Amy's Pensieve

Reflection on Yom Kippur 2010

2010-09-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

If there is a design to life, to the sequence of events that occurs in the known world, and it is a design orchestrated by a deity or omniscient spiritual entity, then that deity or entity must be both infinitely good and wretchedly evil at the same time. That would be the only way to characterize our experience since the same entity that produced the giant majestic Redwoods also produced the Holocaust. And if there is a design, then our actions are meaningless since they have been pre-ordained. That is why I don’t believe in fate, destiny, or god. Perhaps it is comforting to assume that everything happens for a reason and that there is a greater meaning to all things, a meaning that we humans just don’t understand. I find that too simplistic.

Alternatively, if there is no method to the madness, no plan, and no design, then what we experience is random chaos. The sequence of events is a cause and effect progression with no significance and we are at the whim of chance. Once again, this renders our actions as meaningless. If our existence was set in motion by a higher entity, which then withdrew, then we are basically a failed science experiment, which I suppose is possible (anything is, really), but not likely. In any case, our actions are still meaningless. In a random universe, we can only celebrate with and console each other as we pass through the delights and tragedies of life. If events occur randomly then we have good cause to rise to anger at some of the pointless tragedies of the world. But I don’t believe the world functions in utter chaos and that we have no impact on it. I find that too easy.

It is certainly possible that both a divine design and random chaos co-exist in a tension or balance that is beyond the comprehension of my feeble human mind. That lets me off the hook. I can press the autopilot button and go on faith, not a bad option.

What if there is a design of sorts, but it is changeable? What if there is a way to influence the course of events? If fate does not exist, if all things are not necessarily “meant to be,” if the progression of events is mutable, then despite the tendency toward random occurrence or loose adherence to some mysterious design, we have a way to change the course of events and steer things to a different course from the one originally set in motion. How do we do that? I believe that everything, seen and unseen, here now and here in the past, living in this world and present at another level, has spirit and spiritual energy can never be destroyed. It can be changed and moved. It can never be uncreated. The universe is laced with spiritual energy, which interpenetrates our lives as spiritual beings, throughout the course of events. We can make an impact by the inter-penetration of spiritual energy. We have the opportunity and the potential to change the course of events with the energy we create, channel, invite, elicit, emanate, and conjure. So then our actions do have meaning. In which case, at Yom Kippur I pause to contemplate the fact that I am an imperfect being and to set for myself the improvements I wish to make in the coming year so that my impact is more positive and so that I can do a better job of connecting with spirit.

I will end with a true story. During the last summer of her life, when she knew she was dying, my friend Nan called me up on the night before our family left for our annual vacation at Manresa Beach in Watsonville. She said to me, “Say hello to the dolphins for me.” I promised I would. Sitting on Manresa Beach, I remembered her words and laughed about it since I had never seen a dolphin at Manresa in ten years of family vacations there. But I went to the ocean’s edge and called out, “Hello Dolphins. Nan says hello!” Later that day, you guessed it, a school of dolphins swam past the beach, jumping high out of the water so that they were clearly visible. Astonished, I called to them, “Nan says hello!” And from that time to this, I have seen dolphins at Manresa on every single visit I have made to that beach. Although Nan is no longer living, I always send the dolphins her regards.

Not By Fire, Not By Ice, But By Paper

2009-02-01T20:44:00.000-08:00

We will not perish by fire or ice next time but by paper. If I thought I had too much paperwork when my children were young, well this “biz” (as I call it) is overwhelming now that they are adults. For instance, Akili needs to show proof of enrollment at SDSU or he will lose his medical benefits under Ron’s plan at the school district. The only acceptable proof is a letter with raised seal from the bursar’s office, which he cannot obtain until he shows up for the first day of class. Clock is ticking and I am receiving increasingly hysterical “reminder” emails from the benefits lady at the school district. Do I lie awake at night worrying about global warming? No, I’m too busy worrying that Akili will have a freak skateboarding accident during the 48 hours that his medical coverage is not in effect and that I will have to hold a raffle to sell my house to pay the subsequent emergency room bill. How did contemporary life become so complicated? Four centuries ago, if a young man had a skateboarding accident, he would have bled to death in the street while bystanders murmured, “Dang, I left my leeches in my other breeches” and “What’s a skateboard?”

Yael was laid off from her temporary job and while looking for another, she thought she’d file unemployment. She can’t schedule an appointment by phone or in person as the unemployment office got overwhelmed with all the folks now out of work and so they went to play mini-golf. Who can blame them when half the country is unemployed, including everyone in Wyoming who doesn’t own a dude ranch? Yael applied online and subsequently received a packet of forms thicker than the Talmud in the mail. She came home to get help from me to figure out which ID to photocopy to verify her identity. We selected one from Column A and one from Column B and ordered won ton soup and spring rolls on the side.

Now that Sudi has sent in his college applications, he has joined a paperwork trauma recovery group. With the admissions applications behind him, he has progressed to th next level of bureaucracy: putting together scholarship applications. He leaves for school in the morning with “recommendation letters” written on the back of his hand and returns in the evening with “read War and Peace for English” written on his forehead. I suggested he try writing lists to stay organized and for once he took my advice. He mounted a dry-erase board on his wall and wrote the word “SKATE” on it. (As in skateboarding.) Skate is not just at the top of his list. It IS his list. Getting him to write the scholarship essays is like extracting Orson Wells from a wet suit. “So why do you want to study art? What inspires you?” I ask. “Have you seen my chapstick?” he answers. That Jewish genetics, answering questions with questions.

On my last trip to the grocery store, my debit card was rejected. How embarrassing. Especially after I had just put back the pound of flour, gallon of apple cider, marinated artichoke hearts, and the bag of Barbara’s all natural organic cheese doodles (that Ron had specifically requested) in order to get the subtotal down to $200. Since when are apple cider and organic cheese doodles luxury items? I had to pay the bill with my credit card instead. When I got home I went online to find out what was going on with my checking account and discovered that the bank had changed my password as a courtesy to prevent anyone from hacking into my account. Including me. The next morning, first thing, I turned up at the bank and discovered that they had frozen my checking account until I paid my home equity line of credit payment, which I had already paid (I had the receipt to prove it). Oops, their bad. They fixed it. I am trying to switch over to paperless online bill pay, but I find it distracting to be in the middle of a conference call with a grant writing client and have the cell phone bill arrive via email. I can’t resist taking a peek and then, when I see that AT&T has accidentally charged me $3,000 in individual text messages sent by Sudi (at 10 cents a message) because they removed his unlimited texting plan for some mysterious reason, well, I have an apoplectic seizure, which sounds bad over the phone to my grant writing client.

No wonder I snap at the financial aid counselor from the Art Institute who calls to remind me to file the forms for federal student aid. His name is Mark. Mark was assigned to us when Sudi was accepted at the Art Institute. I explain to Mark that we need to complete our taxes before we can file for federal student aid and that I have provided the accountant with all the paperwork except Ron’s deductions and that Ron, my darling ADD husband, has been up until midnight all week wading through his fleet of baskets of paper, several of which were thrown intact onto the moving van and then taken off the moving van in June without missing so much as a paperclip in the process. I am only as fast as my husband’s filing system when it comes to this one. And he doesn’t even have a dry-erase board with the word “skate” written on it to help him. It’s Mark’s job to help us find the money to pay the tuition so Sudi can attend the Art Institute. Unfortunately, the tuition is more than the total annual income of a small village in Nigeria. Why do I feel like a Hedonist for wanting my son to attend college? Mark reminds me that the Art Institute managed to come up with enough scholarship money to enroll a homeless student this year. This is supposed to make me feel better, but I am thinking, yes, it’s middle class people like me who make too much money for a free ride and who are returning apple cider and cheese doodles at the check-out stand to pay tuition so that homeless children can receive scholarship money. I sound ungrateful, don’t I? I should remember that I am one of the privileged people who lives in a house and owns filing cabinets. I must accept the things I cannot change and find a good recipe for homemade cheese doodles.

Baruch on the Inauguration

2009-01-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

I woke up early on the morning of the inauguration and ran into the living room to see the TV before I even brushed my teeth. I burst into tears when I saw the crowds at the mall. It was only the first of many torrential episodes for me throughout the morning. I had some work that had to be done, finishing up a $2 million federal grant and sending it off for submission. I don’t know how I did it because I could not concentrate on work. I could barely tear myself away from the TV. Ron came home from work to watch the swearing-in with me. Our friend Jessica from Vallejo went to DC to stand at ground zero with the nation. We tried to reach her on her cell phone to tell her to raise her hand so we could find her in the crowd (that was Ron’s line). Jessica would call us later in the day and gleefully inform us that the crowd sang “Sha-na-na-na, hey, hey, good-bye” to Bush’s departing helicopter and we laid a real surprise on her: we could hear them singing that on TV! It wasn’t just the little group around Jessica, it was the whole assembly singing. Tuesday’s participation apparently represented the largest single group ever assembled in one place in the U.S. – I called it a cross between the March on Washington and Woodstock without the mud. And the DC police later reported not a single arrest all day.

When Obama emerged to take his seat, it hit me that this is real and happening. I remember on the closing night of the Democratic Convention, when Obama and Biden and wives waved and walked off the stage into the sunset. I thought, well, that was terrific, but was it the farewell? Can this thing actually fly? I remember Obama telling the nation something like, “I know I’m not the most likely candidate for President, but I’m the one who has presented myself at this point in time.” The love shown to him and his family by that multitude of people on Tuesday demonstrated that he is more than an unlikely candidate. He is the man for the job. After he officially became Mr. President, Ron leaned me back and gave me one of those V-Day kisses.

During Aretha’s rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” I experienced a moment when history telescoped. The line “Land where my fathers died” did it to me. Her fathers died slaves. Although Obama’s African heritage comes direct from Africa and not slavery, First Lady Michele is only five generations out from the Old South. Her great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, was born a slave on Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, S.C., where he probably drained swamps, harvested rice, and was buried in an unmarked grave. (Michele only learned during the campaign that her forebears had been enslaved in the same town where she grew up playing with her cousins.) Imagine the thoughts going through Grammy Robinson’s head? Living in the White House to care for the girls. If Aretha’s singing cracked me up, and Elizabeth Alexander’s poem moved me, well, the actual swearing in brought me to my knees.

But the best, for me, was yet to come. Tuesday evening we held our own inaugural ball. I bought a (used) gown and even let Yael put make-up on me. I wore my (costume) tiara and my Grandma Wachspress’s (real) pearls, which I have never worn before. We rolled up the rug and moved out the dining room table and lo and behold we had a big dance floor. People poured through the doors. Apparently the word spread about our shindig. It was wild. There were lots of folks I didn’t know. Lots of folks neither Ron nor I knew. We had the TV on in the living room with the coverage of the inaugural balls in DC playing. The kitchen overflowed with champagne, caviar, and heaps upon heaps of food brought by the guests. For once, I stayed out of the kitchen. I DANCED!!! The dance floor was packed. Ron spun the tunes of course (that’s what got everyone up and moving). It was 34 degrees outside and we had the windows open and the fan on. I think I must have tossed 50 or more champagne or wine bottles into the recycling during the evening. We started early because it was a week night and we wound down early so as not to disturb our Republican neighbors. A highlight of the evening for most of those in attendance was the Dance-in-the-Streets. I grabbed drums, gourds, and tambourines, passed them out, and we ran out into the street for a triumphant loop around the “Plaza” (the circle where we live). We drummed, danced, and sang. “Ding dong the Bush is gone” and an “Obama” chant. It was an outstanding celebration.

The next day, I cheered the news that Obama had begun the process of shutting down Guantanamo Bay and outlawed torture. We are truly entering the Age of Aquarius. Peace and Understanding. Here are a few more reasons to love Obama: he has read all the Harry Potter books, he speaks Spanish, and he just paid off his student loans four years ago. Last night I saw a priceless picture in Time Magazine. While getting a cup of coffee during an informal meeting, Obama paused to speak with the coffee server, an older Black man. Respect for the server as one of his elders shows in Obama’s face; pride and love in the face of the server.

Here in Ukiah, Jessie’s mother is in a nursing home dying. She is bedridden and suffers from dementia. She has reverted to her native Yiddish, which no one in the nursing home understands. When Jessie visits her, she doesn’t even recognize her own daughter, but she always asks, “How is Baruch doing today?” She calls Obama “Baruch.” Barack is Baruch in Yiddish: Blessing. On Tuesday, Jessie told her mother “Baruch is the President now, Ma.” Blessings on the Inauguration.

Just Said No

2009-01-19T10:52:00.000-08:00

For nearly thirty years I waited for a publisher to discover me, to say, “Your manuscript is the best thing since Moses came down off the mountain,” to offer me a contract, to connect me with my adoring readers. I wrote, and dreamed, and wrote, and fantasized, and edited, and hoped, and wrote again, and sent out letters and more letters and emails and more emails and followed leads and methodically went through Writer’s Market with post-its and highlighter, and drafted flattering letters to distant agents and perfected the art of the query, and wrote, and hoped. Then I got wise. I researched self-publication. I learned as much as my brain could hold about independent publishing. I read Dan Poynter’s book and John Kremer’s book. I joined IBPA in 2006. I look forward to telling my grandchildren, “I belonged to IBPA back when it was PMA.”

A few weeks ago, the most remarkable thing happened: a bona fide established mainstream royalty-paying real life publisher approached me about publishing my next book and (slap me) I just said no. Here’s why.

[subhead] I Know What I Want and What I Don’t Want
First, a little history. My husband and I founded our independent publishing company, Woza Books, in 2006 to publish my children’s fantasy adventure The Call to Shakabaz, which we launched in 2007. The book has sold more than 1,200 copies, received three national and one regional book award honors, and was released as an audio book in September 2008. The audio book was produced by Legacy Audio Books, Inc. (a terrific company in Cincinnati, Ohio) in a joint venture with Woza. We will split the profits even though Legacy did all the production work and will do most of the marketing.

So this publisher approached me because the people there are impressed with my book and excited to see the release of the audio book. They think I’m a good bet. I work as hard as a Coors Beer commercial during Monday Night Football to get the word out about my products. They said, “Let us publish a sequel to The Call to Shakabaz.” The words I had always dreamed of hearing spoken to me at last, and I found myself talking them out of it, convincing them that I would be too much trouble to work with, that we would never agree on contract terms, that, in short, I am as batty as Lucy Ricardo on prozac and they want nothing to do with me. All the while, my inner voice was shouting at me, “What?! Did you just talk yourself out of a publishing contract?! You should be committed!” The publisher said to call if I changed my mind.

The truth is that I love my little publishing company and I want Woza to get all the credit for publishing my book(s). I don’t want to share my meager profits. I’m not satisfied with royalties. I’m doing all the work. I want the reward. I want to market my books in my own fashion. I don’t want someone else mutilating my messages with clumsy advertising. I want to create my image, determine my audience, and select my venues. I refuse to engage in a brutal author tour when I can do just as well touring cyberspace and using the Internet to market my book. I don’t want to contribute to global warming and U.S. dependence on foreign oil by traveling to bookstores in places where I can’t go home to my own bed for the night. I’m a recluse. Why would I want to leave home anyway?

Here’s a tough hurdle. I don’t want to submit to an editor. I am an editor. That’s one of the things I do for a living. I did a terrific job editing The Call to Shakabaz myself (corroborated by the toughest critics). I would not recommend this for most authors, but I’m not most authors. How many publishers would allow me to edit my own book? I’d wager, none. But, I ask myself, who edited Beatrix Potter? D.H. Lawrence? Tolstoy? Flaubert? I admit, I’m not Flaubert, but who’s to say I can’t write and edit? I think I can. I think I did. (Not in French of course.)

