Suzi had an engorged tick in the scruff of her neck the other morning. I saw it on the walk home from the park. It was a marble-like and taupe, the size of a black bean. I thought at first it might be a tumor. Joe, the porter in my building and a friend of all dogs, thought maybe a skin tag. I took a photo, sent to the vet, and got a call back. Remove it yourself or pay for an appointment for them to do it.

I still get queasy imagining it.

We’d been to Vermont a week and change ago, where she must’ve picked it up, though I’d not be surprised if we have ticks right here in Brooklyn. I did tick checks up there in the Emerald Paradise of New England and found a different one, in fact.

On the drive home I swam in a pool of forlorn. Traveling does that, don’t you find? Think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” and you’ll know what I mean. The scenery that barely registers as you speed by it, blurred as it must be, to some other destination. Who lives in that old house? Or that brick one? What is their unique disappointment? What is their joy?

Unmoored is more precisely how I felt—and still feel at times now. My dad’s gone; my mom is too, after a fashion. I still have no full-time job. My son is fairly independent and embarking on an exciting new chapter of his life.

What is my anchor? Where is my tether? Is it in the routine? In this letter-writing? Is it the fact of my home? Is it my sense of self? Is it just up to me now to tell myself that it’ll all be okay?

Everything’s a vector of evil. I read an article yesterday about how the warming planet is affecting bacteria that are exponentially more adaptable to environmental changes than we humans are, such that if you cut yourself nowadays and go into a body of water you may well find yourself with a flesh-eating disease. Or you’re more likely to find that than you were two decades ago. Obviously I’m leaving a lot out explanation-wise. You can find it yourself if you inclined to inciting further alarm.

It’s enough to make you move to the farthest reaches of Alaska, except the microbiome there is equally canny and iterative and I’m sure peril also lurks up north.

I’m off(ish) gluten. How’s that for a non sequitur?

I’ve waited too long to write and now I don’t know quite how or where to enter the maze of ideas and one-off thoughts that animate my imagination. I have World Cup fever. I’ve become a Knicks fan. The casual anti-Semitism I’ve lately encountered is supremely distressing. I thought of a great joke but forgot to write it down, so who am I to even consider pivoting to stand-up with such mediocre habits—or at least to making it some kind of half-past-midlife side hustle. I’ve fallen in love all over again with John Turturro, haven’t you?

Isaiah graduates tomorrow from 8^th grade. He and his classmates were in Portland, OR for a week and a half, building tiny houses and gardening at a settlement for the formerly unhoused. He learned to use an electric saw. He heard the story of a domestic abuse survivor who faced down a rifle-carrying spouse. He went white water rafting and hiking. He called Portland a “wannabe Madison,” a description I can’t properly rebut since I’ve never been anywhere in the Pacific NW but I suspect is inaccurate. He had a great time and came home, as did all the kids, with a signature razor-cut of the eyebrow—the temporary equivalent of getting inked to mark your eternal bond—and a souvenir t-shirt.

His red-eye landed Thursday morning and by evening we were on the road, up to Massachusetts, for a soccer tournament in Lancaster, a quaint, leafy burg northeast of Worcester.

The team fared poorly but it was nevertheless fun. We had a big team bbq at a state park on the NH border, and Saturday night another parent and I took six of the kids to see Obsession, a slasher film I alone found funny—judging by the periodic outburst of my solo laughter. The kids cowered and later pretended they’d done otherwise.

I took a half-garden-bed plot in our building’s courtyard for the summer, trying once again to grow tomatoes and cukes. The plants are growing, though not yet fruiting, of course, and I’m hopeful but I’ve met with too much disappointment before to allow my optimism too much emotional real estate. At the soccer tournament some of the moms were joking that I wear rose-colored glasses, which I wonder if it’s true. I see myself as somewhat cynical, but what’s choosing to raise a child or watering a garden if not an expression of hope?

Am I a hopeful cynic or a cynical optimist? Binaries are for suckers, I reckon.

I’d like more (some) good news, please, now, universe. I am beseeching.

Yesterday morning I planted four seedlings: three tomato and one cucumber, plus the seeds I kept from a just eaten orange pepper as experiment. I tilled the half-patch of soil allotted me, mixed in some new dirt and some compost, pulled out old roots, wedged the marker-stained popsicle stick into the earth and beseeched the universe: Fruit! A job! Health!

Also, I thought of my dad who gardened so avidly and enthusiastically over years and years. His garden in Connecticut overflowed with chard and pole beans and cucumbers and lettuces. Squash as big as a football. Blueberries. And rhubarb! How I loved and still adore rhubarb.

A few weeks ago I made strawberry rhubarb ice cream (one part strawberry to two of the other) splashed with fresh lemon juice. I devoured that divine tang.

After getting a crown fitted today I went to the Coop where they had a seedling of a yellow cherry tomato plant and I couldn’t help myself; yellow and orange cherries are my favorite.

At home, I made pasta and tripped in the half-step to the sink from the stove with the pot of just boiled water in my hand, sloshing out of it and onto the back of my hand. My skin’s not red but it stings. Injury. Insult. My mood is foul. Panic seizing me; I apply for job after job and harness my network and you know how that sentence ends so I needn’t spell it out. No purchase, even if I was tricked out with metaphorical crampons.

I read a book!! It’s been far too long since I have, I admit, and I took on Tom Junod’s memoir about his dad, which was riveting for about two-thirds of it and then became very and surprisingly repetitive. Have you ever read Junod’s essay “The Falling Man” about 9/11 and the fellow photographed falling from the World Trade Center? What an outstanding piece of prose. And who am I to criticize his memoir? It must be tremendously difficult to write a book. It sometimes feels near impossible to write a cover letter. I haven’t done it—the book, that is—though if I could somehow turn these missives into one I’d be over the moon, at least for a day.

Other critiques of other items: Hacks is so…well…hacky this season. So boring. So predictable. There are no stakes anymore. The jokes don’t land; Kayla and the assistant are extraneous, and even Ava is uninteresting this season—little more than a dull helpmeet in a plot line that feels too played out. Where did the promise vanish to?

The Comeback’s my jam; if nothing else, watch the end of episode 7, where Valerie goes on Hot Ones. I cackled.

I sometimes worry I’ll never find gainful employment again and what will happen to us? Where will we go? What if we become unhoused? Will I ever set foot on a plane again? Yes, I know there are so very many things that have to happen before such fears even remotely approach reality. Still, what if they do? What if the good things that have to happen for our ship to be righted simply don’t because there’s too much competition and AI has come for the jobs and the world’s ending and expenses mount and so forth?

(I guess this is a good place to say: if you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one for all the occasional extra goodies and to help me “cover my nut.”)

How can I stop catastrophizing? I’m usually good at compartmentalizing.

The sun’s out—that helps a little. So does writing to you.

When the birds are old enough to fly away, will they remember their mother? Will she remember them? When they happen to perch on the same branch somewhere later this year, will they recognize each other as the closest of kin? Will it be a joyful reunion?

Suzi has been driving me crazy with her barking. Workers are doing construction next door. Outside in the distance is the sound of a hedge trimmer. Who knows what phantom nuisances propel her to exclaim.

I got a cavity filled on Monday. Tomorrow I’m getting a new crown. Getting all the ducks in a row before my good insurance lapses with the new month and my new, mediocre insurance kicks in. The job search is dispiriting. Everything (nearly) is dispiriting.

My mother’s birthday was on Sunday. She turned 90 and Rebecca and Cliff organized a lovely lunch for her, though she barely ate and was not particularly engaged. Still, she enjoyed seeing her grandchildren and her one-great grandchild. Later that day Isaiah had a soccer game at Queens College, near Mt. Hebron cemetery where one set of my great-grandparents are buried and, with them, Aunt Billi. A few blocks over lies Billi’s brother Sidney, whom I never met, and his wife Anna. They died in the early 70s. I went to say hello to the whole lot of them; I told them that Alfred was gone, but maybe they knew already.

