Toilet Bowl Blues - Leaving Sri Lanka

Is there a respectable way to solve the horrific problem of a backed-up toilet in a hotel room? Last few hours in Colombo, frenetic and dreary capital of Sri Lanka, tail end of Christmas holiday. My wife, Carrie, was—newsflash—shopping. We chose as our last night in Sri Lanka the Gulle Face Hotel (re the name: don’t ask—I have no idea), which is a square U-shaped old hotel opened onto the Indian Ocean. Dark wood interiors, 19th century colonial detailed exterior painted proudly British white. Everybody’d stayed here, illustrious guests’ names inscribed on a plaque in the lobby—that kind of place. I remained during the morning at the hotel, preferring to read and sit in the shade and listen to the gentle Indian surf. But of course before relaxation gets underway one must relax the tension in one’s bowels: morning achievements, shall we say. I’d finished, folded up my New Yorker, flushed and…the gurgle and filling, the swirling and chilling. My question: is there any respectable way of dealing with this in a hotel? Meaning of course your backed up toilet in your room. What you first must establish at all costs in your own mind and also the world’s is that the back up is absolutely not your fault. You give to the toilet, the toilet receives and spirits away. But once in a while that reciprocal agreement is broken. Enthroned, you fulfill your end, so to speak, often exceeding expectations, wipe clean, flush and rise (or visa versa). But instead of sucking and swirling down, the terrible waters rise, wayward contents nudge each other lethargically, the waters continue rising to floodstage, the murky currents anticipating a joyful overflowing as they glimpse the bowl’s rim and break into song at only sky beyond, while you and any other mortal and even the very gods could only gaze on helplessly while holding your pants at the swirling happy waters hoping to rage onto the tile. If that strumpet Fortune kindly glances your way at that moment, the waters cease their rise; the murky swirling slows thank goodness but remains at floodstage. As you’re left wincing, biting your lip, you hear the toilet audaciously refilling itself to await the next appointment. And you realize you’re on your own now. The toilet actually believes it’s fulfilled its obligation and turns away unsmiling like your flight attendance at a hotel bar whom you begin chatting up because she seemed so nice on the flight over. Besides being alone, so very alone, you’re stuck: you don’t dare flush again, for the toilet possesses now twice normal capacity, though best of Irish luck getting the toilet to acknowledge this, let alone remedy the critical imbalance; let’s not mince words: the toilet doesn’t give a rat’s arse. So, there isn’t a plunger in the room, unfortunately. The gallant hotel staff is paid to serve you, cater to your whims, redress the tiniest grievance. But you do not want the hotel staff to fix this. You do not want the hotel staff to help. You do not want the staff or anyone else on the planet to know. Why? Because the floating shit, the drowned toilet paper, the fetid flotsam and jetsam of the morning and night before all reflect somehow on you. Inexplicably, it just does. Like a great artist his epic mural, you made this shit. A sudden vision of Hell crosses your mind: you need to remove the apocalyptic logs. But how? In the name of all that pukes and writhes, how? Quickly you realize the action would only compound the problem, and create dreadfully new ones. If you had committed any other heinous act in your hotel room, you wouldn’t hesitate to alert the hotel staff. Perhaps you very deliberately sailed an empty champagne bottle through your beautiful glass window overlooking a Spring meadow dancing with wildflowers: No problem, sir, we will replace the window and the champagne…will a 1998 Brut suffice? You may have slept with one of the bridesmaids at a co-workers wedding, and the next morning she’s dead: No problem sir, we will take care of the body. Ah, tis a pity when such a lovely young girl dies, isn’t it? But leave shit floating in your toilet and have the staff discover it? I shudder to think. I deliberated in my hotel room 105 (see, this “you” wasn’t hypothetical) whether to be present after I’d called the front desk and explained the dire situation. Instead, I decided to flee to the anonymity of the poolside lounge, floppy safari hat lowered over my face, reading until the coast was clear, hoping the staff never pasted a room number to a face. If I had remained in the room, I imagined the worst: the lowly cleaning guy would peer into the flooded bathroom, flinched, then slowly turn to fix a disgusted stare: “My god man [sneering with horror and pity]. You were so kind to when I greeted you in the hallway yesterday evening. You looked me in the eye, and I felt in your gaze acknowledgment of our common humanity. My heart swelled, and I was uplifted. And now…this. How could you…” He turns away embittered, bewildered. My imagination then flew to the front desk. Word would have reached the entire staff. We go through a cold ceremony of paying the bill in silence. The manager—someone tipped her off that “he” was checking out—would then flatly announce that, speaking for the entire hotel industry and all of Sri Lanka, I am no longer welcome. I then lose it. “But it was your toilet!” Unmoved, her growl measured and severe, “But it was your shit!” As though hit with mallet, I’d stumble a few steps back, turn and flee before the first tear quivers on eyelid. Yeah well nothing like that happened. I should hasten to add that when I did return after a few hours the problem was not solved; in fact, the bathroom floor was flooded! Detritus, toilet paper, a fetid film of water spreading. And perched dead, legs in the air, on the back rim of the toilet, was a cockroach. At first I wasn’t surprised. I mean, it’s like going to see an Elton John concert: with the lightshow and music and stage antics, you’re also paying for the tacky Dr. Seuss glasses. So there’s the cockroach. And I realized that earlier when I’d been sitting there calmly reading, I’d felt a tickling in my undergroin, and my initial response was that I was leaking somehow. I looked down and saw nothing, realizing, well, of course you’re not leaking. Now I know the tickling was the fated cockroach scaling the varied cliffs to escape. Ironically, the flood propelled him up, up, up and away. And now he lay, perished, upon the rim of the bowl, free at last.

Hiking Czech Republic Again

If in a fit of youthful enthusiasm you decide to backpack for three days straight, have a spa town at the end of the trail. This wasn’t quite how it worked out for us in the Czech Republic last summer, but we managed to find Marianske Lazne in West Bohemia eventually. When we awoke that morning in that small town on the Vltata River (where the last blog paused), we were southeast of Prague by about forty or fifty miles, having taken a train to Revnice and then hiked the day. Over beers the previous night (not those bunch of beers, another bunch of beers earlier in the evening) we’d spread our Czech map on the table and sort of traced a route. Oh how romance and idealism takes over when you’re gazing comfortably at a map. A finger glides easily upon the glossy surface: “Okay, we can hike down to here, cut over that range [!?] then head down to there for the first night…” “Yes, and from there we can just kind of swing east over to here [!!??] and stay the night near that river…” You would think we were generals sending our forces across Afghanistan for a spring offensive. A finger swoop across the map covered eight to ten inches. What were we thinking? But for three days we hefted our backpacks and made the journey as far as we could. As mentioned before, the trails spanned the country; some were hiking trails that turned into fire roads that poured into paved streets that dwindled into meadow paths. At the end of each day our feet really hurt, and progressively so such that after the third day we knew we didn’t have it in us to—oh, I don’t know—hike across the entire damn country! But flashing in memory are snapshots: a wheat field billowing lightly as the late afternoon sun fans the shadows, a small village tucked into a distant mountain; peering down from a cliff onto another village set against a forest; narrow country roads through apple and pear orchards; undulating hills across the landscape wherever we traveled; stopping along a fire road to pick plump blackberries; and the deep, profound delight taken at the sweaty finish on a patio at a beer garden, the crisp Czech pilsners like frosty nectar. Man, we worked for those beers. But it felt good knowing we could carry what we needed on our backs and hike a long sometimes burning hot day. Flowers danced in grasses all along the way. But it was at Novy Knin that we realized the end: through forest, meadow, crossing streams, orchards, villages, roads, trails, that our feet needed a long rest. But we realized from this small village there were no direct or even indirect trains to our destination. Eyes lowered in shame, we took a bus back to Prague to catch a train to the spa town of Marianske Lazne. This beautiful town is set in the Slavkov Forest in a protected region, and runs a long valley between mountains. Architecture boasts neoclassical and Art Nouveau and the buildings form an elegant horseshoe with lush parkland in its heart. There are thirty-nine springs, and you can shove your Nalgene in a fountain and fill up. We spent three days recovering, lounging, feasting, and we may have sipped more beer. The highlight was a two to three hour visit to a grand hotel spa. We paid fifteen dollars for hours of sauna, mineral spring floating in a beautifully blue tiled pool, clear cold mineral water waterfall splashes, warm mineral foot baths, around and around again. Love the body, and it will return your love. … We stayed the nights at a lovely hotel with views of rooftops of the town. Before we leave West Bohemia, a diversion: come with me for breakfast that first morning in Marianske Lazne. The hotel breakfast experience. That hesitant, slightly uncomfortably self-conscious way we shuffle into breakfasts at hotels or, God help us all, B&Bs. We drift into the banquet-square rooms like the infirm or mildly retarded. It’s not our kitchen. We don’t know where anything is. We are blindly fumbling for the handholds of their routine, the ones who run the establishment. And the infernal deliberations forced upon you before coffee: do I make eye contact with other fellow travelers? Do we nod at each other acknowledging our shared fate? “So, you slept here too?” I actually enjoy the B&B experience, as I fancy I’m indulging in the illusion of free breakfasts, and the food is usually plentiful and good. You’re not sentenced to the evil “Continental Breakfasts” of cellophane cardboard pastry and watery coffee. Regardless, the hotel breakfast is a dance you’re expected to know but you’ve forgotten the music. You try your best to move naturally, gracefully, conscious that the guy behind you wants to dig into the vat of scrambled eggs and you’re standing in front of it transfixed because you can’t choose between the little sausages and the undercooked bacon in the vats to your right. Everyone at a hotel breakfast eyes everyone else suspiciously. We all transgress on everyone else’s private morning routine (I mean, come on, think how you act around your spouse, and it’s just you two; the hotel breakfast experience is thirty people crammed into tables in your dining room). When you finally get your plate piled high with food, curtains close around you, and you’re blessedly alone. But getting there is slightly nerve-wracking. At any eatery, it’s best to waltz in with friends or loved ones simply mired in scintillating conversation, the kind where the person following the hostess to the table is throwing her lively and pointed remarks over her shoulder. The vibe you and your friends emit is one brimming with life; you are deigning to divert the stream of your erudite and witty moving salon into this chosen eatery, so, waiter, make it snappy, make it good. Of course, you are ever gracious with the wait staff, for you and company are neither above nor beneath them. But when the sultry university student pirouettes at your table with pen at the ready, nightly specials bubbling from her lips, you are not sitting there with your backs against the chairs looking wide-eyed at your place settings with blank smile awaiting the restaurant’s blessedness to wash over you. No. Each of you is leaning chest into the table nearly all talking at once, your conversation so germane to whatever cultural beast is currently spreading its wings downtown that week. This is, yes, next to impossible to achieve at a hotel breakfast. But if the hotel knows its game, it will provide your table with a thermos or silver carafe full of hot coffee. No dull-faced staff is going to want to return to your table seventeen times to refill your stumpy white coffee mug: just set the whole pot down, sweetie. I know people who despise the B&B experience: too much intimacy in too small a space with strange people too early in the morning. But I’ve elicited wondrous tips and travel insights from folks munching at adjoining tables. B&B patrons do seem a cut above the rest. They’re not weird. After a few hot slugs of coffee, spirit brightening, you might find yourself turning to the young couple at the next table and singing “So, where’re you folks from?”
