I hope that all of you are getting some moments of rest and water and golden sun if that’s your thing. Or cool movie theaters and sleeping late, if that’s it. Or mountains or museums or novels or Netflix or just staring into space – mostly I hope you are spending some hours in a pleasurable way that is different than the usual.

In these last weeks I have been letting work slide to make the rounds of summer visits to friends and family. The hours spent with people I love at the lake, or sweating in front of the fan, or taking slow walks through the park feel languid and elastic. In the same way that our muscles stretch more easily when they are warm, the hours of summer feel stretchier to me - the time with friends and family is dreamier, easier, different than the rest of the year. I am storing the love and ease up for the long winter. As the poet Kate Baer describes in her poem, Before the Guests:

In the end, it’s who we loved—

how we’d sit out on the patio after it had rained,

telling the same stories about the family dog.

How, when invited over for a campfire, a round of cards,

a late night summer swim, we’d pile in the car,

show up empty handed to a house lit up

by familiar conversation. Yes, you can

build whole kingdoms of picture perfect

laundry rooms and remodeled kitchen walls,

but when the light comes from every direction,

ready to carry you to the great unknown,

there is only one thing I’ll care to remember:

August nights, September mornings,

entire seasons spent loving you.

See you in September, and go PONY (Pride of New York)!

P.S. All this rest will lead into a Fall of more work and cooler weather and some fighting for democracy. If you have any interest in doing some of that last thing with me, in District 17 in New York, where Rep Make Lawler (R ) is being challenged by Cait Conley, Jonathan and I are volunteering with Canvassing Connectors, trying to turn out Democratic voters in Peekskill New York to flip the congressional seat. Let me know if you want info about that, I’d love to tromp around in the Autumn leaves talking to people about how to reclaim our country with you.

Which is why I am so surprised to be able to report that I have successfully completed my goal of taking fifty-seven 5.7 mile walks in the year I turned 571. After reading this article about the author taking 58 walks in her 58th year, I decided to do the same. And I did it! Things were looking pretty grim as of March after a very slow January and February, but I rallied this Spring and completed the project last Saturday - 3 whole days before my 58th birthday. I took a lot of walks, through a lot of weather, in a bunch of places, many of them alone, and others with some of my favorite people. It was fun and boring and occasionally painful and sweaty, and long. And it’s done.

And so - what of it? Am I glad I did it? Was it hard? What did I learn? Will I do it again?

I am glad that I did it. It was a year of a lot of uncertainty for me - I left my job last summer and I didn’t really have a professional plan. My second kid was starting her last year of college, which felt like it was leading to a significant change in our family life. I live here in this same country as most of you, where we never know who we will be at war with when we wake up, or what fresh political hell will have broken out from one day to the next. The walking was a knowable and doable task amidst the uncertainty. It didn’t depend on anyone else’s buy-in other than my own. And I was stupidly proud of myself each time I completed a walk - I often sent my family boring screen shots of my pedometer . It was hard, but not that hard. It got me outdoors for hours at a time. It got me to write down where I was each of 57 days of the year. It led to long conversations while walking with some of my favorite people. It got me to listen to a lot of podcasts. It made me spend a lot of time in my own head, for better and for worse. It took me to new stretches of the city. It gave me a way to think about which aches and pains are reparable, and which I just have to work around - which feels like an important distinction as I age.

I walked in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, Carmel, Cold Spring, Long Island, Fire Island, Seattle, Vancouver, Martha’s Vineyard, Hardwick, MA and Woodstock, VT. I walked with Tessa, Tanya, Biscuit, Rose, Jacob, Sam, Grace, Jody, Lori, Laura, Margery, Jody, Sarah, Meg, Dohra, Olivia, Oona and Lynda. I only took two of the walks with Jonathan (which maybe is the secret of a happy marriage?). I had lovely walking offers from other friends but couldn’t make the logistics work (it’s a lot of time to have to talk to me!). I felt accompanied through the year, a reflection and reminder of the lucky way I feel accompanied through this life.

As I walked I thought about grocery lists, and books I was reading, I puzzled through work questions, and family dynamics. I tried to remember where I had put my keys, and tried to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I got a bit faster as the year wore on, and I wore through a pair of sneakers as I walked on. I walked on and on.

And what next? In this year of turning 58 - starting today - my goal it to eat 58 pieces of cake. Will you join me for one or ten?

I’ve got a summer reading list to accompany this (perpetual) set of questions about how I spend my days. My current focus is on political activism and parenting. I think of participating in the fight for a more equitable world to be both an essential part of what I owe my kids, and also a competitor for the time taken up by the domestic work of raising them.

Many, if not most, activists make tougher choices than I do. I have been able to balance my mid-level activism and mid-level parenting without much pain. The folks I have been reading about this summer have harder balancing acts: the Weather Underground activists of the seventies and eighties (written about by their children Harriet Clark, in the novel The Hill, and Zayd Ayers-Dohrn, in his memoir Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground), as well as the older-school Esther and Julius Rosenberg, parents of Michael and Robby Meeropol (written about in a recent article in the Atlantic). Looking more closely at these white, Jewish political activists who made choices that impacted their parenting is lending some historical resonance to my figurings, but it is not really a joyful set of beach reads.

One of my central questions - who should I be taking care of? was underscored in a gorgeous review of Clark and Ayers-Dohrn’s books by Jordan Kissner. The TL:DR context is that the Weather Underground was a revolutionary group formed in the late sixties. Their manifesto stated that “the goal [of revolution] is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world.” Both of the authors reviewed by Kissner grew up in the ‘80s. The mothers that they are writing about are Bernardine Dohrn and Judy Clark. Both women were radical and sometimes violent activists when they had very small children. Their children’s lives were formed by the decisions their mothers made. These stories are fascinating and moving to me - I was inspired and angry, judgmental, conflicted and a little jealous while reading them. My perspective on them shifted often – back and forth between the point of view of the child and the mother. In his book, Ayers-Dohrn quotes Angela Davis to explain his mother’s choices: “When one commits to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.” And then he asks - “But whose lifetime?”

In her review, Kissner makes a profound point about these activists’ commitment to the collective – even at the expense of their own children:

This is a radical idea, and a difficult one to live out. It runs counter to a strain of thinking rising in popularity in some corners of the right, voiced most succinctly by JD Vance in a January 2025 interview on Fox News that went viral: “There is this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

Vance’s parochial notion of care — one in which someone’s proximity to me determines the extent to which I should care about their well-being — is a seductively intuitive worldview. There’s an easy, retrograde story about motherhood at work in Vance’s politics too, one that plays to common assumptions about the acceptable behavior and temperament of a “good” mother.

I often run into a distinct but parallel version of Vance’s story about motherhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn and other well-heeled liberal communities. In these kind streets, our intention to raise the very best children to the very best of our abilities is not articulated as part of Vance’s Christianity, but rather as ‘the best way to mother’. Women my age, some of whom were children of divorce, or were latch-key kids themselves, reject their own mothers’ choices. Excellent women raise excellent children, seems to be the line of thinking: mothering is our job and we are good at our jobs. As our current projects, we manage the hell out of our kids. We devote endless time and money and attention to their care and feeding, they will be winners and thus we will show our own competence.

There is, of course, an opportunity cost to that time and money spent on our kids, taken from other pursuits that could benefit a wider community than our own families.

What’s my point here? That the choices we make when we choose to serve our own families (children are the most obvious family in this case, but partners, parents, nieces and nephews, siblings too), affect the choices we make to serve the world1 .

