Lehigh Valley Columnists

Greetings From Israel: Wily Cat

By BARRY STEINBERG
Special to Lehigh Valley Source

Eilon, 2009
Hello friends

After nearly a week of dense and hot arid weather,cooler temperatures managed to wend its way into the region. A good part of the day was actually overcast, with its woolen gray clouds colliding overhead vying for space. When they did this, a few drops of rain might inadvertently fall, reminding us that rain does and can fall from such heavy skies. Having been faithful for this long, I intend to hold out until the rains arrive. However, except for a few niggardly remarks about the existence of such a phenomenon in our region, the forecasters stuck to successive days of precipitation in Athens. After experiencing all that enervation beneath those oppressively breathless skies, I was so energized in the calming pall of those broadening clouds that I barely recognized myself skipping lightly through the orchard.

During the week a friend of ours has raised the specter that the Palestinian people are not whom they claim to be. All of those years, and those years are also in dispute, when they lodged in their homes or huddled in their Ottoman period hovels, seemingly more felicitous, when actually being deprived of a national identity. Now that they have evolved a national identity, part of the conflict between Israel and her adversaries is about mutual delegitimation. The many old unclaimed homes, some with their  undeniable grandiloquence, or a fez and a rosary with its various and becalming invocations of the Prophet, and others in the now overgrown ruins of the old  hovel, concealed beneath the sprouting"ears" of prickly pear leaves still left undiscovered beneath a maze of untended grape vines in an abandoned village.

Presently we are baby sitting again, as we did last night when Yoav and Idit attended a meeting of future residents at Hanita. This afternoon they are out shopping and stretching their legs. The baby carriage is currently parked near the window that overlooks the yard. On a previous occasion, when our grand-daughter Shani cried in the carriage, Zed [our dog] became very curious about this new and vital entity that either took such little space, once Shani was removed from her ambulatory quarters, or so much room, but who was virtually concealed deep within the womb of the carriage. This of course does not seem to have altered Johnson, Yoav and Idit's cat's household dominion. He has even found a few more comfortable household sites with which to curl up, such as the cloth diaper that is spread and covers the top of Shani's white dressing table. Yes, it is important to close the door and restrict the tomcat's wily access.

Enclosed is a photo of an extraordinary looking caterpillar that Yoav espied during a summer hike on the adjacent eastern hill that overlooks the Crusader  fortress of Monfort. I was unable to identify the caterpillar, but he seems to employ mimicry for camouflage and defense. Love-Barry

Greetings From Israel: Mark From Winnipeg

By BARRY STEINBERG
Special to Lehigh Valley Source

Eilon, 2009
Hello friends

An arid heat wave penetrated the region last week, with temperatures surpassing 100 F [38 C]. While we combated our fatigue and sought shade and shelter wherever it could be found, we were also honored by Mark P, visiting from Winnipeg. Mark is one of those select and hardy personalities that has in just a few months experienced the biting freeze of tundra-like temperatures of wintry Manitoba, as well as the Arabian inspired heat that has drifted beyond that desert peninsula, causing so much listlessness.

Despite this we were very busy this weekend. The irrigation in the avocado orchard worked overtime with two irrigation cycles daily. It chose, of course, the most propitious times to break down, when it was needed the most, a rather droll commitment to its own destiny.

Mark is often known in his quiet way as someone who might stir a commotion. He did so once in a big way. That is, he left a footprint that caused a frenzy. On some spring day in 1980 he meandered off the premises of Adamit with a companion, exploring the inexact altitude of the hilly countryside. They eventually reached the frontier fence between Israel and Lebanon, where Mark and his friend stepped on the powdery soil adjacent the security fencing. The strip of sand is checked by army patrols for wayward footprints. Surely, as soon as Mark and his friend had innocently returned to Adamit, the region went on alert, as the oncoming patrol had discovered indecipherable footprints in the dust. Where had they come from? Interestingly, a sabbath rumor initiated by Mark's companion about the inadvertent border gazing led to a visit by the harried regional commander, who sped up to Adamit with an entourage of troops in his jeep. Mark and his friend were interviewed, and their shoes briefly confiscated for some fundamentally forensic testing. When the shoes were returned, a match having been made with the footprints on the frontier, the commander in a frenzy, and the bemused and bewildered, parted each in their own inimitable way, satisfied that a simple but agonizing mistake had been made. Thus, Mark made an impressionable imprint long before shoes became objects of scrutiny at the security counters in all airports.

