Family Story

By Andy Corren

Mom has a plus-sized can of Maxwell House Coffee clutched to her bosoms, one of those Costco-sized cans you buy for your office, or your camper, or for visiting one of your sons at the Hyde Correctional Institution. Which she has had to do once. Okay, four or five times. Mom doesn’t drink coffee—it makes her paranoid. I sense things are amiss. Why would she carry an entire barrel of coffee on the plane, all the way from Miami to Newport News to Kill Devil Hills? She knows full well you can buy whole beans at the Food Lion for $4.99 a pound. Renay Mandel Corren clearly has a plan.

All I want to do with what’s left of this non-celebratory Passover day is curl up on the couch, watch TV with my probably-gay nephew, gently program him with correct homosexual diction.

I’m too old for my mom to plan for me. So I pretend I don’t see “Free Haggadah With Purchase!” written on the front of the coffee tub. I pretend I don’t see her ripping open a cellophane bag filled with tiny little Jewish hand booklets, and strewing them over the table, her eyes glowing with an unaccustomed religious fervor.

“I didn’t buy it for the coffee!” she triumphantly exults, “I bought it for the free Passover kit!”

Have you ever had a total holiday fail? What did you learn from it?

Andy Corren is a talent manager and playwright in Los Angeles.

Reflecting Story

With the Jewish High Holidays rapidly approaching, it’s a good time to take stock of your year, with the help of the questions below. Answer them quickly and honestly, and then take a few minutes to reflect on your answers.

This week's content is brought to you by 10Q, a Reboot project that engages you annually in a series of contemplative questions around the Jewish High Holidays.
 

Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. How did it affect you? Are you grateful? Relieved? Resentful? Inspired?

Is there something that you wish you had done differently this past year? Alternatively, is there something you're especially proud of from this past year?

Think about a milestone that happened with your family this past year. How has this affected you?

Describe an event in the world that has impacted you this year. How? Why?

Have you had any particularly spiritual experiences this past year? How has this experience affected you? (“Spiritual” can be broadly defined to include secular spiritual experiences: artistic, cultural, and so forth.)

Moving On Story

By Jonathan Ames

I was going to write that my heart feels less now that I’m older. I thought this because I was recalling how I used to weep while listening to Cat Stevens. I was eighteen and my heart was broken and I was driving my car on a long trip and for hours I would just play over and over my Cat Stevens album, which was, I believe, Tea for the Tillerman, and all the while I would cry, thinking about the girl I had lost.

So as I sat down to write just now, I didn’t think I could cry like that any more. But I put on a Cat Stevens greatest hits album to reacquaint myself with the music, and maybe because it’s first thing in the morning and I’m tired, but, in my mind, I was back in that car, I was eighteen again, except I was imagining what it would be like to lose someone now, and I felt the tears coming. I felt like I could weep. I didn’t, but I could have. I turned off the music and the water left my eyes and my heart closed; that is, it went back to normal.

There’s something a bit seductive, though, about crying. I sort of wish I hadn’t stopped myself. But I guess it would be melodramatic to cry about a heartbreak that hasn’t happened. Recently I was terribly worried about something that could possibly occur in the future — something that could go wrong, a small personal disaster — and a friend of mine, quoting some Hindu text, said, “The problem that hasn’t happened yet does not exist.” I like that quote; it’s been very helpful lately. [From “Cat Stevens,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 6, Fall 2007]

Do you allow fear of the unknown to impact your decisions?

Technology Story

By Ben Greenman

Everyone knocks technology, especially social networking. Everyone worries that the Internet is giving us a false sense of connection while in fact creating new kinds of separation and isolation. Everyone worries that sites like Twitter and Facebook are encouraging us to curate our lives rather than be honest about them, to present ourselves in a favorable light to others rather than keep our own counsel. Everyone wants to lament that children today are harmed by the immediate gratification of sites like Wikipedia. None of this is true. The Internet and particularly social networking is the greatest means ever invented to represent ourselves authentically. The notion of human identity—of the individual—is stronger than it has ever been, thanks to the Internet.

Is this an April Fool's Piece?

Waking Up Story

I picked at the bandage of my new tattoo. When we decided to get the tattoos that morning, I sketched something quickly on a napkin while we ate our eggs. “What’s that?” Joy asked. “Just something I’ve been doodling.” I didn’t mention that to my eyes the six points made up an abstract Jewish star bursting open. When the tattoo artist offered to put special “glow in the dark” ink in the center, I eagerly accepted.

How do you awaken?

