Shvargh - another one of those great Yiddish words. It means feeling worn out, used up, spent. You can mean it emotionally, too, but at the moment -- this whole week, pretty much -- I'm just physically shvargh. (There's no real sound at the end of that word, kind of a very soft, barely pronounced, guttural "ch" sound. The word is really kind of open-ended.) When I talked to the Sibs a little while ago, I asked "How are you?" and she sighed "Shvargh ..." and I realized that's what's going on with me, too.I woke up at 5:00 this morning -- damn -- and even though I napped for about two hours this afternoon, it left me feeling more tired than when I lay down.
I did tackle my closet yesterday, and it went much better than I expected it to. I didn't get rid of as much as I thought I would, although some. Mostly, I took out the things that didn't belong in my closet, like extra blankets and pillows, and made enough room so that all the clothes fit. I had been keeping a special thing in there, but I got an airtight container for it, and I'll put it in the basement. Here's what it is:
My father's business, since before I was born, was that he was an embroidery broker. Ever heard of such a thing? When I was a kid and I had to fill out forms, he told me to put for his job "Manufacturer" because really, I didn't understand what he did until I was an adult, and I certainly didn't know what it was really called. He worked in southern Bergen County where it touched Hudson County, where, for some reason, America's embroidery industry was located at that time. (LIke everything else, the American embroidery industry is now in China.) There were hundreds of local embroidery makers, men who had these great big jacquard machines that produced the long panels of embroidered trim and wound it onto spools hundreds of yards long. An embroidery machine was about the size of a small, old-fashioned steam locomotive engine, and just as noisy, with its hundreds of needles pounding up and down. Or so it seemed to me as I child when I would visit some of Jack's friends with him. Jack's job was that a clothing maker that needed embroidery, let's say to trim children's pajamas, would contact him with the pattern number they wanted and the amount, and he would contract with his various buddies for this one to make a certain amount of it, that one another amount, and so on, until he had arranged to get it all made and then he would ship it to the garment maker. Never even thought about somebody doing that for a living, huh?
But one of his friends specialized in very fine quality embroidered fabrics, not just trim, the kind you would use to make a wedding gown or something else quite lovely. I don't think Jack ever dealt in his goods, but he was a friend, who, in the late 70s or so, retired. And he gave Jack two bolts of this wonderful material, yards and yards, one for the Sibs and one for me.
When Wonderful Niece was little, the Sibs did her bedroom with Victorian wallpaper, and used the material to make beautiful curtains, a bed skirt, and so on. I still have mine, the whole bolt.
So this is the prized possession I've been keeping in my clothes closet, but it's big and bulky, and better off in an airtight container in the basement. What am I saving it for? Who knows. Maybe one of the girls will want a wedding gown out of it one day, or it can decorate a granddaughter's bedroom. It's good stuff, though.
Oy vey.
Changing the subject here. If you've read my diary more than once, you may have some idea that I rather enjoy The Golden Girls. Now they're showing the sequel series, The Golden Palace, every day at 6:30. How impossibly bad is this show? I can understand that they wanted to continue a successful series, but why would they have done it by making a point of changing everything that made the original show good? I'm just asking.
