One Year to Bar Mitzvah

The Future of Publishing

2012-01-17T19:40:00.001-08:00

From where I sit, the future of publishing is both up in the air and moving aggressively forward. Right now I’ve got a completed manuscript (memoir) and am looking to have it published. Do I go traditional or do I self-publish? The upside: many options. The caveat: with so many options, each slice of the pie gets smaller. The one-shot blockbuster may be as quaintly nostalgic as the 51.1 share the “Roots” finale earned in 1977.

Still, with so many opportunities to simply publish – as opposed to publishing and making a living – and so many different avenues toward expression out there, the chances that someone will see a writers’ work are better than ever. Publishing, video production, music – they’re in the same boat. It’s easy to get on Google but difficult to make it your living.

Back to you Hyperink.

two days after Bar Mitzvah: the rabbi has left the building

2010-08-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

There are times when, after spending the day doing essentially nothing -- maybe a Thursday where I wrote one story and spent the other seven hours reading people's Facebook pages -- I lie in bed at night scolding myself for ignoring the adage that tells you to "live each day as if it were your last." Which, of course, just extends my already-underlived day, as it inevitably leads to wondering how much more time I have before having the heart attack my genes chose for me 45 years ago -- which leads to tossing and turning in bed, then suddenly sweating, throwing off the covers and waking up a bitter, confused Sandra Bullock.

It's impossible to live each day as if it were your last, although, considering how unpredictable our lifespans are, that's exactly what most of us end up doing. What we ultimately get is a handful of truly special days during our lifetimes. We learn to ride a bike, graduate from places and things, maybe get married, spend 46 minutes in a birthing suite as our Jawa comes bursting into the world. It's up to us to make the best of the truly special days -- many of which don't exactly announce themselves when they arrive. Some of the time, we don't even realize until it's too late which days are the ones that are special. Sometimes, special days involve nothing more than barely missing getting hit by a drunk driver while driving around aimlessly with your best friend on an otherwise featureless afternoon in 1988.

Saturday was not unexpected. It was the opposite. It carried with it a year's worth of expectations and pressures. We knew exactly when it would occur, and parts -- but not all -- of what would happen.

For sixteen months, we built to this day; and other than seeing him learn his Torah part, we have no way of knowing how the Jawa prepared. One clue: on Friday, during rehearsals, while my quavering version of the blessing before the reading of the Torah filled the main sanctuary, I caught a glimpse of the boy-to-become-a-man moonwalking across the Bimah. It'd be a lie to say this was my first indication that our Jawa was ready to seize one of his life's most special days; even so, his performance Saturday exceeded anything we could have imagined. It's funny: I'd suspected all along that the time I spent this year yelling at him to practice his chanting was a waste of time. I just got the reasons wrong.

The flipside of having a willful, "spirited" Jawa who is incapable of being a silent, easy-to-overlook non-factor is that he is no more likely to shy away from the spotlight than he is to back down from an argument. A star is born.

There was no stumbling, no stuttering, no rushing through his speech. At one point, as I stood behind him on the Bimah, sweating, I saw him lose his place in the Torah, then refind it with the pointer. He was actually reading the thing. No memorizing here.

And then, suddenly, it was over. 185 people (but not the lady with the box, who attended services in the Martin-Meyer sancturary, so said to me the as-usual neatly-dressed Rabbi Jonathan Jaffe (known as J.J. to some Emanu-El insiders), a short time after informing me that he had found the blog you are now reading and shared it with basically the entire Temple Enamu-El staff, which added an element -- for me -- of the Bar Mitzvah as that dream where you look down and suddenly find that you're wearing no pants.

But it's not about me, and never was. It was all about the Jawa, and he hit all the right notes. No less than Chaim Heller, Head of School, took me aside after the service to rave about my pinstripe-suited son.

When you arrive at a special day, all of the logical conclusions you make during the other 364 days go away. For a year, I'd been going to Bar Mitzvahs and listening to parents gush over their children, thinking, "Geez, I just had a knock--down, drag-out with the Jawa about leaving his iPod on his bedroom floor. When he's up there, am I going to be able to not think about that while delivering a gushing speech?"

As my next-door neighbor said in 1976: duh.

No matter how well he did -- and he did well, make no mistake -- the minute that kid was called up there and threw that (substitue, my parents left the real one at the hotel) Tallit over his shoulders, I suddenly couldn't remember that last time my child had argued with me.

Instead, I sat awestruck, more impressed by my child than I had been since the summer of 2002, when his four-year-old exceptionalness got him into every school we applied to, though he was several months younger than the competition.

The entire weekend, which included a total of four events, two motorized cable cars and three hours removed from the end of my life as I fretted about the weather, included only two minor glitches. The video montage ended up at the bottom of a shopping bag in room 952 of the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero, not at the Golden Gate Yacht Club and the short intros the Jawa was supposed to deliver during the candle-lighting ceremony also disappeared. They remain unfound.

Which mattered not at all, as the Jawa, who'd been told by me five minutes before candle-lighting showtime, "We lost the speeches. Here's the order; you can just say their names or try to do more," decided instead to sharpen his Toastmasters skills, cutting a striking, completely calm figure as he delivered room-enrapturing remarks for about 20 minutes. At the next opportunity, I grabbed the mic and told the room, "Fear of public speaking ends with me!"

By the time Saturday's service ended, four months' worth of fog had lifted, leaving the sunny skies I felt necessary to complete our presentation of San Francisco as fantasy wonderland, not a place where two-liter Coke bottles are illegal. Getting off the motorized cable car, several guests were overwhelmed by the view. One by one, they stopped, turned toward the Golden Gate Bridge, and took pictures. That three hours the fog took from the end of my life? Non-returnable, unfortunately.

And of course, before we knew it, we were back on the buses. Pictures exist of the Jawa and his two preschool friends, who returned to him nine years later tall, blonde, exotic and studly enough to make the Brandeis Hillel Day School girls swoon, doing the "YMCA" dance on glowing speakerboxes.

Dark horse guests danced and spoke in loud, enthusiastic voices. My parents' long-lost and newly-found cousin/Sun City West neighbor Eric responded to the call for family members and joined us in the middle circle of the Hora. Four grown men -- me included -- put the Jawa on a chair and jumped up and down until he almost flew out, which wouldn't have been good.

Yesterday morning, a 13-year-old man awoke in his own Hyatt Regency room, surrounded by his best friends and about 10,000 empty candy wrappers. "I have a candy hangover," he moaned as I peeled him out of his bed for the brunch.

"Too bad. You've got to get down to that brunch." As if he was the only hungover person there.

The Jawa grabbed his special day and held onto it for more than the full 24 hours. He comes out the other side changed but of course the same. By Sunday night -- after an hour of opening quirky, thoughtful gifts and envelopes whose contents left us staggered and with a clear view of how great and admirable the population of the world we've surrounded ourselves with truly is -- he was already giving it back to us because we wouldn't let him make popcorn at 9:45.

Because no matter how long you plan, how good of a job you do, how important a rite of passage a day is, the next day the sun goes up, you take a shower and get back to everyday living. Today, we woke up to alarms and were out of the house by nine. He's a surf camp right now, riding out the last week of summer atop Pacifica's two-to three-foot swells. Sandra Bullock, who should be taking the lion's share of credit for the flawnessless of last weekend but never will, is back at work, talking to other Genentech employees in a scientific code language I'll never crack. I'm looking at my usual weekly workload.

Which won't include this blog. In about five minutes, I'll post this and go into radio silence as I try to convert a year's worth of off-the-cuff musings into something someone might buy if they saw it at a bookstore. And yes, Temple Emanu-El officials, I will change the names of everyone (and every institution) involved. And if anyone knows anything about getting and agent, let me know.

But for now, we will charge ahead. Our meeting with Neil Biskar, Brandeis Hillel Day School guru of high school placement, is scheduled for Friday. So as the Jawa coolly said Saturday morning, when Rabbi Jonathan Jaffe suddenly darted from the Bimah, mid-Bar Mitzvah, leaving Cantor Roslyn Barak and him alone on the Bimah, "The rabbi has left the building."

24 hours to Bar Mitzvah: final prep

2010-08-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

One more day.

Who am I kidding? It's already here. You wouldn't know it, right now, if you were using the present scene in our house as a guide. If you had installed a spycam in our house, right now it would show me sitting at the kitchen table and the Jawa sprawled out on the living room floor, an empty plate the once held pancakes sitting on a tray in front of him. He's watching Cartoon Network, looking like he hasn't a care in the world. That is one cool customer.

We all know what's going on in Sandra Bullock's head. If you're reading this, you know what's going on in my head. But what about the Jawa, the boy king who seems to swing wildly between panic and indifference. First thing this morning, he stumbled out of bed this morning and said, simply, "Tomorrow."

The boy-who-will-be-a-man just finished watching cartoons and is in his room, building a fortress out of the Legos he keeps expecting to find boring and childish any day now. In two hours, I will teach him how to shave, lest he look at his Bar Mitzvah like a smallish extra from a movie celebrating the styles and mores of the 1970s.

Somewhere within the city limits, though, Sandra Bullock is charging around in a car holding both Bar Mitzvah supplies and our dog, Shack. Poor Shack didn't rate an invite to the Bar Mitzvah, so he's on his way to Pet Camp for the weekend. Don't waste too many tears on him. He loves Pet Camp and practically loses his mind every time he realizes he's going there. Besides, last time he was at Pet Camp, Sandra Bullock ponied up the extra $5 to buy him his own pancake breakfast. Pet Camp is a business lucrative enough for its owners to send four children to Brandeis Hillel Day School.

After she drops off Shack, she'll go to see The Hammer, who has graciously volunteered to bring several items somewhere for us. Honestly, I was briefed on the whole deal multiple times yesterday but right now I can't find the particulars.

Most of our ceremony and party-specific items are out there already, at the Golden Gate Yacht Club, at the hotel, en route to their staging area in back seat of The Hammer's whisper silent Toyota Camry Hybrid. Only oddballs remain here at home, drips and drabs of what was once a Bar Mitzvah powerhouse. These are the things easily forgotten, small in size but not importance. On the island in the kitchen -- four rolls of quarters (for the trolley ride from Tarantino's to the Hyatt), several innocent-looking envelopes that actually contain thousands of dollars, two DVDs that may look bland and unimportant but if we forget them will create a ten-minute gap where our video slideshow went, and a mysterious-looking battery charger that I can only assume has something to do with a camera or laptop.

This morning, Sandra Bullock burst into the bedroom and announced, "Bad news is coming from all over!" For a second, I flashed on the morning of September 11, 2001, when she burst into the room and said basically the same thing. So this time I was ready for anything and relieved when the bad news turned out to be that one of our guests was stuck in New York and another got bumped to a later flight. Both will be here in time for tomorrow night's party.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here proofreading next week's Examiner real estate section, which feels oddly surreal, given the fever pitch of my immediate world. A few miles from here, the Examiner production team has no idea how this week is different from all the others. Here's a hint: it isn't because on this week we recline while eating.

Two days from now, our household now comprised of one woman and two men (and a very dense, short dog), I will close the electronic book on this particular project that I hate calling a "blog." You won't get enigmatic updates on your Facebook page and you'll suddenly find yourself with an extra fifteen minutes or so each day. What you do with that extra time is up to you. What'll be weird on my end is what I'm going to do with that extra time.

Here's how it will go: what I'm going to do with what for me is actually about 90 minutes each day is read this entire thing all over again, starting 165 posts ago, cringing and destroying the worst ones and picking out the best ones. Then I'm going to organize them, rewrite them and bolster them with the list of related topics and events that I've secretly been keeping for the past year. I couldn't give you everything up front; I had to keep a little bit for myself. And frankly there were some things that I just wasn't ready to either a) defend or b) talk about 24 hours after they happened. Besides, if I gave you everything you'd have no reason to buy the book that will hopefully appear on the shelves at your nearest Barnes & Noble next year. Or you can order it on Amazon.

It'll be a miracle if I get the chance to write in here tomorrow, which seems somewhat anticlimatictic. What good is counting down One Year to Bar Mitzvah when you don't finish it with Zero Days to Bar Mitzvah?

Check back on Sunday. When all the fanfare dies down, I'll jump back in here one last time. Come Monday, the Man-Jawa will be back at surf camp for a week before starting eighth grade. I'll be hammering out real estate stories on my laptop and trying -- probably in vain -- to drop the 10 or so pounds of inevitable Bar Mitzvah weight that shows up right about the time you also stop paying attention to how much money you're spending.

Sandra Bullock, of course, will already be in the midst of another project by then. You can bet cash money on that one.

My head is full of songs from "Fiddler on the Roof." 23 hours and counting.

48 hours to Bar Mitzvah: reality check

2010-08-19T10:54:00.000-07:00

What I just learned is that double-digit trips up and down our front steps are a sweaty business, regardless of how thick the cloud cover is. It only took five trips to load the car, but that was enough to remind me once again how much easier our lives would be if we lived in a Mediterranean-inspired tract home in Walnut Creek.

The games have begun.

It's barely 11, but already Sandra Bullock and I have spent 25 minutes crawling up Third Street, covering the one mile between King and Market Streets at an average speed of 2.4 miles per hour in an efffort to reach the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero in time for our nine a.m. gift bag dropoff. We'd called our contact (whose vowel-heavy first name caused not a small bit of consternation in the car until she answered the phone by clearly stating her name, probably having spent her entire career correcting all manner of name butchering)from in front of the ballpark and told her we were five minutes away.

Almost a half-hour later, we reached the construction site. San Francisco, demonstrating once again its complete lack of practical leadership, had chosen morning rush hour to shut down one lane of Third Street. I can see their logic; if they don't shut down that block of Third, all of those construction guys are going to have to find another place to lounge around and drink coffee. Welcome to the world's favorite travel destination.

A little over two weeks ago, I wrote of the Jawa's August 3, 1997 arrival. Today, and not a moment sooner, I realized that I've been repeating myself. The minute our glass elevator emerged into the ten-story Hyatt Regency atrium, I was knocked senseless by a wave of realization: our Bar Mitzvah is in 48 hours.

I think the idea was that we stay busy enough not to think about stuff like that, but there it was. After almost two years of abstract reasoning, it's as real as the Jawa's tantrum about appropriate brunch attire.

But there's not time for that. Right now we're in a little air pocket between dropping gift bags and centerpieces off at the Hyatt and running a two-car convoy to the Golden Gate Yacht Club. Our car is already full of everything except the centerpieces. That was me running up and down the stairs and shoving -- no, sorry, carefully placing -- bags full of Chinese take-out boxes (with attractive tissue paper inside), 90 pounds of candy, two boxes of candles and a few other miscellaneous items, including two bags of paper lanterns, into the vehicle; then returning to my keyboard, only to feel a wave of after-the-fact sweat hit me as I sat down.

Stop for a moment, if you will, and join me in marveling at the engine that drives my wife. In the past five minutes, while we wait for a text telling us that our neighbor Stephanie is home and will turn her minivan over to us (for the centerpieces), she has done the following:

1) vacuumed the living room.
2) wiped down the stainless steel fronts of the dishwasher and kitchen island.
3) called the party rental place to set up payment for the extra tables and dishes we found out yesterday we needed to rent.
4) called to see if our Godzilla poster's framing was complete. It wasn't, so she slammed the phone down and berated the framing shop for about 25 seconds -- while simultaneously beginning another project.

Right now she's vacuuming the kitchen floor. It is covered with Mexican terra cotta tiles, which apparently benefit from vacuuming.

We just received our text. "Car is ready," said S. Bullock, deftly flipping the vacuum off, stowing it in a corner and disappearing out the front door. A few seconds later, I heard a faint, "Watch Shack!" from somewhere outside.

If I had the time, I would spend today laying back and watching the master in action, but I don't. I'm needed, to drive a car and provide an extra pair of offloading hands, at least. Mostly, I'm just hanging on, trying to keep up. I'd much rather be in my room, singing along to the Black Eyed Peas, which is what the Jawa is doing at present.

I'm lying about that part. I wouldn't be singing along to the Black-Eyed Peas. But God bless my son. Yesterday we went over his tendency to default to rage where others might withdraw into depression. This glee -- running around his room singing, as if he has not a care in the world -- isn't fooling anyone. He's wound up pretty tight, but I appreciate how even his pretend cool is rooted in a total celebration of all things big and grand.

I just got the call. "Comeoneletsgoloadthecarkeepshackuphereletsgoareyoureadyyet?" so I'm going to have to cut this short. Less than 48 hours until our boy climbs up onto the bimah and makes his claim to manhood. Almost two hours since I looked up into the heights of the imposing Hyatt Regency atrium lobby and thought, "Holy cow, it's really going to happen!" No more time for musing or stories.

As Dr. Marcie nee Mark Bowers might say, "We're way past that now!"

72 hours to Bar Mitzvah: jawa power play

2010-08-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

I can't help thinking, less than 72 hours to Bar Mitzvah, of how much easier my child's life would be if he didn't have to live with idiots like Sandra Bullock and me. I know we're idiots because we constantly try his patience. We know nothing about computers, for example. We don't know how to load photos onto our desktops and we depend on him to do things as simple as switching the TV back to cable after playing a DVD.

Some children suffer their parents foibles in silence. Some retreat into privacy, hoping that by limiting their exposure to the two morons who pay the rent, they can get through adolescence with a shred of good feeling intact. My child prefers to meet this sudden crisis head-on.

Our Jawa is no shrinking violet. His approach to handling life's curveballs is to launch a preemptive strike right back at them. Some kids go fetal, their fallback emotion being sadness. My son's go-to is anger. Add to that some impressively developing skills in the ancient art of sarcasm and you're looking at a long teenage road ahead.

My guess is that this morning our Jawa awoke suddenly aware of the full weight of the coming weekend. All of our efforts of the past year are about to either pay off or flame out spectacularly. And despite what he sees at home -- a mother busily tying bows, wrapping banana bread, negotiating with Bob from the Golden Gate Yacht Club to see if we can drop a bunch of stuff off on Thursday instead of Friday, a father disappearing for hours and returning with tales of multiple parallel parks and often tense back-and-forths with service industry employees -- the Jawa must know that, in the end, it all comes down to him; he shows up and nails it or slinks off in horror in front of 185 people.

So, feeling uncomfortable and pressured, he unsurprisingly established early on, less than three minutes after stumbling out of his room this morning wearing, that today we should think of him as a combination of De Niro in "Raging Bull," Popeye's nemesis Bluto, Steve Jobs on a bad day and Wile E. Coyote. In the hours that have passed since this morning, he has repeatedly demonstrated his commitment to upholding this promise.

The argument I enjoyed most concerned the Sunday brunch. I think I mentioned a week or so ago that, despite the wide range of personalities, cultural totems and socioeconomic status of our 185 guests, almost all have asked us the same question: what are we supposed to wear? The service itself is slamdunk (pretend like you're at a wedding), but our efforts at creating clear guidelines for Saturday night have come up just short of igniting a riot as our flustered guests try to pierce the ambiguity of the term "dressy casual."

The Jawa should be beyond all this. There was the Bataan-like shopping trip that ended with triumph in the Bloomingdale's basement. That took care of Friday, Saturday and Saturday night. We assumed he would carry this over to Sunday morning's brunch (to be attended by everyone staying at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero), thinking that 48 hours clad in classy duds would convince the kid to don something workable Sunday morning. We were wrong.

"I want to wear whatever I want to the brunch," he announced late this morning.

"That's fine," S. Bullock responded. "Just like, you know, some jeans and a collared shirt."

"NO. NOT A COLLARED SHIRT. I WILL WEAR A T-SHIRT."

"Not a t-shirt. This is a brunch with all of your out-of-town guests."

"SO? I WANT TO LOOK LIKE I JUST GOT UP, LIKE I ALWAYS DO AT BREAKFAST."

This doesn't seem feasible, I thought. 60 people did not come all the way to San Francisco to watch you eat pancakes while wearing too-small boxer shorts and nothing else.

"At least wear a nice t-shirt. Your nicest Godzilla t-shirt."

There were two or three minutes of back-and-forth in there that I left out. I was hiding in the bedroom, pretending I was getting ready to take a shower, knowing that any contribution I made to this specific argument would only escalate things. Without spelling it out, I can tell you that he was not budging, and that by arguing the point, it only confirmed what he'd known all along: that his mother was a fool.

It seemed pretty stupid to me -- him making such a big deal out of wearing a collared shirt when he'll have been wearing one non-stop since Friday by then -- until I remembered how deep a line in the sand I'd drawn over his wanting to buy a fourth Wii controller (to replace the one mysteriously lost in our house) so that everyone attending his candy-fueled post-Bar Mitzvah hotel room party could play at once.

I figure that, faced with the sudden realization that he'd lost all control over his Bar Mitzvah, the Jawa grabbed onto the nearest thing he could get his hands on. Out of the hundreds of items whizzing by, "what to wear at the Sunday brunch" was the one he grasped. He's had plenty of say in Bar Mitzvah planning and execution -- I mean, as much as a 13-year-old stuck in the midst of a grownup-sized party budget can expect -- but I can see why he'd want to make something, anything, his own; especially something that shouldn't mean much to his parents, if they thought about it.

For all we know, for the past nine years he's been carrying around a very specific image of how his Bar Mitzvah, like how once, for a week in second grade, I locked onto the idea that I was going to grow up and be a teacher, but my classroom wouldn't have desks. Instead, it would have couches and chairs, so everyone could lounge around in class.

We've seen bits and pieces of his Bar Mitzvah ideal. The rest of it he's probably kept to himself, having seen how far his idea to build a roller coaster in the backyard went once it got to me.

This was a panicked Jawa seizing power, using his default emotion -- anger -- to get his point across. Eighteen years ago, I used a barely more mature approach to get my bride to agree to spending her honeymoon walking around Skagway,, Alaska a month after the cruise season had ended.

That, and the fezzes my dad bought for the groomsmen to randomly wear during the reception, totally confusing a few of my brand-new, not dialed into absurdist humor, very not Jewish relatives, who kept asking if "that was some kind of Jewish thing," and the 1966 Triumph Bonneville we rode from the reception to our hotel. Those were my power grabs, and I was satisfied.

Come Sunday morning, you can wear what you want; if you need the Jawa, he'll be the guy in the ratty Godzilla t-shirt and hopefully something more than too-small boxers (but not those huge Walton's Grizzly Lodge sweatpants. We drew the line at that). Jawa wear his Sunday morning worst as a proud display of adult-like power? Maybe. Either that or he's just sick of dressing up.

4 days to Bar Mitzvah: in search of greatness

2010-08-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

I'm always going around repeating my two favorite quotes about having kids, paraphrasing parental giants Ethan Canin and Joe Mele. Canin, who wrote a National Book Award-winning collection of short stories while in medical school, was once asked at a reading how the recent birth of his daughter impacted his writing.

"This is going to sound stupid if you don't have kids," he began in response, "and if you already have kids, it's going to sound redundant, but the biggest difference is that until I had kids, I'd always thought of myself as someone who feels things very deeply. Then I had kids and realized I hadn't felt anything at all."

Okay, maybe Ethan is a little hyperbole-happy, but the core idea is strong. As for Joe Mele, he was a guy I went to grad school with who had his first son while both of us were teaching at Blanchet High School in Seattle. A few months in, we -- accompanied by our own smartly-dressed, months-old Jawa, joined the entire extended Mele family for the christening. Afterward, as we dove into an awesome Italian spread at the Meadowbrook Community Center, Joe stood up to make a little speech.

"Everyone asks me what I like most about being a parent," Joe said. "It's pretty simple. The best thing about being a parent is that by the time I realized there was a hole in my life, it was already filled."

I like words. Last week, I told someone that I didn't understand people who say they "don't have time" to do Facebook, not only because my daily investment in Facebook is about five minutes, but also because if I wasn't writing status updates to my Facebook page I'd just have to find somewhere else to put all those words. I've simply got way too many words; the more places I can find to write them down, the better. Otherwise, they'll back up, which may be why I get so many headaches.

As a word-lover, I take my hat off to Canin and Mele. I've been in this game 13 years and I still can't think of a better way to describe the highlights of parenthood; that's why I constantly cite them.

Ethan and Joe touched on the best parts. What they didn't discuss was the street-level life changes that accompany a Jawa. In my experience, the worst part about expecting a baby was having to endure the endless, well-meaning "advice" doled out by everyone in the entire world -- friends, co-workers or complete strangers. Everyone wants to tell you how it's going to be.

I made a promise to myself on August 3, 1997 that I would never tell a pregnant woman or a nervous would-be father, how it was going to be. Last week, when 31-year-old newleywed Matt Elliser asked me if having a kid meant giving up your dreams of being great, I told him how it had worked with me, not how it would work with him. And of course, I quoted Mele and Canin, suggesting that, to them, fatherhood is its own kind of greatness.

It's a greatness that comes when you shrug off all of the selfish impulses you've built up in a lifetime, not by slaying dragons or building a multinational company out of nothing. It's more evident in the way you give up the last cookie than it is when you get promoted at work. As subtle a form of greatness as it is, the hard part is that it's a greatness that is way more elusive than the kind you get when the Queen drops an OBE medal around your neck.

Tell me how it feels when you realize you just ruined your son's night by making some sarcastic remark because you had a headache and didn't feel like hearing more about Disneyland. Or when you figure there's something not right about the 13 year-old in the back seat telling you to close your window because he can't hear his iPod over the wind, which snaps you out of this awesome private moment you've been having, thinking you'd created the perfect Sunday afternoon drive, only to find that your efforts are actually annoyances and Steve Jobs has defeated you again. You know the right thing to do is to close your window without comment, but you say something anyway because darn it, the kid needs to know that the world is not his alone.

It's a balance, and I find it nearly impossible to maintain. I try pretty hard, but I could try harder.

Because it takes a ton of bad behavior to turn your kid against you, which is part of the great responsibility that comes (to those who choose to accept it) with being someone's dad. I still remember a day, several years ago. The Jawa couldn't have been more than four, maybe five, but I was giving him a bunch of crap anyway, because I'd forgotten how to be an adult.

We were out somewhere, arguing back and forth, or he threw a fit because I wouldn't buy him something, which ticked me off and made start thinking in the "how dare they!" mode of thought -- the quickest route to being a terrible dad. We were walking, and somewhere during our twin tirades, we reached a curb. Without thinking, the Jawa reached up and grabbed for my hand, because he knew that I was going to protect him as we crossed this street, and no amount of arguing was going to change that, and no matter how mad he was at me, the bottom line was that I was still his guy, which was pretty awesome and terribly heartbreaking, and something I should have not needed a five-year-old to remind me of, all at the same time.

The one day you wake up and your Jawa is 13 and holding hands is no longer a heartwarming picture of father and son, but instead two hairy guys who need a shave holding hands.

I still feel terrible about the arguing/hand-holding day, several years later; which doesn't stop me from hitting the roof when it's obvious that my son thinks I can't tell that suddenly realizing that you haven't played with your hamster all day is more than a coincidence when it happens thirty seconds after someone has told you it's time to go to bed.

The problem with seeing fatherhood as a paradigm for measuring "greatness" is that if you care at all about it you constantly feel like you're failing. The job often requires behavior that goes against your nature (see: patience/lack of patience) and the rules are always changing. Over the past month, the Jawa's bedtime has slowly crept back an hour without anyone saying anything. One night he's up working on his Bar Mitzvah speech; the next night he's making origami fish for the centerpieces. Last night, after working on paper lanterns for two hours, he joined Sandra Bullock in watching "Clash of the Titans" from nine until 11.

An hour later, I went into his bedroom. Until earlier this year, this was my habit. Every night, after he had gone to sleep, I'd sneak into his bedroom and watch him for a few seconds before going to sleep myself. I don't know why I stopped. Maybe because he's often up as late as me now. Maybe because it seemed like something you do when your kid's little; not when he's a teenager.

Last night I went in there. He was asleep. I went to pat his head and my fingers caught on something: headphones. From them, a cord ran down into the covers, where it was attached to an iPod. He'd been watching videos, something we've told him numerous times not to do.

But what can you do? Sure, I can ban his iPod. I can take it and hide it and tell him he can't have it for a week. It wouldn't be the first time. The efficacy of this behavior modification tactic is questionable. And what, my solution is to let the poor kid lie in bed for hours, staring into space because he inherited my night owl genes and I insist on him trudging into bed every night at 10 even though he can't fall asleep before 11?

Add this to the growing list of confusing elements involved in watching your child turn into a teenager. I want him to go to bed at 10. I want him to put down his various electronic devices and do something else. I want him to keep his room clean. Is any of this realistic? Should my real goal be to monitor his decisions, instead of making them for him?

Back in August of 1997, I had my own take on sudden parenthood. It was neither as eloquent nor as deep as those of Canin and Mele. "It's like someone turned my life up to 11," I said and continue to say. Thirteen years later, I've found that no matter how many things change, that's the one thing that stays true.

5 days to Bar Mitzvah: parallel-parking, Shelley Berman and the Chai life

2010-08-16T17:23:00.000-07:00

Less than a week to go and we've lost all control of our budget. Unplanned line items are killing us, but do we fight? No. There's nothing left to lose.

And still I try, clinging to some long-forgotten budget, nickel-and-diming myself to a good night's sleep, saving pennies and spending pounds.

Should I feel guilty for spending only $9.95 on a Challah cover made of polyester and not silk? How many times are we going to use a Challah cover? Were we industrious and resourceful Jews, I would not have been buying a Challah cover today; we would have borrowed one. I'll bet The Hammer didn't have to go to the "Judaica" store near the JCC and buy a $9.95 Challah cover five days before her son's Bar Mitzvah.

By the time I reached the JCC, I'd already parallel parked seven times and spent almost $500 on things I don't remember seeing in the Bar Mitzvah Master Budget. Did I plan to start today by going into Bank of America (parallel park #1) and buying $40 of quarters? Of course not. Anyone who actually plans to do that is obviously unstable, or possesses an enormous amount of laundry.

It is true that by sending our chartered bus home Friday night after dropping us at Tarantino's, we save hundreds of dollars. And yet, the $40 I had to take out of the ATM today and immediately convert to quarters felt like an unplanned expense. The quarters are for our guests to hand over to the MUNI driver when we board, en masse, one of the quaint and whimsical waterfront trolleys that conveniently run from Fisherman's Wharf to the Hyatt Regency Embarcardero. Even as I am saving over $200 in overall expenses, it still feels like I am spending money.

At times, my odd little chores take on a surreal glow. Today, shortly after parallel parking for the third time (on Nob Hill, after waving my arms in what I hoped was a menacing way at the fat cat behind me who was chomping on a cigar in his Mercedes and refusing to back up so I could park), I had a brush with obtuse greatness and also seized the opportunity to act rudely in the presence of a man who probably knew Milton Berle.

Shelley Berman was standing at the concierge at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, looking about 1,000 years old, trying politely to understand how his plane tickets to Burbank worked. I was the obnoxious middle-aged guy who ignored Shelley -- who as recently as 2008 was nominated for an Emmy Award for his role as Larry David's dad on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- before finding out that I wasn't even in the right hotel to begin with.

I would like to apologize to Shelley Berman, his wife Sarah (they have been married since 1948), the guy I mistook for a hotel employee when he was just a good samaritan helping Shelley with his plane tickets -- because who wouldn't help Shelley Berman with his plane tickets? What kind of boor shoves past a dapper, elderly, toupee-wearing Shelley Berman in order to meet his own selfish needs?

The kind who has completed 33% of his parallel parking for the day.

By the time I reached Dayanu, the Judaica store where I bought the Challah cover, my nerves were shot. What is a Judaica store? It is like a gift shop, only the t-shirts all have different whimsical puns based on the Hebrew "Chai" (life) written across the front.

This time, as I parallel parked (#7) amidst whizzing traffic on California Street, some wag in a Cadillac slowed down, rolled down his window and shouted, "I wish my car would park that easy!" I gave him a courtesy laugh. We get it, pal; you drive a Cadillac. I'll bet Shelley Berman drives one, too.

Then I'm standing in front of Dayanu. There is a sign on the (locked) front door of Dayanu, whose slogan, at least to me, should be, "Where else are you going to buy a Challah cover in San Francisco?" The sign reads: "Back in five minutes!"

I have learned over the past nine years that there is a thing called "Jewish Standard Time," which runs about ten minutes behind normal, Christian time. When Dayanu said five minutes, it meant ten. Squinting into the fog because this summer I have either lost or destroyed two pairs of prescription sunglasses and yesterday I tore my left contact lens in half, then went to the closet in the hall to find I had no more contacts lenses, leaving me wearing glasses and hoping Eye Q Optometry in Noe Valley can rush order some contacts to me by Friday, I thanked the gods of technology for creating my Droid, read Peter King's "Monday Morning Quarterback" on SI.com and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Finally, a woman I have for five years been secretly thinking of as "Evil Lynn" even though I know her name is "Eva Lynn" -- not because I don't like her; I don't really know her except by sight. It's just that the first time someone mentioned her name, I thought they'd said "Evil Lynn." My sense of humor is juvenile enough that I still find it hilarious, five years later -- arrived and I bought my Challah cover. Embarrassed by my cheapness and still wondering if Evil Lynn was going to recognize me, I made some lame crack about how I "bought the polyester Challah cover."

"It's very colorful, and inexpensive," Evil Lynn responded, thinking she was speaking to a very sane, not-at-all-childish stranger. Or maybe she recognized me but, like me, did a quick cost-benefit analysis and decided that the 30-second conversation that would follow acknowledging each other was not how she wanted to spend that particular 30 seconds of her life. Maybe she had other things on her mind, like whatever had taken her away from her business for five minutes in the middle of a Monday, and just wanted me to leave with my $9.95 Challah cover.

"Oh, I don't care about that," said Joe Kennedy's debonair and long-lost Jewish son. "I mean, at this point, who cares."

What I didn't say but meant was this: come on, now; give me a little chuckle, a raised eyebrow, anything. Show me that you get it: a guy walks into a Judaica store, looking for a Challah cover. You think he might be that guy who used to run the Book Fair at Brandeis Hillel Day School, where you'd set up a table and sell stuff while everyone milled around, buying books. Maybe he has a kid who might be Bar Mitzvah age, which would explain why he's randomly buying a Challah cover on a Monday in August. What he's probably telling me with his little toss-away line is that by now, so soon before his son's Bar Mitzvah, he's been hemorrhaging money for so long that the difference between a $10 Challah cover and a $30 Challah cover is negligible.

I get it. We're all in this together.

Come to me, Bar Mitzvah father, wandering Jew in a city with Jews so rare and assimilated that you can carry on a 10-minute conversation with a Realtor about how blown away you were the first time you visited your cousins in Great Neck as a teen and found that their high school included Jewish football players and cheerleaders. I, too, am a Jew, and so understand how absurd this Bar Mitzvah process has been, how you've struggled with rationalizing the costs until you've simply come to the point where you'll worry about the money later. You are in the right place, balding Jewish man. We are sympathetic.

Am I asking too much? Stupid question. Evil Lynn, being of sound mind and right in the middle of her day -- which for all I know, might have included multiple parallel parking opportunities -- instead adopted the distant, careful air often employed around the insane or people who somehow wander past the security ropes at a crime scene and said, "Oh, well, I don't know anything about that." And then she told me about how Dayanu sells round Challah for the High Holy Days in the fall.

That was it, my one shot at finding human connection in a calloused urban environment, and it was ripped to shreds. I got back in my car, mailed something I needed to mail (parallel park #8) and drove home in silence. Tomorrow is another day, number four on the countdown. By then, Shelley Berman will be in Burbank, Evil Lynn will have sold t-shirts with (Chai) Anxiety! written across them, and I, odds are, will have parallel-parked another half-dozen times.

6 days to Bar Mitzvah: one lap to go

2010-08-15T13:01:00.001-07:00

One you get down to the point where less than a week remains between you and your child's Bar or Bat Mitzvah, the event itself becomes the only thing people want to talk to you about -- and the only thing you can manage to talk coherently about. Everything else takes a back seat.

It must be relieving, in a way, for our more socially anxious friends and acquaintences; for the next week, they have a can't-miss conversation starter. We'll always have something to discuss, whether our sub-topic is "final preparations," "unexpected drama" or "the Jawa's state of readiness." Both meaningless small talk and potentially relationship-changing in-depth discussions are off the table. Unless you ring up a string of jokers and ask Jack to go off the board, you're stuck talking about our Bar Mitzvah.

Yesterday, as we drove home from an overnight in Stinson Beach, approximately 95% of our road trip conversation hinged on Sandra Bullock's shockingly long "things to do" list. The other five percent was about how we weren't sure if we'd missed the turn for Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and how nice Fairfax would be if it weren't overrun by hippies.

At first glance, the list is daunting. It is two pages long. You'd think, with six days remaining until the Bar Mitzvah itself -- five, if you count the beginning of a Bar Mitzvah as the moment we sit down for Friday night services (Barbara Boxer might say it begins the moment we depart the temple) -- we'd have all the heavy lifting completed. That was S. Bullock's original plan. Six months ago, she laid it out for us, saying that her goal was to "get everything done so (she) wouldn't spent the last week running around, trying to get stuff done."

As it turns out, that plan, like most of my career plans, was more of a fantasy than a tangible goal.

As we drove past the rolling hills and redwood groves, we went down the list. Most of it involved calling people to confirm stuff and picking up very small items that may have a negligible impact on the overall event but will stick not only in my wife's craw but that of our graphic designer neighbor, a crucial member of the Bar Mitzvah Design Team.

My worry is that Sandra Bullock, famous for refusing to leave her mother's house while on vacation, lest she seem unappreciative and thoughtless, will not accept the offer of her very willing and eager Bar Mitzvah Design Team members: to sprint from the Bar Mitzvah to the Golden Gate Yacht Club, where they will do a major share of the set-up while S. Bullock remains at Temple Emanu-El, greeting guests (and the lady who drags a box around behind her on a small cart while attending every single Bar and Bat Mitzvah held at Temple Emanu-El, a small price to pay for the free lunch that follows) as they chow down on our mid- to upper-mid-level Oneg.

I plan to do my best at reminding her that this event, a year in the making, will pass in the blink of an eye; and that any time she spends not with our guests shortens that blink to a nano blink of an eye. But she has repeatedly said that she "doesn't want (her) guests to do any work," so it is likely that I will be the one greeting guests and the lady with the cardboard box at the Oneg, which is fine with me, since I hate battling for food at an Oneg and will probably not spend a second in the food line. I can't say she'll regret it, because from Day One this is how she's imagined it unfolding. If it was me, I'd regret it; which is probably why my primary responsibility next Saturday will be guest-wrangling.

Will this be an easy job? All I have to do is get everyone out of their hotel rooms and down to Market Street, where they will witness first-hand the mighty power I hold over parking and transportation in the world's favorite tourist destination, make sure nobody shows up in sweatpants and a t-shirt, and shepherd them onto one of two buses by 4:30. Oh, and I have to make sure the buses know where to park, though honestly, I think I saw that as an item on Sandra Bullock's to-do list for the week.

Can you believe it's only six days away? It may become more real tomorrow, when I wake up to find Sandra Bullock not at work but instead sitting at her laptop in my "office," the Jawa's seat at the kitchen table, but today, it still seems months away.

As for the Jawa, he's still playing it cool, save for a moment last night when he burst out of his bedroom, ran the three steps between his room and ours and leapt on our bed, suddenly bellowing, "It's only a week away! Scary!"

I have another job, actually. I have taken it on myself to look skyward each day, shake my fists and curse the Fog Gods. You know the old joke that starts, "Do you believe in God?" and ends with, "Well, someone's out to get me, that's for sure,"? It's tough not to agree when the largest event of your son's life, planned August 21, which is traditionally the tail end of a fog-free month, takes place during THE COLDEST SUMMER SAN FRANCISCO HAS EXPERIENCED SINCE 1960.

Fog Gods, you have exactly five days to get it right. I say five because I don't want our poor shrug- and sport coat-wearing family members to look out the floor-to-ceiling picture windows of Tarantino's -- a restaurant we chose not for its fine dining but for its so-iconic-it's-kitschy Fisherman's Wharf location -- and see not a tableau that brings to mind an Italian fishing village but instead one solid wall of impenetrable white.

Every day for the past week I've made certain to catch at least one local news weather report, hoping to hear good news. Unfortunately, the power of my positive visualization -- already proven to be folly during a recent 72 holes of golf in Lake Tahoe -- is no more effective in willing whatever local affiliate's perky young self-appointed meteorologist to give me anything more than a five-day forecast showing half of a sun shrouded in fog. I curse them, much as I once cursed Jeff Renner of KING-5 in Seattle for his cavalier manner in telling us, each night between October and July, that it was going to rain tomorrow.

