The day that our vacation turned deadly we were expecting Lisa and Mariel to return from touring the country. Steve and I were leaving the beach when we suddenly heard radios being turned up everywhere. “Something’s happened,” I said to Steve. In Israel, when bus drivers turn up the volume of their radios, it means trouble.

We learned that there had been a skirmish on the Lebanese border. Israeli soldiers had been killed, some taken hostage. The next day the katyushas made their appearance. And so the nightmare began.

Steve and the girls had never been in a war-time situation before. Mom and I tried to reassure them, but I knew that this was different. I had spent years being suspicious of every stray, ownerless package but had never experienced this intense, random bombing. When the first people were killed, the first houses and stores blown up, we realized that the only safe places were bomb shelters.

We stayed glued to our TV sets even though we could hear the bombs and their reverberations in the streets. Still, it felt like it was happening someplace else. The next day we were told that it was safe to go out for a few hours to shop for food. As we walked to the supermarket, Lisa asked me, “Mom, how do they know it’s safe?” I didn’t want to tell her that there was no such thing as safe, so I made up some reassuring lie.

The days were surreal. One afternoon I stood in front of our building and watched the aftermath of an explosion down the street, feeling as if I were watching TV. The tension ebbed a bit during the nights — until a bomb went off in the next street in the middle of the night, causing me to almost hit the ceiling.

At the end of that week I forced Shatz and Lisa to go home. I hoped that once they left I could convince mom to go back to the States with me. Though Mariel and I stayed on, mom refused to budge. She insisted that there was no way that she was going to abandon her country. I cajoled, pleaded, yelled, pulled out my hair, all to no avail. Mom wasn’t going anywhere. Mariel and I had no choice but to take off without her.

We got home on a Friday, and by Sunday we saw pictures of the apartment building next to mom’s sheared off at the corners by a bomb. That finally shook her up. She agreed to come to us. Mom stayed for three weeks, protesting the entire time. She kept telling us that she felt like a traitor, that she should be home when her country was in trouble. We couldn’t understand why she couldn’t simply relax and enjoy the unexpected holiday with her family. “How are you going to help if you’re in Israel?” we would ask her. “Are they going to give you an Uzi and send you to the front lines?” But she was adamant. She wanted to go home.

Fast forward to April 15, 2013. For the first time in years, Steve and I planned a trip for April vacation week visiting Lisa and Matt in California. Mariel had come in for the weekend as well, and it had been wonderful. On Monday we dropped her off at the airport for her return flight and went for a stroll near the ocean. Suddenly my phone buzzed — a text from Mariel telling us that a couple of bombs had exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line. We were stunned. Everyone took out phones to search for news. We stood there in the beautiful sunshine, listening to the ocean, eyes glued to phone screens filled with horror. And that’s when it hit me — I needed to get back home to Boston.

I knew I was being ridiculous. There was nothing I could do; no one was going to put me on any front line of anything. I wasn’t a police officer or a doctor. But the pull was so strong and the feeling wouldn’t leave — I had to get back. I didn’t tell Steve or the kids. It was just too ridiculous. But I did finally understand how mom felt all those years ago when she felt that she had betrayed her country by running away.

All that week, wherever we went, I managed to slip the fact that we were Bostonians into any conversation that we had with strangers. I couldn’t understand why I had this urgent need to make my Boston citizenship known to the world. If I could have worn a t-shirt blazing a neon Boston sign, I would have. Every morning I rushed to hear the news. I felt lost, frightened and proud all at once. I may not be Boston born, but after almost 40 years I am Boston bred. This city now claims a bigger piece of my heart than I ever realized. Boston, you’re my home.

But the next year it was just the two of us and Lisa. We did the best we could and laughed at our mistakes. We felt like kids playing grown up. After all, it should have been one of our fathers leading the seder. Soon Mariel joined us. We bought more Passover items: our own seder plate, a wine cup for the prophet Elijah, and a matzoh cover. But it took a few years before we felt like we knew what we were doing.

Each year we added new songs, different interpretations, more guests. The girls left for school but made it home for Passover. It got harder, but still every year we had at least one girl home to celebrate.

Every year, the first of four questions that is asked by the youngest at the beginning of each seder is, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The rest of the evening is spent answering that question. This year I had my own question: “Why is this year different from all other years?” And my answer? Neither of our girls could make it home to celebrate with us. So we decided to spend the first evening with mom at her seder and we were invited to a friend’s house for the second. “It’s for the best,” I told myself, “since Passover comes out on Monday and Tuesday, which would make it difficult for me to get off work during the day to cook.”

