A Word From the Weiss

        L'Shanah tovah, everyone. A happy and a healthy to all of you. Seems like only yesterday that it was 5771. Well, here's to a better 5772!
        This is a new year for me in more ways than one. It's now been a full 12 months since I began filling this space as NiceJewishMom.com. Someone asked me recently if there were ever a week in which I simply had nothing to write about. That's a concern that you might imagine would keep newspaper columnists, bloggers and other life cataloguers awake at night. But no.
        Not one.
        I'm not saying my life is so eventful and action-packed that there is never a dull moment. Yet it's actually my fantasy to have just one week without some personal conflict, calamity or other tsuris to relate. Instead, it's been more than 52 weeks now, and so far not so good. As the mother of two children, however mature and independent they may be, I have no shortage of material. Or misery. As Roseanne Roseannadanna (a.k.a. Gilda Radner) would say, "It's always something."
        More often than not, something unwelcome that I cause myself.  
        An integral part of marking the Jewish New Year is to issue apologies to those whom we have hurt or harmed in any way. So let me start out by offering a heartfelt mea culpa -- to family members I have been cross with too often, good friends I haven't crossed paths with often enough, anyone I've offended by anything I've written, and also to all of you. Because this week I've had more than my share of tribulations, trauma and family drama to report, but I have too much else to do to come through.
        Yes, I got halfway through writing my post yesterday, but then an appointment with a shofar -- not to mention a pot of matzah ball soup, a raisin challah, two roast chickens, three bottles of Manischewitz and eight mocking birds (I mean guests for a holiday dinner) -- somehow got in the way. I promise to finish by next week and to try to do better in the months ahead.
        In the meanwhile, you can check out my story about the annual Rosh Hashanah ritual of Tashlich if you haven't read it already. Speaking of which, here are some other provocative thoughts to chew on, passed on by a close friend.

        Jews have a custom of throwing bread crumbs into a body of water during the High Holy Days to symbolically cast away their sins. 

        For ordinary sins, use white bread.
        For exotic sins, French bread.
        For particularly dark sins, pumpernickel.
        For complex sins, multi-grain.
        For twisted sins, pretzels.
        For tasteless sins, rice cakes.
        For sins of indecision, waffles.
       
        For sins committed in haste, matzah.
        (For sins committed in less than 18 minutes, Shmurah matzah.)
        For sins of having chutzpah, fresh bread.
        For committing arson, toast.
        For committing auto theft, caraway.
        For being ill-tempered, sourdough.
        For silliness, nut bread.
        For not giving full value, shortbread.
       
        For excessive use of irony, rye bread.
        For telling bad jokes, cornbread.
        For war-mongering, Kaiser rolls.
        For immodest dressing, tarts.
        For causing injury or damage to others, tortes.
        For racism, crackers.
        For sophisticated racism, Ritz crackers.
       
        For davening off-key, flatbread.
        For being holier than thou, bagels.
        For unfairly upbraiding another, challah.
        For trashing the environment, dumplings.
        For sins of laziness, any very long loaf.
        For sins of pride, puff pastry.
        For lying, baked goods with Nutrasweet and Olestra.
       
        For the sins of the righteous, angel food cake.
        For selling your soul, Devil's food cake.
        For lust in your heart, Wonder bread.
        For substance abuse, stoned wheat.
        For petty larceny, Stollen.
        For timidity, milk toast.
        For risking one's life unnecessarily, hero bread.
       
        For being hyper-critical, pancakes.
        For over-eating, stuffing bread or bulky rolls.
        For gambling, fortune cookies.
        For being snappish, gingerbread.
        For impetuosity, quickbread.
        For negligent slip-ups, banana bread.
        For dropping in without warning, popovers.

Just remember, whatever form of baked good you may choose, you don't have to show your crumbs to anyone!

