Observations: Pacifiers, passwords and pandemics

• Date: 07 January 2021
• Author: HERB KEINON
• Published date: 07 January 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Like their parents before them, Skippy and his wife decided not to cut their son's golden locks for the first three years of his life. There are many lofty and beautiful explanations for the old kabbalistic custom of letting a boy's hair grow wild until his third birthday, when it is then cut in a ceremony known as a chalaka or upsherin.

This ceremony marks a transition from babyhood to childhood, a physical passage from the wild and the unbridled to the tamed and controlled.

It also marks the moment when parents go from continuously searching high and wide for their son's pacifier, to looking endlessly for his kippa. Because once the long locks are shorn, the pacifier is generally discarded and a kippa is donned.

ADULT LIFE has many different stages, and they can be distinguished by the different objects one spends an inordinate amount of time searching for.

Skippy, with small children, is at that stage where he spends hours looking for pacifiers. When he comes for visits, there is at least one tense moment when one of his kids wants his pacifier and my son scours the house looking for it – sweeping the floor, stripping the beds, crawling under the tables.

"Why didn't you just bring an extra one?" is the parental question that always goes through my mind at moments like those, though I usually have the good sense not to ask it. And then, when the pacifier is finally located, it is as if the clouds part and the angels burst out in song.

Once the days of looking for the pacifier are over – generally after the upsherin – the days of looking for the kippa begin.

"Where's his kippa" my daughter-in-law now says in a constant refrain. "Has anyone seen his kippa?" Then, like the hunt for the pacifier, the floor is scoured, the beds are stripped and every possible nook and cranny is checked in the chametz-like search for the elusive head covering.

And when it is found? Unadulterated joy.

While I am long past the stage of searching for pacifiers, I remain well ensconced in a constant search for keys, and wallets and phones; as well as for the ketchup in the refrigerator and the purple onion in the vegetable bin. I swear, I spend half my life looking for things.

Attempts to just have one bucket in one set location where I deposit everything I need before leaving the house never worked for me. Besides, that doesn't solve the problem of the ketchup and the onion.

THIS SCOURGE of the search for items mislaid has only been exasperated in the computer age by the needs...