Hanukah at home

B. and I are hermits; we rarely have anybody over to our tiny Minnipin Cottage. A few overcrowded book group meetings pre-pandemic were the only exception. Except that, when my mother was still around, we'd have her over once a year at Hanukah for latkes and matzo ball soup. One year we had B.'s mother over at the same time. That worked well and we would have repeated it, but they're both gone now, and except for one try a few years ago with B.'s sister and her husband - they liked everything, even the gefilte fish, which I doubt either of them had ever heard of before - which didn't really count as it was at their house though I cooked, we hadn't done it since.

But I've been trying to find more occasion to see my local brother and my nephew, so we had them over last night. (Sister-in-law is in health care and works evenings.) N. is now 6, 7 in 2 months, and easier to communicate with than I found when he was younger, He was hyper, didn't eat much, and was only happy watching endless animated time-lapse videos about the evolution of the universe (about which he's quite well-informed; even knows what a quadrillion is) which he kept insisting that I look at while pointing the screen of his tiny device in the wrong direction. But did we have a good elderly-uncle and very-young-nephew time? I think we did. N. wants to come back, which is a good sign, though we think maybe not as soon as he has in mind.

Meanwhile my brother J. was anxious about propitiating his son's moods, to keep him occupied, and himself ate some of everything and was on his best behavior. You don't want to hear stories about what he's like when he's not on his best behavior, which used to be most of the time, but we had good conversation. J. and B. are both Silicon Valley techies by profession which I'm not, so they could converse about computer chips, and when J. asked us why leftists are so upset with the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, it was because he genuinely wanted to know, not to troll us with objections as he does with philosophical topics like "If God is omniscient, how can there be free will?" Be assured, readers, that he got a substantive earful of an answer.

But whew, making room in our cluttered dining area for dinner guests and otherwise preparing everything was exhausting, so any thoughts of repeating this with B.'s sister will have to wait till next year, and then what takes priority?

The cats disappeared upstairs as soon as J. and N. arrived, and reappeared as soon as they left.