What Will We Do When We're No Longer Outsiders?

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Death and Art Propel Big Questions This Weekend

At the funeral of our neighbor Megan of blessed memory earlier today, bookmarks-as-mementos sat next to the guestbook. One of them featured a girlhood photo of Megan and a quote: "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -- Wayne Dyer

The quotation reminded me of some insights shared with me earlier this weekend, and how I might change the way I look at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity.

Last night, with our friends David & Gerard, I attended a lecture by Jonathan Katz, the co-curator of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Most of the works he featured in his slideshow included metaphors and symbols and codes that were dense and tense and rich for eyes that could recognize the homosexual subtext of them; in a number of cases, Jonathan Katz decoded them for us, as a number of them were subtle.

As I watched and listened, I was touched by the artists' ability to make visible to any degree a segment of society that between 1898 and 1991, and even still, today, depending on where in the world we live, typically was marginalized, stigmatized or at the very least, in the shadows.

During the Q&A afterward, I asked, "What happens when LGBT artists are no longer outsiders?"

Jonathan Katz said, "Other differences will emerge....It will not be central to their themes."

I was shaken by this answer. And I told David and Gerard so after walking through the exhibit together.

Gerard: "He was saying something hopeful, I thought, like that even heterosexual artists might include us as subjects and we'd just be more visible."

Me: "Maybe I'm too literal, but I don't ever want to be lesbian just incidentally. It's part of my core identity."

David: "I'm literal, too, but maybe assimilation's not so bad. I mean, isn't it nice being married now?" (He meant, he to Gerard and me, to Pat.)

"Yes, *so* nice. Your use of the word 'assimilation' helps me a bit because it reminds me of some alarmist Jews in my community who say that Jews will disappear if we assimilate too much, and yet, we've been here for 3,000+ years. I don't really think we're gonna disappear, since we've hung on for this long."

Dance? No, Lurk Around the Margins.

We said goodbye, since I was ready to go home, while they wanted to linger at the exhibit a bit longer. Making my way toward the exit, I found a free dance party on the third floor of the museum.

Oh, the music was so good with Rhianna's voice bouncing off the paintings in the nice and dim, cavernous room. I was nearly ready to enter the dance floor and move alone among the crowd, which likely would have been fine had I not been too shy.

I wished that Pat were with me, so that I'd have a partner. It struck me that no one would even notice us; in fact, we might stand out more so for being older than most of the crowd, rather than for being a same-sex couple -- to Jonathan Katz's earlier point. After "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics played, I slunk away to my car in the parking lot. When that song was first popular, I was most of the dancers' ages, and I just owned a bicycle and a subway pass, and a radio/tape-deck I got as a premium for opening a bank account.

Driving home, I thought, Oh, no! Have I become like the lesbian separatists who used to alienate me when I was first getting involved in the gay community in the late-'80s? Who thought that "womyn"-only spaces were supreme while I thought they were unappealing and even obsolete as a group due to their insularity?

There's an analogy, right? AIDS and other societal realities made lesbian separatism untenable back then, just like today, staunchly gay, lesbian, bi or transpeople were misguided whenever we ghetto-ized ourselves, smothering ourselves with an insecurity blanket; more and more polls showed that younger people weren't half as discriminatory as previous generations, so why did any of us hang on so fiercely to separateness and outsider status?

Still, the chip on my shoulder had become comfy after all these years of hauling it and the prospect of heeding Wayne Dyer's/Megan's advice to change my thinking was scary. Earlier today, I spoke with a heterosexual relative, to tell her of my new confusion around my identity, and of my fear of losing my minority status and as usual, she had great on-the-spot wisdom in response:

Sarah, you don't have to be ghetto-ized or Marrano-like anymore [in this area of the world]. And compared to Jews, I think there's less of a chance of LGBT assimilation causing the end of LGBT people, since you won't intermarry.... And in any case, don't worry that you'll lose your identity when people stop being hateful, as there will always be hateful people; there are persistent taboos in every stripe, like unwed mothers. There's always someone who will make sex dirty.... Sex is the engine for intrigue and betrayal and murder and art and politics.... Your sort of desire won't disappear just because it's more so accepted. It will simply be less underground, which should be good, right?

