The Empty Spot at the Table

My old friend Felicia writes a blog called "The Gratitude Project" in which she gently explores the effects of incorporating conscious expressions of gratefulness into our daily lives. Last Thanksgiving, she let me write a guest column. This year, I reclaim it.

“Let me start by saying thank you to Felicia for inviting me to make a guest appearance. This is hugely satisfying to someone who grew up rehearsing what she’d say to David Letterman in the unlikely event that she was not busy delivering a thank you speech at the Academy Awards. In fact, I have spent much of my life practicing saying “Thank you” for honors that I never received.

In other words, gratitude is more complex than my parents ever taught me. After meals, my sisters and I would fold our hands, bow our heads, and give thanks for the food we’d just eaten or else surreptitiously fed to the dog under the dining room table. “We thank Thee, Lord, for meat and drink; we thank Thee, Lord, for everything: Amen.”

How nice it was to cover everything so quickly, and believe me, many speed records were set at that dinner table! Turns out only one thing was missing from that everything: Meaning. You see, meaning comes with naming. English teachers are not the only ones scribbling “Too vague. Be more specific” in the margins of our life stories. What we fail to name will elude us, just as certainly as, even if, as in Orthodox Judaism, we give it a name so holy we dare not pronounce it. Naming adds meaning and momentum.

At the dinner table of my childhood years, no one was really grateful, except maybe those who’d experienced the Great Depression years. At my family’s Thanksgiving table today, though, before the soup tureen is brought out with its tantalizing curls of steam spilling out the ladle slot, there will be a wide mouthed ceramic urn in the middle of the table. In this urn will be as many little slips as I can stand writing out the night before, each about the size of a fortune cookie paper. The urn will get passed around the table and each of us in turn will reach in and pick a slip to read aloud and complete.

“This morning I was grateful for clear skies for my drive here,” says Auntie Jo, beaming more brightly than any November sunshine. “The last time I got really sick, I was thankful for Kleenex with aloe and for over the counter Claritin,” Kenny announces without hesitation. “What I am thankful for more often than anything else is health,” says Jesse, to a chorus of “Boo!” and “Too boring!” “Right now, I would like to give a special thanks that Aunt Nancy stopped trying to improve her absolutely perfect dressing recipe finally and putting things like chestnuts in it!” says Madeline.

Everyone will get to speak a specific gratitude. Some people will answer in a way that makes us laugh. Almost everyone’s answer will bring out smiles. Some will be so serious that we all grow somber for a minute; others will send us into giggles. Almost assuredly at least one reply will provoke a little political repartee and another, probably from my dad, will elicit groans because it will be something predictable about patriotism that he manages to get in every year.

And when my mom answers, no matter what she says, we will all struggle not to cry because this year is the last time she will be at the table with us; her time on earth is very close to being done. Every answer will bind us more closely.

We are most grateful for her and for the years we have had together, rushing through our table prayers, spinning through our bedtime prayers, mumbling through the endless church prayers, but thankful every minute for the love that holds us together around this fine old table. This year, wherever you are, speak some specific gratitude. Tell someone you are thankful for the love or just the plain old time and the stories they have shared with you. Tell them even if you need to call them on the telephone. You don’t always get another chance, which is no less true just because you’ve heard it before."

My mom was not with us at

this year's table. I don't even believe she was watching us from above, despite the fact that my Dad would like us to believe she is. And yet here we are around the table again, still laughing, telling bad jokes and embarrassing stories, and grateful for everything that allows us to gather again.

A Thanksgiving Poem for You

Things I Didn't Know I Loved
by Nazim Hikmet
translated by Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing

it's 1962 March 28th
I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don't like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn't know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it
I've never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

and here I've loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can't wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you'll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I know this has troubled people before
and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before
and will be said after me

I didn't know I loved the sky
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard
the guards are beating someone again
I didn't know I loved trees
bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino
they come upon me in winter noble and modest
beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish
"the poplars of Izmir
losing their leaves. . .
they call me The Knife. . .
lover like a young tree. . .
I blow stately mansions sky-high"
in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief
to a pine bough for luck

I never knew I loved roads
even the asphalt kind
Vera's behind the wheel we're driving from Moscow to the Crimea
Koktebele
formerly "Goktepé ili" in Turkish
the two of us inside a closed box
the world flows past on both sides distant and mute
I was never so close to anyone in my life
bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé
when I was eighteen
apart from my life I didn't have anything in the wagon they could take
and at eighteen our lives are what we value least
I've written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I'm going to the shadow play
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather's hand
his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
with a sable collar over his robe
and there's a lantern in the servant's hand
and I can't contain myself for joy
flowers come to mind for some reason
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky
I didn't know I loved flowers
friends sent me three red carnations in prison

I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I'm floored watching them from below
or whether I'm flying at their side

I have some questions for the cosmonauts
were the stars much bigger
did they look like huge jewels on black velvet
or apricots on orange
did you feel proud to get closer to the stars
I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don't
be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract
well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to
say they were terribly figurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them
they are our endless desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad
I never knew I loved the cosmos

snow flashes in front of my eyes
both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind
I didn't know I liked snow

I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherry-red as now
in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors
but you aren't about to paint it that way
I didn't know I loved the sea
except the Sea of Azov
or how much

I didn't know I loved clouds
whether I'm under or up above them
whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts

moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois
strikes me
I like it

I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved
rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette
one alone could kill me
is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks
I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty
to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return

19 April 1962
Moscow

Envisioning a New Egypt

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Let’s ask Ahmed Harara about that. Ahmed Harara is the young Egyptian who lost one eye in the violence around Cairo’s Tahrir Square this January 29. A rubber bullet is really as good as a metal slug where the destruction of soft tissue is involved. Ahmed, along with the scores of other stalwart and inspired Egyptians who filled the central square of Cairo with a new and rousing cry for freedom, found the deposing of the Tyrant Mubarak ample recompense for the patch he wore over his left eye socket.

It’s now ten months later. During those intervening months, Tahrir Square resumed the steady flow of traffic in a whirling dervish of a dance around its curves. Hawkers along the curbs sold mementoes—flags and tee shirts, posters and scarves – commemorating the ouster of Mubarak on January 25. Now, Ahmed, along with tens of thousands of stalwart and inspired Egyptians, has returned to Tahrir Square. On November 19 Ahmed was there to protest the military government which took hold of the reins of power this winter. This gathering, too, has cost Ahmed dearly. He now wears two patches. Ahmed Harara is blind.

A friend of mine in Cairo, an idealistic young man who would probably take issue with that adjective, thinking himself a firm realist, is also back on the Square. He writes, “Cairo is the only place where the young are not afraid to die but are still afraid to tell their parents they’re heading over to Tahrir Square.”

Here in the US, it’s so easy to be scornful of what the Egyptians are trying to accomplish. “Did they actually think that the military would voluntarily relinquish power?” my learned friends, safely tenured, write on Facebook.

