Dreidels on the Brain (6 page)

Then, this morning, as I opened the door to walk to school, do you know what I saw?

Snow.

That's right. Snow.

Everywhere.

Well, it wasn't exactly snow. But it was frost, and lots of it, which is practically snow. It covered our lawn, the cars, the mailbox. Tiny icicles hung from the branches of the elm tree in our front yard, and you could feel there was more to come. I checked the barometer on our porch—still between 29 and 30, but now it looked a little closer to 30. I stepped out of the house to explore what was
almost
a winter wonderland.

Everything was covered with ice, and as I walked, I could see my breath, which I tried to blow into rings of smoke, like Bilbo in
The Hobbit
. I couldn't do it, but it was still pretty cool. Not just cool, but cold. I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and started walking to school, picturing my father dancing and singing, like Tevye from
Fiddler on the Roof,
with his new golden joints.

Frosty as it was, it wouldn't actually count as snow until there were flakes falling from the sky. I needed to see at least one—or two, so I could compare. That's one of the amazing things about snow: Every single flake is different. Even if you have six million of them, they're all different. I walked up Kimdale Drive, looking to the sky for that first flake.

Mr. Culpepper says that if you're going to tell someone a story, you need to tell them where it's happening, and I haven't done that. Here I've been going on and on about Cantor Grubnitz and dreidels and golden hips and chopped liver and everything else, but I haven't told you
anything about where I live, here in Temple City. I'm like “the butcher who backed up into his meat grinder” Mr. Culpepper always talks about, “who got a little
behind
in his work.”

It's called “setting the scene,” and Mr. Culpepper gave lots of examples from
Tom Sawyer,
which we're reading in class and takes place in a town called St. Petersburg on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Describing a place is no problem when it's exciting and colorful like St. Petersburg, with riverboats and haunted houses and buried treasure. But “setting the scene” is harder here in Temple City, because it is the least interesting place in the world.

Even the name “Temple City” is a cruel joke—there's no temple and no city. All right, that's not technically true. There
is
a temple, but we don't go there. It's like the joke my dad told me about the Jewish guy who gets stranded alone on a desert island in the middle of nowhere. Twenty years later a passing ship rescues him. Before he leaves, he takes the crew on a tour of the island to show them everything he's built. “Over there is my house, and that's my store, where I sell myself coconuts. Here's the school, where I would send my kids if I had any. Finally, here's one temple—and there's the other.”

“Wait a minute!” says the captain. “I can see why you
have a house, and maybe a store, and even a school for kids you don't have. But why
two
temples?”

He pointed at one. “That one,” he says, “I wouldn't set foot in.”

So, we don't go to the temple in Temple City. When we want to be Jewish, we
schlepp
across town to another temple three suburbs over. But don't be fooled: Temple City isn't named for the temple. It's named for
Mr.
Temple, who, by the way, wasn't Jewish, because Temple isn't a Jewish name. Go figure. As far as I can tell, he was the one who came up with the money to plan out Temple City, which I figure cost a dollar and seventy-nine cents. That's how much a pad of graph paper costs at Midway Drug Store. And really, he only needed one sheet to plan our city; he probably used the other pages to plan out the other suburbs around here as well because, like Temple City, they're all squares, squares, and more boring squares.

Now, I know what you're thinking, especially if you're not from around here. That Los Angeles is Hollywood, and that's where movie stars live. That's what my cousin Abby thought, when she came here from Bethesda, Maryland, last year for Kenny's bar mitzvah. As soon as she got here she started looking around, like she was trying to find someone. When we asked what she was doing, she said she was looking for celebrities. We laughed and explained that we've
been here all our lives and have never seen anyone famous, and that movie stars aren't actually real people, and even if they were, they would hang out at the beach, which is miles and miles from Temple City.

You might be wondering how my family ended up stuck here, in Temple City. I wonder the same thing. As near as I can figure, it's because of the Rose Parade. My mom and dad both grew up in Cleveland, a big, old industrial city that's so polluted that a couple years ago its Great Lake—Erie—actually caught on fire! That's bad. But that was during the summer, when Cleveland is hot and sticky. In the winter it's freezing, too cold to go outside. As kids they would wake up each New Year's Day, trapped in their houses, looking for some way to escape, and turn on the TV. And what would they see?

Thousands of people, some in shorts and shirtsleeves, standing along a boulevard lined with palm trees stretching up to the sky, in a place called Pasadena, California. Huge floats glided past, everyone on them wearing beautiful gowns or bathing suits, smiling and waving. But the most amazing thing of all was what covered the floats. Roses. Bazillions of them, something unimaginable in the Cleveland winter. Had a single rose appeared anywhere in Cleveland, it would have instantly frozen and shattered, its petals falling to the ground. Yet, there they were in full bloom. To people trapped in
Cleveland—including my parents, who hadn't seen the sun in weeks—Southern California was paradise. Though their TVs could only show the rose-covered floats in black-and-white, my parents saw them in every imaginable color—and in those colors, the dream of a new life.

A lot of people have dreams they never follow—but not my dad. He told me how he and my mom decided to get married and move out west, where they would buy their very own bungalow set on a hillside surrounded by orange trees. Every orange you ate would remind you that you were living the Pasadena Dream.

