In the Biblical Sense

Sometimes treating yourself to a hefty slice of velvety chocolate chip cheesecake that literally melts its way through your digestive tract has its price. Last night, as I savored my annual portion of grandma Cissy's extraordinary kosher-for-Passover dessert, I learned there may be some exaggeration in the Bible, that there may never have been an exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt.

This would be major exaggeration, mind you. Not just obvious fibs like referring to Cissy as grandma when she's not even related to me by blood or marriage. Certainly not like Cissy's version of a "sliver" of cheesecake, which would be enough to harden the arteries of an entire third world country, or my own dogged insistence that she give me "just a sliver," which is about as heartfelt as an assertion by your basic politician that he wants to reach across the aisle and achieve some bipartisan productivity. All petty bullshit, not unexpected, no harm no foul.

But this business about the Exodus never having happened (and I am not referring to the movie starring Paul Newman), well that's serious stuff, not just an exaggeration but a bold faced lie that strikes at the core of everything I always believed. No seas parting? No burning bushes? No men with long white beards hearing voices and still being looked upon as great leaders and not being subjected to involuntary commitment proceedings? Folks, if the exodus never happened, then maybe we're not the chosen people. Preposterous. Next someone will be telling me that we Jews aren't smarter than everyone else.

I'm hardly a biblical scholar (the flip side of exaggeration would be understatement, and that would be about as under a statement as anything gets), but I think I've always kind of guessed there may be a little bit of poetic license in that large volume of work. Face it, when you write by committee, there's competition for the best story line, and the truth can get lost in the details. If Nora Ephron had been around when they wrote Genesis, the old boy network of misogynists would never have gotten away with blaming all the evil in the world on Eve for biting into an apple. The woman was just trying to watch herself; what was she supposed to eat if she wanted to look good in a loin cloth. Talking snakes? Please. And do I have any doubt that the whole two by two thing on Noah's Ark was not so orderly as they make it out to be? Is there anyone else who isn't certain that more than a few threesomes snuck on board.

I've just always assumed there's a fair share of bullshit in the Bible. It's what makes a good book great, and the Bible is a great book, filled with sex and violence and betrayal and all the stuff that sells. If they have to kill off a main character after almost forty years just because they want some fresh blood, so be it. If some guy has to walk on water to get everyone's attention, let him have the bragging rights. Forty years trudging through the desert or forty minutes in an air conditioned minibus, who cares? How else are we supposed to study persecution and the distinctly human capacity to overcome adversity and make something out of life? Historical fiction, creative nonfiction -- whatever you want to call it, it's a really good story and it gets some good points across. Inspires, even.

To say Exodus never happened is really beside the point. It would be like saying Grandma Cissy is not really a member of our family, when she has baked for us and served us her delicacies for as long as I can remember. Like saying the friends who have welcomed me and my extended family into their homes to celebrate holidays with them for years are not my own relatives just because we share no DNA. These people, my friends and their parents and their children, the people in my life who have become such dependable and treasured pieces of my life, are as much my family as anybody can be, laws of inheritance notwithstanding. You can't pick your real family, but you can pick most of the other special people in your life, and if it entails a bit of exaggeration here and there, even a hefty sliver of poetic license, I'm all for it.

I am about as likely to believe the exodus never happened as I am to mean it when I ask for just a sliver of cheesecake. Yep. Amen to that!

Knockin' On Heaven's Doorway

At first, we walked by him the way so many people do, as if we didn't even notice him. I saw him, knew he was there, but couldn't tell you anything about his face. And I heard him too, but I couldn't tell you what he said. I kept walking, holding my bag of leftover pasta from a favorite Italian restaurant, continued to talk to my brother and daughter as if nothing had happened, as if we hadn't just passed a man bundled up in a doorway on a busy Chicago sidewalk.

My daughter suddenly stopped, almost as if she had been hit. "No, I'm not!" she said. To herself maybe, or just to the air. Certainly to nobody in particular. She turned and marched back to the faceless and voiceless man, handed him her bag of leftovers. "I'm not going to eat that," she said to me, "I'm just not," when she joined us again. She pulled her coat more tightly around herself and kept walking. We followed her lead. I felt silly, still holding my bag of leftovers that would, no doubt, go uneaten.

The man had yelled something as we passed, not in a threatening way, just louder than his initial mumble. You gonna eat that? is what he had said. All I had heard, at first, was random sound, meaningless letters floating in the air like scrambled refrigerator magnets. Only my daughter had paid attention. You gonna eat that? I realized why she had looked as if she had been hit. I had heard it too; I had simply chosen not to listen. I will never forget the look on my daughter's face as she stopped so abruptly and did what she knew was the only right thing to do. It was as if everything, finally, made sense.

She is a third of the way through her twenties, a decade during which so many of us live in fear. The pressure to be a grown up is overwhelming, as is the uncertainty about where life will take you. We are consumed by the possibility of ending up unattached while everyone around us pairs up. We just don't know what's going to be, and it's scary. Sure, I know it sounds a heck of a lot like me, about a third of the way through my fifties, but starting fresh the second or third time around is a little less daunting than facing adulthood for the first time, when you can't even rest on a few laurels. My daughter, though, seems to be figuring it out. She has a good head and a good heart and a reliable moral compass. She will find her way.

An acquaintance asked me the other day (when I was no doubt moaning about some wildly trivial indignity, like being stuck in the cold for spring break) whether there was anything truly hard about my life. Compared to the man in the doorway, no. Come to think of it, compared to most people, no. There's no shame in wanting more, but no, at least at the moment, no matter what yardstick I use, life for me is not particularly hard. 

