Drawing Tel Aviv

This is what I was drawing when my friend was drawing me, as we sat in a cafe this morning. She's a serious and trained artist, and knows her way around water colors, whereas I am an amateur, having fun with pen and ink in my Tree Period.

So many people in the world

This is not a new discovery, but whenever I go on a trip, I discover it all over again. The airports, the roads, the trains, the sidewalks, the shops, are so full of people: every one of them has a story to tell. And I want to hear it! What's with this curiosity? Are we all born with it, but become too busy writing our own story to have time for anyone else's? I imagine sitting around the tribal campfire listening to everyone's dreams on a regular basis. Who needs movies or TV?

Long ago my mother said, "every performer needs an audience." She was such a wise woman; she's been gone for 28 years and I still miss her.

What Else I Did in Canada

Aside from losing, replacing, and then finding my American passport, and a lot of after-school pickups, I managed to organize a family photo session. My daughter has posted the definitive and most eloquent description of that event on her blog. Be sure to scroll down to the end of the post for the grand finale. Note: the person she refers to as "my mom" is me.

What I Did in Canada *Updated*

*Update*
I gave a good bit of thought to this year's election, as did most of you. But one thing I didn't have to think about at all was whether or not to vote. Of course it's a citizen's duty to vote, but some of my dual-citizen (American-Israeli, to be precise) opted out of voting in the US election because they felt they could only vote responsibly in Israel, because they don't live in the USA any more and feel that citizenship is exclusive. I strongly disagree, for at least three reasons:

1. The USA is not just any other country, and it is disingenuous to pretend that it is. The USA is still, despite George W. Bush, the Iraq War, the economic catastrophe, the bailout, the outsourcing of manufacturing to China, the outsourcing of services to India, the USA is still the largest world power and having the opportunity to influence that power is an obligation I feel as a citizen of the world.

2. My children are US citizens and I want to do what little I can from this distance to ensure their safety and security, which definitely includes what kind of government they live under, so reason #2 is as a mother.

3. My country is so directly influenced - not controlled, but influenced - by the policies and strength of the US that anything I can do that will improve the US automatically improves Israel. So reason # 3 is as an American-Israeli, qualified: I never vote in the US election based on which candidate I think is friendlier to Israel; I vote in the US election for the candidate I think is friendlier to the US!

From Sea to Shining Sea

From English Bay in Vancouver to the East River in New York City would be more accurate. I arrived in New York City this morning, just in time to avoid the closure of Fifth Avenue for the Veterans' Day Parade, but not in time to avoid heavy traffic in all directions. If I hadn't had baggage I would have taken the subway and arrived at my best friend's apartment much sooner. Never mind. From the taxi window I got to see buildings from my childhood (Penn Station, Carnegie Hall), the building where I worked and met the father of my children (Time-Life Building), the Plaza Hotel where we spent our wedding night, and because of the hour (8:30 AM), I got to see New Yorkers hustling to work on the coldest day of my month-long trip (36 degrees Farenheit). The city seems to have managed quite well without me living in it lo these 20 years.

The scale of the place requires me to ramp up my energy level, but jet lag and the effects of a red-eye require me to take a nap. Oh the conflict (Yawn)!

Cognitive Impairment or Where Did I Put My Passport?

All of this connects my excursion to LA a few days ago with the loss of my passport a couple of weeks ago. I attended a memorial symposium at UCLA in memory of my recently deceased second-cousin, Dr. Murray Jarvik. Among the entertaining and informative talks given at the symposium by his illustrious colleagues in Neuroscience, Psychiatry, and Psychology, one - rather frighteningly entitled "Pre-Symptomatic Cognitive Impairment" - really captured my interest. It was delivered by Dr. Herman Buschke, a Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which Murray had attended many decades ago. Despite the technical title, Dr. Buschke's talk was beautifully accessible. Many of my friends suffer from lapses of memory. We jokingly call them "Senior Moments," but really worry that our memory is failing in ways that could precede Alzheimer's Disease or Senile Dementia. As of now, there seems to be little known about how to diagnose or treat either of those ailments, but Dr. Buschke and his researchers are working away in their labs and at conferences to develop and share their findings.

