Right now as I write this, I’m lounging on the settee behind my home looking out at the vast expanse of blue-grey bay with pale pink light shimmering over the hills beyond.

To tell you the truth--and I do so love discovering and revealing my truth--I’m supposed to be on my way to Berkeley to hear one of my favorite New York jazz musicians play at the Botanical Garden. I’ve been looking forward to this toe-tapping event for weeks…

But I woke up this morning with a surprising sense of foreboding. Then around 10 a.m. my intuition was validated when I received an e-mail from the organizers telling me that the concert was going to take place in an outdoor amphiteather and not in the elegant Arts and Crafts building designed by architect Julia Morgan that I looked forward to experiencing for the first time. I also learned that to accommodate an overflowing parking lot, shuttle buses would be provided from the nearby Lawrence Hall of Science.

Then came the biggest kickers of all: the seats in the amphitheater were stadium-style benches without backs and families with children would be seated towards the entrance so that the kids could run in and out during the performance.

Huh? The more I read, the more dread my highly sensitive, aching-back self felt about going. The scene described was not at all my idea of listening to my beloved style of trad jazz and I stomped around my house wondering how my increasingly hermit, silence-loving self could handle this scene.

The decision about whether to forego the concert was further complicated by the fact that the lead musician, a fine clarinet player whose weekly live-stream performance from Manhattan was my regular Tuesday night date-- had been kind enough to arrange a complimentary ticket for me.

After an exhausting half hour of my Libra brain weighing the pros and cons, it became increasingly clear that I wouldn’t be able to get myself into the car to cross that bridge to Berkeley. I composed as kind an apology letter as I could muster through the thick lens of guilt and discomfort about being a no-show.

I don’t regret my decision, especially as I’m sitting quietly here listening to the sweet rhythm of bird song, but I do feel a sense of shock that I no longer have the stamina and resilience to do the kinds of things I used to. Indeed, it feels like this cancellation is a pivot point in my life, the beginning of a new and different chapter: looking inward rather than outward and opting for quiet solitude rather than sound in public spaces.

But who is this person now sitting on the settee instead of tapping my feet to the rhythm of live music among other jazz aficionados?

It always puts a smile on my face to remember the time several decades ago when, as a food and travel writer, I came home from a press trip to Australia one day and nonchalantly left for a press trip to Egypt the next morning.

Back then I would travel with a small carry-on suitcase or backpack. Nowadays I need to load my car with several bags of stuff to keep me comfortable when I leave for an afternoon jaunt! And the thought of waiting on long lines at an airport and boarding an airplane fills me with a grid-locking sense of dread.

Indeed, I have not slept any place but my own bed since moving to my current home about eight years ago.

Who is this person who no longer wants to leave home for more than an afternoon? Who is this woman who prefers to hang out gardening rather than taking in the latest movie? Well, you guessed it: it’s the 80-year-old version of me!

Life as a human in a body on this earth being what it is, there seems to be no way to predict what our final chapters will look and feel like despite any efforts we make to stay cheerful, healthy, and fit.

What is becoming clearer and clearer is that my days need to unfold at a much slower pace. In this noisy world, I seem to need longer and longer stretches of silence and my travels are increasingly inward, just being still and listening, and writing to make sense of my life.

So instead of getting on an airplane heading for a remote destination, the highlights of my day will likely include floating in the hot tub and watching the clouds do their ballet, rescuing an insect that’s drowning in the community pool, chasing bees away from my lunch on the deck, watching my succulents bloom, and reading about places like Bali and San Miguel de Allende that I’ve always wanted to visit but won’t likely manage in this lifetime.

Yes dear reader, in the days ahead it looks like my most exotic travel will consist of my hands wandering across the computer’s keyboard attempting to fit together all of the puzzle pieces and make sense of my life.

I have felt a pressure all my life to do, do, do.

It’s been mighty uncomfortable but I have known no other way.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been living under the heavy weight of a deadline.

Deadlines began early in my life, first when I was editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper and then, a few decades later, with my masters thesis and doctoral degree.

Deadlines always seemed like natural punctuation marks in my life and I set up my days and weeks with never ending due dates, eventually for the many cookbooks and magazine articles I wrote. I didn’t resent or hate the deadlines. Indeed, I welcomed them as task masters whipping me to perform so that I could acknowledge myself in a way that my parents were unable to as a person worthy of praise for her accomplishments.

So accustomed did I become to slave-driver deadlines that when I finished one book or article I went on to another, rarely stopping to celebrate my achievement. Deadlines were my lifeline to productivity.

Fast forward to my retirement from writing cookbooks in my mid-sixties. I had shared everything I needed to about food and felt a deep urge to explore life beyond the kitchen. To this end, I started a blog called Lorna Sass at Large and documented my thoughts and wanderings with photographs about magic moments in New York City and elsewhere. Needing something more to fill my days, I became a docent at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and studied to be a transformational life coach. Although I completed the arduous training and became a licensed profession, somehow I never felt a strong urge to develop this new career. While I was good at the work, I now realize that my deeply empathic self absorbed the sorrows and frustrations of others and never developed a system to shake them off. Sessions left me exhausted so I slowly lost energy for pursuing this new career.

So there I was receiving Social Security and feeling kind of lost without any external deadlines to keep me in motion. In New York City everyone is rushing around being busy and creative and I was so used to carrying the heavy burden of deadlines that I unconsciously developed one after another on my own-- whether it was to change the kitty litter box, tidy up my apartment, do a round of yoga, or go for a walk.

Going, going, going.

Doing, doing, doing.

Everything felt like a heavy pressure and I have the slouched shoulders to prove it! Slowing down was a concept that never occurred to me…

When I moved to California at the age of 66, I quickly became aware that I was moving faster than everyone else. So intense was my New York fast-track energy that I noticed some people taking a few steps backwards when I started to talk! But I had no idea how to slow down.

So what did I do? I set up new deadlines in my new west coast life. Whether I was pushing myself to water my plants, do the dishes or laundry, or exercise it always felt like there was something I was supposed to get done. And when I was doing one thing, I was always in fast-forward mode, already thinking about the next thing that needed to be checked off the to-do list.

Where does rest fit into all this? I don’t remember ever feeling a time when I felt justified taking a nap. Now that I’m an elder and can’t run around the way I used to, the big challenge is to let it be OK and natural to take a nap in the middle of the day. And while I’m forced to nap most days because I’m too tired to take another step, I still don’t really know how to be OK with doing nothing.

It makes me smile to look back and recall that I’m best known for the pressure cooker books I wrote. It will not surprise you, dear reader, that what drew me to pressure cooking is that it’s a fast-forward way to get food ready to eat.

But it never occurred to me until now that the title of my cookbook, Cooking Under Pressure, is an apt description of how I’ve lived my life. Turns out that it was a brilliant strategy because I recently put some puzzle pieces together and discovered at the ripe old age of 80 that I have ADHD—possibly making me a contender for the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest woman diagnosed.

The pressure of those deadlines was what make it possible for me to stop fidgeting and hyper focus, something that is extremely challenging for ADHDers to do. Without living under deadline pressure I am at loose ends, haphazard in my thinking and acting, unable to read a book, and finding it challenging to stay present in the moment.

So I owe gratitude to my unconscious for finding a way to help this neuro-divergent being have a successful career. Now I pray that my brilliant unconscious will discover a way for me to spend my last chapters in peace and flow.

How I long to experience the rich, benevolent stillness of doing nothing…

I was going through my files and came upon the article below which I had so much fun researching in the late 80s. When I moved to Manhattan in 1968, many of the famous Jewish delis were still thriving and I have the fondest memories of eating in them, enjoying the barbs of the old Jewish waiters. Over the next few decades, the waiters and many of the delis vanished, one by one.

I hope you enjoy this reminiscent glimpse of Jewish delis the way they were. It feels like my mission to keep the memory of them alive!

******

“There is cold joy in a salami sandwich eaten outside the steamy atmosphere of a New York kosher delicatessen,” declared writer Ruth Glazer in her crusty memoir, “The Jewish Delicatessen.”

The truth of this statement was brought home to me one afternoon in the late sixties as I was attempting to get my jaw around a hot pastrami on rye at Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side.

When the waiter delivered my bottle of Dr. Brown’s Cel Ray tonic–-a quintessential part of the old New York deli experience–-he asked me if I’d heard about the guy at the cemetery who was throwing himself on a tombstone, wailing with great emotion, “Why did you die so young?” When a concerned onlooker offered condolences on the death of his wife, the grieving man stopped sobbing long enough to correct him: “This isn’t my wife buried here, you dummy; it’s her first husband.”

As I laughed and offered sympathy to the waiter for his bandaged finger, he qvetched: “That’s what you get for working in the restaurant business,” with a shrug of his slouched shoulders. It was then I experienced the most memorable flavor enhancer for a hot pastrami sandwich-–not the mustard, but the kibitzing and schmaltz that come from a 65-year-old Jewish waiter who shuffles on tired feet, wears grease-smudged glasses, and barks at customers with a strong Yiddish accent.

