Blue Light Special

It’s the weirdest thing… Today, as we were writing in our student planners (or, more accurately, while I was taking attendance and the students were writing in their planners), a student said, “Oh, it’s Yom Kippur today!” I gave him a weird look, and he laughed and said, “What? It’s an important celebration day for my people.” I said, “Are you Jewish?” to which he responded, “I’m a ginger.” …as if that explained everything. This was new to me; I hadn’t heard of orange hair and pale, freckled skin as a common genetic pattern for Jewish people. Out of curiosity, I asked if he was Irish, and he said, “I’ll be Irish tomorrow.” (…again, as if that explained everything. This student has a fantastic dead-pan delivery.) But for today, he was content to stay Jewish. I asked him how he would celebrate Yom Kippur, and he said he would, and I quote, “Party down with my goats and yaks.” (And after all, isn’t that what Yom Kippur is for?) Yes, he said yaks. He informed me that yaks are very popular these days.

As if that weren’t strange enough, in a later class period, another student noticed the same holiday in the planner and then made a similar comment about it. When I looked at him askance, he laughed and asked if he could bring a yak to school for a class party. I can’t imagine that this was a coincidence – two different boys talking about yaks on the same day? I responded to this second student (who is not a ginger, in case you were wondering) by asking, “Why does everyone have yaks all of a sudden?” By way of a response, the second student said to me, “I think there was a yak sale at K-Mart.”