Category Archives: Mindfulness

And So It Begins – America Summer of ’24

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After seven and a half months of planning and reserving flights, cars, hotels, and activities, we were on our way to our month-long road trip in America. Ten-month-long war in Israel notwithstanding, flight cancellations all around us, our El Al reservations held firm, and we woke up in Boston at a hotel near the airport on July 16th.

We reserved Premium Economy seats for every flight; something we never would’ve done even as little as five years ago. With age comes compromise. We arrived in Boston well-rested and likewise in Rapid City, South Dakota, after two flights; Premium Economy on all. Worth every penny. Of course, if you don’t have it, you can survive Economy, even in your 70s, and if you’re addicted to travel as we are, it becomes a moot point. But the extra comfort meant starting our vacation without needing a rest day after each flight. In fact, minutes after we landed in Rapid City we were at the Alamo Rental Car counter to pick up our comfy Hyundai Elantra and hit the road.

The Rapid City airport is tiny compared to most of the mega airports we’re used to. Delhi, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Rome, Tel Aviv. The two men staffing the Alamo Rental Car desk provided foreshadowing for our entire trip. They received us with smiles and kind words. They offered us maps, listened to our plans, and made helpful, gentle suggestions. They offered basically all the cars on the lot (not all that many) at no extra charge and only reluctantly waved goodbye when we drove off.

I’m always a little surprised that there is such a thing as rental cars. Mostly brand new cars in perfect condition. I get it that insurance will cover any damage we manage to do but they don’t know us. At all. Maybe we’re the worst drivers EVER. If they’d spent a few days driving the highways in Israel they’d probably charge a lot extra for Israeli drivers. But, no, they happily waved goodbye and we were on our way.

Our first Walmart experience had me laughing at my partner. He’d actually never in his life been in a Walmart. Yes, he was born and raised in the United States. He lived there until he was twenty-eight and has been back for visits many times over the past decades. And, yet, he’d never been to Walmart. He was in shoppers’ heaven. Despite having been on two flights that day, he wandered the aisles in amazement. We stopped in to buy a cooler, ice, and basic food for the next week. We ended up checking out every aisle, from appliances to clothing, to shoes, to over-the-counter medications. Of course, being a man, we walked out with only a cooler, ice, and food for the next week, but he also walked out with a new-found respect for that American icon, Walmart. We were to visit Walmarts in several cities over the next month.

An hour later we arrived at our hotel which boasted a view of Mount Rushmore from our room Unh hunh. You know how that goes. If you walked to the end of the outside balcony and stood on tiptoe, craning your neck around a corner, you could vaguely make out the famous foursome in the distance.

No matter. We were psyched.

At the front desk, we learned that in half an hour there would be a nightly flag ceremony. Half an hour. Yikes! We’d been traveling since about ten o’clock a.m. and it was seven-thirty p.m. My partner wanted nothing more than a shower, food, and sleep. But – a flag ceremony! – come on, dude. We’d be leaving the next morning after seeing as much of Mount Rushmore as we could absorb. He’s nothing if not a great traveling companion. We were in the car quick as a flash and on our way.

If you’ve never been to Mount Rushmore: it’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It’s not on the way to any place you want to be unless your Great Aunt Martha lives in South Dakota. And nobody’s Tante Shoshana lives in South Dakota or any state within three states of South Dakota. For some reason, it found its way onto my bucket list decades ago so here we were.

And if you ever do find yourself there for some very mysterious reason, DO NOT MISS THE FLAG CEREMONY!!!

It was amazing. Moving is too small a word. Thousands of people every night during the tourist season, and they are all – each and every one – patriots. They’re proud Americans. They stand for the National Anthem (and seem to know all the words) and even for America the Beautiful, with hand on heart. When there’s a call for anyone who’s served in the military or has a family member who’s served in the military to come down to the stage, the stage is filled to overcrowding with people.

This is Trump Country. It’s the other America. It’s an America with which my partner and I are not familiar.

It’s an America where a teenager offered me her hand (unasked) to help me rise from the stone wall seating. Where children behave and sit or stand quietly while adults speak. Two things, sad to say, we didn’t see in Boston or Florida, later during our trip.

We both learned new information about Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and, especially, Teddy Roosevelt.

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The next day at breakfast at a diner one of the owners suggested we drive the back way into Mount Rushmore. He was as friendly, without being intrusive, as the Alamo Rental Car staff, and we took him up on his recommendation. It was one of the most beautiful, impressive pieces of road we traveled. Beautiful forest on either side of us. A quiet, windy road through the Black Hills with two short tunnels. One of the tunnels framed Mount Rushmore in the distance.

Breathtaking.

We spent another hour or so wandering around Mount Rushmore and then headed to our next stop – the nearby Crazy Horse Memorial.

A short half-hour away, we parked and climbed on a mini-bus to go up the gravel road to see Crazy Horse chiseled into the mountain. Only the head of the famous (or infamous) Oglata Lakota warrior and one of his arms – pointing ahead – is finished. Commissioned by Henry Standing Bear to be sculpted by Korczak Ziokowski in 1948, the Native American Nation refuses any financial support from the United States government on principle. Not hard to understand given their history. The constant lack of funding has made it challenging to employ enough workers to make serious progress over the decades.

Considerably larger than each of the heads of the four presidents depicted in Mount Rushmore, perhaps 4-5 times as large. It is an impressive undertaking.

Crazy Horse fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn – Custer’s Last Stand – and surrendered to US troops the following year. In yet another broken promise by the US government, he was killed by the military guard after surrendering.

It seemed only fitting to continue on from there to the Battlefield of Little Bighorn. But it was time to rest a bit so we slept overnight at a motel with little cabins in the town of Buffalo,

So far the trip had been everything I’d hoped…and more.

An Alternate Reality – And Not a Good One

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Beginning in the 2010s the mid-20th century term “woke” has gained popularity as connected to matters beyond race such as gender and identities perceived as marginalized. It became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z, and by 2020 became a sarcastic pejorative among many on the political right and many centrists in Western countries. Writer and activist Chloe Valdary, essayist Maya Binyam, and others have written that the new usage of the woke concept is a double-edged sword, being used for “Woker-than-Thou-Itis” which leads to canceling people for a potpourri of opinions – societal, economic, political, educational – and worse.

Being woke has become, for a very vocal and powerful minority, a raison d’etre; the social group to which they belong, indiscriminately adopting every element shouted most loudly by the woke in-crowd. Because this includes most of the Western media, it sometimes seems that it is representative of the entire Western world. And since cancelation can mean not only a loss of acceptability but a loss of status, job, and income, the majority of people, those who see that the emperor is, indeed, naked, are reluctant to speak out against the increasing lunacy.

