OF BUTTERFLIES AND HOPPLES

Point and click. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. It is far less ceremonious and momentous than ripping pages from a diary, or from one’s life, and burning or trashing them. Why do I need a record of twelve-year-old appointments, anyways? So, pretending to need more “space” in my MS Outlook (hah, with a bazillion-gig hard drive!), I do a little housecleaning before I start my new job next week.

Point and click. Delete. Delete. Delete. And stop. Too easy, I realize, to rip pages from my life, some of them joyous, some of them painful, some of them remorseful, some of them ignominious. Some dates are pivotal. Some are lost to the mundane and trivial. One of the latter particularly catches my eye . . . a trek twelve years ago to New York to visit my then 19-year-old Chanie. It leads me to reminisce about a mandate that my blessed mother, may she rest in piece, insisted I work into my quick trip. I remember that . . .

She “suggested” that I pay a visit to two elderly cousins, Cynthia and Toby, who recently moved to a nursing home. Cynthia and Toby as I remember them, were overstuffed, jovial busybodies whom my Dad indelicately called "The Butterflies." The last time I had seen them was in my freshman year of college. It was on a similar mission from my mother, to pay a visit to my elderly Aunt Ruth, who in her thick Yiddish accent repeatedly offered me fruit with the words, "Markie, have a hopple!"

To say that I was thrilled to trek Uptown to do my mother's bidding would be an overstatement. The irony was, however, that to my own surprise, I was not at all reluctant. Maybe, I thought, it was that the first time I saw Cynthia and Toby, in 1956, they were not much older than I am now. Maybe it was a function of hitting 40. And maybe it was my growing awareness of how profoundly deprived our kids are of a notion of the people, and things, and times, and places, and experiences, that collectively make us, us.

Now again, this time well into middle age with old age looming close ahead, I have come to appreciate that reincarnation is not an irrational religious doctrine. Reincarnation is nothing more than my capacity to see that each one of my cells is encoded with the legacy of a thousand generations that converges for just a fleeting moment in the organism that is I. This sense of reincarnation is the antidote to the poisonous nihilism that flow from the delusion that life is the product of a solitary moment, detached from yesterday and tomorrow and from interdependency with fellow creatures.

Perhaps being an only child made me a more enthusiastic receptor for the delectable morsels of reminiscences that were repeated to me over and again with ever-greater relish by my mother and father and aunt. They were marvelous anecdotes deliciously retold and re-retold until they were inseparably bonded to the fiber of my being.

And so, I have besieged my own kids with wonder-tales of people that now live on in them:

Their great-great-grandfather and my namesake, Reb Maishe Yitzchak Levinski, who chanted meticulously from the Torah every Sabbath and holiday, and who induced my father to read Hebrew by dropping an occasional penny to the table, feigning surprise and swearing that it was the work of an angel from heaven. And Auntie Levin, who distinguished herself in the 1893 Columbian Exposition by eating a banana while standing on her head under water, and who had a trained poodle act in vaudeville, and who fed my unsuspecting grandmother, newly arrived from Europe, pork chops as an unsolicited crash course in the realities of life in America.

And my grandfather, Pa, and his rambunctious, "anti-Semitic" horse, Tootsie, who pulled his milk truck through the icy streets of Chicago. And Grandpa Julius, the misunderstood, whimsical scholar who, for his own mental stimulation, definitively cross-referenced the entire Apocrypha to sources in the New Testament and Talmud. And Cousin Martin, a brilliant, selfless young physician who was hauled before Senator McCarthy's witch hunt for his communist inclinations, and who died tragically of a heart attack at age 34.

And Aunt Minnie, a most successful career woman who could do any New York Times crossword flawlessly in pen. And my Dad, who spent the better part of the Depression as a railway mailman on the legendary City of New Orleans. And Reb Mottel Wiludzanski, the only one of my grandfather's brothers to stay behind in Poland, who perished with his entire family in the Holocaust – Reb Mottel, whose family of nameless faces haunts us in a picture from 1928, the only tangible reminder that they had lived at all.

I remind my kids incessantly that the melodies they lustily sing at the annual family Passover Seder are not documented in any book of liturgical music, but that they are the memorabilia of God-knows-how-many generations of Wiludzanski’s and Levinski’s and Goldsmith’s and Gornitzski’s that are now reincarnated in far-flung and unanticipated places like Greenville and Ann Arbor.

I bring out ancient family pictures even if they are not always enthusiastic about seeing them again, and relate fragments of wonder-tales in a determined effort to make relatives long gone come back to life. I laughingly offer them "a hopple" in memory of Aunt Ruth and “The Butterflies.”

Now, my kids and their spouses grow increasingly fascinated with these forebearer stories, luxuriating in vicarious reminiscences of the family grocery store on the West Side of Chicago. Even at age 6, I remind them, Ben was motivated to learn a self-taught genealogical litany he would repeat to anyone who would listen, declaring proudly that his full Hebrew name was "Binyamin Immanuel, ben Moshe Chayim, ben Shimon, ben Yehudah, ben Yonah, ben Yosef, and Esther Devorah, bat Avraham Yitzchak."

I know by implicit faith that there are worlds more at work here than mere ancestral trivia. For, it is as much a matter of biological fact as it is philosophical conjecture that in deepening its roots, the stock of a tree grows more vital, and the fruit it produces invariably grow more bountiful. This I believe more firmly than ever: The possibility of creating generations that will flourish to their highest calling will increase exponentially as we speak to then of "Butterflies," and "hopples," and savory stories of illustrious and not-so-illustrious ancestors, all of whom will remind them that our lives are more than the spontaneous products of detached moments in time.

What is past, I pray that they will learn, in deference to Shakespeare, is simply prologue.

Oh, a final word: I did indeed visit The Butterflies. Ironically, both of them passed on shortly afterward. Mother, as always, knew best.