Baile Rochel Locked In? Nah! Can't Keep a Good Girl Down

Baile Rochel tell you how it really is:

Life in The Corona Lock-down

The other day I got an emergency call from my childhood playmate:

"Baile Rochel, the world is waiting for your words of wisdom."
"Nu, me?"

What wisdom?

I'm just a sloppy overweight middle-aged senior citizen who keeps getting chastised by my children for taking walks outside the house. I dress like a bandit with a mask and all. OK, I admit that the "mask" is just a folded shmatta, cut from a ripped flannel sheet. For goggles, I have my trusty multifocals.

When people ask why I still go outside I answer:

"Doctors orders!"

When corona virus, COVID-19, the plague, or whatever you want to call it, is no more than an awful memory, high blood pressure, diabetes, serious aches and pains, etc ad nauseum will still be live threats. In addition, I live in the "sticks," in a private home, so I don't need scuba gear in an elevator or public stairwell.

I rarely see anyone when outside, and if I do, I cross the street. And if that's not possible, proper corona manners demand that the younger wanderer must climb the nearest tree. A close call was averted when a clueless little kid started approaching encroaching on my personal space, about the distance/height of a star basketball player, so I growled. He got the hint and ran away.


Like many, I'm hoping that I still have clothes that fit when this corona has crooned away. In a "normal year," I would have given fattening chametz, the food forbidden on Passover, away before the holiday begins. And in case you haven't been following the Jewish calendar, Passover's next week. Corona prevention regulations forbid giving away food, so my husband and I are enjoying suffering by eating pancakes-made in large family quantity and other forbidden for dieters foods. Yes, I'm finishing the beer, too. It's chametz!

I haven't seen my grandchildren in person since Purim. But now on the advice of one of my kids I am "living my old dream" to be an international "entertainer" by reading children's stories daily on facebook. Anyone can tune in, as long as you have a facebook account. Join to watch my daily shows.


One corona related regulation I'm following very strictly is staying away from the supermarket. My husband can't do his beloved shuq, open market, shopping either; it's in Jerusalem and shuttered. We must be saving a lot of money. Every few days I call the manager of the local grocer and order a few things. They arrive straight to our doorstep.

And I can't remember the last time I ate out with friends, another frugality of the corona lock-down. We now meet frequently on Zoom, Skype, Whatsapp, email and, of course, my blogs written under my other name. But:

 I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND!

Mrs. Sullivan's Dancing School, Bayside, NY, circa 1953

Sitting Shiva, Showing Home Movies and Other Tips

I'm almost finished sitting shiva for my brother. Just over two hours left. Soon I'll change out of  my shiva "outfit," the same clothes I've been wearing since leaving for his funeral. Except for Shabbat, I've been wearing the very same outer clothes, skirt and two-layer top. The outer shirt was ripped at the funeral in one of the Jewish customs.

When we sit shiva, weeklong Jewish mourning, one is supposed to ignore the usual dressing and grooming care. No hairbrushing or clean clothes. Also no bathing. Yes for sure, I'm looking forward to taking a shower, shampoo and putting on something clean!

The night before my brother's funeral I was at my New York daughter's, and she took out a set of DVDs that my brother had made from our old home movies. We watched a couple of hours worth. She gave me the package, and I took them home. Yesterday I decided to put them on to watch and turned off the sound. The sound was just some musical accompaniment the "film to DVD" place had added. In the 1950's and early sixties, home movies were silent.

So, in addition to the little album my eldest daughter had made before I left Israel for the funeral, I now had moving pictures of my brother and our family life way back when to show those who came to לנחם linachem, comfort me. These family movies were from about 1956-1960, if I'm not mistaken. There are additional DVDs that follow my parents and us well into the early 1980s when we moved to Shiloh.

Here I am riding my bicycle near our last* Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY apartment, 67-62 Springfield Blvd.

I moved the low chair I had been sitting in to a place I could also see the screen, and I'd talk about my brother and the world in which we grew up.

One advantage of showing the home movies over the picture album, which people continued to look at especially since it included photos from his entire life up to a few weeks before my brother died, was because pretty much everyone in the room could see it at once.

Few of those who came had any real idea of what it was like in a place like Bell Park Gardens, which was such an important formative part of our childhood. My brother was ten when we moved to Great Neck. Seeing us and it, in faded color, brought my stories to life far superior to even the most descriptive words.

