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2004-01-03 | 12:34 p.m.

Jinx, who is five, picks up a gold foil-wrapped chocolate coin. "Can I have this? Or did the word 'chocolate' escape your lips?"

I laugh. Then he asks me if he can jump from my chair to the bed. "Or did the word 'jump' escape your lips?"

I ask him, "Where did this 'escape your lips' stuff come from?"

He explains that he is paraphrasing Wallace Shawn's character, "the bald guy," from The Princess Bride.

He delivers a long string of dialogue a la Wallace Shawn to Andre the Giant, which concludes: "Do you want me to send you back to where I found you? Unemployed? In Greenland?!"

***

Of course, they are no longer merely foil-wrapped chocolate coins to me. They are gelt. Jinx's new best friend is Jewish and when Jinx discovered that Jude doesn�t celebrate Christmas, like, at all, but rather Hanukkah, Jinx asked if we could do Hanukkah, too.

Did I already write about this? I can�t remember. He asked me and I said, "Sure, I think we can find a little Menorah�" and he interrupted to remind me about the real meaning of Hanukkah: "Eight! Days! of Presents!"

So we did Hanukkah. But we did not do eight days of presents. And I still don't know the blessings you're supposed to say, or even if I�m allowed to say them. I'll try to get caught up by next year.

I have been thinking an awful lot about Jewishness, Judaism, Jews. Several different threads of my life have been coming together: my new friendship with Jude's mother, Gaby; reading Leo's essay about Yiddish and remembering his funeral kaddish; remembering how strongly I identified with the Jews as a kid reading everything I could find about WWII and the Holocaust; and a new story my mother told me about my grandfather being declared an "honorary Jew."

More later. I'm being paged. (Ooh, my first oh-four entry! I think.)

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