Growing Boy

For about a year now, I've served one main purpose in Bar Mitzvahzilla's life: I am his yardstick. He walks up to me each day, assesses my height, and then tries to get me to stand back to back with him in front of a mirror so he can see if he's taller than me.

Since I've actually been shrinking while he's been growing, this is kind of a win/win situation for him. What could be better than having a really old mom whose bones have been eaten away by all of her asthma medications? My last bone density scan was so alarming that my doctor had to put me on 7000 units of Vitamin D per day and a bone density medication once a week, and I'm only 49. At this rate, what will I look like at 59? All I know is that each day when I get up I'm not sure whether all my vertebrae will simply slide down my spinal cord and pool at my feet.

But Bar Mitzvahzilla is a strapping, healthy young man. If I judge him by the size of his feet or hands, I'd say he's going to be a veritable Jewish giant - which means he'll be over 5'8". He's happy about this. He's still at the age where he wants to be older and bigger than everyone else. Of course, he also really likes having two fangs growing in his mouth, so his opinion is pretty unreliable.

To get bigger, Bar Mitzvahzilla is eating a lot of food. I had heard this was going to happen but I don't think I understood the sheer magnitude of it, that feeding my son would end up being the bane of my existence.

Since I am the village idiot when it comes to cooking or feeding my family, always found wandering aimlessly in my kitchen, trying to scrub out a spot on the counter that's actually part of the granite design, I'm not exactly suited for this job of growing a child. When I get him home from school I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be to prepare some kind of slap dash dinner. I manage to prepare something and then he is full. After dinner's done, amazed at my kitchen prowess, I collapse on my bed only to hear, one hour later, the call: he's hungry again. He needs dinner number two. And an hour after that? Dinner number three. It's actually impossible for me to think of three original, interesting things to make for dinner all on the same night. To me, three ideas should equal three days of dinner out of the way forever.

Bar Mitzvahzilla, on the other hand, has got a pretty indiscriminate appetite. Basically, he'll eat anything that's not a vegetable. If it has picante sauce on it, that's really good. If it's a la mode - good too. If told to make his own dinner, he will make salsa and chips.

I won't even get into the sheer logistics of trying to sit down and enjoy a meal at the same table with him - his meaty paws grabbing all the food before anyone can get their hands on it, him watching us for a lull in our eating to ask if we're going to finish our food - and if we're not, can he have it? The mad scramble as he tries to eat everything on his plate at once, till food is scattered everywhere - crumbs on the floor, his shirt splattered, food in his hair.

And when he's full, he's so done that it's like he was never hungry at all. He looks up from his plate and doesn't know what we're all staring at. He stands up, pushes his chair back till it hits the wall, and stalks away from the table, leaving his plate.

Lead Foot

I have a reasonable amount of credibility in my family, by which I mean that if I say something happened, the people in my family normally believe me. Like if I yell out, "Scorpion!" my husband will show up with the scorpion spray, he won't come to inspect whether it actually is a scorpion while it runs away under our bed.

So, when I kept telling Husband this week that my car was having a hard time starting, since he's in charge of our cars, it would have been nice if he would have given me some credibility. Then a light came on in my dashboard that included an exclamation point. My car, normally mute, was trying to tell me something. I know the rules of writing and the use of exclamation points - they are to be used sparingly. They connote excitement, urgency. So I sat up and took notice.

The light in the dash finally got Husband moving, especially because he could finally use some of the dust-covered tools he's bought and stored in our garage. First he just got to use the tire gauge to measure the air pressure, but then, for true excitement, he got to turn on the thunderous air compressor and fill those tires up.

This afternoon, however, the car stopped moving. Husband had paid attention to the most apparent issue - the exclamation point in the dash - but hadn't paid attention to the other issue, the car barely starting. Luckily, the car worked fine for everything that I leisurely did today: exercise, shopping, a meeting, lunch. It was just when I was about to do what I'm actually supposed to do - picking up Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter from school - that the car wouldn't start. Because Husband is a slave to our carpet store, I had to call my mother to rescue us, which entailed her zooming over in her souped up, bare-bones Toyota Matrix, and then taking me on the ride from hell.

