Growing Down

When I was a kid, I used to think that by the time I reached twenty-five, I’d be a marine biologist living in Sydney with my husband and two kids in a cutely quaint seaside home studying the great white sharks off the coast.

When I actually arrived at twenty-five (miles off target), I swore that I would dedicate my life to becoming the Bride in Kill Bill (both volumes). Now at twenty-seven, I’m no more closer to being a kick-ass leather-jacket-wearing Uma Thurman than I am to being the second coming of Jacques Cousteau.

Too busy for any quality blog/instant messenger/e-mail time during my fun-filled eleven hour Monday at work, I came home and started writing this really sarcastic (surprise, surprise) and bitter post about how much fun work is. But I quickly scratched that because a.) for the most part, I like my job and b.) being a bitter asshole was more my forte when I was thirteen. Although I’m sure I still have some latent asshole shrapnel buried somewhere deep in my squalid heart.

So on the evening of Rosh Hashana, I started contemplating whether I was just a big fucking flake who’s never followed through or whether I was just as normal as the next kid who never found the cure for cancer or became the astronaut they swore they would be when they were ten. (In all fairness, you gotta give me the Bride/Uma Thurman thing, because, you know, awesome!)

But before I could think too much or get all depressed from my brooding, my sister came over with gifts fresh out of her unpacked suitcases. Somewhere in the bag amidst the Elite chocolate bars, evil eye paraphernalia and weird stuffed goat thing sewed for me by my paternal grandmother in the senior community she lives in, there he was; my monkey.

When I was one, my aunt bought me this stuffed monkey thing that I used to carry around everywhere. It moved with me to California when I was six and back to Israel when I was thirteen. And when I was fourteen, I left it in Israel when I moved back to the states again because I decided that it was an eyesore and I no longer cared for it. (See asshole shrapnel.)

So when I pulled it out of the bag last night, I was pretty sure my sister found it in a box at my maternal’s grandmother’s house, along with my stacks of old Mad magazines circa 1987 and stamp albums, because my grandmother would never let me throw anything like that away. My grandmother passed away this summer, so to have anything that smells even remotely of her house or remind me of her is just the greatest thing in the world.

And suddenly, the fact that I wasn’t hurtling myself into shark infested waters or whipping around Japanese steel against an army of Crazy 88s didn’t seem like such a bad thing.