There is one bright spot in my life.  Other than faith in God, which is a given, there is one thing that makes my day worth living — the beautiful smile of my great-grandson.  I sometimes can’t help staring at him and imagining a wonderful, successful and happy life for him as he grows, even if I’m not there.  The one bright spot on a cloudy day.  Thank you, God.

So you can imagine my surprise when I went to the hospital as the doctor had told us to get my out-patient treatment and it was the wrong day!  Not only that, but they had told us just to come “next Tuesday” as a walk-in and it would be done.  Nope.  Not only do they not give chemo treatments at the “day-care” center on Tuesday, but you need an appointment.  So I was put into the hospital again for three days, without my bringing any necessary items, for treatment.  Apparently the doctor and the nurse on the unit didn’t know how the day-care center works; i.e., the right hand and the left hand don’t talk to each other.  They were very apologetic, but I lost three days again.

This Wednesday I will be going for the first “out-patient” treatment.  Than means a couple of hours there and then going home with an “infuser”  that takes two days to do its magic.  But at least I won’t  have to stay in the hospital every other week.  That is a pain.

The doctors have been surprised that so far the after effects have been light; some nausea and weakness, but nothing I can’t deal with.  Baruch HaShem.  I don’t need any other problems.

My only problem is “looking forward” to six months of this.  It’s kind of breathtaking to know that there’s nothing I can do but what the doctors tell me to do.  I’m not really complaining about the twelve treatments, ’cause I know that many people have it much worse than I do.  My treatments are preventative, since they really don’t yet have a way to find out if there are any sneaky cancer cells running around my body waiting to plant themselves somewhere.  I hear that a test is “in the works” that can find out if you have even one cancer cell in your body.  That’s in the future.  For now they have to put you through the treatments just in case.

The thing that still haunts me is that it was the final test for anemia that found the cancer.  That was the colonoscopy. Now, I don’t look forward to having to “prepare” by drinking three liters of soap in order to clear out my colon the day before the colonoscopy, but like everyone who knows someone who has/had colon cancer, I think everyone should have a colonoscopy.  I had one ten years ago.  I was supposed to have another one five years later because they found a polyp.  I didn’t.  Would the cancer have been prevented if I did what the doctors said back then?  Maybe, maybe not.  But you better believe I will have one whenever they say to in the future.  And — here it comes — YOU SHOULD TOO.

That’s my public service announcement.  And the end of this post.

Thus, it makes grieving for the mistakes of the past as I’ve discussed even stronger, even sharper, even more real.  It makes the need to find closure for those parts of your life that you never finished, or fixed, or reconstructed to your liking even stronger — strong enough to grab you in a most uncomfortable way — and make you hope you can complete them before the end.  It converts angst into a life-consuming foreboding that intimates you may never get the chance to complete all that is left behind.

Right now I am at the beginning of this new fight and this new calendar for the rest of my existence.  And this is just a short note to let you know that I will be chronicling them for you in the future.  For now, it’s Sunday and I go for my first chemotherapy treatment on Tuesday.  If you can, keep me in mind.

Old Me

I’m getting old.  Or maybe I’m already old.  I’m not sure.  But besides having some of the physical ailments of the old, I seem to have found my way to a syndrome which is normally encountered by people who are slightly younger and much richer than I am.

I’ve been suffering through a “funk” the last few months, and I couldn’t figure it out until I had a serious counseling session with myself.  That started me thinking about my sudden desire to find out about old friends, even high school girlfriends, wondering where they are and what has happened to them.  I even discussed this with my very understanding wife.

I came to an initial working name of “grieving my youth.”  And it’s not that I had such a wonderful glorious youth, but that’s as close as I could come to a scientific term.  Then I realized that what I first understood as “grieving my youth” can also be known as a midlife crisis, although those usually happen earlier in life and mostly to people who have some money.  Not that the money is necessary to get the syndrome, but the person’s use of their money is usually the first evidence to others that the person is stricken.

There are only a few old girlfriends whose faces I remember; actually one in particular.  But the most difficult “first step to recovery” was convincing myself that she/they no longer looked like that.  It was hard to accept that the “S” I knew and dated and consider my first girlfriend and who I went to the prom with has lived some 45 years since then,  has gone to college, has gotten married, has had children, and has grown to close to 60 years old with her husband.  She has lived a whole life without me, and I have lived a whole life without her.  Of course I wonder if her life has been as weird and interesting as mine has, but that’s another story.

