Scent-memory.

The instant I uncap the bottle, I'm in my twenties again. We used to spend weekends driving around rural New York and Vermont, looking for secondhand furniture at antique stores and junk shops. Even the most weathered, beat-up pieces gleamed again after light sanding and some Murphy's oil soap.

Just in time for the first Rosh Hashanah of married life in our new home, we found a pair of antique wooden church pews. Each featured four folding seats, joined into a bench. It meant that whoever sat on the same side of the table had to work together to push their seats out from the table... 

Like this, but with four seats instead of three.

My life has a different shape now. It's almost six years since I moved into this condo. A hand-me-down outdoor table just came my way, and I showed it to my beloved ex when he was here to pick up our son. "You'll want to sand that," he offered. "Use a 220. That way your rag won't catch when you oil it."

Do I have any sandpaper? Of course not. But the local hardware store has plenty, so I picked some up, and a bottle of oil soap. I should have expected the sense-memories that came flooding back. Listening to Car Talk as we drive up Route 22. The scent of oil soap after we bring something home...

Old wood, sanded smooth. 

As I sanded and soaped my secondhand outdoor table, I watched robins flit across the grass, pecking between the season's first little yellow flowers. Leaves are coming in. I'm eager for summer, for late long light and sitting at this table watching the changing sky. It feels good to look forward to things. 

And it feels good to recognize that these days, remembering my marriage makes me smile. Not unlike how remembering mom (a"h) now makes me smile, though right after her death I mostly felt grief. The sharp edges of loss have been sanded away by time, and now a softer kind of memory can shine.

The Italian place I remember
had dark walls, and candles
in cut-glass red votive bowls.
I thought the owner was Polish.

He and my dad were buddies,
talked business, smoked cigars.
I wore black-patent Mary Janes,
drank Shirley Temples, feasted

on baskets of crusty bolillos:
French bread reimagined
into perfect torpedoes
by Mexican hands.

That's where Dad taught me
how to relish soft-shell crab,
and the names of big wine bottles
like Jeroboam and Methuselah.

All I knew about Methuselah
was that he lived a long time,
maybe forever. I thought
Dad would too.

The restaurant that inspired this poem was the original Paesano's. Here's a reflection on the place written at its 50th anniversary, and here's an oral history from Joe Cosniak. I went to junior high and high school with the daughter of co-owner and chef Nick Pacelli, of blessed memory. 

The photograph above came from Vintage San Antonio - A Photo History (FB). Meanwhile, bolillos are a Mexican roll which some trace to the period of French colonization in Mexico. I baked some today. Mine aren't as beautiful as the ones from Paesano's, but they're still pretty good.

Obviously my household of origin didn't keep kosher. I don't eat soft-shell crab anymore, but I remember loving them when I was a kid. Shrimp Paesano, too. Maybe it's just as well: let them be a memory, along with Dad's cigar smoke and the way he laughed with his friends.

I found it in one of my mother's desk drawers. Mostly the drawer contained pens, mechanical pencils, a few thick yellow highlighters. And then there was this little metal case, shaped like a teardrop with a rounded tip. At first I mistook it for a white-out tape dispenser, though Mom hadn't owned an electric typewriter in years. When I pried it open, I found a vintage pitch pipe. The cylinder is silvery (probably made of tin) with a shape like a stylized cloud at one end, engraved with letters representing the chromatic scale. On the back it says MADE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Crafted there, but engraved in English: it must have been made for export. An internet search suggests that these were common in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Did this one come with my grandparents from Prague in 1939? Did Mom pick it up to sing camp songs with her friends in 1950, the year she returned home and told her parents she'd met the man she planned to marry? There's no one left who can tell me its story, but its sound is pure and clear.

Mom and three friends at Camp Bonim, circa 1953. She's second from the left. 

Related: Keys

Top row: wedding and honeymoon in 1954, and in the middle, a party at my grandparents' house in 1956. Middle row: Dad and me, circa 1976, 1984, and 1980. Bottom row: with my kid in 2014, with Mom and kid in 2015, with kid and me two weeks ago, not long before the end.

1. 

We buried my father, Marvin Wolfe Barenblat z"l, on Friday. He was eighty-seven years old. He was generous and funny and opinionated. It will be a while before I really understand the spiritual impacts of the fact that that both of my parents are now gone.

There are so many stories. How he grew up in San Antonio with immigrant parents. How he met my mother. Work and travel and parties. (Everyone agrees that my parents knew how to have a good time!) The places he went, the stories he told, the bargains he struck. His gregariousness. His smile.

Mine are small stories, the stories of a youngest daughter. Just as the photos above are photos that are not necessarily representative of the whole: these photos show my parents as newlyweds, then my father and me, then my father and my child. These vignettes are the picture of his life that I can most easily paint. 

2. 

One of my earliest memories is waking up in the morning and taking my clothes into my dad's walk-in closet to get dressed there. I remember Dad splashing water at the fogged-up glass doors of his shower, and making faces at me, and making me laugh.

When I was five, my parents built a lakehouse on the Guadalupe where it feeds into Lake McQueeney, and we went there often. I used to feel sorry for our cat Leland who would yowl in the car, so I'd let him out of his carrier and he'd walk across the dashboard and Dad would yell. (Dad complained about the cat, but in early mornings he'd beckon, "c'mere, Lele," offering a ramekin of milk.) On the way to the lake we'd stop at a convenience store to get ovals of hard spicy cured sausage hanging on strings.

I remember Dad driving the boat in the evening, maybe with scotch and soda in a Texas-sized styrofoam cup that said Dad's Roadie. (Mom had those cups printed for him, back when it was legal to take "one for the road.") I remember him perched sideways on the side of the boat, his hair windblown, pushing up the throttle to pull whoever was about to ski next. I also remember that he would get frustrated if someone was struggling to get up on skis, and I never wanted him to be frustrated with me.

3. 

