New Year Begins

What a week! Joel and Sarah leave tomorrow, and it has felt like nonstop parties and socializing, the house rocking for almost two weeks. New Year's locally, a neat Prospect Street reunion with Mary and Tony and Anne and Gordon and Katherine and Ed and Joan and, oh, a ton of other people.

Yesterday, Mom, Andy, Joel, Sarah, and I went to Liberty Science Center . It was a mad house– Friday after New Year’s, the whole world off from work and school, and apparently everyone with children under ten at LSC! My mother loved looking at the kids and interacting with them when she could. We hadn't been there since long before their expansion. It’s enormous, with lots of things to see and do, and I could have used more time actually to explore some of the learning sections, but it was super crowded. Many artifacts, of course: a great folded beam from the World Trade Center; activities for kids: Suspended I-beams to walk on in the Skyscraper exhibit; Gila monsters, a Gaboon viper (Venom to kill 30 grown men!), a room full of interactive stuff that Joel remembered fondly from childhood. But the sensory deprivation tunnel has been gone for a long time.

Black widows, a floor map of the Hudson estuary so you can walk up to the Berkshires in four steps. Fifty foot tall wave-ladder; views of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. My mother reverential about Our Lady of the Harbo. Driving over, we had a long discussion about Judaism and the Jewish man’s morning prayer, which Joel, like Andy, thought said Thank you God I wasn’t born a woman but is actually mroe like “Thank you God King of the Universe who didn’t make me a woman.” So according to Sarah and Joel, this puts the emphasis on the thank you for everything including what You made me. And to Joel, this also was maybe also about someone writing the prayer and meaning a sexist world view but God Himself directing the man’s hand so that the words came out in a way subject to interpretation by future generations. Interesting hair splitting or profound Meaning?