It’s good to be back after a rare respite from my five and a half year blogging adventure. I was intending to take two weeks off, but this brief report on part of my time away would have gone stale in another week. We drove the last of our family members who were here for the Passover holiday to the airport yesterday. We love having them and we love to see them go, and I think they would admit to being relieved to return home to their shower with actual water pressure and their own deeply ingrained routines. Granddaughter Dalia pined for her beloved dogs, one of whom she considers her best friend, the other her sister.
If you’re a grandparent reading this, you’ll recognize this description of the challenging transition from feeding two to provisioning five or more. It’s true that the visitors increase the number of hands preparing meals, but it’s the accelerated cycle of setting up and cleaning up that’s dizzying; the dishwasher seemed to be running 24/7. To be clear, we loved every minute of it, but at our age, it’s reasonable for us to relish returning to a slower pace.
The weather wasn’t conducive to the outdoor activities we had planned, but we did get downtown to revisit The Bean, where Dalia remembers taking photos at age 6 or 7. Many museums and city facilities are on money-saving Wednesday to Sunday schedules, so we had to engage in some nimble reroutings, one of which landed us in the Lincoln Park Zoo. Dalia, barely out of childhood herself, declared that the zoo brought out her “inner child” and I totally agree. Even though we’ve seen lions in the wild on Safari, seeing them clustered together for their afternoon naps or standing proudly on a “climate controlled” boulder was still thrilling.
Watching movies has always been a cherished part of family visits. Pre-streaming, it meant building in time at local theaters. Now it also means whatever TV watching we can squeeze into the schedule. I’ll mention two of the highlights from this visit. The Friend, based on a wonderful novel by Sigrid Nunez, at its most easy to communicate level, is about a woman who inherits a dog from a dead friend/lover. And what a dog! Apollo is a Great Dane living with his new mistress in a cramped rent-controlled New York apartment. We thought the presence of dogs would engage Dalia, in spite of the “adult” themes that were central to the movie. Of course, we underestimated her. She connected with all of it. See it while it’s still in the theaters.
One of the highlights of our winter trip together to New Orleans was a visit to the World War Two Museum where we encountered an exhibit about a little-known battalion of Black women who took over a system in disarray — getting mail to and from GIs and their families. Tyler Perry’s movie “The Six Triple Eight” starring Kerry Washington as the battalion’s legendary captain celebrates their achievements in creating order from chaos when handed a task that was designed for failure. This is an old-fashioned movie in many ways, but it generated no shortage of tears in our TV room, including more than a few from Dalia.
I haven’t mentioned the key reason for this gathering, which is the Passover holiday, which began last Saturday with the first of two Seders and which will have ended on the Sunday night before you’re reading this account. The holiday is built around the retelling of our story of the Jews’ liberation from bondage. There’s a tremendous focus on eating, particularly of special unleavened foods, which most of you are already familiar with, so I’ll save my words for the context in which all this was taking place.
A few days before the start of Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) Elana sent a picture from five years ago, barely a month after the Covid shutdown. It showed a computer monitor at the head of a Seder table devoid of people. The following year the Seder was a hybrid event, with some in attendance and some at home. These were profoundly depressing experiences for me, so this year’s table in our living room so fully inhabited by family and friends was the perfect antidote to those dark years. Mind you, the Gaza War last year and our emerging authoritarian regime cast a dark shadow over the holiday, but at least we were together, united in our commitment to work to bring some light into that darkness. We were not alone.
There was another dark cloud that gathered over the holiday. Mid-week, we learned of the death in New Hampshire of one of our dearest friends, Edith Milton. Edith was a woman of unique gifts and a survivor of a unique history. She was born in Germany, but left for England on the famous kindertransport, where she spent the war years living with the warm family of the warden of Dartmoor prison, until she was reunited with her mother in New York at war’s end. That period of her life is recounted in a wonderful book, The Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English (University of Chicago Press). I will always hear the slight tinge of a British accent in the many conversations we had in countless dinner conversations at her house in Francestown, New Hampshire.
I am eternally grateful to her for taking our daughter Adina under her wing for an after-school introduction to Shakespeare to supplement the thin fare of her school’s curriculum. Edith devoted herself to supporting the work of her husband, the renowned printmaker Peter Milton, who survives her. Our annual return visits to New Hampshire always began with our reunion dinner and our time there will never be the same without her.
