took my inaugural european poop by skylight in a room that is also itself a shower stall. the airbnb host purports by profile to speak english and hindi (no danish, i guess), and we haven’t met but i believe him. i took a fitful nap on sheets that smelled like maybe they hadn’t been prewashed for me per se but who cares?? it’s inevitably cleaner by volume than the airliner seat that was my last place of rest and fully reclined, too. whoever’s room it usually is is a smoker, i’m sure, and reads books with titles like FINANCE FOR NON-FINANCIAL MANAGERS. later i wandered the brickyard and took this photograph of a mirror in some ivy under a window from which spilled music i once was regularly acquainted with, back when i almost had an indian mother in law.
I went to Chabad House of København for Shabbos Mincha, et cetera, tonight. Unsure how to get in, wary of the utterly unmarked door and the apparently-armed possibly-Politi loitering outside to lend an air if not the reality of security, I rang the bell — surely a faux pas, disruptive of ritual, to say nothing of engaging electricity on Shabbos, but no one said anything about it to me. Not that the man who opened the door, muttering along to the liturgy through his teeth, could’ve said anything less. Le sigh.
I wasn’t thrilled with the service. To the upper balcony, we women were sent, not to one half of the downstairs pews demarcated with mechitzah for the pseudo-egalitarianism I prefer to accept. Most of my balconymates were dowdy, dowdy teenagers (or maybe early-twenties femmelets) paying me no mind and children playing too loudly while the men, below, raced through. Afterward, the lean middle aged woman in a white head scarf — Orit! — asked if I’m Israeli.
I’m American, I said, omitted the US, and she said, You sing like you are Israeli.
On the walk through the courtyards to supper I chatted with the rabbi, who invited me to give a Shavouos talk tomorrow night, and I said yes without knowing how I will.
I sat to eat beside the man-boy who I’d guessed, from above, from his polo shirt, conspicuous for its gay chartreuse in the somber sea of black and white and how it bared his arms, would alone among them be willing to shake my hand. Alon is his name — Danish-Israeli — studying finance and working in programming — and he told me that what I’m doing is brave and exciting and asked, if I’m around long enough, whether I’ll help him with a writing problem.
Orit and I talked across the table about the difficulty of taking the sort of leap that I am, of the necessity of changing one’s status quo, of not prolonging some numbing stasis, about how the United States embodies this sinister intersection of populousness and widespread sense of entitlement: the consumption, the emission, the imperative to put everything in evermore disposable packaging, to get an even bigger car. I noticed her declining the fish, the chicken soup, the salads with mayo, and asked about her veganism. She told me that in olden times all Danish housewives brewed their own beer at home, always in the same nook reserved for washing, and to this day any Danish laundry room is called the brygghaus.
She talked about how her daughter and son-in-law are expecting a boy and won’t circumcise him. It’s like beating your child, she said they’d said, which hurt her. It’s their choice not to, she said, but to put it like this… She did not finish the sentence, and I talked about what I’m hoping to do with this journey and in life, hoping to help people isolate which parts of what they say are a constructive sharing of fears and which are something that will hurt.
This afternoon I lingered a long time in a brasserie on Rue Jacob where I’d been psyched to order something off the comparatively cheap menu like what everyone around me was tucking tastily into but — because I wasn’t assertive enough with these gelid French waiters — as advertised — it’s just breathtaking, their disregard — and the kitchen closed — couldn’t and instead talked a long time, through my hunger, with the guy lunching at the next table avec ses enfants who was very smart and interesting but not as smart — not as much a purveyor of revelation — as I realize I was trying to lead him to believe he was, doing that thing I do where I act like whoever is talking to me is the first person to talk to me ever in my whole entire life, like everything they say is just blowing my sweet little mind so sweetly, like they’re just with every word bestowing this terrific cognitive gift.
I guess the thinking is that if I flatter someone with my synthetic ingenue idiocy and awe they’ll keep talking and like me and other good will come of it.
Today is USAmerican Independence Day, and I will do nothing, in deliberate protest. Will anyone even notice? I’m no longer convinced people in the world care about or have even heard of the United States. Justice Kennedy is retiring and President Trump has the opportunity to appoint yet another Supreme Court justice, and I don’t know anyone here to talk about it with, anyone who wouldn’t stare at my mouth as the sounds came out, both of us considering a question of reality and/or having gotten it wrong. I want to put quotation marks around all of these proper nouns, which are something people made up and getting a little fuzzy around the edges in my mind.
Today I followed the footpath down the mountain from Rupert’s place to Apollonas. The dogs scare me and I don’t trust their chains, the sound of which attends their barking but which are otherwise not in evidence.
At one point I tried to take a shortcut, snipping out one of the switchbacks by picking my way through the prickly Aegean bushes, but in the end I think there was no time saved.
The waves pulling back on the jumbo pebbles of that first beach at the foot of the hill make a sound that is distinctly like something else I know but can’t quite call up to write down. I keep thinking of something rushing to fill a vacuum. But what?
A third, taunting sound, after dark, on my walk back via the paved road, hoping to hitch: the wind through the olive trees sounds perpetually like a car coming, when really there is nothing more viable to ride than the breeze. Finally I caught a ride in a rattly red van — the driver and I could barely communicate but he mustered a “Where you go?” and opened the back to me and I knelt beside some tools, gripping the metal window onto the cab with my hands and not putting my head quite through, lest he take a turn too quickly and I be decapitated. I said “HERE GOOD” in advance of my stop, such as it is, and he seemed to understand that I meant the hairpin left up ahead, which I would walk to Rupert’s, and took me a bit farther.
Trudging up the last leg the house from the pavement I encountered a small Greek snake, which spooked me in particular in the dark. Rupert, who hadn’t gone out for the evening after all, professed to have worried and my skin crawled some more at his unwelcome interest and proprietary scolding. Perhaps working with him and his gentle lechery and his indignation at what White Anglo Saxon Protestant males can’t acceptably say anymore is my real opportunity for growth and writing.
