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of leakage. Twenty miles into western Massachusetts, not far from Stockbridge, where, in six weeks, like the song says, the first of December will be covered with snow, I pull into a gravel driveway that curls around to the side of a cavernous red-painted barn, a silver silo, and a small, ominous-looking cinder block building whose wood-burning stove is belching plumes of white, fatty smoke into the air. The place belongs to the man I talked to—a middle-aged, beer-bellied butcher wearing stained, caramel-colored Carhartt overalls and a red woolen cap. He’s old-school, the best, everyone has told me. He opens the back hatch of my car and packs my coolers with bags of ice and half a custom-butchered Tamworth hog: giant cuts of fresh ham and butt for the Christmas holidays, two dozen three-pound blocks of fatty, boneless pork belly, baby back ribs, country-style ribs, a standing rib roast, chops, cubed stew meat, four shanks, four trotters, two ears, and a tail.
    â€œEverything but the squeal,” he says through a yellowing mustache, wiping his hands on his pants.
    I hand him a check; he squints at it, folds it up, shoves it in the breast pocket of his coveralls, shakes my hand, and I leave for home with roughly two hundred pounds of heirloom pork in the back of my car.
    I weave my way back south through the hills; I take the ruralroute, avoiding the towns, and consider what I will make for dinner, given the beast—a nod to food trends and excess more than to
need
; no couple actually
needs
half an adult pig—that I’m carrying home to my kitchen. The sun begins to set slowly and I remember that it is Shabbos, and the prayer I spoke nearly every Friday night during my childhood summers echoes in my head—it’s been forty years since I learned it—and I whisper it to myself:
    Thy Sabbath has come
.

2

The Year of the Mitzvah
    O n a sunny Saturday morning in the late spring of 1974, Candy Feinblatt became a woman.
    She stood on the gold-carpeted bimah in front of friends and family at the Forest Hills Jewish Center, her long, deep-parted sun-dappled blond hair cascading forward, hippie-style, over her shoulders and down to her waist. On that day, with Nixon not yet out of office and
The Streak
blaring out of open car windows cruising up and down Queens Boulevard, my best friend was called to the Torah dressed in a special bat mitzvah outfit chosen by her mother: a blue-and-red-flecked Huk-A-Poo blouse, black peep-toe Carber sandals, and a tan suede miniskirt under which she wore suntan panty hose. Candy’s tomboy days of stiff, rolled-up Wranglers and flannel shirts were officially over; I was on my own.
    Candy, suddenly statuesque in her wedgies, chanted in perfect phonetic Hebrew, holding the heavily ornate silver
yad
—thepointer; touching the Torah is considered ritual defilement under Jewish law—in her right hand. She chewed nervously on her lower lip when she lost her place in the scroll; the cantor, his face beet red from the heat, sidled up to her and offered help, his soft brown kiltie loafers squeaking as though they’d been soaked in water. Everything that day was damp with humidity: the pages of my prayer book, the scalp beneath my blond frizzy afro, the armpits of my tight rayon blouse and the entire lower half of my body, which was encased like a salami in a narrow ladies’ denim maxi skirt festooned with butterfly appliqué and dime-sized silver studs, bought for me by my mother at her favorite boutique and hemmed eight inches by our local tailor before I could wear it. It was a point of pride that once I hit eleven years old, she bought all of my outfits where she bought her own; my friends were still wearing clothes purchased for them by their parents in the kids’ department at Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, while I was dressed up like a smaller version of my 1970s New York City mother, in long skirts and transparent voile blouses and