One of many beaches on Aruba that I’ve never seen. Photo credit: Vlad Man via Pixabay.

My senior year in high school, out of the blue, my parents planned a family trip to Aruba over spring break in April. This was unusual. We traditionally spent Christmas skiing in Colorado, but beach vacations were rare since Florida trips with my grandparents in early childhood. That was as close as I had ever been to the Caribbean. It sounded balmy and exotic and a welcome break from the Michigan winter.

Spring break on Aruba? Oh yeah! There was only one problem.

The only problem was, I couldn’t go.

I had signed up to be pianist for my high school musical, Bye Bye Birdie. It was the most ambitious production the drama department had ever attempted. To meet the challenge, the director scheduled rehearsals every day of spring break. As pianist, I was indispensible—and I had made a commitment. Regretfully, I had to stay behind.

My parents made arrangements for me to stay the week with my best friend Bud. There was nothing novel about this; I had slept over with him many times and felt like a member of the family. The only problem was, Bud’s family was hosting an exchange student that year, a boy named Kees from Holland, who occupied the spare bed in Bud’s room. No worries: I could bunk with Bud’s sister Ilene, two years younger.

If this sounds strange, it was. I’m not sure whether Bud’s parents trusted me to be a gentleman with their adolescent daughter, or they considered me a suitable mate and hoped we would perhaps become a bit more intimate. The fact was that I had grown up with Ilene and considered her more of a kid sister.

The week came, my parents and siblings took off for Aruba, and I moved down the street. Bud and Kees were also in the play, so we drove to rehearsals together. Far from being a burden, the week was actually fun. It felt like theater camp and, spending so much time together working on a passion project, the cast and crew became a close-knit community. With the intense rehearsals, the show was coming together nicely.

Besides, there was this girl.

Her name was Patti, she was a sophomore (Ilene’s classmate), and she was the choreographer. She was smart, confident, and pretty, with long straight hair parted down the middle. Her skirts were as short as the school allowed and she had the legs to match—a dancer’s body, lithe and graceful. She turned pages for me when she wasn’t working with the cast. Next to me on the piano bench, her presence was electric. During breaks, we talked and bantered.

Okay, we flirted. During one break, I came up behind her onstage and put my hands over her eyes. Instead of guessing who it was, or slipping out of my grasp, she fell back into my arms.

As intense and fun as the daylong rehearsals were, the evenings were dull. We had no homework and Bud and I had already been accepted to the colleges of our choice. I wanted to go out. I wanted to ask Patti out.

The only problem was, I already had a girlfriend. Wendy was a senior at a Detroit high school that wasn’t on break that week.

Wednesday afternoon, after rehearsals ended, I called Wendy. “Want to go to a movie tonight?” I asked casually. “I have to study,” she replied, as I knew she would. “That’s okay,” I said. “I might go anyway.”

I called Patti and invited her out. “I thought we might go see Bonnie & Clyde,” I said. She accepted without mentioning that she had already seen it.

I picked her up and drove into town to the theater. The date was so last-minute that we slipped into our seats a few minutes after the movie started. That was actually a relief to Patti because we missed Faye Dunaway’s brief nude scene.

Afterwards, I took her to HoJo’s for fried clams and a soda. Even in the harsh restaurant light, she glowed. We talked and talked. Finally I drove her home and kissed her goodnight on the front stoop.

I drove back to Bud’s in a daze, undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. “How was your date?” Ilene asked. “Good,” I said. “There might be more.” “I’ll have to get to know her better,” Ilene said.

A few days later, I called Wendy and broke up with her.

On Sunday my family returned from Aruba, tanned and rested, telling tales of beaches and snorkeling and exotic Caribbean food.

I didn’t care. I had the girl.

One day, we might even get to Aruba together.

The gumdrop tree came to our house unheralded,
And unpretentious.
It stood six inches tall.
Its silver-foil branches were covered with gumdrops.

But little hands lifted the top of the garbage pail, and discovered the resting place of the gumdrop tree.

We put it in a corner of the kitchen,
And its tiny, colored candies began looking more and more like blossoms.
Until one day, we decided to eat them….
The gumdrops on the gumdrop tree.

