The Land with Promise

            When I was five, my parents pulled me out of kindergarten to meet you. It was spring of ‘71, the year Apollo 14 landed on the moon, and you’d just turned twenty-three. Like an astronaut, I was blasted into space—San Francisco to New York to London—until finally arriving in a cramped airport surrounded by police and palm trees. Hebrew hummed in my ears. My body felt upside down and inside out, wrung out like the coarse strings of a mop. 

            Each morning, I awakened, my forehead swaddled in sweat, sheets dangling off the bed. I couldn’t step outside without a brimmed hat and bottle of water, white sunscreen slathered on my fair, freckled skin.

            Everyone from second cousins to souk sellers offered tangy grapefruit juice and crunchy sesame candies, urging us to sit, stay, schmooze. Cigarette smoke drifted blindly. We tasted your fried, cumin-filled falafel; we dipped in your seas—Red, Med, Dead; we planted saplings in your fledgling forests, your soil hungry for hands to dig. 

            When the grown-ups spoke in hushed voices, uttering words like army and enemy and war, I startled. Teenaged soldiers with guns slung across their shoulders steered khaki-green trucks, waving when they passed us on bumpy, barren roads.

            What I remember most was your empty space. Rosy dirt. Russet dust. Acres and acres of earth. Miles of void. Houses spread across vast patches of still unclaimed, undeveloped terrain. A desert desperate, yearning to bloom. I wondered if anybody felt scared, lonely. I wondered if that’s what Alan Shepard experienced when he walked on the moon.

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