My Literary Return to the Green Mountain State

I used to live in Vermont in another lifetime as a reporter for United Press International, covering state politics in Montpelier. Next week, after a two-decade career as a journalist, I head back to the Green Mountain State to build on my second career -- novelist.

I'll read from my novel The Opposite of Everything at Flying Pig Books, a quaint store in Shelburne, about 20 minutes south of Burlington. A homecoming, you might say. And I'll read alongside Rebecca Coffey, a Vermont humorist who's signing copies of her own comedic novel, Hysterical. Hope you'll join us there. If you think you can come, please RSVP to the Facebook event invite.

My novel, which took me thirteen years to write and nabbed a couple of awards this spring, is a comedic twist on my struggle with cancer and divorce. Interestingly, it's full of Jewish humor and I'll be reading from it in a book store with a decidedly non-Kosher name, "Flying Pig." The Yiddish word for non-Kosher is traif.

Here's the nutshell of my novel.  When Brooklyn journalist Daniel Plotnick learns he has cancer, his fortunes fall faster than you can say Ten Plagues of Egypt. His wife can't cope, his marriage ends in a showdown with police, and his father accidentally pushes him off the George Washington Bridge. Plotnick miraculously survives his terrifying plunge, and comes up with a plan to turn his life around: He’ll do the opposite of everything he did before. In the darkly comedic tradition of Philip Roth, THE OPPOSITE OF EVERYTHING was named Top Literary Novel in the Somerset Fiction Awards.

About HYSTERICAL: Imagine growing up gay in a household where your world-renowned father calls lesbianism a gateway to mental illness. And it is always, he said, caused by the father and curable by analysis. Now imagine that he analyzes you. Liberally salted with the lowbrow humor that may have saved her sanity, HYSTERICAL: Anna Freud’s Story is the fact-based, fictional autobiography of Sigmund Freud’s funniest daughter. Booklist called HYSTERICAL “an avidly researched, shrewd, and unnerving first novel” that is “complexly entertaining, sexually dramatic, [and] acidly funny.”

Book Tour Hits Stride Five Months After My Novel's Launch

My book tour hits its mid-summer stride this week, veering into Albany, N.Y. for back-to-back events, as my comedic novel The Opposite of Everything celebrates its five-month birthday.  

The first event is Tuesday, 12 noon, at the Albany Public LIbrary, sponsored by -- you guessed -- Friends of Albany Public Library. Then Wednesday, 3 p.m. at the Albany Jewish Community Center, an event sponsored by Jewish Family Services of Upstate New York. (This one requires an RSVP; just click on the link). I feel relaxed going into them, but excited on another level to see who shows up and what each venue brings to the experience. Wednesday's JCC event, for instance, will be a Q&A format conducted by my good friend and fellow author Lale Davidson, a creative writing professor, and the excerpt I read will reflect my Borscht Belt humor.

I can't wait to meet my readers. It's the part of the job I love -- interacting with people who are curious about my writing process and want to learn more about how I built this book from scratch. 

So if you're around, please do drop by!

My Membership in the Extremely Empathic Husbands Club

(Ruminator’s note: This essay is a factual retelling, more or less, of events depicted in my new novel, The Opposite of Everything)

For a brief and painful time in my life, I accomplished what every man since probably Adam has tried, and failed, to do.

I felt what my wife was feeling.

Now, I can hear all you guys, and gals, scoff. A resident of Mars cannot possibly live on Venus. Men and woman are fundamentally different creatures. There are situations, ranging from menopause to morning sickness, a man cannot pretend to know, or understand. But as a cancer survivor, my situation was special. It drew my wife and me closer than you can imagine  – closer than I felt comfortable with. It deepened my understanding of not just my wife, but what I was going through.

The year was 2000. July. Two months after getting pregnant my wife, Ingrid, began to suffer morning sickness. Around the same time, I underwent chemotherapy treatment for thyroid cancer.

The morning after my first treatment, our symptoms collided. I awoke in our Brooklyn apartment, listening to the sickening whir of my portable fanny pack pumping chemo through a tube into my chest. I turned to ask my wife Ingrid to hand me my anti-nausea pills from the night table but she, for some reason, wasn’t around.

A wave of nausea washed over me. I staggered to the bathroom, made a beeline for the toilet, and loudly hurled. Just then Ingrid teetered in, looking as sick as I felt. As if to demonstrate the correct method, she vomited too, but quietly, like the Queen of England might pour tea, leaving scarcely a droplet on the rim. She wiped her lips with a tissue, and dabbed Crest on her toothbrush.

“Daniel,” she said, after gargling, in a weary voice. “Do you know the story of Jonah? He was spit out by a whale that sneezed. Just a sneeze forced him out!”

“I’m not sure … ”

“I mean, you should be afraid you may lose something you need. Like your soul.”

“I’m not following.”

“You need to vomit softly. I don’t want to hear your inner pig. You don’t know how sick I feel.”

“But I think I do,” I said, weakly.

As if on cue, my gut spasmed again, jetting the rest of its contents into the toilet.

Ingrid shook her head in disappointment and left the bathroom. I flushed the toilet, unsure where this nightmare was leading. I saw what I had suddenly become: an involuntary member of the Extremely Empathic Husbands Club. I would have done anything to quit. The last thing I frankly needed in my delicate state was retching lessons from a pregnant woman.

