Tikkun Olam

It is raining a coldish, shivery spring rain.  I am sitting here at the computer in my “office”--the room which I still call ‘C----‘s room’--by the window, listening to the rain pouring down the downspout against the brick outer wall of our townhome and onto the ground. In fact, I am consciously calling this room by that name, that is: the room of my youngest child, and I stop myself when I find myself beginning to say ‘my office’ when I refer to it either to friends, or even to my husband. I know I wrote sometime back that I am metamorphosing as a mother; that I am beginning to accept my children as adults, as well as my role as grandmother to my grandkids.  But that is not the whole truth, only just…most of it. There is still a small part of me that does not want to make that final, emotional leap out of the past and into the future by calling the room in which my youngest daughter spent a very small fraction of her life, actually—she was here in this townhome where we ...

This morning I did something wonderful, that I rarely, if ever do: go out with friends for coffee and shmoozing. Today I was invited out by a friend to Starbuck's for a coffee-and-Yiddish-and-Hebrew-Poetry-reading-and-explicating-treat . Does that sound boring to you? It might, to some, but not to me. Although these days I rarely read poetry, which I love (and on which I grew up). I used to read, and even dabbled a little in poetry writing (my poems weren't very good). My father ( alav hashalom *) was a Hebrew scholar, teacher and poet, and published one thin little book of poetry, after having published many poems and articles in Hebrew newspapers and literary magazines (many now defunct) such as Ma'ariv, Bitzaron, and Niv (the latter which he founded many years ago) . He also translated poetry by the American and British masters to Hebrew, as well as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (מידה במידה ). My friend ( -mefuzeret le-gamrei *, somewhat like me--but a wonde...