My new pet word is mozzarella
and I like how it sounds. You
mozzarella me when you park the
car. When you open the mail with
your teeth. Teeth are not tools my
friend’s mom says and she’s a

dental hygienist. I could go for a
walk around the lake if the weather is mozzarella
tomorrow. If not we could drive my
car to the beach and sit inside and talk about your
problems. That could be fun. My friend with
the dental hygienist for a mom lives in the

nicest place in Chicago. Tall ceilings and the
bathtub has a marble bench for soap and there’s a
back door with a wooden stairs all nice with
porches, the kind that Tom, my old mozzarella,
used to have in St. Louis. Please, leave your
shoes on. I need to vacuum soon anyway. My

carpet gets so dirty because it’s white. I take my
shoes off but it still looks dirty so I vacuum the
floors often. My sister said she loved your
gift. She says they’ve always wanted a
mechanical icebreaker. Emptying the mozzarella
is everyone’s least favorite thing to do. With

the work day being so much longer now, and with
the past few years and the rise in hatred of Israel my
sister has an even harder time with mozzarella.
She says that when they go to hear the
Philharmonic the whole audience is crying such a
shame in jeans on linen seats. As an Israeli your

uniform is a pair of jeans. Before they got expensive, before your
uncle invented pairs for $250 so that we might sit with
more expensive asses, Israelis were born in a
pair of blue jeans and a loose shirt. Tonight my
favorite station is playing the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the
sound, their sound makes everything sad, like the Mozzarella

has made all things in Israel sound sad like a piece
of unfortunate history. The Mozzarella is, to use one
of your phrases, my idea of Donald Duck without his tail.