I went to a memorial service yesterday evening for the mother of a friend. I never met her mother, but I felt I knew her from the obituary that she shared, which she had cowritten with her mother, a synopsis of husbands, children, education, career, hobbies, illnesses and triumphs. I went prepared to offer solace to a grieving daughter. I left inspired and uplifted.

And I called my mother when I got home. 

"Hi, Mama!" I said. It was hit-or-miss whether she'd be awake at 10:30 p.m., Maryland-time, but I heard the TV in the background when she picked up. "I just came home from a beautiful memorial service for a friend's mother, and I thought about how glad I am that can still call my mother and tell her I love her. I'm glad I didn't wake you."

She said it would be alright to wake her up any time to tell her I love her. "Yes, I figured that," I said. We both laughed.

She told me she'd just gotten into bed and was watching TV "of course," as she does most of the day. Dad was already asleep, as he is now most of the day. She asked me what I'd done that day, and how Charles and Ariel (her son-in-law and grandson) were doing. Then she asked me to remind her where I'd been that evening, because that's how it is now; at 89 she repeats herself a lot, and asks people to repeat things for her. 

We talked until I ran out of news, and she thanked me again for calling. "Wake me any time," she said, and we laughed again. 

I poured myself a glass of red wine and went out to my writing room. It was just a night after the longest night of the year, the end of a friend's mother's life, nearing the end of my parents' lives. A storm was blowing in and temperatures were dropping. Not in the mood to put words on paper yet, I ran a bath to collect them in my mind.

I thought about how it surprises me now to see how readily my mother takes in love, as unguardedly as a plant takes up water. I resisted that neediness in my own younger, needier days, but in this late chapter of our lives I see how she craves approval and acceptance she didn't get as a girl. After a lifetime trying to see around my mother's shadow, I'm grateful now for this late chapter of my life as a daughter, when I can absorb her love - imperfect perhaps in its manifestation but perfect in intention - and offer her my own. 

And I thought about my friend's mother, whom I never met yet feel I know through through her daughter's passion for learning and teaching, for family and friends, dance and writing. I thought about the phrase "intergenerational trauma," a juicy (and important) one these days. Maybe we underestimate the generational impact of love.

By the time I went back in the house, Charles had gone to bed. I crawled under the covers beside him, but not before removing the cat, Misty, who is a sweet foot-warmer while we're falling asleep but a pesty chatterbox in the middle of the night. No blame there; she just wants what any of us want, warmth, security and comfort, same as any good mammal. But we also want sleep. Out goes Misty, with two doors closed between us and her. We accept Misty's feelings, but her declarations, loving or otherwise, must wait until morning.

From an email to a friend, Sunday Nov. 15, 2015

We all know now about the bombings that happened in Paris Friday evening, but I found out from a woman who interrupted a conversation I was having with a young flamenco dancer's mom, after a show where Charles had just performed with several other students, teens to adults. I didn't go online to learn more, or even tell Charles, because I really needed that not to be the story of the evening, yet. But of course it was the first thing I read in the paper when I got up Saturday morning. My reaction was probably not much different from anyone else’s, to horror that can’t be put into words, but that it seems no one can keep from trying for words anyway.

A few minutes before 11 Saturday morning I went out to a little indie theater near our house to see a movie on Impressionist painters. It was sold out. Now, this isn't the new Bond movie we're talking about, it's a documentary on the Impressionists, so the fact that it had sold out at an 11 a.m. Saturday morning screening surprised me. 

“I hate it when I think I have an original idea and realize half of Santa Fe had the same idea,” I said to the woman in front of me while we waited to find out about the next showing. She was elderly, and a little hard of hearing, and I had to repeat things.

“I think we're here because of what happened in Paris," she said. "We want to connect with them over something positive.”

