Walls, stones and what is sacred

I’m a writer and I swim in words. But occasionally, there is an image that expresses things better than any words I could write.

When I was in Israel back in November, I took several photographs of the stones of the Western Wall because I loved all the textures and colors. It’s a classic image; I thought it might be useful sometime for this blog.

Then, as I wrote about in an earlier post, we walked a few hundred steps outside the Old City to the disputed Arab neighborhood of Silwan. And this is what I saw:

Photo by Ilana DeBare

Photo by Ilana DeBare

When I squinted my eyes, those images blurred and became the same — both patchworks of textured white stone.

One was the Wall, the most sacred site in Judaism. The other was a workaday Palestinian neighborhood.

The Torah portion for my Bat Mitzvah service almost a year ago concerned construction of the Tabernacle, and I talked about how places — official “sacred” places, places in wild nature, other kinds of places and settings — can help us get in touch with the spiritual part of ourselves.

But physical places can also become idols, false gods.

I understand how, for many people, the Western Wall is a sacred place. But what those photos say to me is that living communities — the people in them, no matter the nationality or religion — are equally sacred.

To me, the people of Israel and Palestine will always be worth more than any particular place. No stone wall is worth a human life, no matter how many thousands of years of Jewish history it embodies. No olive tree is worth a human life, no matter how many generations of Palestinian family tradition it represents.

That’s the basis of the land-for-peace concept, the basis of a two-state solution. Both Israelis and Palestinians must give up some places that are precious to them in order to save lives that are ultimately more precious.

With right-wingers like Netanyahu and Lieberman running the Israeli government, and the rejectionists of Hamas tying the hands of Palestinian moderates, that solution seems almost impossibly distant these days.

But governments can change — maybe Israel’s will. And perhaps a more open Israeli government will spark a parallel openness among Palestinians. What we can do, in the meantime, is keep reminding ourselves and our leaders that human lives are more sacred than any walls, trees or stones. That’s why I support groups like J Street and Americans for Peace Now.

There! It just took me 379 words to deliver this preachy message.

When really, all it takes is looking at those two images.

Sudden-Onset Scrapbook Compulsion

I have spent about fifteen hours over the past three days obsessively creating digital photo albums on Snapfish. One was of our recent vacation in Puerto Rico; the other included all of our family photographs from 2011.

I’d finished the first draft of my Technion manuscript. I didn’t have to start my new job at Golden Gate Audubon until next Tuesday. In the interim, I could have worked on my poor long-neglected novel. I could have immersed myself in checking out Bay Area bird-related Web sites and blogs, or reviewed the past two years of Audubon’s newsletter, or collected resources on nonprofit marketing, or… you get the idea.*

Instead, I uploaded and and edited and arranged  a gazillion photos.

And before that, I gathered up all of our home videos from B’s childhood and took them to the camera store to be transferred onto DVDs. That costs a ton of money. I’d been putting it off for about four years. But I did it this week.

It doesn’t take Dr. Freud to diagnose that there’s something psychological going on here.

On one level, this is just trying to tie up loose household ends as I move from one phase of life into another — from working at home with total freedom and flexibility, to working in an office with a whole additional set of external demands on my time. It’s a new calendar year, a good time to organize mementos from the past year, and who knows when I’ll have this kind of available time again? It makes perfect sense.

But I think there’s also a deeper level. Maybe I’m quietly gearing myself up for B. going off to college in the fall. I’m starting to tie up the loose ends of her childhood. There were twenty-one VHS tapes that needed to be transferred before they someday decay and before our decrepit VCR gives up the ghost. There are about six years of family photographs sitting in my computer, waiting to be put into albums.

B. will always be our child. She’ll come home on vacations, we’ll fight over chores just like we do now, we’ll help her with her problems, maybe even more than we do now. But as of this coming summer, her childhood is officially over. The years of outings to the Oakland Zoo and Children’s Fairyland, the birthday parties at gymnastic studios, the horrific Disney princess dresses and early-morning soccer games and lousy attempts to braid her hair. All gone, tied up like a package that has just gone into the mailbox with a metal, unarguable clang.

So some part of me wants to tie all these photos and videos up too. To have her childhood neatly organized and packaged, lined up in a row on a shelf. So I can look at that shelf and feel, “We did it. We did this project of raising an entire child.”

