The Summer of the War and the Ugly Shoes

August 30, 2006 - 4:41 PM by Sarah

[Allison is "up to her neck in kids" and asked me to cross-post this entry from her personal blog, on her behalf. -- Sarah]

In this last week of the summer of 2006 (five and a half more days till school starts, but who’s counting?)

Everyone seems a little dazed, the way you feel after stepping off of a ride in an amusement park that had you spinning around, not knowing what to expect next. We’re no longer spinning, but we don’t have our balance, and we’re not sure it’s over. I’m wondering if it’s safe to reflect yet.

When I try, and I start to look back on what I’ve been through personally, I’ll think of it as the summer of utter dissonance.

On one level, on the surface of it all, for me and most other residents of greater Tel Aviv, it was a summer like any other. The kids went to camp, the afternoons and evenings were spent at the pool, the park or the mall.

It was possible to have a perfectly pleasant, perfectly normal summer. You had to pay attention to the details to see that something was terribly wrong. You had to notice that the pool was crowded with strangers from Kiryat Shmona and Nahariya, who would leave the pool and the play area to glance anxiously at the television set.

In order to remain “normal” you would have to ignore the requests for donations of sheets and towels for those who were camping out in town from the north, or for deodorant and socks to send to soldiers. You would have to be insensitive enough not to see the looks of worry and stress on the face of every fourth or fifth person you passed on the street who had a father, son or brother on the front lines, or overhear their conversations in the coffee shops and supermarket.

And, of course, you would have had to stay away from the newspapers, television, and computers. Because once you broke out of your bubble and entered the world of current events, that was it. You became bogged down in a world of stress and worry. The smiling faces of the civilian victims in Israel, the many young soldiers whose promising lives were cut short stared at you from the pages of the newspaper and the evening news haunted you, along with the terrible pictures from Lebanon — photo-shopped, staged, or not, awful tragic things happened there, too.

Repeatedly, I felt the dilemma of whether to live happily in the moment and enjoy my kids and the summer — or check the news and the blogs and enter the sphere of sadness and the fear and the concern. That’s when I would start putting pillows and blankets in the bomb shelter and stocking it with snacks and water.

Which was the real world? What was the right one to live in at any given day, minute or hour? That’s the tension I’ll remember when I think of this summer.

And I’ll also associate the summer with a certain kind of shoe. The ugly, comfortable plastic colorful kind.

The two subjects are somewhat related, I think. With all of the worry and the stress, we figured we might as well be comfortable, so we said: the hell with fashion (sorry, Manolo)
pink crocs