Brooke: Avatiach! Avatiach!
February 8, 2008
Israelis eat watermelon.
During July and August—the height of the season—the streets of Israel fill up with large wooden melon carts. The carts amble slowly, unhurried and the vendors calling through crackly old megaphones yell in Hebrew “Avatiach! Avatiach!” — “Watermelon, Watermelon!” as people scramble to purchase their favorite summertime fruit. Later they will serve it in a bowl, carefully cut and cubed, with nuts and tea for their guests—the perfect summertime treat. Sweet and refreshing.
In America, the summer streets are filled with ice-cream trucks. Sleek and white, neat menus printed on their sides and loud tinny music springing from their speakers. Children run to the streets with pocket change to buy fudgesicles, ice cream sandwiches, strawberry milkshakes—whatever they can scrape up the money for. If they are lucky they might even buy one of those colorful Popsicles shaped like The Hulk or Spiderman.
But not Aileen Tamir. She never ate Popsicles shaped like the Hulk or like Spiderman or like any of the other cheesy Marvel superheroes. Summer in the Tamir household meant watermelon, and never mind that Los Angeles was about as far away from Israel as a person could get. It was a tradition.
The day before Ami Tamir returned to his native Israel he ate watermelon with his family one last time. It was a hot day in Los Angeles, a peaceful day. They sat together in the backyard. Nothing about the scene suggested that in just a few hours the already small family of three would be reduced to two. Fuse, the family dog, sat panting under the shade of the trampoline, chewing on watermelon rinds. Ami sat with his wife on the garden swing. He was a large man, strongly built and well over 6 feet tall. Silent, stoic, he threw the rinds to Fuse, and a small wistful smile played on his lips as the dog caught them in her hungry jaws and gnawed them down to the green.
The next morning the family woke up, Ami packed his bags, they drove the 20 minutes to the Los Angeles airport and said goodbye, forever.
“You both can come with me if you want,” Ami said one last time, his voice was thick and clumsy in English. He had never managed to hide his accent.
Aileen shook her head. She had loved all of their summer trips to Israel, but could not envision spending the rest of her life there.
“All right,” he said in a moment. “Well, then goodbye.”
A quick hug a wave of his hand, and he left. There were no tears, no sighs—just a silent, seamless acceptance. He had never belonged in Los Angeles anyways. Not in the land of shiny white ice cream trucks and metallic, manufactured tunes. He belonged in Israel, with the watermelon.
I love the concept! There’s a lot of good stuff here but I think some reanging would help. Just a suggestion but I think if Ami’s leaving came more out-of-the-blue we would get a better sense of this scene’s wonderful statement on the non-chalance of the moments that change our lives. What I mean is, perhaps if you take out this sentence “Nothing about the scene suggested that in just a few hours the already small family of three would be reduced to two.” and just describe the watermelon eating, maybe with come unimportant dialogue followed by Ami’s “announcement” followed by more friendly chit chat.
The whole thing actually reminds me of a great scene in the Gus Van Sant movie “Gerry” with Matt Damon and Casey Aflec. They have been lost in the desert for almost a day and they are sitting around a campfire they made talking about the stradegy for the Age of Empires videogame, emphasizing their obliviousness of the severity of the situation. Not that the Tamirs were oblivious.