Though the seder at mom’s place was lovely, I still felt lost. We didn’t sing our songs, didn’t discuss the things we usually discussed, and I didn’t hear our family’s voices reading the familiar words. I felt lost — a stranger in a strange land. When we got a call from Mariel, I smiled thinking she was calling to wish us a happy holiday, but it turned out she had a question that had nothing to do with Passover and everything to do with filing taxes. It was a good thing that we got a text from Lisa asking us for the recipe for Charoset — the mixture of apples, crushed walnuts and wine that represents the mortar used to build the pyramids. She laughed hysterically when I told her about Mariel’s “Passover” question — “Yay! I win the best daughter contest tonight!” she said.

Today at work I read Lisa’s description of her seder:

It was so fun! Yesterday afternoon I sent Matt on a wild goose chase to find matzoh ball soup mix. He finally found the soup mix at Whole Foods, along with some Kedem wine, which I had to assure him was the real thing too, not just a Manischewitz knockoff. He was like, “I don’t know what this crap is, but it’s not Manischewitz.” But once he tried it and found out that it was equally as sweet, he was ok with it.

We invited my friend Jess and her 8-year-old Sky over, and then at the last minute we saw my neighbor was home too so we leaned out our window and yelled to her that she should come over to eat matzoh ball soup. So then I was a crazy person for an hour trying to put together dinner (I made tofu burgers, but Matt wanted to know where the brisket was.) We bought horseradish from Trader Joe’s. I thought it was going to be weak but then took a big bite and thought my head was going to explode. Matt thought I was just being a wuss until he took an equally big bite and looked like a cartoon character for a few minutes with smoke practically coming out of his ears.

We put the apples and walnuts in a plastic bag and took turns smashing it with a hammer in the hallway. I hid the three afikomens and told Sky that she would get a prize if she found them all. And then we ate dinner and introduced Jess and Sky to matzoh ball soup, which they both loved.

We went through about two bottles of wine and had a big debate about whether rich people should get taxed a higher percentage of their income than lower income people and how we should fix the health care system. Jess says she always wished she was Jewish. I told her she could be an honorary Jew.

Last night we spent Passover with new friends, Helen and Steve. Twenty of us sat around an impossibly long table reciting in turn, eating wonderful food, laughing, getting to know one another. It was wonderful. It’s not often you meet that many interesting, new people. We were so warmly welcomed into their family that I felt less alone, less bereft. My holiday had been “redeemed.” Still, Shatz and I agreed that we missed our seder with our songs and traditions, and next year, no matter what, we would do our own once again. Certain things shouldn’t change.

Print photographs, hand write letters, make mix tapes, check a map before a road trip, send off film for photographs, remember phone numbers, make a photo album, send love letters, hand write essays, keep a personal diary.

Reading her list, being of a certain age, I sighed even as I accepted myself for the dinosaur that I have become. I still do many of the things on that list. I may have a GPS, but I still check a map in case Madame GPS dies mid journey.

The two items on that list that particularly resonated for me were the love letters and the personal diary. Though people still keep diaries — now renamed blogs, tweets or Facebook — they are no longer personal. If Jane had eggs for breakfast, the entire world knows about it. People no longer lock their feelings up with little gold diary keys. It’s a shame.

As one who has kept a diary since elementary school, I fondly remember the entire process. The first step was finding a book that was quintessentially you: mine were inevitably pink with hearts on them and included the essential little gold key, since I would have died if anyone had read what I had written. Later on I abandoned store-bought journals and bought spiral notebooks (those still exist right?) that I would cover with decorative paper.

Next was the search for the perfect pen — for me, a fountain pen. Then finally, the writing. I would always write in them at the same time every day — after everyone else in the house was asleep. Secrecy was paramount.

A few years ago I decided to look through my diaries again. They were filled with the usual things that teenage girls obsess about: boys, girl friends, tests, clothing, parental strife. Occasionally I surprised my present-self with the insights and poetry that I had written in those pages. And there were gold nuggets as well, like descriptions of dates that Steve and I had enjoyed and all our firsts — the first time we met, the first date, the first kiss — all there and all precious because here we are 46 years later, still together.

I miss the whole handwriting experience. Does anybody still pass notes in class? I suppose texting is today’s note passing, but does texting encompass the whole, heart-throbbing experience? Can I pass the note without the teacher seeing? Without any of the note-passing intermediaries reading it? Will it get to my current flame? And then the ultimate agony of watching the recipient’s reaction as he opens it: Happy? Excited? Annoyed? One simple facial expression could lift or crush. Can a text do all that?

