How broken can a broken heart get? If she’s completely, utterly, totally crushed by the news about the cat, well, this might be the time to dispel some of those other non-truths and societal myths that have found there way into her life.

"Honey, the cat’s dead." I can tell her and then add "Oh, and... there’s not such thing as Santa Claus."

I have to tell her about Santa sooner or later and it just seems like it would ruin Christmas if we wait until December. Maybe the best thing to do is economize on the tears and heartache and come clean about all the little lies that have slipped out over the years.

"Honey, the cat’s dead and there’s no such thing as Santa Claus. Oh, and Bambi’s mommy doesn’t really get better in another movie. There is no Easter Bunny and, I know this stinks, Sweetheart, but I’m the Tooth Fairy. And, oh, Honey, I know this is going to hurt most of all but, you... you’re not really adopted. We didn’t really find you floating down the river in a basket near Paris. I made that up. I’m sorry, Honey but you’ve got the same genes as your crazy Aunt Emma."

Maybe I'll let her keep thinking I was good in baseball for now but this honesty stuff could be troubling. Once you start telling the truth it seems like you’ve got to keep telling the truth. Pretty soon their whole little world unravels.

Even from my position as non-expert in the matter I can see that I have only two viable options. I can put the deed off a little longer, hey, maybe the cat will get better. Or, I can go with the old standby. "Honey, I have bad news about the cat and I think Johnny Cash did it."

Laurel was our celebrity. She didn't just GO to Woodstock - she was memorialized in the pages of Life. No one was surprised. Like a celebrity, Laurel was also a stranger.

Whenever and wherever she appeared, Laurel smelled like fresh sex in broad daylight. Laurel was gloriously wanton, whorishly flush when she'd smile at a new man. Meeting up with Laurel was like walking into someone's bedroom unannounced.

Laurel was at least 25 years old, the first old hippie I met in 1969. Blue-eyed and beautiful, her dark roots peeking through short blonde curls, Laurel could run her fingers through her hair and take over a room upon entering. She commanded the panting admiration of younger men, older men and most in between. She was sleeping with Roger and Tom and maybe Rob, and didn't care if Richie Havens or Joe Cocker would show up to play at the rock festival. She was looking for somebody to do. It wasn't even a landmark event in the making.

That day in 1969, she was looking for a ride to some farm, Max Yasgur's farm.

A bunch of us, about 10 people who said we were friends, were sitting around a rundown basement apartment off Western Avenue. There wasn't a breeze and the temperature was about 102 degrees with a fan. Frank - on parole, in between prisons - was rolling joints; everyone was looking for something to do, somewhere to go, it seemed.. There were going be some bands playing in the Catskills, but "who's going to be there" was really about who we knew, not the musicians who might not show up. Laurel would be there. She was unemployed or in between jobs or men but she had the time. I didn't.

I was in awe of Laurel's freedom; she was amorally joyous in her inhibitions, grabbing what she wanted (including one of my boyfriends). She abandoned conventions without a hint of reflection or regret, inspiring envy and revulsion all at once. Laurel was a force - she was tall, taut, seductively draped in men's bleached white t-shirts, her underarm hair growing openly, not accidentally.

She was also the "queen" of wannabee hippies gathering in the park in upstate New York that year. We'd all meet around 11 o'clock in the morning by the fountain, daydreaming about migrating to Haight-Asbury in San Francisco and wondering out loud who'd get there first.

A man walked on the moon a few weeks earlier. But back at the fountain, Freddie was dropping acid, George didn't know he'd jump off the bridge a few years later, and Tom was going to be a lawyer someday. Bob, who captured youth by living with his mom at age 36, sold too many drugs and went to prison. Chink tried to kill himself the following year.
Freddie never did stop taking LSD; he was still hallucinating 5 years later when I ran into him on the street.

But back then, the rest of us were mostly just a pack of renters or nearly homeless people on the run from menial jobs in mediocre lives. A refugee from affluence, I was lost from suburbia, trying to "find myself" between Bernie the hustler and Neil the felon. That day in August, it was hot and steamy and I was lost.

Laurel was wildly found, not lost. She knew who she was. She would be on the pages of Life magazine within the week. Covered in rainstorms, dirt and men, Laurel beamed victorious, celebrating her sexuality, the image of Woodstock's women.

That weekend - the weekend of Woodstock - I was getting ready to go back to school, waitressing part-time on the graveyard shift at the Union Diner. And that's where my story of Woodstock ended. I had to work. There I was, a mile from a band of earnest hippies ready to board a Volkswagen bus and sling around in mud and marijuana for a few days of music and I had to work. It didn't seem important at the time. Some guy’s farm was about an hour's drive away and it was just another rock concert. I didn't even try to get the night off from work. I needed the money.

So I spent that night saying I'd see you all and went to wait tables and greet the drunken guys at 4 am looking for scrambled eggs and soup and me. Laurel and everyone I thought I knew was taking down tents and closing off traffic in the Catskills, I was wiping off tables and splitting tips with the cook.

The news about Woodstock wasn't pretty or exciting or history in the making at the time. There were traffic jams, muddy people getting high, acoustics unplugged, famous musicians and bands that would be legends or has-beens in no time. Or, like Jimi Hendrix, dead.

But it was Woodstock, a sit-in for the revolution, a handful of rebels, most of whom would go home and have regular jobs and ordinary lives. I was on the periphery of Woodstock, but it wasn't relevant. I didn't know the bands or the crowds and didn't miss the mudslides. I could always claim to attend because, after all, who would challenge me among 300,000 strong?

But my truth was better because the truth was that I knew someone who did go, someone on the pages of Life. I knew Laurel, unashamedly sexual Laurel who slept with everyone we knew and made the pages of Life magazine, raising her hairy armpits in defiance, her breasts wrapped in a damp, muddy t-shirt.

She smiled orgasmically into the lense, mud-covered and alive. Laurel made our history.

Captain Bracey, Mr. Stephens and I were headed home to Vung Tau after a day-long parts route or “milk run.” I had finished putting the emptied cargo compartment of the Caribou in order, stowed my cleaning supplies, and laid back to relax. As I reread my latest letter from Myra Faye, I hummed words from a recent Righteous Brothers song, You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’, oh-oh that lovin’ fe-e-elin’ . . .
Myra Faye and my relationship had been like an overworked Army airplane, in the sky sometimes, on the ground lots. And like Major Dint’s at Go Cong, our “landings” were hard and damaging. This time was no different. I loved Myra — her brown eyes — her searching hands — her husky voice that used to urge me on in the back seat of my old blue Dodge. I knew why we kept breaking up — she was just so hot and I wasn’t there . . . . and now it’s gone - gone - gone and I can’t go on, oh-oh-oh. I heard Mr. Stephens through my headset as he contacted the 1st Air Cavalry’s An Khe airfield.
“An Khe tower, this is Gray Tiger 99, over.”
“Roger, Gray Tiger 99, go ahead.”
“An Khe, we’re southbound through your vicinity.”
“Roger that, niner-niner. Got room for six dust-offs?” Dustoffs was Air Cav slang for combat dead. “We’re outta ice,” An Khe tower said. “Gotta send these boys to Saigon, now.”
“We’ll take ‘em, An Khe. How is it down there?”
“Hotter’n hell.”
We landed on An Khe’s semi-permanent runway, bulldozed from the coveting, suffocating jungle by Army Engineers. The air traffic controller was wrong about the heat. Hell never got this hot. I was sweating even before we touched down.
The six dead soldiers, in olive drab body bags, were delivered on the bed of a deuce-and-a-half which the driver had backed up to the airplane. Two privates, transformed into specters by rising heat waves, carried the bodies to the plane’s cargo bay.
I placed the bagged remains three to a side, heads toward the cockpit. The first five had been loaded and strapped down when the last one was brought to me. The gum-chewing PFC who handled the trailing end of the last stretcher looked up to me. “I told this joker to relax, to lay back.” He chuckled at his own wit. “But he just ignores me.” I chuckled, too.
A nearly visible stench preceded the body. The PFC told me he had been killed by Viet Cong and had floated in a rice paddy for several days. Rigor mortis, he guessed, had hardened him in the hot shallow water and the body bag had molded to his final figure. His arms were stretched out and bent as if hugging someone who wasn’t there, his knees pulled up as if to prop a book for nighttime reading.
More than the other five body bags, angry flies swarmed about this one, biting, buzzing, and ramming as they tried to penetrate the green plastic. They seemed drunk with the stench of death, something I’d never gotten used to. I couldn’t breathe, even with my handkerchief tied around my face.
I don’t know what Captain Bracey or Mr. Stephens thought, but I wanted to make the scene go away. I tried to think of other things; how would I answer Myra Faye’s letter? Whose birthday was coming up? How bad was that oil leak on number two engine? Nothing worked.
I finished tying down the last body and sat next to it, near the cargo door, for a moment. Curious, like the swarming flies, I leaned over and read his bag tag. He was a staff sergeant from Seattle. Now, I can’t remember his name.
I do remember trying for weeks to remove the stench from the plane’s cargo compartment. I scrubbed the gray vinyl sides with bleach and polished the wooden deck. I replaced the decking. Nothing worked. The death odor never went away. A month later, even Captain Bracey and Mr. Stephens said they could still smell it.

I was a constant source of amusement, even bemusement. “He’s so…creative,” my mother would explain, with a bit of a smirk, as anchored the news for my aunts and uncles, who probably would have been happier if I simply shot them “dead” with a cap gun and ran away.

