Not just a turkey!

Addition for Thanksgiving: Maya made this at school today. Notice the pattern, very carefully thought out, with interesting symmetries. That’s my girl!

Grammar lessons

We often find ourselves correcting our elementary school grandchildren’s use of the English language. Among the incorrect phrases they are often heard to say is “me and my friend played a game.” Our corrections motivate them to practice rolling their eyes.

We were a bit surprised to hear President Obama say the following last week (emphasis mine):

“To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”

The use of “my” or “me” in this sentence is actually rather complicated. A non-finite verb form that can function as a noun is called a gerund. The gerund is the form that names the action of the verb (for instance, “acting” is the action of "to act"). So in the sentence quoted here, “acting” is functioning as a noun, which would suggest that “my” would be the better choice. Another choice is to rework the sentence a bit, and say

“To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the action I took when Congress failed to act, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”

But here is a somewhat less flattering thought. The phrase "me acting where Congress has failed" might seem as though the Congress does not object so much to what Mr. Obama did but rather simply does not like Mr. Obama personally. Is it possible that the President is a stickler for grammar and said precisely what he was trying to say?

I sit here listening to an endless stream of bad news from my home town of St. Louis. I am not sure I was ever in Florissant but I just took a look at Google Maps and it is only about 15 miles from where I lived as a girl. The pain of the family and community is very sad indeed.

For some years after our daughter Simmie was born 12 weeks prematurely, I found myself amazed at every full-term healthy baby born among our friends. Of course everyone knows that a healthy baby is a miracle, but fortunately most of us do not have to experience this feeling in such a stark way. That same sort of feeling has come over me quite a few times during the past 2½ years as I have seen a number of friends receive cancer diagnoses. But the latest is especially poignant: one of Barry’s students, a radiation oncology resident at Mt. Sinai, is now undergoing cancer treatment.

One of the really nice things that comes from being part of a traditional Jewish community is the way that people pitch in to help families in need. Not surprisingly, the primary activity revolves around food. Whether it is providing meals for families sitting shiva (the week of mourning) for a loved one or for families welcoming a new baby, there never seems to be a lack of volunteers. For some years I coordinated this activity for our synagogue in Riverdale. These days there are web sites that help to organize the meals and communicate the recipient family’s preferences and allergies, much easier than all those phone calls I used to make! What I never realized until now is that this is also done outside the traditional Jewish community. A couple of the other residents set up a page on Care Calendar, and we were honored to have an opportunity to prepare a dinner for the resident and her father, who has come to take care of her during treatment, and look forward to doing this again.

We are planning to head up to Sharon tomorrow morning. Let’s hope the weather cooperates, and the snow ends this evening with plenty of time to clear the roads.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Love,

Rebecca

Rosewater

Once again, a week has passed since my last post, but I sit at the computer feeling overwhelming sadness. Whatever I may have planned to write has been overshadowed by the news from Israel, the murder of four innocent men saying the morning prayers at a synagogue in Jerusalem. There are never many degrees of separation between traditional Jews. Even if we are not personally acquainted with the victims, it is not unusual for us to know someone who is related to or friends of the victim’s family. Last week, a young woman was killed whose family is well known to friends of ours. Today, one of the four victims of the attack was the brother of a woman who lives with her family diagonally across the street from us.  

We had been anxious to see Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, “Rosewater,” and were able to squeeze it in when we returned to New York. Given the recent events, this seemed an appropriate film to see. Although the reviews were not overwhelmingly positive (a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes), as fans of The Daily Show we just had to see it. Having said that, I have always had some trouble watching movies with violence, and at this point I generally try to completely steer clear of them. So I went into this with some trepidation, and I did have to close my eyes during some scenes.  

Rosewater is based on The New York Times best-selling memoir "Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival," written by Maziar Bahari. Bahari was born and raised in Iran but moved to the UK as an adult, where he worked for the BBC. In 2009, he returned to Iran to interview Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who was the prime challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After sending the BBC film footage of the street riots that followed the obviously rigged election, Bahari was arrested by police. What followed was a nightmarish 118 days during which he was interrogated and tortured by a man who frequently sprayed himself with rosewater. Unbeknownst to Bahari, as well as to moviegoers until the very end, his wife lead an international campaign to have her husband freed, and Western media outlets kept the story alive. Iranian authorities finally released Bahari on $300,000 bail and the promise he would act as a spy for the government.

Although I almost assuredly would never have seen this movie if not for Jon Stewart’s role in bringing it to the screen, I thought it was extremely well done. If you are able to watch such films, I highly recommend it, but it is definitely not a fun date night.

