Every Little Thing

by Miriam Karmel

Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. . .. Something more will arise for later, something better. –Annie Dillard

Preserved and resurrected

A team of Russian scientists recently grew a narrow-leafed campion from seeds that had been buried by arctic ground squirrels some 32,000 years ago. They attributed this feat of endurance to a combination of extreme cold and the deep windblown sediment that sealed the burrows soon after they were dug.

     Stacked up against other notable achievements—say the eradication of smallpox or walking on the moon—the propagation of ancient seeds seems like very small potatoes. And yet I recorded the campion story in a notebook, perhaps because in a weirdly meta way, what happened to those seeds before their remarkable flowering may be at the root of a memory I’ve carried for decades.

     The year is 1955. I am seven years old, the same age as Israel, where my grandparents have rented an apartment in Tel Aviv for the coming year. The family is gathered at my aunt and uncle’s home in Chicago to say goodbye.

     I cannot remember what my grandmother said that day, or what she wore, though she was a stylish woman who always left the house in a dress or suit, fine leather shoes and lipstick. And because my grandfather was a furrier, she always wore good coats, though she was never flashy. And because it was the 50s, when air travel was still an occasion, I know that she would have been well turned out. But that is conjecture. What isn’t conjecture, what I do remember, the only thing I remember, is that sticking out of her carry-on bag was a box of Saran Wrap.

You can take it with you

All these years later, I’m still circling back to that box of plastic wrap in my grandma’s carry-on bag. Perhaps she schlepped it to the desert 6,000 miles from home because otherwise she’d have to do without. Saran Wrap had only been sold for household use in the States for two years. It probably wasn’t sold in Israel at all, especially in the early 50s, when the most basic goods—oil, sugar, margarine—were rationed. Even after the official rationing policy was lifted, some consumer goods that were household staples in the U.S. were unheard of in Israel, my Israeli friend Yaniv told me.

     My grandmother’s impulse to pack a household staple does not surprise Yaniv, a graduate student at the University of Chicago who brings with him a can-opener from Israel because it’s familiar. Similarly, he and other Israelis transport something called a smartut rizpah, which is essentially a rag for mopping floors. According to Yaniv, the Swiffer has nothing on the smartut rizpah. This floor rag is so beloved by Israelis that it appears on lists of things students should pack for a stay abroad. Such advice travels in both directions. On a website to help students prepare for a year in Israel, an American student listed ten items to pack, first and foremost Ziploc bags. “You can find such bags, but they’re not as good,” she wrote. “And if you do find Ziploc, they’ll be very expensive.” (I have discovered my grandmother’s soul mate.)

     Yaniv’s Aunt Trudy, who moved to Italy after World War II, traveled with her own toilet paper when she visited Yaniv’s Israeli grandmother. “Now, make no mistake,” he said. “Israel was not so backwards, even in the 1950s. We had toilet paper. But I guess that our rolls were not soft enough for the genteel Italian lady!”

     As Yaniv spoke, I recalled my fruitless search for peanut butter the year I lived in Madrid and had children to feed. If I were to return, I’d probably pack peanut butter, the way Yaniv brings floor rags and a can opener, the way his aunt packed toilet paper, and the way my grandmother brought Saran Wrap.

     It’s reasonable to think that my grandmother took Saran Wrap to the Holy Land simply because there wasn’t any, as Yaniv suggested. Still, I want to believe that the memory I’ve clung to all these years centers on something more poetic than can openers or floor rags.

Goodbye to all that

Today, like most everything, Saran Wrap has a website, complete with testimonials from satisfied customers. “The cookies looked exactly as they had when I neatly placed them on the plate!” exclaims a woman who had inadvertently driven to a party with a plate of homemade cookies on the roof of her car.

     Did my grandmother believe that Saran Wrap would ensure that upon her return from Israel everything would look exactly as it had before she took off? Children. Grandchildren. The ranch-style home (albeit minus the cattle) in a modest Chicago suburb. That was her everything.

     She wanted to stay home.

     Once, when my grandfather suggested a trip to Europe, my grandma shuddered and said, “Alta buildings. I’m through with all that.” Europe was pointed in the wrong direction, back to where she’d come from—a confined village along the ever-changing border between Poland and Russia. Why would she want to leave her home and travel backwards to a place with old buildings?

     And yet. She would follow my grandfather anywhere. She’d followed him to America, after all. The story goes that he came home one afternoon and said, “Enough!” after being assaulted at a train station by a group of thugs who happened to not like Jews. So my grandfather, a modestly successful young businessman, scouted for a new home in a new land. When, at last, he called for her, my grandmother boarded a ship with one child in tow and another on the way.

