Apropos of nothing in through the looking glass.

As our friends continue to celebrate life’s joyous milestones, I remember the little things that marked our own:

We built our own chuppah. I remember lugging it from our apartment to the park across the street, making big divots in the grass and down into the sod below to check that it would hold. As we walked back home, pleased with our accomplishment, we overheard a passerby whispering to their companion, “Woah, a chuppah!”

We used David’s tallis (the one he received at his Bar Mitzvah, the one I carried up Masada for B’nei Mitzvah on our Birthright trip) for the canopy. For weeks, I laid it out in front of the window, trying to use the sun to bleach the stains and smooth out the creases where David had always folded it. And that reminds me, too, of how I would stand in the shower and rub lemon slices over and over my arms to try to soften the contrast of the tan lines that showed when I wore my wedding dress. I’m not sure either technique really worked. But it didn’t really matter.

For a time, David did some work as a research assistant at Carnegie Mellon and learned the halls of one of its buildings. There was a single soda machine, hidden in a nook at the end of a particularly collegiate-looking corridor, that dispensed cans for only 50 cents. It was good stuff too. Cream soda, David recalls, though I remember root beer. That was nearly 10 years ago now. What a comfort it is to have someone with which I share so many of these little memories, of moments and spaces that once made up my world.

My last year in Pittsburgh, I spent Shabbos mornings at shul wedged between two men who had become like surrogate grandfathers. To my left, Milt was always moving, gesticulating, dictating the pace of the service from his seat. I could credit this frenetic behavior to the fact that he was the floor gabbai, but really it’s just who he is. To my right was Yale, quieter and less assuming, but kindhearted. One time, the room was so uncharacteristically cold that I began to shiver, and Yale, without a word, walked down and back up a flight of stairs to retrieve his oversized coat, draping it over my shoulders.

Every week during the Torah service Yale would nod off, his head lolling gently onto his shoulder. And in that warm, low-lit room, with methodical chanting filling every space, I would often follow, my body sinking into the arms of the chair.

The summer before my brother went to kindergarten, the school sent home a packet of worksheets intended to help the children prepare. My mother assigned me the job of working on them with him. One sheet contained a list of 20 or so sight words. I bought a pack of multicolored notecards, asked him to pick a color, and wrote out the first five words on blue. The first word I showed him was “I” (or maybe “a”?) and I can still remember how he beamed when I told him he had read his very first word.

But the thing that sticks with me the most, him eagerly perched on a kitchen chair across from me, is the proud, deliberate look on his face as he intoned the word “the”. It was a sound he didn’t really know how to make, a sound I had to teach him, to show him where to place his tongue against his teeth. “Th-e”.

Last updated January 23, 2018