My mother didn't start driving until she was 34. She had a car before then, a faded red Chevy Nova, which was parked under the tree in front of our house in Skokie. She was afraid to learn to drive so it just sat there rusting under the tree while she schlepped out of the house each day with her baby buggy and shopping baskets and 7 daughters, going grocery shopping at the National store about 5 blocks away. Finally, in 1964, she learned how to drive and, as she proudly told me today while she hugged the center line, braked hard for dips in the road, and sped up as she approached red lights, she's never had an accident in 45 years. Maybe if she tries harder.

We got the kids and then my mother briefly considered letting me drive her car. It was like high school again: me, the anxious, shifty teenager waiting for the car keys to drop into my hand so I could zoom out to a boondocker in the desert. Then she shook her head. No, she couldn't risk it. I've only been driving 32 years. That's not long enough.

So she put the pedal to the metal to get us back home. After a few more close calls, we got there.

Falling Cactus

My mother has returned from spending the summer in Northern Arizona. After calling me all summer and making fun of Phoenix for being too hot all summer - which was her way of inviting me up to visit - it finally got too cold up there and she returned home.

Because I live the closest to her of her seven daughters, my mother calls upon me for general house maintenance and run of the mill slavery while she's in Flagstaff. There's the dead and dying arboretum in her front yard that she calls landscaping and which must be tended to. I don't take care of it, I just call to tell her when, finally, her last living cactus has keeled over and whether it's hit the house. Also, for some reason, my mother and stepfather don't fully understand the idea of stopping the paper when they leave for three months, so I have to swing by, pick up the papers that have accumulated on the driveway, and throw them behind her front pillar. After a long, hot summer, the shade behind the pillar and her leaky hose, it turns out I've pretty much started a mulch pile.

Since my mother is elderly, there's no imposition that she won't foist upon me to make her life easier and my life harder. The newest one, just invented this summer, is that now, when she's driving down from Flagstaff, she wants me to pop over to her house and turn on her air conditioning so it will be cool for them when they get there. I need to do this at exactly 9:00 in the morning. They've timed this exactly. They'll be there at 11, which will give the house two hours to cool off from a summer with the air conditioning off. So she wants to know - is there a problem? Can't the kids go to school at a different time? And what do I mean, I need to be at exercise at 9:15?

The next thing I knew, she was back in town but there was dead silence, unusual for someone who usually announces her presence with, "What, you can't come over to see me? You're so busy?" Both her home phone and cell phone were malfunctioning. I left a message on the cell even though I know she's never figured out how to retrieve them.

By the time I got to her house, another sister was already there. She greeted me with cries of, "Oy, Linda! You're so skinny! A size four?" This is actually her standard greeting or farewell comment. When we were leaving she said the same thing as a goodbye to my sister. "Oy, Eileen! You're so skinny! A size four?"

She's back home. Her ringer's back on. Her house is cooled off. The TV's turned on to something that keeps her up at night, like a Holocaust special. Things are back to normal.

Beached

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not exactly the outdoorsy type. I'm more the indoor, bookish type who considers nothing more fun than sitting at a bookstore searching through stacks of books. Arizona suits me perfectly with its completely hostile climate. But sometimes I have to leave Arizona and go on vacation. Then we drive west, to Southern California. And when we're there, I'm suddenly supposed to be a different person - I'm supposed to love being outside.

There are a few problems with this reasoning. First of all, from the minute I get out of our car, I'm freezing. After all, I just survived a 45 degree drop in temperature - from 115 degrees to 70. I'm wearing my winter coat. My teeth are chattering. Daughter is wearing mittens. I don't suddenly think, Hey, I think I'll throw my clothes off and go swimming in the Pacific Ocean.

Unfortunately, just when I'm finally comfortable again, bundled up in our hotel room, my husband and children appear before me in swimsuits, holding boogie boards. I feign a grave misunderstanding.

