It has come down to this. I’m finding myself obsessing about the most trivial thing possible. Not the rockets from Gaza, not Iran, not the raging fires, not even Corona, but the fungus on a tiny part of my fingernail. last month, when it first appeared, the health clinic said to send a photograph to the skin clinic. They diagnosed and prescribed something. Today I visited a private dermatologist with Ezi and incidentally showed him my finger – he prescribed a complex treatment. “Don’t know if it will help, but it will keep you busy.” So I took the prescription to the pharmacy. In a thick Palestinian accent, he said, “What health clinic are you in?” “It’s a private prescription.” “So what?” he answered, “Let’s let the clinic pay for it.” He brought out the big box. “Now, let’s look at the instructions.”

I am not sure if he thought I was a little bit stupid, or he was trying to screw the system, or he was just being nice.

A few years ago we saw a fire in the Jerusalem hills near the hospital. Frightening and overwhelming. And it was nothing compared to the fire raging now, where they about to evacuate Hadassah hospital. They’ve got helicopters out to evacuate people from villages, and they’re calling for international help.

And this fire was apparently man-made.

It isn’t enough that we’ve got pestilence and rockets, we’ve got self-destruction.

It doesn’t really matter to me who set the fire. what matters is the willingness to destroy miles of forests and endanger lives.

i

Almost everyone wants to go back to normality. It seems even the Taliban don’t want to disturb too much as they take over all of Afghanistan – as they put the women back in their places and reinstitute extreme religion.

Back here in Israel, we’re ignoring the plague as much as we can. Masks maybe, but no quarantine as much as possible. Schools will probably open in two weeks and then we’ll really be in trouble, but we’re trying to ignore this, The fact that Corona appears to be less fatal than before, that we have found all kinds of ameliorating treatments may be part of the reasons for our actions, but financial considerations are clearly involved as well. And we really want to do everything possible to feel normal. Even if it is all self-deception.

Why have I not spoken to many of my friends in the past year? Not only because nothing much happens to you that you can communicate, but also that talking to friends winds up being commiseration. And the commiseration turns out to be such mutual complaining that I wind up feeling sorry for myself. And there is no justification for self-pity when there are so many more serious problems to solve in the world. Let’s try to solve those problems instead of our own.

But what can we do? How can we help the people of Haiti or Turkey who need our help?

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Tuberculosis was almost totally stamped out before people started refusing to vaccinate their children. Now it seems that we’re going to have Corona with us for a long while because some people don’t believe in the vaccine. Some of them are in my family. There’s nothing to discuss because both sides are firm in their beliefs. One because of the body’s gradual natural resistance to disease and one because black people were experimented upon in the Tuskegee studies of 1932. I can’t really argue with the latter – it makes sense to be wary of a government that used a race for experimentation. (It also makes sense that everyone is getting the same vaccine so why not you) But the former one really scares me. There are too many things a human body does not learn to fight against. I keep thinking about Adelaide Crapsey, who was infected with TB at the beginning of the twentieth century. The cover of my book on her had the following poem

and if we want to go natural, we have to accept the fact that death is nature’s way of slowing us down.

My head is spinning from this government. I can barely remember what the ideology of this country was when I first fell in love with it. Sometimes it goes right, sometimes it goes left. Sometimes it is humanitarian, sometimes purely capitalistic. Sometimes we understand what we’re supposed to do to keep safe, sometimes it seems we are being sacrificed for the economy. No wonder people keep telling me we’re confused – we’re confused like lab rats always are. We know we’re being experimented on, and we don’t know what is going to be done to us, but for the moment we’re being fed well and it looks like we’re being cared for.

On the other hand, I know there are numerous inroads here towards easing the degree of the illness and minimizing the side effects – even though it doesn’t seem to be discussed in the news.

I never know what I’m going to write about before I start writing, and before I set down the title of today’s entry I had no idea that I would write about something so intimate and yet so universal. It began when I spoke with a friend I ran into that I had forgotten existed, and she too forgot that I had been involved in her life. And she had changed so much in the time since we met that we would never be able to connect again. At least not as we were.

And there are so many of us who are disappearing – losing connections that were important in our lives but have forgotten that we exist, just as we may have forgotten them. When we could have helped each other through so many of our challenges in the past 18 months. Let’s try not to disappear from each other – we need to stay together.

Even if we have nothing to say to each other, because nothing has happened today, we really need to keep the channels open. We need each other.

We don’t even photograph the sunsets. We’re so used to the amazing scene. My friends says our standards of fun keep getting lower and lower. So one Aperol spritz, hummus, and a salad — and my evening is made. Well, maybe watermelon and a little encouraging news – support to the medical staff, building permits for Arab towns, and few other perks that Bennet mentioned tonight. Maybe every little bit seems to help. But I cannot overemphasize how important that beach is for so many people at this moment.