Calls and Matzo Balls

3 p.m. Erev Rosh Hashana


Matzo balls are cooking in a pot on the stove, 31 of them, to be exact. I’m hoping that will be enough for a Rosh Hashana lunch with 4-5 teen-aged boys.

None will be left over, I’m fairly sure, because after the first round of soup is eaten, a gangly mob usually surrounds the pot and finishes off everything that is left.

As soon as the matzo balls cook to fluffy perfection, I’ll refrigerate the soup mixture and head upstairs for a bath and a nap. With dinner beginning at 8:30 p.m. or so, after services, it will be a late night.

I’m looking forward to the festive meal with a combination of old and new friends. It makes me think of the rhyme I learned as a child, “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.”

If only….

If only we could keep the people we love, so every holiday isn’t as much about who is absent as who is present. That may sound a little sad, but I can’t stop thinking about the telephone call that won’t come today.

Just before Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Passover and Hannukah, my entire adult life, the telephone would ring and one of my oldest friends would be on the line. Some readers of my blog know her only as Potty; others recognize her as Earlene Fuquay.

She would wish me a happy holiday and then always ask the same two questions, “Are you going to see your sisters?” and when I said I was celebrating the holiday at home, “What are you cooking?”

Potty, along with my mother and Julia Child, was one of the three greatest influences on my cooking style. When I would tell her what was on the stove, she would begin reminiscing.

“Do you remember how good that cabbage soup smelled?” she would ask. “I could eat a bowl of that soup right now. Right now!”

Or, maybe, if it were around Passover, she would recall how she and Mom worked together to scour every cabinet and put the special dishes in place, or, around Hannukah, how they would fry up batch after batch of potato latkes.

In recent years, as she got older, Potty got a little confused sometimes, although her heart always remained in the right place. Last spring, she told me she had called my sister Susan at her business to wish her a happy holiday. She wasn’t there, so Potty told me she left a message with a young man to “tell Susan Happy Hannukah.”

I didn’t say anything, but she obviously meant “Happy Passover.”

“I don’t think he ever gave her the message,” she told me a few days later. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell her.”

I agreed that was a shame but couldn’t help laughing to myself at the thought of the young store clerk, puzzling over whether he should tell his boss that some old lady called to wish her Happy Hanukkah in March.

It’s true, her stated messages may have become less accurate over time or that, in recent years, she might call me twice and forget to call my sister Linda. But telephoning us before major Jewish holidays and on our birthdays was Potty’s way of keeping in touch, of remaining an integral part of our lives.

She also would call if we hadn’t picked up the telephone to talk to her for a few weeks. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay,” she would tell us.

Staying in contact was the same reason I sent her cards for her birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Mother’s Day – and often called too. Potty was far more reliable than the U.S. Postal Service and would telephone me immediately to thank me for the cards, whether she received them in two days or two weeks.

Now, all of this is reminiscence.

Potty died unexpectedly in an automobile accident this summer. I know that is a strange way to describe the death of someone in her 80s, but she was in fairly good health and took excellent care of herself. Everyone expected to be at her 90th birthday party, even her 100th. I took it for granted that those holiday calls would continue for a long time.

Sometimes, I regret to say, I was even a bit irritated when the telephone rang while my hands were immersed in matzo ball mixture or while I was lugging a heavy pan of brisket from oven to counter. Maybe I even rushed her off the telephone a few times because the oven was beeping and my challah was about to burn.

But what wouldn’t I give for the telephone to ring today and to hear her voice again, even if she had just called to wish me Happy Passover in September.