*The Visit | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | December 5, 2025*
Let me tell you a story. For a month now, something has been happening that brings a smile to my face. Something that repeats itself twice a week. Something small. But anyone who reads the things I write already knows that the smallest things are, for me, truly large. And the small thing is that twice a week an email lands in my inbox with the same subject line: “G has entered your Zoom room.” So why the smile? Here is my explanation.
.
For those who don’t know, when you teach on Zoom, you receive notifications for everyone who enters your Zoom room. And indeed, since the war with Iran, I opened a Zoom room for anyone who wished to write with me on Sundays and Wednesdays. And among the large community that gathered and wrote with me, there was also G. He was quite an active participant, sometimes reading from his texts, always responding in the group chat, and renewing his registration every month. And before we took a break in November, he even wrote in the group to say thank you and to wish us a pleasant break. Still, on Sundays and Wednesdays, always at the exact time, he continued like clockwork: “G has entered your Zoom room.”
.
Did he join again and again because he got used to those days and hours over the months? Or maybe he kept on writing at home, facing the mute screen of Zoom? I don’t really know why he continued to enter. But every time the email landed, I checked the time and date and smiled to myself. The break didn’t confuse him. “G has entered your Zoom meeting room”.
.
And it reminded me of another man, elderly and kind, who lived in our house in Canada before us. He had lived there for fifty years, raised his children there, and then moved with his wife to a smaller apartment overlooking the sea. This tenant left us a beautiful garden, a huge maple tree that reddens in the fall, and a large fireplace in the middle of the living room. Meaning, he left them to us, but had trouble leaving them behind: once a month he would walk up the steps to the front door, knock with an embarrassed expression, and ask whether any mail had arrived for him.
.
No mail had arrived. The mail was automatically forwarded to their new address. Still, we invited him in. Sometimes he wandered a bit through the rooms. He shared an anecdote about the doorframe or the shed in the garden. Sometimes he simply stood at the entrance, as if he just wanted to be there and breathe a little, the way he had been accustomed to all his life. Sometimes I felt that only in that house did he recognize himself.
.
I know this feeling as I too have felt it myself. This need to return and visit places that time has already closed. How many times have I visited Kinneret in that way? I crossed the path to my grandparents’ house, where another family has been living for years now, circled it as if there were something to see there - the pecan tree? The laundry lines? No. I saw far beyond them: I saw myself with my cousin Dror climbing through the window when we forgot a key, I saw my grandfather packing boxes on the porch, my grandmother with the dining hall cart, seasons, ages, years. When I touched the shed door, I touched the witness who had seen everything I was there and everything I loved being.
.
We don’t always have an apartment in the kibbutz such as this one to visit and return to. Or a Canadian house whose front steps we can climb. Or even a Zoom room whose old link we can click to enter. And even when we do have such a place, time has already passed, and how exactly do you visit your own past? In this sense, we are fortunate to have poetry. Meaning, the ability to sink into distilled writing about a point in place and time, to write and linger there. And if you’ve read my poems, you know that for me poetry is often a door one can step through back into a past that slipped away and locked itself somewhere. And not only for me. Many times poetry is a visit. And this week I translated a poem that is exactly such a visit:
.
*Lessons in Mathematics / Amy Dougher-Solórzano*
My father taught me everything
except geometry. (He’d never seen it.)
Once we got beyond arithmetic,
he couldn’t help with homework.
As a boy, he’d pull his rusted red wagon
down to the A&P on Harrison Avenue
and haul women’s groceries for tips.
Fridays and Saturdays were best for business—
he missed every school dance.
Still he’d whistle on the walk home
with his pockets full of nickels,
head humming with sums and interest.
Then he enlisted.
The calculus of poverty
is its own rigged lottery,
but his eyes would glisten
when he talked about the mess
at Long Binh:
the math of feeding all those mouths,
the giant bags of flour, the powdered eggs.
He didn’t cook much at home—
we used to joke that he couldn’t make
pancakes for fewer than four hundred.
But after his shift at the firehouse,
if he found me awake with my books,
he’d fry up a pack of Steak-umms,
then take the lid from a pickle jar
and cut out perfect disks of white bread
for his famous “circle sandwiches.”
We’d sit in silence at the kitchen table
while we ate. I didn’t know much
about love then, but I knew the shape.
.
Like many American poems, this poem tells a story and also reads a bit like a very short story. And just like the poems I love most, this one is a door - one that opens into a visit to a time that has passed, a kitchen that is no longer, a particular hour in that kitchen. A visit into a moment between a daughter and her father. If you read it again, notice how the poet uses concepts of mathematics, geometry, simple arithmetic and shapes precisely when she speaks about what cannot be measured by any calculation: time and place and longing and love.
.
As I translated this poem, I thought of G, who will soon return to write with us on Zoom and this time will find the Zoom room full and bustling. And in our first meeting I truly want us to study this poem and write inspired by it, and in my heart I will dedicate it to G, who never left the Zoom nor the times.
.
Our inspiration season in Hebrew will open this coming Sunday, in just two days, and the poems we read this time and draw writing inspiration from will all be taken from contemporary American poetry. Almost all of them slightly narrative, almost all of them opening a door inviting us to visit another place and another time. But even though their doors are in America and arrive from English, the human spirit is similar everywhere, so each such visit will, inevitably, lead us back to a visit within ourselves.
You are warmly invited to join us.
.
Wishing us all good visits, and wishing all of us a Shabbat Shalom.
*Maya Tevet Dayan*