Smashing Pumpkins

When I was about 11, my pumpkins suffered a fate shared by many of their gourd brethren -- an untimely end on the asphalt of Maple Street. We had grown these pumpkins ourselves in our little garden, and like other things in which eleven-year old girls invest human attributes (horses, unicorns, fairies), these round-faced smiling vegetables felt like friends. Not knowing how to console, my mom suggested I write a note telling the offenders how insensitive it was to smash our pumpkins. I wrote it with a Sharpie pen in bold bubble letters and taped it to the fence. Boy, did I tell them!

Over the decades my heart went the hard way of adulthood, accepting the essential vegetative nature of a pumpkin. Yet my depravity has gone further - I admit a secret pleasure, envy perhaps, for the expression of destructive impulses, at least when contained to pumpkins. (My mother used to name her misbehaving students before hurling glass bottles at the recycling center.) Maybe over the years I've gotten in touch with my inner anarchist. Pumpkin parts smeared among fallen leaves expressed an honest impulse.

But I am also now a parent to young children who renew a bit of that old pumpkin magic for me. So a few weeks ago when we visited New Hampshire for the weekend, my father and step-mother took us to their pumpkin patch at Hilltop Farm. For the big boys we selected two perfect pumpkins as big as Reeve. For Tucker we chose one barely bigger than a grapefruit. Reeve and his grandfather hoisted their harvest into my dad's tractor front-loader and drove them back to the waiting station wagon with New York plates.

You might think - what kind of idiot leaves precious homegrown Hilltop pumpkins out on the front stoop in NEW YORK CITY? As a child of the country I believed all cities were thick with thieves in every shadow. After moving to Brooklyn it took us a while to leave strollers on the front porch; now we have to remind ourselves not to leave laptops, or small children. The neighbors all put their pumpkins out, even those who remember twenty years ago when a pumpkin wouldn't last an hour out there. It's the post-Giuliani New York, a softer city, safe even for a gourd.

So at first I thought maybe we had misplaced it. It was Saturday morning and I was getting my bike out to go to my painting class at the Botanic Garden (talk about a softer New York, geesh) when I noticed one of the pumpkins was gone. It was the one with the dimple near the bottom, which made it roll back too easily, so I looked down the basement stairs shaft to make sure it hadn't rolled to an untimely demise. No. Then I called to Jordy to ask if he'd moved it. No. My eyes darted to the street in search of pumpkin guts. I would enjoy the fantasy that a teenaged Banksy had made protest art from our raw material. Nothing. This was insult to injury -- had someone stolen our pumpkin to put on their own front stoop, passing off their petty thievery as legitimate Halloween decor?

Three small boys in pajamas awaited explanation on the porch. "Someone took our pumpkin, guys," I said. They took it like little men, lots of unanswerable questions (who? why? what did they do with it? but it's ours), sad but no tears (and no impulse to write moralizing notes to the perpetrators). We agreed that we would move the remaining pumpkin onto the porch itself, far enough from the stoop, we hoped, to dissuade another theft but asserting our determination not to let these marauders intimidate us into hiding our pumpkins behind glass. Duncan and Reeve honorably agreed to share the remaining big pumpkin, and we voted to table the decision whether or not to tell GrampaDicken and GrammaGhee of their pumpkin's uncertain end.

The decision was made for us Sunday morning. It was barely seven o'clock. The big boys and their dad were running out the door to meet a boat for an off-shore fishing trip. I was running alongside them, holding Tucker on one hip while zipping jackets, when the whole moving Green Bean train ground to a sudden stop and nearly derailed.

At the foot of our steps sat our stolen pumpkin. I knew it was the one from the dimple near the bottom. From our vantage point it looked intact save for a circular incision around the stem.

There was a note on the pumpkin itself. It was written in black Sharpie ink.

"Sorry for taking your pumpkin.
We just wanted the seeds. So we carved it and
brought it back to you.

Happy Halloween!

P.S. Look for me on Halloween. I'll be dressed
as a Vampire."

We spun it around to find our pumpkin laughing, eyes spinning wildly as if from some thrilling, dizzying ride.

STAR WARS, or, When should I introduce my child to Pure Evil?

