Objects Are Closer Than They Appear

The Accord

My most indelible memory of it was the smudge of a kiss. On the driver’s side window for some short period of time lived two lip marks that spoke of a tearful goodbye before one of us left for Rabbinical school on the other side of the country. The smudge was temporary but really it lasted forever.

Early this week, Lauren and I said goodbye to my Honda Accord which was actually my sister’s original purchase back in 2008. On one hand, I was so ready to say goodbye to this car. It had all sorts of issues over the years although she was reliable. Cosmetically, she left a lot to be desired.

As the day for saying goodbye drew close, I found myself surprised at how sad I was. The truth was, there were so many memory in this car. There were the mundane ones: countless commutes, grocery runs, and road trips up the California coast and across the country three times. Then, there were the holy ones: officiating funerals and prepping last minute in the car, carrying Torahs and siddurim for various services, and most powerfully a ride to Greenwich hospital last year on October 12th in anticipation of Cal being born. And so much in between.

You see, cars are not just cars and objects are not just objects. Marie Kondo might have what to say about this but these things in our life, whether or not they bring us joy, are receptacles of history and meaning. So however annoyed, fed up, sick of them we get, they carry deep wells of emotion. They are interwoven with our life.

As many of you know, I come from a family of story tellers. One reason why this is a such a deeply embedded practice is because of how stories bind us together. Even as the moment in time passes, the story keeps it alive. It reminds me of one of my favorite teachings from the Midrash¹ on why toward the end of the book of Bamidbar, the Torah needs to give a detailed account of all the various stops on the Israelites’ journey. We’ve already read about them already.

It may be compared to the case of a king whose son was ill and whom he took to a distant place to cure him. When they returned home the father began to enumerate all the stages, saying to him, “Here we slept, here we caught cold, here you had the head-ache, etc.”

We tell stories in order to remind people of what was. You can’t possibly remember all the seemingly picayune aspects of a lived memory because they fly by. So we regale ourselves with stories of the memories and for a second, we’re back there. We’re at the road-side stand in Georgia eating peach ice cream. We’re parked in Malibu eating fish tacos at the Pacific Ocean. We’re in Riverdale, saying goodbye and wondering how we’re going to survive the next four years apart. And then we’re here installing a car seat for our son 12 years later.

It’s all there. The holy and the mundane dancing together in a beautiful mess of a shitty 15 year old Honda. Relationships began and ended in that car. Life and death. So yeah, it was just a car. And also, it was so much more. Don’t feel so bad and alone when you’re having trouble throwing that thing away. Always remember, the physical thing will be gone but smudges and their stories last a lifetime.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend!

1. Tanchuma 4:10