It's been twelve days since my last blog entry, and although I've had several very fine ideas for entries since them, I haven't been able to muster the time or energy. I admit I've spent some time tracking down people on Facebook. Joel Neft, my very first bar mitzvah student at the Beth Samuel Jewish Center, is my 30th friend. Joel has 433 friends on Facebook, which makes me feel rather socially inferior. But it's true that I have been a grumpy Facebook user and routinely turn down offers of plants, hugs, and causes.
It may well be time to sign off for a while. As a Beit Shalom member and regular reader noted, "You're here." I think I'm mostly settled, despite the occasional bumps and surprises. We move from challenge to challenge with our kids, which makes us pretty much like all other parents. Other activites include trying to keep the cat off the dining room table, gearing up to pick several hundred oranges off our tree, and calculating whether we can hang out the laundry without too much fear of rain--we have had 2 1/2 inches of rain so far this month! My days and evenings are pretty well filled with synagogue or family-related activities, and I look forward to collapsing at the end of each day.
One way you can keep with us at least a bit is to check out the synagogue's website www.bshalomadel.com You can download our newsletter, see photos of what's been happening, and read my monthly attempts at wisdom. And it's entirely possible that I'll get enthusiastic about the project in a month or two and start writing again. Why stop at 146 entries?
I have officially run out of excuses to neglect my blog. Bobby's parents returned to the U.S. on May 5, along with several paintings by Aboriginal artists and two didgeridoos. Two nights ago, I finished the third book of Phillip Pullman's terrific "His Dark Materials" trilogy, although I'm contemplating starting the whole thing over again and reading it a little less breathlessly. And this morning, we survived our first rental inspection in the house where we've lived since October. WAY better than the inspections in our last house, when our property manager used to walk around with her clipboard, frowning and scribbling down notes, and then leave without saying anything to us. Our current landlady was very chatty and told us she would send us a written report for our records. Wish we'd gotten one of those at our last house! We are very happy where we are living now, despite the leaky shower, broken toilet seat, and rusty water. To compensate, we have lemons galore, oranges rapidly ripening on the tree, and enormous amounts of olives.
Personally, I have never liked olives, but I wasn't going to let them go to waste. Nadav and I held a huge tarp taut while Bobby shook down what turned out to be 6 kilos of black olives (about 13 pounds), with plenty of olives still on the trees. I pulled a recipe off the New York Times website, quadrupled it, and packed our olives in a huge bucket along with eight lemons, four heads of garlic, celery, four handfuls of chili peppers, lemon juice, white vinegar, and lots of salt water. Now it's supposed to sit for six months and will hopefully be edible and not moldy when we open it. Thanks are due to the Honey Shoppe at the Central Market, which kindly parted with a 20 liter container that had formerly held organic dishwashing detergent.
I promise to try to get more entries in in the next several weeks. In all honesty, the ideas are not flowing as thick and as fast as they used to, but I'm sure more exciting things will happen to me, and I'll write about them!
The year cycle swings round and round, and so Yom HaShoah--Holocaust Remembrance Day--has come again. Last night, the Adelaide community had its annual observance, this time at the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation. Five survivors were on hand to light candles to memorialize the six million Jewish lives lost. Regina Zielinski, who had lit one of the candles last year, is currently in Poland as an official guest to mark the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Martin Spitzer, a partisan fighter and forgery artist during the War, died just a few weeks ago and was sorely missed. A piece of his extraordinary story is told on the "book of life" section of the website of Adelaide's Jewish museum. Karen Finch, an Adelaide native who is still a Beit Shalom member even now that she lives in Sydney, was the guest speaker. As an educator at the Sydney Jewish Museum, she has the opportunity to participate in a nineteen-day seminar at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem earlier this year. She spoke in particular of an extraordinary morning she and the other seminar participants spent with Hannah Goslar, a Dutch Jew who happens to have been Anne Frank's best friend.
Today, an article by me was published in the "Australian Jewish News" to mark Yom HaShoah. I had noted that by a happy coincidence, the start of Pesach fell on the same date as the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Indeed, part of the observance of the 65th anniversary was to include a Passover seder held in Warsaw, conducted by the chief rabbi of Poland, and attended by the Polish prime minister. I wrote the article three weeks ago just as Regina was gearing up for her big trip, and I can only hope that things turned out as planned!
The phone rang this afternoon as I was making challah and chicken soup for Shabbat. A heavily accented voice on the other end identified himself as Sam Spitzer, calling from Sydney to talk with me about my article. He wanted to make sure I knew the story of Rosa Robota, a young Jewish woman who managed to smuggle enough gunpowder into Auschwitz to blow up one of the five crematoria. He instructed me to read everything I could about her, and then expect a call from him next week to discuss her. Sam Spitzer himself was a partisan in Slovakia during the war who was instrumental in having a gate in Sydney named in Rosa Robota's memory. We made a delightful connection over the phone, when I learned that his granddaughter is engaged to marry a very lovely young rabbi in Sydney named Paul Jacobson. Shabbat shalom!
With luck, we'll have rain today and throughout the weekend, and then it will turn colder and more autumn-like. I asked the kids yesterday how they wanted to spend the last sunny day for the next while and suggested we go to the beach. They said No! Nadav commented, "I'm starting to get sick of beaches." I guess that five-day run down the Great Ocean Road soured him on local sand. Even when they are reluctant to go, by the time we get to the beach the kids are usually elated. But I decided not to force it on them yesterday.
Yonatan declared that he wanted to go to an art gallery and see beautiful pictures. He may well have been influenced by the book we've been reading called "The Art Book for Children," which is a thoroughly charming kids' art appreciation book. At any rate, after a quick stop at the department store to buy grey slacks for the new school term, we walked up to North Terrace to spend ninety minutes at The Art Gallery of South Australia.
The kids whizzed through the galleries displaying earlier works and started showing just a bit of interest when we hit the Impressionists. But what really captured their attention was the contemporary art. Nadav looked at an enormous field of black paint framed with a narrow band of red and asked, "Why did they paint a picture of nothing?" He commented that several paintings must have been created by children, and shrugged off my assurance that all the pictures in the gallery were by adults. Both Yonatan and Nadav are very tactile beings, and they were extremely disappointed that they weren't allowed to touch anything, including the oh-so-touchable metal sculptures just at their eye level.
