My hobbies

Because I am very talented, I have managed to squeeze in a couple of hobbies in between all the carpools that I do. One of these you may have already figured out. It is called Starbucks. This is a very good hobby. Here's why: you can do it alone, with friends, and with children. You can do it on the rare Friday when your Big Shot Husband is working at home and he is nice enough to make you a quesadilla to take and eat it with your coffee. Like a date. You can do it while you're working (or blogging, like I am doing as I type), reading, staring at the people around you wondering why they don't have jobs or filling out school forms. If you build model airplanes as a hobby, for example, you can't do any of these things surrounding the hobby. I feel I have chosen well.

I also enjoy the dog-eat-dog aspect of getting a table at particularly crowded Starbucks where lots of people go to "work." This happened just yesterday. I ended up at the only available table, the one with the wheelchair sign on it. Though I felt a little guilty, there was nobody there who needed it.  And since I was doing actual PAID work yesterday, I felt especially justified in grabbing the table because I had lots and lots of articles on diabetes that I was busy summarizing (yes, it is extremely fascinating work, yawn).

OK, so total oops when a couple who were extremely disabled appeared on the scene. The lady looked at me accusingly (yes, she was right), and I jumped up and said, "Ma'am, would you like this table?" "Well, yes,"she said, looking down at her canes (doh!). Of course it took me a million hours to gather the 57 articles I was summarizing, my lunch, my coffee, my computer, my mouse pad and my purse and skedaddle to another table. Cringe. But it was the most exciting thing that happened to me yesterday. Well, almost. Because that brings me to my second hobby: Yiddish!

Every time anyone learns about my passion for the language (which I started learning a year and a half ago now), they invariably ask, "Why?" And look at me as if I am from another planet. They are right. But I also have a theory as to where my Yiddish love stems from. I believe that in the 19th century, I was a lovely shtetl-living girl named Rivka. That's my Hebrew name in real life. My nom de plume is Honeycake, my nom de Jew is Rivka.

Anyway, Rivka lived on a shtetl and was married to a fun-loving Rebbe who loved her for her sharp mind and not-too-shabby looks (work with me, people). He gave her ten children (K"H) and she worked tirelessly to keep their dwelling clean, put good food on the table, educate her children, and tend to the chickens. She was a ba'alas chesed and well-respected in her shtetl. And she spoke tons of Yiddish, duh.

Now, obviously some of Rivka's traits have morphed over the centuries, but the Yiddish loving part is still 100% there. And I firmly believe that because little Rivka worked her fingers to the bone in the shtetl, today this Rivka likes to relax (I mean work) at Starbucks.

So yesterday I trekked back to the JCC for another start of another semester of Yiddish at the JCC!! It was so much fun. This session, we have a new boy in class. His name is Rudy and he's from Brooklyn. And he's in his 70s. Like everyone else in the class. That's right, it's an early-bird special crowd in Intermediate Yiddish, but those are my peeps.

We started off the class with the teacher (who's not that old, maybe 50s), speaking only in Yiddish. Pure heaven. He asked us all to introduce ourselves. Here's what I said:
"Ich heis Lekach. Ich voyn in a shtetl. Ich bin a mame. Un a schreiber!" (My name is Honeycake. I live in a small community with lots of other Orthodox Jews. I am a mother. And a writer). So zayde number 1 asks, "Du bist a schreiber?" (You are a writer?) So I said, "Ich hob a blog.!" Right?! I am plugging Honeycake613 any way I can.

Anyway, here's why I really love Yiddish. It's the only language that is impossible to teach with language tapes (there aren't any), television shows (none), movies (few available), immersion (difficult to impossible--there are no cultural exchange programs with New Square or Mea Shearim). It is a language that is taught with linguistics, history, songs, jokes, and Jewish religion. For example, last night we learned the origins of Slavic words and sounds in Yiddish. That was most of the class. The highlight of the class for me, though, was when our teacher said about a particular imperative, "That's the word you use when you point." Have you ever taken a language class where that sentence was uttered? As the DEFINITION of a word? Awesome.

Lucky for you, I have carpool now because I could go on and on about Yiddish. I will sign off with the following lyrics from a famous Yiddish tune (one of my faves) that I was just thinking about:

A bisl zun a bisl regn
A ruig ort dem kop tzu legn
Abi gezunt ken men gliklakh zayn

A little sun, a little rain [actually a lot of rain today]
A quiet place where things are mellow (or I can lay my head) [I can't believe they wrote about Starbucks back then]
As long as you have your health, you can be happy!

I'll keep reminding myself of that as I slog through traffic to pick up my kids. One thing you can say about the shtetl: no minivans allowed.