It was the sort of closeness I never expected or desired when Ingrid and I decided earlier that year to make a baby. Honestly, until that decision, having a child was the last thing on my mind. Ingrid, a recent immigrant from Colombia, was busy studying for her medical boards; I was a reporter at The Associated Press in Manhattan, just promoted to economics writer in Mexico City. All set to move, we’d sublet our Brooklyn apartment, changed our health insurance to international, sold our car, booked international movers. Lastly we married so Ingrid, on a student visa, could travel freely across borders with me.

But three weeks before we were to board a plane for another life, a routine scan revealed my thyroid cancer, until then stable and confined to my neck, had spread to my lungs. In a stunning reversal, I was forced to stay stateside for chemotherapy, instead of jetting around Latin America with reporter’s pad in hand.

Then came the clincher. Since chemo can hurt sex cells, the oncologist urged us to try to conceive before my treatment. Though I worried I’d feel too sick to chase after a kid with a leaky diaper, the doctor’s insistence won out.

Ingrid and I, wouldn’t you know it, were successful right away.

At first, I was too busy reversing my life to worry about the consequences of our success. I had to change my health insurance back to domestic, pay the subletters $2,000 so they wouldn’t sue me for breach of contract, relinquish my deposit on a car in Mexico City, and shop for one in Park Slope. I settled back into my old position on AP’s international desk, editing overseas stories by reporters stationed in exotic places that reminded him, painfully, of the one I’d given up.

Then came chemo and its clash with pregnancy. At first, I didn’t know what to make of my weird bathroom encounter with Ingrid – our odd physical convergence. What does it mean to share nausea with one’s spouse? I was still processing this weird coming together when, a week later, things grew even more awkward.

That Saturday morning, I spied a clump of hair in the shower drain. Examining it closely, I determined it was mine. As I dried myself with a towel, feeling emasculated, Ingrid strode up. Rolling up the bottom of her shirt, she revealed seven short black hairs sprouting around her naval.

“See? Isn’t it terrible? And that’s not the worst. Look.” I examined her in the fluorescent light. Fresh fuzz clung to the underside of her upper neck.

“Woop-di-doo,” I said, showing her the hairball in my hand. “Thanks to chemo, I’ve got a clump.”

She drew back. “Oh David! First we share stomach problems. But now we’re becoming opposites, in a similar way.”

She touched my head as if to share her new sense of solidarity with me, but I nudged away her hand a bit too forcefully. I was frankly in no mood to celebrate. I wanted to cling onto to my last shreds of dignity, much as I wanted to cling onto my hair. “Please don’t touch. My hair’s liable to fall out if you feel it. I’m trying to hold onto what I have.”

“If your hair bothers you so much,” she said, “why not let me shave you? Lots of sexy men are bald. Bruce Willis. Agassi. No need to look like a bad lawn.”

“Sure,” I snapped, thinking of a barbershop from Village of the Damned. “But first let me shave your peach fuzz.”

Her eyes moistened with hurt.

“Don’t give me your look,” I said. “That’s what you wanted to do to me, right? Shave me? Why can’t I say the same thing to you? Fair is fair!”

She switched off the light above the mirror. “Is it fair I look like an old woman with fuzz? Is it my choice? And now you would shave me so it grows back as stubble? Like a man with—how do you call it?—five o’clock shadow?”

Ingrid stalked out of the room, leaving me to stare in the mirror. A bad man with bad hair. That’s what I look and feel like.

It wasn’t so much I didn’t sympathize with her. It’s that I had less tolerance. We went days without talking after that. I blamed her anger on pregnancy hormones. Maybe they swam inside Ingrid in tempo with the chemicals eroding my insides. Researching over the Internet I learned that “human chorionic gonadotrophin” helped nourish the fetus by diverting nutrients from the mother’s bloodstream, provoking nausea.

One night, I had a dream about lump reversal — Ingrid birthing a tumor, and a fetus surgically removed from my throat. I jerked awake, famished and nauseous, squinting into the low morning sun through the window. I left Ingrid sleeping in bed, her back to me like an icy fortress, put on a baseball cap over my patchy scalp and went outside to forage for food that wouldn’t make me gag.

My first stop was at a café on Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue, where I ordered a cappuccino, but after one sip I spilled it down a sewer grate. When I gazed up, I saw I stood in front of a bodega, overripe platanos displayed in bins. An idea came to me. I went inside and bought a loaf of Bimbo, a crunchy bread Ingrid once told me she liked. Returning to the apartment, I showed her it and uttered the only four-syllable Spanish word I knew: “Mantequilla?”

She seemed too stunned to answer; I brought a stick of butter from the kitchen and spread some across a slice for her. Shutting her eyes, she crunched down.

She blinked as if waking from a dream. “Wait till I tell my mother you’re feeding our child Colombian food!” She crunched some more. “I remember toast for breakfast every Sunday in my home. And the fruits! In Colombia, the papayas and guanabanas so ripe and sweet and large.” A tear slipped down her cheek as she ate a second slice, rambling on with nostalgia.

