Seder with the Saints

Yesterday I brunched with a Latter Day Saint and sedered with Saint Anthony. Threw together a small impromptu seder at the Hall. There was a certain delight in disarray of making our own meal. The components were all carried away from different kitchens or culled from strange places. Someone slaughtered something for a shank bone. Elijah provided plenty of parsley. The Hillel gave us Haggadahs, a seder plate, and kosher salt. Everything came together except for dessert. Apparently, macaroons do not exist in New Haven (macaroons? are you looking for macaroni?). Stole apples and raisons from the dining hall for charoset. Chopped them standing around in the foyer underneath the goyim's trophies, elk and deer heads. David, more of a Goliath, crushed walnuts with his bare hands. Came upstairs with wine glasses to find him on the floor leaning over a bag and pounding it with his fist. After a ceremonial debate over proportions, combined elements in a pitcher and stirred with a knife. Coco Krumme remembered cinnamon. Daniela Dover, a bitter herb, poured best of a bottle of Manishevetz into the concoction. Oddly, the idea of ritual made her sweeter than Passover wine even before ritual's consumption. We pushed couches around a table to recline, set our feast and began following the stage directions. Being first without family, it felt like our original Pesach. Between the 7 of us, counted 3.5 literal Jews including David Weil who had the most Jewish name but was the least so, actually being baptized. My kind of crowd. But between 3.5 you can have endless agreeable kibbitzing and signifying on the text. Could feel different traditions reclining around the table, rising at their favorite songs, raising which passages had to be kept and which skipped. After some blessings, glasses, stories, those useless sons, four questions, some plagues, and excessive consumption of food, dayenu. Reached for the afikomen slightly sad no one had played youngest child. But unlike any other year when the surprise was part of the charade, when Saul knew it was missing and who took it, we were surprised to discover it wasn't there. No one looking, Shansby had stolen the matzah and secreted it somewhere. We tore around the Hall, ruffling and rattling things, delighted to be playing this game, delighted to keep customary delay in the play. Looked through photo albums and underneath couches and in the pianos. Glanced up to see the swineherd Saint presiding over the search party from his portrait. We found a drawer full of keepas in a desk and laughed at once at the ludicrousness of their location here and at the comedy of our own seder. It turned up behind one of the framed posters. Acquiring afikomen, we reassembled to complete the order. Opened the door of 483 College Street for Elijah. Strange to be somewhere not the hallway of 53 Spring or the yard in Millbrook. In the foreground was the usual Yale evening I experienced without religion, Eliahu ha Navi sang in the background. Gazing out the door into that dark street scene splattered with rain, realized I'd been transported, not back to Germany like the girl in The Devil's Arithmetic but into my own future. Closed the door and we skipped to next year in Jerusalem. We'd all forgotten the tune to the verses of Chad Gad Ya, and Shansby called his Bubbe. Called on collective memory for melody, but we ended by substituting bemused Beatles songs between choruses in an act a little symbolic of the evening.