True Ancestor

The Dream-Making Machinery of "Cooperstown"

Driving across the Eastern half of the United States with a passel of kids is an object lesson in land planning, transportation, parenting, patience -- and awe. A vast stretch of the drive arrows through open farm land, which begins to pitch and roll in western Ohio. More than one third of the drive from Chicago to Oneonta, New York -- which covers almost exactly 800 miles -- takes place within the state of New York, whose western and west-central valleys are shrouded in cloud and spotted with farms and moribund mill and manufacturing towns.

None of this prepares you for the odyssey that is Cooperstown -- a name which, in classic real estate practice, pours past the borders of the town proper and overflows onto the hungry hamlets that want and need to cash in. Such is the nature of baseball, and the industry it supports, that Oneonta, some 30 miles south of Cooperstown, sports a facility that calls itself "Cooperstown All Star Village" and which hosts a dozen week-long summer baseball tournaments for teams of 12-year-old boys from all over the country.

All Star Village's eight fields are immaculate miniatures of a major league facility: chalked-in foul lines embrace pea-gravel warning tracks and carefully mowed outfields around a pristine dirt-and-grass diamond. The drainage systems under these fields make it possible for games to be played even minutes after downpours -- a frequent occurrence in this moody, Appalachian ecosphere. Parents of kids on opposing teams are caged into segregated bleachers, next to the dugouts of their respective teams. This makes it harder for the parents to engage in confrontations while still being within earshot of their loved ones (and their coaches).

The fields sit at the foot of a steep hill, and tractor-drawn haywagons haul the fat and the disappointed back up the hill after games. The kids stay with their coaches in bunkhouses in the Players Village -- living, eating and sleeping baseball, away from the exhortations and scoldings of parents (and the prying eyes of pedophiles, I suppose). Parents are allowed into the village for one two-hour visiting period; otherwise, they see their boys only at games, or if they check the kid out of the village for a movie, a meal or some R&R.

For fun, the kids have a swimming pool, an arcade, and about 200 other kids from around the country to play with. There's serious work to be done, however, and there are batting cages where swings are readied prior to the 32 or more games played every day.

These are 21st century kids, though: they not only make prank calls, they do it from their cell phones, where they record the calls and upload them to YouTube. I'm not at all proud to say Gabe, hectored the helpless employee of a sandwich shop with his imitation of Stewie from Family Guy, then menaced someone else with a kind of Ricardo Montalban patois. The calls are preserved here, for some reason (click on "prank calls").

Each player comes to All Star Village with a supply of custom-made pins bearing his team's logo. The boys feverishly set about trading pins, collecting one from each of the 23 other teams in their tournament. I don't know who came up with this, but it's a fiendishly clever way to get the boys familiar with the other teams and kids (while stimulating the economy).

The games themselves are six innings long (or an hour 55 minutes, whichever takes longer). In our tournament, Gabe's team won 3 and lost 5, including two losses to the eventual tournament champion, the Palm Desert Toros, a group of 12-year-olds that probably could beat the Seattle Mariners straight up. California, Texas and Florida teams tend to play year round. The kids are terribly good, but one fears not only for their enthusiasm for the game but for their rotator cuffs, too.

Most kids are great sports and well-behaved -- "giving five" to opposing players who've just cleared the fences -- but there's inevitably at least one team that engages in trash-talking, much to the delight of its parental spectators. One team sported a first baseman estimated at 230 pounds, who hit a line-drive home run that surely would have killed any outfielder who tried to catch it. His tags on pickoff throws were so hard that kids on our team came away with bruises. Some teams' parents come equipped with percussion instruments and rehearsed cheers that can damn near kill your enthusiasm for the sport.

Every tournament is scheduled so that each team has time to make the pastoral journey up to Cooperstown proper and pay homage at the shrine known as the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The kids all visit the displays that feature their favorite teams (sadly, in our case it was the Cubs). The coach then led the kids to and let them climb the fence of Abner Doubleday Field, one of the oldest baseball fields in the U.S. and the self-appointed "shrine" to the game. "I knew it was against the law, but some laws just have to be broken," the coach said. The local constabulary was not amused, but the kids sure were.

