Shmingegge

"You have to laugh..." my Mom would say.

Her name was "Shmingegge" - that was what everyone in my mother's family callled her. My father also called her Shmingegge. Her name was also Pauline. There is no information about the name "Shmingegge". There is information about the word "shmegegge", but that is neither here nor there. Yiddish in our house, in our family, was something from the "old country" - from somewhere far away and forgotten, like the language of nursery rhymes and stories that people heard and repeated and changed and the changes repeated till they sort of caught on for a certain style or sound - like "five and dime" or "c'mon will ya" - something like that. No one really was an authority on this language - you had to ask what it meant and then take it or leave it - whatever you got for an answer, It had a sort of secret code password associated with it like "Joe sent me" - and you either got in the door or you didn't - it took a lot of street savvy to get around in those days - you just didn't question these things. Her name is not as important as that everybody called her that. What was more important about Pauline was who she was and how she made a living.
Pauline wore outlandish clothing - flowered robes. She wore hats indoors - in her apartment. She was a strange person. My father forbid my mother to go see her and especially not to bring me along, Pauline used a rectangular magnifying glass to read with - a large rectangular magnifying glass with a long handle. She would hold it up to objects and read the labels on them. Her entire kitchen table was covered with bottles and boxes of stuff - perfumes and band-aids, deodorants and fountain pens, toothpaste, soap, nail polish - all kinds of stuff all crowded together - things that made no sense being together - shoe polish, mercurochrome (they used to use that for disinfecting cuts), cotton swab packages, lipsticks - things that you would find, perhaps on the shelves of drugstores or other shops. In fact, that's probably exactly where Pauline found these things see? Are you getting the picture? - because I never did - I was about ten years old and all I knew was that Pauline would talk with my mom and look at things with her magnifying glass and after a while my mom would take home a zillion ball point pens and lipsticks and stuff like it was Christmas or something - she would even give a lot of this stuff to her friends and family!!
My dad would get really mad at my mom for this. "What if you get caught" - he said. "You're not allowed to do that, don't ever go there again!" It was years - years and years - before I really understood what Shmingegge did for a living. G-d bless her - she might be alive today - she would probably be one hundred and five years old! The whole family knew her - they all went to see her from time to time. There were always plenty of ball point pens and deodorants and toothpaste around, I'll tell you that. To this day, I feel that it's improper somehow that I have to pay for a ball point pen! Pauline never charged for these things! - well probably not that much I guess.