But halfway between bakery and home, my hand dove into the paper bag, plucked out its contents, and – long before a.m. was over – I devoured my p.m. snack in two impulsive bites.

I’d ingested several hundred calories so quickly, in fact, that my tasted buds had no chance to kick in. When I realized this I tried, futilely, to recover the pleasurable sensations of butter, sugar, chocolate and nuts that I was sure my lips, tongue and throat must have felt, if fleetingly.

I admit it: I’m a gobbler. Naming my problem is, I figure, the first step toward curing it. I’m a food lover who doesn’t take time to savor before swallowing. A snacker who chomps down between-meal treats fast, often, and mindlessly.

I gobble while walking. I gobble while driving in traffic. I gobble while skimming the newspaper. I’m gobbling now: as I type these words, cookie crumbs drop down between the “b” and “n” keys, as if to say that gobblers are born that way.

But they aren’t. Genetics can’t explain gobbling, though childhood experience may. A fellow gobbler says he wolfs down food because he grew up in a family where  food was scarce and you had to eat fast to get a shot at seconds. Dinnertime dynamics at my house were middle class but equally bad-habit forming. My mother was a mediocre cook who covered up by engaging us in scintillating conversation. Dinner, she made clear, was for swapping opinions, not for paying attention to what’s on our plate. We’d heedlessly gulp down her bland casseroles, then linger over our more satisfying exchanges of ideas.

These days, 21^st century multi-tasking feeds the gobbling habit, as well. We’re all on the run, and have gotten into the habit of doing as many things at once as possible, which can be dangerous. Once, at a party where I tried to talk and eat at the same time, a tortilla chip that I hadn’t taken the time to chew, lodged in my throat and cut off my breath, as well as the conversation. My face turned red and then blue. Happily, a Heimlich Maneuver-trained partygoer embraced me from behind and jerked both fists up under my ribs. The chip abandoned its niche. The party-goers gaped. That should have cured me, especially after a repeat close call a year later, but whatever compels me was stronger than any near death experience.

A friend recommended the silent eating cure: I should go to her meditation retreat where you eat at refectory benches along with 100 others who eat in silence, focussing on the act of tasting, chewing and swallowing, bite by bite.

No thanks. But the idea reminded me of times when I’ve given food my full attention. On hiking trips, when I’d reach a mountain summit, exhausted and weak, I’d pull from my pack whatever simple stuff I’d packed: peanut butter, crackers, cheese, raisins, apple. And I’d take my time tasting, chewing and swallowing, bite by slow bite. Apples eaten atop mountains, I remember, tasted stunningly juicy, crisp, and sweet.

So tonight I’ll give simply stuff a try. I find only ordinary fare in the fridge: leftover pasta and spinach. I heat up my simply meal, tossed with shallots, sprinkled with fresh-grated parmesan.

By habit, I prop a compelling book in front of my plate while I sit down to eat, and at the same time semi-listen to NPR report a gripping story set in a far-off land. I’m oblivious to my first bites of my evening meal.

And then I realize that the food, the radio, and the book: they’re all good stuff, but too much at once. I turn off the gripping radio report. I close my compelling book. I look down at my plate. I notice the lovely haphazard arrangement of pasta. I touch my lips to a single tortellini and feel it silkiness. I bite into a tangy shallot. I notice a spinach leaf’s earthy sharpness.  I inhale the aroma of warm olive oil, the scent from a sprinkling of nutmeg. My tongue enjoys each scratchy grain of parmesan, each sharp chunk of black pepper.

By the time I’m ready for that favorite butter walnut chocolate confection that I’d managed to forgo all day in order to save for dessert, I no longer want it.

My 4 best books:

Try to Remember, by Iris Gomez (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group, 2010). This novel “grabbed” me from the very beginning: I read it straight through. The main character is a Columbian immigrant girl whose father loses jobs, obsessively composes demand letters and forces his daughter to type them, has violent and paranoid rages. The girl’s mother, won’t admit the problem or let the kids talk about it outside immediate family, but resorts to giving the father Dramamine, calling it vitamins, to calm him down. Meanwhile, the mother and kids take jobs that they hide from the “proud” father so they won’t lose their home. The author is an immigration lawyer and must be aware of all the family problems that immigrants may hide from agencies that are supposed to help them.

Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb, by David Kushner, (Walker, 2009). This non-fiction book describes how the Levitt brothers built housing “affordable for all” and yet excluded Black families, proclaiming, “I’m not prejudiced: I couldn’t be – I’m Jewish – but I can’t accept blacks because I couldn’t get white customers.” One Jewish (and Communist) family does help the first Black family buy into the whites-only suburban development, and endure the violence and  harassment that followed, fomented by racist neighbors and the KKK. I can would not deign to call myself an “anti-racist activist” after seeing what these two determined, principled and ground-breaking families went through.

Persian Girls by Nahid Rachlin (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006). A memoir by an Iranian woman who as an infant was given to her aunt, who’d had no children because of her husband’s infertility, which couldn’t be acknowledged — she was made to blame. After 9 years, Nahid’s father grabs her to take her back to “real” mother (who’d been married at 9, bore 10 kids, two of whom had died, and didn’t want or like Nahid. As a teen, Nahid read American and European books that could get family arrested; she also resisted marriage, begging her father to let her study in America. He finally relents, and she goes to the U.S., where she attends a St. Louis “finishing school” college, but suffers from knowing little English and making few friends. Her father expects her to return to Iran to marry but she sends him a letter, saying she’s staying to go to graduate school. She supports herself, barely, with odd jobs and a scholarship, manages to become writer, and marries a Jewish man, Back home, her sisters have unhappy marriages and give up their passions for theater, true love, or children. By middle age, Nahid accepts her family, in part because of secrets she discovers about her mother, and herself.

To Awake My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance, by Peter P. Hinks (Pennsylvania State, 1997/2000). A dense history/biography of a fascinating man: a free Black man who galvanized resistance to slavery with a 1829 tract calling on free and enslaved Blacks to demand an immediate end to slavery. He distributed his Appeal in the South via Black seamen, and deeply influenced Douglass, Garrison, and Maria Stewart. But he’s been “disappeared” from history. A Community Change Inc committee of Boston legislators and historians is trying to bring him back into prominence. I’d started reading this book before but had flagged – I soldiered on during my reading weekend and was riveted by the last 2 chapters (which he should have put first)

Here are Jon’s 4 best books: clearly, he’s more intellectual than I am!

Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920).  Wharton’s novel is about the upper classes in NYC and how a maybe “disreputable” and free-spirited relative comes to town, heats up a man who is engaged to someone else, and roils up the members of this class.  Tragic, as the man begins to see outside the bounds of his culture, but the relationship is thwarted.

Morris Bishop’s Petrarch and His World (1963).  A life of Petrarch with many extended quotations from his work and poems.  Bishop presents him as the forerunner of modernity, the Renaissance, precursor of Shakespeare’s poetry, breaking out of the Middle Ages.  The “first”poet laureate of Rome after a long hiatus. Lots of characters — Boccaccio, Chaucer, the tyrants Luchino Visconti, La Scala.  Also, continuous war, particularly in Italy, and the corruption of the popes, etc. Connections for me were Fontaine de Vaucluse, Avignon, Mont Ventoux, Naples, etc.

By the Waters of Manhattan  by Charles Reznikff. Autobiographical novel about  Russian Jewish immigrants in NYC, the first half is in Russia.  Much of the second half is about the son of one of the immigrants who opens a cool bookstore.

Jumpha Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth.  Read less than half but liked the complicated parent/child relationships that were both particular to Indian immigrants but also common to people of all cultures.

Anna Gavalda, L’Echappee Belle about sisters squabbling with their sister-in-law together (2001).

His The People’s History of the United States, published in 1980, documents grassroots struggles for economic and racial justice, democracy, free speech, led by the people whom textbooks ordinarily describe as either mere victims or as dangerous agitators: women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. His 1994 memoir You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train chronicles his experience as a World War II Air Force bombardier, an historian, a Civil Rights and anti-war activist. Zinn spoke at our National Writers Union annual book party in 2005, focussing on the increasing challenges for writers in the face of wartime censorship, and encouraging writers to send 700-word op-ed pieces for the Progressive Media Project, which distributes them to publications around the country. As he said in his 1993 book, Failure to Quit, “When one voice speaks out against the conventional wisdom and is recognized as speaking truth, people are drawn out of their previous silence.”

