There I sat debating for five minutes with myself, ice cream scooped tuna is it worth it? Am I really that hungry? No I wasn’t but what else was there? The tuna in the shape of an ice cream scoop stared at me, and I at it, the small morsels of cellery poking their heads through the mayonaise ladden soggy pile. It wiggled every time someone leened against the table. Kind of looks like some crazy ice cream/jello/tuna-madness I thought to myself. I peered down the long table to my right and to my left a few times, knowing what I would find I searched anyway. Nothing, garlic tam-tams, half full old bottles of raspberry seltzer that must be flat. A paper plate full of triscuts, and the lone box of egg matza from three years past.
The chior of old men strikes up their same weary tune of yesteryear, Yedid Nefesh begins and I can feel Shabbos slipping away. Is that why shalosh suedos is always so depressing, because the ebbing of the mundane week is nearing? Or is it just that Evolution missed shalosh suedos. Almost everything in our lives have improved in one way or another, yet shalosh suedos, from the food to the depressing tunes has been left out of Darwins theory.
Nowadays the typical shalosh suedos contains what I just described above, ice cream scoops of tuna and egg salad, the occasional left over stella dora cookies(maybe those ones with fudge in the middle) some herring, pickles, and garlic tam-tams. These common foods have replaced kichel, fish balls with those little tooth picks and maybe if you were lucky some cream herring. Oh how I long for those days of fish balls in the ever famous, disgusting to anyone under 50, fish jelly from the jar. Everyone can remember the fish balls and kichel with some lemon lime vintage seltzer, old men arguing about JFK and FDR or whether the commies or shvartze’s are worse all in the langauge of the “old men in back of the shull” yiddish. Unlike charedi yiddish, this dialect has a goodness to it. Smooth like a single malt scotch and funny like an I love Lucy episode. Ok I digress Shalosh Seudos always sucked.