What is a Corrigan doing in the pages of the Bay Area’s Jewish newspaper? In a word, journalism. I tell stories. Just now, it is my privilege to be filling in for J. staff writer Drew Himmelstein while she is home with her new baby.
I’m at home in these pages, and have been since 2010, but my admiration for Jewish culture began in junior high. While my friends read teen romances, I read Leo Rosten’s “The Education of Hyman Kaplan” and Harry Golden’s “Enjoy! Enjoy!” For years, I wanted to be just like Dorothy Parker.
Later, I moved on to appreciate more serious Jewish writers who celebrate a life of the mind. Over time, I came to admire other aspects of Jewish culture — the food, the art, the music and the Yiddishisms I learned from a Jewish friend in my college dorm. And what can top tikkun olam as a worthy life goal?
In 2009, working as a freelancer for the St. Louis Jewish Light, I had a memorable experience. My editor sent me to a Jewish senior residence to interview five women who were preparing for a group bat mitzvah. The women, ages 75 to 93, were eager to speak with me about their special day.
After the interview, the eldest woman, who was blind, told me they all appreciated that I had not only listened to what they said, but that I had actively heard them. “You believe in what we are doing,” she said. “We can tell.” Then she asked if I would be offended if she gave me a Hebrew name.
I have distinctly Druid leanings, and am spiritually renewed when out in nature. As an infant, I was christened Catholic. At 6, I got my first stage gig as the head angel in the Christmas pageant at the neighbor’s Evangelical Reformed Church. When I was 10, my Southern Baptist grandma saw to it that I was “saved” at a tent revival. As an adult, I have shivered in the presence of Shiva in Mumbai, spoken aloud to a statue of the goddess Sekhmet in Egypt and came close to genuflecting on my first visit to City Lights Bookstore in North Beach.
I told the woman I would be honored. Taking my hand, she said my Hebrew name would be Penina, and that she would call me Penny. The blind woman did not have to guess my reaction, because I gasped.
My mother, who died when I was 26, had planned to name me Penelope and call me Penny. Daddy had agreed, but on the birth certificate, he wrote in a favorite Irish name. For my middle name, he chose his mother’s name. And so I am Patricia Ann. Yet almost 61 years later, a 93-year-old Jewish woman gave me the name my mother had chosen for me.
That day, the women felt heard. I felt known.
I knew other Jewish women. In 1998, I moved to a condo complex in a suburb of St. Louis. Soon I discovered my building was full of Jewish widows, all about two decades older than me. They recognized me from my work in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and they came calling with mandelbrot, latkes, rugelach and matzah ball soup. I invited them in for a glass of wine and fed them my homemade pumpkin bread, and we quickly bonded over food and drink.
Over time, six of us became close. I admired their devotion to family, their volunteer work and their kind hearts. Also, they were lots of fun. We went out for Chinese, we argued over movies and theater productions, we took water aerobics classes together and, side by side, we worked to help Barack Obama get elected.
When I had surgery, these dear friends helped take care of me. When it snowed, I collected grocery lists from them and drove to the store. Every year on New Year’s Day, together we held a party in the lobby for all the residents. They wanted to teach me mahjong and bridge, but counting is not one of my skills. Instead, they taught me how to age.
These women, all gone now, also mothered me. “Love the woman your son marries,” they said. “Wear your good jewelry now,” they said. “Travel before you are too old to enjoy it,” they said. And unfailingly, they read every story I wrote, cheered my every byline, in the Post-Dispatch and later the Jewish Light.
So here I am in the pages of J. making paragraphs and telling stories. Journalism brought me here. It’s what I do, and I am grateful.
Patricia Corrigan is a writer living in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].