He was both fierce and funny – and people listened and were moved to action. Howard would get up in front of an audience of 100 or 1000 or 100,000 with scraps of paper in his hands, mostly news items from the morning’s paper — and then he’d talk. He’d ponder aloud the deep import of such small news items, dig out the falsities and name the power dynamics. He would appear amused — and was always amusing — but also fierce in his belief that ordinary people are powerful and their voice must and will be heard. Here’s a quote from his memoir, You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train:
No pitifully small picket line, no poorly attended meeting, no tossing out of an idea to an audience and even to an individual, should be scorned as insignificant.

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies but the complacency of their friends are precious catalysts for change.

Her large white home in Lowell brims with possessions. Old and new, large and small, bought and handcrafted. As the clutter grows, her spirits sink. She has no idea how to clear it out.

Doreen Doyle bounds up the steps of Solomont’s house on crisp autum, wearing white pants, white sneakers, white t-shirt and carrying a white bag. She looks like a visiting nurse but she’s not one: she does not see Solomont as sick. De-cluttering, Doyle believes, is a learnable skill. Doreen Doyle is a professional organizer of homes and offices. Her t-shirt, printed with the words “Get Organized,” declares her intent. She’s here to clear things up and out.

Solomont opens the door with a friendly smile that collapses into a weak sigh. “It’s too much,” she says, like a patient reporting symptoms. “I’m overwhelmed.” Her words bounce off Doyle, who’s immune to despair.

Doyle sweeps through the foyer, glancing sideways at her handiwork, as Solomont trails behind her. For years, 5-foot stacks of boxes, files and clothes teetered here. Visitors would come and Solomont would throw a blanket over the heap. The floor now gleams bright and empty. Doyle worked with Solomont to clear this space on an earlier visit. This is visit six, at $135 a session.

Solomont clears the diningroom table by shoving a jumble of papers and craftwork to the floor. Doyle spreads out a calendar — she figures that Solomont, an artist and craftsperson, needs visuals, not lists. Doyle maps a 6-month plan like a general plotting a troop advance. Solomont watches as intently as a patient awaiting a life-saving treatment.

Doyle ignores Solomont’s angst. She focusses instead on Solomont’s most pressing reason to clean up. She and her husband and three children are moving to Brookline to be closer to Boston. Their new house is smaller and more expensive. They must sell this place for top dollar. Cluttered property won’t sell, their real estate agent warned them. “Space sells,” he said.

“Let’s concentrate on that,” says Doyle. Solomont leans her head against the chair. Across the table, 100 costumed dolls crowd a 5-tiered cabinet. Next to her, a throng of photographs, craft pieces, and candlesticks jostle for space on a sidebar. Behind her, silver and china obscure one another behind the glass of a large cabinet. She’s exhausted already, at 9 a.m., by the burden of her overflowing worldly goods.

Each surface of Solomont’s house, except for areas Doyle has tackled on previous visits, is over-occupied. All good stuff, just too much of it.

“Today we attack the attic,” Doyle announces. She pulls on white rubber gloves as if preparing for surgery. She climbs up past boxes and bags that block the stairs. Solmont follows her, shoulders slumped.

On the landing, Doyle surveys what’s visible of the scene. Boxes and furniture parts fill the chilly space, in some places, halfway to the ceiling. “I’ve never opened the boxes over there,” says Solmont. “My grandparents sent me family stuff; I have to keep them.”

Doyle picks out a single dusty box, the one closest to her. “Sort this,” she says. “I will make a walkaround.” She thrusts a clean empty box into Solomont’s hand “for keepers” and a large black garbage bag for throwaways.

Solomont is a keeper. Her husband, Ari, is not. “What he’s got is what he uses,” says Sarah Solomont. “He’s got no problem getting rid of things.” During the first years of their marriage, they argued about the messy house. “I told Ari,” says Solmont, “‘That’s who I am. You have to live with it.’” He loved her, he accepted her, he stopped complaining.

Recently, however, her overstocked started to weigh on Sarah Solomont. She decided to pare things down. Theoretically, at least.

Doyle wades into the central thicket of boxes and bags. She grabs the nearest containers, opens their flaps, calculates their contents, and lines them up by category in separate corners where she will place others of each sort. Within minutes, she’s created order from chaos.

