I'm grateful for: books read and to read; a weekend with S2; possible buyer for our place in Vermont.

First thing, visit to the L's, family of S1's first love. It was a pleasant enough day for an outing, despite my sprained ankle and lack of wheelchair. We left S3 and D3 at home, neither particularly wanted to come, and with S3's chicken pox and D3 feeling under the weather, it was better that they should stay at home anyway.

Arrived, parked, made it up to the apartment, were invited in, all was pleasant enough.

You should hope you are never someone I feel the need to be strictly 'pleasant' with. It means I have no respect for you, probably dislike you intensely, and am so good at this particular act that no one ever knows how I truly feel about them. And I feel sick and disgusted with myself for hours or days afterward.

We were invited in and offered (told) to take seats in the front room/salon. JL the mother had prepared lunch despite our firm insistence that they not feed us. S1 went off immediately with his love, who told him apparently in no uncertain terms that she was going back to the U.S., S1 later said it was because she felt 'too much loyalty to her family.' Whatever.

He and she came back out to the front room where she and I talked about life in Israel, particularly about how it didn't have to be as awful as she/they had experienced it.

I don't know if I've written about it, or if I have in any detail, but the problem in that family is the father. He is really quite unbelievable. Just as a for instance he took the apartment in a construction site - one that was going to be in an ongoing state of construction for years because of the size of the development going in - without any regard for the fact that his wife and one of the daughters has asthma. Because it was convenient to the work that he wanted.

Oh, and because there was room for their birds. Parrots.

His selfishness, obnoxious behaviour and attitudes, self-righteousness, 'justified' anger about any- and every-thing that wasn't as he had decreed it ought to be, would make him unwelcome in many more countries than this one. Being over-bearing and stupid added to the family's troubles, and in Israel, most everything is PERSONAL. So, having set up the backs of just about everyone that he ever met or had to deal with, the family then spent all of their time in Israel not getting any help from government offices, or bank tellers, security guards, &tc. He set up the backs of his employers, and, being INCREDIBLY stupid, managed to lose his job, whereupon no one else would hire him. Israel is also a very small country. He didn't lose his job, he threw it away. I'm not willing to take the time to type the whole story. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

This is a man who, on being reasonably asked to use his fork to help get a pickle out of a jar, answers peevishly 'NO,' with a tone that indicates there is something wrong with his wife for even asking.

Well, I haven't gotten into his attitudes and ideas, which really aren't important to giving a flavour to the situation, but let me just add that this is the sort of family in which whatever the father says, goes. Mother/wife doesn't argue with him and defers to him on almost everything. Kids don't question that you just have to put up with him, he is a fact of life like hurricanes or botulism.

S1 told me that his love wanted to ask her father about her possibly staying on in Israel while the family went back to the U.S. (without a relationship with S1), and he refused to even acknowledge the question, sending her away with a negative but without actually listening to what she asked.

So we sat to dinner (mid-day meal) with this family. Mother, father, two grown daughters, and a younger son and daughter. The only really likeable one on reflection was the youngest daughter, and that probably wouldn't last. I am being harsh. You weren't there. Ugh.

After the meal, I talked to S1's love briefly in her room. She expressed an attitude so awful I almost didn't tell S1 about it. She took on a slightly superior air and said that while she was flattered of course by S1's affections, she couldn't even THINK of anything like that with him. Was that her making the most of a bad situation? Had she really led him on so far with no intention of it becoming serious for him? I had warned his mother from the very first about his feelings.

I don't know. The brief conversation I had with her convinced me that he is well out of a bad bargain. I'm sorry to say. Because it may not be true, she may just have chosen that road as the least painful to herself (not being able/willing to take the necessary blind leap to get away from the family). She had talked to S1 previously about abuses in the family that were pretty horrendous, and it seemed to him that she had wanted a knight in shining armour to rescue her. I can't guess what was in her head, either when she spoke to S1 in the past, or when we were visiting last Friday really.

After that, I went and 'visited' with the mother in her room. We chatted, I knitted and she talked about her crafts, the bins and boxes of which were piled high all over the room. But she doesn't knit. I told her of my offer that either or both of the two older girls, if they wanted to stay in Israel, would be welcome to stay with us and be cared for if they needed it. She was really quite positive and pleasant, thanked me for the offer, and told me tales of other people making similar offers.

Conversation was becoming a bit laboured, at least for me, as I had listened at least twice to her tale of finding the house they intended to live in in Montana, and singing praises of the place as if no one else had ever lived someplace with clean air and water and not too many neighbours. TH interrupted us with the news that there was serious trouble at home, S1's dog had hurt a neighbour's boy and D3 had been screamed at and was hysterical and I don't know what, and we (me gratefully) left in a hurry, saying quick goodbyes and wishes for safe trips and all of that stuff.

I really am good at making pleasant conversation with horrible people. Sometimes I make me sick.

Actually this was the second time TH did trooper duty making conversation with and distracting the father. So he gets lots of credit and thanks, and maybe some chocolate for the job that he did. Somehow he could listen to the man without ever blowing a gasket. He was once moved to expostulate at something the other man had said that was just too much to take, but then he recovered himself and sat listening until our rescue by troubles at home.

By now father, S1's love, and one of the younger kids are back in the U.S., presumably in Montana. The mother, 2nd daughter and other younger child are flying this week, and as far as I know the birds are sitting in cages somewhere in Israel for an undefined period of time. Bad craziness.

There was something else I'd wanted to write about, but my brain has lost that. I have a phone call to make, so I may write more later, or not. For those who celebrate it, have a happy Halloween.

I'm listening to the fan. What else?

:: Yesterdays : Tomorrows ::

~~~Last Five Entries~~~
Hi and goodbye - 2010-10-15
I'll be moving on - 2010-10-10
Gold membership and stuff - 2010-10-10
Decisions, decisions - 2010-10-07
Days to go - 2010-10-06