Opening day

Yesterday was opening day for the Mets at Citi Field. To the best of our recollection, neither of us had ever been to a game on opening day. What a scene it was! We left the house more than 2.5 hours before game time, but we had no idea just how horrible the traffic would be. It was quite a scene, with enormous and elaborate tailgate barbeques all over the place.

Interestingly, the crowd was primarily male. This was especially obvious in the bathrooms. The women’s rest rooms, which normally involve long lines, were virtually empty, while the men’s restrooms, where waits are seldom required, had long lines snaking out the doors. I am not quite sure why this was the case. Perhaps women have a harder time telling their bosses and coworkers that they are taking a day off work for opening day than men do.

The Mets had gotten off to a good start this season but yesterday did not go so well, and they lost 4-0 to the Washington Nationals. Truth was that it was a little on the chilly side, so by the third inning we found ourselves, along with many other fans, inside watching on one of the many television screens. By the end of the 7^th inning when it became clear that this was not a good day for our team, we decided to head home, and listened to the remainder of the game in the car. Even with that, the ride home was quite long. Overall, we spent about twice as much time in transit as we did at the actual game!

Lesson learned: overall, opening day is not worth it. One of the reasons we have enjoyed the Mets games these past few years is that it can be a very relaxing afternoon. Yesterday was anything but.

Have a great weekend.

Love,

Rebecca

The unthinkable

I earned my Ph.D. in Statistics in 1986 at Southern Methodist University under the mentorship of Randy Eubank, and we have remained friends through the more than thirty years since. Randy and his wife Lisa moved to Hawaii a few years back so we do not get to see them often. Randy has taken up scuba diving over these past years and as recently as early Sunday morning had sent a new batch of beautiful pictures from his most recent dive.

On Monday morning, I saw the following e-mail message which had appeared in my inbox late Sunday night:

Hi Rebecca,

This is Ana, Randy’s and Lisa’s friend. We met at your dive shop. 
I love Lisa and I’m very worried about Randy. 
If you see anything that one can do to help him please let me know. Dennis Young is coming on Tuesday

This note was a bit puzzling, and I later correctly determined that Ana had sent it to the wrong “Rebecca,” as Randy has a dive partner who shares my name. I figured I would wait until later that day, since Hawaii is six hours behind the east coast, and give Randy and Lisa a call. But Randy called me early that afternoon, and I knew the second I heard his voice that something was terribly wrong.

The unthinkable happened while they were out for a drive on Sunday morning, a horrible accident in which their car flipped over and Lisa was killed. I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around this. It just does not seem real.

If I wanted to sum up Lisa in just a few words, I would say that she was an amazingly warm and positive person, someone you felt you had known forever even after having just met her.

Dennis Young, who Ana mentions above, is a good friend of Randy’s, a statistician who spent much of his career at Arizona State University and now holds the title of Professor Emeritus there.  We had never had the pleasure of meeting, but as fellow friends of Randy our names were familiar to each other. It just happened that Dennis and his wife had planned to visit Randy and Lisa this week, and they flew there today. If only I were up to making that trip I surely would.

What more can I say?

Love,

Rebecca

A movie remade

In late January, 2014, I wrote about a movie we had gone to see called “Gloria.”

…. I almost completely forgot to write about a movie we saw last week, “Gloria.” The movie received a 98% approval rating among the critics on Rotten Tomatoes (100% by the top critics). My main hesitation was that the movie is in Spanish with subtitles. My reading is getting better, but speed and accuracy are still issues, and as is the case with so many things, stress does not help. But we read about the story and thought we would give it a try.

Fortunately, the movie does not have a tremendous amount of dialogue. A lot of it is really a visual experience. Gloria is a divorced woman with two grown children who have moved away. She has a rather boring job, and in the evenings she tries to meet men at social dance clubs for single adults. She meets a man named Rodolfo, and although they embark on a passionate relationship, he is unfortunately having a difficult time disentangling himself from the woman to whom he had been married and his grown children from that marriage. As expected, the relationship is not sustainable. Ultimately, Gloria finds the strength within herself to move forward in a positive way.

To be honest, I did not remember much about that movie until looking this up today, which I felt compelled to do because we went yesterday to see the 2019 American version of this movie called “Gloria Bell,” with Julianne Moore as Gloria and John Turturro as Arnold. Both films were written and directed by Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio. The basic story lines of the two movies are similar. Gloria is a divorcee with two grown children. Arnold is more recently divorced when they meet and begin seeing each other, but the relationship is rather rocky, primarily because Arnold has not really been able to fully separate himself from his first wife and children. Like the first version, this does not bode well for this couple, and Gloria’s rather violent reaction to Arnold’s treatment of her is somewhat surprising.

Barry and I agree that we need to go back and watch the 2014 version of “Gloria.”

Seeing the movie reminded me of the 1982 song of the same name that was written and performed by Laura Branigan and was on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for 36 weeks. She unfortunately died in 2004 at age 52 of a brain aneurysm. 

Have a great week.

Love,

Rebecca

Fun pictures

We were, unfortunately, not able to spend Purim with the family in Sharon. But they did share pictures with us, so here are all the costumes.

