The Naturalist

The Naturalist

by Mary Fox           

            The live eel is just inches away from my face. I have to make a split-second decision whether or not to touch him, but as I have a live clam in hand, I skip my turn. Many of the others standing next to me do the same; we examine the eel through the clear plastic bag that stores him and pass him on. Max, a young college student, asks if he can take the eel out of the bag of water and hold him.

            “Sure,” says the Naturalist instructor. “If you can. He’s almost awake. They’re awfully slippery.”

            “Well,” he hesitates. “I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to be that guy.”

            Amy, a young single mom, smiles sweetly and says, “C’mon Max, go for it.”

            Max picks up the eel, and, as predicted, it pops awake and slides from his hands to the ground. He’s mortified; he flushes. Amy pats his shoulder, laughs, and says, “nice try.”

            Henry, an ex-marine sergeant standing next to me, says, “Hey, I guess you are that guy, huh Max?”

            Max takes the teasing well and besides, the instructor has scooped up the runaway with a net. Already, the eel has swum back downstream. This instructor is accustomed to the shenanigans of her volunteers; she can handle us as expertly as she does the rest of the wildlife in her stream.

            It’s week three of Maryland State Master Naturalist training, and I’m a student. I don’t remember what exactly made me want to take this class. Maybe I just saw the sign-up poster in the park and got curious. Maybe I was missing my days of growing up on a farm in Maryland where the woods, rivers, and wilds were minutes away. Or maybe I had seen one too many ‘earth-is-dying’ stories on National Geographic Channel and could no longer ignore the ache to do something good to the earth before I leave it.

            For whatever reason, I found myself, a recently retired grandmother, committing my Tuesdays and several more field trip days for three months and eighty-plus hours of volunteer service each year. I knew it had to be a good thing. What I didn’t know was that it would change the way I relate to my planet.

***

            Master Naturalist trainees carry enormous loose-leaf binders. The books come to us about three inches thick and then grow to four or even five inches. They get filled with hand-outs and brochures, of course, and then we add stuff to them: leaf cuts, feathers, little sticks, maybe an insect wing. Those bits that don’t get tucked into the binders end up clinging to us as we head home after the day’s work. Our cars are soon cluttered, too, with sticks, stones, and seed pods. Every day of training sends us on at least two journeys; the intellectual wash-down  of information from the guest instructors and the treks afterward in fields and streams to look at samples that will bring to life the mind’s new contents.

            I can never decide which of the journeys I love best. I’m a lifelong knowledge gatherer, eager for concepts, rubrics for classification, definitions of bugs and beasts. I adore the little chart that shows things like how eighty percent of my DNA is identical to that of most insects. About half of the class are perennial students like me. We miss that every-September cornucopia of courses and books; we never got enough of school and left it only because there was no pay coming in.

            The other half of the students seem to struggle through the didactic material. Their feet start to quiver and tap as lunch time gets close; they can’t wait to suit up and head for the woods. They are the ones always in front or trailing behind. They never travel with the pack; they are outliers looking for something they haven’t seen before, something not in the book, a question the trail guide can’t answer. First out and last in; these are the people from whom I learn the most. I don’t have a brain like theirs, even though I always thought of myself as wide open to experience. It never occurred to me, I admit, to taste a leaf or smell it to see if it was in the mint or poppy family.

            I envy that look they wear on their faces; these ‘natural’ naturalists with mud on their boots and eyes open wider than the rest of us. Their faces seem larger, their senses attuned to each channel on nature’s wide-screen show. ‘Natural’ naturalists see more flowers and birds and plant types; they see insects I barely notice; they hear bird calls that are just background noise to me. They might be holding a leaf that smells like mint, scratching it with a fingernail to sniff, but what they say comes from some other direction entirely: “that was a pileated woodpecker; he’s looking for a mate.” I look up quickly, hoping to spot it too, but all I see is a tiny flash of red and then nothing. I’m carrying the best binoculars money can buy, yet I’ve missed the bird, as well the scent of mint.

            In the outdoor expeditions, we all accumulate a mishmash of little pieces of the forest, along with a plethora of facts that I’ll forget in a week or hours, or sometimes even minutes. The leaves I can manage to hang onto, but all those exquisite details can’t find a rubric to tuck into when they hit my brain. They have to compete with all the other sights and sounds. They must jockey for a place in the classifications of flora and fauna, invasive versus endangered species, or whether they are pollinators. Despite what I forget, I have assimilated things like coevolution and pollination, habitats and watersheds, habitat loss and pollution. I’ve learned the most important lesson: how things connect.

