I have steadfastly maintained that Israel has the world’s smartest people and, at the same time, some of the stupidest. I should also add that Israel has some of the calmest, nothing will bother them people and some of the most neurotic, belligerent, in-your-face if they have to wait an extra second or two people on God’s green earth. The following episode will prove my point. Continue reading →

Free at last, free at last……… out of the oppressive airport – in which we had been cooped up for so long – into the sunlight of a late afternoon September day in Barcelona. Let’s get on the right bus and get out of here as fast as we can!

Weeks before we arrived, we were asked to assign ourselves for all the land tours to one of three buses, based upon our personal assessment of our mobility, as follows:

• Let’s pretend we’re young and spry
• We’re not as decrepit as we look
• We are as decrepit as we look

Each bus would have an AACI staff person as group leader, and each bus would have a different tour guide. Our friends The Levines were a lock for bus #3, and Barbara and I wound up on #2. Which meant that our guide would be Christian (not his religion, his name!), and he almost (almost!) made up for what had occurred before by being cheerful, well-informed, and speaking good English (even though he sounded like Ricky Ricardo [Let me ‘splain you]).   Continue reading →

And keep your sunny side up, up,

Hide the side that gets blue.

If you have nine sons in a row,

Baseball teams make money, you know!

(Ray Henderson-Lew Brown-Buddy De Silva)

 

If you don’t care for that song, how about:

Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,

Keep on the sunny side of life.

It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way,

If we keep on the sunny side of life.

(lyrics by June Carter Cash)

 

Then there’s always:

Grab your coat and get your hat

Leave your worry on the doorstep

Just direct your feet

To the sunny side of the street.

(Dorothy Fields & Jimmy McHugh)

 

It’s pretty well known that I am an inveterate seeker for the sunny side of the street or of life or whatever. Still, there is little to be cheerful about when you’re leaving for the airport at 4AM – an hour which, in my book, should not exist. The only good thing I can say is that there is almost no traffic on the road at that absurd hour, and you can get to where you’re going lickety-split. Now you might expect – at least I did, foolish person that I am – that if there’s no one on the road, there surely would be no one on line in the airport. Perhaps they had all been camping out all night, but there were LOTS of people – hundreds of people, thousands of people – going through the very tedious procedure: get your boarding pass, go through security, check in your luggage, go through passport control – all the while, standing, standing, standing on one line or another, when all you want to do is curl up in some secluded spot and go back to sleep. Continue reading →

“I think I’ve found an apartment.” That bit of information sort of stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know why, because the news was not totally out of the blue. Natania had more or less expressed her interest in moving out once she got her degree from Hebrew U. – something she had been ever-so-slowly working towards these many years. Now it was going to happen. No more “We forgot to mention that you need this additional elective to graduate,” or some other unexpected bureaucratic road block. Just one more final exam and, hard to believe, she would be done. Time for her to start looking.

We asked Natania the obvious question that parents who have been there, done that would automatically ask: Can you afford it: will you be able to manage on what you’re earning working at the lab out in Ein Kerem (doing unspeakable things to mice)? We’ve learned the hard way that, even if you can reasonable determine how much money is coming in, you never, ever get a handle on the money rapidly flowing out. I can’t say that Natania sat down and actually crunched the numbers, but she must have at least given them a hearty handshake. She felt confident that she could make a go of it. Continue reading →

After an enforced hiatus in order to complete some massive editing jobs, I’m back with the third in a two part series…..

INTRODUCING JOHNNY AND POOMS

In a spare moment of extreme leisure recently, I did the following calculation: since 1967, when Bonnie and Clyde joined my household as kittens, in the succeeding forty-nine years, I (and now we) have enjoyed some form of feline companionship in forty-five of those years. That qualifies me, I believe, as a lifer, entitled to whatever lifers are entitled to – if nothing else, a great deal of emotional satisfaction, the kind that cat lovers derive from watching their pets curl up in a sunny spot and take an extended nap. Continue reading →

The second and final post on this topic.

It wasn’t very long ago when I reported on the demise of one Cookie Cat and the response of Mr. Moby to her disappearance. We wondered how long it would take for him to adjust to his new situation, and would he act any differently now that he was the remaining cat on the campus. The short answer is that, once he got used to being alone, he decided that he would have to be her surrogate and do some of the things she used to do, to wit: He began waiting to get brushed every morning, which he never did before. He began to curl up and sleep on Natania’s desk chair, one of Cookie’s favorite spots. He began keeping Natania company at her laptop – even joining me once in a while – whereas before, the only desk he would deign to grace was Barbara’s. He began dividing his time at night, sleeping half the time with Barbara, as he always had, and half the time with me. I began talking to him more, and I thought maybe he might begin to react to verbal cues (Moby, do you want something to eat?) Perhaps if we had had more time….. Continue reading →

Shabbat mornings, after a few of us stalwarts learn some Mishna with Rabbi Gedalia at 7:30, and the congregation slogs through the longer-than-necessary davening at 8, I am eager to return home to make kiddush. One or two of my buddies join me for some whiskey and herring, and maybe a little more whiskey, and maybe a little more herring… I, of course, make myself some coffee, because why wouldn’t you want some coffee to go along with the whiskey? It’s a time to relax and chew the fat, before we all need to get ready for lunch with whomever we’re having lunch.

One of my kiddush stalwarts, we’ll call him “M”, is a convert and grew up in a very different environment in the mid-west from what life was like back in The Bronx. I’ve heard his story about his father bringing home a snow shovel or an old lawnmower and handing it to him. The implication was very clear: “Go out and earn some money.” OK. Except that M’s father expected him to pay him back for the shovel, the lawnmower, or whatever! I’m glad my parents didn’t charge me rent for the use of the wagon I used to deliver The Bronx Home News. Continue reading →

Now that we have properly but reluctantly said goodbye to Cookie, let us return, if we may, to the southwest corner of India…

Sunday, Feb. 14, the last “real day” of our adventure, and I could sense things staring to unravel at the fringes. One couple left first thing in the morning for parts unknown. More important to the group, both Ari’s had taken off. But at least we found out where they were headed. They had received word of another small group, B’nei Ephraim, all the way up north, who were claiming some connection to the Jewish people. I don’t blame the two Ari’s one bit for deciding that they had to check them out. When would they get another chance? The two of them would rejoin us at the airport for the journey back to The Land, and with any luck, they would have something exotic to report back. Continue reading →