From spa town Marianske Lazne we headed south to the Sumava Forest for a backpacking experience. It wasn’t really to be. As mentioned, I don’t think Czechs backpack as much as drive to a spot, set up camp, and start drinking. Furthermore, there really is no wilderness per se in the the border with Germany, and during the Communist era was off-limits; you could and people did get shot trying to flee across borders. So much of this corner is relatively untouched. Long inclines through dark and sunlight dappled woods, across grasses to come upon sloping countryside sprinkled with wildflowers—look in the distance and see thick forests running up hills. The most beautiful trails were trod were grassy ones: natural, gentle, animal and human feet seemed to tread with care. At the end of the day we always found ourselves searching for that auto-camp on the map; it always seemed right outside of town—and it was, by car. But after a day of hiking three kilometers is a brutal push. “Have we gone three kilometers? We must have by now.” “This sucks. Do you realize we’re the only backpackers?” “Where the hell is it?” “Let’s just go back to town and get a beer.” “I want to put this crap down first, I’m tired.” “Is this even the right road?” “Where’s the map?” “I just gave it to you!” “Don’t yell! I was just—“ “I WASN’T YELLING.” “Does that truck see us?” “Wait, what’s that sign say?” “I need a beer.” “It doesn’t say that—ooh, look at that flower.” “No, I’M saying that…” and so on. After a night at the camp outside of a nameless little village, we hiked the asphalt road out to a bus stop, sat at an outside table for lunch, had the waitress take a photo of sweaty us lifting frosty mugs of pilsner with forest and mountains in the background. Next stop, the city of Brno.

Trekking the Czech Republic - Part 1

Ramadan is well underway, a time for Muslims to remember the less fortunate by fasting from morning till night, then gorging on two or three separate feasts into the wee hours of sultry mornings; the fast is broken by the call to prayer around 7:00pm accompanied by the booming of cannons firing (for more on the Ramadan experience, see earlier blog, but this I have to share: during the half hour before the fast is broken, you’ll hear on average but every night half a dozen tires screeching in the distance. You wait for the thundering boom of metal against metal, but it never comes. As mentioned in earlier blog, folks here fasting are crazed with hunger, strung out with no cigarettes, whatever). There is something communally festive about all of Islam ending the fast together. Last night we heard the cannon and call, then clinked wine glasses. School is underway as well, but a frothy pint’s worth of our souls is till wandering the hallowed cobblestones of Prague’s glorious squares, towering cathedrals, and beer gardens. We spent one month traveling through the Czech Republic. You’ll probably want to hear about our sleeping over stables on a horse ranch outside of Mikulov; floating in the mineral-springs pools in the West Bohemian spa town of Marianske Lazne, backpacking through forests and passing girls wearing bonnets collecting wild mushrooms in baskets; learning about defenestration at Prague Castle (my new favorite word: it means the political act of throwing someone out the window); wandering narrow roads between villages and picking delicious apples and plums right off the tree; being given a personal tour in Brno of the home now museum of the great Czech composer, Janacek, by a lovely woman in a long flowing dress and hoop earrings who’s studied the composer all her life…. Yes, all this and more will I reveal with scintillating wit de rigueur, pausing only to reign in my galloping prose to harness for another day, but there’s an important issue I simply must address forthwith: camping and beer. The Czechs have figured it out. Carrie and I spent our first month of summer vacation in the States, both coasts, had an amazing time, saw wonderful friends and family, and then flew back to Aleppo, stayed two days, lugged our backpacks out of storage, filled them up, took a bus to Damascus and flew to Prague. At our hotel in Prague we spread the map out and traced a general route through the country, at least our first leg of the trip. The Czech Republic (like many countries in Europe) has an amazing and well-marked circuitry of trails. The blue trail, red trail, yellow trail, green trail, crisscrossing and interconnecting and spanning the countryside, through cities, along rivers. You can get anywhere and everywhere either walking or biking. So at the end of one long day hiking some 15-18 kilometers, we stumble into an auto-camp. I don’t think many Czechs backpack much, but many do the citified wilderness thing much like their American counterparts: load up the RV with creature comforts and park on a grassy steppe overlooking a river. A strange way of vacationing: it’s like setting up camp in your backyard. We never saw the mammoth rolling mansion motor homes that bulge and fart their way through America’s heartland to gather at holy sites (what Mecca is to Muslims, Wall Drug is to retired Midwesterners), but Czechs still made the weedy patches their home. RVs now sport front porches. Kids have bikes. Volleyball nets are strung, soccer balls booted about. Young couples sometimes play cards. But if your experience is anything like mine, you know what happens: you drive around looking for a “spot” in this cluttered neighborhood of RVs and trailers, agree on one that’s not in the glare of a bathroom but in proximity to one nevertheless, get even more excited if the spot has a surrounding wall of bushes that gives your spot a “private” feel, one of you gets out the ice chest and dumps it one the picnic table to claim the spot as yours, register with the olive green hat guy in the booth, return to your site and set up the tent, lay out sleeping bags, decide on where exactly the ice chest will be for ready use, if you have camp chairs you unfold them, sit, exhale, look around at the trees towering above, smile as relaxation slowly melts into your soul, and then…well, and then you…. What now? You and spouse decide to “have a look around”, so you wander the circling roads, snickering at latecomers driving cautiously with peering eyes and open mouths at the remaining scrap sites left to forage, then return to your camp chairs no more enlightened about your adventure. Let’s face it: it’s pretty much like sitting in your backyard. You can’t experience the majesty of backpacking in the wilderness (and anyone who’s done it knows those sacred days, so no more needs to be said). The Czechs have a different way of camping. I think they’ve figure out that it never lives up to the hype. So all the auto-camps we stumbled into had beer gardens and restaurants. What do you do after you set up camp? Drink! If you didn’t already know, the Czechs are known for their beer: they drink more per capita than any other country. Furthermore, their beers are damn good, and the beers in the auto-camps were on tap. So imagine our delight after a long day of hiking; we throw down our backpacks, set up the tent, then head for the beer garden to hold a frosty half-liter glass of cold and delicious Pilsner Urquell in trembling hands. I think the Czechs just tossed out the illusion of a “wilderness experience” like a soiled cocktail napkin. Carrie and I were carrying everything we needed for a month away from home on our backs. I suppose we could have dropped an ice chest full of beer into a wagon and dragged that behind us. Instead, at the end of each day we’d read a little, write in our journals, and then join the other campers for a few coldies. And no matter how remote or small the auto-camp was, a restaurant and beer garden/patio stood proudly greeting us as we sweated our way into their open arms…. Prague is a shitstorm. This is how it was described to us by Carrie’s friend, Akemi, who’s traveled. Indeed it was, but what a glorious congestion. All we did was wander and gaze upon the architecture, the culture reverberating beneath the streets, and bless the West that women weren’t covered in burkas. Hail to mortal flesh! To sun dresses hefting proud Slavic bosoms! To men and women just hanging out together! We also worried out loud about how we’d make it through hot Aleppo days without a tall cold pilsner right around one or two o’clock (and one or two at four o’clock, etc.). It’s just what Czechs do here. During a particular long and sweaty trek we came upon the small village of Novy Knin three or four days after we left Prague. All roads led up to the church—that’s how they designed towns back in the day—and we got a hotel room for the night. Next morning waiting for the bus to take us I don’t know where, we saw two elderly women waiting for a café to open. When the doors opened at 10:00, Carrie dropped her backpack to bounce in and get us a couple espressos. She comes back smiling. She told me she saw the two elderly women in the café. One had a latte, the other a tall cold pilsner. This is a Sunday. Which proves what I’ve argued all along: for morning beverages, beer and coffee are interchangeable. But of the trek: it felt good to know we could still load up a backpack and heft it across the countryside for days at a time like we were young. The trail systems simply made use of existing paths, roads, bikepaths. The memories are magical; it seems amazing that we did it. I remember us sitting down to rest on an old log, then turning to find we were surrounded by bushes of wild blueberry. Hiking through forests to come into long green meadows of wildflowers. Crisscrossing streams. Our first day hiking, we left the train station at Revnice and trekked the whole day. I have a picture in my mind of walking a long dirt path through billowing wheat fields, small villages holding on to sloping distant hillsides, late afternoon sun washing over the world, slugging mouthfuls of water while a hawk sails overhead, and thinking: yes, this is the Europe I’ve wanted. That picture in mind, culled from books or films, of a place where life just seems good. We hiked down a steep hill to a small town on the Vltava River. We were tired down to our bones, and it began to rain. The auto-camp on the map was nowhere in sight, so we booked a hotel room, changed out of our sweaty clothes, and—what do you know—ordered beers at the restaurant. After dinner we walked across a bridge and wandered a narrow road. A few small dwellings dotted the hillside. We passed a restaurant that looked empty, then further on came up a broken down looking cinderblock structure with an ancient bicycle parked against it. Weeds raced around the lot. But we thought we heard singing. Carrie and I looked at each other. Should we investigate? It was one of those moments when you felt you’d be better off just moving on. But this whole trip was meant to be an adventure. We agreed: if we don’t check it out, we’ll always regret it. So we ducked our heads in. About ten middle-aged folks were sitting around a table, huge glasses of beer proudly hailing, and two guys with guitars. They waved us in. They were all locals, disheveled looking. One of the men was turning this old barn-like structure into a pub. It was half finished. But this, they told us, is what Czechs do: they gather together in the evenings and sing. So Carrie and I spent the next few hours listening to Czech folk songs, drinking up the endless pilsners supplied by a young teenager (so that’s what teenagers are for), petting the dog ambling between chairs. I offered up Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” which they welcomed with warm applause. We drifted back through the dark, thanking the heavens we chose to intrude.

