A Very Good Memory: “That little coffee kiosk in Tel Aviv”

Scrolling through my library of photos yesterday morning, I came across a very good memory. Before my trip last summer to Tel Aviv, I looked up how to order my favorite drink, then took a screenshot of the translation: “An almond milk latte.” / “Latta im chalav sh’kadim.”

Every morning for a week, my parents and I would walk down David Ben Gurion Boulevard. Where the street intersected with Ben Yehuda, there was this little coffee kiosk which would be in the encyclopedia if you were to look up “Tel Avivian coffee kiosk,” so bursting it was of young and beautiful expats with their neo-hippie laissez faire, their borrowed Israeli confidence (which looked great on them, by the way). In a parallel reality, I would visit that kiosk every morning and order my lattah im chalav sh’kadim, and then I would sit at one of the tables beside the pedestrian median and the great, big trees with the sleeping bats in their boughs and edit yesterday’s writing, learning the faces of the other regulars, picking up a phrase here and there from couples at nearby tables; watching as Tel Aviv languidly stretched, then sprung back in dizzying splendor, despite the world.

I admittedly didn’t have to use my newfound vocabulary knowledge until my very last day in Israel (there was an espresso machine in our apartment and that made us very spoiled), ordering a latte at the airport, half in Hebrew and half in English. How bittersweet that moment was, watching the planes arrive and thinking how wrong it felt, absolutely, to be leaving when I’d only just arrived.

Where many are sharing the horrors of a broken reality in Israel, I wanted to share something good about that place. Something that affirms Life, and the people who live there. Later, the possibility of making this a campaign became a reality, even if it only begins and ends as a campaign of one. 

“A Very Good Memory,” I call it. Not because I’m turning a “blind eye” to evil—for, indeed, it is the acute awareness of evil that makes me affirm Life with unwavering resolve. But because there are too many in the world right now who cannot bring themselves to summon their joy—to touch into their Souls.

It’s for them that I issue this call to action:

Joy is everlasting, limitless, eternal. Share a memory of joy during this time of darkness to strengthen joy’s presence on the planet. Do it for the people who are smothering under the curtain of darkness, immobile in its web. Do it for them, so that, like a whisper, joy will one day find its way back into the air they exhale, the dreams they sleep.

.זיכרון טוב מאוד