It was after dinner that night,
We placed the gumdrop tree in the center of the floor,
And sat in a circle around it.
And we told each other what had happened to us that day,
And we laughed.
Then we each had one gumdrop.

And each night,
Thereafter….
We would put the gumdrop tree in the center of the floor,
And sit around it….

We would sing songs, or tell stories, or just visit…
And it was warm,
And we were warm….
And one night we even danced around it,
Then we each ate one gumdrop.

The tree began losing its blossoms,
And some of the limbs were almost bare….
And silver.
Then, it seemed like we found more importance in each gumdrop.
We took more time to savor the chewy sweetness.

And then the night passed when we ate the last gumdrop off
the gumdrop tree.
And we clapped our hands for all the joy it had brought us.

And the gumdrop tree was discarded for we said we could
never replace the sweets we had taken from it….

But little hands lifted the top of the garbage pail,
and discovered the resting place of the gumdrop tree.
Gentle hands repaired the gumdrop tree….
With soothing fingers…
And scotch tape.

And it was then that the gumdrop tree was again placed in
the center of the hard linoleum floor,
And flat on their tummies,
Chins resting on hands and elbows,
The little faces stared at the gumdrop tree,
And remembered the colored drops…
And smiled….
About many things.

Now the simple wisdom of children often remind us of God’s Way,
It is always an unbelievable quality,
Yet quite proper, and in order.
For children are close to heaven.

And so it was with the gumdrop tree…..

For the silver branches of fleeting life are not shorn of the
pleasures that once grew there.
There is always the precious memory….
Of Youth,
Of Courage,
Of Love,
Of Deeds……
On each barren branch.

And for some of us,
There may still be the promise of the remaining gumdrops.
And the knowledge that we must taste each one succinctly,
As a bee sucks honey.

The gumdrop tree will stand in the center of our room when
we take the time to place it there……

Myron Unger, my father, died of cancer in 1960, when I was ten. Thirty years later I inherited a thick folio of his manuscripts, from which I’ve previously posted his poignant reflection on fatherhood, Upon Reaching the Age of Three. This poem seemed especially appropriate for the relaunch of Retrospect because of the way it celebrates savored memories. But the image of gentle, wise hands saving the discarded tree from oblivion also seemed relevant! With gratitude for stories old and new.

A woman with an attitude.

When my grandmother died, the family dutifully assembled in Chicago for her funeral, but we were none too happy about paying our respects. Sure, we loved her, but as the rabbi rose to deliver the eulogy, we did not relish listening to half an hour of praise and platitudes about a woman who was, to put it charitably, hard to get along with.

We did not relish listening to praise and platitudes about a woman who was, to put it charitably, hard to get along with.

The rabbi, it turned out, did not intend to mince words. The stories he told did not sugar-coat Grandma’s critical and domineering nature, her tendency to complain, her parsimony, her constant battles with my grandfather into which she never hesitated to drag the rest of us. Remember, when their apartment went condo, how she nagged at him incessantly until he finally gave in and bought it just to gain a little peace? (It turned out to be a wise financial move, but still.) Or how they threatened to divorce—after 49 years of marriage? When we’d call her, her first words were invariably to complain about how rarely we called. And remember how, in her seventies, she walked four extra blocks in a snowstorm to the Jewel T Market to save a few pennies on toilet paper?

With my grandfather in earlier, happier years. Wish I knew the story behind this one!

But all the stories had a twist. Every criticism, said the rabbi, showed her love for us by encouraging us to do better. If she was bossy, it was because she only wanted what was best for us. Grandma’s stinginess was her way of making sure we never had to struggle for lack of money as she had, raising a family during the Great Depression. By eulogy’s end, the rabbi had us laughing at Grandma’s foibles, crying because now we truly missed her, and guiltily wondering how we had failed to see the love and devotion at the core of her difficult nature.

When the service was over, the grandchildren converged to thank the rabbi for evoking Grandma’s memory so vividly and to ask how long he’d known her. “Oh, I never met your grandmother,” he replied. “Your mother and your uncle told me all I needed to know.”

He may not have known Grandma personally, but he knew her pretty well.

