Even the paper guy at the shuk is illluminating....

אחר' ulpan אני הלכת ל קופת חולימ to sort out health coverage here in Tel Aviv. It's a tantalizing walk up Gruzenberg past the local music store with their own made guitars and across the burst of Allenby Street and a left after the 5 shekel carrot juice. It's almost so satisfying here only to walk the streets...  the feast for senses is so full, it almost fills any need for actual things. I went between the shops to the alley entry of the כלל'ת health service and ...So close I came to ...hebrew is intruding on my English!...to ordering a place for meeting the רופה and benefiting from state health insurance, so close only to be greeting by noone. Noone really, they were on strike. The door to a place called Paradise was opened if you went downstairs, but to go upstairs no way.... on strike....secretaries, the doctors, not sure, couldn't speak enough Hebrew. Yesterday someone translated for me that they were on strike and today the doors were locked to the clinic. Here speaking out is as basic and pita.

So I wandered along Allenby with rows of bursting shops filled with disorganized everythings. And I shopped curiously with empty bags. Then I remembered the perpetual challenge of organizing myself has come with me to Israel and I went into Shuk HaCarmel to see if I could find some little cardboard nicely designed drawers. Imagine a Middle Eastern Shuk with tightly snug consecutive slabs of fruits and veggies and bras and yarmulkes and cheese graters and juicers and pitas and spices.... along a narrow corridor of people and arms and legs and faces. I was happy to find that the guy I bought the cute paper drawer from before actually had a little booth of journals and notebooks and nicely designed organizational things. And it was there that I learned the I have to make room.

He spoke easy English and was warmed with my meager attempt at Hebrew...and so the conversation begins. Where are you from? How long have you been here? Did you make Aliyah? Wow good for you! Do you have family here?....and then a quick plunge into why. And quickly you are talking with an interested heart about why you changed everything to live here with them. Here people can handle the real answer and so we tumbled into the pull of my soul year after year and he asked if people started to tell me then to come to Israel as if to him it made so much sense.  And the encouragement of letting my brain make the switch to think in Hebrew and to not be afraid. With my head so full and tired it's hard. Tired from what? From moving. Moving? and moving. Moving? and moving...for 40 years. And his questions deepened and my answers in response as he tried to understand how I look so young. Together we figured out I lived forward the first 20 years and have been going backwards ever since.  I told how to begin anew I threw an egg into the ether on my 40th birthday and how it disappeared and he gasped as if he could feel the mystical happening it that moment. His hands talked from his heart and chest and his round face and soft body drew out what years of New England stuffed in. And he asked about my allergies and why so many from the states seem to be so sensitive and still he stayed atuned, so I told him that I believe here the people have a sense of place. They are more connection to family and friends and with the safety of כשר their bodies can relax. And he nodded with me. Here people eat vegetables in season, most of us in the states eat vegetable from the supermarket.  And there is more and more. And he told me that when he went to the states after the Army he stayed in Bethlehem Pennsylvania with his family. He didn't like it at all and was left with such a feeling of emptiness and loneliness that he felt in the states that 25 years later he had sadness in him as he talked about being there in the country of independence. I nodded. Deeper and farther with ease and interruption of people buying colorful journals and things. His dream of living in the desert and his resonance with living here. Easy. Just normal conversation here in the shuk. More questions in exchange and wonderful probing.  And an easy reference to the torah: חדש מפני ישן תעדיף new instead of old you prefer...let go make room don't be afraid to clean out and be left even with even one sock. His arms swept down and away from his body in an movement essential to life.  Make room for new to come in. More stories from him and the company hum of the shuk. Am I lonely here is asked. No. Not at all. And he encouraged me to make room, let go of the tired and the wondering, make room.
I think I'll have eggs for dinner. Shakshuka. Eggs and tomatoes and garlic. Eggs. The beginning of life.