I say, "I thought we just came here to look at the beach."

But they're determined to actually go there and, for some reason, they seem to want me with them. I'd like to think this is because I'm essential to their existence but, after this trip, I know that I'm just their pack mule to haul their stuff down there and their guard dog to watch it all while they frolic in the waves.

My history of beach-going isn't so great. I grew up in Chicago during the era when Lake Michigan was clogged with dead birds and the shoreline dotted with broken glass. Despite all these drawbacks, my mother and aunts would schlep us down there so we could all "get some color," which, apparently, was any color other than our own. My cousins and I would play in the hot sand, watch the oil-slicked water, the dead birds floating, and slowly burn to a crisp. We ended up a different color: red.

I was going to outsmart the beach this time. If it was overcast, I'd bring along yoga pants and a jacket so I could sit comfortably and read. If it was sunny with a cool breeze, I would sit in a bathing suit with my new secret weapon: SPF 85 sunscreen. That strategy worked on the cool days but, finally, there was one day of gleaming sunshine, the kind of day that always makes me think that the pretty, nice sun is my friend. Of course, it's not. I sat in my bathing suit with my sunscreen on, my book in hand, guarding my family's possessions. I was cautiously optimistic. Maybe the outside world wasn't so bad after all.

Three hours of sand and seaweed later, of Frisbees thrown at my head, of every person on the beach shaking out their sandy towel onto me, like I was a still-life, and it was time to load me back up and head back to our place, all of us burned to crisps. Red.

The Camper Returns

Bar Mitzvahzilla came back from camp on Sunday. I had gotten a Twitter update that the camp buses left early, so I was stalking the parking lot they'd be pulling into, hovering there for my boy. Two buses pulled in. I stood there, watching the doors of both buses, a smile frozen on my face, my head flipping from side to side - one bus, then the other bus, one bus, then the other bus- when suddenly both were empty. No Bar Mitzvahzilla. Then someone told me there was a third bus that had pulled in while I was watching the first two.

Of course, I missed him completely. I found him over by the mountain of duffel bags -and his lone rolling suitcase - standing there, dirty, with a weird-looking medieval monk-type haircut. It was his hair but with three and a half weeks of grease in it.

Still, there he was! My boy! The joy! The relief! The love!

Then things got back to normal.

Here's what he did immediately. Since he knew Husband and I were pretty much complete blithering wrecks after him away, and after getting his increasingly harrowing letters about camp life ("Mom, this place is like the Holocaust: Never Again."), he pressed his advantage, asking if he could get access to his banned electronics for the night. We caved. So much for a joy-filled evening of camp stories.

In the middle of his anguished month away, when I was afraid to open his letters because of his pleas for me to come get him ("Again, Mom, could you please come pick me up?"), and in order to make sure he wanted to survive camp and live long enough to come home, I promised Bar Mitzvahzilla two things in my return letters: a completely redone bedroom and a night over at his cousins' house before we leave on vacation.

I'm not going to go into a big description of what his bedroom looked like before but let's just say that if I stood at one end of our pretty long hallway with his room at the far end, I could smell it. Also, it was like a museum of his childhood. I guess we just hadn't sorted through the toys for a few years. We had sorted through them back when the Power Rangers had to go, but we hadn't sorted ever since Spiderman had to go. And we had never sorted through the books. I mean, Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? was in there.

So I spent days crawling on my belly with a crevice tool, wearing a chemical poisoning suit from head to toe to grab his bedding and throw it out, and, finally, to reassemble the room as no longer that of a boy, but of a teenager.

He came home and walked in there, mesmerized. A double bed. A macho comforter -not Sponge Bob anymore - toys cleared out except for age-appropriate weaponry hidden underneath the bed. There's a chair and ottoman, so he can entertain.

And then he laid around like a bum. He watched too many DVDs. He monopolized the computer. He had to look through every little thing I bought him from his school supply list to make sure all of it met his exacting requirements to be both macho and cool because, apparently, certain colors need not apply. He was hungry on the hour and ate food by swallowing it whole, but anything he did manage to chew ended up on the floor.