We Are All Outsiders.

In 1998, two years after Pat & I moved in to our neighborhood, Megan, Steve and their young son Ben moved in three houses down from us. I never brought them a house-warming gift, or any food or drink. Never invited them over. Promptly forgot their names as soon as Megan introduced her family and herself to us one day in the street. Thereafter, Megan would drive by us while we were raking leaves or gardening and would always wave. Whenever she had her car-window down, she'd address us by name, and I always felt bad that I had to try to stretch "Hi" into a multi-syllable word, since I was too embarrassed to ask Megan to tell me her name again.

Every time she passed us, she smiled whole-heartedly at us, but after all, what did we have in common with a woman who had a husband and a young kid? So why bother to be friendlier and learn more about her by talking with her? When other neighbors with whom we've been friendly since we've moved in, called to tell us of Megan's sudden death from a massive heart attack the other night, first, I was relieved and ashamed finally to know her name, but then realized that I'd lost the chance of ever being friendlier with her.

What did we have in common? Through loving eulogies from her husband, son, brother and best friends, I learned what I never bothered to find out from her while she was alive: One of only two other families in the neighborhood (that I know of), Megan's family and she were Jewishly-affiliated, attending High Holiday services and bar mitzah'ing their son, who was now 18 -- our nephew and niece's age...like Pat & me, originally, Meg & Steve spotted each other across a room...like part of Pat's heritage, Meg's was French-Canadian...and volunteered from the early days, helping PWA's (People with AIDS), and so likely saw a number of friends die over the early years, like we did. And probably, we'll never discover how much more we might have had in common. It's just ironic, and tragic, how I was so busy, being shy of a stereotypically nuclear family, that I didn't stop to consider that Megan and her family felt like outsiders in the neighborhood initially, which we could have softened by being friendlier.

The other bookmark-as-memento that sat next to Megan's funeral-guestbook had an adult photo of Megan, smiling the smile I recognized, and the quote associated with it came from the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: "This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess."

Happy 5772, 2012 and Soon, Year of the Dragon!

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

This is My 600th Blog Entry, Which Is a Cause for Hope in Itself

I've been at this -- blogging -- since Passover, 5768/2007, or for nearly five years. Granted, whereas for the first two+ years, I managed to blog at least three times a week and lately, I'm lucky if once a month, it's still a friend to me and I use it when I need it.

My blog has been a friend when I'm wondering, inspired, sick, lonely, celebratory, suffering from indignities, sad, mournful, grateful, hopeful, what-if'ing in positive or catastrophic directions. On the yawning first day of every new year, I find myself what-if'ing in hopeful directions, though not usually aloud/publicly, as I'm superstitious. What if, in 2012, the rest of 5772 and the upcoming Year of the Dragon, what if I weren't superstitious? And what if:

• The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl again
  
• Pat's and my trip to Israel in June was life-changing and wonderful
  
• My thyroid challenge turned out to be only temporary, i.e., just subacute thyroiditis
  
• I collaborated with colleagues to design and deliver more first-of-a-kind social learning activities for new internal clients
  
• Traveled to a new city or country for work
  
• Exercised at least three times a week and was nice and fit
  
• Earned my Masters in Organization & Leadership with a specialization in Adult Learning and Leadership
  
• Studied and regained some Hebrew fluency
  
• Celebrated my mom's 87th birthday and Pat's mom's 89th
  
• Saw real progress in marriage equality for same-sex couples
  
• Found time to do more fun things with friends, more learning or volunteer work.
  

Reflections on *Ek Naukrani Ki Diary* & *The Help*

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

We Are Not Essentially All the Same

...And the trick is not to be afraid of our differences while we're searching for common ground -- and not all ground needs to, nor should, be common. A light-brown-skinned Indian friend of mine recommended that I read *The Help* more than a year ago. At that point, I was in the thick of my part-time Masters program and wanted only to read books that I had found, since so little of my discretionary time was available for reading anything other than journal articles and textbook chapters.

A couple of months ago, I reached the point where I had much more time available and finally read first a fiction recommendation by my mom, *Cutting for Stone*, about twin boys raised in Ethiopia and much more, which was superb. When I picked up *The Help* directly afterward, I was jarred by the dialect and thought it was predictable initially, and put it down for more than a month. In its place, I picked up *The Stranger's Child*, the writing of which was beautiful, but the plot of which did not compel me the way the author's prior novel, *The Line of Beauty* had.

