Go Fly A Kite

“Go Fly a Kite” will appear in To Have Not: A Memoir. ©2010 by Frances Lefkowitz; due out this spring from MacAdam/Cage.
— Ed.

I WAS ON A TRIP back home to northern California — part work, part vacation — and I had a terrible head cold. My research for a magazine article on the wine country north of San Francisco had brought me to a chilly town on the edge of the San Andreas Fault, a place populated by a combination of wealthy tourists, ranch hands, and hippie holdouts. There, alongside the gift shops, the feed store, and the yoga studio, I stumbled across an herbal apothecary with a hand-painted sign that read, “Garden of Eden.” I stepped into this garden to buy some echinacea to supplement the Sudafed and Tylenol I was already taking. (When feeling this low, I discriminate against no potential cure.) The shopkeeper — whose long, graying brown hair identified her as one of the holdouts — watched me peruse her shelves, then asked, with a surprising French accent, what my symptoms were.

“If you like,” she told me, “I can mix up a custom tincture for your problems.”

She grew or collected all the herbs herself, she said, and she seemed to know what she was doing, so I offered up my symptoms to her: sore throat, congestion, headache, fatigue. With that, she turned to her workbench, a two-tiered table covered with large bottles full of various mud-colored extracts, and began to pour and mix. But my problems didn’t end with my cold symptoms.

“Oh, yeah,” I said to the hair spilling down her back, “and my love life is a shambles, and I lose interest in anything I pursue, and I don’t know where to call home. You got anything for that?”

Eden — it turned out that was her name on the sign; not the name her mother had given her, but the name she had given herself — smiled as she turned to me with a handful of colored paper slips and asked me to choose one for the label. And as she wrote out the directions (“Half a dropper three times a day, with prayer”) on the saffron paper I’d selected, she told me that she was studying an ancient healing tradition.

“Do you know the Sufis?” she asked.

“I know they do a lot of dancing,” I replied. It was all I knew about Sufis. Once, when visiting one of my childhood homes as an adult, I’d come upon a Sufi commune whose inhabitants whirled like the dervishes they were. They had moved into the house on Norwich Street in San Francisco where my earliest memories had taken place: eating a parsley sandwich from a floating pie pan in the bathtub; slamming the window on my finger; reminding my older brother in the middle of the night to turn the pillow over to the cool side.

“Sufism is the mystical form of Islam,” Eden explained. “In a healing we don’t dance; we breathe and chant and pray to Allah — though if you’re not comfortable using that word, you can pray to whoever you want.” Then she offered to give me a free healing; she was in the student-teaching phase of her program and needed to practice. “The healing could address some of those other concerns you mentioned,” she said with a little smile.

“I’m not really religious,” I told her. “I’m not even what you would call ‘spiritual.’ ” I gave her a brief rundown of how my parents — one Catholic, one Jewish — had abandoned their religions at a young age and didn’t have time to figure out what to tell their children before we started popping out: one, two, three. “But they did manage to teach us awe and humility,” I said, “so I’ve never had the gall to disbelieve in the possibility that something benevolent, or at least concerned, might be trying to orchestrate behind the scenes.”

If pressed, I would have to call myself an agnostic — an I-don’t-knower who doesn’t quite discount magic and luck and coincidence; someone who, just in case, picks pennies off the ground if they’re facing up and makes wishes on stars, moons, planets, and anything else that twinkles in the night sky. What I don’t believe in is congregations. As a child I watched teenagers, grown-ups, and whole families join the Hare Krishnas, Scientology, Lifespring, Synanon, the Moonies, and various other groups that liked to accost you as you walked along Mission Street, offering free personality tests or spice-dusted popcorn. An imperviousness to cults is a blessing when one waits for you on every street corner, hoping to catch you in the aftermath of a fight with your lover or your mother or your boss — or other times when you might be particularly susceptible to kindness. So my skin was perhaps unnecessarily tough, sealing me off from hucksters but also from strange-sounding disciplines — Reiki, shiatsu, Feldenkrais — that might have done me some good.

I’d come of age in the center of the New Age — San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s — and was currently an editor at a magazine called New Age, which required me to take seriously all kinds of theories and practices I didn’t believe in. Through it all my resistance had remained firm, but that day something in me melted just a bit. It was time, I supposed, to cast off at least a piece of the armor I’d been wearing for most of my life and try something new. Plus it was free.

“OK,” I told her, through the haze of my head cold. “I’ll give it a try.” We arranged a healing session for the following week, and Eden suggested a date — February 26 — that, as coincidence or God or the stars would have it, happened to be my thirty-ninth birthday.

