The Power That Moves Through the World

Winter day in Los Angeles

I was sitting at the table with Sophie this morning, feeding her breakfast. She wasn't eating very well and by that I mean she'd take a bite but then forget how to chew for a moment or two. Saliva collects in the front of her mouth and falls out and down her bib, carrying the raspberry and the panettone. I imagine her motor planning to be scrambled. She will look at the food, coming toward her mouth, and I swear I can see the gears turning in very slow motion. I like to think that I look serene, but I know that my mouth is tight and my eyes are hard. Caregiving. Sophie had two big seizures in the early hours of the morning. She hadn't had any for about two weeks, so I guess it was time. I woke up at about three this morning to find her sitting on the floor beside her bed. After changing her and putting her back in the bed, I climbed in with her and closed my eyes. I guess it was sometime after 4:00 or so that she had the first seizure, in her sleep. Her stiffened arm hit my nose. When that one was finished I dozed off again for a couple of hours before she groaned and stiffened next to me, then began jerking. It only lasts for a couple of minutes, and I won't type but. I got up, made myself some coffee and put raspberries and panettone on a plate for Sophie.

Sophie is warm, nourished, housed and loved. She lacks for absolutely nothing.




But. 





If I look outward, I see the citizens of Syria coated in white dust, the children's' faces bloodied, their little mouths downturned. Some people say I can't watch those videos or look at those pictures. I feel compelled to do so. It's not because I am one-quarter Syrian. It's not because I am on the highway rubber-necking the accident on the side of the road. The necessity of being a witness. As one of my friends said, I will look at this and work to try to understand.


I will look at this and work to try to understand.












Sheep in the Winter Night

Inside the barn the sheep were standing, pushed close to one
another. Some were dozing, some had eyes wide open listening
in the dark. Some had no doubt heard of wolves. They looked
weary with all the burdens they had to carry, like being thought
of as stupid and cowardly, disliked by cowboys for the way they
eat grass about an inch into the dirt, the silly look they have
just after shearing, of being one of the symbols of the Christian
religion. In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were
full of light gathered on summer pastures. Above them their
white breath was suspended, while far off in the pine woods,
night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering,
along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes,
but the power that moves through the world and makes our
hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself.

Tom Hennen, via The Writer's Almanac

My Syrian Relatives, Part 4

Splendor in the Grass

Well, we had quite a brouhaha when I posted earlier about my Syrian relatives. One of my cousins was extremely upset and let loose a personal attack in response to what she and other relatives thought was a shameful depiction of my Syrian grandfather as an angry man. My cousin apologized later, but I made the mistake of not accepting it as graciously as I might have, and my cousin took offense again. I decided that going back and forth on my blog was too upsetting for everyone, so I closed the comments. Thank you to those of you who had such thoughtful, interesting responses to both that post and to the spat as it unfolded. I did not paint a full portrait of my grandfather -- he was, obviously, a complex man and having strong opinions was only one of his characteristics (that I've apparently inherited and that I grapple with almost daily!). I thought this would be understood, but I offended not only my cousins but my dear Uncle Charles, my grandfather's only son. He wrote me a loving message on my Facebook page that I am going to post here. I think you'll get a far richer picture of my grandfather than mine, and also see where I might even get my wicked sense of humor.

Elizabeth ,I hope this does not start a family feud ( Hatfield and Mc Coys ) but i felt i had to respond .My Dad was not an angry Man and was not against Jews or Moslem he worked for many years for a Jewish boss and they were like family he was always invited to all his children's weddings and if you could picture it wore a yomica( spelling is bad ). I went deep sea fishing many times with his Syrian Jewish and Moslem friends out of Sheepshead Bay to the Jersey coast. He had strong feelings ( like you on many subjects ) on what is going on in the Middle East. Remember he lived in the period after World War 1 ,when Britain and France chopped up the area creating new countries out of other peoples land (ex Trans Jordan ) i know its before your time and your interest in the Middle East History while you studied Chinese and cooking might not have existed .loved my Dad and was so proud of how people looked up to him ,coming over for his advise and reading letters from Syria that they received and could not read. I have many good memories of my dad and so does Amy . He loved all his Grandchildren equally and it hurt her and yes your uncle Charles . He showed so much love to my beloved Vivian as well as to all his son in-laws. I remember when we were young my Dad would take us onSunday rides and we would all sing as we rode and i could see the happiness in his eyes. He would try to sing but he only knew a part of a song ( cherrie cherrie be ) an old song it was a happy time. i know Mom went thru times like all married people go thru ( im sure you can relate ) but i remember after all of us left the nest and they lived in a apartment in New Jersey when we would visit them they seemed so happy. He worked with Mom on a assembly line together in a factory and later he worked for a Jewish Lady who owned a candy newspaper store in Danville N.J. and a wonderful relation with her he was so honored that she let him open and close. II am sorry that all you remember is a terrible legacy . I write this with love, and a am blesses to have so many nieices and nephews who i love dearly and they all treat me with so much respect.

