Star Wars | Red Boots

What’s special about these shoes is that they have tiny Darth Vaders and Storm Troopers checkered all over them. Even to a non-Star Wars fan, that’s pretty cool. Other than that, they’re unremarkable.

Comfortable. Versatile. Durable. Functional. Although only a few months old, they are scuffed and well-worn. Their white soles already marked from climbing trees and exploring parks, playgrounds and backyards. They are I’m-a-big-kid-now shoes, full of adventure, potential, growth, and a future of life and possibility. We know they won’t fit him forever, but for now, they’re perfect.

The problem with these shoes is that one is lost. An active afternoon of earnest play and fun brought him home with one shoe on, and one shoe most definitely off. Gone. Tossed over the hedge. Hidden in the neighbor’s brush. Unable to be found and never to be seen again. Not even with a ladder.

The problem with shoes, all shoes, is that they’re absolutely useless when one is missing. There’s not much you can do with one shoe. Actually, there’s nothing you can do with one shoe. Shoes operate together. In a pair. Two shoes are a run on a hot beach or a walk on a snow-covered road. They’re a party, a movie or a game of tennis. They’re a small boy climbing in a tree with his friends because that’s what small boys do, or a quiet stroll with the one you love on a warm, gentle evening.

They watch us, our shoes. They bear witness to our journeys and adventures, our struggles and our joy, our fear, our pain, our elation and our weariness. They are quiet and present, completely inanimate. But if they could talk with their long, wagging tongues or the short ones that never seem to come out all the way, they would have much to share about our lives and experiences in this world.

Only if there are two.

Two shoes are how it works. One shoe is futile.

***

Last week I met someone new in my life: Dr. Andy. Dr. Andy is a wonderful doctor, kind and caring, attentive and empathic. With entertaining and honest personal stories that he loves to share. Partly, I imagine, to put his patients at ease, and also because he enjoys the opportunity to make them laugh, cry, gasp in horror or frown in concern. To hear them say, “Are you serious?” or “I’m so happy for you!” or “Oh no, I’m sorry.” He tells his stories because he wants the people he is with at that moment to share in his experiences. To offer them a way to relate to him, and probably a way for him to relate back. As is the human condition. We relate to each other. It’s how we work.

I hope I don’t have to see Dr. Andy too often, but I loved our few minutes together. He confirmed I did not have pneumonia, and told me he had been feeling similar: congested, feverish, with a nasty cough and difficulty breathing. But before he did that he told me about his father, a Holocaust survivor, whose 90-something-year-old mind and body are frail and almost incompetent.

In lucid moments the old father shares memories and stories with Dr. Andy and tells his son how proud he is of him. Andy showed me a photo of his father’s number from Auschwitz, tattooed forever into his arm. It is blurred with age and time, and the green ink screams in stark contrast to his wrinkled, harmless skin.

I don’t have a known relative who survived the Holocaust. But by the time Dr. Andy finished telling me about his beautiful father, we both had tears in our eyes. The horrific death of six million Jews and the widespread hatred, panic and desolation of the Holocaust is a close and personal experience for many. And it is also a collective experience. One we experience as Jews, as people, as humans all over the world. Never forget.

At the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. there is a permanent exhibition I have visited with my son: shoes. An enormous gray pile of 4,000 tattered shoes.

The Nazis confiscated the shoes of Holocaust victims in the killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. When Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau were liberated, the troops found hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes. And very few living prisoners.

You have never seen anything like this sea of shoes.

source: ushmm.org

Above the awful, heart-searing collection is an excerpt from the poem “I Saw a Mountain” by Holocaust survivor and Yiddish poet Moses Schulstein z”l:

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.

We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers.

From Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam,

And because we are only made of fabric and leather

And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.

My boy’s lonely shoe will never more run down the street with his brothers nor look for snails with his friends. Not again will it witness the free, growing life of hope and possibility. It’s useless on its own.

But I’m going to hang onto it.

Never forget.