One fall afternoon in the mid-‘60s, my best friend’s mom, Babs Kaufman, was sorting through the mail. There were, I imagine, a couple of bills, a personal letter or two, a bank statement, a Saks catalog, a newsletter from the temple sisterhood, a charity luncheon announcement, the pennysaver, a postcard from the local Jewish funeral home advertising a casket sale—

The flyer—featuring a jolly Santa and offering floor models, repossessions, and a choice of linings—was in spectacularly bad taste.

Wait, what?

The local Jewish funeral home was owned by her husband, Herb, and her father-in law. And this advertising postcard—featuring a jolly Santa and offering floor models, demos, repossessions (repossessions!), and a choice of linings—was in spectacularly bad taste.

She called the funeral home and asked for her husband. “What the hell is this postcard?” I imagine she demanded. “Is this supposed to be funny?”

“What postcard? What are you talking about?” Herb quickly convinced her he knew nothing about it.

Well then, where had it come from? Herb suspected one of the unions, with which the funeral home was currently in a dispute. Whoever sent it, it was a PR disaster. Had it gone out to the whole neighborhood? The whole Detroit area?

Babs hung up and called my mother down the block. “Did you get an advertising flyer from the Chapel?” My mom checked the mail. Yes, it was there. She called another friend, Ruth. She’d gotten it too.

What a catastrophe. The next few hours were spent in consternation as Herb tried simultaneously to limit the damage and track down the source. Until—

—until my father confessed that, working with a client who owned a print shop, he was the source. The flyer had not gone out to the whole Detroit area or even the neighborhood. It was sent only to a handful of friends and relatives—exactly the people Babs and Herb would be most likely to call to see if they had received it. He hadn’t even told my mother for fear she would spill the beans. The Kaufmans had been pranked.

Once they realized that no real harm had been done, Babs and Herb were able to laugh at the whole thing. No harm, no foul. The prank was actually pretty funny and perfectly executed. It burnished my father’s reputation as a wit. Herb even had the flyer reproduced and enlarged so he could mount it on the wall (as pictured in the featured photo, which his son sent me after Herb sadly passed away this year).

*

Several months later, we returned from a family vacation. We were sitting at the kitchen table finishing dinner when the phone rang.

One of us reached over to the kitchen counter and picked up the phone. Dial tone. But the phone was still ringing. Wait, what?

Finally we realized that the ringing was coming from one of the drawers underneath the counter. Someone opened it to find … another phone! They picked it up. “Hello?”

“Welcome home!” said Herb brightly. “How was your trip?”

It turned out that, while we were gone, Herb had used his emergency key to install another phone line. “We were tired of calling and getting a busy signal,” he explained. “With this phone, we can get through anytime we want.”

Good one! We’d been pranked.

For about a week, Herb refused to give us the number of our new line. Finally he relented—and for the rest of our time in that house, we made good use of both lines.

*

But if turnabout was fair play, for my father it was a declaration of war. He didn’t say much, just sat back and plotted his revenge.

It came, again, several months later when Babs and Herb went on a European vacation. A few days before their scheduled return, my father had an outhouse delivered to their front yard. This was not a Port-a-Potty or high-tech outhouse that construction workers might use. No, this was a ramshackle wooden half-moon-on-the-door outhouse like we’d seen on The Beverly Hillbillies, front and center next to their suburban driveway.

Not the outhouse, but very much like it.

We kids, predictably, couldn’t leave well enough alone. My siblings and I teamed with our three Kaufman counterparts to furnish the inside with framed pictures, a toilet paper stand, and a magazine rack. Since Babs and Herb would be coming home at night, we ran an extension cord out from the house and trained a floodlight on the structure. We put up a festive sign that read “Kaufman’s Kozy Komfort Kabana.” And we waited breathlessly for the Kaufmans to return.

On the night of, we all waited inside. Every time we heard a car approach, we’d run to the window to see if it was Babs and Herb. When they finally arrived, it was almost anticlimactic. Exhausted after traveling all day, they gave it a glance and a chuckle on their way to bed. I don’t think they even saw our furnishings until the next day.

As far as I know, that was the last battle in the prank war between our fathers. Herb retired gracefully from the battlefield and my father enjoyed the fruits of victory. I still remember it as a model of pranks that were truly creative, hurt or humiliated no one, and that all could laugh at in the moment—and years later.

