If You Hear Far Off Explosions...

... it's because my father is in Israel.

He's going there to threaten his cousin, or his aunt-- I kind of forget which-- with a lawsuit. And hopefully he's just going to threaten her with a lawsuit, and not bodily injury. Because, although I'm not entirely sure, that may possibly be a crime in Israel.

See, a month or so ago, my father's uncle, we'll call him Uncle Schmenkman for the purposes of this blog, died. He was very old, as the uncles of 61-year-old men usually tend to be. He was being cared for by the woman my father is going to sue/threaten. Reportedly, she wasn't the Florence Nightingale, dress-your-wounds-and-sing-to-you type. She was more of the Annie Wilkes, chain-you-up-and-hobble-you type. She, allegedly, verbally abused Uncle Schmenkman, called him names, mistreated him in other, unspecified ways and, in the days leading up to his death, made him change his will to effectively screw my father, his brother, and his sister out of potentially rather a lot of shekels.

Because I am loathe to use real names in this blog, and because I'm not even really sure if she's an aunt or a cousin, we'll just call her "Twat."

So, anyway, Twat scored the vast majority of Uncle Schmenkman's coinage, and my father and his remaining siblings are now kind of left high-and-dry. Which sucks, because my parent's house needs a new chimney, and I have around eight-and-a-half years of student loans left to repay.

And so, after weeks of screaming on the phone in a delightful mixture of broken Hebrew and broken English to sisters, cousins, aunts, and lawyers, my father finally last night boarded a plane to go back to his Motherland to, in his words, "straighten this motherfuck out."

Nothing broken there.

Last night, he texted me to say goodbye before taking to the skies. Even the most practical, least hysterical member of our family acknowledges the fact that it's always good to say "goodbye" and "I love you" before getting on an airplane, because it very well could be the last time.

I called him immediately after receiving the text.

Me: "Hi."

Him: "Hi, Mummy."

Me: "So, how are you?"

Him: "Well, you know, I am sitting here with a bunch of... {lowers his voice}... I guess they're Israelis..."

I'd guess so, too.

Me: "Well, I'm sorry you have to go back there for such a shitty reason."

Him: "Yeah, well, it's okay, Mummy, you know. I'm not going back there to take fuckin' pictures or jump in the Dead Sea, you know?"

Me: "Yes, I know."

This morning, I sent him my standard Daddy's-travelling-communique:

"Hi. Are you alive?"

Not six minutes later, I received his reply, indicating that he had just landed. I can't keep time-changes and time-differences and time-zones straight in my head. I did wake up and immediately check www.nytimes.com for reports of a plane going down en-route to Tel Aviv, because that's how I roll, bitches.

Relieved, I texted him back:

"Yay! I love you. Have a good trip. Try not to get arrested."

My father has a knack for getting into trouble, especially when he is not closely supervised by my mother. Her thin-lipped disapproval is usually enough to appropriately and efficiently reign him in and, without it, I feel that my fears for his safety and that of others around him is legitimate.

Reasons?

1.) Though I have no absolute proof, his active participation in two Israeli wars leads me to believe that he has almost certainly killed people. Sure, anyone is capable of killing someone but, once you've already done it, the door to repeat performances is pretty much wide open.

2.) His temper is volcanic. One Sunday morning, when we were kids, he absolutely popped his jugular because my sister and I were crunching too loudly on our Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I almost shat myself at the table.

3.) He's already extremely pissed off. We're not the kind of family that drags other family members into court all the time, like the people on "Judge Judy" or whatever. When we do, it's because we've been pushed to the absolute limit. Actually, we've never sued anybody. This will be an Apron family first. Just like my sister's kid is the first grandchild, and like I was the first one in our immediate family to own a microwave.

4.) He cannot stand the following people: authority figures, soldiers, police officers, politicians, lawyers, family members, other Israelis, being away from home, being stuck in traffic, being late, being challenged, being frustrated, being constrained by generally accepted standards of social decorum/civil law. This, to me, bodes ill for this particular trip.

5.) He wears dress shoes without socks and carries a gigantic wallet, held together by a rubber band. Do you honestly think this man gives a shit about anything?

I'm always a little uneasy when my father goes away. He used to do it a lot, for business. He used to have an office in New York City, but those days are no more, and I think that's a good thing. One of his clients in New York called my father in absolute hysterics one day.

"What the hell did you say to my secretary?" the client cried, "she's sobbing in my office like a little girl-- I'm afraid she's gonna jump out the window!"

"I did not do anything," my father said.

He never does.

Group Therapy

My aunt Ruthie doesn't come around much, but, when she does, we take notice.

Living in Australia as she does, it's challenging to make the trip to Pennsylvania, especially when you're a round, short woman in your mid-sixties. But she manages, and I'm glad she does. She has a mountain of rotini curls atop her head, a genuine, toothy smile, and a voice that sounds just like my father with a helium addiction. Because, in Hebrew, there is really no "th" sound, we call her "Rooti" and it's appropriate, because she certainly is fresh and fruitty.

