“All art is crap. But some crap is worth admiring more than other crap.” – Tzipi, Rabbi, 2025

 

    If you’ve read the Jack Reacher novels, you know the story. A gigantic, military-trained hunk with slick one-liners and a badass, bantam-bred attitude rolls into town and curls the whole place up to the sky using just one of his Berkshire pork torso-sized biceps. The bad guys are clearly bad. And the good guys are clearly good, and also unquestionably justified in their use of unregistered firearms, proclivity for assault, fondness for trespassing and privacy tampering and battery, the occasional manslaughter, and even, in some cases, illegal lane switching. 

 

    Well, I was Jack Reacher circa January 2024, minus the muscles and jiu-jitsu background (I’m being modest, here) and the ability to quip my enemies to their untimely demise with a mere flick of the bard’s tongue. 

 

This, of course, would’ve made Beaufort, South Carolina the town. 

 

    If I ever finish this doggone book, and if you decide for some insane reason to peruse this grisly muck, gird thy loins: you’re going to hear a lot about Beaufort, South Carolina. If you catch me on a Dr. Jekyll day, I might tell you it’s a special place full of natural beauty, singular vistas, temperate weather, and wholesome people. On Mr. Hyde days, however, I might tell you it’s hotter than Satan’s asshole, that the surrounding marshes are glorified mud pits, that the “folks” who live there are all C- or D-list actors, that every piece of telecommunications equipment is bedeviled, and that there is nothing to do in Beaufort except to fart around in the shade and find some new old person to harass when you can’t stand the sound of your own inner monologue any longer. 

 

    Bear with me. This’ll all make sense… sort of… eventually.

 

    My Great Uncle Dick, who I affectionately call “Uncle Dick,” and Mr. Frank Cummings founded a community betterment group called the Beaufort Community Partnership in the year 2022. The goals of the BCP are undefined, if not nebulous. But generally speaking, the group aims to foster collaboration all throughout Beaufort by both supporting and building connections between representatives from disparate ministries, afterschool programs, activist groups, and educational institutions. 

 

    The reason this is in any way relevant is because I met Rabbi Tzipi during my second ever BCP meeting. The meeting took place at The Beaufort Bookstore, a meek, measly-looking front tucked away in a strip mall alongside a bunch of other financially-troubled, half-forgotten businesses. It did, and still does, I should mention, have desirable views of the local Outback Steakhouse. At the time, I looked like a Macy’s Day Parade blimp. Having been placed on a steady regimen of mood stabilizers and sedatives by a scattered assortment of doctors, I ballooned suddenly and gained a whopping fifty pounds in less than three months’ time. Whenever I caught a glimpse of myself, the inflated cow, in the mirror, I hardly recognized the figure who returned my gaze. My fat cheeks were yanked up to my eyes, creating this crushing but consistent, squint-like countenance. My belly was rotund and lumpy. I jiggled. I had about three shirts that fit and within two weeks of having arrived in Beaufort, I had ripped half my boxers straight down the asscrack seam; blame those awkward bends, stretches, side-shuffes, etc; blame ‘em to h-e double hockey sticks. 

 

I relocated to Beaufort from Lake Bluff, Illinois, where I had been living with The Moms following six psych ward stints, a six-week jaunt to rehab, a sober living arrangement in which I was bound to the rhythms of urban (and eventually suburban) Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) life, an Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) procedure that practically melted my brain, and a pathetic attempt at revitalizing my corporate career by starting over in a print warehouse where I counted socks all day. To say I was depressed would be an understatement.  

 

Inexplicably, I found myself sleeping above a filthy garage off the lone roundabout in town on an aesthetically unpleasant stretch of road called Sam’s Point. I rented out from a kind, active, Southern-core grandmother named Stacy who kept as company two of the plumpest–and I mean plumpest–labradors I’ve ever set eyes on. Without a car, I was essentially a loft-based prisoner. The bed creaked like a banshee and the bedroom lacked a door, as did the bathroom, which stood but two paces away from the main entrance. A flimsy curtain is all that separated the tyranny of my “egregious” shithouse from the superfluous, mild-mannered clime of Lady’s Island.  

