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Posts from October 2008

An Israel Story: Tomatoes Anyone?

My life in Israel started on a kibbutz, which is basically a community of a few hundred families that lives and works together, and shares in all of the support systems of that society. Everyone works for the kibbutz, in different capacities, and even those who work outside of the kibbutz deposit their salaries into a common fund. [There are a few hundred kibbutzim (plural for kibbutz) all over Israel; the first one, established in 1910, was down the road from where I lived.]

Since I lived on the kibbutz in 1982, things have changed, but at that time all of the members ate their meals together in a community dining hall. Just think, you could go years without having to prepare a meal, or you could go a year or two preparing meals for hundreds; or you could not fold a towel for years, and then, well, you could supervise volunteers from all over the world as they folded towels in the laundry for you and your neighbors. There were children’s houses for the care of children so the parents, especially the mothers, could go to work. The premise here (remember this idea goes back to 1910) was that instead of one woman staying home to take care of one child, the kids would be “pooled” together so that mothers could go out to work, and the adults could take turns caring for each others’ children.

In short, a kibbutz is a self-contained socialized system. As I said, things have changed (for example, the ascendancy of the communal dining room has waned, and more people work outside of the kibbutz than at that time), so what I am recounting is life as I knew it then, and as it was followed on the kibbutz where I lived for six months.

First Job: Tomato Selector
My first job on the kibbutz was in the preparation room. I, of course, had no idea what the “preparation room” was, but quickly found out that it is part of the kitchen, where the food gets prepared. Made sense. So off I went in my very worn cast-off clothes, since my own clothes were still somewhere between New York and Tel Aviv.

I was placed in front of a large sink and counter, and told to inspect a couple of crates of tomatoes. I was to rinse the tomatoes, put the good ones in large bowls in preparation for being served in the dining hall, and put the bad ones back in the wooden crates.

I don’t know about you, but up until that time I had never encountered a tomato outside of a supermarket. Since I grew up in an apartment, I had never even encountered a home-grown tomato. My tomato expectations were: red, uniform shape (meaning round), firm, and clean. But the tomatoes in the crate did not conform to that standard; there were mushy parts, there were green parts, there were tomato booboos. They were not round. They were uninviting. And they were not clean. (Okay, I did understand that that was part of my job.)

Going through one crate, out of the hundred or so tomatoes that I inspected, I found about four tomatoes that I thought were of almost supermarket-quality. I was proud of having saved the kibbutzniks from having to eat less-than-standard tomatoes.

My supervisor came over to inspect my work. She was horrified. I was made to understand that I am a wasteful American woman. She gave me a knife and told me to cut off the bad parts and not to be so picky.

What? It had never occurred to me that just because part is bad, that does not mean that the whole is bad. I thought that the entire tomato must be perfect in order to be purchased or eaten. Why had I never seen these imperfect tomatoes before? I mean I had touched tomatoes with bruises, but these were not bruises, these tomatoes had serious issues.

I welded the knife and picked up the first rejected tomato. I felt it; there were mushy parts. Conquering my revulsion, I cut off the mushy parts and placed the surgically-altered tomato into a bowl. And on I went, dispensing with imperfections and creating a new kind of perfect tomato. In the end, there were about ten tomatoes that were not salvageable. The process was perspective-altering. It had never occurred to me that just because part of something is not good means that the rest is not good.

This first lesson in a new land was a good lesson to learn; in fact, it became more than a lesson in tomatoes, it became a life lesson. If a tomato is not all bad, don’t discard the good parts along with the bad. In life, this insight enabled me to understand that there is good with the bad, and to look for the good parts, and not to focus on the bad parts. Yes, this could be a useful lesson. Only problem was, I went overboard, and focused too much on the good, forgetting that the bad was not cut away as with a tomato, and so was still a part of the whole. I guess there are some problems extrapolating things from tomatoes to people. So the revised lesson has become: focus on the good, but don’t overlook the bad.

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Book of Life

Book of Life. What would it mean to you to think that once a year God gets out a big book and writes down who shall live and who shall die in the coming year?

The sealing of that book for the year occurs tomorrow night, as the Days of Awe and Yom Kippur come to an end.

Then I get to eat after a 24-hour fast, hopeful that the caffeine-withdrawal headache, hunger pangs, and dry mouth were worth it.