     I wish I’d told her how brave she was, but I was too young to know that then. And though I loved her unconditionally, I was too young to see past her other-worldliness. I was deeply self-conscious about her otherness. She looked different. She sounded different. She had a formal, reserved demeanor that revealed her as someone not born in this brash, blowsy, swaggering country. Nevertheless, over time she assimilated, or at least accommodated.

     Europe? Old buildings? Goodbye to all that.

     Israel? An austere desert 6,000 miles from home? She’d rather stay put, thank you very much.

     And yet she went, taking Saran Wrap with her.

     Was it her talisman? Her good luck charm? She’d laugh and dismiss that for what it is—dubiously mystical twaddle.

     Yet with it, she at least had the power to protect the food she prepared. In her Tel Aviv kitchen, she would be mistress of her small domain, mistress of the quotidian.

Saving something for good

Shrouding food in plastic to look exactly as it had at the git-go is an act of temporary preservation. The plastic signals an intention to use/eat the food tomorrow, or the day after. Soon. Saran Wrap saves something for a little later.

     This is different from “saving something for good,” which has become tangled in my mind as I consider the various meanings of preservation. What does it mean to save something for good?

     Stories abound.

     A friend used to make Divinity with her grandmother at holiday time. The treacly candy consists of sugar and corn syrup and, most importantly, egg whites beaten into a stiff meringue. Though her grandmother owned a mix master, they beat the Divinity by hand for what felt like hours. “It’s nice to think that Grandma didn’t want a machine to spoil our fun,” my friend said. “But I think the real reason she made us beat those eggs by hand is that she was saving her mix master for good.”

     My friend C’s mother never used the living room. The pale blue space might as well have been roped off in velvet, like a museum period room. C and I were banished to the basement rec room, where the linoleum was beige, the ceiling baffled. The rumpled furniture was demoted from upstairs, to make way for all that was cossetted and blue.

     Last winter, my husband received a Christmas card that depicted a nostalgic sleigh scene in black and red and white, with lots of glitter. The friend who sent it said that she’d discovered a stash of these cards while packing up to move. They’d been passed along for generations. “We were all saving the cards for good,” she wrote, relieved to have broken the chain.

     At last, good had arrived. Hallelujah!

     I don’t know that one can save Saran Wrap for good. I do know that my grandma would have hoarded it, or at least dispensed it with a frugal eye. She may even have reused it, though not as I do to fend off environmental disaster. (All that petroleum; all that non-biodegradable waste.) She would have reused it for the practical reason that, in Israel, it was scarce. In that sense, one might save Saran Wrap for good, even though the purpose of Saran Wrap is to save something else for just a while.

Saving the whatever

One January, I discovered a pile of wasabi peas and shell-shaped pasta in a dresser drawer on the second floor of a house in the woods that I’d vacated in the fall. “Red squirrels,” a neighbor said, not surprised by my discovery. “You found its midden.” The cheeky rodent had raided my kitchen, hauled the loot upstairs, and stockpiled it in a drawer. It wasn’t saving pasta and peas for good, it was stockpiling food for the winter.

     We all hoard something.

     Like my pesky red squirrels or those arctic ground squirrels, we save for a time when the object of our obsession might come in handy. We save for a long hard winter, or a rainy day. In its less obsessive form, such saving is practical. It’s pragmatic. It makes sense. Until it doesn’t.

     J.C. Payne of Valley View, Texas saved enough string to create the world’s largest string ball. My mother strung so many rubber bands around the kitchen faucet that they choked and immobilized its long swivel neck.

     Then there were the Collyer brothers of New York City, legendary hoarders who filled their Fifth Avenue brownstone with so much stuff that one day they became trapped inside and died, entombed in the things they’d saved.

     Hoarding, benign or extreme, is driven by the fear of running out, fear of the proverbial well running dry.

     Saving something for good is different. It is driven by the fear of wearing something out, of corroding or deflowering the object of our affection. Use the whatever and it loses its shiny new-penny luster.

     So you save the whatever—the living room, the mix master, the Christmas cards—for the right moment, though you don’t have a particular moment in mind. You’ll simply know when “good” arrives. (Even if it never arrives. Consider the generations of women who died before sending those glittery Christmas cards.) You believe the moment will manifest itself as dramatically as Abraham did when presenting himself to God. “Hineini!” Here I am!

Lose it All

P. phoned to say that it had rained all day. She’d stayed inside knitting, baking, reading. “What I really should have done is clean,” she sighed. “Get rid of stuff.”

