Resting

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm eighty

There’s a Greek grocery on Lake and Aldrich that whispers to me out of the long ago, reminding me of the shops on Broadway that sold smoked fish and the bakeries that made seeded rye fresh every day. I can’t resist this place. We go there often to buy French feta and black mammoth olives, inevitably succumbing to a nice chunk of pistachio halvah as well. Halvah is good for you, the owner tells me. Today we didn’t even plan a trip to Bill’s Imported, finding ourselves in front of the briny shrine of wrinkled olives as if in a trance. The area around the store is crummy, garbage in the gutter. The place itself resists any attempt to gentrify. No neon. No self-checkout. Not many customers. Besides the food, I like to go to Bill’s to chat with the owner, a woman about my age who sometimes waits on us but is always, in any case, in the store. I asked her today where she comes from in Greece. “Kalamata,” she says. “In the Peloponnese,” pointing ruefully at a travel poster of impossibly blue water flowing through a natural archway. How, I wondered, could you start in that sundrenched place and end up on a rainy day in a corner grocery in Minneapolis. The store owner’s English is not that great. I have the sense that she’s been here a long time but still swims in the Ionian Sea in her dreams. She rarely has much to say, but today she tells me that she works every day. “I don’t like to stay home alone,” she says. And isn’t that the universal refrain?

Photo by Zhen Yao on Unsplash

Yesterday, on another field trip, I accompanied my grandson to church. The congregation is loosely affiliated with the UCC and checks all the boxes for me. They talk about immigration and racism and LGBTQ issues and climate. Still, it’s as unfamiliar as pig’s feet and I always think I’m going to be found out. See that woman with the curly hair and the funny accent? Watch out, she might be Jewish. But they were reading Genesis 12 which I know as Lech Lecha. God tells Abraham to leave his father’s house and go forth without really knowing where he’s going. Ain’t it the truth? I took the opportunity to explain to my grandson, sneaking in a little Hebrew, that Lech Lecha also means go inward. He said “You mean, figure out how you can be the best version of yourself?” You cannot improve upon that conversation. He is at twenty an excellent traveling companion and what are we all doing if not traveling. From Kalamata to Minneapolis. From Ur to Canaan. From fearful to curious.

After the service, there was a lunch for a large crowd where we were asked to sit with people we didn’t know. This was not difficult for me since I didn’t know anyone. There were questions for us to ask one another. The questions were about worship. What are you comfortable with? What are you uncomfortable with? Several of the people at my table were escapees from evangelical churches. They talked a lot about the music and how whenever it took on the quality of “praise,” they became uneasy. I was fascinated. I feel squeamish about the word “worship” to begin with and had no idea that some Christian believers might be uncomfortable with the word “praise.” They reminded me of the many people I met in Protestant churches in my Hospice days in Holyoke, Massachusetts who were running away from their Catholic childhoods. We are all always on the move, always reinventing ourselves. There is Genesis and there is Exodus and then there is Genesis again.

All of this traveling, by sea and by air, along the arteries of belief, trying to know the unknowable, trying to nail down what by definition cannot be captured, must at some point come to a place of rest. I’m feeling that more often now. At eighty years of age, this moment becomes all there is. The pillows supporting my back. The coffee getting cold on my bedside table. Frank reading about the Dodgers winning in the eighteenth inning. The old woman from Kalamata and I share a slow tempo and an inclination to be in the world but not entirely of it. I sit on a park bench in the ongoing miracle of this October and watch small children on the swings like my mother and my grandmother before me.

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