So where were my heroes? OK, sure, I could take the easy pass and say “Dad,” one of my Uncles or my allergist, but I was a kid who thrived on a little drama and being larger than life. My brothers, both considerably older than I, were no inspiration. Joe Namath? I didn’t even understand football. Worse yet was the whole GI Joe thing, which I simply didn’t get: He’s was a World War II soldier, as had been my father, though he played sax in the Army orchestra. But in any case, why would I want to be one of hundreds—make that thousands—of guys, recruited to ride on a stinky ship going to a jungle or a desert? Worse yet, we’d all be wearing the same exact thing and eating food worse than what we’d get at the S.S. Kresge soda fountain. And let’s not even talk about the killing part. No, GI Joe was not the answer.

Astronauts, on the other hand, presented an entirely different proposition: After an extensive and exclusive screening process conducted by a new government agency, you and a couple other guys were picked from hundreds, maybe even thousands of applicants, because you were tough, smart—and totally photogenic. After doing some groovy zero gravity training, you got to ride on a specially built spaceship going to an exclusive never-been-there-before destination. Can you say red velvet rope? As if this isn’t enough incentive, you would wear specially designed white outfits and get all the freeze-dried ice cream and Tang you could eat and drink. To a five-year-old with a penchant for paisley, it was a no brainer.

On that Sunday the 20th, there was the same kind of feeling in the air that I knew from New Year’s Eve with Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians, just before the ball dropped—except I had no idea that the stakes were much higher. We watched the coverage in the den, me in my bright orange rocker, which not coincidentally matched perfectly with Mom's bright orange and yellow Danish Modern décor. The 23-inch TV screen was mostly black and blurry, and it sounded like a really static-filled version of a baseball game on the AM radio in my mother’s Impala. I just remember being amazed at how quiet my usually boisterous family was during those hours leading up to what was probably the most momentous arrival of someone anywhere since Carol Channing as Dolly Levi hit the stage in “Hello, Dolly!” a few seasons before.

And then, three hours past my bedtime, it happened.

“The eagle has landed.”

At five, you’re all about the literal. What eagle? I was watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon. Or at least I thought so. Why didn’t birds have to wear the cool suits with the bubble helmet too?

I ran to the patio doors to get a glimpse of the real thing for clarification. And while the moon beamed bright and brilliant over our perfectly fenced square of a backyard, neither Neil, Buzz nor Gus was in site.

“There’s no men on the moon!” I blurted in that petulant, wounded way that only a five-year-old can. After all, 11p.m. and I had been up for at least 17 hours and was full of pancakes, hamburgers and Nestle's Quik.

“You can’t SEE them up there, silly,” said my brother Bob, “They’re thousands of miles in space.”

I took it on faith, since the TV was showing them just fine up close. I just remember the happiness that filled the room. And heck, why wouldn’t they be happy, after all? Fabulous events had a way of doing that; astronauts had a way of doing that.

The afterglow would last for at least two years. For Halloween 1969, I was of course Neil Armstrong. I wrote to NASA in my best bad penmanship, and got his autographed 8 by 10 photo, which I know I still have somewhere wrapped in a Baggie. Now that I see he was a blond, it all makes total sense. In Kindergarten and 1st grade, I was in charge of bringing my brother’s 5-inch Panasonic TV to class so we could watch more Apollo launches and landings. Now Why an otherwise well-funded suburban school system asked a six-year-old to carry a portable TV across the street to his classroom is another story, but I was proud in any case to being serving my country’s space program.

Unfortunately, this Era of Good Feeling about Cape Canaveral couldn’t last forever. Sometime in the Summer of 1971, I was hanging out in my Sears Lunar Landing Module, which at the time was docked on the patio. Even though Mom told me not to sit on the ledge of the hatch, this astronaut didn’t follow orders and took a mighty tumble. While I avoided stitched or broken bones, my dispassionate kissing of the concrete doused my passion for the cosmos. Now, long after the ticker tape and interviews, I had fallen--for real. Besides, I was having trouble seeing the bulletin board in math class and was getting glasses. Astronauts just didn't wear glasses.

Being a hero now seemed passé, at least on this frontier, so I tendered my resignation to NASA. Though for a small time I liked to peg the demise of the Space Program with my exit, it ultimately didn't matter. Watergate sent me running from the government to the media business. Now there’s a place for heroes.

My one-step-one-breath rhythm, a pace that had served me well on every mountain I’d ever climbed, was suddenly no longer adequate. As the lead climbers shrunk in the distance, my one-step-one-breath became one-step-two-breaths, and then one-step-three-breaths, but the additional air didn’t propel me any faster. If anything I moved slower. Altitude sickness is still something of a mystery to science. Thin mountain air can disable the young or old, man or woman, the fit or the unfit in equal measure, and can even spare a climber on one mountain but level him on another. My heart hammered in my chest and I panted so hard I almost drooled in the snow. Behind me, I heard Marshall say something, and Dmitri laughed.

They can still talk! And laugh! It dawned on me that these men were not behind the Great Pacesetter because they liked his pace. No, they were along for the ride. They were cruising. They were here for moral support.

Several eternities later, when I hobbled up the last rise like an 90-year-old on his way to the shuffleboard deck, Pinky hollered, “Welcome to Camp 2!” If Fabrice sent a Gallic shrug in my direction, I didn’t even notice; I was keeled over my trekking poles, sobbing with exhaustion.

But no sobbing made it into the blog post that night.

The harshest truth I could have uttered into the phone would have been that I came in dead last, behind a Frog, and the mountain made me cry like a baby. But too much climbing remained for that depth of self-examination.

“For some reason, it seems my lungs are not adapting to the altitude as quickly as others in our party,” I reported with diplomatic formality of a U.N. declaration. “I trained diligently for this climb, but it seems that today I needed to take three breaths for everyone else’s two.”

Forty-eight hours later we repeated the climb to Camp 2. We weren’t yet to the top of the first snowfield when I sensed impatience at my back. As one unit, five climbers swung to the left and marched by, including all the women, Frank and Fabrice. None said a word; everyone looked straight ahead as if ignoring the proverbial elephant. The rest of the route we headed into a freezing headwind with the occasional 50-mph gust that nearly blew us over. I limped into Camp Two dead last.

Again, I couldn’t summon the honesty to say into the phone Today I learned I really do suck, and that if I don’t hut-to, I’ll never see the summit. All I said was “This climb, once again, was very hard, and it took me several hours to do anything more than drink soup and stare into space after it was over.”

• * * *

At Camp Two, the wind picked up and stopped us in our tracks. Situated in a shallow basin below the Polish Glacier and the edge of an abyss, Camp Two offered little cover from the gale. Terri and I burrowed into our big sleeping bags and tried to read our books over the endless flapping of the tent. We moved slowly and thought slowly and only basic needs could make us stir. One of us would poop in the tent vestibule while the other turned away, and once, in the evening, I staggered through the whiteout to the guides’ tent. There I gathered our one hot meal from the three young Argentines, who wore colorful spandex shorts and boiled endless pots of water. I returned to the tent and passed the spoon by my cracked lips, only to realize the altitude had robbed me of an appetite.

On Day 13, at 3:45 a.m., I heard Martín’s boots crunching the ground outside. “We go!” he called. I sat up, heartened by the announcement Marshall had made the day before: Today the party would stick together, all for one and one for all, no matter what.

Terri and I struggled into stinky clothes by the light of our headlamps. We headed out into the dark to put on our crampons. An hour after waking I clanked up to the trailhead, wrapped in down, fleece and Gore-Tex like a Wisconsin schoolboy dressed for February. I arrived at the trailhead at the same time as Dmitri and Frank. No one else was there. We looked uphill; we saw our teammates’ and guides’ headlamps in a line, half a mile away and gaining.

For three hours Dmitri, Frank and I walked alone. The sun rose but did nothing to ease our gloom. “How could they just leave us?” Frank asked for the fifteenth time. The Great Pacesetter looked back at his miserable subjects and shrugged sadly. About 9:30 a.m. we crested a rise and saw our assistant guide, Gueri, sunning on a rock. A lanky thirtysomething with a curly black ponytail, Gueri had been gruff and distant for the last few days. Now he just seemed annoyed.

“If you do not go to Refugio Independencia by eleven, you turn back,” he said. Then he turned away and strode up the trail. We bitterly watched him go; we’d thought that paying $2,600 for a guiding service meant having, you know, a guide.

All week, Dmitri had shadowed me as silent as a Soviet submarine on maneuvers. Now he tapped some deep artery of Slavic forbearance and took off up the trail after Gueri. He was out of sight in no time at all.

So the Great Pacesetter was reduced to one subject, Frank. Frank’s mood and energy were improving just as mine began to bottom out. “You know,” Frank yelled over my shoulder, “if Gueri has so much energy, he can carry my crampons. Right in his ass.”

“Heh,” I gasped.

We soldiered on toward Refugio Independencia and made the ramshackle wooden hut just under Gueri’s deadline. Gueri joined us for a snack. Then we three shouldered our backpacks and entered a long, wide snowfield that formed a welcome mat to Aconcagua’s final knob. We were almost there.

But I was moving slow, epically slow, the slowness of a nightmare where one is pursued by impatient men with iceaxes. Frank and Gueri watched as I shuffled and weaved and my chin dropped to my chest. I was so oxygen-starved I was falling asleep.

Frank stepped around me. “I’m sorry, buddy,” he said. “This is my only chance.”

Frank hiked off, and Gueri followed him without even a backward glance.

I slouched down and pointed myself toward that rock in the snow. There I was, the only living thing among the dead peaks, alone to concoct an explanation for my invisible, expectant friends.

