Normally, a parent might agonize over her teen\’s decision to defer her freshman year of college. But when my 18-year-old daughter Lauren left recently on a flight to Israel — deferring her first year at college for yet a second time — I was thrilled.
I have cancer. It\’s thyroid cancer, which has metastasized. In every bone in my body there is a tumor eating it from the inside out.
That\’s why I was at the Cedars-Sinai Outpatient Cancer Center on June 25, 2003, having a bone infusion. I sat there on one of those comfortable chairs as the drug slowly slipped into my veins to make my bones stronger.
And that\’s where I saw her — an old friend and a former client who emigrated from Iran. We were so happy to see one another. She was there with a friend, who was there perhaps for a reason similar to mine.
Critics say Los Angeles is all image. The city, they claim, presents an illusion to the world much like the movies Hollywood projects on its big screens. The myth goes that it\’s a city of facades, with the favored tools are the editor\’s airbrush or the plastic surgeon\’s scalpel. There are no friendships here, only contacts and connections, they say.
Last week in Baghdad, 30 Iranians were captured fighting for the militant Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. A few days earlier, two trucks transporting weapons for Sadr\’s fighters were caught trying to drive into Iraq from Iran.
Primarily, I learned, as a writer, that if you live with a crime long enough, it seeps into you. You cry at the trials. You hug the siblings of the victim, and they hug you. You keep your distance. You know that the best thing most of the time is just to keep your trap shut and let people talk when they feel it is safe for them to talk — or when they feel they can do nothing but talk.
\”People don\’t become suicide bombers for the fun of it, you know. They have grievances.\”
For thousands of years, communities have wrestled with the question of how to treat accidental killers. The Book of Numbers (consistent with a shorter passage in Exodus) tells us that God instructed Moses to tell the Israelites to establish six cities of refuge to which accidental killers could flee. The accidental killer was to be protected from the wrath of the victim\’s family — the \”blood avenger\” — so long as he remained within the city of refuge. Only when the high priest of the city died could the killer return home.
These days, many women complain about the epidemic of males who run in terror from the thought of a committed relationship.
Back in the good old days, when I traveled freely though the Gaza Strip, Rafah was our neighboring village across a stretch of sand, my boss was Ahmad from Khan Yunis and stones were for building, not for throwing.
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