Pesach Prep

This will be my first Pesach in retirement.  I am already ahead of schedule with most chametz appliances already in the basement, shopping largely done or at least with a detailed list, cleaning less frantic than when squeezing into a few hours after work already mired by fatigue.  Pesach has been one of my demarcation points for years, a challenge to what I can do and a diversion from what I usually do.  I eat lunch every day, the only time of the year I can say that.  Coffee is rationed by the relatively limited volume and heat retaining capacity of my Pesach travel tumbler.  Yom Tovim being two days, I am electronically liberated, three days if shabbos precedes or follows one of the Yom Tovim which it cannot do on the Sukkot calendar but sometimes does for Pesach. 

My house gets cleaned, at least the lower level.  I cannot realistically take a multi-day trip or even a long day trip.  Food is special.  Menus are planned.  I try, with variable success, to serve as host for Shabbos Pesach, which invariably overlaps with Good Friday which has traditionally been treated as a secular workday off.  My planning skills get a workout.  For Seder, I have to arrange not only food but transport to my in-laws, a mixture of multiple courses with limited prep time competing for oven and stove space.  My muscles and stamina get their workout hauling stored dishes and utensils from our basement.  My patience gets a workout from washing them.  Even the refrigerator gets its annual scrubbing. 

And then for the next seven weeks, I count Omer.  For some things Pesach is really the beginning.

Facebook on Fritz

After avoiding FB for a month and returning rationed to three half days a week, my computer expressed no Fear of Missing Out by failing to load my homepage.  My login was not recognized.  My homepage would either have a Welcome Message, as if I were a new user or display two or three posts but no more.  All my other pages are fine.  Occasionally my home page will also scroll correctly.  My tablet and smartphone do not have this problem so I can access but not type effectively.  I suppose I can use the library's computer if I need to but do I need to?

One of my favorite biographies was that of Reb Yaacov Kamenetsky, perhaps the greatest sage who ever lived in my home town.  We overlapped there my final two years of high school but I never met him, though one of my rabbi's knew him as headmaster of his school.  It seems Reb Yaacov always rode in an American car produced by a UAW member on a Monday morning after a debauched weekend.  His car could be counted on to break down at some point en route from Brooklyn or Monsey to his summer camp in the Catskills.  He never cussed out the union people like I did with a similar car.  The unexpected time of breakdown were part of a divine plan in his mind to give him some down time without his students or some dedicated time with his driver or others in the car.

If i cannot be as full a FB participant as I had in mind, opportunities of better sites to visit are not at all hard to imagine, though maybe take a little dedication to pursue.

Bronx Detour

My first five years my family lived in the Bronx, where my father worked his entire career.   I remember nothing of living there, a little of visiting my paternal family through the 1950's, and staying a few weeks on school breaks with my maternal grandparents so that my mother could tend to my infant sister with less interference.  As I reached my teens, trips to NYC began near Yankee Stadium, as I mooched a ride from my father,  practices that continued through college.  Since then it has been a relic of my past, a drive through to get to New England on I-95 or into Westchester on the Major Deegan Expressway, which I think is numbered I-87.

On a long anticipated short holiday in Rhode Island recently, the route again took me over the George Washington Bridge through the Bronx into Westchester and Connecticut.  Traffic came to a virtual standstill along the Cross Bronx Expressway, far more severe than in any previous venture there.  As I passed under the overpasses, familiar names appeared on the signs.  Jerome Avenue, Nelson Avenue, Webster Avenue, Arthur Avenue, all places that my father used to travel nearly daily or when we visited relatives, typically with me riding shotgun.  I grumbled but endured the traffic which eased as we approached Coop City where another set of relatives settled, the northern limits of New York City and the onset of smooth sailing until another major tie-up in eastern Connecticut.  Pleasant few days in Newport visiting white elephant mansions, wineries and an historic synagogue's outside.  At least my synagogue lets me inside.  Then home.

By then I had gotten some experience with Google Maps to detour me through traffic standstills.  Mostly smooth sailing until that same spot on the Cross Bronx Expressway.  I decided to detour myself but getting from the left lane, which was not even free of semi's, to a right exit lane took two potential exits but I eventually succeeded.  It turned out to bring me to my old neighborhood with familiar street names but totally unfamiliar traffic patterns.  Thirty or more years must have elapsed since my father drove me there as his passenger and it was my first encounter as the driver.  The local streets moved about as well as the Expressway and basically directed me in a semi-circle to the next Expressway exit where I had little choice but to get back on. Yet for a few minutes, maybe more minutes than I liked, I got to see sidewalks with people on them, storefronts that now offered Halal Goat in place of Kosher Neck & Tenderloin, an electrical repair firm with small trucks that may still be owned and operated by direct descendants of the original Jewish owners, a deteriorating elevated transit line above me, the street where my mother. z"l, attended high school, some Hispanic owned businesses with Spanish signage, and less litter than had been imprinted in my mind from previous visits.  Superettes are now bodegas.  If you need clothing appropriate to a white collar job, that requires transfer to a different neighborhood. 

Being a suburbanite except for my university and residency years, we had no neighborhoods.  I had forgotten that they still exist.  Living there probably has its indignities but it has its identification as well.  And I got to immerse myself in a brief refresher.