Reading two ways

When I started to type this post, it was the 16^th of March. I truly do not know where the time is going, but it seems to be zipping by quickly.

We have seen a couple of movies over the past month. The first is an animated movie with a quite touching story, Zootopia. In this movie, the animals have human traits and feelings, both good and bad. The main characters are a bunny named Judy Hopps and a fox named Nick Wilde. While these names represent a bit of over-the-top use of puns, remember that children, who may not appreciate subtleties, are included in the target audience for this film.

The story begins as the animals are preparing for winter and the holidays. These animals have established a society that for the most part has them living quite peacefully. Judy’s dream is to become a police officer, but as a small bunny she has a hard time being taken seriously. Her first assignment after graduating from the academy is as a traffic officer giving out tickets to cars parking after the meters have run out. She is conscientious about this and gives an enormous number of tickets hoping she will be promoted to real police work, but the powers that be.

Along the way, she meets Nick, a hustler who gradually becomes her friend, and helps her work on a case of 14 “missing mammal” cases despite her boss’ instruction to stick to ticket writing. The two of them decide to pursue the 14 crooks on their own. At one point, they go to the Department of Motor Vehicles where they are “assisted” by a group of sloths (the double entendres go along with the other wordplay).

The ending is, of course, happy. But Judy remains humble while holding on to the joyful energy that is uniquely hers.

The second film we saw was a documentary on the current situation in Israel, Colliding Dreams. This movie perhaps tries to cover far too much in far too little time. The issues are surely somewhat more complex than the way they are exhibited here. I am no expert on this so it is sometimes difficult to sort out honest from biased reporting. But what cannot be denied is that there are problems that can neither be easily fixed nor remain indefinitely the way they are.

Meanwhile, I have continued combing through the hundreds of pictures and tried to organize them. We just found three more scrapbooks that Barry had taken out during Shiva and forgot he had stashed them in a closet in one of our extra bedrooms. I am glad we bought a binder-type scrapbook, which makes it easy to insert extra pages without moving too many individual pictures. And I have decided to work on pictures only until the early 70s, before any grandchildren were born. I still have a long way to go!

One of the days last week I had medical appointments in both the morning and the afternoon, leaving a gap that straddled lunchtime. So we brought a couple of sandwiches and headed over to the Conservatory Garden in Central Park. Things are just starting to grow, so there is not a lot to see, but we started reading the plaques on the benches, and this one amused us:

I guess you can read that two ways. Did she rescue the garden from her black-thumb family, or did her family give her this honor?

Meanwhile, we are having friends for lunch tomorrow who have been in Florida for a few months, along with friends who live around the corner. The six of us always enjoy each other’s company. This is the first Sabbath after the time change, so while Friday is less stressful, Saturday night quickly becomes a bit late for us.

Love,

Rebecca

The real birthday gift

We left the house early this morning to head down to MSKCC for an MRI and a visit with Dr. DeAngelis. The news continues to be good!

Next visit: in 8 months!

Love,

Rebecca

LXIV

I’ve borrowed this song for my birthday today from The Beatles.

Now that we’re older, all our hair grey,
Aging day by day.
Will you still be buying me my chocolate dark,
Wine in bottles closed with a cork?
If I stay out ‘til quarter to three
Will you lock the door?
Do you still need me, will you still feed me
Now that we’re sixty-four?

You’ve grown older too
And if you say the word
I’ll still stay with you

You may not be handy, mending a fuse
When our lights have gone
I won’t knit a sweater by the fireside
But off to Sharon we’ll go for a ride
Calling the gardener to dig up the weeds
Who could ask for more?
Do you still need me, will you still feed me
Now that we’re sixty-four?

Every winter we can rent a villa near the beach on St. John
If the airfare’s low.
We shall scrimp and save.
Grandchildren on our knees
J, E, G, M, J

Send me an e-mail, or maybe a text,

Stating point of view.

Indicate precisely what you mean to say,

Yours sincerely, wasting away.

Give me your answer, fill in a form,

Mine forever more.

Do you still need me, will you still feed me,

Now that we're sixty-four?

Here is a picture of ½ of my birthday present.

Have a wonderful week!