I have probably already subjected you to my diatribe. A few years ago on Halloween I noticed the preponderance of Darth Vaders, Darth Molls, etc. against a severe dearth of Obi Wans, Luke Skywalkers, Princess Leahs, and the like. The trick-or-treaters who visit our block number 500 to 600, which must constitute a statistically significant sample size, so I figured this trend indicates something meaningful about our culture and the world as a whole. My question: Where did all the good guys go?

The battle between good guys and bad guys is, of course, as old as time. Cowboys v. Indians, Allies v. Hitler, God v. Devil, Red Sox v. Yankees. Occasionally, in liberal pinko commie crowds, the contest allows for moral ambiguity, and history often inverts the designations. But the essential struggle endures in stories that reflect outwardly our inner conflicts. I want the last cookie; I contemplate my temptation to grab it from weaker hands through the moral lens of European conquest and I am ashamed. I share the cookie. If dressing up as Darth Vader helps my almost-six year old son get in touch with his dark side, I'm down with that. Assuming, of course, he concludes that earning his candy the old-fashioned way is better than terrorizing younger kids on the block into relinquishing theirs.

And herein lies the rub, and my gripe with George Lucas. Jordy and I grew up on the original trilogy - a classic hero's journey wherein Luke Skywalker discovers that he is not who he thought he was, that he has the force within him, that an estranged relationship with his father tempts him to the very anger that turned his father away from the jedi's path, and that he must find the strength to devote himself to the light. It ends with the ultimate father/son reconciliation and a giant Ewok barbecue. Moral order is restored.

But "these kids today" (!) are growing up with a very different part of the story - the fall from grace, the embrace of evil, the surrender without the redemption. Of course they are supposed to go on to watch Episodes IV through VI in order to end where we did, but as my clever film history professor friend points out, the change of film aesthetics from the '70s to now mitigates against that identification. The video games feature exciting races and inter-galactic dog fights in which Anakin Skywalker is the hero. Yesterday when my little round-faced, towed-headed Duncan pushed his Darth mask up for a breath of air, our little neighbor Charlie exclaimed, "He looks just like Anakin!!" It was true. Unnerving for a mother.

I already accept the Wet Blanket Award for Taking Pop Culture Too Seriously, yet I will go a step further. I don't know what makes one person's moral development proceed toward Ghandi-status and another toward Hitler, or of course, like most of us, to the mostly law-abiding vs. law-defying shades of gray in the middle. I imagine a complex interaction of innate, primate, and cultural forces. But on the cultural part - I have to believe that we play a role in teaching our kids something about morality, starting by showing them love and respect, then helping them imagine the inner lives of others. Is it possible to exert your greatest parental effort and end up with a Hitler? Maybe so. This question is way beyond the scope of this wee blog. I don't believe shielding kids from evil characters is the way to go, nor would I advocate banning play-acting the part. (I loved being a pregnant witch last Halloween.)

But what if the moral growth of children happens like the zippering and unzippering of DNA, with moments when the introduction of an idea has the potential to weave itself in -- or bind with a pre-existing template -- in more and less powerful ways? If so, how do we judge the right moment to introduce such stories and characters? (And if this seems like a nerdy line of inquiry, isn't it telling that we don't introduce our kids to real-live monsters like Hitler until "a certain age"?) Duncan knew a boy who began watching Star Wars at a particularly vulnerable moment, it seemed, judging from his bullying behavior on the playground fortified with Star Wars re-enactments. It can't be a matter solely of chronological age. There's something else I'm looking for... Some kind of contextual understanding in the child's life experiences up to that point... An ability to look at the daily opportunities to exercise exploitation vs. fairness -- grab-the-cookie-from-the-weak v. there's-only-one-left-let's-share -- wherein moral and physical power separate... Or a child's dawning recognition, after cooling off, of anger's roots in hurt feelings...

Although his 6th Birthday Party will have a STAR WARS theme, Duncan has not actually ever seen "Star Wars" -- with the exception of a clandestine partial viewing of "The Empire Strikes Back" when he manipulated a babysitter into showing it to him and his then 2-year old brother. (Useful material for moral explorations.) However, he has heard the story the Homeric way, i.e. as an oral epic enacted by his parents during long car rides. This telling allowed us to stop, answer questions, re-tell confusing or exciting parts, and reconcile differences between his parents' versions. At age 4, driving in the dark one night, Duncan already perceived the essential question: Why did Darth Vader turn to the dark side?