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Show Compassion for the Unhappily Married

The Rosh Hashanah sermon that the rabbi at my synagogue gave was about being more understanding to people who are unhappy or troubled in their marriages. The “come away” was not to judge people in this situation, which I guess means not to make them feel that they are failures, or that they are not properly mature to commit to a commitment, or that they are not deserving in compassion because they didn’t do what they are “supposed” to do. I was surprised by what he said, I had thought that people understood that when a person, or a couple, gets divorced it’s not because they didn’t try, but because it didn’t work. It’s like those people who think women rush to get an abortion without considering the various alternatives. If you are aware of the options, you can assume that the people in the midst of the problem know the options as well.

Judging others, shouldn’t that be a sin? I mean if gossiping is a big no-no, shouldn’t this be even bigger? Who put you in charge of deciding what is right and good for people? As far as I know, even therapists don’t tell people what to think or where they have gone wrong, they ask questions to get the client to consider the situation from other angles, to consider themselves from other angles.

I’m assuming that when someone tells someone else that she is unhappy in her marriage that the person she confided in is a friend or someone with whom there is a modicum of friendly feelings, so why would that person then go out and judge? Am I being naïve here? Do I assume too much from people, you know, that they care about the people they are talking to the same amount when they are face-to-face as when they are apart?

And why in this day and age are people judging others so harshly? Do we not get it that marriage is hard, that raising children is hard, that working is hard, that getting by day to day is hard? And you know what, even if the person did not work at her marriage and just decided that she didn’t want to be in it any more, isn’t that a valid enough reason to end it? And isn’t knowing that someone is unhappy enough to wish her happiness?

Is it jealousy or envy? Are the people who stayed in their unhappy marriages the ones who condemn those who break the commitment because they wish they had the strength to go—and not the weakness to stay? Is this similar to the most vociferous gay bashers who are often latent homosexuals who are afraid of their feelings?

Perhaps the expression “the grass is greener on the other side” has been transformed to “the grass is dried up on my side so why don’t you come over.” That sentiment must truly be sinful, and the antithesis of everything that we are taught, in whatever faith or non-faith tradition in which we are raised.

Sometimes our grass becomes poisonous and we need to change our diet. Sometimes our grass doesn’t grow enough to provide us with the sustenance we need, so we must move on. Sometimes our grass turns out to be Astroturf. Yes, compassion, I guess it is like fertilizer, helping new grass sprout within the soul of a marriage-saddened person. Why not spread some fertilizer this year instead of lawn mowers.
 
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My Neighbors and their Dogs

Taking a break from me for a bit, I’d like to tell you about my neighbors and their dogs. We have lived drive to drive at the end of a four-house street for about six years, with a four month hiatus when they tried to sell their house (and they rented it to a family of home-schoolers in one of the best school districts in the country who let their guests park their cars on my lawn), to no avail. (I guess that is a sign of how bad things are: the husband is a real estate agent and he couldn’t sell his own home.) Anyway, onto discussing the three dogs that they have called theirs. 

When they first moved in they had an old lab and a young German shepherd, Sam. After the old dog wandered off a few times, they decided to get an electric fence. For some reason they only bought one collar. One would think that they would put it on the young German shepherd, and they did, for a while. But after the old dog wandered off again, they decided to put it on the old dog so that it wouldn’t wander off into the woods that run alongside our houses and just lie down and die. I guess the electric fence company was resisting selling them another dog collar.

So the old dog lived outside and in the garage. He had apparently become stinky in his old age. The young dog was at home, until they discovered that their youngest child was allergic to dogs. At that point he, too, barked the garage home. Responsibility for the dogs rested mainly on their somewhat mentally-challenged 10-year-old son.

One day as I was weeding (in the days when I cared enough to stop, unlike today when I care enough to notice, but not enough to bend down to pull), Sam wandered over and started sniffing me. Now, as someone who has grown-up in a petless home and with a dog-fearing mother I can safely say that the dog fears have been transmitted in my DNA. My dog, a Maltese, is just too small and too cute that he passes under all dog-fearing radars. Not so with Sam. I yelled. And the son came and got him, because the dog was not going back to the garage on his own.

Around this time the old dog did manage to crawl off and die. Perhaps they buried the collar with him, because it did not go on Sam.

