we’re still in lockdown and it is pretty clear we’ve all gone over the edge.  Even if we plan to meet on zoom, one of us forgets.  

but i have discovered that my birthday this year is the same day for the Hebrew and the Roman calendar.  After the second seder, my mother went into labor.  My father recommended that my mother wait until morning, because there was a particularly nasty rocket attack on London going on at the time, but my mother insisted, and they went to the Salvation Army Hospital in Hackney, which had been recently bombed.  My mother complained that she was forced off the table as soon as I was born and made to run for shelter, but the delivery room was also a shelter.  Anyway, it was the last night of those nasty V2 rockets.  That’s why I remember my birthday dates.  

Since nothing happens except the continuing discovery of continuing corruption in our government, I have gone to my past for a bit of optimism.  And although I told Ezi the story over and over again when we met, it never really meant anything to him until one day we were visiting the science museum in Munich and there was a display of weapons.  Suddenly Ezi stopped in from of a rocket and said, this is your partner.  It was a V2 rocket, and the sign in front of it said only, ‘last flight march 29, 1945.’