Now, I’m fairly sure that wasn't my motivation, even unconsciously, but I loved what she said, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Friday evening, everything was about survival: hundreds in Paris fighting for it, many losing; millions and millions around the world then asking ourselves what we would have done, what we should do if it happens here, whether we're safe if we don't go to France, or Europe, or big cities, or stadiums. And Saturday morning, people were going to art movies, and calling their children, calling their loved ones, maybe making French onion soup, who knows -- anything to affirm life and love.

Sometimes it seems everything we read or hear anymore is about survival, what we must do to protect our planet from all we’ve done to imperil it. Things like this remind me that it is not just the mighty task of survival that matters, but the things of this life that we intuitively love – the shade of a tree on a hot day, a butterfly, a hawk on the branch of the apricot tree, food, family, friends – the daily moments that make the difference, the difference between Friday night and Saturday morning.

Green Chile Corn Chowder

Comfort is in the taste buds of the beholder. I've never made a French onion soup, but here in my adopted home of Santa Fe, New Mexico, comfort comes in the coupling of pleasure and pain that we experience from hot green chile. Use or omit from this creamy chowder as you wish; likewise the bacon, which figures more as a supporting character here than a central one.

6 pieces bacon
2 cups diced onion
1/2 cup diced celery
1 diced red pepper
2 diced potatoes
1 quart water or broth
Thyme, oregano and/or basil
1 package frozen corn (or 6 ears fresh corn, shucked)
1 1/2 cups heavy cream or milk
Fresh cilantro to garnish

Cook the bacon until crisp, then chop and set aside. Saute onion, celery and red pepper in vegetable oil in a heavy soup pot until the vegetables are tender. (I like to cook bacon in the oven, although you could cook it in the soup pot, remove and drain, leaving a little bacon grease in the pot for cooking the vegetables.) Add the potatoes, water or broth and herbs, and cook until the potatoes are tender. Add the corn and cook another 10-15 minutes. Before serving, add the cream or milk and heat until just before boiling. Add salt and pepper to taste, and stir in the chopped bacon. Sprinkle with fresh cilantro before serving.

It’s a gorgeous fall Sunday here in Santa Fe, an interlude perhaps between the rain we had almost every day this week and more that might reach us soon from Hurricane Patricia. Charles is out planting garlic at the garden he shares with some folks in La Cienega, leaving the house to Misty, refining the art of sleeping, and me, editing articles for the winter Tumbleweeds. In any issue there’s usually at least one article that particularly grabs me, something not just useful but charged with some moment of truth that the writer trusts us to share. I’m not sure yet which will do that for me in this pile, but that’s what I’m looking for.
 
If I must work on a Sunday, this is how I like it, feet up on the couch, Misty sleeping beside me, flamenco guitar of Paco de Lucia in the background, hot tea in reach. From the corner of my eye, some motion out the window steals my attention. A large bird has just landed on a branch of the apricot tree outside the porch. I inch forward slowly, finding my cell phone and zooming the camera lens to get a good view. I think it's a Cooper's hawk, standing stock-still, just whipping his head from side to side occasionally with the snap of a flamenco dancer. As I ease open the front door and tip-toe off the porch he flaps up into one of the elm trees, with that powerful, lumbering whoosh that animals are wired to fear. I walk out into the middle of the yard, barely able to make him out in the high branches, though I'm sure he can see me. Like a hawk.

We didn't go out looking for nature this morning, but it made its way to us, big, bold and taloned. Misty slept through it all. I assume the hawk and she are too close in size to be much threat to one another, though I'm glad not have my theory tested; I'm sure his instincts are even more predatory than hers. She's still curled in her favorite spot up on the back of the couch doing her sleep-breathing, perhaps dreaming herself a lioness in the savanna chasing down a peregrine falcon: a feline moment of truth.
 
Mushroom and Caramelized Garlic Quiche
 
I made this from things we had in the house, but you can add caramelized garlic cloves to your favorite quiche or vegetable tart and let them steal the show. The instructions for caramelizing the garlic come from Yoram Ottolenghi's amazing cookbook, Plenty; I'm only the middle-person here, though this is a case where you might just want to kiss the messenger.
 
