נְשָׁמָה

13Aug07

There was a time when, as a five-year-old, I would make mud pies in Central Park for the two old Jewish men who used to sit on the rotting green park bench and kvetch and feed the pigeons with dried bread crumbs, and I made one once with pieces of colored glass sticking out of the top because they made my creations sparkle and was running to show my elder friends, tripped and fell on the sidewalk, slicing my left hand open on a glass piece right where the thumb connects with the palm and was taken across Fifth Avenue to Mt. Sinai Hospital, and the nurse soaked my hand in white soapy disinfectant solution which to this day I have no recollection of hurting, and afterwards they sewed me up with Mom there.  And there was the time on the uptown #6 train when I faced the gang of black teenagers who were fixing to beat up the Hispanic man, and I declared “Jesus” this and “Jesus” that, because that was the only word I figured would scare off those scumbags, and they backed down and went on to the next subway car, whether to find another would-be victim or to repent, I did not know and still do not, only God knows.

To the sets of these scenes, these urban mini-dramas, the Lovely K and I return, with boys in tow. I am at peace. I didn’t think I would be. It’s not like coming home, because even now, we don’t know where we’ll live, or where the boys will go to school, and we don’t have Point O’ Woods to escape to on weekends or in the summer.  Mom and Dad are gone, and Jim and Rachel live in Brooklyn, and we all know that residents of different boroughs might as well live in passport-protected countries, because getting together for dinner – not to mention the X-factor of small children on both ends, their being cousins notwithstanding, and babysitters who no doubt charge by the hour like Big City Lawyers – is like planning for G-Eight leadership detente. 

New York can be epitomized by this:  my parents would host their friend Lady Enid Pratt, from Australia, and she’d sleep on the fold-out sofa in our library (a third bedroom that had been converted into a TV room), and Jim and I would sit with her and laugh and I never knew whether she had been married or had always been single, but she always gave us money in small denominations and played games with us, and she was tall and slender and had pretty eyes and short curly hair and seemed exotic. 

And there was Margaret, who had been divorced, which was still somewhat scandalous in the late 1960s, and she bounced along Sixth Avenue in Chelsea once with me and my family and grabbed onto my dad’s arm and started singing “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” and I recall thinking it was strange for any woman not my mom to grab my father’s arm.

New York was going to hear Die Meistersinger at the Met when I was eight and Jim was six, courtesy of Dad’s advertising friend who was in charge of the radio program that aired during intermission, and it was Jim and I running around the hall outside our mezzanine box seats because the opera was three hours long and in German and…it was an opera, after all, and we were energetic boys.  Dad later told me that his friend was gay, and I wondered why he thought to mention it.

There was playing baseball with Jim in the alley between our building and 60 East 96^th Street, the next one to the east, with a trash can lid holding open the basement door so that we wouldn’t be locked out having to scale an also-locked seven-foot wrought iron gate leading to the street and to freedom, and I’d wing in a pitch, perhaps too wild and too hard for Jim, my younger by two years, and we’d get yelled at by the old woman on the third floor of the building south of us – a total witch – and we’d laugh or say something smart back to her.

The city was Danny McLaughlin, my best friend from first to sixth grade, who went to a different school that year and we drifted a bit, and then he drowned in the Central Park reservoir at age 18 on the night of his senior prom, and it was splayed across the front page of the Daily News the next day.  I missed his funeral because of a summer job out at Fire Island – which I should have taken a day off from – and instead wrote a song for him on my guitar which I would play when alone and cry by myself.  I am still friends with Danny’s mom; in fact, she is Carter’s godmother.

If I am candid – not “honest,” because I hope I always am, but “candid,” which for me means to say something that I would need to say at some point if I was to continue to be real with you even if it might hurt you, much as I wish it wouldn’t – I would have to say that in New York I feel more connected to the “real world.”  I have enjoyed South Hamilton, Massachusetts:  it is idyllic and – at fifteen minutes from the beach – allows me to be close to the kind of nature I love the best.  I hate cutting the grass, but I sure love to see children play on fresh mown lawn.  This place has been nothing less than a gift from God.

Yet New York City has extreme bests and worsts, and therefore is a microcosm.  The evil of the 9/11 crimes was surpassed only by the good of the civil servants who went into the burning towers to save others.  This is real.  There is nothing more real than at the fulcrum of extreme moral loci. This is what gives me “neshawmaw” (source:  http://net.bible.org/verse.php?book=Gen&chapter=2&verse=7).  נְשָׁמָה , transliterated as n’shawmaw, means breath or “breath of God,” which the Bible talks about early in Genesis as the life which God breathed into the first humans but is different from that which is breathed into animals to give them life. 

In New York, נְשָׁמָה is breathed in me, and I come alive spiritually. 

I will still, however, root for the Red Sox. 

Filed under: Central Park, Fire Island, Friends, Jesus, Judaism, Manhattan, Massachusetts, Nevski Prospekt, Point O' Woods, Upper East Side, children, family, parenting, prom, surfing   |  2 Comments