No. They did not. But they dared to hope that the incredible pulses of the Arab Spring might coalesce into a current so strong that only the lightest of flowers and the purest of intentions would float on its forward historic waves. And hope, more than knowledge, is what carries a revolution to conclusion.

The Egyptians are doing a mighty endeavor. Conciliatory gestures and charades are being repulsed by the demonstrators. The Islamic Brotherhood along with the military government is scratching its covered heads.

Whether or not the demonstrators

in Tahrir Square win, they are fighting the good fight. And having given both their eyes, they are still facing tanks and rifles with cobblestones.

ADDENDUM: Several days later, as protests continue and public support for protests builds, the host of the popular evening talk show had the following to say, “They want us to believe that our eyes do not see what they see, that even when they see they don’t see, and that if they indeed see, it means nothing?’ ”

A Bad Case of the Clap

I live in a small city with an outsized cultural agenda. Living in a place that is consistently in the top three best educated cities in the US has significant cultural advantages. Education and erudition are old bedfellows, and while formal education has terminal points for most of us, erudition requires constant feeding, for unfed erudition is better known as its ignominious alter ego, pedagogy. In my little city, we enjoy almost constant intravenous feeding of lectures, exhibits and theatre, of choral and orchestral music, of the best intellects of Europe and Asia and even America, along with outstanding artists from every corner of the world, including our home state of Wisconsin.

This is among the enduring reasons life is good here, almost compensating, if the show is good and the post show conversation stimulating, for the unfathomably frigid winters and the sweltering sweatiness of the suds sweetened summers. And it’s no wonder performers agree to present their works here; it’s the Land of the Standing Ovation.

Seriously. It doesn’t matter what

you do on stage here, the crowd will rise to its feet. Oh sure. Sometimes the audience is slow. Sometimes it takes a few bows onstage before the first faltering fan pushes to her feet. Then her seatmate rises, followed by the couple behind them, whose view of the stage is now blocked. Eventually, if painfully, the whole audience is standing, clapping like a beach full of seals.

Here’s a guideline people in small cities need to apply. If you find yourself debating whether to stand to applaud a performance,

then don’t. Standing ovations are not meant to be the result of a meditated decision making process. Standing ovations are impulsive, irresistible manifestations of exultant joy and satisfaction with the material presented. One stands because one cannot stay seated.

And I do not mean those who would stand because they are so tired of sitting that they just cannot wait another second to leave the theatre.

Please. For the sake of all of us

who value legitimate expressions of appreciation, keep your approbation appropriate. When you demean your expression of gratitude, you demean the value of our striving for greatness as well.

O Tannenbaum, Darn Tannenbaum

I hate to say this, but the Gub's right, and for once I am not alluding to the orientation of his alation.

Wisconsin's governor announced yesterday that the tree going up soon in the rotunda of our beloved capitol building is in fact a Christmas tree, not, as it's been formally called, since 1985, a "holiday tree."

There is no generic holiday tree, unless

of course you count the Festivus Pole as a tree. (Do you know that in 2005 Democratic Governor Jim Doyle did actually erect a Festivus Pole in the Governor's Mansion? It's now in the State Historical Museum.) But an evergreen tree lavishly decorated with strings of lights and shiny objects is, let's be frank, a Christmas tree. Ironically, it is a Christian symbol with avowed pagan origins, a connection to both a pagan past and the present commercialization of Christmas that some of the stricter Christian denominations actually view it as anti-Christian. (Could we make a successful judicial argument for removing the tree from the capitol based on its anti-Christian nature?)

From any perspective, a Christmas tree or a holiday tree does not belong in a government building. Except perhaps the Governor's Mansion, which is, after all, a residence in which a family lives and enjoys free speech. Deck the halls with lights since we are all craving light in the dark heart of winter, but don't string them on an evergreen.

We need to be vigilant about keeping the right of free speech distinct and entirely separate from any governmental right to preach. Let the shops around the Capitol put up trees if they choose.

The Androgyny of Being and Nothingness

There is a member of my family who was born about 20 years ago, a single child to two intelligent and loving parents who have somehow managed to stay married through all the inevitable and largely unremarkable challenges to that status. The three of them have lived with much happiness and only occasional sorrow in a nice house in a good school district with solid careers. This 20-year-old is someone with whom both my own children have spent prolonged visits, at both houses, even when we have lived on opposite sides of the country. This person has been, in short, a close relative, known, loved and always welcomed.

But let's stop there for a moment, among all those flashing past tenses of verbs that do best when they continue into the present. Does my description of this relative seem puzzling in its emptiness, vague in its pronouns,

lacking the intimacy one might reasonably expect from an opening paragraph about someone not only well-known, but allegedly well-liked? If you thought so, you might also intuit that right now as I type, I am nodding. This is an empty description of a young person who has been a part of my life for two full decades already. You really know nothing from what I've said here. Why?

This is an issue I call a gender-bender. This relative is at present deeply immersed and dedicated to the prospect of becoming gender neutral. And I hereby confess that I am finding it challenging to know how to go forth as if it doesn't matter that there is no longer a pronoun to use, to know that all the customary labels that have allowed me to fit this young person into my life: niece/nephew/grandson/granddaughter/boy/girl/woman/man have all been scraped into the disposal by the concept of androgyny. It has no androgynous handle. There is no mail carrier here or fisher or flight attendant. This relative is not an occupation.

Even the first name by which I knew this person as a child is gone now. It was too suggestive of definition, not of gender perhaps but of sex. I've unfriended this once close relative on Facebook because the photos I saw made me uncomfortable, saturated as they were with sexual transformation and the reformation of identity. I don't care if my relatives are male or female, but if there is no word for them, then how far can conversation go? We are not just individuals, possessed of one identifying name. This is not some stranger, whom I can introduce to you by saying, "This is The Relative Formerly Known as *. Asterisk is a student. Asterisk wants to be a singer when * is done with college." No. My relationship with * is familial. Asterisk is my....

It's complex. When the first name we'd used for 18 years was replaced with a new one, there were some murmurings in the family. "I only know the person of the old name...I love the person with the old name...what happened to that person?" It's just a name. A rose by any name, etc. But if this was really true, why would the rose rename itself a mum? Like I said, it's complex. Secretly, it makes me glad I've never had a significant identity crisis.

I don't know. Right now, it feels, for lack of language, that I've lost *. Language is part of every revolution. I'm ready for some new language here, that will enable me to reconnect with my lost *, and I'm really hoping it's not like some of the language that came out of the women's movement, the "wimyn" and the "woperchildren." If we have a chance to start using new words, couldn't they please be words fit for poetry?

You Can't Take a Helicopter to Heaven

It's been nearly a month since Apple founder Steve Jobs died at the age of 56 of pancreatic cancer. He is no longer on the cover of magazines. The piles of flowers and

the posters and letters heaped in front of Apple stores have been cleared away and replaced by a single nice clean Apple-endorsed image of a candle flickering within the Apple icon. The story is pretty much over.

