The Stars and the Cookie Jar

What do 100% wool trousers, a pearl necklace and a Tiffany bracelet have in common?

a) they don't belong to me

b) I never wear things like this

c) they make me feel uncomfortably fussed and high-maintenance

d) both b and c, with a smattering of a

...I am Semi-Casual today. As I will be roaming the collections and stacks, a suit is inappropriate (I might knock something over with my lapels). Also, I only have the one suit. So it's a camel tweed sweater and trousers, and darthrami's pearls and Tiffany bracelet. The bracelet I find strangely compelling; it hasn't been engraved yet, and maybe I shall take it and have 'I belong to N' put on it in teeny, tiny letters. It's true about the bracelet and others.

I have reverted to my old metropolitan custom of wearing street shoes and carrying my uncomfortable shoes in my bag. This makes exponentially more sense, as there is snow and slush on the ground.

This afternoon is the culmination of the longest interview process ever; thank you to everyone who has crossed their fingers for me.

I go and frow up now.

...And it's gone.

I was at the Holocaust Memorial Museum today.

I wondered how those people felt, all those years ago, when the ground changed under their feet.

A world of poetry. Singing. Jazz clubs and dancing. A world of kisses and babies and shared meals and soccer balls. A world with a language that had no bounds. A world of best clothes and home-knitted mittens. The world you live in when you safely lock your door behind you in the morning, knowing that you will come home and warm up again and there will be food to eat and a bed that belongs to you, that your beloved and your books will be there. There was a world just like the one you own and disregard, knowing that what you work for and bruise your muscles for and nick the skin of your hands for and dirty your nails for is safe.

That world was washed away by ten years' rain and ground down into the ceaseless gray mud of Poland.

It's gone.

There's no getting it back.

Un di malekhem veynt.