Happiness and sadness

We arrived in Sharon on Friday afternoon and settled back in to our apartment.  We had a quiet Friday night dinner (Barry prepared one of my favorite Moosewood recipes, Rebaked Potatoes) and on Sabbath day after synagogue the whole family headed over to Dina and Aaron’s house for a wonderful lunch prepared by our daughters. The lunch was dairy/vegetarian, because it was, after all, for my birthday, and we enjoyed a J.P. Licks ice cream cake with layers of mint chocolate chip and chocolate ice cream separated by a layer of chocolate fudge. The cake was decorated with chocolate fudge flowers and cookies that looked like Girl Scouts Thin Mints. The truth is that both of our daughters are excellent bakers, and I would have loved whatever cake they served, but this was clearly ordered with me in mind. Fortunately, the rest of the family enjoyed it as well.

Lovely as the afternoon was, Shabbat was somewhat bittersweet. We had learned on Thursday afternoon that a member of the community who was about our age and we had known for many years had collapsed and died. It was heartbreaking seeing the family gathered as the Rabbi (also about our age) spoke about the integral role Eddie had played in the community, for many years helping most of the boys in the community prepare the ritual Torah reading that is done on becoming a Bar Mitzvah. The Rabbi asked everyone who had a relative who had learned with Eddie to raise their hand, and an amazing number of hands went up. This morning, before leaving Sharon, we went over to the Shiva house to visit his wife Amy and their sons. What made this even sadder, if it possibly could be, was that Amy’s father just died a couple of weeks ago. So now here she is, sitting Shiva again, this time for her husband.

Eliana and Maya came over after Sabbath for a sleep-over while their parents went out for the evening. We made them macaroni and cheese (or perhaps it should be called cheese and macaroni) and played and talked and before we knew it bedtime had arrived. With the time change overnight, we tried to get them into bed early but of course we did not succeed. Fortunately they did sleep until about 7 the next morning. We made breakfast and then we started up a game of QBitz. I had written a while ago about Maya being quite good at this game, but we had never played with Eliana and she did extremely well, winning many of the rounds the four of us played. The girls went home for lunch and afternoon plans, and we left for an engagement party for the son of some Sharon friends who is getting married in a few months. This, too, was somewhat bittersweet, as our friend, the father of the groom, was also recently diagnosed with cancer. We had not had a chance to see him since his diagnosis, and it was nice that when we arrived we managed to have a few minutes to chat with him.

We stayed at the party until we had to leave to pick up Maya. She was at a friend’s birthday party at one of those gymnastics and video games places that have become a popular venue for birthday parties. From there, we took her to a carnival for preschoolers at the synagogue to celebrate the upcoming holiday of Purim. Maya enjoyed going around to all the games. Somehow with everything going on I had failed to bring my camera, but Barry caught this with his iPhone.

We are back in New York and settling in. The residual snow from our poorly shoveled driveway has finally completely melted! And now I am running around changing all the old clocks. You have to love the new ones that change themselves!

Have a great week!

Love,

Rebecca

How cool is this?

When I opened Google today, this is what I saw:

Old age

Today is my 62^nd birthday. I know that women of a certain age are not supposed to be so forthright with this information. But two years ago I celebrated the Big 60 just weeks before being diagnosed with a tumor in my brain, so the old Maurice Chevalier (an actor who died in 1972 at age 84) quip rings true:

Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.

We watched last night’s Colbert Report early this morning. I am happy to pretend that Stephen knew today is my birthday and that this song is for me.

Warner Music's "Happy Birthday" Copyright: Warner Music maintains a legal stranglehold on the rights to "Happy Birthday."

Have a great weekend!

Love,

Rebecca

Playing catch

We were in a shop in St. John when a t-shirt caught my eye. In large letters, the shirt said

We don't stop playing because we grow old;
We grow old because we stop playing.

I stood there staring at that shirt, because the line was familiar from a David Roth song on his Think Twice album, “Playing Catch,” which asks

Did I stop playing because I grew older,

Or have I grown older because I stopped playing?

When we returned to New York, as I packed the shirt to send to David, I began to wish that I had bought one for myself. And that thought took me to searching for one on-line, which led me to explore the origins of that line.

It turns out that this line goes back at least one hundred years, but the actual authorship is unclear. According to G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904), the line was included in a book by Karl Gross published in 1896, Die Spiele der Thiere (The Play of Animals). Gross wrote,

Die Thiere spielen nicht, weil sie jung sind, sondern sie haben eine Jugend, weil sie spielen müssen

(The animals do not play because they are young, but they have a youth because they must play.)

The line has been variously attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr. or Jr.), Herbert Spencer, and George Bernard Shaw, but Gross is apparently the original source.

Whatever the origins, it is a wonderful thought, and as he always does, David eloquently worked it into his song. Click on the link below, and enjoy!

Love,

Rebecca

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2iIonzFMTqGZjdLb1BCQzI3WUk/edit?usp=sharing

Amateur photographer

I just saw this picture on the March 14^th posting on

http://newsofstjohn.com/DailySTJ/ :

Here is a picture you readers have seen before (03 February 2014):

Clearly their photographer picked a nicer day, but my amateur version is not too shabby, right?

