Travelers Like Me

I shivered when I heard looters in Cairo had broken into the National Museum and ripped the heads off two mummies. When did the people’s revolution turn into a looting mob? Young people formed a band around the museum to keep out further looters until the army arrived. I love that!! Someone held the possibility that others would join them in what was right even if it meant getting bludgeoned ... or worse. Sometimes I’m disappointed in people, but these stories stir my blood to believe in the human spirit again-to refresh what was always there.

I feel a little guilty that I thought about Tut’s golden face up on the second floor of the museum, the riveting eyes and idealized features, before I worried about the 100 Egyptians dead in the riots. The only thing I can say is that the people are faceless to me, while I have a relationship with Tut. I saw him both in the US and in Egypt and have read book after book.

Same thing happened in Iraq with the sack of Sumerian artifacts during the war and when the Great Buddha in Afghanistan was blown up. I thought of the incredible impact on our world heritage before individuals who might have died.

And yet … I do remember faces, especially the kids on a school field trip in Alexandria. Please God, don’t let any of those young teens be among the dead there. Strangers, we all stood high atop a fort facing the Mediterranean. Waves crashed the shore below us. Junior High-aged boys grabbed each others’ hats, playing keep-away, just like my grandsons back home. Most of the girls in the group covered their hair with scarves. Otherwise, they could have been modest but very with-it girls in Phoenix. Tight jeans, designer tennis, glittered tops, and jingly earrings. They grouped their friends and asked me in English to take a picture on their camera. One girl with large dark eyes asked my name. I told her my name was Sandra, like her city, Alexandria. Lots of giggles. She asked if I liked her town. It’s in moments like these that we, as Paul Bowles once said, stop being tourists and become travelers. I think about those kids once in awhile.

I guess it’s hard for me to care about a number, such as 100 dead, but I care a lot about faces that giggle and practice their English on a traveler like me.

Pyramid Dust

I once knew a teacher who, during their study of Egypt, had her students embalm old stuffed animals she picked up at Good Will. Wonder if those kids remember more factoids today than those who constructed the way less cool sugar cube pyramids. I guess I’m thinking of it because since I started reading Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff for my book club, Egypt seems to pop up almost every day-from the news to my doctor’s office.

At my appointment yesterday, for instance, my doctor perused the book cover. “Cleopatra? Should I read it?” Turns out he was dying to go to Cairo. Egypt evokes big time glamor and mystery for most everyone. Hoping the good doctor was paying as much attention to my throbbing knee as to asking questions about my trip to Egypt, I told him about visiting Giza.

You’ve heard of Bar Crawls? I did the Pyramid Crawl. The passage into its innards is barely wider than an airplane aisle, plus the ancients made sure you approached reverently by making the ceiling so low you have to bend at the waist. So here I am bent in half and bumper to bumper with a hundred other tourists going in and going out. I can close my eyes and still see “Cheer” blazed in purple across the gray sweat pants of the girl in front of me as she complained about no phone reception.

Lights strung along the passage failed to minimize the creepiness of having a million tons of stone above me. As I stumbled deeper into the pyramid my thigh muscles knotted from being bent over so long. I felt I was breathing air that had been in twenty other people’s lungs very recently. But I wasn’t giving up. Besides my own crazy stubbornness, how could I tell my granddaughter, who loves all things Egyptian, that I chickened out?

Finally, we got to a space the size of a walk-in closet where we could stand up and the lighting was better. My thighs were grateful. I looked around for the sarcophagus. Sadly, I realized this was just the seventh inning stretch. Cheer Rear and a dozen others turned around and headed for the exit. Where was their sense of adventure, right? They probably expected a tram to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, too.

When I reached Pharaoh’s burial chamber, my heart raced. Only gray walls survived, the colorful wall paintings had been either carved out and stolen or had flaked away. I touched the outer stone sarcophagus, too heavy to cart off like the rest of the contents had been. Listening, I heard the past speak to me. How much easier it had been for me to hear its voice on the surrounding sand dunes than in here amid chatter of lunch and the heat and malfunctioning cameras. I concentrated and scenes from the past appeared in my mind complete with flowing white robes and intricately woven hair. A psychic episode? Nah, just scenes from History International. Still, I felt transported in time.

When I finally emerged from the pyramid, I looked over my shoulder at one of the Wonders of the Ancient World and marveled at my magical journey to its center. It had always been my dream to come here. My gaze dropped to my shoes now the pale brown of pyramid dust. Pyramid Dust. It might just as well have been Fairy Dust.

Listen to the silence

The following is from my book House of the Earth. Have you ever had a time when it seemed like you could stop the chatter in your mind long enough to "tune in" to the silence? Alison Cabot never has ... yet. 

From her perch on the housetop, something caught Alison’s attention on the roof of a house across the plaza. A handful of men, bodies painted in wide black and white stripes, had climbed onto the rooftop. They wore loincloths, moccasins, and striped, two-horned hats over painted faces. Drunkenly, one of them almost walked off the edge of the roof before another man grabbed his arm and jerked him back. With much laughter from the crowd, they threw a rope over the edge and lowered each other to the ground where thay gawked about without seeming to notice the katsinas dancing in their long unbroken line. The clowns’ clumsy presence on the plaza served to emphasize more sharply the elegance of the katsinas’ graceful movements and intricate costumes.

Leaning close to Alison’s ear, Ben’s aunt, sitting on the blanket next to her, jutted her chin toward the clowns on the plaza. “Once the Hopi were like the clown people. We couldn’t even tell the spirits danced right beside us.”

