Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-06
Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...
The worker at the clinic's front desk explains what's going to happen with the form that I just gave her. She tries to make it sound easy. "I have entered the information in the computer. It will go to the insurance office. They will send a confirmation that they will cover the MRI. We will send you an SMS. You will come in here and get Form 13. You will then schedule the MRI at the clinic office downtown. You will select where it will be done. Despite what the form says, they can not do it at that office."
At least that's what I think she has said. Fortunately, I have a relative with me, so he's hearing it, too. He's there in case the worker could only speak Hebrew. He can translate. She's speaking English, though. I understand only slightly more than if she were speaking Ugaritic.
We leave the office. He heads south to handle his errands. I head east for mine.
I have taken the day off work. I had a Hebrew lesson this morning and have a meeting in the afternoon. I'll fit in some other things in between.
My next stop is the clothing shop where I got my trousers. A few blocks down the street with the merchants, I stop into what I think is the right store. It isn't. The merchandise appears to be pretty much the same, but it's far too neat. There's a logic to how things are shelved.
I step out and look at the sign again. I see how I got confused. The two shops are named "Jeans" and "John's". The words look almost identical in Hebrew.
I find the right shop and go in. The owner recognizes me. I show him the problem that I’m having. The belt that he sold me isn't quite right. It fits, but the free end of it is too long. It keeps working its way out of the belt loops and dangling in front of me.
I take off the belt and hand it to him. (Good thing I'm also wearing the suspenders that he had sold me some time before.) He can fix it on the spot.
I'm not sure how he can do it. Cutting the end shorter would look terrible, since it has stitching that would end abruptly. But he's not doing that. Instead, he removes the buckle from the other end. He cuts that end shorter with his shears, then punches a new hole in it and reattaches the buckle.
I put the belt back on. It fits beautifully. There's no charge. I thank him and leave.
I'm still carrying around the envelope that I have to send to a government office. I don't see a mailbox anywhere. I pass the post office, then double back and head in.
Dozens of people are waiting. People are taking numbers.
I rarely break lines, but I take a chance this time. When a worker reappears at his window, I go up to him with the envelope. I tell him that I just have to send it. He takes it from me and solemnly declares, "You have now sent it. May you have success." (That's the closest that I can get to conveying b'hatzlakhah in English). He presses a button. Electronic signs summon the customer with the next number to his window.
I head toward a bus stop. I intend to get lunch when I get off the bus in the next city to the south. I realize that I'm hungry now.
I go into the hummus joint a few doors down. I get a plate of hummus with fava beans, an assortment of salads, and a soda.
While I'm eating, a man comes in and orders just the vegetable salad. He gets it. It's cheap.
A woman comes in and asks if they have rice. The worker looks confused. "We have rice in this soup and in another dish. But you want just rice?" She does. She's eating the lunch that she brought from home in her office nearby, but realized that she forgot to bring her her rice.
The man nods. "If you want just rice, I can sell you just rice." She gets a bowl of rice to go. It's cheap, too.
Another woman dashes in as the woman with the rice is leaving. "I'm going to get something, but right now, do you have a bathroom?" They do. He gestures for her to follow him. They go around a bend, out of sight. He returns quickly. She returns after a while, sits at a table, and orders.
When I go to the counter to pay, the worker says, "You haven't had coffee or tea. You must have coffee or tea." OK. I get coffee. It's Turkish coffee, not the best that I've had, but good.
The best Turkish coffee that I've ever had was in a Syrian-owned deli around the corner from my store in San Francisco. I remember that one night, when I was there, a woman came in and asked if they had Hamas. The worker stopped cold and stared at her.
I took a guess, and asked the customer if she really wanted hummus. "Yes, yes, hummus. I'm always getting that wrong."
The worker thanked me. "I was afraid of what she was asking. Here sometimes we have jihad, but never Hamas."
I leave the hummus joint and head for the bus stop. A couple doors down, a voice calls out, "Shalom, friend. Friend? Sir? Shalom?"
I turn and see a man sitting in a chair outside a storefront, calling out to me. I come over and shake his hand.
He says something to me quite rapidly. I don't understand. He sees that. "English is better? OK, I speak English. Friend, I see the sneakers you are wearing. They are Asics. Are they comfortable?"
I had forgotten the brand. They were a gift. And they are quite comfortable.
