March 16-22, 2021
It is almost Passover, 2021. I happen to love Matzah with butter, and Matzah Brei for breakfast, and prior to the pandemic, I made all these different kinds of Haroset from all over the world for our sedars. If you don’t know what haroset is…look it up please. It’s part of the ritual foods we eat at Passover. We have big dinners called Sedars on the first two nights of Passover. Passover lasts 8 nights but we only have these big gatherings on the first two nights.
It is hard being a Jew in a Christian world. I live in a Senior Cooperative building in Minneapolis. There’s only a handful of Jews living here as best as I can tell…given that we all wear masks. I don’t know how many people live here, surely between a hundred to two hundred. I moved in at the beginning of the pandemic over six months ago, so I only know faces with masks.
Last December, 2020 about six months after I moved in, I asked the management of the Cooperative if I could place an electric menorah in the lobby of my building since there were multiple x-mas trees in the lobby. It’s not that I’m such a religious Jew; I’ve explained to non-Jewish friends that Chanukah is a minor Jewish holiday but it became a big deal because Jewish kids wanted presents at x-mas time, so Chanukah became the “Jewish x-mas.” (I don’t literally this, but you get the point, right?}
Spring has sprung in Minneapolis so it’s lovely to be having some warm weather as Passover approaches. No buds on trees yet, but they are coming soon. And equally important, my birthday is April 3rd…as spring begins to happen here.
I am turning 70 years old in a few weeks. That blows my mind. When you are young, you don’t think of yourself as aging. So I never imagined myself turning 70 years old. Damn, I say this aloud and it blows me away. Seventy years old.
As I am turning this momentous corner, I’m working on trying to finish my life story/my memoir. It’s called: Are We ‘There’ Yet?” Social Justice Journeys in my Lifetime. It’s scary working on this book. It just has my name on it. The other books I’ve worked on with Beloveds were collaborative works. This will just have my name on it. Damn.
I’ve never sat down for long periods of time to write without a pressing deadline. It feels great to sit for several hours and just think about putting my words on the page. What a privilege! The more I write, the more I believe that this book will really happen.
I just finished revising a chapter, “My Mother’s Story.” It is about my mother’s journey into alzheiemer’s and what it was like for me. I’ve started to do a podcast, and I also decided to read this chapter at a weekly zoom call for members of the Becketwood community. All this happening as Passover will begin in about ten days.
I’m also doing a podcast. I am planning on reading the chapter about my mother on an upcoming podcast.
Going back to the chapter I am working on…
Lisa Albrecht 