     I thought she then said, Swedish desk cleaning, which made sense, given that I was on the phone at my very messy desk, which needed cleaning, Swedish or otherwise.

     “No!” she laughed. “Death cleaning. As in, to die. As in döstädning.* As in, clean like there’s no tomorrow.”

     I said I prefer that other cleaning system, the one that instructs you to touch your belongings and ask of each, “Does this spark joy?”

     I said, “I’d rather focus on the Now than on the Hereafter.”

     “Either way,” P. said, “We’re supposed to get rid of things for good.”

* Döstädning is a combination of Swedish words—dö, which means death and städning, which means cleaning.

Use it all

The morning after Janey married Dado, we were gathered round the breakfast table nursing hangovers with strong coffee when the phone rang. From the kitchen, where Mother took the call, we (the whole lot of us home for the wedding) heard what sounded like the sympathetic cooing of doves.

     “That was Eda,” Mother said, when she returned to the table. “The top of Dado and Janey’s wedding cake is missing.”

     We all talked at once. Huh? What did you say? Why did Aunt Eda call you? To which Mother replied, “More coffee, anyone?”

     At dinner that night, Mother carried to the table a glossy round of cake upon which stood a resplendent doll couple. Ignoring our stunned silence, she plunged a silver knife through layers of ivory butter cream and cake. “Nobody wants to eat anything that’s been sitting in the freezer for a year,” she said. “Even if the marriage lasts. Which it will not.”

     It has been said that Mother is a witch. “A good witch,” cousin Janey once offered, in the context of something I no longer recall. “Not the kind who kidnaps children in the woods and eats them. Your mother just knows things that others do not.”

     So, it was no surprise that Dado and Janey lasted a mere eight months. But I’m not here to buttress the assertion that my mother knew the unknowable. The point isn’t even that a cake sitting in the freezer until the one-year anniversary will taste like old socks—though that may be true. The point is: What’s the use of saving something for good, if good may never arrive?

Spend it every time

My father had a party—let’s call it a small gathering—one New Year’s Eve, while my mother was in the hospital. Dr. and Mrs. F, old friends in town for a few days, would be stopping by to ring in the new year. Before they arrived, Father sent my brother to the deli for a platter of cold cuts while he selected a bottle of wine from a cache he’d been saving for special occasions. What better occasion than to usher in a new year with old friends, in the Great Room of your home in the foothills, leaving aside that your wife is in a hospital bed across town?

     Later, my brother told me that before he headed out to sit with our mother, Father opened the bottle, sniffed the cork and let the wine breathe. When the guests arrived, Father poured the wine, swirled his glass, inhaled the bouquet and tasted. And spluttered.

     “Vinegar,” my brother reported. The wine had turned.

     Sometimes saving things for good can backfire.

Something more will arise

Perhaps the librarian who stamped DISCARD on the front page of a used book I ordered by mail had read about Swedish death cleaning. Or had he held the slim volume of poetry close and felt no joy?

     Either way, he made clear his intention to clean house. In red, ALL CAPS, as if he couldn’t wait to be rid of the book, he’d stamped: DISCARD.

     As if to reassert that the book, written by an esteemed poet, was no longer wanted, the word appeared again on the last page beside the cream-colored pocket for the check-out card. The shelf-life of “The World Doesn’t End” had come to an end.

     Like a torero’s cape, the red DISCARD taunted me. And then I heard my aunt’s voice.

     “No matter what,” Aunt Elsie said. “Do you understand?”

     She was speaking of gold, as in, No matter what, you must never sell your gold.

     You must keep your gold for a time when you have been stripped of all else, when you are, say, fleeing for your life.

     Don’t worry, you will always find buyers. Everyone wants gold. It’s the standard. It’s the lingua franca of the material world. Though gold’s value may fluctuate, it will always be valuable. So never sell it. Until you must.

     This is different from saving something for good. This is saving something for bad, for upheaval, cataclysm, extreme misfortune.

     “Do you understand?” my aunt repeated.

     I nodded, though I had no gold to hold onto or to sell. But I have a book of poems. When I hold it close, it sparks joy.

Something better

Just when I think that I’m finished with my grandmother and that farshtunkene box of plastic wrap, I visit Ellis Island, home to the nation’s first federal immigration station, and now the National Museum of Immigration. Between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island was a portal to America, through which some 12,000,000 immigrants stopped before fanning out across the land. My grandparents were not among them. I know this, not because my family spoke of such things, but because their names do not appear in the easily accessible (click here!) digitized archive of ship manifests.

     Writing is said to be a way of discovering what we didn’t know that we do not know. At Ellis Island all of the things that I do not know came rushing at me. Among them: I do not know where my grandparents entered this country.