The questions I am asking may be obvious, but there are not obvious answers - even just in my own pursuit of the right way to spend my days. I continue to wonder, and I welcome your thoughts, and suggestions for readings to add to my list. My children are taking care of themselves these days, so my choices are easier than they once were - but I never wanted my kids to suffer for my political and career choices. I did and do want them to live in a world where people, including their mother, prioritize beyond their families to take care of each other.

Anyway, a work in progress - like everything else I do.

And Maria’s work in progress…

Until I was writing this today, I never looked up the reason why it’s a superstition, I just did it because that’s what you do on the 1st. Apparently it is related to the idea that rabbits are lucky — as in carrying a rabbit foot for luck. Some people say “Rabbit rabbit” instead of bunny bunny”.

I forget to do it about half the time, and even when I remember, it almost never works. We keep trying, but many months are not very good, despite the magical incantation.

But a funny thing happened in June - even though I don’t remember if I successfully bunny bunny’d, I had a really happy month. There were a bunch of reasons for happiness - a week of vacation with my family, the city going crazy over the Knicks, a night of dancing in Prospect Park on a gorgeous June evening, watching a random world cup game in the backyard of a bar with Tessa and Jonathan, the fully-dressed Mayor jumping into a swimming pool to celebrate summer, a new season of The Bear, and all of it in rare and lovely sunny days.

Even the things that I don’t care that much on my own - like the Knicks or the World Cup - produced contagious happiness which I caught and kept. Like a secondary high, but one that lingered. I had day after day of feeling light and awake. And it lasted long enough for me to notice two important things:

1) Being happy did not sap my motivation to work, to connect, to try to make things around me better. I continued to support and learn from the hard work people around me are doing to fight for democracy and against fascism, I continued to care for friends and family, I just did it with less anxiety and a little more hope. Happiness is not selfish.

2) Happiness is not a finite resource - I was not stealing mine from anyone. Love is not a pie, joy is not made to be a crumb, and happiness is not in limited supply.

And in fact, if we take the Knicks euphoria that swept the city as an example, one person’s happiness fueled another’s as we all high-fived when passing in the street, complemented each other’s t-shirts, stood next to strangers watching games projected on the sides of buildings, and boosted one another up scaffolding to see the parade. Other people’s giddiness, relief, elation and thrill made me so happy, regardless of the fact that I slept through the critical comeback moment in more than one game.

A new month is starting, it’s going to get really hot this week, the supreme court is handing down unimaginably cruel rulings on immigration rights, and each morning I continue to read Heather Cox Richardson’s chronicles of the daily corruption and chaos in our country. Events will not line up in my favor the way they did in June, but I am hoping that with the momentum of this magical month I can hold onto a more durable happiness. One that can last when faced with the daily news, and that I can hold onto as I accompany loved ones through hard times, as I grind through each weekly to do list.

I have one last embarrassingly woo-woo part of this quiet revelation about happiness. I went to a Yin restorative yoga class with my friend Tanya last week. I had never been to this special kind of deep stretch class before, there were only 4 people there, and the instructor chatted away much more than I wanted her to. I spent a fair amount of the class grouchily wishing that she would be quiet and thinking that I could have saved $25 and stretched out at home. But then the teacher then had us hold several stretches for far longer than I would have lasted on my own. I moved through different iterations of discomfort and release in each one. And at the very end of class, when she had us lie in the final savasana position, I started to drift off and had a vision of a yellow cloth floating over me - in the way my mother would shake out a sheet and pretend to make the bed with me in it. As I lay there in the light and airy studio, my friend lying next to me and this imaginary yellow cover floating down over me, I pictured my family and I thought to myself, over and over “enough. I have enough.”

And I do.

Bunny, bunny.

June skies by Maria Mottola

When I wake up each morning, even before I open my eyes, I scan to locate my kids in time and place. Then I try to remember what day of the week it is. This simple set of facts is harder to remember than it used to be (though in my defense, the kids always used to be in their rooms, and I used to go to the same job every day).

Once I have established those basics, I turn my mind to whether we have coffee and milk. And then I try to remember what the hell I am doing with my life. This includes recalling what I have on my calendar on any given day, but also why I am doing those things, and what the world in which I am doing them is looking like today.

Scot Nakagawa always helps me orient myself through his excellent Substack, The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook. His analysis places our current situation in historical context in a way I can understand - that is sobering but also offers a path forward. Here is a section from a recent post that lays out a way to think about our collective work to defeat authoritarianism in this moment (please read the whole thing, it’s worth it):

Movements that defeat authoritarian consolidation do two distinct kinds of work....In the popular language of the movement people refer to this as “block and build.”

Block is the work of stopping the authoritarian project from completing its consolidation.

Build is the work of constructing the institutional, economic, civic, and analytical infrastructure that a democracy actually requires to function, and that the country, in significant respects, has never fully had.

Block prevents the worst from happening. Build makes possible the better that comes next…. A movement that only blocks can win the immediate fight and lose the long one. A movement that only builds cannot survive the immediate fight long enough to see the long one. Both are required.

What the moment is asking of us is harder than what either block-only or build-only would ask. It is asking us to fight the immediate fight while building the long infrastructure, with the same coalition, in coordinated relationship, with the discipline to hold both time horizons at once.

Importantly, Nakagawa explains that we don’t each need to do both, but we do need to track both. It’s a useful frame for me, one that makes sense and offers a direction forward. But it is a ton of work to implement, and much of it - especially the building part - is work that we haven’t done well in the past.

I think it’s also useful to parse how we approach the work from varying entry points: as part of our day job, part of our faith community, part of our union, our building, neighborhood, network or on our own. This added analysis can help us to build the infrastructure to support and connect the various actors.

I am trying to use these frameworks in order to get specific about where I plug in, and what my task should be. It is all still a work in progress, of course - and a conversation I would love to have with anyone who is similarly looking for where to act. Finding the right work and way to pursue it is confusing and overwhelming and chaotic and I think it is the thing worth doing. It’s just hard to do all the time.

As a respite I took the chance to spend a week away with my family. We had a moment of alignment in our schedules and went to my very favorite place in the world - the town of Menemsha, Martha’s Vineyard, where I was born and where my parents and grandparents are buried. We had quiet, sunny days and a freezing deep blue ocean. It was so beautiful. I had big plans to write, reflect, and plan. And I did not do any of that. Instead I napped, ate ice cream, talked about the Knicks, and spaced out. I return to Brooklyn no clearer about the future than when I left - but so much calmer about the chaos. So I add this to the recipe - Blocking, Building, and Spacing Out.

And I offer you this poem - How to Do Absolutely Nothing, by Barbara Kingsolver, to guide you on that last part:

Rent a house near the beach, or a cabin

but: Do not take your walking shoes.

Don’t take any clothes you’d wear

anyplace anyone would see you.

Don’t take your rechargeables.

Take Scrabble if you have to,

but not a dictionary and no

pencils for keeping score.

Don’t take a cookbook

or anything to cook.

A fishing pole, ok

but not the line,

hook, sinker,

leave it all.

Find out

what’s

left.

P.S. In case you’ve been waiting with bated breath to learn what I wore to my 40th high school reunion: I went with white jeans and a green shirt. And I looked totally OK. And it was fun and weird and we watched the 2nd Knicks/San Antonio game together and loved on New York City together.

P.P.S. Here’s Maria’s June….

Right now I have a 2026 planner notebook and I make a weekly list each Sunday night or Monday morning - and I then make several daily sub-lists on random scraps of paper. Is that a system? I haven’t lost the planner yet, and we are five months into the year - so I count that as a win.

