Category Archives: Musings

just that — musings on the world around me

Worrying like Ping? You still can’t prevent a whack.

When I get to yoga class just under the wire, I often think about Ping, the duck in Marjorie Flack’s children’s book. As I sign in, my name last on the list, I anticipate an imaginary whack on the back, like the one Ping received each evening when he returned late to the wise-eyed boat that floated on the Yangtze river. In the story, read to millions by Captain Kangaroo, Ping becomes so worried about avoiding an occasional whack that, one night, he dares to …

(Well, if this story is new to you, consider getting your own copy of the children’s classic, The Story about Ping, first published in 1933. And, if you want to discuss Ping further, please add a Comment below!)

One morning, I was as worried as Ping! I was late enough that class already was beginning!

The teacher had to ask two students to pull their mats aside for me so that I could roll mine between theirs.  They did, and the class proceeded: down dogs giving way to warriors one and two, which evolved into revolving triangles, half-moons and such. I felt a twinge of guilt for disrupting the yoginis beside me, but soon got into the flow as they say and welcomed the calm that yoga practice brings. The day’s true lesson was soon to come.

After class I approached the two women who had made room for me. I thanked each one in turn for doing so and apologized for disrupting their practice just as they were settling in.

The first woman responded: “Oh don’t worry about it!”  She laughed and waved her hand. “We all come late at some time or another.” I shared her laugh and thanked her for being so understanding.

Then, I turned to the second woman. I offered the same message, same offer of thanks, same apology.

But, this second woman snarled at me. I don’t even remember what she said, if indeed she answered with anything beyond the snarl. Her response made it clear that she was mightily ticked off to the max. I had committed a grave wrong and she wasn’t going to let me off the hook—even after an hour of very relaxing yoga practice.

Then, came the insight: So often the reactions we get from people have nothing to do with us. However much I worry, and however sincere my apology may be, I still can’t prevent an occasional whack. People often respond to us with what they already have bottled up inside of them.

The first woman made room for me on the floor at the start of class, and room for me in her heart in accepting my apology.

The second woman had spent her hour of practice mentally rebuking me as she moved into each pose, so much so that by the end of class she was a hot mess of resentment.My apology probably didn’t soften the first woman’s attitude any more than it turned the second woman into, well, a number two kind of come-back.

That morning’s biggest revelation wasn’t Hey! I can hold this pose today—but that others’ reactions to us—often just ain’t about us.

Debra Darvick: Heirlooms of Thoreau, Whitman, Seurat and …

I was never one of those kids who played house all the time. I didn’t have rafts of baby dolls whom I fed little plastic bottles filled with pretend milk before putting them to bed in shoebox cribs lined with fabric scraps borrowed from my mother’s sewing box. I never gave future children much thought. Except now I realize that I did—in the things I began to acquire or create over the years.

When I was 11, my mother taught me how to embroider, giving me a kit that featured a quote by Thoreau printed on a piece of off-white linen. No pioneer alphabet samplers for my literary mother. Only Thoreau would do. There was a rainbow of embroidery floss, a tiny scissor, a round wooden hoop, and needles I quickly grew to respect. I loved decoding the semaphore of squiggles instructing me which birds were to have blue bodies and grey wings, which had brown beaks and which ones yellow. It was never framed when I finished it, but I saved that embroidery year after year somehow knowing that when I had a child, it would hang in her room. It did and still does, above Emma’s dresser.

I embroidered a second canvas after coming across a Walt Whitman poem while doing research for a children’s publisher.  My mother’s literary influence, no doubt.  I loved the poem’s spirit and the poet’s celebration of childhood. It, too, became part of the for-future-children trousseau. When my son Elliot was born, I chose a bright red frame, and hung it on the wall above the foot of his crib,  so that it would be the first thing he would see when he woke up. I just love that last line—the singer, the song and the sung—and suppose I chose the poem with the hope that my children would embody Whitman’s words.

I spent my junior year abroad and of all the things I brought home, the one that remains (aside from a love of speaking French and great memories) is a Seurat reproduction of circus performers.  I was transfixed by it, as I was by so many masterpieces in the Jeu de Paume at the time.  I bought quite a few reproductions, but the Seurat is the only one I held on to down through the years, knowing I would frame it for the future children I rarely thought about. It hung in the kids’ bathroom for years before making its way down to a wall in the playroom.

