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.

To Know, Know, Know You Now

I sort of accidentally attended my high school reunion last night. A "save the date" postcard in flame orange had arrived at my house fully six months ago, the date of the reunion unfortunately hidden under some skinny adhesive strip the post office affixed for no apparent purpose other than to add an uninformative barcode and eliminate the vital information of the mailing. A more formal and informed invitation never arrived, however, and I'm now suspecting that innocent looking barcode may have actually contained important details.

No matter. I kept the faith and waited. After all, one of my very best friends from high school was on the reunion's planning committee; surely she would make sure I got an invitation. But months went by, and I didn't, she didn't. Apparently, our friendship had changed. High school friendships can do that suddenly and without known provocation. I sort of forgot about it.

One or two small things happened in the meanwhile: I went to Egypt for a life-altering visit in the post-revolutionary months, which is the political equivalent to riding the curl of a wave  if you're a surfer: the experience of total jubilation. I had a bike crash that was particularly gruesome, hence awesome. I had a Chinese family visit me for a month and my world grew larger again. I took in a lodger when the new Republican government of my state lopped twelve percent off my paycheck. I finished plastering my upstairs hallway as well as my oil painting, "Romania." I saw tons of good plays, had a few good dates, and wrote some mediocre poetry and lots of blogposts. Time passed somehow with remarkably little tedium.

This Saturday I went to visit my dad, who still lives in the little northern city aka hamlet where I went to high school. Entering town, I stopped by a friend's apartment to deliver some flowers for his mom and see if he was ready to marry me yet. He accepted the flowers but declined the marriage option. Then his younger brother stuck his head out the doorway. I'd never met him before because he went to the rival high school but he was in from New York for the reunion, too, the two schools having finally made their peace for reason, as is usually the case, of economy. His wife had declined his invitation to make small talk and drink too much with people she'd never met before and would never meet again. "Do you want to go with me and use her ticket?" he asked.

Eight hours later, encouraged by my dad and spruced up as much as you can when you're not at home and have no wardrobe options or drawers full of dried up twenty-year-old make-up, mascara that's the thickness of tar, concealer that's so ancient it comes with its own irregular pigmentation problems, I was back to pick up Brother Rob. He looked gorgeous. Made me wish I could move to New York, not for him personally, but for all the men with arty ponytails hanging casually down the back center seam of impeccably tailored suitcoats above dress slacks of just the right cut and fabric. You know. The kind that billows just the slightest bit when they walk down city sidewalks with that urban purposefulness that makes men worth the difference in the sexes.

And we were off. Neither of us had ever attended any of the earlier reunions, and neither of us felt particularly well connected to our classmates either now or in our fading but still vaguely uncomfortable memories. But together we had a little buttressing, a small fortress even, and through the hours that followed, that was just enough to make the whole night pleasant. Really, it was like having a treehouse where you could sneak with a flashlight late at night. Refuge and adventure wrapped up in one.

Hanging out with Rob was the best part, when all was said and done, and probably what I'll remember best about this night of really bad, sweet wine in those damned plastic highball glasses. But there were some other nice parts to the night, too, even once I put aside the smug fact that I was not in the two-thirds of the class who'd completely lost their youthful body proportions somewhere under accumulated subcutaneous fat. Remember, this is Wisconsin. The women, it must be noted, looked much better as a whole than the men. Part of this is hair dye and make-up. Another huge part of it's social pressure: We have to keep looking good or we lose our social capital. Whatever it is, it works. Aside from my "date" and a few others, these were men who had walked their final runway and who were now content to sit at the furthest end of it, trolling a fishing pole in the somnabulent waters of middle age. The women, by and large, looked a lot better.

Best moment: A classmate I hadn't seen once since high school came up and said she'd seen some of my poems and loved them, wondered if I had a book of them. Said one of them made her cry and pick up the phone and call her mom for what was a significant change in their relationship. If I was still in high school with this "girl," she would be my new best friend. Since I don't work on publishing my poems, I'm always absolutely thrilled and surprised to find that anyone finds them, let alone finds them worth reading.

Second best moment: My very first boyfriend, the one-time short and scrawny seventh grader with whom I was inevitably paired when lots were drawn since I was equally short and scrawny, had grown up handsomely. (Why is this somehow gratifying? Does it vindicate all the silly impulses we followed back then? Do other people find satisfaction in discoveries like this, or is it just my unabated shallowness?) We dutifully exchanged nods across the crowded room, then smiles crossing the distance, and cheek kisses up close. I met his wife; he met my scrutiny. I found out what he did (he did well); he found out what I do (I do largely as I please). A few hours later, he walked up to where I was sitting with Rob and whispered in my ear, "When I saw you walking with your date down to the lake on the boardwalk, I was intensely envious of him."

