In Which Jasmine Talks Family

Whoops, it's been a couple days. My bad. I kept meaning to updated but I'm afraid my blog posts will revert to their former incarnation of: This is what I did today and then I did this and then I did this. For the sake of updating about my life: class is boring and homework is tedious. Today we read a sad story about a little boy who gets a piggy bank and fills it up to save up for a toy. But he ends up totally loving his piggy bank (he names it and everything), and then his father tries to smash it to get the money out, and the boy gets upset. He ends up going out and leaving the piggy bank (still full of money) in a field so his father won't get to it. It was really depressing! He was never going to see his best friend the piggy bank again. And yes, I realize how silly this sounds but seriously. It was sad. Anyways, now I think I have something much more interesting and important to write about, and that is how awesome my cousins are, plus the rest of my family.

I have two first cousins and they are both great! I have a small family in general: my dad is an only child and my mom only has one brother, hence the two cousins. I have some other second cousins or something but we're not close and I actually don't even know how they're related to me. My entire family besides my parents and my siblings (plus some distant family in Brazil - random, right? Apparently they moved there right before World War II) lives in Israel. When I was younger, my family would fly over every summer to spend about a month here, staying with my grandparents and seeing old family friends. My cousins would come visit once or twice during that month, and when we were younger it was great. My older cousin (who is turning 23 on Friday) and I would make scavenger hunts for my brother, my sister, and my younger cousin, now 19. We wrote the clues in Hebrew and English so everyone could understand and hid them throughout my grandfather's apartment. The prize was always something small we could scrape together on the spot - a handful of chocolate coins, or some candy from my grandmother's cabinet, where she kept the sweet things she liked to give us. We made human pyramids in the dirt backyard under my grandfather's apartment, surrounded by all the stray cats Israel is so well known for. We were great friends in the easy way young children have.

When I started my sophomore year of high school, I got busy. I had homework and summer work and a volunteering job. There were things I had to do during the summer that couldn't be put on hold to go away for a month and bake in front of the air conditioning. I missed my own brother's bar mitzvah because I couldn't make it to Israel - and that's something that I will most likely never stop feeling guilty about, although I'm pretty sure at this point he could care less. But the main idea is that I was busy all the time. So the summer before my junior year was the last time I flew to Israel with my family. I didn't go back until last winter, during my second year of college.

By then, quite a lot had changed. My grandfather had been living alone for about ten years by that point (my maternal grandmother passed away in 1999 and she was, I'm convinced, the greatest woman I have ever met), and he was about to turn 90. Fortunately, he was still in good health. My other grandmother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and the disease had been taking a serious toll. By that point, she didn't know who I was. My father's father, while still mostly sound in mind, couldn't walk without a cane and someone holding him up.

Then I saw my cousins. Without my noticing, they had sprung up about ten feet, cut their hair and become young men. They were soldiers: my younger cousin does something to do with tanks and support teams and my older cousin is a paratrooper and an officer. When I met them for the first time in four years, everything for all of us was different. I realized that I wanted to be their friend again like I had been, but now I had no idea how. I think that that, along with not seeing my grandmother before she lost her memories of me completely, is one of the things that I most regret about not making it back to Israel during those four years, and when I flew back to the States, that new distance between my cousins and me stayed with me.

But now things are changing again. I'm here in Israel, and I'll be here for the longest time I've ever spent in the country: just about four months now. I saw my cousins last weekend and it was weird and a little awkward and generally amazing. The idea that I can see them in about two weeks again is mind-blowing for me! The fact that I could get on a bus and go visit my grandparents is unbelievable.

What's the point? The point is this: I love my family to death, but it's always been death at a distance. Now I have the chance to make it up to them and to myself by actually getting to know them and being around them. And I can't wait.