shabbat shalom 05.06.09

Hi everyone, This was a week with a lot of ups and downs. One of the downs, which a lot of people can understand, was the death of my very old dog Shelly. I came home from evening service on Sunday night to find her panting and barely able to stand. She had these bad spells before, so I made her comfortable in her dog bed with pillows and blankets and went to bed. In the middle of the night she started whimpering, and I knew this was getting worse. Shelly was 17 years old, blind, deaf, unable to stand even when she ate, and incontinent. I made the decision, right or wrong, that if this was her time to check out, then I should let her go. I made her more comfortable and sat up with her half the night, and she died around dawn. I don't know exactly what killed her but it was most likely a stroke, since she had one years ago which she survived. So I disposed of her body and went to work very tired. Two days later I went out in the garden for breakfast, and was astonished to see a little brown *$#*@ in the garden. I knew this dog; she was in the neighborhood for weeks, and the dogcatcher had come by the previous day. He darted her but she got away, so he was coming back that day to finish the job. Little brown dogs have no chance of adoption in Israel; the country is full of them. So she would be immediately put down. Well, I looked at little brown dog and she looked at me.....I closed the garden gate and told my neighbor to call off the dogcatcher. I left little brown dog in the garden for a day, then decided to see how tractable she is. I chased her around the garden a bit, then she went flat and since then I have found her perfectly easy to handle, even when I'm examining her. She was somebody's pet at some time; probably adopted by the soldiers as a pup and then left behind when they moved on. She is not in good shape; fleas, ticks, worms, an infected bite, and she is pregnant. So I dewormed her, used flea spray, put antibiotic on the wound and made an appointment with the vet. She will have an abortion and be neutered; the world does not need more little brown dogs, and I have zero problems with abortions in any mammals, including humans. Neither does my vet. I told a colleague about the little brown dog and he laughed. Knowing about the earlier death of Shelly, he said she must have been a Druse dog. (Druse are a kind of local Moslem that believe in reincarnation.) So Shelly came back as a little brown dog, he said. His recommendation for a name was "Fuchsi", since "Fuchs" means lucky in Hebrew slang as well as "fox" in Yiddish and German. Little brown dog looks a lot like a fox, so that seemed reasonable; Fuchsi it is. I continue taking care of the Turkish Van cat, who is now named "Alifa", a good Turkish name meaning "charming". She is doing well, her fur growing back and some flesh beginning to pad her bones. Soon it will be time to let her out of the back room to settle into the whole house. She probably will not go further than that, being domestic by nature. Work gets done as well as critter adventures. I'm going full tilt on my EBONE project and my student intern is preparing to wind up field work and move to Jerusalem. He was in our offices this week. I have activated my immediate boss to supervise him on assessment of biodiversity data in the study site. Eliezer (my boss) seldom works with real data any more, or immediate problems; mostly he is on international conventions and agreements, a lot of handwaving. This is a good opportunity to pull him back down to the ground. He's getting engrossed in it, which is good. In fact, all my team are chugging away. I did an assessment of the last half year of work, and it is impressive. The holiday season has ended and the long dry dusty summer of the Middle East is rolling in. I used to hate summer in Israel but as I get older and arthritis gets worse, I appreciate this as the season when I am usually free from pain. We have no rain now until perhaps November. The open fields are turning brown, speckle with evergreen shrubs and trees. The grapevines and the figs, odd continental originally from summer rainfall regions, have put out their summer leaves and are making fruit. Arab women gather the young grape leaves and stuff them with rice and pine nuts, a quintessential Levantine dish that I have neither time nor patience to make, but enjoy eating. I let my cleaning lady collect leaves from my grapevine for stuffing, and she brings me some stuffed "dolmas" from home. I see the change in the seasons even in my organic vegetable crate from Wadi Fukhin. The cabbages and cauliflower are ended, and now is the time of summer squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, and salad herbs. We leave behind the stews, and start eating lighter foods, pita and dips, salads, etc. Israelis eat more salads than any other people I've seen on earth. Huge salads of chopped vegetables, small salads for dipping, salads with fish, salads with eggs, salads with cheese, tabbouleh, you name it. While salad eating has a vaguely feminine connotation, if you add some grilled meat on the side, even hungry young soldiers will scarf up tomatoes and cucumbers like a New York lady on an eternal diet. In the field, our hairy game wardens will usually lunch on pita, white cheese, boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions, with Turkish coffee afterward, usually in the shade of the jeep or under a tree. They would be disgusted by a salami sandwich, and far more likely to eat quiche (locally called pastida) out of a plastic box in a cooler bag. Yes, you Americans,real men eat quiche and salad, and then pick up their rifles and on their merry way. I've seen it many times.....kinda startled me the first time, I must admit. Even T.H. Lawrence's Arab forces were fueled by bread and yogurt, and seldom ate meat...... That's about it. Friday, lots of errands to run, so I better get moving. shabbat shalom, Linda