What I am passing on

As a parent it often occurs to me that I wonder what it is  that I am giving my daughter?  How will she look back on her childhood?  How will she be when it is her turn to go out into the world?

I am a cushy affectionate mother and my daughter is affectionate too.  I hug and kiss her A LOT.  I think I try to give to her all the hugs and kisses I wanted as a kid but didn't get enough of.  My parents were old school.  They weren't given that kind of affection as children so they also didn't know how to give it.  My dad was different with me than he was with my brothers, the father-daughter bond brought that out in him, but while he was sweet and protective and he listened to me, I still didn't get enough of those outward signs.

I knew I was loved, but I always questioned whether I was worthy of love.

Until I hit my 30th birthday I felt in my heart of hearts the answer to that question was always no. So during my morning commute to work, while Amsterdam passed by in the window and teenaged girls talked too loudly on the tram, I set off down memory lane, I found some music from that time in my life to help set the mood and stared out the window, not seeing the Amsterdam school architecture and the familiar tree lined cobblestone streets, but seeing me, as a  young girl, several pounds lighter, just shy of my 18th birthday, with the world in front of me.

I was headed to college, leaving my home, my family and finding freedom and independence. I was the first of my friends to leave at the end of an idyllic summer spent in the hot sun and the cool rivers outside of Pittsburgh, spending my days boating, swimming and waterskiing on the banks of the Monongahela River surrounded by my high school friends.  All of us caught up in that special feeling that only happens precisely at the moment when we're done with high school and haven't yet gone out into the world, but have every possibility open, ripe for the picking. Looking forward to the future, yet trying desperately to cling to the right now.
  
I had gotten into a good college.  My family was encouraging and said all the right things.  I really was, as the child of an immigrant, raised with the idea that in America, anything was possible.  Time and again my dad told me that I could do anything I wanted, that the only thing stopping me was my own ambition.  He constantly fed me a diet that the brass right was right there, all I had to do was reach up and grab it.

I spent my high school years in a college town, so many of my friends were staying home and going to the local college, I was one of the few that had chosen to go away.  Staying was not an option.  I loved my little town but as one of the few Jews in town, I also felt like an outsider.  Going to a goyisha college in a goyisha town did not seem like a realistic option for me.

The day I left, my dad and I packed up our car and my friends from high school came up to see me off.  There were hugs and tears and frantic waves and honking horns.  As my hometown disappeared in the rearview mirror and my dad turned our car onto the highway for the 3 hour drive north, my dad took my cues.  When I talked, he made easy conversation, when I just wanted to just lose myself and look out the window, he stayed quiet.

Truth was, I was scared to death.

As much as I had talked about getting out and wanting to get out of my small town and go out into the world, like many kids at that age, I was amass of insecurities.  My parents having divorced when I was 12 left its scars.

I had always been a fragile, sensitive girl  who was able to overcompensate by being loud and funny. I let my big mouth and easy humor work for me.  I learned early on that the best defense was a good offense, so I acted confident and above it all and figured if I could pretend to be happy, people would believe I was happy and therefore I could be happy.

At 17, I still had no clue as to what was really important.

I went to college and I made friends and I got lost in the freedom and absence of limits. I drank.  I drank a lot.  I figured out that alcohol helped, it helped me quiet the voices inside of me that told me I was ugly and not good enough.  Around me, my girlfriends found boyfriends and I had no dates. I was typecast as the gal pal.  I was so busy being funny and confident all the time and I was so good at it, that people bought it and felt I didn't need anything else or perhaps they all knew me too well and could see I was worthless.  I developed crushes on boys who I didn't know, who I could look at longingly on campus and devleop scenarios in my head, but where I never ever had to take a risk by putting myself out there.

While I had a good time in college and did well enough, I had no direction and even though on the surface everything was good, I was happy, I had friends, I was pursuing a college education, behind all the jokes, I was unhappy.

In my junior year, still directionless and without a major, I had moved in with 3 of my friends into an apartment off campus.  It was fun having our own apartment and not being in the dorms helped us to branch out and meet new people outside our immediate circle of friends.  One of my roommates in our junior year started dating a new guy and we became friendly with his friends.  I liked them, our group had become too insulated.  I was adrift and lonely and I was happy to branch out and meet some new people.  We had a party at our place and I was really excited about it. But after my third beer I went running for the toilet and got violently ill.  I didn't really understand it, I had built up a good tolerance and hardly ever got sick.  My friends reassured me it was because I hadn't eaten all day, we had shopped to get ready for the party and I ran out to buy a new outfit because I wanted to look nice.  I cleaned up, brushed my teeth and in a half hour I felt better.  My friend D, my roommate from our sophomore year talked to me and told me it was no big deal and told me to sit down, relax and have fun, and she ran off to get me another beer.  She brought it back and after I drank a few sips I got violently ill again and threw up.  People started to leave after that, as parties with sick girls are no fun. My friends put me to bed and told me to sleep it off.

The next day I was humiliated and embarrassed but my friends laughed it off with me and we chalked the whole evening up into a drunken escapade.  A few weeks later while having lunch on campus, I ran into one of the guys who had been at the party, a friend of my roommate's boyfriend.  He was a nice guy and we sat and talked for a while.  He told me he hadn't seen me around much and I told him I had been laying low a bit, embarrassed for being such a drunken mess at our party a while back.  He then told me that my friend D had been spiking my drinks with serum ipecac the whole evening.  I didn't believe him at first but in my head of course it made perfect sense after I thought about it.

I ran off to confront D and ask her why she had done such a thing?  I considered her one of my closest friends, we had lived together for a year, why would she want to humiliate me like that?  She tried to write the whole thing off as a joke and told me I didn't have any sense of humor.  Finally she told me that she just wanted to embarrass me in front of my new guy friends and bring me down a peg or two.

I drove off in tears convinced that I had done something to birng this on, that if I was a better person, someone who was supposed to be one of my best friends  wouldn't have done this to me and my other good friends wouldn't have sat idly by saying nothing and bearing witness to my humiliation.

I left.

I moved to Florida, I worked, I partied.  I made better friends but surrounded myself mostly with gay men, who were great friends, loads of fun and true blue, but who were emotionally unavailable to me.

A good offense is the best defense.

It took a while but eventually I made my way back to school, a different school.  I was more focused and ready to learn, and I got my degree with honors and went on for a Master's Degree.  I spent the next seven years of my life studying and working, I made some great friends.  I fell in love with a guy, we ended up becoming close friends and although we enjoyed a romantic relationship, he didn't return my feelings.  I allowed myself to just be his friend and we established the kind of relationship where if neither of us were dating, we'd take each other up on the benefits part of friends-with-benefits.  Still,feeling unlovable, I hoped that one day something would change, that his feelings for me would change.  So, I pretended, I pretended I was okay with the whole thing, that I was cool with the arrangement, that I was doing the same thing he was.

And I hung on, because I had spent my entire adult life putting out a good offense, never telling people what I really needed, never really putting myself out there.

