Still Phony

I’ve taken a break from this space for some time now. Mostly this has been due to writer’s block. For the life of me I couldn’t think of anything trivial enough to write about. Things have been pretty serious around here: peace talks are in the toilet – raise your hand if you’re sorry about this. Then there was the fire in the Carmel followed by the firestorm in the Knesset and the media. And all of this was followed by the hurricane on Sunday which blew over one of my cypress trees. Well, this was serious to me. But I spent an inordinate amount of time in this period struggling with my new phone.

All I wanted out of life was to download a few ringtones, nothing too fancy. I would go to Google and could plainly see that there was nothing wrong with the connection. But from there the browser would just not work. Ok, once in a while it would give me something like you’d throw a bone to a dog. Most of the time, however, nothing/nada/bupkiss. It was getting me down.

Then yesterday I had a breakthrough. Now, I am renowned in the computer world for the gentleness of my touch and I have never worn-out a keyboard. You see, it turns out that touchscreen is something of a misnomer. I found this out when I tapped the infernal thing quite hard, more out of frustration than inspiration, and it blooming worked!

Suddenly I was able to acquire a few nice pieces like Debussy’s “Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” I’ve never actually seen flax and so I don’t really know what it looks like, but I think this is about a blonde girl because men never change. For my ringtone I went with Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” – just because I love it. I’m so relieved. I think I may also be unblocked.

Phony Baloney

In the neighborhood where I grew up there was a park with a great, big hill that had a reservoir on top. Most of the hill was wooded and the back of it was quite steep. My friends and I used to love to climb up the back way on the “trails” as we called them. It was a challenge and as close to an adventure as any of us had ever experienced. But for some reason it always freaked out my mother. “If you get hurt, don’t come crying to me,” she would say. I don’t think that ever stopped me and I don’t think I ever got hurt.

All this comes to mind because of our cell phone service provider. Orange says if we don’t buy new phones, they won’t fix the old ones should they need it. I like my old phone. It’s small and cheap and works perfectly as a phone which is all it does. Best of all, it has a flip-open cover, meaning you can close it and it doesn’t dial itself from the bottom of your purse they way the previous one did. I can’t tell you how many messages I got saying, “Your purse called me again.”

So I’ve had a dilemma. Should I keep my perfectly good old phone and hope that nothing goes wrong in the next two years? Is that even a good bet in the world of electronics? Or should I just cough up the money for a new one? Ultimately Orange had more luck than my mother did with the Don’t-come-to-me-if-you-don’t-do-what-I-want admonition. I’ve gotten more cautious in my old age.

That’s why I decided to upgrade. The new phone when it arrives will have a camera, an FM radio, a touch screen, an internet connection and GPS capabilities. I’m hoping I can also use it to talk to people, but that’s not part of the hype. I’ll just be happy if it doesn’t shop on the internet from the bottom of my purse.

What Feast of the Tabernacles?

We have arrived once again to the week-long holiday of Succot when we celebrate 40 years of wandering in the desert. As I’ve mentioned before in this space, I find it the most perplexing of Jewish holidays. I don’t know about you, but if I had been lost in the desert for all that time with no way to shower and nothing to eat but the same old manna every day, I would want to forget the experience as quickly as possible, not commemorate it.

But commemorate it we do. The main task involves building a tabernacle. When you get an instruction like this you know you’re in trouble. “Tabernacle” is a huge, substantial word for something so flimsy. Besides, some of us are, shall we say, mechanically-challenged and consideration ought to be given. Not only could I not build a tabernacle to save my life, I was the only kid in my kindergarten to flunk Tinker Toys.

Once you have the tabernacle you’re supposed to decorate it with the four species: palm, willow, myrtle and a citron. These aren’t the kinds of things you find laying around so you either have to shlep to a market to buy them at hefty prices or else raid a neighbor’s garden or national park, all of which is pretty unsavory.

