Emptiness speaks

It's the best bedroom in the house, the contractors said to us a few years ago when they built the upstairs extension.

Why don't you live up there?  Soon your daughter will be off to college, and her own life.

It wasn't solely the fact that I wanted her to have the big room, and some privacy.  I also preferred to be downstairs, near the living room and the deck and my son.  Our movie-watching, Downton Abbey and baseball rituals are important to me. He's still young enough to want his mom around -- at least in private.

Now the sun shines in the window, and the stars dance outside at night -- she is not there to see them.

Precious slumbers in the velvet chair near her door, and she does not walk by the chubby cat on her way down the stairs.

Jeans lie on the bed, her chest of drawers is brimming with junk she never sorted out, and a box of books and stuffed animals has been pushed to the room's corner.

But she never made the room her own -- it was if she was camping out, waiting that moment when she was free to go.

She's having a good time, said her dad. She's very social -- hanging out in West Chester coffee shops.  I've tried, but she doesn't want to come back to you.

I spoke to her today.  I'd lose all of my freedom if I came back to you, Mom, she commented. Dad lets me go out on school nights. He wants me to get a driver's license. I'm moving out to a friend's house anyhow when I graduate from high school.

Sometimes, when I go upstairs to shower, I turn on the heat.

Quickly it warms the rooms upstairs, cold and empty since she moved in with her father.

After I punch down the numbers on the thermostat, the emptiness rushes back in.

Wherever I am in the house, I can feel it -- the presence of an absence.

My daughter. My beloved child. My life.

Esau's baby brother

I was really nervous about this commentary.

It's been a while since I wrote about the Hebrew Scriptures, and I know that the whole topic of Israel is a hot potato.

So I took extra care with this one, even running it by two rabbis to check for errors...

Like the fact that Isaac was Jacob's dad.

Something I've known since Sunday school classes at the local synagogue in Brooklyn when I was a kid.

Until, apparently, now.


http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/821135_Column---Israel--Land--nation--people--battleground.html

Not going the distance

I've just written a guy in Texas that I don't think we are close enough to have a relationship.

Actually, to be fair to him, he's moving to the Philadelphia area.

Sometime.

It was supposed to happen in February -- but now, que sera, sera.

I guess.

I sure can see myself as the love of his life.

Or the second love.

I'm contacted often by guys who can't even tell me that they are ever going to be living anywhere near Pittsburgh, let alone the lovely city of Philadelphia.

What is distance between two loving hearts, they ask me.

And before you think that I'm just being scammed, let me reassure you that most of the time, I know the difference between the guy in Nigeria (or, come to think of it, Texas) and the guy with the rose-colored glasses.

I can't date guys in Jersey, let alone D.C. (who knew there were so many single men in Jersey?)

It's incredible (at least to me) how much free time a lot of these men have to fill.

Kids gone, most likely.  A number of them have no children.

Dogs they love, but who can't seem to have an intelligent chat over dinner.

(True confessions -- I do talk to my cat. Most of the time, it's pretty clear that he's saying he either wants MORE dinner, wants MY dinner, or wants me to spray water on him, but that's another story).

Many are on the verge of retirement, which may impel the quest for a companion.

And a lot of them are dyed-in-the-wool romantics.

Distance is nothing between two loving hearts.

I can't argue  with them there.

Distance is nothing when I'm on my way, after a long day at my internship, to pick up the boy at school.

Distance is nothing when I reach out to hug my daughter after a bruising argument.

Distance is nothing when I see the "Wallace Township" sign up by the Creek and know I'm almost home, or drive to meet a friend, or reflect on the love that warmed my childhood years.

But time...time is a lot.  As we get older, we have less to squander.

So I'm really careful about who gets my time, and hope that they are equally choosy.

Not because I'm a snob (perhaps I'm a snob, but it's not about Jersey guys).

It's about time -- precious time.

For work.

For the kids.

For fun, when I can cram in a little.

And, of course, for sanity.

Maybe the fact that I consistently choose sanity over romance says something about me.

Boring?

Desperate?

Or just tired?

You get to choose.

Meanwhile, I've got a novel, a roaring pellet stove, a couch and some hot chocolate.

See ya soon.

Niche thinking: the future of American journalism?

Before the common era, say those who don't like the term "before Christ.'

Understandably so. Not everyone believes there WAS a Christ, let alone that they should set their clocks by whether he lived or was resurrected.

Well, maybe we could call this era of journalism (if one can call all of it journalism) -- A.C.E.

After the Common Era.

I was wondering, yesterday, when the deterioration began. When did we "evolve" into a national peanut gallery?

