A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

4 April 1999 - Tradition! Tradition!

Not a lot of actual news this week. The new AC adapter did solve my laptop problem. I'm going to try to limp along with this system for a while anyway, since it meets my needs well enough and I am still rebuilding my finances from last year.

Speaking of which, I finally did my taxes and I am getting nice refunds from both the feds and the state. Usually, I get a small federal refund and owe California money but working just three months last year changed the picture. The combination of such a windfall and a minor case of technolust has me thinking hard about buying a palmtop. I may look some next weekend up in the Bay Area, assuming I stay over until Sunday. (Too many things I want to do, as usual, sigh. If I could only be in more than one place at a time, life would be wonderful. As it is, every weekend this month is fully booked up - trips to the Bay Area and to Portland, walks, cocktail parties, such a social butterfly I am becoming!)

Anyway, the obvious thing to write about this week is Pesach (the Hebrew name for Passover). When I was a kid, it was my favorite Jewish holiday, mostly because of all the special foods we only got that one week a year. Mom always made chopped liver, for example. Other times of year, we sometimes got the packaged sort, but never her homemade version. One year, being lazy, she bought chopped liver and doctored it to be closer to hers. Aunt Bernice said something about how good it was "as always" and Mom glared at me when I laughed at that. Then there was the special stuffing for the chicken, made with matzo and chopmeat. (We did eventually persuade Mom to make that other times of year.) And matzoh farfel pancakes for breakfast. And fruit slice candies and egg kichel and so on and so forth.

Nowadays, it's a pain, with all the cleaning beforehand and cooking all the time because I hate to spend the money on packaged things. Of course, now they have interesting kosher for Passover products that didn't exist when I was a kid - even breakfast cereals and pasta - but I just can't imagine using them. I end up eating a lot of baked potatoes and veggie casseroles, though I did actually make matzoh farfel pancakes today.

There must be something uniquely Jewish about celebrating liberation by having especially strict rules about what you can do. It's not just what you can eat - you're not even supposed to own or benefit from chametz in any way. By the way, leaven is not a good translation of chametz. What it really means is one of the five grains (wheat, rye, oats, barley and spelt - and, yes, everyone asks what spelt is, but it turns out to be a sort of wheat variant with a different number of chromosomes) comes in contact with water for more than 18 minutes.

At any rate, inconvenient as they may be, the traditions run deep and it's pretty much unthinkable for me to ignore them. It isn't just the chopped liver that's essential or the spilling of drops of wine for the 10 plagues or the off-key singing from "Dayenu" through "Chad Gadya". What I really cherish is repeating my father's annual joke, "And to think I believed them that everyone is so rich in America! Here it is Pesach, one of the most important holidays in the Jewish year - and we don't even have any bread in the house!"

Finally, the changing of the clocks reminds me of a tradition I would like to see end. Daylight savings time means the start of the baseball season. So would the Red Sox please stop snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?