Well, pretty much. Except for the bone pickings of loonies who have nothing better to do than to criticize the dead, and I don't mean historians. I mean the ones who smell a scrap of meat a mile away, like hyenas gathering around the edge of the clearing as dusk settles into

sunset. The predators. The ones who you might think were personally involved with Jobs for the personal way they are now attacking him. In our local newsweekly last week, a letter to an advice columnist castigated Steve Jobs for not "being there for his kids." "Pathetic," it calls him, for the bone-chilling sin of agreeing to have his biography written because he "wanted my kids to know me. I wasn't always there," Jobs confessed, "and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did." The writer's point? "To me, other people deserve our love more than Steve Jobs does." Well, duh. As if anyone is talking about loving Steve Jobs. No. We are talking about admiring him.

We are living in an age of the helicopter parents, adults who act like their children's soccer games and dance lessons are more important than, well, nearly everything. I know. I'm one of those people parents call when their twenty-something student "just doesn't really seem to care that he got a C in Calculus and a B on the Economics midterm." Just today, I had a young man come in to talk because his mother wanted him to study leadership in his final semester of college since she wasn't sure he had the ability to go out into the world and grab it by the testicles. We talked for a while, and I sent him off with some links to groups that led workshops on leadership skills and, I confess, the suggestion that he might do better to do something that let him exercise leadership instead of sitting in another classroom. I resisted the salient urge to suggest he learn what leadership really is by telling his mom he was a man now.

Only people utterly insecure in their own planetary worth would criticize the newly dead for their own personal shortcomings. The action of those who try to rob Steve Jobs of admiration and

respect reminds me of those deplorable creatures who haunt cemetaries with signs of vitriol hate and violence at the interment of soldiers brave enough to die in the course of duty while not asking, not telling. Again, the hyenas around the periphery, waiting for the defenseless.

How despicable to be so cowardly that the only people you dare to criticize are dead. How revolting to be a dung beetle when you have the skies open above you because you had the great good fortune to find yourself a human being alive in the United States of America.

Make the most of your own life. Don't try to inflate yourself by deflating others. Do something positive. And leave Steve Jobs alone. He died an untimely death extremely well.

Prayer of a Proud and Good Enuf Mama

Dear God,

Thank you for listening, if you are. I have a lot of lifelong questions about that, but I've been reading this book about the twelfth century Abbess Hildegard lately, and I guess you could say I'm writing this under her spell.

I have come to you today to ask for your assistance. Vanity and boastfulness threaten to overwhelm me, and I need someone to properly humble my inappropriately soaring ego. No one has ever proved better at undermining human ego than you, so even though it's been years since I last prayed, I suspect you've been gleefully marking time: That omniscient aspect of you.

My trouble is not, please understand, that I've become vain about myself. No. You took care of that decades ago, when you dispatched me from nothingness into being, a grossly imperfect being complete with overbite and stick straight hair and a figure, once I was old enough to think of having one, to match. I was not even vain about my intelligence, which for some peculiar reason you chose to grant me, peculiar since within the circle of my middle class family I was unlikely, especially since I was created female, to ever fully use it. No. I was raised to be just "good enough." When I won an award for scholastic excellence, I shredded it on the way home. When my first poem was published, it was published under my best friend's name. There was no sense calling attention to oneself. Good enough was the goal. Throughout Scandanavia, where "good enough" is still a way of life, they even have a special word for it: "Jante." In the north central states of the US, which are full of Scandanavians, Jante is practically a way of life. Which may be part of my problem today.

You see, I have extraordinary children. Large children. I mean, they're actually young grown-ups. They can out run me, out argue me, even out think me. Very vexacious if extraordinary creatures they are, both of them, and I am having a heck of a time not bragging about them, of becoming one of those irritating adults who live through their children, who act like their children's accomplishments are their own.

Some parents start this the first time their toddler bobbles out onto the soccer field and keep on advancing in a linear formation all the way through the high school graduation where the now grown toddler was almost certainly bypassed for the valedictory address just because she had once gotten the better of the advisor in a debate on whether to initiate an open campus; she really should have had top honors but for her perfect character.

But I am trying to hold out. I was at a large dinner party a few weeks ago, in a big old house full of interesting adults with satisfying careers come together from all parts of the globe to enjoy each other's company. And it was great until about ten o'clock, when someone started bragging about their progeny. Then someone else had to chime in. Then someone else. Then someone turned to me and asked brightly, "Aren't your kids doing something amazing?"

I blinked. Yes. Both of my kids are doing many amazing things I would never have had the ability or the courage to do when I was their age (or since). But I don't want to spend my own precious life talking as if it is their lives that matter, not my own. It diminishes me and it diminishes my responsibility for living my own life to its fullest and best. I blinked and said, "I'm sorry. I have to leave now."

Raising my children is without a doubt the best and most fulfilling occupation I have known, but if I did not hope to do something equally wonderful and good with the rest of my life, wouldn't that be like giving up? My children's lives do not validate my own. And yet, when one of my kids calls me to tell me the next incredibly wonderful accomplishment of their life, I want to broadcast it to the world, in a way that I do not care about broadcasting the accomplishments of other equally wonderful young people. It really does feel as good as if I did it myself. But I didn't. They did it.

God, this is surely empty vanity. It is not quite as shallow as deriving a sense of personal satisfaction from the championship of a professional sports team maybe, since my children do at least have my own DNA and my imprint on their successes, but it is empty. We each need to live our own fullest, best lives. We need to lead lives so full of excellence that our own children are tempted to brag about us. We need to set that constant example, all the way through. It's so easy when we hit middle age to let our children live for us. But we still matter. The world and our children still need us to accomplish wonders, too: To be wonderful still.

Let me lead that life, God. Help me to be as fine as my own children. Let me not rest in smugness, boasting of them. Funny. As I was writing this, one of my kids called and told me about a really great compliment received on some work. I have never felt happier. Thank you for listening.

Amen.

That Little Round Person Without Sleeves or Dreams in Mississippi

In the state of Mississippi, where boys are sometimes grown African American men and men may be men even though they have names like Bubby and Lynn and Shelby, the government is considering a constitutional amendment that would identify a fertilized egg as a legal person.

I've been thinking about the ramifications and meaning of this ascertainment, as well as how one, let alone a legislative majority, might either validate or repudiate this idea. It occurs to me that the idea flies in the face of certain basic and amazingly simple facts.

What are some of the most basic elements all persons share, even those in Mississippi. Well, people need oxygen, water, and food. I'd venture we need love, too, but I know people who might argue that, so I'll let that one go for now. We need, with extremely insignificant exceptions, clothing, either because of cold or sunburn, mosquitoes or modesty. We do not need cars. We need a sense of purpose -- world peace, raising peas, quilting bees or saving honey bees -- or at least some area of interest, be it car mufflers or cashmere mufflers, Katy Perry or Rick Perry. We need to feel like we make some little inkspot of difference in the world. We have thoughts, dreams, anxieties and hiccups.