Like I said, this holiday is nothing but trouble. The neighbors and Park Service wardens can rest peacefully and the emergency services can stand down: I will not build the tabernacle. In fact, I think I’ll just ignore the whole thing until it goes away. Wishing everyone a happy holiday, just please wake me when it’s over.

No Milk Today and Not Much Else

I’m so naive. After the splendidly long holiday weekend I genuinely expected to be able to shop as usual on Sunday afternoon. Wrong. I stepped into the kibbutz store only to be greeted by mostly empty shelves. I thought I had been transported back in time to the Soviet Union. There were no tomatoes, no bananas and no bread. Two people were arguing over the last bunch of grapes. And of course, there was almost no milk. There’s almost none in the whole country.

It seems that Israel’s cows have gone on strike in support of the airport workers. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, you can’t fly into or out of the country and you can’t drink a glass of milk while you’re here. What the airport workers grievances are I cannot say, although I suppose they revolve around money, but the cows are said to be aggrieved by the heat.

I don’t know about you, but I’m nonplussed. Summer here is always hot. If you look up the definition of “hot” in Webster’s Dictionary you’ll see it’s defined as “summer in Israel.” This can’t come as a surprise to the cows. As far as I know, they haven’t just emigrated from Finland. But somehow August was so hot that they stopped giving milk in September. This must be bovine logic.

The thing is, it stopped being really hot and humid three weeks ago. So why is there a milk shortage now? How big a lead-time could there be? I would have expected the stuff on the shelves to be slightly fresher than that. Like I said, I’m naïve. It couldn’t possibly be that the milk monopolies are holding back the supply to raise the prices for the holidays. That would be inconceivable.

Swimming the Channel

I’m a couch potato by nature. There’s nothing I like better than curling up with a mug of whatever and letting the Hollywood entertainment machine work its magic in my head. I’d be overjoyed to never have to move from that state of bliss. Sadly, in the real world if you want to live longer than 15 minutes you have to put in a certain amount of exercise. I don’t like it, but I do it. So when, during a chat with my friend, Maya, she mentioned that she’s swimming every day before work and that I should do it, too, because it gives her so much energy for the rest of the day, I inwardly groaned. The world if full of fitness gurus who want to get you out of bed early and run you around a track “for your own good.”

Still, there was something slightly attractive about the idea of having a dip on these sultry summer mornings. So I started doing it and it’s a humbling experience. I have always loved immersing myself in water. Like Labradors I think water is the best thing in the world. But as for propelling myself through it – isn’t that what outboard motors are for? Luckily, there are very few people there at that hour to witness my performance. I move at glacial speed through the lovely, silky water, enjoying every moment of it and just sorry I have to get out of it to go to work.

I don’t get the energy rush Maya talks about. If anything I find myself longing for a nap afterward. But come to think of it, I haven’t seen her there in the weeks I’ve been doing this. I guess we work on different schedules. In any case, I’m grateful to her for the suggestion because it’s about as pleasant as exercise gets. And as everybody knows, exercise is a good thing when it doesn’t kill you.

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, FIFA

Now that the World Cup is finally drawing to a blessed close, I find that I have some feelings on the subject. Normally I wouldn’t care because I’m so not a sports fan. Watching any sporting event for me is about as exciting as watching chorus lines of ants marching in and out of their hill. But for some reason this event seems to arouse global passions, so I thought it was worth a look.

Wrong. This is the most boring thing ever invented. As my nephew wisely observed, any sport where you can only score one goal in 130 minutes isn’t worthy of the name. This could be the American in me. We like our athletes to look and act tough. American football could never be played by wimpy little guys in shorts. Americans can’t respect guys in shorts. Well, ok, basketball players – but they’re tall.

So tonight this event which has been going on for 30 or 40 weeks will end. That means only one more night of going to sleep with plugs in my ears to muffle the cheers and groans coming from neighboring fans, especially the slightly incapacitated ones that gather at the House of Wine. Then maybe they’ll talk about something else on Israel Radio.

