year on a large ranch in the Sierra Nevadas, breeding horses. On her land there was a sequoia tree that she said was over three thousand years old. It towered above us, straight and powerful, its branches so high up above us. “Who’d ever have thought,” I remember thinking, “that a person and a tree could be the same age?” And it was on one of those Serach Days that Clarice and I had gone to visit Bick, so the day sticks out even more in my mind.
When I was little I didn’t know that I was different. In those days we didn’t have the concept of being different yet, in quite the way that you do now. For example, I grew up knowing that I loved women, but that wasn’t considered Queer back then. It was just how some of us were. And we Hebrews didn’t even consider ourselves different then, in any way that would make us feel better or worse. We were different because we weren’t the same. That’s all. Because every tribe and group was different, and yet all of us were connected. I didn’t know I was different when first I fell in love, or when first I made love. I didn’t know I was different as I got older and one by one all of my relatives and friends died. People would often tell me that I looked young for my age, and I answered them with the ancient equivalent of “I guess I have good genes,” which was, “The goddess must think kindly of me,” by which we meant Asherah.
I didn’t think I was different when my grandparents died, or my parents and all the people of their generation died, or even when my sister and brothers started dying. But I did begin to wonder about myself when my nieces and nephews started dying. By then we’d all moved down to Egypt, and there were many distractions, so it took a while for me to sit down and soberly ask myself, “Serach, why are you still here?” and for others to begin to start asking the same question. The first thing that came to mind was of course what happened when we found out that Uncle Joseph was still alive, and what my grandfather said to me when I sang him the good news.
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