Both of my parents were quite devoted to butterfat. My father, from the dairy Midwest, was born of Hungarian stock; butterfat was next to godliness. My Mother had already lived through the worst her gluttony could offer, so no low-fat incantation was tolerated.

Little Laura’s fondness for ice cream made her the special target of a prosperous Jewish family in her small German town in the mid-thirties. In preparation for their eventual flight to Holland, these people would pick her up and take her across the Dutch border for ice cream, hiding their valuables on her small person. In hindsight, she resented them for using her to smuggle their gold out of NAZI Germany, putting her at risk of being bayoneted on the spot. But she never regretted a smack of the ice cream.

My ice cream adventures were much safer. Childhood summer nights were often graced by a square dip from a local Evanston shop—I’ve forgotten the name. Today I cannot imagine how I could begin to manage a square of ice cream. Those corners would impair the experience for me. As a kid the square scoops were nicely weird.
Non-ice cream frozen treats (“quiescently frozen” as opposed to churned) were frowned upon in my household and thereby exoticized. In my Mother’s courtroom these treats could be exonerated by chocolate; my weakness for fudge-sicles was tolerated. I didn’t get to try a rocket pop until I was grown.

At nineteen, a double-dip cone of maple nut ice cream from Bridgeman’s took me to my summer graveyard factory job each night in Minneapolis. Occasionally I flirted with other flavors, but I always came back to maple nut. This was one of my few devotions to a non-chocolate dessert. Bridgeman’s chocolate just wasn’t chocolate-y enough.

In my child-raising days, ice cream was the third level of emergency treatment for childhood injuries. Step one was “kiss the owie.” Step 2—put a band-aid on it. When my daughter grabbed the searing beam of a metal jungle gym I initiated step three; “let’s go get ice cream.” Step 4 would have been a trip to the emergency room. Fortunately I never got to step four.

From an early age, I gave my daughter expert coaching in ice-cream cone management. I knew iced cream would be an important part of her future, so I approached this as a valuable skill to be handed down and practiced. You circle the cone, working the meeting of cone and ice cream, picking up the meltiest outside layer to get the “ready” ice cream and prevent drips. Watch the tongue pressure—you can easily undermine the stability of the scoop on the cone. Yes I had a tragedy once as a child. No need to reproduce that trauma. Practice makes perfect and how sweet it is.

Ice cream still works quite well on those injuries that transcend age and maturity, such as wounded pride, disappointment, fatigue … just about anything short of a broken bone. It’s so easy, so elegant, so well-disseminated. Even the worst retail muck or the hyper-precious versions transport the eater directly to the magic of a very cold thing on a hot day, summer’s best punctuation mark.

My big opportunity was going up in … well not quite in flames. Rather it was going up on the biggest screen I had ever seen with a lot of hoopla, fabulous costumes and barely understandable nasal voices intoning hymns and devotion I couldn’t possibly understand. Charles was marrying Diana. The local Gilbert and Sullivan company was assisting, in costume, as ushers and distributorsof lovely little bites of fancy cake. The secretaries of DC and I filled the theater in a distinctly American bond of excitement and mystification. For some a dream was being fulfilled. A royal wedding was playing out before us (with endless footage of an apparently disembodied dress train making it’s way down the aisle.) For me my dream was finally over. I would never be Queen of England.

I realized, even then, that I had been an unlikely choice for Queen. Although all my endless childhood dress-up games featured me as the Queen of England, Charles was unlikely to know, let alone, fancy a short Jewish girl from the Chicago suburbs who had never been on a horse. True, I had studied theatre in England. But I was no longer a virgin–not my biggest drawback, perhaps, but apparently it mattered back then.

And here we are again. This royal wedding seems far less personal to me. Although I am again single and as usual caught in my routine quandary of what-do-I-want-to-be, Queen of England has left the page of considerations, along with so many other fields of specialty. Today I’m quite sure they don’t need a Jewish head of the Anglican Church. Yes, today I understand the concept of Queen Consort. The monarchy seemed quite out of touch in 1981 and seems only many degrees more so today. The royals do seem a bit more interesting and less tacky than Branjo Octo AnisHilton, or whatever. And I might wish we could trade the King of the Comb-over for the Queen of the handbag. But I’m happily insulated by walls of rhododendron on the Pacific Rim, unlikely to look too far east. Oh right, that was me posting Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might live in Oregon” list half an hour ago on Facebook.

