peggy guggenheim

my grandfather and i carried his fragile body to venice and ran through his travel budget in the shrouded december mist. we ate bursting plates of wheat and cheese and tomatoes twisted into different shapes and i bought little leather bound notebooks and hauled our suitcases through medieval streets that were certainly not ada compliant. i hung on his arm to stabilize him as we walked through art museums and he cried at post holocaust paintings. i’ll never know how many cousins he watched evaporate into the gas chambers. i am downstream of all the fractured bloodlines, reaching back to try to wind a narrative around an empty space. when we left the shtetl, what did we lose? what did we keep? i wish i’d asked my grandfather more questions. i saw a looping neon sculpture hung on a hedge that read ‘if the form vanishes, it’s root is eternal’ in italian and posted it, years later, as an instagram caption on a foggy photo of the berkeley marina i took right before his funeral; i will never not see him in tumbling, hazy landscapes, wherever they may find me.

i can’t stop thinking about what happens to a body when it’s taken out of place. when the caught shoe foists the subway door open and you slip onto the train and suddenly you’re being transported faster than feet could ever take you, the strident clank of zipping across boroughs. when you board a plane and feel nothing at all but you’re being propelled through the air at hundreds of miles per hour in a vacuous, liminal place, neither origin nor destination, counting down the hours until you’re somewhere again. travel is a song, emergence an acclimatizing dance, a point in time when you attempt to exist in an alien world. who am i in this foreign space? what do i carry with me?

in portland, i recognize my grandfather everywhere; in the suitcase he bought me, a little more banged up every mile it logs. in the towering douglas firs, the old world judaic art that lining my friend gav’s parents’ walls. you don’t have to travel to go home. i spend a little too long staring out at the fibrous mountains and loopy, swooping valleys thinking about the time my grandparents drove me six hours to go to the shakespeare festival in ashland on tisha b’av when i was fifteen, fasting, and cranky as all hell. they’ll never know how much i appreciate that they tried to show me all the beauty in the world. i want to tell you about how my grandfather used to walk from the bronx to carnegie hall on shabbat to try to score standing room tickets. my family tree is besotted with reciting our own lore and mythology, as if we were there. if i can keep my grandfather alive through stories, maybe you can know him too.

ashkenazis are the skeleton key keepers. i talk to gav’s dad on the porch about the genealogy research my dad is pouring his retirement into. i used to resent how obsessed with the past my dad was; i get it now. my friends get married and we grab hold of the goyim to show them how to dance the hora as the dj who has never performed a wedding, let alone a jewish one, cranks out havah nagila and siman tov u'mazel tov back to back. i am dizzy, and i am home.

an ancient greek philosopher, fleeing in wartime, has been attributed with saying “all that i own i carry with me,” or so the inscription in the journal i bought in venice told me. i will always wonder where my safest resting place will be. my body will bounce around in planes and trains and taxis until they come to a stop and i tumble into the light, clutching my shredded bag of memories, and offer them up to you.