Ladies Day at the V&A

One of my all time favourite museums in London is the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington.  I was delighted when an American friend came to London and today had an opportunity to spend a day with her at the museum.

Waiiting in the manin entrance way I suddenly became aware of the fact that I was surrounded by women.  Women of a certain age and two rather distinct types - the first were rather sleek and stylish and in their 40's or 50's.  They were all queuing for tickets to the Grace Kelly style exhibition.  Not my cup of tea at all.  The second , much larger group of women were slightly older, wearing one size fits all clothing, rather a lot of ethnic jewellry and sensible shoes - they were all queuing for the exhibition of quilts. How strange to be in this magnificent entrance hall enveloped in the chatter of women, women air-kissing as they met, discussing train journeys, re-doing lipstick - I don't think I've seen so many women together in a long time. A bit surprising and overwhelming.

We decided to go to the exhibition oof quilts.  Good exhibition, interesting differences in styles, techniques, designs and colour-sense, but incredibly impressive.  Some of the quilts on display were 350+ years old and in seemingly perfect condition.  Huh?! I can't keep a blanket from one season to the next without spilling some permanently staining solution on it, how do you keep a handmade quilt for over 300 years?

Seeing these beautiful handstitched quilts made me realise how much I enjoy sitting and sewing.  It doesn't even matter much what I sew.  I love the quiet act of stitching tiny hand sewn objects and seeing the flow of the threads across a piece of cloth. I don't use a sewing machine for lots of reasons, but the main reason is that there is no quiet in using a machine.  It has no intimacy.  Sitting in an armchair and threading a sharp fine needle and watching it progreess through the fabric becomes a kind of meditation that I can get lost in.  With a sewing machine I am always nervous that the machine will run away with my sewing.

I also spent a bit of time in the Japan section of the museum and was again bowled over by the fineness and beauty of everything the Japanese do. The masks, the pottery, the netsuke and the fine carved ivory objects were so still.  The devotion in each object was so seductive. Maybe it's time to start saving my pennies to get to Japan and see for myself.

It was a delightful day.  Lunch with my friend, the rain held off until I got home and then a small rainbow appeared.  A fine London day.  I love this city.

With a little help from my friends...

Once again today I am overwhelmed with good feelings for my friendships and what they mean in my life. I have a small number of really, really good friends and a much larger number of those I count as the family of my friends.  I am struck again by how often it has been those very friendships that have pulled me out of a hole of my own making.  It is my friends who reassure me that I am ok and life will go on and things always change.  Sometimes it is those same friends who say nothing and just listen or offer to cook me dinner or just come and hang out when life gets overwhelming.

During the past few months of my father's increasingly fragile staate of health I have experienced many different feelings.  I believe that on many levels both my brother and I have accepted that my father is aging and becoming increasing mentally and physically unstable.  On another level I am still screaming inside.  The uncertainty of my dad's health and the distanse between us makes this so hard.  My brother and sister-in-law have had to carry the responsibility of daily hospital visits and bedside vigils when they should be celebrating the oncoming marriage of their son.  There  nothing I can do to change the fact that I live far away, but I am sick at heart over this state of affairs.  The state of 'should I go, should I stay' made me three-quarters crazy and the only time I genuinely relaxed over the past few weeks was when the cloud of volcanic ash took that decision away from me.

Right now I am in a permanent state of hyper-alert.  I'm not even sure what this is for.  I  speak to my brother most days.  I don't feel that any catastrophe is imminent and yet... it's hard to let go of this state.

The arrival of Spring and the explosion of blossom and trees has added to my state of expectancy.  The whole world is pregnant with life and I feel like I am waiting.

As Starbucks is getting hot and noisy, I will  end with a long and wonderful poem I discovered when I was 15, and sums up an awful lot.

