By the time we crossed the Tappan Zee, Lilah was out cold and Cookie had either passed out or had decided the effrontery of a long car trip in the cat carrier was beyond his limited vocabulary.  The only sound from the backseat was Lilah’s occasional thumb-slurping.

The boys were still in school in New Jersey even as I crossed through New York; their father would get them after school and take them skiing for the weekend while I met the moving truck at our new home in Massachusetts.  For another two hours, Mountain Lakes, NJ was still their home, yet I was already gone and might never set foot there again.  The future is forward and rarely loops back.

It took less than an hour to get to Connecticut.  Crossing that border into New England always gives me a premature sense of accomplishment.  Two states already!  Yet still three hours to go on the drive.

My tags and my driver’s license both said New Jersey, but New Jersey wasn’t my home. In the past two weeks, I’ve changed my address on magazine subscriptions, credit cards, and bank records, but Massachusetts was not my home.  I’d arrive in three hours and retrieve the keys to our rental house, but that wouldn’t make it my home, either.

People always tell me how much they hate moving, sort of in the way people meet a dentist and spend twenty minutes bitching about how much they hate getting their teeth cleaned.  I don’t hate moving.  I am flustered by trying to find the grocery store and anxious about locating swimming lessons, but the only thing I really hate about moving is trying to sell a house.

Moving is a cleansing.  You go through old papers and throw away expired Infant’s Tylenol.  There’s a sadness to turning the lock on your old home and an expectancy to turning the lock on the new one, but in the middle there’s clarity.

Liminal spaces are powerful.  Just ask any child who has ever stood with the left foot in one town and the right in another.  There’s a potent ambiguity attendant upon not knowing exactly where you are, being unable to define yourself by location.  It’s the thrill of walking through a doorway, finding a secret passageway, and standing almost dry at the edge of a mighty ocean with just the tongue of it licking against your feet.

In Mountain Lakes, there are people who grew up in town and are now raising their kids there, sometimes in the same house where they once surreptitiously rubbed a booger onto the wall instead of bothering to get a tissue.  I find that romantic and maybe a little exotic.  There’s much to be gained by that.  They know exactly where they are, and they can say with no doubt that Mountain Lakes is their home, that they are “Lakers,” that they are rooted in this spot.

The trade off is the clarity that comes from being alone with yourself somewhere in the middle of Connecticut without a location-based identity, not even knowing which station is NPR.

At 7:30 yesterday morning, Cookie attacked my ankles.  It’s a favorite game of his, and I can’t seem to convince him that I don’t share his enthusiasm.

The poor cat had spent the day before in the master bathroom.  I was afraid he’d be freaked out by the burly gentlemen emptying our house of all objects and run away for a few days, thereby foiling our plans to set out for Boston on Friday.  When I let him out of the bathroom that night, he skittered around the bedroom, slunk along the living room walls, and vociferously lamented the injustices of the world.  Freaked out, indeed.

So, yesterday morning, at 7:45, I moved the food bowl and litter box back into the bathroom and went to put the cat in the bathroom so that the movers could continue their plunder.  And I couldn’t find him.  Anywhere.

All that was left in the house were beds and a few odds and ends.  No one had opened the door.  Where the hell could he be?  I looked under the beds and in the closets.  I called him, because he loves me bestest of all and usually comes at the first of my dulcet tones.  Nothing.

Somewhere between 7:30 and 7:45, he had completely disappeared.

As the painters arrived to freshen up the living room and the movers pulled up with their 18-wheeler, the kids began running about the house hollering, “Cookie!  Cookie!!”  Because that’ll bring a scared cat out of hiding.

I went down to the workshop/boiler room.  He often hangs out behind the water heater in the dim no-man’s-land of negative space where the cement basement walls meet the beams supporting the floor above.  Nope.

“OK guys, I’ve got to take you to school.  I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

The kids didn’t look so sure.

By 3:00 school pickup, I wasn’t all that convinced, either.  The movers were long gone.  There was no furniture left. Either he had completely evaporated, or he had gone from the no-man’s-land into the very walls of the house.  And he sure as shootin’ wasn’t coming out while the house echoed with men’s steps. He wouldn’t even meow in response to my calls.

And I needed to be in a minivan stuffed with humidifiers and cleaning supplies, GPS headed northeast over the Tappan Zee Bridge, at noon today.  The humans stayed in a hotel last, but today I’m picking the cat up at the house at 11:45, sharp, before getting his human sister from preschool. This is not the day for the cat to go AWOL.

I went back to the house at 7:00 last night.  Paint bit my nostrils as I stepped in the back door.  “Cookie?” I called.

For six or seven seconds of air-sucking doubt, it was just me alone in a perfectly clean, echoing house.  And then two golden-green eyes came through the doorway to the boiler room, followed by the most pathetic collection of feline muscles and fur that I’ve seen in many a day.