Does any of this apply to a fertilized egg? Just what the heck is it that makes anyone think a fertilized egg is a PERSON? If it is

indeed a miniature and somewhat round version of a four limbed, twenty-digited person with the miraculous opposing thumb, we can safely assume that the good ole boys (Harmon and Horton and Beauregard) are going to immediately curtail the right of any person within the state's borders to do anything that keeps it from maturing into another poorly educated southerner with lamentable job opportunities, but what other rights does this microscopic round person without clothing or dreams or hiccups then have? If this is a person, does a pregnant woman on welfare immediately qualify for another ration of child support? Can the father claim another dependent on his income tax even before the child is born? Or is the right to be born the only right this legal person will have?

I think the state should watch out. There are a lot of aspects of personhood that are not being addressed here, and most of them have budgetary ramifications.

And these are my thoughts without even beginning to address the really serious issue here: the right of every woman to decide what happens to her body.

Waiting for God at the Audiologist's

I have been waiting a very long time. Originally, as a child, I was told God was already in the house. This was a lie. In the scheme of events that unfolded in the seventeen years I spent living in that home where God was not, this was not the biggest lie I was told, but it was fairly significant; I spent a lot of time talking to someone who wasn't even there. My younger sister had an imaginary friend named Jiffy who lived with us for a while, and she spoke quite freely to Jiffy until one day when my dad apparently ran over Jiffy in the driveway with the Ford station wagon, an irreparable deed that ended that conversation.

No one ran over God, though, and I spoke to God more than my teachers and three sisters and parents combined. God stayed up later. You could talk to God even when everyone else was asleep. In fact, that was my favorite time for the long, one way conversations that characterized talking with God. Because one didn't actually have conversations with God, no. One ranted, raved, cajoled; one pleaded, remonstrated, argued both sides convincingly and rendered both verdicts and appeals handily; one did one's best to dictate: After all, there was such ear-splitting silence when one stopped.

Sometimes I think this is why I

have tinnitus today. My ears are just fine, thank you, but I haven't had a moment of silence in over three years. This may be how God has chosen to come to me.

I thought of this today when I passed a group of about fifty people ranged on one of the outdoor stairways that flank our State Capitol building all around. One of them had almost certainly been a member of that now happily defunct touring group, "Up With People," because that is how they were arranged on the stairs and that is how they smiled as they sang. Really, no one should smile while they sing. It's sort of like peeing in the lake just because it's big and you don't personally know the children who are splashing nearby; it may seem inocuous, but it taints what is meant to be pure. Anyway, these people were waving large flag-like banners in a way that reminded me of the bizarre fact that rhythmic gymnastics are actually an Olympian event and they were singing as they smiled at me some line, one line over and over again: "His name is the highest name."

Before I was educated, I was naive. Before I was skeptical, I was, of course, totally optimistic. Before I was rational, I was a dreamer. I am still naive and optimistic and a dreamer, but I am also educated, skeptical and rational. But God has never been in the house. And so what do these smiling people on the Capitol stairway know that has so long eluded me after so many one-sided talk sessions and so many years of the mosquito buzzing in my ears?

The Occupation of a Lifetime

Everyone is occupying something somewhere right now. Wall Street, of course, where it began, though it'll be interesting to see what happens now that cold weather is about to hit New York City. Madison, Phoenix. Rome. London. Responses to the ongoing occupations of cities across the world have varied; where I live, as soon as three people exchanged

tweets using the word "occupy," the city designated a park for their use and set up portapotties; in Phoenix, when three dozen Occupiers gathered with signs, police poured out of vans wearing full riot gear and hauled a third of the Occupiers off to jail for trespassing.

To the best of my knowledge, everything the Occupiers are saying is true. Well, except for their claim that they are the 99 percent. What is true is that most of us have nothing. Most of us are not part of the one percent who own everything, including us. Our bank accounts are as empty as the U.S. Treasury. We are in debt over our ears, whatever that means. We are the nation. We don't talk to people who disagree with us. We speak in meaningless signage: No concealed weapons allowed in the building. Don't ask don't tell. We don't want to know what that lump is.

Winter's coming. Even protest takes a holiday in the summer months; we all need vacations. Last winter I froze on the pavement outside my state's Capitol. Now the zinnias in my garden are all hanging their heads bowed, their colors shamed into obscurity by last night's frost. It's winter, and the conservatives who own the utility companies and the oil rigs and the pipelines and the financial empires that mortgage these

industries to our detriment are turning up their thermostats and locking us out in the cold again. It's gonna be another long, cold season. And it's protest season again, it seems.

I just walked by the Occupiers' encampment, which was moved from the city-endorsed park to a more conspicuous and less comfortable location on the cement near the city center for obvious reasons of exposure. Until the Occupants set up camp here, this spot was among the

main hangouts of the homeless. Now they have been additionally displaced, by the Occupation Forces.

It's very hard to win at anything lately. And when I walk by the new site and do my best to scrutinize the Occupiers who are by some reports the vanguard of the populist future, the 99 percent, you know, I see no one who really looks like part of the American middle class, the economically and politically impoverished middle class which by my analysis is the real 99 percent, or at least perhaps the real 90 percent from whom we are still honestly waiting to hear anything besides what we have already heard from its representatives in the Tea Party of No Fine China.

Not My Brother Not My Sister But It's Me Oh Lord

My favorite souvenir from my trip to Egypt this summer is an empty bullet casing from a rifle, picked up from the cement of Tahrir Square. My second favorite souvenir is the homemade CD of Egyptian music given to me by a taxi driver whose singer I will never know but whose songs I can sing almost perfectly in Arabic after listening to it for nearly four months. After these two come the rugs and the jewelry and the bags and the scarves and the skirts and the shirts and the shoes and the books I bought. Well, someone had to support the economy this summer, and there was a noticeable dearth of tourists!

But what I would most liked

to have brought home with me was impossible to bring home. It was something in the air. It announced the morning and the evening. It filled the dawn and dusk with longing, with sadness and humility and acquiesence, with faith. It was, of course, the call of the muezzin, the call to prayer. If you have never heard it and if you're somewhere quiet, you should click on the link now, before you read any further. I can think of no piece of music that stirs the soul more deeply, no matter how loudly the parishioners in my father's congregation belt out, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

I first heard the adhan, the call, at sunset a few hours after my arrival into Cairo. We had just had a wonderful meal in an open air restuarant overlooking Cairo's "Central Park," the big green space that is the best place to get an overview of the city, the 74 acres of Al Azhar Park, created over a garbage dump less than two decades ago. Dusk creeps up over the park from the densely populated city at its base. Dusk rises

around your ankles, like a fog. And the music of the adhan starts at one mosque, the rich and sonorous sustained notes of the statement of faith that is required of every Muslim, trailing down the narrow streets like a tendril of smoke calling the faithful to mind. One by one, the muezzin with the nearest, most powerful speaker is joined by the others. It is not synchronized. Each muezzin seems to have his own version of sunrise and sunset and the other three times set for prayer. It is not always entirely harmonic depending where you are. Remember: There are over 4,000 mosques in Cairo.