I feel lucky that I was able to make changes in my life, that finally after so many years I was able to figure out that it wasn't about what people think, but it was about what I felt.  I feel lucky that I was able to find a way to understand my childhood and to understand I had gotten myself all wrong.  I am grateful that I figured out that while I was so busy putting out a good defense and blocking a lot of hurt and drama and misery out of my life, that not much else was making its way in either.

It took a lot of years, a move across continents and oceans and a lot of solitude but I was finally able to drop my defenses and just live.  Just be me.  

Lots of good things happened after that, some hurtful things too, but then they were just hurtful things that happened and were no part of some grand plan to show me I deserved it.  

I don't want my daughter to go out into the world the way I did.  I don't want her to feel unlovable.  I want life's disappointments to be just that, disappointments, not confirmation of her worst fears about herself.

I don't want her to do stupid things just to try and fit in.

I don't want her to feel like she has no choice but to play a role in order for people to like her.

I don't want her to accept something less because she doesn't feel like she deserves anything more.

I want her to like herself and put herself out there and not be so afraid all the time.

I want her to understand that being hurt is part of life, it happens to all of us, but if we go around trying to avoid being hurt, that we get hurt anyway but we shut out lots of good things in the mix

I know I can't stop her from being hurt or disappointed, those things are just part of life. But I hope if she feels good about herself, and feels our love, she will be able to make better decisions and won't spend so much of her life feeling lonely and worthless.

Perhaps my journey is the just the journey.  Maybe no amount of hugs and hand holding and sweet talk can alter us from this path.    Maybe as human beings we are programmed and socialized to feel unloved.

I don't know.

I just know that while my parents gave me some wonderful gifts, they also raised a child who was sad, wounded and bereft and I in turn allowed myself to spend half of my adult life feeling rotten.

I don't know if what I am doing with my daughter will put her on a different path in adulthood, she has her own journey to take.  It's her own and not mine, but I am trying my hardest to send her out into the world feeling worthy and not question whether she is lovable.

I'm trying.

Blogging at Times of Israel

Hey there, I am blogging today over at The Times of Israel.  I've written a tribute to my dad.

Click here to read my post.

Wanting to see it

For a second time we have spent a vacation in the French countryside of the Dordogne region.  Small bastide towns, castles dating back centuries, caves, wine country and miles upon miles of beautiful scenery make this part of France a wonderful spot to be in.

Not to mention the food, the birthplace of Foie Gras and truffles as well as national French delights (croissants anyone) make Dordogne a feast for all the senses.

And don't even get me started on the wines.

Two years ago when we went I was all obsessed with the wines of Bordeaux and the creme de la creme, St. Emilion Grand Cru.  Good wines definitely but honestly a bit too heavy for my taste.  This time around we focused on wines produced in the Dordogne region itself which are lighter, Leo fell in love with Monbazilliac, a semi sweet white wine that the French drink as an aperitif or as a dessert wine.  And I developed a penchant for Pecharmant, a blend of cabernet, cab franc and Malbec wines.  I drank Malbec rose every day for lunch and it was heaven.  We decided not to go crazy buying wines this time so we brought back a modest two cases (12 bottles), considering two years ago we brought over 100 bottles back and we don't really have the proper room to store them (now I wish we had a basement), we were very restrained this time.

As I mentioned before, I love spending time in France but it also haunts me since it is the birthplace of my father, the country where he spent his most formative years, the majority of which being refugees, hiding in Vichy France, living with unimaginable fear.  That time and what he experienced in France shaped the man he was to become,  therefore I feel this strange longing to walk a little in his footsteps.

During our vacation we took a side trip to the city of Cahors in the midi-Pyrenees region, about 2.5 hours away from where we were staying.  My dad, aunt and grandparents spent 6 weeks in Cahors during the war.  When the Germans attacked France they lived in Cuise-la-Motte, a small town in the northern part of France.  They were bombed out of their house and spent a few days in the woods with other families and my grandparents decided to travel south and try to get out of France via the Pyrenees mountains, go into Spain, into Portugal and try to get a boat to the United States from Portugal.  They set off on bicycles, my dad riding on the back of my grandfather's bicycle and my aunt on the back of my grandmother's.  They rode mostly in the night when the roads were less crowded and my grandfather felt there was less danger, although it was still risky.  France is a hilly terrain and outside of the major cities there were not yet a lot of paved roads, so the riding must have been treacherous and with two small children in tow and heavy packs on their backs, the journey was slow going.  They had money and gold sent to them by my grandfather's brother who had a flourishing furniture business in Fredericktown, Pennsylvania.  They took shelter in small villages and unlike a lot of other refugees, were able to pay for meals and shelter along the way.  My dad, who was all of 6 years old told me that my grandfather taped his and my aunt's mouths shut on the bicycles so that in case they cried out in their sleep, they would not attract attention.

It took several weeks but they finally reached Cahors and there they stopped and they rented a one room apartment to rest and get their bearings.  My grandfather went out and started inquiring about the best route to Spain through the mountains and he learned that the trip was very dangerous, that many French refugees trying to escape France were killed by Spanish robbers for their valuables.  After discussing the situation with my grandmother, they decided it was too risky to try and escape and that they were better off trying to live quietly somewhere in Vichy, France which was, at least on paper, not directly controlled by the Germans.  My grandfather took some of the gold sent to him by his brother and bought false identity papers which protected them from immediately being identified as Jewish and he made arrangements to move out from the city.  My grandfather went to university in Toulouse, a larger city a few hours away from Cahors.  He traveled to Toulouse by train and met up with a former professor and friend to get some advice.  The professor agreed with him that their best chance was to live in obscurity somewhere, in a small village.  His friend offered him the use of his late parents home in Vacquiers, a small village outside of Toulouse.  So they ended up settling there and living out the war years and my grandfather donated gold to the Church in Vaquiers, next door to their home and the Priest, whom my grandfather befriended,  looked out for them and even hid them in the Church for a few days later in the war when the Nazis entered Vacquiers.

Cahors was an important stop on their journey, it was a turning point, had they not stopped there they  maybe would have been killed trying to get to Spain, so I wanted to go there.

Driving there and through the entire Dordogne valley I couldn't help but notice the similarities between this part of France and the part of Pennsylvania where I grew up.  Rivers creating winding, hilly country single lane roads, trees as far as the eye can see, a smattering of houses, mostly old, some beautifully maintained, others having seen their better days decades before.  Old tires and buckets being used as flower pots.  Small sheds and houses dotting the roadways with faded billboards advertising a nearby restaurant, grocery store or attraction.  The beauty of the rivers with people swimming or boating in small canoes.

I have to admit that I was lost in a reverie every time we got in the car.  I took in the scenery but in my mind's eye, I was driving along the Monongahela River of my youth and remembering the summers I spent on that river, boating with friends, swimming, laying in the sun.  The days, months and years spent in our furniture store in Fredericktown on the banks of the Monongahela, the beauty of Southwestern Pennsylvania, so similar to that of the French countryside.  I was imagining how my dad, aunt and grandparents must have felt as new immigrants to Fredericktown, in their rented house on the banks of the Mon.  They didn't speak the language and were in this strange place, with a strange culture (there were no pain-au-chocolates in Fredericktown), but part of them must have felt at home in this small town on the edge of a riverbank with trees and hills as far as the eye could see.