A Word From the Weiss

        All too often, we all start sentences with those seven wistful words -- “I don’t remember the last time I…” – then follow them up with some activity that we ought to do more often: “I don’t remember the last time I went out dancing.”  “I don’t remember the last time I took a nice, hot bath.” Or, “I don’t remember the last time I called my mother.” (Well, hopefully not that one.)
        But there was one activity about which I recalled exactly the last time I’d done it. And I was painfully aware that way too much time had managed to elapse ever since.
        I’m talking about going on a mother-daughter getaway, one of those spontaneous and incomparably special adventures that we need desperately and relish thoroughly, yet somehow never get around to planning because life and whatnot get in the way.
        I took such a trip with my daughter Allegra, her good friend Samara, and Samara’s mother Laurel back in September of 2004. Laurel had noticed an irresistibly cheap, end-of-summer promotion advertised by a Catskills-style hotel nestled in the Berkshires. The girls, then 14, had been separated all summer and were about to return to high school. My son, meanwhile, had just left home for his first year of college. Men always seem to go away for golf outings, fishing trips and other sporting events. Why not us?
        The hotel, called Eastover, decidedly had seen better days, yet offered more than enough diversions to fill our one overnight there, from swimming and horseback riding to skeet shooting and archery. There was even a herd of buffalo on the premises to visit. We also managed to fit in a thought-provoking modern play at nearby Shakespeare & Co. Yet it was the joy-provoking camaraderie that made the weekend so memorable. The excursion proved to be so invigorating that we vowed to make it an annual event.
        Yet you know how it goes, especially when four busy people try to synchronize their schedules.  At least one of us always couldn't find the time to fit in even a single night away. “Next year, for sure,” we kept resolving. How easy it is to put things off in life, knowing that there will always be another chance.
        Seven whole years managed to sail by in this way. Then suddenly, last week, we ran out of “next years.” Laurel has been offered a job in another country. Samara has one year of college left, but Allegra graduated in May and is moving on with her own life. We realized that it was probably now or never. And we came to a unanimous decision.
        Now.
        The only questions that remained were what, where, and how? Everyone else seemed too busy to take any initiative, so I sprang into hurried action.
        My first inclination was to try duplicating our previous experience as closely as possible. But that rundown resort, I soon discovered, was under new ownership. The quality of the premises had gone up precipitously. So had the prices, though. Meanwhile, all of those wholesome, old-fashioned activities had been purged. The stables had been transformed into a banquet hall, the horses and the buffalo presumably sold or put out to some other pasture.
        To top that off, the place remained under construction. I still went to the effort of convincing the new owners to waive the new two-night minimum and let us stay only on Saturday night, just in case the girls truly had their hearts set on it. (“We have to do Eastover,” Allegra had written to me. “This is not an option, it’s a necessity!”) Then I began hunting for better alternatives.
        That resort is located in lovely Lenox, MA, which is also home to Tanglewood, the tranquil summer music venue. Its programming had just wound up for the season. But a bit further up the road is another bucolic mecca, Kripalu, a serene yoga center. This former monastery features spare yet pricey overnight accommodations, but also offers one-day passes. For $100 on Saturdays and $75 the rest of the week, you can go for an entire day, eat three healthy, vegetarian-oriented meals and take life-enriching classes in everything from meditation and “The Enchantment of Chanting” to something called “The Yoga of Yes.”
        That may sound a little too touchy-feely for some people, but I’ve done it twice before and had an incredible time. I was heartened to call and discover that it had a world music concert (a new-age genre that Allegra enjoys) on Saturday night. So I was frustrated to email everyone all of these options in great detail and hear back that Allegra wasn’t available to leave New York City until sometime Saturday morning. (I hate to be my late father’s nice Jewish daughter, but even when it comes to Zen experiences, I'm a zealot about getting my money’s worth. What’s the point of paying $100 apiece to spend a whole day somewhere when you aren’t going to arrive until mid-afternoon?)
        This, though, was nothing compared to the major setback in store for us later that night.
        At Laurel’s urging, I decided to nix the pricey resort and, after a lengthy search, negotiated a very affordable rate for The Yankee Inn, a newly renovated motel with both an indoor and outdoor pool.
        No one seemed too enthusiastic about the only current offering at Shakespeare & Co., a play called War of the Worlds, adapted from the H.G. Wells sci-fi novel and based on the infamous radio-show hoax created by actor Orson Welles that threw listeners into a panic back in 1938. (The girls probably didn’t know the difference between the author and the beefy Citizen Kane star, despite Orson having an extra “e” in his name and at least 300 extra pounds on his frame.)
        Everyone seemed intrigued, though, by another literary adaptation I found, based on the Chaim Potok novel My Name Is Asher Lev. This production, about a young Jewish painter whose artistic ambitions conflict with his parents’ values and the rigid strictures of his Hassidic upbringing, had been playing to rave reviews at the Barrington Stage Company, in nearby Pittsfield. Unfortunately, it was finishing its run that weekend. When I’d first looked, there’d been four seats together. By the time I got the go-ahead to buy them, it was completely sold out.
        For the rest of the day, till well past midnight, I continued checking online periodically to see if someone had turned tickets back in. I also kept phoning the box office, manned by a poor young woman who clearly didn’t want to be my new best friend. “The show is sold out for the rest of the run,” she kept replying patiently, then not quite so patiently.
        Finally, I came up with an assortment of other options and figured that I’d let the girls choose as the weekend unfolded. Besides, what difference did it really make what we did? As long as we were together, we were guaranteed to have a great time.
        Or were we? Just before I shut the lights at 1 a.m. on Friday night, Allegra phoned with big news.
