sarah in nyc

Today’s post is a jumble of thoughts, a blog salad if you will.   Yesterday was the Yahrzeit of my mother’s friend Rachelle. I think they met in college. My mother kept  very few of her pre-marriage friends. Rachelle was one of them. Rachelle’s daughter Miriam was in my class in school. She was unfailingly nice to me in a place where kindness was a rare experience for me. I went to several of Miriam’s birthday parties. At one of those parties, Rachelle served not the regular frosting topped birthday cake but a Dobos  Torte.  I have eaten Dobos Torte exactly once, at Miriam's birthday party in 1969, and I still remember that hard caramel topped  many layered cake. The cake was a wonder to look at it it’s thin layers of cake and frosting. It was a sophisticated thing to serve to elementary school kids. I remember that Rachelle warned us that it was rich and we shouldn’t eat too much of it. I ate two slices.   In 1978, Rachelle published this cookboo...

Jean and I went shopping for the fabric for her tallit a few months ago. She had chosen a delicious black ribbed silk for the body of the tallit. Jean also fell in love with a complex striped silk that included stripes in satin , and gold brocade. The stripes silk was expensive. it was sold by the panel. The stripe pattern didn’t repeat. My original plan was to have the stripes continue to the inside of the tallit.   Once I got the fabric home I realized that this was not possible.  there simply wasn’t enough of the same element of the stripe pattern to have the same bit of the stripe pattern on both the face and the lining of the tallit. I spent a little while feeling completely stymied by the problem. Jean, ever gracious, was prepared to find new  new fabric.  I was not ready to give up that easily. She had invested a fair amount of money in the fabric. I didn’t want to see such beautiful fabric go to waste. Also Jean is a really careful decider. It takes...

After a long and difficult winter, it is finally spring, not just by the calendar but by the weather as well. The street trees have begun to bloom. I am also doing the spring time task of catching up on ironing all of the table cloths I used during Passover. Well, I actually haven’t gotten through all of the cloths.  I have done about half of them. I also ironed most of the napkins we used for the two Seders. Unlike my mother who was a big believer in using matching napkins at a meal, I use a mix of similar napkins. Some in the stack are from my mother, others I inherited from other people.  All of them are roughly the same size and are ivory linen with taupe cutwork. I think that like the various people at the table, they can get along even if they are not identical.   I also began constructing the stripes for two very different tallitot for two very different people. This black gold and blue tallit is for Jean.   She had taken a  tallit wor...