It started with a pair of heels clicking down the hallway of a dream.
I have a great grandmother I’ve never discussed here. She is a family legend and, like most family legends, a family shadow. She and I were never alive at the same time but she looks out for me like no one in my line but my mother’s mother Alice May, who died when I was 18.
This great-grandmother’s name was Rubenfire, which I learned long after I named my now-deceased kitty Ruby. Growing up I was only told that she was a very cruel woman who’d made a small fortune selling rags. Later I learned she was brave, charismatic, and resourceful, and that when she’d arrived here from Poland as a non-English-speaking teen, she’d done the only thing she could to support her children upon discovering her husband had started a new family in Brooklyn: She turned tricks, and eventually became a successful brothel owner in the Salem area of Massachusetts. Continue Reading →
So long as we still have memories, each of us eventually becomes a time traveler. When I walk down a NYC street, I can see how it looked 20 years ago as clearly as I can see the way it is now. And when I speak to someone I’ve known a while, I can see all the ways they once looked, talked, and felt as easily as I can see who they are at this moment. I’ve always known our bodies are time travelers–that they store every feeling and experience we’ve had and translate them into ailments and strengths. Lately I think our minds are, too. Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once” but he was only talking about chronos, or linear time. In kairos, or soul time, everything does happen at once, and none of those things change unless spiritual progression occurs.