In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk is a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person.  This is was my nickname growing up.

We made it to Eugene in the late afternoon. The quality of light in Eugene is very unique and all these years later I can still feel the way the light looked in Oregon when I was a kid. That late afternoon light was cool and deep blue in the shade of the Douglas firs at the end of the street, and clear and golden in the sky. The scent of Douglas fir was always faintly noticeable back then especially in the cool of their shade.

In those days before the advent of the GPS Dad turned right instead of left to our new house and was headed up a steep hill in the old metallic sage green Dodge Dart with the U-Haul and all our worldly possessions in the back. About halfway up, the car decided it didn’t want to pull that much.  In fact it just decided it was done and it was time to relax and we started skidding backwards.  Just plain sliding.  Dad swore, as he does when the driving goes awry, low, with clenched teeth, getting louder with each repetition “Son of a bitch!  Son-of-a-BITCH!!” The car skidded back to the bottom of the hill. My New York dad enraged, scared and exhausted from days of driving with a dog and precocious toddler, and a little embarrassed turned around  in the  narrow street and finally pulled up to our little house on the corner of Whitaker Street.

And to think this was an improvement over my parents’ previous car. That car had been a stick shift – and it had a habit of stalling if it stopped moving.  Dad had started graduate school at Princeton where he had a full ride, but couldn’t abide the pretentiousness as a kid from Flatbush among the blue bloods. Mom was putting him through school.  They lived in a little trailer, and had some old jalopy to get around in. So when they drove through toll booths on the New Jersey turnpike, my dad would slow down well ahead of the booth,yell “Sharon! The change! Get it ready!”, and throw it into the funnel, or to the attendant, and would just keep driving whether the change made it where it was supposed to go or not.  Was it the clutch? Or was it that they were kids at 20 and 21, just terrible New York drivers who grew up taking buses and the subway and learned to drive in New York City?

As soon as we pulled in the driveway, Mom and Dad started schlepping the bags and boxes into the little yellow tract house. It felt good to move. We had been cooped up in the car for days. But it was boring for me to watch them carry things in and I was too little to really be helpful.  I started exploring the yard.  It was a quiet neighborhood.  No traffic. All streets ended in cul de sacs or in the woods. It was safe. There were pretty camellia bushes with bright pink blossoms in the front of the house.  They climbed up a little trellis on the side of the house as well.  There was a steep incline at the edge of the back yard.

Mom and Dad were busy unpacking when they saw several people walking toward the house.  They were really touched.  The welcome wagon!  How nice is that?!  And then they noticed that everyone was looking up.  They walked outside, dad’s hand extended to introduce himself and shake hands. There was a mixture of bemusement and anxiety on the neighbors’ faces.   I can’t imagine the paranoia in my parents’ minds.  They were in the land of chimeras and gorgons west of New York City after all. Do we look weird?  What’s with these people? They turned to see what everyone was looking at, and clutched their chests, just like terrified characters in silent movies.”Oh my gwahd!” There I was, with my blond curly top dancing on the roof.

The corner of the house where the trellis was was pretty close to the ground, but the distance between the ground and the roof increased as one went to the other end of the house.  It hadn’t been hard at all to climb up- just like a jungle gym. It was fun up there. I felt perfectly secure.  I was probably the most coordinated three year old in the country in 1967.  I was always in motion. Even when I was an infant.  I was so active my mom would put me in my pink snowsuit and let me crawl several blocks to the park just to let me work off some energy.  There are no pictures of me sleeping. All pictures of me in the crib show me looking back. I haven’t changed.

