January 12, 2012 The Felix Factor

This morning as I stood in front of Eddie’s high chair feeding him breakfast, he stuck his hand into his bowl of oatmeal and banana and grabbed a fistful.

“Noooo!” I exclaimed and yanked the bowl away.

Food, food everywhere

He looked at me, paused, and then let out a wail. I considered putting the bowl back in front of him and letting him swish his little fist around in it, but my neat sensibilities wouldn’t allow it.

I don’t seem like a neat person. My hair is sometimes unruly. My shirt tails stick out in the back. I manage to get a bit of food front and center on every shirt, it looks like a family crest. But the thought of Eddie having food on his face and hair, and of cleaning it off his high chair, was too much. I ran over to the paper towel rack and grabbed one, held it under the warm water, and ran back to the high chair before his porridge-encrusted little hands could cover any more ground.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to let him root around in the food with his hands. I can’t tell if it would be a freeing exercise that would embolden him and give him a sense of independence, or if it’s a bad habit I should nip in the bud. I handed him a spoon. He threw it on the floor.

I tried to make up for having pulled the bowl away by waiting until it was nearly empty and then holding it low enough for him to reach in. “Go ahead,” I said and braced myself. He looked down at the bowl and then up at me, and he let out a wail.

My husband, Bruce, lets Eddie play with his food like it’s finger paints. Perhaps that’s why the baby likes Bruce better than me. But Bruce doesn’t have to clean up the high chair afterward, digging into its seams and holes that have gotten plugged up with sweet potato and broccoli. I do. Bruce makes an effort to clean the chair, but it’s like the effort he puts into making the bed: whatever can be done with one hand and one eye in less than one minute. I usually have to give the chair a once-over after Bruce has cleaned it, to get the remaining bits he missed.

Every afternoon, the babysitter is here, and I’m upstairs in my office working for a few hours, and when I emerge, I find her sitting in the middle of the living room floor with Eddie, surrounded by all of his toys. The three different kinds of blocks are blended together. The plastic boat has been dumped and all of its primary colored shapes – the red squares, blue circles and yellow hexagons – have been scattered. Pieces from three different puzzles are in different parts of the room like families that have been separated by war.

I love the sight of it, the randomness, the freedom it exudes. If toys could sing, they would be belting out a discordant note but boldly and happily. And yet after the babysitter leaves, I spend the next 15 minutes putting the puzzle pieces back in their respective slots, the circle-, square – and hexagon – shaped plastic pieces back inside the boat, and each of the different types of blocks back into their respective boxes. The toys then go back into the toy chest we use as a coffee table — though I place the two wooden puzzles and the bead maze on top of the toy chest in case Eddie wants to play with them. I like the way it makes the room feel like a kindergarten classroom – though one you might find on the cover of Country Living magazine.

Toys that escaped from the toy box

I like the boat with the primary-colored shapes. It appeals to my sense of order. The boat has colored windows that match the colored shapes, and I like pushing the shapes through the appropriate windows. In fact I have a hard time playing with the boat with Eddie because as soon as I’ve dumped the shapes out on the floor so we can play with them, I’m putting them back in the holes and cleaning them up.

I clean up everything. I gave Eddie a bowl of dry Cheerios this morning. Four times he dumped them out on the floor as he was eating them, and four times I picked them up and put them back into the bowl. The upside? He would get excited every time he saw the bowl filled anew. The downside? His mother’s a wing nut. I might as well be following him around the room with a brush and dustpan.

It’s not hard to see where I got it. My parents were neat and orderly. My father tried his hand at painting once by drawing a grid on top of a playing card and copying the image in each box onto a canvas until he had replicated the card precisely. My mother loved to do crafts, but everything she made had a pristine little bow on the front of it like a birthday present.

There’s a story in my family folklore in which my mother and I were at my paternal grandmother’s house, and when my grandmother went to feed me soup for dinner, she spilled it onto the floor in front of me.

“What are you doing?” my mother shrieked, to which my grandmother replied, “It’s going to end up on the floor anyway. Why not start it off down there.”

“My daughter is not an animal,” my mother said. She told on my grandmother when my father got home.

I like the babysitter’s scattered approach, but it comes at a cost. She takes a similarly scattered approach with her personal belongings. She’s lost her wallet, her keys, and her coat in the short time I’ve known her. And she always brings a black and silver coffee cup when she arrives but rarely remembers to take it home when she goes. Yesterday, she left her cell phone on our counter.

I try to make up for my Stalinist approach to toy-playing by being zany. I acquired the giant Easter Bunny Eddie once saw in a shop window, and when the light in it didn’t work, I replaced it. A glowing bunny now stands three feet tall in our kitchen, next to the Christmas bubble lights and the light-up Chanukah lights I strung in the doorway. I pull out the bubble wand and surround Eddie in a cloud of bubbles when he seems blue. When he pulled all of the tissues out of a new tissue box, I didn’t scold him. I held a few of them over the heating vent until they floated up in the air and then danced to the ground like feathers.

Has his own Easter Bunny

Yesterday, our babysitter sat Eddie inside a little seat in one of his toys. It wasn’t really a seat but rather an indentation in the toy that used to be covered by a plastic piece that’s since broken off. After putting Eddie in there for a moment, the babysitter picked up his Winnie the Pooh doll and placed the doll in the seat. Eddie looked at the bear, pulled him out of the seat and neatly placed him back in the toy box where he belonged.

January 10, 2012 Kid City

My husband, Bruce, gets home at around 6.30 p.m. every night, so that leaves me about nine hours a day — not counting when the babysitter is here — in which I must entertain my 11-month-old, Eddie, before Bruce gets home to help. Nine hours may not seem like a long time, but if the person with whom you’re spending it needs 100% of your attention for 100% of that time, nine hours can seem like a lifetime. It’s for that reason that I like to have activities planned. If I don’t, we’ll both wind up on the kitchen floor playing with pots and wooden spoons until I start reading my email on my iPhone and Eddie starts whining from boredom. I had a cashmere sweater to return to Macy’s so a trip to the mall seemed like a nice outing for both of us.

We got an early start and arrived at Macy’s before it opened. As we stood in the vestibule waiting for a store employee to unlock the door, an older woman with a rubbery face who was also waiting approached Eddie and began to smile and wave. He flashed her a big toothy smile, as he always does.

“Well aren’t you a cutie! Look at that smile!” she said. They all say that.

Eddie’s grown accustomed to this response, so much so that he wants people to look at him so that he can flash them a toothy grin to elicit that response. When we were in Boston last month, he stared at a young salesgirl for so long waiting for her to glance over at him, I eventually had to tap her on the shoulder and ask her to look at him so he could flash her a smile, which he promptly did.

“Look at that smile. Well, aren’t you a cutie,” she said.

He liked the orange one

They opened the doors to Macy’s and with the store virtually empty, I returned the sweater in under a minute. That left eight hours and fifty-five minutes until my husband got home. Next door to Macy’s was a Barnes and Noble bookstore, a place I liked to go before Eddie was born, but I couldn’t imagine him quietly reading a magazine while I sipped coffee and wrote my blog, like I used to do. But I had to give him breakfast, and Barnes and Noble seemed a better place to feed him than sitting on a bench in the middle of the mall.

I wheeled Eddie over to the counter to get a coffee and some silverware because I couldn’t find the baby spoon I usually carry in the diaper bag. The young girl behind the counter handed me plastic utensils, but I told her I would be using the fork to mash a banana into oatmeal so I needed a metal one. She went into the store’s private stash. I swore I’d give it back. She also gave me a metal spoon, but it was a soup spoon. I can make waves only once. I took the soup spoon even though I knew it would be too wide for his mouth.