“You are eating,” I whispered, happily. Struck with empathy worthy of the club I belonged to, I handed her a razor. A smile lit up her face. She pulled me to the bathroom, ran the water warm, splashed it across my scalp, and sprayed foam from her leg-shaving kit into her hands. For the next twenty minutes, as she hummed a Colombian melody, she spread foam and stroked the razor across my patchy skull, tracking its bumps and lumps gentle as a mother bird preening its fledgling.

“Gracias,” she said, when she was done, admiring her handiwork. “I felt I was living with a sick person. Now you’re sexy!”

Taking a deep breath, I gazed at my reflection and touched my smooth glistening skull as if it were someone else’s – someone cool with the situation, not angry and bitter over it. I realized something about Ingrid. She needs to nurture her sick husband, because if she can, her helpless unborn child should be a cinch.

The unspeakable tension in me lifted a bit. I imagined my lump having a one-on-one conversation with hers, breaking the communications barrier. A tête-à-tête, perhaps. “Maybe,” I joked, “we can get a group rate on lumpectomies.”

She kissed my scalp. “Please don’t refer to our future child as a lump.”

I wasn’t done paying my dues, staying bald and nauseous for the duration of pregnancy. But five months later I got my money’s worth. Ingrid gave birth to a healthy eight-pound girl named Sophie, and I felt, in a sense, that I’d given birth too.

That was thirteen years ago. I’ve since begun an experimental drug treatment that keeps my cancer at bay, and the only hair loss I experience is age-related. Next spring my daughter celebrates her Bat Mitzvah. Of her parents’ rival growths Sophie is the one who survived, thanks to a most unusual time in my life – thanks to my membership in the Extremely Empathic Husbands Club.

David Kalish is author of the new comedic novel, The Opposite of Everything, a finalist in the Somerset Fiction Awards. Next stop on his book tour is Thursday, April 10, 6:30 p.m., at Saratoga Springs Public Library. Click here for more information.  

Giving Something Back to the Cancer Group that Helped Me

The Thyroid Cancer Survivors' Association, ThyCa, has helped me through some rough times during my long struggle with Medullary Thyroid Cancer, and now I'd like to give something back. As I kick off my book tour this week, starting tomorrow night at Northshire in Saratoga, I've decided to donate one-half of proceeds from my book to THYCA during special times such as Head and Neck Cancer awareness week (in April), Thyroid Cancer Awareness Month (September), and the week of ThyCa’s annual conference in October. I will keep you updated on details. Thank you to Cherry Wunderlich at ThyCa for helping me arrange my donation.

After several operations, chemotherapy, and experimental treatment, I'm grateful to the group that's provided me with a community of survivors and helped me research and find an effective treatment. THYCA has been in the back of my mind as I've written my novel, The Opposite of Everything, a comic twist on my journey through cancer, divorce, treatment, and renewal. Here's my Amazon link, and my Web site.

I can't wait to see my THYCA friends at the annual conference in Denver in October, where I'll be presenting alongside Bill McClain on the subject of Art as Therapy.

My Fifty-Second Year

My wife urges me to play “52” on the lottery. Because this is your lucky year, she says. Your first novel is being published. Your musical comedy,The Gringo Who Stole Christmas, will be performed at Proctors Theatre in December. Your blog appears twice a week on the Times UnionCommunity Blog site. You fixed the snow blower all by yourself, and kept the driveway clear without paying someone else to do it.

Not so fast, I counter. Who says anyone will buy my book beyond my family and friends? So far Amazon ranks it 200,000 among books in terms of sales. The ranking is the same as the population ofAkron, Ohio. The play is $70,000 and nearly a year away from a performance. And the Times Union, while widely read in the capital region, is surely noNew York Times.

You are your worst enemy, she says. You will sabotage the good things. I search her voice for irony. Finding none, I remind her I’m on the bottom rung of a very tall ladder. I picture gazing up at the well-worn soles of thousands of respected authors before me. Ernst Hemingway. Philip Roth. Lorrie Moore. Tennessee Williams. Plenty of writers like me have clasped the first rung and climbed no higher. Plenty of writers like me have clung to the first rung and fallen off.

My wife insists I shoot the lock off my wallet and play the lottery when the jackpot hits $52 million. But the publisher of my novel is small, I counter. I am like a vacuum cleaner salesman, going door-to-door to book stores to get them to stock my book. I remind her the play I wrote needs money and actors. My Times Unionblog appears in the Lifestyles category, near gardening tips and dating adventures, an uncertain platform for an author’s literary debut.

My wife urges me to look at the greater fabric of my life. How the first reviews of my novel on Amazon are all positive. How I wrote my new comedic musical in collaboration with Alex Torres, a well-known known musician and composer, and a reputable director and producer have climbed aboard – a step up from my last play, performed for my daughter’s sixth grade class. How auditions are being held this week to pick a cast. How the Times Union has tripled the number of people who see my posts compared to when I used Blogger.

I remind her that my book is merely one of hundreds of thousands of new books hitting the market each year. A lot of perfectly good books have fallen to the wayside. Gone up in smoke. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” I say, purposely using clichés to demean my profession.

