Category Archives: Blog

She Said Yes to the Dress

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Things didn’t bode well for the bridal-gown-shopping excursion. The weather forecasters weren’t sure how much snow the storm would dump on New York City, and the bride had to travel down from Albany. One bridesmaid would be coming in from New Jersey. Another bridesmaid (my niece) and a flower girl (her five-year-old, my great-niece) live in Boston, which everyone knew was going to be hit hard.

Taking a good guess that school would be cancelled for Friday, my niece and her family made a getaway Thursday night to her brother’s home in CT, and were safely ensconced in a midtown NYC hotel by Friday afternoon. When my daughter got on the 4:15 train on Friday to the city, I was feeling better — even though the legendary Kleinfeld’s had already emailed her that they might have to cancel her appointment because they might not be able to open the store. There are, after all, many bridal stores in New York City.

And thank goodness for that. Manhattan was largely spared the snow — on the Upper West Side we had about 11-inches, although Brooklyn Heights came in at 2-inches. The subways were running. We all own boots. Only my daughter’s mother-in-law-to-be hadn’t made it in. And, yes, Kleinfeld’s had cancelled.

But RK Bridal was open.

This store bills itself as “no-frills,” and certainly is. The dressing rooms are not fancy. They don’t offer the bride bottled water. Over a thousand dresses hang on racks (in plastic), grouped by designer. It could be overwhelming.

From the moment we walked in, however, we were made to feel at home. Because of the slush, we all had to remove our boots, For those of us who forgot shoes (um, moi), the store provided slippers. They did not fuss that my daughter had an entourage of eight. They did not mind that we all dumped our coats in the dressing room. The staff was cheerful and relaxed.

Kudos to my daughter who came prepared with pictures of gowns she liked (which I had printed out for her).

I am also in awe of our saleswoman who grabbed the gowns my daughter liked off the floor, found similar ones for her to try, and then, in an act of brilliance, produced a gown of a type my daughter had totally nixed, but which fit in with my daughter’s sense of style and also emphasized her best features.

That was the dress. What they say is true. When she  tried it on, she knew it, and we knew We applauded, and so did everyone else in the store.

I have little experience in the bridal gown department. At my own wedding 32 1/2 years ago, I wore flowers in my hair. It never occurred to me to look at a traditional gown. I was teeny tiny in those days, and I couldn’t find anything to fit me. My mother wasn’t particularly interested, I think. I ended up having a three piece silk outfit made, which my daughter derogatorily refers to as a “suit.”

I cannot post a picture of this wonderful bridal gown my daughter will don in September because if I put it on the Internet, somehow her fiance may see it — and we can’t have that, right?

I continue to be amazed at what a wonderfully easy bride-to-be my daughter is, so different from the bridezillas we watch on television shows or read about in magazines.

For me this mother-of-the bride experience is exhilarating and exhausting. I’d love to hear from others, both brides and mothers, about the special moments in their wedding planning. If there were disasters, well I guess I better hear about those too. Thanks.

Snowflakes for Sandy Hook

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As we come close to the one week anniversary of the tragic shooting at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, CT, I can’t get my mind off of the parents whose children never came out. I can’t imagine what it could have been like to see the various classes led out by first responders (indeed, the news was full of such videos. If you haven’t seen enough,  you can go here), and then to wait, and wait, and wait, until there were no more children coming from the school. Even then, even then I know those parents were thinking, “perhaps she’s hiding in a closet,” or “maybe he’s at the firehouse and I missed him,” or “she’s wounded, but she’ll be OK.”

Strangely, those awful moments may be what the parents of the children who died remember as the last “normal” moments of their lives, the hours and minutes before they knew for sure.

Parents do weird things. When our children are infants, we wake in the middle of the night and run to their cribs to make sure they are still breathing. If a toddler taken care of by a babysitter or nanny comes home in a different brand diaper from the one we use, we ask the caretaker, “where were you?”

When our 26-year-olds drive back to Albany on I87 and it’s already past dark and besides that it’s cold and rainy — possibly even cold enough for the rain to make the roads slick — we call them to make sure they arrived home safely.

It’s what we do as parents. We love our children. We do everything we can to protect them.