But the one purchase that still startles me for its extravagance is a gold and diamond ring I bought with birthday money my grandparents gave me when I turned 22. I had just moved to New York and was staying with my Aunt Joyce and Uncle Marty on the Upper West Side, job hunting and trying to start my adult life. I was living on the tip money I had earned through a summer of waitressing. New York was costlier than I had imagined. But there was an art fair on Columbus Avenue. And I had been firmly instructed not to put my birthday gift toward future rent or subway rides. The irregularly shaped hammered gold band with three small diamond chips in it cost exactly what my grandparents had given me. The jeweler was a cute hippie with dark brown eyes and a killer smile. How could I not? When I slipped the ring on my finger, it fit perfectly.

And again the thought, I will give this to my daughter one day. It fits her perfectly, too.

If an heirloom is something handed down through the generations, what do you call treasures gathered for a generation that hasn’t yet come into being? A prayerloom? And what about you, loyal readers? Is there a ‘prayerloom’ in your closet or drawer? Something that you have tucked away for a future child or grandchild? Share a photo and a few (or more) words about the item — its history, whom you are saving it for and why. It would be fun to create a semi-regular feature around these treasures.  Send your contribution to [email protected] and we’ll see where this takes us. Somewhere special, I have no doubt.

My dream comes true: Following in Dear Abby’s footsteps

This letter from Ann Landers was one of the greatest thrills of my young life!

I‘ve had a lifelong passion for advice columnists, starting with Dear Abby when I was about nine or ten. This was my after-school routine: get home at three-thirty; grab the pertinent section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; head for my room where I’d sprawl on my floor and pore over the day’s crop of troubles. Unruly children, family spats, unrequited love. Dear Abby always had an answer, soothing words of good sense that tied up each day’s angst with a bow.

HOW TWIN SISTERS CONQUERED AMERICAN JOURNALISM

The rise of American advice columns really rests on the shoulders of twin sisters: Dear Abby was born on the Fourth of July 1918 as Pauline “Popo” Esther Friedman in Sioux City, Iowa, to Russian Jewish immigrants. Her twin sister was Esther “Eppie” Pauline Friedman, better known to the world years later as Ann Landers. Both studied journalism and psychology in college.

For a while, the sisters even managed their love lives in tandem. They were married in a joint ceremony in 1939: Popo to Morton Philips, which made her real name Pauline Phillips, and Eppie to Julius Lederer, after which she signed her real name Eppie Lederer.

Popo took over an ongoing Chicago Sun Times byline, Ann Landers, in 1955—although not even trivia champs will recall the journalist who created the column (a Chicago nurse named Ruth Crowley, who wrote from 1943 until her death in 1955).

Eppie started a year later at the San Francisco Chronicle and got to choose her own pen name. She turned to the Bible, to Samuel, where it said in her English translation of scripture: “Then David said to Abigail … ‘Blessed is your advice and blessed are you.” In their prime, the Friedman sisters each had an audience of about 100 million readers, although Abby always claimed slightly more.

As they rose in fame, newspapers, magazines and even standard reference books began to list the Friedman sisters among the world’s most influential women. They also became infamously estranged from each other.

HOW MY GRANDMOTHER MET ANN LANDERS
… AND I JOINED ANN’S RANKS

One of the greatest thrills of my young life was hearing my grandmother tell the story of meeting Ann Landers! They had met at a benefit event in Birmingham, Alabama. Sometime during the evening, Eppie had a run in her hose or a tear in her skirt. Whatever the wardrobe malfunction, my grandmother had supplied the necessary fixes. Above, today, you’ve seen the letter of thanks Eppie wrote to my grandmother, whose mother’s maiden name was Lederer.

Flash forward forty-something years to this past February when the Detroit Jewish News put out a call for an advice columnist for their monthly edition of the Red Thread.  I leapt at the chance, wanting it in the worst way. I was determined to snare the gig if at all possible and honed and shaped my responses to the three test questions.