The Hall of Fame itself was something of a disappointment. Located beyond a skein of t-shirt and memorabilia shops, the Hall overwhelms with its fussiness, and the PR bonhomie with which it breezes past the Steriod Era and its arch-villains to tout the sanitized saints of the game. Simply put, there's too much BS, and too much for kids to look at: too many shrunken baseballs and faded uniforms, too little video, and too little of the darker side of the big business of sport. The plaques to the Hall's members are mounted in a hushed, cathedral-like setting that's just short of comical in its sanctimoniousness.

Four of us dads rented a house -- really, it was just a trailer on a slab -- about seven miles from the baseball complex. Here, we were perched up high on 35 acres: us, a firepit, a 3-bedroom trailer and a grill. This afforded the primitive pleasures of drinking beer and criticizing the coaches, lounging under a canvas of stars and around a blazing fire, surrounded by a traffic-jam of fireflies. The flashes of the nightly thunderstorms, and the thrilling arc of the occasional shooting star, were no match for the fireflies, whose brilliance was the more astonishing because of its complete silence.

For fun we . . . watched baseball!, trooping into Oneonta to watch the Tigers of the New York-Penn league play at a revamped and intimate Damaschke Field (below) that felt more timeless and more present than Doubleday.

On our last night, we had all the kids and parents up to our double-wide. We barbecued dogs and burgers, guzzled beer (the kids stuck to Gatorade), and made s'mores over another roaring fire. To entertain themselves, the kids brought a bat and rubber ball and -- what else? -- played baseball until it was too dark to see. Watching them run improvised bases and smack the ball into the weeds and woods was a primeval pleasure.

What has stayed with me -- more than the baseball, the shrines, the kids and their careening joy at being the center of attention in a game of skill and chance -- is the unchanged and unchanging nature of the central New York landscape. It makes sense that baseball is enthroned here: there's nothing else. Like baseball, the landscape has cosmetic differences but an unchanging, almost regal nonchalance about it. Time moves its tiny metronome but is forbidden its grander gestures. The ghosts come out of the woods to watch every game.

It's been built. And come they do.

--T.A.

Where to go -- when you really need to go -- in L.A.

My niece has unveiled a blog that's witty and useful, ribald and resourceful.

Sh reviews bathrooms in public venues in Los Angeles. I think this is a brilliant idea, and one that she should publish in local papers.  Every coffee house, music store, and cafe she visits will be reviewed in the harsh fluorescent light of her wicked prose.

Be sure to check this blog if you're out in L.A.: you never know what's waiting for you in that stall.

My advice: don't go -- unless you go here first.

--T.A.

Rest Stops, Retching and Reeking: A Travelogue

As soon as I can download a picture or two from the past week's trip to the vast and abandoned countryside of upstate New York (henceforth, "Cooperstown"), I'll give a more detailed description of the tournament that Gabe played in, and the peek it provided into the big business of youth baseball.

For now, though, join me as I revisit the road trip from Chicago to Oneonta, New York, and back, with bulleted highlights.

