Is This Thing On? by annie newman

Schleppin' 'Cross the Wilderness

"Wait. Is there gonna be a test on this?"

We don't like to make comments about our friend JC, who is a very smart man and much larger than ourself. But the man complains a lot. He truly does.

Last night, f'r'instance, he was Twittering from his seder. which already is going to get on God's nerves. But it might have been okay if his tweets has consisted of comments like : "This haroseth is incredibly yummy" or "Memo to self-do not actually eat bitter herbs".

Instead, we heard nothing but complaints.

"Let my people go...out for a sandwich!"

"My stomach is rumbling so loud it drowned out two choruses of 'Dayanu'!"

"I swear to God that hard-boiled egg is a gonner if I don't get some brisket within the next five minutes!"

The fact is...and anyone who has seen The Ten Commandments can bear me out on this...the Exodus was not a journey for sissies.

First of all, we (not just ourself this time, we mean all the Jewish people) had to leave the house without packing. Our own mother, never a vain woman, couldn't leave the house without fifteen minutes of makeup and hairdressing, and, as to some of our more princessy friends, we think they would rather be caught by Pharoah's henchmen than be seen in their gear from spinning class. So already the complaints would start.

Our bff La Skolnique ("Chava the Peacemaker") would have to run back twice to see she had turned off the stove (had the camel pee on the fire) underneath the tzimmes. Which no one would eat anyway, because it looked like mortar and reminded them too much of work.

JC (or, as he would have been known in Biblical times, "Joshua the Fresser") would have demanded to be carried aloft by his handmaidens, claiming some old stonelaying injury; his comments ("So who told you to bring the half-baked bread? Half-baked gefilte fish would have been okay but why the bread? Did anyone remember the half-fermented wine?") would make his wife and child beg for Egyptian citizenship.

You see how tiresome this would get? And he wouldn't be the only one. 

Our brother, Pesche With the Open Mouth, would be lecturing his adorable two sons (Sholem the Pure and Mordecai the Yeller) about the true meaning of the holiday, whilst his wife, Judith the Balabusta, would illustrate with healer-approved tub toys.

"Did anyone bring noseplugs? I've got a deviated septum!"

Over at our part of the caravan, we ("Hannah the Unpaid") would be trying to comfort our Beautiful Daughter ("Tauba the Annoying"...once you start these things it's really difficult to stop)...while we searched high and low for her father, "Baruch the Messy", who, we hoped, brought her prescription manna.

Our only point here is that Passover could be a lot worse, so everyone pipe down and pass the affikomen. And if you don't know what that is, you weren't on the Exodus anyway. You get to tell the jokes on Sunday.

Love in the Basement

One character to whom we wish to introduce you is our house. Known to us as The Old Newman Place, it is a 1932 four-square bungalow, apparently built from a Sears kit by a crew of loafers who were sitting around the corner tavern waiting for the New Deal to kick in, when the person who owned this 1/3 acre told them it was free beer for them as would lend a hand, and he didn't mean the needled stuff, neither.

(If this passage made sense to you, you were probably wondering what good it did anyone to sit around a tavern before Repeal, anyway. You're such a smarty!)

Anyway, the boys pitched right in, and we think many a fine craftsman learned a profession on this job. As in, the electricians learned plumbing, the plumbers learned floor-installation, and the flooring men learned wallpaper hanging. We should point out that no one learned any of this well.

Time went on and we have owned this house since since 2005. We actually got a mortgage in 2005, although we were broke, in school, and subsisted on a small and undependable hand-out from our brother. This, in its essence, is the germ of today's Financial Crisis. 

Anyway, we live here with our Beautiful Daughter, our Cat and our Young Roommate. We refer to her as a Roommate although she does not contribute to the upkeep of this house in any way. She pays for her own food (a slight cost), beverages (not at all slight) and cell phone bill (roughly equal to the gross national product of Peru).

Every third week she unloads the dishwasher and puts everything back in the wrong place, an action which must be greeted with fawning approval or else we will lose the right to ask her to do it again. (Not that she will, but we like being able to ask.)

Our Roommate keeps company with a nice young man who looks forward to working in his father's construction company. This ambition has the dual benefits of preventing him from taking any further education (he doesn't know when he'll be called to a full-time job) and keeping him under his parents' thumb, unable to do anything of which they disapprove. They are the sort of people who disapprove as a way of life, although they call it Religion.

Our Roommate has been working part-time at Walmart for two years and is already up to 25 cents more than the minimum wage. She works 45 hours per week, which is called part-time with overtime. In this way, she is protected from having to take time off to go to the doctor, as she has no benefits whatsoever.

In this happy situation, it is obvious that the two needed to become engaged, and so they did, on a $300 ring and a sixpack of Mike's Hard lemonade. And they have been miserable ever since.

Since they live in our basement, we have ear-witnessed every moment of the romance: the recriminations, the second thoughts, the throwing of the ring in the ring-giver's face, the piling out of the basement and into the cars and the speeding off madly in every direction, the reconciliatory pizza, the creaking bedsprings, the having the ring re-sized because it cracked when it hit the basement's concrete wall.

Does Love always go this way? Or is it Love in a Basement which makes it go wrong?

We are actually happy to be living on the celibate (and airy) second floor of the Old Newman Place.