I don’t want a publisher to change the title of my book, choose an author photo that makes me look as if I’d done my hair with an egg beater, decide on the cover design, select the interior fonts and the chapter names. I want to have the book printed on recycled paper, even though it costs more per unit. In short, I want complete control over the entire product and the entire process. I did a decent job the first time around, all things considered. I’m confident I can do it again. I like having my own publishing company, as impoverished and unknown as it is. I am that new breed of author who is self-published by choice, who refuses to buy into the traditional corporate established literary complex. I choose indie and I’m proud.

Last week, while working the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA) Booth at the Sonoma County Book Festival in Santa Rosa, California, I started talking to a woman about publishing children’s books. She was passionate about children’s literature and increasing literacy, and she finally confessed to me that she recently finished writing her first children’s book.

“Have you considered self-publishing?” I asked her.

“I hope I won’t have to do that,” she replied.

She looked befuddled as I laughed my head off.

(This article was originally published in the Independent Book Publishers Association trade journal, "The Independent," in January 2009.)

An Ordinary Day

2008-11-25T08:37:00.001-08:00

I had an uneventful weekend. My husband and I watched the Raiders beat the Broncos, and it’s about bloody time. I spoke by phone with my two older children, who will be home for Thanksgiving. My daughter has a temporary job at iTunes and we hope it will evolve into something permanent. She recently graduated from college and has had a hard time finding work in her chosen field in this recession. Her brother has one more year of college to go. So far we have managed to pay for his expenses. Scholarship money makes a huge difference. We hope to send our youngest to the college of his choice next year.

I phoned my friends Mr. and Mrs. C. in Chicago. I call them every week. Their daughter was a good friend of mine who died in a car accident a couple of years ago. Mr. and Mrs. C., now in their 80s, had three children, all of whom died abruptly, without having married or producing grandchildren. The holidays are hard for them. I try to talk them into flying out to California to spend Thanksgiving with us, but Mr. C. is in one of his moods so I don’t think they will come. After I hung up, I thought about my three lovely children, all well, all following their heart’s desires.

After the football game, I went to the grocery store to buy some fresh broccoli. While I was there, I picked up a couple of gallons of orange juice and some graham crackers for E., who goes to my synagogue. She lost her husband last Wednesday. He fought valiantly against Hepatitis C for many years and was waiting for a liver transplant when his body rebelled and refused to obey his heart. E. has three children, age 16, 14, and 8. The rabbi sent an email on Friday saying to bring the family food. So I brought juice and graham crackers. A hug. Kind words. The 14-year-old has been in his bedroom playing his drum set for two days. I don’t know this family that well; but I know they have a good support system. As I drove away, I thought of my husband, who works hard to keep his diabetes and high blood pressure under control. We pay a fortune for his visits to a half a dozen doctors and for his pharmacopoeia of medications. He lived to raise all our children. He exercises regularly and is usually strict about what he eats. Hopefully, as long as he doesn’t get hit by a bus, he’ll be with me well into old age.

I called my friend K., who was diagnosed with breast cancer in August, to make a date to have dinner together. She is in good spirits. She had a lumpectomy in October. The margins were clear. But the cancer has moved into her bones. The doctor says she can control this kind of cancer for many years on medication. She is optimistic, has made extreme lifestyle changes, and believes her positive attitude will make a difference for her. I am scheduled for my annual mammogram in January; so far, so good for me.

Checking email, I discovered a message from my friend J. He and his wife of 30 years split up in July. We used to do a lot of things together as couples and I miss that. Although he is relieved to have finally ended an unhappy marriage, he is dreading the holidays. His children will spend Thanksgiving with his ex. He is coming to our house. He promises to bake apple pie. He makes a superb pie crust. My mouth waters just thinking about it. My husband is also an excellent cook and he will be the turkey maestro. We have been together over 30 years. Unlike J. and his ex, we are still good together. We sometimes cheer for different football teams, but we both jumped up and down with glee when the Raiders trounced the Broncos. He knows how to make a plain middle-aged lady feel sexy. We laugh together like idiots often and indiscriminately. Now I sound like we’re Ozzie and Harriet. Sorry.

I did the laundry. Cooked dinner. We ate in front of the TV because the Colts were playing the Chargers. That game went down to the wire. I love both of those teams so I just about needed anti-psychotic medication by the time that game ended.

Before I went to bed, I photocopied, signed, addressed, and sealed my Freedom Writers letters for Amnesty International. I don’t read the letters anymore because the stories of what these people have suffered are so horrific that they pursue me like a wolf intending to devour my heart. The rape. The torture. Death. Loss of family. Uncertainty about those disappeared. The gruesome details keep me awake at night, struggling with undefined panic. On my desk I keep a post-it that says “Fessahaye Joshua Yohannes of Eritrea, I remember you.” Yohannes was a featured prisoner of conscience in the Freedom Writers a couple of years ago. A journalist who taught clowning skills to children, Yohannes was arrested and murdered in an Eritrean prison for writing his opinion, which was disapproved of by his government. If I lived in Eritrea, I might have met the same fate.

This morning, before sitting down at my computer, I went for my habitual walk. Every day. Half an hour. I walk through an oak forest up behind a lake. The trees this time of year glow gold and amber as if lit from within. The view at the zenith of my walk takes my breath away, every single time. I am lucky to live close to nature.

Except for witnessing the Raiders win a football game, nothing extraordinary, unusual, life-changing, or remarkable happened to me in the last 36 hours. I did not escape from a war-torn country six inches ahead of a death squad. I was not tortured, raped, imprisoned, or placed under house arrest for expressing my beliefs or practicing my religion. I did not lose the love of my life in a car crash. My children are well and following their dreams. My husband and I have secure jobs. We have food in our refrigerator and clean laundry in our closets. We have not lost our house (yet) in this recession. We plan to spend our Thanksgiving in the company of friends, our children, good cheer, laughter, music, and much too much food.

I am grateful for the peace, the blessing, and the order of an ordinary day. I appreciate it for the sake of those others, elsewhere, whose pain flickers in the corners and shadows of my consciousness, who wish for nothing other than my mundane 36 hours. I owe it to them to remember to be grateful. And I wish for you, Dear Reader, a ho-hum ordinary day and a simple Thanksgiving, among family and friends, with all the trimmings.

Breaking Bread in My Mother's House

2008-11-14T20:55:00.000-08:00

My mother prospered in her life and she believed in sharing the wealth. There was always room at her table for another chair. Educated as a social worker, she was an expert listener and had a hunger for knowledge about what made people tick. Her fascination with people prompted her to sign on as a placement coordinator for the Exchange in International Living. That is how I became the “little sister” to a Taiwanese brother, a Palestinian brother, and a Turkish brother, and shared my dinner table with countless other foreign students from around the world while I was growing up.

Mom placed foreign exchange students in host homes for one month before the students went off to an American college. The host home placement was meant to assist the student in adjusting to American culture. One of the greatest challenges, of course, was providing some of the more exotic students with familiar food. It should come as no surprise that one thing that particularly contributed to homesickness for these students was the strange food in America. They yearned for their mother’s and their grandmother’s cooking.

One of Mom’s greatest successes was an African student who could not find anything to eat in America that even vaguely resembled the food he knew from home. (This was back in the 1960s, when international cuisine was not as prolific as it is today.) He was a picky eater to begin with and he was utterly miserable until Mom did some research and instructed his host home mother to feed the young man steamed spinach and peanut butter with baked sweet potato on the side. He loved it. Further trial-and-error visits to the grocery store resulted in other food combinations that reminded the young African of home.

When my Taiwanese brother first arrived stateside, he was an adventurous eater. Unlike the African who wanted familiar food, my Taiwanese brother was game to try whatever Mom cooked. Unfortunately, he was so polite, that he refrained from telling her if he didn’t like something. He just ate it and declined the next time. If you knew how polite he was, you would understand the enormity of his response when Mom attempted to feed him cottage cheese. He took one taste and set his fork down, gagging. Mom apologized, so did he, both of them embarrassed. He blurted out, “That stuff tastes like glue.”

Although she was an excellent cook, Mom didn’t particularly enjoy cooking. It was a task she did to nourish and care for her family and her household. She did, however, enjoy pleasing our foreign students by discovering food familiar to them and preparing it for them, often with their help. Certainly this injected more fun into the task of cooking for Mom.

When my parents took in my Palestinian brother, it caused quite a few raised eyebrows in our community. Our family is Jewish and the synagogue to which we belonged was loaded with avid supporters of the State of Israel. Some of my parents’ friends and acquaintances questioned their choice to care for a Palestinian. My parents were not concerned with public opinion. They did what was right. My Palestinian brother was the youngest of seven children from a Christian Arab family in Beirut. His older sister lived in our home town, taught English at the high school, and spent two years laying the groundwork to get her little brother out of Beirut before he was conscripted into the army. Only weeks before his arrival, his sister was deported to Canada by the INS. Before her hasty departure, my parents arranged to host her brother upon his arrival. He lived with us for over a year, then went to college nearby, and finally emigrated to Canada to be near his sister. While he stayed with us, Mom learned how to cook an assortment of Lebanese dishes. She discovered an import store in a nearby town and took my Palestinian brother there to seek out foods familiar to him from his home. Thus, she had a good source for imported food when she took in my Turkish brother. My Turkish brother lived with us for only a month; however, he returned to us for part of the summer and during most of his college vacations while completing his master’s degree because he couldn’t afford the airfare to return to Istanbul.

Mom’s open door policy and involvement in the Exchange in International Living led to her most challenging culinary moment, which occurred when I was a freshman in college. I returned home for the Jewish Passover holiday and, although I was not particularly observant, my mother was. She kept a kosher house, meaning she would not cook meat and dairy together in the same meal and she did not prepare un-kosher meat or fish (such as pork or shellfish). She had painstakingly trained the Taiwanese, the Palestinian, and the Turk in how to keep kosher so they wouldn’t accidentally mix up her meat and dairy dishes or silverware and un-kosher her kitchen. For Passover, she removed all her plates, cups, and silverware from her cupboards and drawers and replaced them with her Passover kitchenware (a meat set and a dairy set). She taped many of the drawers and cupboards shut, covered others with plastic, and she removed all prohibited food from the house. For one entire week, her kitchen produced only foods deemed kosher for Passover in the Ashkenazi tradition, which forbade any foods made from grains (except matzo) or legumes. No wheat, rye, barley, rice, pasta, beans, lentils, peas, soy, soy oil; the list goes on and on.

On this particular Passover, when I returned home, Mom had a houseful. My paternal grandmother, a diabetic with a heart condition, had moved in with my parents. She was on a restricted diet. My Palestinian brother, a Christian, was in Lent so he couldn’t eat meat. The Turk, a Muslim, was in Ramadan, so he couldn’t eat anything at all while the sun was in the sky. He had a pre-dawn breakfast and was pretty hungry each day by the time the sun officially set. I am vegetarian (no meat or fish). If memory serves, at that time a high school friend of mine was living in the basement while she attended a nearby college. An Italian Catholic (also in Lent), my basement-dwelling friend was still learning my mother’s kosher house (mainly under the Turkish Muslim’s tutelage). And another friend of mine (a lapsed Anglican), visiting from Scotland, was living in the den until he recovered from a medication allergy that had landed him in the hospital while touring the U.S. He had never met a Muslim or a Palestinian before. I was the first Jew he had ever known. He had no idea what Jews ate during Passover and relied on the Muslim and the Palestinian to help him navigate the kosher kitchen because Mom had taught them how to keep kosher. The Taiwanese was not present during this particular Passover season.

Armed with little more than twenty boxes of matzo, dozens of eggs, six jars of borscht, and ten pounds of gefilte fish (an acquired taste to say the least), Mom faced the dubious task of preparing a meal every evening for this eclectic household, which, by-the-way, also included my two younger brothers and Dad. Let me add that one of my brothers has celiac and the other is an extremely picky eater who, at that time, lived on ketchup sandwiches. (Ketchup and matzo?) The food situation was, to say the least, mind-boggling. On my first night at home, Mom called everyone into the dining room where she laid the ground rules. “I have filled the refrigerator and cupboards with food that is kosher for Passover,” she informed us. “I am not cooking this week for anyone other than Grandma. Everyone else will just have to forage and prepare whatever appeals to them, whatever they are allowed, at whatever time they want to eat or are permitted to eat. Just don’t un-kosher my kitchen.” And that was that.

When Mom fell gravely ill in 2003, prayer circles of every religious denomination in places around the globe spoke her name and prayed for her recovery. And when Mom passed away in 2005, my Taiwanese brother drove four hours to her memorial service, my Palestinian brother flew in from Canada, and my Turkish brother phoned from Istanbul to speak with each of us in turn and tell us how much he wished he could be there to break bread with us in my mother’s house.

The Politics of Love

2008-11-14T20:54:00.000-08:00

I met my husband at the Jewish Community Center, which was no consolation to my Jewish grandmother, who broke my heart by disowning me for falling in love with a Black man. To their credit, my parents always fully supported my marriage, which they never regretted as their relationship with my husband grew deeper with the years. My grandmother went to her grave without speaking another word to me after she found out about my fiancé. I would like to think that had she lived, my grandmother would have re-owned me when my first child was born. Unfortunately she didn’t live to see my daughter. At the time that I married my husband (1982), some relatives in my parents’ generation (still living) cut off communication with me. One relative (still living) wrote me a letter telling me she did not approve of miscegenation. I had never heard this word before and had to look it up.

In 1954, when I was born, miscegenation was illegal in 16 of the (then) 48 states. Miscegenation means “the mixing of different racial groups, that is, marrying, cohabiting, having sexual relations, and having children with a partner from outside of one’s racially or ethnically defined group.” Historically, the term miscegenation has been used in the context of laws banning interracial marriage and sex, so-called “anti-miscegenation laws,” and is therefore a derogatory or offensive term for interracial relationships. Until 1948, 30 of the (then) 48 states enforced anti-miscegenation laws. The U.S. Supreme Court finally declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

Tevye, in A Fiddler on the Roof tells his daughter “A fish and a bird might fall in love, but where will they make a home?” A fish is a fish, a bird is a bird, and a person is a human being. An interracial couple can make a home quite effectively. Race is not our only difference, and yet my husband and I have managed to make a terrific family, thank you very much. My husband is Christian and I am a Jew; he grew up in poverty in inner city Chicago and I grew up in a middle class home in suburban upstate New York; he was raised by a single mom and I had both of my parents present in my home; he is one of the first in his family to obtain a college education and everyone in my family has a college degree. The list goes on. I can testify that 30 years, 3 children, 4 counties, about 10 career changes, 3 homes, 40 acres, 9 Hondas, 12 cats, 2 dogs, and scores of goldfish later, we can still find something to talk about at dinner. We have raised three beautiful, talented, intelligent, thoughtful, multicultural children. The oldest just graduated from college, the middle child will graduate from college next year, and the youngest is applying to colleges now (he graduates from high school in the spring). My oldest child goes to church occasionally, the middle one is an agnostic, the youngest had his Bar-Mitzvah in 2002.

I recently found myself talking about interracial marriage to my friend Ellen, a lesbian, who just this past summer legally married her partner of 12 years. Many years ago, Ellen’s mother cut off communication with her when she learned that Ellen was a lesbian. I can identify with the pain she felt as a result of her mother’s actions. After Ellen married her partner, she wrote an emotional letter to the California State Legislature explaining what it means to her to finally legalize her marriage and thanking our elected officials for voting to make this possible. In our recent conversation, I heard myself say to Ellen, “I still can’t believe that laws banning interracial marriage were not overturned until 1967.” In that moment, I recognized the implications of this fact as it extends to laws banning same-sex marriage.

Our family relationships have probably the most powerful impact on our lives. The family unit is the most basic, personal, individual, and sacred element of communal life. How then can government have the power to define a family? To legislate the parameters of love? What is the difference between a Muslim government legislating that all women must wear burkas and a predominantly Christian government legislating that marriage is defined as a relationship between a man and a woman? I guess many people view this legislation as a moral imperative. But we have to ask ourselves, by whose morals? Based on which sacred book? Theoretically, isn’t there supposed to be a separation of church and state? I see a direct connection between legislation granting rights for same-sex marriage and the banning of the miscegenation laws of the last century.

