Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

for the third night of Hanukkah, adrian_turtle and cattitude made sweet potato latkes and cranberry relish, and they were very good. And there's leftover cranberry relish, also good. My main contribution to the project was going to the store for the sweet potatoes and a half gallon of apple cider (not part of this meal).

I took a picture of our menorah for the Scintillation Discord server, where people have been posting photos of theirs, starting on the first night, some of them captioned with our locations: Jerusalem, Waterloo, Maryland, Minneapolis, Montreal, Boston...

The three of us chatted on zoom with my mother, a bit earlier in the day. She is doing well, and glad to hear that my PT seems to be helping already.

It's adrian_turtle's birthday. and her birthday cake was an impressive chocolate cherry cake she and cattitude made. In place of dairy whipped cream, they used whipped coconut cream; on the cake, the cocunut flavor was overwhelmed by the chocolate and cherry, and it was mostly a fine rich texture.

For lunch, we went to the branch of Mamaleh's on Beacon Street in Brookline, which has a few outdoor tables. I had sable (yum), Adrian had smoked sturgeon (decent, but I'm glad I got the sable), and Cattitude tried the pastrami burger, which was less impressive than our fish.

(And then I went to the dentist.)

tl;dr cattitude's father can't safely live alone anymore, and after lots of back and forth, it looks like he's moving to an assisted living place in Lowell, near cattitude's sister's house, and also a lot closer to us than Niskayuna is. Cattitude will be spending a couple of weeks in Niskayuna, to keep his father company and do some stuff related to the move. We'll miss him, and he will miss us and the cats, but there are phones, and email and text messaging and zoom, and we will manage.

At greater length: A few weeks ago, cattitude's father fell and was unable to get up again. He didn't get help until the next morning, when paramedics came and took him to the hospital to be checked out. At various times we've been told things including that he was basically fine aside from being weak; that he'd had at least one stroke; that the scans did show evidence of small strokes, but not recently; that he had bladder cancer and we might be looking at hospice; and that no, it's just a urinary tract infection. Tom also told someone, now, that he'd known for about a year that if he fell on the floor he would be too weak to get up on his own, but he hadn't told anyone, including his doctor.

Tom was discharged from the hospital to a skilled nursing facility several days ago, and the doctor now thinks he'll be well enough to move to assisted living in another few days. Cattitude's sister is good at making plans, so she had found and looked into this assisted living place a couple of years ago. She talked to them recently, and they do ha

Family members have been taking turns going to Niskayuna, visiting Tom in the hospital, and doing stuff related to their father moving to assisted living, including making arrangements for selling Tom's extensive, and I gather valuable, antique collection.

Cattitude is planning to take a bus to Albany tomorrow afternoon, and spend a couple of weeks visiting his father and doing useful things. The timing is planned so he and his younger brother will both be there for one night, and can talk and possibly deal with paperwork. He's going to spend a couple of weeks there (or possibly less, depending on when Tom moves to Lowell).

Tom retired from IBM basically at the mandatory retirement age, and arranged to take his lab equipment to SUNY Albany, which gave him space to set up his lab, and the title of Associate Professor (adjunct). He wasn't teaching any classes, but he was working with grad students when that made sense. He was going to the lab occasionally until 2020, and spent the first year or so of the pandemic writing up his data for publication. That's 20 years after he "retired" from IBM: cattitude sums it up by saying that his father "aced his retirement."

cattitude and I went to Niskayuna with his sister and her husband, to have an early Thanksgiving celebration with his father.

Nancy got out her phone so I could look through Ravelry for a sweater pattern I like. Even with help, it felt like there was just too much there; after looking at dozens of patterns that fit a fairly broad search string, I decided I liked a pattern she had added to her queue a while ago. We then looked at another site, and I picked out a yarn I like -- cotton, in royal purple -- and ordered it, for delivery to her address. Nancy likes knitting sweaters, and already has more than enough for herself, so offered to knit me a sweater, if I bought the yarn. Shopping for the yarn in person might have been better, in theory, but I was pretty sure that if I didn't select pattern and yarn while we were talking, we'd be having this conversation again in 2023, having first had it in September of last year.

Otherwise, the visit was low-key and pleasant, although we got up very early to meet them at Alewife, where they picked us up. Dinner was roast lamb and potatoes, which Nancy and Crit brought with them and cooked, and an apple pie Cattitude baked on Friday. We left his Dad about a quarter of the pie, but made sure to bring the glass pie dish home with us.

Cattitude's father is still keeping his house chillier than I find comfortable; I brought a hoodie, but forgot Adrian's advice to wear or bring long underwear.

I now have the date my grandparents were naturalized. I emailed my cousin Anne yesterday, because Mom thought my aunt Lea and my grandparents were naturalized at the same time, and before my mother, because Lea was still under 18 and could be included on her parents application. Anne said that didn't match her recollection, and offered to have Dave (Lea's widower) see what he could find.

I mentioned this to Adrian, who told me where to find US naturalization records online.* It turns out that my grandparents were naturalized a few months after my mother, who came here several years before they did, and became a US citizen about a month after her 21st birthday.

