The Apprenticeship Of Elijah Kravitz
We got our Christmas tree a few days ago. The pickup occurred on York Avenue, the business district directly south of our block, which contains a lot of really delicious-looking Mexican restaurants of various types, a seedy but serviceable post office, and also a bunch of other businesses that, let's face it, aren't really looking for my patronage. York's main Christmas tree lot, in non-holiday times, serves as the outdoor showroom for a somewhat surly electronic music hobbyist who also sells homemade fountains. It's guarded by a remote-controlled iron gate and three bichon frissee, who all appear to have that weird tear-duct problem endemic to the breed.
We pulled up to the lot at around noon on Tuesday to find it closed. "Grandma," the woman who runs Grandma's Closet, a junk store next to the Christmas tree/fountain boutique (it's nice to be back in a big city), toddled out of her domain to inform us that she was going out of business after 35 years, because she was 70 and also because she was tired of all the road construction in the area. She yelled over the gate. The proprietor yelled back that he was in the shower and that he'd be right down. Fifteen minutes later, he arrived, looking really dusty, and I wondered how he could possibly have been in the shower. He then backed his pickup truck out of the lot so we could have a better look at the merch.
Elijah picked out a nice tree and the guy drove it three blocks to our house in his pickup. Then Regina decorated it with various ornaments, both ironic and unironic, and placed it atop the tree skirt that she bought from West Elm for I don't want to know how much money. This provided the decorative backdrop for Elijah's first Christmas in his own house, which, of course, means nothing to me. I still want him to enjoy himself, but now that I've moved Elijah to Los Angeles, which is Spanish for "Land Of The Eternal Schnorrer," I feel like it's time to start educating him about the Jewish part of his destiny.
This began last Sunday, when I drove him down the 134 to the 101 and then a couple of exits down I-405 to a Chanukah Festival at the Skirball Cultural Center, which describes itself as "a Jewish institution in an American context" that focuses on the horizontal orientation of "the human encounter." Architect Moshe Safdie's design features a "series of longitudinal wings," which encompass open, light-filled galleries and rooms. These make you feel like, I don't know, a Jewish bird or something, flying free in your dual cultural identity as a Jew and an American. Elijah had specific questions about the Chanukah Party.
"Will there be monsters there?"
"Probably not."
"What about sharks that eat monsters?"
"Unlikely."
"What about chocolate?"
"There will probably be chocolate."
This assuaged his disappointment a bit. We arrived to find, indeed, a room utterly devoted to making driedels out of candy. You frost the bottom of a Hershey's kiss with icing, attach it to a marshmallow, and then stick a little string of licorice in the bottom. We also had the option of drawing Hebrew letters onto the driedel with edible marker, but Elijah chose to eat the driedel first.
This was followed by a visit to the toddler playroom, where Elijah proceeded to sit in a canvas schoolbus for 15 minutes until I finally persuaded him that I hadn't paid eight bucks so he could sit in a canvas schoolbus. After that, we entered the room where you could make oil lamps out of clay, though Elijah decided he preferred to roll his clay into a ball and penetrate it with two toothpicks and a popsicle stick.
"Look, Daddy," he said. "I made a squid."
"A squid?"
"Yes. A Chanukah squid. It's for mommy. She will like it, because it's nice."
"OK."
"It's a nice squid, daddy."
I had no cause to argue. Next, we went into a room where we made decorative lanterns out of wax paper, stickers, string, glue, staples, and possibly a few other crafts items that I can't recall. Elijah chose most of the material, but I did most of the work. The fact that Regina, when we brought the lantern home to her as a present, thought that Elijah had made the entire lantern himself was only moderately insulting.
We had lunch in the Skirball's inexpensive restaurant, because I was out of cash and therefore couldn't treat my son to the festival buffet, which was kind of a shame, because the food looked better there. He hardly cared, though, since I got him a grilled cheese, causing the usual meditative zone that a grilled cheese instills in him. As he pulled the cheese off the toast in great globby Cheddar chunks, I had a chance to overhear a woman talking to her daughters at the next table.
"Mommy wishes she could buy you swimming lessons, but mommy doesn't have a lot of money right now," she said. It was somewhat sad to hear this, but at least I knew that I was at a Jewish event.
We closed out the Chanukah Festival by attending a show put on by Phranc, who, as she's wont to humbly and amusingly remind you between most songs, is L.A.'s most famous Jewish lesbian folk singer. I hadn't seen Phranc perform since I was a 20-year-old sophomore in college, during my experimental lesbian phase. She hadn't aged at all, though perhaps her sense of style, which includes a crew cut, blue jeans, and work pants, masks the aging process better than more femme sartorial choices.
Elijah found Phranc's opening number, an ironic paean to Condoleeza Rice, a little dull, but she followed that up with "I've Been Everywhere," which got his attention, and then with a song where she encouraged all the children in the auditorium, about 100 total, to get up and shake various parts of their bodies at various times. At this point, Elijah leapt from his seat, obviously feeling the rhythm, and went into full rock-out mode, shaking his head madly and sticking out his tongue. As soon as the song ended, he looked at me and said,
"Only one more song, daddy, and then we will go home."
One more song passed, and then another, and then another. Elijah developed into a Phranc fan, though the next day when I asked him who Phranc was, he said, "a big octopus with giant teeth that eats dinosaurs." Regardless, I think I taught him to enjoy the holiday. We came home, he gave Regina her presents, and informed her that he'd seen a "funny man sing songs about Chanukah."
"It wasn't a man," I said. "It was a woman who looks like a man."
But I didn't press the lesson. I'm trying to teach my son about Judaism. We live in L.A. now. There'll be time enough for gender ambiguity.