more than shoes.

after having lunch with a friend of mine today, I wandered into the shoe store on the corner to peruse their current 'exciting sale.' Not surprising, I found something that I liked--a pair of ankle boots, dark brown leather with straps wrapped around. Not something that would have traditionally been my style, but something about them called to me, and not just the for sale tag. I found out that the pair on display was the last in the store, and a half a size smaller than I usually take. But I decided to try them on anyway, and they were nearly perfect. So close to fitting. Especially being leather,I tried to convince myself they would stretch and be perfect. But every lap around the store, I could feel that they were just slightly too short, and would eventually hurt. So I put them down, determined to go to the same shoe store two blocks away and see if they had what I was looking for (since of course this location couldn't call over for me). Unfortunately, they also were completely out of stock. Not ready to give up just yet, I decided to check the Strawberry on another corner of this same street...sometimes they surprise you. And I was! There, on the wall with the shoes, was one pair of the boots I was looking for, in my exact size. Even more than that, they were a better sale, and $50 less than the first pair I had initially seen. But the color was different--a different shade of brown, like a camel, generally a color I really prefer. And yet, when I looked at them, all I could see was what they weren't. Even though in the context of themselves, I would have loved those camel boots and bought them in an instant, all I saw in them was what they were not--the dark brown. Since New York is abounding in shoe stores, I decided not to settle and to keep looking, trekking through the mush and slush and snow toward Soho, toward what my mind told me I wanted, through more than half a dozen additional shops. No luck.

Ok, I realize that this may seem entirely shallow a story to share--boohoo, the girl couldn't find her shoes, not that she needs any more anyway. But really, this is more than another example of American consumerism and greed...this is the problem that so many of us have in our lives. I was so convinced of what I wanted, that dark brown boot. And yet when I first found it, it didn't fit, but rather than be dismayed or reevaluate what I was looking for, I convinced myself that with so many places to look, what I had ideally in mind must be out there somewhere. And so I passed on the pair a bit too small, and I let go the pair exactly my size (and more my budget) determined that this now holy grail of shoe must exist somewhere. Everywhere I went, where I would see other possibilities, I did not see them for what they were, but only for what they weren't. I had prematurely locked myself into this corner of an idea of what I was looking for, that even when I found what was actually perfect in so many ways, all I could see were flaws.

I finally realized this, and what this meaningless search I had send myself on really meant about my problems in general, and decided to go back to Strawberry, get the boots in the other color (which were even preferred by some of the friends I had sent pictures of them to!) Of course, as is only appropriate in such a story with the moral given, by the time I got back there, the perfect boots were gone.

(in a nutshell for those who wanted to skip the intro about my incessant shoe shopping: too often, we get these ideas of what we want and convince ourselves that even though it really wasn't right when we were first exposed to it, it is right in the end, and nothing else will do; then, when we see other things that could be right, or that are even more right than the first, the memory of the first taints us so that we cannot see things for what they actually are when we find them.)

i don't know if i've been changed for the better...

...but I have been changed for good.

It seems like a long time has passed since I last wrote, a long time since I sat in the lounge in Tel Aviv. I guess it is because it has been a long time.
I had expected a slightly rocky and slow transition back in to my old life, my old places. I expected time to deliberate. Who could have predicted that, due to two deaths in my immediate community circle in the firs few days I was back, I would see nearly every single family friend at least twice, and be asked what I am doing now with my life more times than I would ever wish to count. Unpacking and adjusting to the cold weather don't seem to be acceptable answers.

The return was in many ways surreal; in one conversation with my mother, she asked me if I really felt like I was coming home, she asked me even, where I considered my home to be. This might seem like it ought to be an obvious question, but how could it be? Was home Roseland, where my parents live, my dog lives, my room is and all my things are? No, how could it be a place filled with but separated from my life, a place I hardly knew and knew no one in. Hopatcong, where I had grown up, spent 19 years? I had never truly felt home there, and less so with most friends moved away, and my childhood house covered in Christmas decorations. Berlin? Jerusalem? True, these places were beloved, invaluable, but foreign. I realized where I considered home to be--a place where I had actually lived, grown in, and the first place where I chose to be. New York.

As my time back, wherever I was, some things had improved. I had started making a proper Shabbat dinner every Friday night at my home. I was seeing old friends, reconnecting with people I hadn't seen in a while. Eventually, after the constant Shivas ended I went to spend a week in the city, seeing my friends, walking my old routes, returning to some old and loved places, routines. Things that always seemed immortal. And yet somehow, in a certain way, it had become foreign. Not just the snow, which was a shock to my middle eastern comfortable system, but something intangible..
even though you return to the old places, people, it seems that from some things, you really just can't go home again.

but that doesnt mean you stop trying to.