Today was B's father's 12th yahrzeit. What can I say? I love this day. I wait for it every year. We go out to Jerusalem, where B's father was born back when it was under Turkish rule, and B goes to visit his father's old neighborhood. We have lunch, we talk about his dad, etc.
But how can I say that I love his father's yahrzeit? It sounds so callous.
But today was fun. First we stopped off along the way to pick up a totally cool woman I've been email for years who, it turns out, lived a few blocks away from me in NY and now lives down the road from me a piece. We went into town, parked, and separated. B went to the travel agent to plan our next trip (he wants me to be away for over a month? Is he nuts?) and Rachel Ann and I went fiber shopping. Unfortunately we didn't find anything unspun, but Rachel Ann bought some beautiful purple handspun and I got buttons for the BSJ I finished the other day. We both bought embroidery floss for our protest bracelets--mine was DMC #970. I gave some away over the course of the day--there are now at least 6 people wearing them. And if they each get 6 people tomorrow, and then they each get 6.... As of tomrrow, the bracelets will also start making an appearance in two of the local schools.
But the best part of the day was just talking. It's been a long time since I had a chance to just stand and gab about life, the universe and everything with a fellow metro-NYer, especially one who can introduce me to a bookstore I've not been in since I was a kid, visiting Israel, one so good I even broke my "buy no more books" by getting "Stevie Smith, a Critical Biography." You have to understand, I went through an intense Stevie Smith period one year, braving the whores on 8th Avenue in Manhattan to get to the theater playing the movie Stevie 8 times, seeing it another 5 at the Thalia on the Upper West (IIRC) side. How could I resist? But poor Rachel Ann had to keep listening to me saying "I have this book. I have that book." And now, thanks to her, I'll have to introduce my kids to the store. Hello, bankruptcy! Then we sat and spun until B and I had to go off to pick up P's laundry and have a talk with the rabbis at his school.
She'd clued me in that today's her birthday, so I prepared a little gift for her. Some brown cotton lint, white and green ginned cotton, white cotton seeds and fiber flax seeds, and a wrist distaff. She thinks she spins unevenly, but I can already see that one day she'll look back at what she's spinning now (thin and froghair designer yarn) and wish she couold reproduce it.
B did the mincha thing at the no-women-ever CBS shul and we ate in the food court. (are we so upscale we scare you? Me, too.) Looked at some building materials in a store behind the CBS, went to Har Nof to buy B pants in Bazaar Elitzur, and then back home.
Exhausted. Satisfied. Had "Zeide Isaac's poifect pea soup" for dinner and recalled one of the biggest mischief-makers ever to walk this earth.
All in all, a good yahrzeit.
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Of course a yartzeit can be "good." It's good to remember. Friends of ours (two friends, not typo) were killed over 30 years ago in the Yom Kippur War. We meet at the grave, friends, widow, children, mother, grandchildren, every year, and then we go to a friend's home in Jerusalem and talk and laugh and have a grand old time, like old times. The past few years, since I'm English teaching, it has been hard for me to attend, can't cancel classes in a proper school, so I've missed a few. But this year and last I've managed to get to the "wake," as I call it. and another new custom for me is to have dinner afterwards with one of our friends. Just us two ol' grannys. Very special. Yartzeits can be wonderful. We can't bring the dead back, but we can celebrate life.
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