I Am Waiting 

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
Of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe 
for anarchy
and I am waiting for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the second coming
And I am waiting
For a religious revival
To sweep thru the state of Arizona
And I am waiting
For the grapes of wrath to stored
And I am waiting
For them to prove
That God is really American
And I am waiting
To see God on television
Piped into church altars
If they can find
The right channel
To tune it in on
And I am waiting 
for the last supper to be served again
and a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting 
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed
and I anxiously waiting
For the secret of eternal life to be discovered
By an obscure practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and TV rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting for retribution
for what America did to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty's clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting for Aphrodite 
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeting lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

---

Back writing again

I can no longer wait for my crap internet provider to fix my line problem and have decided that the noise, smells, children running about and assorted chaos of Starbucks IS conducive to creativity so I will attempt to write from my hard wooden chair amidst the madness of the marketplace.  I do this because I have so missed writing this blog. I would like it to be as regular as it was originally but I cannot promise since there is only so much coffee I can drink.

In the past few weeks I have watched the passage of my life with sometimes a detached interest.  I have been to Germany, Holland and am now back home.  My dad was in hospital having broken his hip and is now in rehab. My dear friends are back from their expat retreat in Thailand, and life seems to be rolling along as  normal. And yet, I am unsettled.  Can't  really put my finger on why, does it help to know why?  Maybe it is enough to acknowledge the unsettlisation (!) I am experiencing and just go with it.  I fight this a lot and this does create conflict inside me that unsettles me even more.

I have to admit, once again, that living with uncertainty is near impossible for me.  It is like living with itching and not being able to scratch or in any way relieve the itch.  It makes me pretty crazy and doesn't take much to put me in the shaky, insecure land that uncertainty is the capital of.

I went to my GP yesterday and wanted a magic pill for my anxiety symptoms - you've all seem them - screaming, crying, panic breathing, resignation, low self-esteem, weight gain and general madness.  A whole catalogue of self-pity for which my GP tells me there is no magic pill.  Damn!  I thought that as I have been experiencing these feelings for over 45 years, they might have invented something easy, instant and successful to treat this by now.  We have sugar-free chewing gum, eggless eggs and self-repairing paint, but no instant magic bullet for  anxiety!  Not fair. Instead I was asked to go away and fill in a questionnaire.  The questions are interesting:

1. I feel tense or wound up - Most, some, or all  of the time or not at all.
I can answer yes to all three, some, most, or all of the time I feel tense, wound up, completely loopy.  Not at all is a big ask and obviously the compiler of the questions is not Jewish.

2. I have lost interest in my appearance -  Definitely; I don't take as much care as I should; I take just as much care as ever.
Answering this is easy - I take just as much care as ever, but I am fighting a losing battle.  Just as much as ever is having less and less impact.  Aging sucks!

3.  I can laugh and see the funny side of things - as much as always, not quite so much, not at all.
Easy answer for me.  I not only can see the funny side of this, but find myself laughing at the absurdity of repeating things again and again.  Without the ability to laugh about my own situation, I think I would really be institution material.  Laughter is absolutely necessary.  The writer of this question must also be Jewish!

Now, to change the subject.  A remarkable thing happened to me while I was away.  Through the miracle or Facebook, which most of the time is simply away to pass the time when I don't feel like doing anything useful. I connected to a distant cousin.  He posted his father's old pre-war family photos on his site.  Amongst the photos he casually mentioned that one of the photos was of my mother's parents, my grandparents.  I have never seen a photo of my grandparents - EVER! I have examined this old grainy black and white photo countless times and feel so grateful that I have another piece of my history to fit into the incomplete jigsaw puzzle  of my family.  It matters that I now know what my grandparents looked like and that the dark circles under my eyes are inherited and have nothing to do with how little I drink! It matters that my grandparents now have faces I can see.  Remarkable.

Friendship, flying and enforced breaks

This is the first blog entry for weeks.  I am still without internet at home and there is only so much I can take of  sitting in Starbucks.  So many things seem to have happened in the last weeks that it's tough to know where to begin.

Last time I wroteI was in Berlin (great city) and then we went on to Hamburg for a super  terrific 60th birthday party for one of my oldest friends.  The whole of the last few weeks  seems to have been about friends, old and new. 

In Hamburg I stayed with dear friends and met some new people who slotted right into my friendship file.   it was so nice to connect with some unfamiliar  people as if they were long-time family.  It happens when we can communicate with some depth and importantly, share laughter.

