Ricki spent her life performing random acts of kindness. I don’t think she ever thought of it that way; it was just who she was. If she saw a need, she filled it. If she saw someone sitting alone, she sat next to them. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know the person — in 10 minutes, that would change. And very likely in the next few days a bag of her famous home-baked rugelach would appear at their front door tied with a ribbon of their favorite color. She had a gift for unearthing life’s fun little details.
When “Ricki” Rosalind Lane passed away on July 24, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center lost a piece of its heart. If you didn’t know her personally, and almost everyone did, you knew of her, the grand hostess of PJTC who cooked and catered and cared for her temple family with unending kindness. She had so much love in her heart that she could spend it abundantly and still have plenty left.
I was the recipient of her kindness on the afternoon before my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah when I was decorating tables for her party. Ricki, who generously helped all the mothers with this task, put her arm around me and asked if I had eaten. She had noticed I was looking a little stressed.
“Come,” she said, “we’ll have lunch at my house.”
“What else can I do for you?” she asked as I sat at her kitchen table.
Given that we didn’t know each other very well, I was hesitant to answer.
“Just tell me, I want to help,” she said.
I told her that in all the fuss of the preparations I hadn’t bought a hat to wear to my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah ceremony. Within minutes she was opening a closet door and taking out a hatbox containing the lovely white hat she had worn to her son’s Bar Mitzvah the week before.
“Here, try it on”, she said, giving me a hand mirror. “Look, it’s perfect on you.”
That was the beginning of our 40-year friendship.
To say Ricki was a caterer makes us think of food, but she was also a caterer of needs, and she could spot a need before you even knew you had it. Thirty years later, on the morning after my husband died, she sat at my breakfast room table and asked if I had clothes that needed to be picked up from the cleaners. Were there appointments I needed to cancel? She left with a to-do list and returned later with food.
She was the kind of person everyone would have liked to have as a mother, and three lucky children actually did. Although she would lose her two sons, as well as her beloved husband, she maintained the life of purpose that made her such a wonderful role model. She left the world a loving, devoted daughter and two granddaughters, who carry on her legacy with honor. And a friend looking at long-ago photos of herself in a white hat.
Email patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net. Follow her on Patriciabunin.com.