Burning Down the House

HOBB drove up to the bungalow earlier tonight -- when it was still Thursday -- after his new media workshop at Columbia and I stayed in the city because of several appointments tomorrow in Manhattan. The most pressing one is the 9 am drop-off of my brand new MacBook Pro at the Apple store on Broadway so a resident "Genius" can transfer the files from my mega-sucky Acer PC into this sleek, slivery machine which I expect will change my entire life. The purchase of the Mac was inspired by my impending identity as a full-time graduate student at Columbia, in the very school where my husband is a professor.

The thing is, it is nearly 4 am and I am still awake. The grande iced coffee I had at 8 pm might have something to do with it. I was en route to the gym at that hour and needed something to inspire my three-mile elliptical workout. The caffeine worked so well that I was wired even after my sweat-drenched session, so after showering, I wandered down to the 3rd floor of the JCC to check out the Israeli dancing and was surprised to find a party-like scene with dozens of people doing complicated choreography to contemporary and classic Hebrew songs. It was so fascinating that I stayed until midnight, enchanted by the spectacle, talking to people, fantasizing about learning these dances and joining the Israeli dancers as soon as possible, maybe even by next week.

It was well after midnight when I returned home (having stopped at Fairway to buy steak and lambchops and then having walked with a friend up to 96th street) and I was completely famished so I put the meat up to broil and went to turn on the television, a rare treat enabled by my solitude. (If any other members of the Bungalow Family had been around, vigorous negotiation would have ensued and I would have retreated to my room with a grumble and a fashion magazine.)

While I was watching Law and Order, the meat caught fire in the oven. I found out because of the sudden urgent beeping sound the oven was making. Also… the smell of burning appliance that filled the urban bungalow. I rushed to the kitchen, saw the fire and became paralyzed with fear. What to do??? I couldn't remember. Should I google "fires in oven?" I wondered as I stared dumbly at the dancing bonfire behind the glass. I didn't want to open the oven door as I was afraid of flames leaping out, fed by the oxygen...on the other hand, I was pretty sure letting a lively fire burn in the kitchen was a bad idea.

After a small eternity, the fire burned itself out. I breathed a sigh of relief, removed the charred pan and actually ate parts of the lamb chop that had not turned into charcoal.

To calm down after my ordeal, I watched two back-to-back Law and Order episodes, each more disturbing than the next. That morphed into two episodes of a true crime show called Snapped which features women who commit heinous crimes...and almost get away with it. Both episodes last night had to do with women having affairs who kill, or try to kill their husbands.

After a futile fifteen minutes spent tossing and turning in bed, I got up and decided to research what to do if I were to encounter a bear in the wild. This quest for information arose out of my early morning hike with HOBB on the Appalachian trail earlier today, the first twenty minutes of which were spent in abject terror, anticipating an up close and personal bear encounter.

Because the information I found strikes me as both reassuring and helpful, I thought I'd pass it on so others who fear bear encounters might be likewise armed with useful knowledge. Maybe later I'll look up what to do if your oven catches on fire. Or what to do when you can't fall asleep, though I have a solution and this is it.

Close Encounters: What to do

If you see a bear, avoid it if you can. Give the bear every opportunity to avoid you. If you do encounter a bear at close distance, remain calm. Attacks are rare. Chances are, you are not in danger. Most bears are interested only in protecting food, cubs or their "personal space." Once the threat is removed, they will move on. Remember the following:

Identify Yourself

Let the bear know you are human. Talk to the bear in a normal voice. Wave your arms. Help the bear recognize you. If a bear cannot tell what you are, it may come closer or stand on its hind legs to get a better look or smell. A standing bear is usually curious, not threatening. You may try to back away slowly diagonally, but if the bear follows, stop and hold your ground.

Don't Run

You can't outrun a bear. They have been clocked at speeds up to 35 mph, and like dogs, they will chase fleeing animals. Bears often make bluff charges, sometimes to within 10 feet of their adversary, without making contact. Continue waving your arms and talking to the bear. If the bear gets too close, raise your voice and be more aggressive. Bang pots and pans. Use noisemakers. Never imitate bear sounds or make a high-pitched squeal.

If Attacked

If a bear actually makes contact, surrender! Fall to the ground and play dead. Lie flat on your stomach, or curl up in a ball with your hands behind your neck. Typically, a bear will break off it's attack once it feels the threat has been eliminated. Remain motionless for as long as possible. If you move, and the bear sees or hears you, it may return and renew its attack. In rare instances, particularly with black bears, an attacking bear may perceive a person as food. If the bear continues biting you long after you assume a defensive posture, it likely is a predatory attack. Fight back vigorously.

Audience with God

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Middle Babe surprised me with a confession:

"It's so hard to believe in God. D'you know what I mean?"

So moved was I by my child's cosmic musings that I immediately wanted to accompany her in her place of doubt.

But as someone who doubts the existence of just about everything except for God, I had to make a confession of my own. I told my daughter that although I knew exactly what she meant, I have always felt God by my side.

No matter where I roam, Hashem is my home.

Still, formal prayer has always been a bit of a challenge for me. Recently, at a launch event for the publication of the new mahzor Lev Shalem, published by the Rabbinical Assembly* I caused a bit of a stir by alluding to my own experience of DADD: Davening Attention Deficit Disorder...a condition where one finds oneself drawn to the experience of prayer but unable to sustain interest in a traditional synagogue service or the printed page of the siddur, especially on the High Holidays when davening assumes the form of a vast sea, with no shore in sight.

Which is not to say that I have never had transcendent davening experiences within the confines of a sanctuary or haven't felt a path to God or been warmed by the presence of community or buoyed by the bond of Jewish peoplehood and the tragic and triumphant course of our history.

Indeed, some of my deepest and warmest memories reside within the walls of a shul, specifically, the Marathon Jewish Community Center in Douglaston, New York, where I grew up as the daughter of a charismatic and caring rabbi. Far from being a cynical PK (preacher's kid) I felt fortunate to be surrounded by an entire community that watched out for me and my siblings. My father was Kennedyesque and a commanding orator. I loved our Shabbat and holiday services with their quaint decorum, hazzanut and responsive readings in English sprinkled liberally amid the traditional Hebrew and Aramaic prayer service.

(Of course, there is much more to say about the experience of growing up as the first family of a tightly-knit Jewish community -- especially in the sixties and seventies -- and I have, in other venues. There were personal style restrictions, especially when it came to hair and clothes, meaning that I never looked quite the way I wanted. My siblings and I were kept apart from the kids in our community in the manner familiar to kids of the aristocracy. I had a secret rebellious life, which grew more complex as I entered adolescence. To this day, I am simultaneously drawn to and harshly critical of clergy.)

Though I didn't have the negative religious experience that people often recount when discussing their adulthood aversion to prayer, I do find myself struggling with the details of davening: the synagogue, the length of the service, the siddur, the choreography of prayer.

Which is why what I did this morning is so thrilling and shocking to me.

Heavy of heart, troubled of soul, I wandered aimlessly through the empty rooms of the Urban Bungalow until my eyes lit on the Koren siddur, sitting next to a Paul Auster novel on a shelf in our dining room.

I opened up the prayerbook and started to read the Shacharit service. I thanked God for restoring my soul. I praised God for giving strength to the weak, for clothing the naked, for giving sight to the blind. I stayed with the proscribed prayer for a bit, then, as if animated by a force outside myself, I walked into the living room, located the velvet tallit bag that bears my husband's Hebrew name in golden thread -- my present to him on his 60th birthday - withdrew the majestic garment, pausing in awe and terror, and then wrapped it tentatively around myself, over my head, obscuring my gaze.

Once enclosed by the wool, I shut my eyes and rocked. I do not know how long I stood but I knew before whom I was standing.

I stood and rocked, stood and rocked, stood and rocked, surrounded by the soft, sweet smell of the garment. And when I finally ceased my prayer and removed the tallit from my shoulders, shaking it out on my bed to figure out the folding, I was transfixed by the new mark it bore: a blotchy tear stain, Rorschach-like, smudged with grey-black kohl, unmistakeably that of a woman.
_________

* full disclosure: I represent the Rabbinical Assembly and mahzor Lev Shalem.

Starbucks on Shabbat

I'm trying out something new, which is really something old, though it is new to me.

I call it blog-byting.

By this I mean that when I have a cool idea, but no time to expound upon it, I will simply produce a mini blog post instead of my typical tome.

So here is my very first blog-byte, which is really a question:

Is it okay to use a Starbucks gift card on Shabbat?

The answer, for those who adhere to a more-or-less halakhic observance of Shabbat, is "obviously not," but I think that perhaps we should reconsider this, based on two ideas:

• The Shabbat Elevator
• The fact that being able to get an iced Venti coffee or Frappuccino on these deadly summer afternoons could be considered "oneg Shabbat," the enjoyment of Shabbat, or even "pikuach nefesh," a life-saving maneuver, which is a mitzvah, to be sure.

