Mama Bear in the Woods

I am a Jew from Brooklyn. Christmas is not my holiday. It shouldn't seem all that odd, then, that I celebrated it this year with a family other than my own. What is odd is that I celebrate it at all.

Christmas, though not a holiday in my own family's tradition, has long been a part of my end of year routine -- ever since I "married out." Though I was well into my twenties at the time, "Lisa's first Christmas" was a magical day. My soon to be mother-in-law had added a stocking for me over the mantle, my name glued on to the thick white cuff in silver glitter, the fat red sock below it bursting with unexpected treasures. In the mountain of gifts neatly wrapped under the tree, an overwhelming number of them bore my name. Santa, apparently, loves a newbie; naughty or nice, you get the royal treatment.

Though it certainly never acquired the significance for me as say, my birthday (which is, in my mind, a national holiday), Christmas has occupied a square on my calendar for over a quarter of a century. It has marked time, was something to be anticipated. I even went to Midnight Mass a couple of times; whether I was searching for meaning or just avoiding my inevitable duties as "wrapper in chief" I couldn't say, but, as I recall, the music was pretty. Over the years, my mother-in-law began to worry that she was incapable of choosing something I would like, and my piles of sparkling packages gave way to hastily written checks tossed into an otherwise thin stocking. She never really understood how much I just liked the ritual of tearing off wrapping paper, that I would take a lump of coal with a shiny bow on top over a gift card any time. Though the exorbitant feting of my first Christmas was forever unmatched, Christmas has remained important to me. For most of my adult life, it has been one of those few days each year I could count on for time spent with family. A tradition, for better or for worse, a day comforting in its humdrum sameness.

With the break up of a marriage comes many casualties, and my version of Christmas was one of them. I have spent the last two rekindling long forgotten traditions, reconnecting with my Jewish roots. While my children have continued to spend the day with their Catholic relatives, as they always have, I have remained behind, comforted at least by the long abandoned but still strangely familiar ritual of Chinese food and a movie. I have missed the last minute shopping, the frantic wrapping, the living room carpet littered with stray tinsel and an occasional ornament hook, the smell of bacon frying in the morning. But again, it's not really my holiday, and on the grand scale of collateral divorce damage, it's pretty minor.

This year, Christmas was different for all of us. Unexpected crises intervened, and nobody went to Grandma's. Nobody ate Chinese food. My son, still in Japan, feasted (oddly, I think) on KFC and cake. Like I said, it's not my holiday, so none of my business, but I still felt his absence more acutely than I do most days. I ended up in Seattle, of all places, with somebody else's family. Well, near Seattle anyway. Exchanging gifts with somebody else's daughter, sprawling on a couch with somebody else's dog, reveling in the antics and unbearable cuteness of somebody else's grandchild. Wondering how my own children could possibly survive (or thoroughly enjoy) Christmas without me.

This was my fourth trip to Seattle. There were two conferences for work years ago, and, one summer, a wedding. My own children were young back then, watched over at home by one grandparent or other while I tried to enjoy my time away. I never felt entirely confident that they could survive without me for a few days. Especially under the care of elderly folks. Funny, they did survive. And they did this year as well, seemingly no worse for the wear.

On the day after Christmas this year, I accompanied my friend and his grandson to a children's museum while his mom tried to enjoy a couple of hours of pampering. (Tough to do, as she had entrusted her baby to the elderly, and no doubt wondered how he would survive.) As I followed little Billy around, trying to capture for posterity (and for his mom) the look of wonder on his face as he explored this brightly colored utopia, I recognized somebody I used to know, somebody I haven't seen in a while. It was a young mom who wanted to slug the kids who grabbed toys, who pushed the littler ones down, who refused to share. It was a young mom who became so irate at a museum worker who would not let little Billy play with the Lego's while she put them all back in a bin that she stuck her foot in the filled bin when nobody was looking and kicked a healthy instep full of Lego back onto the carpet. "Who are you?" my daughter asked me when I told her about my behavior. But she was smiling. Though I may sometimes wonder, she knows exactly who I am, wasn't really surprised at all. She has mentioned before the superhuman strength she knows I would possess if I ever caught somebody doing her harm. I like to think she's right, and I also like to think we'll never need to find out.