Come March I learned that I had been chosen. A childhood dream had come true—the advice column was mine.

Huzzah!!

ABBY, ANN … AND THE MAYTAG REPAIRMAN

But these days I’m feeling less like Dear Abby and more like the Maytag repairman, who famously moans: “No one calls!” Or, in my case: No one writes! Well, almost no one.

Wit, wisdom, and well-prepped advice languish in the ether, in that space where my sechel* meets my fingertips and my fingertips meet my keyboard. You can’t tell me that in a Jewish community of tens of thousands there’s no heartache? No dilemmas crying out for solutions? No tussles over who eats where and with whom for the Holidays? No eccentric relatives who spill the beans at inopportune moments? No twenty-somethings stymied over how to get the ‘rents to lighten up and stop interfering? And what’s more, heartache knows no denomination. You don’t have to be Jewish to write to Dear Debra. Troubles are universal.

So nu? What are you waiting for? Dig Dear Debra out of her doldrums. If you’re aiming at my southeast Michigan Red Thread advice column, connected with the Jewish News, then direct your dilemmas to me at [email protected]. Read more of those Dear Debra columns here.

And what if you’re not Jewish? Well, my motto is: Heartache knows no denomination. So, if you want to reach me as Debra Darvick—the Read The Spirit author, columnist and roving public speaker—email me via [email protected].

* common sense; reason; street smarts

Voices & Visions: Art inspired by Jewish wisdom

Last Saturday in synagogue, instead of a sermon, we had a fabulous discussion inspired by  the Voices & Visions™ project, an exhibit sponsored by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation. Voices & Visions™ is about art, about powerful messages, about combining them into posters, about starting conversations, about continuing the Jewish journey.

The exhibit consists of 18 posters melding Jewish wisdom (quotes by Maimonides, Martin Buber, Susan Sontag and more) and art created by today’s top graphic designers and illustrators. Although I find it hard to believe that the work of only two women—Carin Goldberg and Paula Scher—made the cut. Goldberg’s effective illustration (A human being is like a letter of the alphabet: to produce a word it must combine with another) embedded the quote within an alphabet, forcing the reader to decode it one word at a time and heightening the quote’s power and message. Scher’s illustration, simple and streamlined, brought to life Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous quote, “When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.”

During what would have been the break for sermon, we trooped into the social hall to view the posters. There were additional copies for us to bring to the tables set up around the room for discussion. With our favorites in hand, we did what Jews do best—we talked. About the posters, about the quotes, about the integration of the images and the thoughts that inspired them. Susan’s Sontag’s words on silence, Silence remains inescapably a form of speech  were paired with images of American Sign Language.

I was drawn to a quote by Maimonides, A miracle cannot prove what is impossible; it only confirms what is possible.  Seymour Chwast’s illustration and Daniel Gordis’ commentary were fabulous accompaniments, one of the most effective pairings, I thought. Can you find Jonah and the whale? Hint: Use your head.

A friend and I both went for image above featuring the colorful arcs and the quote by Martin Buber, All journeys have a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware. Paul commented that initially the arcs are rendered in primary colors. As the illustration progresses there is a shift to secondary colors. His keen observation totally escaped me. My take on it was a bit more pedestrian, in that I focused on the fact that some roads led to nowhere, others intersected, and still others went in two directions at once.

What piqued my interest even more was Bubers’ choice of the word “secret.” Why a secret destination instead of one hidden or unknown? Hidden and unknown imply destinations that may never come to light. Yes, secret-keeping has a dark side, but it also has the promise of felicity and surprise. It holds the promise of eventual revelation.  Secret implies a dyad—one entity possesses knowledge that the other will ultimately realize. Perhaps Buber was suggesting the Divine hand shaping our path has scattered it with gems of revelation for us to find. Some will undoubtedly be dark as coal; but others, if we are fortunate and manage a glass-half-full kind of perspective, will ultimately sparkle with diamond-like clarity.

Voices & Visions™ is a brilliant collaboration and one that I plan to revisit. Visit the site or check out the video .

Which poster resonates with you?

What quote draws you in?

