In less than two years, Tracie went from stay-at-home mom with a couple of side gigs to a million-dollar-listing realtor in one of the hottest real estate markets in the country.

In spring of 2021, she got her license. And this week, she was named “rising star” and a top earner by her firm Greenwood King.

That’s the screen (above) at her agency’s annual award ceremony as they announced the accolade on Tuesday.

Our daughters and I are so proud of her. She’s an amazing model for the girls (ages 9 and 11) in terms of what a person can accomplish when they put their mind to it and heart in it.

And as her mother-in-law loves to say, “You know she makes more money than her husband, don’t you?”

It’s been an incredible time in our lives as her income has helped us dig out of the financial lows of the health crisis. On Thanksgiving weekend last year, we moved into our new house. Even with the rising rates at the time, she got us a great deal and a great mortgage. And we are just in love with our home.

Tracie, the girls and I love you so much and are so proud of you. You are such a fantastic role model for our children and you are most wonderful partner I could have ever hoped for or dreamed of. It has been such a joy and inspiration to watch you become a leader in your field. And I just have to say it one more time, I love sleeping with my realtor! You have made our lives and future so bright. You are the love of my life.

It’s been a year that none of us will ever forget.

The biggest news was that we bought a house!

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we moved into a three-bedroom, two-bath ranch-style house in the same neighborhood where we have been living for the last eight years. It’s literally a block and a half away from our old house (a rental).

We love our new home, our neighborhood, our school, and our community. And the girls love having their own rooms.

Both girls are getting straight A’s in school and both continue to play music.

Lila Jane, 9, above left with Tracie, Georgia and our Levy cousins, plays cello, piano, and sings in the advanced children’s choir at our school. The choral teacher there is super rad and gets the group really cool gigs, like singing the national anthem before a Houston Texans game. That’s Lila Jane at the stadium after the gig.

Afterward, I was like, so you’ve already played a stadium gig! Not every nine-year-old can say that.

Both girls performed with their school’s “performers” orchestra at the mayor’s tree lighting event this year. That was super cool because they were on stage with professional singers and dancers and the whole thing was televised — lights, camera, action and all. Gloria Gaynor, “I Will Survive,” was the headliner!

Georgia, who just turned 11, continues to play violin and piano. She dropped out of advanced choir this year, her last at our elementary school. Instead, she did tennis, chess club, and theater as her after school activities. It’s been a busy year so far!

As she heads toward her teenage years (sometimes we think they’re not too far off!), her intellectual curiosity is really beginning to grow. It’s amazing to watch.

Both girls are eager to get back to Italy. Venice is their number-one city to visit (they’ve never been). We’re hoping to save enough money to take them on a proper tour of Italy this summer — and not just to wine country.

The real estate market isn’t as hot as when Tracie first began working as an agent last year. But that hasn’t stopped her from maintaining a steady income. This year and last, she more than doubled our family’s finances. Her going back to work (after 10 years as a stay-at-home mom) is what made the new house possible.

We’ll be celebrating our thirteenth wedding anniversary next month. And what can I say? I’ve been sleeping with my realtor and she’s a super hotty. I love her so much and it’s been so awesome to see her enjoying her work.

We have too many blessings to count… poo, poo, poo!

As Tra has settled into her new professional rhythms, I’ve been ramping up my own work again. I have some great projects lined up for next year and I’m working with a wonderful new client whom I genuinely adore.

There’s not much to complain about these days.

Tracie, Georgia, Lila Jane, and our doggies, RooRoo and Pachy, wish you a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and a new year filled with light, joy, and good health. See you in a few weeks!

Above: a sunset in La Jolla, California where I grew up. Before my family moved there, realtors redlined Jews until it became apparent that community wouldn’t thrive without them.

It’s widely known that La Jolla, the beautiful oceanside neighborhood in San Diego where I grew up, was off-limits to Jews until the 1960s when the University of California began to build a campus there.

“They didn’t let Jews in until they built a university and they needed Jews.” That’s what my father used to say. He was a Chicago-based psychoanalyst who moved there with our family in 1971. We were part of an early wave of midwest professionals who migrated west toward the Pacific.

He was echoing words spoken loudly by the founder of U.C.S.D., Roger Revelle (for whom one of the university’s colleges is named).

“You can’t have a university without having Jewish professors,” said Revelle in a now famous speech. “The Real Estate Broker’s Association and their supporters in La Jolla had to make up their minds whether they wanted a university or an anti-Semitic covenant. You couldn’t have both.”

