Author : Patty DannEditor : Sallie Sanborn
Publisher : Trumpeter
Year : 2007
Publish In : London
Collation : 166 p ; 20 cm
Sinopsis :
The snowy night I met Willem at a synagogue in New York City, in February of 1990, I Knew we would marry, but I did not know it would last only ten year. He was sitting in front of me and I fell only ten years. He was sitting in front of me and I fell in love with the back of his neck. The floor sloped down to the front, so I didn't realize he was six feet three inches more than a foot taller than I. He was from Holland, the son of a Mennonite minister, and was drawn to Judaism. I was the child of suburban assimilated Jews. He was almost forty and had never wed, and I was thirty seven and had just about given up on men, Jewish or otherwise.
Soon after, he dragged me to the Lower East Side, where we met an old rabbi, who looked at us a bit askance and said wisely, "You will have a sweet and crazy life together," which we did.
Nine years later, on a April day 1999, our little family Willem; Jake, our three year old son, whom we'd adopted from Lithuania as a baby; and I visited a friend's sheep farm in Connecticut. When we returned to New York, Willem parked the car on the street near our apartment. We walked from the car with Jake riding on Willem's shoulders.
Willem said, "What's a car seat?" and with that seemingly simple question we entered a new kingdom. Suddenly the work I'd been doing the past twenty years, teaching writing workshops where I give simple memory assignments to help my students' became my own personal quest to remember my life, my husband's life, the life of do the assigments I gave my students, so that I had a taste of my own medicine, or as, the Dutch would say, "a taste of my own cookie dough."
I remember watching an interview with John F. Kennedy Jr., where he said he didn't know if he remembered sitting under his father's desk at the White House or if seeing all those photographs constructed the memory.
All that effort to remember, I thought, all those talismans in Jake's room. As I poured the lemonade I smiled to myself. I now realized that this was part of it all. Perhaps in fifteen years, or perhaps when he is an old man, Jake will have a memory of his father, perhaps then it will be time to remember again.
short story
read this book only in padmanaba library
Willem said, "What's a car seat?" and with that seemingly simple question we entered a new kingdom. Suddenly the work I'd been doing the past twenty years, teaching writing workshops where I give simple memory assignments to help my students' became my own personal quest to remember my life, my husband's life, the life of do the assigments I gave my students, so that I had a taste of my own medicine, or as, the Dutch would say, "a taste of my own cookie dough."
I remember watching an interview with John F. Kennedy Jr., where he said he didn't know if he remembered sitting under his father's desk at the White House or if seeing all those photographs constructed the memory.
All that effort to remember, I thought, all those talismans in Jake's room. As I poured the lemonade I smiled to myself. I now realized that this was part of it all. Perhaps in fifteen years, or perhaps when he is an old man, Jake will have a memory of his father, perhaps then it will be time to remember again.
short story
read this book only in padmanaba library
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