The Trip There

• We rent a Chevy Uplander from Enterprise Rent-A-Car. I pick it up on Thursday evening.
• Friday morning, at 6:42 AM, we set out from the northern suburbs of Chicago: me, Gabe, another dad, his son (we'll call him "Kyle"), and a third boy -- we'll call him Todd -- whose father will meet us two days hence at the tournament.
• Some 40 miles into the trip, warning lights on the dashboard indicate a problem with the sensors that monitor tire pressure. The toll collector at the Chicago Skyway says the tires appear fine. We learn from this -- surprise, surprise -- that the car is cheaply made, and that every sensor merely attests to this fact, while actually being of no help whatsoever.
• We fill up the gas tank in Toledo, Ohio. Sometime shortly after this, Todd discovers he has lost the $40 his father gave him for the trip. Despite the entreaties coming from the other father and me, Todd jumbles up all the luggage in the back of the Uplander looking for his money, which Kyle finds between Todd's seat and the upholstered interior wall of the car.
• We stop for lunch in Cleveland, at a very run down Kentucky Fried Chicken. Todd develops a nose bleed and runs around the restaurant looking for napkins. The restaurant looks like a crime scene. We depart in haste.
• As we discover from Todd, who has been monitoring his cell phone, the Cubs have come from behind to beat the White Sox in the first of a three-game series. Todd, the only Cub fan in the car, gloats and begins singing the Cubs theme song. I begin to hate him.
• We stop at a rest area overlooking Chatauqua Lake, at the western edge of New York state. Todd, Kyle and Gabe get their ya-yas out running around and throwing rocks. Just as we are pulling back onto the Interstate, Todd says, "Wait! I left my cell phone back there!" We reverse down the on-ramp, back to the rest area, and retrieve Todd's phone.

The Trip Back

• It is 6:30 AM on the following Thursday (aka "yesterday"). Todd's father, who has joined us for the end of the tournament and the return trip, lifts his son on his back, and carries Todd from his bed in our rental house out to the car. "It's freezing in this car," Todd says to me. "Can you turn the heat on?" I point out to Todd that his father has given him a sweatshirt, which is in his lap. "Oh yeah," Todd says.
• We stop for breakfast in Jasper, New York. Todd has chocolate chip pancakes and chocolate milk.
• We are nearing the New York/Pennsylvania border when Todd realizes he does not have his iTouch. He begins to panic. He wants to again deconstruct the careful packing job we've done, but his father dissuades him. Todd is sure he has left the iTouch back in the rental house. I promise him that, at a decent hour, I'll call the owner of the rental house and ask the owner to send the iTouch back, if she finds it. Only then, he begins to calm down.
• We stop for lunch at a rest stop in Ohio. Todd and his son share a footlong Subway sandwich.
• Four hours and one violent thunderstorm later, we stop at a rest area in Indiana. Todd gets a giant, noxious, pseudo-chocolate concoction at a Dairy Queen in the rest stop, which looks like a minimum security facility for fat criminals.
• Four and a half hours later, we are within 10 miles of home on a crowded Chicago freeway. Kyle's bladder cannot wait for us to escape the traffic. I pull over, and Kyle takes a pee behind the car. Todd laughs, then begins to impress everyone with his belching. We pull back onto the road.
• Not 300 yards later, Todd throws up all over the back of the car. His father is disgusted, but not particularly angry at Todd. I, meanwhile, even more impatient and irritable than usual, ask Todd why he couldn't have gotten out of the car 45 seconds ago if he didn't feel well. Todd has thrown up on my suitcase and all over my raincoat (at least it's moisture-proof).
• Todd's father gets angry at me for scolding his kid. Todd whimpers that he just plain got sick and couldn't help it. I apologize to the dad and the kid -- whatever Todd's offenses, I don't think you can scold a kid when he's sick, and especially when the parent is right there.
• We do our best to scoop barf out of the car on a tiny traffic island in the expressway, using trash bags, water bottles -- even my poor raincoat. Then we have to take side streets the rest of the way home, because freeway construction has slowed traffic to a crawl. We drive with the windows down and the air conditioning blasting, while vomit congeals on the car's carpeted floor and takes up permanent residence in our olfactory glands.
• At long last, we reach Kyle's house -- about 15 hours after we started out from Oneonta. The moms are waiting with cleaning supplies. Todd goes off to play. Todd's dad scolds him to come back and help clean up the mess he made. Something of a domestic dispute arises as Todd's mother and father argue over the father's anger at his child, and exactly what the child is and isn't responsible for. The rest of us clean as best we can.
• I return the car this morning, as the rental counter was already closed by the time we got home last night. Overnight, even though I left the windows cracked, the smell of vomit has seeped into the car's carpeted pores. The rental agent swoons as she opens the driver's side door. Soon after, I get a call telling me we will have to pay at least $100 to have the interior detailed.
• I have never been happier to get back home.