When I got Eddie set up in a high-chair, it seemed easier to give him the yogurt I had than to mash up the banana and mix it up with the oatmeal. But as I took the yogurt out of the bag, Eddie began to whine and kick and screech. I became very uncomfortable. I have a strong physical reaction when he fusses in public. My heart rate rises. My face turns flush. I want to crawl out of my skin. It’s probably because I’m acutely aware of how disturbing a baby’s cries can be because, frankly, I was the person who was bothered by it – before I had a child. I hated the parents who would inflict their screaming child on everyone else, like one might hate the parent of the kid who’s kicking the back of your seat on an airplane. My strong reaction to his fussing is either from that, or it’s genetic. My mother would almost break out in hives if we misbehaved in public. She once stormed out of a restaurant and walked the four miles home because we were blowing the wrappers off of our straws at the table.

I quickly ripped open the yogurt and stuck a spoonful in Eddie’s mouth. It calmed him down. I dug into the container and pulled out another spoonful, but the spoon was so big, the yogurt came out in a huge mound. He began to cry so I stuck the mound in his mouth, and again it calmed him down. I got out another huge spoonful, and another, trying to pre-empt the crying.

He knocked over the display

After breakfast, I decided to change Eddie’s diaper. I put my knapsack over my back and the diaper bag over my shoulder. I grabbed Eddie with my free arm and carried him into the bathroom like a football. I headed toward the large stall in the back, which had a diaper changing table. I didn’t want to put Eddie directly onto the table because I feared it was covered in germs so I grabbed a toilet seat liner from the box hanging on the wall, but the liner got stuck in the box, and I only managed to get a small piece of it in my hand. Still holding Eddie, I took the shred of paper, put it down on the diaper table, and placed Eddie on top of it. The paper was so small, it covered just the back of one butt cheek and a thigh.

With the diaper bag still on my shoulder, I tried to grab a diaper and the wipes out of the bag, but as I did, Eddie tried to turn over on the changing table. I pushed his shoulder down so that he was once again flat on his back, but every time I tried to get the diaper under his butt, he would start to flip over like a fish on a dock. I eventually ripped the tags off an outfit I’d just bought him in Macy’s and handed them to him. He loves tags. He promptly stuck them in his mouth.

When I was done changing him, I realized I now had to go to the bathroom, so still balancing the knapsack and the diaper bag on my back and shoulders – because I didn’t want to put anything down on the floor of the stall — I grabbed Eddie again like a football and walked over to the toilet and tried to pull my pants down with my free hand. I realized it was not going to be possible to keep everything suspended in the air so I gave in and placed everything down on the floor, including my son. He immediately began to crawl toward the divider between my stall and the adjacent one, so I scooped him up and held him as I stooped over the toilet. I put him down again, pulled up my pants quickly, and then picked everything up and walked over to the sink. I placed Eddie and the bags in the middle of the counter as I washed my hands, but when I went to reach for a paper towel, the dispenser was out of my reach. I leaned toward it as far as I could, trying to keep my body in front of Eddie so he wouldn’t fall off the counter, but it was too far away. I felt like Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who claimed she inadvertently erased part of the Watergate tapes because she answered the phone while transcribing them. Skeptics said that for her to have answered the phone while keeping her foot on the pedal of the transcription machine would have required her body to stretch so far, only a super hero like “Rubber Woman,” could have achieved such a feat.

When we came out of the bathroom, I wheeled Eddie through the bookstore and paused by the magazines, but he started to cry so I pushed him over to the children’s section and began pulling out children’s books.

“Look, it’s the Grinch,” I said, picking up “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

“Oooh, ooh, look at this,” I said, as I wheeled him past a shelf filled with stuffed animals called “Ugly Dolls,” which seemed to be part rabbit, part dog and part monster. I plucked a pastel blue one off the shelf. He grabbed it and began to gnaw on one of its ears. I picked up an orange one and handed it to him. He looked at it and grabbed it, tossing the blue one aside. I then gave him a yellow one and a red one. I lined them all up in front of him.

“Which do you like best,” I said.

He paused, looked at each one, and grabbed the orange one.

“The orange one it is,” said a woman who was walking by.

“For now,” I said. Sure enough, his love affair with the orange doll ended in less than a minute, and he began to whine and kick his feet in his stroller. My heart rate began to rise again, and I left Barnes and Noble quickly, like an arsonist walking hastily away from a fire he’s just set.

I pushed Eddie’s carriage down the center hallway of the mall, feeling like a heel for being uncomfortable about my child’s behavior, when I saw a sign that said “Kid City.” I remembered the fanciful play area at the Freehold Raceway Mall and was surprised to see that my local mall had something similar. I felt I owed it to Eddie to let him have a bit of a romp. I imagined hearing his laughter as he ran from monkey bars to a little kiddie tunnel and then over to a bouncing horse, or whatever toys they might have. I envisioned mounds of multi-colored balls into which little children were jumping and squealing, and Eddie just watching it all with wonder.

I pushed Eddie for what seemed like half a mile, turning left and then right and then left again as I followed the arrows on the signs pointing toward “Kid City.” We stopped briefly at the Disney Store,where Eddie knocked over a display of little dogs and the placard in front of them, before we were on our way again. After a while, I took Eddie out of his carriage and let him push it himself. He likes to do that, push the carriage like a walker, as he walks behind it in his little feetie pajamas with a gait that’s as smooth as Lurch or Frankenstein. Every now and again, we’d pass someone who would pause and say, “Will you look at that,” and Eddie would stop, flash them a smile, and they’d say, “Oh, isn’t he cute.” He’d then move on until we reached the next person who would pause and say, “Will you look at that.”

The Holy Grail

As we neared the end of the mall, by the movie theater, I saw it there on the horizon like a beacon, bold letters that said, “Kid City.” But Kid City wasn’t a playground. It was a store. It wasn’t even a toy store. It was a discount clothing store that carried things like school uniforms and children’s furniture.

He could barely hold on

Disappointed, I turned the stroller around and started to head back toward Macy’s where we had parked our car when I saw a cluster of little amusement rides that move slightly up and down or from side to side, but usually not both. Eddie pushed his carriage over there and walked right up to a burgundy colored airplane. I sat him down on the seat and as I was about to put the $.75 into the slot, I noticed a sign that said, “Children must be three years of age to go on this ride.” I paused, brushed it off as a silly legal precaution, and dropped the money in. As the ride started pulsing up and down, Eddie began to slide from side to side on the seat. I could see his little hand was holding on to the seat next to him. His knuckles were white. I stood over him holding him up. When the ride finished, I grabbed him and put him on the floor. I was afraid to put him on another ride. But as I put him on the ground, he crawled over to a ride that was shaped like a hot dog truck. He climbed inside and stood up in front of a control panel and fingered some of the buttons until he spotted a little piece of bread, possibly a hot dog bun, on the floor. He dropped down and crawled over to pick it up. I grabbed it out of his hand three times before calling it a day and putting him back in the stroller. I gave him my car keys to divert his attention.

He spotted a piece of bun

I pushed him back through the mall and out the door by Macy’s. As we headed through the parking lot, I could hear a car horn beeping. I stopped and looked around for the origin of the sound because I feared it was someone about to pull out of a parking spot, no doubt talking on a cell phone, and that they would fail to see me and the stroller. My eyes moved from car to car, but I saw nothing, until we approached my car, and I saw the tail lights flashing on and off.  The beeping car was ours. Eddie had the car keys in his mouth and was gnawing on the key pad.  When I reached for the keys, my phone fell.  I picked it up.  11:00 a.m. Seven-and-a-half hours until my husband gets home.

