Welcome to “How Should I Know?”—the column that’s trying its hardest to remember what we used to do with our time before we started spending it obsessively cleaning.

Dear Mordechai,

Do I have to remove all the things I put down to cover my kitchen surfaces, or can I keep it all covered for now?

F.L.

Dear F.,

It depends what you’re asking about. If your question is, “Should I keep my counter covers on?” have you looked under your counter covers after Pesach? Those things do not protect your counters. They protect your pots from your counters, and only because gravity is doing most of the work.

And anyway, you don’t want to keep your counter covers on, because you want to reuse them for the next Pesach, as long as you remember to mark which way is up and which way is down and store them so that the up sides are facing each other and the down sides are facing each other and you juggle them before putting them on the counter next year.

And technically, even contact paper can be reused. My wife’s been reusing the same carefully-cut piece of contact paper for 14 years to shield the part of the medicine cabinet that a dog might eat. We don’t actually have a dog, so we’re very liberal in what we think one would eat. We assume this is a dog that suffers from allergies, underarm odor and chapped lips. And morning breath.

But I assume you’re asking about something you don’t want to reuse. For example, we keep those cheap plastic fridge liners in after Pesach. That way, in case something spills a couple of weeks down the line, instead of all of it going straight down to the bottom of the fridge and collecting in that non-removable gravy trap that we had to chisel out before Pesach, only some of it goes down there. The rest collects in the grooves of the fridge liner, unless we installed it upside down, and then all we have to do is carry this wobbly zero-structure fridge liner over to the garbage, and then clean up the trail we made. So that’s pretty convenient.

Dear Mordechai,

I want to give someone a bar mitzvah present, but I don’t know what to get him. Should I get him a bond? I received bonds for my bar mitzvah, and I think that’s the minhag.

I.B.

Dear I.,

No. Most kids don’t even know what a bond is, so you’re giving the parents something to explain to them in the middle of going through presents. (“Here! Teach your kid about this!”)

“OK, so how do I explain it… It’s like a gift certificate for money. And you can only spend it at the post office.”

I see why you want to do it. Let’s say you buy a $500 bond that matures at $650. So, you’re saying, “Look, I’m getting you $650! But years from now, way after this bar mitzvah! I’m getting you a really really late gift—later than any other gift you’re getting. But on the bright side, it cost me way less than $650!”

Bonds are the most Jewish bar mitzvah present. Even more Jewish than seforim.

Yeah, I bet this 13-year-old kid will be so glad that you saved money to get him a really late gift that will mean less to him when it matures and he has all kinds of actual expenses to deal with plus inflation. And then he has to write them a “thank you” card now.

I still have a bunch of bonds from when I was a baby. I have no idea how to cash them, and I don’t want to have to do homework to figure it out. How about YOU figure out how to get me your money? You didn’t have to get me anything at all. That would have been OK. But instead, you got me a piece of paper I’m afraid to throw out, plus I keep getting paperwork in the mail about it.

And you’re saying, “Yeah, but this is a teenager. If I give him money now, he’ll just spend it now!”

How about you don’t parent someone else’s kids? The kid has parents telling him to put away his regular checks for later, when they decide he can spend it. He doesn’t need your outside parenting saying, “And this one you can’t spend until a specific date that I decided! Well, me and the government.”

Got a question for “How Should I Know?” Send it to the government, and they’ll send me a bond that will some day mature and become one-and-a-half questions.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published seven books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].