I think I’ve mentioned Sunny more in the last few weeks than the last year. Her father died yesterday, he’d been dying for a while. The last SMS conversation we had she was anti-social and I was all ‘See your Dad’ she lied and said she’d been staying up there in the boonies to see him daily. He was a good man, I mean I liked him.
A few years back she had a bob Dylan line translated into Hebrew and tattoed on her ankle. The tattooist said he hadn’t ever done a Hebrew tattoo. There’s a reason for that of course. Any religion that follows any version of the old testament/Torah/Koran does not desecrate the body or, as we said in Juvenile corrections, no self detailing. The body is a temple and all that. Sunny not only didn’t understand my explanation but thought I was criticizing her and did the standard shame thing wherein she says she had it done for me. Yeah, I’m all about the ankle tattoo.
A funnier story is the other ex-wife, adamantly a recovering catholic who, at the time of my first childs birth when I continued to bring up the suggestion of entering our child(and later children) in some sort of Sunday school/theological foundation, decided Judaism would be the only one she’d consider, which is why my son had a bris even though the seahag, like many mothers of her generation, thought of circumcision as barbaric and unhealthy.
She used to say some very funny things thinking they were sweeter. She called my son mashugana , pronouncing it Mah sugar a nah beliving it mean the equvilent term in English (my sugar). It doesn’t, it means crazy or bizarre or generically a negative insult implying wrong thinking. She also used bubala which actually is a term of endearment for a child, but she used it to mean breast feeding. It meant she’d say things like Boob-ala my sugar I na? In public to mean ‘Are you hungry darling baby boy? The way she was trying to phrase it would sort of mean ‘Would you like a child you crazy bastard?’
I was also thinking about various terms that sort of mean tourist. In Northren Michigan the term is Fudgie, in Hawaii it’s Howley, in Alaska it’s Cheechaka. The northern Michigan one just means people who come to what the yuppers (people from the UP) consider beautiful and majestic land to buy fudge (on Mackinac Island there are a lot of fudge shops, they roll out the fudge in front of store front windows and piping the scent of warm fudge out to the street). Howly and Cheechaka, however, are more like the Yiddish word Shiksa. They don’t just mean tourist, they mean an outsider with either bad or negligent intent. Ok, goyim means that, Shiksa is particular to women who aren’t Jewish trying to seduce nice Jewish boys. Unlike Fudgie, which sounds more like an insult or a slur for African americans, the other words mean something worse than tourists and imply untrustworthy.
I guess I wasn’t really expecting to see Sunnys father again, but he was a good man and I seem to miss him more now that the unlikely event of ever seeing him again is impossible. Although I don’t quite understand this place I’m from and I do understand my people in Oregon and Oregonians, I think I like my people here better, I’m positive I do as far as my romantic interests are concerned. I think Sunny didn’t join the vigil for her dads last day (the doctor had given him 24 hours, most of his children went to spend those with him) and I’m sure she has many plausible excuses. I don’t know people here who would do that. For that matter the seahag dragged her demented father from his home in Vermont to put him in an old folks home in Portland where he has no peers, no one except family, and his daughter doesn’t visit very often.
I don’t understand much about geriatric medicine, I do understand a lot about the things that bond us to one another. In hindsight I don’t know why I was attracted to such cold hearted bitches. That might be an unfair characterization, some of the reticience isn’t cold hearted but lazy and chickenshit, and, honestly, watching a loved one fade away to nothing is not for the faint of heart.
Just saying. I will Miss Tom Sayer, he was a good man, he was a Mensch.
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