Just Hilarie

Sleeping late

On December 30, 2024

I’ve never been a natural early morning riser. There is something so nice about waking from a poor night of sleep at around 8 in the morning, going out to the bathroom to pee and then coming back to bed to once again fall back to sleep, to dream, to wake again around 11 to start the day and eat what others would call lunch but I call breakfast.

This kind of routine was of course impossible once I had my son. Back then I woke at 6am, got myself ready for work, woke the boy at 7 to get him dressed and fed and then it was off to take him to Dagis or school and then be at a heavy day of work by 9. When he was still in Dagis we picked him up at 3pm. Once he started school, we would pick him up just before 5 from his after-school program. The hours at home were filled with making dinner, bathing the kid, doing homework with him, putting him to bed and often, many nights, going back to the computer to finish the work I didn’t get done before leaving for the day. And finally getting back into bed myself until the next day started bright and early. Well, maybe not so brightly during Stockholm’s dark winters.

But those days are gone – its rare now that I have to be at an early morning meeting – I can still do it if I have to – if it is out of my control to plan it. I don’t like it, but I can still get up early if forced to.

In 1974, I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the upper east side of Manhattan. It was just part-time. I was still attending art school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn – it was my last year there, my fifth year actually. I had switched from the Fashion Design program to Commercial Art after my second year at Pratt and in the process had lost a number of credits I needed to graduate. I had a choice of stuffing my final fourth school year with those extra needed credits or spreading my last batch of credited courses out into a fifth year. I loved being at Pratt and I was not in any great hurry of being out there in the real world, plus… I was and still am, a bit of a sluggard. So I decided to take that extra year and work part time at the Museum at the same time.

The way I worked at the Met was called per-diem, meaning on a day by day basis. The Admissions Department (the department where I worked, not one of the fancy curated art departments) gave me a schedule of days and times I was to come in, based on when I had no classes. But they could also call me at the last minute and ask me to come in to work on the same day. I skipped a lot of classes by going in to the museum instead of appearing in a classroom. It was the early 70s which were really still the 60s, so nobody really noticed if I was sitting in a classroom or not. I preferred to sit at the cash register giving out buttons to everyone who paid to visit the museum.

If you have ever seen or been to the Metropolitan Museum you would know that the front of that massive, pale stone building is faced with a wide array of many low steps leading from the front door to the fifth avenue sidewalks where all the hot dog venders sell their wares. We used to joke that the vendors filled their carts with water from the fountains that sprayed water on both sides of the staircase. They probably didn’t but I never bought their hot dogs. I mean…why take a chance. The stairs were the perfect place for natives and tourists alike to sit there in the sun to rest and chat and watch the stream of people walking by.

Back then, in 1974, when called in to work, I would take the hour long subway ride from my dingy and very slummy Park Slope Brooklyn neighborhood to exit the underground darkness at the 86th Street subway stop in the very fancy Upper East Side. A short walk got me to the museum on Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. I would bound up the staircase, often taking 2 steps at a time, to finally arrive at the entrance where the guards nodded hello and let me in.

But that was then. Now when I find myself faced with a flight of steps, I immediately go looking for the elevator or escalator. At 73, stairs have become something to avoid if possible. It doesn’t mean that I am unable to climb them – I still can. But slowly.

And it seems that everything else I do is happening slowly too. Just getting out of bed is taking longer. Getting dressed too. If I don’t need to be anywhere past the borders of my island of Reimersholmen for days at a time I will just wear the exact same clothes over and over again. I rarely spend hours in front of the closet, deciding on how to assemble the perfect wardrobe for the day. Now it’s just a matter of taking that old cotton shirt and the cat hair covered sweatpants from the chair in the bedroom that they were tossed on the night before and if it’s chilly in the apartment, adding the bulky black cable-knit sweater that I bought with my mom the last time she was here visiting me in Stockholm. The holes in the elbows are now big enough to fit an entire cat through them but if my long sleeve t-shirt underneath is also black…who’s gonna notice. Just the process of putting everything on takes longer. And now, I make sure to sit down when putting on the pants.

