In My Father's Mansion Are Many Doghouses

Lately, I have been wanting a dog again. Our family pet, Crockett, died over two years ago, very old, hardly able to move any more, yet even as his cataracted eyes closed with the thick shroud of death, I could read how reluctant he was to leave this earthly home. It has taken me a long time to even think of replacing him.

But time has its way with us. In the Sinai Desert this June, a young and homeless dog who wandered freely up and down a stretch of the Red Sea strand had a litter of eight on the stones of my daughter's front porch. To give the young puppies shelter from the increasingly relentless sun of peak summer, rugs were draped over supports to provide shade. Coming and going from the small house one stepped carefully through a tumult of beautiful puppies, stooping and stopping, of course, to pet and play with them, for who could resist their happy frolics?

The pups were not allowed inside. Egypt is a Muslim country, and dogs are far from universally loved. In fact, in most places where Islam prevails as a religion and especially where sharia law is practiced, dogs are shunned or disallowed or even doomed. In Egypt, one sees cats everywhere, dogs rarely. I remembered a small event from years past, the first time a family of Muslims came to my house for a visit. Crockett was at my side as I opened the front door to welcome them. Their faces blanched noticeably, but they mustered a resolve which I was astute enough to notice but not sufficiently worldly to understand, and stepped into my foyer.

They did not make it further into my house. Other people were gathered in the living room, visible and audible from the foyer, drinking wine, conversing and laughing, waiting to meet the new neighbors, the Shumailans of Kuwait. Crockett wove in and out of the five Shumailans, wearing the big happy grin that revealed his canine teeth. The look of suppressed panic on the faces of the Shumailan parents intensifed. The children showed no signs of distress, only interest in the sounds of children coming from other parts of the house. "Come in," I urged. "There's food and drink this way, in the kitchen." I'm sure at that point, my new neighbors were certain the food was pork, the drinks all alcoholic. And it might have been. At that point in my life, twenty years ago, I was, I think it's safe to say, completely unconscious of the practices of Islam.

"I'm very sorry to say, but we must be leaving now," Mr. Shumailan finally spoke. I had just beckoned Crockett back to my side, as I could tell Mrs. Shumailan was very uncomfortable with his friendly weavings among her family. "Oh, but you just arrived!" I protested, in what I hoped was not an overbearing American way. "Please stay for a bit and come in." It was useless. They left. I was always welcome in their house, but they never again came to my house, well, except for their son Mohammed, who loved to trade baseball cards with my own son.

Muslims do not care for dogs. Cruelty against animals is strictly and expressly forbidden in the Quran, so they do not persecute dogs; they simply do not care for them. Heidi, the name my daughter gave the dog who had adopted her porch as her nursery, was free to roam the desert and even came and went from some of the shelters ranged upon the sands without persecution, but no one fed her regularly, no one made sure she was de-wormed or given distemper shots, no one brought her dietary supplements as eight always hungry puppies suckled from her teats everything she could possibly scrounge to eat and then some, and Heidi grew skinnier and skinnier. Muslims do not care for dogs. Unless dogs are used for hunting or herding, hardly any practicing Muslim will set food in front of a canine. And so the word came down: The pups had to leave the camp, and since they were still nursing, Heidi had to leave with them. In a way, these dogs were lucky. In some parts of the Muslim world, there are periodic campaigns to exterminate dogs, with cruel strychnine or "kinder" bullets.

We found, to our momentary joy, a place only 30 minutes away that called itself an animal welfare society, and they agreed to take in Heidi and her puppies and look for homes for them all. We loaded the dogs into a van and drove off to Nuweiba. What we found there made me almost violently ill. I had to walk away in order to keep from shouting out what was truth to me and an insult to the well-meaning caretakers who were working so hard to take care of abandoned animals in a place that did not value them. The shelter had the feel of a death chamber. It was a hot and airless cement bunker, hidden in the squalor behind a heap of junk. Within ten days, I heard. Heidi had died there. No one knew what would become of the pups, who were, at six weeks, still nursing. Well, I thought I knew, and I wept for them.

The intervening weeks have, happily, brought better news. The people who ran the shelter were limited in their resources financially, but they worked incredibly hard to save these puppies. They were removed from the life-sapping heat of the room where we had to initially leave them and  put into foster homes. One by one, they've been adopted. Last I heard, only one was still in need of a home. How I wish I could be that home for her. This is her in this picture, at the time that we left her in Nuweiba, just in case you live near there and fall in love with her.

Muslims say that angels will not enter the house that is home to a dog. I say I'd choose a dog over an angel any day.

The Crazy Wrong Costs of Freedom

This winter, the good people of my home state of Wisconsin decided it was time to let our new governor know we objected to his plan to send our population back to the Dark Ages. During the coldest and snowiest months of the year, we gathered by the tens of thousands at our state capitol to demonstrate that we had another vision for our state, one that involved moving forward. We were, admittedly, inspired by what we saw happening in another part of the world, far away in Cairo and Alexandria, and so, young and old, white collared and blue collared, farmer and teacher and firefighter and civil servant, we shouldered our hand-lettered signs and raised our out-of-tune voices, and we marched and we slept and we sang; we fed each other, and we learned to respect and admire each other. Altogether, we comprised a fine and noble chorus.

 And when our efforts turned from the physical to the political, when our efforts to persuade our legislators came to naught, as the doors of first the hearing rooms were bolted and eventually the doors of the entire Capitol were locked, we turned our efforts toward that ultimate repository of American free speech: the ballot box. In Egypt, where the precedent of genuinely free and open elections has yet to be realized, the voices of the Spring Uprising are also waiting to gain expression at the ballot box. Across the whole world, people are speaking up in unprecedented numbers. China has noticed and has cracked down on journalism and the social media, afraid demands for democracy may spread to their big city squares. Even Israel's cities, in a bizarre counterpoint to the government's repressive response to the failed freedom flotilla, are full of citizens protesting, demanding lower rents, demanding lower child care costs.

Bizarre? Well, sometimes it seems like there's a really gigantic problem with myopia in what maps call Israel, what my friends in Egypt call Occupied Palestine. I mean, daycare and housing costs are very real concerns of a lot of working people in all parts of this fermenting, fomenting world, but right now in Israel there is another housing related crisis: The Israeli government this week filed a NIS 1.8 million lawsuit against 34 Beduoins living northeast of Be-er Sheva whose homes have been demolished by the state repeatedly. Yes, that's right. The Israeli government razed the village of Al-Arakib 27 times, according to its leader, and each time the villages rebuilt it, absorbing the cost of rebuilding each time, and now the Israeli government is suing the villagers to pay for the costs they incurred with their repeated demolitions. The right of the Bedouins to live on this otherwise unoccupied, public land is under consideration by the courts. This whole tactic, of using a prolonged combination of legal and physical obstruction, has become the main method used to take away land from the Palestinians living within Israel's boundaries. For a very good read on this, check out Palestinian Walks, by Raja Shehadeh, a short and excellent book.