Dad encouraged me to try new foods. As a child I craved his attention, so I became an adventurous eater. I especially enjoyed escargots (and the joke he would tell, the one with the punchline "look at that S-car go!") He always let me taste his wine. As a little girl I remember chirping, "My favorite wine is Chassagnet Montrachet!" to the amusement of his friends. Relatedly, he taught me the names of big wine bottles -- magnum, Jeroboam, Methuselah. 

The year I was ten we lived in Manhattan. Dad spent part of that year in traction with a ruptured disc, but most of my memories of him from that year are of Dad enjoying city life: smoking his cigar on the tiny balcony of our 37th floor apartment, or taking Mom and me to the theater and to as many restaurants as we could visit. There was a Chinese place he really liked called Pig Heaven. For a treat, he would take me to Serendipity for frozen hot chocolate.

Once when I was a teenager my mother was away and Dad took me out for dinner. I dressed up, in a denim miniskirt and big flashy earrings and lots of eye makeup. We overheard a scandalized fellow customer -- "Look at that man, isn't he embarrassed to be out with a girl that young, she could be his granddaughter!" He thought that was hilarious. When I was 14 and we visited Egypt, Dad joked with merchants in the Cairo souq about whether he would sell me if they offered enough camels. 

4. 

Dad had a notorious temper. (When he pitched a fit, Mom called it "having a piñata.") Relatedly, he disowned me on my 18th birthday because he was mad at me. A week later he took me out for enchiladas at Brown's on south Hackberry, where his father used to take him, and he told me, "I wouldn't sell you for $100, kid." That was his way of apologizing.

A number of years later he also took me for enchiladas at Casbeers, which sparked a poem. Both of those establishments are long gone now. Dad knew San Antonio inside and out; aside from one year in Manhattan, it was his forever home. He'd worked in construction with his father as a newlywed, and he remembered before all the elevated highways changed the shape of the city. He used to drive around and reminisce -- that's where we used to live, my mother had a chicken coop in the back yard...

When my parents were young they traveled to Acapulco with friends at least once a year, and to Las Vegas ditto. Later in life they traveled the world. They went to Kenya with two couples in 1982 -- their friend Sy was a hematologist studying blood-borne diseases in primates -- and they stayed at the Treetops lodge. They went to China with friends around then too, and when they came home they showed slides on the dining room wall.

During the years when he owned a crystal import business, they traveled in Eastern Europe several times a year for work. Once I was with them on a business trip there, and Dad took me to a place in Frankfurt that served the very best schweinshaxe -- pig's knuckles -- so I could try them too.

5. 

So many of my memories of Dad involve food. He snacked on spicy pickled okra, and on Ba-tampte pickled tomatoes that he cut into quarters and ate with a fork. He never cooked, but was a master at the grill. At the Barn Door, he used to eat steak basted in butter alongside twice-baked jalapeño potatoes stuffed with cheese. He'd grown up kosher, but my parents never kept a kosher kitchen. (Though when some of their kids became kosher, they made sure that family meals were kosher so we could all eat.)

In my childhood home he always kept a box of See's toffee that came with a tiny golden hammer. He pretended it was our secret and Mom didn't know it was there. That felt conspiratorial and sweet. When I was in college he sent me boxes of that candy, much to the delight of my friends. Later in life he ordered Enstrom's toffee to arrive at my door and my sister's door every December like clockwork. He loved being able to give people food or wine that he knew they would enjoy.

When I was in my twenties, my mom encouraged him to come north and visit sometimes without her. Once he and I walked from my office to Jack's Hot Dog Stand a couple of blocks away. It was a beautiful but frigid January day, with a crystal-clear blue sky and a wind chill around -20 degrees. For years he marveled about it, retelling the story again and again: "That sky was Texas blue, but the air was so cold it was like being smacked in the face with a frozen porcupine!" What a turn of phrase. 

6. 

In the last 20 years or so, Dad came often to seders at my sister's house. He used to comment on how different our seders had become -- his childhood seders were speed-sung in Yiddish! He spoke some Spanish and some Yiddish because those were languages his parents spoke. I'm told he gave his bar mitzvah speech twice, once in English and once in Yiddish.

His parents died on the same day in 1971. He told me that though he said daily kaddish for eleven months when his parents died (because he knew it mattered to Nana and Papa) he didn't care if his children did the same -- unless we would get something out of it, in which case he wouldn't stop us.

Dad used to tell me that being a Reform Jew was the best thing in the world because as long as you paid your temple dues, no one would tell you what you could or couldn't do! That made me laugh at the time, though in retrospect I hear something deep in it: for him, what mattered was supporting Jewish community and taking care of that community, not whether or not you kept Shabbes or kept kosher.

I remember sitting with him on a patio in Hot Springs, Arkansas, when I was in my early 30s (so he was in his early 70s.) We were there for the wedding of a cousin who, like me, bears his mother's name. He was wearing a warm brown blazer, smoking a cigar, and enjoying the crisp cool air. He told me he'd had a great run, and wouldn't mind dying whenever the time came. I've thought of that often lately.

7. 

Dad hated that Mom got sick at the end of her life and that no amount of medical intervention could save her. He would sit on his smoking porch with a cigar and shake his head and mournfully say, "I just don't understand how something like that could happen to someone as good as her." After she died, he visited her grave every day except for Saturdays when the cemetery was closed. 

When we visited him last, about ten days before the end, Dad was frail and confused and skipping around in time, asking where Mom was or speaking earnest paragraphs of word salad. But he managed to ask me if I needed anything -- trying to take care of me to the very end. He was charming and flirty with his caregivers.

He told his favorite caregiver that I was his youngest daughter. "Yeah? What's her name," Eddie prompted. "You ask her!" he retorted without missing a beat -- he couldn't remember my name, but he knew I was his kid. He also said to her, "You know what my daughter does?" (No, what, she asked.) "Ask her!" He couldn't remember the word rabbi, but he wanted Eddie to know that what I did, mattered.