Some of this may be a little obsessive and Type-A personality. I just spent 20 years in a career where every project I undertook left a written record, a page of newsprint with my name and work on full display. I keep a lot of those clips jammed in a file drawer. Are these photo albums an effort to turn B.’s childhood into similar proof of my productivity?

But some of it is perhaps a normal reaction. She’s going away; our time with her will become a wisp of smoke, a tuft of cat fur floating in the living room sun. And these albums and DVDs are something tangible that can remain.

Perhaps when the albums are done and arranged, I will be able to read  them in order like a graphic novel and perceive the patterns and plot turns that were completely invisible to me as we were living through them. Perhaps the albums will help me make sense of it all.

When B.’s soccer team was little, we bought them cheap plastic trophies at the end of the season — whether or not they’d won any tournaments — so they would have a tangible reward for trying hard and being good sports.

These photo books and videos are my cheap plastic trophy.

I’m not sure how to tease out all these intermingled causes, but I do know my syndrome — SOSC.

Sudden-Onset Scrapbook Compulsion.

—————————————————–

*Author’s disclaimer: In all honesty, I did engage in some productive activities like looking at bird-related blogs this week. But I also did a ton of photo album stuff. :-) 

Israeli women flash mob for their rights

If you’re one of my more tech-savvy readers, you know what a flash mob is — when a group of ordinary people come together, in what appears to be spontaneity but has in fact been orchestrated via cell phone, Facebook etc., and perform a group dance or dramatic action in a public spot. There are some great examples on YouTube of people doing this in places like Grand Central Station. It’s fun to watch the looks on the faces of passersby as they try to figure out what’s going on.

Here’s a video of a flash mob last Friday in Beit Shemesh by a bunch of Israeli women standing up for their rights! (Thanks to the Jewish Chronicle online.)

Beit Shemesh, an otherwise pretty ordinary city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, is the latest hot spot in the ongoing clash between the ultra-Orthodox and modern-minded women in Israel. Signs had been hung in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood instructing women not to walk on the same pavement as men, to dress modestly and not to loiter by the local synagogue. Girls as young as eight and nine are regularly harassed, spat upon and called “prostitutes” by local ultra-Orthodox men as they walk to school.

This particular flash mob is not great as far as choreography goes. (For better choreography, see the classic flash mob doing Do Re Mi in the Antwerp train station.) But I love the spirit behind it and the statement it makes.

Plus, who’d ever have guessed that a song by Queen would become a political statement fro women’s rights in the Middle East?

I have a job!

I have a job!

Three years after leaving newspapers, I’m starting a new job on January 17th. I haven’t exactly been lounging around eating bonbons all this time — I’ve drafted one novel, reworked another, revised the one I drafted, wrote queries and collected rejections on both of them, and worked as a freelance writer for a variety of clients, most recently the Technion.

(Oh, and there was an adult Bat Mitzvah in there, wasn’t there?)

But being on staff somewhere is different. This feels like grasping the wood of a dock after treading water for a long time. It feels like feet on solid ground after drifting weightless in space.

There are many wonderful things about freelancing. I’ve appreciated the ability to set my own schedule, accommodate family needs and put time into fiction. But I also love many things about a traditional job — being part of an organization, connecting with co-workers on a daily basis, having a dependable paycheck.

Now I may have the best of both worlds. This is a halftime job, at least for the near future, so I will still have time to work on my novel, maintain some freelance clients, and be available to Daughter during her last semester before college.(In theory! In reality, I know it will be a challenge to make time for the novel.)

By now, you’re probably asking, So what’s the job?  (Trumpets, please.)

I’ll be communications director for Golden Gate Audubon Society, the independent local chapter of the national conservation organization. GGAS has an incredible grassroots volunteer base who lead dozens of free bird-watching walks each month throughout San Francisco and the East Bay. It provides nature education for inner-city kids, and political advocacy on behalf of birds and other native species. One of GGAS’ recent achievements was a San Francisco ordinance requiring that new buildings be “bird-safe” — i.e., take steps such as using frosted or textured glass to prevent migrating birds from flying into large glass-walled skyscrapers.

So you’ll probably be hearing a lot more about birds in this blog in the future.