And then suddenly, Pat and many of her Facebook friends were reading *The Help* and loving it, and that was almost the nail in its coffin, since Pat and I rarely have the same taste in books. Still, I picked it back up and went ahead.

What I Related To:

Now that I'm done with the novel, which turns out to have borrowed from the author's experience -- and doesn't all fiction? -- I do appreciate it and feel enriched for having read it. *Ek Naukrani Ki diary*/*The Diary of a Maidservant*, which I found and read while we were living in India in 2007, was written by a well-educated man and translated by a well-educated woman, rather than having been written by an actual maid in India, and yet, I heard the maid's voice, just as I heard the voices of the maids in *The Help*, which was written by a well-educated White woman.

For six months in 2007, we benefited from the cleaning services of a daily maid. That was the first and last time in our lives, and the whole time I was reading the book, I was feeling like I needed to keep it out of sight of our maid, who spoke good English, and I was also feeling guilty, that is, there but for the grace of God or whomever go I. With *The Help*, a lot went through my head about my own Whiteness and the memory of recognizing it best when we lived in India. The same Indian friend who recommended *The Help* once said to me, "If I were in a wheelchair and you and I entered a restaurant, you would be attended to first [because of the color of your skin]."

In the United States, I always felt not quite White, since as a Jew, I was on the Ku Klux Klan's list along with Black people. I'm pretty sure I've written about this here before. And yet I also recall my dad's stories about growing up in Washington, DC in the '30s and early-40s and how discriminatory it was there for Black people, and also how during his U.S. Navy experience on the USS Alabama, he said that all of the Black sailors were waiters and they lived at the bottom of the ship.

Both books -- the Indian and the U.S. one -- were about abused workers who wanted a vehicle/voice to express the abuse, but who were not historically entitled to express it or protest it. How can I relate to them? Can I?

My second semester at Michigan, I needed more work-study hours and signed up to mop the cafeteria floors. They paired us up -- two per half -- and the cafeteria spanned the width of the super-wide dorm. As moppers, we were invisible, cleaning the floors pre-meals and then disappearing. It was the closest I ever got to being a maid or janitor and it didn't feel great. The difference was that when my shift ended, I could go study, or to class, or to play badminton with my friend Gerald or go eat in the cafeteria, and the janitorial identity was just temporary -- a means to help pay for my terrific education.

Wait, when I stretch back further, I recall a relative who treated my sisters and me like maids. Often, this relative lay in bed watching TV. Routinely, she would ring a cow-bell and one of us had to come running. "Get me an orange and a knife," she'd command. We'd run and get it. "You forgot a napkin!" she'd say with frustration and we'd go running again. She also paid us 50 cents an hour to clean her home. Back then, that felt like a good wage because we were eight and 13, though it wasn't minimum wage...and I don't think we even knew about the concept of minimum wage.

Still, ultimately, that was all temporary. Why was I born White, with education-oriented parents, in the 20th century? Many Indians would respond that it's the effects of karma, but it's mysterious to me. Still, through their maid characters, both authors did a detailed job of enabling the maids to observe the pain of their employers, of being anyone who's alive -- whether privileged or not. The jealousies and heartbreaks and pettiness-es and desires and shame -- they are the common ground.

Like the Jewish Cartoonists Who Invented Superheroes

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Feeling Part of the American Family Once Removed

Every year around this time, I begin to feel un-American. U.S. Thanksgiving is the gateway to the Christmas season that many now inclusively refer to as the holiday season, but I always feel like many Americans really are still thinking of Christmas.

Thank God, this year, "a first look at life's newest solutions:"

This patented "menorahment" reminds me of a similar impulse I learned of five years ago with Pat and our friends Judy & Jim at the Milwaukee Art Museum. While there, we saw a terrific show on comic book artists. Through it, I learned that many of the most famous American superheroes were created by Jewish artists who were realizing their deepest fantasies of what it would be like to be ultra-American, which at that time, was a contrast to how they felt as Jews, i.e., to be loved/admired/respected by the whole community, and to be able to protect it from evil-doers. Somehow, this tree-topper seems born of similar wishes -- to be a star that is part of, yet in parallel apart from, the rest of the earth-bound ornament community. This item was featured in "Skymall" magazine, just in time for the holidays.

