51 Birch Street

What I wouldn't give right now to go to a bar mitzvah in upstate New York. I'd get really tipsy and dance with 13-year-old boys and eat lots of sheet cake. I love that area of the U.S.--well, in the summer at least. I picked cherries there when I was fifteen. It's so classically American country; I picture boys on horse-drawn sleds gliding through the snow and Christmas carolers and summer carnivals with caramel apples.

So I've always felt that I am an inner Jew. Meaning, though I have a Protestant Scottish/German background, I relate more to Judaism. I love the culture, the deli foods, the acceptance, the attitude, the challah bread...I just want to meet a nice Jewish doctor, is that too much to ask? I'll gladly convert. I went to a Saturday Shabbat service by myself last weekend and it was lovely.

Where am I going with this? Well, I watched the documentary 51 Birch Street. A guy's mother dies and he tapes his family's reaction and going through their mother's stuff and finding thirty years of her diaries. It made me sad. We never really know our parents as people. And there's probably some stuff we would rather not know. But I think I would read my mother's diaries if I found them after she passed. I'd want to know her thoughts. I don't like this hypothetical situation, but there it is. What hurt the most watching this was when the son asked his dad if he missed Mom. And Dad said, "Not really." Not really? Fifty years of marriage? Oh yeah, Dad got married to his former secretary three months after the mom's death. I understand it was not a happy marriage, but spending that much time with someone has to count for something, doesn't it? And his poor mother...extremely bright and articulate and passionate and frustrated with her suburban housewife existence.

As much as I love the 1950s, I'm thankful that that repressive period for women and marriage is over. As much as divorce sucks, at least they are socially acceptable now and people get them if necessary. Now if we could just stop teenagers from having babies and people getting married too young...

I wonder if anyone will ever read my journals when I die. It's horribly embarrassing for me myself to read them. Some of the stuff I've written is so eye-rollingly corny and self-pitying. And don't get me started on my ninth grade poetry! I'd obviously read too much Sylvia Plath. Anyways. Shabbat Shalom.