This blog-byte presumes a certain Jewish literacy so if you are reading this and need help, call up your Jewiest friend, who can hopefully explain what Shabbat elevators are and what the deal is with spending money on Shabbat. Because this is a blog-byte, I will be logging off now to resume my regularly-scheduled crushing workload and leave this provocative question dangling in cyberspace.

Or blowin' in the blogosphere, if you will.

Opinions, comments and feedback are welcome.

Shabbat Shalom!!

Andre Aciman/Glow Lotion/Existential Despair

When I staggered out of bed this morning, plunking myself in front of my laptop, armed with a steaming cup of Oren's Beowulf Blend, the following email popped out at me from my insanely overcrowded Inbox:

Hi there,

Thank you for contacting Soap & Glory – we really appreciate hearing from you!We are currently aware that our ‘Glow Lotion’ is out of stock in stores and on www.target.com. We are striving to rectify this, but are unsure of when it will be back.I would also like to bring to your attention our press release regarding Target and www.target.com. Please have a read here. We would like you to know that S&G is not going away from the US, we will be selling through another retailer in September. Until we launch with our new retailer, we ask for your patience as due to Target clearing stock, you may not be able to purchase some of your favourites. In the meantime, if you are struggling with your local Target, you may have better luck purchasing on www.target.com than in store.I hope this information is helpful.

Kind regards

Jess

Yes, I am that woman who writes to the customer service people when she cannot find a beloved product on the shelves. And gets abnormally excited when they write back.

In the case of Soap&Glory's Glow Lotion -- one of the world's most amazing (and cheap!!!) beauty products, missing from the shelves of Target which has carried it exclusively for the past several years -- the customer service people are based across the pond, somewhere in the UK.

And while I cannot diminish the great sense of relief I felt to have the mystery of the missing Glow Lotion finally solved, I was exponentially more delighted to learn that this addictive elixir wasn't gone forever, simply in short supply until Soap&Glory products appear in a specialized beauty retailer, as the press release details.

You see, the disappearance of beloved products causes me to go into a state of existential instability, as I have detailed in a previous blog post (Discontinuity/February 18, 2010). Indeed, I still have not gotten over the demise of Origin's Ginger Glimmer (http://www.origins.com/)

and have endeared myself (or established myself as a wackadoodle) with the sales staff at the store on Broadway and 84th street, where I periodically pop in to optimistically inquire about the product's sudden re-appearance, even after the folks at company headquarters told me (several times) that it is no longer available and that every single store in America is apparently out of it.

I know, because I have called them all, scoring the last stash of the stuff, which I tracked down at a mall in Westchester.

Getting back to the Glow Lotion...the appearance of Jess's email this morning was fortuitous timing because just last night I had the privilege of hearing Andre Aciman in conversation with Joshua Ellison, the founder of Habitus: A Diaspora Journal (http://www.habitusmag.com/) at the magnificent Museum of Jewish Heritage (http://www.mjhnyc.org/). (Full disclosure: I work with the impressive Mr. Ellison, promoting his remarkable journal.)

In the course of the public conversation on the subject of Is New York City the Diaspora? Aciman spoke about the sense of spiritual dislocation he experienced during the renovation of Straus Park, a rather pathetic little park at the intersection of Broadway, West End and 106th Street, a subject he has written and lectured about extensively.

Aciman writes from the perspective of an exile or displaced person. Some critics point to him as the quintessential scribe on this subject; indeed, this very fact informed his participation in last night's event. An Egyptian Jew whose journey to New York entailed the adoption of other national identities, he addressed the inherently Jewish nature of exile last night...and how that rootless, insecure identity that shaped the consciousness of an entire people is affected, changed or possibly even obliterated by the experience of living in New York City, clearly the most extreme and enduring of all the new Jerusalems.

As I looked around the room, I kvelled at the packed space and rapt faces turned towards the conversation. My joy was compounded by the fact that I had expected the worst (no one showing up) due to the weather (rainy) and the location (remote, at the southwest tip of the island with a fabulous view of the Statue of Liberty.) In general, doing events in Manhattan is a masochistic endeavor because no matter how great the program or how much advance buzz there is, you are up against thousands of other happenings in this restless town and are never sure that your event will be a hit or that even one person will show up.

So I was in a state of supreme happiness.

However, my personal takeaway was something that might not have impressed other members of the audience, indeed, may have gone unnoticed.

It was Aciman's allusion to his existential despair in the course of the renovation of Straus Park, in particular at the statue of Mnemosyne, or Memory.

And though I was born in this non-Diaspora in the latter half of the 20th Century, making me an historical anomaly -- a Jew who feels entirely at home outside the Jewish homeland, a member of a minority with paradoxically elite social and cultural status, an unambiguous American citizen who has never once felt the sting of persecution on her native soil -- the sense of exile I experience is internal and ubiquitous. stemming either from my adoption or from the metaphysical force of collective Jewish memory or from something else, rendering me sad and shaky when Glow Lotion goes missing from the shelf of my local Target.

Oy Story...or a Twist on the Gift of the Magi

The Urban Bungalow is littered with Dave and Buster's paraphernalia, owing to Middle Babe's penchant for patronizing the place with her friends.

For the past couple of months she's been home from college I admit I've been curious about Dave and Buster's since she has described it as a nocturnal playground, an Eden of alcoholic drinks, arcade games, hoops, upbeat music and jolly youngsters.

Having stumbled into the Dave and Buster's at 9:45 pm at the Palisade's Mall this past Sunday, I can vouch for the aptness of the observation that one man's heaven is another man's hell for no place I have recently visited has made me want to run screaming into a forest populated by hungry bears like Dave and Buster's.

But why would a groovy chick like me even find herself at a suburban mall on a Sunday night, you might ask?

The answer is possibly even more disturbing than the fact that I was wandering around a mall at night to begin with: to see the 10:05 pm showing of Toy Story 3. In 3D.

Reader, this was not my idea.

You see, we were en route back to the urban bungalow after an intensely wonderful weekend which was capped by a Sunday night barbeque on the lawn of our bungalow with Middle Babe and her GC (Gentleman Caller).

With Alfie and Nala the Pomeranians taken care of my our daughter and her GC for the evening, we had the same thought: "Screw Manhattan movie prices! We're stopping to see a movie on the way home!"

The thing was, by the time we cleaned up dinner, packed up our stuff and got on the road, it was already verging on 9 pm. Though readers of this blog can attest to my penchant for partying like it's 1999, with HOBB at the wheel of our Honda, I started drowsing off, exhausted by my weekend warrior workouts, my hostess duties and the relentless heat.

Positive that my husband was likewise anticipating nothing more adventurous than climbing into our bed back in Manhattan, I was positively SHOCKED when he pulled off 87 at the Palisades Mall and cheerfully announced our night activity -- the next showing of Toy Story 3, which he was dying to see as Middle Babe gave it a rave review.

Loathe to be a party-pooper, I weakly agreed that this was a fabulous idea.

The Palisades Mall is a nightmarish work of architecture designed by a descendant of the Marquis de Sade. It has an industrial feeling to it, like being inside a gigantic warehouse held up by scaffolding. The construction also has an aura of instability to it, looking like oversized metal Lincoln Logs. This brings to mind the possible existence of a giant and malevolent toddler, bent on destroying the entire structure ANY MOMENT NOW.

Late on Sunday night, the place was deserted with the escalators stopped dead in their tracks and only the ghostly movement of elevators moving up and down. Most of the retails shops were long closed, a good thing considering the freakish window displays. There was a store hawking the world's most hideous evening dresses and gowns; another one carrying fake-looking artifacts from Africa, India and the Philippines.

"Can you imagine being locked inside this place, overnight?" I whispered to HOBB as we searched for the movie theatre. "It's a great premise for a slasher film. Those dresses could come to life and strangle us."

In addition to the Loew's at the mall, the chain restaurants were open. Included in this group was Dave and Buster's -- which we wandered through like a pair of stoned and anguished tourists -- and Friday's, where we had the super-relaxing experience of sitting at the bar drinking tea and really horrendous coffee while a Beyonce song blasted, followed by some unrecognizable rap/disco rant thing.

Finally, the time came to see our film.

Nudged into fake wakefulness by the caffeine, we presented our tickets, were awarded with Al Maysles-shaped 3-D glasses and rushed into Theatre 11...worried that we would be relegated to the front row due to the overflow crowd. Instead, we found ourselves gaping at the grand total of 9 other movie-goers who also had the weird inspiration to see this kiddie flick at 10:05 at night.

We grabbed two perfect seats in the dead center of the auditorium. After an interminable presentation of previews of children's movies, Toy Story 3 began.

The good news is that the film was diverting, even creative and touching in parts.

The sad news is that I was the only one who actually saw it. About ten minutes into the film, HOBB fell asleep, waking up only to briefly share the popcorn I bought midway through.

Since he was yawning mightily as we left the theatre, I took the wheel on the drive back to Manhattan, instructing HOBB to keep up his end of the conversation so that I would not fall asleep.

And as I drove down 87 into Westchester County, I felt HOBB beaming with pride...and satisfaction. Correction. Beaming? He was positively gloating. In fact, he was GLOWING with pride. He was radioactive. I looked towards him quizzically.