As we walked away from the man, bracing ourselves in our warm coats against the punishing wind, I glanced back at him. He was silent now, and he most certainly had a face. He was still staring at my daughter, the neatly tied bag of food still resting in his lap. He said nothing, but he spoke volumes. I think it wasn't really about the food. He had been seen; he had been heard. And maybe, just for a moment, his life seemed a bit less hard.

Boarding Games

Seriously? American Airlines' solution to the mayhem also known as the boarding process is to reward people without carry-ons with early boarding. Let me get this straight. They have to pay twenty-five dollars to check each bag, then get more time to sit in cramped seats in coach while everyone else fights for bin space, then wait at the luggage carousel for an hour after landing while everybody else whisks out of the airport with their oversized carry-ons in tow? Including the folks who got to valet their bags for free on the jetway while the flight attendants attend to the passengers still brawling on board to claim the last cubic inches of overhead bin space?

Am I an idiot, or is it unlikely most folks are going to fall for this crap? Personally, I'll need a bit more incentive to fork over twenty-five bucks to check a bag than prolonged discomfort in a tiny and smelly seat while everyone else is busy throwing punches in the aisle. And unless I am heading somewhere I really don't want to be, there's no way I'm paying to know that everyone else has arrived at their final destination while I'm stuck at the lost baggage desk trying to figure out where my clothes traveled to on my dime. Okay, so I may still be an idiot, but I am NOT checking my carry-on just so American Airlines can save face and money by boasting more timely departures.

If only everybody could just be more like my mother. (Never thought I'd say that!) A woman ahead of her time, she has travelled back and forth from New York to Chicago for years with nothing more than a Louis Vuitton purse I mean pocketbook and the crossword page from the New York Times. Granted, her pocketbook is larger, or at least heavier, than your average oversized bag, but rules are rules, and if it's billed as a pocketbook it's a personal item and it gets a free pass. Frankly, the thing is so dense and downright lethal it should probably be banned as a weapon, but since knives are fair game now, nobody is going to raise an eyebrow about Louis. Even if it's packed to the gills with small blades.

Hopefully, when my mom flies out here tomorrow, enough folks will have been seduced by American's scheme to benefit itself without benefiting anybody else to make my mother's journey through security uneventful. This time around, in addition to the pocketbook from Land of the Giants, she will be carrying a freezer case filled with osteoporosis fighting meds that cannot go through the scanners. She's been nervous about this, so I checked on line a few weeks ago to see what she needed to do to get through security without getting her meds confiscated. A doctor's note would suffice, the TSA site told me, but she should call security seventy-two hours before departure to confirm. A lifelong rule follower, she called airport security exactly -- and I mean exactly; down to the minute -- seventy-two hours prior to her flight to confirm the procedure.

Seems simple enough. I'm pretty certain most people will ignore the early boarding incentive and bring their gigantic carry-ons with them on to the plane. I just hope there aren't too many fist fights; I don't want my mom's ice packs to melt.

Curses! Foiled Again!

After a bit of a rocky start, yesterday turned out to be a fairly decent day. Causing someone I care about pain really puts me in a bad mood. These days, even causing pain to someone I don't particularly care about fails to give me the kind of temporary satisfying rush I used to enjoy. That sucks.

But, as I said, things started to look up, and at work I even earned myself a little bonus for an extra big sale which, to tell you the truth, happened mostly because I left the customer alone (in blatant and horrifying disregard of company policy). Nevertheless, the random minor success gave me an extra spring in my step, and I smiled all the way home until I opened the door to the kitchen and saw what looked to be the beginning of a crime scene on the floor.

Manny, the blind puggle, just gets really pissed off when I'm gone for more than a few hours. Apparently the company of Cal the handyman and Margaret the biweekly cleaning lady who doesn't really clean is no substitute for mom, the lady with the food. Margaret seems to know this, and has become Manny's accomplice, always leaving the pantry door slightly ajar when she departs. (Sometimes, I think all she does is come in, open the pantry door, whisper a hint in Manny's ear, and leave. Just based on the physical evidence anyway.) Manny can't locate a cookie when you place it directly under his nose -- I often have to tap his nostrils with it -- but he can sniff out an open pantry door from the other end of the house. Or maybe it's just dumb luck; maybe he's always banging face first into stationary walls hoping to find that one in the kitchen that moves, welcoming him into a world of culinary (and often toxic) delights. Pay dirt!

Yesterday, the first thing I saw was the broken pieces of some sort of package, the words "non-stick" screaming up at me from one of the chunks. I panicked, thinking he must have eaten the contents of a package of construction goop, filled with toxic chemicals, something Cal had brought in to touch up the family room walls. Upon closer examination, I realized it was the box from a roll of tin foil, serrated metal edge and all, sliced in half as if by a "Ginsu" knife (a "Shih tzu" knife?). It's amazing what Manny can do with a severe underbite. Personally, I would have gone for the chocolate, but Manny is not very bright, and clearly not very discerning.

After checking to be sure the serrated edge was all there and not somewhere deep within Manny's digestive tract cutting open his insides, I looked for the foil. No need to look far; I glanced to my left, toward the "butler's pantry," and saw the beginning of a path that had been carefully laid out by the unravelled tin. Sort of like a shiny, silvery yellow brick road, it made a straight shot through the front room, a clean wide turn toward the front hallway, then a hairpin turn toward the stairs, where the long sheet of glinting path ended abruptly midway up, the cardboard roller off to the side. I had to laugh. I imagined Manny as if on a treadmill, his little feet pushing against the rolled up end until the entire thing was completely unfurled. How he made the jump up the stairs I couldn't begin to fathom. What a pup.