It cannot help but remind me of some of the mind-blowing tactics we saw tried here in good old Wisconsin this winter of our discontent and protest. We occupied the state capitol for several weeks trying to get our message heard by the legislators and media, and we covered the walls and the staircases with our hand lettered signs and petitions. When the government was finally successful in evicting us and barring us from the Capitol along with all other citizens and even some of our state legislators, they announced that it was going to cost the good State of Wisconsin (aka all of us, its citizens) an estimated $7.5 million to clean up and repair the building. Eventually, that estimate was lowered a bit, lowered by well over $7 million. Indeed, certain parties offered to clean it up for a mere $7,500. Eventually, the (unionized) janitors who work there, whose collective bargaining rights were being stripped by the very budget we'd been protesting, would simply apply a little acetone to the marble to wipe away the residue of the painter's tape we had used to hang up our signage. No one has so far confessed how little it ended up costing. But the cost was made to seem ours. We were made to seem the criminals. And meanwhile, today the papers reveal that this same governor authorized the payment of up to $500,000 to his favorite law firm to defend his move against collective bargaining rights.

Follow the money. Follow the money. Let me know in whose pockets you eventually find yourself.

Inner Space on Planet Earth

Perhaps you've read my post from yesterday and already know I'm currently preoccupied with issues related to clutter and space and possessions, or perhaps you are fresh to my blog from some unknown linkage of interest or happenstance or even, gulp, fate. Well, I am still tonight dealing with my daughter's possessions, I am still hosting a houseful of delightful visitors from Hong Kong, and I am still thinking about issues related to the spaces we occupy on our comparatively little spinning orb, Good Ole Long Suffering Earth.

But tonight I'll be brief. I will be content to offer you two words: Capsule hotel. I will also offer you a few links, to Wikipedia's definition, to a short film tour of a working capsule hotel in Japan  and one more to some additional pictures. These are real overnight accommodations for real people.

Suddenly, I find myself newly fond of my ancient, ramshackle house and all the wonderful history and beauty of what fills it. I do not want to become an inhabitant of an anonymous cell with no natural light or audible sounds from the streets beyond; I do not want to be a worker bee in a hive devoted to production.

The Chinese, incidentally, just shut down the first capsule hotel to open in their country, in Shanghai. The government decided that it was a safety hazard, too hard to get people out in case of fire.

Puttin' Stuff to Rights

"hey man/ this is not your perogative/ i gotta have me in my

pocket/ to get round like a good woman shd/ & make the poem
in the pot or the chicken in the dance/ what i got to do/
i gotta get my stuff to do it to/
why dont ya find yr own things/ & leave this package

of me for my destiny/ ..."

Those are a few of the rockin' lines from "somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff" by Ntozake Shange, part of For Colored Girls who have considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. I loved that play when I first saw it in the seventies, and I loved it again when it came around in a film version last year.

I've been thinking of this particular poem this weekend, because I've spent much of my time packing up my daughter's Stuff. That's "Stuff," with a capitol S. You know what stuff is: It's whatever you can dismiss with a wave of your hand, it's undefined by definition. "What are we having for dinner tonight, Mom?" If the answer is "Just stuff," it may be time to wrangle an invitation to a friend's table. "What's bothering you, sweetie?" "Oh, just stuff." Again, it may be time to go out. You are probably included in that "stuff," but you're not going to get to hear that for a while yet. "What'd the professor talk about today?" "You know. Same stuff." Your fellow student didn't listen; again, turn elsewhere.

But Stuff is essential, and it's this Stuff Ntozake Shange wrote about in this poem; it's a woman's essence. This weekend, I've been trying to discriminate between my daughter's stuff and her Stuff. We Americans have a mind-boggling amount of stuff. Our touted right to the "pursuit of happiness" has propitiously been equated with the right to buy anything we want. In our society, even college students have so much in the way of material possessions they require moving trucks to change apartments every semester. It's common for many middle class families to hold yard sales every summer, an annual ritual whereby they make a little money getting a sunburn sitting in their driveway all day while strangers pick through clothing they outgrew and George Foreman mini-grills that they used twice and then stored on the unreachable shelf at the top of every built in cupboard. We have so much. We have too much. I'm preparing to ship my daughter's Stuff to Arizona for her. I'm thinking now it might all be just stuff, and the only Stuff is what she's already toting right inside that big brilliant brain of hers. Well, and maybe her cello gets to go, too, maybe it's Stuff.

I have a family from Hong Kong staying with me this summer. After they'd been here a couple of days, when the 10-year-old son felt comfortable enough with me to speak freely, he commented sagely, "I see that when you have such a big house, it isn't kept as clean." I was startled, then I laughed. He was right. My house is so old it sometimes seems like it's no longer made of stone and shingles but almost entirely made of dust, which falls at a faster rate than anyone could ever clean. But what Chihang meant was somewhat different. He meant that when someone has so much space, they fill it with lots of possessions. Yep. Stuff.

Chihang's family, which is doing very well by anyone's financial terms, lives in an apartment that is under 1,000 square feet in Hong Kong, on the 43rd floor of a building built over five underground levels containing a shopping mall, the parking spaces, and a state of the art fitness center. Everything has a definite place in their apartment, and at day's end, everything is stored in its place. In my house, things can be left out. My easel with its current wet oil painting is out in the dining room. My good old road bike leans against a bookcase in the living room. There is room. I noted to Chihang the other day that he was making a speedy and thorough adjustment to living in America's vaster spaces. His books and his flipflops and his jacket were strewn about the living room. We grinned at each other, conspirators in cultural exchange.

I wonder how this translates into the vastness of the American landscape. Are we less respectful of our land because we have so much? We came from a population of explorers and from ranchers and farmers who kept moving further West when they needed more land, better land. Do we allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness because there's just so much of it we can't imagine it ever being depleted? Do we allow strip mines in Appalachia because, heck, who'd want to live there anyway? Do we hardly think twice about abandoning rockets and satellites in space because they'll probably never be seen until they fall at random, probably "just" into some ocean?

We need to remember that what really matters, as Ntozake knew, is our Stuff. Don't let anyone take your Stuff. Strut your Stuff. Sell the rest.

She Sells Sheesha

I bought a hookah for my daughter's birthday present. (Don't worry; she never reads my blog.) I bought it because she's about to return to the States from Egypt, where "smoking shisha" is a community ritual, one even a middle aged mom is finally induced to try during a recent visit to Cairo.

