My friend Gila phones me:
“It’s so cruel what the passing years do to us! We slowly and somehow unnoticeably
have lost touch with each other! Do you remember the wonderful times when we met every Friday evening for coffee and cake and even dinner sometimes? Do you remember our picnics at the beach, the many rides and walks we enjoyed together? This morning I got up with the very urgent need to reconnect and meet with you and our other friends and the need is so great that I had to phone you right away!”
“All right, I tell her, let’s really get together! When do you want us to meet?”
“After the holidays, she said, immediately after the holidays!”
After Gila’s phone call I spent a thoughtful minute or two before I decided to embark on a challenging project. I decided to ask friends and acquaintances about their agenda for the famous “after the holidays”. I got some routine replies like the plan to start a diet after the holidays because these are the days one eats too much anyway, David told me he intends to see the dentist in order to extract a tooth that has been bothering him for the last half year or so, Eva wants to start writing her memoirs. Trouble is that Eva, the grand daughter of a friend is only 21 years old and when I asked her what kind of memoirs she had gathered in her young life, she answered with a wide grin:
“You’d be surprised!!!!”
I met Daniel, the youngest son of a friend of mine on the street. I practically helped her raise him, but now that he is all “raised” he is married and his wife is expecting.
“She is due any time now, how can I convince her to wait until after the holidays? It would be so much more convenient!” he says and I really have no advice for him!.
And then I met Arik in the supermarket. At 60, he still behaves and dresses like an eternal flower child. He wears a bright yellow shirt, multi-colored Bermuda shorts, several gold chains around his neck, and a half-wilted flower behind his ear.
“I bought myself a guitar!” he announces happily.
“Good! Now you will play for me my favorite songs! ”
“Not yet, not yet, I start my lessons after the holidays!’
It seems that everyone has an overcrowded agenda for just after the holidays.
“Why after the holidays? Why procrastinate? Why not get it done now?”
I simply cannot afford to ask that, for the simple reason that I am the ultimate procrastinator myself. I don’t postpone things for after the holidays, I just postpone them all throughout the year. There are still the many old tapes which I must take down to the storage room because I will never look at them again, but I am not sure enough of that just discard them altogether. Because maybe, maybe, I’ll want to look at that old Jane Fonda exercise tape and do the work-out with her! Nonsense! A monolog becomes a dialog within me. Pro and con. No final decisions.
I can just imagine the frantic, frenetic and crazy activity that will overtake the whole country after the holidays. Even the Knesset members who have been napping peacefully throughout the hot months may wake up and I don’t know if this is good or bad
We face a period when we get up in the mornings and don’t know whether it’s a holiday or a regular day because they come and they go. We socialize and we overeat, and we wait for after the holidays.
. It always turns out to be a disconcerting time. Yes, yes, I will tell you all about it right after the holidays!
Lucca.