In a Foreign Land: Homeland

In a Foreign Land: Homeland: The interactive map on the seatback in front of me is an education.  Flying to Israel from Istanbul the city names illuminate as we pass o...

Homeland Part II--Good Borders Make Good Neighbors

Sometimes a neighborhood turns bad.  Sometimes it always was.  

There is much to contrast between Israel and Turkey.  But their mutual complaint is about their "tough neighborhood," they say with a roll of their eyes.  

The Israelis love their neighborhood, just not their neighbors.  Every street corner, every road and hillside has a Biblical antecedent.  On a visit to an Army base the driver explains the area is called Herodion, where King Herod stopped on his rush from Jerusalem to Masada.  His Mother's carriage overturned and he feared she was dead.  To show his gratitude that she survived he built a town to commemorate it.  It ultimately became his burial plot.

At the last minute our visit with the soldiers is altered by the recent kidnappings.  We switch to a bullet-proof minivan because you don't know what it will be like down the next block.  We stand on a hilltop with soldiers pointing out the Palestinian and Israeli overlapping neighborhoods.

The soldiers, men and women, explain their day.  In Washington people show off their wall of fame, photos of politicians they've met for a moment.  The man (boy) in charge of this base shows us a picture of two Israeli F-15 Jet Fighters flying over Auschwitz. "We are not just the protectors of this land, we are protecting the Jewish people," he tells my children.

The flight from Israel to Turkey is only 90 minutes, but when you land at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport the two worlds collide. Woman in Burqas mingle with tourists in shorts and tanks waiting at the Burger King. The expensive jewelry stores glisten, the Hermes scarves stack neatly.

But baggage claim brings it all together as our luggage from Tel Aviv rests on the turnstile alongside flights from Baghdad and Najaf.

Turkey shares a border with Syria, Iraq and Iran.  Israel's border partners are well-known, but no less volatile.  When you ask about the contrast and concerns they all say with resignation, "This is the Middle East."

But how they deal with the internal and external threats is illustrative:

• In Israel my kids notice the doorman at the King David Hotel wears a taser on her belt
• In Turkey, thousands of daily visitors to the Blue Mosque, their most traveled tourist destination, has no security, no metal detector, no bag check.  The only thing strictly enforced is the dress code.
• At Ben Gurion airport they ask you numerous questions about why you were in Israel. The usual stuff like "were your bags with you all the time" preceded questions like, "what Jewish holidays do you celebrate?"
• There were 4 security check points before we got to our gate on Turkish Airlines, including one at the front door, where we sent our suitcases through an x-ray machine before we were even let into the air conditioning.

Turkey is a sprawling country across two continents, and their worries are not about Israel, but the influences of their fellow Muslims.  It is a fiercely proud place whose bright red flag with a crescent and star flies from every hilltop.

It is a land of earthquakes, carpets and kilims, where 90% of the people are Muslim, but Burqa's are officially banned on constitutional grounds of the "secularity of the state."

In Israel all the Army bases are Kosher and celebrate Shabbat.

When people emigrated to Turkey in the early-20th century they were told to pray wherever they could, a Mosque, a synagogue or a church, as they were all houses of god.  That is no longer the case.  A city of 15 million people has 3,000 Mosques, 250 churches and "only 2 or 3 working synagogues," according to our guide.

Both countries are divided, some reaching for the future with others pulling it into the past. Israel is a place rooted in its history, but has embraced a future that gave way to a start-up nation of businesses and board appointments.  Modern Turks wrestle with their progress as well, more worried about whether their neighbors will quash it.

While countries can't move, people can.

France is in the midst of a record migration of Jews to Israel, who have had enough of their neighborhood and are getting out.  

“I love France, and this is my country, but I am disgusted now...In Israel there is an army that will protect us. Here, I can no longer see a future for my children," one French Jew told the New York Times before leaving home.

Homeland

The interactive map on the seatback in front of me is an education.  Flying to Israel from Istanbul the city names illuminate as we pass over or near them.

It is a history lesson, geography quiz and newscast: Allepo, Hommes, Damascus, Baghdad.  Tripoli looks so close to Beirut.  As you approach Tel Aviv the Bible comes alive, Beersheba, Nazareth, and then reminders of the wars, Aqaba, Suez.

Jerusalem is hopping at 11:30 on a Saturday night, old and young, religious and secular, Jews and Arabs walk past the Nike store, the World Cup blares from every restaurant.

Crowds of young people stare into televisions big and small watching France vs Honduras.

On the first day Yad Vashem is swarming with tourists.  The last time we were here the kids were too young to go.  Now they tell us about all they learned from their secular schools and how they didn't focus on the Jews.  "A lot of what Hitler wanted to do was about the purity of the Germans, killing the Jews was only part of it."

The soldiers who sit next to us with their Uzi's tilted across the table take on new meaning.  They are only 18 months older than my son who is disappointed about eating his hamburger without cheese, since we are at a Kosher restaurant.

The King David Hotel and the Old City don't disappoint, they look as we remember or as the postcards remind us.  It's hot in the market at Machane Yehuda, vendors screaming, a woman sneezing on the basket of cheeries fondled by every passerby.

