This is where I was for about two hours this morning, at the Friends of the Highland Park Library Book Sale. I volunteered for a little over an hour taking the money from the sales, and then I came back with my daughter to buy some books. Despite the pouring rain, patrons were coming in and buying books. Those running the sale told me that the sale has been a success (they have made over $3000). In the middle of the photo is Mort, who spent a lot of his time this past week putting together the sale, and on the right is George, another sale organizer.
So, what did we buy? I bought a biography of the Rema, the story of Rabbi Moshe Isserles. It says in the introduction that certain liberties where made with re-creating his life, but I think I will get a feel for what life was like in 16th century Cracow. My daughter selected a Mother Goose book (we already own one, but this one has different illustrations), a Berenstains Bears book, and Meet Samantha, an American Girl book. I also threw in a copy of the Princess and the Goblin, thinking at some point my daughter will enjoy this classic.
I’m currently reading Mary Poppins, the original book by P.L. Travers. It is delightful, and one can see how it inspired the producers of the more famous movie. I hope to post excerpts from the book in the next week. But now I need to get back to my holiday preparations.
Received in a synagogue announcement late last night:
This Thursday, September 25 at 7:30 there will be a rally at the corner
of 3rd & Raritan Avenues. The purpose of the rally is to express our
disappointment that the Mennonite Central Committee, the parent
organization of the 10 Thousand Villages store, is hosting the
president of Iran for dinner while he is in New York, and to protest
Ahmadinejad’s calls for genocide against Israel.
Ahmadinejad is basically a modern day Haman. He has threatened to destroy Israel and has held a Holocaust-denial conference. One of the hosts is someone named Penny Pritzker. I’ll let you do the research.
The week following a wedding Orthodox Jews celebrate by hosting the bride and groom at Sheva Brachot (means 7 blessings, referring to the seven blessings one says to wish the bride and groom well). Last night, the chasan (groom) and kallah (bride) were running late; she had an early evening faculty meeting, and then they both got stuck in traffic. So while we were waiting for the party to begin, I stood on the hosts’ porch and took these sunset photos.
You can learn more about the wedding from MalkaEsther.
I ruminated over whether I should post about September 11. Do I really have anything new to add? Some bloggers have chosen to commemorate this day; others have not.
The easiest part was to decide on an image. Black. It is a day of mourning, is it not? There is a Jewish tradition to leave one part of one’s home unbuilt, to commemorate past tragedies, especially the destruction of the Temple and the scattering of the Jewish people. In that vein I leave you a big square where I might normally place a joyful image.
9/11. I was at the dentist that day, in East Brunswick. Some 9/11 widows live there and became famous a while back. I’m not going to link to that story. Back to the dentist…my dentist plays the radio in his office. When I heard the first plane crash, I thought, a fluke. When I heard the second one, I got scared. Deliberate? Could it possibly be terrorism had struck New York? This was only a month after the Sbarro pizza bombing in Jerusalem, where 15 people where killed, including young children. Anyway…fast forward a few hours, I’m back in Highland Park and hanging out with a friend. She nicely offers to turn off the tv. That was the last time I watched tv news. The previous time was in the first Gulf War, when Sadaam Hussein was pointing his nasty scuds at Israel, including my little cousins (who are now grown up with kids of their own) huddled in a sealed room with gas masks. Aside: do you understand why I didn’t want to write this post? All these yucky memories.
OK, so my friend and I wander the day together, listening to U.S. fighter jets flying above our heads in the direction of New York City. My friend in Ma’alot, Israel emails me to make sure we are OK. We leave our kids at school; it turns out, the kids are comforting the teachers, who are the scared ones. We later hear stories about the lucky in our area who did not go to work because of taking care of a child’s cast or some other reason. We also learn of the many who did go to work and did not come home.
Enough of the bad news. I can’t concentrate anymore on this. I have a great Sky Watch post coming soon… enjoy it!
Do you live in a small town? Do you find that more people are shopping in malls or online, so the stores in your little town are not what they used to be?
I photographed these begonias on Raritan Avenue in Highland Park last month. They remind that while we have some pretty planted flowers through volunteers and through state tax money, we still have empty stores and too many hair and nail salons. Not enough stores that one can really use. We do have a great toy store, but the bookstores disappeared, the bike shop went away, a fish shop closed, and not enough new, interesting stores move in.
To participate in Ruby Tuesday, post a photo (or more) with a little red or a LOT of red. Then visit Mary the Teach at http://workofthepoet.blogspot.com/ to submit your link.
Setting up an art show is not as easy as it looks.
Jill pulls the wire to hook up a painting.
Or maybe you are thinking, who says I ever thought this was easy?
My daughter and I helped Jill with the set up on Wednesday afternoon. My daughter took this photo of me holding a portrait of her.
My daughter is so proud of her ballerina painting.
Jill was at the library setting up on Thursday night and for several hours on Friday. I’ve gotten emails on the progress; and I will gladly be supplying the lemonade in memory of Kiersten.
This past week we (my daughter, my middle son, and I) spent some time at Jill‘s. We all painted. Jill spent a lot of time with my daughter; this was her second art lesson with Jill. My middle son has been taking classes with Jill for about one year. I finally finished my broccoli painting (see my broccoli drawing), which I started months ago:
Here’s the ballerina that my daughter painted:
I finished my broccoli painting before my daughter finished hers, so I did this sketch:
This is my son’s artwork:
My son is excited about surrealism (Jill taught him about Salvador Dali). What do you see in his painting?
My Middle Son and I are going to be in an art show at the Highland Park Public Library in September 2008. You are all most cordially invited to attend the opening on Sunday, September 7 from 2-5 pm (did I just invite way too many people, Jill?).
Here’s a piece I chose to be in the show; not one I did with Jill, but it is my favorite oil painting:
I’m afraid this image doesn’t do the painting justice; it’s much nicer to view in person, especially when the subject himself is sitting right under the painting, buried in one of his books.
"See that woman walking down the street
Don't you know she brought me my beets
She brought me beets,
She brought me beets,
Yeah, we got some beets."
When my daughter was six months old, we had a family crisis. I won’t go into the details, in order to protect family members who aren’t anxious to tell the whole wide world all about our lives. However, there were many friends, acquaintances, and community members who helped us, as well as two superb New Jersey surgeons who performed two separate operations on two different patients.
I would like to highlight one person in particular. At the beginning of the crisis, she discovered through a friend that I liked beets. So every week before Shabbat she brought us a different dish containing beets; some had pickles, some had onions, some lemon, some potatoes. But it really wasn’t the beet dishes themselves that struck the chord for me; it was her understanding that our crisis did not end in a few weeks. Indeed, it was difficult for almost six months. But she brought us beets for at least four months, and then she said: it’s time for me to help another family. That was more than fine with me; I was happy to let our mitzvah lady help another family. I want to stress how thankful I was that she got the lengthiness of the situation and how it went on beyond the first few weeks of help. Getting that extra piece, that meant a lot to me.
She now lives somewhere in Jerusalem; on our last visit, we saw her daughter, and through her daughter I thanked her once again. But for someone who understood difficulty and pain, it’s always good to thank her again.
I ruminated over whether I should post about September 11. Do I really have anything new to add? Some bloggers have chosen to commemorate this day; others have not.
