Story of the Day 6/ 29/ 2009

Story of the Day 6/ 29/ 2009

This story isn’t finished, which makes it hard to begin.
My husband works in Greenwood.
Greenwood is part of Indianapolis.
Sort of.
It is more white and more Christian.
The streets have names like Christmas Tree Lane and Mistletoe lane and…well, you get the idea.
And, my husband, with his beard and his kippah, gets occasional….comments. Even at work.
He has learned to cringe when he hears, “I hope you don’t’ mind if I ask something personal…” or one of several other conversation openers.
He has also gotten used to having a patient refer to his kippah as a “teapot”. Okay, he didn’t’ really get used to that one.

So, following one of those conversation starters, and after he has already started cringing, he is out and out stunned when his elderly patient starts telling him, after the initial explanation about how she used to live across the street from a rabbi, that she has a Torah.
She didn’t’ plan on having the Torah- she got it somehow when fire gutted the rabbi’s home and it was cleaned out.
Of course, did the rabbi actually have a Torah in his home? My husband asked her , “well, how big is it?” “Is it written on paper, or is it on parchment?”
All that he can figure from this is that it is a scroll, it is on parchment, and it may or may not be a Torah. (Other possibilities, which are really much more likely include it being a Megillat Esther ( Scroll of Esther) which would be found in a home.
But the real humdinger came next. It turns out that this lady has been wanting to get it out of her closet for a while.
She even called Shapiros and asked them what to do with it.

Now, I have to explain what Shapiros is….it is a Jewish style ( as in not Kosher) restaurant which is in a non-Jewish neighborhood. Well, if you count the residents of the old cemetery, maybe it is a Jewish neighborhood.

And my husband and I are both trying to visualize who at the restaurant would have answered the phone ,and what they thought was going on.
Oh, and of course, almost everyone who works there is not Jewish, just in case you wondered.
My husband spent a little time explaining to the woman that if it is a Torah, the issue will be if it is repairable or not- and if not how it will have to be buried.
At any rate, the woman- his patient with the unusual conversational topic of the decade, is supposedly going to drop it off for him at the office.
Since she has been his patient for about 15 years, and has procrastinated long, my husband is not sure what her time frame is.

So, the story is not finished. And we are not even very sure what the story is yet.
But it is……certainly something he never expected to happen to him in Greenwood.