Archives for September 2007

1. Feeling the cool breeze blowing as I look at my sukka, I am struck with what a privilege it is to live in Israel where building a sukka is not only normal; it’s a national pastime!
2. Thinking about my life, I am awed at all of the opportunities I have had and am thankful for every one of them.
3. Having seen 3 of my 5 children today, I feel incredibly blessed.
4. Having seen both Abigail and Kinneret today, I am struck with how incredibly cute little girls can be (especially when they’re my granddaughters).
5. Having seen Abigail’s big sisters and brother today, I can’t help thinking about what terrific kids they are.

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I remember as a little girl watching the movie “White Christmas” and hearing Bing Crosby sing “Count your blessings.” The song made a very strong impression on me. It was almost my theme song, especially the line that said, “I think about a nursery and I picture curly heads; and one by one I count them as they slumber in their beds.” And now when I picture curly heads, there are about two dozen. Every one is precious. I never taken them for granted.

As I was contemplating my potato kugels (making them, not eating them), I realized that by now I have made that recipe so many times that I don’t need to open the cookbook. Now this is no major accomplishment as far as I can tell since there are not a lot of ingredients and it’s not a complicated recipe, but for me, it is unusual. You see, over the years I have cluttered my brain with lots of facts that I simply have no practical use for. What good does it do me to remember that our phone number in 1970 was 531 0485 (in Pittsburgh)?? Why do I need to know the name of the staff chaplain at Fort Knox, Kentucky in 1967 (Bermel)?? Why am I remembering useless information???

Well, knowing that I have been craming my poor little brain with useless information, I chose not to learn any of my recipes, satisfied that the cookbook would remember and all I had to do was remember which cookbook had which recipe. And that worked. Over the years, one could trace which were my favorite recipes by seeing which pages the books opened to and how dirty they were. The dirtier, the more loved the recipe. None of that plexiglass cookbook holder stuff for me. I’m hardcore. If its going to get dirty, well, then, so be it. I am expressing my love for the recipe in this way.

And I started to think… we have all sorts of measures of personality from the 16 PF to the Myers-Briggs to the MMPI. All of them have their uses. But I was thinking that maybe we could learn a lot about a woman (yes, I do think that men and women are different, but that’s another entry) by looking at her cookbooks. Maybe even we could ferret out the nurturer in her by seeing what she chooses to make. We certainly could see if she is daring or conservative. We can see if she’s a “health food” person or an “eat, drink and be merry” person. We can, of course tell her age by the yellowing of the pages. Of course, in my case, you would have to take into account that some of my cookbooks were my mother’s and in that case, some of the paperbacks have begun disintegrating.

Well, I began my foray into this type of personality testing by looking at my own books and by and large, we’re talking comfort foods- carbs of all sorts. After all, meat and fish kind of speak for themselves. Most of the time, in my experience, anything you do to meat detracts from its taste. Fish can be sweetened, but then is it really fish? (Of course I exclude gefilte because after all, that is a very special hybrid kind of fish that grows complete with bread crumbs, egg, onion, salt, and sugar already in it.) Same thing with vegetables. To me, they are all pretty delicious with very little intervention. Desserts? Yes, well, desserts. In the days when I weighed in at a hefty 125 when I was 5ft 6inches, my favorite recipe was for chocolate cheesecake. At this point, typing the words just added 3 pounds to my weight. Need I say more? Lemon meringue pie? I did that a few times when we lived in Oklahoma. It was so much fun and very delicious, but on went 2 more pounds just typing about it. I don’t know if I can continue …

And I began to think about my mother. There were a lot of things about my mother that were hard for me. But when I think about her recipes, it makes me appreciate that fact that she did care. She did want to give us good things to eat. She did want to nurture us that way. Her cabbage borsht was not just delicious; it was love. Her spaghetti sauce was caring. Her Passover apple kugel provided sweetness that lives on after her.

Yesterday we were in Ashdod. We had been invited to a wedding and decided that rather than drive back home in the middle of the night, we would stay over at a hotel in Ashdod. We drove there early in the day so that we would have a chance to enjoy the beach. We found the beach almost empty of people and exceedingly clean. We left our belongings and went into the water. The water was cool at first, but after a while, it seemed almost too warm, but we enjoyed riding the waves and bouncing and getting jostled and tasting the sea water as it dripped into our mouths…

But just as memories are jogged by a song that one associates with a person or event or a scent, like the perfume someone used to wear, so were my memories activated by the undulating waves and the sound of their peaking and breaking. And suddenly, there was my grandmother.

She appeared in my memory as she had been that summer when I was turning 7. My parents had rented a huge house in Atlantic City along with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle. We all were in Atlantic City for the summer. The men (my father, grandfather, and uncle) remained in Philadelphia working, visiting us on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and driving back in the mornings and spending from Saturday night to Monday mornings with us. The three women (my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt) had two workers who kept the house clean and helped watch the three children (me, my 2 year old sister and my 2 year old cousin). Their lives were pretty much perfect.

They would be free to do whatever they wanted and we, the children, would appear only upon request. So each afternoon, we were taken to the beach to romp and play and when we got tired or the women got tired of us, we were taken back to the house, fed a snack, bathed, and dressed for dinner. In those days, Atlantic City was quite an elegant place and people literally had dresses made to wear on the boardwalk in the evening. I remember two dresses that had been made for me. One was a lavendar organdy dress trimmed with lace and it had hand-embroidered flowers on it. The other was a blue organdy dress that had a blue plaid overskirt, also of organdy. The dresses had matching taffeta slips and had to be starched and ironed for each wearing.

That summer, I was unlucky enough to develop a fungus on my feet. I remember my mother taking me to a foot doctor (then they were chiropodists) who would have me hold my feet in a whirlpool for 15 minutes or so and then coat my feet with a thick yellow creamy substance. Then he would wind gauze around my feet and tell me to be sure not to get them wet. This went on for a number of weeks.

Well, my grandmother couldn’t stand the fact that I would not be able to go into the ocean for several weeks, so she would be sure each day to pick me up in her arms and stand in the water with me suspended between her arms with my feet out of the water. She would jump with waves and I would get wet everywhere except on my feet. She would stay there with me for a long time and finally she would carry me back to the shore.

Ever since, jumping the waves has always reminded me of my grandmother and of how much she loved me.

And it set me to thinking…

A week ago I returned from 9 days in Beijing with my oldest granddaughter. We had a wonderful time. She laughed and smiled and enjoyed seeing all of the beautiful structures and gardens and she enjoyed walking through the colorful markets and bargaining and buying wonderful things and interacting with the Chinese people. I wonder, though, what it may be that someday will trigger her memory of me and will she realize how much I love her?