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MEANINGFUL MATZOH: My Sunday Morning Volunteering At Lifetown

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

No more rearview window humanitarianism for me. For five years, I had watched my son volunteer with”differently abled” children at the Friendship Circle from the safety of the front seat of my car. I pulled away every Sunday morning while he did the heavy lifting. It was time to stop pretending I was a good person because of my close genetic link to a former volunteer.

Last Sunday, a good three weeks before Passover, my friend Lisa invited me to volunteer with her at a matzoh-making event at Lifetown, the new Friendship Circle headquarters right off Route 10, less than 10 miles from where I used to do drop off. Heading over, I decided to focus on something I could deal with, that I didn’t know exactly where I was going. This was preferable to my other concern, that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing.

Lisa has been talking about Lifetown for weeks.  Many Sundays, she volunteers there with autistic children and teens, and it’s where her son Harry now has a career.  Let me just put it out there.  Lifetown is a funny name. It sounds just enough like the local fitness center Lifetime so that when you go, most people will believe you’re headed to the gym. But as Lisa said being at Lifetown offers a very different kind of endorphin rush.

I was afraid I would not get that kind of rush or any rush at all, other than one that would lead me right out the door. Cancel that. I was afraid period.  Years ago, my son had told me about a story about something that happened when he was volunteering for the Friendship Circle.   The boy he was working with — known then as his “special friend;” there may be more politically correct nomenclature now– began doing something decidedly un-special:  hurling pretzels across the room. By the time this happened, my son had been exceptionally well trained by the Friendship Circle. Flying pretzels did not faze him. Little did.  I’d done nothing to prepare for my volunteer hours Sunday but go to Starbucks and drink coffee.  I wasn’t ready.  This kind of work, I imagine, is like changing a ceiling lightbulb without a step-stool. I could easily end up hanging by an arm.

Let me just report that the Lifetown complex, and it is a complex,  was nothing like what I expected. It’s a great example of what can happen when lots of money gets together with love and commitment.

The Friendship Circle’s new home is an amazing facility;  under construction are a handicapped-accessible pool, rooms specially outfitted for sensory stimulation, and touch tanks.  A gym with equipment for those with physical challenges is already up and running. One day soon, there will even be an opportunity for young adults with special needs to have real work experiences in a specially constructed town with a bookstore, hair salon, pet and grocery stores and a bank. It’s Mr Rogers Neighborhood on steroids.  But this is no place for Henrietta Pussycat. Nor, when I walked in, was I sure it was for me.

I’m not going to lie.  Being there was not easy. I had tears in my eyes a lot of the time especially as I watched Lisa’s grown son working with the child who’d been assigned to him. I’ve known Harry since he was a toddler playing with my own boys. To see him navigating his post-college professional world in such a meaningful way was beyond moving.

Lisa had been assigned to D., a preteen who, according to the program, was labeled high functioning. My job was to follow them through mundane matzoh tasks. Pounding.  Rolling.  Screaming in excitement.  Lisa and I  were kind of extraneous.  D. worked the room.

The first thing D. said to me when we met me was “I like your shoes.” And like the chump that I am, I deflected her compliment.  “Oh, well, these have rubber soles and they’re easy to wear,” I said.  Why did I say that?  Did I really think she would care about rubber soles?  Was I planning to help roll matzoh dough or run a marathon?   “They’re pretty,” she said, but then she moved past me, happy to be with the friends she sees every week.

In spite of her enthusiasm, she came with the saddest story of all.  She is sister to E., a younger, non-verbal Lifetown member for whom the raucous nature of the matzoh room proved too much.  Lisa and I volunteered to watch him to give his recently widowed mom a break.  Yes, that’s right. The mom was widowed.  It wasn’t enough that she had two children with special needs to care for, one with severe autism.  Her husband had to die of cancer, too.  As I watched Lisa speak calmly to E., I was in awe.  But the music grew louder, and E. reached for her arm and began to head butt it.  She looked at me.  “We may be in over our heads,” was all she said.