It was our great fortune to get to enjoy the exhibit The 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Handle with Care. The exhibition had received rave reviews in "The Australian," and although I'm unqualified to evaluate contemporary art, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The textures, variety, materials, and presentations were very compelling, and the kids kept finding things to capture their attention. Both boys were entranced with an installation entitled "Leave your shoes here," which had the sense and feel of a mosque and had been created by the Iranian-Australian artist Hossein Valamanesh. It was a room with niches in the wall, covered in a variety of oriental carpets, and dappled with long vertical cylinders that cast spots of light. My favorite was a piece called "Be-longing" by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan. It was a cozy room with a door and windows, formed entirely out of personal belongings. There were clothes of course, but also several home computers, kitchen appliances, a stereo, board games, stuffed animals, and hundreds of other items. I found the work particularly evocative, because it reminded me so powerfully of our own experience of trying to condense the possessions most significant to us down to 1000 cubic feet as we prepared for our move to Australia.
The boys behaved very nicely, and only once did a security guard need to chase one of them away from coming too close to one of the pieces of art. It was a lovely afternoon.
It seems that on those rare occasions when relatives come calling from overseas, my blog vanishes from sight. Bobby's parents arrived on April 10, and I've managed how many blog entries since then?
We have had a crazy but terrific time, with Bobby and his parents currently wandering somewhere in the northern Flinders Ranges while the kids and I hold down the fort here. We had our whirlwind six days on the Great Ocean Road, which was all around a great trip. Our favorite was the two days we spent in Lorne, north of opulent Apollo Bay. We rented a three-bedroom house with sea view and frequent visits by crowds of sulphur crested cockatoos, who seemed to expect this to be a good place for snacks. They especially enjoyed the Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers that Grandma and Grandpa had brought by special request from America.
We all started calling the house "Doug's House," and in the end we felt more like housesitters than renters. The house had the feel of a relative's home open for our personal use in the person's absence: "The key's under the mat, help yourself to whatever's in the cupboard, and clean up when you're done." There was a magnet on the fridge that said, "If it walks out of the refrigerator, let it go." Lots of condiments, including a jumbo jar of Vegemite, assorted cutlery and utensils, and a little sign that requested that the nice blue dishes not be used outside. We felt right at home.
From Lorne, we drove the rest of the Ocean Road, with the high point of the last day being a visit to the Airey's Inlet Lighthouse. Bell's Beach, one of the most famous surfing beaches in the world, was a bust, with indifferent waves and a shortage of surfers. We drove through the busy city of Geelong, then an additional hour northwest to the city of Ballarat to spend the night and gear up for the 330 mile drive home.
Ballarat had something Adelaide lacks: true Autumn. The boys and I headed for the caravan park's mediocre minigolf course, only to discover that it was mostly covered over with oak leaves. After fighting against the leaves for fifteen minutes, I had a brain storm. I went to the office and asked to use the rake. Then I raked up a huge pile of leaves, and the kids got to jump in autumn leaves for the first time in two years. (Upon returning to Adelaide, I heard a former Ballarat resident remark with ill-disguised disapproval that "Ballarat planted lots of European trees.") The air was cool and crisp, and we had our first truly clear day since we had set out on our trip. Plus, Rizzo's Pizza on Eureka Street was the best we'd eaten since coming to Australia.
We arrived home from our trip on Thursday evening, and Pesach showed up only two nights later, so I hit the ground running. We had a modest Pesach dinner, especially since the matzah balls dissolved when I dropped them in the chicken soup and we ended up with "matzah mush soup." But the pineapple with berry sorbet was a hit at least.
The high point of our first seder was the puppet show Yonatan and Nadav put together to portray the Pesach story. I had asked them to work on this as a way to keep them out of my way, and the production they come up with far exceeded my wildest expectations. They made at least fifty individual stick puppets, including puppets for doing special effects, like when Moses and the Pharoah's magicians turn their staffs into snakes. Required equipment: a pharoah puppet, a Moses puppet, two magician puppets, three staff puppets and three snake puppets. Moses' snake then eats the other snakes, at which point Moses' snake puppet is replaced with a larger, fatter snake puppet. The show took about half an hour to go through, mostly because the kids hadn't sorted their puppets into scenes and were constantly stopping to find the puppets for the next bit. We saw all ten plagues, and a terrific climactic Red-Sea split. I'm seeking a larger audience now.
Greetings to you all from Lorne, Victoria. We are staying in Avarest Cottage, a privately-owned house which I thoroughly recommend to all you Aussie readers. Three bedrooms, two with queen-size mattresses that still have their springs intact, a nice kitchen, cozy living room, and direct sea views for $115 per night. We have had adventures in accommodation along the way, and I must say it was a tremendous relief to arrive at the house and find it exactly as described on the website.
We drove for seven mostly monotonous hours through southeastern South Australia. Mile after mile of scrub and scrawny gum trees. We drove through Meningie and were quite shocked at the low water level in Lake Alexandrina. Luckily, we've had rain in recent weeks, so we can only hope that some of it reaches the lower Murray River area. By the time we reached Allestree Holiday Units outside of Portland, it was "time to brush our teeth," as Nadav put it. We had our first accommodation surprise here. There were two bedrooms, but not room for four adults and two children. We six ended up sharing one queen-size bed and two bunk beds. Otherwise, it was quite a friendly place to stay: just across a quiet road from the beach, nice-sized living space, decent kitchen, good bathroom. A good deal for $90 for the night.
Sunday was a long LONG day. We spent the morning seeing some of the sights in the Portland area, particularly the spectacular coastline at Cape Nelson State Park as well as its famous lighthouse. From there, we drove to the scenic town of Port Fairy. It wasn't until 3:30 p.m. or so that we finally hit the Great Ocean Road we'd traveled to see. In quick succession, we stopped to view the Bay of Islands, Loch Ard, and Thunder Blowhole. My mother-in-law Judy has been keeping a blog that includes many gorgeous pictures of our trip. By the time we left the Blowhole, it was already 5:30 p.m., and I was becoming concerned about making it to our campsite by darknesss. So we bypassed the most famous site of all, the 12 Apostles, with the intention of getting back there today. Hah! We spent sixty finger-biting minutes making our way through the twists and turns of the dark and spooky Otway National Park, and by the time we finally reached our destination we had all decided that we didn't want to do the drive twice the next day. So we are now just about the only tourists in the history of the Great Ocean Road not to see the 12 Apostles. At least there are nearly 19,000 available images of it on Google, so it's just about as good as being there.