It’s a peaceful cemetery, calm and rather lovely. Orderly, green. You look out at the sea of headstones and marvel—each individual an entire universe.

Last night I attended a Zoom general meeting of the Park Slope Food Coop. In the course of a discussion on a proposal to endorse a boycott on goods from Israel someone used the phrase “Jewish supremacy” and I was livid. I am livid, still. What a bigoted, antisemitic dog whistle. Goddamned German shepherd. I raised my hand and, it felt like hours later, was called upon for my comment: The casualness with which people bandy around antisemitic slurs and the ugly euphemisms they toss off are vile and galling and unacceptable anywhere. That doesn’t mean I sanction Israel’s actions or that I reject them. It only means that ugly and abominable expressions of hatred and bigotry are intolerable against Jews as they rightfully are against any demographic.

The tulips fail at consolation just now. My apartment’s dusty. The stovetop’s mottled with grime. I’ll run later and that might help my disposition, though it’s also supposed to rain. I’m afraid to look at my bank account, dwindling as it is. I don’t like living this way.

Fearful. On edge.

I must get back to the precipice of hope. What’s the path there?

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When the phone rang yesterday afternoon, as I was taking a ten-minute snooze, I didn’t want to look to see who it was. Uncertainty was hope in that moment. They were calling to tell me I got the job and it’s even better and bigger than what I applied for. At the same time, I knew it was unlikely and when I finally looked at the message, I knew my hope had been fantasy.

Later the phone rang again with a number I didn’t recognize.

“This is your congressman, Hakeem Jeffries….” Did I want to hold the line for a constituent call? I did not.

Suzi was at the pet hospital Monday—she got an MRI, a spinal tap, the works. She had a seizure a month ago. She was hobbling a week and change ago and shrieking in pitches that made my skull spasm and ring as if the worst of the worst of the worst had befallen her. She hop-walked on constitutionals and let murmured cries escape. She had been on a cocktail of gabapentin and codeine and another narcotic and Tylenol and looked stoned most of the time. I kept expecting the worst and then, it felt all of a sudden, she was better.

She’s not hobbling. She’s not crying. She’s not medicated anymore. We are still taking it easy for the time being, and she has to go back in May for an orthopedic visit but it seems now that this latest unease was a muscle pull or strain of some sort. Was she playing too hard? Going too rough and tumble? She did she land funny on a run in the park?

Does it matter now? Not really. She’s well(ish). She seems with it. Lucid. Energetic, except for at this very moment as the spring sun pours in the through the window and she luxuriates in its illumination.

Isaiah got a haircut last week which he hated and regretted and swore up and down he’d never cut it again. He went on and on about being so upset he was “speechless,” blind to the irony and took my laughter as mockery of his ‘do rather than amusement at his histrionics. He wore a baseball hat on the subway to shield himself. His coach called him “Unc.” He complained he looked like an egg. He complained that formerly handsome (kinehora), he was now an LTN (low-tier normie).

By yesterday he said it had grown out enough that he felt good again.

Here he is in a video filmed pre-haircut.

He was cast to play a high school jock of the kind that populated the teen shows of the UPN and CW from days of yore for a parody bit about nepo babies produced and written and starring the son of two famous actors.

“He was cast,” I write, as if deus ex machina herself got involved, and not lil old moi who saw and responded posthaste to the nepo baby’s post looking for boys in NYC for the gig. There was more email back and forth than I would’ve expected but then, I’m not in the biz, and maybe it’s like that sometimes.

On the morning of the shoot Isaiah was hard to wake, and I got nervous about his being late and making a bad impression and felt myself stage-momming out for a job he never even asked for. In the car, I told him all of this—how silly of me to be pushy about this—and if he wants to do other such gigs, that’s fine but he has to take the lead.

Today’s the end of Passover (well, tomorrow, but the last two days are holidays) and I went to services this morning. I had a dream I found a trove of tallits belonging to my dad; that’s neither there nor here. It felt consoling; warm. After the service there was a kiddush, a little something to eat and drink, and Sam asked me how the seders were last week. I got teary-eyed answering and then in a subsequent conversation cried again. Going to services makes me feel close to my father.

In fact, the seders were lovely. Rebecca and Cliff hosted and my dad’s absence was conspicuous. We sang the songs his way (dirge-like but with tremendous oomph!) and remembered his jokes and parsed the text in the way he loved. Still, it felt a little empty to me.

I thought a lot about the parable from the Haggadah of the four sons—the wicked; the wise; the simple; the one who knows not how to ask—amidst especially the context of conformity and community. What makes a community? What are the rules that govern it? How much dissent can it endure before it breaks down? How elastic can be? How porous? But also, when we call someone wicked—what does that say about us, about our need to label people and categorize them? About our disinclination to allow that people can change? And why is the son wicked anyway? Because he asks a pointed question? Because he doesn’t accept everything as it’s told to him?

At the service this morning, the rabbi spoke of the killing of the Egyptians pursuing the Israelites as they fled through the parted waters of the Red Sea in the biblical story of the Exodus. He made a connection to this week’s threat of “annihilation” of Iran. Wait, let me correctly quote DJT in case you missed it:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

What an abominable thing to say. What an abomination our president is.

Sam made the point that he was threatening nothing less than committing genocide. I hadn’t thought of it quite like that but it’s true—and patently unforgivable. What a time—wretched and scary and violent.

Behold the budding magnolia.

May it distract you from the mayhem and may peace and harmony prevail everywhere.

Many years ago I interviewed Annette Ezekiel Kogan, a klezmer musician and accordion player for Golem. The one thing I recall so clearly from our conversation was a discussion of a lullaby she wrote. The thrust of the song—what broke and still breaks my heart about it—was its conceit: she’s singing to a child who’ll one day mourn her, who’ll grieve for her, who’ll recite the mourner’s kaddish for her. At this tender, vulnerable moment between mother and child she already looks forward to the ultimate separation.

Annette uses the Yiddish refrain, “mein kaddish’l,” the one who’ll say kaddish for me, in other words—my child. With that phrase, she portends a unique, profound anticipation of grief. It’s an affirmation that when grief eventually and inevitably arrives and you say the mourner’s prayer, your recitation, while painful, will be a pure expression of love.

I’ve been saying the mourner’s prayer since my father died. It’s an Aramaic prayer, not Hebrew. We’re now past the “shloshim,” the 30-day post burial marker, in our calendar of sorry. Jewish mourning customs divvy up time. First comes the most intense period of grief—the shiva, or seven days. Then the shloshim. Then the year, which is really eleven months of mourning.

The truly dedicated recite the mourner’s prayer for a parent every day of that year. The lesser among us do so less frequently, though in my view frequency as an indication of fidelity only applies if you’re a natural born bean counter.

Gloria Deluxe has a song too, a lullaby, that’s likewise about the aftermath of leaving. “Who’s gonna love you like I do? Who’s gonna lace up your little shoes when I’m gone?”

Cynthia Hopkins, the band’s singer, invokes country motifs far more than Annette Kogan does. The song may well be about the longest goodbye—it does talk about the inevitability of death—but there’s a quality about it that conveys more, or at least a little, levity.

We sing songs to children that ready them for us to leave for the same reason my friend M said she likes to have animals around: so that her child experiences what it feels like to lose someone you love.

Do you remember the first time someone you love died? Or the first time someone you know died, love notwithstanding?

I do.

I was in high school and a young woman who’d been my youth group counselor the year we lived abroad died alongside her boyfriend. They had a kerosene space heater in their bedroom; the gas leaked and poisoned them. A friend wrote to share the news, and I remember sitting in the kitchen telling my mother about it. She cried. One of the only times in my entire childhood that I saw her cry.

I digress.

The minor key that Annette uses in her lullaby only amplifies its sorrowful quality. Minor keys will do that.

