Observing the fast

Last week, a Jewish fast day, 17th of Tammuz, coincided with a day of Ramadan. Several groups got it in mind to take advantage of this and make the day one of mutual consideration and solidarity between Jews and Muslims in light of the cascade of horrors going on in Israel. Some of the groups called it simply a fast day, and others called it a hunger strike. Reading about it, I got hung up on this difference as I considered joining a friend for the event. If a fast day, then its purpose would be more inward looking, meditative. If a hunger strike, then a public performance designed to draw attention. It was muddy from the start. My Muslim friends and colleagues were fasting anyway, but none of my Jewish friends normally observe this particular day. And as for me, a secular humanist of Christian cultural heritage and a non-believer all around, what was I doing here? If I fasted for a day, what would I accomplish? Was this self-deprivation as self-indulgence? Finally, I decided, why not try it? I wouldn’t die, and I might learn something. Besides, although my readership is small, I think of myself as a writer, and this is an experience I might approach with journalistic interest. So here we are.

On the day itself, I had failed to utilize the strategy of waking up before dawn for a meal, so when I woke up on July 15th, I already hadn’t eaten in ten hours. It doesn’t take long for the brain to get clouded. On the way to the boys’ swim lessons, Simon asked if he could go to the playground. “Yes,” I told him, “You can play for a couple…” what? what kind of units is it? Days? Hours? No, minutes. Minutes is right.

Once you are hungry, it doesn’t so much progress throughout the day. The stomach goes through its usual cyclical processes, churning on nothing, informing the brain of this, and then comes a combined wave of nausea and longing for food. You chew your thumb and notice your eyeballs are sluggish in their sockets and having trouble tracking people’s movements. Then it passes and the sensation of hunger abates, and you feel almost as if you’ve mastered it. When it rushes back, you realize, you’re not the one in control.

As I passed through these repetitive phases, it became clear to me how like grief hunger is. At full force, it makes me distracted, panicky. I can’t focus on anything. I want very badly to eat, decide that I will, and remember all over again that I can’t. The times when the hunger comes as a persistent knocking, nausea, a flood of saliva. Trying to speak to normal people who have eaten lunch and a snack feels like a performance. I am not quite following what this woman is saying to me. I lost the thread and now am trying to guess the right reaction. Am I raising my eyebrows the right amount? Is this the right thing to do with my face? When I speak, my fluency is degraded, and I cast around for words.

While my husband and sons ate supper, I stayed upstairs, distracted by even the clink of a fork against a bowl. I tried to read, went online, made the profound error of looking at a food blog. After I read to the boys and put them to bed, I still had half an hour or so before sundown. Watching TV and knitting were not sufficient to the purpose. Several times a minute I looked at the clock. I got up, and went to watch night fall. A storm had been through and the street was still steaming. The maples were bowed in dripping canopies. When the wood thrushes and veerys had begun singing forty minutes before, it had been a torment, knowing how close I was, but not quite there yet. At this time of year, in these latitudes, it does not get dark until long after sunset, but the light does shift in the long gloaming. I watched things grow granular and the light diffuse. By now, I could eat again.

A few days after the fast, I was packing for a family camping trip. On my computer, I had up several tabs. Between “Pillsbury State Park” and “Recipes: Kale Chips” was the tab reading “Through Lens, 4 Boys Dead by Gaza Shore.” I left the tab up all day, opening it from time to time and looking at the picture of a dead boy on the sand, ashen skin, legs twisted up under him, the soles of his bare feet visible at grotesque angles. What had the fasting day done for these boys? Nothing. And for me? Over the course of that day, how many times had I thought of the mothers putting their children in the ground, and far worse, the aftermath? How many times would I have thought of them otherwise, had the hunger not been coming and going in its fierce waves?

In the end, I fasted for the same reason people travel, or walk the length of the Appalachian Trail, or read. To be out of one’s own head for a time. To learn something about a culture that isn’t yours. To find out what you find out. I realized I’d been being quiet about what happens in Gaza because I’d believed what people had said to me–“You can’t understand. You’re not a Jew. You can’t understand, you don’t live there. You have no idea. You don’t understand.” I admit to not fully understanding all the nuances of what is happening there. But there is not a lot of nuance to dead children. If there are severely disabled adults dead under a pile of rubble that used to be their home, if there are four boys lying dead on a beach in t-shirts and swim trunks, something is terribly wrong. I am not naive and I understand about Hamas, and terrorism, but this is too great a price. I am not a Jew and I am not a Muslim, but I am a mother, and that is my proper tribe. If anyone tries to pat me on the head and tell me I don’t understand about Israel again, I will not quiet down and concede the point. I am learning the history, learning the nuances, learning the names of the players and the geography. It’s not an easy task, but it is far easier than learning how to reclassify enemies as fellow humans. Unless that is done, I fear for Israel, for Gaza, and for all those living with their anxious guts clenched every day as they do what I am doing–plan a summer holiday, make snacks for the trip, look again at the crumpled bodies.