But this was amazing. I liked to dance, I was on a high stage, and I had an attentive audience.  I also remember the look of terror on my father’s face.  “Debbie!  Debbie!” he yelled with some desperation in his voice. (They hadn’t been in town for an hour and their baby was about to break her neck – easy prey for the savages.) “How did you get up there?” he said as he edged under the eaves to catch me in case I fell.  I pointed to the trellis with one hand on my hip. “Come back down!”he said motioning toward the trellis.  I probably said something about it being fun up there. I thought he was being silly. I didn’t want to climb back down the trellis.  “Debbie! Climb down right now!” he said with his arms out sidling closer to the trellis where roof was lower. “I’ll jump Daddy!  It’s easy!” “Debbie!  Don’t jump!” Oh why not?  Climbing down is such a bore when I could just hop down. I imagine myself leaping to the ground. “Tuh Duh!” He says I climbed back down the trellis. I really had no fear in me, but I wasn’t disobedient.

Considering my dad’s high-strung personality, and my impetuousness, it’s amazing one of us isn’t dead already.  Maybe I should have been a smoke jumper!   I did become a fierce gymnast though. I was able, once upon a time, to do handsprings and aerial back flips on the balance beam without so much as a thought. “Rubberband – Exhibit A” was my nickname. I could bend backwards, put my head between my legs and push up to a handstand. I looked for lines – lines on the gym floor, the gap between sidewalk sections, the edge of a rug, and was compelled to practice flips landing on the line. All the time. I never missed.  It was no different on the beam.  You just had to nail it the same as you did on the floor. But Mom and Dad couldn’t bear to watch it.  Too nerve-wracking.  There are literally no pictures of me doing gymnastics even though I qualified to compete in the state meet at age 12.  They just couldn’t watch.

Dad somehow made a joke of my antics on the roof that day, the neighbors shook their heads and chuckled, and the crowd disbursed. The neighbors must have thought they had a real bunch of winners next door. We both lived to see another day.

This summer there was a terrible storm which blew down the turbine on the roof vent when Val was away.  I climbed on the roof, recalling those days in Eugene, my days on the beam and flipping around the uneven parallel bars. How hard could it be? I’ll just stick that thing back on, and hop down. The roof isn’t very high on this house either. But it was hot that day, and the roof was scalding.  Daughter Rachel stopped by, and I asked her to hold the ladder.  No big deal climbing up, she handed me the turbine.  But then the scalding shingles, and the big round metal thing was heavy and awkward to carry up, and oh shit. I need tools!? Why the hell didn’t I know that before I got up here?  I sit and assess the situation trying not to touch the roof with ANY part of my body, covered or uncovered to avoid a blister.

I’ll just stand up and walk down to the ladder! Vertigo. Nope. Not gonna happen today. And oh my god the ladder is so flippin’ far away, and when did my roof suddenly become a ledge on Mount Everest? I’m without ropes or a Sherpa. I inch down the slope of the roof on at least three limbs. And my legs are so short, I can’t reach the rung of the ladder AND bend my leg enough to reach it. I’m squatting by the ladder, stuck up there for a while.  Rachel kept offering to climb up and help me down. No handsprings off the roof.

One of my first good friends in Eugene was a boy I called “Erik the Viking” because with his white blond hair, blue eyes, and brawny big boy body he was already looked like a Viking. We were in kindergarten together. He liked me because I didn’t act like a girl.  I liked to climb trees and play with trucks and play ball. Our favorite pastime was to climb up on a balcony on the side of his house and swing like Tarzan from a rope tied to a branch of nearby tree. Totally unacceptable by today’s parenting standards.  Where were his parents? But ohmygod it was fun.

It was embarrassing when a friend came over and just hopped up, put the turbine on the roof vent and hopped down. I cannot imagine my father’s terror seeing me on the roof of our house.  I can simultaneously remember the feeling of invulnerability as I thought of jumping to the ground, even as I obediently climbed back down the trellis, and yet I am not be able to reproduce it now.  And my parents who grew up in homes where not wearing a sweater could  cause you to “catch your death”, had to adjust to a child who thought she could just fly off the roof and land on her feet and could do handsprings right off the balance beam.

I still see lines on the floor and have that compulsion to land a back flip. The long hallways at work look like the perfect spot for multiple aerial back handsprings all the way down. Obsession. Muscle memory. But now fear and self-doubt have crept into my mind and prevent me from taking some of those big leaps.