January 6, 2012 The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

We’ve turned a corner of our dining room table into a diaper changing table, and I was changing Eddie’s diaper there yesterday morning when he reached up, tried to grab my cup of coffee, and knocked it over sending its contents spilling out onto my lovely blue and white checkered table cloth.

“Eddie!” I snapped, trying to upright the cup and limit the damage while making sure he didn’t roll off the table. “Jesus Christ. It’s all over everything!”

Can destroy a bathroom in five seconds

I heard the sound of my own voice and was disgusted. I’ve turned into the kind of person I wouldn’t like. If I was watching the exchange in a movie, I’d root for the kid. And yet I couldn’t stop myself.

“Why do you have to touch everything?” I said, feeling like a heel with every word I uttered.

He touches everything, and his little flipper hands are better for knocking things over than for picking things up. When I was wrapping Christmas presents last month, I spread everything out on the floor, and in just two minutes, he crinkled the wrapping paper I was about to use, grabbed the tape, unrolled all of the ribbon, crushed the shirt box and tissue paper I’d neatly laid out, and I kept losing the scissors because I had to keep them out of his reach and inadvertently, kept them out of my own.

No garbage pail is safe

Last night as I cooked dinner, he knocked over the bucket of recycling, found a bottle of wine and despite my having emptied it, he managed to spill its residual contents onto the floor and then sit on it, staining his onesie and new sweater. This morning, he knocked over the cat’s water bowl, spilling all of its contents onto the oak floor and soaking the edges of the antique rugs. And while I had him cloistered in the bathroom with me after taking my shower, he unrolled the toilet paper and then fished his hands around inside the toilet bowl that I thankfully had just flushed. He then crawled over to the garbage pail and turned it upside down, emptying the hair, dental floss, nail clippings and other detritus I like to keep hidden out onto the floor. Thankfully, I don’t do much entertaining in the bathroom.

It’s all normal. He’s doing nothing wrong except being a child, and he’s a wonderfully curious one at that. And having a cat already trained me to not leave small, important items like pearl earrings or keys or flash drives on shelves or countertops she can reach unless I want to spend hours searching for them in the cracks and crevices of my house. The rules for a baby are a similar but slightly expanded version: I can’t put any thing, any where, ever. And yet knowing this, I still snap when he knocks something over, and then I hate myself for doing it.

When my husband, Bruce, got home, we had a fight. It should have been about money because it’s tight right now, but it was about the fact that he didn’t read the email in which I told him about money being tight. And I only knew he hadn’t read it because he said, “I’ll write the check to the insurance company from our joint account” – the account I’d told him was tapped out.

“Didn’t you read my email?” I asked.

“What did it say?”

“Read it,” I said.

I was annoyed. I don’t have a lot of time these days. I have a babysitter for three hours a day, and in that time I’m supposed to write my freelance articles, my blog, do the laundry, the bills, and anything organizational I can remember, as well as doing the food shopping and cooking dinner. It was in that time slot that I fired off about four emails to Bruce that involved housekeeping matters – mostly budgetary in nature – and it appeared he hadn’t read them. I don’t have time these days to do things twice.

“Just tell me what it said,” he said.

“Read it,” I said.

“Fuck off,” he said as he turned on his blackberry.

“Did you just say ‘Fuck off?’ “ I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Nice,” I said and walked into the kitchen. I didn’t like the way he spoke to me, though I knew I couldn’t take too strong a stand as it could easily have been the other way around. I’m usually the one with the foul mouth and bad temper when we argue. He’s just taken my lead.

As I washed the dishes, Bruce stood in the middle of the living room searching through the emails on his blackberry and found the one about the checking account. He said he couldn’t find it because I had put the information in an email that started out talking about insurance. It appears I need to keep my emails to one sentence or he loses interest, because Bruce is now doing in our virtual conversations what he does in our live ones: listening to only the beginning of what I say. The rest of my thought drops to the floor like a dead limb. Just tonight, I tried to say something and when I got to a certain point in my explanation, Bruce cut me off. I tried to say it again, and again Bruce cut me off before I could finish. It’s like wearing bell bottom jeans that are a tad too long, and the person walking behind you keeps stepping on them.

The truth is, I usually get mad when I feel slighted, and I usually feel slighted when I’m getting down on myself, and I usually get down on myself when I feel like I’ve done something wrong, like being a bad parent by yelling at my son. So I yell at Eddie, I feel bad, I think I’m a jerk, then Bruce comes home, ignores me, I lash out, then I feel like a jerk, and because I feel like a jerk, I get frustrated and so when Eddie spills my coffee, I get mad, and then I feel bad, and the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.

When I went to sleep, I dreamed of a social studies teacher I had in high school named Mr. Hoffman, who wore sleeveless vests and a comb-over, though his hair was brown and the big sweep of bangs that lay over the top of his head like a crown was gray, making it particularly noticeable. I had a special place in my heart for Mr. Hoffman because he was the only teacher who paid any attention to me. I felt like flotsam in high school, bobbing up and down in a sea of students completely unnoticed, but Mr. Hoffman and I would have heart to heart chats, about school and friends and life, and he thought I was smart and special. In my dream, I bumped into Mr. Hoffman in the lobby of a hotel. When I saw him, I was very excited and ran over to him. He didn’t remember who I was.

January 2, 2012 Sudbury

We took our son, Eddie, for a walk along the boardwalk yesterday. He pushed his stroller like it was a walker for about five city blocks, so far that my husband, Bruce, was pestering Eddie to stop.  We then went for a drink at a bar along the boardwalk. As Bruce and I had a drink at a table near the bar, Eddie sat in his car seat at the foot of my bar stool yabbering endlessly as if he was telling you about some dramatic event he’d just witnessed.

Can someone help me up here?

“How old is he?” asked a woman seated alone at a table nearby.

“11 months,” I said.

And as often happens, we went from Edwin’s age to fact that he was conceived from a donor egg and how she had breastfed her son until he was about two-and-a-half, the personal information going back and forth in loud voices over the wide aisle of a restaurant. She said she was from Connecticut and that she and her husband had moved to New Jersey recently and their daughter was enrolled in a program called The Sudbury School, where they learned by democratic vote. That is, the children, and not the teachers or school board, determine what the kids are taught. Her husband, who joined us at the restaurant, said at the Sudbury School in Massachusetts, the children wanted to take mathematics and wound up learning eight years worth of math in 60 hours.

“But how do the kids even know what to ask for? How would they even know to ask for something like chemistry when they don’t even know what it is?”

“They do research. And if they like something, they hear about other things related to it,” the husband said. “It motivates them to investigate what they want.”

But they said the founder of the branch of the Sudbury school to which they sent their daughter was being dictatorial, failing to put certain staffing and curriculum matters up for a vote. They were considering switching their child to another branch.

The hypocrisy of it reminded me of a situation a friend of mine experienced this week while on vacation in Washington State. He and his girlfriend drove for 15 miles at 10 miles an hour on a road filled with pot holes and then hiked uphill for another five miles in order to reach these hot springs that were supposed to be magical. But when they finally arrived, the hippy environmental group charged with protecting and overseeing the springs were running it like a hotel and turned them away because they didn’t have a reservation.

“We weren’t even allowed to look at the springs,” he said.