He commands you where to sit: “That’s the only table we got left. You want to eat, or don’t you?”

He stands as the moral arbiter of right and wrong: “If you want sauerkraut on your pastrami sandwich, you’re gonna have to put it on yourself. What jerk would wanna eat a sandwich with soggy bread?”

He slides the sandwich-laden plates to you as if were practicing for the local bowling league and about 20 minutes later tells you when it’s time to leave: “Did you come to eat or to sit and kibitz?”

The good news is that if you know where to go, you can still get a fine hot pastrami or corned beef sandwich in Gotham, but the sights, sounds, and smells of the old New York Jewish deli have vanished along with the salamis that hung their windows.

In the old days, if anyone dared to ask for lean corned beef, the waiter would put on his most disapproving look and yell: “Vich vay do you want it to lean?”

One of the regular deli patrons I interviewed for this article was Bernie Styles, then the owner of the venerable Central Casting Talent Agency. “If I had my life to live over, I’d live over a deli, ” he crooned into my ear over the telephone. “Actually, to tell you the truth, I live right over the Stage , so I’m living my life over right now,” chirped Styles.

Before the Stage, there was the Gaiety, Styles told me. “Back in the thirties and forties, on “the street”–-the colloquial name for Broadway-–“eating out was a very important part of our culture. We’d meet to eat and eat to meet. At any given hour you always knew where to find somebody amusing to talk to, ” he recalled.

“The Gaiety had only a few tables and couldn’t have been more than ten feet wide,” he said. “The waiters controlled the place. If they liked you, they’d make sure you got a seat and would let you stay a little longer, or they’d seat a pretty girl next to you. The place was always jammed.”

“The Gaiety was the first deli to serve overstuffed sandwiches, and you could even order a half-sandwich if you were short of cash. If things were really rough, you’d eat salami-–“a nickel a schtikel”–-or a hot dog–-the real kind, rolled on a grill–but if you were flush, you’d have pastrami or corned beef. The Gaiety backed onto a burlesque theater on 44th Street, and you’d always be elbow-too-elbow with actors. If they were really broke, that one overstuffed sandwich would be their only meal of the day.”

It was as a counterman at the Gaiety that the legendary Max Asnas got his start. In 1937, after he had become deft enough at hand-slicing pastrami, Max opened The Stage, billed as The Delicatessen of the Performing Arts. When a customer asked Max why he was never seen eating at his own restaurant, he promptly replied: “Who can afford the prices?”

Short, pudgy, and shaped like a soft diamond, Asnes was quick with the one-liners and encouraged his waiters to do the same. Once a customer complained to a waiter: “I don’t like the looks of this whitefish.”

“You want looks, ” barked the waiter, “order a goldfish.”

Another time, a party of four tourists ordered sandwiches and coffee. One of them commanded, “Make sure that my coffee is in an absolutely clean cup.” When the waiter returned with the order, he inquired, “Now, vich one of you gets da clean cup?”

When a woman complained to Max that his food gave her heartburn, he quickly replied: “What did you expect–-sunburn? Go to Miami.”

Max’s customers got so used to getting hit with his barbs that they felt disappointed when he ignored them. “Hey Max, you don’t insult me any more, what’s wrong? Are you mad at me?”

Max didn’t only dish it out: he could take it, too. Once, when the Stage had a fire, Milton Berle sent Max a wire: “This is the first time in years that the food in your place has been served hot.”

When I wrote and researched this piece in 1988, I was in the Carnegie Deli with my dad and bit enthusiastically into a pastrami on rye, I quickly found myself chomping down on chards of glass. I spit it all out onto my napkin and quickly called the waiter over. “Waiter, I found glass in my sandwich! I exclaimed. “Don’t worry, lady,” he reassured me, “We won’t charge you for the glass!”

Another time, I went to the beloved Second Avenue Deli and overheard an elegantly dressed lady asking a waiter, “What is schav?” The waiter answered impatiently: “Lady, if you don’t know what it is, I know you’re not going to like it.”

Like schav (sorrel, or sour grass soup), the foods served in a Jewish deli are living relics of time gone by. And the waiters are no longer old and Jewish. As the late comic Sam Levinson so eloquently stated: “Somewhat in the style of Marcel Proust, most of the customers [in a Jewish deli] are involved in a contemporary recherché de temps perdu…a remembrance of things past, of a Jewish way of life all but destroyed…”

NOTES AND RESOURCES:
This essay above is an excerpt of a longer piece published under the title “The Great Nosh: Some Landmark New York Delis,” The Journal of Gastronomy. Volume 4, number 1 (Spring, 1988).

Sam Levinson, “Oh, Cuisine!” Saturday Review, March 1980. This quotation and citation were taken from the menu of the Second Avenue Deli, on which the Levinson article was printed in full.

Remembering my father is a fairly painful experience but when I think of him as a man who survived considerable trauma, some of the pain gets melted by compassion.

My dad Alfred escaped Hitler’s Germany in his late teens with his immediate family. They settled into a dark apartment in Astoria, Queens and he soon met my mother who lived down the block. Their budding romance was quickly interrupted when he was drafted to serve in the Pacific. He ended up in the motor core on the island of Saipan, the site of one of the worst battles of World War II.

Though he frequently watched war movies on TV, my dad never spoke about his time in the army but when I pressed him a bit, he told me that when his best buddy lit a cigarette in their shared fox hole, he caught enemy fire and was blown to pieces.

Like most war veterans and survivors of the holocaust in the decades before anyone spoke of PTSD, my dad pushed his traumatic memories deep down into his unconscious and went on to fulfill the Father- Knows-Best dreams of the forties: buy a little-box house in the suburbs on the GI bill, raise a family, weed the lawn and barbecue on the weekends, and take mambo lessons.

My father was the nice guy on our block who dropped everything my mother needed him to do when a neighbor sent out an SOS. Although he never finished high school, he was brilliant at repairing just about anything and loved to be the local hero. He owned and ran Sass Auto-Electric Service on W. 53rd St. in what was then Hell’s Kitchen, a rough neighborhood in Manhattan, and commuted about an hour there and back every weekday. When he returned home from work around 7 pm, after being stuck in traffic, he expected dinner to be on table and recounted what went on at work. His work stories didn’t hold my interest and I don’t recall his ever inquiring about my school day or my life.

During these years, he remained a loyal son to his traumatized parents and would stop by their apartment several times a week on his way to work, bringing them treats like preserved meats from Schaller & Weber, a famous German deli in Manhattan. Neither of his parents adapted well to America. His father worked as a “schlepper” in Bloomingdale’s, rolling racks of garments to various departments. My grandmother remained at home and seemed quite depressed.

During holiday school breaks, my father would drive me to Astoria to pick up my grandmother and then drop us off at Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes kick up their heels to live orchestra music. (My great love of Art Deco goes back to the days of being in that glorious place.) My father would slip my grandmother enough cash to cover the ticket cost and lunch afterwards at Lindy‘s, a nearby Jewish restaurant famous for its blintzes and cheesecake. I had little to talk about with my grandmother and always felt embarrassed when she would tuck the extra onion rolls into her purse, a sign of frugality and scarcity that my father inherited. After my father died of leukemia in his mid seventies, I found a letter that he had written to his mother during these years. In it he expressed how difficult it was that she was always angry and never satisfied with anything he did. So sad, and yet he remained a devoted son.

My father earned a very good living and always carried a big wad of cash in his wallet but he never stopped feeling poor. He doled out a weekly allowance to my mother but she always had to beg and plead for anything beyond the basics and I got the message early on that I needed to flirt with him to have something extra I might want. The flirting always left me feeling squirmy and it didn’t even help when I was around twelve and begged him to pay for summer camp in upstate New York. He firmly said, “No, I don’t have the money.” Since all of my friends were going, I felt determined to make it happen, so I decided to surprise him by earning the money myself and somehow got the idea to make a commission by selling magazine subscriptions. A kind neighbor named Elliot Schwartzman bought dozens of subscriptions to gift his clients for Christmas and I swiftly earned the five hundred dollars needed to pay for camp. I proudly put the money in an envelope and presented it to my father.

After a moment of shock and disbelief, my father --who almost never expressed anger--became outraged. “How dare you?” he said. He threw the money into my lap and said, “If I want you to go to camp, I’ll pay for it myself,” which he eventually felt shamed by my mother into doing. But the message I took from this unfortunate experience was that no man will like me if I am financially independent--a message that took years of blah-blah therapy to turn around.

I imagine by now it’s clear that I never felt like I had anything in common with my dad and I never understood what my mother saw in him aside from the chance to escape from her own family, shell-shocked from fleeing Russia and the Cossacks. While my mother and I were reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, my dad’s reading was restricted to the Reader’s Digest.

