Everlasting Visions

At my father's funeral, a vaguely familiar gentleman approached and gave me a hug. "Hello Mick," he said. Mick. Mickey. My mother. This man thought I was a 67 year old widow. I was 38 at the time, and 66 seemed ancient. For a brief moment, my grief turned to rage.

Mistaking my homicidal glare for confusion, the man introduced himself. Jerry. I had not seen Jerry since I was about ten. When my mother was, hmm, about 38. For Jerry, time had stood still; it was an honest mistake. I corrected him gently, returned his hug.

I don't even remember how my parents knew Jerry, but I remembered him fondly. He was hilarious. Not just in the garden variety kibbitzer sort of way, like Walter or Roy, the ones who were always on the guest list when my parents "had company," the ones I referred to as uncles even though we shared no DNA. Jerry was funny in a stand-up comedian sort of way, subtle, clever, grammatically correct.

I remember also that he was ill. He's not well, my mother would whisper, whenever his name came up. I remember thinking how unfair it was, that someone so funny and smart could be so sick. It was some gastrointestinal thing, as I recall. Not as bad as "cancer," the thing that was whispered with darting eyes and a hiss that made it sound almost dirty. Bad enough, though, that it was probably a good thing he wasn't around a lot on those Saturday nights when my elegant mother teased her guests' palates with pounds of the most delicious shrimp I have ever tasted while she slaved in the kitchen, closely monitoring a Corningware baking dish filled with chicken breasts drowned in Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. The digestive disconnect might have killed him.

My nineteen year old daughter and I went to see Beautiful yesterday. Tapestry was the album of my formative decade, debuting when I entered junior high and spinning right along with me all the way through college. I wondered whether my daughter would appreciate the music, the deeply personal lyrics and the piercing melodies of my youth, the story sung by the quintessential hippie chick pictured on the album cover. I wondered, too, whether the show could really be as good as everyone has claimed, and whether I should have saved some money and just dug up my old album collection, plugged in my son's vintage turntable, closed my eyes and let time stand still.

When the crowd cheered for the young woman cast as Carole King as she appeared on the stage for the grand finale, her long wavy hair draped over the shoulders of a long, peasant style dress, I thought about Jerry and time standing still and the tricks our minds play. For a moment, I think we all made the mistake of thinking it was Carole, the real Carole, And if the real, 72 year old had appeared, I think we would have believed she was thirty. The tapestry she wove and shared, all those years ago, is timeless.

The notes of Tapestry, the song, were played in short bursts throughout, but the lyrics were never sung. The omission surprised me, even disappointed me a bit. But when I woke this morning, those were the lyrics running in a continuous loop through my head, rich and royal, everlasting. A feeling, intangible, "impossible to hold."

It was wonderful to see and feel and hear, with my daughter, the story of an extraordinary young woman who came of age at a tumultuous time, a time more innocent than but not unlike the present, in many ways. I can't help but wonder what her tapestry looks like now, several lifetimes later. Larger and older, perhaps, but still rich and royal. Timeless.

A Galaxy Far Far Away

New Year's Eve, 1977. Times Square. Star Wars. With whatsisname.

The movie, for me, was little more than a welcome respite from the cold, two warm hours tucked between an outdoor, endless movie line and the crush, afterward, of shivering, drunk revelers waiting for the ball to drop. I thought the way the prologue scrolled into the far reaches of the galaxy was cool. I thought Princess Leia's side buns were adorable, in an odd sort of way. I thought anthropomorphic robots were a tad unrealistic, and I thought the Darth Vader thing was a bit over the top. I know I didn't really follow the plot, because years later I had no idea which Empire was striking back or why we cared about the Jedi returning. I didn't even know they had left.

I don't remember whatsisname's name but I remember he was nice and had come prepared with a bottle of cheap champagne and a couple of plastic flutes. Once, back at school, he had called the local radio station and dedicated RubyTuesday to me, just because he knew I liked it. And he tried to teach me to ski somewhere in New Jersey. I really wish I could remember his name.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, a memorable New Year's Eve with decidedly unmemorable details. Yesterday, about a week shy of thirty-nine years later, I sat between my son and my youngest daughter and saw the latest Star Wars flick. I was determined, this time, to follow the story. My son gave me a brief tutorial on the way, and there was at least the benefit of familiarity on this second go-round. A somewhat helpful prologue scrolled into the far reaches of the galaxy, and it still seemed cool. Harrison Ford, even thirty-nine years later, caught my attention. I'd get lost in space with him any time. Carrie Fisher, well, at least she saved face with a single dignified cinnamon bun at the nape of her neck. I got the feeling she would have happily accepted more than the chaste hug from Harrison, but that's all he offered. Even when she said she loved him. Cad.

Thanks to El Niño, this winter is warmer. It would have been a better year, I think, to celebrate the New Year outside, at Times Square. Or to stand in an endless line snaking around a city block just to see a movie I can't grasp. I enjoyed it more this time, though, sitting between two of my children. No offense to old whatsisname or the original flick. As I have from the time they were little, I would glance at their faces when something struck me as funny, or surprising, or, more often than not, ridiculous. It's always better seeing things with them, through their eyes.

Welcome back Jedi, and droids, and aging princesses and ageless heroes and assorted other motley creatures. Welcome back memories of years gone by and people who somehow stick in my mind though I cannot recall their names. And welcome home, albeit briefly, to my children from galaxies far, and sometimes farther away, and thanks to them for the occasional fresh glimpse at the world, shared through their eyes.

Playing Crap in Vegas

Had it not been for an eleventh hour "happy anniversary on your divorce wish" from a close friend, the occasion would have passed unnoticed, at least by me. Oddly, I kept thinking the date -- which is conspicuous by virtue of an unlikely symmetry of numbers --  rang a bell, but I could not for the life of me figure out why. Solid evidence of life moving in a good direction despite a deteriorating brain. Youth may be wasted on the young, but happiness is never wasted, no matter how thick the fog.

Though my memory may appear to have become selective, I am fairly certain that neither one of us has actually forgotten the occasional misery of our less than ideal marriage or the relentless torture of our drawn out divorce. It's just that the animosity no longer serves a purpose, especially now that the lawyers have been paid. With precious little opportunity these days to piss each other off, our relationship is not unpleasant. Our children have progressed from being bothered by our amicability to simply not being amused by it. Given that they were never amused by us -- either singly or together, at least not in an "I'm laughing with you" kind of way -- this is good.  Maybe as good as it will ever get, but I'll take it.

As apolitical as I am inclined to be -- being on different sides of the aisle did not factor into the break-up of our marriage, except maybe when I accused him of being a bit stodgy -- I could not wait to watch the final Republican debate last night. Animosity may not serve a purpose in my own life, but it sure is entertaining. As the candidates filed onto the stage, it seemed an SNL skit in the making, really writing itself. I mused about costume design and captions. Ben Carson, retired neurosurgeon, a stethoscope dangling in front of his decidedly un-party-like blue tie; Chris Christie, former federal prosecutor, pizza stains dotting his shirt; Carly Fiorina, dragon lady CEO, holding a puppy. And maybe squeezing it a bit too tightly when Chris Christie talked about moms at the bus stop and dads at work. Seriously? Donald Trump. Always in costume.

Yes, animosity is entertaining, but it certainly doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose. Why can't they all just get along, like me and my ex? My take on the whole thing -- and this is coming from a place of embarrassing political ignorance -- is that the Republicans have finally figured out that being divided means being conquered, so they decided to pair up and battle each other in twos in an effort to at least cut the field by half. Sure, Carly seems smart, but she's just downright scary and unlikeable (not just a bitch but a skinny bitch) and, therefore, irrelevant, so she was nominated to be the "why can't we all just get along" ambassador. The one to remind everyone that the enemies are Obama and Hillary, and if the Republicans all waste time ganging up on the buffoonish Trump that still leaves a gang of eight front runners to divide the shrinking pie. Jeb got the Don, Rubio got Cruz, and Paul took on Christie. John Kasich and Ben Carson, well, they both seem nice.

