My first weekend in Brooklyn. A Pride Parade and remembering Mom's Blintzes.
We arrived in Brooklyn last Thursday.
We don’t know when our stuff will get here.
The moving company won’t give us a date specific and by contract they have 21 days.
It’s a good thing we have family here and a place to crash until we can move into our new apartment.
The City’s huge Pride Parade isn’t until the end of the month. But Brooklyn Pride, a smaller, but still big, parade steps of onto Brooklyn’s 5th Avenue this evening.
It will be our first Brooklyn Pride and it is just a couple of blocks from our new place and where we are currently staying.
We will grab a couple chairs and enjoy the new scene.
Back in Chicago the current administration decided to make this years Pride Parade shorter and will less contingents. The sudden decision by the Johnson administration to downsize has more than a few folks scratching their heads.
“What we’re up against right now is really just staffing challenges,” said Jackie Rosa, deputy mayor for community engagement. “Often what ends up happening is we’re seeing staff—not just police, but also Streets and Sanitation and the Office of Emergency Management Control—working straight for 18-19 hours.”
The main changes aimed at reducing this strain include capping its number of entries at 150 groups, which is 25% smaller than the 199 groups that marched in last year’s parade; starting the parade at the intersection of Broadway and Sheridan Road in Lake View, which is a few blocks south of its former starting point at Broadway and Montrose Avenue in Uptown; and shifting the start time to an hour earlier to 11 a.m.
I don’t get it.
But we will walk down to our first Pride Parade in our new neighborhood in Brooklyn.
I got a call from my old high school friend Rene who still lives in Los Angeles who reminded me that this coming week is the Jewish holiday of Shavout.
Rene is one of the many practicing Jews who oppose the current war on Palestinians and supports an immediate ceasefire.
Rene knows that, although I am of Jewish ancestry, I am not a believer.
He wasn’t calling on me to engage in anything other than a slice of cheesecake. Eating dairy and particularly cheesecake is apparently one of the rituals of Shavout.
Eating blintzes too.
As Rene was explaining all this to me I remembered my Mom’s blintzes, filled with farmers cheese, eggs and sugar fried in oil.
As a kid I slathered them with blueberry jam.
It was a warm memory.
It led to another memory of Mom.
On an April day in 1967 I came home from school and was greeted by my mother watching the news on television.
It was the start of the Six Day War.
The look on Mom’s face was one of worry for a world threatened by war once again.
By the end of the fighting Israeli troops captured the Sinai, Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, doubling the territory under its control.