The Prince of Zorg

     It looked like an ordinary passport to me.

     There was his name, Jack Rabinowitz, in the frail type of some old compositing machine.  And there was the photo of his face with that jarred expression of someone having a passport photo taken.  He had chubby cheeks and a wisp of hair that gave him a bemused look, which, as I think of him, was an outright lie.  But most photos are.

     Even so, that was not the odd thing. 

     On the page where you would expect to find the visa stamps of an traveled person, there was only one.  It was not for France or Italy or any of the places on a middle-class cultural itinerary.  The not-so-grand tour, so to speak.  Instead there was a single round stamp dated 7 DEC 1956 in an alarming red color.  The country on the stamp was Zorg.

     I searched but could not find it on any atlas or world map.  Not even on the maps of inmates in an upstate asylum – so sad, so detailed – that had been published in a book.  And so I decided to ask my Aunt Ethel, who knew Jack much better than I did when he was alive, what it meant.  She was living in Florida then, in Boca Raton, the third stop after Brooklyn on the great Jewish migration to the warmth.  I called her one afternoon so as to squeeze myself in between canasta and the early bird special.  Over the phone I tried to describe the passport and the peculiar stamp on the visa page.

     “It says Zorg,” I explained and spelled it out, just to be clear.

     “Ah yes, Zorg.  As in zorgn zikh.  That’s Yiddish.”

     “Which means?”

     “To worry.”

     “That’s funny because I’ve never needed a visa to get to worry.”

     “I think this must be some sort of gag,” she said.  “Zorg is a kind of rumor.”

     “Worrying is a rumor?  Not to me.  It’s as real as Flatbush.”

     She did not laugh at that because, I presumed, she was getting ready to go out to eat.

     “No, Zorg is,” she corrected me.  “It’s a place that doesn’t really exist.  A mythical country.  Zorg is a country of worriers.”

     “I’m not following you here exactly.”

     “Back in Vilna, in the old days,” she went on, “they talked about this country somewhere in Europe where worriers were born.  The country of Zorg.  They were constantly under threat of invasion even though no one else, not even the Roman Empire, was the least bit interested in them.  They became so fearful about this impending doom that they began to disperse throughout Europe.  That’s the reason that every village had its share of worriers.  Vilna especially.”

     “Aunt Ethel?” I said, not so much to get her attention as to make sure it was still her that I was talking to.

      My aunt was a very grounded person, very real.  She played softball as a girl.  Somewhere I have a picture of her as a teen at third base.  She was the one who taught me to play craps.  So this kind of fancy did not seem to suit her at all.  But that only made it more believable to me.

     “This passport looks real,” I said.  “Where did this official-looking visa stamp come from?”

     “Maybe your Uncle Morty.  He was a commercial artist.  You’ve seen those photos of my face on Esther Williams’ body.  He was good at that kind of thing.”

     “So it was just a joke.  Or do you think cousin Jack believed in it?”

     “Jack was a basket case,” she summed.  “Freud would have had a field day.  His mother used to call him mein zorgella, my little worrier.”

     “What happened to him eventually?”

     “To Jack?  No one really knows.  He kind of disappeared in the late fifties.  Or maybe I just lost touch with that end of the family.”

     “Maybe he went home.  To Zorg,” I kidded.

     “I doubt that.  They say that they don’t let strangers in.”

     “Why?”

     “They worry about their safety.”

     “Is it a dangerous place?”

     “No.”

     I did not know Jack and the one thing I knew for sure about my Aunt Ethel was that she was no worrier.  But I was and I am.  I know worry like an old shoe, one I could wear on the trembling trek all the way to the original land of worry, to Zorg, wherever that was.  Perhaps I should return there myself, I thought.  The old country.  I could become a prince of the realm.

     Good days to me are good because there is nothing to worry about.  But when there is nothing to worry about, I worry about that deeply.  About what is going to happen tomorrow to balance things out.

     It is impossible to explain this, to make anyone else drink from a half-full glass.  This kind of worry goes above and beyond the dull kvetch and kvell of life.  It is an atmospheric realm whose dark light imbues everything with one’s own shadow.  Non-worriers have no clue about this and they tell me all the time to stop worrying because it will not change anything.  But they are wrong.  Worrying does change something.  It is a magical transformation of the future.  If I worry now, worry deeply and intensely enough, the bad thing that I imagine will happen, will not happen.  It makes no sense, even to me.  Yet I must believe this or why else do it?

     I have read countless books and heard endless lectures on how to stop worrying and start living.  The theme is always the same: how pointless it is to worry and how seeing things positively will change my life.  Obviously this worries me terribly.  Who would I be if not the worrying me I know so well.

     The passport may have been a joke for Jack but it was a real document that I was holding in my hand.  That became the impetus for my big decision to accept my birthright, to stop wandering and move to Zorg.  I imagine myself welcomed by troubled looks that are a sign of fellowship and a sad anthem that is music to my ears.  I have designed a stamp showing a dark cloud, created citizenship papers full of dire warnings, and even made a survey of the land from the Mountains of Disquiet all the way down to the Blue River.  I want to be a useful citizen.

     Days in Zorg are fraught, the storm never seems to end, the central city is filled with dark corners.   But we know who we are.  We fret and we furrow our brows and we fear what will come but we are, in the end, together, united in our bright gloom.  I am home here and that alone is cause for joy, which in turn is cause for concern.  As it should be.