Don't Gel Too Soon

AND YOU THOUGHT YOU ALREADY LOVED THE INTERNET

OK. So I’m writing the script for a benefit I have to MC and I can’t find my stopwatch – anywhere. I was a TV news producer for more than 20 years so I have stopwatches all over the place – just not right here where I need one.

You can guess what’s coming, right? I type "stopwatch" into Google and, for the very first post, comes this. There’s just nothing that’s not here, is there? I’m so happy! PS If I knew how to save a web page as a JPEG (I don’t have time to go look it up) I could also show it to you instead of just linking to it. If you know how – let me know. Please.

DC RESTAURANTS: BEFORE AND AFTER

So Foodmomiac, whose writing, recipes and self I hold in high regard, asks for five top restaurants in one’s hometown. I have to do 10 — 5 PRE-kosher life and 5 SINCE Kosher life.

Since Kosher is easiest since there are only around 10 in DC anyway

JCC Cafe – more nicely appointed than the others and nice, regular food.

Pita Plus – Shwarma and lots of other Middle Eastern meat stuff

Max’s – Great matzo ball soup, schwarma, so-so fried chicken, good fries (according to my husband) etc.

Eli’s – a NY coffee shop type menu – salads with sliced steak, burgers (zillions of types) plus some real "entrees."

Ben Yehuda Pizza – Great pizza w/spinach and tomato and lots more.

NOW – before we began our Kosher life – there were several we loved. Here are 5 of them:

Bistro Bis – cool, beautiful and delicious — American/French cuisine – light.

Neyla – Spectacular Middle Eastern food in an elegant setting (expensive)

Cafe Milano – The Clintons eat here and so do a lot of other "cool folks" on the patio and inside… but celebrity haven or not it’s great Italian food (expensive)

Bombay Club – A fabulous Indian restaurant with a great outdoor area for dinner near the White House at dusk.

LEAVING WAY TOO MANY BEHIND

This is the kind of thing my friend Cooper usually writes about, but foster care has been an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember. Kids who, because of the incapacity of anyone in their families to care for them, get placed "in the system" and shuttled among foster homes – some group homes, some loving families and some just plain horrifying. It’s a disgrace.

Now, there’s some particularly disturbing news. When foster kids turn 18, they "age out" of the system. Often they have nowhere to turn and end up on the streets, in jail or both. They don’t know how to get a job, open a bank account, balance a check book, fill out a resume or be a family. As of this year, reports the Pew Charitable Trusts Kids Are Waiting campaign , the number of kids aging out of the system is up 41%. Here’s some of what they say:

The report, Time for Reform: Aging Out and On Their Own, found that although the total number of children in foster care has decreased, the number who "age out" of the system has grown by 41% since 1998. In total, more than 165,000 young people aged out of foster care between 1998 and 2005 – nearly 25,000 in 2005 alone.

"When children are removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect, we, through our government agencies, assume responsibility for their protection and care. We have failed these children if they ‘age out’ of foster care without a safe, permanent family they can count on," said Jim O’Hara, managing director, health and human services, The Pew Charitable Trusts.

"Every day we do not reform foster care, we fail 67 more young people who exit foster care completely on their own."

Think about that – 67 kids a day set loose with no moorings, nowhere to go for Thanksgiving, no apartment, job, phone, home address.

I have no answers for this; I know there has been work to try to reform a foster care system which has been burdened by budget cuts and a surge of (truly) broken families. But I don’t see how we can continue to allow our supposedly "child centered" society to allow these kids to tumble into adulthood with no safety net at all. Not much help to rant without suggestions — I know that in LA for a while there was a group that held formal "graduations" and "proms" for kids aging out and that in some places there is some effort to help the kids learn how to live on their own before they have to — it just seems we should have it on our radar.

GETTING EXCITED FOR BLOGHER

Boy is this getting exciting! I’ve been on real deadline rollercoaster and will continue to be but seeing BlogHer at the end of the tunnel makes the journey easier. If you haven’t gone in the past, I’d give it a try – last year was a real blast. Here are a couple of photos from then – just to inspire you (Oh and this is not a commercial; no one asked me to write this…) I think I downloaded most of them from Flickr so they’re borrowed – but fun.