        Back in mid-August, as regular readers of this space may recall, Allegra’s longtime boyfriend learned about a promising job opportunity in Los Angeles. Stevo, a talented guitarist who aspires to be an audio engineer, was recommended by a close friend to a man who is opening a new recording studio. Stevo soon flew to L.A. for an interview. The man was encouraging, but repeatedly delayed giving him an answer. Finally, a call came in late Friday night. Stevo had landed the job!
        As wonderful as this development might sound, it had a major downside. He would need to move back to the West Coast, where he grew up, before the end of the month. He and Allegra had just moved to New York, where she was about to begin her own dream job. So she would be staying put.
        One look at her face when she arrived at noon on Saturday told everything. She had barely slept all night and then cried throughout the long drive home. How much would she possibly enjoy a single moment of the weekend? Then again, maybe a brief respite from romance with her mom, her best friend and her best friend's mom was just what she desperately needed.
        As it happens, her friend Samara had just returned from working all summer on the West Coast, where she'd met someone very special. Josh, a nice Jewish boy who lives near San Francisco, seems determined to keep the relationship going, even though Sam has another year at Smith, in Northampton, MA, then may be applying to med school. Throughout the weekend, the girls commiserated about their plights and joked about visiting their beaux together, even though Josh is in the Bay Area and Stevo bound for L.A.
        It was just as well that Laurel and I were bunking together, because we had plenty of issues to commiserate about as well. I hesitate to divulge any deep personal confidences, of which we shared many. Suffice it to say that we are each married to older men – my husband is more than a decade my senior, and Laurel, who is in her mid 50s, has a husband who will turn 78 next week. I’m sure our husbands sometimes kvetch to others about how contrary and crotchety their wives can be. Now it was our turn to play that game.
        As for recreation, it turned out that I’d gone to far more trouble than necessary. Samara and I had both packed copious snacks and a bottle of wine, and upon arrival we were all more than content to sit at a picnic table outside devouring cheese and crackers, fresh fruit and vino. We got so carried away gabbing and gulping, in fact, that we forgot to go for a swim.
        Having packed four pairs of yoga pants (just in case anyone else had forgotten theirs), I proposed that we repair to Kripalu for dinner, where the ample buffet costs only $18 and is heavy on healthy items like stir-fried tofu and kale. Having brought mostly silk and lace, the girls held out for something a bit more festive. They preferred to get all dolled up and find a stylish café downtown.
        Before leaving, just in case, I gave one more call to the box office about Asher Lev. “We’re sold out for the rest of the run,” a now-familiar voice said with a sigh.
        It was just as well. Or Welles. We spent so many hours traipsing around town comparing the menus of the restaurants that by the time we were ready to choose one, many had already closed for the night. This included the newly renovated Kemble Inn, a posh B& B that recently added a restaurant, where we were still offered a tour of the premises, complete with a gleaming chandelier in the bright central hallway and a gorgeous eggplant-hued velvet chair in which Allegra demurely posed, looking radiant and thoroughly content.
        We finally settled on a cozy Italian eatery named Frankie’s, where the food was far more upscale than the homey red-and-white checked tablecloths suggested. Here we toasted with yet more wine, devoured delicious fare like my chicken piccata with copious capers and haricots verts, and shared yet more confidences about our romantic histories (although Laurel merely blushed the color of the chianti when her daughter went a little overboard with the camaraderie and dared to ask whether she’d ever slept with her own high school boyfriend).
        Afterwards, we were too bushed to have seen a play or done almost anything else. The girls came to our room in their pajamas to chat, but soon we were all ready to turn in.
        We agreed to forego spending the next day at Kripalu, sensing this would be too much structured activity and that all the girls really wanted to do was hang out. Instead, we slept late, then reconvened for breakfast, which included omelettes made to order, a surprisingly posh touch for what was essentially a modernized motor inn.
        Then we arranged for a late checkout so we’d have time at last for a swim. How content and exhilarated the girls seemed, splashing around together before repairing to the adjoining hot tub for a soul-soothing soak. (Was it their tendency to behave like conjoined twins that made people keep asking all weekend if they were sisters? Despite a certain resemblance between them, Sam, who is Jewish, looks a lot like her dad, who is of Indian descent. Allegra's looks, meanwhile, favor her own father's. Lord knows she doesn't look like me.)  
        After packing up, I made one last call to my reluctant contact at the Barrington Stage box office. You get only one guess about what she said. So I finally gave up and called Shakespeare & Co. War of the Worlds turned out to be much more appealing than any of us had anticipated, a rather camp romp in which the cast recreated a 1930s radio variety hour, then descended into horror and mayhem under the onslaught of a mock invasion from Mars. (All's well that ends Welles, you might say.)
        After this matinee performance, we meandered into town for the one thing this mother-daughter excursion had  been missing, a little shopping at my favorite store in Lenox, Shooz (no explanation necessary). Then our daughters instantly neutralized this one distinctly girly interlude by suggesting dinner in a rather rowdy sports bar with assorted beers on tap, a venue far more befitting a father-son outing. It was fun, though, and as Cindi Lauper says, that’s just what girls want to have.
        By the time we’d topped off the meal with ice cream at ever-popular The Scoop, everyone was beyond relaxed and positively glowing with good humor. Sadly, though, our much-anticipated getaway was coming to a close and it was time to leave for home.
        Samara had driven her own car from school on Saturday and rendezvoused with the rest of us en route, whereupon Allegra had joined her for the remainder of the trip. Now Laurel proposed that she ride with Sam for the first leg back, noting that we moms hadn’t had any alone time with our own daughters. We readily agreed.
        What a spectacular time we’d had, maybe even better than the original trip seven years ago. We’d refueled our psychic engines. We’d laughed. We’d cried. We’d done everything but see that Jewish play (although God knows we'd tried).
