“It’s something I’ve tried to avoid. Something I didn’t want to have in our house at all. But it looks like it can’t be avoided any longer”
In my room, I poured a little puddle of white glue right onto the smooth surface of the desk.
It reminded me of that day in Tishrei a long time ago. I was seven or eight, and Dudi was a bochur. I was fixing a decoration for Savta’s succah, gluing back some stones that had fallen off a mosaic. And the whole time, we were arguing about the glue.
Dudi kept trying to explain to me that it was a plastic substance, and I kept saying it wasn’t plastic, it was glue. He said no, he meant plastic as an adjective, not a noun. It was a concept in physics, he said. I had no idea what he was talking about, and his explanations were only making it more confusing.
“I don’t care,” I told him. “To me, it’s just white glue, and I just want to get this succah decoration fixed. Why won’t you let me call it white glue like everybody else calls it?”
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