By this time we feared going outside. Sam would be forever getting off his leash (I guess they didn’t realize that you need to hold the leash and not just put it on the dog) or go beyond the range of where he was supposed to stay on his own volition. He would be sniffing visitors, or causing visitors to stay in their cars. As my ex-mother-in-law commented, "isn’t that the Nazi dog" (German shepherds)? And that is the way he started making things feel down here at the end of the street.

That is until one morning at around five-thirty when Poops and I were walking up our street to get the newspaper. It was fall, it was dark, it was chilly. We were in our own little world: Poops was doing his smelling-peeing routine, and I was thinking about how clear the sky is, so I didn’t see Sam running up the street until he was right next to me, or rather Poops, who he was clearly more interested in. I screamed. “Get this dog!” And out of the darkness I could see the son running towards us.

“His leash slipped out of my hand” he stammered.

I was too shaken up to comment. Poops almost had a heart attack; he’s not overly fond of big black dogs since a few months prior he had been “greeted” so enthusiastically by a Rottweiler that was wandering freely around the neighborhood that a toe was broken and he needed to be in a little dog cast.

A week later a new home was found for Sam with someone who had experience training German shepherds.

Then came Walter, some kind of non-allergenic dog. No electric fences for him. Only a boy and his dog and a leash. Needless to say boy was constantly running around the neighborhood looking for his missing dog. When they moved back from their four-month hiatus it was without Walter.

I thought, good, they know that they can’t take care of a dog. But no, this morning I saw those orange electric dog-fence flags around their yard. Walter was back. Maybe this time they will figure out how to train him.

My only overt comment on my neighbors and their dog-caring abilities: if this is how they care for their dogs, I wonder what they’re doing with their children? And if one son riding his tricycle into my garage door is any evidence, I see no difference.

Back to me: Let’s all visualize a SOLD sign for my house!

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What Unhappiness Feels Like

It might be self-evident, but being unhappy is a tremendous drain on a person. It’s like living in the fog that descends upon you when you have a cold: nothing tastes as it should, nothing sounds as it should, nothing looks as it should. There’s a pall over everything. Or perhaps it’s a separation between yourself and the world around you, and that disconnect makes you feel even worse. That’s what it feels like to be unhappy. That’s what it feels like day after day when you know that no matter how good your day is and how much joy it brings to you and you bring to it, there is that underlying unhappiness that cannot be displaced.

To be unhappy is not the same as to be sad. To be unhappy is to realize what you are lacking, to feel in your very fiber that you are not happy; whereas, to be sad is to be focused on the negative, and not even acknowledge or dwell on potential happiness.

So here I am, going about my life, day in and day out, in my pall of unhappiness. I am beginning to feel the debilitating effect of living in this place: it is that life feels like a struggle and not something lovely and worthwhile. And that realization makes me even more unhappy.

I need to stop this slide, into sadness.

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I Love Cleavage

I started writing about love songs tonight, but I’d much rather think about cleavage. About a year ago I discovered my very own cleavage and have come to flaunt it. Flaunt in the way that a midlife teacher would, so don’t start thinking Madonna-flaunt (although I feel compelled to say that she is older than me). Think three unbuttoned buttons and not Italian stallioness to the belly-button unbuttoned.

Apparently I should be drooping now, what with having breastfed my two daughters for about a year each, but I still have bounce. This cleavage discovery (or rather “uncovery”) has enabled me to understand what a midlife crisis means: it means that you realize you wasted years of your life ignoring a part of yourself that deserves attention. Why? Why did I waste those years with high-necked tee shirts and two unbuttoned buttons when I could have been exposing hints of my sexuality to all passersby?

I could lay the blame on my father and his fairly prudish home-based restrictions and how they seeped into my own psyche. But I shall not. Nor shall I blame the good girl buttoned up image opposite the bad girl unbuttoned image, and I’m sure we know where I felt I must lie in that situation.

No, here I shall lay the blame on me. It’s my own fault. What was I thinking? I can be smart and put out, just a bit. I mean why not? Will the world come to an end if I feel a small, ever so slight feeling of joy when I look down and see that I am not just this cerebral (okay, I’m into exaggeration tonight) woman, but a sensual woman too?