There are plenty of wishy washy Hillary lovers out there (although, to her credit, at least she's not a skinny bitch), and let's face it, desperate times call for desperate measures. In the months to come, I can only hope politics will indeed make some strange bedfellows, and unlikely but productive alliances will arise out of the muck.

Gosh, with all this bickering, it almost makes divorce look tame. Terrorists and like minded folks notwithstanding, one of the things that makes us distinctly human is our will to survive.  Maybe a few handshakes across the aisle will help us.

Guns and Poses

In two weeks, all of my children will be together, in one zip code — mine, no less — for the first time in what seems like forever. Knowing any attempt at resistance will be futile, they will grudgingly appease me and pose for a picture.

Their exasperation will be a well kept secret among us, a secret I will easily forget as soon as the moment is captured and permanently transferred from the present to a nostalgia-worthy past. The picture will tell the story as I would write it — a whole rendered far happier, by virtue of togetherness, than the sum of its not, by any means, unhappy parts.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Is happiness real unless it is posted on some form of social media for all to see? Does the extent of the happiness depend on the number of “likes?”

I’ll be the first to admit I am and have long been a bit ambivalent and, worse still, hypocritical about social media. I resisted it at first, wondering why anyone is interested in what anyone else happens to be thinking or doing at any particular moment. If I cared, I would ask, and even then, I generally do so only to be polite.

I resisted also as a matter of principle, appalled by all the fake (I assumed, because I’m a bit nasty) smiles and the manipulated depictions of life. I held myself above it all, until I succumbed to reality, the reality that I was wildly envious of all these permanently happy people populating my news feed. Could the grass really be so much greener on the other side of all my fences? Months passed, still no evidence of misery. There was nothing else to do but jump on board.

I have done my share of posting pictures that nobody in their right mind should give a shit about, announcing to the world that I am a perfect mom or sister or daughter or a perfect friend or a perfect dog owner and that it is virtually impossible to be in my presence without smiling. I haven’t just tallied the “likes;” I have checked my phone obsessively for the little red superscript telling me there might be another thumbs up. I have silently grieved when the notification is not, in fact, a “like,” but a reminder about a birthday for someone I barely even know.

Other than posting a link to my blog each time I write one, I have steered clear of using Facebook as a forum for debate, whether civilized or not so much. I have not judged those who use it as a soapbox, as posting a link to my innermost and highly irrelevant thoughts places me in a bit of a glass house.

But when I heard, the other day, that the young mother who murdered more than a dozen innocent people before turning her six month old baby into an orphan had just posted her allegiance to ISIS on Facebook, I began to rethink the weird questions. Like the one about the tree in the forest or the one about true happiness being a warm “like.” Like the one about whether crazy talk inspires otherwise sane people to do crazy things — I still believe the answer to that one is “no.”

Like the one about whether guns kill people or people kill people. I suppose it's only a matter of time -- smart guns with smart triggers will be commonplace in the arsenal of smart weapons, and there'll be an ammo app in our smart phones that will enable us to spew bullets along with our rants. For now, though, as far as I know, it still takes two to tango.

Just hours after my daughter and I discussed whether Facebook has outlived its usefulness, whether the viciousness and the hostility has finally made the silly attention-seeking even sillier, a good friend who has tended toward the soapbox announced, eloquently and at length, that he was done. Done with saying things he would not say in person, done arguing with people he doesn’t know, people with whom he would never, not on the coldest day in Hell, achieve any sort of meeting of minds. Done stirring the pot on such a broad and, apparently, incendiary scale.

As a writer, or aspiring writer, can I truly be expressing my thoughts if nobody reads it? Of course. Will I still hope that I get a bit of an audience and an occasional “atta girl?” Of course. Will I take a stand and shut down my Facebook page? Not yet.

And will I post the picture I intend to take in two weeks, the one in which my kids and I and even the dog all pose as the happiest beings on earth, happier still to be basking in the glow of one another. Of course!Even if nobody “likes” it.

Going Nowhere Fast

At a hundred strides per minute and about a thirty per cent incline I was definitely going nowhere. As I watched the two television screens overhead -- I love multi-tasking at the gym, thanks to closed captioning -- I realized I am not alone.

Truth be told, nowhere seems like a better option than where we all seem to be heading. Then again, truth be told, the truth is overrated. On screen one, the Sunday talking heads spent a half hour talking about Donald Trump, and whether his aversion to truth telling is any different from, say, everybody else's. Okay, seriously?

The only thing that sets most politicians apart from the rest of us mortals is there's a lot more at stake when they lie. Let's face it though, in politics and in real life, "lie" is such a strong word; there are lots of shades of gray. "I did not have sex with that woman!" Only two people and a soiled dress know for sure, and different dictionaries might give us different definitions and different answers, but really, who cares? Except for Hillary, and only years later when the whole "affair" just became another little grenade for Hillary-haters to toss her way.

Mostly, for politicians, winning (or not losing what you've already won) is everything, and it's why they pay lots of money -- no doubt obtained from questionable sources -- to really smart people who know how to spin a good yarn. Most of us know what it's like to get caught with our hand in a cookie jar, and most of us know how nice it would be to have some help with the back pedaling while we're trying to floss the crumbs out of our teeth. It's human nature. In a presidential election year, it's human nature on steroids.

There are two things that set Donald Trump apart not only from the rest of us mortals but from the rest of the folks vying to be, arguably, the most powerful and important person on earth. First, he already believes he is the most powerful and important person on earth, so that's hard to top. Second -- and this is somewhat related to his penchant for delusion that led to reason number one -- he does not care about facts or crumbs in his teeth or back pedaling. Essentially, he has no shame. Look at the man's hair.

Is anyone really surprised that a whole lot of folks want him to be POTUS even though they know, deep down, he lies? Let she who has never chosen to believe her husband's answer when she asks "do these jeans make my ass look fat?" be the one to cast the first stone. People like to hear that we can easily identify all of our enemies and, as a result, easily obliterate them all. There is nothing like a basic formula to make everyone breathe a sigh of relief and sleep better at night. This isn't the first time somebody has stepped up to a soap box claiming to have a simple solution to "the problem" and gotten otherwise right thinking folks to believe him. And it certainly won't be the last.

Mostly, I shake my head in amusement at Donald Trump, but today I watched a bunch of really smart political commentators analyze why saying "your ass doesn't look fat in those jeans" when everyone knows damn well it does is different from trying to explain why your hand was in the cookie jar. And, I was thinking, if that's something that even merits discussion we really are going nowhere fast. All of us.

They say bad things happen in threes, and this morning, as I strode on a stair climber to nowhere while I watched the decline of civilization on two television screens (the second one was airing a piece about the millions of dollars celebrities spend on gifts for themselves and their loved ones, but that's a post for another time), I figured there was nowhere to go but up. Ha!

As if on cue, a fitness instructor who appeared to have a megaphone sewn into his vocal chords started screaming out instructions to the line of people on treadmills behind me.  In a room filled with signs reminding us not to talk on our cell phones, where the televisions are silent unless you plug yourself in, where the treadmills talk to you and encourage you and take you on virtual tours of the Alps and pretty much do everything for you except your laundry, seasoned runners with sinewy thighs and no body fat needed someone to scream at them at the top of his lungs for forty-five minutes. "Precision running," the class is called. I am not lying, not this time.

I was going nowhere. Politicians and talking heads were going nowhere. Celebrities were going nowhere. Actually, they were jetting off everywhere, looking for perfect and useless gifts. And now I was going deaf. What a morning, what a world.

The New Abnormal

I didn’t think twice about descending into a crowded New York City subway station yesterday. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and, under “normal circumstances,” far less death defying than your average taxi ride through midtown.

