Israel 3

March 13, 2019

          Strange that I have not obsessively recorded, as I usually do abroad. Part of it is mechanical; I fear this computer is failing, and the work will be lost. But today was the best and longest of days. It started at 7 with the tour to Nazareth and Galilee. It was my father’s hundredth birthday, and finding some way to engage that, to commemorate that, lay at the center of my thoughts. A little cat waited with me until the van arrived. We saw Megiddo and Armageddon and Nazareth and Cana and the Hill of the Beatitudes and Tabor of the Transfiguration. On the first tour there was a woman who corrected the guide’s Portuguese pronunciation—though he was fluent in six languages right before our eyes—and on this one a woman who had taken a bible class (or something) and corrected or questioned everything that guide said. How can we be SURE the rock under the Dome was the very rock where Abraham prepared his sacrifice? Is this really the house of the Holy Family? What if it isn’t?  Our guide’s mind was methodical and her English halting, so by the time she got something explained I was ready to explode. “Just tell her to shut up,” I counseled silently. The Holy Land in spring is lush with flowers. The Sea of Galilee is bigger than I imagined. The Jordan River, though smaller than the French Broad (it’s like a twisty Cam) is beautiful, and moving to behold. Unlike depictions in the movies, it’s not a stream struggling through desert, but a long oasis overhung with trees and loud with birds, tropical and jungle-y. Parrots screeched through the sky overhead. Happy people—including one of our tour group--donned white robes and had themselves baptized in the sacred place. I watched a moorhen paddling. A girl and I watched anoles cavort on the ruins of Capernaum. We were gruesomely late getting back, and I had them drop me on Rothschild, where I had a burger at Moses’ and began a poem—on the subject of my father’s 100^th, as I had wanted to do. Something came upon me, and I wandered afterward up and down the boulevard thinking of my father and my life, weeping bitterly and anonymously in the blessed dark. When did I ever know the right thing to do? How could I have known? What could I have done to change things? I heard myself say, “I miss my dad.” It was the first time I had ever said it. It should not have been. I do not think it was my fault. I came home and, again, had a night full of elaborate and revealing dreams.