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no nostalgia value Sunday, April 20 2008
Today was cloudy and much cooler than it had been in recent days, to the point where I had to wear one of Ray's outgrown sweatshirts as I continued the disassembly of the Honda Civic hatchback. My focus today was on the heater core, which is boxed up in a high density polyethylene housing beneath and behind the dashboard. The heater core is used to transfer heat from engine coolant to the air inside the car's cabin, thereby warming it in cold weather. I figured I could use the heater core either in some future hydronic or solar project, bur first I'd have to figure out how to get it out. It seemed to be trapped behind a large number of objects secured by screws that were oriented in such a way that they couldn't be removed, as if the whole dashboard had been assembled before being installed into the car. [Indeed, this is the case.] But I couldn't figure out how to remove the dashboard.
Meanwhile Gretchen was busy in the kitchen, preparing food for a second day of pesach (Passover seder). Back when I married Gretchen, I was fully aware that I was marrying into a culture that involves pesach. Unfortunately, though, despite my self-enforced open-mindedness about this ritual, I have not grown to enjoy it. Since Passover meals are not part of my culture, they have no nostalgia value for me. And, as with all ancient rituals, any inherent value pesach might once have had is weakened through sheer repetition. Indeed, I find myself enjoying pesach less and less every time I suffer through one. It's not easy keeping ancient ideas fresh and free of the trappings of cliché. (I like to joke about Catholics, before heading off to mass, trying to remember precisely why it was that Jesus died and what sort of woman his mother had been.) For this reason, the only rituals I like are the kind (like my family's tradition of Jesus-free Christmases) that provide basic pleasures without relying on a script.
For some reason we didn't have a lot of local options for pesach year, but this was partly the result of how finicky Gretchen is when it comes to what constitutes a proper pesach (particularly given her preference that they be vegetarian). There are annual pesachs throughout the Hudson Valley that we will never revisit because they were, in some way, not up to snuff.
We ended up attending a pesach hosted by a student in a night class Gretchen is teaching. The class is a photography class for members of local unions, and Gretchen's contribution is to help the students craft captions for their photographs. This particular student is at least a decade older than Gretchen, though she is part of a vibrant lefty Jewish scene. One of her sons is part of a community of anarchists who have moved into an abandoned New Orleans neighborhood to squat, a very early stage of gentrification if you will. Tonight's pesach crowd was female-heavy, and the only child there had two mommies (as well as a long-suffering guinea pig). Though the main course for the meal was a turkey, there were a number of vegetarians there in addition to Gretchen. (Tonight I played vegan as well, mostly as a means to avoid having to explain my aversion to the boiled eggs as they come around. The ordeal of explaining it is inevitably more repulsive than experiencing it.)
The pesach got a late start due to the tardiness of the guy who was bringing the all-important horseradish. Somehow we started an hour and a half later than had been planned. Gretchen and I had ourselves gotten lost on the way there (it was in a fringe village northwest of Saugerties), but had only arrived a half hour late.
The most impressive thing about the pesach itself was how completely secular the haggadah was. The "Adonai" in Hebrew had been translated as "life force," "universal love," etc. Other than that, the dragged like in any other pesach.
Finally the food was served, and I was full in record time, mostly on Gretchen's nutloaf. We split soon after that, mostly because the time had arrived at the hour Gretchen had imagined we'd be leaving at, and she'd thought I'd been a good sport and had suffered through enough.
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