Ten for Ten

"The Night is Always Darkest Just Before Dawn, and It's An Hour Worse During Daylight Savings Time."

Cousin Two-Three-Four, everything's gonna work out fine. You've just got an extra hour before the sun comes up. You can trust Plottie on this one.

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Plotnik ordered a ten pound brisket yesterday, and put canned stewed tomatoes (the secret weapon) on his shopping list. The usual crowd is assembling next week, minus a few, plus one -- after all these years, the Jews STILL need help getting out of Egypt. Year in, year out, they never learn.

There is still a very small possibility that Mummy P. will make an appearance, but...well, we're not counting on it. If she came Plotnik would get to make the brisket at the side of his maestra, the Queen of All Yummy Things, which recalls to him his story about the last time she came to Saint Plotniko to make brisket. That's at least...what, ten years ago? Wow.

Yes, Plotnik remembers at that time writing "Mom's 85 now, and has trouble navigating that wooden spoon..." Well, now she's 95. Things don't get any easier.

But the point is that as long as we are on this earth we've got a chance to get together, and getting together is the whole point. Not the service, not the ceremony, not the tradition, not the building with the fancy altars or statues or the sacred this, that or the other; neither eating one food and not eating the other food nor giving up something for X amount of days or weeks, nor reclining nor sitting up straight -- you do what Ducknik's dear Auntie Melba used to say: "Everybody come stick your feet under my table!"

Ten pounds of brisket for ten people sounds like a lot, but there's never a scrap left. That's a holiday.