Marilyfe As We Know It

Is it Possible that Saul is 65?

2012-02-16T11:03:00.003-05:00

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Saul and I were childhood sweethearts. We have known each other since I was 11 and he was 14. He walked me home from my friend’s twelfth birthday party. We all lived down the street from each other in a section of North Philadelphia called Logan. On our first date, when I was 14 and he was 17, we double-dated with that same friend and attended Olney High School’s Kix and Kapers in May of 1964. I still have the program from this variety talent show that the students of the high school performed, and some subsequent ones that we attended for a few years after that. It is unbelievable to me that we now have a granddaughter who is 11.

As we were lucky enough to grow old together, we still feel an element of that youthful relationship. The way we look belies our perception of each other. My friend Roxy and I are always laughing about the fact that we are shocked each time we walk past a mirror. In our heads, we are still in our twenties. My mother used to say that inside every old lady there is a 16-year-old girl screaming to get out. Saul and I are so lucky to have all the shared memories of our youth together, and it colors the way we see each other, much as it would be if we were “looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.” I don’t think either one of us minds being perceived in a more flattering light, however unrealistic that might be. A 65th birthday celebration is both a shock and a privilege. We need to make serious plans for our old age, but how lucky we are to have reached this milestone together and to have had the time to enjoy each other for all these years!

Ari has been visiting the last two weekends to help us celebrate Saul’s birthday. In the intervening week, the holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish Arbor Day, has occurred and we have had three separate Tu B’Shevat seders. The first was at a Shabbat dinner at Jess and Alex’s house. Jess wrote a beautiful ceremony, gleaning from various sources, and including a very clever poem of her own creation. Alex, as usual, made a delectable meal ordered up by Izzy. We celebrated her eighth birthday as well as Saul’s 65th. When we arrived for dinner, Saul was greeted at the door with a crown that the girls made that said “King Saba,” and a royal robe, trimmed with gold, that had been part of a Purim costume for Jessica. Jess was able to find a great variety of fruits and nuts for the seder, all grown in the U.S. Rif brought a box of caramelized mixed nuts from Trader Joe’s that had us all addicted the moment we tasted them. We had the required four cups of grape juice ranging in color from white to dark. The dinner Izzy ordered for her birthday, so unusual for a child’s taste, was black bean soup, baked glazed Brussels sprouts, salad, seared tuna, glazed salmon, and mashed potatoes. We also had the birthday-cake-shaped pasta that I had bought the week earlier, and for dessert, brown-sugar-iced sweet potato cake and carob sheet cake brownies. Attending the seder and dinner were Alex, Jess and the girls, Saul and me, Ari, Larry, Faith, Elaine, and Rif. We had picked up Larry and Faith for the drive to NJ, and Ari drove us all home, tired, but sated and happy.

The next day, Saul, Ari and I attended services at MBI-EE and participated in our second Tu B’Shevat seder and luncheon there. Again, there was was an incredible variety of fruits and nuts, various colors of grape juice and a thoughtful series of readings and blessings in a pamphlet prepared by Rabbi Addison. On Sunday, we had bento box lunches with Jess, Alex and the girls at Chez Elena Wu where we are now recognized on our once-a-month excursions and treated very well indeed. In the late afternoon, Saul, Ari and I decided to take a short trip to The Dump in New Jersey. We found the merchandise there to be quite a bit different from what we had seen at the one in Oaks. Ari found the perfect, one-of-a-kind console table for his foyer and also bought a beautiful, room-size Oriental rug for under his dining table made of wool and silk. We figured that we would find a way to get them to DC eventually.

During the following week, I spent several days in front of the computer working on an international publication. In whatever free time I had, I continued to scan the descriptive and engaging letters from my father to my mother during WWII from the months of March through July 1945, a very auspicious time during the war. In the last year, with a long hiatus, I have scanned over 500 letters and have just scratched the surface. On Thursday, I attended Faith’s class where we sampled leftover fruit and nuts from the previous night’s seder at Temple Sinai and read from a seder pamphlet compiled by the daughter of members of our class (a fourth seder for me). Saul and I shopped on Thursday afternoon for the supplies for our own Tu B’Shevat seder, going to Costco, Produce Junction, Assi Market, Trader Joe’s and Giant to assemble all the necessary and diverse components. Ari arrived late on Thursday evening after attending a work-related dinner. The three of us spent most of the next day enjoyably preparing dinner and the seder, although Ari was interrupted by work much more than he had anticipated. We took a break and had lunch at Eastern Dragon. We used our traditional seder from previous years and were joined by Saul’s colleague, Sister Lisa, Beth, Larry, Faith, Jerry and Betty. For dinner, we had homemade challah; chestnut soup; spinach salad with hot sesame dressing, goat cheese, pomegranate seeds and slivered almonds; Israeli salad; slishkas; mashed cauliflower, and maple-glazed steelhead trout. For dessert, we had coffee and an upside-down fresh cranberry cake topped with whipped cream, and assorted tree-related cookies, such as mango teacakes, mini pecan pies, lemon cheese logs, lime cornmeal cookies, and walnut cookies. On this day, Saul became 65 years old and we marked his birthday again.

An icy snow began to fall in the wee hours of Saturday morning and travel became treacherous, so we lounged around on Saturday morning, and had a big breakfast. While Saul took a long nap, Ari helped me assemble and decorate the roller skate cake that Izzy had baked a few weeks earlier, which was waiting in the freezer for her birthday party. As with the Cat in the Hat cake that I made two years ago, I used the standing lamb pan from Wilton to get the basic shape I needed. We had taken a photo of Izzy with her lavender roller skate a week earlier so that I could copy it. I was very pleased with the result.

On Sunday, the three of us packed up both cars and headed for Izzy’s roller skating party in New Jersey, stopping to have breakfast at the Marlton Diner on the way. Izzy had a rollicking celebration with a dozen other children, including her cousins, Brenna and Ava. Alex’s sister Naomi, her husband Matt, their baby Talia, Elaine, Rif, Erica and Danny came to the rink as well as some of the other parents. Jess had provided all sorts of crafts projects for the kids, as well as packs of glowing light sticks. At the rink, there were also mazes, a giant inflated slide, which Yona climbed until she could not take another step, arcade games and air hockey, to name a few of the delights there. After two hours, all rendezvoused back at the house for snacks, drinks, birthday cake, and ice cream. When the party ended, Rif and Paul drove with us to The Dump where we loaded Ari’s table and rug into the back of Paul’s large SUV. We met Jess, Sami and Izzy at a Thai Restaurant, Bankok City in Voorhees, where we had a delicious and leisurely meal. Transferring the table and rug to our SUV on the parking lot after dinner, we decided that we would visit Ari this coming weekend so that we could deliver his stuff.

Now well into winter, we are hoping that this unusually mild weather will continue so that we can begin some major renovations to the house with an eye to putting it up for sale in the spring or summer. The future of Camp Bubbie and Saba for this year has yet to be determined. Sami is going to overnight camp at Ramah this year. Izzy may be at the JCC day camp, and a day camp program is available for Yona as well. We hope that the number 65 is only a number and that we have a healthy future in store with lots of energy to enjoy the summer with our kids and grandkids. We childhood sweethearts have to keep ourselves active and moving if we want to reach “Infinity and Beyond!”

Getting Away for Some R & R in D.C.

2012-01-30T20:04:00.001-05:00

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The last week of January, Saul and I decided, on an impulse, to visit Ari in DC this past weekend. We had not been there since mid-November and Ari has been chiding us since Jess and Alex moved to Cherry Hill that we would probably never come to visit him any more. We love DC, and we love our adventures there with Ari, so I really think there is nothing for him to worry about.

We certainly did have an adventure-packed weekend. Driving down on Thursday afternoon when Saul finished his classes at CHC, we encountered uncharacteristically light traffic and arrived at Reagan National Airport within a couple minutes of the time Ari picked up his checked bag and emerged from the terminal, returning from his business trip to Atlanta. We did not have to circle around the airport even once! Dropping our luggage at his house, we drove the few blocks to Thaitanic II, where we had a cozy and delicious Thai dinner. Afterward, we stopped into the Giant Supermarket down the street in Columbia Heights and picked up some milk, etc., and batteries for Ari’s fire alarm, which was chirping rather annoyingly.The next evening, we ate at Red Lobster in Silver Spring where we waited just a brief time for a bargain of a four-course $15 dinner served by a very accommodating waitress. While we were waiting, Saul and Ari went across the street to CVS to pick up special batteries for Ari’s burglar alarm which was not working properly. I was kept amused in the waiting area of the restaurant by a very small boy, about two or three years old, who was having an approach-avoidance conflict with a large, live lobster in a holding tank. The expressions on his face of fear, fascination, and awe, all at the same time, were something to behold. Over dinner, Ari told us of his week-long experience at the seminar in Atlanta. Despite a half hour of the guys tweaking the alarm when we got back to the house, they were not able to fix it.

With his preoccupations and travels in the last few months, including spending time with us during the shiva for his grandmother, spending Christmas through New Year’s Eve with us, putting up Jess, the girls and me, traveling for business, and entertaining friends who came for overnight visits to see a live concert for which he had bought tickets, Ari’s house was in some degree of disarray. Of course, my winter cleaning OCD overtook me in DC as well as at home, and aided by Saul, by the time Ari arrived home after work, his whole house was clean and in order, his trash taken out, his laundry done, his new Bodum insulated glassware (a housewarming gift from Larry) unpacked, de-labeled and stacked in the cabinet and his newly-framed Ebgi (a Chanukah gift from Larry) hung where he wanted it in his bedroom. Usually, Ari is a bit upset when I move things around in his house, but this time, I think he was delighted. I got lots of exercise, especially going up and down the two flights of stairs countless times, and felt better about the calories eating out.

During the weekend we had breakfast at the retro Tastee Diner in Silver Spring, shopped at a cool, vintage mid-century-modern furniture store on Georgia Avenue called Modern Mobler, spent several hours at the car show at the downtown DC Convention Center, and caught the movie, The Artist, at the E-Street Cinema. Saul and I had Ethiopian food for the first time ever at Etete, and hopefully, will be enjoying it again many years into the future. Ari had a good laugh when I commented on the plates of hot towels that were being brought to the tables because we were about to eat an entire meal with our hands. As it turns out, what I mistakenly thought was rolled towels was actually the sponge-like bread called injera that is used to pick up the food and sop up the sauces. We also sampled a glass of Ethiopian honey wine called tej, which Ari liked, but I found a little medicinal or herby tasting, like eucalyptus. We had the vegetarian combo and each of us had a most succulent and crispy whole fried fish. We had French crepes for breakfast in Pentagon City at LaCreperie, and spent many hours shopping at Sur La Table, Costco, Marshall’s, Bed Bath and Beyond, World Market, and Nordstrum Rack. We had ice cream at Moorenko’s, a place we have been meaning to visit for several years, especially since I learned from my brother that the proprietor, Susan Soorenko, is a playmate from my childhood. She is the granddaughter of our childhood next-door neighbors, Sarah and Harry Benn. Unfortunately, we were told that she can only be found at the manufacturing plant, not at the ice cream parlor, so I am not sure if I will ever get to meet her again.

We loved the movie, The Artist, despite the fact that it was black and white and “silent,” although there was some sound that was played in a very clever way. We had a marvelous time climbing in and out of all kinds of vehicles at the car show. There was even an inventor whom we met who had converted his Prius, after it had been damaged in an accident, to run solely on solar power. He told us to look it up online as the woodie Prius. Ari bought a vintage red enamel on stainless steel bowl for the center of his dining room table. I bought a Calvin Klein dress to wear to an upcoming wedding. We picked up accessories for our houses, like new towels and a stone soap dish for Ari’s guest bathroom, accent pillows for my bed at home, bottles of a German honey made from rapsflower blossoms to add to my collection, bacon-flavored Torani syrup for Beth, the bacon maven, that actually has a circle K on it, and multi-colored pasta shaped like birthday cakes, among other things. It was a very eclectic shopping weekend and we never bought what we were really looking for, which was furniture for our guest bedroom. Before we left for home last night, we had dinner at Lebanese Taverna, a chain which we had been meaning to try for several years. We had an assortment of wonderful, Middle Eastern food—ample hot, balloon-like pita, delicious baba ganoush garnished with fresh pomegranate seeds, grilled hallouma cheese with Greek olives, shwarama, falafel, and kafta. For dessert, we shared a dessert called awamat—hot, light, fried donuts dipped in orange blossom honey and served with a baked custard topped with apricot sauce. Our waiter was exceptionally accommodating and packed up a bag of extra pita with containers of herbs and olive oil, which Saul shared this morning with his Middle Eastern global studies class.

We were on the road home by 6:30 p.m. and again, had light traffic. We went to bed at a reasonable hour all R & R’ed and happy about our productive and exotic weekend.

Cocooning in January 2012

2012-01-23T21:37:00.002-05:00

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We haven’t done a whole lot in January. As it was when Saul’s father died, the responsibility of finding a minyan every day to say kaddish for Saul’s mother, and the time spent traveling back and forth to join at least 10 others in prayer, takes a large bite out of the spontaneity that we enjoy and usually try to incorporate in our lives. For almost a year, it seemed as though every time we started on a project, it was time to wrap it up and head off to synagogue. Saul’s father died at the same time of year as his mother, and so, added to the initial shock of death, shiva and shloshim, is the natural indisposition of the weather—the ice, snow, freezing rain, hail, and early darkness—which makes getting out of the house each day at an appointed time a real trial.

The first two weeks of this month, Saul was on the tail-end of a month-long, mid-semester break. On both of those Shabbatot, we journeyed to Cherry Hill to have dinner with the kids. Rif joined us on that first Shabbat, during which Yona was banished from the table because she absolutely refused to close an umbrella which Jess had compromised on letting her hold at her seat. Several days later, we picked up Yona for a few days so that Jess and Alex could go unencumbered to visit Alex’s best friend, Menachem, now a rabbi in Berkeley, who was attending a conference in Baltimore at the Pearlstone Center where Jessica works. We arranged to meet Jess and the girls at Sushi Kingdom on a Wednesday evening so that we could pick up Yona. Again coincidentally, as we were just starting dinner, Rif and Paul appeared and joined us. For the second Shabbat, TBS hosted a family program called Sugary Shabbat, which was something that Alex never would have conceived or designed, but is a long-standing tradition at TBS that he cheerfully facilitated. We drove over to Cherry Hill in the late afternoon for the well-attended family service, which Alex led with his usual boundless energy. Afterward, a dessert buffet ensued during which families played a game of M&M bingo using the candy as markers, and an enormous amount of candy, cookies, pretzel sticks, marshmallows and icing were used to create fanciful constructions which were then demolished by the participants. Jess had given the older girls an early dinner, and Yona, whom we were returning after her two days reveling in being an only child with us (she was an angel), had a late dinner with us adults before being packed off to bed. After dinner, we returned home with the other two girls in tow so that we could spend the weekend together.

We had planned to all attend services at MBIEE on Saturday morning, but Izzy, who had packed hastily while we were all tired the previous evening, had not brought appropriate clothes with her. I hung around with the girls on Saturday morning, while Saul went off to shul. We had a big bagel breakfast together, watched some movies, and assembled the Lego Guggenheim Museum model that Larry had bought for Izzy as a Chanukah present. When Saul returned, we played Garfield Monopoly in the afternoon. When Shabbat was over, we went to King of Prussia and bought lots of new clothes at Nordstrom Rack (great bargains) for Sami, who is now a petite woman’s size and difficult to fit, and some new tops for Izzy. Then, as Bahama Breeze had a two-hour wait, and the Mall food court was closing, we wound up having a very late dinner at King Buffet in Plymouth Meeting. The girls could not have been more delighted, or more appreciative. They have worn hand-me-downs without complaint for most of their lives, and King Buffet is their favorite place to eat.

Alex was off (a rare occasion) for the Sunday of MLK weekend. Since it was one of the first days of this winter that was bitterly cold, we decided to meet for breakfast in New Jersey and spend the afternoon indoors at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden. Jess called ahead for reservations at Ponzio’s, a long-standing, classic New Jersey diner. Despite the large crowds waiting, we were seated almost immediately and breakfast was delicious, served efficiently, and the menu offered many non-meat choices. We left for the aquarium, less than 10 miles away, in two cars. We were absolutely wowed by the scope and size of the facility. One of our first encounters was with a tank of rays that could be patted with two fingers. Every hour, a 15-minute time-out was observed, during which no hands were allowed in the tank. Shockingly, when the period was over, and hands returned to the tank, the rays headed right for them at the edge. They evidently enjoy being touched and patted! During certain periods, sardine-type small fish could be purchased to feed to them. I also loved the jellyfish displays. Watching the phosphorescent jellyfish undulate is endlessly fascinating to me for some unfathomable (pun intended) reason. I could literally stand there all day until someone drags me away. The huge tanks hold enormous hippopotami as well as other aquatic creatures and they oblige by swimming right along the glassy walls so that they can be observed from, literally, only a few inches away, something that could never happen in the wild. At the end of the afternoon, we returned home with all three girls as school was closed on Monday for them. Saul, however, began his new semester on Monday. We were all so tired from our excursion to the aquarium that we ordered in pizza, and we and the girls all went to bed early, without protest, even Yona. On Monday, Izzy and I baked her birthday cake in the three-dimensional lamb pan from Wilton that I used for “The Cat in the Hat” cake a couple of years ago. This one eventually will be turned into a standing, 3D, roller skate. I continue to marvel at how well the girls have learned to bake and cook. Other than a little help with fractional measurements, about all I am needed for is to clean up. While we made the cake, Sami kept Yona amused with retro cartoon clips on my computer. For lunch, the girls made soba noodles with Japanese-style shiitake mushroom sauce, probably the only dish that makes all three of them happy. They have very different tastes, usually, when it comes to food. Even Yona got into the act, standing on a chair, beginning to learn how to slice the fresh mushrooms with a tiny garnishing knife. On Monday evening, Saul and I met Jessica at Wegman’s in Warrington to have dinner there and return the girls home for school the next day. Wegman’s was the perfect place to meet. There is a children’s area with tiny chairs and picnic tables, a television tuned to “The Disney Channel,” and kosher rotisserie chicken. The children were not confined to their chairs as in a restaurant. We were extremely sorry to say goodbye to the girls as the next scheduled meeting will not be until Izzy’s birthday weekend a few weeks from now. We may have to go sooner if the “withdrawal pains” get to be too intense.

In the meantime, the return to a regular routine has meant long weekdays in the house for me. When the weather gets cold and nasty, I get OCD about cleaning and keeping the house in order so that being indoors doesn’t depress me. I find that the short winter days have a tendency to do that to me; but there is also the satisfaction of curling up under a fluffy down comforter with a good book, my iPhone Kindle app, or the NY Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle. Having the ability to do that at will is a great satisfaction and joy to me.

This past Shabbat, we were all tired from the first week back to routine and the nasty change in the weather. I shopped on Thursday afternoon and made Shabbat dinner at home—homemade challah, leek and Cope’s dried corn soup, buttery steelhead trout glazed with Meyer lemon, Brussels sprouts and chestnuts glazed with maple syrup, homemade coleslaw, Israeli salad, salt-rubbed giant russet baked potatoes, followed by an assortment of leftover homemade holiday cookies from the freezer and coffee. Larry, Faith and Beth joined us. On Sunday, Ari called to say that he had arrived safely in Atlanta for a week-long business seminar. We did not go out the entire weekend. Snow and freezing rain made travel anywhere extremely hazardous. Like me, however, Saul enjoyed curling up under the covers, usually with his laptop, watching old movies, eating yummy leftovers, and getting some much-needed rest.

A Cathartic End to 2011—The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

2012-01-06T11:23:00.002-05:00

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Our new kitchen was completed, competently and strikingly in two consecutive days culminating on Thursday, December 1. After that, we spent every other day at the beginning of December driving back and forth from New Jersey. Lion’s Gate’s hospice staff had called Rif on that same Thursday evening a few days after we returned from our Thanksgiving vacation to deliver the information that Sima was “actively dying.” When we arrived on Friday morning, she was practically comatose and was in that peculiar breathing pattern that I now know is the signal that the end is near. Rif had been with her mother for about an hour when we arrived, and as Saul stood holding his mother’s right hand and greeted her, she turned her head, gave a hint of a smile, and blew him a kiss. It was so brief and illusory that we could hardly believe it happened at all, but Rif had been standing and holding her left hand and had seen it, and I had, also, sitting at the foot of her bed in her room. This was to be the last time that any of us saw any sign of responsiveness. We spent all day Friday at her bedside. We met some of the most wonderful and selfless people during this trying experience. The Lion’s Gate staffers who had known her for several years kept stopping in to check on her and share memories. In the afternoon, she was visited by a hospice rabbi, who sat with us, said prayers for her, and played a bit of “Jewish geography” with us before rushing home for Shabbat. Hospice volunteers, who were strangers to us, came and sat with her for hours, sometimes into the wee hours to relieve us. I can’t say enough in praise of these exemplary human beings. Alex prepared Shabbat dinner for us; we drove home, and then back again on Saturday morning. Jess joined us after services bringing us snacks. On Saturday evening, before we left, Saul said goodbye to his mom, not knowing if she would make it through another day. Rif took up the evening watch. By 1:00 a.m., Rif was exhausted. She drove home, five minutes away, and took a sleeping pill. As she swallowed it, the hospice called to say her mother had died. Having spent a year with hospice nurses in my home for my mom, I had warned Rif that her mother, if she followed the usual pattern, would wait until she left to finally pass on. It appears to be a common pattern, especially among women with their daughters. Officially, she died on Sunday, December 4, 2011. According to our tradition, she was attended by a shomer until the funeral on Tuesday, December 6. Saul and I had been afraid to broach the subject of funeral arrangements, the relationship with his sister having been so recently revived, so we were relieved to hear that everything down to the limousine, choice of coffin, funeral home, etc. had been prearranged and prepaid when she had entered Lion’s Gate. We drove again to New Jersey on Sunday afternoon to meet with the funeral home director, Harry Platt, who could not have been nicer or more accommodating. Afterwards, we had a late lunch at the Marlton Diner and went back to Rif and Paul’s house to wait for Rabbi Lindemann from Temple Beth Sholom, who was meeting with us in order to prepare the eulogy. Jess joined us for the meeting.

Monday was spent working out all the logistics. Rif and Paul arranged for Meredith to fly to Baltimore, where she was picked up by Ari on his way here from DC. Our friends, Bob and Loretta, whom we had not seen for a long time, paid us a visit on Monday, as they could not be here later in the week. I spent a few hours getting our home ready for the seven-day shiva period and trying to arrange kosher cold-cut trays for what was to be a late afternoon repast for the mourners. In the end, I decided to make up the trays myself on Monday evening. I called Alla at Simon’s Kosher Meat where they have been wonderful to us for many years. She agreed to have the meat sliced by late that afternoon, and Jessica picked it up along with bread from a kosher bakery on her way here to help. She had arranged for Yona to sleep over and for Erica to babysit and take care of putting out the trays. Adele and Larry, who preferred not to go to the cemetery, went back directly from the funeral to help her. I went to Produce Junction, Giant Supermarket, and Costco and bought veggies and other necessities. By late Monday evening, everything was in place and I was satisfied. For dessert, Jessica brought back all the leftover pareve sweet breads I had baked for our Rosh Hashanah meals. We had a dozen loaves of zucchini bread, strawberry bread, and date bread wrapped in the freezer.

On Tuesday morning, Saul, Ari and I drove to Rif and Paul’s home in New Jersey where a limousine took us and Meredith to the funeral home. Jess came with Alex, Sami and Izzy. Izzy sat next to me during the funeral and, as is her way, asked an unending barrage of poignant questions about everything that was said and done. Meredith and Paul both spoke beautifully about Sima, particularly about the bonding experiences they had had every summer on vacation at Hilton Head Island. Rabbi Lindemann’s eulogy was excellent and we all felt that he really captured the essence of what we had been trying to convey about her life and personality. After the funeral, we proceeded on a harrowing, hour-long drive to Mt. Sharon Cemetery in Springfield, PA. Jess joined us in the limousine. We narrowly escaped a terrifying collision on the Delaware Memorial Bridge when a semi decided to push into our lane between our limo and the hearse. The day was gray, but not too cold, and fortunately, the rain held off until friends and family had almost finished filling the grave. Izzy asked if she could participate in the mitzvah of filling the grave with me. After I checked, and everyone said it was okay, we shoveled the dirt together.

The next lap of the day began with another hour-long drive home in the limo. Erica, Adele and Larry had everything in order by the time the mourners began to arrive. Our home filled with family, friends, and food every evening from the beginning. Saul’s colleagues at Chestnut Hill College were wonderful about covering for him during this time. To our surprise, and appreciation, some of Saul’s very Orthodox relatives from both Brooklyn and Monsey, NY, paid us a visit, whereupon we pulled out the family tree chuppah (wedding canopy) and the books we have with pages for each family member so that we can collect more information.

In the middle of our shiva, a severe wind-driven rainstorm caused our kitchen ceiling to leak right over the kitchen table. Our contractor came the next day and cut open the ceiling to try to find the source of the leak. As of now, the jury is still out on what caused the problem. We haven’t had any leaks since, and Saul taped the ceiling with a series of plastic trash bags to prevent cold air leakage and dust. Jamie made a shiva visit bringing Presley and our newest family addition, Evan. On Sunday, the sixth day of our shiva, cousin Abie’s wife, Fagie, called from her hospice bed to say goodbye to each of us. She was a year younger than I, and had been battling cancer valiantly for almost five years. When I saw her a year-and-a-half ago at Abie’s mother’s shiva, she needed help to arise from a chair. Every time I thought of her, I wondered for how long she would be able to keep up the struggle to live and to be with her close-knit family. We had not been close over the years, but I liked her and all we could say in that final conversation was that we wished there had been more time in both our lives to spend more of it together. What can you really say to someone who is taking leave of this life that will somehow be meaningful? Fagie died on the following Wednesday evening and we attended her funeral and helped to bury her on Friday. Shiva is suspended for Shabbat and the New Yorkers had to rush home to make it back before sundown. I had prepared Shabbat dinner on Thursday, mostly by removing and defrosting things from the freezer—challah, chicken soup, dumplings, chicken for paprikash, and chocolate almond bars. With the addition of leftover homemade potato salad and coleslaw from our shiva, dinner took less than an hour to prepare. Larry, Beth and Faith joined us for dinner. It always seems callous to me to be so obsessed about food when there is so much sadness in our lives, but for me, it is life-affirming and comforting to see that others are nourished by my efforts.

At the end of our shiva, we were invited by Marianne, my mom’s hospice volunteer from several years ago, to have dinner with her and her friend Cliff at Foulkeways, the magnificent Quaker retirement facility down the street from where we live. Marianne and Cliff had just returned from Budapest where a number of her family had been invited to attend an art symposium to posthumously honor the art of her son, Tibor Kalman. She had many stories to tell about the emotional ups and downs of her trip. I learned about some of her horrific experiences during the Holocaust, about relatives lost and the inhuman practices of the Nazis in Budapest. She revisited the elegant hotel, Gundel, where she had been married. She was asked to speak, and addressed the attendees of the conference. She visited the graves of family members. I also learned about Tibor’s art; he was an avante garde graphic designer, so his work is not art in the usual sense of a painting, print, or sculpture. Dinner at Foulkeways, as it was the last time, offered a delicious plethora of choices from an ample buffet, staffed by very accommodating people, in an elegantly-appointed dining room. What more could anyone ask of a pleasant evening, spent with friends, listening to anecdotes from the past?

Saul and I went for long overdue eye exams on the thirteenth. He discovered that his prescription has completely changed, and he is seeing things much more clearly with his new lenses. The doctor discovered a small, broken blood vessel at the back of my right eye, and I need to go back in three months to make sure it has healed properly.

After attending services at TBS on the seventeenth, we had lunch with our old friends, Ruth and Giora and some even older mutual friends whom we had not seen in over thirty years. Saul had taught religious school with Hedva at Adath Zion many years ago. We socialized back then and attended her wedding when she married Harvey. We even catered their engagement party and decorated a special cake. When they moved to New Jersey, we completely lost touch. Now that Alex is on the professional staff of TBS, we noticed her name on the door of one of the classrooms and discovered that they have been friends of Ruth and Giora for many years. Lunch was delightful and a tremendous diversion from all the misery.

Another diversion from misery, for me, is baking cookies. As the holidays approached, I began turning out as many of the twenty-eight varieties of cookies that we usually make each year as I could. Eventually, and with the competent help of my granddaughters, I succeeded in completing 25 of them. Although we did not believe it would be possible this year, we were able to have a family cookie wrapping and pizza gobbling evening on Sunday, December 18. I also made latkes for our family Chanukah party from potatoes, zucchini and yellow squash, and golden beets. I froze them in foil trays so that they would be oven ready.

On the first night of Chanukah, we drove to New Jersey to have an early dinner together at the “all you can eat” sushi restaurant that had been the scene of our serendipitous reunion a month earlier, Sushi Kingdom. The restaurant set up a large table for us. Present were Jessica and the three girls, Rif, Paul, Meredith, Saul and I. Alex was still at TBS for high school. The restaurant was not so busy as the last time and we polished off a tremendous amount of beautifully-prepared and presented sushi. Considering the usual price of sushi and sashimi, it was the first time I have ever left a Japanese restaurant feeling full. We actually left a few pieces behind because no one could eat another bite. They also had specialty flavors of good ice cream like green tea, mango, and red bean. Afterwards, Paul drove Meredith and me back to their house, while Saul and Rif went to services to say Kaddish. Jess drove the girls home to craft their Chanukiah. They make a different one every year. When Saul and Rif returned, we rendezvoused at Jess and Alex’s to join the craft project in progress and each of us made our own separate candle holder. I thought the design was particularly brilliant on Jessica’s part this year. We were using multi-colored Sharpies, super glue and glass beads to decorate glass ash trays and shot glasses that were leftovers from our catering business many years ago. We had planned to donate them to Impact. The shot glasses were the perfect size to hold tea lights. When Alex returned, we lit the candles together with Ari and Elaine participating simultaneously on iPhone’s FaceTime.

On the second night of Chanukah, Beth cooked and invited us next door to have dinner with her. We lit the candles together and dined on her delicious coconut chicken cutlets and sauteed zucchini, It was a really thoughtful gesture that uplifted our spirits, which have had a tendency to flag all this past month. Afterwards, Saul and I took the hour-long drive to Northeast Philadelphia to Fagie’s shiva so that he could say kaddish with his cousins. I made the drive twice with him that week, and he drove there four times. The rest of the month of mourning (or shloshim), he has been alternating between services at Temple Sinai and Tiferet Bet Israel.

Ari came in from DC and Jess and Alex came with the girls and we all had Shabbat dinner together here the Friday before Christmas, a rare and precious occasion for me. Inky hung out at Beth’s house overnight and got to know Hobbes, Beth’s Cairn terrier. The girls and Jessica helped prepare the dinner which gave Alex a rare chance to rest on a Friday night. We made challah, chicken soup with dumplings, Israeli salad, chicken paprikash, black and white rice, glazed Brussels sprouts, sauteed mushrooms, and snickerdoodles. Larry had a Chanukah dinner at MBIEE to attend, but came afterwards to join us for dinner, bringing presents, including two miniature architectural Lego kits for the older girls—Falling Water and the Guggenheim Museum, both Frank Lloyd Wright designs. We had a large breakfast of bagels and cream cheese, fish, salads, etc. imbibing large quantities of latte and cappuccino from the new Tassimo machine we had purchased after sampling the coffee it produced at Paul and Rif’s house. It makes a far better cup of coffee than the K-cups. Jess and Alex returned their Keurig, which had broken several times, and purchased one also. Saturday afternoon, we all spent several hours building the complicated Falling Water design. As we flipped each page of the lengthy instruction booklet, a different person would assemble the next step. If even one tiny piece was wrong, the whole construction would have to be disassembled page-by-page until it was correct, a process much more difficult than the assembly itself. That needed to be done three times. When it was finished, Ari, Sami, Izzy and I played Garfield Monopoly for a few hours until dinner time. Jess and Alex left with the girls and Inky to attend a family program at TBS. Saul, Ari and I did what most Conservative and Reform Jews do on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—Chinese food and a movie. We went to see the new Sherlock Holmes and enjoyed it, although Ari did fall asleep for a while. He usually does in a dark comfy movie house. We slept late on Christmas day. My scratchy throat had turned into a strep infection as evidenced by a white spot on the right side of my throat. I managed to reach a doctor on call on Christmas and filled a prescription for a Z-Pack at a 24-hour pharmacy. We had lunch at King Buffet in Plymouth Meeting Mall. In the evening, I made two soups—leek and dried corn chowder, and black bean—a large pot of vegetarian chili and tzatziki.

Our family Chanukah party was scheduled for 1:00 p.m. on the Monday after Christmas, which was a holiday for nearly everyone. Jess and the family came early, and Alex, hurricane that he is in the kitchen, managed to marinate and grill fish for fish tacos, cut up and arrange all the salads and veggies for the fish and the veggie chili tacos, make fresh guacamole, and three different types of fresh salsa. Also on the menu were the latkes with various toppings like applesauce, sour cream, cranberry apple butter, eggplant garlic spread, etc.; a cheese board, and margaritas. In addition to the huge assortment of cookies left over from making gift packages, I prepared batter for sufganiyot. It was the usual sour-cream and baking soda type-batter that our family has been making for years. The kids at the party all participated in frying, draining, sugaring, serving, and eating the donuts with much excitement. This year, however, Saul expressed some discontent over the fact that we have not been making the “real” sufganiyot that he remembers from his childhood in Israel, the rolled-out, raised yeast donuts that are filled with jelly. At Fagie’s shiva, there was a discussion with Abie’s brother, Bobbie, who remembered his mother making a type of donut called “fank.” Searching online, he had not been able to find an actual working recipe. Saul, equal to the challenge, found a suitable one and emailed it off to Bobbie, printing a copy for me as well. Our party went off without a hitch, although at times, with 35-40 in attendance and all the kids running around frenetically, it seemed like pure pandemonium. After a few hours of munching, each family lit a Chanukiah with accompanying blessings in order from oldest to youngest, as is our family tradition. I had hoped to be able to see some of the gifts that were opened by enforcing a one gift per person rule with a lottery-type swap, but the gift distribution and opening were just as chaotic as always. One of the highlights, though, was that Meredith bought Yona a plastic drink fountain because she loves to play with water so much, but the motor was not strong enough to propel the water all the way to the top. First the kids ran off and assembled it, and when it was not working properly, the grownups reassembled it, Beth returning from next door at Brenna’s call to lend her engineering skill. Unfortunately, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” could not put it together again so that the water would be propelled to the top level. It had to be returned.

Ari was off from work between Christmas and New Year’s because his office was moving into other facilities and the company deemed it wise to actually close during this time. There were no cheap flights during this particular week, so he hung out with us the whole time. On Tuesday, he and I went to King of Prussia and shopped at Nordstrum Rack and at the Mall. On Wednesday, we went to a new outlet mall facility in Limerick, PA, only 22 miles from our home. It was the closest I have ever been to the nuclear reactors there, nothing separating us but a large field, and probably some fences. In addition, there is a small airport nearby, so there was the constant buzz of small airplanes overhead. We had a good shopping experience, though, finding great buys on all the things for which we were looking, except flat boots for me.