Bigger imprints would soon be made, evidently lured by Mark's notorious magnetism. One evening as Mark was standing before his kitchen pantry, ruminating about whether to go with the macaroni and cheese or his favorite vegetable stir-fry recipe, a 200 pound wheel came hurtling through the ceiling of his upper floor flat in Winnipeg. Having crashed through the roof, the tire landed just a few yards from Mark, who was armed only with his handy spatula. Stunned by this sudden disruption to the quiet evening that he had planned for himself, neighbors alarmed at what sounded like an explosion crowded the corridors and burst into Mark's apartment, where they quickly apprised the situation and phoned the emergency services. The wheel detached from a Canadian cargo plane that had begun its descent into Winnipeg International, and the sequences actually alerted the pilot that he would have to make a fractious landing. The tire, bolting several thousand feet through unimpeded space had made an impressionable imprint, but fortunately, not a final one on Mark's life!

Mark and I visited Joe and Isabelle in their new white home with their long blue-stained glass window. This window, along with those upper smaller portals with their southern exposure provide such a diffusion of airy light, that both the piano and the cat appear to have whitened, as though acclimated by some Arctic exposure. Of course, the blue swirl of paint interacts with the space, at once transparent. The paint provides a kind of kinetic energy that interacts with the outdoor landscape , but on cloudy days stimulates and emphasizes the movement of clouds, with the window frame functioning like a perpetuated picture that heightens the sequence of clouds in motion.

Out of the blazing heat, Mark and I visited with Avner. I had phoned Avner shortly before our departure from Eilon. He was cycling in the vicinity of Za'arit. "In this heat"? I queried. Why, Avner hardly even felt it. It is not for nothing that Antonio coined his favorite sobriquet, "Super Avner".  Avner was preparing for his journey to celebrate his daughter Na'ama's Bat Mitzvah, and while doing so, I noticed a brand new looking Athens 2004 Olympics baseball cap sitting upright in the nearby chair. I asked Avner about it.

Somewhere in Israel a warehouse was discovered that was known to have held all sorts of Athens 2004 Olympics souvenir paraphernalia. It was a mystery as to how all this merchandise had actually gotten there. Some local enterprising spirit from Nahariya decided to buy up the stock and began selling the souvenir caps and tee shirts at a kiosk near the train station for just 5 sheqels [ about $1.20 US dollar] per item. Avner had sauntered by and took an interest. He was wary about investing too much in this bargain, surmising that at 5 sheqels it all surely must be of poor quality and junk. To his great surprise it turned out to be authentic stuff. The local enterprising spirit did so well Avner informed us, that entering Nahariya is now like walking into a time warp, as everyone on the street is walking about adorned in Athens 2004 Olympic sportswear!

In other news: Richie and Barbi have become grandparents again! Their second grandson is named Natan. Congratulations to the family!

Enclosed is a photo of the blue stained-glass window at Joe and Isabelle's home.

Love-Barry

Greetings From Israel: Hussein & Mouad

By BARRY STEINBERG
Special to Lehigh Valley Source

Eilon, 2009
Hello friends

As farmers we often find ourselves battling with nature, or at least making her more malleable to our needs. In the eastern pool we have been discovering that it is not enough to understand nature but also to learn to live harmoniously with the super-natural. A year ago we utilized the eastern pool, where once accumulated the copious waters from the spring in the Karkara gorge. In those days the water flowed freely in the stream through August, and the farmers controlled the pump with a series of floats. When the pool was filled to capacity, a float transmitted a command to deactivate the pump. When the pool level subsided to a low point, it touched on the lowest float which transmitted a command for the resumption of pumping. So simple and effective was the pool that we channeled the remainder of our annual allotment of water, 100,000 metric cubes into our reservoir in Hamdan last autumn.

Perhaps things became too easy as we indulged and congratulated ourselves with our modern technologies. The eastern pool is located near the dairy.  An access road that borders it leads into the poultry farm. South of the road is an enclosed plot mired in assorted water piping of sundry sizes, of both steel and polyethylene plastic, a pump house and a towering edifice that once stored water overshadows the mess. A few other facilities exist amid boulders embedded in the terrain, a thicket of trees that provide constant shade and bushes that impede our progress as we trudge above the underbrush searching for clues. Some pipes still carry water to the residents of Eilon, but others remain a mystery, with no viable maps detailing their functions, their origins or their intended destinations.

This season we already encountered an overflowing pool whose waters stubbornly refused to drain into the reservoir. The pipes were empty, and we drove to all the known places searching for the faintest hint for why the pool was so begrudging of its largess. We finally determined that a bright blue eight inch valve had sealed itself. Externally there was no way to determine whether it was operable or not. We removed its valving mechanism, leaving an empty shell. We believe we improved the flow. However, at the time of the torrent the neighboring dairy farmers and mechanics from the nearby garage abandoned their work to stare, arms akimbo, at the water surging along the asphalt. They appeared to be pondering the implications of flooding in August. They looked so surprised, as though they had never seen water on asphalt before as it rippled  in the sweltering heat of August.