So it goes. In some obvious ways, I have not matured enormously, despite the furrow deepening by the month, I swear, between my eyebrows. But in one important way I have grown up. I can appreciate all these people now, the ones I went to school with forty years ago, the fat ones and the ones who look like models, the ones who showed up in worn down white walking shoes with velcro as well as the ones who came in with Gucci or Ann Taylor. I watched the couples out on the dance floor, swaying their ample trunks to the rock and roll we still loved cause it made us feel young again, and I was so happy for each of them, including myself, that they were still out there, embracing it, having a good time, keeping up friendships, laughing in the face of old age.

Sometimes those old friendships actually turn out to be deeper than you ever realized they could be.

To Name You Is to Claim You

Generalizations, I would venture, provide the central nervous system of rational thought and rational thought the backbone of western civililzation. If you are not a fan of western civilization or indeed of civilization from any part of the world today, you may as well close this page now and go gnaw on bones.

Without generalizing, we cannot discuss anything more than specifics. One toenail. One drop of rain striking the windshield. One second of pain shooting up our arm into our molars. No discussions of heredity or weather or monsoons. No shoe fittings, no forecasts, no diagnoses of heart attacks. Without generalizing, we're pretty much fools salivating in dark corners hoping without reason someone will feed us.

But when generalizations become stereotypes, the anatomically correct model that teaches medical students how and where to press, to slice, to listen is rendered something no more useful than a paper doll. Flat. Easily torn. Of little value save as a collectible.

I am trying hard not to make my hundreds of contacts with students into stereotypes, even as I try to learn enough about them to generalize in a way that allows me to step with some sort of assurance into the pool of light that is each of their individualized collective lives.

Two Plus Two Equals Anything

I've had such a long, bad day to close out this long, hard week that even the most fundamental truths are not making sense to me anymore.

Like, two plus two equalling four. This, quite frankly, isn't true. Two plus two could equal anything; it depends entirely on the identity of the two.

For instance, if each of the two is a half of something, you only have one. If each of the two is a rabbit or almost anything taxonomically close to a rodent, you have not four, but possibly a kazillion.

I'm just sayin' that life is a little more complex than it might seem, and that language has a part in speaking the truth.

Like I said, it's been a doozy of a week.

Arriving in Cairo: Dazed and Duty Free



Flying from the US to Egypt is a long flight even if you live in a major east coast city. If you live in a slow little city in the heartland and fly to Cairo, you arrive at your destination possessed of two advantages over other first-time visitors: You know you are in a very distant place (you just spent 18 hours in a cramped position to prove this), and you are acutely conscious of the fact that everything takes longer than expected. These two bits of knowledge prepare you better for the cultural shock of Egypt, which includes, among other more physically salient differences, one of the world's most strikingly inefficient economies; I'm guessing there's no word for "hurry" in Arabic. Given these facts, you can sit back and relax; you may as well smell the flowers along the way, so to speak. (I must note that there were no flowers on any of my flights actually, unless the bad breath of my seatmate from Detroit to Amsterdam could by any stretch of your imagination be deemed floral. I am thinking here of a remarkable flower called for good reason a corpse flower.) Taking it easy will help you adjust to the weeks ahead of you in Egypt, a place where eventually you will be somewhat amazed to discover that they actually DO run on the same schematic of time that we do in the western world, the structure of minutes, hours, and days. So put your feet up, relax, have a good glass of wine.

Approaching Cairo by plane

Or not. The wine, that is. I'm spectacularly unskilled at sleeping in moving conveyances, which comes in handy on escalators and bicycles but which is lamentable for intercontinental plane flights. My daughter had suggested I take full advantage of the free wine still offered on these longer flights in order to get some sleep, my tolerance for alcohol being nearly as small as my ambulatory insomnia is large. Well, I am even worse at drinking wine in daylight than I am at sleeping in daylight, so it wasn't until I was on my last flight leg that I finally ordered some vino. It was then I realized I was going someplace truly different. The wine on the attendant's cart was in a box. That's weird enough, but on the side of the carton I read: "Almost 50 percent real wine!" Oh yeh. That's right. I was landing in an Islamic culture. The content didn't matter; I spilled most of my plastic cup anyway and resigned myself to staring out the window at the sere landscape that was beginning to materialize below now that the Mediterranean blue was receding behind our jet trails.