By all accounts, this city — like all other cities but maybe just a smidge more — is on high alert. Bomb sniffing dogs, increased police presence, Fort Knox style security in my daughter’s downtown office building, and invisible measures we average folks can’t even imagine, no matter how many episodes of Homeland we watch. New York still goes about its business, though. Surly crowds, accents that make the literate sound uneducated and the nice sound nasty. Old fashioned comforts of home.

It occurred to me, as I waited in my daughter’s lobby watching all the smartly dressed twenty-somethings slip into the heavily fortified bank of elevators. that 9/11, to them, is the defining event of their pubescence. When I was the age they were then, the south tower of the World Trade Center had just been completed; and it would be a year before the twin towers were officially open for business. The scandal-gate era had just begun with the Watergate break-in. We were fighting a pointless and horrific war, but it was really far away — particularly for a middle class Jewish kid in New York. As bad as things were, fear had not yet become a way of life.

What went up has since come down. The image of Richard Nixon insisting “I am not a crook” seems sweetly nostalgic. We pay more attention than we used to Asia in general these days, but it still seems very far away and vary unfamiliar. It’s not uncommon for people to ask me whether my son, who has lived in Japan for almost four years, is fluent in Chinese.

No matter what was going on in the world, back in the day, I don’t recall feeling vulnerable or threatened. Except when my mother caught me sneaking some Twinkies. I never thought movies or concerts or subway stations were dangerous on a mass scale. Sure, there was always street crime, but all I needed to do was pay attention, or, as my father always told me, “keep my wits about me.”

My daughter, the one who lives with the daily reality of twenty-first century New York, doesn’t think twice about taking the subway, or going about her business the way she has since moving here. When her younger sister said she would take the subway to her office, though, she put her foot down and insisted she take one of those garden variety death defying taxis. The kind of threat that seems manageable. We accept that we have no control over what happens to ourselves, but when it comes to the ones we love, the known, old-fashioned evil is definitely the lesser one.

My subway ride yesterday was indeed cheap, fast, and, to the naked eye, at least, not particularly death defying. It was mildly unpleasant, being crushed by way too many bodies crammed into way too small a space, but everybody seemed far more interested in getting to where they needed to be than, say, destroying human life. Despite the harsh accents, I could just tell.

Wedged in with my packages, unable to even hold on, I was startled when someone tapped me on the back. Braced for a New York style confrontation, I whipped around, ready to apologize. It was a woman seated near where I had achieved my precarious balance for the ride. She just wanted to let me know she was getting off soon.

Maybe the villains still are far, far away, in a place very unfamiliar. We know it’s not true, but it’s the way we keep going.

Toujours Paris

A friend last night remarked how eerie it was that I had written only days ago about Paris.

I had thought it wasn't really about Paris, at least not by design. I was musing, as I often do, about life and love and other profound mysteries. The elasticity of the human heart. The beauty of a crisp autumn day. The sweet buttery taste of a perfect croissant.

The caption at the bottom of the television screen remained unchanged for hours last night: At least 153 killed in Paris terror attacks. This could not be happening again. Less than a year after coordinated attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish grocery store and a few other gratuitous kills, satire lives on and Parisian Jews still buy food and people walk around, feeling safe. Months from now, Parisians will again enjoy concerts and soccer games on a Friday night, and an entire country will no longer be on lock down. C'est la vie. La vie continue. 

I am glad I remember Paris the way I do, exactly six years ago, when I finally fell hopelessly under its spell. The news coverage of last night's carnage was, somewhat mercifully, blurred by darkness. Mostly, I listened. To the not-so-distant wail of sirens. To tongue tied reporters trying to articulate what is still, to most of us humans, unthinkable. I wondered if Paris would look familiar to me when the sun came up. I wondered if the croissants would ever taste as good.

When I returned home from my first visit to Paris, I couldn't eat bread. Especially French bread; even the still warm, extra long loaves cleverly packaged in white bags adorned with tiny French flags. I learned, soon after, that it's all about the water. You just cannot replicate French bread with Chicago water. You can come close, but you can't make a New York bagel here either. French bread.* New York bagels.* That's the best we can do.

As humans, we adjust to these things, the minor adversities and inconveniences that go hand in hand with our instinctive will to survive and our realistic expectation that life is not perfect. Life goes on, la vie continue, without French bread or New York bagels in Chicago; there are certainly enough simple pleasures out there to keep us content, to help us appreciate the ones that are harder to come by.

Life also goes on after the unthinkable happens. We don't forget but we keep going. A sparkling new tower lights up the sky by Ground Zero now, lit up in red, white, and blue stripes, in solidarity with our friends across the pond. Tragedy is a part of life; we mourn, and then we keep living. I like to think it's not only because of a lack of better alternative. There really is a lot of good stuff here.

My Paris post the other day, my 'love and loss and mysteries of the universe' post, was a little bit about game theory. About how love isn't -- or at least shouldn't be -- a zero-sum game. Love for one thing doesn't -- or at least shouldn't -- cancel out love for another. And, I suppose, we can only hope that the kind of hate that cast darkness over Paris and humans everywhere last night cannot take away all the good stuff. I marveled, only days ago, about the capacity of the human heart to stretch and always make more room. I despair, today, about the capacity of a frightening number of seemingly heartless humans to hate and destroy and fail to see what seems so obvious to the rest of us.

It's counterproductive to wonder when the next monster will come out from under the bed, hell bent on destruction. But on mornings after, when the sun comes up and the unthinkable mess is in full view, it's tough to focus on the croissants. No matter how many terrorists have blown themselves up or let someone in law enforcement do the honors, we know it's not a zero-sum game, and there are plenty more where they came from.

Social media enabled folks in Paris to mark themselves safe. It was reassuring, for those of us who immediately ran through our mind's Rolodex to account for friends and loved ones who might be in harm's way. It would be nice if we could think of "safe" as a permanent status, but we all know better.

We'll always have croissants and French bread and New York bagels, and we'll always have Paris. And, la vie continue, because that's how we roll, Well, la vie continue.*

Game Theories

I have been plagued, lately, by an irrepressible urge to visit Paris. By my calculations, a seven year itch.

My love affair with Paris was slow to bloom. It finally hit me on my third visit, my forty-ninth birthday gift from my husband. We were trying desperately to salvage whatever we could, and he was astute enough to know it was pointless to wait for my fiftieth. At least we'll always have Paris.

It wasn't the first time it occurred to me that love, or at least my capacity for it, could be finite. A zero-sum game. I remember worrying about it before my second child was born, a bit uncomfortably close on the heels of my first. I think it was my mother-in-law who reassured me, but I was skeptical. She was right, though. My heart stretched, and it did it again for my third. And, as time went on, for a few dogs.

With Paris and my marriage, though, game theory seemed to apply. Maybe it's because everything about the city was so perfect that third time. A mad cow disease scare had marred my first visit, dashing my hopes of gorging on steak frittes and forcing me, every evening, to stare into the dead eyes of some unfortunate sea creature. The second time, it was just too damn cold, and it's difficult to fall prey to any kind of romantic spell with three kids and your mom in tow. The third time, though, with my marriage falling apart, Paris came together. Crisp, sunny, November weather. A quaint hotel on Ile St. Louis where we had to ring a bell to wake the night manager if we returned after nine. It didn't matter that we could touch all four walls of the room from the bed. All was forgotten in the morning when we descended the narrow winding staircase into the dungeon to devour our designated basket full of croissants and French bread. Love was unraveling but, hey, we were in Paris. We got along.

Seven years, and I barely remember why we were coming unglued, but I can still taste the croissants. I can still hear the sounds of my shoes on the pavement, still see the crowds of annoyingly compact French women, so purposeful, so efficient, so stylish no matter what the time of day. It was our third time, and we had already done the museums and the cathedrals and the Eiffel Tower and, when my mother was with us, about seventeen Louis Vuitton stores. This time, we just walked. Sometimes together, sometimes alone, but each of us, I think, always alone in our thoughts.

