Running for Our Life

In White Zombie’s 1995 album, Astro Creep, one of the tracks starts with the line “Yeah I remember her saying: I’m already dead. I’m already dead. I’m already dead…”. In my childhood, Comics have influenced my artistic sensibilities. In my youth and young adulthood, heavy, thrash and death metal were among my fond sources of inspiration. White Zombie caught my attention for their masterful stitching of tragedy and mockery. You can’t take them too seriously. Their craft, however, is dead serious. If I’m afraid of dying, I might as well be dead.

The 2020 lockdown made me think that through the shock of the pandemic, humanity was experiencing a simulation of its own death. Not that every individual was afraid of imminently dying. It’s just that each and every one of us must have known at least one person in our lives that was. Considering this mass of individuals, their fear engulfed us on a social scale. Their fear became humanity’s reality. In light of death metal’s sense of logic, if we are afraid of dying, we might as well be dead already.

My own approach to the pandemic was very similar to most people I know. Putting a mask when advised, staying at a safe distance, washing hands and so on. Outdoors was deemed very early on as definitely the safer place to be around other people. Our whole society faced a common burden of intense uncertainty. For those of us who trusted their scientific sources of information, the relative safety of the outdoors provided a welcome window of assurance. I still tried to keep a distance to minimize exposure to other people’s breath. But if someone approached me, the most I did would be to suggest keeping a few feet away. I never had anyone insisting on staying near me on purpose, as if to prove a point.

The fear of death can be exhibited in unexpected ways. It showed itself in one of my first outdoor runs of the lockdown.

The route I take in a run outdoors often changes. I get too bored to run the same route over and over again. My time slots for running vary over different times of the day.

But for a long time, I managed three runs each week. Gradually, I marked a few streets on the map that made up the distance I wanted to cover. The next thing to do was go out.

Most of my runs end in the park – Norquay Park in Vancouver, BC. I live a few blocks away. Ending my runs in the park is a good way of cooling down and stretching. My walk back home becomes part of the process.

Hattie is a regular morning walker of the park. Hattie has a strict routine. She goes clockwise on the path surrounding the park. I typically reach the path from one of the side streets and go counterclockwise. So we pass each other a few times.

I noticed her by the hats she wore, hence her name. Hers were mostly simple military-type hats. Sometimes her hat was black, occasionally beige. Occasionally she had a more pronounced all-around cap. 

On early runs, I would notice her reaching the park at a specific time. From when I started late, I could determine Hattie’s walk time. I always noticed her leaving the park at 7:00 AM. It was safe to assume that she had started her walk at 5:30 AM.

Early on I noticed that she stuck to the dead center of the path. I use the center too. But whenever I approach someone else, I make sure to move a bit to the right. The fraction of a second we are on the same section of the path makes it into very few steps. Then each path user returns to the center in their direction. I can’t remember anyone else, apart from Hattie who wouldn’t allow space for others.

Initially, I didn’t think much of it and ran a few steps on the lawn as we passed each other. Our first encounters date to late 2010, when I started making a routine of my running. My encounters with Hattie became part of my routine. After a few times of stepping aside into the lawn, I started saying good morning or hello. With many other walkers of the neighborhood I exchanged greetings. With Hattie, it was clear she wasn’t into it. She kept walking at the dead center of the path, not saying a word. Her blank gaze became somewhat opaque as we passed each other. One day I decided to check what would happen if I stayed on the path. 

I saw Hattie from a distance. She was walking defiantly as usual. As we came closer to each other, I noticed Hattie’s chin budge ever so slightly higher in the air. Her shoes confidently made their mark in the dead center of the path. I was getting closer. Her arms kept swinging back and forth. I was already on the right edge of the path. We were getting closer to each other. She only budged from the center of the path when I was a step or two away. The woosh from our sleeves almost touching each other competed with the breeze playing with the tall trees around the park.

The next time we were together on the path, I kept to the right again. She seemed to have realized the need to share the path. She still didn’t budge from the dead center until very late into the encounter, but this time her concession came in earlier.

That was strange. Did she really think she had some kind of priority?

I really don’t know her at all. Her name is most probably not Hattie. It was about that time when I started calling her “my friend”. Not to her face. Just in my conversations with my wife after an encounter in the park. The futility of my ‘good mornings’ and ‘hellos’ made me invest some effort in remembering to avoid them. Once or twice, when I didn’t notice it was Hattie and did greet her, I could hear a faint response. She wasn’t mean or anything. I guess her morning walks were the precious time she had for herself in the day. Her choice to avoid contact seemed strange. That’s all.