Can we point out a time when opinions began to wrest the greater stage from objectivity?

Was there one year, or a decade, when writing tilted from an analysis of covert bias, the use of a few allusive words in an article, to the ruckus of a literary dogfight or the glitter of knives as a Shark or a Jet drew scarlet?

There have always been subtle ways in which a reporter could signal a certain lack of objectivity. As I've said before -- watch the kicker quote or the last graf to see how someone really feels (unless they are trying to switch it up).

And there have always been partisans. Just look at eighteenth-century American journalism.

Perhaps we idolize the Murrows and the Brinkleys, even the Brokaws, for qualities that they did not, in truth possess.

But they tried.

Now my Twitter feed is littered with examples of advocacy, ranging from right to left -- and they, at least in the "safety" of the Internet, appear to want mutually assured destruction...

Slash, burn...SCORE!

Cheap shots. Cheap points. Cheap victories.

I'm not saying that some of my advocacy pals don't have a point -- or points.  There is plenty of prejudice to go around.

But the people I really respect are still the ones trying to report the news -- not bend it, twist it, or fry it according to the prevailing political winds.

I like my reporting straight, or as straight as is possible.

Sometimes I claw my way through the caverns of the Internet, where one link leads deeper into another, feeling as though I've been in a mine -- covered with someone else's dirt.

I go back -- there's a certain fascination with watching one train wreck after another.

But I still emerge, night after night, feeling slimed.

Roman holiday

Ancient Israel looks fascinating.

In fact, the land of Israel is the subject of my new series of columns.

But medieval Italy, the land of Dante and the Popes (except when there were three claimants) looks more fascinating still.

It always did, I confess.

That's why, in part, I enjoyed writing this column on the Pope's resignation -- which I, along with many other journalists, keep calling a "shocker."

Shocking even though it is perfectly canonical, and he's hinted at it before.

Shocking although his older brother Georg apparently thought Benedict XVI was a little too old to be Pope to begin with.

Shocking even though he left his pallium on the tomb of the last Pope to resign of his own free will...the Pope that Dante apparently castigated for making "the great refusal."...

To borrow a metaphor from the great poet, let me admit that I, along with many others, apparently find this story, rent from the back pages the Catholic Church,  a hell of a lot of fun.

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/815662_Column--How-will-history-judge-Benedict-XVI-.html

Online dating: how it can ruin a nice evening

The thing is -- I'm incredibly straightforward.

Not only that, but I stubbornly try to stay calm and polite, even when the guy on the other end of the correspondence doesn't.

I am a bit baffled tonight.

The guy who said last week he wants to meet me isn't returning my emails.

A man who has my email address isn't using it -- which makes me wonder...

A 78-year-old gentleman in New Jersey begs me to talk to him.  I wonder what he would think of me dating a young man in his thirties.

Then, of course, there are the married guys and all the other online bounders.

I never seem to be QUITE cynical enough for the online dating universe.

Instead, I take a break from one site, and leave my profile up on another.

While it may not be a change of characters, it is a pragmatic move.

And what is online dating about among the middle-aged, in the end, but pragmatism?

Doomed, moody pragmatism...not even the delusional feel good kind.

Why do I continue?

I suppose that I'm as entitled to my delusions as you to yours.

Ain't American romance wonderful?

Through the desert

A few days ago, I did the inconceivable.

I asked my seventeen-year-old daughter to move in with her father.

Actually, the verb "to ask" is probably stretching it.

Infuriated by her behavior towards me, I told her I was bringing her clothes down to her father's house.

Those of you who are friends of mine, who have walked this long, often barren, sometimes heartbreaking road alongside me (no one else can walk it with me), will know that, as hasty as this choice appears, it was actually the product of years of agony.

I have been in darkness for a long time -- looking back and wondering if anything I have done has mattered in the least.

The conferences at the six or seven schools she has attended since kindergarten.

The trips to therapists.

The conferences with her father and child guidance experts.

Right now, I don't know how to be her mother.

 A mother is supposed to protect, to rejoice, to discipline, and to teach, as well as to love. I could do none of those but love -- and because of the constant friction between us, to be brutally honest, I often questioned my ability to love her.

A survivor of a family suicide, I fought with every fiber of my being to prevent this from happening. But the choice just ratified what was there already.

I'm also aware that there will be facile, quick judgments -- that I will be seen as  parental failure.

All I want to say is -- walk in my shoes, or anybody else's shoes, before you condemn them.

Tonight I am grieving -- a grief beyond tears.

Is my daughter lost to me forever? Am I lost to her?

There is no answer, at least not now, that I can embrace.

And this is just the beginning.