Thanks for that, Uncle Charles, and I apologize for hurting you. (As for the potential family feud, I know for a fact that my cousins are far better armed and better shots than I'd ever be, so I'm keeping my distance from here on out!)

Narrow Borderlines

Of all people, it was seeing former President GW Bush's smug mug on Facebook this morning, getting ready to dump a bucket of ice water on his head that prompted me to want to write something on this blog that I believe has been languishing for days due to my relatively comatose consciousness. I happened to see that smug mug right after I'd read the headline (cause that's all I can handle at this point) about the journalist who was beheaded by the militants in Syria, and the grotesquerie of it all just struck me, right then and there. I might be only expressing the biased and simple thoughts of a certain tribe (because aren't we all tribal, after all?), but there's something incredibly ludicrous about that man -- our former President -- smiling his nasty smile as he sits in front of his family fortress, his head intact, across the world from a country that you could arguably say he helped to de-stabilize with his disastrous war thirteen years ago. Now I don't think the black-hooded figure looming over the American journalist dressed in an orange robe is anything but a vile human being who we can only hope will be judged in some way at some point commensurate with his crimes, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to think any other than madness, too, at that video of that man getting ready to dump ice water over his head.

Moving on.

This quote intrigues me:

The most fascinating and perhaps most significant of all interfaces is the one that separates yet connects the ridiculous and the sublime. The surprisingly narrow borderline between things holy and things profane, between prayer and laughter, between a Leonardo chalice and Warhol soup can, between the Clear Light and the joke, provides a zone of meaning as exhilarating as it is heretical: a whisper of psychic release so acutely yet weirdly portentous it just might offer a clue to the mystery of being.

--Tom Robbins, from Now Showing: Satori 

Read the whole article -- it's short and sweet and so perfectly helps me to realize why I was so struck by the head of G.W. Bush today, engaged in innocent activity, and by the head of that innocent journalist, severed from his body. Perhaps my claiming that all is vanity, that it's all madness and insanity is defensive, a way to protect myself from the horror, the horror. Or maybe it's just another path to satori or understanding. I have no idea.

Bush, painting his toenails***

Allow me a political rant.

Humor my thinking out loud, my perhaps ignorant, inchoate thoughts.

If you don't allow it or don't humor me, please have a wonderful weekend!

It's the Syria thing again -- the morass this entire country is facing, is already struggling inside of -- what to do? what to do? what to do?

I saw one of those Facebook posts the other day of a picture of George W. Bush's smug mug with the words Miss Me, Yet? and this time I actually did feel physically ill as opposed to just disbelieving. I've been thinking about how even those of us who generally support President Obama and share many of the same values disagree with his and John Kerry's decision to strike Syria. I'm thinking that at the very least if it's so imperative that we do this, if we send target missile strikes (is that what they're called?) to kill people and thereby punish the lunatic who runs the country, why is there room for discussion? If it's so imperative, why not just do it? I know. I know. Because this is a democracy and these important matters deserve discussion. I'm thinking that the time it's taking to figure it out means there's time. There's literal time to do something different, something not so wildly incendiary, so violent, so in keeping with the bravado and bluster and bullshit of the Bush administration and the decade of war that has followed.

I like this piece, written by Timothy Egan:

He’s there in every corner of Congress where a microphone fronts a politician, there in Russia and the British Parliament and the Vatican. You may think George W. Bush is at home in his bathtub, painting pictures of his toenails, but in fact he’s the biggest presence in the debate over what to do in Syria.

Read the rest here.

I imagine the President is basically damned if he does and damned if he doesn't, and I guess it's the sign that democracy is still working if he took it to Congress (although conservatives have already derailed even that, saying it's a sign of weakness). I guess debate is healthy. I've heard all the arguments for and against, but my convictions that violence only begets violence and that nothing new is under the sun and that nothing new will come of it haven't changed. I say stuff flowers in the missiles.



***I wanted a photo of one of Bush's paintings to go right up there, but every time I tried to download one, the internets wouldn't allow it which sort of creeped me out as much as the painting does. It's probably for the best, though, not to allow the crude paintings of a mediocre man and war criminal to sully this sweet and gentle place. Would that the old war criminal had stuck to painting his toes instead of conjuring death, torture and destruction. Right?

