Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Cattitude, Adrian, and I went to supergee, Bernadette, and womzilla's wedding/anniversary celebration at the Bronx Zoo yesterday. We had fun, but the trip itself was tiring: Lyft to South Station, Amtrak to New Rochelle, then a cab to a hotel in Yonkers and a Lyft to the Bronx. We stayed overnight, and took a late-morning train home.

I had a good time, and saw several people in person for the first time in years, and I think a few I wasn't even in email or social media touch with. Supergee had to participate over Zoom, because he is in a hospital, but fortunately not sick enough that they needed to cancel/reschedule the wedding.

The plan had been to have most of the event outdoors: the ceremony itself, and some of the socializing+food part of the evening. It turned out that between the weather (rainy and low 50s F) and the move to Zoom for the ceremony, the entire event was indoors. Based on what Bernadette had said a week or so ahead of time about ventilation, air filters, and UV, we decided to take the hopefully slight risk of unmasking indoors for a couple of hours of food and conversation, rather than eating something quickly and then remasking. This feels a little odd because if the event hadn't originally been planned to be outdoors, I probably wouldn't have gone; I have turned down a lot of indoor events in the last few years.

Even so, I spent a lot of time masked yesterday and today, enough that the skin right behind my ears was feeling a little tender earlier. (I'm using N-95s, which fasten behind my head rather than having earloops, but the behind-the-head straps tend to slip down and run into the ear-pieces of my glasses.)

Our friends Alan and Jeanne are in town over the Thanksgiving weekend, visiting Elly (who lives in Salem). They spent the afternoon here. Alan is one of my oldest friends. We met in roadnotes' living room in 1983, when he lived in Toronto, and he and Jeanne now live in the Bay Area. [cattitude points out that I've known Elly about as long.]

I took a covid test for unrelated reasons yesterday (it was negative) and then I asked cattitude and adrian_turtle how they'd feel about visiting unmasked iff everyone tested negative. They said yes, so I suggested that to Alan, and also noted that I had already tested negative but had tested because I seemed to have a cold. Everyone tested negative, but Elly spent most of the afternoon wearing an N95 because she doesn't want to catch a cold. We also replaced the pre-filter on our living room air filter.

Much conversation, and we finished the apple crisp from yesterday's belated Thanksgiving dinner (Elly took her mask off for this). They left around 6:30, after spending 3.5 hours here. I suggested to Elly that we get together again when we don't have visitors from the other coast, and we hope to do this, either her visiting us, or the three of us taking transit and her picking us up at the commuter rail station. So far this is a hope, not even the glimmering of a plan.

The postponed Thanksgiving dinner, which we had yesteray, was good, especially the duck. I didn't like the rice salad, and Adrian and Cattitude thought it was only OK, but there were plenty of roast roots, so that was all right.

Friday night's small, somewhat improvised* seder at adrian_turtle's apartment worked quite well. I hadn't realized the extent to which using a different haggadah than I was used to from my family seders would have me thinking more about the whole Passover story and liberation more broadly. Some of that, I think, was the specific texts -- my family always used the Maxwell House haggadah, as did many other American Ashkenazi Jewish families, and Friday night we used (part of) "Gates of Freedom," a more recent Haggadah published by the Reform Jewish movement, with a few pages of other material Adrian found online.

Beyond that, and beyond the more contemporary language -- the Maxwell House haggadah is full of quasi-King James Bible phrasing and grammar -- both different phrasing for the translations from the Hebrew, and the added short pieces by other writers meant that I was thinking more about the meaning of the words, rather than things like "this is where my aunt makes a joke about Rabbi Jose."**

The menu was also slightly experimental: Adrian made a Moroccan Passover chicken recipe, and put some caramelized onions in the matzo ball soup because she had them available. The sauce for the chicken was sweeter than I really liked, but that was OK, there was this dish of horseradish right there, which cut the sweetness nicely.***

* Until Tuesday morning, Adrian was planning to go to Virginia and spend the holiday with her other partner and his family, but various pandemic-related reasons led to her postponing that trip.

