Ask not for whom the bell tolls…

May 2, 2005 - 8:20 AM by Israelity

Passover was wonderful… thanks to everyone who sent wishes. My super wife spent a good part of last night putting away the holiday dishes and switching the kitchen back to the year-‘round stuff.

Every year I am amazed at the mountain of work that goes into this holiday! And every year Zahava reminds me that it was obviously a man who thought up the details of Passover. Her hypothesis hinges on the fact that if women had had any input whatsoever, instead of one week each year, Passover would be a whole month every four years! Then, she posits, it would already be worthwhile to completely switch over the house to an entirely new set of dishes and utensils! But one week?… clearly a man’s idea!

By the way…if you’ve never done the whole Passover preparation/switch-over/switch-back thing (or witnessed it being done), picture building the pyramids at Giza in the hot Egytian sun… and then add in some real work!

Where was I during all this preparation?

Well, during the couple of days before the holiday, like most Jewish men, I was doing the ‘supermarket shuttle’. This is a 48-hour period of pretty much non-stop trips back-and-forth to the store. It’s not that my wife isn’t organized… she is amazingly organized, with lists of everything she needs. But for some reason each time I returned from the store there were always "just a few more things."

On one of my trips I finally noticed a bunch of husbands hunkered down in the ice cream shop next door to the supermarket. When I went in they were all sitting around eating ice cream and glancing nervously at cell phones out on the tables in front of them. The consensus seemed to be that if they were going to be sent out again anyway, the longer the interval between stops at home, the fewer trips to the store they would have to make.

You can’t argue with that kind of logic… especially if triple fudge and coffee ice cream is involved in the argument!

As I sat talking to a few friends there in the ice cream parlor, occasionally a cell phone would ring… a hush would fall over the store… a crumpled shopping list would be taken out and carefully amended… and a few serious ‘yes dears’* would be offered. When the call ended conversation would spring up again, and everyone would look nervously at their cell phones wondering if theirs would be next to jangle to life.

As we sat in our air-conditioned bunker licking ice cream cones… the bell tolled for each of us… sometimes more than once.

* The trick to a well-delivered ‘yes dear’ is to not to sound too smarmy. If you sound like Eddy Haskell you’ve gone too far. If you sound like Lurch, then you haven’t put enough feeling into it. I find that it helps to have a mental picture of Mike Brady when I deliver the line.

Cross-Posted on Treppenwitz

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