A new hat

This is adapted from a piece I wrote for my memoir writing class.

Before heading off to college in the fall of 1970, I bought a soft white felt hat with a large floppy brim, then in style. I can still remember walking around campus in that hat, which was a terrific ice breaker and helped me make many new friends.

I did not start wearing hats again until some years later when I began attending a traditional synagogue, where married women wear some kind of head covering. Most of the many hats I have owned over the years were a variation on the same theme that seemed to work best for the shape of my face: a simple hat with a moderately wide brim.

The chemotherapy I received after my cancer diagnosis caused most of my hair to fall out. To minimize the mess, I had my hair cut very short. It was early summer, and I bought a few cotton knit hats with modest brims that I would throw on when leaving the house. By this summer my hair had returned but I still wore those same hats to synagogue or as sun protection. Then the fall arrived. I had a couple of well-worn hats that had been bought in more recent years, and half a closet full of older hats. The older hats were large, with rather wide brims, the type I had favored for many years. But the significant weight loss that came along with the chemotherapy left me with a thinner face and somewhat smaller head circumference, so the hats in my closet made me look like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s old clothing.

So I set out to a hat store on the Upper West Side. We had driven past the store many times, sometimes stopping at the traffic light just outside the store, and the hats in the window looked nice. When we walked in, I was drawn to a grey hat with an asymmetric brim, longer on the right side, and adorned with a peacock feather and a navy blue velvet ribbon tied in a bow. It was not a hat I would have ever expected to buy and cost quite a bit more than I would have ever expected to spend. Yet somehow that hat was calling to me and fit perfectly.

A difficult experience may change who we are and how we see ourselves. I was moderately overweight throughout most of my adult life, and although I lost the weight over a year ago, I still find my image in the mirror somewhat surprising. Before last year, I spent years in black clothing. Now, having survived through a dark storm, and being newly thin, I find myself drawn to bold colors and new ideas. In the past, I never would have bought an asymmetric hat, let alone one with a peacock feather. But the detour of this past year and a half has taught me to find new meaning and even a sense of balance in alternative routes.

It started as a simple trip to a hat store, but it became so much more.

Although today was relatively mild, it is fair to say that we have seen the last of the warm weather for a while. I am not particularly fond of winter, but this year I find myself thinking about a prayer traditionally said on holidays and milestone occasions:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this time.

I cannot say I am a fan of snow, but this year I feel I will be especially grateful to be seeing it fall once again.

Have a good week.

Love,

Rebecca

Six Word Memoirs

In the writing class I am taking, we have worked a couple of times on something called “Six Word Memoirs.” This is a fun exercise, an effort to express the meaning of life in six words.

Here are a few I have penned:

Math comes easily, writing less so

Love to sing, consider yourself warned

Wash clothes, wear clothes, wash clothes

Clean, shop, schlep, cook, eat, clean

Friday Times crossword far too difficult

Passover Eve: kitchen ready, am I?

Hours spent cooking, minutes spent eating

MRI: big white blob, bad sign

Brain MRI: do not open eyes

College, babies, graduate school: good order?

Is Chanukah early or Christmas late?

Memory loss....don’t know, I forgot

I had no idea that this was a common tool until I stumbled upon a website called “Six Word War,” which posts six word memoirs written by troops in Afghanistan. We don’t tend to think of the young men and women who serve in the military as creative writers, but there is some amazingly moving material there.

Six Word War

It has been cold the last couple of days so I have been primarily indoors. I do hope to venture out today to go to my class. Tomorrow, we are off to Sharon. We haven’t seen the children and grandchildren in two and a half weeks, so we’re really looking forward to it.

Stay warm and have a nice weekend!

Love,

Rebecca

A heartwarming story

All too often these days we hear about bad or downright evil things that are said or done in the name of religion. So it is refreshing to catch the following on the news last night. This is definitely one to share with our grandchildren!

http://www.youtube.com/v/OghL84kBrPk?autohide=1&version=3&attribution_tag=O1eyFMKS4vKyPwc6XrH9uw&autohide=1&autoplay=1&feature=share&showinfo=1

And in case you haven’t figured out those word scrambles from the last post, the Jeopardy questions are:

$400: What is ALGEBRA?

$600: What is STATISTICS?

Have a great day!

Love,

Rebecca

Jumbled words

The first round of Jeopardy that aired last evening included a category called “School Subjects.” Here are two of the answers:

$400

Expressive Math

RAGE LAB

$600

The World by Numbers

SIT CATS SIT

Questions to follow in next post!