IN OTHER PARTS OF THE COUNTRY February is dreary and cold, a month of bare branches against a gray sky, but in northern California it is a time of pink and white blossoms emerging from moist, vibrant green. It wasn’t until my first semester at a New England college that I understood what my high-school English teachers had meant when they’d said winter is a symbol for death. In California things die in summer, when the rains stop and the heat bleaches the grass to a pale, crispy brown. Winter, by contrast, is the season when water pumps life into rivers and fields, creating rich black soils covered with improbable shades of green. Now, after twenty-some years on the East Coast, I almost couldn’t adjust to the lush vitality humming all around me. I spent much of my time trying to convince myself that I had a right to partake in such beauty and opulence.

In New England people would ask me why I’d ever left San Francisco, that city of light and charm. But for me San Francisco is the place where I grew up poor and learned to be a Have Not; a city of sadness and divorce and impossible dreams; a city drenched in cold, damp fog, while just over the bridge — any bridge — the sun is shining and anything is possible. I’d stayed away for decades, afraid that whatever fragile sense of possibility I had created for myself would not survive a return to my birthplace. But the small town in Maine where I’d finally settled had started to feel too cozy, and I missed this Northwestern landscape: the soft, sloping hills going down to the Pacific; the foggy wind that whipped through the valleys; the green-and-cream streetcars and bright gray sidewalks of the city. This was the geography imprinted upon me at my most impressionable age, and I had begun to yearn to see it again.

As soon as I’d stepped off the plane in San Francisco, though, the wavering had begun. No one was there to pick me up — it just wasn’t done in our family — and on the bus from the airport I closed my eyes against the city and even the bridge, not opening them until we’d passed into Marin County, then Sonoma, where both my father and younger brother had settled. Neither father nor brother met me at the bus station, and I took a five-dollar taxi ride to my brother’s house, where he lived with his wife and two young girls. And with a hollow thud I was “home,” trying with all my might to remind myself of my right, and my desire, to be here.

ON THE MORNING OF MY BIRTHDAY Eden and I sat in her little shop with the door locked and the closed sign in the window. The sun was out, and the sky was clear, but the damp chill of the ocean air seeped under the door and through the threads of our sweaters. She had asked me to come up with a concern — physical or emotional — that I wanted to work on, and so I was confronted with the eternal question What seems to be the problem? Though I’d been having on-and-off pain in my lower back for some years and a lifetime of insomnia and digestive complaints, I wanted to focus on the one problem that felt most impossible to solve. I’d spent the week tracing my ailments back to their origins, trying to describe this mother of all problems, the Big Kahuna from which all the others had hatched. But it’s hard to condense a life’s worth of troubles into words, and once you’ve done it, those troubles can come off sounding petty.

Mine had mostly to do with poverty. They refer to poor kids these days as “at risk,” but when I was a child, the word was “deprived,” and there was something accurate, if condescending, about the concept of deprivation. I grew up wanting many things, including a safe and reliable home where the family ate dinner together every night and the kids had to call to ask permission to miss a meal or arrive late. But even after I got out from under the laws and habits and necessities of poverty, even after I got jobs and apartments and stereos, I still couldn’t shake the sense of scarcity. I no longer had to live in poverty, but I chose to dwell there nonetheless, because I knew no other way to live.

“My problem is in my head,” I told Eden, who regarded me with a serene, closed-mouth smile. “Or, at least, that’s where it started, but then it spread out to every part of my body, like a cancer. It’s not actually a thing; it’s an idea, or a belief, really. In fact it’s a lie. But it feels so real that it might as well be a physical disease.”

“And what is the belief?” Eden asked.

“That things that are possible for other people are not possible for me. That I am excluded.”

Honestly, I thought to myself, haven’t I gotten rid of this ridiculous theory yet? After all these years I was bored of my own way of seeing the world, and the evidence no longer supported it. Back East I had a decent car and a good job, with health insurance and a retirement account. I owned a small sailboat and a surfboard and made use of both. I’d spent my summer vacation in France — flying into Paris, then surfing the beaches down the Atlantic coast to Biarritz. The article I was currently working on — about the vineyards, restaurants, and spas of the wine country — would go on to earn me a nomination for a prestigious award for food writing. But this other version of myself was fragile and tenuous, especially in my old setting.

“Excluded from what?” Eden asked, her tone somewhere between compassion and incredulity. Sometimes I forgot that I looked normal on the outside, and that this “exclusion principle” was invisible to others, no matter how pervasive it felt to me.

“Everything,” I said, trying to convey how deep this belief went. “A husband. A home. Nice underwear. Dinner parties with stimulating conversation. Vacations abroad. A garden with nasturtiums and sunflowers . . .” As I was listing these things, I realized that I actually had some of them, but curiously that didn’t stop me from feeling they were out of my reach. I always chose the off-brand, on-sale, low-cost version; either that or I won a scholarship, a pity prize. So even when I got hold of the car, the surfboard, the vacation, it felt cheapened, and I went on yearning. In my hands possessions and accomplishments felt insubstantial, as elusive as smoke.

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