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.