Then March 2020 dawned on us. It happened just as I was about to say goodbye to the treadmill in the gym. It was pleasantly dry and not too cold to run outside. I was more than happy to get back to my street running routine. With the gradual increase in awareness to what was safe and what not, the outdoors was clearly the winner. No one in the early days imagined that the stay home would last as long as it did. Nevertheless, even the first few days provided incentive enough for many to embark on a renewed enthusiasm with the outdoors.

My approach to the park that first day in the lockdown wasn’t new.

Although I do different routes, they are all variations of a number of sidewalks around my house. Some are more north-south one day and others are more zigzag than others. Eventually, I reach the park from the southwest corner, down a street sloping gently from the south.

I turned to the right in the corner.

As my steps stabilized on the path I noticed Hattie maybe twenty meters away.

She noticed me just a fraction of a second later.

But her reaction was lightning quick. She looked like someone running away from a murderer. Before I could understand what was going on, she was a few meters away from the path in the vacant lawn of the park. It was strange. It was sad, yet I smiled. Here is someone I have a slim chance of ever getting to know, let alone understand. Just a few days before, her whole demeanor was of one who couldn’t care less about anyone around. It was hard to imagine anything other than the pandemic to have shattered her façade. I had reason to believe that she shouldn’t be so alarmed. But there was nothing in that moment that could make a difference. I kept running and Hattie was off to her day.

The pandemic, as its designation implies, reached all corners of the world. Although the toll in actual lives is marginal, the implications are devastating. A global threat to humanity is a powerful reminder of how fragile we actually are. One walker runs in fear. Millions of other human beings express their fear in one way or the other. Just like my engagement with Hattie was a lost cause, so can I imagine millions of others watching their fellow human beings crumble under the weight of fear. The scope of fear transforms it from a feeling into a reality. If our fear of death is so tangible we might as well be dead already. The fact that I am still typing these words is no consolation.

Not that I am mourning anyone or anything. I’m observing this fear of death with a curious mind. Life and death are but a thought in the form of a few letters and words.

Music is Discipline

A dwelling unit becomes my home as soon as I set up my audio system in it. Even living beside a noisy street can be shielded with the right audio system and the right music. You can see that I think music is fun. But even more so, it is a substantial source of discipline in my life.

Saftliv, my grandmother, lived in the downtown center of Jerusalem. I liked spending time in her apartment, listening to my records on her Akai turntable. At our place, a household burdened with two controlling parents and four of us, kids, there weren’t too many opportunities to play records, let alone enjoy them. And my parents never bothered to invest in a proper sound system anyway. So, when I was invited by our grandmother to park my vinyl collection in her living room, I did that and never looked back.

King Crimson ‘In the court of the crimson king’ Cover art (cropped)

Among the shelves displaying crystals and other precious items, two were dedicated to prominent loudspeakers. My grandma wasn’t an audio buff. Neither was I. But she was disciplined. Saftliv knew what she wanted. She had a sound consultant visit her apartment and make his recommendations. I hardly ever listened to the classical music she had in her vinyl stock. But the sound was immaculate.

Savta in Hebrew is Grandma. Liv was our fond abbreviation to her real name – Livia. Saftliv was how we referred to her among us. Her apartment’s front windows faced one of the busiest downtown streets. When shut, they provided reasonable isolation from the noise outside. Thanks to that noise, I could listen to my records without ever worrying about neighbors complaining. And when my grandmother finished her day in the shop she owned, she even liked some of the bands I was listening to.

“Just turn down the volume a bit,” she would ask. “We don’t want to disturb the neighbors.”

Later, when I was a student, my apartment in Tel Aviv, was located beside one of the noisiest streets of the city. Not thanks to my experience with my grandma’s “music hall”. That was what I could afford. My shelving units weren’t in any way as high quality as the ones in the music hall either. But they housed loudspeakers that could express the quality of the music I liked. Whenever my brother visited me, even more than the M&Ms, he appreciated the ability to really listen to music with me.

Meni, as he is known, used to visit me once a week for a gig he had at a local business. Whenever he settled into my living room, he quickly stretched his hand to my ceramic jar, where I kept the M&Ms. It had a lid and the right volume for the half-pound package I purchased every few months. That half-pounder typically lasted about a month.

“I can’t believe there are still any left,” he exclaimed in admiration.

“Well, I only take the handful I want for the day and consume them from the plate.”

Or

“You know, I’m Saftliv’s grandson,” I said.