The dirty-word version of miscegenation is the root cause of countless lynchings across this nation. Hard core racists hate nothing so much as the idea of a Black man having sex with a white woman. A few weeks ago, my husband and I watched the movie The Great Debaters, which includes a horribly disturbing lynching scene. As the mysterious pattern of life would have it, the following night was the closing night of the Democratic Convention and we watched Obama accept the nomination for president. As his lovely Black wife and adorable Black little girls joined him on the stage at the end of the evening, my husband, from the South Side of Chicago, turned to me incredulously and said, “You have no idea how surreal this is to me to watch this. I never thought I would see anything like this in my lifetime. Last night we watched that lynching scene, and tonight this.” Two scenes just a blip apart in the line of history extending back thousands of years.

In these historic times, as the white wife of a Black man, I look at Barack Obama and I do not see a Black man. I see a biracial man. Many journalists and political analysts want to talk about race and the first Black man in the White House. I see more than that happening here. Obama is as Black as my children, which is to say half. The other half is white. Lines of distinction begin to blur. Fences collapse. The new race is multicultural. The new race is the human race. Every day more multicultural children are born in our country and in other countries around the world. Every day my marriage becomes more accepted, more ordinary. Every day I step closer to old age with the father of my multicultural children, my beautiful Black husband that no one and nothing could keep me from marrying.

Our Elena

2008-11-14T20:53:00.002-08:00

I met Elena in the spring of 1980 when I moved in with my future husband, Ron. Ron and I rented an apartment on the second floor of an older building in the flatlands of Berkeley. Elena lived on the top floor in a quasi-collective arrangement with three roommates. She had rich mocha-brown skin, deep brown eyes, and thick shiny blue-black hair that flowed nearly to her waist in those days. In short, a thoroughly Latina beauty from head to toe. Her infectious cackly deep-bellied laugh cast a wide net.

When we first became friends, Elena worked at an organic urban farm and could answer any question about gardening, chickens, or goats that might cross your mind. I once asked her how to get rid of snails without using poison. She explained that at the urban farm she kept a “snail blender.” Every day she picked snails off leaves in the garden, put them in the blender with water, and whirled up a snail shake. She poured the snail shake around the edges of the garden beds containing the plants most vulnerable to snail munching. Snails stayed away. They apparently sensed snail death. I tried this method in my own garden and dang if it didn’t work.

Not long after we moved into our apartment, Elena moved out of the building to join a housing collective that rented a cluster of houses a few blocks away. She also left the urban farm and joined a collective of floor refinishers. She learned everything imaginable about finishing wood floors. During her floor refinishing days, when she lived in that housing collective rental (she later bought into a cooperative housing collective), I recall a mutual friend asking her at a party, “What cooperative are you in these days?” The question still makes Elena’s friends chuckle because it was such an Elena-type question. She tends to align herself with cooperative endeavors. She is the queen of the consensus and could teach even a Quaker minister a thing or two about group process.

When she lived in the housing collective rental, she had three rabbits: Lupe, Conchita, and, the male of the crew, Bugsy. Bugsy was an escape artist. Elena would release him from his hutch (“he needs a little freedom, he’s a guy”) and he would inevitably sneak out under the fence. That rabbit had nine lives. He always turned up somewhere in the neighborhood, until, in his old age, he lost his agility and became dinner for a Labrador retriever. Elena also had a fat black cat for fifteen years and then a canary named Tweetie who lived at her office until the bird’s inexplicable demise when Elena was laid off from that job. Elena said Tweetie got homesick for the office.

Elena’s parents never pursued a college education. Her mother was so smart that she graduated from high school two years early. Today that woman would have been the darling of the guidance counselors and would have had scholarships falling on her from the sky. But back then, young Chicana women were not encouraged to go to college. Elena was determined to break the family pattern of low educational attainment. She not only earned a bachelor’s, but went on to earn a master’s in English. She also studied Spanish and became fluent. Her Spanish-speaking parents, typical of their generation, didn’t teach their children Spanish because they wanted them to fit in. Elena spent many years studying Spanish and traveling in Spanish-speaking countries to learn her native language.

She had two brothers, one older and one younger. Her younger brother died of a rare disease while in his twenties. Her older brother also died young, of a heart attack. Neither one of them had children. Elena’s parents wanted grandchildren and Elena would have liked to have children when she was younger, but she didn’t want to raise a child without a partner and that opportunity didn’t come her way. She was married briefly to a German artist named Wolfy, who was wandering through the U.S. on an expired visa. She took him as her lover and married him so he wouldn’t get deported. Wolfy was funny, creative, a talented cook, and he treated Elena like a queen, the way she deserved to be treated. He appreciated her beauty and his appreciation made her glow. As a Chicana, she constantly wrestled with the negative images portrayed in the media and the culture that told her she was not beautiful. But Wolfy loved every inch of his Aztec goddess! I thought she should have stayed with Wolfy, but his lifestyle was too chaotic for her and he never had any money or ambition. As Elena worked hard doing floors and putting herself through college, Wolfy smoked weed and made jackets on his sewing machine. Eventually they parted ways, although they never divorced. Wolfy was still technically her husband when he died of an aneurysm a few years after they separated.

Elena is an example of a true political activist. While other people sign petitions online and send money to worthy causes, Elena steps into the line of fire. She once spent two months in Nicaragua building houses for single mothers and their children. The women’s brigade she went with built five houses during their stay in a small Nicaraguan village. Elena’s idea of how to spend Thanksgiving is with the Native Americans at their sunrise ceremony on Alcatraz Island. She demonstrates, advocates, and speaks out when others remain silent. In 2003, her unpoliticized childhood friend Terry was visiting her during the escalation of hostilities in Iraq. Elena wanted Terry to go into San Francisco with her to a demonstration. Terry had never demonstrated before and was hesitant. Terry had many health problems and Elena was very strict with her about what she ate whenever she visited. So Elena told Terry that she’d buy her a hamburger if she went to the demo. Terry went. Elena bought the hamburger.

Elena always seems to know which corporations and financial giants deserve our business and which don’t. She was the only person I knew who could tell when we were supposed to boycott table grapes and when we were supposed to buy them again and then when we were supposed to boycott them again. Her car is highly fuel-efficient, but she rides a bicycle everywhere to help prevent climate change. She buys clean food at local sources. No GMOs. No products from giants squashing little people in developing countries. She boycotted Monsanto before I even knew what it was.

After she earned her master’s degree, Elena taught English as a second language at the college level for a few years and then she landed a job as a counselor for teenagers who didn’t fit into the system and who spoke English as their second language. She worked at a residential high school where these misfit youngsters had the opportunity to get their lives back on track, complete their education, and have access to the extra supports they needed to be successful. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the people running the program didn’t get the memo about putting the needs of the students first. Elena struggled and struggled in that job, caught between out-of-touch, control-freak administrators and the students with whom she connected and tried so hard to help. That was the job that did in the canary when Elena finally got “laid off.”

She is an avid Lucille Ball fan, I think mostly because she admires Lucy for marrying Ricky Ricardo and she admires Ricky for his successful career during a time when Latino performers had little hope of making it in show-biz. She memorized every Lucy episode and never misses an opportunity to refer to Lucy’s antics. (Remember the candy factory? The vitameatavegamin commercial? Oh, and that imitation of Harpo?) Where other people make analogies to scenes in Shakespeare or classic films, Elena makes reference to I Love Lucy and The Three Stooges.

When our third child was born in 1991, we asked Elena to be his godmother. I had no idea how seriously Latinas take this godmother business! We had moved from Berkeley to Mendocino County by then, but the distance did not deter his godmother (or “Nina” as he calls her in Spanish). Elena looks out for our son.

For at least two years before her 50th birthday, Elena constantly reminded her friends that on her birthday she wanted us to throw a pie in her face to remind her to lighten up about aging. I thought she’d really have it coming to her on her birthday because everyone would want to “pie” her. Not so. With her parents visiting from out-of-town and her friends gathered to wish her well, no one dared take the risk of actually putting a pie in her face. Enter my family. We arrived at her birthday celebration late because of a prior family commitment. I bought ready-made graham cracker crumb crusts in pie tins and two cans of whipped cream. In the back of our car, before entering her party, we filled those crusts to the tipping point with whipped cream. Ron and our son each hid a pie shell behind their back as we entered the party. Guests could see the pies behind them, but Elena couldn’t. Ron gave Elena a huge one-armed hug in greeting, then stepped back and put the pie right in her face. Our son followed with a pie to the side of the head. Elena howled with laughter, that wonderful infectious cackle. We all howled. The pies were her favorite birthday gift.

After mopping up the whipped cream with towels I had brought, and settling into conversation, Elena told me in all seriousness, “I think we are most productive in our later years, after we turn 50. It takes us that long to figure things out and to find our voice and our calling and to become efficient at our tasks in life. We don’t fool around anymore after 50. We get things done. We know how to get things done.” She said she was just getting started at 50. The way she faced off with 50 and began to blossom continues to inspire her women friends to approach our older and elder years fearlessly, creatively, and with purpose.

On the morning of August 9, 2007, our Elena was riding her bicycle to work in Oakland when she was run over and killed instantly by a huge dump truck. The driver claims he did not see her. She was 55. On the night of her death, my husband sent a simple email to let friends and acquaintances far and wide know that we had lost our beautiful beloved Elena. It ended with the words, “My heart is broken.”

Elena was such a fully evolved human being that I sometimes think she had completed her work on this plane and so the powers of the spirit realm decided to take her to them because she had no more work to do here. She was done in the earthly world. She was needed at a higher level.

Forgive me for misleading you by slipping into the present tense while writing these words about Elena. I hoped you might fall in love with her as we did. I wanted you to love her through my voice and my words; and if you had realized from the start that you would lose her, you would have perhaps held back and avoided the pain by not allowing yourself to fall in love. Or perhaps not. For who among us truly regrets any of the minutes and hours spent with those we love, even knowing that we will lose them to death in the end?

A Walk in Santa Monica

2008-11-14T20:53:00.001-08:00

When we were young and starting out fresh in life, my husband Ron and I worked in the theater in the San Francisco Bay Area. We built and painted stage scenery and Ron did some acting. During that time, we met and befriended an actor named Shabaka when he directed my husband in a community theater production. We later had many opportunities to watch Shabaka onstage at various little theaters in the Bay Area. He was a gifted actor and we encouraged him when the going got tough and celebrated with him when he met with success. He had a key to our apartment so he could come by and play Ron’s bass guitar when the mood struck him. That ended when he moved to Los Angeles to try to make it in Hollywood.

Although we didn’t see Shabaka much after he moved, we stayed in touch and he sometimes visited us when he returned to the Bay Area to see his mother. Occasionally he’d call to let us know he was going to appear in a TV show or a movie and we’d watch. While Shabaka was busy hitting the pavement in Hollywood, Ron completed his bachelor’s degree and we got busy making a family. When I became pregnant with our third (and last) child, we asked Shabaka to be the godfather for the baby and he agreed. While we raised our children and worked our ordinary jobs, Shabaka got bigger and bigger acting roles. Once he visited us and told stories about celebrities he worked with or met in Hollywood, like Debra Winger, Meryl Streep, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, and Delroy Lindo. He talked about them like you would regular folks. “I went to a Christmas Party once with Meryl Streep and that woman knows the words to just about every Christmas carol ever written,” he said. It seemed surreal to us that he had hung out with these famous people.

Pretty soon we started to see Shabaka all the time in movies and TV shows. He played the detective or the psychiatrist or the judge. He landed highly visible minor roles in major movies and sometimes he played a significant supporting character. Our children were constantly calling to us from the TV room with “come quick, Shabaka’s on TV again” or “there’s a preview on for a new Eddie Murphy movie and Shabaka’s in it.” He played Herbert Muhammad in Ali with Will Smith; he was on NYPD Blue, Grey’s Anatomy, Barbershop, and Heroes; he played the security guard Thurman in The Terminal with Tom Hanks and Stanley Tucci; he played the jazz musician Daniel who gets shot in Collateral Damage with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx; and in 2006 he was Lt. Castillo in the movie Miami Vice.

In the summer of 2006, Ron and I and our son (Shabaka’s godson) visited Shabaka in Santa Monica. We arrived a couple of weeks after Miami Vice had opened in the movie theaters and Lt. Castillo was a huge role for Shabaka. One evening we went for a walk on Santa Monica Blvd. As we passed a movie theater where Miami Vice was playing, people pointed and stared at Shabaka, recognizing him from the film they had just seen. A few people he didn’t know came up to him and complimented him on his performance. We were so proud of him and loved to see this friend who had worked so hard for so many years recognized. As Ron said later, “Shabaka was walking tall.”

During our walk in Santa Monica that night, a man approached Shabaka and shook his hand. The man, Omar, was an old friend of Shabaka’s who had seen him in Miami Vice and stopped to congratulate him. They got to talking as our family stood politely by. Then Shabaka introduced us and said, “Omar just moved back to Santa Monica from Chicago. Hey,” he informed Omar, “Ron here grew up in Chicago.”

“Oh yeah?” Omar asked, interested. “What part of Chicago?”

“South Side,” Ron answered.

Shabaka interjected, “Ron grew up in the Robert Taylor Projects.”

Omar’s eyes grew wide. He put the palms of his hands together as if in prayer and bowed deeply to my husband. “I give all due respect to you, Man,” he said, with ten times the admiration he had just shown to Shabaka for his big movie role. “You made it out alive. This is your wife? And is this your son?” He pointed to our son while my husband proudly nodded affirmative. Omar pumped our son’s hand and told him, “Your father is a real man. He’s strong. He made it against all odds. You better appreciate him, Man. Respect him.” My husband blushed with embarrassment at the compliments.

Later that night, my son asked me, “Why did Omar make such a big deal about Robert Taylor?” I explained to him briefly that Robert Taylor was an African American ghetto in Chicago identified by Newsweek magazine as “one of the most dangerous housing projects in the country.” Very few African American men made it out of Robert Taylor alive and led productive lives. In 1988, Newsweek journalist Sylvester Monroe published his book Brothers about the men he grew up with in Robert Taylor, I told my son. In his book, Monroe shows how most of the young men from that ghetto wound up dead, in prison, on drugs, or crazy. “Omar,” I concluded, “was just showing your Dad how much he admired him for overcoming overwhelmingly bad circumstances and making it out. He admired him for having a beautiful son like you and being here for you while you are growing up.”

My son learned an important lesson about fame and celebrity that day. When we returned home, he took Brothers off the shelf to read about his father’s roots. Godfather Shabaka is a famous Hollywood movie actor, but Dad is his hero.

