Dog's Life (Or My week in 5 Chapters)

Chapter 1- a Chance Meeting at the Museum
Back when I was serious about researching (…) I went to see what the Museum of Diaspora in Tel Aviv could tell me abut the Jewish community in Yemen. Turns out – not much. But really, I wasn’t paying too much attention because when I got there I ran into an old old friend who I haven’t seen (not even once!) since I was 15! It was bizarre, looking at this grown man’s face and recognizing the awkward teen features that started it all. He is now a handsome confident man, and a translator for the museum. We reminisced about the good old days. He remembered some of my pen pals from back then: Bridgette from Germany, Pavel from Poland. Apparently I used to dump those I couldn’t manage by passing them on to him, which he enjoyed because it helped him practice foreign languages. It worked well from him because he now speaks fluent German and Dutch and Danish…

Growing up, I had about a 100 pen pals from all over the world. No one knows how I managed to write them all, keep a journal, write short stories and poems, articles for the magazine, and do my homework. (Oh wait a second, that’s right. I didn’t do my homework. Like, never.) Apparently even when I came to visit him all I wanted to do was write. I had an alter ego, he told me, her name was Monique and she wrote prank letters to people in the personals ads. Shameless! Of course I had no recollection of any of that. I think the most interesting thing he told me was that he remembered me as happy and energetic, “always with a smile,” while I remember myself as a dark and depressed teen. By the end of the visit I didn’t care so much about the poor representation of my people in a museum that is supposed to document ALL Jewish communities. Later on I found that we were actually better off than others. Moroccans or Ethiopian Jews had no representation at all!

Since running into him I’ve been running into people from my past on a regular basis, so much that it started to scare me. I always have to look my best because I never know who I might run into.

A side note: so far, this has been the extent of my research and I’m admitting it aloud in the hope that it will give me a very much needed kick in the butt.


Chapter 2 - a Chance Meeting with a Man in Black

Two days later I’m strolling Dizzengof Street (a very popular street in Tel Aviv, packed with restaurants and cafes and shopping) looking for a sunny patio to drink coffee at, when I notice a religious man standing on the corner and offering Tefillin for passersby (Tefillin, also called phylacteries, are leather objects used in Jewish prayer, containing Biblical verses. They are an essential part of Morning Prayer services, and are worn on a daily basis by many Jews).
I look at him, his red haired beard and his little sparkly eyes and gasp: “E***?” And he says, like he’s not surprised at all: “Ayelet!”
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I say. “It’s been… what… like, 4, 5 years?”
“Something like that.” His smile hasn’t changed. Still sunny and childlike.
“Sean, this is E,” I say. “You heard about him.”
And E says: “Really? You heard about me?” The two of them shake hands. Of course, I can’t even shake his hand because I’m a woman.
“Of course he heard about you!” I say. “It’s good to finally meet you,” Sean says. Truth is over the years I told lots of people about E. He had a huge influence on my life at the time. I met him on a beach in Thailand just before turning thirty and we became inseparable. I was single and broke, barefoot (Literally. I lost my flip flops and decided footwear wasn’t so important after all) and had shells woven in my messed up hair. I had shells everywhere, shell necklaces, anklets and bracelets. I was reliving my early twenties hippy days all over again. E and I were on two opposite spectrums of a decade, but somehow he was the wise one. I thought for a minute there that I was in love with him, because he was extremely bright and happy and full of light and insight and every minute with him was an adventure. He was a joy to be around. Soon enough everybody on the beach was in love with him. People talked about him. They said he was enlightened. “Aren’t you with E?” a British guy asked me once when I asked him for an advice about something. “Ask him! He’s a little crazy but he knows things.” “He is a truly great man,” said my friend Axel, a 50 something year old German man. I felt really lucky to have met him and special because he chose to share a hut with me and spend all his time with me. It’s possible that he chose me because I was more lost than anybody else, but at the time that didn’t occur to me. I was too happy. Everything was magic.

