Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Age = Wisdom + the word ASS
Before you cleverly point out that layering shirts when it's this hot out is not terribly brilliant, I will tell you that after much thought I came to the conclusion that the purple shirt on its own was just a little too skankalicious to wear to the airport to see my 88-year-old grandmother off.
You can cleverly point out that I'm too damn lazy to use a timer right now, and that's why the lighting is soooo bad and I've got the Zulieka-like mirror effect going on. Don't worry, I'm not under the mistaken impression that the bluriness is artistic. I know it's poor, and amateurish, but I am after all a Poor Amateur. I'm losing enthusiasm for the whole self-portraiture shtick too. Somebody else should clearly be taking photos of me, if any are to be taken at all.
Layering aside, my grandmother is not the kindly, doddering old lady type who I really need to impress with false displays of immaculate virginity. She coined a rather famous phrase a few weeks ago when we were all over for dinner at my aunt's place. We were all gathered around the dinner table when my great-aunt, my grandmother's sister, with whom she's pretty much constantly bickering, said to no one in particular "where would you like me to sit?" My grandmother replied, in utter seriousness, "ON YOUR ASS!"
Then she regaled me and my brother with tales of the "bare breasted ladies" who danced at the Moulin Rouge in Paris in the 1970s. Most excellent.
We call her 'Bubbie,' which is the Jewish word for grandmother, and since she's the only one in my immediate family who keeps kosher and goes to synagogue, we figured it was worth the upkeep of that particular turn of phrase. My brother has no foreskin, we go to an "alternative" [read: low on the God and high on the tolerance] Passover seder every year, and when we remember to do so my dad lights the Chanukah candles. But we're really only nominally Jewish. I've been to synagogue only a handful of times and I understand just about nothing, having never been to Hebrew school. I never went to Camp Miriam or Camp Shalom and I never had a bat mitzvah. My ignorance of these rituals is only really embarrassing when I get invited to one and have to mumble through the service in anticipation of the kosher chicken and strobe light dancing to come.
And now Bubbie's back in Toronto, in the retirement home that my mother refers to as "Jewish Summer Camp for Seniors." She's not all alone again, because my great aunt came back with her this time. But I must remember to write to her. Soon she will be all alone in that giant building in her little apartment, and it will be winter and her grandchildren will be far far away.
I'm one of those rare twentysomethings who genuinely believes that age carries with it considerable wisdom, and that I ought really to respect the people whose matriarchy brought me into the world.
It's quaint, I realise, but at least I'm not opposed to nude beaches.
-N
p.s. By the way, budding lesbians, male and female, this is a rather good magazine. Better than reading fucking Cosmopolitan, anyway.
