Unaccompanied minor
I took my 13-year-old son to the airport last night. He was flying as an “unaccompanied minor” to Los Angeles to meet up with his grandparents who have promised him two weeks of unmitigated American fun (roller coasters, beaches and all you can eat sushi – yum, I wish I was 13 again!)
The unaccompanied minor (or UM, as the El Al staff calls them) program is a mini-industry for the airlines. There must have been a dozen kids, ranging in age from six to fifteen, in the posse, all wearing their UM plastic pouches draped around their necks. For the privilege of keeping their kids from wandering astray in the duty free, buying 12-packs of Toblerones, parents pay $100 each way.
We got to the airport the proscribed three hours before the flight – usually that feels excessively cautious, but seeing the crowds jostling towards the check in counters during one of the busiest summers in history at Ben Gurion International, I was thankful to have the time.
I wasn’t sure exactly where to go – I’d been told something about a mysterious “counter 98” – so I went to ask a security person. “Come with me,” she said somewhat sternly. Uh, oh, I thought. Had I done something wrong? Nah, she was jumping us ahead of the thousand or so sweaty passengers to the front of the line. Cool – this was better than in the dot.com years when I got to stand in the “short line” to fly business class!
This also presented us with a problem – er, an opportunity – since we now had nearly two hours free before the UM’s were supposed to return to counter 98 to be collected by the El Al staff and whisked through security and passport control.
There aren’t a lot of pickings in the shopping lounge open to the public at the airport. A McDonald’s, a couple of cafes and a Pizza Hut. Also a pharmacy and a Steimatzky’s selling overpriced books that you can buy for half once you cross the Atlantic (hey, how come the social justice movement isn’t protesting the high price of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union?)
My son ordered a sandwich and a water. NIS 40, the kiosk salesperson said. Yowza, can you say price gouging of a captive audience. My slice of pizza was NIS 18 – just earlier in the day my son complained that he’d had to spend NIS 12 for a slice at the mall and that was pushing it.
We ate slowly, talked about the trip, the excitement of flying alone, and the Flash Pass Uncle Dave bought for the their day trip to the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park. Before we knew it, the two hours were up and I was hugging my big boy goodbye as he was sucked through the bowels of Terminal 3.
As I drove home, I thought about the time when I first flew alone, also to my grandparents, and how such an adventure marks a kind of rite of passage, even more momentous than the bar mitzvah that preceded my son’s trip just a few months before. Sure, getting an aliyah to the Torah is nice, but sitting in a window seat without your parents and ordering as much Coca Cola as you want – now that’s the real deal!
Sleepovers
Here’s a cultural phenomenon that isn’t specifically Israeli, but seems to happen a lot here, perhaps because young adults tend to live at home with their parents, even after finishing the army. That is, young adult children who want to spend time with their parents at home, but frequently do so with their boyfriend or girlfriend in tow, creating a situation in which every bedroom in the house has a couple residing within, crowding into that childhood twin bed.
I’ve been coming across this phenomenon a lot, probably because my nieces and nephews and their friends, and my friends’ kids, are all reaching the age where they may have a very significant other, even as young as 18, when they begin the army. They come home for weekends to mom, dad, Shabbat dinner and clean laundry, and they want to bring their boy/girlfriend along. What’s a parent to do?
Most parents I know want to discuss it with their kids, but often end up saying it’s fine for the couple to share that onetime childhood bedroom. Their feeling is that they’d rather have their kids come home, and are pleased that their children still want to spend time with them, even if it means a larger gathering around the Friday night dinner table or Shabbat morning in the kitchen.
And lest one think this is not as common a phenomenon in the religious Israeli community, don’t be so sure of that, either. One religiously observant mother told me that she often has her three daughters’ boyfriends sleeping over, although not all of the couples ‘sleep’ together. Her feeling is that she’d rather have her kids safe at home than fooling around in some park at two in the morning. So she ends up stocking her fridge with much more food than normal, but at least she knows where her girls are. And one father told me that while he finds it strange to sense what his son is doing on the other side of the kitchen wall, he truly likes his son’s girlfriend and would rather have this time to get to know her, than not.
