‘Mom, is crocodile kosher?’

Posted on July 17, 2016 by Nicki

Elephant The wide African sky is streaked pink and gold as the sun inches toward the horizon. Sunset happens early and quickly in winter. The trees stretch their bare arms upwards, as if reaching for those last few essential rays of light. Their dark silhouettes are a dramatic contrast to the gently glowing sun and pinky-orange sky.

We are all quiet in awe and wonder.

One lone elephant grazes in the twilight. Her trunk effortlessly tears entire branches off the tree. She drops the woody limbs with their few leaves into her waiting mouth. Her tail swishes behind her, and the grass rustles. For many moments, we are surrounded only by cracking branches, whispering leaves and the setting sun.

We are the only humans around for miles.

We journeyed many hours and great distances across continents, oceans and time zones to this tranquil place at the bottom of Africa. It was a Thursday when we left our busy home in California. By the time we arrived in Johannesburg, it was Saturday. In our exhaustion and excitement, none of us noticed that we traveled through an entire Shabbat.

Like many Bay Area Jews, we celebrate Shabbat and observe the laws and customs of our religion in our own traditional ways: we eat homemade challah and enjoy a family dinner every Friday evening; we keep a kosher home, and the no-pork-no-shellfish rule applies when we eat out; some years we do only one Passover seder, and Lag Ba’omer was a holiday that completely escaped us this year. I acknowledge to my husband and to myself that we are doing our best to teach our four children about Judaism and how to live a Jewish life … but sometimes I wonder if it’s enough.

And now here we are a few days after our arrival, watching the sun bid farewell to a quiet Friday afternoon on the African savannah. Our Shabbat candles and kosher home are far away, as we glimpse a giraffe gently loping though the trees. The elephant doesn’t seem to mind as she continues to munch the branches. A baboon runs across the road with a baby on its back, and now my own kids start to chatter and complain that they’re hungry.

The sun has set and it’s dark by the time we head back to our hotel just outside the magical game reserve. We cross the bridge over the shallow river as we make our way toward the main gate. “Do you think the hippos are still there, Mom?” my daughter whispers to me.

Nobody mentions candles, challah or Shabbat as we head to dinner. We are full of thoughts and conversation about the leopard we saw hiding in the tree, the pack of wild dogs we came across in the middle of the road (a rare sighting!) and the sinister vultures scavenging in the wild brush. It was a thrilling day, and we are all eager to recount our wildlife experiences over and over. The air smells of wood smoke and we take our seats around the table in the outdoor restaurant, close to the fire pit. I watch my kids argue about how many times they saw buffalo. The fire throws flickering shadows over their happy faces and I briefly remember that it’s Shabbat, but I say nothing.

Dinner is a buffet of exotic foods: a rich lamb curry, roast beef, kudu steaks and impala sausage. My daughter returns to the table with her standard bowl of plain pasta and my youngest son is happily tucking into a plate of salad. No unusual foods for these two! But my older boy taps my shoulder.

“Mom,” he says with a frown. His brown eyes are confused and a little worried. “Mom, is crocodile kosher?”

In the wild heart of South Africa, where the animals roam free and the air is pure and quiet, we are so far from our routines, from the customs and rituals of our regular life, and I mistakenly assumed that meant we were far from our Jewish lives, too.

But no matter where in the world we are, we are always connected to our Jewishness. And, just for the record, crocodile is not kosher.

This post originally appeared in my “In Real Life” column in J. the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California under the title “‘Mom, is crocodile kosher?’ A curious question in the wild heart of South Africa.”

This is a Finish the Sentence Friday post, where writers and bloggers gather together to share their versions of a completed sentence. This week’s prompt was, “This summer…” Hosted by the wonderful Kristi of Finding Ninee.

My Childhood Home

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Nicki

Our smiles are as broad as the streets we amble down this sunny morning. They aren’t streets really. They are wide walkways, closed to traffic, and paved in perfectly uneven brick. Cobbled, except easier on the legs.

The spring sun warms our bare arms, and the tall palm trees that line every street in Los Angeles sway almost imperceptibly. It’s only when we stop moving that I feel a faint chill, so quiet under that happy yellow air I almost don’t notice it.

The bright busy stores beckon on the right, and on the left the farmer’s market lures us closer, promising fresh, tasty, fragrant… I am distracted by an exquisite array of tiny succulents, and gaze with pleasure at the rows of miniature gardens, green and orange and pink perfectly contained in glass spheres of every size. Safe and happy.

“I don’t know where he is? Wasn’t he with you?”