Who Am I Kidding?

When I am with people from beyond the United States, I'm reminded that compared to them, I'm as ultra-American as any comic book character, to the point albeit unwittingly of caricature occasionally. For example, with a Dutch friend who lives in Paris, I'm visible from a mile away when we're in Milan on business, in my bright red raincoat; Europeans do not wear such bright colors in their rainwear. Or I'm silly for taking a series of vitamins daily with my breakfast. But here, in the United States, I sometimes feel like a foreigner during this season compared to most of my fellow countrypeople. Perhaps it's the impossibly challenging combo of being a Jew who would never have need for a menorahment along with the challenge of staying engaged in the series of football games that populate our Green Bay branch of our family's home all day on Thanksgiving (and every Sunday and Monday night during the long season).

This year, though, I came to think about this outsider sensation in a new way, since I'm fresh from finishing my Masters thesis on cultural intelligence. Yesterday, I even tweeted about it: "In one way, surely, I'm culturally intelligent: I try to dress like the locals when in Green Bay; today, I'm wearing Packer-logo'ed pants." In the case of my thesis, cultural intelligence referred to being able to work effectively with colleagues and clients from other countries, but in my own life, currently, I've come to realize that there can be a domestic version as well. In addition to aligning my sartorial choices with those of the townspeople, when in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I need to be able to "talk cheese." Or at least, I need to be able to comprehend it when Pat and random strangers engage in it.

At breakfast today, the hotel cook chatted with us during his break and Pat and he went on endlessly with what I've always thought of as small-talk. I've never seen a conversation like this anywhere in the Northeast, where I grew up. Here, it's common. I first learned about it during -20 degree Fahrenheit weather, when Pat was pumping gas in Green Bay during one of our annual visits 18 years ago. "Where were you?" I asked Pat when she finally returned from paying the gas jockey.

"Oh, we were talkin' cheese," she answered simply.

Somehow, no matter how American I seem to my European friend, with my multivitamins and red raincoat, when we head into Football Season, into the Christmas gateway of Thanksgiving and into Green Bay, Wisconsin, I feel like one of these things is not like the other, to borrow a phrase from the American kids' show, "Sesame Street."

My Blog as Confidante

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

You're Not Going to Blog About This, Are You?

My thyroid's messed up. A few weeks ago, my mom and Pat & I did not yet know why I had lost 12 pounds in a month without any reduction in my food intake. It was pure scariness then. Total mystery. Blind anxiety.

When we first discussed my health a few weeks ago, "Please tell me you haven't blogged about this," my mother said.

"No, Mom, I haven't yet."

"Yet?"

"I may want to at some point."

How can I explain that even though up to a couple dozen people stop by daily and I have some followers, my blog feels most of all like a friend in whom I confide.

Today, I went to the endocrinologist and she said that I have some form of hyperthyroidism and she's sending me for a bunch more tests to determine precisely which kind.

I will not be done with the tests until the 29th of November, my middle sister's birthday. On the up-side, the doctor complimented me on my fitness, which never happened before. My blood pressure was 105/70 and my resting heart-rate was 68 beats/minute, which for someone who hasn't done much exercise in the past month, and who is 46, we didn't think was bad at all.

God, I must count my blessings, rather than being babyish and anxious with fear. Next step might be to tweet about it and see who's willing to share any experience s/he has w/hyperthyroidism. As with most life-situations, I'm sure I'm not alone.

Wishing to Realize a Fantasy

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

If We Visited My Parents' Friends, Then My Father (z"l) Was Not Dead

It was my fantasy. If my mother and I drove three hours plus, we could reach a place, where my father of blessed memory (z"l) was still alive. A place with lots of leaves and people who seemed part of their land, rather than guests of it. A place where I could hear my father's voice, which is only faint to me now. A place, where my father and I were relative giants once I was no longer little, and which was full of pleasant surprises. A place, where perhaps no one remembered me well because I was the youngest and the younger ones always remember the older ones more than vice versa.