Driving away had been easy years ago.  But even then I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do.

PARENTING THE PARENTS: Who’s In Charge Now?

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Today I emptied a storage unit, signed a sale contract over e-doc, and oversaw an estimate on the imminent transfer of two step-stools, 15 pots, one couch, seven tables, and an easy chair. These sundry items will move from my parents’ apartment to the homes of my four grown sons. Somehow, almost imperceptibly, I moved up the responsibility chain. Odd isn’t it that at age 57, I had wanted nothing more than to stay put.

In the past, I would have been fighting to advance. When my son was born 28 years ago, I remember being upset because in the family line-up, nothing seemed to change. Even though I now had someone to diaper, it was like I was relegated to being the sitcom kid forever.

My grandmother still got to be called “Grandma Rose”. My mother continued to behave like a benevolent despot around the holidays, assigning the making of jello molds and mandelbrot. She had no compunction about airing her displeasure when I insisted that, at a mere 10 months, my son give up his bottle and drink from a stupid plastic cup.

With my husband working about 100 hours a week, my dad prevailed over the burnt-out bulbs and recalcitrant outlets in my tiny new house. When we went somewhere together, my parents drove. I sat in the back next to my son in his car seat. Touché. For a long time if I had a question, any question at all, I was convinced my parents had the answer. And often they did. Because my parents were so competent and so forceful, I stayed everybody’s little girl.

At some point, weren’t we all supposed to catapult forward a generation? In retrospect, I was way more anxious than I should have been for the shift to occur. And now that it has, it is uncomfortably seismic.

Today my parents mostly watched the dismantling of their last owned home, occasionally interjecting some unhelpful nugget. I refer specifically to my dad’s conviction that anything affixed to the wall like the television sets was a fixture and couldn’t be moved. He argued for ten minutes that a corner table that fit perfectly into the corner had to stay where it was because it was part of the apartment. What he was really saying is that he was part of the apartment.

Earlier that day in the storage unit, I’d found the tiny bulb boxes that he’d labeled with the names of every lamp they belonged to. There was the extra large water bottle in that unit that they’d bought just in case the water in the building was ever shut down again, like it had been during three days in a storm. My father doesn’t label things anymore. He can barely use his cellphone.

Later when we were nearly done, my dad said “You wouldn’t have to worry about any of this if we had just stayed here.” Well, yes. And rather gratuitously my mother reminded him, “Our daughters made us do this”. Why were they so clear on this point and yet couldn’t remember not to double pay their rent in the assisted living?

It’s strange how much I miss being the daughter that my parents always worried about. I forget what that was like now that I have to worry about them.

DIETING FOR DUMMIES

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I have been married to Hal for almost sixteen years, and I have been trying to get him to eat right for fifteen and a half of them. While I love my husband, we have had an ongoing battle about why the 200 calories in a pretzel are not equal to the 200 calories in an avocado.

This is why I was shocked when he told me he had signed up for a prepared diet food delivery system. I never asked to stop serving as his unofficial nutritional guru. In fact, I kind of liked it.

Was this service going to laugh about his joke about liking a little tea with his sugar?

Would they pack him a Tupperware container lunch with a piece of fresh salmon and broccoli? I doubt it.

Next I imagined he’d be getting into bed with Jenny Craig who, incidentally, now refers to herself as Jenny in all lowercase letters. Enough with the familiarity. I didn’t want her in my bedroom, to say nothing of my kitchen.

This wasn’t Hal’s first go at a nutritional remake. Since 2003, we have gone through the Moosewood Cookbook phase, the private chef shared with our neighbors’ period, and the infamous plastic bag diet, which was both environmentally unsound and nutritionally unsatisfying. It involved my putting small quantities of nuts or cheese or raisins into tiny packages and telling Hal that was all he could eat between meals.