So I went through the (short) list.  I remembered all of the “girls” I was fond of  in high school and one by one told myself, that even if I saw one of them now, it would not be my S or R or P or whoever, that my “version” of that person is long gone.  But the most earth-shattering news hit me when I found out that R, who I was quite fond of in high school and dated, is dead.  I found out quite accidentally and with no further information other than the realization that I could never contact her, speak to her or find out how her life had gone.  She’s dead, just as statistically some of the rest may soon be gone.  This started me thinking, it started an anxiety attack and it started me grasping for connections to that time and those people in my life.

High school was a terrible time for me.  I grew up with such a negative self esteem and lack of emotions that I was truly convinced that I was ugly and that no one even knew I existed.  So for most of that time I didn’t even try to have relationships.  By my senior year was slightly better, and I dated some freshmen and others who to my surprise said they would go out with me.

Things went fast after that.  At least now looking back on them they seem to have gone fast.  I met Miryam, got married, was in the Navy, had two children and got divorced.  (That, by the way, is a teaser for another story, how we were apart for fifteen years and came back together and remarried.)

But as I got to be 60 years old, there was a new technical world that I could use to take the place of what I missed in high school.  As usual, the Internet was not far behind the need, and it developed tools with which to exploit the “baby boomers’” desire to remember.  First came classmates.com and reunion.com and various alumni-gathering sites.  Then we poor memory-deprived old people came across (to my grandchildren’s disdain) Facebook.

Facebook is the modern day replacement for meeting and gathering with people for social interaction.  But we quickly found out that baby-boomers could find each other anywhere in the world and reestablish ancient relationships, even ones that happened only in our minds — or dreams — or fantasies.

I found L and J and others that I could never have had a relationship with as the “ugly” social reject that I was in high school.  Easing the pain of shyness now is a conscious recognition of the fact that these are people I’m not likely to ever meet in person again, being that I live some 6,000 miles away.  Not that I wouldn’t want to travel to the U.S. and meet them, only that’s probably never going to happen.

So what is the result of my “self-counseling” session?  Well, I certainly came out of it more positive about life.  I came out of it realizing the reality of the situation I have been punishing myself with.  I realized that the life I’m living now could be worse, and that I’m living with my loving and “long suffering” wife in the place where God says is the correct place for Jews to be.  Each and every day I appreciate the fact that where I am is due to a conscious decision to do what is right because it is right.  And I am thankful that He has brought me to the age of 61 in relatively good health, considering.

What about my “midlife crisis?”  I’m alive and I have my new/old friends and knowing them puts a little bit more of a smile on my face.  So there.  It’s not a crisis at all, and it’s certainly not “midlife.”  Just a speed bump in the road known as life.

It’s winter.  Winter is the rainy season here, and although it doesn’t get as cold as the U.S. east coast, the cold combined with the high humidity makes it very uncomfortable.  Oh yeah — besides not having air conditioning we don’t have central heating either, so electric space heaters have to do the job — and sweaters.

But I do remember working in Jerusalem in the winter, and the getting on and off busses and walking to my workplace in the rain is something I don’t miss.  Working from home has that advantage, although seeing the same four walls every day is a bit boring and working for a third of the salary makes things tough.

So from what we hear the U.S. is having a problem with its economy.  So far Israel’s economy has not been affected, but we’ll see.  For some strange reason the dollar is up today compared to the shekel, so that is good because I get paid in dollars to do the transcription-typing work that’s paying the bills.  I had hoped to re-energize my web site design company, but it looks like that needs to be retired along with my previous brain power.

Something weird — I have been getting obsessed with things in my past — high school friends, names, trying to remember faces, songs etc.  Maybe that’s just part of growing old.  It certainly is weird seeing your mind start acting like a bunch of swiss cheese.  Maybe writing, which has always been something I have enjoyed, will help that some.  I don’t know.

But as much as I complain about the way we have to live as Israelis, and as much as I have an occasional yearning for WalMart, Radio Shack and Home Depot, it always comes back to the reason I left everything I’ve always known and moved to Israel.  And that is that it belongs to us, God gave this land to us, and unless we inhabit it, we will lose it again. It is our inheritance, and so here I am, doing the right thing, hopefully for the right reasons, and complaining like a true Israeli.

