sarah in nyc

 Like everyone else on the planet, I am reading the news about Ukraine obsessively. I am leaving the writing about this topic to people with wiser things to say and instead will be writing about a much smaller topic. When my daughter was a toddler a credit card company sent her an application to get a credit card. My sister was visiting. She was horrified that a child not yet old enough to cross a street by herself, ( let alone take the elevator on her own) would be sent an offer to apply for a credit card and asked my daughter the questions on the application. When asked about what her occupation was, my daughter stated that she was a waitress in an imaginary restaurant. My daughter didn't get a credit card then. I was reminded of her then occupation as a waitress of an imaginary restaurant in my attempt to get my insurance company to cover the cost of my new hearing aids.  Officially my insurance company does cover the cost of hearing aids. That's what they say on their cont...

  My grandparents didn't know their exact birthdays. My grandfather knew that he was born in the year of the " groisse shturm ", or 1888. As we keep living through the pandemic my own sense of time has gotten a little wobbly. My feisty friend Yocheved died early in the last crop of deaths that claimed five friends in about four weeks. Yocheved's nieces now have the awesomely difficult job of emptying out Yocheved's apartment which was filled with books and more books, giant African sculptures, pottery from the Middle East, Judaica, books, textiles, tons of needlework made by Yocheved and books. Earlier this week I had lunch with my dear friend Esther. We usually end our visits with a look around the thrift store. While I was waiting to pay for my purchase,  there was Yocheved's niece Martha asking after her lost glasses. I greeted Martha and she asked if I wanted to choose things to take from Yocheved's apartment. Yocheved's wish was that anything that...

 Tonight, Shabbat dinner is mostly plucked from the freezer.  I had made far too much chicken last week. Since you asked my take on the idea of Chicken Mole was quite delicious even though it probably has little resemblance to actual Chicken Mole. The challah has been frozen since I had baked it a couple of weeks ago, The fruit and vegetable pushcart had beautiful leeks and cabbage so I made  braised leeks, cabbage, and mushrooms flavored with herbes de Provence and red wine.  They smelled amazing while being cooked and now look like this. Not having to cook quite so much meant that we were able to go for a chilly walk in the park. Despite it being really cold there were lots of robins in the park. The sky looked like it was out of a tourist postcard. It feels so luxurious to have a bit of a play day on a Friday. Shabbat Shalom!

 Soon after I started going out with my college boyfriend I started to hang out with his group of friends a large family-like group of people who spent lots of time together. We all played out the drama of our lives, our studies, our family lives, our love lives within this group.  Most weekdays we all sat together at lunch at one big round table in the student center. One of the members of this group was Donna. Actually, There were two Donnas in our group one was from Brooklyn and the other from Billerica, Ma.  I am writing today about our Billierica Donna. From Donna, we learned that the name of the town wasn't pronounced (as most Bostonians know ) as Bill-rikka but locally it was pronounced losing most of the internal consonants, as B' rika. Donna was in those days ferociously smart, wickedly funny, and had something of a hard edge. I found her in those days to be a little terrifying.  We spent lots of time together within our group but we weren't especially close...

 Today both is and isn't my mother's seventh Yahrzeit. My mother died on the tenth day of Adar on a year when it wasn't a leap month. If I remember correctly you get an extra month of Adar three times every nineteen years or something like that frequency to be sure that the holidays stay at their appointed season ( unlike the Islamic calendar where Ramadan can appear during any season of the year). The year after my mother died it was a leap year with two months of Adar. I asked my rabbi what I should do. he told me to observe the Yahrzeit during Adar II. My sisters' rabbis told them to observe during Adar I . Such a completely Jewish answer! Our synagogue calendar actually sends out the Yahrzeit notice for me for the first Adar and not the second, but I am following what my rabbi told me to do. I actually find this difference in family observance to be both amusing and oddly appropriate. After all, I am the granddaughter of the woman who used blue towels for meat and r...

 When you last had tuned in to the adventures of  Benjy's Torah Mantle I had just started stitching the outlines of the letters. After that task was completed I had to carefully pull away the fabric that had the lettering all laid out. It's a messy job that is accomplished using a pair of tweezers and a blunt needle to loosen the warp and weft threads and then pull them away. It's a boring job---but someone needed to do it. It is also a messy job. I ended up tracking wads of thread all through the apartment. After that task was completed it was time to carefully cut away all of the excess turquoise block printed fabric. Eventually, the task was completed. The letters are exactly where I want them and are ready to be edged. You might ask if there is a different way to complete this task. Actually, there are many. My friend Susie Kessler who made Judaica in fabric from the 70s to the 90s used to back fabric with iron-on glue-web, cut out the letters, iron them into place, and...

 My husband has subscribed to the Wall Street Journal since the early 1980s. It is the paper that is on our kitchen table as you are reading this. For years though we have joked that articles about new trends (often in the weekend section of the paper) often appear after it has been something we have been doing for a long time. An article about how smoked paprika is the latest thing in the world of food appears after I have already been slathering our Shabbat chicken with it for months. My son had been wearing checkerboard everything (from underpants to jeans to shoes to jackets) since high school an article showed up after he had graduated from college and had been wearing checked everything for nearly a decade about how chich checked clothes were for men. This week's Off Duty section led with  The Glory of Used Furniture . A friend once described her beautiful apartment as decorated in "Early Dead Relative".  You can probably count on one hand the pieces of furniture in...