Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

adrian_turtle came down to New York for a seder at my aunt Lea's. (Lea specifically invited her as well as me and cattitude, who was too swamped by work to come with us.) Again, not only do my family like Adrian, they seemed glad that I bring someone who can sing. My cousin Janet was talking about my grandmother on the other side of the family's singing, and I said something about that being the job of my side of the family (broadly defined).

Janet (our leader) said she didn't think we needed to adjust the language much for feminist purposes, in part because this was very much a women-run seder. (We started with one man present, and Dave never says much.) So we used the traditional Maxwell House haggadah; Lea noted that this is the one the president uses.

I heard a bit more about Frieda's history, and good things Grandpa did. (Frieda isn't blood kin as far as I know, but my mother and aunts refer to her as their "fourth sister.")

There were some new-to-me people at the seder, neighbors my aunt knows from her Shakespeare class. So she gave them the apartment tour, and when we sat down noted that almost everything in the room was from other members of the family, including my grandparents' expanding table and some of their dishes. (My aunt has bought furniture, it's just mostly in other parts of her home.)

Partway through the seder Janet's boyfriend John arrived. As in past years, he was loud and seemed to feel the need to be at the center of attention. This involved, among other things, asking questions some of which I realized afterward he had to know the answers to. Maybe he didn't know that humans are the only animals with a menstrual cycle, but I refuse to believe that a recently retired science teacher doesn't know what the male and female parts of a flower are. That's fourth grade material. But because it's fourth grade material, and I had it on my desk an hour earlier, I just answered without stopping to analyze.

A little later, the topic of eggs, egg-laying, and male animals that carry or protect eggs (I think) led to my aunt saying that egg-laying animals are defined as female. John's reply was "Well, what about transvestites or transsexuals or whatever they are? They don't lay eggs—are they female?" Adrian answered that a person's gender is whatever the person says it is. John challenged that idea (which I know is not universally accepted), and then asked something clueless about (IIRC) the difference between "transgender" and "transsexual." My first response was "Do you have a few hours?" Then I and Adrian settled in to do a bit of Trans 101. That's not what I'd expected that afternoon, but it may have done some good—probably not with him, but with some of the other people there, who seemed uninformed but not hostile. For example, one of them said she thought transgendered people were "confused," and I just said that my trans friends didn't seem confused, though other people sometimes are. Adrian suggested on our way home that he had probably been leading into some kind of ignorant "joke," but that he hadn't been counting on throwing those questions to a room where the answers included "Well, my doctor is trans, and…," me talking about trans friends, and my aunt being calm and thorough on biological questions.

I think we did a decent job with that bit of education, and I'm fairly sure it was better than if we'd left the topic lying there after John tried to heap scorn on the idea that a person can say "I'm a woman" and have that be meaningful. If I'm less practiced at Trans 101 than some people, I'm also less worn out by having to do it, both for the same reason: I'm cisgendered, and most people read me as female, so I don't have a lot of these conversations. And I was talking in third person, which in some ways is safer.

I also had a nice catching-up talk with my cousin Karina before the meal, as well as chatting with Janet; the one thing I regret is that I barely got to say more than hello to my cousin Anne. Had the conversation not veered the ways it did, I might have asked Janet how her father is doing; I tentatively attribute his absence to introversion and/or not liking crowds of his wife's relatives, even if he's known them for half a century.

Because food also matters: I ate lots of charoses, in part because it seemed most other people had forgotten that there was any left, and of a good cucumber salad. My only contribution was some Ceylon teabags; I wanted something good that wouldn't need milk, so threw a half dozen in my bag. One of Lea's friends made a very nice ground walnut and lemon cake. And my aunt Lea made a point of giving me one of the few remaining glass teacups and saucers (again, stuff from Grandma and Grandpa) to drink from.

(Edited to change title: I'd thought I was writing an outline, and it turned into a real post.)

I was exhausted last night, and am still tired today despite having done little. Happy, though. ( seder, and Alan, cut for length )

adrian_turtle, cattitude, and I went my aunt's Passover seder yesterday [1]. When Aunt Lea called to invite me and Andy a few weeks ago, I asked if I could bring Adrian, because she didn't have a seder to go to. Lea said it might be a little tight, physically, but of course Adrian was welcome. Adrian came down here Saturday afternoon; she could have gotten here earlier, but Andy and I wanted a little time to ourselves, and for him to nap, given that I was in Montreal the weekend before.

Finding matzoh in the neighborhood was more hassle than we expected, between stores that had none and the local supermarket having gotten several kinds of not-for-Passover-use matzo. I'd not been expecting a problem, because I hadn't bothered in years. I'm just in this to see my family; Adrian actually observes the holiday, and wanted matzoh. Nonetheless, Cattitude succeeded in finding the appropriate food, and had a nice walk out of it. I'd gotten a duck at Jefferson Market Friday, which I roasted for Saturday night's dinner, with roasted potatoes and cucumber salad. Sunday, Adrian made matzoh brei (a different style than I grew up with, but we all three enjoyed it) for late breakfast/early lunch.

Adrian and my relatives hit it off well. She said very nice things about my aunt Lea (who really is very cool), was proclaimed "now officially a relative" by my cousin Janet halfway through the seder for reading fluently and quickly from the hagaddah, and happily let Janet (and me, but mostly Janet) show her family photos and heirlooms. In the course of that tour, Adrian exclaimed happily over the poster showing the Periodic Table of the Protozoa. Aunt Lea still has Grandma and Grandpa's seder glasses (and my parents' highball glasses, which she used for water and seltzer during the meal), and some other nice glass dishes. Two teacups and saucers left, which she gave to me and Janet. Next year I may suggest that she use one herself, so I don't worry about dropping them.

My aunt Ruth seems to have mellowed in the last year or two; I don't know if that's an actual change, or that uncle Hank (her husband) wasn't there, or some other factor. After Ruth said something about Simon's health, Friedl (who I didn't grow up around, but who my mother and aunts refer to as "the fourth sister") told me that my mother is a saint.

On the way home, Adrian asked if Dave (Lea's husband) had been the only Jewish man there. I said no, there had been no Jewish men there. (She knows Cattitude isn't Jewish, and Janet's friend John was asking questions in ways that made it clear that he's not Jewish.)

When I asked Lea if I could bring Adrian, I referred to her as "my girlfriend Adrian," and then figured that I wasn't going to make a fuss about the nature of our relationship, but neither was I going to deny it if asked. As people arrived, Lea said "Vicki's friend," and I just referred to her by name. One or two people asked, and we said she'd come down from Boston for the weekend and to attend the seder. Similarly, John was introduced to people as Janet's friend, though that's pretty clearly a romantic connection (and he clearly wasn't looking for a seder for the sake of a seder). [To Lea, I said "this is Adrian," having described her previously.] She, Cattitude, and I showed up together, clearly all on good terms and happy;, while half of you would read that as cozy poly family, a lot of other people are going to read that as good friend (which she is) but not of that shape.

[1] This was officially a first seder: my aunt's figuring is that the day, for these purposes, is sundown to sundown, and starting at 2:00 Sunday afternoon and finishing around 5 or 6 is much easier on her and other people than starting right after sunset and finishing after 11 p.m.

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; 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.