There are comedians like Ricky Gervais who unabashedly refer to “The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs.” or “Oh, they want to use our toilets. Why shouldn’t they? They are ladies – look at their pronouns! What about this person isn’t a lady? ‘Well, his penis.’ “Her penis, you fxxking bigot!” But the bad boy of comedy can certainly court cancelation. He’s already a multi-millionaire. And, even so, he was condemned by LGBTQ groups, and his Netflix special SuperNature was criticized as ‘dangerous’.

What’s dangerous is this entire alternate reality we’ve witnessed come into being. A reality that exists only in the minds of the woke, but has been attracting Generation Z. You know the ones – zoomers – university students who do not yet have real knowledge about anything much and are wont to invest time or energy in learning about an issue before they join earnest activists and their paid counterparts on the front lines of protest.

When it was mostly about pronouns, we could smile at the annoying reminders. Perhaps many of us balked at the plural ‘them’ being used for a single person, but generally, we made the crossover gracefully. When we got over the surprise at the audacity and absurdity of portraying the Queen of England as Black in Bridgerton, many of us could even accept the importance of opening a wider range of roles for people of color (although note that the sanctimonious woke are not so accepting of actors with no physical disability portraying characters with physical disabilities or for a Jewish Israeli actor portraying Cleopatra).

Critical Thinking Theory, originally introduced by Watson Glaser in his Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) used to be a process of using and assessing reasons to evaluate statements, assumptions, and arguments. This approach, based on thinkers such as Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot, is not to be confused with the new, woke-lauded Critical Theory which is an attempt to disprove and discredit widely held or influential ideas or ways of thinking in society, also perhaps commendable if used without the current agenda of rewriting, or as gentler souls than I refer to it, reframing history. This includes taking people respected in the context of their time and condemning them with the eyes of 21st-century North America.

And if it weren’t enough to turn already-confusing adolescence into a morass of further gender identity crisis on steroids and with suicidal tendencies, demand that everyone change biology and grammar to accommodate the 10% (I’m being generous – some put it as low as 3.8%) who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and to force commendable, often heroic personalities of a past long dead (as are they, of course) to retroactively conform to the woke standards of 2024, the alternate reality today is most conspicuous in the war against the terrorist organization, Hamas.

Why have I waited until now to come out against the “Alternate Reality of Woke”? Because in this most recent mutilation of reality, brave young people are sacrificing their lives and my own country’s existence is at stake. We must not cast a benevolent forgiving eye on the misinformation accepted blindly by those protesting as “Pro-Palestine” or claiming that the atrocities of October 7th never happened.

The world’s blatant ignorance of the history of the Jewish People in their homeland of Israel fosters the claim that “Israel popped up in 1948 as the creation of the British colonizers”, a statement presented as fact in a question-and-answer forum in one of United States’ most respected universities. It allows people who have never experienced modern-day Israel to state with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state. It encourages people to call the casualties of war in Gaza genocide.

Support for the Hamas cause should not be surprising.

For decades, perhaps as many as five, the United Nations has been controlled by anti-Israel interests. Since the creation of the UNHRC in 2006 over half of the country-specific resolutions passed were those condemning Israel. The sitting UN Commissioner for Human Rights, an Austrian, has been vocal in condemning Israeli airstrikes on Hamas in Gaza but to my knowledge has made no comment about the 1300 Israeli civilians murdered in their homes, dismembered, or about the over 200 Israeli civilians taken hostage of which only an estimated 100 remain alive. UNWRA workers were filmed participating in that horror.

In the alternate reality over 35,000 Arab civilians have been killed during the war in Gaza, all as a result of genocide. In reality, Israel has gone to lengths never before seen in the history of warfare to evacuate civilians from the areas of conflict. And clearly, a large number of those killed were Hamas fighters, inserted into residential areas to use civilians as human shields.

In the alternate reality, the people of Gaza are starving. In reality, the markets are open and functioning in addition to the huge amounts of humanitarian aid received. Gaza has been given foreign aid to the tune of literally billions of dollars since Israel left the area in August 2005. Sufficient funds to develop Gaza into a Garden of Eden for residents and the development of a thriving tourism industry. Sadly, over 75% of the population is considered to be living in poverty as the aid has been used primarily for Hamas weapons and the building of hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels large enough for truck traffic in which to store weapons and house the military arm of Hamas

In the alternate reality, hospitals and schools have been bombed by Israel. In reality, yes, they have, but only after careful investigation showed that they were serving as storage for Hamas weapons, and Hamas camps. They received ample notice to evacuate and IDF soldiers helped evacuate patients from hospitals, sometimes at great risk to their own lives.

In the alternate reality, Israel is villanized and constantly pressured to stop fighting in Gaza by countries and organizations posing as humanitarians. In reality, Hamas has remained uncensured for refusing to give a list of hostages still in captivity, alive or dead, or for refusing to allow The Red Cross to visit the hostages or provide medical care for those in need. Those organizations also ignore the fact that Hamas has changed the terms of agreement to a ceasefire significantly at the last minute every time – and then blamed Israel publicly for not signing.

In the alternate reality, the LGBTQ community has come out full force as Pro-Palestine, in some cases Pro-Hamas (which is beyond comprehension on every level). In reality, Hamas indiscriminately and without compunction murders anyone known to be LGBTQ, while Tel Aviv has been listed as the No. 1 LBGTQ-friendly city in the world.

Israel has had a Jewish presence for 3000 years. From time to time during those 3 millennia, Israel has been controlled by Jews. The Jewish People, as a recognized People, has existed for between 3000-4300 years, depending on the source of information.

There has never been an entity called Palestine, other than in Yasir Arafat’s mind, Arab propaganda, and the alternate reality. As a People, those considered ‘Palestinian’ today are a collection of tribes bound together for political purposes.

There are so many lies, so much misinformation, and lack of information, that it’s virtually impossible to debunk them one by one here. And, of course, if unwilling to invest the time and energy to research them adequately, one can never know who to believe. Why believe me? Easier to just decide blindly, choosing the worldview that best serves you in your preferred social group.

I could present hundreds of photos of Arabs, Asians, Blacks, Whites, Jewish, and non-Jewish meandering freely in Israel’s malls, on Israel’s streets, working as pharmacists, doctors, nurses, store owners, teachers, or sitting in Israeli coffee shops and restaurants. Anyone who visits Israel knows how ludicrous the claims of apartheid are. But you could prefer to believe that the photos are as photo-shopped as the horrendous photos and clips of the October 7th atrocities.

The Muslim world began planning for this day in the early 70s when they began filling American universities with their young people. They have increased funding and investment in American universities, institutions, and commercial interests to the point of dependency. They have an extensive and extremely talented public relations arm that has created an alternate reality that builds on the naivete and laziness of the Western psyche as well as an Israel lulled into complacency.

Make no mistake – October 7th was the culmination of decades of planning, strategizing, coordinating, and enlisting. It was an excellent plan. If it had gone as planned they would have seen their dream of a new Middle East realized.

