A week of celebrations

Sunday, our cousin and her beloved organized a socially distant engagement party in Central Park. It was the first time since February that we and our children were all together in real life and not just onscreen. I didn't take photos of our family, my cousin and her beloved, her older siblings with their families (including our newborn cousin), and our kids because I was too busy enjoying our time together to take photos. I apologize to the bride's parents for not taking photos because I was just having too much fun.

My youngest and I had to leave the celebration early. He has a weekly meeting with friends and I was tying tzitzit with Max and his family via Zoom. We walked home because I am still not doing public transit.

This building seems to have been renovated recently. I am not sure if it was painted or if the decorative elements were re-cast and restored. I don't remember it looking quite so crisp and beautiful in the past.

Clearly, the old fire escapes have been replaced with jazzy looking Bauhaus ones.

The restoration made a completely forgettable building something worth noting.

Brownstone is soft. The acid in pollution tends to wear away at all of the crisp and lovely details. Lately, I have been seeing lots of the previously melted away details on old brownstones beautifully recast and reapplied to house fronts.

Below you see both restored decorative elements as well as the eroded version just to the left.

Old decorative ironwork often rusts away if not properly maintained. In the great golden age of building on the Upper West Side, each building had its own custom ironwork that was created to add a bit of extra to a building.

This corner building had all of the elements of the ironwork preserved, here as a balustrade around a set of cellar stairs.

Here on a service door.

The motif is here on a basement window as well.

As we walked we passed my brother-in-law's old home.

In the late 1970s, a Barnard student was killed by a chunk of falling facade from a building along Broadway. As a result of that tragedy, every building facade is inspected and repaired every few years. Scaffolding is put up and every inch of every building is inspected and then repaired.

The repeating patterns of the metalwork are not exactly beautiful but are always interesting.

While the pandemic has made most things worse, it is because of the pandemic that I was virtually able to attend the wedding of my friend's son in Israel.

I loved seeing the beautiful relationship she has with her son.

I also loved seeing her parents, who I haven't seen since about 1973.

Hoping for more good things, more celebrations.

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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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