My wife is fed up. Take out the garbage, she suggests. Do something useful instead of wallowing in self-pity. I grow defensive but hold back. Fortunately, it’s morning, and I feel positive about life. Then, like clockwork, around 11:30 a.m. the bottom drops out. By mid-afternoon I’m inconsolable. Everything turns dark. I wrack my brain for answers. Low blood sugar? Did my body digest that donut too fast? By mid-afternoon I am performing mental self-torture. My writing sucks. I have no new ideas. I’m not going anywhere. My life is a waste.

Then my brother emails me that he read my book, which he pre-ordered. He said he laughed out loud on the airplane. His wife laughed out loud at the dentist’s office. I feel better. After all, my novel is meant to be funny. I feel like jumping up and down and celebrating. I’ll hang on another day. Or at least a few more hours. I check my wallet and spy a wad of dollars. Maybe they add up to $52. Maybe there’s a lottery ticket out there with my number on it. Perhaps the jackpot’s closing in on $52 million.

Hey, you never know.

David Kalish is the author of the novel, The Opposite of Everything, which will be published in March and is available for purchase now on Amazon. His author events this spring are in Saratoga, Brooklyn, and Long Island. 

Feeding My Soul, and Others, at the Meatloaf Kitchen

Sometimes I need a refresher course in humanity. I see the ragged people walking around Saratoga Springs with their canes, sitting forever in the nook tables at the library. I categorize them in the mental file called: People whose eyes I avoid. There’s an overweight man dressed in layers with a shopping cart who spends a lot of time on a bench on Division Street. I make a wide berth. I think: Get a job.

We have a tendency to file into simple categories people who are different, whose lives we don’t understand. Each time my mind leapfrogs to those thoughts I become a little less human. On Saturday I regained a bit of humanity, revisiting a soup kitchen on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for the first time in twenty years.

I caught a bus down from Albany to New York City for a few days and showed up around 9:30 a.m. for the morning shift at the University Community Soup Kitchen, which serves up equal portions of hot food and dignity to those in need of both, in a restaurant-style setting.

I broke down some personal class barriers I’d erected in the interim I’d been away, reopening a place inside that has been under lockdown during my suburban life in upstate New York.

I poured coffee for dozens of down-and-out folks. They said thank you again and again. I chatted in basic Spanish with a nice Cuban man. I tried to talk people into less sugar in their coffee. “Four teaspoons,” several said. “Five,” one said. We laughed about it, though the word “diabetes” flashed through my brain. I handed out peanut butter and jelly slathered across slabs of bakery bread. They eagerly took them and said thank you again. We had no deep discussions, just simple friendly interactions.

I spent an hour spreading frosting and slicing cakes donated by area bakeries. I collaborated with young volunteers who were optimistic, hard-working, and eager to help. I felt if this was the future of the world, then perhaps, after all, we’re in OK shape.

The Meatloaf Kitchen, as it’s known affectionately by locals, has a special place in New York City. Guests come by the hundreds every Saturday, shuffling up in worn shoes, sleep-deprived and destitute. By foot, bicycle, and subway, from as far away as the Bronx, they make their way to the Lower East Side, and check their indignities at the door.

Sure the meatloaf’s to die for, and the coffee’s hot and fresh. You can’t beat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – or the price: nothing. But these ragged folks also come for something else. Respect. A smile from the waitress. Friendly words from fresh-faced volunteers.

This past Saturday, volunteering after twenty years away, I took some nourishment there myself.

A friend of mine who manages the place, Steve, who used to be my editor at The Associated Press when I worked there in the 1990s, had encouraged me to revisit and help out. Something inside me was ready. It was time to re-lower the barriers, I knew. To rediscover that the people I often step around are in fact human beings.

It was a needed homecoming. For a period of ten years in my life, in the 1980s and early 1990s, I served meatloaf on Saturdays to down-and-out folks here. At the time the University Community Soup Kitchen was run in the basement of a church several few blocks from its current location. After serving hundreds of people and cleaning up the place, a bunch of us would head out tired but exuberant and eat out at a nearby Italian restaurant, Frutti de Mare, or Kiev, the Ukranian joint. Then we’d play pool and drink cold beers. We’d often see the people we served wandering the streets, and exchange a friendly glance or a few words with them.

The kitchen was started in 1982 by two university professors at a time of explosive homelessness on New York City streets. They had a unique idea—to provide not just a hot meal but an oasis from cold streets. A place where the destitute could replenish their bodies and dignity. A restaurant without a cashier, where the volunteers would eat the same food they served to guests.

“We try to duplicate a restaurant situation with one exception—no cashier,” Steve said, addressing a group of two dozen volunteers Saturday, during a break in the morning shift. “If you’re walking in today and someone says the meatloaf isn’t cooked enough, we’ll take it back. We only serve food in a manner we’d want to be served in.”

Acceptance works both ways. Steve related to me a story. He was riding home early one morning on the No. 1 train, on the Upper West Side, far from the soup kitchen.  “It was about 1 a.m. and I was tired and I’d had a few drinks so I was kind of nodding off, when I saw a group of shady looking men get on the train.  I was worried at first, and started to think whether I should get out at the next stop.  But, in a couple of seconds I recognized them as members of a Doo-Wop group who were regular soup kitchen customers, and who even sang for us at our annual volunteer appreciation party a couple of years earlier.”