Solomont, planted before her assigned box, holds up a set of Barbie dolls. Doyle watches from across the room. “Their head’s are missing,” Doyle points out. “But they’re my Barbies!” says Solomont. “I would never throw them out!” She places each headless torso in the “keep” box. She adds a sewing box from her junior high home ec class, her collection of Seventeen magazines (”some seventh grade girls came over and saw these — they were in heaven!”), and a pile of “skinny clothes” that she wants to keep “in case I lose weight.” She holds up a teddy bear dressed in frayed lace, a wedding present, she says. “Too bad I didn’t keep it nice.” Perhaps she can mend it. She finds some tissue and lays it carefully beside the “skinny clothes.”

Solomont is not a careless person. She keeps a kosher kitchen, carefully separating two sets of dishes, cutlery, cooking pans and utensils, with which she separately prepares meat and dairy dishes. Last May, she earned a Masters Degree in expressive therapies, a program she pursued for five years while raising her son and two daughters and volunteering for a Visiting Moms program. Her thesis illustrates several of her own art work — dynamic, colorful, well-constructed pieces, none cluttered.

Doyle is a do-er. She delights in sorting, filing, throwing out. “It’s my Irish nature,” she says. Her father would tell her, “All you need is two dresses: one to wear, and one to wash.” As for keeping things for memory’s sake, he’d say, “Who cares. We’ll all be dead tomorrow.”

Solomont ponders an album whose pages are stiff and mildewed. Droppings coat its cover. She gives it up to the discard bag. Next, she ponders a tangle of old pantihose. After a wistful remark — “I could make sock dolls of these” — she lets them fall atop the album. Two small victories for decluttering.

“This can go, right?” Doyle says as she lugs a broken bamboo screen into view. “That’s from my childhood,” says Solomont. “We lived in Thailand until I was three. When we left, we couldn’t get the screen out of the house, so my father sawed it in half. I can’t let THAT go.”

Dustballs cling to Doyle’s t-shirt. She’s sweating, but the attic looks larger than it did an hour ago. She’s separated china from toys from clothes from furniture. She’s cleared a path for Solomont to move through. Doyle points out three boxes: “That’s your homework for next week,” she says, reassuring Solmont that they’re only half full.

Solomont has picked up a sheaf of her children’s schoolwork. She slowly scans each paper. She keeps her kids’ handwritten stories,discarding only rote “color-this-circle” projects. The rejected papers drift from her reluctant fingers into the box like petals thrown into a coffin. “It breaks my heart to do this,” she says.

Doyle sneezes. Solomont mourns. Her “keep box” is full; her garbage bag of throwaways is not.

It’s hard for an outsider to see progress. But Solomont is satisfied. She’s “done” the sock drawer, the mitten drawer, and the canned goods bin. She’s organized the medicine cabinet, cleared the basement playroom of broken toys. She’s transformed a junk-filled kitchen corner into an efficient “messaging center.” She’s organized her 100 hats.

Now Solomont worries that her children are copying her packrat habits. Her daughters, who are five and seven years old, have been walking around the house with bags full of other bags, purses, dolls, papers, utensils. “They look like bag ladies,” she says. Last night, her 11-year-old son grabbed a used-up glue container she was about to drop in the trash. “I can use this for a project!” he declared. She’s alarmed.

Sarah Solomont is not Doreen Doyle’s most cluttered client. “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d put Sarah at three or four,” shesays. “But she’s high on the anxiety scale.”

It’s easy to psychologize. Clutterers are holding onto ghosts. They’re stuck in the past. They substitute things for feelings. They’re afraid to face the future — or themselves.

Doreen Doyle does not assume pathology. Howard Hughes, she says, may have qualified for psychiatric help — he hoarded his fingernail and saved his urine, but only a small percentage of her clients need therapy more than practical help.

Solomont says her messiness is left-over rebellion. Her mother, she says, was a perfectionist who would “ground” her when she left her room a mess. “Messy was bad to her, and I internalized that,” says Solomont. Doyle listens but doesn’t judge her, says Solomont, so she’s getting over that adolescent rebellion. “It’s just like therapy,” says Solomont, “except you can see the results.”