I liked the concept of the democratic school but found it hard to imagine children knowing what they want or need, in life and in education. Like most, I was used to the idea that you tell a child what they need to know, you present it to them in the driest possible way, and you then test them to see if they retained it.

That night, we gave Eddie his dinner and then placed him in his ExerSaucer – a donut with a seat in the middle in which the kid is placed, and he can play with an assortment of balls, wheels, buttons, and a rubbery star. It seemed like a good way to keep him in one place while we ate our dinner. We usually eat in the living room, at 1960s-style TV tables. When Eddie is allowed to roam freely, the first thing he does is crawl over to our tables and rock them incessantly until the water spills out of the glass, the salt and pepper shakers fall over, and our dinner plates are at risk of flying off the edge. It’s like eating on an airplane with violent turbulence. Putting him in the ExerSaucer with a pile of Cheerios seemed like the perfect remedy.

But last night, I can’t even remember why – perhaps he’d been cooped up in a car seat a lot recently? – we decided to let him out of the ExerSaucer before I was done eating. Bruce had already finished, but I was still eating my soup, and as soon as Eddie was free, he made a bee-line for my table. Bruce put his leg up before Eddie reached my table, but the child was driven. It was like the baby was a dog, and my food tray was lathered in bacon. Eddie tried to go over Bruce’s leg, but Bruce raised it. Eddie then tried to go under Bruce’s leg, so Bruce lowered it. This dance went on for a minute or two, with Bruce going one way and the baby going the other, until Bruce dropped his leg for just a second to let it rest and inadvertently created a sliver of an opening, and whoosh! Eddie darted through the hole like a greyhound at the dog track. Within seconds, he was at the base of my TV table shaking the legs like an animal shaking a tree to make the fruit fall.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I said, watching the salt and pepper shakers sway and then fall over.

“I only put my leg down for a second,” Bruce said.

The funny thing was, Eddie didn’t even know what was on my tray. All he knew was that he wanted it badly.

December 25, 2011 Christmas Day

I woke up Christmas morning and snuck into the guest room to grab the four-foot tall sock monkey I’d bought our son, Eddie. He’d seen it in our local drug store two weeks ago and squealed every time he looked over at it, but we decided not to buy it. Last night, when I ran out to buy cat food, I grabbed the monkey before I went to the register, even though it cost $30, and I had to mend a little hole in it when I got home.

I crept into Eddie’s room with the monkey behind my back and walked up to his crib. He was awake and standing at the bars. “Ta da!” I said, pulling the monkey out from behind my back. Eddie looked at me, and then at the monkey, and then back at me, and then like any other morning, he reached his arms up toward me as if to say, get me the heck out of here.

He preferred a bottle to a present

I changed his diaper and then carried him into our bedroom, dragging the sock monkey behind me. My husband, Bruce, was sitting on the bed. I sat down next to him and put Eddie on my lap and gave him a bottle. When he was done, I propped him up on the bed and handed him a gift, which was neatly wrapped in striped paper and burgundy ribbon. Eddie dropped the gift and picked up his empty bottle and began sucking on it. He then pulled it out of his mouth and started playing with the nipple of the bottle with his finger. I don’t remember if he kicked the gift box away with his feet or if it just felt that way.

I grabbed his gift, peeled off the ribbon, and tore at the paper, slowly, waiting for Eddie to take my lead. He just sat there fingering his bottle. I took his hand and closed it on the paper and started tearing it off the box. He grabbed a piece of the wrapping paper and sat back and stuck it in his mouth, as if his work was done. I continued to rip off the paper until I got to the box of Lego’s inside. I opened up the package and dumped the Lego’s on the bed. Eddie looked at them, smiled briefly, and then stuck the piece of wrapping paper back in his mouth. I handed him a red Lego piece. He stared at it for a moment like it was an ancient relic and then grabbed it and plunged it into his mouth.

He eats wrapping paper

“Those are nice Eggos,” Bruce said to him.

“Did you just say ‘Eggos?’ “ I asked.

“I did,” he said.

Bruce gave me one of my Christmas presents – a pair of earrings in a blue jewelry box. As I opened the earrings, first the large box in which Bruce had put it to conceal what it was, then a smaller cardboard box, and then the classic velvet jewelry box that snaps open and shut, Eddie was at my side watching, his little paw of a hand on my thigh. When I finally got to the earrings, he was pulling on my arm and on the box. I took the cardboard jewelry box, stuck the red Lego inside it, and closed the lid and began to shake it like a maracas. Eddie grabbed it and started shaking it and giggling.

Lego in a box

“’Baby’s first Christmas’ is really his third,” my brother, Richie, said later that day.

That afternoon, we went to Bruce’s sister’s house for a meal. When we arrived, Bruce’s two-year-old niece emerged wearing a beautiful beige and gold dress. She’s a pretty girl, and with her fine blonde hair, she looked like a Christmas princess – though she must have changed out of the dress at some point because when we sat down to eat, she was wearing a red dress and pink tights.

Pepe Le Pew

The first time Eddie saw her at Thanksgiving, he accosted her. I don’t know if it was her beauty or that he was thrilled to see someone his age. Either way, she couldn’t get away from him fast enough. This time, however, Eddie was glad to see her, but it was she who kept pulling him close so that their faces were touching, as if she was posing for a photo, and he who was pulling away like the female cat in the cartoon Pepe le Pew.

But while the girl may have wanted Eddie close to her person, she wanted him far away from her stuff. She had a fuzzy pink rocking horse that Eddie saw and wanted to ride. But when the girl saw his interest, she dragged the horse away. When Eddie saw she had a little plastic tricycle, he tried to ride it, but upon seeing this, she abandoned the horse and jumped on to the tricycle and rode it away. With no toys left with which to play, Eddie crawled into the hallway and grabbed on to the knob of a wooden cabinet and lifted himself up. He began opening and closing the cabinet door. The girl saw this, walked over to the cabinet door and grabbed the knob. She then removed a little plaque that hung from the knob by a string and walked away, almost like Dr. Seuss’s Grinch who Stole Christmas, who not only stole the Christmas presents and stockings from the homes of the Who’s, but he stole all pictures from the walls as well as the nails on which they hung.

He liked the horse

Eddie’s too young to be selfish because he doesn’t yet value possessions. I’m not even sure he knows what it means to possess. He’s more concerned about his bottle and his snacks, though given the chance, he won’t just take one orange slice if he can easily hold two.

Horsie be gone

As we drove home, I read to Bruce an article written by a woman I’d met when I lived in Budapest back in 1993. Even though I rarely saw her these days, I felt an attachment to her because she was the first person I met there. She was the managing editor at the newspaper that had hired me, and she had picked me up at the airport and let me stay with her for a few days until I found my own place. For those first three or four days there, I remained cloistered in her apartment, nursing a jet lag and clinging to her and her husband like a life preserver because I was afraid to go outside. The only time I left the apartment was to go down to the courtyard of their Socialist-architecture apartment complex to use the pay phone to call Bruce, dropping in pockets full of forint coins for a phone call that would last only a minute or two. When I last saw Susan a few years ago, we were both back in the States, and she was a court reporter for a newspaper in Florida, though I’d seen on Facebook recently that she’d resigned and had posted photos from a trip she’d taken to see the Northern Lights in the Yukon territory of Canada. When I wrote her to ask what was going on, she said she’d written an article about it that explained everything. As I read the article to Bruce, Susan told of how she’d been diagnosed during the summer with Lou Gehrig’s disease and that it had always been a wish of hers to see the Northern Lights. She and a childhood friend made the trip to Canada to see the lights, but her friend had to dress her every day in layers and layers of clothing because the disease had already progressed to the point where she could no longer use her hands. She wrote how every day for three days, they would go outside waiting to see the Northern Lights. By the third day, she says she stopped checking the auroral forecast because she knew she couldn’t change anything. “What’s meant to be, is meant to be,” and “I don’t know what’s meant to be,” she thought — the same concept she said she ’s conveyed to her children when they ask her if she’s going to die.

