Throwing the book at Restoration Hardware

So we get a lot of junk mail. Fundraising letters, political letters, continuing solicitations to join the AARP beginning about five nanoseconds after I turned 50.

But this week we got junk mail to out-junk the worst of them — the Restoration Hardware catalogue.

“Catalogue” may not be exactly the best word for it. Doorstop? Deadweight? Anchor for a cruise ship?

The thing sat on our front stoop like a granite paving stone — 710 pages in the main catalogue, plus three smaller RH catalogues caught in its gravity like moons of Jupiter.

It’s thicker than the Oakland city phone book, which is only 333 pages. It’s even thicker than the June issues of Bride magazine, which until now I had naively assumed was the largest periodical publication known to mankind.

I weighed it on our bathroom scale and it clocks in at 5.5 pounds. That’s almost as much as Daughter weighed when she was born.

Think about how much paper went into our one catalogue, and then multiply that by the number of copies they must mail out — hundreds of thousands of copies, maybe millions, each one wrapped in a plastic bag.

How many trees died for this?  How much of that plastic will end up in the ocean killing fish?

And this is the age of the Internet! When people shop online!

Somehow RH figures that dropping this waste bomb on my doorstep will motivate me to drop money on things like a”reproduction of a 100-year-old Hungarian sleigh, crafted of solid elm with a tea-stained burlap cushion.” Or a “linen-bordered 650-gram Turkish towel.” Or a “1920s Odeon glass fringe chandelier.”

It actually has the opposite effect.

I’m so appalled at the waste and excess that I am vowing never again to set foot in a Restoration Hardware store.

There’s a letter at the start of the catalogue from the chairman and “curator” of the company, who says they have revised their vision statement. Their vision now is “to create an endless reflection of hope, inspiration and love that will ignite the human spirit and change the world.”

Okay, he’s ignited my spirit, I’ll grant him that.

But change the world? Maybe he means through deforestation?

So matzah matter with you?

Passover eve – can’t wait for matzah

Passover Day 1 – love that matzah

Passover Day 2 – like that matzah

Passover Day 3 – I am becoming a matzah

Passover Day 4 – do all the carpets in my house have dandruff?

Passover Day 5 – discover one thing worse than matzah, which is whole wheat matzah

Passover Day 6 – writing indie movie called Triscuit Dreams

Passover Day 7 – revelation while in hallucinogenic, yeast-deprived state that Pharoah actually invented matzah as ultimate revenge on the Israelites

Passover Day 8 – I think Passover is over in Israel already, can I have a turkey sandwich now?

Day after Passover – throw out multiple unopened boxes of matzah bought in bulk to save money

Week after Passover – mmm, you know what would taste good right now…

The world as a dinner party

We don’t throw formal dinner parties. It’s both generational and demographic; my husband and I came of age in the era of Laurel’s Kitchen potluck dinners filled with dreadful lentil-nut loaves.

We’ve moved beyond lentil-nut loaves, but we still tend to entertain in a casual way. Good wine, but no crystal glasses. Delicious food, but stainless-steel flatware rather than the sterling silverware that my mother had.

There’s one occasion a year that’s different, our Seder. White tablecloths, flowers on the table, and the silver wine goblets and serving platters that I inherited from my mother’s family. I always scramble to polish them at the last minute, since they haven’t been used since the previous Seder and have accumulated tarnish.

Our seder table / Photo by Ilana DeBare

We also make place cards for the guests. That was always Daughter’s job before she went to college, writing elaborate versions of their names with colored markers. My part of it was figuring out where to place the guests.

So Monday afternoon, I took a little break from the Passover cooking and table-setting to sit down with the list of 22 guests and figure out who was to sit where.

It’s a job that takes  consideration. You want to keep parents and children next to each other, but you also want the kids to be near another kid of their age. The strong singers shouldn’t be bunched up at one end of the table. The guests who don’t know anybody shouldn’t be stranded in Siberia at the far end of the room.

Mostly, I try to place people next to each other who will connect in some interesting way — the bass player and the soccer coach? the two Kaiser doctors? the 20-something surfer and the 50-something Qi Gong practitioner?

Getting ready for our Seder sometimes makes me feel like a Virginia Woolf character — Clarissa Dalloway or Mrs. Ramsay, preparing a social gathering with small deliberate steps that no one really notices, but that create order out of chaos.