In all my visits to Seattle, I had never seen Mt. Rainier, was convinced it was merely an artist's rendition. On the last full day of my trip this year, the sun broke through the clouds early in the day, and, finally, after years of searching, years of doubt, I saw it. The lone peak rose up before me as I drove down a long stretch of road in the hills near Olympia, its outlines fuzzy but distinct enough to set it apart from the clouds that seem to float in a protective ring around it's pointed snow covered apex. As I turned into the winding roads to climb higher, the elusive mountain again disappeared, swallowed up in the upside down carpet of impossibly tall trees. When I emerged later in the day, Mt. Rainier again appeared. It seemed to be everywhere now, its massive form taunting me at the edge of the horizon, no matter which way I turned. As I meandered along the outskirts of the woods, it came to life on a canvas of blue sky, watching over me with its snowy gaze.

It has been there the whole time. I just didn't see it.

Oh Maya God!!!!

And to think I was embarrassed when, upon finding out marshmallows contain gelatin, which apparently comes from pigs, I thought maybe folks could tap dance around the whole kosher problem. It never occurred to me that rocky road ice cream could be sinful in such a literal sense.

"Well it's not as if they have to kill the pig for that," I suggested, grasping at straws. All those years at a predominantly Jewish summer camp, evenings spent spearing fluffy white marshmallows with long twigs and blackening them to a crisp in the fire, could those camp fires have been no less barbaric than your average pig roast?

"Well they don't give it up voluntarily," my friend pointed out, hoping against hope that I had been joking and that I couldn't possibly be that stupid. After all, as they say, you are who you hang out with. Or if they don't say that, they should. Anyway, I tried to save face, suggesting that maybe the gelatin came out of something like pig udders, but needless to say, this particular friend no longer hangs on my every word.

But I digress, to the extent that you can digress before you even set out on a particular path. This is a post about people who seem to know stuff saying stuff that just makes no sense. Like the weather reporters yesterday -- or, as they like to call themselves, meteorologists, giving themselves an imprimatur of expertise -- who went on and on and on about the approaching storm that was about to create blizzard conditions in the Chicago area. Plans were cancelled. People rushed to the store to stock up on comfort food so they could hurry home and ride out the storm in front of a cozy fireplace. We all spent hours gazing outside our windows, certain every once in a while that a lukewarm raindrop had finally morphed into an icy and menacing snowflake. Armies of "snow fighters" spent the day waiting for the call, their massive plows gassed up and stocked with rock salt.

As it turns out, we got little if any snow, and "blizzard conditions" may have been a bit of an exaggeration. Unless they were trying to tell us it was a great night to go out to the local Dairy Queen, which, as far as I am concerned, is hardly newsworthy, since I can't really think of a night that wouldn't be a perfect night to go out to the Dairy Queen. Although I will have to rethink my order and avoid anything with marshmallows.

I understand that even the smartest experts can sometimes get things wrong, and I am pretty forgiving about it, particularly if they own up to their errors. So when I watched one local television meteorologist yesterday evening (who must have felt pretty stupid when he looked out the window and saw nothing white) taking the time to explain why it looked like there would not be a blizzard after all, I softened and I just felt thankful that I would be able to get my car out of the garage in the morning even though I had forgotten to send a deposit to the guys who plow my driveway. Thank goodness for weather people who can't get it right.

Later, though, as I listened to the rather spooky sounding howling of the wind all night, I thought maybe the whole blizzard thing was a ruse, a clever way to make us all forget the real disaster that was about to unfold, which was the end of the world. I had officially stopped worrying about that yesterday morning when a friend pointed out that it was already December 21st in New Zealand, and nothing had happened. Talk about a theory with holes in it, although I should have known better than to be taken in by my friend's reasoning; he doesn't call himself an ologist of any kind. Worse still, he's Canadian! The Mayans never even knew New Zealand existed, so why would they base their calculations on New Zealand time? Frankly, why would anyone base calculations on New Zealand time?

In real time, December 21, 2012 has arrived. No blizzard, but the jury is still out on the apocalypse. Will I ever believe a weather reporter again? Maybe when pigs fly. Or maybe when they give up some gelatin voluntarily. But if there's even a slight chance that the Mayans didn't just run out of paper and were trying to tell us something, I'm heading to the Dairy Queen for a gelatinous blizzard. The conditions are perfect.

We the People?

If everything happens for a reason, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday is certainly a stumper. It was a spree of unspeakable violence that took the lives of twenty small children and six adults and made mince meat out of the lives of so many others.

