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 danaliseshavin@gmail.com.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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It’s kind of a funny story, really, if you overlook the whole cheating part. When I was in high school, I had to write a term paper on child development. Oh how I railed against this assignment! As I intended to never educate children, give birth to children or raise the children of others, it seemed a waste of time to explore how they were put together. For the record, I also railed against math, geography, history and lunch, but at least I could see the relevance of knowing how to count, knowing that it’s prudent to avoid volcanoes, knowing the world was not dreamed into existence by my birth, and food.

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There are many take-aways from Rubin’s book, but one thing really stuck with me: the idea that the pleasure we take from an event  is only partially derived from the event itself; the balance of the pleasure comes from the hatching of the idea, the planning of it, the anticipation of it, and the afterglow. It’s just another way of saying, ”It’s the journey that counts,” but with some measure of happiness research mixed in. While reveling in the  pleasures of anticipation seems suspiciously like not living in the moment at all, Rubin’s point—and the point of everyone from Tolle to Chodron to Thoreau to LaPorte to God–is that every moment is a moment. Or, to say it the same way only differently, every moment is a moment.

Which brings me, rather longwindedly, to what I actually want to address, which is how easy it is to let celebratory moments go by without celebrating. It’s something my husband and I were talking about last week. I have a publishing job that goes on hiatus two months every summer, and last week marked the beginning of my two months’ time-off. Feeling celebratory, I gathered up 3 friends and my husband and we went to our favorite dinner spot, Canyon Grill, on the back side of  Lookout Mountain, where I ate wood grilled trout and fire-seared red cabbage and a baby lettuce salad that I could have made myself but didn’t, and we drank three bottles of wine and laughed for three hours and then went home. I loved it. I also loved the entire week leading up to it, and my husband and I are still replaying funny stories from it four days later.

Was it such a big deal, reaching the beginning of my summer, that it needed to be marked by dinner out with friends? Not really. And yes. The point is  not to assign worth to moments but to attempt to live fully inside of each one. When I fully “got” this, I stopped being in a huge hurry all the time. I lost my impatience, my agitation, and my dissociative states. I even stopped tailgating. You don’t have to send up a huge hurrah every minute you don’t die. It’s really about being here–quietly or loudly, whichever brings you the most fully alive–for the ride.

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A little spark of anxiety ignites at the base of your spine. You put down your sandwich and look up from your magazine. Because you’ve just realized something incredibly important: what you do isn’t what you were meant to do. And unless you want to live a life of constant regret, you must chuck it immediately and pursue the [profoundly fulfilling] thing that is your true calling. Stephen Cope, in his book, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling, calls this living along the spine of your dharma.

But there’s something else, too. It isn’t just that you’re doing the wrong thing. It’s that you’re doing the too big thing. The thing you now know you should be doing is (you believe, because you have no real understanding of it) deliciously, delightfully “small”. What could possibly be involved in being a chocolatier (even one who takes a cue from primitive societies) besides throwing together some cocoa and milk, stirring it up, and then hanging out in your shop all day in the hippest part of a hip town, selling to hipsters? Although to clarify, it’s not the alleged “easy” part that lures you. It’s that you know the profoundest satisfaction sprouts from the belly of single-minded purpose.

And it is, of course, an illusion, a fantasy, a hold-over from the days of childhood when all that was required to be a superhero was to dress like one and all it took to be a mommy was to carry a plastic baby around by its hair. There’s a reason stories about simplifying our life, and movies about romantic love, get to us, and it’s precisely because there’s no “there” there. We don’t hear (or we don’t listen to) the parts about the ego pain or financial struggle or long hours involved in retrofitting a career. And lovers in movies never go the bathroom, run out of dinner conversation, or pluck chin hairs.

Which is not to say you should go back to your Oprah magazine and your sandwich and blot out the voices in your head telling you to make a change. One of the funniest things my father ever said was something he didn’t intend to be funny: “Everything means something to you, doesn’t it, Dr. R.?” As Dr. R. was a shrink, this kind of went without saying.

It’s the same with the chatter in your head. Listen, but maybe don’t take it literally. I’m thinking the chatter is more like dream imagery: messages couched in symbolism, waiting to be unravelled. I’m actually pretty happy doing what I do, and certain I don’t want to chuck it all to source chocolate. But the idea that there’s some other part of my life “seeking the spine”? Now that’s something worth considering.

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Today was a case in point. Unable to locate our favorite popcorn at Fresh Market, I promised to make an even better version for him when we got home. Dr. Oz had just done a show about popcorn in which he warned that the chemicals in store-bought microwave popcorn is bad for your health. He suggested instead popping plain corn in a paper bag in the microwave.

It couldn’t be easier, I told my husband. Corn and a bag! I had this.

He was skeptical. As I knew he would be. All I had was Oz’s word. I didn’t have anything in the way of measurements. “It won’t work,” my husband said.

“It can’t NOT work,” I said. “Kernels in a paper bag, bag in the microwave. What’s not to work?”

It wouldn’t taste the same, he said. The popcorn would be dry. The salt wouldn’t stick. Without the salt it wouldn’t be worth eating.

“I’ll mist it with olive oil,” I said.

“It’ll drip,” he said.

The issue of course wasn’t popcorn or the relative benefits of misting vs. popping with oil. The issue is that we have vastly different approaches to work and the world. My husband’s perfectionism serves him well in the realm of fine art, while my looser approach allows me the flexibility I need to endlessly revise and rethink my writing. He occasionally wins me over to his side, as I occasionally win him over to mine. After endless rounds of popcorn discussion, he finally agreed to try it my way. We would get the paper bags. We would pop the corn. We would mist with olive oil.

I would prove that flexibility trumped perfectionism.

And then I remembered. We don’t own a microwave.

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“Well,” said the therapist, “You could just upset the apple cart completely.”

As I recall I stared at her in disbelief. Did people really do that? Decide that so little in their life was working that the only recourse was to chuck it all and start over?  It was the emotional equivalent of yanking the plug on some misbehaving, little-understood piece of technology and then plugging it back in with great expectations.

It was a terrible idea. But as a depressed, anxious, recently de-fathered 26 year-old, I couldn’t see this.  At that time, I believed PhDs didn’t have terrible ideas, or if they did, they used them for making hideous sofa choices. And so, three months after my father’s death, I said goodbye to my boyfriend, my best friend, my job, and the horse farm I lived on and adored, and moved to what was then the middle of nowhere.

Do I have to tell you the plan stunk? That I missed the boyfriend, the best friend, my coworkers, and the horses intensely? That what I had done, far from hitting the reset button on my life, was to heap sorrow, loneliness, and unemployment on top of grief, anxiety and confusion? I have to wonder: what did the therapist think might come of this apple-cart overthrow? Had she thought it through at all? If so, what did she think was possible?

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite questions to ask or be asked: What’s possible?  It’s a great question to ask yourself (or someone else) in times of  stuckness or uncertainty. I often wonder what would have come of my young self and my supposedly dispensable “apples” had the therapist taken the time to ask me, What’s possible if you upset the apple cart? What’s possible if you don’t? She could have even followed it with the deliciously abstract, often maddening, but almost always revealing, What else?  I might have still tossed the apples, but maybe I’d have at least salvaged the cart.

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You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert
repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

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