Kristall Slanted Light
Refractions, reflections, and sadness
11/9/23 (Belated)
I don’t hate November, but lately I’ve slanted in that direction. Generally, I love the golden colors, and even the way the sun hits the brick wall toward the back of our house.
In those rays I think of my grandmother, the brick set of apartments where she lived when I was a boy, and how in November when we’d go to see her on those late Sunday afternoons, she and my Aunt Carole wouldn’t cook out for us because the wind would invade their thoughts of fire, would keep them huddled inside, and so we’d eat kosher food from the local deli, and this would be the first marker in the way I understood us to be Jewish.
I loved those Sundays until I learned more about petty and real jealousies, the triangulation that caught me in the middle of some war between my parents and between my mother and her mother-in-law, with my dad never trying to be peacemaker.
Now I see that this was all a tenuous strip of land, un and non-negotiable, really, or at least by me. I understand what it means to try to be a peacekeeper, when in the end, nothing was kept but the slants of light that hit me so forcefully as I realize that I can’t distinguish my own feelings from the ones imposed on me, occupied within me by another’s feud.