The Other Half

Remember when you were a child, and used to spend hours tying lanyards into intricate patterns that you would then loop as a choker or give to your bff as a friendship bracelet until forever? It’s my last full week in Charlotte, and I feel desperate to tie up the past two years into a neat anklet I can take with me. It’s a gradual process—I started saying goodbye after exams last week, and will finish next week at graduation. In every area of my life, I’m twining memories and people into farewells.

Last week, I showed my classes the video I’d made of them. The sillinesses, the pranks, the jokes and laughter of the year, threaded through with cries from each student when they spotted themselves.

“We really do dance a lot,” noticed one.

“Put it on youtube! Put it on facebook! Put it on all of the internet!” the rest cried.

“Will you show this to your new students?” somebody in each of my classes asked me. By the last class, I understood—“will you tell your new students that we came first, that we matter? Will you forget us in your new school?” was what they meant.

Students o’ mine, you are enmeshed in my teaching for the rest of my life. I will use you as archetypes, remember your reactions, reflections, and realities, and coast off of your jubilance, for the rest of my teaching days. Your personalities wreath my teaching. I will not forget you.

Friday, some of the teachers sat out on a restaurant patio, clinking drinks and toasting the end of the year.

The Teacher of the Year asked us, “what are you going to miss the most about teaching at our school?”

“The students.”

“The stories.”

“Knowing my job matters, that I make an incredible difference.”

“Introducing students to things they might otherwise never have seen. Like smores made in tinfoil solar ovens.”

I thought about it, since, certainly, all that had been said was true. “The intelligence of our students—the real-world experience they have that they bring into the classroom, that I certainly didn’t have at that age. Their degree of reflection and intelligent compassion.”

I feel knots forming in my throat as I think of leaving them. Their wisdom will form a tightrope upon which I will balance as I cross an ocean to my new classroom.

On Shabbat day, the community—nay, family— that has adopted me here sat in the Charlotte Torah Center, eating the kiddush that they’d sponsored to say goodbye. I stumbled through a dvar Torah, thinking that every second of it couldn’t possibly express my gratitude for their warmth and moral guidance and the feeling of belonging they’ve given me over the past two years.

Several of the people with whom I have built the closest bonds spoke after the meal. They forgot that I’m very much alive, and I felt like Tom Sawyer, eavesdropping on his own eulogy. It’s an experience I’d much rather be dead for. I wanted to crawl under the table, but I also appreciated what people had to say, especially the rabbi, who in the course of his encomiums managed to praise my future husband at great length. He seems to know a lot about him—maybe he can introduce me to him.

At the end of the kiddush, a man from a couple whom I consider in the closest part of my Charlotte Torah Center family came up to me and referenced a blog post I’d written after Simchat Torah, about not belonging in the Jewish community as a woman. He told me that I may feel like that, but the community feels that I belong in it. We’re braided together as intricately as the scrumptiously browned challah that Sara bakes every Shabbat, and I leave this part of my Charlotte community secure in the knowledge that I will see all of them again. I am, after all, moving to our home. Moving to Israel.

This morning, a friend and I ran our second half-marathon this year. We both got bitten by the running bug at Disney, and nothing seemed like a more fitting end to two years of insanity than finishing the second half of a marathon. We made our goal, and I finished in 2 hours and 28 minutes, running full out for the last part. As I pounded across the finish line, muscles aching, heart pounding, but oh so proud, it felt like a physical manifestation of the past two years—the pain, the pride, the triumph. Running these past two years has been my catharsis, my coping mechanism, and ultimately, a way to challenge myself in an arena in which I feel I have complete control.

 

As I slowed to a walk past the finish line, I felt my throbbing calves and considered the feat of finishing my second half. It was different from the first. Harder. For the first, my goal was simply to finish, and because I knew that I would never give up, it was merely an exercise in ignoring agony and humorously pulling up from stumbles as best I could. For the second, I wanted to push myself. To do the best I could. To summon all of my strength, my will, my humor, to aid me, and help others along with me. We were sent off with a Sunday-morning prayer and the Star Spangled Banner to spur us forward at dawn. Looking back at the end, with Southern accents congratulating me and my muscles knotting in aching soreness, surrounded by a strangeness of culture that I will soon be trading for my own familiar one, I feel the deepest gratitude for God and country, and the strangers-become-friends who cheered along the way.