Then yesterday I thought of myself as God.

Suppose the world is a large-scale version of a dinner party, and God makes the seating plan. God sits there with the guest list and table chart and thinks about whom we should meet on any given day.

Now, those of you who have read this blog for a while know that I don’t believe in God. Not a God who favors one sports team or army over another, or cures individuals of cancer, or decides who we will meet as we blunder along in the world.

So I’m talking hypothetically here.

But just imagine that some God has made a dinner-party-style seating chart for your life — has sat there, putting careful thought into why you should encounter certain people. The co-worker in the cubicle next to yours. The Starbucks barista who makes your morning coffee. The homeless guy who begs for money at the freeway off-ramp. 

Imagine that there is some reason you are meant to encounter these people — something you have in common, something you might enjoy together, or something you might learn from each other. There is a connection, a reason to get to know them, even if you don’t have a clue what it is.

And then relate to them like that.

Forget the God part. You can believe in God or not. The God bit is optional.

Just relate to them like that.

Searching for chametz

This is the time of the year, right before Passover, when observant Jews go through their kitchens and get rid of any foods with even a trace of chametz, or leavening.

We don’t do that. We keep kosher for Passover to the degree of not eating foods with leavening during the holiday, but we don’t go through the search-and-destroy mission. We just let those boxes of pasta and bags of flour rest quietly in the cupboard, backstage for a week.

This afternoon, though, I felt compelled to clean out our pantry.

It had reached the point of irritation: Whenever I looked for something, I had to pull four other boxes out of the way to see if it was even there. And I figured, now that we are empty nesters, there are probably a number of teenage foods that we really don’t need to stockpile any longer.

It was a little surprising.

I pulled everything out and found eleven — eleven! — cans of Trader Joe artichokes. Five cans of Amy’s Organic Lentil Soup that expired in 2011. Two jars of Ragu tomato sauce that expired in 2009. Four cans of “lite” and regular coconut milk  – although I have never in my life cooked anything with coconut milk. And so on.

I think there are a few things going on here:

• Groundhog Day in the Pantry. Your shelves are so crowded and jumbled that you don’t know what you have. So at the store, you see the cans of artichoke hearts and you think, “Hmm, I bet we need some artichoke hearts.” Then you add them to the jumble and don’t see them. So next week, you’re at the store and you see the cans of artichoke hearts and you think, “Hmmm, I bet we need some artichoke hearts….”
• The Cupboard of Good Intentions. The person I aspire to be when I am in Trader Joe’s is different from the person I actually am. In Trader Joe’s, I imagine myself as someone who makes dinners with coconut milk. Or corn-and-pepper relish. Or Mojo Cilantro Sauce. Or bean threads and pad thai and star anise. While in reality, when it’s 6 pm and I’m tired and hungry and want to get dinner on the table, I just hurl vegetables into a wok and dump on some soy sauce.
• Laziness.
• Inertia.
• Time. Or — like a Jackson Browne line that is in my head a lot — “be aware of the time going by, in the end it’s a wink of an eye.”

Here is the strangest thing I found in the cupboard:

The expiration date was 2008…. but gosh, no one had been eating strained apricots in this house since maybe 1995.

I happily got rid of a bunch of packs of revolting teen-beloved ramen. I got rid of all the expired organic lentil soup. I kept one can of lite coconut milk since, well, you never know. Change happens.

It’s shameful to look at our trash can, now filled with cans of uneaten food. But the food banks don’t want expired items. And I’m leery of eating stuff that expired two years ago.

Now what’s left is the dreaded Water Bottle Shelf. If  you go to enough charity fundraisers or bike marathons, you tend to accumulate water bottles.

But if wasted food is terrible, wasted plastic is probably just as bad. Maybe worse. Who knows, it may take even more natural resources to make a plastic water bottle than a can of organic lentils.

Perhaps the water bottles are my version of chametz — something that is not kosher, not in keeping with what God wants.

We shouldn’t just get rid of this batch of bottles; we should also stop accumulating more.

Kotel in the kitchen: a happy Internet story

Amidst all the spam, porn, stupid cat videos, and Facebook Scrabble addictions, every so often there is a happy Internet story. This is one of them.