Here’s Cooper Monroe (Been There and The Motherhood), Jenny Lauck (Three Kid Circus) and Mary Tsao (Mom Writes)

Posting during lunch.

Come on – it’s really fun and Chicago is a beautiful city. More here.

HER WEDDING, AND MINE

I am a huge admirer of Mir – whose blog Woulda Coulda Shoulda bears a rare warmth and humor. She’s an amazing writer and an even more amazing person. I learned, late, that several people were writing about their own weddings as a kind of virtual bridal shower. Because of my affection and high regard for her I thought I’d come along. We got married on a boat on the Monogehela River in Pittsburgh in 1971. We’re still married. I wore an Israeli Bedouin wedding dress and flowers in my hair; Rick wore a navy blue suit and a fancy tie. He spent hours in the Library of Congress researching Jewish weddings and wrote the service; I inserted quotes from William Saroyan, a speech about our families and another about the Vietnam War. Margot Adler sang Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream. My sisters and college roommates were bridesmaids. Lots of our best friends, family and even a few people you’ve probably heard of were there. It was a wonderful day. As Jenn offered a quote about marriage, I offer one from the Wlliam Saroyan speech that opened ours. In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it. Be happy Mir.

WAY BACK IN EAST BERLIN AT STASI HQ

This is the headquarters of the East German Security Forces – STASI. It’s now a museum. We went there today in an appropriately grey, rainy day. We left the brightly lit neighborhood where we’re staying and took the U Bahn (subway). The exit from the station was breathtaking. Literally. I’d been all over East Germany, in Dresden, East Berlin and all the little towns along the way as well as in both Prague and Budapest — on several occasions before the Wall fell. I know more than most Americans about the grossness of life for the people trapped there for so many years.

Somehow though – after leaving funky Prenzlauer Berg – and even the U Bahn station with its neon and magazine stands and climbing the stairs to find – the past – was stunning. This part of Berlin is still as it was – lines of grey, sterile, tall apartment blocks. Each looking like the end of the line. No signs. No ads. No nothing. You walk a block and go into a parking lot, up a little rise and there’s the building in this photo.

Enter and its shabby and grey. Here’s whose statue is in the lobby.

Yup it’s Karl Marx – but this time he’s a small copy and here to remind us what used to be. And what used to be is pretty bad. I wish I could explain what it felt like to wander the halls where these men (it was mostly men) dominated and terrorized generations of East German citizens. To see truncheons and vans that travelled day and night with receivers to pick up random conversations – and photos of sweeps and arrests – and of this cell.

Now remember, I’m an old leftie myself. I wish the world could allow people to give what they can and receive what they need. But this is not what was happening here. Not at all. Fear was the dominant value – and conformity to prevent any threat to the state. Walking around looking in those bland offices and at the room after room of photos and documents had far more impact than even atrocity stories about the period. Because if you’ve been around eastern Europe before 1990 you knew the weight on your heart; you could feel the thickness in the air. And it was from this place that enforcement of that weight emanated. The museum not a fancy place and I don’t think much visited but if you come to Berlin (and you’ll love it here) come here. It’s a deeply disturbing reminder of what people are capable of doing and of how they always call it something else when they’re doing it. We had lots of thoughts about what’s happening at home now in relation to this – but that’s a conversation for another day.

And here’s a little bonus – the view out the double decker top deck on a bus later in the day — in a more liveable part of what was the East, in the same rain…..

Chuppas, Kallahs and Spiderman

Today I went to a wedding – the first in the new building donated to the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation for its work helping to rebuild Berlin’s Jewish community. This is the bride (Kallah) and groom. Here are a couple more:

The bedeken – where the groom lowers the veil over his wife-to-be’s face in recognition of the ploy that led to Jacob’s marriage to Leah when he thought he was marrying his beloved Rachel —

Men dancing in celebration.

This was the first Orthodox wedding I’ve ever attended – and since almost everyone was from someplace in Eastern Europe- especially Russia, – it had an exotic flavor anyway. I have lots to say about it but I wanted to post the photos now because I have to think a bit about how to describe the intense feelings it evoked.