Filling:
16 ounces crimini and button mushrooms
1 onion, chopped
8 ounces crumbled gorgonzola cheese
2 heads of garlic, cloves separated and peeled
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. balsamic vinegar
1 cup water
¾ tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. chopped rosemary
1 tsp. chopped thyme, plus a few whole sprigs as garnish
1/4 tsp. salt

Sauté the onion in olive oil until translucent. Add the mushrooms and sauté until browned.

Caramelize the garlic, from Ottolenghi:  “Put the cloves in a small saucepan and cover with plenty of water. Bring to a simmer and blanch for 3 minutes, then drain well. Dry the saucepan, return the cloves to it and add the olive oil. Fry the garlic cloves on high heat for 2 minutes. Add the balsamic vinegar and water and bring to a boil, then simmer gently for 10 minutes. Add the sugar, rosemary, chopped thyme and ¼ teaspoon salt. Continue simmering on a medium flame for 10 minutes, or until most of the liquid has evaporated and the garlic cloves are coated in dark caramel syrup.”

Egg mixture:
2 eggs
¾ cup heavy cream and/or milk
¼ teaspoon salt
Fresh-grated pepper

Whip or whisk egg mixture until smooth.
 
Line a buttered 10" pie pan with the pie dough. Spoon on the sautéed mushroom mixture, then the gorgonzola crumbles, and finally the caramelized garlic with the remaining syrup. Pour the egg mixture over all. The garlic should be peeking up above the liquid. Bake at 400 for 25 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 for another 10 minutes or until the filling has set and the top is golden brown.

I went to the woods not to live deliberately, as Thoreau did, but to walk among the changing trees for an afternoon, perhaps catch a moment of deliberate awe. I was surprised to find the Aspen Vista parking area on Friday afternoon as crowded as Trader Joe’s the day before Thanksgiving, but I suppose I shouldn't have been. Leaf season is short, and winter is long.

On my short hike I overheard Japanese, French, I think Swedish, and English, lots of English, too much to lose myself in solitude, but the beauty led to a sweet unguardedness among strangers. I stopped to watch a woman compose a photo of the reflection of leaves in a large puddle where the trail crossed Big Tesuque Creek. “I’m crazy, I know!” she said when she looked up from her camera and saw me. “No,” I said, “You have a good eye!”
 
Two women walked side by side, deep in conversation. “I mean, how do you explain to someone the theory of complex systems?” the older one asked the other, with the intonation of a conclusion. “Maybe you explain it not by saying it but by showing?” her friend replied, her answer inflecting up like a question. Up the trail a ways, a little girl lifted a fuzzy caterpillar off the trail on a stick and laid it under a tree with words of encouragement.
 
Changing seasons are on my mind for all the obvious and some less obvious reasons. This week’s emails included some from my brother with mock-ups of our parents’ memorial plaques. Mom and Dad are still with us, but their time’s getting close, and we’re ones to plan ahead.

“I'm not old, am I?” Mom asked me on my last visit in September. Which some would have taken as a good occasion for benign denial, but that’s not my easiest note to sing with my mother.

“I think at 87 you can claim being old,” I said. She asked me to repeat that. I did, adding, “People dream of living to their 80s with someone they love.”
           
“Yes,” she said. “That’s true.”
 
I’m bracing for losing my parents as I am bracing for winter: I know that it’s inevitable, and that there’s justice in the changing seasons, that we're lucky to have time to prepare, and that it’ll be hard anyway.
 
I drove home from the woods with my share of photos, but my favorite was just a mental snapshot. Driving up the mountain I saw two women in an overlook by the side of the road. One thrust out her arm to take their picture with her cell phone, and the other squeezed her face as close to her friend’s as possible. They were a little pudgy, post-middle-aged, not what you’d call glamorous, but they beamed with delight, their selfless abandon giving a new twist to the word “selfie.” I went to the woods to find what they found.