I had my first bitter taste of anti-Semitism when a seven-year-old playmate and neighbor of mine told me that his parents had forbidden him from interacting with me. “Because you’re a Jew,” he said.

Throughout junior high (as it was called then) and high school, it was a normal occurrence for other students to taunt me and my Jewish friends with anti-Semitic epithets. My two best and inseparable friends throughout my teens were Jews. One of our classmates dubbed us — with insouciant but innocuous malice common in our age group — the “Jew Crew.” (He’s still a good friend. A few years ago he remarked off-handedly, “I don’t know why all of my best friends are Jews.”)

But aside from the stress caused by heckling, being a Semite has never impeded me or my brothers from achieving everything we wanted in life. I feel it’s important to note, as my younger brother once wisely pointed out, that the only suffering inflicted on us by anti-Semites in our early years was solely emotional and superficial.

That all changed for me when the white supremacists openly chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville in 2017. That’s when I began to realize that anti-Semitic violence was no longer a far-fetched notion in our country.

The 2019 shooting at a San Diego-area synagogue really and quite literally brought it home: a close childhood friend of mine was a member there and my older brother and his wife have worshipped there. They knew the 60-year-old woman who was killed by the shooter.

Seeing images of white supremacists chanting, raising their arms in Nazi salutes, and displaying anti-Semitic messages over the 405 freeway in Los Angeles brought a chill to my spine. When I lived, studied, and worked in LA as an undergrad and grad student, I used to drive on that stretch of road nearly every single day. The overpass where their rally took place is not far from the Getty Museum (where I used to work, although not at that location) and the Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish community hub. I used to attend the nearby Stephen Wise Temple on the high holy days when I lived on campus at U.C.L.A.

During my last years in New York City, I used to wait on the entertainer who unleashed a chorus of anti-Semitic rhetoric with his own inflammatory remarks over the last few weeks. He lived in a SoHo building where a high-profile Italian restaurant was located on the ground floor. I was the restaurant’s marketing director and I often worked the dining room as a sommelier.

His overtly racist comments have made anti-Semitism a dinner table topic of conversation in our home.

Our children, ages nine and 10, are not considered Jews by most of my conreligionists. That’s because Jewish law holds that the mother must be a Jew for the kids to be Jews. Tracie is a gentile. I like to call them “semi-Semites.”

But Jewish culture and Jewish language are a big part of our daily banter. And we happen to live in the historic Jewish neighborhood of Houston. Many of their classmates are Jews and we often attend Jewish observances with other families.

Our girls have been tight-lipped about this episode. They are aware of it because it’s been unavoidable on the news. And there’s no doubt that they are affected by it, in part because Tracie and I have been outwardly upset by it.

Where I grew up thinking that a few nasty words about my ethnicity were all I would have to tolerate throughout my life, they are living in a world where verbal and physical violence are threats that self-identifying Jews have to live with every day. Anti-Semitism is no longer a sad joke that we can brush off as anachronistic. Even a living former president of the U.S. has been known to make anti-Semitic comments. It’s no surprise that his political mentor was a rabid anti-Semite.

When Tracie and I first talked about starting a family together 13 years ago, I never would have imagined that our kids would grow up with this cultural pressure and stress. Yet here we are.

In our everyday interactions, people around us often use racist language about Jews without even realizing how harmful it is. I only wish they would stop to reflect about how it’s going to shape our children’s self-perceptions and their perceptions of the world around them. In today’s world, that verbal violence seems closer than ever to the physical violence that my ancestors fled.

Thanks for letting me share this personal history with you. Parzen family friends, please consider following the Anti-Defamation League and their newsletter. Their reporting will give you a better sense of how pervasive anti-Semitism is in our country today.

It was the fall of 2007, nearly fifteen years ago this week, when I found myself on a park bench at the La Jolla Cove waiting to go to Yom Kippur services with my family at the same synagogue where I was a bar mitzvah some 27 years prior.

I had given my all to my relationship in New York City where I had been living for the previous decade. But it had unraveled irrevocably by that point. I had quit my marketing director job as I tried to focus on my career as a translator and songwriter. I was living on a best friend’s couch on the upper westside. On a whim and with nothing really to keep me in the city, I decided to come back home to La Jolla to see my family and reconnect with friends for the Jewish new year.