The last day I saw him, I sang a line of "Hey, good-looking, what'cha got cookin,'" -- released in 1953, when he and my mom were courting -- and he sang the next line back -- "How's about cookin' something up with me?"

That morning he said something like, "If I weren't here, none of you would be in jail," gesturing around the room. I asked him if he felt like he was in jail and he shrugged. I told him that we were all there to be with him, and he smiled. But looking back, I think he knew that his life was ending -- I think "jail" was his body, after COVID and a heart attack and a stroke and everything else -- and he was ready to go.

Old barrel keys are heavy in the hand. Most have a round or oval bow, though two brassy ones sport criss-cross shapes instead. All have rounded shafts, pin holes of varying diameter, and idiosyncratic teeth. Shaped entirely unlike the keys I can get copied for a buck-fifty at the local hardware store. One is stamped J. MICHALIK PRAHA. Did that key travel with my mother and her parents in 1939? So did the sideboard where I keep china, the one with a cabinet to which I long ago lost the key. I try every key twice, but the Czech cabinet remains locked. Maybe it's better that way. I know it contains the silver goblet from my wedding, a marriage long ago undone. No one gets to know what else might be inside.

When I remember Yom Kippur in my childhood, I remember stiffly-ironed fancy autumn clothes, usually far too hot for south Texas in September. I remember running around the Conservative shul of my early childhood with friends, wearing dresses and tights and black patent Mary Janes, and (re)discovering that the water fountains were turned off because the grown-ups were fasting.

I remember my mother in the car, using a spritz of Binaca to sweeten her breath before going into shul. She was fasting, of course; all the adults fasted, and my Russian grandfather broke his fast with a shot of vodka. But minty breath spray didn't count as breaking the fast, for her. It was just part of ordinary hygiene. She'd offer it to me, too. I remember the scent, the taste of Binaca on my tongue.

On erev Rosh Hashanah this year I was thinking of mom. I went over to the oval mirrored tray ringed with a gilded frame where I keep the cosmetics I never use. One of the items on that tray is a bottle of Bal à Versailles, my mother's perfume. I dabbed it on my pulse points at wrists and neck. Suddenly I was a child again, perched in my mother's dressing room watching her put on makeup before going out. 

Scent telescopes time. I let my thumbnail lightly indent this year's etrog, and breathe deep. It's every etrog I've ever held in my hand, the spicy scent linking the sukkah I'll use tonight with every other sukkah I've ever had. I didn't grow up with a sukkah. I love the fact that my kid is growing up with one. His memories will include this little house bedecked with autumn garlands, fragrant with citrus scent.

When I was a kid the tree was impossibly enormous. It was like the giant Christmas tree that rose out of the stage, dwarfing everyone, in the local ballet's performance of the Nutcracker. But mine wasn't a Christmas tree. My tree had a big smooth trunk and thick, sturdy branches. One branch protruded over the jasmine, and there was another one a bit higher and to one side. The lower one was perfect for sitting on, letting my legs dangle. The higher one was perfect for leaning on with a book. I always had a book, Laura Ingalls Wilder or EB White eventually giving way to Robert Heinlein and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Eventually I got brave enough to climb higher, onto the roof of the playhouse with its asphalt shingles. Sometimes I would read up there, instead. Once I carved my initials into the bark with my red pocket knife, alongside the initials of the kid I had a crush on. The magnolia's leaves were big and oval-shaped and glossy and they cast pockets of cool shade that kept the playhouse roof from overheating. The best time to climb my tree was late May -- right around my mother's birthday -- when the magnolia would open her great creamy blooms. Her flowers were as big as my head. The petals bruised easily. Later, when they dried up and fell off, they were like scraps of tan leather. I used to try to stitch them together with monkeygrass to make doll clothes. By then, they only had a shadow of their former fragrance, but they were still sweet. I can almost remember that fragrance, forty years later and two thousand miles away.

I've had this kitchen tool for as long as I've had my own kitchen. I don't remember how it came to be mine. It belonged to my grandparents -- the only set of them that I knew, my mother's parents, who lived in San Antonio throughout my childhood. Eppie was Russian, and Lali was Czech. All through my childhood they lived in a condo not unlike this one.

I know that he loved to cook. He's the one who taught me to make matzah balls. He used to make little knotted rolls, too, and knedliky (Czech bread dumplings, made with stale white bread). When I would spend the night with them, sometimes they would treat me to the sugary cereals my mother didn't allow, and sometimes he would make salami and eggs.

This tool has a smooth handle, satisfying to the hand. There's a burn mark from some long-ago scorching-hot stove. The iron twists and curls. It's beautiful; I think in one of my early apartments I hung it on the kitchen wall as an ornament. Today it was the perfect tool for flipping pumpernickel bagels in their simmering bath before putting them in the oven to bake. 

Learning to make bagels was one of the projects I planned for myself, imagining the long isolated pandemic winter. I baked loaf after loaf of rye bread, and soft golden challah almost every week. I kept putting off the bagel project. Maybe on a subconscious level I wanted to keep a treat for myself, something to look forward to in this year of solitude and grief. 

But the winter is past. The snows are over and gone. Every day more people here become vaccinated. (Though in India, the pandemic is raging worse than ever...) Baking bagels today felt like an act of hope. I don't need to defer the tiny sweetness of trying a new recipe lest I need that sweetness to get me through some other, worse, day than this.

I'm pretty certain my grandparents never made bagels. I grew to love chewy pumpernickel bagels because my parents brought them back from New York City. They used to take an extra duffel bag when they traveled there, and on the day of their departure they'd fill the duffel with paper bags of New York bagels and freeze them as soon as they got back to south Texas.

A cursory internet search suggests that this is a Danish dough whisk. How did my grandparents come to have a Danish baking tool in their kitchen? Did they pick it up as a souvenir on their travels, or from a fancy kitchen store, or someplace secondhand? I wonder whether my mother would've known. There's a quiet melancholy in questions there's no one left to ask.

