I'll drink later, maybe

I started this as a complaint. Oy, travel is so hard!! Oy, I’m so uncomfortable? Oy, I miss my ease, and my regular beer. Who will watch the grass grow?

This reminds me of the joke: Mrs. Goldberg sits in the back of her tour bus as it moves through the desert pathways of Tunisia. Despite the warnings she received from the tour guides, she has not brought enough water, and that beverage she has brought she has long since consumed. “Oy,” she complains aloud in her seat, “I’m so thirsty.” And every several minutes she sighs deeply, and says too loudly, “Oh, I am so thirsty. I think I’m going to die of thirst. I’m so thirsty.” Finally, someone, no longer able to stand her moaning one more instant, hands her his water bottle, and in one steady gulp she drinks it down. She hands it empty back to him, and forgets to say ‘thank you.’ It is quiet on the tour bus, and everyone breathes with great relief. For a minute more. And then from the rear of the bus comes the plaintive sound of Mrs. Goldberg’s voice, “Oy, I was so thirsty!”

But I don’t feel like being Mrs. Goldberg, and I am not inclined anymore to complain. I am trying to change the vision of life I live, despite the funeral march of the second movement of Block’s First Symphony.

I am traveling to Israel to see my eldest daughter. I am traveling to Israel to see my eldest daughter and to see a bit of Israel. I am not certain why exactly, except that she is there, in Israel. She could have been in London or Paris, I suppose, and then I’d be drinking at the Cheshire Cheese with Samuel Johnson. And maybe seeing a show at the Old Vic. Or I might be commingling with the tourists in Montmartre and visiting with Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison in their rest at Pére Lachaise Cemetery. Instead, I’ll be visiting the Western Wall (assuming it is politically safe to go there), and Yad Vashem, and the lair of the Kabbalists in S’fad. Maybe even seeing Einstein’s original manuscript of the General Theory of Relativity.

And I want to learn to say, “Its all good.” Or at least most of it is, I think. And to express too little thirst.