Head in the Clouds

When clouds are pasted onto the horizon in the still dim light of early dawn, they can look like mountains. As I drove eastward this morning toward the rented townhouse that I have been slowly filling with the stuff I can live without temporarily but cannot leave behind -- a motley collection of coffee mugs, crystal goblets, uncomfortable shoes, cocktail dresses -- I imagined that I was visiting my vacation home. A small chalet, maybe, tucked away from reality on the ledge of a rocky slope.

In a few short weeks, the rented townhouse will be my reality, no longer just a haven where I can escape for a brief visit. The house I have lived in for almost twenty years will be emptied of my stuff and filled with somebody else's. A young child whose name I do not know will sleep where my children once slept, unfamiliar aromas will permeate the kitchen, another woman's jeans will be shrinking in the dryer. The worn molding around the front door will become just something else to repair; it will no longer be a fond reminder of a beloved dog unable to contain his excitement when the UPS guy visits, or a squirrel scurries across the lawn, or when a leaf blows by. Eventually, the insidious puggle hairs that defy vacuuming and settle onto every inch of fabric will dissipate, and all evidence of our life there will be erased.

It's odd. What I love most about the townhouse, my vacation home, is that it is a clean slate. Yet, almost every moment I spend there is spent examining spaces and figuring out where and how my stuff will fit. I travel with measuring tape, I envision still unfurnished rooms configured in ways that will seem familiar. I envision puggle hairs floating through the air, scratched walls, carpet stains with known origins. I imagine faded Pepsi stains on the ceiling from the time my son and his friend decided to see what happens when you boil a soda can, V-8 stains in the bathroom from the time I tried to bathe a skunked dog in the sink. I wonder how long it will take for my blind dog to figure out the path to my bed each night, how I will explain the new bedding that still smells fresh.

Technically, my old house, the one from which I am slowly erasing myself, is not the house where I grew up. I lived in several homes before I landed there, in that house more spacious than any I had ever known, in a suburb I had never intended to live in, living a suburban life I had never really imagined living. In many ways, though, it is the house where I grew up. It is where my family took shape, it is where I started to figure out who I am. It is a place filled with wonderful memories and a place where I learned many lessons, some of them painful, most of them useful. There was life before that house, and I hope there will be much life after that house, but the meat of my story happened there. It is changing hands, and it will soon be spruced up and coated in new paint, but it will always, in some fundamental way, be mine.

My townhouse in the mountains will likely be temporary, as fleeting as the backdrop of jagged cloud formations in the distance this morning. Maybe it will become more than just a pile of brick and mortar to me, maybe it won't. There are no mountains, but there is plenty of new terrain.

All Hooked Up

I am sitting in the kitchen of my cute little new townhouse while the cable guy marches up and down the stairs in his fluffy white shoe covers and sighs an occasional exasperated sigh while he attempts to get me set up for what I hope will be long cozy hours spent as a certified couch potato.

I pretty much gave up on the cable boxes in my old house years ago. At least now things are happening, now that I am getting a fresh start and a brand new account number. No matter how huffy this cable guy becomes, moving to a new house promises to be a lot simpler than waiting in line at the world (world meaning my world as opposed to the real one) cable headquarters for hours hoping that this time -- just this one time -- when you get to the one window that is open to folks other than those trying to save a stamp by paying their bill in person the clerk behind that window doesn't decide it's time to go to lunch or pee or go in the back room and do a word search puzzle.

Much to my relief, the cable guy looks nothing like Jim Carrey. He looks a bit like Colombo, actually, not quite as adorable as Peter Falk but just as disheveled, with a thick end of cable tubing hanging out the side of his mouth instead of a cigar. He stops by every so often to give me a progress report and ask me the same questions he's already asked more than a few times, and each time he seems to be really deep in thought. Just one more thing, I keep expecting him to say as he pivots back toward me and shakes his head before moving on again to solve the mysteries of the universe. My universe, that is.

Just about every day now I visit my cute little new townhouse, even though I don't officially need to move out of the old one for more than a month. Other than the kitchen table that my daughter and I managed to stuff into her car and the five carved wood coyotes that have stood watch at my front door for years, there is no furniture here. There is diet coke and water and wine, and plenty of toilet paper. Within a few hours, there will be cable. (I'm considering telling him not to bother with the wireless, since I had no trouble logging into somebody's unsecured network.) All I need now is one comfy couch and I am set. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how or why I have accumulated so much other stuff over the years. There is so little I really need.

