A Sunny Death

“Ima, I want kaftorim surgery,” I hear Sebastian calling out in a drone from the kitchen. Kaftorim is the Hebrew medical name given to middle ear surgery designed to treat excess ear fluids.

Earaches are commonplace for Sebastian, misken (poor soul), and visits to Dr. Rosenzweig, Ear Nose and Throat specialist, are routine. On our walk back home after our last follow-up visit with Rosenzweig, my dear child turned to me and pronounced offhandedly: “Ima this whole business with the ears is really quite annoying.” I had to agree. And to add that we’re addressing it and that we’ll take care of the situation and resolve it. I was surreptitiously thrilled when the doctor, after numerous months of visits and follow-ups, resorted to suggesting surgery. I swiftly added to my sweet and fragile gibor (brave hero), that a special fruit shake and a sweet treat were his for the choosing.

“You’ll have the surgery,” I assure him keenly, as the seams in my heart splinter. The sight of this child, face thrust forward, hands pressed against his small and inquiring ears is heartrending. “Wednesday!” I pronounce in a cheerful tone, and the faint smile that forms on his face creases my heart. This kaftorim surgery is looking to be the highlight of our week. I myself have been stealthily envisioning our post-surgery chocolate pizza at the Max Brenner Chocolate Café that is tactically situated directly across Assuta hospital in the Ramat Hachayal district of Tel Aviv. And I have to own up to the enchanting visions of helium balloons and candy and ice cream and flowers that have been permeating my dreams.

Besides kaftorim ear surgery, there are additional proceedings that our four year old is looking forward to with great anticipation.

Dying on a sunny morning, for example. At the age of 100 mind you, but still, the foresight is scrupulous and the expectancy is hearty.

Why in the morning? “Because I need to be wearing pants with pockets so that I have enough room to hold all the things that I want to die with.”

But the time of day is only a single thread in the bound web of deliberation that this child has woven: “I want it to be a sunny day when I die. Sunny days are the only truly perfect days for dying. Because I don’t want my drawing to blow away in the wind, or to get wet in the rain. I really hope it’s sunny when I die.”

He has even picked out the shirt he wants to die in: RED with monkey musicians!

He is attentive to detail, meticulous, and thorough in his planning.

I watch Sebastian’s thought processes in motion and think: I wish I could plan my life as methodically as this child plans his death.

It’s true. I really can learn from him. About the importance of making lists, of writing things down, of taking multiple factors into consideration, of prudence and of prescience.

All valuable stuff in this trying to figure out what to do with my life phase.

“At peepee shel chatul” – “you are cat peepee” – I hear a laughing voice gurgle and break my meditative state. I respond to it and am instantly drawn into the currently popular diversion of back-and-forth directed nonsensical dialogue with a disarming two year old – “at (you are) mooki”; “at pooki”; “at keeka”; “at koola” – allowing the sparkling laughter that accompanies each and every utterance to soften my chest and slide down into my gut before rising and surging into the atmosphere. 

The other child is sensory, intuitive, and rolls from the gut. This is a child who knocks back her antibiotics as she flips headfirst from table to couch.  

I meditate on the importance of both dynamics – the reflective and the intuitive - and on the desire to tread the fine bar between the two.  Surely this is an evolving and ongoing process. Like parenting.

Parenting comes with a steep learning curve. I’m thankful for my two little mentors. They make life sunny.

Food, Glorious Food

“I should write a book about conversations with Israeli taxi drivers”, I exclaimed to Lance upon returning late one night from a one-woman-show at the innovative and experimental Tmuna Theatre. After fixing myself a smooth milky nescafe and a side of chocolate wafers for dipping (a hot drink without a little sweet nosh is unheard of in my family and in this country), I grabbed my notebook and started jotting down bits and pieces of dialogue (rather, monologue) so that I wouldn’t forget the colorful morsels of conversation that were delivered en route. As I wrote, sipped, dipped, and nibbled, the national blended with the personal. And I came to realize there was a pungent common motif here: food, glorious food.

