For the moment, I am banning myself from writing about not feeling well. Even though I actually don't feel so hot today. Partly due to the weather, partly due to stress, partly due to the methotrexate - the Yellow Menace - having been injected somewhere along the port side yesterday morning at 8AM. In today's email I received a document I look forward to every few months - the rotation news from my friend Esther, who is one of the curators at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, of which I am a proud alumnae. MJH-ALMttH (as my dear, lovely former boss and friend Abby and I like to refer to it) was where I developed my chops as a marketer. My job at the Museum was the prototypical job that didn't feel like a job; it meant more to me than someplace where I sat at a desk and put in my hours. This was for both good and bad reasons: the good ones had a lot to do with our staff, a dynamic, passionate group of scholars and teachers and fundraisers and communications folk, most of whom possessed a vision about our work that went far beyond the day to day conflicts and stupidities that are part of every workplace.
What was tough about working at the Museum, however, was that everywhere you turned, there were stories of sadness. For every miraculous, tenacious, emotionally devastating story of survival, there were hundreds, even millions more of loss. For me, this was personified by the hallways that lined our office suite when we were located at 1 Battery Park Plaza. The walls were lined with portraits of children from before World War II. Some of them survived. Most of them didn't.
After 9/11, as you could imagine, it only got worse.
I hung on for three more years after that, but in the end, the neighborhood really got to me. The worst part was the immediate aftermath; I was literally terrified of being at work, scared to get on the subways in the morning, even, for a while, taking the bus from 42nd and 2nd all the way down to the Battery. I remember reading the first Harry Potter book during those bus rides, covering a lot of pages because it took so damn long. But it was better than being underground, disoriented, and utterly positive that the bomb would explode on the train that I was riding.
When I converted, one year after 9/11, so many of my colleagues came up to Larchmont for the ceremony, and in that hour, I realized that they had, in some sense, become my Jewish family. And what I didn't know about leaving the Museum was that I would never feel that sense of family and community in the workplace in quite the same way ever again; that little rituals like everyone wishing one another a Good Shabbos on a Friday afternoon really meant something. At the Museum, for all of the emotions and talk about budgets and decisions about color palettes and worry about attracting visitors, it was a place where people looked out for one another, where you could really rely on your team to support you, and know that at the end of the day, your work, quite possibly, may have changed someone's life.
So much of workplace life is about going through the motions, empty conversations, tolerating people because you have to; saying that you are part of a team, without ever really feeling it. In the end, I feel fortunate to have had this experience, and even more so when the Rotation News hits my inbox. I scroll through the images of the objects, reading about their history and their small, but key role in the greater story of survival that the Museum tells with such lyricism and poignancy. It may be a simple email, but for me, it is still about belonging to a family. I may not get to visit as much or as often as I would like to, but it is always good to remember that every so often, I can go home again.
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