 

And so, on the second Monday morning I ever spent in Beaufort, Uncle Dick picked me up in his sedan and whisked me to The Beaufort Bookstore. As I recall, I was the only person on premise who had any semblance of collagen to spare. It was a ghostly bunch. Vampiric in hue (yes, even the luster of those black and brown people in attendance seemed to have dissipated years before). Tucked in shirts. Life-weary wrinkles. The consummate elderly gait; the one that makes you wonder, “Is this person even trying to lift their feet up off the ground?”

 

The meeting began without fanfare. Uncle Dick, a specimen for his age, though goofy-grinned and classically Caucasian, paced in front of the podium, emceeing the affair with surprising eminence, tact, and polite humor. I observed from the back row, careful to avoid appearing eager or as though I might be open to sharing the spotlight by way of some unwelcome introduction. It happened anyway. Uncle Dick’s waggling finger hovered in the air, pointing at me. I, in turn, and in my own way, “hit it.” It was the glossiest gloss job one ever did gloss on about. “Lowe Marr. 32. From Chicago. The burbs. That’s my Uncle Dick. He’s a good man. Happy to be here.” Not a conjunction or secondary clause even sniffed the atmosphere. In all fairness, Alcoholics Anonymous had done a swell job at assuaging the majority of my apprehensions regarding public speaking. However, I was still rock-mouthed from the Trazodone, brain-dead from a decades-long weed binge, and innately and deeply–unreasonably–shy. 

 

After a respectable golf clap and bare-boned clattering of terse “welcomes,” I found the back of the chair and leaned into it, breathing deeply. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a pair of spectacles trained on me. I took a defensive position, acknowledging the inquirer with an unsubtle swivel of the neck. A short, shawl-wearing woman with a Roman nose, a small mouth, and beady, presence-affirming eyes nodded to me. She leaned over and, sporting a grinding New York City accent, said, “I’ve heard a lot about you. Let’s chat later. Here, take my business card.” The business card read:

 

Rabbi Tzipi

 

“Yes, AND…

Joyously interconnected in a solidarity partnership with you

in an infinitely abundant world.”

 

    The card itself was standard fare. Traditional stock. Patrick Bateman could say more about it but I’ll spare you the inessential. In this book, we abide, and sensibly so, by that which is diaphanous. Worth noting, however, is this: gracing the front of the card was a skimpy, wobbly-penned venn diagram. Hovering inside its left circle was a grotesque, poorly-sketched green face. Inside the other, a grotesque, poorly-sketched yellow face. The middle had been hastily filled in with what could not have been anything other than a pink crayon. I was deeply confused, but–no, AND–also undeniably curious. I had never met a Rabbi before. For years, I thought they were bound to their Temple the way Sisyphus was bound to his insufferable hill.

 

***

 

    The months slid on by, and a lot happened. For now, it’s best I save those gems for other tales. If I’m to finish this thing, I must be judicious about which tangents to include, and which to exclude. Pick a day, any day, in this life I’m leading and it seems to me there’s a story–or at minimum a singular moment–worth writing about. It’s insane. Life is utterly, gobsmackingly, horribly, wonderfully, jaw-droppingly insane. Today, for instance, I’m pretty sure I saw at the local Beaufort cafe a roundtable of uber wealthy goobers (I’m talking, Wall Street famous goobers) wearing matching slacks and tucked in collared shirts. It could have been a Board Meeting amongst the 1% of the 1%. Or it could have been a ritualistic pre-acquisition chicken salad run. It could have even been six white fellas grabbing a beverage and smacking their lips together to make noise for the fun of it. I’ll probably never know. Anyways. I’m stalling. Back to Rabbi Tzipi and the whole “all art is crap” story.

 

***

 

    So like I said: The months slid on by and a lot happened. I didn’t see Rabbi Tzipi again until, oh what was it… let’s call it mid-July. I had been plucked out of obscurity by a local after school program called the EMC (Extra Mile Club) to film a fundraiser event hosted at one of the churches in the nearby Whale Branch educational cluster. Gaynelle and Chris Dantzler had founded the EMC years ago in the hopes of improving outcomes for at-risk youth. The program’s stats were impressive:

 

• Zero incarcerations amongst EMC participants

• One van (for local transportation)

• Over one hundred children served

• A handful of NCAA football players

 

    Despite the fact that Gaynelle and Chris Dantzler had recently gone through a divorce, the two navigated the room smartly. Meaning, I don’t believe I ever once saw them come into contact with one another. I had been to loads of churches by way of the AA program, but this one looked (like a schoolhouse), smelled (like eggs and grits), and sounded (like the claps of well-struck daps) different. In a way, the building was really pretty standard pastoral fare, quaint and picturesque. Used and structurally square with white-slatted bearings, and a handful of simple windows that gazed out upon the yellow-green grass of the country, which stretched out and beyond the only road, a two-laner at that, within a few good miles of the place. 

