The Mind Wanders and I Let It

There have been countless things I have wanted to write about lately, but precious little time. I suppose it's some sub-category of Murphy's Law which applies to writers, stating that when there is ample time for writing, one will be faced with a substantial block or deficiency of ideas, whereas when the writer's days are filled with other engagements, the desire to write will swell from within, along with a plethora of ideas on which to focus one's (figurative) pen. That leads to a build-up of ideas, triggering extensive entries like the one I'm about to write, entires that would--I assure you--end up running far longer if I didn't have mercy on my readers.

Anyway, few people in my life know of my astounding aptitude for remembering numbers. Birthdays, license plates, phone numbers, addresses, you name it. For someone who could barely function in a math class, someone for whom the most basic functions require signifcant lower lip-biting and whose existence depends on the power of language, I have a Rain Man-like gift for memorizing numbers. When writing yesterday's date, I had the suspicion that the date June 12 had significance for me, yet couldn't quite put my finger on the reason.

June 12, it dawned on me later, was Anne Frank's birthday. She would have been 75 this year. The Diary of Anne Frank was one of the most important, memorable and significant books of my childhood and I have never forgotten what I learned from it. At the time I read it, I was close to the age Anne was when she began writing it and had already commenced my own love affair with words, reading voraciously and keeping a diary. I knew little then of my own family's struggle during World War II; had little comprehension of the nightmare they endured and even less understanding of a world that could allow the Holocaust to happen. I simply understood that Anne was a young girl very much like myself--bright, introspective, curious. A girl just beginning to grow into a woman and feeling that intense anticipation; that desire to rush headlong into experiencing all the things a woman experiences.

Although my grandmother was born on January 20, she will often cite April 15 as her birthday, that being the day in 1945 when she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen. I can only wonder which date Anne would choose to celebrate as her birthday, had she been lucky enough to survive to see her own liberation.

Posted by ayelet at June 13, 2004 10:17 PM