Three memories of childhood, all revolving around my mother, came bubbling up over the last 72 hours.
The first was how, almost every night at dinner, between the setting of the table and the serving of the meal, my mother would pause, look out the window, and remark how (half the year) “the days are getting shorter” or (the other half of the year) “the days are getting longer.”
My mother has light sensitivity issues so she was keenly aware which way the momentum was headed and it wasn’t dinner unless she’d performed her duty as Lieber family publisher of the Farmer's Almanac.
(By the way, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere... the days are getting longer.)
My mother also had a habit of buying a jar of Smuckers strawberry jelly EVERY TIME she went to the grocery store, no matter if it was on the list or not, which is why we always had a dozen extra bottles in the pantry.
She’s never told me WHY she persisted, even though we ribbed her mercilessly, but I suspect, like with “light”, she just felt like you could never have too much.
(I, by the way, do the very same thing now with my kid’s Trader Joe’s “A Blueberry Walks Into A Bar” Breakfast Bars, of which we currently have 5 boxes.)
The last of my mother’s rituals, the one that started me down this road of “habit and history”, is that when, on the evening news, Rather or Cronkite would tell the story of some mass murderer or embezzler or general bad guy, my mother would say, “Please let him not be Jewish.”
This, I know to be about collective guilt.
In her mind, every time a “JEW” did something wrong my mother felt as if it would be added to the tab of all Jewish people by those predisposed toward anti-semitism.
Now, what triggered the triptych was my own reaction to the Bernie Madoff story.
Of course the perpetrator of the biggest personal investment fraud in American history HAD to be named "Bernard"... HAD to be from New York... and HAD to resemble the central casting version of a reform rabbi.
When I saw the story on MSNBC MY first reaction was exactly my mother's: “PLEASE let him not be—Oy.”
Now, I don't believe in any collective guilt, but we are a society that seems to need it to fuel our fury.
And all that got me to thinking, again, about the story of the Muslim family that was thrown off an AirTran flight because they were talking about airline security which made me consider, for the first time, that the phenomenon was not, “duh”, specific to my Jewish-American mother.
In this day and age, to be a Muslim-American mother probably means… when passing by a muted television to see a building on fire or the wreckage of a plane crash… the whispered, “Please let it not be terrorism,” and a profound sadness – both at the act itself and the unfair added “debt” to the ledger against the whole.