Ten Things I Wish

Ten Things I Wish….. …..Weren’t Replaced by Technology is the name of the link that my husband sent me last week. It was a list compiled by Michelle Guo on the website RSS, which she had pared down from, A List of 50 Things Replaced by Modern Technology from the website, Mashable. Guo’s list comprised the following: print photographs, hand write letters, make mix-tapes, check a map before a road trip, send off film for photographs, remember phone numbers, make a photo album, send love letters, hand write essays, keep a personal diary. Reading her list, being of a certain age, I sighed even as I accepted myself for the dinosaur that I have become. I still do many of the things on that list. I may have a GPS but I still check a map in case Madame GPS dies mid journey. The two items on that list that particularly resonated for me were the love letters and the personal diary. Though people still keep diaries now renamed blogs, tweets or Facebook, they are no longer personal. If Jane had eggs for breakfast the entire world knows about it. People no longer lock their feelings up with little gold diary keys. It’s a shame. As one who has kept a diary since elementary school, I fondly remember the entire process. First step was finding a book that was quintessentially you: mine were inevitably pink with hearts on them and included the essential little gold key, since I would have died if anyone had read what I had written. Later on I abandoned store bought journals and bought spiral notebooks (those still exist right?) that I would cover with decorative paper. Next was the search for the perfect pen—for me, a fountain pen. Then finally, the writing. I would always write in them at the same time every day—after everyone else in the house was asleep. Secrecy was paramount. A few years ago I decided to look through my diaries again. They were filled with the usual things that teen-age girls obsess about--boys, girl friends, tests, clothing, parental strife. Occasionally I surprised my present-self with the insights and poetry that I had written in those pages. And there were gold nuggets as well, like descriptions of dates that Steve and I had enjoyed and all our firsts--the first time we met, the first date, the first kiss—all there and all precious because here we are 46 years later, still together. I miss the whole handwriting experience. Does anybody still pass notes in class? I suppose texting is today’s note passing but does texting encompass the whole, heart throbbing experience? Can I pass the note without the teacher seeing? Without any of the note-passing intermediaries reading it? Will it get to my current flame? And then the ultimate agony of watching the recipient’s reaction as he opens it: Happy? Excited? Annoyed? One simple facial expression could lift or crush. Can a text do all that? Most of all I miss letters: Pen pals, envelopes with fascinating stamps from traveling friends, thank-you notes, miss-you notes and best of all, love letters. No amount of e-mails, texts or tweets can replace pages filled with a familiar handwriting that makes your heart to jump. I consider myself an expert on letters since Shatz and I corresponded for years. When he left for college, though he only traveled as far as Boston and we spoke on the phone for expensive hours, we still wrote letters. Later on when I moved to Israel we wrote weekly. When Mark was killed there were times when those handwritten letters formed the single fragile thread of my sanity. They pushed away the too dark, dangerous thoughts that threatened to overwhelm me. They were hope. We wrote reams and torrents. I knew that we had saved those letters. We had packed them away somewhere in the attic but I had lost track of where. I thought of them often through the years and always meant to find them to make sure they were safe. Somehow I never did—until yesterday. I climbed up and found a ratty looking box in the corner of a shelf marked, letters and diary. Diary? Singular? When I opened the box I found a small, pink diary, it’s lock rotted, but pages intact. And letters, four stacks of letters. They were slightly damp and I couldn’t believe they were still in one piece and legible. I sat there on the kitchen floor holding the tangible proof of our constancy and hope and wanted to read them all at once. I noticed that Shatz had numbered his letters so that will make it easier when I begin reading them again, 38 years after I had read and re-read them the first time. And then I will pack them away in a sturdier box for our daughters to read one day. This will be their hand written legacy. It makes me wonder, what will our children leave behind? Thanks to our new technology where everything is stored on a cloud, what record will be left of their lives and loves? Will texts and tweets be all that is left, only to melt away as the air that they already are? I wish my children written words, and drawings and photographs, or like Hamlet, their too solid flesh will melt and leave nothing behind.