Have a great weekend. And whatever you do, wherever you go -- keep barf bags handy.

--T.A.

Road Trip!

Gabe and I begin a road trip to Cooperstown later this week -- well, actually, Oneonta. But in the grand tradition of real estate marketing, anything within a 50-mile radius of Cooperstown calls itself Cooperstown. Cooperstown is an idyllic little American village which houses both the baseball and soccer halls of fame, and has moved from calling itself the birthplace of baseball to the loftier and more profitable home of baseball.

Gabe will be playing in a week-long tournament at All Star Village, one of the area's giant baseball establishments catering to 12-year-olds and their fathers suffering fevered dreams of stardom for their above-average kids. He'll play two games a day for at least three days against teams from Kentucky, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Many of these kids will look like they're 16, and they'll hit our pitching like they were hitting off a tee.

I'm driving out with another dad and two kids. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of road trips -- an experience that may soon go the way of all flesh, given the price of gas. When you look at a map, you see that more than a third of the driving takes place within the state of New York, whose rolling hills and Appalachian affect I remember from summer camp.

I'll do my best to send a dispatch from our rental house -- which has WiFi! It's out in the country, seven miles from the baseball "factory," a glorified trailer plopped in the middle of 34 deserted acres, backing up to a state park. There, these two other dads and I will grill flesh and drink beer, bemoan the fate of our team and our youth, and get devoured by flying insects as another day of our life circles the drain.

I can't wait.

--T.A.

The Old Folks' Home

Got on a 7AM flight this morning to make a business trip to Florida -- and, also, to look in on the aged and revered parents.

As the youngest of six children, I have no problem at all regressing into an infantile and dependent state -- even though my father and mother are 90 and 84, respectively, and could use more someone with a little more "initiative" (one of my dad's favorite admonitions when we were growing up was "Show some initiative!" We never knew what it meant, and didn't have the initiative to get the dictionary down off that high shelf).

The patterns in this house form a mnemonic choir that sings to me a lullaby of protection and sloth, borne out of the years of walks on the beach and afternoon naps in the bedroom facing the Gulf of Mexico. The colors and textures -- the salmon-pink tiles in the back bathroom, with its inexplicable three toilet-paper holders and its faux cut-glass doorknob -- are so familiar to me that I make conscious efforts, every time I'm here, to shock myself into pretending it's the first time I'll see them, or the last; and I try to open my eyes so that I can see any little hint of dilapidation in the house, or of descent in my parents.

The steps of their marital ballet, choreographed over six decades ago, are the same as they ever were: my father's anxious solicitousness in the kitchen; my mother's exasperation before guests arrive, and her expansiveness the moment they appear; the parents' tendency to carry on conversations across several minutes and between distant rooms, my father ensconced in his chair watching a ballgame, my mother engaged in a fierce post-prandial sterilization of their tiny galley kitchen; occasional calls from Dad, extending the obligatory offer from help that we all hope will not be accepted; these are the backdrop of their evenings, and of a childhood that I get to revisit, oddly enough, only on business trips.

Tomorrow I will, in the immortal words of Edward Albee, gird my blue-veined loins; I'll put on my "game face" and head down to Naples for a day of being a boss, casually inspecting the operations of a property that I rescued from condo conversion six years ago and preserved as low-income senior housing. I'll be harangued by at least a few residents about who did what to whom, and what about the property just isn't as good as it was once upon a time. I'll see the staff at the property gamely holding back the voracious elements, the bugs and the weeds and the mold and the heat washing in as the leading edge of summer's frontal assault. I'll review reports and talk to the manager; I'll walk the grounds and the hallways and talk to residents; I'll see and be seen.

