Of all the times to have a war drill

Yesterday, my neighbour Lynn and I were standing on our street just pondering life. I noticed a make-shift sign hanging from the street post on the corner, so I went to read it. All it said (in hebrew) was public bomb shelter, 125 meters, and an arrow pointing to where the nearest one is located. "What's that about?" I asked her and she said, "I don't know but Moshe (her youngest son) says that we are getting ready for a big war."

Well, that was enough of that conversation. We both shrugged our shoulders and went back to our conversation.

Now before I continue I want to state that everything "official" I am about to mention has already been addressed in The Jerusalem Post. So, to my ad hoc law committee, just chill, this isn't confidential information and I am not provoking the censors today.

As I was walking around the neighbourhood after my earlier conversation with Lynn, I noticed the temporary signs in a few different places, but frankly I didn't spend more than another 30 seconds pondering their purpose. My mother is visiting and I don't have any extra time for pondering.

Fortunately I couldn't sleep last night. At about 3:15 this morning I got out of bed and turned on my computer. I was going towatch television, but megavisions' 72 minute access limit shut me out of the program I had chosen. Instead I decided to do my favorite thing... read newspapers on-line.

About two stories into the first page of the Post I noticed an article talking about the Home Front War Preparation Exercise that is being held throughout the country next week. Generally I see that as a smart and responsible thing to do. You cannot live in Israel and not be prepared for every eventuality. In Israel, the "eventualities" tend to occur more than eventually. Apparently the Hebrew media have been prepping people for the war exercises for the past few weeks, but somehow I totally missed that. I would normally feel bad about that, but Lynn missed it too -- and her hebrew is excellent.

The problem is that my mother is visiting and I am already imagining what she is going to do when the test sirens start wailing -- without notice -- across the country next week and everyone is expected to run to a bomb shelter within a prescribed amount of time. My mother is not going to have any sense of humour about this and as a result, I am just dreading it. Of all the weeks available in an entire year, the Home Front had to pick a week that my mother was here? I really wish someone from the government had run this by me for my input during the planning stage.

I have every day planned and accounted for next week so that my mother has lots of things to do. But now, I am nervous to take her anywhere. I can just see myself trying to coax her to cooperate with the national security exercise from the streets of Tel Aviv, Netanya or Jerusalem. "I don't live here and I don't have to run to a shelter." I can hear the entire conversation in my head -- all with wailing sirens screeching in the background and young soldiers running at us and screaming for us to follow the damn instructions immediately.

The reasoning behind this real-life war simulation is that several of our enemies -- Lebanon, Syria and Iran, to name a few -- now have the ability to hit Tel Aviv, the center of the country, with their missiles. As a result, it is fair to assume that anything could happening and something might well happen.

We were first introduced to real life in the least popular country in the Middle East a few months after we arrived here. Within four months of setting down our new roots, the government started issuing gas masks to every citizen in anticipation of a chemical weapons attack from Saddam Hussein. (I would also like to add that my parents showed up in the middle of that war-pending moment as well.) We prepped our bomb shelter and got ready for war. Fortunately, it didn't come.

That does not mean that it won't happen this time.

My friends who have lived here since 1991 or longer have already experienced war in a way that the average American or Canadian can't possibly imagine. One of my friends had a section of a Patriot missile land on her lawn. Bet you don't expect that when you get out of bed in Toronto!

For those of you who don't live here, let me answer the question that is probably on your mind: I am definitely not afraid to live here. In fact, I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I don't feel safe when I leave the country. I feel very vulnerable in a way that I do not feel here. Here, I feel safe and protected.

So next week, on the assigned day, the sirens are going to ring out and I am going to drag my reluctant mother along to the nearest shelter which I hope to heaven is the bomb shelter inside my own house. At least then I can wait out the hypothetical war with a few good bottles of wine, several pieces of sporting equipment, the decorations for my succah, and enough duct tape to last anyone a life time -- a long life time living across the street from my equally not-concerned friend Lynn (who, by the way, is neither my water-abusing neighbour or my Mexi-Cali neighbour. But she is my only other -one-degree-of-separation neighbour.)