 

 

 

 

 

It was the day before my second year of music school. Another flawless day in Santa Barbara.  Low 80s, deep blue sky, the hint of salt sea, night blooming jasmine, and Mexican food in the air of the barrio where we lived. A day that just couldn’t be allowed to go to waste. My best friend, Andy, another friend, a tiny little Asian American girl, Stella? and I put on our bathing suits and headed to Butterfly Beach in her little white VW Bug. Our last hurrah before we hit the practice rooms and books.  We looked pretty good back then.  Andy  came from good Presbyterian stock.  High cheekbones, dark eyes, the jawline of a singer (with room to resonate), a pretty face with freckles, shoulder length reddish brown hair and bangs. Long legs, short torso which accentuated her ample bosom.  I was petite, long light brown hair, green eyes, tight but not ample anywhere.

We spread out several beach blankets on prime real estate on the beach which was a popular and particularly scenic stretch of sand, away from the wharf, and the traffic around State Street in a fancier part of town near the Four Seasons Biltmore. Between work and practice we really didn’t have much time to hang out on the beach, so we were on the pasty side for beach goers.  Andy with her freckles never really tanned anyway.  Her boyfriend, on the other hand, was a surfer – her boy toy of sorts.  He had wavy, longish hair bleached by the sun, a chiseled body baked to the perfect golden brown from sitting on his board in the surf all day.  She was a Music/Business Econ double major who never studied because she had perfect pitch and a photographic memory. She skimmed her books and was done studying.  Music theory came easy. That poor guy was a Business major and was always frustrated because he had to study so hard to keep his head above water academically, and here she was cruising through two majors seemingly effortlessly.  But he was very pretty, very pretty indeed, especially for a Jewish guy. But I digress. He wasn’t there.

I got bored of “lying out” and took a walk along the waterline.  I saw a really cute orange mop dog, with crazy, long, wiry fur, wide, stout low-slung body, and a large head with a huge maw, carrying a big stick and watching something out in the water, and following it.  He was up for a game of fetch, so I threw the big stick several times, and he was on that thing. He loved it.  But he was always following his person in the water. Soon he started wagging his tail and got excited. He saw his human paddling in from the breakers, so I left him to it, not wanting to interfere with the big reunion.

I watched the scene from my blanket.  The dog was barking toward the water, and a man was swimming in from quite a distance.  He emerged from the water, and it was like watching the male equivalent of Aphrodite rising out of the sea foam – a perfect California specimen, glistening in the sun. Sandy hair, square jaw, strong but not overly beefy, wide shoulders, narrow waste with that delicious V framing his ridged stomach muscles. Oh. My. God.

He played with his dog on the way back to his beach towel.  He had the same sort of easy gait I had seen as a toddler when a handsome cowboy had walked past my table at breakfast in Montana and blew me away by tugging his hat brim and saying “Howdy ma’am.” I must have been yelling something like “Look at the cowboy Mommy!”  – really don’t remember.  He must have done that to make a towheaded toddler’s day.  But in any case, we girls all took notice of THIS cowboy. He resembled  Robert Redford more than a little from that distance.

He had a frisbee with him, and the dog was crazy for it.   He looked like a long haired, ginger pit bull doing ballet, a canine Nureyev jeteing ten feet in the air, catching the disc in his massive jaws. It was something to behold.He never missed.  Until the wind kicked up and blew the frisbee onto our beach blanket and he dug the place up in his frantic effort to retrieve his quarry.