Israel didn’t get one plane or helicopter into the air for 8 full hours. Israeli civilians were left to the mercy of barbaric murderers, with only sparse, ridiculously small groups of IDF soldiers trying to stem the tide of thousands of Hamas terrorists and Gaza civilians who stormed the flimsy fence. Only their own bloodthirsty culture, which focuses on death and the extinction of Jews, ruined their plan. If they had not been stalled by the joy of seeing several thousand Israeli young people running for their lives from the Nova Music Festival of Peace and Love, or the thrill of decapitating people, burning babies alive in front of their mothers or gang-raping young women while forcing their boyfriends to watch before murdering them, they could’ve been all the way to Tel Aviv and northward before Israel recovered from the shock and lack of preparedness.

Hezbollah was caught off guard. Apparently, the original plan had been for a two-pronged attack; Hamas from the South and Hezbollah from the North. But the Nova Music Festival was too tempting for Hamas and Hezbollah was not yet ready to join in.

One of my pet peeves is people who use the language of the Holocaust in political argument about our 21st world. However, we are in a war for the very continuation of the State of Israel – nothing less – in a world that is showing itself to be unfriendly to Jews at best and anti-Semitic altogether at worst. Israel is our homeland and only safe refuge in this topsy-turvy world. The Holocaust proved unequivocally that we can never again allow ourselves to be dependent on other police, army, government, or people. In the mere 79 years since 6 million Jews were murdered while others stood by or collaborated, it seems that much of the world – many of them Jewish – have forgotten or convinced themselves that it could never happen again.

October 7th should have destroyed that alternate reality.

Hamas must be wiped out totally and irrevocably. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is living in an alternate reality; one that doesn’t bode well for the world.

Like Father; Like Daughter

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I was looking for something in an old file the other day and came across a letter my father sent me 33 years ago. It was the day he found out that his cancer had returned and the prognosis was not good. In fact, within six months he would be dead.

When I showed it to my partner, he said that it looked exactly like something I might have written. The sentiment is mine, Even the language is mine. And it’s very 2024, even though it was written in 1991.

My Dad. What a special person. A complicated man. A man never quite at home with his emotions. Quick to smile; slow to hug. A very active inner life. A very active public life. But most often not emotionally present for those of us he shared a house with.

I like to think things would be different today.

So here’s that very special letter, with those very special thoughts, lessons for us all, from that very special man who was my father.

  It was an idyllic morning in sunny Sarasota.

  I stepped outside the hospital, blinking in the sunlight. The everyday sights and sounds were different; they were as never before. The deep blue sky, the gently moving leaves, the traffic flow, the people — all seen in a new light.

  I reflected on how casual I had been, before my traumatic experience, to such common phenomena and to so much else in life — indeed, to life itself. And so I resolved to spend wisely whatever of life was yet to be mine; not to squander it. For life, I saw with stark clarity, is an incalculable gift. It should be held close, made the most of, constantly enriched, and cherished.

  That is one half of the lesson I learned there, standing in the sun. There was another.

  The wondrous sunlight enveloping me, could I retain it? Could I keep that sun from setting? Had I tried to halt its slipping away, and inevitably failed, how frustrated and saddened I could have been. But if that were my reaction I’d have transformed the glorious moment into one of regret and sorrow.

  But it is not only the sunlight which must slip away. Our youth and our years, our senses and our lives, these must go also. And we must accept their inevitable departure; be ever ready to let go.

  That is the other half of the lesson.

  This, then, is the paradoxical conclusion. Hold fast, hold close the precious gift of life, but with arms so loose as to be ever ready to release it; with arms virtually open.

  Is this an impossible challenge? Physically, yes; mentally, emotionally, of course not. We do it repeatedly throughout our lives. We give away our hearts in love, and we have more heart to give. We wear out our minds in deep thought, and we have a better, sharper mind. We are smitten by pity for the deprived, and we are the stronger for it.

  The key word in the conclusion about life is ‘inevitability’.

  Aware that life must and will inevitably end, each of life’s moments becomes all the more cherishable. The sole unknowns are the when and the how; when and how these moments will end. The choice is between succumbing to fruitless agonizing — fear and dread of the when and how — or living those moments richly, fully, gratifyingly; savoring them and saying, in effect, “I’ll relish this as long as I may, and whenever it ends I’ll be grateful for having had it — and hope there are some others who will be grateful that I had it also.”

  I imagine nodding heads. It does seem logical. But is it unduly difficult to transfer from the thought process to one’s inner being? To transplant the idea into actual, living reality? To live by it?

  It is not difficult. We do it again and again in our daily lives.

  Look. We are enthralled by a spectacular sunset. We are immersed in passionate expression of our love. We are transported by a rapturous violin concerto. Do we destroy such moments by dwelling upon their transitory nature? Our minds tell us these moments will pass. We know it. But do we permit that knowledge to suck out our enjoyment? How infinitely sad that would be. And in truth, we don’t, do we?

  So it is, or so it should be, with life.

  Life, that wonder-filled possession, is ours to keep for a while. Think of it as the wise sage Bruriah, wife of the Tanna Rabbi Meir, did, as a divine loan. How wholesome, how sensible, to make the most of the temporary gift while accepting that one day, any day, it will be taken back; that one day, as in Joshua Leibman’s lovely Day in the Park fable, the Great Nurse will beckon, “It’s time to go home now.”

  And, so, hold life close, with open arms.

  Of course, I have had frequent occasions in my life to recognize life’s precious worth — in peak moments of joy, or when escaping serious dangers. And, of course, I have long known that being mortal, my life must end at some time. But my acceptance of both of these truths was tucked away inside me somewhere. They were concepts I did not question. They were “givens”. I was never challenged to affirm them. I was never tested. How, then, could I be certain? When the Angel of Death confronted me, how would I really react?

  I have been tested now.

  And I thank God that I found, find, myself in total accord with the balance; with the synthesis of holding life close and readiness to let it go — of holding life with open arms. And in cognizance that I really believe this, that it has penetrated my inner being, I am warmed, strengthened, grateful, at peace.

  For you who may read or hear this, I pray that you find the wisdom to enjoy life, to cherish it, to make the very most of it for yourself and for those with whom your life is entwined; to hold it close — all the while accepting its inevitable departure without fear, frustration, or dread; prepared to let it go.

  And if you do that, if you really make that belief your innermost conviction, you will be among the most fortunate of mortals. For you will not only rob death of its anticipatory fright, replacing that with inner peace, but your life will be enriched beyond measure.

Amran Prero, March 1991

Addendum: I was with my father for the last few days of his life. We watched television together, chatted about my kids and about Israel, and he told me about a series of dreams he had on the nights leading up to his death. He was calm, at peace, happy, and in good spirits. He laughed at Tom Selleck’s Magnum P.I. as usual, giving him a constant barrage of advice.

He truly held life close with open arms.

