Back from Montreal
Jun. 18th, 2005 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyOh, man.
As a testament to howaddicted I am to teh interwebs how much I love you all, I'm writing this before I've finished packing and checking my e-mail. (Down to 48 new messages out of 185...a certain group I'm in had some rather intense debates over the past few days that killed my inbox dead.) I'm alive, albeit frazzled and dead exhausted.
The funeral was good, as far as funerals go. We scored on the rabbi. There was a big deal with my grandmother hating the rabbi at her synagogue to the point of bribing him when my Zaidie died so that she could get a different rabbi to do the service. We had to do the same thing this time, too. Anyway, the one we got was really great -- despite being so Orthodox that he wouldn't shake my hand (I am queen of the Bad Jew faux pas), he spoke very little about religion and very much about the sort of complicated person my grandmother was and what her life meant to all of us. Funny thing is that he never met my grandmother -- he reconstructed some of her life from what my mother and uncle said about her, and sort of expanded from there. He talked a lot about the artistic things she was doing in the last few years of her life, and what a creative person she was. I wish I'd gotten to know that side of her better, because it was probably the only thing that she and I ever had in common. She repressed a great deal -- like everyone else in my family -- but I think she did find some joy in knitting and pottery.
Funerals are cathartic, anyway. I get the whole shovelling dirt onto the grave thing, really. (For those of you who've never done it, that's harder than it looks.) It was closure. I'm not okay now, but I'm more okay than I was when I left.
The shiva...oy. They could only do it for two days, which caused a minor stir with my grandmother's (relatively secular) friend. But seriously, even having it for two days was pushing it. We had to rent a hotel room, since hardly anyone in the family lives in Montreal anymore, and by the second day, only three people managed to make it.
By the way, for you goyim reading this, one doesn't send flowers to a shiva, but rather, food. Unfortunately, this tends to come in the form of "party sandwiches," which are about the most unpalatable thing imaginable. They are these insipid little constructions with marshmallow bread and various types of goos, like tuna and egg salad. I was actually sick this weekend because, for the most part, I was eating things that I wouldn't, under normal circumstances, consider food. You could probably make interesting statues out of them, though. By last night, I was dying for anything that had spices in it. (Fortunately, that need was filled by the best vegetarian restaurant I'd ever been to. They did this mock duck with black pepper that almost had me doing a Harry Met Sally-type incident at the table.)
Also, many of my relatives, particularly on my grandmother's side, are about as exciting as the little sandwiches. (My grandfather's surviving relatives are quite lovely. Deaf as posts, mind you, which possibly accounts for why we get along.)
But I don't understand most of my relatives. Their conversations are solely about basic life functions: food (and, as may have been implied above, gourmands they are not), housing (ditto for their ideas about interior decor), and reproduction (no one wants to hear about your children/grandchildren unless they are interesting. And guess what? They probably aren't.)
You have to wonder about this, particularly couples who've stayed together for decades. I mean, I don't expect everyone to argue politics or discuss literature -- but you'd think they might have read a fucking book once in awhile. Or what do normal people talk about? Sports, movies, music? All they seem to be doing is eating, decorating their houses, and trying to make more sprogs. Fortunately, the fertility rate in my family is quite low or we'd have real problems on our hands.
Now, it's not that I dislike children. Quite the opposite -- provided the children are well-behaved and able to carry on a reasonable discussion and/or do cool shit. The child that someone brought to the shiva was one of the ones that have splatters of drool and food all over their clothes, communicate in a series of gurgles, and bump into things. This struck me as odd, given the age of the girl in question. And then I figured it out. See, everyone was cooing over the kid and speaking monosyllabically. The pitch of the adult voices in the room rose by an average of an octave. (Let me tell you -- this is not very pleasant when one has a headache.) The kid was a moron because all she'd been exposed to was baby talk. The Maolets are probably as articulate as they are (even the five-year-old can have a very intelligent discussion with you) because no one ever cooed at them. Uncle Joe probably reads them the Little Red Book as a bedtime story or something.
I'm the end of the line as far as the family goes, incidentally. And I probably won't have kids. I'd be a shite parent.
Saturday, post-shiva, was actually vaguely fun -- I did some yuppie indulgences in honour of my grandmother (i.e., bought girly-clothes) and wandered around the city. Then I ended up back at my step-sisters' apartment (in frelling Westmount!) and finished off a bottle of wine with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wlach.) Now I get to do the whole Countdown to Chicago bit, wherein yours truly will get a Real Vacation, finally.