This is a Finish the Sentence Friday post, inspired by the prompt, “When it comes to the end of the world…” Hosted by Kristi from Finding Ninee, and co-hosted by me and by Jena (this week’s sentence thinker-upper) of JenaSchwartz.com.

Orange October has brought way more than the awesome San Francisco Giants to the World Series. A tiny life lost in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, a brave army reservist senselessly gunned down in Ottawa, nationwide Ebola panic, a beloved friend quietly battles a ventilator, and another awaits a worrisome surgery. Is surgery ever not worrisome? Strep throat, Halloween mania, lost teeth (finally!), a very skinny dachshund, and nothing screams frightening 40s like smooshed boobs at the first ever mammogram.

In full spin on a very wobbly axis, I whiz through this agitated orbit. It takes a lot of output, seemingly limitless energy to keep that axis spinning. Even though it’s wobbly and erratic. Not only to make sure it doesn’t all fall apart on its unpredictable, hurtling journey through time but also to keep the love, the happy, the optimistic going, and going strong.

But of course everything, everybody reaches a limit eventually.

The very old, skinny dachshund is definitely not my favorite right now. For all his supposed inability to see, hear, run and jump nothing stops him from brazenly climbing onto the dining room table to gobble the last of the chicken, from gingerly pulling himself into the dishwasher to sneak a last lick of the stew, and if I said he peed in my bed the other night that would be TMI.

But after all is said, done and cleaned up he snuggles his warm small body right up next to mine, like he did in the days when Pretzel made three… and I smile. Breathe deep. Feel the crazy spinning axis slow some. “It’s the little things,” I think.

It’s the rare morning coffee date with my always-traveling husband. He is mostly somewhere, and hardly ever here. But a travel schedule includes flights that leave at off-hours, so I get a bittersweet hot chocolate and an hour of Just Him before the 11.35am to Arkansas.

source: foodspotting.com

It’s the news that my niece has an imaginary friend. G-d bless the child, she is too clever, too busy and too chatty for her three-year-old self so she invented a friend for the overflow! Wonderfully creative and imaginative, inspired and whimsical. And simple. To create what she wants, how and when she wants it, using only the power of her 38-month-old imagination.

This beautiful photo, taken by my mom, of the jacaranda trees in my hometown squeezes my heart and lifts my cheeks with a smile. Pretoria is famous for these blossoms that tint the air lilac and carpet the wide roads with messy purple every October. This scene makes me homesick, but in a good way. In the way that feels warm and comforting, even though I am far away.

photo by Dianne Faktor

These hilarious-to-me texts from my friend Stephanie, who thinks I am the “challah Jedi master” (her words). Her confidence puzzles me, since the one time we did make challah together my dough was too sticky, the braids were misshapen, and the end result was edible but definitely not delicious. Be that as it may, my weekly attempts at rise-to-perfection inspire her inner Princess Leia to text me these hashtags. Even the rising dough laughs: #ChallahJediMaster #MayTheYeastBeWithYou (my favorite) #QueenAmichallah #HansSchlomo. Her hashtagging rules the Empire. Yep, #itsthelittlethings.

Hengry. This is what my little guy calls his friend Henry. Somehow, his five-year-old tongue gets stuck at the back of his throat when he says Henry, and this delicious modification provokes a giggle every time. Luckily, Hengry isn’t bothered by the creative slip.

The surprise purple cauliflower in my salad (purple again – love it!), the 4am blood moon moment with my son as we caught the lunar eclipse together, the garden-fresh rosemary I pick for the lamb chops, this amazing song from Hozier (the way he says Honey makes everything better):

All give me pause, and clear a space in the chaos, a tiny space big enough to find a few ounces of me in the heaviness of everything else. These little things, these small moments remind me to turn in instead of out, to breathe, to find the calm and the happy. To replenish before I reach my limit.

After his cataract surgery last week, my father the optometrist marveled at his suddenly clear vision: “I can’t believe how much brighter the colors are!” The little things between the not so little. Bright orange October.