Diary

Real life is getting in the way of blogging here at Pratie Place. Both Melina and I have been very busy, doing things we mostly can't post about.

I've been writing tiny stories in Yiddish to give to my teacher, Sheva Zucker. I'm working hard in preparation for my Yiddish Immersion class in Paris in July - I rashly signed up for "Intermediate," even though, at the time, I was only up to Beginner's Chapter Two.

I've been playing a lot with Bob. He seems to have found the Pratie Heads a lovely once-a-month berth at the Whole Foods Market - people we know who visit us there feel sorry for us, playing in a grocery store, but it's actually great fun. This past week I brought a stack of tunes and songs we hadn't played for decades - or perhaps never played - and we read through them, and then we got paid well. We'll be there again, middle Wednesday in June.

Meanwhile, in family news, Zed finished up his schoolyear at Wesleyan by taking his Spanish exam twice, the first go-round having been sabotaged by a brain-cloud. (He got permission from his professor via email as the guy had already hied himself to Istanbul.)

This, plus Zed's natural tendencies to dither and procrastinate, put him a bit behind schedule.

We had cooked up a complicated plan: Melina drove out to Long Island after work in Manhattan Wednesday night, picked up her famously free car from her ex-boyfriend Yankl's driveway, and drove to Zed's dorm in Middletown. She would bunk down there and they would leave first thing yesterday morning.

However, I got a call Wednesday night around midnight from my Type A daughter meeting up with, well... this was her astonished, rageful observation: "Mom. He hasn't packed. He hasn't packed!"

She went to sleep curled up in his closet (never having seen the sleeping bag he'd borrowed for her - and somehow he didn't notice she was sleeping with her head on a pile of socks and books) while he packed all night. At 6 am he hit the pillow and his grunt of satisfaction woke her up. Three hours later they were on the road.

And at 8:15 last night, as I was saying goodbye to a friend downtown, Zed called and allowed as how they would be home in half an hour and hadn't eaten. So I rushed to the grocery store and there was stir-fried chicken and broccoli on the stove when they staggered in the door. They hovered around the frying pan, hunched over their steaming bowls like refugees. It was the first meal I'd cooked in months, my staples as an empty-nester being Shredded Wheat, peanuts, and oranges.

Life has been so interesting lately I haven't been inclined to write. I'll try to get it together, friends.

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