Ungeshikt and other Disasters of the Untalented

Succos is over and I cannot even begin to tell you how many challos I baked. Or how many roasts I put up. Or how many side dishes I made and threw out because you have to make side dishes for yom tov in order to put color on the plate, but nobody eats side dishes because nobody (like my sons) likes any vegetables or fruits that are cooked, and I am not, NOT, making brown ferfel to put next to the brown roast and brown potato kugel (which is always on the menu for some reason). Whew.

I made Bobby-day camp for the grandchildren while their mothers slept late, read stories and entertained them with drama and singing and gymnastics in the park. Let me tell you, I was a class act.

As I was saying, I won’t even tell you how geshikt I was this past yom tov. Because I was geshikt like you have never seen, if you are interested in hearing.

Which brings to mind the problems I had in high school. Which is feeling very ungeshikt (what is the English translation for geshikt??? klutz? Nudnik? Such good Yiddish words for all the things I felt like when I was fifteen…).

Geshikt is talented. But it’s way more than that.

Let me tell you all my tzorres (Yiddish for problems) about being the most untalented, dumbest person in all of the United States of America the years that I was in high school. If you think I am exaggerating, I am. But what I am not exaggerating is how I felt, not what was actually true.

You want to know who was amazingly talented?

Frieda and Raizy. They were always heads of dance and were unbelievably graceful.

Rutty who had the zaniest sense of humor that made everyone in a fabulous mood whenever they were in her vicinity.

Miriam, who effortlessly breezed through school. No math, no essay, no regent ever took too much sweat.

The members of the Solomon family who starred in every single play and performance whether in camp or in school, bringing down the house with their incredible acting and singing.

Tzivi, Rivky, Malya, and Hindy who were just simply brilliant, their conversations beyond mere mortals as they talked about calculus or Ramban.

Sori, whose prowess at baseball and machanayim and basketball won every tournament and intercamp leagues.

Chany, whose creativity and ingenuity was the envy of all, her projects original and colorful, her ideas out of the box, garnering everyone’s admiration.

And what did I know how to do?

Nothing much.

While I slaved over a writing assignment in ninth grade, Tzivi got an A on some composition extolling the virtues of cockroaches. Cockroaches!

When I was sure my teacher had given me the wrong mark on my History regent, mixing me up with Esther Davidson whose name preceded mine, because I could not believe I actually got a 96, my teacher reassured me that the 96 was mine; Esther had gotten a 100.

I was in the French class, part of the elite allowed to learn a foreign language; and when I received a 95 on a test conjugating French verbs, my teacher accused me of cheating.

My scrapbook on the Lamed Tes Melachos looked like the work of a third grader, my artwork hopelessly messy and immature.

I was Beggar Number 3 in the school performance and had stage fright saying my lines. I was Head of Sports in eleventh grade and even though we won, I acted like a sore loser all throughout a game against another school.

I could not sing or dance or play an instrument. I could not bake or cook or figure out geometry. I could not get my tenses straight, read dikduk Rashis, or sit through a single class without somehow misbehaving.

Whatever the antonym is of geshikt, I was that antonym (and I was always confusing antonyms and synonyms, by the way. So you can go look up those two while I wait here…no pressure).

Which makes it funny when my high school friends (the one I didn’t know I had but who I hung around with because I thought they were just being nice to me) meet me at a wedding and say, “Hey, Malka, just read your column in Mishpacha and you are soooo funny!”

And I say, “Funny? What was funny?”

And they say, “You know, how you pretend you were such a failure in school!”

And then they tell me interesting stuff about me that I hadn’t known. Or really, maybe I knew, but I was so insecure as a kid in so many ways, I could not really believe the things I should have known (am I making any sense to you? No, right? Well, that’s exactly how I was as a teenager. Totally not making sense!). Like how popular I was in school and everyone knew exactly who Malka Davids was in those days. And how I was so smart, and everyone knew it. My nose was always in a book and I always read such smart books and was involved in such smart conversations with all my very smart friends!

And I am listening to my friends talk, and I can’t believe they are saying this, because when I was in school, although I knew my friends were smart, I thought of myself as the dumbest one.

And they remember how great I was at sports, and always played against Sori because if we were ever on the same team, nobody ever had a chance. And I always had such original ideas, like Operation OPCO (a different column so contain your curiosity!), and things were always fun when I was around.

Whew.

Really? Why didn’t I know all of this when I was in high school? It sure would have made my life easier!

“And remember the journals we had to write in tenth grade? You were one of the only two girls who got an A plus, plus!”

“Yeah,” I tell my friends, “but that’s because I stuck in a lot of pictures and quotes in it. Nobody else cared about writing like I did, so nobody else put in that kind of effort.”

But I remember that journal now. And I know now that those tenth grade journals were one of the first steps to my becoming a writer today. Except for the novel I wrote when I was in third grade. Yep. I wrote a novel in third grade. So maybe I wasn’t as untalented and ungeshikt as I thought I was? Coming to think of it, I also wrote a play in third grade that my group performed. And another play in sixth grade that we performed at a class shabbaton. And it was me that thought of making a chagigah in eighth grade that I told you about in a different column. And it’s over 35 years later and the school is STILL making an eighth grade chagigah. Although I doubt any chagigah can be as fun as that very first one I organized as a student.

Hmm. I was one of four ninth graders chosen for a part in the school performance. I didn’t cheat not one bit to get that 95 on the French test. I did get a 96 on the regent. I did win the sports game for my team in eleventh grade. I also organized and created the entire prop and scenery set for the school performances. Also in camp. And Operation OPCO was truly a success (stop being curious! I will tell you about it next time!). and even though Tzivi’s cockroach composition stole the day in ninth grade, nobody is reading her column this minute. But lots of people are reading mine!

So maybe, if anybody is reading this and wondering how I could have been so wrong about being talented and geshikt when it is so obvious I had plenty of gifts and contributions, they could lean a very important moral from this column (that was sneaky, wasn’t it? sneaking in lessons into a column when you are supposed to be reading this just to have fun or avoid doing homework?). And that moral is: everyone has got some talent. And it would be really, really, really dumb to have to wait until your are my age (grandma-age!) to feel geshikt about whipping up a grand Succos when you should have realized that you are whipping up great stuff all your life!

Originally published in Mishpacha Teen Pages