A CHILDHOOD VIGNETTE

My dad had the coolest friends. I had forgotten this until recently. That is, until after his death. Because before his death, everything had sort of gone to shit already—and for a while. About twenty-five years at least. More or less from the time we left Israel and my childhood, as we know it, ended abruptly and, just as abruptly, America began.
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America was an odd place comprising a city called San Francisco in a thing called—by the odd name of California—which apparently was an even odder thing called a state. All of this was vaguely amorphous and came out in the shape of words spoken by my mother and her friends and relatives. I don't remember my father saying much about it. I don't remember him saying much, in fact, in those days. At least not to other adults. He did talk to me, but that was different. I don't think he liked talking to other adults, at least not in the way my mother did.
Back in Israel though, before my childhood as we know it ended and America began, there were certain adults my father did like talking to and, because he liked me also, my father would often take me with him to visit these adults. One of them was Diadia Liova, the upstairs neighbor. Diadia Liova was a photographer. And his apartment was a wonderland.
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For one, his wife, Tiotia Tania—who wore incredible bottle-thick and perfectly round giant glasses that made her eyes look teeny-tiny—was the possessor of tons of interesting stuff. My mother never had interesting stuff like Tiotia Tania's. Sure, my mother had that little wooden jewelry box inlaid with a mosaic of mother-of-pearl that I liked snooping through, in which she kept hers and my father's golden wedding bands and a couple of my grandpa's war medals. And there was that amazing handmade metalwork and raw amber necklace that she so cherished, which I would lose in college years later and never be able to forgive myself for.
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But my mother's paltry accoutrements, laid out meticulously in her neatly organized and very beige bedroom, could not compare to Tiotia Tania's veritable cornucopia of unearthly delights strewn about her treasure-trove of an apartment, of which every possible corner and crevice overflowed with a glorious mess that made my mother gasp in horror and amused-yet-wholehearted dismay (but never in Tiotia Tania's presence, of course).
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There were all manner of intricately glazed pewter clip-on earrings and brooches in the shapes of beautiful flowers. There were long beaded necklaces and big rings of every imaginable sort. None of this I saw Tiotia Tania wear, except on truly rare occasions. There were also beautiful eyeglass chains. These she did wear with her ubiquitous bottle-thick and perfectly round glasses.
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While wearing them, she would often—in what I found to be a very unusual sing-song Muscovite accent that resembled my family's Kiev-speak not at all—dispense endless compliments to my mother, who was ten years her junior, about her allegedly exquisite choice of outfit. I would then look closer at my mother, examining what it was that Tiotia Tania had taken such an extraordinary fondness to, but I was never quite able to make it out.
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Most of the time I'd notice that my mother's pants hugged her behind rather tautly and that she'd have on some elaborately knit sweater that rose regally from her bosom to her neck. After that, I'd see my mother's head cocked to one side, quizzically, smiling at Tiotia Tania and saying something self-deprecating like, "Oh please, this old thing? Stop!"
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That was how it went at our house, which was mostly beige and neatly ordered. But at Tiotia Tania's and Diadia Liova's house, there was always a glorious, beautiful mess—of which my mother disapproved, and my father and I were both deeply enamored. And so it always took some effort to get us out of there.