The words are a reminder to the faithful to pray, as well as a summation of the Shahada, the statement of faith. But the power of the adhan is the power of a lament. It is the voice of the individual, lost in the world, lost in the desert, and crying out for salvation. It is the voice of all those who seek God. That is the power of the adhan. Though it is the song and sound and heartbeat of Islam, it is also the voice in the wilderness who is Jewish, who is Christian, who is you and who is me. It is the truth of our fundamental, inexorable aloneness in the world, and our fundamental yearning to be gathered in some

expression that can redeem this plight. The plaintiveness of the call reveals what no sermon ever does, that our faiths are based in our loneliness and in our desire to find the "oneness" hidden therein.

And what better than music, the most universal voice, which needs no language but a single note drawn across the night air on some stringed instrument no culture has yet given a name.

There is an old church of some lost and undefined denomination a block from my house. It's a community center now, where the elderly play games and eat hot meals, where the homeless can usually find a spare loaf of bread fresh from the neighborhood's several bakeries. Daycare and after school care fills the building and its small playground with children. It has a small square tower untopped by any religious symbol, and it is here I would like to plant a speaker to broadcast the call to prayer over my neighborhood.

How does that spiritual go? "It's me, it's me, it's me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer." Who does not?

The Jobs Left Behind For Us

It seems like everyone has some kind of reason for feeling a sense of sadness over the death of Steve Jobs this week. This includes me. If you're a writer, this means you have to write about it. So here is my bit of writing on it. It is part of the responsibility of being a writer, part of the things we carry.

Steve Jobs was 56 years old. He was rich and successful. He did not have great hair but he had a great smile and this counts for a lot more. He was 56 years old, and he died of cancer. It seems quite unnecessary to state these facts as every news source in the world has covered the story this week, and over 9 million people have clicked on the YouTube of the commencement speech he gave at Stanford six years ago when he thought he had beaten pancreatic cancer.

I wish 9 million more people would listen to the speech he gave then. It was great. I want my kids to listen to it. I want to go back to my office and retrieve the memo I dropped into recycling today, the one with the phone number of the mother of one of my students who was going to have a brain tumor removed and who was worried about how he was going to manage to graduate "on time" now that the neurosurgeons said he wouldn't be able to do anything academic for the rest of this term. I want that student to listen to it and his mother, too. I wish my friend who abandoned the work he loved twenty years ago because it required him to be on the road and he chose to be home with his children would listen to it. I hope you will listen to it, if you haven't yet. It's nice that you're reading my blog; it might change your life to listen to Steve Jobs.

On campus today, there was a new batch of chalkings. Chalkings is a new social media. Overnight, legions of students come out with buckets full of chalk probably salvaged from their parents's garages, leftovers from their recently abandoned careers as children, and get busy inscribing huge pastel-colored messages on the university's sidewalks. This week's messages were a little different than most, though; they did not advocate joining any social or religious organization nor even a fraternity. They did not recommend a vote for anyone on any ballot but the divine's.

Today's scrawlings said simply: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." This is the concluding advice Jobs gave the Stanford graduates in his address. It came from the cover of the final edition of what Jobs described as the "Google of the sixties," the Foxfire compendiums.

I am not a Mac user. I don't own an iPhone or an iPad, and I just sent my iPod to my son because I wasn't using it enough to justify keeping it when he would use it daily. I am not interested in computers, and I think the world might not be noticeably worse off if we didn't have the ability to look up every fact in every language at any moment instead of turning to those in our community and coming up with our own answers. And yet I am mourning Steve Jobs. I am mourning Steve Jobs because he set a very great example of what one person can do if he follows his heart.

Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Never finished even a Bachelor's degree. He dropped out because it was draining his parents' life savings. His parents never went to college either. He was fired from Apple. He started his own company. He started several. He had some ideas he wanted to pursue. He ate at the Hare Krishna's weekly "Chant with us, eat with us" table. He slept on the floor. It reminds me a little of JK Rowling scribbling notes that would become the Harry Potter saga on napkins in two-bit restaurants. Oh. I've never read any of the Harry Potter novels, either, and I'm kind of guessing I might feel sad when Rowlings eventually dies, too.

So why feel so sad about the passing of one man from the planet? Lots of good people die every day. Some of these good people get even fewer years than Jobs did. But Jobs knew he was dying. He knew it for nearly ten years, and he just kept right on doing his same old wonderful work, following his vision. Talking about the importance of doing work that you love. Talking about living each day as if it's your last day.

My mom died this year. That's a loss that kicks your feet out from under you; in many ways I'm still staggering around like a drunk without direction, howling at the moon that dares to spill its unperturbable light upon the surface of the lake behind my house like nothing has changed. My mom, like Jobs, knew she was dying, knew she had a very finite amount of time left on the planet, in her case, three years from diagnosis to death. I was with her when she got the diagnosis, and I was with her when her breath finally stopped. But until I listened to Jobs' Stanford speech I couldn't quite forgive what I blurted out absolutely without premeditation when we heard her diagnosis: "It's going to be the greatest experience of your life, Mom!"

That was a very strange thing to hear coming out of my mouth that day, and my mom was as shocked as I was to hear them. I would, in the next three years as I watched her suffer and dwindle, often rue the way words sometimes pour from me. But Steve Jobs makes me feel just a little bit better. He inspires me. He makes me think about what it is I should be doing on this planet for my one brief life here. There are not many people left who inspire us. There are not many people left who have both power and simplicity, wisdom and intelligence, conviction and belief. David Brooks captured some of Jobs' unique contributions to us in his column in the Times today. When we voted for Obama, we thought he might be another one of these rare public figures who had all this. That illusion is gone. He may not be corrupt, but he's been beaten. He's become ordinary. Ironically, after I came to this thought on a walk today, I returned to my comnputer to find a link to an Onion article saying much the same thing, having their own way with words.

Good night, Mr Jobs. Thanks for everything, including the work you left behind for us. I'll be tackling that assignment for the rest of my one wild and precious life now.

Feminism Is What Passes Between a Mother and a Daughter

When my daughter was in middle school and just starting to eye me suspiciously, aware of the fact that some day in the no longer unforeseeable future she might have something in common with me beyond our inexplicable fondness for American cheese and sweet pickles melted into a rolled up tortilla, she asked me, "Mom, why the hell do you call yourself a feminist?" She apparently, as she vouchsafed, had not yet experienced any sort of discrimination, nothing that limited her ability to enjoy her life and express her opinions and her talents to their fullest. Nothing, that is, except her feminist parent, who refused to answer this question until it was posed without the Dantean reference to the place that makes the Sahara feel like a fjord. I am of the generation that still believes that everything matters and, not least of all, the words we use.

