Miracles of one kind and another

This photo was taken yesterday of me and three of my cousins. Two years ago we didn’t know of one another’s existence. Their father and my mother were first cousins. Their grandfather, and my grandmother were brother and sister. The last previous contact was in 1965.

I discovered yesterday that my grandmother and her beloved older brother died within weeks of one another in the late winter of 1968.

My family is one that suffered many drifts and rifts over the past century. Over the past dozen or so years I have worked on finding relatives and piecing together family history. I have had the very real pleasure of connecting with people with whom I share a deep bond. I have been learning that I understand the causes of many of those rifts, but those old hurts are not my own. I love that my family is now so much bigger than it was when I was growing up.

I’m sure that it’s easy for you to see how dark haired Leslie and I are related. When I look at my cousin Susan standing to my left I see my grandmother’s face, and my mother’s. A happier face than my grandmother’s to be sure, but it’s my grandmother’s face.

And now, a new topic. My husband often reminds me that I switch topics without warning. This is a new but tangentially connected topic. My husband is a thrifty man. The toothpaste tube that other’s might see as empty, for him is a treasure trove of at least another week of use. Underpants or undershirts that other’s might see as too full of holes to wear are for him perfectly fine , except that there are some holes. I take a new toothpaste tube for myself and give my husband the pleasure of eking out the last droplet of paste. I let my husband decide when an undershirt is ripe for the trash.

A few weeks ago we were supposed to get a new fridge. The new one was supposed to arrive July 3. the driver arrived late and insisted that the new fridge couldn’t fit into our apartment. We cancelled the order and duct taped the the gasket which was draped on the floor back into it’s channel.

We then spent the next few weeks trying to sort out my health issue. The fridge could wait.

Last night, after we came home from spending the day with my cousins, my husband opened the fridge. The door came off in his hand. My husband said that we needed to buy one immediately. We did.The new one is arriving on Thursday.

And the cloud of health crisis that has been hanging over my head all summer is over. None of it is cancer. All of it is fine.

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...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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