They were preparing to sing when they noticed Steve. The leader stood up and announced to everyone in the car,  “Hi everybody, we’re going to sing for you in a minute, but first I want to introduce Steve, here, who runs the Meatloaf Kitchen downtown, where you can get a great hot meal every Saturday.  We’d just like to say thanks to Steve and all the volunteers at the kitchen and sing this song for them.”

They launched into an old favorite from the 60s.  It left Steve both embarrassed and happy. “I saw that we really do make a difference in people’s lives, and they remember us for it.”

As for the other subway passengers, well, they just looked down of course, and tried not to be noticed, just like any other time.  “I didn’t care.  It made my night,” Steve said.

In addition to working at the soup kitchen, David Kalish is the author of the novel, The Opposite of Everything, which will be published in March and is available for purchase now on Kindle. His author events this spring are in Saratoga, Brooklyn, and Long Island. 

Debunking the Reality of My Fiction

My new novel is the opposite
in many respects of my life
on which it's partly based

As my novel The Opposite of Everything marches toward publication – it hits bookstores on March 11, and became available to Kindle users this week — I’d like to get a couple things off my chest.

I never wore a nose ring or pierced my skin for decorative purposes.

I never went Gothic.

My father never pushed me off a bridge, even accidentally.

My mother does not speak in a Yiddish accent and embraces my wife’s Hispanic culture.

My wife and I never tried to conceive a baby at my father’s home with his help.

My father supported me during my health and marital problems, and showed up for my police showdown with my first wife – the opposite, in some ways, of how the father character is depicted in my novel.

At my second wedding, I never canceled the caterers, never corralled guests to help cook, and never replaced the priest with Buddhist monks.

I hate heavy metal music.

I could go on with this list for a long time. Because it turns out that my novel, The Opposite of Everything, is the opposite in many respects of my life on which it’s partly based.

All fiction writers draw from real-life experiences for material, some more than others. But novelists with a rich past are in a particular bind.  Like me. Back twenty years ago, in one week flat, I learned I had cancer and required surgery to remove my thyroid, lymph nodes, and a sliver of trachea. As all this was happening, my first marriage fell apart.

Writing about one’s own troubles can be overwhelming. You’re forced to revisit all the ways life hurt you and those around you. Lots of writers do it, of course – bookshelves and Amazon are crammed with tear-extracting cancer memoirs. But my own temperament is different. When I first sat down to write, I couldn’t stomach reading back my own words. The words “predictable” and “melodramatic” sprang to mind. Too many sentences sounded sappy. My characters felt like stick figures manufactured to highlight milestones on my journey.

My life felt too hot to handle. So I distanced myself from it. I told the story in third-person. I replaced real names with offbeat ones (“I” became Daniel Plotnick).  I searched for humor in tragedy, stretched truths for dramatic effect, and made characters do crazy things their real-life counterparts would never consider.

In reality, for instance, my first wife had a predictably strong reaction to my diagnosis of cancer. With no treatment on the horizon, she supported me in her own way. One thing she did was buy several pounds of green tea, touting the benefits of anti-oxidants to keep me healthy. For my novel, I amped up her reaction. She shops in a panic at the health food store. Bursts through the door laden with groceries. “Handfuls of dark green leaves. Flax. Wheatgrass. A vial of primrose elixir. Pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, dried pomegranate. The kitchen filled up with the ripe odor of vegetables and nuts and fruit on the verge of turning. Plotnick gazed back down at the crossword puzzle to divert his attention from the hub-bub, but a large Kale leaf now blocked the Across clues.”

In reality, my first wife gained some weight amid our craziness. But for the novel, the wife character gains a lot. As a writer, I upped the ante. Troubled by his wife’s weight gain, Plotnick goes Gothic. In a climactic scene, he walks drunkenly through the door dressed in his black duds and stumbles across her as she binges on premium ice cream.

Of course, I face the danger that readers will see more in my book than actually’s there. Here’s the question that strikes fear in my heart – and in the hearts of all novelists mining their personal past: Nice book, but why did you make me look so bad?

So when the question came to me last year from someone I won’t name, my gut felt sliced open like a watermelon. But I’m just doing my job as a fiction writer, I thought.

So consider this blog post my effort to make a point of clarity. To pre-emptively answer any questions that might come up. Toward that end, I hereby reprint the first paragraph of my Acknowledgment from my novel:

 “This book is a work of fiction, pure and simple. As fiction authors do, I drew for material from my own experience, and went to town with it. My overriding goal was to create a fully realized story, rich with drama, comedy, and a narrative arc. Toward that end, the characters I invented to populate my story are precisely that – invented. Any perceived resemblances to real people are coincidental to my goals as a novelist.”

That said, I will always mine my past for material. Currently working on a second novel, and a musical comedy The Gringo Who Stole Christmas, which will be performed at Proctors in December, I stretch things for impact. I look to situations where comedy reveals painful truths about dying, broken hearts, and busted dreams. I free myself from the shackles of facts. As long as I am able, I’ll write my way out of this pickle I’m in.

David Kalish is the author of the novel, The Opposite of Everything, which will be published in March and is available for purchase now on Kindle. 