I eventually embraced the rain, to the point where hot weather still stresses me out. And over the past decade of living in San Francisco, I've always counted the fog as my friend, showing up just in time to guarantee a good night's sleep in our non-insulated home, always choosing whipping winds over the oven-like state we'd achieve whenever the mercury topped 75 degrees.

So I ask you, just for 48 hours, fog, please part and give our guests the drop-dead gorgeous view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and the riotous ramshackle mish-mash of houses, apartments and downtown skyscrapers that renedered the Golden Gate Yacht Club's aged blue carpeting a moot point the day we chose it for our venue, way back in the early summer of 2009.

9 days to Bar Mitzvah: your name in lights

2010-08-12T17:22:00.000-07:00

The first time I saw my name in print I got all goose-bumpy, which seems endearingly innocent and clueless 19 years later. It was atop a story I'd written, a sourceless rant, really, for a 24-page newsprint 'zine called "Big Whoop," that two friends of mine had started in their Lower Haight Street apartment. They printed 10,000 copies, put them in coffee houses and bars. Then we had a party and all sat back and waited for our careers in journalism to begin. It was the spring of 1991.

Since then, I've seen my name in newspapers and magazines well over 1,000 times, and have made about as much money out of simply making stuff up and writing it down -- or listening to someone else make stuff up and then writing it down so they sound smart -- as I would have earned in a year had I gone to law school. Having my name show up in stuff people read is still pretty cool. It would be cooler if my name was "Pete," but I make due.

A few times, when I was either writing way too much for a publication or, recently, having to write stuff I thought sucked, like a thousand words on a Ford dealership or a glowing review of a sushi restaurant that sucks and has a questionable commitment to hygiene, I use a fake name. Paying homage to my old friend and semi-mentor Bill Crandall, I use a name he used when he wrote for his own 'zine in 1991.

Bill Crandall went on to become an editor for Rolling Stone. While he has never been forced to write 1,000 words about Serramonte Ford, I have seen pictures on his Facebook page of him playing softball with the Jonas Brothers, which, if we're going ot pretend it's possible to get through your adult life without sacrificing most of the things that were important when you were 21, is only slightly less heinous of an event.

You could say that I've become calloused at seeing my name in print. In the nineteen years since Ken Dunque rapped on my one-bedroom apartment door, then shoved the first copy of "Big Whoop" in my face when I opened it up, only a few stories stand out. They're outnumbered by the number of times I've gotten really excited about something -- a possible story, a new publication who wants me to write for them -- only to have the whole thing blow up in my face or quietly fade away without a word. It's not like I've been on Oprah like Po Bronson or established myself as a professor of creative writing, like Tom Beirowski, who always wrote stories about his experiences in Catholic seminary, or even become an editor at Rolling Stone.

Still, my face shows up in a part of a semi-major metropolitan newspaper every Sunday and I get to write about pretty much whatever I want, unless one of the sales team decides that something I've written might hamper their efforts to attract clients. It's not ideal, but at least two people I haven't seen in 25 years have found me via the San Francisco Examiner over the past three years.

And yet, all of it -- every half-hearted but earnest attempt at fame -- pales when you consider the fate of anyone who tries to park on the 00 block of Market Street next Friday and Saturday. Most of the area is a no parking zone anyway, but next weekend, anyone who tries to flaunt the law has to answer to me. However cavalier they are about parking, when they exit their vehicle they will find a series of signs, clearly marked "NO PARKING." Above that will they see the name of a construction firm? The city department of parking and traffic?

No. They will see my name. For it is me that has decreed there will be no parking on Market Street next Friday and Saturday. And if they don't like it, if they are able to shrug off my obvious authority, putting their petty needs above mine, I will simply whip out my Driod and call the number printed at the bottom of my "No Stopping" permit. Within minutes, I'm told, their vehicle will be towed. Game over.

What does it take to wield such power? A simple two-and-a-half-hour trip to the Hall of Justice, three separate trips through the metal detector, the total indifference of the woman working the desk at Room 458 (Permits), a short, angry scolding from a policewoman working the phones at the Southern Station, who then disappears for ten minutes and returns with Sgt. Gutierrez and then, finally, the complete, undivided attention of Gutierrez, who has been on vacation in Mexico for the past week and was drunk "at least half of the time."

Let me sing the praises of Sgt. Gutierrez, because planning a Bar Mitzvah, especially at this late of a date, requires almost constant interaction with people who work in the service industry, and not everyone is cut out to work in the service industry, which doesn't prevent people from signing up anyway. By the time I reached Sgt. Gutierrez, I'd already spent two hours of my day navigating seemingly simple tasks that were complicated to the point of psychotic break by automated customer services systems and ambivilent service reps which, combined with a Jawa who awoke at 10:48 on the wrong side of the bed, had me longing for the relative calm of my old Examiner cubicle -- even though it faced the wall, leaving me vulnerable to anyone who wanted to sneak up and scare the daylights out of me).

Thanks to Sgt. Gutierrez, the citizens of San Francisco and their guests will now know the awesome power I can wield. They can ignore my keen weekly real estate observations all they want; if they want to park anywhere between 50 and 98 Market Street next Friday and Saturday, they're going to have to get through me first.

10 days to Bar Mitzvah: it's the little things

2010-08-11T22:09:00.001-07:00

First of all, lets establish right away that the Jawa is not known for his demure and respectful world view. Fact: if you happen to be sitting in the main sanctuary at Temple Emanu-El ten days from now, you will hear Sandra Bullock read from a speech I wrote that heralds our son for his indominateable spirit and his zest for life.

She will go on to point out great our respect is for his willingness to stand up for his beliefs -- not ours, a subtle difference often unacknowledged by zealotous San Francisco parents -- but his alone, even if it means having to slowly explain once at a cocktail party that even if your child makes the "wrong" choice -- say, he decides as a six-year-old that he really likes George W. Bush because "he has cool hair" -- what the child is doing actually IS "questioning authority," which he wouldn't be doing were he merely parroting his parents' beliefs. You will hear of this, but AT NO TIME will you hear us speak of our Jawa's core respect for authority (at least that of his parents), his ability to deftly avoid conflict or his powers as an arbitrator. The "listens quietly" option does not appear on his pull-down menu.

Which is something we live with, an often infuriating but completely understandable part of the "spirited child" package. Hey, I'm the one who let him run around saying he liked George Bush, right?

And I will be the first to admit that, as the Bar Mitzvah gets closer, the tension in our house rises, creating periodic outbursts completely in character with our personalities. I think my wife almost threw something at me tonight when I made her repeat the instructions for contacting the San Francisco Police Department (Traffic Permits Desk) because I wasn't paying attention the first time she said it. No, I'm not kidding. I looked over there and she was fingering an apple with malice in her eyes.

More importantly, why on earth do we need to obtain a traffic permit from the SFPD? I went over the guest list; there were no dignitaries on it. We haven't scheduled a motorcade.

What we have scheduled are buses, running to temple and Tarantino's and the Golden Gate Yacht Club from the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero. When we ordered up these buses, I imagined them sidling into the turnaround in front of the hotel, all of our guests filing out the revolving doors and lining up -- unhurriedly, away from the street -- to get onboard. Yesterday, we found that it is not to be so.

Despite their decades of experience extracting visitors from stopped vehicles, the Hyatt claims it cannot accommodate buses -- not even buses that hold a mere 40 people -- in the turnaround. They didn't call it a "turnaround." They had another word for it; something French.

Their solution is to park the "buses" -- that are not actually buses but more like very bulbous, overgrown SUVs -- on Market Street. Do you know of Market Street? It is often described as "one of the most congested streets in San Francisco." Market Street runs from the Ferry Building to Twin Peaks, passing what is essentially an open air drug market between Sixth Street and City Hall before changing its name to Portola Drive and continuing almost to Brandeis Hillel Day School, way past anywhere casual tourists would want to go. Portola Avenue is very pleasant, save for the cars whipping down its gentle curves at freeway speeds.

Market Street is another thing entirely. Our buses will be competing with tourists, a cable car turnaround, several makeshift vendor booths selling amateurish watercolor paintings of San Francisco, angry cab drivers playing sitar-heavy music at elevated volumes while flaunting California law by speaking on their cell phones while driving. Into this we plan to park two (very small, barely worth mentioning) buses and ferry 60 people -- some of whom will likely already be wrapped in blankets not because of the fog that we told them wouldn't go away but they didn't believe us because who thinks it's going to be 57 degrees in August? but because they're still in shock after negotiating BART from the airport after never setting foot onto any public transportation for their entire lives.

And this, only if we can get the permits, which require access to a fax machine. I am one of 46 freelance writers in the U.S. who does not own a fax machine. Pretty exclusive company.

It's things like this -- piddling little details, traffic permits, the fact that Denon & Doyle ask for your slideshow on a DVD and you have no blank DVDs so will be driving to Target tomorrow to buy about 100 blank DVDs, even though you need only one and last burned something to CD right about a week before you discovered the iPod -- these are the unexpected glitches that ratchet up the stress in our 1,079 square-foot piece of paradise, here in Baghdad-by-the-Bay.

So should we just look the other way when the Jawa answers a pointed question ("Do you realize you've been playing with your phone from the moment we got into the car until the moment we arrived home?") with a similarly pointed response ("So? You're obsessed with your Blackberry!"), chalking it up to stress that otherwise is imperceptible?

Or are we being fools, saying, "Let him play 'Roller Coaster Tycoon' for a few hours, not stopping until we threaten to remove his CPU unit from his bedroom. He's under a lot of pressure," instead of laying down some kind of law and implementing a forced legal separation between Jawa and keyboard?

It's hilarious unless you're up to your eyeballs in it. We probably have little explosions and sparks coming from our heads that we don't even notice. Every so often one of us mentions a particularly heinous night of insomnia. Otherwise, we act like everything's normal, except that we don't watch TV anymore because we're sitting in front of the Jawa's computer trying to sync music up to our eight-minute "This is your Jawa's Life" slideshow. And nobody agrees on what music we should use, so we yell at each other or say something sarcastic then storm out of the room, at which time the Jawa quickly switches back to "Roller Coaster Tycoon," assuming that we are done working for now and he can finally have some peace.

I'm afraid not, boy-soon-to-be-a-man. Just now I ducked my head into his doorway and said, "Nine days."

"Scary," he answered.

On the contrary, I thought; by the time we get to August 21, all of the scary stuff will have already happened.

11 days to Bar Mitzvah: a world apart

2010-08-10T17:13:00.000-07:00

As the wait time for your Bar Mitzvah closes in on single digits, your life begins to take on a quality most often found in the stellar phenomena known as a black hole. Once you pass that event horizon, you enter a great sucking maw from which there is no escape. Nothing, not even light, can get out.

Nearby stars are toast. The gas they create is drawn into the black hole, where it is superheated, kind of like how everything that takes place within our 1,079 square-foot slice of San Francisco from now until August 21 will operate at a heightened pitch, ten billion pounds of matter compressed to a single point. Margin for error is a luxury for others; not us.

Even the usually unflappable Sandra Bullock is beginning to show signs of wear, occasionally losing track of items she's spoken out loud versus only thought. As a result, guests sometimes move mysteriously from table to table, and woe to the husband poorly-equipped to anticipate such a move.

Each blown-off request to "go do your chanting" is a potential moment of life-changing embarrassment on the bimah. The two hours I just spent poring over iTunes, looking for songs to accompany the slide show tracking the development of the Jawa from birth to yesterday (no, seriously; the last image in the slide show is from yesterday) could make or break that very important segment of the party. You don't want people walking away in the middle of the show, their interest quashed by music too obscure or inappropriate to keep them on board.

As for the Jawa, he is finally beginning to feel the pressure, I think. Yesterday, while hurtling down 101 toward the promised land (you and I call it "Great America"), he sometimes looked up from his Droid and said, "Eleven days. Freaky."

"I remember when it was eleven days before my Bar Mitzvah," announced Josh K., expansively, from the back seat. "I already had my Torah portion memorized."

"Do you have yours memorized?" I asked the Jawa, breaking the unwritten rule that states adults sitting in the driver's seat must concentrate only on their assigned task -- driving -- and not make any potentially mortifying attempts to join the conversation.

It was difficult, because I've known Josh K. since he was five and have always had an easy rapport with him. Some things that don't crack up the Jawa crack up Josh K., which I've always appreciated. But this time, with two civilians -- Jonah and the bewitching Jenny -- in the car, every time I opened my mouth I risked ruining my child's social life.

The Jawa does not have his Torah portion memorized.

Interesting thing, riding in a car with three 13-year-old boys and a single 13-year-old girl, even one as clueless about her power over the boys as Jenny apparently is. "Jenny's just cool," the Jawa told me last week, when he screwed up his courage and called her, enduring parental inquisition on the other end before finally, nervously getting Jenny on the phone and asking her to go to Great America, then slamming down the phone afterward and announcing, "Now THAT is how it's done!"

As a completely unpretentious tomboy, clad in soccer shorts and tennis shoes and slightly taller than our Jawa but dwarfed by the towering Josh K., little Jenny had absolutely no clue that three boys were vying for her attention, each exaggerating certain elements of his personality in the hopes of winning her favor. It was bedlam in that car, let me tell you.

By the time we got to Great America, after 45 minutes of me not sharing with the car just how headache-inducing it is to drive while someone is playing youtube videos starring teenage boys yelling at us about how to become a ninja, I realized the folly of our boys’ efforts. The scales had been tilted all along. Jonah is a chick magnet.

We got out of the car to find that some ninth-grade girls -- former students at Brandeis Hillel Day School -- had parked next to us. Of our carload, they knew only Jonah, who absorbed their excited hugs and questions about his summer with effortless panache. My boys stayed behind and discussed certain roller coasters. Jenny milled about uncomfortably, not, I suppose, because she'd lost Jonah's favor but because she was honestly flummoxed by girls who'd wear impractical shoes and uncomfortable clothing to a theme park.

It's amazing what you can learn when you keep your mouth shut in a car full of 13 year-olds. The friendly science teacher, so polite and enthusiastic around parents, apparently transforms into Senator John Blutarski once we're out of earshot. And the Scottish P.E. teacher who earned my ire last year by repeatedly forcing the Jawa onto teams with his tormentor? The kids love him so much that they find his verbal abuse hilarious. It must be the accent.

It's easy to forget how much eighth grade is a world apart from the time kids spend at home, with us. We see them for a few minutes in the morning and then a few hours at night. When we talk about school, it's to monitor performance: are you keeping up your grades, are you behaving in class, are you learning things that you find interesting or will benefit you later in life? We totally overlook the fact that they, along with a bunch of adults we barely know, have constructed an entire universe within a bland institutional campus.

Which is our bad. We should know better. But we get caught up in the administrative tasks of running a life -- there's food to buy, laundry to fold, bills to pay, very short but dense dogs to feed and walk -- and so tend to only focus on the low-hanging fruit, the stuff they tell us we should pay attention to, lest our children end up poor citizens or unhappy adults.

Back when I was a schoolteacher, this stuff was foremost in my mind. I understood that for the two girls sitting next to each other and disrupting my English class, what they'd remember about that class wasn't Beowulf; it was that they'd sat next to each other. I was a chirping annoyance in the distance, a J. Crew-clad version of the teacher barking orders at Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty.

It's harder as a parent. Much harder. They should force us to take classes where we sit behind one-way glass and watch teenagers interact. Then we'd have some clue of what we should have remembered all along, before we ran headlong into mortgages and politics and forgot how long it took at 13 to get over some random sarcastic remark made by a hurried, overworked teacher or a completely out-of-patience parent staring at a mountain of unpaid bills and a child demanding an upgrade on his Wii.

I say this as my child sits in his room watching "Predator" on his computer, only a few hours removed from our latest dustup, in which he made it very obvious that my authority extended only to the keypad of his phone, lasting as long as it took to dial his mother and get her to overrule me. “You sound just like Dwight,” he spat at me, referring to the sadistic father in “This Boy’s Life,” assigned summer reading from Brandeis Hillel Day School.

And still, we plunge forward. Ten more days as a boy and then he's a man. One week later, he's back in school, trying to find his way, a Bar Mitzvah whose how-to-be-a-man guidebook is still several pages short, steered by parents hoping to remember that there are unquantifiable lessons that must be included along the path leading from childhood to the world.

13 days to Bar Mitzvah: in-between sizes

2010-08-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

Right now, I would estimate that the Jawa stands about five feet, three inches tall. That's the same height as Harry Chappas, the shortest man to ever play regularly in the major leagues. Eddie Gaedel doesn't count.

Chappas was a shortstop who played 72 games for the Chicago White Sox from 1978-1980. He was a career .245 hitter, but appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in March of 1979, due mostly to the relentless promoting of his team owner, Bill Veeck. (Veeck is also the man who, as owner of St. Louis Browns, sent the 3'7" Gaedel to the plate to face the Detroit Tigers in 1951. Briefly the starting shortstop for the White Sox, Chappas was quickly demoted, reportedly after missing a "stop" sign while rounding third base during a regular season game. Veteran Don Kessinger took his spot. Harry was demoted, returning to the majors only briefly before completely flaming out in 1980.

A decade later, the Orlando Sun-Sentinal reported that then 33-year-old Harry Chappas was living "in Coral Springs with his parents and (spending) much of his time fishing for bass in nearby canals while sorting out his future." Six years later, Chappas was living in an SRO hotel in Florida, about to begin vocational school.

After spending several fruitless hours yesterday at Brooks Brothers, Macy's, Zara, the GAP, Nordstrom and Banana Republic, I have only one question for Harry Chappas. It does not concern his experiences playing baseball in Italy or the terrible motorcycle accident that shattered his leg, ending his professional career and any hopes he had of one day joining the Professional Golfer's Tour.

My curiosity where Harry is concerned is limited. I want to know one thing. It's the same question I'd ask my Great-Grandfather Henry Tillis and Lou Gehrig's dad if either were alive today: Harry, after you completed vocational school in Florida in 1997 and began looking for a job, where did you go to buy a suit for interviews? Because I know you didn't go to Brooks Brothers, Macy's, Zara, the GAP, Nordstrom or Banana Republic.

I can't speak for South Florida, but here in San Francisco none of the stores named above keep on hand any mens suits smaller than a size 36. Harry, being the same height as the Jawa, probably wears a 32 or a 34. After yesterday I have my doubts that either size actually exists. In hindsight, our chances of finding a men's size 32 suit yesterday were the same as they were of seeing a unicorn. Were Harry buying a suit in San Francisco in 2010, he'd have to face an unpleasant reality: the children's department.

If you're out there today, Harry, and have turned things around to the point where a suit is an integral part of your wardrobe, here's a bit of advice: find the Bloomingdales closest to Florida. There's one in Miami at the Falls Mall (8778 SW 136th Street), which shouldn't be surprising, since it's a New York-based department store and Miami is full of ex-patriot New Yorkers.

If you go to Bloomindales, you will find, hidden in the basement along with housewares, a perfunctory children's department. If you're looking to completely outfit your tot, you will be disappointed. Unless the love affair you had with Ralph Lauren products while in high school during the mid-1980s (see below) continued into the present, you are better off finding an Old Navy for everyday wear. Poor Harry probably knows this; even money says he's been buying graphic tees up on the third floor at Old Navy for the past decade.

But if Harry, or Great-Grandpa Henry, or Heinrich Gehrig need a sharp-looking suit, one that is neither solid black or solid blue, not haphazardly strewn across several display racks where it is forgotten and eventually violated by someone needing size 16 dress pants but no jacket, not festooned with oversized shoulder pads so that when donned, its wearer takes on the appearance of a cast member of MTV's "Jersey Shore," then Bloomindales is the right place. For there, proudly displayed apart from the Ralph Lauren section and the pink skinny Levis are several racks of Joseph Abboud boys' suits.

Ironically, yesterday Bloomingdales was an afterthought, an 11th-hour brainstorm tacked on to our Bataan-like downtown shopping march at the last minute, just as we were ready to trudge home and order a second sober blue Nordstrom suit online -- to match the one the Jawa wore throughout the 2009-2010 B'nai Mitzvah season. Exhausted, short-tempered and hopeless, we were checking every single men's store downtown, since as far as we knew, only Nordstrom and Macy's had children's departments. We simply had no other choice: the Bar Mitzvah is less than two weeks away.

Already we'd nailed down a semi-casual Saturday night outfit, which featured a green Polo shirt whose significance hit me just now while folding laundry. Crank the clock back to the fall of 1981, when the just-employed and determinedly social-climbing me, with a pocket full of cash from my new job at Baskin-Robbins, set out for the Santa Ana Town & Country mall with one goal: to buy a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt.

Back then there was no "vintage" look, no "athletic fit." There was just the status implied by the simple, perfect logo: the rider on the horse, polo mallet drawn back, ready to strike. It was the culmination of a journey that began the year before, when I realized that a simple polo shirt was worthless -- or even counterproductive, an article of clothing that actually made you look worse, not better -- unless it bore the sewn-on alligator label of Rene LaCoste's Izod brand.

My mother is not a frivolous woman where money is concerned. In 1981, her track record included a yearly outlay of $15 for tennis shoes. Anything more came out of our birthday money or anything else we could scrape up on our own. In 1981, a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt cost $30, the equivalent, in our house, of two pairs of shoes.

The first one was red and smelled like Polo cologne. I brought it home and looked at it for the rest of the day, then proudly wore it to school the following morning. The skies did not open. Kris Erickson did not suddenly decide to go to Homecoming with me. The change was imperceptible, invisible to the rest of the world, but I could tell. And here the Jawa gets his first Polo shirt at age 13, begrudgingly, since as he says, "I'm just not a person who cares what they wear."

He's lying, by the way. Over the past month, he's worn a yellow t-shirt that says, "Six Flags" across the front at least 11 times.

Poor Harry Chappas; living in his efficiency unit in Florida, probably by now a licensed air conditioning repair specialist with little use for a nice, three-button summer weight suit. He's probably better off for it. It's bad enough that Bill Veeck treated him like a very tall dwarf. Nobody wants to see a 52-year-old man trying on suits in the boys section of Bloomingdales.

15 days to Bar Mitzvah: to slumber, as a teen

2010-08-06T15:12:00.000-07:00

Lets just circle August 6 on the Calendar and call it "the day the Jawa truly became a teenager." We can record every official milestone all we want; it's not until a child masters the art of sloth that he can truly call himself a member of the youth culture. And my child, who just for the second consecutive day refused a cash money offer in return for vacuuming the house, is now a member of the youth culture.

Since he was a toddler I've worried that he didn't get enough sleep. Never one to accept a toddler-like bedtime, he's battled going to sleep forever. You hear about kids who pass out on the couch or on the floor at 7:30, exhausted after a day of crawling, chewing on things and throwing up on themselves? Not my child. From the day we caught him impaled on the side bars of his crib, trying to escape what was once a haven but now seemed, to his 18-month-old eyes, a prison, he's accepted bedtime begrudgingly.

Which would be fine, except for the utter lack of privacy it affords, if he also slept past the first rooster's crow in the a.m. Four years old and the kid's sleeping an average of eight hours a night.

For years I wondered what the aggregate negative impact would be. Would he be four inches shorter than he was meant to be? Does a lack of sleep during the formative years mean a lack of cranial development? All of that Baby Mozart; was it wasted, overwhelmed by a post-toddler's interest in David Letterman?

Add to the late bedtimes the child's propensity for bolting upright immediately upon any sleep disrutption. Four, five times a night, I'm lying in bed reading and I hear something, some movement coming from the room located about four feet from mine. (This is a particular joy of living in San Francisco, by the way, where the tidy sum you set aside for home ownership buys not a spacious, three-bedroom stucco home built in 2004 but instead a mere 1,079 square feet of falling-down bungalow of indeterminate origin.)

After that first rustle, it's only a matter of seconds before the next sound: tiny footsteps -- of remarkable density; it sounds like a baby rhino is charging through my house -- leading from the room next door to mine.

Sometimes, he was still asleep. You could just take him by the shoulders and guide him back to his room. Other times, he was wide awake and, his mind functioning at an age-appropriate level, would demand that one of us, either Sandra Bullock of I, find a way for him to fall back asleep. And you're not allowed to look your child in the eye, spread your arms wide and plaintively say, "I don't know how to help you," until he's at least 11.

So it went, with a few variations, until he returned from Walton's Grizzly Lodge two weeks ago. Then, suddenly and without warning, his 7 a.m. wakeup call became 8 a.m., then nine. Today, he stumbled out of his room, hair askew and wearing no shirt but already dialing up something on his iPod, as I was leaving the house for a 10 o'clock meeting. "Hey," he mumbled, shuffling off to the kitchen for his everyday and unwavering breakfast of frozen pancakes and really expensive maple syrup whose intimidating purchase price should in now was dissuade someone from completely drowning his frozen pancakes, which makes sense since, like the garden burgers I've learned to love when they're accomopanied by cheese, lettuce, a tomato slice and a number of different sauces, frozen pancakes have no flavor themselves.

Several hours later, I returned home to help the Jawa with a rewrite of his Bar Mitzvah speech. "I wonder if he did that load of laundry I left on the kitchen table with specific instructions attached?" I thought, quickly filing that idea in the dustbin when I entered the house to find the following tableau: my 13-year-old, pre-Bar Mitzvah Jawa stretched out on the living room floor, still wearing his pajamas, his headphones hanging half off his head. Next to him was an iPod, several pieces of paper and his netbook computer. Some online show he'd been watching was still blaring away.

It took me a few seconds to convince myself that he wasn't dead. Only after I watched him and saw the he was breathing did I relax.

No, he wasn't dead; he was deep into the kind of daytime sleep only teens can manage. After 13 years of alertness to the point of annoyance, my child had become an adolescent.

"How long were you asleep?" I asked after finally rousing him.

"I don't know. Last thing I remember, it was around 11:30." I did the numbers. Even with last night's patience-testing hour of calling out to me from his bedroom (at 1,079 square feet, your living room is only about 25 feet from your bedrooms) he'd logged an impressive 11 hours of sleep. Right now it's about four. I'm looking across at him and, I swear, he's completely zoned out. Not nodding off, but in a password-protected netherworld occupied by denizens not old enough to vote.

And Sandra Bullock is vacuuming. I'm sitting her typing, which means that, with the Jawa settling into his teen identity, we're all doing what's expected of us.

It's Friday, August 6. Two weeks from right now we'll be speeding back downtown to the Hyatt Regency in time to turn right around and return to Temple Emanu-El for Friday night services. After that, we'll load up 25 family members in a bus and cruise down to Fisherman's Wharf, much maligned by locals except me, who goes there occasionally just to be reminded of how some people save up all year to go to San Francisco for two foggy weeks in August, and have dinner at Tarantino's. Then I'll drop a pocket full of quarters on an F MUNI trolley to take us all back to the hotel.

The next morning we'll wake up and this slumbering child I just spent two hours badgering to stop playing with the camera and pay attention while we rewrite your speech will speak Hebrew to 187 people (plus an estimated 75 Emanu-El congregants, including the mysterious Lady With the Box, who show up every Saturday, regardless of who's being Bar or Bat Mitzvahed, so they can rifle through the free lunch afterwards) and, under Jewish law, become a man.

That's two weeks away. Today, he is a teenager.

16 days to Bar Mitzvah: rehearsal

2010-08-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

It's 3:35, two weeks before our Bar Mitzvah and we're tearing across town for a four p.m. meeting with Rabbi Jaffe, our second-to-last meeting before the big day. On a good traffic day, this drive takes 30 minutes, and it's not a good traffic day.

I've been told that "yelling" while driving really stresses out a certain 13-year-old Jawa, so I'm doing my best to say nothing, just stare straight ahead, silently noting that once again, a single rose protruding from the built-in bud vase of a Volkswagen Beetle is a failsafe indicator of someone who will drive exactly 22 miles per hour down Clayton Street, where the speed limit has to be at least 35. I am convinced that Lucifer had a hand in designing this particular half-hour segment of my life. He's giving me a preview, in case the ledger sheets don't add up when I leave this mortal coil.

With only two weeks remaining until the Bar Mitzvah, tensions are running high. Following our Hallmark-ready birthday outing to Raging Waters, the Jawa and I have spent another difficult day: me nagging him to work on Bar Mitzvah stuff, him fending off my verbal blows by hiding under a pair of inexpensive Radio Shack headphones. And now we're rushed, my least favorite thing to be.

It doesn't help that, once we arrive at Temple Emanu El (at 3:53, thanks to a campaign of silent but intensely focused and slightly illegal behind-the-wheel maneuvers employed by me in the last 20 minutes) we spend 15 minutes sitting on the dusty couches located outside Rabbi Jaffe's office, absorbed by our individual Smart Phones and wondering if there's been a scheduling snafu.

Finally, I call the temple -- from inside the temple, a weird type of 21st-century phenomenon that's surprising, given that two hours earlier I refused to use my phone to call the Jawa, who was about 100 yards away swinging on a swing while I kicked the ball in a field for Shack. "Call me when you're ready to go," he had advised me. Instead, I just yelled for him, old-school-style -- and find that Rabbi Jaffe has a new office. The junior team member has been moved from his Siberia-recalling location to new digs closer to the inner sanctum. Good for him; would have been better for us if someone had told us before we spent the first 15 minutes of our 40-minute appointment sitting on dusty couches playing solaitare on our Droids.

To Rabbi Jaffe, we must look like exactly the kind of basket cases he sees in his office every day. I'd thought about complaining that the Jawa is procrastinating, but realized quickly that he actually isn't the first kid to procrastinate doing his Bar Mitzvah stuff. Just as I hadn't given any thought, a few weeks ago, to the possibility that I wasn't the only guy losing golf balls in the trees, I'd forgotten that we weren't the first and only people ever getting Bar Mitzvahed.

This meeting was the kind Sandra Bullock loves -- a step-by-step layout of the actual Bar Mitzvah ceremony, revealing every opportunity to involve/honor family members and friends by giving them things to do. Even non-Jews like the kind comprising over half of our Bar Mitzvah party can be slotted into the service. They can open the ark, quickly stepping aside once the Torah itself emerges, not because they're not "allowed" to hold the Torah; more like since this is a traditional rite of passage, it'd be weird to have people hold it for whom it represents nothing more than a 25-pound scroll of paper whose exterior adornments seem to have been inspired by Liberace.

They can walk with us during the joyous Torah procession, in which we (the parents and Bar Mitzvah boy) walk up and down the synogogue aisles, shaking hands with our guests like Bill Clinton at a political fundraiser. Nobody shakes hands like Bill, but we'll try.

At 4:40, the Jawa dashed from the room for his meeting with Cantor Roslyn Barak. "You guys can wait in the car!" he shouted over his shoulder as he disappeared down a hallway.

Which is exactly what we'd planned to do until we passed the message board in the temple lobby and saw listed among today's events our child's "Bar Mitzvah Rehearsal."

"Rehearsal? Isn't that what we're going to do on Friday?" I asked.

"It's not a wedding," said my bride of 18 years. "I think he's in the main sanctuary, practicing his Torah portion. Lets go spy on him."

Five minutes later we're huddled in the foyer of the main sanctuary. Sandra Bullock's shoes are off and I'm inching silently toward an open archway, hoping to catch a glimpse of the chanting Jawa without getting caught.

There he is, up there on the bima in his blue hooded sweatshirt and jeans. He sounds ready, our Jawa. His pre-Peter Brady changed voice fills the sanctuary with chanted Hebrew. It only stops twice; two glitches. Satisfied, I slink back to a bench and sit down.

"I see you, Mom." Sandra Bullock, who will later claim she "meant to get caught," is not as slippery as her husband.

"Are you spying on us?" I hear Cantor Roslyn Barak say.

You're not supposed to spy on Bar Mitzvah rehearsal, but they let us off with a slap on the wrist. Afterwards, a confident Jawa emerges and pronounces himself "ready." Save for the five photo albums he needs to scan for his slideshow, the multiple playlists he needs to make for our boyband-looking Denon and Doyle Emcee, A.J., his intros for the 13 people we will be honoring with a candle-lighting and the last touches on his Bar Mitzvah speech. We celebate a few blocks away at the Hukilau with terayaki garden burgers and fries while some jingle Kevin Gagan made up while we were pledges keeps running through my head. It's to the tune of "We're going to a hukilau," whatever a "hukilau" is.

18 days to Bar Mitzvah: happy birthday

2010-08-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

Exactly thirteen years ago at this moment, I was a mess, with no control over my future happiness. The entire thing was TBD, thanks to a guy I'd known for less than six hours. Stop me if you've already heard this.

August 3, 1997 was a Sunday, ridiculously warm, the beginning of a heat wave that would bring triple-digit temperatures to Seattle for the better part of three weeks. Sandra Bullock and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment in a small, five-unit brick building built in the 1920s. Though today it abuts a giant condominium complex, in 1997 it sat next to an empty lot. From our kitchen, you could look out at the intersection of Broadway and Roy Street. One more block down Roy was the DAR House, where we'd gotten married almost five years before.

Unfortunately, the bricks and the open lot meant maximum sun absorption. Early on that Sunday, our apartment was already sweltering. Two weeks later, I would awake in a heat-generated daze at 7 a.m., stumble two blocks to Safeway and buy two donuts, a Coke and a bottle of Excedrine Migraine Strength, so bad was the headache I had from the heat. I'd weave back to our apartment and lie on the living room floor, silently repeating -- "Please, just let it go away enough that I can get through the bris."

But that was still two weeks away. On Sunday, August 3, I was thinking more about Sandra Bullock, and why the child inside her was waiting so long to get out. He wasn't so late -- his due date was August 1 -- but we'd spent the past month dodging phantom labor pains. Two weeks prior, I'd coached at the annual Blanchet High School girls volleyball camp with a now-prehistoric-seeming beeper attached to my gym shorts, but no call came.

A week later, hoping to speed along the process, my young wife responded to contractions by frantically ironing a pile of clothes. She'd hoped the activity would encourage labor. It didn't.

On this day, she awoke early (sleeping had become a luxury reserved only for the non-pregnant). Wracked with pain but unconvinced of its sincerity, she took a shower and ate breakfast. Then, at around nine, she came into our bedroom and shook me awake. "I think we should go to the hospital," she said, simply.

I'd imagined that when the day came it would resemble a scene from "The Dick Van Dyke Show." I'd leap up, throw a narrow-shouldered suit jacket over my pajamas, run around the room like a lunatic, trip over an ottoman, maybe run out the door without my wife... but it was nothing like that. It was more like our Sunday trip to get coffee, except we were in the car instead of walking, and when we reached the coffee place, we kept going for another half-mile until we reached the Swedish Medical Center.

This would not be the last time my preconceived notions turned out to be wrong.

We were prepared. Oh, were we prepared. We'd completed Lamaze class, breast-feeding class (I was the only guy there without a ponytail, and probably the only one who'd admit he'd rather be at the Mariners game), had written out our birthing plan, had an overnight bag and a backpack full of relaxing Van Morrison CDs to play during the birth.

We'd imagined it would take hours. In the weeks leading up to August 3, I'd pictured us walking the halls of the hospital at 3 a.m., shouting at people in the delivery room, collapsing, completely exhausted after hours of labor, our new child lovingly sprawled out across a hospital-gowned Sandra Bullock.

Instead, we arrived at the hospital and were quickly moved to an examination room. There was another couple there. Unfortunately for my competitively efficient wife, though the other couple was moved onto the actual delivery center, we were sent away. "Maybe walk around for awhile to help induce labor," they advised. So we went out into the heat to take a few laps around the campus of Seattle University, located across the street from the hospital, where I'd just finished a since-tarnished-from-lack-of-use Masters in Teaching the year before.

Now lets get something out in the open right now: I was relieved when we got sent away. I can admit it, 13 years later. Right up until the moment that child came storming out of his mother's womb, I was in complete and utter denial. Yes, I had participated in the whole run-up, the trip to buy the crib, the stroller, the multiple baby showers. I wore the beeper and I kept my mouth shut.

But on that day, as we trudged up the sweltering streets of Seattle's Capitol Hill, I waited for each contraction to end and then said silently, "Thank God, it's not going to happen."

But, you know, you talk the good talk. So when we passed one of the places that was on our list of potential daycare centers, I stopped and looked inside. And I held my wife's hand as she waddled down the street. Even if I had no idea what do to about the eventual result of her condition, I already knew that I'd married one of those women who glowed during pregnancy. She'll tell you now that she was fat and uncomfortable, but I will still today go to the mat versus anyone who insists she was anything but radiant.

And impatient. "I can't believe those people got to go in," she muttered as we climbed Jefferson Street. "Lets go back. I think I'm ready."

Still dialated at four centimeters, they moved us anyway into a very luxurious "birthing suite" in the new birthing center, introduced us to a twelve-year-old who insisted he would be assisting our doctor with the birth, and told us to settle in for the long haul. "Why not start running a bath?" the nurse suggested.

We were nervous, but mostly because we knew that our regular doctor, the soothing and calm Dr. Ann Bridges, who'd shepherded us through the entire pregnancy, was not available. The week before, during our final scheduled visit to her office, she advised us that she would be gone for a few days. She introduced us to her office partner, who would be doing the honors, should we deliver that weekend.

In walks this very soft-spoken, very tall guy with Michael Landon's hair and a pair of tasteful gold stud earrings. But that description is inadequate. There was something else, something a bit off about his appearance, something more than just being a guy wearing Michael Landon's hair. "I'm Dr. Mark Bowers," he said.

Today you may know him as Dr. Marcie Bowers, the stylish blonde woman who has become a world-renown gender-reassignment expert and the star of the reality show "Transgender Hospital." I read in the paper last week that Dr. Marcie Bowers is now moving to San Francisco, after several years practicing in Colorado.

But again, this is all in the future. On August 3, she was still a he we didn't know who was about to spend the next few hours pulling a child out of my wife, assisted by Doogie Howser, who turned out to be the other Jew living in Seattle, and looking for a few synagogue recommendations. "Can't help you," I said, "but if you know a good mohel, we may be needing one in a week or so."

All was calm. The bath water was running. I was about to cue up Van Morrison then walk out to the car to get our birthing plan, when the nurse suddenly lost her cool.

"We're at TEN CENTIMETERS AND CROWNING!" she said. Doogie ran from the room. The bath water was still running. "Uh, should we think about drugs?" I asked, stupidly.

"IT'S WAY TOO LATE FOR THAT."

Into the room strolled Dr. Mark/Marcie Bowers, cool, calm and reassuring beneath his head of Michael Landon Hair. With the wide-eyed assistance of the Jewish Doogie Howser, he extracted my son from my radiant bride in 46 minutes. At no time during that 46 minutes did Sandra Bullock call me names, swear at me or shout random obscenities, not even when I lamely tried to imitate the guy from the lamaze video and say, "You're doing great! Good job!"

"Just grab her leg!" shouted the nurse. So I spent the first few seconds of the Jawa's life cranking on his mother's leg until it was up around her eyeballs.

At 3:06, it was over. My child, whom I'd assumed would arrive looking like the missing link, had a perfectly-formed little head of brown hair and was not covered with goop; which may be the reason why, at that moment, someone reached into the amplifier of my life and turned it up to 11. Never before or since have I so completely changed my worldview in such a short period of time. A total lifechange, one summed up very succinctly a year later by my friend and classmate Joe Mele who, upon his first son's christening, told the assembled crowd "The great thing about having a kid is that by the time I realized there was a hole in my life it was already filled."

Even with all that, though, there was no way I was cutting that embilical cord. Let one of the ponytail guys do it. I could have skipped Doogie and Dr. Mark/Marcie Bowers staring thoughtfully into the aft end of my wife following the delivery, too. We appreciate your patience with young interns, Doc, but a little sensitivity here?

If it had ended there, it would have been fine. Had I never seen the inside of the fetal intensive care unit, had Sandra Bullock and I been kicked out of the hospital that night, clueless yobbos with 12 hours of parenting experience forced to finally grow up all at once, no one would have complained. We would have laid wide-eyed on our bed, put our tiny infant to sleep in the crib we'd set up in the corner of our one and only bedroom and just stood there and stared at him for a week, until it was time for his bris.

But it didn't work out that way.

Instead, it worked out like an episode of "ER," at the height of its popularity in 1997. Two hours after the Jawa's abrupt arrival, as we were showing him off to Sandra Bullock's parents, the nurse came back into the room. She looked at these monitors they had the Jawa hooked up to and frowned. "I don't like this," she said.

"What?" I asked.

