AH-ha.

Many several years ago by now, my wife (who was, back then, my girlfriend) was babysitting for two children belonging to this family who lives nearby. She sent me a text message earlier in the night saying that she was craving a pickle, and that there were none in the refrigerator in the house occupied by the two children belonging to the family who lived nearby.

So, I procured a pickle from a local establishment which trades in such things, and I brought the chick who was, at that point, my girlfriend, a pickle.

She was elated. She invited me inside and, although we didn't have sex in these people's master bedroom as I'd been lead to believe we would by Hollywood, we did have an enjoyable conversation. At some point during my visit, my wife left me alone in these folks' living room so she could go do something babysitterly like put children to sleep or fold up the Twister mat or whatever. While she was gone, I was left to eyeball the immense, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf belonging to these people who lived nearby.

Philosophy.

Cooking.

History.

Theory.

Humor.

Literature.

Biography.

While the subjects and the heights and spines and the colors and the ages of these books all differed, one from the other, there was a common element that united all of these published, literary works, or unified most of them, at least.

Jewish.

Jewish authors.

Jewish themes.

Jewish titles.

Jewish slants and bents and perspectives.

My eyes narrowed and moved to the music collection, which I only had a brief moment to study before my then-girlfriend now-wife returned from upstairs.

Jewish composers.

Hebrew lyrics.

Jewish singer-songwriters.

Israeli orchestra.

Irritated, I abruptly cut my visit short and left the house, noticing, as I walked out, the "Evil Eye" hamsa by the front door as I passed.

I would qualify the rest of this post by saying, "I don't have a problem with being Jewish" but, clearly, that would be a lie.

I do. I do have a problem with it. In fact, I kind of can't stand it. I reek of Jewishness.

"I've got a friend who's Jewish, but he doesn't look Jewish," a coworker of mine said to me recently, "but you really LOOK Jewish."

That might sound horrible and inappropriate and offensive, but he ain't just whistlin' Hatikvah.

In Dublin, my wife and I arrived at the departure point for our tour bus on Friday, August 5th. There was an elderly lady standing in front of the steps to the hostel, her bags packed, her slicker on, her teeth-- well, I don't know where her teeth were. Probably in her suitcase. But her eyebrows were drawn on and she was ready to go. We made superficial smalltalk with her about Ireland before my wife said, "I need to go get breakfast, do you want to come with me?" I said no, because this lady was starting to get entertaining, I thought. She had just checked her watch (which read five minutes of nine) and announced, in a thick German accent,

"Ah. Zey are late."

There was no way I was going to miss an opportunity to hang around this woman, I thought, so I said to my wife, "No thanks, you go on ahead. I'll stay here in case the bus shows up."

My wife rolled her eyes at me, thinking she was trying to rescue me from this woman's clutches, and disappeared around a Dublin street corner. The woman, who I silently named "Gerta" chatted amiably for another couple minutes until a natural silence interceded between us. She broke it with,

"You are from Israel."

Notice the distinct dearth of any interrogative punctuation mark. Another silence, this one less natural, took its place before I replied with,

"Uh-- no. We're... I'm-- we're American."

"Oh," she said, "AH-ha." She peppered her conversation with "AH-ha's", making sure to really emphasize the first syllable. "But," Gerta said, "that is where your people are from. Israel."

Again-- no question mark.

"Yes," I said, suddenly wishing I'd gone for that croissant with my wife as sweat trickled into my asshole hair-forest, "my father is from Israel."

"AH! AH-ha!" she ejaculated, with a satisfied smile, indicating "Got one!" on her face. "Your nose, though, your nose," she continued mercilessly, "is Persian. You have a very Persian nose."

Yes, I thought, and you have no teeth or eyebrows. Did you lose them in the war?

Instead of saying that, I came up with, "Well, my father was born in Iraq."

"AH-ha."