Lest you think I am jesting about the impact of the places we did manage to visit, you should know that they were absolutely spectacular. The kids didn't want to get out of the car, but when they did, they literally jumped up and down. The scenery was magnificent, and well worth the trip.
At 7:15 p.m., we limped into Bimbi Park for the night. We had been looking forward to staying here, because it was located right in the middle of the Otway National Park and sounded quite charming. Charming it is, but rustic in the extreme. Bobby, the boys, and I shared a bunk house, which turned out to be a room with two bunk beds and no curtains. Not even a welcome mat to wipe our feet, so that within minutes the floor was covered with a thin layer of sand. Bob and Judy did better with a small but lovely cabin. Another big surprise was that there was no drinking water available. The camp relies on untreated spring water, which must be boiled in order to be safe for drinking. Hot water with your dinner anyone? The signs over all the sinks informed us that bottle water was available at the kiosk, but by then the kiosk was closed. The restroom facilities were state of the art, but you had to pay $1 for the privilege of taking a 3-minute shower.
Would I recommend Bimbi Park to others? I think so, provided you arrive while it's still daytime and are prepared for the sparseness of the facilities. Certainly, it is among the cheapest places to stay in a very pricey area.
You may have noticed the absence of new blog entries lately. I've been really busy, but I've also lately run a little short on inspiration. Happily, I'm looking forward to new sources of inspiration now. Bobby's parents have just arrived for a 3 1/2 week visit, and we are all gearing up for a five day drive along the famed Great Ocean Road in southern Victoria. I'll be busy getting ready for Passover when we return, but will plan to fill you in on everything in another 10 days or so.
Readers will remember the addition of a grey tabby cat to our household back at the beginning of December. Hobbes was then about 9 weeks old and weighed all of 3.5 pounds. He's been with us for four months now and has grown into a beautiful cat. Hobbes has become a beloved part of the family, and the boys absolutely adore him. Although he often minds his own business, he predictably turns up for the ritual singing of bedtime songs to the boys. This generally marks the start of the most high energy part of the day. He loves it when I chase him around the house and enjoys it even more when we fold paper airplanes and toss them for him to catch.
He has also grown into a discontented and rather large cat, weighing in at something in the neighborhood of 8 1/2 pounds. As responsible pet owners, we fed him a carefully calibrated diet of Hill's Science Diet kitten food, purchased from the local vet--$45 for a 5 kg. bag. The problem was, it never seemed to be enough for Hobbes. After our vet told us he gave his two cats only 1/4 for the whole day, we cut Hobbes' food rations down to 1/2 cup, split into two 1/4 servings during the day. We'd give him his 1/4 cup in the morning, which he would wolf down in five minutes. Then he would start haunting the breakfast table, sniffing in the garbage, and stealing crusts of bread off of the table. Eight hours later, he was more than ready for dinner and was furious when we refused to feed him before 6:00 p.m.
On Sunday, I talked to Jonathan Wysoke, a quietly brilliant veterinarian who is a member of the synagogue. As in the past, he had an immediate answer for my problem: The cat was hungry. Or, as he passionately phrased it, "The cat is starving." How was that possible? Because dry cat food is ten times as concentrated and so gives the cats all their necessary nutrients without leaving them feeling fed and satisfied. Furthermore, he pointed out, cats were not really meant to eat a heavy carbohydrate diet. Modern cats suffer from obesity and diabetes, conditions that have never before afflicted them. When I objected that I was feeding our cat the state-of-the-art pet food, he gently told me that I had been duped by the food industry. Alas for our nearly-full $45 bag of cat food!
Dr. Wysoke prescribed a strict diet of kangaroo meat. Kangaroo is increasingly acquiring a reputation as a delicacy for humans--slightly gamey, highly flavored, and very low in fat. It's also really REALLY not kosher, so it will not be finding a place onto our dinner table. Although kangaroo in restaurants is a fairly new phenomenon, kangaroo meat in pet food is a decades-old practice. It's marketed usually as "pet mince"--meat chopped very finely and apportioned out in pre-measured packages just right for kitty. This wasn't what Dr. Wysoke had in mind.
I made my way to a small pet store at the Central Market which sells meat for consumption by pets. For $4.50, I brought home a kilo a chunks of kangaroo meat scooped into a plastic bag and wrapped in newspaper. I gingerly slipped a few smaller pieces into Hobbes' food dish and waited. Hobbes of course made a mad dash for his food dish and prepared to dive in. He took one look at the radically-altered contents of his bowl and literally sprang backwards two feet. It took him about fifteen minutes to decide he was willing to try something new, and he did so in a fairly meticulous, almost scientific manner. He plucked each of the meat chunks out of his bowl, gave them little shoves across the floor, and then slowly starting figuring out how to eat them. These were not bite-sized pieces, so he had to use his teeth to tear off manageable bits to chew up. It took a solid thirty minutes for him to consume every bit of meat, and at the end he seemed to have achieved a state of inner bliss.
Americans are often amazed to hear that kangaroo meat is used to make Australian pet food. But the fact is that there are way more kangaroos living in Australia than is either good for the continent or good for the kangaroos. It's hard to get an exact figure, but one website estimated a total population of at least 50 million, well more than twice as many people and apparently more than at any other time in Australian history. Kangaroos are cute, cuddly, and generally friendly, so that periodic calls to engage in targeted population reduction are about as popular as efforts to trim deer population in America. Hobbes seems very happy to do his part, and we'll be quite delighted if at the end of the day he loses some weight, has more energy, and is less interested in raiding the dinner table.