"It's probably nothing." If, at the end of her life, this nurse suddenly finds herself alive but three words short, she has only herself to blame. "It's probably nothing" were three completely wasted words.

"I'm a little concerned about his respitory rate. It should have come down by now."

Everyone in the room stopped. We looked at the monitor. It read 121. For the next five minutes, we all sat there looking at the monitor, each of us silently trying to will the number down, but it didn't budge: 121.

Fifteen minutes later, we're ushering everyone out. And they're leaving without argument. Nobody wants to be part of this. We're like the couple that comes into the ER with a small problem, only one of them ends up dead by 9:45 and George Clooney has to go tell the other one what happened. And they all start with, "It's probably nothing."

"It's probably nothing, but we may want to take him upstairs to check him out a little more."

"It's probably nothing. You'll probably be able to take him home tonight."

"It's probably nothing, but we're going to move him up to the natal ICU for some tests."

Baby ICU sucks. It's up on its own floor and everyone who's in there is thinking the same thing: "It can't be as bad as it seems." They try to make the place cheery with balloons and little signs over every baby's bed with their name and birth weight written on them, which for a lot of the kids, only reminds their parents why they're in there in the first place: "RYAN, 1 lb. 3 oz."

It was grim. All of us were avoiding eye contact, desperately looking for signs. "The nurse smiled at me; maybe it's going to be okay." "The doctor told that couple to sit down. He didn't tell us to sit down. Is that a good sign or a bad sign?"

At three a.m., some doctor we'd never before met took us aside. We'd spent the past six hours going back and forth between our birthing suite (still with the bathtub half-full and Van Morrison sitting there, waiting, on the CD player) and baby ICU, washing our hands over and over, talking to nurses and doctors who all said the same thing: "It's probably nothing, but..."

We'd go into baby ICU sit there looking at the Jawa. He was twice as big as all the other kids in there, wide awake, looking all over the place, probably already thinking about robots and theme parks. Every so often his monitor would start beeping like mad and both of us would have nervous breakdowns until a nurse came by and explained that a sensor had come detached. I'd had to leave the room at midnight, when they stuck an IV into my hours-old child's head. If we got through this, I figured, the bris would be a snap.

So this doctor with a crooked smile takes us aside. He's on duty, it's three a.m. and someone has turned all of the flourescent lights up as high as they go. We're freaked out beyond lucidity. He starts explaining, "So it may be as simple as there being fluid in his lungs that wasn't expelled due to his fast delivery," he said, "or it could be some kind of infection. We're not sure."

"Okay," I said. "Just tell me this. Are we talking 'worst-case scenario is an extra week in the hospital?' or 'worst-case scenario is something much worse'?"

"Oh," he said, suddenly realizing that he was talking to two completely freaked out people facing a situation that nothing yet in their lives had prepared them for -- and who'd been awake at a fever pitch for going on 20 hours. "Worst-case is he's here for a week. But I think it's just fluid in his lungs. If you want, we can put him on antibiotics just in case it is an infection."

Four billion pounds removed itself from my back. It was still dark, very dark, but dawn was only a few hours away.

"One more thing," said Doctor 3 a.m. "There might be some nerve damage on one side of his face. All it means is he might grow up and have a crooked smile. Like me. I've got a crooked smile." He smiled crookedly. Turns out, 13 years later, that he was wrong about that one.

I went back to the birthing suite to sleep in a chair. Sandra Bullock came with me, then awoke a few hours later and went back to baby ICU by herself. The sun was just beginning to rise when she reached the Jawa, who was lying on his back, his eyes wide open. At birth, his eyes covered about half of his face. The rest was cheeks. And they were rosy, healthy looking.

The new mother reached into the crib, picked up her baby and sat back down in a rocking chair. When she held him in her lap, she noticed that it felt like something she'd already been doing for years. She was a natural, as it turned out.

They were sitting in front of a large window, so she looked past her new baby at the world outside. For the past day, it had seemed as if that world didn't exist.

The sun was almost all the way up. It was going to be another beautiful, sunny day. Mount Rainier, visible from downtown Seattle on only the most pristine days, looked gigantic outside, framed perfectly by the baby ICU window. They sat by the window, rocking. "He's fine," she said to herself.

She told people later that she knew, at that moment, that everything was going to be okay. They'd been right all along; it turned out to be nothing.

By the time he came home, three days later, we were ready.

19 days to Bar Mitzvah: won't you let me walk you home from school?

2010-08-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

After two weeks in fractured mode, our family regrouped Sunday when we picked the Jawa up at Walton's Grizzly Lodge. For two weeks, he'd lived the 13-year-old's version of college, sleeping in a "dorm" (actually a cabin) with a bunch of kids he'd just met, responsible for his own upkeep and hygiene, his days rolling out before him with no input from either Sandra Bullock or I as to how to spend them.

It was like college, but it was also like a short stint in the military. They lived by strict time schedules. Every hour was accounted for. Weirdly, Walton's Grizzly Lodge exists in its own time zone. Upon arrival, everyone sets their watches ahead an hour. Whatever the real efficacy of such an act, it seems to me like an institutionalized version of letting the car clock run a few minutes fast so you can fool yourself into thinking you're late, and thus always be on time.

It's amazing how short a period of time it takes to snap back into "normalcy" after two weeks spent off-kilter. We had barely made it past Graeagle -- ten miles out and a town that, for the right father and child, could be a boundless source of conversation about the makeup and ultimate fate of turn-of-the-century mill towns as the U.S. gradually moved toward a service, rather than manufacturing, economy, coupled with the rise of environmentalism during the second half of the 20th century, before he started asking about his iPod and his Droid. A half-hour before Truckee, he announced, "I'm going to zone out for awhile," and disappeared under his headphones. From my perch in the driver's seat up front, I reasoned that camp was supposed to be a break from normal city life, not a complete lifestyle reconfiguration.

Our child did not grow six inches during the two weeks he was at camp. He didn't come back with a handlebar moustache or a prep-schooler's taste for filterless Lucky Strike cigarettes. All in all, he returned the same as he left, albeit dirtier and with several undetected but probable cavities, the price paid for intermittent toothbrushing while roughing it 40 miles north of Lake Tahoe.

Tomorrow, the Jawa will turn 13, the mini-event preceding the Big Event. This year, his birthday has been underplayed, giving him a year's worth of the experience anyone unfortunate enough to be born on December 24 must feel every single birthday of their life. It's too bad that 13 must be the birthday given the short shrift. It's a very important birthday, so much so that during their productive artistic careers Alex Chilton wrote a haunting ballad and Catherine Hardwicke made a terrifying (more so to parents of teenage daughters than sons) distopian movie, both entitled, simply, "Thirteen."

Tomorrow, the Jawa will open his own Facebook account. This we've anticipated for some time, since he's one of the few of his peers not to simply lie on their information page and open one before turning 13. His parents wouldn't let him, something I often cling to as evidence that indeed, I do have some control of my child and am not in fact afraid to set and abide be clear boundaries.

What I didn't know is that he's quietly been making a mental list of all the other things he will be able to do starting tomorrow. He will be able to get his own Pandora (online radio) account, he told me while on BART this morning. "You have to be 13 to get a Pandora account?" I asked.

He nodded. I pressed further: "How did you find that out?"

"I tried to open an account."

So thirteen has been looming as a big day, the moment he is handed the keys to so many of the doors forbidden to pre-teens. Suddenly, as Tom Petty might say, the future is wide open.

"How far is the Concord water park from BART?" he asked a few minutes later.

"Far."

"No, it's a 28-minute walk." He had his head buried in his Droid. The machine was contradicting me, its unlimited data access working counter to my interests and needs.

"So now you're thinking you're going to go to the water park on your own?"

"With some friends. They say it's an easy bike ride from BART."

That's another thing. At some point over the past year, the Jawa learned how to ride a bike without our assistance. That's a good thing, but it still confuses me. How and when did he acquire this skill?

I have a long personal history of anti-bike sympathies, beginning the day I scraped my hand on the driver's side mirror of that big 1950s car Billy Comerford parked in front of their house and continuing right up to last Halloween, when I spent my walk home from work dodging costumed members of the San Francisco Bike Coalition, who'd decided their monthly anarchistic middle finger of an organized downtown ride would shake up the squares all the more if they appeared not only on bikes, but in costume on bikes. And yet during weaker moments I sometimes put my feelings on hold and imagine that it must have been a lot of fun to be one of the guys in my ninth grade class who used to ride their bikes down the river trail to Newport Beach during the summer of 1980. Why did I not join them? Because there was no room in that cool and hip pack of Schwinn Beach Cruisers for a guy on a lame Huffy 10-speed.

Were the Jawa to join his friends on a warm summer day for a bike ride up the Iron Horse Trail in Concord, wearing backpacks containing their towels and sunscreen, plus a few bucks for a hot dog you eat while walking around in your swim trunks, taking just enough time to slam down a few calories before getting in line for the next water slide, well, I could see the timeless sentiment in that. He shouldn't be forced to appropriate someone else's summer memories because his aren't colorful enough.

And now that I write it down, I feel about 100 years old for realizing that I'm old enough to remember when neighborhood teenagers' first cars were gigantic black Buicks built in 1953.

He's thinking about it, that's for sure. Twelve is one thing; thirteen is another. Especially when it's followed, less than three weeks later, by a special ceremony designed to draw a sharp line between "childhood" and "adulthood."

"You know what I don't have to do after I'm Bar Mitzvahed?" my still-twelve-year-old child just proudly announced.

"What?"

"Give up the couch to Mommy. Once you're Bar Mitzvahed, you don't have to give up things anymore."

Should I tell him now, or should I let him find out for himself?

20 days to Bar Mitzvah: mysterious Minnesotans

2010-08-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

That's it. It's August 1, the deadline for RSVPs. If you have not yet sent back your attractive little response card, prepare to receive an email inquiring as to your intentions. If you're from out of town and have not yet decided whether to make the August 20-22 weekend trip to chilly San Francisco, expect your airfare costs to double in the next week.

If you are a member of the Brandeis Hillel Day School community and have not yet replied -- I saw the list, there are more than a few of you floating around out there -- I can only shrug my shoulders at you in utter confusion. Huh?

Actually, given our late August date, I can see how the invites, once prominently displayed on refrigerators and bulletin boards, may now be buried under a summer's worth of birthday party invites, dollar-off coupons and articles clipped from the local news offering showers of adulation for President Barak Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. This is San Francisco, after all.

Summer is a time of relaxed standards. After spending nine months getting Jawas out the front door by 8 a.m. five days a week, no one can be blamed for letting things slide for a few weeks during June and July. All I'm saying is that the Jawa's Bar Mitzvah is in three weeks. When you get that email, don't be offended and don't immediately hit "delete." Simply hit "reply" and write a single sentence outlining your intentions.

I estimate that each of the numerous discussions regarding seating assignments I've had over the past week with my wife has removed approximately 90 minutes from my ultimate lifespan. If you can't be convinced that a prompt reply is worth it just for the positive vibes of politeness it generates, then consider the added time taken from the end of my life as my logical-conclusion-seeking wife attempts to shove a square peg of 100% RSVPs into the round hole of reality, where about 20% of the people we've invited haven't yet responded by the "official" cut-off date.

A special note must be made for the Mystery Guest (or non-Guest), the master of brevity whose response arrived yesterday postmarked Minneapolis, Minnesota. Inside, the response card was blank, save for a check next to "cannot attend." Who is this person we will not see on August 21? Odds are good we will never know. Why will we never know? Because we didn't invite anyone who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Maybe they were on vacation?" I suggested to my rarely stuck dumb wife as she held the response card in front of her face like an unsolved Rubik's Cube.

"So they thought to take the response card with them on vacation, thought to mail it, but didn't think to write their name on it?"

"Yes."

I tried to imagine how this happened. Were they in Minnesota for business? Did they spend three days at meetings fingering the response card in their pocket, reminding themselves during breaks to remember to drop it into the next mailbox they come across? Maybe they were visiting family, maybe for a wedding, a family reunion or another Bar Mitzvah, and while being drivin by cousins across Minneapolis they suddenly remembered the card and yelled, "Stop! We just passed a mailbox! I have to mail something!"

Or maybe mystery was the plan all along. Maybe we invited someone who secretly loathes us, probably someone I've inadvertently insulted or offended over the years. Honestly, it's hard to keep track. Our little invite, showing up on their doorstep with Godzilla peeking out from inside the envelope, reminded them of what an unpleasant thorn in the side it has been knowing us. "Well, here's a new standard set for nerve," they might have thought. "There's not much I can do, but at the very least, I can mail this thing from some weird address, unsigned. Then they can think about it for awhile." Maybe we're getting exactly what we deserve.

By "we" I mean "me."

Because not only am I the more likely of us to inspire loathing, I'm also the one more likely to have disorganized friends. Many of Sandra Bullock's friends are like her: efficient, inspired, neatly assembled, positive outcome-based.

As for me, I have a very long history of RSVP-challenged friends. Eighteen years ago, legendarily, we invited an entire peer group of mine, Guys I shared a foxhole with the first year I lived in Seattle, to our wedding. Of maybe a dozen guys, only one RSVPed. Why was he so different? Because he was already married, I was told by my not-old-enough-to-yet-be-amused-by-the-foibles-of-unmarried-men wife.

So this time, I will readily admit, our sense is that most of the unsolved guest riddles involve people on my side of the aisle. Even for my group of friends, though, the Minnesota Enigma sets a new standard.

Who could it be? I rand line-by-line down the list of highlighted names: the unaccounted. There were about a half-dozen names on there I could easily picture stuffing a response card into their carry-on and remembering to drop it off at the next mailbox, only to forget to add their name. I pored over the list; who would be in Minnesota?

"It's not Kathleen and Bill," Sandra Bullock interjected. They're the only invitees with a direct Minnesota connection (which is sort of weird, given that I once worked for a magazine headquartered in Minnesota and for awhile seemed to always be surrounded by very polite people with Scandanavian roots), and they alread RSVPed weeks ago.

Who else could it be? Who was in Minneapolis a week ago?

With 20% of our guest list unaccounted for, it's probably best not to dwell for too long on the Minnesota Enigma. There is far too much else to do, starting with the Jawa's slideshow, in which 13 years of Jawa-ness will be encapsulated in seven minutes of fades, pans and dissolves, hopefully including at least one photo of every kid who's at the Bar Mitzvah because I've been to Bar Mitzvahs, and nothing can make you feel more isolated than not seeing yourself show up at least once in the slide show.

I promise I will not be consumed by the Minnesota Enigma for any longer than necessary. Nor will I spend time wondering, on an individual basis, of the status of each unresolved RSVP. Just as an FYI, my lack of RSVP skills, pre-Sandra Bullock, were legendary. If I remember right, I actually once showed up late to a wedding I was in. Payback, man; it's not pretty.

22 days to Bar Mitzvah: still wandering around

2010-07-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

Thirty-two years ago today, I was called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah. And then, the following day, I woke up, my Sears-Roebuck rust-colored corduroy suit hung neatly in my closet, and looked into the mirror: still a boy, not a man, though $3,000 dollars richer, more concerned with the pending arrival of eighth grade than the after effects of the culmination of a big event.

That day, July 30, 1978, was my older sister's 16th birthday. Still reeling from the after-effects of our 1976 move west, she accepted a Sweet Sixteen party assembled from the still-standing building blocks of my big day (the tables and chairs set up in our backyard), rather than ditch us for a more debauched teenage version of the the celebration. So our family photo albums have two events, held back-to-back in the same setting, with the same people wearing different clothes. The effect is kind of surreal.

Bar Mitzvahs were different then. At least mine was. It was 32 years ago. The funny thing is that at the time we were certain they'd become gross parodies of the Bar Mitzvahs that happened 32 years before that. My cousin's Bar Mitzvah, held the year before mine, was an orgy of excess, a real "event" held at Leonard's of Great Neck with a band and a big cake. It more closely resembled a wedding than it did the party we threw a year later. It had no theme, however; no Godzillas in the middle of the tables.

Nor did mine have a theme, other than, "We're going to try to remind ourselves that we're Jewish, even though we're out here wandering in the wilderness, swarthy outsiders gasping for air in a blonde world." Something like that. And neither party had a DJ.

You want to stop dead in your tracks? 32 years before my Bar Mitzvah was 1946. The Vietnam war had been over for five years. Woodstock was less than a decade in the rearview. Mamie Eisenhower was still alive.

And still, it seems like last week.

Right now, if you flew me via Jet Blue to Long Beach, then drove me to Orange and put me in the middle of Santiago Junior High School (now Santiago Charter Middle School) and told me to find my eighth grade locker, I could approximate its location. It was on the wall between the Social Studies wing and the wing I now understand was devoted to languages; all languages, from Mr. Peralta's Spanish class to Don Sevier's eighth grade honors English class.

And if you then asked me to find where I was sitting in Mr. Peralta's class the day Jack Larson intimidated me into letting him cheat off my quiz, only to get caught by Ben Peralta himself, who busted Jack but not me because he probably, as an experienced teacher, understood that my options were limited: cheat, or risk getting pummelled by a guy reputed to have pulled a chain on Lane McAllister, I could show you.

It was the second seat in the second row of seats on the side of the room, near the door where the MECHA club used to set up a table and sell chips and salsa after school, except instead of selling the chips and salsa, they'd stand there and actually drink the salsa straight, like they were slamming Kamikazes, out of little water cooler cups. I sat there because Chariya Koepke was sitting in the seat at the front of the row and I had a mad but brief crush on Chariya Koepke, mostly because she was exotic and a cheerleader. Had I known that her vague connection to Jack Larson (a football player as well as aspiring juvenile delingquent) would also draw him into our row, leading to a semester of terror disguised as criminal abetting, I might have set my sights lower.

Today, on a Thursday, I went downtown to do some errands. I went to get my new suit altered and to buy the Jawa a birthday present, plus the book "This Boy's Life," required reading this summer for incoming eighth-graders. Forty-five years old and I'm walking up Polk Street on a Thursday past the apartment we lived in as newlyweds, in 1992. Same scene, same guy, different clothes.

I'm not sure if I should feel blessed, sheepish or defeated by the fact that I spent yet another workday out walking around, this time at age 45. As I passed our apartment building (in which a one-bedroom unit rented in 1992 for $550 per month), I tried to imagine what I might have been doing during the various July 29ths of my life. We already know what I was doing in 1978.

Twenty years ago, July 29, 1990, I was probably riding a mountain bike near Alki Beach in West Seattle, struggling to keep up with my girlfriend at the time, who took to that sort of thing naturally, forcing me to pretend I, too, was an outdoor enthusiast. Odds are good I worked that night at The Last Laugh, serving drinks to cigarette smokers while some comedian whose name is lost to history bombed onstage. I know one thing: I had no idea I was exactly five months away from meeting my future wife.

Ten years ago, July 29, 2000, I was sitting at a desk in a very cool-looking building in Chinatown, downloading songs from Napster and pretending that being a part of an early-stage startup that makes not only widgets to add to your company homepage that will allow you to sell items but also handles fulfillment and customer service was the culmination of a lifelong dream, even as the company's founder and CEO paced nervously outside his office, just a few feet behind me.

That I was worried he'd see me dowloading music instead of working shows how clueless I was. My job performance was the last thing on his mind.

He was pacing because the company he'd founded and sunk a bunch of his own money into was already circling the drain, soon to shutter its doors, leaving both me and the CEO on the street, him pacing, me wandering aimlessly.

Me wandering aimlessly. Every so often I google that guy to see which his entrepreneurial brass ring he's grabbed at this time. I just checked. He's the CEO of a company in Utah that sounds very much like a clone of Amway. Still selling things nobody really needs, though probably still making a ton of money.

Everyone picks their own kind of aimless wandering, I guess.

24 days to Bar Mitzvah: Sid Berger and divine intervention

2010-07-27T21:41:00.001-07:00

The Lord our God must have been looking over Sandra Bullock and I tonight as we capitalized on the Jawa's two-week camp trip to shop for appropriate Bar Mitzvah clothing. No way can science explain why we were so successful.

As you may already know, we are booked for the maximum Bar Mitzvah-related appearances on the weekend of August 20-22: the Friday night service, followed by dinner, the Saturday morning service (the actual Bar Mitzvah), the Saturday night party at the Golden Gate Yacht Club and the Sunday morning brunch at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero; an impressively full weekend requiring an impressive and potentially wallet-draining wardrobe of clothes.

While Sandra Bullock's approach has been to slowly accumulate a closet full of dresses, taking time to get to know the nuances of each garment before making a final decision to commit or move on to the next potential sartorial suitor, mine has been to wait until the last minute then try to get enough stuff for the whole weekend via one blitzkrieg-style shopping trip. Her long journey ended last weekend, with the help of a visit from her de facto personal shopper, known in this space as Butter Goats. They got together and nailed down the last outfit, leaving one to be returned this week. Mine took place tonight, between 6:00 and 7:30 PM.

Seeing as how my approach to this conundrum begged for a little divine help, I can only conclude that Adonai, the God of Abraham, had a hand in tonight's unprecedented downtown run. Why else would the majority of sales clerks helping us be Jewish? This is San Francisco, not Scarsdale.

Ninety minutes. That's all it took -- the same amount of time it takes to complete two Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles. During that very brief period of time, we visited four stores, buying something at each one. Absolutely no time was wasted browsing. We went in, found what we liked, tried it on and paid. And when the final bill was tallied -- in my head, while bombing up Sutter Street toward Van Ness -- our total outlay represented approximately 65% of the ticketed price of each item. Everything we bought was on sale by more than a third.

Sure, there were short periods of uncertainty. Was it was wise to buy the first suit I trid on? Is the perfect suit now sitting on its rack at Bloomingdales, neglected? Should I have recklessly dived into the Kenneth Cole store and emerged with two pairs of shoes (one for me, one for the Jawa) when I'd imagined myself finally making the jump to a more grown-up brand? Who was I kidding? Freelance writers don't wear Ferragamo.

Appropriate clothing seemed to be looking for us, rather than the other way around. I'd never considered a seersucker jacket until one my size suddenly appeared on the sale rack at J. Crew, marked down to a third of its original price. No way do I buy that thing at full price. Even at 25% off it doesn't make it from the rack to my shoulders, especially after pairing it with a white shirt and khaki pants that make me look like William F. Buckley's cavalierly overweight Jewish son.

Elohim once again had my back. Was it a coincidence that steered us toward the dark-colored pants and light blue polo shirt (both on sale, of course, for a combined 40% off) at Nordstrom's? Or that the nice girl who helped us was from Westchester County where, when you're 13, you go to "two or three Bar Mitzvahs a month?"

No. This was a reward of some kind. You don't just go out and nail down your Bar Mitzvah garb in 90 minutes, and the whole take doesn't add up to what you'd planned to spend just on a suit, especially when you leave the house having absolutely no idea of what you're looking for. It just doesn't happen.

That it did almost overshadows the weird fact that we ran into three of my former co-workers at The Examiner while downtown. One was the guy who you'd pass in the hall and he'd either look down or just raise his eyebrows instead of saying anything, so it didn't make me feel very guilty to not say "Hi" to him here in the outside world.

If there were there any doubt of the sectarian aspect to our trip, it was erased the minute we saw Sid Berger at the Vietnamese place downstairs from Bloomingdales (where we did not go). Sid Berger, who is almost always seen wearing a tweed sport coat and a tie, was a very visible Brandeis Hillel Day School parent before his daughter graduated and moved on to Lowell High School. While I run into Sid Berger everywhere, running into him tonight was a nice piece of punctuation for our evening.

As deep as we are into preparations, we've been working in a virtual vacuum for the past several weeks. Save for The Hammer, we've been living in a gentile world since early June, which has changed our approach to our big event in subtle, barely-perceptible but very significant ways.

For nine months we were surrounded by people focused on a common experience: the B'nai Mitzvah. Then, for two months, nothing; just us and a world of civilians, eager to learn about the process and meaning of our Bar Mitzvah but without the context of knowing its meaning. And we haven't helped. Most of what they've heard from us involves the massive preparations necessary to stage this event. "It's like a wedding," we've told many people, which is an unsatisfactorily partial explanation.

Tonight, when Sid Berger said, "Mazeltov!" before leaving us to our Vietnamese noodles, the term "joyous event" suddenly flashed into my head. For almost a year now, we've had our heads down, putting everything together to make this work. And over the next 26 days, it's only going to get worse. By August 20, we'll be right where my in-laws were on September 19, 1992, except we won't be slicing luncheon meat with an industrial slicer on our kitchen table. We'll be at this fever pitch, a black hole of intensity, ten million pounds of energy compressed to a single point.

But it's a joyous event, a rite of passage, something that happens only once in a (Jewish) person's life. Once the Jawa shuts the book on his Haftorah portion, he'll join an exclusive club. Twenty years from now, he could be talking to a co-worker. One of them will mention their Bar Mitzvah, and suddenly they'll have something to talk about for hours. I get you, buddy, because I'm one of you, too. Gabba Gabba Hey.

So thank you, Sid Berger and your tweed coat and tie, because after I heard you say "Mazeltov," I thought back and remembered that the two sales clerks had also congratulated us, and maybe the reason Yahweh smiled on us tonight was because in doing all we can to create the Jawa's special day, we're doing the right thing.

And if that means 40% off at Ted Baker, man, I'm right on board.

25 days to Bar Mitzvah: back home again

2010-07-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

Last night, after four-plus hours on the road, Mark Gagan steered his Volvo XC90 off of the 280 freeway and onto the Monterey Boulevard off-ramp. His older brother Brian lounged in the front passenger's seat. In the back seat, metaphorically holding back a storage area full of luggage and golf clubs, were his other brother Kevin and me. It was closing in on eight o'clock, foggy and cool.

I was too busy thinking about how great it was going to be to sleep in my own bed, in my own bedroom, with the breeze blowing through my window, so I almost forgot to tell Mark to turn right at the bottom of the off-ramp. We almost went straight, to their parents' house, who live about a mile away from Sandra Bullock, the Jawa, Shack and me in a house they purchased for $33,000 about 40 years ago. "Turn right!" I said hurriedly. The panic was unnecessary. In front of us, also turning right, was a Subaru with two bumper stickers. One read, "END ISRAELI APARTHEID!" The other said, "PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!"

After a week away, I was home.

A few blocks away, at my house, all around was evidence of the limitless industriousness my wife is capable of when freed from the needs and wants of her husband and child. Twenty-five glass vases sat on the kitchen table. A mound of origami fish sat on the center island.

While you might think that a looming Bar Mitzvah would sap a person's energy, I am not relying on hyperbole when I say that I don't think I've ever left home for a significant amount of time and not returned to find something different about our house. This is not even considering the legendary Sunday morning, several years ago, when I awoke at 9:30 to find that she had demolished the downstairs bathroom. And she wasn't even mad.

This time, not much had changed. As we were talking about our respective weekends, though, for some reason she kept looking up toward the archway leading from the entryway to the living room. Finally, I followed her eyes to find a gigantic wall clock where before there had been only wall. "What do you think?" she asked enthusiastically.

"I think there's a big clock on the wall," I thought. "It will be nice to not have to go into the kitchen to see what time it is. How much did it cost?"

"You don't like it," she said while I was thinking this.

"No, no, I like it."

This morning at 10:45, I realized that I'd set up a meeting to see a house in Pacific Heights at 11:00, demonstrating again how little I know about the adult world. A normal, savvy adult would never have scheduled a meeting on Monday morning after being away for a week. He would have settled back into his routine first.

Not me. I schedule meetings based on how I feel at that moment, not how I might feel on the day of the meeting. So I had 15 minutes -- actually 10, after I found the car keys in my wife's big green bag, not on the hook in the kitchen -- to get to Pacific Heights. That's a 20-minute proposition on a good day.

Let me apologize in a public way to the visitor from Arizona who today endured five blocks of me looming large in the rearview mirror of his PT Cruiser. I know you were just trying to sightsee, or maybe you were looking for City Hall but weren't sure if it was on Van Ness or Polk. It's an honest error. Had it been an hour earlier, I would have been relaxed and charming, and in all probability would have patiently given you directions to whatever landmark you sought. I am not the monster you saw behind you, red with panic and rage, knifing in and out of traffic. Hopefully you watched me tailgate that little Mercedes after I passed you, sighed and said, "It's obviously not me. That guy's crazy."

I arrived at Jackson and Franklin at 11:09, parked and assumed the demeanor of someone who's been on the go all morning, instead of someone who woke up at 9:30 and read magazines in bed for an hour before checking his email, continually patting himself on the back for working the system to such a degree that he could return from a week away and sleep until 9:30 the following Monday while still making the same amount of money he'd be making were he obliged to get up at seven and ride BART downtown to an office.

"Sorry I'm late," I gasped, adding the winded effect for more legitimacy.

"No problem," said the Realtor.

If our Subaru-driving friend's Pro-terrorist bumper stickers hadn't been reminder enough, a quick trip across San Francisco in traffic while late clinched it: I was home.

And if that didn't make it clear enough, meeting the owner of the house I was looking at, a $5.8 million dollar rehab job with 6,700 square feet and an upstairs wet bar whose marble countertop came "from some post office in the Central Valley," did. He wiped out my smug self-satisfication by appearing in the huge, mahogany-paneled entryway of his $6 million house at 11:00 in the morning on a Monday wearing flowered shorts and a Champion sweatshirt, eating a bagel and spending an hour-and-a-half showing me around before finally saying, "Oh, yeah, I should get going. I've got some things I've got to take care of."

Did I mention that he was 35 and had a gloriously full head of hair? On Saturday he had about 75 people over "and the place still seemed empty." He was selling because his girlfriend had moved out. "I'm never living in a place this big again," he said.

Yes, I was home, where people who've made millions in the decade since they graduated from college are just as likely to be hanging out on a weekday, wearing flowered shorts, as self-styled rebels are to be eagerly tearing open envelopes from mail-order incendiary bumper sticker clearing houses, then lovingly affixing their "radical" message onto their vehicle before ducking back into Muddy Waters on Valencia Street for another black coffee, hold the capitalist oppression.

Just as there will be fog in July and I will find a new clock above the archway in the living room after being gone for a week. And there will be 25 glass vases on the kitchen table because there's only 25 freaking days until the Bar Mitzvah and we have a long list of things we have to do before it comes.

For example: my list is incomplete. Right now it reads --

1) Slide show (choose photos, scan photos, Jawa edits and adds music)
2) Speech
3) Candle-lighting (complete list of honorees, help the Jawa write a sentence about each, choose music for each)
4) Inform my father that he will have to say a few words when presenting the Jawa with his Tallit -- the one he wore at his Bar Mitzvah, in 1951.

Oh, hey, I guess I just did that. Dad, you need to say a few words when you present the Tallus.

Meanwhile, my wife is affixing Godzilla movie posters (in Japanese) to the glass vases and doing something with Chinese restaurant takeout boxes. It's as close as we can get to business as usual with the Jawa four hours away at camp, incommunicado except for a form postcard he sent early last week. According to it, he is currently rappelling down the face of a dam.

27 days to Bar Mitzvah: gentlemen.

2010-07-24T23:24:00.000-07:00

Right now, all over the U.S. middle-aged men like me are sending emails to each other, planning "guy weekends" involving golf. And whatever their walk of life, the emails all begin with the same word: gentlemen.

It doesn't matter who the group of guys is. Right now I'm in Lake Tahoe with about 20 other guys for four days of golf and poker. Well, for me it's four days of golf and trying to figure out what to do with myself while everyone else plays poker. One thing I know: I'm going to have to step up my evening game by this time next year. Hopefully, my present wet blanketness will be overlooked and I will be re-invited. It would suck to no longer be a gentleman.

This is not an unusual thing, this "guys weekend." As Peter Cetera once said so succinctly, everybody needs a little time away. Sandra Bullock sometimes disappears to Calistoga with a "girlfriend" or two, where they spend a weekend drinking wine and getting spa treatments. When this happens, I do not feel at all left out, as I am no less inclined to want a spa treatment than I am to want to play poker.

I am right now amidst a good cross-section of modern American men in their 40s. And I don't doubt that more than one person here this weekend has in the past gotten a spa treatment. However, I'd lay even odds that the mud bath or cucumber facial came at the request of their wives.

For today, at least, though, we are gentlemen. About a year ago, Roger Hunt forwarded me an email he was included on. A bunch of guys we went to high school with -- guys he, as a member of the football team knew and I did not -- were trying to plan a "guy's weekend away." And you guessed it: the first line of the email was, "Gentlemen."

When we arrive at the golf club, the guys in the pro shop greet us as "gentlemen." If it's not "gentlemen," it's "fellas" or "boys." It's never "guys," which is maybe a subtle admission that the only people who refer to a large group of men getting together as a "guy's weekend" are usually the women they left at home.

But gentlemen? It seems like this forced formality, to remind us that, freed from whatever yokes have been placed upon us by the lives we live 51 weekends out of the year, we should now be treated as though we were meeting for a fox hunt, followed by brandy and cigars. An event such as ours, which encourages the wearing of saddle shoes with spikes in the soles and misleadingly advertised "microfiber" golf shirts that, at least in my case, led to noticable body odor before the completing the front nine, is not so formal. And it's difficult to be a gentleman when you have B.O.

Meanwhile, only 27 days stand between now and my child's Bar Mitzvah. One of the golf courses we played this week was off the same exit on Highway 80 as Walton's Grizzly Lodge. "This is the closest I will be, geographically, to my son for the next week," I thought as we pulled off the freeway; then, like the socially retarded weirdo I am, I said it out loud. There was no response from anyone else in the car.

He's up there right now, probably asleep. I fully expect him to be changed when we pick him up next weekend. Two weeks on your own, when you're almost 13, is a big deal. When I went away to UC Irvine baseball camp at age 15, I came home a week later convinced that I was ready to go away to college right that minute. Come to think of it, I think that week was the last time I voluntarily played poker.

Is the Jawa playing poker this week? Is he water-skiing or shooting a bow-and-arrow? Has he met some 13 year-old girl camper and found that, for reasons that elude and confuse him, he wants to spend all of his time with her? How much of his experience at camp has he already decided we don't need to know about, for whatever reason? That's up to him, I guess.

Gentlemen. Someday, it's likely, my Jawa will be a middle-aged man, and you've got to wonder how closely his life then will resemble how he pictures it now. When I was thirteen, in 1978, I was positive that I would play first base for the New York Mets, even though Scott Moores had already taught me that I wasn't even good enough to play first base for Santiago Junior High School.

That year, we had to do a mock future timeline for U.S. History class. Mine, I remember, had me winning the A.L. Rookie of the Year trophy in 1988. (just to show how flexible I was about the future,I had me playing for the Boston Red Sox, wearing the same uniform number as Carl Yastrzemski.) Things didn't really pan out that way, unfortunately.

When Sandra Bullock was thirteen, she wanted to be a fish and game warden, I think. Something similar to that. Something that required being outdoors. Tellingly, she actually exceeded her childhood dream job, though the little khaki outfit would have been cute.

Once again, I hope my son takes after his mother. Right now his dream is to be a roller coaster designer. He's done all the research. He knows who the top companies are. He figures he'll first have to get a Civil Engineering degree, then a Masters. He wants to go to M.I.T., but is almost as sold on Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (so he can visit his parents, who will be living in nearby Cayucos, frequently).

It's much more realistic than figuring you'll be Carl Yastrzemski's successor, playing caroms off the Green Monster and hitting dinky home runs over the Pesky Pole in right field, which is good and not good. I was positive I'd be a big leaguer when I was thirteen, a dream almost as big as the one I had today, when I was certain I'd be able to get that seven iron onto the green and putt out for par. Neither one happened, but I hope the Jawa doesn't grow up and wonder why his dreams weren't more fantastical as a young teen.

Incidentally, when he's approaching middle age and gets that email that starts out, "Gentlemen," I hope he already knows how to golf. Otherwise I'd advise him to budget an extra $100 for the four boxes of golf balls he's going to buy to replace the dozen or so he loses on the course each day.

30 days to Bar Mitzvah: out of place

2010-07-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

What do you do when you find that you’ve become ineligible for night life? If you waltz into a bar and the bartenders ignore you because you’re 20 years older than they are, wearing a green polo shirt and shorts and do not want a Pabst Blue Ribbon? What then?

Do you will yourself to invisibility, silently staring ahead, noting that no one has bothered to tell the drummer from tonight’s band how badly his t-shirt (which ironically advertises a non-existent tavern in Ephrata, Washington) fits? Do you wonder how many people in the bar have actually been to Ephrata, Washington, home of former Oakland A’s relief pitcher Dave Heaverlo’s nationally-known summer baseball camp?

How long will you last? If you move around, maybe the motion will convince the bartenders that you are an actual person, not part of the Abraham Lincoln-themed artwork on the walls. Just five minutes ago, you were walking down the street, listening to Tom Waits on your iPod, stepping over homeless people and peering into an empty boxing gym, feeling pretty good about yourself for escaping the tourist-approved part of town. Now this.

You can tell yourself all you want that sitting in a bar on a Tuesday night in Reno, Nevada, waiting for a band with a fat drummer to play, is a pretty sad ceiling for self-styled 20-something hipsters. You can tell yourself that when you were their age, you were plumbing the depths of artistic meaning, reinventing the meaning of romance, doing things with the kind of great, dramatic feeling and soul that separates the run-of-the-mill from the truly special. You can tell yourself that 20 years from now, not a single one of them will try to enter a bar like this, having left that sort of silly adolescent whim behind the day they got that first job at the software firm.

You can pull aside one of the bartenders (blissfully involved in a vague conversation about the relative coolness of the guys working on the road outside; one of them has a Mohawk and is smoking a cigar: very cool), yank off his paperboy cap and say, “I’ve been around, buddy. You have no idea.” You can remind them that the real enemy is the mob of t-shirt-wearing tourists, crazy on buffet prime rib, pouring coins into slot machines a half-mile away, that what should really happen here is that they should form a semi-circle at your feet and listen as you explain the secrets to remaining vital way past your nightlife “sell-by” date, but none of it will matter. This is how it goes. You have your time. They have theirs. In the end, there’s nothing to do but drink about half of your beer and quietly slink out the side door.

Outside, it’s the same stretch of road that made you feel so alive a half hour before. There’s still the boxing gym, the poorly-lit Basque restaurant, the homeless encampment. The Tom Waits song is waiting for you to hit “play” on your iPod, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.

Better you should take a seat at Shooters, where the bartender looks like a tired P.J. Soles and will remove her fake ponytail to the great shock of about a dozen guys in tank tops who thought it was real. “Sometimes I wear the whole wig,” she’ll tell them. “Everyone calls me Bartender Barbie.”

Or maybe, 24 hours later, after the kind of relaxed and uniquely geeky day of driving around northern Nevada, taking pictures of ruined buildings and imagining what Nevada State Route 342 must have looked like in June, 1965, when the Charlatans drove from San Francisco to Virginia City for a six-week gig at the Red Dog Saloon that unofficially became the birth of the 1960s (None of these houses were here. That shopping center wasn’t here. This was probably a two-lane road.) that is only possible alone because you could never inflict it on your family, you decide that Reno’s nighttime scene has no openings for a bald, paunchy middle-aged Jewish guy in a polo shirt, so maybe it’s time to see a movie instead.

But not before enjoying one more bar scene, this time as a pizza-eating civilian, that involves a heavily-tattooed young mother – who, minus her three-year-old-looking kid, could easily have been slouched at a low table last night at the Lincoln Lounge.

In front of me in line to order was the usual Reno group of guys – tank-tops, weird, amateurish monochromatic tattoos, goatees, angry, “What are YOU looking at?” expressions, skateboarding shoes. One guy was wearing a t-shirt advertising the legendary Mustang Ranch. Pictured on it – naturally, for it represents the Mustang Ranch, the last bastion of the wide-open West -- was an almost-naked woman holding a rifle.

The mom noticed the guy’s shirt. “Look at the hot, hot lady,” she said to her child, using the same sing-song voice that drives many of us to distraction when it’s used to point out flowers, puppies and the ocean. “She’s so very hot!”

“What do you mean?” said her kid.

“I mean, she’s very pretty, isn’t she?”

“Why does she have a gun?”

“Well, sometimes Mommy has a gun. When Mommy goes out sometimes, she has a gun. Lots of people carry guns.”

Yup. Sometimes Mommy has a gun. And that Mustang Ranch lady? Very hot, for a cartoon. And yes, my fellow San Franciscans, Full democracy means these people deserve every bit as much of a voice in how they are governed as you do, no matter if you know better than they do what’s good for them. Very sobering, and a blaring reminder of why I think everyone who lives in my city should be forced to take at least one road trip per year.