Like any normal adult, I called my friend to see if she'd like to head to the local watering hole for a drink. She was game, and off we went, to celebrate, I suppose, making it through a day that had been a bit of a roller coaster ride. Over a glass of wine, we shared a bucket of tater tots. Fried stuff sure feels good on the way down. Hours later, not so much.

Usually, at night, I lie awake listening to the odd rumblings of Manny's insides as his canine enzymes break down lord knows what and his stomach churns to digest the indigestible. Last night, much to Manny's annoyance (I could tell by the way he kept batting away at his ears), my insides were the ones belting out a gurgling serenade. As the dissonant crescendo continued to keep us both awake, Manny finally hopped off the bed and peed, quite emphatically, on the floor.

He may be the stud I sleep with, but, as usual, payback's a bitch!

Fifty Shades of Neutral

There are still bits and small strips of masking tape clinging to the edges where the floor meets the ceiling in the front room, remnants of the painting spree my husband had embarked upon years ago. He was meticulous about the tape; he didn't want to make a mess.

The front room: once a dining room where nobody ever dined, then an office where nobody really ever did any work, then a TV room where I would lay on the orange love seat until I fell asleep (usually two minutes) and then the cable box just stopped working anyway. Mostly, it was just where the dogs hung out,  curled up together on the big orange chair by the window so they could keep watch. Now, with one dog gone and the surviving one blind and the cable out, there is nothing to watch and no real reason to curl up with anybody. I usually come home to find Manny on the couch, awakened by the hopeful sound of the garage door opening, his tail wagging tentatively until he is certain it's the lady with the food. Neither one of us notices or cares about the yellow walls or the ancient tape in the corners.

As my new handyman, Cal, becomes more deeply entrenched each day in preparing our nineteen year old house (was it really hardly finished yet when we moved in?) for sale, no stone goes unturned, no chip of colored paint goes unnoticed. Everything must now fade to shades of neutral. The laundry room can remain tangerine (it's just a laundry room), and the living room turned dining room can remain the still trendy rich forest green that provides such a strong backdrop to the Edward Hopper print on the wall and the mint green chairs I just had to have, but the rest, unless it is the deep taupe that runs sporadically through the house, must go. The citrusy peach that is my very own handiwork in the master bathroom (a decorator friend, trying to be polite, once suggested it was a bit too Caribbean); the sickly pale yellow in the front room that has had so many incarnations and still doesn't know what to call itself but, gosh darn it, not a speck of yellow paint got on the ceiling; and the bright blue in the kitchen, so stark against the nineties style white cabinets and floor tile, the lone neighborhood survivors of almost two decades of epidemic upgrades to dark wood and stone tiles with rivulets of pink running through them.

My teenage daughter is vaguely aware of the home cleanup effort going on around her, and tries not to let it get in her way. But when she saw the six paint swatches taped to the blue walls by the pantry, she was offended. She likes our blue kitchen. I don't know if I like the blue so much as expect it. It's like an old shoe, really, a little bit nasty but comforting, something other people might sneer at even though it reminds me I am home. I explained to my daughter that we had to neutralize. I have promised Cal I would pick my favorite swatch; together my daughter and I agreed on the least offensive of the six. I have promised Cal I would dig up the leftover cans of taupe so he could touch things up. I think they are in the garage, along with the bright kitchen blue. I say it's the cold that's keeping me from dragging them inside, but I think I'm fibbing a little.

Maybe I won't object though, if Cal replaces the old masking tape in the front room with a better adhesive. Maybe there's a silver lining to draining the color from our walls; maybe, with the right paint, and better tape, things will be a little less messy.

Spring Hopes Eternal

It's the first day of spring, and folks in Chicago are, as always, shocked that the weather doesn't seem very springlike just yet. Shocked and offended, as if somebody is playing a cruel joke on a population accustomed to balmy sunshine and snowless sidewalks the moment the clock strikes vernal equinox. Silly.

Silly and irrational, and I'm right there with my neighbors, thinking maybe the astronomers were off by a few days this year. When the readout on my car dashboard told me this morning it was twenty degrees, I considered the possibility that my car could be wrong. After all, every other light on the dash tells me the thing is falling apart at the seams; brain death cannot be far behind. So I flipped the worn and unraveling thumb flap off my mitten and brushed the tip of my thumb across the ever optimistic picture of a bright sun on the screen of my iPhone. My phone is young and healthy, not a tired old coot like my car. It doesn't sound like a flock of angry birds struggling to take flight when I put it to work, and the voices in my head are nowhere near as clear and levelheaded as the voices in my phone. It is clearly nowhere near being brain dead.

Fifty-two degrees, it told me. Aha! I looked more closely, realized even my trusty iPhone, the brilliant little carrier of voices that tell me how to find my way and, occasionally, to watch my language, had thrown in the towel and taken off for Apple headquarters in California. Cheeky little gadget. I brushed across the screen to find the local weather, still hopeful that my car was wrong, that it was not twenty degrees on the first day of spring. Aha! My car was wrong. It was eighteen degrees, not twenty. Ugh. My thumb was freezing from all this research.

Reality hit like a ton of bricks. Cold hard bricks. I began to remember how things work around here. Come to think of it spring-like weather never arrives on the exact date when daytime is as long as night. It tends to arrive in Chicago the moment my airplane touches down somewhere south of the border, someplace that offers up year round warmth for a not so small price plus a whole lot of schlepping. The astronomers have not yet caught up to the findings of deep dark upper middle class suburbia, where the start of celestial spring means nothing and the only accurate harbinger of spring is spring break. Spring break and Murphy's law, two great forces of nature working together to ensure that spring will arrive the moment most of us are somewhere else looking for it.

