If you’re on to a good thing…

It was just before Yom Haatzmaut in 2008, the first year we were here, and we were acutely aware that we were out of the loop – to use an expression that would befuddle most Israelis. Imagine if you were stuck in Teaneck on July 4^th and you and the missus were sitting in your kitchen by your lonesome whipping up a package of Wacky Mac on the stovetop. That would be equivalent of being here in the Land among a nation of hard core barbecuers with no grill, nothing to grill on it, and no one to share your viands with. Thank God for Jeff and June, who had a place to go and enough room in the car to take us (probably including Natania) with them for us to celebrate our first Yom Haaztmaut here in our adopted homeland.

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We keep talking about it; why don’t we go already? I’m available next week Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Pick a day.

 Ezra had come over for our usual Shabbat morning kiddush several weeks before Pesach (it may have even been before Purim; I can’t remember back that far) and mentioned that their daughter Jordana and her boyfriend Matan had just visited the Whiskey Bar in the Sarona complex in Tel Aviv. They had a super-special time, and we (meaning Ezra and I) should go too. As he explained, you can go for a tasting of different whiskies and have a meal. Now when Ezra talks about ‘having a meal,’ he has in mind the carnivorous kind of eating. But these days, meat restaurants usually have offerings for those of us who eschew moo, so I wasn’t worried about going hungry. The issue was finding a date when we were both available, and that was the hard part. One of us needed to take the bull by the horns and say, let’s go already. Or else we’d never get there.

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The conversation went something like this:

Richard: the bill is 592NIS

Me: let’s just split it

Richard: Our share is a lot more than yours. How about if we pay 60% and you pay 40%?

Me: OK. Say 600NIS. Ten percent of that is 60; times 6 is 360; times 4 is 240. (to the young lady who waited on us) Put 360NIS on this card and 240NIS on this card. And add 15% on each card for the tip.

Figuring that all out in my head was about as time-consuming as tying one’s shoes – assuming you were with me in P.S. 80 and are still of sound mind. It was assumed by one and all that, in that old brick building on Mosholu Parkway in The Bronx, you would learn arithmetic as well as spelling and the fundamentals of English grammar. There was also art and music appreciation, because it was assumed these were important disciplines. Moreover, some of us were chosen to play an instrument, in my case the clarinet, which is why I have more than a nodding acquaintance with the layout of the treble clef (which came in very handy when I joined the ranks of Encore!) There are five lines, and the spaces between the lines correspond to the notes F-A-C-E (easy enough to remember). The notes on the five lines? E-G-B-D-F. Which becomes the mnemonic, Every good boy does fine, or better still by a lot, Every good boy deserves fun. Yes! Let’s work on that. Don’t we all deserve some fun? Which is all the segue I needed to get to the meat and potatoes of this article…

Read more: Every Good Boy — Part 1

We had survived the Winter of Our Discontent, when we had focused mainly on turning our new apartment into an actual home. True, we did get out and about once in a while. Barbara would trudge out almost every Tuesday to Tzomet Pat to hang out with Liel, our step-grand-daughter; I would arrive at Power Coffeeworks and the shuk on Thursdays; we would dutifully arrive at our medical appointments whenever, and so on. But little else, not much anyone would describe as more than the run-of-the-mill activities. And then, we were coming up to Pesach. We gotta do something over chol hamoed to get out of the house, or else what’s the point. (That was me using my most plaintive tone of voice.)

One thing we could do was go to the Israel Museum. Yes, like most of the museums in The Land, it would be free over chol hamoed and hence very crowded. And, yes, we are member of the museum and can go whenever we like. But we haven’t gone, so why don’t we? Besides, I’m especially interested in seeing the exhibit of Chris Marker’s photographs. If nothing else, we could vicariously travel the length and breadth of the country – at least how this French filmmaker saw it in 1960 when he was here making a documentary about our tiny country.

All of the prints were small, but, still, 120 was a sizable number and, with everything else in the exhibition, took some time to digest. That’s one things about photographs. If someone is actually interested in what’s going on – not just running around taking shots of everyone sticking their tongue out – after a while, the pictures being taken turn into historical documents. Because the world changes in sixty years. Certainly the Israel of today is very different from what it was in 1960.

