Saturday, June 20, 2020

As I enter the House of a Hundred Grandmothers, the receptionist waves her thermometer at me. I walk over to her. She’s quite short. I have to bend over the counter for her to reach me. I take off my baseball cap. She scans my forehead. She looks at the thermometer when it beeps. She nods. I move on. At dinner, I sit in the chair that I usually use. Dinner lasts longer than usual. This chair, too, starts to collapse under me. A relative’s caregiver grabs me under my arms and lifts me to standing. I’m amazed. She weighs about half what I do and is not muscle-bound, but she lifts me without a problem. She brings me a stool to sit on. She shrugs when she sits down again. “I am thin, but I am strong.” After dinner, the family discusses aspects of Jewish law and other issues. The scholars in the family agree that being on different sides of a mezuzah wouldn’t keep a group from praying together. Their precedent: In the face of the pandemic, rabbis have ruled that people can pray together even if each is on his own porch. They look at the current rash of statues being torn down, in the light of a statement in Deuteronomy about an evil tribe: their memory should be blotted out, but they shouldn’t be forgotten. Thus, we shouldn’t celebrate and honor the slave traders and other figures, but we can’t forget what they did. We can’t let it happen again. Once at home, I get my laundry ready and drag it outside. As I talk on the phone, the largest cockroach I have ever seen wanders up to me. I stamp my foot next to it. It runs off. We’ll meet again.