Patience

We were in Display & Costume to look for, well, display options for an idea I had. Boy of Joy gave me his time to see what I wanted to and now it was his turn to poke and pry through bright tissue paper and party supplies. A store employee walked up to us. She was from the other end of the age spectrum from the gangly college kids D & C usually churns through. She was small and brown and rounded, everything from her age to the style of her hair and make-up to the lilts and pauses in her voice spoke of coming from whole worlds and cultures I will never know. She asked if she could help us; she asked it like reciting from a script. I-- with one eye constantly on my very small child to make sure he neither hurt nor was hurt by anything-- thanked her and joked that I only needed patience. And her eyes flashed at me. Yes, they did. Her eyes actually flashed at me. She moved in on me with an expression of absolute intense seriousness. "Patience costs nothing," she said, and she said it the way Captain American would drop a word about patriotism, the way a surgeon would stop an intern about to do something terribly wrong, the way a mother would step up to a teacher who'd given up on her child. "You close your eyes--" she closed her eyes. "You breathe--" she breathed. "You open your eyes and you see what you have to be grateful for--" she opened her eyes and looked and my child. "And-- patience!" "Patience costs nothing." And then she moved away, at her dignified slow pace, to find another customer whom she could help.

Nightmares.

Nightmares. Nightmares again. The green-gray trucks were their open sides, an endless flow of them, the crowds of our people rushing, pushing, screaming down the sidewalks and streets and our soldiers jumping out of the truck. Rat-ta-tat, ra-ta-tat, in the background, not far in the background, rat-ta-tat, ra-ta-tat, one thing it can be. Up a hill around a corner the sound can't be heard and everything's fine.A circle of the women friends who rejoiced with me over my baby join arms to toss a toddler into the air, one of theirs. I find my husband sitting and struggle to decide if I am awake or dreaming, if I should be warning everyone one way or the other. The trucks are coming. I turn to come in upon my son, much older than my son, trying to keep hold of a match while it burns. "No." I snatch it from his hand. "Don't use a match, use an ice cube." My voice. My hand places the new ice cube in his. "Don't use a match, use an ice cube. It works the same way but doesn't do the same damage. The trick is still not to mind it." Is it my son, or my husband? Still dreaming, my mind fights its way to catalog the dreams leading up to this one. The bonanza of books found at the local thrift store. The exquisite vintage victorian Thousand and One Nights that I hoped would lure so-and-so back into my life. The huge coffee-table book of a Western artist I wanted for my father. This makes two nights in a row of violent nightmares coupled with the fiercely explicit dreams of thrift store finds. The desire to make life better for my loved one honed until it can cut me without me feeling it. And before that, the convention attended with my ex-partner, the old pattern of listening to him, watching over him, speaking for him to people who came to me for explanation-- the last moments of doing for myself cut short. (How was it we were able to go to so many conventions and me to spend so little time in hotel pools?) The sharp contrast-- the ex-partner who was able and willing to plan and progress but who was limited in his love for me; my husband who loves me so well but who is so limited in his ability to turn that love into the actions we need to survive. Nightmares. It's Shabbat. I can't Facebook my mindset away. I can not even call out for a trio of Jews to conduct the ritual that banishes bad dreams by decreeing them to be good. I can only tell myself "Gam zu le tova", can only commit myself to making, this, too, for the good. And doing it yourself is fundamentally not the Jewish Way. Judaism is a Belonging System. And in my isolation from everything from poverty to geography to health I feel like my very Jewishness is slipping away against my will.