When I was in Israel in late 2011 working on a book about the Technion, I took some tourist snapshots of close-ups of the Kotel, the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I liked the different textures of the stone, the irregularities amidst the rectangular blocks. I liked the visual parallels between the stones of the Kotel and the stone houses of Palestinian East Jerusalem. You might vaguely remember: I posted one of my Kotel snapshots here.

Then, about six months ago, I got a message out of the blue from some Israeli designer or design student who said he liked the photo, and could he use it?

Of course. I was delighted that someone had noticed my photo, and gratified that he had the courtesy to ask permission. I sent him my highest-res version, asked him to credit me in whatever project came out of this, and promptly forgot about it. I pictured some kind of  abstract collage or installation. Actually, I didn’t picture much of anything.

Then yesterday Sam told me there was a package on the porch. I opened it up and was amazed to see:

It’s my Kotel photo, turned into a magnetic metal note board! The kind of thing you’d hang in the kitchen and post notes like “buy milk.”

It’s ingenious and gorgeous. To my surprise, my snapshot blew up with good clarity. I also thought of a use going beyond household notes — a kind of personal prayer board. Like the real Kotel, you could post notes on it of your greatest yearnings. “Help me find a way to resolve this plot problem in my novel.” “Help Aunt Edith fight off her cancer.” “Give me the courage to change jobs.”

I don’t believe in a God who reads notes on a magnetic bulletin board any more than I do in a God who reads notes stuck in an ancient wall, but I do think it is a ritual that can focus the mind and bring peace, determination or clarity. Seriously. I am thinking of hanging it in my study as a tool to help myself solve fiction writing problems.

In any case, the designer, Shaul Mualem, has a Jerusalem studio called Yahli Design that specializes in products that “blend traditional Jewish elements with modern ones.” You can find his online store on Etsy, including the Kotel note board for $26.50.

I know some people might say, “Hey, he’s making money off of your photo! Why didn’t you ask for payment?” but I couldn’t care less about payment. I hope he sells a gazillion note boards. I’m just delighted with the whole episode: A photo I took for fun is discovered by someone on the other side of the world. He makes an ingenious and useful product out of it. Unlike the vast majority of Internet surfers, he even asks permission to use it and credits me for the photo! And then follows up with a thank-you gift that might help my own creative process.

Cool, eh?

And then there’s what Sam said when he saw the note board, referring to the continuing arrests of women who try to pray at the actual Kotel in Jerusalem:

At least they can’t stop you from praying at this one. 

An emerging feminist filmmaker (who happens to be my daughter)

Normally Daughter is not thrilled about being a subject of this blog. But for once she asked me to include something of hers!

During the fall, for one of her freshman film classes at NYU, she produced the following montage.

She has had almost 1,000 viewers on Vimeo without doing any promotion. She’d like more views! So… if you feel like it, please share this link on your Facebook page, or with friends who might be interested etc. The link is http://vimeo.com/54917152

I’m very proud of her. Not just the production quality, but the ideas. I’d say something about the feminist apple not falling far from the mother tree, but there is altogether too much fruit associated with this issue already. :-)

Hope in a cookbook

There is not a lot of hope floating around the world of Israeli-Palestinian relations these days. We’ve got Hamas still in charge in Gaza, as dead-set against coexistence with Israel as ever. We’ve got Netanyahu in charge in Israel, forming ever more hawkish coalitions and sticking his finger in the eye of a two-state solution by moving ahead with massive new settlements in and near East Jerusalem.

But here is hope… in a cookbook.

My daughter had a job providing holiday retail help this past week at Rockridge Home, a hip, friendly gift store in our neighborhood. Yesterday she pointed me to a cookbook they sell called Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is a beautifully-produced hardcover recipe book with gorgeous photos of food and people from Jerusalem. No big deal, right? There are lots of beautiful cookbooks around. But Jerusalem is co-written by an Israeli and a Palestinian — who are warmly willing to credit the cuisines and cultures of the many peoples living in that disputed city.

This is in distinct contrast to the more common approach, which is to fight over who invented hummus and falafel. Jews invented it! No, Arabs! No, Jews! As if it’s not enough to fight over land, water and sovereignty, people even have to fight over sandwich fixings.