On our way back from a meeting in the southern part of the city (pre-bicycles), our taxi driver speaks loudly and brazenly on his phone, as is the modus operandi here, in an inimitable mix of Arabic and Hebrew: “Yalla, come meet me for lunch at the Hyatt. What do you mean? Nah, “shtuyot”, bullshit, it ends up costing the same wherever you go. Business lunch. Yalla, I’m in the mood for some fish and potatoes. Challas, I don’t want to eat pita and hummus again.  Nu, are you coming?”

On my way to see a show in a rather seedy part of town, my taxi driver motions: “you see this place over here? It’s good, fairly new. They serve these sandwiches… but they pack them with too much meat. Blech. How can anyone eat it like that? I like my meat but come on. So I said to them: do me a favor, give me another couple slices of bread, I’ll pay for it, to make a decent sized sandwich. Something I can enjoy. I want something that I can fit in my mouth, that’s pleasant in the mouth. So much meat like that, it’s not pleasant in the mouth. I told him my grandmother would have said that such oversize sandwiches are “unappetitlich” (unappetizing).

On my way back home, my husky voiced taxi driver with the ponytail (only when she spoke in the feminine did I become aware that this was a woman), asked me if I am hungry and offered me what she called a “biton” (brick) cookie. Her mother’s recipe: A family tradition. No one in the family can refuse them. They’re hard as rock but they’re tasty. Her mother was something else. She misses her like crazy. She visited her everyday during the last ten years of her mother’s life when she was suffering from alzheimers and couldn’t remember a soul. Everyday except for Yom Kippur because you can’t drive on Yom Kippur. I could only mumble in concurrence as I munched and munched and munched on the very solid and very savory slabs of sesame.

I was struck by the fitting tenor of this driving monologue in view of the one-woman-show I had just emerged from, titled “No longer anybody’s daughter”, about the performer’s coming to terms with her mother’s death.

I sunk into the backseat and found myself thinking of my grandmother’s heart shaped butter cookies. And of my mother’s relationship with the beygale.

There is nothing like a post-show beygale (sesame crusted cross between a bagel and a pretzel) that seals an evening at the theatre and leaves you sated with the evening’s experience. My mother’s visit here, to my delight, was filled with theatre events. Time and again, upon exiting the theatre, inspired and moved, my mother’s characteristically brisk gait would significantly intensify. I’d leave it to her to wedge her way between the clambering people answering to the call of “beygale cham” and happily much on a beygale on the way home. The nonappearance of the beygale man on some occasions was so entirely unfulfilling that it called for an express stop elsewhere. On my mother’s next visit, I’ll know exactly where to take her when the beygale man fails to deliver. Since the recent opening of the new Ibn Gvirol branch of the Jaffa bakery-cum-institution, there is Abulafia to salvage the evening.

My mother’s course is often savory. With my grandmother it was always sweet. I remember seeing a movie or a concert with Safta and returning to her apartment to sit together savoring kaffe und kuchen (coffee and cake). The hot chocolate and the cheese Danish that we’d shared during intermission didn’t diminish the craving for sweetness. I think of her often, my Safta, for whom this country was home.

I recall the way her eyes sparkled and the way her hands danced to the sounds of Yossi Banai or Edith Piaf. I picture the way she scooped jam onto a crusty roll -- with a spoon, never a knife. I summon up the story about the time she came back from the kiosk with TWO ice creams because she couldn’t decide which one to get. This was a woman who chose to eat ice cream for dinner. And desert. A woman who was the inspiration for the decadent yet simple “ice cream celebration” dessert featured at our Vancouver restaurant Bridges: loads of ice cream and a heaping helping of chocolate sauce.  A woman whose warm heart and sweet tooth were inextricably entwined.

How I would love to sit with her today and have an ice cream with her and with my children whom she never got to meet.

In our home, “glida” (ice cream) was a close contender to ‘Aba’ and ‘Ima’ as far as baby’s first words go. My little one, age two, wants only to hear songs about chocolate, candies, and ice cream. I am happy to invent such songs and to sing them to her.