This is a perfect “shoulder season” soup, between the chilled soups of summer and hearty winter stews. Red lentils and coriander are essential. This is all about the interplay between the coriander, garlic and lemon; adjust as needed so you taste notes of each. Whole coriander crushed in a mortar and pestle is delicious, but pre-ground coriander works fine.
 
You’ll need:
 
2 cups red lentils
4-6 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon coriander
1 T Kosher or other coarse salt
1 lemon, cut in wedges
Cumin
Cilantro
Red pepper (Aleppo pepper if available)
 
Put the lentils in a large kettle with two quarts of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 to 40 minutes, adding more water if necessary. Red lentils are actually brown lentils with the hulls removed; expect them to turn to a golden mush, the consistency of thin porridge.

While the lentils are cooking, crush the coriander, salt and garlic together into a paste and fry it in oil in a small pot for just a minute or two. Stir the coriander paste into the soup and cook another 10 minutes or so. Serve in cups or bowls, garnished with a sprinkle of cumin, red pepper and a little chopped cilantro. Drizzle with fresh lemon juice, or serve with a lemon wedge for guests to do the honors.

A word to the wise. The Bible says Esau traded away his birthright – just the family inheritance and a direct line of communication with God – to his brother, Jacob, all for a bowl of red lentil soup. Keep your head.

The east coast is battening down against Hurricane Joaquin, but I'm down in Silver City, New Mexico, where as Grandma might have said, "They don’t know from hurricanes." I have come for the Southwest Festival of the Written Word, to attend some workshops and try to sell some books. I'm staying for two nights with the friend of a friend, a fascinating woman whose walls are lined with books and paintings but who doesn't know her Internet password, which was set up by her granddaughter. When, I wonder, did the flow of information begin to go up the generations more often than down?
 
So I make my way to the Javalina Coffee House in the middle of town, where I order a pot of Blue Lady Black tea (flecked with blue cornflower petals), and find a comfy chair among the sun-dazed, slow-moving, colorfully-dressed humanity in this college/mining/ranching town. I let my tea steep while I send some emails before jumping into the pleasure of editing a friend’s paper on the environmental benefits of green roofs, green walls and street-side planting in urban areas. Given the right material, editing is just fun, employing many of the same muscles as writing, but with less crankiness. I've been entrusted to help tell the story of how everyday plants and humble water, on sufficient scale in rooftop, wall and sidewalk gardens, can transform city climates.

Here, where the sun blares as in a dream, they also don’t know from mass shootings, and the newspaper by the register jolts me from an otherwise ridiculously happy morning. A community in Oregon is ravaged, and a whole country is scarred, because a mass murder taints all who learn of it with helplessness, rage, humiliation and fear. Who can make sense of our species? I return to my editing, counting on the power of vertical and horizontal plantings, water capture, and parallel sentence structure to restore and transform.

I’m away from home so this post's recipe is simple, but timeless.

You will need:
 
Water
Black tea of your choice
Milk (cream, half-and-half, soy creamer, even - heaven forfend - rice or almond milk)
 
Heat the water just to a rolling boil. Steep the tea for 3-5 minutes. Add milk to taste. Tea with lemon is a reliable friend, but tea with milk is your favorite elegant aunt, the one with the lingering trace of old-world accent, genteel manners and inevitable right word for any occasion, in whose presence you feel honored to listen and learn.

"One, two, threeeeeeeee!"

Charles notices it before I do, that familiar sing-song count of parents holding the hands of a toddler and swinging the giggling child high in the air. He nudges me to turn and look. "Our son's all grown up now," Charles says to the parents wistfully. "We can't do that with him anymore." The parents smile as awkwardly as we once did, not sure what to say to people whose lives have taken them outside the borders of what to them still seems a land without end: the country of parenthood.

