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For the past two nights we have been going out to Einsteins bar after the funeral activity dies down. It is in the University of Toronto campus near fraternity row. Einsteins is a bit of a dive but my dad declared it to have been the best bar he had found when he went to a 3 day drag of a meeting at the airport so we had to trust him. The bartender at Einsteins has a tattoo of a DNA double helix on his bicep. He is studying neurology. The screens behind the bar flash trivioke questions of various levels of difficulty and complexity. My dad knew most of the answers and I knew a few of them. My sister was immune to looking at it. Two nights ago the bar was full of students there to watch the junior hockey championship game between Russia and Canada. Normally it wouldn't be a major event but with the NHL season cancelled the bar was full of people dressed in Canada hockey jerseys. The NHL shutdown has united Canada to support their youth to beat the Russions. We could barely find a seat and we couldn't get the waitress to come to our table to serve us nachos so we gave up and went home.

After this fun experience last night at Einsteins the whole Housman family returned to Einsteins dressed fully for a funeral amidst the crowd of students out to have a good time, meet friends, hook-up, and listen to amateur musicians play their music on open mike night. One fan was wearing his TGIW (Thank God It's Wednesday) t-shirt. The MC was shouting a quote from Lord of the Flies that sounded like “Kill the Pig - Bash its skull - Spill the blood”. A singer with a giant afro that the MC called on called 'Frobot' played a few songs. Frobot was one of two members from the band fire-hydrant, (www.firehydrant.ca) who each played successive solo sets to promote the band. A two man band appeared afterwards with a lead singer and a bongo drummer. Both of them were completely stoned and the bongo drummer with a ganja hat drummed the bongos slowly and apparently randomly using full sized drumsticks instead of his hands. Among their antics was a rendition of Freebird before ceding the stage to a man who played some morose songs followed by a whiny cover of “no surprises” by Radiohead.

This morning Lisa and I ventured out into the snow to get breakfast while mom and dad went to my grandparents place. We stopped into a few potential breakfast spots but the first one turned out to be a college cafeteria although it advertised as an all day breakfast buffeteria open to the public. The word buffeteria sounded like vomitorium to me so we moved on. Next we stopped into a little diner that looked good but was run by a Chinese woman behind the counter that didn’t have any breakfast foods and smelled like a stale smoky hotel room. So we passed on it.

We finally settled on the future bakery. It is across the street from the restaurant where we filmed Philip interviewing a lesbian for our Manufacturing Attraction film. The woman taking our orders at the bakery was a charming and beautiful young Russian woman. I love the unintentional hope of Russian translations of English. She asked me “How do you wish your eggs?” She relayed my order of a spinach and feta omelet back to her mother, an older woman in the kitchen in Russian. The future bakery has great ambience, excellent music, wonderful coffee, good prices, and mediocre breakfast food. My omelet wasn't very good and the mother somehow managed to make a terrible grilled cheese for Lisa with only a pair of slices of processed American cheese.It was good to be outside in the snow even though the snow cancelled our flight to Boston.

We took the subway to my grandparents place on Heath Street. I noticed on the subway that the danger warning signs had a character that looked like Kenny, the kid who always dies in South Park episodes. It would be pretty funny to license Kenny to make him the poster child for warning signs. I couldn't figure out one warning sign that I ultimately decided was a no dancing sign. We got off of the train at the wrong stop but had been waiting in the DWA (Designated Waiting Area) rather than walking to the front of the train. The result of this was that we exited through an exit that was far from my Grandparent’s apartment. I called my dad to give me directions and he told me to "go north". I looked around in the cloudy snowy sky for the sun to tell me which way was north and then I told him I would get my compass out. Then he told me that Toronto was rectilinear so I could figure it out. Finally he told me to walk towards the Loblaws which took us to Tichester that connected to Heath Street. I recalled the time we came to Toronto before and I had yelled to my navigator Sarah "What the hell is a Tiechester?" as my grandfather was trying to direct us in a minivan full of Bob Dylan fans driving northbound, westbound, and southbound in random directions on the rectilinear streets of Toronto.