Home, Wherever It Is

A few breaths before afternoon drizzles into twilight, that hushed interval where a blue patina softens the surfaces of the world, October sunlight slants like a shimmering cold knife through the trees in my big backyard in Sacramento and across backyards and housetops beyond. I would open the family room’s sliding glass door and wander outside and simply stand in the day. Never welcoming the night rising in the east, a closing of light, a return to a house where the TV seemed always on, I remember always looking west—to San Francisco, the coast, the Pacific Ocean, years to come; I felt somehow drawn west. October remains the blessed month for this memory, as it was for Kerouac (October for me stands for that autumnal air, the way the day feels). Summer in its blazing glory threw the sun high overhead and winter dragged it bumping low around the sky, but October freed the light to pulse and pierce the air. I wore a light sweater against early cold and waited for the afternoon’s mystery to rise and linger. Was I waiting for something to happen? Waiting for a question unasked to reveal an answer, like a stone statue blinking dust and turning into a princess? I never knew, and still can’t hold it in my palm. The air was still, the sunlight sharp, and I stood westward as the earth rolled away. You only recognize beauty when it begins to disappear is the last line of a Mark Eitzel song during his time with the American Music Club. The day was disappearing, October disappearing, another year disappearing, and so goes life. That’s precisely what was happening, exactly the answer. And a month or so after having left home in Sacramento for life in the Bay Area (San Francisco, the coast, the ocean), perhaps feeling poor and lonely and distant, I drove home to Sacramento, walked through the family room and sliding glass door to wander again the backyard and linger in the waning afternoon light (March-April can offer similar experiences; perhaps its the changing you feel). I had left home, but the ghosts remained and waved a kind welcome, the memories imbued in the grass mowed and the silver maple climbed into telephone wires and gnarled plum tree leaning and cracking the cement porch and the pale weathered wooden fence trying to hold the restless dogs within. This backyard was home; it is no longer home, although I feel at home anytime I’m standing in the line of cold sunlight sliding through creaking trees. I have driven by the old house, my mother and father long dead, and once I met the new owners, a young family, their first home. I introduced myself to the lady of the house, and she was overjoyed to meet, anxious to show what she’s done in the house and yard. The yard had changed a bit: I think I spotted a lawn ornament, a fairytale fawn or ceramic bonneted lass gathering invisible berries. The grass appeared designer mowed, as if you’d be scolded for running scrimmage. Growing up I remember proud clumps of weeks, the edges a little unkempt. There is something sinister in the nervous demand for the manicured yard, the ever-renewed battle (waged either by you or immigrants) against wild growth; wanting a lawn that doesn’t offend or require interpretation, but pleases easily like a Christmas with Kenny G album. We had lawns growing up, but we ran and tackled and rolled upon them like dogs. I remember surprises hidden in weeds, whole societies busy with work. Oh where are the frogs of yesterday? Extinct through chemicals, those wreckers of ecological balance. But standing in the backyard no longer my own, the plum tree filled the sky, the loquat held fruit, and the rosemary towered. The lady seemed happy with the yard. She confided in me that often she felt Barbara’s spirit in the house, often thought of her, eagerly hoping my mother approved what she’d done. With tears welling up in her eyes, she received my assurance that my mother would indeed be pleased (for the most part). Here’s another line from a song, Luther Vandross singing the version I heard: a house is not a home. He meant, I believe, his digs felt lonely without his woman. But home is also not a house. When I was standing in my backyard reminiscing with the new owner, I failed to hear the lingering ghosts. They’d packed up and caught the last train for…the coast. Home disappears when the beautiful ghosts stop speaking to you. So I feel little nostalgia for that suburb in South Sac. The house is not a home. Yes, the structure is not the dwelling within. A life is not a body, but the pulsing soul bubbling in the veins and nuzzling the rib cage and rising against muscle and dancing behind the face. Where is home now? We asked ourselves this on our summer flight from Syria to California via Istanbul and New York. Possible answers: Home is where you live, your current address. Home is where you grew up. Home is what is familiar, where you feel welcome. We sit back satisfied when we are “at home.” I’m trying to get at the meaning. I first felt a strange tug of home in New York’s JFK airport during the layover for our flight to San Francisco. Carry-on luggage bouncing and flipping behind us, I’m leading the charge to the nearest bar like a linebacker on a blitz. Old ladies are shoved out of my path like wiry rookie tight ends. I don’t care how many CDs I had on rotation, only one was spinning: get a good beer that’s not a goddamn mass-produced lager, the only thing available where we live (Heineken is about the best…for what it’s worth). A micro-brew, Brooklyn’s Brewing Company’s Amber Ale, was on tap. Our waitress dully asked if I wanted a tall one. After recovering from a laughing fit that had my eyes bulging tears and dry mouth a-foaming, I picked myself up off the hardwood floor, rearranged the surrounding tables and chairs in polite order, recovered the knife and fork from the potted plant near Gate 17 where I had flung them after upending our table, and answered yes please. Of course, what you miss is home, but is home simply what you miss? (My ugly god, I’m writing like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City). Flying into the Bay Area, California felt like home because our haunts remained humming and getting along fine. We missed bopping down for beers at Jupiter in Berkeley or Cato’s Ale House in Oakland, taking our travel mugs and getting a Peet’s coffee and then pastries at Arizmendi’s on Lakeshore, seeing women walking and talking freely of all ages and ethnicities without the black shroud of invisibility covering them, buying a slice—two!—of Arinell’s NY-style thin slice pizza offa Shattuck near University, taking a walk in the Oakland Hills of bay laurel, redwood, patches of sun like stars splashing upon leaves, wading through Moe’s and Shakespeare and Co. books on Telegraph, and damn did we miss our CA friends. But in the middle of our joy I realized we were experiencing the giddiness of the initial. We were on vacation; we didn’t have to go to work. If we wanted to wake on a Wednesday morning and drive to Ocean Beach, walking along the sandy shore with the joggers and dogs, then hit the Beach Chalet overlooking the Pacific for beer and onion rings, well, we’ll just do that. If we want to meet my old musician friends for beers at Jupiter, sit in Adirondack chairs in the sun in the open air patio, passing guitar back and forth and plucking out tunes for one another like back in the dizay, then bid our farewells because we have to make happy hour at Sea Salt on San Pablo for Tomales Bay oysters on the half shell and fruity drinks, again, we’d manage. But we’re wallowing in all we’d missed: does that make the Bay Area home? We don’t own a house there. The four walls in a prison cell are familiar to an inmate: is it home? A charitable guard can pull strings and tie up a hammock in the inmate’s cell. In it, he can be comfortable: it is home? Paroled, he can return to the prison years later and revisit his old cellblock, which is now filled with producers of Reality TV shows, and the damp and cold dust and whiff of steel urine will trigger memories familiar, but he is far from home, and not comfortable, I’d wager. My long lost friend and old roommate in Santa Cruz, Helen, told me once she went home for the holidays, where she grew up on the East Coast. Sisters and brothers she had, cousins, Mom and Dad. All were there together to celebrate, but she felt dismayed at how little her family appreciated the great effort she’d made getting out there. A single woman, beat reporter for a small weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, and it was a financial struggle to get back East to join the family (who all lived within twenty miles of each other; no hike for them at all). Though she was home, she felt less at home than a stranger, a tolerated guest. Her heart, where home is supposed to be, wasn’t in it. I’m scraping for a meaning. The notion of home does, of course, include the familiar, the comfortable. I suppose I want to loosen and set adrift the traditional notion, tear it away from the tyranny of home as finally settling down, the shiny gleaming ranch-style with two-car garage of cherishing the fixed. Home is where you land, end up. If that’s the case, then let me show you a bit of real estate Hamlet calls “the undiscovered country, from whose borne no man returns,” very spacious but no views. This is your final resting place. And it’s free. Only a nihilist calls this home. We are semi-nomadic, Carrie and I, for the time. But Syria is our home, in some ways, in a narrow but essential sense, inasmuch as we cut and paste the paper maché scraps of our life in this strange new land. But rain floating from a redwood forest canopy is home when you wander underneath. The wild, free and fertile stillness that rises when the captain cuts the boat engine and you drift where the Pacific’s continental shelf drops off, hushed breathing, where whales swirl and sound, this felt like home to me one afternoon about thirty miles off San Francisco. I feel at home in all kinds of water. Icy cold granite-bowled alpine lakes, mineral rich seaweed rolling Pacific tidal waters that sparkle hues of bronze and blue, rumbling and splashing Idaho mountain rivers, clear cool Lake George whose wind-nudged waves are lapping behind me at this writing, the warm salt waters off Turkey’s coast—it’s all good. Same goes for the day. If the Weather Channel and news meteorologists depended on the likes of me to sustain their livelihoods, they’d be slouching to the poorhouse in droves. "What’s the weather going to be like today?" I don’t know, peek your head outside. Get thee hence and whoop, dance and sing under whatever skies surround you. I think the only time I wanted to check the weather forecast was when planning a backpacking trip. But even then, rain happens. Thoreau should be our guide and savior in these matters. Don’t huddle and turn against snowstorms; go out and inspect them! I feel blessed I’m at home in whatever weather heaven choreographs. “Oh, it’s a crappy day out there” you hear radio voices lament if rain is coming down and replenishing the earth and its depleted groundwater sources. This is “crappy”? Hell, you’d think they were announcing the latest round of firing squad penalties being carried out. I take the weather the way I take music: a sunny afternoon is bluegrass; rainy mornings, Joni Mitchell; overcast noons, Coltrane; whipping and raging storms, Mahler. I think I’ll manage to carve out a dwelling any hemisphere I plunk down my bags. In Syria we have our rhymes and rituals, our daily bread of dreams, we hose and squeegee the dust from the patio and pull up the outdoor furniture, check if there’s ice in the trays, tune my guitar, welcome friends and uncork champagne purchased on a run to the Turkish border. Home is less a place or predicament than dwelling emboldened by the mysterious art of living. Home is sanctuary, enclosed only to safeguard the opening to mystery of being alive. This is why holy places feel like coming home, be they stone cathedrals or Sequoia canopies or Pacific Ocean depths above which you respectfully drift, knowing life shudders underneath. Only the truly mysterious possesses the power to draw, to welcome. Arrange your fixtures and furnishings with the delicate touch handling a bouquet of flowers, vines and leaves. Wait for the feather brush of wind, and then call things that truly matter to you into presence, let them enclose you, allowing a droplet to fall into your soul like the twirl and snap of a cold October sun, the moist heart pumping in a clump of moss, the murmur in the burrowing warm dark hole that furry critters call home.

