The Adventures of the Would-Be Jihadists in Riverdale, New York

Riverdale, New York is about the least cool neighborhood in Gotham City.

Straddling the Henry Hudson Parkway just north of Manhattan, it is a mess of mismatched apartment buildings, pre-fab townhouses, senior facilities, private schools, depressing stores and shopping centers where, incongruously, gorgeous and often palatial private homes adorn the bank of the Hudson River or slouch self-consciously a couple of blocks over, to the east of the Parkway.

There are no groovy hangouts, no hip nightclubs, no restaurants that could properly be called destinations. But Riverdale has Jews, and lots of 'em. There are at least at least three thriving Orthodox synagogues, a bustling Conservative one and even a Reform Temple. Though badly in need of renovation, there is also a Jewish Community Center. There are at least two Jewish day schools and a new Jewish high school. I've heard rumors that there is a Reconstructionist congregation.

The largest senior facility has the word Hebrew in its name, there are kosher pizza places and Chinese restaurants and delis and butchers and bakers and even a Dunkin' Donuts shop under rabbinical supervision.

It's a bit of Jerusalem on the Hudson, Riverdale is; the kind of place where Saturday afternoons bring the local yidden out on the streets in Shabbat garb -- gaggles of formally-dressed kids running in tandem, families strolling in their finery, elderly couples in dignified shuffle.

Still, unlike Brooklyn, Riverdale is not on any subway line, not the kind of neighborhood one is likely to stumble onto by accident. It is a drive-thru community, a passageway from Manhattan to Westchester or Connecticut, a place that doesn't have a quaint and cozy center.

So it is therefore extremely puzzling to learn that of all the New York communities renowned for being Jewish, Riverdale was being targeted by a gang of would-be terrorists from Newburgh, NY.

As the news of the foiled plot hit the airwaves, complete with the details of a bomb set to detonate outside of the Riverdale Temple and the Riverdale Jewish Center, where HOBB and I proudly sat in the sanctuary, just three weeks ago, to hear Little Babe play cello in his school's Yom Hazikaron presentation, it struck me as exceedingly odd.

If one was going to strike a blow to the heart of the New York Jewish community, Riverdale would hardly be the place. My own nabe -- the Upper West Side -- or Boro Park, Brooklyn or the Upper East Side or Forest Hills, Queens or any number of Long Island and Westchester communities have higher Jewish visibility.

While it is a vibrant, important and Jewishly-dense area, Riverdale is more akin to the right arm, not the vital center of the community.

And unlike the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, which is located along the Henry Hudson Parkway, the intended targets of this particular plot are located within the grid of inner streets, hardly the kind of place a Jew-hating terrorist might stumble upon accidentally.

Begging the question -- how did they know?

Yet, this was not the first time that Riverdale was under terrorist threat in recent years.

And by the light of day, puzzlement morphed into another emotion -- uneasiness -- as new emails filled my Inbox. Several contained links to news stories about the foiled attack. One was from the principal of Little Babe's school in Riverdale. It offered a recap of the story and news from the police briefing that took place last night.

The FBI acted in an exemplary way, infiltrating the terrorist cell, the situation is now entirely under control, the email explained. There is no heightened threat to the children or the community.

The words were intended to reassure the parents of the nearly 1000 Jewish kids who are scheduled to leave the safety of their homes this morning, like any regular school day. And news articles now carry an "all's clear" message from Mayor Bloomberg.

Yet suddenly, Monday's email from the school nurse's office about swine flu, seems quaint, nearly cartoonish.

Unlike terrorists, swine flu doesn't target Jews, though the first New York City fatality of the virus did turn out to be Jewish.

In a free-associative, crazy-person kind of way, this seems like a premonition of sorts as I prepare to wake up Little Babe and get him ready for school.

Sunday Night in May with 'Mockingbird' and a Calligraphy Brush

Here is a slice of the life of Bungalow Babe in the Big City:

Last night, at 10 pm, tired of reading To Kill a Mockingbird, Little Babe handed me his tattered paperback copy.

"Could you read me the last chapter of Part One?" he yawned/asked.

Being that I had just returned from the gym five minutes earlier, which capped off a 12-hour marathon of activity, which began with an early morning breakfast on Long Island, included a three hour cleaning frenzy at our actual upstate bungalow and had just concluded with a 45-minute session on the elliptical trainer with the music of the Go-Go's blasting in my ears, I must admit that reading out loud to my youngest child was not what I had in mind.

Evidently, my feelings were written all over my face. But Little Babe knew how to sweeten the deal.

"I'll do Japanese calligraphy on your back while you read to me," he offered.

Deal.

So, for the next 20 minutes or so, while I retold Harper Lee's timeless tale, Little Babe dipped his calligraphy brush into ink and drew on the canvas of my back. The tickling touch of the brush was totally relaxing, the perfect end to a hectic day.

Sensing an opportunity, Alfie the Pomeranian curled into my side while his sister, our year-old pup Nala, watched respectfully from the floor.

Time superimposed itself onto place resulting in this moment: a fortysomething American Jewish woman in 21st Century Manhattan reading a novel based in the American South of the mid-20th Century while her young teen son draws Japanese pictographs on her back.

Nearing the end of Chapter 11, the insult hurled at Atticus Finch -- "Nigger-lover!" -- tasted foreign and uncomfortable in my mouth, a dusty vestige, long ago but not too far away.

Not so far away indeed that when Scout landed a punch on Francis's foul mouth, the blood on her fist felt warm on my own hand and the beating that she got from her uncle was as tangible as the breeze from the open window of my apartment drying the ink on my naked back.

Bitch on Wheels

Looking at the mug shot of Madlyn Primoff at 2 in the morning provides a jolt of adrenaline. This image seems borrowed from a seventies horror film; it is reminiscent of the psycho vagrant hanging around the parking lot or an extra from Night of the Living Dead.

It's not nice to make fun of the way someone looks (even when they are being booked on charges of child endangerment) but it is the vacant-eyed, strung-out Sunday evening expression that Mad Madlyn wears that I wish to address.

Working people everywhere (but probably less so in France or Italy) know the bittersweet quality of Sunday evening, that last refuge of blissful non-work before the relentless pace of the work week resumes.

A certain melancholy always sweeps over me at sunset as I bid farewell to unstructured time with my family and friends, to trysts with the New York Times spread out on the couch, to the memory of red wine, to the joyous cessation of demands, deadlines and deliverables, to the freedom to just be... without the pressure to constantly produce.

Of course, to working parents of young children, the weekend is often just as stressful (if not more so) that the work week...with the exception that you have no lunch hour, no arena in which to feel smart and competant, little or no time away from your kids and very little control over just about anything.

Though I have always preferred weekends to the workweek throughout my nearly 25 years of motherhood, I have often heard people with young kids say that they cannot wait to get back to work following a weekend and that their true work is at home, being a mom or a dad.

Maybe that sense of utter overload is what Madlyn Primoff was experiencing last Sunday evening when she dumped out her young daughters, who had previously been bickering in the backseat of her car, in downtown White Plains and drove away, leaving the girls miles from home.

According to news reports, the older ran after the car and was admitted back. The little one did not and was left alone by her mother and sister. A short while later, the crying kiddie was found by a concerned couple, fed ice cream and handed over to a passing cop.

The police took the agitated 10 year old to the station and waited for the parents to call. When Mommy Madlyn finally did, it was to report a "lost child." She then went on to tell the cops that she had let her daughter wander around downtown and couldn't locate her, blah blah blah, neglecting the troublesome part about throwing her out of the car.

White Plains' Finest reassured the mom that her daughter was safe and instructed her to come down to the precint to retrieve her. When she arrived, she was arrested and thrown into the clink for the night.

I provided this recap to save you from googling "Madlyn Primoff" on the off-chance that you hadn't heard of this story. Perhaps you have been working day and night on your doctoral dissertation or are engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Swine Flu or have just been in a remote village without internet access.

In other words, chances are that if you are breathing, you've heard about this infamous woman: Scarsdale wife, mother of two young girls and white shoe lawyer at a fancy pants Manhattan firm.

Not to mention bitch on wheels.

Over the past week, I've clocked untold hours reading civilian reactions on the myriad blogs and websites dedicated to Maddy's misdeed and have been fascinated to find that there is a hearty debate in this country (and even in such places like France and Italy) about the degree of heinousness of Madlyn Primoff's actions with some parents calling her insane and irresponsible while others give her a You Go, Girl! (and even 'fess up to having done the same to their bratty offspring) and still others admit to having had the urge but stop short of condoning Primoff's penchant for putting her kids out, curbside.

As my POV on L'affair Primoff is pretty evident, (yep, I find the notion of actually throwing your young kids out of the car hostile, crazed and nearly unforgivable) I don't wish to belabor it.

