She’s young, pretty, sweet, and well-off -- maybe there’s something to this God thing after all
This weekend I was in Cleveland, Ohio to attend the wedding of my cousin Avraham. A little family history would go kind of, but not exactly, like this: my aunt (mom's sister) Susan becomes Hasidic; Shoshana gets married (a bad match), three children are born (before the divorce): Chava, Avraham, Chani (a year older, a year younger, and several years younger than I); they move to Far Rockaway, Queens and we spend quite a bit of time with that side of the family; Chavi and I tend to antagonism (which made the year and a half when she came to live with us rather more interesting), but before they move to Baltimore around 1990 (+/-2 years) Av and I are kind of closer to siblings than cousins. (At least that's the way I remember it.)
So it is a little strange, to me, that I haven't seen Av for a while, and especially strange that he's now known by his closest friends as Shaggy (something about a poorly-grown and -maintained beard that he had at one time). Well, that I haven't seen him too recently does make some amount of sense, as he made aliyah to Israel (to our goyische readers, "aliyah" means something like "going up" and is the same word used to refer to a Bar/Bat Mitzvah going to read his/her Torah portion and to the act of a Jew emigrating "home" to Israel) several years ago. He's done his stint in the army (he gets called up for reserve action, natch), and is now studying for a degree in physical therapy (which in Israel includes acupuncture and other alternative and homeopathic therapies). Meanwhile, sometime along the way, he met a nice Jewish girl originally from Ohio.
I took some pictures, rather random, and am sad to say I did not take any of myself or my family in our fine duds. (Maybe my mom can be convinced to try to use her .mac account and post the pictures on her camera online.)
Now, a wedding being a wedding, I was ready for a great deal of people I wouldn't know, a great deal of somewhat boring ceremony, a great deal of feeling that I was a little lost among all the Hebrew, and not a lot of time with my cousin or other (non-nuclear) family. And that's pretty much what it was (as a character said in the movie Drop Dead Fred, "Don't you hate being right about the wrong things"); but I did enjoy the drunken singing and dancing, meeting (long enough to say hi) the new bride, and seeing Av (I don't think I could ever bring myself to call him Shaggy) long enough to hug him. I wonder if he feels, like me, a little regretful that we didn't keep in touch all these years.
The wedding was in the very nice, very new, and very empty Intercontinental Hotel in Cleveland, and I enjoyed the shine still in the furniture and the fact that there was always an elevator available. (The elevators themselves were rather too new and too efficient for my inner ear's tastes, and several times I wished the acceleration and deceleration were just a little gentler). Now I have four small jars of honey from Israel and a bunch of silly string hardened to the bottom of one of my dress shoes by which to remember the wedding. As nice as the rest of the food was, I don't think I could survive any more of it, so rich and different from my normal diet (e.g., the raspberry vinaigrette I had was more like raspberry maple syrup); though I do have this to say about my appreciation of Kosher cuisine: thanks to rather ambiguous commands in the Torah I have no worries about my dairy allergy.
(Let me try to get this joke my sister told me recently right:
So the Hebrews have just gotten the Torah from God, and they want to make sure they have everything right. So a Jew asks God, "When you say here that we shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk, what do you mean?"
God says, "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk."
"You mean," asks the Jew, "that we should keep meat and milk separate?"
"You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk."
"You mean that we should wait several hours after eating meat before we eat milk?"
"You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk."
"You mean we should keep separate sets of dishes for milk and meat, and we should keep these sets completely separate."
"Fine," says God, "have it your way.")
For the first time in my life my mother took this opportunity to give me subtle hints that she would like me to find a nice Jewish girl and have a religious ceremony. (Maybe, I just realized, she simply has some extra plates and glasses she would like to get rid of, but cannot bring herself to throw out unless they were broken; you all know at the end of the ceremony the groom breaks a glass to symbolize the destruction of the Temple and to remind us that even in joy we are not completely joyful. [Similar to how we pour wine out of our glasses at the Seder to remember the unfortunate hardships visited upon the Egyptians and to remind us that even in joy we are not completely joyful. {No wonder we invented psychology - for us everything is a symbol and we're always depressed about it.}] The plate is broken earlier, after the groom signs the Ketubah [marriage contract], by the two mothers, to act as warning: a broken union, like a broken plate, can never be put together again [a ritual not updated to take into account the invention of super-glue]; in every wedding where this was done, the plate took a lot of smashing to finally break; maybe that symbolizes something too.)
