Don' t
anti
It

„..

If you're happy and
you know it, just hush.

C

ERICA RAUZIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

C/3

UJ

CC

0

Lu

=

Cat

aution. Watch what you say. You might undo some-
thing important.
I have been traveling under a strange new cloud
recently, like the little man in Eil Abner whose name
was spelled entirely with consonants. The minute
I notice something going right, it goes wrong.
This is a wide-ranging phenomena.
When I was giving myself a manicure just be-
fore a big party, I had the random thought that for perhaps
the first time in memory, all my nails were the same, nicely
rounded, slightly long, length. It looked perfectly elegant. I
am, after all, raising three children, an occupation that in-
volves heavy lifting and lots of mess. It is not conducive to
maintaining perfect fingernails, not that such an achievement
has been a ranking priority. But this one evening's ten-fin-

gered accomplishment did catch my attention. I never should
have noticed.
The nails didn't survive the evening: the first one to go snapped
before we ever got out of the house, snagged on my purse, and
was gone. Of course.
I noticed that my herbs were growing, and the next day, the
gardener mowed the herb patch. Of course.
I congratulated myself that after some years of building up a
collection of blue glass dishes and such, I finally had enough
dairy pieces to go around.
Ten minutes later, I dropped and broke a good meat plat-
ter, thus launching a whole new quest to, once again, search
for a special piece in a discontinued pattern. We selected
this china when we were engaged (some 17 years ago) be-
cause we loved the spiffy pattern, a pattern the manufactur-