Bruce found the article inspiring. Life affirming. It made him want to go out and do things. I felt that way, too, but more, it made me profoundly sad. I couldn’t stop thinking about Susan.

The following morning as I was changing Eddie’s diaper, I tickled his belly, and he began to laugh. I looked into his eyes and thought what if I knew I’d only see those smiling eyes for another year or two. I couldn’t imagine the courage it must take to face your imminent death, to know you’ll never see your children again, that they’ll grow up without you, and that they’ll feel an enormous amount of pain when you leave. To know you won’t get to live anymore, to have pancakes and thick syrup or warm chocolate chip cookies, or smell a fire burning on a cold night or feel hopeful at seeing a sunrise. I’m not brave. I’d be grabbing at the dirt like a child might grab onto a banister as he’s being dragged up to bed.

Hoarding

My father had to face the end of his life at 62 when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and told he had six months to live. He didn’t wax poetic about it like Christopher Hitchens or try to see all that was magnificent in the world, like Susan. He got depressed and bought a bunch of books about letting go, because he found it almost impossible to do.

I heard on the radio today that Steve Jobs’ last words were, “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.” Perhaps when we finally let go, we find bliss.

One can only hope.

December 24, 2011 The First Noel

There’s a Nativity scene in the park near our house, courtesy of our local Fire Department, and for the second time in three years, someone has climbed into the manger and stolen the baby Jesus. It’s either a sign that as a culture, we’re now spiritually bereft, or that outside of video games, there’s really nothing for the kids in our town to do. The Fire Department has since replaced the little doll, but while the rest of the figurines in the manager are glazed ceramic, the new baby Jesus looks like he’s made of plastic. He also appears to be attached to the manger, assuring that if this one is taken, the thieves will be dragging with them a large piece of the creche.

While people visit the park throughout the Christmas season to see the Nativity scene, it’s over-run on Christmas Eve when Santa arrives, via a motorcade of firetrucks, and hands out bags of candy and fruit. But in a cruel twist, the children who sit on Santa’s lap that night tell him what they want for Christmas, and it being Christmas Eve, it’s too late for their parents to go out and buy that gift.

Santa's arrival

We took our son, Eddie, to see Santa. He’d already met one Santa at a local bar a few weeks ago. We’d gone to see the lighting of the Christmas tree in the neighboring town, and we went to a bar afterwards. As we sat at the bar feeding Eddie, in walked a Santa who was slightly inebriated.

Mrs. Claus

“C’mon. Bring him over. Get out your camera,” he said, unsolicited. He then posed for a few snapshots with Eddie and went to the other end of the bar to have a drink.

The Santa we saw last night in the park was sober, and he worked for our local buildings department. As we waited on line, Mrs. Claus handed Eddie a plastic candy cane filled with M&Ms, which he shook a few times like a rattle before inadvertently flinging it at the ground, cracking the plastic. I asked Mrs. Claus for another one, though knowing it was our fault, I felt a little funny for the same reason I feel uncomfortable returning a meal in a restaurant when the only problem with it is that I chose unwisely.

Santa's lap

When we got to Santa, Eddie sat on his lap quite happily, but my camera has a delay of about three seconds, so while Eddie smiled and seemed at ease with Santa, every photo I have is of a smiling Santa and the side or back of Eddie’s head.

We returned home to wrap a few presents and then walked over to the home of our neighbor, Jim, who has a big Italian family that commemorates Christmas Eve with a Feast of the Seven Fishes. I’ve wanted to join them for dinner every year, but Bruce’s brother usually has a Christmas Eve party, which we feel obligated to attend, but this year, they went away for the holiday so we were free to go to Jim’s house. Unfortunately, Jim didn’t invite us this year. So I invited myself. I was surprised when he said he would have to ask his wife.

“Lois used to do buffet, but now she wants to have a sit-down dinner. I have to see if there’ll be room at the table,” Jim said.

That was three weeks ago. I never heard back from him until Bruce bumped into him in front of our house on Christmas Eve.

“I just saw Jim outside, and he invited us over for the Feast of the Seven Fishes,” Bruce said. “He said to come over at 9 p.m.”

“Yea!” I said. “9 p.m.? That’s late, huh?”

“It’s leftovers,” Bruce said.

“Hey, leftovers is fine,” I said.

We arrived at about 9:10 p.m.  and were invited into Jim’s living room. There was a coffee table with some cheese and a shrimp ring. On another table were empanadas and a bowl of dip that was scraped clean by people who had clearly been there before us.

A set of glass French doors separated the living room from the dining room, and through them I could see Jim’s sons and daughters standing around talking. The doors were open only slightly, and the family members remained back there, setting up a line of demarcation beyond which those outside the immediate family were prohibited. I was surprised his family members didn’t even come into the front room to say hello. During the summer, I would often see Jim and his children sitting out on his wrap-around front porch, and they were always very friendly. I chalked it up to the holiday and assumed for them, it was purely a family affair.

We continued to sit on one of the couches picking at the shrimp ring as a few more guests arrived: a couple who worked for the Department of Defense and lived in Brussels and had lots of friends who worked for the European Union, a neighbor, Deb, who attends Jim’s church, and a friend of Deb’s. The guests remained in the living room while Jim’s family members remained cloistered beyond the glass doors, laughing, chatting, and probably full from having eaten all of that fish. I was starting to feel like a second-class citizen. When Bruce first said we would be getting leftovers, I had no problem with it, but now I felt like a scavenger, having to wait in the drawing room for a couple of scraps. I wanted to go home.

Just then, one of Jim’s daughters popped her head out of the door and said, “Okay, everyone can sit down. Dinner is ready.”

As we walked into the dining room, I looked over at Bruce.

“I guess it’s not leftovers,” I said.

“I was wrong,” he said.

We sat in between Jim’s son, Ted, and his daughter, Rose, as his oldest son, who owns a bar in New York City, brought in platter after platter, one filled with a bouillabaisse of lobster, clams, mussels and octopus, another with stuffed clams, platters of sardines cooked two different ways, a bowl of mussels and clams in a sauce of kale and white beans, bacalao cakes, and a soup urn full of scungilli that people poured over stale bread called “tacks.” There were so many platters of food, we had to move a few to a side table to make room for the new dishes that came out. We gave Eddie a bottle of formula while we sat at the table, and he fell asleep in my arms as we ate, drank and talked about the disintegration of the European Union.

December 20, 2011 Starbuck’s

I edit a financial newsletter every morning, whether I’m on vacation in California, reporting a story in Toronto, or as this morning, taking a small holiday in Boston. Since the hotel charges for internet service, which I need for my job, I woke up this morning at 6 a.m. and walked over to a nearby Starbuck’s because internet service there is free.

I’d done the same thing yesterday morning and was able to get the nice table in the corner. It was a nook surrounded by windows, set back so it was protected from the drafty front door, and it had a little space to accommodate a stroller for when my husband, Bruce, would meet me here later with our baby, Eddie.

