Chapter 1 from my book "Doodle & the Wandering Jew"
DOODLE
u.s.a. 1979
In the beginning was the Word.
And the Word was Doodle.
“Doo-dle, doo-dle, you are a doooo-dle.”
Despite my little sister’s insistent taunt and my helpless imprisonment in our family station wagon, I would not accept that I was Doodle.
“Doooo-dle.”
My parents’ perception, typically dull like all grownups, hindered them from seeing that Hanna’s chant was more than just an innocent six-year-old’s little ditty. Lulling our baby brother Avner to sleep was her perfect alibi as he suckled away beside her, in hungry abandonment, on Mum’s exhausted teat. Hanna knew every nuance of my vulnerabilities and calmly doodled renditions of me with a multi-coloured palette of crummy crayons in accompaniment to her song.
“Doo-dle, doo-dle, you are a doooo-dle.”
Nothing on Heaven or Earth was more inciting than my sister’s illustrations of me as Doodle. Page after page of plain white paper, desecrated. Forests felled to sawdust in sacrifice for the iconography of the darned Doodle derision.
“Daaaaaad….!” I launched my furious protest from the hull. Hanna watched with sadistic glee as it ricocheted through the backseat row towards the pilot cabin, waking Avner in a scream and Mum in a tutting bout of exasperation.
The skin on Dad's nape turned pale grey. Why it always turned grey when he was angry, I never understood.
“Will you shut the ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffu…” With superhuman strength, Dad suppressed the volcanic explosion of parental frustration at the folly of travelling the world with little children in a station wagon.
In my persecuted despair, I slouched in the car boot upon the pile of books that served as both my mattress and my entertainment for our three-month journey across the globe towards the Holy Land, fuming at the memory of Mrs. Bucket’s lame attempt to compare it to the biblical Exodus.
“Mrs. Bucket?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Moisheh is mean,” I stated.
“How so?”
“Nobody wants to go to Canaan, and they’re not getting anywhere either, but he’s getting angry at them for getting angry at him for not fulfilling his promises.”
“Sometimes it takes a long time to get where you want to go,” said Mrs. Bucket in Moisheh’s defence.
“But they didn’t want to go.”
“They were too preoccupied to realise that they truly did want to go.”
“But you can’t tell someone that they want to go if they don’t want to go and then punish them for being upset that they don’t want to get to where they’re not getting to.”
Mrs. Bucket’s forehead crumpled up in confusion. "Well, you're also going to the Holy Land soon." Aren’t you excited?”
I looked around at my class, not wanting to admit that I was, in fact, deeply peeved. The Torah of Moisheh had endless lists of things a Jew is expected to do, but also lots of stories as well. The recurring theme of endless trails that never led anywhere or got you to where you wanted to go was particularly annoying.
Mrs. Bucket didn’t wait for my answer: “And we’re all going to write letters to you. Aren’t we children?”
“Yes, Mrs. Bucket,” sang the celestial chorus of hell.
“You are?” I was genuinely surprised.
“Yes. I spoke to your father, and we agreed that you would send us letters about your travels, and we would all write back.”
“You did?”
“Yes, I did. You’ll be our little Moisheh.”
This sounded promising.
“Oh! So that means you’re all coming too?” I looked around the room with elation. Everyone looked back at me with a dull, blank stare. Even my Blue Shark mates.
Mrs. Bucket cleared her throat. “Amm, no. We’re not coming... yet.”
I really loved Mrs. Bucket, but the disappointment of her misleading rhetoric was too much for me.
“So, I’m no Moisheh, then, am I!”
I couldn’t see the point of driving all the way from New Zealand to Israel in a station wagon when there were obviously quicker methods, like trains or airplanes or a spaceship even. Our primitive travel arrangement confirmed my suspicions that this so-called adventure of discovery and broadening horizons would mark 1979 as the worst year in history. My parents couldn’t fool me. I was already eight years old, and I knew stuff. I knew that this station wagon slug ride was the compromise between Mum wanting to reach her home in Israel and Dad wanting to postpone getting there.
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