A week ago, the giant box of food arrived, and Hal was really excited. Usually when the door opens and there’s a package behind it, it’s got my name and Nordstrom’s on it. He ripped into the box, conveniently ignoring the one plastic envelope that said, “Open Me First.” Clearly this was shaping up to be a rousing success.

By the time he was done, all the packages of chemically modified meals were hopelessly mixed up. He decided it didn’t matter. If he could just eat five things in the packages every day, he told me, the weight would come off.

Initially I was not a supportive spouse. I had met the enemy, and it was packaged chili with beans.

“The one thing all the nutritionists say is that you should eat fresh, not out of packages,” I told Hal. Did I really say that out loud? Yeah, I did.

In a shining example of untruth in advertising, the first week of the program was called Fresh Start. Really? It might have been a start. But how could anything that came through the mail encased in plastic claim to be fresh? I consoled myself. At least I was spending less at the supermarket.

It all came to a halt last night when Hal faced Week Two.

“What do I do about the special shakes? I’m not sure where they fit in,” Hal said. It occurred to me that Hal was becoming unduly attached to these drinks which weren’t part of any discernible food group.

That was the dawn of the Evening of Befuddlement, wherein two grownups with masters’ degrees couldn’t figure out the nuances of the food system vocabulary. We even waited 20 minutes to get a weight counselor on the phone who kept admonishing us to read the tiny little book. I didn’t want to read the tiny little book unless it was a page turner by Lianne Moriarity or Harlan Coben.

No such luck. The book had the scintillating title of Daily Tracker and Grocery Guide.

The thing was incomprehensible. There were addition signs around words like PowerFuels and SmartCarbs. Then there were the puzzling FlexMeals; Hal was allotted six a week.

A Flex Meal was a real (very small) meal, and Hal could add one diet food packet to whatever he chose to eat. This could be actual fiber or protein. Oh, excuse me; I mean PowerFuel, as in one egg, a piece of turkey bacon or a slice of cheese. In other words, real food. But at first, only occasionally. All Flex meant was that the ubiquitous packets continued to star in the new eating “program”. What a shocker.

As we paged through the book, something struck me when we got to the infamous Grocery Guide.

“This is just a printed list of the things I buy every week at the store,” I said.

For fifteen years I have been going about it all wrong. I should have marketed myself, given my food packages for Hal fancy one-word names like CarrotCarton or BroccoliBox.

But for now, I will be his packaged diet food cheerleader. When he can’t find his glasses, I will read him the insanely small print on the packages, so he knows precisely how long to put them in the microwave.

If this food plan turns eating into an exercise in cutting through plastic, so be it. But there’s no one for me to eat with now because Hal’s not really eating. He stands at the counter, and he’s done in less time than it takes to microwave his dinner. I admire his discipline. But I suspect good conversation around the table may be better for his health.

I can’t be too angry at the program. The proof is in the results. After one week Hal is down six pounds.

NYC DINER SPYING: Why Eating Eggs Alone Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I had a plan, and it didn’t involve eggs. Early this morning, I set out to buy books at Shakespeare and Company; I figured I’d have a cappuccino and a scone at their cafe and read for an hour before I took barre class.  It sounded decadent, a little like Paris.   Sugar and dairy were the prices I was willing to pay for a few good books. The web said Shakespeare and Company was open at 8, so I off I went.

Next time, check the real-live sign, stupid.  8 am openings are for weekdays only, as I found when I pulled the door open at 5 after 8 and was promptly shooed out.  “Not yet, not yet.  9 am on Saturdays,” said the enforcer who blocked me in the alcove. Then she promptly locked the door.

What if I were willing to buy $150 worth of books?  Would they open 20 minutes early for that?  Maybe they’d open now if I upped it to $300.  I did not offer either of those things. I’d been unceremoniously dismissed to the sidewalk.

That’s how I ended up at a solo table at the West Side Diner a few doors down with just my cellphone for company. Now I had an hour and a half before class.   Luckily, this diner has a veritable wall of windows.  Eating alone isn’t bad because I can pretend I’m there to offer trenchant commentary about what’s going on in the neighborhood. Unfortunately not much — at this time on a Saturday morning in NYC, the only things dumb enough to be awake are dogs, little children, the people who take care of them — and me.

