Happy Families Are All Alike

"When does school start?" If you see me, don't feel obligated to ask me that. If you do ask, it's OK, but if you can hold back it'll just be one less time and I'll be appreciative. Soon. That's the answer. And there's miles to go before I sleep (gosh, that's good).

There are so many life events that I want to write about...

The woman that I sat next to on the plane back from Israel. She went to a Satmar school in Meah Shearim. She got thrown out for hosing a teacher. She left the derech, as the saying goes these days. She lives now in Long Island. Her father was a big donor to the school, got her back in. On this visit she went to the school and asked to see the principal. They said he wasn't available. She said she'd come back every day till he was available. The principal told her of her great yichus and how he hopes she keeps something. She apologized to and forgave him. She's still not ready to fully forgive a teacher whom she idolized and then was very disappointed by. She's in her fifties and you'd think all this happened yesterday...

I bought one secular book in Israel, by Etgar Keret. Very high level stuff IMHO.

I've always been a big Mister Fred Rogers fan. I just got a book about a man's friendship with Mr R. "Anything mentionable s manageable," Rogers used to say. It's like that poem by the girl in Haifa...

A friend read Anna Karenina over the summer. I just heard about this today. It's a heavy book and reading it was a big deal. Also today, serendipitously, I found a new release of Billy Collins' first book. Here comes a poem:

On Closing Anna Karenina
by Billy Collins

I must have started reading this monster
a decade before Tolstoy was born
but the vodka and the suicide are behind me now,
all the winter farms, ice-skating and horsemanship.

It consumed so many evenings and afternoons,
I thought a Russian official would appear
to slip a medal over my lowered head
when I reached the last page.

But I found there only the last word,
a useless looking thing, stalled there,
ending its sentence and the whole book at once.

With no more plot to nudge along and nothing
to unfold, it is the only word with no future.

It stares into space and chants its own name
as a traveler whose road has just vanished
might stare into the dark, vacant fields ahead,
knowing he cannot go forward, cannot go back.