On Thursday, we did a major cleaning up of the house after the party. I was feeling well enough to delve into things, pack away the Chanukah decorations, de-wax all the Chanukiot, and Ari was up to taking out the rug shampooer and cleaning both the Oriental in the dining room, and the high traffic area in the bedroom hallway. Saul had developed sciatica somehow, right before Christmas weekend, and had suffered for several days taking ineffectual, over-the-counter medication. On Friday morning, the doctor saw him and gave him a prescription for a Medrol Dose Pack that began to work almost immediately and involved a five-day course of pills, just like my Z-Pack. From the doctor’s appointment in Elkins Park, we stopped at Rolings Bakery to pick up some pareve desserts, drop off cookies to some friends, and then the three of us drove to Cherry Hill, ostensibly to meet Jess, Alex and the girls for lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. Unfortunately, there was a 45-minute wait, so we met instead across the parking lot at Brio and had a very satisfactory lunch there. Ari and I dropped off Saul at Jess and Alex’s and then went for a drive which culminated in a much-needed haircut for Ari. We returned in time for what the kids like to call a “Shabboup.” Jess and Alex had cleaned out their freezer which yielded four different types of homemade soup. With the addition of an assortment of good breads, salad, rice, and some excellent homemade schwarama, we had an excellent Shabbat soup meal. Meredith and Rif joined us for dinner bringing a trunk of Meredith’s old princess costumes for Yona.

We brought Sami home with us after dinner, so that she could celebrate New Year’s with us, stopping on the way to walk through a particularly beautiful, lighted home Christmas display that we passed along the route home. Izzy had a sleepover party at a friend’s house for New Year’s Eve, and Jess and Alex had been invited to a party for parents with toddlers. On Saturday, while Saul and I attended services at MBIEE, Sami stayed home with Ari, who slept in. She correctly surmised that no kids would be there because of the holiday. Saul and I napped in the afternoon. Sami hung out in pajamas all day, and worked on origami sculptures, a big treat for her. We had lots of great leftovers that needed to be cleaned up from the party. When Shabbat was over, Sami and I made the dough for “Fank” from the recipe that Saul had found online. I had to add an additional cup of flour to get the proper consistency, but the donuts were amazing! They puffed up perfectly in the fryer and had a nice big hollow into which we injected strawberry jam. We ate warm jelly donuts until we couldn’t move and watched the ball drop in Times Square on television. By 1:00 a.m. we were all asleep. On Sunday, while watching the Mummer’s Parade, we worked on the dollhouse and discovered that Greenleaf Dollhouse Company had included (in addition to the parts we ordered) a sheet containing the parts for bathroom fixtures. Sami punched out, assembled and glued together a bunch of those, while Saul worked on the drawer lattice and tower roof, and I made pillows, a cover, and a dust ruffle for the bed. Jess and Alex arrived with the two other girls at dinner time, and we pulled together yet another dinner based on leftovers with the addition of some tortellini from the freezer.

Monday, January 2, was a very sad day for me. It was time for our lives to return to some semblance of normal, for Ari to return home, and for the kids to get ready to go back to school. During his time here, the sleep center where Ari had done a study 10 days earlier called to say that the pulmonologist had urgently requested that they schedule a follow-up study with him. In this case, no news was not good news. When they finally got around to reaching him, he was told that he has severe sleep apnea and that his oxygen level dropped to a dangerous 47%. He will definitely need a CPAP machine, and last night, in the follow-up, he tried it for the first time.

Saul’s shloshim ended the day before yesterday, but he decided to wait one more day to trim the beard he has grown. Yesterday was the fast for the Tenth of Tevet, a day marking our mourning for the destruction of the Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. We went to Faith’s class yesterday where we studied texts dealing with the vicissitudes of Jewish life in Europe from the 15th to 16th centuries. After minyan at Temple Sinai, we had a late dinner with Faith at Bonefish Grill.

This past month has been a mish-mosh of crazy highs and lows as we went from the distress of death, to the reunion of families, the loss of loved ones to the comfort of closeness with those we love, the helplessness of our human condition to the empowerment of selfless people to imbue our world with kindness. May 2012 be a year of life and good health for those dear to us!

Coincidence, God’s Way of Remaining Anonymous

2011-11-30T23:26:00.006-05:00

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Rabbi Sidney Greenberg used to say this all the time, but if ever I believed it, this month clinched it. Jess had agreed to work in Baltimore at Pearlstone during the days leading up to Veteran’s Day weekend. The girls were off from school and we had previously arranged for me to babysit them at Ari’s home in DC while she took the time to complete some outstanding projects. The previous weekend, Saul and I had traveled down to DC just to have some recreational time with Ari, who has been complaining that we are neglecting to visit him with all the brouhaha that has been going on in Cherry Hill. We spent the weekend just having fun, shopping, eating out, watching movies. The whole family was about to pile in on him on the following Wednesday.

Saul drove us to NJ to drop me off at Jess and Alex’s home so that Jess and I could continue on to DC and I would not have to leave my car there. The idea was to have a quick dinner together when the girls finished their after-school activities and then we would get on the road and Saul would return home to finish teaching for the week and attend some meetings. On the way there, we discovered that our friend Larry, who has not been feeling well for weeks, was about to go to the emergency room on the advice of his doctor. By coincidence, we had just driven past his house and offered to take him there, but he wanted to have his car there in case they did not admit him. When we picked the girls up from their activities, we asked them what they would like for dinner out. They wanted sushi and Jess mentioned that she had discovered an “all you can eat” sushi place nearby. When we all arrived and were seated, we discovered that seated right across from us were Saul’s sister Rif and her husband Paul. They had just been seated a few minutes earlier. Our families have been estranged for over four years and they had never met Yona, who is two-and-a-half. We invited them to sit with us and we squeezed around the large table we had been given. With no mention of the past, we began to catch up with each other’s lives. Eventually, Jess and I headed off with the girls for DC and Saul remained for another hour in conversation with Rif and Paul. Later that evening, he told us that Rif had asked if we could get together the following weekend when Meredith, their daughter, would be in from dental school. During the week, we were able to arrange it, including Ari. Larry was admitted to the hospital and spent the next few days on an I.V., with no other food or drink allowed, while they administered various tests and eventually began treating him for severe diverticulitis. It still hasn’t been determined if that is really the problem. Other friends took his car home for him.

We had a great time in DC. I stayed at home with the girls on Thursday. The weather was gray and rainy. Sami and Izzy spent a few hours making fabulous and fanciful constructions with a box of Ari’s old business cards, scissors, and Scotch tape. They took long baths in Ari’s whirlpool. We couldn’t find Ari’s deck of cards, so Sami set about making a deck of playing cards out of the business cards and then, created money from more cards so that I could teach them to play poker. We spent a few hours, while Yona napped, playing poker rather successfully considering our homemade materials. Ari ordered a delicious vegetarian Chinese dinner that was delivered to our door just before he, and then Jessica, arrived from work. Jessica had finished her projects in one day and was free to play with us on Friday. Saul arrived on Friday in the late afternoon after his meetings. We found out from a call from my cousin, Anne, that Aunt Ruth had been rushed to the hospital early Friday morning for emergency gall bladder removal surgery. By coincidence, she landed in a hospital room just down the hall from Larry. He was able to look in on her and Anne was able to look in on him.

Since Izzy had been learning about money at school, Jess and I decided to take the girls for a tour of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Unfortunately, despite the fact that we had checked hours and tours on the net, we discovered, when we arrived downtown, that the Treasury and most other DC attractions were closed on Friday for Veteran’s Day. After wandering around on foot on an unseasonably cold, windy day, we gave up and went shopping at Trader Joe’s for the provisions for our Shabbat dinner. I waited in the car with a napping Yona while they shopped. Jess did most of the prep work and we had as our main course a huge and varied chicken stir-fry on top of rice. We supplemented this with my homemade chicken soup and dumplings that had been in Ari’s freezer, vegetarian hors d’oeuvres from the store, some of the leftovers from the previous evening, and for dessert, we had frozen slices of banana coated with chocolate from Trader Joe’s.

We visited the magnificent Smithsonian American Art Museum on Saturday, as they were having a Lego League event there for kids, but most of the fun was specifically designed for the participants, not the observers. We happened upon a docent-led tour of the miniature model of the museum and so the girls were able to see all the tiny contents of the various drawers. When neither Saul nor I was able to lift Izzy to see contents of one of the higher open drawers, our docent offered to lift her up. I warned the woman how heavy Izzy was, but she said she was stronger than she looked, and indeed, above and beyond the call of duty, she was kind enough to lift Izzy to see the contents of the drawer. In one of the upstairs galleries, tables were set up with boxes of Lego parts, and we spent about two hours there, as even Yona enjoyed building things with Legos. We returned home for a late lunch of our previous evening’s leftovers. We had great breakfasts together during our stay at both the Metro 29 Diner in Virginia, and at the Tastee Diner in Silver Spring, MD. On Sunday, after breakfast, Saul and I drove directly to the hospital to visit both Larry and Aunt Ruth.

During the next week, I had lunch with Adele and we went together to visit Aunt Ruth. We had a very enjoyable family dinner at the Metropolitan Diner to celebrate my brother-in-law Larry’s birthday. A while ago, I invited our friends, Mort and Elsa, for Shabbat dinner. Saul and I shopped and prepared the dinner together and we had a lovely evening catching up with the lives of our old friends whom we had not seen since April. Larry and Beth joined us, and, at the last minute, Anne and her son Ben. They were coming to visit Aunt Ruth, who had some complications and was still in the hospital. Larry, who was released from the hospital a day or two after our visit, was on a special diet, so we made one of our challot without the usual sesame seeds, Craisins, and raisins and some plain mashed potatoes to accompany the lime and maple steelhead trout that he was able to eat. We made faro with sauteéd shiitake mushrooms. We also made a big composed salad with marinated Greek olives and feta, goat cheese, avocado, etc. and dressed it with a homemade sesame, honey and soy vinaigrette. For dessert, I made the blackberry cheesecake dacquoise that Elsa and Mort had liked so much the last time we went there, and Larry, Beth, and Ben (who is allergic to tree nuts) had Costco pumpkin pie with whipped cream and pumpkin ice cream. Larry slept over and we drove him to services the next day.

During services, our learned friend Michael read Torah in honor of his 75th birthday, delivered a thought-provoking sermon about the lives of Abraham and Sarah, and sponsored a delicious luncheon for congregants and friends. When we returned home, Ari joined us in preparation for our Sunday get-together with Rif and Paul. Together, we drove Larry home in his own car and came back in Ari’s car because Larry was feeling too weak to drive.

Although we were all feeling a bit of apprehension about our Sunday get-together, it turned out to be a really lovely day. When we were seated at our big, round, lazy-susan table at Chez Elena Wu, we discovered that Meredith and Sami had dressed in almost the same clothes, dark blue jeans with a magenta shirt. They greeted each other with warm hugs and excitement. Observing this, Izzy leaned over and whispered in my ear with a mixture of distress and wistfulness that she had no memory of Meredith at all. Our bento box lunches were great, as usual, and we mostly had the place to ourselves. Afterward, we walked a few storefronts down and had frozen yogurt. Then, Jess took the girls home and the rest of us went to visit Saul’s mom at Lion’s Gate, practically across the street. It was the first time we have all been there together and the first time in a year that Meredith saw her grandmother. Sima was in her rolling chaise and was smiling to see us all there with her and seemed especially happy to see Meredith and Ari, although she probably doesn’t have a clue anymore about who we are. She did not seem to be in any pain, as probably the fractures have mostly healed by now. She barely speaks. After our brief visit, we went to Jess and Alex’s house where eventually, a game of Garfield Monopoly ensued for a few hours between Rif, Ari, Sami, Izzy and Meredith. As the hours passed, Jess ordered pizza, and we had dinner together as well. Saul, Ari and I finally had to leave, as Saul had to get up at six for classes the next morning. Ari worked remotely from our house on Monday as we prepared for our last-minute vacation in Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for Thanksgiving. Ari and I had lunch at Eastern Dragon on Monday afternoon, and then wandered around Costco for a little while until Saul arrived home. We packed our bags and were on the way to DC in our Prius late Monday afternoon. We stopped at Woody’s in Northeast, Maryland, for dinner on the way. That evening, Rif called to say that Lion’s Gate had called her because Sima had begun bleeding rectally rather profusely and would probably need a blood transfusion shortly. On hearing this, we immediately called to order trip insurance. A little later, Rif called to say that she had gone over to Lion’s Gate to see for herself how much bleeding there was and to see how her mother was doing. Her mother had been all cleaned up and Rif was pleased with the level of care. The amount of bleeding had diminished. She told us that she was requesting an increased amount of morphine to keep her mother comfortable and they were able to do this, not by increasing the amount, but by increasing the frequency.

Early Tuesday morning, Saul, Ari and I took a cab to Reagan National Airport where we took a two-hour flight, arriving in Fort Lauderdale about 12:30 p.m. Ari picked up our rental car while we claimed our baggage. We had lunch at a Cuban chain restaurant called “Las Vegas,” and checked into our deluxe rooms at the Crown Plaza in Hollywood. From our balconies, we could see the ocean on one side, and the intracoastal waterway on the other. The rooms were spacious, well-appointed, and had kitchenettes with refrigerators. I had found this terrific deal on Travelzoo as a last-minute Thanksgiving getaway, and Ari did the rest of the planning to give us a great, warm-weather vacation for bargain prices. On Tuesday evening, as we returned from a walk on Hallandale Beach across the street from our hotel, Rif called to give us an update on Sima’s bleeding which appeared to have leveled off. That evening, we took a dip in the infinity pool that overlooked the intracoastal and sat in the hot tub for a while. It was a pleasure to be in Florida with temperatures in the eighties and no mosquitoes at night. After showering, I took a nap, and we went for dinner to a Cheesecake Factory where we ate outdoors.

We spent most of our time on Wednesday at the beach, and Saul got a bit of a sunburn. The 77-degree ocean water was turquoise and as calm as glass. We snacked on junk food we had bought at the Seven-Eleven next to our hotel. That night, we had dinner at Sweet Tomatoes, a chain that is only in the south, and we have been missing it since our first encounter with it in Orlando over the summer. On Thursday morning, we drove to Hollywood’s boardwalk, which was a beautiful, low-key, two-mile stretch of block-paved promenade. We walked for about a mile and, as it began to get hot, stopped at an open-air, French café for a well-made and very inexpensive ($3.49) breakfast. Saul and I waited comfortably at the breezy table while Ari (who had the foresight to wear a bathing suit to breakfast) took a swim in the warm and tranquil ocean. Saul and I discussed vacationing with the family this time next year and found that an RCI resort (Hollywood Sands) was just down the boardwalk. The business office there was closed, but a nice old lady who was in the pool at the resort invited us to go in and see her apartment. We had intended to spend the afternoon in the infinity pool of the Crown Plaza, but the weather became uncomfortably windy and gray clouds began to form. Instead, we took a drive up to Fort Lauderdale, and then down to Miami Beach. We planned to have a Turkish dinner on Thanksgiving at a restaurant on the beach called “Istanbul,” but discovered it was closing by 4:00 p.m.
So much for our little joke :oP Then we spent an hour calling a number of places for last minute reservations. We finally found a well-rated place on the beach and made a reservation. When we arrived at Jake’s, the staff had turned the tables upside-down and were playing beer pong. We didn’t even go in, but headed back to the car. Ari began to look for other places that might be open and suddenly realized that we had gone to the wrong place. The place where we actually had made the reservation, Ocean Alley was two blocks away. We had a cozy and well-prepared, non-traditional Thanksgiving dinner, with a congenial waiter, while gazing at the dark ocean. Then, we went to see the movie Descendants, but the first theater we visited was closed. We drove to another nearby that we found open. We all enjoyed it, especially for the locations we recognized in Kauai, but I found it a bit melodramatic.

The weather was a bit threatening on Friday, too. For years, ever since I had seen a documentary about it, I wanted to see the Coral Castle in Homestead, FL. After a good breakfast at a popular diner-type bagel place in Hollywood, we drove the 50-mile distance down to Homestead and toured the Coral Castle. It was very unique and I was happy to have visited there. Saul and Ari seemed pleased that we had made the drive, also. We had an early dinner at Sonny’s, another southern chain, and headed back to our hotel to prepare for our early morning flight home on Saturday morning. We were back in DC by 9:30 a.m. Ari packed an overnight bag and a few minutes later, we were on our way home. We stopped at Hollywood East for dim sum as they opened, and then stopped in Baltimore to pick up hardware at IKEA for my new kitchen cabinet doors that were to be installed on Tuesday. My new beautiful granite countertop was installed at the beginning of the month. On Sunday, we met in NJ to have lunch again at Chez Elena Wu. After lunch, Ari dropped Izzy off at a youth group event at the JCC and went to visit his grandmother before heading back to DC. Jess, Yona, Sami, Saul and I walked down the parking lot to the Rave Theater and saw the movie Hugo. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that it was a 2-1/2 hour movie. Yona was only good for the first hour and a half. Jess took her out and did not see the end. I loved the movie. Sami enjoyed it very much but was unhappy with changes from the book. Yesterday, Jess came with Yonah to do some printing on my computer and joined us at the Metropolitan Diner where all of the family gathered to celebrate Adele’s birthday. Today, most of the kitchen has been completed and it looks completely different—up-to-date and opulent. The two guys who have done the work are perfectionists. We are thrilled with the results.

Aunt Ruth, who was convalescing at the Abramson Center for the last few days was supposed to be returning home today and her daughter, Jaine, was flying in from Minnesota to help her get back on her feet.

Saul and I went to our IKEA this evening to pick up additional hardware for tomorrow. We discovered that we have 73 cabinet doors and drawers, not counting the refrigerator and freezer handles. That was shocking to me. I never would have guessed there were so many. We met Beth for dinner at Pho Thai Nam. Tomorrow, the kitchen should be finished.

I have invited family and friends for a Chanukah party on the Monday after Christmas. Since the reconciliation, Saul has invited his sister and her family to join us once again and they have accepted. Apparently, he and his sister will soon have to deal with the death of their mother. What are the chances, given the number of restaurants in the Cherry Hill area, that all of us would have decided to show up in the same place at the same time?

A Weird End to October

2011-11-01T21:19:00.002-04:00

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The very weird end to October this year was a freak snowstorm that dumped inches of heavy wet snow onto trees that were just reaching the peak of their fall color and still loaded with leaves. The result was multiple deaths from fallen trees and power lines, a myriad of car accidents, and many days without power for tens of thousands of people. I fear I lost a number of plants and trees to the frost that I would soon have sheltered in my garage.

The last two weeks have been loaded with activity. We had Yona by herself for a delightful weekend, while the others attended a bar mitzvah in Baltimore. I took out my button box and Yona was quick to learn how to string them and made herself a necklace. She enjoyed being an only child much more than we thought she would. Saul’s colonoscopy went well and he only had one small polyp that was removed without incident. We attended services at MBI-EE on Sukkot. We spent a day shopping for a dinner for 50 people at the synagogue. Then we spent a day preparing the dinner with our friends, Jerry and Betty, and Natalie. We were so efficient that we finished all our prep and had a day off before it was time to actually serve the dinner. The evening of the dinner, we found ourselves with many adept volunteers and were ready to go an hour ahead of schedule, which gave us all a chance to rest and schmooze a bit before dinner. Beth came early after work and helped with the preparations, also.

Our three granddaughters were here for a weekend while Jess and Alex had a chance to attend a special birthday dinner for a friend at a restaurant in downtown Philadelphia, a rare occasion when they got to interact with all adults rather than the family activities that they have been attending for the last eight years. The girls helped us make dozens of pumpkin-face cookies in preparation for Halloween. We watched movies together. We worked on the dollhouse. We celebrated Larry’s birthday with a Shabbat dinner that included many of his favorite dishes. The girls helped decorate his birthday cake. I had to prepare his dinner a day early as Simchat Torah fell on a Friday this year. On Simchat Torah, we attended services at TBS with the kids, and Saul was given so many honors, aliyot, hakafot, closing the ark doors, etc. that he was embarrassed and refused the last one offered, which was to lead the kiddush prayer. After a luncheon there with the congregation, we headed home with the girls to finish the prep for Larry’s birthday Shabbat dinner. Beth and Faith joined us and Larry was very pleased with the dinner, although he has been fighting some sort of bug for a few weeks and hasn’t had much appetite. We had homemade challah, strawberry soup and black bean soup; iceberg lettuce wedge salad with homemade Russian dressing; seared sesame-encrusted fresh tuna steaks; kasha and bow ties; fresh glazed Brussels sprouts; and a decorated Texas Sheet Cake with Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Ice Cream and Ben and Jerry’s Clusterfluff ice cream for dessert.

During the strange blizzard we had this weekend, we lost power for about four hours in the afternoon. Saul spent the time napping, while I polished off a NY Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle—a rare and lazy day spent in occasional wonderment gazing out the window at the huge snowflakes falling onto colorful leaves. On Sunday, Saul and I made several more dozen pumpkin cookies, some of which he delivered to a few of our neighbors. We shopped at Produce Junction to pick up lemons and other veggies and fruits, had a leisurely late lunch, and came home to prepare Etrog-Honey Jelly from the etrogim left over after Sukkot. We really enjoyed cooking together.

On Monday, Halloween, I met Saul when he finished classes, and together we continued to Cherry Hill in one car. We stopped on the way to drop off pumpkin cookies to our friend, Laura, and jars of jelly to the synagogue for Rabbi, Cantor, David and Warren. When we arrived in Cherry Hill, the girls were already in costume and hot and delicious veggie pizzas had just been delivered. Sami was a gypsy, Izzy, the goddess Athena, and Yona a princess. They were flushed with excitement over the wonderful day they had experienced at their public schools in Cherry Hill. Evidently, Halloween is a big thing in Cherry Hill. Although it was still light outside, they had already been visited by many trick-or-treaters. After dinner, Jess, Saul and I set out with the girls as the sun was setting to make the rounds of their neighborhood. Alex stayed home to hand out candy. From the warm welcome parties that had been held for them when they moved in, Jess and the girls already knew a large number of their neighbors and their children. Yona was babbling and squealing with excitement everywhere we went. The girls brought in a huge cache of candy after just over an hour. Exhausted, but happy, we made the hour-long trip home, stopping to drop off jelly to our friend, Faith. Saul and I were both asleep by 10 p.m.

The Best Yom Kippur Ever

2011-10-17T19:59:00.002-04:00

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Ari and I decided this should be the title of the blog because as this past weekend ended, we all had been having such a great time together that I had a difficult time saying goodbye as we all headed home, knowing that the High Holy Days are now over for this year. Ordinarily, Yom Kippur, which requires sitting in synagogue all day and fasting from sunset to sunset, is not a holiday which I happily anticipate.

On Selichot, as we usually do, we and our friend, Faith, had a late, delicious vegetarian Indian dinner at the Elkins Park branch of the restaurant we had already liked a few months ago, Tiffin. We arrived at MBI-EE just in time for the dessert buffet that preceded the Selichot services. Rabbi Addison had chosen the theme of memory for his sermons during the High Holy Days, since many of the members of our congregation have spent decades in the building from which we are preparing to move. Rabbi asked those in attendance to share their own poignant memories from the past, their first memory of being Jewish, and their most important memory of being Jewish. The personal stories that came forth from some of our congregation were unique and fascinating.

Rosh Hashanah fell on Thursday and Friday this year, the last few days of September. Ari came in from DC on Wednesday evening. The three of us attended services and as we arrived, the skies opened and it poured so hard that the parking lot became flooded. We sat in the car for about 15 minutes rather than have to walk through ankle-high water that flowed like a small creek. As the rain subsided, we were able to circumvent the large puddles. Saul gave the Israel Bonds speech this year. I think he did an amazing job, and the co-president, Lori, told him to save the speech because it was so successful financially that he will probably be using it again next year. Rabbi Addison’s sermon was a continuation on the theme of “memory” which began at Selichot services the previous Saturday night. He spoke about the nature of memory, both in terms of Talmudic views of the subject and clinical discoveries regarding memory in the last few years. He also spoke at length about his father, who passed away this past year, and about how his memories of his father have helped to shape his life and will continue to influence him ethically and morally into the future. He quoted from the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass—“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward,” encouraging us to use our memories, both good and bad, to advance and expand our lives. After services, the sun had come out and the parking lot was almost dry as we exited. We drove directly to Cherry Hill to have lunch with the family, a cooler full of food in the trunk to supplement the abundance of food that Alex always prepares. Our family tradition on Rosh Hashanah is to begin with brachot (blessings) over dessert and schnapps, apples dipped in honey, and round challot. Highlights of our meal included zucchini bread, glazed salmon, farro with mushrooms, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, salad, and carrot cake. Alex’s mom had stayed over, and had attended services with Alex and Jess. After lunch, Saul and Ari went to visit their mother and grandmother, Sima, at Lion’s Gate. She seemed relatively comfortable and pain-free, despite the fractured femur and shoulder, ensconced in a rolling lounge chair designed so that it would be impossible for her to casually get up and fall again in her state of dementia.

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the congregation was again invited to share memories that had occurred within the building. Again, some very remarkable memories were shared. A 95-year-old member, who had raised her whole family in the 54-year-old congregation, was among the most memorable speakers. Beth joined us for services on the second day, and continued on with us to Cherry Hill for a light dairy lunch of leftovers, and Shabbat dinner. Larry joined us also. While Alex finished preparing dinner, Jess, Ari, Saul and I paid another visit to Lion’s Gate. We wheeled Sima into a more private space and had a pleasant conversation around her as she kept dozing off from the medication. Again, she appeared not to be in any pain and was pleasant and smiling while we were there.

Jess had paid an earlier visit to Simon’s, the kosher meat market which had always provided us all with great provisions in past years. There was an additional advantage. We are now close enough that Jess was able to meet Roxy and me for lunch at Wegman’s on her excursion. As a result of her trip to Simon’s, we had a Shabbat dinner that was heavily protein-laden, with duck, chicken, turkey, and beef stew as entrées. I made a pareve carob cake for dessert. On Sunday, Ari, Saul and I drove to Oaks to look at furniture. We scored big that afternoon, as Ari found six perfect dining room chairs to match his table on special, and Saul and I found a great sofa and chaise lounge for the sitting area of our bedroom, at a wonderful price also, at a store called Mahogany and More.

Saul and I got our flu shots courtesy of Chestnut Hill College on Wednesday, and had a nice buffet lunch together with some of the other faculty members in the school cafeteria. It was the most painless injection I have ever gotten, and luckily, neither of us had any real negative reaction. In the early evening, Saul met with the doctor who is performing his routine colonoscopy shortly. Afterward, we had dinner at Bonefish Grill. Listening to the radio on the way home, we learned that Steve Jobs had just died. Just as we were approaching home, the doctor’s office called to say that Saul had forgotten his driver’s license and insurance card and we had to return there to pick them up.

On Thursday, I worked most of the day on a publication that is becoming due as I had done the rest of the week, so it was mostly finished. When Saul came home from school, we went to look at granite counter tops with an eye to replacing our loosening Formica ones and perhaps, refacing our cabinets. Ken and Randi took us out for an exquisite dinner to belatedly celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary at an incredible little restaurant in Warminster that has to be one of the best kept secrets in the area. Off on a little side street in a residential neighborhood, Augusto’s has evidently been there for many years without our being aware of it. Foodies that we are, we were surprised that this gem has been completely under our radar. Ari arrived later in the evening and worked remotely the next day until it was time for an early dinner, and to shower and dress, before heading off to Kol Nidre services. We had butternut squash soup, seared tuna, homemade macaroni and cheese, creamed corn, and Ben and Jerry’s Clusterfluff (now tamely renamed “What a Cluster!” ice cream with triple ginger cookies for dessert. The services went so smoothly and quickly that, what usually feels interminable, was over before we knew it. The three-hour service had such a wonderful flow and pace that we were shocked when we found that we were at the end, much the way you feel when you exit from a long, but really interesting movie. What a unique synagogue experience!

The long service the next day was not quite as fleeting because of the onset of hunger pangs and sleepiness, but again, it was spiritually uplifting and we experienced a warm and welcoming feeling being surrounded by the congregation. We went home for a while after Yizkor to rest and pack up food to take to Jess and Alex’s to break the fast together. We met them at TBS for the end of the service and to hear the blasts of the shofar, which signal the end of the fast. We sat in the balcony with Elaine, Naomi, Matt and Talia as the lights were lowered and the children congregated at the bimah with their glowing, multi-colored light sticks. We were joined for breaking the fast by Alex’s new high school director and her partner. Saul and I were very happy to be surrounded by lots of friends and family. We have had some very somber and lonely break fasts in recent years because Baltimore was too far away to allow us to join the rest of the family. For breaking the fast, we had lox and bagels, whitefish salad, pickled herring, cream cheese, assorted sliced cheeses and gourmet cheeses, sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, avocados and onions, olives, artisan breads, fruit juices, coffee and tea, assorted ice cream and homemade rice pudding with whipped cream, carob cake, etc., etc.

Sunday afternoon, we did a reprise of a previous enjoyable Sunday at Chez Elena Wu. Alex joined us, and we again sat at a large, lazy-susan table and had bento box lunches of sushi, sashimi, miso soup, veggie dumplings, tempura, and ginger-dressed salad. The service was as cordial as the last time. Saul had been fighting a cold for several days, and we decided not to visit his mother and risk spreading it. In the early evening, we all went to a sukkah-decorating program and pizza dinner at TBS that Alex had sponsored. Jessica had spent a few days drawing outlines on the outside walls of the synagogue where the sukkah was to be erected. Part of the decorating involved painting in the designs, and we all had such fun doing it, including Ari and particularly Yona. As the sun began to set, and I kissed and hugged Ari as he set off for DC, I realized how sad I was to be saying goodbye to all the togetherness, good karma and fun engendered by this holiday season. Ari was sad to be leaving also, and he agreed that it was the best Yom Kippur ever.

The End of September, Not So Good Again

2011-09-28T22:40:00.000-04:00

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Each year, as the High Holy Days approach, our tradition requires that we do some serious soul-searching so that we may soberly reflect on culpable behavior, repent for our mistakes, and try to do better in the coming year. Rosh Hashanah, which begins this evening, represents the hope that the new year will bring all good things to us and our loved ones. The metaphor is that God’s book is opened and we pray that we will be inscribed for life. Yom Kippur represents the sealing of the book, with our future year, for good or bad, about to unfold. Before I began writing this, I looked over last year’s September entry. I had all but blocked out my memories of the High Holy Days last year because of the trauma we all felt dealing with Maury’s death.

Although the holidays are mostly a pleasant time spent enjoying special meals with friends and family, ours have certainly had their share of trauma at this time of the year. I think it began many years ago when Uncle Ed died suddenly in the hospital of an aneurysm following surgery after being struck in the head accidentally by falling debris while doing repairs around the house. Because of a family split, my mother had not spoken to her brother for several years. When she received a Rosh Hashanah card with a personal note asking for forgiveness, she and I immediately went to visit him in the hospital and they made their peace, unbeknownst to any of us, only a few days before his sudden death. We attended his funeral right after Yom Kippur. Saul’s father was rushed to the hospital hours before Kol Nidre many years ago, and Saul spent that evening at his bedside. He required a second round of bypass surgery after that. My mother signed herself onto hospice just a few years ago just as the holidays were approaching. She died late in August the following year. Larry’s parents both died at this time of the year, a year apart. Perhaps it is merely coincidence, because we know so many people, or perhaps it is the serious way in which our tradition at this time of year asks us to contemplate our mortality, but I have begun to feel a certain amount of trepidation as the holidays approach. It is remarkable, also, that as part of our tradition, a person’s death during this season is taken as a sign that he or she were notable among the righteous, and so, perhaps, we walked among angels.

A few days ago, we received a call from Saul’s brother-in-law, Paul, that he had received a call from Lion’s Gate at 4:00 in the morning that Saul’s mother had fallen and that she had fractured her femur and collarbone. He told us that the leg fracture was not bad and that nothing much needed to be done about it except to give her pain medication to keep her comfortable. Collarbones heal on their own. The next day, we had a conference call from his sister, Rif, who had accompanied a friend returning her car down to Florida, and Paul. Evidently, their mother was taken to the hospital and had remained there. Her surgeon was pushing for her to have surgery and gave Paul the impression that it was very serious and that the surgery should be performed despite her advanced dementia. He went to see her in the hospital and found her happily finishing a hearty lunch, moving about in bed freely and not in any apparent pain. Thus began the tearful, hour-long discussion of what to do in this difficult situation. Putting her through the expensive surgery would surely cause more pain and she would not exactly be the ideal candidate for rehab, not to mention that she would forget from moment to moment that she could not just get up and walk away. After a long discussion, Saul and his sister agreed that she should be sent back to Lion’s Gate in the hospice program, so that she would be able to have access to any pain medication she needed to keep her comfortable. Jessica went to visit her the next morning in the hospital and also found her healthy-looking, cheerful, moving about freely in bed, and with a good appetite. She was on pain medication and was feeling okay. Jessica also learned that she had broken her shoulder, not just her collarbone, but the doctor was not recommending surgery for that. The next morning, while the nurse was away from her station, Sima got out of bed and fell again. They did a c.t. scan because she couldn’t tell them her name or what year it is and they did not seem to be aware of the advanced dementia when Paul spoke with them. Luckily, she did not do any further damage. Today, she is back at Lion’s Gate in the hospice wing with an “elixir” of pain medication. Tomorrow, after services and lunch, we will go and visit her there. We sincerely hope we made the right decision, but there is no way of knowing. Before her mind disappeared, she told all of us that she did not want to ever suffer if given the choice. She had seen way too much suffering all her life, especially as an inmate of Auschwitz as a teenager. We hope that this is the decision that will cause her the least amount of suffering and that somehow, the bones will heal themselves in time, or that she will just die a peaceful, medicated death in bed in a place that really has cared for her very well over these last several years.

Like Alex cooking soup last year to deal with the death of his father, I have been busy in the kitchen, compounded by the fact that my freezer needed to be emptied for 24 hours. My Sub-Zero freezer had created huge chunks of ice at the bottom so that my drawers were frozen to the bottom and could not be opened. I spent an afternoon with a hair dryer, and Saul turned off the water to the ice-maker. Since the home warranty we have doesn’t cover ice-makers, we called in the people who had replaced the ice-maker a couple of years ago, First Rate Appliance. They sent a man who told us that there was nothing wrong with the ice-maker and that we needed three parts replaced, the thermostat, and two different types of drain heaters to the tune of $429.30. I gave them a check (big mistake) for $150.00 as a deposit. But then, we realized that we might be covered since it was not the ice-maker, and we called the home warranty people back. They agreed to cover the repair. The new company, that the home warranty company sent, Home Zone, checked it out and told us those parts were not necessary. According to their instructions, I turned the freezer off for 24 hours, sending Beth whatever would fit into her freezer. The man came back and fixed my freezer as he said he would the next day. Now, I will have to try to recover my $150 from the rip-off company.