It’s what the parents in Newtown could not do and why we are all at such a loss about how we should respond. A woman with a mentally ill son writes a blog that goes viral. It seems to speak to us all. Raising a violent child is a nightmare, and there are not enough resources available to parents who fight this battle. Yet the post also enraged many people because it once again opened a door to the anti-gun-control apologists who say, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” I saw many rants on Facebook by people furious that the blog was getting so much play.

Nonetheless, it’s time our country began offering more help to the mentally. And those of us who want to tighten gun control laws, it’s time to write letters to our elected officials, to vote with our feet and our signatures. (Sharon Hodor Greenthal has a good list of resources for both mental illness and gun law advocacy in a recent blog on her Empty House, Full mind blog about the Sandy Hook Shootings.)

Still, what can we do that will really help the town? If we’re NY Giant football player Victor Cruz, we can write a victim’s name on our shoes and go talk to a dead child’s team and give some comfort.

The rest of us? Well some people changed their twitter avatars to pink daisies in memory of one of the little girls who loved daisies. Others are making cut out snow flakes from paper to decorate the new school where the kids who survived the massacre will return to school in January.

My Twitter Feed is filled with tweets like this:

 

 

At first I found these gestures annoying. It’s not like sending teddy bears or daisies to Newtown, CT will actually do anything that will effect change. It was different after Hurricane Sandy. We could give money to the Red Cross, and they would use it for victims. We could go help out in shelters. We could dig the sand from people’s basement floors. We could take action.

For Sandy Hook, it’s inaction that will speak, a moment a silence. Cutting snow flakes and sending them to the Newtown schools — I finally figured out that a piece of paper also speaks volumes. It says we care. It says, yes, our kids are here with us (or away from us), safe. Yes, it’s unimaginable to think what those parents went through, those parents whose children never came out of that school. A snowflake, a pink daisy. Small gestures. It’s all we have to give for now.

That and our voices and signatures and votes that will ensure that the kinds of guns and ammunition that aren’t even used by police or by hunters will not be available the next time someone, insane or just angry, decides he or she wants to kill people.

I’ll Make My Garden Grow

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So there I am, three pairs of gardening gloves already too muddy to use, surrounded by flats of tomato, lettuce, eggplant, cabbage and leek “starts,” a paper bag full of seed packets and my gardening bag, and I think, “this may be the last year I can do this.”

Gardening is hard, and at some point I’ll have to stop. At some point bending over will make my back ache too much, or my knees won’t be able to take it. Over twenty years ago, when we rented a rototiller for our first vegetable garden, it never occurred to me that my body would ever feel “old.” And, really, mine doesn’t feel so old. But I turned 60 this summer, and that how-can-I-do-this-again feeling really hit hard.

Then there’s the emotional turmoil that goes along with gardening. You put in all that work, and then it rains too much, or too little, or a blight wipes out your tomatoes, or the rabbits manage to get through your garden fence. I do not find little bunnies cute. I look on them as destroyers of produce.

So let’s see. This year, first there was a lot of rain, and the garden was infested with slugs. We killed hundreds during May and June. Then in July it stopped raining. I do have a sprinkler system for the vegetable garden, but it was broken, and the guy who was supposed to fix it – well he just got around to putting in the new heads week. (My garden has evolved and grown over the years, and we now have raised beds surrounded by a beautiful fence to keep out those obnoxious deer.) By the second week of July, the leaves of several of my tomato plants started turning yellow and brown. I’d be gone all week and the temperature was in the 80s and 90s. Then something started nibbling at my eggplants and strawberries. The first several ripening tomatoes were savaged during the night by something that was able to get through the chicken wire that double guards on the bottom of the fence. I thought I’d have maybe 15 tomatoes. My brussel sprouts didn’t sprout.

Then, oh then, suddenly there was produce — more than I can possibly use. We had peas, string beans, carrots, onions, cabbage, and kirbys. There will be lots of peppers. I will string and dry the cayenne! So far I’ve made six jars of brine pickles (using some equipment my wonderful kids gave me for my birthday). This morning, before the deluge, I picked a colander full of cherry tomatoes and made a sauce with fresh peppers, onion, parsley, garlic and basil from the garden. I’ll use it later this week. For dinner I made stuffed cabbage, kapushnik as my grandmother said in Yiddish, with cabbage I had just picked.