At least the neighborhood obliged quickly with a distraction.  Right after I ordered my spinach and eggs, a woman outside the diner window tied a young dog to a fire hydrant.   She motioned for the dog to sit.  Then she walked away.  Was she abandoning the dog?  Should I do something? Leave my eggs and go outside for a doggie intervention and rescue?

As soon as the woman had gone, the dog stood up, strained at its leash and barked incessantly.  “Save me, save me,” it seemed to say.  Well, that’s exactly what I would have done if I were tied to a fire hydrant.

Maybe this would play out like the opening of an episode of Law and Order. The dog might have been barking for totally non-selfish reasons — to alert everyone in the immediate vicinity that there was a dead body ten feet away.

This is what your mind does when you’re having breakfast alone, you’re bored, and it’s eight ten on Saturday morning. Make stuff up.

In under five minutes, the woman returned with her cup of to-go coffee and untied the dog from the hydrant. Drama ended.

But not entirely. Respite from tedium arrived in the form of a tiny little boy and a dad who sat down in the booth across from me.  Soon, they were engaged in a heady game of “I Spy”.  “I spy something black,” the dad said.  With his face peeled to the window, the little boy gestured at a passing car.  “Nope, that’s blue,” the dad said.  OK, really?  The dad was obviously cheating or color blind.  The car the boy found was clearly black; it should have counted, and I was about to say so.

Instead I told the dad that I thought his son was adorable. When I tell someone his kid is adorable, it’s often good for a three-minute conversation. Typically I explain that I’m the grandma of a 3-year-old and wait for the person to say I look much too young to be a grandma.  Things didn’t go that way.  “We’re busy playing I Spy,” was all the man said.

Ok.  Conversation ender.  Maybe the guy thought I was flirting, but that was ridiculous.  He was young enough to be my son.  Perhaps he was afraid I planned to snatch his son. He might have even been a kidnapper himself, concerned that if he and I talked too long, I’d grow suspicious and… Nope. The blue in his eyes was a pretty direct match to his son’s.

End of story: he was just a run-of-the-mill dad doing his sleeping spouse a favor on a Saturday morning.

Ok. Back to the grind for me, which meant my head’s inevitable return to my phone. Even though all I was doing was texting friends and scrolling through Facebook, let this stupid guy with a cute kid think I was closing a 10 million dollar deal. Talk about overcompensation.

When I paid my check and headed over to the bookstore, I realized I didn’t have to buy any fiction. I’d created enough of my own.

THE SHOWER’S STALLED: What A Bathroom Renovation Reveals About My Character

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

When we moved from a house to a townhouse six years ago, I swore to my husband that my days of renovating bathrooms were over. (For the record, it’s the same thing I told him about a new puppy after our old dogs died. Maisie, our rescue, is now almost five years old.)

It’s weird to say I feel more alive when I’m picking out toilets. But I never want to think of myself as too old to take on a project. There’s something incredibly hopeful, or maybe just really stupid, about remodeling a space to make it yours.

There’s also a circus-like quality to renovation that reminds me of being a young mom. Someone’s always in the house, and usually that person needs something even if it’s only an extra tape measure. Sometimes, someone completely unexpected, like the caulker, rings the bell the way the kids’ guitar teacher once did. And now, as then, I’m just happy I remembered to be home.

So a sense of optimism pervaded my latest project. The bathroom in my townhouse was going on ten years old which is a great age for a kid but for some bathrooms it’s more of a finale. Demolition began in October and now in April, we are nearly done except for the planned installation of a small TV over the tub. Essentially if I put in a refrigerator and a sleeping mat, I’ll never have to leave my bathroom.

