2001:December:4
12.4.2001

so what the hell is a pooch? Lisa--and forgive me if you are reading this--has the habit of appropriating the accent and vernacular of her environment. So what is this word pooch?

>A "pooch" (throat-clearing "ch") is a quilt. It is becoming increasingly necessary as the damp Israeli winter makes my poured concrete building feel like a refrigerator.

My friends all know this story, but one day,when I was living in Jerusalem (and sleeping under a pooch although he was a nice pooch), my friend called me up to go for cheesecake and coffee on Ben Yehuda street.

I had the night off at the Yemenite restaurant (yes, located at the same place where the suicide bombs went off this weekend) where I was the worst waitress in the middle east.

I was on the brink of getting fired, so I didn't really want to hang in the 'hood that night and see all the skilled waitresses effortlessly doing their thing.

We went to see a movie instead.

We went to see True Lies and I have to tell you , it was not for lack of choice. I just like a nice action film.

As we waited for the bus to take us back to our neighbourhood, my friend and I started to bicker.

I had found the movie offensive, as it stereotyped arabs as swarthy, crazed terrorists. My friend, who is smart and sweet and funny, has --er--questionable politics. She said, annoyingly, "but most of them *are* terrorists" (or something to that effect).

Now I knew that feeling too well in Israel, and you never get used to it: those moments when politics or religion make your friends feel like strangers. It feels like hitting a brick wall.

The bus was really late coming, so we hailed a cab. The driver had the news on full blast. There had been an attack downtown.(which is why the bus had not come). Two terrorists had opened fire with machine guns on the strip of restaurants where I worked and people had been killed.

I found out the next day that when the shooting began, everyone at my restaurant had hidden in the bathroom. When I went inside, I saw bullet holes in the back wall where the washrooms were.

When off-duty soldiers had started to shoot back, the shooters took refuge in the one place where the patrons had gone up to the roof: The Mexican restaurant across the way from where I worked.

Oh,yeah, I forgot this part: On the taxi ride back, my friend and I were both teary, imagining the terrifying scene and reeling at our luck. But then my friend turned to me and said: "see?"

That's the story. My friend and I both live in Canada now, where we both vote for the same 'left-of centre' party, I think, which is funny.

I had considered that night of the shooting a close call, and dined out on it for ages, but had I stayed in the same apartment in Jerusalem these past years at least 5 bombs would have exploded within 1 block of my apartment. And I would have known about it first hand instead of seeing it in the news.

But I stopped running to the T.V. every time a bomb went of in Israel after I saw CNN footage of the scene of a suicide bombing in the outdoor market a couple of years ago. Suddenly, I recognized the old man who had sold me rice those years back, stumbling around in front of the camera, in shock. His head was bleeding.

This is my second Israel story. And I am not writing it to make suicide bombers look worse (is that necessary?) or to make Israelis seem more sympathetic. Because it is so dumb to try and embrace or condemn a whole nation. The world is a weird working of individual stories blabbering for attention, right?

When I decided to leave J'lem after 2.5 years, I was crying because of the anticiapted distance between now and then. Because the language and the stories and streets that I knew and people that I loved that were "now" and "here" and "us" would become "then" and "there" and "them" once I left.

Which is really why we are sad about leaving any place, I think. The anticipation of distance in every sense.

But with Israel--or perhaps it is any place where you actually live and love--the tragic stories still hit me so hard. But I kind of worry what right I have. I don't want to be one of those preening people who morbidly try to associate themselves with tragedy.

>I am very afraid that Sharon is going to do something terrible especially now that GWB gave him carte blanche at the White House meeting yesterday. There is a sense of hopelessness in the air.

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