Tikkun Olam

My daughter Rambo is a special person.  Well, all my kids are special.  But she has developed a quality that has been drawing perfect strangers to help her, and bringing out the best in these strangers.  Let me explain: she is twenty-three years old, and suddenly, for almost a year now, she finds herself in a wheelchair, in constant pain, and unable to support her own weight--or any weight whatsoever--on her feet and legs, thus unable to stand up, and of course, walk. She has been on her own since age 15, when she left for Israel after one year of high school here on her own, without her family, through a program called Na'aleh .  At the completion of three more years of high school in Israel and in two different schools, she was one of the few students on the program who stayed and stuck it through: most of the teenagers went back to the States and to their families.  She went on, after graduating, to enlist in the Israeli army (the IDF, or Israel Defense F...

It is raining a coldish, shivery spring rain.  I am sitting here at the computer in my “office”--the room which I still call ‘C----‘s room’--by the window, listening to the rain pouring down the downspout against the brick outer wall of our townhome and onto the ground. In fact, I am consciously calling this room by that name, that is: the room of my youngest child, and I stop myself when I find myself beginning to say ‘my office’ when I refer to it either to friends, or even to my husband. I know I wrote sometime back that I am metamorphosing as a mother; that I am beginning to accept my children as adults, as well as my role as grandmother to my grandkids.  But that is not the whole truth, only just…most of it. There is still a small part of me that does not want to make that final, emotional leap out of the past and into the future by calling the room in which my youngest daughter spent a very small fraction of her life, actually—she was here in this townhome where we ...