To Be a Giraffe 1. Like soft yellow clouds speckled in brown, the Masai giraffes cross the Kenyan safari. I was a giraffe once, too, in my mind, even though I was the shortest in my class, hanging on to high branches to be nourished from above— my imagination, books, arts. On the earth, lonely, not matching my classmates, vigilantly searching from my distance after possible dangers. A child in the Ramat Sharet elementary school in Jerusalem with her head up in the mountains of Africa, reading repeatedly ‘Lobengulu King of Zulu’ by Nachum Guttman. “What is your favorite animal of them all?” I asked Francis, our tour guide in the Masai Mara safari. He came with rifle and khaki uniform, as if camouflaged as a solider. “The giraffes,” he answered instinctively. “They hurt no one,” said the man who has known them from before I was born. 2. As I'm about to turn fifty, half a century, I’m awakened by the October 7 th massacre in Israel, by the unrest...