T4 Israel: You Don't Know Anything

Good morning from Jerusalem, a city I have heretofore seen only at night and, in large part, from the back of a bus. All I wanted to do yesterday was wander around the Old City, to stay looking at the Western Wall and quietly weep; this, because without having any forethought of the idea, I realized I was seeing this for Tim, my daughter’s late father, who would have wanted to be here so much, it mattering not at all what religion people were practicing, he was himself infused with a love of Christ (whom he credited with helping him in a snap stop drinking, more on that in a moment), and what the wall does and means; the millions of people pouring their belief and grief, it would have poured into him. He was an appreciator, of everything and everyone, even if it was, say, a bite of a cookie. He would have loved so much to see and receive the wall, and Israel, but since he cannot I saw it for him. I don’t Tim would mind me pasting what is below, the idea of seeing something for someone else, he was after all a friend of Sam Elliott’s.

I did wind up spending the day with some people, people whose stories we are asked to receive. It’s an interesting situation here, and when I write interesting I mean complex, there is no place we have gone that doesn’t crackle with conversation and conflict and joy and immediacy. It’s easy, near ineluctable, I think, to be pulled into the maelstrom, but what I want to do these next few days, is stay a bit quiet. Watch and listen.

I did fall in love a little yesterday. Meet Malak.

So Tim: He was 34 years old and woke in the night to find he was being driven in a car through a sunshiny desert. The driver was Jesus. Tim wondered what was going on but did not ask. “You won’t be drinking anymore,” Jesus said. Okay, Tim thought, as Jesus pulled to the shoulder. As he was getting out, Jesus had one more thing to say. “When you get back, eat some bananas.” Tim always did.