The kids ask why the Falafel tastes so good, and the hummus?  There are no answers, like the mystery of New York bagels, I tell them.

You hear about the three young boys who were kidnapped from the settlements, but still the tourists shop, the markets open, the buses run, the flags fly.

 

More Than a Day at the Races

We were running late. 

The traffic from JFK was solid the whole way. Before getting to Belmont we had to find a Howard Johnsons in Queens, which housed our tickets.  But these golden tickets only got us through the front door, if we could reach it. 

Stewing in the back of a steamy cab we dug into the racing sheets.

“Hey dad, look, there’s a horse in the next race from Maryland,” he said.

“That’s a sign,” I told him.

I had prepared a day of teaching my son how to handicap based on facts, but it turned into a day of patience, luck, intuition and inevitably betting on losers.

Seven minutes to post time.

Looking out the cab window nothing but cars and people, the grandstand half a mile ahead on the other side of the track. 

“And look at this,” he said, “the horse’s name is Ben’s Cat.”

The blood drained from my face.  My hands sweaty. 

My son has a friend named Ben Catt.

“That’s our horse.”

We leapt from the car and ran.  Past the people in pastels, the broken bourbon bottles and cigar butts. 

“Dad, you run ahead, I can’t bet anyways.”

I pulled out my phone and with three minutes to go I could see the security team waving their wands over every whale belt, horse pin, and powder green hat.

My son and I had made a deal, we’d bet every race, ten bucks a horse.

“You need limits,” I told him.  “Never dig into your pocket for more money.”

I pull out the cash, sprint up the escalator to the window where I place my bet with a minute to post time, as Josh falls in behind me, the winning ticket in my hand.

“Did you bet the ten bucks?” he asked.

“I bet the whole thing,” I said, doing the calculations on what it would mean to our $100 if he won.

We settled in the back, and they were off.  

“So how much do we win?” he asked after the horses crossed the finish line.

“For coming in fourth?  Not much,” I told him.

Facebook is awash in endings, graduations, leaving home.  I don’t care what Webster says about commencements, they are not beginnings. For parents they are only endings.

But when our oldest was born we won the birthday lotto as the calendar gods made him miss the Kindergarten deadline.  So while many of his friends are high school graduates heading off to beach week, he is just a rising senior.

Under the gauze of his final year in our house, lots of things become "once in a lifetime" opportunities, including the possibility of a triple crown winner.

So we flew to New York, and managed the traffic and ran to the race and placed the bets, and survived the disappointing horses.  We cheered our hearts out for Chromey, as the locals call her. 

And we got stuck on the train platform for three hours and missed our flight home and made friends with some Arkansans and walked through Manhattan until we found a place to eat and watch the end of the Rangers game deep into double overtime.  And the next morning we were back at the airport and then home again 24 hours after we placed our initial bet on Ben’s Cat. 

We were wrong about the horses.  But right about the opportunity.

A Camera in Canyon

"Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you..." 

--Theodore Roosevelt

"Dad, can I borrow the camera?"

It was like hearing the roar of a Tyrannosaurus, this sentence emerging from extinction.  We are in the depths of the Grand Canyon, just south of the Colorado River, seven miles into a 10-mile hike.  My 13-year old and I are trailing the rest of the crew, save for our guide who intentionally staggers behind.  

There are so many things about the sentence that grab me, not the least of which includes the fact that she spoke to me.  We have a fine relationship, but she's 13 and I am, well, her father.   But here along the Havasu Canyon there is nothing to do but talk, spot the occasional waterfall, eye the hikers who come and go, the sad mules hauling crates of groceries to the village, or backpacks for those unable to carry the load.

And so she speaks to me. 

And the sentence fills me up.  She asked if she can borrow "the" camera.  Not a camera, because in this wifi-ravaged section of the world there is only one camera and it is a camera.  One that you hold with two hands (no selfies), that zooms in and out with buttons labeled W and T.  Okay it's not exactly a Nikon and my pockets aren’t filled with yellow boxes of Kodak film, but for a moment we are back in time.

It is a question I asked my dad dozens of times as a kid.  Sometimes I probably got an "Okay" and others I may have been warned against the shrinking number of pictures in the roll.  Similarly, I warn her there will be no outlets and she needs to be careful how long the camera is on and how much battery she might use.  Make sure not to look at all the pictures because it's such a battery suck.

She excitedly snaps a shot of a distant waterfall.  The kind of photo that won't mean much in a day or so, nobody is in the picture, the distance too great to be memorable.  

But it was what we, as parents, wait for, the reason we take these trips.

Our days in the canyon are filled with moments like these, that mean little to the kids, but everything to us.  Watching them play cards in the day's fading light, the songs they sang along the trail, the games they invented as the miles of endless rock passed by.

There is this need within us to go back, not to a happier time, but a simpler one where our days are focused on fixing the next meal, the footing on a narrow pass, the depth of the water, warmth at night.

We pay money to leave our expensive lives and spend time in a place that escaped civilization.  

We meet a park ranger who brings us a jar of goo. He tells us about how the tree was struck by lightning and as they removed it he discovered the treasure of a honeycomb.  "Have a taste," he says with infectious enthusiasm.  And as we share a spoon with this tribe of travelers, we wonder how we could get this excited about our jobs?