My mother already had her BA by the time she married him and she always assumed that I’d go to college. But the most my father could imagine for me was to either be a secretary or a kindergarten teacher and he balked so much at paying college tuition that I ended up getting a student loan and paying it back myself after graduation.

Sadly, my younger brother, Philip, was autistic and schizophrenic and wrecked havoc on a daily basis. My mother, little sister, and I did most of the caregiving and my father, who seemed to have an easier time connecting with boys than with girls, befriended his two nephews in the absence of a son who could communicate. In recent years, these cousins told me how proud my father was of me for all that I accomplished but I don’t recall my father ever revealing these feelings of pride to me.

So it is with equal parts of sadness and compassion that I remember my father on this Father’s Day. I honor that he provided food and housing and I marvel that he didn’t regularly seek solace in alcohol or cigarettes given the traumas he endured. But I deeply regret that I did not have an emotionally available dad who knew how to help me feel safe in his arms and in the world.

When I stepped off the scale recently, I felt annoyed about having gained a pound even though I had eaten relatively little the day before.

“How is this possible?” I asked myself and suddenly I felt downright angry at my body for gaining ten pounds over the last year for no apparent reason.

Then, in the midst of this cloud of negativity, I had a sudden moment of brilliant goddess insight: “Wait a minute,” I thought. “You’ve made it to eighty and have you ever had a kind word to say to your body?”

The answer was a resounding NO.

Like most women, even when I was twenty-five pounds lighter and truly slim by anyone’s standards, I still felt like I could lose a few. How could it be otherwise when I was encouraged to wear a girdle in my early teens lest my belly protrude an inch?

Women through the centuries have been trained to hate our bodies and do all sorts of nasty things to make them conform to the current notion of beauty--think of bound feet that cripple, high heels that injure the back, genital mutilation that causes pain and denies pleasure, bras that constrict blood flow and may even contribute to breast cancer.

One of my earliest memories is of pulling the strings of my sweet grandmother’s corset so tight that she could barely breath…Many women I know won’t swim in public because they are ashamed of how they look in a bathing suit and one of my friends stopped wearing short sleeves in the sweltering heat because she hated the wrinkles on her arms.

Dear Body, I owe you a BIG apology for treating you more like an enemy than a well intentioned companion and for cracking the whip all too often instead of giving you time off for fun, pleasure, and joy.

I was brought up to treat you very badly and I didn’t know any better until this moment. You have gotten me thru eighty years of stress, deadlines, prescription medicines that sometimes did more harm than good, and more cookies, chocolate, and ice cream than I care to remember.

Please accept my humble apology and my much overdue list of gratitudes:

Thank you body for allowing me to keep all of my parts for these eight decades.

Thank you brain for helping me make sense of life and earning me a PhD from Columbia.

Thank you neck for inviting me to see around the corner.

Thank you eyes for reminding me of the beauty all around.

Thank you nose for inviting in the rich scents of food and nature.

Thank you heart for pumping without my asking.

Thank you lungs for receiving about twenty thousand breaths a day and some six hundred million breaths in my lifetime.

Thank you feet for walking me around exotic corners of the earth and up and down a steep hill every day.

Thank you hands for doing the washing and cooking, and for stroking the comforting fur of my beloved cats.

Thank you ears for inviting me to tap my toes to the joy of jazz.

Thank you bones for keeping me standing.

Thank you tummy for digesting food and life.

Thank you lips for knowing how to smile.

Thank you immune system for keeping Lyme at bay despite numerous tick bites.

Thank you vagus nerve for keeping all of my vital parts in communication with each other.

And a very special thank you body for being open to accepting my heartfelt apology and loyal friendship after all these years of harsh criticism.

I love you and I am grateful to you for giving my soul a home on this journey called life.

By Lorna Sass

When I stepped out into my carport recently, I witnessed a dove industriously weaving a nest in one of my plant pots right out in the open and very close to my path onto the street.

I was instantly dismayed. “What a nuisance,” I thought to myself, remembering how there was so much fluttering agitation last year when I walked past an active nest in the same spot.

I am ashamed to admit that grouchy mode took over and I destroyed the half-built nest when no one but the dove was looking. “There,” I said to myself, “I’m in the clear, at least for this season.”

Little did I know what was to follow…

The next morning when I walked outside, I was astonished to discover that the doves had built another nest in a pot nearby. The pair must have worked on it all night knowing that the female needed to lay her eggs very soon.

Lesson One: Don’t take “no” for an answer when you have a strong instinct to make something happen.

Lesson Two: You have a right to take up space and do your thing and the whole notion of private property is highly debatable. (Besides, we doves were on this land way before you humans invaded our territory!)

Oddly, this time they chose a plant pot that held a prickly Opuntia cactus but they didn’t seem to let the thorns interfere with their process.

Lesson Three: Don’t let irritating obstacles like cactus spines prevent you from fulfilling your destiny.

Once the dove was settled in the nest protecting the eggs, it seemed that it went into a trance state. I never once saw it blink and when I walked by or even went quite close to take a picture, it didn’t seem to notice or care. I named it Patience and started saying “good morning” or “hello, how’s it going?” every time I passed by.

Weeks after naming the dove Patience and assuming she was female, I did some research on line and learned that the male dove sits on the eggs during the day and the female relieves him at night. Though there are said to be slight differences in appearance, I couldn’t tell them apart and I never noticed when they changed shifts.

Lesson Four: Life is easier and more fun when you divide responsibilities equally to get the job done.

Lesson Five: It can be quite sweet to share your space, even with a surprise guest.

After about two weeks, the eggs must have hatched because after a while, I saw two adorable little hatchlings at Papa Dove’s side. They hung out in a cozy way for a couple more weeks, growing considerably bigger every day.

Lesson Six: Patience can bring great rewards.

Lesson Seven: Trusting life is a beautiful thing and allows you to sit still and joyfully witness the miracles unfolding around you.

Then one morning the nest was suddenly empty. I looked around and, sure enough, the fledglings were nearby, strengthening their wings in short bouts of flight, then resting on my chairs and carport rugs. When I walked by, they flew to higher ground, sometimes bumping into things. The little doves hung around my garden for about a week and then disappeared into the great unknown.

Lesson Eight: When it’s time to expand your horizons, take off! Trust that you’ll know what to do…

Lesson Nine: Seeing what patience it takes to raise a family and knowing that I have ADD, I’m super grateful that I never had kids.

Lesson Ten: It’s possible to be an empty nester even if you’ve never been a mom!

PS: It is now several months later and I’ve had doves nesting on both sides of my house, eight nests total and still counting…

We always went on a weekday. I was around twelve, and my mom kept me out of school to avoid making the trip alone. There were no seatbelts back in those days, but I felt so tightly strapped into the car that the only squirming I could do was inside my belly.

I had already learned how important it was for me to act like a grown-up, good girl in order to have my mother’s approval, and I knew that she had enough to worry about without my adding to her troubles.

Besides, if I came along without complaining, on the way home she promised to treat me to something I loved: one of those yummy, crunchy, fried clam rolls you could buy at Howard Johnson’s. And my mom didn’t seem to notice or care how many of those tiny plastic sacks of tartar sauce I would squeeze on top.

Then, if I was really good, I got to order a coffee ice cream soda for dessert, a reward that turned into an lifetime addiction to yearning for something sweet at the end of a meal...

Once we got to Hawthorne Circle, only a few minutes south of Letchworth, I always started feeling strange, like I was having a very bad dream—except that my eyes were wide open. Then something lucky happened. When we drove through the Letchworth gates, an inner part of me named Sarah showed up and told me that if I let her have the clam roll and ice cream soda, she would make the visit for me.

Ah, what a relief…

Once Sarah took over, I could fly out of her body, vanish, and escape seeing the horror ahead--the filthy cinderblock walls, the skinny crossed arms tied firmly into straight jackets, and childrens’ heads as huge as Halloween pumpkins and as tiny as grapefruits.

Sarah also shielded me from breathing in the putrid smell of disinfectant mingled with urine and poop. She even made it possible for young Lorna to escape from hearing the wailing screams echoing down endless white-tiled hallways.

And perhaps most significant of all, I could escape from witnessing my younger brother rocking on all fours in the corner, banging his forehead against the wall and acting as if he didn’t know that my mother and I were there.

Having Sarah take over was a very good bargain, don’t you think?

True, I would have to give up savoring the clam rolls and ice cream soda to fulfill my promise to Sarah, but by making this bargain I survived the ordeal of being trapped in the Letchworth Village snake pit by escaping from my body and spending the entire visit floating among the clouds.

When my mother announced that it was time to leave, I descended from the clouds and stepped into the car. And when we stopped at Howard Johnson’s for the clam roll on the way home, my mother was so distracted and caught up in her own pain that she never even noticed that I hadn’t accompanied her to Letchworth after all…

I drag myself into the steaming hot car with the thought of driving 20 minutes south to Sausalito where it is always at least 10 degrees cooler. Well, when I get there I’m in for a surprise: Sausalito is just as hot as my hometown of Novato.

