A few years ago, I stayed up all night and watched a man stand outside of a closed high school. He hadn’t slept for at least 24 hours and was subjecting himself to heavy rains and winds blowing at over 120 miles per hour. I was sharing this night with him, me parked safely in my bed over 1,500 miles away, because I was terrified that Hurricane Rita was going to flatten my childhood home, the home built by my father, who would come home after work every day to our rental house which was by luck and the grace of G-d one street away and go over there to help the contractors build. He helped pour the foundation, he helped erect the first wall and every wall that followed, he nailed shingles to the roof. That house was the culmination of a life-long dream for him, along with having and raising a good family. That was in 1976.

My father died in 1999. The house was destroyed in 2008.

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On September 13, Hurricane Ike made landfall and pushed inland a massive swell of warm, Gulf Coast water which surged up a seaward lake and into the small town where I was raised. It crept rapidly up the old familiar streets, streets where I learned to drive, streets where my cousin and best friend discovered that if he bounced in the driver seat of his father’s old beat up truck, it would for some reason honk, past the house of the girl I had such a fierce crush on all throughout school, past the house where my cousins lived, past the city bank, the old gas station, the new gas station, my elementary school, across my father’s grave and the grave of that cousin and best friend who died stupidly when he was 18… all along those old roads and places and finally up to the doorstep of the house that my father built.

I slept through it this time. Perhaps I just didn’t have it in me to wait up all night, heart in throat, pulse in hand, to see what happened. Perhaps it was because I already knew that this time that there was no hope. But, still, I had hope anyway. I woke up the following morning thinking that maybe a miracle had occured, that somehow the waters had avoided the house that my father built.

In the early hours that day, the reports were few and far between and I kept hope. When the news began to bubble up toward us, none of it was good. There was a recording of a woman who called in to a local news station. She and her husband had been rescued by neighbors and they were trapped on the second floor of that neighbor’s house. The water was standing about four feet there. They lived just three streets away from the house that my father built.

I had watched hurricanes come and go from inside that house all of my life. I’ve seen flooding so fierce that the street was no longer visible and most of the yard had been covered. All that was left was just some grass peeking up here and there over the gray waters: the tips of thousands of narrow green fingers. We’d go and splash around when the rains had eased up enough.

This time, however, was dreadfully different. This time, I imagined the water creeping up in the dark, a wide wet thief. It must have been like a black and angry surface, spilling up and over the step at the front door, a foot above the yard. At that point, it must have already found easy entrance into the garage, spilling beneath and around the garage doors, re-arranging the boxes inside that had accumulated since my father’s death, boxes of unnecessary detritus from a life that did not seem to belong to our family, long left undisturbed by my mother’s lonely melancholy and increasing bleak stasis. She had plans to deal with them, to give them away to Goodwill, to do something with them. But they, like so much stuff, had remained undisturbed, always the target of some plan that was going to be launched tomorrow, or the next day, or the following week. Every year that I visited, it had become increasingly clear to me that time had ceased to move forward there, in the house that my father built.

Eventually, the water began pressing against the doors and eventually through, finding its way onto 40-year-old linoleum where the bare feet of a four-year-old me had ran around endlessly. Where cats had jumped, run, and collapsed exhausted; where my sister walked, where my mother walked, where my father walked; where I had, without any prompting from my parents, bid farewell to my imaginary friend, who always came in and out of my days through the pantry door (a child-sized Larry Fine who showed up one day wearing a traveling suit and carrying a single piece of plain luggage, telling me that it was time for him to go, that he had other kids to go keep company); where we ate dinners and played games together: The Game of Life, Monopoly, Stop Thief, and Trivial Pursuit; where my mother had taught me to play backgammon and my father had taught me to play chess; where old family friends had wandered in on the dark and directionless nights of my single-digit youth with guitars and songs; across the carpet in the living room where sometimes when my father was working the graveyard shift, my mother, sister, and I pulled mattresses from the beds and cushions from the sofas and pretended to be camping, huddled around the small black-and-white television lifted from my sister’s room; overcoming the desk containing the financial journals my mother had started when she and my father were first married, containing every paycheck and every bill they had paid over the course of their lives together, committed dutifully in blue ink in my mother’s impeccable and classic handwriting; where dozens of Christmases had transpired, where I received a Millennium Falcon toy that seemed larger than life, where my mother one year received a pistol from my father (a feat he pulled off without telling anyone); where my father had stood over me, his face so red with anger over a $1,000 telephone bill racked up over two months when I had become addicted to downloading pirated Commodore 64 software from bulletin boards across the US on my 9600 baud modem; senselessly across all of those memories as if it could somehow wipe them away.