Our last morning there, while he slept, I walked, by myself, to visit the new Holocaust museum. A wife without a husband, a mother thousands of miles from her children, a Jew on the streets of Paris (even in le Marais) -- I felt conspicuously alone. Not particularly unhappy, just alone. And a little bit in the dark, in the City of Lights.

I've thought about returning to Paris several times, but somehow the itch has become stronger now, at the seven year mark. Maybe it's just coincidence, maybe it has nothing to do with seven years or Paris and it has everything to do with turning fifty-six or being almost three years into a divorce.

Maybe there's no theory to the game at all, but there's one thing I know -- it's not a zero-sum. There's always room for more.

A Kid in a Cotton Candy Store

I admit it. I'm kind of an idiot when it comes to politics.

But I read recently that physical activity combined with a little brain exercise could help make me smarter, or at least improve my aptitude in a targeted area or two, and I'm all about the efficiency of killing two birds with one stone.

I decided I'd start with the things that elude me most -- my glutes and Donald Trump. An ass and an asshole. I like the symmetry. At the very least, if I can't comprehend them, maybe I can make them disappear.

As luck would have it, Sunday morning news shows are big on candidate interviews, and no self-respecting glute toning machine is without a television, so the gods were well aligned for a little bit of self-improvement. I adjusted the setting on my stair climber to a level where the little flashing light assured me my butt cheeks would get full attention and tuned into a talk show. I live a charmed life. Donald Trump was on.

I forgot my earbuds, which meant I had to actually read what he said, in closed captioning black and white. It was far more instructive than just listening. I'm a visual learner. I can tune out noise, but I cannot unsee the spectacle of what appeared to be words spilling out of a talking cone of rotten cotton candy.

I don't know much about learning theory, but I do know that repetition is always a good teaching tool, and Donald Trump, in that respect at least, is a master pedagogue. He hammered away at his two themes like nobody's business: diplomacy and energy policy. And he did it in language that even I, a political idiot, could understand.

Diplomacy: Ben Carson is a really nice guy. Jeb Bush is a really nice guy too. Even nicer than Carson. Or maybe it was the other way around, but I think he was saying both scored high marks in the diplomacy department.

Energy: Jeb Bush is really low energy. Ben Carson is pretty low energy too. Not as low energy as Jeb, but still low energy. Or maybe it was the other way around, but I think he was saying both need some work on their energy policies.

Then he launched into this whole thing about super PACs, and how Ben Carson relies too much on his super PACs. I started to get a little confused, until I realized he probably was talking about Ben Carson's six pack because, as we all know, physical activity is important when it comes to improving brain function and a six pack is not anything to sneeze at. So I think he was saying maybe Ben would be better than Jeb, although of course nobody would be better than the Don, even if he looks like rotten cotton candy.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

I haven't noticed much improvement in the tone of my glutes yet, but I feel as if my political IQ has skyrocketed. I am trading in my Ken Ken puzzles -- which will apparently do nothing to enhance my brain unless I am called upon to do some simple arithmetic -- and I am going to devote myself to following the presidential campaigns more closely. Then I will really know how things add up.

The Fiend-ly Skies

Air travel just ain’t what it used to be.

Last night, I knew something was up when a flight attendant snapped at a woman who needed something a few rows back. “Ask the other one. I have a job to do.” I felt a gust of wind as she wheeled the cart by me. She was definitely in a hurry, although I was a little confused about where her other job was.

Things had been going so well. Without spending a dime, I have somehow landed on what appears to be the opposite of a watch list, and more often than not there’s a TSA pre-✔︎ notation on my boarding pass. At rush hour on a Thursday evening, that’s huge. Like royalty, I breezed past the mile long line of regular folk snaking slowly toward security, and without touching a bin or removing my laptop or taking off my boots or my jacket I was through to the other side. Sometimes I appreciate being not worth a second look.

We had made up for our plane’s late arrival at the gate with a swift and uneventful loading process. Everyone obeyed the repeated warnings from the ticket agent, and nobody dared sneak through before their group number was called. I feigned patience as I held my position near the ropes, reassuring myself that even though there were at least ten precious and semi-precious metal groups before mine, Group 2 was still like winning the lottery for overhead bin space.

And then, we waited. Twenty minutes past the pull back time, belted in and ready for the dulcet rumble of wheels on the runway, we hadn’t moved. That’s when the flight attendant whose smile had seemed so genuine when I boarded let loose on the woman a few rows back and propelled the cart up the aisle in a death defying rush to nowhere.

Then came the perky voice on the intercom, explaining the delay. I hoped it wasn’t anything serious, like the hydraulic system, or a broken wing. Or a faulty oxygen mask in the cockpit, which is what happened when my mom and brother were flying to Chicago last month, and I could not believe they were holding up a flight just so the pilot could have a working oxygen mask.

It was worse than I thought. In row 27, a guy’s reading light was out. No wonder the pretty flight attendant with the fake smile was feeling a bit homicidal. The work order had been filled out, and the mechanics were on the way. To fix one guy’s reading light in row 27. Everyone within a five row radius offered to switch seats with him. He declined. The flight attendant who was not quite yet in a murderous rage offered him a little pen light. He snarled. The intercom crackled again. It would be another hour before the mechanics could arrive. Somebody, a rare person with a brain, made an executive decision. The doors were locked, and we prepared, again, for takeoff. Everybody was happy. Except the guy in row 27.

I felt a little guilty later in the flight when I finally gave up on sleep and reached up to turn on my fully functioning reading light. I felt downright terrified when I accidentally pressed the flight attendant call button instead. Thankfully I caught it before the scary one with the fake smile could send the cart hurtling up the aisle to slice off my toes.

The good thing about arriving really late when your flight was already going to be one of the last flights in is the swift exit, a perfect matching bookend to my TSA pre✔︎. And I still have all my toes. Things could be a lot worse.

Torn Between Two Teams

When night baseball first lit up Wrigleyville, we had already moved too far south of the stadium to be affected by the crowds or the glare. I could still remember hearing the distant roar of a cheer when the Cubs scored, still remember the packs of fans straggling through our neighborhood hours later, savoring the day's win, their faces ruddy from too much sun and alcohol. 

It's funny, sometimes, what we remember. Last night, perched, as I never dreamed would be, on a suburban bar stool watching the Cubs get one step closer to the World Series, I thought about those days in Wrigleyville. The days before the lights. The days before Harry Caray was just the name of a restaurant. The days before yesterday, when it occurred to me I would actually route for the Cubs if they play the Mets for the League Championship. 

That's all I was thinking, really, until I saw my brother's nostalgic Facebook post. It's difficult for anybody who was a Mets fan in 1969 to let go entirely, no matter where we end up. It was a magical year for the perennial losers (the Mets and I were about the same age, so it had literally been a lifetime); we rolled our eyes at the start of their winning streak in late spring, never imagining it would last more than one game. The wait was over. Back in 1969, I had no idea there was a team somewhere in the Midwest that had gone several lifetimes without winning, a team more beloved to generations of fans than the newcomers in New York could ever have been. 

Back to my brother's post, another in a string of recent posts, I assumed, about his own lifetime of Mets memories and about this year's amazing Mets. A team that didn't even have to fight for back door admission into post season play. Show's what I know. It started with a note of congratulations to his nieces and nephew, his favorite people in the world, born and raised in Chicago to love the Cubs.    

There was a picture of the commemorative program he had received at the first night game at Wrigley Field, twenty-seven years ago. The first night game only because the real first night game had been rained out the previous day. It is one of his fondest memories. My husband had gotten tickets for the three of us, and my brother was thrilled to join. It was the Cubs versus the Mets. It was a piece of history, much appreciated by a guy who has, I think, visited every baseball stadium in the country and still has not forgiven our mother for tossing out his baseball card collection. 

Like I said, it's funny, sometimes, what we remember. When I saw his post, I realized I had no recollection of the Mets playing under the lights that night. In fact, I had little recollection of the game at all. What I remember is calling my parents from a payphone in the stadium, struggling to hear them over the din, telling them they were going to be grandparents. I remember telling my brother he was going to be an uncle. I remember craving even more hot dogs than I usually do at a baseball game. I couldn't tell you what the score was, much less, who won. 