Love,

Rebecca

Peaceful easy feeling

We had a quiet Sabbath because we wanted to rest up for last night: The Eagles at Madison Square Garden. We went to synagogue in the morning and played two games of Rummikub in the afternoon and Barry won one of them!

Neither of us can quite remember when we were last at Madison Square Garden, but sometime between then and now it has undergone a fairly significant renovation and, like so many places in New York City in recent years, it is actually quite a bit nicer than we remembered it. Our seats were fair, but these days with the big screens you can actually “see” the band quite well. We had stopped on the way in to pick up some earplugs, so we were all set.

This show was part of the band’s “History of the Eagles” tour, and that is exactly what it was. They basically went through all of their most popular music, sprinkling in only a few less familiar tunes. The first half was largely folk-inspired, beginning with just Glenn Frey and Don Henley on acoustic guitars, then gradually adding others including Timothy Schmit and Joe Walsh, who joined for such hits as “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Witchy Woman.” The volume was cranked up for the second half of the show but it never became painful and we never even used those earplugs!

The full house was quite enthusiastic, at least as much as we aging baby boomers can be. I doubt there were more than a handful of people under 50 there. There is a part of me that wonders how depressing that must be for the band: despite having continued to create new music throughout their 40 years together, the crowd really just wants to hear the first few years of their repertoire. It brings to mind a line I shared once before from a James Taylor song,

Fortune and fame’s such a curious game,
Perfect strangers can call you buy name.

Pay good money to hear “Fire and Rain,”

Again and again and again.

But, like they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! And the music that brought the Eagles to fame back in the 1970s is still, to quote one of their songs, “the best of their love.” We are left with that peaceful, easy feeling.

In a complete change of gears, we are going this afternoon to a concert at the 92^nd Street Y that would have likely escaped my notice if not for the music class I am taking there:

Exclusive New York engagement
Hagen Quartet
      Lukas Hagen, violin
      Rainer Schmidt, violin
      Veronika Hagen, viola
      Clemens Hagen, cello

BEETHOVEN:
String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132 
String Quartet in E minor, Op. 59, No. 2

The Hagen Quartet will be playing all of Beethoven’s string quartets in a series of a half dozen concerts, but this was the only date that worked for us. Because I am enrolled in a music course there, we even got a discount!

Have a good start to this week.

Love,

Rebecca

Digging through my closet

Where have the last few days gone?

We had a very nice Sabbath in Riverdale. We went to Hebrew Institute and were fortunate that Elli Kranzler led both Kabbalat Shabbat (welcoming the Sabbath on Friday evening) and Shabbat Mussaf (part of the morning service). He has a wonderful voice and style, primarily using tunes of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. It is always a treat to hear him.

It was nice having that extra hour on Saturday night. On Sunday, we planned to head up to Woodbury Commons, an outdoor outlet mall about an hour away from here, and I spent some time mapping out our excursion; I printed a mall map off the web site and annotated it with the stores I wanted to visit. It was a lovely ride towards Upstate New York through the last of the fall colors. Unfortunately, the shopping part of the trip was quite disappointing. The mall was extremely crowded, with long lines in many of the stores. We noticed quite a few people with large wheeled suitcases, apparently a new solution to the problem of lugging their bounty. But I am not sure what all those folks were buying, because I found very little to my liking. We have many fond memories of trips to that mall, most of them with our then teen- and college-aged daughters, after which we returned home to voice mail messages from the credit card company wanting to confirm our purchases. Such calls are proof positive that you have spent too much! Shopping for just me, the damage was not that serious. On the other side of the highway from the outlet mall is the Eileen Fisher outlet store, and although our last visit there a couple of years ago had been a complete waste of time, this time I was able to buy two very nice skirts and sweaters, and this redeemed the trek out there.

Having bought quite a bit of new clothing over the past year, I realized that the moment has come to start cleaning out my drawers and closets filled with larger-size clothing I no longer wear. I spent a good part of Monday working on that, and have just one more small closet to get through. For the moment I have put the clothes in large bags that I have labeled (sweaters, summer shirts, etc.) and Barry is schlepping them up to the cedar closet in the attic. I am just not ready to state definitively that I will never need them again, although I hope not. At least now I have plenty of room to easily store all the clothes I have bought during the past year and a half. And of course I had a song going through my head as I worked on this: an old David Roth song called “Digging Through My Closet.” I do not have a video but am attaching a recording here.

