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22:34 - May 16, 2002
cream cheese
I keep remembering this conversation my uncles had right in front of me at the Sunday morning breakfast table at Thanksgiving. Marty was quizzing me on math, as always, piling tomatoes on his bagel and going sparingly on the fish. '7 x 8',' he said, accusingly, since it was the one he'd always forgotten in junior high.

'56,' I said immediately, because I had memorized it after years of being quizzed.

'Smart-ass..' he muttered, taking a bite out of his loaded bagel and rubbing his sizable tummy. Gene looked up from his forkfuls of lox. He was sitting next to me; kept sneaking spoonfuls of some disgusting food or another that I didn't want onto my plate. 'She's always been smart,' he barked in his thick Jewish-New-Yorker accent. 'I knew that from the first time she started talking to me, when she was a tiny baby.'

'Bullshit,' mumbled Marty through a mouthful of bagel. 'You don't know that kind of stuff. You just make guesses. She could be a halfwit for all you know. Look at her sitting there peeling the skin off the onions.'

I sat there, peeling the skin of the onions.

'No, I knew,' insisted Gene. 'She used to have these great creative open responses before somebody..' here he looked pointedly at Marty, '...scared her.'

'I didn't scare her,' Marty retorted. 'Remember? Marty makes zokes? I'm her favorite uncle, the little shit.'

'Aw, you're just ticked off because she liked my jokes better than yours. Remember? She told you I made better jokes? Eh?'

Marty smiled. His Santa Claus eyes twinkled and his Santa Claus beard had cream cheese in it.

'And the shape shifter,' Gene continued. 'The way her little sense of humour worked when she'd pretend to put the circle shape into the square hole and look up at us with this...'

'Shit eating grin,' finished Marty. 'Maybe she doesn't know her shapes. Hey! Hannah! If you've got the radius of this bagel and the depth of the cream cheese, you know how much is on there, right?'

'Right,' I lied.

'Yeah? I'm gonna write that out for you.'

'Trig...' I muttered.

'Simple algebra. I'm gonna be the one to teach you calculus. Root of all knowledge.

'Aw, c'mon!' burst in Gene. 'Calculus is the cream cheese. I mean, screw calculus. That's what's the matter with you. You think math is life. You use it to judge...'

'It's intelligence.'

'Cream cheese.'

'Intelligence.'

'Cream cheese.'

'Stop talking about it and pass it,' snapped my grandpa, who for once heard something that was being said. 'You're the cream cheese if you don't.. be quiet.'

 

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