Thursday, April 23, 2009

Hello? Wood Collectors' Hotline, can I help you?

One of the things that I forgot to mention about wood collecting for the upcoming holiday is that unfortunately we live smack dab in the middle of the best wood burning sites on the east side of the city. As a result, my house is the depot for wood. It is also the first place the parents call when they can't find their children -- which is most of the time. And it is where all the kids show up when they are finished collecting wood and just want to play. This usually occurs in the middle of dinner time.

(Not that anyone here is actually eating dinner except me.)

As a result, I spend a lot of time operating my ad hoc missing children's inquiry hotline. If I had a dollar for every call I received .... I would have made about $6 today alone.

When I was growing up in Nova Scotia, kids wandered. It was the late 1960s and early '70s in a city with 30,000 people max. Despite our best efforts, there just wasn't a lot of trouble to find. Ra'anana is like that today. I suspect that most of Israel is the same. Kids wander and no one worries. Well, the immigrant parents worry because we all come from places like Toronto, New York, Chicago and Miami where absolutely no one lets their children out of their sight until they are 18 and leave for university. (In Toronto, kids never leave home for university -- I guess their parents are just too scared.)

My boys have been wanderers for several years now, but letting my daughter and her friends out together but alone is an entirely new experience. As it turns out, I am a lot more sexist that I thought. That said, she is still out there somewhere with at least a few other third grade girls. I fully expect her to show up in the next half hour. (Late Breaking News Flash: She's home.)

One night last Spring Chaim came out of his office and he asked me where Zeve was. Zeve was 10 at the time and it was 9:00 p.m. It was fortunate that he asked because no one had noticed but Zeve was not home. As an aside let me add that Zeve is truly a kid who needs a computer chip homing device inserted under his skin. Chaim, in true Chaim form, panicked. I just grabbed my shoes and started to retrace what I figured was Zeve's possible route. I found him on the third try.

The biggest problem that this wandering business causes is that I realize I can never take my kids back to Toronto to live. They have no concept of how to live as caged animals, which is exactly how we would have raised them there. I usually spend the last half hour of our flights to Canada telling them that upon arrival in Canada they cannot leave my side under any circumstance because they could get killed or kidnapped just like that.

It's funny how the tables have turned. People all over the world are afraid to come to Israel because it is sooooo dangerous. Me, on the other hand, I am afraid to take my kids out of Israel and into the big, nasty world which in my mind is the truly scary place. And in that big bad world, there is no Wood Collectors' Hotline.

1 comment:

  1. Kendall, excellent article on Shlomi and quite amusing...u know Sami is the one who got him into the blowing up stuff...luckily, neither one has caused damage yet.

    Also, I am proud of you for what you write about being afraid of taking your kids out of Israel and into the real bad scary worls...its so safe here for our kids, we should never take it for granted....Kol Hakavod to you and your family!!!
    Chag Sameach!!!
    Mercedes

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