Of Crabgrass, and Letting Go

As I stare out the window at our frozen backyard, bracing for yet more white stuff to fall, I think of what lies beneath. I think of our patchy lawn. Crabgrass, sleeping in seed.

For now it remains buried under layers of snow. But one day soon, spring will come. It always does. And the crabgrass will spread across our half acre of lawn like a pale dishrag, massing against our house. Its unruly blades will poke up as if Mother Earth were giving me many middle fingers.

Because I’ve picked my battles in life. And they don’t include my lawn.

Once again, I will let go. A little more this time. A little more deeply.

At the age of 52, I’m letting go.

Of my precocious daughter, who turns thirteen on Sunday and holds her Bat Mitzvah in May. Of my novel, which will be published next month after I coddled it for thirteen years.

Of the lawn, which is already 90 percent crabgrass.

I remember the stages I passed through to get to this point. How it felt for me giving up the idea our grass should look like a golf course.
Growing up on Long Island, I learned weeds are bad — to be controlled, pulled up, and generally reviled. A melancholy Billy Joel sang about his suburban dad who “never lets the crabgrass grow too high.” So when my wife and daughter and I moved upstate in 2003 to our four-bedroom house on a half-acre, one of my first calls was to a lawn care company.

But the applications of herbicide, announced in cautionary yellow flags stuck in my lawn, made me nervous. As our puppy and daughter played on the lawn that first summer, I worried about liver cancer. I imagined weed poison stunting my daughter’s growth. The second season I told the lawn company to skip some treatments. Seizing the opportunity, crabgrass sprouted around the edges of our property. The next season I thought of my own slow-growing cancer, which I’ve battled for many years. I fretted over poisoning the water and earth, for the sake of aesthetics. Something snapped in me. I cancelled the lawn care company. The hell with the neighbors. The crabgrass was ecstatic.

At first I saw the spreading patch-quilt as a blemish on my reputation. I figured my neighbors were judging me. I’d return to my house under cover of darkness, when the lawn was invisible, like a criminal returning to his lair. I looked forward to fall and winter, when the crabgrass slept. I particularly liked snowstorms which blanketed everything under a carpet of sameness.

But time, and crabgrass, marches on. Next summer, I know, it will again stubbornly shimmer across our lawn, a jade-green testament to what happens when you let go. Oh sure, some patches of Kentucky Bluegrass will poke through here and there, ghosts of an old life, reminders I was once locked in battle for control of my lawn.

I’m reminded of other areas in life. I think of my daughter, my impulse to try to control what she does and where she goes. I tell her she must practice cello and piano before her playdate. I forbid her from eating a marshmallow fifteen minutes before dinner. She reminds me she excels at music and always cleans her plate. Sometimes I flash back to her Jewish mikvah for comfort.

She was six months old, when the rabbi told me I had to submerge her in the ritualistic pool for three seconds. I had to let her go. Like God commanded Adam and Eve to go from the Garden of Eden. Like Moses beseeched Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” I held her tiny body against my bony chest. I dropped her. She gazed up at me through the water with pale eyes. Her tiny arms flailed, seeming to wave goodbye. By some automatic reflex, my hand jerked and scooped her back up and clamped her to my chest. Through the din of her screams, the rabbi checked his stopwatch and smiled sadly, shaking his head that not enough time had passed. By the third try, though, I finally got it right. My daughter was Jewish.

Letting go of my novel, which I started when my health was in crisis, was especially hard. I could have tended to it until the day I died. But when a publisher offered me a contract last year, I gave up the notion of perfection to someone who was not me. When I stand up before Northshire Bookstore at 7 p.m. on March 20, presenting my novel to a crowd, I will release it to the public, signing it away.

I’ve learned that change comes in patches. First crabgrass appears along the edges of driveway and on lawn fronting the street, in the sunniest parts of the lawn. We try to fight it with herbicide.

But when the snow finally melts, the crabgrass will surely win. And in a backward sort of way, so will I.

David Kalish is the author of the novel, The Opposite of Everything, which will be published in March. His author events this spring are in Saratoga, Brooklyn, and Long Island. Click here for more information.

Four Decades Later, Finding What I Lost on Long Island

My sister and our Weimaraner, circa 1973

I’m not exactly sure when I forgave my parents for moving to East Meadow, Long Island. The year was 1971; antiwar protests raged across America, but all I knew, at the age of nine, was I missed my friends from Brooklyn. Then our dog went missing. One day Rusty, a beagle — the one friend I was allowed to bring from Brooklyn – nudged open the front door with his nose and ran away, never to return. Presumably, I thought, back to Brooklyn.

Or maybe, if he was lucky, he’d find the meadow I couldn’t find in East Meadow—a meadow located east of nowhere in particular. Looking around, all I saw were detached houses flanking a maze of empty side streets. My sole consolation for getting yanked from my urban life – where you could pick up a football game just by stepping outside – had been the thought of bounding across a grassy field filled with snakes and salamanders. But that wasn’t happening.

