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.