Yesterday, I took a walk in my new neighborhood. I am only minutes from some of my favorite stores, which is a shame since there's really nothing I need to buy. Still, it's nice to window shop, even to wander through shops stocked with expensive items that serve no purpose that I can think of but are certainly pretty to look at. Nowhere near as pretty as the view of the lake, though, just a few short blocks away. I paused at the edge of a bluff thick with tangled tree branches and autumn leaves, listening to the sound of the gentle waves and marveling at the flat crystalline surface of the water as it prepares to freeze for the long winter. As useless, I suppose, as many of the luxuries for sale in town, but that view, well, you just can't put a price tag on it.

The houses, which became noticeably bigger the nearer I got to the lake, were all quiet. I wondered about the people inside, even wondered a bit about their "stuff." No doubt there is a lot of it, and, to be fair, the most useless stuff can be enlightening. Even the Halloween decorations give me clues about the nature of the beasts inside.

I am guessing I will fill the rooms and closets and drawers and any available nooks and crannies in my cute little new townhouse with more than water and diet coke and wine and coyotes and toilet paper. Some of it will be useful, most not. As is my custom, I will have no Halloween decorations. (I stand not on principle but on pure laziness.)

Inside, I will try my best to keep it simple. As simple as hooking up a new cable account. As simple as a fresh start.

Shell Games

Early on, I realized I was not hard wired for fantasy. Fantasy in the literary sense anyway.

I was in first or second grade. This I know because I had not yet left behind the old fashioned rows of linked wooden desks with attached seats and obsolete holes into which boys from previous generations dipped the long hair of girls sitting in front of them. By third grade, many of the classrooms in P.S. 217 in Brooklyn had been updated with modern laminate desks, free standing shiny rectangles into which you could stuff your notebooks with covers decorated by Peter Max and textbooks protected by optimistic book covers bearing Ivy League insignias, and, more importantly, from which you could easily extract assorted candies you had purchased during lunch at Morty and Eddies across Coney Island Avenue to help get you through the afternoon. By 1967, a jawbreaker was always within easy reach; there was no need to surreptitiously lift the creaky hinged wooden flap and pray the teacher wouldn't notice.

The scrap paper in those days was so thin and soft it almost felt like cloth. I remember those grainy five by seven sheets of yellowed paper that looked as if they had been shaved off an ancient and decaying bit of tree bark. Once a week, a story would be piped in over the public address system, and, when it was over, the teacher would distribute the flimsy pages and ask us to illustrate what I suppose would be our version of a "take away." I remember thinking the stories were a bit silly, but maybe I was just missing the point.

One week, the protagonist in the story was a fellow named Mr. Turtle. If there was a message in the tale I couldn't tell you, but Mr. Turtle, as I recall, had a wife and some kids and spent his days doing the kinds of mundane things that most dads did. If Mr. Turtle had a first name, it was never revealed. It was the same for Mrs. Turtle, which made more sense because she was a minor character.

As always, I did my best to color the best picture in the class. To me, anyway, my figures looked lifelike, and everything appeared to be drawn to scale. My coloring was precise; I never went outside the lines. My rendering of Mr. Turtle was so realistic it could have been mistaken for a photo of a neighborhood dad, maybe even mine. I was proud to print my name on the back.

The teacher collected the drawings and held them up for everyone to see, one by one. The deeper she got into the pile, the more mortified I became. Everybody else had drawn Mr. Turtle as a turtle, not a human. It had never occurred to me that a turtle would do things that a person would do -- eat breakfast at a table, drive a car, speak English. It had not even crossed my mind that someone named Mr. Turtle would actually be a turtle. When the teacher got to my picture, she looked concerned. The boy behind me, the same one who had squeezed my hand on the first day of school so hard it made me cry, snickered. I wanted to crawl into my inkwell.

All these years later, as I try to write a novel, I feel like that little girl who wants to disappear into the inkwell. Fiction, to me, is as far fetched as the most fantastical fantasy, at least when it comes to creating it. Somehow, every character is a hodgepodge composite of me and the people I've come to know along the way. As hard as I try to escape reality, it shadows me with every keystroke. The stories I write are remarkably similar to my own stories, then and now.

I fear I am destined to be a turtle without a shell, exposed, at risk, unable to imagine life as anything but a turtle.

Lost in Space

Almost everything about the house seemed perfect. Walking distance to town, close enough to the high school in our old town so my daughter doesn't need to adjust her alarm clock but far enough away to at least give me the illusion of a fresh start. A third bedroom in case an adult child stops by. A fenced in yard for the blind dog. A brand new refrigerator, updated bathrooms, polished wood floors.