One evening a neighbor, who’d heard of our loss, brought a stray dog to our house. He was a sleek silvery Weimaraner with a threatening bark that had been hanging out in alleys, scaring the neighborhood kids. My mother had a thing for strays, put him in the backyard, and asked me if I wanted to take on the responsibility. That night, I gazed into the dog’s clear blue eyes. I named Silver under a moon that color, figuring what the heck.

Muscular and noble, Silver won me friends. He was like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of dogs. One day a neighbor, Andy, rode up on his bicycle and seemed impressed by Silver’s muscles as I walked him around the block. We took Silver and Andy’s dog, a German Shepherd, to a large sump near my house, letting them romp unleashed.

One time after a snowstorm Andy and I tied a rope from Silver’s collar to my Flexible Flyer sled at the snowy bottom of the sump. I sat on the sled and grasped Silver’s leash while Andy called the dog from afar. The dog tugged fiercely, got the sled gliding fast. I braced myself against the cold wind, the world blurring past, laughing uncontrollably.

Though I was mostly oblivious to current events in 1971— Charles Manson sentenced to death, three million people killed in what was then East Pakistan – I began to ask myself: where was the world I thought I knew? How would I make my way in this strange new place? Like the rest of America, I was searching for something. I gradually discovered an answer. A hidden side to East Meadow. Neither concrete nor country, but rather somewhere satisfyingly in between. Because I had two feet, a banana-seat bicycle, and a maze of streets to get lost in — the perfect neighborhood for reckless riding. By the time I graduated to a Nishiki ten-speed, tires spitting dirt, my diploma was written all over me: one well-chipped front tooth, a scarred chin that had seen more stitches than I had bike spokes, and several pretzeled bicycle rims.

At some point, I forgave my parents for moving to East Meadow. It was partly the dogs, partly the bikes, partly the fact that parents brought home my newborn sister Shari, giving me a little friend to babysit and bond with. Possibilities opened up along East Meadow’s less traveled roads. Summers, I kept lazy pace with her tottering steps as we walked the mile down the hot tar of Powers Avenue to Veterans Memorial Park on Prospect Avenue. There, in the suspiciously warm shallows of the kiddie pool, I became co-captain of her Fisher-Price houseboat, connecting with her through play.

Pedaling the streets with fellow bicyclists, we ventured into forbidden places. Through a hole cut in a fence, we’d enter the strip of woods insulating the expansive split levels of East Meadow’s western border from Meadowbrook Parkway.  We’d corral our bicycles by a near-dead brook. The water weakly murmured, but in our imaginations we thought we heard rushing rapids in the whoosh of parkway cars.

When my friends and I got our drivers’ licenses, the era of bicycle riding came to an end, signaling an end to a carefree era, of pointing our handlebars toward no place in particular. In 1979, I graduated from East Meadow High School and went away to SUNY-Binghamton. After that I returned to visit, yet drifted from the places and people that connected me to Long Island.

But while I’ve lived in several places since—Brooklyn, Vermont, and upstate New York—none gives me pause like East Meadow. I wouldn’t call what I feel nostalgia, because I often felt lonely growing up there. Yet I’m tugged back to the feeling of discovery. Back then, I tried everything. Even today, I try to relive that feeling of discovery, using East Meadow as a benchmark.

Mornings, I drive to a forest near my upstate New York house and wander the paths with my two small dogs, unleashed, like my thoughts. We go off path and crunch through undisturbed snow. Here, the low sun cuts through the bare trees, splashing paint balls across the trunks. Squirrels scurry up tall pines. Mourning doves coo. Along this path, as before, dawn arrives cold and sweet.

David Kalish is the author of the novel, The Opposite of Everything, which will be published in March. His author events this spring are in Saratoga, Brooklyn, and Long Island. Click here for more information.

Honey, I Changed the Locks

(Ruminator’s note:  Part of an occasional series, this essay is a factual retelling of events depicted in my upcoming novel)

 Of everything that’s happened to me in life, perhaps nothing upset my moral compass more than when I changed the locks on my first wife. Even now, thinking back to 1994, it’s tough to believe I did it. Or that it happened at all.

And yet the memory remains vivid, the scene clear as day. It’s late autumn. Evening. I pace the living room of our fourth-floor Brooklyn apartment, sweat dampening my shirt. My father sits on the sofa, watching me from beneath his head of gray hair. The shiny new lock I had installed earlier that day stares out from the front door like an all-seeing, guilt-invoking eye.

“Make the damn phone call already,” says my father, who I’ve asked over for psychological, and possibly physical support. “Just get it over with.”

I phone my wife at her mother’s, where she’s eating dinner. I tell her, in my best diplomatic voice, I’ve changed the locks on her. She could come by at a mutually convenient date to pick up her stuff.

“You changed the effing locks?” she says.

After she slams down the phone, my father asks how it went. I don’t answer, just stare out the window at the street four stories below. At the tiny cars streaking past.

It’s been a long year for me – getting diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the same time my marriage went south. As the wound from my neck surgery healed, a wound in our relationship opened up. “It’s like a part of me is dying,” she told me after learning my cancer was incurable. Instead of touching me in a good way, her declaration of empathy seemed to me a sign of weakness. I felt less patient with things that only half-worked. I didn’t have time for half-ass anymore; I didn’t have the luxury of breaking up years down the road. She spent more time at her mother’s; I’d taken to sleeping on the living room sofa. But she’d refused to separate.