But I was also looking at the pictures as someone who himself has traveled The Land, camera in hand – although first arriving twenty years after Marker. I couldn’t help thinking, some of my work is……. DON’T GO THERE! IT WON’T DO YOU ANY GOOD. Maybe you’ve had this experience: someone who’s not your parent, your rabbi, or an official pedagogue has taught you an invaluable life lesson, even an Invaluable Life Lesson. My mentor, Lou Bernstein, would assemble a group of his students, and we would go out together somewhere to photograph. And we would be standing next to each other, ostensibly photographing the same thing. But when we reassembled a week or so later and began showing the prints we had made, I didn’t see that. Where was I when you shot that? It was hard for us to fathom how differently we saw the same situation and how our photographs were not at all the same. That was Lou’s point. The only person you’re in competition with is yourself – a bit of wisdom I have never forgotten, and which has made my life a lot more pleasant and a lot less stressful. Let me do my thing, and you do yours.  Marker’s photographs, made from negatives that were presumed lost for half a century, are now on display at the museum. Mine have been zealously guarded over the decades and kept in storage boxes, available for viewing in our living room. And I’m good with that.

One of my favorite images on display is of a group of teenagers leaning out a train window and looking at the photographer. Are some of them still alive? Supposing some smart person in the museum’s publicity department circulated the photograph with the question, Anyone recognize anybody in the picture?  And then someone might show up and say, yeah, that’s me, second from the left.  Then we could ask: do you remember why you were going to Tel Aviv on that fateful day? Or even better: Tell us how you got to be in Jerusalem in the first place. Where were you born and where did you grow up?

Barbara reminded me of the obvious. In today’s trains, the windows don’t open, so you can’t stick your head out. Even if they did – I hate to say it – today’s generation of pre-adults would be too busy on their phones to notice the presence of a man with a camera or anything else of note. But now is now and then was then. Which partially explains why some of us have chosen to pay attention and photograph what we see. Because what we see now will soon become what we saw then. That’s because time flies when you’re having fun.

To be continued, as we took ‘having fun’ seriously during the weeks that followed.

Now that you’ve had a chance to settle in…..

I know what you’re about to ask me. Do I feel better about the move now than I did before?

Well, are you glad that it happened?

Yes and no. How’s that for a definite answer? There are things that I like and things I don’t like. Which is what you might expect. But I do feel I’ve gone from the ‘this is where I’m staying’ phase to ‘this is where I’m living,’ if you get the distinction.

There’s no going back…

There’s no going back…

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Read more: The Dreaded ‘M’ Word — Part 24

For many of us, putting up pictures on our walls is a defining moment. Now we really do live here. Some people decorate their space with family albums; others use ‘Jewish’ art. I’m fortunate. I have plenty of original paintings, prints, and photographs done by my late sister, my sister-in-law, Natania, and assorted other folks. Oh, and my own modest efforts. Plus the vintage sepia print done by somebody in Tiberias in the 1880’s, which we bought in Bloomingdales, a NYC department store, of all places.

You might assume that hanging the same artwork we had on the walls before would be a walk in the park for me. I’ve certainly done it before – quite often, in fact. I’ve hung my own exhibits; helped others do the same. But I’m getting older. Brian, come on over and give me a hand. The one thing he couldn’t do was help me decide what to put where. He would come; he would go; I would change my mind and rearrange everything. But after three sessions, we were more or less done, and I could find other things to worry about. But now at least we could make a to-do list, and if most of what we needed to do didn’t get done before Pesach, so be it.

Or so we thought. The moral being, you never know what worries are lurking in the dark shadows, waiting to ambush you at the most inopportune moments. For example… Our friends The Levines were going to The States for six weeks, going on two music cruises and then doing a sivuv hither and yon from Florida to Texas to Connecticut to visit all manner of other Levines, before returning to The Land the week before the Hag. They would leave their Mitsubishi SUV with us, and we (at least, Barbara) would start it every few days to keep the battery alive and well. At least that was the plan. But you KNOW something was going to go wrong because something (or better still, ‘somethings’) had to.

First potential for catastrophe: would Richard Levine make it there and back in one piece, given his propensity for doing battle with gravity and, of course, losing? No he would not. He tripped along the way, cracking a rib and suffering a concussion. Hence our friends returned two weeks earlier than planned.

