Home Again, Home Again jiggity jig

We arrived home from, our adventure in San Francisco at about one in the morning. I didn't post while we were away but plan to do a few posts about our adventures. The main reason for this trip was the opening of the exhibit of my late father-in-law's artwork at The Lost Art Salon. I will write about that magical day in a different post.

We visited a fair number of museums. Our first was The Museum of Craft and Design, which, unlike most museums, you enter through the gift shop. It's a small museum and we loved the exhibit of Tom Loeser chairs.

This folding chair was from the 1980's and was designed to do double duty as either a chair

or a piece of artwork

I was completely charmed by the series of chairs and benches he had made incorporating farm implements.

I wished that I were a designer for a convention center in farm country so I could purchase these benches.

My husband adored this one.

We also visited a dear friend of my husband's in Berkeley and visited their museum as well.

I was charmed by these large sculptures.

The downstairs galleries had a disturbing exhibit about torture and suffering through the centuries. I wasn't in the mood so I drifted out of those galleries and found a really compelling installation of altered photographs.

You can read more about the artist and the work here.

We did two really fast museum visits to two of the museums on the Moscone Center campus. While looking out a window in the first museum, I spotted the exhibit that I really wanted to see at the Contemporary Jewish Museum across the street. So we quickly left the first museum and went to see the Rube Goldberg exhibit.

You can see how he was such a powerful influence on Mad Magazine writers and cartoonists.

This completely prophetic cartoon was a 1950's cover for an issue of Popular Mechanics magazine.

You can visit the exhibit virtually here.

When my husband and I travel we tend to wander. As soon as we arrived we bought a bus pass for the week. We hopped on and off of busses all day, sometimes knowing our destinations ahead of time but sometimes just taking the bus to see where it would take us.

We love cool architecture.

We waited for a bus on the top of a hill overlooking the working business of a port.

As we waited for the bus we looked down the hill towards the ocean.

The grassy lot next to the bus stop was dotted with California poppies.

If I cropped my photos properly, you might think I was out in the country.

Eventually, our bus came. We got off at the last stop. The beach beckoned us but the hills foreshortened the distance.

Eventually, we got to the beach.

Wednesday, we went to the Civic Center farmer's market

I felt like I could get drunk from the intensity of the colors.

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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