Maybe it morphs into Midlife Bird Mitzvah?

No more adorable kitty photos? / Photo by Ilana DeBare

More seriously, this feels like the end of a phase of being in the semi-wilderness. Perhaps transition is always a wilderness — like the ancient Jews in Sinai, when you are no longer what you used to be, but not yet what you are going to become.

I was a newspaper reporter when I entered the wilderness. I hoped to be a published novelist when I came out the other side. But would I succeed? And in between… what was I? where was I?

One of the reasons I undertook the adult Bat Mitzvah process two and a half years ago was to help tame that wilderness. I hoped that studying to become a Bat Mitzvah would serve as a small anchor — providing structure, connections, and achievable goals — when everything else in my life felt amorphous and uncertain.

It did fill that role. But even so, I’ve felt a little unmoored.

It’s nice to touch a dock.

Reading the Steve Jobs Biography

When Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs came out during the fall, I scarfed up a copy to give to Sam for the holidays. Almost immediately I regretted that because then I had to wait for the holidays to read it myself! In any event, I finally got to sit down with it this weekend at Stinson Beach and am loving it.

Photo by Ilana DeBare

Isaacson does a great job of showing both Jobs’ genius and his (many) flaws. He is a terrific storyteller, and Jobs’ life is perfect fodder for stories — both because of his own intensity and oddities, and the way his life paralleled and influenced the zeitgeist. From being a Bob Dylan fan in the 60s, to living briefly on a commune and traveling to India for spiritual enlightenment in the 70s, to… well, you know what Jobs did from the 80s on. I’d also like to give Isaacson big strokes for telling vivid stories that are entirely reported — not imagined or reconstructed or whatever it is that Bob Woodward calls the narrative scenes in his books.

I just switched from owning PCs to a Mac in 2011, so had never followed the world of Apple closely and a lot of Jobs’ story is new to me. As a business reporter, I’d covered a little bit of tech and an occasional Apple story — but very occasional, so I’m not someone with any real connection to the company. I’m as much of an outsider as anyone else, except with the frisson of living in the Bay Area and knowing that all these events happened a stone’s throw from me.

But because of that stone’s-throw element of geography, and the fact that we are pretty much the same generation, reading about Jobs is sparking constant comparisons with my own life.

• In high school on the East Coast in the early 70s, I heard of friends-of-friends who had some kind of box that allowed them to make long-distance phone calls for free. It sounded weird, a little unlikely, and more illicit than anything good-girl-me would do. And why would you want to make long-distance phone calls for free, anyway? But this was one of young Jobs’ early forays into technology.
• In 1980, I finished college and moved to San Francisco. With no clear career direction, I applied for a couple of social-change type jobs including one with a group called the Electronics Coalition on Occupational Safety and Health. It was located someplace called “Silicon Valley,” which I’d never heard of but apparently could reach on a commuter train. I didn’t get an interview. If I’d gotten that job, would I have spent the past 30 years in the Valley? Haranguing folks like Steve Jobs over their labor practices? Maybe crossing over and working with those folks at some point?
• In 1981 Xerox introduced the Star, a farsighted desktop computer with a Macintosh-like graphic interface that pre-dated the Mac. It failed and became a minor footnote in tech history.  I was working as a temp in 1981 at the San Francisco offices of Bechtel (after none of those social change jobs materialized). Selectric typewriters were state-of-the-art. But I remember being tantalized and excited to get to work on a newfangled Xerox office machine with a screen and black and white images — in retrospect, a Star.
• Almost everyone who was around in 1984 remembers the Super Bowl “1984″ commercial that introduced the Mac. I never saw it or even heard of it until years later. I was living in Jerusalem in 1984-5. There is a whole chunk of American experience that I was oblivious to — the 1984 political conventions and presidential race, the 1984 Olympics, the 1984 introduction of the Mac. Those eighteen months are like a black hole in my life when it comes to American culture and history.

I guess that, over all, reading about Job’s early life gives me a kind of “so near, and yet so far” kind of feeling. With a couple of minor circumstantial changes, I could have been someone in the orbit of the Apples and Steve Jobses of the Bay Area — maybe someone working in marketing or communications at a place like Apple.

