No Milk Today and Not Much Else

I’m so naive. After the splendidly long holiday weekend I genuinely expected to be able to shop as usual on Sunday afternoon. Wrong. I stepped into the kibbutz store only to be greeted by mostly empty shelves. I thought I had been transported back in time to the Soviet Union. There were no tomatoes, no bananas and no bread. Two people were arguing over the last bunch of grapes. And of course, there was almost no milk. There’s almost none in the whole country.

It seems that Israel’s cows have gone on strike in support of the airport workers. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, you can’t fly into or out of the country and you can’t drink a glass of milk while you’re here. What the airport workers grievances are I cannot say, although I suppose they revolve around money, but the cows are said to be aggrieved by the heat.

I don’t know about you, but I’m nonplussed. Summer here is always hot. If you look up the definition of “hot” in Webster’s Dictionary you’ll see it’s defined as “summer in Israel.” This can’t come as a surprise to the cows. As far as I know, they haven’t just emigrated from Finland. But somehow August was so hot that they stopped giving milk in September. This must be bovine logic.

The thing is, it stopped being really hot and humid three weeks ago. So why is there a milk shortage now? How big a lead-time could there be? I would have expected the stuff on the shelves to be slightly fresher than that. Like I said, I’m naïve. It couldn’t possibly be that the milk monopolies are holding back the supply to raise the prices for the holidays. That would be inconceivable.

Bovine Positioning Systems

If you’ve ever tried to navigate in Boston you know what a nightmare it is. Streets wind around, merge and diverge without so much as a by-your-leave and street names repeat themselves in every neighborhood without any connection to each other. Navigating around the kibbutz is kind of like that in miniature except without any street names.

You can wander around for quite a while, depending on the dependability of the directions you got, until you stumble upon your destination. Not only are the roads unnamed, the buildings are more or less unmarked. I always pity the visitors who ask me for directions and explain to them as exactly as I can what the dining hall looks like. I still remember the directions I got to the laundry sorting place, the Communa, when I was new – “Turn left at the first cow.”

The situation changed about 5 or so years ago when we were all given plaques with our family names hanging on poles in our front yards. This was a vast improvement. Now, assuming you can read the language, you can locate the house of the family you want to visit if you wander around enough without having to knock on a random door to ask if Pinchas lives there.

This all came to mind yesterday as I took a break over the cup of tea I’d made an hour before. Suddenly I was roused from my reverie by the sound of drilling on my house. Upon investigation I found that a number plate had been fastened on, high up next to the eaves. I’m 252. I suppose this means everyone will be locatable by number which is a good thing. But why is it placed so high? So it’ll be identifiable from the air? That’s an alarming thought. Still, it’s a cut above the former system of direction-by-landmark – especially since the cows are now elsewhere.