The words come to me slowly, muted, muffled even at first. They take a long time to reach me as I stand in the sun, and even longer to register in my brain, and finally my heart.

“Where is he?” Raised voices. Something like panic. I am anxious, and confused. Who are they talking about?

“Nicki. Nicki! Where’s Jed?”

“Jed? What? Why?” He was right… there. No, no… there. I know I saw him, newly seven and so curious, just a minute ago. Before the succulents. Long before. Many, many minutes before. Shit.

The chill is no longer faint. It is absolutely unavoidable. The blood freezes in my veins, and even as I spin around in actual circles convinced I will spot him any second, I wonder what will happen to our family without him in it. Who will we be? How will we be? WHERE IS HE?

Lost. He is lost.

There. Behind the palm tree. Doing ninja moves, or following a bug.

“He’s there he’s there. Jed. Jed!”

“Mom, I’m hungry. Look what I found. Is this a spider? And look, look Mom. I can jump from all the way up here. Look.”

My frozen heart resumes beating. The fine hairs on my arms relax. I hold his little hand in mine and turn my face up to the sun. I see the palm trees sway a little. We walk, all of us close together, down the cobbled street. Safe and happy.

***

Coastal Seascape With Red And White Lighthouse

Umhlanga Rocks, South Africa. photo: http://www.decharmoy.co.za

The Indian Ocean has always been my favorite. The waves are big and the water is warm, and it’s where I first learned how to swim in an ocean. My dad taught me: if the wave has already broken, hold your breath and go under. But for the ultimate thrill, jump up to meet it, before it breaks, and ride the swell. I stayed in for hours. Often I miscalculated and was dumped in a froth of saltwater and sand. Once I lost my swimsuit. I love swimming in the ocean.

It’s been a long time since I’ve swum in that ocean.

So many summers were spent on the shores of the Indian Ocean. The long eight-hour drive from our landlocked town, usually through the night so that we wouldn’t waste our first day of vacation, was generously rewarded with the first dazzling glimpse of the sea as we drove down the hill, so blue it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the water started. And the lighthouse. White and red and ever-present on the jagged rocks.

My mom made sandwiches with cold cuts and soft white rolls, and my dad developed asthma from running in the humid coastal air. Our striped umbrella was mostly easy to find in the throng, and we knew to find a landmark or two so that we could head in the right direction when the rough waves eventually tired us out. We used the lighthouse to gauge how far we were from where we should be . Often we vacationed with friends from home, and my sister was with me always.

We were young, barely eight-years-old, and while my blissful childhood memories are of hours of unsupervised ocean swimming and play, my rational parent brain knows that can’t be true. Eighties life was safer and simpler, and even more so during the hot South African summer at the beach, but there must have been a vigilance cast toward us that we were happily unaware of as we frolicked in the waves and munched our sandwiches on towels laid carefully on the sand.

My friend taught me to jump over the little waves as they broke at the shoreline. We held hands and shrieked as the water nipped at our ankles and we teased the frothy water as it crept back and forth back and forth. She dropped my hand, and headed back to the striped umbrella. Maybe she yelled over her shoulder that she was tired and was going back.

Maybe not.

Suddenly I was alone with the whole of the wild Indian Ocean before me, and it was no longer fun to jump over the waves. I was scared. I walked toward the striped umbrella but it was gone. Or maybe it was somewhere else. The colorful, busy beach I loved turned cold and unfamiliar. I walked and walked and wondered if anyone knew what I knew: I was lost.

What if I never found them? Who would I be? How would I be?

The waves continued to nip at my ankles and I think I was lost for a very long time. But perhaps it was only a few minutes. Someone found me wandering on the beach, and I was reunited with my parents and my sister.

Safe again. And happy.

Inspired by the prompt “My Childhood Home” by Linda Schreyer.

What Life Does

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Nicki

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This is what life does. It gives you four children, spread over eight years, and you wonder how you got yourself into this mess and if you’ll ever, ever get out of it and you pray to G-d to clean it up so that you can take a small break, just a breath really every so often, not even that often, but enough to take in small sips of quiet air untarnished by squeaky cries of “mommy mommy mommy…” And then one day you realize you don’t want it to be clean. You look up from the apple you’re slicing – “with cinnamon please Mom” – and see four faces, so different yet all undeniably yours, and you not-so-suddenly but very, very completely understand how much you love this mess that’s yours and oh please G-d keep me in it, just like this: slicing apples, spilling milk, “Don’t hit your brother,” school lunches and a new pair of shoes every other week.