I am thinking about all of those memories now, the ones I've carried with me, and the ones my brother brought back to my attention. Those memories from before I had spent more of my life in Chicago than in New York, before I found out my parents would be grandparents and my brother would be an uncle and I would be a mom. Before I raised three children who love the Cubs. 

If the Cubs meet the Mets in the League Championship series -- and I hope they do -- I will be slightly torn, but my adopted home town team will have the edge. Yes, I will surreptitiously wear my Mets tee shirt under my sweater, as I did last night, but, as my brother said to me this morning, 109 years is long enough!

In the Venti Scheme of Things

I felt a little envious of the young, bleary-eyed woman who rushed in and out of Starbucks yesterday morning. Her oversized sweatshirt and her venti coffee helped dwarf her already slight frame. She seemed even tinier than usual, without her two-year-old twins in tow.

She is young with a touch of an old soul. I know she is tired just thinking about the day ahead, alone with her small children while her husband goes off to work, even though it is Saturday. I miss that kind of tired, the uncomplicated, explicable kind of tired. The tiredness born out of being larger than life to small children who just cannot imagine that you feel as small as they do, sometimes, at least in the grand scheme of things.

Those years are a blur of vivid moments, virtual selfies that never seem to fade. Me, wheeling a double stroller against a steady stream of morning commuters heading to the El, complaining out loud to my sleeping babies (much to the amusement of passers-by) that I needed sleep. Me, standing on a narrow strip of grass on a sunny fall day, a baby in my arms as I pivot to watch her older siblings play on adjacent soccer fields. Me, feigning interest at a parent teacher conference. Them, looking at me as if I had all the answers. Them, questioning my answers. Them, wondering when I became so dumb.

Thanks to social media, I can still get glimpses of their lives, even though I am rarely in the daily picture. Sharp and vivid, these photographs often don't seem as real to me as the ones in my head, the ones that capture three childhoods marked my seemingly interminable days that passed by in a minute. Days that made me feel tired and put upon and overwhelmed by responsibility. Damn I miss all that.

I ran into the young, bleary-eyed woman hours later; again, I felt a little envious. She was still wearing her oversized sweatshirt, but with one child in her arms, the other holding her hand, she had grown into it a bit. They were off to the local hot dog joint for lunch, and then, if mom had her druthers, a nap. I was enjoying a leisurely telephone conversation about life with my nineteen year old, thinking how nice it would be if we could duck out together for a char dog and cheese fries.

Missing Pieces

The reactions were generally predictable. Lots of leg crossing among the men, a more maternal empathy from the women. Eli knew something was up -- somehow figured out that getting "snipped" probably didn't mean a haircut. He amped up the obstinacy for a few days. It only strengthened my resolve.

I received periodic updates from the vet's office, His staunchest fan, Jenn, assured me she had showered him with hugs and kisses when she arrived in the morning. As soon as he was all sewn up, Jenn texted me to tell me all went well. When he woke up, the doctor called to fill me in on the details. When I finally retrieved him, his stumpy tail -- no longer overshadowed by the equipment below -- wagged as it always had. He looked as devastatingly handsome as always, content in spite of the perennial sad droop of his boxer eyes and the oversized lampshade on his head. I was overcome with relief. Even a friend's taunt that I had emasculated another one didn't bother me.

The lampshade lasted about fifteen minutes. I decided I would just be vigilant, monitor him closely to make sure he didn't lick his wound. I kept him away from other dogs who might try to help him out. At the first hint of a slurp, I wedged my left arm between his head and his missing pieces while I did whatever else I needed to do with my right. He had been sent home with sedatives and pain medication, and -- I'm not gonna lie -- I took a bit of guilty pleasure in administering both like clockwork.

Oddly, the only comment that got to me came from the most unexpected source. The homeless woman who has made our town her home -- the paradoxically articulate straggler who sleeps in an enclosure by the train parking lot and does her morning ablutions in the Starbucks restroom and spends the rest of her day in the local library -- asked me how Eli was doing. She has known Eli since he first arrived. From the beginning, she would follow his other admirers when she saw us outside Starbucks, politely awaiting her turn for a faceful of licks. She hangs back, and everyone else gives her a wide berth while pretending not to. She wears everything she owns, and she doesn't shower the way we "homefull" people do. Eli is the only one who doesn't seem to notice, or care.

I told her he seemed to have come out of it unscathed. (I was still telling myself that the lampshade was the worst of it.) She told me what a shame it was, that Eli would not be able to reproduce, that Eli was now the end of the Eli line. I had not even thought about that, except maybe when someone once suggested I breed him and make some money off his good looks and infectious droopy grin. She continued on, remembering a childhood pet of her own, how devastated she was when her parents did to him what I had just done to Eli, how she hated the thought of him not being able to live on in his offspring.

It does seem a shame. Not just that there will be no more little Eli's, but that this woman, once a young girl with two parents and a puppy and a roof over her head, a person who speaks with more intelligence and compassion than many people I know, sleeps in a parking garage and bathes in a coffee house sink and lives, during business hours, in a library. She is engaging, and people smile at her and talk to her wherever she goes, but there is always that tiny hint of discomfort. On both sides.

Except when Eli licks her face. It makes me think twice, at least for a moment.

My Easy Fast

My timing was a bit off yesterday. I arrived at the bakery just as congregants from morning Yom Kippur services were spilling out of sanctuaries. Risky business, twenty hours into the annual fast.

The bakery, an inviting pink storefront tucked into a primarily Mexican neighborhood nestled between kitten heeled gentiles to the north and equally well-heeled but noticeably different Jews to the south, is nondenominational. No matter what the holiday, the delicacies are the same. There is no need for cross shaped cakes or elaborate icing designs depicting the destruction of the first temple. It's all about the sugar. And the butter. 

I felt slightly conspicuous, sweaty from my bike ride (my idea of a a spiritual journey), the clips on my bike shoes echoing against the tile floor. The small space was packed with "good" Jews, dressed to the nines, the ones who have made it to the afternoon without so much as a sip of coffee. I tried to make myself inconspicuous.

The good Jews have their own problems. Even the leaden matzoh balls have been digested, and crankiness has set in with a vengeance. A young woman came in with her parents. Her face had a rosy glow, but something told me it had little to do with that warm, fuzzy introspective feeling you get from a good sermon. For a few moments, she did her best to contain her belligerence. 

"Do you want something for later, mom?" She appeared to be salivating, but that would be natural, standing in a bakery at the tail end of a fast.

"Surprise me!" Well if mom was cranky, she showed no signs. A nice sense of adventure, although I'm not sure how surprising anything would be since she was right there and her eyes were open. 

"I am NOT surprising you. Just pick what you want!" I was wrong about the daughter. She wasn't salivating; she appeared to be foaming at the mouth. Whatever impact the sermon might have had, it had been digested and expelled with the matzoh balls. Give that woman a cookie, I thought, before she loses all hope of redemption. 

My friend told me later about his rabbi's sermon, all about overcoming hate on a grand scale with love at home. A grass roots campaign for kindness and acceptance and generosity and all that good stuff that seems lacking in the world, if you believe what you read in the paper. It makes so much sense, even on an empty stomach, but who am I to judge. I am fifty-five years old, and I no longer even attempt to fast, for fear of becoming homicidal, or, as my daughter says, "hangry." 

I am sure the good Jews made it to sundown without sneaking even a fingerful of cupcake frosting out of their neatly tied box, and I like to think they made it to sundown without killing each other. And maybe, after a few forkfuls of white fish salad and a glass of wine, they reflected on how lucky they are to have each other and to live close to the little pink bakery where you can find the sweetest treats, no matter what the occasion. 

