A complicated week

In addition to all that is going on internationally, things have been busy here on the home front as well. This is my oldest.

Monday she called me saying that she was experiencing chest pain, numbness in her left arm shallow breathing and dizziness. She had gone to a walk in health center who checked out her vitals, did and EKG and suggested strongly that she go to an ER.

I met her at Mount Sinai Hospital.The ER there is busy. The gurneys are stacked three deep in each little curtained cubicle. Other gurneys with sick folks are stashed away in hallways.

The ER staff first determined that my daughter was not just having a panic attack and began monitoring all of her vitals and began testing her heart in various ways. The episodes my daughter kept having looked like what in the 19th century might be called The Vapors, . if she were a fragile sort of a girl I would have not paid a whole lot of attention…but she is a tough cookie, a strong girl in mind and spirit.

By early evening they moved my daughter to the relative luxury of the observation ward. Lots of different kinds of testing was done to my kid. She was hooked up to various sensors that kept track of all of her parts. This think that felt like something bad in her heart showed up as perfectly normal numbers and ratios.

Her potassium numbers were a bit, but not alarmingly low they gave her a dose of potassium ..and her symptoms immediately improved. Yes, we did all make Borat jokes and commented that she needed to move immediately to Kazakhstan for their excellent potassium.

My very independent girl wanted me to stay with her. So I spent the night. We discovered that two adults can not sleep on one hospital gurney. I began the night on an uncomfortable metal chair . At 2:00am a nice nurse took pity on me and brought me a comfortable chair. After another day of testing, they sent my daughter home.

We know that the problem isn’t her heart, we just don’t know yet what it is. They symptoms are somewhat less…but are still bothersome. She went to a primary care doctor today and she will explore in a less stressful way what is going on. The nice thing is that what she has isn’t fatal. The hard this is that it seems to be one of those fuzzy unclear things that make your life a little harder to lead and an answer as to what is going on isn’t all that easy to reach.

As one might assume, spending the night sleeping in a chair in a hospital isn’t all that restful. But Wednesday , instead of sleeping or just hanging out of the couch watching endless episodes of Toddlers in Tiaras I had to get ready to exhibit my work. I had made a commitment to exhibit at the national convention of Women’s league for Conservative Judaism in Whippany, NJ.

It’s a big job to get organized for a show. I was wiped out.. I did the best I could. Meaning lots of stuff just didn’t get done.

My saintly husband drove me and helped me set up and even helped me set up a slide show of my work. He was also a really good sport when I realized after we were driving on Route 80 that while I had packed the car with my display stuff…I had forgotten to bring my suitcase full of work so we had to go home to pick up my work.

So while I didn’t sell a whole lot at the show. It was pretty extraordinary for an entirely different reason. we all know the expression “six degrees of separation”. I think that in the Jewish world it’s more like two degrees of separation.

So over the course of yesterday I spoke to a woman who used to go to shul with my great aunt and uncle in their small town when she was a kid. I spoke to another woman who was a dear friend of a couple who were very dear to my parents in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. I last saw them when I was five.

I had a lovely conversation with a much younger colleague of my father’s who had worked closely with him in the 1970’s and 80’s on the publications committee of the Rabbinical Assembly.

And in the middle of all of this I reconnected through Facebook with one of my friends from middle school who I haven’t seen since she moved back to Israel in the early 1970’s.

So in many ways, it’s been a crummy week. It’s been crummy in my family, it’s pretty awful in Israel and in Gaza. It was really terrible for the folks flying over the Ukraine in the plane.

And yet, there were some nice things that took place as well. ( Including the fact that my son made Shabbat dinner after he realized that I wasn’t home to cook it)

Shabbat Shalom. Hoping for an upcoming week of health and peace for all.

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 ...

SandyJuly 18, 2014 at 6:53 PM
Oh Sarah,
Sorry to hear of your worries about your daughter. Big hugs.
I hope you were able to sell a lot of your work. Glad you met lovely people.
Enjoy dinner made by someone else.
Sandy
Sarah JacobsJuly 18, 2014 at 7:01 PM
I sold two pieces.

I didn't cover the table fee, (not to mention the additional costs of the car rental, bridge tolls or the purchase of new racks).

I did meet really nice people. You never know though who might decide they want me to make something for them down the road. Usually working a show works more like PR than as a decent generator of direct sales.

sarah in nyc

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