The turntable had been my sister's before it became mine. In my memory it is black and white and sleek, standing on one foot like a cross between a mushroom and a flying saucer, with a smoky dark plexiglass lid that lifted up so you could put the record down on the turntable.

The stereo was dual-purpose, with an 8-track tape deck on the front side. I remember playing Barbra Streisand on 8-track, though I can't remember what else I had inherited on those big boxy cassettes.

My record collection was slightly more expansive. An album of what I grew up calling Mexican polka (though now know as norteño); an LP of Strauss waltzes; Prokofief's Peter and the Wolf (narrated, I think, by Captain Kangaroo); Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends, Bob Marley's Exodus; James Taylor's In the Pocket; and Lullaby Raft, by my childhood poetry teacher, Naomi Nye. She had inscribed the cover of the LP to me, from "Naomi and the chicken." 

The Naomi Nye LP recently came back into my possession. I don't own a turntable, so I can't listen to it now -- but as soon as I picked it up, I remembered the crackle of the needle in the groove and the sounds of her guitar.

I must have listened to the B side on infinite repeat, because 40 years later those are the songs I remember clearly: "When You're Not Looking," "Can't Complain," "The San Antonio Song." There's a lot to be said for a house and a bed...

As an adolescent I used to get desperately homesick at summer camp. (It started the summer I was eleven, at a camp in Wisconsin that just wasn't the right fit. The kids in my cabin teased me mercilessly, and after crying myself to sleep for a few weeks, I left the camp before the eight-week session was over. I struggled with homesickness for a few years after that.)

This was one of the songs that would run through my head when I yearned the most for my home, the sound of my mother's voice, my four-poster bed with the forest-printed coverlet. I want to run back to your loving arms...

It's been more than a year now since the last time I visited San Antonio. In a normal year, I would take my kid there a few times a year to see my dad and my brothers. The last time I went, I went alone for the unveiling of my mother's headstone.

I promised my dad that I would come back soon with my son. A few weeks later, we started hearing about something called novel coronavirus. Soon we were sheltering-in-place to slow the spread. For a while I thought it would be safe to go back to Texas by summertime. Then it became clear what we were facing...

I don't want everything I write to become an elegy or a lament. This was supposed to be a light-hearted remembrance of an old record and my old record player! But all paths seem to lead to remembered loss, or to the ache of yearning for something that isn't yet possible.

To meet my father and brothers for Mexican breakfast at our favorite brunch joint in the old neighborhood. To visit my childhood home where my parents haven't lived in decades. To hug my mother who's no longer here. To hug my beloveds who are (thank God) still alive, but we can't safely touch. 

Out for "frozen hot chocolate" with my dad, the year we lived in New York city.

The year I was in fifth grade was the year my parents and I lived in New York city. One of my brothers stayed in our San Antonio house while we were gone. We spent that year in a sleek modern apartment on the 37th floor of an Upper East Side apartment building, with an elevator and a doorman. Everything was different from the life I'd known in Texas.

I remember the diffuse light that filtered through our paper windowshades at night. I remember attending a city school, endlessly running up and down flights of stairs.  I remember a candy shop where my father would buy me white-and-milk-chocolate mushrooms with caramel-filled stems and toffee-brickle caps. 

I remember making maps, endlessly taping together my mother's typing paper and drawing grids to mimic Manhattan, marking every restaurant I had visited, every theater, my school, the hospital where my dad went into traction when he threw out his back.  The literal maps bespoke a metaphorical truth: I was trying to make sense of where I was.

My child's fifth grade year is not like any other that came before. (I hope it won't be like any that comes after, either.) His school supplies live in a plastic box that he carts from place to place. His teacher and classmates are on Zoom. He gave a google slides presentation to his library class last week with headphones on at our dining table.

There's one kid in our quarantine pod. Otherwise his social life is digital, like his schooling. He plays Minecraft with two groups of friends (and with his parents.) He voice-chats with school friends on one device while gaming on another. I know how lucky we are to have the devices. It still isn't easy. Nothing about this year is easy.

When he looks back on this year, I hope he'll remember teaching me how to Minecraft, kvelling when I learned how not to be a "total n00b." I hope he'll remember fresh challah and singing Shabbat blessings, learning to ride a horse, and creating vast imaginary realms with his friends even though they are physically staying apart.

I wonder whether this year will feel to him, later, like a year out of time... the way my fifth grade year came to feel once we moved back to Texas, leaving the glamour of the big-city apartment to return to our old limestone house in the suburbs with the giant magnolia tree in the front yard and playmates across the street and one house down. 

I don't know when the doll collecting started. One of the standing dolls has a note on the base that reads "from Brad,  Japan, 1975," which tells me it was a gift from one of my brothers the year I was born. Another bears a piece of tape on her foot reading "Lali and Eppie, Norway, 1988" -- a gift from my grandparents when I was thirteen. Some are porcelain dolls, some are plastic. One is a carved wooden man in a garment of rabbit fur -- I think he is Inuit in origin, and must have come from a parental trip to Alaska -- but the rabbit fur disintegrates in my hands when I pick him up.

There is the big porcelain doll in an off-white muslin dress whom I remember naming "Suzette" when I was a child, because I thought that sounded French; did my parents get her for me on a trip to France, or did I just think the name sounded sophisticated? There are two cloth dolls that my parents got for me when visiting China in the mid 1980s.  There are two cloth dolls that we bought in Amish country when I was nine, as we were driving to New York for our big year in the city -- they wear simple garb, and their faces are blank because of the Scriptural prohibition on graven images.

Four of the dolls, in varying sizes, are wearing Czech traditional dress. My mother was born in Prague, and returned there several times. Did she bring these dolls in hopes of giving me some kind of connection with the folklore and heritage of the place where she was born? When I was 18, we went to the Czech Republic (by then no longer called Czechoslovakia) with my grandparents. It was their final trip abroad. Their memories were already beginning to fail, but we visited the street where their apartment had been when Mom was born, and my grandfather's medical school alma mater. 

