hodayot [thanksgivings] for today

9:30
My Body, my Partner, my God
In contrast to our suffering from torturous sounds
like barking dogs and air & ear shattering motorcycles and tractorons
I give thanks to the anatomy and physiology of our wondrous ears,
the parts which deal with hearing and the parts which deal with balance,
beginning with the outer ear and ear canal, which collect sound (acoustic energy), and funnel it to the eardrum (tympanic membrane) .....

I again express my gratitude for the wondrous and wonderful gift:
instead of the intended Grandma-day with the Quintet= five grandchilden ~
the jeep-trip into Nakhal Sorek with us Five: I, Micha, Efrat, Arnon, Mika.
Following a remark of Efrat at 22:30:
"I feel like waking up Mika and playing with her! Isn't she stunning?"
I wish to say out loud:
"Thank you, our Mika, for having chosen us as actors in your drama!"
I'm grate-full for this only exterior assignment in my present life:
to create a harmonious threesome with my wonderful daughter-in-love
and with my tenth and youngest and most dazing grandchild,
peppered with the challenges and teachings by her stepbrother Tomer,
and this not all the time but in between my al-one-ness in my Arad castle!

"Driving Backward into the Future" = "Closeups to the Past" = Healing&Harvesting my Past

Another reason for this night's sleeplessness had also to do with dogs.
Perhaps the ongoing talk about the dog which Micha and Arnon yearn for,
and against which wife and sister erect so many obstacles,
that the matter has developed into a "saga",
and later Efrat's not less intense expression of compassion for Arnon
and anger against his mother and sister
made me recuperate some of the more painful experiences with dogs
during my marriage and my children's childhood.
I may have told somewhere , how I - not a dog-lover -
not only did not object to my husband's need for a dog,
but took care, that also my children always had a dog.

(a)
We didn't have a dog yet, perhaps in 1966,
when one day a sweet puppy sought refuge on our veranda.
I wanted to keep it and so wanted my husband ,
but he was adamant that the dog should not sleep in the house.
It whined through the night, whined and whined, until it whined no more.
In the morning we found it - slain by a garden hoe...
I was so shocked by the cruel murder and so griefed,
that in the evening I said:
"I haven't mourned about a death like that since Kennedy was murdered."
"Aren't you exaggerating a bit?" my husband said.
Of course, I was , but those were my feelings.
Everybody remembers the situation in which s/he heard about Kennedy's death.
I was studying in my room in a student hostel at Tuebingen,
where I lived during the last months of university.
I was also still working as an assistant at the Institutum Judaicum
Immanuel, who was already 9 months old. lived with my mother at Boeblingen.
I did not connect to anybody at that time, I only wanted to finish somehow,
before my son's father would get his divorce, marry me and bring us to Israel.
I therefore wouldn't even remember that hostel nor my roommate,
whose name I don't recall.
But I remember how I jumped, when she came in and said:
"Kennedy was murdered!"

(b)
Once we had a dog living with us, the problem was how to feed it,
since dry food for dogs was not yet on the market,
or perhaps my husband didn't want to spend money on it.
Our neighbor Shlomit Adler had a huge hen-house,
and often a hen died of some sickness.
She brought it to me, I had to spill boiling water over it and pluck the feathers
and then cook the animal.
I remember the sickening smell in the kitchen....

(c)
Just as torturous was the coping with the suitors of our bitches
when they were in heat.
The scene I remember and which doesn't make any sense, is this:
As so often, we had a longtime guest from Germany staying with us,
Hilde Kuehlewein, a pupil in the Ulpan, the Hebrew Class,
which Rafael and I conducted at Tuebingen in April 1962.
I see us coming back with the 3 children (perhaps 4, 2 and 1/2 a year old)
from the neighboring village, Neve-Hadar, from my cleaning woman Sa'uda.
Her eldest daughter (from 10 children alive, 16 children altogether)
had given birth to her first son and Sa'uda wanted to celebrate his circumcision.
The family lived in a tiny half house with 2 rooms and a kitchen and toilet...
I baked 5 cakes for her - secretly , so my husband wouldn't know.
When Hilde and I entered our house, I saw some 5 male dogs on the veranda...
The mess they made must have been so terrible,
that Hilde and I worked frentically to put everything in order,
before my husband would return from work.

Of what was I afraid?
That he would ban the bitch and cause pain to our children?
I don't remember.
I was always afraid of Rafael, always, always.....