In any case, co-authors Yotam Ottolenghi (Jewish from West Jerusalem) and Sami Tamimi (Palestinian from East Jerusalem) work together as chefs and restaurants owners in London. They’ve both lived abroad for longer than they lived in Jerusalem, which perhaps accounts for their ability to collaborate like this.

The book has plenty of wonderful-sounding recipes from Jerusalem. Stuffed artichokes with peas & dill. Stuffed eggplant with lamb & pine nuts. Butternut squash & tahini spread.  But more importantly, it acknowledges the central role that Jerusalem — its tastes, its smells — plays in the deepest hearts of both Jewish and Arab residents.

The flavors and smells of this city are our mother tongue. We imagine them and dream in them, even though we’ve adopted some new, perhaps more sophisticated languages. They define comfort for us, excitement, joy, serene bliss. Everything we taste and everything we cook is filtered through the prism of our childhood experiences; food our mothers fed us, wild herbs picked on school trips, days spent in markets, the smell of the dry soil on a summer’s day, goat and sheep roaming the hills, fresh pitas withy ground lamb, chopped parsley, chopped liver, black figs, smoky chops, syrupy cakes, crumbly cookies….

Jerusalem market, from Jerusalem: A Cookbook / photo by Adam Hinton

In a recipe for Roasted sweet potatoes and fresh figs, the authors describe how Sami as a boy used to sneak onto a neighbor’s roof and steal the sweet figs she was drying there. In a section on seafood, they describe ten-year-old Yotam’s first disgusted taste of gefilte fish — “sweet, gray and smeared with gelatinous gunk, it was perceived as a typical remnant of the old Ashkenazic world that was best left behind in eastern Europe.”

Hummus, from Jerusalem: A Cookbook / Photo by Jonathan Lovekin

This is a book that acknowledges and cherishes those childhood memories. It doesn’t ignore the political conflict. But it seeks common ground — even where Jewish and Arab foods may be different, their emotional resonance is shared.

Jerusalem-style bagels, from Jerusalem: A Cookbook / Photo by Adam Hinton

It also pays homage to cultural traditions in Jerusalem such as Russian, Greek, Armenian, Lithuanian, Bukharan, Yemeni and Ethiopian that are often overlooked in broad-brush discussions of Israeli versus Palestinian claims.

In this soup of a city it is completely impossible to find out who invented this delicacy and who brought that one with them. The food cultures are mashed and fused together in a way that is impossible to unravel. They interact all the time and influence one another  other constantly, so nothing is pure any more. In facet, nothing ever was. Jerusalem was never an isolated bastion. Over millennia it has seen countless immigrants, occupiers, visitors and merchants — all bringing foodsand recipes from the four corners of the earth.

So why does this mean hope to me?

Certainly there is the inspirational image of the Palestinian and Israeli chefs as partners, collaborators and friends.

But it is also their philosophical approach — acknowledge the “other,” acknowledge the other’s deep emotional connection to this place, and use that common connection to build a partnership.

(Rather than continually trying to trump the other: We came first. We’re more oppressed. We’re more righteous. You don’t really count. In fact, you don’t really exist.)

Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

This is what we will need in order to achieve a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians — enough people who accept the other’s deep ties to the land, who respect the other’s culture, who can perhaps even celebrate the commonalities.

Maybe it requires living in diaspora for this to happen, away from the daily body-blows of checkpoints and missile strikes, in a place with a melting-pot tradition like London or America, in a country where the damp, cold winters make a common longing for sunny olive-studded hillsides and fresh tomato-cucumber salads so much more apparent.

This is only a cookbook. And I haven’t even tried making any of the recipes yet.

But it’s also a tiny spark of hope.

Thank you Ten Speed Press/Random House for publishing this! At $35, it’s pretty pricey. But the production values are high, the pictures are beautiful, you can learn a lot about the cultures and foods of Jerusalem, and yes, your $35 buys you a little bit of hope.

—————

Click here to order Jerusalem from an independent bookstore. Or click here to order it (at a discount) from Barnes & Noble. 

Family traditions, my traditions?

What happens to family traditions when your family goes away?

Well, “family goes away” might be stating things a bit too strongly. But this is our first winter with our daughter away in college, and holidays feel different when there is no child in the house.

Even if for the past couple of years that “child” was a big, independent, less-than-optimally-communicative teenager.

