MEESH-MEESH WAS THE STORY of Passover. When he arrived he looked lost and eagerly filled the seats that'd been vacated across from of us. “My last Seder was in Nepal,” he said. How was that? we asked. He smiled and placed a self-mixed bottle of vodka and tang on the table. He had bright and gentle eyes and a feather in his hat and a hop in his step, one could see even as he sat. “I was born in '69.” he told us. Heard that was quite the summer! “But I was born in winter–I caught the tail end of it.”
And together with this fine Canadian and some bearded young scholars from Brooklyn and a hundred or so gruff and jaded Israelis we sang. We ate, we drank, we asked Four Questions and drank four cups of wine and some tang too. The chicken was so good, and the Colombian staff, so confused. But they kept refilling our glasses–refilling and refilling as we recounted plagues and sea crossings and the almighty colds of North America.
Later, well-fed and free, we wandered the old city and came across some strange and dark places and some colorful and crowded ones. Meesh-Meesh was excited to send pictures of the night home to his mother, he'd told us. Who wouldn't be? He was a good man and he'd traveled far.
