sarah in nyc

My older son has an important career interview this afternoon. It’s a big deal four hour long interview.  Earlier in the week my son had me iron a dress shirt and his khaki pants. Last night my son began talking to me about Shabbat dinner.  He offered to make both the chicken and the challah.   I realized as he was kneading the challah that he asked to make the challah because he knows that kneading a big batch of dough is a really good way to get rid of free floating anxiety. Hopefully, all of the anxiety has gone into the challah dough and my son will be cool calm and collected during the four hour interview process. I love that my son knows that a great way to get rid of worry is to punch a load of dough hard. Despite the fact that he looks like me, but with a beard, I know that I really did take the right kid home from the hospital. And a Pre Shabbat bonus some photos of a jewel box pretty synagogue in our neighborhood. The interior of this synagog...

My mother’s birthday is today. My mother does not need stuff. She owns a life time’s worth of stuff. What my mother does need is a few short sleeved shirts. After a lifetime of wearing shirt waist dresses, for the past few years my mother has been wearing pants. For me, this is a shocking development. Since 1959 there is exactly one photo of my mother wearing pants (posed with my sisters and their new snow shovels in the back yard – I was not yet born,and was not even the proverbial twinkle in the eye). This new sartorial life has called for a new item in my mother’s life, tops. My mother seems to have winter weight shirts.  She does need some summer weight shirts. I made her three shirts as a birthday gift. I bought a size large t-shirt to use as a pattern. I  chose a red and white seersucker as the fabric for the first shirt. My mother loves seersucker and owned many seersucker shirtwaist dresses over the years. I also owned several as a child. When i bought the seer...

There is a school of thinking in Constitutional Law that believes in original intent. That is they try to intuit what the founding fathers were actually thinking and then base their own legal rulings based on that original intent. While I am not of the school of original intent when it comes to American law, sewing in the manner that I do, I do end up stumbling onto  the clothing equivalent of original intent.     About ten years ago my youngest attended school on Madison  Avenue. Yes, that Madison Avenue.  Once after a teacher conference, I walked uptown on Madison Avenue .  During my walk I noticed that a fancy lingerie store was having a giant sale.  One of the life lessons I learned from my mother is that you should always check out a sale in a really fancy store. Listening to my mother paid off. On the $25 rack was a beautiful white spa robe. I needed a new bathrobe.   I took the robe to the cashier. The cashier became all flu...

  Before your start reading I need to tell you that I am a child of Vatican II who grew up on the milk of ecumenism.   My father was close to many of the other clergy in Quincy. I grew up attending masses. When ever we traveled we would check out churches to see  what they looked like. I watched every Kennedy funeral mass on TV.  So the vernacular of the church is familiar to me.   Today when I attended Sixto’s funeral at St. Anthony’s of Padua in Greenpoint I had an entirely new understanding of Catholicism. I am used to the form of a Jewish funeral. The family of the deceased is in a small room inside the synagogue or funeral home. Visitors greet the family ( read embrace and weep) and go to their seats in the chapel. When the family of the deceased walks into the chapel everyone rises. At Sixto’s funeral we gathered on the sidewalk in front of the church. At the appointed moment the hearse doors were opened and Sixto’s family carried the coff...

The first time I came to New York to visit the man who is now my husband, I was 20 and a senior in college.    I walked into the lobby of the building and was greeted by a bearded man in a janitor uniform. Greeted is probably too strong a word for our exchange at that moment thirty years ago. But that was the first time that I stepped foot into what is now my home and the first time I met Sixto.   Sixto was one of the doormen in our building. Sixto didn’t talk a whole lot.  He kept his face formal and closed for the most part.   When my older son was two for some reason he developed a crush on Sixto in the inexplicable way that two year olds fall hard in love with someone or something. One of my kids had a friend who at that stage fell in love with the letter W. I remember having a crush on dump trucks.  My son had a crush on Sixto.   Each time we would leave the building he would yell out his name. Think of a teeny bopper calling ou...

Is on the menu for tonight’s dinner.  Yeah, I love that the colors look like they migrated from a piece of Marimekko fabric. Mostly though, it’s how my day has felt. I was done with my workout just before 11:00 am when I remembered that my building turned off the water for the day at 10:00am for some sort of a maintenance task. I now see the downside of not owning cases of seltzer. I washed up using what was left in my electric kettle. needless to say, I felt completely grody on this warm and muggy day. I’m working away on the T-shirt quilt. I have now used up nearly all of the t-shirts. At this point it feels like a complicated word puzzle that I’m in the middle of solving. I’m not ready to show photos, but soon it will be time to join the three strips together. As I was about to go grocery shopping because it feels like Old Mother Hubbard’s house around here, we had a giant sloppy rainfall. Instead I made a load of pita, fixed up a pickled cabbage salad from several day...

If I were interested in writing a cookbook I suppose I would organize every thought I had about a topic, say challah in one place.  Given that I write about topics as  I’m thinking about them I realize that learning how to bake challah from me is like learning how to do it from a friend if you hang out with them as they bake. given that I actually know most of my readers it’s like sitting on a kitchen stool as I make challah week after week.     This week’s wisdom is about the early stages of making challah.   Many years ago  after taking a bit bite of my challah, my father in law mentioned that he thought that the challah he was eating was the ready to bake Kinneret  frozen challah.   I was insulted and said that I didn’t start with a pre made frozen dough but began with water.   I add about 1 1/4 tsp of yeast and then feed the yeast.   The yeast got two forms of food, a teaspoon of flour.   And the...

This week my youngest went to prom.  Many of my son’s friends are seniors so my son figured out how to go. He asked a friend.     When my son and I discussed his getting a suit to wear to my niece's wedding he said he wanted a suit that would make him look something like Pee-Wee Herman. My son loved that this fitted knit blazer fit the bill. the silver jeans were a birthday gift from my daughter.   My son made the tie out of duct tape. It is is Pee-Wee like look. This photo taken by Cynthia completely expresses who my kid is. One of my favorite things about my kids is their ability to push the humor in any situation. Last weekend we stayed at the home of good friends. They had purchased two slankets.  For my kids, this was an opportunity not to be missed. The photos show the joy but not the laughter and the chants that accompanied  the donning of the slankets.    My kids may never win the Nobel Prize but they are compl...

Pretty wonderful! All of the photos in this post were taken either by my cousin ET, or by my cousin Mark. Here I am with the bride and her mother, my older sister. You can see the dress on my actual body. The pearls I’m wearing were a 50th birthday gift from my sister. My husband and his sister. Yes, they do look remarkably similar.   I love that my sister in law has made herself so beloved to my family that she is as a matter of course invited to all family events, even those hosted by my sisters. My sister in law made the trek from California. As always, it was wonderful to spend time with her. My oldest sister looking elegant in grey. My kids goofing around together. My daughter wearing the 1959 Miami Casuals dress she had inherited from Vivian’s mother.  I call it the man catcher dress. It cost $16.50 in 1959. Another shot of me in the dress with a bevy of bride’s maids behind. My husband with our daughter. She is wearing a necklace that my mother...