Weekly Featured Essay
We feature new essays every Wednesday; make it a weekly habit to stop by and be enchanted by our eclectic content.
This week we revisit an essay we published in 2020.
Leaving
by Judy Lev
I have been making mud bricks with tourists six times a week. The tourists—Jews, Christians and Hindus, young and old, believers and atheists—dirty their hands in a batter of straw, water and mud, while imagining, with my encouragement, Egyptian slavery. After Brick-building 101 I lead each group to a shaded overlook with a table covered with branches of hyssop. From there, the tourists see the modest gray-green hyssop bushes hugging the gray limestone rocks of Neot Kedumim, The Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel. “Take a sprig of hyssop,” I say, quoting Moses in chapter twelve, verse twenty-two of the Book of Exodus, “and dip it in the blood that is in the basin.”
Each tourist picks up a sprig of hyssop and dips it in the plastic cup on the table filled with red food coloring.
“Take the hyssop and touch the lintel and the two side posts of your door,” I continue, and ask them to paint with the hyssop, its fuzzy little absorbent gray-green leaves as paintbrush, the wooden beam of the overlook. Thus, hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors at Neot Kedumim relive the night God, dressed as the Angel of Death, passed over the houses of the Children of Israel during His mission to smite only the Egyptians. I enjoy this hands-on activity that makes the experience of leaving Egyptian slavery come to life. Doing it six times a week lifts my self-esteem from the gutter.
MORE ESSAYS
Max Krasner
Max Krasner
65 Boston Street (home)
540 Market Street (business)
Newark, New Jersey
“Newark’s Milk Station #1 Owner”
“If these stations are the means of saving but a single life during the entire summer, all the labor, time and money they have cost will be repaid a thousand fold.”—Newark Evening Star, August 16, 1915
Objective: To find a wife even Mama approves of.
EDUCATION
Kheder, Borisov, Russia
Apprentice joiner, Borisov, Russia (good at math, I can calculate in my head)
Night school to become a US citizen, Central School, Newark, NJ
Acquired first papers, Newark, NJ
IMMIGRATION
1899 SS Rotterdam from Rotterdam, Holland
Pilgrim
by Phil Cummins
Worryingly high. Not a tad high, or just a teensy bit on the high side. But worryingly high, as if the adjective needed some extra punch. That’s how my healthcare provider described my cholesterol levels during a call to discuss the results of bloodwork. Not surprisingly, my middle-aged heart gave a little wobble as my anxious mind promptly worried up a future filled with cardiovascular concerns. This call was a blunt reminder that ageing inexorably pushes one ever closer to the high mileage category, a time when the body often decides it no longer wishes to cooperate as slavishly as it once did. It loses pace and starts to grumble and creak, periodically sending out urgent reminders of the need for a regular overhaul in order to maintain its roadworthiness. This call was one such reminder, and to maintain drivability I needed to reduce saturated and trans fats in my diet, ramp up my intake of soluble fibre, and take considerably more exercise. In other words, an end to all gustatorial joy and time to get fitted for new trainers. It was goodbye to fried food and takeouts, and hello to fresh fruit and workouts. Driving home, I began to imagine my stomach straining against the seatbelt, reinforcing the need for action.
One week later, my wife and I booked ourselves in for a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain.
These two events, it should be said, are only partly connected.
Walks with Caribou
by Michael Engelhard
It is my last day guiding a weeklong backpacking trip in mid-July from the East Fork of the Chandalar to the headwaters of the Hulahula. We are camped on the western bank of the Hulahula in the broad, treeless valley an Ice-Age-glacier incised. Because the morning is drizzly, my peeps still hide inside their sleeping bags. Over a contemplative cup of Joe in the kitchen area—a stone’s throw away from our tents—I notice shifts in what in the flat light resembles a boulder field.
“You might want to come outside. The whole hillside is crawling with caribou,” I rouse the sleepyheads, unaware yet that I’m seeing a vanguard of ten thousand, a quarter mile down the valley, a prong of the Porcupine herd’s southbound trans-border migration. I feel we have suddenly struck it rich.
Quantum Physics
by Beth Benedix
The black and white tabby loped gingerly across the gravel towards the base of the grain bin. From a birds-eye view, the bin is one of a handful dotting the sparse expanse of pastures and cornfields situated forty-three miles from the nearest city (Indianapolis), twelve from the nearest supermarket (Kroger). A glacier-cut landscape that turns instantly from barren to lush in the curve of a road or the transition from winter to spring, most of the houses sit next to barns, acres sprawling between cultivated plots of land, some with rusted cars or trailers tucked behind wire fences, chickens darting in and out of man-made boundaries that mean nothing to them.
“Don’t let him get under there, Abby,” Anthony said, squinting into the late November afternoon sun.
Anthony’s voice registered an anxious click, not-yet panic. His wife, Abby, lunged in slow motion, her right arm scooping dust as the cat disappeared into the opening, disproportionately agile in his weakened state. In her left hand, she held the phone to her ear as she described the play-by-play to the vet while Anthony ran inside the bin. Circumnavigating the elevated floor, he surveyed the slatted metal for vulnerable cracks to access the crawlspace beneath it.
“He’s hurt,” Abby snapped into the phone. “We think he was hit by a car. His jaw looks misaligned and there’s blood all over him. Shit! He just climbed under the bin. We can’t see him!”