The dinner conversation was certainly swinging by the time she got to her tale of a group therapy session she attended after the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

"Everybody was in therapy then!" she said, laughing. I sometimes am driven to inquire whether she's serious about some of the flip comments she makes, but it would ruin the mood, so I don't.

"We were all there, there was a man who was in the war... not doctor... eh...." uncertain of a word, she turns to my father. "-- eh, ma azeh in English...?"

"Nurse, Rooti. Fuckin' nurse," my father offers helpfully, extending his knowledge of the English language like an olive branch.

"Ah, okay. Nurse. He... was in the war, and was with a doctor, and there was an explosion, yeah? And the doctor, he died right away, but the nurse was not hurt. So he was in the therapy, okay, because he was.... you know... he lived."

"Survivor's guilt," my wife, the psychiatrist's daughter, helps out this time.

"Yeah!" nods my aunt, grinning her comforted smile. She is ready to continue. "So, there was also this Romanian woman, who was totally controlled by her husband-- just like my mother was by your grandfather," she says to me. I am instantly hurt by this statement. I know little about my paternal grandparents, whether because of my father's reluctance to speak about it or because of my prior disinterest, but, tonight, I want to know more about their relationship. Again, though, I am silent. I don't want to ruin the mood.

"So, this Romanian woman was agoraphobic, so her husband had to drive her to all the group therapy sessions! It was so funny! And there was this soldier there who sat there like a Chief, you know, with the arms crossed in front of him, and he said nothing the whole time, and finally I started yelling at him one day. Really yelling! 'You asshole! You just sit there! Why don't you say something sometimes!' But he just sat there smoking his pipe."

I looked at this woman as she was telling this story. I looked at her teeth and her curls, her rings and her ringlets-- this woman who is my father's sister, who I first met when I was fifteen years old, and had only seen one other time between then and now, at my wedding, and I tried to picture her, in the 1970s, yelling at some shell-shocked Israeli soldier in her hinge-squeak of a voice. It was hard to imagine.

"And then there was this man from Morocco, and we all knew he had this very dark secret. But nobody knew what it was, because he, it was very hard for him to talk about it. But, we all wondered, what could it be? Finally, at the end, he talked and it turned out that he.... liked to fuck....

....cows!"

My entire family burst out in hysteria at the dinner table. I had my head in my arms, pounding one fist on the table. When I looked up, my wife was laughing with her hand covering her mouth. My oldest sister was wiping tears away from her eyes. My father was smiling, shaking his head, either at his sister or at the cow-fucker. My mother giggled like a little girl, listening to older kids telling a naughty joke.

"And he couldn't do it... with a woman!" my aunt added, for good measure.

We laughed for a long time about that one. I love my aunt Ruthie. She's a little like a three-year-old in certain respects-- she's small, and cute, and you never know what the hell she's going to say. Last time she was in America visiting, she told us a story about an attractive sports reporter in Australia who entered a soccer team's locker room, "and they were masturbating!" she exclaimed, except, the way she said it, it sounded more like, "ehnd they vere mister-bating!" With her voice scaling new octaves and her eyes popping out to the lenses of her glasses, she is the consumate story-teller, as long as it's obscene. You know you want to hire her out for your next black-tie affair.

Unfortunately for Ruthie, this tendency to be inappropriate and humorous can sometimes tend to make people not take her very seriously. Admittedly, it's hard taking her seriously when you ask her a question about the Yom Kippur War and she replies with a story about a Moroccan cow-fucker. Maybe, though, it's what we really want to hear. After all, it's been very serious around my family's house lately, with my sister getting pregnant, getting married, basically shotgun style, and immediately thereafter having her son, maybe levity is what we all needed on Friday night-- a little group therapy for us, too.

Of course, Ruthie isn't just a naive humorist-- she's the secret-keeper, too. An all-knowing mystic from a land before time, a land before Israel. She knows the family stories that my father doesn't know, or doesn't tell. She knows about the tragedy surrounding my grandmother's first, very brief marriage, she knows about how my grandfather mistreated my grandmother, and blamed her for all of his failings, occupational or personal. I am sure that, some mornings, when she wakes up and goes to get dressed in her little one bedroom unit in Australia, she sees four pair of children's shoes, all perfectly shined and buffed, waiting for her, her sister, and her two brothers-- all prepared the night before, and ready every morning by my grandmother. Every morning.

She tells these stories, too, and I want more of them, but I think she worries about saying the wrong thing, and upsetting my quick-to-anger father, so she mostly keeps it light. And I guess that's okay. I did get to find out where my family is really from, a small town in Iraq called "Amara." She also remarked, before being quickly cut off, that my father was extremely popular with the young, Israeli girls. But I already knew that. I didn't know that she tried tirelessly to teach my father English in preparation for his Toefl exam, but that he refused to learn and constantly made jokes to distract her.

"He would make jokes and make me laugh, and then I would get so angry at him, because he wouldn't leeeesten!" she said, as my father's face contorted in displeasure.

"What are you talking about? You didn't teach me fuckin' English!" he yells.

"Yeah, I know! Because you wouldn't leeeesten! How did you pass the Toefl test anyway?" she asks him.

"How did I pass? I showed them my ass, okay? Jesus!"

"Some girl probably took the test for him," my mother offered.