So if you ask me right now if I’m planning on a vegetable garden next year, the answer is yes. Right now I am basking in the glow of a blue plastic gardening basket filled to the brim with tomatoes ready to be canned. I wish I had the optimism of Barbara Grufferman, the author of The Best of Everything After Fifty. She’s about five years younger than I am, but she looks at the birthday numbers creeping up and truly has the reaction, “You can’t bring me down. Now, Yay!” In fact, take a look at her inaugural post for the AARP. She’s irrepressible and has a much better attitude than I do. It’s not that I obsess about age or feel depressed about getting older. The other day someone pointed out that on my FB profile I have the year I graduated from high school, so it only takes a bit of math to deduce that I’m 60. There, I said it again. I have no problem being sixty. I’m not about to doctor my LinkedIn and not list jobs and positions so someone might think I’m 50 or 45. I just that I fear that one day I’ll wake up and I’ll feel old, too old to manage a vegetable garden.

So here’s a few questions to consider. Let me know how you feel in your comments — and notice that I’m using a new commenting system that doesn’t make me “moderate” them. You’ll have to sign in if you’ve never used Livefyre, but many bloggers use this commenting system. Let me know what you think about this comment tool. Then I’m going to give a few recipes, so stick around.

1. Do you “feel” old? If so, what makes you feel old?

2. Do you “feel” the same way you always did, and get surprised when you see yourself in the mirror or a photo? (That’s what happens to me.)

3. Any suggestions for aging with grace?

OK. So now for the recipes:

Tomato Sauce from Cherry Tomatoes

4 quarts cherry tomatoes (red and yellow)

2 sweet banana peppers

1 green bell pepper

1 orange bell pepper

1 cayenne pepper

1 small red onion

1 small white onion

1 small yellow onion

handful of parsley (about ½ cup chopped)

handful of basil (about ½ cup chopped)

three cloves garlic

Wash and de-stem the tomatoes. Put them in an uncovered pot with about 2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, chop up everything else. When the tomatoes are soft, add everything else. If you add salt to things, add salt. Keep on a low flame until the sauce has boiled down and is thick. This might take an hour.

Yield: about a quart of sauce, maybe a bit more. Right now mine is in a container in the refrigerator. I might do a hot-bath canning and can it, but most likely I’ll serve it over spinach pasta in a day or two. The yellow tomatoes make the sauce low acid. The cayenne gives it a bit of a bight.

 

Kapushnik (Stuffed Cabbage)

How my grandmother made it, or, at least, how my mother made it.

1 lb chopped meat

¼ cup breadcrumbs

1 egg

1 tsp nutmeg

1 small green cabbage

1 cup ketchup

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup raisins

½ cup lemon juice

Mix the chopped meat with the egg, breadcrumbs and nutmeg. Divide into eight portions. Steam enough cabbage leaves so that you can wrap each portion of meat. Put into a covered casserole. Put ½ cup of liquid from steamed cabbage at the bottom. Add lemon juice. Cover with ketchup. Sprinkle brown sugar on the top. Sprinkle raisins. Bake at 350° for 50 minutes. Serve on top of rice or pasta.

 

 

 

 

Honor Thy Father

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Like most Baby Boomers, World War II had a significant impact on my father’s life. Although shortly before he died my father confided in me that, as Chemical Officer on the Air Force base, he dreaded the weekly lists of war dead because he’d always find the names of recruits whom he had trained to use gas masks, and even visited in the “enlisted men’s mess” because officers

My dad, on the right, doing something official. 1942

felt a true camaraderie with their fellow soldiers . . . irregardless of this, I think in many ways these were the best years of his life. He married soon after graduating from officer training school (and I think he ended up there because he had a B.A. from Harvard), and the bases were full of young couples, who, in spite or because of what was going on overseas, had a lot of fun. Like many, he made some life-long friends.

