One of the very first entries I ever put up on d-land was allegedly about my plans for heaven, but it was really about my grandfather. This is because I have always planned to spend eternity with him. In this entry, I went briefly into Our Passover Story -- not The Passover Story -- and here it is tonight, the first night of Passover, so I'm at it again.
It's more than Passover, though, because this Sunday is also Easter. When we visited the ILS a couple of weeks ago for her birthday, the MIL was of course weepy because she will be short a grandchild this Easter, what with R over in Wales and all. I commented that it been hard for me too at Thanksgiving. She dismissed this though, saying something like well, Thanksgiving isn't really a very big deal. Okay, everybody:
Not to her, maybe. To me. Right?
Easter, of course, was lost on me as a kid. Bunnies? Eggs? This is an important holiday? Christmas, I knew, was someone's birthday, at least. But not being raised in a Christian home or going to church or Christian Sunday school, the concept of Jesus and his death/resurrection was beyond all comprehension. Now, I get it. The ILS do go to church on Easter, although their house is a veritable garden of bunnies and eggs. I'm not looking into their personal beliefs or anything, I'm just saying, different holidays mean different things to different people.
(I commented to K on the phone yesterday that I'll be taking off of work next Monday to get her to the train to get back to school -- after coming home to spend Easter with the ILS -- and that Colleague will be out, too, since she's going down south to visit her son, his wife, and their miracle baby. I remarked that the poor SCM will be in the library on his own that day. She wondered if he's reconsidering his choice of a pagan lifestyle. Hehe.)
The biggest holiday of my childhood was Passover. And before you ask, no, there wasn't anything religious about it. Mysterious, a bit, but all the religious genes stopped at Grandpa Sam. He had enough for everyone, but no one after him got a scrap of DNA faith.
This is a weeklong holiday, so I may be able to pull up a picture or two by the end of it. The memories started coming back today when kids at school started bringing in notes to get out of school for a couple of days, and a few women on the staff complained about having a long faculty meeting when they had to get home and get dinner on the table for twelve, fourteen, twenty. I remembered.
Days off for Passover? Unheard of. Rushing home after school to help out? Oh yes. I set the dining room table. I dusted the living room. My mother and my grandmother were in the kitchen, and I'd help out in there when I could. The two of them putting a big meal out was a challenge, because my grandmother was a bad cook, but was not terribly aware of this fact. This left my mother to do most of it, with a few special tasks going to Grandma. Basically, this meant that she made the stuff that only Grandpa ate. She put the seder plate together, the ceremonial plate that sat in front of him with stuff on it that wasn't really eaten, just referred to in the ceremony. She made the charoses, which is combination of walnuts and wine and other stuff that goes on the seder plate. I understand that in other homes, charoses is a treat that everyone enjoys. At our seder, only Grandpa ate it.
My sister and I got dressed up, and then company came. There was almost always someone, or some other family, with us. We had the draw of a genuine Orthodox Jewish Grandpa who knew what he was doing.
I seem to remember the seder always starting before it got dark; it must have generally been after Daylight Savings Time had started. For us, it was a meal and a floor show. Everyone ate while Grandpa stood at the head of the table -- the foot, actually, farthest away from the kitchen door -- and almost never sat down. Activity swirled around him, food coming in, plates going out, eating, eating, eating. He chanted, he swayed. We each had at our places a haggadah, the program of sorts that everyone looks at and follows along in the ceremony. I understand that in other homes, other people at the table take part in the ceremony. Mostly, we ate. Until ...
There would come a time when Grandpa would require, in order to continue, a particular piece of matzo that had been put on the seder plate, a piece known as the afikomen. But the afikomen was **gasp** gone! Missing! Where was the afikomen?
I had it, or my sister did, or both of us, along with every other kid in the room. It's part of the game: kids steal the afikomen, and the leader of the seder has to ransom it back. Grandpa would have given us each a quarter, or maybe, as we got older, a dollar. (Somehow, over the years, this evolved into my father giving every kid at the Thanksgiving table a roll of quarters, and then later, a $20.) We dug the afikomen out of wherever we had put it, and the meal went on.
Until Grandpa told us, near the end, that we had another job to do. That on this night, the Prophet Elijah -- Elionohu -- would come to every home where there was a seder and take a sip of wine. All we had to do was open the front door for him. Elionohu would be very fast, so we would have to race back to the table to see if any wine was gone from his cup, the special one left on the table in front of Grandpa just for the Prophet.
Either he was always too quick or we were too slow. By the time we were back at the table, a distance of maybe ten or twelve unobstructed feet, wine had been taken. There was less in the goblet, always. Always! Amazing Prophet! No one, of course, could be faster than Grandpa getting his hands on the goblet as we raced back and forth across the room. So that's why all the grownups were always smiling when we sat back down.
After the ceremony -- Grandpa really could eat faster than anyone alive, and finished right with us, even though he'd been standing up and praying and talking through most of it -- we would have dessert of some kind and sing. Yes, sing. I come from a completely tone-deaf family, and it really helped that by this time, nearly everyone had had a whole lot of too-sweet Kosher wine. My father didn't drink, but he didn't sing either. My mother sang alongside Grandpa, her Pa, she just a little tipsy and he very much so. We always sang something called "Had-Gad-Yaw", which is a multi-versed "Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly" kind of song, about someone buying a goat. At the chorus there was much "had-gad-yaw"-ing and voice cracking and general hilarity.
It went on for hours. It was dark by the time the dishes were done and put away. The next day we all went to school, or to work. Grandpa was retired by then, or semi-retired, so he probably didn't. He couldn't have gone back to the Bronx or Brooklyn anyway and made it back for dinner the next night. I guess they came out for a few days for Passover. The last two nights of Passover, a week later, didn't exist for us. No special meal. We probably even had bread in the house all week, but we didn't eat it in front of Grandpa for as long as he was there.
It was better than Chanukah, better than Thansgiving. It was a meal, with family, with Grandpa center-stage. Loved, loved Passover.
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