To sum up in layman's terms, they found that memory involves two different kinds of work: encoding and recall. In my former life teaching systems analysis, we used to call it storage and retrieval. Because we were designing computer systems, there were many levels of encoding involved, but the highest level was naming. Dr. Buschke's human memory impairment screening test calls these names "categories" and tests category-cued recall. [Note: Google uses the keywords you supply as categories and does a nice job of "recall." But if you don't give it good keywords, you won't get it to retrieve what you're looking for.] So an important step in remembering something is assigning it to the proper category, e.g. "What movie made Johnny Depp really famous?" Pirates of the Caribbean can be filed in your memory as a movie, a DVD, a screenplay, a musical, the thing you saw with your boyfriend on his birthday, but way to answer the question is to recall it from the movie category.

I lost my passport because in a way I didn't have it assigned to the right category. I found the passport this morning, now that it's been invalidated and replaced, for an outlay of about $120, including new photos, bus fare downtown twice, and the cellphone storage fee at the coffee shop across the street from the Consulate. When I reported the passport lost, the person at the Consulate said be sure to check all the zippered pockets in my luggage, because it was a common place for passports to hide. I assured her I had. I believed I had. BUT...

My latest skin treatment is something called Enbrel, a product that requires refrigeration. It is dispensed by self-administered subcutaneous injection, so the packaging is quite bulky, what with syringe components encased in plastic and everything supposedly sterile. As a result, the manufacturer supplies a large cooler bag for storage on lengthy trips. With appropriate doctors' letters, the airline security people let you carry this bag on board without counting it in your carry-on limitation. (In the olden days, you could store medications in the plane's refrigerator, but now they just give you a bag of ice cubes.) In said cooler bag there is a nifty little outside zipped pocket for storing doctors' letters.

This is the first trip I've taken with the cooler bag + doctor's letter, so during the trip that involved four airports, I kept moving that letter around from with the plane tickets to with the passport, to a pocket, to the backpack, to the hand. Finally, after going through immigration at my destination 32 hours after leaving home, I stored the passport in the little zippered pocket of the cooler bag. I checked it when I arrived, but the passport slipped down to the bottom and evaded me - the sneaky little devil!

Now it can be told

I lost my passport somewhere between the airport and my daughter's house upon arrival last week. I had been traveling for 32 hours, and although that's no excuse, it's probably the reason. I called the taxi company, whose name I had the presence of mind to note as I entered the cab, and I called the airport lost and found. Nada. I was so anxious and embarrassed that I didn't tell a soul. Monday morning I braved the unfamiliar bus lines in an unfamiliar city, and thanks to an old-fashioned paper map, I found my way to the Vancouver American Consulate and reported the loss. I was dismayed to learn that not only is it forbidden to enter the Consulate with a cellphone, as it is at the Embassy in Tel Aviv, but unlike Tel Aviv, there is no checking facility. After asking around the neighborhood, I learned that a crummy-looking coffee shop across the street does a booming business checking cellphones and laptops for $5.00, no guarantees, no receipts, no nothin.' So I decided to risk it, and let them store my iPhone.

The security to enter the Consulate made airport security look puny by comparison. Luckily I had not lost my Israeli passport, which was acceptable as photo ID. The over-systematized service windows did not systematize emergencies, of which I was one, so I had to wing it. My passport was invalidated, so all you imposters out there won't be able to use it, and I was given an appointment to return for an emergency passport Wednesday (yesterday), so I did. This time I left my iPhone home and saved myself $5.00, and brought two pictures of the appropriate size and composition. Luckily I had a photocopy of the lost passport (highly recommended for all travelers!), so I was able to complete the application form thoroughly and as a result, a mere two hours later I left with a replacement passport, good for one year!

When I told my daughter, she thanked me for keeping it a secret; the trials of home ownership are stressing her out sufficiently these days.