Not about the elephant in the room

I'm not going to write about the September 11th elephant in the room right now. I can get through the crisis of COVID -19 raging around us right now by not focusing too much on September 11. There is a limit of how much pain a heart can hold at one moment and I have to save my emotional energy to get through the Jewish Holidays.

This post is about small lovely things.

I mailed a baby gift to our niece in California and some gifts for the older sibs. On the way home from the post office I passed a bee getting nectar from these blue flowers in a tree pit.

I could crop my photos so this scene looks completely bucolic,

but I have chosen not to.

One of the side effects of Covid-19 is that the tree pits which are normally tended by the buildings closest to them have been allowed to run wild.

I kind of like the verdant chaos.

The Catholic Church on the corner of 96th Street always has a few blowsy roses blooming.

Next door to the church is a plant shop. They have put out fall plants.

There is something so cheerful about the peppers and the berries.

Broadway had big socially un-distanced groupings of pigeons.

Right now I envy the pigeons. I look at the pigeons and think about life before the pandemic when friends would gather in groups to talk and to chat. Some day, I will get to do that again.

Another nice thing:

I am allergic to sesame. I have been able to be fine with not eating sesame candies ( the sort that only seemed to live in Jewish homes) I can live without techina . It can be inconvenient to not be able to eat hummus but I can manage. I can even live without halvah. The one real loss for me has been the lack of za'atar.

My son had mentioned that he had a jar of Passover Za'atar made without sesame. I went searching on the manufacturer's website but alas non -sesame za'atar isn't available the rest of the year. A google search did yield this

Our youngest has been allergic to sesame for years and had never eaten one of the great taste experiences of life, pita za'atar.

I made some.

He loved it and mentioned that he thought that the za'atar would probably taste delicious on chicken. We had making chicken with za'atar only when our youngest was away. Tonight we are eating chicken made with za'atar( and lemon and a smashed tomato)

I'm glad that my youngest can enjoy the deliciousness that is chicken with za'atar. I am looking forward to eating it again after nearly two years.

Yet another nice thing:

I am still getting my head around doing the High Holidays without the hustle and bustle and joy of 1100 people in one space. I am missing doing the holidays without walking to and from synagogue and seeing so many other people walking to and from their own synagogues. I am also so missing the crush of people who normally sit around our table for so many of the holiday meals.

I decided to make holiday challot for the people who are part of our Friday night Zoom Shabbat.

I hope to make stuffed cabbage next week for our cohort. That way, even though we are all sitting at our own tables, we can at least all be eating some of the same food as we join together for Rosh Ha Shanah.

I made two small challot for us for tonight.

The challah and the cabbage won't change the world or do anything about Covid-19 but it does make me feel a little bit better, even on September 11.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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