• * * *

I don’t know how long I sat on that rock. I stared at the sky without really seeing it and thought, maybe I’ll sit here just a while longer. But another voice nagged: It reminded me that people freeze to death at altitudes like this because they simply forget to stand up. I unzipped my backpack, chewed on an energy bar, and peed. I knew what I had to do.

At that moment I looked up and saw Gueri walking down the trail. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to slash him with my ice axe.

“Buenos tardes,” he says. “Como estas.”

“No bien,” I said. “Quiero bajar.” Not good. I want to go down.

“Una buena idea,” he replied.

• * * *

The next afternoon, seven thousand six hundred feet lower in the thicker air of Base Camp, I sat with an index finger poised over the satphone keyboard.

Already I’d alerted listeners to the ugly fact of my failure, as there were simply too many witnesses to lie. I had stumbled back to camp with Gueri and plunged into a 14-hour oblivion of sleep. At twilight Terri crawled in, dusty and hollow-eyed. She told me everyone had made the summit and then joined me in exhausted slumber. The next morning we broke down camp and prepared to descend. No one seemed to want to look me in the eye, except for Louise, who approached and held my hand and asked “how are you?” like I were a second-grader who’d scraped his knee. On that long downclimb, each minute brought us easier breath and a step closer to Sunjaya’s cooking. But the sense of relief fled when I glanced back at Aconcagua, that run-on sentence that concluded, not with a period, but a question mark.

Now the question hovered between my finger and the keyboard. It was the question that friends and family and clients would be too polite to ask.

I dialed the number. Ahem. “Could I have made it to the summit?” I said.

“It’s a question that hurts to ask right now. To be the only person on an eight-person party not to summit is difficult to accept. The Clint Eastwood, the Rocky Balboa, the Edmund Hillary in me imagines that I would get up and go forward, regardless of the odds. But that’s not what I did. Instead, exhausted, alone and somewhat delirious, I decided to descend.”

It took us three days to climb out of the high wastelands and drive back to Mendoza, the graceful Argentine town of wine and steak from which we’d started, and find an Internet cafe.

I leaned in toward the screen and rubbed my chin, recently cleared of stubble with the help of three disposable razors. At the next computer an Argentinean girl wore pink velour and popped gum. I stared over at this alien life form for a moment, then opened my email.

Messages had poured in by the dozens. “Bless your heart! And your sea level lungs, and your very good brain and sound judgment, “ wrote Mom. “There is just no way you can count this trip as a failure of any sort,” insisted my friend Ariel. “You gave it your all. That's all anyone can do,” wrote Dad. “You are the best, best, best,” wrote my client Jan, “and your experience (and your rich and honest description of it) has created and inspired a virtual community.”

My view of the computer screen blurred and there seemed to be salt water in my eyes. I rubbed them hard so the Argentinean girl would know I was un norteamericano muy macho.

Another email came a few weeks later from Louise:

“The parents of my students, as well as my students, followed us each day, and appear to have adopted you along the way, and were quite devastated when you returned to camp. There were comments such as...at least he tried; he can always try again; I know when I'm feeling sick I just want to go to bed; and, he was brave to turn back!”

After committing such a public belly flop, I might have been insulted to receive peppy advice from second graders. But I wasn’t. I’ve kept that email, as well as a picture I borrowed of our climbing party on the peak, where every victorious face is present but mine. I find myself thinking of the email much more often than the picture. Failing big, and getting love anyway, is better than standing on a heap of rock. Who knew?

Epilogue: To further embarrass himself, David Ferris has archived all his Aconcagua audio posts at http://theferrisfiles.com/projects/the-aconcagua-project/

The only sound was the uneven rasping of my breath and a faint, chilly breeze off the Andes. Then, clank! The steel crampons of my right boot hit stone. I had reached the rock. For an hour I’d aimed for this resting spot as I staggered across the snowfield. I unslung my backpack, sat, and stared out at the Andes. Days ago the peaks had risen above me, but now they spread below, sharp and jagged and innumerable, a continent of shark’s teeth. I took another gulp of ultrathin air and tried to inventory my situation.

Dmitri and the Frenchman and the rest of them are at the peak now, or nearly so, having abandoned me here; I don’t quite remember the way back; my fingers are getting numb, even under three layers of gloves; I can barely walk. A terrible thought popped into my head – you’ve climbed for two weeks to the top of the world, only to stop in sight of the summit – and was trumped by another that was even worse because it was so petty.

Tonight, or at best tomorrow, I’ll have to call and tell the whole world I blew it.

Stupid satellite phone. Back in the States, fit and full of swagger, I had rented it so I could give everyone – my girlfriend, my friends, my parents, the clients who looked up to me as their personal trainer – a daily update on the big climb. Every night on the mountain I had pulled out the chunky tool and made a call that appeared as an audio clip on my blog. It worked beyond all expectations.

A week ago, on a scratchy phone call, my girlfriend had told me, “Do you know hundreds of people are following you?”

At the time I’d rejoiced. It hadn’t quite occurred to me until now, slumped exhausted near the top of the world, that my story might be something other than triumphant.

• * * *

The ten members of our party met for the first time on January 11, 2007, over a steak dinner in Puente del Inca, a tiny ski town on Aconcagua’s flank. At the table sat two Argentinean guides and the eight climbers, including five endurance athletes who could outdistance just about anyone on the planet, and three mortals who could not.

Someone asked Marshall Ulrich how cold it would be up on Aconcagua, and Ulrich took a thoughtful bite of beet salad before answering. Ulrich was a Coloradoan in his fifties with a sad, lined face and a wry sense of humor. He had assembled the climbers and guides and had the most illustrious resume: He had won the Badwater Ultramarathon four times and had stood atop all of the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each of the continents, including Aconcagua. Ulrich put down his fork. Cold, he said. Cold and dusty and windy, but not nearly as cold as Mt. Everest or God forbid Mt. Vinson, the highest mountain in Antarctica. On Vinson you wear every shred of clothing and you still can’t feel your hands, he said.

This bleak piece of information left the table unfazed. Louise Cooper, a former pro triathlete and a second-grade teacher in L.A, smiled and turned to her friend Nancy Bristow. Remember that race in Morocco when the kayak almost sank in those big waves? she asked with a laugh in her voice, as if she were recalling a fender-bender at the mall. She told the whole story, about the foundering boat and the hours of wet misery that followed, and after all of the protagonists had safely pulled themselves to shore, a guy across the table named Frank launched into a story of his own, about this especially amusing sandstorm he experienced during a footrace across the Sahara.

Then my friend Terri Schneider, with whom I’d share a tent on Aconcagua, looked across the table and said to Marshall: Remember Nepal? Remember mountain biking that Himalayan pass for 17 hours and then swimming for miles down that icy river? Ha ha. What a day that was.

The two Europeans, Dmitri and Fabrice, followed this banter like spectators on Center Court. The guiding company had tacked them on to our group at the last minute after two of Marshall’s friends had dropped out. Dmitri had a firm jawline and eyes the color of dishwater and revealed a thick Russian accent when he spoke, which was rarely. Back in real life he was a Silicon Valley software engineer. Fabrice, a pudgy and bald Frenchman, ran a travel company in New York and conducted a passionate affair with his Blackberry until the signal dropped in the Andean foothills. At first the two Europeans listened to the uber-athletes with admiration. But as the war stories piled on through the main course and on into dessert, the Europeans’ expressions became more and more dejected, and at the end they stared down at their plates without looking up.

After dinner I found them outside lounging in the evening sun. “So, what did you guys do for training?” I asked with all the innocence I could muster.

They shot glances at each other. “I did not have time to do much,” Fabrice admitted in his Gallic lilt. “I cut back on my cigarettes?”

I gave the Frenchman a wrinkled little smile. I offered no hint of the months I’d spent humping up and down the California foothills with a 50-pound pack on the steepest trails I could find, or the hours I’d logged lifting weights in the gym. You see, the year before I had joined Marshall and Terri and their super-duper friends to climb three big volcanoes in Mexico, and though it was difficult to keep up, I summited each one, just as I’d made it to the top of every peak I’d tried, from Mt. Kilimanjaro to Mt. Whitney. I knew Aconcagua would be no different.

What I told the nervous Europeans: “Oh, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

What I told myself: At least I won’t be in last place.

• * * *

In 1928, James Ramsey Ullman became the first American to summit Mt. Aconcagua. Afterwards he wrote: “The reports of the various parties who have battled their way to its summit are unanimous in declaring that, from the point of view of climbing, it is one of the most unattractive mountains imaginable. Its altitude is so great, its cold so bitter, its storms so frequent and savage, that the ascent ranks among the most grueling ordeals known to climbers.”

During the first days on the Polish Glacier Route I would have dismissed such talk with a cheerful wave of my trekking pole. Mt. Aconcagua is the highest mountain in the world that one can walk to the top of, and the journey started most pleasantly with a hike in our daypacks to a camp called Pampa de Lenas. We walked alongside the muddy glacial meltwater of the Vacas River and the tiny yellow flowers on its bank. That night, after a dinner of grilled steak and a trip to the toilet (a real flushing one, out here in the wilderness!) I placed my daily satellite-phone call. I rhapsodized about the sunset glowing red on the walls of the Vacas Valley and how our caravan of 17 mules, loaded with backpacks and cooking pots, had swept into camp that afternoon in a cloud of dust, driven by shouting muleteers in orange berets.

The next day we meandered up the Vacas River to our second camp, Casa de Piedra. The headline of that night’s dispatch was the first sighting of Mt. Aconcagua. The foothills lowered and revealed it to the west, rearing more than two vertical miles into the sky, dripping with black palisades and icy cirques. This fearsome visage didn’t dampen my spirits, though, because I was simply too excited at the novelty of a mountain and a country I had never laid eyes on before. I didn’t tell my blog listeners that the clean toilet of last night had been replaced with a filthy, fly-spattered one. I was too exhilarated for such things to matter.

