Underpants On The Outside

As some of you may know, Friday was the Jewish New Year.  I don’t have any family in New York, so I usually spend the holidays hanging around my much more observant friend Sarah and trying to look like I know what everyone is talking about.  I nod a lot, make a couple jokes, and do my best to maintain my cover; Sarah helps by reaching over and turning the page so that I can pretend to read from the correct Hebrew.

Friday she took me to a Jewish community center where her mom was hosting a dinner.  I don’t know if anyone else under the age of 120 was invited, but from the looks of things all the youthful octogenarians had other plans.  I was afraid that the Jewish people had collectively stopped reproducing in 1903 until I remembered that I am actual evidence to the contrary. 

For the record, I like the elderly.  I can make jokes under my breath so they don’t hear them.   I can charm their women with flattery and the Foxtrot.  They like their chicken bland, their vegetables mushy, and sometime around the age of sixty they just stop giving a fuck. 

After any blessing, there’s usually a couple seconds of serenity while a few last “Amens” are muttered and we eat whatever it was we just blessed.  (It’s a particularly long and silent pause after the blessing of the wine.)  It’s like the silence right before the orchestra kicks in, so I can only imagine that, “fuck it, I’m old” was the last thing to pass through one particular guy’s mind before he punctuated that silence by ripping off one of the loudest sternum-rattling burps I’ve ever heard.  I’m no doctor, but there’s no way that was a safe thing for him to do at his age.  But I’m only twenty-seven, so I found it so hilarious that Sarah’s mom asked me if I needed to be excused.   While I wasn’t the only person in that room who needed to excuse himself, apparently my sputtering and giggling was interfering with the next blessing.

So that’s how I welcomed the New Year: laughing inappropriately because some old guy belched.  Don’t worry ladies, I may have a girlfriend but I’m not married yet.  Act now, while there’s still time.