Or maybe not. I might not have had clear ideas about a career in 1981, but I had very strong political views and values. In the early 80s, while Jobs was aiming to revolutionize the world with a human-scale computer, I was spending my volunteer time trying to reverse Reagan’s wrongheaded support for Central American dictatorships. My car had a bumper sticker that read “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.” I was interested in political change, not technological change. I had zero interest in phone-hacking boxes or “personal computers.” And I would have died rather than go “into business.”

Now, thirty years later, I am typing this blog post on a Mac. I learned my Torah portions on an iPod. My husband and daughter have iPhones. All my old Windows PCs were influenced for the better by Apple.

Thank you, Steve!

The shortest path between two points is a gadget

My husband got an apple corer as a Chanukah present from my sister. This is nothing high-tech — a simple plastic circle with metal blades that you push down over the apple and voila! Apple slices. But he was delighted. He rushed into the kitchen to core me an apple.

And it was fine. It was tasty. It was nicely cored and sliced. But I thought, Why do we need this? I’m perfectly happy slicing my own apples. 

Riddle: What do these two orange objects have in common? / Photo by Ilana DeBare

And this was just a simple little human-powered gadget — it didn’t plug in, didn’t beep or blink, didn’t burn fossil fuels or contribute to global warming or require a log-in and a password. But still, I started thinking — as I spun the salad for dinner in my plastic salad spinner — why do we want all these gadgets?

This is similar to a riff goes through my head when I’m putting away dishes. It’s only twenty feet from the dishwasher to the dining room hutch where we store our china, but I always feel a compulsion to do it in as few trips as possible. I stack salad plates on top of dinner plates, I balance beer glasses on top of soup bowls. For what — to save 10 calories of walking energy?

I guess we human beings are hard-wired to conserve effort and energy. It must go back to our African savannah or European ice age days, when food was scarce and starvation was a constant threat and you didn’t want to burn any more calories than necessary. And certainly there are times when saving effort makes sense. If I were building a stone wall or tilling a rocky field, I would damn sure want to domesticate a horse or invent the wheel.

But today? To my knowledge, no one in my household is facing starvation. No one is physically overworked. In fact, the opposite is true on both counts: We’re all perpetually fighting too much weight and too little activity.

Today it’s better for most of us to take the stairs rather than the elevator. We’re healthier if we eat less and move more. Those hard-wired drives to grab every ounce of fatty food and avoid all unnecessary exertion are no longer helpful — they’re harmful.

But still, I stack those salad plates to save a trip into the dining room. My husband beams at the ability to core an apple with one firm shove rather than twelve little slicing motions.

We have as many gadgets in our kitchen as any good yuppie. How much of why we buy them is mindless consumption (The Next New Thing!), how much is intellectual appreciation of an ingenious solution or elegant design, how much is this primordial drive to do less work?

And it’s not just gadgets. After spinning my salad in the salad spinner, I reached for some Satsuma oranges to add to it.

Now, I love Satsumas. They’re my favorite fruit of all time. I love their tart, juicy taste. I love that they are only available for a few months every winter.

And I also love that they are so easy to eat — the peel comes off as easily as wrapping paper, and pits are rare. There’s no digging your nails into peel that refuses to leave the orange, no juice spurting all over your sleeve, no ragged slices that are missing chunks.

Is my love for Satsumas just a fruit version of the gadget phenomenon?

It used to be that the shortest path between two points was a line.

Today it’s a gadget.

Happy holidays, and a surprising kind of supermarket music

A belated merry Christmas to my Christian and Christmas-celebrating friends! Happy end of Chanukah to my Jewish friends!

We just returned from a week-long family vacation in Puerto Rico, where we rented a big house with my brother, sister and their families. This was a rare and wonderful way to bring everyone from two coasts together and build connections and memories among the young cousins. We swam in the ocean, hiked in the rain forest, bought Puerto Rican fried snacks and cooked our own fried latkes, and took an amazing nighttime kayak trip into a bioluminescent lagoon, where the plankton emit light when disturbed, creating comet-like trails as you move your hand in the dark water.

The trip began in the best of ways — with an email saying that Daughter had been accepted early-decision by N.Y.U.’s film school! This was wonderful news, since she really, really wanted to go there. It’s the perfect program for her, in a city where we have lots of family, and to top things off, it eliminates four months of worry and the need to slog through another three or four applications.