We have spent much of this four-day weekend making up for the absolute absence of housecleaning during the fifteen day heat wave that ended last week. But yesterday after the bathroom had been cleaned, we headed off to the the Semaphore Odeon Cinema to see "Horton Hears a Who." Since I wrote about the Semaphore Cinema in an earlier blog entry, they have raised their ticket prices to $7 from $6, but that still makes tickets half what they cost most other places. Since our move last October, it now take a full thirty minutes to get there, but I consider it worth the trip. In addition to having a cozy small town feel, the theater has a little cafe for refreshments either before or after the show. Although popcorn is as expensive as anywhere else, ice cream bars are reasonably priced, and home-baked cookies are available for fifty cents each. We arrived half an hour early yesterday to make sure tickets were still available, so we spent the time waiting for the doors to open munching on popsicles. We sat through several minutes of quaint commercials advertising local businesses, plus two previews (was it my imagination, or did the preview for "Nim's Island" give away the ending?!). Then it was time for the feature presentation. Certainly wasn't the best kids' movie I've seen in the last twelve months ("Enchanted" takes that honor), but the boys enjoyed it.
The main attraction of this movie theater is that once the show is over, we're in Semaphore. It is a charming seaside resort town with a modest downtown shopping area, several playgrounds, and a gorgeous beach. As we drove into town yesterday, it seemed like the sky was littered with little balloons. In fact, we were seeing dozens of kites on display for the town's annual Kite Festival. After the movie, we strolled the two blocks to the jetty and enjoyed the spectacle. My favorite was the little teddy bear who with the aid of his own kite made his slow way up a long kite string. Suddenly, his handler hit a release, and the bear dropped from the kite string and floated gracefully to the ground with his very own parachute.
It was Easter Sunday, but nearly all the businesses were open, and the little Steam Train was running. We picked up a couple of apples from the local fruit and veg shop, and indulged in fried-to-order doughnuts to top off a special afternoon. Yonatan and Nadav dug in the sand for an hour, while the kites continued to soar nearby. It was a tough sell to convince them to get back into the car for the rather monotonous drive down commercial Port Road, but eventually we all had our shoes and socks on and were making our way back home. We'll be back as soon as the next decent kids' movie opens.
On Tuesday, both The Age and The Australian newspapers carried the same cover photo: it is a black and white picture of hundreds of men, smartly dressed in their naval uniforms, posing proudly aboard a large battleship. The ship is the HMAS Sydney, which was sunk off the coast of West Australia in 1941. The ship had approached a merchant ship, only to discover that it was actually a disguised German raider, the Kormoran. All 645 men aboard the Sydney were lost, and no one was left to suggest where the ship may have come to rest. The battle left the Kormoran fatally wounded, and it too sank nearby. However, 300 out of its crew of 390 sailors were rescued. Although the German sailors were interviewed extensively about the location of the Sydney's remains, their testimony was treated with considerable suspicion. Relatives and friends of the lost Australian sailors have been searching for the Sydney for the last 66 years, with little hope of finding this rather large needle in an enormous haystack.
Two spectacular news stories broke within 24 hours of each other at the start of this week. On Sunday came the news that the wreck of the Kormoran had been discovered, pretty much exactly where its sailors had said it had been. Of course, just knowing where a ship might be doesn't necessarily mean it can be found when it is lying 1.5 miles beneath the surface. The Finding the Sydney Foundation managed to raise enough money to dispatch a boat with a very sophisticated sonar device to the suspected location and start sweeping the area. They eventually spotted the outline of a boat lying on the ocean floor that matched the Kormoran's description. Excitement exploded with the very real possibility that the Sydney might finally be located as well. I was listening to the news on Monday morning when a reporter broke in to make the announcement that the Sydney had already been located--also just about where the Germany sailors had predicted and ten miles or so from the Kormoran.
The Finding the Sydney Foundation has gone so far as to publish the GPS coordinates for the ships, so that those who wish to can travel to these deep-water graves. When an ABC reporter expressed concerns that unscrupulous individuals might exploit that information to plunder the ships, the Finding the Sydney director pointed out that no one can possibly reach the ships without really expensive equipment.
I've said before that Australia is not a religious country, but remembering the military dead is in many ways the closest to an official religion we have here. Along with the jubilation that this great ship has been discovered and that now the mysteries related to its sinking might be solved comes the somber recollection of 645 souls lost so close to home. Thousands of words about the event have been written already just in the last several days. "The Australian" has dedicated a whole section to the Sydney and its history, and for sure much has yet to be said.
Both the Adelaide Festival of the Arts and the Adelaide Fringe Festival came to an end with a whimper last night. As a family, we attended a grand total of three shows during the 3 1/2 week fringe, and two of the shows were mainly for the kids. Our one foray into adult drama was the one-man show "I Might Be Edgar Allen Poe," magnificently performed by Canadian actor David Hayward. The play portrays a psychiatric patient who finds refuge from his own traumas in Poe's tumultuous life. The dramatic recitation of "The Tell-tale Heart" alone was worth the $20 admission. The Adelaide Advertiser named the show a "must-see," but fewer than thirty people braved 105 degree heat to come to the Prometheus nightclub for the play. We had ambitious plans for the Fringe, but the heat managed to drain all of that away.
It turns out that the last beautiful days of festival season were the first weekend of March, when we were out and about nearly the whole time. We spent a lovely evening watching street performers, and then walked up to North Terrace for the spectacle Northern Lights, in which the city's iconic stone buildings were illuminated with a number of different colorful projections. That particular exhibit--part of the Festival of the Arts--has proved so popular that the show has been extended for another two weeks. The day after we spent a night out, the temperatures soared, and few people have had the energy or enthusiasm to venture out for culture. A number of my congregants did attend the outdoor music festival Womadelaide, and most were very enthusiastic about the experience despite the heat. We will hope to go next year, and will hope even more that the weather is more cooperative!
Just about the only thing this weather is good for is performing conversions, and so I've done two in the last two days. Judaism requires full-body immersion in a pool containing fresh water as the final step of the conversion process. This is usually done at a mikvah--a very small swimming pool mixed with water from a freshwater source. Mikva'ot are very expensive to build and maintain. With a few notable exceptions, mikva'ot are generally run under the auspices of Orthodox Jews, whose women are expected to visit the mikvah monthly at the conclusion of their menstrual cycles. Pittsburgh has a magnificent mikvah which is available for both Orthodox and non-Orthodox rabbis to use for purposes of conversion. Here in Australia, there is not a single mikvah which is open for use by non-Orthodox rabbis. If I want to immerse a candidate in water, I need to take that person to the ocean. And since the mikvah needs to be performed completely naked, this tends to happen very early in the morning.
