Talk the Israeli talk

Saturday night is one night where I no longer want to run into town and party. After all, I'm in my 50s and Sunday is a work day, so going anywhere on a Saturday night is no longer fun.

My eldest daughter wanted to go for pizza with me, my Complainer and her boyfriend. We looked quite the motley crew as we sauntered in there with our pajama fleece pants, and slippers with pink socks. The pizza place was busy. It does a brisk business on Saturday evening, when most people, like myself, prefer staying home. The pizza shop is our local version of a pub. Maaleh Adumim doesn't have a pub, so it's a great place for people wanting to dry out. Too bad we don't have rehabs here for alcoholics, because I'm thinking maybe the Brits should forget about their fancy shmancy Priory clinic and open one up here.

The male members of one family were at the Pizza shop taking up most of the floor space, watching the football game on the television on the wall. In fact, they were watching a few football games, cheering for Chelsea (against Manchester City), reiterating for me that they were not against Manchester United, God forbid, before switching the station to watch Jerusalem's Betar team with alternate cheers and loud OY's while holding their heads in misery at times.

The pizza was great, smothered in onions and mushrooms, flavored with sumac and other spices. The pizza makers asked us how it was. The Complainer shrugged "nothing special...." I glared at her. It was delicious! Why did she insult them?

"Oh be Israeli mom. This is how we talk."

"Yes, so I've heard" I muttered.

But the big Israeli bully of a daughter that I have, turned helpless this morning.

"Mom, Visa took 1,000 shekels from my bank on the 2nd, and I TOLD the bank that I wanted it out on the 10th. Now I have no money..." she was miserable.

"Looks like it's time to Talk Like An Israeli now and give it to that bank person, isn't it?"

It's a good thing she has a good many years of practice....

Home Sweet Home

My family were putting pressure on me this week to stay home more and make them normal meals, meaning non-vegan, non-healthy, laden with meat or cheese (separately, of course) and vegetables only as a side dish. I thought I'd do that yesterday, so last night was spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner.

This morning I was rewarded accordingly. My unemployed daughter calls me up to rat on her brother at 9:30 am.

"Why didn't he go to school?" she demanded. Not that she cares about his education, mind you, but because she wants to take over the computer that's in his room. The family computer.

I call him and he's like --- "Ok, Ok, I'm on my way right now!"

"Why are you late by an hour?"

"Because my English teacher isn't in today, so what am I going to do - huh?" he asks me.

"How do you know your English teacher won't be coming in today??" Did he get a chain call from one of his classmates telling him of the good news? Of course not.

11:30 am I get a frantic call from my daughter, while I'm busy at work, and needing to get stuff done in a hurry.

"That stupid boy locked the computer. Call him NOW and get the code from him, otherwise I'll wreck this whole place. I'll wreck everything he has."

I tried to get her to have patience, tolerance, whatever....until he got home from school, but she and I both know that once that happens, he takes over the computer and hardly lets her on.

I called him in school, figuring he's not in class anyways. I was right.

"Nu, what?" he asked me impatiently, as if he's pretending that he's interested in joining class.

"Give me the code now. PLEASE!! I don't want your room in pieces."

"Why did she tell you I wasn't in school??? Because of that I locked the computer. She can go fuck herself."

Great. But I think he was worried about his stuff, so he gave me the code and I passed it on to my daughter.

One hour later, she calls me back.

"Why is he here?? He rushed back from school so I can't be on the computer? I swear I don't care if he calls the police, if I don't go on the computer at 1:00 I'll KILL HIM!!"

So now you know why I try to force feed healthy food to my kids, and also, why I'm out all the time, as much I can be.

Two hours passed. No phone calls. I'm wondering if I'll be coming home to kids with broken bones and shit thrown and broken into pieces all over our brand new house. How far will they go? And all this over a computer!!

At 3:00 my son calls. He's calm. So I assume he hasn't thrown her out of the 8th floor window. He's concerned because he's being called up for army service and doesn't want to take the urine test there. He wants to do it at our local medical clinic, so where did I put the forms. I give out a great big loud OY and my boss hears, and is taking it personally.

"I know" she says. "I drive you crazy, don't I."

Not at all. Not at all.

Nothing Comes Easy

"Is there anything that comes easy in this country? Anything?" asked Hubby on the phone to me today. This was one of the few conversations where I agreed with him entirely.

