She walked into the doctor’s office, trailing behind her mother. The feeling of overwhelm was everywhere. New office. New smells. New staff. New protocol.

Hey OOTOB readers,

First, you may have noticed that my writing style has changed somewhat. See, as of August I’ve been writing a column for the Cleveland Jewish News, our local paper. The pieces have to be 500 words and as I write, I have a certain audience in mind. Then I publish here. Also, I write every few weeks for our congregation’s newsletter. In the past seven years that I’ve been blogging (started in July, 2011) my tone and content have shifted and fluctuated, but I never thought this was the place for “Jewish inspiration” per se. But now I’ve decided to publish those pieces here too. So pretty much you get a mosaic of my writing.

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling recently (Philadelphia last week, California today, Dallas and South Bend in June). Each time, a few day before I travel, I get these benign feelings of travel anxiety. Now, in general I am not an anxious person, so I wasn’t really sure where these feelings were coming from.

Passover approaches like a returning visitor bringing melting snow and sunshiny Sunday afternoons to clean your car in the driveway. Every year it marches forward steadily, predictably. The smells of Passover coming: frying onions, potato starch cakes, hard-boiled eggs.

I was flying home from a speaking gig in Atlanta and was waiting at my gate in the airport terminal. My kosher Chinese takeout had made a narrow escape from TSA clutches, and now I had just started to chow down when I saw her: a fellow hair-coverer.