I am going to make it through this year if it kills me

The trees outside my window have broken into full bloom, white and heavy as snowfall, reflecting sunlight into my apartment, and no longer smell so entirely like fish. I still feel botanically ignorant: if I am going to have a fish-scented tree tapping twigs against the glass, I should at least like to know what it is. But it's an oddly pleasant view, all the pale petals nodding and shifting on their branches with the wind whenever I look up from my computer, and it keeps me from seeing the red plastic beer cups scattered all up and down the street from last night's fraternity debauch. They were singing the bawdy song to the tune of "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye" again. I am continually impressed by the existence of that song.

A pigeon crashed into my air conditioner yesterday. I felt terrible. Then it came back and perched on the air conditioner and looked in at me, as though to prove some point. Clearly I am like unto Everest in the world of the pigeon. Go, me?

For the first time in my life, with the help of Eric Kimmel's Wonders and Miracles and a couple of dog-eared coffee Haggadahs that came from my grandparents, I led the Seder at my parents' house on Saturday. There was much historical tangency. There was much improv. There was not enough coaching of my brother on the Four Questions as there should have been, since I am the only person in my family who actually reads Hebrew, but he and his fiancée were fine. And the afikomen was discovered in under fifteen minutes, which is a miracle on the order of the Red Sea because my father has been known to hide half-matzot everywhere from record covers to photographs on the wall to guests' boots to (last year) halfway through Revelations in the King James Bible. I should have prepared more formally for the telling of the Exodus story. I don't have as many prayers committed to memory as I needed. But I think it still went well, and it was surprisingly fun. There are few rituals that, if left to myself, I will keep faithfully. Pesach is one of them.

Worship of the Great American Weevil God and the Well-Rested Ammonite, however, is not.
(Cut for tentacles and future archaeology.)
( Read more... )

Thanks to dgr8bob for the Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, which has become my working soundtrack lately. If you can get the files to play here, I particularly recommend "This Year" and "Song for Dennis Brown." Thus far, my other favorites seem to be "You or Your Memory," "Dilaudid," "Magpie," "Love Love Love," and "Pale Green Things." I need to see John Darnielle live sometime.

There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year . . .