Just Another Day in the World

Well look who’s up. Here, let me get, do you want cream? Coffee’s in that thermos. I assumed you wanted as close to regular coffee, as the coffee you can get here in Aleppo often has hints of cardamom, as the Syrians like it. I don’t mind it sometimes. This stuff here is espresso from Italy, they got cans of it at the. So, over the jet lag? Often you need, I don’t know, at least two days to get back in the—that was the call to prayer. Yeah every morning, the muezzin over loudspeakers without a trace of subtlety reminds the faithful to offer supplication and thanks due to Allah. God is Great and Mohammed is His prophet, so come gather and receive some blessing is a rough translation. Often the muezzin spices up the preface with recitations from the Koran. I think so. Oh, around four in the morning, something like that. It’s like living next to the train tracks: after a while get used to it, part of the sonic architecture of the country. But one of my students told me her father gets up with the call, goes to the mosque to pray, then goes to work. All in all, not a bad way to start the morning. Better than donuts. I remember reading Jalal al-Din Rumi, the Sufi poet—he actually got part of his education here in Aleppo around the twelve hundreds—saying something like “If you wake up in the middle of the night, listen, for the early hours have much to teach you, don’t go back to sleep…” I like that idea. No, I never do either. Wish I could, though. It’s always so quiet, just songs of birds. So eat something, do you constitutional business, and let’s get out so I can show you a day in the life. If you want we can—no, don’t bother, the power’s out. Goes out around this time every morning for an hour or so. Government does it. Like everything else, you get used to it. Just kind of plan your day around it. Nights are harder, though. You’re right in the middle of cooking and bam. Darkness. But you deal: light candles, pour a glass of wine, wear a headlamp to read. … Okay, got my keys, got my wallet, where’s my, all right, got my passport for you never know. Head of school instructed us to always keep around five hundred U.S. dollars around, easy access, just in case we have to flee the country. Wild, huh? Sun’s out! Beautiful day. Weather here’s pretty much like we had in Oakland, except the summers are painfully hot. Dry heat my ass. It hurts to be outside, saps your energy. No, let’s walk up this street, we’ll catch a cab downtown. The field across the street looked nicer in the dark, didn’t it? What you see through the trees, besides the ubiquitous trash, are people. See the clothesline? That crumbled concrete shack is where they live. Like I said, really poor people here in places. Oh yes, the honking. Cab drivers honk at everyone, potential fares. They don’t make much. Cab ride downtown to Azizyeh or the Citadel or Jedidah or wherever is like a buck. The average guy in Aleppo makes the equivalent of like ten bucks a day, most of these guys. And if you’re at a stoplight? Second it’s green they’re honking. Before even. Yeah, the trash. It was the hardest thing to get used to. That and the exhaust. But see that kind of dirty guy pushing that cart? Guys like him go around and scoop up trash from the gutters. Folks here just kind of drop their trash in bags in the gutters and in the morning they. “Salaam alaykum! Kayf Haalak!” “…” “Mabsuut Al Hamdulillah!” We walk by this shop every day, guy always smiles and greets us. Little hole in the wall, a lot of these shops are like that. But notice all the fruit? Juice shops. You just go in and get a big one point five liter bottle of fresh fruit juice, he squeezes it right in front of you. Grapefruit, orange, pomegranate, whatever’s in season. No preservatives, no pasteurization crap. And it’s like three bucks for the whole thing. How much is a little Odwalla? Here kitty kitty! No, they won’t come. The cats are all feral here. See that one’s kind of dirty. They hang around the trash bins and. Check it out up ahead. Horse drawn cart coming down the street. Clop clop clop! The red head scarf around the guy’s head? He probably lives in the outskirts of Aleppo, maybe in one of those tents we saw driving from the airport. Bedouin. Like I said, people here don’t have much. Probably comes in to sell vegetables or I don’t know. Now I bet you don’t see that in—where are you living now? No kidding. She took the house? Dude, you got hosed. You should have just told her to. No. Make a left. More cabs on this side. … “Jedidah, min fadlak, shukran.” We’ll head to Jedidah, oldest part of the city. Which is ironic as jedidah in Arabic means new, and so the oldest part of the city was once the newest. Shows how old. I know. There aren’t really rules of the road so to speak. Cars just scoot and swerve and drive on the line. It’s all very fluid. At first I was annoyed, but then I thought: who the hell cares if the guy crosses over the line? You just slow down or speed up. Result is that you’re very much more aware of your surroundings driving here. You still get idiots with cell phones stewing in a toxic combo of oblivious and smug, same as the States, but you just flow, and everybody else flows with you, give and take. Driving’s fine here, like driving on the sea, shifting with waves and wind. What’s really annoying is—like that guy. Just walks out into traffic. Everybody does it. Just start walking and dash and swoop between cars. Little kids, old women. What you have to do is—see them all?—just keep driving. It’s a dance: they plan their dash according to your speed and approach. So you don’t pause, that’ll upset the rhythm. Okay, see that clock tower there? This is near city center. Prime location for a public hanging, don’t you think? One of these days soon. Some guys robbed a jewelry store in Khaldiah, killed the owner and some other guy out front when they shot through the glass. Anyway, they caught the guys, and one’s going to hang. Other guys aren’t nationals, my students tell me, so they’re in for life instead. Couple years ago these five guys hanged, same clock tower. That kind of crime is rare here, killings or robberies. Perhaps because the punishment is so swift and sure, I don’t know. Well yeah it’s kind of barbaric. But hey I’ve been checking out news from the homeland: guy stabs one sister then decapitates his other little sister? Guy rages in and sprays a nursing home killing all those old people? School shootings, practically every other month or so, parking lot shootings, what the hell kind of barbaric country you living in? If you thought—“Hone!” That means stop here. We’ll get out here and walk. “Bikam?” Seventy-five lira. Let’s see what. Here’s a hundred. “Tfaddal. Shukran! Ma Salaama.” Not bad huh? For that cab ride downtown. That was about a dollar fifty. What do cabs start at in San Francisco? … Yeah these streets are narrow, and look, cobblestone. Much of Aleppo at one time or another was destroyed either by earthquakes or invasions. And here it’s all about the small shops. See that guy sells all kinds of roasted nuts. There’s the butcher, all that meat in the. I don’t know what that is. Sheep probably. Those guys over there are. All the vegetables and fruits are fresh. See how ugly the oranges look? Juiciest sweetest oranges you’ll ever eat. See how deep almost burgundy red the bell peppers? I make great salads here. Lettuces, arugula, frizze, cucumbers, tomatoes, it’s all fresh. Let’s walk down this street… You see, these narrow streets kind of grimy and dusty have sections where the same kinds of goods and whatnot. All these guys sell pipe fittings…all those guys sell jewelry. No, not here, Khaldiah. Yeah, people stare. They just don’t see foreigners much. They’re fascinated by foreigners. They all give this deadpan stare, but the minute you smile and wave, they smile wider than you and wave back, even call out Ahlan wa sahlan which means welcome very much welcome, something like that. No, you’re not pronouncing the h. You have to pronounce the h. Forget it, you’re not going to be here long enough. Oh him? No, there are no child labor laws here that I know of. No idea. What, he’s around ten years old? It’s different here. People just work. Syrians are industrious. You wouldn’t know it from some of these guys sitting on white plastic chairs and having tea and watching the world go by. But if you. Look at this wall, pockmarked and weathered and crumbling almost. Probably what you looked like after the divorce. Let’s get a shwarma. We’re close to a place I know…. Here, take it. They’re like Middle East burritos. The bread is xubz arribyy, Arab flatbread, and wrapped up inside is chicken, garlic cream, chopped tomatoes, shredded lettuce and pickles. They’re wrapped then flat pressed fried on the grill. These two? A dollar for both. Good huh? Let’s head up this way. I’ll take you to the Christian quarter….No, not much color. That kind of yellowish brown like faded clay is the color of Aleppo buildings. In the upper income newer neighborhoods you’ll see a dusty pink, but that’s the stone. One thing you’ll notice about the apartment buildings, there all about four or five floors high, that’s it. And the reason some of them look abandoned is because, like there, see all the dark brown shutters on the windows? Looks like the building’s boarded up. But it’s filled to capacity. People here just shutter the windows. It’s like they entomb themselves. I’ve asked and my students say folks don’t want people looking in, seeing their business, whatever. But it’s not like they’re running around naked acting out the leper scene from Jesus Christ Superstar for chrissakes. I mean, they’re having tea or watching TV together or doing the bland motionless living we all do. It’s just depressing to me: no natural light—ever! And yeah that’s the hardest thing to get used to here: the women having to cover up. And in black! Black is the color of invisibility. A negative of the spark of life. See, like those women there in front of that clothing boutique, eyeing those slinky dresses! And all of them completely veiled, head to toe, black gloves, the works. Thing is. Okay, here’s the thing. An acquaintance of ours, originally from—dude, watch where you’re walking; that taxi almost took you out—from Iraq gave us the run down: seems back in the day invading, marauding armies would storm through villages. Besides bestowing on the unlucky inhabitants your garden-variety pillage, they’d also steal the prettiest girls to use and abuse at their leisure. Kind of like frat parties. Anyway, villagers learned to veil the girls when the rampaging armies sauntered through. So then the armies couldn’t see the faces of the pretty ones. So but here’s the thing: don’t you think if you were a thirsty invader looking for a few sheep and a pretty young thing to love, you’d go straight for the veiled ones? I mean hello. But now it’s just a religious requirement. Women aren’t allowed to be “seen” by other men other than their husbands. At home the women unveil. And that’s when their husbands get to see his wife in one of those slinky strapless numbers in the shop window. I don’t know. I don’t really like it either. But like it was explained to me: women here cover up, then get dressed up stylish for their husbands; women in the States go out in the world looking dressed and stylish, then turn into frumps wearing sweats, tying rubberbands in their hair at home for their husbands. Whatever. You can just as easily—let’s duck in here. Here’s one of the many video shops. All pirated. All the new movies not even on DVD yet in the States, but you can buy them here. Here, buy this one: Brad Pitt’s all in it. I know you idolize him. You’re such a fairy. Check it! DeNiro in “Taxi Driver”. You talking to me? Are you talking to me? Let’s totally watch this tonight. Okay, we’re out of here. This DVD? A buck. See, we don’t even need to rent. Everybody just buys them, other teachers, and we just pass them around to each other. Sometimes I think it’s not—no, most of the folks you see here are Christians. Arabs or Armenians. No, they’re not the same you dumbass. What, did your ex take your brain too as part of the settlement? Armenians many of them settled here after the Turk genocide of 1915. See, there’s Armenian church, over there’s a Greek Orthodox. This neighborhood is called Azizyeh. You’ll see more restaurants, cafes here. People stay up late here. If we came back at midnight all those tables there would be filled with people. Okay, this is boring, let’s head home…. So basically, my day is school. At my desk by 7:30 every morning, we leave around 5:30 or so in the afternoon. Carrie goes running or walking. I go home and play guitar, read. Carrie does Yoga a couple times a week. Weekends, not much. Although we are planning on heading to the village of Maluula about an hour north of Damascus. It’s a town set in a cliff, a Christian town, and people there still speak Aramaic, the language old Jesus spoke. Cool, huh? Let’s head to the Sports Club on the school campus, start hefting beers. See if the cabbie knows where the school is. “Ismahli…?” … So the nice part about working here are the grounds. It’s like a park in here. All the trees, a good bit of shade, gardens, flowers. Ah, you’ll see cats all over the place here. Like a sanctuary for them. Brutal Aleppo streets. See the terraced lawn? All that lawn furniture. We hang out here with our friends quite often. Sometimes it’s after work and. Yeah, that’s the tennis court, over there’s that tented structure is basketball court, soccer field behind that. There’s a narrow running path through a small sort of forest. That building’s a squash court. Showers, all that. We have dinners in—well let’s get some coldies first and start drinking. It’s past noon…. So the different thing about living here is that our friends are generally somewhat older than we are. Not so when we lived in Cali. The benefit is that most of our friends have second houses, or first houses in nice locations. And we’ve made fast friends here; the expat community, you know. But in the years to come we’ll be able to visit friends on a beautiful stretch of coastline in Australia; friends in a village in France; friends in Segovia, Spain; friends in Cyprus; friends in Borneo; friends in Mexico. We ain’t couch-surfing in trailer park in Fresno, I can tell you that. So we meet after work here and—damn, my beer’s gone. Must have spilled most of it. I’ll get us a couple more….Yeah, I can’t believe it either: drinking beer from a can. And a lager for chrissake. Would you believe I actually last summer poured beer from a can over ice in a glass to chill it? Desperate times call for desperate measures. But like I said, we’ll just drop by and there’s always somebody here, sitting out at one of these tables. More folks will show. More beers. Then somebody says “Hey, let’s fix dinner at my place” and we all drive on over. The people here make it enjoyable, and worthwhile. Like anywhere. Let me tell you a story. The other evening Carrie and were finishing up dinner, and the people upstairs like two flights up start hosing down their patio. So it’s like splashing and dripping on our patio of course, dirty water. So I’m pissed. I don’t know how many glasses of wine are sloshing around my brain, but there I go, storming up the stairs. I bang on the door. The guy opens it. And I’m slightly aggravated and explaining forcefully in English that “No more!” “Khallas!” I say, which means Finished! Like stop it, enough. The guy doesn’t speak much English, but he gets my drift. But here’s the thing: as soon as I finish my rant, he asks me to wait, then to come in. I follow him into the kitchen, his little kids are milling around, and in a mixture of Arabic and pointing he prepares to give me a gift of honey. He’s a beekeeper! On the kitchen counter’s a wooden box, and it’s filled with wooden files of honeycomb! He motions that I’m to take one. A dark rich amber honeycomb, filled in cells of dark honey. He’s apologizing with honey. Of course, I’m feeling like an idiot for getting so mad. But I’m suddenly humbled, and I pour out my appreciation and thanks like a waterfall. See what transpired? A Muslim performing a Christian act of love which transformed my proud self-righteousness into a binding peace. A miracle, no? Here are small wonders to amaze, like glowing sunset red wildflowers dancing out of limestone slabs in a windswept field. Ah. The call to prayer again. Evening prayers. Yeah, why not. I don't have to work tomorrow. I'll take you to a dead city. Haunted sky. We'll make a picnic in the ruins. The beer’s not bad, is it…?