In an attempt to answer the unfathomable, I drew from tragedy close to home. At the time Duncan was also just beginning to understand the death of his beloved cousins' father, Gary Lehmann. It is one thing to say a drunk driver hit Gary's car, taking his life. It is another to make sense of the vast chain of substance abuse and suffering behind that driver's behavior. Was it an accident, or was it a crime? What is the difference for the survivors? What do we do with our feelings of anger and sadness? Do we punish? Seek revenge? Or do what we can to mend the chain of brokenness? And if so, what is that? I asked him to look at his Aunt Kristin's example. Does she still love her children? The world? I explained to Duncan the efforts Kristin had made, despite her clear conviction that this was a crime and not an accident, simultaneously to confront the man who killed her husband, form her own impression of his efforts to reform and recover, and ultimately support his parole in the interest of his being a better parent to his own son. It took Aunt Kristin a lot of strength to let her sadness be stronger than her anger, and out of sadness to keep loving the world in spite of how it hurts us. Darth Vader (in my version) did not find this strength. Instead he gives in to the anger of his wife's death and cuts himself off from his heart. Our conversation stuck. Two years later Duncan still refers to how "the Lehmanns chose the light, even though they miss their dad."

Yet and still... This summer Duncan couldn't make up his mind between the myriad of Star Wars Lego kits, mostly destroyers for the Republic, advertised in his Lego magazine. At one point, already in debt to his parents for an earlier impulse buy, Duncan begged for the Death Star Lego kit -- a mere $400 item. Death and destruction, it turns out, is expensive. (Am I hopelessly uncool if I register my opinion that the mechanized space warfare of Star Wars looks and feels too much like our unmanned and, ahem, also expensive drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan?) And what am I to do with my little Darth Vader, whose light-saber swashbuckling knocks over his toddling baby brother and harasses a poor old dog with hip displasia?

Maybe I should take comfort from a variation on the Banality of Evil, otherwise known as the Cuteness of Evil. When we forget to put up the gate to block baby Tucker's ascent of the stairs, our little Darth leaps up to spot him. At Family Swim at the Y, our Darth offered the soft swim cap to brother Reeve unprompted, knowing the plastic one pulls Reeve's hair. And when he leaves for school, little Darth drops his mask and light saber in a heap on the bathroom floor, eager to see what games they will play in gym today. Maybe he is ready for Star Wars after all.

Are you Jewish?

The Jewish Festival of Sukkot has just ended, leaving me wistful for a few reasons. One, it means winter is lurking just around the bend. Two, we have to take down our sukkah, which I love like I loved my cousins' backyard "Fort Apache." But most of all, because it means we leave that special time when any Jew is Jewish "enough" to shake a lulav.

Brooklyn puts the divisions among Jews on display in full color. Drive on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway past Williamsburg and you will see Ultra-orthodox men in tall, furry hats and black overcoats crossing a pedestrian bridge overhead, apart from their wives and numerous children. Pack a picnic in Prospect Park and you will see tattooed, tongue-pierced Ultimate Frisbee-playing Jews eating ham sandwiches on Shabbos. There are many shades in between, but for the most part, the religious and non-religious Jews of Brooklyn mostly look at each other as if through panes of glass, such as when the private charter bus shuttles orthodox Jews from Williamsburg to Borough Park at blinding speed. I watch them pass me on Prospect Park West, feeling myself an earthbound muggle among wizards on blazing broomsticks. And feeling a bit judged, as if contact with me might sully their purity.

But during the 8 days of Sukkot, something unique happens. Rather than maintain their customary separation, young men in black fedoras and overcoats can be seen approaching strangers everywhere -- on the train, in the park, outside Starbucks -- offering a long grassy bouquet and something like a lemon. They speak to women, even women in tank tops like myself. Always their first question:

"Excuse me, are you Jewish?"

As if it were a Yes-or-No question.

The first time this happened, Jordy and I were on the subway. Two Hasidic men asked Jordy first. We assumed a kind of racial profiling, not to mention sexism and evangelism, so Jordy politely said, "I'm not interested." A few days later, though, two young Hasids approached me outside the public library as I pushed sleeping little Duncan in a stroller. They were very young, pimply, and eager. I was touched. Out of context, people don't assume I'm Jewish. I was glad to be asked. And I was curious to explore this ritual, one that begins with a lovely prayer of thanks for bringing us to this moment - an unlikely one in my life for sure. So I said, "Yes."

