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

Another year

We had a wonderful start of Passover with three of our five grandchildren; the other two were with their other grandparents. Every year we conduct the same Sedarim using the same text and singing the same melodies with the same core group. But no two years are ever completely alike, particularly with young children who can change so much in one year’s time.

The first night went especially well: Joshua and Ella read a lot of the Seder, with Ella adding many commentaries she had learned in school. Even Julia had a good time – she surprised us all by staying awake and quite engaged until past 10 pm! Dina had invited friends for lunch each of the days so we were surrounded by children running around and having a great time. The second Seder was quieter, and Julia went to sleep long before we even got started.

We are in the process of trying to clean up the cooperative apartment that Barry’s parents (may they rest in peace) had owned. They had wood dining room and bedroom furniture that, although old, was in excellent condition and we wanted to keep. Yesterday it was all moved over to our house, so rooms that seemed somewhat under-furnished no longer appear so. Of course it is extremely dusty but the woman who cleans for us will be here tomorrow and I do not feel guilty giving her all that “extra” work since most weeks the house is nearly pristine with just the two of us here. There are now only a few pieces of furniture, made by Barry’s grandfather years ago when he worked as an upholsterer, sitting in our garage waiting for Barry’s cousin to pick up. Lastly, we have (hopefully) identified someone to take the old piano, now sitting in the kitchen of the apartment while the hardwood floors are being refinished.

Thanks to my friend Joanne for sending a link to a recently released documentary that we have not yet seen: “Persona Non Grata.” The film tells the story of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese consul in Lithuania who issued travel visas to thousands of European Jews allowing them to leave Europe through Japan. In 1985, the Israel Holocaust Memorial Authority, Yad Vashem, named him one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”  We will keep our eyes open for a chance to see what looks like a fascinating film.

How my grandmother’s chutzpah helped Japan’s consul save thousands of Jews: The story of Rachel Sternheim may answer a long-unsolved mystery surrounding the rescue of 6,000 Lithuanian Jews from the Nazis

Hopefully the weather will continue to improve and we are even talking about going to a Mets game next Sunday afternoon!

Love,

Rebecca

Ready or not....

A few months ago, a very dear friend told us about a pillow she had bought from Brookstone: the Memory Foam Wedge Pillow. I bought one and could see that Barry liked it, too, so now we have two of them. They are terrific for reading or watching television in bed.

I quickly discovered that I could write or draw pictures on the plush cover of the pillow, and it became a challenge each day to come up with something clever. Early on Barry started pulling out his iPhone and snapping pictures of my daily quips. They are not anything all that profound, but they are a nice way to jump start my brain for the morning.

Here is my message for today:

חַג כָּשֵׁר וְשָׂמֵחַ

Love,

Rebecca

If you could not read the message, it says

READY OR NOT

PESACH IS HERE

The meaning of traditions

When I was a girl, my grandmother told me that whenever her mother would prepare a brisket, she would cut a piece off the end and cook it separately. My grandmother thought it was simply a part of the preparation of a traditional Sabbath meal. Years later, when my grandmother was married with her own home, she found herself doing the same thing. It seemed a curious tradition, so she asked her mother,” why do you always cut that piece off the brisket?” To which my great-grandmother replied, “the butcher always gives me a piece of brisket that is too big for the pot I have!”

Lest any of my vegetarian friends become nervous, I am not cooking any briskets for Passover. But I was reminded of this story yesterday as I began to do some baking for the holiday. I always start with a lemon sponge cake that Barry likes.

When her sponge cake was done in the oven, my mother would invert the pan over a wine bottle (Manischewitz Concord Grape is what they always had) so it could fully cool without the cake collapsing. For the 30 odd years I have been making sponge cakes, I have done the same.  Over those years, my sponge cake pan had become rather sad, all bent and a bit leaky. This year I finally purchased a new one.

I have to say that coming out of the oven that lemon sponge cake was a vision of loveliness. I had the wine bottle (it was a kosher dry red) on the ready, but suddenly I could not seem to get the cake onto the wine bottle. Coming straight out of the oven, the cake was a bit hard to manage. Making a long story short, the bottle fell over and I nearly dropped the pan. I grabbed it with my oven mitts and managed to stand it upright on the little “legs” it has.

Ah, the little legs. My old one had these, too, but I never relied on them because of the family tradition to invert the cake over a wine bottle. When the cake pan was emptied and clean, I took the wine bottle and quickly confirmed that the diameter of the neck of the wine bottle was larger than the diameter of the hole in the sponge cake pan.

I think I was able to salvage the cake minus one small section. But I did pick up some more lemons and eggs and if I have the energy maybe I will try again. Sponge cake #2, the chocolate one that cooled in the inverted pan sitting on the counter, looks perfect.

Is there a lesson here? Try as we might, we will sometimes mess things up. We are just not perfect beings. The challenge is to accept our imperfections, do our best to correct them, and move on. My memories here are mundane examples of the charge to us on this most exhausting but richest holiday on the Jewish calendar.  

