DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN

There was a poignant moment during our Thanksgiving in Maryland when, after the meal, after talking with my cousin about the suicide in her family and my dad’s precarious condition and my husband’s job loss and the massacre in Mumbai, all forty of us cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and kids joined together to sing songs while my eldest strummed his guitar, and for a small moment, however falsely, all felt right in the universe. The next morning Dad woke up with a belly full of fluid and a body wracked with pain and had to be rushed to the hospital.

No one knows, as of this writing, what’s going on with my father’s bloated, infected abdomen, but it’s not good and most likely a harbinger of things to come. Even so, after he was given pain killers and was feeling a bit better, Dad looked around at his hospital room at my three sisters, my mother, and me and said, “Look, isn’t this great? Because I happened to get sick during Thanksgiving weekend, we get this quiet moment together, all six of us. How lucky is that?” I am going to try to see the bright side of this situation, as my father always does, but we are made from different stuff, he and me, and luck is not the word I’ve been using of late, although it does rhyme with one I’ve been yelling in anger.

As my sisters and I were about to leave the hospital late last night, the gastroenterologist said that a Dr. Machete would be paying a visit the following morning. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Dr. Machete?”

My doped up Dad didn’t miss a beat. He smiled mischievously and said, “I once knew a framer named Mr. Frame.”

Today they drained three liters of fluid from his abdominal cavity, and by the time I left the hospital, it looked as if three more had accumulated in their place. Meanwhile, we gingerly discussed our plans for the summer while Dad took a walk down the hospital corridor, clutching his grandson in one arm, his IV pole in the other.

...are finally up on my dad's cancer blog.

Last night, I went with my friend Josh to see his friend, the actor Frank Langella, play the lead in “A Man for All Seasons” on Broadway. Josh is one of my closest friends, and my parents have always treated him like a son, and he flew all the way from his home in London to attend the b’nai mitzvah, plopping himself next to my father to watch the service. Josh and I have been through a lot together—we suffered through Beowulf in college, we lived in Paris at the same time, he met my husband Paul the night after I did (and gave his immediate seal of approval), and we try to meet up at least once a year, somehow, somewhere, to catch up on each others’ lives. Neither of us is at our best right now. Josh and his wife finally decided to get divorced, after a year of separation, just two days before his flight; I’m trying to keep it together under my own circumstances but failing. (My eyes are so bloodshot and weary that yesterday, in the elevator of our building, our neighbor’s 3-year-old daughter Stella came up to give me a big hug, and her playdate, who’d never met me, turned to Stella and said, “Is that your grandma?”)

In retrospect, we probably should have gone to see a comedy instead, but it was nevertheless a treat to see Langella play Sir Thomas More, a man who is condemned to death for refusing to publicly approve of the marriage of King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn. He is a man of conscience, who will not bend according to what’s fashionable or good for his career or will place him in a position of power, and in this he reminded me, in so many ways, of my father, who, as a young associate at Covington and Burling, refused to serve the legal needs of the tobacco industry, even though he was told his career would suffer as a result.

At the end of the play, More is about to climb a long staircase, at the top of which stands the executioner, but first his daughter runs over to give him a hug. She collapses into his arms, sobbing. “Have patience, Margaret, and trouble not thyself,” says More, trying to comfort her. “Death comes for us, even at our birth—even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.”

At the end of the play, Langella invited Josh and me up into his dressing room, and I asked him to repeat that final speech. (Actually, I said, “Do you remember the final words you say to your daughter before you climb up the stairs to die? I’d really like to hear them again,” and Frank looked at me, bemused, and said, “Of course I do. I speak them every night.”) So he humored me and delivered the lines again, his voice sonorous and breathtaking, and I hugged my friend Josh goodbye, trying not to cry, hoping that the next time we see one another, things will be a little bit better for both of us.

When my eldest was ten years old, we went to a Bar/Bat Mitzvah meeting at our local synagogue, where we were told that it would cost $6000 to reserve our child’s spot on his big day. Living in the real world, on a middle class income, with an older son and a younger daughter born 21 months apart, we decided, right then and there, that instead of spending $12,000 for the two of them in a short span of time, we would take the whole family to Israel for a joint celebration—a b’nai mitzvah, or “double” mitzvah—during the three month period when my son would still be 13 while my daughter turned 12. We figured we’d scale the Masada at dawn, read the Torah at the top, then climb down in time for a nice felafel sandwich and a bottle of wine.

It would be both meaningful, we thought, and, because of the frugal way we travel, probably cheaper than the cost of renting the shul for one mitzvah, let alone two. We presented the idea to our immediate family, and they all said they were in, with the caveat that our parents would probably skip the whole hiking at dawn thing and take the cable car with our toddler up to the summit. My daughter, a climber at heart, was thrilled. My son was relieved. Unlike his sister, who attends a public school, he’s a scholarship kid at a private school, where one of the bar mitzvahs he attended, at the top of the Mandarin Oriental, was decorated with massive paintings of the bar mitzvah boy’s face, painted by a well-known artist, and included, among a seemingly endless array of activities, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, make-your-own hat, and make-your-own skateboard.

