I did a reading last week at a lovely little bookstore in Ringgold, Georgia, called Book and Barrel. I was thrilled by the invitation—I’m used to having only about ten minutes to speak at any given reading, but that night I would have thirty minutes all to myself. Thirty minutes! But, as I always told my dog Jada when I let her off leash, with freedom comes responsibility. Sure enough, once the thrill wore off, the anguish set in. I would need to consider the audience.

What, oh what, should I read? Something grim and desolate from my anorexia memoir? Something light and comedic that did not take away people’s will to live, from my book of Chattanooga Times Free Press columns? A brand new personal essay that took on both Alzheimer’s dementia and the philosophical underpinnings of yardwork and, weirdly, made one a referendum on the other?

The only thing I knew about the potential audience was that everyone would be of drinking age, as the bookstore serves wine and beer. Which is hardly a lot of information from which to draw a consensus on anything, let alone literary taste.

I decided to go with grim and desolate with a little juicy and funny thrown in. I brought three  excerpts and gave the audience a brief overview of what each was about, and said they could tell me which they wanted to hear. I explained that I had done this years earlier, when I read at Jewish Federation, only I had given that audience just two choices: did they want to hear about sex, or did they want to hear about death?

“I was certain they would choose sex,” I said. “I should have known better. My people’s identity has been shaped by never-ending persecution. Of course they chose death.” I paused here for effect.

“And so I read about sex,” I said.

At this I expected robust laughter. Instead, a barely audible titter rippled across the room. Perhaps the audience was afraid I would enact this same bait-and switch scheme with them. Just in case, I reassured them I would go with whichever of the excerpts they chose.

They chose sex. And so I read about sex.

I should have read about death.

I’m not saying it didn’t go well. I remember reading somewhere that it’s not up to the writer to judge whether our writing does what we intend for it to do, that once we “let go” of it—by publishing or reading it aloud—it no longer belongs to us. Like children (the thinking goes), what we create comes through us, and ceases to be ours once it’s out in the world.

So all I can say for sure is, it seemed what I read didn’t quite resonate. There wasn’t laughter where I expected it. One guy walked out in the middle. It’s possible he was a transplant surgeon and got word of a long-awaited spleen, sure. But my guess is he just didn’t like what he was hearing, or possibly from whom he was hearing it.

All of which is ok. It’s great, even. Because the whole event got me thinking about the risk we take when we put ourselves out there in any way, whether it’s our writing or our painting or asking our boss for a raise or telling our partner we need to make some changes in our relationship. Going in, we can’t possibly know what the response will be, and so it’s a little like a high wire act, with the only safety net our own self-acceptance.

This means knowing that we will be fine, even if we bomb or think we have. As long as our ego is resilient, then regardless of what we think about our performance, when it’s over we know ourselves to be the same person—a little embarrassed maybe, if our sex reading made probably-not-a-surgeon leave because he was disgusted or bored—but no better and no worse than before we put ourselves out there.

And there is another part to this as well. As I was driving home after the bookstore reading, I started to think not just about the risk I had taken, but about the risk the audience had also taken.

They came to the bookstore that night not knowing what they might hear. Probably they hoped they would be entertained, or enlightened, or simply distracted from whatever worries they had. But they took the risk that they might instead be bored, or saddened, or offended.

So it was, on the drive back home, that I came to understand my one true role at the bookstore that night: I was simply there as a catalyst. Whatever the audience felt in response to my reading was between themselves and themselves. It was theirs to own, not mine. It always is.

*******

Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist, and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is also the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].

One afternoon in my fifteenth year, I was wandering morosely around the house. Probably it was raining, which meant I couldn’t go horseback riding, and I was kvetching (that’s Yiddish slang for complaining) about having nothing to do. 

My father handed me a book. “Read this,” he said.

It was an old, mildew-smelling tome he’d no doubt unearthed from our dank basement. I looked at the title: What is a Jew, by Morris N. Kertzer.

My jaw dropped. “It’s summer,” I said, the subtext being that learning should only happen during the school year. I spun on my heel and walked away.

Growing up, I attended Sunday and Hebrew school, went to synagogue on all the major holidays, and lit candles on the Sabbath. Like my parents, I followed the basic rules of kashrut, or kosher eating: I avoided pig products and shellfish, and never mixed meat with dairy. At Passover I skipped bread for a week; on Yom Kippur, I fasted.  

Thankfully, the foods I was allowed more than made up for the forbidden ones. And I was elated to see so many of them at Chattanooga’s first Jewish food festival, Nosh-a-Nooga, which was held Sunday, August 18^th at Waterhouse Pavilion.

Nosh-a-Nooga was put together by the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga. I caught up with Executive Director Michael Dzik outside the pavilion just as the event was getting underway, and asked him what the purpose of the festival was.

“We wanted to bring the Jewish community together,” Dzik said, “but we also wanted to share some of our culture and traditions with all of Chattanooga.” Forty-five volunteers, including the local home chefs who prepared the various foods—some from recipes handed down over generations—made the event possible. Tickets were a dollar; each “nosh,” or sample, cost between two and four tickets.