     The scope of my ignorance is vast.

     This is what I do know: I am a tourist at a museum dedicated to immigrants because of an oddly Rube Goldbergian chain of events that began when my grandfather was knocked down by anti-Semitic thugs at a train station in Poland. That assault triggered his decision to emigrate. My grandmother followed soon after and gave birth to my mother in Chicago, who in turn bore me, a second-generation American. Everyone has a story. This is mine, minus the details that make it peculiarly the story of my family’s migration.

     I’m on the museum’s third floor when I understand that I’m not done with my grandmother and the Saran Wrap. Here I encounter the Treasures from Home exhibit, a vast trove of things immigrants carried to their new home. I wander from one display case to the next trying to make sense of these objects, looking for some organizational structure, like the taxonomic sequence in a field guide to butterflies or birds. But I can’t discern a pattern to this hodgepodge. The items on display are as varied as the people who possessed them—people who arrived from all over, speaking different languages, practicing different religions. A worn teddy bear. A metal pasta cutter with a crimped blade. Flatware. Hand-embroidered linens. Violin. Samovar. Porcelain tea pot. Playing cards. A beaded necklace. Bibles. Most are everyday items, but some look so new they might have been things their owners were saving for good.

     On the museum’s website, two siblings who arrived in 1925 recall to an oral historian that they brought clothing, “of course,” and some pieces of china that were “very, very special. And maybe a blanket or two also that were real good wool, that we felt maybe we may not be able to get here in the United States.”

     I think of my grandmother, who hauled a box of Saran Wrap on a plane to Israel because she might not be able to get it there. And I think of her crossing the ocean on a steamship, with a three-year-old in tow, another in utero. What did she pack for that journey? Forget the Saran Wrap. What did she pack, not for a one-year trip abroad, but forever?

     Clothing. Of course. But what else? What treasures from home traveled with her? Something else I do not know.

     And then I think of my friend Masha, who fled Baku with her husband Talkum in 1993, following a situation not unlike the one my grandfather endured nearly a century earlier. Talkum had been roughed up by anti-Semitic thugs. Of course.

     I recall an afternoon I spent in Masha’s kitchen in a subsidized high rise on the edge of a pretty park near downtown Minneapolis. We are having tea. She is 92 or 93. Her hand trembles as she pours boiling water into a pretty porcelain cup. I admire the floral pattern and gold-leaf rim and ask if the cup is from over there. “No,” she says. “We can only bring 60 kilos.” “But what about your things?” I ask, a question she doesn’t seem to grasp, just as I cannot grasp leaving everything behind. Surely, she brought things with her. (Later, I will read about a Holocaust survivor who saved family pictures by stuffing them inside her shoes when she was deported to the camps. The pictures survived because the Nazis had not confiscated her shoes, as they often did. I have so much to grasp.)

     Masha’s English has declined since her husband died. He was the one who insisted they attend English for Newcomers classes. Now I may be the only person she converses with in English. Even her television, which has hundreds of channels, broadcasts shows in Russian. But she has retained enough English to convey that when she and Talkum arrived, people gave them things. She points to a long desk across the room, by the window, a gift from a family on the New Russians welcoming committee. A large glass breakfront—another gift—occupies an entire wall of the compact living room. “But what about the pretty dishes and wine glasses stored inside the breakfront? Surely, you brought those?” She shrugs. I take this to mean, No. Or perhaps: Stop bothering me with your questions. Yet, I persist. “It must have been hard to leave everything behind.” Another shrug, this one feels like a rebuke: What’s hard? She and Talkum fled Baku after an encounter with anti-Semites. As a child, she’d witnessed Stalin’s henchmen arrest her father, a rabbi, in the middle of the night. She never saw him again. She survived the Siege of Leningrad. It must have been hard. What’s hard? To leave behind tea cups? So, you pack clothes. Of course. A few books. The bronze medals and ribbons you acquired over the years for being a devoted apparatchik. If you are lucky, you bring family photos in something other than your shoes.

     I had wanted Masha to tell me what it was like to leave with little more than clothes, a dozen medals, some photographs and books. Did she and Talkum simply close the door and walk away, leaving everything as it was? Or did they sell their belongings before they left, which is what my peripatetic son does each time he relocates to a new job in a new city. He sells his TV, his bed, his pleather sofa, on Craig’s List or eBay. But Masha only shrugged. I was asking her to explain what it was like to leave everything behind, a question she either didn’t understand or lacked the language to convey. Or perhaps the memory was too painful for words.

