My blogging history:
2012: diagnosed with and underwent treatment for Primary CNS lymphoma in my brain.
2012-2013: blogged on Caring Bridge.
2013: moved to Blogger.
2017: diagnosed with bladder cancer and blogged through 14 chemotherapy treatments and 37 sessions of radiation therapy, each with its own t-shirt and musical selection.
2018 to February 2020: Treated every 3 weeks with pembrolizumab for spread of bladder cancer to lymph nodes. As of June 2020, continue to be cancer free.
One of my most vivid memories of our
first trip to Israel back in 1980 was that we were there for Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day,
which, this year, is today.
At 11 am and again at 11 pm on that
day, sirens are sounded throughout the country and life literally comes to a
standstill. It is truly a moving experience. I am sorry to say that I do not
seem to have taken any pictures that morning, but it is still very much etched
in my brain.
Now, forty years later, even if we
cannot be in Israel this week, we can join in this experience through the
wonders of modern technology. Here is an example from Jerusalem.
We had a nice
Passover holiday in Sharon. We spent a lot of time with Dina’s family for the
first days, while Simmie and family were with her in-laws in Cedarhurst.
We managed to have a
lot of fun with the children during the middle days. On Monday we took Ella and
Maya (Dina, Julia, and Noah came along as well) shopping. We bought each of the
girls three new Shabbat outfits and a
bunch of other things. On Tuesday, we took Maya to see the movie “Penguins,” a
beautifully done documentary. The last few minutes were especially fascinating
as they showed scenes of the actual filming of the movie. On Wednesday, the
weather cooperated and we met up with a large group of former Sharonites,
friends of our daughters who were in town for the holiday, at the Roger
Williams Zoo in Rhode Island. On Thursday Barry took Joshua to a PawSox game
and then Eliana to see the movie “Shazam!” which she loved.
Before we knew it,
the last days of the holiday came and went and on Saturday night we put our
kitchen back to its regular state and headed home to New York on Sunday.
Today is the 9th
day of the Omer. For those of you not familiar, here is a brief definition from
Wikipedia:
Counting of the Omer
is an important verbal counting of each of the forty-nine days between the
Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuot as stated in Leviticus 23:15–16.
I freely admit to
being somewhat lax on many traditions, but for some reason over many years
Barry and I have taken up this challenge. The Orthodox Union (the organization responsible
for, among other things, the little circled U on a wide variety of food products that ensures
the items are kosher) publishes a magazine that comes out before Passover that
lists all the foods that they certify as “Kosher for Passover” and provides
tips on preparing the kitchen. The last page is always an “Omer Calendar” which
I dutifully cut out and tape to our bedroom door as a reminder each evening. Like
so many Jewish activities, the count starts with a blessing, but there is a
hitch: if you forget to count one day, you can keep counting but no longer say
the blessing, so it loses something. Each evening when we count the omer we always
“high five” to celebrate that we are still counting with the blessing.
This tradition probably
seems sort of silly, but at this point, this year, having seen so many friends
pass on, perhaps this counting is a good reminder that we are very fortunate to
be here each and every day. We “introduced” two friends who had recently lost
their husbands to cancer, one in Sharon and one here in Riverdale, and they managed
to get together for lunch in New York on Sunday. They are grateful to have met each
other but I wish we would have had better circumstances to get these two bright
and compassionate women together.
It is almost May: warmer weather has to
be ahead, right?
We went to see “Leonard Cohen: A Crack
in Everything,” the new exhibit at The Jewish Museum. This amazing exhibit was
inaugurated in November of 2017 at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal
(MAC) in late 2017, a year after Mr. Cohen’s passing. Over 315,000
visitors attended the exhibit, making it one of the most viewed in the Museum’s
history.
There were so many fascinating pieces
of the exhibit but the one we enjoyed most was a “Passing Through,” a lengthy,
360-degree video work drawing from fifty years of onstage moments throughout
Mr. Cohen’s career. I remember the title song as part of the repertoire of
songs we sang in the Jewish youth group in which I was quite active in high
school. However, until today I had no idea that it had been written in 1948 by Richard (Dick) Cleveland Blakeslee (September
15, 1921 – April 7, 2000), a professor of English literature, and recorded by
Leonard Cohen back in the early 1970s.
I
saw Adam in the Garden with an apple in his hand.
I
said “now you’re out, what are you gonna do?”
“Plant
some crops and pray for rain,
Maybe
raise a little Cain.
I’m
an orphan now and I’m only passin’ through.”
Passin’
through, passin’ through,
Sometimes
happy, sometimes blue,
Glad
that I ran into you.
Tell
the people that you saw me passin’ through.
There was another video installation, “The Offerings,” that looped clips of interviews in which Mr. Cohen talked about themes in his work.
The exhibit will be on display at The Jewish Museum through September 8 of this year before moving to Copenhagen, Denmark and then on to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from September 17, 2020 through January 3, 2021. If you are going to be in New York over the next few months, try not to miss this one!
This past weekend
turned out to be a special one to spend in Sharon. Yesterday, we attended the
2019 “Innovation 4 Inclusion Make-A-Thon” at NuVu The Innovation School in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. This event was inspired by Tikkun Olam (Hebrew for “repair
of the world”) Makers Israel, an organization that works to create solutions to
everyday challenges for people with disabilities. The program had been piloted
at one school in 2017 and has now expanded to include eight Jewish day schools
from across the greater Boston area.
Over the past year,
each school was paired with a “Need Knower,” a person with a disability who
experiences a challenge in need of a solution in order for the person to
participate more fully in daily life. Although the program is primarily
designed for junior high school age children, they made an exception to be able
to include Striar Hebrew Academy of Sharon (SHAS), which includes children
through the fifth grade, and where our granddaughter Maya is a student who was
part of the team selected to participate on Sunday.
The SHAS team was paired
with a young man named Ethan who has a disability called Spastic Paraplegia, a
degenerative disease which effects the lower part of his body. The challenge
that Ethan asked the students to try to solve is to improve the traction for
his crutches on the snow and ice that are frequent during the Boston winters.
The team came up with a product that screws retracting claws on to the bottom
of his crutches, thereby adding support for him when the roads and sidewalks
can be especially treacherous for a person with disabilities.
What a great program
this is! The room was packed and the lighting required a much better camera,
but Barry did manage to snap a quick picture of Maya during her presentation.
Kudos also to our
daughter Dina, Director of Teaching and Learning at SHAS, who was instrumental
in arranging for the students to participate in this exciting opportunity.
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 7th
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.
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.