I used to move quickly. I was spontaneous. I reacted to things instantly. I spoke rapidly, having been taught by growing up in my family to never let anyone finish their sentence. I was damn quick on my feet as I moved in three dimensional space. But that seems to be all gone now or at least on its way out the door. Except for the talking. I still talk fast, still not letting people finish their sentences. And this is something I get reprimanded for, especially here in Sweden where it is considered an unspoken sin. But I can’t fight upbringing.

So now…no longer moving quickly and frequently checking the ground while walking – I don’t want to be surprised by some uneven stretch of earth that will send me sprawling. I used to be able to hop over obstacles – now I go down like a sack of potatoes. And getting up again. That takes a lot longer. I no longer turn around suddenly – I might lose my balance. I check that the chair is under my butt before I even start to lower it. Chairs with arm rests are a great invention – as are railings along staircases. And things hurt when I walk. Thanks Mom for passing on to me your arthritic knees. Last week the back of my calf started to hurt when I walked – it started at the back of my ankle and slowly worked its way up to the middle of the calf. How did that happen? I don’t remember twisting anything or spraining a muscle. It just appeared. Was it because my leg wanted to remind me that I had a calf? Just in case I had forgotten?

All this slow moving is very tiring. It takes a lot of effort to just get started doing something. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do. And then by the time I am done thinking about it, it seems to be just the right time to take a nap. And I can sleep as long as I want and dream about racing up a long flight of stairs.

Passover 2024

By Hilarie

On April 7, 2024

In Uncategorized

Every year at my Passover Seder here in Stockholm with my J.A.P.S. (my Jewish American Parents in Stockholm group) I say a few words before we start. This was what I said this year.

I want to welcome you all.

I am very glad to see you – glad that we can join together to celebrate Pesach, in these difficult times. And they are difficult, but I won’t say anything else about that.

To us the word, Pesach means to pass over, and that comes from the idea that the angel of God passed over the homes of the Hebrews, as our people were called over 3000 years ago, when we were slaves in the land of Egypt. That is why we call this holiday Passover.

But recently I have just learned an interesting thing about that word, Pesach, that Hebrew word. Now I don’t speak or read Hebrew. I sort of know most of the letters in the alphabet and can follow along the Hebrew words in the prayers in the prayer book. But this is what I just learned…The first letter or syllable in Pesach is Pe. And as a word all by itself Pe means “mouth” and the second syllable “sach” means speak. So, the word Pesach, also can mean something like “using your mouth to speak or to tell”. And that is what we are gathered here in this room to do tonight – like Jews all over the world do. Tonight, we will tell the story of the Exodus – the journey of the ancestors of the Jewish people from slavery to freedom.

And we don’t just tell this because maybe we might feel like it – we tell the story because in the torah we are commanded to tell this story, every year, at this same time of year. We keep telling the story so that every year it gets passed down from generation to generation. We are expected to tell this story to our children, so that they can tell it to their children. But even in places like Jewish nursing homes, they still hold a Pesach seder, even if the youngest person in the room is 75 years old and has heard the story many times. A reform Rabbi named Arthur Green explains “Even if we all know the story, we are commended to tell it again. The act of “Storytelling” for its own sake, you might call it, whether there is anyone “new” who needs to hear it or not. You might call this the miracle of Pesach.” Says Rabbi Green.

This year, this night, we are missing a bunch of our second generation of J.A.P.S. They are off doing other things and cannot be with us this year. I hope they will be with us next year. But as I look around this room, I see a whole new generation sitting here – ready to hear the telling of this story.

So, let’s begin.