Last week the water stood still again, but this time it was after a windy night. Leaves and other organic debris crowded and clung to the filter from where the water is discharged, thus choking off the supply to the orchard. We used a broom to clear the filter of debris and presto we were back in business again! Imagine then my surprise and disappointment when I discovered the road awash in flood water on one pre-dawn visit earlier in the week. Imagine my befuddlement when I noted that the eastern pool was nearly empty of its water, exactly as planned, and there was no accounting for how its water [barely able to contain itself] came cascading along the side of the pavement!

Once again we made a mad search for evidence of some mishap, but it took several days to find. Within the abandoned complexity of piping,  Fauzi had been clearing the ground with his JCB backhoe tractor. Some pipes had been torn apart or laid askew, none of which were active. Evidently deep in the bushes a sizable six inch pipe, whose business no-one could attest to, was cut and a portion dragged away. After several days of ruminating about the profitability of this real estate, I  noticed a puddle forming near our own emergency drainage pipe which handles the dreaded overflow from the pool. I soon discovered an unimpeded flow of water from the cut pipe [I did not know that it had just been severed]. Evidently the pipe sinks half-way into the pool. When the water reaches the level of the open pipe, the pipe vacuumed the water up and spilled it out where Fauzi had inadvertently cut that pipe. The pipe had apparently run up the old edifice that had stored water for emergency use, or so say Eilon's sages and amateur hydrologists. After ten minutes helplessly observing water gushing into a nearby gully the water suddenly ceased its flow. A minute or two would then pass as the pipe proceeded to draw its recent spillage back into the pipe, partially draining the pool that had come about in this most recent and strange deluge.

What next, I thought, as the lagoon commences to yield its most sacred secrets but the conversion of its resident frog population whose probable feudal Crusader scion, the seigneur Chastiau de Roi acquired this original thirteenth century fiefdom. What is lacking, I surmise, is a well implanted kiss on the recessive surface of our frivolous pool!

I race to reach Hussein Abu Fuad and his son Mouad who have returned to repair the fencing in the Ya'ara orchard. Recently a sparrow hawk has begun roosting in the cypress trees that shade the road along the fence. The bird, alerted to my presence, appears to escort me while winging his way westward above the utility poles for some fifty yards. The tandem of father and son are sometimes aided by other family members. They are Druze from Daliat al-Karmel and have been in this business of fence mending for more than sixty years, ever since Abu Fuad, as a soldier detailed with the British led Transjordanian Legion during World War II was assigned to guard the critical oil pipeline that extended from Iraq to the Haifa refineries. "Yes", he tells me with the broadest gestures and a husky but hoarse voice, "this is where I learned my trade", which he emphasized with even broader sweeps of his forearm, during his military service with the Israeli army [IDF] and as a civilian. His sweeping motion leaves little doubt that there are few frontier fences in this part of the Middle East that he has not straddled. He and his son are exemplars of their profession and meticulous about detail. David, Mahmoud and myself are in agreement that we have never seen any of their competitors invest as much as they have in building the strongest and most resistant fencing. Abu Fuad, who is only eighty-five years young, works thoroughly, barely pausing even in the hottest days and in the scrubby and most discomfiting terrain. Love-Barry

enclosed: photo of Hussein Abu Fuad and his son Mouad with the tools of the trade

For Pets’ Sake: Himalayan Kitten Entertains Day Spa Clients

By DALYNN BOYER

Special to Lehigh Valley Source

 

In my quest to learn more about cats, I have been doing a lot of research by reading books, attending seminars, and searching the Web. In addition to my fascination with cats, I am becoming more and more fascinated by the people--women and men--who love them. 

 

People are passionate about their cats, and I now understand why. Since bringing Penny--our Himalayan kitten--home, we have fallen deeply in love with her, and she entertains us daily. Penny goes to work with me every day to the business that I co-own, Spoil ’Em Rotten Pet Boutique and Grooming Spa in West Reading.

 

The boutique is located next to an upscale day spa, and each day someone from the day spa comes into the boutique to ask if Penny can have a play date at the spa. Penny is so popular that women visit the boutique with hair color in their hair, wearing the classic plastic capes around their necks. Or Penny’s fan club visits after their pedicures with tubes of cotton still zigzagged between their toes.

 

We also sell Persian kittens at the boutique, and the same number of men as women come in to see the kittens. I’m unsure of the reason. Maybe it’s because, although cats have been domesticated for thousands of years, they still retain some of their wild ways. They love to climb and pounce, and they remain independent thinkers. They are social animals, but only on their terms. To be graced by a cat curling up on your lap for some snuggle time is a true blessing.

 

Dalynn A. Boyer is co-owner of Spoil ’Em Rotten Pet Boutique, Grooming Spa, and Wellness Center, 402 Penn Ave., West Reading, Pa. She breeds and shows Yorkshire terriers and specializes in grooming small dogs and cats.

 

 

A Himalayan cat
Photo by arebella/MorgueFile