I put on my trusty wet cooling towel and start ambling around feeling very disappointed but determined to get near the healing waters. I feel beckoned to a small alley leading towards the Bay and soon catch the eye of a handsome blond man, about 20 years younger.

“I’m so disappointed that it’s so hot here, “ I blurt out to him. He stops and responds, “Yes, I’m surprised too. Where I live in Inverness, I saw a huge cloud of fog overhead when I woke up, my last experience of coolness today. I’m Bill,” he says offering his hand for warm connection.

“I’m Lorna and I’m feeling very old,” I respond, not knowing why I am telling him this except that my loneliness and his receptive listening and sweet blue eyes invite me to share. Then I chirp, “Guess how old I am. I know that’s a tricky question to ask a man since he has to guess younger than he thinks, but please be honest.”

He takes a kind, leisurely look at my face and says “ 62.”

I shake my head and point upward with my right forefinger.

“70,” he ventures. I point upward again. “75?” he guesses with surprise.

“I’m 80,” I respond and I’m reeling with the truth of it…”

He pauses for an instant and then, as if responding to a very ancient protective instinct, opens his arms to invite me in. Feeling entirely safe, I lean into his warm embrace, close enough to feel his strong, compassionate heartbeat. In that moment, sharing this loving, hug with a stranger feels like the most delicious medicine and the most natural thing in the world.

After a few moments, we gently end the embrace.

“You never know who you are going to meet in an alley,” he comments with a sense of awe and amazement.

“Love is everywhere,” I think as we part and I move closer to the water with a smile on my face and in my heart, “especially when you share how fragile and vulnerable you are really feeling.”

And somehow the extreme heat of the day vanishes from my consciousness…

I just dropped a container of sliced jicama all over the kitchen floor and two days ago, the smoke alarm went off to remind me that I’d set a concoction of loose tea leaves and water over high heat and forgotten about it until the mixture evaporated, ending up as billowing grey smoke that infiltrated my entire home.

What’s going on? Did it feel this cold and dark last year?

Did the rain used to keep me at home as it does now? Nothing seemed to stop me back then…

Is it possible that I’m the same person who came home from Egypt one day and left for Australia the next? Given the chance to get on an airplane these days, I’d say “no thank you” and be aware of feeling like a scaredy-cat.

Could I be the same human who left for a 3-month ramble through Europe with nothing more than a vague plan and a backpack? Or the woman who took herself solo to England to learn how to read a map while driving on the “wrong” side of the road? Nowadays I seem to need the equivalent of two or three backpacks when I leave home for the afternoon…plus I have no idea how I’d manage to get from A to B without the help of Siri.

I turned 80 in October and it’s been quite a shock. It’s not that I didn’t see it coming but somehow I couldn’t find a way to soften the blow. And then it happened…

What am I to do with the fact that I’m now officially old? When I ask friends this question, some sweetly try to comfort me by commenting that I don’t look 80. While this is pleasant to hear, it doesn’t help when I feel increasingly fragile and seem to spend half my day looking for words I’ve lost or objects I’ve misplaced.

Even though I may not look my age, I sure feel it, and it’s becoming startlingly clear to me on a moment-to-moment basis that I’m no longer the person I used to be:

Where is the woman who met deadlines and wrote 15 cookbooks? I look at the shelf of my books and wonder what happened to the person who wrote them. These days I have an especially hard time focusing and a ripening cataract not ready for surgery makes reading books a challenge. Libraries have always been my safe places and reading has always been one of my favorite pastimes but I’ve pretty much had to switch over to audiobooks. It’s hard to curl up with an audiobook…

And where do the days go? I seem to need about 10 hours in bed at night, either sleeping or trying to sleep, and then I have to give myself a pep talk to extricate my THC-gummied-groggy self from bed in the morning. When I remember, I step right onto my vibration plate for 10 minutes while listening to relaxation sound waves to quiet my anxiety about facing the day.

Then I do my stretch and rebounder routine and start thinking about breakfast. Since my tummy and blood sugar have gotten more particular, I’ve had to switch from easy almond butter and jam on gluten-free bread to a more savory routine like eggs with greens. By the time I finish preparing that and doling out my dozens of supplements, it’s almost lunch time!

In the last few months I’ve put on about 15 extra pounds for no apparent reason. I look in the mirror with some disdain. Having grown up at a time when I was taught to believe that I’m supposed to be as skinny as Twiggy, it’s not easy to accept a bulging belly.

And what ever happened to the woman who dressed to the nines in the latest fashion, wearing high heels that contributed to an unhappy back? Nowadays I wear only clothes that are super comfortable. My gorgeous, silver, designer jewelry feels too heavy and sits forlornly in a box, forgotten on the back shelf of a closet.

And what about the woman who could garden for the whole day and lift heavy pots? These days, after an hour or so, my back starts hurting and the settee beckons, leaving me with the realization that I have to trim down my garden and simplify my life.

And where is the woman who got a lot done in a day? As someone who always judged my goodness and self worth by how much I achieved, I’m having a rough time not getting much accomplished in my waking hours. Though I joke about relieving the pressure with a “to-don’t” list, I actually need a “to-do” list to keep myself on track.

I know that self-compassion is the key to finding sweet solace in this part of my life but I’m not quite there yet. I need to let myself nap when I’m dragging but find that hard to do. I want to be more like my maternal grandmother Edith who laughed every time she burned yet another tea kettle! I know it would be a good idea to look more at the brighter side, for example that I haven’t needed to have any parts replaced nor had cancer but positive thinking has never been my strong suit…

Now I’m going to have to locate my car keys…and if I find them in time, I’ll go sing with the gospel choir in Petaluma. Singing is one of my joys and yes, I plan to do more of that…and get back into playing the piano!

One thing I know for sure: Prioritizing pleasure and fun is the best revenge against old age.

I began the trip in Athens and then wandered from one Greek island to the next, checking out the beaches and tourist sites and becoming increasingly lonely despite being an empath/HSP (highly sensitive person) who needs to spend lots of time alone to settle myself.

When I arrived in Rhodes, I decided it was time to have some sandals custom-made as every American tourist seemed mandated to do. After picking up the sandals from the shop, I wandered into a nearby market dangling them proudly on my shoulder. Before long, a very handsome Greek man caught my eye. This was somewhat unusual in my experience since I didn’t have a history of attracting men. I had no idea how to flirt and had never even had my butt pinched by a sex-deprived Italian man during junior year in Florence.

But back to Greece! When I returned the handsome man’s smile, he quickly made his way towards me and said “hello.” In halting English, he asked if I’d like him to show me around the island. I agreed without hesitation--perhaps a case of lonely curiosity and innocence conquering prudence. He spotted the dangling sandals and suggested leaving them in his nearby flat. I ignored the prominent flip-flop warning signals in my belly and said “OK.”

We wandered the beautiful island for a couple of hours and he was a perfectly pleasant and respectful tour guide. I was pleased to be free of needing to follow a map and felt lucky to have such a personalized tour.

Once twilight began to shut things down, we circled back to his home. He asked if I’d like to come into his home to pick up the sandals and have a cup of tea. Once again ignoring the even louder rumblings of “NO” in my belly, I walked down the few steps to his dark, basement flat. As the door shut behind me, he locked it and I was immediately shrouded in a dark cloak of danger.

Within seconds he shoved me down to the floor and pressed his body on top of mine, struggling awkwardly to yank off the panties beneath my mini-skirt. After a futile attempt to push him off, my body went totally limp just like a gazelle being stalked by a tiger. He fumbled around clumsily, alternating between pulling down his pants and trying to locate my vagina with his unwashed fingers.

What he encountered was the string of my tampon and when he yanked it out was shocked and horrified by the dripping blood. Perhaps in that moment he remembered that he was Catholic and thought of Christ’s blood on the cross? I’ll never know…but it stopped him cold and brought him to his senses.

I have never been so thankful for the bleeding time…commonly called “the curse” in those often misguided days of female liberation.

The handsome Greek man rolled over, slowly pulled up his pants, and began to say very penitently, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I was still limp but beginning to feel my breath return.

He gently helped me up, continuing to apologize, and offered to walk me back to my hotel and once again I said “yes,” this time feeling strangely safe with him and wanting his protection and guidance on unfamiliar streets. It was a dark night and the air was still, smelling mildly of oregano and bay leaves. We walked in silence…

The next morning, when I left my hotel room, I stepped over a bouquet of pearly white yarrow he had left at my door.

Along with a sensuous breakfast of silken yogurt and wild Greek honey, I swallowed the whole incident, pushing it way down into my unconscious secret vault where all of the other violations inflicted upon my body were locked away in deep, dark silence.

It was only when I attended the historic performance of The Vagina Monologues in Madison Square Garden in 2001 that the memories came flooding back. When Gloria Steinem asked that all of the women who had been sexually violated stand, well over half of the 18,000 women in the audience rose.