The stories we tell

By Hilarie

On December 28, 2023

In Uncategorized

I recently spoke with a very dear friend who I have known a very long time on a one and a half hour skype call. We spent a lot of time talking about family and discussing our past. She told me some things about her parents I hadn’t heard before and I told some of the stories from my family. And this got me thinking about the stories that are passed down from our parents and grandparents. The way we tell them. The way we tell them as if they were true. I told her that the story as she heard it from her father might not have been the way it really happened. And she answered me by saying that that was the way it happened – her father wasn’t a liar, he told her the truth. I told her that I wasn’t calling him a liar but that his story of what happened in his life was just the way he remembered it. But it didn’t mean that that was actually what happened. He wasn’t a liar – he was human. Like the story from my grandfather about the boat he took in his travel from Poland to the USA in the early 20th century. When my cousin researched his history, she couldn’t find him on that boat. But another boat was in New York Harbor at exactly the same time and on that boat’s list was his name. He had seen that other boat when he arrived in America and instead of remembering the name of the boat he was on, he remembered the name on the side of the ship he saw when entering the harbor to his new world. He wasn’t a liar – he was human.

Humans tell stories. Well some of us do. Not all. Some are just silent, unable to make sense of the life they are living, unable to recreate it in words, unable to examine what their life is. But I think most of us humans tell stories. We have a need to explain and understand ourselves. Did a person not choose to go down a path in their lives because they felt it was better to stay at home or was it because they were afraid. Did a person become successful because their own father encouraged and supported their choices or were they just lucky? Did someone not follow their dream because they just didn’t want it bad enough or because they weren’t strong enough to buck a domineering mother?

Life is never a straight shining path. It is a crooked, winding, bumpy road with all kinds of divergent paths leading off to different directions. What fork you choose to take at any of those branches determines the path of your life – you rarely get a chance to backtrack and redo your choice. You can only move forward. But your mind can redo those turns you took. You can think back and tell yourself “I took that path because your father was there and I chose to marry him”. But years later, well along on the chosen path, deep down, you know that the reason you didn’t follow the path of your dream was because you weren’t brave enough to do so, and so, you took the easier path. And yes in many cases, having encouraging parents or advisors who can help you decide what is the best choice for you to follow is definitely an asset. Many of those forks in the road get walked without any forthought whatsoever. We humans just go where our feet lead us and then spend decades mulling it over and telling the story which we, with our human memories, remember about it. And that is the life story that our children or our friends get to hear and to pass on to others.

I think I must have been born a sceptic (or at least someone who was unwilling to accept at face value what others told them). Maybe not since birth but definitely since I was four years old. I was four years old when I needed to have my tonsils removed. The very nice doctor told me it wouldn’t hurt and afterwards, I could eat all the ice cream I wanted. When I woke up my throat hurt a lot and when I tried to eat the ice cream my mother gave me, it hurt even more. That very nice doctor lied to me!! And I don’t think I ever believed anyone else, or the stories they tell, wholeheartedly, ever since.

I know people who never fail to say how much they loved their parents or how much they respected them, or admired them, or looked up to them or miss them greatly once gone. And I have to admit, this makes me feel a bit jealous. Because I am unable to use any of those words to describe how I feel about my own parents. Now don’t get me wrong…my parents were not not horrible people. They didn’t beat me, they didn’t starve or torture me. They did the best they could with the limited means they had that were a result of poor decision-making earlier in their lives. I definitely loved them but… By the time I was 14 or 15 I was sure I wanted to live my life and make choices completely differently than what my mother did. And I give my mother credit for encouraging me to do exactly that.

Happy new year

By Hilarie

On September 18, 2023

In Uncategorized

Happy new year everybody…
Or rather, not to everybody…mainly to all my Jewish family and friends.
Happy New Year because this weekend was the start of the Jewish New Year – not the regular New Year that is celebrated with fireworks and such on December 31 but the one that we, the Jewish people celebrate – usually in the fall. This year, we are celebrating the beginning of year 5784. That’s a lot of years.

For me personally, it was a pretty busy weekend, preceded by a couple of pretty busy weeks preparing for this weekend.