As a little holiday gift, I’d like to share this link to a video from our first day in Puerto Rico.

We had stopped to buy lunch and groceries in Ralph’s Food Warehouse, a U.S.-style supermarket in the town of Humacao. We were surprised to find a live band of drums, horns and a Christmas-clad stilt walker dancing through the aisles. They were sponsored by a local candy company and performing either bomba or plena, two Puerto Rican musical styles based in African drumming. Perhaps someone with more expertise can fill in the details….

A far cry from the Muzak version of Silent Night!

Happy holiday season, and may you and your loved ones have a 2012 filled with health, happiness, and unexpected music.

El Yunque rain forest / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Pelican at Punta Santiago / Photo by Ilana DeBare

With the bomba/plena band / Property of Ilana DeBare

Eighteen, chai, life

My daughter turned 18 this past weekend. Eighteen!

I remember so clearly being home with a new baby, sleepless and overwhelmed and terrified of losing my independent adult life. Every half-hour seemed to drag on for a year. (Especially at 3:30 a.m.) The nurse/diaper/cry/nurse routine felt like it would go on forever. I couldn’t imagine her sleeping through the night, let alone going to school.

The juncture she has reached now — turning 18, a legal adult, applying to colleges — would have seemed as impossibly distant as Star Trek’s 23rd century. But of course here it is, and like going through a Trekkie wormhole, it feels as if practically no time has passed.

Ice cream cake with Rollos and Kit Kits, by my sister-in-law Esther / Photo by Ilana DeBare

I could write about how proud Sam and I are of the person that B. has become. But I won’t.

Instead I want to play with numbers, which is a polite way of saying I want to write about me.

She is 18. I am about to turn 54.

Eighteen is one-third of 54. I look at her and see my life divided into neat thirds: From birth to 18, I was growing up. From 18 to 36, I was an independent adult. From 36 to 54, I was a parent. Yes, I continued to work as a journalist, but my main creative energy went into being a parent and into projects that spun off from parenting (helping start the Julia Morgan School for Girls, writing a book about girls’ schools, etc.).

Now my next 18 years will take me from 54 to 72. What will that entail? A return to being the independent adult, a chance to invent a new career, more time for fiction writing?

Eighteen also connects to the word “chai” in Jewish tradition. The Kabbalist mystics assigned numerical values to each Hebrew letter, and the chet-yud of “chai” add up to 18. I learned this around the time of B.’s bat mitzvah, when she started receiving checks from relatives in weird random amounts — a check for $36? or $72? It was mystifying until someone explained the tradition of giving sums that are multiples of “chai.”

And then 54 — thrice eighteen — is the age at which my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died two years later. Almost two decades after that, I learned that I had inherited the BRCA2 gene that creates a high risk of breast and ovarian cancer. I undertook preventive surgeries so my actual risk of breast/ovarian cancer is now very low — lower than that of the general non-BRCA population. But still, the age 54 carries undefined emotional weight for me. I’m not sure how I will react to it. Part of me irrationally assumes I will follow in her path, and that age 54 signals doom. Another part is prepared to celebrate every day after 54 that I’m cancer-free — Hooray! I made it another day longer than expected!

What does this all add up to, all these 18s and multiples of 18?  B. took the graphing calculator to school for her math final today, but that’s not why I’m stymied.  Perhaps this is just continued perplexity at the strangeness of a system where children’s birthdays inspire joy and wonder, but our own aging feels scary and bittersweet, if not downright sad.

At some point in those years between 18 and 54, birthdays shifted from being a moment when doors perpetually opened more — and more! and more! —  to a moment when they wobble on their hinges and maybe start inching towards closure.

 

A J.D. Salinger scavenger hunt

My daughter likes J.D. Salinger. She’s read all his books, wrote her college application essay about one of his short stories, and made a movie based on another of his stories for her filmmaking class. A while ago she told me that, for an 18th birthday present, she would like “all of Salinger’s uncollected stories.”

It turns out that Salinger wrote 22 short stories — mostly in the 1940s — that appeared in magazines but were never anthologized. They are listed and summarized on Dead Caulfields, a terrific web site devoted to Salinger’s work.

So off I set on a Salinger/scavenger hunt.

