Spelling Test

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

He was too young to know what they did to him or what he owed them. But that didn’t matter to them. It was enough that their best gift was the absence of harm, that he was safe.

Or so they hoped.

Two weeks of age, ready for his first outing, his grandmothers had won the right to wheel his carriage around the park, eventually pushing it to the part where the other Polish ladies, on benches and folding chairs, nursed their aches and prayer books, shared the Yiddish newspaper, bartered gossip for pieces of coffee cake.

Accompanied by a few “oy veys,” four of them rose from their seats, grouping themselves around the newborn’s new version of the pushcart. They bent over and bent in, noting his long eyelashes, clear gaze, and animated curiosity, mouthing not just pieties but praise -- he is adorable; may he live a long life; look -- see the intelligence there? trust me…he’ll be someone someday -- at which point they

straightened up, recognizing they had just voiced a chorus of compliments. Catching each other’s worried looks, they silenced their lips with the tips of fingers and – in sync, as if following an unspoken command -- sucked in their breath, leaned inwards again over the baby and, in unison, spat three times: pu, pu, pu. One of them then whispered “Kein ayin hara,” and the others muttered the same Yiddish words of protection, “no evil eye”…after which two of them quietly added, in quick succession, another three symbolic spits.

Straightening their bent bodies with effort, they each recognized and welcomed the looks of relief on each other’s faces. The disaster they themselves had invited with their admiration, their forecasts of good fortune, could easily have been a provocation for the rage of the jealous, for the envy of evil forces to take their revenge on someone more blessed and loved than they had ever been. No. He would be safe, despite the ill-considered blessings which could have conjured a curse. With mock-spit and a mumbled incantation, the shield of a spell had been cast.

In the decades that followed, the baby’s grandmothers continued to

adore, defend, support and protect him, albeit in more literal and less liquid ways. They offered him money, advice, opinions on his girlfriends, suggestions for a career, even marriage prospects. It is true he only became a ‘second-class doctor,’ meaning he got a PhD and not an MD…though they always claimed that he could still take just a few more courses if he cared to and practice “real medicine.” His penchant for compulsively washing his hands and face, they insisted, was proof of this yet-to-be-realized profession. More to the point of their prophecies and prophylaxis, this man-child, my son, now past 50, does not fully appreciate how he got this far this whole in life. I am tempted to tell him the tale of his first walk in the world, but fear that would break the spell spread by that thin layer of mist and Yiddish which once hovered over his young face. So, I let him walk on and enjoy this innocence in his maturity, without invoking such a perilous look backwards.

Still, when he and his children now leave my house after a family dinner, I watch him descend the front steps, and think of how he began his life’s journey into this dangerous and uncertain world. And when he reaches the bottom of the stairs and can no longer see or hear me, I spit three times and whisper to myself “Kein ayin hara.”

Joel Savishinsky’s Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, won the Gerontological Society of America’s book prize. Three times a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee, and a California Quarterly, Cirque Journal, Passager, Third Wednesday, Open Kimono and LIGHT Magazine award winner, the other places his poetry, short stories and nonfiction have appeared include Beyond Words, The Decolonial Passage, The Examined Life Journal, Ginosko Literary Journal, The New York Times, SLANT, Unlikely Stories and Willawaw. His collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging was published by The Poetry Box. 

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