Jewish Federation program director Ann Treadwell explained how the festival was laid out. Lining one side of the pavilion were the “glatt” kosher foods; for the uninitiated, or those who did not finish (or start) What is a Jew, glatt kosher means that the lungs of the animal slaughtered for meat were smooth and without adhesions. Less technically, it’s a term applied to foods that meet the highest standards of kashrut. Foods that did not meet the very strictest kosher guidelines could be found on the opposite side.

I made my way around the crowded pavilion, gathering goodies as I went. Bourekas? Yes, please! These are savory pastries, or hand pies, formed into a triangle and stuffed with a variety of vegetables. They are a mash-up of the deep-fried dumplings that originated in Asia, and the empanadas of the Sephardic Jews of Turkey. My boureka was satisfyingly warm, and the phyllo crust was nicely tanned, flaky and crunchy all at once.  

Then I came upon the rugalach, a treat I remember from the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) celebrations of my youth, when it’s traditional to eat sweet foods for a sweet new year. Little twists of buttery dough wrapped around a jam filling and baked to a golden brown, they are comfortingly sweet.

The knish, a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish snack food, is made by forming a round dough ball and filling it with mashed potatoes or grains, caramelized onion, spinach, mushroom—really, the sky’s the limit. I dragged mine through a dollop of grainy mustard, and an entire Jewish deli bloomed in my head.

Little round balls of chremzel: matzo meal rolled in cinnamon and honey, then baked in more honey, were served warm. Think of a fritter, with a little more density, lounging in a bath of honey, waiting to be scooped up and served. This was comfort food at its finest, as was the lokshen (noodle) kugel, an Eastern European dish that dates back to the 1500s, originally made with leftover bread, now mostly made with either noodle or potato and often lightly sweetened with raisins and other fruit.

Round, twice-baked cookies called biscochos (also known in Mexico as wedding cookies) were delicate and lightly sweetened, and very similar to shortbread. These are Sephardic in origin, and traditionally make an appearance at Chanukah and Purim. They are usually formed into open rings; the ones I had looked like little flowers.

Whole, beautifully braided challah loaves were available for purchase; this is a traditional bread in kosher Jewish households as it is pareve, i.e. made without meat or dairy (oil subs in for butter), and so can accompany either meat or dairy meals.

While you might be tempted to think of babka as a cake, it is actually a brioche bread. While similar to challah, a babka boasts plenty of butter (as well as sugar) and the dough is slathered with a variety of fillings (Nutella, cinnamon, chocolate, fruity jams—almost nothing is off the table) and then rolled over and over on itself and baked. The finished product looks like a twisty layer cake. (I will be thinking about that chocolate babka for a very long time.)

Also on tap: bagels, lox and cream cheese; falafel balls and a traditional Israeli salad of tomato, cucumber, and onion; mandelbrot (mandel bread), an Ashkenazi Jewish cookie very similar to biscotti; brisket sliders; and matzo ball soup. If you left hungry, that was on you.   

When I left, the pavilion was so packed it was hard to move between the tables and chairs, and the line to get inside was a block long. Something tells me that this first Jewish Food festival will not be Chattanooga’s last.

My husband and I bought ourselves a red Ping Pong table last December. We put it in his upstairs office, which is the only place it can fit. Since buying our house, we’d gone back and forth on what kind of sitting area to create in front of his desk but could never decide. When we saw the ping pong table, we knew the problem wasn’t indecision. The problem was we didn’t want to sit.

We play ping pong sometimes in the evenings after dinner, but mainly we play in stolen moments between working and working, like when I walk down the short hallway from my office to his to let the dogs out, or when he calls me in to ask a question about something he’s doing. Dogs let out, question answered, we pick up our paddles and a ferocious volley explodes. We play until we are ready to get back to work, or lose three balls to the staircase, whichever comes first. Usually, it’s not more than about ten minutes. But it does the trick. We return to our work more focused. The dogs return to their happy places under my desk and in the big red chair in the corner of my office. And that’s that until we do it again, maybe in two hours, maybe not until the next day.

It’s no secret that my husband and I struggle with balance. We tend to overwork, though we tell ourselves it’s just because we love what we do. And we do!  But even too much of a good thing can be too much, we remind ourselves. Years ago, my writing mentor, upon hearing that I was laboring all day and then again after dinner on a writing project, exclaimed, “Stop sitting on your manuscript!” She was trying to tell me that projects, like people, need space to breathe. Which reminded me that I also needed to breathe.

To not work all the time, my husband and I have thrown ourselves into other activities in addition to the pop-up ping pong rallies. He plays golf two or three days a week. I play pickleball five mornings a week. I tell myself that while it’s true too much of a good thing can be too much, the rule doesn’t apply to golf or pickleball. I tell myself the fact that my right elbow sizzles with pain and I had to have surgery on my right hand is somehow unrelated to my playing a paddle sport ten hours a week. Admittedly, when my doctor heard the five-days-a-week pickleball statistic, she, like my writing mentor years ago, was aghast.

“Can’t you find something else to do a few mornings a week?” she asked. I could write more, I thought, but then I didn’t want to get back to sitting on my manuscript, so really, the answer was no.