The “specimen” came running over to help us shake the sand out of our clothes, off the blanket, and to apologize.   He said, “My name is Valdo.  I’m really sorry about this.  Can I get you ladies a drink or something?  I’d really like to make this up to you.”  I thought he had said his name was “Valdor” and, this being California, I was deflated – another California weirdo. I said, “Thanks VALDOR. You must be from Planet X.  We can’t take you to our leader. Nice meeting you. See you later. Buh bye!” He replied, fully understanding what I was getting at, “No! No. My name is Valdo.  Like Waldo with a V. Just call me Dave. It’s my middle name. I really am serious. I’m sorry for Baddog tearing up your stuff.  Can I get you some beers? Take you girls to dinner or something?”  His dog’s name was Baddog. How cool was that? He looked as good close up as he did from afar. A Hubbell Gardiner to my Katie Morovsky.  A goy dream boy.

It was getting to be dinner time. But we were all covered with the detritus from a day at the beach.  I looked at Andy (What do you think? Please, please, please!!!), and she said she’d call her boyfriend to see if he could join, and we decided to head back to our apartment not too far from the beach to get cleaned up.  Maybe Andy was driving our other friend back – or perhaps Stella had already left, or perhaps she wasn’t even there. The details of the day faded with the new prospect. The beautiful”specimen” offered to drive someone back.  And like an idiot, I got into the white Toyota pickup of a complete stranger, albeit a beautiful stranger and showed him how to get to my home.  Luckily, “Valdor” turned out not to be a serial killer. We all rinsed off the salt, sand, and sweat, and put on fresh clothes in our little upstairs apartment in a big old house in the barrio.

Andy’s boyfriend joined us I believe – I think they drove separately in her VW to the Rose Cafe, a well-known Mexican establishment near my neighborhood, but I can remember “the specimen” opening the door for me, pulling out my chair for me, and paying the entire tab.  We were starving college kids. He told us how he injured his back fighting a wildfire – and how part of his physical therapy involved snorkeling in the salt water several hours a day to take the pressure off his spine. Normally he wouldn’t be around this time of year – it was fire season – but he was still convalescing a little. This guy was too good to be true. He was a firefighter?  A freaking hero type? No way.

Andy and I had to get back to get ready for the first day of classes.  He walked me up to the door of the apartment, and said with a bit of a western twang “I’d like it really a lot if you’d go out with me again.”  I said “Okay.” We set a date and time.  Years later he told me he gave Baddog a steak for dinner that night.

The “specimen”  was a little late to the next date as I recall, it made me start to wonder if maybe he was a mere mortal after all. But there had been a fire, or a rescue or something that afternoon – which was a better excuse than most.  He wore a tie.  His shirt fit him well.  On the way to the Italian restaurant on the other side of town, traffic was backed up because of a stalled vehicle in the middle of a busy intersection.  It was an elderly lady – carbon copy of the “where’s the beef” lady – gray bun, specs and all.  She was crying because she was scared. No one was stopping, or even slowing down much. The “specimen” pulled his truck over, and walked up to the woman’s car holding his arm out to signal cars to to slow down to let him cross.  He asked her if she was okay to make sure it wasn’t a medical emergency, told her he was going to push her car to the side of the road.  He helped her out of the car, hugged her shoulders, told her it was going to be fine, took her to the sidewalk. He tried to start the car and saw she was just out of gas and pushed the car to the curb. She stopped crying. He got gas for her at a nearby gas station while I waited with her, and put a few gallons in her tank, gave her another sideways hug, and sent her on her way, refusing the money she offered, of course, and reminding her to go straight to the gas station to fill her tank up the rest of the way.

By this time, we were quite late for dinner.  But who cared? Was this guy for real?  How many kind of shitty boyfriends had I had?  How many boyfriends didn’t really go out on “dates”, or cheated, or were intellectually competitive and impossible to have a normal conversation with (this was especially aggravating when they thought they were smarter than I, and I knew they weren’t, which would be most of them), or never did anything nice for me?   How many of them would have helped that lady?  Few, if any. What a bunch of jerks.