We started planning for the Masada b’nai mitzvah in earnest with our children’s Hebrew school teacher. But then life, as it always does, got in the way. The very week we were starting to look into hotels and flights, eight months shy of the big day, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 2-6 months to live.

At first Dad told us to keep our plans, that we should not change anything about our lives because of his illness. I had a novel coming out in October, and I stuck to my plans to go on a book tour, as he’d asked me to do, but having the b’nai mitzvah in Israel without my father was unthinkable. I wanted him to be there to see my children experience this right of passage, plus what if the week we went to Israel without him was the week he…no, it was too much to bear.

I started looking into the cost of New York City party venues, just to gauge the cost of doing both the ceremony and party in one spot, here where we live, sooner rather than later. This was back in August, when the entire family had gathered at my parents’ house on the Delaware shore, for what we imagined might be our last family vacation with our father. The numbers I was quoted were alarming: $6000, just to rent a space for three hours. Another $10,000 for food, drinks, DJ, etc. And that was at the allegedly cheap place above the bowling alley.

“What if we don’t serve anyone dinner?” I said, when I got off the phone with one of the places.

My friend from childhood and her mother were visiting with my father when I asked this. “You can’t do that!” they both said. “It’s a bar mitzvah!”

I didn’t agree, but I nevertheless spent hours poring over venues on the internet, trying to find an affordable solution, with dinner, until I decided to table the whole concept until after vacation. Time spent trying to find a cheap venue in New York was time spent away from my father at a moment when neither of us had any to spare.

Then, in September, I went to hear my friend Jonathan’s band, I’m Not Jim, at the Housing Works Used Bookstore Café on Crosby Street in Soho. A non-profit bookstore and café during the day, which donates its proceeds to those in need, the place had been transformed into a performance hall. No, there weren’t enough chairs for everyone in attendance, but the sound system was excellent, the vibe down-to-earth, and as I sat there listening to the music I thought, here’s where I should do it! I’d been to various book parties at the store in the past, and they’d been great. It wasn’t the Mandarin Oriental, but it was a cool enough space that my son would save face. Plus at $500 an hour—most of which would go directly to AIDS/HIV relief and to job-training for the homeless—we could throw a three-hour party, with an hour on either end for set-up and clean-up, all for a well-spent $2500. Plus if we asked every guest to bring a book to donate to the store, that would further fulfill the whole ethos of the word mitzvah (“good deed.”)

Yes, there were restrictions: the party couldn’t begin until 8:00 P.M., after the store closed for business, and we were limited to 200 guests, but this meant I could keep the guest list lean and child-centric while stipulating on the invitation that we’d only be serving dessert. (Housing Works has its own non-profit catering company which is both excellent and cheaper than most, and it employs the formally unemployed and/or homeless as wait-staff and bartenders.)

We held the party on the night of November 22nd, two days after my father had to go in for emergency surgery to put a stent in his bile duct. (His liver is now riddled with tumors, one of which was blocking the duct.) It looked as if he wouldn’t make it to the party. After he was released from the hospital, he was rushed back for a morphine and IV drip the next morning. But the day of the ceremony he rallied, and my mother drove him from Potomac, Maryland to New York City, and though he screamed in agony for most of the trip, he was there to see my children read their Torah portions and perform Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence,” the song he’d asked them, in a fit of pathos back in August, to play at his funeral.

The venue, packed with friends and family, looked, as my friend Adam later told me, like a shul in Krakow circa 1931: guests were sitting on the floor, hanging over the balcony, leaning up against bookshelves. My two year old and my sister’s two year old ran around the room, wreaking havoc. We clapped and sang along to the closing Havdallah service, which my bar mitzvah boy strummed on his guitar. We listened to my daughter compare her luck with having her grandfather present at her bat mitzvah to Obama’s unfortunate timing, winning the Presidency a day after his grandmother’s demise. And when we danced the hora afterwards, circling around the dance floor, ecstatic to have my father present and alive, we hoisted the dying man aloft on a chair and bobbed him up and down to the beat of music, his cherubic smile hovering above us as it inevitably will forever, whether he’s physically present with us or not.

When it came time to pay Housing Works at the end of the night, the final fee was far less than we’d expected. Hearing that my husband had just been laid off from his job, two of our friends, Anne and Ann, had simply paid off a significant portion of our bill: a double mitzvah, indeed. Meanwhile, in the back of the store, ten new boxes of books, all contributed by our guests, were awaiting sorting and shelving.

“We hosted a big literary event last weekend,” one of the staff told me, “and everyone was supposed to have brought in a book, too, but even though they were in the profession of writing—they were authors!—their donations barely scratched the surface of yours.”

“That’s so great!” I said, signing the Mastercard bill, hoping we’d have enough funds to cover it at some nebulous point in the future.
________________________________________

Because many parents with soon-to-be bar and bat mitzvah-aged kids asked us how we pulled off a party in less than two months and for less than the cost of the shul, herewith are thirteen rules for keeping it simple:

1) Forget the shul: Yes, purists will be offended by this one, but it’s important to remember that a Jewish boy becomes a bar mitzvah on his 13th birthday, a girl on her 12th, no matter whether or not he or she ever steps foot in a shul, and $6000 spent to reserve a spot at the bema is $6000 that might be better spent elsewhere. A book store in Soho is untraditional, yes, but for the “people of the book,” as we Jews are often called, really, why not?

