The tension of the war has brought out the worst and the best in people.  Some of us are short-tempered, some (like me) are forgetful, some (like me) get confused more easily, some (like me) get smarter.  My mad neighbor for example seems to me to be more mad than usual – and I can understand some of her rantings, but there are others are off the wall.  As the daughter of a schizophrenic auschwitz graduate, she has some of the genes, and has learned a lot of the behavior of her mother.  But she’s more violent and scary.  She likes to slam her door shut repeatedly, for example, because it really irritates the guy upstairs.  Obviously he did something to irritate her because she was slamming the door over and over all morning.

And then when I opened the door to go down to the local grocery, she screamed at me about something that kept her inside for weeks and it was my fault.  She did seem more pale that usual. 

But she ran ahead of me before I could try to speak to her.

Once inside the grocery, she rushed to the back of the store, where the vegetables are kept, and then began ranting about being poisoned, warning me about being murdered.  There was another person beside the grocer in the shop, an old man who had come on his motorized cart.  He looked totally confused and the grocer immediately told her she is not allowed to shout in his store.  When she left, the old man asked what was going on, and the grocer explained that she is second generation holocaust survivor.  “I was in Auschwitz too,” said the old man, “and of the thousand children in my group, only three survived.”  then he turned to me “and you see, I don’t shout.”  He paid for his purchases and the grocer walked him out to his cart.  As I waited for the grocer to return, I found myself in tears.  The local grocery – once thriving – has been in dire straits since the building has been under renovations.  The renovations stopped with the war, since all the workers were from Gaza (who at least bought their provisions from the grocer), leaving the grocery almost buried in construction, and inaccessible.  

And yet he has remained as alert and kind as ever – to the mad woman, the old man, the Gazan workers.  Yes, this will all pass, and the building will be gorgeous, and the crowds will throng to the little grocery, but no one can tell me that he will be less kind when the celebrities in the neighborhood come back to him than he was today.