the seder

Saturday 19 April 2008

MY SALAD WAS A MISTAKE

Well, someone else was doing the brisket, which would have carrots and potatoes, and someone else all the symbolic foods, and someone else the dessert, so I said I’d do a salad. Not that anyone but me wanted one all that badly, but I thought someone might be tempted.

Never again; or at least, never again that particular salad.

Ingredients: shredded carrots; shredded zuccini; mesclun greens; a ripish avocado; romaine; fresh basil; and tomatoes. The dressing was chardonnay vinegar (which I first tasted on a date in January, and loved) with extra virgin olive oil, salt, and pepper. (Yeah, heavy; but I’m accustomed to making heavy salads because they make up a large part of what I eat.)

There was too much of it; that was one problem. And too much shredded stuff in proportion to the greens. And then there was the fact that a guest — my daughter, in fact — was two hours late. I had already dressed the salad; I like a salad that has been dressed a little while, say, 15 minutes, so that you can really taste it on the greens and everything. But after two hours of dressedness, this salad was a gloppy mess: everything was sticking to everything else, especially the carrots and zuccini.

Plan C put some on his salad plate and never went near it. It just sat there.

And there was a lot left in the bowl.

It wasn’t a ‘popular’ course….

Even I, a vegetarian, preferred the brisket to my own salad.

Okay, next year, if I do a salad, it will be a very light one, maybe red leaf lettuce and romaine and dill…..and I won’t dress it till the last guest has arrived.

THE ASSEMBLED GUESTS WERE ALL JEWISH

I’ve been to Seders where there were non-Jewish guests who had never celebrated Passover before and enjoyed this new adventure. But we were all 100% Jewish: Plan C, his sons, the fiancee of one and the girlfriend of the other, and one of my daughters. This was the first time she met Plan C’s sons.

GOD POINTED HER FINGER AT ME

Yeah, boy, did she. Not that I believe in God, but —

I got the passage to read about the unobservant Jew, who thinks Jewish tradition is just fine but depends on everyone else to keep it up…. Reading it aloud, I felt its meaning powerfully and knew it was a direct critique of me….

Was it an accident I got that bit to read?

Yes.

Or no.

PARENTAL SEXUALITY IS TABOO.

Only one of my daughters was present, and she was seated two chairs to my left. Every now and then, she would lean back so I could see her and make a gesture with her hands.

The gesture meant: your top is sinking too low and exposing too much cleavage. Pull up those straps!

So I did. Each time.

Later I asked Plan C if he had noticed that my top was too low, and he said no. But he had a lot on his mind, because this was the first Seder held at his house. (His family used to go to his wife’s brother’s for Passover.)

PLAN C’S ATTITUDE WAS MIXED

Plan C had organized the Seder, and it was the first major family ritual held at his house since his wife had died almost three years ago. He had been getting it together since March.

During the religious part, he occasionally made lightly disrespectful asides, and then apologized for them. No one minded.

But at the end of the dinner, he made a little speech of about forty seconds, saying that it was good to see the table full again, and that a year ago he hadn’t even heard of many of the people there (me, my daughter, and the one son’s girlfriend), but he was so glad to see us there.

That’s what Plan C is like: sentimental, emotional, prone to make little speeches, the sincerest person in the world.

He didn’t cry. I had kleenex ready in case he did (or, for that matter, in case I did), but all eyes were dry.

IT WAS MEANT TO BE

The week before Passover, one of his sons, as it turned out, and one of my daughters spoke to each other on the phone — in a completely unrelated context. They’re in the same business, and son X was calling daughter Y’s office, and she was the one who answered! And they knew one another’s names, so of course they were aware of their connection, and the fact that they were about to meet.

Son would have talked to daughter even if Plan C and I had never met, if I had never answered his email last February 5th, if I — or he — had never been on jdate, if if if.

AND (this is why it was ‘meant’ to happen, our meeting and romance) it also emerged, during the after-Seder conversation, that this same son had been invited to a wedding that I went to last summer. My daughter discovered that connection: did you know Son knows Sarah Bader? she called down from her end of the table.

I saw Sarah in her crib 36 years ago! And now my new boyfriend’s son knew her too. The generational connection was right…it made sense. Son hadn’t gone to the wedding, but we had lots of nice things to say about Sarah. A funny coincidence. And if he had gone to the wedding, nothing would have happened any differently between me and Plan C, because I would not have met Son anyway — unlikely, at a big wedding — and even if I had by chance been introduced to him, he would hardly have been soliciting dates for his father, and anyway, I had just met Performer a couple of weeks before the wedding, and (the more fool I) he’s the man I was thinking of then.

But don’t forget, I had already written Plan C via jdate, picked him out and emailed him, a good 18 months before he picked me out and emailed me (he had rejected me that first time because, he said, I lived too far away…).

So what with the daughter-son phone connection, the wedding connection, the fact that each of us picked the other out on jdate — you can see that we were supposed to meet.

Or maybe not ’supposed.’ But that’s the kind of myth couples create about themselves.

As he says, I am his beshert.

I HOPE WE DO IT THE SAME WAY NEXT YEAR — HIS HOUSE, OUR CHILDREN

But I’ll make a different salad.

Explore posts in the same categories: Plan C, families (oy), fashion, jdate

Tags: Add new tag

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.