Dreidels on the Brain by Joel ben Izzy Read Free Book Online Page A

for
Mr.
Temple, who, by the way, wasn’t Jewish, because Temple isn’t a Jewish name. Go figure. As far as I can tell, he was the one who came up with the money to plan out Temple City, which I figure cost a dollar and seventy-nine cents. That’s how much a pad of graph paper costs at Midway Drug Store. And really, he only needed one sheet to plan our city; he probably used the other pages to plan out the other suburbs around here as well because, like Temple City, they’re all squares, squares, and more boring squares.
    Now, I know what you’re thinking, especially if you’re not from around here. That Los Angeles is Hollywood, and that’s where movie stars live. That’s what my cousin Abby thought, when she came here from Bethesda, Maryland, last year for Kenny’s bar mitzvah. As soon as she got here she started looking around, like she was trying to find someone. When we asked what she was doing, she said she was looking for celebrities. We laughed and explained that we’vebeen here all our lives and have never seen anyone famous, and that movie stars aren’t actually real people, and even if they were, they would hang out at the beach, which is miles and miles from Temple City.
    You might be wondering how my family ended up stuck here, in Temple City. I wonder the same thing. As near as I can figure, it’s because of the Rose Parade. My mom and dad both grew up in Cleveland, a big, old industrial city that’s so polluted that a couple years ago its Great Lake—Erie—actually caught on fire! That’s bad. But that was during the summer, when Cleveland is hot and sticky. In the winter it’s freezing, too cold to go outside. As kids they would wake up each New Year’s Day, trapped in their houses, looking for some way to escape, and turn on the TV. And what would they see?
    Thousands of people, some in shorts and shirtsleeves, standing along a boulevard lined with palm trees stretching up to the sky, in a place called Pasadena, California. Huge floats glided past, everyone on them wearing beautiful gowns or bathing suits, smiling and waving. But the most amazing thing of all was what covered the floats. Roses. Bazillions of them, something unimaginable in the Cleveland winter. Had a single rose appeared anywhere in Cleveland, it would have instantly frozen and shattered, its petals falling to the ground. Yet, there they were in full bloom. To people trapped inCleveland—including my parents, who hadn’t seen the sun in weeks—Southern California was paradise. Though their TVs could only show the rose-covered floats in black-and-white, my parents saw them in every imaginable color—and in those colors, the dream of a new life.
    A lot of people have dreams they never follow—but not my dad. He told me how he and my mom decided to get married and move out west, where they would buy their very own bungalow set on a hillside surrounded by orange trees. Every orange you ate would remind you that you were living the Pasadena Dream.
    By the time I was born, at the rear end of the 1950s, that dream had all but faded away. It turns out my parents hadn’t been the only ones to see the Rose Parade. Millions of people came to Southern California, filling up Pasadena and spilling down into the San Gabriel Valley. They started new suburbs, and suburbs of
those
suburbs—including Temple City. And they all drove cars, clogging up the freeways and filling the valley with a gray muffin of smog.
    And what about the Pasadena Dream? I’ve only ever glimpsed it. I remember one day when I was about five years old, this winter storm came through and washed away the smog. The next morning, the weather suddenly turned hot—you could actually see the steam rising from the ground. The desert was blooming! I looked up to the north,where there’s usually just smog, and saw mountains sharp and purple against the sky. Actually purple, like the song