Take Chanukah, which arrives this weekend with its usual single-candle blaze of glory. Normally we would make a Big Deal of the first night of Chanukah — festive dinner with relatives or friends, lots of presents, latkes, chocolate gelt, dreidels. Most years we would end up making latkes on two or three different evenings for different configurations of friends and guests. And we always made sure to buy at least eight gifts, and we had big gift-opening hoopla every night.

This year? I do not want to cook a single latke. I will be completely fine if I don’t eat a single latke. Okay, I’ll eat some when we get together with our chavurah in late December, but other than that…. meh.

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last / Photo by Ilana DeBare

I don’t want to open gifts every night either. I’d like to open gifts on the last night, when Daughter will be home for her winter vacation. But other than that, I don’t really care.

What I do want is to light the candles and say the blessings. Just a nice straightforward little candle-lighting at dinnertime with Sam. (Followed by watching some Jon Stewart re-runs?)

In one sense, this is completely reasonable. Chanukah is a minor holiday in Jewish tradition, which mushroomed out of its historic proportions in the past 50 years as American Jews tried to come up with a counterbalance to the glitter of Christmas. Lighting candles with a minimum of fuss is probably closer to the traditional Chanukah than what we’ve been doing in our household for the past 18 years.

But there are other times when the issue is murkier. Take Shabbat. When Daughter was home, we lit candles and said blessings on most Friday nights where we were all home together. This fall, when Sam and I have been home on a Friday, it’s felt slightly weird lighting candles with just the two of us.

Part of me felt, “Why are we going through the motions? It’s just the two of us.”

Which raised the question… were we just lighting candles to educate our child? or were we doing it for us also?

That question is more nuanced for me than it might be for some people because I was not raised with much Judaism at all. My family had a Passover seder and lit a menorah, but we never celebrated Shabbat or belonged to a synagogue. So the Jewish traditions I carry out are ones that I’ve consciously chosen as an adult, rather than ones I inhaled with my childhood air.

But back to that Shabbat moment of to-light-or-not-to-light….

I lit.

I skipped the white table cloth. But I lit the candles, even without Daughter.

And there are really two reasons for that. One is that as adults, we need to take care of ourselves — regardless of whether we have kids around or not. I don’t want to be someone who lives on TV Dinners because there are no children to cook for. I don’t want to be that old lady who lets the house go uncleaned and unrepaired because she’s the only one living there. We need to nourish ourselves as well as our children.

Shabbat is a kind of nourishment, like a home-cooked meal, an occasional massage,  a bouquet of flowers from the farmer’s market. And that brings me to the second reason — I do want to keep Shabbat as a part of my life. I care about it and believe in it. So I lit.

But clearly that’s not true for every Jewish tradition. Some are falling by the wayside.

Building a Sukkah? We did it for about ten years when Daughter was little. Now? Forget it!

Latkes? Can live without the oil, the mess and the calories.

Shabbat? Big Passover Seder? Chanukah candle-lighting? Those are keepers.

What about you? Any changes in your family rituals or traditions if you’ve had children leave home? And what does that say about your values and priorities? 

In Toledo, asleep in the room of the moneylenders

We took advantage of our empty nest status to take a week-long trip to Spain this month, the first time in almost 20 years that we could travel at a time when schools weren’t on vacation. In Toledo, we have been staying in a delightful small hotel called La Posada de Manolo that, for me, is as evocative and fascinating as any of the official sights in this historic medieval city.

The Sanchez Nunez family turned their 500-year-old home into a hotel that celebrates Toledo’s three religious heritages — Moorish (Muslim), Jewish and Christian. In a detailed and  incredibly thoughtful renovation in 2001, each of the three floors was decorated to honor one of those traditions.

Rooms were named after various medieval professions. Purely by happenstance, we ended up on the Jewish floor in a room that, instead of a number, is called Los Prestamistas — the Moneylenders. (Before your anti-Semitism antennae start vibrating furiously, let me add that that the other rooms on the Jewish floor are the Farmers, Doctors and Translators.)

Sam after a tough day of touring, in the Moneylenders room / Photo by Ilana DeBare

La Posada de Manolo is outfitted in my favorite style of European hotel — revealing and emphasizing the historic, artisanal “bones” of the building while providing modern comforts like wifi and a good mattress. The hallways show the heavy wooden ceiling beams; the rooms have thick, ornate wooden doors that close with iron latches. The head board and night tables in our room are heavy, rustic wood.

