I don't know why, but I remember (part II)

I don't know why, but I remember the coins in the yard outside our apartment building in Eilat, Israel. I was five years old when my mother brought me with her on her sabbatical at the Marine Institute. Everything in Israel was different from my short life in San Diego, California. Yet I never thought of life in Israel as new, because it was so old. Israel exudes ancientness. I found out that the rules of society in Israel were old too, set in the stone tablets of history. At the time, and sometimes even now, it was a place unlike the confusing mishmash of American society, where feeling accepted has always been a struggle. But in Israel I understood how to fit in, just by looking around me. Channah, the woman who watched me after school, lived in an apartment building with her family and in the courtyard outside, all the kids would play on the bomb shelters. I liked those funny concrete domes, interspersed closely together around the courtyard like an enormous inter-connected jungle-gym. it wasn't until years later that I realized what the domes actually were.

Christmas Day in Israel is just another ordinary day. At sundown on Friday everything stopped-- there were no buses, no traffic, the stores all were closed, the streets were empty. Those Friday afternoons, my mother and I often walked down to the edge of town, where the roads crumbled into the desert where, it was said, you could follow the way to King Solomon's mines.

I went to a big kidnergarten where my forty classmates and I were vigorously instructed in the making of raisin wine for Passover. After it was done fermenting we were all given a large bottle to take home, as though giving homemade alcohol to five-year-olds was absolutely the most natural thing in the world. On Rosh Hashonah, the Jewish New Year, the streets were again empty of traffic and instead were full of hundreds of families walking together, holding sparklers, singing, skipping. It was a parade of everyone, and I ran down the empty block while twilight faded into night, until my stomach ached, delighting in the freedom of not having to hold my mother's hand because there were no cars to watch for.

In Israel my mother read me the Old Testament for the first and only time in my life. I marvelled that the nearby beach where I often swam and collected seashells was the shore of a sea that had once famously parted.


"Will it ever happen again?" I asked her.

"Why is the Red Sea blue?"

"Where is the Burning Bush?"

I had a lot of questions.

Just below my mother's bedroom window that faced the trees behind our apartment building, shiny silver coins were scattered in the gravel and dead leaves. The first time I saw them I got very excited and ran outside to collect them, sure that if I could collect them all, we'd be rich here in this land where stranger and more mysterious things had happened than a mysterious windfall. When I came back inside my mother tried to explain that the old British shillings were worthless, the currency of a bygone era. "See, they use shekels here now," she said, showing me the coins she had in her wallet. I nodded indulgently, skeptically-- completely dubious of what she said and paradoxically having steadfast faith in the value of those old coins.

I believed in the coins because for the first time in my life I knew about God; in Israel He was everywhere and I did not need to ask Him if the Red Sea could be parted again.