** There's a story about several rabbis discussing Passover and the Exodus, including "Rabbi Jose the Galilean," almost certain pronouncing "Jose" like "Joe's," but my aunt liked to pronounce it as if it was Spanish. A small thing, not exactly a joke, just a thing that was always there when we were having a seder at her place.

*** I was in my forties when I started liking horseradish (other than in shrimp cocktail sauce), rather than putting the tiniest amount possible on the matzo with the charoses.

We had visitors this afternoon, including two of my oldest friends: Elly, who I met sometime in the 1980s and who then lived next door to us for several years, and Alan Rosenthal, who I met at a party in Velma's living room in 1983, where we proceeded to talk for several hours. Alan was living in Toronto then, and we visited back and forth moderately often. He then moved to Seattle, meaning less frequent visits, but even if it takes a year for one of us to realize we haven't talked in a while, the conversations are always comfortable.

The third guest was Alan's partner Jeanne, another cool person but one I haven't known nearly as long. Just conversation and admiring the cats; I mentioned the German citizenship paperwork, and some of the conversation was to do with Covid and vaccines and such, and otherwise we talked about random things.

Jeanne and Alan live in the Bay Area; they spent Thanksgiving with Elly in Salem, after visiting Alan's father in Toronto.

Ideally, this visit wouldn't have been the day after my mother left, but Alan and Jeanne are flying home tomorrow, and I didn't want to miss the chance to see them while they were at least vaguely nearby,

My 40th high school reunion is coming up. There's a zoom event on Friday, plus an in-person gathering in Central Park on Sunday, and another event for fully vaccinated people. A couple of weeks ago I decided the in-person parts weren't worth the round trip from Boston, and I have now taken a freelance gig that might conflict.

Two hours of Zoom, with people I haven't been in touch with*, on Friday evening? I'm going to RSVP, to get the link and put the reminder in my calendar, and then see.

* The only person from Hunter I was close to as an adult was roadnotes, who wasn't in my class (she was a year older than me). Her comments on how disappointed she was at her thirtieth reunion weren't the only reason I skipped mine, but they were a factor.

I have been feeling a little out of it, mentally, since mid-afternoon, but had sufficient focus for a book club/discussion of Le Guin's Always Coming Home on the Gathertown annex of the Scintillation Discord server this evening.

We talked about that book, and some of Le Guin's other writing, and a bit about other things, including how nice it was to be looking at and talking to people we don't live with (or, in my case, brief practical interactions with various health care workers).

Jo recommended the Library of America edition of the book, which has substantial additional material; this is hardcopy, so I need to choose a bookstore. (I haven't bought any paper books since before the pandemic.)

I saw my eye doctor yesterday. The appointment itself was straightforward--masks and hand sanitizer, and they told me which of the two available chairs to sit in while waiting for my eyes to dilate--and everything continues basically well. No change in my eyeglass prescription, though I got a hardcopy in case I need to get a new pair of glasses sometime in the next year.

( eye stuff, no worries )

My eye doctor now has an office literally around the corner from adrian_turtle's apartment, so I scheduled a visit with Adrian around seeing the doctor. That's partly just convenience--why spend twice as much time on buses?--and partly that while the risk of each trip is low, one round trip is still lower-risk than two.

adrian_turtle came over here today, and we had lunch and watched Hamilton. (This is the recording of the Broadway play, made in 2016, which Disney just released on Disney+.)

We all enjoyed it, and I will probably go back and listen to the cast recording to make out more of the lyrics. (Between the loud orchestra, and some buffering glitches, there were lyrics I literally didn't hear, and others I couldn't make out clearly.)

I found myself crying near the end, in part thinking about people I've lost, and letters I didn't keep, or discarded in what now seems like an excess of post-move tidying some years ago. We paused the show until I stopped sobbing, wiped our eyes, and watched the last bit.