Both of my parents were collectors. My father collected matchsafes, and my mother collected silver napkin rings. I suspect this doll collection was started for me when I was born, though my father won't remember, and I can't ask Mom now. I know that everyplace where they went, and everyplace where my grandparents went, they would bring back a doll for me -- ideally in local folkloric costume -- and sometimes a children's book. I still have some of the children's books on my bookshelves: fairy tales in French, The Little Prince in Polish, a bright sturdy pop-up book in Czech.

Some of these are dolls that seem intended to be played-with. They are made of fabric and stuffed, or made of plastic that is soft to the touch. Some have fragile, breakable porcelain faces and hands and feet: dolls meant to be admired rather than cradled or dragged around by a child. Seeing them all assembled together, I'm struck by their assortment of faces, by their eyes and expressions. They represent probably twenty years' worth of my parents and grandparents thinking of me when they were far away, choosing something to bring home to show me where they had been. 

My parents shipped me the dolls shortly after I married. It didn't feel right to display them in my marital home, so they were relegated to the basement. They've been boxed up for more than twenty years. I wish I could look through them with Mom again now. I wish I could ask her where each one came from, what she was thinking when she chose them, what she wanted them to teach me or to say to me: about the richness and diversity of world cultures, or about the fact that even when my parents were traveling the globe, they were thinking of me at home. But that time has passed. 

We never know what questions we will wish we had thought to ask until it is too late to ask them. 

Title borrowed from John Berger.

When I think of my last Shavuot of rabbinical school, all I can remember are glimpses. Like the slide shows that I remember my parents used to project on the dining room wall. Most of my memories of my son's first year of life are like that. They're a punctive story told through images. He didn't sleep through the night until he was well over a year old, so my memories of that first year are spotty. The visuals are points on a line that don't quite add up to a whole.

When I try to call up the slideshow of those Shavuot memories, I see the square of light that used to shine when the carousel was first turned on, and then I see disconnected moments. Click: trying to get my kid to sleep in the portacrib in the closet area of my room at Isabella Freedman. Click: walking with the stroller in the middle of the night to the great hall, because if my kid wasn't going to sleep, then by God I wasn't going to miss Reb Zalman's 4am teaching.

Click: pushing the stroller in circles around the back of that room while I listened to the rebbe teach. He taught about the Torah of our mothers. Click: morning davening, singing in harmony with beloved friends. (Have I ever known a more fervent form of prayer than singing in harmony?) Click: morning davening, leaving the room so I could nurse my son in private on the other side of the wall. Nursing him while still immersed in the sounds of the community singing.

My son and me: Shavuot, Isabella Freedman, 2010.

My son was six months old then. We had survived colic and postpartum depression. Sleep was still hard to come by. When I went to Isabella Freedman for Shavuot that year, I packed the "bouncy seat," the little inclined chair that played music and vibrated gently. I carried it with me. On the second morning of Shavuot I parked him in that seat so I could try to daven my way wholly through shacharit for the first time since he was born. It was harder than I expected.

By the following Shavuot, I was ordained and in the process of negotiating for what would become my first rabbinic position, serving Congregation Beth Israel, where I still serve. In coming years I would occasionally send congregants to Isabella Freedman to hear Reb Zalman teach, but I didn't feel able to go myself. I didn't return to the Shavuot retreat experience until last year, when I took a delegation from my congregation with me. (This year I will do the same.)

The year I took my infant son to Shavuot at Isabella Freedman, I knew that I would someday tell him that over the first Shavuot of his life I took him to hear my rebbe teach, and to receive a blessing from the teacher of my teachers. I wish I could remember the blessing that Reb Zalman gave him. I was still so sleep-deprived that my brain wasn't forming longterm memories, and I didn't know then that if I didn't write it down immediately it would become lost to me.

My son and me, a few days ago.

I couldn't have imagined, then, what life would be like now. My son is seven and a half now: tall and lanky, funny and sweet. This past Shabbat we played Trivial Pursuit. The first question he drew was one about which day is considered the day of rest in Judaism, and he crowed with delight. He sings me songs, reads aloud, assembles his stuffed animals into elaborate families. (One is a family of stuffed kittens. The other features both Pokémon and giraffes.)

Parenthood has given me new ways to understand the idea that God is constantly revealing Torah. The Kotzker Rebbe taught that Shavuot is called the day of the receiving of the Torah, not the day of its giving, because God is always giving. Shavuot is when we notice the gift that we receive. Parenthood too is an adventure of always-receiving, though I'm not always mindful of the Torah that's coming through. I forget, lose track, and get caught up in ordinary life's minutiae.

And then every now and again I wake up again to the reminder that I can learn from the Torah of every human being I meet, including and especially the tall funny cuddly seven-year-old human being who is in my care and keeping. I'm grateful for what he teaches me about finding God in the presence of change. One of our tradition's names for God is Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, "I Am Becoming Who I Am Becoming." Parenthood is an amazing reminder that in change, we glimpse God.

The summer I was fifteen, I spent a month as an exchange student in a small city in Brittany. The city was called Lannion, and it was adjacent to Perros-Guirec, which was the hometown of my middle school French teacher. Each summer he took a handful of his students back to his birthplace. In retrospect, now that I have a child and live a few thousand miles away from my parents, I imagine he must have started organizing the homestays in order to help him afford to bring his kids back home.

I grew up in south-central Texas, where summers last a long time, and they're hot: really hot. (I couldn't quite fathom it when I was instructed to pack some things with long sleeves.) The beaches I knew were those at Port Aransas and South Padre Island, on the Gulf coast, where the water is warm. And the flora I knew was the stuff that grows at the intersection of subtropical and scrub desert -- very Mediterranean. I grew up with banana trees, bougainvillea, oleander, prickly pear cactus, magnolia.