From Hamburg I went on a funny road trip with my friends from the Humaniversity and because of the volcanic ash trapping us in mainland Europe we went to the Humaniversity in Holland and spent the rest of the week there. 
An unexpected opportunity for Ralph and me to take beach walks together, eat herrings, and patat mit mayonaisse.  Lovely to be in Egmond again.  I was there to helpout with the text for the new Humaniverrsity website and had a blast working with new young staff  members in their public relations department.  I begin to feel like Grandma  Moses when I go there.   I am older than most and certainly have a breadth of life experiences that I bring.

I cooked, calligraphied and wrote and enjoyed the energetic lifestyle I live when I'm there.  Finally got home on Friday by plane.  Ralph did a heroic 13 hour ferry crossing in order to get to school on Friday.  Really amazing how much chaos a few days without airplanes brought.

I'm back in London, feel pretty good and am in the process of picking up daily life again after a two week break.  When my internet comes back I'll carry on writing in more depth, but right now in Starbucks, this is as deep as I go.

Bratwurst, weiswurst, bier and memorials

So, after many days away I have an internet connection at my hotel in Berlin and can write a bit today.  It's been quite a few weeks without my electronic lifeline to the world and I have had to drink far too many cups of coffee to take advantage of Wi-Fi at Starbucks.

Two weeks seems so little time and yet I feel like I've gone through a lifetime of worry and angst over my dad.  He broke his hip last week. Oy vey! Had surgery on Sunday and is finally beginning to show signs of recovery.  I feel so sad for him to have to go through an operation and the subsequent recovery and rehab that this will require.  Somehow I feel his body is just getting worn out and tired but his spirit and desire to stay alive is still so strong.  I feel his presence very strongly right now and walking around today in Berlin that sense is even stronger.

Today - our first day of three in this strange city was raining and cold.  Of course, since it was such a grey and miserable day we decided to visit the Holocaust Memorial by Peter Eisenman.  This is right next to the Brandenburg Gate in a large plot of land in what is essentially, the centre of Berlin.  The memorial is made up of over 2,000 large dark grey concrete columns of varying heights on undulating paths in a huge unmarked maze.  At first I didn't get any real sense of what this was trying to say but as I walked further into the centre of the memorial I began to experience a deep sense of discomfort and disorientation.  At the centre of the maze the stone columns got higher and there was less light and it became somewhat menacing and claustrophobic.  You could hear voices of other people walking through the maze but would only catch quick glimpses of others.  I found it a very powerful memorial. 

Underground there is a museum and archive relating to the Holocaust.  Like a moth to a flame I had to go through this exhibition.  Again, it was an intense and saddening experience.  I thought so much of my parents and my aunt and uncle and all their cousins who survived the war and also thought of their families and those who didn't. I fought the urge to get angry at the teenagers who seemed to be in the museum on school trips, giggling and playing with iPods.  How could I feel so overwhelmed by this when they seemed so untouched, but then I remembered what it was to be a teenager and remembered that at 14 or so I also felt untouched by the sadness in the world. All of this is history and yet, for me it is completely alive. To walk through this exhibition with its harrowing audio testimony and vivid photographs of life during the war years in the Lodz ghetto and in the concentration camps whilst upstairs was bustling Berlin was quite an experience. 

I need to be here in Berlin to see that what was, over 60 years ago, is no longer.  This is a different place with different values.  This country is alive and dynamic and open in a way that you need to see and experience in order to let go of the past.  Sure, Ralph and I joke about the history of Germany and there is a darkness to our humour, but for the most part, it feels fine here.  Healing takes time and maybe the youth and vibrancy of Berlin is what I so enjoy.  This is a city that is looking ahead but is also finally acknowledging its past.

I do understand most of the German I hear.  It is so like Yiddish (or is that the other way round?) and today a woman came up to me and asked me how to get upstairs to the terrace of the cafe we were in and I realised she was speaking German and I totally understood her, but could only answer her in English.  Perhaps I'll have a go at speaking a bit of German/Yiddish patois and see if it works.