Photo credit: 1950sunlimited on Tumblr.

I walk out in a daze, music ringing in my ears, the girls in their party dresses still twirling across my eyes.

Sixth grade. Pressured by my turncoat best friend, I go from girl-haters’ club to boy-girl parties overnight. But for me, the party doesn’t end when our host’s parents turn up the lights in the basement rec room. I walk out in a daze, music ringing in my ears, the girls in their party dresses still twirling across my eyes, so even as my mother kisses me goodnight, it’s not her words I hear but Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka, Lesley Gore, the Beach Boys. I toss and turn, replaying every conversation, every dance, reviewing the progression of each snowball, kicking myself for muddling the steps I’d practiced, for making my stepfather’s conversation-starters seem so wooden. When the girls aren’t dancing with boys they dance with each other, but boys have no such luxury, so we must either screw up our courage and do the asking or stand in groups tapping our feet, mouthing the words along with Elvis, Frankie Valli, the Everly Brothers, afraid to sing in our cracking adolescent voices, trying to divine from the lyrics what it will take for a girl to not just dance with us if we find the will to ask, but actually like us. Hours pass before the rock beat softens in my head, before the buzz recedes and the images fade and I drift into fitful sleep. Why is this so difficult? Why am I tormented? And why does no one tell me that the others are lying in bed doing the exact same thing?

A sane adult would have stayed home and taken refuge from the storm, wary of the tornado watch that was all over the radio. But I was neither—17 and heading off to college in the fall—and my parents weren’t home to convince me otherwise. Patti and I had been dating for three months and we were caught in the rush of hormones and mutual attraction. Neither rain, snow, sleet, nor gloom of night was going to deter us from our planned movie date.

Neither rain, snow, sleet, nor gloom of night was going to deter us from our planned movie date.

I had seen the movie before: A Guide for the Married Man, in which a master philanderer (Robert Morse) tries to teach his married protégé (Walter Matthau) the secrets of infidelity. In retrospect it was grossly sexist, but in 1968 I found it witty, adult, and sophisticated, and thought Patti would like it. Besides, it featured hilarious cameos by the likes of Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Joey Bishop, Sid Caesar, Jayne Mansfield, Phil Silvers, Sam Jaffe—box office gold then, though unknown to teens today.

By that time, the movie was playing at only one theater, way across town on the west side of Detroit. I picked her up in the rain and headed west on Ten Mile Road. I drove carefully—or as carefully as any 17-year-old boy with a sports car—as the rain pounded the convertible top and the wind whipped the chassis. More than once we looked at each other in amazement. Can you believe this deluge? But I was an experienced driver—I’d had my license for almost two years—and if we considered the danger we never let on. It was all part of the adventure. Finally we made it to the theater.

The auditorium was cavernous (in those days before multiplexes) and we felt safe and warm inside. Still, we heard the storm outside the walls. The wind wailed around the building.

By movie’s end the rain had stopped and the remnants of a rosy glow lit the western sky. The drive back was easier, despite the wet streets. I headed to my house, which I had to myself that weekend—my parents were out of town and my brother and sister were at camp. But as we entered my small tree-filled suburb—it wasn’t called Huntington Woods for nothing—we realized that the storm had not just passed through. Huge elms and maples were down, damaging houses, crushing cars, and blocking streets. Limbs and branches were strewn across the yards and streets. No lights shined from the house windows. We tried one route after another, only to find the streets flooded or debris blocking our path.

This was damage that only a tornado could wreak. Holy shit! In the time it took to watch a movie, a tornado had devastated my quiet suburb, then left as quickly as it arrived.

Finally, we made it back to my house, dark and forbidding against the gray sky. I unlocked the door and led Patti in. Everything seemed intact but it was creepy. The power was out and the phones dead. I rounded up candles and flashlights and made it as cozy as I could. We talked and made out on the couch in the den for maybe an hour, then decided we had better get Patti home, where her mom was doubtless waiting anxiously.

So we ventured back out onto the streets toward her house, about four miles away. But try as we might, we could not find a route that wasn’t blocked, either by flooded streets or downed trees. Finally we gave up and headed back to my house for the night.

