the surrogate sister

Twice I’ve found myself standing between sisters.

The first time, of course, happened with my aunt. She loves me, and I know that. But she did forget to pick me up at the airport and, when she finally arrived, she didn’t recognize me without my glasses. I was practically in her arms before she knew who I was.

Now, my first encounter with my aunt was very much that of celebrity-meets-doting-fan. Arriving in Amman last summer, I came fully aware of my aunt’s most unflattering nicknames — and there are several. (No, I will not share them with you. She’d kill me.) I knew, for example, that she majored in psychology, that she digs alternative medicine and that she doesn’t entirely discredit the possibility of extraterrestrial life. I knew that Mama fondly calls her Im ‘Eenain Zuru‘ (the One with the Blue Eyes) and that she and my blond grandfather once got through Israeli security without showing ID because they “didn’t look Arab.” To her surprise and indignation, I also knew that she once tricked my uncle, when that they were both children, into drinking urine and that he finds that hard to forgive. (I wonder why.)

She, in turn, knew that I was the kid of her kid sister, born at a faraway time and place.

Therefore, when she picked me up at the airport, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit like a wrong number. I mean, how tearful would this meeting be if it weren’t me struggling with a suitcase my height, but my mother. After all, my aunt and mother haven’t seen each other in upwards of twelve years, and that last meeting took place in a hospital. My late grandfather (Allah yirhamu, God have mercy on him) was bedridden after an open-heart surgery and, because he had experienced “rare hallucinogenic side effects,” he insisted that they were both slices of cake. (They’re lucky he didn’t try to eat them.) Needless to say, they had little time to catch up on news of husbands and (plant) husbandry.

More recently, there’s another pair of sisters I liaise between. A Libyan khweila (auntie) who’s known me longer than I knew myself sent with me an amana (trust) for her sister in Amman. After she played a little phone tag with me, the sister arrived one sunny day at my doorstep to pick up the amana. Though she met me with the Libyan-to-Libyan warmth I’ve come to expect, again, I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed by myself. How much more cherished would a reunion have been between khweila and her sister, how excitedly would they speak, how tightly would they hold each other? But in lieu of that beloved sister, there I stood. A little nobody trying to bridge the Pacific.

If my life story were a schematic diagram, and I had a rubber eraser, I’d wipe out the middleman and pencil in the stick figures together, with watermelon smiles and complementary Dr. Seuss bows on their heads.

But I’m not the artist. So I just keep playing my part, jumping from page to page, shuffling salams from one sister to the other, all the while hoping that the pages will never turn to a point where my sister and I are the estranged stick figures. Or, if estrangement be a must, then perhaps the pages will turn quickly, as in a flip book.

Ah, but why all the angst when we, too, can find our very own delivery girl. Through her, my sister and I can send each other boxes of edible hugs and kisses. After all, feelings are overrated while chocolate is not.

good apples

Be careful, my sister used to warn me when she felt I was being too harsh on the world, One loud jerk can blast a thousand nice people to oblivion. There are good people out there, lots of them. You just don’t notice.

Today I met three of those good apples that could blast a lot of losers to oblivion. I don’t know their names, and even their faces will quickly melt away. They are strangers, and yet I want to remember them. Not them, per se, but what they did.

Apple #1: My aunt and I decided to break our fast at the mall and to do shopping at an adjacent grocery store thereafter. (For those of you wondering why we’re fasting post-Ramadan instead of stuffing our faces, we were working on the six days of Shawwal.)

In any case, there we were, in front of a (wannabe) Chinese eatery at the food court ordering chicken with cashew nuts. After a comically long ordering experience, we hit up the designated women’s prayer area — a dingy little closet-sized room on the first floor. The closet metaphor never seemed so literal. It actually made the most tight-fitting women’s facilities in the U.S. look like the Taj Mahal. Three rak’as (prayer segments) later, we returned to steaming plates of rice and savory-looking chicken.

A quick scan of the room, however, presented us with an itty bitty problem. At left, families waiting for their BBQ. At right, parents feeding their infants pizza. Everywhere in between, children popping open their McDonald’s happy meals. No where to sit, we concluded. With our less-than-happy meals in tow, my aunt and I returned to the vendor, an Egyptian man. “Could you pack these to go?” The breaking-fast would have to wait.

“Try the tables upstairs first. If there’s nothing, I’ll pack them up for you. Hey, and bring down the trays after you’re done.” As we moved dispiritedly towards the stairs, a father sitting nearby overheard and immediately gave up his table. He wasn’t even done eating.

