Grandmother is a widow and has been ever since '55 (more than fifty years now, I guess).

When she lived with us (she lives with my aunt now), I was always a bit mystified by her penitence--her unwillingness to eat sweets or anything made with too many spices. Her insistence that she wear white all the time and that she isolate herself from the rest of the family (to the extent that she couldn't sit at the table with us or eat food that we had prepared).

It felt a bit obsessive compulsive, and now, writing about it and placing the words in English, I'd be worried for her mental health if I didn't know better.

But Grandmother was a widow, and being a widow in India isn't all that easy, especially if you're a Hindu, and especially if you were living in the earlier part of the century. Deepa Mehta, proxied, explains everything in today's arts section of the New York Times and in her new film.

Before, I have blogged about what I now call the problem of Constitutional Presuppositions-- what to do when a constitutional rule appears to presuppose the existence of something, but when no rule of the constitution necessarily to require that thing to exist. For example, it is not clear that the Republican Government clause of the Constitution requires a state to have a unitary executive officer, or an executive branch at all. Yet Article 1 Section 2 assigns powers to the executive authority of the state. Does this mean states are required to have an executive branch? That states are required to name somebody "the executive authority for purposes of Article 1 Section 2"? That a state without an executive authority simply can't fill vacancies? That "executive authority" is a legal term that has meaning even if a state believes that it doesn't?

This Ann Althouse post brings to mind another example of a Constitutional presupposition-- Sundays. Article 1, Section 7 gives the President ten days to return a bill, and also excepts Sundays. What does a "day" mean in this context? As Althouse points out, since there is an astrological objectivity to the day, I think it is fair to say that the Constitution means that the President gets roughly 240 hours, even if we moved to a different system of time-keeping. But what about Sundays? There's no astrological objectivity to the week.

What if we switched to the Napoleonic ten-day week, retaining one day of the week as Sunday? Would the President now only get one out of every ten days off rather than one out of every seven? What if we renamed all of the days, so that there were no Sundays? Would the President get no days off? Or would we be required to keep track of what 24-hour-periods would have been Sundays under the time-keeping system agreed upon by the framers and ratifiers? [I'm assuming here that Congress has the enumerated power to legislate the days of the week under its weights and measures authority.] You scoff, but this question keeps me awake at night.

I pass along, without much comment, an interesting New York Times article on the new pardons for some old WWI sedition offenses. I suppose I think that these sorts of pardons are constitutionally required by an executive who believes the old convictions to have been unconstitutional, but I confess that the emptiness of the gesture does seem a bit sad to me.