Living in coronavirusword 177: Erev Yom Kippur

 

9/27

what the world needs now

Sunday afternoon. Erev Yom Kippur. Time for a family brunch in Brooklyn before Kol Nidre and the fast.The community trying to figure out  the High Holy Days in the midst of Covid 19. One of us enjoys progressive High(er) Holy day services from the Kitchen in San Francisco. Another will preach for Sim Shalom online Yom Kippur morning.  New Covid hot spots are popping up in the Orthodox neighborhoods. My boys live in Crown Heights, a neighborhood that has successfully (so far) navigated gentrification.

Memories of Ebbetts

Jackie

I walk down a (for me) previously unexplored Sullivan Street. The street that used to lead to Ebbetts Field, the home of the Dodgers, now terminates in a public housing project. Much to my surprise, I find a "Dodger Playground” with a Jackie Robinson mural right over, the fence with gates  that echo the original  Ebbetts architecture and tribute to long gone heroes and days. In the very center, the one and only world series championship of 1955. The Dodgers leaving broke Brooklyn’s heart. The identity of the old Brookyn was inextricably interwoven with the beloved Dodgers. Jackie Robinson changed the game here. The new minor league Cyclones do their best to keep a connection with that past in the midst of the funkiness of Coney Island. All this foreign of course to the new hipsters that now define the word Brooklyn. And the urban hipness the NBA Nets. The Dodgers were victim of a squabble between their owner Walter O’Malley and urban one man driving force Robert Moses. It is fitting irony that a ballpark built to mimic Ebbetts sits exactly where Moses wanted it and the Nets play in an arena on the land O’Malley wanted. The Ebbetts flagpole near by.  

Fish pool 

On the corner of Sullivan and Stoddard is a house with a pool in front filled with Japanese koi fish. 

We ZOOM with my son and  grandson in  Berlin, kept separate from us  for over a year by the virus. All is of the return of live students to school in their new hybrid mix. And lament over the inescapable non-democratic  realities of election college and the Supreme Court. And the constant anxiety over an election process that no one can truly see what might happen. We hold our breath. And hope we are inscribed in that Book of Life one more time.