With a Little Tabasco on the Side

Mariel was home for Chanukah this year, which doesn’t happen often. When the kids were small I would spend weeks preparing gifts and decorations. As the kids got bigger the decorations and gifts became fewer, and there were nights when we would miss lighting candles altogether. Now since there are no kids left in the house, it’s gotten a bit sad. But since Mariel was going to join us this year, we would celebrate once again and definitely eat plenty of latkes. We always buy the usual culinary accompaniments for potato pancakes: applesauce, sour cream and sugar. This year we sat down to Chanukah dinner complete with everything, including Tabasco sauce. Mariel’s fiancé, Dan, loves hot food. For his birthday she buys him things like masochistic Chile peppers and insane hot sauces. It’s amazing that the man still has a tongue. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when he put Tabasco sauce on his latkes. After all, one man’s sour cream is another man’s hot sauce. The important thing was that he enjoyed his variation of this traditional holiday treat. The next week, Mom, Mariel and I got together at one of our favorite Chinese restaurants and laughed about Dan’s latke topping. That started us reminiscing about food. I must have mentioned that Chinese wonton were the Asian form of an eastern European food called kreplach. Mariel had heard us speak of kreplach but had never really thought about what they were. So we explained that it was dough rolled out thin and cut into squares, then filled with cooked, seasoned ground beef. Then they were folded over, pinched shut and cooked in chicken soup. They’re traditionally eaten during the Jewish New Year, or if you’re Mom, you wrapped each one in waxed paper and layered them in a container, then put them in the freezer so that you could enjoy kreplach all year long. Mariel was fascinated. She began asking us about other dishes that Mom had made, and more interestingly, how to make them. Now, you have to understand that of my two daughters, Mariel is the pastry chef and Lisa is the cook. So this interest in the nuts and bolts of cooking was a first for her. She figured that if she could make rugelach (a heavenly yeast dough pastry filled with jam, nuts, chocolate, cinnamon, or raisins) she could make kreplach. I warned my vegetarian that it had a meat filling, but she decided she wanted to try making them and if she had to deal with meat, she would. I was completely flummoxed. Mariel hates looking at, smelling, even being near meat, so her enthusiasm for this dish threw me for a loop. Until I noticed the look on Mom’s face. It was then that I realized that Mariel would do anything to make her grandma smile. As we sat there in the restaurant talking about all the delicious dishes that Mom used to cook, I could feel the actual handing down of a cooking tradition. I’m ashamed to say that I have made very few of my mom’s recipes, even though I love them. At first Mom was always there to cook them, then when the kids arrived life got too hectic. And later on when the girls became vegetarians, I stopped cooking the few dishes that I had inherited from Mom, like chicken soup and meat loaf. The only survivor was noodle kugel, a casserole of broad noodles, cooked apples, raisins, and eggs that was baked in the oven. Mariel asked me what other dishes grandma used to cook that I missed. I told her that I loved stuffed cabbage, but it seemed to me to be an incredibly labor intensive dish, especially the cabbage peeling part. But Mariel was on a roll, so between me and Mom we came up with a recipe that she could use. Once again I warned her about the meat filling, but once she decided to stuff dough with beef it was only a short step to cabbage leaves. “What else? What else?” she asked excitedly. Unfortunately, some of the other dishes that I used to love grossed her out so completely that we decided to stick with the kreplach and the stuffed cabbage. She made them that very week. Three generations sat at that table reminiscing about food we loved. I am so lucky that Mom had a large repertoire of delicious dishes that I enjoyed, and I have such sharp memories of them all — their smells, textures, and most of all, their flavors. I can close my eyes and taste a heavy beef and potato stew called “chollent” that cooked on the stove all night, creamy chopped liver and chicken soup that could cure anything. What dishes would my kids remember? Chicken nuggets from Purdue? Pancakes and waffles from the freezer section? Chocolate chip cookies that I cut off of a ready-made cookie roll and stuck in the oven? The only meal that Mariel ever asks me to cook for her is vegetable lasagna, garlic bread and Caesar salad, and Lisa now cooks for me. I can only hope that they remember some of the dishes that I made that they used to eat: spaghetti and meatballs, brisket, and stir fry chicken. And of course, there’s always potato pancakes with sour cream and Tabasco sauce on the side.

