from
the sea (5) –secrets by freda karpf
When you want to hold yourself down
because it feels congruent with your experience, it’s also good to let yourself
rise because it’s matching the life energy starting to surge within. Spring may be an outward reflection of the
need for people to shed the winter they were wearing. This may be another example of mutual
arising.
~
Baubo told Mrs. Scattergood that she was
dead in ways it wasn't good to be if you were alive. ‘How inspiring’, Mrs.
Scattergood thought as she stood in the middle of the kitchen trying to
remember what she was about to do. She
was about to cook something of course, but what? She’d smile because of all the ways her
mother returned to her it was most clearly through cooking and forgetting what
she was about to do in the process of cooking.
~
Mrs. Scattergood liked to think that her
mother was named after the Lena River.
She held Yiddish theater in her memory as casually as she carried
tissues in the large pockets on her schmata.
Mrs. Scattergood used to say her mother wasn't educated. She shrugged her mother’s shrug. ‘So, I was
so stupid.’ “And arrogant,” Baubo
added. ‘Let’s hope some things have
changed’, Mrs. Scattergood thought. She
missed her mother daily.
~
“One time a man on a Miami bus greeted her
mother. She couldn't respond right away and she made a fist of frustration
because she was losing her Yiddish. She responded to him, but Mrs. Scattergood
knew that her mother had stumbled. She
was upset with herself. “What’s
wrong?” “I’ve forgotten my
Yiddish.” She had never known her mother
to know loss like that; to even think of her mother as knowing another
language, to think of her as having this frustration and all that it must have
meant. She knew now that entire worlds
go missing when their language dies. The
expressions, the sense of self and place and what that meant are wrapped in a
special way that only the people that speaks that language could know. Mrs.
Scattergood realized that her mother held Yiddish theatre in her pockets
too. Yiddish was in her blood, in her
voice and the inflections that she heard when she or someone else got a rise
out of her mother. Really, she had no idea what it meant to her to ‘lose her
Yiddish’ but not hearing her voice any longer, in the English, she knew that.
And that was a whole world gone.
~
Mrs. Scattergood struggled to remember her
mother’s voice. That voice was a language in itself and stirred so many
different feelings in her. It was Lena
talk, her mother’s tongue. It was the
talk of the woman who knew Luther and Stella Adler before Hollywood and
Brando’s brand of realism. The woman that said, “Jell-O!, Jell-O! Why not
Jell-O with bananas?” All the other kids
thought she was a real mom. There was no
learned mothering in her. Just the words that came and the feelings that went.
Just the desire to go and do and be before being was something you studied.
~
“Listen”, Mrs. Scattergood would say to
Baubo, as if she weren’t listening already, “my mother had to suffer through my
typing and control of the television. And that was my mother’s world. But when
she moved to Miami, well then, my mother”, she would tell Baubo, proud of her
mother, “would quote entire conversations, both sides, pro and con, from all
night radio talk shows.” That was her
mother. And she was trained, Mrs. Scattergood just realized, by watching Luther
and Stella Adler before they trained the likes of Brando. She knew her lines.
~
Mrs. Scattergood was embarrassed she
didn’t know more Yiddish. She would yearn for this language to be a part of her.
But her mother that held the market, when it was at its height mind you, on
Jell-O and bananas, rarely spoke Yiddish in the home; except as the usual
defense against sharing adult conversation when her mahjong and card friends
were around.
~
She got her ma to teach her Yiddish curses
when they played cards. It was all she knew. None of it really the hard fouls
of language. All of it, at least coming from her mother, more a joke and jab
than a curse or slam. Geh a vec. Geh
schluffin. Or the onion in the ground
curse. May you head grow in the ground like an onion.
~
She never could call her Lena without
feeling it odd and out of place. But she also knew that her mother was Lena and
she was sort of odd and out of place but loved wherever she went. Do you know what you do when you miss
someone that much and you can’t see them or speak to them again? You cry. You cry a river. Then the distractions come along. If you’re lucky you like to eat and you like
to cook. You make soup. Because everyone
knows that to truly commune with the spirits they need the vapors. Dill carried
on the wafting and lifting molecules of chicken soup is a direct connection to
spirit and travels up the Kabballah.
Somewhere between the rocking and rolling it is officially documented in
the Torah. The men don’t always see
it. It is in the little Yeshiva of the
heart. I am kidding. There is no book
that tells you this. Just hunger. Plain, old fashioned hunger that tells you
how to connect with your mother. And
listen, if you’re modern and you should add sea salt instead of Kosher salt, no
worries. But it is written, it is
written in so many places and this will always be the holy of the holies, you
must use dill. If you’re not making
chicken soup, all right with the dill already. But if dill is not in your blood
and if you do not share the secret of the dill with your family, not only will
you bring shame upon your house and bad soup molecules will accrue to your
hips, but you will not get one smidgen of a word into Lena’s ear in the
afterlife. And then, when you think it’s a long time since you spoke to her
already, wait. Just you wait. It will be eternity. I tell you this because it is true. We speak the truth here. Even if we don’t speak Yiddish.
~
Mrs. Scattergood thought, ‘What blood or
river was speaking through her now?’ What speaks through us if we’re all
connected? If I’m my mother’s daughter, why is it that I can’t remember her
voice? I have her DNA. I even have her shpilkes. But her voice, that’s
what I want to hear and what I miss so much. I might have endowed her with
wisdom that she didn’t have. But that’s hardly making up for all the years when
I disavowed her of any brains whatsoever.
The arrogance of some children is astonishing. Someone near to Mrs. Scattergood said to her
once that rivers of blood flow through our veins just as rivers flow through
the continent. If we damn the rivers, one way or the other, we stop the natural
flow of things. Here and there we have learnt, we, the collective that knows
such things from living their lives on the land, that rivers and fishes need
the twists and turns. That all can’t be
damned up and stopped just because we said so. Not without some terrible costs.
~
A long way from thinking that her mother’s
blood flows in her like a river. But one supposes it does. All along the banks
Mrs. Scattergood imagined that she tried to grab her hand as she was rushing by
on some raft, just whooshing by in time and space. Even then, imagining this,
she heard only that small voice with those few words recorded on her brother’s
50th birthday party video.
Lena complimenting her daughter-in-law, told her how she looks just like
a movie star. All beauty was analogous to Hollywood movie stars. It is a beauty
Mrs. Scattergood knows well. But the
real star now is her mother, haunting her beautiful.
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