Fifteen minutes after my wife slams down the phone, my father and I hear a car squeal up. Red lights flash across the window. We simultaneously gaze down through the glass panes at the street below. Two cops step out of a squad car. My wife and mother-in-law emerge from the back of the squad car. Thinking fast, I run over to the phone and call my lawyer, who lives nearby, and tell him to come over ASAP.

After all, it was his idea. Meeting him several weeks earlier, I told him the stress of living with my wife was compromising my immune system. She’d refused to consider separation. The lawyer laid out a method he’d honed with numerous clients. He drew up a letter giving her a month to vacate the apartment. Since I’d bought the place before the marriage, which presumably was of short duration, I legally owned it and could do with it as I wished. But that night she tore up the letter in front of me. So my lawyer went to Plan B.

At first I argued against it. Honestly, locking her out felt extreme. Wrong. Went against what I’d been taught about marriage. My first wife and I had

A Ketubah

signed a Ketubah before witnesses, a Jewish document declaring I’d take care of her through thick and thin. Still, my heart needed immediate action, and I knew she could just stay at her mother’s. If I thought too much I might chicken out, and I couldn’t endure another day of living with a woman who felt as if part of her were dying. So I OK’d Plan B.

The downstairs doorbell sounds. I buzz the four of them in and there are the thumps of many shoes ascending four flights of stairs, loudening.

Twisting the new deadbolt, I open the door.

A pair of white cops stare back at me like disapproving bookends, on either side of a steaming mad mother-daughter team. My father stands shoulder-to-shoulder with me. For a long awkward moment the six of us linger in the doorway getting the feel of things. My heart hammers against my chest. If Hannibal could sneak forty elephants and 50,000 men across the Alps in three weeks flat to defeat the Romans, I strain to reassure myself, maybe I could do the Brooklyn version.

“Ahem!” the bigger cop says, gaze darting between my father and me. “Which one of you gents is Mr. Kalish?”

“We both are,” my father says, supportively.

“He’s the one,” my wife says.

“I see. Mr. Kalish, did you change the locks on your wife?”

“I guess so.”

“Did you or did you not?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Sir, you can’t lock your wife out of the marital abode. You got to give her what, forty days notice?”

“Thirty,” the shorter cop corrects.

Something hard and small sinks in me. My brain pulses with a nightmare vision of living with a seriously scorned woman, stress fueling my cancer.

But just then the door buzzer sounds, like the cavalry. I run down four flights of stairs and greet my lawyer at the downstairs door.

Now, let me tell you about my lawyer. Back then he’s in his seventies, overweight, with bad knees. He meditates on the four flights of stairs. “You got an elevator here?” he asks.  

I shake my head; he grunts. Lifting one foot, he places it on the first step. He ascends like a gimpy sloth. The third step grows into the fourth. Fifth into sixth. Finally he reaches the top, gasping, and strides over to the cops in the hallway.

“I’m David’s lawyer,” he declares. “How can I help you?”

The cops reiterate I don’t have the right to lock my wife out of the apartment because “she’s still his wife.” But my lawyer cites legal code to the contrary, and hands them a document signed by a family court judge. I can’t help but admire my lawyer in that moment: the cops gaze longingly down the flights of stairs, as if dreading a Kathmandu-sized mountain of paperwork piling up on their desks into the wee hours.

“What’s going on here?” my mother-in-law demands.

The policemen scratch their hats; the taller clears his throat. “Ahem! Why don’t you grab what you need for now, Mrs. Kalish? Pillow, underwear, that sort of thing. Blender. You can arrange to pick up the rest of your stuff at a later date.”

“There’s nothing I even want,” my wife says in a shaky voice. Her mother reddens, facing me. “We’ll see you in court, you son of a bitch!”

“You don’t talk to my client,” my lawyer retorts. “You talk to me!”

“We’ll see about that!” The cops’ eyes dart between my lawyer and my mother-in-law. There’s nothing more to say. My soon-to-be ex and her mother stomp down the stairs, followed by the cops.

“Congratulations,” my lawyer tells me. “You have your place back. Your peace of mind.”

I shake hands with him and my father, thanking them both, dreading my lawyer’s bill. Sure, I have my place back. But when they leave me alone in my newly bachelor apartment, it feels eerily empty, as do I.

I’m alone, truly. When my heart finally stops racing, I feel guilty about the lockout. How could I do that to my wife? I reassure myself she’ll stay at her mother’s place until she finds her own. But a few weeks later, a judge rules that I pay my wife $10,000 to compensate for the loss of her home, wiping away my last traces of survivor’s guilt.

Memory is funny. Just when you think it fits into a nice pattern – defining who you are today — you come across a part that doesn’t fit. Who you are today doesn’t seem like the same person who did that thing.

It’s as if I’m writing about someone else. And in fact, I did. For my novel, I changed the names, and twisted reality, to distance myself from the hard truth. Because sometimes we look back and think,Wow, did I really do that? Must have been a twin brother.

Yes, I actually went through those things. But so did my twin brother.

David Kalish is the author of the novel, The Opposite of Everything, which will be published in March. Click here for info on his upcoming book tour.