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Virus Schmirus — A Little Yiddish in the Age of Corona Virus
Years ago I was visiting a friend in North Carolina. Her mother, who was a great shopper, had heard of a small town near where my friend lived that had many second hand stores, including a bookstore. I am a lover of books. Not so much a lover of shopping, but I was a guest and these two women were my favorites to go on adventures with. We headed for our destination with the anticipation of many bargains. After an hour of tolerating my friends driving — think Annie Hall — we arrived and parked on the main street of a small southern town. Indeed, the streets of this remote mecca were lined with second-hand stores, every house seemed to be having a yard sale, and the bookstore was huge, housed in an old southern mansion in need of a paint job. We had landed in a heaven for shoppers who were also financially challenged.
I found a few tchochkes at the shops we went in, nothing special, a nice glass cream pitcher for my mother, and a small print of a Degas dancer for myself, hand colored by someone, perhaps the artist himself, and only fifty cents. We wandered into the bookstore after lunch. The three of us were tired after having eaten heavily on fried chicken livers and cornbread with slaw and fried okra, all washed down with sickeningly sweet southern tea . We were in the south, I think we’d even shared a piece of coconut cake for desert…