Life in New York had been thrilling for me: the bands I played in and with; the magazine where I got my first commercial writing job; the restaurants and wine shops I worked in and frequented; the wine brand I launched; the U.N. where I worked as an interpreter; the poets, musicians, actors, and artists I hung out with… It had all been a blast.

But at 40, my life was at loose ends, in part because of the relationship gone bad and in part because I knew there was more world out there for me to discover.

Nearly a year later, as I was toggling between my old life in the city and a new one in southern California, I received a message from a blogger that I followed. She was writing to wish me a happy 41st birthday. By the end of 2008, I had moved to Austin as our e-mance became a real-mance and we began to talk about building a life together.

Today, 15 years later, Yom Kippur begins this evening at sundown just as it has for as long as anyone can remember.

I won’t be going to shul this year but I’ll be spending the day with our daughters, ages nine and 10, as I fast and reflect on what it means to be a 55-year-old father to them and a partner to Tracie, my wife of nearly 13 years now.

This Yom Kippur, I’ll pray that G-d will give me the wisdom and strength to be the dad and husband I strive to be.

I’ll pray for my brothers, their wives, and their children. I’ll pray for my childhood friends. I’ll pray for my Texas family. That they may find the purpose, meaning, joy, and peace that they seek.

I’ll pray for my mother, who just turned 89. That she may take joy in her children’s and grandchildren’s joy. That she may know that we love her and appreciate all she has given us.

I’ll pray for Tracie. That she may know how much our girls and I love her. That she may know the sweetness of the life she has given us.

I’ll pray for our children and all children. That they may be safe and they may realize their dreams.

I’ll pray for our world. That all people may live secure and free, with enough to eat and a place to live, love, and grow.

Shanah tovah. Happy new year, everyone. May your fast be easy.

Let us turn our heads heavenward and, while thanking Him for sparing so much human life, beseech G-d to restore health and well-being to those who are suffering!
— Chabad.org

Shanah tovah (שנה טובה). Happy new year, everyone.

The last year has been a good one for our family — poo, poo, poo!

Georgia is enjoying fifth grade, her last at our elementary school. She has really begun to excel in the music program there. She plays violin and takes private lessons at the school, a music magnet, and she continues to take piano lessons with a private teacher outside of school. Yesterday, after I met her for lunch at school, she gave an impromptu piano concert for the entire fifth grade in the cafeteria! It was really magical. She’s also started taking tennis lessons, which she really enjoys (especially because tennis was Tracie’s sport in high school).

Lila Jane continues to take cello at school and piano privately. She’s also in the advanced choir at school. Next month, her school choir will sing the national anthem at the Houston Texans’ football game! (The choir teacher is a Grammy-winning children’s choir maestra and so the group gets some cool gigs like this. They are insanely good.) She also continues to write elaborate comic strips (pages and pages long, with illustrations, dialog and narrative). And she’s also become a writer for the school’s nascent paper. Last night, she was so eager to write a report that she insisted on bringing her laptop to the dinner table.

Both girls are starting to speak a little Italian and they are begging me to take them to Venice next summer (we’ll see!).

Tracie’s new career as a realtor also continues to flourish. Even though the market isn’t as “hot” as when she first began, her hard work and devotion have really paid off. We are a dual-income family now and that’s helped us accelerate our path to our financial goals.

Now that she is more steady and confident in her professional life, I’ve begun to travel for my work a bit more. I still do all the caretaking when I’m in town and I do nearly all of the cooking, which has reignited my culinary skills (that has been really fun).

The new focus in my work is my translations of ancient Italian texts on wine. A University of Toronto imprint has already agreed to publish my first one (a 14th-century work) and we already have a second and third book lined up in the series. It’s immensely rewarding for me to combine my skills and experience as an academic with my knowledge of viticulture.

As the old folks used to say (and I’m getting to be one of them), poo, poo, poo!

We have too many blessings to count.

The world beyond our home often seems perilous and precarious these days. But our home life and our community is an oasis where the girls are growing up healthy and safe — the greatest blessing in our lives.

On this Rosh Hashanah (new year), we pray for our sisters and brothers in Ukraine and Puerto Rico, we pray for the Venezuelan migrants, we pray that our leaders may rise to the occasion with grace and wisdom as our country and the world face seemingly unsurmountable challenges. We pray that our children and all children may be safe.

Shanah tovah. Happy new year.

Let us all simply shower one another with blessings!