My liquid diet is over! YAY! Today I can add soft foods like pasta and macaroni 'n cheese. For dinner tonight Mark is making thin spaghetti (ACTUAL pasta instead of our usual spaghetti squash) with marinara sauce (nothing spicy until Friday) with grated Parmesan cheese. Sounds spectacular. For lunch instead of tomato soup I'm having Amy's Minestrone soup. I'm really moving up in the world! Well, not too quickly. For breakfast I'm drinking the last Ensure with the usual two yogurts, just like the last two mornings.
Today would have had us on the road to Charleston, about 450 miles away, for tomorrow's eclipse. Although the maps program claimed it was about 450 miles, a little over six hours to drive, in my driving estimate, it would be more like 9 hours, with a lunch stop and rest stops. We were planning on leaving early. We had not thought about the potentially horrendous traffic jams that the news are all reporting. Truthfully, I'm VERY relieved that we are not going.
Instead we will stay in all day and do the same things I've been doing the last two days: reading, watching TV, playing on the computer, resting.
I will be finishing an excellent book today. I'm reading the new biography of old friend Ralph Mollerick, written by our other old friend David Herschler. Dave's PhD in history made him the perfect person to take Ralph's oral history and turn it into a wonderful book. Ralph was born in Germany in 1930. His parents realized that terrible things were beginning to happen in their town, so they put both of their children, Ralph at age 9 and Edith at age 18, on the first Kindertransport, a train to take them out of Germany to a ferry to England. Ralph spent the rest of his childhood in a series of youth hostels and foster homes, trying to get an education, trying to understand why his parents never came to get him like they promised, mostly separated from his older sister, and eventually learning of his parents' deaths in concentration camps in 1942. On his 16th birthday he landed in NYC, having finally gotten all the appropriate paperwork and visa permissions.
Dave is an excellent writer and Ralph's story is fascinating. Maybe it's more fascinating to me because by the time we met Ralph in our MD synagogue, he was a married man with three kids, twenty years my senior, a respected former synagogue president and tireless worker. He was also a fellow civil servant with Mark at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. At the time, we had no idea of Ralph's background.
The full title of the book is Kindertransport: A Lifelong Journey of Survival and Redemption, The Story of Ralph W. Mollerick, A Kind, by David H. Herschler. It is available through Amazon in paperback or for a Kindle. I really think it would make an excellent book for anyone's book club.
On November 16 we will see Dave and Ralph speak about the book and Ralph's journey at his synagogue in Boynton Beach. Ralph and his wife Phyllis now live in Lake Worth, FL. I plan to ask them both to autograph my copy!
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