NEW PAGE----------NEW DAY

Our daughter wrote this obituary to honor their 15 year old car. Now our 180,000 mile ,12 year old mini van is the matriarchal car in the family. I hope it can live up to its responsibilities.

“On December 6^th, 22^nd of Kislev, the famous Honda mini van passed away after a brief illness. Recently hospitalized and granted several organ transplants (brakes, modulator ,steering pillar) it suddenly had a seizure of the transmission on its final test drive by the mechanic, before car hospital discharge. CPR was initiated (Car Please Restart) but was unsuccessful. It was pronounced dead at the time.

This car represented hours if not days and days of road trips to Sand Lake, the farm, OSRUI, Colorado and many other fun trips. The number of McDonald’s Happy meals consumed in this car can never be tallied.

The end of an era, and the end of a fun car and fun times .But life does move forward, and we all have new memories and new adventures.”

It is never too late to appreciate that we still have the memory of the good times we had with that mini van.

This is the car that I vowed to clean when I won the lottery. I hope it was clean when it went to its resting place.

It’s the end of an era. After I graduated with a BS Degree in Foods and Nutrition, I took a job with Stouffer’s. I was being trained to be an account manager in the food industry. My first assignment was at the Headquarters of Bell and Howell, in the cafeteria. I was eligible to shop in their company store. Because we went back and forth to our cottage, I thought that an Aladdin thermos would be a perfect thing to buy. It is a heavy -duty , industrial strength thermos. The kind that real men (and women) use on construction sites. We used that thermos for over 30 years. It is the kind with the glass insert. Why it never broke, I don’t know, but today, when I left it to be included in the Rummage sale, it was still intact. I wonder if the person who buys it, will open it and all of our memories of good travels will come pouring out. That thermos has been in Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, Colorado, Nebraska, Maryland, Missouri, Virginia, Iowa, Tennessee, and Florida. It never went to New York. I don’t know why.

It’s never too late to appreciate the things you owned and to realize that, really, they probably owned you.

I have to make a confession. I am not bothered by toilet seats being left up. I can't understand why that would bother any women. I never hear a guy complaining because the seat is down. There is a 50-50 chance someone won't be happy.

What freaks me out is hair.On the soap. My husband had more hair in the old days. In 59 years of marriage, my spouse and I have hardly ever shared a bathroom.

Our cottage had one bathroom. We didn't have hot water for years.We heated water on the stove and used that to sponge bathe and to wash dishes ( not with the same water). In the summer, we took a bar of soap out to our raft and jumped into the lake. Before we had plumbing,we would go to the Public Library in Grant which was 11 miles away because it had a bathroom. We did a lot of reading that summer while we built our cottage. I still have my library card from there. It is part of our family history.

When we moved in for two years, with our daughter, 5 of us shared a bathroom on the second floor. The first floor had a spa bathroom, but we slept up stairs and that is the bathroom that got most of the use. We had a schedule that we announced every night. Who ever had to be up earliest got the first spot. Bob and I were last.

It is never too late to enjoy the luxury of being able to have two bathrooms.

I have a problem and I don't know what to do about it.  The dog that we are sitting howls when I start playing my violin. I am a beginner , so I know what he is trying to tell me. My own dog walks out of the room when I play, but the visiting dog really hurts my feelings. He throws up his head, howls and looks so ferral . His parents will be embarrassed when I tell them.

Our dog has become a bit nervous with our four legged visitor.They play, by the visiting dog sniffing you know where, and my  dog rolling over on her back. I suspected she may have a little slut in her. Thankfully, she will growl if visiting dog tries anything more physical.

Having this visiting dog has introduced us to more neighbors, mostly snow birds.  They come out to see if we have a second dog or they want us to tell them what kind of dog this visiting dog is. He is beautiful. I think he would be the kind of dog that some person might want to steal. He is that beautiful. And except for the howling, he is a perfect house guest. He brings his own food, he doesn't smoke and he doesn't have any favorite TV shows. He does take up a lot of room on our bed. I've gotten up in the morning and instead of my husbands head on the pillow, there is this dog snoring, softly. So human.

It's never too late for me to be tougher with our visitor and have him at least move to the foot of the bed.