I made a bunch of dishes to use up defrosted items like phyllo, puff pastry and frozen strawberries that didn’t fit in Beth’s freezer. Some will soon be appearing on my recipe blog. Last weekend, Saul took the fruit down from our two quince trees and I spent the afternoon cleaning and slicing the sink-full of ripe fruit and turning the results into jars of natural ruby red slices packed in light, vanilla-scented syrup. Some of this, in turn, was made into a strawberry, quince, and dried cherry strudel for us to enjoy during the holidays. We also found the time to turn a small sheet of thin copper that we ordered over the net into a copper roof for a bay area of the dollhouse. It looks amazing! I have found that, besides cooking, for some reason, staring at the progress of the dollhouse when I am stressed is a useful way to make me feel relaxed. Perhaps it is the eternal nature of a dollhouse. They get passed down through the generations and allow grown-ups, as well as children, to escape reality into a fantasy world of their own creation.

May all of us be inscribed in the book of life this year so that, come next September, I can write a happier and thankful blog post.

We Launch Into Our New Lives

2011-09-19T18:39:00.001-04:00

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We have been driving back and forth from Philadelphia to Baltimore for almost eight years and I thought it funny recently when I spoke to Saul about having lunch at Thai Orchid (which used to be on our way to visit the kids in Baltimore) on our way to see them. The restaurant is not on our way to Cherry Hill. I haven’t quite gotten used to the mindset that they are an hour and a half closer now and a lot more accessible.

We have had some really good times despite the melancholy that reigns sometimes after the girls go home after “Camp Bubbie and Saba.” Saul and I console ourselves with the privileges of empty-nesters, which is to say that we are able to just pick up and go anywhere whenever the impulse strikes and we don’t have other commitments. For the last few weeks, we have had relaxing, last-minute, dinners in restaurants that we like, reveling in our ability to have an uninterrupted adult conversation.

Our 40th wedding anniversary, which occurred at Labor Day Weekend, was a total washout because of my high fever caused by cellulitis. After spending Friday morning at the doctor, and the afternoon at the dentist to see if I had a gum infection, I spent the rest of the day in bed while Saul ate leftovers for Shabbat dinner. I spent Saturday afternoon in the emergency room of Lansdale Abington Hospital, afraid that the rash on my left ankle was due to a reaction to the antibiotic the doctor had prescribed for the fever, Clindamycin. Saul spent much of the time catching up with paperwork and prep for school that had been put off during the summer.

Jess, Alex, Elaine, Saul and I had a conference call with Sami when she returned from her first day at middle school and she absolutely loved it. One of her teachers turned out to be Alex’s camp counselor and was well known to our family as well. Jess and Alex (Ari, Aaron and Naomi, too) went to the same overnight camp as children, but didn’t really know each other then. Sami made two new friends and had lunch with them and was very happy. The next day, when she went to the teacher to explain who her parents were, after school, she missed the school bus as he enthusiastically hugged her and told her she looked just like her mother. Jess had to pick her up. Izzy was equally happy about her new school and friends. Yona had a few days before beginning her new day care.

The following weekend was such a wonderful, impulsive, and enjoyable one that we have been pleading with Jess and Ari to institutionalize it so that we can do it once a month from now on. Saul had to be present for Team Children in the morning. I was speaking to Ari on the phone while Saul was there, and we decided that it was such a beautiful day for a drive that we would meet on the Eastern Shore at Harris’s for a leisurely late lunch by the waterside. Then, we spent the evening browsing in the Queenstown Outlet Shopping Center, where I found some great buys on outfits that I love for the holidays. By 11 p.m., we arrived at Jess and Alex’s house and visited with them for an hour. We left Ari’s car in NJ and he drove us home in our car. We were in bed by 1 a.m. In the morning, we spent a little time schmoozing, a little time shopping, and then we drove back to NJ to meet Jess and the girls for lunch. We had intended to have lunch at the Afghan restaurant that we had enjoyed a few weeks ago, Ariana, but when we arrived, we found that it is only open for dinner on Sunday. That particular strip mall had a number of other ethnic restaurants from which to choose—Indian, Mexican, and Chinese, as well as a coffee shop and pizzeria. We chose the Chinese because, as usual, the girls wanted sushi, which was available there. The restaurant Chez Elena Wu, was a great and pleasant surprise for us. We weren’t expecting much, given the impromptu nature of our visit, but we loved it so much we can’t wait to return. We all had bento box lunches. The menu provided for a wide range of choices of soups and entrées and everything was delicious. The miso soup was exceptional, as were very delicate and flavorful vegetable dumplings, and the best ginger salad dressing on the crisp salad that I have ever had. The fresh and expertly made sushi was prepared by a sushi chef as the girls watched. Even the tea was a cut above the usual with a nice smoky oolong flavor. The tempura veggies were light, crispy, and ungreasy, as they should be. The glazed salmon was a hit, too. Also included in the bento box lunch was a California roll, which was the usual, and a big scoop of good steamed white rice. Everyone loved their lunches and we ate everything. We had the whole, nicely-appointed and exceptionally clean restaurant practically to ourselves, a boon with small children. The seven of us sat at a lazy susan table, which was very convenient. Our waiter was also unfailingly attentive, and polite, and was very understanding of our requests.

After lunch, Jess took the girls shopping for a cell phone for Izzy. Saul, Ari and I visited Saul’s mother at Lion’s Gate, which is across the street. Saul has been very antsy about going there. We were supposed to visit the previous Friday when I got sick. His mother no longer recognizes any of us, probably doesn’t know who she is anymore, and doesn’t remember that we have been there five minutes after we leave. While she is always smiling and content when we visit, it is a shock to see her this way, and it leaves Saul, especially, disconcerted and sleepless for a few days. We had not been to see her for several months, and Saul was worried that perhaps she was suffering and we would not know. The visit this time put that fear temporarily to rest, at least. She was pretty much the same as the last time. We went to her room and found that she had many baby dolls, both boys and girls reposing there. She had been carrying a boy doll when we arrived and added a girl when we visited her room. When we left, she was positioning the two dolls on the chairs where we always find her when we visit. Other residents were playing bingo with a staff member when we left.

We parted after a rendezvous and brief visit back at the house in NJ. Ari drove back to DC over a much more pleasant and shorter route than when he comes to visit us, and we drove home, stopping for a brief shopping foray at IKEA in Plymouth Meeting.

Wednesday, we met Ken and Randi for dinner at Bonefish Grill. On Thursday, Jess asked us to meet the girls’ school buses and pick up Yona from day care and some time in Alex’s office. She left early in the morning to spent the day working at her job at Pearlstone Center in Baltimore, and Alex had tons of work preparing for the beginning of the school year. I drove to CHC and met Saul after school and meetings and we drove over to NJ together to meet the girls. There was a special program from Izzy’s school at Springdale Farms. Jessica told us it was a harvest festival. I took a Zyrtec when I discovered from the flyer that it involved a hayride (hay fever :P), corn maze, and cider with warm donuts. Just as we arrived with the three girls, the outdoor temperature dropped suddenly about 20 to 30 degrees and a gale-force wind began to blow, followed a few minutes later by heavy rain. As Alex arrived to meet us with jackets, we had just enough time to finish our donuts and cider and go home. Izzy was very disappointed. Alex made the girls dinner as Saul and I headed for a dinner on the road and then home. On the way back, I snapped a photo of the most beautiful sunset I have every seen in my life as we headed over the Ben Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia. The photo, which I took as an afterthought from the car window, a little too late, doesn’t begin to do it justice.

My brother was hospitalized on Thursday when, during a routine checkup, he complained of pains in his leg and it was discovered that he had a large dvt (deep vein thrombosis) at the top of his right leg and two smaller clots in his lungs. My dvt ten years ago was in exactly the same place. He was released on Saturday morning, once his blood had been thinned enough to a safe level.

Friday, I had a doctor’s appointment for my yearly checkup. Before we left, I poached pears and made the dough for the first of the year’s round challot. On the way back from the doctor, Saul and I stopped at CHC to pick up my car from the day before, at Impact! to drop off a bag of unwanted clothing, at Babies R Us to pick up a gift for Jamie’s “sprinkle” on Sunday, and at Trader Joe’s to pick up some odds and ends, and then went home to finish preparing dinner. We were joined at Shabbat dinner by Larry, Faith and Beth. Dinner was homemade challah, homemade guacamole with multi-grain chips, beet borsht with warm boiled potatoes and sour cream, seared sesame tuna, homemade potato salad, buttered steamed asparagus, and a warm, sautéed pear dessert.

On Saturday, we went to synagogue. The day marked the end of the shloshim (30 day mourning period) for the father of our baal korei, (Torah reader) David, and his sister, Atarah. It was, coincidentally, the end of the shloshim for Atarah’s husband, Ira, who had lost his mother. We attended a Shabbat luncheon, sponsored by the bereaved, at which David delivered a shiyur (study session) in memory of his father.

Sunday morning was Jamie’s surprise “sprinkle” or little baby shower. She had been in a minor car accident earlier in the week in a loaner car while hers was in the shop, and had been hospitalized overnight as a precaution because her air bag had deployed. Randi and Haley managed to pull it all together for the party. Jamie had begun having some contractions the night before, but got through the party okay. Ken, Andy and Saul (who was kind enough to drive Adele, Beth, Erica and me to the party in Delaware) hung out at a sports bar for a while during the party. Ken was feeling a bit under the weather, too, but managed to get through everything okay. On the way back, we stopped at the tax-free Costco in Delaware to pick up a few items.

Jess and Alex’s devastated house has begun to come together nicely. The outside pipe was repaired this week, and her powder room and foyer are just about complete. The replacement flooring is curing at her house, ready to be installed in a few days. The girls each have their own rooms which they are settling into nicely, and a playroom where they spend most of their free time. It was a blessing that they all had great experiences with school from the beginning. Ari is becoming more comfortable with his new job and is settling into that new routine. Neri has begun his military service. Saul’s new school year got off to a shaky start with lots of cancellations for flooding, but now is kicking into high gear. Our paths and patterns have changed, hopefully for the better, in a way that will bring us all closer together.

My Attempt to Catch Up with the Last Three Months of My Life

2011-09-13T19:20:00.004-04:00

If you are reading this on Facebook, slideshows and videos are often attached. Click on this live link to my blog: http://www.marilyfe.blogspot.com/ if you would like to get the full experience.

This is the longest period of time I have gone in several years without writing a blog post. My life has been so full and hectic that my journal has gotten away from me, and I have missed writing it and feel like a delectable portion of my life has somehow escaped, although heaven knows I have really enjoyed almost every moment of it. I had started writing a post the day after Neri’s graduation from AHA, but never finished, so I have included that part and continued on with what I can remember from there…

Since my last blog post, I attended the end-of-year party for Faith’s class at the lovely home of longtime class member, Ellen. Ellen’s kitchen has just been refurbished and was done beautifully. About 20 class members attended, bringing a delicious and varied assortment of potluck dishes—everything from salads to desserts. With her usual aplomb and literacy, Faith took us through some of the intricacies of life during the period of the Jewish expulsion from Spain. We spent some time discussing the life of Hannah Mendez, a fascinating and powerful woman of that time. Years ago, I read the Naomi Ragen book, The Ghost of Hannah Mendez, which is an exciting fictionalization of her life. I adored the novel! Saul arrived home late from his first day of teaching summer session at CHC, and we headed out to visit our friends, Ruth and Giora, in their new home in New Jersey. Because we got off to such a late start, we encountered a tremendous amount of traffic during rush hour. Finally arriving, we were delighted to find them very well settled into their magnificent and spacious new place. They had finally sold their previous home in a 55-and-older community which had strangled them with restrictive policies and invasive regulations. We discussed our lives, children, and plans for a satisfying retirement and fulfilling old age (we hope!).

My son Ari’s “little brother,” who was three years old when Ari was a high school junior at American Kibbutz High School in Israel, graduated from high school, after a year on a basketball scholarship, in Greensboro, North Carolina, from the American Hebrew Academy (AHA). Needless to say, we racked up even more miles attending the ceremonies. Neri’s mom, Efrat, had come to the U.S. a week early so that she could tour for a while. Saul, Ari, and I picked her up at Newark Airport on Sunday, May 22, and she stayed with us for a week while Ari returned to DC, and Saul taught summer session. Her English was quite good and we managed to communicate, with the addition of me throwing in a lot of my Hebrew nouns. I know the names for lots of things, but can’t speak a word because of my lack of ability to use verbs. I had lots of computer publishing work to do at the time, so during the mornings she took long walks around the neighborhood, learned about the working farm museum (Roth Farm) across the street, and met the farmer and his wife. In the afternoons, when Saul was finished, we visited shopping malls, toured downtown Philadelphia, including Chinatown, visiting The Franklin Institute and the Philadelphia Zoo. We took her to our favorite, kosher, vegetarian, dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, Singapore, where the Chinese proprietor, Peter, whom we have known since he opened his doors 25 years ago, greeted her with a “Shalom,” and surprised her with his knowledge of Judaism and Israel. Although the kibbutz where she resides is totally secular, she eschews pork and seafood products and was disgusted by the idea of a Philly cheesesteak. She was very conservative about trying new foods here. She seemed very interested in suburban landscaping, habits and lifestyle, which are very different and very isolating compared to the social nature of life on the kibbutz, even a kibbutz which is no longer officially a kibbutz and has lost many of the communal habits of the past. We had a great time together, and, because of her questions, I did quite a bit of soul-searching about aspects of my life that I just take for granted.

Neri’s graduation was quite an experience! We drove with Efrat down to DC on Friday after Saul’s last summer school class, (Efrat and I waited for Saul in his office at school and toured the college a bit), rendezvoused at Jess and and Alex’s in Baltimore for Shabbat dinner, and stayed with Ari for two nights, touring DC, before driving to Greensboro, NC, on Sunday for the graduation on Memorial Day. We arrived early in the afternoon on Sunday and were absolutely amazed by the beauty of the campus, which was designed by architect Aaron Green, who was hired to create the campus using organic architecture, a design philosophy conceived by Frank Lloyd Wright in which local building materials are used, and buildings are integrated into, and become part of, the natural landscape. We were impressed by the quality of the faculty and students that we met, and were hosted for hors d’oeuvres in the beautiful, on-campus, home of one of the Israeli faculty members’ family before the awards presentations the evening before graduation. After the awards, we dropped off Efrat and Neri at a nearby country club for an evening of festivities with the graduating class families and retrieved them later in the evening, after we had dinner together at a nearby barbecue restaurant, Smoky Bones, returning to our hotel rooms with Efrat and Neri. We attended graduation the next morning after breakfast at the hotel, checked out, and had lunch in the school cafeteria. After that, we jammed everything that Neri had accumulated during his year in the U.S. into the back of the SUV and began the long 5-hour drive back to DC. We stopped along the way to have dinner at a Cheesecake Factory in Fair Oaks, VA. The next day, Saul and I drove home, while Neri and Efrat spent the following 10 days with Ari in DC until it was time for them to return to Israel.

We met on the morning of Friday, June 10, at the house on Imperial Drive in Cherry Hill that Jess and Alex were supposed to be buying and moving into immediately. What happened that day fatefully impacted the rest of the summer and ultimately our lives. It was like a family reunion that day. Present for the home inspection were Saul and I with the three girls, Jess and Alex, Alex’s mom Elaine, Efrat, Neri, and Rochelle, the real estate agent. We were all excited about the house and the ease with which everything had finally fallen into place. After the inspector left, all of us had a wonderful Shabbat dinner at Elaine’s in Cranberry, NJ. Ari returned to DC and Efrat and Neri returned home with us so that we could drive them to Newark airport for their flight home to Israel that Sunday. Neri was due to start his mandatory three-year service in the army a month later. When we returned from the airport, Jess arrived with the three girls and their summer wardrobe to begin “Camp Bubbie and Saba.”

Camp Bubbie and Saba began early this year, on June 12, and ended late, on Thursday, September 1, when Jess arrived for lunch with Elaine, Alex’s mom, and helped to finish packing up all their stuff from the summer. An hour after they all left, I came down with 103° fever which eventually turned out to be from cellulitis caused by a mosquito bite on my foot that I received on our last evening together. Sami had asked if we could go to Owowcow for ice cream. She had gone there earlier with us and Ken and Randi without her sisters, who had gone home for a few days. We had delectable ice cream sitting outside in the dark, in the country, at picnic tables. I am just now recovering from the ordeal, but the memorable evening was worth it.

This was Yona’s first year of camp with us, and we were a bit limited in our activities by the lack of attention span of a two-year old and her tendency to have monumental temper tantrums. When she was good, though, she was very, very, good and it was a source of delight and wonderment in watching her encounter new experiences for the first time. The weather was iffy the first few days and we launched the summer with an exciting visit to the Crayola Factory and lunch outdoors at a café down the street, which left us and the girls in a great anticipatory state of mind for the rest of the summer.

We were to have three full weeks before our family vacation in Orlando began. During that time, we spent many days at Beachcomber’s Swim Club, visited The Franklin Institute, baked and cooked together on rainy days, worked on the beautiful dollhouse that was given to us by our friend, Natalie, and often visited the big castle playground where Yona could sit on the swings for hours. Just by chance, we were lucky enough to be there on the one day each summer when the fire department shows up for an hour or two to create a giant, moving, arc of water for the summer day camp kids to play and cool off under. We all got soaked, gladly, on a scorchingly hot and humid summer morning, and followed that with water ice at Rita’s.

Two major problems colored our summer darkly this year. The home inspector discovered, on June 10, that the beams underneath the house on Imperial were rotted and that the all-brick house would have to be jacked up and the beams replaced. Beth, our extremely competent family engineer, strongly advised against getting involved in this procedure, pointing out all the things that could go wrong. Thankfully, we had retained a wonderful real estate lawyer, recommended by our cousin, Anne, who helped us out of the deal and was a blessing when it came to dealing with all the complications that followed as Jess searched to find another satisfactory home. It was crucial to Jess that they be moved in somewhere in Cherry Hill in time for Alex to begin his new job on August 1, and for the girls to be registered to start school in September at the schools they would actually be attending permanently. Considering the housing situation right now, that would have seemed to be a snap, but as it turned out, became quite complicated. One house that they wanted had a tenant who could not move out in time, one that seemed to be available in time turned out not to be and the owners would not negotiate on their high price, one on which they put a deposit, turned out to have been sold the day before, unbeknownst to the realtor, one that was just about to go on the market needed too much work. With each passing encounter, hope diminished and time seemed to be running out. In the midst of all this, we began a two-week Orlando vacation. Jess found the house they wanted days before we left. Rushing through everything, we were assured that all our paperwork was in order before we embarked on our long drive. As it turned out, each day of our vacation was spent scrambling to provide some other piece of paper that the mortgage company suddenly decided was necessary. Thank God for email and pdfs! We did not find out for sure that the mortgage was approved until the day before we were to return home.

We had an incredible vacation in Florida. We stayed in the house next door to the one in which we had been staying two years ago when we had to cut our vacation short to rush back to Mom’s bedside as she began “actively” dying. It backed up to the edge of Summer Bay’s lake and so provided great privacy and beautiful sunset views as we used our in-house pool. The weather was mostly sunny for the whole two weeks, and we were lucky enough to have a few days where the temperatures were high eighties and low nineties as opposed to the usual high nineties. The girls, as last time, reveled in the craft programs at the clubhouse down the street. The huge wading birds that we fed last time were still in evidence and Sami would look for them every day and rush out to feed them bread crumbs. We found some great restaurants and had delicious and unique breakfasts at First Watch, and a variety of dinners at seafood, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese and Thai restaurants. We also discovered a chain called Sweet Tomatoes that was perfect for our family, and was only a 15-minute drive from our house. It was a buffet with incredibly fresh and organic local produce and salads, house-made soups (at least two of which were vegetarian), specialties and baked goods, including gooey brownies that were to die for and real ice cream (not the cheap soft serve), all for an incredibly cheap fixed price. We happened upon it when Anne flew down for a few days to join her son Max and his friends for the final space shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral. They had won tickets in a lottery. We all met there and gorged until we couldn’t move. The servers there couldn’t have been nicer, as well.

We bought three days worth of tickets to Disney World and saved money by not buying park-hoppers this time. Each day, we visited a different park, but did not go to Animal Kingdom as we had been there many times before. We first went to the Hollywood Studios park because it is the least-crowded of them all. This time, we avoided the parks on July 4, and were glad that we did. Our wait times were not terrible and we were able to see all the major attractions before we were too hot and tired and needed to return home. On the day we went to Epcot, the weather was temperate enough, and we found enough places to rest and rejuvenate that we were able to spend the entire day there without returning home. We had a nice, sit-down dinner by the lake at an outdoor table in a British-themed restaurant as the sun set and the fireworks began. We visited areas of The Magic Kingdom where we had not ventured before, catching some new shows as well as a retro one in a revolving theater that has not changed since I saw it at the New York World’s Fair back in 1964. Everywhere we went, Izzy was in her glory because she was finally tall enough for all the wild rides. Sami, who was fearful at first, began to enjoy some of the wilder rides, too. I was mortified when I dropped my new sunglasses as I got into one of the cars on one of the most popular new rides with a long, long line. They fell in such a way that they jammed, upright, in a tiny crack between the moving sidewalk sections. The ride was shut down for a few minutes while a mechanic was consulted about whether it was safe to continue operating. They decided it was safe and left the sunglasses there because the mechanic could not figure out how to extract them and needed to wait until closing before trying to figure out how to remove them without damaging the machinery. I hope it wasn’t as bad a problem as it looked to be at the time. Although I was practically tearful in my apologies, and I know I caused great difficulty, the people managing the ride were as pleasant and cheerful as could be and were apologizing to me for not being able to retrieve my sunglasses. On our day at The Magic Kingdom, we went home in the afternoon for a brief nap, and returned in the evening for additional rides, a light dinner and fireworks.

The three days at Disney in the heat were enough for Saul, me and Alex. Jess and Ari spent a day at Universal Studios, especially to check out the new Harry Potter park. They loved it. Saul and I took the older girls to the splash park at Summer Bay a few afternoons when they grew bored with our own little pool. Summer Bay also had a great July 4 fireworks display, which we could see close up by just walking to the end of our street. By taking a wrong turn one evening, on our way back from a restaurant, we discovered a Disney employee parking lot where we could just pull into the back, find a good spot, and watch the fireworks from The Magic Kingdom whenever we felt like taking a short drive. A few times, Saul, Ari and I went prowling for real estate nearby. Hearing the statistics about the number of foreclosures in Florida cannot begin to approach the dismal reality of driving through certain developments there. There are incredible bargains to be had, but it is difficult to know which newly-built developments will become tomorrow’s slums. We had a great time in Orlando, and we hope someday to be able to take family vacations that way on a regular basis.

The other problem that clouded our summer was our air conditioning at home. Two weeks before we left for vacation, our top-of-the-line, four-year-old system ceased to work. We paid over $9,000.00 for the system and it has never worked properly from the first day. We won a lawsuit in small claims court this year against the original installer, J.A. Smith, but had to drop it when we discovered that we could not answer an appeal ourselves without a lawyer. We hired a lawyer and paid him $600 to answer the appeal, but then dropped everything when it appeared that the lawyer’s fees would run more than the $3,100.00 we had been awarded by the court. Our trusty people at Renaissance kept putting us off. Josh had broken his hand and had more work than he could handle. I told them that if the system was not fixed by the time we returned from vacation, I would be going elsewhere. We also called customer service every day for a week at Lennox, who made the system, and emailed them. They finally returned our call when we threatened to get a lemon lawyer to represent us. (The lemon lawyer, btw, would not touch a case for something so small as a $9,000.00 HVAC system.) Lennox finally sent three engineers, who spent three hours evaluating the system to figure out what was wrong with it, but refused to speak with Josh at Renaissance because he was not a licensed dealer. Then they sent a report, which arrived late, after we had already left on vacation, saying that the system had been installed improperly, could be fixed, and that they would not honor the ten-year warranty because of the improper installation. They supposedly listed everything that needed to be fixed. We returned home from vacation to some of the hottest weather this area has ever seen—over 100 degrees for over a week and in the nineties at night. We had air conditioning from our other 18-year-old system, in our bedrooms at night, but staying in the rest of the house was unbearable, and it was even too hot to go to the swim club. Josh did not get the system fixed in time, and we contacted our home warranty company about the problem. The home warranty company sent, at our request, a Lennox-certified dealer to look at the system (Alpha Mechanics). When he was done, I had little confidence that the problem would be fixed in any kind of timely manner. He wasn’t sure that he was a Lennox dealer to begin with, spent an hour on an automated phone system trying to speak to someone at Lennox and then was kicked out of the system, and he gave me no indication of how long it would take to get it fixed. In desperation, I found a highly-rated HVAC company on Angie’s List and called them that evening. I was willing to pay almost anything to get the system fixed promptly. Sila sent a rep within hours. We met with him that evening and he promised to have the system up and running within two days. A workman arrived the following afternoon and said that he would have the system up and running by the time we returned from a synagogue event welcoming Jess and Alex to the community that evening. Saul helped him fish some wires through the walls and we gave the guy dinner before we left so that he could continue to work until it was fixed. Later that evening we received the distressing call that he was not able to fix it, that it would cost almost $2,000 to fix, or they could install a new Lennox system for $9,000. If we fixed it for $2,000, they would only guarantee it for two more years. We slept uncomfortably on the dilemma that night and I decided that there was no way I would ever buy another Lennox product. Saul paid them $1,500.00 for the seven hours of work and parts. Later, when we complained in a report on Angie’s List, they agreed to settle for $750.00 and returned our money once I took down the bad report.

To salvage what we could of Camp Bubbie and Saba, we packed our suitcases and moved down to Ari’s in DC where we had fun for a few days visiting the Smithsonians, the National Zoo, and playing with Legos and other building toys at the National Building Museum, while I wrangled with the problem, explaining my dilemma for two hours to a sympathetic ear at Angie’s List. They were very helpful. In the end, we had to rely on the company that the home warranty had sent originally. A few days after we returned home, they sent an experienced guy, who fixed the problem in two hours for the cost of our deductible. Amazing how many thousands of dollars can fly out the window if you take a wrong step in one of these matters. We purchased a contract with Alpha Mechanics to service our HVAC systems from now on.

Jess and Alex were able to make settlement relatively smoothly and move into their new house a week before Alex was due to begin work, as they had hoped. And the girls were registered for their schools in Cherry Hill in a timely fashion, which had been Jessica’s one goal in all the uncertainty. There were quite a few bumps. Jess had the beautiful hardwood floors refinished before they moved in, but the refinishers had failed to cover the air conditioning vents while they were sanding. For two days, Jess had no air conditioning until it could be fixed. The plumber who came to fix a leaky pipe and install a new high-efficiency washer and dryer had to be called back the same day when the air conditioning guy punctured a plumbing pipe that had been run through the air conditioning vent. Then all hell broke loose when a clog developed from the tree roots on their heavily wooded lot invading the pipes. Raw sewage backed up and ran out of the toilet in the powder room contaminating large areas of the dining room, laundry room, office, and most of the powder room. Half of the newly refinished hardwood floors had to be removed, and the drywall in those rooms cut halfway up the wall and replaced. The beautiful breakfront from Saul’s mother was a total loss because it was standing in sewage for a day, and Jess also lost the vanity from the powder room. Within a month, her new house was to be totally ripped apart. Luckily, homeowners’ insurance is paying for most of the repairs and replacement, except for the replacement of the sewer line that runs from the house to the street. Jess and Alex have to pay the several thousand dollar cost of replacing the line, but once it is done properly, they will never have a problem again.

On top of all that, Hurricane Irene hit and knocked out their power. Their sump pump stopped and their basement filled with four inches of water. They bailed for a few hours until the power came back on and the sump pump finished the job quickly.

We did have a few good weeks. Before all this happened, we had a lovely Shabbat dinner there, joined by Beth and Larry. I helped the girls bake a spectacular coconut cake for dessert, and they spent a few hours making figures for the top out of marzipan, a substance that Sami recently discovered at the supermarket. I realized when she asked me about it that it is the perfect medium for her creative urges. As we carefully packed the cake for the journey to NJ, Beth made a comment about how great it would be if it collapsed because we could just dig in and have a big hunk before dinner. She was hungry. We were all shocked when we opened the box that she had been very prophetic. The cake had collapsed in such a manner as to be beyond repair. Beth did get to eat a big hunk before dinner with her hands and so did Larry. Izzy had a temper tantrum when Jessica interrupted her attempt to take a big bite before dinner. Luckily, we have before and after photos, so the work on the marzipan figures has been preserved in some way.

On July 24, Elaine had Maury’s unveiling, over which Alex ably officiated. About three dozen friends and family members gathered on a wickedly hot Sunday morning. Afterward, we had lunch together in a private room of a nearby Bertucci’s.

Additional highlights of our summer: Pajamarama at Barnes & Noble; Kids Concert at the Abington Art Center; seeing Spy Kids in 4D; new Smurf 3D movie with Yona on my lap; an earthquake that struck while Saul and I and the girls were having lunch with my friend Roxy on the second floor of Wegmans, (ironically, Ari, who, in DC, would have been nearest to the epicenter in North Carolina was away on business in Southern California); driving to Ocean City, NJ, to dip our feet in the ocean for an hour and then a few days later, just before Hurricane Irene struck, taking the Sami and Izzy there for a glorious afternoon on the beach, giant slices of pizza for dinner, rides at Pirates’ Cove, and ice cream at Kohr Bros.

When we were teenagers, we used to go to the beach for a day because we couldn’t afford to stay overnight. In describing this to the girls, we became aware that they had never been to the beach for just a day, and that they didn’t realize it was within the realm of possibility. They absolutely loved their day at the beach and showered happily when we got home very late as I had demanded even though they were dead tired and half asleep.

We had free carousel rides for Sami’s birthday at Plymouth Meeting Mall and dinner at King Buffet. We found great food including a huge bowl of vegetarian udon at the upscale food court in King of Prussia Mall, and the best gelato ever. Yona loved pink kitchen at Pottery Barn Kids there just like her sisters always did. The synagogue and the neighbors in Cherry Hill were wonderful in welcoming Jess and Alex to the community. We celebrated a special birthday for Beth at an incredible party/barbecue prepared by Erica and Adele. The girls met lots of the Cherry Hill neighbors and kids at parties held for them, and lots of families and kids from the synagogue festivities. We discovered a new favorite ice cream place, Owowcow in Ottsville. The girls learned how to install real ceramic tile by installing a glass tile floor in their dollhouse. They made wonderful kiln-fired ceramics at Beachcombers, and learned lots of new art skills.

We had an incredible summer, despite all the tensions and upsets. Ari started a new job which he seemed to like very much and went on vacation for two weeks with us between jobs, so at least there was no tension there. Everyone stayed healthy until the very end, we bonded with Yona, and we created wonderful memories that are sure to last a lifetime! What more could we ask?

A Whirlwind Weekend as the Mileage Piles Up

2011-05-18T15:07:00.001-04:00

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Saul gave his finals the first few days of last week and then spent a whole day Wednesday rushing to complete his paperwork and get his grades in so that we would be free to spend Thursday in Phoenixville at the Kimberton Waldorf School with Sami. A number of Waldorf schools get together each year for an Olympics-style competition. Jess and Alex could not attend because of work schedules, Jess had late evening duty at Pearlstone for a conference on Saturday, and they had a black-tie, late night wedding to attend for Alex’s cousin, Lisa, on Sunday night. Because of all that, Jess asked me if we would take all of the girls for the whole weekend and Saul and I agreed.

Thursday dawned absolutely beautiful and with ideal temperatures for an outdoor Olympics competition. The Baltimore Waldorf fifth grade was bussed down and arrived at Kimberton about 9:45 a.m. Saul and I arrived about 10:30 after an absolutely gorgeous 1-hour drive over country roads and through an old covered bridge to the picturesque school setting on the other side. Climbing a hill with our shaded folding chairs, and crossing the field past a burning Olympic torch, we found that we had just missed Sami’s javelin toss, one of her better events. According to her teacher, her form was beautiful. The next few events that we witnessed were not so good, as Sami is one of the worst runners we have ever seen. Because of this, she was terrible at the long jump, not getting any momentum at the end. She was the only left-handed discus thrower on her red-tunic-clad team (Sparta), but sent the discus a respectable distance. Despite her inability to run quickly, her team won the final relay race of the day. She was also quite good at wrestling, a sumo-type event where the weight and size-matched opponents locked hands and tried to push the other out of a chalk ring drawn on the grass. Gold and silver medals were only awarded to the two top-scoring competitors of the day. Everyone else received a beautiful bronze medal, congratulations, and a hand-shake. Delicious powdered sugar-covered butter cookies were distributed from baskets at the closing ceremonies. A spirit award was given to a boy and girl on each of the four teams—a laurel wreath with which they were crowned. A Greek-themed lunch was available for purchase in the school’s lunchroom and was quite good— spanakopita and Greek salad with feta and olives. We sat at a table with Sami’s friend, Acadia, and her parents, and the father of another Baltimore Waldorf classmate, Jacob. The navigator took us on a slightly different route home which was even nicer than the drive there. When we arrived home, Beth called, and Sami invited herself next door to visit. She came back with a beautiful acrylic painting she had done there of Hobbs, Beth’s new Cairn terrier, painted to look like a lion.

Jessica arrived with the other two girls already asleep late that evening. Yona awoke and gave her a hard time going to bed, but finally, after about a half hour, all of us were asleep. Yona woke first in the morning, followed by Izzy and then Sami. I toasted bagels and made Sami hot oatmeal and eventually we all breakfasted, watching children’s television. Jess left early to pick up her mother-in-law and sister, Shirley, to look at some more houses in Cherry Hill. She is so overwhelmed right now with the upcoming move that she forgot to take Yona’s car seat out for us to use. Leaving Saul to babysit, I went to Costco in the afternoon, buying us a new one, purchasing a few items for dinner, and picking up a hot pizza for lunch. Our guests for dinner on Friday night included Faith and her son, Jon, and granddaughter, Hilary, and Larry. Beth stopped in just for a few minutes to say hi as Paul is still recovering from his surgery. We had homemade challah, homemade chicken soup with mini bow-tie noodles, hummus with chips, tossed salad, and sesame-flavored brown basmati rice. My right arm has been very achy for a week now that I overdid the gardening, vacuuming, and sweeping, so while I went to lay down for a while while Yona was napping, Sami and Izzy made oatmeal-peanut butter-raisin cookies for dessert. They cooperated beautifully according to Saul, and the cookies were great. They also made tiny individual challahs while I was braiding the dough. Faith brought perky salmon-colored gerbera daisies in a bouquet, and Larry brought each of the girls a stuffed animal.

Saul tried on his full ceremonial regalia for the girls to see before he left for commencement at the college, which took the entire day. He left about 11 a.m. and did not return until 5:30 p.m. The girls and I just hung out, watching videos, playing games, and doing crafts. I gave Sami and Izzy two pairs of old panty hose, an old pillow, a button box, and my sewing kit. They each made a stuffed bunny rabbit. We ate leftovers for lunch and dinner on Saturday.