Heaven and Vienna and a Cold Dry Wind

You may have ideas of heaven, and however vague they float like wispy clouds in your mind, they probably coalesce to paint a happy destination of general good will and relaxed anxiety. Popular western notions concerning this utopia will, if tapped, include an endless expanse of puffy cloud upon which one reclines and catches up with friends and loved ones who’ve arrived earlier in the season. So it’ll be like Fort Lauderdale, Florida with your aunt and uncle and stray cousins. If your imagination never developed much past early childhood—or if you cherish as literal fact the vast painted representations adorning the world’s great galleries—you’ll visualize ducking the heavy swooping wings of angels, refraining from admonishing the cherubs about caloric intake, and participating in mandatory harp circles sans campfire. I once read a fundamentalist Christian tract that invoked the glorious rewards of the afterlife by insisting that true believers will invest their time praising God and judging angels, which to me veers frighteningly close to sucking up to the boss and burying yourself in endless clerical work. Imagine spending the afterlife at the DMV. If you’re of the jihadist hue and are, for better or worse, martyred in a holy war, heaven awaiting you will include seventy or so…well, here’s where meanings muddy up in translation. The fashionable reading in western mainstream media has Islamic martyrs encountering virgins. Young, unmarried women, flowers intact. As I like taunting my students, unless footnotes offer specifics, a recently martyred sauntering through heaven’s pearly gates could very well stumble upon seventy spinsters pitching back in forth in a chorus line of rocking chairs vying to darn his socks and knit him a sweater. Actually, my 12th graders will occasionally get into arguments over interpretations of Muslim culture and Koranic scripture; it’s all wonderfully entertaining, as there exist different ideas of exact wording, and you can tell when the arguments gets overheated when their exchange retreats from English into a fiery Arabic. One of my brightest 11th graders, a devout Muslim, claims—quite astutely—that the Arabic or Koranic word we take as “virgin” has no exact translation. The closest he offers is “one who gives pleasure.” So if you arrive unexpectedly in Paradise, and didn’t pack a sweater, a gray-haired and hunched spinster with an impish grin twirling sewing needles might be heaven indeed. Whatever our dreams of heaven, we rarely lay scrutiny to the implications of our assumptions. If we think heaven at all, we usually imagine ourselves somehow there, in a place, not quite believing that all will forever be well but trembling in our heart at the joyous approach of a loved one running toward us, a welcoming and familiar smile, tears in the eyes sparkling off celestial light, a hand reaching for ours, reunion at last. And your first words will be: “Why, you haven’t aged a bit.” The problem with this pastoral is time. As in a long time. As in a windy, heaving bellow of eternity. Imagine, if you will, living another hundred years upon this airy glorious landscape (I’m granting all readers a healthy and happy longevity). You’ll catch up each other with family goings-on. You’ll have to deal with omniscient loved ones long deceased who’ve been watching and waiting all these years, and all under heaven will be known. “I distinctly remember telling you before I died not to sell granny’s china. And what do you do? I’m not in the ground two days before granny’s china appears on Ebay....” Your grandfather—somehow looking exactly how you last saw him—escorts you to meet John F. Kennedy, or Genghis Khan, or Queen Elizabeth, or Rasputin, or John the Baptist, or Bette Davis, or Miles Davis, or point out the brownstone flat where Jesus composes string quartets under the furrowed-browed eyes of Beethoven, or even meet commoners who never made the front page but can regale with tales of toga parties in ancient Greece, and are damn good listeners to boot. Meeting and greeting the luminaries could soak up a good hundred years easy. Then what? You can spend many hours ironing out thorny metaphysical problems once and for all, as answers should most likely be forthcoming; if the answers don’t dissolve the questions, then I don’t know what you’re going to do. If you’ve been martyred, your troubles are far from over. Besides the obvious, what else are you going to do with seventy virgins? Set up Scrabble tournaments? Furthermore, whatever you do in life, either here or the hereafter, it’ll eventually get boring. So let’s imagine: another lifetime passes in heaven. Let’s ramp it up. A thousand years roll by. How about another thousand? By this time you’ve discussed every topic under the sun with everyone in the peaceful region. You’ve come to grips with the unpleasant reality that death does not, as assumed, exempt you from taxes. You can’t bear to hear another rendition of Handel’s “Messiah,” and, having written forty-seven incredibly intricate symphonies yourself, mastered every musical instrument, learned Dutch, French, Armenian, Persian, Greek, Latin and various Inuit dialects, and can recite lengthy passages from the Koran, Shakespeare, and Homer in your sleep, your passions are long fulfilled, your cup runneth over. Well, buck up, as a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years await you…ten million years is a drop in the sloshing bucket of eternity. You’ve still a long, long way to go, longer than you can imagine. It is taking this thought into your gut, the squishy marrow of bone, your dark and icy soul, that you’ll understand the necessity of death. Paradoxically, you need to know the journey will end, for life pulses with meaning only when death towers over the shimmering horizon. Better, then, to cast off notions of heaven with its looming eternity, let the dead bury the dead; instead, scoop up a handful of clear mountain stream and drink, smile at a glowering stranger, pick up a guitar and play, hand that homeless guy a twenty, read your Shakespeare, and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with. For me, heaven is a small, fleeting affair. Heaven occurred on a cold night in Vienna, Austria, around Christmas Eve. Carrie and I had wandered out of the stony gray, weathered and soaring Romanesque St. Stephan’s Cathedral, the cornerstone of which was laid in 1137. The old cobbled streets were teeming with tourists and shoppers and families and friends bundled in heavy coats, wrapped in thick wool scarves, gloved hands tucked in pockets, puffing icy breath and leaning into the cold. Sparkling lights were strewn festively between buildings. Performers played the violin in mittens. Vendors stood behind steaming grills of sausage, chestnuts and salty thick wedges of fried potatoes. We’d spent the day walking, having rented an apartment a few blocks from the Danube for the two weeks over Christmas break, a week after that in Salzburg. We awake, fix breakfast, sip coffee and check the park beyond the windows of our forth story flat for snow on the rooftops and grass and hoods of parked cars. Then we’d wander the glorious, refined and clean Vienna. This particular evening found us at one of the Christmas markets that seasonally bloom in Germany and Austria. Temporary dark small buildings, like shacks, similar to the hamlets set up for Renaissance fairs, where you can buy crafts for presents, glass ornaments, dried meats and cheeses, gigantic pretzels, more pork sausages…I bought a dapper hat for my cold nappy head. Christmas lights glowed and glittered in the trees, songs wafted between buildings. Heaven, for me, came in a ceramic mug. One of our dear friends here in Aleppo, Andrea, is from Germany and works for the ICARDA research center at Tel Hadiya, twenty minutes outside of the city toward Damascus, “the farm” as it’s called. She told us about gluvien, the hot spiced wine that appears during the holiday season. So here we were. We shuffle up to the stall, order a gluvien, the vendor warms blue ceramic mugs then dispenses the elixir from a steel canister, steam billows as the dark liquid fills the holy vessel, we throw down euros and take our mugs in both hands to where a high table stands empty. The coral reef spires of distant cathedrals silently watch over the city, the celebration of Christmas tingles in the frosty air, proud horse-drawn carriages amble down the avenues as of old amidst the cars and busses, the folks around you smile and laugh, Vienna sings with the memories of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and we huddle close and feel the warmth of the gluvien soak through our gloves into our hands, and then drink. Hot wine against the chill, the spice of winter life. That’s my idea of heaven, let’s hear yours…. One of the famous market streets in Vienna is on a narrow island between two busy streets, Naschemarkt. Long booths and vendor stands line the strip, and shuffling down the center you are assailed with aromas of strong cheeses, fresh vegetables, meats, gluvien, breads, chocolates, sweetly soaked barrels of wine, salty fish, roasting nuts, spices, kebabs, samosas, sauerkraut, fruits. Passing by a shack—probably half the size of an average bedroom—we saw four people huddled and standing around a small round table, their faces sheltered and hidden under an awning. On the table was a large platter of sliced meats and cheeses, like a sample tray. Through a small window a proprietor was standing in shadow. A small door stood on one side. It was rather spooky, and daunting, as though a portal to another sinister dimension. Brave, Carrie and I opened and entered. Warmth breathed upon our chilled bones. On our right stood a narrow counter six feet long, and inside was what amounted to a foyer, large enough to hold five people standing close. Six people huddled in the small space, and we made two more. Behind the counter, a father and two twenty-something sons, all looked healthy and strong like woodsmen. Behind them, before them, all around them, were meats and cheeses, dried, smoked, cured, the works. Aromas were heavy, spicy, damp, sour, sweet, oily, salty, dark, severe, and delicious. A few standing patrons shared a platter of meats and cheeses. One of the sons spotted us, offered a wide happy smile, and asked if we’d like to share a plate. He’d slice off a sampling of faire. We agreed. Then he spoke the most beautiful words one can hear on an early afternoon coming out of the winter chill into a warm room: “How about a couple glasses of wine?” A minute later Austrian wine drifted into our hands. The woodsman sliced and shaved and soon a platter arrived on the counter to linger over. We turned, but there was nowhere to go, a packed house. “That’s fine,” he said, “just stay there, no problem. Enjoy!”