Share the vision by sharing this column via Facebook. Please, click the blue-“f” Facebook icon, like this column and, together, we’ll tell others about this creative resource.

Did Mr. McGregor Ever Try Non-Attachment?

The lilies were mere days from opening. Six stalks heavy with close to three dozen blossoms, each blossom swaddled within its own petals. In full bloom they would soon measure five to six inches in circumference,  bright white petals outlined in deep pink.  I went out to check on them yesterday and …

They were gone.

Every. Last. One. Vanished.

Each flower had been snipped off at the base of the bud.  And to add to the mayhem, mystery:  the severed blossoms were nowhere in sight. It was as if someone had come in the middle of the night, clipped them with a hedge trimmer and made off in the dark with my long-awaited botanical bounty.

Who or what could have done this? It would have been one thing if the blossoms had been scattered four feet below on the ground around the base of the plants. The rabbits love to do that. It’s a special bunny game called Torture-the-Gardener. It goes like this: watch for the tulips to bloom that the Gardener planted last fall. Await her cries of delight and excitement as the tulip flowers are 17 hours from fully opening.  Creep out in the light of a spring moon, nibble them off at the bases and leave the petals scattered like so much dead confetti for Gardener to find when she comes out the following morning. Enjoy watching her scream and steam. Cover Baby Bunny’s ears from the foul language.

I’ve quit skirmishing with the chipmunks of late. They’re impervious to the taste of Tabasco, use  putrid egg potion as perfume, are dextrous enough to pilfer a single nut from my Hav-a-Heart traps. But they couldn’t have climbed the lilies’ sturdy stalks, could they? Bitten off the flowers one blossom at a time and carried them down into their little chippie tunnels? Had they invented specialized lily-ladders? Or had deer come for a midnight snack? I saw no tell-tale prints, nor droppings, but I have seen a few of these white-tailed destroyers every now and then in the neighborhood. As far as I know, I have no human enemies, no neighborhood gardeners who envy my echinacea.  Irrelevant, who did the dastardly deed. I am nevertheless lily-less.

A few years ago, staring at those stems, shorn of all that potential and imminent beauty, I would have been truly livid. Today, I just shrug. It’s not worth the wrath. So the deer ate the lilies. Or the chipmunks managed to pilfer them in some way, lock, stock and stamen. Maybe it’s all the yoga. Or maybe thirty years of tilling these dear patches of earth, riding the peaks and valleys of growth and destruction has taught me non-attachment.  Maybe this is what a Zen garden truly is — not one of tenderly raked gravel and exquisitely pruned shrubs.  But a garden where destruction is met with equanimity and joy can still be savored in what was potential and imminent.

How is your garden growing? Share this column with your gardening buddies by clicking Facebook’s “f”.  And if you have some tricks to keep the varmints at bay, do tell.

Nuit Blanche

Here I am again at 4 AM.  Awake.  Sleepless. Torn between getting up and using this extra time in some productive way, and turning over and courting Morpheus.  I read somewhere that waking up at 4 AM (as opposed to 2 AM or 5 AM) signifies deep sadness and mourning.  Maybe I’m just mourning not being able to sleep till morning. Never read what 2 AM or 5 AM awakenings signify — indigestion and the need for a potty call, perhaps?

My yoga teachers say this is the perfect time to meditate, that the veil between the worlds is thinner on dawn’s cusp.  Which worlds would that be: the world of the sleep-blessed and the sleep-hungry?  I’ve never managed to access a world beyond the veil; as it is for most novices, meditation is a challenge. Sometimes I curl up against my husband, small comma nestling into larger one, and hope to end this sentence of sleeplessness. Other times, such as now, I abandon all hope of sleep and set to writing/thinking/considering….