My bike ride had left me depleted, but not cranky the way I would have been had I not eaten. I suppose you can say I cheated, having enjoyed a picture perfect day even before I dove into the white fish salad. I got the Reader's Digest version of a good sermon without having to sit through it, and I was well fortified with caffeine and food and sunshine infused Vitamin D. 

And the salted caramel treasure from the little pink bakery? Icing on the cake. 

Striking Poses

A boy, about sixteen, sits and plays the upright piano. A teacher sings along. Dream a little dream of me....  Imagine no possessions....  I'm surprised each week by the medley of vintage songs, the matter of fact way the boy sits on the bench and starts to play.

Near me, but not too close, a pretty girl sits silently on the threadbare sofa, staring straight ahead. She smiles when someone addresses her, but her eyes don't move. The rest of the kids -- there aren't that many who stay after school on Thursdays -- congregate on the drab couches across the room, airing their random thoughts to themselves and maybe to each other. They toss Pepperidge Farm goldfish into each others mouths. They seem to not notice me yet, across the divide of ratty orange carpet.

This is where some of them will remain, while the others disperse, for after school yoga, in a small high school devoted to teenagers who, for whatever reason, need a break from their "regular" schools. They would rather be somewhere else -- not just at this moment, but I think for most of the school day. They daydream out loud, about weekends with no plans, about returning, soon, to their "regular" schools, about going far away to college. I have been warned that they might be difficult. I have been assured dozens of times that a teacher who knows how to handle these kids is only a few doors away, down the hall. I suppose it's good to know. They are anything but difficult.

I think about the place where we stopped for tea on a mountainside in Japan in August, my son, my daughter, and I. Tiny, with rattan mats and silk cushions strewn on the floor, the air still but cooled somehow by the dense canopy of trees outside. We left our shoes outside the door and stayed for a while, happy to escape the intense heat. The view was both spectacular and calming. We didn't do any yoga, though there was a perfect space for it, right by the old bookshelves. Look up spiritual journey in the dictionary, and there's probably a picture of this little room.

I never know exactly what we will do in our hour and a half together at the "special" school, but once all the goldfish have been eaten the girls head to the large cardboard box filled with mats and yoga blocks and blankets and bolsters and select their props and line up on the ratty orange carpet, always in the same order, and we figure it out together. We cross the divide, and the big ugly space in the school for teenagers who need to be away from "regular" teenagers becomes a yoga studio. Not exactly a tiny room on a mountainside with a spectacular view, not quite worthy of a picture in a dictionary, but I like to think we're on a journey together, and that we all leave, somehow, altered.

The first day, one of them asked me what namaste means. I tell them what I think it means, that the teacher in me honors the teacher in you. That may or may not be accurate, but it rings true, so I'm happy to pass it on. I think kids forget, sometimes, how much they have to offer. There is a poet in the group, and a dancer. And much more, I'm sure. Dream a little dream. Imagine. We do it together in our makeshift yoga studio, once a week.

Tied Up With String, or Without

Before my youngest daughter slipped into serious vegetarianism, we would occasionally devour a pound of meat together, in the form of two half pound pub burgers. No buns necessary. Growing up in New York, where delis routinely stuffed obscene piles of meat between two rather nondescript slices of Jewish rye, I have always been about the innards of a sandwich.

My passion for a five inch stack of sliced pastrami has dimmed over the years, but my devotion to burgers remains strong.  I was raised on expensive kosher ground beef, straight from the little butcher shop on Avenue J -- never prepackaged from a grocery store. Sometimes, when I was little, we would walk there (though she had a license, my mother didn't sneak off on a death defying whim behind the wheel of my father's Cadillac until years later to reacquaint herself with driving), but mostly she would place her meat order on Monday morning by telephone. It would arrive later that afternoon, the ground beef, the rib steaks, the veal cutlets, the baby lamb chops -- each item meticulously wrapped up like a present in brown paper. Just as meticulously, she would unwrap and rewrap each item for freezing. 

As I remember it, Wednesday was burger night. My mother, never much of a chef, always made our burgers from scratch. Fastidious as she has always been -- she was repulsed by the thought of touching raw cookie dough -- she thought nothing of plunging her perfectly manicured hands into a bowl filled with ground beef, raw egg, and a bit of broken Wonder bread. Her hands speckled with burger bits and glazed with egg, she would shape the mixture into plump patties, always leaving some in the bowl for me. Yes, at least once a week, I feasted on raw egg and raw meat before dinner. Maybe that explains something. Not sure what, but something. It's a good memory, nevertheless. 

Dinner was predictable and orderly. At six o'clock (give or take a minute or two) I would thrill to the sound of my father's key in the door. I loved that he was home, and I loved that it was dinner time. No matter what was on the menu, every stone in the food pyramid was properly represented, including processed sugar for dessert. My brother, my father, and I always sat in the same seats, as my mother meted out portions and whisked away plates when she decided it was time for us to move on. To this day, I sit in my same old chair when I visit, even though the well-used broiler has long been retired and it's been years since I waited eagerly for my father to arrive home. 

Dinner time when my own children were growing up was quite a different thing. The only thing predictable about it was the availability of something edible; timing and nutritional value was always up for grabs. I like to think the chaos benefited them somehow, made them more adaptable. It amazes me sometimes when they reminisce. There was no predictable daily routine, nothing like the regularly reenacted evenings of my childhood. No glue, I sometimes think, to help the memories stick. Yet somehow they do. 

Haphazard as it all was, though, our ill-defined dinner time seems as firmly embedded in their psyches as six o'clock dinner in Brooklyn all those years ago is in mine. My daughter even remembers our pub burgers fondly, though she cannot even imagine, these days, eating meat. I suppose it's all about the innards, no matter what, all the stuff piled in between the nondescript bookends of what once was and what is still to be. 

Fire and Ice

The television screen froze just after Serena managed to pull herself together and avoid a tie-breaker in the second set. I had missed the first set, but I could see from the score that the fist pumping Serena who had just gotten herself out of a whole heap 'a trouble had been as absent from the opening scene as I was.

In an odd and not particularly telegenic freeze dance, the spectators in Serena's box were caught in what appeared to be an eternal grimace, though they must have known what I and everyone else knew at that moment -- that Serena would take the third set swiftly and efficiently, without giving up a game.

ESPN remained frozen for a least a couple of hours, long enough for me to watch the end of Apollo 13 and then catch the entire movie again as it circled through its continuous loop. I checked back periodically; still, the grimaces. Back to the movie, unchanged from the last time I saw it, and the time before that. My stomach churns while Kevin Bacon struggles to lock the lunar module in place. I wince each time another desperate effort at Mission Control fails. I hold my breath for what seems like an eternity as I search the silent and empty sky for the sudden burst of colorful parachutes. I bite my lip and hold back tears as Tom Hanks is extracted from the floating capsule that somehow got him and his crew almost to the moon and back.

As predictable as Serena's blow-out third set was, I would have savored the stomach churning, the wincing, the breath holding, the lip biting, and the holding back of tears as I watched her game face go through its all too familiar paces before loosening up into the signature wide smile that can make you believe the fierce competitor never really existed. In her thirties now, Serena still, with her last winning shot, jumps up and down like a little girl and seems genuinely stunned at her latest good fortune. As predictable and lacking in true suspense as the tennis itself, the transformation gets to me every time. I'm just a sucker for unadulterated joy.

I felt a tiny bit of self satisfaction when I checked the score at four in the morning and saw I had predicted correctly, but I knew I had cheated. I had seen the look in her eye when she decided enough was enough in the second set, and I had seen it when she emphatically delivered the message to her shell-shocked opponent who had somehow gotten to 5-5 in the second set. I was as sure of a 6-0 third set as I was that the Apollo 13 cast would land safely, but still, it would have been sweet to see.