Instead, I want to draw a lesson from this story, one with practical ramifications.

And the lesson can be drawn from meditating upon the scary face of Madlyn Primoff.

We can learn from the face of Madlyn Primoff a truth that we have long suppressed: that it is too steep a transition to go from Sunday night to Monday morning when you are a working parent of small children.

Too jarring is the passage from a weekend at home where it can often feel like your kids are your boss to the office where your boss is your boss.

Honestly, how do we expect people to behave in a sane, responsible manner if they go straight from two days of chauffering their kids to various sports activities and birthday parties, overseeing homework and school projects, buying shoes and eating at fast food restaurants - not to mention playing referee between on-going squabbles in the backseat of a moving car -- to the world of stream-lined professionalism?

Working parents of small kids need a little buffer zone...where no one is their boss.

So, in the spirit of preventing more kids from being thrown out of cars (or worse) or to avoid the melancholy meltdowns of people like me who are guilty of loving weekends too damn much, I suggest the following modest proposal, which I will call Mad Monday Morning, in homage to Madlyn herself:

A mandated work week that resumes at NOON on Mondays, thereby creating a half-day recess for the working parents of young children -- or hell, just about anyone! -- who has trouble making the transition from Sunday night to Monday morning.

The time can be spent communing with nature, watching television, taking a long bath, saving the world, having a mani-pedi or enjoying intimacy with your spouse now that the kids are finally out of the house.

Working parents of America! Let us re-envision Monday morning, thinking of it not as a destination but as a portal between the realms of work and leisure.

Let us honor the need for a journey from one to the next.

And maybe, if we can build this bridge of sacred time, there will be less road rage along the way.

Close Encounters of the Unexpected Kind

On Shabbat afternoon, I left HOBB (husband of Bungalow Babe) and thirteen-year-old Little Babe after the communal pre-Passover shul luncheon known as The Last Challah, and walked down to the JCC to meet a friend.

It was a notably blustery day. Though I typically look forward to this two-mile Shabbat hike -- a personal ritual -- I felt more than a bit daunted by the prospect of traversing 40 windy blocks. In addition, the sky was gunmetal grey with a moist sting in the air. Having decided against a hat, I had a vision of myself arriving at the facility drenched, shivering and miserable.

Forty minutes later, having stopped in at least half a dozen shops to warm up along the way, I arrived. Despite my fears, it hadn't rained, though my fingers were nearly numb with cold and my hair looked like it had been blow-dried by a hairstylist on crack.

As planned, my friend arrived at 3:30 and we quickly commandeered a couch in the lobby in the minutes prior to the performance of the Acapella group -- a standard feature of the JCC's Shabbat R&R program. While she guarded our seats, I went to fetch cups of hot tea and cookies -- all free, courtesy of the observance-friendly community program.

Though we had thought to meet for a couple of hours (before she went off to her Torah class and me to my regular afternoon workout at the JCC), the sun was setting by the time we parted company.

As we spoke in the lobby, and then in the vacant reception area of the nursery school, four hours had passed. And when I arrived home at 9:30 pm, HOBB was completed baffled as to how I had managed to spend six hours "at the gym."

But I wasn't "in the gym" for six hours, I attempted to explain. I was with my friend and then I went to the gym only for the last hour...after which I fell into a locker room conversation with some women about the limitations of talk therapy and philosophy of Viktor Frankl.

While HOBB looked at me skeptically, I asked, don't you ever get into long discussions with your friends or meet really interesting people in unexpected places? Don't guys have these kinds of talks in locker rooms?

But even as the words were leaving my lips, I knew that the kind of locker room talk men were renowned for was hardly about matters such as logotherapy.

No, he stated, continuing to stare at me as if I had just announced my conversion to Wicca. I have never had any kind of extended conversation in the locker room nor do I have four-hour long discussions with my friends in the lobbies of buildings. That's not the kind of thing that happens to men.

I uttered a silent prayer of thanks to the Lord for not making me a man. And happily pondered my penchant for unexpected connections, for interpersonal adventure, for encounters with friends and strangers...the good, the bad and the unbelievably weird.

This, you see, is a recurring theme in my life. I leave Point A bound for Point B. Most often I arrive at my appointed destination...but not until visiting Points Z, Q, G and V along the way.

Or my pre-supposed destination becomes a launching pad for another kind of adventure.

Most of the time, the journey feels magical, marvelous and tinged with bashert, a sense of the pre-ordained.

Mainly, these adventures occur when I am on my own. I have also come to see that there is a special category of Shabbat afternoon close encounters of the bashert kind.

And every now and then, my very openness leads me into an awkward or questionable or unsavory situation.

Such an encounter took place earlier this week, far from the protection of Shabbat. In the course of a prospective business meeting with the kind of client I invariably avoid, my openness exposed me to a sense of personal trespass.

But life adventurers don't easily wear the mantle of victimhood, expect for obviously extreme situations. Creepy though this particular connection proved to be, I proudly toss it into the valise of personal experience, looking back at it with a kind of horrified fascination.

The sun has just come up on the start of a new work week. Twenty minutes ago, my daily alarm went off and I silenced it quickly, so as not to wake Little Babe or HOBB. Sitting at the dining room table in my quiet apartment, I pause to consider that three nights from now this very space will be filled with the clutter of conversation as Middle Babe and Big Babe will, GW, join their little brother, grandparents and guests at our first Seder.

Though I am now rooted in secular time, Pesach will shortly pour its magic over my household. Within the pre-ordained structure of the Seder, unexpected adventure, interpersonal revelation and connection with our collective past and future will occur. As we sit together, recounting the story of our people's journey from slavery to freedom, spontaneous, sometimes startling discussion becomes interwoven with the timeless text of the Hagaddah.

It is for this, I believe, that we were liberated from Egypt. The Children of Israel were the first chance adventurers, refusing to go directly from Point A to Point B.

Indeed, forty years elapsed between their departure and appointed arrival, an epoch that has erroneously been called Wandering.

But as the descendent of this nation of early adventurers, driven to seek an alternative to the straits of servitude to Pharoah, I toast the first recorded road trip in Jewish history, knowing that, though the going was often rough, it was an excellent adventure.

Haagen Dazs at 5 A.M.... and Other Cool Things About Being a Grown-Up

At five in the morning, having been awake and working for one entire hour, I padded into the kitchen, removed the pint of Vanilla Haagen Dazs I had bought for Shabbat…and had breakfast.

The ability to eat Haagen Dazs whenever the heck you want is definitely one of the coolest aspects of being an adult. In my mind, it just about cancels out other, less cool factors, such as stress, the prospect of one's impending death and belly fat that refuses to go away even after millions of ab crunches. (Of course, ice cream might have something to do with that. A bitter irony.)

My pre-dawn ice cream party catapulted me back to a dear and precious memory -- the first time I tasted Haagen Dazs ice cream.

The year was 1977 and my family had just moved to Forest Hills from Douglaston, NY, where my father had been the rabbi of a busy Conservative synagogue. Having recently earned his PhD in clinical psychology, he made a bold career change at the age of 47, leaving behind the highly public pulpit position he had held for 21 years in favor of a private psychotherapy practice in Manhattan and Queens.

The move away from Douglaston was actually a move up on the socioeconomic and sophistication ladder. Our new home was a solid, impressive brick home that cost more than three times the cost of the Douglaston home: a staggering $80,000.

Though we had lived in a woodframe nineteen fifies colonial house owned by the synagogue, most of the members of the Douglaston community lived in modest walk-up garden apartments in the Jewish section of town. (Old Douglaston was as grand as Great Neck. Alas, few Jews had been allowed in.)

Down the block from our house, on 61st Avenue, was an EJ Korvettes -- an emporium of downscale dreck, with the exception of their fine record department.

The other local department stores were Mays and Alexanders. Between these fine shops, the Danskin "irregulars" outlet on Union Turnpike and the occasional trip out to Williamburg to the ever-crowded and dusty Natan Borlam's, we built our uncool wardrobes. The Bloomingdale's branch that opened up in Fresh Meadows a few years earlier was some kind of fluke and I wondered where the store's customers actually lived.

Going out to eat entailed driving to Main Street in Kew Garden Hills for kosher pizza 'n falafel at Shimon's (the first such establishment) or Levi's (the competition, just a couple of blocks away).

Occasionally, we would troop into a diner, such as the Scobee Grill on Northern Boulevard or the Georgia Diner on Queens Boulevard where we ate tuna salad sandwiches festooned with frilly toothpicks, which came accessorized with a generous handful of potato chips, sour pickles and a scoop of cole slaw.

For special occasions, we headed down to the Lower East Side for Ratner's (milchiks) or "Schmulke" Bernstein's (fleishiks). Weirdly, there was one year that we made frequent visits to Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips, which my mother, the rebbetzin, somehow deemed kosher.

