The Jewish calendar is filled with commemorations, but now the coronavirus has disrupted many of our ritual celebrations. Expectations have been dashed, but unexpected new experiences have followed. And sometimes, things work out differently, and the story now has a different, even happier ending. We have all adapted. Families have shared graduations, weddings, funerals, holiday meals and religious services via cell phones and computer screens. In the disruption, people have found themselves together in new ways. It’s made room for new ways of relating, and we are even more grateful for the connections we have. With new experiences, we are changing.

The choices I am making these days show me I’ve changed. A recent incident on an airplane mirrored an experience I had almost four decades years earlier, an experience that had burned itself into my mind, and left a deep scar on its folds. The recent incident, which might have passed by without notice, showed me that my life is changing in remarkable ways. If we pay attention to and think over the details of our lives now, we may see that our lives are changing in good ways.

In 1981 I was on my way to El Salvador to cover the war and change the world. When the plane stopped in Guatemala, a tall dark man with a heavy black mustache boarded carrying a colorful red, orange and yellow woven plastic bag. He spotted the empty seat next to me, unloaded his bundle in an overhead bin farther back, and came and sat down heavily and grinned at me from under his mustache. He was returning from Washington, D.C. with his boss, who turned out to be a most powerful man. 

The encounter would send my life into a darkening spiral that would take decades to climb out of. Descending into the bowels of the capital city that night, the smell of the cooking fires filled the air like Purgatory.

 This last year, wildfires in the California hills had shut down Highway 101 briefly, but friends assured me that everything was under control now, and I should come on my planned trip. My sister, terrified of fires, begged me not to go. “You’re always going into dangerous places,” she said. I caught a flight out of Albuquerque, with prayers for my safety trailing behind me.
After we took our seats on the plane, at the last minute a cheerful group of young people carrying colorful woven bundles and knapsacks trooped onboard. One girl spotted the empty seat next to me, stashed her woven plastic bundle in an overhead bin further back, and then came and plopped down. She grinned at me from under an orange fur hat that framed purple hair and which color also complimented a purple-fringed cowboy jacket. 

As we took off she she pulled out a book by the naturalist Terry Tempest Williams. She told me her name was Sage, she was studying to become an herbalist, she was part Navajo, and her mother was Jewish. She said her Jewish grandmother encouraged her career as an herbalist. 

I told her, “I’m Jewish and my husband is Navajo.” I thought this was true serendipity.
Sage was either nonplussed or unimpressed. I said, as a further overture, that if she came to Albuquerque again, my husband might introduce her to some traditional herbalists. She seemed light-filled, free-spirited and confident. 

I asked, “What’s your style called?” 

Sage said, “It’s whatever makes me feel like myself.”
At baggage claim, her friend took a snapshot of us for me. Later, I studied it. I was surprised to see that her T-shirt had a picture of a Celtic endless knot just like the metal ironwork I’d been transfixed by in O’Niell’s bar the previous week. That Celtic knot had sent me into a reverie—all things connected and came full circle in one’s life with no real exit—but then, behind the Celtic ironwork in the bar was a door with an exit sign over it. So there was an opening, like the thinking of a Navajo weaver to include a line traveling to the edge of the rug so the pattern is open.

      In the photo with Sage in the airport terminal photo, there was a sign behind and directly over us on the back wall, “Baggage.” I also saw the woven red, orange and yellow plastic bundle. Now it jarred loose the memory of that plastic bag I’d seen the man carrying when he boarded the plane in Guatemala when I was 27,  another kind of baggage that I’d carried,  attached to memories imprisoned in my mind.      
That imprinted moment had, like a filmstrip unrolling, now been recast with Sage the lovely herbalist instead of the sinister Salvadoran. A new story, now on the light, bright side.      

After I arrived in California, the uncontrollable wildfires began to close in. I didn’t stay. I was glad to have met Sage, and to have seen a completely different time and place with the smell of burning and death in the air. But this time I chose to leave, before the fires flared again. 

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Gallup Independent, May 30, 2020

New Mexico Jewish Link, Vol. 50, 2020