Everybody is at a loss. And, instinctively, when humans feel lost and unable to control what happens around them, they answer some call to action, frantically searching for solutions. There is no solution to this one. Young children are dead, surviving children are terrified, and families have been forever shattered.  Threadbare silver linings give us hope -- tales of heroism, remarkable stories of children being secreted away in small bathrooms, the knowledge that people everywhere will donate money or time to help the victims recover. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, from ramshackle storefront headquarters to the Oval Office, have begun to address the politically loaded (and potentially suicidal) issue of gun control. It would be unseemly -- downright cowardly, I should think -- to ignore it in the aftermath of so  much bloodshed.

Who knows where the debate will take us? (In circles, possibly, since I just heard Vice President Joe Biden has been put in charge.) We have a Constitutional right to bear arms. Of course we Jews have a biblical mandate to rest on the Sabbath, which doesn't mean it makes any sense in the global community of the twenty first century to not drive or answer ones cell phone on Saturday. Our forefathers are no doubt shuddering in their graves at all the violence, just as God no doubt wrings her manicured hands and grows another gray hair each time she sees a shabbos goy turning an ignition key or dialing a number.

One need only Google "obsolete laws" to get a generous sampling of once well intentioned local ordinances that would defy logic in today's world. In New York City, for example, women who wear clingy or body-hugging clothing are subject to a fine. Imagine the logistics of enforcing that one. In Memphis, Tennessee, a woman cannot drive a car unless there is a man in front waving a red flag to alert others to the danger. I have nothing against legislative attempts to promote public safety or protect the fairer sex from the presumably animal instincts of males (or maybe it's more about maintaining urban aesthetics), but let's face it, sometimes ignorance must give way to enlightenment, and ideas -- and rules -- must actually evolve.

"Let them eat steak!"

So where does one draw the line when chipping away at the right of a society chock full of mental illness, social maladjustment, and general discontent to maintain deadly arsenals?  Hunting enthusiasts might say assault weapons. I don't know, I'm kind of with Bambi on this one. For anyone who really believes there is an inalienable right to blast holes in beautiful animals minding their own business, I say let them eat steak. And play some really cool video games. (If I were a cow, I'd say let them eat tofu, but that's a whole other story.) I am more in the camp of modern day Goliaths; I say ban everything down to a sling shot. What good is such a thing to anybody anyway, buried so deep in some basement junk drawer that nobody would find it in time on the off chance a feisty little prince comes to call.


In the meantime, we will all take whatever small measures we can to make ourselves and our children feel safe. My ex retrieved a call yesterday from the high school letting him know our daughter is safe. He wasn't all that worried, but he understood the gesture. (I did not get a call, but nobody ever thinks I need to know anything around here.) A Utah company that markets bullet proof children’s clothing and backpacks saw its web site crash yesterday from too much traffic. A store in Florida reported that thousands of dollars worth of Spanx were stolen. Having tried those on, I know that they are made with reinforced steel, and would stand up to a bullet as well as any bullet proof vest. Of course I nearly suffocated the one time I wore them, but, again, another story for another time.

"Tofu. They can eat tofu."

Let’s just say that after I see some progress on the gun issue, I will begin my crusade against Spanx. First things first.

Words with "Friends"

Everybody told me things would be better on the other side. It's been almost a week since the matrimonial judge pronounced us man and ex-wife, almost a week since I officially became a free (and presumably wild) divorcee. Yet, as I have almost every day for at least three years, I woke wearing flannel pj's and staring at point blank range into the loaded butt of an obese puggle whose front end was, inexplicably as usual, buried under the covers.

I can handle subtlety, and I certainly don't expect my whole life to do a one-eighty overnight, but at this rate I'll be in a nursing home before anything resembling a peace-of-mind-induced frolic begins in earnest. With my cougar clock ticking, I decided to help things along a bit, and what better way to start than by changing my Facebook status. I went to my "about me" section, and scrolled down to relationship status, all the while feeling a bit squeamish about checking the box next to "divorced." Not because I am afraid of all it's suggestive connotations and the knowing winks and nods, but because my children are my Facebook "friends," for heaven's sake. The last thing they need is to be inundated with a barrage of ill advised -- albeit well meaning -- congratulatory whoops from my other "friends." I thought maybe I could attach a footnote to caution folks away from thumbs upping my good fortune with wild abandon, something like "my divorce is cause for neither celebration nor condolence so please do not comment," but there was no space for elaboration next to any of the status choices. No space for elaboration and, much to my chagrin, no option that read "none of the above" or "none of your fucking business."

