My mother prepared dinner every night for my dad, my brother and me. Meat, potatoes, Birds Eye frozen vegetables. Once in a while a fresh salad. But in those days, fresh vegetables, especially in the winter, were hard to come by. I can still see my mom with her white and red flowered apron tied around her waist, bustling around the kitchen, getting everything ready so she could run to the train station to pick up my father.

He came home from the city (New York) on the 6:18 LIRR train. The three of us sat in the car at the Roslyn station and watched  the passengers (mostly men) disembark, looking for the tall, handsome man in his brown Brooks Brothers overcoat and matching fedora that was my father. When he saw us, my mother got out of the car and moved to the passenger seat so he could drive. My brother and I sat quietly in the back seat waiting to see what would unfold. If dad had been in the Bar Car with his buddies, his voice had a gruff cadence than made me nervous. I often got a stomach ache before dinner.

We sat in a dining booth in the kitchen of our Levitt house. I picked at my food because it hurt to eat it. My dad would yell at me to eat. “Your mom slaved over this for you and your brother,” he’d say. Or something like that. “Eat it!” Sometimes he’d ask me to go find the Tabasco Sauce for him, something he put on everything he ate before he even tasted it. If I couldn’t find it, he’d say I couldn’t find my head if it wasn’t attached to my shoulders. Often, I got up from the table and ran into my room, slammed the door and cried in my pillow, wishing he were dead.

On rare occasions, when things had gone well at work and he hadn’t had too much to drink on the train, he’d bring home petit fours from Horn and Hardart’s or delicious donuts from Mary Elizabeth’s. And on the weekends he’d go to the bakery and deli after his tennis game and bring home bagels and lox and cream cheese. On weekends he made up for all his bad behavior during the week, and I made up for all the meals I didn’t eat during he week.

Needless to say, family dinners have not been a high point of my adult years. Although when I was first married to my first husband and he was an intern at a hospital here in Oakland, on 36 hour shifts, I tried. I would get up at 5 in the morning and prepare a gourmet meal that we shared before he disappeared for all those hours. Then I would bring him dinner in the doctor’s lounge when they gave him a half hour break in the evening. But I didn’t really like cooking, and he didn’t really like Western medicine, and we didn’t really like being married. So you can see where this was headed.

To this day, I do like bagels and lox, though. And I’m very good at preparing it!

To be honest, I hate recycling. If the future of the planet didn’t depend on it, you can be sure I wouldn’t do it. It’s so complicated and way more work than just throwing stuff out. But since I have grandchildren who I am hoping will be able to breathe the air, survive the increased temperature and swim in the seas long after I am gone, I recycle. The glass, the cardboard, the whole catastrophe. I also repurpose, which I guess you could say is a form of recycling.

Remember those Chianti bottles in college that became candle holders for those sultry, romantic nights with your boy (girl) friend? They’re probably still sitting on the window sill in my apartment on Division Street in Ann Arbor, waiting for some new college student’s hopeful lover to come for a candlelight dinner.

Jam jars for leftovers, street trash for art project, dryer lint to make paper. Even broken ceramics to put in the bottom of planters. There are endless ways to reuse the things we have and no longer need. A friend of mine takes old books, cuts out the center of them and makes beautiful art projects of them.

Aren’t hand-me-downs a form of recycling? When I was young, my older cousin gave me all her beautiful clothes (a tweed woolen snow suit with leather knees I remember the most.) When I outgrew them my mother turned them over to the Shinnecock Indian Tribe near where we lived on Long Island. I hope their children enjoyed them. When we grew up, I was bigger than my cousin, so she inherited clothes from me instead. But she also became a fanatic recycler of sorts. Making beautiful quilts out of old clothes. Women, by the way, have been recycling ties and clothing and torn cloth in the form of quilts for centuries.

I recycled all of Richard’s Hawaiian shirts with the original coconut buttons by giving them to a short lawyer friend, the only man I knew who they would fit and who would wear them in Hawaii. All the rest of RIchard’s clothes and shoes went to various grandchildren (who have long since outgrown them, since he was 5’5″ tall and they are 6′ and taller!) I loved seeing them worn by them; it was a way he lived on. The boys have passed them on to their younger cousins and friends.

I try to find ways to reuse as much as I can because frankly, separating the top from the bottom of the greasy pizza box just isn’t my cup of tea. But I haven’t yet found a way to repurpose that. So I do take my green bin down to the compost regularly. And separate everything from everything else like a good person. I just don’t enjoy it. Harumph.

My daughter and my teenage grandchildren spent the pandemic in Israel where things were a lot more comfortable than here. While the boys went to school virtually, they were free to see their friends after school. When vaccinations became available, my daughter and her husband got them immediately, but the 16 year old called me to tell me he wasn’t sure he wanted to get vaccinated. He had heard (via social media, I guess) “horror stories.”

