Mishmar Hasharon - An Outline Of Sorts

Outlining Mishmar Hasharon
Today I feel rich. I can tell by the things that have collected on my bed throughout the day, my loot.
On the bed, the flowers and notebooks:
My program is called an 'ulpan' - hebrew immersion. So the schedule we 'ulpanists' follow is alternating days of class, and working various jobs within the kibbutz community. I spent the first two weeks working in the fish shop, then was switched to the garden, I had one day cleaning the ulpan building…and today was back in the fish shop. It’s a disgustingly fascinating business, really. Mishmar Hasharon has its own fish ponds, for which they are well known. Each day baskets of fish are lugged over to the shop and dumped in tanks right there behind the counter where the customers can see them. There are numbered crates stacked up, and when an order is taken it’s assigned a number by whoever’s working the counter, which is whoever happens to be standing closest. They use orange nets to catch the flipping fishies and fling ‘em into their respective crates to be de-scaled and de-finned. The crates pile up, and whenever one of the butchers is ready they yell “Ken! Mah Od! Number!’ (Yes! What else! Number!) The person at the counter yells a number back from one of his slips of paper and then the requested cut. (Imagine during Rosh Hashanah at least fifteen Israeli and Arab guys yelling back and forth over a small space, fish flicking water everywhere and twenty impatient Israeli geezers waiting in line, trying to tell them what to do, that was an adventure)

So Sydney and I watched as Achmad, Machmid, Nevo and Boaz slit open fish after fish, pulling the guts out, scrubbing the insides, sometimes taking out the bones sometimes not, slicing them up and bagging the rolly polly heads; Achmad looking over at us every twenty seconds or so to make sure we were still engrossed (key word ‘grossed’), shoot us a winning smile and say ‘mah nishmah Seeney? Mah nishmah Aliza?’ Where were we in this process? Well, gefilte fish is, believe it or not, extremely popular. So, when Nir would shout, ‘Etzem, gav, tachoon!’ we learned it meant in shorthand: ‘take out the bones, save the spine, and grind!’. A crate would slide across the tiles in our direction and we’d run the fish chunks through a grinding machine.
After a few weeks of working in the garden, weeding, pruning, collecting trash, riding on the back of the tractor (!), and Sukkot holidays I wasn’t exactly looking forward to being back in the shop, even though the guys are fun to hang out with and there’s plenty of bread and hummus for us to munch. I choose sun and sweat over smelly fish and guts any day.

But today my work started at 9 a.m. and ended before 10. There were five people working and we had maybe twenty customers total by the time I left at 3:30. I helped Nir sort the sleeping fish, by size, first thing in the morning, then watched as Machmid dumped some magical chemical in the tank that put them right back to sleep, as they had woken up and were not happy about being sorted. No joke, it was instantaneous. Have you ever seen a sleeping fish? Because before today it was not something I ever thought about fish doing, but they do!
I ground up one fish and then set up camp with my Hebrew notebooks and conjugated verbs!

But no one really had anything to do, so I got to practice speaking with Achmad, his brother Machmid, and ask their dad Farid about his family. Nir showed me pictures of his trip to South America after the army. Machmid and I had a game of backgammon (sheshpesh here). But the best part was sitting with Achmad, notebook in hand, Machmid over my shoulder, going over the English alphabet and then flipping the page so he could teach me some Arabic. Common language? Hebrew baby!

In true Middle Eastern fashion, Achmad disappeared at some point and came back with a flower, five minutes later Nir stopped by the table, picked up the same flower and re-presented it as his own gift, and then they argued dramatically about who had given it.
It was just the five of us all day, with some kibbutznik visitors, so we played up the unusual time and space we had.
I skipped outta there an hour early and picked some more flowers as I headed over to Colin’s studio.

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On the bed, the bowl: (not the kind you smoke out of, for those of you whose heads are in the clouds)