"Yeah," Ruthie nodded her head, "probably he cheated."

My wife and I stayed at my parent's house until 10:30, which is unprecedented, largely because the two of them are in bed and snoring by 10:00 but, when we left, we left feeling good. I was happy because I got to spend time not just with Ruthie, but with my family. I got to learn and laugh and think and remember. And I guess that's what makes a good group therapy session.

How Many Israelis...

Question: How many Israelis does it take to jump-start a PT Cruiser?

Answer: 2-and-a-half.

My father tried, God bless him. I, the half-breed, tried along with him, but it took the skilled, weather beaten hands of Soly, the Israeli mechanic to whom we are devoted, to get that engine to crank. I couldn't believe it but, at 8am this morning, there he was, standing in my driveway with his sleeves rolled up.

I'll bet you thought mechanics stopped making house-calls, or never did.

When my father came over to the house yesterday to try to jump the dead car, the only thing he succeeded in doing was setting off the car alarm. At least ten times. This alarm is one of those aftermarket ones, the ones that scream "1990s," with the intermittent beeping, horn honking, buzzing, siren that, after about three minutes inspires you to go digging into your left pupil with a broken Coke bottle.

Our street is a small street, with small little houses piled almost on top of each other. It was a beautiful day yesterday, so everybody on the street was either outside gardening or puttering around with their windows open.

EEEE! EEEE! EEEEE! HONK! HONK! HONK! HONK! BooOOOOOP! BoooOOOOP!

We're anxiously awaiting the arrival of our "Most Popular New Neighbor" award.

Being Israeli, my father has little capacity for sympathy or empathy-- these are mostly Western traits born out of guilt and self-loathing, of which he has none. Because of this, he was thoroughly uninterested when I hysterically insisted that he stop the futile, and very noisy, attempts to jump the car.

"Shut up already," he said to me, applying the red and black cables to the thoroughly coked-out battery once again.

BoooooOOOOOOOOOOOOP! BoooOOOOOOOOOP!

"Dad, please stop. Please. People are going to start leaving us death-threats in our mailbox."

"Just turn the fuckin' key, please already."

Nothing. Not even a click.

It took 20 minutes of alarm howling and my pleadings to get him to stop. I think towards the end I was actually clutching his shirtsleeve.

"Okay, okay. Jesus," he muttered as he threw the jumper cables into his car. "Call Soly in the morning, he'll come over and jump it for you."

"He will?"

"Yeah, he did it for me," my father said, shrugging.

Sure enough, Soly, short, hairy, loud, pulled into the alley behind my house at 8am this morning. He was driving a white Nissan Altima from the mid-nineties, a customer's car. Soly always drives customers' cars for his own errands while they're in the shop. I can only imagine what he does in my car when it's there all day. He stopped the Altima right in the middle of the alley. 20 feet away, I observed a shirt-and-tie neighbor getting into his Ford Explorer, ready to go to work.

"Soly, you know you can park next to my car, you don't have to leave it in the middle of the alley."

"If someone's coming, I'll move it. I'm not parking it here forever," he assured me gruffly as he took out the power booster and jumper cables.

"Yeah, but I think that guy over there in the Explorer wants to get out."

Soly squinted his eyes at the Explorer with its headlights on and the engine running.

"Fuck him!"

As Soly popped the PT Cruiser's hood, I noticed the Explorer making the extremely tight three point turn to exit the alley the other way. He had to reverse and go forward about six times.

I warned Soly that the alarm would probably go off the minute he touched the jumper cables to the points.

"So? Turn the fucking thing off with the gizmo," he said, referring to the electronic key fob. I knew this wouldn't work, but I said nothing. The alarm was an aftermarket, ultra-sensitive piece of equipment installed by Mrs. Apron's father years ago, and I had no idea where the specific key fob that controlled that alarm was, but I played dumb, because I didn't want to get yelled at by two Israelis in as many days.

Sure enough, as soon as the jumper cables were applied, the electronic melody blasted through the early morning air of suburbia at approximately 312 decibels.

"JESUS!" he shouted over the noise, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TRYING TO DO? WAKE UP YOUR ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD?! TURN IT OFF! PUSH THE GIZMO!"

I did, and nothing happened. He stared at me.

"This is no fucking factory alarm!" he shouted, pointing his small, fat, hairy finger at me. He was accusing me of concealing information from him, and he was right. I was.

"Somebody put a fucking alarm in here!" I stared at him, and I shrugged like an imbecile.

"San-af-a-beech!" he yelled as he stuck his head underneath the steering wheel of the car.

"Ah-HAH!" he roared. "You see this fucking button? This is the control for this bullsheeet alarm! Push it when I attach the jumper cables."

I did, and the alarm died. It died. And the car started. Peace prevailed at last.

He eyed me suspiciously.

"The factory alarm for a PT Cruiser just honks the goddamn horn, it doesn't do all this beep beep beep bullsheet."

"Oh," I said.

He looked at me.

"Follow me to the fucking shop."

And I did.

And now you know that it takes 2-and-a-half Israelis to jump-start a PT Cruiser, though I suspect that one could have done it on his own.