We're walking across the dirt parking lot to the entrance of the Salman Raspberry Ranch, outside Mora, New Mexico. We come here almost every year for the pick-your-own raspberry harvest, our own little hedge against winter. We started coming when our son was a teen. By now we've been here far more times without him than with him, and while truth be told I've grown to love this middle-earth between child-rearing and grandparenting, something in this place invites nostalgia. Maybe it's the bushes festooned with berries at child's-eye level, the bright blue skies swirled with clouds like egg whites in egg drop soup. This is "Blueberries for Sal," kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk!, where the bears come only at night.

Our first stop is the booth where a tiny Hispanic woman pre-weighs the baskets we brought. (They provide buckets for people who didn't bring their own containers.) A traffic director guides each group of customers to their own row and offers some advice. Most people don't go to the end of the row, he says, so there may be better pickings there. Reach down to the bottom branches; that's where the riper ones are.

It's still early in season, but there are plenty of red berries among the green ones. My strategy is to go for the ripest ones, which have the best flavor. Charles picks the firmest ones, which will hold their shape best by the time we get home. At first as many go in our mouths as the baskets, but eventually our baskets fill. The kids in the next row are getting rambunctious, and Charles is picking up their vibe. His berries are better than my scrawny ones, he says. But mine taste better, I counter. Good thing we're not competitive, he says. Yeah but I'm better at being uncompetitive than you are, I say. He tosses a berry at me.

Back in Maryland, an "Indian Summer" could last well into September, even October. Here in the New Mexico mountains, fall comes early. By Labor Day weekend, summer's harsh light has yielded to softer colors, longer shadows, air as sweet as a baby's kiss. When we get home, I'll line the berries on cookie sheets, put them in the freezer until they're frozen solid, then pack them in freezer-bags until some dreary winter day when we'll throw some in pancakes or a pie. There's no stopping time: kids grow up; frosts hit; harvests end. But a few bags of raspberries in the freezer persuade us we have stolen a piece of summer and given us a jump on the next.

1 cup fresh raspberries
2/3 cup balsamic or other hearty vinegar
1/3 cup oil
Salt to taste

Mash the berries a bit with a fork and let them sit for a few minutes to let more of the juices release, then put them berries in a mason or other jar with a good lid. Stir in the vinegar and salt, then whisk as you pour in the oil slowly. Alternatively, just add the oil, vinegar and salt at once, cover and shake the beejesus out of it. The high ratio of vinegar to oil works well since  the raspberries are so sweet. Delicious on a spinach salad with artichoke hearts, olives, gorgonzola cheese, sliced pear and candied walnuts.

Friday was all about power-cooking, Syrian style. A few months ago I donated a Syrian dinner as an auction at the LitQuest Gala for children’s literacy programs. The winner, Perli Cunanan, chose to use it for an end-of-summer party at her house last Friday evening, and graciously included Charles and me. I’d been too busy to do much ahead of time, so Friday became a marathon of shopping and cooking, adrenaline and allspice.

I made two roast chickens with sliced eggplant, white beans in tomato sauce, rice, a tomato and cucumber salad, stuffed grape leaves with an artichoke and lemon sauce (see below), and a platter of sliced fruit and cookies from TJ’s. Charles and I loaded the pots and platters in the back of the Subaru and drove to Perli’s house with our movable feast. When we got there, Tom, Perli’s husband, came out to help us carry stuff in. “Bring in anything that smells good,” I said.

Parents served their kids, who ate out on the patio, and adults took seats around the dining room table. The guests covered more ethnic diversity than some people see in a lifetime. Among us we were Filipino, Armenian, Argentinian, Basque, Syrian, African-American, Southern, and a couple of Euro-hybrids. I said the Hebrew blessing for the food, to place a frame around the meal, and explained that these were traditional Syrian-Jewish recipes I'd gotten from my grandma -- foods I’d eaten as a kid but that I didn’t learn to cook until I’d moved to Santa Fe in my 20s. After our son was born, I said, I yearned for more connection to the family I’d fled without looking back a few years before. Grandma’s recipes provided a way in.

