Peculiar Company

Because Thanksgiving is less than 48 hours away, it seems like we should we be talking about what we are thankful for.

On this dark Tuesday night, with my husband out for dinner with some guy friends, and my kids full of thawed-out, frozen-pizza and glassy-eyed in front of the TV, I thank God (and I do believe in some combination of Him and Her) that my kids are healthy, our extended family is gathering around the table in a couple of days, the sun still shines and women writers keep recovering from their substance abuse problems long enough to write beautifully about them.

I just finished reading Mary Karr's Lit, which I started reading last Thursday and finally put down this morning. (In between, I fed my kids a few meals, taught two classes, and bought a turkey.) I know I have talked about books on this blog before but they were written by my friends, so take those plugs with a grain of salt. This book, Lit, is one of the best books I have ever read and I don't know Karr at all. I have to admit I never read The Liar's Club, Karr's break-out memoir from 1995, and I have never read a line of her poetry. I don't know anyone who knows her. But I have read about her work for years and finally, when Lit came out, I read so many great reviews of the book in so many places that I thought, I have to buy it, right away, even if it's overpriced in hard-cover and heavy to schlep around. (I also have to confess that I bought The Liar's Club in in paperback a couple of years ago but the print was small and to my shame, I gave up after a couple of pages.)

Two days after I ordered Lit, Amazon delivered it to my door. The first few pages didn't thrill me so I flipped through the book and jumped to page 71, the chapter where she meets her fancy, Harvard-educated, he-is-a-poet-and-eventually-he-will-be-my-handsome-but-unhappy husband. From that page on, I couldn't put the book down. Here are some of my favorite lines:

"My first therapist's name was---I shit you not---Tom Sawyer." (p. 61)
"How dare you cease to Daddy me so soon..." (p. 115)
"Maybe, I think, I do belong among that peculiar company." (p. 195)
"I can interrupt my death for lunch, right? Writing the suicide note makes me feel good enough to have lunch." (p. 262)
"With scads of costly professional help, I gave up pining for maternal behavior long ago." (p. 357)

And so on. Karr is brilliant. She's also far from perfect and owns up to a lot of crap that most of us would rather forget about (or fictionalize.) She's ashamed of the poverty she grew up in, and her education at the school she calls "Lackluster College." She is full of self-doubt and self-loathing, gets into a fight on a train and takes her good looks for granted. She's hard on her ex-husband, bitchy to her Mom, hostile to her in-laws, in love with her Dad and easy on her son. She is an alcoholic who initially shuns AA and a lapsed Protestant who turns her back on prayer. Eventually, she nurses her baby, divorces her husband, stops drinking, has a nervous breakdown, checks into a mental hospital where she meets women who specialize in hurting themselves, starts writing decent poetry, falls in love with David Foster Wallace, breaks up with him, finds an agent, sells her first memoir and becomes a devout Catholic.

Karr blames some of her bad habits on her narcissistic painter mother who married seven times, and her oil refinery alcoholic father, who drank and drove and shared his booze with Karr in the car. But Karr takes full responsibility for honing the bad habits she learned as a girl and letting them wreak havoc on her adult life. This would all be terribly depressing were she not so funny, harsh, honest, imaginative and poetic. Eventually, AA saves her, as do a priest, a nun and praying in front of a toilet.

Okay, I am partial to confessional poets, particularly if they're women with children. There's a lot of mental illness in my family and I want to know how women write insanity and bad habits out of their systems---or try to. (I love Auden and Yeats but they never struggled with the demands of parenthood and if Yeats did, mea culpa, I missed that poem.) In college, I gobbled up Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. A few years ago, my cousin introduced me to Sharon Olds, and I read The Father and Strike Sparks in two days. Mairi MacInnes's Clearances managed to be painfully honest and lyrical about how hard it is to write when you're running a house and raising kids. I have shamefully never read any of Anne LaMott's novels but I loved Traveling Mercies and Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. There are lines in Carrie Fisher's' Wishful Drinking that are even funnier than Karr's Lit, but the book is much too short so not as satisfying. (And Fisher, funny and sharp as she is, is no poet, and seems to have forgiven her mother for her shortcomings, which Karr, bless her frozen little heart, hasn't quite done, and her mother's dead!)

Don't get me wrong, men write nice memoirs too. Call me a sucker but James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard were great reads---my husband and I could not put them down the summer we read them as truth. Philip Roth's Patrimony is memorable and endearing (it was nice to read that Roth actually loved his parents). James McBride's The Color of Water is disturbing and funny, and Nabokov's Speak, Memory is lush and gorgeous, if a little intimidating (you only have to be Russian and brilliant to write like him.) I also really liked Anthony Swofford's Jarhead and Calvin Trillin's Remembering Denny.

