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

There Once Was a Union Maid, But She Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Just home from the theatre and checking my computer one more time before going to bed, and there's this link from my friends at New York's Working Families Party, one of the few bright spots on the USA's political landscape now that Russ Feingold's not in office, and here it is for you too now:

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/06/30/a_wageless_profitable_recovery.html

Taegan Goddard's Political Wire is one of the most reliable sources for solid, factual political reportage on the internet. I know this because my son told me. Without divulging my son's identity, I can assure you his word is, well, good as silver. Gold is apparently not the thing to value any more.

Yes, folks, it seems to be true: "corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income" during our recent "recovery." I doubt that any of you reading this are much surprised, whether or not you pay much attention to the fact that the banks and brokerages we bailed out with our hard-earned dollars basically put the money straight into the silk pockets of their CEOs, whether or not you care that more American families are falling into poverty, that we are dishing out more for gasoline while the profits of oil companies keep going up and up and up. Fact is, no matter whose figures and what analysis you deem important and/or credible, I'd guess that you, like me, are feeling worse off financially today than you were a year ago and probably much worse off than you were two years ago.

I was leafing through a magazine yesterday and found myself staring at a full page ad from a local car dealership trumpeting the fact that "Everyone can afford $250 a month." But they're wrong. We can't. If my car quit working, I would not be able to replace it. I'm not even sure I can afford to take it in for its routine maintenance now due. There is no extra $250 a month to spend on a car or a new furnace or getting the dishwasher fixed. And the ironic thing about this all is that I'm actually doing well by almost anyone's standards. I own a nice house (even if it needs lots of repair), I have a functioning car (with 100,000 miles), I have a fairly nice and secure job, and my children have finished college. What I have is not only out of reach for most of the world's population, it is out of sight for most of the world's population. But this, after all, is America.

Indeed. It is, in a word, advanced capitalism. People in parts of the world where capitalism is just hitting its stride, places like India and China, should be watching what is happening here with interest and some alarm. This is, after all, where they're heading, and it is not a beautiful meadow with wild animals and blue skies and wildflowers so thick they make you wince to traipse through them on brilliant summertime mornings when the dew is still fresh on their petals.

No. Corporate profits are up. Living standards are down. The gap between rich and poor is widening, as more and more of the former working/middle class are slowly dragged into the spreading puddle of the poor. Not even my former trade union seems to understand the real impact of this change. My union was broken this winter here in Wisconsin, and while tens of thousands of us, union members from all over this once-progressive state, converged on our state capitol to protest this, my union made tee shirts to sell to its members and agreed to a monstrous cut in our wages and benefits without even consulting us, its members. They completely missed the opportunity to use their only real tool: The strike. It could have been a general strike, but it wasn't even a local strike. And now, as of yesterday, they lost the right to represent me. They can no longer collect dues from me. And you know what? I don't even care. They lost me when they failed to refuse to comply with the governor who just successfully emasculated them.

And in case you want to see what happens when trade unionists aren't afraid to speak up, go to Four Star Video here in Madison or (sigh!) order it up on Netflix: "Made in Dagenham." Lovely, heartening movie from England.

After the Meal's Done, the Poem's Still Incomplete

Dinner went too late tonight, and my brain's too tired to write a blog of my own, so let me give you someone wiser better more poetic. I spent a part of my day at the office today (don't tell anyone!) looking up poems by this man because I've been thinking about poems and been thinking about Palestine and thinking about a young man named Vittorio Arrigoni who died there this year (along with many others, unnamed, but he was Italian and so the world deigns to name him), and so here is a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, in translation, which follows closely upon my dinner conversation tonight about the difficulties and the dangers of translating poetic thought, which includes both the Bible and the Quran, into languages other than those of their original formation, and in many cases, takes away the mystery and thrill of the oral presentation to the flat rendering of print on a page. But I think this is a nice translation, and my criterion, if you would know it, is simply that it brings beauty and wisdom to its syllables, and I suspect that Mr. Darwish might have found that sufficient.

This blog is dedicated to my dinner guests: Marilyn and Georgy and Leigh. What a fine dinner table we made.


To a Young Poet
By Mahmoud Darwish
Translated By Fady Joudah

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.

If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.

Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.

Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.

If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.

If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.

Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health.

If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.

You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.

You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.

One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.

A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.

Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.

Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.

Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.

Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.

A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.
Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.

Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.

You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.

From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.

Don’t think, when you
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?

The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.

No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.

And last but not least, Salaam.

