melancholy jew

He was the Monday morning of human beings.

The kind of guy who would confront you

in a public rest room if you

didn’t wash your hands

or shooed you with his fingers and bellowed,

“C’mon, c’mon!”

the second the stop light changed from

red to green.

In the late afternoon, he started drinking

Machiavellian martinis

and by about 7:30

he’d become vaguely hostile.

If you asked him a question,

he purposely muttered something inaudible.

If you asked him to repeat himself,

he snapped at you and asked to be left alone

and then wallowed in a kind of

emotional reaction to either good or bad

memories for the rest of the night.

Once during a Passover Seder,

with the entire family present,

he stood up as if he were going

to propose a toast and said:

“Jesus Christ,

with all the fardreyen kopf and shadenfreuding

goin’ on in this family,

is it any wonder why we’re so

estranged from one another?”

Then, gulping the last of his

Manischewitz Concord grape wine,

he stormed out,

taking the afikomen with him.