On Sunday, we cleaned up the house, made beds, did laundry and ate lunch. Erica decided to join us with Brenna for an afternoon at The Franklin Institute. She followed us downtown with Sami and Brenna in her car so that we could continue on to put the girls to bed in Baltimore afterward. We all had a marvelous time at the Institute. The girls made paper, went through “The Heart,” played with static electricity, water, sand, sports apparatus, did puzzles, climbed through and over tubes, and generally were running around and active all afternoon. When the museum closed at five, we headed for Baltimore. Not having had any snacks all afternoon, the girls were ravenous as we searched for a place to have dinner that would be quick and child-friendly with vegetarian choices. We reached Christiana Mall in Delaware a little before six, but The Cheesecake Factory there had a half-hour wait. We settled on Ruby Tuesday, around the back of the mall, because it has a salad buffet. It was practically empty and the hostess was as slow and clueless as they come. Our waiter saved the day, though, by making excellent suggestions and bringing out a constant stream of dishes as they were ready. In addition to the salad buffet, we ordered what turned out to be a big bowl of creamy artichoke and spinach dip with warm chips that kept everyone satisfied. Izzy took the leftovers to school the next day for lunch, and Yona thought it was a delicious soup. Our waiter brought us warm chip refills, lemonade refills, cheesy hot biscuits, and perfectly cooked pasta with chunky marinara for the kids. Saul and I ordered two different fish dishes, trout and mahi, and both were quite adequate. By the time we had finished, however, more than two hours had passed and we still had a long drive ahead of us before we could put them to bed. The ride was a real nightmare for a good portion of the time as we encountered a thunderstorm, torrential rain that was blinding as we crossed the Susquehanna River with tractor trailers on all sides. Of course, this was the time that the girls decided to get difficult until I lost my cool and read them the riot act. It worked! Within a few minutes of singing “calming songs” after that, they were all asleep. The rain ceased on the last half hour of the drive, and they all settled into their beds as soon as we arrived. Jess and Alex returned from the wedding in DC a few hours later, and we decided to take the shorter drive to DC instead of going home rather than chance encountering more rain in the dark while we were tired. We spent the night at Ari’s house and in the morning, cleaned up, watered plants, hung up some of the artwork that he had framed, and put a dimmer switch on his dining room lighting.

That evening, Ari was expecting Menachem and Liz, Alex and Jess’s friends from Berkeley, California, who had been invited to the White House for a luncheon with President Obama. They were unable to find a hotel room anywhere near DC, so Ari was delighted to put them up for two nights and pick them up from the airport. Menachem, who was Alex’s best man at his wedding, is a rabbi in Berkeley. Alex, Jess, Menachem and Liz had all been in the joint program at JTS undergraduate school together.

We left Ari’s house on Monday and decided to stop in Baltimore on the way home for a few reasons. We knew that Jess is now working from home on Mondays and thought she might be able to lunch with us, and Sami had left her Kindle in the car under our umbrella stroller that we had used for Yona in the museum. When we arrived, Jess and Alex, who had just stopped home to have some lunch with Jess, were just sitting down to lunch. Our attempts to reach Jess by phone that morning had failed because Alex had set their phones to mute during the wedding the previous evening. Alex ate his lunch and went back to work, and Jess decided to join us for lunch. We had a relaxing and satisfying vegetarian Thai lunch nearby, and were glad to have the opportunity to just have a long, quiet conversation with Jess without distractions from the kids. Our ride back home over the scenic route was untroubled and relaxing. We were glad we had spent the night in DC.

Tuesday and Wednesday have been full staff development days at CHC for Saul. Tomorrow, his summer school classes begin. Tomorrow is also the last class of the year for Faith’s class and, according to tradition, will be followed by a festive luncheon, which this year is at Ellen’s home. I’ve been trying to take it easy the last few days because my right arm is still achy and getting pins and needles occasionally. Despite overdoing things by picking up Yona, it seems to be a little better each day. Tomorrow evening, we are invited to have dinner with our friends, Ruth and Giora in New Jersey. We are really racking up the miles on our new Prius, but enjoying our new toy very much.

Passover through Mother’s Day 2011

2011-05-14T11:45:00.002-04:00

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In April, we spent most of our weekends in Baltimore and DC. We helped Ari repaint his front door and stain a tea cart/wine rack to match his kitchen cabinets. We shopped for annuals to refill his outdoor flower pots and rejoiced in the arrival of spring further south, where the growing season began a few weeks earlier than at home. We served as surrogate parents for Izzy at a religious school program celebrating her class’s finishing of their book, while Jess and Alex were teaching. We thoroughly enjoyed chasing Yona around the building while waiting for the program to start, and we helped Izzy decorate cookies in class. Afterward, Jess and I went shopping in her well-stocked, nearby, supermarkets for Passover supplies, including Seven-Mile Market, a totally kosher Superfresh-size supermarket. We also spent some time at the Cherry Blossom Festival in downtown DC. The proceeds this year were to be used to benefit the Japanese victims of the tsunami. Ari bought a large Japanese print on handmade paper with an artist’s depiction of the train system in Japan and the highlights of the countryside at each station. We took it to be framed at Michael’s in Silver Spring and had some other things framed as well, including a special fabric rendering of a temple that he purchased in Tokyo. This was specially framed at a do-it-yourself framing place in DC.

The week before Passover was spent kashering my kitchen for Passover so that I could prepare certain dishes and desserts for our seder, Faith’s seder, and for the upcoming 10 days that we would be spending in Baltimore/DC. I made seven sorbet flavors this year. The most exotic was fresh guava. The others were grapefruit, strawberry, mango, blood orange, lemon, and banana. I tried two new recipes this year with great success, vegetarian Passover meatballs, and Passover strawberry rhubarb pie. I made Passover potato knishes, Passover egg noodles, chocolate almond bars, and mocha mousse crepes with raspberry/currant sauce. I made lots and lots of Passover rolls using half whole-wheat matzoh meal but, other than when they were crispy and hot out of the oven, they were pretty heavy and I think I will go back to using regular matzoh meal entirely next year. I made a lemon pudding and layered it with egg noodle crepes and fresh sliced bananas and strawberries to make a torte that was delicious, but the texture needs a little more work before I can post the recipe. I bought Mother’s margarine to use, remembering what a wonderful product it was years ago. I will never buy it again, as it was so full of water that there were tiny wet pockets in the sticks and the texture of the mousses was not right because of it. I am so tired of paying high prices for inferior products during Passover. The one bright note was the jams from the Israeli brand, 778, which put to shame the top brands of jam made here, such as Polaner’s and Smuckers.

A few days before leaving, Saul attended a retirement party for our friend and his colleague, Ralph. I made a last-minute trip to the dentist because of a problem with heat and cold sensitivity, and the dentist told me I would need a root canal as soon as possible. I scheduled one with the recommended endodontist for the Thursday after I was returning and took a complete dosage of antibiotics during the holidays. Also before leaving for the holidays, our Prius needed to be serviced to fix a problem with the headlights randomly going out. After Saul and I had breakfast across the street from the dealer, our car still needed a little more time and we decided to look at the new ones. To make a long story short, they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse, and within two hours, we had traded in the old one, drove home, loaded up the new, 2011 Prius, and drove in our brand new car (complete with up-to-the-minute traffic reports on the nav system) down to Baltimore. On Sunday evening, Saul and I drove home for the day so that he could teach his Monday classes. We drove back directly to the first seder in Baltimore on Monday evening. Within this month, we have put over 1,800 miles on our new car.

We took Sami and Izzy to sleep over at Ari’s house on the Friday night before Passover and Ari and I made Shabbat dinner there. I felt really badly because, through a misunderstanding with Jess, Yona had been expecting to come also and was wild when she discovered that she was not going in the car with the other two girls. On Sunday, I spent a few hours kashering Ari’s small kitchen for Pesach. I brought my mixer and Cuisinart to DC, along with pots and pans, dishes, and utensils for the holiday. Cooking in Ari’s small kitchen was, surprisingly, a pleasure. There was plenty of counter space and storage space, and everything was right within my grasp for convenience.

Our last seders in Baltimore at Jess and Alex’s were incredibly enjoyable for me. Izzy bathed Inky, the house was spotless, and I did not suffer badly from my allergies as I have in the past. Alex produced a beautiful, full-color family haggadah especially designed for all of us, which made the seder festivities all the more enjoyable. His sister, Naomi, brought new baby Talia Madeline the second night and we were joined by some of her friends and her husband, Matt’s, parents. Neri stayed with Ari all throughout the holidays and joined us for the seders as well. Also present were Alex’s mother, Elaine, our friend Elaine, Alex’s brother and sister-in-law and their children, Aaron, Stacey, Jacob, Lilly and Zach, Stacey’s parents, Aunt Ruth and Anne, her son, Max, and a girlfriend. Sami, who has been studying Greek mythology at school for a while, decided that the theme of our seder this year should be a “satyr seder,” and she fabricated an assorted bunch to decorate the table to accompany the usual toy frogs that keep us amused during the evening. This type of word play from a ten-year-old proves that she is definitely my father’s great-granddaughter. As usual, Alex prepared an assortment of delicious soups, the best matzoh balls on the planet, a delectable assortment of appetizers and salads (karpas) to stave off hunger during the early parts of the seder, and an incredible array of grilled and stewed meats and turkey, accompanied by many side dishes. I, of course, provided desserts. The horseradish root Saul dug out of our garden (which had originally come from Uncle Stef’s garden almost forty years ago) was unusually strong this year and just about gave all of us heart palpitations. We had a good laugh at each other’s encounters with the bitter herb. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves very much through the evening, including all the children.

Jamie and Andy with Presley slept over at Ari’s later in the week on their way down to Myrtle Beach to vacation with Andy’s family. We went to the National Zoo together and had a marvelous day. The animals were all very active and interesting, probably because of the beautiful day and temperate weather. A giant octopus zoomed up to the glass in its aquarium and freaked out Presley whose face was only a few inches away. She told us it was her favorite part of the day. Afterward, I made us all a dinner of warm Passover popovers filled with scrambled eggs, creamy sauteéd mushrooms, and cheese. Accompanied by veggie meatballs, steamed asparagus, and finishing with our chocolate desserts, the meal was quite satisfying. In the morning, I made fried matzoh two ways, my family’s traditional scrambled style topped with sugar, and Saul’s family’s traditional pancake-style matzoh brei with salt and freshly ground pepper. Jamie and Andy left on their journey right after breakfast.

A couple of days after we returned home following Yizkor services on the last day of Pesach and lunch cleaning up leftovers with Jess and Alex and the girls, it was time for me to face the dreaded root canal. There were just a few seconds of intense pain as the endodontist began his work and discovered that I needed more anesthetic. Then, in the middle of the process, he decided that my tooth was cracked so far down that he could not save the tooth and that it would have to be extracted. At my request to have the process over and done with as soon as possible, he sent me to the offices of an oral surgeon downstairs in the same building. Designated an “emergency,” I waited over two hours with a cavernous hole in the tooth and the fear that the anesthetic would wear off before they could see me. It didn’t. When I was treated, though, I needed a whole new set of anesthetic needles for the extraction, a process which wound up taking only a couple of minutes despite the fact that the tooth broke into pieces as it was being removed. I was given prescriptions for major pain killers. Beth picked them up for me at the pharmacy that evening, but I slept through the trauma of it most of the afternoon and the entire evening. It was the day after the incredible tornado damage in the south and we were under a tornado watch here also. The weather was frightening, dark, very windy, and with torrents of rain, but luckily, the tornadoes bypassed us. I am lucky also that the tooth is in the back and the hole is not obvious. Saul was at school from early in the morning, until late in the evening that day, so I had to face the whole ordeal without his moral support. I am still trying to decide how best to deal with the hole.

Jess came down late that evening, slept over and went to pick up her mother-in-law and her sister, Shirley, early the next morning while Saul and I waited for the early delivery and assembly of our new bedroom furniture, which we love. After touring some very promising houses in Cherry Hill, where we rendezvoused with Jess, Elaine and Shirley, we were back on the road to Baltimore. Sami was playing the lead role of Phaedra in the play by Euripedes at her Waldorf school. She had quickly memorized over 300 lines of very obscure text and a series of dance-like movements to perform. I think she may have a talent for acting. Jess then delivered Elaine and Shirley to Aaron and Stacey’s home and we continued on to Ari’s home where Jess and Alex, the girls, Naomi, Matt, Talia and us were all to meet and have Shabbat dinner together. Alex had leftover entreés from Passover, veal, ribs, and stew, mashed sweet potato, soup, and desserts. I brought challot from the freezer. Ari had wine and grape juice. We had a very lovely and laid-back Shabbat evening together.

The next day was Talia’s baby-naming at Adas Israel in Washington. It was a gloriously beautiful spring day. We drove over to the shul and Alex easily walked the mile-and-a-half distance. The service was lovely, the synagogue impressive, and the oneg Shabbat luncheon afterward ample and delicious. We went back to Ari’s to change into more comfortable clothing and then headed off for Matt’s parents’ home about 5 miles away where a further celebration was taking place. Alex stayed at Ari’s for the afternoon. The catered menu was all vegetarian and very tasty and the weather was so beautiful that everyone hung around for hours, schmoozing outdoors, and watching the many children who were present playing games in the backyard. Back at Ari’s, Saul and I napped away the rest of the afternoon while the kids hung out in front of the t.v. Unfortunately, Yona refused to nap and was very overstimulated and cranky. They all went home as soon as Shabbat was over. We set out for home rather early on Sunday as Saul had been fighting a really bad cold for several days and wanted to get to bed early in order to tackle his overloaded last regular week of school. He only began to feel better after a trip to the doctor and a few days of taking antibiotics. We picked our friend Larry up from Philadelphia airport on Wednesday evening. Larry had been in Italy on a Grand Circle tour for the past three weeks and Saul had covered some of his classes. Thursday morning, I attended Faith’s class and then met Roxy at P.F. Chang’s in Warrington for lunch. She treated me for my birthday, which was two months ago, but it was the first time we were able to get together.

There wasn’t much of a breather for us, either, with Mother’s Day and Yona’s birthday celebration falling the following Sunday. In addition, I was about to meet and entertain Carl and Kelly (Ken and Randi’s good friends) this past Friday for Shabbat dinner. Never having met them before, and they never having experienced a Shabbat dinner, I wanted to make sure that the house and food were especially presentable. During the week I baked the cakes for Yona’s birthday and went shopping with Saul to pick up the supplies I would need for this past weekend. We bought herbs and flowers to replenish our dead planters on the deck, while Danny, Erica’s husband, made the rest of our landscape impeccable with his new landscaping business. I worked in the garden and finished getting it ready for planting. My arms are still aching today from the unaccustomed combination of garden weasel, large outdoor push broom for cleaning up the deck, and vacuum cleaner. In between, I was readying the girls’ rooms for Camp Bubbie and Saba, which will begin officially on June 12 this year. Shabbat dinner was very enjoyable this week. Larry and Faith joined us. Carl and Kelly were just as wonderful a couple as Ken had told us, and we enjoyed having them immensely. For dinner, we had homemade challah; two soups, cold strawberry and leek and Cope’s dried corn soup; two salads, Israeli and Caesar; deviled eggs, guacamole (made with fresh herbs from the planters), tuna and escolar (which Ken grilled perfectly on the Weber charcoal grill); salt-rubbed baked potatoes with sour cream and fresh chives from the garden; fresh blueberry pie with whipped cream and chocolates that Faith brought for dessert. Ari sent me a bouquet of flowers on Friday for Mother’s Day.

Ari brought Izzy up with him on Saturday evening because Sami had a birthday party to attend. Izzy helped me make icing for Yona’s Noah’s Ark birthday cake. We all headed off to King Buffet for a late dinner, and Izzy was so tired that she couldn’t wait to go to bed. Ari helped me decorate the cake and clean up and then we all went off to bed. Izzy, Saul and I got up early Sunday morning to get the house and deck ready for company. Ari got up a short time after that. Jess and Alex arrived with Sami and Yona about 9 a.m. bearing flowers and about an hour later, sent me off to shower and change. By the time I had finished, everything had been set up beautifully for the party and the guests had begun to arrive. Beth did not join us this year as Paul had surgery in Kentucky on Friday and she had spent the weekend there. Ken and Randi, and their kids got together for a brunch themselves in Collingswood. Ken and Randi joined us later in the afternoon. Adele and Larry came bearing bagels, Danny and Erica with Brenna and Ava, cousin Bob, Aunt Ruth, Anne and Ben, and our friend, Larry were here. While we were out cleaning the deck, we said hi to Ilsa and Manuel, Beth’s friends who had come to take care of her dogs. We invited them to join us and they went home to shower and came back bearing flowers also. At my kids’ and husband’s requests, I did not make as elaborate a spread this year. We had: bagels, lox, whitefish salad, herring, cream cheese, deviled eggs, sliced tomatoes, onions, radishes, peppers, romaine lettuce, Comté cheese, cheddar, brie, sliced assorted cheeses like American, Colby and Jack (Anne brought a delicious farmhouse artisan cheese called Vermont Thunder) Israeli salad, guacamole, strawberry soup, orange and apple juice, coffee and tea, and cake and assorted flavors of ice cream. The Noah’s Ark cake was made of mocha-cooked-frosting-covered chocolate medallion cake, topped with a date bread frosted with vanilla butter cream icing. I used graham crackers to make the roof of the ark.

Ken and Randi arrived after most had gone home and hung around for awhile in the afternoon. They had eaten too much during their brunch to want dinner. When Beth arrived from the airport, she joined us and we had dinner at the Metropolitan American Diner. Then Jess and Alex left with the girls for home. Ari picked up some laundry he had done here and headed for home as well a few minutes later. I straightened up the house a bit and Saul and I went off to bed, trying to rest up for the final week of this semester.

Early April Showers, Late Passover

2011-04-05T16:29:00.001-04:00

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Once Purim is over, my life is usually a headlong rush to prepare for Passover. Even though Jess and Alex have taken over the larger responsibility of hosting family and friends for the seders, the inevitable task of cleaning the whole house, particularly the kitchen, and changing dishes, utensils, and pots and pans so that I can make desserts and other assorted items for the week is topmost on my mind. This is not a complaint. I actually enjoy the rhythm of my Jewish lifestyle. I like it when everything is different for a while, and Pesach certainly fills that bill. There is no reaching for a familiar spoon or coffee mug. Even though it is a tremendous amount of work to clean, I love when all is finished and I can get to work cooking and baking, barefoot, on my silky, Murphy’s-oil-polished, crumb-less hardwood kitchen floor.

During the last week of March, we celebrated Faith’s birthday with Larry by dining together at Bonefish Grill. Faith and my mother had always shared a late-March birthday. The food was wonderful and very reasonably priced. Saul and I began by sharing a large, appealing ahi tuna appetizer and then could not begin to finish our gigantic and tasty portions of flaky, tempura-battered fish and chips. Saul and I had the leftovers for lunch during the next two days. We also joined Larry during the week for the early-bird dinner at The Fireside Grill in Ambler.

The weather has been mostly awful these last few days of March and first few days of April. On the first, we awoke to a constant flutter of the largest snowflakes I have ever seen. I was very happy that we had stopped the previous afternoon to pick up a bunch of perky sunflowers for Shabbat. Looking at the unseasonable weather through the vase full of sunflowers on the kitchen table, we enjoyed the peace and beauty of the snowfall, but felt hopeful that spring would be arriving soon. The inch-high coating on our deck as we ate breakfast, gave way later in the morning as it melted, to what looked like water-ice on the ground. Eventually, it disappeared completely as the sun peeked through in the afternoon. Saul and I puttered with a wonderful cheesecake recipe I developed to try to use up a barely-started, three-pound block of cream cheese before Passover. After getting my challah dough ready, we went on a bunch of errands together to the bank and to drop off our income tax to our accountant. Ken and Randi were supposed to bring their friend, Carl, for Shabbat dinner this week. His wife was attending a brother who had open-heart surgery. Late in the morning, Ken called to say that Carl had begged off because he was sick with a nasty cold. Saul and I both enjoyed the preparations for dinner and the cheesecake came out absolutely wonderful. We were joined for dinner by Larry, Faith, Beth, Ken and Randi. Randi brought a crisp and fruity pinot grigio from Bartenura. For dinner, we had homemade challah; deviled eggs; leek and Cope’s dried corn soup; Israeli salad; baked steelhead trout with lime, caramelized onion, and fresh ginger; and spinach ravioli. The fresh blackberry cheesecake dacquoise for dessert was exquisite and delicious.

On Saturday evening, we were invited to dinner at the new condo apartment of our friends, Mort and Elsa. After over a year of tribulations trying to sell their beautiful, prominent architect-designed home in this terrible market, they were finally comfortably ensconced in their new condo which has sweeping views encompassing sunrise from one terrace, and sunset from another. This was accomplished with a great deal of aggravation and expense even months after the sale of their house had been completed. Elsa unfolded a tale for us, before dinner, of the complicated shenanigans of the new buyers which had undoubtedly sapped much of the joy out of beginning their new life together in their cozy condo. I was feeling very grateful that I can turn my attentions to settling back into my own home after the stress of having it on the market, on-and-off, for over a year. Mort and Elsa had also invited their friends, Sue and Andy, whom we had never met. Later in the evening we discovered that Jess had tutored their daughter, Colette, for her bat mitzvah when Jess and Alex still lived and worked in this area. My cheesecake did double duty on Saturday night also, as I persuaded Elsa to let me bring dessert. With everyone so health and weight conscious these days, no one wants to eat more than a sliver or take home tempting leftovers. Saul and I are in the same boat, so we were delighted to see our efforts spread around and the cake did not go to waste or waist. We had a delightful evening dining with Mort and Elsa and their friends and reminiscing about the highlights of our 25-year friendship.

On Sunday, because the weather looked good when we awoke, we decided to go to visit Saul’s mom at Lion’s Gate. Monday was her eighty-third birthday. The one-hour journey to see her was fraught with tension, as we did not know in what condition we would find her. On our last visit, she had been moved to a more intensive unit than the Alzheimer’s unit, Safe Haven, where she had been originally, and Saul, although he had expected it, had been shocked that she no longer recognized him as her son. This had caused him more than a few restless nights. We found her in the community room just as we entered, sitting in a chair, holding a lifelike baby-doll dressed in pink and wrapped in a small towel. Her face lit up at the sight of us, even though she did not really recognize us. She first said to me “I know you and I like you.” To Saul, she said, “I think you come from Rachova (her pre-Holocaust hometown), and I think you can speak Yiddish.” They conversed about how she was feeling in a polyglot of languages, she mostly answering in English with a smattering of Yiddish. She had no complaints, no concerns and was not in any pain. Her ankles were not nearly as swollen as they had been on previous visits. We had discussed, ahead of time, that we would not trouble her with any questions that might make her uncomfortable. She looked in good condition, one of the few present who were not confined to a wheelchair, and with her hair still dyed her preferred shade of blond. She was also holding a chocolate-flavored energy drink in a box with a bendy straw. She seemed to have forgotten what to do with a straw as she kept taking it in and out of the box, usually placing it the wrong way in, and did not drink from it even when we encouraged her. Even though the facilities are lovely and comfortable, the time dragged as we struggled to find topics for pleasant conversation considering her impaired capacity. An almost comatose woman in a wheelchair several feet from us made horrible, and apparently involuntary, repetitive moaning noises the whole time we were there, which we tried desperately to ignore. A younger woman, who appeared to have a severe case of Downs Syndrome, stood by me most of the time and patted my hair every so often. It was overwhelming to see so many human beings, devoid of most of their mental and physical capacity, being attended to by a staff that surely has a special place in heaven awaiting them for being able to do such a job day in and day out. When we arrived back home, we both napped for a few hours, so taxed had we been by the experience.

Yesterday, while Saul was off at school, I continued to clean and to move things around in the house to accommodate our move to the other master bedroom and to get ready for Passover. I have been shopping on-line and find the arrival of plush packages at our front door very soothing right now, especially a fluffy, Hungarian goose down comforter that was a dream to snuggle under last night.

This morning, I was awakened by the sound of torrential rain beating on the house. There is a possibility of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. Forty-mile-an-hour winds and record cold temperatures are predicted for this afternoon. Rabbi Addison, who gained a new grandson last week, lost his 90-year-old father this week and we are planning to make a shiva call with Faith this evening. It seems as though we have all grown old so fast. I am happy to have the strength and mental capacity to be able to shake my life up a bit. Passover encourages us to do just that and I am grateful for the obligation and opportunity. We don’t get to choose how our lives will end, but I would be happy to have the strength to prepare for and take care of others to the end of my days, and I don’t mind hard work and shaking up my life to do it.

Brrr! Out Like a Lion, Too

2011-03-30T16:14:00.001-04:00

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Maybe my personal body thermostat has been reset by my idyllic vacation in Hawaii, but coming back to snow at the end of March is almost too much to bear. Just as it began to look as though we would have an early spring, the weather turned ugly.

We muscled and muddled through the first few days after our vacation, and then decided, at the last minute, that we were up to heading down to Baltimore/DC to celebrate Purim with the kids. Big mistake, as it turned out. Deciding to head directly to DC after school was over on Thursday, we got caught in a huge traffic jam caused by an accident just as we hit Delaware on I-95, and we set the GPS to detour us around it. The ride was pretty pleasant after that, and we arrived in DC at exactly the same time that Ari arrived home after having some drinks with friends after work. We had pho together for dinner in Columbia Heights. Afterward, we bumped into Matt and Naomi’s friend, Jeff, who lives nearby, as we exited the restaurant. We discussed his upcoming marriage, and we discussed Naomi; her water had broken with a pinhole leak, so we knew the baby would be coming soon. (In fact, she gave birth last night and Jess was on her way to DC this morning with Sami and Izzy to visit their new niece/cousin.)

The next day, Friday, Ari left early for work and Saul and I slept late. As Saul dug into school paperwork that had been neglected while we were on vacation, he began to feel a cold coming on. I dug into piles of laundry and cleaning that Ari had neglected while he was on vacation with us. By late afternoon, as we headed for Jess and Alex’s home for Shabbat, we all felt good about cleaning up and catching up, but Saul was beginning to feel really awful from the combination of head cold and broken rib. Coughing and sneezing made the pain worse. We were joined by Alex’s friends and assistants, Abbie and Isaac. Alex, as usual, made a wonderful dinner—a spicy soup, big salad, borekas and felafel. For dessert, we had homemade hamantaschen and the rest of the cocoa coconut almond cupcakes that the girls had made. Just before we arrived, Jess and Alex had told the girls that they would be moving. Izzy was excited, but Sami was tearful and Abby, who moved many times in her life, went in to talk with her one-on-one after Jessica had been with her alone for a while. The ride back to DC after dinner was long for Saul as his cold was worsening by the hour.

We were supposed to join the kids in Baltimore for Purim services and to see the kids in costume, but Saul was not up to the drive and Ari and I were both too tired. In the afternoon, Ari and I went out for a while while Saul rested. On Sunday, we had a late breakfast and we were on the road home by 3:00 p.m. We missed all the Purim festivities completely, I am sorry to say, and in retrospect, we should have stayed home and rested. At least we caught up with cleaning and paperwork and enjoyed Shabbat dinner together. Also, I had a chance to enjoy the crocuses and other spring bulbs that Ari and I had planted in his garden in the fall. The weather was beautiful and temperate in DC that weekend and belied the fact that more winter weather was on the way.

Saul’s cold was mostly gone by Tuesday and we began the process of moving our bedroom to the other end of the house where Mom had her master suite. Right before we left for Hawaii, we had ordered a Sealy Posturepedic king-size bed (which would not fit into our bedroom suite) on the last day of a sale at Costco. Beth, Adele and Larry came over and helped us move things around so that we could make room for it to be delivered. A few days after it was delivered, Saul and I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to purchase everything we would need to sleep on it, as Saul was distinctly feeling the need for a better mattress in his (broken) bones. Last Friday, Saul and I went to The Home Show in King of Prussia, and afterward, went to look at bedroom furniture that Ari and I had liked at a store in Oaks, PA. I was still not sure about the furniture after viewing it a second time, and Saul liked it, but was not wowed either. For two days, I shopped online and looked at virtually thousands of pieces of bedroom furniture. In the end, I ordered the original set that I had seen, online. It was $150 cheaper than the price that the store had quoted me. We were joined for Shabbat dinner by Larry, Beth, Paul, and Faith. Saul and I did not returned from our wanderings until 5:00 p.m., so dinner was a last minute throw-together. We had defrosted homemade challah, leek and Cope’s dried corn soup, spring mix salad with pecans and craisins, defrosted homemade steelhead trout burgers, cheese ravioli with butter and parmesan, and steamed asparagus. For dessert, we had a butter cake that Larry brought, leftover hamantaschen, and leftover chocolate cake. We went to services on Shabbat morning at MBIEE, but knew that rabbi was away in Israel for the brit milah of his new grandson. We spent all day at home on Sunday so that Saul could get our income taxes done.

We have moved into Mom’s room piecemeal, but today I decided to begin moving all our clothing over. I hesitated to use Mom’s furniture, but now that I know a new bedroom set is on the way, I feel better about it. I have plans to change almost everything around eventually, so that it doesn’t feel so strange to be in Mom’s old room. Just as I was sitting on the bed, contemplating how relieved I was feeling about staying in the house, making improvements, and not selling it as I have been trying to do for almost two years, a realtor called to ask if I would be putting it back on the market soon. I was really relieved to tell him to forget it, although the wanderlust in me that drives me to shake things up all the time, feels a bit let down. How’s that for mixed emotions?! Am I the only one that feels this way? Most people my age seem to be either digging in their heels to keep everything as it has been in the past, or moving reluctantly to retirement communities. I still long for a complete change of scenery. Perhaps it is just my fantasy that is best left in my head.

Saul is on a trip to the U.N. today with classes from Chestnut Hill College. I have been putting off scanning more of my parents’ WWII letters until the weirdness of dealing with the room change has worn off, but I really feel compelled to get back to them.

Erica’s husband, Danny, had a terrible tragedy in his family this past week. His 33-year-old sister died suddenly, unable to breathe. She was soon to be married, and had just picked out her wedding dress the day before she died. Danny’s mother, who is confined to a wheelchair with MS, has been inconsolable, especially because her daughter had been a great help to her. Last I heard, they were not sure what caused the problem, but suspected an interaction of medications she was taking. The funeral is today.

Jess had to take their beloved dog, Zeke, to be euthanized by the S.P.C.A. a few days ago. He was very old for his breed, and has been very sick, on and off, for the past few months.

Passover is just around the corner and we will be going down to Baltimore for the whole holiday this year. Next week, I will be onto kashering my kitchen so that I can be out of Alex’s way while I prepare our special desserts and sorbets for our last Pesach in Baltimore. It appears that good things are in store for us, but given this late March wintry weather, and all the tragedies of this past month, including the tsunami in Japan, I am struggling to stay upbeat and remind myself that Spring, warm weather, and my seemingly perennial optimism for planning and planting a garden will be arriving soon.

Kauai Hawaii Tsunami Breakneckie Aaiiee!

2011-03-23T23:55:00.006-04:00

Despite the ominous title, we had a fantastic time on our vacation in Kauai this month, so much so, that we are dreaming about buying a gorgeous B&B that we saw up the street from where we were staying. I fear it may be only a dream, though. We just learned that Alex has signed a contract with Temple Beth Sholom of Cherry Hill, and this part of the family will be moving closer to us this summer. I just celebrated another birthday during a fantastic dinner at Red Salt in Poipu, and I have serious doubts about whether Saul and I have the stamina left at our age to get started on a new life and business together. If only this had come up 10 years ago.

Our vacation adventure began very early in the morning on Thursday, March 3. Our initial flight to Phoenix on U.S. Air was out of Newark, NJ, and was due to leave at 6:30 a.m. Over and above the call of duty, our cousin, Anne, who lives about 15 minutes from the airport, volunteered to drive us there at 4:30 a.m. so that we could leave our car at her house for the ten days we would be gone. We were well-prepared and awoke at 3:00 a.m. to dress and load our two carry-ons and small suitcase into our car. We figured at that hour we would have clear sailing over the New Jersey Turnpike to Westfield. Were we wrong! Forty miles out from Anne’s house we came to a standstill in a divided one-lane section of the turnpike that was under construction behind a line of tractor trailers as far as the eye could see. Absolutely nothing was moving on our side of the entire turnpike. We just about had apoplexy thinking about losing our first class seats, to which we had been able to upgrade with air miles at the last minute, and our connecting flight in Phoenix, where we were due to meet up with Ari who was meeting us there for the flight to Lihue. We also were due to honor 5:00 p.m. dinner reservations at The Beach House with Ken and Randi, Randi’s cousin Scott, and her sister Lori along with her husband, Jules. Randi’s family was due to leave a few hours after we arrived. We called Anne to advise her of our situation and she was standing at the ready for whatever we needed to get to the airport by 6:30 a.m. After about 20 minutes at a standstill, we saw a triangle formation of police cars with flashers leading a wall of traffic down the other side of the turnpike. Then, gradually, our lane began to move. Desperately, illegally driving down the narrow shoulder for about a half mile, we were able to bypass a slow-moving line of semis that were just beginning to power up. Once we got past them, the traffic began moving incredibly quickly. We only lost about a half hour. Our flights were relatively on time; we made our connections meeting Ari as planned; our plane did not require de-icing; and two hours of turbulence over the ocean on the final leg of the trip only required one Ativan on my part. The movie was The King’s Speech, a good distraction from the turbulence. We picked up our car, drove to the condo, dropped our bags, and we all headed off for our reservations at The Beach House where we watched the sunset over Lawai Beach drinking exotic libations and eating exquisitely-prepared local fish. It always boggles my mind that all this can be done in the space of one 24-hour period. After dinner, the others left as scheduled for their flights, which were also turbulent, but thankfully, all arrived back home safe and relatively sound.

On day 1, we all slept late. Ken and Randi had begun to set the table for breakfast, but I convinced everyone that we should go out because I was planning later to shop for and prepare Shabbat dinner that evening. On an impulse, we decided to have breakfast at Yum Cha overlooking the golf course at the Grand Hyatt Resort. We were too late for breakfast, but convinced the staff to make us omelets as the lunch crowd began to filter in. Afterward, we headed to Costco to hunt down the makings of a memorable dinner. Saul bought a few more Hawaiian-made aloha shirts. Ari purchased a snorkel, which was not sealed in its plastic bubble particularly well, and on opening, smelled suspiciously like pot. Our two “challot” were yummy whole-grain artisan breads warm from the oven there. Stopping in Old Koloa Town on our way back, I picked up candles at the Island Soap Shop and an inexpensive, but gorgeous, bouquet of local flowers from the small Sueoka Market there. Randi and I prepared a sumptuous dinner, and the men, particularly Ari, cleaned up and loaded the dishwasher afterward. Sleeping in Kauai is a joy with subtle trade winds spurred on by lazy ceiling fans wafting through the bamboo-slatted window shades. The restful sound of palm tree fronds brushing each other outside in the breeze is as relaxing as listening to a gentle rain.

