Saturday, August 14, 2004

Bungling Biblical Bus "Trip"

This happened to me a few weeks ago on a bus in Jerusalem:

I was on the bus today typing some very personal private secretive correspondence on my palm pilot with fold-out key board when this kid in his late teens early 20s comes and sits down next to me and starts looking over my shoulder. He was a good looking kid and had sort of an American teenager look to him. You know, baseball cap, basketball tank top shirt and curly dark hair. So he's looking at my palm and I figure he's an American kid who can read English and so I get a bit worried. Maybe he's reading my private content over my shoulder. And this was really way private stuff. So I turned to him and said in sort of a playful and friendly (with a big smile) but playfully accusatory tone (in English); "Are you reading this?"

The kid is surprised and has no idea what I said cause he evidently doesn't know a word of English. He lurches back and spills his Cola on his shoulder and mutters something incomprehensible to me. So I told him not to worry (switching to Hebrew now) and that I was just writing something very private and that I was sorry about being so oversensitive.

I guess the humor here is in the way he spilled the Cola, the fact that he didn't even seem to notice that he spilled the Cola, how much I mis-categorized him, and how we surprised each other so profoundly and so suddenly.

So then my stop is coming up fast and I had to make a move for the bell and position myself near the back door in time to attract the driver's attention so that he would open the back door for me. But I had to save the file I was writing and then detach and fold up the keyboard first. I was in such a hurry that as I lunged for the door after ringing the bell, I stepped on someone's foot. This guy who's foot I stepped on must have thought that this was the funniest thing in the world. He gave me this big smile and said "darachta vegam fisfasta!" You have both trampled and missed (your stop)! Modeling his words poetically after the verse reporting the words of the prophet to King Achav (Kings 1: Chpt 21) Ratzachta vegam Yarashta? "Have you both murdered and inherited?" So I said back to this guy, "but I haven't murdered and inherited!," to which he replied with typical Israeli cynicism, ode lo! "Not yet!"