Me and my new Jewish phone

On the subject of tripping, imagine my surprise when I took a look closely at the new cell phone I was looking to purchase Wednesday (and did purchase last night) and saw this:

If you zoom in and look closely, along with letters in the English script are letters in the Jewish script from the Hebrew alphabet. And Jewish script is what it is called by scholars, according to that great source, Wikipedia, lest you think I’m being anti-Semitic. Which you shouldn’t anyway, since I bought this Jewish phone (my wife said I should call it a Hebrew phone, because she thought I might be too offensive), after all.

How did our local cell phone store get it?

They don’t know. It can’t be to supply the large Jewish community out here in the woods of northcentral Pennsylvania. I think I’ve met one Jew since we’ve moved here and I think she goes to a synagogue, which is about 60 miles away.

All of this somehow led my Caucasian wife and I, also Caucasian, both WASCs (White Anglo-Saxon Catholics), to a conversation about how many friends of the ethnic minorities (soon to be majorities) we have.

We have about one of each, and in some cases, two. The breakdown is as follows:

• ONE Jewish friend, who, bonus, is married to an African-American. TWO down.
• And another African-American, who is the boyfriend of my wife’s sister, and who probably will end up our brother-in-law, double bonus: we’ll have an African-American as a relative.
• ONE gay friend, who was in our wedding and to whom I always refer to my parents, as “Kim’s friend from high school, who was in the wedding, you know, the…(dramatic pause and then pronounced slowly and with a flourish)…LEZ-BE-AN.”
• THREE Asian friends, if you count Kim’s friend, Raj, who is from India. The other two are Soyoung, who is from Korea and who recently married my college roommate for some unknown reason (she’s hot and well, he’s…well, let’s just say if he wasn’t married, I thought we probably had two gay friends) and Tim, whom we met at a conservative Christian college we attended — if you can believe it — and who we always remember for saying once at a reunion in an art gallery full of people at the college, “Holy Shee-It. Holy Shee-it” upon seeing us. We don’t think he quite had the concept of the word being considered a swear word.
• HALF a Hispanic or Latino (depending on which terminology is in vogue this year) friend. I didn’t think we had any, but then my wife reminded me that we have a friend who is married to a woman who is half-Hispanic. So hey, we’ll count her.

To top it all off, when I mention to my mother that I have a Jewish phone, what does she say?

“Well, you’re not anti-Semitic, are you?”

Thanks, Mom, for the vote of confidence. Like suddenly I had strayed that far from the path I was raised and had hidden my Hitlerite tendencies all these years? (They’re in the basement, right next to my collection of Leninesque leanings and my Mussolini penchants.)