After such a good night’s sleep, we were up early in the morning on day 2, my birthday, to take a walk along the greenbelt to turtle beach and watch large sea turtles, some with a little one in tow, bobbing through the lapping waves and sticking their heads up in the rocky protected little cove. Returning, we set out to breakfast at the Kalaheo Café where we know there is a farmer lady who, once a week, puts out her freshly-picked veggies for sale. I purchased fresh basil, golden beets, and green and yellow string beans from her. We drove up into the hills to return a scarf that Millard’s daughter, Debbie, had left at the condo. Her windswept aerie overlooks breath-taking vistas of the valley below. How Ken and Randi came to know Millard is a legendary and hilarious family story that Ken wrote and actually had published in a local newspaper a few years back. I will try to get the archive and publish it here one day soon. Debbie wasn’t home and Randi left the scarf by the door. We spent the rest of the afternoon basking in the sun and swimming with the colorful and abundant tropical fish at Poipu Beach. I took a brief nap when we returned and then dressed for my birthday dinner at Red Salt. Ari, Randi and I shared a bottle of wine while Ken and Saul drank Arnold Palmers. The food can only be described as exquisite, not only meticulously presented, but succulent as well. My rather whimsical dessert was a root beer float and chocolate, chocolate chip cookie. The ice cream was house-made root beer flavor, presented with the locally-brewed and naturally-flavored vanilla cream soda, a switch on the usual root beer float. After dinner, we strolled around the lovely grounds of the hotel star-gazing by ocean side at the plethora of heavenly bodies accentuated by thousands of miles of light-less ocean.

On day 3, the trouble began. We arrived at 10 a.m. in time for our reservations for a wonderful buffet brunch at 22° North, which last year was Gaylord’s. Although everything but the name seemed the same, we were told that the new identity is meant to reflect that most of the ingredients used in the restaurant are locally-sourced from their own large plantation and farm. Stuffed from overindulging in brunch, Ken and Randi headed off to the condo while Saul soaked up the atmosphere in a comfy chair and Ari and I explored the small specialized gift shops housed in rooms on various floors of the old plantation. Ari purchased unique necklaces for the girls. The gift box contained an oyster, sealed in a plastic bubble and a silver necklace with a heart-shaped pendant in which you are supposed to insert the hidden pearl from inside the oyster. It seemed like a good idea at the time, very unique, interactive, feminine, and from the island of Kauai itself; in practice, as Jessica said sarcastically, “thanks for the new pets!” The girls were fascinated with their gift, but neither wanted to open the oyster, not to mention the fact that we were bringing oysters to a kosher home… on Shabbat!? In some other shopping at nearby Costco, Walmart, and Koloa Town we purchased sunglasses, flip flops, tea mugs, and a neat beach chair for Ari. When we returned to the condo, Ken and Randi were headed down to Brennecke Beach where Saul lost his wedding band last year. We put on suits and joined them there. The water was quite rough, perfect for the local children who were having a blast on their boogie boards on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. Saul and I waded in to cool off as the sun had become quite hot. We were standing in water just above my knees when a wave broke just over my head. I suggested to Saul that we get out as the water was quite unpredictable and that he has been a bit unsteadier since his stroke four years ago. As we began to wade out, Ari decided to come in and Saul joined him. Together, they were body surfing in deeper water when a rogue wave caught Saul, flipped him over, and bashed his head and right shoulder against the rocky bottom. He returned shakily to the beach chair, his forehead and cheek scraped and a bit bloody, and his neck and shoulder aching. We had the wonderful leftovers from Friday night’s dinner and Saul went to bed hoping that a hastily-purchased dose of Aleve would quell the pain by the next morning. He spent an awful night.

Day 4 for Saul and me was spent almost entirely in the Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Emergency Wing of the Wilcox Hospital in Kauai. We were shocked at the name because we knew of the philanthropy of the Weinberg family and knew some of their descendants in Baltimore. We just never realized how much their philanthropy extended to all of Hawaii. After I made us breakfast of mushroom and cheese omelets and taro pancakes with coconut syrup, Ken and Randi spent the day at the beach. I sent Ari away to explore, once he dropped us off at the hospital, telling him that I would call when we were done. After several uncomfortable hours in a neck brace with visits from various well-intentioned and pleasant hospital staffers, Saul saw a doctor, had an MRI and x-ray, and found that he had broken his top right rib. The neck brace was removed, and he was told that nothing is done to immobilize a rib. He was given an impressive choice of pain medication, and chose Tylenol with codeine. While at the emergency wing, he met two other men who had broken bones on Brennecke the same day. One younger man from Minnesota had broken a bone in his neck and did indeed need the neck brace. We met him on the parking lot of Walmart where we had all gone to get our pain pills. The other, much younger, man had broken two fingers on his right hand and his rented boogie board. The doctor we saw in the emergency room told us that the hospital employees call the beach “Breakneckie Beach,” and he said that he had almost killed himself there years earlier when he had first come to Kauai. Needless to say, having lost a wedding band and broken a rib there, we are not intending to return there for a third strike. While waiting the 45 minutes for the prescription to be filled, Ari, after beach-hopping all day, took us all for a ride up into the mountains in Kapa’a. We had dinner at the Barbecue Inn, an unassuming local down-home favorite in Lihue. We had soup, entreés of well-prepared fresh local fish, delicious sides, and a slice of one of their seven flavors of cream pies, all for $13.00.

On day 5, Saul rested. I made a breakfast for us of oatmeal with fresh papaya, and fresh pineapple taro pancakes. Ken is always happy to breakfast on the local tropical Anahola granola every morning. I also made some coconut tapioca. The rest of us took a morning walk down to Poipu beach and back. Then we put on our suits and spent the afternoon lolling on the beach. I got a bit of a sunburn, blotchy, because I had not been careful spraying on my sunscreen on such a windy day. I had been wearing my straw hat to protect my face during our walks, but Saul found a cobweb on it and brushed it away. I was afraid to wear it after that, especially since that evening, a small spider crawled across my cheek and freaked me out. I detest spiders, but they are appreciated on the island for their ability to eliminate mosquitoes and other harmful pests. Saul witnessed some excitement while home. Our neighbors were yelling and banging on their door. Their combination lock had broken and the whole family was locked in their condo until a locksmith arrived and managed to free them about two hours later. He said that, as far as he knew, that had never happened before. Late in the afternoon, when there was shade from palm trees and surrounding buildings, Ari, Saul and I spent some time in the condo’s pool and volcanic stone hot tub. While there, we had an interesting conversation with a family visiting from Alaska… really! We made sandwiches from our leftovers for dinner with whole grain bread, horseradish sauce, lilikoi (passion fruit) mustard, caesar salad, and creamy leftover flan from Costco.

Day 6 was preplanned to be our pilgrimage to Ke’e Beach on the northern part of the island. Saul, Ari and I awoke at 6 a.m. to get an early start. We had breakfast at the Olympic Café in Kapa’a where we spoke to Neri’s mom, Efrat, in Israel on the iPhone via Skype about her plans to come to the U.S. for Neri’s graduation in early June. There is a 12-hour time difference between Hawaii and Israel. There had been an earthquake off the coast of Japan a day or two earlier and we were surprised to find that the waves at the usually-placid, cove-like beach were roiling and wild, creating strong currents. The ocean was beautiful to watch, though, striking alongside the verdant Mount Makana, usually known as Bali Hai from the movie musical, South Pacific. We were surrounded on the sand by cheeky families of brilliantly-plumed feral roosters and chickens loosed on the island by a previous hurricane. They peck at any hint of a crumb and shelter in the exposed gnarly roots of aged trees foresting the edges of the beach. After a time, Ari and I went for a walk up the road looking for a phone signal on high ground between the steep volcanic mountains. We ventured a short distance into the Limahuli Botanical Gardens, but neither of us had brought our wallets along to pay for admittance. After two hours of exploring and taking photographs and videos, including of the mystical cave of Puff the Magic Dragon, we gave up on finding a decent phone signal and returned to the beach. Ken and Randi joined us there. Saul left with Ken and Randi after a few hours to find something to eat in Hanalei before our date with sunset on the elegant terrace of the St. Regis Hotel in Princeville. Ari and I, not hungry, remained behind to savor the beach for just a little bit longer. I began to realize that my two-hour walk with Ari sans hat had done terrible things to my previous day’s mild sunburn. I wished I had thrown a baseball cap into my suitcase beside the straw hat. Ari and I met Ken, Saul and Randi at the Hanalei Café as they were leaving and decided to stay and have a light bite also. We shared halves of two fish sandwiches, one a Hawaiian “lox and bagel” made with a cured local fish that was delicious, but only one thin slice. The real knockout was the fried mahi po’ boy. It was yummy! We rendezvoused at a condo that we had rented for the day in a retro building we had always admired when visiting the Princeville Hotel. We showered, changed, and enjoyed the striking ocean views from the top of the sheer cliff right outside our living room windows. An hour before sunset, Ari and I took the short walk, and Ken, Randi, and Saul drove to the Princeville St. Regis, where ensconced on the terrace with bar snacks and expensive, exotic tropical drinks in hand, we took multiple pictures of ourselves and the flaming sunset behind Bali Hai. Checking out the menu at the St. Regis, which was extremely pricey and not extremely interesting, we decided to slum it by going to Scotty’s Beachside BBQ on our way back south. We loved the warm and friendly atmosphere, local beer, food, and unique donut-like dessert, the puffasada, which we photographed and put up on “Foodspotting,” an app which was unfamiliar to the local restaurant owners, but which should really catch on in such a small place now that they are aware of it. Like the sunset, the day was practically perfect. Around 2:00 a.m. I awoke to the realization that my CPAP had stopped and I was gasping for air. I discovered that we were experiencing a power failure. I discovered that it was just as dark there with my eyes open as closed. Using my bedside iPhone for light, I looked outside to see if the whole neighborhood was dark, or just our condo. The whole neighborhood was dark and I wondered if the whole island was dark. I woke Ken and Randi because he sleeps with a CPAP also, but he was not awakened by the power failure because he also breathes through his mouth. I thought about the earthquake in Japan a few days earlier and wondered if other underwater quakes could have an effect on Hawaii’s power. The outage lasted for two and a half hours. I never learned what caused it, but it was only in our immediate neighborhood.

Day 7, Thursday, was Ari’s birthday. We traveled to the west side of the island and had a gigantic breakfast at Grinds. Just as a note, breakfast in Kauai usually includes big scoops of steamed rice. From there, we drove to Glass Beach where we collected a big bag of sea glass for Ari and for Sami, who remembered it from a few years ago, and asked me to bring her some. Then, we drove to Hanapepe and wandered around the quaint shops and artists’ galleries there. For my honey collection, I bought a gray, cutesy angel-shaped bottle of honey from bees belonging to the grandson of Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku, also known as “The Big Kahuna,” the man who invented surfing. I was told by the shop owner that the dark honey is mostly from avocado flowers. Also, as a note, the avocados grown on Kauai are “to die for.” I finally bought a hat that I admired in the window of one of the shops. Randi had slathered my blistering nose with white zinc oxide ointment that I bought at a pharmacy across the street from Grinds, and I must have been a sight. Ken and Randi went on ahead to JoJo’s for shave ice, while we visited one of my favorite spots on the west side for local products, Ishihara Market. There, I found the elusive Kauai Island honey, more of the Duke’s grandson’s honey, and more taro pancake mix. We met at JoJo’s where I had a #4 Haupia shave ice (coconut) with macadamia nuts. Ari and Saul shared a #2. Ken and Randi went to look at some real estate, while we headed farther west toward the navy base and to revisit some of the beaches there. We could see Ni’ihau, the Forbidden Island, in the distance. Turning around, we gassed up the car in Ele’ele and met Ken and Randi to tour the house they were seeing. After an afternoon nap, we showered, dressed, and headed for Roy’s to celebrate Ari’s birthday. Roy’s has been exceptional these last two years. Saul and I each opted for two different tasting menus which provided a great adventure in dining. Randi, Ari and I polished off a bottle of wine. At the end of this beautiful evening, the waitstaff informed us about the huge 8.9 earthquake and ensuing tsunami in Japan. At first, we thought they were talking about the earthquake that had taken place a few days earlier. Then, they told us that a tsunami was expected to hit the island a few hours hence as a result, and that some people on the island were becoming unnecessarily alarmed and flocking to gas stations and convenience stores. They told us that many people weathered last year’s insignificant tsunami right at the restaurant because they were on high ground. They certainly appeared not to be terribly alarmed and seemed mystified at all the commotion that we later learned about by watching the news after our 10-minute ride back to the condo. My stomach did a flip immediately on hearing the news, however, because I knew that an earthquake of that size must have killed thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. Also, everyone who knows me knows that I have a recurrent nightmare about being underwater in pitch blackness so that I cannot tell which way is up. I have never taken a cruise for this reason and I also particularly hate flying over the ocean at night. Randi was shaken because she cannot even swim. The guys immediately pooh-poohed my idea of getting in our cars and driving up into the mountains until the threat was over. I had to agree for a few reasons. One, our condo was well out of the evacuation zone and on the second and third stories of our building as well. Two, the news media was urging anyone not in an evacuation zone to stay off the roads so that people who needed to evacuate could do so quickly. Three, our route would have needlessly taken us through low-lying areas where there was a chance we might have gotten stuck in traffic. Four, if there had been any devastation, we might be stuck in the middle of nowhere with no food or water.

When we returned home, it was about 10 p.m. and we began the countdown to the tsunami arriving at our shores at 3:07 a.m. by switching on the local news coverage. Watching intermittent coverage of Japan and seeing the devastating footage was very disheartening. We all felt that the local news coverage was very effective and informative, and there were no commercial interruptions the entire evening. My plan of action, which gave me the feeling I had some control and which all three men found laughable, was to move all of our drinks and fresh water and non-perishable food up into the bathtub on the third floor. I also filled whatever large vessels I could find in our kitchen with tap water and carried them upstairs. We could not fill up the bathtubs themselves because the stoppers were missing. On our third floor loft area were Ari’s bedroom with a queen-size bed, an open room with a queen-size bed, and a bathroom. I asked Ari if I could wait out the tsunami in his room. Everyone else went off to bed. Randi set her alarm to awaken them for 2:30 a.m. I was not able to fall asleep. We felt a bit incommunicado because the internet circuits were so busy we could not get a signal. Jess texted Ari about 2:00 a.m. as the East Coast was beginning to wake up and hear the news. He could not return the text and I went downstairs to use Ken’s business phone that he had set up and reached her immediately to tell her what we were doing. Then, Jamie called and reached Ari on his cell and, because she is pregnant and very emotional, I went downstairs again, awakened Randi, and put her on the phone with her daughter. At 2:30 a.m. I awakened Saul to come upstairs. Ken would not be budged from his bed and slept through the whole thing. In retrospect, he was the smart one. Ari would have slept through the whole thing, but was very annoyed that we all piled into his bed to watch the news for the last half hour and woke him. The news had remote live cameras pointed at a beach wall on the North Shore where the tsunami was supposed to strike first. Our island was to be the first in the chain of islands to be hit. The actual tsunami that we watched consisted of just a few waves that were slightly higher than normal and did not even manage to top the low wall. After about 20 minutes, we began to realize that it was over, everybody went back to bed, and I immediately fell asleep in Ari’s bed. I awoke just before sunrise and went back to my own bed. Later in the morning, I moved everything back to the refrigerator, and Randi dumped out the tap water and brought our pots and pitchers back downstairs.

On day 8, we went back to the Kalaheo Café for breakfast after checking to see if it was open. The waitress told us that they were doing a brisk business as many of the locals from evacuation areas had slept in their cars on mountain roads and were gravely in need of a good cup of coffee. The schools and beaches were closed on Friday. Ken and Randi went to Poipu beach anyway for the day. Saul, Ari and I were feeling peevish after our long night. Saul was in pain from the broken rib. I was still very sunburned. Ari was tired. We decided to go for a long drive and get lost on some country roads around the island. In our travels, we came upon little screen houses where farmers put out their produce and you leave money in the cans on the honor system. We bought bananas and a grapefruit/pummelo hybrid. We went to Costco again to buy provisions for Shabbat dinner, then, to the nearby farmers’ market at the soccer field near Lihue airport. We bought an assortment of exotic fruits there, including Saul’s coveted guavas, a mamey sapote, which Ken had greatly enjoyed the previous year, cherimoya, calamansi, rambutan, longan, and cream apples. For dinner we had caesar salad, pasta, seared sesame-crusted tuna, sauteéd mushrooms, glazed Brussels sprouts, steamed beans with roasted beets, and tapioca pudding and leftover flan for dessert.

Day 9 was to be our last full day on Kauai. We were cleaning up leftovers in preparation to move Ken and Randi to their condo on the North Shore where they were going to spend four days before moving back south to the Lawai Resort where they would be spending the rest of their vacation. We had all the usual—omelets, oatmeal, taro pancakes, and tropical Anahola granola. We spent several hours at Poipu Beach on a gloriously beautiful day. A covered picnic area was set up there for an elaborate birthday party for a child. They had a huge inflatable water slide, moon bounce, long white tents with long tables set with centerpieces of tropical flowers and vases with the child’s photo on them. The tropical fish were everywhere in the calm water. After a short time on the beach, I sat at a picnic bench in the shade of a palm tree and tried to soak it all in. Then, we broke camp and headed for the happy hour at Brennecke’s Beach Broiler across the street. Sitting on the open, porch-like second level overlooking the beach, Ari and I polished off two pitchers of made-from-scratch margaritas with a little help from Randi. We all shared a huge plate of nachos which were so delicious with their topping of house-made jalapenos, that we decided to order a second one. Also, we had meant to photograph it, but had forgotten. We were having such a good time, the second one was almost demolished before we realized we had forgotten to photograph it also. Saul, who is never embarrassed by anything, wandered off to shamelessly photograph another table’s order, but theirs was not nearly as pretty as ours because they had ordered everything on the side. We enjoyed our repast so much that it occurred to us that we had all the fixings except the special jalapenos among the leftovers that we needed to use up in the refrigerator, so they packed us up a little container of those and we set off for home. Ari and I walked back along the beautifully landscaped paths of the greenbelt that surrounded our condo area. I immediately took a nap when we returned, but awoke just as the final rays of sunset began to dwindle. I felt a little badly that I had missed it. Randi was busy preparing our third load of nachos. They looked and smelled yummy when they were baked, but only Randi and Ari had any appetite left even hours after we had eaten at Brennecke’s. Later that evening, we all began the packing process so that we could get started with the moving early the next morning.

On our last day, we managed to fit everything into Ken’s large vehicle so that we could return our own rental car to the airport (so as not to be charged extra) on our way north. We unloaded our luggage and paraphernalia at the absolutely beautiful condo that they would be using for four days, changed into bathing suits and cover ups, and headed off to breakfast at Kalypso Island Bar and Grill in Hanapepe. Our vista was of a long, narrow silver streak of a waterfall cascading down a huge green mountain in the distance. No photographs that we could take would do it justice. After breakfast, we lolled on my favorite beach, Ke’e, alongside Bali Hai feeling melancholy and trying to soak up the entire experience before heading off to the airport for our red-eye flights. Finally, tearing ourselves away, we returned to the condo, showered, and dressed for the flight into colder climates. The act of putting on shoes after a week-and-a-half in flip flops is very disheartening. Feeling queasy, I gazed at the beautiful views of cloud enshrouded verdant mountains from every window in the sumptuously-appointed apartment. For dinner, we ate at a very famous downscale joint near the airport, Hamura Saimin. Saimin is the Hawaiian version of Vietnamese pho, a big bowl of steaming noodle soup, perfect for settling a stomach with pre-flight jitters. Across the large communal table from us was a mother with three girls who were roughly the ages of our three granddaughters. They were a great distraction at a very discouraging hour. Ken and Randi dropped us off at the airport where we eventually found ourselves in a very crowded room. Ari and I sat on the carpeted floor while Saul wandered off to engage in conversation with some of the other passengers and eventually, he found a seat. Our plane’s departure was delayed about three times, but finally we boarded in just enough time to catch our connecting flight in Phoenix. For the first few hours, the flight was smooth and I was very grateful for that as we flew over the dark ocean. I again took pills as we hit turbulence for the last two hours before we reached Newark.

Anne was there to pick us up immediately, and we offered to take her out to dinner before heading home. Saul had only taken his pain pills at the beginning of our flight, so he was able to drive us home. We were famished as we had just had time to share a sandwich in Phoenix and had been flying for over eleven hours altogether (the flight home is considerably shorter than the flight there). As Anne drove us back, we came upon a very promising-looking restaurant that she had been wanting to try, BoulevardFive72 and we read very good reviews of it on Yelp as Anne parked the car on their adjacent parking lot. I think we were all unprepared for how elegant and upscale it truly was when we entered. In the end, I think of our experience there as a serendipitous finale to our Hawaiian vacation. The menu was intriguing and inviting with most entreés in the $18 to $30 price range, only $5 to $10 more than one would pay for dinner at a Red Lobster, for example. As tired as we were, it turned out to be a “wow” restaurant experience. The food was ample, gorgeously presented, and succulent. The ambience was warm, cozy, and elegant, all at the same time. The waitstaff was friendly, efficient, and professional without being stuffy. We were so happy that everything turned out as it did. When we finally got home, we literally dropped our bags inside the door and collapsed into bed. Saul needed to be up at 6:00 a.m. the next morning for school.

Crash!

2011-02-28T23:55:00.011-05:00

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It feels like a tremendous amount of time has gone by since I last posted. I barely remember everything I wished to write about, but at least some of the photos will spur me on. There were really good reasons not to write. I had a major hard drive crash and Saul, with all his finagling, could not even get my computer to boot up with an external drive. We made an appointment to take my baby to the Apple Store in King of Prussia Mall the next day, and not even the gurus there could do anything with it. As it turned out, I had to wait almost a week before it was back on my desk again. Both the hard drive, and a temperature-sensing cable had burned out, and the store did not have the cable in stock. I have a time capsule attached, so I fretted the whole week until I knew for sure that we would truly be able to restore my data. That part worked like a charm, thank God! During that week, data for two large jobs began to pile up and I worried also that I would not have time to get them out of the way before all three girls come for the next ten days while Saul is working. After that there are only a few days left before we leave for Kauai for ten days. Once my data was restored, my keyboard stopped working and had to be replaced. I lost a day that way and I can’t even describe the level of discomfort that caused. Then, my fonts disappeared and we decided to upgrade my page layout software. Thankfully, in the last three days I have spent many hours fruitfully, and I have finally gotten those jobs to the point where I am comfortable again. I really love the upgraded InDesign.

We have had a couple really great weekends in Baltimore/DC and I tried not to let the anxiety get to me. The first weekend of February, Izzy and Sami had a birthday party sleepover for 12 girls…

Since I began writing this post two weeks ago, more time has expired and I am struggling to get it posted so that at least there will be one entry for February.

To continue, the birthday party was adorable—six of Izzy’s friends for her actual birthday on Groundhog Day, and six of Sami’s friends for her half birthday because it was the first time since August that Jess was able to assemble six of her friends to sleep over. Since the party activities included nail polishing and cake decorating, I made a nail polish bottle cake surrounded by 14 gingerbread hands with icing-polished nails so that each girl could decorate her own hand cookie. They had a blast decorating them with food coloring markers, extra icing and candy decors. Each hand was as unique as the girl decorating it. We also supervised while each girl rolled her own sushi and made her own personal pizza. During the party, Ari took Yona off to a quiet place and tried to put her to bed. We had brought Alex’s mom, Elaine, along for the weekend, along with my sister, Adele, so there were plenty of adults to help out. According to reports the next day, most of the girls actually went to sleep during the night.

One of our goals for spending the weekend in Baltimore/DC was that Ari’s furniture was delivered that Friday while he was at work, and that went as smoothly as could be. The two guys who delivered the massive wall unit and bedroom furniture were extremely competent, helpful and pleasant. The furniture looks beautiful and fits perfectly in the rooms. They left us enough time to get to Baltimore for a birthday tea for Izzy in her first grade classroom at Waldorf. With the leftover gingerbread from the hand cookies, I made gingerbread stars for Izzy to share with her classmates. Her teacher made a pretty china potful of tea and we all sat around and shared stories about our favorite memories of kindergarten before school ended for the week. Ari left work a little early on Friday so he could see the furniture and joined us in Baltimore for one of Alex’s amazing Shabbat dinners where we were joined by Alex’s sister Naomi, her husband Matt, Alex’s brother Aaron, his wife Stacey, and their three children, Jacob, Lily and Zach.

During the weekend, in addition to the activities of the birthday party, we took Adele on a driving tour of DC, and walked through the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials. The day was chilly and soggy. By the time we took our short walk back to the car, we were shivering and damp and decided that the rest of the day’s activities should be indoors. We spent hours contentedly wandering in the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Ari bought Izzy and Sami art books from the delightful selection in the gift shop there. Izzy’s came with red/blue 3D glasses and was designed with special backgrounds and markers to enable her to make 3D drawings and doodles. Sami’s was a blueprint for creating 3D architectural models from folding and cutting white paper (sort of advanced origami). Adele mentioned that she loved a good diner, so one day, we had a delightful breakfast at the Metro 29 diner. Waiting to have dinner at a Cheesecake Factory in Bethesda, we were treated to a bird’s eye view of about a dozen couples, dressed for the occasion, doing the tango in the central atrium of the mall—one of the special events for public participation hosted weekly by the mall.

Sunday afternoon, before heading home, we all went to Johns-Hopkins University to meet our cousin, Anne, and watch her son, Max, win along with his team, in a fencing tournament there. The girls were very fascinated with the outfits, protective gear, foils, and electronic tethers. They especially loved helping pull up all the blue tape boundary markers from the large gymnasium floor and rolling it into a big ball for disposal. I had never been up close and live in a fencing match, so it was a great learning experience for me as well. Our drive back on Sunday evening was pleasant, but very tiring after all the weekend’s activities. Elaine’s little puppy, Shana, got along a lot better this time with Jess and Alex’s dogs.

On February 10, Saul’s birthday, a Memorial Lecture was given by Alex at the Princeton Jewish Center in memory of his father, Maury. Traditionally, Chevra Kadisha (Jewish burial) societies everywhere hold a dinner on the seventh of Adar (according to Bible interpreters, the traditional date of the death of Moses). Maury was a founding member of the Chevra Kadisha society in Princeton. I went to Faith’s class that Thursday morning, and later in the afternoon, Faith joined us for the dinner and lecture in Princeton. The whole family was welcomed warmly and made to feel at home by the heartfelt hospitality of our hosts. The dinner was ample and beautifully planned. Alex gave a wonderful d’var Torah and spoke eloquently of his meaningful Jewish family life with Maury. Afterward, Saul and I took the girls home with us and put them to bed as Alex needed to be back in Baltimore the next morning to help prepare the festivities for the beginning of the writing of a brand-new Torah at Chizuk Amuno. While Saul attended a rare Friday meeting at CHC, the girls helped me prepare dinner to take to Baltimore for Shabbat. Alex was putting in so many hours that he would not have had time to prepare. We took a tray of stuffed cabbage, black and white rice, leftover vegetarian meatballs, Israeli salad, homemade challot and pareve chocolate cake. Jessica defrosted some of Alex’s yummy soups. Alex had a rare opportunity to relax a little before dinner. We got into a terrible traffic jam on the way there and spent an extra hour on the road. After dinner, we took Sami and Izzy to DC with us so they would be out of the way until the launch on Sunday. After a quick breakfast at home the next morning, Ari and I took the girls to the National Building Museum where a special architectural Lego exhibit was being held. Saul stayed behind because he had many papers to read to catch up with his school work. The four of us spent hours among the tens of thousands of Lego pieces constructing our own buildings. Ari and I worked on a gray, black and white asymmetrical design which we never finished because Izzy realized suddenly that she was hungry and we were so into our design that we had not realized that two hours had gone by. We walked a couple of blocks to the Sushi Go-Round and had sushi there, seated at a counter where plates of sushi pass by on a conveyor belt and you grab whatever looks interesting. After that, we toured some parts of the National Gallery across the street that we had not seen with Adele, such as the folk art exhibit. Throughout the museum, docents are stationed to provide hands-on experiences for kids with something called “art a la cart.” At the first station, the girls were provided with cameras and props and learned about camera angle and perspective. They were shown examples of an artist whose specialty was unusual perspectives. Then they were supposed to arrange their props and camera angle to get an unusual perspective. Their photos were printed for them on the spot. At another cart, they were given found objects, like bottle caps, shells, and stones to arrange in three-dimensional fashion within a flat box. At another, they were handed sample pieces of driftwood and bronze treated to look like driftwood for a giant modern art horse statue. After a few hours there, we picked up Saul and drove to Silver Spring to see the 3D movie Gnomeo and Juliet, sort of cute with a few good laughs and nice Elton John music, but the kids just said “ehhh.” We had dinner across the street at a Chinese buffet that was handy, cheap, not too crowded, had a huge selection including unusual food that we have never seen elsewhere, but was of dubious cleanliness. It must have been okay because none of us got sick. The girls were happy with their sushi… again.

The program for the Torah-writing was amazing! The synagogue was teeming with as many people as the cavernous sanctuary holds on Yom Kippur. The first people to write the initial few letters walked down the center aisle under a series of chuppot, each held aloft by four congregants with poles at each corner of the tallit. There were people stationed at various places, including the balcony, who blew multiple shofarot, a spine-tingling sound when they are all on cue together. The obligatory speeches were interesting, and not overly long. A choir, composed of about 200 adults and children who barely fit on the ample bimah, sang a moving and harmonious “Lechi Lach” by recently-deceased Debbie Friedman. Large projection screens on either side of the bimah allowed the entire audience to see, first-hand, the flow of ink onto parchment as the hand of the sofer (scribe) guided each writer in the completion of a previously outlined Hebrew letter. Finally, there was an incredible, beautifully-presented, banquet for hundreds, perhaps over a thousand, congregants, with live music and dancing. It was a great celebration of a momentous occasion, and probably the only time in my life that I will get to see a Torah begun. I was very proud of my son-in-law, Alex, who had worked behind the scenes tirelessly to make sure that everything ran smoothly. We left afterward to begin the long ride home.

The next few days, I worked tirelessly to almost complete both publications that had deadlines before the girls were due to arrive for a week here. My computer was finally behaving and I loved the new upgraded software I was now using. On Thursday, I attended Faith’s class, having gotten my work under control. Saul decided that it would be easier to meet Jessica and pick up the girls directly from his school rather than coming home to pick me up first. I used the couple of hours to put in a supply of food from Costco and the supermarket so that I would not have to take the girls out myself during the week. I especially purchased lots of supplies for baking vast quantities of hamantaschen. The girls’ Waldorf School puts on a Purimshpiel every other year, and Jessica volunteered to arrange for the hamantaschen. Others were supposed to help, but I think we probably baked enough during the week to supply the whole school. Sami and Izzy were excellent helpers. We baked for a couple of hours each day and made at least two flavors each time. The work went so fast with me rolling, Izzy cutting, and Sami filling and pinching, that we made hundreds by the time the week was over. Yona was content to sit at the table in her booster seat watching us work and looking at the Sprout network on television. Occasionally, we would give her a warm cookie, which she ate by sucking out the middle and then nibbling the leftover cookie. She liked all the flavors, including poppy seed and prune.

Friday morning, we took all of them to Nordstrum Rack in King of Prussia to get much-needed shoes. We bought Yona her first pair of sneakers—two shades of pink with Velcro closings. Izzy and Sami each got a pair of sneakers, and Izzy got white dress shoes. We got back home just in time to have some lunch and prepare the challah dough and soup. Faith came in the afternoon with her granddaughter, Hilary, who is only one week apart in age from Sami, and took the girls to Michael’s to buy them knitting yarn. They came home with not only that, but novelty items as well, a plastic snake that grew in water for Izzy, a set of wind-up walking feet for Sami, and an Elmo puppet book for Yona. Faith and Hilary joined us for Shabbat dinner along with her son, Jon. While I was shaping the challot, I gave each girl a lump of dough and they each made their own individually-shaped challah. Hilary made hers in the shape of the letter “H.” Larry was not feeling well that evening, and Beth was away on vacation. I made a simple dinner of leek, potato, and Cope’s dried corn soup; cheese tortellini; spinach salad with hot sesame dressing; steamed asparagus; with hamantaschen and ice cream for dessert. Gale force winds on Saturday kept us from going to services as we had planned. The girls’ cousin, Brenna, who lives nearby, came to play with the girls on Saturday afternoon. They played nicely together. We ordered pizza to be delivered on Saturday night, and afterward, the girls climbed into our bed to watch an old movie I had recorded on TiVo, Puss in Boots, with Christopher Walken, a really B movie that he must have made long before he became famous. He played the cat that changes into a man. Erica came by to pick up Brenna later in the evening. On Sunday, we baked and iced two Presley Bella marble angel food cakes in honor of Sister Lisa’s birthday. Saul took them to work on Monday so that one could be shared with colleagues and the other with housemates. In the late afternoon on Sunday, we went to Faith’s house for knitting lessons with Hilary. The girls were more interested in playing with Faith’s vast collection of dolls. Larry met us there also. He was feeling better and Faith had invited him also for an ice cream party of epic proportions. The table was set with all types of cookies, pretzels, candy, toppings, and a large selection of ice cream flavors. We all pigged out. As it turned out, Izzy cast on stitches on a set of Faith’s needles with lightning speed and taught me to knit sitting on my lap so that I could follow her fingering. She complained that the back of her neck was hot from my breathing on her. Having knitted a bit 30 years ago, I was able to knit a small blanket for her mini teddy bear by the time we were ready to leave. She has already made her own knitting needles and a scarf for herself at school as part of the first grade curriculum at Waldorf.

On Monday, Presidents Day, Brenna was off from school and Erica picked up the two older girls and took them home with her to spend the day with Brenna. They had fun playing with all her toys and had felafal for dinner there.

During the beginning of the week that they were here I got very little sleep. Yona kept waking in the middle of the night and screaming. I didn’t want Saul to lose sleep because he had to be at work, so I spent hours holding her until she would go back to sleep. Then, we realized that we were creating a monster as the intervals grew longer and the screaming grew louder. We decided to spend only 20 minutes with her at bedtime, and 20 minutes if she needed a diaper change in the middle of the night. The screaming intervals grew much shorter after the first 15-minute temper tantrum and by the end of the week, there was barely a whimper at bedtime or nap time. During the week, she was very cooperative about using the potty. Considering her age, this is most remarkable. I think she will probably be completely trained by the time she is two. She is also very verbal. These days, we can mostly figure out what she is trying to say.

Wednesday evening, we took the three of them out to King Buffet in Plymouth Meeting. They had been indoors all week and I thought it would give them a chance to run around the mall and get some exercise. Then we rode with them on the carousel there for Izzy’s birthday and bought them punching balloons. Yona did not seem to like the carousel very much. She is the first one not to adore it. They all had such a grand time with the punching balloons, however, that almost every mother that walked by had to buy one for her child as well.

On Thursday, we made the filled chocolate, almond, coconut cupcakes that I had submitted for a recipe contest. Izzy has been reminding me for six weeks that she never had a chance to taste the prototype of those cupcakes. The two of them practically made every step of the cupcakes themselves as I was busy with Yona while we were putting them together. It really is a yummy recipe. If it doesn’t win, I will post it shortly on my recipe blog. The girls were wonderful helping with laundry and cleaning up so that we could finish packing for the trip back home Thursday afternoon. We met Jessica at Bahama Breeze in Towson, where we had a very long, drawn-out dinner together. The manager stopped by to apologize for the long wait for our dinners. At least the girls’ food came right away, but they were finished eating dinner by the time our dinners arrived.