My dad used to sing us a lullaby at bedtime. At the funeral we all sang it together. His version used the classic Brahms melody and he changed the lyrics as follows:

Lullaby and goodnight with angels to guide you
With mommy and daddy singing too-rah-loo-rah-lie
Shluff gazunte, Sara dear
In the morning I’ll love you
Shluff gazunte, Sara dear
In the morning I’ll love you.

Shluff gazunte is Yiddish for: sleep well. I love Brahms. His cello sonata destroys me, though I wonder: Is liking Brahms like being a Gen-X male and gushing over Chuck Palahniuk?

Rebecca changed one line of my dad’s lullaby to “I’ll always love you” when she sang it to her kids because love is 24-7, like 7/11, which isn’t true but I like the cadence of words in this sentence and this is, after all, my letter.

I didn’t change any lyrics when I sang it to Isaiah because I only love him in waking hours, as any respectable mother knows to do.

As for R-SAS, it’s Random Song Association Syndrome, an affliction I’m sure I’ve mentioned before and from which I chronically suffer, though suffer is hardly the correct verb. It’s a blessing. My brother diagnosed it. Perhaps you’ve got R-SAS too.

Mercifully, there is no cure.

Last week I had a dream about my father. But also about flowers. And friends.

A’s sister died at the end of the winter. A is a friend of mine. In my dream, she and I were at a garden, I think it was the Brooklyn Botanic, one of my favorite spots in this here burg. Isaiah and Jessie joke about how often I recommend it to people who come to visit from out of town. I’m as predictable as an incoming tide.

Anyway, in the dream we were admiring some magenta-colored beauties. They were full-bodied, small, many-petaled and robust almost bursting from vibrancy. Like lilacs but pinker, near electric.

Then I remembered—still in my dream—that my dad died. It’s been exactly four weeks today since we buried him. And, in that dream, I got sad and I cried, maybe I heaved once in grief, and I said to A or simply thought it to her: My dad won’t see the flowers this spring.

And then I woke up and wondered why my subconscious allowed for that cathartic moment but not my waking mind.

This morning I took Suzi out for her usual walk and I saw some flowers forging their way out of the very late winter dirt. They had white petals—the ones I noticed—and I thought of my father and then my understanding of my dream changed, or expanded.

While it’s true that he’s gone and he won’t see any lilacs this year or tulips or my favorite peonies, he’ll return in my imagination each time I see them. On my walks and runs when I see the crocuses coming up in Prospect Park or the yellow roses that neighbor on the next block tends in her front yard, I’ll think of him more often than not. And he’ll be here, then, in a sense.

Isn’t that a lovely, consoling revelation.

.

Maybe someone wants the socks? If they don’t have holes in them and aren’t stained. I could leave them at the free store in my neighborhood in case someone has need. In case. Of course someone has need.

My sister found a letter among my father’s materials marked “To be opened in the event of fatality.”

In the event of—as if death doesn’t finally befall us all. It binds us. We wondered what the letter might advise: The location of buried treasure? A secret second family?

Besides some few details about life insurance there was instruction: take care of the water filtration system. Keep the basement door closed to safeguard against critters. Ask Bob Smithwick (long passed since the letter was composed in 2004) for help with any household matters. Make sure Sara and Jessie have enough money to be settled in life, to buy a good cello and bow—that for Jess. Love and look after one another, as well as grandma, Aunt Billi, Aunt Marion.

Such wonderful specificity!

We laughed together when we read it out loud. In the event of untimely death, be sure to keep salt pellets on hand!

It’s now been three weeks and change since my dad died and it feels so much longer ago than that. How does that happen? So much has happened. A war started. We had a huge snow storm. It rained and rained after that, melting it all away. Suzi had an alarming seizure and got blood work which showed her to be fine. I scheduled her a neurological follow-up. Isaiah—and 8^th graders throughout the city—got news (good in our case) from the department of ed about their high school acceptances.

How does life just bump along so? Doesn’t it know of all the grief?

Years ago, a wise person advised me how the tragedies and traumas in a life become part of the general fabric--they don’t remain as jarring as when you first encounter them.

I saw my mom twice this past week. She doesn’t really remember that my dad died.

“Have you spoken to dad today?” she asked me on Sunday. No, I said, and asked if she had. She shook her head. No. I vaguely felt I was teasing her by asking her the same in response but I was curious how she’d answer.

On Thursday she told me she’d gone to hear the rabbi read Megillat Esther on Purim.

“Dad didn’t go,” she added.

When I ran into the social worker, I asked the over under on reminding her that my father’s gone. She was disinclined to remind. She advised to say, “he’s on a trip,” or “he’s not feeling well,” when my mother asks after him, banking on dementia for keeping the charade going.

But it feels weird to lie and dodge, and how long are we to pretend? We can dance as needed. It probably is the kinder thing to do and I’ll swallow my discomfort. But Passover is coming up and if my mom has any of her right mind operating then, my father’s absence at a Seder will be glaring.

Last night I went to a kabbalat shabbat service and when the rabbi got ready to chant the blessing over the wine, I waited for an audible Middle C hum, as my dad used to offer in jest. When the rabbi had us read the 23^rd Psalm in English I wanted instead to sing in Hebrew—as we had at the funeral.

That I did to myself.

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Did I tell you what happened with my watch? One morning during that hospital vigil stretch, I went for a run in the morning. My watch, it’s a Garmin, tracks my mileage, my routes, my steps, and on that particular morning it said I had run--that day alone--upwards of 249 miles.

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We buried my dad a week ago Sunday. He died the previous Thursday. He’d been in a coma for eleven days—longer than I think the doctors expected; certainly longer than we did. The funeral was lovely. We four kids offered eulogies as did my cousin, my brother-in-law, a niece, a nephew, a long-time family friend.

It was livestreamed and we’ve been getting notes from all over from people who tuned in and learned something they hadn’t known about my dad: he loved tennis. He became the gentleman farmer he’d always wanted to be. My great-grandmother Chaya Sora who came from Russia and lived in Peabody called him Albut. He called my older sister Princess Tee Hee when she was little on account of her laughing.

In the days after he died, we received lovely, cheering emails and texts from around the world and around the corner. We sat shiva—the full week of it—and it was exhausting and preoccupying. Even though downtime is built in, it was hard to unwind. Sometimes the shiva felt like a party. Sometimes it was somber. Old friends stopped in—my parents’ friends from decades ago, that is. I told the story I didn’t share in the eulogy about how once on Cape Cod when we were children we came upon a young couple in mid-embrace in the dunes and my dad yelled, “Unhand her, you cad!” And on another visit there—to the Cape—he took my fishing rod from me when I’d caught a big one to reel it in only to meet with failure and birth the legend of “the one that got away.”

I haven’t wept; I feel a little flat. Dissociated. When we drove away from the cemetery, I thought of my dad in his burial shroud in the pine box under all that dirt and I felt so sad for him—how alone there, how lonely.

The shiva itself felt like much more than a week; we’d been sitting vigil for nearly two before the funeral. Time became elastic. Most days I didn’t know what day it was. I ate mediocre parfaits from the cafeteria for breakfast and snacked on meringues, M&M’s, and chips in his room.

(Jo trimming Al’s eyebrows during Covid. They used to sign their cards “ILD,” for ich leibe dich, I love you.)

The blizzard Sunday delayed the return to routine until now.

It’s Tuesday. I’ve been logging onto Zoom minyans from the West Coast in order to recite the mourner’s kaddish prayer. I should shovel out my car. I should wash more laundry. I should do dishes. I should look for a job.

That last necessity is the most vital of all right now. These freelance crumbs are not cutting it and unemployment only goes so far so long.

This lyric is on a loop in my head: I woke up and all my yesterdays were gone.

I share my eulogy below.

***********

B’yado afkeed ruchi, b’ayt eeshan, b’ah eerah
V’im ruchki giviyati, Adonai li v’lo eerah.

That’s the last stanza of the Adon Olam prayer. It says, essentially, I entrust my soul to God; if it gives way while I sleep I will not be afraid.

