Present Day: Dishes

Today is the first day this week that I have not worked, and I am remembering very clearly now--oh right, I use school as a not-so-effective technique for avoiding my uncomfortable feelings about whatever is happening in my life. In some cases it works, in the short term at least, since I got through three very complicated and challenging break-ups as well as numerous challenges with family and finances by being a completely ambitious, focused, motivated, driven educator the past six or so years...except for the times when I would hide in the adult bathroom in the upstairs hall next to the library and cry. Ugh.

And, old habits die hard so the past two days at school have been busy, busy and relatively emotion-free (other than the emotion I feel when I ask a student to GET IN LINE AND STOP TALKING ALREADY and they look at me, turn back around, and continue their conversation with a friend) but today I am home and playing housewife, doing laundry and cleaning up the kitchen from last night's dinner with Rebecca's cousins who are here from out of town and guess what? There are a lot of things that, without the distraction of pitching kickball at P.E., have been on my mind.

Always it is wonderful living with Mark and Rebecca, and sometimes it is challenging as the single housemate of two newlyweds. Today while doing the dishes, avoiding the set for which the happy couple registered as wedding gifts since they are handmade and not so inexpensive and there is a "you break it, you replace it" policy in this household and I should not have to replace anything if I didn't even get to marry either of them and experience the ownership of these gorgeous table settings in the first place, I was thinking about my own dishes. This is not the first time, actually the third I think, that dishes or other kitchenware have prompted a strange and melancholic reflection this year. Once was in my Jerusalem kitchen, once was in a Chinese restaurant in Alameda, and then today. The fact that I was listening to Ani DiFranco probably didn't help much.

There is someone with whom I had talked about traveling this year. From January to June it was an on-again, off-again topic of discussion, as were many things between and about us. I remembered today while doing the dishes a time in April when I was setting a table not for cousins coming to dinner but for a Passover seder of twenty, a table that was to be surrounded by friends and friends of friends and covered with the haggadot, the books that tell the order of the meal and the story of the exodus from Egypt, that we had made ourselves. Amidst the seder plate we'd created from chunks of old mortared bricks we'd found at Baker Beach, among the crayons and pipe cleaners and beads and construction paper we'd put out for those dining with us that evening to craft into art projects along the way, I laid out a set of dishes I'd never seen before, dishes washed in beautiful handpainted stripes and shades of brown. "You know," their owner said, "I just realized something--these dishes will look really nice with your green ones. We won't even need a new set right away, we'll make our own set by putting all these together and then we'll have so many that we can have everyone over for dinner whenever we want!"

And, my green dishes and bowls and cups and plates are now in storage in Alameda and I am leaving for Ghana in ten days. On my own. So I think you can figure out the end of that story.

Sigh.

A (publicly) confidential note to the owner of those dishes, even though I know you do not read what I write here: Yes--they would have looked nice together. Just like we would have looked nice together standing by the Kotel or by the Dead Sea or under the bright blue African sky. But, things had gotten very not-nice between us and in the end I know, no matter how much I miss your or even my own dishes, this is a year for me to travel alone.

A note to myself: Knock it off with the Ani DiFranco. Maybe some Beastie Boys would be better? I think I'll try that.