"Smokin' sheesha/shisha," for the unindoctrinated, is smoking a hookah. You know, water pipe. You know, the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. What Lord Byron talks about in Verse XIX of Canto II of The Island. It is not, fyi, getting high, although in some cases, including my own, it comes close to it; I definitely felt altered after a few hits and not altogether for the better. In many countries, such as Egypt, smokin' shisha is as uncontroversial and easy as smoking cigarettes used to be everywhere. In tea houses, in the back rooms of tourist shops and highway rest stops, there's a hookah ready to be lit, shisha in many aromas and flavors waiting to be sampled. Leisure. That's what shisha represents. Relaxing with friends.

Which is why, I guess, I just bought this darned hookah for my daughter. I want to help keep a little bit of Egypt alive in her soul, I guess, an ember that glows for many years to come, giving her perspective on the time she's spent living there, so far from what she's known in the USA. Once she returns here, she'll be driven to follow her skills, her intelligence, her extraordinary individual composite of personality and interest and ability. In the first year of a five-year PhD program, there's not a lot of time allocated for sitting around teahouses smoking apple-flavored shisha.

If you glance at his picture of me taken when I finally agreed to try smoking, you'll probably have no doubt that I wasn't a natural at it nor even a slightly promising recruit. My daughter burst out in extended bent-over laughter as she watched me try to appear like I knew what I was doing. After just a few hits, I'd had enough; I could feel a deadly pallor creeping over my face and a queasiness growing in my stomach. But it tasted good, to my surprise, much sweeter and softer than the taste of cigarettes I remember from years ago before we learned it was bad for us.

Turns out smoking shisha is probably just as bad as smoking cigarettes. Here's what the Mayo Clinic has to say about its health risks, in case you're an advocate, addict or idly attentive: Mayo Shisha? The American Cancer Society votes a big thumbs down, as well. And it's not just crusading Westerners who realize smoking shisha is unhealthy; Muslim groups have begun working to persuade the young in shisha-rich countries, those who have returned the practice to popularity, to abstain. So why the heck am I giving a hookah to my daughter?

Well, they're beautiful. The low point of my recent travels in Egypt was when a paid driver of mine left me alone in a remote and squalid building with a few old Muslims watching a spooling recitation of the Quran on a wall-mounted television, and the only object I felt comfortable looking at was an assortment of hookahs on a repair table, pictured here. And the idea of sitting around an open air cafe with a small group of good friends on a fresh summer evening, sipping hibiscus tea and apple shisha is lovely, too. But maybe she'll figure out a way to use it that doesn't hurt her. Like blowing bubbles.

Or maybe it would be okay to sit with someone you love and slowly share a pipe now and then. It makes me think of the word languorous, and wouldn't that be nice once in a while.

Entr'acte: Let Us Sing a New Song

In her second book of poetry, published while the student-led antiwar movement was still very actively protesting the US's military involvement in Southeast Asia, Denise Levertov included a piece titled "Entr'acte: Let Us Sing Unto the Lord a New Poem." I was in high school, was launching myself into political activism like a one skinny armed flotilla in the forbidding seas of Joe McCarthy's hometown in the middle of middle class America, and I came upon this slim volume of poetry like a life vessel. Appropriately, the volume was titled, To Stay Alive.

I painted my first abstract watercolor to the above poem. Neither the medium nor the style would turn out to be my own, but then, neither was the poem, so it did quite nicely for many years, and for many years, all the way through my undergraduate years and a few beyond, it was the only piece of framed "artwork" on the walls of my successive bedrooms. When I get home, I'll take and post a photo of it, for your amusement. It's one of the few mementoes I've managed to keep from those years when we moved from city to city, house to house, room to room faster than a hungry mouse sometimes. In retrospect, I'd rather I hung onto the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poster I also tacked onto every wall I claimed as mine, "The World Is a Beautiful Place."

What I've remembered from this poem of Levertov's are fragments, perhaps imperfect. "There's a pulse in Richard...revolution revolution revolution ...And another, seldom heard: poetry poetry. ... But when the rhythms mesh then ...the singing begins." It was like Levertov knew all the strainings of my young soul, to be a radical, to be a poet, to be full of music and alive and like the river, always running.

A friend of mine posted on Facebook today, "Poems are, by definition, agents of change." I wondered what she knew that I didn't. "Please elaborate," I commented. Had I missed something all these years? Was there something inherent to poetry that meant Change? The fingers of my hands plus your hands plus many other hands are insufficient to count the number of poets who have been revolutionary; was it true that they couldn't be otherwise? My definition of poetry contains nothing that suggests they must be agents of change, but I never presume that I'm right, and my pulse quickens when someone suggests something new and interesting like this.

It's a subject of interest to me. Among my other idiosyncracies, I have been collecting names of poets in exile. There are so many of them. I am tempted to write something like "Poets are, by their nature, in exile." But I am not so hasty. It turns out my friend really meant that she was talking not about the definition of poetry, but her own personal definition of Good Poetry. And I suspect that poets are not intrinisically in exile but that many would like to think they are in exile; it sets them apart, makes them special, gives them a longer than necessary shadow that precedes them down streets crowded with the ordinary, the prosaic minions.

But some are truly in exile. These are the political poets, by and large. Joseph Brodsky (Soviet Union). Nabeel Yasin (Iraq). Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine). Ziba Karbassi (Iran). And, of course, Pablo Neruda, from his beloved Chile, until Allende brought him back. When you look at the list of countries that force their poets to leave in order to share the wisdom and the beauty of their words, it should speak powerfully. A nation that banishes its poets loses its own heartbeat.

"Heart's river, / living water, / poetry:" continues Levertov. "and if that pulse / grow faint / fever shall parch the soul, breath / choke upon ashes."

If I ever stop thrilling to this poem of my youthful spirit, I will indeed be old. Let us sing.

Summer in the Cities

Eight o'clock on a July night in Wisconsin and I just resettled with my laptop in a deck chair out on the front porch of my old Victorian. The air is so thick with humidity some moisture meters have been reporting rain in the city. But it's not raining; rain has a soul. This present turpidity and turgidity is soulless. No one delights in this. This swollen tumescence of weather is the unforgivable aspect of summer. It is summer's fatal flaw.

Someone asked me if it was as hot as Cairo yet, and I had to say no, but much worse. The heat in Egypt is such dry heat. Sitting here on the front porch with a chilled glass of Chardonnay and a hardcover atlas between my lap and the heat of my laptop, perspiration is running in parallel rivers down my stomach. In Cairo, feluccas are pushing off from the banks of the Nile down on the corniche. Lovers are glittery eyed in anticipation of an hour's reprieve from the moral laws of the land. Kisses are stolen and never returned.