We walked much too much and far too long today.  My feet hurt, my back hurts, but it is nice to be away with Ralph.  We laughed and cried together today. I am so pleased he's here.
Right now I'm going to relax before another round of bratwurst.

My father seems to be slowly getting better, so perhaps I can stop worrying, but not completely. He is with me all the time on this visit. So strange and yet, so fitting right now.

Still arguing with call centres

I still have no internet access at home.  I am sitting in an internet cafe round the corner from my house simply venting frustration at having to do this. Poor old Ralph has spent hours trying to sort this out and we have discovered something we already knew but is not really confirmed - they all lie!

I will post my usual blog entries when I can and until then I have to content myself with periodic trips to Starbucks etc. to check mail.

I hate this.

No posting till the internet is fixed

Unfortunately there is something amiss with my server and I can't get interent connected.  My addiction is screaming 'feed me' but will have to wait.

Meanwhile, have a lovely easter and don't eat too many chocolate eggs!

Making Chremslech

I like to fool myself into thinking that calories don't count during Passover.  This means that I am free to eat matzohs slathered in butter and I can make (and eat) chremslech. 

For those who don't know, and I imagine there are many, chremslech are sweet, crispy, fried matzoh fritters.  They are one of the most delicious things about Passover and though I could make them all year round I save them for these eight days of Passover.

The day before yesterday I had just finished frying a big batch of these delicious morsels as Ralph came home from work.  Like one of Pavlov's dogs, I could almost hear him salivating as he came through the door shouting, "I can smell Passover", and almost knocked me over as he rushed into the kitchen to begin wolfing down the hot chremslech.  He paused after his seventh and with a huge grin announced that these were one of his favourite foods. No surprises there.  By the end of the evening he had eaten about two dozen fritters and left four or five for the next morning.  I promised him I would show him how to make them on his next day off.

This morning was Ralph's first day off work for his Easter break .  Chremslech making day had dawned. I promised I would teach him to make one of my secret food weapons of mass seduction.  Was this to be a mistake?  Usually I keep my kitchen to myself.  I quite like to keep certain things in my cooking repertoire close to me and not reveal that the making of these little Passover delights is actually very simple.  Or so I thought...

Firstly, Ralph is quite the stickler for technique and measurements. Huh??? I just add a bit of this and a bit of that.  He seemed a little taken aback by my haphazard instructions to submerge the matzohs in water and then squeeze the water out when the matzohs were nicely mushy. Squeeze them?  How? Why? Then I literally threw in eggs, brown and white sugar, vanilla and loads of spices, a few tablespoons of ground almonds, some matzo meal and bang - finis!

I didn't so much teach as show and Ralph got to do the mixing and subsequent frying.  We disagreed about the size of the chremslech - I like small, he likes larger, but they came out great.  Now Ralph knew that making these was not such a big deal and also not such a mystery. The still outstanding question is whether he will ever make these for himself?  I doubt it, I think that they taste better when someone else makes them.

The first time I ever cooked with Ralph was in the Bronx in 1969.  We decided to make a yeast-based danish pastry dough.  Neither of us had much cooking experience and we had never attempted to cook anything with yeast.  All I can remember of this is that the dough seemed to grow and grow and grow.  We obviously added way too much yeast and in the end we threw away trays of ever-expanding pastry dough while falling about laughing.  Somewhere in our archives there are photos of the Giant Yeast Disaster of 1969.

I saw today, once again, that I am not much of a teacher.  It's tough for me to see someone taking too long to do something or not doing it my way. I'm a pretty good demonstrator.  Watch while I do something and then try it, but not while I'm watching.  Do it when I'm out of sight otherwise the urge to take over is enormous.  It surprises me that my kids ever learned to tie their own shoes or button their own shirts, but in the end I can get out of the way and let others get on with things.

It was great fun cooking with Ralph today.  We laughed and fried and ate and made dozens of chremslech. A great start to our holidays.  Tomorrow, roast lamb for lunch and Ralph makes some great roast potatoes. Maybe he can teach me his special techniques.

