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I knew someone in high school. Frosted streaks in her hair. Chain smoker. Caring insights. Generous belly that jiggled with her throaty laugh. One day, her best friend said to me: "She will always be this way, you know. A bubbe with frosty hair and a gravelly smoker voice. She just got there really early."
This prediction was not meant it unkindly - in fact it was spot-on. She is still that person today in her mid-thirties. A precocious bubbe.
Which brings me to our Yiddish proverb for the second night of Chanukkah:
Vi ainer iz tsu ziben, azoi iz er tsu zibetsik.
As one is at seven, so is he at seventy.
And while the above-cited friend is an extreme example of that proverb, I'd like to point out that no matter how much yoga and therapy and cleanses and backpack trips in Central America you embark on, there will still be an essential kernel of you that was there when you were seven.
I was in a Chanukah play at the Jewish day school I attended as a child. There was a point at the end of the last song where we were all supposed to rush the stage and raise our hands up high in a toast 'L'CHAIM!'
And I was so nervous that I'd be in dreamland when song ended and miss my queue, I rushed a beat ahead of the group and was first to arrive at the edge of the stage. And when I realized I had gotten there first, I was mortified, fell back, and let my classmates rush past me while I lingered in the background, red-faced.
In everything I do, there is still that rush to the front, then the fall back. By the time I am seventy, I will have learned to embrace it.
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12.2.2010
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