By the time I was born, at the rear end of the 1950s, that dream had all but faded away. It turns out my parents hadn't been the only ones to see the Rose Parade. Millions of people came to Southern California, filling up Pasadena and spilling down into the San Gabriel Valley. They started new suburbs, and suburbs of
those
suburbs—including Temple City. And they all drove cars, clogging up the freeways and filling the valley with a gray muffin of smog.

And what about the Pasadena Dream? I've only ever glimpsed it. I remember one day when I was about five years old, this winter storm came through and washed away the smog. The next morning, the weather suddenly turned hot—you could actually see the steam rising from the ground. The desert was blooming! I looked up to the north,
where there's usually just smog, and saw mountains sharp and purple against the sky. Actually purple, like the song about purple mountain majesties! I'd never seen anything so beautiful. And you know what was at the top of the biggest mountain, which is called Mount Baldy? Snow. Crisp and white, like you could reach across the sky and touch it.

That's when I started praying for it to snow
here,
in Temple City. I don't know where you are. You may live somewhere where it snows all the time, like Cleveland. Or Chicago. Or Buffalo. Maybe you've been slogging through a long, hard winter, filled with sleet and slush and rain and all that stuff that won't stop the postman but makes everyone else miserable. But that's not the kind of snow I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of snow that falls silently at night, so you awake to a world transformed. The kind you look back upon years later with a warm glow, recalling how wondrous your childhood was. Like the snow I read about in a poem by Dylan Thomas,
A Child's Christmas in Wales,
where he couldn't remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when he was twelve, or for twelve days and twelve nights when he was six.
That's
what I mean: magical snow.

Of course, that's Christmas snow, which is goyisha, but what's wrong with that? Dylan Thomas wasn't Jewish, but Robert Zimmerman liked his poetry so much, he
borrowed his name. That's how he became Bob Dylan. And do you know who came up with the idea of a “White Christmas” in the first place? I'll tell you who. Irving Berlin, the songwriter. Yep, Jewish. In fact, I looked him up in the
Encyclopedia Britannica,
and his real name was Israel Isidore Beilin. You can't get more Jewish than that.

So I got to thinking, why not Khanuyakah snow? Like the kind that falls in Chelm. That's one of my favorite places in the world, even though it doesn't exist. It's the mythical Jewish town of fools in Poland. My mother told me about it. She said that she used to hear stories about it from her father—my grandpa Izzy. He died five years ago of cancer and I only ever met him a couple of times, but he was sweet, and funny. When I was younger I used to ask her to tell me the stories, but she never quite did. Instead she told me about Grandpa Izzy, and what a great storyteller
he
was.

Then one day, Mrs. Molatsky, the librarian at our temple, told me about a book called
Zlateh the Goat
filled with stories about Chelm. I know Zlateh sounds like a weird name, and it is, even for a goat, but it's my favorite book. It's by this author named Isaac Bashevis Singer, with drawings by this other guy named Maurice Sendak, and it's great. One of the stories is called “The Snow in Chelm.” It's about how one Hahnukkah the elders are sitting around stroking their beards—as near as I can tell, everyone in Chelm
has beards—wondering what to do about the fact that they don't have any money. Then they look out the window and see that, while they've been talking, snow has fallen, and it shines and sparkles in the sun. They decide it's not just snow, but actually silver and pearls and diamonds—the answer to all their woes! They'll be rich!

But there's a problem. If the people of Chelm walk in the snow, they'll trample the diamonds and jewels. So they decide to send a messenger to tell the Chelmites not to walk on the snow. They all agree, but then there's another problem: The
messenger
will trample the snow. Oy! They think some more and come up with a brilliant plan: The messenger should be carried on a table by four strong men, so his feet won't touch the snow.

In the kitchen they find Gimpel the errand boy, and have the four cooks carry him all over town, knocking on everyone's windows, telling them not to walk on the snow. They visit every single house to deliver the message. Then the sun rises, and what do they see?

A trampled mess.

That's when they realize their mistake. Even though Gimpel's feet didn't touch the snow, the boots of the four big cooks did. How could they not have seen that coming? So they come up with another plan—that next year when it snows, they won't make the same mistake. Instead, they'll
get
eight
big men, who will lift up an even bigger table, to carry the four cooks as they hold the table with Gimpel.

That's the kind of snow I'm talking about. Funny snow. Magical snow. Khanuyakkah snow.

My footsteps didn't crush any snow, but they did make patterns on the lawns I crossed, which was fun. I bent down and tried to scrape up the frost, so I could get enough for a snowball, but it kept on melting. By the time I got to Mr. Culpepper's trailer, I was shivering and my hands were freezing. I took my seat but kept looking out the window for those first flakes as he told us about Tom Sawyer.

“So there was Tom, stuck whitewashing the fence, on a Saturday no less, madder than a mule chewing bumblebees.” Mr. Culpepper's from Alabama and has all kinds of funny expressions. “And the other kids come by and say, ‘It's too bad you have to whitewash the fence, on account of it being such a beautiful day and all.' But Tom is smart, and he just keeps painting and says, ‘Only special people get to whitewash the fence.' First they think he's joking, but then they get pulled in, and next thing you know, they're begging him to let them paint the fence.