And now, after eons of violence against women and a quarter of a century after we stood up in Madison Square Garden, nothing has changed and countless numbers of women continue to be sexually violated on a daily basis. As if rape and molestation weren’t already more than enough, in the aftermath we have to deal with the shame dumped on us by a patriarchal society blaming us for inciting rape just because we are beautiful and alluring by nature.

May we women continue to rise as we did in Madison Square Garden, holding hands around the earth, and chanting “NO MORE.”

And may all men rise along with us, holding hands and surrounding us with the circle of protection we all long for.

Before I moved to California, San Quentin felt like a distant, mythical, and very scary place. This infamous prison had been on my radar while I was still living in NYC since my dear friend, literary agent Sarah Jane Freymann, had aided one of the prisoners, Jarvis Jay Masters, in getting his memoir published.

Masters lived in solitary confinement on death row in SQ for 21 as punishment for a crime there is substantial evidence he did not commit. I joined the movement Free Jarvis (www.freejarvis.org) to link with lawyers and other concerned citizens committed to setting him free.

During his time on death row, Jarvis became a Buddhist and wrote his memoir, That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row. The book was Oprah’s Book Club selection in September 2022 and Jarvis’ story is the subject of The Buddhist on Death Row by David Sheff.

When I’m driving around locally here in northern California, I am always astonished by how the tall and expansive San Quentin complex plays such a large part in the San Francisco skyline. I was sad to learn that although the prison has a magnificent location overlooking San Pablo Bay, windows in each cell were purposely placed so high that the prisoners couldn’t have their spirits lifted by the view.

As a sensitive soul, every time San Quentin came into view, I would feel sad for Jarvis and everyone else stuck behind bars. I spontaneously started sending blessings to the prisoners and praying that those in charge of our dreadful prison system would find more benevolent ways to treat humans who didn’t get the love they needed and committed crimes out of anger and despair.

For many years I sang every Sunday afternoon in the Joyful Noise Gospel Choir held at St. Stephens Episcopal Church in Sebastopol. I loved how within minutes the extraordinary director, Benjamin Mertz, got us singing in harmony while clapping and dancing to his toe-tapping, syncopated piano accompaniment.

One day Benjamin announced that we had the opportunity to entertain the SQ prisoners celebrating their graduation from various educational programs offered there. I was thrilled at this opportunity to bring musical joy into the prison but very quickly I seized up in fear. You see, dear reader, my body remembered how awful it was to visit my schizophrenic brother in various snake-pit mental institutions and how, when the door closed behind me during visits, I was locked inside with the terror that I might never get out...

But this chance to celebrate with the SQ prisoners was too joy-filled for me to resist so I calmed myself down, signed on to join the group, and went through the paperwork clearance process required for entry.

On the day of our recital, I arrived at the parking lot with a pounding heart. The heavy iron gates were imposing. After a while the guards began checking us in one by one--about twenty of us white folks. But wait, our amazing black choir leader Benjamin was not allowed to enter. What? Somehow his clearance was mysteriously not clear enough to allow him to fulfill his role.

We all felt the need to stand behind Benjamin and cancel our performance but with great dignity he encouraged us to go ahead with it for the benefit of the prisoners and so we did. Only problem was that we weren’t allowed to bring in pencils or paper so the long-time choir member he put in charge felt frenzied, trying to remember which songs we had rehearsed to perform.

After about ten minutes of disorientation one of the prisoners stated loudly in a mellifluous preacherly voice. “There is no need for concern,” he declared emphatically. “The Lord is the best choir director there is and he will take care of everything!”

We all let out a sigh and it struck me that this devout man, who I later learned had spent forty years behind bars, had found transcendent freedom in bondage.

The woman Benjamin had put in charge, though culturally Jewish, took these words in and was visibly relieved. She quickly organized us into our places and began leading us confidently in song. Slowly the prisoners in the audience responded, swaying with the music, some of them standing up and singing along while clapping. It grew into an hour of unabashed joy, a feeling of harmony and union among us all.

When we finished and received a standing ovation, I felt sad to leave. I wanted to talk with the prisoners but we had been asked not to…Benjamin awaited us outdoors and we sang a few more gospel tunes, many of us with tears rolling down our cheeks.

I still send blessings and prayers whenever San Quentin comes to mind and I feel so grateful to have had the opportunity to bring a touch of joy to those locked inside. Like most gifts given, I received back double what I offered.

PS: Here’s a link if you’d like to read more about Jarvis Jay Masters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarvis_Jay_Masters)

By Lorna Sass

When I first moved into a shabby deco building on W. 83rd St. around the corner from Central Park, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. This was Manhattan in the late sixties and my building had the word SHARKS spray-painted on the front. But rather than feel fearful, I was thrilled and determined to create my own West Side Story.

Even though my apartment on the third floor was tiny, dark, and looked out onto a blind alley, that wasn’t a problem for me. Around this time, large and rambling upper west side apartments were split up into smaller units to create more revenue for the landlord. My studio had been a bedroom in a much larger apartment and my kitchen was a former closet with only a two-burner stove, tiny sink, and a half refrigerator. I quickly discovered Elfa shelves and maximized the dish draining and storage space.

Nothing daunted me. After all, I was living in Manhattan and how lucky could a girl get?

I decorated with lots of cheerful geometric Marimekko fabrics to match the dresses I sewed from the same fabric, and I created a dining table from a wood chopping block set atop an old wrought iron sewing machine base--as was the fashion among those with limited income in those days--making due with cleverness and old things.

Every inch of space was put to use and the 250 square feet had an aura of poor-graduate-student-having-fun style. The makeshift sofa was a large piece of rectangular foam balanced on wooden crates that held my collection of folk-song LPs. I had a loft built for my double bed and set my TV at the end of the mattress and my baby grand piano underneath the loft!

A free-standing shelf unit made of scorched knotty pine was loaded with books and divided the miniscule dining area from the tiny living room space. The apartment was blessedly quiet, as quiet as it was dark. Each window had an iron gate to prevent robbers from entry though ultimately one clever, desperate human found a way in and stole my record player. (Remember those?)

When it came time to go outside, I would take the three flights of stairs down to the worn marble lobby and walk onto the street feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. I now have a home of my own in New York City! The whole town is my oyster and Central Park is my back yard--never mind that you couldn’t walk thru it alone to the Metropolitan Museum without risking your life.

This was the gritty, grubby Manhattan I fell in love with. Slowly the city changed as cities do and the Manhattan I left close to fifty years later had become sterile by comparison.

I’ll take porno shops on 42nd over Disneyland and a Lower East Side that reminded me of my Yiddish-speaking grandmother over gentrified designer stores any time.

Shortly after my visit, I wrote the following piece which was published in The New York Times on September 9, 1981. I have revised it slightly:

Back in 1932, when the Nearings fled to an old farmhouse in the Green Mountains of Vermont, they considered themselves pioneers. They wrote about the satisfactions and rewards of living off the land in a book called Living the Good Life, first published in 1954. Before long, they became the symbolic leaders of generations of homesteaders in a movement back to the land that once again seems to be gaining momentum.

When I pulled up on the dirt path to the Nearings' hand-built stone house on Cape Rosier on Penobscot Bay in Maine, it seemed absolutely deserted. Suddenly the stillness was shattered by the 77-year-old Mrs. Nearing, who came bounding out of the house carrying a striped cat in her arms.

''Welcome to Forest Farm,'' she said. Scott Nearing, 97 years old, could be seen through the living room window getting up from a nap. It was Sunday and the Nearings were on their once-a-week juice fast and taking it fairly easy.

Passing through the kitchen and its century-old wood-burning stove, Mrs. Nearing observed that there was little wood in the box. ''Scotto,'' she yelled to her husband, ''How will I cook tomorrow morning if you don't get me some wood?''

Mr. Nearing approached, slightly stooped, with a faint smile that sent ripples along his ruddy, wizened cheeks. As if putting on a little skit for their visitor, Mrs. Nearing added: ''I provide the food, you provide the fire. There, that's a good division of labor, don't you think?''

As Scott Nearing headed for the woodshed, Mrs. Nearing led me into the living room, its book-lined walls interrupted only by a panoramic view of the rugged New England coastline. ''Actually, Scott loves splitting wood,'' said Mrs. Nearing, ''but I think cooking is drudgery,'' she admitted with obvious rebellious delight.

Helen Nearing made no bones about the fact that she would rather be setting stones into mortar than stirring soup, so why did she bother writing a cookbook? ''The idea got its start back in 1970,'' she recalled, ''when Scott and I were spending some time in the south of France. Many of the foreign guests we invited to our vegetarian dinners ooh'd and aah'd at the soups, salads, and desserts I served them and asked me for the recipes. I was astonished. They were the simplest of foods —vegetables in season, grated apples, rolled oats, raisins and honey.''