 In the photo that I keep of Safta that was taken in December 2002, a few weeks before she passed away, she is eating a sufganya.  When I showed Sebastian, my four year old, this photo of her, he asked where she is. I told him that she’s in a sweet sweet faraway place. He wants to go there. But we’re here. In the now: taking and savoring every opportunity to eat ice cream. 

Of death and lies

“I can’t see. He’s blocking my view,” Sebastian pronounced while we were gathered around the ceremonious table at a friend’s newborn’s Bris. I lifted him up high and prepared to deal with his inexorable questions in the most passable and cursory manner possible. “What is he doing to the baby?” “I want to see.”

This is a kid who wants to observe and comprehend everything.

It’s a ceremony that welcomes the new baby to the world. The rabbi just needs to give him a little injection (incision, same thing) to make him healthy. Kind of like a flu shot or a blood test. Just a little “pique” and it’s over. Now he’s putting sweet juice (wine, same thing) in his mouth to make him feel better.

Whew. I figure the flu shot/blood test analogy will go over well enough. We have just emerged from a week of getting the kids’ blood tests done; two separate heavily involved events that included lots of waiting, counting numbers (of people ahead of us), indulging complimentary neighbors with small talk, tight holding, hugging, and caressing, and tall tales of bravery. By and large, the most mundane events involving the kids are… involved.

After a couple faint wails, the baby was placed in his crib. I watched Sebastian and Liliana join hands and dance joyously with the happy families of the newborn and sighed. This parenting thing is becoming an ongoing exercise in improvisation.

“What does the pee-pee fairy look like?”

pee-pee fairy, for those uninitiated, is a kindred sister to the poo-poo fairy, guiding the night-time transition to dryness:

long wavy purple hair, a pink and green dress with flowers, and green sparkly shoes.

“Why does the picture of the flower not have a stem?”

                        maybe it’s just a decoration, like a symbol, like sometimes we draw a face without the  

                        body right?

 “Why do dead people not have to breathe?”

                        they’re in a place where they can just rest

Questions on the dead invariably come in clusters. Death is a subject of immense fascination as of late. Not because of any real-life personal experience with the matter, mercifully. It all began with reading the poet biographies in Sebastian’s Hebrew children’s poetry anthology. Once he understood that not ALL poets are dead, he started orchestrating a head count of living vs. dead poets (brimming with enthusiasm: “Meir Shalev is alive? יואו! "Yo (Hebrew equivalent of “Yay”,) nine living authors, what fun!!” איזה כייף!

“What airplane do the dead people take to get to their special place?”

                   Um… well, you know, when they die, they grow wings and fly!

WTF???!!!

Put on the spot, in the spur of the moment, I make shit up. Moments later, I find myself disparaging myself: Really? What in the world did I just say? Jesus, I can’t believe I’m lying to my kid.

The spiral effect that twists through the arena of lies takes all prisoner; white, black, and floral patterned rainbow colored lies get tangled in its coiled web.

We can’t maintain this “special surprise from the pee-pee fairy thing every night,” Lance and I concur. Alright, what new lie can we make up about the protocols of the enigmatic pee-pee fairy? And so it goes: on and on, around and around.

With the passage of time, I imagine, we will negotiate the path of rapprochement –dusting off the lies, sharpening their round edges, and joining them with the truth. Time, I expect, will guide us as we -- at turns hesitantly, at turns bravely – wet our feet in this ongoing game of improv, this enduring puzzle of parenting.

The passage of time is something our pensive four year-old seems to grasp keenly; he no longer asks how old will you be when I’m eighty, but how old will I be when you’re dead?” (A lump lodges in my throat and sinks into my heart). To boot: “Aba is almost dead because he’s already forty.”

The other morning I went to get my own blood tests done. A short wait, no conversation strikers, no constant chatter, no one fastened to my body. I have to admit I felt rather alone when I sat on the chair in the clinic, a Russian nurse drawing her needle in front of me, with no child to hold me.

That afternoon, I picked Sebastian up from gan at 1:30 pm as usual, took him home as usual, served him lunch as usual, and then, instead of quickly gathering his (stuffed animal) “friends”, dropping him on the couch (his day bed), uttering the word “schlaffstunde” (naptime), and rushing out of the room to get to the computer, I brought him into my bed, lay next to him, and snuggled.