The water kissed the furniture where my mother and father sat and watched television; the sofa where my father would sleep when his back was hurting him; the bed in my parents’ room where I spent so much of my time in a daze when I had chicken pox, watching Fraggle Rock while suffering from tunnel vision. It went into everything, into every room. It filled the house up and with great strength pushed he refrigerator out of position, threw the door open and deposited a dozen uneaten chicken dinners my mother in her disintegration refused to eat and refused to throw away. Later, my sister would report an astonishing colony of mold had taken over much of the kitchen, launched from the water and the rotting food; the Southern summer heat that had followed Ike incubated them in their mystical, fuzzy ambitions. The house that my father built, the house in which I grew up, where we were a family in all of our beautiful and infernal struggles, every pristine failure and tarnished victory, had been destroyed.

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My sister called me today to inform me that the insurance company had decided to give us the maximum value allowed by my mother’s policy. The amount is far more than we had anticipated and is far more than the repairs will cost. My mother will never return to that house so we will either sell it or rent it. Either way, my mother wants all of the money to be split between my sister and I. It’s not enough to make my family, my wife and I, and our future daughter, rich but it’s enough to set us up to where we won’t have to worry about money anymore; where, as long as we invest smartly and I keep working, our debts will be erased and our financial worries, barring some catastrophe, will be, at least as briefly as I am able to see, assuaged. So many of our worries, the worries that plague so many middle-class families, were evaporating. We would be far from rich but we would have enough money in savings and enough money invested that we will be able to raise our family in comfort: no more living paycheck-to-paycheck, no more worrying about contracts ending suddenly and leaving us having to rely on credit cards to survive. We will feel safe.

In the conversation with my sister, though, she mentioned that she would have to go and get photographs of the house, that it was surreal with everything removed, with only the skeleton of the inner walls remaining. I had no idea that they had started work on the house. For some reason, I figured it was still in its post-flooded state, mold on the grow, chicken dinners on the rot, furniture out of joint. I guess it’s because, after Rita, my mother sailed that house with the blue FEMA tarp for months. I figured it’d take equally long to get anyone in to help this time. Somehow I found that ruined stasis comforting.

My sister told me that the beam over the door to my childhood room still had my name written on it in my father’s handwriting. The sudden vision of my father’s house as nothing more than a gutted skeleton, the linoleum he helped lay, the carpet he had helped put down, the house where we had baked cinnamon rolls, where we had watched the Love Boat followed by Fantasy Island, the house where my father had rigged up the best surround sound system around a big screen TV that the technology of the time could allow… it was too much to bear. The money I would make from the tragedy, the money that would give my wife and I the means to buy a house in which we could raise our daughter, all of our children, who my father will never have the pleasure of meeting, suddenly seemed trivial, stupid, and worthless. Every memory, good and bad, of my youth suddenly rushed up to me, my own dark and relentless flood, and overwhelmed me. It was a drowning I was willing to suffer; I wanted to die in it’s nostalgic black and green mirth.

My father, of course, would have been sympathetic. The house is just a house. Its condition (or our ownership of it) does nothing to disturb or detriment the memories that occurred within it. It was just a shell, a lifeless container; it was us who gave it life every day that we lived there. From my youth spent on a fat blue bean bag to the day I first saw my father cry in the moments before we went to the funeral of my cousin and best friend who died in 1991. It wasn’t the house that gave us all that we had, it was us who gave the house what we had. And now that we’re gone from that place, regardless of the times I spent picking up long spines of unspent staples during its construction while my sister was writing her name on every upright of that house’s skeleton, to my mother and all of her unbelievable strength in dealing with us in all the years after… well, there are not enough flood waters in the world to wash that away from us.

I will probably never set foot in that house again. All of the belongings that I had left there, with plans to ship them up, are now forever lost, essentially washed out to sea. I have the things that are most important to me, though: I have my father’s guitar which he had given me and I have carried carefully with me all across this country, I have a bunch of photos of my father and my mother when they were young, including a hand-tinted photo of my father in his Air Force uniform, and I have my baby book that my mother wrote in, noting that I have a fascination with keys and rain, and I have the dark blue photo album with pictures of me in my infancy and youth, including a picture of my great grandmother holding me. My sister has rescued from the house the hundreds of slides my father had taken when he traveled the world in the Air Force and I hope she was able to get his duffel, too. And I’m quite certain she grabbed his shoe shine kit from the same shelf where the slides were safe from the flood waters. It, along with the guitar, are the two physical items which best represent my father’s legacy and bring out the most nostalgia from us.

