Where do you live?
Chanukah is over. The presents are long forgotten, and I had only one jelly donut at my niece’s engagement party. Of course I ate it in the car ride home because no one else at this party ate donuts, but that is okay. It makes me think of the Pesach program that I once visited a friend at.
The tea room was beyond, with its offerings of delectable treats and chocolates, and none of the women there looked like they had eaten in years. Why? No idea. But to each their own. If I die young because of my poor food choices, I won’t know because, well, I will be dead.
There were so many instagram postings of donuts this season. (There might have been last season as well, but my memory isn’t what it used to be, even for donuts.) Filled with everything from air to caviar (caviar, lotus, does it really matter?) and costing upwards of $10.
If I am going to pay $10 for one donut, I want someone famous feeding it to me while I am on vacation in a resort somewhere. Otherwise, an Entenmann’s donut, bought on sale, the kind with the chocolate crumbs on it, is good enough for me.
Back to the engagement party. Someone who is kind enough to read my column pointed out an error. When I wrote about living in Bergen County, I mentioned that I had lived in Teaneck and Fair Lawn. How could I forget that I once lived in Englewood???? (This person lives in Englewood.)
Not that most of you care but, yes, Husband #1 and I lived in Englewood for the first two years of our wedded bliss. We made two brises (is that the plural for bris?) there, catered by Marty from Menagerie, and had a very nice group of other newly wedded friends.
Our first apartment in Linden Lawn, which is now called something else, was apartment I 8. Yes, with all my jokes about food, I can only remember my first apartment because it was I 8. I ate too much, I ate even more when I was pregnant in that apartment, and I 8 was just too good to not pay homage to.
We had a cute little old lady next door who we used to invite over and say Havdalah for. Of course, living right next door to a newly married couple gave her a front-row seat to every fight we had in that apartment. Ahh, good times.
We even looked to buy a home in Englewood. Of course, the only homes we could afford smelled like dog. I am not even kidding. Was it a marketing ploy by the real estate agents? If you like dogs, this is the house for you!
I also was looking for houses when I was very pregnant with Son #2 and I was very sensitive to smell. There was one house we saw that I walked in, took a breath and said, “Nope, there is definitely something dead in this basement.” And I turned around and never looked back. Very lovely people bought that house and redid it. I never had the nerve to ask them about the dead body.
There was another house we looked at where the agent showing it to us kept telling us how the kids who grew up there went to Harvard. Apparently, this was a selling point, possibly the only selling point because the roof looked like it lost a battle with some very large squirrels.
But the kids went to Harvard, so who needs a roof??
In any event, Husband #1 and I lived in Englewood, and we are proud of that. We often wonder that, if we stayed there, would we still have three Oreos? The road not taken is never worth taking, because there is no point.
Teaneck was wonderful to our boys, and it brought them to where they are today. That’s our story and we are sticking to it!
Just kidding, we are extremely thankful to God for our boys and their lives and, especially, Baruch Hashem, their kids.
So, to make a long story short, I am sorry that I forgot to include Englewood as one of the places in Bergen County where I lived.
The end.
Banji Ganchrow of Teaneck just had a lovely Chanukah with Strudel and her sisters and her parents. She never let her own kids sleep in her bed, but Strudel feels right at home there, and Husband #1 has been sleeping across the hall. Poor guy.
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