"You know, I didn't really want to see a movie but I knew how much it meant to you, so I decided to give you a treat," he said.

"What?" I fairly shouted. "Are you nuts? I slept the entire way here! Yeah...I wanted to see a movie FIVE HOURS AGO...not at 10 pm! And not a baby movie!!! I almost shot myself during the trailers! You've got it backwards...it was ME who didn't want to disappoint YOU!"

HOBB sat silently, stunned. And then burst into laughter. Which I had to join, of course, because I thought about the past few hours -- the hell of wandering sleepily through the carnival ambiance of Dave and Buster's and drinking bad coffee at the uber-loud Fridays and having HOBB sleep through a kiddie movie that only he wanted to see in the first place.

Yeah, our entire evening had been utterly ludicrous but also very sweet. And kind of epic. Like The Gift of the Magi or something out of a Chasidic tale.

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes....Misery??

Could this simply be a case of New York Magazine being its irritating, pseudo-trendspotting self, or is our nation indeed overrun by a generation of spoiled brats who decided to have children as a gift to themselves...and are now amazed to discover that childrearing is challenging, difficult and often NO FUN AT ALL?

In a maddeningly shallow and inconclusive article, Jennifer Senior, a writer I often admire, attempts to nail this new reality by introducing us to whiny men and women -- and ambiguous experts -- who support her thesis that the modern American parent hates parenting because it is no fun. Her message is, reader, before you breed, consider the following: You have to make sure your kid does homework and this will produce a power struggle. Your toddler will destroy the object you spent the morning constructing and you will have to give them a time-out. You will no longer feel sexy and edgy. Check out the sordid details here: All Joy and No Fun.

I read this article on a blessedly air-conditioned #1 train during the height of yesterday's heatwave and could barely refrain from losing my cool. Not because I think Senior made the whole thing up; after all, she begins the article with an anecdote about her own toddler destroying the garage she built. Rather, I was aghast at the sheer stupidity of those parents who are shocked and awed by the fact that life changes when you have children. Who are amazed to discover that toddlers are little terrorists. Who cannot accept the fact that some self-indulgent stuff will have to be put on hold for maybe as long as eighteen years as part of the bargain.

Boker freaking tov, Eliahu.

A couple of months ago, I was briefly captivated by a debate raging in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that was playing itself out on the blogs. Seems that it had become standard practice for some parents to shlep their babies, toddlers and young kids to local bars in the evening rather than miss out on all the socializing that the single and child-free were enjoying. Just because they were parents didn't mean they didn't deserve to party! However, fellow patrons disagreed, stating that the last thing they wanted to see during Happy Hour was a small, pre-verbal and bald human drooling next to them...and the last sensation they wished to experience was the crunch of Cheerios underfoot as they walked to the bar to order a beer.

This debate captured my interest because of the self-centered chutzpah of these parents who believe themselves entitled to everything they had prior to the kiddies; their idiocy at lacking the common sense to realize that kids don't belong in bars; their lack of the resourcefulness needed to discover other gratifying activities they might undertake with their kids which would significantly reduce their sorrow at being barred from the bar.

I was also amazed because, throughout the thousands of evenings that constituted my two-plus decades of child-rearing, I never once felt deprived because I wasn't at a bar instead. Especially during those evening hours which encompass dinner, bath and bedtime. I can hardly imagine giving up twilight playground visits for a Cosmopolitan. Or the screening of beloved old films for vodka shots. Or even the drudgery of doing homework together on the dining room table for raucous conversation and the chance to flirt.

Of course, there were plenty of things that were out of reach for me like time for myself or an upscale gym membership or the chance to go to graduate school or buy nicer clothes or hire evening babysitters so HOBB and I could go out more but I didn't cry over what I didn't have. Perhaps my parents raised me right or I had my kids young enough to avoid becoming addicted to my own autonomy but my experience of motherhood was, well, pleasurable. Though horribly broke during that time, we were happy. Rolling pennies to afford tickets to the movies was a bonding family activity. Winning tickets to the circus on the radio was a thrill. Having read Senior's article, I am fairly certain that most of the people interviewed by her would have been miserable in my circumstance.

Which makes them -- not me -- pathetic. It is a gift to have an attitude of gratitude.

I recently remarked to Middle Babe, now a lass of 22, that when she and Big Babe were little and HOBB worked on Sundays, I couldn't believe the great fortune that had been handed to me -- we had a whole day together and I got to be the sole architect of our adventure! And the places we went! Museums and libraries and parks and parties and pools and beaches and little towns on the Hudson River and thrift shops and historic places and amusement parks and friends' houses.

And when Little Babe arrived and my older kids were eleven and seven, we simply toted him along with us, introducing him to the ashram we stumbled onto that served delicious and cheap veggie dinners and had a neat meditation room we could hang out in and the $1.50 movie theatre and the Appalachian Trail and all those 99 cent stores with the sour Charms blowpops -- four for a dollar!! -- near our bungalow and the great ice cream stand that sold doggie treats and the Heritage bike trail and the new promenade along the Jersey side of the Hudson and the new waterfront in Newburgh and the Orange County Fair and the three drive-in theatres near us and the magical lake tucked inside a state park on the border of New York and New Jersey, right near Mountain Creek.

I had my work and I had my friends and I had my extended family but being with my kids was the best fun of all.

That is not a gilded recollection of the variety Senior alludes to in her article. And it goes without saying that there were times of excruciating difficulty -- sickness, trouble, conflict, emergencies, trips to the shrink, the deaths of friends and family members. But I smile as I recollect those busy, long-ago days. I loved being pregnant and I loved having babies and I loved having toddlers and I loved having schoolchildren and now, I love having young adults and a teen. Our dynamic has changed -- we don't have long Sundays together very often and our fights are more up close and personal -- but our present relationship was molded by what took place so long ago, all those sweet evenings and mornings and Sundays and Shabbatot; passing feelings, fleeting glances, shimmering moments, eternity captured in a millisecond.

We are a five-headed organism, the product of innumerable hugs, cuddles, illnesses, crises, tears, laughter, endless conversations, beloved books read aloud over and over and over again, angry words, car, bus and train rides, airplane trips to locales both near and far, museum visits, ice cream cones, movies, studying, fighting, negotiation, dysfunction, transcendence. I emerge into a wholly new phase of my adulthood -- at the age of 49 -- as profoundly shaped by the three Babes as they have been by me and HOBB.

This summer is the very first one in nearly 26 years that I have very few parental duties. Big Babe lives in Berlin, Little Babe is on a teen trip to Israel for five weeks and Middle Babe, who is home for the summer, is a rare presence in our apartment, due to her work and school schedule... and new boyfriend.

I finally have that upscale gym membership and HOBB and I have been on an extended honeymoon, going out every single night, catching up on Mad Men at home, drinking wine at cafes, taking long walks, traveling abroad. For the first time in very long I don't have to make dinner or be home at a certain hour or pay someone to watch my kids or do homework when I'd rather be reading The New Yorker. And come this fall, I finally am going to graduate school.

I love the freedom I have now, but make no mistake, I didn't miss it overly much during the sweet years of full-time mothering.

I had something far, far better. Something precious and evidently, exceedingly rare.

Scrabbleogomy

In 12 hours from now, HOBB and I will be piling into our black Honda with Little Babe and lots of luggage -- a suitcase, knapsack, electric bass and traveling amp for our youngest son, who is leaving on a five-week teen tour to Israel and two densely-packed carry-ons for our own three-day trip to Madrid.

Which is why I don't understand my wakefulness at this particular hour, when I should be catching up on important pre-travel sleep so I'm not a total psycho at lift-off.

It could, of course, have something to do with the two strong cups of Zabar's French Italian coffee downed at 9 pm which were ingested to overcome the effects of the margarita I had two hour earlier. The margarita, customized with cranberry juice, tasted tangy and delicious sipped beneath the trees outside of my bungalow which immeasurably enhanced my experience of slogging through Alberto Moravia's Two, an aggravating novel in the form of a man's ongoing struggle -- and conversation -- with his penis.

And my post-midnight industriousness is rendered even less mysterious given the fact that the past two hours were spent knocking out a computer virus that appeared like a malevolent magician's rabbit on the laptop that had lain dormant for over 36 hours in deference to Shabbat.

Of course, during my computer's lengthy scanning process, I reread Little Babe's Bnai Brith Youth Organization's Trek Israel information packet on the table oh, about three times. Which inspired me to obsess over some minor items we still need to buy between now and 4 pm, not to mention the fact that my youngest child has never been away from home for more than a week's time.

But now as a welcome fatigue overtakes me, worry gives way to a ruminative, creative flow of thoughts and, unbidden, a word pops into my head.

Scrabbleogomy.

It characterizes a decision I recently made -- but didn't realize it until this very moment -- to play Scrabble exclusively with HOBB.

With the possible exception of our children or Pomeranians. On rare occasions.