Though Waldbaum's was our local supermarket, my mother preferred to drive the few extra miles to Pathmark, which became our family's mecca, an alternate spiritual retreat, the consumer counterpart to our synagogue -- The Marathon Jewish Community Center.

I therefore grew up on Pathmark brand everything, including notebooks, shampoo and ice cream. Especially their ice cream, which my mom claimed was actually Breyer's in Pathmark packaging -- a sad delusion... or outright lie. Glorious exceptions to this included actual Breyer's ice cream, when it was on sale; the creamy perfection of Carvel at the local Douglaston outpost; and -- the pinnacle of every kid's dream -- Baskin and Robbin's, with their free tastes, pink spoons and 31 amazing flavors.

Despite my fondness for getting tastes of such creative ice cream incarnations as Bubblegum and Blueberry Cheese Cake, I always chose Pralines 'n Cream. And because there was a Baskin and Robbin's on Main Street in Kew Garden Hills, our pizza and falafel forays often included ice cream.

So, I was hardly deprived of ice cream pleasure in my youth.

However, when, at the age of 17, I discovered the heaven that is Haagen Dazs, my life changed.

I was babysitting for a glamorous young couple with two little girls. The wife was blond and beautiful, with a Lauren Hutton-like gap between her two front teeth. The husband was geeky, with a frizzy halo of hair. Still, they dressed to kill and were the uncontested king and queen of sophistication within the Orthodox community, which my family had awkwardly joined, now that my dad was no longer a practicing Conservative rabbi.

Thirtyish and the very quintessence of Yuppie-ness, though the word hadn't yet been invented, they lived in a massive and gorgeous corner property with landscaped lawns and chic interior decor.

The kitchen of their home was stocked with babysitter-friendly snacks, which the wife graciously pointed out to me. It was during my second visit to their home that I discovered the Haagen Dazs, indeed, a stash of the frozen stuff in a dizzying array of flavors -- Chocolate, Vanilla, Honey and Carob.

I tasted them all.

And depleted more than a few pints by myself.

The parents never noticed or complained.

It was a dream babysitting assignment -- a beautiful home stocked with multiple flavors of Haagen Dazs and two adorable little girls who were invariably asleep when I arrived. It was an excursion into fantasyland for me, a guest pass to a magnificent life on a scale of grandeur I had not experienced before.

And though I was hardly the kind of teen who fantasized about marriage or playing house or even being a mother (running away from home to live in Paris, or at least California was a more common daydream) this was a fascinating experience for me. Settling into their ultra-comfy leather armchair for an evening of prime television viewing, my fave thing was to save the Haagen Dazs blitz for the beginning of the Carol Burnett Show.

To this day, I have a Pavlovian reaction when I sample Haagen Dazs after a long period of abstinence. As the ice cream melts over my tastebuds, a song runs through my head: "I'm so glad we had this time togeeeether; Just to have a laugh or sing a song. Seems we just get started and before you know iiiiit; Comes the time we have to say, so long. So long, everyone!"

In the home of my babysitting clients, I glimpsed a world of tastes and textures well beyond what was available to me in Douglaston. The fine clothes of the wife, the fashionable hats she wore for Shabbat and holidays at the Orthodox synagogue, the heavy furniture that bespoke taste and discernment, the well-behaved little girls with their dream bedrooms...all this was new to me.

And the readily-available Haagen Dazs was the cherry on the sundae of this new experience -- a taste of the World to Come.

Within a decade of my babysitting assignment, this beautiful couple divorced in a blaze of scandal involving matching his and hers affairs. Close-knit communities are always rocked by these things; even more so, Orthodox communities who sometimes consider themselves innoculated from the common temptations and downfalls of humankind.

Over the past thiry years, I've seen the two of them with their respective second spouses. They seem happy; however, I cannot help having a twinge of nostalgia when I recall my wide-eyed introduction to their home, their perfect-seeming family and their endless supply of Haagen Dazs ice cream.

The sun has now come up. Three hours have passed since my unorthodox breakfast and I took a break from blogging to get Little Babe ready for school, the dogs ready for their morning walk.

Naturally, I hid the evidence of my Haagen Dazs-fest from my son and husband. For Little Babe, this is obviously the worst kind of nutritional behavior to model and for HOBB, well, he just wouldn't understand.

Though I expected a blood sugar crash, none has come. Instead, I feel happy and calm, ready to face the Friday madness.

Perhaps I will institutionalize this little ritual every Erev Shabbat, a kind of spa for the soul and treat for the senses. As I grin at my secret indulgence, the words of the Carol Burnett theme song revisit me:

I'm so glad we had this time together
Just to have a laugh or sing a song
Seems we just get started and before you know it
Comes the time we have to say, so long.

The Lady Vanishes

I once quietly stalked Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson on Broadway with my daughter, Middle Babe, walking stealthily behind them for about six blocks until they turned right on a street in the West Sixties -- I think it was W67th Street -- and into a luxury building.

They were wearing sunglasses and holding hands.

"Well?" I asked my daughter, standing stupidly on the street as our movie stars greeted the doorman and disappeared inside an elevator.

"Pointless but cool," my daughter summarized. "Let's check out the Gap," she suggested, heading back to Broadway.

Earlier today, before Natasha Richardson's death was announced, I sent my daughter a message on Facebook reminding her of our long-ago adventure. After accusing me of being Perez Hilton, Middle Babe conceded that the news about Richardson was horribly sad...and that, yes, she remembered we had once stalked her and Liam Neeson.

It was a while ago when we did that; I think Middle Babe was a freshman in high school. Still, I didn't need to explain to her who Richardson and Neeson were after I spotted them on the street. She recognized them, having seen The Parent Trap and Schindler's List.

My Facebook message reached Middle Babe in Dublin, where she was recovering from St. Patrick's Day with one of her best friends, who is taking a semester at Trinity. I'm bound for Dublin tomorrow night to spend the weekend with her, HOBB and Little Babe...and then I'm onto Berlin to visit Big Babe, my oldest son.

Nothing but nothing is ready for this trip. I've been consumed by work, the cleaning lady is MIA, there were Parent-Teacher conferences this afternoon followed by a drive out to Great Neck to see NOBB (niece of Bungalow Babe) perform (steal the show) in Beauty and the Beast

Leaving the show at intermission, I dashed back to the city with the intention of getting a jump on all that needed to get done -- laundry, packing, purchasing items on a Wish List for Big Babe, work assignments -- before I boarded my plane.

Sitting down in front of my computer close to 11 pm, the staccato headline jumped out at me, confirming the rumors of the past day: Natasha Richardson is Dead at 45.

I stopped in my tracks to observe a moment of silence, enveloped by sadness for the actress I first noticed in The Handmaid's Tale.

And reorder my priorities.

It is nearing midnight. I am not Perez Hilton but I find myself thinking of Natasha Richardson and the unkind way that death came for her. I think of her famous husband and her young sons, imagine the terrible shock of her unheralded departure. I think of her family, the names that are a Who's Who of contemporary theatre and film.

I grieve for her mother, that immovable, impossible icon Vanessa Redgrave. I ponder the unspeakable cruelty of a mother having to bury her child.

The suddenness of this particular death rivets and terrifies us. We want to rewind the footage so as to track the stealthy progress of the Angel of Death as he moved to claim her, note the snares he had set, see how he covered up his work, tricking everyone into a false sense of security.

Most of all, her.

For Natasha Richardson, the thinnest of veils separated this world from the world to come.

I think of her death as when last I had seen her -- standing in the lobby of a building one moment, gone a second later.

Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Part II

Dear Readers,

I am delighted to bring you the Second Annual Wish List from Berlin, courtesy of my eldest child, Big Babe, who is living the life of the expatriate American writer in the European city widely touted as The New Paris.

Below, reproduced in accurate detail, is Big Babe's request list of items he cannot live without...culled from the various emails we have exchanged over the past week, in advance of my forthcoming trip to Europe.

And while I had visions of minimalist chic travel accessories, I now see that I will be shlepping a monster-size suitcase, hoping that the pungent scent of salami is muffled by the various books and bottles of hot sauce, a condiment that is evidently and disappointingly shvach in the Fatherland.

But I'm not really complaining, indeed, I am thrilled to be journeying to two cities that end with "lin" - Dublin and Berlin -- and cannot wait to spend time with Big Babe in his (hopefully temporary) adopted home. I am merely trying to figure out when I'm going to pick up all this stuff between now and my Thursday night departure.

Without further ado, Big Babe's Berlin Wish List II:

March 8, 2009

Hi Mom!!!!!!!I've been thinking about what I want you to bring - ideally - from the good ol' U S of A. For the moment, here's all the essentials I can think of...also cognizant of the fact that you'll need to schlep these to Ireland and then on to Berlin, so it’s none too extravagant.