2) Don’t rent chairs: Chairs cost $4 a piece to rent. Housing Works had around 60 chairs available, plus staircases and a balcony overlooking the service. We told the kids to sit on the floor, the adults took the chairs, and those who came late just found a place to stand. Since the service only lasted half an hour, it wasn’t a big deal.

3) Don’t invite too many people: Or rather, invite as many of the kids’ friends as possible but only those friends of yours who have either supped at your table or have asked your family, kids included, to sup at theirs. As for relatives, those who barely know the kids probably don’t even want to be invited anyway. Stick to immediate family and only the closest of distant relatives.

4) Design and print the invites yourself: I designed our invitations on Microsoft Word and had them printed at Kinko’s. Each 8 x 11 ½ sheet can hold two invites, which Kinko’s will then gladly slice down the middle. For envelopes, I bought simple 5x7 peel-and-seal white ones in bulk at Staples. Of course, Evite is always an option, but then there’s the issue of where to email the invitation. Father? Mother? Kid? Are the parents divorced? Does the child even have his own email? It just seemed simpler to send out a paper invites to the child’s home address. Also, you can set up a free rsvp address on gmail instead of printing response cards: We took koganrsvp@gmail.com, but I bet if you hurry, you can reserve “yournamersvp” @ gmail.com right now.

5) Buy your dress clothes online: I was on book tour when I was planning the b’nai mitzvah, so I bought my Isaac Mizrahi for Target dress at target.com for $39.99. Yes, I did get a little miffed when I saw the same dress a week later marked down to $31.99, but whatever. I can imagine a Barney’s tag on it for ten times the price I paid.

6) Ask your friends and relatives to be the photographer and videographer: My friend Mark runs a hedge fund by day, but he is also one of the most talented photographers I know. My brother-in-law Todd is a film director who works at Netflix. As for formal portraits, after my children got dressed, I took a few shots of them in our living room at home, before we left for the service.

7) Go off the beaten track to find a DJ and do not hire extra dancers or “facilitators”: I asked my son, who’d already experienced a year’s worth of bar mitzvahs, to recommend his favorite DJ of all of them, but when I called the kid’s mother and found out the cost—“They start at around $6500, but depending on the number of extra dancers and facilitators you hire, it can go all the way up to $65,000”—I decided to google “Bar Mitzvah DJ” to see if I could find a cheaper alternative. This, too, was a bad idea on many levels, financial only one of them. Then I asked a friend, whose job often involves throwing parties, and she directed me to popshops! dj’s unlimited, owned and operated by a lovely woman in Brooklyn named Colleen, who was willing to work within our limited budget. In fact, when she found out the reason for the “emergency” b’nai mitzvah, she even cut us a pity discount. After we’d already agreed to use popshops!, my friend Michael told us about his former assistant Sarah, aka the DJ ultragrrrl, who comes from an orthodox Jewish family and was happy to help out a friend of a friend for a reasonable bar mitzvah fee as well, had we not already signed a different contract. College students were going to be my next line of defense, if none of these other options worked out.

8) Buy all that blinky-light glow stuff and yarmulkes online: I was told no bar mitzvah is complete without glow necklaces and blinky light magnetic things you stick on your clothes and earlobes while you’re dancing. I begged—and still beg—to differ, especially after I found out that many of the bar mitzvah DJ’s will charge you thousands of dollars to provide them. Then I found them, quite reasonably, online at websites such as flashingblinkylights.com, where we gave in to the insanity and bought ours, and yeah, okay, they were cool. Suede yarmulkes, printed with children’s name and the date of the event for free, can be purchased cheaply as well, if you order in bulk. We bought ours at mazeltops.com, because we liked their name.

9) Don’t rent a Torah: Because we had our service after sundown, and we had orthodox relatives on my husband’s side who would have been offended by a Torah reading after sundown, we never considered renting a Torah for the night, but I’m told it can add a significant hit to one’s budget and is often a logistical nightmare. Our children read from a photocopy of their Torah portion, and this was fine.

10) Serve cupcakes and drinks in plastic cups: If you invite everyone for “desserts and dancing” at 8:00 P.M., they will hopefully understand to eat dinner before coming. Also, instead of champagne for the adults, we ordered prosecco, which is considerably less expensive.

11) Forget the coat check attendant: I don’t know about you, but I’m happier when I get to hang my own coat anyway. I get nervous walking around with the claim ticket shoved halfway down my index finger, hoping it doesn’t get lost.

12) Don’t hire a babysitter for your terrorist of a two year old: Actually, scratch that one. It would have been $75 well spent. Oh, well.

13) Remember, this is a party for an adolescent: You’ll have plenty of time to go overboard for the kid’s wedding. But really? A book store such as Housing Works would be an excellent place to get married.

My father’s condition worsened today—he was in a lot of pain and completely dehydrated after his surgery—so my mother had to drive him back out to Johns Hopkins for an IV drip and a morphine injection. I told the kids this morning that their grandfather might not make it to their emergency b’nai mitzvah, even though the “emergency” is my dad’s cancer and our desire for him to see them mark this passage into adulthood while he is still alive. They were obviously upset but understood the issues at hand.

