Recipes for a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles by Rivvy Neshama (top rated books of all time .TXT) 📗

and blessed. And that night I wrote a thank-you note to Angela, but I didn’t know her last name. So I called Frontier and rang her extension. Someone named Patty answered and told me this: “Angie doesn’t work here anymore. Today was her last day.”

Well, Angela, wherever you are, thank you. And yes, it all turned out most beautifully okay.

There are only two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

GRACIAS, GRACIAS

Once a week I go to the house of Patricia Ramirez. I go because I’m part of a program called Intercambio Uniting Communities, a nonprofit that started in Boulder. They train volunteers to teach English to immigrants at whatever location meets their needs. That location is often their home so they can learn while watching their children. I go to the home of Patricia Ramirez.

It’s a small house that somehow manages to be big enough for Patricia, her husband Eddie, their three children, and niece Rosario, who came here from Mexico to find a better life. Well, Mexico just happens to be my favorite country to visit. So now, once a week, I get to feel like I’m there, in this house of bright colors that has images of Guadalupe on every wall.

Sometimes I feel tired or too busy and don’t want to go. But I do. And almost always, the hour I spend there is a high point of my week. When I sit with Patricia and Rosario and they learn new words and I speak a little Spanish, I feel the contentment that comes from doing exactly what you’re meant to be doing at this moment in time.

Patricia’s youngest child, Marie Cruz, is always there too, and she learns just by listening in as she brings me her toys to show and share. The whole family likes to share. It’s impossible to leave without them offering food and drink or a homemade gift.

One week I went there on a Saturday, and that was the best time of all. When I entered their house, I was embraced with chatter, laughter, and good smells. Rosario and Patricia were in the kitchen, cooking a special soup made with lemons, pork, cilantro, and whole ears of corn. Eddie was sitting at the dining-room table helping his son, Eddie Jr., with his schoolwork, while teenager Kathy sat on the sofa, chatting endlessly on her cell phone. The TV was playing a telenovela, Mexican soap opera, and Marie Cruz was playing with a friend and her many toys.

I went upstairs with my two students, where we sat on a bed as they read from Frog and Toad Are Friends, a children’s book I love. We also talked about our lives so they could practice speaking English. They spoke of growing up in a dusty rural village, where daily outings to street markets gave them mangos, chilies, and a sense of community.

When I left that day, Patricia gave me a large container filled with the freshly made soup and, as always, said “Gracias!” many times. “Gracias, Rivvy. Gracias for coming. Gracias.” I breathed in the smells of the soup, the children’s laughter, the faith, the noise, and the family’s love, and I said “Gracias” too.

LIFE, DEATH, AND LAUGHTER

Some of the best times of my life have been times of all-out laughter. Laughing until I cry when I’m with my sister Susan, who no matter what can get me laughing—at life, or love, or at myself. And laughing growing up because my father, Bernie Feldman, was the funniest man I ever knew. He was our live-in Jewish comedian, and he could tell jokes like no one else.

In Jewish tradition, the best jokes are stories, passed on with the right accents, pacing, and suspense. A Catholic friend of mine, being thoughtful, once sent me an email of fifty Jewish jokes. None of them seemed funny. You’ve got to be there, they’ve got to be told, and no one told them like my dad.

My father died young, after many years of terrible pain. When his emphysema worsened and he was in Abington Hospital’s intensive care unit, John and I flew there to visit him and quietly entered his room—where he was just beginning to feel better, but pretended for our sake to be feeling worse (“Oy!” he moaned. “Oy vey!”).

And then he told us a story (“This is true,” he’d always say first), which evolved into a raunchy joke about reincarnated rabbits. It was one of his best, and he told it pitch perfect, until the nurse came by to scold us because we were laughing so loudly.

“Some people here are critically ill!” she said, forgetting that one of them was Dad.

It wasn’t long after he died that his doctors told Mom how much they missed him. They missed his spirit and courage . . . and how he always made them laugh.

I guess you could live a sacred life without laughter.

But tell me this: Why would you want to?

The Creator made humans able to walk and talk, to see and hear . . . to do everything. But the Creator wasn’t satisfied. Finally, the Creator made humans laugh, and when they laughed and laughed, the Creator said, “Now you are fit to live.”

—TRADITIONAL APACHE STORY

I was going to tell you the joke about the rabbits.

But, like I said, you’ve got to be there.

A GOOD DAY

I was feeling overwhelmed—finishing a community project, preparing for our grandchildren’s first visit to Boulder, cleaning the house and cooking dinner, watering the sunroom plants (how did we get so many?), booking airline tickets to London to attend our niece’s wedding . . . I was also feeling it was a lost day because I wasn’t doing my work.

Then I remembered Susan Jeffers’ advice in her book End the Struggle and Dance with Life. Create a huge life, she says, not one focused solely on goals and aspirations, but one that is “filled with many equally