Still, I love it most when the girls tell their tales. Jeanette Walls The Glass Castle, is fantastic. Until today, I thought it was the best memoir ever. Other great reads include Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck (probably will be a movie some day starring Meryl Streep), Judith Jones' The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (she doesn't regret not having kids, mothered her writers and resigned herself to cooking for one after her husband died ), Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss (spare, shocking, not for the faint-hearted), and Kelly Corrigan's The Middle Place (lovely and sappy---she doesn't blame her parents for anything!)

Still, my hands-down favorite is Mary Karr's Lit. I envy anyone with plans to read it this weekend.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Election Day

Last Sunday, an old friend from graduate school published an op-ed piece in The New York Times. This woman (Lauren Grodstein, author of the new novel, A Friend of the Family), teaches creative writing at Rutgers University/Camden. She wrote about the challenges of getting her students to care about the New Jersey gubernatorial race when the World Series is going on (For news about Lauren's book, check out http://www.laurengrodstein.com.)

I have to say: I'm not all that interested in state politics or baseball as a national pastime. But my stepfather was involved in New Jersey politics for many years, so I do occasionally think about what's involved in running our small, densely populated state. And I teach news reporting to teenagers and twentysomethings at Montclair State twice a week, so I have to pay attention to the news, even when I don't feel like it.

In class yesterday, a couple of my female students talked about writing about the World Series, and one student had blogged about the fact that none of the gubernatorial candidates had bothered to come to campus to campaign. Mostly, though, they were focused on their upcoming class assignments (getting published in the college paper as quickly as possible.) I asked them if they were planning to vote. Most of them were, and though I didn't ask them who they were going to vote for, I urged them to just out there and do it. They nodded. What I’ve found is that although they are interested in news of the world, they feel passsionate about and empowered by news that they can use and/or report on. So even though there was a lot of news over the weekend---the Giants got killed by the Eagles, an American man won the New York Marathon for the first time in a while, the Yankees beat the Phillies and the New Jersey Governor’s race was heating up---we spent most of class discussing their pitches for the college paper. One student is writing about the challenge of getting blinds put up in her first floor room. Another is writing about the alleged increase in the hiring of adjunct professors over tenure-track professors. A third is writing about the chronic campus parking problem.

These are all matters of some urgency to them. Still, I try to get them to peek into the larger world. Every Wednesday morning,I quiz them on stories from the Times. For several weeks, I quizzed them on stories from the front page. A few weeks ago, I decided to give them (and me) a hard news break. Instead, I quizzed them on the front page of the Dining section. That was a disaster. The main story that day was on fried chicken, and there wasn't much news to report there (other than the fact that some ethnic restaurants in the city were making more of it). Last week, I decided to shift gears and quiz them on the editorials and op-ed pages. They had some interesting insights into Maureen Dowd's piece on how to generate income for the beleaguered newspaper and magazine industries (allow sports betting on newspaper websites/host wine clubs/start on-line dating services/hire Vegas show girls to perform in the newsroom and charge admission.) My students thought that aside from the Vegas show girls, these were pretty good ideas.

Tomorrow, we have a young twentysomething reporter coming to speak to the class. This reporter, Brian Stelter, also went to a state university and now covers television for the Times, so I figure he is going to provide both inspiration and advice to the students on how to jump-start their journalism careers. (I also try to give them advice but I am pushing 45, and I know they look at me as some kind of grandmotherly dinosaur who started out in journalism when---gasp--there was no such thing as email or digital tape recorders.) Stelter has written about Jon and Kate, David Letterman, the balloon boy fiasco, covering the war in Afghanistan, "Family Guy" and viral videos (http://www.brianstelter.com). I'm pretty sure the students will be mesmerized by what he has to say. They love it when I bring speakers in (probably because it means no quiz that day), and because these speakers give them news they can use---how to get and do a job in the real world.

After class, I drove home and made brisket. It was Monday afternoon and I should have been marking papers or writing fiction but instead, I sauted two and a half pounds of meat, sliced up sweet potatoes, carrots and onions, washed asparagus, and mixed it all up with olive oil and kosher salt. Then I picked my younger up at school and drove him to Hebrew School. By the time I got home, it was 4 p.m. My older son wasn’t due home for 40 minutes. I put the brisket and vegetables in the oven and looked around. I had a glorious half hour to myself. I could go upstairs, read about the gubernatorial candidates on line (I was pretty sure I knew who I was voting for, but was willing to think about it a little more), and edit some papers.

