Appearances

In South Beach, at the Epicure, I had another lesson about snap judgements. A fastidious woman caught my eye, and I watched her closely. Well groomed, dressed in shades of brown with touches of gold, she first rubbed her hands with sanitizing gel, and wiped the table, on which she spread a clean napkin. How will she be able to eat anything? I wondered. I need not have wondered. Her daughter arrived with a bag from the Epicure deli, and pulled out two huge, thick, rare roast beef sandwiches. The fastidious woman dug in, bit hard, and devoured the dressing-moistened meat, the bread, the tomatoes. All! She and her daughter ate silently, avidly, yet neatly. Not a crumb on the sanitized table. I'm a bit of a crank about not eating red meat--and this meat was red--but please allow me: what could be more unclean than dead flesh? You see how creepy I can get. Yet I'm glad the woman could eat. I had visions of her wiping and wiping, never able to get things clean enough.

I've been away from blogging too long. Many things have kept me away: months of physical therapy, a lingering bout of illness, a departure for South Beach, and writing what I think are risky poems. Right now I'm listening to Callas sing: Casta Diva, che inargenti/ queste sacre antiche piante . . . (Pure Goddess, who silvers/ these sacred ancient plants.) No voice like hers! Callas the Goddess. How did she get that sound out while standing so still?

How are you? What are you listening to. Tell me, wont' you?

Nu

Yesterday I went for lunch at the Epicure, a market in South Beach, which also has a coffee bar. Customers may buy food in the market and eat it at the coffee bar. I bought three slices of sable, a lightly smoked fish, a pumpernickel bagel, and cole slaw, and took my food to the bar. There was L. with his brother, S. and S.'s mother. They come here to shop, eat, but most of all to schmooze. I sat at L.'s table. He is a great talker, smart, well-informed. He brings people together. He has a marvelous speaking voice, much better than Garrison Keillor's without a trace of Keillor's crankiness. L. has an intimate voice. I can't imagine L. yelling.

I had been reading Leonard Michael's essay, "My Yiddish." Michaels grew up speaking Yiddish and entered kindergarden with very little English. In his essay he summarizes the critic Benjamin Harshav: Yiddish "contains many words that don't mean anything: nu, epes tockeh, shoyn ["so," "really," "well," "already."] These are fleeting interjections, rather like sighs." I would also say, like "shrugs."

I took the lid off the container holding my three small slices of sable. L. looked at it. I said, "Sable, I love it."

L. said, "Carp. It's carp. They give it a fancy name."

"S0?" his brother said, and I laughed. (I've made his response a question, but it was the faintest question.)

I broke up my bagel, scooped out the soft insides--I prefer crust--and covered the dark bread with sable. It was the best sable I had ever eaten.

The soft parts of the bagel I had scooped out filled most of the plate. "Are you going to eat those?" L. asked me, and I told him no. He took a small packet from his pocket and unfolded it, revealing coarse white breadcrumbs. "For the birds," he said. "For the birds," his brother repeated. L. took the pieces of bagel and crumbled the dark bits between his shapely fingertips as we talked about the Federal Reserve, Lincoln's assassination, Juval Aviv, the Israeli agent who was Golda Meir's bodyguard, and upon whom the film Munich was based.

"Yiddish serves speech--between you and me--rather than the requirements of consecutive logical discourse," Michael writes. The English of those who grew up hearing Yiddish, does this as well. At the Epicure we sighed and shrugged with our interjections.