Coveted table in the window

But this morning, that seat was taken so I put my knapsack and laptop on a seat two tables over. I might have sat at the table adjacent to the window seat, but it had no chairs because the man who had taken the window seat had moved them. The tables in the café are usually lined up along the wall like soldiers as they are in most restaurants, but the man sitting in the window seat had pulled the chairs out, pushed the table flush against the wall, and lined up the chairs next to his own table, creating a barrier between him and the rest of the café. As soon as I saw this, I thought, “Ahhh, this guy.” I remembered him from the last time I was in this Starbuck’s two years ago. He’s a wing nut, and a mean one at that.

A fortress made from tables and chairs

I got up from my seat and was tempted to pull the table away from the wall and put the chairs back in their proper places but thought better of it. I’m a bit of a fixer like that. I pick up litter, stand up construction cones that have been knocked over by cars, I even wipe the countertop at Starbuck’s if someone’s spilled coffee. At my copy-editing job, I consider myself the fixer or keeper of the newspapers because I make sure to look up every publication we cite to determine whether the word, “The” is part of the publication’s title and should be capitalized, as in “The Boston Globe,” or whether it’s simply being used as a definite article, as in “the Boston Herald.” I think it was my attempt to fix an errant chair situation the last time I was in this Starbuck’s that got me into an altercation with this guy.

I went to the counter to get my coffee, and as I walked back to my seat, I got a better look at the guy. He was a black man dressed in a black turtle neck and black pants, and he had a tuft of hair that stuck up on top of his head like freshly pulled soft ice cream. The only thing that separated his outfit from a uniform was a little zipper he had on his turtleneck. I think he had on the same outfit last time I saw him. As I sat down, I looked over at the barrier he had created with the table and chair and thought, “Wing nut.”

I started copy editing a story when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman walk in the door and give the man a big hello and sit down with him. They talked about an office party and money. I couldn’t really hear the details, but I was disappointed to see he had friends and a job, like a normal person. That means the person with whom I’d had an altercation and dismissed as a wing nut might actually be normal, and that if there was a nut in the altercation, it may actually have been me.

I tried to remember what we argued about. I think he’d lined up two chairs next to him as a blockade and had placed a newspaper on the chair farthest away from him, and when I attempted to move the newspaper, he snapped, “Don’t move that!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was yours,” I said. “It’s so far away from you.”

“Well, it’s mine,” he said. “Don’t touch it.”

A wiser man might have assessed the situation and given him a wide berth.

“Are you saving this seat for someone, or you need a seat for your newspaper?” I asked.

I don’t remember exactly what was said next, but it ended with him saying something like, “Who do you think you are coming in here and…” And me saying, “You don’t own this café.”

I think the man had a friend join him that day, too. Perhaps the same woman. But that day, he wasn’t talking to her about a holiday party. He was talking to her about me. There were a lot of “Sh,” and “S” sounds, and the two of them kept looking over at me and snickering.

I remember after the argument, I walked up to the counter to get my coffee and looked at the young girl working there and rolled my eyes as if to say, “Get a load of this guy,” and she just looked at me flatly and said, “Can I help you?”

There’s a scene in the movie “Annie Hall” that sums up a part of my personality. Woody Allen has gone out to California to try to bring Annie Hall back to New York, and as he’s driving, he’s stopped by a police officer who asks him for his license. Woody Allen takes it out of his wallet, and as he tells the officer he has a problem with authority, he’s ripping his license into tiny little pieces that flutter to the ground at the officer’s feet. I, too, have a healthy fear of authority or people telling me what to do and an unhealthy desire to provoke them.

When I went to bed that night, I set my alarm a couple of minutes earlier with the hope of getting to the café before wing nut so I could get the seat by the window. The following morning, I arrived at the café, and the man was already sitting in the window seat, with a different woman. The table next to him was once again pushed up against the wall, only this time, he didn’t have one empty chair next to him. He had two. As I came in, I took the table next to his barricade, but he had pushed the empty table next to him so far away from his own table that all the remaining tables in the cafe were now crowded close together. As I sat down, I pushed the empty table that the man had pushed against the wall a few inches over, to give myself a little breathing room.

“The furniture needs to stay where it is. I’m serious,” he said looking straight ahead. He wouldn’t even look at me.

I contemplated responding, but I thought I’ve got work to do, and a heated argument would be a distraction. I let it go. But as I reached down to plug in my computer, I nudged the table a bit closer to him in order to reach the outlet. I waited for a response, but he said nothing. He was now engrossed in conversation.

I got my coffee and sat down to begin work, but because he had pushed the empty table so far away from himself, it was now nearly touching my table, making me feel hemmed in. When the man on the other side of me got up to leave a few minutes later, I took his seat.

As I did my work, I could see the man talking to his friend out of the corner of my eye. The line at the counter began to grow as more and more people on their way to work stopped in to get a coffee. A young, dark haired man walked in and got onto the line.

“Hi, Gino,” the man in the window seat called out. “You keep that up, and you’re not going to be able to wear pointy shoes.”

Gino smiled.

After a couple of minutes, the man got up to go to the bathroom, and on the way back to his seat, he stopped by the counter to talk to a young woman working behind it. He chatted with this one. He called out to that one. He was holding court.

He went back to his seat, and a few minutes later, his companion left. Soon, a man with a sparse beard walked in, sat in one of the seats the man was using as a barricade and pulled the chair up to the empty table that had been pushed against the wall. Not only had he disturbed the barricade, but he was actually inside of it. I looked over at the man in the window seat to see what he would say, but he said nothing. The man with the beard sat there, his back to the man in the window, and ate an egg sandwich. I was annoyed the man in the window thought he could push me around, and yet he was afraid to say something to the man with the beard. But I felt a mild satisfaction knowing the man in the window must have felt very uncomfortable.

Soon, the man with the beard left, and a few minutes later, the man in the window left. As I sat there, I saw that the man’s barricade, or what was left of it, was keeping people from sitting next to me. I leaned back, spread my elbows a bit and enjoyed the space.

December 19, 2011 Copley

A very Copley Christmas

We go to Boston each year for three days just before Christmas because my husband and I went to school up there and love the town, and this time of year, the nice hotels have cheap rooms. We usually stay near Copley Square, a beautiful square surrounded by two large gothic cathedrals and the Boston Public Library. This year as we went from restaurant to restaurant eating oysters and clam chowder and drinking martinis, I was plagued by the fear that our hotel room had bed bugs.

I’d woken up with a few bites on my hip and stomach. They say bed bugs usually leave three bites, which they call breakfast, lunch and dinner. I had five. I figured there were two, and the second bug must have had a compelling reason to leave early before he could eat his dinner.

Looking for clues

“I think the room has bed bugs,” I told Bruce as I held up my pajama top to show him my bites.

“No, it doesn’t,” Bruce said, without looking up.

“How do you know?” I said. “I’ve been bitten.”

“You don’t have bed bugs,” he said. “It’s a nice hotel.”

A friend recently told me that a telltale sign of whether a hotel has bed bugs is if you find tiny streaks of blood on the sheets. I imagined the blood came out of the bed bug when someone inadvertently lay down on it. What I couldn’t understand is why a hotel bed would have blood-stained sheets from the previous guest.

Food bits or bed bugs?

“I don’t know,” my friend said. And then as if to resurrect her authority on the subject, she said, “They live in the mattress.”

I peeled back the layers of sheets, looking first at the mattress underneath and then at the fitted sheet and the flat sheet to see if I could spot a streak of blood. I saw nothing on the sheets but spotted a few brown spots on one of the pillow cases, but I remembered that Bruce had propped up our baby, Eddie, against that pillow when he fed him last night. The brown bits were remnants of Eddie’s dinner.