"Friend, wear them well. But when you need new sneakers, please come in here. Or even if you do not need ones yet, come in and try them on." He points to a sign. "These sneakers we carry are the king of all sneakers. Try them, stand in them, walk around in them, and you never will have felt sneakers so comfortable. Yours are black. We have black, but we have many other colors."
A young man rolls past on a bicycle. The man in the chair shouts, "Shalom!" The man on the bicycle waves and keeps going.
The man in the chair turns back to me. "You know him? He's from America. You are also from America? You must know him." I don't. But America is kind of a big place.
I catch the bus to the next town. Near where I'm headed, I start to feel woozy and unwell. I recognize the symptoms. I'm getting dehydrated. And I forgot to bring my water bottle with me.
I get off at the spiral mall and head right to a coffee shop that I know. I gulp down a large iced Americano and wait for the wooziness to go away. It does.
A lot of news reports have spoken about the first Shake Shack to open in this country. It's supposed to be right next to the mall.
I circle the outside of the mall until I see it. Yep, it's a Shake Shack. I think of getting something. Then I see that there's a line stretching down the block and around the corner. At the front of it, a man is opening and closing a velvet rope, letting customers in a few at a time. I don't need a shake that badly.
My appointment a few towns over is in two hours. Google Maps says that it's 45 minutes away by bus. I know city traffic. I hop the next bus going there. It crawls through the city, along narrow streets not built for modern traffic.
It crosses into the next city. I hop off at the Diamond Exchange and transfer to another bus.
That bus crawls through surrounding cities even more slowly. Traffic stops and starts. The air is filled with a continual, shifting dronescape of car horns. We inch forward. The light rail keeps shooting past us.
I get off the bus where Google Maps tells me to. I follow its cryptic walking directions. It doesn't help that there are very few street signs.
I find the right street and look for Building 1. I don't see it. Other buildings have numbers in the single digits, so I know I'm at the right end of the street. The buildings all look residential, the usual interchangeable ritzy towers you see in these areas.
A woman comes by, walking a small dog. I ask her where Building 1 is. "I don't know Building 1. This one here is Building 3."
I go past Building 3. There are no other buildings. I'm in a park across from another mall. I wonder if the mall is Building 1, though it's actually on another street.
The woman with the dog reappears. She asks me what I'm trying to find.
I show her the WhatsApp message from the person that I'm meeting. "You're in the wrong city. What you want is there." She points in the direction that I came from. "It's the next city. It starts on the other side of that street."
I am right where Google Maps sent me. I knew that where I am has a different city name, but when I checked for specifically the right address in the right town, it kept saying that I should go here.
I send a message to the person I'm meeting. I should be at his office already. I tell him where I am. He gives me another name for the building he's in. Google Maps finds it. It's three kilometers back up the road.
I hop a bus back there. It gets detoured. What should be a straight shot winds around. The overhead voice and the signs on the bus announce stops that are completely wrong.
I get off at one point, on a wild guess. The sign on the bus stop confirms that I'm where I should be. I'm right across from a light rail station.
I'm supposed to look for "the Towers." I see three towers a few blocks down. I send another WhatsApp message, asking if they are what I'm looking for. I'm told it's just one building, near where I am.
I send him a photo of what I'm seeing. He tells me it's behind me, across the street. I send another photo. Yes, it's that one.
I find the right entrance and go inside. It's a modern office building, with electronic gates at the other side of the lobby. I don't know how to get through them.
A man eventually appears and sits at what turns out to be a front desk. I ask him. He asks for an ID. I give it to him.
He emerges from behind the desk and goes to a kiosk that I hadn't noticed. He scans my ID and hands it back to me, along with a ticket that the kiosk prints. "Go to the gate on the right and scan the bar code. It will let you in. When you leave, scan the code again at the gate that will be on your right then. Take those elevators there."
I thank him. I go through and up the elevator. When I get to the office door, the advisor is waiting for me. Before we do anything else, he takes me to a corner office and points out the windows. He explains very clearly how to get to the light rail, including where to cross the streets and on which sidewalks to walk. He has figured out that I find directions to be a challenge.
We leave that room. He offerrs me something to drink in the kitchen. I get some water. I'm parched. We go to a conference room. His laptop is open and waiting. The meeting finally begins.
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You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.
The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)
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L'hitraot.