Saul had a conference to attend at the Sheraton in Baltimore on Friday. We drove to DC after dinner, and got up at 5 a.m. the next morning to drive back to Baltimore. Alex took Yona to day care and Jess, on her way to work, dropped the older girls and me off at a nearby strip mall to spend the day at Barnes & Noble so that I would not have to deal with my allergies to the dogs all day at her house. Until it opened up at 9 a.m., we had pastries in a nearby Starbucks. When it opened, I read tales to the girls from an adaptation of Arabian Nights until Izzy grew restless. The girls shared a stuffed pizza pretzel and a large rice crispy treat at the café there. Then I bought Izzy a vanity book that had a lock and key, and Sami a book called Uber Origami. After that, the girls both chose lemon sorbet at a Cold Stone Creamery. Then, we shopped for a while in Pier 1 Imports, where luckily, they had a whole rack of imported novelty toy items for Easter that kept the girls amused for half an hour while a hailstorm suddenly materialized and raged outside the store for a while until we were ready to leave. From there, we went to Café Fresh where I had a half sandwich, veggie chips, and peach juice while the girls played with their new books. After that, we spent an hour in Trader Joe’s picking up a few odds and ends and searching for the elusive stuffed bear “Meep,” which we never found. Jess met us a Trader Joe’s and did some heavy-duty shopping there. After dropping the girls at home with Alex, Jess and I headed for the new Seven-Mile Market, an entirely kosher supermarket. Arriving home and unloading the groceries, Jess then drove Alex and me over to the synagogue so that Alex could prepare for a family Shabbat dinner that evening for Izzy’s classmates’ families. I waited, reading, in the library there until it was time for dinner. The program was adorable. After the usual brachot, (blessings) and a buffet turkey dinner, Alex narrated a story about King Cyrus of Persia and his Shabbat encounter with a Jewish man named Nehemiah. The story was told with the class acting out the scenes in front of a series of long backdrops which the class had created for the occasion. After dessert of fresh fruit and cookies, and the birkat hamazon, (blessings after the meal) Saul and I headed back to DC.

The next morning, we breakfasted at Metro 29, and then set out to find headlights for Ari’s car, batteries for our key fobs for the Prius, which had just about stopped working, and haircuts, which we all needed before our vacation in Hawaii in a few days. We found all those things in a strip mall near Tyson’s Corner in Virginia. Then, we went to Tyson’s II, which is about as upscale a mall as I have ever seen outside of China. There is a unique type of shop there called “The Grooming Lounge,” which specializes in pampering spa-type services for men only. On the spur of the moment, because they had one opening, Ari decided to have his back hair removed by waxing before our beach vacation. The process, which they told us would take a half hour, took an hour and a half. Ari said that the process was no more painful than he had anticipated, and that he would probably do it again as necessary. While waiting for his appointment we found a beautiful area rug that he is considering buying for his bedroom made from pieced-together strips of cowhide that is naturally and subtly colored. The showroom of Bo Concepts, to give an idea of the upscale nature of this mall, has a full free buffet on the weekends with wine, bottled water, cheeses, fresh fruit, Italian salami, antipasto, assorted olives, etc., etc. A live string quartet was performing all afternoon standing atop the floor model area rug that Ari was considering purchasing. For dinner, we had an absolutely delicious and very reasonably-priced Thai meal at Sawatdee in Arlington.

On Sunday, after dim sum at China Garden, we drove to Belfort Furniture where Ari purchased a headboard for our bed at his house. His headboard is still on order there and we found that his second lamp has not come in either. They will be able to deliver both headboards together this way. The flower bulbs Ari and I planted last fall are starting to poke through in his garden despite the violent weather this past weekend. We stopped in Baltimore on the way home to drop off an extra set of Ari’s keys to Jessica and pick up our insulated bag, which had transported the hamantaschen to Jessica’s freezer and which we plan to take back to Hawaii to gather exotic foodstuffs for our meals there. We leave way early on Thursday morning and all my work is done!

Over 1,000 WWII Letters and Tu B’Shevat

2011-01-27T13:03:00.002-05:00

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We were very lucky to be able to hold our Tu B’Shevat seder on Friday night. On Thursday, after a wonderful class with Faith exploring the structure of the Mishneh Torah and other writings of Maimonides, a class that is now so well-attended that we are running out of room at a conference table that seats about 25, Saul and I went on a fruit and nut scavenger hunt to purchase everything we needed for our seder. The weather predictions for Friday were dire, but we decided to be optimistic, and, as it turned out, we were very glad we were. Friday evening’s Shabbat dinner was delightful, and was shared with good friends who were very appreciative.

To purchase everything, we shopped at Assi Market and Wegman’s. After Wegman’s we had a yummy dinner together at Bonefish Grill where we are running out of time to use up our complimentary certificates that we received when when purchased gift cards for the holidays. I had made the trek all the way to Wegman’s hoping to find some of the more exotic fruits, but was only able to bag an Israeli persimmon and a star fruit, or carambola there. It was a delicious, ripe one, though. Assi was again disappointing this year, with none of the exotics that I usually find there, but altogether, we had quite a variety. For dinner, we had our scripted seder first, sampling at least 20 different fruits and nuts of four categories, accompanied by white, mixed, blush and dark grape juice. We were able to dip our fruit in vanilla custard sauce that I made to use up a vanilla bean that had been stewed with quinces that I had cooked last week. Along with our fruits and nuts, we had homemade guacamole with whole-grain chips, and Comté cheese with homemade membrillo. We were joined by Larry, Faith, Terry, Gene, and Sister Lisa from Chestnut Hill College. It was a very congenial evening, and although the weather outside was frigid, below 10° fahrenheit, inside we were warm and comfortable. After the seder, we had chestnut-soup, vegetarian meatballs, barley pilaf, and maple-glazed Brussels sprouts with chestnuts. For dessert, we had carob cake with pumpkin-flavored fresh-brewed coffee and tea. We broke apart the chocolate orange that I had purchased a while ago at Trader Joe’s and found the dark chocolate to be of very good quality. We continued to munch on all the fruits and nuts.

On Saturday morning, Saul and I attended services at MBIEE where Saul said kaddish for my Uncle Stef, whose name is memorialized there. Services were followed by a Tu B’Shevat seder that we helped to prepare. A few days before, Lori, one of the congregants, had requested a shopping list from us, and I had emailed her our script for the seder, which allowed her to figure out what she would need to purchase and how to group the fruit. The seder script prepared by Rabbi Addison was more elaborate than ours and contained many interesting points that I think I will try to incorporate into our seder for next year. When Saul and I returned home, we loaded the dishwasher with a second load of dishes from the previous night, and went off to take a nap. In view of the cold, nasty, weather, we decided to spend a quiet evening at home. We ate leftovers for dinner, watched t.v., and went back to sleep early.

Also on Saturday evening, we booked flights to Kauai, Hawaii, online. We will be joining Ken and Randi in their three-bedroom condo for 10 days. Although we had been hoping to bag the flights that go through Phoenix for around $750, we wound up paying almost $850. The flight from Phoenix to Lihue is filling up, and in view of our horrible weather here right now, we didn’t want to miss taking the trip because of $100.

Sunday morning, after watching a segment on CBS Sunday Morning about handwriting, its history, and the art of letter writing, I was inspired to begin scanning the letters that my parents had written to each other while they were separated during WWII. I spent a weekend last year, shortly after Mom died reading a folio of Dad’s letters to Mom. Since then, I have been eyeing the large plastic carton into which all the rest of the letters have been consolidated with the thought that eventually (especially once I had a convenient scanning set-up) I would get around to scanning them. The segment, and some free time during which Saul had school work to accomplish, gave me the incentive to get started. Little did I suspect what a treasure trove is contained in that box. Initially, I had not intended to read them, but during the scanning process, little tidbits of phrases jumped out at me and I could not resist the urge to read more. Needless to say, the scanning process has been slow, but fascinating. I have been scanning for the better part of three days now, and I have almost finished a folder that contains just letters from my mother to my father, and letters that others had written to the two of them during the months of March, April and May 1944. My mother organized them in this most unsatisfying manner so that I will not be able to relate letters and their answers to each other until I have scanned the whole lot. I have been organizing the scanned letters by date and by who has written to whom. In the meantime, I have learned a great deal about the personalities of their friends and relatives, some of whom died young, and I never got to meet them, or whom I only knew in later years as I grew up. I wasn’t born until 1950, six years after most of these letters were written. Apparently, they wrote to each other just about every single day, sometimes in v-mail form, but most often in long newsy letters that, in my mother’s case, run from 4 to 12 pages in single-spaced type (she was a legal secretary and typed very well). I have three folios of this type from my mother, 2 from my father, and four archival boxes of letters that I haven’t even begun to explore. My father also wrote letters in beautifully-scripted Yiddish (it is written with Hebrew characters and they all called it “Jewish” back then) to his mother, who was from Russia, and I will be calling on Saul to translate them for me. I doubt that there are many examples of these letters, as they would not have been in my mother’s possession. I also find myself wondering what became of the letters, to which they refer, which they wrote back to their friends and relatives. I am beginning to understand how Solomon Schechter must have felt when he began to research the remnants in the geniza of the Great Synagogue of Cairo.

A big snowstorm is underway at the moment which began this morning and is supposed to worsen this evening. Saul taught all day, but getting to school was a horrible mess. In Baltimore, the schools were closed and Jess emailed photos of the girls’ snow day and Yona’s first encounter with snow which was not too pleasant because she was very unhappy with the lack of flexibility in her snow boots. I canceled a dinner date with our friends, Susan and Paul, whom we haven’t seen in several months. Right now, I would rather be going out for dinner and a lively conversation about their recent international travels.

Family Get-Together, Presley is Two

2011-01-19T14:43:00.000-05:00

This past weekend was so enjoyable and I can’t help thinking about how my mother would have so enjoyed herself with her children, grandchildren, and great-granddaughters. Friday night Shabbat dinner was very laid-back, compared to the frenetic pace we had been keeping this past month. Larry, Beth, and Faith joined us. We had homemade challah from the freezer; a delicious lentil soup that can never be duplicated because I used the water left over from boiling 100 whole wheat matzoh balls and then threw in all kinds of leftovers from the refrigerator, including carrots, spinach, two kinds of red wine, honey mustard, ketchup, etc.; Israeli salad; homemade guacamole with whole grain tortilla chips; black and white rice; Kugel Yerushalayim; kosher stuffed cabbage from Costco; and leftover pareve Texas sheet cake. Saul forgot to tell me that Larry was bringing kasha and potato knishes, and poppy seed cake to add to our list of carbs, but I think that is because he really wanted me to make the kugel anyway.

Ari joined us on Saturday afternoon. We attended services at MBIEE and Rabbi Addison’s sermon was a tribute to Debbie Friedman, who died of pneumonia this past week. The funeral service was streamed over the Internet, live from Beth Shalom in Santa Ana, CA, which allowed tens of thousands to attend from all over the world. At the end of his sermon, the congregation, led by Rabbi Addison, sang L’chi Lach. Her passing is a great loss to the Jewish community. She was a trailblazer in many ways.

In the evening, we drove to Oaks to check out bedroom furniture and rugs at The Dump, but again left empty-handed. In the next shopping center over was a big Regal 24 movie theater and we decided to see Tron in 3D there. Although the storyline didn’t really make much sense, logically, the movie was, as Ari said, “visually stunning.” We really enjoyed it on those merits. When we left the theater, it was quite late and we had not eaten. We didn’t realize that it was such a long movie. We drove back home to the Metropolitan American Diner, where Ari had not been before, and which is open until 1 a.m. on a Saturday night. We were the only people in the restaurant at 10 p.m. and we sat by a cozy warm fire and big-screen t.v. and watched the Green Bay Packers beat the Atlanta Falcons in a semi-final game, while we munched on yummy sandwiches and sweet potato fries.

Jessica arrived at our house with the girls looking beautiful in their party dresses on Sunday morning and followed us to Ken and Randi’s for Presley’s second birthday party. The family party was great fun with all the kids interacting with each other and all the adults catching up with each others’ lives. After the party, we headed along with Jess, Ari, and the girls for a vegetarian dinner at Thai Orchid. The girls really enjoyed the food, especially Yona, who dipped everything in the peanut sauce that accompanied our orders of crispy fried golden tofu. At one point, the waitress removed the almost-empty dipping bowl when she was clearing the table and Yona protested loudly. Quickly, Jess got our waitress to bring the bowl back for Yona before she got to the kitchen with our dirty dishes. Izzy has a thing for the soy-based dipping sauce that accompanied the Buddha’s dumplings. All through the meal, Sami kept reminding us about the creamy mango ice cream, her favorite, served in a chocolate cup on a pool of mango and raspberry sauces. The restaurant was running out of mango ice cream, and gave us a cup filled with half mango and half coconut, which was perfect because Izzy loves coconut, and so did Yona. The service was really slow, so we were there about two hours. Considering the type of day they had, and the time spent at the table, the girls were little angels. Jess headed back to Baltimore with the girls after dinner.

Saul’s new semester began on Monday, but for Ari, MLK Day is a holiday. We took his car over, first thing in the morning, to the Mercedes dealer in Fort Washington for its big check-up. Then, Ari and I went over to Costco to look at their furniture, and we left completely empty-handed (first time for me). We also went to Thomasville Furniture to look around and stopped in to look around Impact! across the street. Then, we stopped into Blue Bell Kitchens to look around, and I was very impressed with some of the cabinets, countertops, and glass and ceramic tile that I saw there. Ari and I had lunch at Sultan, which has a respectable lunch buffet. Then, we went back to pick up his car, which was ready. Ari took some photos of our kitchen and bath, finished his laundry and packing, and when Saul arrived, we went back with him to Blue Bell Kitchens so that he could see the cabinets and countertops I liked and we could discuss our renovation ideas for a bit. After that, Ari was on his way back to DC, loaded with frozen homemade chicken soup, whole wheat matzoh balls, dumplings, and leftover kugel Yerushalayim.

Yesterday, after a snow and an ice storm, school’s opening was delayed for two hours. In the evening, Saul found a free program on the Net called SiteSucker, which allowed him to download for archiving, within just a few minutes, the complete contents of both my blogs, saving me hours of cutting and pasting. It almost makes up for the mess in my photos that has been caused by the changes in Picasa.

The weather is supposed to continue to be awful for the next few days, and I don’t know whether I will be able to hold my planned Tu B’Shevat seder on Friday evening. Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish Arbor Day, begins tomorrow at sundown and ends on Friday at sundown.

Our Winter Vacation and Transition into 2011

2011-01-12T12:40:00.003-05:00

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Uh Oh!

Somehow, along with the New Year, all the options that have allowed me to post slide shows for the last few years have changed and both my blogs have lost contact (I hope for the time being!)

with their connected slideshows. Having torn my hair out for the last few hours trying to restore my blog and post my new photos, and having not much more time or hair to spare,

I await answers to “WHAT HAPPENED?!!!”

on the technical forums and hope there is a knight in shining armor out there that can help me.

Saul and I strove to get a few days of adult time together at the end of this semester before the girls were due to arrive to join us for their winter vacation. While we greatly enjoy their visits, the spontaneity of meeting friends for lunch or dinner at the last minute, catching an adult movie, etc. are curtailed completely during our time together. During the week before they joined us we had lunch with Saul’s colleagues from CHC, a lunch that had to be rescheduled because of the death of an old friend. Marty’s wife, Marilyn, died suddenly, shocking all of us, back in March. For some years now, this brilliant doctor had been gradually sinking into dementia and his beloved wife had been his devoted caretaker. After her death, Marty accompanied his son, Jacob, who is a rabbi, back to Jacob’s home and family in Israel, where they all had been lovingly caring for him. Marty passed away peacefully. As the family expressed during the funeral, with Marilyn’s death, Marty had lost his anchor in this world. Marty, in his heyday, was brilliant with words. He sat across from me for many years on Thursday mornings in Faith’s Bible class and rarely did we have a class where he did not come up with a clever pun related to our conversations. Puns are purely intellectual humor and I admired his quick wit. He was a kind man and an avid reader. We will miss both of them now, immensely. His body was flown back to the U.S., accompanied by Jacob, to be interred alongside his beloved wife. The funeral was on one of the most bitterly cold days I can remember. Although we were all bundled up with scarves, gloves and hats, Saul caught a cold and was definitely a bit under the weather for the first few days of our vacation.

On one of those days, at her invitation, we met Marianne, my mother’s hospice volunteer, and her friend Cliff, for a delightful lunch together at Foulkeways, the magnificent retirement community where they live. Marianne had just moved from a two bedroom to a one bedroom condo there. Her children had helped her to downsize, and the new apartment looked much more spacious because a lot of the clutter had been organized or had disappeared. As we enter our eighties and nineties, may we all have our health and sane minds and live such a stimulating and secure lifestyle as Marianne. She and Cliff seem to be very, very happy with their situation. After our lunch together, the two of them were preparing to shop for items of food which they needed to prepare the next day at a soup kitchen where, along with others from Foulkeways, they serve the homeless once a week.

One day, while Saul was attending meetings, I picked up Adele and we met Roxy at Blue Sage to celebrate Adele’s birthday and to enjoy those exceptional fried green tomato sandwiches again. We all ordered the same lunch and I gave Adele and Roxy solid chocolate oranges for their November birthdays, a gift that I always gave Roxy for her birthday and which had disappeared in recent years. Actually, originally, it was a chocolate apple, but I was delighted to find that Trader Joe’s now has both milk and dark chocolate oranges available.

We were at home the weekend of December 18 and 19. Two of our congregants at MBIEE were being honored, Natalie and Elaine. Natalie had called to see if we would be attending and I had told her we would try. Larry and Faith came for Shabbat dinner and I pulled a meal together at the last minute with homemade challah from the freezer, quick black bean soup, also from the freezer, red and green leaf lettuce salad, tortellini with butter and parmesan, a pumpkin pie from Costco with whipped cream and leftover frozen squares of Texas sheet cake from Larry’s birthday. Beth was away that weekend. On Saturday, after attending services, and enjoying a luncheon in our friends’ honor, we hurried home to wait for Ari, Neri, and the three girls to arrive for the weekend. With Yona along, we spent the entire weekend at home, which seemed to be just fine with everyone. As before, Yona seemed very comfortable here. We did have a minor incident where Saul managed to talk Izzy into “being a big girl” and sharing her blue “blanky” with Yona, because Jess had forgotten to pack Yona’s favorite blanket. Then, unbeknown to us, she decided she wanted it back and talked Sami into getting it for her. When Ari went to bed, Yona was standing in her crib complaining that Sami and Izzy had taken her blanket. I went and got her my mother’s favorite blue afghan and Ari was able to get her back to sleep without much protest. On Sunday morning, after I made a big breakfast, Ari, Neri and Saul took a tour of the new YMCA which opened nearby and were absolutely wowed by the facilities. They were able to arrange a one-week, complimentary membership for Neri so that he could work out and practice basketball there. We dropped him off almost every morning during the week, sometimes with a sandwich so that he could spend the day. Ari took Yona back home to Jess and Alex on Sunday evening. They were supposed to have gone to a party at Naomi’s house on Sunday, but got the days mixed up. The girls were happy playing together and vegging in front of the t.v. Izzy decided to play shopkeeper and proudly set up a store in the living room where she was a very convincing saleslady.

During the week before we met in the Poconos, we took the Pilot into the dealership to be serviced and took the girls to breakfast at the Perkins across the street. We spent a whole day touring downtown Philadelphia, including the Liberty Bell. We passed on touring Independence Hall. Neri had wanted to see it because of the movie “National Treasure,” but the top was encased in scaffolding, and we were required, once we got there, to walk two blocks in the bitter cold to pick up tickets for the tour. Saul walked the two blocks to pick them up, but then we realized that they were timed, and we would have had to wait around for 45 minutes with two children and nothing to do. Instead, we decided to take advantage of our membership at the Franklin Institute, where we, the girls, and Neri had a great time. The institute was not very crowded that day and we were among the last to leave as the museum closed for the evening. Also during the week, we shopped and prepared food for our vacation in the Poconos, including snickerdoodles and jumbo oatmeal, peanut butter and raisin cookies. One day, we took the girls for a really fun lunch at Bahama Breeze and to see “Tangled” in 3D at the IMAX theater in King of Prussia. We all loved it!

On the Thursday before Christmas, we spent the morning packing and loading up the Pilot to head to the Poconos. The girls and Neri were really helpful to both of us, hauling boxes and bags so that Saul could pack the car efficiently. As always, the car was packed to the teeth and everyone was making jokes about how there was enough food to last for a month. Once the car was loaded, we stopped at Costco to buy orange juice and to have some late lunch. We made the impulsive purchase of a featured dual screen dvd player for the car when we learned that the girls’ previous one had died. When we arrived after the one-and-a-half-hour drive and unloaded, we left the girls with Neri and, as darkness fell, Saul and I went to pick up a wheelbarrow full of firewood for the evening and order a half-cord of firewood to be dropped off the next day to get through the week. When Ari arrived a short time later, we sat down to a dinner of black bean soup and soba with sautéed mushrooms. Jess and Alex arrived about 8:30 p.m. with Yona, had some dinner also, and after the girls were settled down for the night, we sat by the fire and schmoozed.

Our intention was to awake early and Alex was going to take the girls skiing, but he was exhausted, slept late, and it was bitterly cold that morning. He stayed in with Yona, who protested loudly when we tried to put on her coat to take her out with us. She, too, wanted stay home and take a nap. The rest of us met at Van Gilder’s Jubilee Restaurant for a large, leisurely breakfast. Afterward, Jess took the girls back to the house and Ari, Neri, Saul and I went to check out a few facilities that we wanted to see. We went to see the new Mt. Airy Casino Resort, but Neri was stopped for I.D. before we were able to enter. Then, we went to check out the indoor water park at Great Wolf Lodge, but discovered that you needed to be a guest at the hotel to use the facilities. The hotel and water park looked wonderful, but the vast lobby looked like a zoo with long lines of families sitting on their suitcases waiting to check in and children climbing on every available surface while they waited. Leaving there, we found ourselves passing The Crossings, a huge outlet mall, after just five minutes of driving. We decided to stop so that I could hunt for bathing suits, which Jess had remembered for the girls, but which I had forgotten for us. No luck with the bathing suits, but Saul got a great pair of waterproof leather boots at the Bass Outlet at 80% off. He got the boots, which had originally been around $150, for $35. We continued on to see the inviting indoor water park nearer to our house at the Galleria at Split Rock Lodge. The gift shop had reasonably priced bathing suits, but I decided to wait and see how the rest of the week would play out. Arriving back at the house, we began warming up the Shabbat dinner I had begun preparing and frozen, in parts, weeks ago—homemade challah, chicken soup, Israeli salad, kohlrabi coleslaw, sliced smoked turkey in giblet gravy, chestnut stuffing, butternut apple crisp, and the pareve cookies I had made with the girls. We lit our candles, opened a bottle of wine Ari had brought, and had a cozy and delightful dinner together. Then, we settled in to await the snowstorm that was expected. On Shabbat, we just hung out in the house all day, played with the girls, and ate, and ate. We had been snowed in once before for a few days up there, and I remembered it fondly, but evidently Alex did not remember it that way. He was also worried that the new person caring for their dogs might not be able to get to them in a storm. He announced that they would be leaving with Yona as soon as Shabbat was over. We were relieved when they called to say that they had arrived home safely and that the snow had just begun falling in the Baltimore area.

As it turned out, the snow did not begin falling in the Poconos until Sunday evening. We had a great breakfast that morning at a restaurant called “Piggy’s,” which was a little disconcerting to Neri and the girls as the pig is not a favored animal in their life, but the breakfast itself was completely pig-free. The restaurant and adjoining gift shop are adorned with every type of pig memorabilia one could possibly imagine, as well as a few items that were unimaginable. Our intention was to take the girls to the ski school at Jack Frost, as none of the rest of us wanted to ski. When we arrived there, none of us, including the girls, could stand even the half-block walk to the window in the bitterly cold wind. We would have had to wait two hours for the four-hour afternoon session to begin, and it would have cost $175 per girl for equipment, lessons, and lift tickets. Instead, Ari, Neri, Saul and I took the girls to see the movie “Gulliver’s Travels” in 3D in a town called Moosic. The movie was really awful, even though I usually (sort of) like Jack Black movies. The theater and the new shopping and housing complex that surrounded it were really a nice surprise in such an out-of-the-way place. As the snow began to fall, we stopped into a Wal-Mart for additional food supplies, a snow shovel, salt, and to check out the bathing suit situation. No bathing suits. I picked up a fresh vegetarian pizza which we ate for dinner that night. That evening, after dinner, we spent a few hours teaching the girls and Neri how to play poker with the new chips Ari had purchased—seven card stud, which is what the family has always played. We all really enjoyed the evening.

On Monday, we realized that the big snowstorm was not going to materialize for us. In an unlikely turn of events, the really heavy storm hit hard in areas east of us, like New York City, and caused a record-breaking accumulation there. By Monday afternoon, undecided about what to do next, how to allocate our expenses, and what effect the weather might have on our plans, we thrashed out a strategy to visit Niagara Falls. I had been wanting to take the girls there for a few years, and we thought it would be a memorable locale for Neri, who, coincidentally, is old enough to drink and visit the casinos there. Online, Ari discovered an off-season deal for the Sheraton overlooking the falls in a complex of connected buildings that boast, among other delights, a three-acre indoor water park. No further snow was expected for a few days and we decided to book it on Monday afternoon for Tuesday and Wednesday after checking to make sure that Jessica could overnight the girls’ passports to somewhere where we could retrieve them. The plan coalesced beautifully. For $23, Jess overnighted the passports Monday afternoon to the Fed Ex office in Kenmore, New York, just over the border from Canada. Ari and I immediately set out for home where we picked up Saul’s and my passports, several of our bathing suits, water shoes, and cover ups. It was serendipitous that we returned home when we did as the temperature in the house when we arrived was in the fifties and dropping. Something had gone wrong with our heater. We contacted our trusty heating guys, Renaissance, and arranged to have Beth let them in to fix it the following day, which they did. Ari and I were back in the Poconos in time to have dinner and pack. The girls were really excited as I helped them pack their suitcase for the journey. We all arose at 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday, packed the car (we really had to squeeze in the luggage as we had opened the third bank of seats) and were on the road by 5:30 a.m. The girls and Neri slept for most of the journey and we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for breakfast around 9:30 a.m., having traveled the better part of the 5 to 6-hour journey.
Tracking the passports on our iPhones, we knew that the passports had arrived at their destination by 10:00 a.m. as promised. Ari never goes anywhere without his passport, and Neri had brought his along also. We arrived at the Sheraton at 11:30 a.m. and one of our two adjoining rooms directly overlooking the falls was already awaiting our early check-in. The one package deal we had purchased gave four of us use of the water park from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Tuesday, and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday. For an additional $20 per person, Ari and Neri were able to purchase the same admission as well. We changed into suits and the kids were on the water slides by 12:30. We settled into some lounge chairs on the quieter second level, showed the girls where to find us, warned them not to go out of the glass-enclosed space, asked them to check in with us from time-to-time, and let them go. There were many employees supervising the slides and pools for safety. Izzy climbed the three-stories-worth of stairs to the top of the water slides so many times that she complained hours later that her legs were aching. We were smugly satisfied that we had made the right decision about this vacation.

After showering and dressing, we headed off to a lavish buffet dinner, for which we had vouchers, in an elegant dining room overlooking the falls, which are lit at night with subtle, color-changing spotlights. We decided to have breakfast the next morning at the Rain Forest Café in the complex because there was a special, four-day opportunity to see Dora the Explorer and Diego. Rain Forest Café doesn’t ordinarily serve breakfast. The buffet breakfast was adequate and a bit pricey at $20, but it was a unique experience. On our way to the water park after breakfast, the girls posed with a giant Hershey’s Kiss character and decorated their own cookies at a Hershey’s-sponsored table. Our voucher’s that evening were $80 towards a very upscale, celebrity-chef-type restaurant which would not have been appropriate with two tired little girls. On the net, after an hour’s research, we located a well-liked, mid-priced, local restaurant, the Sandstone Grillhouse, only a few blocks away outside of the complex. We made reservations, bundled up, walked over, and had a lovely meal with friendly, attentive service and good local ambiance. Saul and Ari had the best, lightest gnocchi they had ever eaten, spinach gnocchi in a roasted red pepper chevre sauce, and they also shared a delicious pizza—caramelized onions, roasted garlic, goat cheese and mozzarella. I had the best fish and chips of my life—a whole, huge, flaky filet of haddock wrapped in a fluffy, crispy beer batter made with a premium Canadian beer, Alexander Keith’s, atop beautiful, crispy fries, and with a delicious, house-made tartar sauce and cole slaw. We shared a pitcher of Alexander Keith’s Pale Ale and the baked brie appetizer.

After we returned to the Fallsview complex, Ari and Neri used the vouchers we had received to take the girls to play arcade games and go on the indoor rides at the arcade, which would have been exorbitantly expensive without the vouchers, each ride costing about $7 per person. In the morning, we used vouchers for the hotel buffet breakfast in the beautiful room overlooking the falls. The breakfast was really a big hit and the girls were delighted to have omelets and waffles cooked to order for them. We loaded the car with our suitcases after breakfast, checked out with minimal delay, and headed about a mile down the road to the Horseshoe Falls for a tour. We opted to take the cheapest, shortest tour of the tunnels underneath the falls only, as we had a vague plan to tour the Corning Glass Museum on our way back if we had time. Izzy, who is usually intrepid, was a bit freaked out by the tunnels, especially the powerful roar of the cascading falls, so we did not spend a lot of time down there. Because of the frigid temperatures and ice, the lower outdoor viewing platform was not accessible, and Izzy was a bit disappointed by the fact that we did not get the raincoats about which I had told her. By noon, we were headed across the Rainbow Bridge back to the United States.

The official who had checked our passports on the way into Canada, had failed to mention that Neri would need a special paper document in his passport to return. When we handed over the passports on the way back, the official who reviewed them would not wait for Neri to retrieve the paper from his bag in the back of the car. Thus began an hour-and-a-half ordeal that was very educational, and a bit unpleasant for all of us. We were told to pull our car over to a parking spot and go up to the second floor of the immigration building. All of our passports were confiscated. We were told that we all needed to go upstairs even though only Neri’s passport was in question. Neri got the paper in question out of his bag when we got out of the car. When we got off of the elevator on the second floor, we found ourselves in a small waiting room, packed with a few dozen people of all ages and nationalities. After a brief time, we were able to find seats together on the hard metal benches. Names were being called and people were going through a door to meet with immigration officials. There was a small receptionist’s window to those offices with no receptionist. The girls, after Izzy initially showed great annoyance and asked a lot of questions, resigned themselves to the circumstances and we amused them as best we could with notepads, pens and crayons. No use of cell phones was allowed. As the time slowly passed, we started to get hungry, and I was sorry I had not thought to take our bag of drinks and snacks from the car. When our name was finally called, Ari went in with Neri and was out again in less than five minutes with our passports. The official was annoyed that he had had to take the time to check out Neri’s credentials when, clearly, we were in possession of the paper in question. He was annoyed at the other official who had pulled us out of line. The girls have added a new phrase to their vocabulary—“detained at the border.” Our encounter dashed our hopes of touring the Corning Museum, which closes at 5 p.m. We drove right past it on our way home at 4:40 p.m.

We allayed our hunger with snacks from our supplies in the car. We stopped to have dinner at a Red Lobster in Vestal, New York, but it was extremely crowded and we didn’t feel like waiting 40 minutes. A little further down the road, we happened upon a Chinese buffet that had sushi and we stopped for dinner. Saul questioned a woman going in with a child who said that they love to eat there. Unfortunately, it was a bad Chinese buffet. Luckily, none of us got sick.

Arriving back at our house in the Poconos on Thursday night, we all went to bed early in anticipation of the large amount of packing and cleaning that would be required the next morning. Originally, we had planned to stay in the Poconos for New Year’s Eve. Then, when Jess and Alex decided to stay home, we thought that we would celebrate back at home in the Philadelphia area and Ari and Neri would return the girls to Baltimore on Sunday after brunch. Then Neri heard that a group of his friends had arranged to be at a club in DC on New Year’s Eve. Ari got an invitation to watch Baltimore’s fireworks display from his friends Sam and Sarah’s home near the waterfront. Erica and Danny asked if they could use the Poconos house for New Year’s so that they could party with Danny’s nearby family. At the last minute, this is what we decided to do on New Year’s Eve: We packed our stuff in the morning, loaded the Pilot, and Saul left with Neri and the girls. Ari and I remained a little longer to finish cleaning the place, leaving shortly before Erica and Danny were due to arrive. About an hour before we reached the Baltimore area, we stopped for a late lunch/early dinner at yet another Cracker Barrel. Neri was amazed at the consistency of the chain which does not have a parallel in Israel. Saul then drove the girls home to Baltimore and waited for us. Ari, Neri, and I continued on to DC where Ari arranged tickets online for Neri to meet his friends at the club in DC. After resting for a while, around 8:30 p.m., Ari and I left for Baltimore where we all had a delicious Shabbat sushi dinner together prepared by Alex. Then, Ari left to join his friends for the fireworks and we watched t.v. waiting to ring in the new year. Izzy fell asleep shortly after dinner and was carried off to bed by Alex. Sami stayed awake, but we all were ready for bed after the ball dropped. Saul and I left immediately for DC. I was asleep by the time Ari returned, and at some point, he went out to pick up Neri, who had missed the last metro train of the evening.

In DC, we all did absolutely nothing on New Year’s day, sleeping late, eating leftovers from the Poconos and watching the movie “2012” which Ari had recorded on t.v. In the evening, we decided to meet Jessica at the Arundel Mills Egyptian Theater to see the most recent Harry Potter movie. Ari, Neri, Saul and I had a Mexican dinner at the nearby Chevy’s in the mall beforehand. I enjoyed the movie, although I had gone with trepidation after hearing about the graphic snake scene at the beginning. The description of the horror at the beginning of the book still haunts me, but, for a change, the scene itself was not as horrible to me as my own imagination. On Sunday, we went for dim sum at China Garden and, although we arrived at the right time, we were extremely disappointed with the selection. They had probably been mobbed the previous day and hadn’t had time to replenish their inventory. Back at Ari’s house, we began cleaning up, doing laundry, and packing up in preparation for our return home, the new work week for Ari, and Neri’s return flight to back to school. We didn’t feel like going out to dinner and Ari ordered in pizza from Papa John’s.

Ari left very early while we were still asleep on Monday morning to make sure that Neri had plenty of time to find his airplane at the large and confusing Dulles Airport. As it turned out, Neri called him several times from the airport for advice because his bags were five pounds overweight and he couldn’t stuff another thing into his carry on. I had forgotten about the weight restrictions two weeks earlier when I had bought him a shrink-wrapped double tower of solid white albacore tuna fish cans that he was craving at Costco. Ari advised him to lose the tuna, and reshuffle a few things into his carry on. He found an Ethiopian woman who was delighted beyond all reason to have the tower of tuna fish, and the check-in lady had pity on him and let him go through without charging him for the extra pound or two.