My dad said to me the other night that the most precious and important thing in life is time. I think he’s right. Time-outs have their place in the practice of parenting. I’d like to usher in the time-ins.

All of these (things)

“Write it down”, I am commanded regularly by my four year old son, “so that we don’t forget.” List making has become routine. I try to obey and indulge him promptly. I recognize the urgency in his voice and am familiar with the poignant tears that well in his eyes when he feels that something risks being lost.  At age four, things are very important. The enthusiasm and the beaming smile that inflect his voice as he recites these vital lists are heartening. 

Many lists are sugary sweet: chocolate, m & m’s, gummy bears, skittles. Some are playful: a parrot in a hot air balloon, a horse in an airplane, a rabbit in a tractor. Still others are rather pensive. The other day, Sebastian asked me to write down a list of his favorite Hebrew poets: H.N. Bialik, Leah Goldberg, Fanya Bergstein, Miriam Yallan Shtekelis, Ayin Hillel, Leah Naor, Naomi Shemer, Yehonatan Geffen.  They are all important: all of these things.

There is a song by Hebrew poet Naomi Shemer that speaks of “all these things – of the honey and of the sting, of the bitter and the sweet, of the burning fires and the pure waters, of the baby daughter and of the man who returns home from a great distance”. 

על כל אלה על כל אלה

שמור נא לי אלי הטוב

על הדבש ועל העקץ

על המר והמתוק

Naomi Shemer entreats the good Lord to watch over and safeguard all of these things: the honey and the sting, the bitter and the sweet.

It’s “all of these things” that get to me. Here, it seems, the emotional spectrum is expansive, and the sensations along the spectrum, mercurial.  I have, for a long time now, been in awe of the speed with which young children can shift from an emotional intensity to another – from tears to laughter and vice versa.  As if the emotion and its attendant symptoms simply washes over them, and away, smoothly, effortlessly. I remember sitting cross-legged in “seated meditation” at a yoga class and contemplating the value of this phenomenon: not holding on to the emotion, not allowing it to hold onto you. As an actor, I marvel at the potential for the emotional range and truthfulness that this childlike phenomenon might yield if it were gleaned.

And here I am. A few months into our stint in this crazy place. Reduced to a childlike experience.

One moment I am riding my bicycle, along the sun drenched café-lined avenues, kid in tow, on top of the world, and the next moment I am laboring to lock the bike and stepping in dog-shit.

One moment Lance is beaming with the discovery that all the women who work at the music library speak Russian, and the next he is straining to be understood by the Ethiopian cashier at the supermarket.

One moment I am hopeful and excited over a promising phone call, and the next I am sitting dejected in front of the computer, disheartened with my stagnant search for information.

One moment Lance is grinning, returning home from the butcher with his black pepper crusted salami and chicken filets in hand, and the next he curses through hunger pangs at the realization that it’s Shabbat, meaning all the delis are closed.

One moment I am exchanging niceties with the juice guy who tells me he’s very fond of me and my cutie son, and the next I am reorganizing the weight of the grocery bags as I struggle to carry them home.

All these things, all of them, the bitter and the sweet, make up our daily experience here, during these initial laden months. And the swing from one extreme to the other is swift, robust and glaring.

The other day Sebastian told me that he wants to die next to Aba (his dad) and the early 20^th century poet Bialik. He asked, to be sure, whether we are able to choose where we want to die, or whether אלוהים "Elohim" (God) decides.

I thought to myself, and didn’t say it to him, that we can’t choose when we die. And I went to hug him, in an effort to cling to “all of these” – כל אלה –– all these things that are a part of life, the bitter and the sweet.

United (and divided) Nations

In this laden land, one cannot escape the biblical depth and historical breadth that accompany the various sites. A couple weeks ago we went to Jerusalem. Last week, we spent a morning in Caesaria.

