Endure

4/23/26

 

    Yesterday I woke up miserable with the third day of the same damn headache, but I had stuff to deal with, the gnats of daily life – banking, inexplicable twin letters from the insurance stating that my CT was both pending and approved, weeds taking over the front garden. I brushed Smokey’s grey fur off my sweatshirt and headed out into the equally grey day.  

    Across the street I came across an unfamiliar cat, a small tortoiseshell, sitting behind a neighbor’s driveway fence.  “Do you live here?” I asked her, looking to see if anyone was home, but all the lights were off.  She was clean and not too thin, so I figured she probably did, and walked on, but when I looked back she had slipped between the fence bars onto the sidewalk.

    The few minutes I spent lingering with the cat slowed me down enough that I missed the B63 by half a block. It’s easier to for me to walk fifteen blocks than stand for fifteen minutes  these days, so I headed north with the Verrazano looming behind me.

    As I walked, I considered the Hebrew word that had been lingering around my mind since early morning – sabal, endure.  The oddity of it being a Hebrew word, a language I use only a few times a year, made me focus on it. Where did this word come from, I wondered, and why?

     As I passed from the historically Irish part of Bay Ridge with its many bars, into the Arabic section with its heaps of fuzzy pale green fresh almonds among the more mundane apples and lemons at the fruit stands, I thought about stone – how it withstands impact after impact.  Eternities of weather and water erode the outermost layer in tiny, almost atomic increments, but still it stands.

    In the newer Yemeni section, with its many aromatic coffee houses, and fancy Arabic fonts, among the tempting scents of za’atar and pistachio, I thought about how rock along the shore gets ground down over millennia, how the pieces become tinier and tinier but rock endures.