Which, frankly, does not bode well for me this year, since I won't be going anywhere, at least nowhere appreciably south. I can only assume that the balmy taste of spring hovering over the area for a week will somehow elude me; I will be huddled up in a down jacket, skidding on black ice and trudging through gray slush while birds chirp within earshot and the sun sheds its warm rays tantalizingly out of reach.

But if all goes according to Hoyle (or this guy Murphy), I can comfort myself with the knowledge that winter will return with a vengeance when the flights start returning to Ohare and break time is over. And, as is the case every year, April showers won't arrive until May, and May flowers won't bloom until June. As is the case every year, the astronomers will get it wrong, and, as is the case every year, we will all be shocked and offended.

I Do, I Do. But I Can't!

Folks, I'm in a bit of a bind.

Just when I had thought the Craigslist fellas looking for wedding dates had blown me off, I received an email last night. Okay, I was clearly not the only recipient (not by a long shot), which made me feel a little bit cheap and not very special, but beggars can't be choosers and I really, really want the rights to this screenplay. Here's the email: 

Gals, We know it's coming down to the wire but Dave and I have finally got our shit together. We've got the Empire bar rented out tomorrow for a happy hour thanks to ABC (why? We don't know. But we're Rollin with it). Can you two make it for a drink around 6? Let us know if you're down - because hey, why not? At the very least it'll be a good story.. At most.. True love?

NOTE: ABC Nightline is profiling our journey to find the perfect wedding dates and they will be filming our "meet and greet" tomorrow evening at the Empire. Please come camera ready if you wish to participate as we narrow it down. It should be fun and if all goes well, we hope to pick our dates by the end of the night! We look forward to meeting you! 

Naturally, since I was brought up to be polite, I responded immediately with a lengthy explanation about why we wouldn't be able to make it on such short notice. Camera ready? At my age? I need at least a week, and a very fuzzy lens. I offered up my eighty-two year old mother as a family representative, since she lives nearby. I am aware that's kind of a reach since she doesn't date but it was worth a try. My daughter, whom I've already offered up without permission, encouraged me to go. "It'll get your blog on the news," she said, clearly as wrapped up in the fame and fortune as I am, not caring a whit about the fellas' feelings. Cads, both of us. A friend offered me a ride to the airport, assuming, obviously, that I am a shameless opportunist and wouldn't care about the camera readiness thing. Another friend suggested I set up a Skype meet and greet during the happy hour. Okay, that may save me some travel and botox money, but camera readiness for a talking head on Skype requires extra care and, for that, I'd need even more than a week.

Sigh. I don't expect a big break like this to come my way again any time soon. I suppose I can at least be content to know I was in the running, that I made what has to be the final cut since the wedding is this Saturday. (By the way, I refuse to watch the Nightline coverage; I choose to remain blissfully ignorant of how many thousands of others received the invitation to happy hour.) Frankly, I'm a little hurt that they went with ABC to tell their story. I could have been a poster child for the American Dream, twenty-first century style. Proof that even a sorry old cougar can rise from the ashes and make it big.

This is not to say I have completely given up, though. I am, if not completely shameless, a relatively shameless opportunist. If anyone has an idea, let's hear it.

Happy St. Patrickstein's Day

I'm guessing that historically St. Patrick's Day has as little to do with overindulging in beer as a Jewish ritual circumcision has to do with eating little hot dogs wrapped in dough, but both are most certainly designated feast days, and one man's feast is, well, not necessarily the same as another man's.

Ironically, while a poor unsuspecting Jewish male baby is being prepped to have a piece of his penis lopped off in front of a crowd of revelers, he is given his first taste of wine, which might help explain the low incidence of alcoholism among Jews. And though we pride ourselves on being a civilized people, we refer to this barbaric ritual a mitzvah (a good thing; we are good rationalizers) and we come dressed to party and shout Mazel tov! and stuff in all sorts of fleshy treats. But no beer, definitely no beer. Even on St. Patrick's Day.

Today I will be navigating the green-clad and the hung-over on the streets of Chicago to attend the bris of my old friend's grandson. My friend, gone too long now, would have cringed with the rest of us at the thought of her grandchild feeling even a slight twinge of pain, and at the same time kvelled (does it need translation?) more than anyone at the sight of the brand new addition to her family. Like the rest of her surviving mosaic of goofy family and friends, she was offbeat, sometimes mystified by life, terrified of death, and filled with love for the people who loved her. Unlike many of us, she possessed an amazing capacity for gratitude. Even when she knew her time was winding down, she thought herself to be lucky, just for having all that she had for as long (or short) as she had it. She would have worn something green to the St. Patrick's Day bris, might even have snuck in a beer. For those of us who knew and loved her, the hole created by her passing will be obvious, but her unique presence will be felt. She will, no doubt, arrive late, as was her habit. The energy in the room will suddenly pick up, and the party will start in earnest.

It is my hope for this baby, once the wound heals and the memory fades, that he will get to know his maternal grandmother and learn the many lessons she could teach, even though he will never lay eyes on her. It is my hope that he will be reminded, one day, that his Jewish ritual circumcision and his first taste of alcohol coincided with St. Patrick's day, and that the irony of that coincidence will not be lost on him. Because whether you're on a morning pub crawl with good friends or having, um, a delicate procedure performed by a shaky looking old Jew in the company of people who are celebrating your arrival into the world (both customs weird in their own special way), life is -- and should be -- about sharing good times with people you love. Or at least like. Or don't hate.

It is my hope for this baby that, like his grandmother, who did not have so much as an ounce of Irish blood in her veins, he will always believe that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and believe that it is well within his grasp.

Habemus Papem! Mazel Tov!