So is it “a raging global reality show,” as this morning’s news report proclaimed? Perhaps a member of your family is afflicted with “royal wedding fever.” “Americans seem obsessed with the wedding,” I heard yesterday from the BBC. Well if they say it on the BBC it must be true. I’ll say good luck, y’all. Marriage isn’t easy even if you’ve been living together for a bunch of years, you’re pushing thirty and you have a great party. Been there, done that. I’d do it all again, of course, if I got to be Queen of England.

Two things about this sentence didn’t work for me. The first was probably unusual. I didn’t miss Christmas because I hardly knew anyone who celebrated it or what it was all about. I lived in the Jewish end of town, thanks to restrictive covenants. Of course nobody thought of it as the Jewish end of town, but my school was almost all Jewish, since the many Catholic kids in the area crammed their oh so many baby boomer bodies into the local parish school. We didn’t know them. The Protestant kids had the chance to learn about being a minority. We were fascinated by the blue-lit aluminum tree-like shape that revolved in Jimmy’s living room. He got questions about his family’s unusual alternative observance. Where was he going to hear that again?

And yes a few families toyed with Chanukah bushes—also aluminum and also lit blue. I shopped the idea gingerly at my house and dropped it like a hot latke when my Mother erupted.

What Christmas did mean for me was a dressed-up, lunched-out trip downtown to see the Christmas decorations the Friday after Thanksgiving. There was nothing black about it, except the 4:30 sky on the L ride home.

The second fiction was more subtle and has gotten even more confusing. Chanukah was a refreshingly unreligious holiday in my observant home. We played intense games of dreidel, ate a lot of chocolate, lit candles, sang and exchanged socks and underwear, mostly. There were a few dreidels and stars hung in our apartment. It wasn’t dressed up like a Christmas competitor or a consolation prize. It was something most kids in the neighborhood did and, while I had a slightly more old-fashioned version of it than many, it was a serviceable small holiday.

Growing up eventually meant making some choices. I had boyfriends, a husband and lots of friends who weren’t Jewish. To tree or not to tree? I lived in houses where trees happened, I took strong measures against trees, I acquiesced in trees when my pre-ex plead his case that this had been what was wrong with the whole marriage (reductionist crazy talk and the women who let them—another subject.) I have decided that trees, like so many things, might be the subject of passionate position until one actually has a little perspective on life (and a little less passion in general. Hey, it’s a tree.)

I had years of alternating Scroogedom and buy-in. And then I finally achieved enlightenment (well, on the Christmas issue, anyway.)

This is the best time of the year to be Jewish. There are the neutrals and the positives. The neutrals: I’m not mangled by the mind-body-wallet suck of the retail holiday. My presents are restricted to wine, chocolate and cash. It’s an unusually good time to buy the first two; I buy bars and bottles by the dozen or half-dozen as I do my ordinary shopping so I have a bar or bottle to hand to anyone whenever the mood strikes me. I don’t wrap.

I don’t have to worry about the compromise or confusion of a significant spiritual moment with the financial, familial, logistical, decorative, sartorial, alimentary or entertainment requirements. I don’t have to do anything about any of these.

But I can. I’m often invited to gatherings where I can dress up or down as necessary or desired, make or purchase foodstuffs to share, grab a bar or bottle on my way out the door, and catch up with old friends, meet new ones or tear around like a crazy person. Or not.

On the positive side, this is a time when most people around me are so harried and hassled, preoccupied and stressed, over-committed and out of their element or trying madly to escape their element, and engaged in such strange and strenuous activities that no one would notice if I should happen to space out, nap, introspect or otherwise engage less in the world than I might normally feel pressure to do. In other words, when one is not part of the increasing spin, that spin itself can allow for a bit of a holiday. It’s a foul time to travel, yes, but it’s a fine time to nest.

There are a few negatives, of course: sound pollution in stores and offices; traffic jams; that travel issue… The incessant mostly awful music is good reminder to avoid shopping, the travel is reinforced by the climate and the pricing–now that I’m liberated from the school calendar I hardly mind. And the traffic? Well it’s one really lousy thing, isn’t it. I can’t have it all. But that sense of being the other? Each year it seems like a more comfortable quilt to wrap around me as I nestle into the window seat and count my chocolate bars. We Jews don’t encourage conversion, but if you’re crazy and frazzled? Well it might be one way to find a little peace next year.

*DISCLAIMER: I’m not launching in on some theological diatribe, so if you’re looking for conversion or even conversation in that direction, I must disappoint and I’m not willing to engage.

