Hello World! | Sequence 2
“Your name is Abba because I got to pick my Abba.” [Mila, 9/28/21]
Do traditions of Judaism create expert swimmers in the rivers of collective memory? If the kiddush cup makes a testimony to creation, what cup provokes the testimony to the creation of yourself? Can we sit out a morning swim and stay along the shore to observe the animation of this creation? Or leap into spiritual springs of alternate memories in the pools of Pisces to hear the stories of the beings our soul experienced in different bodies? Why is this cosmic solid state drive blocked off from the superadmins? When your knocks on the doors of time are persistent someone eventually does answer. Be mindful of the question you hold because the answer will always get you kicked out of the garden, and redirect you back to the rivers of thought that more often than not require you reexperience the school of Earth.
Laniado hospital, Netanya, Israel
November 6, 1979
It was a nightmare, chaos really. I saw green pastures, deep blue oceans, with pure white wash caressing the tan shore, well maybe the top view is momentarily majestic. Immediately followed by beeps, loud beeps, piercing loud beeps. The worst sound the Universe can produce, the kind that makes you cry. Tonal monstrosities, beeps, pokes, wetness, and the inability to speak. My vocal chords are like luggage that didn’t show up at the airport, I left with them, yet upon arrival they’re just not there. The inability to communicate is like being tired, you don’t exactly know your inability to sleep is missing, until you suddenly can’t do it. I didn’t yet know I’ll be heading to Detroit, I couldn’t even say “D”.
Legend has it, I was delivered within minutes of arrival at the hospital. Before my dad could park the car, his name is Zelik which means happy or joyous in Yiddish. When he made his way up to the delivery room, my mom was already holding me, her name is Noga which means Venus or bright light in Hebrew.
“What are we going to call him?” my mom asked.
“What do you think about Roni?” my dad suggested.
“Hi Roni.” my mom smiled.
In Judaism there’s a superstition about many things and discussing my name during the transmigration of my soul is a forbidden topic.
“My dad also asked to call him Moshe [Moses]” my dad added.
“A man named Moses helped us exit Russia, and he passed away.”
Naming a baby after someone who passed is the opposite of superstition, it’s tradition!
“He does not look like a Moses.” My mom said.
My mom held a fluffy brown and white, stuffed puppy, with a pink velvet tongue and handed him to me; I latched on immediately.
To a baby in beige, the world is beige, and my new world began beige; and brown. With bean shaped black pomace tiles that everyone seemed to have. Cream door posts, cream doors, nickel handles and one universal key that seemed to open all the doors; which are mostly always open anyway. Except for the front door. Here, front doors are constructed of reinforced steel with a lock slide, a dead bolt, and a key to keep us safe from the robbers. This design seemed to work because I never met any of them. For the first six months of residency, we lived in the projects. Locally, we called it “Ezorim” which roughly means “The Areas”. A location couldn’t be named anything more generically ambiguous and it looked exactly as it sounded. Cream midrises that blended perfectly with the arid, brown, grassless fields surrounding them. Wooden posts were painted cream. Walls of off-white eggshell which were finished with thorns painted in them pricking you if you dared lean on the wall. Who painted these? Communist Youth? Everybody had non-leanable walls in The Areas. And large needle point art of Russian woods and streams. Deer in green forests; elements that Netanya, Israel had, neither. At least not in Ezorim, The Areas.
From the outside you would think nothing happens at the building where we arrived. From within you would quickly learn, the first floor resident grown ups yell at first floor resident children. The building was shaped like an L, stuccoed and structured from the outer perimeter, but from the inside, where everybody hung their laundry, the windows were wide open to chaos, the unpredictable screams of children, and everyone had to do their laundry of which children produced the most of! Wherever the voices of the psychic void travel that we wipe clean between the time we’re newly born and adolescence, I would never voluntarily travel to. They must be echoing in the black holes of the Universe reflecting off primitive self. Imagine the torture in a world that has not yet invented soundless headphones, at least not yet for my being in this space and time.
What the second floor offered in semi-quietness, the 3rd floor amplified in the second worst sound in the universe, vocal vulgarity, volcanic nonsensary; the planet mars, the color red; yelling. And guess who lived on the third floor? That’s right, happiness, Venus and joy, and my sister, Lily. Her name means the same as it does in English, flower. I cannot much tell you what was being yelled, but I can tell you Russian is the cruelest of languages producing the nastiest sadomasochist citizenry; many with the mustache of Stalin himself. A culture that sent the dog Laika into space with no provisions of return and no protest from the people begins to scratch the surface of understanding brute cold Russian. To learn Russian is to hear another child’s torture, Level eleven testosterone spontaneously combusting on my ear drums. Who would want that? Was that in the fine print of the contract I signed to experience this? Or a highway to jumpstart my soul out of my bones and hover over the experience that is suffocating my body? There’s no way I would select this appetizer of an experience for self, so it must not be bad? When, can it then, be all good? Se la vie, neither, nor. Life seems to be starting with spontaneous chaos from the Russian speaking people, I’ll stick to my mother’s Hebrew.