Alphabet Soup Newsletter

Being Jewish is lots of things: being Jewish is bat-mitzvah, briss and kaddish. Being Jewish is proudly reminding everyone that Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Sigmund Freud, Elie Wiesel, Henry Kissinger, Jesus Christ and even Sammy Davis Jr. are your distant relatives. Being Jewish is reciting the

To mark the new year, an old story from the innocent days when all our fears could be crammed into a single drop. My girlfriend says someone in America invented a medicine against feeling alone. She heard about it yesterday on Nightline, and now she’s sending a special delivery letter to her sister to ask her to mail her a crate of it. On Nightline they said that all the retail chains on the East Coast were selling it already and that in New York it was a big hit.

Of all the stories I’ve written, “Pride and Joy” was probably my parents’ favorite one. The fact that it’s a story about a family suffering from an incurable disease didn’t stop them from reading it and retelling it to other people, as if it were the most cheerful story in the world. This week, to mark the anniversary of my mother’s death, I thought it would be a good time to share this sad story that always made her smile.

Two different people told me two different stories this past week. The first was a man who went out to walk his dog. The dog did his business on the sidewalk, and the man realized he’d forgotten to bring waste bags. He looked around and found nothing he could use to clean up, so he decided to pretend he was lost in thought and just keep walking.

My mother always told me: in tough times, ask yourself not just what you need, but what you want. The world will keep reminding you what you need, but what you want? If you don’t ask, no one will. As long as my mother was alive, I rarely had to ask, because she asked all the time, without words, even when I was on a different continent. She asked by simply existing, and when she died, I stopped asking completely, and shortly after that, my spine stopped asking and I ended up with a herniated disc.

A person should have one friend to trust, one animal to talk to when he feels alone, one sidewalk bench to sit on when she gets tired, and one tree to stare at and remember that he’s a part of something, something larger, something that existed here long before him and will continue to sprout green leaves long after he’s gone. My one tree was the Poincianathat I could see from the balcony of the apartment that’s been my home for thirty-three years.

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My best friend has a new friend, which is exciting because at our age you rarely make new friends. I met my best friend when we were three. It was love at first sight. The appliance repairman got stuck without a babysitter that afternoon, and so he brought his little stepson with him. While he hooked up our brand new black-and-white TV to the rooftop antenna, my new best friend and I fought valiantly against a giant, evil skull—a sticker that my big brother had stuck on our wardrobe.

Christopher, a cat I’ve just met At my very first soccer practice with the local youth team, the young and enthusiastic coach explained to us that there are two kinds of players in the world: the ones who want to enjoy the game, and the ones who want to win it. And while the first kind charge after the ball like a bunch of jackasses, the second kind examine the various options available to them and choose the most effective one, the one that’ll get them on the scoreboard.

Sometimes a story starts with a dream. The dream that birthed this story was at least as strange at the story itself. In the dream, I’m hiding in a treetop watching my wife, Shira, who is working as an attendant at an improvised gas station.