Most of all I miss letters: Pen pals, envelopes with fascinating stamps from traveling friends, thank-you notes, miss-you notes, and best of all, love letters. No amount of emails, texts or tweets can replace pages filled with a familiar handwriting that makes your heart jump.

I consider myself an expert on letters since Shatz and I corresponded for years. When he left for college, though he only traveled as far as Boston and we spoke on the phone for expensive hours, we still wrote letters. Later on, when I moved to Israel, we wrote weekly. When Mark was killed there were times when those handwritten letters formed the single, fragile thread of my sanity. They pushed away the too dark, dangerous thoughts that threatened to overwhelm me. They were hope. We wrote reams and torrents.

I knew that we had saved those letters. We had packed them away somewhere in the attic, but I had lost track of where. I thought of them often through the years and always meant to find them to make sure they were safe. Somehow I never did — until yesterday. I climbed up and found a ratty looking box in the corner of a shelf marked letters and diary. Diary? Singular? When I opened the box I found a small, pink diary, its lock rotted, but pages intact. And letters, four stacks of letters.

They were slightly damp and I couldn’t believe they were still in one piece and legible. I sat there on the kitchen floor holding the tangible proof of our constancy and hope and wanted to read them all at once. I noticed that Shatz had numbered his letters so that will make it easier when I begin reading them again, 38 years after I had read and re-read them the first time. And then I will pack them away in a sturdier box for our daughters to read one day. This will be their handwritten legacy.

It makes me wonder, what will our children leave behind? Thanks to our new technology where everything is stored on a cloud, what record will be left of their lives and loves? Will texts and tweets be all that is left, only to melt away as the air that they already are? I wish my children written words, and drawings and photographs, or like Hamlet, their too solid flesh will melt and leave nothing behind.

We always buy the usual culinary accompaniments for potato pancakes: applesauce, sour cream and sugar. This year we sat down to Chanukah dinner complete with everything, including Tabasco sauce. Mariel’s fiancé, Dan, loves hot food. For his birthday she buys him things like masochistic Chile peppers and insane hot sauces. It’s amazing that the man still has a tongue. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when he put Tabasco sauce on his latkes. After all, one man’s sour cream is another man’s hot sauce. The important thing was that he enjoyed his variation of this traditional holiday treat.

The next week, Mom, Mariel and I got together at one of our favorite Chinese restaurants and laughed about Dan’s latke topping. That started us reminiscing about food. I must have mentioned that Chinese wonton were the Asian form of an eastern European food called kreplach. Mariel had heard us speak of kreplach but had never really thought about what they were. So we explained that it was dough rolled out thin and cut into squares, then filled with cooked, seasoned ground beef. Then they were folded over, pinched shut and cooked in chicken soup. They’re traditionally eaten during the Jewish New Year, or if you’re Mom, you wrapped each one in waxed paper and layered them in a container, then put them in the freezer so that you could enjoy kreplach all year long. Mariel was fascinated.

She began asking us about other dishes that Mom had made, and more interestingly, how to make them. Now, you have to understand that of my two daughters, Mariel is the pastry chef and Lisa is the cook. So this interest in the nuts and bolts of cooking was a first for her. She figured that if she could make rugelach (a heavenly yeast dough pastry filled with jam, nuts, chocolate, cinnamon, or raisins) she could make kreplach. I warned my vegetarian that it had a meat filling, but she decided she wanted to try making them and if she had to deal with meat, she would.

I was completely flummoxed. Mariel hates looking at, smelling, even being near meat, so her enthusiasm for this dish threw me for a loop. Until I noticed the look on Mom’s face. It was then that I realized that Mariel would do anything to make her grandma smile. As we sat there in the restaurant talking about all the delicious dishes that Mom used to cook, I could feel the actual handing down of a cooking tradition. I’m ashamed to say that I have made very few of my mom’s recipes, even though I love them. At first Mom was always there to cook them, then when the kids arrived life got too hectic. And later on when the girls became vegetarians, I stopped cooking the few dishes that I had inherited from Mom, like chicken soup and meat loaf. The only survivor was noodle kugel, a casserole of broad noodles, cooked apples, raisins, and eggs that was baked in the oven.

Mariel asked me what other dishes grandma used to cook that I missed. I told her that I loved stuffed cabbage, but it seemed to me to be an incredibly labor intensive dish, especially the cabbage peeling part. But Mariel was on a roll, so between me and Mom we came up with a recipe that she could use. Once again I warned her about the meat filling, but once she decided to stuff dough with beef it was only a short step to cabbage leaves. “What else? What else?” she asked excitedly. Unfortunately, some of the other dishes that I used to love grossed her out so completely that we decided to stick with the kreplach and the stuffed cabbage. She made them that very week.