“Chicken Larissa.”

The sign stands in the parking lot of Paul’s Diner on Route 46.  It’s an old-fashioned sign, the kind that must be set manually, but in our two-and-a-half years living here, I’ve never seen anyone changing it.  Yet, it changes twice a day.  Mornings, it’s something normal for a diner like “Chocolate-chip banana waffles.”  By mid-afternoon, however, it becomes the Twilight Zone of diner signs.

I cannot understand how anyone would look at this sign and think, “Why, yes, I’d like to go to Paul’s Diner and order the Shrimp Primavera.”  This is no fancy restaurant.  The tables are sticky, the waitresses are classic, and the only safe foods are clearly grilled cheese and pancakes.  Nonetheless, every day, they advertise some terrifyingly ambitious dish, usually seafood prepared in a way no one has ever before envisioned it.  I mean, really, would you order Sea Bass Fricassee from a diner?

When I pass Paul’s, I make a note of today’s special so I can email my husband.  He gets a kick out of getting random emails with no text except for, “Tilapia Florentine.”

I’m going to miss the sign outside of Paul’s Diner.  Tonight, we will disconnect all the electrics.  Tomorrow, the movers will come to pack up our stuff.  While the company where my husband will be working is covering the packing and moving, I’ve spent the last few weeks going through papers, taping closed boxes of Legos, and trying to use up all the food.  By Friday afternoon, we’ll just be a memory in this town, the only reminder a “For Sale” sign in the yard in front of our stunning tree.

I’ve found friends here, and a move underlines who they are.  When you move, an acquaintance says, “Let’s get together one last time.”  A friend says, “Let me take your kid while you pack.”  Trust me, there’s a big difference.

This has been the place of my greatest creative fertility, perhaps because I gave my other fertility a rest.  The space, the trees, even the bears have nurtured my writing.  However, I have no doubt that this move is for the best.

We don’t fit in here, which is fine with J, as he’s practically a hermit.  It’s fine with me, because I don’t set much store by fitting in, and I double-dog dare you to find a place where Lilah or Benjamin fit in.  It has been very hard on Zachary.  Very, very, very hard.  I’ll write more on that another time, but for now let me say that this move is in no small part a hope of finding a community that is a better fit for our son.

I won’t be posting for the next week, as the internet goes down tomorrow.  The kids have had their last swimming lesson, and they can’t play with the toys that I’ve carefully sorted.  I won’t be cooking, because all our stuff is packed up.

Fortunately, we can all head over to Paul’s Diner to get Salmon Tetrazzini.

A few days ago, I was thinking about my Tante Esther’s funeral.

It was the early 1990s, and I was waitressing my way through college.  On my break, I went to the payphone at Chili’s and called my mother’s cousin, R, at work.  Her mother, Tante Esther, had been failing.  I wanted to see about arranging a visit.

When I got the Arista Records switchboard, I asked for Rose.  “She’s out today,” the woman answered.

“This is her cousin.  Can you tell me why?”

When I hear that Tante Esther had died, I tracked R down at home, promised her I’d be there for the funeral.  I found someone to cover my shifts, rummaged through my closet for something even remotely appropriate for a funeral, and the next day got on a Septa train.  I switched at Trenton, breathing through my mouth while I used the bathroom in the station.

R was Clive Davis’s assistant and had risen to the rank of Vice President at Arista.  She was bold, smart, and generous.  Whenever I came into New York to see her, a towncar waited for me at Penn Station.

I met R at the funeral home, where she was slipping a few candies into her mother’s coffin.  We’re supposed to go to our grave without any accoutrements, but R couldn’t resist.  “She loved her sweets,” she told me.

It was a small gathering.  Tante Esther was old and had no grandchildren.  Even my aunt, cousins, and sister hadn’t made the funeral.  As we left the funeral home, a florist walked up bowed down under the weight of an enormous flower arrangement.  R took the card, looked at it, and smiled.

“I can’t take the flowers,” she told the florist.  Perhaps he was used to Jewish funerals, because he didn’t question her as he turned around and put the gargantuan arrangement back in the truck.

“Whitney sent them,” R told me.

Tonight, I read people’s crass comments on Facebook. Really, she used crack, why is anyone surprised?

Yes, I remember the Whitney Houston of the beautiful face and the crystalline notes.  But mostly I remember that she was the only Arista musician who thought of R on the day she buried her mother.

My husband and I are secular Jews, which means we light the Shabbat candles but twitch a little every time the rabbi mentions God in his sermon.  I’m the third generation in my family to not believe in God, not that my father’s family is something to emulate.

We don’t belong to a synagogue here in New Jersey, although we have joined one in Massachusetts.  That means no one has been to religious school this year.  To make up for this paucity of religious education, we celebrate every holiday by watching Fountainheads and Maccabeats clips on YouTube.  We also rented Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which features Donny Osmond without a shirt for about 45 minutes.  The kids loved it, although Zach had something to say about the historical inaccuracies.