Second potential for catastrophe: would their car suffer from rejection (being left with strangers) and stop working? You know the answer – if you’ve been paying attention. Barbara went out one day, and the car wouldn’t start. OK, there’s a battery pack. Call our friend Yoni the electrician to come and help. Except the battery pack was as dead as the battery it was supposed to start. Yoni came back that afternoon with jumper cables and got the job done.

Is that all there is to the story? Don’t be silly. Of course not.

By the next morning, the SUV had apparently again forgotten its manners. By this time, Barbara had obtained two important pieces of information: the mechanic that most of our friends with wheels use and information about Yedidim, an organization of volunteers who come and start your car, believe it or not, free of charge. One of their volunteers (one of three females among hundreds of guys) raced over and, using her battery pack – properly charged of course – got the Mitsubishi going. Whereupon Barbara and friend Ezra drove the car down to a garage in the industrial area for Ayal to put in a new battery.

And that was that?

 Foolish person, you. Barbara went out the next morning and…

Don’t tell me; the car wouldn’t start.

Why would you think otherwise? Of course it didn’t start. Barbara called the same service, and this time a fellow showed up. As I understand it, he jiggled some wires somewhere, and the car sprang into action. At least until the next morning when the car again failed to deliver. Now, someone might be thinking, why didn’t Barbara just call up this Ayal person and tell him to get his rear end in gear. Let him get the car, bring it down to his garage and figure what was wrong. Except that Ayal doesn’t make ‘house calls.’

What do you mean ‘he doesn’t make house calls.’

He doesn’t have a tow truck; you have to bring your vehicle to him.

If you could have driven the car to him, you wouldn’t have needed him in the first place.

True enough. But that’s the way things stood. This was a Thursday morning, and The Levines were due back the next morning, which incidentally was the Friday when the clocks were advanced one hour, so that when the plane landed at 5:30AM summer time, it felt like 4:30 (gasp!). We figured we’d wait for them to show up at our doorstep, and we would take collective action on Sunday. Let’s at least bring their unresponsive battery pack into our apartment and charge it with good old-fashioned Israeli electricity.

Shabbat came and left – as it always does. Sunday morning, and we were all rarin’ to go. We would start the car with the newly charged battery pack and drive it down to Ayal’s garage. He would figure out what was wrong, take care of it, and The Levines would be on their way, back to their refuge atop their mountain. They had been gone long enough; time to go HOME. They had things to do, and we were hoping to get a head start on our Pesach preparations. We’re not getting any younger or more energetic. A little bit every day, we figured, and we’d get everything done in time. At least that was the plan or what we thought was the plan. Just to be on the safe side, we called up the garage to tell them we were on the way. Sorry, we’re closed until Wed. It was Eid al-Fitr, the three-day Muslim holiday that ends Ramadan. Undeterred, Richard called up the Mitsubishi dealer in Jerusalem. They too were closed. It seems that most of the employees in both establishments – and all similar places of business in these parts – are of the Islamic persuasion and take these matters quite seriously.

Well, that put a damper on things. Nothing to do but to stay put and enjoy each other’s company. And wait until Wednesday. Except that Ayal decided to somehow open up on Tuesday with his less-than-complete staff. OK, let’s do it! Richard and Barbara got the Mitsubishi started, brought it down to Mishor Adumim, and persuaded Ayal to work on the car immediately, instead of the next day, as he had intended.

Now this is going to shock you. The battery that Ayal installed the week before was…. (drum roll, please) defective. There had been suppositions that the car’s less than stellar performance was caused by a recalcitrant alternator or something else in the car’s advanced electrical system, but Ayal ran every diagnostic test he could, and there was nothing else wrong with the car.

How could there be something wrong with a brand-new battery?

Have you been paying attention these last 32,000 words? How could there be something wrong, for example, with the brand-new compressor for our mazgan? How could there not be something wrong with the….? Never mind; you get the idea.

Trust, but verify. Just to make certain that their Mitsubishi had learned its lesson, The Levines waited until Wed. morning to make their departure. And yes, the car has been on its best behavior ever since, or so we’re told.

