BACK TO THE MOTEL

Getting up early to walk to the DAC and finding no one on the streets, not a single donkey, not hearing a single call to prayers, not even anyone sitting on the curb selling grape leaves.
It is raining. I never saw that in Israel.

Ruminations are the chewing on lifes's narratives.

I went back to the motel where I left the little naked boy that I found running down the middle of the street at 4:00 A. M. so many weeks ago. A young Indian woman was only too willing to tell me how stupid she thought the parents were.
"Hello! They were out partying! What were they thinking? You want a baby, take care of the baby. I can't stand to see the way some of the people in this neighborhood treat their dogs, but a human?!! ".
From somewhere, she said, a grandmother showed up, very quickly, to get the child. So she assumed that they lived nearby.
I thanked her and she thanked me.

Reading David Brooks today in The Times, he posits the life of someone who "did all the right things, not doing the things he wanted to do, but the things he felt he had to do to live, and how, now, he feels cheated by the fecklessness of his society. ".
I say who gave this invented person any right at all to be born into a world where he would be surrounded by people who would always make decisions that would always be in his best interests?!
I just came back from Israel and Jordan where getting screwed from the time you wake up in the morning until the sun goes down on a world that does, in no way, have your best interests in mind.
Just to dodge the constant drizzle of bird droppings all day long counts as success.
Who in the hell does Brooks think he is and how can he presume to invent a man who has a right to be angry, and whose response then is to join with other people who hold themselves entirely blameless and who say that they choose to want no part of the "down" of the "ups and downs" of existence.
I find Brooks , his straw man, and the whole notion of self- righteous selfishness repellent.

Richard found me at the DAC and we talked long and hard about Israel and Jordan. He had been there not so many months ago. We had no trouble agreeing that Israel resembles the old apartheid South Africa all too much. Sadly, for a country that has accomplished as much as it has, to wound itself with the dagger of hatred, It's difficult to watch. Richard is even more bitter than I am, maybe because he's Jewish and takes it that much more personally.

Jerusalem belongs to the Jews until someone takes it from them.
They can hurry the process , or not.

20,000 miles ago and three weeks, I sat right here on this couch and wondered what I might find so far away, and now I sit here and wonder what I did find.

My brother called to say that the doctors have increased my mother's dosage of morphine and that he thinks that she is soon to go, but she seems to think otherwise. She is a tough old bird and I love her for it.
She has said so many time that she doesn't even want to be alive, to the extent that she has tried to commit suicide twice, that to be this determined to live only says that, ultimately, she is afraid to die. Afraid of what she will find when she walks through that door, though if you aren't sure of the existence of god, there's no point in worrying about hell.


This is about three hours later.
Mom died.
Bob just called me and, even though we knew that it couldn't have ended any other way, still it seems lonlier all of a sudden
It's really easy to look up at the big, white, fluffy clouds and the warm sun and imagine her spirit as free and part of all this light.
I called my sister Barbara, who was there when she finally let go, not easily, but at last. She had a desire to stick around and wasn't going to leave until she was assured that the time was right. Barbara told her that she was safe and then took this little moisture applicator, used to wet her lips with, and dipped it in some Pinot grifio and wiped her lips with it and she said "ok" ten minutes later.
What a dear sweet person.

Trying to put the last few weeks in perspective, I can only believe that my trip to Jerusalem and Petra is all of a piece with my mom' s passing on from this world and my managing to be a part of it.
Life is as strange as death.
I am a coin, a circle with two sides, life and death. Flip me and I live, flip me again and I still live. Flip me enough times and, at some point, I die. But again, continue flipping and I get another opportunity to live. And on and on, until, finally, This coin that is me becomes a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is infinite.




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