrow and tell me whether they think I should take him in to the ER for an x-ray.