This is what life does. It gives you a friend who gives you a mug. Olive green and cream, monogrammed with a swirly lower-case burgundy ‘n.’ It’s slightly rounded in the center and a little larger than usual, and is the perfect size and shape for holding in your two hands. You drink tea from it every single day, and every day you marvel at how she knew you always wanted that mug. Even though you never told her.

This is what life does. It wakes you with an alarm that sounds like loud crickets chirping in your ear. Rude. It’s still dark outside and you wonder, not for the first time, if you are certifiably crazy. It’s 5am and if you hurry you can make it to the supermarket and get your grocery shopping done before your 6am workout. That is crazy. But doable. And no fight for parking. It gets you in a dark, candle-lit spin studio with ten other women way before the sun rises and there is something warrior-like and badass about it. Maybe it’s not so crazy. The spin instructor is the perfect amount of inspiring and kick-your-butt and she urges you to “take ease in the recovery” and to appreciate what it means to “endure instead of push ahead or back off.” These are wise, essential words to hear at 6am… or any time.

This is what life does. It makes you smile and remember your grandmother whom you loved with all your heart. She was the only gran you knew who said “shit” and she let you stroke the soft, crinkly skin under her neck. She wrote you quirky, amusing letters which she would fax to you across the miles. Her fish ball recipe is included in one. You make them a few times but they will never taste as good as hers. Nothing will. And that’s okay. Life gives you memories of Granny Mary’s ginger cake and long, meandering walks with her on the beach, collecting shells. And a blanket that is over 20 years old crocheted by her long and knobbly fingers, the ones that look exactly like yours.

This is what life does. It hands you a book and says, “Read this!” So you do, and you are lost in the world of its words and images and characters and story, and reading is easily your greatest and simplest pleasure. You never want it to end and you hope that one day you will write a book that people will love to read as much as you love to write.

This is what life does. It holds you in a time zone on the other side of the world, far far away from the ones that you love. And no matter how hard you try to catch up to the time difference between you, it’s always too early or too late and days and then weeks go by without hearing her voice and your one urgent hope is that you get to talk to each other before the baby’s born.

This is what life does. It draws you to the scale day after day, weighing and measuring and calculating BMI and body fat percentage, and did the red wine and dark chocolate last night show up on your hips this morning. And what if it did? Would that be so terrible? And you know without a doubt that it would. It would be terrible. And the next morning you step on the scale again.

This is what life does. It presents you with every possible opportunity, affords you luxuries you take for granted like water and electricity and soap and Internet on-demand and TV and a car and easy access to any food you want and and and. And it gives others nothing. And when things go wrong for you, you say #fwp (first world problems) and feel bad and uncomfortable for having when most of the world does not.

This is what life does. It gives you a page and you write 800 words on it and you want so much to make a difference in the lives of thousands but all you can really do is make a difference in your own.

Inspired by the poem “Starfish” by Eleanor Lerman and by the prompt “What Life Does” by Linda Schreyer.

Where The Streets Have A Name

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Nicki

Where is home when you’re away from it?

In my hometown of Pretoria, South Africa the streets all have new names. It’s been 21 years. New government. New era. New names. Charles Street is now Justice Mohamed. Duncan is Jan Shoba. Queen Wilhelmina has changed to Florence Ribiero but it’s still long and familiar. You cannot get from there to here without crossing it… no matter what it’s called. I don’t know why it was ever Queen Wilhelmina in the first place.

The hadedas call good morning before 7am. The African sun glows gently. It lights the whole sky from the inside. A car honks outside. Irreverent in the early quiet. For a few moments the hadedas wage a shrill war with the car. The sun climbs higher. The sky is brighter. The car moves on. The hadedas settle down.

The meat thaws on the counter. Somebody’s been up before me. Chops and steak gleam purply-red through the tight saran sheath. A faint smudge of frost clings to the plastic. Drops of water pool on the counter, as the meat softens in the warm kitchen. Coils of boerewors – literally “farmer’s sausage” – slowly defrost. So much wrapped up in those faintly spicy spirals.

There will be hot, crusty rolls. A crisp, green salad. Cabbage finely shredded and doused with sweet, tangy vinegar. Potato salad for sure. Homemade pickles. Cold beer and all kinds of soda. The meat is at the heart of it.

We will eat with towels wrapped around our swimsuit-clad bodies, water dripping from our hair onto our plates. We won’t care what the grown-ups are talking about and we won’t remember to say please or thank you. Not even when we ask for seconds. The meat will sizzle on the braai (barbecue) and everywhere will smell like smoke (the good kind) and chlorine. We will shoo away the lazy flies and pesky bees, and the grass will tickle my bum and make it itch.

Charles Street is still Charles and you always make a right at Duncan. This is the way from here to there.