I find it hard to believe now, but when my 17-year-old daughter was still nursing I decided to start a fancy nursing bra company. Yes, I even had meetings about my fancy nursing bra company. That is until I met with one executive at a bra company who looked at me after I gave my shpiel (I can use Yiddish here because this meeting took place in the garment district in New York that was practically founded by Yiddish-speakers) and asked how many women I thought would want a fancy, lacy nursing bra? And while I was trying to come up with a figure, she asked the killer follow-up question: how long did most women nurse? Hmmm. I got the feeling that she thought it was just me who would need a black lace nursing bra. I did get a lot of samples of lovely lace while researching this business proposal that got incorporated into years’ worth of Halloween costumes. But I really digress.

Back to my boobs. Maybe I discovered them when my daughters developed their very own. And my daughters are not hiding theirs. While they might not be told to “put clothes on” (as I love to say to the students who are going way too low down in front) but those scoop neck (should they be called scoop chest?) shirts they wear show that they aren’t putting themselves in purdah. If my tween and teen can exude their sexuality why can’t I? I’m not dressing to look like my daughters (which I think is an impossibility at my size 14 to their size 0), I don’t see why I have decided to look old maidish when I certainly don’t feel that way. I mean if I wear (okay, buy) leopard print undies, I should be letting just a tad of the roar come to the surface.

Which is the beauty of cleavage. It’s a small roar. You aren’t completely hiding, but you also aren’t banging your presence on the head. No, that line where breast meets breast, especially if urged to join by a push-up, is subtle in the way that Barbra Steisand’s voice is subtle.
I will absolutely ignore the fact that the skin that is involved in my cleavage is getting a tad wrinkled. Or maybe I should embrace it; after all, I wouldn’t have gotten to this point of cleavage admiration if it hadn’t been for the years of life that brought the wrinkles about.  

Gray hair. Chin hairs. Wrinkles in my décolletage. Oh, the joys of uncovering the latest me. I might not be new, but I’m the latest model. And this latest model comes with not-quite practically plunging necklines and a simple pride of coming into a new perspective in mid-stride.
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Home Alone

The girls and mr ex have gone out-of-town for the weekend. I am home alone, well, with Poops. So what does any self-respecting woman do?

I went to the store and stocked up on important foods, foods that are vital to my sustenance for the two days when I will not leave the house and will remain in my home clothes, even when walking Poops. I bought food that will make me happy for the two days that I will be home with my laptop and the 120 essays I need to grade. Just in case you were wondering, the list does include chocolate cake.

Question: Do I need anything else?


Life Lesson

Maybe a life lesson is that there is no lesson to be learned. Unbeknownst to us we are continually absorbing and learning and acting on those refined perceptions without realizing that we are not in Life 101 any more, and neither are we in Life 501, we are, in fact, writing the curriculum.

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An Israel Story: Welcomed by Song Birds

I feel like indulging in sweet nostalgia. You know, the kind that bars the bitterness that came after, the kind that transports you to happier times before the fall. And now, now that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are upon us (the “big” Jewish holidays), I am thinking of Israel, and the years I lived there, especially the time when I first got there, before I realized that this would be my home for more than seventeen years, when it was still the place of my first young-adult discoveries.

The First Morning
It was February, so I was surprised to wake to the sound of birds outside my window. I peeked between the curtains, unsure what I would see, after all, I had arrived at the hotel in the middle of the night after an eleven-hour flight and I hadn’t seen anything. In fact, I had no idea where I was, except somewhere in Israel.

Pulling back the curtains, using them as a shield since I was naked (my bright red backpack with my things for my year’s journey had been lost), I was confronted with the brightness of a morning sun streaming in through the leaves and branches of a huge tree, a tree that blocked the entire window in all its green glory. And when I looked up, through the green leaves I could see a radiant sky-blue sky. Oh, the glory of springtime in the middle of what was supposed to be winter. I had left Buffalo in the middle of my fourth cold, murky December there, and two months later I left New York in the middle of the slushy, steel-colored winters of my childhood and youth. But now, now I woke to a brilliant Israeli morning, and it was only six o’clock.

I was a twenty-year-old college graduate starting on my grand adventure. I closed my eyes and listened to the incessant calling of those birds and felt the warmth of the sun and the coolness of the tree, and I found myself coming to life.