It is not yet winter, but the way it feels outside it might as well be. So stay warm and have a good week!

Love,

Rebecca 

Finding roots

A week has passed since my last post, busy with relatively mundane activities. Dina was attending a workshop out of town for a couple of days, so we went up to Sharon to be grandparents. The older children had school and Julia went to her regular daycare while Barry worked I prepared dinners and Sabbath meals. The three days flew by, and somehow I never even got around to taking any pictures. We are heading back to Sharon this weekend. We will spend Shabbat with Simmie and family, and then on Sunday Barry and I are taking Joshua and Ella to a hockey game, the Providence Bruins (the development team for the Boston Bruins) vs. the Portland Pirates, the beginning of a bunch of tickets to sporting and theatrical events we have bought as Chanukah presents.

A few years ago I “friended” singer/songwriter Carole King on FaceBook. Although I only look at FB occasionally, she (or, more likely, her representatives) appears to post quite frequently. A few days ago I caught a blurb about an upcoming episode of the PBS series; “Finding Your Roots” called “Our People, Our Traditions” featuring Carole King, playwright Tony Kushner, and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.  Something reminded me about it yesterday, and I found it on-line. It is long (an hour) but is interesting and really quite moving. With the storm on its way to these parts, having already hit our Midwestern friends with snow and frigid temperatures, it is a good chance to fix yourself a cup of hot tea or cocoa and sit back and enjoy this.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365359298/

We also found a couple of hours to sneak out and see the new documentary, Citizenfour. The making of this movie is a pretty amazing story. In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras was several years into making a film about surveillance in the post-9/11 era when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as "CITIZENFOUR," who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. In June 2013, she and Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for The Guardian, flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Edward Snowden. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes. 

There are many difficult questions raised by this story. How worried should we all be about the massive amounts of our personal information available to so many people? It goes without saying that much of the answer to this question depends on how the individuals accessing this data intend to use it. Most of us would agree that the lack of a repeat of September 11^th, 2001, is a very good thing, even at the cost of sacrificing some privacy. But do we need this much surveillance to prevent a repeat of that horrific event? How will we ever know? How worried should we be or do we have to be if we know we have not done and do not intend to do anything wrong? At the end of the day, Barry and I did not find Snowden all that much of a hero. I am in no position to judge how much damage he might have done to our national security, but I am not convinced that he found out anything we all needed to know about the overwhelming majority of citizens both here and abroad. As I have discussed about airline security, we need to become smarter and more focused in this work. Still, it is an incredibly well done documentary and worth seeing.

Have a good week, and stay warm!

Love,

Rebecca 

Great for the soul

I should read movie reviews more carefully before I go to see movies. An approval rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes does not guarantee that I will enjoy or appreciate a film. We did not want to go into the City on Sunday because of that little group of 50,000 runners participating in The New York City Marathon, so we chose a film that was playing at a small art-house theater in Westchester not far from here, “Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.” I am hard pressed to call my relative ignorance “virtuous;” this was one very strange film. To be honest, I spent much of the two hours completely lost, and was only able to piece things together with some help from movie reviews read as I sat down to write this.

The main character is Riggan Thomas (played by very different Michael Keaton than “Mr. Mom” over thirty years ago), a once known but now washed up iconic super hero called "The Birdman" who had recently turned down a fourth installment of the franchise. Now washed up, he attempts to reinvent himself as a director by staging a new retelling of a classic Broadway dramatic play called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." The days leading up to the premier find the cast suffering one disaster after another, including an on-set injury of the lead actor and a scramble to find a replacement. Riggan gives the role to a method actor who takes the job quite seriously. But Riggan has a hard time juggling between the set, his replacement actor, his troubled daughter, and a host of other disasters that prevent a proper staging of the play. Meanwhile, a New York Times critic who Riggan has to woo threatens to shut down production of the play before it even starts with a scathing review of the opening night performance. All of this is told going in and out of disturbing hallucinations Riggan experiences. Does Riggan have a hit on his hands or will he even make it past opening night? I do not want to share the ending lest any of you wish to see this film. But you might think about saving your time and money. 

