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That was all familiar and familial, despite the presence of three people I'm not used to having at the seder table, one of whom I hadn't met before. The new people were my cousin Karina (her uncle is married to my aunt), Karina's grandmother Caroline (my aunt Lea's mother-in-law, who now lives with her and her husband Dave), and John, who appears to be dating my cousin Janet.
We had the standard-for-us Maxwell House haggadah (which includes quasi-old-fashioned second person usages that make the King James Bible seem sensible). We skipped some bits, with my cousin Janet (who was leading the seder) saying that these were the ones Grandpa used to skip. (If I needed to abridge it, I'd drop the bit about the rabbis arguing that 10 plagues were really forty or fifty, plus 50 or 200 or 250 in the Red Sea.) During the meal Janet and I talked a little about my Grandma Pauline (my father's mother; the seder was a gathering of my mother's family. Lea sang (including some of the bits of prayer, in Hebrew, and two of the songs that get sung after the fourth cup of wine). I sang along with the latter, once she'd started us on the tunes; when we called my mother, Lea said that she and I had been the only ones singing.
The only thing homemade was the charoses; everything else was either catered by Village Crown (who do a fine job) or out of a jar (gefilte fish and horseradish). Sometime in the last few years, I've gone from putting homeopathic quantities of horseradish on a bit of matzoh because you're supposed to, to having the horseradish bowl in front of me so I could easily spread it on the gefilte fish, and a second piece of matzoh, and more-than-homeopathic quantities on the matzoh that also had the charoses. Janet said that at least in our family, liking horseradish comes on in mid-life;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cattitude suggested that it had to do with all the wasabi I eat, but I've been eating wasabi for a couple of decades. The festive meal felt quite festive, in a homey rather than fancy way: matzoh ball soup, gefilte fish, then good roast potatoes, nice carrots, good cucumber salad, and brisket at Caroline's request. There was chicken, but I skipped that because I'd had a lot of chicken recently.
John spent a lot of conversation announcing, loudly, that he thought X or Y or Z movie ought to be made, asking if we'd seen various television shows, and intermittently quizzing people about things (like "I read a book on five foods that changed the world. What do you think they were?"). We somehow got onto monotremes, and he asked something like "Why did marsupials survive rather than turn into [placental] mammals?" and seemed surprised when I said "That's the wrong question." After a bit of back-and-forth about Gondwonaland, and him saying something to which I said "now explain the opossum," I offered to turn him over to the resident biologist. (My aunt has a doctorate in that field.) It transpired that he teaches school (I don't know what grade level), doesn't think highly of most of his students, and seems to be cheerfully doing lies-to-children, at least with regard to biology. I got the impression that he's not used to talking about such things—including plate tectonics and evolution—with people who actually know something about the subjects. Somehow, we didn't get much time for catching up with each other's lives, though I did tell people briefly about my current job.
By the time I realized that my uncle Hank (Janet's father) wasn't there, though my aunt Ruth (his wife) was, it seemed a bit late to ask "So, where's Hank?" If he'd ever talked to anyone but Lea since my parents divorced and removed the annual arguments between him and my father, I might have noticed his absence sooner.
This is as good a place as any to note that I like my new cousin (Dave and Lea have been partners for, oh, probably 20 years, and married for five or six, but I didn't meet Karina until recently). She mentioned that she and Janet have been spending time together, and enjoying the looks of startlement when they say "we're cousins" (Dave and Karina's family are Chinese-American.)
Addendum: Thinking about this a bit more, I suspect John may have been nervous--new people, and a holiday he didn't know much about. Which will help me cut him more slack next time, but doesn't mean I enjoyed the way he dealt with it.
We had the standard-for-us Maxwell House haggadah (which includes quasi-old-fashioned second person usages that make the King James Bible seem sensible). We skipped some bits, with my cousin Janet (who was leading the seder) saying that these were the ones Grandpa used to skip. (If I needed to abridge it, I'd drop the bit about the rabbis arguing that 10 plagues were really forty or fifty, plus 50 or 200 or 250 in the Red Sea.) During the meal Janet and I talked a little about my Grandma Pauline (my father's mother; the seder was a gathering of my mother's family. Lea sang (including some of the bits of prayer, in Hebrew, and two of the songs that get sung after the fourth cup of wine). I sang along with the latter, once she'd started us on the tunes; when we called my mother, Lea said that she and I had been the only ones singing.
The only thing homemade was the charoses; everything else was either catered by Village Crown (who do a fine job) or out of a jar (gefilte fish and horseradish). Sometime in the last few years, I've gone from putting homeopathic quantities of horseradish on a bit of matzoh because you're supposed to, to having the horseradish bowl in front of me so I could easily spread it on the gefilte fish, and a second piece of matzoh, and more-than-homeopathic quantities on the matzoh that also had the charoses. Janet said that at least in our family, liking horseradish comes on in mid-life;
cattitude suggested that it had to do with all the wasabi I eat, but I've been eating wasabi for a couple of decades. The festive meal felt quite festive, in a homey rather than fancy way: matzoh ball soup, gefilte fish, then good roast potatoes, nice carrots, good cucumber salad, and brisket at Caroline's request. There was chicken, but I skipped that because I'd had a lot of chicken recently.John spent a lot of conversation announcing, loudly, that he thought X or Y or Z movie ought to be made, asking if we'd seen various television shows, and intermittently quizzing people about things (like "I read a book on five foods that changed the world. What do you think they were?"). We somehow got onto monotremes, and he asked something like "Why did marsupials survive rather than turn into [placental] mammals?" and seemed surprised when I said "That's the wrong question." After a bit of back-and-forth about Gondwonaland, and him saying something to which I said "now explain the opossum," I offered to turn him over to the resident biologist. (My aunt has a doctorate in that field.) It transpired that he teaches school (I don't know what grade level), doesn't think highly of most of his students, and seems to be cheerfully doing lies-to-children, at least with regard to biology. I got the impression that he's not used to talking about such things—including plate tectonics and evolution—with people who actually know something about the subjects. Somehow, we didn't get much time for catching up with each other's lives, though I did tell people briefly about my current job.
By the time I realized that my uncle Hank (Janet's father) wasn't there, though my aunt Ruth (his wife) was, it seemed a bit late to ask "So, where's Hank?" If he'd ever talked to anyone but Lea since my parents divorced and removed the annual arguments between him and my father, I might have noticed his absence sooner.
This is as good a place as any to note that I like my new cousin (Dave and Lea have been partners for, oh, probably 20 years, and married for five or six, but I didn't meet Karina until recently). She mentioned that she and Janet have been spending time together, and enjoying the looks of startlement when they say "we're cousins" (Dave and Karina's family are Chinese-American.)
Addendum: Thinking about this a bit more, I suspect John may have been nervous--new people, and a holiday he didn't know much about. Which will help me cut him more slack next time, but doesn't mean I enjoyed the way he dealt with it.