TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 198

[Tobie Shapiro]

April 9, 2000000007


Dear Appreciators of the finer things in life,

	The latest news with Feyna's fascinating friend, Alex, is 
that he's moving to Tijuana.  He has family there who actually care 
about him, as opposed to the family he has here.  They have already 
found him a job.  The job is with his aunt's accounting firm.  This 
is an untrained boy, with two years of community college under his 
belt.  (He says that he was taking courses at the University of 
California in Berkeley but I never saw the evidence).  This job in 
Tijuana as an entry level employee is going to pay him over a million 
pesos a year.  That's the equivalent of about a hundred thousand 
dollars here in California.  He has already flown down to Tijuana to 
hunt for housing.  He's going to buy a house in a gated community. 
He brought brochures.  Fancy places with sunken tubs and tennis 
courts, spas and swimming pools.  I asked her how he was going to 
afford to buy something like that?  She mentioned the excellent 
employment.  "But he won't have earned a dime until he gets there. 
He can't spend the money before he has it."  She said that he could 
buy on time, installments.  It didn't add up.  My friends, it didn't 
add up.  Either the kid has more money than he says (he says he's 
desperate, but has two condos and a financial advisor) or something's 
fishy with the job, the move, the housing, the whole story.  It's 
hard to know what to believe, what to assume, what part of any story 
he tells is the truth.  Can it all be the truth?  Am I being too hard 
on this little kid?  He's only 19.  He's neurotic.  He's unhappy. 
He's angry.  He fights with Feyna frequently.  They are always in the 
middle of a big fight that could end the friendship.  She knows it's 
not healthy.  She makes excuses.  "We do have a lot of good times, 
too."

	This is, as many things are with a daughter who is 20, out of 
my hands.  I'm just going to have to watch this happen, see it unfold 
until it's a flat piece of paper that we can read, or fold into an 
origami crane.





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The Mysteries of the Seder


	It should be a cinch preparing a seder for sixteen people, 
which is our annual average.  We count the heads by name, and we 
write them down on a list.  Then we leave the list in the other room 
and come in to set the table.

	"I thought there were seventeen."

	"No.  There were sixteen."

	"Did you count Dorothy?"

	"Yes."

	"Joanna?"

	"Yes."

	"I was sure there were seventeen."

	So sure was I that I got out another whole place setting and 
squeezed two people at the head of the big table, the little table 
already being cramped.

	"Of course, we should check on the list."

	"Where did you put it?"

	Exit, stage left to fetch the official list.

	"I knew I put it here somewhere."

	"It was near the phone."

	"It's not here."

	We look up and down, high and low, in and out for the list. 
We do not find it.  We decide to write out a new list, forgetting no 
one:  three from our house, because Feyna is in Mexico for a day, the 
four Fishes from Sunnyvale, that's seven.  Five from Dana's clan, 
that's twelve.  Daniel and Carol who will be late even if they say 
they will be on time.  That's fourteen.  Then Dorothy.  That's 
fifteen.  And who else?  Joanna.  We invited Joanna.  That's sixteen. 
I remove the extra place setting which could have been for Elijah, I 
suppose.  Let all who are hungry come in and eat, with certain 
understandable exceptions, which we try not to think about.  It is 
sixteen people.  And this means charoshes, red beet horseradish made 
from scratch, it could knock you over, gefilte fish made from 
scratch, nothing from a lowly jar.  Matzah ball soup, the eggs for 
dipping in salt water (those were our tears).  Then if we can still 
fit it in, a vegetable, tsimmes (you have to have tsimmes with 
knedlach, the gonif that steals the flavour from the rest of the 
dish), brisket and tongue.  Dana brings the dessert and it will have 
no gluten or wheat in it for those two with dietary restrictions.

	Now, everyone has dietary restrictions.  This one's a 
vegetarian; that one can't have cucumbers or bell peppers; the other 
can't have wheat, onions, garlic, asparagus or artichokes; there is 
someone who cannot have seeds, nuts, wheat or gluten.  Okay, we can 
work around no seeds, no gluten, but no garlic?  It cannot be done. 
We make special things for those with dietary restrictions.  Let all 
who are hungry come in and eat.  Thank God no one's kosher!

	This is a big deal.  I think, yes, it is a big deal, and 
sixteen people is a lot of people.  Just try to fit them at the 
tables with the seder plate, the three extra glasses: one for Elijah, 
one for Miriam and one for all those who aren't here.  Vats of 
charoshes, icky Manischewitz wine, better kosher wine for those who 
don't want to suffer.  Plates for matzah, jars of horseradish with 
lids so no one gags.  It keeps us busy for a week with the 
preparations.  The list of who is coming is nothing.  Take a look at 
the shopping list, and the list that schedules what day we cook what. 
Thanksgiving is nothing.  A turkey practically cooks itself.  They 
breed them for that.

	And I say all this because while I was growing up, my Grama 
Fannie and Grampa Benny put on two seders on the first two nights of 
Passover.  At each seder there were something like forty five people. 
Imagine doing this for ninety people.  I remember the days before the 
seder going to Grama's house to help make the charoshes.  Grama said 
I was the fastest worker in the kitchen she'd ever known.  I brought 
her a Moulinex, a hand grater that had discs you fit into the 
contraption.  It made it go faster.