There was one major drawback: no storage space. None to speak of anyway. Every inch of the place was designed for living in the present, with just enough square footage devoted to closets that would keep us well stocked with necessary food and clothing. There was no basement crawl space where I could put the excess furniture and boxes containing who knows what, stuff that has travelled with me from home to home, some of it more than once. There were no extra nooks or crannies where I could hang unworn clothing that I have promised myself I would wear one day, where I could stow folded sweaters that I might one day unfold. One day, maybe, when hell freezes over.

It was love at first sight, except for the tiny problem of squeezing a five bedroom house filled with enough crap in the basement to fill up another handful of rooms into a wildly efficient vertical apartment. Really big square peg, really small square hole. Spatial reasoning isn't my thing, but I felt fairly confident this was not going to be an easy fit.

The rent was just a smidge on the wrong side of my upper limit, but the owner admitted she would rather negotiate a bit with a person she liked than grab the full amount from someone who didn't strike her as an ideal tenant. I could tell she liked me. We bonded over lots of topics -- kids, colleges, New York, favorite restaurants. By the time my older daughter stopped by with her posse to offer up a second (and third, and fourth) opinion, I knew I was golden. We had our cell phones out, and we were showing each other pictures of our dogs. I could almost hear the reverse cha-ching of her mental register knocking off a few bucks.

I couldn't sleep that night, so I counted, um, rooms. And square feet. I thought about what I could take with me and what I would have to leave behind. It occurred to me I could take just about everything I need, and what I could not take was the stuff that has been languishing so long in the far reaches of my basement and closets I can barely see it under the dust. And even if hell does freeze over, I probably won't have much use for sweaters that have been folded so long the creases would defy even the most heavy duty steamer.

Not a drawback at all, the lack of storage space. Come to think of it, it's one of the most attractive features, and I should probably pay a premium for it. But I won't. Not after we've shared pictures of our dogs.

Atone of Voice (and Deed)

A Christian friend asked me recently why, if we Jews know our slates will be wiped clean on Yom Kippur, nobody has ever invited him to get in on the action. A reasonable question, I suppose.

Naturally, my first instinct was to get defensive. I get defensive when somebody asks me what time it is. Not wanting him to think I would ever try to keep the secret to everlasting life to myself, I explained to him that I don't really believe slates are wiped clean on Yom Kippur, as if by some heavenly "delete" key. "It's the day of atonement," I told him, "not absolution."

"But what about the people who really do believe?" His religious convictions are so powerful he considers his beliefs to be knowledge, unassailable fact. We've had this argument many times; he will never accept my position, that beliefs are a matter of opinion. I envy his certainty.

Synagogue sanctuaries burst at the seams on the High Holidays, and even the most secular Jews believe strongly enough in the power of God to seal their fate for another year to fast on Yom Kippur. The promise of forgiveness is worth even the price of admission to temple that day, which is steep. If I were terminally ill and somebody charged me an arm and a leg for some alleged (but as yet unproven) miracle cure, I'd be reaching into my wallet faster than you can say chopped herring on a bagel. (I may not make it to the Book of Life, but I always make it to the "break fast.") I'm a cynic but I'm not a complete idiot.

For me, it's more about hope than belief. And though I may possess way more than a scintilla of doubt about the whole story, there's a piece of me that thinks it couldn't hurt. I know that good people who have fasted and apologized up the wazoo die every year while unreformed sinners live on, but it's only human to try to increase your odds.

I don't fast, I don't recite Hebrew prayers all day, and I rarely even go to temple any more. But I reflect -- a lot -- and I make lots of mental lists of my sins -- real, imagined, or even unimagined. And I silently apologize to God -- wherever she is -- and sometimes I even repent out loud to folks I believe I have offended. Whatever the case may be, I know full well that the sincerity of an apology can only be measured by the behavior that follows, and as arduous as a day spent in temple while on the verge of starvation might be, the real work lies ahead.

When I see my Christian friend today, I will not invite him to temple (that would be like inviting him to a stranger's house). But I will share with him my own secret to, if not life everlasting, a life that feels more right. Acknowledging sins, reflecting, and apologizing are positive steps. And if your intentions are good, you can at least let yourself off the hook, even if God or the folks you've offended don't.

Which is, as they say, not chopped liver.

A Love Well Earned

I moved the miniature pewter vase out of the way so I could get a better look at the picture.

“That’s Stanley,” Elaine announced from across the bedroom. I like Elaine a lot. It was unlike her to point out the obvious, that the handsome man in a tuxedo standing next to her in the picture was Stanley, her late husband.

I gave her a watered down version of the exasperated look I generally reserve for my mother. “Yes, I know.”