Living in France was an amazing adventure. I remember dinners outside in the long light evenings -- and foods I had never before seen: langoustines, raclettes, buckwheat galettes. I remember the dolmens, erected four or five thousand years ago and weathered by rain and salt air. I remember side trips to Mont St.-Michel with its extraordinary tides, and to Rennes to visit my host family's family. I remember going to the beach. I was determined to swim in the English Channel, even if it were cold!

And I remember noticing that plants grew in Brittany which I had never before seen. I was especially struck by the lush bushes covered with giant flowers made up of many tiny blooms. I asked my host mother what they were called, and she told me hortensias. Some years later I visited the island of Nantucket for the first time with the family who would become my in-laws, and there I saw the same beautiful clusters of blossoms again, and learned their common English name, which is hydrangea.

Hydrangeas grow all over coastal New England. They grow in our backyard now, too -- though in our backyard their blooms are a simple ivory-white. In more acidic soils, like the seaside soil of Lannion (or, for that matter, the seaside soil of Nantucket and Cape Cod), the blooms are blue: ranging from periwinkle, to pale lavender, to a deep purple-blue. They're a kind of natural litmus paper. And every time I see them, I remember for an instant what it was like to be fifteen on my homestay in Lannion.

In the summer of 1989, I spent five weeks traveling the American West with a group called Man and His Land. The trip offered opportunities to taste a variety of different wilderness experiences: backpacking and canoeing in Yellowstone, a river-rafting trip in Utah, horseback riding and llama trekking and mountain biking in Wyoming, culminating in learning how to do some technical climbing in the Grand Tetons. We caravaned in a pair of big vans when we had to move from state to state.

In retrospect, I cannot imagine what moved me to do this. I had never been an athletic kid. I always chose books or art or theatre over outdoor activities or sports. What on earth made me think that Man and His Land was a good idea? (Actually, I think I know part of the answer to that -- it was my friend Milly, who went with me. I think it was probably her idea. But I agreed to it all the same.) Of course, it was a great idea. Even bookish kids can fall in love with the great outdoors, and the trip was designed to be a supportive environment for kids to stretch themselves and find their wings. But it was hard.

I grew up in south Texas, and had been to New Mexico, so the vistas of the American West weren't as mindblowing to me as they were for some of the kids who came from more eastern or more urban locales. But I'd never experienced backcountry camping -- the kind of camping where you hike for miles into the wilderness, and carry everything in and out. I was not in good shape (although at least I wasn't struggling to shake a cigarette habit like some of the other teens) and I huffed and puffed my way up every mountain. MHL asked me to do things I didn't think I could do. Somehow, I did them.

1989 was smack in the middle of the era of the mix-tape. And our trip leader -- a woman named Barb, whom I idolized; she seemed to me impossibly wise, at the advanced age of twenty-eight -- made use of a mix tape in a powerful way. Before each segment of the trip, she would gather us around the campfire and play a little bit of the tape. The trip began with a Cat Stevens anthem: "On the Road to Find Out." Before our warm-up hike in the Great Sand Dunes National Park at the edge of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, she played us Carole King's "I Feel The Earth Move Under My Feet."

Before we went backpacking in Yellowstone, we heard Jimmy Cliff's "You Can Get It If You Really Want." Before our river rafting expedition, Loggins and Messina's "Watching the River Run." The songs pervaded and permeated our time in the wilderness in a way that wouldn't be possible now in the era of phones which double as mp3 players. It's probably unimaginable to today's teenagers to be away from their music; music lives on their phones, music lives in the cloud! But none of that was true the summer that I was fourteen. That mix tape was the complete soundtrack of that summer.

I don't consciously think about Man and His Land much. But the songs from that mixtape are still with me. Often I find the melodies and lyrics in my head, and only then do I realize what current emotional or spiritual situation has called them forth. Most of these are songs I haven't heard in decades, but they're inscribed deep in my memory. Probably the one which most frequently arises for me is "Watching the River Run." I'm not especially a fan of Loggins & Messina per se, but that one song still holds meaning. Maybe because I first encountered it at a time when I was doing a lot of emotional growing.

There's something about the metaphor of the running river which speaks to me. Like time, a river flows only in one direction. Like a life, a river may flow past great wonders and also at times great monotony. And when there are sharp rocks along a river bed, the best thing to do may be to let go and trust that the current will carry you safely to your destination. If you try to hold on too tightly to any place along the river's course, the fact of its current can hurt you. Sometimes you have to leave something beautiful behind, trusting that wherever the river is going, new beauty will be there too, waiting to be found.

Barb, my trip leader all those years ago, is still leading wilderness expeditions -- now in Alaska.

We hesitate at the unlit stairwell
but two men sitting in the dark
nod and point us upwards.
Four flights up we reach
al-Sendebad: open on all sides,
Abraham’s tent in concrete.
We sit on plastic chairs
overlooking streets, square, park,
noisy with people in the cool of night.

We are the only visitors here.
Everyone else is local, a regular.
They wear pants and caftans, sport
mustaches and checked kefiyyahs.
I am the only woman in sight.
Two men play backgammon; two
cards; everyone talks. One man
juggles pipe with cellphone,
old world with new.

Thumbing our Berlitz we eke out
requests for hot mint tea and a nargil.
The waiter gestures, raises a brow,
confirming we really do want
what tourist literature translates
as “hubble-bubble pipe.”
The tobacco, cut with molasses,
smells sweet as the honeysuckle
that blooms at twilight.

With their thick mustaches,
backgammon and smoke,
these men remind me of my father.
I imagine him here, nargil trailing
from his lips, scattering dice
on the table and moving stone pips
across the board. He doesn’t play
in person since Philip died,
just online games with strangers

now and then fast words
in the chat window, “What’s wrong,
U still there?” Some of his opponents
are Arabs, Saudis he says, maybe even
Jordanians. Looking out at Amman
at night, listening to the men laugh
and play, I wish my father were here.
Maybe the smoke and coffee
would add up to a common language.