I'll stop on the way back to my parents' place and pick up some fresh fish that Mom will cook for dinner. She will insist on cooking. I've never come close to chasing her out of the kitchen. Then my dad and I wage this mock-chivalrous battle over who will sacrifice themselves to the Chore of the Dishes. He will likely win out, although, when he sits down for a rest before tackling the pots and pans, I will jump in and play the hero.

Then we'll go out to the beach and watch the sun sink beyond Sanibel Island, into the brow-line of sky sweating out its daytime fever. Perhaps Dad and I will smoke a cigar; perhaps Mom will do her Vaudeville cough and wave her hand in front of her face, her comic benediction of the smoke that always finds her. And so, in this small way, I become a small player in their pageant again; a guest with a running part on the docu-drama of their dotage.

Next week's episode will include the quiet celebration of their 66th wedding anniversary, a mind-numbing achievement that would indicate, at least to me, that their solicitous dance, and their dancing of it, is a healing dance, a dance that honors love and hallows time and makes every habitual gesture a breath of new life.

Tomorrow night, I will wheel the garbage out to the roadside for Tuesday morning pickup. On Tuesday morning, I'll kiss the aged and revered parents goodbye, head to work, then to the airport. In a couple of weeks, the parents will migrate northward to Chicago for the summer. They'll engage in their tragi-comic nesting ritual for a couple of days, struggling to find reading glasses and set up their laptop and get their dressers organized; then they will slowly unwind, and all will be as it was, for as long as it can be.

They'll be home again, and so will I.

--T.A.

I've heard of 'helicopter parenting,' but this is ridiculous.

A doting father in the affluent North Shore suburbs of my home town was concerned Saturday that his son was going to be late for a tennis session, a couple of days before the son's tryout for the high-school tennis team. Traffic was a-snarl, due to bad weather and compulsive shoppers.

So, like any good father, this gentleman hopped in his Piper Clipper and flew his kid to practice, landing his plane (which was outfitted with skis) on a snowy golf course across the street from the tennis center, and mere feet from a major roadway.

The police stopped the pair before they could cross the street to the tennis center. The father will be charged with -- something. Maybe tresspassing, unless the police can figure out a way to get a law against Criminally Indulgent Parenting on the books.

Helicopter parenting ascends to new heights. Or something.

Read all about it.

--T.A.

Jerusalem doesn't make sense

Cross-posted on Jews By Choice

I've sometimes thought that Judaism cannot make sense to you if you've never been to Jerusalem. And it follows that neither can Islam, or even Christianity -- in its elemental, formative, rebellious beginnings -- really make sense if you've never been to the one city in the world that has loosed more radical thinking, and more love, and more violence upon the world than any other.

I revisited that thought after I read this stunning, rambling piece by Richard Rodriguez in the January '08 issue of Harper's (a piece sent to me, of course, by that great literary omnivore, me True Ann-Sister). The sun-blasted warrens of that great and bewildering city have been fought over, partitioned, bombed, bulldozed, consecrated, desecrated and celebrated so completely, and so repeatedly, that it's hard to understand what lies under the detritus of all that dogma and delirium. Everywhere you look, every stone you step on, has been in the presence of an occurrence or a person of such significance, a force of such magnitude, that it's beyond our dull comprehension.

And yet those same stones and walls are rumbled over by buses, trod upon by tourists and commuters; lives go on there with the same precarious monotony and the same fevered bliss and bottled fury that Jerusalem has fostered for millennia.

I've been to Jerusalem four times in my life. In each visit after the first (1979), it is so unchanged upon first inspection from the previous visit, and appears so completely transformed after just a day, that it seems like a chameleon or a mirage. You can't believe what you're seeing; you can't believe that what you didn't see hours earlier now seems to proclaim itself to you. The scales literally fall from your eyes.

Jerusalem is a place of polar opposites, a place that radiates polarization into the world. But it is also a place that constantly transmits signals of radical hope, of messianic madness, and of the merest sliver of the possibility that you really can live in a place where one mundane existence touches another, more unseen, more miraculous one.