    I shot some B-Roll outside, including the signage, the welcome table on the front patio of the building, and the arrival of the first batch of visitors. Chris, who perfectly resembles your signature Billy Goat given his thin face, thin body, and thin, triangular beard, greeted me at the door and dapped me up soundly. I putzed around thereafter, poking my phone awkwardly into an assortment of strange and confused faces. Clearly Chris had not briefed anybody about the whole videography bit. 

    After the presentations concluded and the food had been glutted, I tucked myself into a little cranny of a side kitchen in search of respite. There, I ran once again into Rabbi Tzipi. This time, she was with this wild-eyed grandmother named Gene. Somehow, Rabbi Tzipi shited us onto the topic of learning how to breathe properly. 

    “You breathe from your belly. That’s how you breathe.” She told me.

    “Oh. Do you teach yoga or something?” I asked.

    “No. I teach breathing.”

    From there, she dove into an entirely unconvincing scientific explanation about how we breathe–though she did hit the right buzz terms, like “nervous system” and “diaphragm” and "blood flow.” 

    “If you breathe the right way, you can do anything.”

    “Anything?” I asked, skeptically.

    “I met a very large holy woman. Completely massive.”

“Massive how?”

“Big. You know. Fat. I had traveled a long way to be with her. Many of us did.”

“And she taught you how to breathe?”

“No. But she had this… aura. I stood in line for hours and hours and hours after the group meditation 

just to have a chance to be with her.”

“I see.”

“If you want to learn how to breathe, meet me at my house next week. We can figure out the time later.” 

Rabbi Tzipi said.

“That sounds fine. I’ve been losing my hair recently.”

“That’s because you’re not breathing properly, you know.”

“Right. Cortisol. Do you–”

“Did you know if you breathe properly, you can hike Everest naked?”

“I think I heard about that.”

“It can also help you grow taller.”

“Really?”

“Come outside with me and Gene.” She winked.

Rabbi Tzipi and Gene and I formed a small circle and watched the church empty out. We were among the few, the proud, the White–a true honor. Well-dressed Black children and teens and mothers and fathers meandered out of the church and traversed the frayed country grass, footing it for the gravel parking strip. I asked Gene about her husband. She was wearing a wedding band and had on a subdued green blouse whose humble affect was ultimately nullified by a smattering of loud broaches and earrings and necklaces. 

“Your husband made a mistake letting you out the house unaccompanied.” I said (or may have said… 

the truth is, I like to embellish and pretend I’m brilliantly, spontaneously witty. In reality, I do a lot of “guffawing.”). 

“He died three years ago.” Gene responded flatly.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I backpedaled. 

“That’s alright. It was prostate cancer. He kicked the bucket and exited out the back door.”

Did she just make a back door pun about her husband’s ass cancer? I thought to myself. Surely pretty old Genie here isn’t that morbid.

“Prostate cancer sounds painful.” I said, not really knowing what to say.

“You think?” Gene responded. I couldn’t tell if she was being earnest or sarcastic.

“We’ve got to run.” Rabbi Tzipi interrupted, saving me from myself. “I’ll see you next week. I’m going to be dog sitting. I’ll make us tea.”

 

***

 

I took a wide turn away from Joe Frazier Road onto Mint Road and found my destination tucked away in the back of a subdivision. Rabbi Tzipi lived in a ranch home.

“Come in!” She hollered from the other side of the door. 

I wandered inside. A small sitting area featuring a simple couch and two black leather recliners was 

arranged to my left before a nonfunctional fireplace. Straight ahead, a cozy kitchen whose cabinets were paneled in a warm wood absorbed the afternoon sun. I was lost in a mood until I heard the unmistakable noise of pistoned paws scratching against the back sliding glass door. Standing up on her hindlegs a small, poodle-adjacent pup wearing a diaper barked its head off (figuratively speaking), indicating she had had enough.

Rabbi Tzipi appeared Stage Right dressed in sweats. 

“Do you take sugar?” She asked, unabashedly scrutinizing me vis a vis a long, sweeping stare. 