Each year, as soon as the frost broke, hundreds of visitors stopped by Forest Farm to find out for themselves what the Nearings' way of living was like. ''Some of them stayed for months,'' said Mrs. Nearing, who, before meeting Scott Nearing in her early 20's, had studied to be a professional musician in Vienna and Amsterdam.

''They helped us with our building projects in return for room and board. I never knew how many people there would be for dinner and I didn't want to spend any extra time in the kitchen, so I tossed some beans or vegetables from our garden into the pot and went off to build a wall or play my violin. Everyone always said the food was delicious and asked for the recipes, and I continued to be amazed. They all kept asking, 'Why don't you write a cookbook?' ''

Helen Nearing felt that she should be the last person on earth to write a cookbook, but she also felt intrigued. ''I am a library inebriate,'' she said. ''I began spending long hours in the rare book room of the New York Public Library every time Scott and I were in New York. I made my way through the introductions of 14,000 old cookbooks to discover if I had anything new to say.'' Since she was strictly a salad and potatoes woman, she admitted to me that few of the historical recipes interested her.

But ultimately Helen Nearing decided that she did have a message for the world, and the goal of Simple Food for the Good Life became ''to simplify cooking to such a point that it would take less time to prepare a meal than to eat it.''

Since part of the Nearings' philosophy was to avoid the use of and dependence upon money, they ate primarily what they grew and fortunately vegetables flourished all year round in their solar greenhouse. They also believed that the day should be divided into two main four-hour periods: one for ''bread labor'' and the other for pursuing other meaningful activities such as playing the violin, reading and writing.

''Whenever I cook something the least bit fancy,'' Mrs. Nearing told me, ''I ask Scott if he likes it. 'It's O.K.,' he'll say, 'but where are the potatoes?' I'm glad he feels that way, because so do I. We're perfectly happy with a daily breakfast of horse chow, our name for raw oats and raisins mixed with a little lemon juice and oil. For lunch and dinner, nothing makes us happier than boiled potatoes and salad. And, in general, we prefer raw food to cooked.''

''One thing for sure,'' Mrs. Nearing stated emphatically, ''is that I never cook from recipes. I just use what's in the garden and in my personal healthfood store,'' she said, pointing to the large barrels of beans and grains lined up just outside the kitchen. ''I had a very hard time getting all of those recipes down on paper, but I had a simple rule: If a recipe cannot be written on the face of a 3 by 5 card, off with its head.''

Here are two of Helen Nearings’ recipes to try. Both are adapted from Simple Food for the Good Life. Though it’s out of print, you can easily find used copies on line.

Creamy Blueberry Soup

1 pint blueberries, washed and picked over

2 cups water

1/4 cup maple syrup, plus more to taste

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1 pinch cardamom

1/2 to 1 cup sour cream or coconut yogurt

1. Place blueberries in a saucepan with water, maple syrup, cinnamon and cardamom. 2. Cover and cook over low heat for 10 minutes; remove from heat and let cool. 3. Stir in sour cream or yogurt, and chill well before serving.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

Apple Slaw

3 apples, cored and grated

1/ 2 head (about 1 pound) red cabbage, grated

2 cups celery, chopped coarsely (include the leaves)

1/4 cup raisins

1 tablespoon honey

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 tablespoons olive oil

Lettuce leaves

1. In a bowl, combine all of the ingredients except the lettuce leaves.

2. Arrange lettuce leaves on the bottom of a bowl and spoon the apple mixture on top.

3. Serve immediately.

   Yield: 3 servings

I don’t know about you, but early on I picked up the idea that resting was equivalent to being lazy and that being lazy was a mortal sin. Expressions like “You lazy good-for-nothing” say it all…

Since my parents had bought into this ethic, I was brought up to value myself by how much I got done. Yet I’ve always had challenges with feeling vitality, preferring hanging out on the sofa with a good book to running a marathon.

So, to satisfy my high standard of getting alot done, I was forced to come up with strategies to keep on keeping on…During grad school and my food-writing career, I got into the habit of pushing through the tiredness with strong will and large doses of sugar and caffeine.

Another strategy was to rush through whatever I was doing, feeling a pressure to move quickly so I could cross out an item on my to-do list and move onto the next thing without even taking a break. It’s ironic that I became known as “The Queen of Pressure Cooking,” proudly promoting a way to cook food in one-third the standard time! The pressure cooker and I ran full-steam ahead on the fast-forward lane and were delighted with our efficiency and speed.

Speaking of efficiency, another strategy I learned early on was multi-tasking and I became a master at it, often being able to do three or four things at once. Case in point: Every morning these days I stand on my vibration plate with headphones on listening to alpha waves while sounding tones to awaken my vagus nerve and stretching my arms with an elastic band. At the end of ten minutes, I’m proud of myself for accomplishing four tasks at once that are intended to relax me! (Could there be something wrong with this picture?)

Even though I’ve accomplished a lot in my lifetime, I now question how present I was for any of it. If fact, if you agree that you can’t be two places at once, I suspect that rushing and multi-tasking were ways for me to avoid ever being entirely in the moment, a known coping mechanism for dealing with early childhood trauma.

Something that has been hugely helpful in giving me a break over the years is a suggestion made to me by Dr. Andrew Weil when I met him at a workshop at Feathered Pipe Ranch in Montana many decades ago. “Go on a news fast,” he told me when I explained how shaken up I often got by reading the newspaper. In our fast changing world, giving ourselves a break can bring much needed rest. How long your news fast lasts is a very individual decision: it may be an hour, a day, a week, or indefinitely.

Lately my 79-year-old body has been rebelling with aches and pains and won’t let me push myself the way I used to. By mid-afternoon, I often feel a magnetic pull to the sofa but I usually resist it. Even though I live alone, there’s that sense that someone might find out if I took some time off…

This guilty feeling brings me to the question: What ever happened to the Sabbath? Do you remember the days when everything except churches and Chinese restuarants were closed on Sunday? Nowadays with the internet and texting, there seems to be no official day off, no time of declared rest unless we declare it ourselves. In truth, I’m needing to learn how to rest as if I were a baby learning to walk…

To this end, I started googling around (admittedly on a Saturday night!) to see if I could get some help. I came upon a book called Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith. I listened to the author being interviewed (

and while her talking speed suggests that she needs a rest herself, her approach helped me expand my notion of rest.

In fact, I sat down and made a little list to remind myself of ways I can rest and thereby avoid that feeling of exhaustion and overwhelm by the end of the day. After all, I’m retired!

Here you go:

**Come up with a “to don’t” list, giving myself permission to skip doing some non-essential things.

**Close my eyes and notice my breath for a few minutes. Feel gratitude for my body which does so much without your noticing.

**Turn off all sounds and listen to the richness of silence.

**Take a walk in the woods.

**Soak in a hot bath with lavender oil and Epsom salt.

**Sing or hum.

**Listen to my favorite music.

**Jump on a rebounder for a few minutes.

**Rock in a hammock while eating my favorite chocolate. Speaking of which, think I’ll go do that right now…

Knowing that I would be in Aix-en-Provence that summer to attempt learning French and knowing that Julia and Paul Child would be at their home in nearby Gras, I suggested that perhaps I could visit them and personally bring Julia an autographed copy of the book. How I got the nerve to do all this, I do not know. Nor do I recall how I got Julia’s address. But soon after popping the note in the mail, Julia, in her characteristically friendly, energetic, and generous way, wrote back that she would be delighted to have me over to lunch and suggested a date and time.

Not having a car, I had no idea how I’d get myself there, but when I told two fellow students, Pietro and Rick, about my dilemma, they offered to drop me off and pick me up, knowing that it would give them a precious chance to meet Julia as well.

The Child cottage, located on the property of colleague Simone Beck (co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking) was sweet but quite modest. I remember a small open space with the dining table near a window. Julia served a simple, very fresh fillet of trout with some fresh vegetables. Paul, ten years her senior, seemed curmudgeonly and was not very talkative but Julia doted on his occasional comments and remained chipper and cheerful. She thanked me profusely for the book and inquired about how I came to write it, and then asked what I’d be doing next.

The time flew and after about 1 1/2 hours, Pietro and Rick arrived to fetch me. “What have you two been doing with yourselves?” asked the warm and friendly Julia. “We went to Moulin d Mougins,” said Pietro, rolling his eyes with pleasure. “Ah, good choice,” commented Julia with a gentle nod and smile.

When I heard that my friends had gotten a last-minute reservation to eat at the world famous restaurant of Roger Verge in nearby St. Paul de Vence, I became green with envy. After a few more pleasantries, I gave Julia a goodby hug and thanked her for the lovely lunch and we were off.

On the ride home, Pietro and Rick regaled me with details of their magnificent lunch and I continue to feel envious that I had missed out on this great gastronomic experience…until it suddenly dawned on me that anyone with the interest and means could have a four-star meal in a glorious French restaurant in the south of France—but how many people got the chance to have a delicious, home-cooked meal made just for you by Julia Child?