Before and After

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Thirty-two years ago, on one of those magnificent autumn days when the sun is out and the air is crisp, I sat on the small hill at the back of our property which overlooks the road. I don’t remember what I was doing; just that it had something to do with the garden. I heard our thirteen-year-old son calling out a greeting to me and looked up to see him crossing to our side of the road on his way home. I remember smiling and thinking that seeing him made the day perfect.

Then a shot rang out – or what sounded like a shot – and I heard our son let out a yelp. He grabbed one hand with the other and blood began streaming between his fingers.

It took me a few seconds to grasp that somehow there was a connection between the sound I’d heard and my son’s bleeding hand. But very quickly I tumbled down the hill to him, looking around furtively to assess any danger that might still be lurking. His face was white; his mouth slack. I grabbed him to me and pulled him into a dead run back to the house.

After a harrowing drive to the nearest hospital emergency room, x-rays, a very kind doctor extracting what was left of a small part of a bullet I don’t remember the name of, we checked into a nearby hotel because it was too close to Shabbat to drive home. Miraculously the bullet hadn’t damaged a nerve. The wound was painful but that would pass.

You may be familiar with that odd phenomenon of a parent being scared to death because of a danger a child has been in and the anger that comes with the relief of the passing of the danger. Like when a small child goes missing in a mall and then suddenly appears. That’s how I remember the time we spent in that hotel. Miserable for both of us.

Though there was no long-lasting damage to my son’s hand, there was definitely long-lasting damage to me.

I lost something very essential and dear to me – my basic innocent and naive belief that I could keep my children safe.

He’d been so close to me – maybe 20 yards away – and, yet, a nearby teenager’s wreckless play, putting fire to a bullet from his father’s personal weapon, wounded, and could’ve permanently damaged, or even killed, my son before my eyes.

In the thirty-two years from that day to this, I’ve made peace with that reality. Our five kids have made it into middle age, surviving whatever craziness they got themselves into. (And there was a bit.) These days I worry sometimes about our grandchildren, but I realize that they, too, will live their lives without my being able to control the dangers through which they’ll pass, hopefully successfully.

Life has been good to us.

We live in a house we love. We have a garden with gloriously large trees we’ve nurtured for over thirty-five years and a back porch on which we eat breakfast when weather permits, looking out at flowers, birds who come to eat and bathe in our yard, and the occasional fox. We travel to amazing places, celebrate many happy family occasions, cherish thirty-year-old friendships, do things we love, enjoy our relationship with each other, and are in relatively good health.

And then October 7th happened.

On another peaceful autumn day, the sun shining and the air crisp, thousands of Arabs – Hamas soldiers and regular residents of Gaza – men, women, and teenagers – stormed the flimsy gate separating Gaza from the Jewish kibbutzes, moshavs, and other small communities close by. They carried out the worst, cruelest atrocities perpetuated on Jews since the Holocaust.

Parents were brutally murdered in front of their children’s eyes, Women were violently and repeatedly raped while their incapacitated husbands and young children witnessed their degradation and murder. Babies were burned in microwave ovens. Adults and children were dismembered and beheaded. At an international music festival, over 250 young people were slaughtered, some shot to death as they ran for their lives, and others (not so lucky) caught and tortured before being killed.

For six and seven hours, or longer, people hid in their “safe rooms” or, in the case of the music festival, under bushes, behind trees, or under cars, praying for rescue. A few were able to hold out until family members from far away or army forces were able to reach them. Many were murdered or kidnapped into Gaza before help could reach them.

By the end the October 7th massacre over 1200 Jews had been brutally raped, tortured, mutilated, and/or killed. Over 200 Jews had been dragged into captivity in Gaza.

Since that day, when the true face of evil was revealed, my reality has once again shifted.

It took a couple of weeks for Jews around the world to come out in active support of Israel. At first we heard mostly of their fear for themselves – taking mezuzahs down and taking Jewish star necklaces off.

It took anti-semites of every order and in every country only hours to begin to demonstrate in the streets around the world in loud support of Hamas and against Israel.

University professors and administrators defended the anti-Israel, anti-semitic protests and posters as being protected by freedom of speech. One university professor even declared from a loudspeaker to a group of pro-Hamas supporters that she felt “empowered” by the events of October 7th. Administrators at Cornell, Harvard, and Penn shamelessly defended the call for the genocide of Jews as not being against campus rules, depending on the context.

I still remember well the United States of my childhood and young adulthood when no one could express anti-semitism out loud, no matter what they thought or felt in their hearts.

Women’s groups were totally silent concerning the gang rapes of Jewish women, the mutilation of women’s breasts, and the humiliation of parading Jewish women’s naked bodies through the streets of Gaza as residents there – men, women, and children – spat on them.

“#MeToo Unless You’re a Jew” went viral.

Those of us who were active in the women’s rights movement of the 60s and 70s were angry and ashamed.

Today I often catch myself looking at a beautiful young woman crossing the street in front of my car with the words of witnesses of gang rapes echoing in my head and thinking – “It could have been this young woman.”

It was so random. It could have been any woman.

I’m torn between reading yet another witness’s account and clicking on by without stopping. How many stories of such brutality can a soul bear? But what right do I have, as one who was spared the atrocities on that day, to ignore the testimony of those who lived through it?

I don’t know how anyone who survived the evil carried out so joyfully on October 7th will be able to find happiness in their life. To be able to trust other people again. To have a happy relationship with a partner. To fall asleep at night and find peace in slumber. How can they listen to people around the world defending their attackers and feel safe in this world? What effect does the deafening silence of women’s organizations have on their feeling of solidarity with other women?

I live my life in a pastoral setting, far removed from rockets and Gaza. And yet I wake up every morning and read the names of the fallen soldiers from the previous day and look at the photos of their beautiful, young, smiling faces. I believe fiercely that we must keep fighting until the evil has been wiped out, at the same time my heart aches for the loss of the lives of Israelis fighting for our right to live peacefully within our borders.

My hope of peaceful co-existence with Arabs in my Homeland has been shattered. I’m suspect of all.

Most of the communities in which the atrocities were carried out were politically left-wing; their residents believed in co-existence to the point of driving their Gazan neighbors to Jewish hospitals when they were ill, and to work inside Israel. In a shocking turn of events, the specific Gazan Arabs who were helped by their Jewish neighbors were exactly those who carried out their murder and directed others to the more vulnerable homes.

I look back on the unbounded optimism and basic joyfulness of my pre-October 7th life and wish I could have all that back. Maybe someday I’ll make peace with the reality of horrific evil in the world and be able to move on.

For now, there is a background of sadness omnipresent within me. A constant low-level mourning for those murdered, for the orphans, those who lost the most loved person or people in their lives – what a euphemism “lost” is for what happened to them – for those whose memories and dreams are forever tainted by horror.