I spent a good healthy portion of my 55 minutes in the chair yesterday talking about what it means to me to be Jewish, both at home and abroad, about what it's like having the map of Israel (or Persia) tattooed onto your face, about being perceived as weak, nebbishy, schmecky, cheap, stuck up, intellectual, a nerd, a schdork, a minority, with a big nose. And kinky hair. In 1993, "Frasier" first came on the air, and introduced the world to Niles Crane, the hopelessly pedantic, more hopelessly romantic brother to Frasier. He was always dressed in a suit, and had a head of beautiful, flax-colored, thin, soft, WASPish hair.

When I was thirteen, I went into the barbershop owned by the man who, many years before, had given me my first haircut.

"Bob," I asked, "can you do something to my hair to make it look like David Hyde Pierce's."

He looked at me with a mixture of sympathy, confusion, and despair.

"I don't think so," he said. "But you've got beautiful, thick hair. You'll appreciate it some day."

I'm still waiting, Bob.

Hi, Tea.

I made tea for the first time this season.

I don't want to get all goopity about it, especially after yesterday's mush-fest about my blushing young bride of *ahem* seventeen summers, but I have to admit that it felt good.

I miss tea when it's not there, but I don't realize that I miss it until I've been reintroduced to it again, when the temperature gets to around forty five, something clicks inside of me, and I realize it's what I've wanted all along.

I can't even bring myself to drink it when I'm not feeling well. Even when my throat is sore and my glands are pelican-sized, I still reach for the coffee. I don't know why-- it probably has something to do with addiction.

I'm sitting here, rather mesmerized, actually, by the steam that is pouring out from the depths of my metal Thermos travel mug. I've just taken the top off, you see, to cool the tea down a little bit and the steam is just billowing out and drifting off to the right before evaporating about three feet into the air above the computer monitor. Watching the steam pour forth from the mug reminds me of the time in my life when I smoked cigars.

I didn't like the taste very much-- I can't imagine anybody does. Then again, I suppose there are people who gleefully buffet out of their lovers' assholes, so who am I to judge the taste buds of another? Anyway, what I really enjoyed about cigars was lighting them at night and watching the smoke tumble out from the big, fat, luminous end. I loved to watch the smoke snake through the darkness, adding a bit of noir to the night sky. It made me feel that I was more important than I was, more interesting, more debonair.

Less dickhead.

Unlike the taste of cigars, I very much like the taste of tea. At least, after I've placed three teaspoons of sugar into it, that is. My wife would posit that I don't actually like tea, just like she insists that I don't actually like coffee, as the same amount of sugar (plus some whole milk, if readily available) is required for my palate. Perhaps she's right. I mean, she is my wife, after all, so her chances are pretty good.

When we were in Bali on our honeymoon, we moved from a sumptuous hotel in Ubud to a lodging of lesser quality after a brief stay in the beach town of Lovina. It was pouring rain when as we trudged to our new lodging, situated right next to a rice paddy and a throng of ducks. After we climbed the stairs, the sun started to come out, and we were positively drenched. The manager of the hotel brought us up a tray of tea, and I remember that the sugar bowl had ants crawling about inside. Well, some of them were crawling. It looked like a kindergartener's science experiment. Rather than complain to the manager about the sugar infestation, I just sat with my wife on our porch and watched the ducks parade around the rice paddy. I think this is probably why I failed the FBI examination I took recently-- too passive, too inclined to avoid confrontation.

Tea drinkers the world over are probably like that. Tea's not a terribly aggressive drink, and I suppose that's partly why the English love it so much. Tea is very English, even before there were the English. You hear all the time about people getting hopped up on caffeine from too much coffee. Too much tea and you just get very mellow, and you have to pee a lot.

After the autumn and the winter go by the wayside, I'll pack up the tea and it'll hibernate at the back of the cupboard, usurped by pasta boxes and containers of orange jelly candies and granola bars. I'll regret that I won't have the urge to drink any of it during the warmer months, but I probably won't miss it. The same way I don't miss cigars, and waking up with cadaver-breath and thick, green mucous in the back of my throat.

Or peeing all the time, while being very mellow about it all-- probably wearing corduroys.