At the curtain call, the entire cast next to each other, I was thinking that this show looks more like New York than anything other live theater I've seen, on or off Broadway. Not at all surprising -- Lin-Manuel Miranda lives, or lived, in Washington Heights -- but I hadn't thought of it that way during the show.

Cattitude got the TV a few weeks ago, and set it up in the basement, which lets him watch things on a big screen instead of a tablet, and gives me a bit of time/space to myself while we're staying home because of COVID. This is the first thing I've watched with him; if I was more interested in television we wouldn't have lived without one for so long.

Given my general feeling that almost everywhere, including Massachusetts, is reopening too soon and/or too fast, I doubt I'll be going to the theater for a while after that becomes possible again. (Broadway has announced that nothing is reopening until at least January, and I don't know when anything else, including college productions, will resume.)

We had dim sum today with Elizabeth and a crowd of other people; I think 19 total, counting her, me, and cattitude. China Pearl, but I got a better selection than I sometimes do there, in part because they brought the sticky rice around while I was still hungry. (She organizes this every year, has been doing so long enough that she doesn't remember exactly how long it's been.)

I spent some time catching up with her, and a few other people from way back when. I hadn't seen Beth Kevles since some time in the late 1980s, I think; she didn't recognize me, nor I her, but identified her from a conversation about her and "the other Beth". And Karla I'd never met in person; we were in an apa together, way back when, when that was a thing.

That was a pleasant couple of hours, and then we left while I was still feeling cheerful and a bit social.

I also had a nice phone conversation with my mother this morning; got a bit of indexing work done; and have exercised some. Looking at this list, that feels like a lot. Go me.

Three weeks ago, I wrote "I spoke to the staff at Oath Pizza, that had a sign about having said 'sayonara' to the straw. I pointed out that this is a disability issue. The manager said that they have straws for people who need them, and I suggested that they put up a sign saying so, instead of the one saying they don't, because if I had needed a straw and seen that, I would probably have gone elsewhere instead of asking for one. He allowed as how this was a good idea, but I don't know if they'll act on it." I went in again last week, and the "sayonara" sign was still up, but I didn't have the energy to talk to them about it again. *sigh*

cattitude and I are making progress on planning the move. After setting dates for packing and moving, noticed that the deadline for paying the monthly fee for our storage unit will be the day we're moving, so I went ahead and paid that this afternoon, and am feeling pleasantly organized. (This is one of many things to do, but it is one, and I have done it.)

adrian_turtle and I went to a party this past weekend; there were a few people I already knew, most of whom I said little more than hello to. But I had a nice long conversation with a woman named Masha; bits of conversation with various people, in the drifting-through-things way that can happen at parties; and then talked for a while to gingicat, including a bit about her kids.

Adrian and I took a Lyft home (dropping her off at Porter Square before taking me home); I left my daypack at her place rather than carry it to the party, so yesterday's errands included going to Arlington to retrieve that. Along the way, I stopped at the eye doctor's office to give them back an unopened sample bottle of eye drops that were left from after my cataract surgery. Something that took only a few minutes, as long as I was taking the bus along Mass Ave anyhow, but would have taken an annoying amount of time, for a small errand, if not combined.

Last night Cattitude and I had dinner with his sister Nancy and her husband. We went to Dali, a tapas place someone had recommended at Elizabeth's Christmas dim sum brunch. It was very good, but pricey, more so than I quite expected: that may be partly because we were quite hungry, and perhaps also because, drinking so little myself, I tend to forget about drinks when estimating the price of a meal out. My favorite of the things we had was the gorditas, bacon-wrapped prunes (stuffed with a little bit of cheese and almond); Cattitude and I ordered a second plate of those for dessert, because they tempted me more than anything on the dessert part of the menu. The food and conversation were both good, but I was exhausted even before the end of dinner--and then had a hard time falling asleep last night. (425 Washington Street, Somerville, or maybe Cambridge, depending which map or program you're looking at.)