My Syrian Grandfather

Here is my Syrian grandfather and his family, in the early part of the twentieth century. I don't know whether they had left Syria, yet. My grandfather Charles is the young man on the far left, in the back row. I have always been enamored of the woman on the right's wasp waist. I believe she might be my Aunt Hafeezah, remembered for her plastic-covered furniture, dusty hard candies and wet kisses. My grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1907. I am told that he was very handsome, then, so handsome that as a lifeguard on Coney Island, he was picked to be an extra in a Valentino film. He died when I was sixteen, so my memories of him are not clouded. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes-- a lot -- even after lung cancer and the removal of part of his lung. He had strong and often angry views, would holler about them with his children (my mother and my aunts and uncle). He was loud, cursed in Arabic (in fact, the only Arabic word I know is shit, pronounced a guttural cutta). He pushed meat through a meat grinder attached to the kitchen table, grew eggplants and string beans in a backyard garden and called me Rosalita because I looked like the other side, my father, the Italian Catholic who married his youngest daughter.

This is a picture of my Mississippi grandmother and her family. My grandmother, Ida Mae, is the little one in the front, shielding her eyes from the sun. She grew up on a cotton farm in the Delta. All of her brothers had Biblical names, and I believe the baby in her mother's arms is my Aunt Bessy Lucille who married a man named Artie when they were around fourteen years old. Aunt Bessy and Uncle Artie were married for nearly seventy years, I think, and I remember they were always holding hands. My grandmother died when I was around 38 years old and she was 92. She was tall and graceful, soft-spoken and dear, the definition of a lady. She told us stories in her soft southern accent, stories of growing up in the south, how she was bitten by a snake, how her brother cut the spot, sucked the blood out and then ran through the fields to get her father. She had pale blue eyes, suffered from macular degeneration in her old age, had a tinkly, gentle laugh.

So, this man

met this girl

when he was a traveling salesman, peddling lingerie in the south. He married my grandmother when she was eighteen years old and took her back to Brooklyn, where she lived with him and his mother, at first. Ida Mae learned how to speak Arabic, cook Arabic food and then raised five children in a tiny brownstone in Brooklyn. When I asked her many years later why she'd married Grandpa when she was so young, she told me Well, honey, he was tall, dark and foreign.

I'm telling you this story now because I can't get them out of my mind these days, particularly as I watch and listen and read about the conflagration in Syria. I am one-quarter Syrian. That quarter is from the city of Homs which has been in the news of late as one of the tinder boxes of the civil war there. My grandfather Charles was a Christian Arab who fled persecution with his family more than a century ago, and he never let us forget whose side he was on, barking his views from the Barcalounger he seemed to be reclined in for my entire childhood. Israel, Palestine, Jews, Muslims, Christians -- these were words I heard over and over on those weekends my cousins and I ran through the house and outside to the garden, or sat and colored while our grandmother shaped raw lamb into kibbeh and our aunts and uncle argued.

I don't know what to think about the whole thing other than it's a fucking (there's really no other word) tragedy of a colossal scale. Pure madness. All of it. I can't say I feel comforted to see President Obama sitting grimly next to John McCain as they collude on how to persuade our legislature to vote that we strike Syria. I can't say that I agree with them. I don't see the sense of bombing as punishment. I can't say I feel neutral, either, when I read of hundreds of thousands of people brutally murdered, citizens of one country killing one other barbarically and millions displaced, wandering.

I remember the fighting and yelling in my own extended family, though, over what seems like the same old shit.

Pure madness. All of it.

I don't know if I have any relatives in Syria, but I imagine someone whose blood and genes I share is running around there, throwing rocks or bombs or fleeing with her children to neighboring countries or even receiving the gas meant to kill from her own government.

I don't know what to think.

غائط
(Arabic for shit)

The Greatest American Moment in American History

I'm a firmly middle-aged white woman living in southern California, born fifty years and one day ago, the one day, today, that the great Martin Luther King stood up in front of the Lincoln Memorial and let loose one of, if not the most, amazing speeches in the history of my country. I listened to the speech today while I folded clothes warm from the laundry. The hair on my white arms rose, tears pricked at my eyes, I wondered again at the preternatural magic that man possessed, how he wove history, the present and the future into words -- that glorious cadence of his oratory. As sabers rattle and metal machines lie in wait to drop bombs, yet again, in desolate places across the globe, I wonder, too, whether the words he spoke of, that dream, will ever be realized fully, whether the principles of nonviolence will ever take utterly and completely. I know better. They will not. But I know that I will take those principles into my own heart and teach them to my children and hope that by so doing we will be that many more added to the peacemakers.

Here's the speech:




And here's an excellent article for those of you, like me, who struggle with so-called patriotism and honoring soldiers and killing and dying for liberty. 

It's also for those of you who don't understand people like me.

No, thanks: Stop saying "support the troops."