I have no idea where they stayed in Cahors so we just went to the center of town and walked around and took in the town square, it was market day so there was a lot of activity.  We spent a lot of time in the shade near the merry go round where Maya rode and rode and rode, switching from horse, to spinning car, to swing.  Maya, being young for her age still loves the merry go round and France is a haven for her since they have them in practically every town.

My dad was a lot of things, he was brilliant, charming, funny, engaging but he was also dark, angry and embittered.  Most of all he was mysterious.  My dad raised me and certainly was a profound influence on me, I spent a lot of time with him growing up and lived with him exclusively after my parents' divorce.  But in so many ways there is still a lot I didn't understand about him and I certainly wasn't able to help him.  I understand that and accept it but of course I wish I could have helped him.  

Eight years on from his suicide there are still questions that I will never be able to answer.  And I think maybe that is why I am drawn to France, that perhaps the simple act of walking in or even near his footsteps,  being submerged in the country, language and culture of his birth somehow makes me feel more connected to him and gives me peace in accepting all the unanswered questions he left behind.

My dad had loving, caring parents but his childhood was wrought with fear and that stayed with him for life.  I remember once finding a box of canned food under his bed in our house in California, PA.  I asked him what it was doing there, he told me that he couldn't sleep without it there.  When I asked him why, he got a faraway look in his eyes and he simply said, "I hope that you will never have to learn what fear is." It wasn't the answer I was looking for or an explanation, but I walked away from that conversation knowing that he knew something truly terrible.  

Seeing Maya on that merry go round in Cahors feels like some kind of full circle.  Here she was, my daughter, my dad's granddaughter, in the same city where he had been, not living in fear, but smiling and laughing, running, cavorting, and enjoying herself.

Free.

Something just feels right about that.

3 (ish) Words

I owe this post to my friend Sarah who often poses random but interesting questions to her friends on Facebook.  Sarah by the way has her own fascinating blog chronicling her unique journey as a young mother, a new immigrant and a person who like the rest of us is fighting to find her way in the world.  Her blog is is daring and beautiful.  She's not afraid to write about the hard stuff.  It's a good read, check it out.

Anyhoo, today's challenge laid out by Sarah was to describe your parents in three words.

It was hard to come up with just three, because really, my parents were so many things, 3 words is not enough.  30 words?  Maybe.  As I read through the list of other responses, I found lots of words like supportive, neurotic, inspiring, demanding, loving, overbearing, selfish.  Of course my parents had all this too but I decided to go with the first words that occurred to me.  

And it was clever, independent, tragic.

My parents had a lot of traits in common and that is probably what drew them to each other in the first place.  In asking them both that very question at various points in life, they gave me more or less the same answer - "I liked the way she looked," "He was charming and handsome." Keeping in context that my parents came from a generation where after you finished college you were expected to marry and start a family.  And my parents were true to that expectation.  They met in their senior years (my dad's of college, my mom's of nursing school), they dated, they got pinned.  They both graduated in June of 1957 and in September 1957 they got married.

Anyhow as of late, my dad has been on my mind a lot.  I think that is largely because we are in the cusp of summer, which was always my favorite time of year as a kid, particularly when I was a teenager and lived with my dad.

In summer, my dad was done teaching for the year and even if he taught in summer, as he often did, it was usually only a class or two so he had a lot more free time.  We went out for dinner a lot, during the school year we stuck close to home going to the Acropolis or Alfano's in town or over to Bartoletti's in Fredericktown near the store.  If my dad was in the mood for something more sophisticated we headed over to the Back Porch in Charleroi or our family standby, the Red Bull Inn.

In summer though,  he took me to the symphony at Heinz Hall or to shows at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh and I used to love those evenings with him.

We'd make a day of it, starting off in Shadyside in Pittsburgh, having breakfast or lunch at Pamela's or heading to Bloomfield to Tessaros.  We'd invariably end up in the afternoon in Oakland, walking the campus of Carnegie Mellon when he would tell me of his days there as a student or we'd go to the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of learning and stroll through the Commons Room and tour a couple of the Nationality Rooms which I highly recommend if you're ever in Pittsburgh.

We'd have dinner at family favorite spots Samreny's or Poli's and then we'd get lost in an evening of music, pomp and circumstance.

My dad also gladly shlepped me around a lot in the years before I could drive.  He would gladly take my friends and I to one of the malls in and around Pittsburgh and he would let me get my girl on and he would take the Sunday New York Times and he'd go explore the book store and of course the tool section at Sears and then he'd sit on one of the benches in the mall and read the paper while I shopped and enjoyed myself.

He didn't talk about it much, but as a single dad, there was a part of him that I think felt guilty that I didn't have a mother around to do girl things.  I think because of that he was indulgent about me doing girl things and that is why he would so easily give up a whole afternoon just so that I could shop, try on clothes, makeup and shoes and he never uttered a word of complaint about it.

During high school I spent 4 weeks at summer camp.  He sent me to Camp Tel Yehudah, situated on the Delaware River in upstate New York.  TY as it is known by it's campers is a Young Judea camp and having a Jewish identity and Jewish friends was something which my dad was important.

We lived in a very small town and there were hardly any Jewish kids around.  And while I enjoyed California, Pennsylvania and made good friends there, there was always a part of me that felt different from everyone else.  I was an active member of BBYO a popular youth group and  I enjoyed the weekend get togethers and activities.  I made friends in BBYO but it was pretty cliquey, I never quite made it into the "in" crowd there and I always felt like I was trying too hard.  At camp it was different.  Yes there were cliques but a lot of the kids in Young Judea in Pittsburgh were more down to earth, they seemed to have less to prove and I just fit in there more easily.

So every July I trodded off to the pinnacle of the Young Judea year, spending 4 weeks at Tel Yehudah.  I flew by myself to NYC and met up with the camp there and headed out for the 3 hour ride to Barryville, NY.  I loved camp, I made good friends there, I learned a lot and developed a love affair with Israel which continues to this day.

Still 4 weeks was a long time to be away and there was no Skype, email or Facebook so my dad and I wrote letters, his letters mostly consisting of small notes or something a newspaper clipping of things going on at home or comics or other little snippets he thought I'd find interesting.  Two or three times a week I would dutifully call collect and my dad would want to hear everything about camp, what we did, what we learned about, about my friends.

And midway through the 4 week period, there was visitor's day, where parents could come and see their kids at camp.  Most of the parents that came were those from NYC and the surrounding area.  For kids like me and many others, from farther away, trodding out to Barryville, NY was just too far to come for one day.

But my dad always came.

He would drive 7 hours each way to be able to spend 4 hours with me.  I'd show him around, show him my bunk, introduce him to some of my friends but mostly he enjoyed walking down by the river bank where there was nothing but the sound of the water running over the rocks and nothing but trees and blue skies all around.  We'd talk about home and the family, what was happening at the Store (which was always a common topic in our family) or we talked about the trees or the flowers or the indigenous wildlife of the area.

Those were perfect days, not just because I was young and as you get older your youth takes on a splendor which can only be enjoyed when the times are a few decades in the rearview mirror.  But they were perfect because they were wonderful in and of themselves.