Flipping back to the movie channel in the wee hours of the morning, I came upon another old favorite -- The Ice Storm. Much more of a sleeper than Apollo 13, it remains unfamiliar to many, and certainly does not get the kind of prime air time reserved for blockbusters. Actually, I don't think I have seen it since it ran in theaters in 2001. I remember vividly, though, how I related equally, at the time, to the adults and the teenagers in the film. Set in 1973, it was a story of kids growing up and getting messed up when I grew up (and was probably getting messed up but didn't know it yet).  When it was released, I was in my early forties, about the same age as the messed up adult characters. I remember the tantalizing mix of predictability and suspense. The stomach churning and the lip biting even though the inevitable doom was foreshadowed constantly in trays of ice cubes inside and glistening icicles outside and icy conversations between people who seemed to have forgotten why they ever loved each other.

I view Serena with awe; I view the narrow escape of the Apollo 13 astronauts, still, with a mix of awe and relief. And I watch The Ice Storm now with the wisdom of almost fifteen additional years under my belt. I want to shake each character, explain to each one how they can make it turn out better if they just don't give in to the ice. Just put on your game face and fight your way through the cold darkness, I want to tell them. But the damage is frozen in time.

I wish I could predict what happens to the survivors of the ice storm, years later, but when you're dealing with mere mortals, it's not so easy.

Power of Balance

For years, the little piece of paper that confirms my certification as a yoga teacher has done little more than gather dust in the drawer of my nightstand. Now that I am permanently "in the system" at Lululemon, my fifteen per cent teacher discount unquestioned as long as they are too polite to ask whether those size 4 shorts are really for me, I could not imagine why the little certificate would ever again see the light of day.

Sure, I have taught some yoga over the years, but I never really intended to turn it into a career. For me, a very reluctant and skeptical latecomer to the practice, yoga always seemed more of a vocation than a vocation. Teacher training, in fact, almost ruined it for me, blurring the line between the mercenary and the passionate. Not only did I resist teaching, but I abandoned yoga entirely, for a while, anyway.

A couple of years ago, when it came time to dust off my law degree and my various lapsed bar memberships, I included my yoga teaching credentials on my resume. I kept the email address that identifies me as a "yogi," willing to take the chance -- insisting on it really -- that some prospective attorney/employer would not find it off-putting. Whether by design or by accident, it's worked out, and I've landed on the four corners of my wide yoga feet, balancing my renewed law practice with all the other pieces of me, even the ones that don't come with diplomas or certificates or any additional letters of distinction to to include on my resume. The things that really define me.

Yesterday, at an untimely funeral (are they ever really timely) for the wife of an old friend, I saw several people I had not seen in about twenty-five years. Some had been in their early forties back then when I was in my late twenties, and they had seemed so old and so wise. What struck me as most odd was that I am now much older than they were the last time I saw them, when I was just a young lawyer thinking they had all the answers. After a moment they were all recognizable to me, their faces the same except for some tightening around the lips, some webbing around the eyes, and lots of gray. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could swear it generally took them an extra few moments to recognize me. My metamorphosis, to them at least, is probably far more drastic -- as if I had gone from babyhood to adulthood over night. I have decided to go with other theories though -- their bad eyesight? their dementia? The alternative is too demoralizing, and the funeral was demoralizing enough.

As tangential as I felt -- I had drifted away in the past few years, even from those with whom I had initially remained in touch -- I stayed after the service -- went to the actual burial, went to the "shiva." We stuck together, the group of old work colleagues, making idle conversation. For the most part, we avoided asking each other what we had been doing for twenty-five years.  I extracted myself to spend some time with the aggrieved -- my old dear friend and his grown-up children, married with kids of their own. I think it was more for my comfort than for theirs. They were mourning something concrete, something easy to identify. I was trying to figure out how twenty-five years went by so damn fast.

Dusting off the yoga teaching certificate after all, I am teaching yoga this afternoon to teenagers. Though they are students in a "special" high school, they seem no more or less "special" than any of the teenagers I have known over the years. I approach teaching teenagers the way I approach teaching anybody. I assume they can learn whatever it is I have been hired to teach them on line, or from a book or DVD. I might be able to give some of them some extra tips on how to achieve a perfect downward facing dog, but that's not really the point.

Today, while I guide them through some physical contortions, I hope I will teach them something about santosha -- my favorite of the basic tenets of yoga. Santosha. Total contentment. Not to be confused with unadulterated happiness, certainly not with perfection. When one of my old (and older) colleagues asked me the dreaded question about what I'd been up to for twenty-five years, my response was, I'm sure, excruciatingly vague, except for the part about liking where I've landed, and not wanting to change a thing. Santosha. It took a while, but maybe that's because nobody told me about it when I was a teenager.

Bye Birdie, For Now

At midnight, I had busied myself with all sorts of house straightening, undoing some of the disorder I’d managed to overlook — repeatedly and without much effort — for months. A taxi would be picking us up in less than five hours, and I had not yet packed. I was delaying the inevitable; tossing my things into the three square inches of space allotted to me in one of the suitcases would make it official — the end of summer, the resumed emptying of my nest.

I didn’t even mind the loud dissonant medley being belted out by the small crowd of “besties” gathered in my daughter’s room. College sophomores now, they will continue to send each other off this way for the next week or two, faces slowly disappearing from the obligatory selfie until there’s nobody left. Everything will suddenly seem tidy again, and very quiet.

As her summer break wound down, I began to wonder how the three and a half months of renewed togetherness that had seemed so daunting back in May had flown by so quickly. She denies it, but I can tell by the way she looks at me that she’s worried about how I’ll get by on my own. She thinks I’ll flounder without her guidance. I’ll manage without the guidance; it’s her proximity that I’ll miss. Our morning walks to Starbucks, even when we barely speak. Our tap dances around each others’ moods. Our occasional dinners together, squeezed in between other plans. Figuring out where she hid her keys so I can juggle the cars in our narrow driveway. Cleaning up the mess from her occasional baking episodes, because she really believes I enjoy cleaning the kitchen. Limitless private jokes, an uncanny tendency to say the same thing at the same time.

Life leaves an indelible thumb print on the fast forward button. A bleary eyed woman approached me at my New Orleans hotel this morning as I was getting coffee. “Did you just drop someone off?” she asked. I guessed right. It was her first. Her son no longer needed her, and she would just be hanging around today, killing time until the late flight she had booked — just in case. I reassured her, told her he’d be fine. What I meant to tell her was she’d be fine, but I don’t think she would have believed me.

This year, the drop off was just an aside. I am here for a few days, and we will enjoy the city together, one forkful at a time. After only eight months here, she seems to know the New Orleans like the back of her hand, even the potholes that keep turning my insides into gumbo as we tool around in our rental car searching for our next meal. Last year, I was worried. Worried about whether she would make friends, whether she would be homesick. This year I am worried that waiting for her stored boxes might interfere with lunch.

With the image of her hometown besties gathered in her room still fresh in my mind, I hung out for a while in the dorm, enjoying the newer crop of friends. If there was a midnight serenade, I missed it, having escaped long before that to the relative quiet of my hotel room. There is nothing for me to do this morning, except wonder about breakfast.

Sayonara, Japan, For Now

Dinner at Ike's

I visit Japan in the summer because my son lives there. It's far, but at least it's not the moon.

When he first moved there, three years ago, he lived in a small town called Himeji. Again, not the moon, but I often wonder whether it's all that different. There was a Starbucks in Himeji, one that claimed to offer free wifi, but I quickly gave up on cracking the secret access code. In an entire week, we met one other American  family there -- missionaries, there to straighten out the nonbelievers, I suppose. I didn't mention I was Jewish.

A year later, my son moved to Kobe, a beautiful city not far from Himeji but far less like the moon. As alien as everything about Japan still seemed to me on my next visit, I was feeling a bit more  comfortable by then. I was almost starting to understand what drew him there. Almost.

It's been two years since my last visit, and I finally got a few things a bit more right. The hotel I picked, based upon a vague neighborhood recommendation from my son and cost -- much less than the uber luxury hotels with available rooms, much more than the "love" hotels with available rooms stocked with sex toys. Just a tad more well planned than throwing a dart at a map, really, but as it turns out, it's a lovely hotel in a beautiful part of the city. I nod several times daily in a kind of fish-out-of-water-solidarity when I pass other non-Asians. Most are European, but still, we take comfort in our shared foreign-ness.