The Gently Painful Reality

Yesterday, the station wagon arrived at the white-clapboard house with its stone-slab steps. My mother was in the passenger seat as usual. My father (z"l) wasn't driving it, though, and his daughters weren't clambering restlessly around the back-seat and the way-back. It was just my mother and me.

Maybe my dad would be there already.

Last time we visited, I didn't even have a driver's license.

"Station Road. You just passed it," my mother said.

"Potter Road is what the GPS is telling me, not Station."

"I remember it was Station."

My mother remembered everything, too.

We got out of the car and saw that the party was down a mini nature-trail, in a clearing in the distance. My mom looked hopeless. "I can't make it down there [with my walker and bad back]."

"We'll ask the Gaineses to come up here."

"We can't expect them to leave the party they're hosting, Sarah."

"Well, let's at least go to the bathroom now."

I got my mother's walker out of the way-back, and she looked up at the house in despair. "I can't make it up there."

I had been the father, driving us to the Gaineses, and now, I was the mother. All I came for was to be the kid again, with two parents.

"I'm sorry, Mom, but I've gotta go," I said without making eye-contact.

A new, pleasant surprise: Two young boys appeared and said they would help us. I asked the older one to lead me to the bathroom inside the house.

"Here's the downstairs one," he told me, and as I walked toward it, I saw three horses in stone or cement relief on the wall and remembered them from when I was a kid. Nothing else other than the layout of the house was familiar.

When I emerged, I saw my mom sitting in the foyer, like magic; she had gotten herself up the steps -- or had the boys helped her?

And then more magic: My mom rolled slowly down to the clearing in the woods. My parents' friends, their youngest daughter and her musical husband -- who were the parents of the two sweet boys -- and several other friends were there, but my father wasn't...and my mother was, thank God.

B'nai Mitzvah, Turtlebacks, Moonbeams and the Jets

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

"No, they won't have a moment of silence at one o'clock, Sarah; they want people to order food and drinks, not lose their appetite." Pat told me this on the way to the restaurant, where we met our friends Felice & Stacy. Pat was right, as usual.

While waiting for our food, we talked of where we were that day. Me: in Manhattan, at 590 Madison Ave., till my Boca-Raton-based manager at the time sent me an instant message, telling me to leave the building immediately, as he worried that whoever had destroyed the World Trade Center would keep going after U.S. landmarks, and even if they didn't want to blow up our IBM building, we were next to the Trump Tower, which he thought could become a target. I talked of how I saw the dark cloud in my rear-view mirror the whole way up Madison Ave., and how parents were rushing across my path at red lights, holding their kids' hands -- the kids who they went to get from their schools -- and how it seemed that all of us made eye-contact....

In May, I posted a collection of several years' worth of commemorative blog-entries, but never did gain the energy to post screenshots of 2002-2006 entries. And I'm not going to re-read any of the entries today.

Living in Metro-NY, we've had a ton of coverage, and even our twin nephews' bar mitzvah remarks referred to 9/11, since they became b'nai mitzvah (plural of bar mitzvah) on 9/10/yesterday. They were just three years old when the Towers went down, but the tragedy touched their special day in any case.

On the way home from the celebration, heading toward the Midtown Tunnel, Pat & I saw a number of commemorative billboards, including this one:

Tonight, it's a full moon and I'm glad I can see moonbeams, but no longer the twin-beams from NYC, since the backyard trees have grown fuller over the past 10 years. Today, I was determined to have a life-affirming time, which we did by going to the zoo with Stacy & Felice after lunch. Here I am on a lizard sculpture:

Even so, I made sure to take my cellphone with me today, just in case, and found myself extremely anxious as I watched the start of the Jets-Cowboys game, where the whole crowd was chanting, "USA! USA! USA!..." Please, don't provoke them, I said to myself and then turned to Pat and said, "You know that I've always thought that if terrorists wanted to do further monumental damage, they'd blow up a football stadium full of top teams and fans. God forbid!" It hasn't happened, and God willing, it won't. Pat & I swam this morning, spent time with friends and animals, watched football, and now, we're tired. Please, God, keep this 10th anniversary of 9/11 safe.

