It wasn't truly Passover at the Moskowitz residence until Hawk's grandmother, Esther Moskowitz, flew in from her retirement community in Florida. So things got lively as soon as his dad arrived back home that day after picking her up from the airport. Esther came through the door, dressed in her very 1970s-style clothes, setting down the bottles of kosher wine they'd picked up on the counter before zeroing in on her grandson sitting at the nearby kitchen table. "There's my favorite einikel!" she exclaimed, planting a kiss on both of Eli's cheeks.
Standing up from his chair, he grinned and reminded her, "I'm your only grandkid."
His Bubbe patted him affectionately on his right cheek, telling him, "Yes, but you're still my favorite." She then pushed her big sunglasses on top of her head, and her eyes drifted up to his blue mohawk. "Oh my goodness, with that hair!"
"Do you like it?" asked Hawk excitedly. "I'm trying a new look. What do you think?" His parents may have been a bit apprehensive at first when he'd shown them his hairstyle before they came around to it, but he figured if anyone would appreciate his mohawk, it would be his grandmother. She had always been eccentric, according to his dad, she was a woman who did her own thing and didn't care who said what about it.
"Does it make you happy?" asked his grandmother. When Hawk nodded, Esther pressed her lips together in a warm smile. "Then I love it!" Raising her eyebrows, she then leaned forward and asked him half-jokingly, half-worriedly, "You didn't join a gang, though, did you?"
Hawk evaded the hand she reached up to touch his hair with and laughed a little under his breath. "No, Bubbe, but I did join a karate dojo. It's called Cobra Kai. It's so cool, maybe I can show you what I've learned later. I've made a lot of new friends there."
His grandmother looked over at his parents, flabbergasted. "And when did all of this happen? Nobody tells me anything! My grandson shaves half his head and takes up a sport, and nothing? No messages? What happened between Purim and now for all of this change?"
Simon Moskowitz leaned against the counter beside his wife and told his mother, "We tagged you on a Facebook post about it."
Esther shook her head. "Oh, that thing! I haven't been able to open that for over a month, it keeps crashing on that smart phone you made me get." Suddenly, Hawk wanted so badly to get his grandmother and his Sensei in the same room together and see which one of them would be the most clueless with modern technology. He had a feeling his Sensei would come out the winner; or in this case, would it be the loser? At least his Bubbe actually had a smart phone. Sensei was still whipping out a flip phone, like it was 2005 or something.
"Maybe Eli could fix it for you," his dad voluntold on his behalf.
Still scrutinizing the mohawk, Esther asked her grandson, "Do you plan on styling it like that tomorrow night? How are you gonna wear your kippah with it up like that?"
"Oh, I already figured it out," said Hawk, taking a couple steps over to the adjacent table, where his parents had already laid out copies of the Haggadah, as well as his and his dad's kippot. Taking his own, Hawk maneuvered it to the back right side of his head and secured it with the hairpins. "See?" he said, turning to the side to show his handiwork. It still counted, and it made his Bubbe grin.
While Eli put his kippah back away, Ruth continued with the holiday preparation, elbow-deep in food mixing, and asked her mother-in-law, "How was your flight? We heard about the delay in Chicago, the layover wasn't too bad, was it?" She missed the subtle swift cutting motion her husband gave her with his hand as a warning to not bring that up.
"Don't get me started!" said Esther. What commenced was a solid fifteen-minute tirade about how she'd been forced to sit down next to a couple of women who did nothing but kvetch throughout the whole layover. And the only thing that kept the rant that short was her spotting Hawk's mother pulling out a bag of rice from the kitchen cabinet. "Already with the kitniyot?!" she suddenly called out.
"And so it begins," sighed Simon Moskowitz, pushing his glasses up his nose. Hawk just smirked, amused. Passover at their home was held in the Sephardic tradition, according to his mother's customs, it had been for as long as Eli could remember. And his very Ashkenazic, very set-in-her-ways grandmother always had an opinion about that. He knew the next few days were going to involve a lot of heated words exchanged between his mom and Bubbe, that would end with them not speaking for a few weeks to follow. It was family tradition by that point. Those people at the airport weren't the only ones who liked to kvetch.
His Bubbe kept going. "I swear, you do it on purpose, just to kill my nerves, to send me to an early grave!" she told Ruth, who just listened with a tiny smile on her face; Hawk suspected his mother did it to deliberately provoke her. "I just landed not one hour ago, and already you're driving me meshuga." Sometimes Eli wondered if his grandmother didn't lay into the Yiddish a little too thickly on purpose, just so she could completely immerse herself in the role of a bubbe so thoroughly. But Hawk liked it, because sometimes she taught him Yiddish profanity.
His father intervened, suggesting, "Mom, why don't you go ahead and take Eli into the living room so he can fix your Facebook app? You two can get caught up on things." It was probably the only thing that could have convinced Esther to cease her outburst, as she wasted no time taking him up on that offer. As soon as the two left to the living room, Simon looked at Ruth and shook his head with an innocent shrug. "Every year."
"Every year," his wife affirmed, walking over to wash her hands in the sink.
Meanwhile, Hawk sat on the couch, messing with his grandmother's phone. He quickly assessed that all he'd have to do to fix the problem was just uninstall and reinstall the Facebook app, simple enough. As he went about doing that, his Bubbe was telling him a story about how she and her friends in her retirement community had set up a poker league. "And I told Leah, 'sweetie, you always pay the vigorish,' and took my share of the winnings," she said, leaning back on the couch beside him. "I told her, 'you gotta pay the vig.' I was the one who set up the league, the one who taught her how to play, it's only fair I get my dues."
"You guys don't bet a lot in those games, do you?" asked Hawk, raising his eyebrows and smiling over at her.
"Oh, we don't bet with real money, honey, we only gamble with smokes," his Bubbe assured him. With a grin, she nudged him with her elbow playfully and winked. "Don't tell your father, I still haven't given up the habit. Our little secret."