I just spoke to Dad on the phone, from his hospital bed, and he sounded drugged out and groggy but insistent that he would make it. My mother told me not to promise the kids anything yet. I told my dad not to push it: if he feels like shit in the morning, he shouldn’t come, end of story.

I consider myself somewhere between die-hard atheist and an agnostic, but God, let me just say this: if you can make my father well enough to come up here to New York for the b’nai mitzvah tomorrow night? I won’t slay my firstborn son, but I will save you a disco glow necklace and a cupcake.

So I take my daughter to West Side Judaica, the Jew supply store around the corner from us, to buy her and her brother tallises (a.k.a. tallitot) for this weekend. A tallis, for all you heathens, is a Jewish prayer shawl, worn during morning prayers and on Shabbat. My kids’ ceremony will take place after Shabbat, but no matter: the symbolism—the donning of the shawl for the first time—feels more important than the actual letter of the law.

We walk into the store, and the nice, elderly, bearded Hasid who always helps me buy my Hannukah candles every year leads us to the cheap bins. (An expensive tallis can run over $400. The cheap ones are $24.99.) “She’s having a bat mitzvah already?” he says, looking at my tiny daughter, who could still pass for seven or eight.

“Yeah, well, she’s only eleven, but she’ll be twelve soon, and my dad’s dying, so we had to do it now.”

“He’s not dying!” says the Hasid. “Just pray, miracles happen. What does he have exactly?”

“Pancreatic cancer.”

“Oy,” says the Hasid. “That’s not a good one.”

I am hoping he’ll add another, “Just pray, miracles happen,” but even the Hasid seems to understand the limits of God’s cancer-curing abilities.

The man fishes out a tallis and places it on my daughter’s shoulders with only the slightest sense of discomfort, even though I know for him it’s utter blasphemy for a woman—a girl!—to be wearing such an item. (Girls were not even recognized as bat mitzvah in this country until 1922.) And then, though I’ve been keeping it together really well of late—okay, so maybe I teared up a little bit last night when the kids were practicing together, but really, that was totally containable—when I see Sasha wearing that shawl, and I think about all those shawls stretching back through history, and my dad lying there in the hospital, with a giant tube stuck down his throat, and my daughter in her isolette, on the day she was born, I burst into tears and cannot stop. At all.

“Just pray!” says the Hasid. “Keep praying!” And I think to myself, when Sasha’s done with her shawl on Saturday night, maybe I’ll borrow it.

The Hasidic woman in the wig manning the register takes my items and hands me a box of tissues. “Here. Blow,” she says. “The life cycle ceremonies are always the hardest. That’ll be $54.08.”

Last night, as I was sitting with my daughter in the bathtub after dinner, teaching her how to shave her legs for the bat mitzvah on Saturday, our two year old, reaching for his blankie, fell and smashed his face into the corner of his sister’s bed, sprouting the nastiest black eye any of my three children have ever had. Meanwhile, my mother was calling to say that my father’s bile duct is now being blocked by the tumor, so he has to go for surgery at 10 AM this morning to clear it. The reason we’re having this “emergency” b’nai mitzvah for my kids, five months before we were supposed to, is so that my father could be here to see it. But I understood the risks going in: when I planned the event, five weeks ago, running off to Kinko’s to print homemade invites that day, so they could be sent out that day, I was just hoping he’d still be alive by November 22nd.

I got out of the bath, wrapped a towel around myself, and passed out on my bed. For the entire night.

“Please, Dad, of all things, do not worry about the b’nai mitzvah,” I told my father this morning, as he was driving with my mother to Johns Hopkins for the surgery. “If you don’t make it up here to New York, we’ll videotape it, and you can see it that way, and then the kids can do their Torah portions live and in person when we’re together for Thanksgiving.”

“I’ll make it,” he said, sounding scared and small.

“Your father’s yellow,” said my mom.

“Take care of him,” I said.

A note on the new title of this blog. It has been pointed out to me that blog-o-rama, which I thought was original-o-rama, turns out not to be. I then typed “deblog” into Google blogs and realized every blogging Deborah out there has one. Even “Deblog! Deblog!”, which I thought was sort of clever, in that late seventies nostalgia kind of way, was just as shopworn as the plots of Fantasy Island.

So: MATERNAL COMBUSTION it is. I’ve taken it from the subtitle of my new book, Hell is Other Parents: And Other Tales of Maternal Combustion, which you should really pre-order right now. (Or perhaps you'd like to support the dying art of novel-writing?) When I plugged the phrase into Google this morning, I saw that those wacky Car Talk dudes used it for the title of one of their CD’s, but no matter. They’re not mothers, I like it, and I have no time to come up with anything better.

My father and son came home from seeing Star Trek in LA late last night. “Have you eaten dinner yet?” my dad asked.

“Um, it’s nearly midnight,” I said, blowing my nose.

“I know, but I’m hungry.”