Same As It Ever Was

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

...Only More Satisfying

Last week, while Pat & I were vacationing in Alaska, our niece Zoe started her first year of college. In these days of Black Eyed Peas, Katy Perry and Fountains of Wayne, may she find life-long friends and suffer minimal turbulence while living apart from her parents and brothers for the first, real time. Zoe's milestone vividly takes me back to the days of Talking Heads, Madonna, Al Jarreau and Laurie Anderson, i.e., my freshman year, especially because Pat & I ended our trip with a couple of days of vacationing in Vancouver with two of the first friends I made in college.

Lisa, Marni and Sarah at the Vancouver Public Library

When I began college 28 years ago, I couldn't imagine affording an Alaskan vacation, nor that I would wed a woman. Still, as extraordinary as both events would have been to my 18-year-old mind, not so much about me has changed since then, other than seeming more relaxed. Lisa and Marni confirmed this for me. They're right. I am more at ease, since revealing a number of secrets.

The review of Wendy Wasserstein's biography that I read in last Sunday's "New York Times" reminded me of openness vs. secrets. As a sophomore, during a Women's Studies course, I read Wendy Wasserstein's play, "Uncommon Women and Others." The play focused on a post-college reunion by a group of female college friends.

As I read it, I found it comforting to see their post-grad development combined with effectively muscle-memory conversations with one another, as though they had never parted company. When I read the NYT review, the critic honed in on how, for all her wide-open writing, Wendy Wasserstein was a pretty secretive person when it came to her own life, e.g., not telling people that she was dying, plus some other earlier family secrets.

Don't many of us try to keep secrets? In college, mine were that I was more attracted to women than men; had an eating disorder, where I binged whenever I could; and also a number of family secrets that were my family's to tell, not mine. It never occurred to me that my friends probably had their respective collections of secrets as well.

Who knows what Zoe's secrets are? Or her friends'. I just pray that she can have the same warm, funny, challenging, healing, fun, earnest, sad, buoyant, hopeful time as Wendy Wasserstein's characters, Marni, Lisa and I had when she reunites with friends post-college.

Playing Outside

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Weeding While Singing

Pat cajoled me; she got me to do major weeding this afternoon, and she helped, which made it bearable. What if I were Jain? Seems sad to uproot any living thing, but Pat tells me that the weeds choke the flowers -- the gladioli, the roses, the lamb's ear, the irises and dahlias -- so....

While weeding with my iPod on, I sang along loudly to Bobby Caldwell's "What You Won't Do for Love" and Scritti Politti's "A Perfect Way." The first song came out when I was 13 and the second when I was 20. The first song put me in a romantic mood when I was a new teen and the second one made me smile, imagining that *I* "...knew a perfect way to make the girls go crazy."

Finding a Scooter Buddy

When we got done, I saw the little kid next door, playing on her driveway, with her foot-powered scooter lying on its side at the top of the driveway. Either she moved in a month ago, or was staying with her grandmother for the summer. She couldn't have been more than six or seven. I went into our garage and took my Razor off its hook; Pat had given it to me for my 35th birthday, when Razors were especially popular, and to make my commute to NYC more streamlined. I unfolded it and pulled its neck to its full length, then walked out of the garage and called over to the girl, "Guess what I have?"

She did a double-take and then ran up her driveway to get hers. I scootered down our driveway into the street and to the foot of her driveway and asked, "May I come onto your driveway?"

She nodded. I seemed to be at least twice her height and width.

"I'm Sarah. What's your name?"

"Eva."

"That's a cool name --"

"My mom found it in a baby book."

She was fast. I followed her to the top of her driveway. "Look," I said, pointing to the foam on the handlebars and to the wheels, all of which were orange. "Orange is my favorite color," I said.

"Black is my favorite color," she answered, and I saw that her Razor's trim was classic-black, and then, "Look at this," and she shut her eyes and rolled in a big circle.

"That's great. Your eyes were closed," I said, when she stopped. "I'd be too afraid to do that."

"I just pretend that my mother is holding the handlebars as I do it."

Sweet. "That's great. Have you told your mom that?"

"Yes. It's my sisters' birthday today. They're twins."

"Happy birthday to them." When's the party? Why is she alone, playing outside? How come I've never seen them? How much younger are they?