חַג כָּשֵׁר וְשָׂמֵחַ

Love,

Rebecca

Recognition

For many months now I have spent most Wednesday mornings attending a wonderful class given by one of the professional staff members of our synagogue. She has all of the knowledge of a Rabbi, but because traditional Jewish law limits the roles of men and women in some ways, she and her colleagues cannot be called “Rabbis.” Rather, Rabbi Avi Weiss, long-time rabbi of the synagogue (who is now in partial retirement and has taken the title “Rabbi in Residence”) who initiated the program to train women for such positions, has come up with the term “Rabba.”

Learning with Rabba Anat on Wednesday mornings has become a highlight of my week. She adds so much to the texts we learn. The class meets at Moss Café, a funky little restaurant a couple of blocks away from our house (close enough that I can zip over there on my scooter) that opened last summer. They serve healthy alternatives to the typical American diet, lots of whole grains and fruits and vegetables that our daughters and their friends call “crunchy granola” fare. The group and the setting are a perfect match.

It is fascinating to see what sort of customers come in to Moss Café on a typical weekday morning between 9 and 10:30 am. Almost every week I will see at least one person having breakfast there (not having anything to do with the class) that I know or recognize from the neighborhood. I think that these sorts of places are what make New Yorkers feel so attached to their neighborhoods, and you can see why. At this point, the wait staff at Moss Café all recognize me (again, that oxygen does help in this process) and they all know that I always like my hot chocolate very hot with low fat milk. I really do look forward to this outing each week.

Last week, I arrived a bit on the early side, ordered my food, and sat down where we usually gather. Another participant came in, someone I have known here for many years since our daughters were students together in junior high school here. Then a third woman walked in, someone who lived here, had moved away, and has now been back for a couple of years. It has been a bit odd that although I have chatted with her husband I have not interacted with her since they have been back. There were one or two times when I felt she was walking up to me or looking at me but she never said a word. I know that some people have a very tough time seeing that oxygen, but I was disappointed to think that she might be one of those people. She came up to my friend and had a big hello, and I felt that I just needed to see what her story was; maybe she just did not remember me. So when they were finished chatting, I greeted her with “I’m not sure if you remember me…”, and told her my name and that we have two daughters and had lived here for a long time. She lit up and smiled and said “Oh, my, of course Rebecca I remember you!” She went on to explain that she suffers from an inability to recognize faces, and that unless she knows someone very well or sees them quite frequently she will often not recall who they are without identifying information. She told me that her sister has an even more extreme case than hers.

So I typed “inability to recognize faces” into my browser, and found that there is a condition called prosopagnosia, also known as “face blindness.

Prosopognasia is a cognitive disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize familiar faces, including one's own face (self-recognition), is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision making) remain intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage (acquired prosopagnosia), but a congenital or developmental form of the disorder also exists, which may affect up to 2.5% of the population. [Wikipedia]

We saw a new film called “Eye in the Sky” which stars Helen Mirren. This is one of those films I usually do not like to see: very intense and frightening. I did have to close my eyes a couple of times, but for the most part it was really very good. It really brought to light some of the difficult decisions about how to fight terrorism and terrorists, particularly when their home bases are interspersed in the midst of family homes. This movie, by focusing on one such family who are truly innocent bystanders to this incident, brings this point to light. How do you weigh the life of one innocent person versus the lives of tens or hundreds of others that may be lost if the raid is not carried out?

And last, to put life back into balance, our little Maya is still painting.

Love,

Rebecca

Alternate reality

Last week went by so quickly! We had a nice Purim with friends, although we really missed seeing the children in their costumes. One of our Riverdale friends invited a few couples for the festive meal. They also had one of their sons and his family, who now live in Riverdale and are members of the same synagogue as we are. Because of their four year old twins they are not able to stay in synagogue all that often, and this may have been the first time I had a chance to really chat with their son’s wife. I enjoyed getting to know her a bit better.

But before we knew it we were back listening to the news, which only seems to get worse rather than better, between the current political climate and the violence around the world. So thanks to my friend Randy who shared a recent communication with one of his friends that expressed so eloquently (with humor, of course) what so many of us have been feeling:

Randy wrote:

 I thought I’d passed into an alternate (bad or at least worse) reality when George Bush got elected over Gore.
Of course, he (and his brother) cheated. But, the thought of Trump as even a possibility in the oval office, fairly elected by the people, makes me expect to walk back into the living room and see Rod Serling sitting on the couch smoking a Chesterfield.

His friend responded:

About Trump - I think that he will go to the convention and when it's his turn to speak he'll say "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!"

I know that the convention is scheduled to be in Philadelphia, but I would not put it past Donald Trump to have it moved!

We saw the new Sally Field film, “Hello, My Name is Doris.” This is the story of a 60-something woman who took on responsibility for her mother years ago. The movie starts with her mother’s death, and little by little discloses how she got to where she is, alone by herself, unable to part from even the smallest trinket she has ever owned. There is also a clever technique used to share the version of her life story that she wishes she could live which can be a bit confusing at times. It was not a “cute” role for Sally Field (no Gidget or Flying Nun here), but she handled it quite well, and it reminds us that there are relatively few gracefully aging older actresses.

Our granddaughter continues to amaze us with her creativity. She showed us a scroll with a brief synopsis of the story of Purim neatly printed in Hebrew. We assumed she had done this at school but in fact she simply took it on herself to make her own Megillat Esther, asking her parents to help her with Hebrew words she did not know! And she has continued to paint; her latest is the still life shown here.

 

Love,

Rebecca