Hedonism of course

 
Encountered during my wanderings in Santa Monica. 

Frog and Towed

After my first day of baby-sitting ALONE with Little Bear, during which she invented the new art form Poke-alism, and modeled her Hot Chick Sandals and Parasol (see photos), I discovered my rental car was gone. Luckily my Son the Lawyer got on the case immediately, and determined that it had been towed because I was blocking a driveway. We mobilized tape measures and digital cameras in preparation of our defense. Sad to say, we had none: I had so thoroughly avoided blocking the driveway in front of the car that I neglected to avoid blocking the driveway behind it. Truth be told, it didn't look much like a driveway at all, just one of the many curb cuts the City of Los Angeles kindly provides for wheelchairs and strollers. $177 in towing fees plus a ticket for $40. It's only money, right? Ouch.

So what about the Frog?

Typing While Asleep

Arrived in LA today after about 17 hours in the hour plus 8 hours getting to, from, and hanging around in various airports. That makes 25 hours, door to door. Two hot "meals" and three cold "snacks." Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

A Day in the Life...(Updated)*

Here's what happened today:

I took a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to have coffee with a friend and then attend a session of a conference where some interesting people were speaking. The bus to Jerusalem was a little late because it stopped to pick up the passengers from another bus which had broken down.

Afterwards, I took a bus from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv, and then walked my dog. The return bus was on time (45 minutes). During the ride, I received a call from my daughter-in-law, forwarded to my cellphone from my USA SkypeIn phone number.

Here what didn't happen to me today:

No suicide bombers
No Qassam rockets
No stabbings

Is this newsworthy or what?

*(Update)
I just remembered: 40 years ago I lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In those days, the crime rate there was off the charts. I used to call up my brother in Delaware and say: "Hello. I didn't get mugged today."

Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.

Laa Laa Ready for L.A.

Laa Laa
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

You can see why the pipe cleaner was indispensible. Today I bought them at a pipe store in Dizengoff Center. I found the pattern on the Internet months ago.

In one week, we'll find out whether LIttle Bear likes her new Laa Laa.

My Sanctified California Itinerary

I leave on Sunday for:
Santa Monica
San Jose
Santa Cruz
San Francisco
Santa Rosa
Also, for a breath of ssssilicon air, Sunnyvale. And for special friends, Sea Ranch.
No Seattle and no Sarasota this trip.

Expect intermittent blogging and occasional light showers of family-reunion photos.

Weep Here Now

http://elswhere.blogspot.com/2006/06/every-little-thing.html/

...puts a smile in my your heart though.

Singin' the Motor Vehicle Bureau Blues

John just wrote about his driving test experience, and he inspired me to describe my most recent experience with the Israeli Motor Vehicle Bureau. I can only thank Prozac for giving me the strength to change what I can, the equanimity to ignore what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

An Israeli drivers' license expires on the driver's birthday. As you may know, I had a birthday in April. And I am over 65 (although this blogthings quiz says i'm 26). In Israel that means I must submit both a medical and optometry report to the Motor Vehicle Bureau before my driver's license can be renewed. The Motor Vehicle Bureau very kindly mails the form for this medical and optometry report about six months ahead of time, giving one ample time to visit the family doctor and the eye doctor, or, in my case, to lose the form.

Having set forth to the family doctor one day in February with the intention of getting blood pressure and osteoporosis prescriptions renewed, I actually remembered to bring along the form. However, when I arrived at his office, I discovered it was lost with no chance of retrieval. See, my doctor's office is nearby, and I can stop in there while I'm walking my dog (I love a dog-friendly doctor's office. After all, dogs bring their humans to the vet's office, so it's only fair). And I am a good citizen dog-owner, so I always scoop the poop. Somehow the medical form must have got thrown away during this operation.

The thought of birthdays was on my mind: I realized that I would be traveling abroad for my brother's birthday on March 1. If I waited to get a replacement form after my return, there might not be time to do all the fillings-out and mailings before my drivers' license expired, on April 7. I decided to call the Motor Vehicle Bureau to request a replacement form.

Alas! The phone number for the Motor Vehicle Bureau is not listed in the residential phone book, of course, and also not listed in the Yellow pages, which is for business establishments. My Hebrew skills stop at those two references. However, I did remember the organization MEMSI, which is the Israeli equivalent of the AAA. And their phone number was listed in the Yellow pages, because they are a business establishment. So I called them for advice. They told me a) they do not have the form I require, but b) they gave me the phone number of the office that does have the form. Hurray! I call the number and spoke to a clerk who promised to mail me a replacement form immediately.

On that optomistic note, I left for America to celebrate my brother's birthday. When I returned, still in March, alas! There was no replacement form in my mailbox. And Alas! I had lost the phone number of the clerk!