“That’s exactly how it was for me,” Perli said, a striking comment given that our backgrounds are so different. Perli is Filipina, and she grew up in a large Filipino community in Virginia Beach, where cultural identity could be taken for granted. “A third of my high school was Filipino, a third African-American, and a third white," she said. "There were always parties, and everyone always made foods from their family. Then I moved to New Mexico and got married and had children, and I wanted to share some of those foods. Learning to make traditional dishes and teach my kids is a way to bring that community and culture into my family.”

Variations on that theme bounced around the table. Solange came here from Argentina. “I need to cross borders,” she said. She claims that Andres, her husband, is the better cook, but she and her children make Argentinian empanadas for a taste of home. Lisa learned to cook the exotic Basque foods of her husband’s heritage. Our family's journeys (willful or otherwise; remember, one of the guests was African-American) varied as much as our foods. We were unified by diversity.

Grandma never actually made these grape leaves with artichoke and lemon (as far as I know); she made hers the more traditional way with ground beef and rice, topped with apricots and tamarind sauce -- that's for another post. I adapted this version from Poopa Dweck's Aromas of Aleppo, for Perli's vegetarian guests. I had stuffed the grape leaves earlier in the summer and put them in the freezer (through step 1). If you want to save time you could purchase canned dolmas -- now available from many mainstream and ethnic groceries -- and jump to step two, as the distinguishing factor is the combo of lemon, mint and garlic. Just don't tell Grandma.

Stuffed Grape Leaves with Artichoke & Lemon

1: Rolling

Chop 2-4 onions and sauté in olive oil until translucent. Transfer to a large bowl and stir in a half cup pine nuts, 1 to 2 bunches of parsley, a pinch of red pepper, 1 teaspoon allspice, 3-4 chopped garlic, 3 chopped tomatoes and a cup of parboiled rice (cooked in half the usual amount of water; they'll be about half-cooked and will continue cooking after stuffed).

Unroll the grape leaves and soak for several minutes in cold water, then rinse several times to wash off the salt. Spread out a few grape leaves at a time on a clean work surface, with the wide end closest to you. Cut off the stem. Place a spoonful of filling, shaped like a fat finger, about two inches wide, across the leaf near the stem. Fold the sides of the leaf over the filling, then roll it up tightly. It should look like a little cigar. Repeat till you’ve used up your filling. You can freeze them at this point and cook later.

2: Cooking

Drizzle a tablespoon or so olive oil in the bottom of a large. Place 6-10 whole garlic cloves on the bottom of the pan. Layer two cans of artichoke hearts (water-packed, not the marinated ones) on the garlic, then layer the stuffed grape leaves on the artichokes. Drizzle another 2 tablespoons of olive oil over the grape leaves. Cover the grape leaves with a heat-proof plate to weigh them down so they don’t unravel.

Cook over a low flame for 5 minutes, just until the grape leaves start to moisten. Remove the plate, and add the juice of 6 lemons (about a cup – fresh, by all means), 1 tablespoon dried mint, 1 teaspoon salt, and enough water to cover the grape leaves. Cover again with the plate. Cook over medium-high heat until the sauce comes to a boil, then lower the heat to medium-low, cover the pan, and simmer for about 40 minutes. Remove from the heat. Let stand for a few minutes to allow the grape leaves to tighten before serving.

Lay a serving plate over the top of the saucepan and hold it firmly in place as you invert the saucepan carefully, so the artichokes are arranged on top of the grape leaves. Serve hot, cold or room temperature.

New York is the city of my past -- in fact, several of them.

It's the city of my young-adult past. In my early 20s, in the early '80s, I got my BA from the Seminar (now Eugene Lang) College, worked, and lived in an East Village walk-up with my cat Pekoe.