I walked into the bathroom to inspect the bites on my belly and back and tried to chalk them up to the overzealous scratching I do each winter when the skin around my waist gets excessively dry, causing me to claw at it. But the markings seemed too organized for that.

We left the hotel to do some Christmas shopping and get breakfast. We then did some more shopping and met up for lunch, separated again and reconvened for dinner, like two skiers moving down a hill who keep separating when they see a cluster of trees in their path but reconnect again after clearing them. We do the same thing every year except this year, we had Eddie, and we were tossing him back and forth between us like a hot potato. Whoever had him was unable to shop. He didn’t like sitting in his carriage all day, understandably, and so you usually wound up sitting down on a bench or the floor and holding him up as he tried to walk. He likes walking while holding on to the back of his stroller like a walker. Yesterday, Bruce followed Eddie as he pushed the stroller for four laps around Macy’s men’s department while I looked at cashmere sweaters for my sister.

When we got back to the hotel, I read a sign posted in the hallway near our room regarding construction that was going on down the hall. They had erected a wall of wood and sheetrock to block off a section of the hotel for renovations and upgrades. I initially thought it was an elaborate ruse to cover up the fact that they were exterminating our wing of the hotel for bed bugs. I was relieved to see a pile of sheetrock strips on the floor of the hallway when we returned that night, an indication that real construction work was being done – until I thought the strips might be to plug up holes in the walls and underneath baseboard moldings to keep out the bed bugs like one would try to keep out mice.

Construction or extermination?

“I don’t have a single bite,” Bruce said, looking at me like he does when I say I feel a lump on the side of my face near my ear or that I felt a pang in my underarm that I fear is a tumor.

That night, Bruce and I switched places in bed to see if he would get bitten. The following morning, I had two more bites, this time on my upper belly. He had none.

When we returned to New Jersey, I emptied our suitcase and dumped all of the clothes onto the floor of the laundry room. I put the sweaters in the dryer on two cycles, because I heard heat kills bed bugs, and I threw the rest of the clothes in the washer. I didn’t want to wash the sweaters before throwing them in the dryer for fear of shrinking them. I’d hate to ruin all of our best traveling sweaters in a momentary bout of hysteria.

Socializing at the Apple store

After washing, drying and folding five loads of laundry – I threw in all of the baby’s toys, blankets and crib sheets as well – I started to wonder whether it was possible my winter eczema actually could have caused little bumps to develop on my stomach and back. I thought about an incident that happened when I was in sixth grade. I was scared to be in the house alone and so I called up my parents, who were at my grandparents’ house, to say I heard noises that sounded like someone was in the house. I had been doing my social studies homework, which entailed cutting out newspaper articles and pasting them onto pieces of colored cardboard. The kitchen was littered with pieces of crumpled up newspaper like the floor of a bird cage. As it turned out, the noise I’d heard in the house was the sound of my own feet as I walked back and forth on the scraps of newspaper. I knew I wasn’t imagining the little dots on my belly and back, but there were a lot of things it could have been aside from bed bugs.

When I came up from the laundry room, I looked over at Eddie in his playpen. He’d been sleeping there for a few hours now, which was unusual. As I stood over him, he began to stir and woke up. I lifted him out of the playpen and the first thing I noticed was the strong smell of poop. The next thing I saw was a little mark on his cheek about the size of a bug bite.

December 13, 2011 Freehold Raceway Mall

The Freehold Raceway Mall has a large carousel and a children’s play area, with cushioned floors, slides and tunnels, and a little ceramic horse. A young boy was riding the horse when he suddenly kicked out his foot and shoved my 10-month-old son, Eddie, in the stomach, sending him flying onto the ground.

A man, a woman and a horse

I missed the whole thing because I was dizzy with hunger and was wolfing down a sandwich just outside the children’s play area while my friend, Doris, played with Eddie inside. Doris said Eddie was just standing there when the boy thrust out his leg and shoved Eddie in the belly.

“He didn’t even cry,” Doris said.

“Was he trying to get up on the horse, and this kid was trying to get him to back off?” I asked.

“No. He was just standing there watching this kid,” Doris said. “That’s the thing about Eddie. He’s just in awe of everything. He’s not trying to go up against somebody.”

Doris said she scooped Eddie up in her arms and hugged him and told the young boy, “You should apologize. Are you sorry?” The boy said he wasn’t.

Doris said she saw an older gentleman sitting on a bench on the perimeter of the children’s play area and asked him if he was the young boy’s guardian. The man said he was the child’s grandfather. Doris told him that his grandson had kicked Eddie in the stomach.

“He had this ‘Atta boy’ sound in his voice. He wasn’t sorry, either,” Doris said. “Then he said, ‘Oh, he only does that because he’s always getting beat up by his sister.’ “

Going...

Going...

Gone

A little while later, Eddie was standing at the top of the slide, and the boy came up behind him and started making a kind of grunting sound. Hearing it, Eddie suddenly burst into tears. He recognized the kid’s voice, Doris said.

“I just felt like he knew, ‘I don’t want to be near this kid. He didn’t treat me right,’ “ she said.

That night, Eddie fell asleep early, but he woke up crying twice during the night, as if he was having a nightmare.

They say children’s playgrounds are the most germ-infested places around. Almost half of the surfaces are contaminated by bodily fluids like feces, urine, blood and saliva, according to a recent study. I say germs are the least of my son’s worries.

November 23, 2011 A Funeral for Bess

I received a call Friday night that my grandmother, Bess, had died in her home in Florida. She was 96. She’d been declining slowly for several years. A wound that developed on her leg two years ago took a long time to heal. Walking had become more and more difficult, even with a cane. And she’d been steadily losing weight for some time, so much that with her bony frame and large wig, she’d begun to look like a lollipop. But her health took a dramatic turn for the worse when her husband, Bob, died, earlier this year. They’d been married for 74-and-a-half years. She didn’t know how to live without him.

Grandma Bess and Grandpa Bob

I flew to Florida to attend the funeral, leaving my husband and nine-month-old son behind. The service was at the Star of David cemetery. It was the third or fourth time I’d been there in the last 10 years. I knew the exact location of sanctuary, the ante-room next door, the bathroom, and the rabbi’s chamber, where immediate members of the family go for a private prayer with the rabbi. I was in there once, 10 years ago, when my father died.

My grandmother lay in her casket in the sanctuary as the guests began to fill the ante-room next door. Close relatives were allowed to go into the sanctuary to see her one last time before they closed up the casket. For Jews, seeing the body of a loved one is a mixed bag. We’re not used to viewing the deceased. We bury our dead quickly. The casket is usually closed. There is no wake. So when we’re given the opportunity to see the body, we want to say goodbye, but any tender thoughts are often interrupted by, “Holy shit! It’s a dead body. This is surreal. Wow, a dead body.”

My grandmother looked unnaturally healthy. Plastic. Her face was a peachy-flesh color, like a Barbie doll. She wore her signature stripe of blue-green eye shadow and frosted wig, which was perfectly coiffed, but the skin around her mouth looked like it had been stretched, like a drum. A pronounced mole she always had just above the center of her lip now sat above the right side of her mouth.

A large memorial candle in a wrought iron stand burned next to the casket. As we stood over it, my cousin, Cory, accidentally knocked into the candle, extinguishing the flame. The candle was relit and the casket was closed.

