Tu B'Shvat With Fruits
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This Shabbos was Tu B'Shvat, the Jewish holiday to celebrate the renewal of tree life, especially fruit trees. I celebrated appropriately by spending Shabbos with a couple of other fruits. I slept over at the home of David and Arlan, the gay couple I met last week. I got there a couple hours before Shabbos, so they got to show me their snakes (shut up, jeff) in the basement. Only the newly hatched babies were terribly active; all the adults were sleeping the winter months away.
David made a thick vegetable stew in the crock pot for Friday night dinner and bell peppers stuffed with cous cous, mushrooms, and bean sprouts for Saturday lunch, with a baked fruit crisp for dessert. It was all excellent. In the morning, we trooped through the fog and rain to services at the nearby Sephardi synagogue, where I got to meet briefly with their next-door neighbor Mordechai, the retired rabbi. It turns out that I was already acquainted with Mordechai, as I'd met him several times in the past couple of years as he collected charity in the streets of the Old City.
The afternoon was spent playing Uno and Sorry and looking at photographs. They had very many picture of the national parks they'd visited in the western United States. But my favorite pictures were from their wedding at BCC. They looked so handsome and elegant in their white tuxedos. And they had a hilarious pose taken the day before the wedding in which they wore lovely black high heels to offset the tuxes. It was also worth a couple of snickers when I mistook a picture of Arlan's lesbian daughter for his son. Yes, she's quite butch.