We will swim some more and make up dances and tell our parents they have to watch us perform on the patio. Why wouldn’t they? We are their stars, shining with promise and bellies full of smoky boerewors and potato salad. There’s nowhere like home and even though their conversation is full of apartheid and Israel and Houston and Sydney, home is where we are and we are here.

We will have bright yellow mangoes and granadillas for dessert, meringues and something custardy. “Maybe there’s a bag of kosher marshmallows in the pantry…” someone will wonder.

Tea with milk and sugar. Plain “minute” cake. Or a rich, dark chocolate decorated with cherries and chocolate sprinkles. We will lie on the bedroom floor and play rummikub. So happy and easy together. As if we’ve been doing this forever and we have.

Years later, separated by vast oceans and complicated time zones, we will find our way back to each other time and again. Forever will come with us and the decades before and after will always be gently smudged with yesterday’s memories and tomorrow’s desires. But for now there is now. So happy and easy together. We will do this forever.

The sun will start to sink and the light will change. Woodsmoke, charred meat and jasmine will fill the air and wherever in the world my home becomes, the smell of fire outside will always make me ache with homesickness.

One day I will leave. Home will be where the foghorns are much louder than the hadedas, where the streets roll up and down the hilly city. They are long and will become just as familiar. The weekends will smell like smoky meat on the braai because my children love boerewors as much as I do. But we won’t have granadillas.

Charles Street is no longer Charles. But even after 17 years, you still turn right to get from there to here.

This post was inspired by the prompt “Food & Comfort” from the online Winter Joy Writing Retreat I’m currently enjoying. Hosted by Jena Schwartz and Cigdem Kobu of The Inky Path, the theme of the retreat is Edible Memories. It’s astounding, enriching and a little scary to discover where our food memories take us!

This is a Finish the Sentence Friday post, where writers and bloggers gather together to share their versions of a completed sentence. This week’s prompt is, “What I’m really trying to say is…” Hosted by Kristi of Finding Ninee, and co-hosted by Mardra of Mardra Sikora and Vidya of Vidya Sury. What I’m really trying to say is, so many things make home home. Even if they’re not there anymore.

How To Deal With Brothers

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Nicki

Deep in the heart of our noisy family is a pair of green-gray eyes that miss nothing, a smattering of freckles, and a strong, creative voice that can usually be heard belting out Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” or giggling loudly with her friends on FaceTime. A self-proclaimed artist, she loves to draw and write, and watch Rosanna Pansino’s “Nerdy Nummies” cooking show on YouTube.

Sage is the third of four kids, surrounded by brothers. She keeps the door of her bedroom firmly closed to all dogs and boys, except her dad, and when I peek inside I find her sitting at her small desk in the corner with a pen in her hand, her long, dark hair hiding her earnest concentration. I wish she’d tie her hair back.

Her drawings, poems and stories are full of the sugar and spice of 9-year-old girls, often with a small twist or a quietly shrewd observation that reminds me just how much those eyes are noticing.

At the end of the school year, when she was still 8, she presented me with a “How To” manual created as a class assignment:

How To Deal With Brothers by Sage Gilbert

Do you have a brother? Do you want to know how to deal with him? High School, Middle School, Little, Older, College, Baby? Older or little married or not married? Twin? Then this book is for you! I can help you handle difficult times with your brother.

Baby Brothers

With baby brothers, you want to help your mom, and play with them as much as you can because soon they won’t want to play with you.

Little Brothers

If they go to the same school as you, then it is okay to talk to them. Little brothers love you, but sometimes they are mean to you.

Twin Brothers

Twin brothers try and want to mock you. So if they do, ignore them. They also try to annoy you.

Older Brothers

If you go to the same school as your older brother do NOT talk to him! This is for all kinds of older brothers.

All Brothers

This is for all kinds of brothers. Turn on your audio so that you can record what they say to you. Then you can show your parents.

Middle School Brothers

You want Middle school brothers to notice you so annoy them. If that doesn’t work then hide from them or tap them repeatedly.

High School Brothers

High school brothers are normally very grumpy, so ignore them. You want high school brothers to notice you, so annoy them. And if that doesn’t work then tap them repeatedly or hide from them.

College Brothers

For College brothers, you barely ever see them, so my advice is to have good times with him while it lasts.

These guidelines have been published with permission of the author.

This is a Finish the Sentence Friday post, inspired by the prompt, “I Wish I Knew…” Hosted by Kristi from Finding Ninee, and co-hosted by Mardra of Mardra Sikora and Jill from Ripped Jeans & Bifocals.