Palestine, pottery and people

   My first full day in Palestine - "Oh, you mean Israel?"  "Well, not really: 'occupied Palestine.'"  "Not Jerusalem!"  "Not all of Jerusalem, but East Jerusalem."  "Oh, come on!  Be serious."  A good question to begin with: Can one be serious about this "situation"?  Yes, but without a sense of humor and a tad of faith in the human spirit, it's easy to be glum here."
   I arrived yesterday around 5:00 in the evening, 10:00 AM in Maine.  I flew out of New York around midnight, had dinner, such as it was, around 1:00 AM, then we flew into the sunrise and time passed more quickly than our watches, and we had breakfast at 2:00 PM, 7:00 AM Maine time.  And then around 5:00 we landed at Ben Gurion Airport outside of Tel Aviv, Israel.  Khitam was at the airport to pick me up.  We drove to her place outside of Jerusalem, on the "other side" of the wall - like being on the "other side of the tracks."  She made some dinner and opened a bottle of wine and we ate and talked until late.  Not surprisingly, this morning I woke at 4:00 AM, 9:00 the night before in Maine, and stayed awake to a muezzin's call from a near-by mosque at 4:30, followed by a cacaphous chorus of dogs rejecting the muezzin's timing.  I'll get more sleep tonight.
   Today, we left the house before 9:00 for Jerusalem.  She dropped my near the Damascus Gate of the old city and went off to her Saturday gig, working with kindergarten teachers.  I stopped in at Palestinian Pottery, where I chatted with Nishan Balian, third generation owner of The Armenian Ceramics, also called, The Palestinian Ceramics.  I had met him on my last visit, two and a half years ago.  I had told him then that Margie and I had come to Jerusalem on our motor scooter from Beirut in 1962 and had heard about and found his shop.  I told him how impressed we had been and remembered talking with someone about the pottery and someone's being across the little entrance hall, working on the destinctive designs the mugs, bowls and tiles still wear.  "That was probably my grandfather, who was still working then.  He died two years later."  The father took over and the grandson, Nishan, went to Ohio University to study ceramics and the opened a studio in or near Washington, D.C.  He had not beer working there long when his father was diagnosed with advanced Parkinson's, and he made the decision to return to Jerusalem to continue the family business rather than stay in D.C. with his new project.
   The back story is a good one.  In 1918, or thereabouts, the Brtitish Mandate government of Palestine invited the Balians and two other Armenian families to come from northeast Turkey to make tiles for the Dome of the Rock, Islam's cherished mosque in Jerusalem, built over the spot from which Muhammed on a white horse rose into heaven to receive the word of God that became the Koran.  Money ran out and politics reared its ugly head, as politics is wont to do, so the job ended soon after it began.  The Balian family and one of the other two families decided to stay and they started Armenian or Palestinian Ceramics.  Not long after Margie and I visited in 1962, the two families split up, one, the Balians, keeping the shop two blocks from the Damascus Gate of the old city, where the shop still is; the other family set up shop inside the city walls.
   The beat goes on and I'll have more to say tomorrow.  It's almost midnight here, 5:00 in the evening there.  My sleep clock may be getting into sync which means I am about to fall asleep, so I'll not attempt more words except to say it is good to be here making discoveries about Palestine and Israel, history and politics, pottery and hospitality and a little bit about myself (ho-hum)