For craftspeople like Solomont, things ARE important. Momentoes — including sawed-up screens and Barbie dolls — conjure up memories. The stuff our grandparents gave us to keep cannot be discarded lightly. The things our children make are to be cherished.

Lately, however, Solomont has gotten a glimpse of the pleasures of spaciousness. She wrote her thesis not in her home, which she found to distracting, but in the foyer of the nearby Sheraton Hotel, where she discovered she concentrated best in empty spaces. Writing that thesis on the relationship between her life and her art also forced her to pare down. At first, she says, “I wanted to put everything in.” Later, she dared to select, organize, prune. She likes the results.

Where IS her art work? Is it those two sculptures on the
sidebar? No, says Solomont. “A 14-year-old boy I worked with who was very depressed, made these.” The boy used to break any of his creations that drew praise. “He would have destroyed these as well, if I hadn’t kept them. They’re precious to me.”

Sarah Solomont’s own art work is on display in her home, but it’s almost impossible to see. She placed two thesis project pieces — a clay figure and an assemblage of tree branches, shells, clay and ribbon — on her livingroom mantlepiece. But she arranged a family photo in front that blocks her art from view.

Doreen Doyle sees that mantlepiece, that photograph, that art. The livingroom is part of her 6-month plan. Meanwhile, she watches as Sarah Solomont very slowly and in her own time, falls in love with space.

Each year at holiday gift-buying time, my husband and I debate list-swapping, and I win. Lists make me feel like I’m grocery shopping — get me some toothpaste, will you, dear? I let my husband and sons swap lists, and watch them check off each item bought, highlighting those as yet unpurchased. To me, the fun of giving gifts lies in intuiting what the other person might like.

Each year, I set my jaw and refuse to THINK about shopping until December first, resisting stores attempts to start the Christmas shopping season two weeks before Thanksgiving. Then, I panic, picturing crows of shoppers and serpentine UPS lines — will my packages reach family members in Florida, Pennsylvania and Oregon in time?

Then there’s the decision to make: do I give my relative something I know they can use — more golf balls for my golf-loving father, or do I give something of myself? The latter can backfire: I sent my sister my favorite novels for years until she finally told me she reads only non-fiction and they’d stayed unread.

That’s the trouble with far-flung family. You lose track of the whole. Younger sister: art teacher, mother of two, too buys to read, house full of stuff, amateur photographer. Do I buy her film, paint brushes, an advice book on parenting on clearing your house of junk? No, my sister is more than categories. And what she and I have between us can’t be reduced to commercial exchange. It’s sitting over coffee after the kids have gone to bed. It’s swapping gossip until we break through to new perspectives. It’s laughing loud and late into the night.

So I skip the mall and instead scour crafts fairs, where people at least have sewed the pillows they’re selling, baked the cakes in their own ovens, grown the herbs in their gardens. But I find that even that won’t do. I don’t want to piece of someone else’s family. I want my OWN family together again.

So I create something to bring my family close. One year, I made a family cookbook, which got me calling each family member to get their recipes. Another year I asked each relative to write down what they do on an ordinary day, and made a booklet, called Our Ordinary Days, that brought us close to each other’s daily, if far-flung, lives. A third time I gathered funny things we all said as kids and made a “Smart & Silly Book” drawn covering four generations. The next year I made a music tape, with my parents’ harmonizing caught on 1940s on vinyl, to piano, flute and recorder pieces, both amateur and professional, to the melodic babble of our newest family member. And one year I sent each family member cloth and directions for making a quilt square , then sewed them into a family-made quilt.

We may have scattered across the country and settled down in a half-dozen states. But at holiday time, I keep finding ways to sew the patchwork of us back together into a seamless whole.

Clearly, I’m no undergraduate: that was decades ago. Yet I am drawn to this place. At least twice a year I wander its aisles, looking for what I may be missing.

The no-frills warehouse look pleases me: its makeshift shelving, florescent lights, noisy air conditioner, absence of musak, the plastic signs on which are stamped cryptic course codes: EC, DIP, REL – most of which designate fields I neglected to explore during my four English literature focussed years.

Overhead lights expose my every move, so I stride through the aisles as if with purpose, and scan the shelves as if looking for my professor’s course code. My actual goal is obscure, even to me.