Today, we buried another pillar of our Jewish community. She was a strong voice,she was the essence of compassion.For her, the word Mitzvah defined who she was. I came to know her as a member of our small Chaverah group  and as a part of our little knitting group. She held various positions  of leadership in our congregation ,but her special love was education and the acts of Mitzvah.I am sorry that I didn't know her before her health started to fail. I never heard her complain. I only experienced the quickness of her decision making , how she was always concerned about a child not having everything that they needed, and how she looked for answers to that problem. I never had conversations about religion, or politics, or anything spiritual. Instead our association was mostly on a social level. She loved a good joke,she liked our little Chaverah , she liked our knitting group . And we, in return, liked to be with her for her quick mind, her opinions, her insight . Her body may have held her up, but that mind of hers, just kept going and going, always concerned about those around her.

What a menshe..I changed my mind, she wasn't a pillar,she was a column. Rest in Peace, Pauline.

I like to read the sport section. There, you can read all about life : the high of winning,the lows of losing,statistics,history,politics,drugs,personal relationships.And for some reason, the obituaries are included in the sport section (This is another good read).The sport section is better than the first section which I find full of depressing topics,like family abuse,suicide,floods,liars,theft,murders, political unrest in countries whose names I can't pronounce.I start with the first section, but I think my eyes start glazing over by the time I get to the Ed Op page.I sometimes have to reread that in the later afternoon. At 5:30 AM, I cannot comprehend all of the bitterness and hurt in the world. That's why I then go to the sport section. Here ,it is usually, you win or you loose. What you read is pretty much what you saw on last nights TV.Except for cheaters and fixers, the games are straight forward.You win some or you loose some. A few bad calls, some head butting, a concussion here and there. All in good fun. And salaries. Who would have thought that playing games could be so lucrative. Should I have encouraged my children to go into professional sports? Forget medicine, lawyers,social work or teaching? It's never too late to realize that I gave my kids the right advice.

Tonight we are poring over a beautiful Jerusalem cookbook that I ordered. We are so full from a wonderful cookbook dinner that I don't know how we can still be interested in food. It must be true that you eat with your eyes , because where else could we put the food we are salivating over. Food is important to us. We think about and plan our shopping list for the next meal while we are eating the present meal. My daughter says that they go to the grocery store as a date night. She even emails me possible menus and a shopping list before she comes. Another daughter takes full responsibility for shopping and cooking when she visits. I just do the dishes.

I love cookbooks . I read them like novels. Before we moved here , I sold my collection of cookbooks to a dealer. I didn't expect to start another collection, but I have. This new collection has cookbooks that are vegan, vegetarian, crock pot and from TV food channel cooks . I even have a Kosher Crock Pot Cookbook. I figure that if I can find one dish from each category of food in any of  the books , it is worth it. I always put check marks and plus signs next to my favorite dishes. Many of the pages are splattered, so it is easy to see which are really favorites.

I am a recipe cook.I pretty much stick to the printed page . I make cookbook authors rich .It's never too late to add one more cookbook and make it a Kosher one.

For years, we kept a "weather or Not" notebook at our cottage. I've kept them, even though they are not exactly a journal,but they chronicaled the weather as we spent 35 years at a place we all loved.

We tried not to put superfluous stuff in it, but stick to weather and an occasional remark. You'd be surprised how you forget that last year, Memorial day was cold and windy and you needed heat, or it rained so many days in a row, that the onion fields that our area was known for, were going to have a problem.

We always put our raft in the lake on Memorial day , and took it out of the water on Labor Day. Both days could create a hypothermia problem. But those dates were written in stone, or sand , as our lake was named Sand Lake. Usually, daughter number 2 was the official dive down and get the anchor person. Funny,how no one fought for that honor.She's the one who went on to do the Iron Man and may still have the record for a long distant road race This taking in the anchor toughened her.

Dad oared the row boat and help push the anchor into the boat to drag the raft onto shore. That was the point that we all knew that summer was over and school would start in a few days. No matter what the weather was on the day we pulled in the raft, the day we closed our cottage and left until the next time ,was always beautiful, warm and sunny.We have it documented in our weather or not book.It was always hard to leave .Some of us cried. But we all knew that it was never too late to appreciate the days we had together in this special escape we had.