How could something so shocking not be shocking at all?

As teenagers growing up in Sydney, Australia in the nineties, we had a daily, unvarying summer holiday routine. Meet at Nandos at noon, and then head down to the beach. Nandos was the Portuguese chicken shop that boasted delectable chicken ribs at a teen-friendly price that I can still taste if I close my eyes. “The beach” – despite having no less than eight choices of sunkissed stretches of shoreline within a ten mile radius – was Bondi. Always, Bondi.

Unlike the long, continuous coast lines of California or Florida, Sydney’s beaches are individual inlets, each with a different scale and personality. Bondi is about half a mile long and can be crammed with as many as 50,000 people on a hot summer day, so if you weren’t at Nandos to meet your friends pretty close to 12pm you were unlikely to ever find them. (These were the days before we all had portable plan-wreckers in our pockets.) Having said that, we always congregated on the same end, North Bondi, directly in front of the grassy area where thirty years later – in a future beyond the reach of our darkest imaginings – fifteen people would be gunned down at a Chanukah celebration. But in those days – at around 12.30pm in the summertime, towels and Pepsi’s in hand – hordes of Jewish teens would make their way down to the sand. The hot afternoon would be spent flirting, tanning, triaging an oncoming wave across the roar of the ocean (over! – under! through!) and laughing at your friends when they got dumped – not by a boyfriend, but by a wave, which I assure you is much more traumatic.

At around 5pm when we’d had enough of the sun and the sand and the salt, we’d catch the bus to someone’s house and spend the last few hours before the sun set cooling our stinging skin in the pool – the clean chlorine and shade of the pergola a welcome end to a day of salt on our tongues and sand in our bums. Australia doesn’t have a summer camp culture, these were our teenage summer days. Rinse and repeat for 6 weeks.

As adults, the connection to Bondi hasn’t changed. We meet at Speedos, the beachside cafe that has been there since 1985 for a morning coffee, we drink beers and watch the sun go down on the grass. Our teens use the skate park, our preschoolers the playground. We introduce our babies to the harsh Australian sun by covering every inch of their skin with UV protective clothing and sunhats with flaps that cover the back of their necks. We run along the promenade for exercise and wonder if the guy doing pull-ups on the seaside gym equipment will still be there when we circle back (he will be.) At the time of year when the days are long, we stop for a quick dip in the ocean on the way home from work, the beach littered with people even at 8pm. Bondi is the epitome of Australia: laid-back, cheerful, and without a care in the world.

That changed on Sunday, December 14th. At 7am New York time, about 5 hours after the massacre had taken place, my husband gently woke me to tell me I should call home. I hazily checked my phone and saw my family chat flooded with messages. Is everyone ok? Yep… All ok. I asked whoever was still awake to please call me – by this time it was close to midnight in Australia – and as my sister’s number illuminated my phone my four year old came bounding in from her bedroom gleefully shouting “It’s Chanukah! It’s Chanukah!” as if I needed a reminder in that moment of the perpetually painful paradox of being a Jew.