October 25, 2025
Accompanied by our older grandson, we went to Iceland in 2022. We had never been. Now, mosquitoes have followed us. They had never been either.
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That’s some nerve of Ronald Reagan interfering with our foreign trade policy.
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We went to the theater tonight to see “Punch,” a British import. It is close to the real events surrounding the death of a young man by one punch from a barely mature working class “thug”. The first act is a tour de force for the actor portraying the perpetrator. The second act tails off into an exercise in restorative justice instigated by the victim’s parents. An interesting work, on the whole.
Sunday, October 26, 2025
Zuromin is a town 120 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, Poland. Itta Latter, my paternal grandmother, was born there in 1876. My father was born there or nearby in 1903. In 1900, about 1/3 of its 6,000 residents were Jewish. Today, Jews remain only in the cemetery.
Cousin Jerry Latter and I were among the 40 or so people attending the Fall meeting of the Zuromin Society, held in a private room at Noah’s Ark, 493 Cedar Lane, Teaneck, New Jersey. While one or two people were born there, the rest of us were children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of people from Zuromin. Jerry’s paternal grandfather was my grandmother’s brother.
Noah’s Ark is a large Kosher delicatessen, located in a very Jewish shopping district. Lunch was a prerogative of society membership. I started with matzoh ball soup, a decent matzoh ball in colored hot water. On the table were very sour pickles, coleslaw and a nice Caesarish salad. I chose a pastrami sandwich on rye bread and took a handful of good French fries from a large bowl on the table. There were also small carafes of regular and Diet Coke, which were constantly being refilled. This cut the waste, but was labor intensive.
Monday, October 27, 2025
There is good news. Häagen-Dazs has released a new flavor that has my name all over it — Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel. It’s delicious. I remember digging pretzel rods into cartons of chocolate ice cream, my own form of immunotherapy.
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We were watching an episode of “Top Chef,” improbably filmed at the Adolph Rupp Arena of the University of Kentucky. Rupp was the school’s successful basketball coach in the mid-20th century. I like to remember how he was out-foxed by Nat Holman, coach of the historic 1950 CCNY basketball team.
Kentucky was segregated, a sign of American greatness that many yearn to restore. Its basketball team was necessarily all white, while Holman had to draw upon the flotsam and jetsam of New York City playgrounds. When the teams met, on March 14, 1950, at the National Invitational Tournament in Madison Square Garden, Holman started an all-Black team, which shocked and defeated the favored Kentucky team 89-50. Unfairly, Rupp looms larger in sports history today than Holman.
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
I stayed up last night to watch the World Series game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. I faded, though, around 1 AM after the 12th inning, which spared me six more innings until the Dodgers won in the 18th almost two hours later. Normally, only a game involving the New York Mets would interest me as much, but I’ve adopted Toronto as a sort of theoretical refuge and, of course, I retain residual resentment against the Dodgers for abandoning Brooklyn.
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I had lunch at Boongs Chicken, 1075 First Avenue, a Korean chicken joint, new to me. It’s small, but bright and airy, with six two-tops in front of a faux brick wall. Opposite is a colorful wall of hundreds of ramen packages.
I had a spicy snow (dry spices) chicken sandwich, which came with good crispy French fries and a can of Coke Zero for $15. I skipped garnishes, so the spiciness stood out. While the portion of chicken was modest, the flavor was big.
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
It's probably better that Annabel Goldsmith was dead so that she could not read this in her obituary. "It didn’t help that her husband was a serial adulterer, and she was unfaithful, too."
Thursday, October 30, 2025
I’ve moved up in the world. I’ve been seeing a variety of doctors to address my growing list of maladies, but today I went beyond the ordinary specialist and saw a hyphenated specialist, a neuro-ophthalmologist. I hope that I live up to the attention.
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Tonight, we listened to Professor Mel Scult interview Professor Sharon Musher, a great granddaughter of Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. She has just published “Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine,” focused on her grandmother, one of Kaplan’s four daughters.
While concerning a relatively narrow subject, the conversation was very informative and engaging, reflecting the knowledge and personality of the participants.
Friday, October 31, 2025
I met Terrific Tom for lunch at Sophie’s Cuban Cuisine, 369 Lexington Avenue, one of 12 outlets of this local chain. It operates cafeteria style, the server puts together your dish behind the counter at your direction. You then plop down at one of the dozen two-tops along the wall. By the way, we were both costumed as grumpy old men.
I had oxtail stew, small size, with yellow rice and French fries (barely fried) ($16.99). The small was too small, four pieces of tail, so to speak, with some meat clinging to them. The sauce was very good, on the other hand. Dinner cannot come soon enough.
