i'm goin' to toontown

Tonight is the first night of Rosh Hashanah.

As usual: in prosaic terms, this means I won't be around between now and Sunday night. (Next week is normal; the following week I'll be gone from sunset Sunday until a few hours after nightfall Monday. Schedule for after that will follow, but essentially it's going to consist of a couple of missing Saturday-night-through Sundays.)

In slightly less prosaic terms: this seems as good a time as any to let people know that at least one of the things I was praying for this time last year is on its way to coming true.

sdelmonte and I are expecting our first child in March of 2010.



This is the time of year for introspection and self-evaluation. And, where necessary, self-correction.

This is the time of year when the fate of the world, and the fates of all individuals therein, is written and sealed for the coming year. We say in the liturgy: how many will perish, and how many will be created.

Please God. Please, God.

May it be a good and a blessed year for all of us.

Greetings from scenic Rochester, NY! sdelmonte and I are here visiting my sister and her family for the weekend. Which means that between now and lateish Sunday I will be (a) covered in small adorable nieces and nephews, and (b) unlikely to get to the internets much. So y'all be good till I get back.

My mother's mother passed away this morning. The funeral is this afternoon at about two.


I may be writing more about this later.

So today was the fifth anniversary of my marriage to sdelmonte. (We declared it No Responsibilities Day and stayed in bed ridiculously late in the morning and had french toast for breakfast and went to the Met and to the Park and spent too much money on dinner at a new steakhouse.)

And it kinda got me thinking about how much has changed in ( the past five years. )


The good and the bad and the boring and the terrifying and the glorious ...
It's been a good five years, on the whole. Not easy, not placid, not entirely safe, but good. And we've been in them together. And we'll be together for whatever happens next, and that's good too.


Happy anniversary, my Alex. If you don't mind, I'd like to go around again.

The baby's name is Avraham, after his father's late grandfather.

He's beautiful.

(It's been ten days since my maternal grandfather died, quietly, in his sleep. This is the first that I've been able to write about it.)

From the A Word A Day email list, last week:
"We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love." -Madame De Stael, writer (1766-1817)

Do we? I don't feel that I understand death any better now than I did two weeks ago.

Death is the final exit; you're here, and then you're not, and you don't come back. Death is the mistake built into the world from the first, which cannot be corrected until the world shall end. Death is the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Death is the final friend (pale and pretty, smiling under her shaggy dark hair, loose-limbed in her black tank top), come to guide you to whatever comes next. Or Death is a tall gaunt figure in a black hooded cloak, with blue stars for eyes, often lonely, often confused, but never anything but professional when he tells you why he's come. Or Death is a bodiless formless power, with no will of its own beyond service to the higher power.

Death is an enemy, to be fought as long as possible. Death is an awfully big adventure. Death, to one who has lived this long already, is a bit like going to sleep at the end of a very long day.

I think it might have been that last, for my grandfather. He was so very tired.

The only things that could make him smile, in the last few days of his life, were the constant presence of his wife and the recurring presence of his great-grandchildren, my sister's babies. He had stopped taking care of his body; he had all but stopped eating. He had stopped enjoying the everyday things that used to give him pleasure: music, baseball, chocolate pudding, a good salami.

(Last Wednesday: I went through a huge box of family photos, saw countless pictures of him, and never so much as blinked hard. I opened the fridge, saw a whole salami, and had to hide in the bathroom until the tears backed down.)

Sunday morning we got the phone call from my mother's house. By the time of the funeral Monday morning, relatives from all over the country (and beyond) had flown in on that one day's notice: my mother's sister from Colorado with her husband and sons, my mother's sister from Massachusetts with her husband, my mother's brother from Massachusetts with his wife and three small kids, my brother from Israel (he left his wife and two little ones at home, alas), my married cousins from Illinois and Colorado. Friends who could came in; friends who couldn't come started calling by Tuesday morning. My grandfather's old rabbi came in from St. Louis and spoke at the funeral.

And then there was the week of shiva, and I'll talk more about that later if anyone is particularly curious about Jewish mourning rituals.

(And my brain would not stop coming up with inappropriate comments at all the wrong times. We're talking about what's going to happen at the funeral, and the writer in my brain perks up and says "Ooo! Death rituals!", and then I have to hit her.)

So ... the upshot of it all? I know more about my grandfather than I once did. I know something more about my family; I know something more about my religion and my relationship with God.

But I have nothing new to say about death.

I loved my Zeide, and I miss him terribly, and I will never see him again.