Maybe one problem is that I put everything on the list - from the sublime to the ridiculous. ‘Get food for dinner’ and ‘figure out career’ are right next to each other. ‘Do something about democracy’ next to ‘get haircut.’ My commitments to multiracial democracy, to my family, to my dinner — all jumbled together. Nothing ever really gets done to the extent I hoped for.

Some tasks come and go quickly - I am pretty good at getting the milk. Some last for years. ‘Make a will’ was on the list for 12 years after we had kids before we completed and crossed it off. It has recently reappeared, as guardianship for our children is no longer relevant. However, the lawyer who wrote up our original will died, and the challenge of finding a new lawyer should keep this item on the list for several more years.

This week a few of the potential ‘to dos’ were so impossible as to keep me from even updating my list this Monday morning:

1. Figure out what to wear to my 40th high school reunion. I could wear a t-shirt I still have from high school that has been made over a dozen moves with me. I could wear a dress and try to look like a proper grownup - but that might involve shaving my legs, which would require its own item on the list. Am I trying to look 18 or 57? Am I 18 or 57?

2. Get my stuff out of Tessa’s room. She is arriving home from her cross-country drive this week, and moving back home while she figures out her next moves. That means I have to remove the stuff I have shoved into her room this year, and figure out where it should go instead - impossible. This item involves integrating the fact that she has graduated from college, also impossible. I must not be 18….

3. Walk - I have 16 more 5.7 mile walks to go before my birthday in order to reach 57 walks in the year I turned 57. That means I need to do 2 - 3 walks a week through the end of July. Still so many miles to go (and still so many opportunities for you to join me).

4. Raise $400,000 for The Haven Fund. We have raised almost $600,000 and have made 11 grants to immigrant-serving organizations in NYC. But the threats to immigrants in our city and country only get scarier, and we still have over $400k to go (gratefully accepting fundraising ideas and donations).

5. Oh, revise the will.

None of those will get done this week, so here are a few of the things that I know I will end up doing — I’ll put them on the list so I can cross some things off:

1. Watch reels of Newsroom and West Wing on Facebook. I want to quit Facebook, and I don’t want to rewatch either of those Aaron Sorkin shows, but I know I will continue on with all of it, obeying my algorithm like a fool.

2. Schedule chunks of writing time on my calendar, and then move them later and later in the week as I use those scheduled chunks of time to watch Facebook reels.

3. Try to remember what day of the week it is.

4. Get milk.

5. Appreciate Maria’s latest tiny landscape:

   

I left Brooklyn last Monday to go visit my godmother Nina in Sacramento, ahead of my daughter’s college graduation in Claremont, CA. Nina was my mother’s best friend in high school - they lived very different lives, but traveled through the years together from opposite sides of the country. When my mother, Rachel, was diagnosed with Glioblastoma in 2017, Nina came and lived with her for a few month-long stretches to help us get our caretaking systems up and running. I want to call her a life saver, but we were not able to save my mother’s life in the end. Nonetheless, Nina made it possible for us to take care of mom in her home, in the way she wanted to be cared for and helped me to function through a hard stretch of time.

This was the first time I had ever visited with Nina on my own. I went for a few reasons - first to see her and her beloved home that she is about to sell. Second, because I am dumb and thought Sacramento was close to LA. And third, because it felt like a small way to include part of my mom in Tessa’s graduation. It was lovely to be there with Nina, and also sad to be there without my mother. I did feel like I got a glimpse of a younger version of my mother in Nina’s stories, as well as some company in kvelling about Rachel’s grandchildren.

From Sacramento, I headed to LA and then to Claremont, a pretty little college town that I hate. I have hated it since the three weeks we spent there with Tessa after she was in an accident her freshman year. Tessa fractured her skull while hiking on Mount Baldy in the second week of her second semester. She was in the hospital for six days, and then in an AirBnB with me and Jonathan for two weeks, and then was back at it. She persevered through that terrifying time, stayed in school that semester and has no lasting damage from the accident. Her friends who were with her on the mountain that January day have been with her through her whole time in college, and we got to celebrate graduation with them and their people. Tessa has added to that group and formed a family of her own in California who she loves and cares for and bickers with, and who take care of her - much like her Brooklyn family (with maybe a little more tequila).

Tessa is a strong, smart, beautiful, funny, talented and sarcastic person - and I would be proud of her and teary at the graduation of my youngest child no matter what the circumstances were. But being back in that town with her, and seeing how she healed and grew and triumphed after that accident made the whole thing especially moving.

And then some combination of Stephen Colbert’s last week on TV, my sadness that my mother could not see this shining girl get her diploma, that my father never met my family at all, and forgetting to renew my Lexapro prescription for the first time since I started taking it 12 years ago all got mixed into my swirl of feeling. I call it Still Life at 57.

As Tessa marched around the tent, I texted pictures of her glowing in her ridiculous cap and gown to the friends who have saved my life, over and again.

The day after graduation we hung out in Tessa’s off-campus living room, full of empty tequila bottles, dirty socks, notebooks and half-drunk seltzers and beers. Her housemates and their parents came in and out, Tessa packed some bags for us to mule home for her on the red-eye to NYC that night. She and her friends were sad, happy, hungover, unpacked, and gorgeous. I am so glad for who she is, who she is going to be, and that I get to be part of the growing family that accompanies her.

Tiny landscape, by my friend Maria:

.

It’s just one way of marking the time since I lost her, and it makes me sad to realize that this iteration of my body will not know her the same way every younger version of me did. At the same time, I have noticed that the way I miss her has changed recently - moving from a constant dull ache, to occasional sharp waves. That means that more of my time is spent without aching, but the waves are painful when they hit. They come on unexpectedly and often take my breath away. They can crash over me when I walk past a restaurant that I once went to with her, or when I hear a piece of gossip that only she would care about.

My son Jacob and I were waiting for an elevator the other day, and he said that he liked the space we were standing in because it reminded him of visiting her. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed with missing the foyer outside my mother’s apartment. How many hundreds of times did I apply Bonnie Bell kissing potion in that hallway on my way to middle and high school? How many chats did I have with my mom while she waited with me for the elevator to get to the tenth floor? In that moment with Jacob I felt like I couldn’t bear that I would never chat with her again, never look in that mirror again. But I did bear it, because what else is there?

I can’t imagine that these waves will ever go away - although I did not think that the daily pain of missing her would ever ease. Until my cells and tissues or heart and brain shift again, I will ride these waves, just as the people I pass while walking down the street are riding their own waves of grief.

The span of time since my mother died is about to bump up against my daughter Tessa’s college graduation. Tessa will join her brother in their new state of post-college life. And my job will change a bit too. I will always be a mother, and I will always be a daughter - but the physical and temporal demands of each are lighter than they used to be. This leaves me disoriented as I reconsider how I structure my days. A friend once told me that I seem to be motivated by duty, which is not how I understood myself to be moving. I have thought about the word a lot since she said it, and I think it may be true that a sense of duty is so deeply ingrained in me that I don’t recognize it - it is just my default. The dictionary calls duty ‘ a force of moral obligation’: the obligatory tasks, conduct, service, or functions that arise from one’s position (as in life or in a group).

Doing one’s duty is not always (usually?) a bad thing, but it does not necessarily lead the doer to living free. I think that I have often applied that layer of moral obligation when it wasn’t needed, and probably was not helpful. I don’t think that the actions I have taken out of a sense of duty are wildly different from what I would have chosen for myself, but do I think my life would have felt better if I had allowed myself to choose those actions, instead of feeling them as imperatives.

