cable car – Miriam Drori, Author

I Want to Go Back

I haven’t written a poem for a long time, but this one suddenly turned up in my mind. I was listening to the song Days of Binyamina – ימי בנימינה, in which a man looks back fondly at his carefree childhood. The chorus begins: אני רוצה לחזור אל הימים הכי יפים שלי. I didn’t like the translations I found and wrote my own: I want to go back to the good old days. A more correct translation might have been: I want to go back to my good old days, but that doesn’t sound right in English. You know what? On second thoughts, why not?

I want to go back

I want to go back to my good old days
When the love of my life was alive,
When we walked and talked and toured the world,
And returned to our beautiful hive.

I want to go back to my good old days
When we lived in a bubble of bliss,
When the baddies stayed outside the fence
And rockets went to space.

I want to go back but I know I can’t.
So I’ll stay in present. At least I still dance.

I know the “good old days” are a delusion that never existed. Everything is relative.

David Drori and Walking

This is my second post about David Drori (1953-2023). Here’s the first. There might be more – no promises.

We met in the summer of 1973, at a guitar lesson. I was drawn to his shyness, making him refreshingly different from all the boys I’d met up to then. When we parted ways at Euston Underground Station, he gave me his phone number and said, “Give me a call sometime.”

So I did. I invited him to a ramble organised by the Zionist youth movement I belonged to. Little did I know how fitting that was. He was planning to live in Israel, and he loved walking. I liked walking, too, although my walks had been quite limited up to then. I hadn’t seriously considered emigrating to Israel; it was more of a dream at that point.

Over the years, we did lots of walking. We walked in various parts of the UK, in Norway, in Vietnam, in South Africa, in Israel and more. The country in which we enjoyed walking the most was Switzerland. There, we discovered, public transport is so good that hiring a car becomes a hindrance. Using public transport, we could ride to one place, walk all day, and return from another. If the weather forecast in the area where we were staying was unfavourable, we could easily travel to an area of sunshine. If it was too hot down in the valley, we could ride up to the cool air of the mountains.

David was always ahead of me, especially on climbs, and our final trip, to the UK in July, was no exception. He’d sprint up apparently effortlessly, and then wait for me to arrive, breathing heavily. When the children were small, he’d carry one – occasionally two, and still arrive before me.

Walking was the only exercise he did consistently. Neither of us ever wanted to belong to a gym or to do any exercise just for the sake of it. Walking is enjoyable. By walking, you see views you wouldn’t see from a car. You meet people you wouldn’t meet when stuck in a box. And, by chance, walking keeps you fit, too.

David imbued in me a love of walking, and I will continue to walk without him.