There was a time when the whole world was on my side, and not always with good reason. The world favored me even when I didn’t deserve it, and loved me more than it should have. That was almost fifty years ago, and even back then it felt overblown. Even back then, I had the feeling that one day the tables would turn, all that goodness would melt away and leave nothing but a red pinch mark.
In the summer of ’76, they remodeled our house and added another bathroom. That was my mother’s private bathroom, with green tiles, white curtains and a kind of small drawing board she could put on her knees to do crossword puzzles on. The door of this new bathroom had no lock because it was my mother’s and no one else was allowed to go inside anyway. We were very happy that summer. My sister, who was best friends with Rina Mor, that year’s Miss Universe, married a nice South African dentist who’d immigrated to Israel and they moved to Ra’ananna. My older brother finished the army and got a job as a security guard for El-Al. My father made a pile on oil-drilling stocks and became a partner in an amusement park. And I always made everyone bring me presents.
‘Different people – different dreams’ that’s what was written on the American catalog I picked my surprises from. It had everything from a gun that shot potatoes to life-size Spider-Man dolls. And every time my brother flew to America, he let me pick one thing from the catalog. The kids in the neighborhood looked up to me because of my new toys, and they listened to me about everything. On Friday afternoons, my whole class used to go to the park to play baseball with the bat and glove my brother brought me. And I was the biggest champion, because Jeremy, my sister’s husband, taught me to throw curve balls that no one could lay a bat on.
Terrible things could happen around me, but they never even touched me. In the Baltic Sea, three sailors ate their captain; the mother of a kid in my school had a boob cut off; Dalit’s brother was killed in a training accident in the army. Anat Moser, the prettiest girl in class, said yes, she’d be my girlfriend, and she didn’t even talk it over with the other girls. My brother said he was just waiting for my birthday to take me on a trip to America as a gift. Meanwhile, on Saturdays, he’d drive me and Anat to the amusement park in his Swedish car and I’d tell the park operators that I was Schwartz’s son and they’d let us go on all the rides for free.
On holidays, we’d go to visit Grandpa Reuven in Zichron, and when he shook my hand, he’d squeeze it so hard I cried. Then he’d yell at me that I was spoilt and needed to learn to shake hands like a man. He’d always tell my mother she was bringing me up all wrong, that she wasn’t preparing me for life. Mom would always apologize and say that actually, she was preparing me, it was just that life today wasn’t anything like life used to be. That today, you didn’t have to know how to make Molotov cocktails from alcohol and nails or how to kill for bread. It was enough to learn how to enjoy life. But Grandpa wouldn’t let it go. He’d pinch my ear and whisper that if you want to know how to enjoy life, you also have to know what sadness is. Otherwise, it isn’t worth a damn. I tried, but life was so beautiful then, that summer of ’76, that no matter how hard I worked at it, I couldn’t make myself sad about anything.