Instead, I was overcome by a massive desire to do nothing. The triple threat of working/cooking/carpooling had knocked the stuffing out of me. I ran to our living room, stuck my hand in the candy bowl. grabbed a handful of chocolate kisses and headed upstairs to watch “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I closed the shades in our bedroom, turned on the TV, lay down on the bed, unwrapped a couple of kisses and started popping chocolate into my mouth. (If you think I felt a bit like Philip Seymour Hoffman's character in that scene in “Before the Devil Knows You're Dead” where he goes to his heroin dealer’s apartment, lies down on the bed and gets his fix, you'd be right).

The "Curb" episode was about Larry, golf etiquette, tombstones, and the demise of a black swan. Richard Kind guest-starred as "Uncle Andy." I love Richard Kind; last Thursday, I saw him standing on Columbus Avenue, holding his son's hand, so it was very exciting to now see him tussling with Larry David on TV. I managed to watch the whole episode before the phone rang.

"This is President Obama," a voice said. "I'm sorry to bother you."

I was floored. Here he was, on the phone, calling to tell me to vote for Jon Corzine, the incumbent New Jersey governor! Though I’ve received many emails from Obama, he had never called before. His voice was soothing and mellifluous, apologetic and handsome (Can a voice be handsome? Yes, yes, yes, it can!). He also sounded sweet, and a bit self-mocking, as if he might have a sense of humor. The weird thing was that just a couple of hours earlier, I had been talking about the Obamas’ marriage with my closest friend from college. My friend is fascinated with the Obamas and since the state of their marriage was the cover story of last Sunday’s Times magazine, we had much to discuss. My friend thought the marriage stayed intact because of Michelle’s decision to find support from people outside her marriage through an urban kibbutz. I gave more credit to Obama. There was no way he was going to let his marriage fail. His own parents' marriage had failed, his father had died and his mother had left him to be raised by his grandparents. He was going to make sure Michelle stayed happy, even if that meant he had to shop for groceries at midnight.

That was my pseudo-psycho-analysis. But the point was Barack Obama was asking me to vote for Governor Jon Corzine. A few minutes later, Newark Mayor Corey Booker called. He also urged me to vote for Corzine. My head was spinning---two good-looking, high-powered politicians were calling and telling me what to do! Obama was a little more persuasive than Booker. Okay, so I decided to watch TV and not bone up on who to vote for. No matter, here was news I could use, courtesy of two prerecorded messages who were pushing me to vote for the candidate I was inclined to vote for anyway.

Today, my older son was home sick. He had no desire to go to the polls so I waited until my younger son got off the bus and together we drove up the hill to the Church where we do our voting. We went into the booth together and my younger son chatted loudly about our choices. I pointed to the names of the people we were voting for; he pushed the buttons. Probably the whole room heard who we were discussing. But my son had been watching and reading the news; he had an opinion on which candidate he liked. (Fortunately, we shared the same opinion. Unfortunately, the majority of New Jersey voters did not.) He wasn't tired or apathetic; he was paying attention. If nothing else, I was raising an eager voter.

The Life of (Teaching) a Supermodel

Yes, I used to teach a supermodel. And yes, she was really pretty and ridiculously smart too. Two years ago, I walked into a classroom at Columbia University, nervous, sweating, carrying a load of hand-outs, ready to teach my first writing workshop, ever. It was a non-credit class and I was teaching for free, but I was still an anxious wreck. There, waiting for me, was a tall, improbably gorgeous, beautifully made-up young woman. I took one look at her and thought, "Oh my God, is that what college students look like now??? I am so screwed."

Eventually, ten other students showed up---undergraduates, graduate students, and uber-graduate students---and once everyone had gathered around the table, I asked them to introduce themselves and explain what their goals were for this workshop. This woman said, "I'm what they call a supermodel." I don't know what she said after that about her writing goals, other than that she had some. She had transferred from Wellesley to Columbia, was taking a full course load, majoring in economics, and modeling to pay for it all.

As the weeks went by, this young woman looked more like a student, and less like a supermodel. (She explained later that she had been so dressed up that first workshop because it was September and she had come to class right from Fashion Week. ) She was always beautiful, and wrote movingly on a wide range of topics, both fiction and non-fiction, some of it having to do with the modeling world, and some of it having to do with the mundane stuff that every writer covers (neighbors, transportation, siblings, etc.) Since it was a workshop, all the students had to discuss each other's work, and this woman always had something interesting and insightful to say. She was modest, very intelligent, laughed easily and (pretty much) looked like everyone else, coming to class dressed in leggings, baggy sweaters, flannel shirts, jeans and sneakers. Most of the time, she didn't wear makeup and looked like the exhausted college student she was. Only better.