Our townhouse was meant to be lock and go, no fuss — our empty nest, something we occupied but didn’t necessarily inhabit. So, my plan when we bought it was to let it stay exactly as it was. No more TV in the bathroom, I told myself. Did I really need to be in a towel while dealing with Trump? I also swore I wouldn’t have as many books in my house as a mid-sized municipal library. That didn’t last. It wasn’t only about adding things.  In a philosophy that could as easily be applied to my post-pregnancy stomach, I decided I wanted certain things gone.

Funny — the time of my previous renovations is still vivid for me; it was far more complicated, too, with children home. As I said goodbye to the boys every morning when they left for school, I waded around workers installing fixtures, hammering shelves, ripping up floors.

It was loud. It was noisy. It was perfect. Maybe my life now would be too damn quiet if I weren’t willing to depart with a few sinks.

K1s, MEET MY CHOCOLATE OBSESSION How To Sweeten The Pain Of Tax Time

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I just ate my dog’s body weight in Trader Joe’s dark chocolate almond candy. Maybe I should get a pass because at least the candy had coconut flavoring in it. According to some nutrition tables, coconut is considered a fruit. It’s also, according to what I read, known as a dry drupe. That’s exactly how I feel about myself after my chocolate orgy — like a dry drupe. I behaved like a veritable savage in my own kitchen, all because I didn’t feel like doing my taxes.

My friend Julie tells me when I feel this way about something, I should go to the basement and work out on my exercise bike and stay as far away from my pantry as possible. I did not do this. I walked right into the caloric minefield, having told myself it was okay because I had no carbs at dinner. Really?

I used to think when I stopped getting my period, I would no longer do this horrible thing with the candy. Yes, there’s that and the other fairy tale I live by, that I’ll do 13,000 steps a day, including on days I do other forms of exercise.

To make myself feel better about the shock of chocolate my body has just absorbed, I think about something I read that said if you eat enough chocolate, it will make your skin shiny.

So with a shiny sheen, I begin combing through what is left of 2018, a pile of composite statements that should be beyond familiar to me because I see them year after year. I put them in piles, aware that because I can’t find the tax organizer that was sent over email six weeks ago, I’m collecting papers without a map. I feel like I do when I agree to play video games with my sons. I’m pressing buttons randomly and getting nowhere.

This process of “getting the taxes ready” plays into my biggest fear: that I’ll miss something and get audited and not be able to account for my own financial behavior.

First off, I don’t remember year to year how many papers I should be looking for. Yes there are my husband’s K-1s. But in terms of tracking expenses for my own small business? I love to throw things away, especially crumpled pieces of paper that invariably end up not in my files but instead in my pockets.

And then there are charitable donations — there’s no reason to be chasing them down like an animal in heat at the end of March. I could be disciplined and track them as I go. Nope. I never do this. So I end up spending hours reading through old credit card statements and scrolling through old accounts to find out how generous I was back in September.

Based on my search, I discover what I already know. There’s no set time during which I contribute, and while a few regulars appear every year, many donations are new, unexpected, and hard to ferret out. I make charitable contributions spontaneously, the way I buy art.

I’d rather be doing anything than this: shopping on Amazon, paying bills, sweeping out my garage. Taxes point up every one my shortcomings. I don’t enjoy reading directions. I’m kind of lukewarm about numbers. Look, I get numbers as a concept but I don’t particularly enjoy them as individuals.

It turns out that in 2018 I was generous, clearly to everybody –except myself. It is now a lovely end-of-March evening. The Voice is on. I am stuck in my office, filled with regret not solely because of taxes but also because of all the chocolate I ate

Finally I’m done at least for the night. And I do what I should have done when the evening began. I go back into the pantry and pick up what’s left of the Trader Joe’s box of coconut-flavored chocolate almonds — and unceremoniously dump it into the garbage.