I would have chosen to spend most of the time that I did with my mother, and my kids, but maybe not all of it. I would have chosen a lot of the work I have done, people I have hung out with, emails I have answered - but maybe not all of them.

What would the cost have been if I had not ‘done my duty’? How would I have used that extra time, that bit of extra energy? I can’t know that, but I can allow myself to feel some excitement about this next seven years of new cells and tissues. Will it be different? We will see - it will be harder for me to know what to do and how to be. It requires more thought and self-confidence for me to figure out and then act on what I want to do, rather than to follow what I should do.

I wish I could have had a relationship with my mother that was free of that sense of duty, and I hope to have that with my kids (and to free them from duty too). And with my work, and my body, and my beliefs.

If you watch this far out video made by NPR’s Skunk Bear, you will learn that our fingernails are brand new every six months, and our outer layer of skin every few weeks. Different parts of our bodies are living new lives within our one big life. Free the fingernails!

I want to have Maria’s tiny landscapes in all of my lives…

I should love Passover. I would like to love it. Many people do. It has many elements that I do love: harbingers of Spring, conversations about liberation, time with family and friends, matzoh balls. But when it comes time for the seders, my head fills with static and low-level depression sets in. I have been to so many seders in my life that I have a hard time distinguishing one year from the next, and a hard time making any new meaning of a holiday that is theoretically so relevant to the current moment. A big part the problem is that I miss my parents an extra dose on this holiday, which they both loved. My father once made gefilte fish from scratch (and if you have ever eaten gefilte fish, you can imagine how bad our house smelled). My parents, and then my mother after my fathers’ death, always hosted a big, sprawling seder in our living room. Helping my mother to set up and clean up for those gatherings are some of my clearest memories of being with her, and being in my childhood home. I didn’t really enjoy those seders either - maybe I haven’t liked the holiday since my father died. But that is now 37 years ago, and I’ve had many more Passovers without him than I had with him. I imagine there are a lot of rituals like this - you almost don’t consider whether you enjoy them - you just do them because that’s the way they are done.

Luckily, my husband Jonathan is someone who thinks deeply about the content and meaning of the holiday, not just about the feelings around it. This year he created a new version of the Haggadah - the guide to the ritual - for a group of our friends and family. He offered a new way of thinking about the story of the Exodus - the tale of the slaves leaving the narrowness of Egypt for a wider future of redemption:

A modern interpretation of the story might say: Leaving a narrow place requires more than good intentions - it often requires disruption. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman, describes, our minds prefer stability and coherence, even when they are misleading. Liberation, then, may feel disorienting: it is the experience of having our assumptions challenged and our mental frameworks expanded, allowing us to encounter a wider and more complex reality.

The Passover haggadah reads: “In every generation, a person must see themselves as if they left Egypt.”

The rabbis emphasize that this is not just history, but our founding story as a Jewish people. To make this meaningful, our engagement in this moment is ongoing. Each person is supposed to do the work to end slavery in all its forms. Each person is expected to do the work to liberate themselves.

To do this self-liberation, we might lean into using what we know about our physical, social, and emotional selves to recognize our biases, transform our responses, and rewire our systems - so that we can be more free.

Jonathan asked the crowd sitting around our living room to consider the Passover story as an opportunity to leave our narrow mindsets. Something in me shifted in response, and I was able to move a tiny bit out of my chronic Passover melancholy, and into experiencing the moment as its own thing. The food tasted better than usual, and I even had some fun.

A few days after Passover, Jonathan and I went on a short vacation. We were invited to a wedding in Waxahatchie, TX and we went to Austin for a few days ahead of the wedding. It was a rare kind of vacation for us - we were not visiting anyone we knew, no kids along for the ride, just the two of us with no particular agenda. We stayed at a cool hotel, ate a lot, walked a lot, and looked at many cowboy boots. I did a great job of packing, except that I forgot underwear and I brought my brain. The underwear problem was easily solved - the brain one was harder.

I woke up the first morning in our light and airy hotel room with my stomach clenched, absolutely consumed by old grudges and aged perceived slights. I was thinking about conflicts that I had left behind months and years ago - which all of a sudden felt fresh and painful. Was this what happened when I cleared my decks of my daily schedule and took a break from the news? Rather than finding peace and openness, why was my subconscious sending me old shit in to wreck up my day? Were these issues I had not fully worked through, that had just been waiting for space to make themselves known? Why was I wasting this time and place on old grievances? This is the problem with going on vacation with myself.

Jonathan’s Passover question returned to me as I lay in that hotel bed, seething. In this very minor-league example of me leaving the narrowness of work-a-day life for the liberation of vacation, I had brought the constraints with me - moving from one set of worries straight into another. In order to disrupt this pattern - Jonathan had offered an exercise he found on the intertubes: In moments of stuckness, he urged us to use the acronym N.B.C.: Notice. Breathe. Cold. I should notice what was bothering me - feel the anxiety I had experienced at the past moments of conflict, spend a few minutes tracing the path of the worry. Then breathe - inhale and exhale deeply and try to release the physical anxiety from my body. And then splash cold water on my face - to interrupt the pattern, wake myself up literally and physically.

I have to say, it kind of worked. I was able to re-settle those old concerns back into the past, where they belonged, and throw myself into the current pursuit of tacos. And to check out the most amazing swimming hole I have ever seen at Barton Springs Park. And then go witness my friends Natalie and Sam get married - complete with steel guitar country tunes at rehearsal dinner and a Mr. Softee truck at the wedding party. Perfection.

So from the ancient traditions to the chocolate and vanilla twist - quite a Passover. And Maria brings us into Spring….

When I was a kid, I used to go grocery shopping at the Red Apple grocery store on 99th and Broadway with my mother. While we were in the store, mom would often open a package of Oreos and eat a few in the aisle, and then leave the package on the shelf. If you know my mother, you might be surprised by this - more than you are by my coffee crime. In the early ‘70s, my mother did not know that she would go on to convert to Judaism and become a Rabbi, but she was always a spiritual and moral person. At the time of our Red Apple trips, she had read Abbie Hoffman’s ‘Steal This Book’, written in 1970. The book (which I have not read, just heard of and wikipedia’d) was focused on ways to fight against the government and corporations. Hoffman called America the “Pig Empire” and wrote that it was not immoral to steal from it—in fact, it was immoral not to do so.

“To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.”

― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

My coffee crime is not steeped in political ideology the way my mother’s was (though I do like an Oreo with my coffee). Instead, it is a very small rebellion against always doing the right thing, obeying the rules, and being a responsible grown up. It is such a small rebellion it is embarrassing to call it such. I am certain that the grocery store can absorb this loss of tablespoons of caffeine without much damage.

I also don’t think my mother’s Oreo rebellion was very effective as political protest. Both of us were just reminding ourselves that we could do something unexpected. Who knows what kind of criminal masterminds, mother-daughter outlaws or revolutionaries we could have been if we had let ourselves dream bigger?

In both of these instances we were robbing from the kind-of-rich (the grocers) to give to the pretty-well-off (us). No great shakes. Separately from our crimes, I think we both spent a good deal of our lives strategizing about more radical income redistribution. This goal is very much a work-in-progress (and sometimes it feels like it is in retreat). It is harder to pull off than petty shoplifting, and much more important. But as our man Abbie says about Democracy, working towards the reordering of society happens both in the short run and the long haul:

“Democracy is not something you believe in or hang your hat on, but something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles and falls. If you participate, the future is yours.”

― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

______

Unrelated (except by the Pilates and coffee milieu) - I have an essay in the inaugural issue of The Skybridge Review, published by Hunter College’s Creative Writing MFA program.

And Maria leaves us with this image, to keep us company as we drink our coffee (paid for or not):

It was a little bit useful – a few drugstore and grocery runs for sick neighbors came out of it, and at least one instance of checking in on an elderly woman who lived alone.

It was also super annoying, and continues to be so. I have never found anyone to hand it off to, and many of the posts in the last 6 years have been unnecessary ‘reply-alls’, or angry screeds against the management company about plumbing issues that didn’t really need to be shared amongst the 54 units of the building. I did score a used lamp, and once I found out about the opportunity for our apartment to be used for a filming of a ‘Modern Love’ episode, which paid for a Mexican vacation for our family. But in full, this gesture of neighborliness has been a wash in terms of good deeds v. wasted time. It is a concrete offering to my nearest neighbors - but to what end?

I was having a drink with a friend the other day. We were talking about religion, and he asked me what guided me in life - and where I had found that guidance (the drink was more fun than this makes it sounds). I had a moment of panic - what guides me in life? Coffee and beer didn’t seem like the right answer. After the panic, the thing that came to mind was the often cited story of someone asking the Jewish sage, Hillel the Elder (b. 110 BCE), to teach the entire Torah while his listener stood on one foot. He famously replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary.”

It’s a pretty basic teaching, also known as the Golden Rule. But it is not the one around which we have organized our communities. I gotta give it to Hillel - a proactive and progressive definition of ‘doing unto our fellows’ seems like it could be a way out of this terrifying moment, and a passageway to the next. But that requires that we make ‘neighboring’ a verb as well as a noun1.

Here’s a thing I have been trying to figure out: If our common agreement were to treat our fellows as we would want to be treated ourselves, where would that take us operationally? How could we organize that work, that world? There are a bunch of different identities and locations that each of us could select from to support our fellows: our individual identities as neighbors, as part of an organized network, a member of a religious institution, a worker at community-based organization, a member of a union, or a government emplyee. We each have different kinds of time, dollars, risk tolerance, skills, relationships, experience and ideas to bring to the work. A huge first step is figuring how to connect to our neighbors, and then a second it figuring out how to deploy our gifts.

I am not the first to ask, but I cannot stop doing the math: if the golden rule is our starting point, and a true multi-racial democracy is an ending point…how do these players work together in their formations - and how do we head in the same direction? What could we do together? Options include protecting each other from violence, sharing our resources so everyone has their basic needs covered, voting for people that are committed to equality and justice, planning a beautiful 250th birthday party for our country, pulling off a general strike…?.

It’s a lot to do while standing on one foot. And also, what better to do with our days and our feet?

Tiny landscape, by Maria Mottola

In addition to (or in conflict with) writing Side of the Road, I am in the midst of taking part in a 6-month memoir ‘incubator’ with nine other writers and an instructor. I am working on a series of linked essays that are largely about accompanying my mother while she died. I have been working on these essays in one form or another for the past six years. Last week I workshopped a piece with my classmates, and I got a lot of very helpful feedback. The thought of now taking the feedback, revising, re-writing and and continuing to write makes me want to break my computer in half and get in bed with the covers over my head. It feels so hard to keep going, and also I can’t quite remember why I thought it was worth doing in the first place.

So why write? Right? Why torture myself by reliving moments of my mother’s illness and death? And for that matter, why create this every-other-week narrative of late middle age in late stage capitalism? Each time I write a post I have to talk myself into hitting ‘publish.’ Even though it makes me feel better to write, even though it helps me to understand my life, and even though it gives me a feeling of connection to any of you who are reading, it also feels show-offy and dumb. All of that is loudly in my head, not while I write, but when I get ready to share my writing.

I have been thinking about what these two writing projects - the essays and the Substack - have in common. In both of them, I am considering the task of working hard in excruciating conditions - my mother’s fatal brain cancer, the current political polycrisis. I am trying to align a grueling, heartbreaking daily reality with the deep connection, love and community to be found within the doing of the work to deal with it. And then connect those to finding and feeling the joy, family, sun, music, friendship, food and freedom that both fuel and inspire the caretaking and organizing.

My mother had one tiny body, and I organized huge amounts of resources and person-hours into caring for her as she died. Our country is vast, and I can only do one tiny part of caring for it. I love my mother, and my country (though I don’t love apple pie). I also love so many things beyond and beside them - and it has always been hard to keep my eyes open to the threats and keep my heart open to the joys, and to keep my brain and hands at play to experience both. I think writing help me to do so.

The best description I am finding to connect the writing to the work is by the writer Elissa Gabbart, writing in the Paris Review:

I think I write to think—not to find out what I think; surely I know what I already think—but to do better thinking. Staring at my laptop screen makes me better at thinking. Even thinking about writing makes me better at thinking. And when I’m thinking well, I can sometimes write that rare, rare sentence or paragraph that feels exactly right, only in the sense that I found the exact right sequence of words and punctuation to express my own thought—the grammar in the thought. That rightness feels so good, like sinking an unlikely shot in pool. The ball is away and apart from you, but you feel it in your body, the knowledge of causation. Never mind luck or skill or free will, you caused that effect—you’re alive!

In the end - I want many moments of that feeling alive. I want to be energized and in motion, and writing helps me to name the moments and to fully experience them. So in conclusion - get ready for year 2 of Side of the Road. I don’t know if I will continue working on that essay collection. Maybe it has served its function, and it is time for me to shut the cover on it. I will figure it out.

Oh, and while we’re doing this annual review, let me report on my progress on a few other goals:

• You may remember that I planned to take 57 5.7 mile walks in my 57th year. I have completed 25, so I have to do 32 walks in the next 20 weeks - before I turn 58 (which is to say there is still time to hit me up for a loop around Prospect Park, or wherever you are walking these days),

• I am also trying to raise $1 million to support immigration-serving organizations in NYC through The Haven Fund. We have passed $400,000, but there is still time for you to hit me up with half a million dollars.

Lordy. I am a little tired of being in my own brain. Thank goodness it is lighter for longer as of this week, and that today feels like Spring in New York City.

Oh - and let us not forget our usual shot of joy from Maria:

I woke up the Monday morning after the superb owl (TM) feeling better than I had in months. Nothing had changed, my family was still fine, and my country was still fucked.

But bouyed by the music, the dance, the language, the colors, the love of home, the brilliant use of the huge national platform to tell an often neglected story, I was able to lean into the feeling fine, and stave off the fucked. It was as if I had just started taking Lexapro - but I’ve been on that for a decade, so it’s something else. With Benito’s example, I have been able to believe that being miserable about the state of our democracy doesn’t serve anything. That is to say, the misery does not serve. And without that comes a lifting of the sooty glaze that has been impeding my vision. I feel better able to move, to act, to hope.

It’s a tenuously held feeling of purpose and agency for me - but I will ride it as long as it lasts.

Lady Gaga

I’ve had Lady Gaga’s remix of Mr. Roger’s theme song as background music while I dream about how we might open ourselves to the song’s invitation to be a neighbor. Like so many, I am moved and inspired by the way folks have taken to the streets and showed up for each other in Minneapolis. I feel inspired by how many people came out to work for Mamdani’s election. I joined the Handsoff NYC Brooklyn network, as well as the Handsoff Prospect Heights and the Handsoff group for my apartment building. Each group of people caring about their community feels good (even as I am flooded by Signal messages). And as I have been building The Haven Fund1 this winter, I have been touched, inspired and motivated by how many people have contributed dollars, and also by the people who have volunteered to help me to create various parts of the project.