I don’t forgive the world for its insensitivity to what happened to us on October 7th; for the minuscule attention span, the insistence on proclaiming moral equivalency, the legitimization of the rape, torture, dismemberment, and murder of Jews in any way, and for any reason, the silence of women’s organizations all over the world – they are no longer my sisters!.

If before October 7th I found the whole “Woke Movement” a bit ridiculous but temporary and basically harmless, today I know better.

My entire view of the world has changed.

We recently spent several days in Rome. One of those days was spent on a tour of The Colosseum and The Forum with an excellent guide. We had a basic, sketchy knowledge of both places but our eyes were opened that day. During those three hours, we learned of the cruelty of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. Far from romantic, people were pitted against each other, exotic animals against each other, and criminals were executed during the intermissions, as 50,000-80,000 spectators watched: men women, and children – yes, families came to “enjoy” the bloody battles to the death. For four hundred years this form of entertainment went on. Citizens of Rome were gifted with free tickets twice a year.

While shocked at this knowledge of the Rome we’d thought of as bestowing great culture and development upon the world, we found ourselves thinking that not much has changed since then. Hamas and the general population of Gaza, have proven humanity is still cruel, violent, jealous, and hateful. The residents of Gaza, have shown that simple citizens still get pleasure out of watching other human beings humiliated, tortured, raped, and murdered.

Where do we go from here? You tell me.

Udaipur: The Village Tour

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We met our daughter and her three children at the Delhi airport after they’d spent the weekend in Agra seeing the Taj Mahal. We flew together to UDAIPUR, a small, pretty city in the Rajasthan District. UDAIPUR is known as a romantic honeymoon location, home to the lovely Lake Pichola and impressive City Palace. My partner and I were there 7 years ago on our first trip to India and thought it would be a good place for children’s activities.

Rajasthan has its own rich history of colorful dress, dance, and music. We were sure the kids would love the cultural evening with the live Rajasthani music and groups of women dancing with bells on, fire pots on their heads, and especially the young woman dancing while balancing 10 colorful pots on her head. We were wrong. Luckily it was only an hour.

The next day we fared a lot better. All but one of us really got into the 3 hour art workshop where a patient, sweet, talented artist helped us each paint our very own miniature. Our daughter and granddaughter both created truly beautiful miniature paintings. My partner’s peacock and my dancing elephant weren’t bad but revealed that we needed a bit more instruction. Our youngest, a very active 7 year old, showed more focus and attention to detail in his prancing horse than I’d ever seen.

The 3 hour cooking class was a hit with all of us. It was very hands on – from the chopping to the kneading to the measuring and mixing of spices, to the frying…and, of course, the eating. The shy cook started off embarrassed that her English might not be good enough, but once she warmed up (and it’s hard not to warm up to these three kids!), she totally took over the instructions from her (very good looking) son, Gautam.

But the day none of us will ever forget is the day of the village tour.

My partner and I had taken a cab and driver out into the countryside 7 years previously. Our driver took us to several cottage industries – hand stamped textiles, pottery, a country art school for miniatures. We didn’t remember the names of the villages so after reading the glowing reviews of “Salim’s Day Village Tour” we decided to put our motley crew in Salim’s hands and follow wherever he led.

Salim, a devout soft-spoken Muslim, showed up dressed all in white in honor of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. He brought another auto-rickshaw in addition to his own. We all piled in and off we went in the shimmering 35 degrees heat (95 degrees Fahrenheit).

About half an hour later he pulled onto a dirt and gravel road and then turned again onto a rocky path where he parked after another 100 meters. Our first sight was of two women in the distance washing clothes in the small creek. The second was a woman, also dressed in a traditional, colorful sari, with a stack of cow patties balanced on her head.

We followed Salim into a lean-to where five men of varying ages sat on a flat stone area and several women stood by a counter leading into a small hut. It turned out that the father of the woman of the house had died and they were celebrating his life according to their Hindu custom. Somewhat similar to the Jewish shiva, but not exactly an act of mourning since they believe that while his physical manifestation is gone, his (much more important) essence remains.

Oddly enough, one of the ways they honor their guests is to give them cigarettes. Maybe to hasten their reunion with the recently departed? There were giggles from the women and guffaws from the men when my daughter took one of the cigarettes and lit up. Indian women do NOT smoke. But my very white, very light haired daughter differs from them in so many ways that a puff on a cigarette didn’t offend.

We asked to see inside their one-room home and they happily acquiesced. One of the young women whisked off the covering from a large pot to show us the gas burners (my daughter told us later that a mouse came barreling out). Inside it was quite dark. There were big sacks of flour and rice along one wall. There was one bed with pots, pans, metal plates and cups on it. Salim explained later that the couple sleep in the bed and the children, in this case three, sleep on mats on the floor. There was no bathroom; it’s presumably outside.

We asked if there was electricity and a man pointed the one bare, unlit, bulb hanging in the entranceway.

After our goodbyes we moved on to a day care center not too far away. There were about 15 gorgeous three and four year olds inside.

To say the cramped space was dark, dirty, with virtually no toys doesn’t come close to giving an adequate description.

At one point a boy, who looked to be 8 or 9 years old, set fire to some kindling stuffed into a canister-looking contraption. We basically stood with our mouths open contemplating how many safety measures were being ignored while the smaller children heedlessly walked around the open flame. The lone day care worker put a pot of soup on top and began to prepare the children’s lunch.

Salim had recommended we bring candies. Our grandchildren had a great time handing out candies to the youngsters both inside the day care center and walking around the village. They were surprised that when they offered a candy to a child who, as it turned out, had already received one, she declined to take a second. What kid does that!?

By this time we were all drooping from the intense heat and more than ready to head back to our hotel. It wasn’t only because of the heat, though, that it was so quiet in the tuk-tuk on the ride back. There was a lot to think about.

We arrived at the gates to the 42 acres (over 160 dunam) surrounding our hotel. The turbaned guard called a buggy to come get us: goddess forbid we should walk the 150 meters to the entrance to the hotel. Along the way we saw peacocks roaming the grounds freely, smelled the fragrance of the beautiful flowers, and heard the splashing of many fountains.

Truth be told, we don’t usually stay in such elegant surroundings where there are so many impeccably dressed, beyond pleasant staff constantly bowing namaste in our direction over prayer hands. Our daughter is more accustomed to 5-star hotels and it’s actually much easier to enjoy a vacation with children, one of whom is a teenager, when they’re comfortable.

Inevitably at the dinner table when we talked about our impressions of our day, and after the grumbling about the schlepping around in too much heat for way too long, we all expressed our dismay at the parity between the lives of the villagers and the vacationing Indians sitting at the tables around us.

Almost 70% of the one and half billion people who live in India live outside the cities. As in most developing countries, every year people move to the city for employment or other ways of bettering the lives of their family – about 2% annually in India. The already overloaded infrastructure of the cities – Delhi with almost 33 million people, Mumbai with over 21 million, Bangalore with almost 14 million – is hard put to cope with more.

