It has been a while

since I last posted.

Caleb and his mom came by to tie the tzitzit. Since you asked. they were both very happy with the tallit.

That Shabbat I attended Caleb's bar-mitzvah at his synagogue. Aside from being smart and a good artist, Caleb has a beautiful voice.

I had only met Caleb wearing his hat and a mask. At synagogue, he was wearing a kippah and when he was reading Torah or leading services he was unmasked.

It is only as I pulled the photos for this post that I realized why his face was so unfamiliar to me. I had never actually seen his face before.

It was only after I had finished both the Torah mantle and Caleb's tallit that I could go get my second Covid booster shot and risk being laid low by a reaction to it. I am so glad that I waited because a day after my booster I had to nap for five hours in the middle of the day and then remained dragged out for a few more days.

My days have been filled. I have baked several batches of bread.

I have been working away on my next project bits of which you can see through a zip-lok bag. You can see some more progress below

Yes, this is a teaser and there will be much more about this project in another post.

My sister is in town this week. we went to MOMA yesterday.

I had never before seen this particular Tiffany lamp. I suppose that if I were a more generous mother I would get this lamp for my Halloween-born oldest child.

The lamp and the painting below were in a room built around the theme of motion and light.

On a museum visit, you never know what will catch your eye. Both my sister and I really liked this odd painting.

It looked formal and static from a distance. But once you got into the details.....

more questions were raised than answered.

We sat down in front of Warhol's soup cans.

My sister and I both have lots of graphics work under our belts. We realized that all of the cans and the logo have been silk-screened and that all of the soup name letterings have been hand drafted. The fleur de lis have all been hand stamped on using a commercially made stamp and hand-printed.

All of the brush strokes on this painting are in fact ...

paint brushes.

We did join the crowds

to see the exhibit about Matisse's The Red Studio.

Later in the day,
we traveled to Mecca. Not really. We did go to Rego Park to...

We knew that my sister would love this place...and she did. We were able to entice your youngest to join us. We didn't have to work very hard.

You can see his face distorted in the neck of the tarragon soda bottle.

My sister was less delighted by the soda than we are. For us, it is essential to the enjoyment of a Central Asian meal.

You are not seeing food on our plates because we have eaten it. I think that this photo was taken between rounds of meat on skewers. Yes, it was all excellent. I ate quail and it was a revelation. We also ate fried brains that reminded us oddly enough of jack fruit patties.

Just before we went into the subway we saw this lovely sunset.

Today I baked a pie for Shabbat dinner. The crust has lots of lemon peel and limoncello in it. The custard is made with the juice of two lemons and is thickened with tapioca starch. Coconut milk stands in for the milk element of the custard.

I placed the whole blackberries into the hot-cooked custard. The bottoms of the berries should be slightly cooked while the tops stay beautiful.

For me, this is the perfect summer dessert.

These days my heart has been heavy. My dear cousin David is gravely ill.

He is the sweet little boy in these photos. So many of us are reciting Psalms for דוד אברהם בן אלישבע לאה, hoping that perhaps it will help along with the excellent medical care he is receiving.

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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