My last article was about communication between parents and schools. Communication is good, of course, but what is it, really? We usually think of communication as one person articulating to another exactly what he thinks and how he feels. We assume that people who communicate well are truthful, saying what they mean and meaning what they say. The Torah says, “Midvar sheker tirchak – Stay far away from falsehood.” What could be clearer than that as a directive for truth in communication?

But is telling the bald truth always the best way to “communicate” – that is, to express ourselves so that the other person will accept our words without becoming either devastated or enraged? How important is it to speak the truth, and when should honesty be put aside for other important values? We have all heard the famous Rashi, in which he explains that G-d Himself altered the truth to avoid hurt feelings. It happened when Avraham and Sarah heard that they were going to have a child. Sarah was 90 years old, and Avraham was 100. She laughed and said, “After I have withered shall I again have delicate skin? And my husband is old.” But when Hashem spoke to Avraham, he changed Sarah’s words to “…I have aged.” (Stone Chumash). Hashem changed what Sarah said, says Rashi, so that Avraham wouldn’t be insulted about being called old – at age 100!

“Twenty years after my son graduated from elementary school, I still feel pain when I see some of his teachers and rebbeim,” says Mrs. T. “Although my son is now productively employed and happily married, I still cannot forget the feelings of pain I had many years ago when he was a troublemaker in school…those horrible phone calls that filled me with dread every time there was a new infraction to report.  I often felt that the teachers had already labeled him as impossible.”“I have been accused of many things by the parents of my students,” says Mrs. R. a middle school teacher. “Parents have insinuated that their child’s misbehavior is probably my fault because their child has always been fine until he entered my class. They have suggested that I am too old to be teaching and that younger teachers are more equipped to deal with today’s children. It compounds the difficulty of a teacher’s job when we do not have the support of the parents.”

When you are in the thick of life – raising small children, going to a job, and trying to fit a week’s worth of tasks into each day – you feel like the whirlwind will never end. But as a person whose children are mostly out of the house, I am beginning to realize that it is inevitable for all of us, if we are fortunate enough, to enter a new phase of life that is very different from that previous “era.” It is called retirement.

Retirement, say the experts, is more than simply the cessation of a career or a job. Rather, it is a distinct stage with its own joys and problems. Many things change. Working people have a routine and purpose to their daily activities. Whether plumber, scientist, teacher or social worker, they wake up in the morning and know what they will be doing that day. When they retire, they no longer have the structure of a job. They may also miss the socialization with the people at work, the satisfaction of a job well done, and the regular paycheck.

One of the most precious dreams of girlhood is to be a mother and bring up a family together with a devoted husband. A girl may imagine welcoming her husband and son home after shul on Friday nights and staying at home on Shabbos mornings with her cute babies, while her husband and sons leave for shul together. But life does not always turn out as expected, and some women, although mothers, end up raising their children alone, either because of divorce or death. There are many problems and issues that have to be dealt with in this scenario, but one that is unique to religious families is the lack of a father to take the boys to shul for davening and learning.

An expectation in our society is that fathers and sons go to shul together and sit beside each other. A young boy going to shul alone and sitting by himself will feel awkward and different. And seeing all the other boys sitting with their fathers just accentuates his loss. This may be the case even when the father lives with his family but does not have the ability or desire to learn or daven with his son.

For the last three years, I have been running the Jewish Used Book Collection. People donate Jewish books that they have finished reading, and I sell them from a corner of the Savings Center, which kindly donates the space for this project. All the money collected is given to the Chananya Backer Memorial Institute (CBMI). The book collection is an amazing project, because it has absolutely no expenses, except for the dot stickers I use to price the books. One of the perks of running the collection is that all kinds of interesting books and tapes appear on my front porch, and I have the opportunity to read them first, before I take them to the Savings Center. I never know what treasures I will find. While sorting through some new arrivals recently, I came across a book and a tape on the same subject that I thought would be interesting to explore. They were both about sibling rivalry. Although both the book and the tape are from more than 20 years ago, the subject is timeless.

Whenever I drive down Greenspring Avenue, past the Sinai ER, on the way to the zoo, I glance to the left to see the old Bais Yaakov high school building, and say to my grandchildren, “Look, that is where I went to school!” The old mansion that housed our high school, built at the time of the Civil War, is still standing, though hard to recognize because the surrounding area has changed so much. The driveway that led to the school is no longer there, and the elementary building has been knocked down to make room for a housing development.

Since my daughter is finishing Bais Yaakov this year, and we are immersed in the rituals of graduation, I started reminiscing about the school I attended more than 40 years ago. Bais Yaakov has been established in the community for so long that some of its graduates have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren attending the same school they did. Sometimes they even have the same teachers. I spoke to women who attended Bais Yaakov High School in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s to hear about their memories of high school life.