Read Full Post »

A renaissance and a retirement

After just about thirty five years of service to the Town (City) of Amesbury, Massachusetts, my father, Joseph Fahey, at last retired. He did not stop working; apparently they are still contracting his assistance, but the official day came, and the official party too, and now he is much more at liberty to garden. This is a pastime he manages to extend about year-round, even when it becomes the spectator sport of seed catalog perusal in winter.

For many years, he had no time to garden. Taking the job in Amesbury in the office of Administration and Development, as I believe it was then called, he took on a day job and also all the night meetings: hearings, Board of Selectmen, Town Meeting, then City Councils, Zoning Boards, Planning Boards. When I was little, I remember him being gone a lot at night, and when he came home, he carted a brown briefcase with him. I didn’t understand what he did, or why; the minds and motivations of our parents are not so much impenetrable to children so much as they are of little interest, compared with our own crises and fears. My mother was cooped up with me and an ever increasing number of other children, and no means of ferrying us around town, my father being in possession of the only car. Now that I have children, I recognize what a misery that can be.

Dad’s gotta work (a letter dated one week after I was born).

As I approached adolescence, I took gradual notice of what it was my father was up to. Already, he had affected great changes in the town. The old Upper Millyard, which had become a parking lot for hulking tanker trucks and construction equipment now was made up instead with a path by the river and bridges over it, tree-lined walkways, flower beds where I had crouched, grinning, not more than a toddler, for a newspaper photo as we all planted tulips and then, later in the season, marigolds. In summer, the concrete amphitheater they built hosted concerts, plays, and one summer, on my very birthday, a magic show in which I was selected to come up and volunteer to help with a trick. There was a pancake breakfast in the pines, a firemen’s muster, a downtown that struggled and vacillated between its old self (full of townie bars, an ancient hobby shop whose owners seemed to detest children) and its new self (the brief lifespans of a book shop and a soda fountain that I loved and then mourned when they did not survive.) I could not list all the people who worked on and helped with the many projects my father had underway, because I would forget some of them, and that would be no good since I know them all personally, or did. They came for my parents’ dinner parties, where I would crouch in the dark hall to listen to them all talk town politics (or gossip).

Downtown Amesbury now is a charming nest of streets and squares and parks with plenty of restaurants and little shops and places to get coffee or nice chocolates. There’s very little grit left, just a bit swept into the corners here and there. Christophe and I lived, briefly, in an apartment in a rehabilitated mill building verging on the Powwow River above the dam. We could look straight down from our window to the begging ducks. When I walk through town now, I can see the underlayment of what used to be here. It’s taken my whole lifetime for these changes to be put in place. My father spent nearly his entire professional career in civil service to this one community. It’s not glamorous work, and though he had a hand in nearly everything that’s gone on these three decades, rarely did he get the full measure of the recognition he deserved. His was not an elected position, and when he started, we still followed the Town Meeting form of governance. There were no mayoral campaigns, and the Selectmen were hardly a flashy bunch. He was caught up in politics plenty, to be sure, and he is, fundamentally, a political animal. But not having to be elected, he was more at leisure to concoct strategies and angle for plans. His job was physical, on the ground, intimate with the town and its inner workings. My sisters and I found a series of VHS tapes at home once, and settling down to view them, discovered they were footage of the sewer network below ground. Hours of grainy, gray, sloshing straightaways, turnings, and side tunnels. We called them “the sewer tapes,” and, inexplicably, watched them more than once. He might resist the analogy to the rest of his work, but it’s apt; the job required rubber boots, determination, and the courage to keep on in the dark when the future was lit with only a thin beam of light.

On a freezing wedding day, a stop in the Millyard.

I have since moved to a town five miles from Amesbury, but the rest of my family still lives there, at least for now. I was married there, in a stone church downtown, and we had our portraits done on the bridges over the Powwow as it began to snow. I know my father sees our attachment to this town as one of the greatest marks of his legacy. We were raised there, and didn’t want to leave. I see it as larger than that still. Most of us, when our parents come to retire, don’t really understand what they did all day. What drove them, what frustrated them, what they hoped to leave behind. I didn’t really either, but I have the great good fortune to see it all around me whenever I walk through my hometown. I can see what mattered to him. He was pragmatic, diligent, and focused, but there was the dreamer in him too, all along. A part of him that hangs on to the Kennedy rhetoric, a commitment to a progressive agenda that goes beyond preservation of open space, mixed use zoning, and walkable communities, though all that mattered too. He was the Director of Community and Economic Development, and he balanced them expertly, but I know, in his heart, that it’s that first part of which he is most proud. And not only have his children elected to stay in that Community, we’ve learned, trotting along at his heels to work sites, or listening in on meetings, or reading the papers, that this is what you do–offer yourself into public service. We are all of us committed to public art, public education, global governance, conservation and an environmental ethic, town service. That’s not solely his doing, but it is a partial accounting of his work. When the last major project he’s been pushing for, the Lower Millyard rehabilitation, comes to fruition, they tell us there will be a plaque with his name on it somewhere or other. I think there should be some grand monument instead. Then I realize, there already is.

Read Full Post »