From Zabars:

- 3 lbs. French-Italian ground for Melitta.

- 1/2 lb. lox (prepackaged OK)

- Chocolate babka and/ or chocolate rugelach

- .5 - 1 lb of a nice sharp cheddar (totally nonexistent in Germany)

- 2 Vials of Melinda's XXX (German hot sauce just isn't the same)

- Maybe a kosher Salami or two. The hard kind if possible. Spicy too.

No loose cold cuts (they get nasty in transit)

From News Stands:

- Current and one recent issue of the New York Review of Books

- Ditto for the New Yorker

- Maybe a copy of Harpers, The New Republic or The Nation?

From Home:

- That pkg that arrived about a month ago for me

- Another pkg that should be arriving in a week and change

- My video-out mac cable (I'll give you more info on where to find it later this week)

Additionally, if you manage to get your hands of the Everyman's Library edition of Yates, that would be great(s)!!!! and perhaps a bottle of that single malt scotch -- Dalmores -- that dad likes...and if you make it to Trader Joe’s, some of those wonderful tea tree oil wipes would be great!I think that's all...but will let you know if I remember anything else.....love!

March 16, 2009

Let me know if you have any difficulty tracking down / procuring any of the items I requested - among which is a package that ought to arrive in a few days...if we're lucky

March 16, 2009

One more request: Could you pick up the current issue of Sight and Sound? It's a British film magazine. You might have more luck finding it in Ire or Heathrow than in NY...I just saw online that this issue is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick so I'm quite excited.

March 17, 2009

Two more things that spring (!) to mind: my portable external HD (the small gray one...not the larger white one)- last seen on that pine file cabinet that was in the middle of my floor....And a hardbound copy of Edward Lear's The Book of Nonsense, which I believe is on the bookcase next to my desk and the radiator, on the first of second shelf (the books are double stacked...)

love,

His Story, Monday Afternoon

It was my second time seeing him and he was draping warm, wet cloths over my feet.

"Relax," he urged me.

"It doesn't come easy," I replied. He raised an eyebrow. "I can tell," he said. "Try closing your eyes. Some people actually fall asleep."

I closed my eyes and tried really hard.

"Make your feet limp," he said, wiggling my left foot by the toe. He ran a hand under my foot in a tickly stroke. It worked. I felt the muscles in my ankle release.

"Good," he reported, going to work on my feet. While he draped cloths, pushed and prodded my feet this way and that, took measurements and did various other doctorly things, he told me a story.

It was about a young boy, a college freshman, a New Yorker alone on a mid-western college campus because his buddies from Forest Hills High School had been drafted and shipped off to Vietnam.

He was bound there too, but a freakish medical condition prevented Uncle Sam from wanting him.

And so, he lived to grow up and become a doctor while they all died young, in battle. Every last one of his buddies from Forest Hills.

The mid-western college experience was lonely without his friends...but something else. It was terrible, he said, lifting his eyes to mine.

And then he told me why.

In a fifth-floor podiatrist's office in Manhattan's midtown, on a cold March afternoon, a silver-haired doctor talks to his patient, telling her about something that happened to him when he was a boy.

The story has the effect of a punch in the gut, forcing a sharp intake of air, a wince, a flood of empathy for the man kneeling before her.

The patient examines the man who holds her feet and tells this tale. She has come because of a pain in the heel of her right foot which he had diagnosed as plantar fasciitis, evidently a common affliction, though she had never heard of it before. He is there to dole out the cure, explain treatment, foot baths, exercises, prepare special implants for her shoes.

And while he works, he talks, spilling his story like so many pills from an upended prescription bottle. The story heightens her sensory awareness and she observes the murmur of Sunday mass in his voice, the vibration of the stripes that run along his dress shirt, the dull thunk of a basketball bouncing on a driveway, the brush of his mother's kiss along his hairline, the shape of a name whispered achingly in the night, the burnished glow of his tanned skin.

She wonders why this story was offered to her -- a forty-year old remembrance of things past. She wonders if he tells this particular tale to all his patients, or just his female patients, or just patients who come on Monday or in March.

The story ignites curiosity about another story he told her last time -- a contemporary, happy story - and she wants to connect the dots between the two, figure out how A led to B.

Pulling on her high black boots a short while later, she finds herself viewing his story in her head, seeing it unfold in slow motion.

When she steps down hard on her right foot, she imagines that the pain in her heel feels like the memory that is still lodged in his heart.

Beware the F-Word

Oh, irony of ironies.

Last night, a small news story was posted to the New York Magazine website, featuring a shocking collection of words.

The news item, which concerned itself with two rival schools of journalism in this great city of ours, sent my eyebrows WAY up to my hairline.

Not because of what it purported to be about (who cares, after all, after the pissing matches of graduate programs), but because it featured HOBB (whom loyal readers know to be Husband of Bungalow Babe and who is a professor at one of these schools), using a word that he rarely uses in real life.

Yes, it's the biggest and baddest cuss word there is, folks, the ultimate naughty thing to say, beginning with an F, and ending with a UCK.

And it ain't Firetruck.

Now, here's the thang:

The word that HOBB is quoted as using is actually one of my personal faves, the equivalent of the coveted blank Scrabble tile, an all-purpose, pithy, monosyllabic, blunt and utterly vulgar word that sounds good in a variety of settings and situations.

Bang your knee under the table as you're standing up exactly in that horribly painful spot that makes you black out and want to die?

Bump unexpectedly into your ex-boyfriend at the Halloween parade in the Village only to realize that he's holding hands with a guy who reminds you of your father?

Some drug addict darts in front of your moving vehicle and you swerve, nearly killing a mom with a baby stroller?

I rest my case.

The point is, I have a healthy relationship with the F-word, much to the dismay of HOBB who has accused me of being afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome due to my fondness of it.

So, returning to last night, I was stunned to discover him using the F-word...but worse, far worse.

He was quoted using it -- a university professor (and religion writer and publicly Orthodox Jew, to boot) -- in the pages of New York, which did readers a favor by posting the item online before the print issue hit the stands.

The context was his commentary on journalism education that seeks to teach the new bells and whistles of the medium before the basics.

To convey his point, he reportedly told his Reporting and Writing Class earlier this year, "F-word New Media." One of his students dutifully wrote this piece of instruction down and anonymously conveyed it to the reporter from New York.

Naturally, HOBB's pronouncement is the money quote and it instantly went viral, due in small part, to me, the perversely proud wife, who blasted it out to a group of friends and select cool family friends.

Today, you'll find it charmingly referenced in various places online in blogs and websites that care about pissing matches between graduate journalism programs. In the comment log to the New York article, HOBB has both defenders and detractors.

Some find HOBB to be a dinosaur, a Luddite, a fuddy-duddy. Amusingly, others bring examples of other important technological inventions (the phone, the automobile, moving pictures) that were similarly pooh-poohed by those who lacked vision.

What I was not prepared for, however, was the rage-soaked, hostile invective by commentors on a couple of the other blogs, citizens of cyberspace who found HOBB's view so egregious that they were moved to hateful, vicious, even violent-sounding posts.

They became ageist, calling him an old man, which he certainly isn't.

They turned the F-word on him.

They sounded like grounded teens getting really pissed at their parents.

This, I found curious.

Was it HOBB's use of the F-word, I wondered? Did that raise the blood pressure of readers? Supposing he had used a slightly different choice of words, such as -- "I don't really like New Media," instead of "F- New Media?"

But I'm the first to admit it. Positioning the F-word next to "New Media" has a jaunty, sloganistic ring to it. Sounds like a fundraising concept for the J-School, something cool to put on t-shirts, perhaps.

F*** New Media!

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Class of 2009

Anyway, the more I pondered the apoplectic reaction of some readers, the more I wondered who the true Luddites were.

I also wondered how our home environment would change now that HOBB's secret is out of the bag.

Despite claiming to abstain, he is indeed a public practitioner of the F-word.

I'm not the only one who needs to wash her mouth out.

But yet another secret has stayed largely discovered by those writing about HOBB'S public Tourette's attack: this allegedly anti-New Media prof is married to a practitioner of the New Media. (Duh!!! You're reading her blog!)

And with that tantalizing - not to mention, ironic -- little tidbit, his words take on a whole new dimension.

Bernie Madoff: Metaphor

I admit that it has been hard to focus on work today with Bernie Madoff just having being sentenced to a nice long FOREVER stay in prison for pulling off "perhaps the biggest swindle in Wall Street History," according to 1010 WINS, which I just checked a little while ago, having struck a bargain with myself that I would not stoop to watching television during work hours...but radio was okay.

In response to the handing down of his sentence, Bernie said he was "deeply sorry and ashamed."

Really warms the heart.