I asked him if he’d ever heard of polio. He said he hadn’t. I told him how, when I was a kid, everyone’s parents were so afraid of their children catching it that they kept us inside all summer, away from our friends and swimming pools and fun. I told him about children I’d known who were paralyzed by it, or spent their childhood in iron lungs. “The reason you haven’t heard of it,” I said, “is because there is a vaccine now. So no one gets polio anymore.”  I told him I was one of the guinea pigs…one of the kids who stood in line at my elementary school to get this new shot in the arm. And how excited we all were. He was silent. I continued,  “And you, Adiel, have had that polio vaccine, yourself!”

He called me a week later to tell me he’d had his first Covid shot and he felt fine. Then he called me two weeks later and said, “Savta! I got my second shot today and I couldn’t stop smiling for an hour after!”

Now I can’t stop smiling. My daughter and her family are on a plane flying back to California as I write this. I can hardly wait to see them. It’s been a long year. Thank science for vaccines.

I walked into my 90 year old mom’s house years ago and heard her crying. I dropped my purse and the bag of glazed donuts I’d brought her and rushed into the den fearing I’d find her on the floor with a broken hip. But no. She was sitting in front of her computer screen, perched on a phone book so she could reach the keys, sobbing.

Relieved to find her intact, I asked, “What happened, Mom?” I tried to read the screen in front of her, thinking maybe someone had sent her an email about a death in the family. Email was all she knew how to use on the computer my brother had set up for her. (And he was no computer genius, himself, so maybe email was all there was on her computer anyway.) She would write an email message, print it out, and mail it, by U.S Mail,  to the recipient. And she was amazed when a message from someone she knew showed up in her inbox! I tried to explain that she didn’t need to mail the letter, but to no avail. After all, how would they get it? It would just stay in the machine!

“Who is this Norton?” she wailed. “Why doesn’t he leave me alone!”

“Norton?” I had no idea who Norton was. I had no cousins named Norton. And I was no computer genius either.

“Look,” she ordered, pointing to a window that blocked her message. “He won’t let me read the letter from Len” Len was her favorite nephew. “He keeps telling me I have to pay him or I’ll get a virus.” She cried some more. “I don’t like this computer. Take it away. I don’t want to get sick. And I don’t like Norton. I couldn’t sleep last night because of him.”

I pried her away from the desk, promising her that Len’s letter would wait for her, and that we would figure out how to get rid of Norton once and for all (though I had no clue how I would do that.) And we went to the kitchen where she was immediately distracted by her need to feed me. When I produced the donuts I’d brought for her, she forgot all about Norton, Len, and the computer and we sat down to a pleasant cup of tea and donuts.

I must have called my tech specialist–I had one because I had to use a computer for my work and barely knew more than my mom about what to do when things didn’t work the way I expected them to–and we deep-sixed Norton. She went back to reading and writing– and mailing– emails. She would be devastated to imagine the US Postal Service going out of business.

Now it’s my turn. I’ve got the email thing down pretty well by now. And the texting. But when social media became a necessity to maintain a presence in the business world, I quit. I refused to learn how to tweet my way into the hearts of clients. And when that orange guy decided he could run the country by tweeting…well, a twit just doesn’t have the gravitas to run a country. At least I have the sense to know that I don’t have the wherewithal to keep up with technology. Or Norton. I get it, mom.

I didn’t know I could hold my breath for so long until last week when I finally exhaled. I was sitting round a fire pit with a small group of (vaccinated) women from my weekly writing group who I haven’t seen in person for over a year…the last time I inhaled. We’ve been Zooming, of course, and reading our work to each other. But this is a group that has met weekly for 15 years. In person. Around a table. In someone’s dining room. It’s a Wild Writing group. Really more like True Confessions. Therapy. (Isn’t all writing?) We all write our truths and read them aloud to each other every week. We know all about the intimacies of our lives; our loves, our frustrations, our joys, our worries, our gains and our losses. And even though we’ve continued to write together and read aloud to the group all year, something has been missing. We get a peak into each other’s homes, wherever it is we’ve set up our computers. That should add something, right? We see each other’s faces, the same faces that have shown up all these years, right? We know the cast of characters, the lovers, the children, the grandchildren, even the pets, right? We sometimes even cry the same tears. But no, something has been missing. A certain soul. The soul that you feel when you are in the same room with someone. Their essence. Their breath. When you read to a live person, you feel their reaction to your words. They laugh (unmuted) with you (or at you), or nod almost imperceptibly, or wiggle in their chair. Or sometimes annoy you with their distracting ‘ding’ on their phone. I used to hate when people brought their raw vegan foods to the table, as if they couldn’t go two hours without a feeding. But it turns out, it is all that that I missed. We all missed it. When we sat together around the fire pit and talked about what we’ve learned about ourselves or our loved ones during this year, about how we feel about stepping out again (fearful, to be honest), about the joy we all felt at exhaling, finally, at seeing one another in the flesh again, we all inhaled deeply of the shared air, the shared soul and absorbed the presence of our special intimacy again.