Jerusalem is bipolar: it is love and hate, madness and wisdom. Whenever I go, some part of me can't wait to get the hell out of there. That very same part of me -- that loves the Divine, that yearns for the Transcendent, but that also just wants some peace and quiet -- then cannot wait to return.

Jerusalem -- its pecularity, not its politics -- is why peace will always be possible in the Middle East, and why it will never be fully realized. It's why there will always be proselytizers, dogmatists and fanatical dreamers, and why there will be people who want no more dogma or dreaming. Jerusalem is a proof-text for unity and for chaos at the same time, in the same instant, and within the same atom.

And it's why, once you've been to Jerusalem, and been through a blast-furnace of a day, and the afternoon light starts to glow and that afternoon breeze redeems you from desert madness, you cannot see anything the same way, ever again.

Including your faith, or lack thereof.

--T.A.

End-of-Vacation Syndrome

• The children, regardless of age, are restless, cranky or melancholy, depending on their innate disposition. It's certainly within the realm of possibility for any one child to display all these emotions at once.
• Watches, cell phones and shoes begin to reappear on the edge of one's consciousness, then on one's body.
• One's surroundings begin to leak familiarity, until they seem alien. You suddenly feel excluded from all that welcomed you.
• Weather patterns in other parts of the world are matters of some urgency.
• There is a last rush to spend money, eat food, soak up the sun's rays, frantically have fun.
• You become sentimental about home: you are happy at the prospect of your own refrigerator, your own car, your own bed.
• Your mind struggles again to accommodate details, logistics, plans, obstacles: Life.
• You are crusted with salt and sand. Something like a margarata with feet. You try to hold onto this sensation as you once again don long pants.
• It is hopeless.

Welcome home.

--T.A.

Orthodoxy and Meditation: Having a go at at the Jewish Learning Exchange

Last night, the main hall at the Jewish Learning Exchange in London was packed with people, probably more than 200, to hear Rabbi Tatz and me speak about Letters to a Buddhist Jew, our experience of working on it together, and my particular, and peculiar, spiritual path.

To my delight, Oldest Daughter was in attendance as well. She's in the final weeks of a semester at King's College here in London, and had never heard me speak about the book or my own spiritual odyssey before.

The audience was very attentive, very polite and asked very intelligent questions, as have all the groups I've spoken to here. A couple of people approached me afterwards who were full of vitriol about Orthodox Judaism, and who were disappointed because they felt I was too much of an apologist for Orthodoxy. While I made clear (I hope) that I'm not Orthodox, I also tried to emphasize that Orthodox Judaism is a storehouse of incredible wisdom. Most Orthodox Jewish practice has, however, become cerebral and exclusive, and many Jews don't feel compelled to become part of that, or even investigate it.

Nonetheless, I told one gentleman who was disappointed in me that, as Franz Rosenzweig said, Judaism is like a landscape painting: just as there are many ways of the eye to enter a landscape, there are innumerable ways for a person to explore Judaism and to find meaning in it. I also tried to say to this guy, reasonable and polite as he was, that his expectations were not my problem.

Today I'll engage in Round 2 of a lively discussion with Rabbi Aaron (Aubrey) Hersh, who is, if you'll pardon the expression, hell-bent on making me an Orthodox Jew. I guess I've been too influenced by Zen to find his efforts either appealing or insulting. I am fascinated by people who are certain they possess the Truth, and Rabbi Hersh is one of those.

There is a truth beyond logic that the original Rabbis understood, but that Judaism today is in peril of losing, and which Orthodoxy has all but lost. Rabbi Hersh has tried to impress upon me that the tenets and historical facts undergirding Orthodox Judaism are "True," and asks me for my refutation. My answer to him is that light is both wave and particle. That there is such a thing as the sound of one hand clapping. And that the true/false dichotomy isn't up to the task of grasping or communicating the paradoxical nature of our existence (there's a self, there is no self).

