Friday, January 23, 2015

Anne Frank's Electrician

Today? Oh, I'm just still sitting around feeling relieved that I'm not in charge of feeding 100 homeless people tonight.  And you?

Also, I'm waiting for the electrician.  I have no idea what this guy thinks of us, by this point.  Due to Larry's insulation-installation hobby, once or twice a year, we invite our electrician to visit a gutted room in our home and install more electrical outlets.  It looks almost...I don't know...sinister, really.  Maybe he thinks we're building false walls to hide kidnapped people behind.  And the outlets would be for, um, I don't know...their Wi-fi?

No, that doesn't make sense.

Maybe he thinks we're planning to hide Jews from a newly resurgent Gestapo.  I'm Jewish, after all, and every Jewish person in my generation was raised to make plans to do an Anne Frank, if need be. Seriously.  We had games in Hebrew School during which we would discuss who would live where if every Jew we knew were to be confined to a few square blocks near our homes, a la the Warsaw Ghetto.  Because, like, that happens a lot...

Something tells me that you happy unpersecuted Christians never did that in Sunday School.  You were too busy singing about how Jesus loves you to worry about having to hide behind a bookcase, am I right?

When Apple introduced its IBooks app?  I immediately thought of this.


I mean, c'mon - the way it swings around to reveal the IBooks store?

How the heck did I get on this topic anyway?  Oh, yes, the electrician.  I don't know what he is thinking, but he does keep coming back.  And he hasn't reported us to the police.  Yet.  So that's good, right?

But I'll bet Anne Frank's electrician never suspected anything either...

9 comments:

  1. If I were in your shoes I'd wonder what the electrician was thinking too.

    But odd's are, he's just happy to have such regular business!

    ReplyDelete
  2. He's probably sending Larry subliminal messages about which room to strip down to the studs next month!
    If I ever build a dream home (which I won't because I'd like to stay married to my current husband) I will definitely have at least one secret door and passageway. However, we will flush the toilet whenever it needs it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Seriously, you played games about where you would hide? That is one way to frighten an entire generation!
    Worst thing that ever happened in Sunday School was when the teacher allowed my brother to be Joseph with his coat of many colors. The rest of the 3rd and 4th grade class (which included me, his picked-on younger sister) were allowed to beat him up and throw him into "the pit." We might have been a little rough in our handling of Joseph.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I used to wonder the same thing...and I was doubly exposed to that secret room thanks to Corrie Ten Boom. But to add to my general confusion about all things religious, I fantasized about becoming a nun just like Maria in the Sound of Music. Gosh, it seemed romantic to me. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Baptists don't really do the nun thing...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love reading your posts - there is always a little hidden gem that stays with me.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Oh no, Christian kids can be JUST as neurotic! I grew up on stories of Anne Frank and Corrie Ten Boom, whose family hid Jews in the attic, PLUS lots of stories about the persecuted underground church behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Russia and the USSR. I lay awake night and night, figuring out where we'd hide our Bibles and where we'd run to hide and worrying because our suburban bungalow had neither attic nor basement...not that basements are safe because they always find you there. Oh believe me, I still remember the extraordinarily vivid nightmares about the Communists shooting my parents... and the story of the pastor's wife who cleverly hid their Bible by popping it into a loaf of bread she was baking, but that wouldn't work for us because we had lots of Bibles...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yo, us Christians had a history of being persecuted, especially by the Romans with their lions in the Coliseum. Until we re-appropriated the word Roman, as in "Yo, you my Roman... you my Roman Catholic..."

    ReplyDelete
  8. I think the kids in my Sunday School class were too busy plotting their escape from Sunday School to think about escaping the Gestapo. (Unless the Gestapo had nuns.) Me, I was the teacher's pet, because I sat quietly in the back of the class scribbling execrable poetry into a notebook instead of smart-mouthing the nuns. I don't recall any singing (I generally liked singing and would have participated in that) and haven't retained much of anything from Sunday school except that I liked the extremely subversive segment on the history of the church (which they eliminated shortly thereafter on the grounds that religion, like sausage, is a lot easier to accept if you don't know too much about it).

    ReplyDelete