Then again, another mother I know well refused to let her daughter and boyfriend sleep together at home, commenting that her typical Israeli apartment is just too small and intimate…especially with an impressionable 15-year-old boy in the house. So the young couple spent some weekends at his parents — where they could sleep together — and others at her parents, where they couldn’t. He said he didn’t mind, particularly since the food was better at her parents.
The Case of the Purloined Ice Cream
Filed under: Food, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness
The kitchen.
Frankly, I’m a total nincompoop when it comes to cooking. I imagine that if I lived alone with no family, I’d be the take out king. Chinese one night, falafel or schwarma the next. There’s no lack of fast food these days in Jerusalem. We even have our choice of upscale sushi bars.
But I have three growing kids who need a well-balanced meal, and money for eating out every night isn’t exactly flowing like Dead Sea water. So before Jody left, she made me a two-week schedule of meals along with a detailed shopping list.
The meals on the list were pretty simple. There was macaroni and cheese, pasta with cheese, grilled cheese toasts, burritos with cheese, lasagna with (you guessed it) cheese.
Actually, there wasn’t anything on the list that didn’t involve flour and cheese, except for one night when I was supposed to make “orange soup” with sweet potatoes, carrots and pumpkin. But it was a long day and I had two intense deadlines that were going to take me easily past midnight. So we ordered pizza instead…with extra cheese.
All of the starch was supposed to be balanced with a nice green salad. Emphasis on the “supposed to” part. I finally got around to cutting up some veggies at the end of the first week and then only when everyone was so constipated we could barely move.
There was also what I fondly like to call the Day of Disasters. It started when 17-year-old Amir and I were putting away the groceries. A large jar of oatmeal was perched just a tad too close to the edge of the pantry.
It crashed to the ground spewing glass and oats everywhere. I thought about scooping up the flakes into a new jar but I was worried that they might be too “crunchy.”
Then when I was carrying a bottle of olive oil to the table to dress the salad, it too slipped out of my hands, landing on a dinner plate and splattering all over 10-year-old Aviv’s pants. The bottle, thankfully, didn’t break, but the plate did.
Next, we sat down to what turned out to be a highly unusual dinner. Merav, our 15-year-old vegetarian daughter was eating out at a friend’s house, so I decided to treat the boys to some meat. At the store, a bag of what looked like meat-stuffed raviolis looked tempting. And a real change – no cheese this time!
I brought it home and heated it up, just like the instructions on the package said, then served the ravioli to my little carnivores. But something just didn’t seem right about it. The meaty dumplings looked forlorn on the plates. Maybe they needed some sort of sauce?
That’s when I realized it. These were kneidelach, meant to be served in soup not on their own. Everyone chuckled, Aviv came to my defense saying they were delicious, but I felt defeated.
As if it couldn’t get any worse, here was the coup de coup de grâce (or in our case the coup de glida): The case of the ice cream. Earlier in the day, we had bought a small carton of Ben & Jerry’s butter pecan. It’s our tradition that when we buy a decadent dessert, we always take a sample as soon as we get home.
Amir was the first in. He pulled off the top. The protective seal was open. He peeked inside. A large chunk was missing. He called down to Merav’s room – had she somehow sneaked in and snagged a bite while we were still bringing up groceries from the car?
No, she said. Same question to Aviv. “There’s ice cream?” he exclaimed.
Someone apparently had opened the ice cream in the store, scooped out a large spoonful, and put it back in the freezer. Both Amir and I instantly felt sick to our stomachs. We wondered if we had been poisoned.
Clearly this all was a conspiracy, a plot hatched in some evil fiend’s mind to make us miss Jody or, when we eventually told her the story, to compel her to take pity on us, rush back from her trip and cook up a nice pot of tofu and broccoli.
Ultimately we decided not tell Jody about our fortnight of eating badly…at least not immediately. Better she enjoys her time in the States fondly thinking of us as an independent and resourceful brood rather than a collection of culinarily-challenged cranks.
And truth be told, we survived just fine. No one was rushed to the emergency room or came down with rickets.
Jody returned last night. Jet lag may delay our departure from kitchen duty another day or so, but it won’t be long before we’re back to “normal life” and the boss is in charge again.