When I was in fourth grade, I had terrible insomnia. My dad—as Jonathan mentioned—routinely worked in his attic office until midnight. He could focus that late because he’d have gone down for a “shluff,” or nap, before dinner.

“Give me 20,” he’d say.

Anticipating the sleepless evening ahead for me, I’d leave a note on his pillow at bedtime.

“Dear Daddy, please tell me when you go to sleep,” and I’d wait, listening for the distinct creak of the stairs under his pointed, leather slippers. I can picture them still—as well as the Fez he wore to keep his head warm, and his bathrobe, belt tied at the waist, over his pajamas.

He’d open my door and say softly, “Sara, dear, I’m going to sleep now.”

At some point, he suggested I recite that last Adon Olam stanza as a kind of spiritual security blanket—much as his father, our grandfather Morris, advised him to recite Tehilim, the Psalms, in moments of need.

My dad understood liturgy and the Tanach and the entire Jewish tradition as a great, rich resource—not just for true believers, but for anyone who’s engaged by and curious about history, culture, literature and the thorny questions that result from trying to be a moral person in a world riddled with immorality and injustice. He wanted to impart that understanding to us, his children—to demonstrate how much insight and assistance can be wrung from Jewish tradition.

There was an essay he wrote once—I’ve tried to find it but have, sadly, failed—for a reunion of a youth or summer camp group he was part of. In it, he mused on the different names he went by in life: Avi, Albut (ask me about that later if that one’s new to you), Al, Alf, Alfred, Red…he riffed on the ways those names came to represent different phases in his life. My perhaps obvious point is that a person is multi-dimensional and is so many different people at any given moment.

So here are other parts of the picture of Alfred: he was a great lover of adventure and the outdoors. We camped and hiked regularly in the White Mountains, Cape Cod, and Israel where we lived for extended periods.

In Connecticut he fished and canoed with anyone willing. I remember paddling together into the farthest cove of Washinee Lake, where we collected hunks of blue slag from the shore.

As long as I can remember, he had us help him in the garden—in Columbus where we harvested apples from our tree on Bexley Park Road into bags labeled: A, B, and Reject. In Newton—remember our pitiful little strawberry patch there—and in Connecticut, where he came into his own as a gentleman farmer. He grew rhubarb and lettuces, cucumbers, chard, tomatoes, potatoes, blueberries, you name it, along with peaches and apples if local wildlife didn’t harvest those first.

By the time I was on maternity leave with Isaiah, my dad was retired. My mom at the time was still working and would be in Manhattan during the week. Dad came to collect us in Brooklyn when Isaiah was but a month old, and brought us home to the Berkshires.

We took walks—it was winter time—and the landscape was austere and awe-inspiring. My dad, who’d once whimsically named himself the “chef du poisson” since the only hot meal he could prepare besides eggs was fish, corrected my observations that “nothing was going on” when my late Aunt Marion asked what was new.

I’m paraphrasing here, but Alfred basically said: look around—we saw ducklings, the ice cracked, the reflection of the light was a little different today, there was a small plant shoot in that one spot which hadn’t been there yesterday.

The world is always changing in big ways and small—pay attention—because those changes are invigorating no matter how minute.

He was an astute observer, and wanted us to be lest we miss the spectrum of splendor the world offers.

That same winter he coined the superhero name “Kid Kinehora” for Isaiah, tweaking what became my almost involuntary utterance, and for those who don’t know, kinehora…or k’ayn ha-rah…means without the evil eye, a phrase Jews invoke to thwart malicious spirits.

He loved to joke that we had to be good for nothing.

On a trip to Canada, around a camp fire, he taught Jonathan and me how to smoke cigars when we were teenagers. Don’t inhale.

In my mind’s eye, I see him letting go of the back of the glitter-covered banana seat of my bike when he taught me how to ride. He himself loved to cycle—starting from his childhood in Brooklyn well into adulthood. He’d bike to Brandeis and home again regularly—a routine way to commute now, but a novel one back in the 1970s.

Anyone who ever met my dad knew he was sharp. When the student leading our tour of Brown University boasted that the school was non-secular, my dad shouted from the rear.

“Non-Sectarian!”

Jonathan and I shrunk in embarrassment.

That kind of mis-step near guaranteed you public humiliation.

When I failed my driving test, which he watched from the backseat of our car, he remarked, “You have to admit it was a comedy of errors.” I’m not sure if that was supposed to be a consolation—but it sure stayed with me.

My dad loved slapstick, physical comedy, and silliness in general. He introduced us to Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety and Young Frankenstein and so much more. Jessie mentioned our outing to Borat. On a different occasion he suggested we pick up knishes from Yonah Schimmel to eat at a screening of Triplets of Belleville. He never forewent a piece of matjes herring, or a Danish, or a cup of tea after a meal with a slice of lemon; for Alfred, a meal without tea was like a body without a soul, as he’d say quoting his own father.

When I moved to Clinton Hill, down the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he and my mom availed themselves of my proximity and hospitality. I was glad to have them there. We went regularly to exciting performances—Geoffrey Rush in Diary of a Mad Man; Pina Bausch; the opera about Anna Nicole Smith. He was absolutely energized by creativity and the arts.

On those occasions, my parents would take over my room—complain that the bedframe was low—and delight in pancakes or whatever I’d prepare the next morning. My dad always encouraged my cooking and baking; the last time I saw him—the day before his brain bleed—he asked if I could make him chocolate cake, if it was no trouble.

“Yours is so much better than what you get at Trader Joe’s” he told me.

I brought him cupcakes that Sunday. The day before, when we spoke on the phone to arrange the visit—he said he wanted to explore the possibility of me opening a bakeshop. Other times he encouraged me to scale up my salad dressing production and market it. He was such a fan of what he so long ago named “Super Sara’s Salad Dressing,” that I found a document with the recipe on his computer’s hard drive, for safekeeping.

There’s so much more I could say…but I’ll close with this story. One day, when I was considering becoming a solo parent, my dad and I had lunch downtown to talk about it. He was ambivalent and made the case for parenting with a partner—how much easier emotionally, financially, physically.

There were no prospects, though, and I asked: “Dad, wouldn’t you say that having a family and children has enriched your life?”

Game. Set. Match. My dad loved tennis, after all, and he loved raising and being part of a large, warm family—singing together, playing games, camping, watching silly movies, and giving his kids and grandkids hugs so engulfing he’d pretend they could break your bones.

But I also think Alfred was won over because he had what’s called “intellectual humility”— an openness of imagination, the ability to change your mind or rethink your position on a given matter. Except, maybe, for syntax and grammar, he was not inflexible or doctrinaire about anything; that’s a lesson for us all.

Around high holiday time last fall, I asked if he wanted to go to visit family in the cemetery, as is the tradition in Judaism. I’d have been happy to take him.

“No,” he said, adding with a singular Alfred flourish, “I’ll be waving hello from the coffin soon enough.”

Dad, we’ll miss you and we love you.

Sunday, the day before he was found, we’d visited—Isaiah and I and the dog—and had a lovely time. He’d asked me if it was no bother to make him chocolate cake, and I happily obliged, making cupcakes and brought along with some oranges. He had said we should really talk about the possibility of me opening up a cafe or bakeshop. I helped him write a letter to his friend Seymour and ordered him jeans, per his request. I joked with my mother about a career change, that I’d soon be making my debut at the Metropolitan Opera with my gorgeous alto.

Last week has given way to this present in which we are all of us playing a waiting game. As a friend of my dad’s, whose husband is himself in hospice , wrote: We are all of us here together waiting in the anteroom to eternity.

I’m in the hospital with him tonight. It’s a shiny, new facility with enormous televisions and the super bowl is on, my dad’s mouth is ajar, and he’s breathing consistently. Sometimes he swallows; his Adam’s apple bobs in a pronounced fashion. Sometimes there are seemingly endless pauses between inhalations and I worrr: is that it, then?

