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Dec

24

The day before Christmas: What do Jews do, Part IVb


Read Part IVa here, Part III here and here, Part II here, and Part I here and here and here.

Back in West Haven, my mother signed me up for kindergarten in the spring of 1967. I was four years old and at registration, we met a mother and daughter who, it turned out, lived across the street and up three houses from me. And we’d never met before.

The street looked like a street in University Heights west of Warrensville, or in South Euclid, north of Warrensville and south of Mayfield. That is to say, the homes were close together and you could almost see into your neighbor’s kitchen. You could certainly hear your neighbors. The manicured lawns twinkled green and stood at just the right height. In the wintertime, the slopes of our yard provided an attractive nuisance for sledding. And all the trees stood the same height; you could tell that the neighborhood had been created within the last 10-12 years.

Everyone liked it that way, it seemed to me back then. Although we’d play and run from yard to yard and under fences, inevitably, someone else’s mother supervised us at each home. Most of the mothers stayed at home then, although I can think of at least four who went to work after we got into the upper elementary grades, but before we moved away.

I still find it amazing that I’d never met Linda Caprio before that Kindergarten sign up day. But I attended a Jewish day school nursery, and my older brother was in a Jewish day school also (although he switched to public school somewhere around this time too). My younger brother was not yet two years old. And my mother, who was 26, had just lost her mother to breast cancer (at age 52) and her mother, my great-grandmother, had moved in with us. Making friends with all the neighbors probably occupied very little of my mother’s time just then.

But finding a new playmate for me through Kindergarten sign-up led to the creation of a friendship that continues even now. In fact, the word friendship betrays the intense connection Linda and her siblings and her parents and I have with one another, likewise with all my family members.

And, until I married and settled in Ohio, I’d celebrated more Christmasses with the Caprios than I’d celebrated any other holiday with anyone else, except for Thanksgiving and the Jewish holidays of Passover, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 2:00 pm December 24th, 2005 in Politics 

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