Honest Abe

Here’s what happened to me. I must tell you this, what happened to me, because it was somewhat remarkable, though it might reveal things about me which are not pretty, and which I try my very best to hide. Do not be alarmed, readers. I’m ok. Good, even. I just get sad. And then I have thoughts. Sad thoughts. It’s ok. I can’t control them, but they are there. Always there. Lurking around the corner and under the bed. They come. They go. Like the breeze. I must let them pass without becoming too attached to them. I must breathe. I must release. That is my daily work. It’s what the Buddhists are always going on about.

Like many, I have what are called “mood swings.” Ups, downs and all arounds. Perhaps they are “severe” sometimes. I don’t know. I am no one but myself, the last time I checked. I try my best to manage them and create a stability and that has taken me a lifetime to begin to cultivate. Some people might call this “depression”. I think it probably is that, but I have trouble with slapping labels on things. With labels come stigmas and with sigmas come ideas about things and with ideas about things come limitations and with limitations come thinking that we really “know” about a thing when we really might not have any idea. With labels come the relinquishing of surprise. I do not want to ever relinquish surprise, for there is breath and movement in surprise. I’m still learning how.

For whatever reason, this afternoon, a beautiful afternoon in Brooklyn in early June, sun shining and breeze lightly blowing through the trees, I allowed a thought to creep into my mind. It was just one thought. A harmless, pesky one, really. But it was a decidedly “negative” thought. “What if,” I told myself as I stepped out of my apartment, “just what if, I went up on my roof and I got a running start and I jumped off it? What if I leapt? What would happen then? I probably wouldn’t die because it’s only three stories,” I concluded, “but I would be really badly injured. God, that would horrible,” I thought to myself as I glanced at my own reflection in the window of a minivan, “Think of my poor father and mother. They would be devastated.” I imagined myself on crutches with a badly damaged head, unable to ever think or speak clearly again. I imagined my face, disfigured like a wounded soldier’s, barely resembling the person I was looking at in the tinted window of the minivan. I played it all out in my mind. Step by step. I let myself linger there. I let myself feel the reality and weight of it. It was heavy, man. Very heavy.

Just then, as I was about to release this thought, a Hasidic man approached me from across the street.

“Hello there,” he said. He was heavy set, his white shirt stained with a thin black streak on his left sleeve.

“Hello,” I said, somewhat surprised that he would talk to me. I don’t think I’ve ever been talked to by a Hasid before. This was a first.

“Could I buy a cigarette off you?” he asked, two shiny silver quarters in his dirty hand.

Confession: I was smoking a cigarette. Don’t tell my mother. It is a thing that I do not normally do but, in times of increased turmoil, as I had felt this beautiful afternoon, something I reluctantly allow myself to slip back into.

“You don’t have to buy it, you can just have one,” I said, thumbing my nose at the capitalist exchange of money for goods.

“Thanks, you’re one of those then. The healthy people,” he said. “You don’t need to be smoking, you know. You don’t need to be doing this to yourself.”

“I know,” I said. “But in times of increased turmoil and stress, sometimes I do this.”

“We can’t control when we die, you know” he said to me, with fervor and seemingly out of the blue. “What are you going to do? Run and throw yourself off the roof of a building!? Silly. We just can’t control when we die. It’s not up to us, you know. It’s just not.”

Had the Hasid been dwelling in the far reaches of my mind? How did he know what I was thinking about? Did his curls contain special powers of telekinesis? I did my best not to be overwhelmed by the “on the nose” nature of his comment, vowing to myself that I would stay in conversation with this man while he was there but that I would write it all down later (that’s what I’m doing now, good for me on the follow through).

“No, we can’t. We most certainly can’t.” I said in agreement. I believed it.

“What are you so upset about anyways? It’s a beautiful day!” he said.

“A girl, pretty much,” I said. “I’m upset about a girl,” all of the complicated thoughts and feelings I’ve had over the last few months boiled down to the simplest of statements. I felt somewhat pathetic, like a high schooler pining after some unrequited crush.

“What, you were married? You lived here?” he said, motioning to the building with his hands and his eyes. “How much do you pay for rent?”

“I wasn’t married, no, but I thought we could be, maybe. About 2900 a month, not including utilities.” I responded.

“Pretty cheap,” he said, “good price.” Then he took a pause. “Well, if you weren’t married then there will be another girl. You can go and find another girl. That kind of thing, the feelings you are talking about, that’s not what we do.”

“You guys just get married to one another, yeah? A pre-arranged kind of thing? There’s no love?” I asked, feeling my way through the space between the natural flow of conversation and assumptions I had about him and “his people”.

“Yes, we marry. We decide and we stick to it. We have families. I could never, I would never, I couldn’t do anything else. What am I gonna do? Break up my family? It’s not always great, no. But sometimes…We figure out a way to get by. It’s not so much about happiness or love. It’s about something else. Getting through. Something like that.”

“You have kids?” I asked.

“Yeah. Guess how many,” he offered.

“Five,” I said.

“Very good, I have five,” he said, raising his eyebrows a bit. “How old am I?” he posited, both of us enjoying the guessing game.

“29,” I said.

“Wow. Right on. Right on.”

“I just followed my intuition,” I said, me raising my eyebrows now.

Some time passed.

“How old are you?” he asked me.

“Thirty three,” I said.

“Ah, you’re still young. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.” he said with assurance.

He sat and smoked the remainder of his cigarette. He told me that he lived in Williamsburg and that his name was Abe. I told him my name was David and we had a moment- common for me, at least- where there was some sort of mutual understanding, unspoken but very present nevertheless. Ancestral, perhaps. Going all the way back to Russia, maybe.

“Ah, so you have a touch of this,” he said, motioning toward his face.

“Yes,” I said. “A touch. Just enough.”

We shared a smile and parted ways and I thought about all that had gone on. I felt distinctly differently than I had when I walked out of my door. Where there was once heaviness and weight, there was a bit of reassurance and ease. Where I was once out of balance, I had been corrected.

Oftentimes, I think there is a great distance between joy and grief, happiness and sadness, gladness and utter despair. I oftentimes view these things as polar opposites, taking great work to shift from one extreme to another. Heavy lifting and much fanfare. But today, with Abe, I was reminded that perhaps that distance isn’t as long as the mind makes it out to be. Perhaps they are much closer than I think.

I would never jump off of the roof of my apartment in Brooklyn. Really, I never would. But I think it’s useful to think about what would happen if I did. Just as it is useful to think about what would happen if you did anything destructive. In those thoughts exist the deterrence.

And it is useful to be open to surprise, to a visit from an unlikely stranger. To the possibility of a touch. Sometimes, it is just enough.