Does nothing, of course, for his victims, all of whom are recorded in excruciating detail in a PDF file I downloaded this morning from one of the myriad blogs and sites that have been reporting on L'affair Madoff.

Recorded in microscopic print, the file went to 160-plus pages.

Contained therein are thousands of individual, family, foundation, institution and company names. Many are familiar. Some are associates.

Midway through, I had to avert my eyes.

This list of names reminded me of other such lists.

Victims of 9/11.

Victims of the Shoah.

There is closure today, but only in a symbolic Law and Order kinda way. Closure, really, for the spectators of this drama. Restitution and true justice for Madoff's victims -- the honest, hardworking individuals who are ruined, the charitable institutions and our society at large -- might be impossible to secure.

So, rabbi's daughter that I am, I turn to the metaphysics of Madoff, seeking to find something of meaning in this terrible matter.

What, I ponder, does Bernie Madoff tell us about ourselves as a society?

Or, in a more Pollyannish vein -- what is the silver lining of this crime? What good might come out of it?

I listen closely.

But there is no voice from the whirlwind, no comfort to be gleaned.

Instead, the sobering words of Ecclesiastes, old King Solomon imparting his sad wisdom at the end of days: Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

The Remains of the Day

Tonight's Van Morrison concert at the Beacon theater was the nail in the coffin that was my day.

Every freaking parking spot between 66th and 86th Street was taken; even the commodious parking lots on Amsterdam were filled to capacity with diabolical parking attendants standing outside waving on prospective patrons with an energetic shake of the head and an exaggerated mouthing of the word, "NO."

You gotta admire the pleasure some people draw from something so simple as dashing people's dreams of actually making it into a concert they paid $500 to attend.

"Van Morrison. Tonight at 8," read the marquee on the front of the Beacon. Well, how in the heck was I supposed to know about this concert? Perhaps if I wasn't locked into such a marathon of work, too stressed to read anything as diverting as the arts section of the New York Times, or even the past couple of New Yorkers, unable to make it to my gym, one block away from the Beacon, FOR AN ENTIRE SOLID FREAKING WEEK, I would have seen the marquee and known about the Van Morrison concert and not thought that it was a good idea to drive my little black Honda down to the JCC earlier this evening.

Naturally I could have taken the subway but we had a parking spot right in front of the apartment which was not good for Thursday anyway and the car seemed a cozy, civilized way to make it down to the gym after having spent THREE FREAKING HOURS on the phone with a perky T-Mobile tech repair person who was determined to fix my Blackberry...and didn't.

Besides which, the car was perfect for transporting groceries as I planned to pop into Fairway after my satisfying workout to stock up on healthy munchies, including a delectable gluten-free, high fiber, low carb snack I tasted this past weekend that is ONLY available on the second floor of Fairway. And Illy coffee because it was already too late for Zabar's, which closed at 8, and which I missed because of my FREAKING THREE HOUR PHONE CHAT with T-Mobile. And a new bottle of Oil of Evening Primrose capsules to keep my raging hormones in check, which I was unable to buy more cheaply from The Vitamin Shoppe because, alas, it closed at 7 and yes, I was on that FREAKING PHONE CALL which resulted in a big, fat, nothing and destroyed my chances of exercising at home before the babies in the apartment below us go to sleep and I can no longer use our treadmill and ended nearly an hour after all the T-Mobile retailers in the city were closed so I couldn't event race down to a store and BUY a replacement phone right away.

And I really needed those Evening Primrose capsules because I have a horrendous combination of perimenopausal irritability and good, ole' PMS.

I didn't even think it was possible to be courting menopause and persecuted by my period at the same time.

Somehow, I thought that one would graciously bow out to make way for the other.

I never envisioned being tag-teamed by both.

And just in case you're wondering what the big deal is about the THREE HOUR T-Mobile call, let me inform you that the five hours prior to that call were filled with an almost implausible array of time-wasting, maddening, ridiculous pursuits, a TERRIBLE experience at the hair salon and a charming half-hour visit with a representative from my e-mail's server...because my e-mail was coming up in triplicate, nearly crashing my Inbox....leaving me without my secondary form of communication.

And without the primary one -- my Blackberry -- as well.

Well...that's all in the past. I have a big event tomorrow night, okay, not as big as the Van Morrison concert, but respectable in its own right, and I am sure that after I race down to a T-Mobile store first thing tomorrow morning and buy a new Blackberry, then complete all the preps for the event while trying to do some major hair rehab, all will be fine.

In preparation for things to be fine once again, I ate half a bag of cheddar cheese popcorn, bought at my local deli. I just love scarfing down carbs late at night, knowing I haven't moved my butt in a week. I cannot wait to see what I look like in the dress I am planning to wear to this event tomorrow night. I better reserve at least an hour of trying on and tearing off a variety of outfits while crying.

Well, I'm gonna sign off now. It's time to make a strong cup of Lapsang Souchong, my favorite tea, curl up on my couch and watch Nancy Grace who is always in a pissy mood as she goes after criminals in pursuit of justice for their victims -- women and children.

Today was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad SUCKY-TO-THE-MAX, ridiculous, maddening, wasted freaking day.

Yet someday, it will all seem like the stuff of high comedy.

Already, I cannot wait to tell my sister in Israel about it. I am practically rehearsing the punchline..."and then I drove down to the JCC and there was not a single, FREAKING parking spot available for an entire mile! No...I swear!!! But d'you know why????"

Thus are our small tragedies artfully spun into more useful stuff -- a humorous keepsake, a good story, momentos of a particular time in our lives when things were a certain way.

Less is More

Two years ago, at the request of my literary agent, I embarked upon a novel with a titillating, marketable title and a wholly improbable yet engaging premise.

For the past two years, the number of computer files bearing the opening chapter for this novel has grown to the double-digits. In some instances, those files have nothing more than the opening paragraph of an opening chapter.

Starting at about the 10th version, the premise of the novel changes dramatically.

By the 17th or so, it reverts back to the original.

For a while, I lied to my agent, enthusing about how well the novel-writing was progressing. I didn't really see these progress reports as utter lies, rather, optimistic forecasts of what was surely to come.

Then came the day when I simply stopped calling her.

After a while, she stopped checking in with me.

It took two years but I have finally admitted to myself that the concentration or constitution required for novel writing is not mine.

And I see this not as an admission of failure or weary waving of a white flag but as a bold statement of self, an assured assertion of what I truly am, at least in the realm of fiction writing.

I am a writer of short stories.

You see, this whole novel-writing undertaking resulted from the feedback my agent and I received after sending out a collection of short stories I had written.

The consensus was that editors liked what they read but wanted to see a novel, not my novella-length stories.

First novels sell, they said.

Short story collections by unknown authors are unlikely to become commercial successes.

As a significant portion of my professional life interfaces with the literary marketplace, I knew this to be true and embraced the advice with a nose-to-the-grindstone, can-do spirit.

I quickly decided on a title and the plot fell into place.

And I was off, writing by the light of the moon.

Oh what a book this would be...urban, witty, satirical, contemporary, allegorical in a way.

Racy, yes, but really a tease of sorts.

The sexy-sounding title was a device; the work was a novel within a novel.

Yes, yes, yes....all was going very well.

And then, the writing process fell apart. Or simply vaporized.

Vaporized.

One day there was a novel I was working on.

The very next day, it disappeared.

But of course, it never existed to begin with. It was a phantom, a concept at best.

Vaporized.

I like the image of all of those earnest paragraphs rising upward out of the computer files where they are imprisoned, being liberated, reunited with the great global cyber-oneness.

I see those ill-fated words as passengers on an artistic voyage of the damned, denied entry at the port of plausibility, being forced to sail back from whence they came...and there finding a safe haven.

Once that ship docks, it needs to be dismantled.

And then, entirely reconstructed.

For there is another ship that needs to set sail, it will have many compartments; it can be built in spurts and starts or by sustained effort, in daylight or midnight; it will be built to accomodate many lives and locales.

It may not conform to the dimensions of the marketplace but we all know that the marketplace is changing before our eyes...just as the sands of reality are shifting rapidly beneath our feet.

Some of those who patiently read my stories two years ago no longer have jobs.

Some of the publishing companies are nearly vapor.

Sail on, ship of self, vehicle of truest self-expression.

The horizon beckons; adventure is in the air.

Oh, That Magic Feeling...Nowhere to Go

I am haunted by time, exquisitely aware of my personal hour-glass running empty.

Sometimes I even feel persecuted by dwelling within time; it begins to take on spatial dimensions, moving in on me like the walls of a room designed by a demented scientist.

Since I was little, I have anticipated endings. Arriving in school on the first day, I knew that the final day of the school year was just a breath away.

At the start of a vacation, I realized that I would soon be able to fold that day against the last day easily, like the end-pages of MAD Magazine, with their A's and B's and C's and D's that need to be matched up in order to yield an entirely new picture.

