08
Mar
The Julie of 10 years old in Rehovot, Israel, greets you with the same smile and eyes as the Julie of today.
When Mr. Schleissner tripped the shutter, I was already immersed in the atomic age. It was the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks. Her wartime work and naming element 61 Promethium unrecognized, my mother, Grace Mary, by drinking beer, PM whisky, and Manhattans, had begun raising her tolerance for alcohol that would cost her life too soon eleven years ahead. Israel Dostrovsky had invited 30 scientists to teach at the Weizmann Institute and my father, Charles Coryell, had accepted. His wife, Daphne O. Dostrovsky was about to paint my portrait.
In December 1953, we traveled by sister steamships, trains, and airplanes from Boston to Israel. Seeing historic Gibraltar, Grenada and Seville, the poverty, religious prejudice, and political oppression of southern Spain stung my conscience. Writing furiously my first essays titled SPAIN AND HER TRAGIC LIFE on the plane ride from Cairo to Amman, Jordan, Grace Mary insisted I look out the window to see the Suez Canal. In Jerusalem she invited me to be baptized and we celebrated my Christmas Eve birthday in Bethlehem. Crossing the Mandelbaum Gate into the new state of Israel introduced me to the uneasy peace and fresh relics of recent fighting.
War, peace, travel, words, justice, gardens, art. Games, stories, reading aloud. Studying dictionaries to understand roots, suffixes, prefixes, how chemists name compounds. Anxieties, cooking, cleaning, tending water. Conversations, the worlds of faith and reason. Parasites, addictions, affections, sex and senses, music, dance and fun. Questions. Some answers. Allusions, illusions, delusions. Christian mystics name four levels to spiritual quest: reading, prayer, meditation, contemplation. Devout Jews cite four levels of meaning to reading Torah. The first syllable of each level, p- r-d-s-, forms an acronym for paradise. To question, study, pray, seek union with the divine creates heaven on earth.
I invite you into my memory museum.