I missed him so much afterwards and for a while we e-mailed lots and lots. Then he was suddenly studying Judaism, and then it was yeshiva. I was a little disappointed when I heard he turned religious. I liked him better climbing trees like a monkey, cracking coconut for our breakfast with his pocket knife, taking me for rides on his motorbike. I liked him when he was a secular prophet, unassociated with organized religion.
And now there he is, dressed in black, with the hat and the beard. The whole thing.
“You want candles?” he says. For Shabbat he means.
“Sure,” I say.
“One? Two?”
“Sure,” I say and he gives me two. Only later I realize that a single woman is supposed to light one and a married woman lights two. Was that his way to ask?
“You want to put tefillin?” He asks Sean in English and then turns to me in Hebrew: “Is he Jewish?”
“No,” I say.
“What’s that? A belt?” Sean says, picking up the tefillin and studying them, “You Israelis are obsessed with belts.”
E looks up at Sean and laughs and I’m so glad to see he still has his sense of humour.
“You seem happy,” I say. “God bless,” he says. It’s weird. Why can’t I even hug him? It doesn’t seem fair. I remember the moment when we said goodbye, on ko-phangan dock. He gave me one of the world’s best hugs and told me he loved me. I was heading to Israel. He stayed.
We talk about friends from the beach; he gives me a phone number of somebody. Then I say: “you know, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Don’t say that!” he says and then smiles big. “You know. We’re all gonna meet soon! Redemption day is coming!”
And to that I smile speechless and I’m suddenly sad and the moment is gone awkward. Some guy comes and asks to use the tefillin and I quickly say goodbye and walk away.
Afterwards I wish I stayed, I wish I spoke to him more. I waited to run into him for years, and now I have and I had nothing to say. We were so close once, best friends. Surely I could have invited him for a cup of coffee. Now I secretly wish I’d run into him again.


Chapter 3 – a Chance Meeting with a Baby

I made some money cleaning my cousin’s house the other day. (I’ve got a couple more offers since.) While I was at it, Sean took off to a nice café nearby. It wasn’t a neighbourhood of Tel Aviv we frequent often. When he calls me from the café I hear him talking to someone. “Who are you talking to?” I say. He tries to keep it a surprise but finally caves in. He apparently ran into my friend Doron and his new baby boy. Doron doesn’t even live in Tel Aviv anymore and since I came home we didn’t manage to get together yet. “It’s cosmic!” Doron announces, “I was just thinking of how we must get together!”
He has an incredible baby. Tfu tfu tfu, bli ayin hara. (against the evil eye, knock on wood and all of that.)
We had a great afternoon.
And a great wedding the next day. My friend Tsachi and his beautiful bride Orli.
I danced, I drank, I was happy.
I managed to AVOID running into an old boyfriend who was in the wedding. Funny how these things work.

Chapter 4 – Oh, the Haircut.

I’ve been thinking about cutting my hair but have been discouraged by cost and the difficulty (in Vancouver) of finding a good hairdresser that specializes in curls. Except now, in Israel, everybody is an expert about curls.
So I went with my mom to Ziona, her hair dresser who works from her basement in Sharia, a working class Yemeni neighbourhood on the outskirts of my town.
When we get there, Ima has to knock on the door to wake Ziona up from her afternoon nap. She opens the basement door to us and leads us down the stairs to a little room with a sink, a mirror, a towel hanger with bleached towels drying and that’s it. Ziona is about 55 and beautiful. Her hair is hidden under a scarf and she’s dressed modestly, as expected from a god fearing woman. She’s in slippers. She looks a million light years away from any hair dresser in Tel Aviv.
She cuts my hair, orders me to put my head down and goes to town on the diffuser. My hair is huge by the time I leave. A few more minutes and I would have had an afro.
I love my new hair cut. It’s fresh, it’s bouncy. It's totally hot.
Ima pulls a 100 shekel bill from her wallet and Ziona pushes it away. “I don’t take money from Ayelet,” she insists. Ima tries to argue and push the bill into her hands. I protest as well but eventually we give in.
On the way out kids are playing ball and street cats are eying us suspiciously. “In what fancy hair salon they would do that for you?” ima says.

Chapter 5 – the Hotel

As if the kindness I’ve been receiving is not already overwhelming, the day after the wedding I wake up early to a text message from a friend. “I got you a room in a hotel for tonight.” The details aren’t important, let’s just say that it’s a ‘combina’ (a great Hebrew word describing an action that is kind’a sneaky, always relying on inside connection of sorts, something grey, though not illegal.) The room was available, booked and paid for by a company for an employee that didn’t need it, and through our friend passed on the key. Who cares about the details? It’s fantastic! And the weather is unreal. We’ve been sitting on the beach a lot, consume too many cappuccinos and too much food, look at the waves, the surfers, the dogs. Sean decided he wants to come back as a dog in Tel Aviv, with a cool owner who would take him to the beach every day and not keep him on a leash. “A male dog,” he added quickly. We all know how specific you gotta be with requests from god. We spent the morning at a beach café looking at them run free, chase other dogs, dig holes in the sand, and surf waves. They looked as happy as can be, those lucky bastards. But on a second thought, we already have it pretty good as it is, sitting in the sun in our fluffy robes on a 5 star hotel room’s balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. Maybe, just maybe, we’re the lucky bastards...

Next – the Research

So yes. I haven’t done much. But I’m on vacation, right??? I’ll start tomorrow. Promise.