“No, that’s Stanley,” she said, pointing toward the picture. “And that’s Stanley,” she said, pointing toward the large pewter vase tucked into the shelf on her nightstand. Funny, it looked exactly like the one I had moved to get a better look at the picture.

Urns. Two urns. Filled with Stanley’s ashes. How fun! I couldn’t wait to see my mother’s reaction. (She was in the room with us, but she can’t hear a thing.) I pointed to the large urn on the nightstand and tried to be as deliberate as possible as I mouthed the information. “Stan-ley’s-ash-es-are-in-there!”  She looked horrified. I was delighted.

I had always liked Elaine; now I was simply in awe. She had just sold her house in New Jersey and was showing us her new apartment in Manhattan. It was a daunting move for a woman in her eighties, even one as lively as Elaine. But she was not alone. She had brought her dead husband with her. A little creepy, maybe, but it seemed to make so much sense.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask, like which part of Stanley is in the tiny urn, but I settled on “why two?” Elaine explained that the large urn by the bed, the one containing the bulk of Stanley, was there for bedtime chats. A bit one-sided, I would imagine, but chats involving Stanley and Elaine were always a bit one-sided. I remember marveling at how quiet he was compared to his entertaining wife. Once, I told him I thought she was awesome. “She is the best,” he said, gazing at her with the kind of love in his eyes I had thought only existed in fairy tales.

Elaine explained that the little one traveled with her. Not everywhere but on big trips, so Stanley could always be by her side. Or at least in her purse. They had planned it this way. Ultimately, their ashes would be scattered together, maybe into the ocean from the deck of one of their favorite cruise ships. But as long as one was alive, they would continue to travel, together. And if Elaine went first and Stanley ended up on a cruise with another woman, he was to cast her ashes off the deck into the wind so they would blow into the bitch’s eyes.

It’s a great love story, the story of the two urns. It’s about two well-heeled people who had all the trappings of a great life but had all they needed just by being together. There was no funeral for Stanley. No speeches, no tearful tributes, no chapels packed with people wearing black and not knowing what to say. Just a quiet ride back home with his wife.

Stanley stayed in the apartment while Elaine, my mom, and I went out to dinner. Walking to the car, Elaine confided that she wished Stanley could have been with her to enjoy her new city life. No doubt she went home and told Stanley the same thing.

And, no doubt, he listened to her intently and didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. That’s Stanley.

Passage of Rites

The Jewish holidays are upon us, a bit early this year, but, as always, I am prepared to break with old traditions and create a few new ones.

I began bending the rules last night, showing up at my house while some potential buyers were taking a third look at my house. The broker struck up a conversation with me. He wanted to know what my older children were up to, and he lit up when I told him my son was in Japan. Ah, the Asia connection. He is from Shanghai, as are his clients, the young family still kicking all the tires in my house. Though he has never been to Japan and I have never been to Shanghai, we managed to find some common ground. Neither one of us speaks Japanese, and we both agree that Tokyo is very expensive. I feel very close to him now. Maybe he will put in a good word for my house.

Temple is not on my agenda this year, but I'm okay with that. As long as I connect, somehow, with being Jewish, I feel as if I am celebrating the holidays. We all need to connect with our heritage, even on ordinary days. The young mom from Shanghai looked hopeful last night when she asked me if my neighbors were Asian. She explained she thought they might be because they seem to enjoy gardening. They are not Asian. Her disappointment was obvious.

I spent this morning making deep spiritual connections with the handful of Jews who had snuck into Starbucks while the others are putting on dark suits for temple. We talked of blintzes and tsimmes and cholent and gribenes and schmaltz and our grandmothers' homemade chopped liver. Beats the crap out of listening to a long winded sermon. The other day, I found myself elbow deep in sticky challah dough, helping my friend whip up a few loaves. You haven't lived until you've tasted homemade challah. (You also gain an appreciation for the upper body strength of an old fashioned bubbe.) My daughter and I polished off half of it last night before we went to a restaurant for dinner. We felt satisfied that we had connected with our Jewishness. At the restaurant, she had capellini, I had tilapia, but the folks at the next table were eating matzoh ball soup. Again, we felt satisfied. We had connected with Jews. The holiday spirit was intact.

Some traditions remain unbroken. Tonight, I will have dinner at the home of good friends who, for years, have adopted my family for the holidays. I know exactly what I will eat, from the gefilte fish through dessert. As always, some of the usual guests will be absent. This year, my children are dispersed to various continents, but they'll all be with me at dinner, at least in spirit. They always are.

Hey, it wouldn't be a holiday without some breaks with tradition. As long as nobody takes away the brisket, I'll be all right.