Both my sister and mother had called to warn me that Dad wasn’t taking care of his diabetes in this whole pancreatic cancer mess—he was eating too much refined sugar or not enough food, he was having wild swings between sugar highs and near-fatal lows, he needed to be watched and coddled and fed at regular intervals. (Like an infant, I thought. Or a zoo creature.) So despite the fact that I’d spent the morning chasing my two year old around a playground, the afternoon shooting a client and his two year old outside in the blustery wind, and the evening eating milchik and avoiding politics at the in-laws, despite my obligation to wake up at 6 AM to walk the dog and get the three kids off to their schools in three different directions—north, south, east—before sitting down to start a new book so I can get the first fifth of my contractual advance so we don’t starve, I told Dad I’d accompany him both to his hotel and to his post-midnight feast.
The diner nearby happened to be open until 1:00 AM (I heart New York), so the two of us checked Dad in at the front desk, took his bags up to his room, found his insulin man-purse, and joined the inebriated, the addled and the otherwise mentally compromised downing milkshakes and burgers at 12:45 A.M. on a school night.

After I steered him away from the dessert and waffle page, Dad ordered a Thanksgiving turkey dinner. I nursed a tea. We talked about his trip, about how proud he is of his grandson, about his excitement over the emergency b’nai mitzvah we’re throwing for him (and tangentially for the kids) this Saturday. I read him the brief entry I’d written on his cancer blog, and his only response, aside from a few self-aware giggles, was, “Jacob’s face doesn’t come at the halfway point of the Star Trek trailer. It comes at 1 minute, 17 seconds.”

The trailer, it should be noted, is approximately two and a half minutes long.

This morning, I let my daughter skip her first two periods of school, so she could have breakfast with her grandfather. I thought about lying on her excuse note, claiming a doctor’s appointment or one of those magically-cured-by-10-AM illnesses, but then I said fuck it, just tell the truth: Please excuse Sasha’s tardiness. Her grandfather has pancreatic cancer, and she had an opportunity to spend an hour with him.

Had I known the kind of outpouring of sympathy from Sasha’s school that note would generate, I’d have been using that dying grandfather excuse for years.

Dad said he’d read about a Calder exhibit at the Whitney he wanted to see before he flew back to DC, and I haven’t had a day off in two months, so we hopped in a cab and went to the Whitney which, it being Monday, was closed. We stood outside the locked museum door, disappointed and shivering. Dad asked if I knew of a place to get a cup of tea, and we walked up Madison Avenue until I spotted the Carlyle Hotel. “Hey, isn’t there an expression, ‘Tea at the Carlyle’?” I said.

We both shrugged and headed inside.

Somebody famous and in danger of assassination must have been staying there, because the place was swarming with cops and paparazzi, which made me wonder whether all those people taking up every free seat in the cozy tea room were there for the frisson of regular tea or celebrity.

“You know,” I said, as we sat alone in the frigid anteroom, wearing our coats to stay warm. “If you’re nauseous, you should ask your doctor to prescribe you some pot. It’s legal, if you have cancer.”

This led to one of my father’s long, meandering monologues about how the US Supreme Court decision to allow the medical use of marijuana was directly responsible for his finally winning his case against the US Navy, who were using the inhabited island of Vieques for target practice. (Trying to follow his logic, I have to admit, felt a little bit like being stoned.) Then Dad sighed. “I don’t really want to smoke pot, but I suppose I could be persuaded to eat a marijuana brownie.” This from a man who once left a 1969 party at our neighbors’ in a huff, after one of the guests pulled out a joint.

“That’s a good idea,” I said, thinking, if that day ever comes, my darling father? I’ll join you.

We said our goodbyes. He had to zip off to the airport. I had to zip down to Housing Works, to drop off two bagfuls of donated books and to meet with the staff about the b’nai mitzvah battle plan. “Here’s a check from one of my son’s friends,” I said, handing a $36 donation to the cashier.

“A good Jewish number,” said the man standing next to me, whom I assumed was another customer. “I’m Justin Rocket Silverman, from the New York Post. I’m doing a story on this place. Do you mind if I contact you about your bar mitzvah this weekend?”

I’m sorry, but can we pause here for a moment to say this kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life. Sitcoms, sure, but real life, no.

And then, even though I know better, even though I’ve spent half my life on the other side of the microphone, waiting to pounce, I started spewing to this stranger, haphazardly and furiously, flitting from here to there at random, sounding more and more like my unapologetically meandering father. “My father’s dying,” I said, forcing this poor reporter to listen to my rantings because I needed to talk, to digest my morning the way my father no longer can digest his food. “He’s dying.”

This was the week that got away. I was sick, then I got sicker. I had to perform on stage, sick. I had to prepare a lecture and give it. I had to be the guest speaker at a book group meeting about my novel. I had to meet with my agent to discuss my ideas for the next novel. I had to attend a parent-teacher conference. I had to organize a photo shoot. I had to beg book editors to review my novel. I had to hear, over and over again, people just aren’t reading novels. I had to deal with all sorts of last minute minutiae for my kids’ b’nai mitzvah next weekend. I had to finish my application to teach at the New School, which required writing a bunch of stuff, including a statement about my teaching philosophy. Since I’ve never really thought about my teaching philosophy, I had to invent one. I had to tour a pre-school. I had to do my expenses from my trip to San José. I had to pull a shard of glass out of my daughter’s toe.

I had to pack my eldest son’s suitcase. I had to escort him to JFK airport, where he was meeting my father to fly out to LA to see a private screening of Star Trek, organized by the film’s director after he found out Dad is dying and might not make it to opening night in May.