On Day Three we turned west up the Relinchos Valley and started a steep, strenuous ascent, removing our shoes several times to cross the icy Relinchos River. So buoyant was my mood that the day’s blog feed omitted any mention of the biting horseflies, or the mule carcass we spotted frozen in the snow. Up and up I climbed – watching from the corner of my eye to see if Fabrice would falter – and saw the plant life shrink, from man-size bushes, to scrubby ground cover, to a desperate layer of spiky succulents that clung to a few rocks. By the time we huffed into Base Camp, at 13,700 feet, even these were gone. Nothing survives for long up here.

We would ascend the Polish Glacier Route using the strange stutter-step of modern alpinism that makes little sense until one has tried it. Only two waystations, Camp One and Camp Two, separated Base Camp from the summit. We had lots to carry: Our mules turned back at Base Camp and left us with food, cooking gear and tents, about 90 pounds per person. All of it had to be transported as high as 19,000 feet for a week-long stay in a freezing and windy alpine desert. We would take three full rest days, even five if the weather was bad, to accustom our lungs to the ever-thinning air. Other days we would trek hard as we made the round trip to the next higher camp not once, but twice. This shuttled our armaments in two loads, and besides, these spikes into higher altitudes help a climber acclimate. Or at least they’re supposed to.

On the morning of Day Nine, the day of the first carry from Camp One to Camp Two, I stood next to my enormous backpack and contemplated the scene above. The backpack held a jumbo steel coffee urn, of all things, and my mind carried a heavy thought: Maybe this mountain, this blog, would turn out to be a big mistake. I noticed for the first time how ugly Aconcagua really was. The battlements above weren’t crisp or grand or Himalayan, but stumpy and rusty and covered with broken rock. The entire mountain seemed to be rotting away. I looked around at Camp One.

It consisted of 20 or so pup tents strewn across a boulder field, and I could see the occasional climber tinkering with a crampon or brushing his teeth. On the far side, overlooking the valley, stood a purple tent that served as latrine. We wiped ourselves with newspaper, if there was any. Two days earlier we had bid goodbye to Base Camp and its sparkling-clean aluminum bathroom. We played cards in a big blue mess tent where our lovely, 20-year-old cook, Sunjaya, served delicious and improbable dishes like pizza and quiches. We had waved goodbye to Sunjaya and climbed straight into a battalion of Aconcagua’s strangest obstacles – the ice formations known as penitentes. Man-sized and conical, penitentes are named after penitents, the Spanish Catholics in white smocks who worship God by whipping themselves. The comparison seemed to fit. We heaved ourselves through the penitentes, each step icy and uneven, our backpacks tugging and trying to fling us backward. The next day, for the first time, I woke up fatigued.

That morning, instead of our usual hot cooked breakfast, the guides handed each of us a sack of crackers, candies and dired soup that would serve as breakfast and lunch for the next week. I looked up the mountain again and felt a shiver of fear, or desolation, or hopelessness or … something I didn’t want to talk about on a satellite phone.

“Are you ready?” asked Martín, our lead guide. This question was directed at me. Over the last days the team had established a rough order of climb, and amazingly I was at the front. Louise and Nancy liked my steady pace, and no one else seemed to mind, so before we headed out everyone waited for me to take the first step. I was the Great Pacesetter, prudent and wise, the Gandalf of the Andes. I gave Martin a sage nod and kicked into the snow that had fallen the night before. We settled into the familiar rhythm of high-altitude hiking – one step, one breath; one step, one breath – and ascended switchbacks up a steep snowfield. As we neared the crest, I heard an accented voice say, “On your left.”

It was none other than Fabrice, the Frenchman whose fitness program consisted of curling fewer cigarettes. He did not look at me as he pushed by. He was haughty and relaxed as Pepé le Pew.

The Great Pacesetter gritted his teeth and leaned harder into the mountain, focused on one goal: Beat the Frenchman. ("Tough Call" continues here: http://tinyurl.com/toughcall2)

This essay appears the anthology Who's Your Mama: The Voices of Unsung Women and Mothers. Edited by Yvonne Bynoe. Forward by Rebecca Walker. (Soft Skull Press, 2009)

That was my feeble attempt to reconnect with humanity in the confines of an elevator. I was a mess.

Anyway, a company colleague tells me not to go to Shenzhen police but go to Hong Kong and report the incident to the American consulate.

After a night’s parody of sleep, I arrive in Hong Kong and go to the American consulate. I pick up a form asking me to state my reasons for being there, i.e. visa, work permit, inoculations. I write, in large CAPITAL LETTERS, that I am an American citizen who was violently kidnapped and tortured. I hand the form through the narrow slot in the bulletproof glass partition. I am told to take a seat. Wait for my name to be called. I'm not real relaxed, feel like the addicts jonesing at the end of Requiem for a Dream. After anxiously pacing in the waiting room with a crowd of your regular visa application types, I become like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate scene when he bangs on the glass screen in the church, screaming "Elaine" at the top of his lungs.

I got peoples’ attention. I am granted a sit-down with the vice consulate, an elderly DAR type lady. A bureaucrat. She has a clipboard. She asks many questions. She tells me that before this incident may be posted on the official State Dept. travel advisory web site, she is obligated to specifically determine whether the horrendous acts perpetrated on me were, by definition, torture or enhanced interrogation techniques. As I sat there I broke out in another cold sweat, mumbled incoherent profanities. In my post traumatic stress state I believed that my torture session was not over and I basically checked out.

It is fascinating. In the most horrific experiences, my mind went to amazing places and protected me in a ninja like force field. Oh, here’s “the” napkin from that proper southern belle who wrote down the names of those celebrity penile implant recipients.

It was actually a two-family house. We lived on the south side facing downtown and a very old lady lived on the north side with her thirty year old grandson named Boogie Boy. He got that name because he was not right in the head. When he was a teenager, he spent five years in a reform school for beating up his math teacher. Mama warned that we were to run inside when he came out of the house. One day, he got crazy and started a big fire on his side of the house. His grandmother cried when the police took him away. We never saw him after that and a year later, his grandmother died. Mama said she died of a broken heart.

There were five of us living in that old shack. Mama, pop and three wee ones. Big brother Shoo, Yay-Yay, middle Shoo and me, Sasha, baby Shoo. In the winter, we lived mostly in the kitchen because the coal-burning stove was our only source of heat. We had a radio and during the day mama listened to her soap operas and at night, we listened to shows like, Amos and Andy, Jack Benny, The Inner Sanctium, The Lone Ranger and The Shadow.

Pop would put chicken eggs in a cardboard box behind the stove to incubate baby chicks. The wee ones would stand for hours waiting for the first sign of a little crack. Squealling with glee, after seeing a crack, we waited for a little pink, furless leg to appear, then another and then a head with beady eyes. These funny looking skinny, naked chicks would grow into adorable soft yellow fuzzballs. They were so little, they fit easily in our tiny palms.

There was an outhouse behind the chicken coop and pop would hang up torn pieces of the Sears and Roebuck catalog on a hook which was used as toilet paper. The wee ones bathed in round, silver, tin washtubs near the stove. Mama and pop bathed in larger oval shaped washtubs when we were asleep.

There were two important things happened that changed our lives. Grandma moved in. Mama said she was from the old country. Where that was, I didn't know but she spoke a strange language which only mama understood. She eventually picked up a few English words from us but spoke so funny, we kids giggled and laughed. She moved in with a large, battered, black, steamer trunk and inside was her large, fluffy, handmade comforter filled with goose feathers. We three kids slept with her in a big bed upstairs above the kitchen under that puffy comforter and were very warm and happy. We loved our grandma. After eating, she took her teeth out because her gums hurt and had lots of gas, which made us kids giggle even more. Twice a week, grandma would wake up early with the rooster and while daddy got fresh coal and stoked the fire, grandma would start baking loaves of bread. The night before, she prepared the dough and it would rise in time for morning baking. The wee ones woke up to the aroma of freshly baked bread and we felt like we had gone to heaven. For holidays, she made a special powdered-sugar pastry just for us which mama called Grandma's Angel-Wings.

The second important thing that happened was a big war which started by some very bad men in grandma's old country somewhere overseas. I asked pop where overseas was and he said it was across a very big ocean which was big enough to take grandma many hard months in a crowded ship to cross over to get here. Mama was worried and cried because we still had lots of relatives overseas in the old country. They were in grave danger of getting killed and we heard some were hiding in attics, in cold cellars and heavy forests.

We had to get special books which held something called rations to buy food, such as sugar, butter, milk, bread and flour. Pop got gas rations for his work truck and cigarettes. We helped mama stuffing and wrapping care packages for our young boys fighting those bad men overseas. We packed up hand-knitted socks, gloves, hats, gum, candy and cigarettes. Pop stripped off silver cigarette wrappings and when we had enough we helped him roll the silver paper into balls. "For the war effort," pop said. Mama gave up her silk stockings for the war effort too. They were used to make something called parachutes for our airplanes. At night, there was something called a blackout. Everybody in town had to draw down all the shades and turn off the lights. Daddy said it was to prevent the bad guys from flying over our town and bombing us. Sitting in the dark and scared, we listened quietly for any sound of airplanes flying above. The next morning, we found ourselves tucked snuggly and safe in our beds knowing we got through one more night without being bombed by the bad guys from overseas.