Thirteen years ago, we watched the Super Bowl together then, too, when Isaiah was a newborn and we’d gone to Connecticut to stay with my dad, by then retired, in my parents’ house in the southern Berkshires. My dad picked us up in Brooklyn. Door to dooer service. We stopped on the way at the Greek diner that’s long gone and sat from the Red Rooster in Brewster. I nursed Isaiah at the table, but what turned out to be superficial yeast infection on the nipple made the going so painful, my only recourse was to clench my jaw and wince when I wasn’t busy spewing out the most abject of curses and profanity.

My dad took care of us there for several months—through the deepest part of winter until the first signs of spring mercifully emerged. My mom wasn’t yet retired and she’d come home from Manhattan on weekends to find us three in respective roles—new mother, new child, and care-taker to both. My dad would make us fish for dinner—a self-proclaimed “chef du poisson”—and we’d take walks in the afternoon, Isaiah in a snuggly on my chest. Our footsteps would crunch on the snow and we’d hear the sorrowful moans of ice cracking and creaking under the lake’s thick frozen surface.

It came up recently—this memory—in speaking with my father about antisemitism and whether it’s actually on the rise and how much we—as individuals—have experienced it firsthand. He had no recollection of the incident. I did. I can still see it. Spray painted in red. Memory can be faulty, though, maybe it wasn’t red. Maybe it wasn’t the side of the house—the one facing away from Waltham, where my dad taught at a university.

I bring it up now not because of antisemitism. Or anti-Semitism. Or maybe anti-semitism.

Last night Isaiah and I had a great, long laugh about self-regard, mostly, though he probably wouldn’t identify it as such. It was, on the surface, about popularity, about being popular or not, and the trappings of such. I made the potential mistake at one point in the past year of telling him one facet of the first part of first year in high school, which is: that I ate lunch by myself in the hallway outside of my English classroom.

My high school was pretty big—about 600 in a grade. Kids mostly came to it from a handful of junior highs sprinkled around our mostly affluent or middle-class suburb (read: white) Boston suburb. This was Newton North (not South, please).

I’d gone in seventh grade to the “roughest” of those junior highs: F.A. Day, down near Albermarle, where we’d sled in the the winter, not far from “da lake” which people not from there pronounced that way mockingly, deriding the Italian working class who mostly populated the neighborhood of Nonantum where there used to be, in fact, a lake. Perhaps there still is. I haven’t been to Newton in at least a decade and then it was just a pass-through since my family left for good in the early 1990s when my dad took a job at NYU.

I was new at Day in 7^th grade, having switched from a private school but I made my way, made some friends, ran home in fear at least once when someone spat at me at the exit mostly, as I took it then, because I was smaller and smart and there was probably a perceptible class difference and class differences are feeding grounds for resentment.

In eighth grade, though, I was away the whole year with my family. We lived abroad—in Jerusalem—during my father’s sabbatical and we went to public school there and immersed ourselves in a life as far away from F.A. Day as seemed possible. As any middle or junior high school graduate will recall, those years can be stormy. Friendships shift. Kids try out different hair styles, shoes, personalities.

Ninth grade presents still more rupture—plus an influx of cliques and prejudices from other schools, a big churn of often cruel, adolescent humanity. I felt lonely; the cafeteria at Newton North (I’m not speaking of its current enormous campus, but the one that was torn down because of asbestos some years ago) was huge and loud and where was I to sit? It’s like every John Hughes movie you ever saw, but rougher, and noisier, and scarier.

So, I sat against the wall in a carpeted hallway eating my meal, waiting for lunch period to end and for structure to resume. I told Isaiah about eating alone in the hall. I could see he felt sadness but could barely identify with that long ago plight. He might’ve felt I was a little pathetic, maybe a loser.

Not popular. The anecdote was like a scarlet letter, damning me.

Don’t worry. The high school weren’t forever. I made friends. I have friends. Lots of them.

But now I wonder if and when I should share what else happened in high school: not that time I got so drunk on peach schnapps and beer at Thea Brandfon’s house that I vomited in our driveway once I got home. But that thing with the boys later in ninth grade. Timmy B, Richie, Timmy K, and Danny.

Danny was my friend, a least for a while. I think he had braces, a nasal voice—probably got allergy shots or had an adenoid issue like that kid in the first Freaky Friday. He had stiff kind of lope. I’d go over to his house and we’d watch MTV back when it was a novelty and having cable was a mark of the high life. He lived “on the hill”—West Newton Hill—dotted with mansions built at the turn of the century for doctors, I imagine, who wanted to be further out than Jamaica Plain or Brookline.

None of this is fact-checked. It’s all recollection.

I didn’t hang out with those boys en masse. Just with Danny one on one. We didn’t fool around, I don’t think I had a crush. But the boys as were a posse. Maybe the boys disliked Danny’s friendship with me f. Maybe it was Danny’s idea to turn—maybe he didn’t like the friendship or what having a friendship with me might do to his street cred.

In 10^th grade things had changed. Danny and I didn’t hang anymore. He and his crew mbarked on an incessant campaign of harassment against me. I don’t remember verbal insulst, except when a pal of theirs—Orlando—called me grungy. They didn’t touch or grope. It was psychological warfare. Constant prank calls to the point that I dreaded the sound of the telephone ring. Incessant. Our house got egged and minutes later I saw Richie walking down our block, his gazelle like form skulking as if gazelles are able to subvert their own gracefulness. I’d tense up passing these boys in the hallways, where they sat like kings on the library steps, watching comings and goings on the school’s central corridor, Main Street. I remember their stupid baggy khakis and stupid feathered hair dos and Timmy B’s freckles, and Timmy K’s blue eyes and blond curls. He probably looked like a genuine cherub as a baby. I remember feeling watched and laughed at. I remember the swastika.

Do I tell Isaiah about this bullying I endured? Will it cause him to pity me? Does the sharing of this story infect your view of me? I’m a pariah now? I don’t want his pity. I don’t need it. I’m well-adjusted. For a long time I never told anyone about this incident because I genuinely worried they’d see me differently. A victim. A loser. Weak. Lame. Grungy. The emotional scars—well, they remain don’t they, that’s the nature of a scar. We all have them from this or that ding. I want to tell Isaiah about it because I want him to be compassionate. To not think that popularity is in and of itself any kind of goal—the goal is to be kind. And compassionate. And full of humor. And popularity should follow therein, shouldn’t it?

(I may be idealistic.)

Our laugh last night was at the expense of my ideas of popularity versus his. Reading? Art classes? Piano lessons? The extracurriculars that took up my high school years—he cannot fathom they could go into the makings of a popular person.

Some years ago, I approached a producer I know at This American Life about this story. He never replied. In some ways, I want still to revisit these events with those boys. (That is, if you’re a producer out there and you’re reading this, hmu.)

The harassment altogether stopped by the end of 10^th grade. By then anyway I’d made good friends many of whom are still friends. I joined the staff of the literary magazine “ThoughtPrints,” and I request please hold your laughter at the oh-so-earnest pretentiousness of its name. I wrote occasionally for the school paper. I played piano. I had fun. I graduated and went to college and made more friends, and I went to the 10^th year high school reunion—the only one I’ve ever been to because they’re always at Thanksgiving which may make sense when you’re just a few years out of high school but 25, 35, 40 years on—the idea that you’re still going “home” for Thanksgiving seems a little unrealistic for so many.

Danny was there. He gave me a big hello. I asked him what all that bullying was about. Water under the bridge or bygones be sleeping dogs, he replied, and they didn’t mean anything by any of it and were just having fun and let’s forget about it. Even the swastika. I don’t remember if I even mentioned that part, in all honestly.

Danny, by the way, was the only Jew among that crew. He offered a hug; I accepted it, which I later regretted, having seen my participation in the embrace as my gesture of forgiveness, of willing forgetting. Complicity in the history of my own small teenage torture.

