sarah in nyc

 Today is my father's fourteenth Yahrziet. Last night I attended a Shiva minyan and recited Kaddish.  This morning I put up a batch of challah. We will be spending the weekend with dear friends so I am baking challah for my hostess. As I did all of the familiar tasks that make up making a batch of challah I thought about how my father used to bake challah. I thought about our very different approaches to the task. My father was much more methodical. Once he figured out a formula for challah baking he stuck to it with no variations. My father had difficulty braiding the dough so he baked his challot in a loaf pan. Each pan held five quarter pound lumps of dough. My father made up a much bigger batch of dough at a time than I do making at least a dozen loaves at a time.  Despite the differences in our challah baking styles and probably in our approaches to life---doing this act today, of all days connected me to my father.  Today I ran into our rabbi and found out that...

 Many years ago, I worked with a woman who had an idea about how to embellish t-shirts for women and embellish them and sell them.  My co-worker drew quite beautifully. One afternoon after work she went downtown to find shirts to embellish and she didn't find exactly  the shirt that she had in mind and she never pursued the project any further.  I was completely baffled. I couldn't understand how a slightly different shirt couldn't be used instead of the shirt she had originally envisioned. I have thought of that woman often over the decades and how for her, a small alteration of expectations just completely shut her down. So much of my work is about facing an obstacle and then pivoting---like a Roomba. I was about to start the atara for Terry's tallit. For those of you who have lives outside of reading my blog, here is a photo of Terry's tallit. It is made out of chunks of the tablecloth that Terry's mom embroidered for Terry's 20th birthday.  Terry's m...

When I finished typing this post I realized that it actually has a theme---stuff that looks like a disaster while in process and then looks good when completed.  Many of the projects I work on spend much of their time under my hands looking like kind of a mess. There is a large number of small tasks that need to get completed each in the proper order ( or at least what feels like the proper order to me). While that process of  many small tasks is going on  things can look like they may not have a good end. Then, there is a moment when the project goes from looking like DIY gone bad to something quite terrific. This week two pieces made that transformation within hours of one another.  Arianna's tallit --now looks like a tallit. It is complete with the fringes and corner pieced from Grandpa's tallit. I still have to sew on the atara and make the eyelets. I am happy for every inch of the many yards of of machine embroidery that went into this piece. From a distance thi...

  I have been working away, as my mother's care-giver used to remind us, slowly by slowly. I am spending chunks of time on the various projects on my plate. Three projects at one time seems to be just about exactly right. When I get stuck on one, i can swivel and put in a bit on time on another. I wandered into the local thrift store. I saw things that reminded me of my mother. My mother didn't own this exact dress but there were many variations of this dress in her wardrobe over the years. My mother often favored dresses that looked like they were poorhouse uniforms. They made her happy and that is the important thing. We didn't own these mugs, but we certainly owned lots of things made by Jerusalem potters. Seeing these mugs felt like a visit with old friends. One of the tree-pits in our neighborhood has been overtaken by morning glories.  Instead of looking like a fence around a rectangle of earth this now looks like a table festooned with a green cloth. Acloser look rew...