First published in The Wisconsin Review, Vol. 38, No. 1, fall 2003.

Beth's drawings of mint tea and sheesha made me think back to my first trip to Amman, Jordan, in 2002. That, in turn, led me back to this poem. I wrote this in 2002 shortly after our return home.

2002 was before I had my first digital camera, so my photographs from this trip are all prints in an album -- the kind with sticky pages and clear plastic overlays. Twelve years later the plastic overlays are brittle and breaking, and some of the photos don't want to pull free from their pages. Although there were no photos from the nighttime coffee shop visit which sparked this poem, I scanned some of the best ones from the album. If you're interested, you can find them here.

No one knows who these men are or why their photograph has been handed down in our family. If I had to guess, I would say that this photo is probably from Belarus, childhood home to my grandfather Isaac, a.k.a. Eppie (may his memory be a blessing). It is a tiny photo, only three and a half inches by two and a quarter inches. It was in a box of miscellaneous family photographs at my parents' house; I found it in a small envelope labeled "treasures old and new" in my mother's handwriting.

Who were these men? Religious Jews, it seems clear; they are bearded and wearing yarmulkes. Then again, they don't have peyos, the sidecurls which are seen on many Hasidic or Orthodox Jews, and their beards are trimmed neatly. (Though apparently peyos were banned in the Russian Empire in 1845.) It appears that they're wearing long black coats and black kippot, though that may or may not have been a signifier of anything in that place and time, whatever that place and time were.

I looked through The Family History of Alice Fried Epstein and Isaac Epstein, M.D., a volume which contains the transcript of oral history interviews conducted with my maternal grandparents. I remembered that the book contained a variety of black and white photographs, many of which were taken in Europe and date to the early years of the last century when my grandparents were young. But I didn't find either of these men in any of those pictures from early 20th-century Belarus or Prague.

Every time I look at this photograph I'm drawn to the man on the left, with the white beard, who has looked up from their chess game to regard the unknown photographer. I am charmed by his subtle smile. Presumably he knew whoever was taking this picture. Maybe he was winning the chess game. Maybe it was just a beautiful day in the park and he was happy to be alive. Could he have imagined this print traveling across the ocean and surviving more than a century to wind up in my hands?

I'm taking advantage of the #throwbackthursday / #tbt meme -- which usually involves posting old photos on Thursdays -- as an opportunity to write short snippets of remembrance, sparked by whatever old photo I find to post.

For #throwbackthursday: a few photos from 1998, illustrating a short essay of that same vintage. As far as I can recall, this one was never published anywhere.

Lonely Planet is my favorite series of travel guides. The guidebooks focus on exciting places. They're geared to the budget traveler. And I'm charmed by the fact that the series started out as a xeroxed handful of pages about the founders’ journey across Asia. The trick with Lonely Planet, though, is that you have to learn how to interpret their enthusiasm.

Imagine a spectrum of travelers. At one end is the tourist who prefers posh and expensive glamour-travel. At the other end is the traveler whose hiking boots have seen the world and who has the capacity to be entertained by watching fish swim by in a small stream. (No joke; that’s one of the pastimes the Faroe Islands section of our guidebook recommends.) Lonely Planet is geared toward that second archetype.

The Lonely Planet Guide to Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands says of the island of Heimaey, one of the Vestmannaeyjar (Westman Islands, so named after the Irish slaves who unwittingly became their first inhabitants), that visitors normally allow themselves a day or two there, but many wish they’d allowed more. "If you have fine weather (which can include light rain, fog, or overcast skies), three days will allow time to best appreciate the place," the Guide says. We read these words as we were planning a five-day stay in Iceland at the start of our honeymoon. We decided to spend two of those days on Heimaey.

We woke around 5:30 to take a small plane from the tiny domestic Reykjavik airport to the tinier Heimaey one. (Getting up early was no problem, given that the sun had never set.) As we approached the island from the air, everything on its small teardrop shape was visible: at one end, the cross-shaped single airstrip; at the other end, two volcanoes, the harbor, the colorful roofs of Heimaey town.

When I traveled to San Antonio over the summer I brought back a bag of old photographs, which I am slowly digitizing, a few at a time.

Many of the photos are undated, so I have to guess at when they were taken. This one, though, says "1977" on the back. I'm grateful for that piece of metadata. It tells me that in this picture, I am two going on three, and my mother is only a couple of years older than I am now.

This was taken in the backyard of my childhood home. That house was made of limestone, with a roof made out of red clay tiles in the Spanish style. I remember that gate around our swimming pool, and I remember the little sculpture of a turtle (visible, though blurry, in the bottom right-hand corner) which had been shaped around a pipe, so that water could be made to spray into the pool out of the turtle's open mouth.

Some years later, when I was a decent swimmer and it was safe to take the railing down, my parents replaced the pebbled concrete around the pool with red bricks. And eventually the turtle too went away, though the little fountain remained. I think I insisted on keeping the turtle in the secret hideaway I constructed in the small space between our backyard and the backyard of our next-door neighbors. But none of that had happened yet when this photo was taken.

So many of the experiences I think of as having been formative hadn't happened yet when this photo was taken. At two there's an inconceivable amount of growing and changing ahead. My mother, in contrast, was already recognizably herself when this photo was taken. She had been a mom for years; she had already grown into the adult she intended to be. Of course there were decades of adventures ahead for her, too -- but I think nothing is as extreme as the changes we undergo as kids.

When I look now at photographs of myself as a child with my parents, I'm conscious of being a link in a generational chain. It's fascinating to imagine our son, when he is approaching forty, looking at photographs of me holding him when he was two. What will he see in the expression on my face, the way I look at him, the way we are together? What will he remember of those early years of stubbornly insisting "I do it," climbing and running and falling, playgrounds and sippy cups?

