ECHOD

July 11, 2008

by Hugh Fox

      Feeling Friday after noon begin to run down into holiness, aiming the laser beam on her cornea, goofy disease, presumably the reaction of the body to a fungus generated by leaves, earth, dog-stuff...so that the eye began to devour itself. She was lucky, if the lesion had ruptured and bled into the eye, at least at the present state of the art, she would have gone blind.
     Carefully focused and then let it go.Perfect.
     “OK, that’s it!”
     And that would be it for the day, a five minute drive home and his wife’s hands over candles, welcoming the Sabbath Bride, dinner at home and then the synagogue where he was president and sat up on the bima/altar with the Cantor and the Rabbi.
     “I want you back here within, let’s say, three weeks. I want to monitor this thing carefully. This may be the end of it, or just the beginning.”
     Opening the blinds, the sun a red wafer in the late afternoon sky, almost touching the horizon.
     “So good luck,” he said to Mrs.Wasserman, shook hands, as she went out into the waiting room to pay. Her husband on the faculty of the School of Veterinary Medicine over at State. Good insurance. He was always exalted when he saw that people were taken care of and grieved when he saw they weren’t.
                                        2.


     Taking off his white coat. Last patient.Turning to his nurse, “Well, that’s it until Monday. It’s been a good week, thanks,” and he shook her hand too and went out the back door into the office-complex, down a back set of stairs into the parking lot.
     A little guy. You’d lose him in a crowd. Looked like he could be selling insurance or jewelry or stocks or was teaching Russian (he could speak Russian, both his mother and father spoke it to him since the time he was born), or might even be the swimming coach in the local high school or the chief druggist in the local drugstore.
     Driving home, the music beginning inside him, the Cantor in New York at the Cantors’ convention, and the Rabbi had asked him to take over his part both tonight and the next morning.
     A blue Chrysler and a white house, a nicely-rounded wife, six children....
     Twenty minutes before sundown.
     He looked at the sky as he came into the house. It was more like the the New Mexican desert than Michigan. All the familiar smells, the hallah loaves on he table.
     Rivka comes out of the kitchen and kisses him, a look of expectation-hesitancy on her face.
     “We might as well begin now!”
                                                       3.


     And she rounds the kids uip...holiness should surround you in all you do, he thinks, as they come noisily into the dining room, you should bind the words of God on your arms and put them on your forehead and put them on your doorways, and expand out into Shabbat as the sun slides over the horizon with you sliding with it, over the waters of holiness into exaltation....
     Rivka lights the candles, the words begin, Baruch Atta Adonai/ Holy Art Thou, God flowing out of him, this other non-present essential Self that knew thatt he Dayself was sham,that he was one of the Holy People whose days should have been (were!) bounded and enclosed by prayer, as should be the congregation that he was president of, even follow the ancient rules that no one should drive or even put on car-lights as the sun went down, it should all be HERE until the next morning, you live by the Temple because the Temple is the Center/ Midrah. He could get lost in the words and the melodies of the ceremonial language of God, and he was like a snake shedding its old skin and becoming new every week as he emerged fresh and glistening, went over to theTemple and sat on the bima during the services while the Cantor sang and he was a kind of silent witness.
     But tonight it was different, and then the next morning as he went over to what he always laughingly referred to as the Old Men’s Club, as close to the “essence” as it got in this reformed-conservative congregation, with his prayer shawl around his shoulders, his yarmulka on his head,Sol there, 95, two wives
                                                  4.
already dead, and he didn’t leave his retirement home except to come to Saturday morning temple. And there was Jake Minsky who ran a wholesale produce place in Lansing, Ben Kruchkow, the retired history professor, nine, ten, twelve more of them, two or three women, but mainly the old men, pushing the big historical clock back, back, back before holocuasts and diasporas, back into the desert just after the Great Revelation on Sinai when Moses came down with his face “scorched” and he had to cover it, came down with the Laws that separated barbarism from Civilization.
     He loved the music that he didn’t so much even think of as music but as a necessary way to clothe and decorate the words, the way the fourteenth century artist-scribe had decorated Asher Ben Jehiel’s commentary on the Mishnah by filling the letters with eagles and unicorns, dogs, lions and castles. Or how another illuminator from Spain had turned Hebrew lettersi nto animals themselves so that ALEPH became a horse and a rider.
     There could never be too much illumination and embellishment. At heart he was a kaballist who, like Shem Rov the Sephardi, Isaac of Akko and the other “tzerufs/ scholars” believed that through meditations on the Hebrew alphabet itself you came into as much oneness as you could with God....
     “Shabbat Shalom/ Let there be peace!”
     He was sitting there, he was listening, he was THERE, but it took Rivka’s shaking him (“Are you OK, Solly, are you OK?”) to get him out of the well of his selfness into the holy space of candles and torah-prayerbooks and love....
                                                  5.

     “I’m fine, just thinking,” he said as his children crowded around him (all but Dove who -- of all things -- had a date with an Irish girl to study for an economics exam on Monday), and he gathered them close to himself, murmurring to himself almost as if it weren’t a prayer at all, YESHIMEHA ELOHIM KEFRAIM VEHEEMNSHAY...peace, santification....and then his own personal addition in his heart of hearts...and may these rites and rituals and those who perform them never, never, never be absent from this sad, drunk (Le Bateau Ivre) Earth....

Hugh Fox -- An Overview

Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. Polio at age 4, cured by a pre-Saulk vaccine that worked. Spent his children totally immersed in the arts, was part of the All Childrens' Grand Opera group run by Viennese genius Zerlina Muhlman Metzger, studied violin and composition with P. Marinus Paulson, art and ceramics at the Art Institute in Chicago, was pushed into Medicine by his M.D. father, finished four years of pre-med and a year of medicine, then got an M.A. at Loyola in Chicago and a Ph.D. in English/American Literature at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

It was at Urbana-Champaign that he met and married Lucia Ungaro Zevallos, a Peruvian poet-critic who was getting her Ph.D. in Romance Languages, and after the marriage they moved to Los Angeles where he taught for ten years at Loyola-Marymount University and was immersed in the film-world.At the same time thanks to his wife he began to go to Peru to visit his Peruvian family and slowly visited all the major ruins in the pre-Columbian Americas.He met Harry Smith in Berkeley in 1968 and they became best friends and for some twenty years Fox would visit Smith 2-3 times a year in New York City/Brooklyn and work on Smith’s magazines, get to know the poets and writers in the New York scene.

He was a Fulbright Professor for a year in Mexico (1961), two years in Caracas (1964-'66), which especially made sense because he married a Peruvian in 1956. In 1968 he moved to Michigan State U. and taught there until he retired 6 years ago. While at Michigan State U. he had a Fulbright professorship in Brazil where he met and married a Brazilian M.D., studied Latin American literature on a grant from the Organization of American States at the U. of Buenos Aires, and after beginning to make archaeological discoveries and have his books on archaeology published, he received another grant from the Organization of American States to spend a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile. He has some 104 books published.