"Yes, weight gain" I answered, because that was the only thing I could think of that comes easily in this country besides aggravation, frustration, and everything similar.

Hubby's business owes back taxes. Like a good citizen, he's ready to pay it all. The money is sitting in the bank ready for income tax. But since April, they haven't taken it. They don't want it because they want to clear up some prehistoric thing that a former accountant never gave in to them.

"You don't have to worry, you won't have to pay a thing on the 1997 return" the accountant assured us.

But meanwhile, they put a lien on our bank account and threatened to take our stuff because we haven't paid them yet. Even though it's there for the taking. Look, if they don't want our money, I'm certainly fine with that. I could use it for a much-needed holiday, or an LCD or a stereo system.

And then last week, at a friend's wedding, my friend Abdullah came over to tell me that he thought he saw my security guard daughter on the bus the other day and when he asked her "Are you JG's daughter?" She told him "No." I called her immediately when Abdullah left to eat some grape leaves on the far side of the wedding hall.

"Did you see my friend Abdullah on the bus the other day and did you tell him that you weren't my daughter???"

"Yes"

"WHY??"

"Because I don't like your friends." meaning, she was embarrassed by the way he looked (bandana, wild curly hair, same green jacket he's wearing for years, etc.) and by the way he talked - with a heavy Arabic accent. She didn't have to explain. I knew.

If she's going to be rude and racist, I warned her if she's going to disown me as her mother to my friends, then when I'm filthy fucking rich, I'll remember that, and she will be sorry. So very sorry.

This morning I see a letter from the municipality telling me I don't get a water discount because I only have three people in the household? Huh? Since when did my two daughters up and leave me? Hell, if that's the case, I'm taking over their bedrooms as an office and guest room/exercise/hippie lounge respectively. But when I checked this morning, all their things were still there. I called up the municipality to tell them how stupid they are, so they now want me to send them my daughters' ID cards so they can prove they live with me.

I checked with my kids and both have our old address on their ID. So the municipality believes I moved to a new place with Hubby and son and left my two daughters behind in the old house. That thought had crossed my mind once or twice, but I never acted on it. Really.

crowds

The weekend began on Thursday evening. Eliyahu, my peacemaker friend, was getting married that night and it was sure to be an interesting evening with his crowd. The bus left Jerusalem early and my boss didn't give me a hard time about it at all, which left me to wonder why I don't leave early more often to go wherever it is I need to always go. Ibrahim, Tamer, Mohammad, Abdullah were on the bus, as were a bunch of religious Jewish hippies dressed in colorful outfits and I already felt out of place in my shiny black and silver fancy dress. I don't have any hippie clothes for weddings. There were regular non-hippie Orthodox Jews on the bus too. It was such an interesting mix that when we passed the checkpoint to get to the wedding hall, we all smiled when the soldiers kept on coming on the bus a few times perhaps because they thought their eyes were deceiving them. What's this bus full of Jews and Arabs together? I'm sure they talked among themselves about it. I announced we should just do a bus tour together after the wedding and travel to towns around the country to draw attention to ourselves. Another one of my friends wanted to tell the soldiers that "we're just a bunch of peace terrorists.....we blow up stereotypes" - which I thought was so so clever.

Normally, 7 blessings are said under the marriage canopy, but Eliyahu had 8, which included all the Moslem, Druze and Christian sheikhs, imams, priests, etc. giving him a blessing in Arabic, English and Hebrew. I even noticed that the bride's Israeli mother of Iraqi descent seemed as if she was actually enjoying herself watching the Arabic blessings bestowed on the bride and groom.

At the dinner, I was glad Hubby hadn't joined me at the wedding. No booze, no Coca Cola, no dairy, no meat, not even a chicken wing. 100% vegan. My macrobiotic friends thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and I too enjoyed the healthy pickings, but Hubby would have complained throughout the meal. I know him too well. "What kind of fucking wedding meal is this?" he would have said over and over again to anyone who would care to listen, and would have had the bus driver stop for a steak somewhere roadside.