I used to cover retail at Business Week so I've been to a lot of fashion shows, and I've seen a couple of supermodels in the flesh. I once watched Cindy Crawford eat lunch at Bergdorf Goodman and last summer, my husband and I saw Tyra Banks eating ice cream in Vermont. But I never got over teaching Cameron Russell. Here she is, working to reduce global warming by combining her beauty and her smarts. She's the first one you see in the black coat, and she's also the one who conceived and produced this ad to promote awareness of Climate Action Day and Kyoto Protocol. Go Cameron.

Supermodels Take It Off For Climate Change, 350.org

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz555JBIwY

Better than me

Such is the life of a freelance writer/adjunct writing instructor/fortysomething Mom, that nothing everything works out exactly (or even somewhat) as planned. A few months ago, my agent asked me to write a short piece for a family magazine's August issue. The magazine was devoting part of the issue to short essays by Moms. We were supposed to write about a moment when we had some memorable revelation about our children or child. I have had many great revelations about my children, but since I can basically only remember what happened to me last week, and was too tired to go through my kids' baby books to see when they had first (or last) surprised me, I wrote about a recent, written exchange I had had with my older son while he was on the bus. The editors at Real Simple didn't like what I wrote---or maybe they just liked other writers' moments of revelation better. In any case, here's mine:

I have spent most of my life as a mother trying to tell myself that it’s a good thing I don’t have girls.

We had our first boy the week OJ Simpson was acquitted; our second boy arrived four years later. Now my life is filled with mitts, baseball bats, hockey sticks, boxer shorts, jock straps, lengthy discussions about why the rapper TI landed in jail, dirty cleats, and little boys who shouldn’t be talking about boners but do. I have made my peace with my role as mother of boys, and yet, the yearning to get my nails done with a shorter version of me, tie a pink ribbon in a long lock of hair and purchase several packages of tiny pink tights for a dance recital, lingers. Who will visit me in the nursing home, I wonder? My grandmother had dementia and didn’t recognize any of us towards the end, but my mother dutifully visited her for years, and every week, sent out gently nagging emails, reminding all us grandchildren to go visit the woman who had been so good to us for so long.

Will my boys bother to do that for me when I can’t remember who they are?

Most of my friends with 13-year old girls confide how difficult their daughters have become. These girls have long hair, play soccer, text each other relentlessly and wonder when they’re going to get their periods. They tell their mothers they hate them and then they reach for their cell phones. They spend hours getting ready for bar mitzvahs and when they get to the parties, they make each other cry. When my friends tell me about how mean their girls are, I know exactly what they’re talking about. I was one of those vicious girls: The summer between seventh and eighth grades, I was so bitchy to the girls in my bunk that two of them went home. The girls’ parents were furious, and even though it was my fifth summer at that camp, the camp’s owners didn’t invite me back

Fast forward thirty years. My almost-13 year old son occasionally tells me he hates me, sometimes punches his little brother and spends a lot of time texting his friends but otherwise, he’s a pretty sweet kid. Still, he’s not a saint and the other morning he got mad at me because he was tired. He wanted to sleep in, miss the bus and have me drive him to school. His school is a forty-minute round trip drive. I had a busy morning ahead of me and was already planning to drive him two days later, so I said no. My older son got up, stomped onto the bus and wouldn’t let me kiss him good-bye.

That afternoon, I texted him on the bus. I said I was at speech therapy with his little brother, that our housekeeper would get him off the bus, and he should practice the piano when he got home.

“Txt me wen u b cum a good mother (ie drive yer sun 2 skool),” my older son typed.
“Okay, I’ll text you Friday morning.:)” I typed back.
“I’ll haf 2 4giv u b cuz smily faces are a key 2 lerning the txting language, and the fact tht ur even close 2 mastring it without b ing mi age iz incredibl.”

Well, that bone threw me. That my son could so quickly absolve me, and throw in a compliment to boot, was incredible. He is so much more decent at 13 than I ever was. Maybe he would get his brother to visit me in the nursing home after all.

Of Mice and Men

Last weekend, on the day before Kol Nidre, our oldest son became a bar mitzvah. I have to say, I think it was the happiest day of my life. Yes, I know I should say that the birthdays of both our sons were the happiest days of my life but on our oldest son's bar mitzvah, I was neither drugged nor in pain nor was I forty pounds overweight. Plus, there were 200 people in the room, and I pretty much knew and loved them all, as opposed to our birthing rooms at Mt. Sinai, where I knew our OB and of course knew my husband, but was tended to by nurses who probably didn't love anything about me except the fact that I was so thoroughly sedated, I wasn't screaming for painkillers.