***

            We all come to love the field trips. It was a gorgeous day when we went to the local stream to assess its health. We were there to count mayflies and eels. We quickly found mayflies and rejoiced; this find alone is enough to mark this as a healthy stream. We’ve learned which ones are the most fragile species, the ones easily killed by invaders and pollution.  That day, I wore high rubber boots because our instructor the Naturalist is going to shock the water with a power paddle, stunning everything within a six-feet radius. We stood next to her in our boots, holding nets and buckets. We swooped our nets through the water and dunked their contents into the buckets, then went ashore with our catch to count mayflies, weigh and measure eels, and see what else was in there, such as the tiny Asian clams that are just a quarter of an inch wide yet a serious threat to our freshwater streams. Some of us scooped out the buckets and bagged the critters, while others recorded the markers of stream health, and still others formed lines to return the wildlife to the stream. Like always, we had been careful to put things back when we left the park.

***

            In nearly every class, we all stew over problems with invasive species. One day, I bring in a lovely flower that has popped up all over my yard. I show it to Rebecca, the program director, who says, “I don’t know what it is; ask Ellen. And hey, if it’s a good propagator, bring me some seeds. I need something to fill in at the rain garden.”

            Ellen is the ‘flower woman.’ She scratches a leaf, sniffs it, and says, “I think it could be a mustard…no wait. The leaves are scalloped…” She pulls out her smart phone. “Here, let me post a picture in my Google group.”

            The lecture comes and goes; the instructor happens to be an edible plant expert. She looks at my mystery plant and says, “Looks like an asteraceae. Wait, it’s more like a ranunculus; if so, it’s non-native and very invasive.”

            She means buttercup, but I’ve learned enough today to rule that out; my plant is too tall.  

             Ellen heads over to me during the break.

            “Found it.” She pulls up a likeness of my plant on her smart phone.

            “That’s it,” I smile, delighted.

            Her face is even more triumphant than mine and then darkens. She says, “it’s greater celandine, AKA devil’s milk or wartwort. It’s difficult, make that impossible, to keep it from spreading like crazy. By the way; it came here from Europe. Sorry.”

            I recoil in mock horror at Ellen’s verdict: non-native, invasive. I’m only partly playacting; I now have to go home and yank out all those lovely flowers. I’ve learned, of course, not to call the unwanted plants by the name ‘weeds.’ There are only ‘plants that misbehave,’ whether they’re in planned gardens or untamed meadows. The greater celandine would push out all my Black-eyed Susans and milkweeds, so it has to go.

            We worship milkweeds here in this class. We propagate them from seeds in the fall and give the extra seedlings to our friends in spring. Many insect species depend on them as a primary food source. Most important to us are monarch butterflies, since both larvae and adults eat only milkweed.

            Not a weed at all, it’s a tall, stately flower with fruits shaped as green pods that fall off, turn brown, and burst open in the fall to let out great tufts of fluffy seeds. We try to grab them as they float off, and we sprinkle them in potting soil for over-wintering. You can’t propagate them as transplants since their roots are deep and interconnected, spreading themselves underground to form a thick colony that quickly crowds out any other plants.

            In other words, the milkweed is an invasive plant, but it’s the only food monarch butterflies eat. We love our monarch butterflies here in Maryland, and we’ll work hard to keep them. We are sincerely anguished to learn there’s been a ten-fold drop in the butterfly’s population over the last decade. Some scientists predict the monarch will go extinct within twenty years.

            But not if naturalists can help it.

            Change the earth back; wipe away the effects of human mismanagement.

            Like many of us in class, I find myself revisiting the way I eat, garden, buy things. I find that habits that have seemed innocent to me before, now seem selfish, as for example, growing great lawns of grass that strain the water table.

            I have taken on the torch of the newly converted volunteer naturalist, as have most of us in this class, and we are very tiresome to handle—opinionated, unpredictably creative, unruly. We are very different from each other—the housewife, the marine sergeant, that young mom, the college students, retirees, part-time professionals, and paid staff. No matter what our differences, we’ve come to share something profound and permanent. We all wear raincoats, carry binoculars, have magnifying glasses hanging out of our pockets, dress in beat-up hiking shoes and blue jeans, and carry backpacks. And each and every time, the power of our journey takes us individually and collectively to a place where we are becoming bigger and better than our real selves.

