Staying Real in Israel
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"The Marty Roberts Show"

Guess that’s life in Southern Israel these days…

So me and the wife are settling in the other night for our evening ritual of TV series and snacks. I’m setting things up and Ellen is downstairs getting into her ‘jammies and sweats.
She calls me, but, me being a new member of the 60+ generation and a bit hard of hearing even before qualifying for membership in the AARP, I don’t answer, so she tries a bit louder.

“MARTY!!!”

“WHAT?”, my witty reply.

“It’s a siren”, she says, a bit louder this time. “You better get on down here”.

“Oh, crap”, says me, “We’re going to miss the beginning of Boardwalk Empire!…”Okay, okay, I’m coming…and I’ll bring the dogs.”

I realize that we better get in the “safe room”/bomb shelter that every home in Israel is required by building code to have. It’s rare that Hamas hits anything with their primitive missiles, but every now and then there’s a wrecked house, and there’s even been a few dead people.

So we gather downstairs, in the basement, under a doorjamb, far from any glass windows, but NOT QUITE in the bomb shelter itself. It’s kind of too cluttered with old cribs, books, dental molds and bird food for a full size human to fit in, let alone a couple and three dogs. Besides, the missiles don’t usually hit anything, right? But that siren is still wailing and it’s kind of a scary sound, even after the tenth time hearing it and running (slowly) to the shelter. Better safe than sorry.

So after a couple of minutes the siren stops. Ellen says, “Let’s go upstairs and watch TV”.

“But the orders say we wait in the shelter for10 minutes to be sure nothing explodes”.

“But we’re not REALLY even in the shelter.”

“Alright, alright”

After about 90 seconds, we get tired of standing there like fools, so we head up and hit the popcorn (now a bit burned), sunflower seeds. Boardwalk Empire, House and Dexter are waiting.

I turn to Ellen about an hour later and say, “You know, I was just thinking. How weird is it? There are people that are actually shooting rockets and missiles at our house. For real. They want to blow up our house and kill you, me, the dogs and the children. FOR REAL!!! Could you imagine that if we were still living in America?”

“Shhhhh…”House” is starting.

I guess you get used to anything after a while.

Life in Southern Israel…