What’s even worse is that I am no longer working. This time it isn’t Israel’s fault, or age discrimination, or anything like that — I happened to have had a “minor” stroke about a month ago. Physically I guess I am fine, but the ole’ 156 IQ problem-solving brain that made me a natural for computer programming isn’t working that way anymore. In my attempts to try doing the type of stuff I was doing at work, I found that I am no longer able to do the same sort of deep thinking necesssary to solve programming problems and “translate” an idea into computer code.  I can still do simple web development, and I’m trying to get some new customers for that now, but it’s slow going.  The doctors say that maybe in a few months I will be back to normal.  I’ll keep you posted.

If I was still working I would have used my next paycheck to buy at least one airconditioner.  The first one would go into our bedroom.  Not being able to sleep well for weeks at a time doesn’t do much for one’s disposition.

One more thing about summer in Israel — you have to make it practically a full-time job to drink water. Here they say that each person needs to drink 3 liters of water a day. Personally I think that is a little much, but in order to drink the 2 liters I do get down a day means having a bottle of water in front of me wherever I am, and sipping it constantly. With a 20% humidity I guess that is important.

As usual, there is an up side to the clear skies that means the danger of sunburn and dehydration — the skies at night up here on the mountain are the clearest, most star-filled skies anywhere. Staring at the universe at night is surely a way to understand how small and insignificant we are as humans, even as we attempt to do God’s will in conquering and settling this land that He gave to the Jews thousands of years ago as a perpetual inheritance.

So life goes on on this bump of rock on planet Earth, which is obviously better than the alternative.

Shaya

There’s only the two of us (myself and my wife Miryam) and so we finally have some economic breathing room for a change and able to maybe get some of the things we’ve been living without since making aliyah.

The first one of those things that we absolutely must get in a clothes dryer. If you aren’t in Israel or know something of the weather here, winter is miserable. Now, I’ve grown up with cold winters and I can handle snow. But a winter where the temperature is close to freezing and it is raining and extremely windy, THAT I don’t like. Sure, the “summer” is three-quarters of the year, but that 3 or 4 months of winter seems to go on forever. So hanging laundry outside on a clothes line is just about impossible in the winter. Even if it isn’t raining, it takes more than one day for things to dry because of the humid air. And of course if it rains while your clothes are hanging, you just have to leave them there until they are hanging on rainless days long enough to dry. And then there is the wind. No clothespins in the world can keep your laundry on the line in these winds.

So my first month’s salary went to paying off bills we owed that we couldn’t pay before. Half of this second month’s salary is going to go to buying a dryer. Maybe some day we’ll get a dishwasher. We knew before we made aliyah that we would have to do without much of the things we took for granted in the U.S., but we obviously didn’t think of everything.

So I’m looking forward to summer, looking forward to getting a clothes dryer, and starting to wonder what will happen in a few years when I get too old to spend and hour and a half each way to take a bus to and from work. That’s right. My job is in Jerusalem, and my community is only 6 miles north of Jerusalem, but it takes an hour and a half to get there.

That brings me to the only thing I actually miss about living in Israel. Having a car. It’s not only that we can’;t afford to buy a car. Maybe some day we will be able to do that. Butthe cost of maintaining a car here, including the licensing and registration, is ridiculously high. And the last time I looked the gasoline here was the equivalent of $6 a gallon. Maybe I can some day get a motor scooter. It might be a little dangerous driving a motor scooter between here and Jerusalem (past Arab villages, etc.) but that should at least be less expensive to run. And it would certainly simplify things like grocery shopping.

I know I am babbling now, so I’ll sign off for now and hope to have something new and interesting to talk about some time soon.

Shaya

At Ulpan we were told about the Purim party were were going to have. Purim, as you probably know, is a holiday which has to do with the saving of the Jewish community in Persia. It’s main theme is “simcha” — happiness. During the week of Purim, everything is “b’simcha.” People dress up like everything from Bible Characters to TV Characters to angels and cowboys, eat a lot and drink alcoholic beverages a lot, and have a great time. Only there is a sad history to Purim which takes place in recent years. Israel used to have a country-wide celebration for Purim, which had to be stopped because of the terrorists. Some of the big cities still have their own celebrations, especially Yerushalayim, which celebrates on the 15th of Adar, “Shushan Purim” because it is (at least was) a walled city. The rest of the country, other than the walled cities, celebrates on the 14th. But here’s the kicker — all of the army, police, and volunteer units (including the “patrol groups” on the yeshuvim, have to go on major alert during the week of Purim because terrorists might take advantage of the fact that most people are in costume to sneak into Israel and kill as many Jews as they can. It’s sort of like in the U.S., people putting razor blades in apples on halloween, only here one bomb could kill or maim many people. So every clown could be an Arab killer, every firecracker could be a gunshot, and every day the supposedly elected government of Israel plays the world-wide politically correct game of politics and gives more Jewish land, land given by G-d to the Jewish people as an inheritance forever, to a bunch of people who would kill some of those cute little boys and girls I saw coming home from school that day all dressed up as fairies and queens and kings and soldiers and cowboys and whatever. Why would someone be so evil as to do that?

