[copied from dland]
Here's how I got the purple chai. Like most stories, it starts in more than one place and then comes together, the way streets come from all over the city and converge at a traffic circle. (Forgive me, I spent last weekend in DC).
First Avenue
When I was a kid, I wore a tiny little gold star on a chain around my neck. We were wearing, we said, Jewish stars. All the little girls I knew wore them, no more than a quarter-inch across, on a delicate little chain. All the little girls I knew were Jewish, like me. But back then, when I was small, I never knew anyone who went to synagogue or actually practiced the Jewish religion, except my grandpa. Grandpa is a story for another day.
But they sent me to Hebrew school for a while, in a scary old YMHA, in North Bergen, I think. The building looked like the original Jews who followed Abraham had built it there. I was about 6 or 7. We learned Bible stories and a couple of Hebrew alphabet letters. I learned to read one word in Hebrew: chai. This is pronounced like the word "high", but the first sound is the guttural "hhcchh" you hear in Hebrew or Yiddish.
If I remember correctly, chai is a letter in the Hebrew alphabet that is also a word and a number. The number is 18. The word chai means life. The Hebrew name for Adam, father of us all, is Chaim. The expression, used as a drinking toast "L'chaim!" means "To life!"
Sometimes I would see other Jewish people wearing not a little star on a chain (it is really called the Mogen David, which means the Star of David, and not a Jewish star), but a chai. In fact, I noticed, there was a small letter chai in the center of the little star I wore.
Second Avenue
I moved when I was eight, to a community, my parents said, where there were many more Jewish families. It didn't seem that way to me, I guess because my old home was in a heavily Jewish neighborhood within a larger Gentile community. My new hometown was much bigger, and much more diverse, so I thought. There were at least as many Catholic kids in my school as Jewish kids, and we were all in the same school together! There were kids in my school with Italian last names! I had never met any of those before.
I stopped wearing my star because I didn't like wearing jewelry anymore, and it kept sticking me, and none of my friends were wearing stars or crosses or anything. Some of the Jewish kids I met belonged to the synagogue across the highway, and most of the other kids I knew went to church somewhere. I went to Sunday school, in the YMHA in Paterson; it made the North Bergen branch look like it had been built that morning. This place gave new meaning to creepy, dark, and scary, especially on a Sunday morning when the only sounds in the building came from the old men going to and from the pool.
Still, no one in my house went to synagogue or seemed to believe in anything; my parents just wanted me to be culturally literate in my own background. After a few months they pulled me out of the Y Sunday School (Thanks, Mom! Thanks, Dad!) and found someplace new. Some local organization had decided to open a non-religious (yes, that's right) Sunday school for the local Jewish kiddies, which would be held each Sunday just up the block in my very own real school. The Sunday school group rented the space, and once in a while I actually read Bible stories at my own third-grade desk. They didn't teach us Hebrew (feh!) but Yiddish. If only I had paid attention. We had big Purim parties, you know, the Jewish Halloween where every little girl dresses as Queen Esther. This Sunday school lasted for a year or two, I think.
In seventh grade, the big fashion trend among my set was the name necklace, we each wore a little gold plate about an inch across (depending on your name) in print or script, that hung from a chain attached to it at each end. Everybody had one. One day a girl showed up with a tiny cross attached to the chain at one end of her name. Within about five minutes, each of us found the appropriate symbol and got it soldered on. I found my tiny Mogen David and there it was. The correct fashion accessory. I was okay.
Third Avenue
When I was 16, I got the CHARM BRACELET from my parents, the fashion accessory of that age and place. Friends gave me charms for my sweet sixteen, one kind of another. Grandma and Grandpa, as befit their age and nature, gave me the religious charm, the one I would wear on my cool bracelet as a sign of my Jewishness: a tiny little Torah, gold with a white gold door that actually opened, showing the sacred scroll inside. This is called a mezuzah.
When I went off to college in the strange southern land of Maryland just two and a half years later, I thought I should mark myself somehow as a member of my particular group of people. So I went and bought a cheap little silver (at least, silver-colored) mezuzah on a cheap silver (colored) heavy chain. I think it cost about $8. I put it on and set off to college, Jewish for all the world to see. I had still never been in a synagogue in my life, except once for each of my two cousins' Bar Mitzvahs.