The final – I like the sound of that – features the team of seriously anti-Semitic Spain against mildly anti-Semitic Holland so I guess you know who I would be rooting for. If I cared, that is. Instead I plan to be blissfully asleep.

Catastrophe

I’ve always been a cat person. I like dogs –I’m a big fan of Cesar Millan – as well as just about all other mammals and birds but when it comes to sharing living space cats are ideal. They’re sweet and loving and you don’t have to worry about them barking in the night and biting the neighbors.

On the down-side, cats are not really trainable. Or controllable. In fact, they seemed convinced that they are the Masters of the Universe and we humble humans were born to serve them. There may be something to this: cats can change their mass at will which you know if you’ve ever tried to lift an unwilling one.

I bring this all up because of the current tribulations of my poor Chloe. After having disappeared for 3 days she dragged herself home and through the cat flap with a hind leg so broken that even I could tell the bone wasn’t attached to anything. The vet thinks she was hit by a car. I am simply amazed she survived that, got herself home and then also survived the surgery to repair the damage because this cat is 21 years old. How old is that in cat years? I don’t know, but it’s ancient.

I hope our relationship also survives this. Chloe already thinks I’m trying to poison her. The liquid antibiotic I have to force down her throat is pineapple flavored – utterly vomiticious to any self-respecting cat. So I’m not her favorite servant at the moment. But I am full of admiration for her. What a survivor, what a worthy cat!

Not As Lost As You'd Think

This week we said goodbye to the survivors of Oceanic 815 and all the other lost souls of “Lost.” I was a big fan. I see there has been a lot of discussion on the net about the finale, much of it very wrong-headed in my opinion. So here are my thoughts on what we saw.

Most importantly, the survivors were not dead all this time. My evidence for this is a) the producers said so a couple of seasons back and b) otherwise the story doesn’t make sense. There were characters like Ben, Desmond and Juliet who were not on the flight and had their own histories. They were not only seen through the eyes of the survivors. The last shot of wreckage on the beach was the plane carrying Kate, Sawyer & Co.

The sideways alternate universe was some sort of afterlife or more precisely, the anteroom to it. Jack was the last one to realize it, but then he was usually the last one to realize a lot of things. And since it was the afterlife it was outside of time which is why there was no “now” there and people like Hurley who presumably died long after Jack were there.

The polar bear: the Dharma Initiative did animal experiments. You’ll remember the comment when Sawyer and Kate were locked in cages about how much faster the bear figured out how to get food from the machine. The Dharma Initiative was just what it said it was, an organization trying to tap into and exploit the energy at the heart of the island. This is why Jacob (we can assume) had them all killed when they got too close, to protect the island.

It was a great series about grand themes: sin and redemption, the power of love, the overarching need and supreme difficulty of letting go. None of the characters was untainted. Even Hurley told a lie toward the end. But all at the end rose above their flaws to achieve something magnificent – which can also be said of this series. How wonderful it was to have a show that didn’t insult our intelligence. I suspect it will be a long time before we have that again.

Gimme Shelter

Tomorrow should be fun. The whole country is doing a defense drill. I can’t remember another like it, at least not in recent years. Our government happily assures us that nothing ominous is on the horizon and cautions us not to read anything into this. It’s just an exercise, the lack of which would be irresponsible. I am reassured. It’s not as if there’s a maniac in some not-too-far-off country trying to develop nuclear bombs and threatening to wipe us off the map or something.

As a humble civilian not too much is expected of me. At the sound of the siren one is supposed to sprint to the nearest bomb shelter within 2 minutes – I have visions of my grammar school gym teacher standing by with a stopwatch – and stay there until the all-clear. Luckily for both me and my gym teacher, I don’t have far to run. Like all new houses, mine comes equipped with its own bomb shelter. It’s just behind my back as I write this, the entrance being maybe a meter away. So I’m confident I can make it by the deadline.