Ten years ago, I used to measure success in a foreign environment by how many new people I met. After a few days in Reno, I’m starting to measure it by how long I can go without getting beat up. Or shot.

Who am I kidding? I looked as strange and out-of-place to the homeless guys on Fourth Street as I did to the neo-hipsters at the Lincoln Lounge. Any Wadsworth, Nevada locals who saw me get out of my rented Chrysler Sebring and walk around that ruined schoolhouse yesterday probably automatically spat out “tourist” and then went back to working on whatever broken-down car they had sitting in their front yard. And the gun-toting mother at the pizza place pegged me as an emissary from the planet white collar the moment I walked in.

The truth is that I spent most of my twenties walking around alone. Having neglected to start a career at that age, I had plenty of time and not much money. Walking around was all I could afford to do. I was alone because everyone else was at work. Most of my great emotional, romantic adventures were in my head, stuff I saw from far away while walking around alone. To the outside world I was this anonymous guy, a walk-on extra in the movie of their life, who, like everyone else I’ve always figured, was fighting wars, curing great illnesses, tilting at windmills, getting the girl and riding off in to the sunset, all in the privacy of his own mind. When you look at it that way, not much has changed since.

33 days to Bar Mitzvah: Reno Reno Reno honey

2010-07-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

Unlike Las Vegas, which wraps its entire self in a blanket of promises beyond your wildest dreams, Reno is up front about itself. The pawn shops sandwiched in between the casinos are Reno admitting that for every dream that comes true here, a thousand die undignified deaths. This is where I am until Thursday, when a Teduardo-led contingent picks me up and takes me to Lake Tahoe for three days of golf.

Actually, I prefer this kind of random and dark place over a five-star resort. I'm weird that way. Still, even I've got to be careful. Stepping over everyone's crushed dreams as you walk down the street can be challenging.

Not that the Silver Legacy, where I've hung my hat this week, claims to be anything less than four stars. It covers two city blocks and this week boasts an appearance in its main theater by Justin Beiber. How boring for Justin. He can't even go into the casino. Nor will I go into the casino, other than to watch. I don't gamble because I know I'd suck at it, and I've never had enough money to just write off a certain amount in the name of something other than food or beverage.

"Are you a gentleman who wears a size 20?" said the woman sitting on the street a block from the famous "Reno, Biggest Little City in the World" archway. "Do you wear a size 11 shoe? Together these will create an interesting look for the right man."

There was a hip-hop music and arts festival today in a part on the banks of the Truckee River. I walked through the festival on my way to see a minor league baseball game -- Reno versus the Tacoma Rainiers. Tacoma won, by the way.

Since it was about 100 degrees outside, the river was full of people swimming, floating on inner tubes and generally splashing around. Like the hip-hop festival attendees, most of them were covered with tattoos. Not cool, colorful tattoos; more like "I've been smoking crystal meth for the past 23 hours and can't sleep but can't think of anything to do" tattoos. And lots of low-hanging shorts; but not many shirts. Lots of fried blonde perms. It was a hard scene.

The scene was a little better at the baseball game. Reno built itself a new downtown stadium last year, with a bunch of overlapping bars and restaurants out beyond the left field wall. Earlier today, Sandra Bullock and I ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant there. While we were eating, two young guys came up and sat at a table near us. A few hours later, I recognized one of them playing first base for the Reno Aces. The other one was playing shortstop.

After the game, everyone who was there flooded into the bars behind left field. There was a band. Everyone under 40 in Reno who isn't worried about getting up early for work tomorrow was there. Three women with blindingly blonde hair were sitting at one of the bars doing shots. I watched as two guys who were around my age but looked to have grown up in an entirely different world tried to get friendly with them. One of the guys had slicked-back hair and a moustache. Other than me probably spending at least one night of my life trying to get friendly with women with blindingly blonde hair, our Venn diagrams overlapped not one bit. At least that's how it looked.

This morning, we dropped the Jawa off at Walton's Grizzly Lodge for two weeks of camp. It's his fourth year at Walton's. He was a little tentative, because I think he woke up this morning shocked to find that he was going to miss us. "I'm not going to see you for two weeks," he called out from the upstairs loft of our room at the Chalet View Lodge. "That's weird."

Walton's Grizzly Lodge is worth the approximately one month's mortgage payment it costs. For two weeks, he will have no iPod, no Droid, no TV. Instead, he'll swim, water ski, fish, shoot bb guns, ride skateboards and eat with scores of other kids in a big rustic dining hall. Every year since 2006 we've driven up here, some 40 miles north of Lake Tahoe, stayed in the Chalet View Lodge for a night, then traversed the narrow, winding road that has ended at Walton's Grizzly Lodge for something like 75 years.

This year, a bunch of counselors already knew the Jawa. It was pretty cool. We dropped him off and an hour later there we were, in Reno.

One of the best and worst things about traveling alone is that you're essentially invisible to everyone else, except bartenders. It's great if you want to eavesdrop on people's lives. If you can manage to conjure a voting interest in whether or not the quiet guy in Wrangler jeans will get through the ballgame double-date his girlfriend insisted on without her lecturing him on the way home about how he didn't even try to make conversation with her friend's boyfriend, time will pass very quickly. That guy had no chance, anyway. Her friend's boyfriend was a slick-talking city guy who'd recently moved to Reno from Los Angeles. The rest of them were from a Nevada town so small that their high school played eight-man football.

They were so young; this double-date could easily be lost to history. This time next year, those two girls could be back at the ballpark, double-dating with a pair of completely different guys. Still, I was rooting for the quiet guy, even though I'll never know how things turned out.

On my way back to the hotel (which doesn't have HBO. I left that bar -- and its almost all-female live band, "The Chick P's" -- hoping to get back here in time to watch "True Blood." I was here by 8:45. No HBO.), I poked my head into the most rundown-looking hotel I'd seen so far in Reno, The Santa Fe Hotel. The door swung open. About a dozen people were sitting at a bar. They all turned and looked at me. I wasn't in the mood. Maybe tomorrow.

In Las Vegas, people stay up all night. They emerge from casinos at 9 AM, shocked to find that it's morning. They walk around in packs, ready for anything since the Las Vegas bureau of tourism has been very successful in convincing people that the minute their plane lands at McCarron Airport, they have permission to essentially shed their "regular" personality and do whatever it is they think "wild" people do. It's amazing.

Here in Reno, people sleep. Sometimes in doorways.

36 days to Bar Mitzvah: mood swings

2010-07-15T20:11:00.000-07:00

Here I am, walking around thinking I remember exactly what it felt like to be 13, then being completely blindsided by the full range of emotions (and emotional distress) displayed by an almost-13-year-old Jawa during the course of a single day. Apologies to every adult who approached the 13 year-old me expecting one thing and getting another. You just never know what's coming next.

Take this evening, for example. Today was a good day, whose unexpected highlights included eating Panda Express in the middle of downtown Oakland. In the afternoon, we took Shack to the park and ran him until he practically collapsed, then sat on the pavement next to the tennis courts, waiting for him to gather enough strength to get up out of the shade and walk home. It was a day where time passed effortlessly, where enjoying the company of my child was a no-brainer, requiring no prerequisite body of knowledge or skillset; you can just be.

At five, we went to Pacifica. It was time for the Jawa's weekly swim lesson. Three years of swim lessons and the kid's practically a dolphin. A few weeks ago, I overheard him answer "swimming" when someone asked him what he was into. So I was quite surprised when, on the drive down Highway 1 into a fog bank, he said, "You know, you can stop my swim lessons whenever you want. I'd be okay with that."

Call that knockout blow #1. It wasn't exactly a mood change, but it was a hint, a reminder not to get too comfortable. Here I'd thought (and hoped) that he was going to choose something, some physical activity, by which to partially define himself. He would be a swimmer.

Instead, swimming has now begun its swerving drive down the familiar road of indifference, doomed to a slot in the Jawa's memory rather than a place in his present. It's crowded on that road, with bits and pieces of earlier efforts scattered along the median.

I made a mental note: "Swimming interest in danger."

"Those swimming skills will come in handy when you're surfing," I volunteered.

"I already know how to swim well enough to surf."

You see what I was doing there? Instead of lasering in on the slow death of interest in swimming, I went forward toward surfing, this summer's great new passion, instead. All summer he's been talking about surfing, so I'll jump on board with surfing, maybe also subtley working a swimming angle in there as well.

For the short-term, it didn't matter. It was 4:58 and his swim lesson began at five. No time for second-guessing. We pulled into the parking lot and leaped out of the car, pausing for a moment to wordlessly high-five each other as he went into Anderson's and I went into 24-Hour Fitness.

I think, though he would be loathe to admit it, he really likes swimming. He always comes out of there in a good mood. Which is why I was so surprised to feel the temperature in the car drop about 40 degrees without any warning twenty minutes later, after we picked up Sandra Bullock at work.

We do this every Thursday. He swims, I sweat, Sandra Bullock plays basketball at the "GenenGym," one of her employers' many little reminder to the rest of us that not every large corporation treats its workers like chattel. We pick her up and drive to La Corneta for burritos.

He was normal when she got in the car. At some point, though, I think one of us asked the wrong question. Something along the lines of "How was your day," but phrased wrong, touching on an incident or idea that reminded him of something he'd tried to forget, plunging him into sudden reticence. Without warning, his answers, usually expressed in his trademark run-on sentences, became economical and monosyllabic. Animated and engaged only a few minutes before, his voice was now dulled and monotonous.

"Is there something wrong?" I eventually asked, but not before I, not entirely realizing that the temperature inside the car had cooled, tried to good-naturedly make fun of his obsession with his new phone. His response to that had been, "Great. Sarcasm."

So finally, I asked, tentatively. "What's wrong?"

Nothing.

Something was wrong. And lucky for everyone else on the road, our windows were rolled up, so they couldn't hear my son's low opinion of them. "Don't let that guy in, Dad," he spat as a dented Toyota -- the kind of car you let do whatever it wants because you're pretty certain that if you don't, its driver will get out and shoot you in the face -- edged in front of us in the tangle of cars next to the BART station.

Finally, after Sandra Bullock returned from picking up our La Corneta stash, he told us that he'd "pictured something," then described a vision so clearly self-loathing, so horrible in its teenage angst and so detailed that it took us both aback for a moment. From our 45-year-old perch, we could see that it was the basic teenage "I'm a bad person" tableau, but that didn't make it any less deflating for the Jawa held prisoner by its image.

"You're not a bad person," Sandra Bullock said. And it was funny, because for the past couple of weeks he's been radically not a bad person. Part of it, he told me this morning, I think by accident, was that I had told him a month ago that I would not under any circumstances take a misbehaving, disrespectful child to a water park this summer. "It's been a month, Dad," he said. "Do you think we can go to a water park after I get back from camp?" Later, he rescinded. "No, no, I didn't even think about the water park thing until today."

His efforts at being easy to get along with, to not take our parental bait, to sit quietly and not complain while I subjected him to reruns of the Ken Burns "Baseball" documentary on PBS instead of a "never before seen" episode of "Mythbusters" have been very noticeable. At times, I can see him struggle, then tamp down his temper and move forward, almost like he's got visible cartoon thought balloons hovering over his head. It's admirable. And it must make suddenly getting a "you suck" message from your subconscious even more frustrating and strange.

By the time we got home, he was teetering on the edge of anarchy. Without asking, he snapped on the TV and turned to Cartoon Network, offering only grunts in response to questions. Then, I swear, less than ten minutes later, the little kids in the neighborhood knocked on our door, sprinkled fairy dust at his feet and immediately blew his Joe Btfsplk storm cloud harmlessly out to sea. He spent the next hour showing the six-year-old down the street how to operate a fishing pole.

Now he's watching a Godzilla movie, pointing out the cheap special effects, eating a popsicle, with his Lego robot-building materials spread out on the floor. I'd love to go in there and get him to put the Legos away, but I don't dare. And if you're shaking your head from side-to-side right now and smiling knowingly then you have way more experience as the parent of a just-about-teen than I do.

And so we beat on, boats against the current, and all that stuff. He gets bigger and I get older and all the memories in the world still leave little gaps in your skill set.

37 days to Bar Mitzvah: whence, manhood?

2010-07-14T19:04:00.001-07:00

According to Jewish tradition, your Bar or Bat Mitzvah is supposed to function as your official arrival at adulthood. Like many other religions, we have a formal ceremony to mark the end of childhood, although in my case, I suppose, the July 29, 1978 Bar Mitzvah was merely confirmation of a childhood that ended somewhere in the air between Scranton, Pennsylvania and Anaheim, California on March 21, 1976.

If I knew the actual theological thinking behind it, I could tell you all of the things Bar and Bat Mitzvahs are supposed to take on as evidence of their leap to the world of adults. It involves all sorts of things that are now unthinkable, because they were written down during biblical times, when people lived to be 40 and had their own flocks and harems by 16. I cannot imagine the Jawa tending to his own flock right now, unless that flock was comprised entirely by robots he'd programmed, or perhaps scaled-down Japanese monsters like Mecha Godzilla and Mothra.

And if I wanted to be honest, I'd have to admit that while my childhood ended on March 21, 1976, my adulthood really didn't start until I met Sandra Bullock, 14 years later. In-between there was this period of gray area, where the only way I knew to be an adult was to imitate my dad (which explains why my first teenage concert was Simon & Garfunkel) or pretend to be involved in very serious, adult-style romantic relationships. Everything else, all that boring stuff like assuming responsibility and being accountable for your actions I buried under an attractive pile of adult-like tics and poses.

In the end, what I had thought was acting like an adult was actually acting like that guy you date for two months until summer ends and you have to go back to school. I was in a constant loop, playing out the opening scenes of "Grease," kissing Sandy goodbye on the beach and wondering why, the next time I saw her, she was with some guy in a polo shirt while I sulked in the corner in my cool biker jacket.

Sandra Bullock must have decided that there was an adult at the end of that long, dark tunnel, which is pretty funny, since the first time she drove me home from the bar, one snowy late December 1990 night, I tried to impress her by showing her my motorcycle. Having just schooled me on the ins and outs of a 401(k) from the driver's seat of her new Toyota Corolla, her response was to smile politely and wait a few months before telling me how much motorcycles don't impress her.

So now we expect the Jawa to become an adult the minute he slings the tallit over his shoulders and wraps up the last lines of his haftorah? Not likely. If anything, he's lagging a bit behind his peers, maturity-wise, though to be fair, he's also lagging somewhere between six months and a year behind them, age-wise.

As of now, a little more than a month before his official adulthood date, the Jawa is at his best around little kids, making him an adult's dream (provided you're not his father and would rather not watch "Total Drama Island" at 9:00 on a Tuesday), a little kid's idol and slightly apart from the kids he really wants to hang around with -- his peers.

We never saw it coming. Or maybe Sandra Bullock did, but I didn't. Maybe it's an only child thing, though I've always been told that the Curse of the Only Child would have the exact opposite effect -- that the child in question wouldn't want to waste his time with a bunch of people aiming to invade his space, play with his stuff and leave him a mess to clean up.

Not our Jawa. All week I've been dropping him each morning at Tech Know How camp, a week-long day camp designed around Lego's NXT series, which use computer programming to make Legos function as robots.

As a side note, the camp is held at Brandeis Hillel Day School, in the old fifth grade classroom. It is terribly overshadowed by the other camp hq'ed at BHDS, Camp Galileo. Camp Galileo, as far as I can tell, targets little kids -- probably fourth or fifth grade at the oldest -- by enticing them with as over-the-top a display of counselor enthusiasm it can manage. How disturbing is it to roll up to Brandeis Hillel Day School, expecting to be greeted by Felicks and Anatoly, the omnipresent Russian security guards rumored to be registered with the Politburo as deadly weapons, and Robert, the long-suffering, sardonic school facilities guy, only to find in their place a lineup of college-age boys and girls, all wearing funny hats and dancing in place? To call it inappropriate is too kind.

And then to roll past them, privately miffed that they would feel it necessary to point you in the right direction because you come here 180-plus days a year already, only to find poor Felicks, clad in casualwear instead of his usual sportcoat and slacks, and Robert, trying in vain to restore order to Parking Lot Amateur Hour, while some 25-year-old kid stands in the middle of main lot, idly circling his arms around between dance steps? To enter Camp Galileo, you walk through what, during the school year, is a sober gray steel gate. This week, it is decorated with streamers and a sign reading, "Camp Galileo Amusement Park!"

The sidewalk chalk arrows pointing you in the right direction are probably necessary, as it is difficult to hear anything over the high-decibel dance music further desecrating the school.

It's awful. The Jawa, for his part, refuses to walk through the "Camp Galileo Amusement Park" gate. Instead, we ring the buzzer and walk through the school lobby, soaking up a few seconds of sanity before re-entering the chaos on the other side. The Tech Know How counselors, by way of great contrast, are neither singing nor dancing nor wearing funny hats. A few are wearing funny glasses, but I don't think they're funny on purpose.

Today, the Jawa said, the counselors told him he should come back next year as a Counselor-in-Training. "There's not much we can teach him," they told me when I arrived today for pickup. "He's pretty much on his own." The next oldest kid in the class in 11.

By the time I got there, he was sitting at a computer, surrounded by little kids -- in his preferred element, dishing out advice, being the expert. Not yet an actual "man," but "The Man," at least in Tech Know How camp.

As we navigate this difficult and eye-opening summer, that's going to have to be good enough. I don't expect him to suddenly stop leaving all his clothes all over the floor, inside-out, or to wake up tomorrow and realize that Disneyworld vacations cost more money than most people allot for yearly discretionary income. No, I expect him to continue digging his heels in whenever the opportunity to demonstrate newfound independence presents itself, and I expect him to continue to think roller coasters are an excellent conversation topic.

That's not going to change on August 21. Okay, maybe a little. Your Bar Mitzvah's a pretty big event. Even a stubborn Jawa would have trouble going through it completely unchanged.

38 days to Bar Mitzvah: technology triumphs again

2010-07-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

Why does it take an hour to buy a new phone? And once your almost-teenage child has a Droid, does punishing by restriction from electronics include taking away his phone?

According to him, no. "It's my phooonnne," he said as our quick trip to Verizon stretched to an hour.

"I'm not sure about that," I said.

Around here, it was starting to look like an act of God would be required before I'd break down and buy a new phone. My BlackBerry, which I'd hated from the outset, was sputtering toward death. Once loathed by me for its smug efficiency and message of self-importance, it now sought drawn-out revenge by only working intermittently. Without warning, several of the keys on its microscopic QWERTY keyboard would stop working, and they'd do it in particularly cruel and absurd fashion.

It became tempermental. Sometimes it would decide that the center ball cursor thing was no longer the button used to open emails. Instead, I eventually learned, emails would now be opened by pressing the arrow that normally returns you to the previous screen.

More annoyingly, it would randomly decide to replace typed letters with bizarre combinations of alternate ones. "N" became "RF;" "C" was now "AF." The "back" key would not only not erase a mistake, it would enter "WS" instead. "WS" may seem innocent enough, until you are frantically trying to go back a space and your mounting frustration makes you fill the entire screen with "WS."

The Jawa in particular was disgusted by my refusal to buy a new phone. His agenda barely hidden, he went on a campaign to convince me to ditch Verizon altogether and get an iPhone. "Why do I need an iPhone?" I'd ask.

"You can get all these great apps!"

"I don't need any apps. I just talk on the phone and read emails."

At that point, steam would begin to come out of his ears. He wanted me to get a new phone because, using infallible kid logic, he assumed that a new phone for me meant a new phone for him.

Sandra Bullock, though barely invested in the whole thing, also wanted me to get a new phone. To her, it seemed that I would rather curse the darkness than reach for the light switch. It wasn't that; I wouldn't pull the trigger because I knew what it would mean: ninety minutes standing around the Verizon store while some goateed salesguy secretly added charges in five dollar increments to my final bill. And I liked the ring tone the Jawa downloaded for me: LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk is Playing at My House.” I never missed a call.

Yesterday, I lost my BlackBerry. Somewhere between the car and the house, it vanished. In doing so, it followed a great tradition begun many years ago by my house keys and continued throughout the ensuing decades by several pairs of sunglasses, a few wallets and a shocking number of baseball caps.

Honestly, I didn't look too hard for it. I figured if it didn't turn up today, I'd go out and finally get a new phone. I spent more energy looking for the car keys when they disappeared as I was heading out to look for houses to write about. For a frantic ten minutes, I retraced my steps at least 25 times; no keys. They were in the little plate thing on my dresser, pretending that I'd put them there for the night.

With a sweating and unshowered (and frankly, needing a little father-son talk about the added personal hygeine responsiblities one assumes when they enter their teens) Jawa, it was with trepidation that I entered the Verizon store in Daly City, ready for the worst.

One hour later, we walked out of the Verizon store almost $500 lighter. The condition was temporary, we were told. As soon as Daniel, our "Retail Sales Representative," mailed in our mail-in rebates, we'd get back $250.

Why do they bother with this "mail-in rebate" nonsense? Buying a phone has turned into buying a car. Why can't they just tell me the Droid costs $75, instead of first quoting me $569, then displaying their magnanimity by assembling this melange of deals -- probably put together with only you in mind -- that will reduce the price to something that makes sense. In our case, we got the special Droid "buy one get one free" deal, plus a $200 mail-in rebate, plus a $100 price reduction whose origins remain mysterious.

On top of that, we got a thing to plug into my USB port that will allow me to have wi-fi access anywhere. That was $69.99... minus the $50 mail-in rebate and another $20 knocked off by Daniel, just between him and me, and the two-year service contract I signed. So it was free, sort of.

Perhaps there was a time when an almost-teenaged boy's face would light up at the mention of a new dirt bike or baseball glove. Perhaps that boy exists somewhere in the world, and he has already begun X'ing out days on a calendar, counting down to his 16th birthday when he gets his license. That boy does not live in our house.

Our boy could barely contain himself at the notion of getting a Driod. The iPhone? Quickly forgotten. Shoved aside with a cursory, "This is so much better than an iPhone," and a few disparaging comments about antenna placement.

"Let me know if there's anything else, any other questions," Daniel finally told us by way of goodbye. He'd already showed us how your Driod can respond to voice commands. "FIND 123 MARKET STREET," he said to my Droid. A few seconds later, a map popped up. "FIND PIZZA," he said next, holding my new phone up to show me a long list of area pizzerias.

"I think we've got it," I said. By now, I just wanted to get out of there. While I knew I'd be getting about half of what we spent back, I still felt like I'd dropped a ton of dough, signed my life away and been manipulated, despite Daniel's innnocent and low-key approach to sales. If I'd come home to find they'd rifled through my wallet and taken the $12 in my pocket, I wouldn't have been surprised.

But we had Droids, the Jawa and I, and we walked out into the sunlight, heads down, trying to figure out how our new phones worked.

"I can't get mine to unlock," I said.

"Push the button on the top." I pushed the button on the top. Nothing.

"Go back inside and ask them how it works. I'm too embarassed," I said, and God bless the tech generation as the Jawa marched back into Verizon wireless, full of curiosity and the total absence of fear, and figured out how to unlock my phone. You have to push the button and let go quickly. Otherwise, it turns itself off.

Three hours have passed since we returned home with our smart little treasures. The Jawa has already programmed a bunch of stuff into his. Me? I've been typing, old school-style.

39 days to Bar Mitzvah: boolian logic

2010-07-12T17:23:00.001-07:00

I swear everything he does is a mystery to me these days. All I know is that you can't write stories about the performance of the real estate market in Woodside, California, when you have a bored Jawa sitting a few feet away, sending unspoken death rays you way in the hopes that you'll be suddenly stricken with stomach cramps or a migraine, whatever it would take to get you off of your laptop, leaving it free for his use.

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that his little tiny laptop -- the one we bought last spring to solve his poor handwriting dilemma, which I thought was pretty only-child over-the-top, only to find that (according to my child) a majority of his classmates had been using netbooks in class for months -- will not accept/run the software required to make certain Legos turn into robots. I may be simplifying. Or missing something entirely.

However much I've shanked my understanding of what he's doing down there, whatever it is made him so angry about an hour ago that he was on the verge of tears. Here's a quick definition of an almost-13-year-old: when they get frustrated, they don't know whether to cry or unleash a string of profanities. So what you get is, "FFFuuuudgggee! (sob)." A more patient parent would walk over and say, brightly, "Don't let that computer get you down! Lets work on this together!"

Thank you, Ned Flanders. But I am not this patient, saintly parent. By now you should all be very aware of that. I am the parent sitting at the kitchen table, dreaming of one day having a home office, trying to glean something interesting from several columns of statistics regarding the real estate market in Woodside, California. So instead of going all Flanders, I just look up, stop typing and say, succinctly, "Look, if that thing is going to make you that mad, then you should just stop using it."

And in return I expect what, logic? "You know, you're right, Dad." Somewhere between the age of 12 and 45 I managed to forget how obnoxious and unhelpful it is to respond to a bored child with "You say you're bored? Well, why don't you go clean up your room?" Or something like that.

Small books were thrown about the room. Shack went and hid in the corner. Sarcasm was employed, as were attempted guilt trips. "I could get this to work on your computer. It would only take a second."

Why the program won't work on the little computer (or the massively powerful desktop hidden under several layers of clothing in his bedroom) but would work on mine, which uses the EXACT SAME (deeply flawed) OPERATING SYSTEM remained as mysterious to me as Jack Nicholson's continued popularity with women.

This was an hour ago, an eternity in teen time. Thirty minutes ago, he brightened up. "I figured out how to do this," he said. "I can use a different programming language." And then, quoting from the how-to page for the different programming language, he mumbled something about boolians.

The kid tells me today that he'd really like to get one of those "build your first computer" kits, even though he is at a disadvantage when compared to his cousin and a friend at school. Their fathers are "into technology," he explained.

"They also probably have more room to build a computer," I countered, using all of the communicative savvy I have had the time to develop while those other fathers were helping their sons develop a love of technology.

This is a new issue, but one that has become very important -- at least to me -- over the past few months. After nine years in the same 1,100 square-foot (1,500 counting the unwarranted space downstairs), our home is too small to hold a Type-A person, a freelancer, a teenaged Jawa, a small but dense dog and a hamster. Every night, Sandra Bullock is faced with a decision: to eat at the table, and thus force me to remove the stuff I've spread out there during the day, which I do with as little grace as possible, since it's a big pain in the neck to have to set up my stuff day after day, or to acquiesce and eat dinner in front of the TV.

What if our house had two more rooms -- one would be an office, where I could go and not have to pretend I'm listening to people who start conversations with me when I'm deeply committed to making Woodside's real estate market a readable topic. Another would be a room for the Jawa, where he could build massive Lego projects, learn boolian logic and, yes, assemble a home computer.

And maybe a guest room, because Sandra Bullock has always wanted a "dedicated guest room."

We are as likely to get these things as we are to someday own a $3 million beachfront home in Cayucos. Instead, I think I will bring my laptop and various gridded notebooks to the Bar Mitzvah, since its cost is essentially the same as adding three rooms to our house. The living room floor is a fine place to apply boolian logic to Legos. Maybe he can build a Lego robot that knows carpentry.

Sandra Bullock just leaned over me and said, "Are you done with what you have to do? I mean, are you going to need to work at the table more? Because if you're done, you can put your stuff away and set the table." And then, wrongly assuming that my less-than-pleased response had something to do with me not wanting to set the table: "Or you can just put it away and I can set the table."

After that, she went back to the kitchen, where I caught her hyper-intensely focused, carefully wrapping what looks like flowered wallpaper around a tin can.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm trying to see if this double stick tape will work better than the single-sided tape." For the candles, you know. Turns out there are four kinds of Japanese candles, four candles per table for a total of 100 candles. All of them will be wrapped in Japanese wallpaper stuff. Remember this when you're sitting at a table, completely focused on trying to make conversation with the strangers sitting across from you, and your eyes settle on the little candle carefully placed next to the centerpiece.

It's the little things, you know.

40 days to Bar Mitzvah: tick tick tick tick

2010-07-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

Plenty of things can happen in 40 days. The moon will complete 1.4 cycles. I could grow a quite a beard. A home could close escrow.

According to Emcee A.J. Rogers, sent to our home this morning by his bosses at Denon & Doyle, the next forty days could see the release of many new, exciting, danceable songs, so don't make your 25-song "favorites" list until much closer to the 21st.

Two nights ago, as we wrapped up our vacation by sitting, completely ignored by the waitstaff at the Sea Shanty (contrasting explanations as to why: Me: we seated ourselves instead of waiting, so our karma bill has come due; the Jawa: everyone's out to get us; Sandra Bullock: What do you mean we're being ignored? Stop being so negative), it dawned on me that we were only 42 days to Bar Mitzvah. Fully aware that Sandra Bullock had woken up early the day before and created a new "Bar Mitzvah To-Do" list, I knew she'd freak out if she knew it was only 42 days away; so naturally, I had to say it: "Did you know that the Bar Mitzvah is in 42 days?"

The table froze. Temporarily forgotten was the terrible service we were getting at the Sea Shanty. "Forty-two days?" she said.

"Yes."

Do you want to know how to guarantee that you'll spend the entire four-hour drive from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco talking about seating arrangements? Tell you wife there're only 42 days until your Bar Mitzvah.

In 40 days, Noah managed to save several species of living being, cherry-picking the ones he like and inviting them onto his ark, where they'd stay for the duration of the great flood, God's beatdown on man. My belief in the validity of this story always runs into this: why'd he invite the mosquitoes?

Forty days ago, I posted in this blog while sitting in my cubicle, my back facing the newsroom, at The Examiner. At the time, I had no idea whether I'd be employed, freelancing or out on my tail 40 days later. Over the next 40 days, I'll probably go through two new sets of contact lenses.

Forty days is not enough time to lost a bunch of weight.

This morning, on my way out the door to look at houses, I grabbed my golf clubs from their usual spot. Since we have no "spare" rooms or storage space, their ad hoc roost is downstairs, on a chair next to the bed in our "guest alcove." When I came home a few hours later and went to return my sticks to their home, I found that someone had put two boxes of Bar Mitzvah-related stuff on the chair in their place. This left the grand total of downstairs flat surfaces not covered with boxes containing Bar Mitzvah stuff at three. I had to lean my clubs against the wall.

If I were to cut myself this week, the wound would still be healing on August 21. There's not even enough time left between us and the Bar Mitzvah for cuts to heal. The shirt I am wearing today? I might not wear it again before the Bar Mitzvah. The Jawa doesn't know it, but he might be seeing this blue polo shirt through the eyes of a child for the last time. The next time, he will be a man.

Not enough of a man for his parents to enjoy some time in the bar at the Schooner on a Friday night without freaking out because he won't answer his phone, though. Here we are on the last night of our vacation, thinking, "This town has a population of 2,000. Surely it is safe enough for the Jawa to go off on his own, buy some candy and play video games while we're dodging super-tan old guys in tank tops and flip-flops and looking out at the sunset at the Schooner."

This plan lasted the entire time it took us to walk from the candy store, where we'd spied a solo Jawa after our poor reception at the Sea Shanty, to the Schooner, three blocks away. By then I'd already concocted a scenario in which the Jawa is scooped up by some thrillseeking junkie surfers and shoved into the trunk of their 1964 Chevy Impala. Even as we ascend the stairs to the Schooner's outdoor deck, I am imagining my child's kidnappers tearing down Highway 1, our precious cargo terrified, banging on the inside of the trunk, even though no one can hear him over the hip-hop music. Why would they take him? Because we'd left him alone.

Naturally, you buy your child a phone for just this type of situation, or, as in the case of last night, to remind him to do his dishes after eating macaroni and cheese, but the kid never picks up. Three phone calls later, I'm sucking down my beer like Joey Chestnutt in front of a pyramid of hot dogs while simulataneously trying to continue to resemble a relaxed person so my wife won't pick up the vibe.

Too late. My phone suddenly rang once, then stopped. The Jawa's name popped up on my screen. It had to be his kidnappers. "Lets go," I said to Sandra Bullock.

I remember a situation like this several years ago, at the Brandeis Hillel Day School annual walk-a-thon. That time, at least five minutes passed while we frantically looked for our child who, we eventually found, was sitting in the cab of Charley Stern's vintage flatbed truck, along with a bunch of his friends.

For five minutes, though I tried to look cool, lest I end up to be that idiot who overreacted because his kid was out of his sight for 30 seconds, I was an a blind panic. "We're going to be those people," I thought, "whose kid disappeared during a school event."

Cayucos being a very small town, we had only a minute or so of utter hopelessness before reaching the video arcade, where the Jawa was busily playing that game where you try to snag a tiny bag of M & M's with a robotic arm.

"Why didn't you answer your phone!" we semi-shouted at him in unison.

"Huh? Oh, I don't get reception here. My phone sucks."

Forty days. That's one haircut away for the Jawa -- his last as a child, according to Jewish tradition. Over the next 40 days, if he's diligent, he'll change his hamster's bedding at least three times. Because he leaves for two weeks of camp on Saturday and we're going to Stinson Beach the weekend before the Bar Mitzvah, he has only one more weekend to hang out around the house before his Bar Mitzvah.

It also means I'll be posting a maximum of 40 more times. Then comes the difficult part.

44 days to Bar Mitzvah: dream adjustment

2010-07-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

I could live here.

Sandra Bullock decided that for herself last year. The Jawa (then 11 years old) and I came upon her one morning when she'd finished walking Shack. She was strolling past the small playground that's across the street from our hotel, the Cayucos Beach Inn. Shack was half-covered with sand and ocean water, smiling from ear to ear. In true Sandra Bullock fashion, she saw us, waved and, as she approached us, said, simply, "I want to retire here."

Sandra Bullock's plan for "retirement" depended on a few slightly uncertain factors -- primarily, the idea that I would, within the next decade, shed a lifetime of underacheiving to emerge as one of the most well-regarded (and well-compensated) authors of the 21st century.

I quickly got on board. Who doesn't love an idea predicated on their own potential success? "Sure," I told her Tuesday night, while we sat at the cramped second-story bar of Schooner's Wharf, looking out over the beach. "I'll be like Stephen King -- this famous guy living undercover in some small town. Esquire magazine will have to come here to interview me."

Nothing that has happened so far in my life suggests that this is a likely scenario, but where would we be without our dreams? Even if they're likely to dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Privately, I adjusted the picture to include a world where she continues to carry the burden of success for both of us, this seeming, based on past performance, the more likely outcome. Were we to sell our house -- someday, long after the market leaves its present doldrums behind -- we could maybe buy a modest home here. Not the incredible beachfront place she wants, but we'd be in town.

We first came to Cayucos, twenty miles northwest of San Luis Obispo, in 1991. We were 26 years old and new enough to each other that staying in a run-down room at the Dolphin Inn seemed romantic. Seventeen years later, our limited vacation budget brought us back to Cayucos and the Dolphin Inn, where we could approximate a beach vacation for a pittance. Four days at the Dolphin Inn cured us of any romantic notions about poverty that may have remained, but we were hooked on the town. We came back last year but did not stay at the Dolphin Inn.

This year, with an expanded budget but Bar Mitzvah-generated time limitations, we came back.

If I could get inside my wife's head, I'm pretty sure that whatever I'd find would be arranged in an orderly, intuitive fashion. Except for the part that controls spelling; that department would be a mess.

But over in the decision-making areas, everything would make perfect sense. Ideas would be neatly lined up, ready to take their turns in the spotlight. Clear evidence to support each decision would be easily accessible, stored away in a modern, accessible file system. There would be nothing, no scraps of plans or inspiration on the floor, lying around, unusable. It would be an efficient, user-friendly place.

This is why she appeared that one day last year and announced that she would like to retire here, in Cayucos, California, population 2,000. It simply added up.

Over here in my cabeza, things are not so copacetic. As anyone who's spoken to me more than once can attest, the place is a mess. Drawers are left open; ideas both great and ridiculous lie around, unused, inaccessible. The decision room is staffed by a bunch of incompetents. There are no logical practices in there; the staff simply grabs whatever flies by and throws it against a wall, hoping it will stick.

So you'll forgive me if my moments of clarity appear unannounced, their arrival the result of a seemingly unrelated, unimportant series of events.

I was driving up Highway 1 early last night, coming back from Morro Bay after spending two hours doing laundry. You go away for a week, you have to stop in the middle and do laundry. This is no problem for me. I don't mind doing laundry in strange places. It's sort of exotic. Sharing a run-down laundromat with two giant white beard guys, a couple of migrant workers, a nervous lady and her daughter and some poor guy carting around a cylinder of oxygen is okay with me. It's better, actually, than only seeing other people on vacation.

I guess there's a feeling of accomplishment that I get from completing ordinary tasks in unusual places. If memory serves, it was while doing laundry alone that I decided I wanted to live in Manhattan. That one is still (and may always be) pending, but you get the picture.

So it should come as no surprise that it was while driving back from doing laundry, clocking about 55 as the evening clouds began to roll in, that I committed to my wife's idea. Whether or not I die famous, that is.

Everyone goes on vacation and imagines themselves throwing their cell phones in the ocean, Corona Beer commercial-style. But really, what would Cancun be like when you run out of Benadryl or the first time it rains? Would you still want to chuck it all when you realized you wouldn't be going out for margaritas every night?

That's why I get these inspirations while doing laundry. Maybe it does make a kind of twisted, completely erratic sense. As I neared the Cayucos exit, I tried to picture myself here on a cold November, the town empty and quiet, the bright lights of the nearest city a 20-mile drive through the rain away.

I was listening to this great power pop song I'd recently dug up on iTunes. How would that play at 60 years old? Would I still be spending hours finding new songs on iTunes? Would I be doing it from my Cayucos living room, space-age laptop opened on the coffee table, everything slightly damp from living so close to the beach? Would I be alone, waiting for Sandra Bullock to come home from the retail job she would get to avoid going insane from lack of things to do?

Would we wake up, ride our bikes into town, sit at the Rogue Wave Cafe and read the San Francisco Chronicle, still keeping tabs on our old hometown? Would we drive into San Luis Obispo on Thursday nights for the Farmer's Market, or would that soon bore us?

Last night, I lay in bed listening to the sea lions. Today, the Jawa promises he'll teach me how to surf. One week of surf camp and he's a self-proclaimed expert. That's what happens when you're thirteen, I guess.

On Saturday, the sun will set on this year's beach vacation. Next year, though we'll be hamstrung by the Jawa's several-years-in-the-making demand for a Disneyworld trip, we'll carve out a few days to come down here, and maybe our now-passing interest in local real estate will ramp up just a bit, almost imperceptibly. I have a feeling that each year brings us closer to the time we drive down here, unpack and just stay.

Right after we close escrow on that place we bought with the advance from my second book.

48 days to Bar Mitzvah: springsteen lost

2010-07-04T18:29:00.000-07:00

It's almost nine and I'm running for my life. Actually, I'm not running for my life, I'm running for the bathroom. Not because I really have to go; more because I'm freezing. I'm running to keep warm.

I'm also running because I have the amount of time it takes to stand in line and ride the log ride, a five-ticket attraction at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, to copmlete my task. I have to get to the bathroom, do my business and return before the Jawa gets off the ride.

With him is some random little kid he met while destroying Sandra Bullock's digestive tract on the Tornado ten minutes ago. The kid can't be older than seven, but he's brimming with confidence. Completely elated at finding someone besides his parents to accompany him on rides, he's attached himself to the Jawa.

In an hour, I'll be standing next to our car in the dark, parked at the end of a pier, marveling at two things: first, I'll be continuing to be amazed that there are cars parked here on a pier, sticking out into the ocean. Most piers have wood slats. This one has asphalt and is lined with the type of restaurants that cater to tourists by pretending they cater to locals.

Second, I'll be amazed that I managed to make it all the way to the car before reaching into my pocket and finding no keys. Having exhausted my meager 15 ride tickets (I planned it that way) by riding the Double-Shot, the weird and surreal Mine Ride and the Giant Dipper, I was elected to cut out early and get the car while Sandra Bullock and the Jawa -- minus the random little kid, who was dismissed minutes before with a callous "I'm going to hang out with my family now -- rode one more roller coaster.

They were under great pressure to do this, since they'd each spent $30 on unlimited ride wristbands. On the drive back to our terrible (and terribly disappointing) hotel in Capitola, the Jawa would calculate the value of the wristbands. "You saved five dollars," he told his mother. "I saved $26."

I didn't really mind being locked out of the car. S. Bullock and the Jawa were already on their way, and they had the keys.