But what I wanted to say was, "How much time do you have?"

And then I wanted to tell them the story of how I became Jewish, a tale years in the making and by no means finished. I was sure they didn't have years to spend with me -- in fact, I knew the spell that bound us would be broken in just 8 days -- but I would have liked to compare the paths that brought us to this moment when we claimed, together, to be Jewish. I would offer them just these trailer moments:

* me, age 12, sitting in Hebrew classes in Hanover, New Hampshire with my best friend Anna Roland, the daughter of Brooklyn Jews with socialist tendencies who inspired me with their vision of Judaism as a religion that had moved "beyond belief in God"
* my mom and Dad, two goy refugees from the New York country club suburbs, on vacation in Israel in 1965 - why?
* my mom, age 7, passionately in love with a little boy named Johnny Kaplan but advised by her mother that "people need to stick to their own kind, for the sake of the kids"
* mom again, age something like 30, post-divorce, being told by her shrink that she has a "Jewish soul" (By that logic, if my mother is a Jew trapped in a shiksa body, can I claim to be, spiritually speaking, born Jewish? ;-)
* me, age 7, gluing macaronis on Christmas tree ornaments
* me, age 11, in my small New England town reading THE CHOSEN with fascination at such a foreign world
* me, age 14, baking Challah for a school project about "other cultures"
* me, age 16, writing my first piece of fiction about a daughter of Christian Science parents who wants to go to Medical School
* me, age 18, in various Humanities seminars at Stanford agreeing vigorously with Freud that "God is a projection of the father figure," with Marx that "Religion is an opium of the masses," and with Nietzsche that "God is Dead" while watching with sympathy as my poor classmates of faith crumbled under the challenge to their universe.
* me again, age 19, alone on a dark cold night in rural Japan. Writing letters to friends and family back home that reflected the unraveling of everything I thought I knew. Lots of darkness. A letter back from friend Elizabeth to the effect that I was "going places" she couldn't go with me. And from my Dad suggesting that there are contradictory paradigms of reality that one might go crazy trying to reconcile, with recommended reading: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
* me again, age 20, at a Zen temple, eyes half closed, contemplating the possibility that "I" do not actually exist.
* me, still 20, on the Tibetan plateau, spinning the Dharma wheel at a Tibetan temple, contemplating the possibility of reincarnation, or at least the limits of my material view of reality and gingerly giving credence to people who seemed at the very least to have a deeper understanding of their own minds, if not Reality.
* me, still 20, back in Japan before boarding a plane for LA, my sense of myself pulverized and fearful of how I would put the pieces back together.
* me, age 21, having abandoned my pre-med major in favor of the Humanities where I found stories and art that touched on the other realms of reality - or at least human experience - that spoke to me.
* me, age 22, in Mississippi following a love affair with the fiction of William Faulkner. In a Bible study group, eager to plumb the roots of my own tradition better, arguing in very un-Southern-ladylike way with my faithful classmates.
* me, age 23, choosing to have an adult baptism while conferring with Jesus on the side that, while I believed he was a son of God, I actually believe all people are a mix of divine and mortal and that I hoped he was cool with that. One might conclude that I am a joiner, and so I probably am -- I have always found I am pushed further when I jump in than when I watch from the sidelines.
* me, age 24, commissioning a Menorah by an artist in the Mississippi Delta for my boyfriend, one of two Jews from Enid, Oklahoma (the other was his brother). I had our initials cut into the metal. I have always wondered whether he got my initials cut off after we broke up and he married someone else, or just threw the thing away?
* me, age 26, now in San Francisco, clapping and crying at Glide Church. Flash forward two years and I am now up with the gospel choir - among gays/lesbians/bi & transgendered/and a few straight people, blacks/whites/asians/etc., dot.commers and homeless, Christian/Jew/Muslim/Yogis/agnostic, etc.
* me, all ages, in downward facing dog, seeking inner peace/strength/flexibility, etc. through the Yogi philosophy du jour.
* me, age 30, now in film school in Los Angeles. Filming everything from faked car crashes to faked love-making everywhere from borrowed mansions in Chicago to crack alleys in downtown LA, trying to capture essential truths through constructed realities.
* me, age 31, back in touch with childhood friend Jordy Green, now in London. It started with a very vivid dream in which I was wandering the snowy roads of New Hampshire at dusk. I couldn't go home until I found Jordy, and I couldn't remember his long international phone number. Ours is a much much longer story, but let's cut to the chase: August, 7, 2001 I boarded a plane to London to go find out whether our on-again off-again friendship of years had grown into more. I believed I would know when I saw him at Heathrow Airport, and I did.
* me and Jordy, 31, in London, at orthodox Shabbat services at "Cool Shul" with Rabbi Pini. Then later, at Pini's home with delightful wife Sabine and their kids, candles everywhere, lots of cranberry & vodkas, Shabbat dinner. Split frame: Pini at the table telling me Judaism discourages conversion// Pini later, in the kitchen, telling Jordy to marry me and not to worry about the Jewish part because "she can just convert"
* me, lightheaded from my first Yom Kippur fast, looking at the sun setting over the Santa Monica hills on the phone with Jordy, still in London but getting ready to move to LA.
* us, engaged, drinking wine and eating challah until we made ourselves sick, every Friday night without fail.
* me, producing film THE SHABBOS GOY, entering, through fiction, into the bedroom of an Orthodox Jewish couple pained by their infertility and learning on a movie set how to "kosher" a chicken.
* me and Jordy, searching for a rabbi who will marry a Jew and non-Jew, and being rejected by all - even reform rabbis.
* us, age 32, married in a field in New Hampshire by a renegade former orthodox cantor. Our families roasting in the August sun as the ceremony goes on & on. A rabbi would later tell me we are still not legally married, but we disagree.
* me, age 35, pregnant, at Dohány Synagoge, deeply moved by the place and the history.
* a month later, in classes at the University of Judaism in LA, my life and my home becoming more centered in Judaism. Preparations to convert come with my belief that identity evolves. And - as un-American as it sounds - we do not construct it alone. There is a negotiation, and this is OK.
* a few more months, October 2004. I am big as a house with baby. The Red Sox have just won the ALCS. I go before the Bet Din to answer questions such as, "What is your favorite Jewish holiday?" and "Do you promise to raise your children as Jews?" These questions are easy.
(OK, way too many moments to fit in a trailer.)