Truncated in this manner, the true essence of my vacation would be revealed by the folding inward of time.

And though I do not dwell on the thought, I suspect that it will be this way at the end of my days, a folding of front to finish, the gleaning of a new picture that had eluded my view throughout the journey.

Perhaps there is some word, as yet undiscovered by me, that describes this heightened awareness of the finite nature of time within the realm of human existence. Perhaps it is a word that I already know and simply cannot call to mind.

This word characterizes an essential aspect of my perception.

Often it is twinned with the imperative to create something lasting within the finite framework of my lifespan -- a basic human impulse.

And the greatest impediment to achieving this goal is the state of over-busyness, a condition where frenetic energy is expended, where there is motion and the illusion of accomplishment but very little of lasting worth is created.

In the age of the BlackBerry, which nearly single-handedly stretched the boundaries of the workday to the outer perimeters of 24/7, over-busyness has become the universal rule and not the exception.

Many of the people I know have become victims of this ethic and something profound is happening to our humanity. Our patience and attention spans have become abbreviated. Time with friends and family has become a luxury…sort of like working out or reading for pleasure.

(Here is where I could insert the commercial for Sabbath observance, where it does indeed belong. The issue of how restful Shabbat actually is if observed according to Jewish law is certainly up for discussion, but let us agree that the Day of Rest is a genius concept. Still, I am intent on restoring balance to more than just one-seventh of my life.)

In the course of a phone conversation with an exhausted friend earlier this week, I suggested that we need a national, perhaps global movement to stop the madness. A worldwide lunacy has taken hold that is bigger than any individual and we get sucked in because there is a level of busyness where we feel cool and powerful and relevant. Like players in a big important game.

This is the biggest con of all.

Over-busyness is a drug and like wildly promiscuous addicts sharing infected needles, we are spreading this pandemic, becoming the willing executioners of our collective sanity and quality of life.

I don’t want to be simplistic and neglect the important fact that over-busyness in the professional sphere is usually directly connected with earning a living. That piece has to be worked on.

And in this post-Madoff, post-economic collapse landscape, it is indeed preferable to be losing one’s mind by working too hard as opposed to losing one’s house by having no source of income.

But there is still the other manifestation of over-busyness, this terrible ethic of over-scheduling personal time as if unstructured time was a poisonous serpent crouching in the doorway, waiting to strike a deadly blow.

I would like to abolish the concept that "keeping busy" is a virtue because it is based on the false notion that contrived activity is better than slow-paced contemplation or, as the Beatles put it -- “that magic feeling…nowhere to go.”

When busy disappears, remarkable happens.

Worlds are conceived within the chrysalis of a single clear thought.

Solutions appear -- bold, brought to sudden life as if by the sprinkling of magic powder over invisible ink.

Insight and epiphany drape themselves artfully across the mantle of the self, waiting to be discovered and lovingly worn.

I long for the arrival of unstructured days with just the lightest scaffolding to hold them together. Such days frequently occur while traveling. There is an ease and a comfort with the clock, the absence of deadlines or responsibilities, the gift of space, permission to think and stretch out within unbounded time.

There is the delicious opportunity to be blown by the winds of chance.

There is the prospect of adventure.

Even as I join an international army of zombies slogging through 16 to 18 hour work days, living a life that is busy to a fault, I grab fragments of sweet-smelling escape, savoring a unique thought, closing my eyes, sharing a tender moment with a happy, furry little friend, dreaming of defection, of the start of a glorious revolution against over-busyness and the magical new age of nowhere to go...and everything to be gained.

The Value of a Good News Story

Gaza.

Madoff.

Layoffs.

Closures.

Recession.

Bailouts.

Foreclosures.

Bankruptcies.

Attacks on Jews abroad.

Empty retirement funds.

Depleted life savings.

Widespread financial insecurity.

In the midst of this maelstrom, the value of a good news story cannot be underestimated.

On a mid-winter Thursday afternoon, a plane leaves La Guardia airport bound for North Carolina.

Geese invade the engines, the plane fails, the pilot gives warning of impact.

It ditches into the Hudson River.

Beautifully.

Bellydown.

Into frigid waters.

Neatly missing the George Washington Bridge, West Side Highway, Manhattan itself.

Just as the afternoon rush hour was about to begin.

Passengers deplane as water rushes into the aircraft.

Women and children first.

People stand shoulder to shoulder on the plane's wings, appearing to walk on water.

Rescue boats appear within moments.

A heroic, photogenic rescue ensues.

The cool-headed, white haired pilot is the last to leave, checking the aircraft twice for lingering passengers before leaving.

Everyone survives.

This story dominates the airwaves, playing and replaying.

It is called Miracle on the Hudson.

We remain riveted to the television screen, our computers, the radio, the newspaper.

Watching the rescue replay. Hearing the survivors' accounts. Learning of the pilot's prowess.

The image of Chesley Sullenberger III flashes on our screens.

In his uniform, with calmly folded arms, he looks exactly like what he is -- a national hero.

Like the wings of US Airways Flight 1549, this good news keeps us afloat in treacherous waters

Starbucks and Synesthesia

IT was a Tuesday afternoon, colder than loneliness. There were a thousand other places I was supposed to be, but there I was, sitting at a Starbucks on Broadway and 115th, talking about Stravinsky and synesthesia.

Actually, there was much more to the conversation, which veered along a manic, oddly orchestrated trajectory from music to sensory perception, from formative childhood experience to adult pathology, from nature to nurture, from mid-afternoon to early evening.

The day had been sipped haltingly, barely tasted. Just enough of its liquid kept me fueled yet the overwhelming sensation was that of thirst.

And so I sat and talked with a stranger about dreams and the intersection of longing and fear; the color of deep pleasure; the connection between creativity and self-indulgence.

Time lost its familiar markers and the conversation became the universe, self-contained and complete.

In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, I slipped through a temporal portal without a backwards glance.

Climbing the monkey bars of Time, I decided to hang upside down with barely a worry as to who could see my underpants.

And found myself delighted and surprised to find a fellow Time Traipser hanging upside down right across from me, sharing the freedom of this new perspective. We were so close that our noses nearly touched. His breath tasted like adventure.

If Gaza is Auschwitz, Hamas is the Nazis

War is hell.

This is a fact.

There is no way to prettify the devastation, the human toll, the destruction, the fear, the chaos, the death.

And when you are fighting an enemy with a penchant for firing from mosques, hospitals, schools and various other civilian or residential centers, the chances of a higher-than-normal human toll is unavoidable.

This is the reality on the ground in Gaza.

The human toll has been staggering as Israel seeks to beat back Hamas, which has felt free to launch missiles into the heartland of the Jewish State because, let's be real, it cannot accept the fact of Israel's existence and is determined to keep its campaign alive until there is no one left to wage it.

How flipping tragic for the people of Gaza that in the years since Israel's disengagement, terrorist tunnels have been built instead of a social infrastructure. How pathetic that instead of seizing the opportunity to better itself, Gaza has remained a cesspool.

To quote Dov Rosenblatt of Blue Fringe, who took the megaphone at the pro-Israel rally in NYC this past Tuesday: Free Palestine!

From Hamas.

Let the world agree that the Palestinian people are among the most victimized people today.

By their own lawfully elected leaders.

This mantra must be repeated on the world stage, over and over again.

To the animals who beat up a 14-year-old Jewish girl in Paris.

To Hugo Chavez who kicked the Israeli ambassador out of Venezuela.

To the Palestinians in Denmark who shot Israelis at a mall.

To Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, publicly denouncing Israel at a rally in London.

To Jon Stewart, who revealed himself to be such a whore for cool-lefty-edgy-people-approval that he wove an enraged and rather demented rant against Israel into his shtick on Monday night's episode of The Daily Show.

To the Vatican official -- and all the other ahistorical morons -- who insist on making the Israel=Nazi State or Gaza=Concentration Camp analogy.

To all people who find it unthinkable that Jews might exert military might in self-defense.

The situation is complex and nuanced and Israel is surely not above legitimate criticism.

In fact, the best essay I have read on the difficulty of understanding this war appears today on the Huffington Post. Written by Marty Kaplan, Eyeless in Gaza explores all sides of the arguments against and for Israel. Kaplan is the head of the Norman Lear Center at USC's Annenberg School. Read it by clicking on this link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/eyeless-in-gaza_b_155204.html.

However, at the heart of the heated case against Israel, the dangerous rage against this country's military action, is the belief that Jews do not have the right to defend themselves.

That there is some kind of historical agreement we are breaking by becoming soldiers and officers and commanders and intelligence experts and military strategists.

And that Jews around the world should be punished, in an up close and personal way, for this irritating, galling new policy.

