From 1990 to 2008, my Downser son Aaron lived most days of the week in a group home run by the Jewish Family Service. When, at this time of year, there was a Halloween Haunted House anywhere near the group home, I used to take Aaron and a few of his housemates to visit it. Naturally, I always explained that it was a Yom Kippur Haunted House.
This year, like last, I accompanied Aaron to a Rosh HaShonah service for "special populations" at a local synagogue. Aaron marked the occasion's solemnity by wearing unusually formal attire: he had on a suit-vest, a tie (I didn't know he even had one) ... and a Halloween mask. Aaron has evidently come to understand what it took me most of a lifetime to work out: namely, that the Jewish high holy days, on the one hand, and the festivals of Halloween, Walpurgisnacht, and El Dia de los Muertos, on the other, all have to do with more or less the same thing.
The JFS group home was largely kosher, which limited Aaron's range of food experiences somewhat more than had his childhood at home. Not that his food tastes are particularly adventurous, but he does have a taste for certain trayf (non-kosher) delicacies, such as the bacon-cheeseburger. His situation at the group home reminded me slightly of one aspect of my own childhood. Sometimes we ate bacon for breakfast, but my parents enjoined me never, ever to mention the word "bacon" in the presence of my father's mother, a rabbi's widow who was orthodox and strictly kosher. As a matter of fact, Grandma knew that we ate bacon, and we knew that she knew, and I think that she knew that we knew that she knew ---but nonetheless, the dread word "bacon" was never uttered aloud in her presence.
Sunday visits to Grandma in the far-off borough of Queens often involved lunch, which was always chicken boiled to a state of maximum entropy, and a mysterious concoction of carrots and raisins called "tzimmes." I was not enthralled by this cuisine, but always liked the trip and the exotic character of Grandma's neighborhood, which was a block from an ocean beach. After we had feasted on the semi-edible lunch, my father would spend the afternoon talking with his mother in Yiddish, while I (when old enough) was free to wander about the beach. A quarter of a mile down the boardwalk, I could also visit a "penny arcade."
This was an enthralling place, filled with the primitive mechanical ancestors of today's video games: pinball machines, fusball with those comically stiff, kicking players, and my favorite game --- mechanical robot boxers.
As a result of these formative childhood experiences, I have always mentally associated kosher practice with the beach, the ocean, and robot boxers. Last Sunday, I took Aaron to see a terrible movie called "Real Steel," which was all about giant robot boxers, and watching it, I could almost taste the boiled chicken and the tzimmes.
While living at the JFS group home during the week, Aaron very often spent weekends with me. When I brought him back on Sunday evening, we generally stopped at a nearby deli and picked up a sandwich for him to keep overnight at the group home and then bring along to his sheltered workshop job on Monday for his lunch. His favorite sandwich was ham-and-cheese, which does not quite measure up as kosher. Moreover, the parents of one of the other residents sometimes stopped in and checked the fridge ... to make sure their daughter Marjorie was getting enough soup. They would be distressed to discover anything trayf in the group home fridge, so, we always directed the deli to put a "tuna fish" label on Aaron's ham-and-cheese sandwich.
I like to think that my ability to convert ham-and-cheese into tuna fish is akin to related miracles that Christians set great store by: the one involving water into wine for example, or the other one having to do with loaves and fishes (which may perhaps have been tuna fishes). Just a matter of labeling, really.
With this principle in mind, I once asked at the deli if they could give me a whole roll of "tuna fish" labels. "What do you need it for?" they asked. I hesitated to explain that I would use it to work miracles, and could only reply that it was a long story.
In 2008, the JFS closed the group home, and helped us find another group home to which Aaron and three of his housemates moved en bloc. The new place is excellent, run by a Russian couple, and the food is of course no longer kosher. Marjorie, the daughter of the fridge-inspecting parents, was particularly pleased by this change: "The food here," she enthused, "is so much better now."
But, on the other hand, when I drop in I no longer hear the faint roar of the surf, or the barely audible clicking of the penny arcade games down the boardwalk.