For Ezi’s birthday we went down to the Jaffa port to see which of the buildings Ezi’s grandfather have been razed.  It has always been surprising to me what parts of history are important to us, what should be preserved and what can be erased.  So the customs house buildings through which so much of the Zionist past entered Palestine have been destroyed, and I wonder what that means about us.  It isn’t as if Jonah went through customs, I know, although he did go through Jaffa port.  And the customs house was built by British decree so it has nothing to do with the Arabs.  So just the fact that it was built in the 20’s and a lot of merchandise that built the state went through there doesn’t mean anything, does it?

But I digress.  Since we were advised that “the old man and the sea” was the best place to eat, we went there, and I want you to know – it isn’t the best place in Jaffa.  Even though it’s on the port with a view of the sea, I found the impersonality of the place a factor in my appetite.  In fact, I had the feeling that most of the waiters didn’t speak Hebrew and didn’t dare speak anything else because they were not from this country.  Maybe that was a factor in my dizzy spell there – or maybe I misread the entire restaurant because I was dizzy.  Lucky Lisa was with us because she brought a sense of humanity to me, and our conversation about politics was based on the same starting points.  That made it easier to discuss specific events and people, and forget about the food.

From there we plowed through debilitating traffic jams to get to a doctor’s appointment and made it home just in time for the birthday party to begin.  Our high expectations for the birthday cake did not materialize, as the cake was all show and had little taste, but again, maybe I was off balance.  

Anyway, I feel I have more work to do to make the birthday a happy one and more investigation to do to understand who is really in charge of the port.  It doesn’t feel good right now, but there is much more building going on, and maybe a plan will emerge.  It is a place with great potential for the future and a past worth remembering.