The other night, my daughter and I joined my son and his friends/work colleagues for dinner. One of them was moving to Tokyo; it was a surprise goodbye party. The party was held in their Cheers, the equivalent of my favorite neighborhood watering hole in Midwestern suburbia, where it feels as if you are home, among family. The place is owned by a Canadian of German extraction and a Thai American. It occupies the top two floors of a small commercial building in a trendy area of Kobe. shirtlessness. I am mesmerized by the way he moves in the tiny hot space, an artist at work, his masterpieces simmering.

The first level is a bar, crowded with young regulars who don't seem to mind, or even notice, the close quarters or the noise. Outside is a metal stairway where folks can go for a smoke. Upstairs is a dining area with a large varnished wood table at one end and a smallish kitchen at the other. Between them is a narrow space with counters and high chairs on either side. The slanted windows on the outside wall offers a panoramic view of the street, ablaze with flashing neon. Ike, the Thai American, is in the kitchen, shirtless, a backward baseball cap on his head. He apologizes for his shirtlessness.

Ike takes care of this motley crew of twenty-something and thirty-something Americans, Europeans, and Australians, all teachers at an international school. There is only one native among them, but she is an exotic mix of Spanish and Japanese, so foreign also, in a way. They are energetic, bright, irreverent, diverse. One came to Japan to do some traveling; eleven years later, he is still here, with a wife and two children. One, a striking tall beauty from Milan, came four and a half years ago to find herself, and I wonder why she could not find it in Milan. One, a

young gay man with a sharp sense of humor and a flair for a good story came here from Brisbane because, well, why not? They all refer to Ike, the owner and chef, as "Mom." He is only thirty, but he has found whatever he was looking for, and I am content to rely on him as my stand-in.

I told Ike, that first night, about my quest for some storied Kobe beef. He insisted that we come for dinner the next night, and he would cook for me the best steak I had ever eaten. It wasn't really Kobe beef, but it was steak from Kobe. He warned me I would have to eat it rare, which was a little scary for a gal who prefers her steak to look like shoe leather, but at least he wasn't forcing me to eat fish that was eyeballing me from the plate.

The steak, oozing pink and practically mooing, was unbelievable. So was every other exotic mix of ingredients he prepared and served to us as if we were all his children, home for dinner. Home, in a  cramped duplex restaurant in a trendy neighborhood of Kobe, which is not as alien as, say, Himeji or the moon but pretty damn close.

I promised Ike (and threatened my son) I would be back, maybe in spring when the weather is a bit more humane. I might never feel completely at home, might never understand the lure, but I will continue to visit Japan as long as my son lives there, and as long as Ike is doing the cooking.

Where's the Beef

It's difficult to feel at home in a place where they don't sell shoes in your size.

For the third time in as many years, I find myself smack dab on the other side of the planet, wandering around Japan in blistering heat and wondering whether I am violating any serious social conventions and where I can find a more comfortable pair of shoes. Odds are, yes, and nowhere.

Even early on a Sunday morning the streets and the subway are teeming with people. It's easy to pick my son out of the crowd, with his curly hair and green eyes and considerable height advantage. He resents it, sometimes, when people here treat him like a foreigner, even though he speaks the language and embraces the culture and seems at ease with all the unwritten rules. I, on the other hand, am grateful when people here treat me like a foreigner. It gives me a free pass on the nuances; I can get away with saying "thank you" when, for some reason, "excuse me" is more appropriate.

My comfort level has increased after three visits. I know not to cross when the light is red. I know that I might have to carry my empty water bottle for blocks before I find a recycling bin. I know that as long as I keep moving forward in a straight line the bicyclist speeding up behind me will eventually go around. I know that if I bow back deeply at someone it could lead to a spine numbing, never-ending cycle of forward bends, so I have cultivated a brief nod. I can get away with it -- the Japanese expect our disrespect and excuse our ignorance. There is an upside, here, to having frizzy hair and big feet.

Each time I have visited Japan, I have done so in the company of one of my daughters, both of whom happen to be vegetarians. We discovered early on that vegetarianism is uncommon here, often incomprehensible. My son has learned to explain the situation more fully, ever since he witnessed the look of horror on his sister's face when a mystery sea creature bobbed to the surface of her meatless soup. We scour the pictures on restaurant menus, searching for evidence of creature body parts. We breathe a collective sigh of relief when a bowl of noodles is, in fact, just a bowl of noodles.

I have had enough. I am in Kobe, home of the famed Kobe beef, and I want some. I have yet to see it on a menu, but yesterday I noticed a burger joint not far from our hotel. I am as sure as I have ever been of anything that a big Kobe burger will finally make me feel at home here. It will remind me of my favorite watering hole back in my little Midwestern suburb, where everyone knows everyone's name and I don't worry about saying the wrong thing because everyone says whatever they feel like saying and no matter how many times I promise myself I will branch out and try something new I always end up with a burger, and a good burger always makes me happy.

A long day of wandering in the blistering heat left me with a few blisters, and I am stuck with them because they don't sell shoes here big enough to fit my feet. But they sell bandaids (though they are a bit odd looking), and as soon as I bite into that burger, I'll be feeling no pain, and maybe I'll even feel like I'm home.

Cityscape

It's not all that different from what I'm used to, the Starbucks on the corner of Columbus and West 73rd. The music is a little loud, maybe a bit more edgy. The prices are a bit higher, but the coffee tastes the same.

The seats aren't particularly comfortable, but I don't think folks who live here are inclined to sit too long. I am just visiting, though, so I sit, oblivious to the hard and overly narrow metal chair, and I watch the city wake up. Though it is ridiculously early on a Saturday, I can tell it will be a beautiful day. The sun, invisible to me so far, is bright enough to turn the patch of sky between the buildings lining each side of Columbus a pale blue. A young man wearing a "Camp Canine" tee shirt walks by every few minutes with two different dogs in tow. A small cluster of yellow taxis builds up at each red light, the Korean grocer waters down the sidewalk outside his tiny shop across the street. I stare at the rows of dark green buckets filled with flowers of every color. Last night, I watched a young man stop there to pick up a bunch. They were yellow. A young woman emerges now, her arms laden with long stemmed white bouquets.

The passersby are as multi-colored as the flowers. It is impossible to pinpoint the character of the neighborhood -- only that it is filled with characters. A man walks by, a book open, his lips moving as he mutters. From where I sit, the words appear to be Hebrew, but it is Saturday morning and the man's head is uncovered, so I make no assumptions. The dog walker smiles at me on his umpteenth pass. He is all business, but he must have been struck, finally, by the unfamiliar and unmoving shape in the Starbucks window in a city that is always changing, and always on the move.

As I write, my mom texts me to ask if it's weird, being in Starbucks in the morning without my morning Starbucks buddies. Weird that she would ask me that as I sit here wondering what they are doing now, a thousand miles away, these people I have known only a short time but who have become as much a part of my daily routine as my grande blonde with room for cream. Sometimes we chat, sometimes we all sit quietly buried in our own electronic devices, but we notice when someone is missing. And we notice when there is a newcomer, although we pretend not to.

In the little Starbucks on the corner of Columbus and West 73rd, there is no evidence of a "usual" crowd. I cannot imagine coming in here one morning to find my grande blonde with room for cream waiting for me, to be greeted by name by everyone behind the counter. It's not that anybody is particularly unfriendly; it's just that the landscape is too busy, and it moves way too quickly.

The dog walker appears, this time without dogs, and comes in for a coffee. We nod at each other, and we both move on. The patch of sky has become a deeper blue. The Korean grocer has gone inside. More dogs, more taxis, more people of every color.

I am here for only a short time; there is no time to linger. I will go buy some flowers, and I will try to keep pace with the parade of characters

in my old home town.