The drive to the kibbutz where I was to live in a work-study program for six months was a journey in every sense of the word. The kibbutz was at the southern tip of Lake Kinneret (in English it is usually called the Sea of Galilee); the drive took us from the populous Tel Aviv area (I discovered this from a more alert passenger) through the Jezreel Valley. I was driven there, along with seven others, by a driver from the government department that ran the work-study program. We were headed to different kibbutzim in the area. (More on life on a communal farm in another posting.)

As much as I tried to stay awake on the drive, I fell asleep. Car rides, even fifteen minute ones, generally lull me to sleep; that is unless I am driving.

I awoke to another unforgettable sound: sheep bleating. I woke up because the car had stopped, and the car had stopped because a shepherd (yes, they really do herd sheep) was crossing the road with his flock. We waited patiently while the sheep got to the other side and we all looked at each other, aware, finally, that we were not in America any more.

The vision of Israel that I had in my mind was of desert. I expected to see sand every where, or at the very least for everything to be in shades of beige. But when I looked up from the mass of sheep I almost gasped: there was a verdant carpet of rectangles of green laid out all across the valley that we looked down upon. It was truly a glorious sight.

It was truly an awakening in the modern/ancient land of my ancestors; what a glorious sight and feeling. As I beheld the view, my mind beckoned forth the Holocaust stories and Israeli pioneer stories that I had practically fed on from the moment in December when I decided that I would start my world travels in Israel.

The drive went slowly as we dropped passenger after passenger off at the kibbutzim they would be calling home for the next six months. Mine, of course, was the last one on the route. But that way I got to drive through the Jezreel Valley and then down toward the Kinneret (as it’s called in Israel) and past the ancient city of Tiberias, and over a tributary of the Jordan River where I saw people in white robes standing (later I was to find out that this is the site where many Christian pilgrims to the holy land get baptized), past a burned out Syrian tank on the side of the road (I found this out later), past banana trees (I also found this out later, how would a city girl know what a banana tree is?) on either side of the road, and then into the kibbutz that I would happily call home for six months.

And the first person who met me there was the hyper-active director of the program who ushered me into a room full of well-worn clothes to replace my missing ones (which would arrive three days later by taxi from the airport after my backpack had been found). And my new life had begun. I thought it was symbolic that I came practically naked, only me, to meet my new experience, to partake, finally, in my life.

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Fourth Week of School

Man in the Class (MiC) and I seemed to have found a groove this week; and even when we were “Mr’ing” and “Ms’ing” each other over the kids’ heads because we didn’t quite agree on what the other had said during class (okay, it was mostly me “Mr’ing him, but I am the teacher with experience), we were absolutely respectful of each other and the decorum we wanted to maintain in the classroom.

On Back to School Night I almost gagged when he told the parents that we both check our emails obsessively and that they shouldn’t be surprised to see a response at 2am—at this I lost my listener status and yelled out “not me.” I am surely trying not to do too much work from home this year; I need to maintain a separation of work and home. While the number of essays I grade makes me break this rule on occasion (Sunday mornings are usually my paper grading time), I really do try to maintain the separation. Perhaps because I really do see myself as a writer, I have never been 100% committed to any job: I was never my work.

But back to the classroom. There have been far too many deer in the headlights looks from 14-year-olds when they realize that there are implications for blowing off their homework. Yes, if you don’t do your homework 0’s will be inserted in the gradebook and the grade will reflect that, and not the fact that you had intended to do the homework, or that you left it at home, or that your printer broke, or that you, yes, forgot about it but would have done it. Do you not get it? I, of course, break with department policy and grant them a week to get things in; I mean who wants to see kids grounded for a lifetime after just the first month of high school? Surely not me.

I have four Asian girls with very similar first names; it took me a month to distinguish between the names and the girls. Every year there seems to be a name that repeats itself in a few classes, as is the case this year. And, for some reason those kids with the same name always look similar, making my life complicated in the “needing to distinguish each child for his uniqueness” way. 

On a truly positive note where I will ignore students from last year who did not say hello to me when they stopped by my room to pick up papers from last year, a couple of students did yell out to my class “she’s the best freshman teacher!” Yes!

I think that I will end this update on that note. Have a great week.

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