Well, little girls do become recognizable as their mothers from certain angles, usually when the lighting is poor, and my daughter went away to college and majored in, of all things, Women's and Gender Studies. Or at least that is what she studied until engineering caught her eye, and she enrolled in a College of Engineering where at least five percent of the students were, like her, sometimes noticeably female. This summer, we were together

in Egypt. She'd been there since last year, teaching math and science to children in the desert; I came in large part because she was there. My life has not been the same since. Hers was never the same.

What does this have to do with the little girl who disavowed a need for feminism and the mother who still keeps "Passing the Equal Rights Amendment" at the top of her To Do list? Everything. Egypt is a country that has gone backward in terms of women's rights. During the reign of Hosni Mubarak, women have not only covered their heads, they have covered their arms and their legs; they have muffled their voices. It was part and parcel of the repressive regime. Indeed. Religious fundamentalism, in any color and any creed, consistently endorses and enforces the subjugation of women. Why?

Well, in the simplest analysis of all, to remove a little over half of the population from political relevance and engagement is to remove over half of any regime's possible enemies. This is an incredible accomplishment for any regime. It's like jailing half the population, without the administrative costs of building prisons or hiring prison guards. It's an analysis that has frankly not been acknowledged nearly enough in the obfuscation of trendier, more complex explanations.

Secondly, it trims the pool of the unemployed very nicely. If you can make it uncomfortable or (better yet) unfeasible for half the population to hold meaningful jobs, the statistics of joblessness, which are built from the figures of citizens actively seeking employment and not finding it, look significantly better. In Egypt, where unemployment is at 12% overall, 25% if you look at a more youthful cohort, it's pretty much imperative to keep women from actively seeking jobs and sending these percentages skyward. (The younger cohort includes noticeably more women, as younger women are far less likely to be married or in charge of childcare, especially since Egyptian moral law prescribes that a man provide an apartment and a living before he can propose marriage.)

Yet I would be inaccurate and foolish if I tried to persuade anyone, least of all myself, that women feel more oppressed and thwarted in Egypt than they do in the US. Even older women, who have lived in Cairo under Nasser and Sadat as well as during the reign of Mubarak seem, by and large, content with their hijabs and their long skirts and their lack of equal opportunity to be jobless.

These older women can remember, if you press them, miniskirts and capris. They can remember kissing in the park, drinking wine. They hang on to the careers they achieved back when it was a thrill to be female in the busy epicenter that was Cairo.

"Women are not made to do anything they don't choose to do," I heard over and over from men in Egypt this summer. "No one makes them cover themselves; it's their choice." But it is the men who tell you this. You don't get to speak to the women. Even in women's clothing stores, although a young woman will be the one who approaches you and pulls out long skirt after long skirt for your approval, when it comes time to pay, it will be a man who takes your money and men (they are never alone in Egypt) who watch every minute of the transaction between you and the young woman on the shop floor. "Shokran! Thank you!" you call out over your shoulder as you leave the shop with your packages, trying to see the sparkling young woman who helped you find just what you want despite the fact that your Arabic was pretty much limited to hello and goodbye. But she's busy, applying herself with equal energy to the next customer.

The two young men behind the cash register are slouching against the wall again and smirking as they survey the female customers with a sense of obvious privilege. You step out onto the crowded sidewalk and the mild Cairo evening feeling just a little bit violated.

One evening, my daughter and I were walking through a new part of the big city looking for an art gallery someone had mentioned to us. We had a street name but not much else and had been walking in what was starting to feel like circles. In a very narrow side street off the avenue we were walking for the third time, we caught the eye of what was almost certainly another mother/daughter duo, this one sitting on small stools outside what was probably the family business. They were watching us as we approached, and their eyes were friendly. We approached them and asked for directions. My daughter's Arabic is much better than mine.

Before they could answer, a man stepped in. He, like everyone we met, was nice. He extended himself in a way no man in any American city would, unless he was fresh off the airplane from some non-Western country. Soon he had not only answered our questions with an orchestra of hand motions and the usual three consultations with other men who paused nearby in anticipation of just these consultations; he walked us to our destination.

It's hard to complain when you get this kind of treatment. Riding in a cab through Cairo one day, I told the driver I liked the music he was playing. Without a second's hesitation, he popped it out and handed it to me. Another time, in another car, stuck in traffic, I said I was thirsty. "Oh. You want a drink?" Before I could demur, the driver had put the car into Park and hopped out to buy me a fruit juice at the little grocery at the corner. Neither driver would accept any money for their gifts.

But we were sad, my daughter and I, as we followed the quick steps of the man in the gallabiya to the street that would eventually give up the gallery to us. We looked back. The woman and her daughter were whispering and watching us.

How we would have loved to know what they were saying. How nice it would have been to have tea with them.

Sustaining a Non-Dismal World of Non-Drones

When you work in an academic department in a field of study which is popularly known as "the dismal science," you tend to look for even small signs of life with which you can counter that designation. You know: Undismal things. Things that hint of happiness or beauty, things that provoke curiousity or dreams. Things like a well-ironed shirt, for instance, on a customarily rumpled faculty member. Meeting a spouse who's a talented artist or finding out that the staid professor of Industrial Organization is a Flamenco dancer. Finding someone on Facebook, even if you wisely decline to friend him, discovering a fellow blogger. Or spotting an expensively framed portrait of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell on the wall in a faculty office.

Bertrand. I confessed to the professor in whose office I found the philosopher framed that I found Russell's work very dense and had never finished anything he'd written, even though I'd tried several times. He reached up behind the thick heavy volumes of Smith and Mas Colell and Varian and extricated a very thin paperback, Authority and the Individual. "Try this," he suggested. "It's from his lectures, and it's eminently readable."

I don't know if I will ever succeed in reading anything else of Russell's, but I am so enthralled by the analysis of our civilization in this slim volume I will certainly try again. Everything he discusses in these Reith lectures is relevant today. The lectures, delivered to large BBC audiences way back in 1948, did not anticipate a post 9/11 world, where the strong have become fearful and the weak bold. Russell did not see that the religion of capital would find itself in a horrifying round of Russian roulette, minus the now largely ineffectual Russians, minus the sense of gamesmanship inherent in roulette. Just spin the chamber and the twin towers fall down. Spin and Afghanistan's destroyed. Spin again and a plane crashes. Spin again and again and again; like the saying goes, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

No one predicted the way political violence would find its way to the shores of the US, and the subsequent way terrorism became almost mundane, something we pretend to cope with every time we fly to Aunt Brunhilde's for a cousin's wedding, something so much a part of our life now we barely flinch for attacks that kill less than several score. Russell, lecturing in the WWII era, still manages to address nearly everything we're seeing now, even in this slimmest and simplest of his writings.