And the decor is geared to the room’s vocational theme — a wooden case on one wall holds brass scales that might have been used by money lenders, while another wall displays two medieval drawings of financial transactions. The Farmers room down the hall had a big rustic pitchfork mounted on its wall. A Moorish room named after Silversmiths had, of course, some silver cups and bowls on the wall.

It’s like sleeping in a museum!

Scales on the wall of our room / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Like the owners of La Posada de Manolo, the city of Toledo has made a concerted effort to recognize and celebrate its three heritages. Jews lived here for about 1,000 years until they were expelled in 1492; Muslims lived here for hundreds of years until they too were forced out with the Inquisition.

The government has renovated two synagogues, turning the stunning Sinagoga del Transito (built in the 1300s by Jews, with permission from the Christian rulers, and using Moorish craftsmen and design motifs) into a museum of Jewish life in Spain. The onetime Juderia or Jewish Quarter has tiny tiles embedded in the stone streets that say in Hebrew “Sepharad” (Spanish Jewry) and “Chai” (lives). Our timing wasn’t right to catch it, but the city sponsored seven encuentros with Jewish culture in 2012 — mini-festivals of food, music and film timed to holidays such as Sukkot and Chanukah.

Sinagoga de Transito, with Moorish-influenced windows and carved walls, facing east where the Ark of the Torah would have been / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Biblical text bordering the synagogue just below the roof / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Street with “chai” tile in the Jewish quarter of Toledo / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Every time Sam and I go to Europe, we seek out pieces of local Jewish history — the ghetto in Venice, the former Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, the old cemetery and synagogues in Prague. Honestly, it’s more interesting to me than cathedrals. (Although we visit those too of course.) There’s a personal connection, even if my ancestors lived nowhere near these cities. I think, “Huh, this is how I might have lived if I had been here in 1400.”

So it’s both gratifying and impressive to me how much Europe has, in the past fifty years, moved to celebrate its Jewish heritage. They slaughtered us, tortured us, burned us, forcibly converted us, expelled us, and as recently as the 1940s tried to industrially eradicate us from the planet. Many cities no longer have actual Jewish communities. Yet  in the space of one generation, Europeans have turned around, acknowledged their wrongs and put out a welcome mat to Jewish culture. (Sepherad chai!)

Of course one can quibble cynically with this. It’s easy to ask: Are North African immigrants or Roma minorities the modern substitute for Jews in European bigotry? Is anti-Zionist rhetoric the 21st century version of anti-Semitism? But consider countries like Iran and Iraq that expelled or persecuted Jews more recently than Europe. Wouldn’t it be great to have them acknowledge the historic contributions of their Jewish populations the way that Western Europe has? Wouldn’t it be great to see Sepharad Chai (or the Persian translation of that) in the sidewalks of Teheran?

So this is all really good. I love the renovated synagogues, the restored Jewish cemeteries, our little Jewish floor at La Posada de Manolo.

But it’s also unsettling. Visiting Europe, you’re confronted not just with 1,500 years worth of great art and architecture, but with 1,500 years of nearly-constant war. Spain fighting England, England fighting France, France fighting Spain, etc. The post-World War II Europe of cooperation, economic integration, social democracy and human rights is a brilliant development but a very recent, very young development.

View from our hotel window of the Toledo cathedral, built between 1226 and 1495 / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Meanwhile, we Jews have lived in the United States in significant numbers for only about 130 years — and we feel completely secure. Assimilated. Americanized. We worry about Israel, but about ourselves? Not really. We are U.S. senators, university professors, hedge fund managers, newspaper pundits, community organizers, Hollywood producers. We are the model of a successful minority.

And so were the Jews of Spain! They lived here for a thousand years! Samuel Levi, who built the Sinagoga del Transito and for whom a street is named in the Jewish Quarter, was treasurer to the king of Spain!

And then…. expulsion and Inquisition.

Photo by Ilana DeBare

I found myself thinking, as we meandered our merry touristic way with cameras and guidebooks in hand, of some lines in Gates of Repentance, the Reform prayerbook for Yom Kippur. This section of the afternoon service recounts the history of persecution of the Jews and concludes:

Look and remember. Look upon this land,

Far, far across the factories and the grass.