Summer Killed My Mother

2008-11-14T20:52:00.002-08:00

Cause of death is a complex construction.
We identify one culprit as the cause of a person’s death. That’s a narrow view.
A dear friend of mine was killed while riding to work on her bicycle. She was struck by a truck. The driver said he didn’t see her. She was a political activist and an environmentalist. She rode her bicycle for exercise of course, but also to reduce her carbon footprint and to preserve the planet. I say global warming killed my dear friend.
In our community there is a family who suffered the tragic death of their teenaged son. Three years after the boy’s death, his father died of cancer. The surviving mother and daughter in this family are upbeat and positive individuals. They are good people, who do not deserve the suffering inflicted on them of course. And they are strong women who struggled with their grief and plunged through it to continue with their lives. The father, however, wandered lost in his grief without finding a doorway through which to emerge. I say he died of a broken heart.
My mother-in-law had many health problems. Diabetes. High blood pressure. Obesity. Heart condition. A few weeks before her death, she had a small heart attack and was hospitalized. The doctors adjusted her medication and sent her home. She lived her entire life in extreme poverty, although it did not seem to affect her spirit or her ability to make a difference in the lives of others. It did affect her health. In the end, she died of a heart attack in the back seat of a car while a friend attempted to drive her to the hospital because ambulances refuse to enter her rough neighborhood. I say she died of poverty and racism (she was African American).
I have never told the long story of how my mother died. I usually go with the short story and say she died of Hepatitis. Here’s the long story.
My mother had a vegetable garden every summer that I can remember while I was growing up. I have a photograph of us taken when I was three years old. We are sitting on a picnic bench in front of her sunflowers, which are as tall as the roof. The photograph is in black and white. No matter. I am well-acquainted with the piercing yellow of those sunflowers. I have also never forgotten the pink rosebuds on the sun suit I am wearing. I saved it until I had a little girl of my own and then I dressed her in it.
The taste of fresh green beans takes me back to my mother’s summer yard. I picked them and crunched them while standing barefoot in the dirt. And tomatoes. My mother always grew tomatoes. It isn’t summer without tomatoes, which never ever taste any good when they are not in season and never ever taste any better than they do straight off the backyard vine. After my parents sold the family house and moved to a smaller home, my mother abandoned the big summer garden. But tomatoes, never. She grew them in pots on her deck. Cherry tomatoes. Pear tomatoes. Grape tomatoes. Beefsteaks. Early Girls. Better Boys. What is life without tomatoes?
My mother’s health became compromised when she contracted a serious though curable lung ailment that required surgery. After the surgery she received a blood transfusion. At the time, health professionals remained unaware of the danger of Hepatitis tainting the blood supply. Many people during that time period contracted Hepatitis from tainted blood transfusions. My mother was one of these people. For many years her liver functioned adequately, but as she grew older it limped along, steadily degenerating until she was forced to remain on a strict diet and limit her exposure to toxins that would stress her liver.
At the same time, my mother suffered from diverticulitis, or deep pockets in her intestines where seeds could become stuck and cause infection. A dose of antibiotics usually cured the infection. She had to avoid eating seeds. No poppy seeds, sesame seeds, or sunflower seeds. No strawberries, blackberries, or raspberries. No tomatoes.
My mother had a good life. My father was devoted to her. She had three beloved children and six very fine grandchildren. She conducted a productive career as a social worker. She delighted in talking to people, or rather listening to their stories. She particularly loved to listen to elders and spent many hours in the company of the aged who flourished in the shade of her attention. She had many interests, all of which she pursued with enthusiasm.
In her last summer, my mother ate a grape tomato. She usually exercised superhuman restraint with her diet. But that tomato wheedled it’s way in through a chink in the armor. For what is full summer without the delight of a fresh tomato? She told me this, that it was that irresistible grape tomato that caused her last bout of diverticulitis. She didn’t go to the doctor in time. It was hot. It was summer. She didn’t realize she was spiking a fever. By the time she went to the doctor, she had a full-blown infection, which had perforated her intestine. Because of the Hepatitis, the doctor could not enter surgically to remove the perforated section and repair the intestine. Her Hepatitis was so far advanced that my mother would have bled to death from such a surgery. They sent her home with morphine to leave this world in her own room in her own bed.
Technically she died of peritonitis. Although, one could truthfully say she died of Hepatitis. One could truthfully say she died of diverticulitis. One could say she died from procrastinating a visit to the doctor or mistaking a fever for the heat of summer or even from eating a tomato. She loved life so completely and she embraced all of it heartily. Good times, bad times, she had all of it. Sunflowers. Grandchildren. Green beans. Husband. Laughter. Music. Autumn, winter, and spring. If the bountiful fullness of summer had failed to arrive then she would still be alive. When summer spread its wings, she had to have that tomato. Summer killed my mother.

Small Town Homecoming

2008-11-14T20:52:00.001-08:00

Last night, Homecoming Week culminated in the Homecoming Football Game in our intimate, old-fashioned, country community. Every year, at Homecoming, I am reminded that the choice my husband and I made in 1991 to move to this town from the city to raise our children was the best decision we ever made. This year, Homecoming was particularly poignant for us since our youngest child will leave home to go to college next fall.

We have only one high school in our town. Each year in October, our little rural community goes all out for our high-schoolers and celebrates Homecoming Week. Parents, school staff, local leaders, and the business community donate time, energy, money, services, and resources to the festivities. Each student class (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior) selects a theme and a color. The themes are based on things like films, books, fairy tales, or some item in popular culture. For several weeks before Homecoming Week, the students work feverishly and in secret (at a location hidden to the other classes) to design a float, create a huge mural, and put together a class skit based on their theme. The murals are mounted on the walls of the gymnasium on Monday of Homecoming Week, the skits are performed on Friday morning of Homecoming Week, and the floats are the highlight of the parade, which takes place Friday afternoon.

Every day of Homecoming Week has its own activities, games, and a dress-up theme. The four classes compete during the week to earn “spirit points” by showing school spirit at rallies, through creative projects, and by winning contests. For instance, one contest requires a class team to try to be the first to find a jelly bean embedded in a tub of whipped cream and to eat the jelly bean – using only their face and mouth to search for it. Homecoming Week judges are prominent members of the community, like the editor of the local newspaper, the president of a local bank, and the owner of a car dealership. Businesses and private citizens donate money, time, and materials for the contests, floats, skits, and murals. On the Friday of Homecoming Week, the judges select one of the four high-school grade classes to win the coveted “spirit bell” based on spirit points earned. At the end of the evening’s football game, the spirit bell winner is announced and that class gets to ring the bell and to boast that they have the most school spirit.

On the Friday of Homecoming Week, the students gather in the gymnasium to perform their skits. The district had to ban parents from attending the skits simply because of fire regulations. The gymnasium can’t hold as many parents as would want to come. For this reason, they videotape the skits and the PTA sells the videotapes afterward as a fundraiser. At a time when schools around the country struggle to gain parent participation, imagine a school that has to turn parents away at the door.

The students work for several weeks to create their floats on flatbed trucks (the use of the trucks is donated by local businesses). The student floats are not the only ones in the parade. The candidates for Homecoming king and queen ride in the parade in classic cars or on the back of pickup trucks. Horses and other farm animals often appear in the parade, as do rolling advertisements for local businesses, bands performing, and other traveling entertainment.The parade travels a couple of miles from the high school all the way through the main intersection of downtown, past the courthouse, and up to the civic center. Businesses close early as everyone lines the streets to cheer and clap. I usually buy bags of Hershey kisses and throw handfuls onto the floats as they go by for the youngsters to eat. After the parade, the students have a break to eat dinner and soon afterward the junior varsity game takes place, followed by the varsity game, crowning of the Homecoming king and queen, award of the spirit bell, and finally a school dance.

A report in this morning’s newspaper by a local journalist tells how she talked with the coaches from the visiting football team that had the misfortune of playing our football team at the height of Homecoming when our community spirit was bubbling over the top. These visiting coaches watched the parade floats line up in front of the high school, the students dressed in wild costumes climb onto the floats, the music, the pageantry, the small-town spirit, the extravaganza of this event, and they shook their heads in wonder. “We have nothing like this for our kids in our community,” they told her. “In fact, we have never even seen anything like this. This is awesome.”

Several years ago, I drove a van full of cheerleaders and my son (then the school mascot) to a game at a high school in a city much larger than ours. On the drive to this game, my son and the girls described for me in detail the school they were going to play that day. The school, they said, has an amazing football field, brand new equipment, hot uniforms, and all-around top-notch athletics facilities. They described the school’s state-of-the art swimming pool and their country-club-style locker rooms. “But,” the youngsters told me, “even though they have a fancy school, we feel sorry for them because they have no school spirit. We went to their homecoming last year and there were more parents from our team there than from their team – and we were the visitors. They don’t do anything for homecoming. That’s no fun.”

Our J.V. and Varsity football teams both won their Homecoming games last night (school spirit is not always enough for them to win, but this year they did). The stands were so packed that not everyone could find a seat and many of us lost our voices hollering. My son’s senior class won the spirit bell and rang it loud and clear. This community event, Homecoming, shows what is possible when an entire community mobilizes itself to focus on its children by supporting them, teaching them, playing with them, and investing in them. I believe that caring for our children is the most important function of community life. That’s just me. Homecoming gives me the illusion, for just one day, that every child in our community is loved and nourished. Sadly, I know this isn’t true. But for that day every year, I allow myself to imagine.

A Sign of the Times

2008-11-14T20:51:00.002-08:00

My neighbors put a McCain/Palin sign on their front lawn across the street from our Obama ‘08 sign. Why did this make me so upset? They are entitled to their opinion as much as I’m entitled to mine. This is America, right? So why did I have trouble moving past this sign? My husband finally burned out listening to me obsess and told me to just get over it. I had insomnia for two nights thinking about that stupid sign. I really like those neighbors.

This week’s issue of Time includes an article written by a journalist who got in his car and drove around Missouri talking to “ordinary” people who vote. He stood in someone’s driveway and gabbed with a half a dozen couples about why they are voting for whom. He should have come to my neighborhood. A lot of neighborhoods are torn by this election. A lot of neighborhoods, families, circles of friends. I think I’m so right on issues, candidates, and moral imperatives. How can so many other people be so wrong?

And why am I having so much trouble with the neighbors’ sign? When we moved into our house in June, Mike and Judy welcomed us with warmth and generosity. Every time they saw us, they stopped to talk. They came to our housewarming party. They offered to help us set up for it and offered to bring chairs over from their house. They offered to loan us tools for home projects. They offered to help us work on our deck. They are good-hearted folks. Not much older than us, they are both retired and in their retirement they have a home business managing the “home base” for firefighting teams throughout the state. They cook for firefighters all summer long, often driving all night when a fire breaks out to set up the base in time to have hot coffee and breakfast ready for weary firefighters.

A few days ago, I took the plunge and asked Judy, “So, I see your sign, and I’m wondering what you think McCain will do for you?” A benign question. Trying not to be too confrontational. Judy replied (apologetically, mind you) that her family is Republican and has been for generations, is against gay marriage and abortion, that she’s a conservative, always has been, that’s just the way she is. She says security comes first and therefore she will vote for McCain. “What do we really know about Obama? What do you know about him?” she demanded. I didn’t want to touch that one. So I asked, “What do you think about Sarah Palin?” Again, a benign question. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. I felt incredulous more than anything and wanted to understand. I wondered how this intelligent woman could completely miss the boat like this. Judy replied, “I think she’s a real bombshell. We have friends in Alaska and they love her.”

I didn’t argue any of these points with Judy. I didn’t explain to her why McCain would make us less secure in the same way that Bush did by alienating most of our allies around the world, killing thousands of innocent people thus enraging their families and countrymen, and stomping around in places we didn’t belong in big boots while talking embarrassingly loud. We are the ugly American. We are the target. Security comes with building relationships, not shooting people. I didn’t mention that the supply-side economics of Reagan, Bush times two, and McCain, that says that if you keep giving money to the wealthy it will trickle down to the middle class and the poor, doesn’t work. It did not trickle down. It trashed the economy. I still don’t get how giving money to rich people equals giving money to poor people. I didn’t point out that the largest political demonstration in the history of the State of Alaska just took place in Anchorage and it was an anti-Palin rally. I did wonder how someone who thinks Obama lacks experience could feel comfortable placing Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency. She has barely been out of provincial Alaska and confesses that she is a Washington outsider. As for my knowledge of Obama, I’ve read both his books so I think I know a little about him. Sigh.

I did not say any of these things to Judy; instead I asked about her mother’s health and what her grandchildren are up to lately. As we parted and walked to our separate houses, separate signs, I realized why that sign upsets me so much. It upsets me because I like Judy and Mike. And I want for us to be good neighbors and I want for us to be friends and I want to enjoy their company. Now I will have to work twice as hard at it because we are very different sorts of folks. Just thinking about that work makes me tired. But I am committed to doing it because political candidates will come and go while Mike and Judy will be my neighbors for at least another 20 years or more if we live long enough. Here, on the ground, outside Washington, I live across the street from good folks and I will do the necessary work to appreciate them, enjoy them, and remain grateful.

Plumbing Hero

2008-11-14T20:51:00.001-08:00

My husband, Ron, is a Renaissance Man. He is an artist, scholar, engineer, technician, computer wiz, disc jockey, chef, musician, and more. He is one of those people who can do push-ups with both his left brain and his right brain. He has mechanical ability and creative genius. Nonetheless, it has taken him many years to become the plumbing wizard he is today, without benefit of any formal plumbing education I might add. To illustrate how far he has come in his plumbing development, I ask you to compare the following two episodes in our married life.

In 1989, Ron and I both worked full-time and we had a two-year-old and a five-year-old. One evening after dinner, on a week night no less, Ron decided to repair a small plumbing leak he had noticed in the basement. He informed me he would need to turn the water to the house off for a few minutes.

“Can it wait until the weekend?” I ask. “I want to bathe the children and get them into bed.” He assures me it will only take a few minutes and he wants to do it now. He shuts off the water to the house.

The children take out their wooden blocks and build a tower. I stack the dinner dishes in the sink, unpack today’s lunch boxes and repack them for tomorrow, and feed the cats. The children sit on the couch with me and we read Green Eggs and Ham. “Where’s Daddy?” my son asks. Good question. Just how long ago did Daddy go down to the basement?

At that moment, Ron rips past us like the Roadrunner on a mission to humiliate Wiley Coyote. He is soaked from head to toe. He looks like he went swimming while wearing clothes. He offers no word of explanation, instead making a beeline for the cupboard in the front hallway where he keeps his tools. He yanks the doors open and pulls everything out, flinging sandpaper, steel wool, string, socket wrench set, electrical tape, and Makita over his shoulder. He is the very definition of “rummaging.”

“Is there a problem, Honey?” I ask, taking my life into my hands. The children observe, wide-eyed and speechless.

“No, no problem,” he replies as he races back out the door and downstairs with a monkey wrench in one hand and small tub of putty in the other.

I give the children a “bird bath” with bottled water, have them brush their teeth, and change them into their pajamas.

Meanwhile, Ron has whizzed through the house two or three more times, tracking water in puddles behind him, his sneakers sopping wet. I imagine a geyser erupting in my basement.

As I tuck the children into bed, I call to him on one of his mad dashes, “Sweetie, should I see if I can find a 24-hour plumbing service?”

“No!” he shouts, clearly annoyed at this suggestion, “I don’t need a plumber. See if you can find a 24-hour plumbing parts store.”

I read the children Who’s in Rabbit’s House, turn out the lights, and wish them sweet dreams. “Is Daddy OK?” they ask me.

“Yes, he’s fine,” I reassure them, “he’s just a little wet.”

With the children in bed, I get out the phone book and look for an all-night plumbing parts store. Is there such a thing?

Two hours and fifteen minutes since Ron first descended to the basement, he enters the kitchen and turns on the faucet. Water comes out. A miracle.

“You fixed it?” I ask.

“No, but it will hold until tomorrow,” he replies. I’m afraid to ask.

When he is good and ready, and dry, he explains that a simple repair went over to the dark side when an old fixture broke while he attempted to unscrew it. I still don’t totally understand how he managed to get the piping to last for the night with two potatoes, a roll of electrical tape, putty, and eighteen inches of baling wire.

That was then. This is now.

Fast forward to 2008. Ron and I return home after spending the weekend out of town attending the college graduation of our oldest child. I open the cupboard under our kitchen sink and discover a swamp. This is more than a one-bucket leak.

Ron had already crawled into bed to read the Sunday paper, exhausted from driving for four hours and suffering from an ear ache. I reluctantly inform him that we have a plumbing issue. “Should I turn the water to the house off for the night?” I ask.

Ron gets that Tim-Allen-Home-Improvements glint in his eye. Slowly he rises out of the bed. I half expect him to change into his Binford Tools T-shirt, the one that says “real men don’t need instructions,” as he prepares to demonstrate what separates the men from the boys.