Strangely – we decided this evening to go see SPIDER-MAN 3 in German, since it wasn’t playing in English except way downtown. It was just such an interesting contrast – a quiet reverence and sense of something sacred at the wedding, and brash, crashing violence and special effects at the movies. I speak almost no German yet only had to ask Rick what was happening maybe 2-3 times since almost none of the exposition was verbal. It does make you wonder how to understand one’s modern self as respect for old, old traditions grows with understanding.

I’m grateful for days like today, when my life lives up to the title of this blog — never gel. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Another, more attractive (at least to me) movie hero said that….

IT WAS [ALMOST] 20 YEARS AGO TODAY….

Around seventeen years ago this playground, built by the parents of Prenzlauer Berg, then part of the Soviet-dominated East Berlin, opened. Just a little while later Rick and I came upon it. We usually spent much of our time in Berlin in the East, and still do. It was a cold day, and in the home-made fireplace a bright fire burned. Kids were running, climbing, and having a wonderful time in this very low-tech “adventure playground.”

It’s still here, still low-tech and still much-beloved. It’s always meant a lot to me; it was very dramatic to cross into the East, see trees growing from the roof of the decimated central Synagogue, see a wall right across the very beat-up Brandenberg Gate (which now looks like this by the way) and to know that the people whose children played here were trapped, and, much of the time, scared. That they were able to create this for their kids in the middle of it all was inspiring. So, tired and not really up for a serious narrative tonight – I offer you this lovely little place – still loved by parents and kids alike – and probably, among those kids, some whose parents were playing there when we first visited. Goodnight.

THE ADVENTURE THAT IS BERLIN

That’s the door to the apartment we stay in when we’re in Berlin (oh – we’re in Berlin.) It’s in a part of town that was far into East Berlin when the Wall divided the city and the magnificent old buildings were devastated by neglect. Slowly, building by building, that’s been changing in the years we’ve been coming here. It’s quite thrilling to see.

This neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, is kind of like Soho was in the 70’s — pioneers, cool galleries and an amazing yarn store, more people on bicycles than in cars (though that’s changing) and an air of expectation, thought and excitement. It’s a joy to be a (pretend) part of it in our little weekly rental.
I want to tell you all about it – the way this city puts your brain into overdrive, the restaurant a block away where President Bill Clinton turned the town upside down by coming to dinner, the parent- created playground, the fancy apartment house that used to be a Gestapo HQ – but I’ve been up for 24+ hours so all that will have to wait. We’re here and it’s cool to be here and I’ll share as much of it as I can over these next few days. OH – and for all my Jewish friends who “will never go to Germany” – I respect your feelings but one of the most exciting things happening here is the re-creation of a young, vibrant Jewish community by Jews determined to go past the Holocaust and take their rightful place. More on that later, too.

YOU ASKED FOR IT

That’s me with my older son, Josh, in Muir Woods outside San Francisco — pretty many years ago. I don’t know if you can tell but I’m pregnant with his brother. Happy to join the virtual shower although despite my adoration of and respect for both Liz and Catherine, I’m from the generation that put their babies to sleep on their stomachs and so may sound a little old-fashioned.

1. Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel right no matter whose advice it is. 2. Trust yourself. 3. Remember that everybody makes mistakes and anyway a child is not a product, she is a person. You’ve heard that kids are resilient. They are. Do your best with love and if you don’t dwell on your mistakes neither will they. 4. You can’t turn a child into someone. You can only help them become the best somebody they already are. 5. Don’t be afraid to say no. Parents who don’t set limits and help their kids learn self-discipline are selfish. It’s easier but it’s not right. 6. No experience is wasted on a child. Maybe they’re too young to remember, but if it happened, it had an impact. So share as much of what you love as you can – music, museums, trips to Timbuktu or Target — poetry, cooking, washing the car. 7. No child ever went to college in diapers. 8. Listen to experienced people you respect, preschool teachers, friends, even, God forbid, your mother. Experience really is a great teacher. Then, though, think it through and then do what you think is right. 9. Everything is not equally important. Pick your fights and win them. 10. Leave time to just be. Lessons are great but quiet time is where imagination and a sense of self emerges. 10. LISTEN to your kids. They are smart and interesting and wise and if you respect them you have a far better chance of having them respect you. 11. Did I say trust yourself?

With love, admiration and the joy that comes from knowing all you wonderful, poetic and caring, committed and in one case, very new mothers on the occasion of this lovely virtual baby shower.