Melting the Brain to Let the Truth Slip Through

And thoughts on shoes, sorrow, and my aging hands

In an ideal writing experience I let my brain soften, soften, melt a little, buttery, until I don’t have control over what comes in and through me as I look at a phrase, any phrase. I get a little hazy and then wait and see what comes. For example, I see the random prompt “my itchy left foot,” and recall my face, swollen with poison ivy that I got during a photo shoot near Columbus, Ohio, wearing my wedding dress in a shallow brown river and watching the lace float downstream.

Then my mind moves on to the next prompt, “the scratchy side of velcro” and I remember the little blue shoes my daughter got as hand-me-downs and wore until my son got them from her and then at some point the loops that are grabbed by the little plastic velcro hooks broke and there was nothing left to grab.

And then I’m ready to go. Shoes. Sorrow. Game on. I’m ready to write.

*

I break down every single time I throw away a pair of shoes. It feels like I’m killing someone, or two beings really. A pair that has stuck together for their entire short life and will never walk again. They may stay together, but they’ll never feel a small foot inside them. And those feet will have grown by then anyway. It’s similar to the gut pain, almost like nausea, I feel when I cut up tattered baby’s onesie to use for a quilt. I know it couldn’t be worn again, but somehow the shears feel like I’m piercing skin of a small child, and I can’t look.

On the way to the airport in St Louis we stopped at a restaurant that was tagged as a Mediteranean restaurant on Yelp. I made the order on the phone and then went in the golden warmth of the steamy restaurant to pick up the food: hummus, baba ganoush, foul, pita, small green pickles, smoky eggplant, and falafel tucked together in a to go container. The young man behind the counter smiled with his brown eyes while his father with his handsome silver beard went to fetch me hot grape leaves, thin ones, the size of my fingers. Next to the kitchen a head-scarved woman held a chubby baby whose fingers wrapped around a bottle he was happily slurping.

I asked where the family was from. Palestine the young man said proudly. My eyes instantly welled up. Oh my god, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for this food. I’m so…I’m so sorry. This was all I could say as my throat choked up and after looking at him for a moment through clear clouded eyes I turned away. Would you like to try some Arabic coffee? he asked kindly. I nodded and accepted a small pool of dark liquid inside a miniature paper cup. It smelled of far away familiarity and spices. Cardamom, I told him. He nodded enthusiastically. That’s our special secret seasoning. Outside I couldn’t stop crying in the car, feeling the warmth of the food on my lap and imagining the warmth of that small child on his mama’s lap, with his little slippers on, peacefully sucking his milk in the outskirts of the suburbs somewhere in the middle of America.

On the airplane I watched a video about creativity and the artist suggested that we think of what we would have chosen as a tattoo when we were six years old, but it had to be something that we still liked. The funny thing is, he added, chances are you’ll still like it when you’re 90. I thought and thought and am thinking now. I imagine something small — a sketch of a rabbit, or a certain flower from a pink calico scrap of cloth. I think of acorns and spiral shells and peas lined up in pods. I think of all the tiny things that I’ve held in my squishy palm and want to hold and keep forever.

Meanwhile my brain is slower than it used to be, and my experience in this body becomes harder and harder to differentiate between my dreams. When I come home from a trip, my home feels like a recurring dream, familiar but with a smell I can actually smell. It’s a bit smoky, a bit tart, a bit like people I know blended with the walls of 1948 when the house was built. I think of the happy accidents that brought me here and the unhappy ones too that occurred to allow me to be here.

At Thanksgiving we saw an old friend Hank. He told us he’s been thinking about what really makes him stay on his path of being a therapist. It’s not the Jewish value of serving others, he said. Now I think about it like Ram Dass said, We’re all just walking each other home.

Tenderly I held these words in my uncertain hands. The same hands I’d seen in the blue lights of the stage the night before, with all their creases in relief. The lights accentuated how long these fingers of mine have been touching strings and vibrating music into the air. They were nimble and long, but in that blue light they looked so old. Then I let go and watched them perform, dancing in soft tap dances on my fretboard. Sometimes a somersault of an arpeggio or a quivering vibrato, or a flurried running up the staircase of a scale only to fall back down again. I watched the swoop of my body and the swaying of the bow and my shoes and the beat and the tapping of my toes. And I tried to move inside it and outside it too, all at the same time in my own stuttering bouquet of a human dance.