Walking with Dreams

We just got back from a month in the states, which explains the long absence from posting. These days, I feel like I'm walking with dreams. It's not just the jet-lagged induced insomnia which leaves me blogging at midnight, or the stunning Patriots loss to the Miami Dolphins tonight, but rather a feeling that everything over the past month was a dream. When I arrived in America, I had the same strange sensation: everything was very familiar, felt completely natural, and it was as if I had never left in the first place. That our entire year in Israel was just a dream that was fading as I awoke in America. Over the four weeks there, I realized how different I was from the person who left the year earlier, and Israel became more and more real. Now that I'm back, our month in American seems like a dream that fades as we quickly fall into our routines and lives here. But soon enough, I think, it will become more real as I realize that it too changed me.

We left our apartment in Jerusalem at five am on August 19th to make an 8:05 am plane to London. It was a relatively uneventful flight with an eight hour layover in London where we had one of the absolutely best Fish and Chips we've ever had. It was also, by far, the most expensive. See, eight hours at Heathrow actually translated into two and half hours in London. By the time we got off the plane, through passport control, into baggage claim to find that our stroller had accidentally been checked through to Boston and waited for 15 minutes while they found us a loaner, checked most of our carry on luggage in "Left Luggage" ($30) , bought tickets for the train ($25 for both adults), used the bathroom, and boarded the train to London, we only had about two hours to do anything. We wandered around the West end, found a great restaurant, ordered our Fish and chips ($35 for the meal), watched a street performer at Covent Garden, bought some Minstrels for Debra's family (an M&M like candy, but better), and then we started to head back to the Airport. We arrived with just enough time to pick up our stuff and board the plane. All said and told, the Fish and chips cost just over $100, but worth every penny!

Our travels in America felt much the same - running around from place to place, where we spent relaxing time with good friends, then running around some more.

We spent the first day in Lexington, at my folks, trying to recover from the flight, and then packed our bags again and on Thursday headed to New Haven to visit my old friends Kimball and Sherill. They have a beautiful house, with an amazing garden out back. We spent the night there and had some great conversation, and, as always, we had a wonderful time that was much too short.

On Friday, we drove down to Atlantic City for my friend Reuben's wedding. It was wonderful! It was a really beautiful wedding on the beach, followed by a wonderful reception at the local temple where his wife Mimi's brother is the rabbi. It was great to have an entire weekend to spend with people, and catch up. My only regret is that I was still pretty jet-lagged, so was out of it for much of the first part of the week end.

On Sunday night, we drove up to New York City and spent three days with Debra's brother Eric and his family. It was wonderful to see them, and great to watch his children play with ours. They really enjoy and love one another which is amazing to see in kids that only see each other every six months. We went to the Museum of Natural History, the Manhattan Children's museum, and spent some great time in the parks.

For our last night there, we got a sitter (Eric and Anca's Nanny) and went out New York Style: first stop, an Irish bar and steak hour where we had to walk next to their meat locker to get to the bar. They had amazing home-made potato chips, and we started the night with a drink. From there, we walked to the Theater district to see "The 39 Steps" which was a farse based on the movie of the same name. It was light and fluffy, but very, very funny. I really enjoyed it, Debra fell asleep during one of the key moments (she always seems to do this in the theater) and spent the rest of the play trying to figure out what was going on. We left there and went to the "second best Sushi restaurant in NYC". I can only imagine what the best one tastes like because this was one of the best meals I've ever had in my life. We got the tasting menu and got 12 pieces of perfectly seasoned sushi that went beyond just amazing fish but had sauces and different preparations for the fish. Blew me away! After that we went to the tofu dessert place when we got, yup, you guessed it, desserts made of tofu! I was blown away by how rich everything was and amazingly tasty when I made the mistake of asking the waiter how they got vegan food to be so good. He replied that only one or two dishes were vegan but most were made with butter and cream. I was disappointed, but luckily had already eaten everything so couldn't feel too guilty about it! I'm told this is how New Yorkers go out all the time, but for me, doing this once every few years is more than enough.

From New York we drove back to Boston, where we spent Thursday with my parents. On Friday, my mom went in for Surgery. About two weeks before we left for the trip my mom had a chest x-ray because of some chest pain she was having from gastrointestinal problems. On it, they found a spot they didn't like. So they did a CAT scan, then a PET scan, and that determined that she needed surgery - 85% chance that it was cancer. So Friday morning, she and my Dad went to the hospital in the morning. The surgeons didn't know exactly what they were dealing with, so the procedure was to remove a piece of the tumor, do an immediate biopsy, and then either remove just the tumor or the lobe of the lung to which is what attached.

Unfortunately, it was cancer, so the removed the tumor, one of the lobes of her left lung (there are two), and a few lymph nodes around the area. The whole procedure is done laproscopically, so they did not need to crack her chest as they once needed to, and all she had were several small incisions. Really amazing technology. Another moment in my life when I am glad that I live at this point in history!