I liked the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk better at a distance, anyway. From here, several hundred feet away, across a body of water, the twinkling ferris wheel lights and distant rumble of a thousand shouts of joy were something out of Springsteen, circa "Greetings From Asbury Park." I don't know if anyone was chasing the factory girls underneath the boardwalk, but from here it was difficult to see why Bruce should decide that, for him, this boardwalk life was through.

In reality, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is perhaps the most remarkable combination of things I don't like since the time, fourteen years ago, that I was forced to spend a night at a Bed & Breakfast in Amherst, Massachusetts. "Wow," I thought, Sandra Bullock's large green bag slung over my arm as I waited for them to ride some spinning, octopus-looking thing, "Carnival rides, bad food and hordes of scary, hard-looking people. So many great things in once place."

From the pier, you could imagine teenagers creating life-lasting memories, like I once tried twenty-four years ago, when I brought my college girlfriend here. I think I'd expected to meet Bruce Springsteen that time, too.

It's 9:30 and we're sitting at a table, eating the worst vegetarian chow mein any of us has ever tasted. We bought it primarily to force the Jawa to eat something. He's so amped up from being around rides -- his natural habitat, he claims -- that he's forgotten to eat. The last thing he had was a hot dog at two p.m.

In a desperate and final attempt to convince myself and my bride that the Santa Cruz Mountain hamlet of Boulder Creek would be a fine place to buy a vacation home (they can be had for less than $100,000 there), we'd stopped there for lunch, only to find -- again -- that the place had long since been overrun with hippies. "You'd hate it here," my wife reminded me, pointing out that even though there was a brew pub, it was decorated in whimsically Victorian style. Tiffany lamps and boas being the enemy of all that is clear-thinking and righteous, I sighed, accepted her verdict, and drove on.

Sometime over the last 10 years, the people in charge of the Santa Cruz boardwalk decided to upgrade their employees, replacing all of the scary carnies with summering college students. Which put "Adventureland," one of my favorite movies from 2009, into my head. It stayed there all night.

"Have you seen "Adventureland'?" I asked the well-groomed fellow taking our cash at the chow mein booth.

"No. What's it about?"

"It's about a kid who graduates college and ends up working at a second-rate theme park to make enough money for grad school."

"Oh, so it's about me."

Shortly after that, I was on the pier, replacing reality with my own romantic notions of what a beach boardwalk should be. Out went the overweight teenage parents, taking their Mark Ecko tank tops with them. Gone, too, were the agressively drunk shirtless boys hanging out in the arcade, looking for someone, anyone to say something or even just look at them, giving them license to start messing with them and hopefully start a good beatdown.

"I don't like it here," I said to my wife when they finally arrived at the car.

"Why not?"

"It's full of people who want to screw with you." All of the frustration, those angry young men whose already short-circuited dreams have left them roaming aimlessly in packs, looking to find the guy responsible. And he could be anyone.

Add to them Santa Cruz' predictable clumps of burnouts, gathered in small groups, homemade tattoos faded after decades of hard living. On top of them, put the hard-partying vacationers standing cheek-to-jowl on second-floor verandes across the street, drunkenly shouting at each other and anyone else who comes into view and you can hear the clock ticking. Every minute longer that I'm here, it becomes more likely that they'll find me. It was better out on the pier.

And even better from the shore today, huddled and cold, sitting up and watching our Jawa out there with the surfers, bobbing up and down on his boogie board in his new O'Neill wetsuit and the booties his mother had to help him get on.

51 days to Bar Mitzvah: less productive than the average bear

2010-07-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

The golf gods have not been kind for the past two weeks. I curse them. Today they let me suffer an extended string of topspin-heavy shanks, skittering off to the right, witnessed by my child. You have to wonder how this is all going to work out the first time I actually step onto an actual golf course.

The campless week of summer is almost over. It's put a serious crimp in my productivity as a freelance writer, but as long as the Jawa is happy, I am happy. And I can tell he is happy because he's not rolling his eyes at me. All week I've been pretending that I can sit at the kitchen table and crank out newspaper stories while the Jawa entertains himself, sans computer and iPod(s), thanks to the edict that followed his most recent meltdown.

What a fool I was. I'm not exaggerating when I say that over the past 48 hours, I have not experienced a sustained period of longer than 15 minutes without hearing, "Dad?" San Francisco Examiner, I apologize for the quality of my work this week. Ah, who am I kidding. It was brilliant, anyway. There are things, a very few things, that I can do well, even when my concentration is broken because I have to pause every 90 seconds and say, "Please stop singing/humming/making that weird drum noise with your mouth."

Today, finally, I just gave up. Any work I was going to do would have to happen after Sandra Bullock came home. Instead of sitting at the table, I would force the Jawa to engage in out-of-the-house activities. We would go to the driving range, come home, eat lunch and then trundle off to see "The A Team" at the UA 20 in Daly City. We live in one of the world's favorite cities, but there are parking structures in Daly City.

My timing couldn't have been worse. Nobody had told me today would be the day I spend going back-and-forth with the production/design team about photos and captions to accompany my stories. Like everyone else, I saw the PSA about not talking on your phone or texting during the movie. I was the only guy to ignore it, though. In my defense, you can't walk out of "The A Team" for respond to an email, return five minutes later and expect to have any idea what's going on.

It's been several months since I last saw a movie I wanted to see. "The A Team," "The Karate Kid," "Avatar," are the last three movies I've seen. It's been even longer since I saw a movie I liked and it was night time and I wasn't alone. The good thing about all of these popcorn movies is that even at their worst -- and believe me, I could give you scathing reviews of all of them, including and perhaps especially "Avatar," is that unless you consider yourself too sophisticated to fall for that cheap stuff, it's really easy to get caught up in them, making the climactic scenes very satisfying. By the time the updated Daniel-San triumphed over the Asian Billy Zabka, to the great delight of Jackie Chan's Pat Morita impression, my heart was doing double-time.

Today, my morning began at 8 a.m. The Jawa stormed into my bedroom and announced, "We've got two options today. We can either go to Raging Waters or to the Alameda County Fair."

As obnoxious as that was, as badly as I wanted to deliver an improvised monologue on the dangers of entitlement, I still spent an hour this morning checking out the cost and feasibility of going to the fair. He wasn't getting me to Raging Waters, though. In the end, it simply wasn't going to work out. It would have involved a 45-minute drive and approximately $100 I didn't want to spend. On top of that, the Jawa would have spent the day riding rickety midway rides alone. No way are you getting me on The Zipper. I already did my time.

On Saturday, we leave for our week-long central coast vacation. In anticipation of the long car ride, Shack has been banished to his new collapsible dog crate for portions of the evening. He walks in, we zip it up, he stares at us through the mesh window, wondering what he did to wind up in jail. Everyone is hoping this preliminary walk-through will help him not freak out when he finds himself locked up in a hotel room in Capitola on Sunday, homemade fireworks bursting in the air all around him.

Tomorrow, the last day of camp no camp week, I will not buckle. I will sit at this table and get my work done in spite of interruptions. Is it easy to say something creative about Woodside, California, when you've already written about it three times and every five minutes a kid comes up to you, thrusts a small, gray hamster in your face and says, "Dad, look. It's Butters!"

No, it is not. Nor am I looking forward to my fourth consecutive day of laundry. How do three people generate so much laundry? Each time I pull out the lint trap I think of my former high school classmate Eleanor Mejia, now married and living in Utah with a staggering number of kids, eight, I think, or maybe ten. How many loads of laundry does the former Eleanor Mejia do in a normal week? If my family of three is producing approximately 1.7 loads per day, how much is made by a family of 12? I can't even imagine.

I was hoping to get downtown this week, maybe try on some suits and sportcoats for the Bar Mitzvah. Last week at Nordstom's, Sandra Bullock didn't blink when I tried on a slick, pin-striped Hugo Boss number. Maybe now is when I graduate from the ill-fitting one we bought at Nordstrom's Rack last summer. It's 2010. Nobody should have to show up in pleats.

Yes, this life of mine, it's a glamorous life. Sheila E. didn't know it, but she was singing about me all those years ago.

52 days to Bar Mitzvah: perchance to dream

2010-06-30T19:59:00.000-07:00

At the risk of sounding like the kind of prehistoric father almost universally shunned in San Francisco, I had a moment today while at 24 Hour Fitness, sitting in the steam room while the Jawa -- without any prodding from me -- swam laps in the nearby lap pool.

As predicted, by the time we woke up this morning, my almost 13-year-old son had lost what hittle enthusiasm he'd had yesterday for our trip to 24 Hour Fitness. "What? We have to go now?" he thundered when I appeared before him clad in my workout gear.

"Half-hour," I said.

"Give me an hour."

"Fine." Personally, I like to get the workout done first thing. That way, you're set for the rest of the day. Even if you have a huge lunch, waddle home and collapse on your bed, you can still say, "At least I went to the gym this morning." Life being divided into "Days I Went to the Gym" and "Days I Sat Around and Did Nothing," that was a good day. Calories were burned.

Today, due to an ambivalent Jawa, we got to the Ocean Avenue 24 Hour Fitness at 11, way too close to lunchtime, when the gym population swells to double the size it had been an hour earlier. Still, I was feeling very father-son as we trudged into the gym wearing our backpacks, paid our guest fee and walked through the gym to the locker room.

In fact, the whole thing was very father-son. While Ocean Avenue is not my 24 Hour Fitness of choice, it was very apparent that I was welcoming him into a world that had until now been mine alone. It's not a particularly grown-up world, or a World of Men. It's not a barbershop, or the Van Westerhout Cittidini Molesi Social Club, but it's someplace I went that neither he nor his mother had ever been.

I tried to imagine how he was seeing things, perhaps giving him credit for being interested in something other than his iPod and this month's Lego magazine. If today turns out to be the only time he joins me at the gym, it will be sad for many reasons, but none stands out as much as the fact that if we never again log 25 minutes of cardio on neighboring ellipticals, it'll mean today was the only day I ever saw someone reading a Lego magazine while doing cardio.

What did he think of the locker room, one of my least favorite places on earth? It was hard to tell, because he'd adopted the teenage "it's no big deal and I'm totally taking it in stride" self-protection attitude that would be annoying if it weren't so obvious the minute we'd walked in. Instead of staring around the locker room, wide-eyed, he took on an overtly casual air, tensing up only when it became obvious that I was going to have to help him with his combination lock. He'd been turning it to the left instead of to the right.

Recovery was quick. He sauntered out of the lockerrom and into the gym. After a few tense minutes, we found two open ellipticals next to each other. Cardio wasn't his thing. He seemed to be trying to determine how slowly one can move without having the machine go to "pause" setting. If not for a "Family Guy" episode on his iPod (and the Lego magazine), he wouldn't have made it five minutes.

I've never seen anyone move that slowly on a piece of cardio equipment, but then, I've never worked out at the gym at Sun City West, either. From what I hear, there's some glacial movement going on there, too.

I should have figured; a teenage boy. Would he be interested in going nowhere on an elliptical machine? Or would he want to see how much weight he could lift? I scold myself for cluelessness. We moved over to the weight machines. "Lets try this one," I said, pointing to a Nautilus machine. I did my sets and placed my 90-pound son on the seat. "Keep your back straight," I advised.

He's a teenage boy. Somewhere in the middle of his second set, he decided lifting weights was cool. After banging out ten reps, he jumped up and said, "I'm going to try 30 (pounds) next time."

I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel a little bit good to have my son, who is seldom impressed by my fatherly feats, marvel at the amount of weight I could lift. I'd be someone other than me, though, if I wasn't thinking at the same time about how little time I have left to be stronger than him. We've both known for years that the tragedy of our relationship is that as he gets bigger I'm only going to get older, but it was pretty stark looking down at this thin, pre-adolescent boy who would soon be able to kick my butt. "Five years," I said, waiting for some guy to get off the dip machine.

"Five years for what?" asked the Jawa.

"Five years and you'll be stronger than me. Crazy."

He thought about it for a second, then smiled. He liked that.

It was in the pool area that I again demonstrated my vanished aptitude for being a San Francisco parent. By now the Jawa had thrown all of his chips in for the workout life. "Can we do this every Wednesday?" he asked.

"Sure," I said, knowing full well that we can't because 24 Hour Fitness only allows one guest pass per customer. The goal of the guest pass is to get information so they can badger the guest until he or she agrees to become a 24 Hour Fitness member. Good luck to them the first time they call up the Jawa and realize they've contacted a 12-year-old.

Our only option is the Family Membership. Sandra Bullock was all over that when she got home and heard how the Jawa had enjoyed his first gym experience. Because that's how it goes around here. The Jawa shows any interest in anything and we go gung-ho. It's because of this that you will find so many odd, unused, mostly forgotten things in our house: a new-looking basketball, a student-sized guitar (with case), a skateboard covered in stickers. Mark today, June 30, as the day I predicted they will soon be joined by a surfboard and a wetsuit.

It's not that we're a pair of obnoxious stage parents. We don't want him to be a superstar, but I'm also not saying we'd hate it if we had the chance to root our child on from the stands.

Which is what I was thinking as I sat in the steam room, sweating profusely while the Jawa swam laps in the pool. "He really wanted to swim laps," I thought. "I didn't even have to nag him."

"Maybe he likes swimming, and he's not just saying he does to make us happy."

Not out of the question. He played basketball two years longer than he wanted to just because he didn't want to disappoint us; which made us wonder when the awards committee from the Parent of the Year group was going to come knock on our door with our plaques already.

"Wouldn't it be great," I thought, "if he was on the swim team in high school?"

We'd drive him to school at six in the morning, because that's when swimmers practice. The swimmers would hang together, because nobody else understands how hard their workouts are, how quickly football team members would fold after an hour in the pool. At lunch, they'd all eat together at a picnic table in the quad, because swimmers had been eating at that same table since 1975.

Sometimes, at school assemblies, the whole team would pull some kind of prank, running amok in their Speedos, throwing water on people. Something like that.

And we'd go to his meets and sit way up in the stands, a little out of sorts because we know very little about swimming. Watching him in the starting blocks, shaking his arms, getting loose, maybe with his iPod still on, we'd get nervous -- more nervous than staring down a number three hitter with the sacks loaded and the score tied.

We'd watch him in wonder as he knifed through the water. This is something we already do, as he is the only member of the family able to swim the butterfly, the most beautiful and powerful-looking of all swim strokes. After the race, win or lose, he'd be there in the water, looking up at the clock, knocking water out of his ears, either happy with the results or mad at himself for not staying straight in his lane, screwing up a kick turn, having something just off about his stroke. Then he'd pull himself up out of the pool, grab a towel and go off to talk to his coach and his teammates.

The night before every meet we'd find him in the bathroom, shaving his chest, his arms and his legs, good-naturedly cursing me for my swarthy genes. Our son, the swimmer.

After a minute, I caught myself. Another ridiculous, non-productive and potentially harmful flight of fancy. If my child grows up to be one of those guys at the Lego show, well, then I'm going to buy myself a Lego t-shirt and volunteer to take tickets at the front gate. Legos are, after all, one of the few things in our house that never fall out of favor.

A guy can dream, can't he? I know, I know. Of course not.

53 days to Bar Mitzvah: workout partners

2010-06-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, in an effort designed to ease several negative aspects of our first summer no-camp week, the Jawa will be joining me at 24 Hour Fitness. It will be his first foray into the workout world, his first time engaging with equipment and his first time walking among all of the gym freaks who populate your average 24 Hour Fitness.

It won't be the first time he's set foot in a 24 Hour Fitness. For the past two weeks, while he's been leapfrogging into Group Four (the final group) at Anderson's Swim Center, I've been taking great advantage of my free half hour by shedding 630 calories atop the Precor elliptical machine, conveniently located at the Pacifica 24 Hour Fitness, next door to Anderson's Swim (and Diving) Center.

My half-hour elliptical session actually takes 38 or so minutes when you add in time for cool-down (five minutes) and the three or four minutes it takes to flash your membership card, secure an elliptical machine, tear off your sweatshirt and cram it into your backpack and then jam your iPod speakers into your ears and choose some appropriate cardio music. Both times in the past two weeks, the Jawa has finished at swimming and come into 24 Hour Fitness to wait out my last gasping minutes aboard to elliptical.

How funny it looked the first time I saw him enter 24 Hour Fitness, dressed in his enormous Walton's Grizzly Lodge sweatpants and a t-shirt, his hair semi-dry and pointing in several directions, his Brandeis Hillel Day School bag slung over his shoulder. How clear the message on his face: I am ready to go now, yet I am forced to come here and sit at weird bar-like counter and wait while you run in place.

From my perch, I tried to indicate: "Two minutes left!" receiving only a blank stare in return.

Although I knew he was resenting every second spent waiting for me, I kind of enjoyed winding down my elliptical session while watching him move around in the world. It almost felt like spying, something I used to do regularly at his school when he was younger. I'd get there to pick him up, but instead of calling for him, I'd stand quietly, barely moving, playing Possum for a few minutes so I could see how he was when I wasn't there.

Naturally, as an almost-teen, the road that leads to 24 Hour Fitness is plagued with potholes, blind hairpin turns and hidden driveways. Having expressed an interest in lifting weights several times so far this summer, and having again lost his computer(s) and iPod(s) due to a recent ill-advised temper tantrum, Sandra Bullock saw an excellent opportunity for me to introduce my son to organized fitness. This, she reasoned, would kill a couple of hours in a day otherwise given over to television and tormenting the dog, give me a guilt-free way to get to the gym and forge a little father-son bonding, minus confusing hobby shops and spontaneous outings to get ice cream or donuts.

Predictably, though, when I introduced the idea to the Jawa, his response was less than lukewarm. "No," he said simply.

"I thought you wanted to work out," I pointed out.

"Not at a gym. At home."

"We don't have any weights at home."

"I know. I just, I just don't like 24 Hour Fitness."

"...based on the five minutes you've spent sitting at the entrance, waiting for me? Come on." As any parent of a teenager can tell you, this is a dangerous tack, for the same clear logic that might persuade an adult to accept your point of view is to a teenage Jawa what a red cape is to a bull. Feeling cornered, out of cleverish responses, he might simply snap, grow devil horns and start a confrontation that ends with a pile of personal electronic devices sitting atop my dresser and approximately three months removed from the end of my life.

This time I lucked out. He was still exhausted from our last confrontation, so he conceded. "Okay," he said. "I'll try it." It was easier for him to give in once I convinced him that I had no intention of running down to 24 Hour Fitness right now; I was thinking more about beginning our gym adventure tomorrow. Right now we would go there, but only to find out what we needed to have with us to pull it off tomorrow.

I don't know what they pay people who work at 24 Hour Fitness. Whatever it is, it's not enough to entice qualified workers -- that is, people with functioning senses of logic and a rudimentary knowledge of the 24 Hour Fitness users manual -- to work the front desk. When we arrived at the Pacifica 24 Hour Fitness, the girl at the front desk reacted to the following question:

"I'd like to have him (pointing to the Jawa on my right) come here as my guest. What do we need to do?"

by looking at me as if I'd just suggested we both tie my 12-year-old son to the back bumper of my Volvo V50 and drag him down the street a few miles.

"Uh, you want HIM to come as your guest?" she said, wide-eyed.

"Yes."

"Don't you have to be 13...?"

"No. You have to be 18, or 12 if you're accompanied by a parent or guardian. While my performance seldom merits the title of 'guardian,' I can produce papers proving that I am his parent."

I didn't say that last part. You shouldn't push your luck. What I said was, "I saw it on the website."

"Oh?" she said. "It says that?" she smiled. Since I had cited a rule established by her employer, whatever her personal views of men who force apparently undersized teenagers to endure draconian weightlifting workouts were moot. Her job being to welcome 24 Hour Fitness Members, to make them feel as though the gym were an extension of their living room, only full of sweating, often-misshapen and, in the case of one poor guy who shows up in shapeless black sweats every day, terrible-smelling strangers and a really loud stereo that never plays the kind of music you want to hear, she had to change directions quickly and invisibly. The rules say I can bring a 12-year-old, and rules are rules.

"It will cost $10, and you'll need to fill out a waiver."

"They're not going to take him away and give him a sales pitch, are they? I mean, he's 12 years old."

"Oh, no. They won't do that."

On the way home, properly de-traumatized by a five-pound jelly-filled donut at Donut Time, the Jawa accepted his fitness fate. "Do they have a sauna there?" he asked, finally showing some curiosity.

"Not at that one, but they have one at the 24 Hour Fitness on Ocean Avenue," I answered. The great thing about 24 Hour Fitness, a club no one would ever mistake for a serioius gym, is that they've got franchises all over the place. I've worked out at 24 Hour Fitnesses in San Mateo, Larkspur, Orange, even once in Mountlake Terrace, Washington. You just go up, show your card and you're in. You're not going to find Franco Columbu giving body-sculpting seminars, but at least you can break a sweat, even when you're on vacation.

So if you'd like to join us tomorrow, we'll be at the Ocean Avenue 24-Hour Fitness sometime around 10 a.m. Look for us among the mid-morning crowd of vacationing college students, spin class enthusiasts and weirdly muscled old guys. We'll be the sweaty bald guy and the 12-year-old, churning away on the ellipticals before heading over to the Nautilus machines and probably lifting the same amount of weight.

54 days to Bar Mitzvah: fun tissue paper

2010-06-28T17:02:00.001-07:00

I am not a small guy. That's why elderly congregants sometimes mistake me for Rabbi Bauer and why Jenny From the Block's husband, a wiry, supremely confident guy who could probably kick my butt four ways to Friday thanks to his extensive martial arts knowledge, always gives me grief about "looking tough." "I don't like hanging out with you," he told me once at a party where the median age of male guests was around 55. "People might think you want to fight them."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Alas, I am probably the least tough big, swarthy-looking unshaven guy in the nine-county Bay Area.

Still, I'm not a little guy, which is anyone who saw me Sunday, walking through Beverly's Fabrics and Crafts in Colma, holding a basket full of 2 1/4" candles in one hand and a clump of imitation flowers in the other, can be forgiven if they had trouble stifling a chuckle or two. I was like Henrietta Hippo in her ballet skirt, Danny DeVito trying to look sincere so Chloe Webb won't break up with him in "Twins." It was not a proud moment.

As the Bar Mitzvah nears, Sandra Bullock's focus becomes even more laser-like. Yesterday, with the Design Team scheduled to meet at our house at two p.m., she enlisted me to help her find netting for the centerpieces. Not just any netting; this netting must not be too dark; and it must be soft, requiring a trip through the washing machine.

The netting, she hoped, was at one of the party stores in Westlake, an outdoor mall in Daly City. Bar Mitzvah shopping does not take place in San Francisco for the most part. There's just not enough room in the city -- San Francisco is the second-densest urban setting in the U.S., trailing only Manhattan -- for 10,000 square-foot stores that stock netting.

Unfortunately, the Westlake party store only had black netting. Sandra Bullock had bought them out last month. So we went to Beverly's, where I found myself, flowers in hand, wandering lost through the paper lantern aisle.

"We need to find some fun tissue paper," my wife said absently after rejecting Beverly's pathetic paper lantern inventory. Fun tissue paper became necessary when we ditched the colorful paper bags necessary to hold all of the San Francisco-centric items that will greet each guest when they check into the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero infavor of brown ones at $3 for a dozen. Showing a much greater ability to imagine our guests' disappointment at being greeted by a simple brown bag -- no more special than the anonymous brown bags that held their school lunches, a sandwich, a small bag of Fritos, an apple, in fourth grade -- Bullock tried to convince me that only fun tissue paper, plus a vintage post card affixed to the outside of each bag, could make the guest bags appropriately festive.

These small gifts, coming at the beginning of our guests' weekend San Francisco adventure, should reinforce their collective beliefs that coming to the Jawa's Bar Mitzvah was most definitely worth the cost of air fare and hotel. Would they feel that way upon finding a plain brown bag in their room? No.

But I still didn't know what made tissue paper "fun." Would it be a party version of novelty toilet paper, covered with one-liners and puns? Perhaps it would come in brilliant colors -- a blaze of red, a riot of yellow, an explosion of purple -- to set the tone for an exciting weekend.

One thing you can say for Beverly's: their tissue paper aisle completely shames their paper lantern selection. The racks full of tissue paper, arranged by color, were bold and confident while the lanterns were ragged and apologetic. And yet, even when faced with such a display of strength, I couldn't figure out which tissue paper was fun and which was sadly prosaic.

This was the moment I chose to say, "Boy, you want to talk about a place that makes its living selling stuff nobody needs," causing an eavesdropping nearby shopper to wince in pain and earning a sharp glance from my wife. But I couldn't help myself; I just didn't get it.

Here's 10,000 square feet of merchandise: candles, bags, tissue paper, sparkly stuff, flat pieces of cardboard shaped like farm animals. To me, a store selling rocks would have made the same amount of sense. How much of this stuff would Peter Minuet have needed to buy Manhattan from the local tribe? Would it have mattered to them whether the tissue paper was fun or merely bemused?

Despite my disenfranchisement, we managed to spend $168 at Beverly's in Colma, leaving with a twenty-pound bag full of candles and brown bags. Which is fine, because while I clearly cannot fathom why we would spend $168 on candles and brown bags (and particularly foul-smelling netting that requires a trip through the washing machine to make it usable), I also understand that I am in the minority. Though I would be gone later when the Design Team met at our house (I was walking through San Leandro with the Jawa, on our way to a Lego show staffed by the guys who weren't cool enough to get into the model train club. Seriously, these guys looked like mutants. Who walks into LensCrafters, tries on a pair of glasses that are bigger than their face, and says, "Yeah, these are good. I'll take them."?), I'm pretty sure there was much excitement over the candles.

The simple brown bags in particular sent the team into an intense creative electrical storm, as they traded lightning-like ideas back and forth before deciding to add a strip of wrapping paper to each bag, along with the vintage postcard.

It's the little things, and for the past month I've been spending about $20 a week hitting golf balls in San Bruno, which is most definitely money spent on something nobody needs.

Come Bar Mitzvah day -- less than eight weeks from today -- please pause and appreciate the candles, the paper lanterns, which will be hanging elegantly along the wall facing the bay, the softened, deoderized and lightened netting and the centerpiece flowers. Know that someone has spent hours putting them all together for your enjoyment. And that her husband can walk through Beverly's Fabrics and Crafts holding several white flowers and a basket full of candles and still look like he's going to knock the tar out of the next guy who looks at him wrong, even though what he's really doing is being amazed at how heavy a hundred dollars' worth of 2 1/4" diameter candles can be.

55 days to Bar Mitzvah: pretty as a picture(s)

2010-06-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

The shock hit my unflappable wife halfway through the third aliyah on Saturday. We were sitting several rows from the bima, watching Josh S. complete his journey from apprentice Boy About Town to join his father, uncles and grandfather in the exclusive fraternity of full-fledged Men About Town when Sandra Bullock suddenly grabbed my arm, gasped, and stage-whispered, "WE'RE NEXT!"

Technically, that's not true. There is one other Bar Mitzvah, a tandem effort by a pair of twins, between yesterday's and ours. We will be out of town for that one, though, so it is a fact that the next Bar Mitzvah the Jawa attends will be his own.

A sobering thought.

"We have so much to do!" she added, interrupting me as I silently repeated the blessings before and after the reading of the Torah, following along with each aliyah until I got past my blind spot on the blessing after the reading and trying to remember that "asher bachar banu" is from the blessing BEFORE, while "asher natan lanu" is from the blessing AFTER.

Our Bar Mitzvah is scheduled for August 21. That's a little less than two months from now. Three more days of June, 31 in July and three weeks in August. Take away the three weeks the Jawa will be gone for vacation and summer camp and that leaves a little more than a month of preparation. Sobering, indeed.

Tonight, parked downstairs on the sectional, we started the long process of choosing photos for our slide presentation. With the recommendations of Dan from Denon & Doyle ringing in our ears -- "It should be between six and ten minutes in length" -- we pored through photo album after photo album, marking chosen images with post-its. Our subliminal voices were joined as one, all shouting, "HOW ARE WE GOING TO WHITTLE DOWN FROM A THOUSAND PHOTOS TO ENOUGH FOR ONLY SIX TO TEN MINUTES?" The Jawa's photoshop effects, which include zooms, quick cuts and very slow pans, add to the challenge.

How would your seventh and eighth grade years been different if every member of your class took a turn as the Guest of Honor? Think about it; just about every Saturday this year, one kid in the Brandeis Hillel Day School Class of 2011 stood in a ballroom somewhere while a big-screen TV showed a six-to-ten-minute-long slide show of his or her life. There's Josh S. as a toddler. There he is with his sister in Japan. There he is at his eighth birthday. I remember that. They all went to the skatepark in Millbrae.

I'm not sure what it does to their fledgeling teenage development or how it effects schoolyard politics. Do kids predisposed to having big egos have even bigger ones after hearing a room full of 200 people go "Awww" in unision at a photo of them, taken at their second birthday, with cake smeared all over their face? Do kids horrified at being singled out suffer shots of their first trip to Disneyland over a bed of Jason Mraz as a fate worse than your mother dancing the Hora in front of all your friends?

Whether intended or not, the slide show also has a political impact on the larger crowd. Everyone stands around wondering if they're going to show up or not. "Hmm," we might be thinking, "my kid was better friends with the Bat Mitzvah girl in first grade. They haven't hung out much in the past few years, but I'd like to think their great pre-school friendship had some meaning. Will my kid appear...oh! There she is! How nice!"

As we began the initial machinations of putting ours together, we realized that familial politics would also come into play. Why, we asked ourselves as we dug through the album tracing our first year in San Francisco, are there no good photos of the Jawa with my parents that first year they came to visit us? How many photos of the Jawa with his cousin Shea are too much? Will the now almost-teenage Emma Price be horrified when she finds herself standing in a room full of strangers, looking at a ten-foot-tall picture of herself as a toddler, wearing footie PJs identical to the ones worn by an ear-to-ear grinning toddler-sized Jawa?

Then, once you get past the fact that balance is impossible, you're free to focus on the the really painful things, most notably how much you've aged in the past 13 years. Thirteen years ago, 32 years old with only a small bald spot and about 30 fewer pounds of heft, would I have been mistaken for the hulking Rabbi Bauer, as I was during the kiddush lunch on Saturday? Probably not.

Hopefully, we will put together a slide show that accurately tells the story of the Jawa's childhood, giving just enough time to each friend, past and present, honoring our guests, not favoring any one grandparent over any other and, not incidentally, reminding people of what a thrill ride it's been shepherding a Jawa through an occasionally confusing, sometimes perilous and often kick-in-the-pants world.

Put together right -- or even sort of close to right -- "this is your life" slide shows can elevate the guest of honor to a level of sentiment and drama that doesn't actually exist in real life.

I first noticed this during an otherwise rowdy fraternity dinner in 1986, when Greg Baker stuck a few seconds of Simon & Garfunkel's "Old Friends" behind otherwise banal photos of drunk guys in Greek letter sweatshirts hanging off of each other at parties: "Time it was and what a time it was it was... a time of innocence (picture of intramural football), a time of confidences (two smiling guys holding beer bottles); long ago it must be, I have a photograph; preserve your memories (group of guys looking impossibly young, sitting at the beach during a sorority volleyball tournament) they're all that's left you." Excellent job, Bake. You really stopped that dinner cold.

I saw it again a few years later at the Austin, Texas rehearsal dinner for my high school friend Mike's wedding.

Not knowing Mike's fiancee and not having spent much time with him over the past five years, I was stunned by how romantic his life looked when laid out in a series of photos. Mike with his future wife at the beach, squinting into the camera, wearing a really cool denim jacket with the collar up, looked like a J. Crew catalog come to life, except that in 1990 I didn't yet know what a J. Crew catalog was. It was both celebratory and melancholy at the same time, like it referred back to some halcyon time that was brimming with meaning and completely devoid of things like hay fever and bad hair days. It was life with all the dull parts removed.

Same goes for the Bar Mitzvah slide show. When that room full of Bar Mitzvah-goers from all parts of the Jawa's life gets a glimipse of that photo of us at Cardoza's, picking out our pumpkin on an unusually warm October day in 2003, they will forget that have ever been times when I have gone into my bedroom, closed the door, put on my iPod and laid on the floor, doing crossword puzzles and listening to Nick Drake until I'm calm enough to speak to my son without doing any more damage to either of us.

This is the power of pictures. And cool effects like fades and split-screens.

58 days to Bar Mitzvah: unrelated rant

2010-06-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

Dear hair,

I hate you because you lied to me. You gave me no more than 28 years that I won't even call good because for the last sixteen of them -- when it really counted -- you refused to obey any kind of orders, or even suggestions, that might have made our life together more enjoyable. And then, just when everyone else in Seattle was enjoying their hair the most, just when it looked like volume -- the one thing we had in spades -- was something they might value over all else, you abandoned me.

Actually, that's not accurate. You didn't abandon me. You're still here, just not where I'd like you to be. Thanks for deciding that it might be more fun to appear everywhere except on top of my head. It only makes me loathe you even more.

It's not like you were so great when you were around. Your unwavering commitment to unruliness just about ruined by teenage years. All around me people were doing interesting, eye-catching things with their hair. They were growing out different parts of it, letting it fall over their eyes, dying it different colors. Didn't it bother you at all to see the fruits of these positive, cooperative relationships between people and their hair? Didn't you just once wonder what it would have been like to relax and hang loosely, instead of standing at attention all the time?

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't have minded having someone run their hands through my hair back then. But that wasn't an option for us, was it? Our lot -- thanks to you -- was hour-long sessions with "thinning shears" and what I thought then was a life sentence of being compared to Big Blue, the Brillo pad spokescharacter.

Your left me no choice. I had to keep you short, lest whispered asides about someone's "Jewfro" ever reach my ears. So don't try to push it all back on me. That dull, helmet-like cut we sported from 1980-1984? That's all you.

Did you think that I was supposed to coast for the rest of my life on the two years during adolescence when it was cool to be the only guy with chest hair? Did you think you were doing me a favor? I've got news for you, hair; pop culture did not end with the pilot episode of "Magnum, P.I." And just our luck to come of age during a period that celebrated all that is waspish (and hairless). Everyone else is running around sockless in their Topsiders while I'm rocking the sock tan? No socks means four more inches of noticeable hair. Thanks for that, too.

And all along, the consolation -- what they'd tell me over and over as I struggled to tame you, having given up early on the options of a long or stylish coif -- was that I'd "never lose (my) hair." To that I can now only ruefully laugh; more of a snort than a chuckle, completely lacking in mirth.

One day in British Lit., Jay Everett and Kim Senft decided that my hair was "dense." Which is, we all know, the exact word everyone wishes people would use to describe their hair. How I hated to hear that my hair was "dense," closer in consistency to a particularly intricate bird's nest than spun silk. And how ironic that term became later on. I wouldn't mind hearing that my hair was "dense" now. I'd settle for "present."

Because it was only ten years later that John Roderick, now an indie rock star whose every iconoclastic word, it seems, ends up as a quote on someone's facebook page, pointed out loudly to me, in front of everyone at Piper Jaffray, where we were both temping, that it wasn't going to be "if" I lost my hair but "when." Thanks, John. And thanks for showing off now, seventeen years later, your ability to grow so much hair as to eventually resemble one of the Hatfields or McCoys whereas I go four days without shaving and i look like one of those drawings that looks like a face whether you hold it right side up or upside down.

"Oh, it's just your part," my supportive wife told me when I pointed out the clearing in the forest. In Seattle, those were the years of great, flowing, curly locks, when "big hair" was no longer a handicap. "Finally," I thought. "My unruly hair has found its place in society."

But of course, it wasn't to be so. You, hair, had other plans. Those plans were to slowly abandon ship, leaving me, at 45, to look like I borrowed someone's grandfather's forehead, to become one of those guys who always wears a hat at the gym, and no matter how much I protest and point out that, without a hat and without hair, there is nothing to stop sweat from pouring into your eyes, how could you blame fellow gym-goers if they assumed that I was sporting a lid to hide a follicle-free dome?

You don't care about that, do you, hair?

No. You made that obvious when you let me walk around Seattle during the 90s looking like some pathetically deluded baby-boomer, with this growing spot of nothing in the middle of otherwise ponytailable-length locks. For however many other members of the scene up there, at that time, who thought me the pitiful hanger-on, possessed of a hairstyle that would later find a home at ComicCon conventions and in the secret hidden dens of hardcore computer hackers, I hate you. You, hair, let me look like an idiot.

And then I saw the fateful photo, taken in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1995, of me walking around at an air show. "What's that spot at the top of my head?" I asked my wife, who years before had made the mistake of saying, "Yeah, I'm not really into bald guys."

But who knew then that it would turn out to be a mistake? At the time, my head lay under several cubic feet of "dense" hair. Dense, unethical, truth-averse hair. Hair with its own agenda. Hair that is not a team player. Thanks alot.

It's been over a decade-and-a-half since my hair revealed its true colors and began to betray me. Thank you, Roger A. Hunt and the Legendary Dr. Bandeau for being considerate enough to lose yours along with me.

And I breathe a sigh of relief every time I consider that present-day popular culture insists that balding men take a pair of razor shears to their heads and keep their remaining lettuce tight. Otherwise, who knows what I'd be doing? Jewfros don't translate into combovers, so I'd be walking around looking like Prototypical Middle-Aged Jewish Man, all crescent-shaped, with random strays sticking out all over the place.

But I don't forgive you, hair. I never will. You have earned an eternal spot on my blacklist, as if you care, and I rue any day I spent as a child enjoying your presence, including you in any of my boyhood secrets or trusting you to keep me looking at least presentable.

Shame on you.

59 days to Bar Mitzvah: vowels are for amateurs

2010-06-23T17:35:00.000-07:00

In 59 days, our Jawa becomes a man. Right now, he is a boy -- who requires a ton of limousine service. Last week I wondered what I'd do with the extra hours in my workweek, the ones I used to spend surfing the web, trying to look busy when I'd already written four stories that day and still had two hours left until five. It took all of three days as a free agent to figure out where that time would go: to driving my Jawa back and forth from appointments.

This week, each day began with a drive to Pacifica for surf camp. Today, the final day of surf camp, I finally got back to the beach early enough to see my wetsuit-clad child stand up on a surf board and ride the foam to shore. "Woo-hoo!" I said involuntarily as I sat there, huddled against the wind and fog on a flight of stairs leading from the world's only oceanfront Taco Bell to the beach, frantically texting Sandra Bullock and cursing the tiny camera inside my Blackberry.

Surf camp is exhausting. Afterwards, you have to drive to Donut Time and order a custard-filled donut just to regain your strength. You're taking a risk; the donut, having been infused with custard before your very eyes like nothing you've ever seen before, might be too heavy to carry after spending three hours paddling through waves. And when you get home, well, you can forget about doing anything other than falling asleep at the desk in your bedroom as YouTube videos of guys surfing run on your desktop and episodes of "Futurama" screen concurrently on your netbook until your father wakes you up and orders you to accompany him to the dog park, which takes another hour out of his day and your nap.

Fifty-nine days to Bar Mitzvah. This is not a problem when you've already had eight years of Hebrew. Even if you spend seventh grade accepting a demotion from the "highest" Hebrew class to the "middle" Hebrew class, then kind of lost interest enough to get a B+ on stuff you walked into the classroom on Day One already knowing. Even then, you still must invent ways to challenge yourself as you recite your Torah portion in the car on the way to meet Cantor Roslyn Barak for chanting practice.

First, you recite the fourth Aliyah (the last Torah section you will be reading), since this is the one you don't yet know by heart. You follow along in your printed-out Torah portion. The fourth Aliyah is highlighted in pink.

For this read-through, you follow on the side that has vowels, since you want mostly to make sure you know your stuff and won't freeze up on the Bima, embarassing yourself on the day you most want to show the world that you are poised and knowledgeable; that you are a man.

A note to the unitiated: Hebrew has nothing in common with English. It doesn't look like English, it reads from right to left. It's not like Spanish, where some words just sound like English words with the letter "a" added to the end. And most of the vowels don't appear as full-size letters. Instead, they're little symbols added underneath the consonents. Eventually, when you are fluent in Hebrew, the vowels disappear altogether.

You wondered why Jews are so certain that good fortune will always be met with hardship and tragedy? Learn Hebrew. The better you get, the harder they make it.

For this aliyah, the Jawa informs me, as we turn onto Laguna Honda Boulevard, he is employing the "five minute" memorization technique. Since it closely resembles his "ten minute" homework technique, in which five minutes of homework is sandwiched between two ten-minute breaks, I am skeptical.

"No, Dad," he says. "You recite it once, then wait five minutes to see if it's in your long-term memory."

I stand corrected.

Five minutes later, he rips through the fourth aliyah. "That's it," he says. "I know the whole thing."