I got the entire room to engage in a 3-minute, silent objectless meditation. No one in attendance could remember so many observant Jews, in one place, being so quiet for so long. I said this experience was nothing but the experience of existing, a miraculous and paradoxical movement called "life" that must be contemplated, simply and silently, to open us to greater truth and a richer experience of being alive.

Many in the audience at JLE last night expressed a palpable thirst for learning to meditate in a Jewish context, and Rabbi Tatz admitted that Jewish meditation is a valid practice and that it can be taught. People asked why the JLE doesn't teach it; the answer, between the lines, seemed to be that it is not something that this generation of rabbis has learned or practiced.

I probably was the first non-Orthodox presenter at JLE. That was an honor that I hope they'll extend to others, who are seeking in Judaism what is there in rich but neglected veins of the tradition.

--T.A.

London calls

The One True Wife, Middle Daughter and I have made the trek across the Atlantic to visit Oldest Daughter toward the end of her semester at King's College in London. I'm exploiting this family sojourn to give a few talks with my esteemed co-author, Rabbi Akiva Tatz. The first two of these were given back-to-back at the Jewish Free School, London's centuries-old Jewish school which a few years ago, with considerable help from the state, built an entire campus that puts to shame every Jewish school and most other schools I've seen (including the ones I attended).

Not just the facilities were first rate but the students were, too. Despite being the U.S. equivalent of seniors and facing serious exams, they were polite, attentive, curious, and full of probing questions. Talking to them, I realized that my spiritual journey may have seemed a little abstract to them, but my spiritual path and theirs through life and general, were probably very similar. Having slept only two hours on the plan, I felt toward the end of the second talk as though I might be hallucinating a little, but Rabbi Tatz, the consummate host, took very good care of me: secured me bagels and cups of coffee, took me to the Jewish Learning Exchange, where he and I are speaking on Monday evening, and before all that made sure that a driver picked us up at the airport, dropped us at our hotel and then whisked me to meet him at the school.

I haven't been to London in almost two decades. It's now bristling with growth and wealth: the skyline teems with ostentatious architectural statements and construction cranes. The Brits have cut back on their smoking and carbs, and can now be found jogging along the South Bank and sipping upmarket coffee at innumerable coffee bars (only some of which are Starbucks). The traffic crawls over the ancient roads; the British Pound hammers the measly dollar into submission.

We had Thanksgiving dinner with some American friends in a suburb of London. One of their three kids was born in the States and was eight years old when the family moved to London. The other two children, twins, were only two when the move was made. The oldest sounds and seems thoroughly American. Of the twins, one has only the slightest hint of an English accent, and the other, to our tinny American ears, sounded completely British (thought the family claimed that Brits can immediately identify her as an American). This family has taken joint citizenship, because, 10 years on, they feel quite at home in Britain, and appreciate the lack of hysterical emphasis on athletic achievement and cliquishness in the schools, and the more relaxed nature of British life in general.

Our family time has been tourist time: museums, parks, changings of the guard at Buckingham Palace, posing for pictures with Beefeaters at the Tower of London and with wax mock-ups of celebrities at Madame Tussaud's, shopping in Covent Garden, Borough Market and Harrod's, topped off today with afternoon tea at the Orangerie by Kensington Castle.

I face three days here after the family goes home, giving more talks with Rabbi Tatz. I struggle to revive my Buddhist years in my mind, and convey the meaning and vividness of that time to audiences as diverse as high school students, businessmen on their lunch break, and Orthodox Jews. It seems like a long time ago.

And as we walk through London, I find myself dropping back behind my daughters so that I can watch them walking arm-in-arm with the Wife, or chasing Gabe, or simply being women in the great, wide world. They are compulsive picture takers, partly because digital cameras make this possible, partly because they feel we never took enough pictures of them when they were growing up.

Now, as my eyes attest and as the camera confirms, they really are women, and I really am getting old. It's not such a bad feeling (yet), and they are a wonderful site to behold (still). This trip is a gift from the fates to the five of us, a reminder of how, in spite of it all, we became a family.

--T.A.