A Funny Story and Some Sad News

Waugh, another non-posting streak. Saturday I was just too involved in Yom Kippur services and family get togethers to post. Sunday I was lazy. Monday I woke up sick. Did anyone hear the sucking sound but me? Probably not.

Let me backtrack.

Saturday: I went to services with Janis and Eli (Josh decided to go have a serious talk with his dad instead so we didn't meet up until later in the day). Eli wound up loving the daycare program they had set up there at the services (they had Legos! and art projects! and Spider-man Go-gurts!) and protesting crankily when they brought all the kids into the main service for the Torah blessing and reading. He sat with Janis and I for a few minutes, was vaguely interested in the singing, and asked in a loud kid voice "Where's God? What is God? Can I see God?" and other such gems.

But the best Eli moment of all went like this: they took the Torahs out of the ark, and paraded them around the congregation so everyone could touch them. The kids (all ages) got to get up then and follow the Torahs like a parade, which Eli was ok with. The parade wound up with a few adults (including the choir) and all the kids squished back up on the bima (the stage, basically, from which the service was being performed), so that the kids could participate in the first aliyah (blessing over the torah, and first bit of the reading). Eli was squirmy, and kept wanting to go back to the "kid room". And at one point, into one of those perfect silent moments, his little voice could be clearly heard, asking "Why is everybody talking about God? I want to go to the kid room!" I was both embarrassed and highly amused at the same time. (There's got to be a long and complicated compound German word that perfectly expresses this combination of emotions.)

***

Ok, update...I wrote the beginning of this entry earlier today, but tonight just around Eli's bedtime, right before I got a chance to sit down and finish, I got a Phone Call. From my mother. My grandpa died tonight.

It wasn't a huge surprise--he was 93, and had been in a nursing home, deteriorating until practically nothing was left of the man I knew and loved, for years. But it's still a shock and a sadness. At least it was apparently relatively quick and peaceful.

I'm kind of numb. I want to spend some more time writing a proper eulogy for him, but now is not the time. For now, I just want to let the sheer fact of an irrevocable absence hang silently in front of me.