[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 17 October 2023
The cat hotel is back. My landlords set it out every autumn: an array of clean cardboard boxes, tucked along a wall on the covered patio. The neighborhood cats gather and sleep there. It keeps them safe when it rains.
We humans all seem to be waiting for the next thing to happen. The German chancellor is here. The American president is on his way. Both will be talking to a lot of other important people, here and in countries around us.
I realize that I'm living in somewhat of a bubble. Rockets from across one border almost all stay just south of us. Rockets from another are staying well to the north.
My relative's daughter has gone back to kindergarten. Her mother saw soldiers coming to the school. We're guessing that they are there to talk to the children, explaining what is happening in terms that they might understand.
The word for "kindergarten" here, by the way, is "gan," or literally "garden." I think it's short for "gan yeladim," or "garden of children," a precise translation of the German "kindergarten." (My German is very rusty. I took two years of it in high school, but that was fifty years ago. The two sentences that stick with me are "Ist Jochen zu Hause?" and "Ich trinke limonade gern," and I probably have those wrong.) An outdoor furniture shop downtown is named "Ganim Ve-Shoshanim," which sort of puns on "Gans and Roses."
I keep getting messages of things shifting around, at least in the short term. It looks like our local elections, which had been scheduled for October 31st, will now be postponed to January. The government doesn't want to have cities in the midst of fierce campaigns and headed for upheavals during all of this. Fortunately, I like our mayor, and I think he's doing a good job.
Other changes: People whose drivers' licenses are expiring this month are getting an extension. The main bank is planning to freeze mortgages and loan payments for people directly affected by the war. Universities are delaying tuition and dorm fee payments. My phone provider is providing free mobile data for a while for customers who (unlike me) don't already have it. And our city has announced a new free mental health center. The newspaper article doesn't say where it is. You have to call for an appointment.
I get an email from my health provider announcing something or other. I try to read it, but can't make out what it's saying. Unfortunately, in a classic error of interface design, the entire text is in graphic images, so I can't just drop it into Google Translate. I find a page that can do OCR from images, but it's clumsy. I try some of it, bit by bit, until I recognize that I already know the information.
I chat briefly with my Hebrew tutor during the day. She was on vacation outside the country when the war started. Quite sensibly, she's staying there for a while longer. The start of her university semester has been postponed. We'll have our usual lesson tomorrow anyway, via Google Chat. (But later I see that our government is telling our citizens to get out of there, too. I send her a text. She already knows.)
I get my usual lunch, though I buy cherry tomatoes rather than cucumbers. They are delicious. I read later that tomatoes are one of the crops most endangered by the evacuations here that are keeping farms untended.
As I write this, I see news of a rocket strike at a hospital across the border, with hundreds reported killed. The enemy is blaming us. Our army is blaming them, saying that the rocket was one of theirs that fell short. Various countries are blaming one side or the other. This will only make things worse.
The American president will be meeting with other leaders tomorrow. We're hoping that he can pull the right strings to, at least, deal with the growing humanitarian crisis across the border. In addition to the help that the people desperately need, it would be good for America to show that it actually can help bring peace to somewhere again.
I think I hear a moment of rain outside my window. It stops quickly. It may have been my landlord scattering dry food on the bricks for the cats. We don't know what dangers we humans are going to face from moment to moment, but at least the cats have what to eat and where to stay dry.
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L'hitraot.