Now that we had the apartment to ourselves, we could focus (or better, Barbara could focus; I only focus with a camera) on the task at hand, getting ready for Pesach, but you all know what that entails. One of my responsibilities was to obtain KLP chocolate bars at the shuk – 18 of them – so Barbara could make her highly anticipated Pesach cakes. (Do I buy the Lindt at 20NIS apiece or the Schmerling at 17 a pop? We had already sampled the offerings from our supermarket and found them all lacking. Decisions, decisions…)

And then it was the day before the Hag, and we were preparing as best we could. There would be people staying with us and others joining us for a meal. (We would be with the Aarons for the Seder, as we had done the last seventeen year.) The apartment was as clean as it was going to be. I had done as much cooking as strength would allow. Barbara was melting eight bars of chocolate to use as a glaze for her highly anticipated Pesach cakes when….. Why is there smoke coming out of our microwave?

Fred, would you taste the chocolate? Does it seem off to you? I’ve never turned down an offer to act as a sampler, so I willing complied. Eight times seventeen, that’s 136NIS down the drain. Tastes like burnt microwave. That’s so awful that, even if I were starving, I would pass… I guess I know what we’re buying sometime on Monday once Lior reopens.

Barbara, being the compulsive type, immediately headed to the mall to get some kind of dessert to share at our meals. She didn’t have time to buy another kiddush cup for Pesach, after smashing the one we had. But misery loves company. The Levines wound up at the last minute not having a Seder to go to, and then their refrigerator gave up the ghost right before the last day of the Hag. Why does this always happen…? Remember, it can always get worse, a sobering thought at best. So be prepared; you’ve been warned. And stay put where you are. That’s my best advice

The two of you are amazing; we’ve been in our place for over a year and a half, and we still haven’t unpacked all our boxes…  That, more or less, is the kind of praise we’ve received from a number of visitors, upon seeing the progress we had made in eliminating the stack of cartons that had overwhelmed our new apartment, as if we had done something stupendous, like invent a new kind of wheel. As far as we were concerned, we were just doing what comes naturally. That is, if one partner is A.D.D. and the other is on the O.C.D. spectrum (which makes us O.D.D.).

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‘Six months from now you’ll be laughing at all the problems you’ve been having.’ Maybe yes, but most likely no. I’m thinking about a friend of ours who is recovering from major surgery. She might very well feel satisfied with the results and be glad she went through the trauma, but I can’t imagine her and her family feeling giddy about the operation come Pesach time – as in, ‘That was fun; let’s do it again sometime.’ I’ll never look back with nostalgia at what transpired as we relocated from Our Home to THE apartment – even with the benefits that ensued – and yes, there are some, although, as you are correctly surmising, it wasn’t easy.

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I was faced with a quasi-existential dilemma. Should I locate my computer in all the chaos, set it up, close the door to what would be my office, and proceed to chronicle our misadventures in the new apartment, or should I direct my attention towards helping Barbara turn our new quarters into something livable? One thing I knew, I would not have the time and energy, let alone the mental acuity to do both at the same time. I chose the latter option, which I am convinced was the right way to go. Now that things have settled down a bit, I feel more inclined to return to where I left off in this sorry saga and continue.

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It is sometimes possible to overlook the obvious, even if it is knocking on your door as hard as it can. (Or in our case, ringing the doorbell.) In my last article, I described one of the ‘iron laws of bureaucracy’: Get enough people into the mix, and it’s almost a certainty that one of them will be out sick, on vacation, or – God forbid – sitting shiva when you’re in need of something to get done. All of which is true, but here in The Land these days, if someone is unavailable, the most likely explanation for your person’s absence unfortunately is ‘miluim’ – with no end in sight. Now that I’ve made this emendation, I can get down to the business of the day.

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Just imagine this scenario, which I imagine will set the stage for all the turmoil that follows. You’re traveling somewhere in The States without a care in the world, just trying to get from point A to B. All of a sudden, you’re in the middle of a super-sized traffic jam caused by a multi-car accident half a mile ahead of you. You can keep plowing ahead, figuring the road will clear at some point. Or….. you can get off the highway and, with a little ingenuity, get onto a four-lane road that will get you back on the same highway twenty or so miles ahead where there will be smooth sailing ahead. What you don’t realize is that you’ll be going past miles and miles of strip malls that have their own traffic problems. You’re not the only savvy traveler taking this detour, so there is more traffic ahead of you than the road can handle. There’s also all the cars and trucks coming out of the mall parking lots cutting in front of you, slowing you down even more. But the cherry on top of the cake is the traffic light in the middle of all this doing nothing but holding up traffic. Wait a minute, I think I see some police officers up ahead starting to direct traffic. Maybe that will help; otherwise we’ll be here forever.

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