 

Mary H. Fox, PhD, is a psychologist who studied literature and poetry before matriculating to undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology. She was an associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and for 25 years had a psychology practice. She has published a textbook, many journal articles, and a few short stories. She is also becoming a Master Naturalist.

Eulogy

Eulogy

by Douglas Light

 

“Like my hair?” my brother Brad asks, standing under the funeral home awning. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen him, five since we’ve talked. He smokes a cigarette while holding two bottles of Mountain Dew. An uneven shag of dark and gray, his hair is thick except for a small bald spot. He looks awful: his two front teeth lost to decay and his glasses missing the right stem.  

Indianapolis. Monday. December 22. The shortest day of the year. I’d been here the week prior for the funeral of a friend. Now I’m back for the funeral of my grandfather. 

I give my brother an awkward hug. Playing, eating, fighting. Siblings spend more time together as children than they do with their parents. Yet totaled up, the hours Brad and I were awake, interacting and physically in each other’s company is less than 33,000—less than four full cycles around the sun.   

“You take a cab?” I ask. Aside from my rental, there is only one other car in the lot, a gold Cadillac in good condition.   

My brother stocks groceries for a living, the graveyard shift. He lost his license years ago to traffic tickets and hitting a pedestrian. The pedestrian walked away from the scene. 

The Cadillac is not my brother’s. 

“Randy drove me.” He laughs, though nothing was funny.  “Remember how long my hair used to be?” Turning, he touches the middle of his back. “Down to here. Mom and Dad hated it.” Short barbs of hair cling to his face. He’d just cut it himself, earlier this morning.  “We’ll see what they say now.” 

“Who’s Randy?”  

“Denise’s boyfriend,” he says.  

I lift my chin—a nod—but don’t pursue with questions. 

Denise. His ex-girlfriend. He’d lived with her for nearly twelve years, paid the rent and helped raise her three girls from two different fathers. They’d met working at a 7-Eleven. She slapped him in the ass with a carton of cigarettes and told him he should smile.  

He smiled—he had all his teeth then—and they fell into a relationship. 

I look out into the rain-glistened parking lot. At 2:30 a.m. this morning, I caught a SuperShuttle van from Harlem to Newark for a flight to Detroit. Layover. A delay due to weather. A short flight to Indianapolis. Finally, a rental car and a fifty-minute drive to the funeral parlor. A long day for a quick trip. Already I’m exhausted and I haven’t even started. Not really.   

The air, sharp and cold, slips through my suit jacket and bites my skin. I should go in but don’t want to go inside. Not yet. Inside is the realness of it all: the end of my grandfather.

Brad lights another cigarette off the embers of his last, flicks the dying butt into parking lot. It sparks mildly then dies. “Supposed to get down to freezing later,” he says, snapping the buttons on his jacket closed. “Windchill in the negatives.”  

I check the time. It’s whispering toward noon. I motion to his Mountain Dews. “I can put those in my car, if you want?” 

“I need them. To get through this.” He adjusts his broken glasses, the lenses ambered from years of smoke. “Remember 9/11?” he says. 

I can escape, I think. I can hand Brad whatever money is in my pocket, walk to my rental car, and head back to the airport. Leave before anyone else arrives. End this before it even begins. “What do you mean?” I say, feeling the cash in my pocket. A hundred, a hundred and twenty. I can’t remember how much I have.    

“I was the one who got through to you, remember?” he says. “On 9/11. Mom and Dad kept trying to call, but I was the one whose phone worked.” 

Blocks from the epicenter that day, I had witnessed the event unfold in real time. Of all the memories that crowd my mind, Brad’s call is not one of them. 

Yet that moment, that call, remains for him. Fifteen years later, that’s what he remembers of that day. 

A car pulls into the lot, followed by another. My uncle and aunt and my parents. 

Brad pulls deeply on his cigarette, trying to finish it off quickly. “Man, grandpa,” he says, smoke pluming through his nose. “This is sad.” 

I study my brother. “Yeah,” I say. “It is.” 

*** 

Thirteen hours per week—the average amount of time a mother spends on caring for her child. That’s 676 hours a year, or 12,168 hours total by the time the child reaches the age of eighteen. A year and a half, all in.  

For fathers, it’s even less.  

*** 

Brad is adopted.  

Born to a 13-year-old mother, the two share the same birthday, December 28. His father is his mother’s brother, making Brad’s uncle and father one and the same.  

Taken by the state, Brad lived with a foster family for the first seven months of his life. Then my parents welcomed him to our family. For good. A forever home. 