In deference to the hour, I will simply state that despite attempts to adapt an inclusive policy over the past 27 years, I end up wanting to murder most everyone who joins my Scrabble game with HOBB.

The reason is clear -- the dead serious, do-or-die, kill or be killed competitive vibe that fuels our competitions is completely defused the minute an outsider joins the game.

Particularly an outsider accustomed to breaking classic Scrabble rules or one who endlessly wisecracks or gossips or eats crumbly food over the board or sings Broadway tunes or offers unsolicited word assistance or -- sin of sins -- makes up words.

I am hardly joking when I say that I have to surreptitiously undertake Lamaze breathing to avoid a violent confrontation with the interloper.

Of course, HOBB and I aren't unique in having a personal history with Scrabble. Millions around the world do, which is why the game has global bestseller status. Our own Scrabble story began during our dating days when we hauled the set to Central Park on Shabbat afternoons and played on a blanket for hours. When we became engaged on a Friday night in June of 1983, our secret engagement -- embargoed to the outside world until Shabbat ended -- deliciously played itself out through a lengthy game of Scrabble, which felt as illicit as sex in a public place.

There is a special relationship between Sabbath-observers and Scrabble that has to do with the Shabbos-friendly nature of the game and the creative solution to keeping score without writing -- typically resolved by employing books of at least 300 pages and bookmarks.

My own childhood and pre-marital life was gloriously Scrabble-filled, with the vast majority of games having been played on Shabbat afternoon...and occasionally on Friday night. My nephew Daniel was a national Scrabble champion when he was a little boy. Well before his seventh birthday, he was making seven letter words, beating the pants off of me. Next to him, my late Grandma Dorothy remains the most daunting Scrabble opponent I ever met, followed by my Aunt Irene whose matches against my cousin Rena -- her daughter -- mirror the mojo I share with HOBB.

When I played with Irene and Rena, I was painfully aware of being the interloper, the unwelcome outsider. Of course, they never said a word and graciously tolerated my developing Scrabble skills. It is from this mother-daughter duo that I model my cosmic, cut-throat dynamic with HOBB.

Indeed, there have been Scrabble tournaments between the two of us where I am sure that G-d is keeping score, pitting us against each other, weighing our respective moral worth, asking us to compete for the coveted role of His favorite, an honor granted to the player with the coolest, cleverest words, the best strategic moves, the most points.

And when a third or fourth party joins this arena, it throws our private universe into a sense of cosmic disharmony.

So, friends, family members and loved ones, from now on, Scrabble games between me and HOBB are off-limits to you. After practicing an open policy, we are adapting Scrabbleogomy. We might engage in Scrabble flings with others, but the hottest Scrabble action is reserved for us alone. Just so ya know, we will be joining the mile-high club later today by having a quickie aboard our Iberia flight to Madrid.

We hope you will understand. After all, it's for your own good.

The Love Shack

The Love Shack sits on the edge of the woods that surround Walton Lake and form a natural border for the Flats -- the lower level of Rosmarin's, the Catskills bungalow colony we've attended for the past sixteen summers.

Rosmarin's and our bungalow, #10B, has been the subject of many blog postings and articles of mine; indeed, it inspired the name of this blog.

I've written about the joy of opening the cabin up for the season, the magic of the open vistas -- especially for space-starved urbanites -- the peculiar society of the bungalow colony, our summer friends, our children's and dogs' country adventures, the quiet of a bungalow night, the glory of Shabbat in nature, the privilege of having nursed Little Babe beneath a great and leafy oak, my watchful, worshipful relationship with the summer moon, the scary thrill of walking outside in the middle of the night, bungalow intrigue, bungalow memories, bungalow dreams.

In the late nineties, a visiting Manhattan friend -- more at home in the Hamptons than Monroe, NY -- noted our happiness and wryly dubbed our bungalow the Love Shack.

About seven years ago, the designation became official when HOBB surprised me with a beautiful wooden sign, which now hangs on our front door.

So the Love Shack it is and we have taken to referring to our summer abode as such in the copy of invitations to friends and even between ourselves.

Although this appellation is tongue-in-cheek, the Love Shack functions as a greenhouse for my nearly 27-year-old relationship with HOBB, nurturing our private, shared life, cocooning us from the swirling drama of the outside world, sheltering us, providing us with a sanctuary for that which is private and closed to others.

While our summers are enhanced by friends who visit and friends who have bungalows of their own in other sections of the colony and sweetened by the presence of our kids and their friends and beloved family members, there is nothing quite like our Shabbat breakfasts in tandem on the porch or reading together outside in the shade of the woods or walking for miles along the country roads or our intimate embraces in the velvet darkness or optimistic sunshine, the duet of our heartbeats echoing within the wood-paneled walls.

Since my very first bungalow summer in 1995 when I was the 34-year-old mother of three young children, I have been moved by the sight of those couples of advanced years whose summer memories are built of an unbroken chain of bungalow memories. I like to imagine that after a certain number, say twenty, the summers blend and tumble together like heedless children rolling down a great, grassy hill.

Stand strong, Love Shack! Be our Eden, our secret clubhouse, our steady ship in an often-turbulent sea. Nurture and protect us and those we love. Surround us with the sweet memories of tumble-together summers and strengthen the bond that only we two share. Inspire us to be the best we can be for each other. Reveal to our children that great bungalow secret -- that nothing begets intimacy like simplicity.

The Book of Lamentations

It's a bit early for Tisha B'Av but never too early to organize a global gang-bang against Israel.

The reason this time? The Gaza Flotilla Fiasco.

Because of the top billing given to this news item, because of the plethora of op-eds and columns and analyses and statements and newscasts and special reports and punditry and explanations and ongoing coverage since it broke on Sunday, it feels unnecessary to recap the story.

So I won't.

Still, when I review the details in my mind, I am filled with astonishment at the reflexive worldwide condemnation of Israel, the penchant to cast Israel in the role of murderer or aggressor when, at the very most, it fell clumsily into a public relations ambush or failed to be utterly brilliant and clairvoyant. Yes, there were casualties...which seems to have been the whole point of the provocation. And we could argue for the next century about whether the Gaza blockade is a good idea but even if it is misguided, it must still be observed until it is lifted.

Israel's sovereign right to defend her citizenry against a possible attack by a ship filled not with kumbaya-singing flower children but with those intent upon stirring up violence inspired an international instinct to isolate Israel, casting her as a pariah among nations. And when the isolation of Israel or Jews is an irresistible impulse, no barrage of facts in Israel's favor will reverse world opinion.

But this is an old story, as old as the history of the Jews.

Still, it hurts.

For this I weep.

Pulling Rabbis out of a Hat

For the past three days, I've hung out with rabbis. Hundreds of rabbis. Young and middle-aged and of advanced years. Male and female. Illustrious and of modest achievement. Fashionably attired and less so. Celebrity rabbis and counter-cultural rabbis.

During these days, I've gathered with rabbis in lecture halls and dining rooms and synagogue sanctuaries and in the passage ways of old stone buildings and modern classrooms and chapels and on street corners. I've even gone to the bathroom with rabbis.

For nearly 72 hours, I've listened to rabbis and talked to rabbis and heard jokes from rabbis and hugged rabbis and learned from rabbis. I've reconnected with rabbis I first met years ago, during their rabbinical school training. I've gossiped with rabbis and taken note of weight loss and gain, new hair styles that are flattering and not. I've heard about the births, deaths and divorces, career dislocation, disappointment. I've seen at least one former boyfriend in this collection of rabbis. He greeted me with a smirky nod of the head.

The reason for this rabbi-fest is the annual gathering of the Rabbinical Assembly, the professional association of Conservative and Masorti rabbis worldwide and as their publicist I get to schmooze with the Jews, becoming a kind of pseudo-rebbe or at least, a kid-sister facsimile of a rabbi.

Though it might sound like a decidedly unglamorous assignment or the opening of an ethnic joke: "So, five hundred rabbis met in New York City the other day...." the RA convention is always spiritually, intellectually and socially charged, not to mention great fun. Yet this fact sometimes eludes those nearest and dearest to me.

"Do you really have to go on the boat ride tomorrow night with those rabbis?" pressed HOBB earlier this evening. "I mean, do you want to be stuck with them on the Hudson river for three hours??"

Uh. Yeah. And they will have a DJ. And a bar.

You see, I really like rabbis, especially of the Conservative/Masorti persuasion, who feel to me like kin. I like their blending of God-consciousness and social awareness. I like their caring and devotion, the weird fusion of old fashioned values and instruments of the cyber-age. I don't know why, but it makes me happy that rabbis use BlackBerries and send text messages. I adore that they come to sessions with laptops and I-Pads. I even like that their cellphones ring annoyingly during plenaries and important programs.

I like the serious attention that is paid to interpersonal ethics within this movement-- the awareness of the importance of observing boundaries. I do not take this for granted, having met other clergy who egregiously violate boundaries. I like the sincerity, the poetry, the prophetic voice I glean at these gatherings.

