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

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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