Opinions

I didn’t mean to take a field trip last week, but I ended up in a local photo lab where the technician aided and abetted me. “Did you take this picture?” she asked, making sure we weren’t breaking any copyright laws. Not only did I tell her “Yes,” I told her how lovely the vacation was, where we traveled, and how much fun we had. It was Too Much Information…unless you enjoy field trips, meeting new people and hearing stories.

The fact is, I am spoiled.

It is a frightening time to be from Israel. It is even scarier to be in Israel. The nation, the only one in the Middle East whose government is a democracy, like the United States of America, are surrounded by Muslim countries. And they do not like Jewish people, nor do they want them in their neighborhood.

I miss light bulbs… When I recently paid $8.79 for a four-pack of light bulbs, I decided the world was coming to an end. At one time, that purchase might have been a dollar.

It’s time to be honest with you.

My husband, Peter, and I spend the winters in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The center of the town is a designated World Heritage Site, which means the facades of the buildings must remain as they were in the mid-1700s. The streets are made of round and sometimes slippery cobblestones. The doors are stout and covered with hundreds of coats of paint, and on the top of every building is a rooftop terrace where people can watch the fireworks that go off for no reason that anyone has ever been able to figure out. It is wonderful.

In a hospital emergency room or a retailer’s dressing room, you are at least separated from the rest of humanity by a curtain. A thin, gauzy curtain, but a curtain nonetheless.

I was lying in bed the other night in the little apartment my husband, Peter, and I rent in Mexico, and thinking that things were perfect. Then I wondered what that meant. Because, without trying very hard at all, I could come up with things that were far from perfect -- in the world, in the neighborhood, even in my body if I really started digging. But it did not prevent me from feeling that -- at that moment, lying in bed, listening to the distant cacophony of noises outside my window things were, in fact, perfect. I thought about my day and decided it had to do with imperfection.

It’s not often the moon gets this much attention, yet here we are, a day before he throws shade on the sun during a diagonal trip from the southwest to the northeastern United States.