The thing is, it’s my walk-in closet. I can spend 10 minutes in there if I have to, so I’m ok for the drill. But would I really want to stay there for hours in a real emergency? I don’t think so. Salient point: there’s no bathroom. That means after two, three hours tops I’m out of there. Way back when Saddam was lobbing scuds at us and we had to have a sealed room, we sealed the bedroom and bathroom so we could wait it out in comfort. Those were the good old days.

I have no one to blame but myself, of course. When I was planning this house, a shelter didn’t seem like such an issue. I thought it was a waste. Kibbutz houses are small and everyone uses this space for something else, be it bedrooms or offices. Then a few months after I moved in, Hizbullah started shooting missiles at us from Lebanon and I wondered whether I should be sleeping in there. That’s out of the question. I’m too old to sleep on the floor and the bed’s too heavy to move. But there’s no need to worry about that now. Tomorrow is just a drill and I can stay there for a few minutes. I may even get some cleaning done.

Bovine Positioning Systems

If you’ve ever tried to navigate in Boston you know what a nightmare it is. Streets wind around, merge and diverge without so much as a by-your-leave and street names repeat themselves in every neighborhood without any connection to each other. Navigating around the kibbutz is kind of like that in miniature except without any street names.

You can wander around for quite a while, depending on the dependability of the directions you got, until you stumble upon your destination. Not only are the roads unnamed, the buildings are more or less unmarked. I always pity the visitors who ask me for directions and explain to them as exactly as I can what the dining hall looks like. I still remember the directions I got to the laundry sorting place, the Communa, when I was new – “Turn left at the first cow.”

The situation changed about 5 or so years ago when we were all given plaques with our family names hanging on poles in our front yards. This was a vast improvement. Now, assuming you can read the language, you can locate the house of the family you want to visit if you wander around enough without having to knock on a random door to ask if Pinchas lives there.

This all came to mind yesterday as I took a break over the cup of tea I’d made an hour before. Suddenly I was roused from my reverie by the sound of drilling on my house. Upon investigation I found that a number plate had been fastened on, high up next to the eaves. I’m 252. I suppose this means everyone will be locatable by number which is a good thing. But why is it placed so high? So it’ll be identifiable from the air? That’s an alarming thought. Still, it’s a cut above the former system of direction-by-landmark – especially since the cows are now elsewhere.

Jimmy Carter, Jr.

I’ve been seething for the past two weeks. I thought I’d be over my anger by now, but I’m not and so I must descend from the usual trivial topics I write about in this space into the murky netherworld of politics. I am so incensed by the phony, manufactured crisis with the American Administration and the humiliation of the Prime Minister of Israel that I must speak out.

When Obama first stopped the peace talks almost a year ago by demanding a settlement freeze, I thought it was just a rookie blunder by a man who’d been elected despite having no executive experience and no qualifications for the job. He’s now done it again, just when indirect talks were supposed to begin, by demanding that Israel stop building in Jerusalem. Jerusalem – our capital! This time I don’t think it’s a mistake. I think it’s intentional.

The Palestinians refuse to talk, for which they receive not a whisper of criticism. Instead, Israel is heaped with calumny for the stalled peace process thereby setting the stage. For what, you ask? For an imposed solution. I think Obama, a man with more hubris than any collection of Greek tragedies, wants to impose a solution on Israel including the division of Jerusalem and a return to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. Of course, any such solution would just be an intermediate stage before our final destruction.

Let me be clear: I don’t like Obama. Never have. I don’t like his arrogance and I don’t like the way he mocks ordinary people, witness Joe the Plumber and Scott Brown and his truck. And now, like the cowardly schoolyard bully who picks on the kid who won’t fight back, he slaps Prime Minister Netanyahu around as if Israel is a banana republic and not a sovereign state. This from the man who bows before Saudi royalty, begs Ahmedinajad to sit and talk with him and has nary a cross word to say as the Russians announce their intention to keep on helping Iran build a bomb.