Moments later, Cory’s sister, Shari, arrived. She had been given the wrong time to show up. When she was told the casket had already been closed, she was almost in tears. Shari had a particularly close relationship with my grandmother as her family had moved into my grandparents’ house when Shari’s mother, Florie — who was my grandmother’s eldest daughter — divorced her first husband. But as life sometimes takes funny turns, Florie predeceased her mother, and it was not she who was here to grieve my grandmother but her ex-husband, Ira. His presence escaped no one, particularly because he forgot to turn off his cell phone, and it rang several times during the service.

One of many seders at my grandparents' house

Five people read eulogies, all portraying my grandmother as a woman who selflessly gave and gave, opening her home on Long Island and then her condo in Florida — once they moved down there — to anyone who needed it. There was her Aunt, from the Ukraine; her parents, after her mother had a stroke; her cousin Ricky, when his mother, Bertha, found the task of being a single mother too burdensome; her cousin from Argentina and his wife, neither of whom she’d ever met; and her son Lewis’ best friend, Bob, because he needed a place to live after his mother died and his father sold their family house.

During his eulogy, Lewis told a story of how he and his friend, Dean, were playing with his chemistry set in my grandparents’ basement, and Dean began lighting matches and flicking them into a pantry. A lit match landed on a wooden shelf and started a fire. Lewis said by the time they got up the stairs, they could see the smoke coming through the floorboards on the first floor of the house. You could tell that he’d told that part of the story, and the part about Dean running home and hiding in his bedroom, time and time again. Dean’s father apparently set fire to their own family home on several occasions. It was burnt to the ground years later, though it’s unclear whether Dean’s family was still living there at the time. As for my grandparents’ house, there was so much smoke damage, they all had to live in a motel for several months while their home was renovated. While staying in the motel, Lewis said he met Chubby Checker, who was playing at a nearby beach club, and he got the singer’s autograph.

For decades, my grandmother and grandfather were the undisputed heads of the family, the king and queen of the Seder table. While they began passing off some of their leadership duties years ago – my grandmother hadn’t cooked a whole Seder meal in years, and my grandfather no longer led the service — they remained the heads of our clan, like a mafia don who steps down but still makes all the decisions. Their loss has left a vacuum.

celebrating yet another anniversary

After the service, we all drove to the grave site, which was a gaping hole in the ground about six feet deep, wedged in between the graves of my grandfather and my Aunt Florie. Beneath the surface, you could see the hole was lined with concrete on every side, creating a concrete box into which the wooden casket would be deposited. At ground level, all one saw was a large hole surrounded by a metal frame that resembled scaffolding, which would be used to lower my grandmother’s casket into the ground. Sheets of plywood covered with green astro turf surrounded the hole. But the astro turf obscured the edges where the plywood overlapped, or where the plywood ended and the soft ground began, making it easy for someone to lose their footing and fall in the hole. But everyone tread carefully, and most people kept their distance from the hole anyway. It had poured while we were inside the funeral parlor. As the rabbi read the Mourner’s Kaddish, water dripped from the edge of the astro turf into the hole.

When the rabbi was done, the casket was lowered into the ground, and we all walked over to a bucket of dirt and one by one, grabbed a handful and dropped it onto my grandmother’s coffin below.

“I hate that sound,” my brother said, referring to the sound of the dirt as it hit the casket.

“I sort of like it,” I said. “It makes everything sink in.”

As we walked back to the car, I watched the cemetery workers remove the metal scaffolding and roll up the astro turf. Unadorned, the hole in the ground was exposed for what it was: just a hole in the ground that now contained my grandmother. Bright orange flowers appeared to have grown at the edge of the grass that ran along the hole, but I realized it was residual spray paint that had been used to delineate my grandmother’s plot, so the cemetery workers would know where to dig.

After the funeral, everyone went back to the home of my mother’s sister, Marsha, where there were platters of bagels and cream cheese and lox. My mother and her siblings held court as a parade of friends and relatives came through to pay their respects. That evening, another food tray was brought out, this time with brisket and potatoes and asparagus. The leftover bagels and lox were also put out again. Most of the visitors were gone at that point, and the grieving family members sat down to eat dinner. But as night fell, more visitors started to show up, and some grabbed plates and walked over to the platters of brisket and bagels and began taking food.

“Put the food away. Now!” my Aunt Marsha’s husband, Bob, barked at his daughters. “It’s supposed to be for the family.”

His daughters quickly gathered up the platters, resealing them with plastic wrap and putting them into a refrigerator in the garage. My mother’s friend, Rochelle, had come to visit and was holding a plate with a bagel and a dollop of cream cheese when the platter of lox in front of her was whisked away. My uncle Bob was holding it over by the sink, trying to cover it with cellophane. I snatched a few slices of lox just before he sealed it shut.

The Matriarch and Patriarch of the family

This ritual was repeated after every meal, where platters of food would be put out and before all of the grieving family members could even get to them, they were whisked away and resealed, so that visitors didn’t eat any of it. In the days that followed, my Uncle Bob would yell at my mother because her friends did not contribute any food platters, and my mother would yell back at him that he had no right to say that. My Aunt Marsha would run into her room crying, doors would slam and the family would turn their grief into anger, as many families do.

Reunited at the airport

I left after two days and returned to my own small family. It was the longest I had been without my son, Eddie, since he was born last February. When they met me at the airport, I grabbed Eddie and held him in my arms. He had just woken up and his body felt limp and soft, like warm dough. Our little reunion was a stark contrast to my mother and her sister, whom I knew would be going to their mother’s apartment that week to sort out all of her belongings. Few things bring home the fact that a loved one is gone than being able to go through their most personal possessions with impunity.

My grandmother had a screened-in porch at the back of her condo in Florida that was unusable for much of the time they lived there. My Aunt Florie lived in it for four years after she got divorced from her second husband. When she moved out, my grandfather began using it as a workshop, where he stored tools and a pile of broken vacuum cleaners he hoped to fix. The room was finally cleared out about a year ago and the condo association repaired a leak in the roof. My mother’s partner then repaired the sheetrock that had been damaged, and about a month ago, it was ready for my grandmother to use. The porch faced the tree-lined inner courtyard of the condo complex. A few paths wound through it that people used to get to the pool and the clubhouse. For decades, my grandmother would talk about how she just wanted to be able to sit in her screen porch and look out the window at the plants and the people walking by. But when it was finally ready to use last month, she said, “I’m not ready.” For the next several weeks, she maintained she wasn’t ready to go out there. She died last week without ever having used it. Perhaps she was so used to making room for others, existing in the small spaces left over, that when more room opened up it made her uncomfortable, like a bird that remains in his cage even if the door is left open. Either that or she was so used to having her husband’s vacuum cleaners in there, seeing the room without them was confirmation that he was gone.

Reunited in Heaven

My grandmother’s nephew, Joel, wrote a eulogy for her that was emailed to scores of family members, most of whom were unable to attend the funeral. In it, he talked about my grandparents’ generosity, and how they never turned away any one, not even a dog called Vixen that Shari and her brothers brought home. He mentioned how my grandmother never forgot to send out a birthday or anniversary card — despite having four children, 15 grandchildren, and 24 great grandchildren – because she always kept a list of those dates pinned to her refrigerator. And he recounted the giant Chanukah party we had at their house one year, where there were so many presents, they had to be piled into a grocery cart in order to carry them into the living room to be doled out.

The email prompted Ben, the son of Bess’ brother, Harry, to respond. And then Seth, the son of Ben, sent a response. Soon, there was a comment from Lewis, the son of Bess and Bob, and David, the son of Steven, who is the son of Bess’ brother, Nat. At last count, there were 47 responses to Joel’s original email, some writing letters of introduction, others promising to organize a Chanukah party, as the family closed ranks to try to fill the void.