The following day I went to Metzagei Dragot, a vacation "village", by the Dead Sea. My friend's son had a bar mitzvah and this time I told Hubby to come with me because I was tired of going everywhere alone. I promised him the crowd and food will be non-vegan and delicious. We got a ride from one of our friends, who freaked hubby out with her driving by taking her hands off the wheels at times to talk with them and looking out the window at the view instead of ahead. We saw friends we hadn't seen in ages and checked into our rooms which were like cabins. Fancy camping. If you want a romantic holiday, I wouldn't recommend this place. On the cabin floors were old worn tiles, the beds had skimpy old blankets on them and sank when I sat on them. We checked the room to make sure it was scorpion-free and then relaxed. Thankfully the food was indeed delicious and I networked my ass off as peace missionaries do, with some people afterwards wanting to join the interfaith dialogue bandwagon, whether for shiatsu demonstrations, a synagogue family weekend in Beit Jala and a Bedouin worker at the place invited me to see his camp, where he'd like to have a similar tourist village like this. All this added to my ever-growing To Do list and I prayed this weekend that one day I'll be able to afford to work on my Arab/Israeli dialogue work full-time. Now these things will take months to come to fruition because I only have time to work on them a couple of hours a week. But it would be great to get a small crowd over to the Bedouin encampment to see what they would like to offer tourists.

The bar mizvah boy did his Torah reading perfectly, and on the way to the rustic bedouin tent with the thatched roof, where the services were held, overlooking the Dead Sea on the high cliffs, we saw a herd of Ibex. They came quite close to us and I thought perhaps they were attracted spiritually to the prayers. The whole scene was so biblical looking. But the people there said the Ibex were attracted more to the cake on the tables than the prayers. So much for animal spirituality.

Hubby was bubbly during lunch, having drunk about 6 shots of Scotch. He was telling my friend her red hair looked like something he could eat. In the afternoon a small group of us took a walk to see different desert views, which were breathtaking and walked back as the sun set. At the end of the day, I told our driver wouldn't it be nice if we all lived together in some sort of place like that, rural, but with more upscale accommodations of course. Maybe we'll build a retirement village somewhere out there. Just for our crowd.

To Hell or not to Hell

I'm sure Hubby was a preacher in his last life. If it wasn't his last life, it sure is in this life. He and I were having a verbal go at each other as to which one of us is the bigger sinner and who will be going to hell. Him or me.

"You go around eating Halal meat with your Arabs. I would be a successful person if it weren't for you!"

"Oh yeah??? Well the way you go around cursing me and the kids is MUCH WORSE than me eating Halal meat. Much worse!!"

"Fuck you!"

Friday night at my home is me against the world. I get teased by my kids and son-in-law for having Arab friends and believing that most are good and then wish out loud that Beitar, the Jerusalem soccer club, gets a kick-ass Arab player soon. With an Arab who wins a game for the team, time after time, we'll see how things will shift instead of the racist hooligans the fans are now. But they think my peace-loving antics are also evil. I don't give a flying flake.

But you know who might be going to hell? Some bus drivers in Jerusalem. I was walking to my stop when I see a bus flying by with the back door open. This happens a lot here. Drivers just simply forget that you need to close the back door so that passengers don't fly out of the bus. Makes sense, non? Another day I go to the front of the bus and see the bus driver reading a fucking newspaper while he's driving. The paper was sitting beneath the steering wheel on the dashboard. Is he not going to hell? Is this not worse than eating halal meat?

Nostalgia

I've been getting very nostalgic lately about my childhood and teen years. I don't know why, really. Perhaps it's because I'm getting older and I like to look back fondly on those formative, fun, carefree years of mine when I wasn't saddled with mortgages, bills, husband, working, etc. And I wonder why I did not ever take photos of those good times? I hardly have any photos of myself with friends who I grew up with.

There was a review of a book about the history of the Grand Concourse called Broken Dreams. From what I saw on Amazon, it looked like a well-written, interesting book, and for the first time in nearly 4 years I bought that book from Amazon, wondering if it will mention my street in the Bronx where I grew up and the neighborhood of Kingsbridge Heights.

The strength of one's thoughts just getting out to the universe is very powerful. Here I am waxing nostalgic since I bought the book, waiting for it to arrive and, strangely, during this time, someone from my childhood finds me on Facebook, as I also put my maiden name there, asking if I remember her. Of course I remember. She was one of my first best friends. She would come over to my house to play and I'd go over to hers, which was remarkable because my folks didn't allow me to have secular Jewish friends. Her parents were Holocaust survivors and they had this gorgeous dining room which no one was allowed to enter. It was only used for special occasions. She also had a beautiful teenage sister whom we envied who dressed in white go-go boots and whose hair was so fashionable. This was in the mid-1960s. Her sister had a yelling match with her mother, was absolutely horrible to us and used to always slam her door shut. We used to sneak into her room to listen to her records. This is what I remember. We used to giggle when sis had her tantrums and say - "That's teenage for you." We were bratty 10 year olds.