When was the era of King Herod? What is the Tower of David? These are the sort of byzantine questions by which I am barraged by my husband. Normally, I start to reply, assuming the familiarity that is supposed to be a part of my culture, then pause, reflect, stammer, and finally stop short, realizing that my knowledge in the matter is sadly and sorely lacking.

When the question of the tower of Babel surfaced the other day I was admittedly thrilled. I pulled my shoulders back, inhaled a cool breath of self-assurance, and started explaining the theme of scattered peoples, diverse languages, and the misunderstandings that ensue.

The idea of language and culture has always been of interest to me. I am a product of two cultures, two languages –- at home in both and not entirely at home in either. The contrast between the two cultures – Canada and Israel – is marked.

“Would you like a massage and a latte with that?” is how Lance describes the everyday encounter with the service industry in “lala-land” (aka Vancouver).

Meanwhile, the saleslady in the cosmetics section of the Super-Pharm insists (almost angrily), while trying to sell us a pricy product, that “she is not Shiseido, she is just trying to help us.”

I am often intrigued by the preeminence of one or another cultural trait in the context of an other milieu. In Canada, I will charge across the street at a red light because, hey look at me, I’m Israeli, I’m no “פרייר” (patsy). While in Israel, as I discovered the other day while astride my bicycle, I yield to traffic when I have a green light.

In our home, both dynamics – Canada and Israel -- are in constant play.

Sebastian, whom we’ll call Canada, asks me to compile lists of his favorite classical Hebrew poets, contemplates the nature of death, and declares that he’d like to study at university – opera, mathematics, and sculpture. He freaks out when we venture a few steps ahead of him and panics at the sight of stray cats because their nails are sharp and scratchy.

“Lech mi-po chatul”(“get out of here cat!) (emphasis on the guttural “lech”), Liliana shouts while flinging her hand abruptly, matching the physical vigor with the vocal command. Physical and vocal is “bul” (precisely) what Liliana is. Inotherwords, Liliana is Israel. Her booming bellows and rollicking laughter can be heard up three flights of stairs. 

“Kodem Ani”, “first me”, she insists when it comes to everything. "Day!" ("enough”) she pronounces repeatedly and with increasing animation to the blanket, the fork, and a host of other inanimate objects that don’t bend according to her will. “Matzchik” (“funny”) she informs us when her spoon falls to the floor, and proceeds to infect us with a gurgling laughing fit. And today she surprised me with “nu?” (the mark of the typically Israeli brand of impatience that is loosely translated as “well?!” even as it intimates “come on already”.)

We harbor divided nations in our home, and the result, as may be expected, is sometimes invariably fraught. The two prod each other and recoil in turns. But sometimes, right about when I just about lose it and decide it’s time to intervene and separate the two, a prod is pressed and pushed just a little farther --- and the other suddenly starts laughing. It is fascinating this magical and mysterious point of transformation. I don’t know how to determine or evaluate just where it resides but I do know that it happens when the two parties are enmeshed in contact, and that it is always a welcome and delightful surprise. For the moments that follow the “push beyond”, both cultures are united, sharing the mutual language of giggles.

Friday

Beep Beep, Honk Honk. These sounds no longer faze us. This is city living and an Israeli city at that. People are invariably impatient and in a rush. Tune the noise out and turn your head though and you would never know it. Enter into view young hipsters (this city, it is said, belongs to the young people) decking the sidewalk cafés. Suede and leather knee-high boots (never mind that it’s a balmy 75 degrees), funky tunics, skinny jeans, cigarettes, frothy lattes, dark shades, plentiful salads, copious breakfasts, and a relaxed look that says we have all the time in the world.

In Tel Aviv, it seems, everyone is in a rush to get to the sidewalk café. It is a city that runs on highly charged nerves: enjoy life – or bust.

And on Fridays, as we say in Hebrew – פעמיים כי טוב! – all the more so. With a Sunday through Thursday workweek, Friday heralds the unhurried release that the weekend assumes.

One typical Friday, I decided to venture westward. I yearned to catch a glimpse of the glimmering sea and headed to the less crowded side of the beachside restaurant at Metzitzim Beach. No fashionable young Tel Avivians in my corner; just a few old guys (I’ve learned here that alterkakers is an “American” term) shootin’ the shit.