At dinner we made the usual date small talk. He asked me about school, where I was from.  Then it was his turn to tell me about himself. He put his fork down.  He spoke for quite a while about where he grew up, his hardscrabble life, his mom, his sisters, his uncles and aunts and cousins, his job. Yes he had always wanted to be a firefighter, and he had been fighting fires since he was 19. He talked about his grandfather who was a real cowboy – a fast shooting champion, and rope trick rodeo cowboy. When he was done he picked up his fork and finished eating. He had a formal, almost military manner of speech.  Cars were “vehicles”, yes was “affirmative”.  His very blue eyes were kind, unveiled, and mischievous at the same time. He had an electric smile, a little crooked.  I really can’t remember the conversation. I can’t remember if he was funny that night. He’s very funny.  I do remember him walking me to the door again, and saying in that western twang ” I’d like it really a lot if I could kiss you goodnight.” I thought, “Well hell!  If you ask so nicely!” So we did. I was on the stair above him, but he was still taller than I. I had to peek.  His closed eyes were sweet. It was really nice.  He said goodnight and dashed down the stairs. That was date two.

We decided to go on two more planned dates.  I would pick one, and he would pick one.  I got us tickets to a Burning Spear Reggae concert. The band members have radical dreadlocks.  One guy had a single giant dread like a column under a tall hat.  Being a Country fan, this was a first for him, and he got a huge kick out of it.  There was a big dance floor/mosh pit and everyone was packed in, bouncing to the Nyabingi rhythms. The air was thick with pot smoke. One guy was incredibly high or drunk, and kept ramming into the crowd on purpose.  Valdo warned the offender to knock it off before someone got hurt.  And again. But he was persistent.  I’m sure he ran into me. That was the last straw. Valdo gently directed me to the front of the stage with his hands around my waist so I could actually see the band, and to try to get me out of that idiot’s way, and I was having a great time dancing in my little black dress. Unbeknownst to me, the next time that asshole came bashing through the crowd behind me, Valdo held out his arm and slapped him hard on the side of his head and the guy fell like timber.  He was still behind me and just danced me away from the “scene of the crime”.  I had no idea that had happened for many years. That was date number three.

Next up was National Team Penning Championship Rodeo Dance up in the Santa Ynez mountains.  The cowboy was taking me to a rodeo dance.  For real. Driving in my boyfriend’s pickup truck to a rodeo dance. No nice Jewish doctors would be in attendance. It would be a Jew-free zone, with the exception of myself. Knishes and chopped liver would not be on the menu. This was the first night I met any of his friends. And the whole place was cowboys and cowgirls in their full regalia.  Dad would plotz if he saw me there.

The first person I met was a mountain of a man named Bill.  A biker. This person is 6’5″ or 6’6″ of solid muscle with a spherical head that is so muscular he has to cut off the plastic tabs in the back of his ball caps to make them big enough to fit.  He had a blond fu manchu, a smooth, ruddy, round face and pale blue eyes, and his shoulders directly met his head, more or less bypassing a neck.  Not a body builder. Just a human boulder. He had massive hands.  He leaned down and shook my hand, almost a formal bow, and was very polite, very pleased to meet me, but I felt like Woody Allen himself. I thought certainly a giant neon sign on my forehead was flashing JEW JEW JEW.  I was going to be outed and lynched. I told Valdo so.  He laughed.  He knew I was in the great American wilderness, the deepest, darkest jungle among the cannibals who live west of the Hudson River. Surely the Brooklyn accent I had until I was 8 from living in my house was seeping out again, during some kind of spontaneous,  involuntary, neurotic rant and would reveal my true identity.  Then he introduced me to his friend Chris who went by the nickname “Dudley” because he looked, and acted a little like Dudley Dooright.  Okay.  Maybe safe. I met a few other crew mates, all good-looking firefighters, and plenty of other friends, all nice enough. Maybe I could “pass”.

Valdo and his white sideways smile was in his element.  Normally not one for dancing, he twirled, two-stepped, and dipped me all night in his pearl snap shirt, cowboy boots and big belt buckle.  He still liked me. I still liked him.  My Jewish mother’s nightmare. That was date four.