Madison is so far from Cairo entire civilizations must be lost between their circumstances. There is nothing here that isn't green. I walked through a woods on my lunch hour today and inhaled a smell that was between humus and pipe tobacco. It's the smell of fecundity, the scent of rot, the odor of eros and thanatos rolled into one cigar and smoked. Too much life becomes so easily too much death. The vines in my garden after one weekend away are choking each other. The rose bush I've tried several times to eliminate from along the stepping stone path through my garden has triumphed again, and the calves of my bare legs are scratched and bloody from her thorns: a rite of passage.

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age." Dylan Thomas, a Welshman, must have had a premonition of Wisconsin summer in his blood when he wrote that. I have come, in my three+ years here, to despise the prolific growth. Gardens seem like the people here, too big, too blousy, too frowsy frumpy flatulent. Everything smells, including now me. I sit here with my laptop and my glass of summer wine, and the glass is sweating as freely as I but at least it does not smell; I am of the rank earth, though, and my own green age is upon me.

"And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/my youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

Sometimes I drive through the small winding roadways of rural Wisconsin astounded at the vegetative lushness and I wonder how it would look to my friends who've spent their whole lives in Egypt. Would they be even more convinced that we Americans are the most spoiled and selfish people on this little spinning globe we share?

Seeing Bahira

Bahira got her high school diploma this summer. Over her long, black Bedouin robe, she wore a shorter robe, in the forest green color of Memorial High School here in Madison, Wisconsin. Along the elasticized band of her matching mortarboard was glued a tricolor ribbon in the colors of Egypt. Her happiness, with the gap-toothed smile that seemed fairly common among the local Bedouin, was every bit as wide and shining as the other three girls who graduated alongside her from a little school along the sandy shores of the beautiful Red Sea.

The four friends, who had been schooled together for years by a succession of teachers from Egypt and abroad, were the first to earn their diplomas, to complete their high school equivalencies. When I landed in Cairo for my visit this summer, they were all in the city taking some of the tests that would verify their learning and serve as the basis for at least three of them to continue on to college.

But probably not the demurely radiant Bahira. At the time I had to reluctantly leave Egypt, it was not looking likely that this sparkling intelligence would be cultivated further. While the other three girls went off to universities in Cairo and Germany, Bahira was, most probably, going home to her family, to her tribe, to get married, to tend the goats, to make a little money for the family perhaps, by making and selling rugs or jewelry in the desert towns and seaside resorts.

Most Bedouin girls still leave formal schooling at the age of twelve. This is when they start covering themselves, too, and are no longer allowed to associate freely with boys outside their immediate family. Younger brothers are allowed to order them about. When I met Bahira on the bus back to South Sinai from Cairo, her younger brother was along to make sure she was protected. From Cairo’s urban violence, you wonder, from the sexual predators looking for the innocence of a girl fresh from the country? Well, that’s one way of looking at it, if you think that the casual sighting of a young woman whose eyes and the bridge of her nose are the only parts of her person showing is somehow might somehow be construed as male predation, sexual violation, danger. My son, an economist, also visited Egypt this monumental year. He went to visit his sister, who was one of Bahira’s teachers. My daughter wanted him to present a talk to the older girls on the subject of economics, to help prepare them for their comprehensive exams. He was not allowed. He would have seen Bahira.

Bahira, I gathered, was allowed to complete her high school diploma for one reason: Her father wanted it, and before he died commanded the rest of the family to respect his wish that she finish school. It did not seem like the remaining men of her family shared this vision for her, and at the point I had to leave the desert, the conversations between her (male) teachers and her (male) relatives regarding her ability to go to college were not getting any closer to Cairo than the Taba/Nuweiba roadway stretching along the Red Sea shore.

Change does not always come overnight, and if it does come overnight, if the tyrant is deposed and flees to a distant enclave, change has not necessarily been wrought in anything other than a superficial if satisfying moment. Change comes like evolution more than revolution, by tiny increments that eventually change the whole world. My heart aches thinking of Bahira married off to someone she may not even meet before the marriage is completed. My heart grows heavy realizing that Bahira may never leave the desert, never fall in love, never walk in the shade of a dense forest, throw stones into a cold mountain lake, read Yeats, play a piano or hear YoYo Ma.

And then I read what she writes on her Facebook page, “If I cannot go to college then I will be happy to teach the children here,” and I know I have underestimated Bahira, that I have applied my own Western standards of freedom and happiness to a non-Western environment, and that change is coming, as it can, and both Bahira and I have our own small and essential roles in it.

Let Us Grow Big As Sunflowers

I don't know how they grow them in other parts of the world; I'm well aware that soil and climatic differences make for differences in plant growth. But in any part of the world, the sunflower turns its face to the moon.

OK. The sun. Just checking to see if you are really paying attention. As my son likes to remind me, I can be (when I choose) a master of passive aggression.

Whenever I have planted sunflowers, given my penchant for extremes, of course I've planted Giant Hybrids, the kind that purport to grow to 6/8/10 feet tall. I mean, if you're going to tiptoe through the tulips, that's one thing; if you want to get utterly befuddled in the flowers, you need the Giant Hybrids.

Today I spoke with a young American woman living in Cairo who has fallen quite in love with a very fine Egyptian man. Yes, this is a cause for happiness. Love is always well-added to the world; much like oh just one small extra pinch of sugar or salt to the pot on the stove, you cannot go seriously wrong. Unfortunately, you can break a heart or two, though.

The young man in question here has lived in Cairo his entire life. He is a Sunni Muslim, not so devout that he prays publically, not so fundamental that he does not drink or associate with Westerners, certainly not so conservative that he demand anything from his Western girlfriend in terms of how she dresses or what she thinks or says. But he has not introduced her to his family.

Let's be clear. When I say "young man," it is only because I am old. The "young man" in question is nearly 30 years old. He lives with his parents in the house where he has always lived, with his younger siblings. He works in a business his parents bought for him when he finished his college studies, along with an apartment in the city that will be nice once he's done fixing it up. This is not unusual for those who are well-employed in Egypt or blessed with family money. Indeed, it's not truly unusual in any part of the world, though in the West we try to make it seem like it's something more than a gift when the wealthy pass on their privileges.

But I digress. What I want to talk about is sunflowers. What I want to say is that we need to become our biggest, brightest selves. I think it's fairly clear to anyone capable of thought or even hearing that our entire world from Tibet to Sudan to Colombia to Japan to Kazakhstan to Greece and of course the USA: civilization is at a rather low point. Or, shall we say, there are an awful lot of pots on the stove, all boiling. (This would perhaps work nicely with the idea of sugar broached earlier. Feel free to toss in an extra pinch of lovin'.)