        So as you can no doubt imagine, I was a little stunned when we took off in our respective cars, and within five minutes Allegra broke down crying pitifully. Then she exploded, full-throttle, at me.
        She was still stewing about an unfortunate remark her dad had made just before we'd left. She was still brooding about a far more innocuous comment I’d uttered on the way there. But mostly, she was just worn out from keeping her distress bottled up all weekend. She had struggled to hold in her feelings, she said, in order not to ruin the experience for everyone else.
        Or perhaps she’d been genuinely distracted by all of our hilarity, feasting, and female bonding. And now that we were returning home, reality had abruptly come back to roost.
        I hesitate to betray her confidence or offend her in any way, but the exchange that followed was probably a typical one between young people and their parents. She accused me of all sorts of ludicrous things, like hating her boyfriend (something that could not be further from the truth). She even went so far as to suggest that I was thrilled that he was obliged to leave.
        I denied everything that she was saying. I tried to defend myself. But I was so shocked to be verbally assaulted after all the fun we'd had and all that I’d done to make the trip a success that I couldn't help getting steamed and yelling right back. I told her that I didn’t deserve such treatment. I guess some retort I fired back must have seemed cruel and mean, because she actually shrieked at me, “You’re mean!”
        At this, I decided I couldn’t stand to listen to another word. That’s what I told her. Then, until Laurel rejoined us for the final stretch, we rode for nearly 40 minutes in painful silence.
        And so, as much as she’d endeavored to avoid it, she did ruin the weekend for me.
        I probably should have anticipated her anguish, knowing how little time she’d had to digest the difficult news before we’d left. But having her despair burst out now so suddenly and brutally simply shattered my composure. It was as though the last 36 hours had pumped up my spirits like a giant balloon, then it had been burst, not with a pinprick but a big poison dart.
        One pathetic outcome was that once we had arrived home, I in turn took my angst out on my husband. After deserting him for the weekend, I didn’t come back relaxed and brimming with anecdotes and good cheer. I was far more miserable than I'd been when I left. Allegra, still fuming, insisted on taking a 10:30 p.m. bus back to New York, so he drove her to the station. I crawled into bed to sulk and lick my wounds.
        If you read here two weeks ago about the elaborate plans I made for my son’s 25th birthday, only to have them scuttled by Hurricane Irene, you’ll recognize a familiar pattern in my life: I jump through hoops to please my kids, but in the end I can't make them happy. Yet they have little trouble making me unhappy, because my efforts not only sink like a stone but are too often not appreciated. Double whammy for Nice Jewish Mammy.
        Before Allegra had left that night, we'd made a cursory attempt to hug and make up, but that did little to smooth my ruffled feathers. I woke up the next morning feeling morose, and continued to brood all day.
        Above all, though, I was angry at myself. Whether or not my daughter was ungrateful, instead of lashing back out at her I should have tried to console her. I knew that she was in excruciating pain and hadn’t mean anything she said.
        I also couldn’t help thinking of all the times that my husband has let himself get sucked into heated arguments with her, and I’ve chided him that he’s the adult and should have the self-restraint not to react when at the ripe old age of 21 she still occasionally erupts like an adolescent.
        Yet after all the trouble I’d gone to over the weekend, mostly with her in mind, it was hard to step back, take my own advice and be a mature, thick-skinned grownup. I guess all of us are capable of being a little adolescent at times, at almost any age.
        Once again, at the end of our journey, my traveling companions and I had resolved to make our getaway an annual event, or certainly not to let seven more years pass before repeating it. But now all I could think in my tormented state, I must confess, was, “Never again!”
        When my good friend Liz emailed to ask about my weekend, I poured this sorry tale out, with a little less detail, but no less heartache.
        “I think it's unfair that kids, even adult ones, make their parents into punching bags when they're upset or confused about something,” she replied. This was a tendency her own 20-year-old daughter often inflicted on her, she noted. Yet she assured me that no matter how bad I might be feeling now, I wasn’t a bad mother.
        “I wish you were my mom,” she added. “But if you were, I wouldn't want you to internalize my unhappiness. I'd want you to be steady and there for me.”
        Point taken. I began to consider that I might be the one who needed to call and apologize. Yet I remained so despondent that I wasn’t quite ready to do it.
        The silence of the ensuing hours was almost unbearable. Of course there are days when I don't hear from my daughter. But I don't remember the last time this happened only because we actually weren't speaking to each other. So it was with enormous relief late that afternoon that I heard the phone ring and saw Allegra’s number on the caller ID.
        “I’m really sorry about what happened,” she began plaintively. “And as stupid a thing as it might be to say, I hope it never happens again.”
        “Me too,” was all I could choke out.
        “I really don’t want you to think that I didn’t appreciate the weekend, because I did,” she quickly added. “We all did. We had an amazing time. It was all so lovely, and you did so much work.”
        I told her I knew that she appreciated it, and that I was glad we had gone. Then we chatted about the weekend and her impending first day of work. And before I knew it, I was scrambling to print out some glossy headshots she needed for an upcoming audition, then racing out to mail them before the post office closed. In other words, I was once again her adoring personal assistant-slash-slave and we were already back to normal.
        I may be the adult, but I’m glad she proved to be a bigger man than I am by apologizing first. Mostly I'm glad it's over. I don’t remember the last time I felt so stricken, then such a sense of relief.
        I’m also glad once again that I went to all that trouble to plan our mother-daughter excursion. Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun.
        But mostly, I don’t remember the last time I did something for the last time. So I hope I can remember all this and keep my cool no matter what happens with my daughter over the next few weeks. Boyfriends may come, and boyfriends may go, but I'm her mom. Her nice Jewish mom. I'm not going anywhere.