Prime Minister Modi, since his election in 2014, has instituted several programs to encourage villagers to remain in their villages. His government guarantees 100 days of employment to every villager who’s eligible. A gift of 150,000 rupee ($2000) is given to each village homeowner for home improvements, primarily to fortify roofs and walls to withstand monsoon season. 600 million toilets were purchased for the villages in the first five years of the present government .

And, still, the parity is huge.

We talked about the Indian trait of acceptance and the joy in the villagers’ children’s play. We talked about the bountiful nature of our own lives and how, even so, we so often strive for more and better. One of us reminds us of the pride in one man’s voice when he pointed out that his daughters were home visiting from college. So along with acceptance there can be a desire for change.

We conclude our conversation as so many of them end – knowing that we can only ever get a small peek into the depth and vastness of this amazing country called India.

None of us will ever forget these two weeks of ours as a family in India and this day will always stand out.

Riding the Rails

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Literally billions of people ride the Indian Railways every year – 8.086 billion in 2022. Established in 1836, it remains the most utilized form of public transportation between cities in India. Cheap, reliable, and relatively comfortable, passengers can choose between at least 3 classes of travel from non-air conditioned, usually very crowded, sleeper class to air conditioned first class (not available on most trains) with only one person per berth. Clean sheets and pillow cases are provided. There’s a small table and individual reading light in each berth. The seats revert into beds. Often there is a western toilet as well as an Indian “toilet” and the bathrooms are relatively clean, although often stinky.

The reservation process is tricky.

We were fortunate our first time in India to be taken under the wing of the young man who arranged for us to see tigers in Bandhavgarth. Though not at all his job, he walked us through the complicated process of opening our own Indian Railway account. As a result, we’ve been able to purchase train tickets online on every trip since. Most foreigners use the ubiquitous travel agencies where they can purchase train tickets for an added fee.

The status of a reservation is crucial.

We didn’t understand what all the abbreviations stood for at first and learned by making funny mistakes which thankfully didn’t result in us getting kicked off trains, but only because Indians have inhuman patience with how life rolls.

There are many levels of waiting list status. The final status only becomes available 3-4 hours before the train leaves the station. That’s why so many Indian families can be seen sitting, or even sleeping, on the platform floor. Often they’ve brought stainless steel closed pots with food for the long wait.

If a seat has not become available money is automatically refunded.

If one traveler receives confirmed status, all travelers in her party can board the train but they may not have an actual seat. They can sit on the berth of the confirmed traveler…or on the floor.

And then there’s finding the correct platform and your particular train car’s position. The train may stop for only 2 minutes and each train is ridiculously long. If you read Tamil Nadu or Mayalayam you may not have trouble reading the electronic sign but, even so, the platform may change. The final platform may only be announced (thankfully also in English though so heavily accented sometimes that it’s a challenge to understand) 10 minutes before the train’s arrival. Being old and very white, people often approach us to ask if they can assist us in standing in the right place. Indian kindness and gentleness is found everywhere.

Our first time in India we had to keep asking where to get off the train. There’s no announcement of stations. The stations are often not lit up so there’s no possibility of seeing the name of the stations at night. At that time there was no live online running status as there has been for consequent trips. Again Saptarishi, our guardian angel on our first trip, stepped in to save us on one overnight journey. He called us as 4 am to tell us to get off at the next stop. Sweet guy. Who knows where we would’ve ended up?

There’s a sense of accomplishment in learning the twists and turns of using the train system. And not only fanagling our way effortlessly through the process.

Also realizing that less is more. Each trip I’ve packed less so as to be more comfortable getting on and off trains as well as having more space around me in the berth. And that’s a useful skill for every aspect of travel, imo.

Also being with Indian travelers and having some interesting conversations- glimpses into their lives. Once a large group of university students traveling to various cities to see different types of city planning. Another time two middle aged couples – friends – taking an annual vacation together. A few days ago a young man whose job it is to be sure used linens are removed and clean linens provided.

On one of our first train trips a 50-something couple, both professors, returning home from visiting their son at college explained the Hindu relationship with god/dess statues and shared their views on arranged marriages versus “love marriages” (they were shocked to learn that ours wasn’t an arranged marriage).

Another benefit is being able to move around, stretch your legs, and even do a little yoga if you’re so inclined. India is huge – Rajasthan, one state out of 28 – is the size of Germany. A journey between cities might be a couple of days or more. Hiring a car with a driver is relatively inexpensive but not only are you in a pristine bubble, removed from actual India, you’re also stuck in a car for hours and hours, day after day. Sure, you can stop whoever you want, and you can stay overnight in nice air conditioned hotels along the way, but it just takes that much longer and is, imo, claustrophobic.

Did I mention the vendors who hop on the train selling tea, coffee, snacks, and meals?

“Chai, chai, masala chai, coffee!”

So far we’ve only been on two train trips and I’m not sure how many more we’ll take this time around.

I’m already feeling a bit nostalgic..

A Gentler Way of Life

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We’re leaving Thumpoly Beach later today.
Yesterday I spent two hours happily painting with acrylics surrounded by paintings of local artists and classical music in a specially designated room in a local art gallery. The owner of the gallery, a retired professor of political science and engineering, provides this wonderful experience for any tourist fortunate enough to learn of the possibility and make a reservation. There’s no fee.
He explained as we shared a cup of (way too sweet) coffee that he left the university five years before the age of retirement because his wife left her teaching position and was at home. There was a hint of illness on her part but he didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask.
I sensed that the experiential opportunity he offers is an opportunity for him to socialize with people from all over the world now that he’s restricted to this lovely but insular fishing village. We chatted for an hour as he brought out spicy roasted cashews and cookies. A little politics (a big Modii and Bibi fan). A little religion (he’s Christian and fondly recalled his pilgrimage to Israel). A little economy (India has a vastly more reasonably priced medical system and price of living).
A man happy with his lot in life.
As I walked home I thought it could be very pleasant to be in Thumpoly for an extended visit and share afternoon tea and conversation with him from time to time.
I recognized several of the women I passed in their colorful saris with an umbrella held overhead to protect them for the sizzling sun. We smiled at each other, wagged our heads and offered a soft ‘namaste’.
Most stores are closed for a few hours when the sun is at its hottest and only now, at five o’clock, people are again out and about.
My partner and I had agreed just that morning that, as wonderful as it is here, we were ready to move on. But as I gazed at The Arabian Sea and the young men strolling along the beach I realized that I’m a little sad to be leaving.
Every morning we see the fishermen heading out for another day of catching whatever they can – and it isn’t much this time of year. They throw their gill nets or small trawling nets and harvest what they can. A few shrimp. A crab or two. A kilo of very small fish if they’re lucky. Later in the day we see exuberant children walk by in their school uniforms. Inevitably they stop to say hello, ask our names (again) and inquire after our health.
In the late afternoon, when there’s more of a breeze, we see various village residents walking by on the dirt path along the shore in front of our balcony. No one is in a hurry. They seem to be enjoying the sea air and the crash of the waves as much as we do, even though they’ve undoubtedly lived here all their lives.
I suppose there’s gossip and intrigues here as there are everywhere; heartbreak, ill health, kids making life choices their parents don’t understand.
There are very big beautiful homes and tiny unkempt hovels.
But in general life here seems to have a gentle rhythm and people seem to smile much more than in the towns with which I’m more familiar.
Our friends here have two children, which is the norm. One, their daughter, was accepted into the engineering program at a prestigious university very far away. The other, their son, is finishing high school and plans to spend seven years in the army.
Our friend, Antony, raised in this village, the son of a fisherman, was a career officer, head of the anti-terrorist units fighting in Kashmir, and retired as a colonel, one of the wealthier residents of Thumpoly. His wife is a school principal who (in spite of her profession?) is almost always smiling and happy.
Antony and Teresa both give much of their time to the community. Whether from modesty or simply relaying this village’s reality, Antony has told us often that giving to the community is the norm and not the exception.
There are certainly downsides to life in this crazy patchwork of a billion and a half people, over 25 spoken languages, millions living in slums alongside the abundance of IT employment, jewelry production and export, and a caste system which refuses to die, just to name a few challenges.
At the same time, there is a gentler way of life and a serene inner beauty to those who have less, in many cases a whole lot less, but retain an appreciation for what they do have.
So, yes, I’m a little sad to be moving on, even while I look forward to better physical conditions and an evening cocktail.
Ah! The contradictions of life.