I don’t know what I’m worried about. Mr. Netanyahu is a smart guy who can be trusted to defend our interests. I’d be so happy, I’d swell with pride if he’d tell Obama to stick it, but of course he’d never be that blunt. In any case, with an estimated national debt of $20 trillion in the next 10 years, America won’t be a superpower for much longer. In the meantime, we will continue building housing in Jerusalem and anywhere else we see fit.

At this holiday time, let me wish everyone a happy Passover. Next year in the rebuilt Jerusalem.

My Blue Heaven

“Taste this,” my American friend said as I sat down to chat in the kibbutz dining hall. I dutifully took a forkful of the yellow gelatin and fruit stuff on her plate. “Why did you do this to me?” I squealed as I frantically looked for a way to spit it out. This was my first – and last – experience of Israeli gelatin. It was vomiticious: heavy, sticky and way too sweet. It was nothing like the clean, light silkiness of real Jello.

Ah, Jello. I’ve always loved it. Sadly, it isn’t kosher. I’ve never seen it in Israel, not even in the chain of stores that specializes in treif. In my decades in this country I have actually dreamed about it – parfait glasses filled with beautiful, jewel-like colors. But I thought it would remain just that, a dream of home.

Then one day my sister, who’s an artist with birthday cakes, mentioned she was doing one decorated with a blue Jello swimming pool, causing me to wax lyrical on the gelatin of my dreams. Taking pity on me, she shipped me a crateful of the precious packages. Now I’m in Jello Heaven. It’s just as good as I remember. More miraculous still is the blue Jello. There was nothing like that back in my day. The color is simply delightful.

While I’ve dressed it up for the picture here by topping it with vanilla yogurt and chocolate pastilles, I really like it best plain. It’s a simple pleasure perhaps, but a fruity and flavorful one. And one the rabbi doesn’t need to know about. Next time: the glories of tapioca.

Message in a Bottle

If you find this message, please let my family know I am alive and well. As I write this it is day #5 without an internet connection thanks to an electrical storm and resulting fried circuits. A parade of technicians has come on a mission of repair, each failing and passing the project on to the next in line. With each passing, futile day my despair increases.

Gather around, children, and I will tell you about communication in the olden days. You had a cylindrical object, a tube with a point at one end and filled with dark liquid. You held this in your hand with the point on a sheet of paper and moved your hand around to make marks on it. You then folded the paper, put it in an envelope with an address consisting of the recipient’s name, house number and street, and city on it and put it in a box. A person came and collected it along with all the other envelopes and took them to a depot where they were sorted and placed in some sort of conveyance – truck, boat and/or plane – that transported them to the depot in the destination city. Another person then took the envelope to the house of the person marked on it. It was a cumbersome process that took days.

It’s hard to believe that people actually communicated that way. It required no electricity, no connectivity and pretty much no smiley faces. Just lots of manual labor. And since the process was so laborious, you tended to write about the big stuff, no two-line updates about the dog playing Frisbee on the lawn. Difficult to imagine in a Twittering world.

I’m struggling hard to cope with my new-found isolation, disconnected from family, friends and weather reports. As I gulp the last few swallows of wine to empty the bottle that will carry this message, I think back to the days when penmanship had meaning. It’s nothing I want to return to. I like letting my fingers do the talking. But for the moment, my existence feels pre-industrial. I guess that means it’s time to hike to the sea and get this puppy on its way.

Still Here

Another birthday has happily come and pleasantly gone. Like every other year, I am overjoyed to be still here, still anywhere. It’s one small victory against the myriad forces of the universe that seem bent on my destruction. No, I don’t take this personally. The universe is just doing its thing and sometimes I blunder in its way. But I’m still here.