Anne also asked why I'm putting in the application, if it wasn't too long to explain. The shortest answer, which I gave her, is "Trump scared me," I described applying for German citizenship as being like buying an insurance policy you hope never to use.

*Conveniently for my purposes, the records for that period for the eastern district of New York state are searchable online, though the southern district isn't. When Adrian asked which federal court district New York City is in, I said "southern" without thinking. Then I decided to check whether that had been true in 1951-52: the districts haven't changed, but Brooklyn and Manhattan are in different districts. My mother's family lived in Brooklyn, which is in the eastern district, and those records are online and searchable. Once in a while it's relevant that New York City is divided into five counties.


ETA Feb. 23: I sent my mother a draft of an email to the German embassy about this. She sent back a couple of changes, which I'm going to make, and asked me to hold off until the weekend so she can check the documentation on something rather than going from memory.

We (cattitude, adrian_turtle, and I) had Thanksgiving dinner with my mother yesterday, and everyone had a wonderful time (though we're pretty tired today).

This is the first time we've seen my mother -- and the first time she's been in the United States -- since February 2020. She's here until tomorrow afternoon, and is then going to New Orleans to visit my brother.

The menu was mostly what the three of us usually do, plus an odd slaw (involving shredded Brussels sprouts, pickled onions, and pomegranate seeds) that everyone else liked. Adrian had offered me a sample last week, and I decided that I didn't really like it, unsurprising given that I generally don't like sprouts.

We had a minor problem with dessert, and Adrian had to find a replacement recipe for the apple crisp topping--I'd been sure we had rolled oats, but that seems to have been me remembering seeing them at Adrian's. (There are some disadvantages to regularly cooking in two kitchens.) What we wound up with was fine, if not as good as what we usually make, but finding it was part of why things took longer than we'd expected. While the crisp was in the oven, I realized, and said, that the failure mode of this would be that we had to eat chocolate cake, which I was pretty sure we could all cope with.

My mother had a Zoom birthday party today, in two parts: part 1 for her friends in the UK, and part 2 for family in North America. That included some family by choice, Frieda who my mother has known since she was ten and first came to New York, and Norbert who was a friend of her parents from a year or two earlier than that, in France before and during the war, and who thought of them as being like parents to him.

I think everyone had a good time, although someone asked Mom to say a bit about her sisters (both of whom died in the last year) and she was noticeably sad. Mom asked everyone to say something, however long or short they felt like; at least one person left it at "Happy birthday." I said something about being happy to see her and her apartment, where I visited her in late 2019, because it brought back those memories and because it was reassuring, seeing that she looks well.

There was a bit of "so that's what this person looks like" along with "so that's what she looks like now." I think I'd seen a photos of my brother's girlfriend before, but if I'd seen a picture of my cousin Carole's son it was a baby picture, proudly displayed by my grandparents. Carole's hair is still red, though not the flame-orange it was when we were in our twenties; Anne and I have both inherited Grandma's white hair.

Mom's upstairs neighbor, Jackie, who is her quarantine pod, was there, and brought in a cake, with candles.

My mother sent me, my brother, and our cousins a copy of the eulogy she wrote for my aunt Lea. I'm putting it behind a cut, mostly because it's long, but also CW mention of the Holocaust:

( Read more... )

I talked to my mother today, and she is well and enjoying the warm weather. My aunt Lea is well and having her groceries delivered instead of walking two blocks to the store, which we agreed was a good idea. (Lea is my mother's younger sister, and they're both in their eighties.)

I am, however, still a bit annoyed about how the call went. I emailed and said that I'd like to chat, asking her to call when it was a good time. My mother called a few minutes later, and we talked for a little while before a skype call came in, and she told the other person "hang on a minute" and then told me we'd talk later, and took the other call. She has a regularly scheduled call with this cousin, and had forgotten that--and I still think that given that Mom had called me, she should have told *Marilyn* "I'll call you later" instead of putting me off.

cattitude and I went for a walk, my second of the day, which helped some in calming me down. When Mom called back, I told her I was unhappy, and why. She started to explain in terms of tech and "hadn't realized how skype was going to work," and I told her that wasn't the point, the point was that she had called me, at a time she selected, and should not have taken another non-urgent call. At that point I think she got it: she apologized, and agreed with me that she wouldn't do that again. Then we talked about my baking bread, what news we're each following, getting food delivered, and so on.

I'm back from three days in New York, visiting with my mother (who was herself visiting from London). cattitude, adrian, and I spent a lot of enjoyable time with my mother and my aunt Lea, and a bit with my cousin Janet. We also walked too much -- my hips were not doing well by Tuesday evening -- and I am going to try to take things easy for a few days.

In some sense we didn't do much. There was a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we looked at an exhibit called "Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe." They have a fine collection of expensive attractive objects, many of them related to science and math: things like a set of fancy compasses for a nobleman who studied geometry. (That's through March 1, if you're going to be in New York and it sounds interesting.)

Other than that, we went down to Greenwich Village in order to buy chocolate at Varsano's, and spent a lot of time just talking, some in our hotel room, some in restaurants, and a lot at my aunt's house.

I am feeling very worn, at least partly because of unrelated pain in my left wrist; I will be getting that looked at tomorrow morning.