Fourth Avenue
Just after Christmas of my senior year of college, I broke up with a boyfriend I had dated for nearly three years, and whom I had fully expected to marry. I broke up with him, for all kinds of right reasons. His being not Jewish was not one of them, for this was irrelevant to me and to my parents. He was, however, a schmuck. For his last act as boyfriend, he gave me a check as a Christmas gift. He gave me $35. A week later, broken up and with $35 in my pocket, I went to the nearest Service Merchandise jewelry counter to see what I could get. Remember, this was 1975, so it's not as impossible as it sounds.
There it was: a chai. Gold, flat, a little less than a half-inch across, both from side to side and up and down. A charm. Lightweight, but substantial. I thought, this is life, this is my life going on. I am okay, I am strong. I should wear a symbol of life, and of who I am. Jewish is a big part of who I am, not religion maybe, but my ethnic identity, my roots are Jewish. I bought the chai. I began to wear it all the time, on a simple gold chain around my neck.
Fifth Avenue
I wore the chai off and on for all the years since. I made sure to wear it through both of my pregnancies. My husband -- not Jewish -- thought nothing of it; he knew that it was not religious and that it was a symbol of life and of my heritage. In recent years, especially since my mother became ill in 1995, I wore it all the time. The same gold chai I bought for $35 in 1975.
Sixth Avenue
So I'm on a class trip with about two hundred kids and a dozen other teachers in 1995 and I notice that a few of the younger teachers have -- gasp! -- tattoos! These are nice normal teacher-types, not Hells' Angels bikers, and they have tattoos! How terrible! How revolting! How intriguing!
So I ask the first idiotic question that everyone without a tattoo asks: "Did it hurt?" The answer, of course, is a derisive "Yeah." (Tone of voice here says, and rightly so, "What are you, a moron?") Yet my best chum and I remain intrigued. Not only do we begin to consider the amusing possibility of tattooing ourselves for our upcoming 50th birthdays, we begin to realize that there are a whole lot of other women our age doing the same thing.
Chum comes back from summer vacation 2001, now age 50, with a lovely tattoo on the outside of her left wrist. I'm thinking, thinking. Older daughter gets a tattoo the minute she's old enough, a small five-pointed star less than an inch across on the inside of her left wrist.
What will I do? What WILL I do?
Seventh Avenue
I decide: I will get a tattoo. All I have to do is decide what it is I want to carry on my body for the rest of my life. What shape, what design, what meaning, what color?
September, 2001. What will I do? Suddenly I realize: chai. I have always worn a chai, so I will always wear a chai. I would like a tattoo that looks just like my charm: a small, golden, chai. My daughter points out that they will never tattoo something small that looks gold. Yellow, maybe. Hmmm.
September 11, 2001, and I am watching along with everyone else as the horror plays out on the TV night and day. New York is only ten miles from my home; two of the boys at school have lost their father in the attack on the first tower. Life is short.
September 25, 2001, and I have taken the day off from school to go to the dentist, do some errands. Driving down the road, I think, if only I knew what color to get my tattoo, I would do it today. I would do it now. I would be passing the tattoo place anyway. Looking down, I notice that I am wearing a purple t-shirt with a purple button down shirt over it. I've got this purple thing going on; I've been wearing purple for about two years now. It's from the poem "When I Am an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple." (That's not really the name of the poem.) It says that now that I'm older I don't have to care what other people think, I can just be me. I can wear purple, so I do.
Purple. Chai. Purple. Chai.
So I went, I got it. I wear a purple chai on my left wrist, where I can cover it with a watchband if I have to, but I haven't worn a watch since the day I got it. Each time I look at it I think, I did this for me. I did this because I wanted to. It says what I want it to say. It looks like I want it to look.
Thanks for taking the tour of the city, ladies and gentlemen, here we are at the traffic circle.
Chai.
WATCHING MASH :: ENTRY #1800
