Seattle lost a great man last week, when Chef Thierry Rautureau died on October 29th. Only 64 years old, he succumbed to pulmonary fibrosis, an autoimmune disease that scars the lungs, making breathing difficult.

October 18, 2023

At 6:15 a.m., Avi heard the rat-a-tat of machine gun fire. Residents of Southern Israel are accustomed to sirens warning them of incoming missiles, not gunshots. Something was terribly wrong. Shaking Shula awake, he grabbed their cellphones and ran to their secure room, bolting the door behind them. Their cellphones lit up with messages from other kibbutz members, on a group chat, confirming their fears. They were under attack by Hamas terrorists.

My husband’s birthday present to me this past summer was a Fall mushroom adventure.  He found Travis online and arranged a private tour for the two of us. 

Boomy. Gizzy.  Doody.  Tsilly.  These aren’t the giddy babblings of a toddler, learning to speak.  They’re a sampling of the names of friends and relatives who populated my early life. 

A trip down memory lane.  What does that evoke for you?  Visiting your childhood home?  Reconnecting with a friend from high school or college? Or meeting with someone you haven’t seen in fifty-five years and feeling like time has stood still?

Have you ever noticed that it’s harder to capture something in a few, carefully chosen words than to express yourself without limits?  In April, I took a 3-session class called “How to Review Everything,” with Misha Berson, the former art critic for the Seattle Times. 

We got the news about a week ago. Eli was dying.  No longer taking food or liquids, her body could hold out for a few hours, days at most, and then she’d be gone. 

We were packed and ready to go on a 3-month adventure in Israel. My checked luggage included three Global kitchen knives and two slim-profile, Epicurean cutting boards. I imagined the apartment we’d rented in Tel Aviv, one block from the Mediterranean, as a gathering place for new friends to mingle and share ideas. After daily shopping at the large, outdoor market, Shuk HaCarmel, where fresh fruit, fish and spices abound, I’d cook and write every day.

I am not a “dog person.” When I walk down the street, I smile at babies and delight when I see young children in their colorful outfits.  Dogs?  I barely notice them.  And yet, married to a veterinarian, our house has been a home to both dogs and cats.

While you’re living your best expat life, the people you’ve left behind welcome your calls. But when the phone rings at 3 am, or pings with a new WhatsApp message, the Left Behind’s (LB’s) first thought is NOT “I can’t wait to hear what my expat is up to.”

For the past five years, my house bulged with evidence that two little girls frequently spent time here. Just beyond the foyer, a child-sized artist’s easel features a roll of paper on one side, a chalkboard on the other.

I’m a sucker for beauty. My husband is too. So, in anticipation of our son and his family moving far away, and to mitigate the sadness I knew would set in after they left, I arranged a mini-retreat for us in Skagit and Whatcom counties, just a few hours north of Seattle.

Nothing converts you to one-piece bathing suits faster than an oops moment. If you’ve ever worn a bikini, you know what I mean. You’re swimming along when a wave or inadvertent push results in a generous side-boob viewing, or worse, total exposure.

My father was a slave. It took Germany fifty-seven years to make reparations for his suffering. It’s time to start reparations for the descendants of American slaves.

Until his liberation by the US Army, my father was a slave laborer at Mauthausen, a category-three Nazi concentration camp. Mauthausen’s policy, according to JewishGen, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, was extermination by work.

If you’re going to get sick, and I mean really sick, enough to land you in the hospital, think about this: July 1 is around the corner, and on that day, medical students fresh out of school start their clinical rotations at hospitals and outpatient clinics, first year residents are promoted from “intern” to second year resident, and at teaching hospitals all across the U.S., everyone in training is given responsibilities they’ve never had before and feel unprepared to handle.

My parents named me Mindy Ellen Stern, and I never changed it. In Ashkenazi Jewish custom, the dearly departed are deeply honored by naming a newborn after them. Thus, an American Joe carries the spirit of a late European Yosseleh, Susie is named after Saraleh, Faye and Faith are modern versions of Faygie, which actually means “little bird.”

March 21, 2021 - Aish.com

Bubby closed the door to her home on Joste Strasse before rushing to the Hauptbahnhof train station in Berlin, not knowing when she and my mother would return. Their second-floor, comfortably furnished apartment had a fireplace in every room. It was graced with Meissen figurines, crystal wine goblets, an antique brass filigree clock they wound up once a week, a huge silver menorah with two lions, cups for oil on opposite ends, and eight smaller cups on the bottom. They never saw any of these things again.

You know the feeling. You open your mailbox with a sliver of hope – maybe today there’ll be something special in there.  You’re greeted instead by a pile of advertising brochures, tax statements, and worse: bills to pay.  Once or twice a year, around your birthday and December holidays, handwritten cards may appear.  Some are as bad as bills, Hallmark cards personalized only with Dear You, and ending with Love, Us.   If your name is common enough, you could swap your card with your neighbor’s and no one would be the wiser.

To mark our one-year anniversary, I offered to create signature cocktails, so we could raise our glasses together and celebrate our unique group. Each cocktail’s ingredients had to include the letters, T, S, R, & P. And to accommodate different palates, budgets, and the limitations of our fridges and cabinets, I offered choices with different flavor profiles.

Jan 25th, 2021 Mercer Island Reporter

Inauguration Day. I’m listening to Amanda Gorman read her poem “The Hill We Climb” as I drive, thinking of my parents, and how proud they would be at this moment. We called them “the love birds.”

In 1948, when she was 20 and he was 25, they met at an engagement party for mutual friends whom my father had introduced to one another. The successful match was inspired after Dad was set up on a date with someone he deemed too tall to be his love interest.