She spent a week in the hospital, and I spent much of the week going back and forth to visit her. Just as she was getting released, we got the lab results back that all of the lymph nodes were clean! The cancer was in the 1A stage, which is the earliest stage, and I truly thank God that it was caught this early. At this point, the doctors are not recommending any further treatment other than monitoring so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

At the end of that week, with my mom back home, we headed to the far off land of Jamaica Plain for a couple of days with friends. We stayed at Mark and Kelly's for Saturday and Sunday night, and had a wonderful time with them. On Sunday, after I ran off to get two new tires for my mom's car in the early morning after the flat we'd gotten the day before, we invited a bunch of friends over for a late brunch and schmooz fest. It was mostly for the friends who we weren't able to visit with, and it was great to see them all, albeit too briefly, but the trip was too brief to be able to spent lots of time with everyone, so it was better to see them all at once then not at all!

The next day was Monday the 8th, and Debra and the girls were scheduled to fly out to Houston at 1 pm. I ran down to Boston early in the morning to go to the Boston Aliyah center to process some paperwork for our immigration to Israel. Why was I rushing to squeeze this in? Because they had told me earlier that the paperwork would take two days to process, but when I talked to them on Friday before the weekend, they told me two weeks, so I needed to meet with them right away. Is Tuesday ok, I asked. No, the person who I needed to meet with started the job that Monday (which is why I couldn't meet with him sooner), but was going out of town for two days at noon on Monday, so the only time to meet was Monday morning. (As will become clear, if anyone is thinking of making Aliyah, use Nefesh B'Nefesh, not the Aliyah center! Read more about this in my next post.)

I arrived at 9 am, but was told by the security guard that there was no one in the office, and I needed to wait. I waited 40 minutes until someone from the office came in who promptly told me that someone else had been in the office the whole time! We rushed through the paperwork and I ran to the train. Debra picked me up on the way to the airport and we very hurriedly drove very slowly through traffic to the airport. When we got there, Debra realized she had forgotten one of the suitcases! So I jumped back in the car, drove like hell back to JP, got the suitcase, and then half-way back to the airport realized that I was not going to have enough time. So I said goodbye on the phone to them and headed back to Lexington.

The next day, I drove into town again to go to the consulate to get our Aliyah visas. When I arrived, they said, "no problem." So all that rushing for no real reason! I ran errands most of the day then went to New Hampshire to look at our storage unit into which all of our stuff had been moved when we sold our house. It was a mess. Things had just been thrown in there and I spent two days going through it to sort things out and make sure they were stored in a way that would not damage anything. I found four boxes that didn't even belong to us as well as three boxes with just trash in them. It was very frustrating.

In the middle of all this cleaning and sorting, I managed to go up to Northern Vermont to visit an old college friend who is living up there. She, her husband, and small child are living off the grid doing organic farming. It was very impressive to see what they've done, and amazing to see the half acre of cultivated land that they've basically carved out of the forest. When she wanted to cook dinner, she went outside, picked the food, then came back inside and starting cooking. Needless to say it tasted great. I hadn't wanted to go up empty handed so I'd stopped at Frederick's Pastries in Nashua and bought a big box of really delicious pastries. (those of you who've been there know how good that stuff is!) I figured that was food you don't much get when you live out in the woods! But it did feel a little odd sitting by the wood stove in their one room farmhouse eating an eclair.

After four days of running errands and cleaning my storage unit, I got a chance to finally relax by going up to the Maine coast with four other friends for Reuben's post wedding "I'm not a bachelor anymore" bachelor party. We did wild things like cook food, take boats on the bay, and play poker. It was very relaxing and great to spend the time with my close friends. I guess we're getting older as only Mark survived the weekend without getting hurt, but the rest of us were not so lucky: I cut my foot open on a rock, Reuben slipped on a piece of driftwood a scrapped up his ankle, Jeremy took something off a shelf and it accidentally flew into his nose, and Mike went home with poison ivy and a really bad cold. But it just made us mellower and hang out more, which was a good thing in the end.

I'll let Debra tell you about her week herself, but suffice it to say that she was supposed to be in Galveston right when hurricane Ike struck. So instead of hanging with her friends in Houston, she took off with the girls and went to Austin to visit her sister for most of the week. When it came time to fly back, she was supposed to go back to Houston, but their airport was still underwater, so she drove down to San Antonio and flew back through Newark, arriving in Boston at 11 pm instead of 2 pm, and thereby missing the good bye dinner at Mark's house.

Tuesday was spent packing and preping until 1 am. We did all of our last minute errands and tried to figure out how we had managed to buy so much stuff, but we had everything ready when the cab picked us up at 5:30 am. We got off without a problem, had a three hour stopover in Heathrow which mainly consisted of searching for and finally finding the children's play area, and eating a dinner that was very, very tasty at a restaurant called the V-Bar (which looked like it would be better suiting to the West end than to the airport). The kids slept on the final leg of the trip, though Debra did not. I finally got to see Shrek, which I'd never seen, and really enjoyed it. We got to Ben-Gurion airport in Tel-Aviv exhausted but feeling relatively mellow after such a long, crazy trip. We got our last little bit of craziness thrown at us as a suitable end-note because the Boston Aliyah center screwed up and we were supposed to be me at the airport by the absorbtion ministry, but weren't. I'll talk about that in a separate post.

It was a crazy trip with all of the running around - I think I spent more time driving than any other single activity, but it was also really wonderful to see all of our friends and family! As we settle back into life here, and really begin to enjoy having a routine and no car, I will miss Boston and all of our friends and family who made the trip so wonderful!