When I am together with rabbis of this movement, I find that there is a common cultural language we speak -- a blending of tradition, belief and socialization. There is also the camaraderie that arises from being a member of the denomination that once ruled the Jewish demographic charts and has, according to social scientists, fallen. Hard.

Yet I hold fast to the belief that Conservative Judaism is still the anchor of American Jewish life.

In the parlance of The Three Bears, this brand of Judaism is not too hard, not too soft. Just right.

Readers of this blog will note that I have never written about the work that I do nor the clients whom I represent. But there is something up close and personal about my work with the Conservative rabbis, something real and authentic. Aspects of our lives have been shared and traded in hallways and on bus rides and field trips and late at night in hotel lobbies and around Shabbat and lunch and dinner tables. I've climbed pyramids with the rabbis and hotel staircases. We've shared wine and tequila and lots of coffee. I've marveled at the spirit of the Latin American rabbis who will sing Hebrew songs late into the night. Together, we endured good and bad press at these conventions. We've cleaned hurricane-whipped schools and visited political hot spots. Once, we almost got arrested at a protest. We've met dignitaries and important leaders. We've talked endlessly about the development of Magen Tzedek, our ethical kashrut seal. We praised new publications of the assembly. With these rabbis, I've talked about matters of the heart and soul: I've even cried with some of them. And on several occasions, I've danced joyously with the rabbis, most recently this past Sunday night when Neshama Carlebach performed with her band and the Green Pastures Baptist Choir in Feinberg Auditorium of the Jewish Theological Seminary where Big Babe had his Bar Mitzvah in 1997.

And when the rabbis grant a glimpse of what it means to be a spiritual leader in the 21st century, I am positively breathless...and not a little bit envious.

This is the eighth RA convention I have attended as a publicist. Every year, former classmates of my dad, who was ordained a Conservative rabbi in 1955, ask eagerly if my father is in attendance (he is usually not, having left the rabbinate and the movement when he became a clinical psychologist in 1977) spurring me to call him on the spot from my cell phone.

Invariably, I lose access to my phone for at least half an hour as my dad eagerly reconnects with a dear friend, reminding me that I am, and will always be, the daughter of a Conservative rabbi, a post-denominational, egalitarian Jew who nevertheless clings stubbornly to this first identity for it shaped me in innumerable ways, rooting me, enriching me, providing me with a portal into Jewish Peoplehood, a personal path, a vantage point from which to gaze at God.

Elena Kagan, Bat Mitzvah Girl

Gay, shmay.

This Shavuos, the talk of the town will likely be the delicious fact that, thirty-seven years ago, Elena Kagan celebrated her bat mitzvah at Manhattan's famous Lincoln Square Synagogue by reading from the Book of Ruth on a Friday night, marking the shul's very first female rite of religious passage.

If you haven't seen the New York Times article, it is accessible here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/nyregion/13synagogue.html.

For contemporaries of Kagan such as myself, the details of her long-ago bat mitzvah are delectable...and maddening, for all the obvious reasons having to do with Orthodoxy's halakhic restrictions on women. For residents of Manhattan's Upper West Side Jewish community, the article also provides a clubby, insider feeling. It is always fun to know every single person quoted in a Times article, in this case -- Rabbis Shlomo Riskin and Ephraim (Effie) Buchwald, Cantor Sherwood Goffin and Shuly Rubin Schwartz, dean of List College at JTS and an assistant professor of Jewish History.

So.

Elena Kagan had her bat mitzvah at Lincoln Square Synagogue on May 18, 1973.

That November 18th, I also turned 12, the age of bat mitzvah.

But the ironic fact is that I -- the daughter of a Conservative rabbi with a pulpit in Douglaston, NY -- did not have a bat mitzvah. The reasons for this have to do less with halakha and more with my parents' lower-case c conservative tendencies, their discomfort at staging a ritual that was seen as daringly feminist and decidedly un-feminine. While my younger brother had a blow-out bar mitzvah three years later -- and while scores of girls were indeed bat mitzvahed by my dad during his 21 years as the spiritual leader of Marathon Jewish Community Center -- neither my sister nor I had that religious rite of passage.

Which leaves me pondering the power of this ritual in directing one's life journey, feeling at once a sense of communal kinship with Elena Kagan and subdued sadness for the bat mitzvah girl that I never was.

Heaven on a Monday Morning

A thousand hours ago, I felt the sunlight upon my flickering lids, intuited the morning, loosened my grip on the last threads of sleep, rose from my bed -- warm and tousled -- and hailed the new day.

Brushing my teeth, I thought I heard one of my most beloved songs -- Heaven by the Talking Heads. Little Babe, I thought, must be playing his iPod, plugged into speakers.

Shuffling into our dining room, I was stunned to find my ninth grader, singing and playing a perfect rendition of Heaven on the guitar he had restrung and tuned the day before, a hand-me-down from MOBB (mother of Bungalow Babe); an artifact from the era in which she taught young children and envisioned herself as Maria from The Sound of Music.

Seeing my expression of shock, Little Babe nonchalantly informed me that there is an app for guitar chords on his iPod. He simply entered "Heaven" and the music popped up.

Oh. That explains it. Except for the fact that Little Babe has never had guitar lessons. Nor, as far as I knew, had he ever learned how to string musical instruments.

Fifteen minutes later, I was helping Little Babe out the front door, hauling his cello, which is his main instrument. As a member of his high school band, he had rehearsal after school. As my youngest rode the elevator downstairs, I returned to the urban bungalow to commence my work week, wonderfully calm in the face of Monday.

I opened Outlook and began reading the 45-plus emails that had arrived overnight, catching myself up. I was about to release an important news item for a major client in an hour and needed to get final revisions to an official letter. I checked my calendar for the day's appointments. The sky outside my window grew brighter, though the temperature was oddly autumnal.

A humming overtook me as I worked. Heaven had taken root in me. I marvelled once again at my son's musical prowess and good taste. I felt a personal sense of thrill that the very song that moved me more than twenty years earlier also spoke to him.

Soon, I was searching through YouTube for videos of Talking Heads performances. I took out headphones and plugged in. I listened/watched about five videos. I felt unaccountably happy, then sad/moved. Tears filled my eyes and ran down my cheeks.

Tip-toeing into the waters of his Monday, reading the New York Times on the couch, feeding the goldfish, praying the morning service, HOBB seemed horrified by the spectacle of this woman, plugged in, tuned out, weeping.

Heaven followed me throughout my Monday. I sang it with abandon while walking across Central Park several hours later; I listened to it on my iPod at the gym during my lunch hour; in true adolescent fashion, I pondered the lyrics. Heaven kept me buoyed all day long. Heaven infused my heart. It was the soundtrack of my day. And when I returned home from my swing dance class at 9 pm, Little Babe greeted me with surprise.

"Hey," he said. "I was just plaving Heaven before you got home. It's funny that you're humming it now. "

Not funny ha ha or funny strange, but funny wonderful.

Play it once again. Play it all night long.

HEAVEN
Music and Lyrics by David Byrne and Jerry Harrison

Everyone is trying to get to the bar.
The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven.
The band in Heaven they play my favorite song.
They play it one more time, they play it all night long.

Oh heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.
Heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

There is a party, everyone is there.
Everyone will leave at exactly the same time.
When this party's over it will start again.
It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same.

Heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.
Heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

When this kiss is over it will start again.
It will not be any different, it will be exactlythe same.
It's hard to imagine that nothing at allcould be so exciting, could be this much fun.

Oh, heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.
Oh, heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

Music in the Wind

At 3 pm on Thursday afternoon, I chased several pieces of sheet music across Amsterdam Avenue, pursued the papers as they flapped and flew in remarkable aerial acrobatic swirls designed to aggravate me and amuse everyone within viewing distance.

Of course I was on my BlackBerry with a client at the time, bounding up the avenue in the sunny – if windy -- afternoon, arms pumping happily in the abundant sunshine...which is likely the reason it happened.

"#$%&*@##$%$&*@%@#&$!" I exclaimed, dashing into the gutter to step on the first page of "Waltz #2," that wafted down on top of a sewer grate. Retrieving it, I saw the entire paper-clipped bunch of "Landslide" fluttering its way across Amsterdam. Bounding into the street, narrowly missing on-coming traffic, I spied "You May be Right" -- flattened against the side of a houseware shop back on the sidewalk.

Hollering and huffing, I grabbed my papers, stuffing them back into the folder.

"#$%&*&$#*&!!" I exclaimed, overcome by a sense of irony for it was this very folder of music that I had lost yesterday evening while shopping at Fairway...and reclaimed just half an hour earlier. What did it all mean -- first to leave the songs of one's heart in a supermarket basket, then to have them scatter to the wind when retrieved?

Were my songs attempting to escape???

Was this a sign to me...that I needed to break free?

Such are the machinations of my mind.

Back on the sidewalk, the spectators saluted me for my adept -- if foolhardy -- rescue of the imperiled papers. I accepted their kudos, thanking them and laughing ruefully.

It was then I remembered that the BlackBerry was still pressed to my ear and my quiet client had overhead the entire escapade.

