Shalom

"Really," I've said to my wife on numerous occasions, "we don't need to encumber the twinners with names dripping with Judaism because, coming from us-- they'll have the map of Israel tattooed on their faces anyway. No one will ever mistake them for anything other than Jewish. Trust me."

Honestly? We could name them (both boys) Brentwyck and Victoria, or (1 boy, 1 girl) Ghyll and Emmaline, or (2 girls), Brittania and Glucerna and still nobody would think that they are descended from anything other than the purest of Semitic bloodline. If you've ever seen pictures of my wife and I, or, better yet, the real deal in person: you know.

The elderly, toothless man yesterday knew.

My mother-in-law, my wife and I had just sat ourselves down in a booth at a greasy spoon diner for brunch on Tuesday. After the entire staff (admittedly, it was the waitress and her mom, the short order cook) were informed by my mother-in-law that we were expecting twins and I already wanted to crawl under the table and die, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, an elderly, bent-over man with trousers that might have fit him thirty years ago shuffled over to us.

"I just want to ask you," he said, looking directly into my eyes in an unsettling way, "are you a veteran?"

I stared at him. You didn't need to work in the mental health field or have your Cra-Zee-Meter set to "Sensitive" to know that something was... sensitive here.

"Um, no, I am not," I replied, hoping this encounter would be brief and painless. It was neither.

"Well, I'm glad to hear that," the old man said, and I don't mind admitting that I was briefly offended. Like, what-- I couldn't fight in a war? But, then, after a moment's reflection I thought two things: 1.) this guy is crazy and, 2.) frankly, I would imagine that, were I not me, I would be relieved finding out that our nation's safety wasn't entrusted to somebody like me, too.

"I'm a veteran," he contined, "I'm eighty-nine. I was at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Have you ever heard of that?"

"Um, yes, I have heard of that."

"I was hit three times," he said, "twice, in my equipment" (I assume he meant his military equipment, not his male... equipment) "and once in my head," he said, tapping his left temple.

I wish I could say that this was the first time in my life I had ever conducted a conversation with somebody who had been shot in the head, but it wasn't. I try not to make a habit out of it, as it can be unpredictable, but these things have a way of happening to me.

"All I want to say to you is 'Shalom'-- do you know what that means?"

I nodded my head, half in despair.

"You must be Jewish," he said definitively, then, he perhaps thought it would be polite to ask, "you're Jewish, aren't you?"

If I were at work at the psych hospital, I would have responded with my pat rhetorical game that I use whenever I am asked this question by a psych patient-- which I am asked with frequency. I usually come back with, "Why is that important to you?" or "I don't really think that's relevant to your treatment here." Unfortunately, I didn't think I could get away with that, in this little diner. So I told him that, yes, I was. Because, you know, he knew anyway.

"Well, I just want to say that I thank God for the Jewish people, and a lot of gentiles won't say that, but I really do thank God for the Jewish people. And, really, we're all the same. We all come from each other-- there is so much hate. But Shalom to you. I am thankful to God for the Jews."

I thought I would return the compliment, from someone who, had circumstances been very different, might not be alive were it not for soldiers who fought in World War II to say,

"Well, I am thankful for you."

And I thought we could shake hands in mutual... thankfulness and be done with it. But it didn't quite work out like that.

I mean, I did say that, and we did shake hands, but we would shake hands seven times before he finally walked out of the diner.

He asked me if I read the Bible. I said, "Not recently" and I was going to add, "why, has it changed much?" but I didn't think that would have been appreciated, or noticed by our uninvited guest. My wife repeated my response when asked. And my mother-in-law, ever the independent spirit, said, "Yes, I do."

It wouldn't have mattered much what she said, because his eyes were locked on mine.

"You should really read the Bible," he said. He wasn't exactly toothless, I noticed at this point, he had maybe three or four in there-- well, one full tooth, but the shatterings of several others, jagged and rough-- looking like mini polar icecaps. He recommended some passage, but I don't remember which book it was from. The number he cited was "53" and the only reason I remember that is because, of course, that's Herbie's racing number.

I was going to tell him that "53" was my favorite number, but, again, I don't think he would have cared. Nor noticed. Or heard.

I kept trying to end the conversation, using pragmatically-appropriate language and socially-acceptable and universally-recognized lingo and isms, but our elderly warrior was impervious to all of these shrewd techniques, just like, apparently, he could not be felled by Japanese mortars and bullets.

There were more shaloms and thank-yous and handshakes. Paper-thin handshakes.

He left. And, five minutes later, while we were eating-- while this Jew was consuming bacon, sausage, ham, pork-roll, and scrapple, all on one plate-- he placed two pamphlets about the Messiah on our table, thanked us again, and walked out.

The waitress apologized and confiscated the pamphlets.

