One memory leads to another

When our daughters read my last post about our changing a tire on the side of I-95 in Connecticut back in 1986, they were reminded of another one of our impressive accomplishments a couple of years later.

Gas barbeque grills had become very popular, and now that we were living in a house we wanted to be able to enjoy the summer evenings outdoors. There was a choice: buy a “kit” and put the grill together yourself, or pay an additional charge to have the store construct the grill. I cannot recall just how expensive it was but things were tight for us so we said “how hard can this be?” and bought the kit.

The girls tell us that they still remember how we spread the whole thing out in the family room and came home every evening for about a week to work on it. The two scientists might just as well have been solving the secrets of the genetic code for all the serious effort that went into this exercise! But we did get it up and running and enjoyed many barbeques in our backyard on Brook Road.

Meanwhile, a new movie had piqued our interest, “Maggie’s Plan.” Maggie (Greta Gerwig) is a single woman in her early thirties who wants to be a mother, although she has no marriage prospects in the foreseeable future. She makes arrangements with Guy, a fellow who creates and sells artisanal pickles (hard not to think about the charming 1988 movie with Amy Irving, “Crossing Delancey”). By the time the assigned date arrives, she has met and started to fall for another man, John (Ethan Hawke). Their situation is further complicated by the fact that John is married. The movie then fast forwards about three years, and the next we see of them, Maggie and John are now the married parents of an adorable little girl. Sadly, John is beginning to experience the same disinterest that plagued his first marriage. I do not want to go further and ruin the ending.

As he so often does, the New York Times’ reviewer A.O. Scott said it well:

“Maggie’s Plan” is a modest movie, reluctant, like its heroine, to make large claims or excessive demands. But it is also clear eyed, generous and funny — tart but not sour, sweet but not too sweet, like one of Guy’s pickles.

We have a full few days coming up. Friday is Grandparents’ Day at Striar Hebrew Academy in Sharon, so both we and Simmie’s in-laws will be there for the weekend. We are having Friday night dinner with Dina and family, and Joshua is joining us for lunch. If the weather is good I suspect we will head back to their house shortly after lunch so the “boys” can play baseball in the yard. On Sunday we are hoping to take Julia on an outing to the Roger Williams Zoo. By this age (over 2) we had taken her siblings and cousins out on their own. But I guess we are older now and it is a bit more difficult for us to do. Ella, who is nearly a second mother to Julia, is going to come with us, so we get to have lots of fun with both of them. Sunday evening Ella is celebrating her upcoming birthday with a few friends, and then on Monday we all plan to gather for a Memorial Day family barbeque.

I hope to have some pictures to share from all of that!

Be well and enjoy the warm weather that is on its way.

Love,

Rebecca

Red letter days

We all have our red letter days, dates that we mark privately or within our immediate families that mean nothing in particular to our friends or extended family. Something happened this morning that may very well make it one of those days.

Many moons ago, on the final leg of our road trip/move from Dallas to Sharon, we had a flat tire on our blue Ford Maverick. It was early on a Sunday morning, long before the days of cell phones, so we were on our own to change the tire. I still remember dragging the girls out of the car, putting them well behind the roadside barrier, and telling them quite sternly that they were not to move so we could focus on the task at hand. My guess is that they were at least as frightened as we were, never having seen their parents engage in such activities, and they did not so much as move a muscle. We approached this task the way any two scientists would: we took out the owner’s manual and read the step by step instructions on how to use the jack, lift the car, take off the damaged tire, and put on the spare tire. We then made our way to the next exit to make sure the bolts were tight and we had sufficient air in that tire to complete the trip. We talked about this for years as a major highlight of our journey from Dallas to Sharon.

That was back in 1986, and in the last thirty years I do not believe we have accomplished anything quite as noteworthy, including many papers published and grants funded (Barry), pharmaceutical compounds approved by FDA (Rebecca), and raising two daughters through college and weddings and welcoming five grandchildren. But it all changed yesterday.