Yesterday and this morning, a number of dedicated witnesses arrived at the beach at 7:00 a.m. It's amazing how many others were up at that hour, walking their dogs along the beach or even swimming in the water. It was already 86 degrees and the water was warmed by the sun, so the experience was relatively painless. We all waded out until we were about chest-high in the water, and then our conversion candidates disrobed. Yesterday, we had enough women in the water to form a protective circle around our candidate as she dunked and offered the required blessings. This morning, I brought a sheet along and suspended it between our candidate and the beach. I will not look forward to doing this when the weather gets colder, but I am looking forward to being able to walk outside without gasping!
I have been spending a lot of time looking at a photo in an old album. The photo is of a little boy named Avraham David Moses. Pictured with him is his proud mother Rivka, a classmate of mine from Oberlin College who left a privileged life in America to live modestly as an Orthodox woman in Israel. In the photo, Avraham David is close to his first birthday, tow-headed and adorable, gazing down at his smiling mother. I took the photo in the spring of 1992. Last Thursday, Avraham David was one of eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshivah to be shot dead by a Palestinian terrorist. He was 16 years old.
This event has already been politicized both by the right and the left in Israel. Right-wingers blame the moderate government of Ehud Olmert for the episode, while left-wingers point out that the yeshivah is the intellectual center of Israel's religious right wing. Neither of these arguments can do much to bring comfort to Rivka or the other bereaved parents. My friend Rabbi Gail Diamond, a lecturer at the Beit Midrash rabbinical school in Jerusalem, e-mailed me on Sunday with the news. She had attended the funeral, along with at least a thousand other mourners. This isn't the first time Gail and I have known someone who has been a victim of terror. When we were roommates in Jerusalem in 1991-1992, we both used the services of a marvelous chiropractor Moshe Gottlieb, originally from the Bronx. He who was killed along with eighteen others in a bus bombing in 2002.
Here in South Australia, our normal weather pattern of four or five hot days followed by a cool change have been disrupted. Instead, we have endured nine hot dry days, and there is no end in sight. It is already the longest March heat wave in history, with at least seven more days to go. Firefighters are on full alert this morning, with strong north winds predicted that could fan a small spark into a horrifying blaze. The still, hot air reminds me of parts of Israel in the summer. We stay indoors, avoid the sun, drink endless quantities of water and pick lemons off our tree for lemonade. In Israel, the weather will just start turning towards summer, and the really hot weather should arrive around Pesach, near the end of April. Right now, the rainy season should be coming to an end, and the land should be sprinkled with wildflowers.
In May, Israel will celebrate its 60th birthday, but it doesn't feel like much of a celebration. The dream of a Jewish state has long been fulfilled, but the dream of a Jewish state at peace seems more elusive than ever. The national president of the Women's International Zionist Organization spoke in Adelaide recently about the plight of residents in Sderot, who have only 15 seconds' notice to get to shelter when a Qassam rocket is fired from the Gaza Strip nearby. WIZO is trying to raise money to create a counseling center in Sderot for parents in crisis, but it's hard to imagine what kind of counseling can really be of help when bombs are dropping around you every day. Astute writers have commented on Hamas' warped arithmetic in firing rockets from residential areas with the full awareness that Israel will retaliate. They appear prepared to offer up their own civilians as victims in return for the sympathetic international publicity they expect these deaths to attract. When I was a child, the PLO seemed like the most frightening possible terrorist entity. But at least they were a political, not a religious group. It is hard to imagine how Israel can ever make peace with Hamas when Hamas is dedicated to Israel's destruction as a religious principle.
I was deeply struck last Shabbat by the prophetic portion chosen for that day: "Can a land pass through travail in a single day? Can a nation be born all at once?" (Isaiah 66:7) Even before I knew that Avraham David Moses was among the victims, I was moved to read Yehudah Amichai's poem "The Diameter of the Bomb." I hope a day will come when it won't be so timely.
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
Last night at 6:15 p.m. the temperature finally dipped below 100 degrees for the first time since noon. The humidity was 10%. (No, I did not forget to put in an extra zero.) We are in the middle of the longest heatwave since our arrival in Australia 18 months ago: the temperature rose above 95 degrees last Tuesday and is forecast to remain at 90 degrees or much higher possibly for another eight days.
For much of the last week, I was in a pleasant mood despite the heat. The sun is rising later as the days grow shorter, so it has taken longer for the sun's rays to heat up our house. We have actually acclimated somewhat to these extremes in temperature, so that my response to a 105 degree yesterday today was to pack the kids off to the pool rather than stay shut up inside. Also, the UV index is considerably lower than it was at the height of the summer, so the sun isn't nearly as powerful. (Quick intro. to the UV index: anything over a 3 is considered high enough to merit putting on sun screen. Today's UV index was 8. In the middle of January it was sometimes as high as 13.)
My good cheer was shattered Saturday night, the latest in a thankfully rare number of appallingly hot and dry nights. By 3:30 a.m., Nadav had awakened me five times asking for water and to be washed down with a wet cloth against the heat. The windows were open and all the fans were going full steam, but neither he nor I could sleep. I turned on the computer to check the outside temperature. It was 89 degrees, and a light breeze was blowing more hot and extremely dry air from the north. I opened up the sleeper couch in the living room, put sheets on the bed, directed the fan from the air conditioned dining room next door to cool us down, and moved myself and Nadav in by 4:00 a.m. Of course, our cat Hobbes considered our unexpected choice of venue to be an invitation to play and started leaping on and off the bed. Nadav was delighted by his new surroundings and chattered on for quite a while. I figure it was close to another hour before we finally fell asleep. Not the most restful of nights, especially when you know the next day it's likely to be "stinking hot" (to use our administrator Lesley's expression).
Last night the whole family slept in the living room, in an operation complicated enough to impress the military. The boys slept on the floor, and Bobby and I slept on the fold-out futon. Bobby applied his typical scientific methods to finding the most efficient placement of fans. It was, I must say, incredibly comfortable, and I slept like a log for nine hours. It cooled all the way down to 74 degrees last night, which must have helped somewhat. And today it's only supposed to get up to 102, which I suppose must be considered an improvement over 105.