Saul and I had a number of things around the house that we wanted to help Ari finish before we headed for home, including installing dimmer switches in several places, breaking down large boxes and putting them out for the trash or storing them away in closets, cleaning up dead leaves on his outdoor plants, washing sheets and towels and remaking beds, finishing up the laundry, etc. etc. By the time we accomplished our to-do list and packed ourselves up to leave, it was almost time for Ari to return from work. We decided to have dinner together, stay one more night, and leave on Tuesday morning. We had dinner at Pho 14 in Columbia Heights. The next morning, Ari helped us with our suitcases before leaving for work, but was suffering from a cold which lasted several days. We had a really speedy ride home over I-95, which had very little traffic at the hours in which we were traveling. For a few days, I was overwhelmed with the amount of laundry that had piled up, including all the sheets and towels from all the beds and bathrooms at home, all the sheets and towels from all the beds and baths in the Poconos, and two weeks worth of our clothing. I finally got through it all after a few days and now we are about to embark on decision-making regarding renovations to our home. We have decided to wait at least another year before putting it on the market again, and, in the meantime, have begun discussing what and how we would like to update. Saul has decided to continue teaching until he is eligible for Medicare, which will be at least another year or two. Our grandchildren will be delighted that we have decided to stay for a while. They let us know, in no uncertain terms, how much they love our home and their summers here.

Two Great December Weekends in Baltimore/DC

2010-12-13T09:49:00.005-05:00

We had planned to spend the first two weekends of December in Baltimore/DC. The first weekend fell during Chanukah. Saul had a luncheon meeting at CHC on that first Friday, so we were not able to leave on Thursday afternoon as we usually do. I wrote the previous blog post at Saul’s office desk while he attended the meeting, and we left directly from school. Saul’s meeting took hours, and, as it turned out, taking the fast route over I-95, we arrived in Baltimore at sunset, at the exact same time that Ari arrived after work on Friday. We lit the Chanukah candles together on the family’s new chanukiah, which they had all participated in crafting. Sami and Izzy made some teeny tiny dolls that were to be added later, which Saul photographed before candle-lighting. My favorite is the baby with pacifier and teddy bear. We lit the Shabbat candles, and together, we helped put dinner on the table. As usual, dinner was ample and delicious. Prepared by Alex ahead of time, we had great soup, salad, warm challah, good wine, chicken, potato latkes (which I had made earlier and frozen) veggies, rice, and my leftover desserts, including the pumpkin pie we had forgotten on Thanksgiving, which we put into the warm oven, and which was so good that Ari and Jess said they would never eat pumpkin pie any other way. We left Ari’s car in Baltimore and went back to DC together.

During the weekend, we revisited China Garden for dim sum, previously the scene of a frustrating early-afternoon meal with our cousins, this time, arriving at 11:30 a.m. as our waiter suggested. The food and selection were exceptional on this particular weekend. We then stopped at Ari’s office nearby to drop off some cookie packages for his co-workers, and then had a very inconvenient time as Ari accidentally left his keys on his desk when we left. The security guard would not let him back into his office to retrieve them even though she had seen us enter and leave the building. We even needed to go through a security check with her so that she could enable our car to leave the parking garage. Luckily, we had keys to Ari’s house, and he had an extra key to his car in his briefcase at home. The panoramic views in the photos above were taken from Ari’s office window as they will be moving to a building on the other side of the river shortly.

We also had breakfast at the classic Capital City Diner that, at the cost of two years of battling with DC’s licensing red tape, came to fruition as the result of two men with a passion refusing to give up their dream. The place was so tiny, and so crowded, that we decided to sit at the counter just about two feet from the griddle where two Asian ladies were furiously at work turning out classic Southern breakfasts. The Trinidad neighborhood around the lot where the diner had finally come to rest was a bit sketchy, but we were encouraged by the class of people going in to eat. We were not disappointed, as the food was good and reasonable, and all the people working there were extremely personable and pleasant, even funny, despite the very close quarters in which they work. Afterward, Ari said that he felt that he had partaken of an authentic experience from the past that is not widely available anymore, and we were glad we had chosen to sit at the counter. I highly recommend the malted waffles and pancakes.

From there, we returned Ari’s Comcast boxes as, in desperation, he finally contracted for the same satellite dish services as Jessica. The lines to return the boxes were, surprisingly, incredibly long there—a final insult added to the injury of countless service calls which did not fix his problems. He is sorry he did not change over sooner, as he is now thrilled with the number of channels available through DirecTV and the new reliability of his wifi service from Clear. On this occasion, he was delighted to be with his old dad because there was a much shorter line available to senior citizens. On the way back home, we decided to stop and meander around DC’s aged Florida Avenue Market, a huge complex of dilapidated buildings, outdoor flea markets, hole-in-the-wall novelty and electronics stores, and loading docks akin to a combination of Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal and 9th Street Italian market areas. We didn’t buy anything, but Ari now knows where he can obtain all sorts of unusual foodstuffs, such as double-yolked eggs by the dozen, super jumbo eggs, whole fresh-caught fish of every type, and ethnic specialties of many nations. The complex is eventually due, like our Reading Terminal, to be refurbished and polished as a tourist destination. The girls had playmates over on Sunday, so we did not spend a lot of time with them on this particular weekend. After traveling back to Baltimore with Ari to pick up his car, we took the leisurely trip home on Route 1.

This past week marks the last full week of Saul’s department chairmanship at CHC. It was very full, but we managed to get in a few extra experiences, also despite the fact that the weather has turned suddenly frigid. At the beginning of the week, all I wanted to do was sleep. I guess the unexpectedly cold weather put me in hibernation mode. Saul and I went to Metropolitan Diner on Monday night for a light dinner of soup and sandwiches and were delighted with the delicious choices and price. We had been planning to get haircuts afterward, but both of us were exhausted early and went home to bed. On Tuesday, again, we only wanted to be out of the cold and under the nice warm down comforter. Wednesday was the last night of Chanukah, and I had forwarded an email that I had received to Ken about a Texas Hold’em tournament at Gimaro that evening. Randi was game, and we all decided to have dinner there on a Restaurant.com coupon and register for the complimentary poker game afterward. Beth joined us for dinner only as well. The deal is that a group called River Chasers gives you chips with which to play at no charge whatsoever. The winner of the tournament gets $100 in cash. The top five winners, based on points, have a chance to win a trip to the Borgata where they can win up to $10,000 in cash prizes. We could tell that there were a number of regulars at our table who follow the games around to various restaurants, but since it wasn’t costing us a cent to play, we were very relaxed about it. Randi lost all her chips fairly early. Saul, Ken and I played for about two hours before I lost everything on a pair of fives in the hole, and then Saul lost everything on a pair of aces in the hole. Ken played for an additional two hours after we left, with Randi nodding off by his side. Ken came in fifth, and the nice guy, Damian, who was sitting next to him at our table, came in second. About 50 to 60 players had started. When they registered their full names with the man from River Chasers who supervises and manages the tournaments (we had only exchanged first names at the table) the guy who was sitting next to him overheard his name and was flabbergasted. It turned out that Ken, who had never met him in person, had, through his employment agency, placed him in his engineering job alongside Andy, Ken’s son-in-law. He asked Ken if he could hug him, so grateful and happy was he with his job, and Ken obliged. Needless to say, it was a very pleasant evening which left all of us feeling good on various levels, although I can’t imagine having enough time or inclination to follow the games around to various restaurants. Saul and I lit the last Chanukah candles when we returned home, always a poignant time for us as we remember his father’s tear-stained face as we lit the last Chanukah candles he knew he would ever see. He died the next afternoon after having had two sets of bypass surgeries, over time, and eventually losing both legs to diabetes. He died after a long period of decline at home in bed. On Thursday evening, we went to TBI to say kaddish for him. I attended Faith’s class on Thursday morning, where we continued to study Maimonides and, this week, discuss his 13 attributes of faith.

On Friday morning, we had a date in small claims court where we are suing the company that improperly installed and serviced our very expensive, high efficiency, Lennox HVAC system back in 2006. It wasn’t until this past fall that our new guys discovered that the cause of many of our problems over the years was that a wrong part had been installed in the thermostat from the beginning. The hearing was frustrating and upsetting because the judge informed us that he only is willing to read the top page of the evidence that we were asked to submit and seemed to expect us to have every fact, figure, and date pertaining to the case available off the top of our heads. Our new heating guy, Josh, and his wife, Sheila, who had done us a favor by taking time away from their business to testify on the technical aspects, were as unprepared as we were, and were extremely upset at the implication by the owner of our previous HVAC company, that they were not nearly as competent as he. I hope the judge was able to read between the lines (at least) and understand the huge expense, aggravation, and inconvenience we have been put through over these last four years. If not, at least we were able to return some of the aggravation, inconvenience, and grief to the owner of the incompetent heating company. After the hearing, for which we were allotted one hour, we gave Josh and Sheila a cookie package, and headed out to Baltimore.

Stopping to get Izzy’s car seat from Jess, we continued on to pick up the girls from Waldorf at the end of their school day. They each, in turn, expressed great joy at seeing us there, very gratifying to both of us. This week, Jess made Shabbat dinner, as Alex in his professional capacity was asked, at the last minute, to be present for a dinner involving future bar and bat mitzvah parents at the synagogue. We had an early dinner, as Ari had to work late and could not make it to Baltimore. We had two of Alex’s pareve soups from the freezer, pumpkin black bean, and what Jess calls “bornisht,” cabbage borscht without meat. “Nisht” means “not” in Yiddish, and borsht is a type of Russian soup, so the name is a pun meaning “not the usual borscht with meat.” She baked pre-made, store-bought, challah dough that is a fund-raiser for the synagogue school, so we had warm challah and honey for our brachot. She made shell pasta with butter and parmesan, and kosher fake crab (surimi) salad with avocado which is one of Alex’s specialties. For dessert, we had warmed pumpkin pie that I had brought her a while ago from Costco, and which she had frozen. The pie did not seem to suffer from the freezing, as I had thought it would, and was delicious topped with ice cream and whipped cream. Again, as the timing worked out, we arrived at Ari’s house in DC at exactly the time as he did. Saul and I were up bright and early the next morning and back on our way to Baltimore to hear Sami read Torah in front of her class. Ari slept in. The class was delightful and her teacher, Abby, conducts a lively, informative, and interesting service. She asked Saul to do hagba at the end of the Torah service, and it is the only time in my life that I have ever seen him struggle to lift the Torah. It was one of the heaviest ones he has ever encountered, and unbalanced to boot, because most of the parchment is rolled around the left etz hayim (wooden roller around which the parchment is rolled) at this season of the year. In addition, the table on which it reposed was a regular table and about a foot lower than the usual platform on which it rests on the bimah. I touched the left etz hayim briefly when services were over and I don’t know how he was able to even budge it. After services, we had a light luncheon at the synagogue together in honor of their December birthday people. Saul and I then headed back to DC. After I took a nap on Saturday afternoon, Saul, Ari and I had a delicious and surprisingly reasonable Thai dinner at a restaurant that is new to us in Arlington, Sawatdee, and saw the movie, Red, at the nearby movie theater. Red, which has a lot of really big stars in it, like Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Richard Dreyfuss, Morgan Freeman, and John Malkovich is a far-fetched story about retired C.I.A. agents that is reminiscent of The Over-the-Hill Gang, and enjoyable in exactly the same suspend-disbelief way.

On Sunday, Saul and I were up by 6:30 a.m. to pack up and head out on a gloomy, rainy day to Baltimore once again to chaperone for Izzy’s Hebrew school class chartered bus trip to the Baltimore Science Museum. The program is designed specifically to address the lunar nature of the Jewish calendar, about which they have been learning. During the planetarium show, the calendar pages that included the Hebrew months of Cheshvan, Kislev, and Tevet were projected onto the ceiling with the various phases of the moon included and the pertinent holidays noted. Afterward, the children were ushered to a room where they constructed movable paper sundials. The adults, in a separate room, had a discussion of Rosh Chodesh, led by Sami’s teacher, Abby. Each parent was given a beautiful color certificate with their child’s name in Hebrew and their individual birth date, both on the Gregorian and on the Hebrew calendar. Sami had an after-Hebrew-school program on Sunday, so Jess, Izzy, Saul and I had lunch together at Panera, while Alex took a napping Yona home so that he could watch a football game. Eventually, we were on the road again, racking up the miles in the murky, cold rain to return home. But both weekends were delightful and definitely worth the trip. Thanks to the Prius, the trips are much less expensive than in the Pilot. I just wish we lived closer, but at least both kids are within a few hours driving distance on the East Coast.

November Cookies and Thanksgiving

2010-12-03T12:40:00.007-05:00

The girls’ Waldorf school had a bunch of scheduled Friday closings in November. While I stayed at home and baked cookies… literally, Saul left from school and met Jessica halfway to Baltimore to transfer all three girls to his car so that we could enjoy them for the weekend before Thanksgiving. This weekend was going to be Yona’s first weekend away from both parents. The older girls had requested to spend time baking and decorating cookies and since Chanukah came very early this year, in fact, right after Thanksgiving, I was delighted to be able to honor their request. In addition to baking a hundred gingerbread teddy bears, I cut out and glazed with white royal icing about eight dozen Chanukah-shaped cookies the previous weekend. The icing took several days to dry and was just about ready when they came to draw on the cookies with food-color markers. I also made several dozen lemon logs which needed to be dipped at the ends in chocolate and sprinkles. They loved doing that.

Larry was ill with a stomach bug on Friday, and only Beth joined us for dinner. We went shopping on Friday at Costco and Trader Joe’s and I bought a big turkey breast and made it chicken paprikash-style on top of of the black and white rice that the girls love. On our way out of Costco, after lunching on pizza there and then shopping, we bumped into George and Roxy having lunch. On the way back from Trader Joe’s, while we were caught in a traffic jam caused by the extensive construction of the Route 202 Bypass, we waved to them going in the opposite direction home on Route 63. Trader Joe’s had Brussels sprouts on the stalk and I bought one and let the girls pluck them off to make maple-glazed sprouts with chestnuts. They liked the sprouts, but not the chestnuts. We had a salad of deep red and green baby lettuce with raspberry-walnut dressing, and homemade chicken soup and challah from the freezer. For dessert, we had fresh strawberries dipped in individual ramekins of melted chocolate. Yona absolutely adores strawberries and by the end of breakfast on Saturday morning, we had eaten a whole quart.

Yona was an angel the entire weekend. On Thursday evening, when it was time for bed, I sat with her in a big easy chair in front of Sprout’s Good Night Show. She settled in and drank water, rather than milk, without complaint, from a sippy cup because she was teething and had been somewhat congested. She yelled and complained, not really crying, when I put her finally in her crib, but this only lasted about 5 minutes. When I looked in on her 10 minutes later, she was sound asleep. We monitored her room all night, and she had two coughing jags, but each time, she went right back to sleep afterward. The girls all got up between six and seven a.m. during the weekend, but that is normal for them. On Friday evening after Shabbat dinner, I gave Yona a bath. I have never seen a child so ecstatic to be in a bathtub full of water. I had to empty the tub in order to be able to get her out without a full temper tantrum. Then Izzy took a bath and was equally as delighted. Beth had invited Sami to use her big Jacuzzi tub on Saturday.

Erica dropped off Brenna early in the morning to decorate cookies. After a few hours, Saul took Izzy with him to take roll at Team Children, while Brenna and Sami went next door to Beth to play in the Jacuzzi together and Yona took a nap. Izzy loved Team Children and Saul promised he would take her there again so that she can learn how to take apart a computer and learn about the various components inside.

The girls were so contented with their weekend that they didn’t even want to go out on Saturday night. They preferred to eat leftovers from the previous days and climb into bed to watch a movie. On Sunday, we arranged to meet Jessica to send the girls back home at Simon Pearce, a glass-blowing studio, restaurant, and gift shop. I waited with napping Yona in the car while Saul took the girls inside to watch the glassblowers. They were fascinated and had many questions as they watched. When Jess arrived she met us in the extensive gift shop upstairs, but even a glass icicle was $65.00. At the entrance, two vendors were giving out samples of local goat cheese aged in sycamore leaves and Irish Victory cake. Both were so delicious that we bought small quantities to take home.

Our work week was blessedly short—only Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, I made pareve apricot baklava to carry out the theme of Alex’s Turkish Thanksgiving dinner. Then I made a carob sheet cake for Neri’s 19th birthday on Thanksgiving day. When Ari had spent his junior high school year on Kibbutz Beit HaShita in Israel, Neri had been a three-year-old little brother to him. Each American student was assigned an Israeli family on the kibbutz and Ari has stayed in touch with his all these years, visiting every few years when he had the chance. Neri is in the United States this year for his senior year of high school on a basketball scholarship. Ari flew him in for the week to join us from North Carolina during his Thanksgiving break.

While Saul was teaching on Tuesday, I packed and then baked two pareve pistachio-praline pumpkin pies, one for us, and one for my friend Faith’s family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Believe it or not, with all the excitement, none of us remembered to serve our pumpkin pie the entire Thanksgiving holiday. When I checked my email on Monday morning, I saw one from Faith, and suddenly remembered that the pie was still in a second refrigerator at Jess and Alex’s house. :o( Saul arrived early from school and packed up the hot pies in stapled, brown paper bags. As Faith was leaving with her pie in our friend, Lyn’s car, Elaine, Alex’s mother arrived with her new Shih Tzu puppy, Shana, for the ride down to Baltimore for Thanksgiving. Shana rested nicely in her perched little basket in the back seat and we had a very pleasant trip down, introducing Elaine to the delicious fries at our favorite Royal Farms gas station on the long, but scenic Route 1. Both of them napped for a while as well. When we arrived in Baltimore, we packed up the family, except for Alex who had a great quantity of work to finish before the holiday, and went to have dinner at Sushi Ya in Owings Mills, the girls’ favorite restaurant at home. Saul and I continued on to DC after dinner. Ari had arranged special seats for himself and Neri at a basketball game in DC where, coincidentally, DC was playing Philadelphia. It turned out to be a very exciting, historic game which was settled in a second overtime by one point in the last few seconds, unfortunately in DC’s favor. But at least the hometown fans were wildly happy! Saul and I watched the last half hour of the game on television at Ari’s house and waited for them to return home.

On Wednesday, Ari took Neri with him to work so that Neri could spend the morning working out in the gym available in Ari’s building. After getting some work done at Ari’s house and having a light bite to eat, we picked Neri up after lunch. On the way back, we passed the National Zoo, and discovered that Ari had not taken him there yet and that he was anxious to see it. The weather was perfect for a zoo visit and it was not particularly crowded the day before Thanksgiving. Neri had never seen a live tiger before, and both tiger and lion obliged us in their outdoor digs by roaring so loudly that the trees shook and the walls reverberated. We especially enjoyed an exhibit of underwater animals, including luminescent tanks of jellyfish and unusual lobsters and crabs that I had missed on my earlier trips with the girls. The panda was not sleeping for a change on this visit and was stripping and eating huge branches of bamboo while reclining on his back on some rocks indoors—fascinating to watch. On the usually short way back, we encountered so much traffic leaving DC for the holiday weekend that we grew hungry while waiting to inch forward and stopped en route for shawarma and baklava at a Middle Eastern restaurant we were passing in Adams Morgan.

That evening, when Ari came home from work, we took Neri for a tour of the DC monuments at night. We visited The White House, the Roosevelt Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. It was a beautiful, somewhat chilly, moonlit evening and a really memorable way to experience the monuments. In his college days at GW, Ari used to give tours to visiting groups of students on a program called Panim el Panim (Face to Face). We finished by treating Neri to a big, classic American New York strip steak at Ray’s The Steaks in Arlington. Ari and I, with a little help from Saul, polished off a bottle of a cabernet sauvignon called Layer Cake, which marked the first time, outside of Paris, that I had a large quantity of wine without suffering from a painful sulfite reaction. I will be sure to look for this wine again.

Early on Thanksgiving morning, Neri’s birthday, we drove to a wonderful classic diner called Metro 29, so that Neri could experience a big American breakfast. We had been trying to describe a diner to him, but there really is no Israeli equivalent. We not only had a wonderful breakfast, but the staff brought out a huge slice of really rich chocolate cake with a candle and sang happy birthday to him, pronouncing his name perfectly. They didn’t charge us for the cake which the three of us could not finish, so we took it home. We hung around the house for the afternoon, watching television until it was time to leave for Baltimore. I can’t spend too many hours at Jess and Alex’s because of my allergies to the dogs. Again this year, Alex outdid himself, producing so many great dishes that we ate ourselves sick trying to sample them all both Thursday and Friday evenings. To name a few, there were three different soups, tomato and red lentil, chicken soup with matzoh balls, and turkey noodle soup. He made turkey kibbee, and turkey-stuffed fillo pastries in addition to plain old sliced turkey. There were numerous salads and relishes—stuffed grape leaves, Israeli salad, lettuce and red cabbage with avocado and mango, baked beets and pickled beets, homemade skhug; for sides: mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, baked sweet potatoes, rice, roasted vegetables with dipping sauce, lavash, and home-cured olives of which Izzy was especially proud. The table decorations were made by the girls at school, including the hand-dipped candles by Izzy and the wood-carved candle holder by Sami. Our friend Larry, who joined us on Thursday, brought an assortment of bottles of upscale and flavored beer. On Thursday, Jess adorned the pareve carob cake that I had made with candies spelling out Neri’s name in Hebrew. Once again, we lit candles and sang “Yom Hooledet Same’ach” to Neri. I suppose it was no wonder that we forgot the pumpkin pie.

On Friday morning we ate breakfast at Ari’s and I made Hawaiian taro pancakes in addition to toasted bagels and cream cheese (unlike the fresh cheeses in Israel), which Neri loved. Then Saul, Ari, Neri, Larry and I visited the amazing Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum near Dulles airport. After that, we drove directly to the Egyptian Theater in Arundel Mills where Jessica met us with Sami and Izzy to finally see Megamind in 3D together. Neri was wowed by the 3D effect as a previous 3D movie he had seen in Israel had not provided the right kind of polarized glasses for proper viewing. The movie was predictable, but fun. For Shabbat dinner after that, we were joined by Alex’s sister Naomi and her husband Matt, and Alex’s brother Aaron and his wife, Stacy and their three children. There were four dogs present that evening—Zeek and Inky, Casey, Naomi’s dog, and little Shana. I couldn’t linger long after dinner.

Larry headed for home the next morning and we took Neri for his first experience with dim sum at Hollywood East Café. He is a pretty adventurous eater and was willing to try dumplings that I am pretty sure were completely alien to his experience. He really liked the custard-filled “carrots” the best, I think, because they reminded him of American donuts for which he has developed a weakness. Learning this, we stopped in Columbia Heights that evening for an assorted box of Dunkin’ Donuts. I had not had them for years and was gravely disappointed with them compared to how they tasted years ago, but Neri seemed happy. We spent a good deal of time shopping for the right basketball sneakers for Neri. We finally found them at Modell’s. Neri had bought a basketball jersey at Modell’s at Arundel Mills and had asked Ari about the unusual tags in the store. He didn’t believe Ari when Ari told him that they are exploding ink packs that ruin the shirt if they are shop-lifted. Unfortunately, even though he paid for the shirt and had the receipt, he found out first-hand about the ink packs because the salesperson had neglected to remove it when he purchased it and he discovered the damage when we arrived home that evening. He used the credit from the shirt towards the purchase of the sneakers. We took him for Vietnamese pho in Columbia Heights that night for dinner. Ari used Google maps on his iPhone to show Neri the location of Vietnam on the world map. He didn’t have pho, but really enjoyed the noodle dish he ordered and ate every bit of it.

Saul and I were on our way to Baltimore on Sunday bright and early so that we could all have brunch together and get on the road back early enough so that Elaine would not have to make the hour-long drive back to Cranberry from our house in the dark. After a half-hour wait at a crowded, but wonderful, restaurant called First Watch, near Jess and Alex’s home, we had our delicious brunch together and got on the road a short time later. Elaine had picked up a terrible sore throat, congestion and fever over the weekend and we felt really awful that she was going to have to make her hour-long drive feeling that way and, as it turned out, in the dark because the dark fell so early that night. Thankfully, she made it home okay with Shana and was on antibiotics the next day.

I spent most of the past week baking cookies for our family cookie extravaganza, which took place last night. On Tuesday, Adele and I met Roxy at Blue Sage for lunch and we celebrated Adele’s birthday, which actually was on Monday. I was so pleased to be able to find the chocolate oranges at Trader Joe’s just recently that I used to always buy for Roxy on her birthday, and I gave a milk chocolate one to Roxy as a belated birthday gift, and a dark chocolate one to Adele for her birthday. On Wednesday and Thursday, Adele joined me, and we made some of the fancier cookies together. We had an incredibly delicious lunch at the Metropolitan Diner on Thursday before the family arrived, and Saul joined us for lunch about halfway through on his way home from school. Ken brought pizzas later that evening and the cookie wrapping went very smoothly. We were also joined by Randi, Larry, our friend, Larry, and Beth.

Saul had a long executive board meeting at school this morning, so I am writing this blog entry from his desk as we wait to leave for another weekend in Baltimore/DC.

November Weekend with Ari and the Girls

2010-11-17T11:55:00.002-05:00

This past week was especially busy for Saul and me. Saul has been overwhelmed with meetings as department chairman and as a student advisor, and spent long hours at school. On Tuesday evening, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, our friend Elsa had a showing with another artist of her works in connection with hidden children of the Holocaust. When Saul came home on Tuesday, we didn’t know if he would actually be able to “come home,” or if we would be able to go out to the art show. The police had closed off our street in both directions as someone had hit an electric pole with their car and compromised it to the point that nothing could be done until PECO arrived from another emergency to stabilize the pole so that they could work on the wires. Fortunately, the police let Saul sneak through, and by the time we were ready to leave for the show, the pole and wires had been fixed. The show was very interesting, especially since Saul’s aunt, his mother’s sister, had been a hidden child who had been saved by a convent. The show’s kickoff took place at Gratz College.

We had arranged for Ari to bring Sami and Izzy in to spend this weekend with us. Ari had Friday off for Veterans Day and the girls were off for teacher conferences. They were supposed to come down on Thursday evening when Ari finished work, but as luck would have it, he had a stomach-wrenching computer crash at work that afternoon as a result of upgrading some software. By evening, it had all been worked out with no loss of data, but they all decided that they would come the next day, which made me a happier mommy also. I worried about the long drive in the dark, late at night.

After my class with Faith on Thursday, where she introduced the background and life of Maimonides, she mentioned to me that she was doing Shabbat dinner with her son and two of her grandchildren, Alex and Hilary, as her daughter-in-law was away. I already knew that I would be preparing a vegetarian meal this week for Shabbat, and that Alex is a vegetarian. Also, Hilary and Sami were born only a week apart and I thought it would be a good time for some bonding between the girls. We had a wonderful evening together this past Shabbat. I made homemade challah, quick black bean soup, lettuce salad with assorted dressings, vegetarian meat balls, kasha with whole wheat noodles, soba with mushrooms, potato latkes (from the freezer), and a whole assortment of freshly-baked cookies along with some desserts from the freezer and pumpkin-flavored coffee.

This past weekend was to be our cookie-baking and decorating weekend. I suddenly realized, about two weeks ago, that Chanukah this year is extremely early, beginning only three days after Thanksgiving. Adele has been tied up with helping Irv clear out Fran’s house before he flies home to California this Friday. She hasn’t had time to make all the varieties that she usually has finished by now. On Friday, when Sami and Izzy arrived, however, Izzy was ill with a stomach virus that her mother had thought was already over. She threw up as soon as she got to the bathroom and spent most of the afternoon and evening sleeping. Sami was a tremendous help this weekend, helping to get dinner on the table, and making snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies before dinner. We had a wonderful evening with Larry and with Faith and her kids. Sami and Hilary appeared to get along famously. On Saturday, Izzy woke up her usual energetic self, ate a big breakfast with us, and together with Ari, we decorated over 100 gingerbread bears that I had baked earlier in the week and glazed dozens of sugar cookies that I also made earlier in the week. Saul was committed for the day to an open house for prospective new students. He was delighted to see about 180 students where usually there are a few dozen, but he came home hoarse from all the speaking he had done, unusual for someone who has taught for as many years as he.

Since everyone was good and the cookies were looking fine, later in the evening we decided to go out for dinner and a movie. Ari purchased tickets through Fandango to take the girls to see Megamind at the 3D IMax theater in King of Prussia. We headed out for Jim’s Buffet, which is only 5 to 10 minutes from our house. By the time we arrived, Izzy was extremely ill again and only had some miso broth and some white rice. By the time the rest of us finished eating she was so miserable that we decided against the movie. By the time we arrived home, she was doubled over in pain and I thought I might have to take her to the emergency room. Jess put in an emergency call to her doctor, who said that this was characteristic of a virus that is making the rounds right now. We gave Izzy a Tums, and I massaged her tummy for a while while she and Sami watched a children’s video on their t.v. Both girls, thankfully, fell asleep within a very short time. I settled into an easy chair to relax and complete the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle from last week while Saul and Ari watched an episode of Dr. Who.

Erica was supposed to come early to pick up the girls and take them home with her for Brenna’s birthday party. She had rented a moon bounce for the day and was also going to be making and decorating gingerbread cookies with the kids. But on Sunday morning, Izzy was okay, but Sami threw up. She wasn’t as sick as Izzy the night before, so I left the girls home with Saul to goof around in their pajamas, and Ari and I went shopping for dining room chairs. Saul was happy to have the day at home with them as he had not really been able to see them much this weekend and he had computer work with which to catch up.

Ari and I began by heading out to King of Prussia to get credit for our unused movie tickets. We stopped into Nordstrum Rack which is right next door to the movie theater. Ari wound up purchasing a beautiful cashmere and wool formal overcoat at a terrific price. There was no price tag on the piece and the sales guy was having trouble locating the information, so he just made up and slapped a price tag on it to save himself and us further time and aggravation. The salesgirl who rang it up even commented about what a good price Ari was paying for such a great coat.

We headed over to The Dump, but were disappointed to find that most of their merchandise had not changed in several months. We also checked out a furniture place next door called Mahogany and More, especially since it was mahogany chairs for which we were searching. By late afternoon, we were hungry. When I called home to see how everyone was doing (the girls were only supposed to have clear liquids all day according to the doctor), Saul said everyone was okay and Ari and I should go ahead and have a late lunch. We decided on an Indian buffet we had spotted across the street from the mall called Desi Village. Ari had not had Indian food, a favorite of his, in many months. The buffet was very good, but did not compare to the one at Sultan near our house. The girls were packed and ready to leave as soon as we returned. Sami had produced some beautiful origami boats while she was hanging out. I don’t know if she followed a pattern from somewhere, or just designed them herself. Unfortunately, Ari encountered large traffic jams on the road back and both girls arrived home exhausted and a bit ill. By Monday morning, the worst appeared to be over, and both girls have been in school for the last two days. I cleaned up the house after this past weekend and have been preparing more cookies the last two days. This weekend, all three girls are coming and this will be Yona’s first time away from both mommy and daddy for the night. I hope all goes well!

Eat Dessert First

2010-11-10T13:58:00.004-05:00

You know the expression—“Life’s too short. Eat dessert first!” I wish I had taken this advice this past weekend as I feel a bit guilty having advised a few of us to be patient and “the best was yet to come.”

This past week was depressing in more ways than one. The election results were troubling as I am no fan of the tea party and one of my favorite placards at the Stewart/Colbert Rally was “Keep fear alive. Vote Republican!” Another source of depression was the influx of tiny ants through two tiny seams in my bathroom grout. I hate to kill ants. I really quite admire their sense of community and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. I had let the bathroom go a bit since the lock box came off the front door, but when the flow of ants became too troublesome, I finally worked myself up to take some action and spent an entire morning spraying and scrubbing everything, including the shower, from top to bottom. The bathroom sparkled, but late that night there was still a trickle of explorer ants hunting for crumbs. The exterminator was due for his regular visit on Friday morning and I showed him where the ants were coming in. He put down invisible poison bait for them to take back to the nest to kill the others. He told me to wait a week before washing the floor again to give the bait a chance to do its work. About ten minutes after he left, I went to use the bathroom and was horrified to find big, crawly black mounds of ants covering and swarming around every invisible little mound of bait. I closed the door. Thank heavens I have more than one bathroom! When Saul came home, he didn’t even want to see what I described, and we quickly loaded the car and headed for another weekend in Baltimore/DC. To finish the story, when we returned from our weekend there were many dead ants on the floor and there were still live ants swarming around the bait. We stepped around this mess gingerly for a few days, not wanting to mess with the poison, but yesterday, I had waited long enough. After a few hours of procrastinating, I went in there with a vacuum hose and my spray bottle of Lime Away and cleaned everything up spotlessly again. So far, I haven’t seen a single ant. I hope those that may be left have gotten the message and found another home.

To balance things out, there were wonderful parts to my week as well. Last Thursday was Roxy’s birthday, and on Tuesday, Election Day, I treated her to lunch at Blue Sage. Our sandwiches (we ordered the same one) and salads were so delicious that I may never order anything else from the menu again. In the course of going through my box of memorabilia for Olney’s reunion, I pulled out a bunch of letters that I had saved that Roxy had written to me the first year she was in college and a letter I had written to Saul about an adventure she and I had shared on an evening that we had attended a Santana concert at the Philadelphia Spectrum. On this, her sixty-first birthday, we had a good laugh over the fact that she was lamenting that Saul was about to turn 21, and we were all so old!

Beth came home a bit early on Tuesday, and we went to vote together after she helped us move my big plants into the garage to protect them from the expected frost. Then, we went to Pho Thai Nam for dinner, where we left enough room to share their exceptional warm taro cake dessert, a great choice, especially in the crisp fall weather.

Wednesday evening, our friends Ruth and Giora, who moved to New Jersey a few years ago, called to say that they would be in our neighborhood Thursday afternoon to visit their former neighbors whose son had just perished in a motorcycle accident. We were glad for the opportunity to see them as we had canceled a date with them a few months ago and had not rescheduled. On Thursday, after Faith’s class where we reviewed poetry from Yehudah Ha-Levi and Hayim Nachman Bialik, among others, and viewed a short video about the travels of Benjamin of Tudela, I stopped at Giant to pick up some fruit and snack food for our friends. Then, I baked a chocolate rum cake which we shared with coffee. We caught up with each others’ lives for a couple of hours. When they left, we decided to meet Beth, a friend, Phillipe, whose wife just left for military duty in Afghanistan, and Ken and Randi. Ken had found Phillipe a job in the area through his employment service. We met at Gimaro and spent a couple of hours there eating, schmoozing and getting to know Phillipe.

Jess and Alex had programs for older students at the synagogue on Friday, and Izzy had a lantern-lighting program at Waldorf. Ari left work early and met us and we took Sami and Izzy for an early dinner at nearby Noodles and Company and then took them to Waldorf for the program. The festivities included a short skit outdoors by the fifth graders at the entrance to the school, a song by the first-graders, and a silent, homemade-lantern-lit walk through the woods while we were being serenaded by “fairies” (older students) who hid in the dark trees and played a haunting tune on their flutes. Red and green apples were distributed at the end of the program.
Ari said it was like a low-budget version of “It’s a Small World” at Disney World. We had a beautiful, moonlit evening to enjoy this and were very grateful for the perfect weather.