For some reason, hearing that the house was already in the midst of being reborn into a place that shared the shape and geography of my youth but was now built of different things was just… well, I don’t know. It was unexpected. It is a good thing that the flood will vouchsafe the future of my family and will set my sister up (and her care of my mother who now lives with her) well. The price I feel like I am paying doesn’t actually exist. It’s just hard to let go of these inverse ghosts, to know that the place where you spent twenty years of your life was no longer that place… I don’t know. I don’t have much more of a conclusion to offer than that. I try not to be attached to things but sometimes it’s hard to overcome a lifetime’s practice as a kind of fretful barnacle tenaciously attached to the ship through which your youth sailed, your father at the helm, and all stars in alignment with him.

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For some reason, this was probably the most difficult entry I’ve ever had to write; I cried through most of it.

Anger at your faults is arrogance, and of a very self-destructive form. Every failure becomes pain, every pain becomes a gruesome punishment.

An objective person is able to look at his faults and what needs to change and say, “This is what G-d gave me to work with.” He accepts stormy weather as part of the course and slowly and patiently steers his ship to port.

—Tzvi Freeman

My grandfather died four years later due to complications from asbestosis. He had survived 20 years beyond what the doctors had expected and outlived most of his work friends who had also contracted the disease. Although he appeared frail (I was afraid to hug him too tightly lest he crumble like origami), he was actually incredibly strong to have fought the disease for so long.

Two years later, a friend of mine committed suicide. That funeral was a farce. His parents had let him slip through their fingers. He was coming off drug addiction and was incredibly depressed. They found his car on a lonely strip of southern Louisiana highway but he was nowhere to be found. His parents brushed it off and figured he was on another drug binge and would turn up again later. His body was found in the woods maybe 20 yards from where the car had been found. He had taken a shotgun to the mouth. I wanted to stand up at that funeral and yell at his parents. But I stayed quiet. I’m glad that I did.

A few years later, my father died. It’s been ten years and it’s still too rough to discuss.

The following year, my girlfriend attempted suicide with a drug overdose but I got her to the hospital in time to save her life. A few years after that, a friend died of an accidental drug overdose. A few years after that, an ex-girlfriend successfully committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. She left behind two children. In the midst of those years, a few friends-of-friends also committed suicide.

Death’s a funny thing. I feel like it’s been on my heels all of my life.

Last night, one of our gerbils died. His name was Bundle: a frisky little blonde with black eyes. He was a bit of a character. When there wasn’t any food (or if the food was too stale), he would jump up and down to get our attention, doing little back-flips in the cage. When placed in one of those hamster balls, he would actually truck around the floor, bumping into walls, exploring aimlessly. I think I saw him yawn and stretch more than any gerbil or hamster in my life. He was braver than his brother, Block (who is still doing just fine), and was cool with being held. Block doesn’t like it so much although he was amenable last night after Bundle had died. I’m certain that it was clear to Block that Bundle was going; he kept his distance.

I’m glad that I noticed Bundle’s situation. I had noticed that he had been listless and sleeping almost the entire day. I often tap on their cage or get their attention by running my finger along the mesh on the top but Bundle wasn’t paying much attention to it. At one point, I picked him up and he was very cool to the touch, and he didn’t struggle or react much. I kept an eye on him after that. I had a little hope that maybe he just wasn’t feeling well because he was moving to different parts of the cage to sleep. However, at one point, I saw him laying a bit on his side and I knew that it was nearly over for him. We wrapped him up in a clean dish towel, held him, and pet him in his last moments. He sniffed at us a little bit but didn’t open his eyes. Toward the end, he had a couple of very mild seizures and fits, something which had become increasingly common in him whenever I changed out their bedding; the stress of the change, I suppose, was too much for him to handle. When he was younger, he’d just go ‘tharn’: he’d get as flat as possible and not move, twitching his nose before slowly becoming active again. He struggled a little bit in our hands, had a good little cough, and then died.

I buried him in the overgrowth in the very back of our yard this morning.

Death’s a funny thing. I suppose Bundle’s small stature might make one think that he deserved an equally-small emotional response. I mean, he was just a gerbil after all; you have to know what you’re getting into with such a short lifespan. Isn’t the level of sadness we felt ridiculous? Maybe for some people. Can’t just throw him in the trash. He was a part of this house, a part of our lives, for years. You can’t just throw that away and, if you can, perhaps you shouldn’t own pets.