Benjamin has since become obsessed with the soundtrack.  He falls asleep listening to “Potiphar” or “You Are What You Feel.”  He’s bound and determined to learn all the colors in the coat, so he asked me to print up the lyrics to the songs. I spent an hour cutting and pasting from some internet site, which led me to wonder why exactly there isn’t a picture book series of musical lyrics in 16 point font.  Benjamin has also decided that, since Joseph is a Biblical story, the Bible must be fascinating.  He wants me to read it to him.

Did I mention that we’re secular Jews?

Last night, as I lay out the children’s lunch things, I took a Sharpie to write notes on Lilah’s and Benjamin’s bananas.  We only get bananas in the winter, when local fruit is hard to come by, and I often write little love notes on the peel.  Last night, I wrote, “I love you!” on Lilah’s.  On Benjamin’s: “Some folks dream of the wonders they’ll do.”

My husband laughed for five minutes when he saw it.

This morning, I sent Benjamin off to finish making his Valentines (for the love of Mike, just make them already!) while I packed their lunches. There was actually some yelling involved, because he’s been working on them for three weeks and I need to pack up the art supplies and couldn’t we just have bought cards this one year since the movers are coming on Valentine’s Day to pack us up?

After a few minutes, he called out, “How do you spell ‘world’?”  I told him, filled a water bottle, brushed Lilah’s hair, reminded Zachary he needed to wear socks.

“Are you done with that?” I asked.

“Almost.”  I walked over to check.  There, right across the top, he had written: “The Bible is the best book in the world!”  So that the receiving kindergartener wouldn’t miss the message, he wrote it again on the inside.

Jewish people are not buried in their favorite clothes.  We don’t have elaborate coffins or little trinkets to take with us to the next world.  We are wrapped in a simple white shroud and sent out of this world the way we came in: bare and alone.

I question many things about Judaism, but the burial resonates with me.

****

When I was about to turn ten years old, I moved into my grandparents’ two-bedroom condo on the canal in Bay Harbor, Florida.  We had a pool out back, crotchety neighbors to the left, and salamanders on the pavement.

On my first day at Bay Harbor Elementary School, I introduced myself as “Robin.”  I’d never gone by my middle name before, but no one here knew my name and I could begin any way I wanted to.

I was shedding my Amherst identity.  No longer was I the child sent to school in dirty clothes.  No more was I the stepdaughter punished by sleeping naked in the hallway.  In Amherst, I left the girl ignored by her father and beaten by his wife.

Three months in I realized how much more lyrical “Emily” sounded to me.  I switched back, confusing the hell out of my peers.

****

“Moves are exciting for kids like Zachary,” she said to me, “because it seems like a fresh start.  But we take our old selves with us.”

True enough.  I’ve moved 15 times in 38 years, and that’s not counting getting a new apartment or house in the same general area.  Fifteen fresh starts.  Each time I remained myself.

That said, moves have a way of crystallizing what is important.  An acquaintance who remains in touch after I move away is by definition a friend.  I shed belongings before packing, so I learn just what kinds of items I most value.  (Books, in case you were wondering.  I never give away the books.  But does anyone want a S’mores maker?)  In the Massachusetts town where we’ll be moving next week, I’ve already set up milk delivery. It’ll be months before I find a hairdresser.

I will still be honest to a fault, too blunt for comfort.  I’ll still be impatient, quick-tempered, and a little odd.  Lilah will still suck her thumb, Benjamin will still be a force of destruction, and Zachary will still survive on chocolate milk and granola bars.

Yet, when we move, we discard so many of the trappings of our lives.  It turns us inward, to the family, to the people who really matter.

****

Yes, my blog disappeared for 36 hours, and no, I didn’t freak out.  Ask Jennifer Schmitt, who designed and maintains my site.  I was pretty calm about the whole thing.  My archives have gone gently into that good night.  My blog is a clean slate.

It doesn’t really matter.  Once upon a time, the thought of losing any of my words horrified me, and I still backup like a motherfucker.  I have a friend who keeps copies of all important manuscripts.  But there’s something to be said for starting over here.

In the weeks and months to come, I’ll clutter the site with my thoughts again.  Today, however, it is lustrous in its emptiness.  There’s space to spread my arms.

We have so much baggage that we carry with us no matter where we go; there’s no point in adding extra.

****

We are foolish to think we can go to our graves with anything other than the skins we brought into this world.  Beginnings and endings are bare – it is only what we do in the middle that counts.

Thank you all for your emails and concern when my blog went missing yesterday.  It was a technical problem, one which I don’t understand. My peeps are working on it.  All of my archives may have disappeared, which sounds dramatic, but I do write everything in Word and save it, so I’ve not lost the content.  All in all, there are worse things in life.