The backstory on the lost folder of music is that I arrived late to my voice lesson the day before -- breathless, penitent, sheepish -- bursting into Mary's peaceful 9th floor studio like a clamorous, invading army, loudly declaring that, though I was egregiously late, this would be a power lesson.

What I missed in time I would make up in passion.

Ever patient and forgiving, Mary neither reprimanded me nor contradicted me. Brandishing the worn manila file filled with the sheet music I have collected over the past six months, I swept into the piano room. While I stared at my image in the mirror over the piano, Mary went to fetch me a glass of water.

I'm late, but it's okay, I reassured myself anxiously. Examining my reflection, I was visited by a familiar childhood musing: is this really the way I look? Is this the face that others see as well or is it my perception alone?? And just who am I?

The music holds part of the answer: I am the girl/woman who comes once a week to Mary's 72nd Street studio to sing sad and beautiful songs, who nurtures a love for energetic rock. Who dreamed of being David Byrne's girlfriend, who felt her life changed by Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and The White Album and wishes she could be as tough and cool as Joan Jett. Who sings My Sharona loudly at home, who introduced Little Babe to Duran Duran, who plays Name that Beatles Lyric -- a made-up game -- with him on long car rides and Shabbat afternoons.

Who cried through Leonard Cohen's last Madison Square Garden concert, sitting next to Big Babe, feverish and forsaken on a Friday night.

This self co-exists with my other selves, the ones who carry out the serious and adult stuff, of course.

In Mary's studio, I am a student singer, dutifully executing my voice exercises, pushed by my teacher to move out of my comfort zone in the bass notes, receiving praise for my lung capacity.

There, the other me -- mother, professional, wife -- retreats for thirty glorious minutes, and I am awash in timeless, universal emotion of the sort that inspires songwriting. Great loss pervades most of my favorite songs. So does the eternal yearning for true love.

“I rarely lose things,” I had told Mary as I prepared to leave, just 20 minutes later, while reflecting on my love of sad songs. “Loss is traumatic for me.”

And then, several hours and appointments later, I lost my sheet music at Fairway as I shopped… while taking a phone call from Middle Babe.

It is now Friday morning, the eve of Shabbat. The manila folder of sheet music rests on the dining room table, smudged with dirt. The papers within are still in disarray. I have not gone through them to check if all are there. The idea of having lost any pages is distressing to me. I don’t yet have the inner fortitude to find out.

Last night I spoke late into the night with an old school acquaintance who reconnected with me on the matter of adoption. We hadn’t spoken in decades – in fact, we barely knew each other -- but she called me to talk about her pervasive sense of loss, her issues with emotional abandonment.

“My life would be so much better if I didn’t have this emotional disposition,” she stated.

But you do, I told her. And I do. And it often blindsides us, making us sad and even dysfunctional for a time. But it also gives us emotional depth and maybe unusual empathy.

Over the past two days my music has been lost, found and nearly lost again.

The curse of multi-tasking, blabbing on my BlackBerry while completing other tasks, takes the metaphysical sting out of the situation, providing a perfectly pragmatic reason for why I first left my folder in the grocery store and loosened my grip on the folder while navigating my way northward on the streets of Manhattan.

And yet.

When I completed my twenty-minute power lesson on Wednesday, Mary praised me for my passionate renditions, the power in my lungs, the vitality in my singing.

My secret is an amped-up state of agitation, I told her, also known as shpilkes --an existential condition.

Not uncommon for people of the Jewish persuasion or creative types.

In fact, as I told HOBB, when I poured out my soul late Wednesday night in a torrent of tears whose catalyst was the pervasive, unyielding sense of loss, such emotional dislocation is the ideal state for creative expression.

The Wayward Wife Comes Home

This is a portrait of obsession.

At the end of a frenetic NYC weekend, it all came down to me 'n Moravia.

And my cool Ricky's reading glasses, which trick me into thinking that they are just a fun fashion accessory and not a visual aid. Then again, their attractiveness is clearly only a matter of opinion. Earlier today, Little Babe told me that they make me look like a demented librarian.

In truth, I rather like that assessment.

Having read through the supply of Alberto Moravia novels and short story collections that is available on bookshelves and through special order at Barnes and Nobles, Book Culture and the Strand, I finally turned to Alibris.com, scooping up five hard-to-find titles in the equivalent number of seconds.

Over this past week, compact Jiffy envelopes arrived for me, bearing my printed paperback treasures. I could not believe the speed with which my desire had been fulfilled; tracking down Moravia's elusive works had become a stalker's pastime for me over the past few months and I had finally caught my prey. Avidly, I tore open the envelopes. The books tumbled out onto my waiting bed, possessed of lurid covers, aged to the point of crumbling.

I smiled at the volumes, welcoming them into the family of rag-tag Moravia editions -- some European, others American – I already possess, noting that my little library looked like a family of multi-racial adopted children who nevertheless all bear the same last name.

Earlier today, coming uptown on the #1 train, I finished the first edition 1950 hardcover copy of Two Adolescents that Big Babe found for me at a second-hand bookshop in Jerusalem over the Passover break. Breathless from Luca's dramatic denouement, I paused briefly for decency's sake, then greedily dove into The Wayward Wife.

The copy I have -- a slim paperback Ace Star Book published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 1960 -- is adorned with a gorgeous, erotic photograph of a nude young woman by the side of the road. The picture is lyrical and candid; because of it, I feel scandalous reading this work in public. And then, there is the suggestive title.

Tonight, when the action moved to my bedroom, I thumbed through the book's credits and was astonished to discover that Philippe Halsman was the photographer.

This discovery brought me a sense of bashert -- the preordained -- for I had recently been obsessed with the Latvian-born Halsman, having seen the dreadful film, Jump, which was written around the true, astonishing and little-known story of his pre-celebrity life in Europe, when, as a young man, he was tried and convicted in Austria by an anti-Semitic court of murdering his father.

Having always admired Halsman’s stylish work, the horrific story of his earlier life consumed me, refusing to let me go. Learning that the Moravia cover was shot by him, my mind turned associative; the teen Halsman, languishing in an Austrian jail, became confused with Moravia’s adolescents Agostino and Luca, bound together by their common doom. Staring at the black and white cover photo on my book, I considered Halsman's ability to reinvent himself from wrongfully convicted killer to American A-lister, Life magazine cover photog, friend to the famous, creator of "jumpology" and the remarkable Jump portraits, one of the Ten Greatest Photographers in the World, according to a 1958 Popular Photography article. But Halman's dramatic denouement was not only the result of his talent and will. His pardon and passage out of Europe came as the result of a campaign by several high-profile individuals including Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Life magazine extended a cross-Atlantic invitation to him. As I pondered the personal and outside factors leading to Philippe Halsman's redemption, I felt a sense of keen regret that I had never met him, nor my beloved latest-favorite author. Yet instantly, that feeling morphed into one of supreme joy for wasn't I sitting in a midnight cafe with him and Alberto Moravia at that very moment?

It is now no longer Sunday night. The act of writing has, once again, burned off my extreme adrenaline-fueled agitation. I am horrified at the hour, noting that in a very short while, I need to jumpstart my professional week.

This Monday will be different from previous Mondays because of one remarkable detail of this past weekend: the two-day Open House I attended at the Columbia School of Journalism, where I am scheduled to begin my Masters program in Art and Culture Writing this fall.

And while I've known for the past month of my acceptance, it was not until this weekend that I actually embraced the fact of my impending studenthood, which brings with it the restructuring of my current professional life. And my personal life, in some ways. Absent for our Shabbat dinner on Friday night, I became a wayward wife, choosing to socialize with my classmates at Havana Central, coming home only after Little Babe had gone to bed and HOBB greeted me with baleful eyes and the rebuke that I might, at least, have come home to light candles and sing Shalom Aleichem.

This process is personal tikkun; long overdue. If there is one affliction I've suffered from over the past sixteen years, it is imbalance. The work I've undertaken has been ubiquitous, overwhelming, consuming. The writing -- my writing -- when it has happened, has felt like a miracle of sorts, the triumph of will over crushing responsibility, fatigue, the demands of family life. It has felt both heroic and woefully inadequate, not in essence but in volume.

My unwritten projects have bonded and formed a fellowship of their own, rag-tag, like my Moravia books. They patiently sit on my pending project bookshelf, feeling the fierce love of my gaze, my stewardship, my determination.

Like Moravia's books, they know they will not be neglected for they are my family. I have waited for them a long time; I am incomplete without them. I find my identity through nurturing these projects. They are mine. They are me.

Swing Dance. Yom HaShoah: Diaspora 2010

Eight years ago, I angered a British friend by referring to New York City as the Diaspora.

I was in London, researching the desecration of a synagogue in Finsbury Park. A hurricane of Jew- hatred had swept through the sanctuary, attended by mostly elderly Jews. Among the insults: a swastika scrawled on the rabbi's shtender, siddurim torn and tossed on the floor, glass broken, kippot and tallitot stewn about.

In the course of my reportage, I made two mistakes. First, I asked about the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in England; secondly, I referred to myself as a Diaspora Jew.