Ten Things I Wish

Ten Things I Wish….. …..Weren’t Replaced by Technology is the name of the link that my husband sent me last week. It was a list compiled by Michelle Guo on the website RSS, which she had pared down from, A List of 50 Things Replaced by Modern Technology from the website, Mashable. Guo’s list comprised the following: print photographs, hand write letters, make mix-tapes, check a map before a road trip, send off film for photographs, remember phone numbers, make a photo album, send love letters, hand write essays, keep a personal diary. Reading her list, being of a certain age, I sighed even as I accepted myself for the dinosaur that I have become. I still do many of the things on that list. I may have a GPS but I still check a map in case Madame GPS dies mid journey. The two items on that list that particularly resonated for me were the love letters and the personal diary. Though people still keep diaries now renamed blogs, tweets or Facebook, they are no longer personal. If Jane had eggs for breakfast the entire world knows about it. People no longer lock their feelings up with little gold diary keys. It’s a shame. As one who has kept a diary since elementary school, I fondly remember the entire process. First step was finding a book that was quintessentially you: mine were inevitably pink with hearts on them and included the essential little gold key, since I would have died if anyone had read what I had written. Later on I abandoned store bought journals and bought spiral notebooks (those still exist right?) that I would cover with decorative paper. Next was the search for the perfect pen—for me, a fountain pen. Then finally, the writing. I would always write in them at the same time every day—after everyone else in the house was asleep. Secrecy was paramount. A few years ago I decided to look through my diaries again. They were filled with the usual things that teen-age girls obsess about--boys, girl friends, tests, clothing, parental strife. Occasionally I surprised my present-self with the insights and poetry that I had written in those pages. And there were gold nuggets as well, like descriptions of dates that Steve and I had enjoyed and all our firsts--the first time we met, the first date, the first kiss—all there and all precious because here we are 46 years later, still together. I miss the whole handwriting experience. Does anybody still pass notes in class? I suppose texting is today’s note passing but does texting encompass the whole, heart throbbing experience? Can I pass the note without the teacher seeing? Without any of the note-passing intermediaries reading it? Will it get to my current flame? And then the ultimate agony of watching the recipient’s reaction as he opens it: Happy? Excited? Annoyed? One simple facial expression could lift or crush. Can a text do all that? Most of all I miss letters: Pen pals, envelopes with fascinating stamps from traveling friends, thank-you notes, miss-you notes and best of all, love letters. No amount of e-mails, texts or tweets can replace pages filled with a familiar handwriting that makes your heart to jump. I consider myself an expert on letters since Shatz and I corresponded for years. When he left for college, though he only traveled as far as Boston and we spoke on the phone for expensive hours, we still wrote letters. Later on when I moved to Israel we wrote weekly. When Mark was killed there were times when those handwritten letters formed the single fragile thread of my sanity. They pushed away the too dark, dangerous thoughts that threatened to overwhelm me. They were hope. We wrote reams and torrents. I knew that we had saved those letters. We had packed them away somewhere in the attic but I had lost track of where. I thought of them often through the years and always meant to find them to make sure they were safe. Somehow I never did—until yesterday. I climbed up and found a ratty looking box in the corner of a shelf marked, letters and diary. Diary? Singular? When I opened the box I found a small, pink diary, it’s lock rotted, but pages intact. And letters, four stacks of letters. They were slightly damp and I couldn’t believe they were still in one piece and legible. I sat there on the kitchen floor holding the tangible proof of our constancy and hope and wanted to read them all at once. I noticed that Shatz had numbered his letters so that will make it easier when I begin reading them again, 38 years after I had read and re-read them the first time. And then I will pack them away in a sturdier box for our daughters to read one day. This will be their hand written legacy. It makes me wonder, what will our children leave behind? Thanks to our new technology where everything is stored on a cloud, what record will be left of their lives and loves? Will texts and tweets be all that is left, only to melt away as the air that they already are? I wish my children written words, and drawings and photographs, or like Hamlet, their too solid flesh will melt and leave nothing behind.