Veils or no, there is indeed something magical about this time of night-into-day. The birds are awake and at it: baw-weep-weep-weep calls one; chi chi chi-chichitter calls another. The crows caw out their daily updates and the mourning doves trade plaints.  Beyond my window, a robin is bouncing on the roof. Is she really cocking her head and peering back at me as I write and watch her? The trees begin to emerge in the growing light. What moments before was a block of black now begins to recede, revealing a silhouette of branches, leaves, limbs. Soon enough the silhouettes give way to a swath of variegated greens . The hydrangeas appear; I swoon over the magical blue of them. It has taken three summers to get the soil acidic enough to mimic a Cape Cod sky. Pale pinks sometime streak the clouds at dawn; but not today. After a second night of rain, the heavens above remain white, heavy, wet. It is bright enough now to see the leafless limbs of our last elm tree. One more mighty giant is going to fall. The garden will be transformed once again: shade loving plants will give way to sun worshippers. Just as I get it going, I’m going to have to retrench and get out the books again. What will I lose? What might I replace it with? Three decades of gardening under my belt, I know not to fight it. This is the way of nature.

It is now close to six. Another nuit blanche, as the French call them, is gone. Time, perhaps, for a ninety minute cat-nap, and then a peaceful still-early morning walk to yoga.

Tisha B’Av: The story of the impossible

I had no idea what I would write about Tisha B’Av (the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av) when my publisher suggested that I write a column as we near the annual observance. He planned to excerpt on the Read the Spirit website the Tisha B’Av story from my book This Jewish Life, and wanted to refer RTS readers to a personal reflection from yours truly, the book’s author.

Tisha B’Av, a Jewish day of mourning that falls during the summer, marks the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. This year it begins Monday evening, July 15, and concludes sunset on Tuesday, July 16. I have attended services sporadically, more out of a sense of responsibility than any feeling of true mourning. How do I mourn something absent from Jewish experience for nearly two millennia? The Book of Lamentations, the text read during Tisha B’Av services, is difficult for me to access. I cannot summon the suffering demanded by the text, by the day itself, by the loss of the Holy Temples where early Jews, through their sacrifices, drew close to God. Not much there for a column.

But God has a wonderful sense of humor, not to mention perfect timing. First thing I saw when I walked into Shabbat afternoon services was a small book by educator Erica Brown, In the Narrow Places: Daily Inspiration for the Three Weeks.

In the Narrow Places offers a richly accessible perspective on Tisha B’Av, and the entire three-week period leading up to it. Brown addressed my struggle directly when she wrote, “We do not know what it is like to have the Temple as our spiritual focus. We have lost the connection to God, to the altar of forgiveness and thanksgiving that was achievable only within its walls.” About Jewish history she wrote: “[It] is a story of the impossible. Carried within each of us is the touchstone of the impossible when we face despair. We can overcome. We have overcome. When we review our past we reject despair because we can sum it up in one word: Hope.”

The three weeks preceding Tisha B’Av begin on the 17th of Tammuz, the day of the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem in 70 CE (Common Era). It is a day of personal significance because our son’s bris was on the 18th of Tammuz. This year, reading Brown’s words, I imagined myself a new mother at the time of the Roman invasion of Jerusalem. Chaos was pervasive; terror, too; uncertainly, dread, panic. All of it. There I might have been, newly delivered of a beautiful baby boy, besotted with love, beside myself with horror of what lay ahead.

For this mother, the Temple was a reality. She would have brought to the Temple priests sacrificial offerings. Living in the time of the Temple, she shared with fellow Jews a communal experience of God’s presence. Hours after the walls were breached, this ancestor would enter her infant son into the Covenant with Abraham (likely in secret and frantically so). Soldiers would have begun their march on the Temple, intent on its destruction and thus the destruction of all human connection to the God of that Covenant. Would she have been able to reject despair? Holding her son close, how could she not have summoned hope? Hope for him to live. Hope for him to survive the impossible. This ancient woman, and others like her down through the generations, surviving expulsion from England on Tisha B’Av in 1290 CE and from Spain in 1492, again on Tisha B’Av embody the touchstone of the impossible that Brown referred to.

Come next Monday night I will remember Brown’s insight that Jewish history is the story of the impossible. I will mourn the women and their severing from God, the severing from all that was familiar. I will remember that through them I carry that touchstone of the impossible and therefore, after lamenting the destruction of the Temple and recalling generation upon generation of Jewish suffering, I will nevertheless reject despair for hope.

Care to read more?

For this observance in 2013, Read the Spirit is publishing online the short chapter from my own book about Tisha B’Av.

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