Three generations sat at that table reminiscing about food we loved. I am so lucky that Mom had a large repertoire of delicious dishes that I enjoyed, and I have such sharp memories of them all — their smells, textures, and most of all, their flavors. I can close my eyes and taste a heavy beef and potato stew called “chollent” that cooked on the stove all night, creamy chopped liver and chicken soup that could cure anything. What dishes would my kids remember? Chicken nuggets from Purdue? Pancakes and waffles from the freezer section? Chocolate chip cookies that I cut off of a ready-made cookie roll and stuck in the oven? The only meal that Mariel ever asks me to cook for her is vegetable lasagna, garlic bread and Caesar salad, and Lisa now cooks for me. I can only hope that they remember some of the dishes that I made that they used to eat: spaghetti and meatballs, brisket, and stir fry chicken. And of course, there’s always potato pancakes with sour cream and Tabasco sauce on the side.

I was nagging because Mariel was home and we were looking forward to Lisa’s visit as well. Having a contagious husband was not part of my plans. I wanted him to enjoy the daughter who was currently here and the one who was coming. Plus, I didn’t want to catch whatever disease he was incubating. I wanted this man on antibiotics now! So I ramped up the nagging and was then joined by Mariel. There was much eye rolling (mine), pleading (hers), and then out and out yelling (me again). Steve was coughing so much that he had to sleep downstairs sitting up so that he could breathe. I was worried because no matter what my husband said, I could hear that his cough was not a normal one. I was sure that he had the plague.

The final straw came when he took my mom in for her physical. She was fine; he was a wreck. Finally, after almost two weeks of threats, he caved in and went to the doctor.

The next day I kept checking my phone for updates. Late that afternoon Steve sent me an email telling me the results of his chest x-ray: pneumonia. I was relieved that he would finally get some drugs to make him better. Little did I know that the cure would prove worse than the disease.

The doctor gave him some sort of uber-super drug so I figured that Shatz would be running hurdles in a week. Unfortunately he experienced all the side effects (and I swear at least 20 more) that were listed on the package. For the next few days he was back on the couch, weak and listless, while we yelled at him again — this time to get him to eat or drink something. I felt awful screaming at him when he felt so lousy. It’s just that I get scared silly whenever he gets sick. I can’t imagine living without him, so if he’s suffering from anything more serious than a hangnail I get a little nuts.

Steve was finally feeling better when I woke up with a scratchy throat. This couldn’t be happening. I had recently been ill and had just gotten my strength back, so I was determined that there was no way that I was going to be sick again. I did it all: ate raw garlic, drank Echinacea tea and gallons of water, rested, sucked zinc, screamed at myself — all to no avail. After a couple of days I had the same cough that Steve had. It scared me right into the doctor’s office, where I was told that my lungs were clear; it was probably just a bad cold. So, equipped with codeine-laced cough medicine and a script for a chest x-ray in case I got worse, I practically skipped out of that office knowing that at least I didn’t have pneumonia.

But the gods were having a high old time laughing themselves silly. Mariel had already left for Houston when we began getting texts from her telling us that she was feeling sick. Two days later she called me wanting to yell at her father — you guessed it, she had pneumonia and was given the same kick-butt antibiotics that Steve had suffered through. I told her that she could not scream at her father — only I could do that. Besides, he was still recovering, plus he had already promised never to wait that long again to see a doctor.

The scoreboard at that point: Steve — pneumonia, Mariel — pneumonia, me — God only knows what, but it was doing a number on me. That Saturday night I had a dream that there was a bull’s eye on my chest, and a few seconds later I woke up coughing so badly that I couldn’t breathe. Sunday I was off to the emergency room for a chest x-ray. Again it was not pneumonia, but my sides were killing me since I had sprained a few muscles thanks to all that hacking.

Mom, after getting a clean bill of health at her physical, came down with a horrible cold. So there we all were — sick, coughing, wheezing, no energy and keeping our fingers crossed that Lisa and Matt would not be taking this gift home with them.

Today’s scorecard: After trying every combination of cough suppressant, antihistamine, and antibiotic, we’re on the mend. It was the vacation month from hell, but we managed to crawl back. Today I even managed to go to the gym and not die. But of course last night half of my class was coughing, wheezing and moaning. I’m thinking seriously of searching for a designer surgical mask to wear until this epidemic moves on. Or maybe I should just go to bed and pull the covers over my head till spring.

After dinner, Shatz took mom home and the girls were cleaning up. It was heaven to sit back and have a glass of wine with Mary, who I see only once a year. My feet were up, my eyes closing when I heard the words “clogged drain.”

