A day of odds and ends

Today I smelled one of the oddest odor combinations. On the corner of Columbus and 97th there was a coffee pushcart that was selling warmed up baked goods, so you could smell those sweet toasty baked aromas. The lawn in front of the apartment complex there had just been mowed. Of course, there was that usual New York smell of car exhaust. None of those is particularly unpleasant on their own, but in combination it was just plain weird. Just in case you wanted to know.

Today has mostly been a day of laundry. Not only am I doing all of my daughter's laundry, our own hampers were pretty backed up. Actually, more correctly this has been a day of doings the beginnings of things with not a whole lot to show for myself at the moment. I did get my serger humming again. There are times when my serger behaves like a balky child. I cajoled it into good behavior.

I am filling in a Ketuba/marriage contract for a friend so spent part of the day trying to get all of the the things I have to fill in figured out. The calligraphy will wait until tomorrow because by then the dining room table will be cleared of my daughter's stuff. Then I will have a nice clean surface for doing calligraphy.

This image from wirednewyork.com
You might be lucky enough to smell that weird olfactory mix the next time you walk here

I did some more work on the red tallit, stuff that is hugely boring yet essential...lots of thread pulling and cutting , but now, the edges are tidy.

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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...

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...

sarah in nyc

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