I am writing from my childhood bedroom. Some of the books that still line the shelves: The Yearling, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, On the Road, The Tempest, Rabbit Run, Deliverance, The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, The Ox-Bow Incident, Franny and Zooey, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, and Hooray for Yiddish.

When cars come down Northrop Road, their headlights ricochet through the room’s corner windows. Tucked into my bed, at ten years old, I often imagined I was Anne Frank as the high-beams circled the room, soon to be followed by angry Nazi boots on the stair. Only we lived in a ranch. Later, I imagined a Helter Skelter scenario in our suburban neighborhood; when I learned that Sharon Tate was murdered on MY BIRTHDAY, I nearly plotzed*. But my most terrifying fantasy of all was imagining that we were the Clutter family, waiting to be murdered in our sleep by some two-bit criminals immortalized in one of my favorite books of all time.

I know, it explains a lot.

*Plotz: plats (standard) Yinglish, with juice. Rhymes with “dots.” German: platzen: to burst.

1. Bust, burst, explode (“I laughed so hard I thought I would plotz!”)
2. To be aggravated, frustrated, or infuriated to an extremity. (“He was so furious he almost plotzed!”)

–from Hooray for Yiddish, Leo Rosten

Filed under: Books, The End of the World as We Know It |