To each her story; to each his unique voice

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Marie Renee lives outside of Geneva in a small village and bicycles to work every day. Her husband is one of three people whose job it is to administer the village. Their two children are grown and live close by. She speaks with them daily and they meet for a chat frequently.

A charming story of a life well-lived.

Travelers tend to reveal the cracks in their narrative to other travelers sharing their breakfast table morning after morning or their view of the sea from the balcony.

As it turns out, Marie Renee’s husband began experiencing burn out last year. Discontented and unhappy, he disturbed the calm waters of their life. Marriage counseling for them and a psychologist for him and Marie Renee found herself with a husband trekking alone in South America and an empty house. Her inner voice guided her to a course of daily yoga and Ayurvedic massage in Southern India.

The morning she shared her last breakfast with us before leaving for home she talked about what her future looked like from here. She emanated a gentleness and calm as she expressed hope that her husband would come home happier and healthy. I think I could hear love in her tone. Her voice was confident when she said that she’d be alright and she’d be back.

Talk to yourself as you would to someone you love.

After our three year absence we came back to find Vijay still the go-to guy at our beach guesthouse. His wife and nine year old daughter stay with his in-laws near the northern border of India with Bhutan while he works in Southern India. He shops and cooks, arranges transportation, supervises repairs, and makes sure all guests have what they need. His English is rudimentary but his cheerful desire to communicate overcomes most people’s reluctance to attempt real conversation with those whose language they barely speak.

The train ride home at the end of the season takes three days and he travels sleeper class, the lowest class of travel, with wall-to-wall people, no air conditioning, inedible food, and increasingly disgusting bathrooms. He gathers his small family and they return to their own home for the six weeks he can stay with them before returning to work.

This is his life. The life he’s chosen. He’s loyal to his job and is grateful to be able to support his family.

If you concentrate on what you don’t have you’ll never have enough.

A month ago tall, willowy Lillian buried her almost-90 year old father in the Christian cemetery a five minute walk from our guesthouse. It wasn’t easy plowing through all the bureaucracy involved in burying a French citizen – a tourist – in India. She’s hoping that having her father buried in India will make it easier for her to remain in India for longer periods of time without the necessity of leaving for a day every 30 days. And, anyway, she has no family left in France to be uncomfortable with her father being buried so far from home.

Never married, an only child with no children of her own, she has no ties to France…or anywhere else. She had one aunt but she’s dead, as is her mother. She’s basically alone in the world.

She first came to Thumpoly Beach in 2019 and has been back four times. After her first time she began to organize small groups to come on yoga and Ayurveda retreats. She became friendly with the owner and his family and today they are more family than she has ever had.

When she returned to France after her first visit she tried many yoga studios but ultimately arranged daily yoga online with her teacher from Thumpoly Beach. She was unable to explain her dissatisfaction with the yoga in France other than to say “It wasn’t like yoga in India.”

She plans to return to France to take care of her father’s affairs and settle the technicalities of renting out her apartment to a neighbor. As quickly as possible she’ll return to this seaside guesthouse to begin as permanent a life here as the Indian government will allow.

Come home to you. It’s where you belong.


From Here to the Sun and Back Sixty Times

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Human knowledge grows at a phenomenal rate. Think of the world as understood in Medieval days and as we understand it today. No need to go so far back. Think of the average Western household in Ozzie and Harriet’s time and your own household.

My partner, who could be called antagonistic toward maneuvering through life via screens, came home one day not too long ago decrying how much even he relies on screen technology in the course of his day. He checked the best route into the city with Waze to avoid as much traffic as possible. He parked his car using the Pango app. He received and acknowledged orders from clients via WhatsApp. While waiting for an appointment he got caught up with local, national, and international news online. He called me from his cell phone to mine to kill time in traffic on the way home.

And traveling? How did we manage when we started traveling to out of the way places 30 years ago? No booking.com, Airbnb, TripAdvisor; no Facebook groups of like-minded people offering tips or asking for information. No Uber or Ola to find and get us to hole-in-wall locations at a reasonable price. No google to locate pure veg restaurants.

Okay, all that technology is amazing. It makes our lives so much easier and so many things more accessible. And it also, of course, has huge downsides and creates many distressing societal issues. But this isn’t about that.

Human knowledge doesn’t begin and end with technological advances like those.

The medical world has now advanced to allow for many previously terminal cancers to become chronic cancer; cancer with which, with continuous treatment, people can live a quality life for decades. Prosthetics moveable by thought. I could go on but I don’t really know even a minuscule percentage of all the incredible innovations in the world of medicine.

And what about all the new information coming from the James Webb Space Telescope? It can see what the universe looked like around a quarter of a billion years (possibly back to 100 million years) when the first stars and galaxies started to form. Astrophysicists are scratching their heads wondering how their science could’ve gotten so much so wrong now that the telescope is providing new information.

The study of the cell – that most basic of components in the biological world – has changed so much over the past few decades that today we know that if the DNA from the cells found in one human body were stretched out in one continuous line it would reach the sun and back sixty times, Sixty. Six-oh. We didn’t even know DNA existed before the 1860s. It wasn’t known to be the carrier of genetic material until 1944 and became a reliable profiling mechanism only 40 short years ago.