Kids can be mean, so lacking in understanding of the short- and long-term impacts of their malice. Not just kids, of course. Before all of this bullshit happened in high school I asked Timmy K one day in science a question I’ve never forgotten. I didn’t mean it to be cruel or mocking. See, to my eyes then his face seemed odd—his own eye sockets somehow not properly fitted into his skull. I asked if he was born like that. What was I asking: do you have a defect? Are you defective? I didn’t know then exactly how hurtful some questions can be.

Does Timmy remember that exchange, I wonder? I looked him up once—he lives in Boston, a realtor now. I did not reach out.

• Please forgive the resend—it came to my attention that this letter was loaded with typos. So I proofread and tweaked for posterity.

No cap.

(My car—dug out—after shoveling for an hour and a half during which I sweated out half my body weight and developed carpal tunnel.)

My upstairs neighbor told me ICE agents had cleared out the stores on Liberty Avenue—the venues are open but nobody there to work. He said they were brutal about it. We shuffled our feet in the basement as we spoke to rid our shoes of the salt and snow. How terrible, awful I said, and then thought, on the way up in the elevator, how surreal to be having this conversation about our new reality here at home where masked people now approach with billy clubs and pepper spray and guns in the name of ridding our communities of foreigners or anyone who causes them offense—real or imaginary.

On Friday I finally got myself to a march—anti-ICE—that wound from Union Square past Target, Home Depot, and other venues. It was cheering to be amongst like-minded people (thanks JS for keeping me in the loop)—individuals driven by compassion and a sense of responsibility to one another, to our shared humanity. That’s far more important, in my view, than what your “papers” say about you—that you’re from hither or yon, that you were born with brown eyes or green. That your people came in through Angel Island or Ellis or across the Rio Grande more recently.

The next morning Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents. What more can be said? Nothing too much from me that’ll matter. Preaching to the choir over here. Someone posted something about--Mr Rogers said to look for the helpers, but what if the helpers get killed for so doing?

When’s the goddamned general strike, already? And more than you or me or any other self-regarding substacker, can we get the truck drivers to take part? And the grocery store clerks? And the TSA agents? And the cabbies? And the plumbers and electricians and mechanics and everyone who makes the ships run on time?

I’m rewatching the Wire right now. Apropos of mostly nothing except the ships and the docks, and doesn’t Ziggy seem like the model for Roman on Succession—that kind of skinny, charismatic mania?

The Times has a new game called Crossplay but you’ll recognize it as inflation-era Scrabble, cause some traditional one-letter words in this version are worth two points. So far I’m undefeated against the computer on level “Hard.” Come at the queen, you best not miss.

There’s a vigil for Alex Pretti this week—on Thursday—at the VA hospital in Manhattan. See you there?

What happens, though, when you’re awake behind the wheel and make a decision that’s so bad you begin to question whether you’ve lost all sense of reason? A move so questionable you wonder if you’re in a REM state after all. Hands on the wheel, you marvel that choices you made of your own volition have yielded a reality suffused with that specific towering, over-powering sense of the absurd and reckless that your nightmares have made all too familiar.

I finally dug into a book that’s been on my bedside table for months. It’s Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, recommended by my brother. In some ways it reminds of John Haskell’s The Complete Ballet, which I adore, though Labatut’s meditations and digressions revolve around scientists and mathematicians. There are times in the prose that I get lost—I don’t understand all the science, but I get the jist—alternative takes on relativity, the heart of the heart, and other ways of thinking about points on an axis.

On the subway yesterday I was reading the section on Karl Schwarzschild and the singularity. I can’t tell you what that is; don’t ask. I can tell you what I took from it, though; the porousness of time and space, folding in on themselves into some kind of origami present tense. All is not what it seems and when we understand that in some profoundly internal and essential way, we combust or go blind, possibly crazy.

In the car last evening I was stop and starting down Atlantic Avenue, driving Isaiah to an indoor soccer field in East New York for practice. The slow shuffle was maddening and I took a right at some point—was it on Alabama Avenue?—to find a parallel road to take me to Pitkin. But next intersection I reached was right only and to my left stood a huge public housing development. We were suddenly facking backward, in the direction of home. A few vehicles before me on the one-way was a huge truck with flashing lights. It seemed immobilized.

A car before me took a left to drive through the development on those extra wide sidewalks where security cars tend to idle to keep the peace or scare people straight. On a whim I decided to do the same lest the truck block the roadway for much longer. I drove through the complex and then veered right to try to get back on the road ahead of the truck but a fire hydrant stopped me from exiting this maze. I reversed and found another possible outlet but was stymied by a car parked on the road. Isaiah was aghast, maybe disgusted by my poor judgement. I crept forward on the sidewalk. He worried I’d be arrested. The idea occurred to me: this exact carelessness drives my imagination at night. Was I asleep?

I reversed course and looked for another egress. Thought I’d found one but it was too narrow for me to squeeze through. Reversed again, drove south, exited—finally—the complex. I recognized my colossal mistake. I admitted it to Isaiah. I apologized for my epic foolishness. I learned from my learned. Patience, next time. Calmness. Reason.

A day later I’m still agog at my behavior. Still embarrassed—almost enough that I’ve debated whether to admit this all in a letter. Did space and time collapse in on themselves in those moments? Was I dreaming? Did it happen? Earlier in the day on the subway platform in the morning, terror gripped me—and everyone—when scores (30? 50?) people at Jay Street suddenly ran through the station and up the stairs. Was there a gunman? A knife? I started to run and stopped—I’d be a target on the stairs, my back exposed to fire. Should I hide myself behind a pillar, chance the future that waiting prey could evade death?

The F train came and I jumped on, praying for swift departure?

Later I read on Reddit that there may have been a gun or perhaps it was a set fire? It takes a single person to ignite a hysterical stampede. On Christmas eve we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with Jess and Esti and it was the most crowded I’d ever seen it. A bottleneck stopped us where the foot traffic spills out at City Hall and we all inched forward. I could feel the breath of strangers on my neck. Their long hair grazing my shoulders. What if someone panicked and tried to run? What if someone pulled out a gun? Why do we live in a time and place where these thoughts prevail?

This morning, just now, I was a Martin Luther King Jr commemoration at Isaiah’s school. The fourth graders presented a recitation of “I Have a Dream,” and my eyes filled with tears not at their innocence but at the irony given where we are right now in history, our military on the edge of war in our cities. People with browner skin than mine being stopped and detained for having browner skin than mine.

The memorial ended with a screening of the Morehouse chorus singing “We Shall Overcome,” a hopeful idea if there ever was one and I thought of the Israeli national anthem, “Ha-tikvah,” the Hope, and how much these songs have in common. A hope for redemption. A hope for a sense of home and safety. Universal and sacred yearnings.

If only applying were enough.

I sent in two applications today! Yay me!! I’m still floating on that achievement high, imagining all the presents I’ll buy myself as a reward for scoring that big paid gig!! The shoes! The earrings! The mortgage!

But truly they’re both jobs I’d like. In fact, every job I’ve applied for since the Big L (not that one) has been one I’d like. That’s hope-making, until I consider how many thousands of other people have felt the exact same thing about the exact same possibilities. I must shut those others out and let myself dwell here in my bubble on the cusp of what-if.

Today’s my dad’s birthday. He’s 91. Ninety-one!!

I watched some of the videos coming out of Minneapolis last night—it seems so far away but at the same time when will I see ICE detaining, attacking, shooting, arresting in these Brooklyn streets. The people who tell ICE to fuck off—will I have that bravado? It’s sickening what’s going down. You don’t come to my letter, though, for statements of the obvious regarding current politics. Still, how are we to go about life knowing about all these injustices and aggressions?

When Trump told Times reporters he’s guided by his “own morality” I did a spit-take. The morality where you grab ‘em by the pussy and attack women in department store dressing rooms? Or the morality where you fail to pay contractors? Or the morality where you publicly mock people who are disabled or who ask you questions you don’t like?

Morality. Ha. As if.

