future remembering

Let your capital be simplicity and contentment. -Henry David Thoreau
just got that quote in a word-a-day email. Liked it and thought I'd start out with it.
I wish I could say I lived that way! With this decision to leave Israel, I'm faced with the various ways my life is about to get at once simpler, and way more complicated. On the simpler side, taxes. The fact that I won't be running to the tax office to file paperwork I may never see again, every time for the least lowly gig-- that's going to be nice. Being able to actually SEE or HEAR friends and family in the place of this endlessly silent internet connection... I saw an article somewhere recently that said some scientists are thinking of dumping the internet and starting over from scratch. I think we could all use a couple weeks break from being wired in. Definitely makes me cheat way too much on crossword puzzles, which were not invented with Google in mind.

then I think about how life is going to get more complicated, and what I'm going to miss here. My friend Daniel asked me yesterday, "So how do you and Christopher feel about hooking up with that big city machine again?" It reminded me of how on an application I recently filled out for a Music Teacher position at a school in Brooklyn, there was a blank for "how many years experience teaching in an urban setting." and I had to stop and think if Jerusalem counts! Even Tel Aviv- I mean, they're the biggest cities in the country, yet when your vegetable stand guy, Bodega guy, health food store guy, and butcher guy all know you, it does not feel like a city. Or maybe this is how cities used to be. Maybe this is how it will be when we go back to Jersey City. One of my friends from high school (in Brooklyn!), totally randomly, is now living 2 doors down from my parents. There are certain friendly, neighborly things I know I won't find back home, though. You can just talk to people's babies here. And the parents will stop the strollers for you to get some quality face time in. And forget about the puppies. Tel Aviv is a world-class dog city. It will be a nice change to not see sad, scraggly stray cats everywhere, tho I'm sure in a way I'll miss them too.

And then there's the quartet. I moved here to fulfill a dream, to play in a professional string quartet. It's not just because of Christopher's job that it's time for me to go home. There are some clear signs that maybe the quartet and I weren't on the same path... but that's hard for me to even write. I made the decision to leave really for reasons that had nothing to do with the 3 of them. I've invited them many times to come live with us! Either in Jersey City or in the Catskills, where my parents have a house, that now Christopher and I will take over the care of. Ever since I moved here I've joked that scientists have got to get to work on making the distance between Israel and New York smaller. Now I know I'm going to be feeling that same thing, but from the other side of the ocean.
I don't know if I'll ever get such an incredible musical experience handed to me like that again. From now on, back in the crazy scene that is NYC, I'm going to have to make it happen much more, that's how it goes there. I still have my dream of bringing music to my hometown, and that, along with the thought of Christopher and I actually having our own house, makes my heart beat faster. Then there's also the thought of seeing my nieces grow up, and not just in emailed photos. Getting to hear my friends' and my cousin's bands play live. Making dinner for my parents, or for our friends in the neighborhood. Going grocery shopping on Saturday...

today is Yom HaZikaron, the day of remembrance for people who died creating and defending Israel. Last week was Yom HaShoah, the day of mourning for the Holocaust. Both "Erevs" or nights before, stores closed early and the streets were quiet. Last night there was also a siren. There will be one again at 10 AM today, as there was at 10 AM on Yom HaShoah. I walked out to the highway to see all the cars stop, and the people get out of them, standing with their heads bowed on the black asphalt of the Ayalon, Tel Aviv's central artery. It was so intense. The only sound you could hear besides the sirens, were birds singing, and cats fighting. Nothing else human-made. I had this tremendous feeling of vertigo, maybe because I was standing on a bridge overlooking the highway. But I felt like I didn't know where I ended and everyone else in the country began. One of the few moments here when I've felt Israeli. It's getting quiet now;I can tell people are preparing for this next siren. I feel like this day is even more personally felt for more of Israel, since it's pretty evenly divided between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, and while World War 2 affected the lives of people in the Middle East and North Africa, it was a very different experience for the Jews there than for the Jews of Europe. Meanwhile, everyone knows someone who was lost, or injured, or who lost a family member, to the violence that has engulfed this country since the beginning.
I'm going to go stand on the bridge again.

languages of animals

Just got back the other day from a tour with Tel Aviv Soloists to Switzerland and Austria. mostly Austria, actually, only spent the last few days of the tour in Interlaken. It got funner and funner. Started out kind of ok, kind of a drag. The orchestra has this incredibly tightknit social vibe. I specify social because it doesn't always manifest itself musically! Maybe it was the stress of the tour, a city a day, a concert a city, a lot of time in the same bus. All the social stuff, it tends to feel a little bit like high school when you're not super comfortable with the language. But I got less and less stressed about that aspect as I felt more comfortable with more and more folks. I think it was the mid-tour break I took to go visit with Peter and Wendy Moes, my viola family, at their farmhouse outside of Munich. I was only there for a night, but it chilled me out as much as a week at a spa. Good healthy food, good conversation, purring cats and a midday rainbow sprouting out of the middle of a field will do that.
A nice thing for me was being put in the "married" hotel for our first couple nights- the 9 wedded members of the group (none to each other) were put in this adorable little inn outside of Villach. It was nice to get a little bit of air, an early break from the crowd. Hadas and Tali were in that hotel with me, so we had an opportunity to just hang out despite all the weirdness of my impending departure. The hotel was a bit too adorable, in fact: no phones in the rooms. But I did get to use their ancient computer in their office for email. At one point a man with a giGANtic handlebar moustache in traditional south-Austrian costumer stopped by to check that I knew how to use the computer just fine. Later that night I channelsurfed the TV stations and found Full House and the Cosby Show dubbed in German, as well as a comedy about a man in lederhosen and his dachshund. The dachshund had it in for is master and peed on his leg.
Why am I writing about the TV?? Well, I did have one enlightening TV experience (in English). Christopher gave me an amazing book to read on the tour: "A Language Older than Words" by Derrick Jensen. It's hard to describe in even a few sentences what it's about. Basically the author sees his abused childhood through the same lens he sees the abuse of the whole natural and native human world, and charts the destruction Western European society has wrought all across the planet. He ascribes part of the reason this has happened to the fact that humans long ago stopped believing they could communicate with the natural world. He writes about making deals with the coyotes who've been stealing his chickens and finding mouse poop in his sink after he'd destroyed the mice's nests in his garage... Anyway, at one of our little Austrian town stops, I found a movie in English, which made me happy (Germany doesn't subtitle, just dubs, so usually the only English TV is CNN) I don't know the name of it, but it's computer-animated, and about a deer and a bear running away from an evil hunter. I think one of the voices is Ashton Kutcher maybe? The movie felt like a manifestation of this book, about the possibilities of interspecies communication, and how much we miss when we assume we're the only beings on this earth with a language.
I think the book's turning me into a hippie.
Or--- back into a hippie.
I tried asking Spinoza nicely to please stop gnawing on my leg, but we haven't yet found a mutual language.
The best thing of the tour, aside from this book, and the views, and the lovely time with the Moes',-- was getting to know the people in the orchestra. First time in a while I feel I have really good new friends in Israel. And I'm leaving in a month and a half. It's sad I guess. But I've learned over the years, many times, that there is no goodbye in the tiny world of classical music.
I put up tons of pictures of the trip on the flickr site, www.flickr.com/photos/hollerames