Of all the manifestations of anti-Zionistic rage, the one I find most inexplicable yet predictable, is the equation of Israel with Nazism and now, Gaza with Auschwitz.

This has become a new "thing" among those who love to hate Israel and one hears the obscene analogy trotted out all the time. Once shocking, it is now completely unoriginal and overused, so five minutes ago.

I will not waste an inch of cyberspace explaining why this analogy is not only factually inaccurate and ridiculous but morally reprehensible and hypocritical.

Anyone who truly cares about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, perpetrated by Hamas, should gather in the streets of the world's capital cities, shouting the words Free Palestine.

From Hamas.

From Walden Pond to Gaza City

At 10:30 this morning, Walden Pond was a self-contained universe. The thick layer of snow surrounding it was utterly undisturbed by footprints, human or otherwise. Not a single car loitered in the visitor's parking lot across the street. Thoreau's cabin, plunked in the sparse woods, looked pathetic, abandoned, perhaps slated for removal.

Yesterday, HOBB, Little Babe and I ambitiously set out by foot for Walden Pond from our hotel, the Colonial Inn in downtown Concord, Mass. This wonderfully preserved historic inn is a family destination and our yearly trips to the town made famous by Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne and other great American writers have taken on the quality of a religious pilgrimage.

Always at the heart of our Concord trips is a visit to Walden Pond, complete with a leisurely stroll around the pond itself. I have done it so many times that I lost count.

Two years earlier, I made the trek on Shabbat with my sons, Little and Big Babe, while the first snow of the season fell softly around us and HOBB slept in our hotel room. This winter, the snowfall was far more prodigious and the temperature was about 24 degrees south of freezing on the day we arrived at the Inn. Yesterday, it was perhaps 10 degrees warmer.

Still, I was determined to preserve our tradition and made sure to remind my men about our Shabbat excursion repeatedly. Owing to some stroke of outrageous good fortune, we had gotten bumped up to the Thoreau Suite (after booking a cheap room through Expedia) and found ourselves staying in a vast honeymoon palace with a fireplace, dining room (replete with a formal table and chairs), kitchen, spa bathroom with Jacuzzi. four-poster bed and living room...for $90 per night.

Walking three miles in the snow seemed the very least we could offer Henry David in thanks.

Putting on multiple layers of socks and sweaters and donning Arctic expedition-worthy hats, we headed out to Walden Pond at 3:30 in the afternoon, leaving the warmth and elegance of the Thoreau Suite reluctantly.

Stepping outside, I was dismayed to find that the sun that had drenched Main Street in the morning (causing water to pour off of the store awnings as we walked to the Concord Public Library) was now missing in action. As we trotted down Walden Avenue, a hostile wind whipped at our clothes and a lonesome grey overtook our vista.

Still, we set out for our journey with stoic resolve. But upon reaching Rt 2, and with only a quarter of a mile to go, my husband and son stopped in their tracks, refusing to go one step further. Their feet were frozen solid, their cheeks crimson red, and besides, the sun was setting and we needed to get back before it turned dark.

Barely able to contain my frustration (my feet were also frozen, my cheeks also burning...but so what! we were on a pilgrimage!) I relented at the sight of my miserable men (a tear drop was beginning to freeze on Little Babe's cheek) and the three of us trudged back down Walden Avenue toward Monument Square.

After we thawed our feet in the Jacuzzi, I extracted a vow from HOBB to visit Walden Pond first thing in the morning, on our way out of town.

Yet this morning, purring up Walden Avenue in our warm Honda Accord, we took one long and loving look at the lake and declared, "Nah."

It was an instantaneous and unambiguous decision.

That ability to let the dream of Walden Pond slip through our fingers signalled the end of our New England escapist adventure... and a return to our regularly-scheduled lives.

This vacation had an epic quality to it. For the first time in seven years, I declared a work blackout beginning on Christmas Eve and ending tomorrow morning at 9 am. After seven cycles of 24/6, I reached the end of my ability to be on call at all times.

And so, for nearly two weeks, I was missing in action, professionally-speaking. Call it a spontaneous sabbatical, chicken soup for the workaholic's soul.

But turning the car away from Walden Pond this morning was more than just a nod in the direction of the realm of work and productivity.

It was the recognition of a daunting reality waiting just outside the borders of vacationland, the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency, the promise of bold and sweeping changes, of ambitious solutions to the fallout of economic upheaval, of new life and blood, of American molting and changing and giving birth to itself anew.

Far less happily, it was also a quickening step towards the rising sun, eastward, in the direction of the Holy Land, which is also molting and changing and giving birth to itself anew by rising up to slay those who theaten its citizens and, by extension, its very existence. Towards the people who dare to defend themselves in the face of international condemnation from those are enraged at the counterintuitive combination of Jews and power -- a paradigm that flies in the face of a long history of persecution, escape and exile.

Thousands of miles from Thoreau's pristine pond, a young man wearing the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces waits with his unit as a dreadful war wages within Gaza.

Only twenty years old, he is nervous yet wracked with guilt at the thought of his friends already called into combat and he, American born but Israeli-raised, spared the hardships of battle so far.

Around midday, I speak to his mother, my sister, seeking to find out whether he has been called (not yet), whether she still plans to fly to New York this week for a trip planned half a year earlier (she doesn't know), how she feels (worried) and what else is going on (what else matters?).

As we speak, I am on the Mass Pike, heading back to New York City. HOBB is driving. Little Babe sits in the back, wearing headphones, consulting his Japanese/English handheld computer. The sun is glorious, glaring off the hood of our Honda. The supreme luxury of the Thoreau Suite at the Colonial Inn is receding from my mind. My sister is the mother of an Israeli soldier who might be called into battle any minute now against an enemy that is sworn to Israel's eradication. I remember taking my nephew to the Central Park Zoo when he was a little boy. I remember holding him in my arms when he was newly-born. I thought he was a funny-looking baby but he has grown into a beautiful young man, well over 6 feet tall, kind, good-humored, smart, responsible.

I recall a moment from two years ago: breakfast at the Colonial Inn on a Shabbat morning. I had woken up late and rushed downstairs to catch breakfast before it closed. The man at the next table was reading The Boston Globe, spreading his newspaper before him in an expansive gesture of leisure and entitlement. Glancing to my right, I was shocked to see the front page headline screaming: Saddam Hanged. A photo accompanied the article.

First I stared at the headline dumbly, then snapped my head away from the man and his newspaper. I was shaken and unsettled at the news but also at the notion that there is no escape from reality. Even in picture-perfect Concord, Mass. which exists within a conceptual time-warp.

That afternoon, I walked to Walden Pond with my sons. By that time, Saddam Hussein's death was old news. I was no longer shocked and wondered instead how the world would change. I hoped for the better. Snow fell softly around us as we walked.

New Year's Hustle

Last year, we spent New Year's Eve at a filthy, funny burlesque show at the Zipper Factory on West 37th Street.

Two years ago, we were at a Eurogroovy party in a Harlem brownstone.

Three years ago, we hosted our own celebration, which was so much fun that Zoltan, our sour neighbor downstairs, called twice to complain about the noise.

Tonight, we wandered in, quite by accident, to a dance party at the 92nd St Y that transformed this venerable institution into a nightclub in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, circa 1974.

While two burly guys played endless mixes from a disco reject remainder bin, crazed couples hit the dance floor, showing off their artistry. Arms were raised with dramatic flair, heads snapped in synchronicity, bodies spun like possessed dreidels, cheeks pressed side by side, dozens of legs obeyed one single brain, hands grasped each other lightly yet firmly, hips swayed and sashayed.

Male palms were placed possessively on the smalls of female backs; satisfied smiles played on the periphery of lips. Couples moved across the floor like terrifying two-headed monsters, claiming their space, marking their territory.

The idea was to dance and be seen. To own the dance floor through sheer technique...and ego.

But the dance wasn't the only thing. Styles from the Capezio catalog came to life; divas outdid one another, peacocks fanned their tails. Preening was as ubiquitous as breathing.

There were at least two women in midriff-baring outfits, one highly noticeable in a sports bra-like top and Cruella De Ville-like gloves that started at the wrist and ended at her biceps. The other one wore a flowing gypsy number which reminded me of my college wardrobe...attacked by a pair of gardening shears.

There were flamenco dresses, flaring out just above the knees, there were sequined numbers and racy red and lots of basic black. There were opaque Danskin tights, men proudly squeezed into form-fitting Ricky Ricardo pants and shirts or strutting in somber Sopranoesque suits.

Utterly oblivious to the changes in hairstyles and fashion wrought over the past thirty years, women with big hair -- overbleached or darkly dyed -- were everywhere. The accents were regional, basic Brooklyn, with some Staten Island tossed in to be democratic. Most notably, the crowd was decidely unlike most 92nd St audiences. I would bet money that HOBB and I were the only people from the Upper West Side.

