A Letter to my Grandchildren
Dear Benaya and Uriya:
I can’t wait to see you this summer! I know that is a long time away, but for a gray beard Sabbi like me, it doesn’t seem far at all. You see, when you get older, time passes as quickly as a jet flying overhead, as quickly as a car whizzing by you on the highway going in the opposite direction, getting smaller and smaller as you watch it become a tiny dot, then nothing at all.
When I thought about coming to see you, I started to remember growing up, when I was a boy your age. So I want to tell you about what my life was like so you will know me a little better. I decided to tell you my story with pictures so you can see it, but you will see the pictures in your mind because I don’t know how to paint pretty pictures.
Can you see pictures in your mind? Let’s try it. Let’s pretend that one hot afternoon your Ema takes you to the park. You are wearing blue shorts and you run and your head is sweaty and the hair sticks to your forehead. You stop to look down at the hills in the valley and you see sun and shadows and a breeze comes and the sweat feels cool now on your head, almost like an air conditioner. Now you see a man coming on a bicycle towards you. As he gets closer, you see his face is painted and he has funny orange hair. A clown! A laitz! He is smiling and he gives each of you a vanilla ice cream cone! You are surprised. Can you see the ice cream cone? What color is it? Can you smell it? It smells like vanilla. Can you taste it? The sun is hot and the ice cream drips down the side of the cone and your fingers are sticky. Can you feel it? You can. You have the pictures and the smells and the tastes in your mind. I will take you with me on a little road to my childhood and you will come along and see what I saw, hear what I heard. We will go together.
I grew up with my brothers and sister in a big house on a quiet street where we could run outside and not worry too much about cars passing by. Out of the living room window was a mountain covered in snow in the distance. What color was the mountain? She was called Mt. St. Helens and she stood tall and she watched over the rivers and the trees, and over the birds that flew from high places and sang a happy song like a little boy with a new birthday present. The trees were covered with green branches and they stood so tall that they almost went to the sky, up to the very top! I felt very small surrounded by the giant trees and the tall mountains. But I also felt safe, like the trees and the mountains would protect me from harm. From our window we also saw rivers so wide and deep that giant bridges were built for cars to cross them. What would happen if a car tried to cross a river without a bridge? Ships floated on the river and the boats were so high, the bridge had to be raised to let the ships pass underneath! The cars had to wait on the side of the river until the ship passed because the road was so high that the cars would fall off if they tried to cross. The ships’ horn made a deep sound like this: mmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I stopped playing and listened whenever I heard the beautiful sound. I felt like the ships were my friends and when I looked out my window, and they were far away, they looked like little toy boats in a bath tub.
Cats were our best friends when we were kids. We had many cats, white ones, cute ones, even cats that looked like homeless people who slept on the streets and hadn’t had a bath in years. My father said he went to “cat holding school” when he was a kid, and he called each cat “stoopie”. When he called a cat, he said “Heeeeeeeere stoopie!” We laughed when he called the cats because he laughed. We felt happy to play with the cats, to hold them, even to talk to them! We imagined that they understood us, and who knows, maybe they did! One cat was named “Amese”. I have no idea where she got this funny name. She would leave our house for weeks at a time. We though that she was lost, or maybe she died. But she found her way home every time, looking like she had been in a fight or two. She must have had some cat stories to tell us but she just said “meow” and rubbed her face on our faces because she was so happy to be back home.
A special visitor came to my nursery school, what you call gan, one day when I was just four. A friendly little lion cub came to play with us! I loved the cub and played with it. Lions are big cats! The newspaper man came and took pictures of me and the lion cub. A picture of me, a little boy with a striped shirt and black hair, was in the newspaper the next day!
Everyone needs a haircut sometimes. No matter how times change, and hairstyles change, hair keeps growing and needs to be cut. My mother cut the three boys’ hair herself. We sat on a highchair in the kitchen and Mom plugged in a machine to cut our hair. The machine had a motor that sounded like this:
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The machine smelled like oil.
Back then the boys hairstyle was called “crew cuts”. The haircut was so short that it felt like a prickly hair brush when you ran your hand over it. We had to sit very still so my mother’s hand would not slip and make a mistake.
How did we sit so still?
My mother promised us a piece of gum if we sat still.
Every summer our family went to my grandparents’ beach house for two weeks. The house was across the sand from the ocean, but the sand was so wide that the walk to the ocean took 15 minutes. The water on the Washington Coast was so cold that your feet hurt when you went in the water. Huge logs rolled onto the beach and we built giant fires on the beach at night. The sky was black and the orange flames rose in the black night and the air was cold and we all sat around the fire to keep warm. We put marshmellows on a stick and stood far from the hot fire and held the marshmellows in the fire until they turned brown. We ate the marshmellows and the outside was crispy and burned and the insides were soft and white and the smell and smoke of the fire was in our eyes and in our clothes but we didn’t care because we were having fun.
We also flew kites at the beach when the wind was blowing. The kites were pretty colors like yellow or blue and we held them with a string and the wind blew them so high in the sky that they looked like little specks. Another beach activity was riding horses. Everyone sat on a big horse and the horse walked on the beach while we sat on the saddle way up high. But the most fun thing at the beach was the go-karts! The go-karts were little racing cars that drove around on a track and the kids could drive themselves. They made a loud noise like a sports car: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmm. When the ride was over my brothers and were sooooo disappointed! Can’t the ride go on forever?
Some days at the beach it rained all day, and our parents read us a book called “Scuppers the Sailor Dog”. The book was the story of a dog who worked on a boat and he had a yellow raincoat like a person, and when the waves were VERY high Scuppers drove the boat and made sure that the boat didn’t tip over and spill the passengers into the ocean. After the storm passed, Scuppers was so tired that he went to his cozy bed on the boat and he slept so peacefully that you could see that he smiled while he slept.
Of course when the fun was over we went to school. One teacher I loved was Miss Martel in second grade. She was young and pretty and she had short hair. I used to stay in the class after school because I liked to be around her. My best friend was Eric Stromquist. We went to his house every day after school and played baseball. We didn’t have the kind of football they play in Israel, but we loved to play games outside like kids do in every country. Kids, have fun while you can! You will be happy when you grow up if you do so.
I have many more stories to tell you, but we can start with these. Some day I hope you will have children and grandchildren and tell them your stories. If you have a good story you can live the story again and again and again.
Love and kisses, Sabbi