But I digress. Last Saturday was a gorgeous sunny day. I'll admit that the two weeks leading up to the BM (as I came to call it in my various frantic emails to friends) were full of stress, anxiety and worry. Getting my older son to and from Temple for last minute rehearsals with the cantor and d'var Torah discussions with the rabbi, while working part-time, getting dinner on the table, occasionally running with our dog and supervising my younger son's homework, was not easy. I looked for---and found---opportunities to get into the car by myself and listen to Fergie belt out "Outa my Head," from the Black Eyed Peas "The END" album. She may have only been singing about being out of her head but I was really feeling it.

That said, the day of the bar mitzvah was glorious. The rabbi and cantor seemed pleased, our son spoke beautifully on the bima, and he successfully and happily read from the Torah with his friend Tyler. My wonderful friend Carole, who is a rabbi, gave a moving blessing from the bima, and my equally wonderful friend Anna said very nice things and presented Matt and Tyler with their silver-plated kiddush cups.

A word about Tyler. It is nothing short of miraculous that your child shares his or her b'nai mitzvah with a child who you really like. That this other child should be part of a great family is even more of a miracle. Tyler is a great kid (though technically, I should be calling both these kids "men.") He and my older son go to camp together and they are both sweet, funny and irreverent boys, who know how to read and recite Hebrew under pressure. It was delightful to see them up there on the bima giggling, jabbing each other, and waiting for the other to finish speaking. Tyler's mother, Naneen, has an older son so she has been through this whole bar mitzvah business before. She reminded me to tell the bus to come early, find a basket for the red satin yarmulkes (which looked like cardinals' caps, but no matter), and fill a basket with colored socks so the 13-year old girls could take off their high-heeled shoes and have something to dance in. (My sister-in-law's babysitter got the socks at Costco. Thanks, Jasmine!) Naneen also told me to get a frame for the invitation (which I failed to do), bring extra directions cards to the ceremony (ditto), and generally kept me sane. Naneen had the foresight to assign a friend to bring the camp kids' sleeping bags to the party, which I had forgotten to do, so my sister-in-law and brother-in-law helped schlep that stuff from the Temple cloak room to the parking lot at the last minute. Thank you Nancy and Larry!

It was resassuring to hang out with someone who is calmer and more sensible than I am, and it was a total pleasure to share this event with Naneen and her family. Naneen and I are both now mothers of men. Oh, boy!

At the party afterwards, our older son glowed and beamed and danced with his friends. The boys took off their jackets, got sweaty and looked happy. The girls looked beautiful---I hadn't seen some of them in a couple of years, and they, more than the boys, looked as if they were ready to swoop down and embrace adulthood. Some of the kids wore their red hoody sweatshirts before the bar mitzvah was over, which for some reason just tickled me. The oversize sign-in board of Devils' goalie Martin Brodeur managed to look both menacing and cheerful. The table "sculptures" that two artistic women had created out of Matt's old and abandoned hockey equipment looked really good once they had been retrofitted with silver glitter and sparkly "snow." And the life-size chocolate hockey "pucks" these women left on people's plates gave some of us a pleasant and long-lasting sugar high. (If this all sounds hokey, mea culpa. We live in suburban New Jersey and the theme of the party was ice hockey.) My husband read a beautiful toast and so did our younger son. The eight-minute montage that my husband labored over was marvelous, our boys looked handsome in their new blue suits, and I, for the first time since our wedding, was wearing hairspray and lipliner.

If I'm kvelling and bragging, forgive me. It was just one of those days. There are very few occasions in your life when everything goes well and all the people surrounding you seem genuinely happy to be there. This day was one of them. No one got hurt, drunk, sad or pissed off. Almost all of my bridesmaids attended; and so did many friends I've known since grammar school, high school and college. All my husband's groomsmen were there, and it made me so happy to think that we were still in close touch with the people we had been close to when we were married sixteen years ago. We danced and laughed and ate. My friend Terri brought the enormous, many-layered Torah cake, and a week later, we are still licking the frosting off our plates. My in-laws, my mother and stepfather sat with their friends and cousins and seemed very happy to share this simcha with their shared grandson. My much younger half-sister came with a friend, looked beautiful and seemed to have a good time. Our cousins, siblings, friends and extended family members came in from California, Florida, Tennessee, Maryland, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Our neighbor gave an envelope of cash to the bus driver and got on the bus with the teenagers, ensuring they made it from the Temple to the party in one piece. Thank you all for schlepping!