We are quite relieved that today is election day – we had grown tired of the incessant ads weeks ago.

Have a nice week.

Love,

Rebecca

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2iIonzFMTqGd09mYWc0enBpZnc/edit?usp=sharing\

They once were lost, but now they're found

For the last couple of days I have practically torn the house apart. It started with a search for a particular sweater I wanted to wear now that the weather has grown colder. But suddenly yesterday I remembered that there were three other sweaters that had gone AWOL. Now I started to become suspicious. So, although we no longer have the receipt for the winter clothes we took to the local dry cleaners last spring and picked up shortly thereafter, we stopped in in to ask if by any chance they had come across four sweaters. The very nice lady, who knows Barry quite well from his regular visits, insisted that they had none of our clothing  sitting unclaimed. We came home and I was pretty much ready to just call it quits on those sweaters when the phone rang – the lady from the dry cleaner found my sweaters! Barry went right up there and it turns out they also had a pair of his pants. Note to self: keep a list of the items we take to the cleaners!

Yesterday in the memoir writing course we had a few in-class assignments. So Janet, the instructor, said to our all-female class, “this next assignment is one I have wanted to use for a class sometime, but the last couple of years every class has had some males. So now is my chance!” The assignment was to write something about monthly periods or menopause. Most shared stories of their first time. A number of their mothers had not had “the talk” with them and those made for interesting stories. I do not have any dramatic story to tell, but I started writing about how girls are developing at much younger ages than they used to, and with a granddaughter who is 8 years old it may not be long before the next generation comes of age. And then I wrote:

“Note to self: a new idea for an American Girl doll accessory: little pads!”

 I don’t think anything I have written in class has ever received a bigger laugh.

We have seen a couple of movies. The first was a documentary called “Casting by…,” about Marion Doherty, who for many years was a widely acclaimed casting director for films. There were wonderfully fascinating interviews with a wide variety of actors and directors who had worked with her over the years, as well as some other well-known casting directors, such as Juliet Taylor, a name that Woody Allen fans will recognize. We had never really thought about this, but there is no Oscar award category for casting. Late in Ms. Doherty’s life, there was a significant effort to change this involving an enormous number of signatures from quite influential actors and directors. But in the end, The Motion Picture Academy refused to add this award. Ms. Doherty died a couple of years ago, and in many ways we felt that this movie was the tribute she should have been able to hold in her hands before she died. It was a well done and moving documentary.

The other movie we saw was “All is Lost.” There is just one actor in this movie, Robert Redford, and other than a brief monologue at the beginning, there is no speaking. He plays a rugged 70-something who takes off solo in a magnificent yacht on a long trip in the crystal blue waters of the Indian Ocean between Indonesia and Madagascar. One night the boat runs into the remains of a large shipping container filled with sneakers that had fallen from a cargo ship. After he pushes away from the container, he sees that his yacht is left with a large hole in its side. With great calm and ingenuity he manages to patch the hole, but can no longer use any of his water-logged navigational or communications equipment. He calmly pulls out maps and charts a course. But the worst is yet to come when he sails into a severe storm. By the end of this harrowing event, he is left on a small inflatable raft with a small emergency kit and little food and water in the middle of a huge ocean. There are a couple of instances where he can see boats in the distance but they do not see the emergency flares he sends into the air.

Truth be told, I did not really see the entire movie. I found it so excruciatingly painful that there were periods I simply could not watch. Not wanting to disrupt Barry or the other movie-goers, which would have happened had I tried to leave the theater, I simply put my head down and covered my eyes for those segments. I know many of you are thinking, “it’s only a movie, don’t take it so seriously.” But perhaps what I can say is my reaction is testimony to how really excellent the story and acting were. I am not going to tell you how the story ends, because I do not want to ruin anything for those of you who may have a chance to see it.

I went home wondering why I had subjected myself to this particular torture, but by the next day, with a little distance from the excruciating agony, I was able to start recognizing just how amazing this film was. The film can be seen on many levels, but is perhaps first and foremost a testimony to how much we humans inevitably, at some point in our lives, need help navigating our way. For most of is, it may not be as dramatic as being abandoned at sea. But whether due to illness or accident or loss, we were not meant to go it completely alone. I have been unbelievably fortunate to have Barry, my daughters, my sons-in-law, my grandchildren, my doctors, and a large circle of friends to help me navigate this new course I was forced to travel. With all of that help, I have continued on my journey, ever hopeful that I will stay on course and arrive at whatever destination I desire.

Love,

Rebecca