She was quiet for a long time and Alison thought she’d finished speaking but followed the custom of remaining silent in case the other person had more to say.

After a bit Ben’s aunt leaned close again. “We had to learn to listen to the silence and then we could hear drums and see the spirits dance.”

Alison wondered about what the woman said the rest of the morning. What did “listen to the silence” mean exactly? If she could but see it, was there something bigger than herself that she was already a part of?

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Welcome to Hopi: Leave Cameras & Stress Behind

Each of us has silver box experiences we tuck away, and from time to time we re-live the emotive memories. The other day Doug, my oldest, told me going to Hopi (The name is used for location as well as people.) wound up in his silver box. He says it changed his life. Maybe it did mine too.

On trips north, time seems to stretch longer and quiet grows deeper the closer we get to Hopi. Doug says on that first family trip we pulled off on a high mesa and got out to look around at the 360 degree panorama of empty desert. He spoke of noticing the curvature of the Earth for the first time and the pelts of grey rain in the distance and said, “At that moment I knew there was something bigger than me and that I was a part of it. It changed my life.”

I agreed. Something about the high desert puts me in touch with the infinite. Visualizing the landscape with no human footprint, no buildings or power lines, drains away stress kind of like a message, but in a whole different realm.

On a practical level, while in a traffic tie-up on the 101 the other day, conjuring up that vista and long-remembered chants and drumming helped me with perspective. I remembered newly that being late for the meeting wouldn’t matter much ten years from now. Next time I’ll leave earlier. It’s all good. Relax the shoulders.

The day after our arrival on Third Mesa, our Hopi hosts led us up a ladder to sit on the roof of one of the houses facing the plaza to watch the katsina dances. I reminded the kids not to fall off the sloped roof. Duh! My husband reassured me they were old enough to be okay, even when they jumped over two feet of thin air onto the next rooftop with the other kids. The mom part of me was uneasy. The actual me was loving it all.

Over a hundred people crowded around the square, but the dozens of us scattered across rooftops had the advantage of seeing the kiva where the dancers emerged. They danced down the path to the plaza and right into my silver box. My heart pounded. I hope I captured the sights and sounds in House of the Earth when Alison Cabot observes her first katsina dance. My next post will be an excerpt from the book of that experience, but for this blog I’m remembering its effect after the fact. Like how the trip affected my handling of stress and its impact on my son.

We were invited, along with about thirty other people, to eat our mid-day meal at our host’s mother’s house. Because of the numbers, we ate in shifts, males first. Before I could remind Doug not to push away the mutton stew with hominy and ask for mac and cheese, he was swept into the kitchen with the other boys. I worried at first but focused on the drum cadence I'd heard and allowed my mind to relax. “Not bad,” Doug said on his way out. When I asked him about the incident last week, he said, “I knew to behave because I didn’t want the Hopi family to be disappointed in me.” Wow, he took the high road, and I didn’t even know why until now.

Currently he’s writing songs like crazy for his rock band Izzy Edible’s next CD and credits his creativity to many things, experiences on Hopi among them. I think I need to sit down with my two daughters and ask how the trip affected them.

Today's blog makes me wonder. What is it that inspires? What relieves stress and reconnects us with the bigger picture? Are they one and the same sometimes?

By the way, I blogged about enjoying the blues band, Krimson Chord the other day. Today I’ll mention that Druid and I are going to see Izzy Edible next Sat. night. (Google it. They promise to “melt your face.”) Does rock music de-stress people the way chanting or orchestral music can?

Thomas Lynch Quote: Why I Write

Thomas Lynch, an award winning author and former funeral director, sparked a quote about why he writes that’s also true for me.

“I write because I read, and I just think it’s part of the same conversation. I’ve always thought writers are only readers who sort of go karaoke.” Quote from Cyndi Lieske. The Writer. Vol. 123, Issue 10.
The reason I wrote House of the Earth was that one day I searched my bookshelves, the public library and the bookstore and couldn't find the exact book I was hungry for, so I wrote one. You know how it goes, when you're hungry for extra sharp cheddar, even Brie won't do.

Alice B. Toklas Cook Book

When my niece, attending college back East, emailed me about mentioning Alice B. Toklas in a blog, I was surprised she'd ever heard of Alice. That is, until she mentioned a discussion about ABT's famous brownies in a class. Oh yeah, college. How could I forget?
Here's the lowdown: Alice stumbled into being more famous for her marijuana brownies than for Gertrude Stein's biography of her, which GS called an autobiography. (Had GS been eating the brownies, by chance?) According to most sources, it was their painter friend, Brion Gysin, who provided Alice with the recipe. By that time elderly and working against a deadline for her cookbook, Alice included the recipe without trying it. (At least that's her story and she stuck to it. She also said she didn't inhale. Oh, never mind, I think that was somebody else.)
When the cookbook went to press in the 50's, the US refused to include the recipe, but the Brits did. I'm not going to print the recipe, but I was surprised it includes figs, peppercorns and peanuts and is more of a fudge than a brownie.
I'm sure there must be many other recipes, as well. There's a family story about when a nephew & classmates went to Disneyland on their senior trip. Evidently their sponsors couldn't figure out why the kids were all so rowdy on the bus going over and so mellow coming back after their snacks. Back in the day, teachers didn't know what to look for. Wouldn't happen now.
My personal variation on the story is when I taught 8th grade in the early 70's, I didn't have a clue. So one day I praised a kid for his clever little art project with colorful beads and feathers. One of the other kids told me it was a roach clip. Imagine my surprise that my pupil had invented a contraption to catch cockroaches.