A Word From the Weiss

        In a dramatic role reversal so abrupt that it’s liable to give me the bends -- a form of divers’ disease I would normally never get, since like many a nice Jewish mother I refuse to put my head underwater – my son started grad school this week, three years after finishing college, while his younger sister, who recently graduated, started work. (Will wonders, let alone tuition bills, never cease?)
        Then again, my son only has to attend classes one day a week, allowing him to continue working on the other days. This means that both of my children are now employed.
        Happily employed. Productively employed. Gainfully employed? Well, that’s another story entirely, one that goes back several years. Maybe even decades.
        Ten months after my husband and I were married, we moved into our first house, a fairly modest starter home that needed a lot of work. Most of that work never got done. Within just a few months, I learned that I was pregnant. A second child soon followed. Who could think about moving after that, let alone think? We stayed there for 14 years.
        The closest thing to a family room that little old house featured was a tiny alcove off the living room. Our children’s toys invariably migrated out of this nook and took over the entire first floor, where they appeared to divide and multiply faster than fruit flies. Every time my father visited, he would take one look and shake his head in disgust.
        “What is this, a toy store?” he’d ask. “Why do kids have so much stuff these days?” What he really meant was why the heck did mine? I hadn’t been indulged like that. “You really ought to donate some of this junk to poor children who have nothing,” he would scold repeatedly.
        Ashamed by our vulgar display of bourgeois materialism-- since my husband and I, not our offspring, were clearly the ones to blame – I began to realize that it wouldn’t be enough to simply pare down our excess inventory of playthings. Also, as admirable as it might be to give away a bunch of used items we didn’t need any more, that wasn’t exactly the height of true charity. I needed to start planting the seeds of philanthropy in our children before they grew up thinking that life was simply about having lots of things. The problem was they were still so young. How to approach this at such a tender age?
        When Thanksgiving rolled around, I learned that our town was holding a turkey drive, collecting food donations to ensure that all residents got to enjoy a holiday meal. So I drove my children, who were then 3 and 7, to the supermarket. Overflowing with rapture about my mission, I invited them to help pick out appealing holiday choices. Instead, they began hitting each other with fruits and vegetables in the produce aisle. They were more bent on doing bodily harm to one another than helping anyone else.
        I realized that they were too young (and/or too well fed) to understand what it felt like for others to often go hungry.  I needed a different way to get them engaged -- another way to talk turkey, or lack thereof.
        The following Thanksgiving, I undertook the food drive shopping all by myself. Afterwards, I showed my kids everything that I’d bought and asked them to help me assemble bags filled with all of the customary turkey fixings for four different families. I asked them to imagine how any children in those homes would feel seeing their moms unload all of the wonderful goodies they would get to eat, then asked them to write or dictate letters and draw pictures wishing all those people a happy Thanksgiving.
        Maybe because these tasks were fun and well within their skill sets, this new tack met with much greater success. Both kids seemed to exhibit genuine empathy as they eagerly pitched in, then gladly accompanied me to deposit our offerings at Town Hall. We repeated this exercise for several more years.
        Yet thinking of others once a year surely wasn’t enough.
        So we began participating in our temple’s annual Yom Kippur food drive as well – not by purging our cabinets of canned goods we’d probably never get around to eating ourselves, but by buying bagfuls of new groceries. When the kids became old enough, I turned this into a bit of a competitive event, challenging them to take advantage of store sales in order to see how economically they could each fill an entire shopping cart.
        And although you shouldn’t need a special occasion to display social awareness, we soon added another holiday as well – one that we didn’t even celebrate ourselves. Each Christmas, we ordinarily sat at home feeling left out while the rest of the world presumably opened gifts and had the time of their lives. Instead, we found a way to join in on the celebration -- by helping another group that wasn’t having such a grand time either. On Christmas Day, we would go visit a nearby shelter for battered women and their children, bringing wrapped new gifts for the youngsters, along with treat bags for their moms that we had filled with candy, cosmetics, and other goodies they might enjoy.
        This enterprise required a bit of a learning curve, I must admit. The little girls at the shelter seemed to look askance at the black Barbie dolls we brought the first year, so we switched to more generic and far less controversial presents, like arts and crafts kits. Meanwhile, their mothers seemed underwhelmed to receive nail polish, being already equipped with perfectly executed manicures donated by a nearby salon. Who knew?
        In fact, this charity soon became such a popular recipient of local largesse that we eventually had to move on.
        One day, the year that my daughter entered middle school, a catalog arrived in the mail. It was from Oriental Trading, the popular purveyor of party goods, and it was filled with pages of tchotchkes geared toward Valentine’s Day. This was an occasion that had never been so much as acknowledged in the Jewish day school my kids had attended for elementary school, being deemed much too goyishe (along with the ultra-pagan, ghoulish pageantry of Halloween). Now, suddenly, it was fair game. And surveying all that frilly pink and red mishegas, I knew it was guaranteed to sell to my daughter’s classmates like hotcakes and put any designated beneficiary in the black.
        With the school’s permission, and guided by the dictates of my daughter’s prepubescent tastes, I ordered $300 worth of paraphernalia from these pages. Then we set up shop together in the school’s front hall. For the first two weeks of February, we ran a sort of Valentines variety store, selling stuff animals, bracelets, hair ribbons and other such froufrou items, supplemented by baked goods made in our own kitchen and by a few other motivated mothers and friends.