When your parent commits suicide, it can, if you don't pay attention, color every memory with that one horrible, sad, tragic, inexplicable act.  You can forget that there ever was anything wonderful or beautiful.  The pain, that your loved one carried with them and endured until they could endure it no longer as well as your own pain, at the loss which can never be truly explained, take up residence in your head and heart.  If you're not careful, it can eclipse everything else.

Sometimes those beautiful memories are too hard to think about in light of what happened later.

But sometimes, something so inconsequential as a question can bring those beautiful memories back, they can also lay their claim to your mind and your heart and just be wonderful and beautiful in their own right.

Untarnished by any suicide.

Life Imitates Reading

Over the past few months I have been noticing that Maya is imitating more and more.  She´s always been a good at imitations and her tone is pitch perfect.  I cannot tell you how many times Leo and I have been taken aback when she says something in exactly the same words, tone and pitch as we do.

It´s literally like living with someone who has a tape recorder for a mouth. 

It´s so funny to hear Maya say to me, you´re such a drama queen. In the same nasal-cum-Southwestern Pennsylvania tone of voice drah-mah queen.  

If I didn´t know any better I would swear I was talking to someone from dahn moon tahnship.  


And it is not just my Pittsburgh drawl that she can do but she has pitch perfect Dutch, and even pitch perfect English with a Dutch accent.  I can´t tell you how many times I have corrected Maya´s pronunciation of Peter Pan as Maya sometimes refers to it by the Dutch name Pieter (pronounced Pee-tare) Pan.  I tell her it´s not Pieter, but Peter.

That´s usually met with her saying Peter and then muttering something like mommy, stop it with that Peter.  


And now she loves a lot of the same music as our au pair Violah and she loves to dance and she is slowly learning how to play Rummikub since I play that a lot on the computer.  And of course, like her dad she is a whizz with the iPad.

She sees what we do and say and she models it.  Simple as that.


It dawned on me recently that imitation is in a lot of ways the way that you know your child is learning, particularly when you have a child with special needs and your child doesn´t have a lot of homework or has difficulty talking to you about what she did at school that day.

It is often the imitation which clues me into her learning, that her body of knowledge is expanding very slowly every day.

She is still very shy about reading though.  Although I know she can read more than she lets on and she is making progress in school, since January she has moved up one more level in her reading (ka-ching!)  She still will not practice reading at home and any time we try to very by-the-by try to steer her in that direction, she is on the first train outta there.

It´s perplexing because I want her to be able to read, not only because of my fantasy of reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and other books with her but reading is a life changer.  If she doesn´t get good at it, there is virtually no chance that she will be able to be and live independently as an adult.

Reading is a deal breaker.

I had a thought.  Maya doesn´t really see us reading all that much.  The computer and news, sure, but we can just as easily be playing games, blogging or watching tv.   She doesn´t pay that much attention to what we are doing when technology is opened in front of our faces.

Perhaps if she saw us reading, she might follow suit.

I used to be a book junkie.  I devoured books, I was usually reading 2 or 3 books at a time, one for every mood.  But that largely fell by the wayside after I had Maya, at first being too distracted and later wanting what  me-time there was to involve sleep.  I´ve gone back to reading, although I still don´t read nearly as much as I used to, if I read one book a month, that is A LOT.  But most of the time when I read an actual book, I do it outside of Maya´s presence, when she is out with Leo or on my commute to and from work.

I hardly ever read in front of her.

Next week for my anniversary I asked Leo for a Kindle.  I´ve resisted tablets for reading books for a long time as I do love the feel and smell of books in my hand but to be honest, books are super expensive over here and Kindle is most of the time cheaper, plus we just have no place left to store lots of books and I cannot bear to throw even one book away.  I did try reading on the iPad, as of course Leo would prefer to have a second iPad, but the reading is just not as good as it is on a Kindle.  You get a horrible glare even on the grayest and gloomy of days and I´m not even going there.  And to be honest, while I think the iPad is great, I still prefer my trusty laptop to it.  Plus Kindle has the most titles of any e-reader out there.

So, armed with my Kindle, I will start modeling reading for Maya and forgo tv and movie time on weekends in favor of curling up on my favorite chair in the living room and reading.

I have the whole month of August off of work, we are headed for two glorious weeks to the southern part of France, where there is nothing but sun, wine, fois gras, a pool, beautiful gardens and day upon day of solitude and night skies aglow with stars and the backlight of my Kindle.

Let the summer of reading begin!

Can I change my vote?

How many times has anyone said something is like high school?  It's a Mad Lib for the ages.

___________________ (noun) is like high school.  If you are too young to know what Mad Libs are, screw you.

High school is used very often in life to describe anything that is petty, mean, isolating, immature--okay you get the point.

And it's true, high school can be a cold, cruel place or a wonderful place.  And if not cruel, it can be a trying place, a place you can't wait to get out of and for some,  a place that you try to get back to or hang onto.


Pretty typical of small town life, most kids I went to high school with fell into one of two categories.  The stayers and the goers.  I was a goer.  I definitely was in the can't-wait-to-get-out-group.  I did enjoy high school but often  I felt like I didn't fit in a lot of the time and that in order to fit in I had to be something I was not.  I went to a small high school in a small town.  Most of the town's inhabitants, unlike me, were born in this town and lived there their whole lives.  Their parents went to the same high school and grew up with everyone else's parents.  It was not always the easiest place to be an outsider.


To boot we were one of two Jewish families in the town and that made us stand out like a sore thumb.  The majority of people around us didn't know much about Judaism and this was the early 1980's in small town America, political correctness, diversity and inclusiveness weren't exactly the cornerstone foundations of California, Pennsylvania ala 1979-83.  I don't want to paint an incorrect picture here, most people in California were warm, welcoming and kind. There were exceptions, but these were rare.  Still, though it does seem my Jewish identity figured quite prominently in people's minds.  Reading through my yearbook entries it is amazing how for many people, my being Jewish defined me in high school.  One person wrote to me:  stay Jewish and you'll go far.  Now, I am not even sure what that means which is why I can remember it 30 years later, although it is a positive statement.

What I am saying is that for various reasons I was an outsider and that, probably more than any bad time in high school fueled my desire to get out of California, PA.

But I did okay in high school.  I had friends and fun and as Neil Simon once wrote, "I loved it for the most selfish reason of all, because I was young."

Like any other high school, we had our stereotypes.  We had the jerks jocks, the cheerleaders, the beauty queens, the band geeks (although band was considered fairly cool in my school, but perhaps that is because, even though not in the band, I am half a geek myself), there were the brainiacs, the partiers, blah, blah, blah.

I never really fit into group.

I was friendly with a lot of kids from different circles, but was never really a part of them.   I was smart but because I could have a solid B average with the bare minimum of effort, I put no effort in.  I made honor roll but not honor society.  I certainly was not athletic and had never learned how to play an instrument.  In hindsight I think I kept myself out of these circles purposely.  I've always resisted fitting into a particular box as an adult and of course had these tendencies as a child.  Like I said my state of mind in highschool, the hormones of adolescence, feeling different being a Jew in the middle of a Wonder Bread town and being hurt and angry over the loss of my mom and the breakup of our family set the stage for me to keep myself on the outside.