Islamic or not, the ebullient young couple waiting for me on the other side of the customs visa lines barely paused to buzz my cheeks before whisking me, my fresh visa, and barely expired plane ticket off to the duty-free shop to buy wine. Apparently, there's a reason there is no Egyptian section in your local wine shop. The shoppers plundered the shelves of French and Italian wines on my behalf. You know, I don't think I've ever bought liquor at an airport before; I've never had a rousing motivation to carry more glass bottles in my luggage than are absolutely necessary. Perhaps it's this way everywhere, that only a freshly arrived turista can buy alcohol in these shops. In any case, I had to be the one to purchase the liquor, which I was happy enough to do as long as I didn't have to carry them. In fact, that was the last I ever saw of those bottles of wine, except for one I took to my host's home later that night, another inadvertant "learning opportunity," since he turned out to be a Muslim and didn't really drink more than he felt was necessary for politeness.

Everything would prove to be another a learning opportunity. I think I was agog the entire time I was in Cairo but never more than that first night. It was extremely fortunate I wasn't driving and that the young man who drove me everywhere was so absorbed in my daughter he really didn't care how embarrassing her mother was, hanging out the back seat windows, clicking pictures of chickens and donkeys and dervishes, entire families loaded up on tiny motor scooters, women smoking cigarettes through the black veil that covered their lips. Their absorption in each other left me gloriously free to be absorbed by the city.

In the posts to follow, I hope to tell you some of what I saw and heard and felt. I hope by the time I'm exhausted, you'll feel a little bit like you went to Cairo with me. If you do, like me, you will surely want to return.



It's that Nile thing. Even though nobody in their right mind would drink from the Nile, it seems to hold true. You drink the Nile with your eyes now, but it draws you back just as powerfully as drinking was once promised to do.

Come visit Cairo with me.





The Summer Following the Spring Past the Winter

A very dear friend of mine, a young man who has lived in Cairo his whole life except for one visit to Mecca, wrote on his Facebook page today that he is giving up on Egypt; he is done trying to love her.

Love is hard, perhaps hardest when you love a woman as evasive and curvaceous as Egypt. We are not just speaking of Cleopatra here nor the bawdier queens of the Nile's once great pleasure barges. We are talking Egypt, incomparable Egypt, ineluctable Egypt. Love is hardest for the young. They are not cautious as their elders are. They wear neither armor nor life jackets; they dive even from cliffs without sounding the bottom of the ocean. Or the river. "If you drink from the waters of the Nile, you will always come back to her." This is the historic seduction of Egypt.

When I was there this June, the young man was resplendent. He may as well have been wearing the Egyptian flag for the way his pride was flying. My first night in this city, barely off the flights that had left Madison 18 hours earlier, he handed me an empty rifle shell. "It's from the Revolution," he told me, his eyes shining with emotion. It will always be my most treasured souvenir of this visit. Over the following days, as he demonstrated the unending generosity I would come to know as uniquely Egyptian, as he drove me wherever I wanted to go around Cairo, he introduced me to a vibrant city, a city full of color and light and commotion and happiness. He, like everyone I met in the early weeks of summer, had been part of the huge demonstrations that rolled over Cairo's streets this winter. And he, along with everyone else I met, from 8-year-old ragamuffin boys to men so old lifting a tea cup was their version of a day's workout, was illuminated with a new sense of significance. But today, his new car had been stolen, and the police were uninterested in helping. The police have not changed much since Mubarak was forced out. They sort of disappeared for a while, when the January Revolution was at its fullest and best, but that moment, like the peak blossom of the rose, is brief, and the petals drift almost imperceptibly to the earth. The police are

back; they've stepped out of the shadows. The revolution seems to have stalled. The people are still hungry, for bread and for a change in governmental responsiveness. The colors have dulled. The air is polluted. Grumbling fills the teahouses instead of laughter. Israelis are shooting across the borders of the Sinai. There is talk about banning bikinis from the sea resorts that provide the last vestiges of tourist dollars.

When I was there early in summer, there was such jubilation everywhere.

Where Are the Angels Dancing Now?

Beetle dancing on a pinhead

In Boulder, Colorado, the skies were even bluer if it's possible. Hard to say. All our memories of the New York sky filled up with so much smoke, so many little black stick figures falling in cartwheels through their final morning.

Some mornings the bus ride to work was quiet. We Americans tend not to talk to much to those we sit next to on public transit. Heck. We tend to not talk much to those we sit next to at the dinner table. But once in a while, given a random dynamic and the right combinations of loquaciousness and people, the bus in a small city like Boulder can be lively with conversation and the laughter of friends meeting.

This morning, as I took my seat and began my customary settling-in, something was already wrong. There was talk going on, a man's utterly solemn voice was speaking to someone with an equally sonorous tone, and yet the air was so thick with with words that would never be said only falling girders could have cut it. What was not said was deafening.