Just when I was starting to get just the tiniest bit impatient with him, he charged up his dormant cell phone and called in the second part of my promise, the night over at his cousins' house. And now? Gone.

Long, Dry Summer

When I was in high school I spent a month each summer with extended family in Chicago. Each summer I would reappear in my old Skokie life like an apparition, and to strangers I was a very rare thing indeed: the Arizona cousin. "There are Jews in Arizona?," people would say, like I was the Loch Ness monster and maybe they should take a picture. Then I'd suffer through an examination from head to toe while they assessed whether I was really this thing I claimed to be, this Arizona Jew. After a few times, I knew what was coming next, the question: "If you're from Arizona, why don't you have a tan?"

Since I've lived in Arizona since 1973, I'm going to claim a little bit of expertise on this topic, though I'll readily recognize that there were people here before me, like the Neanderthals. Let's put it this way, when I moved to Arizona, kids in my eighth grade class rode horses to school. That was a little too country for me. The big event in Skokie before I moved had been getting a Star of David necklace for Hanukkah; the big thing in Scottsdale in 1973 was going to a weekend tent revival.

So here's the big secret that people in the rest of the country might not understand: people in Arizona don't have tans because when you live in Arizona, you actually don't go out in the sun at all, at least from May through September. You are positively paranoid about the sun. You wear SPF 1000 inside your house in case some sunlight gets through the window, on which you have a sunshade anyway. When you go driving anywhere, like even to the corner market, you carry a jug of water, because if your car breaks down you could die of dehydration before help arrives. Your children wear Transition lenses on their eyeglasses because you're afraid of them getting cataracts before their time, like when they're teenagers.

It's very dry here. So dry that when I moved here, I didn't understand why bottles of lotion were constantly being passed around among women who would swoon at the sight of them, reaching for them with their hands shaking in ecstasy. Now I understand. Each morning I take my shower and then I slather on lotion from head to toe. If I didn't do this, my whole body would actually crack into a million tiny pieces and fall to the bathroom floor. Then comes sunscreen for my whole body, secret anti-aging wrinkle creams, more lotions, more sunscreens. I end up so greased up that when I get in my car I actually slip right out again.

Soon I'll be heading to California where people actually leave their homes and have outside lives. It seems unbelievable, but I'm going to feel a breeze on my face. And when I meet Californians they'll look at me and get a quizzical look in their eyes; they'll look me up and down, and then they'll say, "If you're from Arizona, why don't you have a tan?"

Little Cabin in the Woods

When Husband and I were in Northern Arizona recently we went to visit my mother and stepfather who stay up there for the summer in my mother's cabin.

Of course, my mom wanted us to stay with her. I hadn't seen her cabin for about four years but that horrific memory was enough for me to make up any excuse to get out of it, despite her telling me that since her last burst pipe incident, the place looked great. I think I told her we were packing a lot of Viagra for our trip. That was the end of our invitation.

My mother has a blind spot where that cabin is concerned. There it sits, on the main road into the national forest, headlights lighting up the windows and forest vehicles zooming by making a racket, and she thinks she's living in the center of peace and tranquility. It's made out of beige clapboards with a peeling porch and a circular black-top driveway with weeds poking through, but what does she see? A log cabin in the woods.

But that's just the outside. When we got there I noticed that her decor included every piece of furniture that had left my house, my six sisters' houses, and her own house, in the last 30 years. In the main room there were three rocking chairs - including a glider rocker - along with a pink arm chair and ottoman, and two leather couches. There was an enormous cow-patterned rug on top of the carpeting. The walls were covered from top to bottom with pastel Southwestern art and hooked rugs of sunsets made in the 70s. In the only open space in the room stood a portable evaporative cooler as tall as a human being, blowing so loudly that it drowned out all conversation.