I had my core group of friends who were of the cheerleader-band-brainiac types.  Lovely, sweet, kind girls.  We had a lot of laughs together and sleepovers nearly every weekend, well at least until boyfriends took center stage and we hung out a lot.  We went shopping, we walked around the block at least a bazillion times every summer.  But they, at least to my teenager way of thinking, fit squarely into California and I didn't.

I graduated, went to college, dropped out of college, went back to college, went to graduate school.  Sure, in the first years I enjoyed going back home and seeing high school friends.  I am a person who finds endings tough (child of divorce) so I tried to keep up with my closest friends for as long as possible.  After my dad sold our house, high school friends started getting married and building their own families and little by little that place and those people (with the exception of 1 or 2 exchanges of holiday cards) faded my my mind and were largely only fleeting thoughts.  My connection with California, Pennsylvania vanished.

It was just a distant memory.

Enter Facebook.

I joined Facebook in 2007 at the behest of a few friends.  Living abroad and oceans apart from most of the people you love Facebook is like a G-dsend.  It's a great way to keep in social touch with lots of people and to have daily contact.

I am the poster child for the Facebook time suck and I am not ashamed to admit it.

After a while Facebook really became viral and I started getting friend requests from loads of people from high school.  I am not someone who friends people I don't know.  95% of my friends list are people I know in real life.  The remaining  are bloggers and parents of autistic kids that I don't know in real life but I feel like I know them.

Nearly one-third of my Facebook friends hail from California, Pennsylvania and its surroundings.

And funnily enough a LOT of the more regular contact I have with people are with people from high school.  They look at your photos, they make comments, they like, they're interested, they are genuine and kind and caring.

I've actually developed what I think at least are some real, actual connections with people from California, via Facebook.  People who I knew in high school but had no real connections to.  Now they are some of the people I love exchanging comments with and look forward to the things they are posting about and interested in.  Some of them are people I had not shared more than fleeting hellos with in the hallways of California High School.  People whose labels said enough to me back then to make our contact as little as possible are now some of the people I look forward to hearing from the most.  

More than once reconnecting with random high school people has been used as a prime example illustrating the negative aspects of social networking.  The implication being that social networking kind of forces you to maintain contact with people you don't give a crap about.  And maybe that's true but it's not my experience.  Technology opens up new worlds for people.  While it is not a whole new world, California, Pennsylvania has made me revisit an old world and see it in a brand new light.  I went to high school with some wonderful people, salt of the earth, funny, smart, supportive, genuine, REAL people.

So, while I once marked time in California, PA waiting until the day that I could get out and break free from a place where I didn't quite fit.  Now, 30 years later, after having seen and done a lot of things, having the opportunity to live in two foreign countries, meet lots of people and rack up lots of experiences light years away from California, that it is with some of those very same people, that I feel the most at home with.

How's that for irony?

Oh Detroit, We Hardly Knew Ya

When I took Micro and Macro Economics in college, I felt like I was in a foreign country and didn't speak the language.  I sat in those classes totally baffled scribbling furious notes to try and capture every word out of the professor's mouth so that at home I could try to somehow piece it all together and somehow pass these two courses.  Somehow I got a B in micro and a C in macro but I never really got it, although of course that didn't stop me from using the word widget in a sentence every chance I got to pretend I did.

Of course, my whole life up to that point, I always knew the only economics I would ever need.  It went like this:

"What's good for General Motors is good for the country."

When I was growing up these 9 words were, in everyday language, the cornerstone of the American economy, at least where I was from.  If General Motors was turning a profit it meant that the country was fulfilling the all important healthy economic triangle --companies were manufacturing, people were working, consumers were buying.  I cannot tell you how many times this phrase got thrown around during my youth.  In the last 30 years that phrase has gotten passe, a feeling that this type of thinking was old fashioned, it had exhausted it's worthiness, the world was different now.  All true, but lately I have been thinking that perhaps it was right all along.

To be honest, while growing up my own family's livelihood directly depended on General Motors being in the black.  My family owned a furniture business in the Monongahela Valley in Western Pennsylvania.  Although far from Detroit, our customers largely were people who worked in the coal mines all up and down "the Mon" as it is called by locals.  This area of the world supplied much of the coal for the steel industry which of course was critical to the auto industry.  The Mon valley of my youth was was slightly past its prime but it was a haven for blue collar workers.  Kids were born, grew up, finished high school and went on to find good jobs, union jobs with good wages and benefits, jobs which afforded them houses, cars and the ability to raise children, go to the bar and have money for hobbies like boating, fishing, hunting, motorcycles.  Not rich, not yuppies (who are terribly overrated anyway) but a good life.  Although coal mining is a dangerous, risky job as recent mining disasters have put before our eyes much too often in the last years, in the Western Pennsylvania of my youth, there was plenty of work and the pay and benefits were very good.

And it was the people who risked themselves in the coal mines every day who financed mine and my family's lives.  Mine was truly a middle class existence ala 1970s and 80s America--ranch houses, Chevrolet station wagons (complete with faux wood paneled sides), swimming club memberships, vacations to Florida to visit relatives.  We were not rich, but we had everything we needed.  I wore my cousin's hand-me-downs (what kid of my generation didn't), my mom patched my jeans but my mom also had her jewelry and my parents went out on the weekends and my mom bought whatever she wanted.  It was not a designer lifestyle but we certainly didn't want for anything.

My brother, cousins and I all went to college (all financed by our furniture business) and while growing up my dad and my aunt spent years getting their Ph.Ds -- although my dad technically worked in the store while he was getting his doctorate, "work"  consisted of going to the store only on Saturdays so my grandfather could get the day off and also put together our bi-weekly advertising circular.  My dad spent the better part of 4 years getting his Doctorate full time but nothing changed in our lifestyle so as to be able to afford it.  I had the same toughskin jeans as every other kid (the height of fashion then, trust).  Our stores supported us and my aunt's family while she worked on her own Ph.D (although my uncle did work full time in the business).  In fact when you get right down to it, our life was afforded to us through all those coal miners who went down into the pits of the earth every day.  Although our fingernails were clean, we were just as much a part of the auto industry as everyone else.

 Our store sold a lot of very ugly furniture.  Brown plaid and printed couches with lots of orange and rust and wooden arms and legs sold like hotcakes down at Gross Furniture along with formica dining room tables and orange shag carpeting which we sold in our carpet showroom.  To be fair, this stuff was in style, this was the time when wood paneling lent an air of sophistication to a room, so what can you expect?   I remember once going to the furniture market in North Carolina with my grandparents and I was astounded by all the beautiful furniture, miles and miles of it and I couldn't understand why my grandfather insisted on buying that tacky ugly plaid stuff when there was so much more beautiful things available, leather couches as soft as butter and beautiful sectional brocade sofas in muted colors were so much nicer than the "log pile living rooms" that littered our store. He said simply, "this won't sell in our store as this is not the kind of furniture our customers like."