What he talked about then remains entirely relevant today. When he dicusses fear, one can imagine a shot of a weakly smiling George W Bush on the screen behind Russell's podium, as the towers came crashing down along with our sense of immunity. "If loyalty to (a national culture) is to be replaced by loyalty to (corporations) ...there is only one psychological motive which is adequate for the purpose, and that is the motive of fear of external enemies." We hear the thumping of military boots tromping onto the shores of Iraq. We see the recession being addressed by infusing capital into the very industry that precipitated the crisis, that bankrupted the American working class, without any real reform or regulation of their tactics.

Russell talks about how the individual siting in the world has developed from that of a tribal to a national to a lost soul, still in search of gratifications for our enduring need to explore and create and belong. Combat and war, he postulates, are the most extreme expression of our need to stake out our individual territory, to wager our lives on our physical and logistical superiority. To counter this impulse, Russell advocates something that is becoming familiar to our ears lately: smaller, decentralized economies.

"The instincts that long ago prompted the hunting and fighting activities of our savage ancestors demand an outlet; if they can find no other, they will turn to hatred and thwarted malice. But there are outlets for these very instincts that are not evil. For fighting, it is possible to substitute emulation and active sport; for hunting, the joy of adventure and discovery and creation." To promote these, Russell recommends what we have come to call in our own time, sustainable lifestyles.

Yes. In a postwar world obsessed with unparalleled industrialization (for was it not American manufacturing prowess that actually won the war?), Bertrand Russell is speaking to millions of rapt listeners over the waves of the BBC and telling them to invest in decentralized, local economies, to provide satisfying work for artisans and artists and intellectuals as a means to avert our fatal impulse to find adrenaline and challenge on the battlefield, satisfaction no longer accruing from our daily work routines. Engagement in our work, Russell says, satisfying our sense of individual importance and fulfillment in our communities, is the best means to take away the horrifying prospect of life as drones in the military industrial complex we've built.

What perhaps Russell could not anticipate in these lectures, was the fact that even warfare would become by the 21st century, automated and impersonal. Drones and missiles, armaments that fire over such a long distance in either blinding daylight or deepest midnight that battles can be won or lost without soldiers facing an enemy. Even warfare is becoming an alienated process. The combination of instinct and training that once developed leadership in soldiers on the field of combat has been replaced by a microphone and a computer chip embedded in their helmet, telling them where to look, where to fire, when to run. How much more do we need the shelter of work that engages, inspires and allows us to develop the initiative and creativity that is the best part of being human?

Well. Russell's lectures say it all much better. "We shall not," Russell concludes, "create a good world by trying to make men tame and timid, but by encouraging them to be bold and adventurous. and fearless except in inflicting injuries on their fellow-men." Everyone on my Christmas list is getting a copy of this book this year. I hope you get a copy, too.

Arabic Pie: The Day the Language Died

Something is apparently wrong in Northern Africa, and I don't mean the Arab Spring. No. The Arab Spring is what's right in Northern Africa. The Arab Spring is the first hopeful season the world has known since the reunification of Germany and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1990/91 which amounted to the end of the WWII era of world history.

What is wrong in Northern Africa, if the scholars at the recent Germaine Bree Symposium "Arab Spring and the Humanities" are right, is a problem with language. And no, it is not a problem with the difficulty of Arabic, to which I can personally attest, not without shame. The problem, according to Columbia University professor Muhsin al-Musawi, is that language has been exhausted and depleted of meaning by lies. Now, says Musawi, "Action is the poem." The long regime of Mubarak, he states in that simple way that persuades so well of truth, "has so perverted discourse that words have become meaningless."

It is related to what the popular Egyptian poet known as el-Fagommi has commented about the January revolution. "These youth are writing the poem now. What you see is a poem." It is also related to what the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, "Poetry is to write this cosmic silence, final and total." One thinks of the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi shooting himself in 1982. Is this where poetry must go now? Into that cosmic, final silence?

I confess to not understanding how this can all really be true since it still requires words to state that action is now language. But I'll be thinking about it and watching to see what is being born here. Could it really be, as Musawi would have it, the rebirth of a revolutionary lexicon? What would this mean?

One symposium is not

nearly enough to anchor me in what seems to me a rather painful if hopeful conundrum. But listen to Hawi's most famous poem, "The Bridge," set to music (and translated!) and tell me if it's not stirring.

The Arab Spring continues.

The Law of Gravity Is All About Fall

The air weighs more today. I sort of doubt that this is scientifically verifiable, but if it is, I'd be happy if someone told me how this might be measured. The air's gray; as a painter I know that black weighs more than white, that these molecules are heavier. The interstices between the oxygen and carbon and hydrogen in free form are laden with aitch two oh; periodically it coalesces in sufficient amounts to let loose a light drizzle on the sidewalks. The coffeehouses are a little fuller now than they were two weeks ago; the bars have stopped ordering the fresh mint that means mojito season.

Fall started officially last week, on September 23. It slipped by me unnoticed somehow; I must have been out in the yard, clipping the valiant zinnias as quickly as they blossom. To save them from the frost. To save a few last smudges of color with which to ward off encroaching winter. For it's coming. Here in the northern midwest, that cannot be welcomed like a drop-in visitor; one must plan for it, change the lightweight blankets for the quilts, eiderdowns and woolies, the screens for the storm windows. Soon the lakes will lose the skies they hold in their bowls all the summer. Soon, all will be white, except the black slashes of the tree branches marking off the dwindling distance between the implacid heavens and the hard, frozen earth.

Look at the squirrels.

They're going crazy. The tree branches overhead are full of their chattering. "Henny! Did you bring in the nuts from the old man's yard?" "Esme, what's become of the hazelnuts you promised me!" They scold worst when I'm out digging in the garden, alarmed at the prospect of losing their stash to my shovel. I am uneasy that I haven't seen any of the neighborhood's burgeoning rabbit population lately. Are they under my old house, creating next spring's brood? If I board up the hole I spotted, will I have a dead rabbit family perfuming the eventual spring thaw?

Fall. Already some of the trees are dropping their leaves. Apples no one will ever eat are falling to the ground to rot. Children squeal when they step on them; mothers scold when those soles traipse into the house unwiped. Everything is falling. Towers, apples, the leaves. "Ashes, ashes, we all fall down." Already I am resisting gathering up armloads of deeply colored reds and golds and their dowdier but still regal brown cousins. I'm like a squirrel myself, wanting to hoard these. Already I am looking backward, inward. Fall is such a deep time. The graveyard is full of dark maws. Halloween is a dim shape but recognizable in the unfolding dusk.

Bring me your squash, your gourds,
Your chrysanthemums and stems of Russian sage.
The nuts and homely tubers freed from shores;
Bring these, earth's final volupte to me.
I wait and hope another spring to see.

