What strikes me lately is that we’ve had wars — plural.

The word moves too easily into conversation now, as if it were a season or weekend plans.

This should never be normal.

Sometimes at night, when sleep refuses to come — because sirens and adrenaline have trained my nervous system to prep for danger — I find myself drifting back to music from the eighties.

Songs from another universe entirely:

Madonna. Erasure. George Michael. Cuz you gotta have faith.

And I go home to my childhood for a moment.

Salt and sand and suntan oil on Venice Beach.

A loud world of blue eye shadow and fuchsia lipstick.

Big hair. Neon lights.

I was a kid then with huuuuuge plans.

Doctor. Astronaut. Fairy princess.

All of them felt equally possible.

One of the songs that keeps finding me again lately is Ahah’s “Take On Me.”

Take on me. Take me home.

I heard it again just yesterday while picking up a Jerusalem mix — meorav — kidneys, hearts, everything sizzling together on the grill and stuffed into a pita.

“I love this song,” I said out loud — and for a moment I forgot what timeline I was in.

I was back on the beach. I was four years old. Israel, for me, was just a place we talked about on Passover.

The woman in front of me had electric blue eye shadow and the easy confidence of someone who had seen a few things. She said when she first heard it she was a 37 year old mother of three when the song came out. Now she’s a great grandmother.

The man standing beside me was in the army when he first heard it.

“1985,” he said. “First time I heard it on the radio. Same year I tried meorav for the first time and my first year in the army.”

He lifted the pita slightly, like a toast.

Back then the country felt different.

For the first time in years the old rivals — Mapai and Herut, Labor and Likud — were sitting together in government. Israelis argued about politics the way we always have, loudly and passionately, but the ground beneath the arguments still felt stable.

Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon by 1985.

Hyper inflation ended.

The Intifada hadn’t erupted yet.

People moved through cities and villages and down to the sea. Arabs and Jews knew each other. Some were even friends.

You could stand on a Jerusalem street eating a pita filled with hearts and kidneys, listening to a pop song from Norway, and then drive to the beach in Gaza.

The woman with the blue eye shadow had her memories.

The man beside me had his.

And I had mine — Venice Beach and the smell of salt and sunscreen and the feeling that the future was enormous and glittering and just beginning. A doctor. An astronaut. A fairy princess.

Now we measure time differently.

And now sometimes late at night, when the house is quiet and my nervous system is still humming with the echo of sirens, that old chorus drifts back to me.

Take on me. Take me home.

And I saw each one of us standing there — the 37 year old mother of 3 with the blue eye shadow, the young soldier with the pita full of Jerusalem mix, the little girl who once danced on the sand in California.

Each of us carrying a different version of the same song.

Each of us remembering a world that felt simpler, even if it wasn’t.

A world where the future still seemed wide open.

Now the future arrives differently. It arrives in alerts. In sirens. In fear and grief and exhaustion. In the strange vocabulary of wars — plural.

But sometimes, in the middle of an extraordinarily ordinary Jerusalem afternoon, a song floats out of a radio above a grill full of sizzling hearts and kidneys, and suddenly all the timelines collapse into each other.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)