In the 1960's and 1970's our business boomed.  My grandfather opened additional stores and things were humming along.  Fridays were particularly busy because it was pay day and we were open late on Fridays, precisely so that people could visit us, a convenient two stores down from the bank on their way home and buy themselves a recliner, a kitchen table, a fridge, a tv or whatever else they had their eye on.  There were always customers in the store and I can remember going there as a kid and always trying to guess what people would buy when they came in and often each time I visited, much of what I had seen on the floor was gone.  I used to love to go through the whole store and count how many red "Sold" tags there were on the furniture which meant that soon it would leave our store and be delivered to someone's house.  I remember once being in the office when a customer came in to pay for some furniture he had bought.  He had came to us on his way home to pay the payment on his La-Z-Boy recliner.  My grandfather happened to be in the office when the man came and he was obviously excited to be paying off his chair and asked my grandfather if the chair could be delivered the next day.  My grandfather quietly asked one of the girls in the office how the deliveries looked for the next day and he assured the man that the chair would be on the truck the next day.  He then turned to walk out of the office, I went with him since it was near the end of the day and I was sleeping over at their house that evening because the next day my grandmother was taking me into Pittsburgh, to Saks and to Kaufmanns to buy me some new clothes.  The customer ran over to my grandfather again and happily shook his hand.  My grandfather, not one for small talk, thanked the customer and muttered something incomprehensible and walked away.  The man's hands and fingernails were dirty and when I looked at his face, it had soot on it too as did the white t-shirt he had on under his plaid flannel.  I followed my grandfather silently to his office where he immediately walked into the kitchen adjacent to it (my grandfather to this day is the only person I know to have an actual kitchen in his office -- to be fair it was a kitchenette, but it did have a daybed in it).  I grabbed a pack of lifesavers out of the kitchen and said to my grandfather, "that man was so dirty, why couldn't he clean himself up before coming in."  My grandfather immediately said in his heavy Yiddish drawl, "eet ees dat man's dirt dat pay for us, it ees a living, Dana."  It was a good lesson (one of many that I learned from him).

In the 1980's, things really started to change.  The steel industry had fallen on hard times as the American auto industry was under pressure from Japanese competitors, who were producing smaller, more fuel efficient cars with less maintenance costs and were cheaper than the American Big 3.  Western Pennsylvania really started to transform from a blue-collar haven to a tired, depressed place as wide scale lays offs set in which created record-high unemployment in our corner of the world.  Families who for 2 or 3 generations provided for their families through the mines and mills became poor overnight as jobs dried up, hours and benefits were cut.  Our stores fell on hard times too, we ended up closing all but our main store and our business was scaled back considerably.  Managing a business is cyclical, you have good years and bad years and luckily my grandfather managed the record profits of the good years to ensure survival in the leaner years that came.  Thanks to my grandfather's prudence somehow we were weathering the storm, although my grandfather was also getting older, in 1980 my grandfather was 75 and although he still worked every day it became harder and harder for him to manage everything.  My dad, was teaching by then at a nearby college and spent more time in the store and talked through a lot of things with him on how to keep going.

In 1985 a big flood came to the Mon Valley and wiped out about a third of our inventory.  This was, for my grandfather the straw that broke the camel's back, he decided to retire and my dad took over the store.  Things were changing a lot in our family too, the details are for another post but let's just say there was a falling out and skip over to  that it ended up that my dad bought out my aunt and my grandfather and became the sole owner of the store.  A few years later, as things became even more depressed in the Mon Valley my dad decided to liquidate the business.

While Pittsburgh has certainly recovered from the loss of the steel industry and has even flourished the Mon Valley, a meer 30 miles south of Pittsburgh has never truly recovered.  When things went south for GM and the American auto industry things with south for much of the industrial north including Western Pennsylvania.

Now a couple of decades on from Gross Furniture, in the midst of first the credit crisis and now the debt crisis I come back to those  9 words.  The entire Internet is analyzing-- it is the Republicans, the Democrats, the Tea Party, the Banks, the Real Estate Bubble, the Bush Tax Cuts, Clinton, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Quaeda.

The truth is that there is not any one cause for what is happening in the world economically now, it is lots of things kind of coming together and rushing much the same way that rivers converge on one another, just like how the Monongahela flows north into Pittsburgh and meets the Ohio and Allegheny Rivers to form the Point in downtown Pittsburgh, making one river indistinguishable from the other.  That is how it is, all these causes, great and small just form this economic mess the world finds itself in.

But I come back to the real economic truths ala moi.  A healthy economy is a triangle with three very important points - companies need to be manufacturing, people need to be working (earning money) and consumers need to buy.  This is what is necessary for the economy to stay solid and healthy.  When one of these things is out of balance, it is not good.

The other day I was watching an episode of The Wire and one of the characters said something like:

"...it used to be that America was manufacturing,we were a country that created things, now we are a country with our hands in other people's pockets."

This was probably one of the most profound economic statements I have heard in a long time and it spurned this post.  What do we manufacture now?  Sure we create corporate cultures and fancy accounting and conglomerates and Enrons.  We merge, acquire, buy, sell, trade, sue.  But in the grand scheme of things as a country we create very little.  Manufacturing has been sent to second and third world countries so that profits can benefit from low wages.  We have outsourced and off-shored and consolidated, centralized, de-centralized. We have done this for decades and have slowly but surely eaten away at Middle America.  Corporations grew into conglomerates with resources greater than many countries (and the same rights as people) and a reach so strong that their interests can't do anything but come first.  It is no longer possible for Joe-Six-Pack to get a good paying job out of high school, because we don't manufacture.  Hell, even a lot of MBA's can't get good paying jobs.  When I was a kid a college education was as close to  a guarantee as you could get that you would end up better off than your parents (unless you wanted to be a teacher of course-- then all bets are off).  If you had a college education you had to work really really hard "not" to make it.  Now, a college degree means less than a high school diploma did 30 years ago.  We just keep getting more selective, more exclusive.  I shudder to think what will be required to be successful in 20 years.

I don't have a degree in economics (I chose Political Science and History which means I am by profession cut out to be a contestant on Jeopardy) and I am sure I am missing, omitting or ignoring some important facts.  Or maybe I am just nostalgic for the look of brown plaid sofas and the smell of carpet glue and the view of the Monongahela River from the roof of our store.  But now more than ever I am convinced that the American economy and way of life is in the toilet because we lost sight that America needs to be producing to have a healthy economy.

Or maybe I should stick to autism and chicken soup recipes?

California Dreamin'

California, PA, along the Monongahela River

I know, I know not a very original title, but so it is.


I have been thinking a lot about high school recently.  My reason?  I think it is Friday Night Lights' fault.  I started watching this series in December after avoiding it for many years.  Why?  It's about football and I am so not into sports at all (Steeler Superbowls notwithstanding).  The show is so not about football.  I became addicted to the show and stayed up until all hours watching it, like a good book not being able to put it down, just one more, one more, one more until pretty soon it is 3AM and I have to get up in three hours.  I love the characters and of course, as I always kid Leo, I love watching young guys in tights.  I also love that this show takes place in some crazy fictional parallel universe that is not all that affected by the 24-hour news as entertainment cycle, the society of celebrity and mass consumerism. It takes place in a small town, where small town values are still alive and well, where just as many people dream to get out as desire to stay.  It very much reminds me of California, Pennsylvania, the town where I spent my high school years and that I called home from 1979-1994.