PIROUETTE ANYONE? The Sad Tale Of The Ballerina Dress

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I do prophylactic shopping. It’s an activity that sounds as if it should be conducted with a test tube and gloves —  but isn’t. The bottom line is I buy in advance in the event of an emergency. First let me clarify that there never seems to be an unforeseen event that keeps me from shopping. So this emergency story is a lie I tell myself, so I don’t feel bad.  This way,  I can continue to think of myself as an efficient, productive person instead of what I am, a shopping zealot.

I pride myself on knowing that at any given moment I have the absolute right thing in my closet. A last minute soirée in Paris? I’m yours. A day at Bonaroo? It’ll never happen, but if it did, I’d be ready. This level of fastidiousness does not, unfortunately, apply to my pantry where, because I  rush to be done in the supermarket, I  have six  jars of tomato sauce and no applesauce.

But just humor me for a minute. My obsession for getting things done insanely early led to my recent purchase of Exhibit A, heretofore known as the ballerina dress. I found the ballerina dress in my last 20 minutes at the mall last Monday. The wedding, which was “its intended,”is scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, and for me this counts as last-minute shopping. Keep in mind it’s just now the third week in March. And — oh, goody —  I just learned that the dress code is the dreaded “black tie optional”. Optional? Optional for whom? I don’t want to be the sole sucker in a sundress.

But more to the point, the ballerina dress is a misfire for another important reason. This is an Orthodox wedding, which I did know. What I didn’t realize is that at Orthodox weddings, no one goes sleeveless even at receptions. This is the kind of knowledge that adults ought to automatically have at their disposal: that and things like the exact number of minutes needed to soft boil an egg, which, incidentally, also eludes me.

Sleeves, or the lack thereof, define this dress. Wearing a cover up would be criminal (well maybe not as criminal as wearing a sexy, short dress to your niece’s Orthodox wedding, but I digress.)

I could have returned the ballerina dress if I hadn’t been so efficient. You see in the 20 minutes I had, I also got the damned thing altered around the shoulders. It’s now mine. Forever. I like to kid myself that I will have a number of other occasions for which this dress would be perfect. And there is this outdoor garden wedding that we’re invited to June 8. But wouldn’t you know it? I already bought something else.

The dress pictured above is not the ballerina dress. But you get the idea.

CURTAINS TO SHOWER CAPS: How I Lost My Dignity And My Coat On A Trip To The Hair Salon

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I am that idiot who invariably has a hair blowout scheduled on the day of the downpour. Essentially I pay a lot of money to look wonderful mostly inside the salon, where everyone has nicer hair than I do anyway. It’s curtains to sleekness once I step out on the street, where good hair might actually matter.  That’s how I found myself leaving my hair place with a shower cap on my head, as I ran to get my son a cup of cold brew.

“Take a second shower cap to make sure you stay dry,” Svetlana told me, as if wearing a single shower cap wasn’t indignity enough. Wait till you’re out the door to put them on, she said, because someone will think you’re leaving here with a treatment on your head.  God forbid.  It’d be better for them to think I was walking the streets of Millburn the way I was because I thought shower caps were sexy.

Let me set the scene.  It was raining.  I had paid $50 to get my hair blown straight in monsoon-like conditions.  Where is your umbrella, Svetlana had asked.  The answer was three of them were happily dry in the trunk of my car.

I figured I’d be able to camouflage my one-step-up-from-a-Grandma-in-rollers look with the hood of my winter jacket. But when I went to pull my Amazon jacket from the coat rack, it wasn’t there.  Granted, it is a generic black jacket with multiple zippered pockets and a furry hood.  But I’ve had black jackets with hoods before.  They’ve never gone AWOL like this one has.  This is the second time in two months I’ve come back to a coat-rack to find my jacket gone. I looked around, and sure enough there was the imposter — the jacket that kind of resembled mine but really didn’t.  To be honest, I liked this one a little better; if it weren’t for the used tissues in the pockets and the car key I didn’t recognize, I might have kept it.  So now I didn’t have a hood I could use to go even somewhat incognito. No way was I heading out.  Sure, it was day two of Purim, and maybe in some land far, far away, it was okay to run around in a costume. Still in my shirtsleeves and my two-ply shower cap, I looked more like a bag lady than Queen Esther.