The largest gathering of ineligible bachelors since the last JDate speed dating party has come to a close. We can all breathe a sigh of relief knowing that there is, once again, a Pope. He's a bit older than I had hoped, but that means Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York will be returning stateside, which is certainly good news. (Am I the only one who has noticed how absolutely adorable he is?)

Most of us will never know what really goes on inside the Sistine Chapel when the men in red convene, or how many bong hits it takes to send that plume of white smoke up the chimney. (Whaddaya think the seagulls were doing up there?) But you have to give these guys credit for their efficiency; it's amazing what a day without administrative distractions and revelations about misbehaving priests can do to speed things along. When in Rome, though, you gotta eat well, and I'm pretty sure the big red thing they read the name of the new Pope from was actually the dinner menu. Frankly, I couldn't understand a word the guy was saying; thought maybe he was just a waiter reading off the secondi piatti.  

Everyone seems pretty excited about the new Catholic in Chief; well everyone on this side of the pond at least. Buenos Aires is probably the most European of cities in South America, so the transition of power to one of the zillions of Catholics in that corner of the New World should be fairly smooth. Those folks dress well (Evita Peron wasn't just hanging out at the Louvre when she visited Paris), eat well, can produce a good glass of wine, and really know how to play soccer. And, like folks throughout the ages who have been subject to Vatican rule, they are not exactly strangers to dirty politics. Argentina and the papacy will adjust well to each other.

As a non-Catholic, I still have trouble understanding why it matters who the Pope is. I get that he has to be celibate because it's probably a good idea to practice what you preach, and frankly there are probably a lot of heads of state out there who wish they had, um, kept it in their pants, but how on earth does one guy get to decide what Catholicism dictates for a limited period of time. Is the prospect of eternal damnation really that compelling when the rules keep changing? Maybe the fact that Francis is a Jesuit will keep him from turning his new job into a major power trip; maybe even the most blindly faithful will finally have some wiggle room.

The guy seems really humble, which is kind of refreshing. I just hope he can find a good Malbec and a good steak in Rome.

Magic Carpet Rides

A little more than nineteen years ago, we moved our not yet complete family from Chicago to suburbia. I was kicking and screaming, but not as wildly as I had been months earlier when, stopped at a red light near our townhouse, I watched a boy, no more than ten, stare at our sleeping children in their car seats and pretend to whip out a gun. Sitting ducks, trapped with no room to swerve. It was time to migrate north.

Three days later, when I finally stopped shaking (the Chicago police laughed when I called, and the boy was gone when I drove myself over to the intersection -- to do what, I don't know -- but it's not as if I felt any safer), we began our search for a new life. A life where the kids could run free, where we could feel secure, where we would not have to pay exorbitant private school tuition to protect our children from the diversity of an urban school system. We would move to a place where there was a fraction of a minority student in the local school, and, as far as I could tell, he was a Chinese Jew.

My third one was not yet born, not yet even a fully formed idea. My older two were three and four, still best friends and constant companions who needed nobody other than mom and dad and each other, needed little but their own mutually fed imaginations to occupy themselves for hours. They seemed excited about our soon-to-be new digs, running up and down the wide hallways when we visited as if they had broken out of cages and finally been set free. Their favorite room was the bathroom in the hallway, where they each had their own sink.

No matter what game they were playing back in those days, they usually dressed in their Aladdin and Jasmine costumes. My son wore off white harem pants and a purple felt vest, his bare protruding belly jiggling as he ran amok with his fake sword, his rosy cheeks puffed out around his perennial smile filled with even rows of what looked to be Chiclets. My daughter paraded around in Jasmine style glitz, her sparkly green costume topped with a jeweled necklace and a matching headband tucked around her unruly curls. I bought them each a bath mat emblazoned with a picture of the Disney couple soaring through the air on a magic carpet. On our next visit to the house, they placed the mats on the floor by their respective bathroom sinks. Workers were still putting the final touches on the house, but my children had landed in their living quarters and were ready to stake their claim.

On the day we moved in, one bath mat had mysteriously disappeared. The violation was not quite as severe as the boy pointing a fake gun at my sleeping children, but still, I have always wondered who would take a child's bath mat and, more importantly, why. Nevertheless, our young family's magic carpet ride began, and the four of us set out on our new life together. My daughter, who had always seemed to march quietly but bravely through life, almost as if she owned the place, suddenly got jittery. If I disappeared around the side of the car for a couple of seconds in the grocery store parking lot, she panicked, thinking I had left her there. I don't know whether it was the parking lot or suburbia in general that scared her, although I have my theories.

On balance, though, we thrived, and we grew up together in that house, once so new, now a bit ragged. We adjusted to public suburban schools that, even with their fraction of a per cent of diversity were still more diverse than the private schools downtown. At least admission was guaranteed; we did not have to go through an application process more rigorous than the ones they would eventually go through to get into college just so they could have the right to finger paint. Their baby sister was born, and they wore their Aladdin costumes less frequently; she was too small to be the genie, too angelic to be a villain, so the whole thing just wasn't going to work anymore. We would ride by the high school and I would point and tell them that one day they would go there, even though I never really believed time would go so quickly and they would all pass in and out of that building in a blink of an eye and sail off on their own magic carpets to places and adventures as yet unknown.

I am cleaning out the house in suburbia now, getting ready to move on as soon as my youngest, the baby, leaves for college next year. Our carpet, hardly magical, is stained with dog pee and other delights, including a big burn in the shape of an iron (ouch; must be why I don't do that kind of thing anymore). Going through the hallway closet, I found the surviving bath mat, rolled up neatly and stuffed in with some long forgotten bedding. I unfurled it and looked at the young pair, perched confidently upon their magic carpet without even holding on as it hurtles through the sky on what appears to be, come to think of it, quite a bumpy ride.