Apple #2: There I am at the grocery store, bolting from aisle to aisle, snatching up items and crossing them out on my shopping list. (Crossing out comes with tremendous satisfaction, I assure you.) I’ve checked out all the aisles, and no corn syrup. (What on earth do I want with corn syrup? Well, it’s only an ingredient in chicken cream corn soup. Of course I need it! I guess Chinese food has been the salient motif today. Alas, there was no fortune cookie to act as a harbinger of my good fortune.) Refocus. So I’m on this hunt for corn syrup, and I’m trying to find someone who works at this godforsaken place to ask. There’s a guy with a necktie and a collared shirt who’s been arranging yogurts. Score.

“Do you work here?” I ask, confident of the answer.

“No, but I might be able to help. What are you looking for?”

Well shoot, I think, why not. “Corn syrup?”

“Like on pancakes?”

“Well, yeah. No, not really. Like –” My hands are not really helping to explain corn syrup. I turn to my aunt, who’s too distracted by the Cheetohs to help me out. “Khalti (aunt), how do I say ‘corn syrup’ in Arabic?”

The guy sort of waves my question away. “I’m from Canada.” Well, golly gee that’s convenient! “It’s sort of transparent, right?” He asks about the syrup.

“Right!”

“If I find it, I’ll let you know.”

Well it’s nice of him to try, I tell myself. I go on searching and crossing out things when, moments later, two different corn syrups are in my hands. “They’re in that aisle.”

Apple #3: For the carless in Amman, shopping involves asking my aunt to wait by the cart while I walk to the street to hail a taxi. I find one, and get him to drive to the place where my aunt is waiting. I’m clumsy with directions and he’s irascible. We load up the taxi and, as with all taxi drivers, I feel like I’ve inconvenienced him, as if he were doing me a favor. Back in my apartment, I realize that the vanilla extract and canned hummus are missing. I feel bad. Did the bagging guys forget them? They were hasty and ill-tempered. Or was it the taxi. It had to have been the taxi. Or they might have fallen out on the short walk from taxi to home. Oh what the heck. They’re gone. Kismet ‘u naseeb. I wasn’t meant to have them.

The circumstances are complicated and irrelevant, but a quarter hour later, I’m outside the house with my aunt, and there’s the cab driver, calling out “Ya hajji!” — a sort of respectful word used for older ladies who, presumably, have had plenty of time to perform the hajj. I’d like to think he wasn’t calling me a hajji, but I clearly digress. Long story short, he gives me my bag, tells me he rang the house three times, circled around in his cab a bunch and waited outside a few minutes in an effort to give us back our lost amanah (trust). I offered a dinar, which he refused as he made his way to his cab.

So that was my back-to-back-to-back awesome-people-while-shopping experience. I never felt warmer on a colder night.

Note: I learned afterwards from my aunt that corn syrup is indeed served with pancakes. I’m still not sure if that’s just a Amman thing or if Mama discreetly bequeathed her maple-syrup favoritism to us, her brood. Whatevs. Now you know — said in the Bill Nye the Science Guy tone, of course.

loose ends

For those who know me, as I go abroad:

1. Baba will be using my cell phone. Call him at your own risk. I have a new local number I’ll be using in Jordan (using a Magic Jack). Contact me if you’d like to stay in touch that way.

2. My sister is sisterless. So she’s up for adoption. For all my sisters in Islam and in Scrippshood and in humanity, shower your love on her because I believe that I will leave a gaping hole in her life. (She may disagree. It may only be a prick in the wall).  Just don’t be too nice or she won’t take me back nine months from now.

3.  Please forgive me. I’ve hurt many of you knowingly or unknowingly and I’d hate to carry more weight with me than I’ve packed in my bags.

I know I’ll miss many of you beyond words.

Tomorrow morning I leave for Jordan iA. So here’s a goodnight to my friends in the US of A.

fenced in

As I dropped off my sister yesterday, she told me to pick her up from the elementary school where she works at 6 pm sharp. Sharp.

“Sure, sharp.” I said. And I meant it.

I did some shopping and returned to the school at 5:30 pm and decided I’d wait for her. Despite my (aforementioned) phonaphobia, I dialed the number of a friend who often (justifiably) complains of my rare calls. I walked through the neighboring park, found an open gate to the playground and settled on a swing. With the phone to my ear, I watched two teachers and their children leave the school gate. The sky above was huge and blue. The temperature was beginning to cool. I was weary from another long day’s fast.