There is a quintessential New York City grocery store on the Upper West Side (Broadway and 91^st Street) called Barzini’s. It is not an entirely kosher store but they happen to carry many kosher items, and they are located across the street from Kosher Marketplace, a kosher grocery and prepared food emporium that we tend to frequent. Some months ago Barry noticed that Barzini’s sells Chocolat Bonnat, a line of certified kosher chocolates from France. There are at least eight types of chocolates, with names like Ceylan, Madagascar, and Trinite (you can check these out at  

Chocolat Bonnat

When Barry is in that neighborhood he often stops in and buys them for me, even stockpiling them in some hidden place to whip out a new one when I have finished the previous one (yes, I can hear all the sighs and “what a sweet guy he is”).  

The wrappers on this chocolate all say “Pour Croquer.” I was curious what this meant, so I (1) put it into the Google translator and (2) asked my friend who teaches French to high school students, and both gave the same answer: it means “to chew,” which I assume means that it is chocolate for eating rather than cooking/baking. In addition, in searching around about this I found that there are some chocolates that specifically instruct not to chew, rather to just let them melt in the mouth. As far as I can see, these Bonnat chocolates are amazing either way.

A side note: we can testify that young children do not seem to appreciate these very dark chocolates, which is just as well!

Here is a little about the company that I found on-line:

Master chocolate makers, Raymond and Stéphane Bonnat, select only the finest cocoa classics to make their chocolates in Voiron which nestles right in the heart of the Chartreuse mountains. All of the cocoas used are shipped in from the finest cocoa plantations in the world in the form of beans. They are then roasted and transformed into the wonderful chocolates you are about to discover,  compare and taste. 

Bonnat is the story of a family’s long love affair with chocolate. It is a story which began back in 1884 when Félix Bonnat established his premises at number 8, cours Sénozan in Voiron (Isère region). 

All Bonnat’s customers in France and those making their way home for Christmas by boat from the French colonies looked forward to tasting the Voiron “Pavés” (Praline Chunks) and other Bonnat specialities. 

As time went by Félix Bonnat’s two sons, Armand and Gaston, began to help him more and more with the production and running of the family business. 

In 1956 Raymond Bonnat finally took over the firm. After studying business, he toured France, studied at the School of Chocolatiers in Basel, completed the COBA School and finally did a tour of Switzerland. He got married in 1959 and his wife Nicole, the daughter of well-known hoteliers in the region, helped him to run the business. Two of their four children, Cécile and Stéphane from the fourth generation, perpetuate the high quality tradition which has always formed the basis of the family business. 

Our shop in Voiron is a place of pilgrimage for unconditional Bonnat lovers where they are greeted by Nicole Bonnat and her daughter Cécile. 

Given that many tourists pass through Voiron on their way to the mountains, many of our foreign customers often stop off en route to see us. Our products are sold in Paris and in sixty other departments of France thanks to our network of sales representatives. Bonnat was dispatching its products out to the French colonies as early as 1919 – Africa, Indo-china, Asia. Because our business has always taken us to far away countries, having an affinity with and understanding the diverse mentalities of different continents is something which comes naturally. And of course our travels have also given us a real taste for the high seas. 

In France, as abroad, our priority is to preserve the chocolate- making traditions which have made the Bonnat name so famous. We believe that: "What is good to the taste is great for the soul" 

Chocolat Bonnat's 100% Cacao is made from 100% pure dark chocolate chocolate.     

I LOVE that last line, “what is good for the taste is great for the soul.” How very true!

Have a sweet week!

Love,

Rebecca

Over the rainbow

Even at a relatively young age, you begin to have an idea of where children may be headed. Joshua is passionate about watching and participating in sports, and somehow he may well find a way to have that interest play a major role in his life. Both Ella and Eliana say they want to be teachers, but that is, after all, the main working women they see. Maya says she wants to be an artist, and I posted one of her drawings here last week. Julia may be a bit young, but watching her determination on the following video, we may finally be watching a budding musician.

Tuesday evening we went to the 92^nd Street Y to see Amy Poehler interviewing Seth Meyers. As expected, this was over an hour of endless laughs. Although some of it was too rapid-fire for me to absorb, what I did catch was really funny. The catalyst for this speaking engagement was that Ms. Poehler has recently published a memoir, Yes Please, which I believe was released for general sale the next day. Along with the tickets came two signed first editions. We are anxious to read it.

Wednesday afternoon I had to go into the City for my monthly injection, so Barry and I met when that was done and decided to take in a movie. We saw “Dear White People.” Here is what A.O. Scott had to say:

“Dear White People” is the name of Justin Simien’s first feature film, and I’ll say right away that it is as smart and fearless a debut as I have seen from an American filmmaker in quite some time: knowing but not snarky, self-aware but not solipsistic, open to influence and confident in its own originality. It’s a clever campus comedy that juggles a handful of hot potatoes — race, sex, privilege, power — with elegant agility and only an occasional fumble. You want to see this movie, and you will want to talk about it afterward, even if the conversation feels a little awkward. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. There is great enjoyment to be found here, and very little comfort.

