I have BIG news

It weighs about 500 grams

Friends, things are about to change big time around here. I’m a little nervous.

I mean, I should have known. You can't go on learning one language a month for nearly a year and stay unchanged. Stuff like that is bound to mess with your brain. Only I could have never imagined that it would be this sort of change.

Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash

What I’m trying to say here is that I THINK I’M GETTING A KITTEN.

I have no idea how that happened. I don’t even like cats. Or I didn’t, until recently.

Maybe I overdid it at the time with Grace’s Beginner Thai My Pets series. Maybe it’s because when I was looking for resources on Manx, I discovered that Manx is also the name of a cat breed.

Or maybe it’s just because the world is very confusing lately.

Whatever it is, during our last visit to the vet I blurted out that I wanted a kitten and she got all excited and shared my phone number with all the cat people in town.

We have a lot of cat people around here who care for our very many street cats. There are an estimated 2 million street cats in this country (although according to some sources, it’s closer to 7 million) for a population of 9 million humans.

It turns out that our street cat problem, like many things in life, is the fault of the Brits, who at the beginning of the 20th century, imported a large number of street cats into Mandatory Palestine¹ to deal with a rodent problem.

(Heh, if only our current problems could be solved this easily.)

The cat people organize themselves into designated WhatsApp groups and leave food and water for the street cats, and sometimes help the cities vaccinate, spay, and neuter them.

Cat people are to dog owners what bikers are to drivers. What snowboarders are to skiers. They're a nuisance. They leave so much cat food everywhere that cats feel entitled to sit in the middle of the street and frighten my dog.

And now all these cat people were calling me and offering me kittens. This guy Asaf called me last week and said he had an orphaned two-months old kitten who would make a perfect home kitten. He said she had silver fur and blue eyes and liked to be petted.

When we were little, back in Russia one day my sister brought home a tiny silver-furred kitten with big blue eyes. She lived in a cardboard box under our desk for four hours until my mom came home and said we weren’t allowed to keep it.

Her name was Businka which means “bead” in Russian.

I can’t say I was traumatized by that experience but when Asaf called me and said he had a kitten for me this was the kitten I immediately drew in my mind.

I was a happy would-be owner of a reincarnation of Businka for a whole 1.5 days until he sent me a video of the kitten and it turned out she didn’t look at all like what I had imagined. She had brown spotty fur and green eyes and looked like the young version of one of those street cats that my dog is scared of.

I almost said no.

But then I kept looking and looking at that video and the more I looked at her the more I wanted her to be my kitten.

And then this Sunday morning when a siren woke us up at 6:30 am, and we all ran into the safe room, I caught myself thinking “I wish my kitten were here right now so that I could have more cuddly creatures to herd into the safe room.” Seriously.

Nothing like a ballistic missile from Yemen to remind you of the fragility of life and strengthen your newly found love for a kitten you haven’t met yet.

***

Which made me think about where love comes from, and why we connect with something or don’t. Maybe we love someone or something only or mostly because it is something familiar.

Like my relationship with the Manx language, for example. In the beginning, I wasn't at all sure this language was for me. Some languages I’m very excited about from the very beginning, like Swahili, because I know they’re gonna be different and exciting.

But Manx? I knew very little about it but I thought before I started it was gonna be another boring Indo-European language. The main reason I started learning it was because it was included for free in the Glossika’s list of endangered languages.

But now that I’ve spent some time with it and got to know it somewhat, suddenly I don't want to say goodbye to it.

I just started reading the Vampire Chronicles in Manx, and even though it takes me 15 minutes to decipher a three-sentence paragraph, these are easily the most rewarding 15 minutes of my day. I know I won’t be reading anything in Manx any time soon because I have four more languages to go.

This is probably the hardest part of this project: saying goodbye. It breaks my heart every time. But it’s one thing to learn the basics of 12 languages and it’s quite another thing having to maintain (or keep improving) them all.

***

We can’t get her just yet because she is still too tiny and weak and needs to spend 1.5 more weeks at the vet’s. But yesterday Asaf the kitten guy came over and brought her over to show me, and she turned out to be quite different again from how she looked in the video — she has yellow eyes — and so my initial reaction was who is this cat I don’t even know her.

But she let me scratch her ear and insisted on sitting on Maya’s hoodie on the rocking chair which were all good signs I think.

By the end of the visit, maybe because he saw I was hesitant he said, '“No pressure. If you can’t take her, I have a couple of other families who are interested.” And I was like, what? No! No way. Why would they be interested in my kitten?? So I guess she is mine after all.

1. “Mandatory Palestine” referred to the area on both sides of the Jordan River that was controlled by the British and populated by Jews, Arabs, and, eventually, the British street cats. It included modern-day Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. The term “Palestine” began to be associated specifically with the Palestinian territories only after the establishment of Jordan in 1946 and the state of Israel in 1948.