“Sax isn’t on the list. What? It’s not offered at my school?” The teacher tells me that students from my school can apply to go to Nichols Junior High for lessons on instruments we don’t offer here. But not girls; girls don’t play the saxophone.

“Oh.”

This is so unfair. I want to shout and tell them this is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of—just like my Father says about most things. My parents roll their eyes and tell me to choose another instrument.

“You can’t get to Nichols for lessons, anyway.”

OK. My second choice is bassoon. The Bassoon is also very beautiful and very exotic (“exotic” is big—I am not going to play the violin like everyone else.) Bassoon is so exotic that nobody else even knows what it is. Well not kids; not even my teacher. That’s what makes it so right. I know it’s the long, skinny wooden tube you blow through a reed.

There’s the fatal flaw of the bassoon. I’m not allowed to play anything that goes in my mouth, because of my teeth! Ethel next door—my favorite babysitter—has worn braces for four years apparently because she plays the clarinet. It pushes her teeth out while the dentist is trying to push them in. I’m not so sure I believe that’s why she’s had braces for so long. And my teeth need to be pushed out. But as usual, there’s no arguing with my Mother’s edict.

“How about flute? “

“No—nothing in the mouth.”

“But the flute doesn’t go in the mouth. It just leans against the lip.”

Facts are no match for my Mother’s pronouncements. I’ve run into this before. You can’t predict things with her and you can’t make sense of them. It drives my Dad crazy, too.

OK, I’m studying the list. I have to have an answer by next week. Exotic and beautiful.

“I’m thinking about the cello?”

They seem to like this. They discuss how expensive cellos are—in case they need to buy one in a couple of years. But we all agree the cello is very beautiful and doesn’t go in the mouth.

I’m barely taller than my half-sized cello. School lessons and orchestra begin in a week. It’s not so heavy, really, but it’s kind of hard to carry, especially since I live at the end of the school boundary. I walk it a mile to school and then back again. When the wind blows a lot I have to stop walking and throw my weight over the top to hold it down.

Mrs. G, our conductor and teacher, is supposed to be mean. She is very tall—I’ve never seen such a tall strong woman. She wears old lady shoes that tie and nylon dresses with belts and little prints. Her gray hair is swept around into swirls and held together with combs. She’s always nice to me; she laughs at my jokes.

Mrs. G’s main instrument is the trumpet. A woman who plays the trumpet! I announce this important information at dinner. I’m sure girls can play the saxophone! But it’s too late now. I need to reaffix my loyalties to the cello.

Mrs. G gets really angry during orchestra when the boys haven’t practiced and they won’t shut up. Our trumpet players are the wild boys. She waves her stick at them. When they jump up, she chases them around the section and out the door and down the hall.

Harold Hwang is our brilliant first violinist who shows off all the time because the rest of us bore him to death squeaking and blatting away. When he plays it really sounds like somthing, so he gets all the solos. All together, the orchestra has that slow sour school wheeze.

Getting the cello to school becomes harder when the snow starts. Robin’s mom drives her bass to school. A VW bug can’t hold a girl and a bass, so Robin still walks. My Mom doesn’t drive, though. I try to make it to the middle of each block before I set the cello down and change hands. As I get close to school though, I have to change hands a couple of times a block, so when I get to school the canvas case is soaking wet.

Of course, with the cello, I don’t walk on the snow piles that line Dodge. But it’s harder to avoid the ice balls that fly across the street. Once we cross Oakton, I can barely walk with the cello. It’s crowded and pushy and the top of the ice layer is wet and slick. It’s so crowded, I have to hug the cello to me, so I can’t keep kids from sliding into it. But it’s a good shield.

One day the cello takes a critical ice-ball hit to the bridge. I’m terrified during the wait for orchestra, but fortunately, Mrs. G can get the bridge back in. My parents don’t even have to know about this near disaster.

When I start sixth grade at the new junior high, even though my walk is two blocks shorter, it’s the new theatre that wins my heart. I drop orchestra and start learning about the apron and the battons.

As hard as it is to push my way through the wind and sludge on Sheridan Drive for piano lessons each week, I’m very relieved I’m not carrying a cello.

John Adams was off by two days—he thought the holiday ought to be July 2, the date the Second Continental Congress actually voted for independence, but we’ve always celebrated the 4th, the date on the Declaration, as a tribute to this country, summer, hot dogs, balloon buns, bands, fireworks and retail sales. I marched in the Evanston Independence Day parade and I still have the small plastic flag I carried (it’s so hard to march with a cello—not fair.)

