Don’t worry, Pa — I’ll be home for Seder, if only in my dreams
I remember so well and fondly Passover as we celebrated it in our home on Seeley Avenue, Chicago, in the 1950s.
I am 8 years old, very proud of having mastered the Hebrew of the “Four Questions,” very determined to stay awake until Seder’s end and to drink “all four” of the ritual cups of wine. I never notice that I am the only child amid a sea of adults sitting around a kitchen table made festive in an apartment so tiny that we have no dining room.
Pa, my grandfather, conducts the Seder in the singsong of the Polish shtetl of his childhood. Grammy Ida fusses over dishes as consecrated as any divine law: matzo balls, sweetest carrot pudding, potato kugel, the lightest sponge cake.
Auntie Levin grumbles on as usual, with or without cause. It is understandable behavior from a woman who once traveled the vaudeville circuit with a poodle act. Uncle Joe and Aunt Min put aside long-standing differences to harmonize lustily on the chorus of “Dayenu.”
By the third cup of wine, my always-ebullient mother does her yearly imitation of Little Orphan Annie, placing a cap from the Mogen David wine bottle over each eye. Even my straight-laced father loosens up, providing the barnyard noises for the singing of the arcane “An Only Kid.”
Pa puts another chicken leg on my plate, because “little (120-pound) Maishe Chayim” (calling me by my Jewish name) did so beautifully in asking the Four Questions. By dinner’s end, I am sent off to bed. I awaken the next morning to a buzz in my ears that I have not yet learned is a hangover. This is the real Passover: home.
The years take their toll. Pa, Grammy Ida, Auntie Levin succumb to old age. Death has brought blessed respite for my Alzheimer-ridden father. Joe dies still in his prime from too many cigarettes and too much rare steak. Minnie, my mother’s best friend, is killed by a reckless driver. My mother, so vital to the end, finally succumbs to heart disease in mid-2000.
And “little Maishe Chayim”? He has ventured too many miles from home to make himself a life, far too attentive to the quality of his writing and to transitory crises and a myriad of maladies physical and emotional, and not nearly attentive enough to the longings that inevitably tug at this season.
An edge of reality seeps into the bittersweet. There are many beautiful Passovers yet to be celebrated with a wonderful wife and a third generation of Wilsons. I will chant the ritual to Pa’s ancient singsong. Linda will make the most delicious kugel. Perhaps Joey will provide the barnyard noises. Yet to be determined, who will perpetuate my mother’s memory as Little Orphan Annie, bottle caps deftly over her eyes. And little Sophie and Simmy will do an exemplary job with the Four Questions and will awaken, no doubt, with a Mogen David-induced buzz in their ears.
As he approaches his 61st year, Marc Wilson sits at the head of his dining room table, conducts his Seder and works at creating a legacy of melodies and memories that his own children will inherit. But a little part of him that he cannot, will not, repress forever remains 8-year-old Maishe Chayim, sitting next to a doting grandfather at a very ordinary kitchen table elevated to majesty by the aura of unshakable well-being that enveloped us all. Don’t worry, Pa. I will be home for Seder, if only in my dreams.
Marc Howard Wilson is a rabbi and writer in Greenville, S.C.