I am reflecting about what has allowed for this metaphorical and literal getting off the couch, leaving the house, moving into the streets, sharing money, and time. For me, it is not just Bad Bunny, it is both fear and hope that are moving me - with some anger thrown in. At the top of the list of threats that make up the polycrises we are living through I am overwhelmed by fear of ICE and the national guard invading my city. Conditions here could escalate in the way we have seen in Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago, Minneapolis. I am also feeling deep engagement in the work of building neighborhoods where we can count on each other in crisis moments like these. Unexpectedly, I am also feeling a new, tender hope about what we are learning and building now that we can take into peacetime, that would allow us to create communities of true mutuality and care, within a multiracial democracy.

The chaos and cruelty of the ICE encroachment feels like a game changer to me. The in-your-face nature of the inhumanity, the violence, the kidnapping of children, and general meanness seem to have invited and motivated action differently than many of the other hundreds of horrors we have faced during the first and second Trump administrations.

So many of us come from immigrant families, if not in our own or our parents’ generation then further down the line. I don’t really understand epigenetics, so I don’t know if I am genetically wired to feel this fear in my bones, but I do understand empathy and self-interest, and I do believe that agents could come banging on my door next. And so this movement into action is not about charity or generosity, it is about survival, kinship, and care.

Frank Sinatra

Let’s say my very half-est-full-glass perspective is predictive, and we are going to make it through this moment by taking care of each other, aligning interests, protecting elections, voting, feeding each other, and dancing in the streets or in football stadiums. Then what? Where are we heading and how can we hold onto the identity of neighbor to build into the blueprint for a city we want for our children and nieces and nephews?

If these spit-and-tape systems we are building can help us survive this moment, what can they make possible in the future? Can a collective immigrant identity invite us into cross-class and cross-race solidarity? Can we hold onto the connection and commitment to our neighbors that would allow for a city that can take care of everyone?

I am a third generation New Yorker, and my kids are 4th generation. I have always considered that to be an important part of my identity, but not one that I was especially proud of. This winter, I have been feeling more connection to and pride in this identity than ever before - and this despite the truly revolting mounds of filthy snow striated with dog pee and poop on every corner that lasted for weeks before this last blizzard (and will no doubt be back by Thursday).

This city gives and it takes. And it evolves. And maybe we are at an inflection point. And maybe Frank Sinatra is right - if we can make it here, we can make it anywhere.

P.S. This title of this post is from the great Joan Armatrading - the 4th in my musical inspirations for this week.

P.P.S. Tiny Landscape from Maria…

During my sophomore year of college, Joey and I regularly navigated up and down the Merritt highway between Middletown, CT, where I was in school to the NYU Langone hospital on the East Side of Manhattan. My father was diagnosed with Leukemia at the beginning of that year, and died at the beginning of my junior year. My fear and then grief made my driving even worse, but Joey and I continued careening around New York and New England in the hard years that followed.

I spent those years after college in Somerville, Massachusetts. They were hard years for me. I was mourning my father, and trying to figure out how to be an adult. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or who I wanted to do it with. In my memory, it was always freezing cold and snowing in those years. I was always driving on icy roads, gently careening into parking meters and lane embankments and curbs - never a human, thank god. I knew the car body shop guys all too well, visiting them almost as often as my therapist. I dreamed about driving too - about being lost and out of control behind the wheel. I talked about writing a book about that time of life: Jobs I’ve Hated, Men I’ve Dated.

The driving dreams lasted past my years in Somerville. They came back when I was feeling especially lost, or out of control. I found my dream self again clutching the steering wheel while I slid out of control in the snow on Somerville Ave. That driving dream alternated with the one where I had to take the exam I hadn’t studied for, and the one where I tried to put in contact lenses that grew way too big for my eyes. My car, my brain, my eyes - all betraying me in my dreams.

I was in Somerville last weekend, there to visit friends and family. I have been back many times since I lived there - but all of the snow this last time triggered a nauseatingly nostalgic experience. I found myself zoning out in the same low grey light of a long Saturday afternoon, feeling the same cold in my bones, experiencing the same impossibility of finding a parking place that was not “saved” by someone’s chair plunked in the middle of it. We drove across the city and I stomped down on an imaginary break, turned into the skid, even though I was not the one behind the wheel and we were not slipping.

Happily, this visit I was not in my early twenties. As I got to each friend we visited, I found that their homes were warm, and that the snow was kind of pretty out their windows. More than that, I realized that I had not had a car dream in many years. I still miss my father - both my parents, now and forever. I still have questions about what I want to do, but they are more nuanced. And I am pretty well secure in who I want to do it with. I am still a terrible driver, but now I can hand the driving over to someone else - and given that I am now the shortest person in my family, I am often kicked out of the front seat all together.

There are so many hard things about aging, and I was pleased to be reminded of the ease it can offer too. As I watch my children and their friends navigate that same moment of life, they seem to do it with more ease and elegance than I did. But I do not envy them.

Also this - less weighty, but more practical: if you ever want to drive from Boston to NYC on a Sunday afternoon - do it during a Super Bowl when the Patriots are playing. Fastest drive ever.

And this….a winter-inspired tiny landscape, by Maria:

Last week Facebook pushed a memory at me - a photo taken in the days before that accident. Jonathan and the kids and I went hiking in Yosemite Park during the first week of January that year. It was our holiday celebration and a last moment together before the kids went back to school for Spring semester. In a caption under one of the photos I say something about what a great way it was to start 2023, and how ready I was for a brand new year. Reading my words now, with the benefit of hindsight, is almost unbearable. I feel angry at myself for so naively expecting a good year. I can’t stand that we were cavalierly hiking around together, acting like that was a safe thing to do, unaware that the universe was about to spit rocks at our girl.

In the years since Tessa’s accident, I have spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about how I could have prevented it. Could I have raised her to be more fearful? Should I have encouraged her to take a Friday afternoon class? What if I had called her at the moment they were setting out so that she would have been one step behind that falling rock? I know none of these are really possible - no one could stop Tessa from being the brave and independent woman she is. No one takes Friday afternoon college classes if they can help it. There is no way to know the full range of bad things that might be coming at us, or how to prevent them. Living defensively doesn’t actually work very well, and is a lousy way to process the universe.

Living in the United States during Trump’s second administration it has become even more clear that there is no way to know what to worry about next. I was in denial before the last Presidential election, and thought Harris would win. I remember telling people at the time that there was no benefit to expecting the worst, since we would have to deal with it when it came regardless. I wonder if that was the right stance - did it keep me from doing something more to prepare ahead of him coming into office? Regardless, I never would have guessed that an invasion of Greenland, a systemetized snatching of people off the streets, the unavailability of childhood vaccines, or the survival of public radio would have been among my fears in 2026.

I don’t know what things that I am not imagining today that will come true in the future. There is no value in making tomorrow’s worry list today. I am trying to experience that as freeing, rather than terrifying. And I am trying to take note of the unexpectedly good things that happen - a poem that opens me up, when I thought I didn’t understand poetry. An delicious peach in the middle of winter. An election victory by a principled and unexpected New York City mayor. A gift of time, generosity and attention from someone I barely know. These are not of the same scale as the wretched cruelty and fascism coming from our Federal government, but they matter too.