Dina and Aaron had picked up their “costumes” during their recent visit to Disney World. 

Here is our own little Elmo!

Beautiful Ella as a Grecian Goddess.

Joshua became the Jolly Green Giant! (not sure where they found that suit or why in the world anyone would buy it other than as a Purim costume)

Julia is our little princess.

And here is Simmie’s family. This is the picture from which I had taken our Maya dressed as a little old lady!

Have a wonderful weekend.

Love,

Rebecca

Can you guess who this is?

Pretty amazing Purim costume, I’d say!!!

Love,

Rebecca

Finding something good from a disappointment

It would be no exaggeration to say that I have spent more hours watching basketball games during the past few months than during the previous sixty plus years of my life. But when could I have ever felt as engaged in the game as I do now, watching our oldest grandchild, Joshua, playing as the sole freshman on the Maimonides High School basketball team, the MCats?

This past weekend was the annual Red Sarachek basketball tournament, the country’s most prestigious tournament for Jewish high school basketball teams. Each year, hundreds of high school basketball players and their fans from schools across the United States and Canada gather at Yeshiva University for four days of top-level competition.

By way of background on this tournament, I found this on Wikipedia:

Bernard "Red" Sarachek (born October 19, 1912, Bronx, New York; died November 14, 2005, Deerfield Beach, Florida) was a basketball coach at Yeshiva University in New York City from 1940 to 1969 and a mentor of such famous coaches as Red Holzman of the New York Knicks and Lou Carnesecca of St. John's University. Yeshiva, under Sarachek, has been called "the birthplace of modern basketball" due to Sarachek's innovative ball-handling schemes.

Sarachek designed and implemented motion offenses, trapping defenses, plays to beat zone defenses and creative in-bound plays. His schemes were admired and copied by coaches around the country.

The selection of schools to participate in the annual tournament is rather complicated, but the main point is that Maimonides School, where Joshua is on the team, was one of the schools selected to participate for this year. Dina and Aaron and Joshua’s siblings came to New York along with many of their friends from Massachusetts. Having them (minus Joshua, who stayed with the team) with us over Sabbath was an added treat to the tournament.

Each of the teams plays four games. The MCats got off to a strong start, winning their first game against a school from Illinois. Friday’s game was rather painful, as the score switched back and forth throughout the four quarters but the school from Brooklyn managed to score the final two points to put them ahead by one point just seconds before the final buzzer.

As we milled around after the game, we tried to emphasize to the players we know that they had really done amazingly well, which they had. The players and coaches spent Sabbath at a hotel in Westchester, but we later heard that the team was understandably quite bummed out by that Friday game. Joshua seems to have taken it all in stride.

On Sunday morning the MCats lost to a very strong team from a high school from New Jersey. But there was a bit of a silver lining in that game from our perspective. Because Joshua is the only freshman and newest member of the team, he does not get a lot of time on the court. But on Sunday, when it was clear that the MCats could not pull off a win, the coach put Joshua in the game. Even though he was on the court for less than a minute, he had a nice lay-up to score two points! His personal rooting section was jubilant!

This morning was the final game. We were Joshua’s entire fan section, because his family had to return to Sharon after the Sunday game for the annual synagogue dinner, at which his father was one of the honorees. We were thrilled to be there to see the MCats beat their opponents and Joshua had at least a couple of minutes on the court.

Here are the results of the four games that the Maimonides MCats played:

  

		Final Score
Date	Maimonides School (Brookline, MA) vs.	Maimonides	Competitor
Thursday 14 March	Fasman Yeshiva High School (Skokie, IL)	47	43
Friday 15 March	Magen David Yeshiva High School (Broooklyn, NY)	51	52
Sunday 17 March	The Frisch School (Paramus, NJ)	48	57
Monday 18 March	Torah Academy of Bergen County (Teaneck, NJ)	57	46

The 2018-19 basketball season has now officially ended, but we are looking forward to Joshua’s continued successes on that court!

Love,

Rebecca

Jeopardy

Merriam-Webster defines jeopardy as “exposure to or imminence of death, loss, or injury.” By this definition, it is fair to say that Alex Trebeck, the host of the popular television game show, “Jeopardy,” is now truly in jeopardy, as he announced yesterday that he has been diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. The five-year survival rate for this disease is estimated to be well under 5%. While Mr. Trebeck’s rosy outlook is encouraging to his broad fan base, to say it is overly optimistic would be an understatement. I am sure he will receive the best that modern medicine has to offer, and the rest is out of the hands of us mere mortals.

Meanwhile, I underwent treatment #18 yesterday. Based on Gematria, an alphanumeric code of assigning a numerical value to a Hebrew word based on its letters, the number eighteen is traditionally considered to be associated with good fortune, because, in the Hebrew alphabet it can be written as , which is the word for “life.” We are glad to have made it this far.

Today is my 67^th birthday. Barry bought me some unusual earrings. Here are a couple of pictures, although they don’t quite capture how lovely they are. 

Dina sent along two videos of the little ones singing “happy birthday” in both English and Hebrew, which I will try to post here.  

Meanwhile, stay warm!

Love,

Rebecca