When your seder has five children under the age of 10, things are a bit different.  For one thing, you start at 5. For another, the service is abbreviated. For a third, someone finds the afikomen before the Four Questions. For a fourth, there are a lot of frogs. And for the 5th, there is certainly no after-dinner completion of the Haggadah. So last night, we were back at the Hampton Inn by 8. I expect tonight will be a repeat.

Now, it is another 8, and it’s time for breakfast. We have a box of matzoh in the room and can get coffee downstairs, and yes, we are grateful for the freedom, but isn’t someone supposed to feed us manna?

I can’t say we accomplished a lot exploring cold (temperature never even hit 40) Enfield CT yesterday, but we did learn that things used to be better. Once, for example, it was the home of Bigelow Carpets. “A name on the door rates a Bigelow on the floor”, or something like that. The Bigelow campus was very large  and now looks to be a housing complex called “Bigelow [something]”.

It’s in a part of town called Thompsonville, I think, and is surrounded by what used to be company housing, including many fourplexes, some of which have been fixed up. Like this one:

Enfield also used to be the home of a sizeable American Lego factory. No longer. And George Washington never slept here, but Paul Robeson did live here. That reminded me of a trip a few years ago when we stayed in a different Connecticut town, Danbury, and learned that Marian Anderson had lived there (and we saw her studio).

We lucked into a place at lunch. Called Mark’s, it is a few blocks from the Bigelow campus. It has only 5 tables, seating I think 12 or 14, and is only open for breakfast and lunch. The prices are from maybe the 1980s:

I had a “Good Start” breakfast sandwich, made up of eggs, spinach, tomatoes and roasted red peppers on toasted marbled rye. Here is a picture of half of it:

Not much else happened.  I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the rest of the world yesterday, but saw an article a few minutes ago that said 84% of Republicans like the job Trump is doing. For shame.

One of those people is the owner of a funeral home here in Enfield. His family started the home about 140 years ago. The entire family are Democrats, involved in local politics forever, but he has broken away. Just couldn’t take any more Pelosi and Schumer, he said. Now, no one in his family talks to him.

That’s the way it is in the big city.