…. What has become of the traditional café? I remember a café in downtown Sacramento when I was in college, can’t remember the name, 20th between H and I streets? A small faded red brick building with an alley alongside. Late afternoon, rain lightly splattering the sidewalk and dancing off the huge trees, but inside faint, diffused light poured through the front glass and illuminated the quiet space, light that seemed to have soaked through a dusty curtain in the sky. The tables and chairs were thin and rickety. I remember the guy behind the counter, elderly with shaggy wild gray beard, sitting on a stool, head bowed scanning a newspaper. From behind him came lilting strings from a classical station on his small radio. Coffee was strong, real mugs and saucers, plain, simple lines along the ceiling and modest black and white photographs on the walls. It was a clean, quiet café, and glancing up now and again from your book to see the rain haze the afternoon into blue evening, the room preserved a kind of sanctuary for the soul. Weatherstones, that was the name. My favorite café, and I’ve never found another like it. Walk into cafes now, and everyone sports a laptop, bulwarks standing ready to rebuff unwanted social encounters like guards before a citadel. Or, laptops as drawbridges perpetually drawn up, over which fire deadly sharp glares if you happen to approach and cross into the owner’s protected realm. Leave your cramped, dark, isolated apartment to isolate yourself and glower at petty emails. A book can start conversations. I had a friend who told me how he met a woman he dated for awhile. He was in the Pig & Whistle Irish pub off Geary and Masonic in San Francisco. He had a pint of Guinness, and the woman watching him was intrigued by the sight of this guy laughing out loud reading passages from Joyce’s Ulysses. Can you imagine siding up to someone and saying “So, what email are you reading?” A philosophy professor once told us about being a student in France, sitting with his friends at the feet of Sartre and Camus as they held forth in cafes of Paris. And now? Cafes have become antisocial. Where once they were places to enjoin conversations and share ideas, cafes have become shiny, soulless boutiques. And why do the young people behind the counter think their blaring repetitive house electronica creates an appropriate mood? I hereby declare that only jazz or classical shall be at quiet volumes allowed in cafes. And don’t get me started on sweet flavored seasonal crappacinos and the like. Lord have mercy, folks, grow up. All good things must end, ‘tis true. But good cafes are few, and it’s hard to witness their vanishing. We found one in Vienna. There are restaurants, there are cafes, and often mixing the two invites disaster. Not so at Café Westend. High ceilings fading an elegant, soft turquoise, inlaid wood of vines and branches. Dull white curtains hung in the window. We took a booth in the center and ordered goulash and bratwurst and a couple of tall dark beers. At one table a large laughing family shared a late lunch. Over my shoulder in a booth sat a young man with shaved head in a leather brown jacket, accompanied by two young women in short skirts and heels who seemed bored, sitting gracefully rigid, proud of their cleavage. The young man was talking quietly, but emphatically, hands on the table, in an earnest soliloquy, glancing up at the women occasionally as though fishing for admiration of his accomplishments. The women shot glances at one another, delicate quick smiles, mildly entertained at the young man’s self-absorbed charm. I couldn’t figure out their deal. Were they prostitutes from Eastern Europe getting the scoop on their employer’s competitive healthcare plan? Fans overhead swung slowly, gallantly. The light had the hue of pale golden sand, and the presence of a good waiter: rarely glimpsed but essentially present. Near the windows at a corner table, two young people were chatting, leaning toward one another in the easy thrall of early love. Comfortable and trusting, they’d inch closer to whisper almost wordlessly, and then exchange kisses. The kisses were not wet and passionate, but seemed to serve as punctuation marks in their conversation. Next booth over was an old man’s head hunching out of a dark plaid jacket, wisps of gray hear spraying in a riot from his oval, blemished skull. A pipe veered into view every few minutes as he turned to scan the right side of his newspaper, while snowy blue smoke rose in splashes around his sagging face. The waiters here are all old men in dark suits and ties. Somewhere, music, a waltz begins. A woman at a table alone looks through the window and lingers on the day. She pulls her hair back and binds it with a rubber band, her blond strands dangling loosely on a Sunday in Vienna. …. Darkness had fallen when our driver picked us up at the small airport in Gazientap just across the Turkish border for our drive to what we call home. Our driver is Turkish, but lived in Aleppo and spoke Arabic as well, so for a fee we were driven to and from the airport and had his assistance getting through the border crossings, a bureaucratic nightmare worthy of Kafka. The roads were dark. From the back seat we watch the oncoming cars and listened to Turkish music on the radio. I kept noticing the oncoming cars were turning on their brights as they approached. Nearly every car! I couldn’t understand it, and immediately felt disdain for the drivers. Was that how Syrians drove, finding different ways to annoy? Already their weaving in and out of traffic and trying to squeeze between our Volvo and a large truck earned my insults. But how completely asinine was it to shoot your brights at us! Immediately I deemed them culturally inferior. We knew the right way to drive. We’d gone another five or so miles when I realized that our driver had his brights on, and of course the other cars were warning him, to which he paid no attention. It was a good lesson learned: how quickly we assume our view is the correct one, that how we see things is exactly how they are, in other words, reality. But in truth, we first and foremost have perspectives; we see and interpret events through a lens crafted by and for our own culture. So one could hear me sneer and complain about the trash I witness daily on Aleppo’s streets, comparing life here with clean California. But though litter piles in gutters here, people don’t, human litter, the tragedy of the homeless men, women and children in the world’s richest empire. What’s worse, more appalling to my sight? I’m reminded too of how far away Iraq seemed when living in the States. I think I’ll not be accused of hyperbole when estimating that when the United States invaded Iraq (for the first time) in 1991, only a tiny percentage of my fellow citizens, myself included, could point to Iraq on a map. Something sinister in that. How far away does 1991 seem today, and ironic that now I’m in a country that borders that troubled land. Both Syria and Iraq share the same vast desert. And never could I have imagined walking with my wife to school, and as we begin parting toward our respective classrooms have Carrie say over her shoulder, “Oh and remember, I’m going to the Euphrates River today, class field trip….” The Euphrates! But here we are, and though we’ve only been here a little over five months, we are becoming aware that there are other perspectives to unfolding events, and of history. People here are very much aware of the double standards that seem to apply: Iraq refusing to abide by U.N resolutions and getting bombed by the west; Israel refusing to abide by U.N. resolutions (specifically 242) and getting bombers from the west, as well as financial aid and political support. The people living here are Arab, as the people of Iraq are Arab. So the people I see daily here in Syria could very well resemble the people in the villages, towns and cities of Iraq. By 1996 an estimated half a million Iraqi children died as the result of U.S supported and imposed sanctions, but I was still so far away, and the sanctions failed to get the sexy press coverage; it became old news. But not here. The suffering was shown and reported daily, as daily suffering worsened, and resentment grew. Who knew what kinds of seeds for a bitter harvest were planted? On the weekends, if I’m not hunched over papers to grade or readings to prep, I sometimes take a walk, a pure walk, without any planned destination in mind, just some neighborhood in Aleppo. I wander around and watch people living their lives, going about their business. I see teenage girls sitting side-by-side on a bench laughing. I see men opening up their shutters of their shops. I see families in dilapidated playgrounds, children running for the slide as children everywhere do. I see young men in shiny shirts and slicked black hair spitting nut shells into the gutter. I see a rambling bus spewing dark exhaust, and in the windows bounce students going to school. I see old men and young men ambling into a mosque for prayer. Today on my walk something extraordinary happened. On a dark mountain far in the distance I saw the silhouette of man, his face glimmering in and out of shadow. I was once friends with him and supported him with money and other items, but now I didn’t like him, and wanted him off the mountain. So I wandered into a neighborhood and found families coming out of their houses. I dropped sanctions on them, and immediately they fell to the ground. Others tried to help them, but I had made the necessary medicines disappear, because the man on the mountain could perhaps find a way to use the medicines for evil purposes. Some women were crying and pleading with me to stop what I was doing, but I explained I wanted that man to get off the mountain. It seemed obvious, but maybe they didn’t understand English. I then found other families and distributed depleted uranium shells at their feet. Cancer rates soared, and young people were inexplicably dying at higher rates all over the region. Again I explained I wanted that man off the mountain. My walk found me approaching the little liquor store in the Armenian quarter where we buy our booze. A tall handsome young man, George, works there, and we greet each other warmly (shows how often we visit). Inside, too, was the boy, probably eight years old, who smiles and waves happily when he sees us, enjoys helping us out with our heavy sacks of wine and beer, and refuses to let me carry one of the bags (he’s thin, but really strong). I purchase a few bottles, then order a Tomahawk cruise missile into the neighborhood, because I suspect someone lives there that is helping the man on the mountain. Pieces of George and the little boy—who is not smiling anymore—scatter in the blast. I explain the same thing to the people who’ve gathered, that I’m trying to get that man off the mountain. I point to the summit, but the man has retreated into his shadowy palace. I see the four laughing teenage girls in a bus coming back from a wedding. A cluster bomb splinters the windows and slices the girls and drops them on the hot asphalt. I apologize to the gathered crowd (who are now murmuring revenge), and explain that I didn’t intend to hurt them, but it’s the man on the mountain I was after, and anyway, why didn’t the bus see the guarded checkpoint I installed? If you invaded my country and put up a guarded checkpoint, I told them, I’d happily oblige and stop. I walk up one street to destroy a water treatment plant. That way, women and children will not drink clean water, and disease will spread. But I want that man off that mountain, I don’t care at what cost. For one thing, that man used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, and I want him gone (he used the same weapons on his own people when he was my friend, but that was different). In the evening I am walking home when a white pigeon like a winged angel swoops down and perches on my shoulder. I feed her sunflower seeds from my flak-jacket pocket, and mention the weapons of mass destruction the man on the mountain possesses, or I believe possesses, or that I tell people he possesses whether I believe this or not, that worry me. What if he uses them against me? The pigeon ponders this, and then asks if I am Christian. I say, well, yes, I suppose so, if she insists on labels. I wait for her point, but she doesn’t respond, perhaps because I’m fresh out of seeds. We walk awhile in silence. The pigeon then tells me to turn around. I do, and see a valley littered with countless tiny slips of paper. I cringe at the trash. She tells me on each piece of paper, written in Arabic, are the names of each of the 500,000 children who died because of my sanctions. She then asks me if that’s the weapons of mass destruction I was referring to. I turn around to reply, but she has flown away, leaving me alone. A cold dry wind rises from the darkening valley. In the shadowy distance people are fighting, and more explosions, more death. It’s amazing how far I can see. Then I realize I’m on the mountain's summit, and the man is gone.