I'm taking advantage of the #throwbackthursday / #tbt meme -- which usually involves posting old photos on Thursdays -- as an opportunity to write short snippets of remembrance, sparked by whatever old photo I find to post. I can't guarantee that I'll do this every Thursday, but I'm enjoying the practice so far.

My maternal grandmother; her two daughters; three of their daughters, including me.

Sometimes I wonder: what stories will our son tell about his growing-up, in years to come? How will he remember his childhood? What memories will he seize onto and hold fast amid the swirl of all the other memories which wash away? Sometimes I can't believe that he won't remember much of these early years. How can it be that he won't remember last night's potluck dinner in the synagogue sukkah, sitting at the kids' table, singing along with the Shabbat blessings, and then whooping and laughing while playing tag with the other kids in the deepening dark outside the sukkah which gleamed with strings of little lights?

And yet I don't remember much about being five, much less the years which came before it. My fifth birthday party was a dress-up party at a fancy restaurant called the University Club, at the top of one of the few tall buildings near our neighborhood. I remember dressing up in one of Mom's blue dresses -- made of crinkled chiffon, I think, or something like it -- and wearing a big strand of her pearls and a floppy sun hat. I remember that she asked if I wanted to pierce my ears to surprise my father, but I wasn't ready to do that, so we got me clip-ons instead. I remember the scratchy gold ribbon which held the high heeled shoes on my feet. Do I remember this because there is a Polaroid picture of it and I've had that photograph to remind me in the interim? Am I remembering a memory of a memory?

I must have been attending the Judson Montessori school then, in the old church building just around the corner from the Pontiac dealership. I remember painting at an easel, doing math with sticks which represented tens and hundreds, looking at a timeline made out of felt which depicted the earth's history. (Most of it was black, denoting the time when the earth formed and cooled. Then there was green for the time when plants arose, and yellow for the dinosaurs, and human history was represented by a tiny nubbin of red felt at one end.) I remember eating meals there while listening to Ravel's "Bolero." I remember coming home and throwing tea parties with my miniature set of rose-printed china, filling the tea cups with Bosco-flavored chocolate milk.

A basically happy childhood blurs together in memory. We remember the unusual moments against the backrop of undifferentiated normalcy. (Take the winter of 1985: I remember the "San Antonio blizzard of '85" which dropped thirteen inches of snow on my hometown, and I remember my middle brother's wedding the week of that blizzard, but the rest of the season is lost to me now.) As we age, it seems, our more recent memories are stacked on top of the pile and the oldest memories compress like flakes of soft snow packed over centuries into glacial ice. What would it take to find those memories again?

It's funny how memories come back at unexpected moments. The feeling of bobbing in the warm waters of the Guadalupe, lifejacket and waterskis keeping me afloat, with the bright woven ski rope threading through my hands as the boat idled forward. The big plants at the waterside, which we called elephants' ears; how green pecans stained the water and our hands; how we used to chase cottonwood fluff when the wind blew it across the wide-bladed St. Augustine grass.

Packing up the Suburban for two weeks at the lake house: coolers full of groceries, suitcases, our Siamese cat in his carrier yowling until I inevitably set him free and he marched across the dashboard (much to my father's chagrin.) The old songs Mom taught me -- "The Ladies in the Harem of the Court of King Correcticus" and "As I was walking down the street a billboard caught my eye..." The convenience store (was it in Seguin?) where we used to stop to get whorls of the hard spicy sausage which hung behind the counter.

The scavenger hunts my mom used to organize for my friends and me; I remember holding a sheet of paper marked in her neat curving handwriting, wandering around together in search of -- what, I can't recall, but I know we were successful. Climbing down the aluminum framed ladder into the river in front of our house. How my toes shied away from slimy lilypad stems. Making homemade raspberry ice cream, turning the hand crank; how the end result was brilliant pink with the berries' separated druples. Growing a small garden one year -- I couldn't resist picking an ear of corn before it was ripe, and hiding in my secret wilderness place in the unsold lot next door where no one would see me nibbling its sugar-sweet kernels. The thwock of tennis balls against rackets as Mom and Dad played doubles, resplendent in all white, on the court at the Ski Lodge.

Walking with Mom to pick Indian Paintbrush and cornflowers to bring home and put in a jar on the table. Pyrex casserole trays of King Ranch Chicken. Evening boat rides, my father's hair windblown, sitting on the back of the boat and watching the houses and boathouses and limestone cliffs along the river rush by. Early morning boat rides, the river and lake still as glass, perfect for cutting slalom paths in and out of our boat's wake. Venturing down our street with a friend, aiming for patches of shade because the asphalt was hot beneath our bare feet, and then down the boat ramp at the end of the block to float down the river in lifejackets back to our own pier. Playing games of rummikub with mom and friends on the square formica table, pieces clicking and clacking beneath our hands. The taste of the "special" nachos at the Ski Lodge, made with spicy queso. The orange blossoms my parents ordered there sometimes at the bar.

Catching fireflies on hot summer evenings, putting them in jars with perforated tinfoil on top, then letting them go. The pale yellow moths, redolent with dust the color of hardboiled egg yolk, which beat their wings helplessly against screen doors. The zzzzt of the bug zapper at work. Swinging in the hammock, endlessly. The two flavors of Bluebell we used to get at that Pic-n-Pac (Cookies & Cream, and Pralines & Cream), and the treat of scooping curls into beige melamine bowls and enjoying them at night before bed. Watching the Ski Bees show at the Ski Lodge on Thursday nights, pyramids of women on each others' shoulders, followed by brave and crazy barefooters like my brother. On the Fourth of July, after the ski show, lying back to watch the fireworks exploding brilliant against the Texas sky.

Photo: an old postcard of the swimming pools at the Lake Breeze Ski Lodge in McQueeney, Texas, sometime before they put up the diving board and high board I remember.