Portnoy’s Complaint

I remember all this where? when? While Captain Meyerson is making his last slow turn over the Tel Aviv airport. My face is against the window. Yes, I could disappear, I think, change my mime and never be heard from again- then Meyerson banks the wing on my side, and I look down for the first time upon the continent of Asia, I look down from two thousand feet in the air upon the Land of Israel, where the Jewish people first came into being, and am impaled upon a memory of Sunday morning softball games in Newark.

The elderly couple seated beside me (the Solomons, Edna and Felix), who have told me in an hour's flight time all about their children and grandchildren in Cincinnati (with, of course, a walletful of visual aids), now nudge each other and nod together in silent satisfaction; they even poke some friends across the aisle, a couple from Mount Vernon they've just met (the Peris, Sylvia and Bernie), and these two kvell also to see a tall, good-looking, young Jewish lawyer (and single! a match for somebody's daughter!) suddenly begin to weep upon making contact with a Jewish airstrip. However, what has produced these tears is not, as the Solomons and Peris would have it, a first glimpse of the national homeland, the in gathering of an exile, but the sound in my ear of my own nine-year-old little boy's voice-my voice, I mean, at nine. Nine-year-old me! Sure a sourpuss, a face-maker, a little back-talker and kvetch, sure my piping is never without its nice infuriating whiny edge of permanent disgruntlement and grievance ("as though," my mother says, "the world owes him a living-at nine years old"), but a laugher and kidder too, don't forget that, an enthusiast! a romantic! a mimic! a nine-year-old lover of life! fiery with such simple, neighborhoody dreams!-"I'm going up the field," I call into the kitchen, fibers of pink lox lodged like sour dental floss in the gaps between my teeth, "I'm going up the field, Ma," pounding my mitt with my carpy-smelling little fist, "I'll be back around one-" "Wait a minute. What time? Where?" "Up the field," I holier-I'm very high on hoUering to be heard, it's like being angry, except without the consequences, "-to watch the men!"

And that's the phrase that does me in as we touch down upon Eretz Yisroel: to watch the men.