        Our inventory got depleted so rapidly that each night, we’d have to take a portion of our earnings and comb local stores for heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and other holiday goods on sale. Then we'd sell them the next day for double the price. Each day, the clamoring crowd of kids armed with wallets was so thick and acquisitive that we needed to enlist all of my daughter’s friends to help sell.
        It was better than any lemonade stand any kid in history has probably ever run. By the end of that week, we’d raised over $900. Sure, it required that initial $300 investment, a sum I wouldn’t have considered taking back. But it was the mother of mother-daughter bonding experiences. It gave my 11-year-old an enormous sense of capability and a taste for how good doing good can feel. And how often do you get to make a donation and functionally triple it with a matching grant?
        Since we’d used the students to serve as our customers, we decided to make them our recipients as well. Both of my children were involved in the school music program, so, with arts funding being cut everywhere, we had the money earmarked for that. We repeated that sale for two more years and managed, among other things, to replace the auditorium’s antiquated speakers with new equipment that they presumably use to this day.
        There was another long-range outcome. My daughter seemed permanently hooked on activism.
        This became evident when she began preparing for her bat mitzvah and undertook a so-called “mitzvah project,” a fund-raising effort not required but strongly encouraged by our synagogue. Along with preparing to read from the Torah before the congregation for the first time, she also would demonstrate her newfound sense of social responsibility by raising money for a cause of her choice.
        Choosing a cause was easy. We read about a local organization that was funding musical instruction for children who couldn’t afford it. Allegra had long been taking piano lessons and loved nothing more than to sing. Gifts of Music, as it was called, was ideal.
        The challenge was finding a way for a 12-year-old to raise any significant sum. At another mother’s suggestion, she began collecting bottles and cans from our neighbors to bring back to the supermarket for the return fee, as well as exchanging our own empties. But at a nickel a pop, this enterprise was going at a snail’s pace – not to mention motivating her dad to drink beer with a little too much gusto.
        So one day, after baking and decorating a batch of sugar cookies, she decided to walk around the block, selling them from door to door. Not only did she manage to unload the entire lot, but one nice neighbor was so impressed with Allegra’s artistry that she hired her to bake dozens of cookies for her niece’s upcoming birthday party.
        This netted $50, the equivalent of returning 1,000 cans. But even more compelling, it planted a brand new idea in her brain, something she named Cookies for a Cause. For the next few years, until she graduated from high school, Allegra would continue to advertise her baking services around town. I donated the ingredients, of course, helped her bake, and invested in an inventory of cookie cutters vast enough to open a bakery. She, in turn, donated her time and effort, with 100 percent of all proceeds going to Gifts of Music.
        Particularly popular were her autumn leaf cookies, painted with a sugar glaze in vivid shades of red, orange and gold to resemble maple leaves falling from the trees. She also supplied children’s birthday parties, a bridal reception, and a baby shower or two. But most orders came in around Christmas, Halloween and Valentine’s Day. So once again the holidays became the hub of her philanthropic efforts.
        By the time she was a high school senior, though, the bulk of her attention had been diverted away from baking (and I don’t mean just by boys). There were college applications, lots of homework, and singing performances with her school’s jazz band. But rising consciousness of the world at large brought a brand new cause célèbre.
        During her junior year, Allegra had taken a class in human rights from an impassioned woman widely regarded to be the most inspiring teacher at the school. The curriculum focused on genocide, child slavery, and other atrocities happening around the globe. Allegra became so inspired that she chose to continue it with an independent study on the same subject during her senior year with that teacher, Liz Devine, serving as her advisor.
        This independent study largely revolved around Allegra’s founding a student organization at her school, William H. Hall High, called the Hall Human Rights Coalition. Attracting an astonishingly wide membership, this group sponsored fundraisers and teach-ins to enlighten other students and the surrounding community about ongoing human rights infractions. Most memorable was a public rally they staged in front of Town Hall that fall to raise public awareness and protest the Rwandan-like genocide then occurring in Darfur.
        Hundreds of adults as well as students turned out to listen to a full roster of speakers, from a state senator to our very own rabbi. Allegra was the first to take to the podium, though, urging the crowd to ignore the media’s tendency to dismiss her peers as an apathetic, disengaged “Generation Y.” Their presence at this event, she said, was living proof “that student activism is not only alive, but thriving.”
        My most unforgettable moment, however, came just as people began to assemble, waving placards and shouting slogans urging our government to do more. Mrs. Devine, who is of roughly my vintage, turned to me to say that she hadn’t seen activism like this in several decades, and that what it really called for was some music. They had a sound system already hooked up. Did I have any CDs in my car that might do?
        “You must be kidding,” I replied.
        Her face fell instantly. “Nothing at all?” she asked.
        I shook my head. “On the contrary,” I said, “what I meant was, you must be kidding to even imagine I wouldn’t. What would you rather have -- The 60s Groovy Hits, The 60s MORE Groovy Hits, or Spirit of the 60s, discs 1 and 2?”
        She nearly hugged me as her eyes lit up like tiki torches. “Now you must be kidding,” she said. “You expect me to choose? How about all of the above?”
         I ran back to my car to fetch my stash. And suddenly the last 35 years dissolved in a giant dose of déjà vu as the soundtrack of my own anti-war youth ruled again, blaring “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds, “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and the Papas,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” and of course the ultimate peacenik anthem, “Get Together” by The Youngbloods:
       