In the years that followed and my culinary career developed, Julia was always very kind to me. When we met at a culinary function, she would always ask what I was up to and when I became known for my books on pressure cooking, she would inquire about that.

She was an amazing human: larger-than-life, sweet, friendly, and down-to-earth at the same time.

I miss you Julia!

In my New York Jewish family everyone talked over each other and no one listened. Indeed, I often joke that I became a writer so I could finish a sentence…

But as with so many jokes, there is sadness behind this one. Growing up not feeling heard, I never learned how to tune in deeply and listen to either myself or to a higher power. As a result, my unconscious rather than my soul became the guiding force in my life.

Perhaps this is true for everyone to some degree or another?

Here’s a prime example of how my unconscious--unbeknownst to me--was the director of my life: My dad was German and very conventional, believing that a woman’s place was in the kitchen. My mom, on the other hand, had a BA from Hunter College and was a prime example of the archetypal female described in Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique--a smart, educated woman stuck in the dull suburbs. Her message to me was to do life differently than she had done: get a fine education, never marry or spend the bulk of your time in the kitchen, and figure out how to be a great success in the world.

Fast forward: In my late twenties, while I was at Columbia getting a PhD in medieval literature, I discovered a published version of 15th-century manuscript recipes. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Recipes from that early on? I checked the book out and started adapting and cooking some of the recipes.

Soon I got the idea to teach medieval cookery to children in an afterschool program at the Cloisters, a division of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. When I told the director of education that I was working on a medieval cookbook, she asked if I’d like to be introduced to the head of the publication department at the Met and I said, “sure,” trying to sound nonchalant while my heart was pounding and I had to squelch the desire to jump for joy and hug her.

In 1975, when I was thirty years old, The Met published To the King’s Taste: Richard II’s Book of Feasts and Recipes and my life as a cookbook author and food-and-travel journalist got off to an exciting start. I went on to write fifteen cookbooks and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles over the next several decades. My career was great fun and a big success, but writing about food never quite felt like a path I had chosen consciously as my life purpose or my soul’s true mission.

Only a few years ago, at age 75, did I realize that my unconscious had cleverly figured out a way to please both my father and mother: I achieved worldly success by hanging out in the kitchen!

Where has your unconscious taken you? I’d love to hear if you feel inspired to comment.

My mother was an adventurous cook and, as far as I could tell, we were the only family on my block eating artichokes, kohlrabi, and avocados on a regular basis--by no means common fare in the suburban Long Island of the 1950s.

My father was secretly admiring of my mother's culinary daring, but beneath it all he was a very traditional German who expected his wife to cook and clean, no matter how many children she had. If there weren’t potatoes, a green vegetable, and a crunchy salad to round out the meaty main course, it wasn’t dinner in my father’s estimation.

Mom tried to please Dad by preparing traditional German dishes like potato kugel and marinated cucumber salad flecked with fresh dill. During the winter, there would often be a big enameled orange pot of sauerbraten marinating on the back porch.

We ate dinner around 7, as soon as my father returned from his long, traffic-snarled commute from Manhattan. I was ravenous by that time, even though I’d eaten a “thicky” in the late afternoon to tied me over. (A “thicky” was my name for a bulky wedge of iceberg lettuce submerged under Russian dressing, a tangy blend of mayonnaise and Heinz sweet ketchup that was considered a culinary marvel in 1959.)

Our dining room was small, an extension of the kitchen really. As a young teen and the oldest child, it was my job to set the table. My mother thought it would be a good idea for my younger brother Philip to help me out. He was, after all, nine years old and the task was simple enough. Only problem--and a big one--was that Philip was severely autistic and schizophrenic and spoke only gibberish while shaking his hands violently and walking on his tippy toes.

But despite this inconvenient reality, night after night I was expected to show Philip where to place everything on the table, and night after night he just threw the plates and napkins down helter skelter. After about 10 minutes of this futile exercise, I shooed him off and took over, neatly folding the napkins, and putting the dishes and silverware in their proper positions.

I loved looking at the table then and wanted it to stay that way forever--so comforting and pretty, everything neatly arranged, the border of each person’s place setting distinctly marked off by an aquamarine placemat, an overhead light gently illuminating the scene. But all too soon mom called everyone to dinner.

My father sat at the head of the table and my little sister Marian at the other end. No surprise that my mother’s place was on the side nearest the kitchen. Philip and I sat next to each other across from her. I don’t remember ever having a choice about this arrangement, and I didn’t realize until this very minute that we were the only two members of the family squeezed together side-by-side.

My mother served the food from big bowls, family style. While she was dishing out the portions, she would always turn to my father and ask about his day. Dad expected full attention as he recounted stories about the deals he’d made, the cars he'd repaired, and the strange characters who wandered into his hell’s kitchen auto repair shop on W. 53rd St. in Manhattan—like the man who sold him a full set of Thai brass tableware for so little that he couldn’t resist bringing it home.

Once the food-laden plates were in front of us, my father began to speak louder and louder, his German accent becoming more pronounced, as he became increasingly aware that a sub-plot was distracting his small audience from listening.

You see, soon after my brother sat down at the table, he shape-shifted into a monstrous octupus with many long tentacles stretching simultaneously towards all of our plates, grabbing masses of food and tossing them into his gaping maw. The monster swallowed in great gulps, cheeks and eyes bulging like a gargoyle. Meanwhile, we all tried very hard not to notice, to keep our eyes glued to my father, to pretend we were listening to his stories and having an ordinary family dinner.

But finally the cheeks, the gulps, and the eyes of the monster began to consume us. Just as he was about to gobble up my little sister, she toppled her glass of milk--no doubt a ploy for getting some attention. The spreading white puddle seemed to remind my mother that she had two other hungry children at the table. Holding back tears, she told me to take Philip to his room and lock the door so we could finish our dinner in peace. Then she reprimanded my sister as she slowly sopped up the milky mess.

When I returned to the table, we all sat in sullen silence, finishing the bits and pieces of dinner that the monster left behind.

Although my brother died at age 28 in a snake pit (otherwise known as a state mental institution), memories of the repeated family dinner table horror remain in hidden corners of my body to this day.

If you come to my home, you will likely notice that I don’t have a dining room table. I never gave this much thought until recently when I realized that eating meals with the plate balanced on my lap was a good way to avoid time-traveling back to those family meals in the 50s each time I ate.

Somehow, unlike the popular TV show, my father and mother didn’t know best back then and I was left to figure out how to survive circumstances that were traumatic and impossible to digest. But thanks to the brilliant solution of my unconscious, I’m still eating dinner from my lap reasonably peacefully at age 79. However, thanks to another unconscious coping mechanism, I opt for the peace and quiet of eating most of those dinners alone…

How dare she?

Let me explain something this invader didn’t realize. I come to yoga class early specifically so that my inner feline can mark her territory, staking out a spot close enough to the wall to make it impossible for someone to squeeze beside me. As a human who sadly spent her earliest years behind bars in a crib or playpen, I got used to walling myself off.

Don’t you get it that I need my space? It’s bad enough that there are other people in the class, but to have someone intrude upon my territory is unbearable.

So I did what every good New York Jew does when threatened: I went immediately from deep relaxation to full, unmitigated rage.

The poor unsuspecting woman had no idea that a full scale attack was about to take place and proceeded to get her props, as if she was doing nothing wrong and had every right to that sweet spot.

I catapulted out of corpse pose like a sleeping tiger instinctively pouncing to protect her cubs, my amygdala switched on high alert and fire coming out of my nostrils.

But it was yoga class after all, so I put on the nicey-nicey, pretend-you-are sweet girl attitude--the one I was taught while still in the womb--and said in a gentle, controlled purr: “Next time, will you please not set up so close to me?”

The woman looked a little startled (you are not supposed to speak in yoga class) but sweetly nodded her head. I couldn’t help but notice that she was a few years older than I (which makes her pretty damn old) and looked like a gentle soul just trying to take a few deep breaths and stretches before getting on with her day.

The teacher quickly came running over to intervene in what she intuited might become a massive girl-cat brawl. “Lorna, I’ll take care of it,” she said and beckoned me back to my mat to reassume corpse pose. But she immediately returned to the center of the room and resumed teaching without saying a word to the invader.

So now I began enjoying deep exhales of fire, aiming them not only at the late student, but at the teacher as well.

“That’s how she handled it?” I asked myself. “By doing nothing? How very yoga-like…I hate yoga.” My inner shrew insisted on asking probing questions and offering judgments when I was supposed to be counting my in-and-out breaths.

“Bitches,” I muttered, cursing those two women silently but conclusively as I played dead and buried in shavasana pose, with my thighs feeling their heaviness on the bolster and my arms splayed open and almost bumping into my unwelcome neighbor.

But like a good girl yogini corpse, I resumed deep breathing with intention. After about five minutes of belching fire, the breathing began to do its magic. Soon the teacher said, “Roll onto your sides and assume a fetal position.” As I hung out there like a baby, I silently whimpered and felt a tear of sadness and some shame fall over me like a shroud.

