ADVENTURES OF A TRAVELING BANDERSNATCH – THE FINAL CHAPTER

Apologies to all those who slogged through my typos from last week. After my column was posted, I noticed that one of the subheadings was “Blogging with from the Uninformed Highway.” (The phrase “with from” may be in someone’s grammar, somewhere, but I assure you, it’s not normally in mine).

I’m not accustomed to doing a lot of typing on my laptop, and so am prone to errors. I’m also one of those writers who does almost all of my editing with a red pen on a printed copy. Being on the road has deprived me of the luxury of printing out my work in order to proofread and edit.

A month or so back, Melodie Johnson Howe mentioned her problems with NUM LOCK. Well, I suffer from Touch-Pad Lazy Thumb (TPLT) Syndrome. My laptop is equipped with a touchpad just below the SPACE bar, and every time the lower part of my thumbs brush the pad, my cursor jumps all over the screen. I’ve blinked and found that whole paragraphs have moved or emails have been sent prematurely. I’m hoping to avoid any lapses this week, and if not, I’m counting on JLW to call them to my attention.

By this time next week, I’ll be back in Maine pounding keys on my desktop.

Alvin’s Babhilu

For years my father in law would tell me about a custom he remembered from his mother’s Moroccan Passover ritual. “We used to do babhilu, where they’d hold the seder plate over the kids heads and say ‘babhilu, babhilu.’ That’s the only thing I remember.” I’d never heard of this custom, and did some digging, but without success. Al died about three years back. He did a lot of talking during his life, and no one around him did much listening. When I joined the family, my in-laws initially complained, “He doesn’t talk much, does he?” But after a year, they would tell me, “You’re the only one that listens.” From time to time I’ll tell my wife something about her dad that she never knew. “How do you know that?” she asks me. He told me. He told me stories of his childhood, of his uneasy relationship with his live-in uncle and his bullying older brother who was shot down by the Japanese in WWII. His immediate family tended to tune him out. As I said, he did a lot of talking. But I suppose I’m good at listening, and that, more than anything else, is what makes me a good storyteller.

Well, a few weeks back, the Sephardic Brotherhood of Seattle, an organization that maintains Seattle’s two Sephardic cemeteries and assists with funerals, was honoring my uncle with a Fish Derby held at a shipyard in Alki. One of the people in attendance was Rabbi Eli Natan Bitton, a young Moroccan born rabbi. I got to talking with him, and on a whim I told him about Al’s unusual Passover memory. As I described it, the rabbi began to smile. I said, “my father-in-law called the ritual babhilu,” and Rabbi Bitton’s smile spread and his eyes glimmered. “We did that at our seders as well when I was growing up. We did it just before reciting Ha Lakhma Anya. Someone would raise the plate and say bivhilu yatzanu mimitzrayim which means ‘In haste we left Egypt.’ He would say it three times, and then walk around the table three times, holding it over the heads of all the children.”

I love it when legends turn out to be true. I wish my father-in-law was still around to tell about it.

Kabbalah: A Love Story

Speaking of legends, I’m midway through a novel that’s worth mentioning. It’s not precisely a mystery. It’s a first novel by a fairly well-known storyteller and kabbalistic scholar, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner (not to be confused with the ethicist Rabbi Harold Kushner).

The story involves a Manhattan rabbi who discovers a 13th century page hidden within the endpaper of a 17th century copy of the Zohar (the central classical Kabbalistic text). The text may come from the pen of Moses de Leon, the 13th century Spanish rabbi and probably author of the Zohar. There are hints of reincarnation, as well as two parallel love stories, and a subplot set aboard a Nazi death train in Poland.

Déjà vu All Over Again

While in Seattle, I’ve made several visits to Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum (www.empsfm.org). One of the current exhibits in the Science Fiction Museum is Out of this World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television, which includes Margaret Hamilton’s witch’s hat from “The Wizard of Oz,” as well as uniforms from “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Battlestar Galactica,” and “Lost in Space.” Also included are several costumes from the future-noir classic, “Blade Runner.” Also from “Blade Runner” is a full-size flying police car (“Spinner”).

This brings up my one quick movie recommendation. Tony Scott (brother of “Blade Runner” director Ridley Scott) directed what I found to be one of the most enjoyable films of last year. “Déjà Vu” features Denzel Washington as an ATF agent called on to track down the domestic terrorist who blew up a New Orleans ferry. In the process, he begins to fall in love with a woman who died in the hours before the explosion. The cast includes Val Kilmer, Jim Cazievel (“The Passion of the Christ”), Adam Goldberg (“Hebrew Hammer”), and a beautiful new face, Paula Patton, as the terrorist’s early victim. Beautiful, spiritual film in which – despite how bleak and tragic it begins – has an ultimately satisfying and upbeat ending.

That’s all of my prattle for this week. See you all in seven.