Le Jour de Gloire est (almost) arrivé!

Few of you may know that in my adventurous youth I spent a summer in France with a French-speaking-only family and bicycled over the Pyrenees in a convoy of French and American youth, this in a time when a French-speaking American was such a rarity that I rated many a complimentary menthe à l'eau at roadside cafés en route. It was a heady experience for a 19-year-old and I vowed to return for a year in Paris, which I did, two years later.

Out of the blue - well, not exactly, but quite suddenly for me - in preparation for the influx of French August-holiday tourists to Tel Aviv next week, I decided to brush-up my eavesdropping and cross-table café-chatting skills. So I took a placement test in French conversation yesterday at the French Institute, and got placed in the highest level class they offer! Moi! Classes start mardi (Tuesday).

When over the years various application forms inquired about my language skill levels, I always listed French as "formerly fluent." Next week I start changing that "formerly" to "again," or just dropping it altogether.

Heal! Heel!

14 years ago I took my doggie to obedience training. I learned to get her to Sit! Down! and Heel! on command (in English). Being a small dog, she was not especially menacing in appearance, but she did have the healthy aggressive tendencies that contributed to her survival for several months as a foundling. Over the years we have had an ongoing negotiation over whether I am her Alpha or not, thanks to my own ambivalence on the subject. For example, I enjoy the illusion that she thinks I am a big and rather stupid dog who needs to be taught how to bury bones and treats. Whenever I give her a dog biscuit, which has become more frequent now that she is encased in her lampshade (two more days!), she leads me over to her "bed" - in reality an old blanket on top of an old pillow, under the piano - and drops the biscuit there. She then proceeds to looks imploringly at me and at the biscuit lying on the blanket. If I give her the biscuit again, she repeats her non-verbal imprecations. Finally, after about 12 years, I tried hiding the biscuit in some folds of the blanket blanket, and she happily proceeding to "dig" it up and eat it. I had the strong feeling that she was demonstrating for my benefit the proper storage and retrieval of treats. I know the Dog Whisperer would disapprove of my enabling behavior, but I don't care; she's my pet, and I believe she has humanoid wisdom, not to mention a vast repertoire of non-verbal communication skills.

One of her ritual behaviors still mystifies me, though, and maybe one of You Out There can explain it. When she first arrived, her only possession was a fuzzy green tennis ball. Whenever we prepared to go out for a walk, she would scramble for her tennis ball and carry it in her mouth until we got outside, and then she would secretively drop it. When I was vigilant, I would pick it up, but often it just disappeared. I don't play tennis, so my supply of tennis balls depended on donations from tennis-playing friends. Over the years, there were "dry" periods when there was no tennis ball in the house, and she learned to substitute a small chew bone. Sometimes she even drops it on the doormat. I've come to think of it as her Mezuzah ritual, but don't know why she does it. Do you?

Sick as a dog

Poor Shuki! She's got a couple of medical problems now that she is approaching 15. (By the way, the old formula of 1 dog-year equals 7 human years has been modified, so she is not really 100-something years old, but I'm guess from her usual behavior closer to 70-something.) Anyhow, she had the misfortune to be bitten by a presumptuous flea last week. By the weekend she was frantically licking and biting the spot, and by Sunday morning it had become bald and swollen. I took her to the vet, who pronounced it a "hot spot," dog variety rather than wi-fi variety, injected her with antibiotics and prednisone, and imprisoned her in the lampshade collar to prevent her from further self-destruction. A flea allergy, exacerbated by scratching.

Needless to say, she has not been ecstatic with her new accessory, bunking into corners and tripping up the stairs. She cried and whined for the rest of the day on Sunday, trying to guilt me into removing the unwanted restraint, but I hardened my heart. I told her it was for her own good, and she reacted just as anyone would: continued whimpering until she tired herself out and went to sleep.

I've been administering her daily prednisone dose embedded in a chicken liver, which she devours lustily, so her depression has not yet affected her appetite. Today I took her back to the vet for a review of her hotspot, which is healing but not gone. Another four days of collar, with a few hours' freedom prescribed on Shabbat (only in Israel!) I hope I have the strength of character to reinstall the thing.

Then the vet hit us with the coup de grace: "Do you know she has an eye infection?" Sure enough, I saw the red eyelid: my doggie has conjunctivits. "Put this eye cream in her eye three times a day." We trundled home to add eye cream to the domestic pharmacy residing in my fridge. Now I'm dispensing meds three times a day to my dog, not to mention the new skin treatment (Enbrel) that I'm administering to myself!

The dog days of summer have hit hard at the Savta Dotty residential treatment facility.

Savlanut*

Anyone who manages to live in Israel for a period of time learns the word for patience; savlanut (pronounced sahv-la-noot). Most of the time it is used when you are already so exasperated that you're ready to upend the desk of the clerk opposite you and crave the release of flying papers, spilled cups of tea, rolling pens and telephones. Having seen this melodrama played out many times in various government offices that deal with the public, I've gotten rather blase about frustration: the librarian at the university library won't let a tenured professor of art at the same university look at art books? the local post office branch decides one day that it's too much trouble to work the posted hours? the bus driver refuses to open the back door at a bus stop? Yeah, yeah, so what else is new?

Of course those who don't adapt leave. Or stay and complain. A few committed and energetic ones try to make it better, and eventually a few of them succeed. Changing a closed society to an open, service-, consumer-entitled mentality is a slow and painful process, and requires a certain hardiness and persistence on the part of the crusaders (please excuse the term, which has unhappy connotations for Jews) and for the victims general public. So it's not really a surprise that when Israelis travel, which we do a lot, we carry along habits and expectations that can work to our detriment. In third- and second-world countries, standard Israeli inventiveness, argumentation, letting off steam, and improvisation often get the desired results: an airline seat on "full" plane, a hotel room when a reservation was "lost," a medication from a pharmacy that was "closed." But when we travel to Western so-called "civilized" cultures, the effect can be disastrous. Learning what is "the done thing" in a place usually takes a lifetime of acculturation. "The done thing" is not universal.

Paradoxically, very crucial human behaviors in times of crisis also vary from culture to culture, and at these, Israelis excel. Anyone who was in New York City on 9/11 knows how a catastrophe can put humanity to the test. People who would ordinarily avoid eye contact with strangers suddenly risking their lives to help them; yes there were a few looters, but many more impressive acts of unselfishness. When you look at it this way, daily life in Israel is an ongoing catastrophe.

I love it!

* 29th out of 178? That's not good enough.