Reading this today (I had not before) I have to say it is really on the mark. There were many characters and I had a bit of trouble keeping them all straight, but the messages were quite clear, and at the end they showed newspaper clips and pictures of groups of students from universities across the country demonstrating that the issues the movie raises are still very much a part of campus life. Blacks constituted only a small minority of the students at the University of Rochester in the early 1970s, and they largely kept to themselves for reasons I could not entirely understand. So this movie was interesting for me.

It began to rain as we were leaving the movie theater and driving up the West Side Highway, but the sun was trying to shine through, and a beautiful rainbow formed over the Hudson River. I was able to take a picture because we were sitting in traffic, but it was still difficult to get a good one from behind the glass.

Be well, all.

Love,

Rebecca

Just one more

We had a lovely weekend. Friday night we (mostly I) cooked dinner and ate with Dina and Aaron and the children. We were planning to serve it in our apartment but it was better for Julia’s schedule to be home, so we took the food over there. We spent Sabbath afternoon with three couples, friends who have lived in Sharon and we have known since the late 1980s. It was a splendid afternoon, with good food and terrific conversation.

When we were leaving the Synagogue to go to lunch, Barry went to the coat room to retrieve our coats. He took a while returning and I figured he had run into someone and was chatting. That would have been a nice reason. But instead, he came out and told me he could not find my coat. He found a coat very similar to mine but it had a name written on the inside label that was not mine. It turns out it was the identical LLBean Ultrawarm Coat, Long, item # TA227262 size M in black. I bought the coat last year. The reason Barry knew the one in the coat room was not mine was that the label had a name written on it. I knew immediately that it was not mine because I had taken the hood off of mine, choosing to wear a dorky looking but very warm hat (LLBean Ultrawarm Bomber hat in wine, a color they no longer seem to offer) instead. The name on the label was familiar to me although I could not have identified the owner, and by that time she had surely left for home. So after Sabbath I found her phone number and called her. She said she was a bit suspicious about the missing hood but figured she had taken it off to wash the coat and forgotten to put it back on. She even found the piece of Kleenex I had left in the pocket and, although she had no recollection of leaving it there, figured that she had. She was going out to pick up one of her children and she stopped by and we made the swap.

This whole episode brought to mind an incident that occurred when we lived in Sharon in the late 1980s. A new family had moved to town. They had two daughters, one Simmie’s age and another a bit older. They were new to living a more traditional Jewish life, and really enjoyed the warm welcome they received from the Sharon community, which to this day remains a key asset of its key assets. One Sabbath, when they went to the coat rack, the wife’s coat was gone. This was long before the internet and e-mail and Facebook, so there were repeated announcements at services during the weeks that followed asking everyone to check their closets to make sure they had not inadvertently taken the wrong coat. No one ever came forward, and the family has long since moved away. I can only hope that eventually she recovered from the disappointment that the loss of that coat represented for her.

We had a full day on Sunday. For the first time ever, Barry and I took the three big girls (not Julia) for an outing. We have never taken more than two children at a time. With my limited mobility it has just always seemed too daunting. But they are older, and we were headed to a safe, enclosed place: Launch. I wrote about this place back in February, it is essentially a huge room filled with different sorts of trampolines. The children love that place! But I am concerned that we may need to enlist the help of “Amusements Anonymous” to get past what happens every time we go to such places. Barry tells the children that they can each buy a $5 card (forget tickets, it is all electronic now) and that once they spend that, they are finished. But inevitably, they end up wanting just one more game, “please, please, please, just one more game, I promise!” is their rallying cry. We did give them each another $1 and guess what? When that was spent, they wanted more! When we reminded them that we might not have time to stop for ice cream, they finally got past it.

We then headed over to JP Licks for ice cream. You are probably wondering what happened to lunch. Ah, the benefits of being grandparents!

We returned to our apartment where Barry and Joshua had a date to watch Saturday night’s World Series game, which Barry had recorded on our DVR. Both boys had pledged NOT to read or watch the sports news in the morning so they would not know who was going to win, and they had a great time watching the game.

We all gathered for a barbeque at Dina’s house, complete with protein and vegetables to compensate for that ice cream lunch. It really was a grandchild-focused day, and life does not get better than that.

Have a wonderful week.

Love,

Rebecca