Anyway. This "young" man has so far declined to introduce the young, Western woman he professes to be in love with to his family. He is afraid of what controversy, what tumult, might ensue. It is fairly certain there would be some. They are, after all, Muslims. The young woman is not. Their entire family, for generations, has lived and died a thousand deaths in Cairo. She has lived there one year and is about to return to the States to get her PhD. Yes. Tumult is about as certain as tomorrow, which starts in 50 minutes here.

I don't want to get personal or belabor this. I don't want to play Dear Abby or be a matchmaker; I don't, for once, even want to talk about religion or the Middle East. I just want to say this:

You never know how strong and beautiful a person may turn out to be if you feed them truth, fertilized with tenderness. It's like the sun and the rain and good soil are in your hands now. Give those you love a chance to rise above their present circumstances. Offer those you love the opportunity to grow, to be like the sunflower, tall and facing the light.

Oh. And take a few minutes to click on the link to "Sunflowers, Illuminated." Worth your while music.

Same Sex Restrooms are OK With Me

Yingluck Shinawatra was designated as the next Prime Minister of Thailand following elections this week. That's her at the left. Yep. She is a she. Angela Merkel announced this week she's ready to run for another term as Germany's Chancellor. In the USA this month, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was reintroduced into Congress by Carolyn Maloney of New York's 14th District.

I work within an academic department of the university here whose professors rank among the highest paid in the university. Our faculty right now is about one-tenth women, which isn't bad, for our department, which isn't bad for its field. If you look a little lower, to non-tenure track teaching staff, the ones who reliably teach the gigantic and rarely rewarding principles courses that are the meat and potatoes on an international smorgasbord, the proportion rises even more than my eyebrows, which is to say very significantly. Among our vast body of undergraduate majors, the proportion is a little better; there we can consistently show any wandering Affirmative Action officers that we have 26 percent female students. Our subject, by the way, is economics. Lest you're tempted to any facile riposte like, "Well, that ain't brain surgery," I'd like to point out that even over in Neurology, the percentage of women is much higher, and the number of women graduating from med school nationwide is just about to top the number of men. Over in the Law School, the number of women earning their JJD diploma long since eclipsed their male counterparts.

But economics is really what matters. The numbers say it all. So what do charts and figures about the income gap in American society have to do with the number of female economists in my department, the number of heads of state elsewhere that are not replicated here, the recent reintroduction of the ERA into Congress? Women here still have no constitutional backing for our entreaties that we are the match or the better of men in every field. It is not just that we bake a better cake; we present a better case. It's not just that we somehow manage to cope with the masks demanded of devout Muslim women, we excell at wearing surgical masks, our eyes serious on our patients, our hands steady enough pull a sliver from a child's finger, thread a wire up the artery from your leg all the way to your brain. Our prospects are unlimited.

It is seriously time for the ERA. Maloney and her contemporaries, including my own Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, have reintroduced. They did so right on the heels of the Supreme Court denying that the women workers employed by Wal-Mart have a right to present a class action suit as workers who have been discriminated against for salaries and advancement. Because really, how can you discriminate against a group of people who are not your equals? This is the argument.

It's very simple, and it's time to pass it, once and for all. "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." It may be the most elegant, to-the-point legislation introduced into Congress in decades. Don't let it be done-in again by whining about idiotic inoperables like same sex bathrooms. Think about how many times you saw the line in the women's room queuing out the door while the men were in and out in minutes from their room. This is not Separate But Equal: This is inequal.  Don't let anyone dismiss it again by relying on lies like "Women are already free." We are not free until we are equal. Period. It has to be put in writing. In that document we respect about all others. The Constitution. When someone, anyone, tells you its unimportant, look at them straight in the eyes with that surgical steel gaze of yours and say, "Like water is unimportant. Like breath."

The Game on the Table Now

I just signed an online petition heading for President Obama's office, adding my voice to thousands of others asking him to abstain from offering cuts to Social Security in return for Republican action on the national debt. I signed and submitted my name even though I think we could and should make considered cuts in Social Security. Why do such a thing? Because our national political climate doesn't seem to have any possibility of our taking any considered, reasonable action anymore and, absent this possibility, I would rather have Social Security as it is than cut off another limb for the Republicans to gnaw at their budgetary feast.

Republican ideals are largely pretty much okay with me. Personal freedom, limited governmental instrusions, encouragement of enterprise. That said, as our nation is today, as Republicans pretend to serve their ideals, I actually do believe that Republicans, as a whole, are meaner than Democrats. They don't want to help the sick. (The sick should be out shopping for private insurance.) They don't want to help the elderly. (Cut Social Security. Cut Medicare. Heck. Kill them all.) And they certainly don't ever want to help the poor (If they really wanted the poor to be able to pull themselves up by their fabled "bootstraps," why would they be intent on decimating free, public education?).

Yet they seem to have no problem accepting Social Security payments themselves or applying for Medicare benefits for their own octogenarian parents. My father is a case in point. A lifelong Republican, such a Republican that he refuses to admit he's a Republican ("I have never joined the party. Never paid a cent in party dues. No man can be required to join political party in the United States of America."), even though he has voted for Republicans his whole life and was not above sending his four cute as buttons daughters all dressed up in look-alike dresses out with pamphlets for Barry Goldwater before we were sufficiently conscious to object.

My dad's mother lived with us during her last five or so years, a short and dowdy woman who spoke English with a European accent even though she'd lived in the States for most of her seventy years. I don't remember much of her as I was a thoroughly self-absorbed adolescent at that time, just her painfully thick, trunk-like ankles, the uneven shuffle of her walk, the bubbles of chicken fat on the surface of the soup she cooked in a big pot on the new, built in stove in our sparkling suburban tract house. She paid him rent. She had money to pay him rent for two reasons: Her husband, who died  young, had been a union man, a finish carpenter for Kohler Company, and Social Security. My dad was not a stranger to ranting about either trade unions or Social Security, especially when his brothers were over and drinking too many beers with him. And while I grant that I was 90 percent self-absorbed, I was not quite as unquestioning as the little blonde girl who smiled winsomely as she handed over pictures of an elephant wearing heavy black rimmed glasses; I had reached the fledgling point of social awareness that allowed me to ask my Dad, "But how can you be so against Social Security when it's what allows Grandma to live?" He didn't bother to answer. He didn't have to. He was a Republican. They never have to answer.

Republicans are meaner. They'll spend billions on prisons, rather than millions on schools. They'll endorse coverage for Viagra but not for birth control. They'll build roads for outmoded car traffic, but they won't pay workers enough to allow them to afford gas anymore. And now they are folding their arms akimbo, refusing to play with Democrats again until the Dems give them another free pass around the board, collect $200, get out of jail free, why not. They are better at stare-downs than we are. We hear a child cry in the next room and get antsy. We have a dish yet to cook for a potluck tonight. We have a blog to write. We blink. Over and over and over again, we blink.