I rarely watch a movie more than once. There are just too many great ones out there I haven’t seen yet. My former partner of 20 years had a theory that we shouldn’t waste time watching movies; we should be on the move until we were too old to travel, and then we could watch them all. But sadly, he died shortly after our last trip to India together and we never got to watch those movies. While I’m not too old to travel yet, the pandemic has cramped my travel style. So I watch everything I can these days, trying to catch up.

“Ow!” I rubbed the bump on my forehead. Again.

If he leaves the kitchen cabinets or drawers open one more time I’m divorcing him! Oh! I never married him, did I? And that’s a big reason why.

The first time he took me to his house and showed me his kitchen I walked through it closing cabinet doors. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. The next time, the same thing. I have one bump on my head for every day of the week I go to his house. My shins are black and blue. You might think I’ve been battered by this very nice guy, but no! At least not by his hand. Just by his cabinet doors.

Why is it so hard to close a door or a drawer? It’s such a simple motion. Doesn’t take a lot of strength. No more so than closing the toilet seat, which he still forgets to do. But fortunately he has a guest bathroom that I use so I can avoid falling into the toilet. Honestly, it’s enough to drive me batty.

And then there’s his pants zipper. Seriously! What is it about closing things? Is there something Freudian about it? Does closure scare him? But don’t get me started. He’s just an old man, I guess. With old habits. Well, at least I can’t bump my head on his zipper.

I’ve been called a neatnik. Not by him. He’s too nice to complain about me. (Besides, I often cook for him.) But you might agree. I have been known to call him Pig-Pen. In my place I have a glass dining room table and leather dining room chairs. Whatever he touches has his finger prints on it. Like he’s been holding onto the table for dear life. I follow him around with windex. And when he gets up, the chair has crumbs on it. Even when the food he ate didn’t crumble. It’s a miracle. I give him an apron to wear when he eats so he doesn’t stain his shirt. He stains it anyway.

Most of the time, since I hate cleaning up after him only slightly less than I hate cooking, I go to his place and close the cabinets and the drawers and the toilet seats. Then I cook dinner and let him clean up.

Once Upon a time…and still… hair was the most important thing.

To the day my mother died, the first thing we did when we saw each other was comment on each other’s hair. Mom would either say, “That’s a great haircut, Penny,” or “What did you do to your hair?” Or anything in between. (My dad said only one thing every time: “What the hell happened to your hair?”)  For many years my mother went to the hairdresser every week. I’m not sure she ever washed her own hair. When I was in high school she took me along, so every Friday I had my hair washed and teased and sprayed (Yuk) so even a ride on a roller coaster over the weekend wouldn’t undo my do. But this little story isn’t about my hair. It’s about loyalty.

When my mom finally convinced my dad to retire, my parents left New York and moved to California to be near my brother and me and our families. For Dad the trauma of the move was that he could no longer ride the Long Island Railroad’s bar car home from The City with his buddies. For Mom, she had to leave her long-term hair cutter and find a new one. Not knowing better, she found the hairdresser who did the hair of most of the women in Rossmoor. As a result, she looked like them and they all looked like little old ladies from Rossmoor. They’d get these nasty tight little permanent waves to “give their hair body” and from behind, all these 4’11” Jewish grey haired women looked the same. From the front they did, too. My mom hated how she looked. But would she switch hairdressers? Of course no! But every year the Rossmoor hairdresser would take a vacation for a few weeks and her friend would sub for her. This woman gave Mom wonderful, flattering haircuts, and no silly curls. She looked so much better! I’d comment, of course, as soon as I saw her. “Mom! I love your hair! Who did it?” And she’d say sadly, “I know. It looks so much better, doesn’t it?” And I’d say, “Can’t you continue going to her even when What’s-Her-Name comes back?” And she’d say, sadly, sounding a little like Eeyore, “No. I couldn’t do that to her.” My mom knew her hairdresser’s whole life story, and like all of us, she had some troubles she confided to Mom (and probably to all the other Rossmoor gals.) Mom just didn’t have the heart to add another sadness to this woman’s life. So as much as I tried, I couldn’t convince her to switch. She never did. But once a year, for a few weeks, she looked great.