At that time the new “Palestinian” government went public with what we here in Israel already know – that to an Arab, and especially to a Moslem, one’s word means nothing. You can make all of the peace treaties and agreements you want with the Arabs, but, as they said this week, they will ignore any and all previous agreements that do not suite them. In other words, there is no way in the world that the Jews or any other civilized group of people can live in peace with the Arabs. Rabbi Kahane was right – Israel is for Jews, and Jews only. Get rid of the Arabs, move out the Christians, eliminate the cults, and make it what G-d said it should be — a country defined and controlled by His word – the Torah.

It was a hard year for those of us who love Israel, because our supposed “democracy” has failed. Underneath the everyday workings of the Israeli society there is a mourning going on that will last much longer than a year. It is like the mourning one goes through when he or she loses a limb or other part of their body. Israel has lost some of its jewels and tens of thousands of Jews have been thrust into refugee status by their own government. By their own government! Sounds like what the Arab countries did to their own people to garner power as the “saviors” of the poor “Palestinian” people.

So what Jewish leader was the first Jew in history to make Jews into refugees? Why, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – someone who not only helped to form this country, but was responsible for the building of many of the communities he destroyed. Now Olmert, the Sharon wannabe, says he eventually will do the same thing. Believe it or not, they are not insane. Just controlled like a puppet by thoseto whom oil is more precious than people.

The Israeli-type parliamentary government apparently doesn’t have enough checks-and-balances to keep crazy men like Sharon and Olmert from becoming dictators. And not benevolent dictators, either. Corrupt dictators in the model of Sadaam Hussein. One who is out only for saving his personal behind and that of his sons. Sharon went from being a pro-Zionist “mad dog” General to being the patsy for George Bush and the world-wide oil monopoly. Oh sure, George Bush did a good job of making us all think that his attachment to the oil industry and his friendship with the Saudi prince was incidental to his being President. But after he was elected the second time, and had nothing to lose, his true colors shone through. At first we questioned who was the puppet master pulling the strings of both George Bush and Ariel Sharon, and then we realized that the Arabs were pulling Bush’s strings, and Bush was pulling Sharon’s.

Yes, I know this is one of those conspiracy theories. But as they say, you’re not paranoid if someone is really after you. Conspiracy theories can be really conspiracy fact, and in this case it is looking more and more like we were duped. I was duped twice. Once for voting for Bush, and the second time for thinking I am moving to a democracy. A socialist one to be sure, but what I didn’t realize is that there is no connection between what the public wants and what the government officials do. That may be the most important character of a democracy, but in Israel it has been forgotten. Politicians here, even more than in the U.S. are only out for themselves. For power. For money. So what is the solution? Well, the first solution is to inhabit G-d’s land. Why is that first? Because the Bush/Sharon/Olmert debacle has convinced the Muslim terrorists that they have won. Yup, they think that the murder and mayhem they have been bringing to the world has succeeded in making the U.S. force Israel to give them land. Of course the Saudi princes and other Arab leaders know that it is actually the oil.

We need to show the world that we haven’t given up on Israel, and that we intend to bring so many people here that they will not be able to continue to win. How much land do they want? They want it all. In the near future I mean that they want all of Israel. They want to kill or remove all of the Jews, and make the entirety of G-d’s gift to Israel into an Arab Muslim state called Palestine. It’s not enough that they have been systematically destroying and removing evidence of the Holy Temples from the “Temple Mount.” They want all of Israel, and they want all of Jerusalem. And then they will continue their conquest of the rest of the world. Another conspiracy theory? No, their holy book and their clerics and their teaching and their statements say that the end result of their plan is to make the entire planet one Muslim state. And to do it they will convert or kill everyone. As they have been quoted as saying, “first the Saturday people and then the Sunday people.”

Shavuah Tov (Have a good week)