A Punch Line That Took Seventy Years to Arrive

 Garrison Keillor told a wonderful joke on one of his annual joke shows abut a elderly man who came to the doctor with a broken leg. The doctor asked how the leg got broken and the man began, "Well fifty years ago I was a traveling salesman. A giant blizzard hit while I was on the road and I was finally able to find a farmhouse and the old farmer took me in. He had his daughter fed me supper and I was given an attic room to sleep in. A few moments after I got into bed the farmer's beautiful daughter knocked on the door, smiled and asked if I needed anything. I said that I was fine. She knocked on the door a few moments later and again I said that I had everything that I needed. I was fixing my roof earlier today and I finally understood what she meant and I fell off the roof."

Shawna's mother in law hosted the meal of consolation after Shawna's burial. Before I get into the crux of the story there are some things that you need to know. The first is that Halifax has a small Jewish community. Many of the Jews who settled there all came from the same small town in Lithuania. Ties between individuals and families are long and go back generations. The other thing that you need to know,  is that the language of politeness among the Jews of Halifax is very highly developed. People don't share bad news in a direct manner and they care a great deal about not hurting the feelings of others.

My parents would call their friends in Halifax and ask after, say Mr. Goldberg or Mrs. Shapiro. If the answer was something like "Oh, he is coming along" My mother after hanging up the phone would say, "I'm so sad. Mr. Goldberg is dying.". My mother had learned some of the Halifax code of politeness.

My parents had both been born in Brooklyn where the language of communication is much more blunt. My mother often used to tell the following story about how clueless she was to the refinements of Haligonian manners. Soon after my parents arrived in Halifax my mother received a card in the mail announcing that Mrs. Cappell would be at home the following Wednesday from 2-4 pm. My mother looked at the card and thought, "So what? My mother is ALWAYS at home.".  My mother threw the card in the trash.

The next week my mother received a similar card but this time Mrs. Offman was at home on Wednesday afternoon. This card too got tossed. That Thursday, mother  received a phone call. The ladies of the synagogue were hosting a series of afternoon teas so that all of the women of the community could meet my mother, the wife of the newly hired rabbi.  My mother, much abashed, attended the third At Home. She also learned that the things in Halifax were not the same as they were in Brooklyn.

Shawna often spoke to me about how she treasured my connection to Halifax despite my never having lived there. I wasn't sure if this was perhaps a fantasy on both of our parts.  When I came into the apartment  where the lunch was hosted,  I sat with Shawna's mother. Soon Marlene, ( Shawna's sister's mother in law---Halifax born and bred but now living in Toronto) came over to tell me how much she loved my parents.  I soon discovered that Marlene's first cousin was my mother's dearest friend in Halifax.  Marlene's grandmother's Passover wine nut cake is the one that my mother always made and the one I improved  this past Passover. Marlene is old enough to have a son who is in his early 60s so this cake and this connection between us reaches back over a century. After just a few minutes I realized that the ties that I feel to Halifax are reciprocated. I may not have known the people but the names and the stories are as much of who I am as if all of the members of Shaar Shalom in the 1950s are part of my family tree. My parents, and by extension, me are part of that Halifax Jewish community.

Marlene and I kept seeking one another out during the afternoon. At one point  I told Marlene how very soon after my parents moved to Halifax a member of the community was "coming along", that is, very close to death. My mother was invited to join the group of women from the Chevre Kadisha who were sewing up  linen yardage into shrouds for the woman who was so close to death. My mother learned that you don't speak while making the shrouds and that none of the stitching was secured with knots. For my mother, this was a deeply profound experience. This story is one of the reasons that I am a member of my synagogue's Chevre.

 I mentioned to Marlene that after this one shroud sewing session that the older and wiser women of Halifax realized that at twenty four my mother was too young to join the Chevre in the harder job of washing and dressing the dead. As I told this story to Marlene, her eyes twinkled and she broke into a huge grin.. I realized that not only had my mother flunked getting into the nitty gritty of the Chevre Kadisha, she had flunked being invited back to sew shrouds. 

Those Halifax women were so polite that my mother never knew that she had failed her audition for the Chevre. I don't think that it was my mother's sewing skills, which were good enough for the task.  There was a quality that in her youth that she still hadn't developed. Perhaps after having a child or two or just having seen more of life she would have been invited to join the Chevre.

For me, this has been a punchline that has taken seventy years to be delivered. I think that even my mother would have appreciated the joke.