Flour and Water

My mother says the matzah on the Seder table can be an object of meditation. Something we come back to again and again, like the breath. What is this matzah but flour and water? Just like us: dust and water. My mother's hair is flattened from lying down -- she hasn't been feeling well. Last year in Berkeley I said, "next year in Jerusalem" at the Seder with a kind of glee, conflating the literal and metaphorical. This year, the first day of Chol Hamoed, these passover pilgrims are everywhere, streaming out of the old city, making it hard to sit at a cafe and work.

The family dog knows the extended family: when we get to my half sisters' house, she runs up the stairs full of excitement and lets Odelia smush her ears in patiently. She goes into my sister Avital's house like it is her home and climbs up on the couch like she is a person, to watch Zoolander with us. But at the Seder itself we're shrunk down - it's just my father, my mother and me with some friends. It's confusing - all my friends are in Berkeley having a beautiful meal without me, and I'd like to be with them, but when I was in Berkeley I thought something was missing because I wasn't home...that there was some other Seder waiting for me full of family and meaning, with the old songs we used to sing, the old melodies.

My mother says the matzah on the table is on object for projection, transformation: what was once just flour and water becomes at the end of the meal the most sublime delight. A little afikomen square of goodness better than the best chocolate mousse cake. (We used to make it every year together, mixing fast, trying not to let the egg yokes congeal.) Our lives, our bodies, just water and dust. But if you keep chewing...

Driving home from watching the sunset on Samson Valley my friends are singing Waltzing Matilda in faint voices. This sweet nostalgia for somewhere I never was can be savored.

My mother says, after the Seder, let me lean on you. I take her elbow and she says, no, that's you leaning on me, so we change the clasp.