Three years ago my father remarried, had a baby and moved to the suburbs.  He went domestic in a way only my father could.  He is from Israel; his wife is from Poland; and the suburbs previously mentioned are Harrow, right outside of London.  She has a brilliantly Goth 16 year old daughter from a previous marriage, he has three cynical Los Angelian children (including me), and the baby, as of now, speaks only Polish with a slightly British accent.  Last weekend I went to London for my birthday.  On my last night there, his wife and her daughter baked me, of all things, an apple pie.  We all sat at the table and I stared out the window past my post-nuclear family to their white picket fence as Don McLean played in my head. Bye Bye Ms. American Pie.  The pie was fantastic.

Sometimes, learning to cook is the best thing a child can do

In our house, the first smell of Thanksgiving was not turkey roasting or pumpkin pie but the bleach-sweet steam of my mother ironing the good tablecloth. I remember it from a time when I was small enough to creep unnoticed beneath the ironing board while she painstakingly transformed an undistinguished hump of wrinkled linen into a curtain of shimmering white. With a curt flick of her wrist, my mother sprinkled each length with water from a yellow, plastic bottle designed for this purpose, and then the iron would sizzle ...

I am not a social butterfly.  I can dress, dazzle, chat, and spin with the best of them, but by nature, I am a loner; it’s who I am and I embrace that label.  I relish my solo evenings.

I work, I write, I visit E-bay checking in on the gold and white pottery auctions, tearing pages from magazines, cataloguing the furniture I will buy in my next life. I eat pasta doused with weird combinations of toppings I dig out of the pantry and eat it in front of the TV watching back-to-back episodes of any Law and Orders I have tivoed. I like to hang alone, finding peace in the quiet, finding my voice in the empty air of my house. Even after J-date, after tapas and wine and a dance that never slowed and still hasn’t with the man I now love, I still longed for time away. Even when everything became more entertaining with him there, and the funny things I saw and did had weight because I finally had someone to share them with, I needed my time alone. While the kisses on the Ferris wheel, the late night phone calls from LA to Idaho, the electricity when we touched excited me and made me happy, I still needed to lack, to be without. 

Waiting for my latte at a coffeshop at 16th and Capp one day, I was stunned by a particular poster on the wall - a beautiful woodcut illustrating the declining amount of government funds put towards affordable housing. I demanded to know where it came from, and was directed to the building next door, to the headquarters of WRAP, a wonderful non profit dedicated "to exposing and eliminating the root causes of civil and human rights abuses of people experiencing poverty and homelessness in our communities."

A year later, and I am a WRAP artist too! Check them out (see if you can find the poster I was talking about), and check me out on their site!

Nili Yosha