Ari, Saul and I hunted for furniture, having struck out the previous weekend, and visited one of the largest venues for furniture we have ever seen. Ari had seen some bedroom furniture online that he liked and that is how we found Belfort Furniture in Virginia. Not only was their warehouse the size of a two-story Costco, but they had purchased an entire shopping center directly across the street and had filled it with furniture, dividing it by categories, as well. We looked at dozens of bedroom suites, and, in the end, Ari wound up purchasing the one he had seen online. Another large purchase was a wall unit/bookcase with rounded, sliding doors to conceal a large-screen t.v. in his living room. He had also seen that online at another store, but had not wanted to make such a large purchase without having seen the actual furniture. As we were walking through, Saul spotted the wall unit on the floor and we all were delighted with the quality and construction. He also purchased a custom-made leather headboard, and two bedroom lamps that we were surprised to find that we both liked, despite the fact that our taste is very different. We rushed back to meet Comcast to try to get Ari’s internet working, but found that the service person had lied and filed a report that he had called and not gotten an answer and so had cancelled.

On Saturday night, Jess met us at a Thai restaurant called Little Spice that is near the Arundel Mills Egyptian movie theater. We had a late, delicious, vegetarian dinner and, after schmoozing for a hour, headed over to the theater to see Red, but when we arrived, we found it sold out. Having had such a large meal, we decided to walk it off by circling the enormous figure-eight-shaped mall where we were relegated to window shopping because all the stores had closed for the evening.

The next morning disappeared with waiting for Comcast to arrive. Someone did show up and fixed the connection for at least the dozenth time, but by the following morning, the signal was gone again. Trying to salvage at least part of the day, we called my cousin, Julie, who was being visited by her brother, Bob, so that they could attend a Flyers game that evening in D.C. and asked if they would like to join us for dim sum at China Garden in Rosslyn. We drove over and Julie showed us through the cozy, three-story home that she has been renovating in the tree-lined neighborhood of Lanier Heights where she had been living for a number of years. By the time we arrived at China Garden, it was quite late for dim sum. One of the first carts to come by our table had coconut buns and I convinced Julie, who was very anxious to sample them, that we should wait a while before ordering dessert so that the buns and other desserts would be warm. I was very embarrassed to find that by the time we were ready for dessert, there was literally nothing left. Our pleas to the maitre d’ brought nothing but the admonition that we should arrive around 11:30 a.m. if we expected to have a nice selection of dishes. In the future, should we be stuck with arriving late, we will be sure to eat dessert first.

After dropping off Julie and Bob to get ready for the game, which the Flyers lost, unfortunately, we went back to Ari’s to pack our suitcases, and Ari drove us back to Jess and Alex’s house so that he could retrieve his car that we had left in Baltimore for the weekend. Saul and I took the leisurely trip home over U.S. 1.

The Stewart/Colbert Rally in DC and Halloween in Baltimore

2010-11-01T16:25:00.007-04:00

Saul decided to cancel his 11:00 a.m. class on Tuesday morning so that he could attend Fran’s funeral with me. We feared, because of her advanced age, and the fact that Irv’s life was in California, that there might not even be a minyan at the funeral. Larry and Adele had come to our house to pick up the shiva trays we had prepared and had gone to Fran’s house in Northeast Philadelphia to set up the food and prepare for the returning mourners. As it turned out, about 15 friends and relatives were in attendance. The day began sunny and crisp, but then turned unexpectedly gray and cold by the time the service began. A representative from the funeral home conducted the service and did a very competent job under the circumstances. The interment was at Har Jehuda Cemetery, which we had just visited last year with our friend, Larry, who wanted to check out some graves of relatives and some grave sites belonging to his family. Saul spent hours traveling by car to get to and from school, to pick me up so that we could travel to the cemetery together—an hour’s journey, then to the Northeast for the shiva, and then back home again. As usual this semester, his work was pressing, and he spent the rest of the day on his computer.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I prepared for our past lovely weekend in Baltimore and DC. Ari, Saul and I are big fans of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. We also TiVo The Colbert Report which follows it on Comedy Central. From the time we first learned about the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” which later became “The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” as both Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s two rallies became combined, we planned to attend it in DC. As we discussed our plans, our next-door niece, Beth, decided to join us at Ari’s for the weekend, and a few days ago, my cousin Anne, from New York, also decided to join us. At the last minute, Anne’s son, Ben, arranged to stay with friends in DC and join us for parts of the weekend. The day of the rally also happened to be Anne’s 54th birthday.

Not knowing what to expect as far as which meals we would be taking at home at Ari’s house, I decided to “kill two birds with one stone” and prepare some of my kids’ favorite foods which we could either eat, or could be stored away for future meals. On Wednesday and Thursday mornings I cleaned out and reorganized the kitchen cabinet on which Saul had replaced the broken hinge. I shopped, and then prepared dough and filling for more pumpkin-face cookies, made a huge pot of chicken soup that yielded 18 quarts, a large quantity of chicken salad from the four soup chickens, kasha and bow ties, macaroni and cheese, bread pudding, vanilla custard sauce, coconut/maple tapioca pudding, a brown sugar glazed sweet potato cake for Anne’s birthday, and a pareve carob sheet cake. Along with some other supplies, like milk, eggs, Hawaiian taro pancake mix, bread, avocados, tomatoes, etc., Saul and I packed everything up, including our suitcases for the long weekend and headed off to Baltimore on Thursday afternoon when school was over. We arrived in Baltimore at 6:00 p.m. just in time for a program for young families with toddlers that Alex had designed called PB & J—Pizza, Blessings and Jammies (pajamas). Jessica had been in South Carolina for several days at a conference on marketing retreat centers and was on her way home. We were able to take the responsibility of Yona and Izzy off Alex’s hands while he ran his engaging program. Sami was at a play date after school at her classmate Acadia’s house. Jess was supposed to pick her up at school and attend a PTA meeting for Izzy’s first grade class. Unfortunately, she got caught in rush hour traffic coming through DC and we never got to see her on Thursday night. She never got to attend the PTA meeting, either. She arrived exhausted and ill from six hours of driving, too many traffic jams, and several days of bad food.

Pizza not being one of my favorite foods, Saul and I stopped for a comforting late dinner of steaming soup, mu shu, and crispy sesame eggplant over steamed rice at Hollywood East Café in Wheaton on our way to Ari’s. Early Friday morning, as Ari prepared to leave for work, Saul was appalled to find that he could not get a Comcast Internet connection to answer the nearly 300 email messages that he had received following a controversial speaker who had presented at the college. A last-minute decision was made that he would accompany Ari to work so that he would have the connection to get his work done. I decided to go back to bed. Surprisingly, I slept until a little after 1:00 p.m. When I awoke, I had some late lunch, cleaned up the kitchen, looked at some magazines, played with my iPhone, watched some television, did all of Ari’s laundry, and made the beds. In short, it was a blissful day for me. The same was true for Saul, who managed to complete his work, socialize briefly with some of Ari’s co-workers, have a stimulating conversation at lunch where they were joined, in a rare instance, by one of the two founding partners, and leave in a reasonable amount of time to pick me up for our journey to Baltimore for Shabbat dinner.

Alex had chosen a Mexican theme this particular week. We were joined by his sister, Naomi, and her husband Matt. After we lit candles, dinner began with the blessings over grape juice and warm, freshly-baked challah dipped in honey, which has remained their tradition since their honeymoon. Alex made dishes almost too numerous to remember—spicy vegetable soup, guacamole, salsa verde, warm flatbreads and tortillas, black beans, baked and mashed butternut squash, chili con carne, fake crab and avocado salad and a few other side dishes that I am sure I have forgotten to mention. For dessert, we had the pareve carob cake. Sami presented me with a little gift she made for me out of cardboard, crayons, sticks, glue, nylon string and mini origami that represented a forest with owls and monkeys. Anne had driven into Philadelphia to hook up with Beth after work and they were supposed to meet up with us in Baltimore, but they had gotten off to a late start, had picked up Ben downtown, and had encountered heavy traffic on the way down. We decided to meet in DC instead and all of us arrived there at around 10:30 p.m. A few minutes later, having slept most of the day, I decided to accompany Ari while he dropped off Ben at his friends’ house a short distance away. Ordinarily, it would have been a five-to-ten-minute drive, but after encountering heavy traffic on the way there, we encountered stand-still traffic on the way home no matter which street we tried. Eventually, inching along, we discovered that the police had set up road blocks for a few blocks around the Columbia Heights Metro station which they had shut down. Ari and I did not get back until midnight. By then, everyone else was sound asleep.

In the morning, we rose early; breakfasted on bagels, cream cheese, juice and tea; and discussed what we wanted to say on our signs for the rally. We cut up an old beige bed sheet of Ari’s, and Beth and Saul provided permanent markers. Beth’s sign said, “I like pie.” Ari’s sign said, “I don’t like pie, but we can still get along.” Anne’s sign said “Whatever.” My sign said, “Why isn’t the media reporting on the media reporting on the media?” Saul didn’t make a sign. Then, we packed up a backpack with some chicken salad sandwiches and box drinks, Girl Scout cookies, sun screen, band-aids, our folded, bed-sheet signs, and a few other necessities and headed off, on foot, to the Petworth Metro station at about 10:30 a.m. The trains were quite crowded and became increasingly so as we traveled the few stops down to The National Mall where the rally was taking place. The station was so crowded that it took us almost 20 minutes in shoulder-to-shoulder crowds to exit. We stopped to take some photos holding our signs. Then, as we reached the mall itself, we found ourselves inching along in massive crowds to try to get close enough to the four large outdoor screens to see and hear something of what was happening. A few yards in from Seventh Street, which was about halfway between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, we had to stop as it was not really possible to squeeze in any closer in the mass of humanity, and I, being somewhat claustrophobic, didn’t want to try any further. All thoughts of pleasant, picnic-like seating on our blanket went out the window as we all struggled to stay together, listen to the speakers, or catch a glimpse of the projection screens above the vast sea of heads. It was standing room only for everyone, except those who were willing to climb nearby trees for a perch above it all, and there were quite a few of those. Although I could not see anything, Ari, Saul and Beth were tall enough to see the screens over all the heads, and Ari, who was standing next to me, filled me in periodically about what was happening. Eventually after about an hour, those who grew tired of standing, or needed a bathroom, or just gave up, filtered their way out of the crowd and I was able to find a spot a few feet further up where I could just see the screen if enough heads in front of me moved in the right direction as people shifted around in their spaces. The most poignant moments of the show were not really from the comedy, the music, or the satire, which were not stellar, but just from the experience of being present on that beautiful October day in that colossal, benign crowd (some estimates put it as high as 300,000). Singing, and hearing that huge throng singing the National Anthem on the National Mall, poised between the two iconic monuments of this country brought chills to my spine and tears to my eyes. I enjoyed the show, such as I could in such a situation, standing shoulder-to-shoulder for over three hours (five by the time I finally got to sit down on a concrete bench at the Metro stop). I thought the show was almost beside the point, a raison d’etre for bringing everyone together in such a way. No show could ever have met the expectations that accompanied this gathering.

At the end, we inched our way out of the crowd, struggling to stay together, and proceeded down Seventh Street, which becomes Georgia Avenue and is almost a beeline to Ari’s house about 4 miles away. Ari and Beth walked the entire distance home, but Saul, Anne and I gave up after a mile or two and headed down into the Mt. Vernon Square Station. There, we encountered green line trains so tightly packed with people that we could not hope to get on. The yellow line trains emptied out there as well, and those people just turned around and waited at the edge of the platform for a chance to push onto the green trains. After about 45 minutes of frustration, Saul hatched a plan for getting us home. We got on a train going in the opposite direction and took it well past the Archives station at the National Mall to the Waterfront Station. There, we crossed the platform and actually got seats on the train before it began to encounter the huge crowds from the rally. When we finally arrived at our Petworth stop, we had the idea, as we exited, to make reservations for Anne’s birthday dinner at Sala Thai Restaurant, which was right there. We made a reservation for seven people at 7:00 p.m. Ari was waiting for us in the car so that we did not have to walk the additional few blocks home.

Back at the house, we collapsed on the sofa with big glasses of water and watched the movie Shaun of the Dead, a precursor to Halloween, for about an hour before it was time to walk over to the restaurant for dinner. We were being joined by my other cousin, Julie, who has lived and worked in DC since she graduated from George Washington University many years ago. Anne left very specific instructions with an address for her son, Ben, who needed to get on the metro where he was staying and go two stops to meet us. Somehow, he wound up at a different Sala Thai in that neighborhood and had to take a cab to meet us. Anne was delighted that the restaurant had live jazz performers which she really enjoys. The singer, accompanied by an excellent pianist and bassist, had a terrific voice and sounded a bit like Ella Fitzgerald to me, reprising some of her classic songs. The food was wonderful, but the service was embarrassingly bad. We could not quite figure out why, except perhaps the waitress was new and had received no instruction at all. The restaurant was extremely small and did not seem to be understaffed. It began when she brought our hot appetizers and then disappeared without bringing any napkins or utensils to the table. Ari got up and found napkins, and a signal from the sushi chef spying our distress brought her running from somewhere eventually with utensils. When our entreés arrived, only half the table was served. We mistakenly assumed the others would receive theirs shortly. With no explanation from anyone, including our waitress, who again disappeared, we had almost finished eating before the other entreés arrived. I had asked about a chocolate mousse cake with a candle at the beginning of the meal, but the waitress seemed to have completely forgotten our discussion and we were all exhausted from our day and anxious to leave after so much time spent at the table. Ben left to join his friends even before the other entreés were served, so there didn’t seem to be much point in pursuing it. Julie drove Saul back to the house and joined us as we celebrated Anne’s birthday with tea and brown-sugar-glazed sweet potato cake with a tea-light candle in the center. We had a lively conversation until, one-by-one, we began to fall asleep. After Julie left, Ari cleaned up the whole downstairs before going off to bed. Next door, a wild Halloween party was raging and, as Ari was cleaning up, one of the drunken party-goers leaped from the deck next door onto his garage roof and passed out. Someone else leaped over and helped him get back eventually. In the morning, Ari swept or threw all the broken bottles and beer cans from his yard back in front of their door. Later in the day, while we were out, a hand-written note of apology was dropped into his mail slot.

We decided to go for dim sum on Sunday morning. Ari picked up Ben while Beth and Anne packed, and then we went in two cars to Hollywood East Café again so that they could get on the road home directly from there. We waited briefly for a table and enjoyed the assortment of steaming hot dumplings, taro cake, and lotus-leaf-wrapped sticky rice as always, but the big favorite of Beth, Anne and Ben were the assortment of warm desserts—egg custard-filled crispy mochi “carrots,” mini custard pies, toasted sesame balls with sweet yellow bean paste inside, green tea balls with sweetened black sesame filling, and fluffy pineapple buns. Beth, Anne and Ben headed for home after that, and Ari, Saul and I went shopping for odds and ends for Ari’s house at a nearby Tuesday Morning, Bloomingdale’s, Pottery Barn, and World Market. We began heading to Clarendon to check out the furniture-laden Crate and Barrel there, but realized, looking at the traffic on the other side of the road resulting from the Marine Corps Marathon that took place on Sunday, that we might get into a tremendous traffic jam on the way back and immediately turned around. We were disappointed with a lack of new merchandise everywhere we went. Stopping to pack up our things at Ari’s, Saul and I headed for Baltimore to go trick-or-treating with the girls, who were due back from a costume party at 6:00 p.m. As darkness fell, Jess, all three girls, and I pushing Yona in a stroller, went from house to house in the neighborhood for about an hour and a half. By the second house, Yona in her stroller realized that the other two girls were being given something and began to loudly protest in her own way that whatever they were getting, she wanted also. When she figured out that it was candy, we were assaulted by an endless stream of “open!, open!, open!” until Jess meted out some M & Ms.

We took the long relaxing way home over the Conowingo Dam and were unpacked and in bed by 11:00 p.m. It was a great long weekend!

Olney High School Reunion

2010-10-25T17:09:00.002-04:00

On Thursday evening, Saul and I went out to Costco for just a few food items just as they were closing, and decided to have a late bite at the Metropolitan Diner and to pick up a gift certificate for Larry. This past Friday was our friend, Larry’s, 58th birthday. By coincidence, Saul’s Olney High School 45th Reunion took place the next evening. Larry’s sister, Susan, is a classmate of Saul’s, and month’s ago, while we were visiting her and her husband, Ted, in Chicago, we made arrangements to attend the reunion together which took place this past weekend at Lamb Tavern. Susan’s husband, Ted, has children and grandchildren in this area, so the reunion became an excuse to drive in from Chicago, help Larry celebrate his birthday, visit friends and family, and attend some other related events in New York and Massachusetts.

Our Shabbat dinner this week, which was attended only by Larry, Susan and Ted, was of Larry’s choosing, at my request. We had homemade guacamole and chips with herbs from my garden; smoked turkey, split pea soup; wilted spinach salad with hot sesame dressing; stuffed cabbage; kasha and bow ties; and for dessert, a pareve chocolate sheet cake and a pistachio/praline-topped pumpkin pie, both made with coconut milk. We used this occasion to break out a very rare and delicious bottle of wine that was given to us as a thank-you by the father of one of Saul’s students. Several months ago, Saul had arranged a job interview for her with Ari’s firm, and we had actually driven her into Washington for the interview. It was a win-win-win-win situation. She was thrilled when they offered her the job. Saul was delighted that she took it. The firm was very pleased to have found such a bright and talented employee, and Ari got a generous finder’s fee for introducing her. Her parents, growers in Sonoma, California, were also delighted. Their gratitude took the form of the vintage that we uncorked on Friday—Benziger Oonapais Sonoma Mountain Red, 2006. Susan chose it from among our bottles, and she is one of the few people we know who could appreciate it. It was delicious—smooth, mellow, darkly fruity with notes of cherry and blackberry. We all had a lovely evening together.

Saul had a rendezvous with his students at Team Children the next day. That evening, we picked up Susan and Ted at Larry’s house and drove to the reunion. Many coincidences were about to unfold. Although Susan and Saul were classmates, they only became friendly as Saul’s friendship with her brother, Larry, developed. Saul and Larry met when they were both teaching at Jay Cooke Junior High School and Larry needed help moving into his new house on Thanksgiving. Saul and I both attended Cooke and met there as students. Through Facebook, Susan had renewed a friendship with a classmate, Joan, who was a bridesmaid at her wedding. Joan was the neighbor and cousin of my next door neighbor and childhood playmate for many years. Joan had an absolutely “Eureka!” moment when she realized who I was. Over the summer, we visited a couple from our teen years in Virginia Beach, Wayne and Pearl, with whom we re-connected on Facebook. At our table, during the course of our conversation with David and Karen (also re-connections on Facebook who live near my daughter in Baltimore), we discovered that the same girl, Nadine, who was responsible for Saul and me going out together on our first date to Olney High School’s Kix & Kapers (1964), was also responsible for getting the two of them together for their first Fourth of July date. Karen and Nadine had become close friends in a later class at Olney when I was disconnected from Nadine as I went off to a different high school, Girls’ High. I never knew Karen at all in high school. All this came about when I mentioned that Wayne was the reason that Saul and I had gone out together. Nadine wanted to date Wayne, but her parents said that, because she was so young (14), it needed to be a double date. Saul and I agreed to go along so that Nadine could have her first date. It was my first date, also. Wayne eventually married Pearl, who was in my Girl Scout Troop #222. Now, back to Joan. Her first husband died when she was 38. She remarried five years ago and introduced us to her second husband. He mentioned in a conversation with Saul and me that his uncle had owned a fish store in our Logan neighborhood, Zagar’s. Now, we had a “Eureka” moment, and hastened to grab Susan from a conversation elsewhere. We knew that Susan’s father was a partner in Zagar’s for several years. Susan and Larry’s father had been the partner of Joan’s husband’s uncle.

The reunion turned out to be a very pleasant evening. About 100 attended from a huge graduating class of over a thousand. The food was acceptable, the banquet hall inviting, and obviously, an enormous amount of volunteer work had gone into the planning. All at our table bought raffle tickets for door prizes, $10 for 3 tickets. The grand prizes were a $100 restaurant gift certificate and a Netbook computer. Our number was called and we won the gift certificate. While Saul was on his way back to our table with the certificate, a number was chosen for the grand prize, the computer. It was also one our numbers. A palpable hum of surprise and disappointment filled the room. We were both mortified, and with just a few words and some meaningful looks between us as he approached our table, he turned around and decided to return the computer to be raffled off to someone else. He already has a Netbook from Chestnut Hill College, along with several other laptops and computers that we own. Personally, we would have had no use for it and would have had to sell it or give it away. In hindsight, perhaps we should have kept it and given it to our friends, but it just seemed so unfair to walk away with the two grand prizes.

As the mass of graduates posed for a group photo, the atmosphere was convivial. When the women posed separately, they spontaneously broke into their school song at the mention of their alma mater and someone humming a few bars.

The worst nightmare of anyone who does computer-based presentations to groups occurred at the end of the evening. One of the organizing classmates had prepared a PowerPoint show for the occasion, with old photographs, videos and memorabilia. He had borrowed a company computer and had set up a large screen for the presentation. What came up before us all on the huge screen immediately as he began was hard-core porno! The computer virus that caused the problem was so virulent that he literally had to pull the plug to shut it down. He was freaked because he had just signed papers when borrowing the computer pledging that he would not be visiting porno or game sites. He feared for his job and we never got to see the presentation.

During the evening, my sister, Adele and her husband, Larry, called us to let us know that the mother of our mutual friend, Irv, from California, had just died. Irv’s mother, Fran, was 93 years old and was fiercely independent, insisting on staying in her home despite various health problems over the last few years. Her visiting nurse found her in a bad state of health about 3 weeks ago and had called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. She spent about 2 weeks there recovering from double pneumonia and died on Saturday night in a convalescent home after about 10 days there. Fran and my mother had been friends and we had invited her to all our family get-togethers for many years. When Irv, who originally had been Larry’s childhood friend and neighbor, had come home from the military in Viet Nam, he tried to date me, but I was waiting for Saul, who was on a carrier, The U.S.S. Forrestal, in the Navy. While on leave, Saul arranged a blind date between Irv and an Israeli girl he knew from his classes at Gratz College, Jardena. The sparks flew immediately, and they were married within a year. We all have remained friends ever since. Irv flew in from California yesterday, and his wife today from a short vacation with a girlfriend in Florida. Fran’s funeral is graveside, tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. My sister and I spent today shopping separately to make up shiva trays to serve an anticipated 35 mourners tomorrow. Saul and I made two smoked fish trays this evening and Adele made up cold cut trays.

Things Fall Apart

2010-10-20T15:15:00.002-04:00

This is the title of a very famous book written by Chinua Achebe that Jessica and I read while she was a student, many years ago, at Germantown Friends School. I highly recommend it. Suffice it to say that, as ingrained as our acceptance of tradition may be, nothing lasts unchanged, except perhaps in our memories. There, if we are lucky, reside untarnished, pleasant memories of days gone by, stylized, enhanced, and comforting. When things fall apart, we are challenged to make our way in life discomfited, without the misguided certainty that what existed yesterday will be there for us tomorrow. Being human, we seem to count on this no matter what the evidence to the contrary. Perhaps that is why people commit suicide, mistakenly thinking that tomorrow will be just as painful as (or more painful than) today. As far as I can tell, death is the only thing about life that is permanent and unchanging, and I can wait for that. In contrast to my intellectual understanding that I need to appreciate all the pleasures of today, I find that, humanly and viscerally, I cannot begin to appreciate every little thing that goes right in my day. And when dumb little things go wrong, they upset me beyond what I think should be a logical reaction to them. Such was my week.

It began with a rather large tree falling down in the strong winds that assaulted us for a few days. Seeing it lying there upset me beyond all logical reasoning. The tree, a birch, was one of the few that we were able to save when we built our house 18 years ago. When it grew large enough, after about 10 years, we were able to attach our hammock to it and spend many pleasant hours there. Intellectually, I know that we were very lucky because it could have come down when someone was in the hammock and it could have maimed or killed. It could have hit the house or deck and caused major property damage. It could have landed on my quince trees and damaged them. It could have damaged a large fir tree, or it could have blocked a neighbor’s driveway. If I could have picked the spot ahead of time, I could not have picked a better, more innocuous way for it to fall. Yet looking at the bare spot left in my landscape, I felt only sadness at the change in my view.

Another hassle was with our thermostat as temperatures began to drop in the crisp autumn weather. On the evening of the day that our hvac people came to service our heater, our electronic thermostat went blank and our heat went off. We huddled under our down comforter waiting for our trusty guys to come and replace it the next day. Feeling the chill and suffering the insecurity of this uncomfortable, albeit temporary, change, I struggled intellectually with appreciating that it could have been a much colder evening, the comforter thinner, and our service people could have been much slower to respond and fix the problem.

Having had the house up for sale, we have been discussing updating our large kitchen. I love my Wood-Mode laminated white cabinets with red oak trim, but I know that the look, while extremely practical, is very dated. This week, a hinge broke, causing a small, repairable crack in the outside edge of the laminate, and forcing Saul to remove the door. The gaping hole of the cabinet I can no longer close until we get the new hinge is also annoying me beyond all reason. I should probably take it as a sign that I really should replace the doors with something more up-to-date.

In between these petty annoyances are all the really great parts of my week—meeting Roxy and Adele for lunch at Wegman’s; and the following week meeting Roxy for lunch at Blue Sage; having dinner with Faith at Thai Orchid and attending her intellectually stimulating class on Thursday mornings; hearing Yona say “Shabbat Shalom” on the telephone as clear as a bell; listening to Izzy tell about losing her six baby teeth in the space of two weeks; speaking with Jessica every morning as she drives to work and Ari every evening as he drives home from work; and having a delicious and very inexpensive early bird dinner at the Fireside Bar and Grill with Larry, his sister, Susan, and her husband, Ted.

Only Larry and Beth joined us this week for Shabbat dinner. I baked fresh challah, made cold strawberry soup and a Capresé salad with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and fresh basil from my garden. We had leftover Mediterranean vegetable lasagna from the freezer as our main course, and for dessert we had whipped-cream-topped, Costco-bought, pumpkin pie and a huge chocolate and caramel-covered Granny Smith apple with our pumpkin flavored French-press coffee. Saul spent long hours over the weekend on his responsibilities for Chestnut Hill College, which gave me a chance to spend long hours on my desktop publishing work. Finally, taking a break on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, we got away for a few hours and visited an art gallery in Lansdale called “Water,” where an associate of Saul and Larry, and a mentor of Larry’s brother-in-law’s granddaughter, has some works of glass on exhibit. When we arrived, a short distance down the block, a street fair was in progress outside of a new tavern called Molly MacGuire’s. There was a band, teenagers in costume performing Irish dances, children and adults carving pumpkins, and the usual assortment of vendors selling everything from Phillies sweatshirts to jewelry.

My work has been very frustrating this week as the people with whom I am working on this new publication do not have a full understanding of what it is that I do, and I am having trouble explaining the technical aspects of my work to people who have no technical expertise. They are very nice people, so I guess we will work it out to everyone’s satisfaction eventually.

In spite of the fact that we can be sure, in this universe, that things fall apart, I will continue to strive for the day-to-day appreciation of the myriad of wonderful blessings in my life which I so take for granted, and try not to let depression, pessimism, and pettiness get the better of me.

The End of the Holidays and The Beginning of 5771

2010-10-11T20:37:00.004-04:00

As we had planned, we spent Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah in Baltimore/DC with Ari and Jessica. Heavy rains in the area with thunderstorms caused unbelievable flooding such as DC had not known in many years. I wandered around the synagogue following my beautiful toddler, Yona, who loves to play with water fountains and is familiar with every nook and cranny in the gigantic building. On Simchat Torah, Alex had unraveled a Torah on long tables all the way across a large reception hall, laying paper markers on pertinent sections so that many of the children, working in teams for the contest, could have clues to answer questions about it with stickers on a three-page questionnaire—a sort of Torah scavenger hunt. We had lunch at the synagogue. Ari joined us at Jess and Alex’s for Shabbat dinner, wonderful as usual with Alex’s fantastic soups, chicken, and imaginative salads with ingredients from the Pearlstone CSA. During our weekend in DC, we spent an evening with Ralph, a fellow professor at Chestnut Hill College, and his wife, Ann Marie, meeting them at sunset on the Eastern Shore to dine by the waterside at Harris’s again. Saul and Ari picked up a few more shirts and sweaters at the Queenstown Outlet Mall. Saul, Ari and I also spent a few hours weeding a huge amount of crabgrass out of his new garden and replacing a few of his plants that had expired in the unusually hot month of September with new ones. We added a few new perennials on the theory that the more plants, the less weeds. After just a couple of hours, his front garden looked spectacular! I think that he is actually beginning to enjoy gardening a bit, taking pride in the fact that it is his garden, and enjoying the compliments of his neighbors. All too soon, it was time to head home again to begin our first full week of the school year.

Monday afternoon, my friend Laura, whom I hadn’t seen for several months, met me at the Metropolitan Diner for lunch and we caught up as much as we could with each others’ lives. During the week, I noticed, among my email, a cupcake contest for Scharffen-Berger chocolate. They provide a list of “adventure” ingredients from which to choose along with their chocolate. I began to think about it. The next day, there was a notification in my email of an event taking place, connected with that contest, that evening in two locations around the country. One of them was in a vegan bakery in Columbia Heights, Sticky Fingers, just a few blocks from Ari’s house. I took this as a sign and incentive and spent an afternoon inventing a delicious new filled cupcake using a few of the adventure ingredients. I was very happy with the results.

On Wednesday evening, along with Beth, we went to meet Ken and Randi at Luigi’s in Warrington for a late dinner to belatedly celebrate Beth’s August birthday. My dinner was an absolutely picture-perfect sashimi-quality tuna steak, perfectly seared rare, with grill marks so geometric and perfect that Saul joked that they must have been applied with Magic Marker and a ruler. It was glazed with a cumin-scented balsamic reduction. This was accompanied by perfectly-cooked homemade pappardelle in garlic and oil, perfectly dressed. Yum! None of us had room for dessert. Perfectly guilt-free, too!

Thursday morning was this year’s launch of Faith’s weekly study group which, over the last 20 years, has moved from a Bible-study group to a discussion of Jewish history, particularly the Talmudic period. I stopped on the way home at Trader Joe’s to pick up cans of organic pumpkin so that Laura and I could bake pumpkin-face cookies together on Friday morning as we had discussed previously. Saul was able to finish up at school and join me for lunch at a reasonable hour. I had been craving a visit to our nearby Indian buffet, Sultan, but although the food was delicious and satisfying, we both suffered afterward for having overindulged, especially in their rich and ample desserts, such as gulab jamun, currant-studded rice pudding, barfi, sweet carrots, fried honeyed pastries, etc. etc. When we returned home, we took down the Sukkah. Thursday evening, I made four batches of cookie dough and six batches of pumpkin butter filling for them.

Friday morning, while Saul caught up with endless amounts of paperwork from this semester as department chairman, and worked on our very overdue income taxes, Laura and I had a blast turning out about seven dozen gorgeous cookies. She called this morning to say that they had come in very handy this weekend as her youngest daughter had just become engaged, and on the spur-of-the-moment, she had entertained the whole family with a dinner to celebrate. Saul and I ducked out after she left to take care of her dog on Friday to deliver a few cookies to our friend Dori, who manages Lee’s Hoagies in Montgomeryville, (a long-standing tradition that began many years ago) and share a sandwich before heading home to prepare Shabbat dinner. We stopped at Assi Market and Redner’s to pick up some produce and Glad silicon trays to pack away my cookies in the freezer. Most of the dinner came from the freezer this week, including smoked turkey split pea soup and stuffed cabbage. I did make fresh challah, kasha and bow ties, and iceberg lettuce wedges with Russian dressing. Faith, who came with Larry, brought her pareve blond brownies and chocolate and marshmallow-topped brownies from her freezer supply for dessert. Saul cut up the pineapple from our Sukkah fruit basket. It was a wonderful and relaxing evening, and not too much work.

Saturday morning, we attended services at MBI-EE, where two of our congregants were honored for their many hours of volunteer work, one for the Yiddish club, and the other for organizing and teaching the children’s services. After a celebratory luncheon there, we headed for Lion’s Gate to visit Saul’s mom, who had been moved into a more supervisory wing by Saul’s sister as her condition has been deteriorating. We were pleased to find her in good spirits, although it is obvious that her mind is mostly gone. The facilities were clean, neat, and attractive, and her semi-private room is divided by a wall of closets and drawers into two distinct spaces to provide a more private feeling. She knew that we were friends and was happy to have the attention from us. When we arrived, she was at a table with a therapist and a group of others doing a hand-eye coordination task of putting small objects into a cup. She had a small, soft blanket over her shoulders and spent most of the time that we were there conversing with her folding and unfolding it, smoothing it out, and telling us that she was planning to buy it. She asked us about her father. When I asked what she remembered about her father, she only said that she remembered that he was a “good man.” She did not remember anyone we asked about, including her husband, sister, children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. Physically, she looked okay, and her ankles were not swollen as they had been. I asked about the food and she said it was very good and she was very happy with it. In her pocket, along with some packets of crackers that she was hoarding, was a printed list with ounce-by-ounce quantities of everything she had eaten for lunch. It was a better lunch than we had eaten earlier. We spoke with the rabbi at Lion’s Gate, whom she sees regularly, as we ran into each other in the hallway, and privately, he lamented the dramatic loss of her ability to express herself and to read the Hebrew text as she had when she first came. But, he also spoke about the joyfulness with which she approaches the service and rituals, and about the blessing that she is in no pain and seems very happy with her situation.

Saul and I napped briefly after completing the hour-long drive home. Then, Faith came over and we went to the new Whole Foods in Plymouth Meeting Mall for a snack before seeing the movie, Eat Pray Love at the AMC theater there. The prepared food selection at Whole Foods was mind-boggling and we just walked around in that wing of the store gaping at the exquisite displays for about half and hour before choosing our late dinners. In addition to the usual prepared food case, there was a fresh pasta bar where you could choose from about a dozen fresh pastas and then choose from a half-dozen sauces to accompany them. There was a pizza bar, a salad bar, a bakery, a gelateria, cheese cases, olive bars, a meat station, and, I am sure, many other selections about which I have forgotten because it was all so overwhelming. Housed within the store, as sort of a store-within-a-store, is a really cool-looking wine and beer-tasting bar. The attractive wooden tables and chairs and pub-like atmosphere would provide a great place to lounge with those who are into wine before a movie or shopping trip and it appears to be largely undiscovered on a Saturday night. Upstairs, there is a large, tree-lined roof-deck for hanging out in nice weather. The movie, starring Julia Roberts, had a mere taste of the richness of the book, but we all enjoyed it for its escapism potential and spectacular and quirky scenery.

On Sunday, Saul needed to complete and deliver the income taxes to our accountant, so just Faith and I met and went to see The Social Network at the restored Ambler Theater after a brief walk up and down Butler Pike to window shop the cute little stores. A bride and groom were being professionally photographed in the lobby when we entered. We both enjoyed the movie which was, thankfully, much more about friendship and betrayal than software. Saul and I had dinner at home on Sunday night to clean up leftovers from Friday. For better or worse, home is still the best restaurant in town.