Only my father was missing, and though he passed away four years ago, and has been gone long enough that I shouldn't still be missing him so acutely, I was. Since I sort of, kind of believe in ghosts and am writing a short story in which the protagonist actively talks to ghosts, I'll just say out loud here that I did kind of, sort of think my father was at the service the night before. I started to cry when I thought about what he was missing and regretted I hadn't invited one of his old friends, who was still alive and a member of the Temple, to the service. Before my Dad died, he bought both our boys tallit (prayer shawls) from the Jewish Museum in Manhattan (we were pretty sure he was dating someone who worked at the Jewish museum because he kept bringing us gifts from the gift shop.) The yarmulke that came with the tallis was too small for Matt's head, and Matt deemed the tallis "too itchy" to wear but at the last minute, changed his mind and wore it. My husband wore his tallis from his bar mitzvah and it was nice to see all the mixing and matching of generations and prayer shawls. (Footnote: The Temple was so cold that morning that some of the girls asked the security guard to open the gift shop so they could borrow some tallit and use them to keep warm.)

Of course, life marches on and two days after the bar mitzvah, it was Yom Kippur. We went back to Temple, prayed, fasted, and repented. At then end of the day, we headed to a good friend's for break fast. Then we went home, ate more Torah cake and collapsed.

The next day, my housekeeper reminded me that the mouse problem I had been ignoring for three weeks could no longer be ignored. Our younger son had been complaining about "russling" in the basement, and our housekeeper had found mouse droppings in his old lunch bag. (She, being the goddess that she is, cleaned it out.) She showed me the jar of chocolate kisses I kept in the pantry, and informed me that some mammal had eaten the chocolates and left the wrappers behind. Your kids didn't do this, she said, and showed me the crinkled silver wrappers as evidence. She was right. My kids would have been savvy enough to hide the wrappers. Sigh. The next day, the exterminator came and lay down traps. That evening, our dog, who is a Lab but really a pig, pulled the rack off the dishwasher as I was loading it. The rack fell to the floor and an old white plate broke. Good luck, I hope.

Our kids went back to school, my husband went back to work, I went back to teaching news reporting to teenagers and twentysomethings, and we spent the week doing a collective jig. My older son's teachers congratulated him, and we received emails and voice mails from people who had celebrated with us. (There is nothing better than receiving an an email from someone who actually has something nice to say about how your child conducted himself in public.) I can't say that this experience made us better Jews, though the bar mitzvah did remind us that ancient rituals don't have to make you cringe and retreat, organized religion isn't always divisive and in fact, can be cause for celebration. The bar mitzvah brought us together as a family, it renewed my faith in public spectacles and loud parties, and made me really friggin' grateful for our blessings: health, happiness, friends, family, gainful employment, and a sweet but greedy dog.

The following Saturday morning, we fell back into our old habits. Our dog woke up early, our younger son played baseball for four hours in the rain and our bar mitzvah boy slept late and spent the day texting his friends and playing Xbox. If you were at the BM and you're reading this now, thank you for sharing! The party's over, but it's still going on in our heads. As the Black Eyed Peas shout (in Hebrew!) in the middle of their song, "I Gotta Feeling," L'chaim.

Shana Tova

Here are the reasons it may actually be a good idea to have your oldest son's bar mitzvah on Shabbat Shuvah, one of the holiest days of the year and the Shabbat that is sandwiched between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This is the ten-day period known as the Days of Awe and as the Chabad website, http://www.chabad.org, and my other go-to-Jew source, Judaism for Dummies, just informed me, it is a most auspicious time to rectify the failings and missed opportunities of the past and positively influence the coming year. With that in mind, here are the reasons you might consider scheduling your child's bar mitzvah smack in the middle of the High Holy Days, back-to-school madness and the beginning of football season:

1) You can go to Temple with your whole family on a Saturday morning a full week ahead of time, sneak in late, sit in the way back, and after making it through the two and half-hour Rosh Hashanah service, you can turn to your youngest son, who is almost 9, has been begging to play with your phone and fidgeting like mad , and say, "See, if you can sit through that, you can definitely sit through your brother's service." To which your younger son replies, "Of course I'll be able to sit through his service. I'll be sitting up front!" Shame, shame.

2) You can wear a grey T-shirt dress, with a heavy black velvet blazer over it, and because the Temple's air conditioning is blasting away, sit there and shiver, and know that it's going to be pretty friggin' cold in the sanctuary next weekend, and the short-sleeved dress you bought back in July just isn't going to cut it without a jacket or a pretty black shawl, neither of which you own or have time to shop for.

3) You can stand on a very long line to kiss the Rabbis and the Cantor hello and know exactly what it going to be like to stand on a very long line in high heels in Temple and kiss people hello.