The maintenance charge in my building is going up this year by nearly 10 percent. That’s a lot of cabbage. The WhatsApp lit up with the news—how could the management company do this? A former board member, I weighed in to explain—not the management company’s decisions. It’s the board of directors and everything’s going up, as the announcement explained, and we have too little reserves. Someone suggested had the flip tax measure passed, perhaps we’d not now face this hike. Someone else revealed herself to not really understand what a flip tax is or how it works.

I wanted to say: If you don’t like the board’s decisions, perhaps join the board so you can steer them in different directions. Do people not understand the concept of a cooperative? Whether in apartment form or supermarket or body politic? If you stay quiet, you might wind up with decisions that hurt you either near or long term. Sometimes both. Take part!

Oh! By chance I rented Three Days of the Condor last week. Goodness! No question that Redford’s hair is the 9^th wonder of the world. But also: the oil!! It’s all always about the oil!! That’s the spoiler in the movie (sorry but still worth your watching) and IRL, as this Venezuela biz has demonstrated.

I’ve been thinking about Isaiah’s cinematic education and how weak it is. He’s not seen the Wizard of Oz or the Wiz. He’s not seen Singin’ in the Rain (how is that possible—I love that move) or the Bad News Bears (first version, svp), or the Sound of Music or Good Will Hunting or Freaky Friday or so many other classic. I’m derelict but these are movies I want him to see on a big screen. What to do?

Over winter break, we learned to play Texas Hold ‘Em at the home of our friends and now I want to play again. I need a poker night. Who wants to start a poker night with me?

Make it a fifty cent buy-in for a mope like me.

Every time I think about composing a dispatch distraction steps in. Suzi. Laundry. TV. I started this particular letter a week or so ago and lost momentum; then I lost my draft. Begin again.

And so we are. Tomorrow. January 1. What a year this past has been—so much anticipation and preparation for Isaiah’s bar mitzvah. He started preparing in March. Getting him to practice was a chore. Lots of prodding. Lots of anxiety. A week or so before the big day, two weeks ago, his tutor called me to express her worry he’d not be ready. A week before the big day I drove to Greenpoint to pick heaps of smoked fish (sable! trout! ahi tuna! pastrami lox!). I ordered 400 latkes. Two hundred sufganiyot. Fourteen dozen bagels. Two days before I went to Astoria to get sheet cakes from Costco. It all came together. Baklava and tahini cookies and fruit.

(Isaiah at his bar mitzvah two weeks ago.)

We both had insomnia the night before’ on game day Isaiah was a champ—he chanted his haftorah (Zechariah 2); and delivered remarks with panache. He was suited up, wore my grandfather’s watch, my mother’s tallit. It was lovely—friends and family coming together in celebration. Lots of love and support and kindness and joy.

My dad was there—thanks to Rebecca and Cliff; my mom Zoomed in. It was a special day. Is there a way to say that that properly conveys the sentiment? That makes you feel how wonderful it was?

It is odd how much we look forward and prepare for something and then we’re plunged into the dizzying whirlpool of time known as the run-up to the event and there are odds and ends and waiting and the countdown and then the moment arrives and then the moment passes and the event is completed. This past year the fall season loomed with its momentous hurdles: high school and bar mitzvah and day by day, hour by hour, week by week, the seconds ticked off until completion. And it was all fine.

These past two days we’ve been at the home of friends in Southhampton and I’ve gone running twice and the wind—yesterday, anyway—was blistering and the bay had whitecaps. Today less windy, equally stark. That winter landscape a gorgeous, kaleidescopic drama.

The unboxing of the container of job-search-related panic takes place on Monday. I’m good at compartmentalizing. Know your strengths, job seeker!

Contemplating taking Isaiah to Mardi Gras this year (Justin!! Is there room at the Inn?) It falls over February vacation, a hop/skip to summer, and high school. How is my child a teenager now? Perusing AirBNB for Cape Breton and Bay of Fundy tiny houses where Jess and I may venture while our kids are at camp this summer. Fantasizing about going to Zion and Arches if the rumors of a soccer tourney in Utah turn out to be truth.

I didn’t make my 1000 miles of running goal for 2025 on account of I got sick a week before the bar mitzvah and had a wheeze which kept me up at night—not so much that there was difficulty breathing, but that at the end of exhalation I heard a tiny creak, like a ghost treading on a floorboard in a centuries old house on a back road in Maine in the darkest nights of winter. A shadow of a creak coming from deep within my lungs as if they a thousand miles away. So, my doctor advised me not to overdo it for a week or so and then my family was in town and then it snowed and then the snow froze and at my age I don’t want to slip and break my back or my leg. I think in the end I’m about 40 miles short of a thousand, but that’s still at least 200 miles more than I did in 2024, and there’s always next year. And as I said in my bar mitzvah remarks, the journey is the destination, which I did not steal from Hallmark.

But I do have goals for this year—not just running ones, but ones to do with reading more, too. And volunteering some. And spending less. And being on screen less—unless I’m making a video for Insta cause I’m an influencer now, my babies! Maybe taking a ceramics class or improv. More ice skating!! More yogurt making!! Knitting some sweaters or scarves or hats for various people in my life! Cleaning out my closets and drawers of all the extra books marks and paper clips and note pads I’ve collected along the way. And detailing my car—finally, years after I first meant to—so that it’s not filled with sand from that trip to the Rockaways three years ago and receipts from that Mobile station in New Hampshire (figuratively speaking, that is).

(Me at my bat mitzvah years ago.)

Maybe this will be the year I get serious about writing a book. Or getting braces. Or both. I hope to see you in the new year and I wish you and me and (mostly) all of us everywhere love and peace and heaps of joy.

Avraham was mean, a little snide. I have a clear image of him in my head leaning back on the two back legs of his chair at the front of the class, his feet crossed up the desk, his hand holding small pieces of chalk. He threw them at students who displeased him. I can’t remember any of the reasons why. Did they fail to do their homework? Were they speaking out of turn? Passing notes? Did their very existence just irk him? His “throw” was hardly an innocuous toss. He fired the chalk so hard at his young targets, it hurt and left a mark.

There were days I’d develop a stomach ache in school in anticipation of Avraham’s class. I’d head to the nurse’s office with my lament and wait out the period there, safe. A passed a year of opportunely timed tummy aches.

I didn’t dislike Avraham, though, in spite of the venom. He was, in fact, the person I went to when I had a night-mare so vivid I can still recall it frame for frame. It included a scene in which I was embodied kind of spectral presence, made obvious by the fact that I could see my own faint reflection—or that of my floral nightgown—in the very air before me in that small room where Jonathan slept. Bea Arthur was in the dream, too—standing formidably at the top of the stair case and hurling balls of fire down toward my person. And then there my father, dressed in a dark robe and a kind of red fez, walking solemnly, head bowed, toward the kitchen in line with other would-be monks.

I can’t remember what Avraham said to allay my anxiety about that dream. I just remember that it had thoroughly frightened me and made me suspicious of my dad.

This morning Isaiah pled sick. He said his head ached and was burning. I took his temperature. Normal. I gave him Tylenol. I told him he had to go in at some point. He slept. He said the Tylenol wasn’t working. Early morning turned late and then morphed into afternoon. He’s still in pajamas. He’s napping now. It’ll be dinner time soon. He wrote his teachers. He said, earlier, that I never believe him when he says he doesn’t feel well. He’s right. I don’t. I need proof.

“I can’t believe I have to go to that hell hole,” he texted on his way to school yesterday. Hell hole. As if it’s not the most coddling, supportive environment—almost cocoon like. I get it, though. He’s ready for a break—both a vacation and a change of context, which is serendipitous because high school application season is ending and before too long he’ll start anew elsewhere. We submitted our list of preferences yesterday.

In my late 20s, I lived in the Boston area and through friends met a couple who—for some kind of schadenfreude amusement—headed to a shopping center in Kenmore Square on the late afternoon of Christmas Eve every year. Watching people panic, and sweat, and run around getting last minute gifts was a form of entertainment for them.