I clear everything out from under the sink and lay down clean towels. Ron hands me the fluorescent hurricane lantern and instructs, “Cover me, I’m going in.” After considerable head scratching and chin rubbing Ron announces, “I think I have the parts necessary to fix this.”

I confess that I don’t often appreciate being married to a pack rat who squirrels away parts and pieces, tools and materials, nuts and bolts, enough to build a rocket ship in the basement if it becomes necessary for us to evacuate the planet on a moment’s notice. But on this particular evening, I experienced a heartfelt appreciation for the art of hoarding and my husband’s mastery of that art. He did have everything he needed for the repair. After twenty-five years of marriage, his closet has become the all-night plumbing parts store.

In less than an hour he expertly replaced the defective parts, turned the water back on, and restored order underneath the kitchen sink. No potatoes or baling wire this time. My plumbing hero has come of age. I’m a lucky gal.

Marcy Who Stole My Story

2008-11-14T20:50:00.001-08:00

In fourth grade Marcy stole my story. Our school principal took this crime very seriously. I was embarrassed because I viewed the theft as the highest compliment. I had a fan. I could always write another story. But a fan, now that was hard to come by.

My story was a sci-fi about a snowball fight on Mars. It was long and took up many pages of fourth-grade writing paper. My teacher asked me to read my story aloud to the class, which I did. Within the hour, it went missing from my desk. My teacher had everyone search the classroom for it. It didn’t turn up. As we filed past her at the door to the classroom and said good-bye for the day, her eagle eye caught sight of a thick bulge beneath the cover of Marcy’s math book. It was my story, folded in half and neatly tucked away.

Marcy’s life intersected with mine many times while I was growing up in the 1960s. I sometimes thought of her as my opposite. I was privileged and she was disadvantaged. She would have been surprised to discover how much I thought about her. When I thought about her, I wondered why I got so lucky and why she didn’t. I had a lively, functional, fun, and smart family. Dad made a solid middle class income and we owned our home. My parents were both college-educated. I was well-loved and all my needs were met. Marcy came from a large blended family with a dozen or more siblings and step-siblings and half-siblings from an assortment of parents. Her mother’s current husband, Marcy’s stepfather, either didn’t work or didn’t make much money when he did work. Marcy had shabby clothes, often came to school dirty and unfed, and lived “across the tracks” in a rented apartment.

Once, when we were in Brownie Scouts together, Marcy was reprimanded for eating the Easter candy we were using to fill baskets for “the poor kids.” It would probably be safe to say that she ate the candy because she was hungry. The irony of the situation, i.e., Marcy making up Easter baskets for “the poor kids,” was not lost on me, even though I was only about seven years old at the time.

I never befriended Marcy. We lived in different worlds and I didn’t have any idea what I would ever say to her if I were to talk with her. She existed on the margins of my luminous life. A shadow. A reminder that the world was not a fair or just place and that not all children were loved.

In the eighth grade, Marcy and I were in the same physical education (P.E.) class. In February, Marcy started to sit out of P.E. She had a written note from the school nurse excusing her from strenuous activity. Curious, I asked some of the other girls if they knew why Marcy was out. That was how I learned that Marcy was pregnant. I don’t think she completed the eighth grade, and I don’t remember ever seeing her again after that year.

Perhaps Marcy was raped or the victim of incest in that dysfunctional, chaotic, weird household of hers. I have often wondered what became of her. I wouldn’t know if she was smart or talented or particularly good at anything. I wouldn’t know if she survived, stayed sane, or went crazy. I think, from knowing her as a child, that she never had a chance. Maybe she got a chance as an adult, some subsequent lucky break that I never knew about.

Here’s the peculiar part of my relationship to Marcy. I envied her. Lucky me, with all the world in my basket, I envied Marcy. I envied her the knowledge she had about life. I felt stupid and hopelessly innocent next to her. I imagined that she was wise beyond her years, that she would always have more of importance to write about than I, that she had earned the right to sing the blues in a way that I never would. I envied her potential to make a difference in the lives of others because she had walked in the shoes and was authentic in her suffering. I imagined it would take me years and years to know the things she knew.

I didn’t want Marcy’s life. Her life terrified me. I admired Marcy for getting up in the morning, walking through the day, and surviving in a life she did not deserve in a universe so random and potentially brutal that little girls were raped for no reason and went hungry even though they had never done anything wrong. All these years later, as an adult and a writer, I know better than to envy Marcy anything. I only hope she lived, kept her sanity, made a bearable life, and perhaps found peace.

Losing Mike Hardy

2008-11-14T20:49:00.002-08:00

I saw Catherine Hardy in the grocery store yesterday with her 18-month-old grandson.

Eight years ago, my son came home from school and told me that his classmate Mike Hardy had died over the weekend. The Hardy family had gone out of town to a sports event. They had taken two cars. Catherine and her husband were in one car with their 16-year old son Paul. Their 18-year-old, Peter, drove the other car with Mike beside him in the passenger seat. On the way home Peter fell asleep at the wheel. While Catherine and her husband watched helplessly from their car behind Peter’s, he drove down a gully and hit a tree. Mike was killed, despite the fact that he was wearing a seatbelt. He died in Catherine’s arms. He was 13 years old.

I was not friends with the Hardys. We were acquaintances. We saw each other at school events. My daughter was in Paul’s class, my son in Mike’s, at a small country school with only 180 students. My heart went out to the family, but I was not close enough to them to do or say anything to help them through the difficult days and weeks that followed their loss. I sent a card. Whenever I saw Catherine, I stopped to talk to her, asked how she was, asked about her two remaining sons. We never once mentioned Mike’s name. She always asked about my children.

I found it hard to believe that Catherine picked herself up and continued with her everyday life after losing Mike. I thought that if it had been me, if I had lost my son, I would have curled up in bed and not left the house for a year or more. I would not have had the heart to face the world after such a tragedy. It amazed me to see Catherine out and about, looking for all the world as if nothing had happened.

Since Mike’s death, I have experienced the death of several people very close to me, including the death of my mother. I have supported and comforted one of my dearest women friends for the past five years after her husband died suddenly of a heart attack and left her widowed with two teenaged daughters still at home to finish raising. I have a different perspective and I understand how Catherine returned to the world, however difficult it must have been for her.

She had two sons remaining, and the oldest was suffering deep guilt and trauma for causing the accident that killed Mike. She needed to be strong, she needed to be present for those boys and her whole family. She had a ranch to run, with vineyards and livestock, that was the family’s livelihood. She could not afford the luxury of cracking up, wallowing in self-pity, or curling into bed for a year. She had to pick herself up and go back at it, day after day. It must have taken phenomenal courage and strength for her to return to her everyday life and to help her family cross the bridge of their loss. I shudder to think what it must have cost her to ask me about my son when we ran into each other at the store or a school event. My son alive and well, the same age as Mike would have been.

Yesterday, I saw her in the grocery store with her grandson Adam, Peter’s son. Adam sat in the shopping cart seat and stared at me with big blue eyes as Grandma filled me in on the latest news about her boys. I knew that Paul’s wife had a baby girl two years ago so I asked about the granddaughter. Catherine had spent the day looking after both of her grandchildren. She told me about the fun they had on her ranch. Now she and Adam were at the store picking up a few things to make for dinner.

“Can you shake hands?” Catherine asked her baby boy. “Uncle Paul taught him to shake,” she informed me proudly, stroking the downy blonde hair on the top of Adam’s head.

Adam offered me a plump, firm little hand, and we shook.

Cheese Puffs and Tofu: Raising Picky Eaters

2008-11-14T20:49:00.001-08:00

It lifts my heart whenever I see a toddler eating vegetables. It also astounds me since I could never get my three children to eat vegetables. The only green thing they would eat was lime Jell-o. When comparing notes with other parents, I soon discovered that I had (horrors, drum roll, thunder and lightning) PICKY EATERS.

When my daughter Yael (the oldest) was two years old, I remember going to the pediatrician with her for a “well child” check-up. My voice verging on hysteria, I explained to Dr. Pat that Yael had refused to eat anything other than organic whole grain cheese puffs for a week and a half. I was at my wit’s end. The door to the examination room stood open and I heard Dr. Boyd down the hall laughing his head off. “Is he laughing at me?” I asked Dr. Pat, who smiled kindly and replied, “Yes, I’m afraid he is. You see, you are describing perfectly the eating habits of a two-year-old.”

Once, when my middle child Akili was four, I asked him if he would try a piece of lettuce. He hadn’t tasted any in a long time. He agreed to do it. I gave him one small, fresh, crisp, luminous, green leaf. Akili chewed it thoughtfully and commented, “This will taste like something when I grow up, right?”

Fortunately, Akili, ate many kinds of fruit. But his older sister, Yael, and his younger brother, Sudi wouldn’t touch the stuff. Yael ate applesauce, sometimes, when the mood would strike her, and your guess is as good as mine. All three of them ate watermelon, which was in season for about two months out of the year. You can obtain just about any fruit or vegetable at any time of year in California, but if it’s not in season it tastes like straw. Anyway, I couldn’t serve watermelon every night or it would lose its luster. When they were pre-teens and teens I finally managed to get real fruit (seeds, roughage, and all) into them by making fruit shakes every night at dinner. I put one banana, apple juice, orange juice, and an ever-changing assortment of frozen fruit (strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, mango, pineapple) into the blender. No dairy. Just pure fruit. The banana made it frothy. Presto. They drank it. I thought I was a genius.

I made every effort to keep our home a healthy food zone. I bought and served almost all whole grains (especially bread). If the cereal had sugar as the first ingredient then it didn’t enter our house. No sodas or candy. We usually had one box of cookies or one container of ice cream rationed during the course of a week as a treat (I wasn’t mean, just strict). I tried to slip vegetables into things, but my children were very suspicious. (“Does this lasagna have a mushroom in it?”) We ate a lot of eggs and plant proteins, like beans and soy products. I cooked poultry and fish for the family fairly often, even though I myself am vegetarian. I never served red meat. Although I am a bit heavy on the cheese, most of our protein was fairly low in fat. I always insisted that the children eat some type of protein at lunch and dinner. “You need it for brain development,” I explained, even to barely verbal toddlers. Once, at a birthday party, another parent informed me that my three-year-old had approached the food table and asked, “Where’s the protein?”

Very early in my parenting odyssey, I perfected a foolproof tofu recipe that children love, and this saved my sanity. (Recipe provided at the end of this story.) All of my children ate this tofu for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack. When my daughter was nine, she informed me, “Mama, I’ll keep eating tofu, but don’t tell my friends that I eat it or I’ll stop.” That’s how we became covert tofu-eaters. I cheated by serving the tofu when the children had friends visiting. Other children fell in love with the tofu. If their friends ate it then it was OK for my children to admit to eating it. I put a giant bowl of fried tofu on the table at a potluck BBQ once and the children (mine and everyone else’s) polished it off in record time. I overheard one boy tell his mother, “Mom, you gotta taste this, it’s the best kung fu I ever had. I love this stuff.”

The path to raising children who make good food choices has taken me through some scary places in the outside world. One time at Back-to-School Night, I sat in a classroom while a teacher informed us parents that on Fridays she gave rewards to students who had performed well during the week. The rewards? M&Ms, candy bars, and chocolates. Before leaving her classroom I introduced myself to her and mentioned that obesity and diabetes run in our family and that I discourage my children from eating candy. I suggested she give away something more creative, like books, stickers, pencils, or free passes to the movies. She assured me she would figure out an alternative. On the following Friday, my son came home from school furious at me. The teacher had distributed candy to the other children and told my son, with a pat on the head, “Good work this week. Your mom says you can’t have any candy.”

I became the pariah of the PTA when I complained that they (the parents!) were selling doughnuts to students at morning break to raise money for the middle school year-end dance. “With childhood obesity rates at an all-time high, do you think it’s such a great idea to feed the children doughnuts a half an hour before lunch?” I asked. The response? They said that the children had a choice about buying the doughnuts. What planet did these parents come from? Isn’t there some law that says that, when given a choice between doughnuts and other edible substances, an eighth-grader will always opt for the doughnuts?

I distinctly remember a family outing to the beach that included a children’s food choice that pretty much sums it up. I promised the children we could stop at the IHOP (International House of Pancakes) on the way home. As we drove from the Pacific Coast inland, we passed one roadside fish joint after another. Sudi, who loves fish, started pointing out the signs and reading them aloud. “Look, fresh crabs at that place. Look, fresh fish, caught today. Look Mama. Can we stop here and eat?” I turned to my husband, “What do you think? Should we stop here instead of the IHOP?” Just then we passed a sign that read “fresh octopus.” Akili pointed out to his younger brother, “Are you nuts? We go to the IHOP, we get pancakes for dinner, we stop here and it’s octopus. Which do you prefer? Pancakes or octopus? That’s the choice. Pancakes. Octopus. Pancakes. Octopus.” Sudi piped up immediately, “I can wait for the IHOP. Never mind.”

During those many years raising children, worrying about good nutrition, health, and developing good eating habits, I hoped they would grow into adults who made smart food choices and enjoyed good health. One of my greatest moments of victory came during a phone call with my daughter who had gone away to college a few weeks before. “Mama, you would not believe this,” she exclaimed, “I have met people here who think Kraft Velveeta is cheese! They never ate real cheese.” When she came home at Winter Break, she ate salad. Today, all my picky eaters are about grown (the youngest is 16), and all three of them eat salad when offered a salad dressing that appeals to them (including low-calorie dressings). They rarely drink sugary carbonated drinks. Mostly they drink water, teas, or orange juice. Sudi is a very adventurous eater with a gourmet palate.

My older two children, who have left home, each belong to a gym, where they work out several times a week. My youngest plays water polo and skateboards, both sports that require him to remain extremely fit. My children enjoy excellent health and they look terrific. I am truly blessed. I have come to realize that despite my despairing moments as the parent of picky eaters, I managed to raise three children who have a strong understanding of health, nutrition, and positive lifestyle choices. Many times I thought it would never happen. But those relentless efforts paid off, even though I saw no results for years at a time.

If you would like it, here is some advice for parents who are earlier on in the parenting process than I: Don’t give up. Keep modeling good habits. Keep trying new foods. Keep making the good stuff your children will eat and when they change their mind about what they will eat then think on your feet and try to find something else good that they will eat. Never, ever make meal times a battle ground. Don’t try to convince them of what they like—they know what they like. Don’t be too hard on yourself or your children. Share ideas with other parents. Stand your ground with the whole wheat and non-sugary cereals; the no soda or candy in the house; and insisting that they eat some low-fat protein (not just carbos). And remember that it’s OK to break the rules sometimes just for fun.
* * * * *
Tofu for Picky Children
For those of you interested, here is the recipe for tofu that children will eat. Use firm tofu, sometimes also called nigari or extra firm. Cut about 10 oz. of tofu into 1-inch squares about 1/8-inch thick (or a little thicker, but NOT as much as 1/4-inch—that’s too thick). Heat approximately two tablespoons of oil in a skillet. When the oil is hot, add the tofu. Splash approximately two tablespoons of soy sauce or tamari sauce into the pan (it will splatter when it hits the hot oil so stand back). Sprinkle the tofu in the pan with one teaspoon each of the following spices: onion powder, garlic powder, ginger powder. Stir the tofu constantly while cooking to ensure that it doesn’t stick and that all pieces are coated with spices and soy sauce. If it tends to stick, add a little more oil and/or soy sauce (not too much, you don’t want it too wet—and it’s OK if it sticks to the pan a little). Cook until the tofu is browned and slightly crispy. Some children like the tofu almost burnt and others like it barely cooked. If you have more adventurous children, you might add a dash of sesame oil. For children who like spicy food, add a dash of Mongolian Fire Oil (sesame oil with hot chili).