“Wait till daddy comes back,” I yelled, knowing that Steve would fix it quickly. “Don’t worry mom,” Mariel replied. “I can unclog it with the plunger.”

Intimations of danger tickled my mind, but I was too tired to do anything about them. Lisa objected, saying that her public health persona rebelled at the thought of using a toilet plunger in the sink. But Mariel grabbed the plunger and attacked. Later Mary confessed that she had thought that all that energetic pumping might exacerbate the problem, but she thought it best to keep still.

They kept trying the disposal and plunging, disposal and plunging, while I sat there wishing that Steve would get back and end the uneasy feelings that were building in my stomach. As this was going on, Matt’s dad, Gerry, and Matt’s nieces Sydney and Izzy arrived. We explained the situation, and Matt took the girls downstairs to keep them distracted while Mary and I talked to Gerry amid the increasingly loud gurgling sounds emanating from the kitchen.

Steve and Mike finally came home and joined the fray in the kitchen. The two engineers put their heads together and decided that Drano was needed, so they ran out to find a store that was open on Thanksgiving. Returning victorious with two huge containers, they proceeded to pour it down our drains both upstairs and down.

Then there was waiting and more plunging until suddenly I heard Lisa scream and then shout, “Mom, whatever you do, do not come into this kitchen!” I had no intention of doing that — I could barely get off the couch let alone face a disaster in the next room.

Let me backtrack. We have a closet in our kitchen that we use as a pantry. The original owners had kept a washer/dryer combo in it. We got rid of it before we moved in, but the water pipe remained and it turns out that Steve had never capped it. So all these years later, thanks to a finicky disposal and a furiously plunging family, I was the proud owner of a closet waterfall — a river of everything we had put down the disposal in the past two days of cooking.

Before Lisa’s watery discovery, Izzy had come up to the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about. Bored, she began sock skating all the while singing, “My socks are wet, my socks are wet.”

Lisa looked down and saw that her socks were indeed quite wet because there was a river running out of the pantry. It was then that she opened the door and encountered the waterfall.

So picture this: The plunging had finally stopped, and the mopping up had begun. Lisa and Mariel grabbed some garbage bags and tossed everything that wasn’t sealed into the bags. Luckily our small liquor collection was on the top shelf so that escaped unscathed. The girls then scrubbed everything and Sydney dried it all off. They disinfected the shelves, the closet and the floor.

In the middle of all this madness, Steve came cheerfully into the living room asking, “Should we set the dessert out in here?” and proceeded to carry in an apple pie, cupcakes and cookies, while Snoopy went wild at the sight of food and I sat on the couch in a stupor thinking that I must be the only crazy one since everyone else was acting like this was all quite normal.

To top it all off, Mariel yelled out from the kitchen, “Look on the bright side mom. At least you can get a column out of it!” In our house, even plague is fodder for a column.

The guys finally admitted failure and called our plumber, Bob. They then spent the next hour troubleshooting over the phone with Bob. I’ve never seen two happier guys. They were engineers and they had a problem to solve and all was right with the world. They ran up and down the stairs checking water levels and water flow and drainage quotients and God knows what else while Mary and I sat on the sofa and drank the last of the wine.

So we learned what not to put down the disposal (and it is a very long list indeed!) and our closet pipe, like our chimney, now has a cap. I’m also left with a closet that sparkles. As Lisa says, sometimes the only way you get around to cleaning is when something explodes. My refrigerator could use a good scouring. Perhaps if I’m lucky a milk carton will self destruct.

There are colds that come on so gradually that you barely notice them. There are colds that smack you silly so quickly that all you can do is try to cope with all the stuff that simultaneously emerges from the orifices in your head. There are colds that are gone in a few days and those that linger on for weeks. The ones where a hacking cough holds you hostage and others that steal your voice. A veritable rainbow of delights.

Because of these differences, no one remedy ever works consistently. Sometimes one thing succeeds and other times it makes no difference at all. It’s very disheartening. When I was growing up, my mom always plied me with tablespoons of honey and lemon and rivers of tea. I always hated the taste of pure honey so I dreaded those tablespoons. It was all I could do not to gag. She also made me gargle with warm saltwater, another amazingly nauseating remedy. But she made me chicken soup, which tasted wonderful, and rubbed Vicks Vapo rub on my chest so that I smelled like a eucalyptus plant. When I was older my dad would mix rum in hot milk for me and that was lovely. I may not have been cured, but I certainly was happy!