In other news, I'm now IWW representative for Hogtown, despite having let my dues lapse about four years ago, I had the fun of sending off my first $700 (give or take) invoice, and I miss my kitty.
As a testament to how
The funeral was good, as far as funerals go. We scored on the rabbi. There was a big deal with my grandmother hating the rabbi at her synagogue to the point of bribing him when my Zaidie died so that she could get a different rabbi to do the service. We had to do the same thing this time, too. Anyway, the one we got was really great -- despite being so Orthodox that he wouldn't shake my hand (I am queen of the Bad Jew faux pas), he spoke very little about religion and very much about the sort of complicated person my grandmother was and what her life meant to all of us. Funny thing is that he never met my grandmother -- he reconstructed some of her life from what my mother and uncle said about her, and sort of expanded from there. He talked a lot about the artistic things she was doing in the last few years of her life, and what a creative person she was. I wish I'd gotten to know that side of her better, because it was probably the only thing that she and I ever had in common. She repressed a great deal -- like everyone else in my family -- but I think she did find some joy in knitting and pottery.
Funerals are cathartic, anyway. I get the whole shovelling dirt onto the grave thing, really. (For those of you who've never done it, that's harder than it looks.) It was closure. I'm not okay now, but I'm more okay than I was when I left.
The shiva...oy. They could only do it for two days, which caused a minor stir with my grandmother's (relatively secular) friend. But seriously, even having it for two days was pushing it. We had to rent a hotel room, since hardly anyone in the family lives in Montreal anymore, and by the second day, only three people managed to make it.
By the way, for you goyim reading this, one doesn't send flowers to a shiva, but rather, food. Unfortunately, this tends to come in the form of "party sandwiches," which are about the most unpalatable thing imaginable. They are these insipid little constructions with marshmallow bread and various types of goos, like tuna and egg salad. I was actually sick this weekend because, for the most part, I was eating things that I wouldn't, under normal circumstances, consider food. You could probably make interesting statues out of them, though. By last night, I was dying for anything that had spices in it. (Fortunately, that need was filled by the best vegetarian restaurant I'd ever been to. They did this mock duck with black pepper that almost had me doing a Harry Met Sally-type incident at the table.)
Also, many of my relatives, particularly on my grandmother's side, are about as exciting as the little sandwiches. (My grandfather's surviving relatives are quite lovely. Deaf as posts, mind you, which possibly accounts for why we get along.)
But I don't understand most of my relatives. Their conversations are solely about basic life functions: food (and, as may have been implied above, gourmands they are not), housing (ditto for their ideas about interior decor), and reproduction (no one wants to hear about your children/grandchildren unless they are interesting. And guess what? They probably aren't.)
You have to wonder about this, particularly couples who've stayed together for decades. I mean, I don't expect everyone to argue politics or discuss literature -- but you'd think they might have read a fucking book once in awhile. Or what do normal people talk about? Sports, movies, music? All they seem to be doing is eating, decorating their houses, and trying to make more sprogs. Fortunately, the fertility rate in my family is quite low or we'd have real problems on our hands.
Now, it's not that I dislike children. Quite the opposite -- provided the children are well-behaved and able to carry on a reasonable discussion and/or do cool shit. The child that someone brought to the shiva was one of the ones that have splatters of drool and food all over their clothes, communicate in a series of gurgles, and bump into things. This struck me as odd, given the age of the girl in question. And then I figured it out. See, everyone was cooing over the kid and speaking monosyllabically. The pitch of the adult voices in the room rose by an average of an octave. (Let me tell you -- this is not very pleasant when one has a headache.) The kid was a moron because all she'd been exposed to was baby talk. The Maolets are probably as articulate as they are (even the five-year-old can have a very intelligent discussion with you) because no one ever cooed at them. Uncle Joe probably reads them the Little Red Book as a bedtime story or something.
I'm the end of the line as far as the family goes, incidentally. And I probably won't have kids. I'd be a shite parent.
Saturday, post-shiva, was actually vaguely fun -- I did some yuppie indulgences in honour of my grandmother (i.e., bought girly-clothes) and wandered around the city. Then I ended up back at my step-sisters' apartment (in frelling Westmount!) and finished off a bottle of wine with
wlach.) Now I get to do the whole Countdown to Chicago bit, wherein yours truly will get a Real Vacation, finally.In other news, I'm now IWW representative for Hogtown, despite having let my dues lapse about four years ago, I had the fun of sending off my first $700 (give or take) invoice, and I miss my kitty.