The Birth of Sudi

2008-11-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

It doesn’t take a truckload of imagination to turn an ordinary birth story into a legend. It happens daily. And soon the legend has more value than the ordinary story. Every birth is a miracle of legendary proportions. The birth of my youngest child was a miracle, a legend, and a lot of fun.

I wonder if home births are going out of fashion these days. Back when I started having my children, in the 1980s, there were many homebirth midwives. The ones I knew selected their clients carefully and refused to attend a homebirth if there was any indication of danger to the mother or the baby. All conditions had to be right for a safe homebirth. Parents had to have a backup plan that included a hospital in case the mother needed to transfer during labor. Fortunately, I am one of those women who practically sneezes the baby out. In other words, a prime candidate for homebirth, which was my preferred method of delivery. I had all three of my children at home.

When my second child was born, I had only one midwife in attendance. Not by design. Home birth midwives come in pairs so that one of them can tend to the mother after the birth and the other can look after the baby. As it happened, one of my two midwives (Midwife Number One) had a baby of her own during the night before I went into labor with mine. My other midwife (Midwife Number Two) had delivered Midwife Number One’s baby and had just returned home in the wee hours to go to sleep when my husband called with the news that I was in labor. Midwife Number Two explained that Midwife Number One had just given birth and wouldn’t be attending our birth. Midwife Number Two said she’d be right over and that she’d call another midwife she knew when she arrived. My father gleefully refers to this as my “midwife crisis.” As it turned out, we never got to Midwife Number Three since my son was born only a few minutes after Midwife Number Two arrived. Too quickly for a phone call to Midwife Number Three. Labor hurts. I like to get it over with quickly.

On the morning of the day that my third child was born, the power went out. Since our water pump was electric, and we lived on a remote forty acres of land accessible only by a dirt road, this meant that we couldn’t depend on having running water. Speaking of water, my waters had broken the evening before so I expected to go into labor any minute, even though it was a couple of weeks before my due date. This time around we were short one midwife because she had gone out of town to a midwife conference. Reasonable. My baby wasn’t due for another couple of weeks. Not quite a midwife crisis. Just a midwife glitch. Fortunately, our primary midwife has a sister who works as a nurse in a hospital neo-natal nursery. When I called to say I was in labor, midwife and sister hopped into the car on their ranch in another remote area in our community and headed to our house. Meanwhile, my husband Ron attempted to thumb through the home birth book to refresh his memory. He had not reread the book yet because he is a notorious procrastinator and he thought he still had a couple more weeks to reread the book before the baby arrived.

A close family friend, Linda, had spent the previous night with us in case we had to make a mad dash for the hospital and needed someone to watch our two older children. Linda had attended both of our previous home births. By the time I went into labor, we had power again, so Linda put on a Bugs Bunny video for the older children and then joined Ron at the end of our bed where they sped-read the home birth book together, attempting to keep ahead of my contractions. Evelyn Wood, the speed-reading teacher, would have been proud of Ron and Linda. But before long I announced, “I’m never going to last until the midwife comes.” Ron’s reply was, “You can’t have the baby yet, we’re only on Chapter Three.” I was too fast even for Evelyn Wood.

Linda read aloud from the home birth book, “Boil the scissors and cord clamps for forty minutes.” Linda looked up from the book and said, “OK, now we’re in trouble.” The home birth kit had not arrived in the mail yet so we had no cord clamps and I wasn’t going to last any forty minutes for scissors to boil. Fortunately for Linda and Ron, I am pathologically organized. I had already put the scissors on the stove to boil and I had asked Linda to pick up a pair of white shoelaces on her way to our house. Shoelaces work well in lieu of cord clamps. It’s a good thing one of us reread the home birth book.

I was never a mellow laboring mother. No water birth, low lights, candles, and gentle oil massage. Not for me. I paced around the house banging on walls and furniture and bellowing like a demented water buffalo. Looney tunes played in the background. When my darling husband offered to check to see how close I was to delivering, I snapped at him, “You won’t know anything by checking me!” Had he checked, he would have seen the baby’s head about to crown, a definite indication that the birth was imminent. From my point of view, I thought I had to use the toilet. So I trotted into the bathroom. I never made it to the toilet. I squatted beside the sink and had a baby.

In the next room, Linda and Ron heard me yelp “help” and then they heard a small cry from the baby. Ron appeared instantly in the doorway to discover me holding the baby’s head. The body had not yet been delivered. He dashed over just in time to catch the body. Newborns are as slippery as a greased watermelon. We held on with as many hands as possible as we inched our way back to the bedroom where I finally crawled into the bed and put the baby on my stomach.

Throughout my pregnancy, I had been sure I was going to have a girl. I had been sure about the gender of both of my other children (one girl, one boy) and I had been correct. It never crossed my mind that I was wrong about this one. I didn’t even check the baby’s sex right away. From Ron’s angle, however, he couldn’t help but notice and couldn’t resist teasing me when he remarked, “Look at the balls on that girl.”

My ex-navy husband had quite a time tying off the shoestrings on the umbilical cord. The cord was tough and difficult to secure. He later confessed that he was thinking “Hmm, square not? Half-hitch, bowline, sheep-shank? Trucker’s hitch? Tie it like a shoe?” He eventually figured it out. The scissors had boiled for a mere twenty minutes.

The baby was sleeping quietly, wrapped cozily in blankets that I had put in the oven earlier to warm (pathologically organized, remember). Linda read aloud from the chapter about delivering the placenta. Then we heard a car coming down the driveway. Yay. The midwife at last. Ron met her and her sister-the-nurse at the door with a delighted shout, “It’s a boy!”

The midwife laughed, “C’mon, we made it in time, didn’t we?”

“No,” Ron answered. “It’s a boy.”

“No, really, did we make it?” She couldn’t believe she’d missed the birth. It had only taken her forty-five minutes to get to our house.

“No,” Ron repeated, “it’s a boy.”

Because she missed the birth, the midwife would later give me a discount on her fee. She charged me half price. Our son was a bargain baby. His older brother would later taunt him by telling him we got him on sale.

Because I had expected a girl, we didn’t have a boy’s name picked out. I left it to Ron to choose a name, with the stipulation that I needed to like whatever he chose. It took us a week before we settled on Joseph Sudi. Joseph after Ron’s late father and Sudi for common usage. Sudi means “lucky” in Swahili and it has served our youngest child well for nearly seventeen years now. Yes, that baby born in that wild and whacky country birth will graduate from high school this year. He’s a talented artist, dedicated skateboarder, terrific water polo player, gifted writer, smart, generous, funny, handsome, all-around great guy who made his entrance at that zany frontier birth.

Every once in awhile I talk to someone who has recently attended a birth and, as they tell me about it, I can see that they are touched with sparkle. Each new spirit entering changes the dynamic of the world by a tangible turn, a significant turn however small. To us parents falls the vital task of nurturing that spirit, of raising our children well; so that we build an army of good souls capable of facing the work of advancing evolution into a positive future. The potential of each new spirit to make a difference enters the magic, the awe, and the grace of a birth. I pray that one day every baby born will be as cherished as my babies; wrapped in warm blankets made toasty just for them. I pray that every birth be held in wonder as the beginning of a miraculous, momentous, legendary journey.

Ornithological Threats to My Sanity

2008-11-14T20:45:00.000-08:00

You would think that an intelligent, college-educated woman (such as myself) would have the ability to outwit a creature with a brain the size of a paperclip. You would think, but you would be wrong. Turkeys have a false reputation for being stupid. They are not. Trust me on this one. I wish they would stick to learning to fly, which they are unbelievably bad at for a bird. Instead they have insisted on thinking up new ways to drive me to a level of idiocy beyond comprehension.

I had no idea that I had opened myself up to turkey mania when we gave the dog to my parents early one summer. I have to defend that choice. She was getting old and needed far more attention than we could give her in our busy household full of growing children. The dog joined our household when we moved to our home on forty acres of remote forest. The neighbors insisted we needed a dog and perhaps they were right since she kept the turkeys away from the house during her tenure. Once she left, the turkeys appeared at the back door in evening gowns and tuxedoes whistling “Home On the Range.”

At first, I thought the turkeys were cute and quaint and oh so country. They wandered through the yard, picking off small insects with their wrinkled beaks and booping that inane turkey boop with which they punctuate their gobbles. The males would occasionally show off their feathers to remind the females how conceited they were. “Look,” I called to the children, “the turkeys are in the yard. How sweet.”

I swiftly changed my tune when I discovered how much damage wild turkeys can do to a garden. Those turkeys dug up anything and everything I planted in boxes, pots, or barrels in my yard or on my deck. They dug looking for bugs to eat. They dug to make a place to sit for a few minutes. They dug to get purchase to climb the posts leading up to the grape arbor. They dug just to see me turn purple in the doorway. Atop the grape arbor, they bashed around on their clunky feet, with their large turkey bodies, and trashed the arbor. Slats broke and fell under their weight. They ate most of the grapes before the fruit became ripe enough for us to enjoy it. They pooped on the deck, picnic tables, chairs, benches, grill, and my gardening sneakers. Not delicate little goldfinch poo but honking big turkey poo.

This meant war.

At first I thought perhaps I had simply made them too comfortable and that if I chased them off whenever they approached the house then they would get the message and go elsewhere. I work at home as a writer so I’m around during the day. Whenever I saw them in the yard I ran outside shouting and waving my arms. I work via phone with people all over the country. Picture me politely saying, “Excuse me for a moment” to one of my clients, putting my headset on mute, and streaking out the door screaming and tearing at my hair. Afterward I would return to the phone, sit back down calmly, catch my breath, and resume my conversation.

Unfortunately, they got used to my hollering and gesticulations very quickly and pretty soon they didn’t budge when they saw me, no matter how much noise I made or how bad my hair looked. I jumped up and down. I clapped my hands. They booped. I tried throwing rocks, but I’m as athletic as a radish and could neither aim nor get any distance with a throw. I was forced to physically chase them all over the yard while hollering and clapping my hands. In big boots.

I enlisted my son to blast his trumpet, which worked surprisingly well. The turkeys hated that trumpet. They squawked and fled when he blew it. Soon he only had to show it to them and they’d run away. But he had to go to school and play sports and take trumpet lessons so he couldn’t stick around all day chasing the turkeys off.

Then I thought perhaps if I played a radio on the deck it would keep them away. I put a boom box on the picnic table and played loud jazz. It seemed to be working at first. But within a few days, the turkeys strutted down the deck booping a scat. So I turned it to talk radio. That kept them off for a week or more, until they got used to that too and knocked on the kitchen door booping to be let in to use the phone to call the radio station with their opinion. Just as well. Listening to the radio in the background all day long had given me an eye twitch.

As Halloween approached, I noticed scarecrows in the pumpkin patch where we went for our jack-‘o-lantern pumpkins. Aha! A scarecrow! That’s the ticket. I made not one, but three. I stuffed newspapers into old jeans and my husband’s old plaid flannel shirts. I blew up balloons and put Halloween masks on them and jammed them on top for heads. They looked creepy, but failed to deter the turkeys, who kicked the scarecrow heads off and played soccer with them.

At Thanksgiving, with the smell of a 22-pound turkey roasting in our oven, I thought I might get at least a one-day reprieve. Wouldn’t you think that the smell of one of their brethren cooking would put them off? No such luck. (Can birds smell?) Flocks of these beasts, as many as 30 at a time, strolled through the yard. I guess they didn’t get the memo about it being a national holiday. Perhaps they were protesting the part about the turkey in every pot.

A relatively seasonal gardener, I don’t grow much during the winter months. With my garden dormant, I took a much-needed break from my turkey battles for the winter. By spring, the turkeys had bent our deer fence so low hopping onto it and over that the deer were leaping into our yard in droves. If you know anything about country living, you will know that nothing destroys a yard or garden faster than deer. Deer are not picky eaters. In our neighborhood they ate anything with moisture in it. And the deer apparently notified the rabbits that there was good eatin’ at our yard. The few things deer detest, such as fragrant oregano or mint, the rabbits adore. The turkeys remained indifferent to the deer and rabbits for whom they had blazed a path into our yard. They were after bugs (which required scratching up the ground) and grapes (which required thrashing around in our collapsing grape arbors) and random destruction (just to see that funny woman appear at the door and do that interesting dance while foaming at the mouth).

I did not have the energy to go into battle with the turkeys for another season. I laid my sword at their feet, threw in the towel, signed the treaty, gave up the ghost, capitulated as it were. When people asked me what I was growing in my garden that summer, I told them “turkey and deer buffet.” The turkeys had won.

There is only one way for this story to end. We moved.

Seriously, we did not move solely because of the turkeys. There were many reasons; although one of them was certainly the daunting task of reclaiming our little corner of the earth from nature on a daily basis. It finally wore us down. We got too old for these shenanigans. The persistence of the turkeys and the rapidity with which nature reasserts her authority and seizes untended places gives me pause. Perhaps it should terrify me. Not so. It comforts me that the natural world will continue on into the future long after humans have disappeared from the scene. We people think we are so important, so powerful, such higher beings. What makes us more deserving of a patch of earth than the turkeys? I hope that once humans have disappeared from the planet altogether, these magnificent winged creatures will take up residence as they choose and continue to fling their wild imprint on the pattern of existence.

Even if humans alter the ecosystems of the planet beyond repair, then other life will follow. The natural world will simply transform into something else and continue on an evolutionary path we can’t imagine. And who am I to say that the world without humans will not be as beautiful or touched with grace in its own way as the world with humans has been?

Boop on, turkeys, boop on.

Loss and the Days of Awe

2008-11-14T20:44:00.000-08:00

Each year at this time Jews all over the world begin to prepare for the upcoming high holidays, or, as often referred to, the Days of Awe. Last year, one of my closest friends was killed in August in a bizarre traffic accident. As the Days of Awe approached, I became somewhat panicked about celebrating them with the community in a synagogue setting. I was still raw from the loss of my friend and was struggling to remake my universe without her and to come to terms with the ways in which losing her had shaken my faith.

When I woke up on Rosh Hashanah, I decided to stay home and write my way through to the other side of the holiday. I reflected on the three tenets of the Days of Awe: tefilah, teshuvah, and tzedakah. Traditionally, tefilah means prayer; teshuvah (literally “turning”) means changing or repenting; and tzedakah means giving to charity.

Tefilah (prayer) is particularly complex for me because I don’t believe in God as a deity. I believe that all things living and no longer living, seen and unseen, known and unknown, have spirit (or God-ness) within them. I believe a rock, a person, a cat, a tree, a bracelet have spirit (God-ness energy). I believe that all things and all beings, both seen and unseen, are inter-related and have an impact on one another. We are literally “all one.” Let me walk you through my version of tefilah. My tefilah is a threefold reflection: gratitude, blessings, and constructive visualization. The gratitude part is easy. I think about things and people I am grateful for in my life and I say thanks. The blessings part is about sending protective and supportive thoughts to those I love. I also send healing to those in need, including individual people I know (and some I don’t know), as well as the people of places in distress, such as the residents of New Orleans or the people who suffered in the December 2004 Tsunami. I believe that my thoughts and meditations contribute to a positive energy force that assists these people and builds miracles. Finally, I visualize change. This is the hardest part of my tefilah practice because it requires battle against doubt. I visualize changes I want to see in myself, such as the improvement of health issues or the ability to increase my competency in areas of my life that I find difficult. I visualize peace in the Middle East. I struggle every day when I do my visualization to believe in my heart that what I visualize is possible and will one day occur. If I am successful in this struggle, then perhaps what I experience is faith. I define tefilah not as prayer but as directed reflection.