I looked to see if any of the other choices might fit my situation. There was the old standby, "it's complicated." That might suggest reconciliation, and lord knows after all we have spent on this divorce it had better take. There were only two that seemed to apply. I could leave things at "separated;" after all, I have long felt detached and removed and a bit insecure, and I don't expect that to change any time soon. Or I could change my status to "in a relationship." More like an eternal entanglement; how can you not be hopelessly and forever entangled when you have raised three kids together? I don't know, maybe in time "divorced" will make sense. Maybe when I stop waking up to a puggle's ass in my face.

Facebook didn't invent the concept of boiling down humans and their relationships into oversimplified words and phrases, but it has certainly helped us to dispense with anything resembling nuance. "Friend." "Like." It's just that our labels used to be more specific. My newly unbetrothed has, for example, worn many etymological hats. Boyfriend, fiance, husband, ex. (Actually, if I were a stickler for precision, there would be even more hats: boyfriend, fiance, ex-fiance, fiance, Christ (that uttered by my mother after she had plunged her head into the oven), husband, estranged husband, husband, soon to be ex-husband, one day maybe (god willing) to be ex-husband, ex. Some labels are tougher to chew on than others. It took me a long time to say "husband" without giggling. After twenty-six years, "ex" does not exactly roll off the tongue. (Of course, neither does "my husband's girlfriend," or, worse still, as choked out by my husband's girlfriend as she was about to undergo a medical procedure and was assured that her "husband" would be waiting, he's "somebody else's husband.") There's a brain twister for everyone. Maybe "it's complicated" was the way to go after all.

These are strange times. Times when "friends" can be enemies, "like" can mean hate, when somebody else's husband waits for you to come out of surgery and when your boyfriend's wife calls to inquire about your condition. A time when everyone is entitled to know your status, even when you yourself cannot figure it out.

Flirty Harry

"You're doing the right thing," my friend assured me as I choked down an early lunch before heading downtown to get divorced. Funny. I hadn't asked. At least not out loud.

I don't remember much about my wedding day. The event -- if you can call it that -- was thrown together hastily. Yes, it was a shotgun wedding; I was not pregnant, but my soon to be mother-in-law had promised to pay for our honeymoon if we would stop living in sin. It seemed reason enough. We were in a strange city, and we had spent much of our courtship living almost a thousand miles away from each other. There was no Facebook, no email, no "sexting" to help deepen our relationship. Only the occasional drunken phone call in the middle of the night. "I lourvvve you," he would croon, as I drooled on my Princess phone.

My dress, which I had bought without benefit of an entourage, was frilly and cheap. My hair was cut short, with tight curls from a recent perm poking up through the lacy veil. I looked like Little Lesbian Bo Peep. My parents wore their best fake smiles; his parents' smiles were genuine. It's amazing what alcohol will do, if you only just give it a chance. The photographer sucked, I don't recall even choosing the band, and about an hour before everything got going I realized I had never updated the guest count and we were about thirty dinners (and place settings) short. The wedding coordinator -- I think she was about eighteen -- was still in jeans and a tee shirt, the tip of her nose pink from an afternoon spent drinking beer at the Cubs game.

The evening passed in a blur, and somehow we found ourselves riding in a taxi to Ohare the next morning. The three of us -- me, my new husband, and Harry from Miami. Nice guy; he used to let me sit on his lap and take the steering wheel when my family would head south for spring break. Hmm. Maybe he was joining us on our honeymoon -- I wasn't really sure. But I wasn't worried; I always liked Harry.

Maybe the memories of my divorce will fade as well. Neither the beginning nor the end of the marriage was memorialized in a video, although the latter was recorded in a court transcript. The divorce certainly took longer to plan, cost a lot more, and probably involved a lot more alcohol along the way. It took me longer to choose my outfit for court than it had to choose my wedding dress, and I liked it a lot better. My hair is long, his is mostly gone. All the folks who were supposed to show up were there. There were no surprise add-ons to accommodate, no last minute meals to prepare. All we needed were pens, and there were plenty of those to go around. Each time I said "yes" or "I do," I was pretty sure I meant it.

