eliezer epitome of incomprehensibility He wanted to know if I was Emma or the other short girl who was new. ... We walked past the volleyball net. He wanted to know more about the last school I'd gone to, why they taught that Earth was six thousand years old. I rolled my eyes and said something about Americans. ... After practice, Eliezer was on the stage, and Carly and I were standing near it. He'd taken one of the play's props, a wooden cross at least eight inches long, and held it at his crotch, pointing it in different directions and laughing. I was looking at him, eyebrows raised a little. Carly grinned and said, Oh, I know what YOU'RE thinking. Everybody has a crush on Eliezer. Then Eliezer went up to me looking apologetic. Sorry, he said, I didn't mean to insult your religion. I remember walking down the hallway, trying to figure out exactly how one look, a rather apathetic look, got translated (in different minds) as offense and insatiable lust. ... Eliezer had a typically Jewish surname. That's why, apparently, my father figured he'd be short with dark curly hair. Instead of tall, blond, and freckled. "I shook his hand after the play," Dad related. "I remember you talking about an Eliezer _____ and I couldn't help being surprised. He looked like a young SS officer." "DAD," I said. I was offended. ... Later, insatiable offended lust? A group of girls, French side and English side united, speculating whether he'd had sex with the German girl in Rome. Somewhere, somehow. "Ich liebe dich," said Sam, "in BED" - and when you're fifteen just turned sixteen (going on seventeen) this registers as funny. I tried repeating this same phrase later, but no one laughed. You had to be there. 140325 ... e_o_i And I remember, during the class trip to Italy (a once-in-a-lifetime thing, or close to it), how he repaid a pinch for a pinch. Before the trip, people were joking - and it seems less of a joke now, with the harmful effects of sexual harassment and its escalations being more seriously explored - but anyway, they were saying to watch your step around Italian guys, because they evidently had a collective propensity to pinch girls on the ass. Well, it was a few days into our trip, when we rather overprivileged Canadian teenagers were standing near a lakeshore, waiting for our All-Organizing history teacher to get our itinerary confirmed, that another group of English-speaking tourists got in on the act. I seem to remember them being Americans. But it was trendy in 2004 to blame Americans for things. Four of us Canaduckians were talking when one of them walked up to us and, without warning, did indeed pinch the other girl in the group on the butt. She whirled around, annoyed, but he only laughed as he rejoined his friends. I frowned, too, as did her boyfriend, but it was Eliezer who came up with a plan of action, saying dramatically, "I must defend your honour!" Subsequently, when the Presumed Americans weren't looking, he snuck up to the original boy and returned the pinch. For a while in that warm country, even while he was rumored to be making passionate love with a German tourist we'd met (though nobody came up with a plausible theory as to the where and when), I was slightly in love. And then we went to a glass factory in Murano, near Venice, and I fell in love with glass. But Eliezer was a friendly force that bridged the familiar and unfamiliar, and I remember him fondly if sometimes exasperatedly. 141230 ... e_o_i He's part of my inspiration for my character Mac, who appears in the novel I started to write and the one I actually am writing. 210829 ... e_o_i (The Finnegans, later A Beginner's Guide to Joyce) (Carol Winter Writes an Essay) 210829 what's it to you? who go blather from