A Long Walk & A Good Cry!

My son, age 5, knows which songs are sad.

“This song makes me feel emotions,” he says during Trolls World Tour, particularly during the Kelly Clarkson country song. The movie, his special pick, is in honor of preschool graduation.

He shares so much during a movie viewing and it reminds me of watching a film with my grandmother - Mommom Ethel - his commentary about what’s taking place, and how it makes him feel, in real time.

I saw the film The Sixth Sense, when it premiered in the theater, seated between Mommom and Aunt Sherrie (the two of them, of blessed memory). You can imagine the chatter that took place during this layered psychological thriller, and though I do not recall enjoying this experience at the time, the memory of it - twenty years later - fills me with the sweetest of belly-laugh’s-joy. (I do hope patrons seated near us were offered refunds.)

How will all of this look in twenty years?

In real time, last Friday, I wept. I bawled over my son’s preschool zoom graduation. In my pajamas.

Those of us who’ve been touched by the melancholy know what a relief it is, a good cry.

And there have been many occasions to cry, and much to cry about over these past several months, but I haven’t cried much. I’ve been too busy or too tired.

Then something incredible happened: Someone showed up at our door to drop off Shabbat dinner for our family. There was a time when I would have been self conscious or too proud to accept such a gift.

Now is not that time!

Now is the time for saying thank you and asking if the containers should be returned or recycled.

Time has taught me that.

Knowing that dinner was prepared, I took a walk. A long walk to the beach while Dan hung back with the kids.

When I got there, I saw these colorful glass bottles swaying - suspended in the air - like some desert mirage. I got closer and heard the sounds of their soft clanking, this large scale wind-chime sculpture.

When I returned two days later it was gone.

I told my boy that the sad songs let us feel a way that we need to feel.

There’s consolation in that. In sad songs, long walks, a nourishing meal, even in ephemeral art.

And Thank God.

Prayer + Action: Root & Rebound

Other Music

Now that we’ve been at this for some time, I’ve found my way back to poems and music and art as a source of consolation.

Sometimes I’ll just watch footage of New York City from the 1980s and get lost in the fashion, the cars, the iconic scenes that defined the mythology of the city as it first entered my consciousness as a child.

If I’m feeling more melancholic, I’ll watch videos of people buying newspapers and chewing gum in the lobby of the twin towers.

I try to remember what it was like and who I was when I moved to New York City in the summer of 2001, a few months before my 22nd birthday, and I need for the towers be standing to get there.

Yesterday, I got lost in a modest, eloquent documentary about a music store, Other Music, in the East Village, which transported me straight back to my early twenties in the early Aughts.

The premise of this film is straightforward as it captures the final weeks of this beloved music store, before they shuttered for good in 2016, after twenty years as a hub for alternative, avant garde, new — other — music.

There are no surprises here: We know what’s coming with the rise of digital / downloaded music during the early part of this century, and the eventual streaming services that replaced physical albums.

But that did not diminish the joy or heartbreak of spending 80 minutes back inside this music store with its staff and patrons.

Though I recognize only a fraction of the bands referenced, I know several people in this film.

I shopped at Other Music with my roommates, riding the subway over the Brooklyn Bridge to lower Manhattan. I went to high school and college with a couple of the aspiring musicians, who actually made it all the way to indie stardom. I recognize the clerks, the cashiers, the customers.

At one point as the customers are lamenting to the cashier the impending close of the shop, one says that there should be a therapist on site, and Dan and I paused the movie to recognize that these words had just been uttered by our good friend Andrew!

It’s that sort of film.

One that appeals to me very personally, but I think it will appeal to anyone who cares about music, or community, or local institutions or sacred space, or human interaction. So, basically, everyone who I know!

It also reminded me — reflected by the diversity and color and character of those represented in this film — that these places: record shops, rock clubs, independent bookstores are a natural congregating place for people of all races, genders, sexual orientations. And that when we move everything online, we lose these vital physical unifying spaces.

And I wish that, as a society, we valued these spaces and protected them more.

At one point, near the end of the film, as the owners are watching the junk-lugging crew disassemble the shelves and clean shop, Dan said to me, “Wow, you’ve really got to love this place to watch this part,” and we did, because we do.

Prayer + Action: shop independent & diverse

Happy Birthday, Sherrie.

It’s Aunt Sherrie’s birthday tomorrow.

She’s been gone for over two years, and the world that she inhabited feels far away from the one I’m currently in, the one we’re all in right now.

Yesterday, when I was driving back from the beach with the kids, wet sand sticking to our wet clothes, Kool & the Gang’s Celebration came on the radio, and I opened the windows and blasted the song, driving down a steep hill in time to the “whoo — hoo” of the chorus.

“Isn’t this kind of inappropriate during coronavirus and everything?” my eight-year-old daughter asked from the backseat.

My face-mask was pulled up over my head like a headband, and we’d just departed graffiti next to the sand dunes - still fresh on the wall: Breonna Taylor, Say her Name.

I looked around. The streets were empty, and I reassured her, something that I decided just in that moment:

When Kool & the Gang comes on the radio, it is okay to celebrate being alive.

This song — I told her — was the soundtrack to every joyous family event in my life: My Bat Mitzvah, my brother’s Bar Mitzvah (every Bar/Bat Mitzvah!) My wedding, every wedding.

Whenever the band played the first few notes of Celebration, we all hit the dance floor, no one faster than Aunt Sherrie. She was a joyful, expressive, beautiful dancer. I miss her.

A friend recently posted on Facebook that when his “memories” popped up from previous years, it felt like salt in a wound!

It made me laugh — looking at what he shared, some innocuous outing the prior summer - and how true it was.

And, still, looking at a photograph (like the one above of Sherrie next to me at my Bat Mitzvah) it hurts in the way it should, mixed with joy. My consolation is celebrating her birthday for as long as I’m alive.

We’re in this for the long-game, God willing, for as many days as we’ve got, to engage in the work: to fight for racial justice, to consider our neighbors as we adjust our masks over our mouths, to ask the hard questions, to remember our loved ones, to celebrate their lives — and our own.

It’s time to come together…everyone around the world. Come on.

Happy Birthday, Sherrie.

Prayer + Action: What Next?