Welcome back sweetie. We’re glad your home!
And oh yes, when you go shopping next week, don’t forget to check the ice cream!
Whistling in the dark
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life
It’s been a year and a half since my daughter began her two-year obligatory army service, and was placed in the Israel Police. Sure has gone by quickly for me.
For her, I’m not so sure. While she’s accepted her responsibilities with poise and a remarkable sense of maturity, it’s clear that she’s mentally tearing the calendar page away a day at a time as her long countdown begins to her release.
We’ve been lucky, because her patrol route and home base are relatively close to home, enabling her to sleep in her own bed, instead of staying in a police barracks.
It’s become routine in the house – Adina returning home at 5:30 am after a 12-hour all-night shift, and sleeping all day. If we’re home, we try to keep things quiet, but in the summer, with the younger kids on the TV and computer constantly, it’s not always possible (not to mention the remodeling taking place by our downstairs neighbor).
And when she’s on a day shift, she gets home in the early evening, takes a nap, showers, and heads out to see her boyfriend or her high school friends. We’re happy to be her welcome berth, providing her with food, shelter… and privacy.
Occasionally she’ll tell us about something that happened on her shift – which involves usual police stuff like burglaries, roadblocks to check for drunk drivers, and sometimes, heading into Arab villages to back up army troops on a mission. But usually, she just says everything’s fine, and doesn’t go into detail.
That leaves us with a false sense of security that she’s leaving to go to work like any of us, to sit at a desk or computer – not that she’s leaving home and entering a danger zone where her life or well being could possibly be put in jeopardy at any time.
Once in a while, on the rare occasions we’re both at home and not preoccupied with human doing stuff, I tell her I’m proud of her, and appreciate the sacrifice she’s making for her country, when she’s at an age when many kids – at least in the US – are more focused on where the next keg party is going to be. On Shabbat, during the prayer for the soldiers defending Israel, I put in a good word for her, and ask that she return home safely from all her tasks which put her in harm’s way.
Then the new week starts, and those thoughts return to back part of my mind once again. Still, when I hear her roll in at 5:30 am, I roll over in my bed, and in hazy between sleep and awake state, I pretend to smile to myself.
My bilingual baby
So my 15 month old daughter has been sprouting up words for the past few months. It is surreal enough for me to actually be a parent but thing but to have her actually communicate is truly bizarre. What’s really amazing is that she’s racking up both English and Hebrew words. It started with Abba/ Dada and Ima/ Mama – which is now mostly Dada and Mama (I really wanted her to call me Nighthawk but that didn’t work out). But she still seems to have a growing range in both languages. Yesterday she said ‘tapuach’ when offered an apple. Though she knows the word apple – also as it relates to all other fruits that she doesn’t call ‘nana’ – she seemed really excited to enunciate ta-poo-waaa.
Then the other night she said, na’alayim (shoes). Now she’s been loving her shoes (the English versions) for the past month, eagerly getting hers to put on, treading in mine, bringing my wife’s shoes to her and even putting some on Noonie our incredibly patient dog. But tonight, seeing our shocked responses, she continued to point out all the na’alayim in her books, around the house, etc. Plus she had major fun pronouncing the words, experimenting with the ‘y’ and ‘l’ and ‘yim’ sounds.
So to record the larger achievements in both languages, she’s also got the following words down pat: hello + halo + shalom; ball + kadoor; bye bye; balloon; ma zeh (what’s this) and mee zeh (who’s this); book; doggy; duckie; soos (horse); shoes + na’alayim; peh (mouth); ‘znayim (ears); baby; sing; mayim (water); bottle + bakbook (though she really says abottle); degel (flag); nadned (see saw or swing); noonie (our dog); cookie; lo + no; two; apple + tapuach; banana; todah (thank you); and opah (or oopsy, said when someone or something). She also started recently saying ‘hi mama’ ‘hi dada’ and ‘bye bye tzila’ (her teacher at school and it comes out more like tzee’a).
Oh and when she throws something down, she puts her hands on her cheeks (McCauly Caulkin style) and says ‘oy yoy yoy’. She knows this makes me laugh so she does it continuously, much to my enjoyment.
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