Tuesday, August 4, 2020

I look in vain on my shelf for a clean shirt that fits. Some of the shirts that fit me when I left the States no longer do. I blame my job at the hotel when I first came here, with the wonderful food from its chefs in the employees’ dining room. I almost give up and decide to wear a t-shirt, when I spot a white bag at the foot of my bed. Oh, right. My laundry had been returned last night. I brought it in, but was too tired to unpack it. I lift the bag onto the bed and open it. A small rectangle of white, framing a field of black, catches my eye inside. I pick it up and look at it more closely. It’s a booklet of some sort. The design strikes me as grim. The strict, sharp-lined black and white evocatively says nothing, as if Mark Rothko, in his late period, had gone into advertising. I flip it over. The other side is plain blank white. The afterimage of the other side makes it look like it is white-on-white, until the inner rectangle drifts and fades, leaving only the floaters that are always in my eyes to contrast with the paper. I open the booklet. The design makes sense now. It’s a calendar. I hold it so the fold is vertical. Each of the lower pages has a grid of days on one side. The small squares are crammed with the Western date, the Jewish date, and, where relevant, the name of the day’s Torah reading and the starting and ending times of the Sabbath and holidays. Each upper page is lined for writing. Each has words at the beginning of alternate lines, the same for each page. They are written in pale blue on the glossy white. In this lighting, I can’t make out the letters. Holding the booklet open, I flip it over again. The black rectangle is stiff, with a different texture than the paper. I walk over to the refrigerator and touch it to the door. It stays there. It’s a magnet. Oh. The current calendar from the laundry hangs next to it on the door. I had forgotten that that was there. They’ll stay on the door next to each other for the rest of August. At the start of September, the old one will be ceremoniously retired and recycled. Assuming that I remember to do so. And assuming that I can recycle a magnet.