"Okay, then, from the top," says his father, who obviously was in the kitchen, getting a snack, when the PSA by the Mormon Church, which urged parents to appreciate their children's accomplishments unconditionally, aired in 1985.

The other three aliyot -- highlighted in green, yellow and orange -- are no problem. The Jawa's tuneful, pre-adolescent voice is so soothing that I almost forgot to get mad while inching down Stanyan Street. I imagine thousands of years of tradition flowing through him, ancient knowledge brought into the present by this rite of passage. By chanting in this ancient language he will become part of the unbroken line of generations of Jewish men who've honored their religion and culture in the face of almost constant persecution. Thirty-two years ago, I climbed onto the bima and chanted; twenty-seven years before that was my father's turn; my grandfather did it in 1930. And so on.

"So," I ask when he's through. "Do you feel thousands of years of tradition flowing through your veins?"

"Nope!" he says cheerily. "You know what that part I just said was about?"

"What?"

"It's about a guy getting hanged. I say it over and over."

"Really?"

"Yup. It comes after the part where they say that if you defeat someone in battle and impale their body on a stake, you're not supposed to leave the corpse out overnight."

"Why?"

"It's an affront to God."

I don't know if any of you consciously try to seize certain moments that you feel somehow require parental wisdom. Since I am still operating according to the Tom Corbett model, in which great sage-like knowledge and judgement flows effortlessly from the father, while he downshifts and steers around S-curves in his MGTD, I feel it is my responsibility to bring light to the ethical and moral questions raised by this issue.

Tom Corbett would say something about how God would want His children to realize that even the vanquishing of an opponent was nothing to brag about, that all killing was tragic, which is why you can impale your defeated opponent on a stake maybe for the afternoon, but not overnight. Honestly, thought, I thought it was going to be because after a few hours, the body would get gamy.

"Now I'm going to try it without vowels."

Who says my Jawa shrinks from challenges? Here he is, 59 days before his Bar Mitzvah, and he's got his Torah portion down cold. Looking for a little spice, he's going to try it without the vowels, for most of us akin to poking around in a pitch-black unfamiliar room.

"Should I see how far I can get or count how many times I have to look back?" he asks.

"How many times you have to look back."

The same stuff flows out of his mouth. He has to look back only twice. The meeting with the cantor lasts 15 minutes, as the Jawa has pretty much already locked up the technical parts of this whole Bar Mitzvah thing. I'm not promising a Pulitzer-worthy speech (the d'var Torah), as ours is a Jawa more comfortable among numerals and figures than he is amidst the mysteries of the English language.

By the time we get home, it's almost six. There's laundry to be folded, Shack needs to be fed and we need to start thinking about dinner, since it looks like Sandra Bullock might be working late. And there sits my laptop on the kitchen table, beckoning, promising me that the road to fame and fortune runs straight through its water-spotted screen.

60 days to Bar Mitzvah: disappointment

2010-06-21T21:43:00.000-07:00

San Francisco does not play fair. It sets you up so that one day after you've spent five glorious hours walking from Aquatic Park to the Marina Green, drinking in all that scenery everyone else only gets to see in books or on TV, or during that one week they spent in the city for business in 1991, but it's your own personal backyard and how incredible is that? you get forwarded an email that makes very clear how dysfunctional and downright wrong this city can be. In one 24 hour period, you get to see the upside and severe downside of living somewhere that so convincingly defines itself as "special" that no amount of logic can sway it from its stout self-image.

Since 1976, when we ditched northeastern Pennsylvania for Orange County, every place I've lived has been part of the popular imagination. Ask someone what they think about Orange County, you'll get something back. Ask them about Seattle, especially in the 1990s, and they may go on for hours. Boston, a brief stopover in 1989-1990, may not be New York, but try walking down the street wearing a Red Sox hat anywhere outside of Massachusetts. I've never lived someplace like Belleville, Illionois, probably a perfectly nice place and easier to live in than San Francisco, but seldom included in the everyday discussions of people who don't live there, and then only as a punchline.

And then you've got San Francisco. Has more ink ever been spilled over a place that hasn't been anything more than a grown-up theme park since about World War II? We really believe, when we're marching down Market Street holding our signs blaming everything on George W. Bush, that "the whole world is watching."

I'm not kidding. Yesterday I read an email thread between a Brandeis Hillel Day School parent and San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Chris Daly. In it, the Brandeis dad respectfully asked Daly -- his district supervisor -- not to lend his support to the ridiculous (at best) and immoral (at worst) proposal the Board has forwarded, calling to "condemn Israel for its acts."

Forgetting for a moment how truly misguided and ill-informed I think the sentiment of that proposal is, how about taking a step back and asking yourself how a city whose trains don't run on time, whose schools are awful and whose streets are pothole-ridden finds the time to make lofty proclamations about far-off lands? This isn't the first time we've shared our righteousness with you lesser beings, you know. We already condemned the Iraq war. Yup. Had hearings, spent taxpayer money, etc. We really did that.

But besides that, I read over this email thread and couldn't decide whether to hang my head in shame or write a blistering letter to the editor. Do we really have elected officials here who tell constituents that they "hate politicians, but sometimes constituents are worse?" Do our barely-elected council members really think that "while I am only a local elected, I have had a significant international impact?" I suppose once you've made a 12 year-old girl cry at a public hearing and gotten re-elected anyway, anything's possible.

Seriously. This is where i live.

So I was thinking about this last night. Sunday afternoon's incredible walk -- an hour of coming one step closer to the Golden Gate Bridge at a time, a pause to look out at the Bay from the top floor of the Golden Gate Yacht Club (where Sandra Bullock was measuring windows to determine the correct pitch of the paper lanterns she plans to buy before the Bar Mitzvah), some projected table layouts at Tarantino's -- all disappeared under the increasingly uneasy feeling you can get living in San Francisco: that you're the only one who can see that the emporer is naked.

There he goes, waltzing through The Mission in his birthday suit while everyone stands on the sidewalk and applauds his hip new duds. It can make you crazy if you let it.

On Sunday, the Jawa and I spent a few minutes upstairs at Tarantino's, plotting out table assignments for the Friday night pre-Bar Mitzvah dinner. I know that Tarantino's seldom rates more than three stars on Yelp because the calamari is rubbery and the wait staff has seen better days. I know that the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows is only supposed to impress tourists from Iowa whose idea of sophistication is one of those restaurants in North Beach where the Italian guy stands out on the sidewalk and beckons you to come inside.

But I don't care, and not because I revel in the ironic retro cheesiness of Tarantino's. I'm way too old for that particular game.

I walk into that dining room, with the faded murals on the walls and the view of bobbing fishing boats and Alcatraz, and I feel safe; comfortable. It's like stopping on the channel that's showing a re-run of "The Odd Couple," which immediately transports me back in time to my mother's old teenage bedroom in Great Neck, turned into a TV room by my grandmother where my sisters and I would sit and watch sitcoms on a brown convertible sofa pushed back against walls covered with wallpaper designed to look like the pages of a French newspaper.

You know how it goes, the first time I went to the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero, I was 11 years old, a wide-eyed California newcomer. Thirty-four years later, it's Bar Mitzvah HQ. Blah blah blah.

So last night I'm sitting there emailing with my older sister, railing on the present state of my adopted city and telling her how I miss seeing "The Odd Couple" at Grandma Sadie's house in Great Neck, and I start thinking about why San Francisco is such a heartbreaker. Why it drives me nuts and then rolls out some fleeting moment of awesomness -- it can be something as simple as a bank of fog getting caught up on the bridge as it rolls into the bay or picking Josh K.'s dad's brain about what it was like growing up here in the 1950s and 1960s.

I used to think that my opinion of this city was formed during the long lunch breaks of 1995 and 1996, hunkered down among the stacks at the old Seattle Public Library, leafing through old Herb Caen columns and picture books published in 1970. Last night I realized that wasn't entirely true.

The truth is, my image of San Francisco sprung fully-formed the day in 1971 that my mother took my sister and I to see "What's Up, Doc?" at a theater in Massapequa, New York. Like many women of her time, my mother loved nothing more than Barbra Streisand and San Francisco. She almost succeeded in getting us moved here once, only to settle for the consolation prize of Orange, California.

I'm doomed to be disappointed. My San Francisco is Ryan O'Neal piloting a VW Bug down a flight of stairs in Pacific Heights. Chris Daly's San Francisco is a place where you can be as big of a jerk as you want, provided your political checklist matches up with the local orthodoxy-disguised-as-principle. I really, really wish his mother had taken him to see "What's Up, Doc?" instead.

61 days to Bar Mitzvah: day one

2010-06-21T17:14:00.000-07:00

Day One of the First Day of the Rest of My Life went like this:

Woke up at 7:45 to the sound of frozen waffles ejecting from a toaster, with a little bed of Bakugon cartoon soundtrack underneath. Squirmed a little bit in bed because my back wanted to remind me that spending three hours a week on an Elliptical machine doesn't make your 45 year-old back any happier after 165 golf swings.

Got up, threw on some workout clothes. Now even in middle age's sweet spot, I still like to pretend I'm not part of the old guy demographic at 24-Hour Fitness. They wear small cotton shorts? I wear giant shiny ones. They throw on whatever t-shirt they got at last year's company picnic? I go with the long-sleeved Nike one made out of some synthetic fiber that didn't even exist when I was in my physical prime. The spots where the clingy fabric is supposed to be flat instead of bumpy? We call that "incentive."

This morning marked not only the First Day of the Rest of My Life but also the first day of Surf Camp; three days from nine until noon, the Jawa will meet other Jawas at foggy Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica. By Wednesday, the brochure promises, he will know how to surf.

Where I come from, surfing carries with it a very large and very specific kind of cache. You don't just surf; you are A Surfer. Would that the Jawa could emerge from this week A Surfer? How would that go over at Brandeis Hillel Day School? Totally tubular, dude.

How to feel like an old man: drop your child at Surf Camp. We got down there about ten minutes early, which gave us plenty of time to wander around, looking for the clump of surfers who seemed most likely to be the nurturing type. Those guys over there, changing out of their wetsuits on the beach? No. That very large group sitting in the back of a van with "PACIFICA SURF CAMP" written on the side? You'd think they'd be our surf camp, but they were not.

Our group was smaller. Only two adults and three kids. Is it strange that I felt slightly ripped off when it turned out that the head of Surf Camp had a New York accent?

What's strange about our Jawa is the unpredictability of his social skills. For six months he's been coming home complaining about how everyone makes fun of him, how he doesn't get invited out with everyone else. This morning, as I turned from his little Surf Camp group, I caught out of the corner of my eye this very same Jawa walking boldly up to a nervous-looking kid about his size, sticking out his right hand and saying, "What's your name?"

(Shakes head in confusion and continues rifling through the sofa cushions until he finds his copy of "Raising Your Erratic Teenager.")

Three hours later, I returned to Linda Mar Beach, having just spent 90 minutes at the gym, looking like a much younger man, thank you very much, as long as I keep my baseball cap on... and speaking of baseball caps, don't believe it when Adidas claims to have invented a baseball cap that wicks away sweat. If by "wicking" they mean "encouraging the production of," then they're on the level. Otherwise, their claims are fraudulent.

The rest of the time I spent at a coffee shop in Pacifica, cranking out a story about a house in San Carlos and doing all I could not to jump up every five minutes and shout, "HOORAY FOR ME! I AM DOING MY JOB, FOR WHICH I WILL BE PAID THE SAME AMOUNT I HAVE BEEN PAID FOR THE PAST YEAR, HERE IN THIS COFFEE SHOP INSTEAD OF AT A CUBICLE DOWNTOWN!" Some have predicted that within a month I will be pining for my old commute. Maybe. Until then, I'm going to enjoy myself.

Back at the beach, the Jawa was effortlessly cool in a pair of gray Walton's Grizzly Lodge sweatpants, some flip-flops and my Mariners hoodie. His hair was tousled just so. The transformation to surfer had already begun. "He got up (on a board)," said one of the counselors. She adopted a grave expression and added, "He was really stoked."

"I'm going to be a surfer now," the Jawa said calmly after we'd settled into the car. "It's really easy. Easier than Boogie Boarding."

"Is life really better when surfing?" I asked, parroting a nearby bumper sticker.

"Definitely."

Then we returned home and retreated to our respective neutral corners; that is, he fired up his computer and I sat down at the kitchen table and started typing.

Five hours later, thirty minutes since I told him to turn off his computer, he just called out to me from his room. "Do you have any idea what I'm supposed to be doing right now?"

"That's kind of up to you," I said.

Around here we like to pretend that there was no equivalent to sitting for hours on end in front of a computer when we were kids. Back then, we reason to our child, we spent summer running unfettered through empty fields, playing kick the can until dark, walking down to the corner store and flagging down the Good Humor Man for an ice cream sandwich.

In my case, that scenario is partly true. Before we moved to California, I did spend most summer days outside. When we weren't at Hammond's pool we actually were out somewhere, picking blackberries or playing baseball until our parents called us in for dinner. Every parent on the block had their own unique calling card. Ours was a cowbell. Your hear the cowbell, you come in for dinner.

Two other families on the street, I can't remember exactly who, had almost identical-sounding bells. They could always tell them apart.

Once we moved to California, though, my summer days became every bit as aimless as the Jawa's, minus Surf Camp. Or any other camp. My post-1976 childhood setting was about as far from Hannibal, Mo. as anywhere.

So we didn't have laptops. We had TV. You think it's through osmosis that I developed a love of 1960s episodic television? Those weren't first-run episodes of "The Twilight Zone" I was watching every weekday from noon until one. We watched TV. In a truly sad and pathetic, now that I look back at it from the distance of 30-plus years, attempt to continue my life the way it had been in Pennsylvania, I rode my bike -- alone -- to Ralph's to buy candy.

Several years later I started taking the bus to Newport Beach with my friends. It was an all-day affair and by no means something we did every day. So there was plenty of time left over for gaining encyclopedic knowledge of "The Bob Newhart Show."

The Jawa just marched past me toward the front door. "I'm going to go skateboarding," he said. "It's supposed to help your balance for surfing."

"Okay," I said. He walked out the front door. I waited a minute or so before walking into the living room and looking out the front windows to satisfy myself that he wouldn't be kidnapped within five minutes of leaving the house. That, as much as anything, is why he doesn't spend his summer days running through empty fields. Not only are there no empty fields; if there were any they'd have homeless emcampments in them. City living. All so he can blow his freshman roommate's mind when he asks him where he's from. "San Francisco? Wow! What was it like growing up there?"

Good that he took the initiative and found something to do instead of standing here, looking over my shoulder and driving me insane. Too much of that and you've got a real long summer and a non-productive freelance writer.

64 days to Bar Mitzvah: career menopause

2010-06-18T16:47:00.000-07:00

My final day as an official employee of the San Francisco Examiner (actually, just “The Examiner,” but if I throw that “San Francisco” in there it makes it seem like I’m working for the paper that Wm. Randolph Hearst used to own, not some weird little freebie whose web presence is powered by citizen journalists) was full of confusion. Appropriately, since the last two years of my tenure has been notable mostly for weird gaps in management and job status changes that suddenly appear without prior warning. I posted something about this being my last day on Facebook and drew mostly concerned inquiries and comments saying, simply, “Whaa?”

So for everyone out there wondering what happened, it’s a good thing. It’s been in the works for months. And the end result, unless someone calls me Monday morning and says, “Game off. We were just trying to get rid of you without having to pay unemployment,” is that, like Jay Leno and NBC, I’ll be signing off only to reappear the following week in a different format. That is to say that starting Monday, I’ll have the same job – populating the paper’s two Sunday regional real estate sections each week – but will be doing so as a freelancer, not as an employee. Yes, it is what I wanted.

Even though it’s what I wanted, I understand that it could go a number of ways. This isn’t the first time I’ve stepped back, tore my keycard off its lanyard and declared myself a “freelancer.” I could be back in six months, stuck in some other cubicle somewhere else, a little bit more dead than I was this time. We’re hoping that’s not what happens.

Because this could also mean that today is the last time I’ll ever have to sit in an office. What if it works, and Monday is the beginning of this great run that ends only when I keel over one day, sitting at my desk in some retirement resort, while the retired Sandra Bullock is out riding a bike or cross-country skiing or whatever you do when you only age chronologically? What if in five years I’m signing books at Barnes and Noble and we both look back and say, “Wow, why did I wait so long to do that?” How great would that be?

Because my last week coincided with Sandra Bullock’s trip to Zurich, it has been lacking most of the “we’re going to miss having you around here” events that normally accompany a job change. The most I could manage was including my boy Ray in my usual Friday falafel outing. Weirdly, it marked the first time I’d ever gone out to lunch with a co-worker at The Examiner. Normally, I go the loner route, shoved into the corner at Noah’s Bagels, reading the “other” newspaper. Or worse yet, slamming down a sandwich at my desk, my back to the room, looking at si.com.

Some people are cut out for the workaday world. My wife, for example, is always hooking up with “work friends,” going on work-sponsored outings, meeting for happy hours. She even keeps in contact with her former co-workers, getting together a few times a year for dinner. If there’s one thing we all should know by now, it’s that it is unwise to try to compare Sandra Bullock’s work experience with mine. You just don’t want to go down that road, unless you’re trying to make me feel bad. And anyone who didn’t spend their childhood tying tin cans to puppies’ tails or pulling the wings off of butterflies would not begrudge her success. My hat is off to her, revealing a growing bald spot.

I’ve got to hand it to me. Here I am, 23 years out of college, and I’m still walking around trying to be a writer. I didn’t fall into some vague – yet insanely lucrative – consulting career. I didn’t become a lawyer, as good of a son as that would have made me. You’ve heard the joke about the Jewish mother whose son is flailing about in the ocean? “Help, help! My son the lawyer is drowning!”

Nope. In the face of what has often been crippling feelings of failure, the disheartening realization that what everyone tells me is a “gift” is only worth about 10% of what I’d make if my “gift” were an ability to analyze the stock market, and the sickening feeling that comes from using my “gift” to do things like help sell Fords, I’ve persevered. It helps that Sandra Bullock functions as not only my wife and partner but also as the modern-day equivalent of a Renaissance art patron.

At age 45, quitting my job now is like getting a tattoo of a spider web across my face. It puts me one step further from employable. All of the pieces are in place: my biggest fear, the couple of times I’ve tried to freelance in the past – and make no mistake, I absolutely loathe the word “freelance” – I’ve panicked a couple of months in because of money. “I need income!” I’d shout, just before signing on to a contract job at AOL, even though I’d had lunch with the guy who would be my boss and couldn’t hear most of what he was saying because there were flashing red lights and sirens going off in my head, saying, “DO NOT TRUST ANYONE WHO DESCRIBES THEMSELVES AS A ‘STRAIGHT-SHOOTER.’ NOTHING GOOD WILL COME FROM THIS. YOU WILL BE TRAUMATIZED BY THIS MAN.”

Six months later I was gone, my legacy a blistering email to my boss, which, I later heard, sent him into an existential tailspin that lasted the length of time it took him to drive to Napa with his wife the following Saturday.

As Elvis would say, and has said, “It’s now or never.” That’s the scary part of next Monday. If the powers that be at The Examiner have been telling the truth, I’ll have the same income six months from now as as I had six months ago. That takes care of the money panic. Three years of writing a weekly newspaper column should give me some kind of leg up on the me of ten years ago, shouldn’t it? Someone must have read the thing. My name’s got to ring a bell somewhere.

And then there’s this blog thing. Several months ago, I sat at Barney’s, a hamburger restaurant in Noe Valley, with Teduardo and his clan. “You should write a book about the year leading up to a Bar Mitzvah,” he told me over garden burgers.

“I’ve got folders on my desktop full of 25-, 35-, even 50-page semi-novels,” I thought. “I’ve got unfinished screenplays, short stories, three-page plays. They sit around collecting virtual dust. I grow older and the number of people who think I’m talented shrinks each day.”

“The only way I’m going to finish something is if I know people are expecting to read something from me every day,” I said, and left it at that.

If I’m any good, you’ve been reading the results of that conversation for the past six months. Now, with every obstacle, real and invented, out of the way, it’s up to me to turn it into something someone might want to buy someday.

Wish me luck.

65 days to Bar Mitzvah: measuring success

2010-06-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

How much do you care about grades? I mean now, not when you were a kid. Because I can tell you that I seem to care about them way more now then I did when I was the one being graded.

Today, report cards arrived.

They came along with "practice" SSAT scores. It was coincidence. I'm sure Brandeis Hillel Day School, which sent the report cards but had nothing to do with the timing of the SSAT scores, did not plan on giving us such a comprehensive impression of our children's academic progress. We got it anyway, all wrapped up in a neat little package. Total academic judgement is as easy as laying two sheets of paper side-by-side.

I'm not sure if I've discussed the SSAT here yet. It is the pre-pre-SAT, the standardized test favored by most San Francisco "independent" high schools. A quick Google search reveals that it is also favored by many prestigious boarding schools like Choate and Andover. These are the shark-infested waters in which our children swim. We are, whether we intend to or not, sending them out to do battle with the former Masters of the Universe, the rep tie-clad scions of American fortune.

And here they are: undersized, perhaps a touch immature, sporting faint moustaches that will disappear the first time we, their fathers, teach them to shave. These little kids are taking the exact same test Finny and Eugene would take, were they hashing out their separate peace today, rather than in 1940.

When I was a teacher, I cared not at all about grades. If I thought about it at all, it was to determine that a D should be as hard to get as an A. While the baseball state geek part of me loved the actual act of tallying up people's scores, I was firmly, philosophically against the notion of summing up a kid's value by a single letter grade.

My thinking was that grades are supposed to function as check points. They assess the student's progress. How well is he keeping up with classwork? Is this subject something that interests her enough to give me back what I require in order to give her a top grade? A quiz or test grade seemed simple: it measured how much more you needed to learn. You got a 75? You've got 25% more stuff to master until you can safely move on to the next concept or unit.

Grades should be instruments used to help students figure out how they're doing, and I suspect that whoever invented the four-point grade scale had exactly that in mind. They're not supposed to be endpoints by which we judge kids' value.

Lets say, for example, that the Jawa comes home today and finds two sheets of paper on the kitchen table, along with my laptop, which has not moved since Sandra Bullock left for Zurich, because we're guys and guys are efficient; why move the laptop when I'll just have to put it back there again the next day?

Lets say he sees these sheets of paper. One of them, his report card, has him getting a B+ in math. This is very disappointing for a number of reasons. First, the impressions was that this year, having dropped from the "top" math class to the "middle" math class, an A in math should have been a given, which is so screwed up on so many levels -- the idea being that you should back off from something that challenges you, opting instead for an easier version, so you can log a good grade and improve your chances of getting into a "good" high school. It becomes a game instead of a chance to learn.

Lets say that sitting right next to your B+ is your SSAT score, and your highest SSAT score -- by far -- comes in, you guessed it, math. How are you going to process this obvious dichotomy?

Actually, as a parent who isn't too jazzed about using letter grades as a value judgement, the stellar SSAT score gives you a nice crutch. Instead of railing, "HOW CAN YOU GET A B+ IN MATH?" you can calmly hold the two sheets of paper next to each other and say, "See here, where your math score is so much higher than your other scores? Don't you think that should somehow translate into math being your best subject in school?"

And thanks to the numbered comments system. While it limits teacher comments to a string of digits, "1-9, 12, 16," it at least, in the Jawa's case, forms a nice pattern on which to hang a reasonable discussion. "See this? All of these comments are the same. None of them have anything to do with your ability to do the work, and yet all drag your grades down. Doesn't that frustrate you?"

Even after making this convincing case for raising his grades which, in all honesty, weren't that bad, but with this looming high school admissions pressure coming ever closer, we have to assume that everything short of perfect is potentially a one-way ticket to San Francisco public schools, many of which have no doors on their bathroom stalls, making it much more difficult for students to complete drug transactions or beat each other silly without anyone seeing.

It's a lot of pressure. Too much. We all know that. And yet, it's the agenda we accepted the minute we fell in love with the view from Coit Tower. When in Rome.

How strange is my child's school experience? Think of this: eight years in and he wouldn't recognize a totally checked-out kid if one was standing three inches from his face. Nobody in his school is checked-out. Nobody completely blows off teachers, never does their homework, shows up at school drunk, habitually ditches class, regularly talks back to teachers and spends time every week in the principal's class. Nobody has a marijuana leaf drawn on their P.E. uniform. Nobody hangs out in a gang and threatens people. The one time a bad seed somehow made it through, he was suspended seemingly every other week until finally "not getting asked back" this year. But even that kid, as sociopathical as he was, still managed to have a Bar Mitzvah.

Sometimes I wish the Jawa's school curriculum could be built around Legos and roller coasters, with a few "Godzilla in Literature" Humanities classes thrown in. I bet he'd bring home some killer grades if they did that.

67 days to Bar Mitzvah: business trip

2010-06-15T17:29:00.000-07:00

It is going on a full 24 hours that the Jawa and I have been alone. Last night, at 7:30, Sandra Bullock boarded a plane for Zurich, Switzerland. It is a business trip, the latest in a not-unimpressive line of trips that have taken her to France, Denmark and Finland in the past and probably several times to Switzerland in the future. She will be gone until Saturday.

The Jawa and I have never really discussed our strategy for seeing a vital member of our small nuclear family off on a week-long business trip. Still, I was surprised to find, upon getting home from work, that he'd chosen to make her departure easier by reminding her how miserable life can be around here when he doesn't get his way. It was an interesting approach and very unprecedented. Usually, he's all clingy when she goes somewhere. Not this time.

In play was $10, the amount he was supposed to save from his first day of Theme Park Camp. Yes, you read that right. There is Theme Park Camp. Yesterday, Monday, they went to Great America. He left the house with $40 and was instructed to spend no more than $30, which still sounds like a sack full o' dough until you consider how much food costs at theme parks. And he only spent $20 on food, leaving me to wonder what, exactly he ate, since that'll buy you a pretzel and a Coke, maybe, at Great America.

With the other $20 he bought some swim trunks for a fellow Theme Park camper who'd forgotten to bring some. This way, the guy could join everyone else at Great America's waterpark. 24 hours later, I still can't decide if that was an admirably selfless act or a symptom of entitlement on his part. Sandra Bullock, while not sharing with me her opinion of the act itself, took a firm stand: the $10 will come out of tomorrow's per diem.

This went down minutes before I came home with visions of a heartfelt airport scene, followed by dinner somewhere in South San Francisco in my head, only to see them evaporate before I'd even made it the 12 feet that separate our front door and kitchen.

"What's going on?" I asked with the innocence of babes.

"DON'T GET INVOLVED, DAD!"

But of course I did get involved, because despite my great efforts at keeping cool in the face of adolescent irrationality, I'd mistakenly left the "on" switch for rage exposed, within easy reach of an eye-rolling, rudely-interrupting, angrily smug Jawa. Within ten minutes it was me standing over the Jawa, lecturing, trying not to explode, while Sandra Bullock, oh-so-helpfully, told me to "walk away."

The airport scene was not heartfelt. It consisted of me quietly fuming while my wife went over her last-minute preparations. The Jawa was not invited to accompany us. He was banished to his room, as, you know, punishment. Unfortunately, this particular "punishment" is indistinguishable from his "leisure time," as it involves him sitting on an office chair, staring hypnotized into a computer screen for hours on end.

We reached the airport. I double-parked and didn't get out of the car. I was too mad. The goodbyes were terse.

Forget Mothers Against Drunk Driving; tearing up the 101 on the way home I was the poster child for Mothers Against Fathers Feeling Several Conflicting Emotions At Once (MAFFSCEAO). Ever been blisteringly mad, worried and anxious while simultaneously trying to figure out a way to cool your child's rage, teach him the error of his ways and create a plan to avoid these kinds of run-ins in the future because the last few have left you clutching your chest, wondering if this was the big one and you'd be joining Elizabeth soon, while also planning a day-by-day schedule to get through the week in a manner that will not cause Sandra Bullock to come home and think, "These guys are hopeless without me?"

All of this in the 15 minutes it takes to get from SFO to our front door. I needed more time. No way was I focused enough yet to make this into a positive.

Entering the house, I adopted a laconic, distant mien. The Jawa, taking my lead, followed suit. For the next three hours, we spoke to each other in stilted, weirdly polite tones. "I'll make dinner," the Jawa announced, a few minutes after my return.

"Oh, no, that's fine. I can make dinner." Me.

"No, no, it's no problem. I'll make Annie's (San Francisco for 'macaroni and cheese')."

"That's great. Can you make the orange kind?"

"Well, I had hoped to make the white kind, but I can make the orange kind, since I know you like it."

"Are you sure? If you'd prefer the white kind, I'd be okay with it."

"Oh, no. No problem. I'll make the orange kind."

We went on this way until about nine, when we both decided to thaw it out a little. My idea to write down everything he "needed" to do before bedtime (practice his Torah portion, feed the dog, take a shower), lest he receive no per diem tomorrow, seemed to work well, too. Is this a bribe? Is it adherence to the most tired and amoral of parenting techniques, the "reward/punishment paradigm?" Yes, and yes. I have long since given up my dream to be the Davey Concepcion of parenting. I'll have to settle for being the Ed Brinkman. Look it up.

You know, sometimes it's a drag being the volatile, slightly unstable parent of a pre-teen. Of course he rolls his eyes. He's 12. Don't think I'm not fully aware of that. And yet each time I think, "This is going to be the time he says, 'You're right. I'm acting like a real punk. I'm going to apologize and stop now. Thanks.'"

I think our frosty three hours did the trick, at least for now. Today has been incident-free, even though he didn't want to walk the dog when he got home. It was laid out there on his list. He couldn't argue with it, so after a very short protest and the brief adoption of kindergarten teacher tones by me, he took the dog for a walk. I saw him cross out "walk the dog" with relish after completing the task.

Last night, after the thaw, I was standing in our bedroom, looking at all of these pictures we have on these shelves. Lately, whenever I have a run-in with the Jawa, I go in there and look at them. They're various shots of Sandra Bullock, the Jawa and I, taken over a period of years.

A while ago, I was looking at them and noticed that in every single one, I'm touching the Jawa. I'm either holding him, or he's climbing all over me. In one, I have one finger touching the side of his coat.

I took him in there last night to look at them, but I don't think he got it because I'm not sure what it was I wanted him to "get." I just wanted the both of us to go in there and look at them for awhile.

68 days to Bar Mitzvah: as young as you feel

2010-06-14T15:57:00.001-07:00

Do you remember a commercial, aired sometime in the 1970s, that included a woman repetitively saying, “You’re as young as you feel!” until watching became a study in anticipation as we waited for someone else in the ad to suddenly snap, grab the “You’re as young as you feel!” lady around the neck and shake her until her eyes fell out? Obviously borne of the “annoying song stuck in my head” school of brand strategy, the spot was equal parts successful and a failure; decades later, I know that “You’re as young as you feel!” comes from a commercial; I can hear the exact inflection of the woman’s voice who said it, but have no idea what she was pitching. Geritol?

I just Googled it and went to YouTube. The origins of “You’re as young as you feel!” will remain murky. While it is very easy to call up the Alka-Seltzer, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” commercial, and YouTube has several variations of the pre-PC “ancient Chinese secret” Calgon spot, “You’re as young as you feel!” is lost to history.
Just as well. “You’re as young as you feel” is annoying. Especially when you’re not.

Once the generation that preceded mine turned 30, they started saying things like, “I may get older, but I’ll never grow up!” (variations include “I refuse to grow up”) to explain that their childish behavior was not due to character flaw but instead a shrewdly concocted life strategy whose core belief boils down a psychotic need to demonstrate to your parents that while they are stodgy and old-fashioned, you are the living embodiment of nothing less than a new way to live. It is necessary to pledge 100% fidelity to this concept if you’re planning on spending your 50s attending Rolling Stones concerts and/or enjoying a rousing game of kickball whenever the mood strikes.

However hard you can try to fend off what you perceive as the dull conformity of old age, I’m here to tell you that your body is going to age at whatever rate it wants. Your mind may tell you you’re 18, but your body can’t lie. In two hours, when I get off work, I can walk right into Hot Topic and buy myself a crate of ironic black logo T-shirts; it won’t change the fact that I am 45 years old. It might actually amplify it.

Yesterday, I did something simple: with Sandra Bullock and the Jawa gone for an unplanned all-day trip to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom and with me having a few hours to kill before I had to go to “work” (call it what you like; driving around on a Sunday, looking at multi-million dollar houses and having Realtors suck up to you because they want you to write about their listing isn’t really like work to me), I decided to follow up on Saturday’s poor driving range performance by heading to the range and hitting a bucket of balls. My head was full of Teduardo’s advice: “Front arm straight; wrist cocked. Don’t turn your wrist in your backswing! Feet planted; follow-through; get under the ball; slow backswing. Front arm straight!”

Once I got there, though, it took only a few swings before I became very aware that golf is a repetitive sport that requires repeated upper body and core torqueing and delivers constant punishment to your hands and wrists. About halfway in, I really started to hurt, pretty much all over. I was as young as I felt, and I felt 70.

How was this going to work in six weeks, when I was expected to play 18 holes for four consecutive days? At an elevation of 7,000 feet, for crissakes! Would I hold up?

Way too often, we sit back on our couches and watch pro athletes run around. I can’t speak for you, but it never occurs to me that Kobe Bryant might be sucking air after 45 minutes of running up and down the court. And I certainly never thought that golfers – golfers! – whose physique often trails only that of professional bowlers in resembling your Uncle Morty or that guy in Accounts Receivable who always eats egg salad sandwiches at his desk, would wake up on Tournament Sunday, having already logged 54 holes since Wednesday, and feel as beat up as Brett Favre on a Monday morning in November. I’d gone back-to-back to the driving range and already my hands were on fire, my left wrist was throbbing and my back was all bent sideways.

It was pathetic. I could go home, drop off my clubs and troll Squid List for the next scheduled Bigwheel flash mob event. I’d still feel old. Probably even older. When was the last time you tried to fit yourself into a Big Wheel? I tried it last year at the Surrey Street block party. Didn’t get ten feet before the dumb thing went into a wheelie that continued the entire time I was on it.

Thirty-five years ago, our house in Clarks Green, Pennsylvania had two good surfaces at which to throw a ball. I used the garage doors to throw grounders to myself with a tennis ball. Sometimes Mark “Red” Comerford would come over from next door and we’d have day-long one-on-one wiffleball tournaments.

In front of our house, underneath the front deck and behind a small flowerbed whose contents interested me not at all, we had a smaller brick wall. It was about three feet high and fifteen feet wide. Our lawn was sloped, but there was enough flat space at the top for me to get a decent distance from the wall, throw a hardball against it as hard as I could, then field the rebound, which, because the wall was made of bricks, always came back in some erratic, unpredictable way.

I’d be out there for hours, throwing a ball against the wall, diving in the grass to make the stop, jumping up and throwing against the wall again, then diving to make the next stop. Repeat, rinse, repeat.

Some summer nights I’d be out there until it was so dark out that I could barely see the ball, my shorts and New York Mets t-shirt grass-stained, sweat rolling into my eyes, my hands shaking because I hadn’t eaten in several hours, all alone, throwing that baseball against the wall, completely destroying whatever had been in the flower bed because either it wasn’t just me that didn’t care, or my parents just considered dead flowers part of the price of doing business when you were raising an obsessive little boy.

In the summer of 1975, I could throw a ball against a wall, dive in the grass a thousand times, hit my elbows against the dirt with the entire weight of my body, then wake up the next morning and do it all over again for a month solid.

My dad once told me that he spent his entire career wondering when someone was going to break into a meeting, call him out for pretending to be an adult, then drag him away so the real grown-ups could get to work. I don’t think that’s the same as bouncing around saying, “You’re as young as you feel!” but it kind of sums up the idea that, while we weren’t looking, 35 years passed. And as much as we profess to not remember that passage of time, our bodies will always be there to dutifully remind us.

71 days to Bar Mitzvah: birthday girl gets her wish

2010-06-11T16:49:00.001-07:00

Today is my wife’s birthday. Each year, as she refuses to age, I start looking like more and more of a stud. To paraphrase David Wooderson, “I get older and she stays the same age,” meaning that if I can hang on long enough, I’ll eventually look like an old guy with a hot young wife. All done without the benefit of a divorce and/or a high-paying job.

For her birthday, my very demure wife asked for a barbecue. She’s wanted one for a long time. Until now, I’ve successfully deflected her attempts at buying one by pointing out the obvious: the usable portion of our backyard is approximately ten feet square, hemmed in by four foot-high retaining walls, which keep the rest of the yard, which is at a 60 degree slope, from falling into our bedrooms.

The upside of this arrangement is that any casual thief wanting to break into our house from the rear would first have to rappel down the yard. Either he’d make so much noise digging his boots into the dirt that we’d hear him, or he’d simply fall off the yard, tumbling past the retaining walls and onto the cement patio. And then he’d sue us.

It didn’t matter. She continued to indulge her backyard fantasy. At Target, she’d pore over the outdoor furniture display, rearranging pillows and sitting in chairs. “This would be great,” she’d say. Usually, I’d let a few seconds pass before adding, “…if we actually had a backyard.”

That we are also vegetarians who will never, by definition, throw a few steaks on the barbie, went unsaid. There are always garden burgers.

Someday, we will transform our backyard. Like many of our neighbors, we will chop, grade and dig, moving mountains of dirt, adding more retaining walls and a multi-tiered deck. On the deck will be a hot tub, the quasi-Adirondack chairs that showed up via FedEx two weeks ago, and a barbecue. Only then, I would bellow, will we need a full-sized barbecue.

Two weeks ago, completely bereft of ideas, I went to my wife and asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She didn’t know. Maybe a gift certificate to Nordstrom for some new sunglasses. There were these Kate Spade ones she liked.

That just wasn’t going to rate. A gift certificate? For Kate Spade sunglasses? Doesn’t the Spade family have enough celebrities in it? Not wanting to press the issue, I filed that away and figured, “Hey, no problem. The Jawa and I can go grab that gift certificate any time.” So it is when you have already celebrated 19 birthdays together.

Then, about a week ago, she changed her mind. “I know what I want,” she said. “A barbecue.”

Clever girl. By making the barbecue a birthday request, she’d removed my ability to resist. Were I to ridicule the idea, I’d be a bad husband who makes fun of his wife ON HER BIRTHDAY. Were I to opt instead for a Nordstrom gift certificate, I’d be a bad husband who, given two options, chose not only the easiest one but the least personal one to boot. The next day, I received an email, subject line: “Sandra Bullock’s Birthday Present.” The body of the email was a link to the Weber E210 propane barbecue, available at Home Depot.

So three days ago, the Jawa and I rolled down to Home Depot, once I’d checked online to make sure the Daly City store had the E210 in stock. There we stood in proximity to many barbecues, waiting for someone to notice us while the Jawa tried repeatedly to get me to reject the E210 in favor of larger, flashier units. “No,” I said. “This is the one Mommy wants. She did research, and I know her: she will not want to get something other than what she has stated she wants.”

Undeterred, the boy continued to hammer away, pointing out the advantages of the other barbecues. “This one has three burners!” he said. Finally, I had to appease him by agreeing to get a cover. We got out the door, my wallet much lighter than it had been an hour prior, and set about getting the thing home, taking it out of the box and putting it together.

Jerry Seinfeld thinks father-son projects are the funniest thing in the world, and he’s right. Had anyone been watching is wheel this giant box, precariously teetering on top of a standard shopping cart because the guy who finally noticed us standing near the barbecues couldn’t find a flat cart, through the Home Depot parking lot would have had no choice but to assume that the Jawa and I had a mutually abusive relationship.

My boy, he likes to take charge. “This way, Dad. No! This way! Wait! Back up. BACK UP!”

Me: “What, you’re the world’s biggest authority now? You just backed me into a pickup truck.”

Him: “DAD! Hey, Toyota Tundra. Don’t you see us back here? HEY!”

Somehow, we reached the car without beating each other up. I was bathed in sweat. He, twelve years old, looked as if he’d just completed a refreshing stroll in the park. It would have been great if he’d not felt the need to continue project managing me while we drove him, but it was not to be so. “Can you see out of the back, Dad? Do you need me to tell you what’s behind us? There’s a car back there.” I was forced to turn the radio on, volume up, before we even reached the freeway.

And then there’s the issue of the 32 steps that stand between the street and our front door. “I’m going to go get one of the neighbors,” my son announced forcefully as we pulled up to our house.

“No!” I said.

“No? I’m going to get one of the neighbors.”