This time, we shouldn't blink. We shouldn't even stare back at them. We should just go about our business. Even David Brooks, whom I am starting to like an awful lot, is acknowledging the utter untenability and incomprehensibility of the Republicans's position on the national debt, which President Obama is now trying to buy by offering cuts in Social Security. My dad had no problem accepting, truly, hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Medicare budget to ease my mom's passage through the last year of her life. This wasn't Social Security, but it's the same idea. Now he comments gruffly how the federal government should tighten their belt, as he has. Things just aren't right down in Whoville.

And I, knowing full well that Social Security benefits need to be re-examined if only because they serve the wealthy better than the impoverished, just wrote to Obama that he should not put Social Security on the table. It is not a bargaining table; it's a butcher block. Like the "Get Out of Jail Free" cards and a free ride to the $200 of the Go Square, they will pocket whatever we offer and walk away smirking. It's a ruthless game we play.

The winner of the staredown knows it's winner always takes all. There is no considered reasoning in American politics right now.

Mental Flossing What Remains of the Day

Yesterday's posting about the important issues of clothesline usage left me with a brain crumb. A "brain crumb," for the uninformed among you (Geez. First I have to teach you about the principles of hanging your clothes outside, then I have to give a vocabulary lesson!): A brain crumb is a small leftover thought or image that doesn't blow away or hide under the bureau when you close the door behind you, like their relatives, the obediant little dust bunnies do. The brain crumb I was left with was a mere fragment of a thought, "dirty laundry." Now, to be rid of this ort, I pull out the mental floss and have at it.

I am thinking about what we keep private. I am thinking about this because I watched the totally depressing movie Dogtooth (Ah! What the floss finds!) and read the novel A Map of the World, nearly its twin of domestic gloominess. And, yes, I would actually recommend both to you, though not necessarily in one week as I experienced them.

The film, directed by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and released in 2009, has won many awards and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The novel, by Wisconsinite Jane Hamilton, was first published in 1994 and was an Orange Prize finalist as well as an Oprah's Book Club choice. They are both stories, one surreal, the other too real, that take place deep in the troubled heart of an isolated family. They both are woven from strands involving child abuse, sexual abuse, isolation, and truth telling. (I mean, come on! I already told you the novel was an Oprah selection!) What are the lies we tell? How do we tell truth from lies? What do words represent in our efforts to represent truth to the world around us?

The families of these two stories are as distinctive as their media. What the families share is their cocooning. Both families, visited by horrible events, are closed. Their agonies and horrors, their dirty laundry and their unmentionables so to speak, are not hung outside in the fresh air and sunshine. Think here about really smelly old athletic socks, men's smelly old athletic socks, left in a locker too long. Some doors should never be opened. That is sort of how I felt about both these award-winning creations, and yet here I am saying, yes, you should see/read them. Why? Because they'll take you somewhere, to some of your own experience.

Remember when you were little and had to dig through all the dirty clothes in the bag that hung at the bottom of the clothes chute? Probably a mean sibling had thrown something you loved down the chute in retaliation for your being cuter than she was or maybe for tattling on her for trying on your mom's lipstick, but now you are down in the basement digging through the dirty clothes looking for your favorite barrette. The smell is overwhelming, especially because the dank, dark basement admits no fresh air ever and it's been nearly a full week since laundry was done. Ah! There it is, stuck to an old sock of your Dad's. Phew! A very pungent old sock of your Dad's. You inhale it deeply. There is something to love about it.

You call up the stairs for your sister to come down. "I've got something for you!" Together, you inhale your Dad's stinky old sock and then grin at each other with total happiness.

This is the kind of dirty family laundry I remember. And now that little brain crumb is done bothering me.

The Zen of the Clothesline: Letting It All Hang Out

Here in my neighborhood, where our yards average about 200 square feet, and the tall Victorian houses keep that precious little bit of space mostly in their shade all day, we live with little privacy outdoors. What happens in one yard happens in all our yards. For the most part, it has built a remarkable sense of community among those of us whose yards abut. We share the English pointer's early morning "Let me back in now!" barks (staccato, one long gruff shout, followed by two shorter, appeasing hiccups), the smoke from the barbecues which make even vegetarian me long for pork ribs and bratwurst, the raised pit "campfires" with the girls next door, complete with s'mores and fireflies. And we all hang out our laundry as soon as the temperatures allow.

But there are rules about hanging out your laundry, which you learn as soon as you try it. There are some I've watched the neighbors learn, basics such as the load limit of clotheslines AND clothesline poles! Yes. Not only can ropes snap under the weight of weight laundry, but those aluminum supports are not as strong as steel apparently. The most important rule, however, is more existential than circumstantial: One must never hang one's underwear outside, with the possible exception of sports bras.

It was the girls next door who actually articulated this and with astounding vehemence and clarity on the first day their moms were so awesomely naive as to clip their little panties to the line in full view of all of us who have been watching them grow up for years and may not possibly have realized until now that they wore underwear. Yes. In the intimacy of our neighborhood, we also get to hear the domestic squabbles that keep us nicely cognizant of the Mr. Rogerly fact that, "Everyone argues sometimes." This particular reminder of the fact that every family has its own deep, dark secrets ran as a series of falsetto trills overlaying a repetitive bass line: "You humiliated me! You showed everyone my underwear!" No one, to the best of my knowledge, has hung out underwear since that summer evening's eavesdropping.

In Egypt, everyone hangs out their clothing. I loved that. It may reveal the size of my aesthetic sensibility to confess that I was more enraptured by all the colorful flags hanging from the windows of Cairo's tallest, oldest apartment buildings and festooning the flat rooftops of Egyptian cities than I was by pyramids or sphinxes; to Egyptians in particular my fascination was probably perplexing, if not disturbing somehow. ("Why do you think this weird American woman keeps asking me about the laundry lines?" the taxi driver may have been asking the other taxi driver as they leaned toward each other out their open car windows, pretending to ask directions.) Egypt's climate is as dry as it comes. Air drying wet fabric only makes sense, right?

But I come from Boulder, Colorado, another very dry place on the planet, except during the monthly storm, either rain or snow depending on the month. When I bought my first house in Boulder, I wanted to plant a few trees in its shadeless yard. (Trees, of course, aren't native to a place without water. Early photographs of Boulder show a settlement with few trees and all of those few along the banks of the creek that runs through what is now the town. Understandably, the first settlers built their homes and businesses along the same creek, in the shade.) I didn't know yet how dry it was there. I had moved there from Seattle, by way of Madison, two of the dampest places in the country, and I was going to grow trees in my yard, preferably, sugar maples like we had in the northwoods of Wisconsin. The kind you can tap to make maple syrup in the spring. And so, a day after a fluke storm at the end of October dumped a foot of snow on us, I went out in the renewed 70 degree sunshine with my shovel to dig a big hole for a tree, thinking the ground, usually hard as rock (I mean, the place is named "Boulder" for a reason!) might be softened.

