Got A Ticket For My Destination

This is being written and posted in real time. It's 1:45 AM. About 20 minutes ago I finished watching the movie It's Complicated with dad (hslabw). More a mom movie (lihibadel min hachayim umin hameitm). A month ago, on Saturday night, April 15th, I sat here at about the same time, after having watched Up In The Air with dad. I wrote for a while and envisioned posting but carried the post for the past four weeks. I need to go to sleep soon, so instead of pinpointing my percolating perspectives at this point I will post what I wrote a month ago. Tonight will have to wait. And the spaces being just write will have to wait too - tweaking is tiring and time consuming.

April 16, 2010

At 9:15 tonight I started to write. Shabbos ended about a half hour earlier. After Shul I shmoozed about the sefirot with a wise, good man and then walked home through the courts. Home.

I spent Shabbos in my father's home. Four months ago it was my parents' home. They say you can't go home again. I think you have to try to go home again, and to find your own home. Lately I've been giving myself writing assignments, taking a word and going with it. Home.
o

My spot at the kitchen table will always be -in my soul - my place to eat: perpendicular to dad, opposite mom, diagonal from bro. And my childhood bed, and room, will be my bed and room. I used to make pictures on the wall in the bright light cast from the Rosenbergs' porch till late at night. To fall asleep I'd imagine my bed floating into the sky and fly away to sleep. Home.

I spoke briefly with a potential mate tonight. I passed time as I waited for the Mets' game to end. Dad and I planned to watch a movie after Shabbos, right after the game ended. Who knew it would go to 19 (20?) innings? I chilled in the basement, a place I sat for many hours as a kid - my secret clubhouse. Home.
j

I sat listening to ambient music, thinking and writing about Shabbos and life. I spoke from the pulpit in the morning and taught between mincha and ma'ariv. The first time I did that I was seventeen years old. Mr. Cohen's been asking for months, each time I've visited, if I'll be speaking. Today I walked up that podium again. Home.

There was a shayla in shul. The rabbi was away. They asked me. They had already asked someone else. Two feuding gabayim put me in the middle without my knowing it. I gave my psak - an outlet that was attached to a timer heated the water pre Shabbos then turned it off on Shabbos and heated it again, should there be a knas? - and in the end the other team won. Home.
[ p

People - was it more women then men, or did it just seem that way? - came to me at kiddush and said they liked my speech. They liked that it had a beginning, middle, end, and a clear point (I guess I haven't been teaching public speaking classes for the last nine years for nothing). I said I was glad it was meaningful to them. Home.

;

Childhood friend was visiting from Israel. Seeing him was a joy, it made me revisit sweet times of over thirty years ago. Talking with him, both of us gray haired, yet bearing our old essential selves in clear view made me feel young and comfortable. Home.
;
;

As I spoke to the potential mate I wondered what home means. There's that Gemorah (h or no h? - I never know) in which a rabbi says he never referred to his wife by her name, he just called her home. Then I heard Billy Joel sing, "I never had a place that I could call my very own, but that's alright my love for your my home." That's why a woman walks around a man under their Chupah, she centers him, provides a home. I want to get gotten. Home.

l

This afternoon I walked in Alley Pond Park. That's where I cried at Little League practice because my strabismus made it almost impossible to make bat meet ball, and my scoliosis made it hard to run. That's where I jogged like there was no tomorrow the day that I left to Israel at 21 on a one way ticket. That's where my family and I threw away our missteps at tashlich. That's where I walked today. Home.