I had to try not to cry, after saying goodbye to my dad, because his normally 210 lb frame is now down to 163.

I had to figure out how my husband and I will pay next month’s rent.

I had to reread the book of Job, to remind myself that even in these hard times, I'm lucky: I've got my family, a roof over my head (for now, at least), and aside from the minor annoyance of a sore throat and cold, my health.

All this to say, sorry for the lapse in posting. It’s been a long, glorious, horrible, stressful, wonderful, blogless week.

This morning, amidst a pile of trash on the sidewalk, a massive dollhouse awaited demolition in the jaws of a garbage truck. Actually, it wasn’t so much a dollhouse as it was the wooden frame of a dollhouse, about five feet wide and three feet tall—the thing was huge!—and I paused in front of it, trying to figure out whether it had once been a dollhouse, and someone had pulled off its walls, or whether it had had every intention of one day being a dollhouse, but the person building it had run out of steam.

Either way, looking at it sitting there, alone on the wet sidewalk, I felt a nagging sense of loss. If a kid had been strong enough to pull off its walls, that kid was now too old to enjoy playing with it. If the parent constructing it had simply stopped midstream, which seemed the more likely scenario, what did that mean? How could he/she have put all that work and love into creating such an enormous, beautiful frame and then…nothing? Did its architect run out of energy, time, money? Did the child for whom it was being built…no, I couldn’t go there.

Last week, the old man who lived on the seventh floor of my building was found dead in his apartment. Or let me rephrase that: there was a smell. An awful, horrible odor of decay, familiar to me from my past life covering wars, and I could smell it all the way up on the fifteenth floor, inside my apartment, in every room. The police finally investigated its source when the man’s next door neighbor, a lovely German woman pushing her two young children in a stroller, threw up all over the landing floor while waiting for the elevator.

The old man had been crotchety and unkempt, and every afternoon he would sit in the lobby, reading his junk mail with a magnifying glass. About a year ago he lost his magnifying glass, and he put a sign in the elevator asking if anyone had stolen it, offering a reward of a dollar for its return. He was apoplectic without that magnifying glass, and he had no money to buy a new one, so one of our neighbors simply bought him another one and left it in front of his door. Our other neighbors called him the “mail exhibitionist,” and there was something to that moniker: he was clearly not a social creature, by any stretch of the imagination, but he was human, after all, and his connection to the world consisted of letting us all know, in the only way he knew how, that he received mail, damn it, just like us, and he was going to read it right there on that lobby bench in front of us, in his bathrobe, to hell with what we thought about him.

I watched the garbage truck devour the dollhouse in a single gulp. Then I came home and spotted an ambulance outside my building: not an unusual sight, in a building full of octogenarians. The paramedics were working slowly, as if whomever they’d come to fetch this time were either not in such bad shape or not in any shape whatsoever. I held the front door open, so they could get the stretcher through, and I rode up the elevator with them and made small talk, but I didn’t ask whom they’d come to fetch. The old man with the magnifying glass, the abandoned dollhouse: it was already too much to digest.

So I have to perform tonight in the Afterbirth show, and instead of practicing my lines, I’ve been staring into my closet, wondering what to wear onstage. One of the nice things about being a full-time writer is that every morning, I wake up and put on my uniform of choice: jeans, white t-shirt, sweater, Frye boots. It never really varies much from that, except for in the summer when the sweater is either a light one or non-existent, and the boots become sandals or my blue Puma sneakers, and maybe I’ll throw caution to the wind and wear brown socks instead of white. But really? I prefer the white.

I wear the uniform because it feels comfortable for sitting in front of a computer, and because I don’t have to change when the kids come home, and because in it I feel the most like me, which is essentially a frozen college-aged version of me, circa 1988. I know, it’s kind of pathetic, but here it is twenty years later, and I don’t see me transforming into a swan anytime soon. I wore corporate clothes for six of those years, and I hated who I was in them, never mind the clothes themselves. Plus I never really have to think when I get dressed in the morning: I just grab and go. It’s the sartorial version of Hot Pockets.

The uniform never gives me any trouble, until I have to get dressed up, and then I start to panic. Last night, I went to my friend Dominic’s 50th birthday party, and I just wore the same outfit I bought to wear on the Today Show. I’d spent a whole month sweating over that one, so I figured it had to be good enough for a birthday party. Nevertheless, I was jealous of our friend Marc, who showed up to the party wearing his uniform of choice: jeans and a sweatshirt. He looked so comfortable!

Tonight I’m telling a story about driving alone with a toddler for two whole days up to Maine, just to see my eldest son perform in his camp play, but when we get there, well, I don’t want to ruin the story, but let’s just say chaos ensues, and I end up missing the whole play. But what does one wear to tell such a story?

Part of me would like to say to hell with it and wear the uniform. The other part knows this would be wrong. Problem is? That part of me never knows what would be appropriate instead. A dress? I could wear my book tour dress, an Isaac Mizrahi for Target number I picked up online for $9.99, after my friend Suze, who knows about such things because she’s a fashion editor at Glamour, sent me the link in reply to my email of desperation. Suze does a lot of their makeovers as well. She’s been dying to get her hands on me for years.