And for me it was very meaningful and comforting to see my family, parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends and the locations which loved and shaped us all.

*We lived in three different apartments in Bell Park Gardens from December 1949- August 1962.

On My Mother's Yartzeit

As per Jewish custom, I have a 24 hour light burning in her memory.

I have no set custom as to what to do on these memorial days for her. When my husband has them for his parents, he brings herring and maybe schnapps to synagogue in the morning to make a "Lechaim," in their memory. But even though I do pray the morning (and also afternoon) prayers, I do it all quietly alone at home or wherever I happen to be.

I don't really do anything special to commemorate my mother, and I'm still in the first year of mourning for my father, who passed away just a few days before Passover.

In a sense my whole life is a reflection on my parents, for good and for bad. We all are the results of how we are raised and what we make of it.

Even though both of my parents ended up extremely dependent in the period before they died, I still think of them as a generation of giants. There's nothing I can do or accomplish that can compete with the powers they had. We were taught to treat them with awe and respect. And from what I understand, their parent, too treated them that way. They were the "American generation," the first in their families to be born and raised in America. They paved the way. They were also very strong and influential grandparents, in a way I can never be. And in a sense I wouldn't want to be, since I had to stand aside when my parents (and in-laws, too) visited and were with my children.

My mother always encouraged my love for dance, and there was a summer, when I was twenty, when we actually worked together teaching an exercise class for women. Other women in a nearby community had requested that she give a summer class. I had just taken two years of "Dance Movement" lessons with an excellent, innovative instructor, Allan Wayne, in Manhattan, so she told them that she needed me to demonstrate the movements.

Basically, the truth is that I was the teacher. My mother would point to me and tell the women in the class to "follow" what I was doing.

And in many ways, after the original shock of hearing that I was going to live a Torah aka Orthodox Jewish Life and then move to Israel, she became quite supportive. And as the Great Neck Synagogue became more of an Orthodox community, she enthusiastically joined in the various chesed activities like comforting and bringing food to mourners besides running the Sisterhood Gift Shop and more.

My mother loved and participated in all of the arts, was a paid member of lots of museums, a docent in the nearby Nassau County Museum, performed and was stage manager in the Fresh Meadows and later the Great Neck Community Theater, loved dance and shows etc. She also tried her hand at painting. And she absolutely adored her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

לעילוי נשמתה

שפרה בת אברהם וחיה ריזיה

Kiddie City Memories

For many of us who grew up in Northeastern Queens, NY, in the 1950's and early 1960's  Kiddy City amusement park was a favorite place to be. There were all sorts of rides and treats from simple merry go rounds to bumper cars to spinning cups, roller coasters and more frightening rides in which we were strapped in tightly. 

I am not quite sure when it closed down, but every time I pass its location, on the LIRR Northern Line after Bayside going east, I think of all the fun I used to have there.

Another "Puzzle Piece" of My Life Found

I don't know if this sort of thing is happening to my peers, but of late, now in "late middle age," I've been rediscovering/reconnecting with old friends and have made contact with relatives I hadn't seen or heard from in more than a half century but I'm now in contact with a branch of relatives I had barely known existed. Internet and facebook are fantastic tools for reuniting.

A few months ago when I had written Dancing Memories... about the dancing school run by a Mrs. Sullivan in her tiny basement, I mentioned that I was looking for the friend who is next to me in the picture. Just a few days ago, my friend Margaret found me!

I woke up to an email from her, and yesterday, before Shabbat, we spoke on the phone, and we must talk more and meet in person, even though the logistics are complicated. What timing; I just returned from the states and had spent over a week in Manhattan. But I shouldn't complain, because at least I found out that she had felt the same. We have never forgotten each other.

And along with others who grew up, or at least spent the best years of our childhoods, in Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, New York, we considered it a Garden of Eden for kids. We had a freedom and security that doesn't exist nowadays.

PS Now out of the five of us in that picture, only two are unknown to me, the girl in the middle and the blond next to her. The picture was taken either in spring, 1953 or 1954, when we were four or five years old. If anyone has a clue...

Dancing Memories...

I started to go to dancing school at the age of three. There was a woman, a Mrs. Sullivan, if I remember correctly who had a "dancing school" in her tiny basement. Classes were small, and at the end of each year there was a large recital in the local school, P.S. 46. Bayside, NY.