As I mentioned long ago, Australians still rarely have central air conditioning in their homes. Usually, one or two rooms have a window or wall unit, and that's where life unfolds during the summer. For sure we were not the only families in Adelaide to uproot ourselves from our bedrooms and move into the lounge. There are also a surprisingly large number of households who have no air conditioning at all. In this weather, they may make due with portable evaporative coolers, which cool the nearby air by dripping water through a gentle fan. Otherwise, they may throw themselves on the mercy of friends and relatives, or perhaps pack up to cool Tasmania for a bit of a holiday.
As a Washington, DC native, I'm occasionally nostalgic for humidity. During this dry spell, we are lucky if the nighttime humidity gets as high as 20%. Someone told me that if she flies up to tropical Queensland, she can feel her face puff up from the sudden jump in moisture. I certainly don't miss the 70% humidity the Washington weather could occasionally inflict, and I also can't imagine subjecting myself to the Northern Territory's summers of 110 degree heat and 100% humidity. But when the humidity level dips below 15%, my hands feel dry as dust even fifteen minutes after I've put lotion on them. I wouldn't complain about just a wee bit more moisture!
"So what do you do when you're not teaching me? Do you have another job?" (from a 1998 bat mitzvah student)
There are days when I marvel at the variety in my job. Friday was an awesome day from that perspective. We managed to get the boys to school at 8:25 a.m.--a heroic accomplishment, and a necessary one, since I had been asked to lead the children's service that morning. I had never actually been to a Massada College service, so I floundered a bit. But the kids--especially Yonatan--were very happy to guide me along and tell me what I was doing wrong ("Ima! You're singing the wrong way!").
I drove west and south to the suburb of Somerton to make a condolence call. A member of our congregation had lost her 60 year-old daughter on Wednesday, and due to a variety of factors the funeral wasn't scheduled until Tuesday. I would sit down with the extended family this morning, but this visit was just for the mother. She has two surviving sons, grandchildren, and four beautiful great-granddaughters, but a loss like this is still very hard. I snacked shamelessly on delicious pastries flavored with nigella. (What is nigella? I have no idea, but the pungent taste is familiar.) The recipe originates from the island of Corfu with perhaps some modifications after three generations in Egypt.
I drove five minutes north to the seaside resort town of Glenelg for a quick sushi lunch. I found a Japanese restaurant where the chefs stand in the center of a large room and place color-coded dishes on a conveyor belt. The belt takes the dishes around the restaurant, and the customers pick what they want to eat. I had salmon sashimi and bean curd dumplings with rice inside.
I drove up the western side of Adelaide to North Adelaide and parked just opposite Womens' and Children's Hospital. I had a new baby to meet. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. Baby Bess had arrived the night before and was very keenly observing everything that went on. Both parents were thrilled with the new arrival, although a bit uncertain what their lives will look like now.
I dashed over to the synagogue briefly to line up materials for Friday evening and Saturday morning services. Good thing I already had much of the services planned in advance! Then it was time to pick the boys at the end of their school week. I dropped them at home and ran off to do some quick pre-Shabbat shopping.
It was while I was in the confectionary aisle that I remembered that thirty minutes earlier I was supposed to have called a bar mitzvah student for a phone lesson. I called the family, and discovered they were too pre-occupied with getting ready for the huge world music festival Womadelaide to have remembered the lesson either. It's too bad the lesson didn't happen, because that would really have filled out my life cycle day nicely.
At services, a young couple announced their engagement. No, I didn't plan this, but I admit I thought it was just a terrific way to bring this crazy day to an end. I got home at 7:30 p.m. for Shabbat dinner, drank a well-deserved beer, and settled in to the day of rest.
I have about one-third of a blog entry sitting in the draft box waiting for me to get around to finishing it. It talks all about the lovely weekend we had last week, in which we took in some of the very best of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, as well as the biannual Adelaide Festival of the Arts, which opened last Friday. I was planning to tell you all about a delightful street mime who encouraged and cajoled four unwilling volunteers into performing a dramatic, touching, and extremely silly play about a suitor and his beloved. I was going to talk about the cool laser projections on the stately stone buildings that line North Terrace, so that after 9:00 p.m. the buildings are transformed into works of art themselves. And I think (although I can't really remember) that I was going to share my own experience of being a Living Book at the State Library as part of the Festival and getting "borrowed" by four different curious patrons.
All the memories are fading now, because I've just been too busy to get the blog finished. While I'm not performing professional duties (and it has been a very busy week at the synagogue), I've been transporting kids to various activities. While I do not yet believe I have overprogrammed kids, I have definitely become an overprogrammed mother.
Yonatan and Nadav are currently involved in precisely three activities each during the school week. Both are in Scouts, both are taking swimming lessons, and both have started music lessons. The problem is that neither is in the same activity at the same time. Both Scout groups meet on Monday. Nadav's Joey Mob meets at 5:15, and the Cubs start at 6:30 p.m. This means three round-trips to the scout hall for us over the course of the evening. If one or the other of the groups has a special outing, we have to travel to where the outing is to drop off and pick up. Not that I'm complaining that much; it's still way more convenient than when we lived in Nailsworth and they had Scouts on a different night of the week.
For a while, Yonatan was enrolled in private swimming lessons immediately following Nadav's group swimming lesson at our local pool. This worked out well, because it meant Yonatan could swim for fun during Nadav's lesson, and vice versa. Unfortunately, he wasn't making any progress. The challenge of coordinating arms, legs, blowing bubbles, and breathing has just been too much for him. So yesterday, he started lessons at Child's Play--a hydrotherapy and learn-to-swim program directed by physical therapists at a hospital in North Adelaide. This is a wonderful program. We arrived for our lesson at about the same time as a girl with cerebral palsy. She carefully made her way to the pool with the aid of a walker and slowly descended the steps into the water. Then she swam lap after lap of backstroke, breaststroke, crawl, and even butterfly as the therapist encouraged her on. It was absolutely gorgeous to watch. Her proud mother said that she had been having lessons for two years, and clearly it's been fabulous. Yonatan thrashed around in the water as usual, but by the end of his lesson, his arm strokes were straighter and more purposeful, and he had actually attempted to swim across the pool while turning his head to breathe. He was immensely pleased with his progress and is disappointed the lessons are only every two weeks. We arrived home from his lesson at 6:40 p.m., and I jumped into the car at 7:00 p.m. to teach a 7:30 p.m. class at the synagogue.