I started with the U.C. Berkeley library catalogue and with WorldCat, the online catalogue that tells you (not entirely accurately) which libraries own a given book or periodical. I’d assumed that the immense Berkeley library system would have everything I needed, but it quickly became clear that this would not be a one-stop shop. Instead:

Stop # 1 – Online archives. The New Yorker makes its archives — every page of every issue, back to 1925 — available to subscribers for free. That was a quick and painless way to print out two Salinger stories, one of those moments where I want to blow big sloppy kisses to the Internet.

But surprisingly, there were no similar online archives for Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan or Mademoiselle, where he had also published. And other magazines like Collier’s, Story, and the Saturday Evening Post went extinct long before anyone had even heard of the Internet.

Stop # 2 — Oakland Public Library. Good news: The modest, cash-strapped Oakland library had back issues of the Saturday Evening Post and Story. Bad news: Some less principled Salinger aficionado had gotten there before me and sliced out the pages containing his stories from some of the volumes. I guess that’s the downside of being a writer with a cult following.

Stop # 3 – U.C. Berkeley’s Doe library. I spent a lot of time in this library when I wrote Where Girls Come First, and I love it. I love the way the floors of stacks are built below ground like some post-apocalyptic civilization. I love the tall movable bookcases that slide along a track as effortlessly as if someone had suspended the principle of friction. I love the way you go looking for one book, and then find a half dozen related volumes alongside it that you didn’t even know about.

Here’s what was new at UC since I did my girls’ school research: Scanning. There are no longer any photocopy machines in the stacks. Instead, there are scanners. You place the book on the machine, it scans the page into digital form, and then either saves it to a memory stuck or spits out copies to a printing center next door in Moffett Library.

But UC didn’t have every magazine I needed. And some of those that it did have were barely legible. So on to….

Stop # 4 — New York Public Library. Although I grew up in Manhattan, I had never set foot in the main branch of the New York Public Library. But I was spending a few days in New York on my way back from Israel, which created an opportunity to continue the Salinger/scavenger hunt.

What a building! The great marble staircases and hallways, the main reading room with its rococo ceiling of carved cherubs and painted clouds, the long, pillared oak counter that could easily have been from a Victorian bank… it all conveys a sense of books as sacred, precious, worthy of being housed in a palace.

Some of the magazines were available on microfiche, and I fumbled around with the spools and the light and the focus dial, thinking how clumsy and outmoded microfiche technology feels now that we have things like scanners and online archives.

Others of the magazines I needed were available in bound volumes. I had to get a NYPL library card to page them from the stacks. I felt like a temporary member of the New York literati!

Photo by Ilana DeBare

But even the vaunted NYPL didn’t have everything. I was still missing about four stories. (Might you say that I was short four short stories? Or I was four short stories short?)

Stop # 4 — Return to the Web. Back home, I went online again and found bootleg copies of the text of the missing stories on various individuals’ web sites. (I suppose I could have downloaded bootleg versions of all the stories and skipped the library rigmarole, but there’s something nice about seeing the stories in their original setting, surrounded by period ads for a $2.50 Manhattan restaurant dinner or “Pant-Ease Diapers that are Knitted to Fit Your Baby.”)

I bought a three-ring binder, and clear plastic sheet protectors with holes to fit in the binder. Organized all the stories chronologically and slipped them into the plastic jackets. Printed up a cover. And voila! An eighteenth birthday present.

Photo by Ilana DeBare

Photo by Ilana DeBare

I hope she appreciates it.

All told, I probably put more than 20 hours into this.

If I were billing at $100 an hour, this would be a $2,000 birthday present.

Band-Aids for rejected writers

One way to salve the wounds of rejection by publishers or literary agents is to read rejection lessons received by other, far greater writers. There are numerous collections of these, but I recently stumbled across a small, new compendium of rejection letters on the web site Flavorwire.

It includes rejection letters received by Kerouac, Plath, Gertrude Stein and others, but here is my favorite. The Left Hand of Darkness won the 1969 Nebula Award and the 1970 Hugo award, and established LeGuin as one of the most respected sci-fi/fantasy writers of her generation.

 

(Of course, what we don’t know is what kind of manuscript LeGuin had turned in! Maybe it was “hopelessly bogged down” and she rewrote significantly before it was eventually published.

Then again, maybe not.)