I’m still a little sad this morning. I’ll miss the little sucker. I picked him out and I named him. I guess a big emotional loss can come in a such a small and dynamic hopping little fuzzy package.

I think I’m going to assuage some of my sadness with some Chinese noodles from Chiang’s for lunch. Chiang’s is supposed to be the best and most authentic Chinese food the city has to offer.

Only mundane things. Money. Work. Weight.

Everything else is as great as I could ask: I live in a wonderful two-story house, even if only temporarily; I have a beautiful and wonderful wife; and she has within her our daughter. Perhaps it’s my mother, slipping into grayness, becoming in her decrepitude someone capable of feats I never would have had imagined, but, as selfish as it may be, I am glad it is my sister and not I strapped with the care of those feats and the refuse that they have created. It is more than I could bear, I know it.

Is it my father’s house, the house in which I was raised, now ruined by four feet of sea water urged with tropical anger over the shore and miles inland by Hurricane Ike? The sofas on which, as a child, I had laid sick floated to the other side of the room and now pregnant with deadly mold. The fridge that still had a bottle of wine opened with my father that my mother was too sentimental to throw away, leaning open, contents out and rotting, nine, ten, eleven chicken dinners gone to colorful and furry growths. Dine on that which my mother refused, you fancy colonies of disgust. Is it the fact that my sister, climbing over the detritus in the dark, unable to find the plaque of my father’s honorable discharge from the Air Force somehow gone from the wall?

The landscape of my childhood completely obliterated by hurricanes over the years. First the neighborhood shaved of most of its trees and now the house destroyed. I will probably never step foot again in the house I had lived in for nearly twenty years. I haven’t spoken on the phone to my mother since the hurricanes, since she evacuated and has been living with my sister, since the stress of it all had disintegrated her detoriation even further: trying to wander out into the storm, into the night, forgetting that the old house existed at all.

Perhaps it’s the scare from last week, of arrhythmia. 

I don’t know but there’s something that is tugging at me and, as negative as it may seem, I am grateful for it because it puts my pen to paper again and only when I am writing do I feel truly myself, feel truly alive. And when I come here to distract myself with games or with whatever, I find myself instead writing into this journal, pouring out whatever there is at that moment to pour, aware as ever that no one is really reading and no one is really listening. Is that the key ingredient to this obscure honesty? Even if there are many people reading, I still pretend that this goes out to no one, or maybe to just a patient and tolerant few. I think perhaps that I’m afraid of a sea of monitor-lit faces.

Nothing can hold you back—not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment you can abandon your past. And once abandoned, you can redefine it.

If the past was a ring of futility, let it become a wheel of yearning that drives you forward. If the past was a brick wall, let it become a dam to unleash your power.

The very first step of change is so powerful, the boundaries of time fall aside. In one bittersweet moment, the sting of the past is dissolved and its honey salvaged.

—Tzvi Freeman

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Tonight, I will be an alien in a forest of the familiar. I will fidget and smile too much. I will yearn for home, for books, for movies, for quiet. To turn off. 

But a part of me hopes that, once lost in the underbrush, I will find these reclusive yearnings transformed somehow into comfort in old leaves turned toward me and away from me, toward me and away from me.

The breeze is forever capricious in its orientation.

We did not go to shul this year. There are a variety of reasons for this. Instead, I created a small service for just us: selections from our machzor.

I still daily struggle with my belief in G-d but, oddly enough, I feel more strongly connected to the idea than normal. Not necessarily to the idea of the puppet master image pilfered from the Romans and Greeks but still something: a sense of the universe itself? Clearly, it’s still unclear; perhaps too unclear for me to yet write at any length about it, or at least with any sort of clarity. Clearly. For now, I wonder, to whom or to where are these prayers going? Is it funerary with the prayers for the dead actually being prayers for the mourners? Am I addressing the molecules and the spaces between them and the smaller particles still? The universe as a whole? Or is it just for those within earshot and for myself, too? A lengthy and poetic handshake with the unknown, maybe.

Acknowledge, please.

Okay, maybe later.

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Too many people believe that religious people are religious because something has automatically clicked for them; that it, by default, simply feels ‘right’. For me, though, it couldn’t be further from the truth: the concept of G-d does not feel right. Well, at least the commonly-accepted version. I don’t believe in a Hestonesque figure floating in the clouds who seems to have the emotional capacity and control of a teenager. Something tells me that the creator of the universe shouldn’t be so susceptible to temper tantrums.

