The Peripatetic.

My friend teaching in Brooklyn asked me to share my personal statement for college with her class of high school seniors.  As I have had the chance to read their drafts and see slices of their lives, it is clear now that their stories are matchless.  They have a wellspring of experiences, personal turmoil and resilience in the face of hunger, drugs and death, but those are their stories, and they tell them best.

For now, this is what I said, more or less.

Real joy? Dates before dinner in another Haifa home.

I wrote my personal statement from Niamey, Niger, where I had just moved. I was eighteen.  What had I accomplished?  I had just arrived in Niamey.  What had I done?  I could not think of anything.

I wrote about that: not accomplishing.

When I was nine years old, my family moved to Haifa, Israel.  Three years later, my father was diagnosed with cancer.  He passed away the following year.

The great man who used to carry my brother and me with one arm (usually because we were trying to arm-wrestle him and tag teamed, throwing in our whole body weight — futilely) then suffered strokes that left him incapacitated.  Several times, my mother and I had to carry him out of bed, out to the ambulance.

My father had a larger than life personality.  We would host home cooked meals with friends from all over the world coming to join.  The night I wrote about was another dinner.  As usual, my dad was to sit at the head of the table, commanding conversation and entertaining us with stories.

He had just had one of his strokes, and my mother and I had to carry this great man out to the dining room table.  He was still big, and we were little.  We couldn’t get him past the doorway.  He never made it to the table.

So he sat there, in the doorway, and carried on with his stories and jokes, and we laughed.  He sat as if he were in front of a full spread, gallant and undaunted, not like a weakened man on the floor with a room of adults standing over him.  Dinner was shorter that normal that night, and we never did sit around the table.  No one wanted to eat that way or see him in that position, but the night was joyful.

I reached Niger after years of praying to go to West Africa, to have that year to participate in the hustle of life outside well defined classrooms and curriculum.  Instead, I felt more like an observer than a full participant, like I couldn’t quite make it to the table.  I was taking so much more than I could give, relying on others more than I ever wanted, and any accomplishments were intangible if not entirely invisible.  Sometimes we can only make it to the door, but there can be joy in that, too.

The night my father sat in the doorway, while it pained us all to see him there, proved to be the most memorable dinner party of our five years there.  My year in Niger, while I painfully questioned the value in my being there, was filled with joy.

As my father’s favorite prayer reads: “I will be a happy and joyful being. … I will no longer be full of anxiety, nor will I let trouble harass me. I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life . . . “  Which acknowledges there is anxiety to fill you up, trouble to harass you, and a life of unpleasant things; but you can still sit looking up from the doorway and laugh.