Well, things could be worse

The thing that had been hovering in my throat for over a week as almost a cold came out and laid me low all week.  This cold has laid me out flat and has left me tired and with a tiny pea brain.   It's a cold and not the flu.  It won't kill me like the brain tumor that killed my friend Mindy or the terrible sarcoma that killed my dear friend Marcia nearly twenty years ago, but I am still miserable.

I am drinking gallons of tea and read Facebook because my brain is too small to read anything that takes a whole lot more focus. I see that my friend Racheli is mourning the death of one of the soldiers killed in Israel this week. He comes from her town is the age of her children. Even is a big city like NewYork when you have multiple kids who go to school, to camp, do afterschool activities, go to shul--all those strands of their lives create a big fat rope and as a parent, you are familiar with all of the fibers that make up that communal rope. So no, it isn't a kid I know but his loss is a close one for my friend.

Another soldier now fighting for his life is connected by friendship to another childhood friend...the tragedies are far away and close at hand as well.

I am feeling slightly less rotten so I

made challah.

My son-in-law gave us a bottle of maple syrup infused with chili peppers and smoke .

I used it to make this week's chicken.

 There are also cranberries hiding among the chicken parts. This seems like a nice take on traditional Thanksgiving flavors.

I have begun the thinking part of a tallit that is due soon and that is a nice break both from being sick and the bad news all around.


Continuing in what seem's to be this post's theme of things that are making me sad.  I saw this yesterday.

It's not a tragedy but it is the end of an era.

And once again in that category, first a little backstory.
In the heady post-Vatican II years a curate in the Catholic church down the street from our synagogue took it upon himself to befriend my father as part of his own small way to right centuries of wrong by his church.

What had begun as a political act by one priest evolved into a deeply fond friendship.  Here is Father Blute in his ordination portrait in 1956

Father Blute attended seder at our house most years. He would drop by for tea and a smidgen of cake. Father Blute was assigned to churches a bit further away from our house but he remained close to my parents.

Eventually, my sisters and I began to refer to Father Blute as our bachelor uncle. My oldest sister has taken on the mantle of visiting and errand running that one might do for one's actual bachelor uncle.

Father Blute has Parkinsons and it has damaged both his body and his brain. While we were in  Florence I realized that the images of suffering shown so often in Christian religious art might be a comfort to our dear bachelor uncle. I took photos of objects that I thought would speak to him and his current suffering.

I put those images together in a photo book which I had mailed to his current residence. My sister visited the other day. She told me that he loved the book but kept it hidden. In the torment the Parkinsons inflicts on his brain he was worried that the photo book would be stolen because it is precious.

I feel both very touched and unspeakably sad.

Shabbat Shalom