I mentioned a few days ago that we have been having some plumbing work done in our house. The upstairs level of the house has three bathrooms (one in each of the bedrooms) and a powder room, and the downstairs has one bathroom in the 4^th bedroom/office, for a total of 4½ bathrooms. That downstairs bathroom was the one causing the trouble. But shortly after the plumber turned off the water to that bathroom, we lost the water in the upstairs master bathroom sink. We couldn’t figure out why, but we moved our toothbrushes to the powder room and assumed that when the water was turned back on we would have our bathroom sink back. But when the water was restored to the downstairs bathroom, it was still not running upstairs. It would drip a bit, and eventually came out in a very thin stream, but clearly something was wrong. The plumber had left by the time we realized that the problem had not resolved, and we thought we would just have to wait for his return.

After a couple of days, something got into my head. I do not know why but it suddenly occurred to me that maybe something was stuck in the faucet itself. Here is where the years of making the kitchen kosher for Passover come in handy. One of the steps of cleaning in the kitchen is to remove the tip of the faucet and clean out the little mesh piece inside. Lo and behold when I removed this I found the small mesh piece covered in gunk that must have been relocated by the pressure of shutting off the downstairs water. I cleaned it off, put the faucet back together and voila – return of the water!

I realize that many of you are just scratching your heads wondering what the big deal is. Barry grew up in a household largely devoid of tools, and although my father was a bit more adept at simple repairs I do not think many girls who grew up in the 1950s and 60s had fathers who taught them such things. Now my only concern is that Barry seems far too impressed with this accomplishment and he may get some ideas about other household projects I might be able to tackle….oy!

Have a wonderful weekend.

Love,

Rebecca

So many weeks, so little time

So many weeks, so little time

Where have these last few weeks gone? I last wrote during Passover. There is a tradition to count the days between the start of Passover and the next major holiday of Shavuot (literally, weeks) that begins 7 weeks later. Since we are now at Day 22, I know it must have been close to three weeks since my last post.

We returned to New York as planned during the middle of Passover so Barry could attend some meetings in New York, and had the final two days of the holiday here. But we were quite busy that week, because that was when the workers were ready to begin the major work in Barry’s mother’s (may she rest in peace) apartment which required that everything be moved out. We had decided that we would keep some of the furniture, including the dining room set (table, chairs, breakfront, and server) and master bedroom set. There was also some upholstered furniture that Barry’s grandfather had made years ago which was going to Barry’s cousin.  All the pieces are now in their new homes. We are still figuring out just what goes where in this newfound space. We have moved our nice china to the breakfront, something we had never owned. We divided the bedroom furniture between two previously sparsely furnished bedrooms in our house. We are still working on choosing fabric to reupholster the dining room chairs. In the hubbub the table pads, which may have been in sufficiently good shape to use, were accidentally taken by the “Got Junk?” folks and new ones have been ordered. My project of organizing the family photographs has been at a standstill as we have dealt with these other matters.

It might be fair to say that we had been living in quite an under-furnished home, because even with all the newly acquired good-sized pieces, the only room that looks just a tad over furnished is one of the bedrooms. We selected and are waiting for a few new lamps to finish up this project.

Meanwhile, we started a project in our own house to repair a problem in one of our bathrooms. We are hoping the plumber will complete that this week, but as is always the case with home ownership, there remains a list of more things to be done.

Meanwhile, this sort of works begs for an escape, and we have managed to see a couple of movies. The first was “Sing Street.” What I did not appreciate until I just sat down to write is that the movie was directed by John Carney, who nearly ten years ago directed a terrific low-budget movie called “Once.” The music and story later became the core of a quite popular Broadway show of the same name, winning 8 Tony Awards in 2012. In a way, I am glad I had not made that connection, because that enabled me to think of them together without any particular bias. Fair and square: “Once” comes out on top. This newer effort was a bit too slick, with an edge that “Once” did not have.

The second movie was “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” which stars Dev Patel (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) as the brilliant mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan traveled from his native Madras (now called Chennai) to study under G.H. Hardy (played by Jeremy Irons) and became the first Indian to hold a Fellowship there. When he first arrived in Cambridge, he was taunted and insulted, but over time as he restrained the hurt and continued to produce amazing proofs he was able to convince the mathematicians that of his brilliance. Unfortunately he suffered from various illnesses throughout his short life, and died at age 32 in 1920.

I have shared a summary of our lives over the past few weeks, but this post has one special highlight: a picture of all the Rosenstein/Hefetz/Saks ladies together. There is also a little guy hiding in that picture. Our grandchildren will be in perfect symmetry: BGGGGB! We look forward to greeting this new person for the fall holidays.

Be well, all!

Love,

Rebecca