Behind the white is reddish orange. A mahogany reddish. My
oldest son has the same beard now, 23 years later.
And his glasses. My husband's thick-rimmed dark plastic
glasses that hid his changing-green eyes. After purposefully
never changing that style, his last pair that broke could
only be replaced with more modern wire-framed glasses. I
can't get used to the look. Somehow, like the white hairs
covering the red, these steel-rimmed frames seem to cover
over his stand on not changing. His stance on not being
stylish.
"They're practical and inexpensive. Who needs fancy?" he
would say, when teenager after teenager, even me, sometimes,
would suggest that he get glasses that were more with the
times. Now he has. And somehow, I feel something's been
lost.
But his attire is the same. Black pants, black hat that's
been sat on a few times, and his black kapote that we
wash in the washing machine. Dry cleaning is too expensive
and with a kapote as old as his, it really doesn't
matter. And a simple white shirt.
Some of my boys like pretty patterned white-on-white shirts.
My husband's standard reply is "Eh!" with disdain. And so,
his attire stays the same. A certain simplicity. A certain
defiance against modernization. Such a part of him.
Sometimes I look at him and can almost hear a wagon bringing
ice for the ice box, or more so, a water carrier shlepping
heavy wooden buckets up to our house. With a moan, the
carrier deposits the precious liquid and my husband invites
him in, pays the few paltry coins, and then offers him a shot
of vodka. "Every Jew deserves a bit," I can hear my husband's
voice, probably in Yiddish, perhaps with a Russian, or a
Polish accent.
Or seeing my husband dash out to the yard to milk the goat
and give an earthenware container to the poor water carrier.
"For your wife," my husband would say. "It's important for a
kimpeturim [woman after childbirth]."
But that's not what I actually hear. What I hear is the
doorbell ringing and my husband listening to a man collecting
for a widow whose husband has died of cancer. My husband
sighs and pulls out whatever coins he has. And it's the sigh.
The sigh has nothing to do with steel-framed glasses or
patterned white shirts.
The sigh is a hundred-year-old sigh for the pain and
suffering of Jews everywhere, throughout the generations. We
don't have modern means to help much, maybe a ten shekel coin
on a good day. But the sigh . . .
My husband's sigh says it all . . .