Slowly, like a slow motion, puzzling somehow, the reality so far from anything previously known that it took a while to clarify---why did those white clouds rise from the ground instead of drifting across the skies? where were these voices coming from and what were they talking about in such loud voice that everyone in the bus looked frozen?--truth dawned that morning, broke like a gap-toothed grin. Truth that would never allow the world to look the same.

Bus drivers don't broadcast radio shows on our buses. Until that morning, I didn't even know buses were equipped with radios. "There is apparently a great fire on at least several floors of the tower where the collision occurred." What disaster was this? Where? There was a radio broadcasting in the bus that morning, and in the silence through which it fell like bricks you could hear a pin drop and the pitter patter of angel feet dancing on the pinheads.

Nothing would ever be the same, world without end: Amen. God bless those who were there that last morning of American innocence; God save those who destroyed American innocence. The world needed this one last safe harbor of hope, and now it's gone, covered with dust and glass and those broken girders like the bones of the last dinosaur. What have we all lost.

"Laureate"
July 2010

You know, WS,
that when the girders
come crashing down they
spare no one, not prince
and not poet. You know
that when the trees fall
there are no intrepid Girl
Scouts skipping down the
forest paths in search of
rare wild trillium or the
fairy's spagnum moss. You
know that when our wise
and measured words rise in
clouds of white ash from
the wreckage the birds too
will stop their fool singing

This Very Faint Light Within Me

The building could define unassuming. White, clapboard, rectalinear, the front doors so utterly lacking in fengshui that they open directly onto that homeliest of all American creations, the parking lot. You see more people arriving on foot than by car, though perhaps that will change in the cold of winter. The few cars that are parked here are at least six years old. This is the Meeting House of the Friends. The Quakers, as they're more commonly known.

About a mile away, the Unitarians are meeting. The Unitarians are a force to be reckoned with here in this liberal university town, and they meet for services in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Their dues paying membership numbers in the thousands. Their music is outstanding. Most of the instrumentalists have CDs you can purchase from them. The parking lot is full of Priuses and recumbent bikes. Their message is divine. Well, as divine as you can get without ever mentioning God.

No one mentions God in the Friends' meeting either. In fact, no one mentions anything, unless one is fluent in the intermittent language of a stifled cough, a rheumy throat clearing, the uneasy rumbling of gastric juices that embarrasses the novice sitting in silence in the cushioned pew facing the windows: Me.

I have come here before. In fact, in another city, I came often enough to become almost comfortable with the conspicuous noises of my unfed stomach on a Sunday morning. But that was a more beautiful building, a place where I felt solace when I looked up, a place where I didn't feel boxed in as I do in this inhospitable shelter where there is no seat you can claim that doesn't leave you looking straight into someone else's eyes. I am a curmudgeon of design, I suppose. If I was homeless and sleeping in a cardboard box, I'd probably paint it first.

In a Quaker meeting, one is nothing if not  modest and demure and straightforward. I am better at handling the straightforward than the demure and absolutely wretched at the idea of modesty. An alternate name for this hour of silent meditation might accurately be "The Gathering of Sensible Footwear." I tuck my own platformed sandals inconspicuously under the pew and rearrange my neck scarf so it hangs over some of the sequins on the front of my blouse. This is where Birkenstocks went when they died. Here, socks are ever de rigueur with sandals. This is fashion hell. No one in the room except the woman who I brought with me today has paid more than $45 for a haircut. In fact, most of them are proud to confess that they cut their own.

And I like these simple people so much better than the Unitarians, a congregation where even the men are happy to pay handsomely for handsomeness. There is nothing self-congratulatory in the Meeting House. There is no padding, no frills, no flounces.

Here I am left with no liturgy but that of my own thoughts, and the light filtering through the swaying tree trunks outside the squared windows. There is nothing but myself here; nothing but my thoughts and the stillness of a room full of people who wouldn't see an advantage to wasting time evaluating me or judging me. Most of them sit for the hour with their eyes shut. Only my friend sitting next to me notices when I jerk in surprise, the result of a random imagining of being a brilliant blue butterfly pinned to some lepidopterologist's specimen board. And even she does not seem to notice when I jump at the sight of a heavy black hickory nut ball plummeting to the ground from the high branches of the tree outside the windows we are facing, abrogating the gentle sunshine like a missile, punctuating my flow of thoughts like an oversized black period at the end of an unvoiced sentence. Here, you face your own soulscapes.

Ah. It seems so simple. By the end of the service, I notice my feet have stopped hiding under the pew and are planted quite squarely on the ordinary carpet. The Friends rise to their feet and come over to shake our hands, bid us welcome.

We'll be back next week for their pancakes.