Is That Mint Or Is That Garbage?

Title spoken by our friend, neighbor, and fellow teacher from Colorado, Jennifer Polizos, as we walked to school one day. *…* Our backyard patio is a dull yellow walled enclosure. Stray cats often perch in the sun atop the 12-foot stone, doves promenade. There isn’t much space in back, gazing up as I do from my desk through the windows here in the…what is this room? An extra bedroom for guests, closets, a TV. Although we lack the spacious light and air that blessed our backyard in California—vegetable and herb garden, apricot and apple trees—our Aleppo patio offers a narrow raised stone soil bed lining the wall’s base. Long ago planted and thriving are two orange trees, a lemon, mandarin, and—just a minute, there’s this weird mystery fruit tree at patio’s end that on some days looks like pomegranate, other days appears as angry puffed grapefruit; I’m going to investigate once and for all…well, the mystery thickens: it’s neither pomegranate nor grapefruit, but something resembling a soft-skinned apple crossed haphazardly with cherimoya. And no I’m not going to try it. I did, however, discover another lemon tree cowering alongside. Fruit is plentiful on these trees, and delicious. Eating an orange right off the tree each morning; this is how our days begin. At lunch we nibble juicy mandarins; they hang scattered like deeply rich orange stars in a leafy heaven. The morning sun has just scaled our eastern wall and softly dusts the lemon’s branches. Small birds dart across the rays. We don’t often enough notice these quiet gifts, for we’re both out the door by 7:15 walking to school. Days are cooler now, but autumn lingers long here in Syria, and the weather is quite beautiful. We’ve just begun the first stage of our winter break, a week-off religious holiday prior to our three weeks off over Christmas. The present holiday goes by the name Eid al Adha, and lambs, goats, and sheep are slaughtered, often right on the street, to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son in obedience to God (satisfied, He intervened and substituted a lamb instead). A third of the fresh kill you keep, a third goes to friends and family (Muslim or non-Muslim), a third to the poor in the community. Eid occurs the day after the end of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca undertaken by Muslims worldwide. After this break, back to school for a week then the Christmas holiday, three weeks off. What will we do over the winter holiday? Well, since you asked: we’re renting an apartment for two weeks in Vienna, Austria, then a week in Salzburg. Christmas in Vienna. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Snow, perhaps. Sparkling lights. Hot spiced wine. Mozart. Cozy afternoons sipping coffee in a café. Ah, the expat life. In Syria, however, teaching is pretty much our life. I’m in my classroom by 7:30 and often don’t leave until 6 pm. Besides the regular teaching, we have Arabic lessons on Monday afternoons, I offer an after-school Writer’s Craft class on Tuesdays, and Thursdays I’ve started teaching guitar to two twenty-something Armenian women, Rasha and Engi, who are assistants in the elementary school, and one of my high school students, Suma, a bright, unabashedly outspoken girl from Romania. Lessons to plan, papers to grade, and readings to survey: I tell you, life isn’t really that different from life in the States, outside of the fact that the country we’re living in borders Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, and Israel. That and the unpleasant reality that you can’t get any beer besides pilsners and lagers. What I wouldn’t give for a Rogue Dead Guy Ale! *…* A few days ago we drove out to Palmyra in the Syrian desert, roughly four or five hours east toward Iraq, which holds some of the most extensive and impressive Roman ruins in the Middle East. Palmyra is the must-see in Syria, guidebooks declare. The desert here is vast, and after a morning visit to the ruins of Rasafa, we got lost driving roads which forked off in two directions with no signs to guide us (our map had a single road; we encountered many unmarked roads, and each looked promising). Our two cars, six adults and a four year-old, had been lost for about an hour, trying to navigate by the sun, when one in our party, Barbara, 4th grade teacher, broke the tense silence by brightly announcing, “Well, we’ve got beer, wine, and scotch….” Initially we were using compasses, but soon realized the metal of the car threw us off track. Added to this, we saw a single truck pass us in the two and a half hours wandering the desert, and one Bedouin on motorcycle. Ideas of prompt rescue dimmed. Finally, we prevailed, thanks be to Allah or Whomever was on Duty. Palmyra is mentioned in records found at Mari near the Euphrates dating from 1800 BC, noting a desert fort near the Efqa spring, or oasis. You drive cross an endless desert expanse to suddenly come upon a few square miles of palm and date trees lushly green. Trade routes from ancient Antioch—then seat of Roman power—and the mighty kingdom of Parthia east of the Euphrates sliced through Palmyra. Silk and ebony, slaves and dried fruit, spices and herbs floated by like winds for centuries. The present ruins date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Nero incorporated the Roman province of Syria into his reign (54-68 AD) and so established Palmyra as a garrison town. But trade made the merchants of Palmyra wealthy enough to covet independence. But the Sasanians, who in 224 AD replaced the Parthians in Persia, demanded more territory, challenging Rome. So Palmyra was an embattled oasis. One of the city’s rulers, Odenathus, was assassinated in 267, and so his wife, Queen Zenobia, took the reins. She was reputed to be both beautiful and brave, dark eyes, courageously leading armies fighting Rome’s expansion in the East. She rocked! Rome took off after her, and caught her as she was crossing the Euphrates, to be taken to Rome and paraded through the streets in chains, dying in custody. Our first night in Palmyra, we toasted to the Queen. Long live the spirit of Zenobia. We walked the ruins the morning after our arrival. The Temple of Bel (Babylonian for Baal, meaning “master”) was the site for sacrificial offerings and supplications to the god of the Palmyrenes, Bel, equal to the Greek Zeus. Worn stone steps lead up to the enclosed, high-walled temple. Fortifications and rebuilding have gone on for centuries, for the present temple was built in 32 AD upon a site previously home to a Hellenistic temple, itself replacing a sacred tel (“hill”) dating back to 2200 BC. From the temple you wander west to the great colonnade, a three-city block road lined with tall pillars the whole way in varying states of disrepair (see photo in email). The road itself was never paved, so the camels carrying trade would have soft earth under their burdened feet. There is an ancient Greek-looking theater, an agora (walled vast courtyard for political discussion and commercial business), the Baths of Diocletian, and at the bottom of one bath I noted smooth tiles of dusty blue uncovered from the foot-high sands of ages deposited by the winds over time, and far in the distance the towering conical tomb monuments (see photo). Opposite the tombs stands a mountain with caves dug out of its heart. Inside, one of our party said she’d found age-dusted human bones (I’d found the same in a cave near a lonesome empty road en route to a dead city weeks ago; a Syrian farmer, a Byzantine monk living the solitary life of contemplation, a Roman soldier coming in out of the rain and falling mortally ill? Who knows...). She thought about picking it up for closer inspection, but let the dead alone, wisely, I think. Near sunset we drove up with bottles of Lebonese wine to the Arab fortress on the mountain peering down on the ruins of Palmyra. From here you survey the swath of date and palm trees set off against that endless desert. Turn around and the barren and dry hills undulate into a dust-misted distance, cupping a long valley that seems scraped from the earth. As the last light bled into the horizon, I pulled from my backpack and read passages from Psalms, of “rock” and “temple” and the “dust of death” and “bones” and “crying in the wilderness” and here I was beholding the regions where these words were spoken and written and contemplated. As simple as water bubbles up into a spring to relieve the heat of the day, so sacred scripture (any scripture) is suddenly pulsating with life when read near its place of origin, as my humble, untried, data-deficient hypothesis has it. Speaking of ancient nomadic peoples, that night we arranged to have dinner with the Bedouin, arranged by a local camel rider we met at the ruins. We drove miles out of the city to the large, windy tents of these nomadic people who haven’t altered their lives and work for thousands of years. For a fee they served us local fare, chicken and saffron and cinnamon-tinged rice, peas, tabouli, beer and flower tea, and sang traditional chants while we sat on pillows, cozy in the warm tent. Six or seven camels rested and dreamed outside. The Bedouin had a disarming, genuine demeanor, eminently trusting, and smile at you with the sparkling eyes of a child. We departed under a near-full moon lighting up the desert, a barren land enchanting. We plan to return, Carrie and I, for a longer stay in the spring. Maybe a trek through the arid wilderness. I crave silence. *…* Many of our weekends have been spent driving hither and yon in search of dead cities and ruins. Serjilla, Ebla, Al Bara. In one regard many of these ruins are piles of rock strewn across a landscape of weeds. But others have inelegant buildings roughly intact: churches missing roofs but sustaining weathered stone archways, the familiar Byzantine cross symbol etched deeply in gray rock; small dwellings with shelves and firepits carved in the walls; taverns and baths. In the recently uncovered Bronze Age ruins of Ebla on a scorched arid plain around 45 kilometers southwest of Aleppo, we wandered up a stone stairway once traversed by priests, pharaohs and queens who made sacrifices to the goddess Ishtar perhaps five thousand years ago. Found in the library and records room in this small kingdom were thousands of cuneiform clay tablets recording civil and administrative activities of this once thriving city-state, some of the earliest known writing in history (some of the tablets are displayed in a museum in a nearby town, Idleb). From the top of Ebla’s stone rooms you look far across and note what appear to be small rounded hills surrounding the ruins in a long vast square. The rounded hills were once walls around the city, centuries of blown dust and settled earth obscuring the stone ramparts. If you didn’t know it, you’d swear they were just rounded hills, but eras have come and gone. Our guide points to the gaps in all four corners where the hill abruptly falls away. One is Damascus Gate, for through it the road from Ebla to Damascus beckoned. Another is Aleppo Gate leading to the souks. Euphrates Gate directs your horses, camels and sandals beneath your dry and dusty feet to the great winding river far across the desert. We linger, drive on. Other ruins we visit simply abide like patient ghosts alongside thriving villages. Take a right where the locals are pointing when they see pale faces and a beaten up Volvo cautiously approach the city center (for what else would these folks be doing here in Al Bara besides inspecting the ruins?) and a long winding road deposits our sputtering Volvo in the midst of olive orchards. The trees are thick and laden with sea-green fruit. We take a narrow dirt path toward toppled buildings and huge stones. The groves are peaceful. Following us are