“No. We can do it ourselves.” Seriously. I’ve got great relationships with my neighbors. I don’t need to be bothering them to come hoist a giant box up our 32 steps. In retrospect, given that I probably lost about a half-hour off my lifespan by trying to carry that thing up the steps with the Jawa, I should have listened to him. At age 12 and 90 pounds and imbued with an analytical confidence that can only come from the child of a woman whose job it is to keep people in line, my son was not the ideal furniture-moving partner.

By the time we reached the top of the stairs (and we only went up 16, since we opted to stow it downstairs), the folly of our ways was evident. The only reason I was able to summon the brute strength necessary to single-handedly shove a giant box into our basement was because, like that woman who lifted a two-ton car off of her husband when the jack broke, I’d been possessed with superhuman strength borne of crisis. It was push that thing into the basement or strangle my child.

“Okay, lets hide this thing,” he said, once inside. “We need to build it and then move it to the backyard. I want to surprise Mommy on her birthday.”

My kid is the kind of kid who, once he’s got an idea, will not be swayed by trifling details. Like the fact that the “Mommy will be surprised” ship sailed the moment I got the email outlining in great detail her birthday present wishes. “Okay,” I said, mostly to get out of the room.

“I’ll put it together Thursday,” answered the Jawa.

You know what I wanted for my birthday? Freedom from ever having to assemble items that come in big boxes. And you know what? That’s what I got for Sandra Bullock’s birthday. Last night, with back-to-back episodes of “Mythbusters” as his soundtrack, the Jawa went downstairs, took everything out of the box and, by God, assembled that barbecue. Naturally, he was positive that the thing had arrived missing screws, bolts and other hardware. That always seems to happen to him. Kind of like how his alarm seems to go off at weird times because the radio’s broken. “What are the odds?” I often say.

But I’m not kidding. We went down there at about nine o’clock and the thing was together. My only contribution was grabbing a bottle of Windex and wiping the Jawa-sized fingerprints from the barbecue’s gleaming stainless steel surfaces. I led Sandra Bullock down to the basement, where the Jawa executed a dramatic reveal. He yanked the cover and there is was: a gigantic, assembled barbecue that will occupy approximately 38% of the total usable ground space in our backyard.

“Wow. It’s really big,” said Sandra Bullock.

“No kidding,” I said.

“We’ll bring it up there once I paint the ground.” Because what good is the Saturday after your birthday if you don’t spend it painting cement?

Today is my wife’s birthday. For it, she asked for and received a Weber E210 propane grille. To keep our theme consistent, on my next birthday I’m thinking I might ask for a nice piece of jewelry.

72 days to Bar Mitzvah: day one summer reflections

2010-06-10T17:53:00.000-07:00

Today was the last day of seventh grade, so the newly-retired Wine Guy and I took our boys to Malibu Grand Prix. For me, it was sort of a break from the relentlessly discombobulated Hillsborough Centennial special project I've been toiling on for the past month. Sort of a break because, had I been able to figure out how to work the "documents to go" feature of my BlackBerry, I would have edited this story contributed by a long-time Hillsborough Realtor, instead of just reading it over again on a very small screen, making mental edits that I would convert to concrete ones upon returning home.

When was the last time you were at Malibu Grand Prix? If it was less then a decade ago, you shouldn't be in any rush to go back. Malibu Grand Prix is the kind of place 13-year-olds should go with each other. You should drive up to the entrance, drop them off and return two hours later to pick them up.

Unfortunately, when you live in San Francisco, this is impossible for two reasons. First, Malibu Grand Prix is 29 miles away. With traffic, that's a 45 minute trip. What, we're going to drop them off, drive back to the city, sit around for a half-hour then get back in the car and battle traffic on the 101 to pick them up? No.

The other reason is that in San Francisco, most people don't just drop their 13-year-olds places, especially ones that are 45 minutes away.

When I was 13, Dave K. and I were always unattended. Whether we were skateboarding through the open-air shopping mall near his house or disappearing into Knott's Berry Farm at dusk for the annual "Knott's Scary Farm" party, it was just the two of us, plus the ghostly presence of all the girls we thought we'd be able to convince to hang out with us but never seemed to appear in the flesh. Dave K. and I had huge imaginations.

The Jawa will be 13 in two months. Josh K., his buddy and the Wine Guy's son, has been 13 since last October. We have not as-yet dropped them off somewhere as a duo then picked them up several hours later. Long past our best-if-used-by date, we are still chaperones. Today we were chaperones at Malibu Grand Prix.

Malibu Grand Prix is always running special deals. Today they had two. For $29, you could take four laps, play mini-golf, ride the bumper boats then go nuts in the arcade, thanks to the combustible mixture of 20 video game tokens and a free Coke. For $25, you got unlimited laps, golf and the bumper boats. No Coke, no tokens.

It's kind of amazing to me that Malibu Grand Prix even exists this close to San Francisco. Where are all those people who spend their Saturdays toting "U.S. Out of Iraq!" signs? I looked in the parking lot. For the first time in a long time, I was looking at a scene where pickup trucks outnumbered Priuses.

Back inside, little league jerseys ruled supreme. Dads wore baseball caps that advertise golf equipment. The only food available was hot dogs, hamburgers and personal-sized pizzas. For an extra 99 cents, you could add a large Coke. This was the Bay Area?

I was thankful. Everyone needs a break now and then. In fact, I once decided that every San Franciscan should be forced to take a cross-country road trip at least once every five years. While for most it may simply reinforce their existing prejudices, at least they will be forced to deal with the rest of the country, instead of issuing blanket dismissals of the other 49 states.

Do you remember the last day of school? Next year, the Jawa and his classmates will be the ones wearing miniature caps and gowns as they "graduate" from middle school. The day will take on a sepia tone as they suddenly realize that they will no longer see every day these 40 other kids they've known since they were in kindergarten. Grandparents will fly in. Tears will be shed. But that's still a year away. Today we are at Malibu Grand Prix.

Our first glitch comes after the boys complete their four laps on the Malibu grid. The Jawa improves his time on three of the four go-rounds. As he eases his go-kart toward the start line, he sees his time flashing on the big leaderboard they have and raises his arms over his head in triumph.

Afterwards, we dine on the worst food we've had in months. I actually say this at one point. "I'll bet this is the worst food I've had in at least a month." I am eating the Malibu Grand Prix version of nachos, which are remarkably similar to the County Fair version of nachos and the Baseball Stadium version of nachos, which is to say that they are a platic bowl of chips along with a cordoned-off well of melted Velveeta cheese. They are awesome.

But then the Jawa wants to play games in the arcade. Josh K. wants to go to the batting cages. I want to go to the batting cages. "Just go, Dad," the Jawa says. "That's what you want to do." I'd feel worse about abandoning my child in a sea of pre-teens wearing replica jerseys if I didn't suspect that he didn't really want me around. He likes to eliminate distractions during his arcade time.

So I went to the batting cages, bought a few tokens and struck up a left-handed stance in the "medium" cage while a bunch of young guys watched. Once I timed the thing -- it was really slow, about 30 mph slower than the "medium fast" cage, which, brimming with confidence after hitting the tar out of the ball in the "medium" cage, I cockily tried afterwards, only to barely make contact on about five out of 15 balls -- I got off a few good strokes, enough to transport me back to 1983, the last time I swung a bat with any regularity.

After a quick 18 holes of miniature golf, we packed it in. Several work assignments had begun casting an irritating shadow over me. I needed to get home and put out the fires.

And that's it: the last day of seventh grade.

I can't remember exactly how seventh grade ended for me in 1978. I probably went over to Fred's house and played basketball. There were no parents in sight, because both of my parents worked and that's how it was in 1978. It was sort of like living in a "Peanuts" comic strip. On the rare occasions that adults spoke, it came out, "Wa-wa-wa-WA-wa?"

When I finished up in the "medium" batting cage, my hands were stinging. I'd hit at least two balls really hard. "That's what it looks like at 45, boys," I said to the young guys waiting their turn, secretly thinking less of them because at 22 you should really be hitting in the "medium fast" cage. I slammed the bat back into the rack they had and shoved my helmet into its cubby hole.

This summer, not counting the week leading up to his Bar Mitzvah, the Jawa has something like 15 free days. All the rest are scheduled out with camps. Next week, as Sandra Bullock goes off the Zurich for work meetings, the Jawa will be at "Theme Park Camp," a JCC-sponsored day camp that couldn't be more in his wheelhouse if he'd designed the syllabus himself. No afternoons where you watch four "Twilight Zones" in a row. No walking to Ralphs to buy candy, even though it's two miles away, because who cares if it takes a couple or hours, you've got all day?

No playing an approximate version of baseball with very intricate rules, one-on-one at Dave Money's house, using his garage door as a backstop and pitching from a spot five feet closer than him, because he's the kind of athlete that will one day earn a college football scholarship, whereas I am the kind who will eventually apply bargefuls of effort and focus on becoming a mediocre high school pitcher while simultaneously ignoring my own personal gifts to the point where they atrophy and become unusable.

And on the ride down and back? Both boys hunched over in the back seat, mesmerized by their iPods, identical white ear buds blocking out all other sound. "They'd rather link up in games than actually talk to each other," said the Wine Guy.

Tomorrow is Sandra Bullock's birthday. She will be pleased to hear that the guy who owns to gift and card store thought she was turning 36. Awesome for me. Ten more years of this and I'll look like the old guy with the hot young wife.

73 days to Bar Mitzvah: paging pete pan

2010-06-09T19:57:00.000-07:00

I started reading this book the other day. It's about a guy who leaves his wife. He's 30 years old, the producer of insanely terrible reality shows (the best his jacket blurb can manage is "My Big Fat Fiancee") and has been with his wife for ten years. Since he's actually put a show on TV, he's got money. No matter how bad the show is, if it gets on TV and you produced it, you have money. In fact, I sort of know this guy who -- I just checked on IMBD -- has exactly four movie writing credits, but showed up at my house five years ago in a cool Saab convertible.

Sometimes I get the feeling that there's a ton of money lying around out there, waiting for people to wise up and find jobs that offer access to it. I will likely go to my grave never figuring out how to get one of those jobs.

So this guy leaves his wife because he's feeling trapped. He wants to live the adrenaline-filled life of a bachelor, or at least the fantasy of the adrenaline-filled life of a bachelor that only a married guy can conjure up while sitting at home on a Saturday night, drinking white wine and watching Pedro Almadovar movies while everyone else, he's positive, is out slamming Kamakazes with supermodels.

It doesn't help that this guy's friends are all single, have money and are too young to either A) not want to go out every night, or B) have to deal with themselves on that one night when nobody else wants to go out because they're all married.

Or maybe he's just a guy who was meant to be single. I haven't gotten far enough into the book to find out, and I probably won't because he's kind of unlikeable. Not because he wants to be single but because he constantly name-drops the kind of really affected stuff that people assume Hollywood people will name-drop, like how when he finally leaves his wife and goes out to have dinner himself, he congratulates himself for going to an uncouth "guy" kind of place but still orders something like steak tartare.

Tonight, with the Jawa and Sandra Bullock off attending an "Ice Cream Social" at Temple Emanu-el, I returned to an empty house and three hours' worth of The Life of a Bachelor.

Now everyone, girls included, likes a little time alone. Properly spaced, each snippet of independent time can seem like a vacation from your life. And sure, every so often a bunch of middle-aged guys will get together, look over at a pack of young single guys and wish they could switch spots, but the genesis of this is, of course, based more on wanting to be young than it is on wanting to be single.

I'll tell you, though; one thing that keeps me grounded is that I remember what it was like when I was single. It was a long time ago. You know what I remember most about it? That every night at about seven o'clock I'd end up walking up and down the main commercial street of my neighborhood in Seattle, trying to figure out what to eat for dinner. And that even though I was usually flat broke, I had enormous phone bills because I couldn't stand being alone in my quiet apartment.

Yeah, those were the days, let me tell you. They were the days of undetected high cholesterol and terrible eating habits, and desperate attempts to fill any silence that might enter my day.

Now lets consider that I wasn't 30. Nor was I a successful producer of TV reality shows. I was, intermittently, a grad student, a waiter, an office temp. I did not eat steak tartare, but I did serve it occasionally, sometimes to people who had lived on my floor in the dorms sophomore year.

You know what I did when I was single? I walked around. That's all I did. I woke up in the late morning, had a sandwich and some potato chips and started walking. Sometimes I stopped and ate cheese. Sometimes I hung out in pawn shops and looked at guitars and leather jackets. There were only two rules to dictate my path: first, I always crossed the street with the light, and second, I always crossed if there was an interesting car, motorcycle or girl on the other side. Otherwise, it was pure aimlessness. Not just career aimlessness. Absolute aimlessness. Waking up every day going, "What am I going to do today?"

What's so great about that? When I'm standing alone outside a restaurant freezing, hands jammed into my coat pockets, staring at employed couples eating happily away inside, the fact that I can' possibly get lost no matter where you put me in Seattle because I've walked every inch of the place really doesn't count for much. In fact, all I'm thinking is how badly I'd rather be them.

That's what I remember about being single. Mostly. So you'll forgive me if my 45-year-old flights of fancy don't include wearing a Kangol hat and walking arm in arm with a coed whose never heard of "The White Shadow" and thinks Pearl Jam is an oldies act. I know how grossed-out she'd be the first time she caught me tweezing hairs out of my ears.

I think at 45 "single" is most attractive as a temporary state, when it only covers short chunks of time with a definite beginning and end. Give me a Friday night out after work, or my occasional trips to (unincorporated) Santa Ana to hang out with Roger A. Hunt for the weekend. Any longer than that and I find myself wandering the streets just after sundown, trying to figure out what to eat.

And then you throw a Jawa into the mix; after that, any single-guy fantasy you have has to include the emotional equivalent of the pain you'd feel if you sliced off your right arm with a dull hacksaw. No thanks. It's annoying when Sandra Bullock makes fun of my lacking parallel parking skills, but it's better than showing up on a Friday night because it's my weekend with the kids.

So maybe this guy from the book, maybe he's better off single and isn't just feeling the late-onset symptoms of getting married too young. There are guys like that, and I'd be lying if I said their lives don't ever look like a huge ball of fun. I'm just not one of them.

74 days to Bar Mitzvah: what not to wear

2010-06-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

Today I realized that we have one day less than two-and-a-half months until the Jawa's Bar Mitzvah. That may sound like a lot of time. In some instances, it is. If you've got two-and-a-half months between now and your next vacation day, yeah, that's some time.

Especially if you're a school teacher. One time in 1997, while hiding in my classroom rduring lunch break, eading a stack of old "Look" magazines I'd found in the library, I looked at the school calendar. At no time, I found, did we have more than five consecutive full weeks of school.

I couldn't believe it. It seemed like we'd endured consecutive Bataan Death Marches between Columbus Day and Christmas Break. Nope. Never more than 25 days in a row. Time is highly compressed when you're a teacher.

To begin with, each day starts at full speed. There is no settling in, drinking coffee, reading the paper or ESPN.com. That bell rings and the spotlight immediately hits you.

Meanwhile, back in Bar Mitzvah-land, two-plus months, 74 days, seems like the blink of an eye.

One issue that has bubbled beneath the surface almost from Day one of Bar Mitzvah prep is the question of what to wear. We've already chronicled Sandra Bullock's efforts at finding an appropriate dress for services. Have I mentioned that right now a floral-print dress is on its way here from Nordstom? This is the "party" dress. When it arrives, my wife will eye it, consider it, try it on and likely reject it, same as she's done to its predecessors.

Everyone who attends the Jawa's Bar Mitzvah must understand that the weekend involves as few as two or as many as four costume changes. Over the span of roughly 60 hours you will be asked to display not only semi-formal wear -- that's boring dark suits with ties for men (and boys) and, unfairly, an embarassment of options for women (and girls) -- but also business casual-inspired party wear that could run the gamut from the surprisingly not played-out "Joe's Jeans and untucked shirt from Ben Sherman" look to the lightweight blazer I plan to sport.

Ladies, will you switch to pants for the party? How about a casual sundress? Your Citizens for Humanity jeans paired with something blousy on top?

For guests staying at the Hyatt Regency, the clothing dilemma doesn't end Saturday. They will awake Sunday to find brunch waiting downstairs. Oh, and did we forget to tell you that we didn't bother to outline appropriate brunch dress? My guess is that we'll see everything from shorts and flip-flops to my dad's ubiquitous Reyn Spooner faded print Hawaiian shirt, plus at least one person who not unreasonably expects business casual and shows up in khaki pants and a dress shirt.

Sorry, guests. We will not be swayed. Sunday's a free-for-all.

For the families, the weekend begins Friday with services at Temple Emanu-el, followed by dinner at Tarantino's, where the most appropriate dress would be something that was de rigueur in 1964. Just like Tarantino's.

Assuming no one has a narrow-shouldered sharkskin suit hanging in their closet or a Jackie Kennedy pillbox hot packed away in a drawer somewhere, modern garb will have to do. Think church on Sunday. I'll be wearing my other suit.

What are we asking of these people? "Please come to San Francisco in August and bring not only the bizarre combination of clothes required to comfortably endure days that begin with 50 degress and fog, only to sometimes end at about 75 and sun, but also four separate sets of clothes for Bar Mitzvah events."

"Please remember to bring not only a regular bag but also one of those long bags that hold suits and dresses. Yes, we understand that many airlines now charge extra for bags. While guests at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero will find an attractive and delicious collection of San Francisco-themed items awaiting their arrivals, the gift bag will not, unfortunately, include luggage vouchers for guests not using Southwest Airlines."

That's not even considering all of the sweatshirts purchased by San Francisco first-timers when they learn that Baghdad-by-the-Bay in August is more like Juneau in March than Los Angeles in August. Yes, it is California. Please avoid sweatshirts with "San Francisco" written across the front. You don't want to look like a tourist. Or one of the old guys who do Tai Chi in Washington Square every morning. Actually, you'll have to pair your sweatshirt with a baseball cap that says "UNLV 1990 NCAA Champions," or "Toy Story II: Crew Member" on it if you want to mix in with the Tai Chi crowd.

This is no joke. The Bar Mitzvah Design Team agonized over the invitations' dress code wording. Early in the process, we attended a birthday party whose dress code was "uptown casual." I nominated that for our dress code. "Too confusing," said Sandra Bullock, who unlike her husband did not demonstrate her fashion and language savvy by showing up at the "uptown casual" party dressed exactly like the host.

Every week, we wonder if we've sent the Jawa off to a Bar Mitzvah party either horribly underdressed or embarassingly overdressed. It doesn't matter. By the end of each party, he's wearing the same thing as all the other boys: dress pants, black Skechers and a white undershirt.

I'm afraid I have no magic bullet for future guests fretting about dress code, and I don't have Clinton and Stacy's phone number to call for advice. I can't even tell you what Sandra Bullock is wearing as a guide. That information is classified and could possibly remain fluid until August 20.

What I can tell you is that, as the father of the Bar Mitzvah, my responsibility is to be slightly overdressed at each event. Therefore, I will be wearing a black suit Friday night, a brown suit Saturday morning, some kind of non-jeans, a dress shirt and a sportcoat Saturday night, and a t-shirt reading "I'm With Stupid" with an arrow pointing straight up on Sunday morning. Plus a pair of Dolphin shorts. In blue and white. Jewish team colors.

Okay, okay. I won't be wearing Dolphin shorts. That would be tacky. I'll be wearing Birkenstocks and a pullover made in Ecuador. We are, after all, trying to provide our weekend guests with as much of a taste of San Francisco as one can manage in two-plus days. So please don't wear fur. Do that and you might get paint-bombed by a recent Vassar Humanities graduate now working as a barista and living with three friends in the Mission. That’s not the kind of San Francisco experience we want for our guests.

75 days to Bar Mitzvah: invite follow-up

2010-06-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

Despite our best efforts at mislabeling and erroneously addressing, our Bar Mitzvah invitations have now been out in the world for going on a month. RSVPs are trickling in at a rate of two or three per day. Taken as a percentage of the whole, the operation has run pretty smoothly.

To recipients, they've taken on the character of sausage -- full of all kinds of ground-up nonsense but very smooth and attractive on the outside. The nonsense includes me going to multiple post offices, a long discussion about how to phrase our wish that everyone attend the party in semi-casual dress and the Chardonnay-soaked Sunday afternoon meetings of the Bar Mitzvah Design Team. The shiny, attractive casing is the almost unanimously-lauded Godzilla-themed invitations themselves, drawing plaudits from everyone, save for Brandeis Hillel Day School seventh-grade students wishing to remind the Jawa how much his interests differ from those of the seventh-grade mainstream.

As I said, taken as a percentage of the whole, the invitation process has been a resounding success. At least 95% of our invites have reached their destination, where they are (hopefully) occupying a prominent space on potential guests' bulletin boards while they finalize their travel plans.

Several members of the Jawa's class at school have already responded, leaving me wondering if rounded, flirty handwriting is something teenage girls must be taught or if it is deeply embedded in their genetic code. Cute invitations! Good luck on your big day, k?

The biggest glitch, by far, involved the person we'd least intended to be glitched: my grandmother. As of last fall, she lives in Arizona, a few miles from my parents though outside the walls of Sun City West. While this means she is not eligible to join the photography club (and thus misses out on coordinated photography field trips, which sometimes but not always feature my mother taking charge and righting the ship -- or tour bus -- should anything go wrong and the rest of the retirees be unable to step up to the plate), the facility she lives in has its own dining room, round-the-clock staff and various in-house clubs, including the Wii bowling club, which, if our limited experience is any guide, consists of several elderly people sitting on a couch, staring straight ahead at a TV and loudly cheering as one of their own enthusiastically simulates bowling with a Wii remote.

Despite being in Arizona, the facility is everything a 92-year-old woman could want, supplying not only built-in friends but also a daily 10 a.m. check-in phone call and gratis monthly mobility scooter maintenance session.

Rather than lodge the residents in hotel rooms, the facility gives each of them individual one-bedroom apartments, which closely resemble half of the apartment I lived in during the second semester of senior year. Though they lack the home-built unfinished wood lofts that doubled the occupancy of each bedroom, they do have the same textured walls and vertical blinds.

Her new pad is unit #242. Twice I have been to visit my grandmother since she moved to Arizona. More than once I have been sent alone to pick her up and bring her to my parents' house. When I am in Arizona, I know that my grandmother lives in apartment #242. Unfortunately, when I cross back in California, I apparently forget that she lives in #242, instead thinking that her new living arrangement is more like a rooming house, where the residents all share the same address.

What, did we think that they gather everyone together in the day room every afternoon, distributing their mail a la Igor in M*A*S*H? Do they all stand (or sit) there holding their hands out, eager for some news from back home? And then, when one receives a Dear John letter, do they all nervously edge away from him, lest his sorrow be contageous and passed on through community handing of Wii remotes?

Where exactly did we think my grandmother lived?

I'll tell you where: somewhere with only one address. Her carefully-assembled invitation bore only a street address. No apartment number. We may have well just addressed it, "Grandma, Surprise, AZ." It would have stood just as good a chance of reaching her.

Two weeks passed with the Bar Mitzvah Team basking in the reflected glory of our successful invitation distribution before I got an email from my mother. On the subject line: "Grandma."

Understand that it's only been a few months since we lost my grandfather. I get an email whose subject line is "Grandma" and I start flop sweating immediately. After a few deep breaths, I opened the email. Grandma's invitation didn't arrive: our first glitch.

Once we realized the problem, it was easy to solve. We sent Grandma another invitation. Meanwhile, respect must be paid. I called her up the next day. "What? I'm not invited?" she asked in mock horror. "I know I'm invited. I just want to have an invitation to keep." Once I peeled myself off the floor, where I'd ended up after the anvil filled with equal amounts of guilt and failure hit me, I promised her a second invite. The new invitation, address including #242, went out the same day and order was restored to the universe.

The second glitch happened last night. Once again it came in the form of an email from my mom. "I'm speaking to (her cousin) Janice as I type. (Her late cousin Marvin's widow) Connie (who has made it her business to dutifully and warmly attend all family events)apparently never received an invitation." Since we both knew there were no invitations remaining, having discussed it earlier in the day, the only option, Mom said, was to call or e-mail Connie. This would pose a problem, as I hate to talk on the phone to people I see daily, much less a semi-cousin I've met three times over the past 20 years. "Did we invite her?" I thought, not that it would much matter if I had to call her and awkardly re-invite her via Ma Bell.

Sandra Bullock checked the list. We'd sent an invitation. The address was correct. I carefully worded an email back to Mom, suggesting that it might be more appropriate if she called to feel out the situation, rather than Connie receiving an awkward phone call from someone who'd have to spend the first 90 seconds explaining who he was before offering up a low-rent invite to his son's Bar Mitzvah. Fortunately, Mom took the bait. Which is good, because there was no way Sandra Bullock was going to bail me out of this one.

Twenty-four hours pass before Mom sends a follow-up email. Connie got her invitation, which makes sense, since she has no apartment number for us to forget.

So far we have approximately 100 Bar Mitzvah guests, which means that about half of our invitees have responded. How likely is it that of the remaining 100, several have inadvertendly buried the invite under Thai restaurant menus and utility bills? How many saw it, filed it in their memory, then forgot about it? How surprised will they be the next time they see it, which very well could be August 22? Is there a category of people who are able to hang onto an un-RSVPed party invitation for a month without forgetting about it? If so, I'd like to meet them.

At least we know two things: my grandmother will be there, and Connie will be there. The rest is more or less up in the air.

76 days to Bar Mitzvah: real Jews

2010-06-06T18:11:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, after God created the heavens and the earth but before that awful retreat we went on last fall, we attended our first Temple Emanu-el Bar Miztvah as part of our commitment to "Shabbat Exchange." "Shabbat Exchange," as we've discussed earlier, was several Saturday mornings in a row dedicated to a one-hour class -- led by Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan, who took something I'd dreaded and made it into a truly delightful experience -- followed by mandatory attendance at whatever B'nai Mitzvah was going on that day. Bar Mitzvah crashing was part of the curriculum.

At the time, we didn't realize that there is no such thing as "crashing" a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Everyone is invited, including the lady in the ski jacket who pulls around the box. Weekend services, which begin Friday night, are the nucleus of a congregation, and as our temple representative reminded us a few weeks ago, they'd be happening whether it was your turn to read from the Torah or not. Of course everyone can go.

Even after seven-plus years of Jewish Day School Education, we didn't know that. We felt weird.

Especially weird was the fact that this particular Ba(t) Mitzvah would honor the daughter of a couple we really liked but did not know well enough to be invited to their Bat Mitzvah. "Oh, man," I thought. "That's going to be awkward," which shows you just how much of a B'nai Mitzvah greenhorn I was.

"Maybe we can hide in the back," said my equally clueless bride. There we were, after all, in the slightly-below-business-casual attire we'd though appropriate for Shabbat Exchange class. Suddenly, faced with a room full of people we casually knew but felt didn't know us well enough to understand that, had we known we'd be seeing people we knew at a Bat Mitzvah, we would have stepped up our game, we were cowering in the back, looking like the hired help.

Actually, I take that back. The hired help always wears ties.

I now know that we looked like only slightly-shabbily-dressed members of the congregation, sitting in on the Bat Mitzvah that was part of our Saturday ritual services. Everyone had gone through it themselves. They totally got it.

And I also know that nobody felt awkward except us, because everyone truly is invited to the services. So savvy are we now that we've attended numerous Bar and Bat Mitzvahs this year that we were not invited to, understanding first that our importance on these days is only slightly greater than that of someone who, driving past the temple on Arguello Street that morning, slows down a bit to see what's going on, and second, it's actually honorable and respectful to congratulate the family of the Bar or Bat Mitzvah,regardless of how well you know them.

Rewinding back to last fall, we knew none of this. We thought we needed to be invisible.

There was something interesting about that first Bat Mitzvah, and it had to do with this room full of people we knew superficially but not well. As everyone knows, people are full of surprises -- some good, some not so good. I need more than both hands to count the number of times that people have thought I was one thing, only to be disappointed when they found out I wasn't. That's my fault for either trying to be something I'm not or hiding what I really am. They should know it up front, even though it ain't all pretty. Let them decide if they are going to be disappointed before they make an investment.

On a much less brutal scale, the first time you see a bunch of people you've known in a secular setting -- and yes, even at a Jewish Day School, where you see people trading all kinds of theological, ethical and cultural back-and-forth daily, you're still not seeing them in their House of Worship (Should I have capitalized that? Did I do it just to mask my own faith-based doubts in the hopes of avoiding the bolt of lightning that might come from belittling a House of Worship?) -- the volume and scale of the whole scene can really knock you for a loop.

Maybe I'd assumed they were all like me -- really bad Jews who thought being Jewish meant rejecting all religious tradition, including our own. Maybe it was like my first week at Santa Clara University, when I was shocked to find out that people actually went to Mass on Sunday. For whatever reason, seeing my semi-peers enter the room quietly, pause to expertly arrange their tallit, then respectfully sit down and dive headfirst into the service completely blew my mind.

The lesson was sharpest in the person of this one guy -- a fellow Brandies parent I knew only slightly from coaching basketball at the YMCA. At Brandeis, he's a very high-profile guy, who's sent several kids through the school, volunteered his time generously and is unanimously liked by students, parents, faculty and administration. This guy is a BHDS icon, totally respected by all -- including me, who barely knows him -- so I don't know why I was so surprised to learn that he knew the ropes, Judaism-wise.

I don't know. Maybe I'm so shallow that I assume that a guy who was a football star in high school, coaches sports and seems entirely neurosis-free can't possibly also be an observant Jew. Maybe it's something murkier and far more insidious. Maybe I'll earn that bolt of lightning yet. All I know is that this guy, and all of those other guys that I casually knew not well, all of these other guys who once made the same decision we made -- to send their son or daughter to Brandeis Hillel Day School, guys who show up at Brandeis events, some in business suits, some in casual wear, seeing them hunkered down at services on a Saturday morning, tallit draped over their shoulders, murmuring in Hebrew -- some from memory -- was more than weird. It was very impressive, for one, and very touching.

There was no moment of conversion. Nothing like that. Unfortunately, I haven't turned out to be wired that way, not yet, at least. But it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that I was in awe of these guys -- and slightly envious. Whatever their actual level of faith, Saturday morning services were a time of familiarity, a time to settle into something comfortable and comforting. And the slight bit of adjacent glow I received from them was pretty bright. Thanks, guys.

79 days to Bar Mitzvah: making a mess of things

2010-06-03T17:18:00.000-07:00

Driving from Hillsborough to Brandeis Hillel Day School, somehow a Kelly Clarkson song made it onto my car radio. I don't know how it happened; my mainstream culture blocking functionality must have been on the fritz. One minute I'm pumping Golden Smog through my iPod. The next, Kelly Clarkson. Must have been one of Sandra Bullock's pre-set radio stations.

The chorus of Kelly's song, which I'll be the first to admit was very catchy, said something about how her life would suck without whoever she was singing to. It took me awhile to figure out what she was saying. I thought she was saying, "My life's a mess without you." Although I like "my life would suck without you" better, it was "mess" that got me thinking. As it turns out, unexpected Kelly Clarkson intrusions can cause digressive analytical thought.

So there I was, driving slowly up El Camino Real, having just toured a home worth $13.9 million, thinking about what it means to have your life be "a mess." Your life "sucking" is much easier to get around. Everyone knows what it's like to have their life suck, except for David Lee Roth. I don't think he'd recognize it if his life sucked and more power to him for it. The rest of us, periodically our lives suck.

But a mess? That's different. From "my life's a mess" it's a short jump to the term "I've made a mess of my life," which of course got me thinking about the Jawa's recent troubles at school. Did he somehow "make a mess" of his social life? Do all of those refusals to join everyone else at Club 18 on Fridays, a tendancy to deliver long monologues about roller coasters and an admirable (to me, at least) obstinance when it comes to giving up his less socially-accepted interests in the service of fitting in add up to social outcast? If so, it doesn't seem fair.

This is something I think about often. Not just when I'm listening to Kelly Clarkson.

Several years ago, when my AOL co-worker Kathleen Hennessey and I were merging into two halves of a really cool person, we used to talk only slightly tongue-in-cheek about how disappointing it was to realize that we were both incapable of screwing ourselves up badly enough for people to "be worried." Though I would often pass bars open at 7:30 AM and think, "It'd be so cool to just be sitting in there, really delving into the dark side of life," I never once broke stride. I just continued on to work. The skid row drunks had their world, and who was I kidding; it wasn't mine.

They had something -- a physiological disease, some would say -- that I lacked: the ability to really make a mess of your life.

Give me some isolated instances. Yes, there have been times when I've "really made a mess of things." I've managed to insult or offend people to the point where they stop being my friend. That happened just this year, as a matter of fact, and makes timing after-school pickups paramount. I arrive too early and I have to slink around the halls, trying not to notice my former friend pointedly ignoring me.

Usually, when I make a mess of things, it's because of something I said or wrote, hardly ever because of something I did. My mother was right: someday that mouth did get me in trouble. Unfortunately, her warning came when I was too young to realize that "in trouble" could mean something other than "beat up." It went unheeded, though occasionally repurposed internally when responding to a sassy Jawa.

I've made a mess of certain jobs. In fact, you could argue that I've made a fine mess of my career, especially if you were an adult or teacher who only knew me as a little kid, pre-California, when I was cranking through the math books and drawing intricate pictres on the backs on my tests because I was done too early. Yes, you could make a convincing argument that I'd made a mess of it.

I once made such a mess out of a romantic relationship that it ended with me getting slapped in front of my friends at a New Year's party.

My favorite stories always feature self-destructive protagonists. Gene Clark was my favorite Byrd. Earlier this year, I was obsessed with comparing Shane MacGowan to Shaun Ryder, poring over their biographies to determine which had made more of a mess of his lfe. That book I'm reading right now about Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed? Man, were those guys screw-ups. Awesome screw-ups who could always deliver a witty line no matter how drunk.

And yet here I am, wrapped in middle-class comfort with a butt-kicking wife and a Jawa who often listens to me, despite my best efforts to make a mess of things, which is very comfortable but lets face it, not very romantic. Which is probably the root of this fascination with making a mess of things. Self-immolation is much cooler than remembering to buy new socks the next time you go to Costco.

Of course, even people who make such a mess of things that it warrants a memoir, story or 90-minute special on the Biography Channel spend the majority of their time doing mundane things. And the meditation Kathleen and I did on lacking the commitment to mess things up badly enough to cause worry or, even better, an intervention, was us playing with the dying embers of adolescent daydreaming. We knew we weren't going to make a mess of things. That's not who we were.

Yes, you say, but there's still time. I could yet make a mess of things in ways foreign and tragic.

I suppose I could. Something tells me that I'd find the reality of making a mess of things far less romantic than the abstract notion of making a mess of things. And that's the built-in rev limiter that keeps me getting on BART every morning when I'd rather throw my messenger bag on the tracks, walk back up the escalator and maybe go go for a nice long walk instead.

80 days to Bar Mitzvah: reconnecting

2010-06-02T16:45:00.000-07:00

God bless the internet. Over the past 24 hours, it has surprised me in new ways, made me feel equal parts angry and creeped-out and made me laugh out loud in the middle of a quiet newsroom; all of this without ever properly setting my privacy modes.

It began last night, hours before I came on here to pour my wrenched heart out in support of my socially outcast Jawa. During intermission at Middle School Performance Night, I was approached by the father of one of his classmates, a fellow “writer,” though for him it is not in quotes.

While his heyday was the first Internet wave, this guy is still kind of old school in that his latest book (“Selling poorly,” according to him) is a trad-style hardcover; no pre-blogging, no podcast, no self-publishing on the number of sites devoted to self-publishing. Find an agent, find a publisher, look at your galleys, send the thing out. Or at least that’s how I would imagine it works, never having completed, much less published, anything of my own.

I asked him about all of these new options for publishing; were they worth pursuing? Every time I open up the newspaper, there’s some story about a writer whose stuff is getting hundreds of thousands of hits on the web. “It’s worth noting that there are photos, and in each, the writer in question looks pretty poor,” I added. I should get to know this guy better. He has a two-book contract.

Then we went home and I banged away on the keyboard for about an hour. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting emails, angry comments from my old blog, Ten Thousand Buddhas. Seems I posted something slagging the Grateful Dead. Four years ago. Now Deadheads in nine states are mad at me. “How on earth are they seeing this?” I wondered. Finally – after posting a snappy comeback, of course – I decided to Google the post. Somehow it had found its way to a bunch of Grateful Dead and Phish message boards, where people were debating whether or not I was funny. Mind-boggling, ego-pumping… and really weird. I went to bed feeling like my skin didn’t fit.

Just now I Googled my old college and Seattle roommate. I can’t remember why. I was just sitting here writing about Hillsborough when my lack of discipline kicked in, causing me to stop what I was doing, snatch the name “Scott Mauk” from the whirlpool of facts in my brain and do a search.

All kinds of things came up. Dude’s won a bunch of awards for teaching but just got canned from his job as an Assistant Principal, due to budget cuts. He also owns a working farm and was a candidate for “Mr. South Whidbey,” which didn’t look like a beauty contest; more of a “Hey, we live in this quirky, Pacific Northwest place and we dig oddball celebrations. Lets pick a ‘Mr. South Whidbey,’ load up on REI gear and make it a big event.”

This is far from the first time I’ve learned things about people long since gone from my life via the World Wide Web. Facebook has all but eliminated “Where are they now?” from modern living. I now know what happened to all but two of my former girlfriends and post one-liners on the profiles of people I barely knew in high school. For all I know, people I’ve never met (including fans of the Grateful Dead) could be reading this right now. They know all about the Jawa’s upcoming Bar Mitzvah and how I’m stressed out over his social life, but they could walk right by me on the street, totally unrecognized.

I’m not complaining. If it weren’t for the internet, I’d still wonder if Dave K. turned out okay. I wouldn’t know that Conrad (formerly Brett) Lau, who lived down the street and hid skateboards in his dresser, was until two days ago being detained by the authorities in a room lined with AK-47s, somewhere near the Ethiopian/Sudan border. Or that he was Rob Mazzetti’s roommate at The Cate School in Santa Barbara, Class of 1983. Nor, for that matter, would I know that Rob Mazzetti, fellow member of the Sigma Pi Zeta Eta Chapter at Santa Clara University, was now an enthusiastic runner of road races.

Actually, that last part I could have guessed. Rob was always pretty intense.

So lets say that the internet and social media have created unprecedented opportunities to re-connect with people. What happens after that? Do you return to the relationship you had 25 years ago, only in post-modern mode? Do they become more of your present than they were of your past, in a weird way where you hear about what they’re doing several times a week while still imagining them 17 years old, their age the last time you saw them?

I think people are creating new relationships with people they sort of knew 25 years ago. Whether they’re doing it through some kind of shared invented memories or because they either a) wanted to know this person better but didn’t get the chance in the past, or b) thought about it later and decided they regretted not knowing this person better, is anyone’s guess. I can’t figure it out.

What I love, though, is that I’m scanning various pages where Scott Mauk’s name comes up and I stumble across this Seattle P-I blog touting the “Mr. South Whidbey” contest. Each of the finalists is profiled, with a little accompanying photo – and curse you, Scott Mauk for looking exactly how you did when you were 25 – and some nonsensical answers that are among the countless publically-delivered nonsensical answers that owe much to the Beatles’ first U.S. press conference. At one point, Scott is asked, “(What is) quintessential Whidbey (Island) ?”

His answer: “Running into someone and talking to them next to the cheese at PayLess.”

That’s when I laughed out loud at work. Not because it’s a funny answer but because when we lived together in 1990, there was a grocery store across the street, and every time we went in there we always seemed to wind up having some important conversation while standing next to the cheese display. It must have happened a dozen times, strange because neither of us could afford cheese at the time.

So when I see that Scott Mauk has carried that with him for 20 years, enough so that he busted it out for a nonsensical interview, well, it warms my heart much more than knowing Deadheads and Phish fans are still debating whether or not something I wrote in 2006 is funny. It made me remember that at one time, Scotty Mauk and I were thick as thieves. And even though I’ve seen the guy once in the past 12 years, he still remembers.

That’s why I dig the internet.

81 days to Bar Mitzvah: rules are rules. aren't they?

2010-06-01T17:38:00.000-07:00

Though it has been a non-issue for almost 25 years, there was a time when I was defined by my refusal to drink alcohol. I was, famously, a teetotalling teen, a no-show at high school parties, a habitual Friday night bowler and moviegoer, my blood alcohol content holding steady at .00.