At my grandparents place Rosy was just leaving but she left my family with a couple of old Yiddish jokes. One joke is quite long and involves an Indian/Jew named Geronowitz who is asked to kill a buffalo to increase the size of the family tee-pee to make room for a family and to feed a wedding party. He sees one buffalo and it is too thin, the next one has an ugly hide, finally he finds the perfect plump nicely shaped buffalo and he couldn’t kill it because when he reached for his tomahawk he found that it was the dairy one and not the meat one.

Another Yiddish joke was that there were two bees that saw a big Jewish celebration. They buzzed over to get a bite to eat. One bee looked at the other to see that the bee had a kippa on its head. So the bee asked his friend why he was wearing a kippa. The other bee said “I don’t want to be mistaken for a WASP”.

A great uncle of mine in an untraced part of my family tree named Ronnie came over with his wife. My mom was happy to inform me that he is in the diamond business as a wholesaler of uncut diamonds with the glint in her eyes of unborn grandchildren. Ron told an interesting story about how his grandfather escaped the Nazis. His grandfather had been living in Belgium and he knew that he had to leave when the Germans were coming. So when the Germans were invading and they were one day away from arriving he gathered the family into the car and put mattress on the roof to deflect and absorb any bullets being fired from behind. He was in the diamond business so he took a massive fortune worth of all the diamonds from the diamond company he worked for. He managed to stayed one day ahead of the Nazi’s when he arrived in France but had to stay overnight to wait to take a ship to England as the Nazi’s continued to reach towards France. He then boarded a boat designed to hold a capacity of 43 people that was filled with twelve hundred escaping Jews. When he arrived in England the blitz was going on and the Nazis were bombing them regularly. He then took his family to the US by riding across the ocean in a convoy of ships that were under constant siege by many German u boats that sunk almost half the boats in the convoy. He finally traveled to Canada and returned the diamonds to the company and received a well deserved thank you.

My great uncle Ronnie also speaks fluent Flemish so when he was in Belgium a man asked him how a Canadian came to speak Flemish. So he told the man that actually most Canadians speak fluent Flemish and that anyone from Belgium should come and visit as they would feel quite at home. Ronnie had to leave but I learned from him that wholesale to retail mark-up on diamonds is about 300%. So if he sells a diamond wholesale for $500 it goes on sale retail at $1800.

Things got busy with far too many people I needed to chit-chat with. One very nice elderly woman told me all about how much she loved the Ellen Degeneres talk show at ten AM every morning and that she would put off all incoming calls when Ellen goes into her dance number. The woman also dances with her housecats to Rod Stewart’s new album.The Rabbi came and answered some questions. He explained how he was taught in rabbinical school to approach grieving people. You are supposed to take cues from the person so that you say the most appropriate thing. You don't say something about the weather if someone is sad and overcome with grief that would trivialize their feelings but you also shouldn't interrupt a joke or fond positive remembrance to direct someone’s attention on grieving make the person feel guilty while remembering.

My mom, my sister, and me all had awkward moments independently of one family friend whose name is the same as an ancient prehistoric plant. My problem was that she and her husband were impossible to talk to while I was stuck eating with them at the table. My conversation went something like this.

Dan: So how did you meet each other?(Awkward pause looking at each other)
Man: We met professionally.
Dan: So did you work together on a production?
Man: She came to sell to me?
Dan: Did she sell you anything?(More awkward silence. Prolonged this time.)
Dan: Can you pass the cranberry juice? Actually I am going to go clean my plate.

My mom had given her the food we were eating in the kitchen a few minutes before and when my mom expressed concern with figuring out where to put separate recycling items and talked about how important it is to her to not leave the world around us a pile of garbage the woman said that she didn’t care and that it was ok not to care because the city makes you recycle anyways.

Lisa was in a conversation with her that went something like this…

Lisa: (makes a kind comment that everyone overhears)
Woman: See that type of caring comment is the heart of Judaism. I am trying to convince my partner to convert to Judaism.
Lisa: Oh. I think of Judaism as cultural and not just religion. A lot of what we learned was how we should act.
Woman: See how thoughtful Jews are. Lisa is such a good example of what you should be like. Actually I can look around the room and meeting with people I can tell that a few people aren’t Jewish because of listening to their conversations and seeing how they aren't as caring.
Lisa: (Jaw dropped with aghast look and walking away hoping to not be implicated)