But my generation was soon robbed of public notions of patriotism. Songs, parades and the tear-in-the-eye during the National Anthem were taken over by the purveyors of war, guns, flag pins, my-country-right-or-wrong, lies and fear. I had to discover the brilliance of our founding fathers, along with so many things about this country, by traveling outside of it.

I sat with my daughter on the stairs surrounding the statue of Jan Hus in Prague’s Old town square, less than a decade after the Velvet Revolution. In the sea of young German travelers, I opened to my chief source for European history, The Michelin Green Guide, and read aloud. We were looking for painted
buildings along the square to attach to the tales of de-fenestrations.

Suddenly, I could taste the first Amendment. Madison was not just my best-friend’s home street. John Adams was alive in my head, not just my favorite character in the film of 1776. I was so thankful for their courage and craft, their insight and insistence. I tried to impress on my ten year old how amazing and important the foundation of this country is, with tears in my eyes.

Recently, my choral director assigned us God Bless America. There was too much God and too many memories of this number being trotted out as the symbol of the love-it-or-leave-it brigade. It stuck in my throat. So I traveled to the lower east side of my mind and roamed the tenements that grew an Israel Beilin, or Irving Berlin, as he came to be known. I saw my family, both sides, craving this soil and planting their feet and spirits in it, relieved to be free of the persecution and turmoil they faced in Europe. They became Americans with every fiber, pouring sweat, blood and children into her.

When I returned to the risers and opened my mouth to sing, I could hear my Grandmothers refrains—only in America. I could reclaim the song and fill the lyric with the language of my heart—justice and opportunity.

Geography offered me five choices. I picked canopy. Apples, dust and guano challenged my arrival, but skin leathered and I rose. I passed familiar robins and crows. Shy new neighbors hopped away, surprised to see skin.It’s such a loud neighborhood, especially in the mornings. As dirt caked, broke and caked again, I fit in. Steamy winds pushed my rags away and left me sparrow-suited. Grabbers, flappers and buzzers friended me—arboreal facebook.

Capuchins laugh, squirrels nag and macaws complain loudly—the usual. My towering shade-home transports me—climbing, clawing and hanging around.

A Trip to the Zoo

Mike the polar bear loved his crowds as much as the marshmallows and nuts they pelted at him. High atop his haunches he was stronger than all and a master showman. My little peanuts didn’t make it across the moat.

On the way to the cat house, Daddy showed me again how to crack the peanut, rub the red husk away and toss both nuts into my mouth, all with one hand.

I loved the warm salty nuts, his thick red fingers, his bulging eyes. He was just like Mike—larger than life and a little intimidating.

I try to keep my speed down to 80 as I blast across the miles of bare land. I spy, with my little eye: small scrubby growth; a few dried blossoms; a large road kill—is it a young deer or maybe a mangled javalina? Long passed, now. Occasional rocky outcroppings seem like something really special on the horizon.

I’m zooming across the American west with mind-games for the solo road-warrior. Whatever was it that drew people here, 250 miles East of El Paso and 100 miles west of Odessa? I wonder what this dry, open place looked like to my Grandmother’s eyes at fifty-seven.

This is where Selma came, arm-in-arm with a husband she barely knew, after middle years had been torn apart by anti-Semitism, three and a half years in concentration camps, return to war-torn Germany and salvation in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. Was she frightened? Excited? Hopeful? Disappointed? Relieved? Inspired?

Half an hour from the border at El Paso, the guard stops me to ask:
“Are you a citizen?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going?”
“Fort Stockton.”
“Why—there isn’t anything there?”

In Stockton, Comanche springs raced from the ground. This precious water revived stagecoach passengers fearful of Comanche raids. It allowed Jefferson Davis to dream about fleets of camels patrolling the land. It filled the best watermelons and the old swimming pool.

Nathan Winkler founded a dry-goods store in Fort Stockton in 1912. He’d come to the US in 1900 from Austria-Hungary, not yet twenty. His half brother brought him to West Texas to learn the retail trade. There were handfuls of young Jewish merchants sprinkled across small western settlements.

In 1951, Nathan, a vigorous, prosperous widower with four grown children left Fort Stockton for a visit to Fort Worth. He was introduced to Selma, who had recently moved there with her two daughters, and he wooed her in one week.

Selma must have been so surprised, so grateful for a second chance at love and at life. This sun-scorched land must have looked strange and promising. People were slow, warm and friendly. How different it must have looked, those dusty blocks where cactus struggled to grow replacing Manhatten’s green parks. Here, the men were handsome and well-dressed in bolos, plaid shirts and enormous hats from Winkler’s.