Unlike a lot of the people of Cal, I did not have strong family roots there but moved there in 1979 when my parents were going through their divorce.  Determined to make a new life for us, my dad found a teaching job at the college, now the university and after spending many months looking for a house, we settled on the town of California.  I was familiar with the town, since our family had a furniture store that in town for many years.  My father's roots trace him from France to nearby Fredericktown, just a stretch down the river from California where he was a graduate of East Bethlehem High School (now Beth Center).  When I was very young my dad ran the California store and we would often visit him there on Friday evenings when the store was open later and then we would eat dinner in "The Acropolis" restaurant in town.  My dad ate lunch there most days and the family knew us very well.


When my dad got a teaching job at the college we looked at different places to live, originally my dad wanted a piece of land and we looked at some beautiful houses where my dad promised to put in a pool.  Finally though after looking at a lot of houses we settled on a house in California, in what was called The Harris Plan. I loved the house, but visions of rolling out of bed in summer to the pool faded since our yard wasn't really big enough for a pool.  We decided on that since my dad, as a single parent, who sometimes had to teach night classes, felt safer in this pre-cellphone world if I lived in a house with neighbors close by rather than out in the countryside isolated.  We looked at a few houses in the Harris Plan and settled on our house at 201 Skyline Drive.  I was 13 years old, on the verge of adolescence and struggling with my parents' divorce and my own relationship with my mom which at the time was difficult.  We were both reeling from the divorce in our own way and although I had chosen to live with my dad, it didn't end great with her and our relationship in those years was sporadic and tense.


I was initially kind of bummed out about moving to California.  Our life (save for the 3 years we lived in Miami) had been in Washington, PA.  My grandparents, aunts and cousins were close by and I knew all the kids there.  It was home to me at the time, so while I was happy to be moving out of our cramped little apartment my dad rented during the separation there was a big part of me that was not very happy to have to start over again in another new place.  Although Washington was only 25 minutes away he wanted to live fairly close to the college, without the commute meant that my dad could try to make his schedule so that I wasn't a latch key kid, only seeing him at the end of hte day.  When I was in high school he often started classes in the morning and then was home when I got home from school and one evening per week he taught night classes, so that most days he was home either when I got home from school or shortly after I arrived.  We ate dinner together every evening and a lot of the time I did homework while he prepared his lectures and graded papers.


We moved in June 1979 and the very first day, moving day I was upstairs unpacking my room, the guys from the store had just left and the doorbell rang.  My dad got the door and I heard the sound of young voices at  from upstairs, I was sure they were selling Girl Scout Cookies but then my dad turned to me and smiled and said, "it's for you."  I went downstairs and my dad invited them in and they stood there in our foyer and were explaining to my dad that they had seen the trucks and they had already heard from the neighbors that there was a girl their age moving in so they came over to say hello and welcome me to the neighborhood.  They asked if I could come outside for a little while, I was shocked that they would come looking for me and without even knowing me ask me to hang out with them.  I looked at my dad and he gave me a look which said, go on.  So I walked outside with these girls.  We walked around the neighborhood, they showed me their houses and introduced me to people that we passed on the street and gave me their stories.  Day passed into dusk and we were still walking around, I was meeting people left and right.  By the end of the week we were fast friends and I felt like I had known them forever.  These girls, who were to become my best friends and although now several decades on we don't see each other or talk to each other very much, they are still in many ways the best friends I have ever had.  They adopted me, they accepted me without question and brought me into their world.  Their parents were extremely kind, sensitive and caring toward me.  There was no angle and in the entire 4 years of high school and in our college years, we never had a falling out.  They brought me into their group and we hung out, we played games, we studied together, had a zillion sleepovers, went shopping, we talked about boys, our parents, our lives, our dreams.  I had never made friends so easily or been accepted so wholeheartedly in my life.


California was so chock full of genuine people from all walks of life.  Although the entire Mon Valley at that time and for many decades before was driven by the steel industry and more particular for this area, the coal industry, we lived in a college town so there were also a lot of academic types around as well.  It was quite an eclectic mix of people, most of them old school.  They were though a real community.  When one hurt, everyone hurt.  It was the kind of town when someone was sick, someone came over with a covered dish.  Where weddings and other celebrations were done old school, not in fancy hotels or by chic caterers being herded about by wedding planners and Martha Stewart,  but in fire halls and elks lodges and where the women of the community would band together and cook the food and the entire town would attend.  Although my dad and I were outsiders and my dad, other than his professor friends with whom he would play poker with on weekends, my dad stuck a lot to himself an close to home when he wasn't working.  He had just ended a 20+ year marriage, was licking his wounds and he threw himself into his work.  He really enjoyed teaching and he was really good at it.  I used to love to watch him with his students.  When he had evening classes I would sometimes sit in for an hour or two.  Often in the evenings I swam at the college pool and then would go over and sit in on the second half of my dad's class.  I had no head for computer science but just used to like to watch him.  You could see that teaching energized him and chased away his demons which kept him up at night.  It was just beautiful to see his eyes sparkle when he was asked questions by his students.  On other evenings he manned the computer center or met with students.  I would meet him at the college, we'd go into town and have dinner at the Acropolis or at Alfanos or Saeli's, I would swim or go study at the library with friends and then I would meet him at the computer center and he would drive us home.


School was also a lot of fun and like in town, the people were largely interesting and very nice.  I did not receive a warm welcome from everyone though.  There were people who did not take to me, for what seemed to me to be no reason.  In particular there was a guy in my neighborhood a year older than me in high school, a jock who for some reason hated me on sight.  For some strange reason I dreamt about this guy last night, which is why he is on my mind now and I am bothering to write about this.  I still remember the first time I met him, he was good friends with one of my friends but even when he met me he did not say hello.  It went from total ignoring to cruelty very quickly.  He started throwing rocks at me at the bus stop and in the winter snow balls and he tried win other kids over to torment me as well.  I could be a mouthy girl and I am the first to admit that I can be an acquired taste but for the life of me I could never figure out what I did to this boy to make him hate me so much.  Our house was vandalized once where people wrote sexual expletives out in gasoline on our yard and I always suspected it was this boy but could never figure out why he would do such a thing.  The kicker was that his dad and my dad taught in the same department and I had told my dad about this boy and how he treated me.  He told me also that his dad was very cool toward him at work also for no reason.  Once we had an open house for my dad's department and their families and the entire depeartment showed up except this guy.  My dad  felt that anti semitism may have been the issue because there was just no other plausible explanation, particularly for this man's son to spew such hatred toward me.  I remember seeing him at a wedding about 10 years after graduation and he talked to me as if I was some old friend.  I never got up the nerve to ask him and I really just didn't care, but remember telling my boyfriend at the time, who was my date at the wedding that I was sure he must of thought I was someone else.  I had conflicts with other kids but there was always a reason for that, with this kid there really was nothing.  I had a big mouth and that did get me in trouble sometimes.  I have never been a person that people are tepid about, you either detest me or you love me and that was very true in high school.