In the beginning, it wasn't a problem. Everyone was like me. Then one by one they approached the river of adolescence, looked around for an empty bottle of Dewars to sit on, and floated easily across. I stayed on shore, terrified of the water and what lay on the other side.

I felt betrayed. In eighth grade, Dave Money was my best friend. We played baseball in front of his house. Two years later he was gone, his varsity football jersey the passkey to the scary teenage party that left me behind. After awhile, being sober became my calling card. People who went to parties left me alone. Not at all religious, I got lumped in with the church-going crowd. It was ironic.

The one time I went to a party, I was shocked to find people there that I'd thought of as beneath me on the high school social ladder. But there they were. Someone had told them the password. They had someplace to go on weekends. Faced with Sophie's choice and no less terrified of the high school boozer's world than I had been at 14, I retreated behind a wall of black and white. Let 'em have their parties, the dirtbags. They'll pay for it someday.

For the first three years of college, while everyone else was pushing their livers and behavior to the limit, I was smugly removed, feeling superior and clever while delivering clever lines like, "What would I need that for?" to the guy handing out keg cups at a party.

As a social strategy, being the arrogant guy who doesn't drink was a disaster. It led to passionate midnight debates -- me vs. a drunk guy -- that I could neither win nor lose. It confused at least one of my fraternity brothers, Dave LeKander, so badly that he would leave the room, muttering to everyone about how he just didn't get it. Eventually, he and Jack Murphy, his roommate, tried to have me blackballed.

My poor girlfriend got the worst torture of all. About the only good thing I can imagine that came of the two-hour late night phone calls I repeatedly subjected her to was that by the time she went to bed, she was sober.

I was a social leper, pretending to stand up for something other than fear. Truth is, it had gotten away from me. By the time I turned 21, the only thing keeping me from joining the party was imagining the room full of people who already knew me -- and my reputation -- losing their minds the first time they saw me holding a bottle of Miller Lite. When I finally ordered that first longneck, I did it at a bar with a guy named Mike Dineen who didn't know me well enough to make it a big deal. "This is my first beer ever," I told him.

"Wow, I'm honored," said Mike Dineen, earning my lifelong gratitude. You got anything bad to say about Mike Dineen, you go through me first.

And of course, it took a total of one party for everyone else to get on board. I think they were relieved.

Looking back, I'm not sure why I waited until I was 21 to have that first beer. Like I said, it just got away from me. Turns out for most people, alcohol and career success are not interlocked. You can have both. Who knew?

Eventually, my dry past faded into the background, no more a defining life experience than the Alfa Romeo I drove when I was 17 or the 50 record albums I bought in 1984. If I thought about it at all, it was to rue the parties I missed and the bars I've never been to.

Until I became the parent of a pre-teen.

When the Jawa asks, "Did you drink during high school?" I can answer, "No," without lying. If he asks, "Why not?" I can say, simply, "Because it was illegal."

And actually, I kind of stand behind that. I don't mind never having experienced the sheer terror of being underage in a bar, my entree secured by a phony ID. Mostly, though, I use it as my excuse because the truth is doesn't stand up. "Uh, because I was afraid I'd say something stupid?" "Because I thought everyone who drank was going to end up a loser someday?" "Because after awhile, I knew I wouldn't be able to start without everyone making a big deal out of it?"

But for my child, whose adolescence is arriving with the total absence of emails and casual invites from his classmates, is stressing the "because it was illegal" angle the right thing to do?

I've watched this year as one by one, the friends he's had off and on since kindergarten have approached that river of adolescence. While they're not floating across on empty Dewars bottles, they're somehow getting to the other side. Once they get there, they don't look back. And there he is, all alone, without a clue as to how to get across.

They're all on Facebook. You're not supposed to be on Facebook until you're 13. The Jawa is not yet 13. A few weeks ago at a Family Education event at temple, I watched as three of his classmates huddled together over a violent video game, our Jawa desperately trying anything to pierce the outer armor of the circle. "Sorry, you're too young," one of the boys finally told him.

It's not their problem. They're kids. It's not their fault that while our boy is memorizing the lyrics to the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, they're sitting there with sweaty palms, trying to figure out how to get that girl they like to sit on their lap at Middle School Performance Night.

That was tonight, by the way, Middle School Performance Night. The Jawa played with the jazz band. Don't think my heart didn't break in ways I'd thought had disappeared 20 years ago when none of the seventh graders in the audience yelled out his name like they yelled for everyone else in the band. What can you do? You just sit there like all the other parents and try to clap loud enough so he can hear you. Then afterwards, when he wants to sit with you instead of with his classmates, you bite your tongue because you don't want to be that clueless parent who says, "Why don't you go sit with your little friends?" and sends his kid back into a lion's den of something worse than conflict: total apathy. Nobody actively dislikes him; they just don't care.

You know that genre of movie where some uptight guy learns that he needs to cut loose in order to be happy? In the end, he learns that all of these things he thought were important -- following rules, trying to be what he thinks is good -- aren't. Human warmth trumps all. I always feel bad for the uptight guy in those movies. There's a part of me that still thinks he should have stuck to his guns. The message is, of course, "Be like us and we'll accept you."

But here we have a kid who's having a tough time finding his niche. My rules aren't helping.

So that's it. Tomorrow I'm signing him up for Facebook and we're going out to buy Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Then, on Friday, I'm taking him to Mike's Liquors, buying him a fifth of Jim Beam and sending him off to the nearest teenage party.

No, of course not. I won't be doing any of that. I'm just wondering if stressing this idea -- no, you can't; you're too young -- has made a potentially painful situation worse.

82 days to Bar Mitzvah: fore!

2010-05-31T09:04:00.000-07:00

Forget failing eyesight and 2 a.m. trips to the bathroom; middle age truly began yesterday, when I accompanied my friend Teduardo to Golf Mart in San Bruno and came away with my own full set of Taylor Made clubs and a slick little black-and-white golf bag. That the clubs were an early Father's Day present confirmed it: I'm not turning into my dad, I'm turning into someone else's dad.

Okay, maybe that's a little premature, but don't deny that over half of you out there are splitting a gut right now because Mr. Oddball got golf clubs for Father's Day. Next year, I suppose, I'll get a tie. Soon I will develop an appreciation for Buick Le Sabres. My wardrobe of jeans and shorts? Cast aside for one comprised of Haggar slacks. It is all over now. You will find me at the driving range, lost in the rough or knocking back Old Granddad on the rocks at The Nineteenth Hole.

Sandra Bullock and I have been talking about taking up golf for several years. "It'll be our old age sport," she'd say in measured tones. Either old age came sooner than we thought or my invite to Teduardo's mid-summer Lake Tahoe golf weekend sparked in me a desire to follow a very small ball around beautifully manicured lawns, because there I was on Sunday afternoon, trying out different seven irons at Golf Mart while Ted offered instruction from the sidelines. "Make a wall behind the ball," he advised soothingly as I demo'ed two separate pitching wedges. "Widen your stance," he said as I gripped a driver.

When we arrived at the decision to buy golf clubs, I assumed it would work like this: talk about it for a few weeks, announce "I am going to do research" and go to a few web sites, then head down to Sports Authority and pick up the cheapest clubs I could find. The only reason why I was buying clubs instead of renting was because, as a lefthander, I figured it would be near to impossible to find clubs to rent. Also, Teduardo told me that a weekend of renting would end up costing not much less than buying.

My thinking was that, like with modern motorcycles, golf club technology had advanced to the point where the worst possible set of golf clubs were still well past the upper reaches of my talent. Though I rode a Ducati in the 1990s, I would have been just as well served by a Honda. So, too, did I think that a bottom-end set of Nike clubs would do the trick for me on the links.

We will never know if that theory works, just as we'll never know if I would have been just as happy on a Honda. Once Ted became involved, my throwaway approach to buying golf clubs was thrown away. There would be no trip to Sports Authority. Instead, we would drive to San Bruno, where Golf Mart awaited, big box retail, links-style.

The last time I set foot in a store devoted entirely to golf was 1983. Roger Dunn, the last word in golf in Santa Ana, California, was packed tightly with clubs, bags and accessories. You went in, you picked your set, you left.

The club-buying experience has gained immeasurable depth since 1983. Ted outlined a plan that included separate evaluations of each club, their pitch and depth (?), length and weight. "You don't want to get something that's too much of a blade," he cautioned. "Not for a beginner."

After that, he refused to call me a "beginner." Not only was Ted going to help me choose my clubs, he was also going to mentor me to the point where, come Tahoe, I'd be able to hold my own amidst a bunch of guys who'd taken this trip every summer since 1996.

Golf Mart had walls full of used sets. There was an entire rack devoted to left-handed clubs. Somewhere else were left-handed woods. I never saw where because instead, Ted simply emerged with armfuls of drivers as I stood in the fake driving range "stall," whacking neon green golf balls with a pitching wedge.

"Try this," he said. "This is the one I use."

Last time I had golf clubs, in 1983, the latest thing was woods made of metal. That, and not the fact of buying golf clubs in 2010, should make me feel old. The driver Ted handed me yesterday was absurdly big. The head looked like a sleek, metallic basketball. I took a swing. The ball jumped off the club. Twenty feet from the net, every shot looks great. "This is easy," I thought.

I began explaining to anyone who'd listen how I'd played baseball for so long, maybe there was some crossover between swing techniques, conveniently overlooking the fact that between my junior and senior years of playing high school baseball, when I logged some 75 innings on the mound, I had a combined total of six at-bats. They DH for you, even in high school, when you can't hit.

But that was forgotten. Remembered instead were the hours I spent as a little kid, swinging a bat in front of a mirror. It was all paying off in middle age. Irons and driver chosen, we picked out a bag and some gloves, then moved to the checkout line, where Teduardo was accused of looking like, A) the coach at Valparaiso and B) JFK, Jr. I, by association, was either, A) the coach at Valparaiso's bald friend who knew nothing about golf, or B) JFK, Jr.'s bald friend who knew nothing about golf. Figuring I had a better chance at survival, I went with A), which didn't stop the girls at the counter from finding a photo of JFK, Jr. on line and then looking from their computer to Ted and then back, which added to the general feeling of vertigo I was having.

From there we went to the driving range where I felt much as I imagine my forebearers must have felt upon landing at Ellis Island. Intuition no longer served me. I was in an alien land. People were speaking in a language I did not understand. I was constantly doing the wrong thing and had to be corrected at every step.

But like my great-grandfather Henry in 1908 (?), I was excited to be there, eager to soak up every nuance of the New World. I learned that golf guys always carry their clubs around in their trunk, ready to capitalize on any chance to "hit a few balls." You can't do this when you drive a station wagon.

New golf bags are designed to be worn like (very wide) backpacks. I figured this out only after struggling like Judge Smails' nephew to lug my back to the tee by grabbing onto whatever straps seemed most likely.

Golf Mart success does not translate to driving range success. My drives, so true and spot-on at Golf Mart, now hooked to the right in a teeth-gnashing imitation of every single slow-pitch softball at-bat I've ever taken. Decades later, having sworn off that game for life, I was still hitting line drives right at the first baseman.

Teduardo teed up his first ball, displayed a flawless backswing and uncorked a 300-yard drive.

"Uh, do you have a handicap?" I asked, feeling uncomfortable with golf lingo.

"I used to," he said.

"What was it?"

"Nine."

I don't know golf, but I know math. That means he shoots in the low-80s. What have I gotten myself into?

On a positive note, thanks to the range's Astroturf mats, no blades of grass were harmed as a result of my club head hitting the ground before it hit the ball. "Hit the little ball, not the big one," Ted said philosophically. "The big one is Earth."

The problem was my "disco feet." At one point Ted stood behind me, seven iron handle jammed into my right heel in an attempt to stop me from doing what comes naturally even to a guy used to being DH'ed for. Club head back, ready to swing, and I was stepping toward the pitcher. Thus the disco feet.

By the time I got home, my hands stung and my head was full of instructions about staying planted, addressing the ball directly and not two inches behind it, generating power from my hips (without moving my feet) and keeping my head down.

My new clubs are downstairs now, acclimating to a new life in which they will live not in a trunk but at least until August among boxes of Bar Mitzvah supplies. And I have edged ever closer to the part of life where my intake of pills perscribed to combat the combined effects of aging and bad genes far exceeds my intake of alcoholic beverages.

84 days to Bar Mitzvah: band-aids.

2010-05-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

EZR Miracle Cleaner.

Stain, Lime & Rust Remover.

Klean Logic Scratch Away.

Miracle Floor Restore-a-Floor.

Woolite Oxy Deep.

Cault-Aide Caulk Refresher.

Clorox Bleach Pen.

These are the items needed to improve the state of your bathroom and living room when you are A) saving for a Bar Mitzvah that will cost four times what your wedding cost, and B) having people over tomorrow. They are lined up like soldiers on our kitchen island, sharing space with the Official RSVP Box. Over the course of today, while I've been running errands and taking Shack to the dog park, Sandra Bullock plans to employ each product in a low-budget attempt to make our house "presentable."

My errands included a trip to the drugstore to buy the following items: Benadryl, three-way-lightbulbs and liquid soap, also known as the things dreams are made of.

Never having lived anywhere together for longer than two years before buying this place in 2001, we're unaccustomed to living somewhere long enough for things to wear out. The filmy linen curtains in the living room are almost ten years old, which explains why they now resemble the ghostly billowing window treatments in the Haunted Mansion. Time got away from us. I still thought they were new.

Of course, I also think the living room couch is new. I'm completely shocked when I see pictures of Sandra Bullock sitting on it holding her brand-new baby. That baby is now partway through a sustained effort at proving that the "terrible twos" can't hold a candle to the "terrible 12s."

This house was already falling apart when we bought it. No one knows how old it is, thanks to its nomadic history. Our kitchen remodel was equal parts construction project and anthropological study. Here, on the wall where the old refrigerator sat in an ill-fitting cutout, is the outline of a door. Above the sink is a boarded-up square. How shocked were we when, upon removing the plywood cover, we found an actual intact window? In 1959, it looked out onto Glen Park. Now it looked directly at our next-door neighbors' exterior wall. Maybe three inches separated our house from hers.

Behind the cabinets we found relics both interesting (some "flea powder" perscribed by a Mission Street vet in 1960) and horrifying (a dead mouse). When we removed the ceiling, we found that our house didn't always have a flat roof. Someone -- maybe in 1959, so it would be easier to move? -- sawed off its peaked roof. The ceiling joists were all neatly cut at an angle.

I'd like to think that we've retarded our house's decay over the past decade, but it's unlikely. There are things we knew about ten years ago -- disintegrating shower tile, anyone? -- that we have not touched. It was more than five years ago during a rainstorm that we noticed how pourous our front staircase had become. Half a decade later, it can only be worse.

But who has the money to do all of these wholesale renovations? When you add the Bar Mitzvah to the cost of eighth grade, the sum leftover for home improvements equals exactly the cost of the items listed above. They, plus Sandra Bullock's seemingly endless supply of energy and elbow grease, will improve our house.

Our bathroom, sadly, is well beyond the point of Clorox Bleach Pen revival. For ten years, we've discussed fantasy bathroom remodels. At one point, the project included a complete reimagining of our downstairs, leading to a master suite (a phenomenon we've heard of but don't quite believe in, just like those rooms some people have for their cars. I believe they're called "garages.") and a downstairs retreat for the teenage Jawa.

Budget strains have forced us to scale back our plans. Now we're thinking a new vanity and a few doses of Restore-a-Floor.

I suspect that, despite the many caustic chemicals contained in the various bottles sitting on the bar, their ultimate efficacy will be similar to the endless roster of anti-aging and wrinkle-removing products shilled 24/7 on the Lifetime channel.

Even the eternally youthful Sandra Bullcok, whose job once revolved around the invention of a new kind of collagen and whose entire career is devoted to the creation of new medications, preaches fealty to cremes and lotions made by L'Oreal and Neutrogena. In moments of weakness (or strength) she will admit to me that it's "unlikely" the money she pours into Neutrogena's "Intensive" and "Restorative" product lines has any effect on the aging process. And yet, she says, "They seem to be working, so I'm going to keep using them." That's right. It's not genes and a childhood and adolescence spent in a place where it rains approximately 300 days a year; it's Neutrogena's Intensive Wrinkle Remover.

I do truly hope Restore-a-Floor outperforms anti-aging cosmetics. And I hope Klean Logic Scratch Away is as effective on cars as I've been told it is on hardwood floors.

Unlike most guys, I won't pretend I'm the world's greatest driver or even a "driving enthusiast." I don't get bitten by sharks lurking in the strawberry fields along I-5 (my sister) or back swiftly into the garage door (mother), but I do tend to scrape against things at low speeds. Our beloved Volvo is the sad recipient of my lack of spacial command.

If I do not at least go through the motions of applying Klean Logic Scratch Away to our car, I will be forced to confront the ongoing nighmare that is my child's bedrooms. Short of applying for Federal Disaster Relief, I'm not sure how to deal with that one.

Solutions-in-a-bottle might be band-aids we buy because we can't afford major surgery. Leave it to Sandra Bullock, though, to make sure they're Band-aids in colorful and interesting patterns, instead of the usual beige.

86 days to Bar Mitzvah: it's nice to share

2010-05-27T15:01:00.000-07:00

Some of my best moments as a father have come when I feel like I'm putting the rest of my family's needs in front of my own. Driving back from someone's house, late at night, my wife and son both falling easily asleep because they know they can count on me to get them home safe, that's when all of the happy hours you've missed, all the hours of "Transformers" movies endured, they all become worth it.

Either that or the Tom Waits CD I was listening to put them both to sleep. It's difficult to tell.

I've run into people who tell me, "I could never have kids. I'm too selfish." I have to disagree. I'm completely selfish, and most of the time it works out fine. It's very easy to recognize when I'm being a good parent: it's the times I'm not being selfish.

See, I am not by nature a person who likes to share, another one of the many quirks I like to call "personality traits" but everyone else calls "flaws." Sandra Bullock learned this the first time we were in a restaurant and she demurred on dessert, telling me that instead she'd "just have a few bites of (mine)."

It actually makes me kind of mad just typing that.

It's hard-wired into my DNA, like a receding hairline and hypertension, and equally attractive. I remember being at Disneyland in 1982 with my first-ever Real Girlfriend. I thought the sun rose and set on her, even though my dad said that the only reason she had bangs was to hide the tattoo reading "shiksa" on her forehead and my sister's friend made fun of us at Coco's one night, snickering and calling my girlfriend "Sandra Dee" before figuring out that the tool in the webbed sailboat belt was her best friend's little brother.

The truth lay somewhere in the middle. Regardless, even First Girlfriend was not welcome to eat from my personal popcorn bag as we walked through Frontierland. I held it together and didn't say a word, all in the name of teenage love. It wasn't easy.

It's not that I can't share anything. You want to borrow my car? It's yours. I can't share food.

My inability is to gracefully share desserts, beverages, pasta dishes, whatever. If it's edible, I want it all for myself; further ammo for the "my husband is so weird" school.

I'm not proud of it, but don't deny it, either. It is weird and I hate myself for it and I've worked really hard to not tense up when she says, "I'll just have some of yours," but I'm telling you; in the unlikely event I live to be 100, they'll bring in a bowl whatever space-age salty snack they're feeding guys who've had high cholesterol for 70 years, plop it down on the table and I'll immediately start stressing out, afraid that I won't get any before it's all gone.

And yet, when the Jawa was smaller, I had no problem giving him my food. What was mine was his, proof that I had transcended the selfish world of my single years, fully realized and functioning as a parent. It was part of the responsibility to create a safe and bountiful world for my child. Part of that was giving him what was mine. Whether the hidden cameras caught it or not, it felt good.

So why is it that all of a sudden it drives me crazy that the child never brings his own water bottle? That good feeling wasn't enough to absolve me? To fix the damaged part of me that thinks Daffy Duck had it right when he grabbed whatever money he could and shouted, "It's mine! All mine!"?

Today I picked the Jawa up at school a half-hour before swim lessons. I had no problem going to Ursula's office to get his backpack, giving him the opportunity to launch a few more half-court shots. Back at the car, hidden in my backpack, was a 25.3 oz. bottle of water. My bottle of water, set up for the workout I'd planned to complete while the Jawa was learning the butterfly. Stupidly, I had no contingency plan in the event he did what he does every single day, which is to look around wildly and say, "Dad, do we have any water?"

Clever boy. By saying "we," it challenges me to embrace the concept of the cohesive family unit as fully as he obviously has.

"It's in my backpack in the back seat. If you want it, you've got to get it." This is no problem when you're 12 and still able to touch your toes with ease. In a flash, he had the bottle and was slugging away at my water.

Interestingly, he sometimes employs the language of his mother to get at my water. If he thinks I'm especially hostile to water takeovers, he'll say, "Can I have a SIP of your water?" which drives me insane, because he has no intention of having a "sip." He's going to slam that water, draining half of the bottle in one "sip," no matter how he tries to cloak his intentions in manipulative language. Besides, "sip" is an exceptionally lame word all on its own.

I try to stay calm. There goes my water. Worse yet, he's alternating gulps from the bottle -- my bottle -- with bites of the banana I thoughtfully remembered to bring from home. So not only will I arrive at the gym and immediately have to go refill my water while other people claim free elliptical machines, a rare commodity at 5 pm, but the water I eventually drink will be banana-flavored.

I try to stay calm, but I'm weak. One, two, three gulps. The bottle is a third gone. That's 8.429 ounces for those of you whose laptops have calculators, like mine. The innocent little comments I make are loaded with the pressure of compressed rage. "Hey, leave some for me," I say, hoping it comes out light and joking.

We arrive at swim lessons, my child, 12.65 ounces of water and me, ten minutes early. Usually I hang around until his lesson starts, then hotfoot it for the gym, which is next door, hoping to squeeze in a 20-minute cardio session and be back by lesson's end. This time -- and having nothing to do with the fact that I am presently obsessed with the half-empty water bottle in my hand -- I decide to capitalize on the extra ten minutes. That's 200 more calories I can burn off.

My lame attempts at remaining chipper and neutral have failed. I follow the Jawa into the pool area, only to have him turn, wave at me and say, "Okay, go work out." He usually asks me to stay.

I feel, finally, awful. What kind of father can't share a water bottle with his only son? (The kind who tells the kid to bring his own water bottle, perhaps choosing from the 24 or so in the downstairs refrigerator, left over from last week's block party but, at 16.9 ounces, far too small to satisfy for an entire workout, only to have the kid day after day forget to bring his own water bottle, possibly because he correctly assumes that his father will have one, because his father always has one, and what is his father's is his also, so why bring your own water bottle? That kind of father.)

As I chug away on the elliptical, I vow to allow free access to my water on the way home. In fact, I think, I'll refill the bottle to assure ample hydration for both of us. And, of course, he doesn't touch the thing all the way home, making me feel even worse because he's obviously staying away from it because he doesn't want to make me mad.

As Popeye has often says, "I am what I am." At forty-five years old it's probably too late to change me into a free-flowing sharing machine. Though in moments of weakness Sandra Bullock admits that I'm "much better" than I was 20 years ago, I'll always prefer having my own dessert.

But there is a solution, even for unreconstructed non-sharers like me: next time, I'll bring two water bottles: one for me and one for him.

87 days to Bar Mitzvah: pride v. worry

2010-05-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

I am not embarrassed to say that I watch “American Idol.” It is a fairly new habit and won’t last long. When Simon goes, I’ll go too. Without him, the show is 100% cynical. With him, that number drops to 98%.

I’m fascinated by “American Idol,” how it invents instantly famous people while simultaneously wringing every possible source of income from a group of wide-eyed wannabes. Each year, some of the contestants get rich and famous almost overnight. Some of them gain a tiny bit of Warholian fame, enough to power the small marquees of local venues for a few months. The overwhelming majority of them go home to their lives with an interesting story to tell at parties.
Two weeks before the finale, the three remaining contestants return to their hometowns. Whatever their life was before “American Idol,” they are now pop stars. They fly in a private jet and get a police escort to a stadium, where 10,000 people they’ve lived among, essentially ignored, for 20-plus years, suddenly treat them as if they’re Mick Jagger. Can you imagine how that must mess with someone’s mind? Last year they were watching on TV just like the rest of us.

In the end, whoever wins becomes an indentured servant, trading their naïve idea of fame – borne instantly, not gradually accumulated -- for a few years of their artistic soul. When that ends, they’re free to sink (Ruben Studdard, the gray-haired guy) or swim (Daughtry, Kelly Clarkson) on their own merits. It’s a very strange arrangement, almost as cynical as the one that puts very young, attractive girls with overweight middle-aged men who drive nice cars.

This year, one of the finalists is Lee Dewyze, a 24-year-old from Chicago who describes himself as a “paint store clerk.” His appeal is Johnny Bravo-esque; he fits the suit. He’s polite, he dresses neatly but not like a square. When he ends a performance, he stands in front of the judges near tears he’s so overwhelmed by his good fortune.

His competition is another in the tediously endless line of women who think they’re Janis Joplin. The machine that makes raspy-voiced female blues singers only contains one basic mold, I guess, forcing legions of otherwise fine and creative people into singing “Me and Bobby McGee” in the hopes that, by imitating a dead rock and roll legend whose prime happened to occur when Baby-Boomer taste-makers were teenagers (literally, not figuratively, like now), they will cast a spell that transfers all of the freshness and exceptionality of Joplin at Monterey Pop to themselves. Weirdly, on “American Idol,” it always works.

It’s just not very interesting. What is interesting is Lee Dewyze, this clean-cut, ready for production boy from Chicago. For the past month, his very clean-cut, normal-looking parents (who don’t show up in a ponytail and leather vest, like the girl’s dad) have been in the audience for each show, beaming with pride.

There’s nothing quite like watching your child succeed. It’s awesome. I refer to the final scene of “School of Rock,” where the angry private school parents, having unmasked Jack Black as a charlatan, burst into the Battle of the Bands to give him a piece of their minds, only to stumble onto their children performing as a very tight, catchy rock group. Can you imagine not knowing your kid could do this, then suddenly finding out he or she has some incredible talent you didn’t know about? And that talent has a thousand people screaming with joy?

That’s how Lee Dewyze’s parents must feel right now. And that’s how Chris Ballew’s grandmother must have felt the day she stood in front of us at an outdoor show at the Seattle Center by Chris’s shockingly successful mid-1990s band, The Presidents of the United States of America. Someone standing next to her found out who she was. “You must be so proud,” she said to the grandmother.

“Oh, yes, I am,” Grandma returned.

Knowing a little bit about The Presidents of the United States of America, I found that moment interesting for one reason: two years before that day, her grandson Chris was an almost 30-year-old graduate of Brown University with no career. His success came from nowhere. Now, firmly established as Seattle rock royalty, he’s set for life.

So, too, will be Lee Dewyze about 24 hours from now. Tonight he’ll find out if he’s “The American Idol,” but at this point it doesn’t really matter. By the time the sun comes up Thursday morning, he’ll already be well into a successful – at least monetarily, if nothing else – career as a musician.

Lee wasn’t lying. Before “American Idol,” he really was a paint store clerk. You can search YouTube and find some videos of him leading a band or doing karaoke, and he managed to release two independent albums over the past few years. Essentially, though, he was 24 and working a dead-end job, chasing a massively challenging, unlikely dream on the side.

Even worse, Lee was a high school dropout. He attended Prospect High School, in Arlington Heights, Illinois, until his senior year. Then he transferred to an “alternative” school, which I understand to mean one of those places they send stoners, where class attendance is optional. Even so, he didn’t graduate.

Here’s a 24 year-old high school dropout working at a paint store. We went postal three weeks ago because the Jawa had four Bs on his progress report. You think Lee Dewyze’s parents didn’t spend some time worrying about their son?

One of my favorite parent games is to go up to people and ask them the following question: “If your child came to you after graduating high school and said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m not going to college. I’m going to move to New York and try to make it as an actor’, would you support him or her financially?” “Trying to make it as an actor,” we know from the stylized life stories of successful actors, often means several years of living in poverty and working horrible jobs, wearing inadequate outer wear during blizzards and learning to smoke cigarettes. And those are the success stories. Sandra Bullock says, “I’d tell him to major in acting in college, then.”

I spent a few years showing up for Christmas on my parents’ dime, living in squalor and pretending I was trying to “make it” as a writer. Nobody seemed too worried. Mostly, they seemed annoyed and embarrassed. I’m not sure if they read this blog or the Sunday real estate section of The Examiner and beam with bride. Then again, writing a blog and a weekly column in San Francisco’s second-most popular daily newspaper isn’t exactly winning “American Idol” or becoming an internationally-known rock star.

When you look at it that way, four Bs aren’t a big deal. Unless they turn into a job selling paint at Home Depot.

88 days to Bar Mitzvah: today i am still a boy

2010-05-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

Who was the genius who decided to make 13 the cutoff for Jewish childhood? Someone, back in biblical times, when sage advice meant reminding someone to return to its original owner the ox that had wandered into their tent, made a unilateral decision: the day you turn 13, you are a man or woman.

By the way, according to the Census people who accosted me outside my house last week, gender is now something you "self-identify." No kidding. They looked me right in the eye and said, "Gender?" My response: "Can't you tell?" Not until they hear me declare that I am male am I officially male. Along those lines, you can stop referring to me as a "struggling writer." I've decided to self-identify as a best-selling author.

Actually, just turning 13 doesn't do the trick. You can turn 13 all you want; you won't be a man or woman until you climb up onto the bima, grab the gold-handled pointer and start reading from the Torah. One minute you're playing with Barbies or army men. The next, I guess, you're paying bills and worrying about your prostate.

I just realized that I used two childhood toy references that not only don't apply to today's San Francisco child but would also likely make me a Neanderthal in the eyes of my Brandeis Hillel Day School parental cohort. What I meant to say was that one minute they're playing with gender-neutral wooden toys made by artisans in Mendocino and the next they're practicing Ashtonga Yoga and boycotting Arizona.

Last night, 89 days to Bar Mitzvah, I sat in Room 56 at Temple Emanu-el and looked around. Among the parents in various stages of middle-aged physical deterioration were four Bar and Bat Mitzvah candidates. There was the Jawa, who someday will learn what I have learned: how to fidget in ways that don't attract attention.

There was a red-haired kid wearing a hoodie advertising some local youth basketball league. He was completely stressed out because he hadn't yet come close (in his mind) to completing the 18 Mitzvot required of each B'nai Mitzvah. Abra, our Temple Emanu-el representative, found this unbelievable, since everything short of saying "Gesundheit" instead of "God bless you" when someone sneezes is a Mitzvah.

There was Rachel, the ghost of girlfriends past, and there was another girl who actually sounded like a teenager -- and not a kid -- when she spoke. Another candidate was mysteriously absent, represented by his parents and little sister.

Only the preternaturally mature girl seemed like anything other than a kid. And yet all will soon be anointed "adults" by Jewish tradition. Their hurdle to the complex world of adulthood: taking an active role in religious services.

Even that, to a BHDS alum, is a shaky criteria. These kids have been reading from the Torah since first grade. Starting then, every class takes a turn at leading the Thursday morning T'fillah service. So by the time they reach 13, they've laid their fingers on the Torah at least seven times, maybe eight. Their post-Bar Mitzvah glow must be not unlike the feeling of a newly married couple who've been living together for years. "Do you feel any different?"

(Looks down at ring finger on left hand) "Sure! Now lets go home. I want to see if my Sports Illustrated came yet this week."

There's supposed to be all kinds of other adult-style baggage attached to achieving B'nai Mitzvah. Supposedly you will now accept responsibility for your actions and begin working toward improving the world, kind of a tough road for someone who's 13 with one foot still in the sandbox and the other behind the wheel.

(Interestingly, the generation now approaching retirement age has embraced the latter quality while curiously sidestepping the former.)

According to the May 19, 2010 New York Times, 13 is not old enough to climb Mt. Everest, even though 13-year-old Jordan Romero is already at Base Camp. Johnny Collinson, 17, is the youngest to summit Everest. At 13, Laura Dekker may or may not be too young to sail around the world. David Sills, 13, is already being recruited to play quarterback at USC in 2015. That's too young to everyone except, ironically, very youthful new USC coach Lane Kiffin.

Is 13 too young to date? It's too young to drive a car or hold a job, save for babysitting and lawn-mowing, and plenty of people think 13 is too young for babysitting. I'm one of them. It's too young to go on a world tour or be a movie star. Just ask Drew Barrymore, Danny Bonaduce, Michael Jackson, the Corys, Brad Renfro, Lindsay Lohan and about every other child star in history except for Blossom and Winnie Cooper.

This morning, after a comically inept series of events that culminated in me driving carpool in a metallic green Buick, I watched as the Brandeis Hillel Day School seventh grade presented the results of their Tzedek project, a year-long class in which they took money donated by parents (instead of buying 40 Bar Mitzvah gifts, we pooled our money into one fund marked for philanthropy), then each researched a worthy organization for donation. In the end, they donated to four separate outfits.

Today, they presented huge, golf tournament-style faux checks to representatives of each organization. We all sat and watched a DVD about the "Make-a-Wish" foundation, and a video made by a school in Africa who were to received approximately $5,000, thanks to the stellar research of seventh-grader Sydney Osterweil-Artson.

It was pretty awesome to hear these little African kids talking about Sydney Osterweil-Artson.

Were these adults lounging 40-across in the front of the room? As much as anyone can be at 13 while not climbing Everest or sailing around the world, I guess, and definitely more so for the girls than the boys. Though some of them -- Jawa included -- now sport faint moustaches, they all seemed blissfully free of adulthood. Can a rite of passage designed to create a clear line of demarkation between childhood and adulthood have its desired effect on a 14-year-old? I just don't see it.

Maybe back in biblical times. Maybe 77 years ago, when my 15 year-old grandmother and grandfather met on the beach at Coney Island, where he was pumping iron with all the other muscle beach guys and she was hiding the fact that she was able and willing to perform the highly controversial Triple Lindy when the sun went down and the orchestra began to play.

Romeo and Juliet were 12. Maybe all the way up to the establishment of child labor laws in the U.S. Not now, though. I'm sure that, just as 18 was exactly the right age to completely waste a college education through immaturity, 13, at least for our Jawa, who just came running out of his room with his ipod strapped to a cardboard sword he made, will still be a kid on August 22.

89 days to Bar Mitzvah: making lists

2010-05-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

Long ago I learned that I was the kind of person who would make lists; not out of Platonic love for lists, but because if I didn't write a list, nothing got done.

Naturally, my predeliction for making lists quickly became an invaluable item in Sandra Bullock's "How weird is my husband" toolbox. You can tell the difference between that and her normal toolbox because her normal toolbox is red and says "Craftsman" across the front. Her father bought it for "us" as a Christmas present one year. Yes, my wife has a toolbox. I have books. How weird is her husband?

The joke around here is that if something is not on the list, it does not exist. I go to Safeway or Trader Joe's and purchase everything on the list. The pen I always carry is used to cross off each item on the list as I put it in my cart, at Safeway always stacking items toward the front of the cart to obscure the picture of Realtor Susan Ring, who once accused me of "yellow journalism" at an open house. You'd better believe she found out what "yellow journalism" looks like the very next Sunday.

If I forget the pen, I buy one. Otherwise, how will I know what is already in the cart and what is not? The list grows organically during the week. When someone thinks of something we need or they'd like, they add it to the list.

Before Sandra Bullock and I first moved in together, my idea of "grocery shopping" was crossing the street to buy a sandwich. I got used to grocery lists pretty quickly though, after a short period in which I would sabotage each week's list by adding things like "donuts," or "lechuga."

If I were King of the shopping list and had free rein to build it as I wished, I'd organize it according to supermarket aisle. "Fruit" would be at the top. The last item would be "bread." This, to me, is logical and sleek, the grocery list equivalent of my system for doing laundry, which involves separating colors into "above the belt" and "below the belt." This limits the number of clothing categories during folding time. Otherwise, you could cover the bed with one- or two-item stacks of boxers, socks, t-shirts, sweatshirts, jeans, etc. until you run out of room and either have to use the nighttables or try to air fold, something I cannot do. I need a flat surface.

Sandra Bullock claims to be exasperated by my laundry system and undermines it every chance she gets. If she hates it so much, why does she often bring it up at social functions? Becase her husband is so weird, that's why.

I might think it weird that there has been a small, green post-it on the kitchen island for the past two days with "wire brush" written on it. "I can go buy that," I volunteered. "What's it for?"

"I want to use it on the stucco, so I can do touch up paint. Or if I just want to paint the outside of the house. Do you know what kind of wire brush to get for that?"

"No," in four-point font.

After I checked to make sure I still had male reproductive organs, I went to get a glass of water. While I was changing into my PJs, she'd emptied the dishwasher. I could have easily done that myself, but it wasn't on the list.

Tonight, after a long period of radio silence caused, in part, by the fact that for various reasons -- illness, prior commitments, block party -- the Jawa has skipped three of the last four Bar and Bat Mitzvot, we reprimed the Bar Mitzvah machine and attended a "B'Nai Mitzvot Preparation Class" at Temple Emanu-el. Here we would learn the intricate details of the coming weekend event.

We discussed details, all right, if you consider a "discussion" to be a situation in which one person tells a room full of people exactly how things are going to be, interrupted a few times by timid and sometimes repetitive questions.

Seems that for all of our loopy San Francisco grooviness, there is a definite right and wrong way to be Bar Mitzvah'ed at Temple Emanu-el. You will donate $300 to the Flower Ladies, who used to be part of the Sisterhood until it dissolved, because they go to the Flower Mart every week and their creations are lovely. You can go with FTD, we guess, but it seems nonsensical.

You will add 75 people to your Oneg/Kiddush lunch, because for some of those people, the ones you may see shoveling bagels into their shoulder bags, it may be the only meal they have that day, or possibly that weekend. This your special event, yes, but you must remember that for many people, it is just another Saturday service.

It is a mitzvot, as you know. If you do not do it, you are bad.

Consideration for the temple's congregation is also why, though you may be the reticent type, miserly with their emotions, who sees a Bar or Bat Mitzvah as the perfect time to unleash onto your child an appreciation so overwhelming that you all fall to the floor in tears, you will want to keep the "parents' blessing" to around three to five minutes. You must be cognizant of the fact that, basically, you are renting the temple for one day and while it may be your "special day," in the life of the temple, it is another Saturday service.

If you want to have extra musicians and will be having your event in the Martin-Meyer sanctuary, please tell Marcia. She will choose extra musicians for you. And you should attend several Saturday services before yours, so you'll know what goes on in them, because even though you are a member of this temple, we're going to assume that you're one of those Jews who, when asked his religion, begrudgingly says, "Jewish," before quickly adding, "but barely. I'm not religious or anything."

The Saturday before your Bar Mitzvah, you should be prepared to work during services as a greeter, handing out prayer books and saying, "Shabbat Shalom!" to visitors, regardless of how badly your social anxiety has been acting up as a result of all the people who solicit you for contributions to Calpirg or Greenpeace, want to shine your shoes or give you a massage or simply want to know if you're a registered California voter every day while you walk from the BART station to work.

Don't plan to have dinner on Friday before 7:15, and don't stay out late. You will be at the temple very early the day of your child's Bar or Bat Mitzvah. And while you can hand down a Tallit to your child, that would leave you without one. Better to buy a new one for him.

("If Grandpa gives his Tallus to the Bar Mitzvah boy, what's he going to wear?" said Abra, our Family Education Coordinator. "A new Spooner, of course!" I answered cheerily, to the delight of my wife and utter confusion of everyone else.)

There are definite ways to conduct yourself at services. Each Saturday, Abra told us, begins with the rabbi making some joke about turning off cell phones and getting rid of gum. "I'll be happier when he doesn't have to make that joke," she said.

This is not to frighten you, neophyte Bar Mitzvah-goer. We encourage you to come and wear our inscripted yarmulkes that Abra thinks are a waste of money. If, when I am on the bima, it appears I am chewing tobacco, it will actually be gum, hidden in my lower lip. I chew gum every day and will likely be chewing some on August 21.

I suspect that, based on what I've seen at past Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, tonight's semi-stern lecture was delivered in the hope that we'd follow 75% of the laid-out rules. I can clearly remember, for example, several "parents' blessings" that were much longer than the five lines Abra showed us on the "parents' blessings template." Once you're up there, what are they going to do? Bring out the huge, vaudevillian hook?

I'm making a list. It's called "Bar Mitzvah." Some things I heard tonight will go on it, like "Show up early," "Write parents' blessing," and "send transliterated versions of the blessing before the reading of the Torah to my parents." Other things I heard tonight will not be on the list. Which, as you now know, means they don't exist.