(At this point I have to confess that we didn’t try quite as hard to find a way out as we had to find a way in.)

Patti was just 16 and I wanted to be a gentleman. So I set her up in my sister’s bedroom and found her a robe to wear. I put on a robe of my own and lay beside her as fatigue overtook us. It was all quite proper if not prim, although—perhaps influenced by the movie, perhaps by the cataclysm—we reached second base for the first time that night. Eventually I went back to my own room and we both got a few hours of sleep.

In the morning, the power and phones were still out. Around 8:30 we were snuggling on the living room sofa in our robes when we heard a key turn in the lock. We jumped!—then quickly separated and straightened our clothing. It was my best friend’s father from down the block, coming to check that everything was okay. He looked us over disapprovingly as we told our story. He would certainly tell my parents. But what else could we have done?

A little later we ventured out. The floods had receded and crews were already cleaning up the debris. When we pulled up in front of Patti’s house, her mother rushed out, glad to see us safe but more worried about possible family consequences. “Don’t tell your father you’ve been out all night!” she warned.

It was the first of many storms we would weather together.

Harvesting grapes in the ’90s.

One unusual feature of our 200-home planned community, Portola Valley Ranch, is tucked on a gentle slope above the tennis courts, orchard, and duck pond: half an acre of cabernet sauvignon and merlot grape vines.

How can I convey the childish joy of wading around the tubs as the grapes squished and squirted between our toes?

Our community vineyard is maintained through the year by our resident Wine Committee and landscaping staff, consulting with a local oenologist. Sometime in October, however, when the Brix (sugar content) is right but (ideally) before the first rainstorm of the winter season, they send out a call for the harvest. And we all show up bright and early, gardening clippers in hand, to pick the grapes.

A chilly morning harvest in 2011.

The actual harvest—the fun part—only takes about an hour, as we fan out into the rows of vines. The committee tells us whether to pick the small secondary bunches as well as the larger primary ones. There’s an art to maneuvering your clippers into the tangle of tendrils without piercing or crushing the grapes, then snipping at just the right point so that the ripe bunch falls gently into your other hand. Of course, we have to sample a few of the small, swollen grapes to make sure they’re sweet enough, juicy enough—then spit out the tiny, hard seeds. We drop the bunches into yellow bins called lugs, which we (indeed) lug to the street to be loaded into a pickup truck and carted a hundred yards to our tiny winery.

Which is where we finally go, when all the grapes are picked, to stem them. We don surgical gloves and stand for a couple of hours at rectangular tables and rip the grapes from their bunches, this time trying deliberately to break their skins for easy crushing. This is the tedious part, as we slowly convert each lug of picked bunches into lugs of grapes for crushing and stems for composting. Still, it’s a good opportunity to meet new neighbors, catch up with old ones, and gossip about those who have had the bad judgment not to show up. These days our conversations generally avoid politics, although it’s a liberal California community. No use spoiling a perfect day.

When we first arrived in 1987, the stemmed grapes were dumped into tubs and we crushed them in the classic way, stomping on them with bare (and hopefully washed) feet. How can I convey the childish joy of wading around the tubs as the grapes squished and squirted between our toes? Alas, a couple of years later we bought a commercial crusher, which was apparently better for the wine (and more efficient). For a few years they maintained a “Kiddie Krush” where children could crush grapes in a wading pool, which was way cute but didn’t last.

Our wine label and the vineyard in fall.

When all the grapes are stemmed and crushed and the mess hosed off, we finally retire to the Ranch House (community center) for a convivial lunch of lasagna or pulled pork, salad, cookies, and of course previous vintages of our wine. It’s one of those meals given extra flavor by a morning of hard (or at least diligent) physical work.

But the harvest is just the start of the winemaking process. The committee ferments the wine in a massive stainless steel vat and then decants it into oak barrels for aging. Not quite two years later they bottle and distribute it: one bottle to each household, one to each resident who helped with the harvest, and the rest to those who bought shares to help defray the costs. The yield is about a hundred cases.

And how is the wine? Damn good—with one exception. In 1989, the wine just did not mellow. After collecting enough complaints, the Wine Committee recalled it all and made wine vinegar out of it! Was this related to the Loma Prieta earthquake just a week before the harvest, which shook the San Andreas fault that runs beneath the vineyard land? We’ll never know, but our “earthquake vintage” just proves that farming remains an inexact science.