The husband I had barely known on that day more than twenty-six years ago is now somebody I know better than anybody. When we hugged hello, I felt more genuine fondness for him than I remember feeling back then. When we hugged goodbye, I wondered to myself, as I had on my wedding day, whether I was doing the right thing. We were so different from the other couple in the judge's chambers, the tired looking thirty-somethings who could not stop snapping at each other. "Why can't everyone just get along?" my brand new ex wondered out loud. His attorney reminded him of a venomous affidavit he had drafted only months earlier. Short term memory loss can be a beautiful thing.

The elevator news feed in my attorneys' office building had informed me that 12/12/12 was an auspicious day for weddings, and couples everywhere were rushing to the altar. Several hours later, I emerged from the court house into the December sunshine, certified copy of our divorce decree in hand. Already more auspicious than the wedding (we had forgotten to have our license signed, so -- much to what would have been my mother-in-law's dismay -- we honeymooned in sin, on her dime). I thought about Harry, now long gone. I could have used some company on the ride home.

It's Not the End of the World

People sometimes get things backwards. Like when you first tell them you're getting divorced, and they get that "thank god it's you and not me" look of pity in their eyes and tell you how sorry they are, even though you are so relieved to finally have the cad (or the bitch) out of your house. Or when, after what seems like a hundred years later, you tell them the divorce is final, and they light up with that "hallelujah" look on their faces and congratulate you and ask when you're throwing a party even though all you want to do is crawl into bed with a pint of ice cream and contemplate what you will do next to mess up your life.

In a few days, on 12/12/12, if all goes according to plan (as if!), I will be divorced. The deal has not unraveled so far, but I have yet to feel anything resembling joy. The only satisfaction I have felt since reaching an agreement with my soon to be ex was from watching the looks of exasperation on the faces of our attorneys as we effectively told them to butt out and keep their malpractice worries to themselves. Oh, and there was the little incident with my pen clicking. Had I known how much such a simple thing would annoy the botox queen (who, by the way, is now barely able to move her mouth out of the fake smile position) I would have been armed with a clickable pen in each hand during all our prior meetings. In the hallway of the courthouse the other day, much to my delight, she seemed to be just as agitated (the frozen corners of her mouth turned down ever so slightly into a grimace) when I merely tapped silently against the clicker with my thumb. So fun.

At least the Cook County matrimonial division has been consistent in its dedication to fucking up already fucked up situations (talk about getting things backwards) and draining the emotions and bank accounts of folks who are pretty well depleted on both fronts. Now inches away from ending the nightmare, we have been told that we must take a court mandated parenting class before we can make our split official. "Isn't it too late for that?" I asked my husband. Our youngest is sixteen, with one running-shoe-clad foot already out the door, and our oldest, twenty-three, was quick to point out that we have already screwed them up irreparably. My twenty-two year old son would laugh if he would ever make himself available long enough to hear the details, but the most I could get out of him yesterday when I asked him if he was okay after the Japan earthquake that was all over the news here was "what earthquake?"

But counties need to generate fees however they can, and at some point in the next few days I must block out four hours and take an online course and test about how not to use the divorce to turn your kids against your spouse. Again, backwards and too little too late. Their opinions of us are already about as low as they can go. It's like being required to make up a missed Lamaze class after you've had the baby. (We worried back then whether our giggling through movies about enemas and loving massages offered up during labor to wives screaming profanities at the man who put them in this position would mean we would not be allowed to have the baby; we wonder now whether flunking the online parenting class would mean we have to stay married.) Not willing to risk it, my husband has already passed and forwarded his certificate to the botox queen. He assured me you only have to eke by with a grade of 70 to pass; that's a relief.

My husband and I (much to our attorneys' dismay) have opted to agree on certain details based only on a verbal promise and a handshake; if it comes down to trusting each other (even with our track records) or trusting the attorneys who have bled us dry, there's no contest. And when the botox queen warned him against something for fear that it would invite future litigation, he had a hard time finding a reason not to believe me when I assured him I would never want to look at (much less pay a cent to) a matrimonial attorney again. My word, til death do us part, was good enough. A toast to the god of second chances.

When I told a friend the divorce would be final on 12/12/12, she noted that was also the day the world would end. "That's 12/21/12," I corrected her, managing not to call her a nitwit because, as I said before, sometimes people just get things backwards. So if the twelfth is not the end of the world, it must be the opposite, like maybe the beginning of something. Again, a toast (and a prayer) to the god of second chances. And she'd better work quickly, because if the Mayans got it right, we only have nine days.