Here was a very different scene and one that I welcomed. The cappuccinos, baskets of fresh bread and supersize salads were transformed into home-packed peanuts, olives, and salami in Tupperware.  One or two black coffees sat forlorn on the table as the five or six members of the חבורה (clan) that would keep growing, sunk into the upholstery and spoke in animated jibes. Only cigarettes were the great equalizer, spanning the generations. As the smell of fine salami wafted in the warm sea air, I smiled to myself and turned an attentive ear to the brusque Israeli sounds punctuated on occasion by the more precise register of Yiddish and German.

ארץ אוכלת יושביה “Eretz ochelet yoshveah” – “a country that eats its citizens” – is the fruitful theme. Or in other words: “Hakol Politika” – “everything is politics”.

The banter betrays disgruntlement pierced with humor, nostalgia, laughter, and brotherhood. Old School.

Problems and solutions to all of the nation’s ills are vigorously presented and debated. “They should bring Giuliani over here to clean up the corruption. Why not? They bring over basketball players from America, why not a police force huh?”

Membership to this clan, it appears, is exclusive but broad. Another old guy making his way along the promenade approaches the group.

“Did you hear about the shooting in Korea?”

“What’s new, there’s always shooting.”

“North or South?”

“What difference does it make, one’s a scoundrel, and the other’s a predator” (זה נבלה וזה טריפה)

“There’s nothing to eat but there’s an atomic bomb,” another one chimes in.

“All the states that have nothing to eat are like that… food – no, but a bomb they have,” rejoins another.

Still another starts out elucidating that these countries “train” their citizens to subsist on a bare minimum amount of food.

After a while, naturally, the conversation drifts back to the woes of this little nation. As if we don’t have enough.

“Seriously, what major city doesn’t have a subway system? You know why no one gets the process going, because it would take a number of years to build it, and by the time it’d get done his term would end and there’d be a new prime minister in office and the one who spent the energy building it won’t get the credit, that’s why.” Simply put.

The end, in view of this prolific exchange, is not surprisingly, grim: “there’s no chance for this nation; a country that eats its… eats its…” “Peanuts!”, a fellow chum completes the sentence, chomping on some nuts. ארץ אוכלת בוטניה! "Eretz Ochelet Botneiah" (In Hebrew, the rhyme engendered here between “botneiah” (its peanuts) and the “yoshveiah” (citizens) of the original axiom adds a bemusing twist.)

After a series of plaintive shakes of the head, a positive note concludes: “Look at this – summer in December ah? – only the weather they can’t ruin for us, these politicians.” The group gazes onto the sea and relishes their unhurried social encounter.

I too gazed out at the sea glimmering in the sunlight. Then I smiled, glanced at my watch and asked for the check. 12:30 pm. Time for the pickups. I set off to fetch the kids from their ganim, first Liliana, then Sebastian, anticipating the sweet taste of the mini challahs that they make and take home with them on Fridays.

Kids in tow, we walk down Basel, stopping at our neighborhood bakery to buy a big challah. We push, routinely, through the crowd and partake in the liberal exchange of “shabbat shalom”s. Then down Basel to Ibn Gvirol, where we are stopped on the street corner by an old man sitting on a chair in the middle of the sidewalk, who, charmed by the kids, extends a friendly hand, and promptly reaches into his plastic bag, extending a loaf of cake and a stainless steel knife and offers each of us a generous piece as he bids us “Shabbat shalom”. Next, our juice guy: A nod of the head: “Shalom Dana! How’s it going Sebastian?” Then a shake of the head: “It’s a travesty what happened in the North, huh?”, head now nodding to the television screen in the little threadbare store. Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom.

The collective and the personal here are eternally intermeshed. The collective seeps into the most mundane human interactions. The result is a sense of intimacy that is at once candid and perfunctory. All the same, it is a sense of intimacy that leaves one feeling good. That we are friends, neighbors, citizens, – alike in our mad and importunate need to relax and enjoy life.