Otherwise, the wine is comparable to Napa and Sonoma cabernets, with enough body to pair with food. Ranch wines have won awards in community wine competitions and friends are always impressed when we bring it to dinner parties. “You made that wine?” they ask with wide eyes. It’s like the extra kick you get when you bite into your own freshly picked, home-grown tomato or strawberry. But, you know, it’s wine.

I resisted the lure of social media through the aughts, despite frequent requests from my friend Sam to “please join my network” on Plaxo (remember Plaxo?) and later on LinkedIn. Patti and I were mostly retired from our technical communications careers by then and spent our days (and some nights) writing screenplays. Few Hollywood people were on LinkedIn back then, apparently preferring old-style networking methods like phone calls, movie premieres, and power lunches at Chateau Marmont and the Polo Lounge.

Each time I respond to a post, Facebook uses it to categorize and phenotype me, to slice and dice my likes and comments and sell them to the highest bidder.

Then, in 2008, as the financial meltdown took hold, it seemed useful to have an actual income. I began to reach out to old contacts in high tech. Almost as an afterthought, I set up a cursory profile on LinkedIn.

A week later, I heard from Debra, a colleague from Oracle in the ‘90s. “I’m at a new startup,” she explained, “and I need someone to do our beta documentation. I thought of you but didn’t know how to contact you. Then I found you on LinkedIn!” I ended up completing a four-month contract with her company and it smoothed my re-entry into technical publications.

Magic. At least it seemed that way. It made me a believer in social media.

Still, I resisted joining Facebook. Who needed to know what my friends had for lunch (as the Facebook stereotype then had it)? But in the fall of 2011, my goddaughter Stella went off to college, and I figured the only way I’d know what she was up to was through Facebook. So I joined.

A joyful early post: visiting Stella at college.

And it did help me keep up with Stella at college—her roommates and friends, her art and theater, her studies and creative activities. I also found other friends and relatives, and Facebook helped me keep up with them too. Gingerly, I began to post on my own. I found community there, and it became a good place to share Retrospect stories. More magic.

Stella, like most of her generation, has largely dropped off Facebook. But her mother, Jennifer, hasn’t. She—and several other friends—continue to post or share often out of joy and passion and outrage, with which I usually agree. It’s hard not to like or love their posts, or add a comment expressing support or community. Yet I know that, each time I do, Facebook uses it to categorize and phenotype me, to slice and dice my likes and comments and sell them to the highest bidder—actually to any bidder—to use for their own purposes.

As we now understand, this categorization, slicing, and dicing is dividing our society and undermining our democracy. I have one friend, a screenwriting coach, who uses his Facebook feed to express liberal political views, knowing he will provoke a backlash from his conservative friends and followers, which he rationally counters, even though none are ever convinced. It’s an endless, fruitless cycle. Another friend, a writer, committed progressive, and fervent Bernie bro, was so outraged when emails revealed that the DNC had its thumb on the scale for Hillary that he refused to support her and voted for Jill Stein instead. We now know that those emails were hacked by Russian agents and posted, fanned, and amplified by Russian bots in a subversive, illegal, and ultimately successful attempt to undermine support for Hillary. How many others like him, in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, did it take to swing the election for Trump?

I recently learned about an alternative social network called MeWe that promises “no ads, no spyware, no B.S.” Apparently, it doesn’t track you or sell your data. MeWe was founded by Mark Weinstein, a prominent privacy advocate who was so enraged by Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration that “privacy is a social norm of the past” that he created an engineering project to prove him wrong. It sounds like the much-needed anti-Facebook. But a social network is only useful if your friends are on it too. Does anyone have experience with MeWe? Anyone interested in trying it out?

View of the baths from above. Photo credit: Nate Bolt, Flickr.

Despite their name, the baths at the Esalen Institute, cut into the cliffs at Big Sur, have little to do with getting clean. In fact, you shower beforehand. The baths are about something else.

No one is self-conscious about the nudity, and from our attitude and bearing you would think we were all decked out in our Sunday best, headed for church.