Soon, special little flags with big yellow stars appeared in lots of front windows. Mama said when we pass by one of those windows, we should say "The Lord's Prayer" because in that house, lived one of our brave soldiers who died fighting overseas. That made us wee ones sad every time we passed by one of those windows.

It was mama's dream to have our own house some day. A house with an indoor bathroom, heat in every room and a large lawn with apple trees, flower beds and lots of lilac bushes. And every year, pop promised mama he would buy us our own big house but mama just laughed when pop made promises. She said it was another one of his big whoppers. Big Shoo had to explain what a big whopper was. Another big whopper which never came true. But I wanted this big whopper to come true. We all did.

One Christmas night, after the wee ones helped mama decorate the tree, pop came down those wobbly, old uneven attic stairs, holding two large green-tinted pickle jars filled to the top with shiny brown pennies. He poured the pennies all over mama's bed and squealling with delight, the wee ones jumped up and down, taking turns making penny snow angels. Tossing pennies about us, we kept yelling, "Mama, we are rich! We are rich! Now pop can buy us our new house." Mama laughed and said, "Pop will have to fill up a few more pickle jars before we can afford our new house." Then and there, the wee ones made a promise to save every single penny they got their tiny hands on to fill those extra pickle jars. Big Shoo even promised to give up his favorite Bazooka bubble gum.

Maybe deep down inside that's what we're all asking, "Am I there yet?"
"Am I happy? Am I successful? Am I loveable? Am I brilliant? Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Am I competent?"

I'm sitting here with my utilities off, my van packed and the question hanging heavily in my mind.

"Do I move back in the van, keep the apartment, give up the apartment? Am I happy? Am I there yet?"

After almost 18 months of homelessness - which included a stint couch-surfing at a friend's house and commuting to the Wal-Mart parking lot where I left my van during the day and drove my Toyota to work, I moved back into an apartment. I've been here two years and it's just not the fun I thought it would be. Sure, it's nice to have my own shower and toilet and a washer/dryer in the kitchen. It's not nice coming up with $600 a month to fund it all. Some months are easier than others, but with the economy - it's gotten harder.

The siren song of the van beckons. I have no problem moving back and taking off for the summer, but do I really want to give up the apartment. So I sit. And ponder. "Am I there yet?"

Somehow I always seemed to find the trouble. My mom always said I was a good kid, but my dad well that was another story. He would say “good kid? He was never good to go bad!” I guess that was the struggle that I had to fight alone. At the age of 16 I was arrested for shoplifting. This began a string of criminal activity that became the beginning of the end.

In January 1978 a few months prior to my 18th birthday I was arrested for assault. The Vietnam War was fresh in every ones memory and recruitment into the Armed Forces was low. So as a bargaining chip in court I offered to join the Army. Maybe I could restore my status as a good kid!

In reality wherever you go, well there you are. It did not take long when my drinking and drugging picked up where I had left off. In fact I lasted a full 19 months and a couple more arrests before it was suggested I pack it in and head back home. I was unfit for Military service they said!

That was February 1980 by March 1980; armed robbery had become my source of income. I would head out after the dinner rush hour and stick-up fast food establishments. During my second heist, I was apprehended. The idea that I needed to get help with my alcohol and drug challenges began to emerge. In all honesty, something inside of me believed I was good. I wanted help however I was primarily motivated to stay out of jail.

I was arraigned on robbery 2 a class B felony. At the time it carried an 8-1/3 to 25 years prison term. Due to the fact that a handgun was involved the shortest sentence I could receive was a one-year sentence. After all was said and done a plea bargain agreement would have me sentenced to one year in County jail or a State sentence of 1 to 3 years in State prison. The sentence would be determined based upon my pre-sentence probation report.

The chips were down and now it was time to show whether I was a good kid or a bad kid. I was instructed to stay away from the fellows I had been arrested with and I was prohibited from drinking alcohol or using any illegal substances. So as any reasonably minded young man would do, I attended the probation hearing with my friend that had been arrested with me. We each drank an 8-pack of Budweiser minis and held up a seafood establishment with a shotgun on the way to the appointment.

A week before my sentencing hearing I was arrested again for several armed robberies. I figured my dad was right, never good to go bad! Now I sat in jail facing 175 years in prison. To anyone else in these circumstances fear may be an appropriate feeling yet for me it was relief. I was stopped, jail would do for me what I could not do myself.

Fortunately, after all was said and done I received a 7 year and 9 year sentence that would run concurrently. If all went well I could be released in 3 years. I mustered up the courage to embrace the good kid. I started by getting my GED, I began to attend church, I attended the self-help 12-step groups, I received counseling, vocational courses and anything that would help me to become what I knew I was.

Then I was afforded the opportunity to attend evening college courses in the prison. I honestly did not believe that I was smart enough. However, a friend encouraged me to try. Try I did. I started getting “A’s” and enjoying the experience. When it was time for my parole hearing I was released on parole due to my efforts.

In reality it took me 8 years to truly accept that I could no longer drink alcohol like others could. But I did eventually surrender to that fact and began a journey that has lead to a Masters Degree from Fordham University.

My Journey has led me to build an extensive human service background. I have been significantly involved in recovery based human service, alcoholism and substance abuse services, forensic services, case management with individuals recovering from mental health issues and recovery based program development. I played a significant role in the growth and development of Hands Across Long Island, Inc. the largest and most prominent consumer run mental health agency in the United States. I was contracted to co-author a NYS training manual and program for mental health and correctional service professionals working with parolees with “serious and persistent mental illness”.

Through the years I have been fortunate enough to be supervised and mentored professionally by some extremely gifted folks. I was offered flexibility and latitude to attempt methods of engagement and recovery services that were regarded as outside the box of traditional treatment. It has been through that flexibility and experiences that the Last Resort Panama has been created for the facilitation of positive self directed recovery from alcoholism and drug addictions.

The Last Resort Panama, Drug and Alcohol Rehab www.Thelastresortpa.com www.facebook.com/thelastresortpa www.myspace.com/thelastresortpa www.recoveryforum.ning.com

Last week at my cousin’s elegant and boisterous wedding, I was bantering with an acquaintance when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was a family friend’s mom, donned in a sky blue suit that offset her ash gray hair.

“Hi, Mrs. Karras,” I said and kissed her on the cheek. “You look pretty tonight.”

“Not now,” she said and recoiled. Her manner implied she had discovered a live grenade in the courtyard, or that the caterer was low on baklava.

“Your cousin’s about to toss the bouquet,” she said and pointed to the throng of single women gathering on the dance floor.

“Oh, okay,” I replied and turned back to my conversation.

“No,” Mrs. Karras exclaimed, tugging my elbow. “You go out there.” It occurred to me that, in a past life, Mrs. Karras was quite likely Genghis Khan.

My female pal, married and therefore inoculated from the developing quagmire, winked and scuttled off while I politely disengaged myself from the woman who used to scold me to pull up my knee socks.

“Mrs. Karras,” I said and took her hands, if for no other reason than to keep them in check, “I think the bouquet toss is outdated. It makes women seem desperate and silly.”

She looked at me as if I’d just impugned the Archbishop, or revealed that I sometimes eat baby.

She wrested free and wagged her finger at me. “This is why you’re single. You don’t believe in love.”

I wanted to tell her that, of course, this wasn’t true; that I believe in love as surely as I believe the earth rotates the sun. As I started to respond, a drum roll rattled from the stage and the bandleader announced, “Okay, ladies! Here we go! Who’s going to be the lucky girl?”

Mrs. Karras and I shifted and faced the dance floor. My cousin looked radiant and fifty or so women in varied states of sobriety jostled each other and laughed as they vied for position. I had to admit, the proceedings appeared harmless. Then my cousin lobbed her ornate mass of lilies and a red-sheathed woman with enough cleavage to hide a Datsun snagged the spray and held it aloft, as if it were an Olympic medal or the severed head of a vanquished foe. “It’s my turn!” she yelled, having apparently triumphed over singlehood. “It’s my turn!”

“That could have been you,” Mrs. Karras said and left dejectedly. I stood alone, happy for the woman in red: she got what she wanted. But when it comes to love, what you want and what you think you want are sometimes different things, and inflated expectations often lead to trouble down the road.

I knew I wouldn’t figure it all out tonight. I set off to find a slice of wedding cake. And maybe someone to dance with.

That the entire Gables neighborhood is painted in shades of beige is a perfect metaphor -- or a beacon of warning, depending how you see it -- for the homogeneous hell that lies within.

At the time I was living the prescribed life of a young Potomac Jew. It never occurred to me to question my fate; In a year or so I'd meet a Jewish doctor/lawyer/consultant and float down the aisle in big cupcake of a dress, the kind inspired by Disney and stitched by Vera Wang. My hus-bot would buy us a big new house with lots of chain stores nearby, and fill it with overstuffed furniture, overindulged children, and the spoils of our extravagant wedding registry. I would quit my beloved career to spend afternoons steering a stroller around Nordstrom and lunching with other women my age and their matching babies. This is what I would do because it's what I'd been made for. It's what we were all made for. Like cows for milk, or horses for glue. We were the Stepfordsteins.

A few years went by. I went on dozens of dates with nice-enough men. Some of them really wanted to get married, and if I'd let them into my heart even a little bit they might have wanted to marry me. I kept working, wondering when I'd get to stop but secretly hoping I'd never have to. First I learned to live alone. Then I learned to be alone. I read more. Wrote more. Made more music. I sampled just enough independent joy to make me restless for more... But still I dated and waited, and the beige life did not come.

Then I met John and we fell in love. I wasted no time plugging his likeness into my little template of life: He was older than I'd planned -- older and more Catholic -- but I loved him and our children would be smart. They might even have a shot at being tall.

