Morning, Gang! It is a pleasant morning following a brilliant Piedmont dawn. Our version of your wakening ritual featured a reprise of yesterday’s events in the “Downsizing” process, and a quick visit to a souvenir acquired 32 years ago. As you can read, complete with an ancient typo in black china-marker, it was on the 13th of March, 1990 that it came into our possession. It is a chunk of the ancient city wall of Jerusalem.

It had been hurled with some determination through the passenger-side window of the car driven by the Israeli guide we hired to show us the Christian sites of the holy land in three days or less. Based on the process of life, this old rock will no longer travel. It will rest quietly with other, larger rocks out in front of the new porch at Refuge Farm. There is a story with it, though. It is a small part of the new book we are working on: “Last Cruise of the Cold War.”

Here is what somebody wrote a couple days after the rock transitioned from masonry to political protest device to souvenir. It is about to transition back to masonry, a half-world from where it rested. Everything has a story, you know? Here is this one:

“13 March 1990”

“We rise early and start to clear the cobwebs. I treat Doc Feeks
to a prophylactic Alka-Seltzer and read the Jerusalem Post. The
leadership crisis is percolating nicely; there may be a
Government here later in the day and there may not. The issue is
negotiations with the PLO over the fate of the West Bank. This is
of some interest, as we are bound for the Knesset- the Capital- that morning.

Our guide is Svi Ginzberg, a Polish-German-Sabra of 67 seasons.
He is a veteran of the anti-British Jewish underground during
WWII; a commissioned officer in the fighting in Jerusalem during
the ‘47-48 conflict. He wears a 9MM semi-auto pistol unobtrusively in his belt and drives a Mercedes Cab.

He whisks us out of the Hilton Parking Lot at precisely 1030.

We hit the four-lane Route One to Jerusalem and speed along as he
regales us of tales of the country to which he came in 1934. Every
tree was planted, he says, and the Jews have remade much of this
place in their own blood. We pass scenes of heavy fighting in ’47,
and he points them out with the authority that only a veteran can give.
We pass one of the British Police Forts which were turned over to the
Arab Legion and he describes the action around the place with precision.

As we roll up the hills toward the City we pass the burned-out
hulks of Jewish convoys shelled by the Arab Legion. The twisted
metal has been painted with Rustoleum and stones raised to
commemorate the dates of the destruction. We cross areas where
the old border ran and he speaks of the desperation of ’47 and
the triumph of ’67 when they were eliminated.

Fog at the Knesset Building; we can’t see a thing. When we get to
the walls of the Old City the fog has lifted. We are dropped at
the Jaffa Gate while he parks the car and we wander down through
the Arab quarter and the bazaar. Then into the Jewish Quarter.

The Intifada is on. That is the PLO edict that all shops must close
at 1300 to spite the Israelis. They are, of course, cutting their own noses
to spite their conquerors. Some shop owners hiss to us from behind
closed doors. Toad and I buy camel whips from a turbaned Arab.

We pass the excavations in the Jewish quarter and on to the West Wall
of the Temple Precinct. Into the newly excavated section of the
West Wall, where Svi is reprimanded by a young man for explaining
while Hasidim are swaying in prayer. As we leave, hands clapped
over the cardboard Yarmulkes, he says that normally Jewish prayer
is so loud that nobody would notice, except for the particular
prayer used by these strangely clad devotees. He discusses the
peculiar laws that govern the life of what he calls the Religious
men. A good Jew, he says, cannot walk into the Temple Grounds on
the Mount above us because they are prohibited from walking on
the Holy Soil of the Temple. Since no stone has been left
standing on another from the Second Temple, no man may know where
the sacred soil begins.

The past here has an immediacy that lives tangible around us. We peer
into the Dome of the Rock. Svi ushers us quickly past, although we
could have removed our shoes and gone in to see what may be the altar
upon which Abraham had laid his son for sacrifice.

I find out later why Svi, so even handed in his treatment of the
religions, has little interest in the places of the Muslim faith.
I ask him how many children he has, since he has spoken of his
granddaughter who is serving in the IDF now for her National
Service.

“I have a daughter who is 42” he says. “My son was killed at
eight o’clock in the evening of the sixth of June 1983 in a tank
engagement with the Syrians. He lived for ten hours but never
roused from his coma.”

Like I say, everyone here has a story.”
———-

The “Last Cruise” has stuff like this, based on a determination that we would ever see or experience anything like that again. And we defeated global Communism, or so we thought at the time. We will explain it better when we tell a longer version of the story.

– Vic

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com