Only So Much Daylight

Dearest Rachel –

You don’t need to be reminded about this (if for no other reason, you haven’t to deal with these issues anymore, having left this world behind and living outside of time these days), but it’s like so many other situation; when you’re away from a thing, you forget what it’s like to deal with. While I didn’t have to deal with it this past Sunday, I can guarantee that once we get a decent snowfall back home, people will have to re-learn how to drive in it, for example. On my own end, I’m not looking forward to returning from here and having to deal with the freezing temperatures of Chicago in late November.  Still, at least I can bundle up, and throw some more ‘reindeer skins’ onto the bed, if need be.

What can’t be adjusted for is how long the sun deigns to stay up.  Israel is on a curious form of Daylight Savings Time (although it’s probably not considered as such), running only a couple of hours ahead of the U.K.  It’s as if New York was but two hours ahead of Los Angeles, in terms of time zones. As a result, the sun rises before we can get up (even when I set my alarm for 5:30 in Netanya, it was well over the horizon already) and sets before dinner is served, at about five o’clock. And as our time here wears on, we’re starting to get up before the sun itself. 

On the other end of the day, however, this means we only have so much time for sightseeing in any given day; by five o’clock, there’s nothing to see because you can’t see anything in the dark. So the days are going to be absolutely frantic, but there’s plenty of evening in which there’s not much that can be done. As far as I’m concerned, I’m grateful for that, because it gives me time to edit and upload the video footage I’ve shot during the day – and I hate to admit it, but there are a lot of first, second and even third takes that I have to edit out now and then). For others, it’s a chance to catch up on sleep lost in transit, as they say it takes a day to recover from each hour removed from your own time zone – which means that, by the time we will have recovered, it will be time to go home, and we’ll need another eight days to recover from that.

Of course, you would spend those evening hours wandering the hotel for someone to chat with or play card games with. I know you used to tell me about the conversations you would have, but usually in the morning, we were too busy getting ourselves ready to get on the bus and get going, that whatever you related to me would pass in less time than it takes to record these reminiscences. It may have been that these were inconsequential encounters – although I doubt you saw them as such in the moment, or else you would not have been able to remember them well enough to relay to me the following morning.

If you couldn’t find anyone to talk to or play with (and sometimes, even when you could), you would always take the opportunity to go swimming, whether in the hotel pool or, if you could, the sea itself.  On our first trip, you and I snuck into the side of the (closed) waterpark next to our hotel (with me standing as a sort of lookout) so you could claim to have swam in the Sea of Galilee; with Ginosar being right on the shore our second time around, you didn’t have to sneak out then – although at that point, you still had to be careful simply because it was so dark out.  Finding your way around outside once the sun was down, while perfectly safe, could be challenging to make your way around in.

***

I really don’t know what all of the stories that you encountered in those evenings were like. Of the ones you related to me, I remember next to nothing, and I’m sure there are some that you yourself never remembered to tell me about. It’s possible that they were never meant to be remembered; just the ordinary ephemera of everyday life on the road.  But these days, I’m realizing how important those days really are, in a sort of “Our Town” kind of way, and I’m trying to record them for posterity in those darker downtime moments.

I only wish I’d thought to do this sooner, honey. All I can do now is to advise others to do so in their lives, and not make the mistake of not collecting memories like I have.  That, and in future, writing these missives as I go along, including a request for you to keep an eye on me, and to wish me luck, as I’m going to need it from day to day.