still helpful after all these years?

Without a doubt many of the slips of paper I found in my pockets are eminently disposable. Even I won't miss them. But they're almost always worth a glance.


Some bring back memories, and remind us how much things have changed. This slip of paper was, for instance, a voting slip for my (then) sixth graders. I'd given them the power to decide, between a few possible arrangements I'd proposed, who would sleep in which bedroom, and with whom. Shortly after this poll the entire issue of "communal sleeping" became history, and my own kids today probably wouldn't understand that those kids weren't sleeping in their parents' homes.


This particular note has me scratching my head a bit. It's on the reverse side of a library catalog card - probably discarded and thus available for notes. It demonstrates how Hebrew roots get placed within set formats in order to "create" different words. Interestingly, the top example is actually an error. But that's not the reason I scratch my head over this. I don't know why, or for whom, I would have prepared this note. It seems to have been prepared in order to explain something to someone, but for whom, and why it stayed in my pocket rather than by the person it was prepared for, is unclear to me.


There's no statute of limitations on recipes, which is what's on this slip - one for pancakes, one for what's identified as (apparently) American pancakes, and one for cheese pancakes. I don't recall who gave these to me, but they seem to be fully functional. Nadav will probably want to try making some of these - and in that way we'll have a taste from the past, brought to us via a time machine known as my pocket.