April Fools Day

This morning when I looked back over the past few months of my random thoughts I was struck by the often written about doom and gloom entries.  Feh!  Enough I say! This is a tedious way  to live and for sure tedious to read, so today I am going to change the pace and mood of  my writing.

It's 1 April today,  April Fool's Day. Traditionally a light-hearted day of pranks and jokes, so it seems appropriate that I should lighten up today.  I recognise that this is different to the days in which I feel grateful or positive.  There is a real difference between being happy and light-hearted and being positive.  I can do positive.  I'm good at positive when I put my mind to it. Being positive is what I am when I am actually inwardly negative but outwardly smiling.  Or at least that's part of my definition.

Happiness, that's something else.  I'm not as good at that but I have know wonderful, amazing happy times and I also am able to connect with the fun-loving happy me when I choose to. I love to laugh and can honestly say that there have been times with Ralph, my kids, my friends and family when I thought I would burst from the sensations of happiness and pure unadulterated joy running through me.

To get back to today.  April Fools Day has not featured much in my life.  My parents never really 'got' holidays that they considered to be 'American'.  Halloween, Valentine's Day, April Fools Day - all of these were somehow not Jewish or European enough for them and so usually went unmarked in my home as I was growing up. My brother who is three years younger than me, had a much more Americanised take on life than I did and wanted to celebrate all these strange holidays.  I can remember one year when my brother and my cousin (at about age 10) decided to play an April Fools joke on my parents and aunt and uncle.

Earlier that day we had received a free sample of a new kind of instant coffee. Free food was always a big deal at home since food featured large in our lives and free samples, well, what a treat!  My aunt and uncle often had evening coffee in our house since they only lived across the road.  My brother and cousin knew this and decided to doctor the coffee sample by adding garlic powder to it.  Well, four cups of coffee were made and all the adults sat down to give their verdict on this new coffee. 

"Feh, yuck, terrible,"  they all said as they pulled faces of disgust.  "What on earth were the manufacturers thinking of, making a coffee that tastes of garlic?" my uncle cried.  Meanwhile, my brother and cousin had disappeared to another room and were curled up with laughter.  My mother worked out that it was impossible that a manufacturer would develop a new coffee that tasted like garlic and looked around for the boys.  She decided that they must have added garlic to the sugar, so without tasting the sugar, threw away the contents of the sugar bowl.  This made my cousin and brother crease up with laughter until suddenly it ocurred to the gullible adults that this was some sort of prank and that the two boys must have done this.

Suddenly, all laughter stopped and the four adults were furious.  "What kind of stupid trick was this? How could you ruin perfectly good food?"  The resounding cry of "April Fool" did not go down as it was meant.  These four little Eastern European refugees could not understand what this day was all about.  It really made no sense to them. After all they had just thrown away perfectly good food. This was bordering on committing a sin.

But, you know what? I still find it funny and I still remember the look on their faces as they drank this garlic-loaded coffee and decided that American manufacturers were crazy for making this new garlic flavoured drink.

Now, don't for a minute think that I confuse amusement with genuine happiness.  Of course I was deeply happy when my kids were born, when I got married, when I met Osho in India, when I went on safari, etc. Happiness is more than amusing.  It's warm and fuzzy and like a blanket of delight that you can wrap around yourself on cold nights.  I can feel like this even on the days when I feel really dismal and sometimes it confuses me to experience these contradictions.

Life is not simple and I certainly have a way of complicating things.  I do go up and down and my moods vary as much as the weather, but today I have to say I feel pretty happy.  Ralph phoned my four times today to badger me to meet him for afternoon tea which I did.  We are just at the beginning of two weeks of time off work together.  A holiday in Berlin and Hamburg is on the horizon and life feels pretty good.

I get nervous even saying that things feel good.  There is a part of me that is still afraid to tempt the gods, but today being April Fools Day maybe the gods are busy elsewhere and maybe, just maybe, they think that the idea of my being happy is an April Fools joke.  Maybe, but it still feels good to me, so I'm just going to luxuriate in this feeling for a while.