I was four years old at the time, my sister seven. All I knew was that I had a new brother.  

My parents knew more, knew Brad’s family history and the fact that his atrial septal defect—the hole in his heart—meant he had little chance of living beyond childhood. 

“We had our eyes open with Brad,” my father once told me. “Which isn’t to say we knew what we were getting into.”  

When we all went to church as a full family for the first time, the pastor pulled my mother aside. “Beautiful boy,” he said. But he was confused. Why adopt? “Are you unable to have more children of your own?”  

No, my mother said. She could still have children. But she and my father had decided that adopting a child was the right thing to do. 

The pastor ran his hand lightly over Brad’s head. “God decides what is right,” he said. “Not you.”   

It was the last Sunday we went to that church.  

***

Connersville, Indiana. The town, once known as Little Detroit for all the auto parts it made, holds few claims to fame: the inventor of Sudoko was born there, and the high school basketball team twice won the state championship.  

It’s where my grandfather spent a good part of his 97 years of life.

An entrepreneur, he tried his hand at quite a few things. But it was with a small factory that he found success. Recalibrating machines that once formed door handles and dashboards, he tapped into a $15 billion industry, one that weathered economic downturns.   

He manufactured coffins.  

*** 

My parents. My sister and her two girls. My uncle and aunt. It’s an assembly line of greetings in the funeral home parking lot.  

I carry in a box of photos and memorabilia of my grandfather. My uncle brings in two pies: one cherry, one apple. “It’s for afterward,” he says. “A commemoration.” 

My grandfather loved to bake, was even featured in a magazine for his skills.  Pie was his favorite.  

My mother hugs me tightly. A tiny woman, she’d gotten smaller over the years due to a brutal car wreck she and my father had survived and the rheumatoid arthritis that has chewed away at the cartilage buffering her bones. “We’re so proud of you,” she says.  

“For what?” 

She looks around the room. Her entire family is here, the remaining members. The carpet is a muted moss-green, the wallpaper a sun-bleached beige. Tones of earth. For which we all return.  She takes my hand in hers. It trembles. “This is nice,” she says. “Everyone together like this.”  

*** 

People I’ve known for years are often surprised to learn I even have a brother.  I don’t speak of him often. Talking of him means answering questions, which forces me to examine myself and our relationship. It means stirring a caldron of conflicting emotions. 

Speaking of my brother means having to accept the fact that things often end without closure. It means having to accept the fact that reasons don’t always exist.

***

The last time I saw Brad, which was ten years ago, he had a nail embedded in his front left tire. He was driving without a license.  

I was in Indianapolis for the day, drove out to Wanamaker, Indiana, where Brad lived, to take him to lunch. He ordered far too much food. He didn’t finish half of it. And he didn’t want to take the leftovers home. It was something he’d done for as long as I could remember. It angered my folks to no end. “Order one thing,” they’d tell him. “If you’re hungry afterward, you can order more.” 

“But I’m hungry now,” he’d say and double his order. 

I motioned to his tire. “Let’s take the car in, get the tire fixed,” I said and offered to pay.

He’d been using Fix-a-Flat, filling the tire with a can every couple of days. “I’ve got to get to work,” he said.

It was two p.m. He didn’t go in until seven.

“You should come to New York, visit me,” I said.

“I’ll check with Denise.”

“The offer is for you,” I said. I had never been a fan of Denise, no fan of the way she had treated him. Twice she’d left him, returning weeks later in need of money, in need of a place to stay. “I’ll pay for your flight,” I said. “You can stay with me.”

He tapped the wounded tire with the toe of his shoe. “I’ll check,” he said and lit a cigarette.

***

“It’s his teeth,” my mother said.

August 2005. I was visiting my folks in Memphis. “Who are we talking about?” I asked, easing the car into the garage until the windshield met the tennis ball strung from the ceiling. Perfect, my father had written in red Sharpy on fuzzy yellow ball. I’d driven all of ten feet, my mother switching seats with me in the driveway. She didn’t like pulling the car in.

“Your brother Brad. It’s why he had the issue.”

I turned the engine off. “His heart attack, you mean.” Brad had been raced to the hospital with chest pains. Thirty-three years old, he was the same age Christ died.

Brad didn’t die. He was released the next day with multiple prescriptions and stern warnings: stop smoking, eat better, start exercising.  

“He doesn’t take care of his teeth. The front are black with cavities. That’s what’s causing him heart problems,” she said. “We offered to pay for a dentist.”

