I moved to Bizarro Town 45 years ago today, when I was 8 years old. It was also a Friday. I've always remembered watching The Flintstones that night, and it was something about them all going away for a vacation to the shore. I didn't realize until recently that I could look that up and confirm if what I remembered was real:
The Long, Long Weekend Friend Gus Gravel invites the Flintstones and the Rubbles to his seaside hotel for an all-expense-paid vacation. But upon arriving, the four find that the hotel's planned "activities" seem more like work. Gus finally confesses that his entire hotel staff has just resigned on the eve of a huge convention.
My parents used to say that I had pre-natal memory. Doesn't everyone remember watching a specific episode of a TV show 45 years ago?
Anyway, so I've lived here a pretty long time. Not that it's worth anything, per se. I'm just saying.
My baby is home until Wednesday; tomorrow we're all going to go visit the newly independent firstborn and then go out to dinner. She seems very happy, which is all you really want for them, isn't it? For tonight, the baby has just gone off to Friday night services at one of the half-dozen or so synogogues in town. Holy ... I don't even know what, Batman. Despite my total embracing of my culture and heritage, let me tell you, I have never been to a regular Sabbath service unless someone I knew was being bar mitzvahed. None of us in the house are followers of organized religion of any sort. The kid is actually only there because she has a class assignment to go to the religious services of three different demoninations. She's going to church with a friend on Sunday morning. But this is bizarre. I suppose that if I were a really good mommy, I would have offered to go with her. I did not. Hey, she went all the way to Europe by herself, she can sit through an hour of Hebrew and other incomprehensible goings-on. At least Sunday, it'll all be in English, and she'll be with a friend. Given her chief interest in the history of the Reformation, she probably knows more about the Lutheran church than she does about Judaism. Just another of life's little ironies.
I started packing up my desk drawers at work today, and farming out more of the book and video collection. A teacher came in and asked to schedule a class for two weeks from now. Seriously, talk about missing the memo. Hello. We'd be happy to schedule your class. I hope they're good at packing. What part of "the library is being closed" did you not understand?
Some idiot alumnus called today; I won't even go into why, but I explained that I was unable to help him with whatever it was he wanted because all our archival materials had already been packed and put into storage, due to the construction. Construction? he wondered. Did that mean his name had been erased from where he's written it on one of the bathroom floors? Hmm. class of 1954? Well, I told him, it's been years since I've been in any of the boys' rooms, so I really wasn't sure. Not funny, moron. Even at BT High School, they wash the boys' room floors at least once every 50 years. How the hell would I know? He thought he was being cute. Perhaps he would have been if he hadn't also been so hostile. I was not amused.