I lift a thick textbook as if to gauge its depth by its heft. I finger the glossy edition of a classic. I run my hands over thin monographs, lovely as silk scarves. I admire even the spartan jackets of academic press books. They can afford to be plain: they’re required reading.

This place reminds me of the cramped dorm room where I puzzled over Chaucer’s Middle English. It invokes the mechanical whir of the laundryroom where I considered Sartre, Blake and Montaigne while my blouses tossed. It conjures up the tree on campus where propped on my favorite branch, I wrestled with realism, idealism, and existentialism.

I no longer read in trees. I’m busy and earthbound. I read now by choice and whim. As a writer, I skim for background on topics that vary from month to month. I’m a generalist: I know just a little about a lot. But here in Cambridge, surrounded by specialists, I sometimes question my chosen route. So I come here, periodically, to peer over the shoulders of scholars who spend a lifetime exploring a single subject — as I have not.

I scan the textbooks on subjects I bypassed in college: botany, physics, Chinese, astronomy. Molecular biology — my husband’s inscrutable field. I ponder the assigned reading for courses not offered in my era: The Medieval Torah, The Afrocentric Ideal, Environmental Ethics, and Arabic for Beginners.

I spot a “coursepack” for Harvard’s Thinking About Thinking course: 300 pages badly copied from two dozen journals. I’d love to have to read this dense prose — but I would need the pressure of a professor’s next day questions to get me to do so.

Finally, I drift to familiar grounds — the literature shelves. I recognize the authors — Aeschylus, Moliere, Yeats, Woolf — but not the book jackets. Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs no longer is bound by the plain grey cover I remember — this new edition’s lush watercolor landscape misleads. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom’s hologram-like cover, eye-catching, does not suit. The jacket of Walden II has been changed to attract 1990s readers, a practical adaptation of the sort B.F. Skinner would approve, but I don’t.

Thirty years ago, I was forced by “distribution requirements” to see the world in new ways. In my four college years, I looked through the lens of philosophers, sociologists, artists. I tasted Beethoveen’s symphonies, tackled Olde English, delved deep into modern theater. My mind stretched and strained. Then I joined the general public.

Books are no longer homework. I read now for relaxation, inspiration, personal passions. For 30 years, I’ve indulged my prejudices, pro and con. I give a book just a few pages to entice. If the opening scene does not draw me in, I chuck it, often shunning, along with it, the rest of its genre. After a single irritating encounter with the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez years ago, I abandoned magical realism for decades, which I realize led me to be ignorant of Isabel Allende and Toni Morrison, as well. After rejecting suburban life for the city, I abandoned Updike and Cheever.

I read out of passion for a topic that seizes my attention and time. The French Resistance during World War II, with its questions about who acts and who doesn’t. I dig into library recesses, struggle with academic theory, work through, dictionary at my side, books written in french, pursuing the human drama. Then my passion wanes, and is taken up by the mysteries of Anasazi rock art. I study maps, track down monographs, survive a flash flood in pursuit of desert pictograph mysteries. After each of my love affairs of the mind, I am a different person.

But part of me yearns for a syllabus. On my own, I can so easily ignore wide swaths of knowledge with impunity. I know that the mind is a muscle: it gets stronger when pressed by an outside force, against which it resists before it gives in. I want Required Reading’s rigor.

The literature section hold books by some writers whose works I have uncovered on my own over the years: Edith Wharton, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chinua Achebe, all now certified as Great Literature by their presence here. I spot a book I have not read, Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, and note that it appears on the Literature, Psychology, and European History shelves. I like that. I want this book. I must have it.

After an hour academic voyeurism, I find myself carrying a half-dozen books in my arms, as if my body might absorb their contents. Most I return to their shelves, but three I keep: the testimony of a Resistance fighter, a textbook on environmental ethics, and a novel by a Dutch writer whose name I have never until now encountered. The book’s dull academic cover stands out from the gaudy trades — but holds, perhaps, my next discovery.

I approach the check-out desk shyly, but the cashier does not ask me for my student i.d. I’ve passed. Maybe I am a scholar, after all.

“It’s a marriage, not a merger,” I argue, proposing that we meet his fiance’s family in a public place — a restaurant — for two hours, max — as recommended by Emily Post. We compromise on a 3-day weekend at our family cottage in the woods of Pennsylvania, midway between the two families’ home turf in Boston and Baltimore, respectively.