I waited. I prayed. I loved him as hard as I could. And when it eventually fell apart, I crumbled with it. Turned out that was just what I needed: My entire sense of self had imploded, and once the dust settled I could see, finally, why my suburban fairy tale wasn't coming true: It was my worst nightmare. Beige wasn't a life, it was a lobotomy. All these years I'd been tripping over myself to step around it. Now I was free to build a newer, stronger, truer self from the pieces John had left behind.

Once I realized what I didn't want, I was free to dream up a future that's uniquely mine: A bright home with an old soul; a textured community; hundreds of pageworn books to devour in secret corners; creative, nourishing work; inexhaustible love; and a perfectly imperfect partner whose misshapen pieces fit my own puzzled person. All this and a stack of wild cards, because the best thing about it all is that I have no idea what's really coming. But it certainly won't be beige.

It wasn't a rhetorical question. Calvin, who as far I know answers only to "Hot Rod," was expecting an answer, and I wasn't sure what to say – especially since I was pretty sure that Hot Rod didn't even know that I don't teach in the summers.

"Dawg, I'm in the classroom five hours, but I spend a lot more time preparing for class. It's just like out here, baby (I shove the basketball into the pit of his stomach); I only teach your ass for about an hour, but I spent years perfecting those pretty moves."

Hot Rod chuckles at the lie. I play hard, have a passable jump shot, and am a willing passer, but at 35 my quickness and jumping ability ain’t what they used to be, and they never used to be all that good. As Mister Señor Love Daddy likes to say, “that’s the truth, Ruth,” but I’m not complaining – far from it. I get to hoop three or four times per week, which isn’t too bad considering that, my conversation with Hot Rod notwithstanding, teaching is just one of several professional activities that I and other university faculty juggle. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

****

I go to college to study journalism. All right, I go to college because that’s what everyone (including me) expects me to do after high school. But needing both a major and a potential career, I settle on journalism. It seems like a logical choice. A basketball career hasn’t been a viable option for some time, but writing about sports seems appealing, especially since I fancy myself a good writer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t occur to me during the college search to check whether each school actually offers a journalism major. My immigrant family, although very invested in my education, is in no position to advise me. Sure enough, when, upon arrival, I scan the University of Pennsylvania course catalog for journalism classes, I discover they don’t exist. My journalism career over before I take a single class, I spend the next two years considering a variety of other options, including international relations and communications. I finally settle on psychology, because the prospect of earning a living talking to people (I’m thinking about psychotherapy) seems almost as appealing as writing about sports. I don’t yet know that a graduate degree is required to practice psychotherapy, nor do I know that I won’t actually like doing therapy once I learn how to do it.

I start here to counter the myth that career journeys are linear – that all of us are in constant motion from point A to point B, as though we are born with the knowledge of what kind of work we want to do and just need to obtain the necessary education or work experience to be able to do it. No doubt some people actually have such linear journeys. But my path was always a process of discovery, always a combination of wrong turns and timely opportunities.

It’s the end of my junior year at Penn. I’m completing a double major in communication and psychology but still don’t really know what I want to do after graduation. Entry-level jobs in both fields seem unappealing, and my academic advisor finally deigns to share with me that a graduate degree is required to practice psychotherapy and that research experience is required to be admitted to a graduate program. I frantically search for research opportunities. A staff psychologist at the now defunct Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic is looking for research assistants for his study on expressed emotion, as is a graduate student working with Marty Seligman on learned helplessness. The staff psychologist’s middle name is Sigmund. I don’t know who Marty Seligman is (I learn later that he’s one of the most recognized psychologists of our time). None of this matters; I just need experience. I apply for and happily accept both unpaid positions.

****

“What do you do?” Hot Rod asks.

It’s how our conversation starts. It’s how many conversations start. (The college version of this, of course, is “What’s your major?”). And why not? For those of us with careers (rather than jobs), what we do at least partly defines who we are. This is so not only because who we are influences our choice of what we decide to study in college and graduate school (or even whether to go to college), but also because the process of preparing for our career shapes our personal values. But how to answer? Like every academic I know, I have one “job” but do lots of things.

“I’m a teacher,” I say, “I teach about race…”

More specifically, I am a faculty member in a psychology department of a very large state university. My official job title is “lecturer,” which is designed to distinguish me from 98 percent of the department and university faculty who are either tenured or tenure-track (i.e., on track to become tenured) professors. As far as the undergraduate students are concerned, the distinction is trivial. Like my tenured and tenure-track colleagues, I have a Ph.D., teach several undergraduate courses each year, and have graduate students assist in grading, leading class discussions, and a variety of other classroom tasks. In addition, although students are not always aware of this, I also publish original research in peer-reviewed journals, review research manuscripts submitted for publication, and present my research at both academic conferences and community organization meetings. Yet, the distinction is not irrelevant. Although all faculty members are mostly engaged in the same activities, in most cases, there is a substantial difference in the proportion of time allotted to each. Tenure-track faculty are hired primarily as scholars. Their job is to produce scholarship – preferably “important” scholarship that moves the field forward. In the process, they are expected to teach a few courses (the “normal” teaching load in my department is the equivalent of two moderate size undergraduate courses per year), but they must be careful to prioritize their scholarship, as their performance reviews and job security are ultimately dependent on the quality and quantity of their research production. My primary job, by contrast, is to teach. The department is happy to have me engaged in research, but it’s not actually part of my job description.

My perception of my job depends a little on my mood. Most of the time, I think I have the best academic job on the planet. Since I am at a prestigious university (my department was ranked third in the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings), I work and socialize with some of the brightest and most talented people in the world. Moreover, I enjoy teaching and the department allows me to teach the courses that I most want to teach. Yet, I still have time to pursue other professional activities, including research and community projects, and the fact that I don’t have to teach in the summers gives me time to travel out of the country – which my research often requires. Best of all, I don’t have to deal with the “publish or perish” pressure that is the hallmark of academic life. This pressure is intense and typically leads junior faculty to work long into the evenings, as well as weekends – both because senior faculty members are often explicit about what it takes to get tenure and because of their own internal motivation to be successful.

But, of course, there is a downside. As a lecturer, I’m (at least so far) not included in the department’s official decision making (this includes hiring decisions, graduate admissions, and curriculum changes). I’m ineligible for most departmental and university committees and administrative positions, and I’m not allowed to sit on master’s and dissertation committees. I also get paid substantially less and do not qualify for a sabbatical every seven years. To most academics, mine is a second-class position, and there are moments of insecurity when I internalize this attitude, doubting my ability, questioning my productivity, and generally feeling like an under-achiever – especially since I used to hold a tenure-track rank at another institution prior to my current position. But most of the time, on most days, I like the trade-off. I get to teach, research, and write, but still have time to hoop and talk to Hot Rod afterwards, as well as spend time with my family without feeling that I should be working.

****

It’s my freshman year at Penn. My friends and I are standing in line at the theatre ticket counter, waiting to buy tickets for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which has just been released. It’s a long line, and my attention focuses on the group of young Black men standing directly ahead of us. They are boisterous and loud, seemingly oblivious to the rest of us waiting in line. I watch them because they are in front of me and because I am enjoying their fun. After a time, I notice that four or five are wearing identical T-shirts with the words “It’s a Black thing, you wouldn’t understand” printed on the back. I am flooded with anger at the perceived injustice. I want to go up to them and say “How dare you make assumptions about me? How do you know I wouldn’t understand? Why don’t you try explaining it to me first?” But I don’t have the courage, so I just stand in place, watching them, seething. I like the film – feel bad for Sal and his family, as well as for Radio Raheem and think that, no, of course Mookie didn’t do the right thing. But as I walk out of the theatre, I notice that the African American audience seems agitated. They seem to take a different message from the film, but I don’t know what it is. Did they think starting a riot was the right thing to do? How could they? How could anyone? I feel angry at their anger. They have no right to think that way.

Two years later I am again in line, this time waiting to buy a late-night cheese steak. This line is short, and within a few minutes I’m placing my order with the short-order cook.

“The grill is closed,” he informs me. I nod and head to the back of the store to rummage through the pre-made food options in the refrigerator. The door chimes as two men walk in. They head to the grill and a few minutes later are hunched over a small table, enjoying their cheese steaks. The two men and the short-order cook are Black, and I am usually perceived as White (I was born in the former USSR and identify as a Russian Jew). I assume that I just experienced racial discrimination. I am more incredulous than angry. I want to say something to the cook, but again I lack the courage. I slink out, trying not to make eye contact with either the cook or the customers.

These and other experiences stay with me. I don’t yet have the knowledge necessary to engage in an analysis of what the interactions mean or why they happened, but I instinctively know they’re important. I apply to graduate programs. I get many rejections but also several interviews. An offer comes from the only Black professor I interview with. His research is based in Jamaica. I accept the offer.

Three years later I arrive in Jamaica, along with five African American undergraduate students who, under my supervision, will conduct structured interviews with Jamaican kids who had been identified as having emotional or behavioral problems by either a family member or a teacher. One of the future interviewers is a friend, a former MSU football player from Detroit who gave up football in order to better focus on academics. He had worked in the research lab for several years, and we hit it off almost from the start. Usually thoughtful and reserved, Stan is nearly giddy with anticipation. He sidles up to me as we walk through the airport.

“You know,” he says, “the airport security is Black, and when we get on a bus, the bus-driver will be Black, and hell – everyone else on the bus will be Black too.” He is clearly liberated by this thought. I can’t really relate.