Massada College offers private instrumental lessons during school hours for students who wish to take advantage of the service. Unfortunately, the piano teacher had only one opening for this year, and we gave it to Yonatan. Since Nadav is only seven, this wouldn't have been such a tragedy, were it not for the fact that Nadav is a musical genius. No--I'm serious! This is a child who sings bedtime songs in a different key so that he can experiment with how the different versions harmonize together. Yonatan brought home his piano book last Thursday, sat down at our little keyboard and proudly played through the two pieces he'd learned that day. Once he headed off to watch TV, Nadav sat down in front of the book and worked his way through the next six songs! Clearly, he wasn't prepared to sit back and wait another year to start learning an instrument. So tonight he and Bobby are sampling the Young Musician's course at our local branch of the Yamaha Music School. He is supposed to learn to read music, sing, start playing piano and probably work on rhythm. The lesson meets on Thursdays for an hour starting at 6:00 p.m. I finish tutoring at about 4:45 p.m. and teach a class at 7:30 p.m. Interesting! Looks like take-away food on Thursday at least until my class ends in four weeks or so.
One more wrench in the works is the tantalizing possibility of a social skills class for boys, which has been dangled in front of our noses by the organization Autism SA since before the start of the school year. Now we've been notified of a meeting to take place on Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. "to discuss options for this group." I'm not sure if that means that the group is actually going to start up, or what exactly will happen, but I do know that I won't be attending. I have a funeral to perform at 3:30 p.m. and then need to get Nadav to swimming lessons by 5:30 p.m. So Bobby and Yonatan will go to this meeting in their car while I rush back to pick up Nadav and get him to the pool. How exactly did this happen to us?!
Quick update: Bobby took Nadav to the class, and reported that he had a great deal of difficulty participating in the class at that hour of the day. We'll probably see about signing him up for the second half of the year if the class time is easier on us!
It has been a very busy and fun weekend. The progressive Jewish youth group Netzer sent us five youth workers, who led a rousing Friday evening service and then took us through a terrific quiz night following dinner. I took the boys to our first show of the Adelaide Fringe--a clown comedy called "Ready, Steady, Clown," apparently inspired by the wildly popular TV cooking show "Ready, Steady, Cook." In the background, the V8 cars of the Clipsal 500 roar, along with the occasional sounds of a supersonic jet overhead as part of the show. Tomorrow, we are looking forward to seeing how the youth workers direct our Sunday school program, I get to enjoy the 95th birthday celebration of a beloved member of the Adelaide Jewish community, and Yonatan will be attending the birthday party of a classmate who is returning to Israel in just another week.
11,000 miles away, Panayotis Lambrakopoulos died on Thursday. Panayotis and I graduated from high school together, but I had known him since fourth grade. He was a big bear of a man, full of warmth and enthusiasm for life. He was also a consummate intellectual. He and I served on the staff of our high school literary magazine for four years under the capable sponsorship of his older sister Evanthia, who happened to be my favorite high school teacher. I saw Panayotis for the first time in two decades at our high school reunion in 2003 and failed to stay in touch after that.
Thanks to modern technology, I've been kept up-to-date on Panayotis' dire condition ever since he himself posted a note several weeks back briefly outlining six months of bad medical news. He had been treated for lymphoma in his twenties, and it seems the radiation treatment had weakened his heart to the point that it started to give out. Had I been within several hundred miles, I would almost certainly have tried to visit. Instead, I sent e-mail messages and left one voicemail message which I can only hope he received. And I added him to our synagogue prayer list in the hope that it might help him turn the corner.
After 18 months in Australia, we are just about settled into the pattern of life here, although there are still occasional unpleasant surprises. It is only rarely that I get such an acute reminder of how far away we are. When we were gearing up for our move, a dear friend complained, "I'll never get to see you!" "But we never see you now!" I protested. "Yes," she said, "But we could if we wanted to." Living in Australia means that phone calls, e-mail, and photographs are easy, but face-to-face contact requires months of planning and the extravagant expenditure of money. My sister is not sure when she will visit with her family, but she's already been planning her trip for a year or so. If you're going to spend US$6000 or more just for four plane tickets, you want to be sure you get it right.
It seems absurdly self-indulgent of me to write this entry about my experience of Panayotis' death. In these last few weeks, I've been constantly grateful to Jacqueline Dupree, who volunteered back in 2003 to run our class website and has stuck with the job ever since. The website has sprung to life, as classmates post tributes and discuss the possibility of a class gift. It may be true, as many have said, that a virtual community is actually no community at all. But when you're 11,000 miles away, even the virtual community is pretty comforting.
We wandered through the Botanic Garden on our way back from seeing a clown comedy show as part of the Adelaide Fringe. (I will write more about the Botanic Gardens on another occasion, since they deserve their very own entry.) Yonatan was suddenly inspired by a Gingko tree to tell his own "just so story" about how the tree came to have fan-shaped leaves. He asked me to post the story for him:
Once upon a time, there was a man in China that sold fans that were beautiful green with ruby stripes, emerald stripes, and stripes of every colour you can think of.
One day, a very powerful wizard came to buy some of the fans. The wizard asked, “Can I please have some of your beautiful, elegant fans?”
The shopkeeper didn't want to sell to such a silly man—at least he thought he was silly. So he thought it would be nice to not sell some fans to the wizard.
The wizard said, “I shall make these a yucky yucky green. If you do not give fans to the next wizard that shall come, your fans will turn into tiny little fans.”
The next day, the shopkeeper met the next wizard. The wizard said, “Can you please give me some fans?”
The shopkeeper said, “No, no, no, and no!”
The curse came true. The fans shrank, shrank and shrank until they were as tiny as leaves. Then the shopkeeper threw them into a pit, and in ten years, the fans had grown into a tree with leaves that looked like tiny fans. And from that day on, the shopkeeper always gave fans to everyone who bought one.
Here is another story Yonatan wrote about a magical garden:
Once upon a time, there was a very rich man. He had emeralds, rubies and sapphires a plenty. One day, the rich man was very very bored. A wizard came and said, “I can turn one ruby, one sappire, and one emerald into seeds for the most beautiful trees in the world.” The next day, the man planted the seeds. A few days later, he saw tiny little shoots that gleamed in the sunlight like sapphires, like emeralds, like rubies. The next day, he saw the most beautiful trees, and there were flowers that were gleaming like rubies and precious things of plenty. Then, the next day, he saw fruits gleaming in the sunlight. He made his own garden and called it “The Magical Garden.”