Before our rendezvous, my daughter-in-law to-be takes out her photograph album to prep me. Her family is complicated. The parents have split up but stayed buddies. One snapshot shows her father hamming it up with his second wife plus their two kids alongside his first wife and her mate. The family looks amicably reconfigured. I worry: will we, who rarely ham it up, look like fuddy duddies?

Meanwhile, questions bubble up, though I know that they shouldn’t matter. What do her parents do? What are their politics? What do they want to know about us? Should we lay out our family biology, reveal to them that hayfever runs in the family, and minor thyroid problems as well — but that our cancer rates are low?

All I know about the father is that he is a university professor. I find myself searching for his name in my local bookstore’s Books in Print. I discover titles such as Core Periphery Relations in Pre-Capitalist Worlds. I ask my friends in academia, “What are core-periphery relations?” No one knows. Maybe we should skip our 3-day gathering and just exchange curriculum vitae.

A few weeks later, we do meet. I feel like a student without a syllabus. We pull up to the cottage just as the “other family” arrives in their van. A collection of people from age three to fifty-three emerges, arms full of casseroles, snacks, and desserts — enough food for three days. The father carries a backpack atop which sits a folding potty. The last passenger bounds toward me — a large poodle who, it turns out, pees on people he does not know.

My greetings are casual; I am trying to view this family-blending as no big deal. But the other family has brought a camcorder and intends to record every moment. So I gesture like Oprah, and hype up my greetings for the sound track.

I also ham around a bit — to head off any impression of fuddy duddiness. At lunch, we exchange some lively repartee, except for my husband, who is under par. He is coming down with a cold: he takes his temperature often and with alarm. I want to remind the father that hypochondria is not a heritable trait.

After an hour or two, relating to “the other family” exhausts me, and I retreat to my room to rest and read. I soon realize, however, that the novels I’ve brought with me, by Rosellen Brown and Jane Smiley, are about dysfunctional families. Chagrined, I return to the livingroom, intent on proving myself a fully functioning family member.

After dinner, we gather before a crackling fire, stepping carefully over the piles of wooden blocks we’ve laid out on the rug for the 3- and 8-year-olds’ play. Our families clearly share one priority — kids’ fun over a tidy living room. Soon, my husband is down on his knees, constructing a castle with the 3-year-old, while his builds a bridge with his 8-year old, from the castle’s core to its periphery.

The first day is a success. We may, at this rate, qualify as mekhutim. Still, every moment vibrates with significance. The sense of an agenda persists, like humidity weighing down the air.

The next day, I find myself noting with approval — but why should my approval matter? — that the father’s delights in his daughters’ each catching a trout while he, the expert, gets not a nibble. My son’s future wife also impresses me: when we emerge from a dip in the stream covered with leeches, she — a wetland researcher — calmly picks thhem off us, one by one.

Later, we go to a lake. While my son and his loved one do a tai chi routine on the grassy shore, I swim to the raft. The “other father” joins me and we drop to the hot planks. Soon, I am lulled by the raft’s gentle rocking. So I am startled when he suddenly asks: “So should they get married?” I shrug a limp shoulder: “It’s not up to us, is it?” I say.

But he, like my husband, believes in the concern-equals-love school of parenting. He requires my opinion. I sit up and we discuss the matter, seriously and at length. We conclude that yes, our children are right for each other and yes, they should marry.

Over the weekend, we swap opinions ranging from handguns, wetlands, Muslim history, co-dependency and public schools, to the Internet and how to fix roof gutters. We also jockey for status a bit — around who leads the simplest life. I let it be known that we don’t own a dishwasher. They top me: their country cottage has no toilet, only an outhouse.

Our last night, the soon-to-be-wed couple take us out to lie on the grass and look at the stars. They then lead us inside, put on a dance tape, and get everybody dancing. The 8-year-old is the star — she learned her steps from MTV. The swirling shadows of all our bodies meld in the firelight. My son and his fiancee dance fast, slow down, and then come to a stop of embrace. The rest of us — we mekhutim — cheer.

As for core-periphery relations, I still can’t define the phrase, but I think I’ve just experienced one.

[A shorter version of this essay was published in Smithsonian magazine]