To a startling and terrifying extent, I think about home invasions. I think about deer turning mean and deadly. I think about being run down by a bike, a car, a bus, a train. I fear running over the Holocaust survivor who jogs by my house every morning at 5:20. I fear squirrels when they stop chewing and take you in their sights. I fear people have died when they are late to meet me. Or that when they show, I won’t recognize them. I fear that a bitchy email goes astray. I fear that people can read my mind. I fear my mind and the sink holes it seeks. I fear that I will always live in this body or never appreciate it. That I will fall out of a helicopter. That I will be decapitated by her blades. That too many people will want to speak at my funeral and it will go on too long and that is all that anyone will remember instead of all the wonderful poems and songs and tributes to a person who lined her casket with bad jokes and Playbills from every show she’s ever seen.
What do you fear?
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Dear Betsy,
I never mind coming home. I’m a person for whom travel presents a great many challenges (too many and unpleasant to elaborate here). What I love is coming home and returning to my beloved rituals. Especially opening mail, separating the wheat from the chaff, the catalogues, the invitations to join AARP, the circulars from Best Buy. There was a royalty check, a check from giving a talk to graduate students at an esteemed university, just enough to keep me going in the fantasy of This Is Your Life as a writer/sock puppet. I am highly disciplined and will not crack my People until I get my fat ass back to the gym. I scan the contents of The New Yorker like a doctor reviewing a medical chart, interested and distracted at once. I put bills here. I put my husband’s bills there. I have two letters from a friend from graduate school. THese I also put aside for later, only to savor.
The high holy days. As a teenager, it used to mean getting stoned outside the synagogue behind the playground named for kids who died. Why did I become irreverent instead of reverent. Why did I hate everything and everyone? Today in temple, I watched an older man rub his wife’s shoulders, then knead her neck, then run his hands up and down her back. The first knuckle on his index finger was crooked and rigid with arthritis; soon his whole hand would be gnarled like tree roots. I prayed he would stop when I noticed another man rubbing his wife’s back a few rows up. What the fuck is this, I wondered, an epidemic? Then I said kaddish for my father and for my sister, and then for some reason Lucy Grealy, who came into my thoughts unbidden. Then I went to a break the fast party and a woman came up to me and said, “You wrote that book. The fat book. You’re not that fat.”
It’s starting. THe quest for the perfect three or four books to bring on a little vacation next week. So far, I’m thinking about the Hunger Games (you might have heard of it), Salvage THe Bones by Jessamyn Ward (won the National Book Award) and one or two more. Please suggest just one book. If I take your suggestion, I will send you three books. Does that sound like a good deal?
Guys: CHeck this out. I finished watching the last episode of Breaking Bad Season Four and started googling myself and by that I mean surfing the web. I found a little movie some guy called Brandon made of Food and Loathing. It mocks all the most important scenes and an Asian teenager plays me, Betsy Lerner. I just want to say that this kid really made my day. This sort of mockery is what it’s all about. I deserve it. I love it. I eat my own vomit. If you feel like having a laugh, at my expense, check it out. I gotta go to St. Dunkins and buy a box of munchkins. 
Plagiarism is in the air. 
Betsy Lerner 