Gail's Blog

She started crying two weeks ago and couldn't stop. So she wouldn't go down to meals at Sunrise because she'd cry, and "people would be annoyed". "How can you tell they are annoyed, Mom?" "Because they ignore me." "Maybe they are ignoring you because they don't know what else to do?" "No. They are annoyed. I'll stay in my room." She stopped eating, and called my sister over and over. She cried, sobbed and gulped like an abandoned child. She wouldn't watch TV because, "I used to watch TV with Gordon." She wouldn't read because, "I read when I was with Gordon". Gordon, her husband of 28 years, died in March. She went to Sunrise directly from a stay in a nursing facility where she lived while Gordon died slowly, with much struggle, and a conviction that he'd make it, and take care of her again. He promised her. She believed him whole-heartedly. She misses him dreadfully. But she won't

Last night my sister admitted my mom to the pysch ward again. This morning the clouds drift, the sun shines, a cardinal alights on a branch. The coffee maker burbles. We read the paper and giggle at the absurd story about Rabbis and polititians smuggling Israeli kidneys to the U.S. My daughter leaves for work. Feeds the bunny on her way out. Says, "See ya!". And my sister says Mom is feeling calmer already.

She was right between my two daughters. A year and a half older than one and a year and a half younger than the other. We lived in a townhouse courtyard, one of many in a development originally built for the workers coming to DC for the war effort. The "units" had been redone in the '70's and we were living there shortly after. Her house was in the back of the courtyard, a parking lot in the center. She lived with her Mother, Grandparents, and Uncle. We lived with ourselves. She never wanted to come to our house because I supervised them too much. She liked it better when she could have my daughters over where they could all get into mischief, until her Grandma, my friend, would call and ask for help. There she'd be, jumping on the bed, laughing, because she knew she didn't have to clean up a mess they'd made because her Grandmother couldn't "make" her. I was supposed to help, but all I could do was take my children home. She would be out of

I sang in four Synogogues in Cleveland, before moving to Washington. My first "temple job" was, strangely enough, the place of worship of my mother's family. Mom went to temple with her Grandmother, sitting in a pew next to her grandma, listening to Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, a leading light of the Reform movement in America and a leading proponent of Zionism. How I came to sing at Silver's was this: My voice teacher, Mel Hakola, was "cantorial soloist" at Silver's. Mel was Finnish, but he'd been the cantorial soloist (a cantor substitute) for many years. Mel said they needed an alto, and I got the job. It was an experience never to be forgotten, singing in Hebrew, a language I didn't know, inspite of my ancestry, hidden behind and above the Bema, and hidden from the congregation. My voice teacher sang the Sh'ma, and all the other important service music. We sang responses. A good Jewish service is much more participatory for the choir than a

I was reading James Lilek's blog (which Blogger.com wouldn't allow for some reason, so I couldn't post it) about his home town of Fargo, ND. He has a picture of downtown Fargo back in "the day", as they say now. It is a highly focused, wide-angle black and white picture from a good ol' manual SLR film camera. (Am I prejudiced for the old cameras? You betcha!) He muses on how the businesses along the street were family-owned and run the whole time he was growing up. It is a kind of anti-Walmartian, possibly sentimental piece about a uniqueness in our cities that has all but vanished. I could say alot about this whole idea because I feel very much the same way. But time marches on, as they say, and, like SLR film cameras, uniqueness in home towns is mostly a thing of the past. The picture at left isn't a store in downtown Cleveland, but a Presbyterian church. You can see how the city built itself around the Presbyterians, and they didn't go away. The chu