Friday’s Gotham blogger suggested today’s commentary. Interestingly his Friday blog covered modes of community. He found interesting how I balanced multiple Zooms as Gotham Queens, (GQ) a group I “mentor” met Thursday. Gotham Zooms can run on average 90 minutes but when in person one might allocate up to two hours for many such networking sessions; some Zooms might run a bit more than one hour. That morning I needed to join a brief campaign meeting that would start one half-hour after GQ started.

Driving around, as I enjoy, I noticed new construction at a couple of locations. Very large buildings were being erected with no indications of what they were going to be. Maybe an office building? But no, there's a glut of office space now with everyone still working from home. Maybe a large community center? Library?   Well, I was wrong on all guesses. Both of these buildings turned into these huge storage facilities for consumers. We humans seem to collect stuff. So much stuff we need extra places to store it. What does that say about us?  

In today’s technologically sophisticated world there are myriad channels of communication.  To me, the best and most basic manner of communication is talking face to face, where you can look someone directly in the face and discern facial expressions (“Tells”) while taking in the words, gestures and eye contact.  My father’s number one rule of interpersonal judgment was whether someone looked him the eye. Very little else mattered to him as he took the measure of a person and, invariably, he was right on!

There’s an expression in Yiddish to the effect that “ Man plans and God laughs”. In these times, I think the expression could be “Man plans and Covid laughs”.And so it was as our extended family planned for the return to the traditional in person Seder that had been so evasive over the last two years.

A show about a single mother, her three daughters, and her mom may not sound like a great watch.  But, “Better Things” is rated a must watch 96 on MetaCritic and it received a 100 rating from Rotten Tomatoes.  And, I think it is one of the best shows ever done.  

    I don’t think I could ever relocate to a place that didn’t have four seasons.  There is something special about those first few days as the weather warms or cools.  Change is in the air, literally.  

My family and I are not very religious. We do, however, try to adhere to the eating constraints of Passover. Specifically, we will not eat any leavened products during the eight days including bread, cookies, cake etc. We also try not to eat in restaurants during the eight days of Passover.   

A nice start to a weekend built around family with Passover seders as main events. Prior to the gathering with daughter Marisa I attended Mets Opening Day, preceded by the Tom Seaver statute unveiling (probably merits its own blog),