           C’mon people now, smile on your brother
           Everybody get together,
           Try to love one another right now.
           Right now! Right NOW!!!
       
        And for one brief moment, for the first time in decades, that’s exactly what we did. Everyone listened. People cheered and chanted.  The scene was so illuminating, so electrifying, that it felt like change was there in the air, or at least the realm of possibility.
        A few months later, we saw a story on the CBS Evening News about The Memory Project, an nonprofit organization founded by a young man named Ben Schumaker who had undertaken to have American students paint portraits of young orphans in developing nations who had no photos to keep from their childhood. “How nice,” I said.
        But what Allegra said was, “How can I get involved?"
        She spoke to her school’s art department the next day, and within a few weeks she was hosting the nation’s largest exhibit of these portraits to date, with 78 paintings of Mexican orphans done by her classmates on display and a silent auction that raised hundreds of dollars for the cause.
        So why, you may ask, did we end up paying for her to attend New England Conservatory, a rigorous music college at which academics took a pronounced back seat to practicing and musical proficiency, and activism was glaringly nonexistent?
        It’s just that Allegra was so serious about pursuing a career in music, her greatest passion, that she realized she would have to make a sacrifice – to give up studying human rights and any other academic field in great depth in favor of honing her craft as a jazz vocalist.
        Yet her belief remained that music isn’t just another art form, but rather one that can be used to serve some greater purpose (and I’m not referring to a religious one, or suggesting she'd like to become the world’s first jazz cantor). “Music is a universal language,” she says, “one that I believe can best be used as a vehicle for social change.”
        So, once she'd arrived at NEC, activism there was no longer non-existent. By sophomore year, she had founded another student group.
        Musicians for Humanity, as she named it, strove to raise awareness and promote advocacy for social causes by holding fund-raising concerts. For one, they teamed up with Jazz’d for Life, another Connecticut-based nonprofit, to fund a holiday dinner for poor children in Haiti. Another, held last spring, raised funds for tsunami relief in Japan.
        Allegra’s great fear as graduation approached was that her musical degree might enhance her prospects as a singer, but limit her from pursuing her other life goal. She'd long known that she’d need to take a “day job” to pay the rent, but doubted that any nonprofit organization, particularly in the human rights arena, would take her seriously.
        So I was heartened to come across an interesting job opportunity on Craigslist.
        Home recuperating from wisdom teeth surgery, Allegra had broken down one night, lamenting that she’d been applying for jobs since returning from her summer travels and had yet to receive so much as an acknowledgment from a single prospective employer. She sounded so discouraged and distraught that I had to stifle an impulse to laugh.
        “Honey, you’ve been job-hunting for all of three weeks,” I reminded her. “In today’s economy, there are many people who've been grappling with those circumstances for years.”
        Still, I took pity on her because she’s so eager, and because I knew she’d been filing applications almost relentlessly, writing heartfelt letters that really deserved a response. So I decided to take a look at what was out there and within her capabilities myself.
        Craigslist, the online clearing house for finding everything from housing and used furniture to lost pets, also lists employment opportunities in a wide range of areas, from accounting and finance to web design. But none of those categories really relates to my daughter. So I decided to check under “all jobs,” then plug in key words that applied to her ambitions. These words included “music,” “jazz,” and “singer,” obviously. But given her history, the first one I entered was “nonprofit,” and you wouldn’t believe what came up.
        A small New York nonprofit organization was searching for recent college grads to serve as interns by teaching a class in Human Rights at various inner-city high schools.
        “Building on the energy, talents and passion of its young members, the Advocacy Lab gives students direction and specific tools to raise awareness and promote social justice around human rights issues affecting youth,” the ad said. “The students are empowered with the skills, knowledge and resources necessary to become future leaders, engaged members of the global community, and able to enact change in their daily lives.”
        Because the job was unpaid, I assumed they were not expecting applicants with stellar credentials. I forwarded this instantly to Allegra, along with other postings seeking waitresses at jazz clubs and a receptionist for a record company. (OK, I also sent one seeking singers and dancers for a music video, even though it noted that this production would “include some top less scenes.” But that's only because this seemed like a surefire way to check if she would actually bother to read anything I sent.)
        Apparently, she would. But that first ad was the only one to which she responded.
        “This is perfect!!!” she emailed back instantly. “I will apply today!”
        Within 15 minutes, she had drafted a cover letter that she asked me to proofread. Half an hour later, she called.
        “They responded already!” she squealed. “I have a phone interview tomorrow at 2:30!”
        That, I must confess, is when I stepped back and began to think about what I’d just done. The plan had been that Allegra would get a paying day job to support herself while she continued to seek singing engagements on the side. This internship was not only unpaid, but would require that she make a commitment through the entire school year. Should she be offered a full-time paying job before June, she would have to turn it down.
        She was so gung-ho about this prospect, though, that I didn’t have the heart to discourage her. The phone interview went well. They went on to check her references (including a glowing one from her old friend Mrs. Devine). And within two days, she had been hired.
        The training took place over Labor Day Weekend, where Allegra met her nine fellow interns, all female and fanatically impassioned like her, and got a taste of the basic curriculum. She called after session one.
        “Oh, my God, it was amazing!” she gushed. “It’s definitely going to be a challenge. But usually I’m a little bored and distracted in a classroom, and here I was totally engaged.”
        She’d already begun drafting her first lesson plan. “I can’t wait until tomorrow’s session,” she exclaimed. “This is perfect for me. I could do this for the rest of my life and be happy!”
        