Labors of Love

A high school girl asked me the other day for some advice. (Not to be confused with my high school daughter, whom I thanked the other day for always being there to remind me what a moron I am; she appreciated my gratitude, and was even polite enough to say "you're welcome.")

But the girl who barely knows me, who has no idea what a moron I am, wondered whether she should pursue what she is passionate about (her choice) or something that pays well (her mother's preference). Two completely independent circles in a Venn diagram, I suppose. My son, who wrote the other day to tell me how excited he was about his recent contract renewal and its attendant signing bonus and salary increase mostly because he relished the idea of turning it down, would think the choice to be a no brainer. Why work your butt off for some bitter, nasty middle manager when so many of life's passions, the things that make you tick, beckon tantalizingly from outside the constraining walls of your job? "WAIT! Don't be hasty!" I wanted to scream across the Pacific, across that damn International Dateline, knowing he generally shuts down his Internet connection right after he sends me a provocative email and would not receive my response for at least another twenty-four hours. I typed in some carefully chosen words: "Pursuing your passion is great, especially if you have food, shelter, clothing (and, if you ask me, an occasional new bit of uplifting bling) while you are doing it."

Days have passed, and my perfectly reasonable commentary has been met only with silence. Well, except for the brief Skype episode during which he told me he has a fever of one hundred two and the Japanese vitamins he'd been popping all day weren't bringing it down. Go figure. Anyway, intermingled with my garden variety nightmares are images of a fat and lucrative contract being shredded and released like confetti from the belly of a plane piloted by my son. His belly is as empty as the plane's, his whole being as precarious as the thin skinned metal machine being knocked around by icy gusts as it plunges blindly ahead. I have enough to worry about; I would love him to pursue his passions, but I'd sleep better if I knew he had two feet firmly planted in solid ground. And a bed to sleep in.

A bit of a dreamer and a firm believer in the pursuit of passion myself, I would be a hypocrite if I were to discourage either the inquisitive girl or my son. But should I remind them that passions can be illusory, that time dilutes passion, waters it down the way the microwave did last night when I over-nuked a frozen solid pint of Ben & Jerry's S'mores ice cream? Maybe the secret to maintaining the buzz is patience and immersion in a whole lot of drudgery before rewarding yourself. I should have worked through the humdrum task of doing the dishes first, with the slowly softening pint on the counter taunting me in the corner of my eye. Dipping my spoon into the melted slop was about as exciting as coming home to find the guy you once waited hours, even days, to see sitting in front of your family room flat screen with a beer in one hand and scratching himself through threadbare boxers with the other.

Not that there's anything that horrible about the guy in the boxers. Not necessarily, anyway. Passion is time consuming, all consuming really. It doesn't pay the bills, and odds are the guy on the couch might be of some help with that. He might even change a light bulb, make you laugh, sit and listen while you complain about your day. So who cares if his hand is in his pants? You have electricity. You have dependability. And, if you don't let things slide too far, there can still be a wild night here and there.

Really, though, why would I tell this girl or my son any of this. They both have plenty of time to figure it out for themselves. Should the girl go off to college and opt out of writing classes, enroll herself exclusively in accounting and statistics or, and I tremble at the mere thought, organic chemistry? Of course not! Should my son stay where he is, take the bonus and the raise, toe the line and spend another year feeling crushed by his job? Of course not! Not yet anyway. As long as he doesn't mind living in squalor and eating on the cheap, as long as nobody is counting on him to be sitting on the couch in his boxers waiting to be called upon for mundane chores, the fat pay check can wait. They are young. They don't need to relinquish their passions; they just need to figure out for themselves how and when to fit them in.

Stranger things have happened. "I got a B- on my physics test!" read the text last week from my high school junior, who would much rather be out running or chatting on line with friends or, frankly, having root canal than thinking about physics. But a B-, that was big for her in a class she despises and finds incomprehensible. (My high school physics teacher used to wake me up by using me in hypotheticals: a squirrel shoots a bee bee gun at Lisa, who is sitting on a greased roof....) "Engineering School here we come!" I responded. "Yay!" was her reply. As passionate a communication as I have received from her in a while. My daughter the engineer. The passionate engineer.

Zen Diagram

Maybe one day, for all of these kids, passion will merge with the lucrative, and the things they most enjoy will not have to wait for some elusive chunk of free time that might never arrive.

All of it, I told the high school girl. There's no reason why you cannot pursue it all.