	When there was a seder, we all had to get gussied up.  If we 
didn't look right, Grama would bend my mother's ear until it broke 
off.

	"Let them look nice, Mickey."

	So she let us.

	I'd go into my closet and try to select for moderately 
uncomfortable.  That is how I knew I was dressed for the occasion. 
As a child, that meant something stiff or something with itchy seams, 
and shoes that squeezed my toes together.  As a teenager, that meant 
wearing a slip and a dress that zippered up tight, something to tax 
the thread holding it all together if I ate everything on my plate. 
I say this defined moderately uncomfortable, because flat out 
uncomfortable could be anguish.  There is no limit to how much 
fashion can torture you.  Children's skin can be imprinted with the 
insult of a starched dress, or made to weary and worry you about 
keeping the outfit clean, unwrinkled and neat.  Teenagers can have 
the rest of their physical lives ruined by the full high heels and 
panty hose ordeal.  Still, the latter half of the twentieth century 
cannot aspire to the abuse of the first half.  Girdles, whale bone 
corsets, garter belts and hose, a thousand buttons, petticoats, and 
metal hasps that bite into the flesh.  Those were the routine attire 
of my grandmother's day, and she never quite let go of it.  She 
wanted me to wear girdles and corsets, shoes that deformed the feet 
and posture, the cloth equivalents of an iron lady.  This was what 
she meant when she kvetched, "Let them look nice."

	Dressed up and at attention, I sat in the car on the way over 
to the city trying not to move, or touch my own hair, my own body, 
lest I spoil the effect, all the hard work in achieving the state of 
perfection.  Daniel, the boys, the men had less to do.  The 
difference between street clothes and dress clothes were sometimes 
only a matter of what colour they wore, and if the pants were 
pressed.  The same zippers, the same buttons, the same belt, socks 
and shirts.  The only constriction was the tie, the knotted tail of a 
kite around the neck.  Maybe the fancy shoes had a pattern of fine 
tiny holes about the tips.  See if a man will pack himself into a 
girdle or balance atop spike heels, shoes that could break your legs 
if you fell off of them.

	We would arrive at the family dinner, doing our best, though 
we could never compare to the haute couture of our cousins.  We were 
the east bay crowd: crude, lax, unorthodox, informal.  We were a 
laugh.

	My grandparents' generation knew how to dress because they 
wrote the rules, or had accepted the rules written for them when they 
were in training.  The women dressed their husbands.  The husbands 
would have arrived in crumpled dirty, mismatched shirts and slacks, 
ties askew, socks fallen around their ankles.  It was the women who 
dictated the restrictions to them, and upon themselves.

	None of this ever, in any way, applied to Uncle Louie.  Uncle 
Louie was my grampa Benny's older brother.  Louie was five feet tall 
and about five feet wide.  He smoked cigars, drank, bet on the horses 
and chased women.  He said whatever came to his head.  Auf'n lung, 
auf'n tsung.  He had a calling card that was a treasured document of 
all who possessed it.

	"Office - Home - Church - San Francisco
	Louie Silberstein
	The old and only Uncle Louie.
	* Retired Furniture Dealer
	  *  Indebted to no one
	    *  Likes Races, Cards, Ladies
	      *  Likes People regardless, or what have you
	        *  NO WORRIES  You can't take it with you"

	Then on the other side, in italics:

	"Yesterday is gone,
	tomorrow is never here  -  Have fun
	It is much later
	than you think
	     I love life
	     I want to live"

	In my hard earned moderately uncomfortable duds, I stood 
there being careful and polite while Louie ate the boiled egg off the 
seder plate.

	"I was hungry."  Or announced to the crowd that he had to go 
pee.  Could he help it if he had to pee?  He'd go from great niece to 
great nephew, pressing a dollar bill into our hands.  He was a 
macher.  He made his fortune in the used furniture business.  He once 
made out a list of the people in the family who got past grade 
school, the ones who graduated college and the ones that jumped out 
the school house window in the third grade and never came back.  Next 
to the level of education achieved, he noted how much money they made 
annually.  He quit school somewhere around the third grade.  He made 
a fortune.  The ones who graduated from college fared not so 
handsomely.  It was all there in the statistics.  He crowed about his 
lack of schooling.  It was a savvy move on his part because it made 
it possible for him to earn the big bucks.

	At the seder, as we read the Haggadah going around the 
tables, taking one paragraph each, Louie plowed poorly through his 
paragraphs, or didn't read them at all.  He drank the wine, even when 
the Haggadah hadn't called for it yet.  He spoke in a loud voice.  He 
was a wonder, because he wrote his own rules which did not regard the 
sensitivities of others, living and dead, whatsoever.

	"Louie.  Sit down!" my Grampa would call out to him.  "Behave 
yourself."

	"I don't have to behave," he'd retort.

	And what do you know, he was right.  He didn't.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net