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Archive for October, 2023

Being Afraid

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on October 31, 2023| Leave a Comment »

It’s Halloween. Some people like going through haunted houses, dressing up with ghoulish makeup, and tricking you into handing out candy. Perfectly normal women become sexy French maids. Not me. I won’t watch horror movies or anything with zombies. In fact, I was watching a trailer with Ralph Fiennes in LA that caught me off guard – what appeared to be a cooking contest turned into something else entirely. I closed my eyes.

Did I say LA? Yes, Bob and I took a short, stealth trip out West to see the Rocker and Aunt Kiki. We flew in to see their finished home perched on a hill. It was so sweet to sit and talk, watch Cooper’s hawks gliding above us, and play backgammon. We didn’t Go Go GO! Instead, Bob taught them how to make pasta from scratch. I found myself looking around, at their beautiful home, at the amazing life they are building together in California, and catching my breath.

Kiki came home with her studio’s new coffee table book, so I immediately ordered mine. The living room on the cover is divinely inspired…. “Shamshiri: Interiors.” I’m lucky to have such an outstanding designer daughter on speed dial! Then we went for a seaview walk hike and I saw my first wild coyote.

The coyote is a medium-sized member of the dog family that includes wolves and foxes. With pointed ears, a slender muzzle, and a drooping bushy tail, the coyote often resembles a German shepherd or collie. Coyotes are usually a grayish brown with reddish tinges behind the ears and around the face but coloration can vary from a silver-gray to black. The tail usually has a black tip. Eyes are yellow, rather than brown like many domestic dogs. Most adults weigh between 25-35 pounds…”

https://urbancoyoteresearch.com/coyote-info/general-information-about-coyotes

It actually did look like a skinny wolf. I wasn’t afraid of the coyote, but I understood why my son’s cats must stay inside. They are predators and usually hunt rodents and rabbits, not people. You’re supposed to make a lot of noise if you see one, and indeed this guy looked at us, turned around and slowly sashayed away. I could picture his text bubble: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

We’re back in Nashville and luckily I bought tons of candy before we left. Our new/old house is in a neighborhood of young families. I didn’t count last year, but I hope I don’t run out of treats tonight. There’s a skeleton waving from my front porch rocking chair and that’s the extent of my spooky decorating skills this year. After a week that’s seen another mass shooting in Maine of all places, and more and more anti-semitic rhetoric on social media I’m feeling enraged – but I guess that’s better than fear.

I will not let fear dictate my behavior.

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Quilting Pumpkins

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on October 23, 2023| 1 Comment »

It’s true, I’m just an old arts and crafts counselor at heart, who was masquerading as a boating and canoeing counselor at Camp St Joseph for Girls. Teaching water skiing by day, and knitting at night. Over the years I’ve tackled: crocheting Irish flowers; needlepointing fancy footstools; Celtic cable knitting; sewing pandemic masks; and quilting elephant crib toys. Those tiny grey elephants of differing shades and textures, suspended over a new baby’s crib, gave me the most pleasure. That is, until now.

The arts festival we bumped into on our glamping getaway is the reason my kitchen is doubling as a sewing room, again. The owner of a little shop had the cutest small, handsewn pumpkins I’d ever seen. If you’d rather have a real pumpkin slowly dying on your front porch read no further. Bob and I are finished carving pumpkins and roasting seeds. But if I were to decorate, and that’s always a big IF, for Halloween, I’d want something sustainable that can do double duty on Thanksgiving. So I paid attention when instructions were given on how to quilt patchwork pumpkins, and then I heard,

“You can always look it up on Pinterest, DIY Fat Quarter Pumpkins!”

What the heck are fat quarters? Well a fat quarter is a piece of fabric cut crosswise from a 1⁄2-yard piece of fabric – ie an 18×44″ rectangle cut in half to yield an 18×22″ “fat” 1⁄4-yard piece. And it just so happens the store had bunches of ‘fat quarters’ already cut in lots of fall colors and patterns ready to sell. Surprise. My next grandparenting craft activity, after mosaic birdbaths, was set! I hauled out the ironing board and iron and started cutting out cardboard ellipses as pumpkin templates.

It just so happens that the war in Israel and Gaza has been escalating in tandem with my pumpkin project. The Grands finished their pumpkins in a day last weekend, but then I couldn’t stop. In the middle of a brutal conflict half a world away, I’ve found some comfort in keeping my hands busy, in making something beautiful despite growing despair. Bob reminds me that I have no control over the Mideast; I remind myself that I do have control over needle and thread.

I walk through the Fall garden, still trying valiantly to hang on. The sage and rosemary are bountiful while the tarragon begins to wither. This is my favorite time of year – a time to think about new beginnings, for harvesting, a birthday season for my family. The unbearable heat of a southern summer is gone. This is the time of year to witness squirrels collecting nuts and cardinals standing out like sentries in trees.

Thankfully my Parnassus book arrived in the mail – “The Comfort of Crows: a Backyard Year,” by Margaret Renkl. Her words about nature, about the flora and fauna in her own backyard, are a balm. Her stories soothe me into sleep.