A few weeks after our arrival, the undergraduates and I decide to have some drinks together. We walk into a bar. About 20 people are spread out among the tables. My eyes instantly gravitate to the one White person there. He looks to be near 50. It is likely that we have nothing in common. In the U.S., I wouldn’t have noticed him. In Jamaica, I find myself fighting the urge to walk over to say “Hello.” What would I say after that? “I couldn’t help noticing that you’re White.” Of course, I do no such thing. But I think that maybe I have a slightly better understanding of what Stan is experiencing.

****

I love working in the field of race relations. The topic fascinates me, engrosses me, challenges me – constantly – even after more than 10 years. It’s ubiquitous, affecting how children are tracked in the education system, how employees are hired, evaluated and promoted, how laws are passed and enforced, and how health services are delivered. Even personal choices, such as whom to befriend, whom to date, and which neighborhood to live in, are either explicitly or subtly influenced by race. All of the above are well documented. Yet, many of us live in blissful unawareness of how race impacts our own lives and those of our neighbors, while others make a deliberate political and personal choice to deny the documented reality and pretend that race has no meaning.

The seeming inconsistencies demand exploration. How can one not be captivated by some aspect of this topic? I love the research questions and the self examination that it inspires. I love that it brings me into contact with people of different backgrounds all over the world. I love the students, particularly those who really engage with the material, who are honest (not just with me, but with themselves) about the impact of race on their lives, who are willing to question me and challenge the ideas and theories from class – even when, especially when, they know where I stand. This doesn’t happen to me in other classes I teach. I love how these relationships have enriched my life in ways I could not have predicted, and I look forward to continuing this journey, even as I have little idea where it may lead.

The timing of my descent was as well-defined as the moment I regained my footing. It began when my longtime boyfriend told me he loved me, then disconnected his phone the following day: my graduation day. It continued with a couple of whiskey sours that night at a club on the north side of Austin, Texas, and a stripper I’ll call “Stallion” whose first routine included Chinese splits performed to Van Halen’s "Jump."

My reason for going to the club in the first place was to escape my dark obsession with trying to make sense of my ex's cowardice and cruelty. Sure enough, once the whiskey kicked in and Stallion kicked up his boot heels, I saw the light (along with just about everything else this thoroughbred had to offer). From the edge of the dance floor, I waved a dollar bill. For my money, I got a much-needed kiss. At the time, I was a little drunk and plenty grateful. By the end of the evening, I was totally hooked.

That club helped me forget about a certain person. But a place that featured male dancers on Sunday soon became my favorite feasting ground. What made it even more delicious was that Stallion performed there. By the time Linda and I established ourselves as regulars, she’d abandoned formal church services, I'd put my job search on hold, and Stallion and I were on a first-name basis.

If the club had issued VIP cards, ours would have been platinum. How many Sundays did we spend in that place? How many buffalo wings, cheese squares, and Chinese egg rolls did we consume at the free buffet? How many dollar bills did we fold lengthwise and place onstage for dancers to collect using only the muscularity of their butt cheeks?

Too many to count.

But I can count the number of times they offered a bottle of champagne to the “most enthusiastic” patrons. Once.

And on that day, the joint was packed, the women were acting crazy, and the dancers egged us on. I vaguely remember being pushed, knocking over someone’s drink, winning the prize.

However, the victory was short-lived. In less than ten minutes, two cops approached our table with the club manager by their side.

“This girl claims that one of you stole twenty dollars,” the manager said.

A young woman then stepped out from behind him.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Ya'll knocked over my drink and now my money is missing,” she said.

“We didn't steal anything.”

“Let’s go to my office. The police need statements,” the manager said.

After questioning, the police escorted all of us from the building, while the club manager encouraged Linda and me to come back the following week. We were, after all, his most loyal customers.

Outside, Linda argued with one of the policemen about how she was perfectly capable of driving us home.

“As soon as you leave the parking lot, I'll arrest you for DWI,” he said.

I took the Fifth. Linda, however, did not. That's when he pressed her against the car, slapped on the handcuffs, and hauled her in for public intoxication.

“What’s next?” I asked the policeman who stayed behind until my cab arrived.

“Probably nothing. Things like this happen all the time at these types of places,” he said.

I looked at the structure, with its blacked-out windows, thick doors, and hidden parking area, and I understood. Once I climbed into the cab, I didn't look back.

I moved to Houston that same year and started a new life, complete with full-time job and respectable hobbies, none of which involve nudity. Some time later, my female coworkers planned an outing to a male strip club. Even though the idea didn’t tempt me, I joined them. After all, I was a different person than I had been in Austin.

That night, instead of looking at the dancers, I watched the women shed their dignity over the slightest gyration. Had I looked that foolish, I wondered?

I already knew the answer.

As we were leaving the club after having stayed for only a few performances, someone called out my name. I turned around and there was Stallion, dressed in fringed boots, a cowhide g-string, and a Stetson. And it occurred to me that I’d never seen the man fully clothed. The strange part was: I couldn't remember his real name.

“Are you living in Houston? ” he asked.

“Been here a few years. You're still dancing, I see.”

“Yea. For now.”

An awkward pause followed.

“Well, you take care,” I said, then walked away. Fast.

Once outside, a coworker asked, “Do you know that guy?”

It was a simple question. Or was it?

I thought back to his Chinese splits, the paid-for kisses, the one-sided (my side) conversations on a red velvet sofa in the back of the club, the bare shoulder he let me cry on, and the strong arms that embraced me when the ripping pain of abandonment and rejection unexpectedly took hold in that place with the darkened windows. (Things like this happen…)

Most of all, I thought about the version of myself that I left behind.

“No,” I finally said. “I really don’t know him at all.”

###

Going to college In Nashville, I had a girlfriend, Lynne Lastname, from Evansville, Indiana. Pretty. Tall, thin, long blond hair. A “real” blonde. It‘s easy to tell. Anyway, I met her at a SCLC meeting about a month before Kennedy was shot.

On that sad November day, I was reading to a blind student from Kentucky, Barry Lastname, when my roommate, Terry Lastname, walked in and told me the news from Dallas. Lynne and I spent a lot of time together in late November being pissed off at the senselessness of the assassination and quite depressed along with the rest of the country.

Wrote a short, sophomoric poem:

John is dead.
The world asks,
“Why”?
And Dallas asks,
“Why here?”

In the spring, Lynne moved off campus into an apartment. In the house next door lived a transvestite. His name was Larry. Many evenings, at or near dusk, Larry would prance out on his back patio dressed for an evening out and, I guess, looking for love. Slinky, almost always in a dark dress, pumps, stockings, well-coifed wig and lots of makeup: red, red lipstick, heavy mascara and eye shadow, etc. We never knew her name.

We used to laugh about it. Lynne said, "There’s a man and woman living next door. We never see them together, though. Strangest thing is they have the same shoe size."

One night, I said, "Imagine what trouble he must go through. I mean shower, probably shave his legs and maybe underarms, put on make-up, shape up and hook up his padded bra, rummage through the closet to find something fetching, check his stockings for runs, pull it all together, dress and go out to find what the evening has to offer. Imagine all the effort."

Lynne looked at me with a wry smile and said, "Yeah. Just imagine."

I was never what you would call an athletic kid. It's not that I wasn't fit. I danced from the age of 3 —ballet, modern and tap. I was raised by intellectual, artist-types. My mother is a classic New York Jew who believes if you perspire you are working too hard and should immediately return to the air-conditioned salon to dine on chopped chicken liver and cucumber sandwiches while reading a good book. My father is a tender-hearted, philosophical Norwegian. His Scandinavian stoicism allows him to endure root canals without anesthesia, shovel snow in little more than a t-shirt, but somehow didn't make it's way into his workout ethic. My parents could not have been more loving and supportive, but push the sports they did not.

In my 20s I discovered yoga and hiking. In my 30s I started snowboarding and kayaking. In my 40s so far, skiing and horse riding. Though I have slammed my body against the mountain numerous times by "catching an edge", what happened yesterday morning was far different.

It was about the 9th or 10th time I'd been riding. I was alone with Darryl, who has been on horses his whole life. He is English and a retired Polo player as well. We often ride with our kids and take it easy, trotting with an occasional canter if one of the horses decides to cut loose. This ride was intended to let us run. We were riding horses that we often ride, he was on Twister and I was on Cherokee. After a little warm up, Darryl took off and I followed. He cantered ahead of me. Cherokee was reluctant to go and being inexperienced, I didn't force her. Recognizing we were falling far behind, she decided she'd better catch up and she picked up her feet. We got a good pace going, but when she lost sight of the others, she broke into a full gallop. It was faster than I've ever ridden and it was magical. One of the things I have learned is that you have to hug the horse with your legs. Standing in the stirrups, your lower body must be engaged as if it is part of the horse, providing and independent suspension system. With my very limited experience, I am very comfortable walking and trotting, but as soon as we start cantering, I become conscious of every nuance of the motion and how my body feels in that moment, making sure I stay balanced. This time, when Cherokee took it from canter to gallop, it was smooth and graceful. For a moment, I got lost in it. I was flying. We caught Darryl and Twister and took a breath.

Palos Verdes has a bridle path covered in mulch. It winds around behind "horse properties" and through some commercial stables. It's beautiful, even on a grey morning threatening rain, as it was yesterday. When we reached a straight away, we decided to run some more. Again, Cherokee and I watched our friends disappear in front of us. I stood up and pressed my heels into her ribs. She responded and started to run.

This would be a good place to acknowledge that there is a tremendous amount of trust required to get on the back of a horse and ask it to gallop away. I am not sure I really grasped that until I was in the saddle doing it. I can't think of another experience in which my well-being has been in the hands (or hooves) of a living, breathing being with whom I can't even have a basic conversation. Feeding her a few carrots as the ranch hands saddled her up is not the same as if I had been able to share a few laughs over a beer, or at the very least, discuss the weather!

