Early October Reflections

I am not sure if I am fasting on Yom Kippur. I probably will.

I am sure I got sick last Wednesday and cancelled my Thursday colonoscopy.

Thursday, I felt good enough to eat more than a little something, play Scrabble, and make the word ‘bedding’ with 2 blanks on a triple, using my 7 letters and getting 84 points.

Eating more than a little something and Scrabble figure into my routine. Thank you, Mom and Dad. Thinking and writing about my parents are part of my life, more between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

At High Holiday Services at Buffalo’s Kleinhans Musical Hall, my family sat in the balcony. My father and I counted the heads of the bald men in the orchestra, deciding who had the shiniest, and who could dot the ‘i.’ At holiday meals, some insensitive, judgmental relatives made my self-conscious, nonconforming mother feel more ill at ease. Ouch!

I am fortunate she validated me and gave me opportunities to choose, make decisions, and express myself on paper and elsewhere.

When I played the piano, she’d appear with a gleam in her eyes. If I played show tunes, she sat beside me and sang. Favorite family members have made “Try to Remember” part of their routine. It puts a gleam in my eyes. I wish my mother could hear them. I wish she knew I’ve improved at the piano and enjoy playing the Beethoven and Chopin pieces I sort of learned from my Buffalo piano teachers. I had my piano tuned last week.

Adele, my Buffalo friend since second grade and now living in my ‘hood, took me out for my birthday. Over dinner, then a walk through Washington Square, we discussed what we often do: our families of origin and the plays we’ve recently seen.

The theater and NYC are huge gifts from my parents. They introduced me to both.

It's Saturday morning. I’m heading to the first meeting of a new NYC theater festival of short plays. A section from my full-length play was accepted. Details of our November 9 reading at the atrium at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street will soon be on my website under ‘events.’

On Saturday mornings in Buffalo, my Aunt Dora stopped at our house on the way home from the beauty parlor. She’d get her hair washed, set, combed out, sprayed, sometimes cut, sometimes permed, and often colored.

My father would look up from his book and quietly say, “What’s the matter? They didn’t take you?”

A Sweet, Lovely New Year to Everyone!