But before the mikvah bath that will immerse me (and unborn Duncan) and certify us as MOTs (members of the tribe), the harder questions -- "When did you realize you had a Jewish soul?" and "Do you swear to abandon all commitments to other religions?"

To which I smile and offer answers with lots of footnotes, which I justify as some evidence of Jewishness itself.

To be Jewish, as I understand it, is to wrestle with God - the literal translation of the name "Israel." I wrestle with God, but I experience divinity daily. The story of Judaism is one of seeking continuity within change. This too I do. I will never have my friend Anna's beautiful dark corkscrew curls, my friend Mike DeWitt's sense of humor, or my in-laws' taste for Tongue. I will speak Hebrew with a bad accent, get lost in the Siddur on High Holidays, and continue to love mayonnaise and pastel colors. I will not give up my yoga practice or visiting the churches of my loved ones and finding inspiration and beauty there (though I have no hesitation giving up Christmas). I will continue to find art and love the bravest of enterprises, as they lead us into the infinitely specific experiences of being human. Is my soul Jewish? Are not our souls, if anything, beyond categorization?

But Judaism is and will remain my home base. The tradition gives beautiful form to the weeks and seasons of my life and my family's life. It reminds me to sanctify Time when it would otherwise spin by in a tangle of emails, laundry, and playdates. There is no end to what I want to learn about Judaism - from modern Hebrew to the history of Israel to Kabbalah. Living Jewishly pushes me, makes me ask more questions, and introduces more tensions, than not. A stringed instrument depends on tension to make music. I cherish Judaism with the freedom of one who has chosen it, and I practice it with the grateful enthusiasm - and imperfection - of a new immigrant.

We return to the library where my bewildered young Hasid friends listen, Lulav slack in their hands. Next time I will ask, "So, how about you? Are you Jewish?"


********
Watch the kids shake it at the Sukkah party:

Shake Your Lulav from Samantha Davidson Green on Vimeo.