“His response?”

“We’re waiting to hear from him,” she said. “He won’t return our calls.”

It was three months before they heard from him again.

***

The L-shaped room holds up to sixty people. My uncle and I set up chairs for fifteen. A small memorial gathering for the immediate family.

A projector shoots images onto a screen. My grandfather and grandmother on their trip to Egypt. My grandfather at work on a project. My grandfather holding me at my uncle and aunt’s wedding. Three years old, I’d been the ring bearer. My tiny tuxedo was basically a jumpsuit with a clip-on bow tie.  At the reception, my fast-dance/slow-dance was a hit. Bouncing from foot to foot in rhythm to the music, I’d then manically run in place for a few seconds.   

My memories of then aren’t built on the actual event. They’re based on photos and stories from my folks and others. Vibrant and distorted, they’re memories of memories.  

When we finish with the chairs, I ask my uncle, “So where’s grandpa?”

He eyes me hard.

“I mean the casket.” The graveyard, the burial—all questions I’d neglected to ask in the days leading up to now.

My uncle smooths his tie. “He was cremated,” he says.

***

My uncle speaks first, recounting my grandfather’s life, how his determination drove his success. “His one regret, if he had one,” he says, “was not finishing college.”

I speak next.

“I’ve written down a couple of things that made grandpa great,” I say, and then unfurl a six foot long scroll. It gets a laugh.

I’ve practiced what I’d say, gotten down to the point where I can recite it by heart. But a few words in, my voice breaks.

I pause, my eyes pooling.

I glance down at my notes on how my grandfather had let me drive a forklift when I was 11. How he’d let me drive his 1967 convertible Corvair when I was 14. How he’d taken me for a tour of the farm he grew up on in Greencastle, Indiana. “No electricity,” he said. “The whole place was lit by natural gas.”

The copper pipes, he explained, lay exposed in an open, shallow trough that ran alongside the dirt road. “Winters, they’d freeze,” he said. “My job was to walk the lines, find the problem and fix it.”

How? I had asked.

“By lighting a small bit of hay under the pipe, melting the ice.”

From him, I learned that no American president has ever been born in Indiana. Benjamin Harrison was the closest, having spent a good part of his life as a minister in Indianapolis, but he was born in West Bend, Ohio.

Vice presidents were another thing. Schuyler Colfax, Charles W. Fairbanks, Thomas R. Marshall, and Dan Quayle.  Indiana reared vice presidents. Only New York had more.  

From my grandfather, I learned that nearly half of all American caskets are manufactured in Indiana. It’s the coffin capital of the world.  

But looking at my notes, I realize that my words aren’t about my grandfather. They’re not for him. They’re about me, for me.

Memorials aren’t for the deceased. They’re for those left behind. For those who have to continue on.

***

I’ve failed Brad. There is more I could have done, more I can do. 

But then Brad has failed the entire family—and himself. He had all the opportunities my sister and I had. He had more. Yet he’s turned out so differently.

If nurture trumped nature, Brad would be in a far better place than he is now. He’d have his teeth. He’d have finished college. He wouldn’t have gotten fired from 7-Eleven for stealing. He’d never have stolen—or taken a job at 7-Eleven. He’d have understood that qualifying for a mortgage and being able to pay a mortgage are two distinct things. He wouldn’t have lost his home to foreclosure. And he wouldn’t have had a heart attack.

But nature far outweighs nurture for Brad. His birth parents had burdened him with attributes he was unable to rise above. They’d bequeathed upon him with challenges he could never overcome.

***

The pies are cut. The coffee is poured. Condolences are exchanged.

My grandfather is now a memory.

Across the room, my father lectures Brad on something. His frustration is palpable. Brad shakes his head between sips of Mountain Dew as though to say I’ve got this; I got it.

“It breaks my heart,” I say to my sister.

“Grandpa?” my sister asks.

“Brad,” I say. “It’s not that he won’t ask for help. It’s that he doesn’t even realize he needs it.”

***

My time is short, my flight leaving in less than three hours. I pull Brad aside, give him a hug. I can’t let a decade pass without my seeing him again. “I’ll call you,” I say. “We’ll make plans.”

“Okay,” he says. His look says Why?

“What do you need?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—” I break off. “I mean whatever. Cash, help finding a better job. Whatever you need.”

Brad laughs. “I don’t know what you mean.”

***

I had rented the car for a day. I drop it off after seven hours. Already, the sun is setting.

My phone chimes. A text from my sister. Brad is fine, she writes.