My mother's hints were something like this: "I want you to meet a nice Jewish girl and I want a wedding like this for you soon." I could be wrong (and often am), but I think that when we walked through the women's section of the dance floor (there is some gender mixing, but not on the dance floor, and there was a barrier between the two parts of the dance floor to emphasize that) to say goodnight and congratulations to Jamie (my new cousin-in-law), my mother gave the dancers a quick sizing-up.
Would I like something like that? I confess that my heart-strings are increasingly tugged on by the sight of small children (at least on the street when I just have to pass them in their strollers; this weekend where I was exposed to my two youngest cousins and two youngest cousins once-removed I discovered that my heart-strings are actually attached to my patience, which has the consistency of tissue and ends up easily in shred and patches). And, as my title suggests, my new cousin-in-law does have several positive qualities. (I assume that she's also fairly intelligent and pretty funny, just because I believe that my cousin isn't too different from me, the military training notwithstanding.) But I don't know if I would have married her if it meant that I had to live in Israel. (When someone asked what settlement they were going to live in, someone answered that it was a half-hour from Tel Aviv, and I quipped, "That could be Lebanon"; I don't think Shony really liked that comment. Even less so the reiteration by my dad that thirty minutes from Tel Aviv could be Syria.)
Back home, I discovered that the janitor had placed a box that was delivered to me (probably on Saturday) from the Sharper Image (an air filter, a good one) in my apartment; and I don't know how I should feel about this: grateful that he put it here so nothing happened to it or vaguely nervous? All I know is it's a good thing that I don't have the personal space issues of some people I know.
As a last note, I forgot to say this last time, but I noticed an interesting (possibly insulting, possibly not at all) little phenomenon when I was riding buses and trains all day. Now, if I didn't quite state it before, let me say now that Hyde Park is very racially diverse (an extra bit of joy for me is that some of the kids I see in strollers around here are also racially diverse; I'm too old to change, but I hope that race will drop out completely as a consideration after all of America's gone a dark-tan-beige in, let's be impossibly hopeful, two generations); and the areas around it are almost completely Latino or African-American. So on many of the buses I rode I was the only white (and probably the only Jew) and I was often the only white person at some of my destinations. The phenomenon that I noticed is simply this: after a long day of listening to the people who live around here, I noticed that my consciousness (stream-of-consciousness or internal monologue or thought process if you prefer) had, when conducted in words, a distinctly urban black youth cadence to it. (Quite possibly because, as in most situations, the youngest people were the loudest, and also were the ones I generally drifted towards, and possibly most strongly identified with.)
As is in evidence here, the phenomenon does not last too long or carry over into my written voice.
So it is a little strange, to me, that I haven't seen Av for a while, and especially strange that he's now known by his closest friends as Shaggy (something about a poorly-grown and -maintained beard that he had at one time). Well, that I haven't seen him too recently does make some amount of sense, as he made aliyah to Israel (to our goyische readers, "aliyah" means something like "going up" and is the same word used to refer to a Bar/Bat Mitzvah going to read his/her Torah portion and to the act of a Jew emigrating "home" to Israel) several years ago. He's done his stint in the army (he gets called up for reserve action, natch), and is now studying for a degree in physical therapy (which in Israel includes acupuncture and other alternative and homeopathic therapies). Meanwhile, sometime along the way, he met a nice Jewish girl originally from Ohio.
I took some pictures, rather random, and am sad to say I did not take any of myself or my family in our fine duds. (Maybe my mom can be convinced to try to use her .mac account and post the pictures on her camera online.)
Now, a wedding being a wedding, I was ready for a great deal of people I wouldn't know, a great deal of somewhat boring ceremony, a great deal of feeling that I was a little lost among all the Hebrew, and not a lot of time with my cousin or other (non-nuclear) family. And that's pretty much what it was (as a character said in the movie Drop Dead Fred, "Don't you hate being right about the wrong things"); but I did enjoy the drunken singing and dancing, meeting (long enough to say hi) the new bride, and seeing Av (I don't think I could ever bring myself to call him Shaggy) long enough to hug him. I wonder if he feels, like me, a little regretful that we didn't keep in touch all these years.
