Skip to main content

Home again, home again…

Last Monday morning I took the bus to Boston to help take care of my mother.

The seat I was sitting on on the bus was pitched forward so I had to spend the entire four and a half hours of the trip bracing my feet against the floor so I didn’t have to spend the trip sliding onto the bus floor.

 

By the time I got to Boston I was tired and cranky. While the Red Line  train line does have a South Station stop, both the  connection between the bus and subway , and the bus station  itself are so terribly designed that  by the time I get myself out to Brookline I feel too completely assaulted by design crimes that I  am apt to be really cranky by the time I get to my mother’s apartment.

A long time ago, my mother coined the term, “ And that’s why God invented money.”, to explain why she, a normally really thrifty woman, would choose to do something expedient rather than thrifty.

 

Because God invented money, I took a taxi to my mother’s house from the bus station. My father was one of those people who when in the presence of a new person would often learn the story of that person’s life.  It was always amazing to watch him at work. What he learned about the people who crossed his path was often quite remarkable.

 

So following my father’s lead, I often ask taxi drivers where they are from. While my father was dying and I was visiting him ,  twice I had the same driver from South sStation to the Hebrew rehab,  a former child soldier from Somalia. I got big chunks of his life story,and of course my father was delighted to hear about the life of my cabbie.

 

Last Monday my driver and I settled into a nice banter. By the time we got into Kenmore Square he asked me if I was a Muslim and if I thought Mohammed was divine. I explained that I wasn’t a Muslim  and thought that Mohammad was a man who lived a long time ago.

 

My driver then played a You-Tube video with a lecture by a woman who had grown up Islamic and had renounced Islam because she had serious issues with it’s views of others. Then my driver asked me if I had heard of Aramaic. Well, of course I had heard of Aramaic!!! It’s the language of the Talmud and many of our prayers are written in Aramaic.  It’s a language that is deeply familiar to me.

 

My  My driver than put on this You-Tube video. He asked me to translate it for him. The music itself feels familiar in a deep in my bones sort of a way.  It feels like traditional Jewish prayer modes. I translated the text first into Hebrew in my head and then into English for my driver.

 

My driver was a Maranite Christian  from Lebanon.

It was a powerful moment in that taxi. It was a moment my father would have loved. It was a really apt way to begin my time with my mother.

SAM_0490

Here is my mother in her apartment. In this photo she looks very much like her beloved Aunt Becky.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

  וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים   You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for  giving life to all.  I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of  Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or  the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...