I cross the parking garage to the terminal, a sharp breeze cutting me. He could be doing better, I reply.

Brad has a job, my sister texts.

He has a shit job, I write. He has no front teeth.

It’s 36 degrees out but seems far colder. Wind chill—a formula that vaguely determines the rate of heat loss from our bodies. It’s what the temperature feels like to our skin. But wind chill is not the true temperature. It doesn’t impact a thermometer’s mercury. It’s not real.

But he’s happy, my sister writes. Brad is happy. That’s what matters.

 

Douglas Light is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. He co-wrote The Trouble with Bliss, the screen adaptation of his debut novel East Fifth Bliss. The film stars Brie Larson, Michael C. Hall, Peter Fonda, and Lucy Liu. He received the 2010 Grace Paley Prize for his story collection Girls in Trouble. His second story collection, Blood Stories, was published in 2015. His writing has received an O. Henry Prize and two NoMAA/JPMorgan Chase grants. For more, visit: www.douglaslight.com.

Babushkas

by Leslie Selbst

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, each mourner deposits his symbolic shovel of earth, and the living say goodbye to the dead. The grave is filled in and the mourners file back to their cars, back to their lives, back to their loved ones. The dead are once again left to their thoughts.

Round and round the clay on the potter’s wheel goes. A new life is formed while an old succumbs. Life is always one step ahead of death as we struggle to stay ahead, all the while knowing that, in the end, we cannot keep up the pace.

I am in the recreation room on the top floor of the hospital. I am cold, and I pull the terry-cloth robe a little tighter. The IV bottle is almost empty, and, soon, I must return to my room for my chemo treatment. I try to sneak away from my bed if I’m not too sick, as downstairs, it is depressing and enclosing. I’ve left a note for the nurse, but I have a few more minutes.

There is a weaving group in the corner, mostly women, for the men aren’t as sociable and tend to stay more to themselves. The women are wearing scarves on their heads. Babushkas, as my grandmother would have called them. Russian peasant dress, these babushkas, from a long-gone era. Religious Jews shopping in the open markets, hiding their hair and their femininity from all but their husbands. The women in the weaving group wear their babushkas to hide their baldness. Round and round we go.

There is a tall fish tank in the room, and the fish travel up and down in their endless motion as though death would overtake them if they stopped. At first, their movement appears unnatural, and I have to think for a moment to identify the problem. It is their direction of swimming that seems out of place. In my fish tank at home, the fish swim back and forth across the length of the tank. Here, life goes on with just a slightly different twist.

A man is swimming in a pool, just visible from my window. A sporting complex is on the fifth floor of the building across the street. He strokes across the pool, turns and pushes off again, only to repeat this at the other end. How I envy him. Just a few months ago, he might have been me. This goes on for forty minutes. He is life, one step ahead of death; he must keep going. His rhythm is easy to watch, and I begin to doze off…

I am a young boy with his grandma on Friday morning, and we are shopping for the Sabbath meal that will take place that evening. My grandparents live in a poor immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, and we shop in an open market of pushcarts, little wagons pushed by vendors, each hawking an essential of life in a Jewish community. Blake Avenue in East New York is awash in pushcarts.

A long line of mostly women, all wearing babushkas, poke, sniff, and inspect the various produce. A heavyset woman in a blue faded scarf picks up a chicken and sniffs under its tail. “This chicken is old,” she indignantly snaps at the vendor, who has participated in this very scenario at least six times that day. “I know, but it would make a good Shabbos soup,” he says wearily. “Not for Shabbos soup,” the woman sharply answers and tosses the carcass on the crushed ice. “Do you have anything fresher?” At this, the vendor becomes animated and brushes aside some ice chips, producing a chicken more to the woman’s liking, and the haggling over price begins.

All over the street, babushkas and vendors are engaged in different facets of the same scenario. Like some medieval ballet, the story plays itself out, the transactions are all completed, and the women in babushkas slowly fill their shopping baskets. As my grandma and I leave the chicken cart, the weary vendor readjusts the tired old chicken in the center of the ice. He props its tail up so as to entice the next babushka.

A tap on my shoulder awakens me, and a babushka-clad woman smiles an understanding smile and tells me that the nurse has called. It is time for my treatment. I reluctantly walk to the elevator…I must keep one step ahead.

 

Leslie Selbst is a beginning freelance writer who spent his first forty years in government work. He has coauthored Surviving The Storm, a nonfiction story about a family’s struggle within the medical system.