I came to the garage in order to live deliberately. I brought out two boxes that contained manila folders filled with the efforts of years of writing, teaching, being a parent and father, as well as a husband. Here were data and sheeted papers that recorded several decades — birthday cards from Rochelle, a letter to my deceased daughter, Caryn, which makes me cringe because of its immaturities, emotional trinkets and trivia. I threw out tax returns more than 5 or 6 years old, sometimes hesitating about that as I am conditioned by Big Brother, but I fought that off. Amazingly, what control is inserted into us like squirting jelly into donuts at a bakery. Appalling to contemplate. I came across rejection slips with an occasional note by an editor which was encouraging so I kept that morsel, needy as I was as a young writer — The Paris Review, The New Yorker, to wit. I shiver at the lack of skill I had at that time and yet the bigger the magazine the kinder they were. I did not toss the rejections. Folders were dated, often with the time I had completed a story or essay as if I was preparing years ahead for my sashay into the garage to look over the passing years. If I came across six copies of a published story or article, I threw away three overriding the younger feeling that I need keep at least six copies. “Simplify! Simplify! Thoreau argued.
When Rochelle died on 3 July 1999 I kept the gruesome autopsy records by the coroner. I recall reading it then and it was horrific but I felt, I needed, to read it. I recall the coroner’s description of Rochelle’s “pendulous breasts,” and I remembered them as well; his description of a minor bruise on her chin which I observed through the window of a viewing room when she was covered by a sheet except for her lovely face. I tore the document up. I had no longer a need for that. This coming July will make eleven years since she died at the wheel on a perfect July day. She had fallen asleep. I thought about 1940 and I thought of 1951, for in those eleven years I had grown as a child, conditioned by culture and ethnicity, “reared” with benign neglect, untouched physically by both parents, never read to!! and within that time all the tracks I would follow for the rest of my life were laid down. And now it is eleven years since Rochelle has died and I realize how many lifetimes are in eleven years: learning to ride a two-wheeler, hearing my parents have sex. And yet her memory flourishes — when I am very stressed, when a critical medical examination is about to happen, I pray to the only god I register — Rochelle. I need no Pope nor rabbi. The documents are thrown away now because the fear that lest I forget was a false fear, for I will never forget. Perhaps authentic resurrection is the one in which we “die” in this mortal life and yet resume our living.
Observations of me as a teacher by administrators were kept, although I threw one away by my Italian principal who thought he was Don Corleone, as if I must kiss his signet ring. You don’t ask this Jew to do that. Jews do not bow. I kept the others as a testament to how very good I was at a job that I detested, although teaching an idea was always comfortable for me. I kept a small notebook in which students from the alternative high school I ran gave me their parting comments about their experience with the school and with me. I find it hard now to connect their faces with their names, for that was 31 years ago. Many of them are now in their fifties. I read personal notes and letters to me. One stands out by a student who went on to Harvard and who I had upbraided because he was a pompous ass, just out of junior high school, basted by his “teachers” about his writing skills, overly-praised. He couldn’t write shit and I told him so, in finer words — “Unacceptable” I had slashed across the top of his paper. And when he pestered me about changing a grade on this essay which got my goat, I tore off a piece of paper and wrote the title, Think on These Things by Krishnamurti, telling him to read it and then come back to me. He never did. Well, he kept that slip of paper and he began to read this book and other works that were existential and so on. One day he sent me a copy of the letter he wrote to the Admissions office at Harvard. It recalled his negative experience with me at first and then went on to say how I cut down his hubris and moved him to really learn. The last line was a corker — he still carried that note I gave him in his wallet.
Time has settled upon the rummaging so what moved me years ago does not move me so much, although I can see all of it, or most of it, with equanimty and sometimes with pleasure for what I had accomplished. I see decades before me which contained so much struggle, some of my essays reeking with personal neuroticisms and surface rage without the control of the writer in charge of his material. Writing from the very beginning was a major conduit for my despair and depression. There were years of rage and now my writing is more of indignation — I associate to Kazantzakis: “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” The exclamation point says it all. Running my mind through all this memorabilia like running my hand through my hair, is all in the passing gesture, now silken for me, for time has eased some of my concerns. I realize I was always the recorder in my family. I was always the memorizer. I was always the observer. And it took therapy and working on myself — alone, to reach the point in which I act upon this world, I trust my self, I dread the paranoia of groups and collective responses; I revel in my own personal ornariness; I leave books and writings for my family and for those others who may find me of interest, or note. I excel at doing for myself what no other human being can or ever will or ever can imagine to do so. I chisel out those lucky moments of awareness by myself, alone, for I need only myself to reveal myself.
I pose special questions to myself: what would give you pleasure or satisfaction? what would make your life so much more meaningful for you? What can you say about that? Can you address that critical issue? Rummaging has brought this to me. I believe that material things, although fun and pleasurable, could not give me anything for they are ephemera. All that is temporary fun. I feel that if I had a moment of real awareness, an epiphany of a kind, this would give me the greatest satisfaction of all. How to go about that is a philosopher’s intention. There is nothing on this planet, Cabo, The Louvre, Vegas, a Rolls, a great love affair, a great adventure, getting into a size 34 pants once again, a child’s marriage, being a grandparent, nothing of that can give me what I need, which is to enter into a moment — I am not greedy — in which I feel and experience congruity with myself. The world can go to hell. I am the world, I fully am aware of that. I am the unverse to every goddam cell and vein in my overly complex body. I will never see my liver, gratefully, and my liver will never bring me fruit and bounty in obeisance. I have come and I will go. I am at the point in which I wilt. The glory of each day is in its being and for that I am joyous. All this is in rummaging. I advocate you do that after 40 years. I will stop here, perhaps to continue with this later on.
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