O.K. for those of you who don't know me, to keep my kids entertained, I tell them what I call "boring stories from when I was growing up". So if you want to hear a boring story, read on, but keep in mind, I've warned you. Here is a story I've told, just as I do for my kids (I feel like Arnold Fine):
My parents have a nice 3 bedroom house. They have a basement and an attic. The basement is where my parents have the "
chametz room". Every year, my dad would start getting ready for
pesach by driving to the local
Pathmark, and we would collect boxes to put our
chametz in. Why we had to pack up every cabinet, and every pot and pan to
shlep to the basement was beyond me, but I was little, so I didn't ask. This packing was exceptionally strenuous because my mother wanted to throw out old items
(see Lion of Zion) while my dad wanted to keep things. It was also difficult because my dad wanted us to put tons of packing tape on each box so they wouldn't fall apart. We also had to make balls of newspaper to put in
the boxes with stuff so nothing, like half eaten boxes of cheerios, would get bruised. The
chametz room was an old darkroom that the photographer my parents had bought the house from had sealed off. One door, a lock, no windows. This is where we put everything. Being one of 5 brothers (I have 2 sisters as well) we would make an assembly line to gently pass the boxes from the kitchen to the landing on the basement stairs, and gently pass the boxes one by one until they could be neatly stacked from heaviest to lightest. Well, I'm proud to say we didn't let our father down as boys. I don't think any box ever got to the bottom of the basement steps without being kicked, pushed, stomped on, or otherwise tossed down the steps. I guess that's why my dad had us tape up the boxes so well. I can still hear my dad yelling at us not to throw the boxes down the steps. Not that it helped, but we did apologize each time. After we got everything (yes everything) to the basement we went to the attic to take the "
pesach stuff" down from the attic. If you think tossing stuff down a flight of steps to the basement sounds fun, the real joy would start when we would open the drop down wood steps from the attic, and drop stuff to the second floor, and topple it down the steps to the first floor. Truth be told, looking back, it's a real miracle no one was ever
smushed. It's also a miracle my dad would have a voice left after so much yelling and screaming at us. (And the
occasional smack on the bottom). As we got the boxes of pots, pans,
haggadas, and other stuff, my mother would ask us not to open everything at the same time. She needed time to open and put away one box at a time. Fat chance! My younger brother were always on the hunt for who would be the first to find the "
pesachdig eggbeater". This was a great toy. It could be a helicopter, a boat engine, a propeller, well, you get the idea. This became a serious contest to get the eggbeater because you could annoy my parents by opening boxes out of sequence (not that there was any sequence, we never labeled the boxes) but we couldbeat each other up at the same time! The eggbeater looks just like the one in the picture and it's one thing I haven't got for my kids yet. Also, as I got older, I became fascinated as to what the newspaper stories were from a year ago (we used newspaper packing up too). Life does have lots of boring stories!
For more
Pesach, see
G6...