Surely there, surely, they will let you pass.

Speak then and ask the forest and the loam.

What do you hear? What does the land command?

The earth is taken; this is not your home.

 

Empty nest, two months in

After putting up with a year of my anticipatory angst, you might be wondering, How’s it going with that Empty Nest? 

And after about two months I can answer… really well!

Here are the visible changes in my life:

• Got rid of the station wagon and bought the Chevy Volt (which I love – but more on that in a future post).
• Started taking an intense 90-minute bike/row class at the gym at 6 a.m. three days a week.
• Cooking more “adult” foods — bok choy, kale, chard, cauliflower.

Stinson Beach – an empty nest weekend walk / Photo by Ilana DeBare

• More free time on weekends — autumn without kid soccer games! — for birding, hiking etc.
• Ability to take a vacation in the middle of the fall, not on school schedules.

The biggest change, though, is not a visible one. There’s an entire part of my brain that was tied down and now is suddenly free. It wasn’t taken up with major worries, just a constant drone of minor stuff — when will she be home from school, is she done with her homework, should she be going to bed, should she be waking up, what’s the status of the college applications, what are her plans for the weekend, etc.

It felt like a computer with a DOS program running steadily behind Windows — you don’t see it, you don’t hear it, but it ties things up and makes everything run a little more clunkily. For eighteen years. And now suddenly it’s gone! Wow!

(In other words, my brain went from PC to Mac?? Am I now insanely great?)

There have been other changes that are more nuanced. They have to do with relationships:

The Alice in Wonderland Marriage

My marriage seems more intense, as if it had inflated, Alice-in-Wonderland style, to fill a room.  I suddenly feel more dependent on Sam. We’ve gone from a household of three to a household of two.

Before, if he went out of town overnight for work, Daughter was still around — most likely busy, or staying out late, or closed up in her room video-chatting, but still around for a good-night hug or requesting a lift to BART. Now when he is gone, there is no one but me and the cat. It’s a little unsettling to feel this dependent on him.

The Assembly Line Has Shut Down

For the past 18 years, our marriage has been intertwined with a huge, all-consuming Project — raising a child. Even when we went out for dinner by ourselves, this was always there at the table with us. Now suddenly the Project is gone.

Returning to my computer analogies, imagine if the Apple workforce showed up one morning and were told they should keep on working, but they would no longer be manufacturing Macs or iPhones or iPads.

You look around and think, Um, now what are we supposed to be doing? Why are we all here? 

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

I’m newly conscious that I don’t have that many strong, current, one-to-one friendships. I have a zillion Facebook friends, including some very old, very dear friends from my teenage years with whom I have marvelously reconnected via the Internet. I have blog readers. I have co-workers. I have people I see at synagogue. But I don’t have as many nearby, frequent, get-together-and-laugh-until you-pee female friends as I had in my teens and 20s and early 30s.

Basically — confession time, a little post-Yom Kippur al cheit here —  I let my own friendships slide when I became a Parent. I wanted to spend my free non-work time with Daughter and Sam. And we were constantly socializing in child-centered formations — school potlucks, soccer weekends, dinners with parents of Daughters’ friends. There were lots of people with whom I spent lots of time, but never really developed a meaningful individual relationship. We related through our children. And now those children and those potlucks and soccer weekends are gone.

That just heightens the unsettling feeling of dependence on Sam. And you read those articles about aging and how people with close friendships stay healthier and live longer than those who are isolated. Aak! I don’t want to be an 80-year-old cat lady alone in her house.

So resolved: I will put effort into reviving and cultivating individual friendships.

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All told, I can understand how marriages fall apart when the children leave the house. (Even more, I suspect, when spouses retire and suddenly find themselves together at home all day.)

Now, Sam and I are not going to fall apart. (Don’t worry, Dad!!) But there is subtle recalibration that needs to happen — even with all the positive changes, the freedom, the opportunities, and the knowledge that Daughter is happy and healthy and doing what she needs to do.

I do need to add this as a postscript. The sense of freedom, of losing that DOS program of worry in the background of my brain, is only possible because Daughter is happy and doing well.

The empty nest would be a completely different experience if it were empty because a child had gone AWOL, or was floundering or making dangerous choices. That isn’t our situation… fortunately.