two young children out herding their six or seven long brown-haired goats up to graze. One boy looks to be eight years old, his younger brother four. Dirty faces. The sky overhead is sunny and blue. The boys smile and wave. As we amble over a rock wall toward the dwellings, they follow. We take their picture, and in our broken Arabic we learn they live in the village we passed through. They smile again, and appear delighted when we tell them we’re from America. They know no English other than “Hi”. However, at a lull in the conversation the older boy turns to us and gives a thumbs-up and, nodding, exclaims “Obama!” The goats scramble up a stone pile and busily munch bushy leaves. *…* One of our favorite discoveries is the sprawling Roman ruins of Serjilla. Miles from the present town, this village is a cluster of taverns, churches, government buildings, baths, and houses all connected by narrow lanes snaking through and around. The long hills as far as you can see are choppy gray dry rock. Dark black billowing clouds roll in, and the sun breaking through casts keen and crystal yellow light upon the old stone pillars and dusty tombs. We stop to chat with three young people, two beautiful girls flashing sunglasses as though they’d just returned from a quick shopping spree on Rodeo Drive, and a thin snappily dressed young man just happy to stand in their shadow. They are friendly students from Homs, a city halfway between Aleppo and Damascus, and speak decent English. We exchange small but lively talk, tell each other we’re glad we’ve met, then wander off in different directions. A few moments later one of the girls comes running up to Carrie (I’ve pulled ahead and am inspecting what looks to be a bathhouse; there are rounded and rectangle deep pits, and troughs crossing the floor). I walk back and hear the girls say that they don’t meet many foreigners, especially Americans, and nice ones at that. So they give us their phone numbers and tell us to please visit Homs anytime and they would happily show us around. We also meet two other students an hour later who are attending the university in Aleppo. One of the young men is from a nearby village, and warmly invites us to lunch at his house, as in right now. We kindly decline, but leave them cherishing the offer. *…* As mentioned, Aleppo is home to Muslim, Armenian, Christian, Kurdish, Iraqi, many others, but notice how I’ve listed the range of peoples: a mixing of region, nationality, and religion. I’ve not heard reference to hyphenated identities here, your Irish-American or African-American or Chinese-American. People will tell you they are Kurdish. Or Armenian. Or Syrian. Or they will tell you they are Kurdish, and are from Syria. The cultural traditions which form their beliefs and histories and languages and experiences reach deep in time and across specific contours of land. One isn’t asked to give up ones traditions when coming to live in Syria, for instance. You are Syrian, yes. But you are also Armenian. And your cultural heritage defines you, as it is where you’ve come from, who you are. As citizens of America, our political and cultural experiment affords the opportunity for mixing, overlapping, diverse weavings. Songs from deep in the hills of Appalachia have their roots in English and Irish ballads. Jazz originates from African slaves. Our Declaration has its philosophical underpinnings in the writings of an Englishman, John Locke. But to return. When recommending a restaurant to us, one of the secretaries at school, Raghad, remarked that we should go early, as “the Christians arrive around 8pm.” It was funny to hear, as you wouldn’t have an opportunity to say that in the States. She didn’t mean that there were designated times for peoples of differing beliefs to frequent restaurants, only that those sharing a faith constituted a community of people here, and tended to flock together. “The Muslims show up late,” she would add. Early on when searching a local supermarket for beer, we were told by a teenager with a big smile on his face that “You have to go to the Christian quarter.” Regarding your beliefs and heritage, you cannot be nothing here. You are Muslim, or Christian, or Jew for that matter. I suppose you could fancy yourself Buddhist, but that would seem odd. For religion here is earth and blood and light and air and bone and flesh and struggle and history. “Ingrained” seems to describe a conscious indoctrinating of tenets and beliefs, but that doesn’t speak to faith as lived in the dust and rock and salt for generations upon generations of forefathers and foremothers in the Levant. I prefer the sense of in-grained as speaking to planting, sowing, husbandry, grains watered and harvested from the land. One’s beliefs aren’t chosen as you would a summer-to-fall wardrobe. Indeed, the legitimacy of faith seems little questioned (which is not to say it isn’t discussed and studied). Nobody asks “Do you believe in God?” They will more likely glance your way, and query “You are Christian?” It has the same weight as saying “You’re English?” You don’t just up and “choose” your beliefs one fine day. That would seem a frightfully naïve undertaking, or arrogance, as though you had the power to reduce your spiritual choices to items in a supermarket aisle. Perhaps designing a soft-eyed peaceful hobby for times squeezed in between trips to the gym. I remember hearing variations back home from kindly, well-meaning liberal folks, something to the effect of: “Oh, I’m not religious, but I’m a very spiritual person.” Which means: “I’m very open-minded and don’t hold to any strict belief system or dogma [almost everyone I’ve run across who has used “dogma” in a conversation misunderstands completely its meaning], but if I’m at a party I will gladly hold forth with a glass of wine in hand and talk about myself entertaining vague and shallow notions I’ve not really studied at length or any degree of depth, having no intention of changing my self-absorbed life one iota, but flatter myself that at least at this party in front of this audience I can come across as interesting, and I hope you think so too.” Vanity, saith the sage of Ecclesiastes, all is vanity. It’s as though one wants to strike a bold stance for tolerance by refusing to have but the vaguest idea of what constitutes religion; perhaps one was raised in a “strict” household that believed religion to be obeying rules and delineating proper behavior, but that is only a religion drained of life. Our current culture simply doesn’t possess the patience to sit and study scripture, any scripture, with rigor and contemplation. If one would spend an honest hour with the book of Job, for instance, vast worlds will open on the horizon, and one soon learns how small one’s patch of dirt really is, or, as Hamlet noted, to fancy oneself "bounded in a nut-shell and count myself king of infinite space” (Shakespeare, our secular Bible). And that's only one byblos out of the whole Hebrew and "New" Testament! Actually, after half an hour most of us would quickly tire and flee to email. This has nothing to do with “believing” or “not believing” or any easy oversimplifications. Culturally, we simply haven’t progressed beyond the kind of pale thinking we dully smoked ourselves with through high school. We’re so open-minded it echoes inside like an empty cistern (fundamentalists, whether Judaic, Muslim, or Christian, fall prey to the same simplifications, but of the closed-minded sort, nihilistic and convinced). But here I don’t come across the same intellectual self-deception. These are Biblical lands, Muslim lands, of Jews and Gentiles and Crusaders. History shudders in the blood and dung, feathers the dust and lights upon Jordan’s waters. Let me tell you about a night a few weeks ago. Carrie’s classroom assistant, Tulare (pronounced Tool-Are), invited us to her place for a small birthday celebration, her twenty-third. Tulare is Armenian, a warm and long-giggling laugh, deep almond eyes and a kind way. She had a few friends over, also Armenian. Tulare’s father is a collector of antiques, and the living room brimmed with religious icons, mosaic carpets on the walls, chests and boxes. One of Tulare’s friends, Alig, works in the high school, and has helped me many a time search for books I need for class. Alig loves wine, has a round, expressive and lovely face, and rich dark hair that falls in plumes down the front of her shoulders. High school boys tend to hover round her. I was sitting across her that evening, and as she put her wine glass down with one hand she picked up an antique sheathed knife with the other. The handle ended with an ivory-carved head, expressionless, and the long grey blade was long dulled (how, I wondered; how many tendons and sinews had it torn through?). She examined the knife expertly, as though with an archeological eye determining its time and regional origins. Turning it this way and that, she finally reached a conclusion. “No, this isn’t a Christian knife….” *…* One morning not long ago we walked to school in a distant white mist. The whiteness didn’t sing and billow like cool fog, didn’t drift, but hung dryly in an unquiet sky. We had no idea what it was, but it smelled faintly dirty. When my students arrived they remarked it was from a dust storm that probably blew in from the desert, or from Iraq. “It will rain tonight, it always does after this,” they said. The entire city, every table and chair and window and leaf was covered in a fine patina of powder. Our lungs were coated. But the white air morning was symbolic, too. Before the bell, one of the teachers asked if I’d heard from Bobbi. I hadn’t. The teacher said nobody had heard from her since Saturday morning, and she’s not answering her phone. Bobbi Richards was the dynamic art teacher. She was the lively one in any function, always laughing, quick to ask after you. I remember a squad of teachers heading to the Baron Hotel bar one evening, an elegant dive and a landmark in Aleppo. Agatha Christie wrote part of “Murder on the Orient Express” here. Lawrence of Arabia frequented the bar during lulls in his adventures. Feeling out of sorts, I went out on the balcony, as it was too smoky in the bar. Suddenly, I notice Bobbi had softly wandered up next to me, and was gazing out on the same busy street. That’s how she was, never interrupting, just sharing the view. She’d been over for cocktails a few days before. My memory of that night is a snapshot: six or seven of us doubled over in laughter, dinner plans long derailed in favor of another drink, tears streaming down our faces at one of Bobbi’s stories, and she is trying to choke out the last part while her hand is resting on my back for balance. She was supposed to go shopping the next afternoon. Instead, sometime on Saturday Bobbi sat down on her sofa and died. Early fifties. Heart failure. She had been busy cleaning the house, as her husband, Geoff, a photographer, was to arrive in two days; he’d delayed coming to finish up a documentary he was doing for the Discovery Channel in Nova Scotia. He came anyway, with their two sons, one in his early twenties, the other, late teens. Bobbi loved Dylan, and one night I played and sang "I Shall Be Released" for them. So now the white sky and hushed day whispered another tune. Students who only met Bobbi months before sat in my classroom crying. I looked out my window and imagined the sky a vast empty canvas, which she would have appreciated. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is how the world will end, with neither a bang nor a whimper, but eminently less dramatic. God will simply tire and lose inspiration, His paintbrush held aloft crookedly, and the canvas of creation will fall away into an empty white spray, a long unfinished morning trembling in heavenly peace.