So your sitting there putting two bagels in your mouth at once, your ears got cream cheese on them somehow and your trying to grab the Tropicana no pulp with the other hand(I have noticed at multiple break-fast meals that no pulp is the juice of choice) and the phone rings. You know exactly what they want, and you try desperately to avoid it, until your wife or someone else picks it up. Its for you and your pissed.
“Hey dude, what you doing tomorrow?” Play the dun,dun, dun, dun music-
This is where you try and make up some excuse about needing to get your car fixed, or having to work late- because you know there’s no stress in the world like succah building. Of course after the offer of free food possibly even beer- you grudgingly say yes- at least it’s a mitzvah. This year it wasn’t so easy being a Sunday, and I am sure there were many pissed off men as they tried in vane to save their Sundays from the evil succah building demons.
Now succah building is not rocket science at all- in fact- no matter many succah’s you build-you will still suckand get into a fight with your friend over which way to lay the schach and how many support beams you need- and it will raise your blood pressure every time. It makes no difference whether it’s as fancy click together succah, traditional wood, or even those canvas ones that end up down the street during wind storms. That’s right folks- its nothing like riding a bike- you forget every year how to build your own succah, and every year you get pissed off about it.
I only helped build one succah so far, but since it was as big as 3 or 4 of them I think my commentary will work. No matter how many people are building the succah there will be one person who knows how to use the drill, if a bunch of contractors came and watched succah’s being built they would have a heart attack at the waste of manpower. Usually there is one guy holding a board up and one dude wielding the saw, the rest of the folks are playing with the kids drinking beer or eating the nosh that the women folk set out.
Then you have the guy who feels there aren’t enough nails. Maybe he just likes the power trip of being the only one who knows what a nail is, or maybe he was alive during one of those hurricanes that blew threw Brooklyn and blew all the succas into the street, but he just feels that twice as many nails should be used.
I noticed something interesting this year and thought I would share my thoughts. Every holiday it seems that the women get to stress. Whether its 2 months before Pesach and they yell at you for eating chometz in the living room, or maybe its making enough food for any of the yomim tovim, or maybe it is cleaning, cooking, shopping, yelling, taking kids to those stupid chol hamoid carnivals on 13th Avenue, whatever it may be- the women are usually stressed and screaming while us men sit on the sidelines and pray that over all the pissing and moaning the stuffed cabbage will be good.
Succos is the ultimate payback for women. They get to watch as a bunch of men try and put together a box. They watch as men curse when they get splinters or drop all the scach on their heads, they get to quietly chuckle as the men yell at each other as to who knows how to use the drill the best. This is payback for all those cooking sprees that lasted all night, for all those times they had to clean up 4 week old donuts from beneath the couch, and this is their time to relish and our agony.
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