I’ve been going on the Facebook group about applying to high school in New York City, reading the last-minute questions and terrors about audition upload problems and commute times and AP offerings. It’s not entertaining, but I can’t seem to look away.

How will I pass the time in the next chapter? Right before I gave birth to Isaiah I had this fear—I’d gotten into a routine, I was used to things as they were, and now the status quo would be subverted. How does one acclimate to the new state of play? And, more importantly, how does one know that such ruptures are part of a larger routine and it all gets smoothed out one way or another.

Change is scary.

I’m ready for December to be done even while there’s so much still that I need to take care of related to Isaiah’s bar mitzvah. I can’t even speak out loud what’s on the to do list, nor can I whisper it in the softest of voices. If I keep it inside, will the sense of onus disappear?

In the meantime, I’ve applied for jobs—even ones that I’d love to take on! That’s encouraging. And I’m just over 90 miles away from my 1000 miles in 2025 running goal. I’ve yet to read a single book since January 1, but there’s a limit to my powers.

The intermittent moan of a fog horn is coming in through the walls. Somebody’s cockeyed idea of white noise.

What a time to be alive! The weather this autumn is staggering—each day clearer than the next, and the air is crisp. Everything crackles. The colors mezmerize and it seems the wind’s forever picking up. For years now my eyes start to water outside when it’s dry and cold, indicating to passersby that I’m sorrow-filled, silently weeping as I amble.

There’s what to cry over.

Isaiah’s class is reading Lord of the Flies, which he read on his own over the summer, and for a hot second yesterday I thought—maybe Trump called the reporter Piggy as homage. Ha ha. Ha. Of course he didn’t. What a colossal prick. There’s definitely a Lord of the Files pun to be made but I’m too lazy to finesse it.

High school applications are due in two weeks. It can’t come soon enough. My doubts grow daily about what decisions we’ve made. What we’ve decided against. Is it too late to make him audition for Laguardia (yes, and what would he audition for anyway)? Why didn’t I force him to sit for the ShSAT and try to go to Tech or Lehman? Is his future thusly foretold? Does it matter if a school offers just three AP courses or 23? Will he take any either way? He sits for the Beacon essay this weekend; this evening I plan to run a little exercise where we both take a half hour and respond to the same essay prompt. When we’re done, we’ll review our respective approaches.

When I was in 7th grade at F.A. Day Junior High School (W Newton represent!), Ms. O’Malley, my English teacher, marked up an essay of mine, but in made some kind of mistake in her remarks. I don’t remember if it was a grammar error or a syntactical one. My father was aghast. I’m fairly sure he contacted Ms. O’Malley to inform her of her misstep; somewhere in a mess of memorabilia I have the essay.

Some weeks back, Isaiah asked me to look at a piece of his writing; he wanted editorial suggestions. I pointed out that repeating the same adjectives makes the text boring for the reader (and, frankly, very often for the writer), and I suggested a substitute. He got the jist of my point, but said the alternative I’d chosen is not one an 8th grader would ever use. Fair enough.

How do we impart to kids how to write good well?

Pardon the following digression. As I think I’ve mentioned, I was in the final stages of producing a podcast series with my coworkers at JSTOR Daily and with Julie, my friend and sometimes colleague when we were shown the “door” some weeks back. Nevertheless and happily, the podcast—Perspectives on Public Space—is coming out bit by bit. So far, two episodes have been released; the first a conversation with Setha Low, an anthropologist, who speaks to the general idea of public space and threats to it. The second features a conversation with John Leshy, an environmentalist, writer and former undersecretary in the department of the interior in the Clinton era. He speaks about public lands in the United States. To be clear, when I say conversation—I mean I interviewed them both. It was a lot of fun and I learned so much. I hope you’ll take the time to listen to both episodes and share them with others. I’m proud of this work and want it to get exposure.

Okay, back to it.

Part of what induces panic around the high school application process is the ambient anxiety. Just the by-the-by chatter; and the insufferable Facebook group which ultimately is un-representative of the general student body and only occasionally has useful information. I get it—your child’s brilliant beyond all measure. Their kindness is exceeded only by their empathy. Their intellectual curiosity is measured in leagues known only to members of Mensa. Their innate sensitivity is an unrequited gift to all whom they encounter. How hard it is to be a butterfly.

I’m kidding, of course, we’re all right now in the SS What Does the Future Hold. I know it’ll turn out fine how way it does, but the waiting, as Monsieur Petty once advised, is the hardest part.

Isaiah turned 13 last weekend and rearranged his room. It looks much better, frankly, and I appreciate his initiative, if not his taste in decor (nothing unseemly, but he does want all the art I’ve put in there to come out). For breakfast that day I got him two doughnuts from the most excellent Fan Fan.

Meantime I’m passing most of the time these days looking at job openings (I’ve applied for some!), fretting over bar mitzvah menus, sighing in disgust at the grime in the tub and then at myself for failing to clean it, making Insta reels and videos (I’m wildly entertained by it and that’s what matters), and running like I’ve got more legs than two. As of today, I’m 136 miles shy of the 1000 I’ve pledged to cover by the end of this year. And today I found out I got into the NYC Half marathon in March, which happens to be my favorite race in the whole entire city, starting out in Brooklyn, winding over the Manhattan Bridge, up the FDR and ending up in Central Park.

March is next year—that is, at least two blinks away.

It feels crushing when your child’s spirit’s crushed. How to buoy them?

Is it more important for the institution to succeed than to worry about the welfare of the individuals who make it up?

That question obtains all over the goddamned place.

Last Monday I was laid off. I didn’t see it coming. I don’t know if the 46 other employees who were likewise ushered out did either. For the good of the company, we were told, for its longevity and success our summary exit was necessary.

Hashtag teamwork. Hashtag speed. Hashtag trust. Hashtag horseshit.

I’ve updated my resume. I’ve started looking for new jobs (do send any and all opps my way please thank you). But I’m also juggling so many other things—high school applications, bar mitzvah prep, household responsibilities. Same old unaccountably boring number.

Panic will set in, I’m sure. Maybe the other responsibilities are a good distraction.

Yesterday I went to see my parents and took one of my nephews with me. My dad told stories of his mother’s family and I recorded it. The Tales of of Muni and Minnie and Molly. The immigrant ladies of Kings Highway (well, not Minnie—she apparently resided in Riverside Heights and had snobbish airs of Russian intelligentsia).

For his part, he said he’d had a pretty good life and doesn’t want to be a glutton. Time to go, more or less

.

As for my mother, well, it’s like she’s having a conversation inside her head and every now and again a string of words—a fragment of a sentence—gets articulated out loud, like a cloud that swiftly blows in and then just as fast falls apart.

When I ask for clarification about the rest of the idea, she waves me off. She can’t remember. Or she doesn’t know how to answer. She said I have a beautiful face. That was nice. I said the same back to her and she laughed me off. She said her piano teacher was attentive and kind. She said it while pointing at a large framed print of a tapestry from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as if the image held a clue or key for more information. Maybe the link was simply geographic. The piano teacher was based in Peabody, north of Boston, a mere 70 or 80 years ago, when my mother was a child growing up on Lowell Street.

I asked what her grandfather’s work was, since I’d forgotten, and she replied, “he was a ‘shneider.’” I asked what that is, and she couldn’t say. I’ve since looked it up: Yiddish for tailor. Of course. I knew that was his trade. When he moved to this country, after first stopping on the Lower East Side, he and his family moved to Cambridge, where he had a little place on or near Harvard Square, but then landsmen from Russia coaxed him farther north.

My mother told me not to ask so many questions; answering was taxing, so we listened in silence to Chopin. It’s funny she used that word—shneider, since the amount of Yiddish I heard growing up was close to none. Certainly she’d never used that term in front of me. My father sees her deterioration and tries to mediate. We all sat near her, moved our chairs in a cluster around the bed, and my father leaned over and stroked her hand, tried to give it a kiss. When we called Jessie and Esti on facetime, he took the phone and held it for her to seem smiling at us from California.