Rant #3,113: My Little Red Book

This past weekend was completely uneventful, but I did manage to get two things done that needed to get done.

First of all, that transcription that I told you about, the one that I needed to do for work, was completed on Saturday morning.

All 55 pages and 14,171 words are on the books, and after I send it into work in about an hour or so, I will be as happy as can be.

It’s done. That is all that counts.

And then we have my bar mitzvah album, which I finally got back from my sister yesterday evening.

I believe I told you last week that she took it for safekeeping, she didn’t even realize that she had it, but lo and behold, she did, because we certainly didn’t have it here.

Anyway, I now have it in my possession, and this keepsake of my early life is finally in the right hands.

I thumbed through the yearbook yesterday and this morning, and it really is something to behold.

In our current days of video and streaming and the like, I doubt if people even have albums like this for their children who go through bar and bas mitzvahs--or even weddings and other such celebrations—but back then, in 1970, you had a bar mitzvah, you had an album made of the festivities.

I have probably looked through this album of photos from my great day perhaps thousands of times over the past nearly 53 years that the event took place, but honestly, I hadn’t checked this thing out for a few years, so seeing it again brought back such memories of the time to me.

The photos haven’t faded and are still as vibrant as when they were shot, but many of the people in the photos are not with us anymore—like my father and my grandparents, and even one of my friends—so this has become not only a document of that time of my life, but it also stands as a scrapbook of those times, featuring photo after photo of people who I dearly loved and have fantastic memories of.

Take my paternal grandfather.

He was a difficult man to figure out, although I think I had a keener perception of who he was simply by being his grandson.

He was an Orthodox Jew, and he was the one who said to me, when I had 105 degrees fever and couldn’t move out of my bed the evening before my actual bar mitzvah ceremony, “You will do it in the bed if you have to.”

He grew up in the old country in Europe, was still very European in his ways—in the ways he treated his family, in particular before I came on the scene—but when he became a grandfather, he kind of mellowed down a bit.

But he still followed the Orthodox ways, and the European ways, and his treatment of my grandmother—or mistreatment sometimes—became legends of my family that we still talk about and grimace about to this day.

But he had softened up a bit by the time I came around, and he could be very loving and also, very funny.

He had a strange sense of humor that I think I somewhat inherited from him.

But anyway, on the day of my bar mitzvah ceremony, he probably put out a big sigh of relief when I got through my Haftorah, even though I nearly passed out doing it.

And on the day of my bar mitzvah party, a few weeks after the actual ceremony, he just let it all hang out.

It was the first, last and only time I saw my grandfather drunk, and he was drunker than drunk that day.

There is a photo of him in the album that shows all that, his impromptu dance of the hora all by himself.

All the anger, all the rage, and all of the angst that my grandfather had was let out in full when he did his dance—it was like opening a bottle of soda that had been shaken and exploded when you took off the cap—but it was something that he needed to do, and he did it with a verve that I had never seen him demonstrate before, or even after.

So even with just a photo, I can see him doing his dance right before my eyes like it was yesterday.

And that is the idea behind the bar mitzvah book.

It is full of photos, just photos, but every photo brings up a memory of something being played out, so each photo almost becomes a template for a living, moving memory in my mind, almost like a mental video.

And I can still see my grandfather doing that dance, and all the angst and anger just dripping off of him right then and there.

I miss him, and my other grandparents, and I miss my father too … but the memories of them live on in this book that I finally have in my possession.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, my bar mitzvah book speaks many more words than that transcription I had to do, and is certainly much more memorable.

“Those were the days, my friend, I wished they’d never end … .”