But is a dress appropriate? Should I wear jeans and a nice blouse? Do I even own a nice blouse? What about my hair? It’s raining outside, and I’ve got hair that frizzes easily.

At least I don’t have to worry about make-up: I’ve got a full supply I purchased back in 1993, to wear to my wedding.

UPDATE: After trying on seventeen different outfits, all of them wrong or uncomfortable in some fundamental way, I went with the old Today Show dress standby, only without the blouse underneath, and guess what? Jeans would have been fine.

See this post on the Huffington Post

Okay, so my Redbook editor just emailed to say she’d been axed. My husband was just downsized from his media tech job. His twin brother just lost his hedge fund job last week. Our good friend Dan was given a pink slip from his corporate conglomerate, and my high school boyfriend no longer works at Lehman. I know it’s bad science to use personal experience as a white collar trend barometer, but let’s just say you’ve been warned. It’s happening. It’s real. And it’s definitely not fun.

Sorry to be a downer on this of all days, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that yins always have their yangs. This is, without doubt, one of the most—if not the most—historic moment in our country’s 232 years, but it also may turn out to be one of the more painful. Eight years of buying into the mirage of trickle down economics has taken a toll on the average Joe, never mind Joe the plumber or Joe the investment banker or Joe the dude holding out his cup on the street corner outside my window, begging for quarters.

My grandpa Albert, who was profoundly affected by the last depression, used to scold me whenever I'd leave three Cheerios floating in my breakfast bowl. “Eat them!” he’d beg. “You never know when you’ll have Cheerios again.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Of course I’d have Cheerios again. In fact, I’d have them the next morning. And the morning after that. And the morning after that. Grandpa Al would sing to himself, while forcing me and my sisters to eat every drop of food on our plates, and it was always the same song: “Once I had a railroad, made it run, made it race against time. Once I had a railroad, now it's done, brother can you spare a dime?”

His voice was beautiful, deep and sonorous, and this morning, while pouring Cheerios into my children’s bowls, trying to hold it together, I found myself humming along to its memory.

Last night I watched, from my 15th floor window, as fireworks lit up the sky over Harlem.

My husband just lost his job, and I have no idea how we'll pay next month's rent, and my father's dying of cancer, and I'm drowning in poorly-paid work, but nothing--nothing--could wipe today's smile off my face.

See this post on The Huffington Post

Dear Almost President-Elect Obama,

Congratulations. I’m sure you’re going to be very busy over the next few days coming down from the high of winning and finding the socks you left in Buffalo and building your cabinet and all, but I’m busy, too, and that’s what I’d like to talk to you about. As I write this, my 2-year-old is asleep in the other room. Why? Because his daycare center has a day off for the elections. So basically, I figure you owe me.

We need government-subsidized daycare. As in yesterday. We’re one of the only industrialized nations in the world that doesn’t meet this most basic need for its working families. You think all those mothers are “opting out” or going on welfare because they want to spend 24 hours a day building Tinkertoy castles with their children? Tinkertoy again! They can’t afford to go back to work. To wit: the average urban babysitter today costs around $15 an hour, or at least that’s the number here in New York, and I don’t really have time to look it up because I have three kids and too many jobs. In San Jose, CA, where my sister Jennifer lives, they cost $22 an hour. Since a full-time employee needs 50 hours of childcare coverage to work a 40-hour week, that comes out to $750 a week in my neighborhood and $1100 a week in my sister’s. Multiply that by 52 weeks, and you’re paying $39,000 a year, out of pocket, in New York and $57,200 to a sitter in San Jose. Which means you have to earn at least twice that (approximately $80,000 a year in New York and a whopping $114,000 a year in San Jose) just to break even. Yes, there are group daycare options—we use an excellent one for our baby—but even those cost upwards of $20,000 a year, and they’re often so hard to find and/or get into, lots of parents just throw in the towel. (Leo was our third, so I knew I had to sign him up when I was only 12 weeks pregnant. We’re talking not even showing. Nevertheless, he was put on a waiting list until he turned one.) Even Google, which used to subsidize childcare costs for its workers, now charges $22,000 a year for each child. My friend Kim, who works there, told me that. Again, I’d look it up to verify, but who has time? I trust Kim. You can ask her yourself.

Compare these figures to those of my friend Marion, who lives in Paris, France, where excellent government-subsidized childcare is available to all on a sliding scale according to one’s salary, meaning she pays far less per month for full-time childcare than I pay per week for mine. Also? Her childcare workers earn much higher yearly salaries than those of the women taking care of my son, and believe me, for the kind of poopy diaper work they do, they should be paid better than those bank CEO’s who got us into this whole mortgage-backed security doo doo in the first place. Plus, as an added bonus, Marion’s daughter Lulu’s ears, eyes and nose are checked every Friday, gratis, by a pediatrician who comes into her school and doles out antibiotics to those with strep or other contagious infections. Which makes excellent business sense, if you think about it. As do the practically free birth control pills Marion can take to keep from having too many little Lulus.

You want to know why we Americans are hocked up to our ears in debt? Yes, we shouldn’t have been spending money on all that shiny stuff we didn’t need, but we also should not have been handing over our entire paycheck to the babysitter.