Just a word here about genetics. I went to the same hairdresser in San Francisco for 25 years. From when I had a raging Jewfro in the 70s to when I had a modified Jewfro in the 90s. I, too, didn’t have the heart to leave my guy. He’d become my friend and, like my mom, I’d become his confidente. But he made the mistake of taking a very long vacation one year, and my daughter invited me to visit her hairstylist in Berkeley. She took one look at me in the mirror and asked, “So…how committed are you to the 1970s?”

After several months of expensive therapy, I was finally able to break up with my SF guy and keep him as a friend. Wish I could tell my mom.

Someday I’ll tell you about the purple hair.

I have a very bad habit of singing old commercial jingles over and over again. Especially when I’m using some similar product. Or just walking down the street. Sometimes when I brush my teeth I’ll hum, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” Even though I’m using Crest. Afterwards, when I’m washing the sink, “Ajax, bumbum..the foaming cleanser, wash that dirt right down the drain. You’ll stop paying the elbow tx, when you start cleaning with Ajax.” It’s sometimes annoying enough that someone will relieve me of my task. Or divorce me. Remember Castro Convertible sofas? “So easy even a child can do it.” The last time I tried to open one, I pulled my back out. Best leave that to the children, I’ve since decided.

My dad once won a contest for creating a jingle for Blue Bonnet Margarine. I wish I could remember what it said. He was a big fan of margarine. He thought margarine was going to save him from high blood pressure or alcoholic dementia. My mother, on the other hand, believed the tag line on our favorite bakery in Roslyn. Butter Makes It Better. It turns out margarine isn’t so good for you. And neither is butter. Nevertheless, both my parents made it into their 90s.

Anyway, the prize for the best BBM jingle was free art classes in New York City. Dad wasn’t interested. So my mom and I got to take the train into The City a couple of times and take free art lessons. I must have been less than 5 years old. I remember being told the cat I drew didn’t look like a cat. Which I’m sure was true, and is probably why I have always hated cats and preferred Picasso.

We stopped at the bakery and bought blueberry muffins for a picnic on the train. That is a much more pleasant memory than the art classes. We’d unwrap our muffins, carefully pick the blueberries out of the muffins and eat them one by one. I don’t recall if my mom had coffee to wash them down, but if she did it was probably Chock Full o’ Nuts. “The heavenly Coffee. Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy.” That was before Starbucks.

While I do think some of today’s commercials are pretty cool, especially now that they’ve co-opted all our old songs from the 60s and 70s, I like the catchy jingles from long ago that worm around in my brain. “Mr Clean gets rid of dirt and grime and grease in just a minute. Mr Clean will clean your whole house and everything that’s in it!” So where is that guy, anyway? Promises, promises.

Connection is the lifeblood of civilization, I think. It has become more apparent in the past year when we have been so separated from one another because of the pandemic. Loneliness, grief, depression have made life all but intolerable for so many of us.

I am someone who enjoys her own company, but I do need touch points with others. I live in a high rise building in Oakland, California with beautiful 180 degree views of Lake Merritt and the city. There are 100 or so units in the building. I’ve lived here for 22 years during which I had pretty much kept to myself except for the neighbors I ran into in the gym. I saw clients during the day in one unit, and came home, across the hall, at the end of the day to enjoy my solitude, sitting on my couch looking out the windows. A pretty sweet commute.

When I retired a couple of years ago, I started to realize that it was pretty odd to live somewhere for this long and to not know the names of more than a handful of my neighbors. I’d say hi to people in the elevator and they to me, but I didn’t really know them, or their names. A few months before the pandemic hit, I was moved to start a women’s group for women over 60 in my building. I sent an email out and received tremendous response. Over 40 women wanted to connect! They, too, were looking for community. Here we were living so close and yet we were strangers to one another. So we started meeting in person in the Club Room, sharing our stories, many of which were fascinating. I started getting thank you letters daily in my inbox. People felt less alone. When the pandemic hit, we moved our meetings to Zoom. I became known as ‘The Convener.’ From that group, a book group evolved, and a political action group. We reached out to one another for check-ins. We wrote thousands of postcards last year to get voters out to vote. We raised a nice chunk of money to go to a project that helps previously-incarcerated women with children find housing. The men in the building started making noises about being left out and wanting to start their own group. All in all it’s been very satisfying.

Still, the most important connections for me, my lifeblood, are the ones that have lasted over the years. My daughter and grandsons, of course, who are waiting out the pandemic in Israel. My high school friends who I visit every summer for a month in New Hampshire. And my very closest high school friend, Jane, who lives in upstate New York. If we don’t talk for an hour every few days we both begin to fade. My mother used to ask me what we could possibly have to talk about after being together all day after school. The other day Jane and I were trying to define our special friendship. She said, “The way I see it, nothing in our lives is ever complete until we have shared it with each other.” That is a special connection.