I am steeled for Facebook to send me ‘memories’ of the weeks after Tessa’s accident when I was posting photos of her to let our friends know she was battered but not broken, that she would be OK. In these photos Tessa has black eyes, and I know that a patch of hair is shaved in the back of her head where the surgeon operated. But she mostly looks shining and strong and ready. Those dark days were illuminated by friends who sent us cookies and bagels and candies, who showed up in California to check on us, and most especially by Tessa’s friends who took care of her when we went home.

Amidst the terrible deeds we are witnessing in Minneapolis, we are hearing stories of community and fellowship that sustain. They matter too.

Taking Turns, John Roedel

let’s create a schedule where we can take turns giving up on hope for a day

~ so we all don’t do it at once

and when it’s your day,

just let me know what you need

i can bring you a hot drink,

the softest of blankets, and a funny movie we can watch together

on my day to give up, please just walk

me outside so i can place my hands on a tree so i can feel the hum of creation again

my love, on the days we can’t hold onto hope, we’ll at least be able to hold each other

I often miss younger versions of my children, now that they are both in their twenties. I get pangs when a photo from long ago appears on my phone, or when I see a baby or child who looks like one of them. But this feeling was different. I was not missing them so much as I was missing the time of my life which was consumed by parenting. I missed the years when I was so sapped between taking care of the kids and doing my job that I had no time for the rest of the world. I longed to listen to Dan Zanes sing about pirate ships instead of NPR reporters talk about facism. I wanted to go to soccer games instead of protests. I wanted to be woken in the middle of the night by a kid climbing into our bed instead of by existential dread. I wanted to spend my hours thinking about how to entertain the kids, keep them healthy and safe - to have that as my world again. It is the privilege of having healthy children and enough to eat, but the simplicity of prioritizing my own family’s needs seems so much easier, and more doable then taking on bigger challenges.

The love I have for my kids is huge and unending. Sometimes they torture me by asking which of them I love more - and I give them the answer my mother used to give to me and my brother: I love you both as much as all the stars in the sky and all the grains of sand on the beach. Unsatisfying to them, but true.

Raising our kids is my favorite thing I have ever done. My love and affection for them is highest on my list of things I am grateful for, and each morning when I wake up my first thoughts are locating each of them in time and space. It took a lot of time, energy, money, and concentration to get them through to young adulthood - and I am so proud of who they are now. And also, I think of having kids as essentially a selfish endeavor - something Jonathan and I did for ourselves, not for the world.

I wonder if we spent too much on them. What did we fail to do with our time, money, and energy because we were dropping kids off at school, sitting on the baseball sidelines, buying Pokemon cards, applying to middle schools? I wonder what we would collectively gain (and lose) if individual parents focused more on the conditions for all children instead of just their own. I have been thinking about this as I read politicians’ speeches, Instagram memes, organizational slogans, and campaign promises about making the world better for our children. ‘For our children’ justifies a lot of selfish behavior, as well as benevolent action. A lot of selfishness, greed, and violence against “the other” is unleashed in the name of giving our own children the best lives possible. I wonder what it would take to open each of our apertures - to widen our goal to make the world better for children writ large, instead of for our own children.

I am hardly the first to ask these questions - so share any answers you’ve got...

Some Maria art, for your enjoyment:

P.S. The Jewish Literary Journal just published this essay I wrote about the year after my mother died: The First Year.

New Year’s Eve is less loaded these years - usually spent with a few friends, sometimes just me and Jonathan. We have a dinner that’s a little better than a regular night, and stay up a little later than usual. We are not invited to great glittery parties, and do not usually venture into the cold to watch the fireworks at Grand Army Plaza. But I always love the feeling of waking up on January 1st - a fresh new morning when a clean page and untouched year lie before me.

We could all use a clean page - no? This year has been long, hard, dark, scary: all the things. It’s hard to summarize it in any new or helpful way - so instead here are a few short thoughts on what I am taking into a new year:

1. I like to make a low-bar, very doable New Year’s resolution. My gold standard is the year I resolved to listen to more music, and so got a shower radio. I knocked that one out on January 1st. This year I want my plants to grow - so I will turn the ficus in my living room around so the other side of it gets more of the sun. I think I can get that done pretty early in the year.

2. In addition to this small, concrete resolution - I am tempted to adopt comedian Josh Gondelman’s more aspirational goal: My new year’s resolution this year, as every year, is to be a more available, supportive friend as well as an increasingly looming, formidable enemy.

3. I highly recommend a quick watch of David Byrne’s Tiny Desk Concert, if you need a shot of joy on the first day of the year, or really any day.

4. I am due for my second Saturn’s Return this year. These intervals or “returns” coincide with the approximate time it takes the planet Saturn to make one orbit around the Sun. Astrologers believe that, as Saturn “returns” to the degree in its orbit occupied at the time of birth, a person crosses over a major threshold and enters the next stage of life. With the first Saturn return, a person leaves youth behind and enters adulthood. With the second return, maturity. So perhaps this year I will finally reach maturity???

   

In addition to teaching me about Nostalgia for the Mud, my friend Maud also once told me that as it turns midnight on New Year’s Eve you should be doing what you want to do more of in the next year. And to burn some shit you don’t want to carry into the year.

My plan for Wednesday evening is to be with people I love, eat some good food, burn some newspaper articles about some of the terrible happenings of ‘25, and maybe a few ‘to do’ lists. And I will write a sentence or two, hold onto the friends and family I am lucky enough to go through my years with and hope (and work) for a better 2026. How about you?

Happy Fucking New Years.

And Maria’s Tiny Landscape of the untouched snow will lead us in….

This year I am copping a particularly bad attitude. I had a colonoscopy a few weeks ago, and while in the horrendous evening-before preparation, I texted my friend Jenn - who is almost always right - to ask her what I should watch on TV. She failed me this time, suggesting that I watch a Netflix Christmas movie, starring Minka Kelly (she of Lyla Garrity/Friday Night Lights fame). From there, the Netflix algorithm brought me directly to an even-worse Alicia Silverstone (she of Cher from Clueless fame) Christmas glop of a film. The combination of these aging beauties, the nausea induced by the colonoscopy prep liquid (this time in an appalling cranberry flavor - to add holiday-themed insult to holiday-themed injury), the attention to my innards and the general darkness of these times have emboldened me to admit that I do not care about the holidays. Here are just a few of my complaints:

• Starting in November, I have to put my headphones in upon entering any store playing Christmas music - which is almost all of them. So I basically stop speaking to strangers right around Thanksgiving.

• I love a latke, but not more than I hate the way my house smells like deep fried potatoes and oil for the next week. The smell creeps into everything, and I start my days smelling like I slept in a diner.

• By night 4, Chanukah is a bore. I spend a lot of the holy blessing time noticing how much wax has dripped onto my windowsill, which still holds the wax that I never got around to cleaning off from a year ago. My family gives each other hastily chosen gifts, poorly wrapped in the leftover paper from the night before.

• Everyone else seems to get invited to more holiday parties than I do (think it might have something to do with my attitude?).

• Even though my parents were also not great at holidays (my mother always hid our presents in the too-easy-to-find lower left hand corner of her closet, and my father bought everyone carefully considered but terrible gifts ), I miss them both an extra dose at the end of the year.

Womp.

I woke up Sunday morning with my daughter home from college and in her bed - where she belongs, and Eastern Parkway looked beautiful under the first real snowfall of the season, but there will be no ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ redemption narrative here for me. There were also two more mass shootings - one very close to home, one further away on the first night of Chanukah. Like so many other days, Sunday was full of joy and fear and sadness and comfort and beauty and ugliness all smushed up next to each other.