4) You can observe/complain/whine to to one of your friends who went through her oldest son's bar mitzvah back in June, that you will be in Temple six out of the next eleven days, and she will just smile in sympathy and say something encouraging like, "Oh, God."

5) You can buy your first pair of Spanx pantyhose from the nice ladies at Footnotes, admire your artificially flattened stomach and shrunken butt in your mirror at home, march off to synagogue, take your seat in the pew and sit there for a long time, far too aware of your bladder, your lungs and the various other organs the Spanx is compressing in your stomach, struggle to breathe, stand up feeling as if a balloon has been inflated near your vital organs, and conclude that in fact you will not be wearing a pair of Spanx on the day your older son becomes a man, and that you'd better find time for at least three Bar Method classes between now and the big day, even though you have to teach two days this week and it's a new job that doesn't leave much time for extra-exercise.

5) You and your husband will cry and beam during your son's coming-of-age ceremony Saturday morning, dance and laugh at his party that afternoon, feed him and his camp friends pizza Saturday evening, beg a bunch of 13-year old boys not to stay up all night watching inappropriate movies in the basement, serve the neighbors and out-of-towners bagels, lox and coffee Sunday morning...and after everyone leaves, you and your family will collapse into a heap and stare at the TV---only to rouse yourself a couple of hours later so you can eat a huge dinner with one of your closest friends and return to Temple for Kol Nidre Sunday night. The next morning you will wake up and it will be Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, and you will sit in Temple, fasting and hungry but relieved and grateful that your oldest son is now officially a man. You will confess your sins, you will pray for peace, and you will promise to be less of a bitch when you're tired, when deep in your frozen little heart, you just want to sneak off, eat a box of chocolates and get a massage on the day of Atonement.

6) You will make sure that your younger son's bar mitzvah is scheduled closer to Thanksgiving than Labor Day.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy and peaceful New Year, everyone. L'shana tovah.

Letter from the Beach

Oh, the summer family vacation. Or as my husband's former boss once corrected me, the summer family trip.

Every August, since my older son was two, we have rented a house for a week or two on Long Beach Island, a.k.a. the Jersey shore. We did fly West in 2007 and 2008 to see Yosemite and Yellowstone but this summer, we regained our provincial senses and headed down the shore.

Even though LBI lacks such creature comforts as a movie theatre, a bookstore, a shady place to sit or a Starbucks, it does have its attributes.

There are a lot of ice cream stores to choose from. The ice cream trucks will sell your almost-nine year old a cold can of Pepsi even though you specifically gave him money for a popsicle. It’s very easy to get fresh fish. You can see water from almost anywhere you stand. There's some excellent fudge. It's flat.

While we're there, we run, read, rent kayaks, go fishing, catch inedible crabs, grill salmon/swordfish/shrimp and scallops, drink white wine, do laundry, empty the dishwasher, leave the towels out to dry on the line, and relax. I rarely write when we are at the beach. I spend a lot of time going to Neptune Market and Foodies in Harvey Cedars and seeing people I know from childhood. I often feel like a French housewife and a French maid, shopping every morning for groceries and then hauling the bags up three flights of stairs. I don't (necessarily) mind. The coffee is weak but the sun is strong. I like to gaze at the ocean and my kids and my husband love to swim in it, even if it is warm one day and full of rip-tides and freezing water the next.

This summer, my brother and his family, and my sister-in-law's sister and her family, came down the same week we did. Altogether, there were seven kids, four of them teenagers, six of them boys. Because there were so many kids, the cousins ended up spending a lot of time together, comparing notes about their parents and grandparents. My boys came back to me with such gems as:

"Uncle Michael says the reason you are not super-skinny even though you run all the time is because you have a slow metabolism and your father was fat."
"You're kind of like Grandpa Brendan (85 and semi-retired). You sort of work but you don't really make a living."
"You've been misleading us all these years about what MILF means."

And so on.

Some good clean fun did come out of our week together. My older son and husband ran a five-mile race and raised money for the local firehouse and diabetes. I did five loads of laundry, and emptied the dishwasher ten times. Every morning, we ran with my sister-in-law's 15-year old niece, who is training for a 70-mile bike race. We watched Hannah's blonde-pony tail bounce on her back as she sprinted ahead and left us in the Long Beach Boulevard dust. We played Set at my brother’s house and Scrabble at ours. I read a lot: Maile Meloy’s new short story collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It (brilliant and wonderful), Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles( smart, snappy and in-your-face---tells every artist what s/he needs to know to start working again without obsession or delay,) some of Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (which I may or may not ever finish) and Melanie Gideon's The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After.