Love,

Rebecca

Back to the Garden

The first day of spring is on Thursday, March 20^th, two weeks away. But the annual Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden opened last week, and even though the temperature did not get above the low 20s we just had to head over there (the entire exhibit is indoors).

Barry snapped all these pictures (and countless others) with our better camera. The “garden” in the song is not the NYBG, but it works for me.

"Woodstock"

Well I came across a child of God, he was walking along the road
And I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me:
Well, I'm going down to Yasgur's farm, gonna to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, set my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog
And I feel like I'm a cog in something turning.
And maybe it's the time of year, yes, and maybe it's the time of man,
And I don't know who I am but life is for learning.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere there was song and celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden, we caught in the devil's bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

The Orchid Show means that the annual tenure of the Allman Brothers Band at the Beacon Theater cannot be too far behind…stay tuned, we have great seats for the 19^th.

From where I see it, spring cannot arrive even one day too soon!

Love,

Rebecca

And the winner is....

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that Barry and I enjoy movies. We had intended to go see one or two on Sunday but we were somewhat sidetracked by predictions of snow (that never materialized) and by running one errand that turned into another.

It all started with baby clothes. With the impending arrival, our daughters were trying to track down all the baby clothes they had passed back and forth between them when each of the four grandchildren was born. But they discovered that after Maya, the youngest, the clothes went to the sister of our other daughter’s husband, who had a girl last year. She lives on Long Island and delivered the clothes to our other daughter’s in-laws’ home a few towns over. Early Sunday morning, we drove out to retrieve them and will take them up to Sharon on Friday. I think I can say that we spent no more on gas than the baby clothes were worth.

While we were driving out there, it suddenly occurred to me that there is an Amazing Savings near our in-law’s home. If you have never been to Amazing Savings, it is quite an experience. I am not sure quite how they do this (and maybe I do not want to know) but they sell a lot of good stuff at prices far lower and with selections far broader than you would find elsewhere. Among those things are items that are most useful with both Passover and a new baby coming: very nice disposable plastic tableware, and every imaginable shape and size of foil pans. Yes, I know, not environmentally friendly, but sometimes you have to prioritize. Between the three bins of baby clothes and the umpteen bags of foil pans and dinnerware, we had a completely full car, both the back seat and the trunk.

We had thought about driving back from Long Island through the City and stopping to see a movie. But a combination of the weather forecast and the fact that we had a bit too much sitting in the passenger section of the car convinced us to head back home. As it turned out, the snow never came. So perhaps we could have gone to see a movie, but instead we took care of something that truly needed to be done, pulling together all the 2013 tax documents and completing the workbook that our accountant provides each year. Just between you and me, I think Barry and I both secretly wanted to go see a movie just to avoid that task. 2013 was a complicated year because of my separation from Pfizer and our efforts to consolidate a bunch of retirement savings accounts. But in fact it went much more smoothly than we expected.

We knew we would have a hard time staying awake through the entire Academy Awards Show last night, so we set up to tape it and watched it early this morning, fast forwarding through some of the fluff.

In case you missed it, here a partial list of the 86th Academy Awards winners:

Best Picture	12 Years a Slave
Best Actor in a Leading Role	Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club)
Best Actress in a Leading Role	Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
Best Actor in a Supporting Role	Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)
Best Actress in a Supporting Role	Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave)
Best Animated Feature	Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, Peter Del Vecho)
Best Cinematography	Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)
Best Directing	Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
Best Documentary Feature	20 Feet from Stardom (Morgan Neville, Gil Friesen, Caitrin Rogers)
Best Original Song	Let It Go - Frozen
Best Original Screenplay	Her (Spike Jonze)

The film that did very well was the one we know we should have seen but did not: 12 Years a Slave. I mentioned this in passing back in January when I wrote about the Golden Globe awards. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, whatever minimal tolerance I may have had for watching intense suffering on the silver screen before my diagnosis has been exacerbated to the point that I simply cannot subject myself to it. The clips alone have been too intense for me to watch! But I have no doubt that this was an excellent film deserving of all the accolades. 

Back in December I wrote about Dallas Buyers Club “There may well be some Academy Award nominations from this one.” This, too, was a painful film to watch, but I think I was able to see beyond that aspect because of my early experience in antiretroviral drug development. In fact, the film won both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for two brilliant performances. Cate Blanchett, who won Best Actress, was excellent in Blue Jasmine. The Best Supporting Actress category also included two other outstanding performances by less well known actresses, Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine and June Squibb in Nebraska, not an easy choice.

Frozen, another movie we thoroughly enjoyed and about which I had written “with or without children, I recommend this movie,” won Best Animated Film (the animation was spectacular) and Best Original Song for “Let it Go” (good luck getting that one out of your head once you hear it a couple of times). I was happy to see that Her, a movie we enjoyed immensely, got a nod, presumably for its thought-provoking storyline.

The next few days will be cold but next weekend should begin to warm…it cannot come too quickly!

Love,

Rebecca