The building is cut into a cliff, open to the ocean so you can hear the waves crash on the rocks below. There are large concrete tubs in the sun and the shade, as well as claw-footed porcelain tubs for one or two. Fed by hot springs, the water feels soft, like liquid silk. It’s all in the open, and no one wears a stitch, so it’s easy to feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven. There is such an abundance of flesh that by the end of the weekend I am tempted to cry “Enough! No more! Save it for next week, when I’ll be back at my community pool where everyone’s in board shorts and tank suits.”

Photo credit: Amanda Marsalis, esalen.org.

There is a talking side and a silent side. The talking side is a good place to get to know your fellow workshop members who, for me, are other writers. No one is self-conscious about the nudity, and from our attitude and bearing you would think we were all decked out in our Sunday best, headed for church. But it’s strange to be deep in conversation with someone you know … well, barely. We are subtle. We have learned not to stare, certainly not to leer. I can talk politics with a woman in the tub and not look down once. But under the water I feel her nakedness; I can sense it when she shifts position or stretches her legs or leans over the ledge to watch the surf.

On the sundeck, I wait for my massage therapist. The young woman on the next table is just beginning hers. The woman slips off her towel; she’s wearing nothing but a woven chain around her waist, which the masseuse asks her to remove. When she does, the gesture is so intimate and revealing I have to gasp. It reminds me of the old joke about two guys at a nudist colony who pass a particularly buxom woman, and one turns to the other and says “Man, wouldn’t you like to see her in a tight sweater!”

Photo credit: esalen.org.

It’s not that all these bodies are so perfect; there are all kinds of bodies here. But there is something attractive about any body whose owner is comfortable with it, confident in it, and enjoys how it feels languishing in the hot water or soaking up the sun. The bodies here exude that confidence.

In my fifties—unlike in my twenties—I generally have little problem with, um, unwanted excitement in these settings. For one thing I have more experience mastering my arousal, and for another, the hormones just aren’t flowing as strongly as they used to. Unfortunately I lose such mastery when my wife comes down to the baths with me. (The same thing happens at nude beaches when, after lying next to each other naked in the sun, she’ll get up and say “I’m hot, let’s go in the water,” and I’ll say “You’ll have to wait a minute, honey, I’m hot too, in fact I’m a little too hot,” and she’ll wait while I think of baseball or calculus or the stock market.) At the baths, she curls up next to me and puts her arm around my neck, or stretches her body in the sun, and I am called to attention and have to cover up or turn aside. Left alone momentarily in the shower, she soaps me up, and I think I am never going to get soft, I am going to have to spend the rest of the weekend with a towel or a notebook or a lunch tray positioned carefully in front of my crotch. And I pray that no one comes in, and of course I also hope that someone does. But I also store the scene for later reference, and I think my wife does too.

When you start the day in the baths—if you can drag yourself out—you find that the writing in the workshops comes easier. The process of self-revelation has already begun.

In her later years, when hosting the family for Thanksgiving week, my mom would make a recipe for Cream Cheese Pound Cake she’d gotten from her friend Shifra. It was a hybrid of pound cake and cheesecake, moist and delicious and sinfully rich, and so addictive we used to call it Cream Cheese Crack Cake. She’d serve it as dessert at lunch and then leave it out in her condo kitchen where anyone could help themselves to more.

I could give you the recipe, but you'll have to sign a release form.

By that time, Patti and I had learned to control our weight through a combination of mindful eating, frequent exercise, and small portions. We didn’t deny ourselves anything as long as we didn’t eat much of it. So I’d take a small piece after lunch, and it was so good I’d carve off another sliver, and then another later in the afternoon, and then another when we’d come back from dinner. Patti observed this and warned me. “Portion control,” she said. “Those little slivers mount up.”

She was right, of course, but I resisted. It’s just pound cake, I thought. Even if those tiny slices added up to a tenth of the cake, how bad can it be?

Finally I decided to prove it to her by googling the calorie content of the ingredients and adding them up. It was easy; there were only six ingredients. I added up the butter, cream cheese, cake flour, sugar—

I stopped counting when the total calorie count reached eight thousand. And I hadn’t even gotten to the eggs.

After that, I found it a lot easier to resist that second, third, and fourth helping.