My favorite “air force” story about my dad has to do with the afternoon a black sedan with blacked-out windows drove up to the door of his Quonset Hut office, and two rather dour looking military men with no insignias on their uniforms escorted him quickly into the back seat of the waiting auto, where he was blindfolded and lost all sense of time and direction. He was able to get a message to my mother through another officer — to think

My dad on field exercises, 1942

that my parents didn’t even have a phone in their quarters! — and a couple with whom my parents were close immediately took her to stay at their place. (To think that she wouldn’t have stayed in her own place! To think that my young dad was so protective of my young mom! This is all such a different world.) As it turned out, someone had told what could be none other than Army Intelligence that my dad spoke German just like they did in a particular area of Germany.

What my dad spoke was Yiddish. He was driven back to the base after a couple of days.

I know this story is true because I heard it from my mom, my grandparents, my uncle, my dad’s army friends.

But there is this other story, also great, that, well, I’m not so sure. Yes, my dad did help develop gas masks and oxygen masks. And it is plausible that he made special ones for special people. He had the rank and the expertise. So supposedly when the Americans needed to get Neils Bohr out of the Carlsbad Brewery and were planning quite a wild dash that would involve flying a plane way above the radar, they asked my dad to make him a special oxygen mask. Because Neils Bohr had such a big head (confirmed in any picture you see; I’m sure it was filled with physics), my dad converted a horse mask to fit the famed scientist.

Yes, this could all be true, but last night when my husband repeated the story to friends of ours, I cringed. It may all be a myth.

That’s the way it is with stories about our parents. I’m sure all parents ply their kids with some real whoppers. I’m not a psychologist, but life experience tells me they do so to make themselves look a little better in their kids eyes. Then the story sticks, and what may have once had a kernel of truth takes on a life of its own.

My father was truly heroic. After his younger brother died of meningitis, my dad came home from Harvard for a semester (it may have been a whole year) to be there for his grieving parents and to help out in the family business — a neighborhood grocery store and property, which my dad and uncle tended to, even to the point of receiving calls from locked-out tenants in the middle of the night, until my cousins and I put our collective feet down and made them sell it in 2000. I’m sure my dad would have loved to have gone on to receive a Ph.D. in Chemistry. But there he was: the war, his brother’s death, his marriage. My dad worked every day of his life so that he was able to accrue a significant savings that accounts for how a philosophy professor (my husband) and a writer (me) manage to have a weekend house. My dad truly hated driving to New York City. So he looked at a map and figured that the New York Berkshires were equidistant from their home and ours, bought property and paid for a house. It meant that the whole time my kids were growing up they spent nearly ever summer weekend with their grandparents. During the winter, if it wasn’t too snowy, they’d come visit too. A hero. My dad was a hero.

But what about the truly outrageous stories, not ones about tipping cows, but that sing of great deeds? I think particularly of friends of mine whose parents survived the holocaust, something unimaginable that will float out of our consciousness as that generation dies off. Most of these friends have stories about how a parent (usually the father) saving lives in the concentration camp by doing things like giving out jobs in the camp laundry to a guy with one arm. Yup, I’ve actually heard that story. I saw the movie The Counterfeiters and I’m sure there were skilled people who managed to share their semi-safety with others. But I also know from reading history that many who survived did things like shovel ashes out of ovens or beat up their fellow Jews. They were not heroes. They were survivors. When it’s a matter of life and death, especially in indescribably horrible places such as the German concentration camps, the Japanese POW camps, the Soviet Gulags, I think that the Ayn Rand in us may overtake all our impulses of tikkun olam — saving the world. If you look at the numbers, if there had been so many opportunities for saving lives, more would have been saved.

Admitting that you were a kapo in a concentration camp — I would expect no one to do that. Making up a cover story, totally understandable. Making up stories about our parents so we have something to tell people — you know, there’s always the scene where someone comes and thanks the grown child because his or her father had saved his life — I guess that’s human nature too. But still, it’s not right to perpetrate lies and falsehoods, and, even more so, it desecrates their memories — because if you look at their lives, they probably did something heroic, even if it amounted to going into work sick one day out of a feeling of obligation to the family.

But for those of us who repeat a perhaps embellished tale we heard from our dad’s lips — I guess it’s a form of honoring them to keep on telling. They are, in the end, just stories. When Moses brought the tablets with the ten commandments down from Mt. Sinai, the fifth one told us to honor our parents. (If you’re Christian, you number these differently. Sorry.) Yes, there are horrible, horrible parents. Children suffer, and sometimes these sufferings ruin a person’s life. But those of us who feel good about honoring our parents should do so all the time, not just on Father’s Day, even long after they’re dead. If the stories are true, make sure they’re passed down. If they’re not true, well, we can laugh and say, “according to the story.”

