Itinerantdaughter's Blog

A young editor I once met at a party where we made gingerbread houses (Brooklyn is so weird) emailed me the following, when I reminded her of our initial introduction:

(Man, gingerbread houses: I could really go for one of those right about now.)
(Although, you know, what a tragedy they are, ultimately. Right? Like sand castles. Or sand mandalas. Anything made out of sand, basically.)
(And is all of that stuff actually edible?)
(Like, isn’t there glue and stuff, usually? I seem to remember this from childhood. You’d spend all afternoon building a g’bread house and then the teacher-type-person would be all, No, don’t eat it—it’s just for decoration. Which is like, teacher-type-person, have you ever met a child? I mean, seriously.)
(Forget it. Gingerbread houses are clearly the worst.)

“When I’d become a regular at the shop, [Shabtai, the owner] invited me to sit with him and have horrible coffee and stale cookies––this was a major step forward in our relationship.  From there, he started to ask me to watch the shop while he… it wasn’t clear exactly what he was doing.  It seemed he had other business in the market, possibly involving certain female acquaintances.  He had a serious flirtation going with the chain smoking lady who sold dish rags and mops.

During my time as deputy junk man, I got to know the shop regulars.  The cabbie who would come in after his shift in search of radios and call me “sweetie”––which, in Hebrew, is considered a macho thing for men to call each other––and would inevitably begin speechifying and tell me that when I returned to the US, I should ‘tell the Americans’ whatever slightly frightening political opinion he happened to hold that day.  There was a very old, very pious woman who inspected every item with Orthodox exactitude and usually ended up buying her grandson a coin from a distant, long-obsolete country.  Sometimes, I would end up watching the shop for a few hours––but I didn’t care.  For better or, more likely, for worse, minding a junk emporium in the Jerusalem outdoor market was kind of a dream job for me.”

~Avi Steinberg, The Lost Book of Mormon: A Journey Through the Mythic Lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, & Kansas City, Missouri