On Saturday, my group of J.A.P.S. as I call them (Jewish American Parents in Stockholm…not the kind of JAPS who always have perfectly polished nails), arrived with their offerings of food at my apartment almost promptly at 2pm. We were 22 people crammed into my open-plan kitchen-dining-living room. Håkan and I had spent the last 2 or 3 days, cleaning, vacuuming and dusting the place – putting the miscellaneous crap we always have lying around in the kitchen-dining-living room out of sight in other parts of the apartment. It wasn’t spotless but good enough. Our small entry hall became filled with shoes, backpacks, jackets and empty bags. The kitchen counters and buffet table were filled with brisket, tzimmes, honey chicken wings, salads, cooked veggies and assorted drinkables. All the desserts were off to the side on the window sill. The large dining table was set up with candles, a bottle of red wine, a round challah, dishes of honey and a big plate of apple slices. Once all the hugs and hellos were done and the food organized, shoes were found and the disorderly group was sent scurrying down the stairwell (I took the elevator) to the front door and out across a ramp to a floating dock on Pålsundet. It was a beautiful day – warm and sunny with a feeling of still remembered summer. Motorboats of various sizes kept passing us as we gathered on the dock, probably wondering what this unruly group was doing there. Some of them waved to us. We were there to do Teshuvah and Tashlich as we have been doing every year for many years already.

Teshuvah can be seen as the process by which Jews atone for the bad things that they might have done in the past year and it requires a good amount of self-reflection. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides said there are 3 steps in this process: first one must adopt a sincere feeling of regret for one’s bad actions, then one needs to ask for forgiveness from those one has harmed and finally one vows to not do so again. We follow this process of atonement with Tashlich which is a symbolic “casting off” of the sins we have carried around with us for the past year. We do this by tossing something into flowing water – we used to toss bread crumbs but that’s now thought to be bad for the ducks who might gather around us. So this year we used defrosted corn kernels.

I passed around the papers that explained what we were to do and which had a few prayers on them that we spoke together. And then we threw away our sin-carrying corn.

Back upstairs again, we gathered around the dining table, passed around wine-filled small plastic cups and said the blessing over the candles I lit and then over the wine, the round challah Håkan baked, the apples and the honey and finally a prayer for a sweet new year. And then we could eat!! And schmooze and eat some more.

On Sunday, I managed to drag myself out of bed before noon and by 3pm I was at the Jewish community building with my neighbor and good friend Eva-Britt for a Progressiv Judendom i Stockholm activity. We had planned to hold a short afternoon Rosh Hashanah service followed by a shiur/discussion. Tim Kynerd led the service with his beautiful voice, helped by Monique Nilfors and Sonja Kalmering and with Nathaniel Glasser Skog and his son contributing with the music. Afterwards, Noa Hermale led the discussion. He talked about how thousands of years ago, the sighting of the new moon determined the start of the new year. And how it was not always self evident to the different rabbis of the time when the new year actually started. The natural phases of the moon was the calendar they used, not having a printed version to refer to. But what he also talked about is how Rosh Hashanah, a day when the moon is new is made into a holy day. How we humans can take an ordinary recurring event like the phases of the moon and give it meaning. And that idea spoke to me.

Rosh Hashanah is one of the most important days of the Jewish calendar – one of its most holy days, if you will. It is the time when most Jews, regardless of how “religious” they are, go to the synagogue to sit in communal prayers with their fellow Jews. I don’t go to the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah any more – I haven’t done so for many years now. I don’t find meaning there. And without meaning, can it truly be holy?

One of my guests at my Saturday Rosh Hashanah dinner party was explaining to me that since Rosh Hashanah was on a Saturday it was the custom to not blow the shofar like it usually is done. And since it was a Saturday, candles should not be lit and he went on to tell of other things that should or should not be done on this holiest of days.

But I don’t really care about all those guidelines or rules. We didn’t blow the shofar I own mainly because I forgot to get people to try. But I like the idea that Noa Hermale was talking about. He talked about how a wine cup on the sabbath is only an ordinary cup until we give it meaning. A candlestick is only important at chanukah because we give it meaning. I have been celebrating Rosh Hashanah with my J.A.P.S. in basically the same way as I did this past Saturday since my son was 6 years old. The Jews of long ago decided to give meaning to the new moon, to the day that started the month of Tishrei – they said that was the start of the new year and was holy. Every year I call my J.A.P.S. to gather with me to celebrate the arrival of the new Jewish year with a few prayers and a lot of food. For me this gathering has meaning and by giving it meaning it becomes a special day. It becomes holy.

And may this coming year bring sweetness to all of you. Shana Tova!