It’s fun to collect all the greetings and good wishes from family and friends, some so very far away. In Israel, of course, everyone says, “mazal tov,” the all-purpose, congratulatory salutation. Translated into English it means simply “good luck” which would be an odd thing to say on such an occasion. I remember trying to explain to an Israeli woman why one doesn’t say that at a wedding or on the birth of a baby and I’m not sure I really got the point across.

The thing is, in English “good luck” is a phrase that carries a 1-2 punch. Good luck – you’ll need it. Disaster is one footstep away, so good luck. You say this to the proud parents of that bouncing, diaperful of joy and you’re not likely to be invited to the Bar Mitzva. Instead we have a bunch of expressions for different occasions that all translate to “mazal tov”. My mother once instructed me, as we waited in a receiving line, to say “Congratulations” to the groom and “I hope you’ll be very happy” to the bride. Rituals.

Anyway, I had a good birthday. It was miraculously warm and sunny. I’m ever so pleased with the lovely flamingo lily my stepdaughter brought me. It’s just the thing for that empty space in the corner of the bedroom. Maybe best of all were the virtual hugs and kisses from my family in California. Yeah, it was a good day – and I’m still here!

Pining for a Tree

This Saturday Israel will celebrate Tu Bishvat, the Jewish Arbor Day, signaling the beginning of spring. It’s one of the nicer holidays, symbolized by blooming almond trees. Its main activities involve eating dried fruit and planting trees. Nice.

In the spirit of the day I’ve been negotiating with the gardener to replace a dead tree near the curb with a laburnum. The laburnum is a beautiful tree with spectacular clusters of yellow flowers. While yellow is not one of my colors I’m willing to overlook this because of its sheer gorgeousness. I’m even willing to pay for it even though strictly speaking the area in question is not part of my garden.

The problem – and there always is one – is the resistance of the garden guy. For some reason I cannot seem to convince him of the beauty of my vision. We’re even having trouble agreeing on the facts. When I first raised this issue a year ago, he tried to convince me that the tree isn’t dead it’s just dormant. The conversation continued in the spirit of Monty Python’s parrot sketch (if it’s been a while since you’ve laughed at the comedy classic, it’s on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj8RIEQH7zA) and I was only waiting for him to tell me it’s pining for the fjords. A year later the tree just keeps getting more and more dormant.

Now we cannot seem to agree on exactly which tree we’re talking about. I’m saying the tree is at the end of a line of trees and so can be replaced with a different type. The garden guy says it’s in the middle and must be the same type to preserve the unity. Thus we arrive to the crux of the matter: the tree species. This is important because the trees that are there, and I have no clue what kind they are, are definitely unlovely. They’re spindly with little foliage – the ugly stepsisters of the tree kingdom. In fact, now that I think of it, they could easily be mistaken for dead. Maybe I should re-check my facts. Tell me, where do you find a tree’s pulse?

Resolved

I’ve never understood the thing about New Year’s resolutions. Everybody makes them, nobody keeps them and everybody is surprised. And then when the next New Year rolls around the whole process begins again. Talk about an exercise in futility.

It’s always been perfectly clear to me why no one keeps their resolutions. January is not a time to begin projects. It’s the coldest, bleakest, longest month when all you can do is hunker down with something pulled over your head and wait, no, pray for it to pass. It’s a time for over-indulging in mac and cheese and hot chocolate, anything for a bit of warmth and comfort. It is definitely not the time to start that diet.

The time to take stock and begin those improvements has got to be in the spring. The sun shines and warms the earth, flowers sprout, birds sing and it is finally possible to feel optimistic about the future. That’s when the new exercise regime actually seems possible. That’s when you have a fighting chance to make a change.

Whoever put the New Year in January and then added the resolution requirement got it horribly wrong. Timing really is everything. I suppose it’s far too late to do anything about it and we will continue to answer the obligatory questions about our resolutions with the usual stuff. And then by the week’s end, we’ve blissfully forgotten the whole thing.