Prison Baby: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

situation.
    “No matter what,” my father always told me, “for dignity, for the challenge of life, do the best at whatever you do. If you work in the post office, wherever, do your best.”
    That was one of the few conversations with my father I could recall from my childhood, though it was more like the one sentence. My lockdown was so cemented in me then, I recollect few conversations with him or with anyone else.
    The street-corner preachers near the Pike Place Market fed my early fascination with spirituality and ways of worship. Although we weren’t a religious family, I grew up with a broad religious exposure. My mother was more observant than my father. She sent my brother and me to Sunday school and lit Sabbath candles, and we said grace every night in Hebrew and attended synagogue on the Jewish high holidays. But I grew to understand Judaism more as a culture than as a religion.
    My mother was raised Orthodox. Every spring we visited Minneapolis to celebrate Passover with her five brothers and sisters. We’d spend a week with a flock of my aunts and uncles who’d embrace me with abandon. The affectionate racket of a large family gathering put me more at ease than the sedate academic gatherings at home, where my father and his colleagues constructed dense sentences and analyzed every word as if it were a mathematical equation.
    Even though I sometimes thought my father an intellectual snob and arrogant academic, I admired his humanity, his instinct to help those in need. Both my parents lived in a strong Judaic tradition of helping others, as in the text from the Talmud: “It is not your job to finish the task, nor are you free to avoid it all together.”
    I recall a vague memory of my mother’s volunteer work as a tutor with a literacy program for inner-city school kids. I can’t recall specifics, but I also remember my parents and their friends in day-to-day dialogue about the 1960s civil rights movement. They favored whatever group felt oppressed, and they condemned the privileged, whoever dominated. I admired this until I put something together:
Was that how they viewed me—as a girl in need? Did they adopt me as a social statement, a souvenir of their ultra-liberal principles?
    WHEN I WAS in elementary school, we lived in Rome for one of my father’s sabbatical years. One afternoon my mother took me to St. Peter’s Basilica and I plunged into a world I’d never seen before, a universe of incense, marble, candles, and stained glass, and of sculpted figures of saints and the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
    I arched my back to look up. “Wow!” I whispered to my mother as we stepped through the heavy double doors carved with religious symbols. I imitated the old woman in front of me at the entrance and dipped, then splashed my fingers in the shallow basin of water, a birdbath-shaped bowl the size of a small fountain. When I waved my watery fingers in the outline of a cross over my face and shoulders, my mother swatted my hand away. “Stop that!” she said in a hushed voice. The décor and all of it fed my budding fascination with worship.
    ONE SATURDAY, AFTER a jaunt to the Pike Place Market with my father, I charged down our driveway to climb into my secluded galaxy of boards, the tree house I’d built with Wendy in the thick-trunked maple at the bottom of our yard. We’d gathered scrap wood in my garage to pound together nothing more than a platform of plywood and two makeshift windows with a wide plank for a door. We never let our brothers or any other neighborhood kids inside our silent and private haven, and I climbed up there whenever I got a chance, even in Seattle’s wind and drizzle. Some days, alone, I lugged up a bag packed with books, blank paper, and colored pencils. In tree heaven, I wrote poems, drew pictures, and illustrated stories I never showed anyone. I collected leaves to decorate the tree-house walls, and Wendy and I rigged a school-locker padlock to lock the door. We formed our