She also had a lovely country home in Lake Mohegan and I loved going there on Sundays, walking on those country roads, letting inchworms crawl on us and watching fireflies and having barbecues.

So we caught up on Facebook emailing our stories, checking each others photos, and trying to catch up on 45 years of life in just a few short paragraphs.

Then, I glanced at a couple of her friends on Facebook and one was a group from the same elementary school in the Bronx and there I saw someone whom I was friends with who lived in the same building as I did in the 60s. I contacted her and she remembers me too. I remember playing with her when I was as young as three. She had a brother and together (with his friends and without her) we used to poo in our apartment building's concrete back yard (I think we were about 4 or 5 years old)to piss off the superintendent, who'd think it was stray dogs dirtying up the premises. Disgusting, eh? But that's what little kids do behind their parents' back. I think at one point we were found out and his folks didn't allow me to play with their son any more. Fortunately, I eventually grew out of being a shit-disturbing troublemaker and became friendly with his sister. She was gorgeous and looked like a little Elizabeth Taylor. I felt ugly and stupid next to her. I remember when I stopped hanging out with her because I just felt so inadequate. We were about 12 and she was hanging out in the lobby with some boys trying to bum a cigarette off them and I heard her call them "cheap" because they wouldn't give her one. She was way out of my league. I wasn't cool, I didn't smoke anything until I was 19 and I was an Orthodox Jew which made me feel so old-fashioned and frumpy next to her. So it was great to catch up with her too, though I didn't remind her of the poo thing with her brother. I'm hoping she either never knew or forgot about it totally.

And I wonder if anyone is doing a documentary on how Facebook reunites people after decades of not being in touch...

It's all relative

First of all, thanks to the anonymous person who tipped me off about the bug on my blog. It was unreadable and it seems the problem stemmed from Photobucket. So I erased all my photobucket images and have a new, but plain blog without the bells and whistles or beads and camels. For now anyways.

Getting back to what I wanted to say --- my sister and neice and nephew came in from Canada this past week and we got together at my brother's house. They are all uber ultra-orthodox and so I donned my only dress - but no headcovering - and headed over to my big brother. My niece was having the freakies. Seems she is nervous about taking buses still, even though there haven't been any bus attacks for years now (thank you good God). But much to her horror:

"I took this taxi and then I looked at the seat next to the driver and saw an Arabic newspaper. I was so scared!!!"

I looked at her and laughed. Cab drivers? They're just scraping by to make a living. They may not all love Jews, because not all Jews love them either - but they're quite safe. I can assure you.

My sister in law put her mind at ease with:

"Oh, don't worry about that. If you have any problems with Arabs, just call her" she said tossing her head towards me. "She's friends with ALL of them."

"What??"

I explained to them (for the 100th time) my interfaith work and my sister was like:

"You know you can't trust them. They're all terrorists." She used the dreaded "all" word. I was calm. I was cool. I was collected. I looked at her and asked -

"Did you EVER in your life sit down and speak with any Arab? Ever?"

Sis lowers her head down slightly.

"no"

"So you can't tell me they're "all" like that."

Certainly we don't want to hear that ALL Jews are Madoffs or shysters or rich as shit. Why do I have to hear the "all" word?

Next day I was at the family wedding. This time I had to act the Ultra Orthodox part. If I didn't come dressed appropriately - meaning head covering too - it would have been an embarrassment for my sister and niece. And it's a grave sin to embarrass people in public. I actually felt more mature donning the elegant headscarf to cover my hair, and noted that when I nearly slipped in my shoes, it wasn't becoming of me to shout out "FUCK" when I looked the way I did.

The relatives were pleased to see my hair tucked in wearing a long-sleeved dress. They even introduced me to their friends. But I sat at their table and found I had nothing much to say to them. The conversation was strained if there even was a conversation. But when it was time to leave, I hugged them and told them I loved them and I felt they loved me back, even though we don't speak much to each other.

I come home to the person I'm related to by marriage - Hubby. He's in a foul mood today and tells me:

"All I want is for people to go on buses and cough and sneeze on each other. And get sick. That's all I want. That's the person you married."

Whatever.

Then this morning I see a bill he got from income tax for 43,000 shekels. After all, why shouldn't they run after our money? Aren't we all brothers?