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Cats and Dogma

My children are intrigued by every living thing from mold to mankind.

    For the first year and a half of our marriage, we had a cat. And we could barely cope. Then we had triplets.
    There was a perverse justice here in that the cat had been spayed and then we had the litter.
    Four years later, the cat's still with us, and the kids, and we're still married. 
    Children grow up either as strangers to nature, or enthralled by it. When I was young, I wanted a dog. But I grew up in the kind of house where, when my mother discovered something that might be interpreted as a distant relative of the common cockroach, we moved. We weren't even allowed to bring dust in the house. My closest contact with the Animal Kingdom was what wriggled up out of the lawn after a rain.
    The major incentive for growing up was so that no one could tell me I couldn't have a dog. I lived 19 dogless years under my parents' roof, and sure enough, it's now been 19 dogless years out.
     This cat is, obviously, an oxymoronic symbol of my life, sort of like identifying with one's tormentor: subjugated oppression followed by self-imposed denial and then antithetical spite. It is not insignificant that both cat and wife entered my life at the same time.

HAVING AN animal around the house -- I mean the cat, of course -- has given my children hands-on experience with wild life.
    "Daddy, the cat's melting."
    "Moulting."
    "When she finishes, will she be bald like you?"
    Her name -- I mean the cat again -- is Rovie, which is the diminutive of Rover, a dumb canine name I gave her as a protest to her being of the wrong species.
       For a long time after the babies were introduced to the household, Rovie dealt with the situation in a most catlike manner: pathological defiance. For her, they did not exist. She would  even jump up on a lap that was holding a squalling, cheesing baby, and, absolutely oblivious, curl up for a catnap.
    This antiexistentialism lasted until about the time the girls began to crawl, which they learned to do for only one reason: Get That Cat.
    When they finally realized (the hard way) that Rovie was not just another stuffed toy, and Rovie came to understand that the children were here to stay, they became friends. Now, whenever we come and go, Rovie accompanies us through the beastly jungle out there.
    The neighborhood dogs know: don't mess with the Orbaums. Even the local pit bull learned this painful lesson -- twice. (Rovie leaped on its back and tried to kill it.)
     As cats go, she's odd. She'll terrorize the most vicious urban beast, so you'd think we could never have a mouse problem. Huh. We once had a mouse problem because of Rovie: she'd hunt for mice outside, and then bring them home to play with.
    She's unfriendly to my wife (thoroughly a cat person) but adores my mother (an ailurophobe).
    Her preference for hostile strangers may have saved my life once. I was home, alone, asleep one night. A thief broke in and was too busy removing my valuables to notice that a jet-black cat was shadowing him. Rovie snuck up and amicably rubbed up against his leg. He stepped on her tail, she yelped, I woke, and the thief hightailed it out the window.

WHAT'S AN Israeli house without unwanted visitors? Not just crooks, of course, but the sort of encroacher that goes crunch underfoot. Just going from the bedroom to the kitchen can be a hike through nature. We've got three species of ants, a family of sloppy slugs, lizards that have lost their way and, of course, those disgusting, scuttling unmentionables that roam through my home like buffalo. Stray cats slip in to chup Rovie's vittles. There's a cricket equipped with a megaphone, kamikaze mosquitoes and you-name-it flying what-have-yous that get sucked in through our windows as if we'd left the vacuum cleaner running, plus an array of incredibly stupid spiders that starve amid all this. National Geographic should do a special on our house.
    All this is a real bonanza for the children, who are intrigued by every living thing from mold to mankind.
    They're militant activists devoted to snails' rights, prowling the sidewalks to save delinquents who have strayed onto the path of not-so-righteous children, who love to step on them.
    Fortunately, we live a toad's-leap from the Jerusalem zoo.
    The zoo is like our house, but on a larger scale. I suspect Noah really docked his ark at Teddy Stadium; beasts bigger than a breadbox went thataway, the pests migrated thisaway. (That biblical story is, of course, politically incorrect in our family. We like to believe the creatures boarded the ark three by three.)
    We are stalwart zoo-goers. When the kids grow bored of watching flies bounce off the window or moths vaporize in the halogen light, we pile into the car (which usually looks like an aviary outhouse) and in five minutes we're at the entrance where, sure enough...
    Me: "What should we see first?"
    Chorus of three: "The bugs."
    The Jerusalem zoo paid us a great honor recently by naming its three new ostriches Odelia, Nomi and Donna, not by coincidence the names my girls go by. But I'm certain the girls would be more flattered to give their names to a trio of lice.
    After we get our money's worth at the bug display, we set out in search of bigger game. We all have our favorites: my wife likes the big cats. I like the chimps. The children's tastes are more refined: Nomi loves the siamangs, Odelia the cassowary and Donna the zoo jeeps. But the greatest attraction of all is that hulking red ogre around the corner from the mandrills:
    "Daddy! Look!"
    "Oh, no."
    "Please, Daddy, please!"
    The Coke machine.
    One can is never enough, two cannot be divided into three, and three is two-thirds more than they can possibly finish. Don't try to understand the mathematics of it all, because statistics show that four-year-old sisters are 65% thirstier when they have to share. And besides, 100% of the time they have to hurry to the bathroom afterwards, which is not what we go to the zoo to do. So no, I tell them, we'll leave the drinking to the fishes.
    I make the same mistake every time we go to the petting area of the zoo: I buy feed for the kids to feed the kids. The baby goats always end up hungry, and I always end up looking sheepish, stuck with a handful of grub the girls want no part of. They're wary of any animal that slobbers, drools, has teeth or claws, is bigger or faster than them, or makes loud noises. That eliminates all the petting-area animals but the turtles.
    Not that we haven't been outwitted by turtles. During one zoo visit, Nomi decided the turtles needed to be organized. She laboriously corraled the dozen of them and lined them up according to size. But they, of course, had places to go and things to do, and Nomi became quite piqued that they kept stepping out of line.
    At a farm in England last summer, the girls witnessed a cow giving birth. They took it in stride. The most notable aspect was, as Donna described it later, that "the calf came out in a pink plastic bag."
    Then there was the time we happened upon the hippos when they were doing what hippos do to make more hippos. It is not as sexy as you might think. While he was atop her, she was underwater, snorting bubbles and coming up for air every so often.
    "What are they doing, Daddy?"
    "Uh, cuddling."
    "Oh. Looks like he's trying to drown her."
    It was not the best way to begin sex education.   

THE DAY will come when they suddenly realize the meat they eat is derived from the animals they love.
    They may already know. When they were of the age when toddlers learn to mimic animal noises, my girls had one very unusual exception to the norm. They mooed, meowed, baaed and hee-hawed like other tykes do, but when you asked them what sound a chicken makes, they responded with chewing noises.
    They first encountered the sensitive issue of Animals and the Jewish Question at the tender age of two, and settled it with refreshingly innocent abandon. They were in a pre-nursery run by a nobly conscientious haredi woman. One day they were playing with plastic animals. "And that's a horse," Chana said, "and that's an elephant ... bear ... lion ..." and then she froze in repugnant horror. "And that's a deer," she sputtered.
    Odelia, distressed that she knew something her venerable mentor did not, challenged Chana with adultlike aplomb. "Maybe," she dared to suggest, "that could really be a pig?"