An open letter to a pioneer

[a memo best enjoyed after breakfast]

Dear Pioneer,

I address you in this manner because I assume you must be an Israeli of long standing and rich history... a person who, at very least, spent his youth draining malarial swamps, fighting off marauding Arabs and dancing the Hora late into the night among the other brave and hardy pioneers of your generation. 

Although we have never met (that I know of), I assume these things about you because you clearly hark from an era when the infrastructure of the nascent State could not stand even the modest demands placed upon it by you and your fellow pioneers.  The few existing roads were of dirt... the electricity was intermittent, at best... and the plumbing (where it existed at all) could not handle toilet paper.

It is on this last, delicate subject that I must ask your indulgence.

You see, several times per week I am left to wonder whether it is out of habit or nostalgia that, even in this day of modern miracles and more-than-adequate plumbing, you continue to wipe away the remnants of your morning output, and then deposit the soiled paper in the wastepaper basket beside your porcelain perch, rather than committing it to a watery end like the rest of your, er, effluence. 

Who knows, it may be that you act thus out of old habit... or it may be that you are so amazed at the leaps in toilet tissue technology - with yesteryear's scratchy, non-absorbent crepe-paper but a vague memory to you and the other surviving remnants of your pioneering generations - that you just can't bear to let such a luxury go.  I don't know, and because I have never discovered you in the act, I have never had the opportunity to ask.

I admit that as a new immigrant, I am soft, spoiled, and completely undeserving to be an heir to your labors (in the grand sense, mind you... not of your daily output, as it were). 

Instead of foul swamps and unpaved roads, I arrived in the Jewish Homeland to find air-conditioned offices and finely paved highways.  Instead of having to build settlements by day, defend them by night and then dance the Hora with exhausted comrades well into the early hours of the morning, I arrived at my 'settlement' kitted out with a brand new washer/dryer, an enormous self-cleaning oven and a surround-sound home theater system that probably makes my elderly Israeli neighbors wonder if they are time traveling whenever I watch the History Channel or classic films like 'Exodus' and 'Cast a Giant Shadow'.

I apologize for the indirect and impersonal nature of this communication, but I know you only by habit, and sadly, not by name or face.  I recognize your comings and goings by the fragrant Rorschach tests you leave me to find when it comes time for my mid-morning constitutional... and I dearly wish we could exchange a word. 

I am, therefore, left to hope that this unaddressed missive finds you in continued good health, spirits and bodily functions (tfu tfu tfu)...  and that you will come to trust that the marvels of modern plumbing will be equal to the task of conveying the daily labors of your healthy appetites to a suitable resting place, far from whichever bathroom stall I decide to use.

I remain your patient, yet optimistic beneficiary and partner in Zion,

David (although you can call me treppenwitz)