My ruthless emptying of the nest has its limits. That mat is a keeper.

I Got No Rhythm

I heard recently that seventy is the new thirty, which, according to my calculations, puts me at about thirteen. Frankly, I'd rather be thirty, and I am hoping my formula is a bit overly simplistic. Numbers have always confused me, particularly when it comes to seasonal time changes. I usually have to sit down with a pencil in one hand and my head in the other to figure out whether the bump forward or backward is good news.

Like everything, it depends. When my children were babies, I lived for the day the clock would spring forward, turning five a.m. into six. Though morning would arrive faster that Sunday, the new wake up time sounded far more palatable. It never occurred to me that human circadian rhythms adjust almost instantaneously to things called zeitgebers, environmental cues such as, say, daylight, which couldn't give less of a shit about what time it says on my adjustable digital clock. And so, within a day or two, wake up time for the babies would still be five, even though I still considered that to be four.

As the kids got older and they would sleep until they were physically dragged from between the sheets, I looked forward to the Saturday night in the fall when the clocks would "fall" back, giving me an extra hour of sleep. Again, back in those days, I was not an insomniac and did not spend my time in the wee hours scanning Wikipedia for if not useless then entirely forgettable information about circadian rhythms and things called zeitgebers, so it never occurred to me that the extra hour of sleep would negate itself very quickly.

These days, between circadian rhythms (which I appear not to have) and bouncing hormones and the competing side effects of pills for anxiety and leg twitches and bloating and muscle aches and, yes, sleeplessness, time changes throw me off completely. Yesterday and today, with four thirty abruptly becoming the new five thirty, I woke for the day at three, which is the old two. Four thirty, which is the old three thirty, is suddenly looking awfully good. I'm sure it will all work itself out, hopefully before the autumnal time change rolls around to once again wreak havoc with my already addled system.

Life is confusing. I should have felt joy, the other day, when my friend's first grandchild was born. Joy for the parents, joy for the grandparents and surviving great-grandparents. Joy for the baby because, no matter how shitty things can seem sometimes, life is a gift. But my friend is not here for the arrival of her first grandchild. In the six years she's been gone, she's missed lots of milestones, but this one, for me, stings the most. Waking up at three which is the old two when I should have woken at five thirty which is the old wake up time of four thirty is baffling enough. My friend's absence for the birth of her oldest daughter's son is beyond comprehension.

As is the case with everything, I suppose, the new abnormal will become the new normal and life will go on as it always does. The new baby will have his own circadian rhythms for a while which, coincidentally, seem to have nothing to do with zeitgebers of any sort, certainly have nothing to do with his parents' need for a bit of rest. Sleeplessness will become their new normal; they will quickly forget what life was like when the clock actually meant something.

Stranger things have happened and they keep happening, and it's not even just about the numbers. Walk into any women's clothing store and you'll see that not only is seventy the new thirty but horizontal stripes are the new black. Really. Sleep cycles and untimely death I can understand, but horizontal stripes, well, that's a hard pill to swallow. Especially with all the crap I'm already taking. Side effects are bad enough, but widened love handles?

Give me a two o'clock wake up call any day. Or at least a good old fashioned zeitgeber to make it all go away.

Points of View

Yesterday I met a friend I have not seen in a while for lunch. She has a corner office overlooking the river. When she went to the bathroom I snuck a few minutes in her desk chair, popped my feet up on the desk, enjoyed the view.

Things always look better from the outside looking in -- or, as the case may be, from the inside looking out. I was green with envy. The space was filled with her family photos, sparkling images lit from both windows by the southern midday sun. Her desk was just cluttered enough to make her look busy and important but not crazed. Accordion files filled to overflowing with documents lined the shelves not occupied by family photographs. Her briefcase sat on the floor, tossed there haphazardly with one flap slightly open, a testament to her productive morning in court. A borrowed space in a rented office, yet it seemed to me a most desirable piece of real estate.

She laughed when she returned from the bathroom. I jumped from her chair as if it had suddenly sprouted thorns. Tricky and alluring, like a rose. My friend's journey to the corner office has not been a fast-track-straight-shot vertical climb from one cubicle to another in the same firm in the same building. It was far more arduous. Traversing the hill may leave you less breathless, but it takes longer. She is smart and determined and she is good at what she does. I watched her, her face calm as she flipped through the pleadings sitting on her desk and signed each one. If I had only stuck with it I could be like her, sitting pretty in a swivel chair, surrounded by windows, signing documents, handing the stacks over to a waiting secretary who would take care of the less glamorous part of the process.

Minutes later, as we sat across the street in a chic Italian joint being fawned over by cute young waiters who kept calling me Senorita, she filled me in on the few years that had formed a gap in our friendship that was actually longer than the friendship itself. Struggles. Not the same as my struggles, not easier or harder. Just someone else's shit. I gazed back across the street at the imposing tower, the building housing that prime piece of real estate that is her office. The windows were as opaque as brick, offering up no hint of life inside. Shadows played against the glass exterior, the building seemed to sway. Solid and as impenetrable as a prison, yet flimsy as a house of cards. My salad was small; I left feeling hungry.

Hungry and full of "shoulds." I should reinstate my long inactive law license, I should re-enter a world that has survived and changed drastically since the last time I wandered through a courtroom door as an attorney, not a client. I should re-educate this brain that still cannot figure out how to coordinate all the remote controls for my family room television, train it to understand electronic discovery and databases and all sorts of research that never has you turn so much as a page. I should claw my way into the world of corner offices and swivel chairs and important looking documents that become extremely important when someone like me signs them. My friend did it, and she looks pretty damn good. I was exhausted thinking about it.