So there we were running on the path and I felt her stumble. My mind raced. What was I supposed to do? I remember being told to put my feet forward and flex them so if she went down I might project forward and land on my feet rather than my head. It's mostly a blur, but I do know this. She recovered her footing. I did not. I was thrown to the right and lost my left stirrup. For a short time as we were galloping along, I thought I might be able to hoist myself back up into the saddle. I was hanging on with everything I had and trying to figure out how to pull back on the reigns to slow her down. But it was happening so fast, I was sliding further off-center. There was a definitive point at which I decided I'd better bail if I wanted to have an ounce of control in how I was going to fall. "I can't believe I am falling off a galloping horse."

I was shocked at the sound my body made as it hit the ground. If I was going to try to describe it, I'd say it went, "thud". The impact was hard enough to knock the piss out of me...literally. And then the pain. I couldn't form words. I moaned. Apparently I had yelled for Darryl on the way down because he was riding back towards me asking me if anything was broken and if I could move all my parts. It took me a minute to be able to answer him. For one thing, I hit my head really hard. I was smart enough to be wearing a good helmet correctly. I also know how to fall: tuck and streamline your body. Whatever you do, don't stick a limb out trying to break the fall. The only thing you'll break is that limb. So after wiggling each identifiable body part (intentionally), I got up. No permanent damage. My ribs are sorely bruised and I've got some road rash (or mulch rash), but I am lucky, and made some good decisions on the fly. A stronger rider would not have gone down. But given the particulars of my situation, I believe I did as well as I could. At least that. I got back on Cherokee (who was standing over me looking concerned) and we rode back to the stable.

In the day and a half since the accident, I have thought about the next time I ride. Suddenly the phrase, "getting back on the horse" has new meaning. Early this year I ended a ten year relationship. In an overarching kind of way, I am happy and healing and thankful to have my life back. As is normal, I continue to work through feelings of hurt, betrayal, disappointment and anger, the legacy of which tends to surface in facing new relationships. A classic dilemma: How do I surrender to vulnerability? How do I know that the person I am entrusting with my emotional safety — my heart — is not going to stumble along the way, throwing me so far off center that I have to bail. The parallel is not lost on me. In some respects, I was riding a creature with whom I couldn't have a basic conversation.

In the week between Christmas and New Years I will be riding again. I am sure I'll find some challenging moments. When I first break into a canter, I will have to fight the urge to associate that sensation with the feeling of falling. The memory of the pain as I hit the ground will be tangible. The thing is, I don't plan to give up riding horses. I could analyze the fall over and over and try to figure out what went wrong and what to do differently. This kind of reflection — like therapy in the wake of a break-up — is helpful, or even essential to progress. But in the end, it's about applying what you've learned by putting yourself in the very situation in which you were once hurt.

And so... I will get back on the horse. Hopefully, he will be more solid, I will find new strength and flexibility and the ride will be smooth.

My husband and I started departing from traditional holiday celebrations early on, even before we were married. Our distance from family and religious ties gave us the opportunity to improvise. One Christmas, with the abandon of an unmarried, childless couple, we flew to a small town in southern Spain where we met up with a cousin of mine. She was on a pilgrimage, of sorts. She was following the literal footsteps her spiritual teacher had taken decades before through Andalusia. Though we didn’t share her religious interest, we happily danced in the New Year with her and the local crowd of grandmothers, children, the town mayor and even the village drunk in a former convent turned community space. At midnight, we enjoyed the view of glimmering lights on the coast of Africa. How wonderful, we thought, to make our own holidays. Love and festivity could be found elsewhere—not just under a Christmas tree or at midnight mass. We simply needed to look other places. For the next year, we decided to do just that.

Stylizing our own holidays was easy at first. The following autumn at our non-church wedding, for example, our interfaith minister quoted Gnostic Gospels, Buddhist texts, Native American folklore, and E. E. Cummings at the ceremony, combining the beauty of many great traditions in an original nuptial design. My Catholic relatives were moved to tears, and I never missed the formality of pews, priests or Bible prayers. Similarly, a few months later, after visiting my husband’s quiet, Dutch Reformed family in Atlanta for a ‘turkey and all the trimmings’ Thanksgiving, we drove to a friend’s bamboo farm in rural Alabama. We ate their vegan leftovers on a sun-filled deck overlooking their neighbor’s geodesic dome. Later we toured their acreage of oversized grass and carnivorous plants, amazed at how easy it was to be creative on the holidays, when we put our minds to it.

The difficulty came that first Christmas when we tried to do too much in the name of adventure. Against better judgment, we drove through thirteen hours of bad weather to my parents’ house in New Jersey to give them the news that I was pregnant (our gift to ourselves was to avoid holiday air travel). In order not to focus on the storms, sharing our surprise became the theme of our holiday. We took our time and wandered through snow drifts in upstate New York to tell friends all along the Hudson—and finally—my grandmother, ailing in the hospice, our good news. By New Year’s Eve we were home but exhausted, both from the trip and in advance of the next day. I had committed, insisted, on hosting a New Year’s Day Godfather party, and I couldn’t bring myself to back out now. The event held too much potential in terms of create-your-own-tradition payoff, so I attacked it head on, like I would a box of canolis. In between preparing antipasto, swisschard pizza, stuffed mushrooms and lasagna for fifteen guests, I contained my first trimester nausea. When people arrived, bleary eyed and hungover, I put on a happy hostess act. I explained the courses, detailing ingredients of the homemade pizza dough, sauce, and mushroom filling in effort to slow down the shoveling that had commenced. I had expected everyone to know that in an Italian family, food equals love. I had expected, unrealistically, that everyone would act like family.

I did get some satisfaction announcing our pregnancy to the crowd. Everyone mustered the appropriate coos. But it wasn’t enough to soothe my rage when I saw a pile of chard on the side of one guest’s plate (they picked it off!). It was hard not to wish I had served mac and cheese out of a blue box.

As promised, we screened The Godfather parts I, II, and III. I had forgotten how much violence riddled parts I and II. Nobody stayed for part III.

The mistake had been ours, of course. In my mind, creating our own holidays had to be unique and memorable, or else it wasn’t worth it. We had to “do something” in order to “feel something.” The doing had completely overtaken the feeling.

Pregnancy provided me a chance to reflect. I had come from people who celebrate everything: weddings, christenings, first communions, confirmations—even funerals, plus the major holy days and, especially, Easter. These occasions created opportunities to gather, talk, eat, and remind each other of our similar fabric; the belief that family bonds are stronger, that whenever possible, family comes first. My husband and mine’s overtures to replace this tradition with our own experiences did not fulfill us in the same way. We were exhausted. I was willing to take another tack.

After our daughter was born, another missing link became apparent. The faith I no longer followed really was gone. And while I had adjusted to its absence just fine before I had a family, as winter passed into Spring, and we approached that first family Easter, I found myself falling back into old habits.

I awakened early, too early, to set out the colored eggs and the elaborate Easter baskets filled with sick amounts of candy, stuffed animals, and Easter grass. I then made a breakfast of things I rarely ate anymore: curried devilled eggs, lamb sausage and mimosas. I sat on the couch eagerly as my husband stumbled into the living room festival with our daughter on his shoulder. I explained how, in my family, Easter was always a feast. My husband, ever accepting, enjoyed the meal. Our daughter, just then understanding that meals are social, entertained us by pinching avocado between her fingers and thumb. But it did not yet feel like the holidays of old, or of new.

After breakfast I insisted that we go on a walk along the lake. We dressed in our winter coats and strolled just a block before hearing church bells, and something inside me snapped. I insisted we find a church—any church—just to sit in and absorb the atmosphere. Right now, I urged. We walked to the cathedral on our corner. Hispanic families filled the pews and lilies adorned the altar. Our daughter looked at the stained glass with wonder, and engaged with a little boy in a game of peekaboo. Familiar feelings of childhood milestones—first communion, confirmation, confession—filled me as if I had switched bodies with a real Catholic. My husband, politely, waited until I said it was time to go. We had come back to my roots with the hope they were the right fit for my family. But as we left the church I knew we wouldn’t be back.

Our decision not to raise our daughter Catholic is firm, but we currently don’t have a clear alternative. I am daunted by the task of presenting to her my wide-ranging tolerance for many paths. But narrowing it down has its problems, too. Do we just pick a tradition I’ve been dabbling in, like Buddhism? Pick one that will serve our daughter’s participation in the world? Pick a religious institution close to the house?

A friend of ours brought us a joke gift last week; a cardboard spin-the-dial game where you can choose your new religion on a wheel of options. After she left, I found myself drawn in by the gag copy on the back. “Are you a searcher? Disappointed with your religion of birth? Agonize no longer—use proven techniques of comparison shopping to select just the right religion for you.”

Among the options were Unitarian Universalist, Snake Handling, and the Sufi religion of my pilgrimmaging cousin. I laughed, realizing our search for spirit had been made into a game for a reason. And the reason is this: many, many others have the same questions and concerns that we do. Breaking with tradition is okay, and making a new one might actually take some time. As this holiday season approaches, my husband and I have come to agree: as we grow as a family, we’ll grow into our faith. For now, we’ll take our holidays one at a time. Celeste, meanwhile, provides us with miniature holidays with every milestone—her first word (angel), her first joke (a fake cough)-- and in doing so she has reminded us of our family truth. Living in the moment is, in fact, our tradition.

Suzanne Clores is the author of Memoirs of a Spiritual Outsider.