Put aside your nightmares, Selma. Forget the rocks through your windows and the blood sprayed across the walls of the Riga Ghetto. Take comfort in the new and familiar: the rituals of married life; man and wfe working at the store; civic leaders. Money was available; it could be made and spent. There were new things to have—a home, a car, diamond jewelry, furs. People in Texas didn’t speak in terms of the four or five cows that brother Norbert would have brokered in Westphalia. Here, people had thousands of head of cattle. They took enormous risks and pulled oil right out of the ground. But the biggest difference was safety, security, warmth, acceptance—knowing that your hardest times were behind you and you’d made it through somehow.

Changes aren’t easy at 57: foods; names; weights, measures; language; the way it’s done. Selma wrestled with the English language, laced with Texas drawls and Spanish phrases, into an agreeable tongue that offered her the hearts of her neighbors and even the pages of Tolstoy.

Her new husband was a silent man, a skillful merchant, a far-sighted investor in companies and people. She relished the role of the merchant’s wife: a life she’d trained for forty-five years before. She dove into the dust of her back yard and pulled out apricot trees, watermelons, plums and even roses. She qvelled over her grandchildren. Finally she had a normal life, full of the nice things she had once owned and all the modern appliances the 1950′s had to offer.

Working at the store, she came to know everyone. She licked her wicked wounds and revealed her exotic and disturbing past on occasion at ladies luncheons and rotary breakfasts. Selma flowered in the relentless sun that would whip her sheets dry in a flash.

We would go to Stockton for Spring break, flying from Chicago, loaded with packages and reeking of garlic, anise, salt and Westphalian rye bread. We transferred in Dallas, hopped to Midland, drove for an hour through oil derricks and tumbleweed. As the trip grew hotter, we smelled more strongly of our Chicago deli imports. It became harder to carry the ill-wrapped goods with their string handles and awkward corners. They would bump and tip. Finally, we were at Grandma’s, spilling our goodies across her kitchen table and drawing her delighted exclamations.

“See, we even brought a little plant.”

A tiny start had grabbed my Mother’s attention on our way out the door and found a hand between us. In Fort Stockton, where even the cactus wanted care, that extra spot of green was precious; a little spot of life that Selma could offer a second chance.

The King of Pop is dead. Broadcasters would suck us into the dramatic lens, telling us what to do and when and where, offering emotional irritation and then catharsis. What a welcome break from those awful, yawning, impossible-to-solve issues that crowd in at us from every continent. For moments, we are softened and disapproval fades. What’s the point of disapproval, anyway? The King of Pop is dead. Long live the Pop.

No big grief here. I love a good tribute, thanks, and that’s enough, now. The press, adoration, money, waste, creepiness: it all seems part of the overwhelming imperative of stardom, an audience so fickle in its judgment, but idolatrous all the same. No more new ideas? Is it such a shame to be out of ideas? I don’t have to know why fans slather it on so thick. It’s kind really, forgetting the weird and reviving the beautiful. Of course we could do that anytime, but the grief-fountain mobilizes.

In the meantime, a real man, a friend of a friend tragically cut down stirs a sense of loss for the world, the community and the family. It was unfair, random and unexplained, just like death is, whenever it lurches out beyond the old and sick and frail. I much prefer the un-lurched venue.

People who leave this world without adding to our own sense of frailty allow us a stately dignified pause—stirring in honor, peace and resolution. And there’s room for that too, in this crowded time of dying. An old man, Ezra Gordon, was an architect, a man I met and spoke to a few years ago, when his sparkling eyes drew me in. He built buildings, both noticed and taken for granted each day. His passing offers me a quiet, thoughtful moment. Thanks.

I crossed steel arteries stretching
red blood to locales I could never live in
when I tasted city juice.

Her jeweled waterfront disappoints some,
sure, but for millions, it sings
work, wealth and getting by.

Elevated cars, elevated dreams…
Push through two feet of partly cloudy,
and sour summer stockyard winds.

When age dissolves, dis-loves, dislikes,
disrepairs and despairs,
plastic drive-by-dream-crates look good–for a moment.

Come on, City! update your glory.
Glass boxes, frappacined granite, pillars
and designer concrete.

Stilettos, boots and flip flops race.
I’m glad you’re back, City! with your
garbage trucks, permits and little bags of dog shit.

I won’t resent your pretense;
Not so long as my padded shoulders
paint my own miracle on the mile.