Those Elusive Blanks 

Every time I do it, I promise myself that I’ll never, ever do it again.

And then I do, of course.

Inside one of my kitchen cabinets hangs the calendar that has all the unremarkable nitty-gritty details of our family’s collective life on it. There are appointments and weddings and reminders, vacation days and deadlines and plans. All routine, penciled in with great haste and zero pomp.

Then there are days, and sometimes even weeks, that stay blank. They’re plain squares of white noise, portending days that will be perfectly unremarkable, and I love them.

Anytime life gets overwhelmingly chaotic — and that happens with astounding regularity in our blessed frum lives — I find myself looking at the calendar, wistfully eyeing those rows upon rows of empty squares waiting for me. They’re usually only a few weeks away, those blank squares all lined up, so full of lovely, wonderful nothingness. No destinations penciled in. No times jotted down. No deadlines marked. Nothing.