Is tomorrow Friday?
I get tangled with timezones and travel and the general confusion that is my life. If tomorrow is Friday then my family in Melbourne will be having a roast dinner. Our ancestors in Western Europe would have eaten meat pies for Shabbos. Our next door neighbours when I was a kid ate fish. Friday has attracted more regular food customs than any other single day of the week.
I’ll ponder a bit more on food and time one day, but right now I’m going to leave you with a story about the neighbours who lived over the back fence of my childhood home. They were a good Catholic family. We didn’t mean to upset them when we named our cats after food. Truly we didn’t. We were just a family that got on very well with food.
There was giant Felafel (who slept and surveyed his domain from the whole of the ironing board) and not-very-bright-but-motherly-and-sweet Tahina and there was Cinnamon and there was Pitta. Everyone assumed that Felafel was really Fluff and that we had speech impediments. They also assumed that Pitta was male, especially (for no reason that I can see) when she opened doors. Only our neighbours had any trouble with Cinnamon though.
Cinnamon was a big, sweet, shy cat. We had to spend ages calling her in for dinner every night, because she hid at the merest glimpse of a shadow. “Here Cinnamon,” we would call at first. As we grew impatient, we shortened it, “Here, Cinna, Cinna, Cinna.”
Our neighbours heard that as “Here, Sinner, Sinner, Sinner.”
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