Back in bed with my laptop that night, my dog's ass on my pillow, his fat torso making all sorts of gurgling and threatening noises while his back end had my face in its cross hairs, it was not lost on me that blogging was never going to get me into a corner office, much less pay the mortgage. But then I received an email from another friend, a dear old friend (and, by coincidence, a successful attorney as well) who's known me since the beginning. It was a link to an article about Nora Ephron, written by her son in the months after her death. It was about Nora but it could have been about anyone with a passion. So many Nora quotes, words I wish I could have come up with myself. So much about life and what it's about and how awful it is when you realize you have to give it up. So much about how one person's passion and talent can live on in so many others she touched.

I thought about the corner office, but I brushed it away. I emailed my dear old friend, a friend who knew, somehow, how much this article would move me. We have promised each other a date, to go see Nora's last play. There will be no swivel chairs in the cramped theatre, no desk to kick my feet up on, no spectacular views of the river. But, more than anything, this is the view I need.

Armed and Dangerous and Thirsty

Slow news day. The media frenzy about the storm of the century bearing down on D.C. resulted in the complete shutting down of D.C. for a day that was completely devoid of snow. A breaking story suggests we might soon find out the date on which the conclave of Cardinals will convene to begin chit chatting about the identity of the new Pope. I'm on the edge of my seat. And Rand Paul had to pee. Note to self: always go to the bathroom before a thirteen hour filibuster.

One can only hope that the apparent absence of anything interesting to report led terrorists and other garden variety psychopaths to stop watching or reading before they found out about the new TSA rules loosening restrictions on what folks can bring on an airplane. It's official; you can now bring weapons on. Not just the dubious weapons like hockey sticks (I'd like to meet the person coordinated enough to get a full swing going in the two inches of space not occupied by seats and excess carry-ons that folks bring on to avoid the exorbitant bag check fee) and pool cues (which I suppose could be used to poke a flight attendant in the butt when she refuses to move the damn cart for a second so a passenger can go pee), but knives of all shapes and sizes. Well, small knives, to be fair; you know, the kinds that can be concealed and take somebody completely by surprise. Machetes and three ton medieval swords are still not allowed. Seems reasonable.

And, thank goodness, water, bottled water, is still prohibited. So what if a lunatic who cannot spend a few hours without a sharp blade close at hand might be sitting next to you while you try to doze. We can rest easy knowing his water bottle was purchased at a premium from a vendor inside security, or, better still, we can keep sleeping, secure in the knowledge that he couldn't afford a water and won't be getting up constantly to pee.

My guess (and, I admit, my fear) is there are some knife wielders out there who are not exactly boy scouts who have managed to catch the story on the news. And I bet they're already busy polishing and sharpening their blades. To be sure, they pose less of a threat without the bottled water, but everybody has to pee at some point so if they're in a window seat they can still, at the very least, be a royal pain in the ass. But who cares? North Korea has just threatened nuclear warfare. For a change. Again, not really news, but if there's anything worse than a knife wielding and very thirsty soul seeking some attention on an airplane it's a North Korean with a finger poised near the missile launch button.

I wonder what the TSA is going to do when the NRA starts getting huffy about all this. If you're going to allow small knives, why not small guns? What's the difference? They're easily concealed and people who own them feel secure when they're close at hand. It's not as if a pearl handled pistol is dangerous. It's certainly no water bottle!

TSA? NRA? WTF?

Weather. Or Not.

Something seems off.

It's Tuesday morning in Chicago, late morning for me, even late for folks whose sleep cycles are more in sync with the sun. My right eye is staring out the window while my left eye reads (I'm double jointed). "When the Chicago area awakes Tuesday," my up to the minute on line news tells me,  "it will find itself in the midst of a [monster] storm." In the midst, it says. My right eye blinks. Well I guess, to be more accurate, it winks. Other than cars pulling in and out in front of Starbucks, nothing is moving. Nothing is falling from the sky. Once again, the storm of the century -- and, given how many of those we've had already this is going to be a really long and dreary century -- appears to be a tempest in a teapot. Or maybe the Chicago area just sleeps until noon.

Nevertheless, schools everywhere are closed. My daughter was as focused last night as I've ever seen her, watching her untouched mountain of homework with one eye (she's double jointed too) while her other eye and ear awaited news of the closing. Her powers of concentration have never been more impressive. It gives me great hope.

We watched the nightly news together. Quality time together as a last resort; it gets boring watching a pile of homework not getting done, even more boring watching someone watch a pile of homework not getting done. Apparently, there was nothing going on in the world last night, nothing worth discussing anyway, other than the storm about to bear down on the Midwest. Thank goodness a storm of the century spawns a lot of side stories. Like the fact that everyone in the Chicago area was rushing to the grocery store and then to the hardware store to stock up on emergency provisions. Everyone except us that is. My daughter and I looked at each other, exchanged a silent "oops." I tried my best to look unconcerned, but when she wasn't looking I ran to the pantry to make sure we could survive. Phew. Plenty of chocolate. And I think I still have some glow in the dark tubes from her bat mitzvah in the freezer.

My computer screen is sticking to its story, despite a notable absence of precipitation outside. I wait. I schmooze with the other morning regulars. We laugh about people who "do the right thing" -- like stock up on provisions before the storm of the century or write thank you notes. My right eye starts to twitch and it gazes out the window again. Lo and behold, I see flakes. And snowflakes too!

I have nothing against being prepared; I just don't like to waste time doing it too far in advance. Eventually, my survivalist instincts kick in, and even if all the canned goods have long been plucked off the grocery shelves, I have a plan. I pack up my things, treat myself to a second overpriced cup of caffeine (who knows, I might not be able to count on my car as a snowplow this time), and race across to the store to stock up on chocolate.