The wedding was in the very nice, very new, and very empty Intercontinental Hotel in Cleveland, and I enjoyed the shine still in the furniture and the fact that there was always an elevator available. (The elevators themselves were rather too new and too efficient for my inner ear's tastes, and several times I wished the acceleration and deceleration were just a little gentler). Now I have four small jars of honey from Israel and a bunch of silly string hardened to the bottom of one of my dress shoes by which to remember the wedding. As nice as the rest of the food was, I don't think I could survive any more of it, so rich and different from my normal diet (e.g., the raspberry vinaigrette I had was more like raspberry maple syrup); though I do have this to say about my appreciation of Kosher cuisine: thanks to rather ambiguous commands in the Torah I have no worries about my dairy allergy.
(Let me try to get this joke my sister told me recently right:
So the Hebrews have just gotten the Torah from God, and they want to make sure they have everything right. So a Jew asks God, "When you say here that we shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk, what do you mean?"
God says, "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk."
"You mean," asks the Jew, "that we should keep meat and milk separate?"
"You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk."
"You mean that we should wait several hours after eating meat before we eat milk?"
"You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk."
"You mean we should keep separate sets of dishes for milk and meat, and we should keep these sets completely separate."
"Fine," says God, "have it your way.")
For the first time in my life my mother took this opportunity to give me subtle hints that she would like me to find a nice Jewish girl and have a religious ceremony. (Maybe, I just realized, she simply has some extra plates and glasses she would like to get rid of, but cannot bring herself to throw out unless they were broken; you all know at the end of the ceremony the groom breaks a glass to symbolize the destruction of the Temple and to remind us that even in joy we are not completely joyful. [Similar to how we pour wine out of our glasses at the Seder to remember the unfortunate hardships visited upon the Egyptians and to remind us that even in joy we are not completely joyful. {No wonder we invented psychology - for us everything is a symbol and we're always depressed about it.}] The plate is broken earlier, after the groom signs the Ketubah [marriage contract], by the two mothers, to act as warning: a broken union, like a broken plate, can never be put together again [a ritual not updated to take into account the invention of super-glue]; in every wedding where this was done, the plate took a lot of smashing to finally break; maybe that symbolizes something too.)
My mother's hints were something like this: "I want you to meet a nice Jewish girl and I want a wedding like this for you soon." I could be wrong (and often am), but I think that when we walked through the women's section of the dance floor (there is some gender mixing, but not on the dance floor, and there was a barrier between the two parts of the dance floor to emphasize that) to say goodnight and congratulations to Jamie (my new cousin-in-law), my mother gave the dancers a quick sizing-up.
Would I like something like that? I confess that my heart-strings are increasingly tugged on by the sight of small children (at least on the street when I just have to pass them in their strollers; this weekend where I was exposed to my two youngest cousins and two youngest cousins once-removed I discovered that my heart-strings are actually attached to my patience, which has the consistency of tissue and ends up easily in shred and patches). And, as my title suggests, my new cousin-in-law does have several positive qualities. (I assume that she's also fairly intelligent and pretty funny, just because I believe that my cousin isn't too different from me, the military training notwithstanding.) But I don't know if I would have married her if it meant that I had to live in Israel. (When someone asked what settlement they were going to live in, someone answered that it was a half-hour from Tel Aviv, and I quipped, "That could be Lebanon"; I don't think Shony really liked that comment. Even less so the reiteration by my dad that thirty minutes from Tel Aviv could be Syria.)
Back home, I discovered that the janitor had placed a box that was delivered to me (probably on Saturday) from the Sharper Image (an air filter, a good one) in my apartment; and I don't know how I should feel about this: grateful that he put it here so nothing happened to it or vaguely nervous? All I know is it's a good thing that I don't have the personal space issues of some people I know.
As a last note, I forgot to say this last time, but I noticed an interesting (possibly insulting, possibly not at all) little phenomenon when I was riding buses and trains all day. Now, if I didn't quite state it before, let me say now that Hyde Park is very racially diverse (an extra bit of joy for me is that some of the kids I see in strollers around here are also racially diverse; I'm too old to change, but I hope that race will drop out completely as a consideration after all of America's gone a dark-tan-beige in, let's be impossibly hopeful, two generations); and the areas around it are almost completely Latino or African-American. So on many of the buses I rode I was the only white (and probably the only Jew) and I was often the only white person at some of my destinations. The phenomenon that I noticed is simply this: after a long day of listening to the people who live around here, I noticed that my consciousness (stream-of-consciousness or internal monologue or thought process if you prefer) had, when conducted in words, a distinctly urban black youth cadence to it. (Quite possibly because, as in most situations, the youngest people were the loudest, and also were the ones I generally drifted towards, and possibly most strongly identified with.)
As is in evidence here, the phenomenon does not last too long or carry over into my written voice.