I had a yoga teacher who swore by her netti pot. It’s a small teapot-shaped container with a long narrow spout. You fill it with warm salt water then pour the solution up your nose to lubricate your sinuses. You can achieve similar results by swallowing water as someone tells you a funny story. We used to do this quite often during school lunch hours, when kids drank their milk. We’d wait for them to take a sip then say something hilarious and watch the kid lubricate his sinuses by blowing the milk out of his nostrils, whereupon we would all yell, “Through the nose!”

Of course, the best way to take care of a cold is to rest, but that’s never possible. You have to work, or take care of kids who probably have caught it from you so that you’re all one big sick, cranky family. When Lisa was a toddler we both caught bad colds. We were stuck in the house alone since none of our friends wanted to come near us and risk contagion. I tried to get her to play the game “Let’s-take-a-nap,” but she wasn’t having any of it.

The worst part was that even though my upstairs neighbor was also sick, she got to rest in solitary comfort, sipping tea and watching the soaps. She didn’t have to blow her nose while playing endless games of Chutes and Ladders. Plus her friends kept sending her flowers, which she never accepted because she was sleeping so the delivery guys would leave them with me. Every few hours I would trek upstairs to hand her yet another bouquet while she stood there dressed in gorgeous lingerie complaining that there was nothing good on TV. I had some very unkind thoughts about what I wanted to do with her flowers.

Nowadays when I’m blessed with a cold I follow my routine of swallowing decongestants, or as I call them, my little red wonder pills. At night I gulp down a cough suppressant and spray more chemicals up my nose to help me breathe. I’m a veritable cornucopia of cold remedies. I’ve also sucked on zinc lozenges, which makes my tongue feel like a troop of squirrels have done a conga on it, and drank gallons of Echinacea tea in an attempt to flush the germs out.

Last year my daughter Lisa swore by a natural method for getting rid of colds … raw garlic. You chop up two cloves, let it sit for 20 minutes, then mix it with a little liquid and swallow. I tried it a few months ago and it actually worked. I was ecstatic. So I tried it again another time but it didn’t work. This week when both Mariel and I were starting colds she talked me into trying it again.

So we did garlic shots, followed by a tomato juice chaser for me and ginger ale for her. I warned her that for the rest of the day her mouth would reek of garlic. But she also discovered that it was not a good idea to swallow garlic with a carbonated beverage — for the rest of the day she burped up raw garlic, an experience she never wants to repeat.

Yesterday, despite the garlic and Echinacea, I developed one of the worst colds that I’ve had in years. I’m back to my red pills and cough syrup. And if all else fails, rum and milk will go down a treat.

“Ms. Joan! Do I look okay?” they would ask. I would look over to see that they were wearing jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers and just sigh. I would ask them why they hadn’t come to me a couple of days before so that I could have given them some pointers. Then I’d tell them to go home and change into a shirt with a collar, nice slacks, and shoes. But they would always insist that they were fine and then inevitably come back the next day angry because they didn’t get the job. I used to conduct interview classes to give them advice, but my students believed that if the employer couldn’t accept them the way that they were, they didn’t want to work there anyway.

Most of us have no problem dressing for an employer’s approval. The dressing part is almost the easiest. You find a decent suit, comb your hair, slap a smile on your face and you’re done. It’s the questions that are the unknown descent into hell.

After having been on countless quirky or soul-crushing interviews, when I’m on the other side of the desk looking for employees, I become the warm, fuzzy questioner that smothers you in sugary sweetness. It’s absolutely nauseating. But I honestly feel that the more relaxed an interviewee is, the truer picture you get of their personality. And in the adult teaching profession, personality counts for a lot. If you have a class of 18 year olds who have dropped out of high school after having challenged everyone who has ever tried to teach them, you need someone strong, with a boatload of patience and a good sense of humor. An industrial whistle helps too.

The only time that I was completely relaxed in an interview was when I applied for a job that I didn’t really want. So of course I got it. I tried to explain that to Lisa a few weeks ago. Interviewers can smell desperation. They’d rather hire someone who plays hard to get. It sounds crazy, but it’s true.

Since Lisa and Matt moved to California, Lisa has been job searching. She has two nice suits, a good looking resume, and a great personality. (Okay, I know I’m her mom, but it’s true) She also has the usual case of job-hunting nerves. Last week she got called in for an interview that would last from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and encompass everyone at the company, including the custodial staff. So she decided to enlist Matt’s help in the interviewing process. She asked his help despite knowing how absolutely, adorably nuts her husband is. It’s the main reason why he fits in so well with our family. The “interview” began with just the two of them but quickly mushroomed as we all got electronically involved.

