Friday, January 12, 2007

Burning Impressions

Here you go campers, the last of three stories from the not-so-dark side.  Have a good weekend.  Monday is MLK day - a good day for moving back to the light, wouldn’t you say? 

In some neighborhoods she might have seemed a little edgy, but there, just off the lower Haight, she was really pretty mainstream.  Her hoodie, ruffled skirt and tights seemed all the blacker in the washed-out light of that afternoon.  It was a December Saturday and we were going to my cousin’s house to bake schnecken with the whole fan-damnily.  And, since our labors would take us to nightfall and the timing was appropriate, we’d have a little Chanukah service too.  I’d even brought my own menorah along, the slick chrome job from the old country.  So it was me and the mrs and little Korean Z, all of us in the most comfortable clothes we could wear in public and toting the chanukiah of my forebears, and her, clomping up the street in combat boots, with a friend who was, of course, as authentic and jaded-looking as she was. 

It’s not that I felt no connection to her as we passed each other - I sensed an actual disconnect, that somehow we were walking on different streets altogether at the same place and hour. 

This impression was short-lived.  As we hit that key point of space and time where we shared an intimate but transient propinquity, her eyes ranged over us, sparkled, and she smiled broadly and brightly.  “Pretty menorah!,” she exclaimed. 

And that was it - we and she were all already back on separate tracks, proceeding into unrelated futures from a common point.  However, when she undertook to express, unilaterally, her hamish familiarity with, and warm appreciation of, my family’s heirloom ceremonials, that common point felt more harmonious than merely coincidental.  Whether a bond was created at that moment or whether she’d just divulged to me a pre-existing relationship to which I’d been, apparently, intentionally blind, I now know that, if our paths hadn’t crossed and I’d somehow missed her, I would certainly have missed her.