Ha ha ha. Now that is one bad piece of poetry!

Bloomsday in Cairo: Pigeons and Prizes

Some people prepare for travel to Egypt by reading those dismayingly heavy travel books put out by Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, DK or (if you're elderly or English, the two being nearly synonymous) Frommer's or Fodor's. Others go shopping, which, if they're shopping nearly anywhere in the western world, is almost certain to leave them with a suitcase full of inappropriate clothing. Some people diet and others enroll in a language intensive. I read fiction and watch movies.

I did buy a Lonely Planet guidebook, but I gave it one try and put it aside. It will come in handy if I ever write a book about Egypt and need statistics about elevation or the height of the pyramids or the preferred Anglicized spelling of Sharm al Sheikh. The fact that travel books are, per square inch, the heaviest books to roll off the presses has always eluded my version of common sense. That heavy, glossy paper not only makes them expensive, it makes them prohibitive to carry.

Egyptian movies are hard to come by in the US. "The English Patient" and "On Cairo Time" are both good enough to watch repeatedly, but they're not actually Egyptian. "The Yacoubian Building" has that creepy little actor who loves Mubarak as its star. I read instead the great classics of Egyptian literature, mostly Naguib Mahfouz, but a little of the country's more recent literature, that of Alaa al Aswany and Ahdaf Soueif, for example. I have never felt better prepared for a visit to any foreign country.

Mahfouz, in particular, was an unbeatable guide to his people. Mahfouz lived in Egypt nearly the whole 20th century, keeping a home in Cairo for nearly all of that time. His work goes much deeper into Egypt though, way back to the Pharaonic era. I read it all, so there was little of life in Cairo that took me totally by surprise except the craziness of traffic and the dryness. These are both elements that factor into every single moment of life in Cairo, so pervasive no Cairean even thinks about either anymore. It, the consciousness of these, would be like a New Yorker being conscious of the way residents of that city treat visitors or asking an Angeleno how bad the Los Angeles smog is or how heavy traffic on the interstate.

The weather in Cairo seems uniformly perfect. I wasn't there in August, when temperatures are at their peak, but even that month seems to be manageable with a fan. Unlike life in the desert southwest of the USA, air conditioning is not common. Storefronts are left wide open, as are apartment windows if they're up a few floors for safety. You can walk around comfortably at any time of the day or night in any month of the year. And so I walked. I walked and walked and walked. Except for a few times I thought I would die crossing a multilane road full of speeding little cars all honking like the band on (Islamic) Judgement Day, walking was the perfect way to see the city. Well, that and the time I convinced my driver to take me deep into the heart of Cairo, where he warned me no American woman should go. That was one of the few times in my life I ended up being grateful for the steel and chrome of a good old Japanese car.

But that will be another episode.

My favorite day in Cairo was spent walking around the el-Khalili district of Old Cairo. It's known as a tourist destination now, but it's also home to many hundreds of thousands of Caireans, and along its narrow, twisting roads, in its hidden stairways and tiny shops is the Cairo Mahfouz described so well in his great Cairo Trilogy.

This was the perfect summer to be in Cairo. The January Revolution succeeded not only in deposing the Tyrant Mubarak but in bringing tourism to an absolute standstill. I was pretty much the only tourist in the country, which was as great for me as it was lethal for the economy. I would raise my camera to take a picture and when I was done turn around to face a bankful of Caireans casually stashing their cellphones after having taken my picture. I have to suppose that in previous years, a head of blonde hair was not so rare. If I was better at keeping a scarf tied I'd happily have covered my head, but I don't seem to be too good even at keeping my hair pinned up, let alone covered.

Or perhaps it was my camera that drew everyone's attention. I shoot with an SLR, an older Canon digital model that still requires that one hold it up and focus through the viewfinder window. My friends back home had cautioned me not to look too much like a journalist in view of the female journalist who was sexually assaulted during the revolution, but if you use a camera like this, you can't help but look suspiciously like you know what you're doing. In any case, I never had the least bit of trouble with anyone because of my camera unless you count the police who several times chased me out of sacred religious or military compounds.

But in el-Khalili, there were no police in evidence, at least in the immediate months following their shaming in the people's revolution of this winter, and I was free to take pictures of everyone. Occasionally I bought something, to make sure good will was maintained as well as my obligations to everyone back home. A belly dancing costume, extremely beautiful and glittery, for the little girl next door. An Aladdin's lamp, brass and certainly full of magic, for her big sister. And an elegant carved cane for my elderly father for which the negotiations took nearly an hour.

But the highlight was all Mahfouz. Walking down a skinny little street, my friend and translator Haytham reached out and touched my arm, then pointed skyward. "Amina," he told me, with his eyes twinkling happily. "Mahfouz's Amina."

The second story of the ancient building had huge windows taking up nearly the entire streetside wall. They were covered completely, in a way that made American maximum security prisons look like pleasant courtyard apartments. I'm putting a picture of the main window up for you here. If you've read any Mahfouz or almost anything about historic Cairo, you'll know what you're seeing here: the mashrabiya panels. This is how they covered the windows of the homes of the wealthy Caireans so that the women who were kept indoors could look out down to the streets below without being seen by any of the men who were allowed free passage there. In Mahfouz's great trilogy, Amina is the female head of the family who lives almost her entire adult life shut behind these closely gridded windows, in this iron cage like a bird.

I had hardly recovered from this sight when Haytham beckoned me to follow him down another tinier lane, up a flight of stairs,

through several more merchants' spaces ("No, shokran, not today, shokran," I would smile as we sped past them.)He came to a stop inside a restaurant. "Hungry?" he asked, that same mischievous light glinting in his eyes. I was suddenly ravenous. An elegantly attired man ushered us into an equally elegant back room with deep mahoghany walls and lush red carpeting and waiters spaced along the walls in their immaculate red jackets and Turkish fez caps. Again, one became aware of the lack of tourists in town. I vowed to order excessively, both because of hunger and my American cultural debt.

Then I saw the framed photographs on the wall and picked up a expensively printed flyer propped on the table by the menu. We were in Mahfouz's favorite restaurant, the place he'd frequented, now named after him, the country's only Nobel Prize novelist. The waiter and Haytham both laughed to witness my surprise and visible sense of wonder.

The laughter changed from manly to giggly when I asked in my bumbling Arabic, "Bathroom, please?" not realizing the waiter was about to bring me a blissfully hot steamed towel to wipe the city dirt from my fingers. "Bathroom?" I repeated. "Hamana?"

"You just asked for pigeon," Haytham grinned. "And they may well be able to serve you what you ask for," he finished, as the waiter managed to tone down his laughter to a very nice and sympathetic smile.

It was the best meal I had in Cairo, and I was so exhausted by the time I ate it, so replete with happiness and depleted of everything else that I can't even tell you what I ate now.