Amazing, exciting, miraculous advances in human knowledge.

And yet…

Yesterday I tuned into day three of The Dalai Lama Global Vision Summit. I happened to choose Dr. Joe Loizzo’s talk about ethical leadership. I got as far as his call for every person on the entire planet to commit to becoming an ethical leader. Certainly I agree that each of us can and should develop leadership skills in our lives but, seriously!?! If the prerequisite to improving the unfortunate state of a world in conflict is for every single person on earth to become an ethical leader, it just ain’t gonna happen, bubba.

I mean look at us.

In the United States you have the cancel culture, a city proposing that each household pay $600,000 to help pay reparations to people who were never enslaved by a state which never had slavery, part of another state wanting to secede from that state to join a neighboring state, and people afraid to express their opinion for fear of being fired from their jobs. And in one 45 hour period, in one state, there were three mass shootings resulting in nineteen dead.

In England there have been three heads of state in three years. In Spain the birthrate has plummeted to 1.23%. In France the divorce rate is over 50%. The crime rate continues to rise in the Baltic countries. In France a man was found not guilty of a brutal murder of an elderly Jewish woman by reason of marijuana smoking.

In India, Muslims in the state of Kashmir continue to fight for independence. A recent reactivated Sikh movement has begun demanding their independence in the state of Punjab. The Muslim minority in the southern state of Kerala is quietly taking over local political positions.

In Israel political, social, and judicial reform has provided an opportunity for those interested in strengthening social and religious divisions. Extreme and violent language has become acceptable on both sides of any given issue. Defamation of character, personal attacks, and demagoguery are representative while, unsurprisingly, compromise is less and less of an acceptable option.

Humanity seems to be like the proverbial snake swallowing its own tail

We can create, investigate, research, change, and vastly improve our physical reality. But what good is it ultimately if we tear ourselves apart as human beings inhabiting a common earth?

Contrary to what many of us have come to believe when our phones have achieved the capability of supplying so much of our needs, no (emotionally healthy) human being is an island. We do, in fact, inhabit a common earth. And one of animals’ basic instincts is, pardon the expression, not to shit in their own home.

People! We’re unloading a lot of crap in our own homes. And it will not end well for us.

How about trying this? The next time you’re faced with a person whose opinions are not your own, take a breath, think to yourself that she, too, just like you, is a human being who wants to be happy. First and foremost, a human being. Immediately afterwards, who wants to be happy. Choose to distance yourself from her if you must, but treat her with the respect and, if it’s not stretching it too much, caring, that could provide for a gentler, less threatening world.

As far as human knowledge has taken our understanding so far, we only have one world. And if there turns out to be others we would do well to practice protecting the one we know about or we’ll just destroy any others we discover.

Stories Our Parents Tell Us

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Just back from a dip in The Arabian Sea.

I’m sitting on the wooden balcony just outside our room, watching the mid-morning calm waves, really ripples, just as I’ve been contented to do most of my waking hours over the past four days.

There’s a rhythm to the sea. Several actually. And a rhythm to life here dictated by the sea.

The waves arrive from the south and break on the shore traveling northward, but oddly seem to recede back into the sea at the same time along the shore for quite a way. I’m sure there are physicists among you who can explain that phenomenon to me in language I wouldn’t understand.

In the morning the sea is so calm that the ripples have no sea froth. By mid-morning they are already small waves complete with white caps. In the afternoon the waves become quite healthy. At night they are loud and powerful and often stormy.

When they are at their calmest the fishermen in this small village of Thumboly are out in force. They employ several different techniques but none of them catches much, and the few fish they catch are tiny. We’re told there was a time when fishing was a viable industry here but that time is long over.

By mid-morning there isn’t a soul on the pristine beach other than the occasional tourist. By mid-afternoon the fisherman are out repairing their nets or playing card gambling games , sitting on the sand in groups of six to ten men.

It’s a bit of a mystery where the women are. Home, I suppose. We see the occasional woman shopkeeper and saw a little girl out playing with a little boy on their shared bicycle on one of our afternoon walks. But mostly we see men and boys. Playing soccer. Playing volleyball on the beach. Walking the village streets.

Our days are quite serene.

My partner takes a morning beach walk early every morning. He always comes home with a new adventure to tell me about. One morning it was two children out walking their crab…on a leash.

We have a breakfast of some kind of unfamiliar grain dish in various forms, a vegetable in soupy sauce to put over it, papaya or some other fruit, and tea.

Once breakfast is digested I spend an hour on my yoga mat. My practice immediately returned to its full glory with the first unfurling of my mat opposite The Arabian Sea. It had sadly stagnated for the past six months.

We read, write, and chat most of the day to the accompaniment of the sea’s music.

In the late afternoon we take a walk through the narrow byways of the residential area, where people happily greet us with a friendly “Namaste” and often ask us in to eat (which we politely decline) or into the small commercial area just past the large church.

Today, we decided, was the day we would venture into the water. We were out there at 9:45 when the waves were just starting to be more than ripples. My partner went in first to scout out the drop off and reported that it was sudden but not too steep. The water was warm and delightful.

In I went. But not far and not for long.

Sixty years ago my mother told me about her good friend, Joseph. They were childhood friends and both enrolled at Northwestern University in Chicago. He was an engineering student and she was a drama major so they didn’t share classes but they shared social circles.

In their sophomore year they went to the beach one afternoon with a group of friends. A beach on Lake Michigan they often frequented. Like Israel’s Kineret, Lake Michigan could be treacherous in the afternoon, with a strong undercurrent.

As the story went, on that fateful day Joseph decided to go back in the water long after the others deemed it unwise. As my mother and her friends watched helplessly he was rolled over and over, dragged under and drowned. No one could save him without endangering their own lives.

I love the ocean. If I have a few free hours I sometimes jump in the car and drive an hour or more to walk along the beach. On my way home from visiting grandkids I often take the slower, longer route to stop off for a half hour of breathing sea air and watching sea birds hop in the shallows.

I’m not convinced that my mother’s story about her friend, Joseph, was true or just a cautionary tale, but it accompanies me to the beach every time I go. I rarely go in the water past my ankles or, if I do, it’s only a little above my waist. I need both feet firmly planted. I have what I like to call a healthy respect for the power of the ocean, while recognizing it as anxiety that’s not always justified.

I enjoy my grandchildren’s fearless frolicking in the waves and beyond but only while keeping an eye on the lifeguard to make sure she remains alert. I’m happy that some of my children and grandchildren surf; proof that Joseph isn’t a filter through which they experience the sea.

I’d love to ask my mother if she actually had a friend named Joseph and if she actually watched him drown in Lake Michigan. But she’s been dead for twenty years and, really, does it even matter?

Beware all you parents out there. Stories our parents tell us are powerful beyond logic.