A Picture is Worth...

Did you ever wish you could revisit a time and place but still be the age you were back then?


A sunny day in 1984
I'm with Bentzy on the beach.
We just moved to California from Florida and Bentzy is wearing a paper crown made from orange bulletin board border stuff and a Tzivos Hashem tshirt.
I'm making some crazy pose with a huge closed eyed smile.
You can see my shadow and my reflection.
Life was good and sweet and so so simple.
I love this picture.

Erev Pesach 1999
I'm lying on a bench in Lily park with two casts decorated by a friend who came to visit erev pesach only to find me with two broken arms.
One cast has a flower design.
The other has pesach artwork.
I remember sitting in my parent's room erev pesach feeling forlorn and forgotten as everyone ran around, minutes to candle lighting, showering, dressing, blow drying.
Bluma walks in, takes one look at me and starts to cry.
"Oh my gosh, your so sad because you can't take a shower and you probably have nothing to wear because nothing fits over your casts and everyone is too busy to help you and you didn't even complain...
I don't cry easy but when I do I remember.

Summer 1985
I'm with Raizel at the CGI carnival.
We both wear long white knee high socks with jumpers too short you can see the tops of our fancy footwear.
On our heads are the old green and white Gan Yisroel hats.
We both wear red, white and blue.
The carnival flag streamers that they used year after year at my favorite day of camp hang overhead.
We had a dunk the counselor booth and Rabbi Engel used to sit in it and there were these ATV bikes with a whole trail through cones (before they were outlawed due to danger) that I was finally old enough to go on.
I can smell the hay from find the pencils in the hay and feel how they stuck into you on the hay rides...taste the cotton candy and sugar cones.
Camp Gan Izzy of Orange County CA was my favorite place in the whole wide world.
When I turned 14 I was given a choice to go to sleep away camp or stay for my 10th year at CGI.
It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make.

1986 At the Children's Museum in Long Beach
I'm with Bluma and cousin Yossi Moss and some nice Hispanic kid.
We are sitting behind the counter of a game show of sorts.
My face is painted.
Bluma's is not.
Typical.
:)
I don't know what ever happened to that museum...it was fab.
They had this room full of cushions that had velcro on them where you bounced around and threw the cushions all over and a fire truck with real fireman clothes to dress up in and a science show that before you walked in there was a video screen with a mad scientist singing "potassium, magnasium, pastassium..." (as I recall it...)

~~~~~

Did you ever paint an old chest of drawers with your sister and end up painting her shoe green?

Did you ever have a warm and cozy quilted light blue and white pajama nightgown with flowers and lace on the cuffs?

Did you ever get chosen to say one of the twelve psukim in front of thousands of kids at a camp rally in Los Angeles with Rabbi Levitansky who was a real cool cat and made a "kuleh"?

Did you ever take a picture at knotts berry farm where they put your face into a body and you laugh and laugh and laugh at your faces in 'singing in the rain' because you look so ridiculous?

Did you ever go back to the home you grew up in only to find that the big huge backyard you remember is surprisingly small and the whole house has shrunk while you were gone?

~~~~~

Be grateful for all the good memories.
I'm sure you've got a truckload too...


Good memories are the blessings that made us who we are.
- anonymous
(yeah right, it was me)



- post adapted from the new wall of pictures plastered behind the desk in my room at 3260 El Dorado Dr.