BUT - I’m going to drag the menorahs out, and boil some hot water to get the solidified wax from last year off of them. To balance out the list of holiday gripes above, I’m going to share eight organizations that I will give to this Chanukah. The list is easily adapted to seven days of Kwanza if you drop one of them, or to 12 days of Christmas, if you give to a few twice. I hope you are going into the holidays with a better attitude than me, but if not - know that you have a cranky friend who feels you.

1. The Haven Fund* - This is the ‘pop-up’ foundation I set up this Fall to raise $1 million to support neighborhood-level immigration organizations in NYC. As our city comes under fire by ICE - these organizations are helping us to keep each other safe.

2. Red Hook Initiative* - A community-based organization in Red Hook, Brooklyn that does some of the deepest and most authentic youth development and community-building work I have ever seen.

3. NYC Kids RISE *- Provides families, schools, and communities with a way to work together to invest in and save for their children’s futures. Setting up 529 accounts for every student in NYC public schools.

4. Hebrew Free Loan Society - The Hebrew Free Loan Society advances economic stability and opportunity for lower income New Yorkers within and beyond the Jewish community by making safe, affordable interest-free loans.

5. Square One - ​​Square One seeks out the most promising Democratic women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community to run for Congress in long-overlooked red districts and states, and provides the high-impact, hands-on support they need to launch, run, and win their groundbreaking campaigns — against all the odds.

6. Oil Change International - Oil Change International is a research, communications, and advocacy organization working to expose the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitate the ongoing transition to clean energy. This organization is supported by one of my heroes, Rebecca Solnit.

7. Brotherhood/Sister Sol* - With a focus on Black and Latinx youth, BroSis is where young people claim the power of their history, identity and community to build the future they want to see.

8. College Access: Research and Action (CARA)* - CARA ensures that first-generation college students, low-income students, and students of color have the knowledge and support necessary to enroll in and persist through postsecondary education.

Donations to any of these places would make great gifts (though not that exciting to small children). Where are you sharing resources these days? Maybe you will let us all know in the comments.

And, because my heart is not made of ice - I am sharing a spectacular video from Maria - whose tiny watercolor landscapes I usually feature here. This weekend, Maria and her son and his husband continued her family’s transition of making a Timpano each December. As you will see below, she is a multifaceted artist. We all contain multitudes. Happy returning-of-the-light season to you.

*The organizations listed above with asterixes are places where I have worked, served on the board, or have close connections to - feel free to ask about more info on any of them.

In my defense (and I know that I am only defending against myself), I was in the glorious mushy time that the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend offers to people who are taking it off. I was relishing that feeling of surprise that you get on Friday evening of that weekend that there is still a whole weekend in front of you. That feeling is so delicious, and rare. We had a particularly easy and fun Thanksgiving weekend this year, so I didn’t experience the anxiety or sadness that sometimes prompts me to write. And I wasn’t listening to the news. And I was out of the city. And so the item on my to do list slipped away from me.

I have always had an embarrassingly good memory for the small details of other people’s lives: what they are doing and who they are doing it with. I very often remember people who don’t remember me. I know where we last ate together, who you were dating, and what job you had. And so for a person like me, forgetting is destabilizing. And has been happening more frequently of late. I am getting used to the extra second it takes me to remember someone’s name, the fact that I can no longer recall Ellen’s phone number from 7th grade (I know it started with an 8…), the moment when I catch myself repeating a story I’m telling the kids. It’s all strange, and hard - but it’s also soft. In forgetting to write the substack, I was being gentle with myself. In order to let go of the great ‘to do’ list of my life, I have to believe that 1) no one is watching, and 2) it doesn’t really matter if it happens today or tomorrow.

I have to let go of some ego to take those two to heart, especially the part about no-one watching. But oh, what they offer: a little bit of the ease of that rare 4-day weekend in the middle of a regular week, a little bit of kindness to myself, and a little bit of grace for the person who has not yet emailed me back.

I’m keeping it short this week, for obvious reasons. But I offer you some words from the great Grace Paley on getting older. She shares the advice she got from her father -

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.

[…]

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

Thanks Maria….

.That’s what it was like for me to grow up in Manhattan - I thought mine were universal experiences. I took for granted the huge hauls of trick-or-treat candy I could gather in my building, without stepping out of doors and ruining my costume with a coat. I thought the 24-hour bodegas, crowded subways and loud noises down on the street that served as lullaby were part of every kids’ life.

I have been thinking about growing up in the city in the ‘70s and ‘80s as we get closer to the night-before-Thanksgiving tradition of closing off blocks of the upper west side of Manhattan to inflate the Macy’s Parade balloons. Thanksgiving eve was a big social event when I was in high school. We went out in the November chill to 72nd street and met up at the Chinese restaurant that would serve us under-aged glasses of Bacardi and Tab (forgive me, this is what I drank back then). In those years before cell phones, we had to search through the crowds to find our friends and crushes. It was exciting and I felt free and independent.

Part of growing up in the city for me was that sense of freedom - I could get anywhere by bus and train with no need for my parents to drop me off or pick me up. They trusted me and I trusted myself. There was no way they could reach me when I was out in the streets - find-my-friend technology still decades away. I was young and dumb and white and well-off and sensed no danger. I had a thick and bouncy safety net. I am sure that I narrowly escaped bad things, but just as I thought everyone put their shoes on in the elevator, I thought that everyone was safe in the city.

Everyone is not safe in the city, of course, and they never have been. Not in the eighties on the Upper West Side, and certainly not today. The combination of a matured frontal lobe, years under my belt, expanded political consciousness, and a deepened understanding of the many ways danger is emanating from our government have changed the way I understand the city. This Thanksgiving kicks off a winter that is likely to bring even greater danger for immigrants (and people who look like immigrants) who live in our city. It is quite likely that we will be invaded by even more ICE agents than we have now, as well as the National Guard after our new Mayor takes office.

What will that look like? A friend in Washington DC wrote over the summer about what her neighborhood was like after ICE and the National Guard arrived:

In a 1.5 mile radius from my home, ICE is teeming in the streets. Every major artery in this small area of the city has round the clock daily checkpoints. Masked ICE and federal agents carrying military grade weapons are roaming our high-density Latino neighborhood, in front of schools, nursing homes, daycare centers, metro stops, and are breaking into buildings pretending to be amazon to kidnap people, Neighbors and friends aren’t leaving their homes to take their kids to school because they are afraid of getting kidnapped…. Uber and delivery drivers including ones that have green cards or are citizens are being hunted down and arrested by unidentified masked agents while neighbors in the dozens are videotaping them and in some cases physically trying to stop them.

DC Council Member Janeese Lewis George shared her take on the DC climate on Instagram in August.

The Free DC movement has put together an amazing neighborhood-level response in their city, and HandsOff NYC is doing similar work here. In both cases, people who have never engaged in civic action before are showing up to protect their neighbors in all kinds of ways. People are passing whistles around the city, to help warn of ICE raids. If you are looking for a way to be involved, look up HandOff NYC, or check out the work I mentioned in my last post: The Haven Fund, which supports the work of community-based organizations that are protecting new New Yorkers.

The counterweight of New Yorker neighbors taking care of each other helps to balance the cruelty of the federal government. The idea that we are out in the streets looking out for our neighbors gives me some hope. This Thanksgiving, this winter, can bring that kind of bounty if we want it to. When I think of crisp winter days and blue sky and new possibilities, I think of the poem, Praise Song for the Day that Elizabeth Alexander wrote for Obama’s inauguration.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Tiny Landscape by Maria, thank goodness.

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