“I mean. Hello, welcome.” She cantered. “Take a seat wherever you’d like.”

Rabbi Tzipi poured water into a kettle and placed it over the stovetop and then routed toward the back sliding glass door as I found the back of the nearest recliner.

“She’s going to jump on you.”

“That’s okay. I grew up around dogs.” I responded. Then, genuinely curious, I asked: “Why is she wearing a diaper?”

Rabbit Tzipi seemed perplexed by the question.

“Well, why do babies wear diapers?”

“Babies wear diapers so they don’t… you know. Go on the floor.”

“Exactly.”

“I guess–I didn’t know they made dog diapers.” I pushed. 

“They don’t.”

“I see.”

She slid the glass door ajar and a blur of fur dashed across the hardwood, landing excitedly in my lap. 

“What did I tell you?” Rabbi Tzipi smiled. She passed from the kitchen into the living room with two steaming mugs in her hands and set them down on the coffee table between a brown leather couch and the armchair I had dissolved into.

“So. You want to learn how to breathe.” Rabbi Tzipi, squinting, inquired as she lowered herself onto a couch cushion. 

“More than anything.”

“Why more than anything?”

“I was sort of being sarcastic.”

“Oh.” Rabbi Tzipi knitted her fingers together and formed a bowl. She secured one of the mugs in her hands and then lifted it to her pursed lips, sneaking a piping hot sip. 

“I don’t know if I’ve ever told anybody this.” I began.

“And you trust me?” 

“Why… should I not?”

“That’s not for me to say.”

“Oh.” This time, it was my turn to tip the conversational balance into her court. Monkey see, monkey do: A curt answer followed by a perfunctory silence.

Rabbi Tzipi didn’t move. Literally. She appeared so frozen, so lost in thought, so out of body, that after ten seconds I stirred.

“I overrode my autonomics while I was in high school.”
   “What do you mean?”

“I became so obsessed with breathing, that I would tell myself to breathe. And I did this over and over again. And I did it so much, so frequently, that eventually, I convinced myself that if I didn’t tell myself to breathe I wouldn’t breathe and I would just, like, die or something.”

“Are you weird? You seem weird.” She poked.

“Yes, but I own it.” I said in an attempt to bat away her apparent insult.  

“No, you don’t. Not really. What do you like to do?”

“I like to… I like to write a little bit.”

“Oh, journaling is a great practice.”

“No.. It’s more than journaling. I don’t like to journal. If I ever wrote a book–of nonfiction–a memoir or whatever–I think I would just end up… making half the conversations up. I like Fiction. Invention is thrilling. Recitation is dull as… as…”

“Crap!” Rabbi Tzip stood up and rushed the puppy by the collar to the back door, letting the dog outside. The animal immediately turned around, whimpering, and began scratching at the door in long, drawn out paw strokes.

“Are you an artist?” She whirled around.
   “That’s quite the accusation.”

“Well?”

“I’ve never published anything. So, I guess not. I’m not any good.”

Rabbi Tzipi appeared shocked.

“I didn’t know you had to be good to be an artist. I thought you just had to make things.” She mused.

“I… I guess… I don’t know.” I stammered.

“All art is crap. But some crap is worth admiring more than other crap.”

“I see.” I said, puzzling her words out in my head. “Are you an artist?”

“I make my business cards. And I write poems. And I paint. I love painting.” She wiggled her behind about the couch cushion animatedly. 

We spoke for nearly two hours about everything and nothing–Israel, Judas, apples, AA–the gamut. 

It took until later that afternoon for me to realize, after squeezing between the front door and kickboxing the diapered puppy back into the shadows of the ranch home, that the art of proper breathing was never pinpointed. 

 

***

 

It was an unexpected text message:

 

Hi. You do graphic design. 

I know you do. I need help

building a calendar. I will pay you.

When can we talk?--

With love, Tzipi

 

I wasn’t sure how to respond. My graphic design skills were–still are–woefully limited. But I also needed the money.

 

Hi! Glad to hear from you.

I would be happy to help, although

I’m sure there are other people

who are better suited.

 

No. It will be you.

Radiantly spreading radical

kindness in the face of unfathomable

darkness, Tzipi

 

Great. Let’s chat next Thursday.