My mom yelled, "ISN'T THE FAN GREAT? IT COOLS OFF THE WHOLE HOUSE SO WE DON'T HAVE TO OPEN ANY WINDOWS!"

I asked her if she could turn it off. Then I counted all the seating. I said, "Ma, are you expecting a crowd? You've got enough seats here for nine people but there's only the two of you each night."

"Well, you never know. Someone might come up. Doesn't it look great? I found a place for everything!"

"Wow."

"My neighbors - they have junk in their cabins. Junk!"

"Hard to believe. Junk?"

My husband was on red alert because, like a dog, he can enter any home and immediately sniff out its problems. The last time we stayed at the cabin, we walked in and within 5 minutes he was on the roof fixing the TV antenna and then crawling beneath the house. I swear, he was burying a bone. This time he had the place pegged: leak in the hall bath, no water in the evap cooler, rotting porch. He was holding back on fixing things, though, because we had to get back to town. He sat down on rocking chair number three but refused my mother's offer of fruit salad. She was eating it with her hand out of the serving bowl.

Soon my mother yawned. My stepfather yawned. It was 5:00. Time for dinner and bed. We took the hint, made our excuses and left.

We heard the fan going back on as we crossed the porch.

Road to Nowhere

With the kids are away at camp Husband and I headed out of town and out of the heat up to the cool pine country.

I've lived in Arizona since I was 13-years-old and the odd thing is that there are still some things around here that still haven't changed since I was 13-years-old. Like there are grizzled cowboys running around with bolo ties and ten-gallon cowboy hats and who don't know that Jews still exist. They say, "Like in the Bible?" And I say, "Yes, like in the Bible." There are still pick-up trucks on the road that belong in museums, and we still just have one main Interstate going up north, I-17.

You know how sometimes you hear about some horrible thing that happens on a highway that backs traffic up for hours? I always think about the people in the cars, like what did they do out there? Did they have water? What if they had to go to the bathroom?

Well, now I know, because this happened to Husband and I as we were heading up to Flagstaff for a romantic three-day sojourn. When we were passing through one of the carved out mountains - half a mountain on one side, half on the other and a roadway in between - traffic suddenly stopped. It stayed stopped for two hours with no notice from anyone - no Highway Patrol coming by to talk to us, no Red Cross bringing us bottles or, something we could have used more, Porta-Potties. This is all we knew: there was black billowing smoke up ahead; there was a helicopter with a long swinging bucket pouring water on that black billowing smoke up ahead; and behind us, there was a 50-mile back-up of cars. Oh, and a bad sign: there were news helicopters in the air above us.

Here's what people do when this happens. First they stayed in their cars with their air conditioning on, after all, we weren't very far from Phoenix and it was 100 degrees. Then, after a while, people started getting out of their cars, walking around and talking to each other. A few cars up ahead, some cowboys started having an impromptu hoe-down with the occupants of another vehicle nearby. Women and men started making for the hilly roadside for some kind of brush cover for necessities. People got out of their cars to smoke and Husband and I watched their lit cigarettes nervously, waiting for one of them to ignite another brush fire on the side of the road.

Husband was busy mulling over in his mind exactly whose fault it was that we got stuck in this. Had I taken too long to get ready, as usual? Did I just have to go exercise that morning? Should he have filled the car with gas the night before? Had he armed too many fake sirens for our empty house or had he hooked up too many vacation plugs for our lamps so our lights would go on and off while we were gone? Maybe it was overkill to go inside the house and then lock the garage from the inside and come out a side door?

I'm not a pessimist, but I figured we'd be spending the whole three days of our trip right there, at mile marker 249. I magnanimously agreed to save Husband's life by sharing my water bottles with him when I saw that he had brought only Diet Dr. Pepper for himself. I was about to call the hotel in Flagstaff to cancel our reservation when my mother called. She lives in Flagstaff each summer so she was waiting for us at her cabin. I told her what happened. Did she give me soothing words of comfort? Ideas of how to fill my time? No. She said, "You should have left the house earlier!" Thanks mom.

