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rowing up, Friday afternoons were spent in shul. Swinging on the folding chairs in the men’s section, stacking huge volumes of seforim, and hiding in the supply closet thick with the smell of Z-fold paper hand towels.

My father was the gabbai. Fridays he’d prepare the shul for Shabbos, and we kids would tag along. We’d help sometimes, cutting tablecloths from the great roll of white plastic. Checking on the kava shtiebel, snagging a white sugar cube from the magic tower, and hoping the whole thing wouldn’t topple. Learning snatches of Spanish, Italian, Polish, from the guys who cleaned and set up and knew the old corners of the shul — what they could do and we couldn’t, and what we had to do and they should never.

Sometimes we shopped for the shul. We’d drive out to Costco and wheel huge shopping carts around the supermarket, piled high with coffee and those ubiquitous sugar cubes. We’d lug jumbo bottles of Coke back to the car, the bags overflowing the trunk, our lap, our feet.

And then there was shopping for Shavuos. The mission: to transform the shul.

The flower shop was a pocket of paradise. We’d get long tangled vine flowers to wreathe around the furniture, bushes that could be pruned any way we wanted, and flower pots — whatever was on sale, geraniums and tulips and lilies, a sunflower sometimes. Nothing matching or coordinated, male style, with a bit of input from an opinionated nine-year-old girl.

The real fun was Erev Shavuos, when the forest of foliage started to grow on the wooden benches and shelves. A chuppah of leaves and twigs on the bimah, our flower pots hanging under it like so many swinging brides. And the signature piece: a crown formed of greens atop the aron kodesh. It was magnificent, vivacious, all those colors between the white of the talleisim, especially when viewed from the women’s section. Looking down, no one was prouder than I.

Eventually my father started phasing out of the job; we knew we wouldn’t be on the decorating team forever. We had to make this last. On Motzaei Yom Tov when the vibrant display came down in a tumble of earth and greens, my brothers came home with a garbage bag of pots. They lugged the whole clanking thing in, and we pulled out broken bits of pottery, clumps of earth, unrooted flowers.

There were three survivors: bushes and a flower, one for each of my brothers, one for me. (Excerpted from Family First, Issue 594)