 

    I won’t bore you with whatever insanities lurk in the inanities of the in-betweens. Sometimes, details are details for no other sake than being details. This is one of those wretched cases. And so, let me hit fast-forward and zip this little narrative right along so that we may hum past the droll and find the juicier bits. Basically, here’s all that you need to know:

 

1. Rabbi Tzipi and I held a private phone call. She formally asked me to create a calendar for her based on a number of poems and paintings that she had created. A single poem was to appear alongside a single painting for every month of the succeeding calendar year (2025). 

2. We spent the majority of our call pairing up the poems and paintings, and then ascribing to them a given month.

3. After we hung up, I spent the next couple of weeks dilly-dallying and avoiding doing any work.

4. Rabbi Tzipi, at some juncture, requested that we meet over a Zoom call to discuss my progress.

5. I quickly pulled together a very ugly rendition of the 2025 Calendar. The colors were arbitrary. The fonts were abrasive (a true assault on the eyes). And the design was laughably arcane. A caveman could have done it. Truly. If some sad, world-weary professor exacted enough self-pity and took it upon his or herself to teach some Australopithecus the rudiments of graphic design, a caveman literally could have done it. And, frankly, probably could have done it better than I did.

 

    “Hi Tzipi. Did you get the file I sent you.” I said, waving at the inches-tall visage of a squat grandmother knifing around a sharp New York accent. I deployed whatever charming zest I still had to project outwardly from my wrangled, psychologically-scorched mass. 

    “I did.” She said, speaking slowly. “It’s marvelous work. Just marvelous.”

    “It is?” I said, colored by the light of surprise.

    “Yes. I love what you did with the colors. And the fonts. And you arranged everything on the page fantastically.” She smiled. “I just… There are a couple of things I’d like to change. Nothing to bear upon you. More out of personal preference.”

    “Absolutely.”

    “Can you share the calendar? Is that something you can do?” The camera was tilted up towards her chin. I could almost see her brain pulsing inside her nostrils.

    “Yes. Can you give me permission to share?”

    “You have my permission.”

    “No. I mean. You need to click the center button that says SHARE.”

    “Share? Where?”

    “It’s near the bottom of the screen. Right by–”

    “I clicked it.”

    “Ok. Now, do you see a dropdown?”

    Rabbi Tzipi crouched out of the edge of the frame. From the ground I heard a muffled, “I’ve dropped down.”

    Eventually, we figured it out. I pulled up the design file and explained my thinking behind my design decisions as they appeared on the front cover of the calendar. Really, it was the zen of critical bullshit I tried to lay upon Rabbi Tzipi that day:

    “I intended to amplify the warm tone of the poem by choosing a bright font color. The poem, obviously, is gorgeously written. When you write: ‘Holding my round warmth,” I think of a pillowy, almost swollen, benignly-metastasizing radiance billowing outwards from the core of the sun. There is a caressing quality to that ‘roundness,’ you mention. And the word, ‘warmth.’ I just adore your–”

    “You chose red. What if we… what if we make it brown.”

    “Technically, it’s crimson. But… You’d prefer brown?”

    “Yes. Absolutely. Show me the different browns. Now, please.”

    I pulled them up. 

    “You see the red?” Tzipi asked me.

 

 

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    “Yes. Yes, I do.”

    “Make it… brown. The brown we talked about.”

    “Daily Cafe Ritual?”

    “Yes, please. Oh. And add a trim. And also, change the name of the calendar to”:

 

 

 

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    “Ok. That looks better. Let’s move on to the next page.” She announced after we had adjusted the margins of the trim and implemented the new browns.

 

 

 

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“It’s so boring.” She scoffed. “Is there anything we can do to spice it up?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I can look into it.”

“Can you add… splotches?”

“Splotches?”

“Yes, please.”

“You mean, like this?”

 

 

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“That’s lovely. Just lovely. What do you think?”

 

“I think the splotches are a nice touch. They’re clean, too.” I added, hoping to expedite the process by coming across as agreeable.

 

“Splotches are never clean.” Rabbi Tzipi muttered. “Oh. And one more thing. Where it says, ‘connections holding me / safely in My womb of compassion…’ Change the My womb to Your womb. 

 

“Easy fix.” I confirmed. 

 

We trucked along from January through March. Each month, the background and the words started out plum, tangerine, veridian, neon pink. Whatever. Variegated in color. But eventually, no matter what, with each round of deliberation lasting longer than the last, a choice was made:

 

“Make it brown.”