I went to the front to inform my friends at reception that my coat was gone.  Are you sure, they said.  Remember, given the plastic on my head, I was not terribly credible. I pulled out the key and put it on the counter.  “I don’t even know what kind of car this is,” I said.  Everyone stood there, unsure about what to do until Svetlana suggested I take off my shower caps.  As she pointed out, there was no point in wearing them if I wasn’t going anywhere. And incidentally neither was the person whose coat I had, considering I had her keys.

“She couldn’t have gotten far,” someone said. That was true.  The odd thing was my coat walked in a couple of minutes later on the body of a woman who was completely unaware she was wearing it.  “I just came back for my keys,” she said.  Apparently. We did the coat exchange.

At that point, I finally left the salon with my hood over my shower caps.  You’ll be happy to know my hair remained intact — even if little else did.

RACCOON ALERT: How My Phone Kept Pace With My Mood On A Jarring Morning Walk

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I walk to relieve stress, so when I spotted a raccoon carcass on what what is known as the reservoir trail, you can imagine my surprise. The animal’s body, or what was left of it, was upside down in full view of the walking path in between McLoone’s and a patch of grass.  “Oh my god,” I said to my friend.  “Look at that dead turtle.”  These were obviously not the words of a keen naturalist. (At first I thought it was some kind of dinosaur fossil.)  My friend pointed out that the thing had teeth that didn’t look like a turtle’s.   When I looked it up later, I learned turtles don’t even have teeth.

For me, nature’s not necessarily bad.  Seeing ducks sleeping with their heads tucked into their feathers as they float aimlessly in the water can be as good for mood elevation as 20 minutes of yoga.  I draw the line, though, at death on the path.  As I walked, I became obsessed. What had happened to the poor creature? Had it frozen? Been mauled by a hostile goose? I couldn’t focus.

I use a fitness tracker on my iPhone so I can record my steps every day.  But when I looked at it at the end of my walk, the tracker was frozen at 3,053 steps.  My friend had close to 8,000.  It didn’t make sense.  It was if my phone had picked up on my emotional state and gone into shock after the sighting of the raccoon.

All the things my friend and I were talking about fell away: getting older, our kids’ reaching an age that seemed like it was us just yesterday,  the real reason we don’t call our in laws.  I began to muster all my conversational energies on behalf of the dead raccoon.  We should call someone to get it, I said.

I’d like to think I wanted the raccoon gone for humanitarian reasons.  It was a living thing.  Its demise shouldn’t be advertised to the world.  It needed a little dignity.  Or  maybe it was just that I thought the carcass was disgusting. Well there was that.

And there went my nice calm walk.  Every time, I circled the track after that, I was terrified I was going to see the raccoon. If I was five, it was the kind of thing that would have given me nightmares.  I am 57.  I had to contain myself.

Ultimately, my friend switched position with me on the pavement, so I’d be on the inside of the track and she’d be on the outside, closer to the site of the raccoon casualty.  Look at me, she advised, when you talk.  You’ll forget about the raccoon.  She’s a psychologist, so she has some understanding and appreciation of people — particularly of me, it seems — and of science.  I was an English major. While I’m okay reading about death in books.  I’m not so sanguine about it in life.

Eventually we met up with a public works  groundskeeper who told us he’d be in touch with the vets on call.   It’s hard enough to see an animal floating on the water, he said. But this….  I wanted to know if the point of the vets was to diagnose the raccoon.  If it was rabid, could they figure that out after death?  Would there be a public health warning?   No, no such thing, he said — apparently, there are vet-specific scoop-up bags.

I never did figure out the reasons behind my phone’s step counting problem.  But I’m beginning to appreciate how in synch with me my phone was in those moments around the reservoir. Oddly enough when I checked my steps later in the day after I’d done some errands, it was working.  It showed I had 5,088 steps.