My friend, a native Londoner, firmly set me in my place, telling me that European anti-Semitism has not returned for it never went away, merely hid beneath the surface in that wounded period after World War II.

And then he assured me that, as a resident of that Jerusalem-on-the-Hudson known as the Upper West Side, I had no right to consider myself a resident of the Diaspora.

Though shocked, I instantly knew that he was right.

And yet every now and again, as I navigate my Gotham existence, I find myself firmly implanted in the Diaspora.

For instance, this past Sunday.

Freshly returned from a Passover trip to Israel, sun-kissed and toned from hiking in Eilat, looking more Sabra than city slicker, I found myself possessed of a rare gift -- a free Sunday, due to the last-minute cancellation of a day trip upstate to retrieve our dogs from the friends who watched them in our absence (they decided to drive into the city and drop the doggies off for us), Little Babe's self-imposed study plans and HOBB's announcement that he would be spending the day in his office, catching up on work.

While I had an evening engagement in place -- a Yom HaShoah commemoration on the Upper West Side featuring Frank Blaichman, a partisan fighter and author of the new memoir, Rather Die Fighting, a project for which I am serving as public relations consultant -- several hours opened up to me, filling me with giddy delight and a small measure of panic.

What on earth should I do with my free Sunday??

After perusing the Weekend section of the Times and several NYC events blogs, checking my email, Facebook and MeetUp for invitations and events I had previously ignored and emailing a friend whom I've been trying to see for months, a glorious schedule fell into place: an early morning hike down to the JCC and gym workout, a planning meeting at a friend's place for an upcoming fundraiser, some brief local errands, a three-hour Lindy Hop and Charleston workshop at Dance Manhattan in Chelsea, a kamikaze assault on the H&M on Sixth Avenue, dinner with my friend at the Hummus Place back on the UWS...and the Yom Hashoah program at Ohab Zedek on West 95th Street.


While my day began and ended at Jewish venues -- a community center and synagogue -- it is the substance in between that lends it a distinct Diaspora quality.

Specifically, the swing dance workshop. Three hours of boisterous bopping around, learning ecstatic eight-count dance moves in a relentlessly social atmosphere.

In Israel, on Yom HaShoah, there are no dance classes, no music classes, no lite recreation or frivolous entertainment.

In Israel, on Yom HaShoah, the television stations broadcast programming dealing only with the Holocaust.

In New York, on the Sunday of Yom HaShoah, the city hosted hundreds of commemorations for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Synagogues, museums, schools, institutions and community centers offered lectures, films, exhibitions, book talks, the Reading of the Names and other programs in the spirit of the day.

In tribute to its Jewish populace, the soul of the city observed a palpable moment of solemn silence and then the heart of Manhattan beat on, demanding streets streaming with citizens basking in the post-winter new sunshine, maintaining its staggering array of cultural offerings, adventures, opportunities and experiences, indoor and outdoor, high and low brow; artistic, athletic, educational, ethnic, retail, pricey and free-of-charge, multi-cultural, weird, wild, wonderful.

And when Monday arrived and I opened my reluctant eyes, my body felt the full imprint of the Diaspora -- muscles sore from my swing dance intensive, memories of the extraordinarily moving Yom HaShoah event etched upon my mind: a synagogue filled to capacity with children and adults alike, yahrzeit candles lit in memory of the Six Million, songs mournful and triumphant, the testimony of Frank Blaichman, Holocaust survivor, partisan hero, Jewish grandfather, resident of Manhattan.

A Maus in the House

A paper-mache mask sits drying on my dining room table, painted grey, an art project by Little Babe for his Ninth Grade English class.

The assignment was to reflect upon Art Spiegelman's Maus, which the class had just read. In addition to his essay, comparing Spiegelman's father, Vladek, with Odysseus, Little Babe made a Maus mask, which is taking forever to dry.

I don't remember doing anything remotely as sophisticated in high school, one million years ago.

Little Babe's high school encounter with Spiegelman's masterful work helps to bridge the gap between him and his older brother, Big Babe, a culture writer in Berlin. Indeed, when Big Babe was a student at Columbia, he studied with the Artman himself, taking classes in Spiegelman's studio because the artist liked to smoke while he taught.

My youngest has been the baby of the family for so long that watching him catapult into adolescence is a form of endless entertainment, hinting of science-fiction. Who is this kid studying Latin and Ancient Rome? What's that foliage on his legs? When did the 'stache sprout on his upper lip? When did he take up electric bass? And did he actually inform me that he's starting a rock band called Off-Key??

And while everything he is learning at his excellent school has proved mind-expanding, this particular English assignment forced Little Babe to venture beyond Manga -- one of his obsessions -- and embrace the artistry of graphic novels by the masters.

Next stop: Will Eisner and R. Crumb.

While I am pondering Little Babe's metamorphosis, Middle Babe calls. A junior in college, she switched to a Philosophy major at the end of last year from Music and Theatre after developing polyps on her vocal chords. The transition went seamlessly; my songbird and actress turns out to have a natural ability for philosophical inquiry. While walking to the gym, she talks to me about her upcoming Heidegger paper, her essay contrasting Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen, the Logic exam she took this morning. She says this all glibly; I am mindblown, amazed, bursting with admiration and pride.

Spring break starts this weekend; Middle Babe has a ticket for the 11:15 Bolt Bus out of Baltimore tomorrow morning. She tells me that she will call me when her bus approaches Penn Station, asks if I can bring Little Babe, her best friend Rebecca and Alfie and Nala the Pomeranians when I pick her up. She tells me she will text me a list of food to buy in preparation for her return home. I make a mental note to move all of my papers and boxes out of her room.

It is a Thursday morning and my work day is well underway. Reporters call to arrange interviews with clients; I make my pitch calls, draft materials, book appointments. Amazingly, spring is in the air though the sky is overcast and there is a chill. It is visible in the optimistic quality of the light; it is tangible after this severe, entombing winter.

Yesterday evening, HOBB left for his annual journalism trip abroad, taking 16 students with him to the Middle East. In two weeks' time, we will join him in Jerusalem for Passover and a family Bat Mitzvah. I am traveling with my two younger children and Big Babe will join us from Berlin. The prospect of being together serves as a golden carrot at the end of a very short stick, luring me forward through my busy days and action-packed evenings.

The Maus mask gleams at me from across the dining room table. I reach across and touch it, surprised to find the paint nearly dry. Now all that remains to be done is the shading of the inner ears, the snout, the mouth. If he is feeling ambitious, Little Babe can clip a few bristles from our kitchen broom and make whiskers.

Tomorrow morning, the mask will be packed and taken to school but for now, on this late winter morning in March, there is a moment of perfect suspension, the prospect of a Passover together with my family in Jerusalem, a homemade Maus in my house.

Facebook vs. Goldfish

Little Babe finally went to sleep after copyediting his Power Point presentation for Talmud class and synchronizing songs by the Beatles and Green Day with the images.

HOBB returned home after heroically walking Alfie and Nala the Pomeranians in the driving rain. Once he removed his soaking coat and toweled down the miserable pooches, he commenced cleaning the fishtank.

And I, after editing press releases, answering emails and doing my several-times-daily sweep of a dozen or so news sites and blogs, finally turned to Facebook.

Where I read a posting by a friend that made me laugh out loud.

Prompting HOBB to ask what was so funny.

Which prompted me, in turn, to inform him that if he wished to know, he should resubscribe to Facebook.

I was kidding, of course. My husband gave up the Facebook habit after an uneasy year as a subscriber. Too much exposure, he said. Too many old roomates eager to reconnect; too many former students wishing to stay in touch, too many stalkers...or simply people he had no interest in communicating with.

I never argued him out of his decision. Frankly, he's not the Facebook type.

But HOBB took my flippant comment seriously. Watching me avidly click on links to videos and punch in pithy responses, hearing me cackle and talk back to my screen, he informed me that the key choices in life can often be framed as Facebook versus goldfish. I must have looked perplexed, because he rushed to explain:

While he was tending his tank, adding chemicals to the water, scrubbing the sides of glass, moving the gravel around, I was communing with my computer. While he was nurturing another species, I was networking for the sake of...networking.

He didn't begrudge technology or the march of time or our newfangled era of cyber-dependency. But he did choose to be a dissenter every now and then.

To be on Facebook is human, he said.

But to care for goldfish is divine.

Discontinuity

I am a creature of habit, given to extreme product loyalty.

When I like something, I love it. Eventually, I end up obsessed and dependent.

So when a favorite product is discontinued, I have a melt-down.

And when I say discontinued, I mean OVER. Not hard to find; I'm good at that. If it's hidden, I can find it. If you're hidden, I can find you...and I have. No. I mean absolutely gone - history, archives, toast, finito. The End. Zapped. Powed. Banished from the face of Planet Earth. Not available on E-bay. Not to be found through a posting on Craigslist. Not in a forgotten drawer at any store or in a buried box at a warehouse.

And certainly -- puleeze, do not insult me – not housed at Gone but not Forgotten.