If you’re the one who made up the story . . . well, it’s your responsibility to your own kids to cut it out now. That’s how I feel. And I don’t tell the Neils Bohr story anymore, though there’s a chance it’s true. It’s not fair to my dad, who did great things, or to the generations to come whom I want to love and respect a real man and real deeds.

As always, I leave you with some questions. I’d love for you to comment here, but, you know, you can find me on FB and Twitter and even Google+.

1. What is the favorite story your dad told you about his young years?

2. If you have a WWII story, please, please share it.

3. Have you ever doubted a story your parents told you? If so, why, and how did you deal.

4. If someone tells you a story about his or her parents that you know isn’t true, how do you deal? Just nod politely? Point out the inconsistencies? Unfriend them on FB?

 

Fifty Shades of Grey From Clairol Hair Products

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My nephew has a category for people like me: women whose real hair color he can’t remember.  Nicely, my beautiful niece, his older sister, also falls into this category, and she hasn’t yet reached the big 40.

But Mike has a point — I don’t remember my real hair color either. Sure, I can look at pictures, and until I was in my late 40s I had a very normal shade of brown that got a lot lighter from the sun in the summer. Now my hair is, well, not brown. And my roots are almost completely grey — that is, when for some horrible reason I can’t get to my colorist and it’s been over six weeks since my last visit. I used to kid myself and say I was only 30 percent grey, and I was just doing highlights to make the grey blend in better. The truth is, though, that I’m probably about 85 percent grey.

I have many friends who don’t color their hair and are perfectly happy with grey, salt and pepper or even white. My graduate school roommate was grey in college, and comfortable with it. Now her hair is completely white, and she looks great. My friend Lydia had long white locks. Except for its color, her hair looks like a teenager’s. One of my friends Marilyn (I’m of a certain age; there are a lot of Marilyns in my life) keeps her salt and pepper in a cute bob. I’m not sure if it ever crossed her mind to dye her hair. I believe that although she cares about looking good, she is self-accepting. (The photo here, that’s of her.)

So does it mean I’m vain because I color my hair? Um. Yeah. Probably. I tell people that my hair would be a terrible color grey, not nicely layered or toned. Just dull. In truth, I do not know what kind of grey I’d be. Aslo, what it would take now to actually grow grey! I’d have to dye it while my roots grew out. Clairol color (or Wella or whatever) would still find its way to my scalp. Also, I don’t want to have grey hair. I just don’t. I think it would make me look like an old lady, like my grandmother in the photo here. She’s probably in her late 40s, early 50s (no one was ever clear about my grandmother Nellie Bernstein’s age), holding my very blond older brother. She looks old. She does.

So evidently I’m all hung up on this aging thing, beginning with my hair. I wish I could be like Barbara H. Grufferman and say, “I’m getting older! Yay!” “Yay” is Barbara’s reaction to most things. She may be one of the most upbeat Baby Boomers around. That’s why you should read her blog: “Five Infuriating Fibs About FOFs  http://bit.ly/KaQgNv.” Barbara does look fab (fabber than most of us in our 50s), and she even ran the marathon last fall. Her fantastic attitude, her ability to keep in shape — I could go on. There’s much to admire.

But her hair isn’t grey.

Perhaps those cute blond curls are natural. I mean, one of my Marjorie friends (I have a bunch of those too, and a bunch of Barbaras. Baby Boomers don’t have exotic names in my world) at 63 still has barely a strand of grey running through her brunette. My dad didn’t turn grey until he was in his 70s.

So since Barbara is a Baby Boomer who inspires me, who is so comfortable with herself, maybe I should just stop worrying and remember to make appointments with my colorist so I don’t have to contend with all those shades of grey for a while yet.

How do you feel about turning grey? Do you color your hair or let it take its natural color. Let me know how you feel about this and what you’re doing with your hair. You can comment below, or reach me on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/linda.bernstein) or on Twitter, @wordwhacker.