The Great Schottenfeld Pandemic

The Great Schottenfeld Pandemic of 2012 It started with a cough. Not a very impressive cough at first but as the days passed it grew. Steve kept telling me that he just had a cold and when I insisted that it sounded like something worse, he got cranky. Now I’ve lived with this man for 36 years and I know when a cough is just a cough and when it sounds like his lungs are about to leap out of his chest. But my husband is nothing if not stubborn and so the coughing and the nagging escalated. I was nagging because Mariel was home and we were looking forward to Lisa’s visit as well. Having a contagious husband was not part of my plans. I wanted him to enjoy the daughter that was currently here and the one who was coming. Plus, I didn’t want to catch whatever disease he was incubating. I wanted this man on antibiotics now! So I ramped up the nagging and was then joined by Mariel. There was much eye rolling, (mine) pleading, (hers) and then out and out yelling (me again). Steve was coughing so much that he had to sleep downstairs sitting up so that he could breathe. I was worried because no matter what my husband said, I could hear that his cough was not a normal one. I was sure that he had the plague. The final straw came when he took my mom in for her physical. She was fine, he was a wreck. Finally after almost two weeks of threats, he caved in and went to the doctor. The next day I kept checking my phone for updates. Late that afternoon Steve sent me an e-mail telling me the results of his chest x-ray: pneumonia. I was relieved that he would finally get some drugs to make him better. Little did I know that the cure would prove worse than the disease. The doctor gave him some sort of uber-super drug so I figured that Shatz would be running hurdles in a week. Unfortunately he experienced all the side effects (and I swear at least 20 more) that were listed on the package. For the next few days he was back on the couch, weak and listless, while we yelled at him again—this time to get him to eat or drink something. I felt awful screaming at him when he felt so lousy. It’s just that I get scared silly whenever he gets sick. I can’t imagine living without him so if he’s suffering from anything more serious than a hangnail I get a little nuts. Steve was finally feeling better, when I woke up with a scratchy throat. This couldn’t be happening. I had recently been ill and had just gotten my strength back so I was determined that there was no way that I was going to be sick again. I did it all: ate raw garlic, drank ecchanacia tea and gallons of water, rested, sucked zinc, screamed at myself---all to no avail. After a couple of days I had the same cough that Steve had. It scared me right into the doctor’s office, where I was told that my lungs were clear, it was probably just a bad cold. So equipped with codeine laced cough medicine and a scrip for a chest x-ray in case I got worse, I practically skipped out of that office knowing that at least I didn’t have pneumonia. But the gods were having a high old time laughing themselves silly. Mariel had already left for Houston when we began getting texts from her telling us that she was feeling sick. Two days later she called me wanting to yell at her father—you guessed it she had pneumonia and was given the same kick-butt antibiotics that Steve had suffered through. I told her that she could not scream at her father—only I could do that. Besides he was still recovering, plus he had already promised never to wait that long again to see a doctor. The scoreboard at that point: Steve--pneumonia, Mariel–pneumonia, me--God only knows what but it was doing a number on me. That Saturday night I had a dream that there was a bull’s eye on my chest and a few seconds later I woke up coughing so badly that I couldn’t breathe. Sunday I was off to the emergency room for a chest x-ray. Again it was not pneumonia but my sides were killing me since I had sprained a few muscles thanks to all that hacking. Mom--after getting a clean bill of health at her physical she came down with a horrible cold. So there we all were--sick, coughing, wheezing, no energy and keeping our fingers crossed that Lisa and Matt would not be taking this gift home with them. Today’s scorecard: After trying every combination of cough suppressant, antihistamine, and antibiotic we’re on the mend. It was the vacation month from hell but we managed to crawl back. Today I even managed to go to the gym and not die. But of course last night half of my class was coughing, wheezing and moaning. I’m thinking seriously of searching for a designer surgical mask to wear until this epidemic moves on. Or maybe I should just go to bed and pull the covers over my head till spring.