We simply cannot afford to live like this anymore. Problem is, those of us in the thick of the childcare years don’t have time to storm the barricades. We’re too busy earning a living to hand over to our babysitters. Speaking of which, my son just woke up. Call me later?

Love, Deb

At 6:10 AM, when I went to walk the dog, the line to vote in my district stretched all the way down 97th Street and around the corner onto Columbus Avenue. By the time I left to vote with my eldest at 7:00, it snaked down Columbus to 99th Street.

Long lines, like any group "hardship," provide an instant camaraderie with one’s neighbors. The elderly couple behind us were on the verge of tears, so happy they were to be voting for Obama. “I don’t ever remember such lines in this neighborhood, even back when Kennedy was running,” the wife said to me. Then she turned to her husband. “Can you imagine what it would feel like today to be black?”

The African American mother/daughter voting team standing directly in front of us smiled. “Are you kidding?” said the mother. “It feels great!”

Paul, Leo, and Sasha joined us just in the nick of time to cut in line without people getting pissed. I went into the booth with the boys, Paul took Sasha, and we pressed our levers and pulled our handles to the left and celebrated with some bake sale blueberry muffins which we ate, picnic style, on the pavement.

For whom, you might ask, did I vote? Let's just say I told the kids that if McCain wins, we're moving back to France. Forever.

While walking the dog early yesterday morning, I noticed a cop on every street corner, and then I remembered, shit, the marathon.

Every October since the dawn of time, or at least since the dawn of this century, we’ve been going apple-picking with our friends Adam and Martha and their kids. This October all my weekends were taken up with either book tour or photo assignments, so our families had planned to go on the post-Halloween Sunday instead. I’d even arranged to borrow another friend’s Chevy Suburban, so we wouldn’t have to pay for a rental, which, in this economy, and with my husband’s job hanging in the balance, and with my up-and-down-but-mostly-down writer’s income, was the only way we were going to be able to pick apples.

“How bad do you expect the traffic to be?” I asked a cop.

“Bad enough that I’d avoid getting in a car today at all costs.”

I called Martha and canceled, and the kids—ours, theirs—were not happy. Especially after we told ours that instead of going apple picking, we’d spend the day cleaning and sorting through all the junk their rooms, because that’s what happens when one parent goes on the road for a month and leaves the other in charge of his two jobs and three kids: stuff piles up.

As a consolation, I promised the big kids we’d take them to a movie, but neither of the two teen sitters in our building could watch Leo, and Paul came down with the flu, and Sasha lost several homework-friendly hours waiting for her friend’s mother to cross the 24th mile of the marathon, so then it was just Jacob and me and Zach and Miri and their porno, which I assumed would be like the other R-rated fare in the Seth Rogen oeuvre—raunchy, yes, but passably so and funny enough to redeem itself—but here’s what I have to say about that: forget about all the reviews you’ve read that try to paint the film as more of a quirky love story than a porno. It’s a porno. And even I, liberal parent that I am, was upset at myself for letting my 13-year-old see it.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Jacob said, as we left the theater, and I started ranting about how inappropriate the film was. “I’m still your innocent little boy.”

And I looked at him and thought, no, you’re not. We may not have gone apple picking in the literal sense, but that apple, my darling son, has just been picked.

My son Jacob’s ADR session—this is when an actor sits in a recording studio and lip synchs his own lines to the moving image on the screen in front of him—went much later than we’d thought, so we didn’t get home for trick or treating until well after 6:00 P.M., which meant I missed seeing my daughter dressed up as Bristol Palin. It also meant 2-year-old Leo was already strung out on M&M’s and exhausted by the time we walked in the door. He refused to wear his Elmo costume or any of the other costumes from our graveyard of Halloweens past, so I put a fireman hat on his head and called it a day.

I’d considered sending Jacob downtown on his own to do his Spock looping, but he said he was nervous going on the subway by himself on Halloween. Apparently, a rumor had been circulating his school that the Bloods and the Crips were planning a murder spree on the 6 train, which I told him was just ignorant rumor-mongering, but he would not be swayed. When I was his age, I believed the rumor that Mikey, the kid from the Life cereal commercial, had died from a combination of Coca-Cola and Pop Rocks, so who was I to judge?

Besides, it was exciting seeing my son as Spock, even if only for that one scene. I’m looking forward to seeing the whole film, but I’ll have to wait until summer like everyone else. Everyone else, that is, except for my father, who shared the burden of Jacob’s onset guardianship with me and will fly out to LA to see a rough cut in two weeks. When JJ, the director, found out Dad was dying of pancreatic cancer (and would probably not make it until the premiere in May), he invited him out for a private, early screening with Jacob, disproving yet another rumor I’d once heard, about Hollywood being littered with jerks.

I handed in Hell is Other Parents. I handed in my essay. Now it's time to rehearse for Thursday's performance and apply for that position at the New School and face the blank page of my next book and meet with my father's partners about taking over his position at his company, but not before taking my family apple picking tomorrow. I haven't had a day off, including weekends, since the end of September. I need an apple orchard. And some apples. And a dollop of crisp, autumn air.

UPDATE: A friend wrote in to say the rumor about the bloods and the crips was true, but I can't find any mention of it in the news. The only mention I see is this, saying it was an urban myth.