"I thought they were boys when they were born because they had no hair."

"Did you have hair when you were born?"

"I just had a curl on the top here," she said, pointing to the center of the top of her scalp, which now, was covered with cutely arranged, long, dark, fuzzy corn-rows.

"I had thick, black hair, I'm told, but no eyebrows. My sisters prayed for them to grow and they did, but you can see that they're still not that thick." She didn't look.

"I didn't have eyebrows either." Hmm. Do I believe her? No.

"My mom had a baby yesterday."

"Is that really true?"

"Yes, a boy."

"What's his name?"

"Brian. It's my father's name."

"Congratulations!"

Eva scootered over to a patch of dirt next to the driveway and talked about some vegetables that they had planted unsuccessfully.

"Well, we planted tomatoes on our deck and guess what happened to them?"

She looked at me, wanting to know.

"There's a squirrel who's been eating them."

"We put garbage bags over ours with a hole at the top for the water and then the animals just think they're garbage."

"That's clever." And the plants don't suffocate?

We do some more scootering and I spot a smooth, small, light-purple, semi-faceted chunk of plastic in the middle of the driveway. "Hey Eva, come here! Look, this matches your dress."

"Oh, that's from my collection of diamonds. Come here, I'll show you," she says, scootering down to nearly the foot of the driveway and letting her scooter fall over into the grass. She crouches over a pile of them and keeps unearthing them from under the mulch near a Bonsai-ish pine tree. "They used to be around this tree, as decoration."

"How neat," I said, and felt like it was the most magic I'd seen in a long time -- these sleek, purple, plastic jewel-pebbles, being pluckable from the black mulch. I felt sweat trickling down my temples from the heat and the weeding and scootering, and didn't know what to do with my awe and childhood-reminiscent thrill. "I'm sweaty and I have to go inside now," I said a bit abruptly.

She nodded without looking up at me. "Nice meeting you, Eva." She nodded again. I scootered down her driveway and back up mine, pressed the code to open one of the garage doors and looked over and saw her watching me. When she saw me see her, she looked back down at the purple pile.

A couple hours later, Pat & I were on our deck, sitting in our double-rocker and hearing party-noise next-door. Pat: "Yeah, they've got 'Happy Birthday' balloons out front."

Maybe Brian does exist. Why not, if there can be purple diamonds?

Have You Been Here Before?

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Yes, Five Years Ago

I push this new friend's shoulder playfully and say, "Don't wait another five years to come back!"

"Well, I'm from Berlin," she says and I feel silly.

"Ah, well...."

Pat & I are headed out of Shabbat services last night when I see a woman, standing by herself near the exit. Is she an older version of a young woman I knew when I lived in Jerusalem? I look at her like she looks familiar, but then realize she's not. She's not at all old enough to be that friend.

She has thick, nearly black hair to just above her shoulders; dark, twinkling eyes; is almost slight in physique at a quick glance; and is a few inches shorter, and many years younger, than I.

"Lots of young Israeli lesbians are coming to Berlin..." she says when I ask her how big the community is where she's from. I'm trying to act casual about her homeland, but it's still wild to me to meet a young, Jewish person, let alone a young, Jewish lesbian, from Germany -- it's just the generation I'm from, I guess, but I'm still stuck in a Holocaust time-warp when I least expect it.

"I was in Hamburg once, but just overnight for a focus group, for business," I say, and she becomes excited that I've been to Germany. "I've been told that when I go back, I really need to see Berlin."

"Yes, definitely, you should," she says, looking at both of us.

Pat recalls that a congregant's family is from Germany and that he gave a Torah from the family to the local, re-built synagogue in the town they were from.

I bring him over to meet her. Pat & I want to leave in any case, as that's how we spotted the woman at the exit in the first place, but we don't like to ignore strangers.

Once the woman and he begin speaking in German, I excuse us. The woman looks anxious and I say, "Are you on Facebook?"

"No, I've not wanted to be, but I can see that I'm going to need to be before long....Let's exchange e-mail addresses, in case you come to Berlin."

"Sure." I write down Pat's and mine and she writes hers -- her name spelled backwards.

Wow, a young, Jewish lesbian, living in Berlin today....Humanity hosts so many stories.