Back in the US of A Don't Know How Lucky U R

I guess you can tell if you scan my recent posts that I am still thinking a lot about my experience in Egypt. It was my first time visiting any country south of the Mediterranean and my first time in a place where I didn't speak the language and my first experience in an Arab nation, so I guess it's understandable and perhaps even good that my two weeks rocked my world. I would not have it otherwise. I didn't even visit the pyramids, but I had such a great opportunity to spend time with everyday Egyptians that to spend time with tour guides just didn't hold appeal. Maybe I'll go back when I'm 80 and sign on to a tour bus group that will take me straight from the airport to the pyramids, maybe even let me pose on a camel's back. The only camels I saw were loose in the streets of Nuweiba, wandering freely, eating out of the town's open dumpsters before heading home to sleep.

I prepared for my visit by reading all the Egyptian novels I could cram in, almost all of Mahfouz and a major selection of Aswany. It turned out to be a really great preparation. Today, my hair stylist, working diligently to repair my travel's double devastation of the desert's sun and the sea's salt, asked me if I'd ever felt real culture shock. I thought about it, thought about the women in hijabs and birqas and the men in long, loose galabiyas, the bruises in the middle of the devout men's foreheads, the hookahs and the separation of the sexes, the crazy crazy traffic and the all-night bazaar life that substituted for nightclub life, and I had to answer, "No, not really." Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction can be more informative than truth.

Now that I'm back, I'm rereading a lot, mostly archives of the articles about the revolution that make more sense after having crossed Cairo's bridges and walked around Tahrir Square. I'm reading more non-fiction now: Aswany again, but his pre and post revolution collection of essays this time, "The State of Egypt." And a book I heard about right before I left and ordered right after my return was waiting in my mailbox today after work: "Cairo: The City Victorious."

Travel is not just tourist sites and postcards, not just collecting souvenirs. Travel is a quest for understanding another place, another people, another way of life. I am still on my quest, even though I'm back in Wisconsin, where democracy is just as precious and precarious as it is elsewhere, as our friends in Egypt are now experiencing. Here, democracy is just looking a little less inviting and exciting than it is in Cairo, with a careless Republican government fully installed and controlling the conditions of our daily lives with as little regard for diverse opinions as well, any deposed Egyptian tyrant. Thank goodness state's here don't control the military nor even most levels of law enforcement. That may prove the essential diffence.

The Big Screen and the Capitol Building

The Wisconsin State Capitol lies pretty much on a straight line between my office and my home, and for the nearly three years I've lived and worked here in Madison, it's been one of my many small, sustaining pleasures to cut through the capitol building on my walks home. It's a really magnificent building, and it always make me feel a little taller, a little braver, and a little better to walk through it somehow.



Do real cops wear T shirts with printed badges?

 But this winter changed all that. The Republican governor who was inaugurated in January had the capitol sealed off when thousands of Wisconsinites began regular protests around and in the building, decrying Scott Walker's stated goal of taking away collective bargaining rights from public service workers in our state. One door was left unbolted of the score of doors that are usually wide open, and if you were determined to enter by that one door, you were greeted by ostensible law enforcement officers of sometimes indeterminate affiliation, made to empty your bags, packs and

Now THESE are real cops: the Patrol!

pockets with a thoroughness and a lack of good humor that TSA would do well to imitate.


 The last time I tried it, halfway into the ritual of dumping my pens and and pins and private belongings into plastic bins for these strangely unidentified men to inspect, I realized I was about to start crying. I refused. I grabbed back everything I had already deposited, told the unsmiling men, "I hate how you're doing this; I really hate how you've destroyed the civilian atmosphere of this building," and I ran back through the metal detectors and out of the building.

Today, for the first time since then, on an absolutely beautiful day toward the end of June, nearly four months to the day since we were surprised on February 28 to find the entire capitol in lockdown despite a promise to open it after what was to be a temporary closing for cleaning it after many days of protests, today I got to walk freely through my House again. During those four months, I felt seriously depressed every time I walked around the Capitol Square. To see the doors shut against the people the building proposes to serve provided a gut wrenching reminder of the fact that the present state government did not even pretend to be interested in serving me, or any of the 49 percent of the voters who are reliably Democratic right now. Republicans thoroughly control both the Assembly and the Senate, as well as the Governor's Office, and, most cruelly of all, the State Supreme Court, once naively assumed to be a chamber where party affiliation was not relevant. If you live in Wisconsin, you know all this. If you live elsewhere in the States, but are politically active or involved in labor issues, you probably know this too. Developments here got quite a lot of press this winter, most of it as outrageously slanted as our alleged representatives here.

But today I got to walk straight up the stairs to the big revolving doors and enter the high cool hallways of my  beloved state capitol. I sensed a knot begin to dissolve a little in my chest, a knot that has felt oddly like a clenched fist instead of a heart pounding inside me. But I vow not to forget. Today, the Capitol was reopened because Governor Walker signed the state's new budget into law this weekend, a budget that is built on the premise that the rich deserve more, that the poor deserve nothing, and that the working class, the middle class is too concerned with reality television to bother with reality of class issues and public education.