Each class performed and we had costumes as you can see here. The year of this picture we were "toy soldiers" if I'm not mistaken. From the shoes, it must have been when I was four or five. I know the names of two of the other girls. One is my friend Lisa  who writes about her mother on Alzheimer's - My Mom My Hero. Our parents were close friends for maybe half a century. We were friends and neighbors when we were little and then became nextdoor neighbors as teens and then lost contact until reunited not long ago, when I found her on facebook. The girl next to me is Margaret (Margie) Gruen (at least that was her name when we were kids.) We haven't been in touch for more than fifty years. I have no idea what has happened to her, and I don't remember the other girls at all.

This picture brings back so many memories, especially of how much I have always liked to dance.

Can you guess which little girl is me?

Memories...

Someone I knew from the time I was just a couple of years old has written a book about memory, or the lack of it. She also blogs. Lisa Hirsch was my neighbor in Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY and then in Great Neck, NY. Her parents and mine were very close, and I remember the family well.

Lisa and Ruth

Alzheimer's - My Mom My Hero

Her blog and book are about her mother's Alzheimer's and growing lack of memory, coping with it for both of them.

There are so many different types of dementia. And it progress differently in each sufferer. I knew my mother had it and knew that it was getting very bad when she forgot that my son was engaged. The last truly aware thing I heard her say was "beautiful" when looking at a photo of my eldest granddaughter, her eldest great-granddaughter.

So few people who've survived to the ages of Lisa's mother and my father have both physical and mental sharpness and health. Usually at least one, if not both, of those are faulty. How sad.

I'm not good at waiting

I'm in a strange halachik-Jewish Law- status.  According to our LOR*, I can't start the official pre-funeral mourning or onan, because I'm not part of the funeral planning crew for my mother.  That status will start for me once I'm off to the funeral, to which I'm going alone from here.

my parents a few years ago here in Israel

I've never been good at waiting, nor letting other people make my plans, but now I'm in a "just waiting for orders" situation.  Almost everything has fallen on my sister, part of the package she got when she agreed to have our parents move to Arizona, and she is being assisted in New York, where the funeral will be, by my NY daughter and a cousin, who will host the first stage/night of shiva after the burial.

Today our family is spread out all over the world, doing all sorts of things, but we were once your typical New York Jewish family.  Both of my parents were the first generation to be born in America.  They (and I) were born in Brooklyn, New York.  Then we lived in Bayside, NY and after that Great Neck, just over the City Line. 

Now my sister is in Arizona, and I'm in Israel.  Our brother is still on Long Island.  We have cousins and their children much further afield.

Many of the cousins from both sides and some old friends  will be making every effort to be together at my mother's funeral.  That will be a comfort.

*local Orthodox rabbi

The New Eli - Shiloh Bicycle Path

When I was a teenager and younger I loved to ride my bicycle.  It's one of those things I haven't done for decades, but it's also one of the few things still popular, at least in this part of the world, Israel.  One of my sons finds cycling to be the most efficient and quickest commute to work.  The bonus is that it keeps him fit, and he has to be fit for his job.

Way back when, in the "old country," my friend Louise Rosenstein and I met up a couple of times in-between Bayside and Great Neck on Northern Blvd at the bicycle path near the Throgs Neck Bridge.  We'd cycle to the "end of Queens," then go into a store, buy a big container of ice cream, get some plastic spoons and then finish off the ice cream, sharing it until the very last drop.

Israeli cities, including Jerusalem, have bicycle paths which you can see on the sides of roads.  And even here in the Shiloh area there's a new bicycle path to tour Emek (the Valley of) Shiloh, Tel Shiloh to Eli.

When I was at Tel Shiloh on Rosh Chodesh we spotted a number of cyclists riding by.

Here's a video of it; hat tip: my husband.


חנוכת שבילי האופניים בשילה הקדומה from Ronen Siman Tov on Vimeo.
אירוע חניכת סינגל במרחב מעיינות שילה- עלי, אירוע מאורגן למופת על ידי תיירות אזור בנימין, בהובלה של חברת בוץ ובעבודת בנייה של חובב, מאות רוכבים התקבצו ובאו להפנינג של רכיבה בנופים מרהיבים. הסינגל זורם ומהנה ביותר! וההשקעה בבנייתו ניכרת. שיר הנושא הוא "דרור ויקרא" בביצועו של שלמה בר מהברירה הטבעית.