Home

Today, via facebook and thanks to the photos my brother Chen took, I'm saying goodbye to my childhood home. It’s a strange thing to look at this place, the bare walls, the bare floors and to force a Proustian moment of summoning the past, remembering days gone by, a lifetime ago.

These tiles, for example, how I used to lay on them on hot Tel Aviv summer days to cool myself, how in this living room I used to sit and draw as a kid, or run around making space noises imagining myself a Luke Skywalker or a Transformer or whatever it was, and how we would sit on Friday nights with my grandfather (may he rest in peace), watching an Arabic movie, because that was the only thing on, and fast forwarding many years later it was also the last place I saw him, the last Friday dinner with him, and when we said goodbye and it hit me that this could truly be the last time, and I ran to the balcony and saw him walking away down on Nafha street, hoping that he will stop and turn around for a second, though he never did, and I remember saying, not aloud, but to myself, goodbye Sabba. Or even many years prior to that where I used to spend hours watching the street from there sucking chocolate milk (or just milk?) from my bear-shaped baby bottle waiting for my father to come home from New York. That same balcony where Tal, and Dan and Liad, and myself used to take the speakers out every Friday afternoon and “teach” the masses frequenting Sheinkin Street (from wherever it was they all came from – I still don’t know) what’s good music, at that time we thought it was hip-hop (but forgive us we were 15 or 16, and hip hop was still good back then), or a few years prior to that how my dog, Belfi, when he was still alive used to bark onto the Sheinkin garden across the street, hitting his nose on the iron bars of my balcony accentuating his dog cries with a metallic echo. And how after he died, my mom and I kept finding locks of his hair around the living room and didn’t know what to do with them, how can you throw away relics? The living room where my mom taught all the kids in my class how to dance in one of my birthday parties in elementary school, and how hours earlier I was terrified that no one will show up to have their half pita with hummus, pickle and pastrami. And how, in cold winter nights we would sit close to the red gas heater staring at the blue flame and watching TV, I believe I dreamt about that heater last night though it looked much different, but in that dream we ran out of gas and had to go downstairs to the small courtyard to switch gas tanks, where years later some idiot had a great idea to open a juggling store, and I had to carry my dying dog when he couldn’t walk anymore, all 100 pounds of him, through a barrage of bouncing balls, up the stairs, that thank to the dog was no longer populated by any stray cats, that used to scare me when I was 5 years because our landlady, Mrs. Lenchner (who used to ran the café bearing her name), would leave food for them, and I climbing up the stairs and the cats frozen not sure if to run further up to the second floor or down the stairs towards me, staring me down and hissing violently in yet another long standoff. Or the open kitchen (where my mom is standing in the photo), into which out of boredom I would consume crazy amounts of grapefruits, grapes, Milky chocolates, and peach yogurts, or Romanian salami my grandfather brought from his trips to Romania and Hungary, or Biltong that my mom’s friend had brought from South Africa. And the kitchen table where my mom sat me down and told me she has cancer when I was in high-school, and when years later Itay Yerusalem, may he rest in peace, would force us to sit our drunken early 20s group, and make us toasts to absorb the insane amounts of Jameson he’d first challenged us to consume, or the bathroom where my brother and I caught a burglar once, entering the same bathroom window through which I would enter myself whenever I’d lose my key (which happened quite often), or the narrow hall leading to my bedroom, which I used to climb all the way up to ceiling leveraging myself with my legs pushing on the opposite walls, where I broke my front teeth playing football with my brother, or down that hall, my bedroom where I used to play basketball with a tennis ball shooting at the gap between my wall and the door, and my old-fashioned curtains that would create strange stretched out light patterns on my wall at night whenever a car drove by in the street below, and the base of the curtains where a family of pigeons made a nest, after which the crying of the pigeons-chicks during feeding time served as not such a welcomed wake up call each morning. And perhaps it’s appropriate that my current room in the Lower East Side of Manhattan is facing an interior courtyard populated with pigeons so that in the morning I wake up to sounds of home. But now home is just a memory, an assemblage of visual thoughts, the architecture of it lost to new tenants and the planned renovations of the new landlords, and the imaginary continuity of my childhood to my adult-self is broken. But it is broken already, whether I choose to admit this or not, I’m closer to my 40s than I am to my childhood. That’s an indisputable fact. 

So, goodbye childhood home, we will meet again in my dreams.