Progress Story

By Edgar Allen Poe

There is, perhaps, no point in the history of the useful arts more remarkable than the fact, that during the last two thousand years, the world has been able to make no essential improvements in road-making. It may well be questioned if the Gothamites of 3845 will distinguish any traces of our Third Avenue: and in the matter of street-pavement, properly so called, although of late, universal attention has been directed to the subject, and experiment after experiment has been tried, exhausting the ingenuity of all modern engineers, it appears that we have at last settled on a result which differs in no material degree, and in principle not at all, from that which the Romans attained, as if instinctively, in the Via Appia, Via Tusculana, and others. The streets in Pompeii were constructed on the very principle which is considered best by the moderns: or if there be any especial variation, it certainly is not to the credit of modern ingenuity.

What’s one way that the world has improved in the last ten years, and one way it hasn’t?

Love and Loss Story

One year ago, my dog Ella died. She was a sweet, mischievous, expressive little pug, whose hoarse bark a friend once likened to a broken garbage disposal.

I began volunteering at the pug rescue, from which I had adopted Ella. The backstories of the dogs read like a Debbie Downer routine from SNL—elderly, blind, diabetic, abused. (My wife, who reluctantly tagged along once and only once, dubbed it the Island of Misfit Pugs.) But I felt sustained by the very existence of this place—the relentless optimism and abiding hope that I saw in the people who keep it going.

A few months in, I fell for a sassy 12-year-old pug named Midge and decided to adopt her. When I shared the news, I was met with a variety of incredulous reactions, from my wife’s genuine concern for my well-being, to a stranger at a holiday party who gasped, “But she’s just going to die!”

Mostly, people asked why? Why would you knowingly enter into an emotional attachment that’s likely to end in sadness so soon? It’s a divisive question, one that forces us to consider the relative value of love and hope. To me, it’s worth it. As renowned pug enthusiast W.B. Yeats said, “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes; what more is there to say?”
 

What have you learned from brief loves?

Storytelling Piece

Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything.

This brings us again to composition--the using everything [in storytelling].

The using everything brings us to composition, and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again. There is an elaborate complexity of using everything, and of a continuous present and of beginning again and again and again.

What is your favorite story? What it makes great? 

Return Story

“Why would you go back?” asked my Austro-Hungarian-born grandmother in 1994, when I announced I would be spending the summer in the former Czechoslovakia. She had never looked behind her after fleeing Bratislava in 1940, first to Italy, then traveling across continents to Sydney, then Los Angeles, where I was born.

“We knew you would come back,” said my wife’s grandfather as Zuzana and I prepared for our 2001 chuppah in Košice, Slovakia, her hometown. He had always looked forward; a Jewish surgeon under state socialism, he had moved his family from Prešov to Bardejov to Košice, no one city more than 80 km from another.

“Why would you want to come back?” asked the ministry official as I reclaimed my Slovak citizenship, in the name of my forebears whom the wartime Slovak state had disenfranchised, dispossessed, and deported. By right, I replied, and the only restitution that mattered to me: the acknowledgment that my multinational, multilingual family had always belonged here, and that this new Slovak Republic was the heir not to fascist chaos but to cosmopolitan “civitas.”

The guns of August, first sounded 100 years ago this summer, resonate across the generations. Empires disaggregated, nation-states pronounced and divorced. To the different roots of our children’s family tree, the changing seasons brought wealth and poverty, death and life, love and loss. There were those who migrated and those who remained. We, their descendants, have recovered, rediscovered…returned.

Of course there is no undoing the past century. But for our family—for me—I am not so sure that there is no going back. The United States, unquestionably, is my home. But today we also are at home in Slovakia. The art of return? It is dance—a round—always in motion, ever unbroken.
 

What are the things in your life that you would like to return to?

[From Jewels of Elul: jewelsofelul.com]

Renewal Story

The subway the freeway the airwaves stop. The traffic the deadlines the newspaper stop. The shopping the carpool the homework stop. The iPhone the iPad the Internet stop. The politics restaurant food stamps homeless man garbage can God plan stop. The drones and the clones and the suicide belts. The attacks and the cracks in the facts and the holy arcade by the black street parade and another kid down she’s been kicked by the trade. Ones and zeros piled high as the sky and the nighttime cries while the dreamer’s awake he can’t shake the mistakes of the dizzying day.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

Catch a breath. Take a sip of cool air. Sit on the ground on a rock on a bed on a chair.

Light a candle. Take a walk. Under trees. Holding hands. Bare feet.

Breathe deep.

Close the eyes. Go inside. As the belly expands then the weight of demands have a chance to release.

Breathe deep.

Give it time to unwind. The cells need fresh air to repair.

The mind quiets. The candle burns. The time slows down. The breath is here. Always. To remind. The closest friend in the world, the breath. As the world speeds on. I breathe into rest.    
 

How do you renew and how can you do more of it?