It is the city of my parents' past. Dad arrived here in 1947, a handsome, fresh Syrian émigré by way of Shanghai. Mom was born in Brooklyn, though her parents moved to Washington D.C. when she was a little girl. She came up frequently to see her cousins, and her parents moved to an apartment in the Franconia on W. 72nd Street (just off Central Park, near the Dakota) when Mom was in her early 20s, so she could find a Syrian husband. (There are differing versions of that story.) She found one. Mom and Dad married in 1950 and lived there briefly before moving to Washington.

And it’s the city of my ancestral past. The Syrian-Jewish immigrants began arriving here at the turn of the last century -- my maternal grandfather, Abe Beyda, and his family among them -- and settled in the Lower East Side before moving to Brooklyn.

On this trip, all my pasts are interlacing with one another and with my hopes for the future, and -- since New York never fails to keep us firmly rooted in the present -- with the exquisite now.

Yesterday was Memorial Day, our last day up in Westchester, and Charles's last day before flying home to go back to work. David and Carolyn took us to the beautiful Innisfree Garden in Millbrook ("one of the world's ten best gardens"), then drove Charles to JFK and me to the train station in Hartsdale, where I caught the commuter train to Grand Central, for a taxi down to Soho. Initially sad to be alone in the station Charles and I passed through three separate times in the past few days, my spirits jumped when I checked into my very own room at the Solita Soho Hotel (recommended by a friend from New Mexico who is also here for the Jewish Book Council conference). I unpacked and headed just next door to a French restaurant for a glass of white wine, a bowl of chilled melon-mint soup, and an hour with my journal before going to bed early.

On this Manhattan stage of my trip, I'll be giving a reading tonight at Congregation Edmond J. Safra, the synagogue in Manhattan for the Syrian community. This morning, I'll visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, just a few blocks from my hotel. I read there's a nice tea shop, Harney and Sons, a few blocks away, which I'd love to check out, and this is Soho, on the edge of Chinatown and Little Italy, which means, who knows what else...

First, breakfast: Baz Bagels, a few blocks down Grand Street from my hotel. Eggs (scrambled), tea (English Breakfast), a bagel (“everything”), and cream cheese (“plain”). I don’t know what it is – we can throw rings of dough into boiling water in Santa Fe, too – but there’s nothing like a New York bagel.

The Tenement Museum visitors' center has a fantastic bookstore honoring New York’s many immigrant stories (I hope soon to include Farewell, Aleppo; I sent them a copy.) The museum itself is a restored old tenement at 97 Orchard, built in 1863, home in its time to over 7000 immigrants before being abandoned and shuttered for decades. Today it has been upgraded to modern safety standards as a museum, while stylistically preserved in its earlier state.

On their "Shop Life" tour, our bright young guide tells us about the German, then Jewish, families that ran businesses here from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. In the 1870s a German couple opened a saloon in the basement that served as a restaurant, bar, bank, post office, support center and social hall for the upstairs tenants. In time "Kleindeutschland" spread north to 14th Street, and east all the way to the East River, enticing people down from wealthier uptown neighborhoods for German food, music, dancing and bier.

By the end of the century, the Germans had disbursed and Eastern European Jews took their place. By 1900, our guide explains, the "Jewish East Side" was not only the largest Jewish community in the world but the most crowded place on the planet -- with a higher concentration of Jews even than back in the shtetls in Europe.

Our guide doesn't mention the small subgroup of Middle Eastern Jews. Their far more numerous European Jewish neighbors greeted these swarthy-skinned, Arabic-speaking immigrants with skepticism, sometimes outright disbelief, that they were really even Jewish. My Grandpa Abe was part of this first wave of Syrian Jews,  arriving with his mother and three siblings in 1902 as an 8-year-old boy who didn't speak a word of English. His father had come two years earlier, selling dry goods door to door and on the streets with a pushcart, until he saved enough money to send for the family. They lived for a time just a few blocks from here on Hester Street, in a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor (because rent was cheaper than on the lower floors), with a potbelly stove for heating and cooking, a sink in the hallway shared all four apartments on that floor, and an outhouse behind the building. Eventually they moved to Brooklyn, to the Syrian-Jewish neighborhood that thrives and expands to this day.