Lisa: Ask me about a time when I faced a challenge while conducting research.
Matt: You can’t tell me what to ask you! I’m the interviewer!
Lisa: Okay.
Matt: Errrmm, ummm … What would you do if you were stuck in a castle surrounded by a moat full of sharks?
Lisa: Umm … Can I catapult myself off?
Matt: No, that would kill you.
Lisa: Umm … Do I have a hot air balloon?
Matt: Yes, but it catches on fire. Also, the sharks can walk and talk and have keys to the castle. They eat you and you die. You’re going to have to find another job.

That’s how it began. Lisa emailed that to me, Steve, and Mariel, so of course we all began to stir the pot.

Joni: Matt definitely has a future as an interviewer. What imagination! What daring! What utter craziness! Can I work for you Matt?

Steve: From where I stand the interview would be a killer.

Joni: Excuse me, but it’s obvious that Lisa should have gotten into her plane or helicopter or had plenty of food and beer to feed the sharks. This sounds like a typical interview for a job at Google!

Mariel: I sent this link to Matt this morning: http://xkcd.com/585 (go to this site for a great shark lesson and all around amazing comic).

Matt: The sharks have sabotaged all the planes and helicopters.

Steve: Then there’s only one correct answer. The sharks play Bezzerwizzer* and will allow Lisa to cross the moat if she lets them win.

Matt: Actually, the correct answer is to use a flame thrower, which Mariel guessed in a separate thread.

Mariel: Matt gave me a clue when he told me you couldn’t beat the sharks with science, but with FIRE.

Lisa: I want to print out this email chain and frame it.

I want to print out my family and frame us! We are all nuts … but we interview well!

*Bezzerwizzer is a fantastic strategic trivia game that our family is addicted to!

It was a beautiful fall day, so we decided to go for a ride. I had read that a new exhibit had opened at the deCordova museum in Lincoln. Though Steve is not a great museum aficionado, he does appreciate interesting exhibits and outdoor art, and the deCordova had both.

So off we went, excited to be on the road again. I pretended that we were heading somewhere out west or down south or up north, to spend the week meandering. But though it was just a day trip, the ride was still lovely. The museum itself was tucked into a quiet neighborhood, hiding behind the twists of a country road.

As we entered the driveway I could see enormous sculptures surrounded by woods and could hear the soft sounds of chimes and children laughing. We parked and pored over the map trying to decide where to start.

We began outside since we don’t often get the chance to wander in sculpture gardens. Some were huge and overwhelming, others small and intimate, yet others downright weird. As we passed each one I would read its plaque to see if the name of the piece would give me a hint as to the creator’s intentions. Most of the time the title seemed to have nothing to do with the piece at all. Shatz told me that he was tempted to come to the museum at night and switch all the signs to see if anyone would notice.

Surrounding the sculptures were meandering trails through gardens and woods, and kids and dogs running through it all. It was wonderful. After a while we went to get some lunch before venturing into the indoor museum space.

After we ate I visited the restroom — that was my first mistake. I opened the door to a voice that seemed to be speaking to me. Confused, I looked around to see if someone was talking on a cell phone, but no, the voice was definitely talking to me. Suddenly I realized that it was a recording, but that didn’t make it any less strange. And let me tell you, being in a stall while hearing a voice say, “You can do it. You’re a magnet for success. Your existence matters. You’re fascinating and interesting. You’re a winner. People like you,” is not exactly conducive to the business at hand. I ran out of there.

It wasn’t until we entered the exhibit “How Deep is Your,” created by the artist Julianne Swartz, that we figured out what was going on.

“These whispered reassurances, emitting from invisible speakers, are audible from the comfort of a black couch situated in a lobby at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. You can hear them, disconcertingly, in the bathrooms, too. They’re part of a work called ‘Affirmation,’” Sebastian Smee pointed out in his Boston Globe article, “Works as fragile as how we see ourselves.”

We walked into the main exhibit space and found ourselves surrounded by various configurations of tubing, wire, feathers, wooden blocks and prisms. Things hung from the ceiling and sat on the ground. They climbed up walls and went around corners. There was a blue line that seemed to travel along one room and into another. Pieces of wire dangled aimlessly; bits of string hung or were pasted on wires; little lights blinked on and off. There was a tube that bent into the wall and sat there. We were a bit confused.

Later I read Smee’s critique of the show and found out that most of Swartz’s work is about “forms in space and how we perceive them. It’s about materials and textures. It’s about gravity, air, light, shadow.”

Oh. Shatz and I stood there looking at a pile of the blocks scattered on the floor and began to laugh … uncontrollably. We both knew what the other was thinking,

“They call this art? They paid how much for all of this?”