        I pour out this lengthy saga not to bore you, I hope, and certainly not to gloat, but mostly to present what you might call a portrait of the activist as a young woman. People often complain that the younger generation seems self-involved, ignorant about global issues and geared toward personal gain. Maybe that applies to many of them. But I know from witnessing my own daughter’s evolution that it isn’t universally true.
        People often scratch their heads when they hear how we’ve encouraged both of our kids to pursue creative careers, which threaten to be risky at best in terms of remuneration. How do I defend that the fact that the day job my daughter chose isn’t risky, but simply pays nothing at all?
        The only way I can explain it is to go back to the beginning and try to determine what it is that fired her up somewhere along the line. Although I do my share of donating money to the Jewish Federation, the local Jewish book and film festivals and assorted other causes, I assure you that she didn’t get this way from watching me.
        It may have been any or all of the experiences I just related and the many people who encouraged or inspired her along the way. (It didn’t hurt that one of her best friends’ fathers is Chengiah Ragaven, a renowned peace activist once exiled for 25 years from his native South Africa, where he was a pre-eminent leader of the anti-Apartheid movement during the 1960s. He's egged her on a lot.)
        Or maybe it was just something innate in her character. My son grew up in the same house and took that high school human rights course as well. He’s hard-working, good-natured and scrupulously ethical, but not especially keen on social causes.
        He also never became one of those earnest, often self-righteous kids who ask friends to donate to a designated charity in lieu of bringing them birthday gifts. (That’s what Allegra did when she was 12, managing to raise money to buy a goat or cow or some other form of livestock for a poor family in South America after another catalog, from Heifer International, arrived at our door. And yes, many kids brought presents to her party too, although she didn’t need them. More than a decade later, altruistic or not, she still had too much stuff!)
           Make no mistake, she’s no Mother Teresa by any means. She’s a fairly normal, regular kid. She likes to go out. Loves good food, clothes and makeup, and hanging out with friends. She does her share of drinking, no doubt. She even talks back to her nice Jewish mom. But when she is good, she’s not just very, very good. She's a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
        The fact is that I heartily endorse the idea of young people giving back to society by performing some form of public service before they go into full throttle seeking their fortunes, the way many in my generation once joined the Peace Corps (although I must confess that I never did that myself).
        And so, although Allegra longs to be self-supporting, the parental subsidy will continue for now.
        Maybe this latest adventure in activism will lead her somehow to where she ultimately wants to go. Although she intends to sing professionally, she also talks of starting her own non-profit group someday. She still hopes to use music not just to entertain, but to call attention to causes in which she believes. Perhaps that doesn't require making either pursuit take a back seat to the other. Maybe she can indeed "have it all" by becoming, on some level, a sort of Jewish Angelina Jolie of jazz.
        At least for the moment she’s happily employed. Productively employed. Gainfully employed? Well, that depends on what you mean by “gainfully.” Someone is bound to benefit from her efforts. At the very least, the young students she aims to inspire.
        And so, along with singing about the A Train, she’ll soon presumably be taking it. She starts teaching at a Harlem high school next week. My dad would probably scold me about the location. But I think that he'd be proud.