The foot of snow, I kid you not, had indeed softened the "soil," if you can call it such. My spadefuls showed me the line of saturation, how deeply the snowmelt had soaked into the soil. That foot of snow moistened the "soil" for nearly two inches one day after it fell to earth and then disappeared under the relentless sun we all loved. That was when I learned about "trans-evaporation," the phenomenon whereby snow falling in a very arid climate evaporates into the air before it can subside gratefully into the earth. This is why the few native trees that did grow in Boulder were ones like silver maples that grow with very shallow root systems that creep along the surface of the "soil," where there's some chance of finding water. I was never going to grow sugar maples, not unless I put in an extensive and costly irrigation system in my yard. That was the end of my syrup production.

So. Very dry in Boulder. So very dry in Boulder. (This repetive speech pattern cannot help but remind me of how David Whyte reads his own, wonderful poetry in his rolling British voice.) But so very dry in Boulder and still no one hangs out their laundry, not their sheets not their towels not their expensive yoga outfits or their state of the art running shirts and certainly not their underwear. Hanging out laundry, you see, takes time, and time in a city of the well-to-do and the amazingly fit is not best spent in domestic chores; time is for enhancing oneself, displaying oneself, playing the game known as working-out, not working. You can dump your wet items in the dryer and push the digital switch and they'll be dry when you're back from your marathon, ready for you to slip into stylishly for your post-marathon sushi. Uh huh!

But in Egypt, even the well-to-do hang out their laundry. I stayed in a beautiful apartment in Cairo, belonging to the parents of a friend of my daughter, and even this modern and immaculate, spacious and lovely private home had a clothes rack strung outside a fourth floor window. There was a washer in the utility room, but no dryer. At that point, I fell in love with Cairo.

Hanging clothes is a ritual, a meditation. It suits me far better than any religious ritual I've yet sampled. My mom, when I was really little, used to hang out all of the little dresses her four daughters went through every week, the shirts my dad wore to the office every day, and the dresses and aprons she favored, all cotton, all heading to the ironing basket after their time swinging in the summer breezes on the backyard clothesline. I don't know if she found it pleasing; I was too small to think of asking her, and by the time I was older, we, like everyone else on the block, had a clothes dryer, and no one hung their laundry out anymore. But I remember the slow rhythmic movements she made as she did the task, while we four little girls pumped our chubby legs earnestly higher and higher on the swingset, and I think she must have experienced what I might call the Zen of it. Could you be as graceful as she was and not be experiencing the serenity of immersion in the simple moment?

I rediscovered clotheslines when we were spending some summer time living in a castle in the French region of La Dordogne, a real English castle complete with a drawbridge and the smarmiest moat full of the largest, most disgusting fish I'd ever seen. While the children were delightedly rowing around and around the moat in an old wooden rowboat that June, I was learning how to hand wash and hand out our limited clothing in the little yard we had inside the castle grounds. I fell in love with clotheslines then, and I've brought back the habit from France, first to Boulder, then to Madison, where I found some afficiandoes of the art in my new neighbors.

But we don't hang out our underwear, here or in Egypt for that matter. That's why we have those little collapsible clothes racks and retractable lines that pull out from the wall over our washing machines. Way out in the Sinai Desert, running out of clothing, I was doing my best to wash out critically needed items in a small basin of water. I hung them out on what passed as a front porch, with my usual satisfaction, wiped my hands on my pants legs and prepared to go to dinner. I was called back by my daughter, who'd lived there long enough to know what was acceptable and what was not in the culture.

"Uh, Mums, I think it'd be better if maybe you didn't hang your underwear out here in public, ya know what I mean?" she asked so politely.

Oh yeh. How could I forget. I quickly gathered all the small pieces and draped them over pieces of bamboo inside my little hut. Some things are the same in every culture.

On an Oasis in the Sinai

“Be a well of fairness,” he said, as I was leaving for the desert.


I am such a deep well you
May not see even the
Shine of your own eyes
When you look into
Me. I am such a
Deep well a pebble you
Let fall from your
Elegant fingertips
Does not offer up its
Splash to your cocked,
Expectant ears. I am such
A well you should take a big
Step back, my friend,
Lest you fall head
Over heels into me,
Lest I should offer
You water again, in all
My fair warning.

Whole Lot of Buzzing Goin' On

The first time I went camping with the man who would eventually be known as My Husband, he was much amused to find that I was bringing a tent. We were driving from Seattle to meet my parents in Rocky Mountain National Park, he for the massively important first time, and while I hadn't been in that park before, I knew perfectly well about who really rules the rugged ranges, and the furry creatures I was thinking of were not unshaven rangers; along with extreme amounts of body hair, these creatures sported fangs and claws and sometimes very large and pointy antlers. My parents were bringing a tent, too. We native Midwesterners are a practical lot. My future husband, in case you hadn't guessed, was a Californian, flippant and irreverent by birthright and nature. Yep. As my uncle put it when he heard I was engaged to someone from San Francisco, "Oh. A granola and nuts kind of fellow..if he's really a fellow... lots of fruits out that way, I hear!" (Guffaw, guffaw, the stage directions would instruct here.) My family has more than its fair share of asses and equally obnoxious altruists, I must admit, a rather typical American family in this respect. Along with population groups like cannibal sandwich eaters and vegans, these are just part of our national diversity, I guess.

Some years later, circumstances found my By-Then Husband and I preparing for a camping trip in Wisconsin with our miniature daughter. He called up my parents and asked to borrow their tent.  Apparently, my pup tent was no longer adequate. The Man wanted in to the tent it seems.  I was gentle as I could manage in my mockery of his lost bravery, and I do believe I refrained from actually calling him a coward, but I'm reasonably sure I may have pointed out that there were not only no mountain lions in Wisconsin (at that time), but no wolves (at that time) and not even any elk (just some deer who didn't even have chronic wasting disease yet) and a handful of doddering and largely harmless black bears. He was nonplussed, utterly. He had only one word to hiss in response, and it was sufficient really, especially with the hiss: "Mussssskitoesssssss!"

It's July. Summer's here, just in time for the fireworks. Just in time for all that lovely, luscious bare skin of the picnicking inebriates, their response time slowed just enough to allow each mosquito landing to produce a hemophiliac feast. We had a very cool, wet spring, which we thought was its own penance, and now we are paying the real price, the blood price.