Then we take seven hours to walk the miles out of the canyon, past the waterfalls, through the Indian reservation, around the rock formations and then up, up, up the narrow pass to the safety of the plateau, where we load our car.

An hour into the drive we hit a hotspot and everyone's phones begin chirping, lights blink, the car fills with voicemails and Snapchats, we clog the chargers.  Our children's eyes no longer lit by the golden sun of the canyon, but the green glow of their screens. And then they are gone, back to the future and into their world, and so are we.

Forty-Seven

So this is 47.

The plans were all set.
Flights to Utah, lift tickets, reservations, dinners with friends.
And then the snow came.

School was cancelled.
Then the planes.
We re-thought the weekend.

Then they opened one runway.  And our plane arrived.  We plowed through Georgetown and a foot of snow...
But we missed it.

So we stopped for Chinese food.
Just me and two of the kids.
Jessie fell on the ice.  She laughed hard.  Her brother harder.

We were the only people in the restaurant.
They made us sit in the corner "in case a large party showed up."

So in the morning we drove to Deep Creek Lake.
And knocked down the world's biggest icicle.
Bought groceries.
Ran on the frozen lake.

The kids had time to ski.
I made time to write.

The ski lift ticket on my birthday read:  Feb 15, 2014 -- Adult Twilight.

I hope not.

The Gift of Long Hours

There is something powerful about watching your first-born child's chest rise and fall.  Listening to the air pass through his lungs, his small pursed lips.  I didn't think I was going to be this kind of parent...The one with the pocket mirror.  The one who wakes him only to put him back to sleep.

I move my face close to his to feel the fever.  His skin aglow in blue monitor lights.  Memorizing every fold, each crease, the way his brows arch.  I try to catch the movements in his eyes as they roll through another deep cycle of REM.

His face twitches as he stretches his neck.  He's not in pain, it's just the expressions of a new born, the jerky movements as he tries out his new parts. The faces only we see and think they are funny.  The face we fell in love with for the first time and then all over again.

When I need to check his temperature I don't feel it with my hand.  I take advantage of this opportunity to get close to him.  His breathe is warm on my ear.

I gently, barely touch my cheek to his.  Then I realize I don't know which razor stubble is his, and which is mine.

It's been more than 16 years since I've had the chance to spend so much time watching him sleep.  How long had it been since I checked on him.  Sure I give him a thorough smell test when he gets home late on a Saturday night. Do I detect smoke?  Drink?

When have I cared for him in this way.  So completely.  He doesn't cry when he hurts.  Instead, he tells the doctor about the pain.  Rates it a one to ten. He can walk, when he has the strength, getting himself to the bathroom and pees in a special plastic container so the medical team can examine everything that goes in and out of his body.

It's a staph infection in his chest. There have been tense moments. Especially at first when we weren't sure if we could get him home from the coastal Spanish town where he'd been studying.  Scarier yet when the hospital didn't know what it was.  A mysterious bite under his arm our only clue.

But after a few days in the hospital, a host of treatments, doctor visits and endless blood-taking and pee-examining he seems better.  More alert, his color is back, fever is down, swelling is receding.

And then it becomes a gift.  When the marrow-shattering fear subsides and the parental nightmare fades, it is our time.  This isn't about a near-death experience re-shaping my world-view where I come out the other side stopping to watch rainbows.

It's about a parents' awareness that our children are with us, if we are lucky, for 18 years.  And then if it all goes according to plan they are swept off into the world and leave us to our life if we can only leave them to theirs. 

I desperately want to feel close to him.  Adolescence now an obstacle. Tensions rise over school, friends, curfew, cars, money, homework, Facebook, phones, computers.  But none of those matter here in the dark of the hospital room.  At night we watch ESPN.  He in his hospital bed hooked up to monitors and IVs.  I rest in a recliner.  We talk about the games. The slowness of the baseball season.  How will the Redskins do?  He asks about things at home. He tells me about his trip to Spain without me asking.  It won't be this way next week, but it is tonight.

And with a scant two years left it's on our minds a lot.  What life lesson can we still impart?  What final factoid can we squeeze into him hoping it becomes part of his philosophy?  

We are in his presence for periods of time that we haven't had since before pre-school.  Interrupted by doctors and family and visitors and bouts of sleep. In our normal lives there are no long hours. just times together before we have something else to do.

Tonight he and I had dinner in the hospital cafeteria.  We sat there well after our tasteless food was picked over.  We laughed at how he couldn't tell if his last bite was a piece of chicken or a carrot.  At home the meal would have been a short segue.  Tonight it was a destination.

The hum and wheeze of the machines that clean his system and fight the poison, rouses and confuses me.  Is that his breathing?  Are those strained noises his body trying to do something it can't?  I check his fever.  Its four o'clock in the morning.  He moves his head and squints in the early light.

"Did you just put your cheek up against my face?" he asks in a whisper, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.

"I did," I said smiling, feeling like a teenager caught sneaking in past curfew.

"That's just weird dad," he says, before fading off to sleep.