A word about The Slippery Year. Initially, the idea of the book really pissed me off. A fortysomethng Mom writing about waiting in the car pool line for her nine-year old son and trying to make sense of it all? That was my territory. And as my older son’s former hockey coach said in an email, “That was supposed to be your book.”

Ouch. So out of spite and and a lame attempt at frugality, I decide not to buy it. But then my great friend Liz, another fortysomething writing mother who reads more than any other person alive, said the book was good and offered to let me borrow her copy. Not only that, she would drop it off at my house before she left for vacation. Needless to say, it became my go-to book on vacation. Very little happens in it---Gideon talks to her friends and her mother, she visits her sister and hangs out with her son, she gets her hair straightened and buys a new mattress, she realizes she loves her husband a lot, even though he snores and thinks he's preparing their son for camp by making him watch "Into the Wild." The book is a soothing and illuminating read. Parts of it are wry and poignant. A couple of paragraphs made me laugh out loud. I think of it of now with fondness and longing. And envy.

But back to the trip. My in-laws drive down from Philadelphia and spend a couple of days with us. Whenever my in-laws visit us at the beach, my husband likes to rent a boat and take them fishing. My husband loves transportation. He loves cars and boats of all kinds---he comes from a family of German engineers and scientists and what I’ve discovered about them is that they love objects with moving parts. They love fixing cameras and bikes and working on computers and calibrating distances and unreeling fishing rods. My husband loves to read sailing books and wander around harbors. He and his brothers and his father like to use their hands and their brains at the same time (My mother-in-law is more like me---she likes to read.) My favorite activities are to sit very still and read a book, then stare at the computer and type very fast.

What I’m trying to say is my husband loves to fish and I go along for the ride.

We pile my in-laws and kids into the car and drive to Barnegat Light. We rent a boat and buy two containers of frozen squid. The boat is more like a barge, and my husband mans the wheel. Our kids attach the bait to their fishhooks. We have the fishing boat for four hours so everyone relaxes. The men and boys are fishing, my mother-in-law and I are watching.

After a half hour, I pull out a bag of gluten-free chips. I have also brought pretzels, potato chips, pita chips and six bottles of water because God forbid we go hungry out on the bay.

“Do you want to fish?” my husband asks.

“We’re going to sit here and make sure there’s enough shade,” I say and hand my mother-in-law the bag of chips.

We sit on vinyl chairs under a canopy in the 90-degree sun. An hour goes by, nobody catches a fish but the lines still manage to get tangled up many times. My kids fish in the front of the boat, my father-in-law and husband fish in the back. Finally, my husband catches a fish. It is small and grey and writhing, and much too small to keep. We have to throw it back. My husband grabs the hook out of the fish’s mouth. It continues to thrash on the floor of the boat. He tries to grab it but these fish are agile things and it keeps wiggling way. I try to grab it. The fish looks angry, its eyes are fierce, it’s thrashing from right to left, it’s fighting for its life. My heart starts to pound. The fish thinks we are trying to kill it! Maybe we are.

“Get the net, get the net!” I yell.

Someone hands me the net. I scoop up the fish and throw it in the bay. Well, I try to throw it in the bay. The fish get stuck in the net. Back and forth, I swing the net in the water. The fish stays in the net for way too long. Finally, it either swims away or I manage to dump its body out.

“Mommy, did you kill the fish?” my almost nine-year old asks.

“No,” I lie. In truth, I have no idea. All I know is the fish is no longer our responsibility.

My husband decides that the big fish must be in other spots and we need to keep moving around the bay to find them. Every few minutes, he tells the kids and my father-in-law to to reel in their lines. He is getting a little bossy on the boat so I move away from him and rejoin my mother-in-law. We talk a little bit about family dynamics. My husband and I are both first children. We want what we want when we want it. We are all hot and cranky so I suggest we jump in the water and have some fun. I climb down the ladder and ease myself into the bay. Whoopee! The water is warm and delicious. I am so happy to be swimming with the fishes, wherever they are. My kids jump in and we all tread water. My husband suggests I swim to shore and see how deep the water is. I suspect he is trying to get rid of me.

“It’s really deep,” I say.
“I bet you can stand,” my husband says.
Our thirteen-year old stands up. We walk back to the boat.

Afterwards, I say to my husband, “Your mother says you like to be in charge.” My husband shoots me a look. He hates it when I talk about him with his mother and then repeat her observations back to him. I know exactly how he feels because I hate when he talks about me with my brother and repeats those observations back to me.

We head back to shore and return the boat, fishing rods and excess bait to the boat's owner. As a reward for our semi-good behavior, we treat ourselves to ice cream and iced coffee. Maybe next summer, we'll head West and go for a hike.