The menu of the music was disco tempered with salsa. Alas, there were no recognizable songs, no "Le Freak," "I Will Survive," or even the pornographic, "Love to Love You Baby."

Two hours in, after three pathetic attempts to assert my own freestyle dance moves against the tyranny of the disco beat, I swam over to the DJ to ask him when rock music would be played. After all, the website had promised a "rockin' New Year's Eve party."

"Rock music?" He stared at me as if I had requested Gregorian chants. "Nah...this is a Hustle party."

So as HOBB and I sat out yet another endless dance mix with a chorus of women's voices repeating some inane string of words ("I wanna get with ya"? "I wanna get togetha"? "Why don't we get togetha"?) I was at least able to put closure on this most surreal New Year's Eve adventure.

In our quest to do something fresh and fun, we chanced upon an event hosted by a secret society -- amateur, or perhaps even professional practitioners and enthusiasts of The Hustle, that iconic line dance of the seventies.

Preserved in a time warp, the members of this society exist below the radar screen, lurking in the shadows of 21st century New York City, coming out when there is strength in numbers. I learned, as I was leaving, that the party was not hosted by the 92nd St Y after all. The building had simply allowed this seventies spaceship to land there, renting space for its Hustle-crazed alien crew.

These parties are their playground and in it, they are the alpha males and females, owning the dance floor with their deliberate, self-consciously orchestrated moves, pretending not to watch themselves in the reflection of windows and mirrors as they whizz and twirl past.

They dance for each other and hopefully for their own pleasure. They are the keepers of the flame ignited by The Hustle, which once burned bright in discos and clubs, causing untold numbers of individuals to fall into lines on a dance floor and perform the simple, repetitive steps in tandem with their neighbors.

While the rest of us stand on the sidelines, pondering the peculiar party we seem to have crashed, comforting ourselves with the knowledge that the very room containing this weird scene on the last night of 2008 normally features authors, politicians and pundits, people like Elie Wiesel and Nora Ephron -- architects of ideas, composers of concepts, advocates of individualism -- people who remind us of ourselves.

The View from 12/31/08

Middle Babe and her BF are lying on the leather couches of our living room, talking sleepily, mostly about how tired they are, about the party they will attend later tonight (assuming they actually fall asleep), about the sudden Israel-Hamas war which World Jewry has been watching, heart in mouth.

Cajoled into giving "chills" (back, arm and scalp) to my daughter for 15 minutes, I joined their conversation, explaining the backdrop to Israel's offensive and the inevitable public relations fallout -- anti-Israel demonstrations in the streets of New York, Europe and the Middle East, anti-Zionist slogans heard around the world: Israel the aggressor, Israel the murderer, Israel the Nazi State.

It might sound parochial and paranoid, but coming on the heels of the Madoff scam, this war is bad news for the Jews.

Not because Israel isn't justified in trying to obliterate the murderous bastards who have been launching rockets inside its borders despite the alleged ceasefire, for every nation has a sovereign right and responsibility to protect its civilians against aggression and I'd like to see the saintly (and suicidal) nation that would tolerate such overt threats against its own citizenry.

But because Israel's dramatic and effective military response provides one more reason for world opinion to pitch so dangerously against Israel...and the Jewish People.

With Bernard Madoff singlehandedly reviving the stereotype of the sly Jewish ganof, the last thing we needed was a military operation where cameras can capture wounded and dead Palestinian women and children, victims of sly Israeli rockets and guns.

This is the contemporary blood libel...but with seeming journalistic proof that the charges are real.

And the fact that Hamas has a habit of launching rockets from within civilian centers, universities or even hospitals -- in other words, uses its women and children as human shields, a humanitarian crime of enormous proportions -- seems to register not the least in the world court.

So the condemnations of Israel come fast and furious, while once again, the mantle of victimhood remains solely a Palestinian privilege.

These last moments of the year 2008 are tense and terrifying. As I write, in the limited light of the dining room, next to the living room where the supine girls have now fallen quiet, I wish to transport myself back to that magical moment at the start of November, that night when a miracle took place, when good triumphed over evil, when people of different colors and faiths danced in the streets, when the prospect of a hopeful and peaceful future seemed ours for the asking.

The Watcher in the Night

Yeah, yeah. I know.

It's been over a month since I blogged.

Not for lack of material to write about.

For lack of mental space.

And physical too.

You see, the Three Babes were all home at once and the Urban Bungalow was a glorious Grand Central Station of kids, young adults, voices, Pomeranians, food, laughter, yelling, fights, food, movies, music videos, manga, food, anime, opera, tears, recriminations, spontaneous songs, jibes, sleeping bodies on couches, floors and every available surface.

In other words, Sheer Overwhelm.

This business of watching your kids grow up is grueling. It is at once exciting and thrilling and beyond belief that you have spawned humanoids who are your size or larger, who can borrow or steal your clothes, who always seem low on cash and perk up at the mention of eating out, who want you around... in judicious doses, who go through marvelous relationships and heart-rending breakups, who suddenly seem to take up more space and time than previously...and then who vanish back to their regularly-scheduled lives, leaving you relieved and bereft at the same time.

So, first Big Babe came home from his perch in Berlin...and then, a week later, Middle Babe returned from her South African adventure. Looking pretty much exactly as I remembered them, they seemed truly joyous to be returned to their mothership, delighted to be back in New York City, happily reunited with our family apartment, with their friends, with my cooking, with us.

There were a few bumpy patches in their relationship with the sibling still at home, their lil bro' Little Babe, an eighth grader -- nothing major, just a low-grade, simmering resentment that took the form of barbs and comments and meanish observations to us about the various ways in which we were screwing up in our parenting of him.

When last we were together, it was for his exuberant, weekend-long bar mitzvah this past June and shortly afterward the older sibs departed for their respective adventures. I can still recall my pride and relief at the family harmony that prevailed during this time.

Now, re-entering the family home after their several months' absence, I felt the older two carefully sniffing around, trying to ascertain exactly how much extra love and attention the youngest sibling was getting in their joint absence.

Which I see as perfectly natural.

If annoying.

In any case, it is well over a month since Big Babe got off that plane from Berlin, unshaven and mustachioed and wearing a Eurohipster get-up, which we teased him about for weeks. And it is just over a month since Middle Babe returned from Grahamstown, South Africa, looking resplendent and rested despite a 23-hour journey, proudly sporting the tan she got in Port Elizabeth.

This evening, we drove Big Babe to JFK to catch his flight back to Berlin, and I am sad and wistful and happy that I blew off work midday to go to the Marlene Dumas and Miro exhibitions at MOMA with him.

In a few weeks' time, Middle Babe returns to her college in Maryland and a certain tranquility will be restored to our apartment. Little Babe is a relatively low-maintenance child, not yet in the habit of having friends over at all hours, though he is up now, well after midnight, watching The Wedding Crashers with his friend Joe, who is sleeping over tonight...and possibly the next three nights, and he had his friends Mo and Colin sleep over Saturday night, but still, they are relatively small people occupying our not-large apartment, somehow less obtrusive than the sleepover guests of Middle and Big Babe, who are our size or larger.

This business of parenting children who grow up, leave, come back and then leave again, is fraught with emotional peril. I am a mother who has always celebrated days off from school, unstructured time with my kids, snow days, Sunday adventures without end. I have hardly minded when HOBB left the kids solely in my care in order to finish writing a book or a project, in fact, I often breathed a deep sigh of relief.

Being with my children, I often feel most like myself.

This time, however, with everyone around, there was palpable tension as our family struggled to find its equilibrium now that so many variables had changed. Two of the members are older than 20 now, the youngest -- so long a baby -- is now a teen. One has traveled halfway around the globe and seen things none of us have. Upon her return home, she proclaimed her vegetarianism. Another has forged a life and career for himself in a foreign country and language.

And the parents have changed as well, with one settling into middle age in quantifiable ways, and the other more restless than ever.

So here is a snapshot of our new family-in-transition, taken in the middle of the night, two days before the beginning of the New Year, on the heels of the most astonishing political victory of our lifetime, on the cusp of a terrifying new future, from the ashes of the Bernard Madoff scandal, in the early throes of a dangerous war in Israel and Palestine: one family member -- the eldest son -- thousands of miles away, six hours into his flight, nearing his adopted home in Berlin; another -- the middle child -- our only daughter, asleep in her loft bed at our home; the third child -- our youngest son -- watching a totally inappropriate movie on our couch with his buddy and our dogs; the father, the husband -- long asleep -- snoring softly in our bed; and finally, the fifth member -- me -- the mother, the wife, the watcher in the night, writing to seal this moment as a fly in amber, as an aerobic activity for my restless soul, as a balm against sadness.