You are what you wear

I was looking at this girl's ankles yesterday while she was brewing up some coffee at the shuk coffee shop. I don't have a foot fetish or anything but it takes one kind of person to recognize his own. She was wearing a beaded ankle bracelet - the kind that the Bedouin sell in Sinai. I knew she had been there recently. I didn't have to ask her, I knew. Like others who stare at my jewellery and know where I'd gone. Like the white turbaned, and all dressed in soiled white cotton clothing rasta-haired cute guy I saw getting on the bus in Eilat. I knew he had just come back from Sinai. I didn't have to ask him. People don't dress like that wandering around Eilat.

When we were an Orthodox family living in Canada, we'd go for hayrides in the Ontario countryside farms with our small children. Hubby wore a cap instead of an obviously Jewish kippah on his head so he wouldn't stand out too much. We're talking hicks here who probably never met any Jews before. We'd occasionally stumble onto other families there whose father and sons also wore baseball caps and we knew that they too were from the tribe of Abraham, without having to talk to them.