Happy Pesach!
I'm home in CA for Pesach, having made my quarterly trip home line up with the holiday this time. So far, it's been wonderfully worth it. I always love spending time with my family, no special event necessary, but Passover is my favorite Jewish holiday and carries very specific memories of the extended group of friends we would usually spend it with. Tonight, we went to first seder at the house of one of my parents' best friends, whose seders I've been attending since the age of seven. In attendance were three generations of her family, including her wonderful partner, her daughter's wife and two sons whom I've known since birth, her older son and his wife who are mathematicians in the UK, and her younger son, who I haven't seen since I was in high school and he left for college. In regard for the two attendees under seven, we did the higher-speed "good parts" version of the service, but hit the important moments. Highlights included a delicious meal (my mom's matzoball soup, quinoa-stuffed cabbage leaves, and dairy-free lemon bars -- yum, and I didn't even have to dodge my various dietary restrictions for once), my father's dramatic reading of the hysterical graduate student haggadah, and a napkin-and-pen explanation of a really cool toy where a cube reassembles into two stellated rhombic dodecahedrons. (shaenie: somebody said "equidecomposable!")
I feel full-hearted, not too severely overfed (for once), and happy, like a piece of my childhood grew and blossomed before me. This is what holidays and traditions are supposed to do -- help you connect the years of your life, give you foundation as you grow and change, root you without constraining you.
It was a lovely night.
I feel full-hearted, not too severely overfed (for once), and happy, like a piece of my childhood grew and blossomed before me. This is what holidays and traditions are supposed to do -- help you connect the years of your life, give you foundation as you grow and change, root you without constraining you.
It was a lovely night.