Dear Russ, I know you're not in government any more, but you are still working for the best interests of the good people of your home state. I know you are convinced that what most needs to be addressed right now is the influence of corporate money on our elections and our elected officials, including not least of all our no longer impartial judiciary, but I would focus a lot better on truly important issues like these if I didn't have to contend with all these damned insects here in Wisconsin. Between the spiders who threaten to web in my entire front porch every night and the mosquitoes who are swarming off the lake behind my house and the nasty looking flyers that must be the Darth Vaders of the wasp world who are torturing the blossoms of my flower garden in some sort of unholy alliance with the innocent looking Asian beetles who are eating up the plants's leaves, well, I may not leave my house until October. Will I miss any crucial elections?

Turns out my Then Husband was right about one thing: It's not the big critters that should give one concern. Eventually, Tyrannosaurus Rex, the tiger, and the crocodile become historically irrelevant and evolutionarily obsolete. It's the nasty little pests, that endure. Mosquitoes. Flies. Millipedes.Rats and other small vermin. Mubarak has been deposed. Nasty little Scott Walker and his morally stunted pals, the Fitzgerald brothers are still swarming around the dung heap they call a state budget. So, if you could help get rid of any of these pests, Russ, that'd be great. I have a feeling you're done running for elected office in this state we share, but maybe you could talk to that other smart guy who's been doing so much talking on our issues, you know: John Nichols.

Now there's an interesting byte of political buzz!

Learning to Hear Their Voices

In the spring of 2008, four months after my mom's diagnosis with ALS, I was already fairly well on my way to what would, over the next three years, become a weekly ritual: Weekends with my elderly parents in a city two hours north of my own home. It was a ritual from which I would learn much, and not all of it based on the suffering of watching my mom slowly have her muscles and her bodily functions torn away from her. I learned the beauty of the Wisconsin countryside in all seasons and weathers of the year. I rediscovered old high school friends who were still living in the small city of my adolescent life. I made new friends. I lost some of my aversion to this small conservative community, but not by any means all of it. And I finally learned a little bit about who my parents were.

So, in April 2008, I took my mom, who was still walking, talking, eating then, whose smile never left her eyes until that last day of her life closed them forever, I took my mom to her first poetry reading. It was a breakfast reading at the Fox Cities Book Festival, and I had tickets for cold eggs and weak coffee at the best hotel in town and to listen to Naomi Shihab Nye read from her then-recent book of poetry, The Words Under the Words.

I don't really know what delighted my mom most: the fact that Naomi poked fun of Republicans in front an audience full of them, the fact that she occasionally let slip a "bad word" in a roomful of devout church-goers, or the fact that she was there, in a hotel conference room with me, her renegade artistic daughter. Realize please, that we are talking about a woman nearly eighty, who came home from teaching school one day in the 1970s, giggling because one of her students, a farm child, had used the word "teats" when talking about his cow, "right there in the classroom." My mom, you might rightfully conclude, led an extremely sheltered life. Remarkably, even as ALS had its unstoppable way with her, she continued to live as if she was still the most blessed person on the planet. And now, she had poetry, too. For the rest of her months on earth, we would share poetry and in doing so, we learned to listen to each other, deeply. Poetry, being at its heart an oral artform, builds this skill in us.

Learning to listen is a rather adult skill. My children, in their twenties, have not really learned it yet, though sometimes I can tell they are starting to see the way to listening. Here is a short (very short: 34 seconds short) YouTube in which the poet who started my mom and me on the path to deep listening speaks about the same subject, though she calls it "Creativity." I hope you'll listen.

And then, since we're visiting what connects us to our parents,here is another poem of Mahmoud Darwish, which graces the cover of a slim volume of Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry, 19 Varieties of Gazelle. It's titled, in translation from the Arabic which was done by Naomi's father, the journalist Aziz Shihab, "To My Mother."

I long for my mother's bread

And my mother's coffee

And my mother's touch

And my childhood grows up

One day following days of patience

And I love my life

Because if I die

My mother's tears will

shame me.

Leaning Into Summer

"Leaning into the heat and quiet of summer." A friend of mine wrote that as her Facebook status today. It made me long for the days, not that long ago really, when you'd write something on FB and it would stay there until you felt done with it. Your status could last, as long as you felt comfortable with it. It accompanied you, like a shadow whose color you got to choose. Meanwhile, you could continue to post more ephemeral comments, current events, links to your favorite old television shows, 37 different sources of the same fleeting political moment, what your amazingly precocious children said at the breakfast table. Now, there really is no status line. Whatever is most current defines you. The split second moment is all. If you lean with a friend's shadow into the heat and quiet of summer, be prepared to have it yanked out from under you without notice. Indeed, while I was still meditating on this beautiful posting of my friend walking home from work tonight, "leaning," as it were, into the thick and ample arms of the first genuinely hot, humid evening here, she was at home typing, "Beautiful green salad with shrimp." Now she is probably listening to the quiet hum of her dishwasher cleaning away the last traces of that post, while I am still sitting here musing about how one leans into summer heat, wondering what happens to the fireflies. The only humming I'm hearing is that of the mosquitoes, who are absolutely loving the thick and ponderous air of midsummer.

"Leaning into summer." I confess to being a Titanic fan, not just of the historic episode and the physical ship, but of the fascinating moment enshrined on celluloid and its digital counterparts. The movie. Leonardo and Kate. Kate on the prow of the great doomed luxury liner in that brief moment before fate takes over, when for just a few minutes it seems rich and poor can mingle, the stateroom and the below-decks fall in love; leaning off the prow, the air will hold them. Ah. But we know how that ends, both the film and the moment in history. At least we got a few good movies from the moment.

But today, this one unique moment in time right now, we are leaning into summer from the prow of another boat, a fleet of boats actually, also in the grip of forces larger than those humans who wait on their decks. The flotilla that was to set out from Greece toward Gaza is being held in the ports of Greece by authorities. After weathering sabotage and delays and threats from several governments, Greece announced today that they are refusing to allow the ships to leave their waters. Netanyahu has been courting Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou for months now, and this is his prize. Here's a link to a good article on how this all came about from the Israeli news source Haaretz and another perspective from Al Jazeera.

The American ship was named "The Audacity of Hope." Though an outright take-off on the second volume of President Obama's pre-presidential memoir, it was more a tribute to the spirit of the Reverend Martin Luther King; Obama's administration has been blunt in warning Americans not to join the flotilla. One has to wonder what his part was in the conversations between Netanyahu and Papandreou. Would they have held the ships without American consent?

I am very sad. Palestine is once again let down and her people left to suffer. What audacity, what hope?

Later added link: More on the audacity of hope