The process of being religious itself is to me part of my seeking G-d. I don’t practice religion because it feels right but because it is challenging. There is, obviously, enough that I like to keep me going; I wouldn’t continue if I hated the whole thing. I may be ridiculous but I’m not ridiculous. I like the struggle, the community, and the order. I enjoy the arbitrariness and the abstractness. And I try not to be atheist or nihilist about it. One of the greatest dangers of prolonged and deep Buddhist practice is that it can be easy for some to fall into nihilistic philosophies and, although I had thought I had side-stepped it, perhaps I haven’t. 

I am uncertain nearly every step yet I continue.

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I found myself spending some time beneath the interstate, watching a half-dozen small birds splashing around in a puddle. All around us was the dull roar of the traffic above and the occasional sharp crack of a particularly heavy vehicle passing over a metal reinforcement in the highway; it was the constant rough and uneven exhale of an ear-pressed conch amplified. 

And the final fifteen minutes of the film? Well, they speak for themselves, don’t they? Easily the best ending of a movie that I’ve seen in a long, long time. And, I’m glad I saw it in black and white. It wouldn’t have been the same in color. Funny how that works.

Overall, it’s not a great movie but the ending saves all the missteps that come before it. Just make sure to watch it in black and white.

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When our house was repainted recently, our painter informed us of a nest of Vespula yellow jackets in the narrow strip of yard between our house and the next door neighbor’s. Today, I spent an unusual amount of time watching them from one of the dining room windows. Five would arrive, spiralling swiftly to an area of earth just out of my vision blocked by the undergrowth there, and three more would erupt. This happened constantly, busier than any airport. It was a nonstop procession down into the hidden kingdom and back out again.

I’m not sure why I found it so fascinating but, thoughout the day, I returned to the window again and again to watch their ceaseless business. I wanted one of them to pause momentarily so I could get a better look at them; or, better yet, to alight briefly on the window itself. I even briefly, dumbly, considered going outside and standing nearby so I could have a better look at their lair. I did not do this, of course, but I really wanted to. Even though only maybe five feet or so separated me from the spinchter of their waspish capital, it didn’t seem like I was close enough. I wanted to see more.

I didn’t, of course. Else I wouldn’t be writing so casually about them and would be writing much more smartly about their swift and unforgiving waves of defense and the weeping casualties it would have most certainly left across my skin.

I know that I need to pressure the owner to do something about it. I know from experience that yellow jacket nests do not resolve themselves; they do not get bored and move on. Once rooted, they will stay unless they suffer predation of some sort and, in this case, that predation needs to come in the form of a professional. I, certainly, have no plans to wander out there bravely with a long-range can of Raid with any expectation of positive results. I’m not crazy.

But, for now, I will occasionally stop at the window and watch them and their earnest and thoughtless industry with great curiosity.

Where once she was truly strong, she was now weak. Any strength she perceived in herself was actually an illusion manufactured through her own careful orchestration. Instead of embracing life’s occasional coarseness and opposition, she actively censored it. All disturbances she chucked into darkness. She performed a kind of social book burning, a PhD-inspired witch hunt for sedition and for all who did not or were unwilling to recast themselves in the roles she designed for them. These processes left her with an aching sense of sanity. But it was always on the balance, always burdened with a woeful potential for upset; and when that happened, and surely it happened, she would merely run away and, once she reached a safe distance for her sterile articulations, she would perform a grand denouncement and then marvel at her newfound strengths.

He still loved her previous edition, the one lacking these fitful and unfortunate updates. He would always find in his nostalgia that girl that seemed so invicible and unstoppable. Now she seemed to be nothing more than a sum of maladies, an untrustworthy process prone to endless error, and her clinical self-righteousness seemed to be no more effective in engendering compliance in those around her than an ATM’s display claiming that there weren’t enough funds for a transaction would make someone feel ecstatic. In a sense, their relationship, which had always steered a wary course from one disaster and the next, had been running short on funds for some time and neither of them have been doing much to maintain it. She cared enough, however, to go ahead and fully close it out. He would never have predicted it, or at least he never would have admitted it (even to himself), but he was grateful. Maybe there is some strength in censorship now that it was clear that he had been censored. 

So, he left his card stuck in the ATM like a paralyzed tongue and smiled as the sun lifted the weight of her from his mind. He walked away pleased and, as he turned the corner, he could still hear the ATM beeping maniacally, desperately, as if it hoped that someone, anyone would hear it and pay the attention it demanded as long as that attention obeyed its parameters.