This time I decided not to trust the phone and the postal system, but rather to go to the Motor Vehicle Bureau in person. Rumor had it that the MVB was in Holon. Once again I called MEMSI, and determined the address and bus # to take. I took the recommended bus and asked the driver to let me off at the stop for the MVB. Everyone on the bus became interested, and they all made sure I got off at the right stop. Miraculously, right by the information desk at the MVB they had stacks of exactly the form I needed. I took two, just in case.

By this time I had two weeks left until my drivers' license expired. I went to my family doctor's office on Thursday afternoon, which is one of the days listed for his office hours. Alas! he was not working until Sunday afternoon. I left the form with his secretary. I returned on Sunday afternoon to pick up the filled-out form, too late to catch the eye doctor. On Monday afternoon I left the form with the eye doctor's secretary and picked it up on Tuesday morning, too late to go to the MVB, which closes at 1PM. Wednesday morning I again took the now-familiar bus to the MVB in Holon. They were giving out numbers. I had number 158. Alas! they were serving number 37. That meant I had to wait for 121 people to be served before my turn. My birthday was Friday. I observed that there were eight clerks working and that it seemed to take 20 minutes for the numbers to advance by 40. So I only (!) had to wait an hour. I presented the clerk with my filled-out form and my almost-but-not-yet-expired license and my ID card. She said, alas! I can only issue you a temporary license because you are taking these prescriptions and our consulting doctor must approve. I said "They are blood pressure and osteoporosis medications," and she said, "I'm sorry." So I left with a temporary license, not laminated and with no photograph, and the clerk gave me a telephone number to call in a few weeks to see what the consulting doctor says about my eligibility for a real drivers' license with photograph.

Now it is June. I didn't call, but the temporary license doesn't expire until October. Last week I received a bill from the Motor Vehicle Bureau. It says that as soon as I pay NIS 136, I should receive a real driver's license in the mail within two months. I imagine it will arrive at about the same time as the medical form for next year's renewal! Gah! And I don't even own a car any more!

The Only Story

The Perpetual Refugee has been writing about significant personal turmoil lately. Thanks to Lisa I learned about his blog. In his case the political and the personal have caught up with each other in an unavoidable way: he's a Lebanese businessman whose work now requires him to oversee the management of a branch in Israel, so he's recently made several clandestine trips to Tel Aviv, and bravely recorded his feelings here, here, and here.
I'll wait for you to read them before I continue...

*************************************************************************************

Because I'm fortunate to have lived long enough with my memory intact (well, relatively), I can experience history repeating itself in front of my eyes. Here's how...

When I was a little girl, America was fighting World War II. Our enemy was The Germans. And also the Japanese. My brother was in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese, so they were an immediate danger to him. But the Germans, they were destroying my entire People…the Jews who didn't leave Europe when my grandparents did at the beginning of the 20th Century, not to mention the American GI's on the ground and in the air. Maybe for that reason, or maybe because the Yiddish I heard from my relatives and the German language were so closely connected, maybe because the Germans were always portrayed in the movies and cartoons brandishing riding crops and wearing sinister boots and sounding angry, maybe because I knew they had injured my uncles when they fought in the U.S. Army in World War I - both of them gassed in Flanders - to me as a little girl the Germans were The Ultimate Enemy. So easy to hate. Far away. Evil. Easily identifiable by their riding crops and their sneering barks. Think Dr. Strangelove. And after the war, as the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, hating Germans became not only automatic, but also righteous.

17 years later (1962), with barely a second thought I bought a Volkswagen, just because it was the best car I could afford. 19 years after that (1981), my son had a choice of languages to study in Junior High School: Spanish or German. The parent news network, a pre-blogging phenomenon similar to the sandbox mother's group for absolute reliability, had it that the German teacher was the best teacher in the school. It was then I recalled a song I had learned from our 1949 original cast recording of the show South Pacific, a Rogers and Hammerstein musical set in 1943. Lt. Cable, an American soldier stationed on one of the Solomon Islands falls in love with Liat, an Asian girl on the island but has to forsake her, and sings this bitter song (you can listen to a clip, scroll down to #14):

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be carefully taught.

Well I was six and seven and eight during World War II, and I was carefully taught to hate Germans and Japanese. We all were.

So 40 years after that war ended my son studied German, went with his beloved teacher on a class trip to Germany, and 10 years after that he married an American woman whose late mother was Japanese. I love her.

And now my American children and I are somebody else's Enemy. It became real and immediate for me when Saddam Hussein sent SCUD missiles my way in 1991 and my Tel Aviv windows rattled, and then it became real for my children in 2001 when Osama Bin Ladin sent planes crashing into New York's World Trade Center, but it became human to me when Perpetual Refugee published his posts.
http://perpetualrefugee.blogspot.com/2006/05/decompression-part-1.html
http://perpetualrefugee.blogspot.com/2006/05/decompression-part-2.html
http://perpetualrefugee.blogspot.com/2006/06/decompression-part-3.html