Abby jammed the phone in her pocket, sliding onto her belly in front of the narrow opening. Her head ducking a strand of web, she peered as far into the dark as the cinder block framing the opening would allow.
“I can’t see him,” she told Anthony.
Sleeping Dogs
by Clare Simons
My husband tells the story of the sleeping dog over a thousand cups of chai, across hectares of land, on stalled express trains, and into the heart of India. He sees grace in the story. I see the future. It all begins with Shiva.
The filthy mongrel is asleep. Not a flea moves, disrupting his dreams of chapatis and lentils fried in ghee. His scarred ears flop on the cool concrete and shut out the din of the train station. Burlap sacks of mustard seeds shield his mangy hind from dusty feet, toppling bundles, and thrashing sticks. The stray has claimed a safe hideout for the night.
My husband sprints to the ticket window, rupees in hand, ready to pay for our one-way, second-class, sleeper berths to Tiruvannamalai and the holy mountain of Lord Shiva, The Supreme God of Creation and Destruction. He does not see the dog or hear me scream.
Fangs through flesh—down to the bone—blood through khaki. The mutt vanishes into the electric air. Scott staggers, genuflects before the inescapable forces of India. The mongrel’s bite unleashes Kundalini shakti—She Who Is Coiled at the base of the spine—amps his Ida and Pingala channels, pulsing currents of pink and blue light through all 72,000 nadi’s—clears his Ajna chakra—unlocks the door to the glory of Brahman. Shiva’s bite is a grace. Diksha is bestowed.
Weaving Lessons
by Lory Widmer Hess
I sit next to Luca on the weaving bench, watching as he throws the shuttle, beats, and changes his feet on the treadles. He looks up at me and smiles, patting me on the shoulder. Back to work, then, with a low grunting sound, a sign of contentment. I smile, too, and walk away. All is well in order, and he doesn’t need my help.
It wasn’t always like this. When I first met Luca, who lives at the residential home for adults with developmental disabilities where I work, there was no smiling, no friendly pats. As I sat with him on the bench, I was more likely to receive a scowl, even a shove. He would go through the weaving motions for a while, then look out the window, or page through a book of pictures I kept nearby for these moments. He might even stick the shuttle in his nose, a move I had to gently discourage, trying to guide him back to the loom.
Someone had taught him the basics, and he could do each step in the process perfectly, but he lost interest easily. His attention slipped, and he’d tangle the thread or do things in the wrong order. My task was to accompany him, watching his every move, encouraging him to keep going when he stopped, reminding him of the next step if he seemed lost. It was tedious, repetitive work that yet required constant alertness, a strain to keep up for over an hour.
I was also nervous and unsure in my relationship with Luca, whom I didn’t know well. His scowls and shoves could easily escalate, and he might refuse to do anything at all or decide to grab any papers in sight and scribble on them or rip them up instead. I was anxious about how to keep him on task without making him feel pushed, which inevitably resulted in him pushing back. I started to dread my time in the weavery each day. How could he enjoy working with me, though, if he sensed that I didn’t enjoy working with him?
Still Running
by Mario Moussa
Aunt Net was waiting for Uncle Curty when he came home from the Dunes Hotel, where he was a pit boss. I watched from the living room sofa as Uncle Curty trudged over to his recliner, took off his thin tie and let it drop to the floor, did the same with the dark suit that barely accommodated his enormous belly, wrapped himself in a white terrycloth robe, slipped his feet into white velour house shoes, and stretched out in the chair. He sat for a moment, then yelled, “Bring me one!”
“Okay, Curty,” Aunt Net answered from the kitchen in a voice that made my back ripple with dread. She emerged from the doorway, with a beer in her hand, like a painted bird from a cuckoo clock. She shuffled to his chair and back until late in the evening, Uncle Curty taking hourly trips to the bathroom as he worked through an entire case of twenty-four cans.
I witnessed it all as the tension between them began to feel like electricity in the air. I sensed that Aunt Net would punish me for it. Why? For starters: because I was there and she could. But there were deeper reasons—reasons intertwined with my family’s history. I’d overheard conversations between my parents and was figuring things out. Aunt Net’s first husband had ditched her for a life on the road as a big band singer. Her younger sister was beautiful and Aunt Net wasn’t. My father had a big corporate job and Uncle Curty didn’t. For all these reasons, she was angry and needed a target for her anger. Anger ran in the family, too, growing from one year to the next like money in the stock market. Nobody ever seemed to feel they got what they deserved, no matter how much they got. The value of our collective holdings in resentment had become staggering.
The Days Went By
by Bryan Mammel
When I was young, I did stupid things.
I don’t think I knew it at the time, maybe because I was young. Maybe because we all did stupid things.
Our group of friends tended to be outcasts, or at least we liked living at the fringes: skaters, musicians, artists, philosophers, and poets. College students, trying on the poses and postures of who we wanted to be. Except, we hadn’t figured that out either.
The stoop was our hangout spot, ideal for its proximity to the essentials: cheap coffee, cheap food, and cheap beer. The small, unadorned strip mall at the corner of University and Moon boasted four floundering businesses and a mostly-paved parking lot. Tufts of grass grew through cracks in the concrete, drying out and dying in the hot Texas summers. We littered the steps in front of Zookas Burritos and Jo On the Go Coffee with bicycles and skateboards, slouching in an array of cutoff jean shorts, tattered pearl-snaps, tie dye, and Chacos.
Giving those steps a name made the place ours.