Love,

Rebecca

An extra day

Since 2016 is divisible by 4, it is a leap year, which means that February has 29 days, rather than the usual 28. Some people were all excited about the extra day, particularly those who were born on the 29^th of February. I had never paid much attention to it until this year, when I could only see one thing: an additional day of listening to the endless barbs thrown by the various presidential candidates. I am not sure how I will make it until November! It would be alright if it were just tiresome and annoying. Instead, it is growing frightening. I am not sure what scares me more: the idea of a President Donald Trump or the fact that so many people seem to think that is a good idea. So I will continue as I have, listening enough to be aware but not enough to become clinically depressed.

A couple of weeks ago, in an art class Maya has been taking, she painted this.

Barry and I were absolutely enthralled with this, with the way she managed to turn the two-dimensional sheet into a three-dimensional image, and to capture the light of the sun in the distance. We were with Maya at home for a while on Sunday, where her bedroom has become a mini art museum of Maya’s paintings and drawings. It is quite a thrill to watch her develop her creative talent.

On Sunday we took Ella and Maya to something called the Kid’s Mega Challah Bake. A Chassidic sect known as Chabad is sponsoring these events all over the country (maybe beyond?). In a large room there are tables set up. At each table place there is a large bowl holding small containers of ingredients: flour, sugar, salt, yeast, water. One of the organizers provided instructions for each of the children to mix and knead their own dough. During the waiting periods, they led the children in singing songs and telling stories. At the end, each child took home their creation to bake. This was a bit juvenile for Ella, who often bakes delicious challah with her mother, but she had a good time, as did Maya. Here are a couple of pictures we took.

Now I am about to undertake a huge project. Barry’s mother (may she rest in peace) accumulated family pictures over the years. Many of them are in albums but in no particular order, and the ones of our family are pictures we already have. So my goal is to go through, sort them out, and make up a couple of scrapbooks for the family to have. I cannot even imagine how long this might take. It’s all sitting in our extra bedroom downstairs, and the first thing I have to figure out is where to set up to work on it. So far I have ordered a scrapbook with inserts for various size pictures. That should arrive shortly, and then the work will begin.

And finally, this week Will Shortz provided a word challenge for us math geeks:

Next week's challenge: What two 8-letter terms in math are anagrams of each other? One word is from geometry, the other is from calculus. What words are they?

Have a good week.

Love,

Rebecca

Race

If you look up the word “race,” you will find quite a few entries which can broadly be grouped into two:

• ·       a contest of speed
• ·       a class or kind of people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics

These two meanings made it the perfect title for a film about Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals in track in the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin.

Jesse Owens, born in 1913, was a young man whose amazing talent became apparent by the time he was in high school. The movie begins as he leaves his boyhood home for Ohio State University, where he joins the track team. The movie makes no attempt to soften the rampant racism with which he is confronted every day in everything he does. Even after winning those four gold medals, he continued to be shamefully treated by many whites, remained prohibited from sharing common spaces with white students, and was never invited to the White House to receive honors along with his fellow Olympic medalists.      

While limiting the movie to that relatively short period of his life before and just after the 1936 Olympics (Jesse Owens died in 1980), the filmgoer does not learn anything about what happened on his return to the United States. Although very well-known and cheered when he earned those four gold medals, once he returned he was just another African American, subject to all the same discrimination that had long been a part of this country, and, listening to some of our current politicians, appears to continue to this day.

After the games, he was barred from participating in further amateur sports competition, and was not much welcome in the professional sports world. By the end of 1936 he was racing against horses in Havana just to make some money. Rather than crowds of 100,000 in Munich, he was lucky to appear before 3000.

Watching this movie gives much pause. Part of the story involves the many Americans who did not believe our country should have participated in the 1936 Olympics in Germany. There was never a complete consensus but majority opinion supported participation and most athletes here and around the world did participate, with small numbers of Jewish athletes remaining at home. The movie makes clear that leaders of the Black community here in the United States tried to convince Mr. Owens to stay at home, and that he was really torn by the decision. Of course it is easy to admire his decision in retrospect because, from the viewpoint of the Nazis, he did the worst possible thing: he prevailed against the Germans. It would have been a much darker story had he not run so well.