“The end of of a community like Little Italy or Little Germany means its success,” our guide says, "because they've moved up." For most immigrant groups, I can see this is true. The curious thing about the Syrian Jews is that they measure success precisely by their resistance to assimilation. Financial success has made the community more self-sufficient, more contained – more like a hive of bees, functioning together as a unit, than individuals making it on their own.

On the way back to my hotel I call Mom and Dad, who have just arrived in Maryland from Florida for the summer. My family's migration to this country once took them across oceans and continents. At this point in their lives, my parents have the migratory path of birds: south in the winter, north in the summer. This is good. I give Mom as vivid a sense as I can of the sights, sounds and tastes of my trip. To Dad I give a description of the talk I'll be doing tonight at the Safra Synagogue. I'll take him with me in spirit. Wish I could take him physically.

Charles and I wake from what he calls “the sleep of the just" after yesterday's ordeal with flights and lost luggage. Personally I haven't experienced an inevitable connection between a clear conscience and deep sleep, so I just say we slept like rocks. We say good morning to David and Carolyn, who were out when we arrived late last night, and get a proper introduction to the cats, Emma Blue and Peppermint.

It’s gorgeous weather here in Hartsdale, up in Westchester County in the Manhattan 'burbs: bright blue skies, full sun, sweater temperature. The house is trimmed with decorations for this afternoon's party for Lauren, who just graduated from Sarah Lawrence. Lauren is the daughter of Kent (David’s older brother) and Nancy. Carolyn jokes that she'll will get many uses from these decorations from Kent's family alone. She bought them a few years ago for their party for Emily, when she graduated from NYU. In a few years they hope to use them again for Jackson, who just completed his first year at Cooper Union, also in New York. I'm happy for (and a tad envious of) Kent, who loves in LA but loves New York, for having his three children attend college near one another in a city he loves to visit. A day into this trip I'm realizing that I need to find my own excuses for getting here more often.

For Charles and me, this party is lucky timing. My initial motivation for this trip was the Jewish Book Council's author network conference in Manhattan next week, to pitch my book to representatives from synagogues and organizations. Charles has a big construction job starting next week, so we appended a weekend with David and Carolyn on the beginning of the trip as a little vacation before he flies back on Monday. Being here for Lauren’s party is an unexpected perk.

David and Carolyn take us on a little drive, stopping at a riverside lookout in Hastings-on-Hudson where can see clear down to the far tip of Manhattan, a good 20 miles away. From here the World Trade Center, the architecturally inane new One57, the lush green rectangle of Central Park, are compressed like a toy village.

I love the Hudson River (technically a tidal estuary), a grand aquatic thoroughfare that could slip our little Santa Fe River in its hip pocket and not even feel it. I have loved it since the end stages of my angsty five-year love affair with New York City, when I would catch the Hudson Line from Grand Central Station when I needed a break from the city for an afternoon. Once I went to the end of the line at Poughkeepsie, getting off long enough for a walk in the open space and fresh air, maybe a bite to eat, before heading back down to the city. I suppose this yearning for sky and space is what led me to Santa Fe, though I couldn’t see it that way at the time.

On the way home, Carolyn picks up a beautiful chocolate-on-chocolate cake that Lauren had requested, with an edible Sarah Lawrence insignia. Guests -- the graduate and her parents, brother and girlfriend, grandma and step-grandpa -- are shuttled from the train station in two carloads, with the take-out Turkish food in the trunk. My aunt Lauris gives a moving toast to Lauren, who opens presents (including the Zuni bear kachina we brought from New Mexico) and revels in family pride. After lunch we all take a walk through Ferncliff Cemetery, just around the corner from David and Carolyn's house, a lovely and curiously befitting end to the afternoon honoring a young woman on the doorstep of adulthood, reflecting on her past and looking to our future, within the perimeter that surrounds us all.