Teshuvah (change or repentance) is often thought of as the heart of the Days of Awe. But I don’t think it is just for the holidays, it is an everyday practice. I am a work in progress. Teshuvah is inextricably bound up with daily tefilah, which, as described already, includes visualizing the changes I wish to see in myself and my life. Teshuvah is all about my constant striving to be a better person and to have a positive impact in the world. There is a popularized quote that, as near as I can tell, is best attributed to Hopi Chief Dan Evehema and it goes like this: We are the ones we have been waiting for. We have the ability to set in motion many of the changes we wish to see. I believe each of us has tremendous powers of transformation locked within us and that our creativity helps us recognize and utilize these powers. I define teshuvah not as repentance but as transformation.

As I reflected on tzedakah (charity), I realized that I associate tzedakah with giving money. And of course tzedakah is much bigger than that. I watched my mother-in-law, who had almost nothing, give away whatever she had to whomever needed it more than she. She took homeless people into her house to live with her. She fed and clothed everyone who came to her door hungry or cold. She devoted all her resources to helping others. My mother also dedicated her life to the service of others. She once bought a house and gave it to a struggling single mother of five whom she had befriended at her synagogue. Not long after the Six-Day War, she took in a Palestinian adolescent (a refugee from Lebanon) to live with us; and to this day he refers to her as “Mom.” I ask myself how my efforts at tzedakah can compare with these spiritual linebackers in my family and I know that I must change my whole notion of tzedakah. I am not a social worker. I do not have the means to donate much money. So I must seek ways to use my personal gifts to improve the lives of others in a manner that is appropriate for me and which matches my abilities.

My gift is writing. My job as a grant writer affords me the opportunity to raise funds for worthy causes that benefit children and families all over the country. In my travels through life every day, I see people making their own tzedakah contribution by being passionate, caring, and dedicated doctors, teachers, real estate agents, car mechanics, caterers, grocery store clerks, artists, musicians, bank tellers, booksellers, etc. These are people who love to help others in their role in the work world. I consider all of this tzedakah. Tzedakah is the dedication of one’s life and work and energy to using one’s gifts to improve the lives of others. That’s the most important contribution that we make. I believe that energy does not disappear, it goes somewhere; and for this reason we must make as much positive energy as possible. And I think that the positive energy that each of us makes is ultimately the only thing that endures in the end. I define tzedakah not as charity but as putting positive energy out into the world.

Traditional Orthodox Jews might not like the definitions of tefilah, teshuvah, and tzedakah that I articulated last year during my meditation at home on Rosh Hashanah. But I think that my definitions are fundamentally deeply Jewish, and probably not as far from the traditional concept of them as I might imagine. After spending the day at home and taking a moment to reflect on the true meaning of the holiday, I felt more grounded in my beliefs and more prepared to enter the new year with purpose. This year, as I look back on how I spent the holiday last year, I feel the presence of my friend who died. She has remained in my life in many ways both great and small. Last year, she kept me home to spend time with my own thoughts and to sort out my doubts and my faith. This year, as I read back over what I wrote last year, I realize that I did not “remake my universe without her” but discovered that my universe will always include her, in ways both seen and unseen.

How I Found Football and How It Set Me Free

2008-11-14T20:43:00.000-08:00

I am a born-again football fanatic, and I don’t care who knows it. I was not always like this. My friends can hardly believe my love affair with football. They know me as a pacifist vegetarian salad-eating cat-loving pie-baking bookworm. As a mom who encouraged her children to follow their dreams and supported them in each of their extracurricular endeavors but who stubbornly forbade her sons from playing football.

“How many Jewish football players do you know? Why? Because of Jewish mothers. Football is a seriously dangerous sport,” I told my sons.

“Mom,” my youngest son whined, “ it’s not more dangerous than water polo or skateboarding. If you remember, I broke my leg playing soccer.”

I never played sports growing up. I walk a mile every morning, religiously, for my health and sanity nowadays, but walking doesn’t qualify as a team sport. I can’t throw a baseball more than twenty feet. My friend Annie beat me at the 50-yard dash in elementary school and Annie was in a wheelchair. I drive a fuel-efficient car. I hate TV. I rarely drink alcoholic beverages. The last time I entered a fast food restaurant was during the Nixon Administration. SUV, beer, and McDonald’s commercials are lost on me. I oppose violence, brutality, and aggression. I confess (forgive me Peyton and Eli), I used to go grocery shopping on Monday nights because the store was empty. That was then. This is now.

It all started so simply, so innocently. I bought tickets to a Raiders and Chiefs game at the Oakland Coliseum in 2002 as a Christmas present for our family. My children and I had never attended a live football game. My husband, Ron, and two of my three children loved the Raiders. It seemed like a fun family outing. I bought the tickets for a song in September at a silent auction to benefit some worthy cause or other and stashed them away in my underwear drawer. In December, I wrapped them in a box with a big bow and put them under the tree. In the meantime, from September until December 25th, I carried a deep dark secret.

Knowing I had those tickets, I started watching Raiders games on TV. I wanted to give my family a terrific Christmas gift. I wanted that game to be a game to remember, which would only happen if the Raiders and the Chiefs were playing at top form. The first time I sat down on the couch to watch a Raiders game, Ron’s jaw dropped to his knees. When I took a peculiar interest in the Chiefs, he was completely baffled. Before long, I was spending every Sunday and Monday glued to the TV as I grilled Ron about each play, each foul, and each referee call. I started learning the terminology and basic strategy. Ron rejoiced in the arrival of his new football wife. He loved explaining to me the ins and outs of this game so dear to his heart. If you have ever watched a movie you love with someone who hasn’t seen it before, then you know how Ron felt introducing me to the whys and wherefores of football.

An avid observer of life, I search for the lessons ripe for picking in the world around me. Every person who crosses my path, every situation I encounter, every dog, bird, tree, flower, or natural occurrence has the potential to expand my knowledge and spark my imagination. Football is a phenomenal teacher. They say “it’s a game of inches.” So is life. One never knows what hair’s breadth forward movement will tip the balance and take you to your goal. I love the drama of football, the drama of the players and their lives and the passion that brought them to the field, the commitment that keeps them there, the effort that makes them win or lose. I love the life lessons inherent in the game and the analogies that can be drawn from even the simplest football plays. I am forever hooked on football.

I knew that I had crossed over into the zone on the night when my husband and I were making love and my mind strayed to the game. In mid-stroke I whispered in my husband’s ear, “It was a fumble, not an incomplete pass. That ref should be fired.” My husband nearly bust a gut laughing. When he could finally speak, he said, “Excuse me, I gotta go call Jim [his best buddy] and tell him about this.”

Unfortunately for me, I fell in love with the Raiders during their last hurrah with Rich Gannon and Jerry Rice. I wonder if the Raiders have maintained the worst record in the NFL for the past five years because I became a rabid fan. Maybe if I stop wearing my Raiders sweatshirt they’ll go to the Playoffs. In 2002, they were still hot and my family went berserk when they opened that box under the tree. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the game we saw with those tickets was the last time the Raiders beat the Chiefs before today’s game, when they FINALLY beat them again. (I think they’re coming back. JaMarcus Russell, he’s the man.)

I feel sick when I think of all the years of football that I missed; wasted years, because I had no clue. Football will be the delight of my old age, and will make a major contribution to that longevity. Football has become one of the biggest stress relievers in my life. What therapeutic activity could do more to reverse the stress caused by my everyday worries? (Multiple choice below.)
A. Spending my Sunday curled up on the couch with my cats on a rainy winter afternoon in a glut of games, my husband gleefully TiVo-ing like mad to look at the replays and switching back and forth between channels to see all our favorite teams.
B. Jumping up and down as the ball sails down the field into the perfect cradle of Ladanian Tomlinson’s hands as he propels himself forward yard after miraculous yard into the endzone.
C. Spilling my popcorn as I rise to my feet, my heart in my throat, as Devin Hester scores a touchdown AGAIN off a punt return.
D. All of the above.

Football has set me free.

Happy's Dogwood

2008-11-14T20:41:00.000-08:00

When I overheard Mom say “We got the kids a dog,” to a friend on the phone, I figured that meant that Dad officially qualified as one of us kids, because that dog was Dad’s from the moment he and the dog laid eyes on each other. Happy was a Kerry Blue terrier, and he was never for a moment for the kids. We were his hobby. Dad was his profession.

Dad has been a boy scout his whole life. He even wore the uniform with the shorts on an airplane when he chaperoned (as assistant scoutmaster) a scouting group that went to Scotland in the 1980s. At nearly 80 years old, he still goes out hiking with the scouts in no other capacity than as a scout himself. Perhaps he’s the oldest living boy scout in the country. Back in their heyday, he and Happy went all over the map with the scouts. They frequently camped in subzero weather together. And I mean together. Dad put Happy in the sleeping bag with him because he didn’t want the pooch to freeze to death. Dad told us that you didn’t really know a dog until you shared a sleeping bag with him.

Whenever we sang “Happy Birthday” to someone in our house, Happy barked like mad. At first we thought perhaps he was singing. Then we thought perhaps he had perfect pitch and Dad’s tone-deaf singing made him go crazy. But after many years, we realized that he barked because he thought we were singing for him, since his name was Happy. As he grew older, all we had to do was light candles and he’d bark with glee, anticipating his song.

In the evenings, after supper, Dad often sat in the den and watched TV while Happy sat at his feet with his nose buried in his nether parts where he blissfully licked himself. Dad used to say that if men could do that there would be no wars. To my knowledge, Happy was a pacifist his whole life. He never fought with other dogs, who occasionally beat him up. His greatest fear was the water. He refused to step into a pool, lake, ocean, river, or any water not coming from a hose. When Dad tried to teach him to swim, he clung to Dad, literally wrapping his front paws around Dad’s neck and not letting go while he shivered in terror.

Happy’s one sworn enemy was the bread basket, which lived atop the refrigerator. Whenever we had need of a container for the dinner rolls, Happy followed hot on Mom’s heels barking furiously as she moved that basket from its home on the fridge to the dinner table. I once saw him run into a wall while giving that basket what-for.

We had a fenced-in portion of our back yard for Happy to claim as his own space. Mom said he used the yard to “do his business.” It was ludicrous for her to use such delicate phrasing, since Dad delighted in describing Happy’s “business” from his evening walk in great detail at the dinner table. We got the latest report about color and consistency along with our tuna noodle casserole. Update at eleven.

Happy spent his spare time digging a hole in the corner of his fenced-in yard. Mom called the hole Happy’s “Great Escape.” We thought he was trying to dig his way out of the yard so he could get a better shot at the squirrels. But he was no engineer and the hole went straight down, not under the fence.

Dad was quite the athlete. He played hand ball in the winter and tennis in the summer. Hiked. Biked. Ping-pong. He won tennis trophies in the men’s league in our home town. In the summers, when he returned dripping with sweat from a tennis game, he would lay down on the living room floor and let Happy lick the salt off him. That, and bubblegum, where Happy’s favorite treats. The trash cans were in Happy’s yard and he managed to extract used bubblegum from them in ways we could only imagine. Unfortunately for him, the bubblegum stuck in his teeth. Mom was constantly having to dig it out of his mouth. Happy was usually Dad’s dog, but when he had bubblegum in his teeth, he was all Mom’s. He was also hers when he committed an indiscretion that required paper towels and Lysol, such as vomiting behind the living room couch. Dad would find the indiscretion and tell Mom, “Look what your dog did.”

Happy was a purebred dog and as such he suffered from asthma. One day, when he was about twelve years old, he had an asthma attack that morphed into a series of seizures. Dad took him to the vet immediately, but there was nothing that could be done. The vet sedated him, but when the sedative wore off, he began to have more seizures. He died in Dad’s arms. Mom told me afterward that Dad wept more over the loss of that dog than he had at the death of his mother.

After we lost Happy, Dad called the breeder who had sold Happy to us as a puppy. She told Dad that Happy had outlived his siblings and cousins. She had kept track of all of them and none had lived as long as Happy. Obviously, none of them were as “happy” either. My parents had Happy cremated and they brought his ashes home where they buried them in the Great Escape, finally filling in the hole that Happy spent his whole life digging. Dad told people that Happy dug his own grave.

In the spring, Mom and Dad planted a dogwood tree over Happy’s ashes in the Great Escape. The dogwood is beautiful to look at and smells a lot better than Happy, but Dad can’t take it for a walk or blame his farts on it. It’s a cruel twist of nature that dogs have a life span so much shorter than humans. Dad and Happy would have been good growing old together, sharing a sleeping bag, chasing squirrels, defending their loved ones from that dangerous bread basket.

Carrying On the Family Name

2008-11-14T20:33:00.001-08:00

At the age of sixteen, my paternal grandfather, Sydney, sailed the Atlantic to make a new life in America and entered the U.S. through Ellis Island in 1915 with his brother Izzie. Sydney was the youngest of eleven children and came from a Jewish family in the Galicia region of Poland. He made a modest life for himself in New York City, marrying my grandmother and raising two sons. Sydney put both of his sons through college on a working man’s income. He died young of lung cancer without seeing his family in Poland again, even though he returned to Europe briefly to fight for the U.S. in World War I. Sydney’s father, Melech, was one of three sons, all of whom perished in the Holocaust along with the families of Melech’s siblings and much of Melech’s family. At the time that I was growing up, very few people in the world had my last name. We have multiplied since then. But I still tell strangers who comment on my name, “If you meet another one, they’re related.” The Nazis annihilated most of our family along with the rest of Polish Jewry.

My father had the opportunity to meet some of his European relatives in 1960. My father is a mathematician and at a young age he published a book that founded a branch of mathematics. If you know anything about mathematicians (and many physicists as well), you will know that they peak out young. Most mathematicians make their most substantial contribution before they turn thirty. My father was invited to present at an international mathematics conference in Paris.

While in Paris, Dad took the opportunity to meet with his first cousin Joseph. Although Joseph spoke several languages (French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish), he did not speak English. His wife, Yael, also spoke many languages and fortunately English was among them. Joseph explained to my father through his wife, who translated, that he had not seen more than a couple of his relatives since the end of the war. He was more than delighted to meet my father, his first cousin. Joseph’s father, Baruch, had been the oldest brother of the eleven children and my Grandpa Sydney had been the youngest. Joseph told my father that when he was a young man, he emigrated to the land then called Palestine. The British ruled Palestine at that time. Joseph became an active communist in Palestine and for this the British arrested him and attempted to deport him to his homeland of Poland. Joseph slipped into France during the deportation process (by train) and remained there, eventually fighting in the Resistance during World War II and spending eighteen months in Auschwitz before the Liberation. After the war, he returned to Paris where he was reunited with his wife and an orphaned teenaged nephew, whom he adopted. Joseph and Yael had one son of their own.

Dad told Joseph and Yael everything he knew about the living relatives in the U.S., Canada, Israel, and Australia who still bore the family name. Joseph told my father that when he was in Auschwitz, he wondered if any of his family would survive the war and he often thought of his cousins Sydney and Izzie in America, hoping they were well and would continue the family. Many years later, Dad would make it possible for Joseph to reunite with his cousin Dave (then living in Michigan), whom he had grown up with in Poland. I met Joseph and Yael in 1970 and subsequently visited them several times in Paris during the travels of my youth. There is much more to their story, more than will fit in these brief paragraphs. The fact that I know that story, that they lived to tell the tale and meet my father and me, their American cousins, is a miracle.

Needless to say, I didn’t change my name when I married. Who could relinquish a name with a history like this attached to it? Before the birth of my first child, my husband magnanimously agreed to allow our children to keep my surname. Thus, my children bear my family name, which survived the Holocaust. They have met many cousins with their name, and there are more of us in the world these days. Still, I have overheard my children say, “If you meet another one, they’re related.”

Bringing Peaches for 911

2008-11-14T20:32:00.000-08:00

Old news that won’t go away, 9/11 is the breaking news of today as we commemorate the anniversary of this event that has shaped the worldview of my children’s generation in the same way that the Kennedy and King assassinations shaped the worldview of mine. I am gratified to see that Obama and McCain have set aside their differences for a day to stand together to honor the dead and comfort those who continue to grieve for their loss. I believe that this action by these two presidential candidates illustrates our only hope for the future: we must acknowledge and move past our differences.