As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of the natural world: “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” And grief at a shifting climate, at winters that end too soon, at songbirds growing fewer and fewer.” 

https://www.parnassusbooks.net/comfortofcrows

And the universal grief of war. I have to believe, to hope that peace is attainable. So I’ll continue to quilt as a meditation.

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Ring of Fire

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on October 16, 2023| 1 Comment »

The war invades my thoughts. It seeps into my dreams.

A friend from the midwest asked what I thought of the war because I am the only Jew she knows. I said, “And I’m an Irish one at that!” I try not to watch the images, still I can see the brutality in my mind. Dancing with the Torah at night, dragged out of your ‘safe’ room in the morning and loaded onto a truck. Grandparents, babies, and children, sisters and brothers all herded into Gaza.

Did you know that fourteen of the 199 hostages are citizens of Thailand? They are not just Israeli citizens, some are also Americans, Italians, and Germans. I wonder how you negotiate with Hamas; do you trade Israeli soldiers for Palestinian prisoners?

Israel has a well-proven expertise in hostage rescue, which it trains for intensively. Set up in 1957, its secretive Sayeret Matkal unit is broadly similar to Britain’s SAS or America’s Delta Force. It shot to fame in 1976 with its Raid on Entebbe where its commandos rescued hostages from a hijacked plane at a Ugandan airport. The commander of that unit was Yonatan Netanyahu, the only fatality amongst the Israeli commandos. Today his brother Benjamin is Israel’s Prime Minister and it is with him that the decision rests as to whether to wait it out in the hopes of a negotiated release of the hostages or go in hard in the hopes of rescuing them by force.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67084408

On Friday night, a week after the attack, we gathered at home around a live stream Sabbath Service from the synagogue. We listened to the Rabbi grapple with grief. In the Torah portion, we went back to the beginning, to the Creation story – a tale of the forbidden fruit. But what if the apple wasn’t a test? What if we were given free will, and the test is yet to come?

In other news, I’ve been sewing quilted pumpkins to keep my hands busy. Bob and the real Pumpkin – who wants to be Einstein for Halloween – made a pin-hole box in order to view the partial eclipse safely. It transformed the ring of fire into a small white ellipse on cardboard! And the Bug is starting to look like a California skater girl.

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Sunrise

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on October 11, 2023| 2 Comments »

I was going to write about our glamping getaway with friends to Wildwood. But then I thought I’d have to start off before our Granville, TN jaunt, with our trip to the Emergency Department of the Bride’s hospital. And then Hamas attacked Israel.

At sunrise on Saturday the war began. The terrorists entered the country by land, sea and motorized paragliders – launching over 2,000 rockets and overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. The descendants of Abraham are caught once again in a biblical battle and my heart aches for all the innocent Jewish and Arab citizens who are caught in the middle.

But make no mistake, their hatred runs deep.

Before glamping with friends last week, our whole southern family met up with my step-brother Eric at the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky. If you recall, the Flapper married Eric’s father, her third husband Mr B, when I was in middle school. He was a distinguished judge in town, and he and Bob’s father shared the honor of being first and second presidents of the Dover Jewish Center Brotherhood.

Eric and I have been wanting our Grands to get together forever; he has three granddaughters living close by in St Louis, about the same age as our Bug and Pumpkin. Eric spoke fluent Hebrew and worked on a Kibbutz after college. When Vietnam happened he was drafted, and because he is a pacifist, he served as a med-evac Huey pilot. He introduced me to Arlo Guthrie and the fine art of passive resistance.

I was looking forward to hearing his thoughts on the politics of Israel today, on the extreme Orthodoxy that would like to turn Israel into a theocracy like Iran… before Saturday.

Many years ago I was visiting Eric and his wife Bev with the Flapper for their daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. He’d been a practicing dentist for over 30 years at that time. We were sitting in their living room with friends of theirs from Israel, one a young lawyer and judge who I’ll call Anat. I’d been complaining about Newark airport, about an Army soldier being searched before boarding our plane. It was the early 90s, long before TSA. And Anat said,

“You don’t think they would dress like a soldier?”

No, I hadn’t thought of that. Just like I didn’t think a plane hijacking meant a suicide mission. But her eyes changed, her posture changed, her essence changed before my eyes – Anat became a soldier. And so I immediately thought of Anat’s beautiful family in Ramat HaSharon, Israel on Saturday. I texted Bev to see if they were OK, and for now they are safe. I checked her facebook page but it was all in Hebrew, nothing past mid-September when the Holy Days began.

They should have been celebrating the end of Sukkot, a Jewish Thanksgiving and more. Last Saturday marked the end of reading the Torah in synagogues everywhere, and opening the book again to the first of the Five Books of Moses. It is a joyous time. Instead they are under attack from an enemy that wants to annihilate OUR people, the Jewish people. Their hatred runs deep. The British tried to draw boundaries on an area of nomadic tribes with fluid borders. But since shortly after the Holocaust, since 1948, Israel has been a sovereign state, a democracy, the size of New Jersey, surrounded by Arab states.

Make no mistake. Israelis do not slaughter Olympic athletes, or fly jets into buildings. They don’t strap bombs on themselves and walk into markets or behead journalists and children to post on Facebook live. Hamas must be stopped.

The sun is rising on part of my family in California – can you tell who is Jewish?

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