Perhaps the governor's right. I have become a little more cynical since we lost our noble efforts to influence public opinion enough to alter the shape of our state's financial future. An article in the New York Times yesterday detailed how the boxes that Americans use to deliver cable signals to their televisions consume more energy in our homes than our refrigerators and in some cases even more than our air conditioning systems. Perhaps we do care more about reality TV than reality. Perhaps I'd better subscribe to cable and see what the hokey-pokey's all about.

The Revolution of Hand Holding

Back in the seventies, when everyone with a heart was a radical leftist and we still thought Mao was a hero even though we all knew the murals and posters of the Chinese Communists were never going to hold a candle to the artwork of the ancients, my friend Mona got to go to visit there with the very first group of Americans allowed entrance. Mona, you must understand, had been wearing a Mao cap and jacket for several years already, along with those flat little archless MaryJanes on her feet. She'd been learning Chinese. She was, in short, eager as they come.

But it was, after all, the seventies, and we were not only radical leftists with heart, we were hippies and we were still  young, and sex and love were probably the ony two agenda items that beat out world peace and freedom on our agenda. So when Mona reluctantly returned from her long-anticipated visit to the culture that would set a model for the rest of humanity (yes, we are indeed talking about China...there was a point when we thought they were actually heading toward freedom), the first thing she had to tell us was this and it has long since surpassed anything else my friend told us that may have had political value: "They don't even hold hands on the streets in China!" Mona's current boyfriend was also on the trip. I'm sure the two of them scandalized most of Peking, as it was still known then.

Now it's 2011. So much has changed. Hippies are pretty much gone, except for a handful of scrawny men with scrawnier gray ponytails aimlessly wandering around Berkeley and Madison and Santa Cruz still; China has not only moved beyond Mao, they have become a model of Western industry, complete with all the environmental hazards inherent in that. And in Egypt, lovers still can't kiss in public, can't spend the night with each other, can't acknowledge homosexuality which, as I've said previously, "doesn't even exist." Egypt may not be ruled strictly by sharia law, but there is still a surprising amount of enforcement of sexual mores in both the cities as well as the desert. I guess it gives the huge police force something to enforce. In a nation where drinking is also frowned upon, if not outright banned, and traffic laws are absolutely non-existent, there can be so little for police to do with their authority.

It's serious. Doormen and porters are the primary enforcers of the code that prevents premarital sex, and in hotels, even the big Western hotels, you must show proof of marriage to be given a room with someone of the opposite sex. I don't imagine they would ask two men for this, but then, remember: homosexuality doesn't exist in Egypt. Bowabs, as we non-Arabic speakers, muddle their proper Arabic title, can make or break a romance and make or break your budget. During the corrupt reign of Hosni Mubarak, they were part of a deep and sinister chain of informants that kept Egyptians docile and compliant. What role they play in post-revolutionary Egypt remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, I don't recommend you go kissing your honey in the streets of Cairo or even on the beaches of the Red Sea. Someone may still be watching you. But take heart: It's okay to hold hands here.

It's a Man's World (cont'd)

A few hours after deplaning and my first awestruck encounter with a fully Muslimized woman, I was whizzing through the dizzy traffic of Cairo on a Friday night after prayers, when everyone is out and everyone is at their best (no accident the revolution had its highest moments on Fridays after prayers...the whole population, er, 90 percent of the population to be exact, is holy and ready for miracles on Friday evenings), while my driver had his head stuck out of the car window to conduct one of the 38 conversations he would have with his fellow Cairean drivers that night, I noticed the following. It will rest forever in my mind snuggled right next to the image of the woman in head to toe black waiting outside customs.

Two boys, not yet truly young men, but aiming diligently at that noble goal, walking together down the crowded street. They were probably thirteen years old, by most Arab standards, men, meaning they were mature enough to be considered threats to unveiled women, would not, hence, be allowed easy access to classrooms of girls, share food at weddings with girls, see the skin of no females until marriage if they were devout, except their mothers and their sisters. You know the age: When puberty has gained the upper hand, no longer takes the boy by surprise. Whiskers are sprouting on upper lips, if irregularly; perspiration has taken on a new pungency. And somehow, in any culture I have ever witnessed, the stride of the boy has changed, a little longer, a little more from the hip. So we have two boys, on the cusp of sexual maturity, where they will balance with more or less  ease, depending on their religious values, their family ties, their imaginations for another few years or so. And these two boys, in Cairo in June of 2011, post revolutionary Cairo, are wearing completely matching ensembles that remind me immediately and uncannily of the beautiful boy in the filmed version of "Death in Venice," the blonde boy with the striped shirt. They are holding hands and walking with their new man-stride down the crowded street, dressed for the night, dressed to impress, holding hands and walking on a Friday evening after prayers. I am the only one who notices, except my daughter. The Egyptian who is driving, a deep and dear friend of ours, doesn't seem to understand why we even remark upon the boys.