"I keep those so that, when he comes back, I can give them back to him and say, 'Do you see this? You think people want to talk to you, but they don't.' and I give him the pamphlets back so he understands that you're just being polite, because nobody's going to tell him to go away. Nobody."

And, of course, she's right. And, also of course, she's doing a far better thing for him by serving him up a plate-full of reality rather than suffering through his diatribe with forced grins and false handshakes.

We do what we do because it makes us feel better, not him.

"Look," I said to my mother-in-law and my wife as we were driving home, "for a guy who's been shot in the head, he's not doing so bad."

Shalom, indeed.

Anger Management

It's not the anger, we tell they who must be told, that's problematic-- anger is, of course, a normal human emotion-- it's what you do about the anger you feel that can be problematic. Like, for instance, engaging in self-injurious behavior, i.e., placing your fist through some drywall or abruptly and forcefully introducing a loved one's head to an item from your toolbox. Maybe you're angry at your boss for some passive-aggressive slight or other and you stifle it all day or all week only to, on an otherwise languid Sunday afternoon, explode at your spouse, or your cat, or your window air-conditioning unit.

Poor, poor Emerson Quiet-Kool. We hardly knew ye.

This is probably going to come out sounding (unintentionally) funny, but I'm not particularly good at getting angry. Of course, you're reading that going, "What the fuck does that mean?" and I suppose I'd have to come right back at you and say, "I don't really know." I suppose I say that because I am under the impression that one ought to be "good" at getting angry, as if there is some sort of skill to it. And I think there probably is. Believe me, I know how to swear and rage when one of my vamp-teeth pierces my lower lip while eating a Granny Smith apple, and I certainly know how to unleash a stream of delightful epithets when a Toyota Camry stops in front of me, for no reason other than the fact that the driver is probably having a T.I.A.

So... I can do that. I'm not all that deficient.

But, when it really counts, when it gets emotional, well, that's sometimes where I run into a mite of trouble. Because, see, emotions-- um... I'm not particularly good at emotions either. I'm fine with talking about how I'm feeling, it's just that I launch so enthusiastically and skillfully into the talking that I rarely find that I get to the feeling. Maybe I'm flattering myself a bit here, but I think that I can sit with someone for, oh, I don't know, say 50 minutes, and pretend that I've just talked about my feelings the whole time when, really, truly, I haven't said anything.

I'm kind of awesome that way.

Oftentimes, when I get very angry, I get very quiet. Why? I guess it's because I feel like I need that time to sort through what I'm feeling, because, even if the emotion is one that should be relatively easy to pinpoint, most of the time, the road to arriving at that particular emotion is, well, foggy. And I don't use my foglights very often, so I need that time to find the switch on the stalk. Or is it a button on the dash?

See what I mean?

Maybe, I think, I sometimes trick myself into believing that I don't have a right to be angry. Or maybe it's that I'm scared of what other people will do or think if they see me get angry. Maybe I'm scared of what I'll do, or think, or say. My mouth is scary, and not just because my teeth are fucked up and English-looking. Scary things emanate from my mouth. My cakehole. My venom-pocket. It's a cruel place. It's supposed to help, and heal and, for roughly eight hours a day, it succeeds, to varying degrees, but I'm afraid of what happens when the time-clock swipes out.

I'm afraid.

And fear will keep you from doing lots of things, I suppose. It'll keep you from taking risks. It'll keep you from confronting realities about the world in which you live, and your job, and yourself. It will keep you from climbing rock walls, or at least it'll keep you from enjoying it. It'll even keep you from getting angry.

Yesterday afternoon, three big, angry black guys were this close from beating the shit out of my 67-year-old Israeli mechanic. They had pulled into his garage in a beat-up Pontiac Grand-Prix with two shredded front tires. My mechanic had the nerve to ask them where their spare was. They didn't have one.

"Driving without a spare is asking for trouble," the mechanic said.

"MOTHAFUCKA! JUST FIX THIS SHIT!" one of the men screamed.

A mouth-match ensued, and my approaching-elderly Sabra mechanic, who has shot Arab soldiers dead in the desert many years ago, was winning. But I knew, at any second, it could go the other way, and I was scared. I work in a place where simmering violence lies just below the surface, like a camouflaged snake ready to pounce. And here I had survived another day, only to probably be killed in the cross-fire in my mechanic's garage. Fortunately, the driver of the car exited the vehicle, got between the parties, and apologized to my mechanic for his friends, and reason had prevailed. Anger was, sort of, managed. The temperature outside was 92 degrees, but it had cooled down considerably in the garage, and, as I went into Soly's office to settle the bill for my new car battery, he remarked that he hadn't seen my wife in quite some time.

"I know-- that's what happens when people buy Hondas, you never see them anymore," I said. His gaze shifted from the credit card machine to meet my eye and he said, with a mischevious glint,

"Maybe I should get one for my wife!"

And we both laughed, more out of relief that we could than anything else.