Hello. I checked with them, like, two years ago.

I mean totally used-up as in what happened to the stash I scored after the first wave of the Origins Ginger Glimmer crisis was made known to me. Those 14 tubs that I located at the shop at The Westchester last Chanuka after calling every last store in the Northeastern United States once I heard that the company was discontinuing my favorite body cream????

Gone, baby, gone.

Those Mudd calf-high combat boots I bought at Kohl's three years ago and wore to freaking death?????

Well, if you want a left one only in size 9, you should be able to replace your beloved pair by bidding quickly. Only 19 minutes left. Otherwise, this fine footwear is forever lost to humanity.

I did have a recent discontinuity scare with a favorite tea of mine -- the trippy Lapsang Souchong. (There is a sweet little story concerning how I managed to identify and then locate it in NYC after drinking about 20 cups on a damp and chilly Saturday afternoon in Dublin and then departing to the States without asking the name of the phenomenal smoky drink I had been imbibing all day.) I was recently concerned that Twinings had discontinued production based on my failure to find it in the tea section of Fairway at both the Broadway and Harlem locations.

Trepidation seeping into my soul, I researched the matter and found that Twinings was thankfully still smoking its Lapsang Souchong leaves. Fairway simply stopped carrying the product, possibly because my taste is not shared by many residents of the Upper West Side.

Now, in order to avoid the anxiety-producing empty aisle syndrome, I intend to buy the stuff online.

On a far less frivolous note, I went into an actual panic a couple of months ago when it seemed that my natural thyroid medication had been discontinued; a possibility I had never before considered. After pumping my clueless doctor for clues, I took matters into my own hands and discovered an entire community trying to cope with a sudden shortage of this vital medication - the gold standard of treatment before the synthetics were invented. The experience of joining a fellowship of victims of a discontinued product was edifying. Other people -- far more frantic and radicalized than I -- had already bonded and organized, putting together an underground railroad for this excellent stuff as well as a clearinghouse for information.

Sometimes, discontinuity is a very serious matter.

But more often than not, discontinuity simply illuminates a sensual dependency that one develops for a beloved product, an addiction to a smell, a taste, a look. Oh, the time I have invested in trying to locate lost things; the hope I have nurtured that Origins may reverse their fatwa against Ginger Glimmer -- the most awesome skin product ever: gorgeously golden, spicy fragrant and sparkly -- and start up production ASAP; the pathetic hours I have spent trolling hardcore goth fashion sites looking for combat boots that might fill the void left by the demise of my Mudds, my foolish optimism that Steve Madden or Nine West or Harley Davidson or Aldo or Target or someone might steal Mudd's design and reincarnate these cheapo, cool accoutrements.

I think of myself as a serious person, given to spiritual yearnings.

So, why the stalker-like behavior to uncover a lost booty of body lotion, a crate of smoked leaf tea, those kick-ass combat boots?

Why do I care, indeed, why do I experience something akin to grief at the prospect of a perfect product being forever lost???

This is the stuff of my life, a few of my favorite things, the items that keep me anchored to the here and now. Some of them are silly; others essential. Here are the artifacts of my life, my personal expressions of self, islands of comfort and security -- a familiar smell, taste, style of shoe – the things you will know me by, portals to eternal plenty, perhaps an intimation of einsof, providing reassuring proof that I am alive.

Serendipity on a Sunday

What is the soul of Sunday?

Shabbat comes first, to wipe the slate clean. This one was spent, as it often is, in the warm company of friends and family. There was a crowded table alive with conversation and company, overflowing food platters passed one to the other, strong wine, savory courses, chocolate desserts. There was the leisurely reading of the New York Times on the couch the following morning, the cozy cammaraderie of kiddush at our shul, a lazy lunch of leftovers at home, more reading, a high-spirited Scrabble tournament in the afternoon. There was the strenuous shoveling out of our Honda -- barricaded by walls of snow -- Saturday night; the subsequent drive out to Great Neck to visit MOBB and FOBB (mother and father of Bungalow Babe) with Little Babe and HOBB and Little Babe's electric cello and electric bass and cupcakes and noisemakers to celebrate FOBB's birthday.

And suddenly Sunday happened.

Sunday feels completely different from Saturday. Though I've always wondered if my perception of Sunday is linked to my Sabbath observance, it is possible that Sunday's difference is inherent and not relative. I wouldn't know. I've kept Shabbat my entire life and even when I've refrained from perfect observance, the aura of the day's distinctness remains draped over me like a permanent prayershawl -- a temporal tallit.

Shabbat commands you to refrain from creation. Sunday commands you to create.

Sunday instructs you: Go Forth. Shabbat impels you: Go to Sleep.

My preferred Sundays are constructed like totem poles, monumental, boasting a variety of faces, forming a formidable work of art, leaving you exhilirated and giddy and spent, heartbroken by the time night comes around and the scent of the imminent death of the weekend fills your nostrils.

There were several faces to this Sunday: the gift of fragrant roses, the joy of intense exercise, the necessity of work, the thrill of attending a live literary event featuring a beloved writer friend, a visit to the ICP -- the International Center for Photography in midtown http://www.icp.org/-- to see Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography and Paris. There was a delicious Middle Eastern dinner, swing dance class with HOBB at night and a candlelit adventure back at the urban bungalow for the two of us.

But this Sunday's totem pole bore a special face -- that of serendipitous discovery. Though we came to the ICP for the Paris exhibit (having dutifully read the listings Friday night in the Wall Street Journal, New Yorker and NY Times) we found ourselves pulled into the poignant art and biography of Miroslav Tichy, a Czech painter and photographer who lives alone in a rat-infested hovel in the woods, homeless by appearance, a crazy, bearded old man, an exacting visionary, an artist mercifully saved from obscurity.

Tichy's grainy, haunting images cover the carefully curated walls of the ICP's main gallery. They form a perfect contrast to the works of the surrealists in Paris one floor below. They hold you captive, draw you into Tichy's world, orderly and disordered, squalid and solitary and beautiful. They reflect magic and madness. They are the essence of rebellion against the rigors of communism. They are draped in a Sunday shawl, their scent is eternal Sunday afternoon, they present a Sunday face to the public.

What is the soul of Sunday?

The soul of Sunday is Miroslav Tichy, driven to build his own cameras out of found objects, to capture small scenes, gestures and details through his lens, to defy a crushing political regime, to foresake normalcy, surrendering entirely to the impulses of his heart, capitulating completely to the commandment to create art as he saw it, imprisoned by his terrible talent, liberated from temporal constraints and social convention, patiently waiting to be discovered by a grateful public.

Double Self

The sculptures of Viola Frey overwhelmed me today, stalking me through Manhattan's Museum of Art and Design in Columbus Circle, surrounding me in their oversized grandeur and gawky majesty.

Frey's glazed ceramic people are the star attraction of this quirky, creative space, accosting visitors, delighting and deluging their senses, demanding that the fullest attention to be paid.

"Have you ever heard of her?" I asked my friend, an artist, astonished that Frey's name and work was unknown to me, abashed at revealing the depth of my ignorance.

Much to my relief, my friend shook her head.

It was a Sunday of extremes -- extreme cold, extreme wind, extreme sunshine, extreme emotion. Early February already. How did that happen?

After a night of dancing, I had been on the go for hours -- from an 8 am meeting, to a 9:30 workout, to an 11 am brunch with friends. Now, it was midday and I was ambling comfortably through this quaint museum with a friend I had known for nearly twenty years. Dinner and family responsibility was three hours away.

My friend and I met nearly two decades earlier when we were living in Westchester County and the mothers of young children. One of those children is lost; two others were since born. One of us is a Manhattanite, the other a Connecticut homeowner. We know the scaffolding of each others' lives but today, endeavored to learn the interior design. To this end, we traded tales, listening, probing, sometimes challenging the other. We spoke about our work and our professional ambitions. We articulated what we sought in our intimate relationships. We pondered the depth of the chasm between men and women.

We mostly walked and sometimes sat. At one point, we watched a short film about Viola Frey. In it, the artist is captured in the act of creating her inimitable art. She addresses the interviewer, answering questions or speaking spontaneously about her work. Her colleagues talk about her. It is important to note that she died in 2004, at the age of 70. Funny, how we nurture the illusion that the entire span of a human life can be condensed into one museum trip, how we gain a glimpse into the creative mind of Viola Frey through some clunky, colorful statues in a Manhattan museum.

Hours later, it is one comment -- captured in the film -- that stays with me. It belongs to a fellow artist, a woman, who recounts how Viola told her not to get married and certainly not to have children. Having relationships distracted one from devoting oneself to making art, she had warned.

I turned to my friend with raised eyebrows. She shrugged. "It's true, of course."

Of course it's true. It's just hard to admit.

We make decisions about the way we lead our lives. Artists or not, we opt for solitary, single-minded purity or for the messy distraction of relationships that are prone to take us miles and centuries away from our work.

We adapt. We struggle. We compromise. We concede. We conspire. We reach for transcendence.

We each have a single self. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we are able to awaken and animate a double self.