Then we got on hands and knees and did cat-cow, and each time I arched my back followed by dipping it, I could sense my spine becoming more flexible. Next we sat on our hips and spread our arms wide. The tardy little woman was hanging as close to the wall as she possibly could, making it impossible for her to stretch out her left arm when requested. “She deserves that,” I thought and then thought better of it.

By the end of class, I was full of remorse. My nervous system had calmed down and my inner, deep-breathing, compassionate guru had come alive. “Hey,” I thought to myself, my inner wise woman taking charge. “She isn’t Hitler after all!”

“I apologize, “ I whispered to her, this time real and heartfelt. “I have an issue around space,” I explained. “I seem to need a lot of it!”

And then it came to me and I sang to her in a gentle lilting tone full of wonder and remorse the Paul Simon lyric “Still crazy after all these years…” and a godzillion hours of blah-blah therapy that gave me understanding but never taught my amygdala how to turn off…

Shortly after moving to Manhattan in the late sixties, I found myself asking this question just about every day as I exited my 8-story deco-style building at 46 West 83rd St. and walked the two short blocks to Central Park.

What got me started watching out for Magical Manhattan Moments was the time in the late sixties that I turned the corner onto Central Park West and saw the aged famous anthropologist Margaret Mead walking towards the Museum of Natural History on 81st Street. I stopped dead in my tracks and stared: She was holding a tall carved staff in her right hand, using it proudly as a walking stick as if to be reminded each time it hit the cement that she was no longer on the balmy beaches of the South Pacific.

Or was she holding tightly onto the staff as a way to transport her back to the warm shores of New Guinea? Even though I was not yet a seasoned New Yorker, I knew that it wasn’t right to intrude upon her space and ask, or do anything more than nod in recognition if I caught her eye.

Other times, as I approached 81st Street, I saw Beverly Sills getting into a taxi, octogenarian actor Tony Randall pushing his new baby in a carriage, and the elderly lyricist Adolf Green plodding along slowly with dog in tow.

One evening I walked passed a parking garage on W. 83rd where a guard stoically stood watch. “What are you protecting?” I asked. “Oh, Seinfeld’s collection of Porsches are parked inside,” he answered nonchalantly, combining a typical New Yorky blatant honesty with a strange lapse of discretion. (Except for Mead, all of the folks mentioned above lived in the Beresford, an elegant building on Central Park West and 81st Street.)

Once entering Central Park, I always took a spontaneous deep breath. The path was shaded by an arbor of trees and the air was noticeably fresher and cleaner. It quickly felt like I was no longer in New York City but rather in a sacred place deeply connected to Mama Gaia, a place where the birds and bees, the raccoons and woodpeckers also didn’t know that they were in the middle of a honking, bustling metropolis.

Because the park has so many different personalities, on any given day I could choose an area to suit my mood. A personal favorite was the Ramble, a wilder section than most so deep in the center of the park that, despite some asphalt paths, I felt like I was in the middle of a forest. One day during spring migration, I was bird-watching with Park Ranger Bob and he stopped us beneath a large oak tree and knocked loudly on the trunk. He pointed upwards and we soon saw a sleepy-looking, surprised woodpecker peak out her nest, eying us suspiciously us as if to say, “This is my home. What are you doing here?”

On another day, I entered the park and soon saw a Knight in Shining Armor on a white horse. What??? I couldn’t believe my eyes. With my PhD in medieval literature, I thought I must be time-traveling or perhaps hallucinating so I trotted close enough to see a man following the horse with a camera. I asked him what was going on. “Oh, we’re filming a Marlboro ad,” he explained matter-of-factly. I still smile when I think of that fairy-tale day…or the time helmeted JFK, Jr. sped by me on his bicycle…

Entering the park a few blocks to the north, I walked around the reservoir almost daily, watching the seasons change. One spring day, the runner who passed me breathing hard was Robin Williams, bare-chested and sweating, wearing only shorts and a baseball cap. Another time I saw the always elegant Jackie Kennedy relaxing with her companion Maurice Tempelsman on a bench near the path.

Even getting a haircut could be quite an adventure. Once at a salon on W. 72nd St., I was under the scissors and John Lennon walked in with Sean and his Japanese mother-in-law. Another time I was at the very upscale Bruno Dessange on Madison Avenue and the French actress Catherine Deneuve strolled in.

One Sunday evening while I was listening to live jazz at The Ear Inn, an heirloom bar on Spring Street, Jeremy Irons walked in. Another time, I was on line at the Joyce theater to pick up my ticket for a performance by Lynn Redgrave. I turned around and there was her sister Vanessa in line behind me!

Such was the everyday magic of New York City, where the best theater is free. On any given day you would find the whole world gathered peacefully in one crowded subway car. Often there would be live entertainment: musicians, jugglers, gymnasts, outlandish outfits to behold.

Since I lived alone, I quickly got into the habit of speaking to strangers. So when I emerged from the Delta shuttle at LaGuardia one blustery night and encountered a very long taxi queue, I went to the front of the line and began asking if anyone was willing to share a ride to the Upper West Side. After shrugging off numerous startled faces--apparently this was brazen hussy behavior, even in NYC--I found a willing young Asian woman who shyly told me, "I've often thought of doing that, but never had the nerve."

Once in the cab, we exchanged the usual pleasantries and upon learning that I'd been in Boston to promote my latest cookbook, we began exchanging recipes. The minute we dropped the young woman off, the until-then-silent cab driver turned to me and said, "So you write cookbooks? I have a degree in Classic French Cooking. We then discussed how best to make arepas, the corn pancakes of his native Columbia. "I'm going to buy your new cookbook first thing in the morning," he said as we reached my apartment building. (Whoever started the rumor that New Yorkers are unfriendly must have never taken a cab…)

Yes, the city might be crowded and noisy, but there was always room for everyone and, for the most part, no one intruded on another’s space--just gazed in grateful recognition and amazement at the harmony and magically creative energy wrought by diversity, acceptance, and astonishment.

Do you have a Magical Manhattan Moment memory? If so, please share it with me. Some days, now that I’ve moved to northern California, I am so very nostalgic…

In New York City, where I spent most of my life, complaining is a way of life and just about everyone consistently does it.

So it was only when I moved to California at age 67 that I began to notice how I was the only one complaining--along with a few other New York Jews who had also migrated to the west coast and become friends.

As I looked around at all of the beauty surrounding me, my complaints began feeling like thorns on a rose bush and I became increasingly curious about the origin of my habit…

So I took myself to the Marin library web site and entered “Jewish complaining” in the search engine. I almost gasped out loud when I came upon a book called Born to Kvetch by Michael Wex. (Kvetch is the Yiddish word for “complain” which, like many Yiddish words, sounds like an exaggerated, onomatopoetic version of what it means and includes a dollop of chicken fat.)

I opted for the audio version of Born to Kvetch and listened to it in the car while riding thru the lush green fields of Marin, a very unlikely setting for the author’s delightful Yiddish accent (which reminded me touchingly of my maternal grandmother whose first words were uttered in that rich tongue and who gifted me with old world lullabies she had learned as a child).

Much to my surprise, the author traced the origin of kvetching back to the Bible. He recounts how Moses led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt: the Red Sea parts and, after much challenge, the former slaves find freedom in the promised land.

And what do the Jews say to Moses as soon as they get a chance to catch their breath?

“Moses, why did you bring us here?” they demand in petulant tones.

“Can’t you see that there is nothing good to eat!”

When I tell this story, that last line always gets a knowing laugh, and sure enough I laughed too when I first heard it. But soon the author posits an explanation for kvetching that hit me right in the gut: Jews began complaining because if anyone knew how good we had it, they would surely take it away from us.

“Wow,” I thought, “Now I get why I complain so much and it makes all kinds of sense. I’ve made myself feel and look like a victim so no one will know how privileged my life has been. If they see my good fortune, they’ll find a way to hijack it.”

Then the truth beneath the truth revealed itself to me like a photograph in a dark room coming up with stark clarity in the hypo: Yes, my habit of kvetching was initially cultural and deeply rooted. But sadly it had become an addiction and, like all addictions, is imprisoning me in “poor me” mode.

In fact, I had been so stuck in the mud of complaining that I didn’t realize how I had been hiding the goodness and bounty of my life even from myself.

I began noticing more and more when complaints surfaced, either in my thoughts or in my conversations with friends. I started catching my “kvetches” before they became spoken and turned the complaints upside down with statements of gratitude. To further shift my thinking, I created a gratitude practice by stating five things I’m grateful for each morning and evening.

Some days I’d forget, but little by little I managed to wash off all the ancestral mud that was keeping me stuck in fear and victim mentality despite the evidence of abundance all around me.

And the biggest gift of all is the deep knowing that after living for almost eight decades with the belief that my cup was half empty, I now know with certainly that it is full to overflowing.

How about you?