I cannot help but wonder how I would have acted had I been a young adult in the late 1930s. Even in the 1950s and 60s I remained in a Caucasian cocoon. It was not until going to college in the early 1970s that I thought about people of other races. But just because more people of color were being admitted to schools that had been predominantly white did not mean that there was any meaningful interaction between the students. I remember at the time I was confused and disappointed that the Black students on campus tended to keep largely to themselves. Seventy years was not long enough to erase the negativity stemming from the years of slavery. Here we are at well over one hundred years since slavery was abolished and still wrestling with the fallout.

Although this movie did not get very high scores on Rotten Tomatoes, I still recommend it, because I think it was well done and, from what I have read, fairly accurate. If I have gotten either the details or the message wrong, please do not hesitate to share your thoughts.

Love,

Rebecca

Call me a cockeyed optimist

After spending the last few frigid days confined to quarters, we had a chance to see Michael Moore’s new documentary film, “Where to Invade Next.” We have seen almost all of his films, so we have long realized that he can be a bit loose with the facts and biased in his approach, but the audience is always left with something to ponder or discuss.

“Where to Invade Next” is no exception. He starts with a cartoon in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff are asked a simple question: why has America spent so much money and lost so many lives and wars since World War II? Rather than answering that question, he travels around the world trying to glean solutions to some of the non-military problems with which the United States is suffering.

He visits eight countries, studying different aspects along the way, and here is a very brief summary of what he finds:

Country	Service	Highlights
Tunisia	Health care	Government manages health care; the film emphasized women’s health issues
Finland	Education	The excellent public schools in Finland have been discussed quite a bit in recent years
Norway	Criminal justice	Local law enforcement with emphasis on rehabilitation, very few guns
Germany	Social services	Government provides excellent social support for families
Portugal	Drug use	Government has decriminalized drugs, provides extensive rehabilitation services
Iceland	Gender equality	Government, with persecution and imprisonment of “white collar” crimes
Slovenia	Education	Government provides free college education
France	Nutrition	Government provides high quality, delicious, and nutritious school lunches

The film is beautifully done, with many breathtaking scenes of country sides, quaint cities, workplaces free of tension and schools filled with happy and healthy children. It is certainly a very interesting topic and he makes a compelling argument. At this point you are probably waiting for the “but….,” and here it is: I just wish he would be a bit more honest. By painting such a rosy picture of life in these other countries, I am left wondering about what he is not showing us. He does, at least, throw in one encouraging point at the end of the film, reminding us that during various times in our history we have done a better job of addressing some of these issues. We need to get back to those ideals.

It will be a long road ahead. United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had barely breathed his last before every one of the Republican presidential candidates insisted that they would block any nominations put forth by President Obama.

Oy.

Love,

Rebecca

Taking note

For as long as I can remember, Barry’s mother (may she rest in peace) kept one of those “At-A-Glance” calendars on her dresser. She used it to keep track of appointments with doctors and items that needed to be addressed on a periodic basis, such as quarterly tax payments. Early each year she would purchase birthday cards for family members and slip them into the appropriate dates for mailing.

Every fall I would order her the calendar for the next year, which I did this past fall. Even at that time I remember thinking about whether she would need or be able to use the calendar for 2016.

This morning I received this email:

   ATnAnGLANCE

It’s your life. Take note.

Dear TERRY ROSENSTEIN,

Your current subscription status with AT-A-GLANCE is: UNSUBSCRIBED which means that, unfortunately, we cannot contact you via email regarding the expiration of your dated planning products.

However, we want to inform you of a new management feature which allows you to only receive emails regarding the expiration of your planner. This option restricts all promotional emails, leaving you with a tidier inbox.

To update your account status to receive only expiration notices about your planner, please click here and select “Renewals” for your AT-A-GLANCEsubscription.

Sincerely,
The AT-A-GLANCE Customer Account Team

I was struck by the manufacturer’s tag phrase, “It’s your life. Take note.” Losing a close friend or relative does make us take note of our own lives. I don’t think that’s what they meant, but there is never a better time than the present for us to stop and count our blessings.

Love,

Rebecca