Secretly, I think it’s a positive thing that I like what I do enough to cause myself to need surgery and interventions from alarmed others. Perhaps it’s because I can remember plenty of years that I cried on my way to work every morning because I was so unhappy, and years when I moved my body in healthy ways only in service to losing a staggeringly unhealthy number of pounds. Those days make the imbalance in my current life look a lot like balance.

Recently my husband and I started reading Arthur C. Brook’s book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. It’s all about embracing the inevitable, age-related changes in our abilities and interests while recognizing that the trade-off is deep wisdom, richer connections with others, and detachment from empty rewards. Brooks says it’s important, as we get older, to let go of the illusion that our achievements and accolades can sustain us, because they are ephemeral: they begin to dissipate almost as soon as we get them.  He explains that the path to happiness in later life lies not in continuing to rack up successes (which gets harder and harder, particularly in certain professions), or in attempting to live off the emotional spoils of our legacy. Through seven years of research and interviews, Brooks discovered that happiness in later life comes not in continued striving (which is a strength we enjoy most in our younger years), but in tending to our relationships, and in embracing the “deep wisdom”—a more enduring and rewarding strength–that (if we are lucky) has come with age.

I’m not ready to give up the thrill of seeing a new writing project in print, and a win on the pickleball court still delights. Still, I can see the beginnings of one curtain dropping as another one lifts. I no longer have the drive to make a name for myself, to show up on some lighted billboard for an accolade that is sexy but fleeting. More and more I find myself appreciating not just the challenges of pickleball, but the players, who have become my friends. I think this must be how the march from one strength to another begins: as a kind of ping-ponging back and forth between your current world and a new and potentially more resonant one, until such time as you put down one ball entirely, and step fully and fruitfully into a whole different game.

Last night at a restaurant some distance from Chattanooga, I did something I regret: I lodged a complaint. Well, not exactly a complaint. It was more like an unwelcome clarification. What happened was that I ordered what the menu called a roasted beet salad appetizer, but what arrived did not actually contain roasted beets. I don’t think I was wrong about this: I’ve made my share of roasted beets, and of my four dining companions, at least one other agreed that what lay sprawled across my plate was roasted beets’ flaccid fraternal twin: beets that had been either canned, or pickled, or both. So I suggested this to the waiter.

It was a clarification he did not take well to. His smile departed. His demeanor hardened. The beets were as described, he said; he knew because he had watched them being prepared. While I had my doubts about the veracity of his account—research studies have proven time and again that eyewitness testimony is fraught with bias—I didn’t want to argue. I liked the salad, I assured him. I just happen to be a stickler for truth in marketing. I did not say this last part. Nevertheless, there would be no more kindness from our waiter, who moments before had seemed so delighted by our presence.

That night I Googled the proper way to lodge a complaint in a restaurant. In a nutshell, you should be polite, mention the problem as soon as you’re aware of it (not after you’ve polished off your meal), and be clear about how you’d like it resolved. I’m happy to say that I was, I think, polite, and I did mention the beets immediately. I didn’t suggest a resolution, however, because aside from the salad being an uninspired lie of an appetizer, it was perfectly fine to eat. My husband and I are decades out from the days when we turned our noses up at the canned, pickled beet slabs that topped every Italian restaurant salad, until the day we actually tried one and liked it, after which we vied for who got the bigger slab. What I’m saying is, I find beets in any form pretty acceptable, but more importantly, those restaurants never pretended their beets were anything they weren’t.

So I was bothered by our waiter’s defensiveness. I’m reminded of the story about my husband’s ex-girlfriend, who sent back a steak so many times the chef himself finally came out to their table, took her by the hand, and said, “Come. Let’s cook this steak together.” That, my friends, is accommodation in action, and that isn’t anything like what I was looking for.

Which makes me wonder what, exactly, I was looking for. Since I wasn’t requesting a replacement salad with actual roasted beets, did I just need to flex my gastronomical muscle? As foodies go, I’m about a four on a scale of one to ten. I’m a respectable cook who has never sickened anyone (there was some suspect turkey once that did cause my husband to vomit, but in my defense, I ate it too, and I was fine). And while I do have a fantasy of opening a soup café one day, I realize that having a repertoire of three good soups does not a café make. But of everything in the world of cooking I do not understand or have patience for—and this includes, apparently, turkey safety, as well as a well thought-out soup philosophy—roasted beets are something I actually do understand. And maybe that’s why I had to say something.

In the end, my husband’s ex-girlfriend did not go to the kitchen to help the chef cook her steak, and I did not go to the kitchen to watch my chef roast beets, so it’s really anyone’s guess whether she could have taught her chef a thing or two, and whether I might have caught ours in a tangled web of alternative beet facts. In thinking about it (at length, it turns out), I believe that all I wanted last night was for the waiter to say, “You’re right.” Maybe he could have explained that they just couldn’t get their hands on fresh beets, or that they sold out of them moments before we arrived, all dressed up and with a yearning for roasted root vegetables. Either of these responses would have made it all ok. Because in my opinion, the raw truth is always more satisfying than a half-baked defense.