After A Night's Sleep

I do feel better.  Last night I forced myself to stay up to watch my favorite TV show, Law & Order, but I fell asleep after the opening credits, woke for a minute in the middle and made my way to bed. Those peculiar posts I posted were before the show, when I was trying to stay awake.

Yesterday I took my father to Jerusalem to get his Te'udat Zehut, Israeli Identity Card.  My daughter had checked hours and discovered that there are afternoon hours.  Well, it's open twice a week in the afternoon, but not for Identity Cards. She got them to agree to see us anyway.

Somehow I didn't know that we needed all the same documents, originals and copies like we showed the aliyah shaliach, the guy we met in New York to approve my father's aliyah.  The problem is that the originals are back in the bank vault in New York and whoever had taken them out had made one copy each.  My mother will need some, like their marriage certificate, for her own meeting.

The clerk and my daughter ended up talking and negotiating above my head, if you follow. It was very obvious that they considered me in the same category as my father.  I didn't fight it.  At this point if my daughter wants to take over something else, fine with me.  My life's complicated enough.  She's also in charge of the medication.  She should have been a doctor or something like that.

We got into Jerusalem early.  I had gotten a call from Steve Leibowitz of IBA News asking me to come in for a quick sound-bite interview.  I was hoping he'd offer a taxi, like when they had me driven in about 13 years ago after I had been run over by an Arab terrorist and I was the featured interviewee.  Instead I walked with my father from the bus station to the studio's parking lot to stand under a tree for a quickee interview.  My father got a kick out of seeing news being made and meeting a TV star, Elli Wohlgelernter in addition to Steve, who's a fan of my son's football prowess.

After that adventure in modern media, we took a cab to downtown Jerusalem and went to "Ha'Ozen," a hearing aid place, where a very nice young man taught me how to clean and change the batteries of my father's hearing aids.

From there we walked to the Interior Ministry, yes my father is quite a walker, and we did what I wrote about earlier in this post.  After that we went to the optician across the street, sorry I forgot its name, and we had his glasses repaired and cleaned.  By then my two sons had joined us and we got something to eat at Coffee Bean.

We took a bus to the bus station.  It was raining.  The same neighbor, aka the lantzman who had driven us down to catch the bus late morning, picked us up and took us home from the Shiloh bus stop.  It was pouring rain, thank G-d.

If I was exhausted, for sure my father was even moreso.