As a lifelong pacifist, I believe that retaliation is never the answer. Retaliation is the problem and justice is the answer. We of the U.S. must face up to the consequences of our actions in the world and understand that we are not immune to large-scale tragedy. If nothing else, this was the mighty lesson of 9/11. We must understand that the family members of those we have murdered in other lands, for whatever reason, lofty or not, might hold a valid grudge. We must accept that we are vulnerable to their rage. Will Americans ever understand that our safety and security at home depends on the safety and security of the rest of the world? ALL the rest of the world? We are in this together.

On the evening of September 11, 2001, I received an email from my friend Sue. She wanted to connect with her friends around the country. She told us that in the wake of the terrorist attacks within our borders, she was at a loss for what to do. She took some peaches from her peach tree to a neighbor. While walking to the neighbor’s house with the peaches, she resolved to engage in acts of kindness with a new dedication. She decided this would be her way of responding to the inhumanity that threatens to engulf us. The significance of Sue’s choice of action is not lost on me, a Jew, whose family would not be alive today if not for the simple acts of kindness committed by ordinary people struggling to remain human and caring in extraordinarily inhuman and brutal circumstances. In the broader vision of history, many of these simple acts of kindness are recognized as heroism. Thus, in the post-9/11 world, we must act bravely by holding fast to the moral value of caring for others. We must hold fast to the value of love.

It is not so difficult to love our families, our own children (well, OK, sometimes the children get grisly and don’t exactly bring out the love in us, but usually they are extremely lovable). It is far more difficult to love the stranger, the other, those not like us whose values and perceptions differ from ours. I do not believe that people are fundamentally the same. As long as we think that people are fundamentally the same, then racism, injustice, war, and terrorist acts will continue. People are different and that difference is the essence of the richness, the wonder of humankind. That difference is our greatest resource, our greatest challenge, and the gem that we must chisel from our rough perception. Rather than forcing similarity where it doesn’t exist, we must take that terrifying step of trying to walk in someone else’s shoes, of making the effort to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Terrifying because we risk transformation. We risk being deeply and irrevocably changed by what we learn from this experience.

Unlearning racism is not the same as tolerance. Tolerance is putting up with the mystifying actions of someone different from oneself. Tolerance is a fragile veneer. Unlearning racism is about opening our hearts to the possibility that there are beliefs not our own that have value and that our personal view of the world and our view of life is not the one and only right one, the only truth. There are many truths. A Buddhist monk once told me that being a good Jew was being a good Buddhist in his worldview. Unfortunately for us struggling humans, oftentimes different truths are in conflict with each other. If we truly wish to see justice and peace prevail in the world, then we must accept that our personal truths constitute only one perception out of a multitude of perceptions, and that right and wrong may not be as straightforward as we would wish. My fundamental truths and values may differ considerably from those of someone else, in fact, they may contradict each other. Who has the vision or the right to determine which of our truths or values is better or more accurate or correct? We have to live with that and find a way to avoid fighting about it. We have to be big enough, wise enough, brave enough, compassionate enough, and caring enough to learn from each other and to permanently change each other.

In short, we must all show the bravery of heroes. We must take each other peaches from our trees. We must listen, question, strive to understand, listen to the words of the voice and the words of the heart. Listen without fear of transformation, confusion, and doubt. Listen to hear more than one truth. Listen as if our lives depended on it.

Ralph Is On the Roof

2008-11-14T20:31:00.000-08:00

Ralph-the-Roofer inspected our roof before we bought our house in May. He explained that the roof was shot. He provided copious glossy photos and wrote up a detailed report. He warned that it was leaking into the attic and that the underlay needed immediate replacement, before the next rainy season. This was not a simple matter since we have a cap and pan tile roof vintage 1978. It’s old and a repair is a complex, time-consuming project. We negotiated the price of our house based on Ralph’s estimate of $10,000 to fix the roof. The sellers agreed to split the cost with us and knocked $5,000 from the sale price.

After we bought the house, I called Ralph and asked him to do the work. He mailed me a contract that listed the cost of repair at $16,000! Wait a minute, how did the price inflate like that? I got two more estimates from other roofers. Both were twice as much as Ralph’s quote. Ralph was the best game in town. I resigned myself to going over budget on the roof. Then I spent over two months attempting to get Ralph to answer his phone. Office phone. Home phone. Cell phone. Could NOT get this man to respond. I left a message every day. I left notes in the mailbox at his office. One day I saw him standing by the side of the road talking to someone in a truck. Eeeee, wheels screeched, I pulled over, jumped out of my car, and grabbed him by the lapels. Ralph! Ralph! Help me! Help my roof!

Ralph and I had a heart-to-heart in the garage of his shop after that. It turns out that Ralph lost his crew. One guy left town. One guy decided he never wanted to work as a roofer again as long as he lived. One guy committed a felony and went to prison (honestly). One guy went into hiding because of a bad tattoo. The dog ate Ralph’s contracts. He got a flat tire. His cell phone fell in the lake and stopped working (this one was real, I kid you not). But, the good news for me was that Ralph had cancelled all his big summer jobs so he had time for mine. He promised he’d be at my house Monday morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and he’d just plug away and do my roof alone. He promised to have it done in three weeks, well before the rainy season. On August 9, Ralph started working on my roof. He is still up there. In case you hadn’t noticed, it is now October. I wonder if he will want to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. It has rained several times since Ralph tore our roof open and removed our skylights. He thoughtfully rolled out plastic. I should be grateful for small favors I suppose.

During the roof job, he has frequently disappeared for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. I can’t get him on his phone when I call so I gave up, even though I hear him on my roof talking on his cell phone all day long. He never tells me when he’ll be up there and when he won’t. Sometimes he wakes us up at seven in the morning on a Sunday hammering and pounding. Sometimes he turns up at three in the afternoon, works for two hours, and leaves. Six or seven different helpers have traipsed through and lasted a day or two with him. One day some guy turned up with his teenager to see if Ralph would hire the kid to work on our roof. Three weeks ago Ralph took our skylight out and put it in the front yard. He covered the hole with a board and informed me I needed a new skylight, which I ordered. They said it would take two weeks (so far three have elapsed). It would have been good to have had a heads up on that skylight a few weeks ago. Once, when Ralph had disappeared for a week, I realized he had left water leaking from a hose on the roof. It took me several days to notice it. I dread the water bill.

One morning last week Ralph’s wife called me to tell me Ralph had just dropped a nail through my skylight and he wanted to warn me not to step on it. “Jill,” I said, “why are you calling? Why didn’t Ralph call? Or ring my doorbell? Or just come inside and retrieve the nail?” Jill had no idea. If she has no idea then I haven’t a chance because she’s been married to Ralph for thirty years.

A few days after I put my Obama/Biden sign out on the front lawn, Ralph called down to me, “What’s the difference between a Democrat and a Republican?” I thought he was about to tell a roofing joke. He was serious. His sister-in-law watches Fox News all day long and is a rabid Sarah Palin fan. Ralph wanted my advice on how to convince her to vote for Obama. I suggested a strong shot of Scotch and anti-psychotic medication. Apparently Ralph is an outcast in his very Republican family because he plans to vote for Obama. While I brainstormed with Ralph about how to convert his family in time for the election, I couldn’t help but notice that my roof is still not even remotely close to being completed. The skylight replacement has still not arrived. Rain is in the forecast again. But at least Ralph is on the roof. And he’s voting for Obama. Thanks for listening. I feel much better.

Plain Jane and the Glamour Queen

2008-11-14T20:30:00.002-08:00

I admit it: I’m a fashion Luddite. I don’t wear make-up or shave my legs. I have almost no jewelry and the few things that I wear every day (and never change) have sentimental significance. My hair-do is a one-trick pony. I have never had a manicure. I’m allergic to deodorant and perfume. The former gives me a rash and the latter makes my eyes swell up. I have twelve pairs of flip-flops, two pairs of UGG boots, walking sneakers, gardening sneakers, and one pair of Birkenstocks -- and that’s my repertoire. By now I expect you see the picture clearly. I am a Plain Jane. Not ugly, mind you. I was attractive in my youth and now that I’m a middle-aged lady my husband says I’m an “older Babe.” Thank you very much. I’m just saying that I haven’t a clue about style and fashion. So how did I raise a Glamour Queen like my daughter?

My daughter has been selecting her own clothing since she was fourteen months old. Before she could talk she had already figured out that she couldn’t trust her mother to meet her standards for excellence in the clothing department. She chose each day’s ensemble tastefully, although not always with common sense because, after all, she was a toddler. On more than one occasion she had a fit because I wouldn’t let her wear her slip to preschool without a dress over it. When she was three she went on a two-week swimsuit jag in the middle of March. Not only did she want to wear her swimsuit to preschool every day, but she insisted on wearing it backward so she could see the big bow. All this aside, that girl knew her own mind when it came to fashion and clothing almost from day one.

I realized my daughter was a Glamour Queen in a flash one evening in Tower Records when I glanced over at my two-year-old and my heart stopped. She looked twenty-two. My husband is Black and I’m Jewish so my daughter is an exotic multicultural gal. On that evening in Tower, she wore her hair swept up in a hair clip with her thick curls tumbling out the back. She wore a jeans jacket over a pink scoop-neck top and a thin silver bracelet on one wrist. She had on tight gray jeans and little pink plastic jelly shoes, which matched her nail polish and earrings. At two years of age, she already looked more stylish than I had ever looked in my life. She had one hand in her back pocket and with the other she held a tape (this was before CDs), which she studied as if she could read the words written on it. She looked like a college student. It was at that moment that I realized I was out of my league with this child. She was destined to have all the style and grace that I lacked.

During her elementary school years, she became a trendsetter among her peers. Whatever she wore, however she did her hair, wherever she shopped, the other girls followed her lead. By the time she entered high school, she had perfected the art of shopping a bargain. If I gave her thirty dollars at the mall, she would come home with four shirts, a handbag, earrings, and a pair of sandals. She had shoes three layers deep in her closet, a pair for every outfit. When she came home from her first high school dance, she said she thought there should be a “Fashion Police” at the door for school dances and that they should turn away all the girls who wore hideous cupcake party dresses.

One day, running late to get out the door to school in the morning, she asked me to close a gold chain around her wrist. I couldn’t figure out how the catch worked and she couldn’t do it with one hand. In frustration she chewed me out, “Sometimes I really wish you cared about girly stuff and fashion, then you would know how to do this kind of thing.” She got a part-time job at a clothing store and used her earnings to have her hair and nails done regularly.

She left home for college with three large boxes and a suitcase full of shoes. She took one look at the size of the closet in the dorm room and threatened to forego a college degree altogether. I took the summer shoes home again and she kept the fall and most of the winter ones with her. Every few weeks she called and asked me to mail her a pair of shoes. During her college years, she worked as a model, a dancer, and a fashion writer for the school newspaper.

When we took a family trip to New York City, my daughter went missing at every street corner. The rest of us would look back down the block and see a sign that said “shoe sale” or “handbag sale” or “belt sale” and we would know exactly where we could find her.

On the phone with me one evening not long before my birthday, she lamented the fact that I have no interest in style and female accessories. She said she couldn’t figure out what to get me and she complained, “I wish you liked perfume or jewelry, then it’d be easy. What am I going to do when I get rich and famous and I can’t buy you a mink coat?”

“Sorry, Babe,” I answered, “but a mink coat would trigger my allergies and make my eyes puff up. Besides, you know I’m a vegetarian, and wouldn’t wear a dead animal.”

“I guess I’ll have to buy you a tofu coat,” she said.

Even though we don’t have the “girly stuff” in common, we do have other common interests. For instance, we both have a weakness for fancy underwear. I should have bought stock in Victoria’s Secret twenty years ago. Also, my lovely daughter recently received her college degree in journalism and, like myself, is a writer. (I hold a degree in English.) Thus, despite our style differences, we do have significant defining qualities in common. At her graduation ceremony this past spring, she paid me a high compliment when she said to me and her father, “You guys actually look good for a change.” We had dressed for the occasion. I even bought a new skirt. My Glamour Queen approved.

It continues to amaze me that a regular gal like myself managed to raise such an elegant, poised, beautiful daughter. We share many of the same values, interests, and perceptions of the world. Nevertheless, we are very different women. In the end, the way a Plain Jane successfully raises a Glamour Queen is the same way that every successful mother raises a successful daughter, by supporting her and giving her the space and the resources to become her own woman. I worked hard to allow her to blossom and discover who she was and what she wanted to do in life. Our children are not creatures for us to tame, shape, and mold. They are spirits for us to discover and nurture on their own path.

Air Guitar

2008-11-14T20:30:00.001-08:00

My husband Ron lives, breathes, eats, sleeps, and emanates music. He half-plays piano and sax. He completely plays drums. He sings. He does a decent job on the bass guitar. Music is his passion. Unfortunately, music is not his profession (he would like it to be). In his spare time, he DJs a couple radio shows. When the opportunity arises, he jams with friends, usually playing the bass guitar, often singing as well. He knows the words to every R&B and Soul song produced since Soul was defined.

So when our friend Scot asked Ron to sit in with a family band and perform with them at a local restaurant, Ron said “sure.” Scot’s two children, then teenagers, are extremely talented and play about five instruments proficiently between them. Scot’s son composes music and writes lyrics and is a local heart throb as a result of his compelling performances. He won best musician at the County Fair two years in a row. The family band was to include Scot on lead guitar, Scot’s daughter on flute and piano, Scot’s son on lead guitar and sax, Scot’s neighbor’s teenager on drums, and Ron on bass guitar. Although Scot tried to arrange a time for the band to practice beforehand, it just never happened.

Ron and I arrived at the restaurant a half an hour before the gig. It was a lovely warm summer evening and the band would perform on a platform outdoors as guests dined at tables under the trees and flowering vines that surrounded a picturesque courtyard. The dining area was packed with friends and relatives, as well as fans of Scot’s children (particularly the heart throb son). The band quickly set up, checked the microphones and instruments, warmed up, and, without much fanfare, began to play.

I ordered a plate of pasta with pesto and a garden salad and chatted with Scot’s wife and family, swapping local gossip, admiring everyone’s children, and talking about our gardens. I was busy hanging out and even though I applauded at the end of each number, I confess that I was not listening that carefully. The band must have been five or six songs into the first set when I really paid close attention to the music. I couldn’t hear my husband on the bass. He was playing alright. He looked good. Pretty sexy in fact. He was getting down. But for the life of me I couldn’t pick out the bass in the palette of music. I tried turning up my hearing aid, but I still couldn’t make out the bass line.

After they finished the first set, the band took a break. The musicians came over to our table for something to drink. The teenagers went to talk to their friends. Scot ate a little bit of his wife’s leftover dinner. Scot’s mother gushed to Ron about how great he sounded. Others at the table chimed in and complimented Ron. “You sound terrific,” they said. Ron laughed and humbly thanked them. Then he stood and headed into the main restaurant to find the men’s room. I followed close behind.

When Ron emerged from powdering his nose, I cornered him, “Would you please turn up your amp for the second set? I can’t hear the bass whatsoever.”

Ron laughed, leaned in close, and confessed, “The amp is turned off.” I looked confused. He continued, “I was messing up so much I got embarrassed so I turned the amp off.”

“You turned the amp off?” I echoed. “But no one can hear you.”

“Yup. I’m having a great time and I’m not worried about making any mistakes,” he explained.

“I can’t believe all those people were complimenting you.” I shook my head incredulously. “They think they can hear you.”

“It’s all in the style, Babe,” he said.

“You do look pretty good up there,” I grinned. “But then you always look pretty good to me.” I got a kiss from the bass player.

At the end of the evening, Ron continued to receive compliments. Only the other members of the band and I seemed aware that Ron had effectively played air guitar for most of the gig.