Tuesday, April 22, 2003
- and in my festival
- and in my festival of self-pity, my demonstration of applied wallowing, I act as if the preceeding days had not existed. That is an unbalanced perspective, so I’ll right myself.
Tara and Phil got in Thurs pm ready to party and eat chocolate, in which we were happy to oblige them well into the night. We got up late on Friday (Kel and I took the day off), had some orange scrambled eggs and popped over to Seakor deli for an easter butter lamb. Seakor’s an authentic polish deli, and it was fun to show off one of our neighborhood treasures with all its pope pictures, dangling kielbasis, questionable cheeses, packages of unpronouncable biscuits and cookies… the west coast butter lamb was a bit more stylized than the Wilkes-Barre standard and had no cellophane flag, but it did have little leaf ears and the requisite peppercorn eyes. The tradition of the butter lamb seems a bit bit gruesome to me, making an image of a lamb out of (cow’s) butter and identifying it as the messiah and then slicing it up and smearing its creamy body on a slice of toast and eating it… but when in Rome....
But the lamb was for Sunday; this was Friday and we dropped it off at home and went on to the Palomarin trailhead outside Bolinas for a hike to Alamere falls. After our recent rains, the trail had dried of mud but hadn’t gotten dusty; wildflowers were abundant and outrageously vibrant. A mile and a half we walked along the coastal cliffs, then inland up and over a pass into a valley, past Bass lake and Pelican Lake to the Alamere creek, where the maintained trial goes on north into Point Reyes but the cool trail peels left through humid green walls of towering undergrowth down to a clearly unsafe scramble leading to a plateau of small cascades where the creek pours out of the mountatins, across the flats to the cliffs, and over a final 50-foot rock face before hitting the beach and losing itself in the ocean. It’s where we left old Syd (the cat)’s ashes. The moss impressed me, and the clearness of the water. The moss was so rich and deep, I wanted to push my face into it, to take it into me somehow, but I knew the experience wouldn’t have lived up to my desires and expectations so I denied myself.
We hopped the creek and had lunch in a secluded cove of the stream next to a 20’ waterfall, big tasty sandwiches from Andronico’s gourmet market and deli, which Phil noted sounds like an italian android. After lunch we scrambled down a scree slope to the beach; we stood at the base of the falls, watched the water cascading, the moss glistening, the flowers positively glowing; the creek had cut a deep channel in the beach and it looked like an enormous canyon viewed from high up and far away. It was worn in a somewhat stratified pattern, neatly echoing the cleavage patterns in the flat fractured rocks of the limestone cliffs.
We walked for a few minutes on the beach, then turned back, returned to the car, came home, cleaned up, set up for upcoming events a bit and then went out to pick up Justin at the airport. Everybody stayed up late (except for me) talking and teasing and eating easter chocolate (Jesus wouldn’t be mad if we started early, right?).
The next day I got up early and there was basically nonstop activity until we left for seder at Jon and Lisa’s at 3 pm; kel made a ham and a blintz souflee and we ate and cooked like mad things. I made mazoh balls (veggie and schmaltzik) and fried candied mazoh squares (bizarre but tasty); Kel made the world’s best lemon bars, again, by popular demand. We arrived at Jon and Lisa’s lovely peninsular home to find the house packed and swarming and more people steadily arrived. I met some very nice people, saw some very dear old friends, and faked a 10-year-old girl out of her glittery turquoise sneakers with a decoy aphikomen, leading Justin to wonder whether there was any precedent for celebrating “prankover.” Kel’s relatives had never been to a seder before, and hadn’t seen our circle of friends in full-court press - there were about 25 adults and 10 kids, all mingling and laughing, loads of great food and wine, lovely and thoughtul and funny conversations - this group of friends is a very rare and powerful phenomenon, one that we all have cultivated carefully over a period of 20 years… I was glad to be able to share this special experience with Kel’s peeps. Also, it was total ego gratification for me because I get to lead the seder every year. So I had a blast, wearing my big white suit and swilling wine and distributing toys. Oh yes, and eating myself into collapsed satiation. Priorities, priorities....
Easter morning we had more ham and more blintz souflee and butterlamb rump smeared on toast, and chocolate crosses ("choco-fixes") and bunnies and smidgens from Northeast PA’s own Gertrude Hawk chocolates, and we engaged in a lively debate over the preferred peeps consistency (fresh? frozen? stale.) , and the following sacrileges were uttered:
“Even if Jesus wasn’t the son of god, I think I’d like him.”
“Nothing says ‘Christ died for your sins’ like a good nut cluster.”
I packed up a ham sandwich and a PBJ for the road, put my suit and a change of travelling clothes and my lucky bingo bag in a case, and Kel took me to the airport. So you see, it was a positive, life-affirming weekend, my grandmother’s funeral notwithstanding - plus, there’s more ham, peeps, lots of beer and a whole choco-fix left over! If this isn’t redemption and resurrection, well, I like it anyway…
