Just gave my last heart out to someone who has been here for 14+ years ...

[DFW]

32. As a kid, I was often embarrassed to admit my ignorance about many things

I never knew what or when Jewish holidays were, vaguely knew that some kids were invited by others to their Bar Mitzvah, but had no earthly idea what that was. In third and fourth grades, I had black classmates and teachers, but didn’t understand that the difference was supposed to matter. In fifth grade, a girl in my class invited me to her family’s house for Passover. I had to ask what in the world that meant, and when I was told she was “very Jewish,” I was too shy to let on I had no idea what that meant, either. Religion was absent in my family, so I wasn’t steeped in all these things people believed in.

We had ancient history in the fifth grade, so I knew the ancient Egyptians believed in Osiris and Anubis, and the ancient Greeks believed in Zeus, Athena and Apollo, but I didn’t get that people still believed in that kind of stuff. Sort of like the Assyrians. I had learned about the Assyrians, too, in my fifth grade ancient history class. I was 22 before I found out that there were still Assyrians all over the Middle East, and that some of them were living in Philadelphia, where I met them. For their part, they were surprised to meet a white guy from the South who had never been to the Middle East, but knew about Assyrians. I said, “sure, ziggurats, Ashur Bannipal.” BIG smiles, believe me!

When I hit puberty, I quickly realized I had what came to be known as “Arafat’s disease.” It’s a skin condition where your facial skin is super-sensitive, and mine turned bright red, like a boiled lobster if I shaved it, even with an electric razor. Well, if you’re a male pubescent teenager in America, you don’t get any girls if you look like a circus freak, so I stopped shaving. My school gave me hell for it, but my social life was more important to me than what the trustees of some school wanted. I quickly found out that it made me “look” Jewish. The look didn’t impart me with any more knowledge about their culture than I had before, but when I entered college at age 18, at least I wasn’t the only guy that looked that way any more, and my social life improved.