You see, this is so much a man's world, a world where homosexuality has for so long been so denied, hidden, subversive no one can readily understand how standards of affection and affiliation between men are different here than elsewhere in the industrialized world. Men spend their deepest lives with men here. The division between the sexes is so deep and wide they don't even often see the other side. And before Mubarak, there was a long period of time when it wasn't like this, when men and women mixed, when women didn't have to hide themselves from view. Mubarak was smart enough to know that increasing Islamic fundamentalism would serve his reign well. Over the course of his cruel dominion, women lost a lot of freedom and men returned to the ways of their great grandfathers. Our friend the native Cairean told us about how his mom used to wear miniskirts. Now, both she and his sisters are veiled.

In the USA, we call this kind of sexual separation a fact of life only in the Board Room, where life is still a man's world.

It's a Mad, Man's World

There is no homosexuality in the Islamic world, well, you know what I mean: There is no blatant homosexuality in the Islamic world, well, you know what I mean: There is no blatant homosexuality in the Islamic world unless you know where to look. And this goes for both men and women.

The Islamic world, it's no secret, is a man's world. Wait. Let me correct that. The world is a man's world. There is not a place on the globe with a population of greater than 100 that is not a man's world. But in most parts of this man's world, a woman can wear (pretty much) what she likes and can afford, she can go (pretty much) where she chooses and can afford, and she can say (pretty much) what she wants, even if that voice comes in the form of a ballot.

The first person I saw after I passed through customs in Cairo was a woman (I have to assume) in the long black robe and head covering we call a birqua, a rather radical birqua at that, having even the small slit that is usually left open for her eyes covered with piece of black fabric which I hope was transparent from the inside as it certainly was not from the outside. This was my first visit to Egypt. I'd come prepared for more conservative dressing in Cairo, but nothing really prepares you to find that it's real and it's thorough. I noticed that even the woman's hands were covered; she wore black gloves that went to her elbows. When she walked, and her robes swung, I saw that her ankles were covered in what appeared to be beautiful black shaded stockings. Fascinated, I had to almost physically restrain myself from reaching out to touch the soft folds of the burqua's cloth. It looked irresistibly soft, reminding me of the skin of the bat ray in the open tank at the Monterrey aquarium, which is, to date, the most remarkable surface I've ever had the pleasure to be able to touch with my eager fingertips.

Tell a modern Cairean man anything about how Egyptian women are subservient, and he will probably laugh at you. "They dress as they do out of free choice," you will almost assuredly be told. "No Egyptian man can tell an Egyptian woman what to do. He would not eat for weeks if he tried." Even in that statement, something makes me cringe. No one seems to care that there is an implicit suggestion therein that it will be the woman who is making sure there is food on the family's table. And definitely they do not want to hear this from me, the blonde, blue-eyed, wide-eyed Americana.

This is a man's world. Here, unlike some countries where the Quran is more important than the Constitution or where the Quran IS the constitution, women can vote, can drive, are required to attend school for as many years as their brothers. Women are engineers, doctors, lawyers, and mothers. But this is a man's world. Go into any of the teeny tiny shops that line Cairo's teeming streets, and even if it is a woman's clothing store, there will be a man in charge. He is usually sitting. Sitting with his four closest friends, all of whom are now silently assessing me, without a smile, without a single sign of interest, without a greeting. If there is a woman in the shop, she may approach and if she does, I will probably even be awarded a smile that somehow seems real to me. But the team of men, two of whom are probably smoking sisha, one of whom is thumbing through a wellworn copy of the Quran, and one whose eyes very rarely move from the cash register, just watch me. Only one works here. The others, his buddies and or brothers and or sons, are here to bolster him. This is life in the Societe des Cafes. Every shop here is a mosque and a teahouse.

(to be continued)

Letters, Redux

After a really long hiatus, I'm giving this blog another go. It's been over a year since my last posting. It's been a tumultuous year. I am not just older, I am changed. My mother died and I did not, my youngest child graduated and moved to DC and I did not, my daughter moved to Egypt and I did not. But I learned from everything. There was the revolution in Egypt and a failed democratic movement right here in Madison. The two had many similarities, many differences. I studied both quite closely. I made many new and wonderful friends, from all parts of the world, some right here in Wisconsin, some very far away. I wrote poems and rediscovered painting. I mourned my mom and tried to find within myself a residue of her spirit and the joy she held onto even as death cruelly, cruelly claimed her. I went to Egypt and experienced life in a third world country seeking to reinvent itself. It was a revolution for me as well as the people who lived there. I will see what I have to say now. Welcome back, Russ Feingold.