Both my elder brother and I had heard about our grandma’s peanuts story. But I think it stuck with me the most. Am I the more disciplined?

The two years separating us since my birth continually became insignificant as we developed. Still, for the most part of our growing up, I was the one looking up to him. With our grandmother, I was the more frequent visitor.

Saftliv was indeed a disciplined person, living on her own some twenty years before she passed. In her twenties, our grandmother was a new settler in the future Israeli community of pre-independence Jerusalem. With her father’s encouragement, she moved from Czechoslovakia to Palestine before the Nazis took over in 1938.

The 2022 war in Ukraine is a grim reminder of how discipline is required in dealing with this world’s tyrants. Are we heading into a full-blown World War, or will it stay but a nightmare to the ones directly affected by it? You would think that the pandemic brought us all to some degree of calm and responsibility, but who are you in that sense? Who am I? We just listen to our music and consume our M&Ms or any comfort food for that matter.

One day Saftliv told me about a family gathering from those early days in Jerusalem. She was a little shy, not entirely familiar with all the relatives and guests. She found a quiet spot in front of the coffee table in the living room. Of all the treats that were placed on the table (there weren’t too many), the peanuts bowl lured her the most. Growing up, peanuts were her favorite snack. The roasted ones served in that family gathering were amazing. She took a handful and chewed on them, politely yet absentmindedly

“So, you like peanuts,” a family member smiled at her approvingly.

I could still hear the shame burning in my grandma as she told me this story, more than forty years later. She ate the whole contents of the peanuts bowl. 

“From that day,” she said, “I never touched peanuts again!”

If I remember my response at the time, it was something like, “Wow! I guess they weren’t bothered by that as much as you were.” But some years later I realized I carried in me a very similar load of shame.

I had the questionable opportunity to watch a video of what happens to a dog when exposed to nerve gas. That video was part of a training session I had to go through while serving in the Israeli army. At the end of its torture, the dog lay dead in a puddle of his own excrements. If knowledge is power, then that kind of knowledge made my stomach swerve like a washing machine. So, yes, maybe I do have a strong stomach since I didn’t throw up. But at the time, that knowledge didn’t feel empowering at all.

Then, in the 1991 war on Iraq, I was frustrated with the success Saddam Hussain had had in terrorizing the Israeli society. No one could reliably tell whether he had chemically-equipped missiles. His threats of even launching them were constantly questioned. I was already living in the same apartment where my brother later enjoyed my M&Ms. Everyone around me seemed obsessed with the war. I had the urge to dismiss all of that. The sense that we are puppets in a game that none of us has control over was overpowering. I had believed, like many in the media that missiles would not be seen in Israel.

None of that mattered. The line-ups for respirators were in the news. Not only were they long beyond belief, but they also brought about the ugly side of human behavior. Some people were fighting each other. Others were bullying volunteers and staff who were assigned to provide everyone with the dwindling supplies. I refused to sign up for a respirator.

Misinformation, disinformation, deception and tactics, are all at play in times of peace. In crisis and in wartime, the uncertainty they promote becomes our concrete reality. People hate uncertainty. I hate lineups.

One of the first Iraqi missiles hit a store hardly more than 500 meters away from my apartment. Well, I was wrong. And now I was about to die from nerve gas. I was still frustrated with the hysteria the whole propaganda brought about. However, I was more concerned with my body being found in a puddle of my own feces, just like that dog in the video from my time in the army.

I was even amused to realize how much of my grandmother’s shame I had in me. Our need to be in total control is futile. However, it was either 2 or 4 a.m. I had a few hours before I could do anything useful. I got out of bed. I headed towards the toilet and released whatever I managed to push out. When done, I went back to bed and engaged in thoughts and plans in anticipation of breathing the first molecules of debilitating gas.

Before March of 2020, when the pandemic reached our shores, I’m already living in Vancouver BC with Anat, my wife and Inbal, our teenage daughter. The anticipation for the unknown felt similar to the days before the Iraqi missile strikes. There wasn’t really anything that we could do but follow some guidelines and wait.

King Crimson ‘Discipline’ Cover art (Cropped)

For the longest time beforehand, my small household had a straightforward mobile CD player. During the days of the lockdown, it started to misread some of the CDs we listen to. Quick cleaning of the laser lens fixed this. Nevertheless, I suggested to Anat and Inbal that maybe for the sake of jazzing up our listening experience, we should look for a better piece of equipment. From the day the new compact audio system was placed on its shelf, we never looked back.