     If Masha had told me what it was like to leave behind everything but 60 kilos, would I have a better insight into what my grandmother packed and what she left behind when she left the world of alta buildings? Surely, she took the silver candlesticks. They would have held the candles that she lit weekly to observe Shabbos, as well as throughout the year to mark all the other holidays. Perhaps they’d belonged to her mother. And her mother’s mother. Yes, my grandmother would have packed those. Unless. Unless she didn’t acquire them until she was ensconced in her new life in a ranch-style house in a middling suburb in the middle of America. But I prefer a more romantic scenario. I want the silver candlesticks to have crossed the ocean with her and the child and the one on the way.

     Whatever their origin, they eventually went to my cousin’s wife, a slight that my mother never forgave. “Corinne got the candlesticks,” she’d say. “They should have been mine.” Though true, it raises this question: What’s the point of saving something if it only leads to conflict and grief?

An exception

Recently, the people who sit on the board that runs the condominium association where I live determined that my Norway maple must come down.

     The tree shields my house from the road. It is a barrier against the wind, a buffer from the heat and cold. In spring, it sprouts fresh green growth; in fall, its leaves burn red. Birds perch on its branches; feeders hang from its limbs. In winter, from my second-floor aerie I watch birds cracking seed between their thick bills. It is a good tree.

     The board members think otherwise. My tree is a nuisance, a liability, an inconvenience. They say its roots are pushing up the brick pavers that surround my home. They say that someday it could fall and hit the siding. Some day.

     I found a way to save my tree, one that did not require chaining myself to its trunk. I saved my maple for the good. For the good of the birds, our planet, our souls.

Treasures from home

I have a bracelet that belonged to my sister, and which became mine after she died. It is a wide silver cuff with etchings of feathers and a bear paw, made by a Hopi silversmith. I will not travel without it. Once, I lost it in an airport and in the panic-stricken moments before I found it, I knew that I would not board the plane if it wasn’t round my wrist. The bracelet is my talisman. Was Saran Wrap my grandmother’s?

     I don’t know.

     But here’s something I do know: I have been writing about our relationship to things. I have been writing about the things we hold dear. And I’ve been writing about being a stranger in a strange land, and about the need for some thing that makes us feel a little bit less strange. Yaniv needs his smartut rizpah and his can opener. Aunt Trudy needed her Italian toilet paper. A woman who came through Ellis Island needed her pasta cutter. A child needed his teddy bear. My grandma needed Saran Wrap.

     We hold onto things, until, like my friend Masha, we cannot. Until then, we hold on. We hold on for a time when we may need whatever has become the object of our obsession—gold, wasabi peas, string, rubber bands, wedding cake, wine. Or we hold on to preserve our belongings—living rooms, mix masters—from decay. We hold on. We push back. We resist entropy, wanting everything to stay exactly as it was.

     But when we finally use the thing we’ve been holding on to, when we allow good to happen, we allow something else to arise. We send joy to a friend in the form of a glittery card. We experience pleasure lolling around in a pretty blue room. We savor the wine before it turns. We eat the cake when it’s fresh. And sometimes, as happened with those ancient seeds, we sow them and flowers bloom.

     When I started to write about the memory of my grandmother and the Saran Wrap, I didn’t know where I was headed. I was hoping to discover poetry in my grandma’s carry-on bag. I wanted to find metaphor in the quotidian. Instead, I ended up writing about preservation, both literally (all that food kept fresh under wraps), and figuratively (Saran Wrap as talisman, warding off disaster, guaranteeing good juju).

     So in the end, I have to settle for something I now know: Sometimes a box of Saran Wrap is just a box of Saran Wrap. My grandmother could take it with her. And she did.

Miriam Karmel’s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Coe Review, Water~Stone Review, Passages North, Moment Magazine, and others. She is the author of the novel, Being Esther (Milkweed Editions, 2013), and a short story collection, Subtle Variations and Other Stories (Holy Cow! Press, 2017). She lives in Minneapolis, MN.

Judge: Amy Schutzer is an award-winning poet and fiction writer who makes her home in the wilds of SE Portland. Her first novel, Undertow, published by CALYX Books, was a Lambda Book Award finalist, Violet Quill Award finalist, and Today’s Librarian Best of 2000 Award winner. The Color of Weather, her second novel, was a Finalist in 2010’s Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. Her third novel, Spheres of Disturbance, was published in 2014 by Arktoi Books and was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award. She is the recipient of an Astraea Foundation Grant for Fiction, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Taking the Scarecrows Down, a chapbook of her poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press in July 2011. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary reviews and magazines around the country. She has completed her fourth novel, The Autobiography of My True Self, a Fiction.