I tried to hold in my laughter, but we all know how that works — the more you hold it in, the more it sneaks out. Suddenly I noticed one of the young security guards looking at us with a smile on her face. Our eyes met and then I quickly walked away. She was either laughing with us or at us art-ignoramuses who couldn’t tell a Picasso from a Monet, but I’d like to think that she was on our side.

The giggling continued to burst out of me, making me feel like an ignorant yahoo, until I reached a big white funnel. It was the exhibit’s main advertising image, so I already knew that I was supposed to stick my head into it. And so I did. I could hear the Bee Gees singing “How Deep is Your Love,” followed by John Lennon singing “All You Need is Love.”

I pulled my head quickly out of that funnel and ran out of the gallery with my laughter following me. Smee may have written that Swartz’s work is “ultimately about love,” but for us it was about disbelief and a bit of lunacy. What can I say? Having discovered that we’re basically artistic louts, we’ll probably end up buying one of those dogs-playing-poker pictures to hang over the fireplace, and we’ll make sure to include an Elvis on painted velvet as well. After all, as brand new Philistines we have reputations to establish.

It’s one thing if you’ve initiated change, but when it’s been thrust upon you it’s not usually something that you wished for. From something as small as having your supermarket rearranged so that you now spend all your time aimlessly wandering the aisles and muttering, or having a favorite store close (I’m still in mourning for Jordan Marsh and Filene’s), to the more serious loss of a job or a loved one. I understand that change is growth, but it’s also painful.

The biggest change for me came about in June when I learned that the Department of Education (DESE) had not refunded my adult education school, the Blackstone, for the coming year. This meant that I had to close it down, lay off my staff and find spaces, somehow, somewhere, for my students. After hearing the news I walked around in a fog of denial. Surely, this had to be a mistake — they couldn’t just shut down a school that was the last opportunity for so many adults, the last place for them to get another chance at success.

But of course they could. Every five years all the adult literacy programs in Massachusetts have to reapply for the money that enables their existence, and money is getting tighter by the minute. I’m not quite sure where DESE wants my students to go when we close our doors. But I suppose it’s not my job anymore to worry about Randy and Matias and Laura and Deanna and the rest of the adults that I have come to know and care so much about. I’ll have to adapt to the change just as they will.

They left us one site at the Perkins Community Center in Dorchester. My long suffering boss, Mike, installed me there as the site counselor, coupled with teaching and administration duties. What worries me is that this school holds classes in the evening from 6-9 p.m. and my energy levels aren’t what they used to be. I’m keeping my finger crossed that at 7 each evening I won’t fall asleep on my desk.

Fortunately, Lisa and Matt’s summer wedding proved a lovely distraction, as did having a house filled with daughters, their friends and loved ones. So for once change was wonderful. But the knowledge that Matt and Lisa would soon be moving to San Francisco was hidden in every corner of my mind waiting to slither out — and it did last weekend when they moved some of their furniture and various other boxes filled with their lives into our attic. They were really leaving.

Shatz and I find it both wonderful and funny that they will be moving to their new home slowly over the next few weeks — driving cross country, discovering new places. Funny because we did the same thing the year before we were married 37 years ago. In fact, Lisa and Matt will be seeing some of the same places that we passed through all those years ago. It was about that time that Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” was popular, and now the song haunts me:

And the seasons they go ‘round and ‘round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Last week Shatz and I took the day off to explore the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard. It was a beautiful day, just the two of us on the road again, heading toward lovely summer vistas. We wandered in and out of the galleries dedicated to the various groups that had lived in the area: Native Americans, the Shakers, and Louisa May Alcott and her family of Transcendentalists who had set up an agrarian commune on the spot. Afterwards we had lunch outside in the museum restaurant, gazing at the expanse of hills and mountains as we ate.

We talked about the kids’ upcoming trip and how similar their experience is to ours. Suddenly Shatz asked me, “Could you do that? Just decide that you want to move somewhere else for an adventure?” Then he stopped short with a funny look on his face and said, “Oh I guess you did,” remembering my travels to Israel and then back to the States. But Lisa and Matt’s decision seems different, healthier. I was running away when I left for Israel and later when I returned to the States. In the beginning I desperately wanted independence, and later I needed to escape the grief of being a widow. Lisa and Matt are heading off for the sheer joy and adventure of it.

Then it was my turn to question my 36-year partner even though I already knew his answer. “Do you have any regrets at all about your life?”

“No, never,” he answered. “Regrets only hold you back. I always look to the future.”

And that’s why I love him so very much. He keeps me from keeling over with regret, keeps me from battling change fruitlessly, keeps me filled with hope that it’s not so terrible out there after all. Especially with a partner like him to hold my heart.

There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through.