Though I normally dread being stuck in the house, I occasionally look forward to a chance to hunker down and catch up on things. Like thank you notes. And eating all the old chocolate to make room for the new. Hopefully I'll get it all done in time to watch the nightly news. I'll want to hear about the storm's aftermath, find out about the clean up plans. And whether I'll need more chocolate.

Motherhood: State of Grace

Everybody loves a list.

I couldn't resist peeking at the two most recent newsworthy compilations on line the other day: the ten happiest states to live in and the ten unhappiest ones. Shockingly, Hawaii is number one on the happy list, and has been for some years. I was hardly surprised to see Colorado in the top five (everybody loves a mountain) but then again West Virginia made it to the bottom five, proving that not all peaks are created equal. John Denver notwithstanding, of course.

None of the states I have lived in made it to either list. Mediocrity has always been a way of life for me, so I am hardly surprised to learn that I have always resided somewhat unremarkably among the middle thirty. Not that it matters anyway. Statistics show (this was a very scientific study) that the happiest states are populated by greater numbers of employed people with relatively high median incomes; unless they're happy and stupid I doubt they're gonna move any time soon. And it's not as if the folks in the unhappy states can afford to pick up and relocate, so it seems to me people are pretty much stuck in the state they're in.

I don't know where this latest study puts the rest of us who didn't make it to the top or bottom ten. We're neither happiest nor saddest, which could mean we're just perpetually confused. Sounds about right, at least in my case. Chicago's my kind of town, but I've always got a bit of a New York state of mind and I'd love to come to Boston for the springtime. Sometimes I don't know where I am, and more often than not I have a hard time figuring out who I am. Until recently, I've thought of myself first and foremost as a mother, but kids get older, life gets complicated, and, as my friend's daughter recently pointed out to her  when she wondered why she was not entitled to the same sorts of courtesies as everyone else, "you don't count." Yes, it certainly seems that way sometimes. But if I'm not, first and foremost, a mother, who the heck am I? If I'm a daughter or a wife, I'd like a redo on both. Same with my various careers; I am still struggling to figure out which letters should get top billing after my name on a resume.

Desperate times often call for desperate measures. Calling my mother credentials into question (along with everything else), I emailed my own mother this morning. I rarely confide in her these days; I still live in abject fear of the occasional I told you so, even though I have not heard one from her in years. I shut her out, and she leaves me alone, but when I need her, really need her, she hits it out of the park. It's what mothers do, and they do it best, and if I know my mother the way I think I know her, she's having a really good day today because I looked for her and she was there. And a really bad day too because she knows I was confused.

She told me what, I suppose, I have always known. Mothers (at least mothers like us) have an amazing capacity for unconditional love, and an equally amazing incapacity for letting ourselves off the hook. At eighty-two, she still worries about the time, when I was three, that she didn't realize I had a terrible ear infection and wouldn't let me sleep in her bed. (I assured her that she has done way worse things since then, but then again, so have I.) It sucks sometimes, but as "they" say when there's nothing else intelligent to say, "it is what it is."

Sometimes I couldn't even tell you what state I'm in, but motherhood stays at the top of my list wherever I go. It is what it is.

Mrs. Toad's Wild Ride

The best thing about a fantasy is it beats the crap out of reality. The worst thing about a fantasy is that like all good things, it must end. And so it is with my dreams of fame and fortune (and a good nosh at a wedding in upstate New York). 

My fledgling relationship with the young Craigslist fellas seemed so promising. I thought they kind of liked that my appeal was in my personality and not my appearance, that I was in it for the money and the glory and not for a chance at a no-strings-attached roll in the hay. Sex they could get anywhere (I've seen pictures of them in shorts). But a low budget screenplay -- now that's something you don't come by every day. Okay, so I've never claimed to be all that intuitive. It explains why I'm going to be one of those old ladies who walks around with lipstick smeared all over her cheeks and lives with a dozen cats. And I hate cats. 

Things went well at first. The fellas responded to my initial counter-proposition with enthusiasm and great speed. Later in the day, they asked if I'd be willing to make a telephone appearance on their friend's podcast. With the other finalists, I could only assume. I agreed to let them call me after receiving assurances that I would not have to put on makeup or change out of my flannels and do the Skype thing. Then, nothing. No exchange of so much as a fake phone number, no firm appointment. Zero. The fantasy Oscar I had been hanging onto all day was slipping through my fingers, about to drop, no doubt, right on my toes. Back to the resume with all the taunting white space, back to the real estate classifieds to search for my new double wide. 

There's a bright side, I suppose. I was wondering how I was going to explain to my mother that while she was winging her way from New York to Chicago for Passover a day early just so she could visit with my older daughter I was winging my way to New York from Chicago with that same daughter for a double blind date at some goyish wedding. Then there was the issue of having to buy a new dress, since I'm fairly certain I would not be able to tuck all my newly cultivated back fat into the cute little number I wore six months ago. And, really, an entire evening spent explaining to people that I was not my date's governess -- who needs that shit? 

As always, there will be other adventures, probably when I least expect it. Starbucks may introduce yet another new coffee blend. (I hope so, because I'm feeling kind of silly every time I go up to the counter and ask for a tall blond.) I might, one day, come across a pair of boots in the Nordstrom shoe department that doesn't resemble anything in my closet. Maybe I'll learn to cook and I'll find somebody out there actually willing to eat it. Maybe some genius will discover a foolproof cookies and ice cream diet. Maybe pigs will fly. The possibilities, as always, are endless. 

They say life is a journey, not a destination, so even though I won't be landing in upstate New York later this month I'm keeping my seat belt fastened. I could still be in for a wild ride.