Things You Can't Put Down a Garbage Disposal

Things You Can’t Put Down a Garbage Disposal Our house was full and I was happy. Every bed had a loved one in it: Lisa and Matt, Mariel and Dan, and Mike and Mary our wonderful friends from Georgia. On Thanksgiving we had more food than we could ever possibly eat and more laughter than we possibly deserved. The girls had cooked and baked, Steve had created his masterful salads and I had basted the turkey till it shined golden caramel. We toasted with our favorite Prosecco and had a Norman Rockwell meal. After dinner, Shatz took mom home and the girls were cleaning up. It was heaven to sit back and have a glass of wine with Mary, who I only see once a year. My feet were up, my eyes closing when I heard words, “clogged drain”. “Wait till daddy comes back,” I yelled, knowing that Steve would fix it quickly. “Don’t worry mom,” Mariel replied. “I can unclog it with the plunger.” Intimations of danger tickled my mind but I was too tired to do anything about them. Lisa objected saying that her public health persona rebelled at the thought of using a toilet plunger in the sink. But Mariel grabbed the plunger and attacked. Later Mary confessed that she had thought that all that energetic pumping might exacerbate the problem but she thought it best to keep still. They kept trying the disposal and plunging, disposal and plunging, while I sat there wishing that Steve would get back and end the uneasy feelings that were building in my stomach. As this was going on, Matt’s dad, Gerry and Matt’s nieces, Sydney and Izzy arrived. We explained the situation and Matt took the girls downstairs to keep them distracted while Mary and I talked to Gerry amid the increasingly loud gurgling sounds emanating from the kitchen. Steve and Mike finally came home and joined the fray in the kitchen. The two engineers put their heads together and decided that Drano was needed so they ran out to find a store that was open on Thanksgiving. Returning victorious with two huge containers they proceeded to pour it down our drains both upstairs and down. Then there was waiting and more plunging until suddenly I heard Lisa scream and then shout, “Mom whatever you do, do not come into this kitchen!” I had no intention of doing that--I could barely get off the couch let alone face a disaster in the next room. Let me backtrack. We have a closet in our kitchen that we use as a pantry. The original owners had kept a washer/dryer combo in it. We got rid of it before we moved in but the water pipe remained and it turns out that Steve had never capped it. So all these years later, thanks to a finicky disposal and a furiously plunging family, I was the proud owner of a closet waterfall—a river of everything we had put down the disposal in the past two days of cooking. Before Lisa’s great watery discovery, Izzy had come up to the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about. Bored, she began sock skating all the while singing, “My socks are wet, my socks are wet.” Lisa looked down and saw that her socks were indeed quite wet because there was a river running out of the pantry. It was then that she opened the door and encountered the waterfall. So picture this: The plunging has finally stopped, and the mopping up has begun. Lisa and Mariel grab some garbage bags and toss everything that isn’t sealed into the bags. Luckily our small liquor collection was on the top shelf so that escaped unscathed. The girls then scrubbed everything and Sydney dried it all off. They disinfected the shelves, the closet and the floor. In the middle of all this madness, Steve comes cheerfully into the living room asking, “Should we set the dessert out in here?” and proceeds to carry in an apple pie, cupcakes and cookies, while Snoopy goes wild at the sight of food and I sit on the couch in a stupor thinking that I must be the only crazy one since everyone else is acting like this is all quite normal. To top it all off Mariel yells out from the kitchen, “Look on the bright side mom, at least you can get a column out of it!” In our house even plague is fodder for a column. The guys finally admitted failure and called our plumber, Bob. They then spent the next 45 minutes trouble shooting over the phone with Bob. I’ve never seen two happier guys. They were engineers and they had a problem to solve and all was right with the world. They ran up and down the stairs checking water levels and water flow and drainage quotients and God knows what else while Mary and I sat on the sofa and drank the last of the wine. So we learned what not to put down the disposal (and it is a very long list indeed!) and our closet pipe, like our chimney, now has a cap. I’m also left with a closet that sparkles. As Lisa says, sometimes the only way you get around to cleaning is when something explodes. My refrigerator could use a good scouring. Perhaps If I’m lucky a milk carton will self destruct.