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Potent Quotables

Girl with Jewish Last Name: (faking child’s voice) Why are there eight days of Hannukah?
Me: … ?
GWJLN: You know! When you read that book, and the little kid has to ask: Why are there eight days of Hannukah?
Me: You mean, why is this night different from all other nights?
GWJLN: Yeah! … Oh. Different holiday, huh?

Me to boy: I like your watch.
Boy to me: Thanks! I like your face.

I wrote a whole entry about my emotional trip home this weekend to see my beloved house on Unicorn Lane one last time — and of course the internets ate it. Just as well, I guess. The gist of it was, in my mind’s eye, it’s as though the only house I’ve ever lived in is being whipped away into space like in the ads for Zathura. Through the crack in the door, you can see Little Ester — angsty, skeptical, morbid, safe — and Sheba and a thousand Shabbes dinners with my grandparents and a thousand horizontal afternoons spent watching Jack Nicholson or the Marx brothers and the hole in the wall from when my older brother hurled his toy bat and my little brother’s myriad scattered computer parts and the Steinway Grand piano none of us learned to play well and the Mexican death cart that used to totally freak me out and all those books. My god, will I ever have access to so many books again? And my parents, in the kitchen, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee or tea, cursing the Republicans, immediately jumping up to offer food to anyone who came in.

Of course, when I returned to New York, having triaged my childhood memorobilia from my room and bid farewell to all the other rooms too, one by one, I was exhausted. I turned on the TV and there it was, The Wizard of Oz, my own reference come back to bite me in the ass. I turned it off again before Dorothy could say what I knew she was going to. For my own mental health. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know she’s right.