The next day, people came from all over the world paying lots of good money to come to there. From that day on, people came to eat fruit and to see the beautiful trees. Everybody who ate a fruit got richer, because the middle was as sapphire, a ruby, or an emerald.
These are heady days in Australia. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has scored a record 70% approval rating from the Australian people and is showing every indication that this is a job he was born to do. (Brendan Nelson, leader of the opposition Liberal party, has a 9% approval rating and may wish to reconsider his career options.) It is remarkable how in just a few months in office PM Rudd has really turned around the general mood in the country through several dramatic and sometimes symbolic gestures. This government's very first action was to ratify the Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming, leaving the United States standing alone as the one western nation that hasn't signed it. Rudd then announced his intention to pull Australia's 550 soldiers out of Iraq. In between announcements, he's been visiting schools, chatting up elderly people, and generally sending all kinds of genial messages to the public.
By far the most powerful action of the Rudd government so far was purely symbolic, but what a symbol! Last Wednesday, February 13, Kevin Rudd stood in the Parliament House, surrounded by current members of parliament, a gallery full of Aboriginal leaders, and just about every living former prime minister (John Howard decided to stay in Sydney and go for a walk instead). He read a brief apology to indigenous Australians for the decades of wrongs perpetrated against them. In particular, he apologized for the sixty-year policy of removing Aboriginal children from their homes without their parents permission and sending them off to be brought up in missions or in white foster homes. Following the formal apology, PM Rudd then gave a short speech in which he promised to follow up his actions with words--specifically a plan to make high-quality preschool available to all indigenous children within the next several years. He received a standing ovation for his remarks, and tears flowed freely both in the parliament chamber and among the thousands of people who had gathered outside and in numerous squares around the country.
Although at least a couple of people have told me that they personally didn't approve of the apology, in general the public reaction has been hugely positive. I bought "The Australian" the next day, with it's enormous headline "We are Sorry" and a full quarter of the newspaper devoted to this one story. People have been referring back to the event ever since, generally with a sense of pride. Bobby listened to veteran leftist broadcaster Phillip Adams on his daily radio show "Late Night Live" and noted that for once Adams didn't sound in the least bit cynical. Indeed, in his Saturday column, Adams admitted that he been wrong to say repeatedly that Kevin Rudd was essentially a clone of John Howard. I'd love to share that witty and self-mocking article with you, but the link is not yet up on "The Australian" website.
John Howard must be given a little bit of credit for the buoyancy of the country. Whatever you have to say about his policies, Howard managed the budget magnificently, and as a result the Rudd government has inherited a budget surplus and the possibility to spend a bit more on social programs. (I imagine Mr. Howard sitting at home and wondering to himself how he could possibly have managed to have been turned out of office--and even out of his own parliamentary seat!--when he did such a good job balancing the budget.) Mr. Rudd faces challenges as well. Inflation is on the rise, and the federal reserve has been raising interest rates at an alarming rate. Since many mortgages are tied to the official interest rate, folks are seeing their savings depleted and are feeling the pinch, even in this booming economy. The drought continues to drive prices up--milk and cheese have gone up at least 20% as far as I can tell, and lately the north of the country has been plagued with line after line of very heavy rainstorms that have put considerable pressure on disaster relief services. But all in all, there is a hopeful and even happy mood in the country. I can only wish for the same for the United States in the not-too-distant future!
After dinner last night, I packed the kids in the car, and we drove twenty minutes to West Beach, just five minutes west of the airport. It had been the first really hot day in a while, although by 7:30 p.m. the temperature was falling below 90. I have learned in recent months that on days like these, the beach is essentially its own country--quite divorced from the weather conditions just over the dunes. You walk up the path from your car, pass over the short hill that separates the parking lot from the beach, and something marvelous happens: the temperature drops 10 degrees, and you are hit by a steady cooling wind from the south.
On this warm night, the beach was dotted with visitors, and the parking lot was unusually full. Nadav ran straight into the water, which proved to be freezing cold. Yonatan soon joined him, and the two spent half an hour or more riding or leaping over waves while I shivered in the surf. Then we headed back to land to get warm. Nadav rolled in the sand, while Yonatan went straight to work building sand castles. By now, the sun had set, and a small collection of cirrus clouds was making for an absolutely glorious sunset. I kept drawing the kids' attention back to the sunset so that they wouldn't miss out, and they were quite appreciative. As the light began to ebb, and I dragged them back to the car, sat them on towels, and we headed home for showers and havdalah--the ceremony that marks the end of Shabbat.
I am in day two of recovering from a rather nasty case of sunburn. In these "Sun Smart" times, only the truly stupid get burned over the whole body. The rest of us only get burned where we neglect to apply--or in my case re-apply--sunscreen. I'm burned on the sides of both feet, the back of my right calf, and on both collarbones, which is particularly vexing, since the seatbelt is rubbing on the burn on my right side. I'm applying lotion like crazy and hope to be well on the way to recovery by tomorrow.
The cause of the burn was the synagogue's Day at the Beach on Sunday, held on a picture-perfect day where the temperature just touched 80 degrees. We met at Seacliff Beach, one of numerous pristine beaches to the west and south of Adelaide. It houses the local yacht club and is a terrific place to launch boats. We had nine boats on hand: four one-man canoes, two three-man canoes, and three small sailboats. This was a whole new world for Nadav, and he absolutely loved it. Avid sailor Tom Sag and synagogue president Larry Lockshin took Nadav out for his first sail. He returned half an hour later beaming like the sun and ready to jump right into the next boat leaving the beach. He next paddled out in a canoe, and then had another sail a bit later in the day. Yonatan went out paddling twice, including a turn with Australia Scouts leader Danny Sag, who let him capsize the boat just as they were nearing the shore. The combination of an aching back and a history of seasickness kept me on the shore, where I enjoyed the novelty of being kid-less for up to thirty minutes at a time.
We stayed for nearly four hours, enjoying the company, the sand, and the tranquility of the day. It was only in the evening when the evidence of damage started to pop up on various parts of my body. Yonatan and Nadav, who had been meticulous in getting their sunscreen applied, were spared!
