My family keeps talking about cats. "Your cat is not nice," my father told my sister when she arrived from her apartment down the street, with her black and white cat trailing her with suspicious looks.
"Mine is very nice, yours is not nice," she responds, speaking about my parents' black-and-white cat, which was having fun on the patio table. "They are mother and daughter," my mother reminded everyone of their common genes, which made us turn from dog lovers to cat lovers. She immediately continued by telling them that the silent black cat and the white female cate have once again shared their food.
Eight cats roam the area. My parents and my sister feed all of them. They are all numbers, they have no names, except Zevulun, a skeletal cat with a truncated ear who had arrived a year ago and turned into a bully with shifting moods thanks to their care. He has been accompanying my parents and sister in their neighborhood walks in the same level of zealotry in which he has been scratching them.
The discussions has continued in the house over cats, the mulberries that my father has picked in his walks, on the points my mother has been tabulating as part of her weight-watcher program, and on the children who have been taking classes at my sister's studio.
This all has made the isolation for me and Ravid anything by isolated. The pace of things here is like a conversation that keeps twisting and turning but is only seldom interrupted and this makes me happy. This explains the inability of my family members to spot the moment someone is busy with something else and wants to avoid distractions. "Are you reading?" was a common question when I was young at home with my head literally inside a book. Without waiting for an answer, the person would start talking endlessly on what Shoshy the dog had done. But today there are eight cats rather than one dog.
Unfortunately, I have adopted this. From my window at the isolation area, I tell Ravid on the neighbor who keeps shouting at her kids every night, or on the neighbor that everyone hates because of his barking dog. Only after 10 minutes I realize that I have yet to receive a response. The poor thing just wants to watch Netflix and chill.
Even coronavirus gets its proper place in the conversations in my family. "There are 1,000 new cases today," my father tells us the news, with a satisfying yet grim look. "You guys are mad, no one is following the guidelines, another wave is coming," my mother concludes.
"Come on, since when are you all so convinced on the necessity of the guidelines?" my sister erupts, and provides contrarian data from YouTube, from clips she watches every night.
I so hope that she is right. But as for myself, who has arrived from the coronavirus-hit UK, I will stay in Herzliyya even after my isolation is over. I will continue to share stories about cats with my parents rather than go to Tel Aviv my love. Zevulun, that bastard, has already scratched me too!