Finally Husband chased down a highway employee who told us it would be a few more hours. Of course, right after that we began to move. The people who were out of their cars began running to get back to them. We slowly rounded the curve by the fire and saw the ground scorched on both sides of the roadway with the firefighters standing by the roadside in their gear.

I waved as we drove past.

Carrying Baggage

Since neither my husband nor I ever went to overnight camp as kids, we kind of botched up a few things as we sent our kids off last Thursday.

First of all we sent the kids with real luggage, like the rolling king of luggage you would take on an airplane. We got to the the synagogue rendezvous point and, trust me, there was no baggage like this besides our kids'. Their bags stood there - green, bulky and square, with roller wheels on the bottom - while every other bag was a soft-side duffel. When they head off on their camping trips into the forest, my children will need a valet.

I can't help it that I was raised like a wolf. My mother's idea of summer camp in Skokie was to shoo me and my six sisters out of the house into the garage to play all day. We'd wait for the milkman; then we'd wait for the pop man. Or maybe some boys would ride by from the other school district and we would chase them - that one activity could occupy us until school started in September. That was a typical summer.

Since my parents were Holocaust Survivors, they didn't quite understand the concept of summer camp. First of all, the word "camp?" Not good. Concentration Camp, Displaced Persons Camp, Labor Camp - those were camps. After all, they had both come out of the DP camps after the war. Were they expected to send their own children there on purpose? Of course not. Also, it cost money. My parents only spent money on food and shelter. If there was any money left over, my dad bought a new station wagon.

My parents also couldn't understand why we'd be interested in the deprivations of camp. Why would I want to give up living in the lap of luxury in Skokie in a three-bedroom house with nine people, sharing a bedroom with four sisters and sharing the bathroom with seven? How could I give up the authentic immigrant feistiness of my family - the fistfights over a salami, murder over a matzo ball - to go live among American strangers?

But on camp drop-off day, my kids are oblivious. Even paranoid Bar Mitzvahzilla, who will micromanage his underwear, doesn't care about having baggage that clearly shows not only is he a novice at this, but his parents? Novices too.

Their bags get on the bus, they get on the bus, and they're gone.

My Mother's Forest

My mother called me up recently to tell me she had heard about a movie about the Jews who had hidden from the Nazis in the forest during World War II, just like she had. Have I heard of it?

She runs all these things past me because I'm the Super Jew in the family. Of course, there's a very low bar on Jewish adherence in my family. In this family, just subscribing to the Jewish newspaper means I'm some kind of Jewish fanatic.

But I do keep on top of the Jewish world, so I say, "Sure, Mom. It's called Defiance. It came out awhile ago - over six months. I just bought it on DVD."

This gets her very excited because if my mother can combine her two favorite things in the world, the Holocaust and television, this is a good thing indeed.

She says, "Can I borrow it?" And I say yes even though I haven't watched it yet. I bought it because of my family's history and because I know I should watch it, but, really, I have no intention of watching it. Having been raised in my mother's Holocaust immersion school of child-rearing, I can't stand to purposely subject myself to it. But to my mother? Pure unadulterated pleasure. Nothing can be better than two hours of complete abject misery - watching and crying, crying and watching.

I bring it over to her house and she says, "Oh, good! I'm going to watch it right now! Can you put it in the machine? You want to stay and watch with me?" I swear part of her thinks that maybe she'll see someone she knows.

Of course this wasn't even tempting to me. I say, "No thanks. Two hours of Jews being chased through the forest by Nazis who are trying to kill them? That sounds like my childhood."

"What? You were safe in Skokie!"

"Ma! You told us about it everyday in Skokie!"

"Oh."

Later she tells me she watched but she didn't like it very much so she stopped before the end. It wasn't exactly what she thought it would be like. It wasn't exactly about the part of the forest she had lived in; the family portrayed wasn't exactly like her family; they didn't live through exactly the same experiences she had lived through. So when another of my sisters came over to her house, my mom loaned my movie to her.

Then she turned on Schindler's List instead.