  Although my central group of friends remained the girls in my neighborhood, I had a lot of other friends, some were friends that lasted throughout the entirety of high school and others that were friends just for a time.  I didn't fit into any one particular group.  My close girlfriends were cheerleaders, class presidents and NHS types and that wasn't really me, I did well in school but I didn't apply myself very much so I was honor roll but not more. I had friends from a lot of different circles and didn't fit squarely into any high school prototype.  I was too wild to be a goody-goody, too goody-goody to be wild.  While at times it was frustrating, mostly it left me with a very interesting group of friends and a fun high school experience.


Not everything was sunshine and roses in school, after all I was an adolescent and California was a place where a lot of people's parents went to our high school and grew up with everyone else's parents. In some ways, even though the town welcomed me, there were times when I really did feel like an outsider.  But they were very few.  Being Jewish in a small town also was not the easiest thing.  You can say a lot of things about Jews but we are mostly city folk.  There was one other Jewish family in town and I often got questions about being Jewish, most good natured but some not so good natured.  I also joked about it and made fun of myself for being Jewish so I think I also invited people's scrutiny to some extent.  I do think though that many people defined me by my Judaism.  It was different and many people had never been around Jews before.  In my yearbook, about 80% of the things people wrote to me refer to my being Jewish.  It certainly was on people's minds.  A low point was in my sophomore year when I came out of class to find someone had scratched a swastika on my locker.  At that age, I knew about the Holocaust but seemed very remote to me.  I knew a swastika was a bad thing but didn't realize how bad.  Still this was horribly upsetting, I broke down crying in the hall and when my friends finally convinced me to report it to the principal.  I went to speak to him and his initial reaction was not very concerned.  He gave me a "kids will be kids" type of response and told me to brush it off and go back to class and then my sorrow gave way to anger and I was screaming at him that he had to find out who did it and punish them.  He tried to get me to calm down but it was too late, I was totally irrational.  Finally he told me that if I didn't calm down he would paddle me.  I told him that my dad would wipe the floor with him if he touched me.  He said he was going to call my dad and have him come get me because I was going to be suspended for yelling at him.  I asked him, "are you going to do anything about the swastika or just suspend me?" He said he didn't need to do anything, he didn't know who did it, and what did I expect him to do?  I said I expected him to try and find out who did it and punish them or at least to make an announcement that this was unacceptable.  He said it was not my place to tell him what to do and if I didn't watch out he would make me keep that swastika'ed locker the whole school year.  He called my dad and told him to pick me up, that I was suspended for 2 days.  My dad came to the school and went to the principal's office and asked me to wait outside.  He came out 10 minutes later and asked me if I was okay.  I started crying and he hugged me and told me everything was going to be okay.  The principal was a total jerk but I wasn't suspended and we were going to leave school right now and go out for pizza and tomorrow when I came to school I would get a new locker and everything would be fine.  I found out later that my dad threatened to file a complaint with the school board and that he would mention the incident in our synagogue and he was quite sure that a reporter from the Washington Observer Reporter (one of the local newspapers) who was a member of the synagogue would be very interested in this story  I did not speak to the principal for the remainder of my two years there, and refused to shake his hand during graduation.


Despite those things though California was fun and these were isolated incidents.


I had my first teal romance in California too.  When I was a freshman, a senior boy developed a crush on me.  He was a nice guy and kind of shy and we had home ec together and we always joked around .  He asked me out which was surprising to me, I was only 14 and although I had one boyfriend before, it was total kids' stuff, a bunch of stolen glances and giggling to my girlfriends and a few kisses.  This boy in school used to write me letters and leave them in my locker at the end of the day.  Getting those letters was the high point of my day.  They were very sweet and romantic.  But to be honest, I was so young, very immature and pretty well messed up after my parents' divorce.  I did not know how to deal with the attention of a  boy.  I liked the attention and he was a very kind, sweet guy and even at my tender age, I could see that he saw through the very tough walls I built up around me to protect myself from hurt.  Still, I didn't know how to return his affection and was scared and so I strung him along.  He asked me to go to the prom with him and I just didn't know what to do. I wasn't allowed to date so I was afraid to ask my dad and I was so afraid of both being rejected by this boy and even more terrified of actually feeling something for him  that I just did nothing until the last moment and then turned him down.  When I was a senior I didn't go to the prom, I asked a few guys from school but was turned down, at the time I felt I probably deserved that for the way I strung this boy along.  I felt awful for doing that to him but just couldn't do anything else.  Even then though he was kind to me and really sweet but by summer time, just as I was feeling that I might be able to give it a chance, he grew tired of my games and said that he still really liked me but that we could never be more than friends.  Although I saw him less as high school went on, he was always very kind to me.  As an adult I had the opportunity to talk with him and apologize for doing what I did and for hurting his feelings.  He took it kindly and gracefully.  I was glad to learn a few years ago that he is very happily married.  Still, once in a while I get those letters out and they always bring a smile to my face.


I loved summers in California.  My girlfriends and I belonged to one of the local pools and we spent long summer days swimming and soaking up the sun (back when the sun was supposed to be healthy) and warm evening hanging around the neighborhood with the other kids, sitting on the curbs, talking, laughing and piling in kids cars to go to Dairy Queen.  When I was a bit older I made friends with some people who lived in nearby Roscoe and we spent a lot of those summers on the river, boating, water skiing, and swimming and evenings laying on boat docks seeing zillions of stars and lightening bugs talking about everything under the sun.


When I watch Friday Night Lights I am of course intrigued by the characters and the writing, which is really fabulous.  But I think what I like most about it is that even though the fictional Dillon, Texas and California, Pennsylvania are far apart geographically, there is so much about them that is similar.  I don't think I have ever met 'realer' people than I have in California.  Hard working, genuine, honest, G-d fearing people some of whom dreamed of nothing more than having a family and passing the years with their family, friends and neighbors, lives revolving around high school sports teams.  When I was in high school, very much like in Dillon, Texas, Friday nights were about football.  We didn't have a team as flashy or good as in Dillon but the football field was still full of flesh and blood people rooting their hearts out for their kids, grandkids and for their town.  Winters were about basketball and summers, baseball.  When I watch FNL, part of the appeal is that it takes me back to a simpler time in my life, a time when, even without knowing it then, I didn't have a care in the world, or as Neil Simon once wrote in one of his movies (I am paraphrasing), "I loved it for the most selfish reason of all, because I was young."


I am a city girl in my heart and unlike many others I didn't have roots in California.  My dad sold our house in '94 and I have only been back a few times since then.  My life post high school has taken me from Erie to State College to Tampa to Pittsburgh to Tel Aviv and finally to Amsterdam.  I have had a lot of adventures and via Facebook I have been able to reconnect with a lot of people in all those places, including California.  Even though I know small towns are not for me, I have always craved the city, with its endless possibilities, culture, anonymity and action and I know the city is where I belong.  Still, I am very glad to have had the experience of living in a small town as there is a sense of community, bonds and genuine-ness (I know it is not a word) that cannot be found in cities.  I am a better person for having lived in a small town.  


I am happy that even for a short time California, PA was my home and in some sense, it always will be.