Ten minutes to 6 pm, I figured I should make the one-minute drive to pick up my sister. When I came to leave the playground, though, I discovered that the entrance had been locked up.

Perplexed but not alarmed, I followed the fence around. There must be an opening. They must have seen me as they left. Right?

There was no opening. I had to climb over.

A Little League baseball game was going on in the distance, and no one seemed to notice my predicament. To be honest, I didn’t want anyone to notice because, let’s face it, I’m no acrobat. This wasn’t going to be pretty.

I began to climb over the chain-link fence, but the bulbous nose of my shoe didn’t fit. I couldn’t get my feet in. So I threw my shoes over the fence, and tried to climb. Still, no luck.

I could do it, I told myself, but I might end up with scabs. That would be my last-ditch effort, I decided. I called my siblings. No answer. Okay, perhaps spending the night in a playground isn’t all that bad, right?

I made my way over sand and woodchips, asphalt and cement back to the school buildings.

The janitor. There was a janitor.

Hope swelled in my chest. Then a sense of vulnerability swept over me. I took heart. People are good.

I approached the man with long neatly tied back hair and explained my problem. He looked at my feet and saw my white socks. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t smile.  Maybe he gets frantic locked-in people every day, I told myself.

“There is an opening,” he said with the calmness of a sage, “but you’ll have to walk all the way around to get your shoes.”

“That’s fine. That’s perfect.” I wasn’t complaining.

I moved at a less-than-dignified trot as I made my way to the well-concealed exit. I felt like a freed animal. Like someone who’d been given a second chance.

I walked a good mile to the place where my shoes had landed, and though the soles of my socks turned tawny, and though I felt faint with dehydration, I appreciated every step I could take outside of that understated but prohibitive fence.

I looked at my watch as I rolled in to pick up my sister. My (perceived) entrapment was twenty minutes. Twenty minutes too long, that is.

My thoughts go out to those who live under seige, who experience perpetual hunger and thirst, and yet who live not in another world as I’d like to imagine, but who wake and sleep under that same huge blue sky.

leggo my ego

At the park the other day, the basketball courts hypnotically drew my sister and me. There were two of us, two back-to-back hoops and no ball. Scratch that, there was a ball sitting lonely in a bed of grass.

A teenager of our acquaintance had just followed a bunch of his scootering friends off the court, and as he left, we asked if the ball happened to be his. He said yes.

“Can we play with it?” (Yes, we should have said “may we play with it” but this isn’t English grammar school. It’s the park.)

“Go ahead!” He said with too much enthusiasm, I thought.

I looked at my sister skeptically, as she weighed the ball in her hands.

“Do you really think it’s his?” I asked.

“No.” came the ready answer. ”It might be theirs.” Pointing her chin (in proper Arab fashion) at a neighboring party. “But who knows, really.”

“Should we?” (Yes, I’m still a goody-two-shoes who doesn’t want to be caught dead on a timeout. My sister, too, is a goody-two-shoes, but she’s also my conscience on speaker — the voice I can’t mute.  Put another way, she’s the moral compass that redirects me when I digress.)

“No.” She said and dropped the ball.

The day lazed by and, as dusk set in, the teenager approached us. “You know that ball,” he said. “It wasn’t mine.” What a smarty-pants, I thought.

Not to be outdone, I retorted, “Actually we didn’t play with it.” His smile faded and his eyebrows flew. “Sadly, we didn’t believe you.” I could tell I had stung him.

Beside me, my sister was silent. That was reproach enough.

I had taken revenge for myself. From whom? A boy half my age. Impressive. And to what end? I only reinforced in his mind that he is perceived to be “a bad boy” and a liar. My voice had effectively joined society’s often judgmental choir. Sheesh, Tamatim. Talk about destructive criticism.

As if to chastise me further, my brain recalled the story of Ali ibn Abi Talib — a cousin of the Prophet, pbuh — who, during the thick of battle, was spat on by a man whom he held at sword-point. Suddenly, he released the man. Later asked about his unwonted clemency, he explained that he had fought for a just cause — for the right to practice his religion, free of persecution. After the man spat in his face, however, Ali’s intentions turned egotistical, and he realized that he wouldn’t be excused for taking a life to smooth his own ruffled feathers — even in war.

To tame my ego and reign in my words are things I clearly haven’t learned yet. (And, for the record, my equestrian inadequacy is not figurative either.) I owe a thirteen year-old an apology.

the inalienable right to sleep

The Founding Fathers were so busy with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” that they forgot to record our inalienable right to sleep. Since sleep is a prerequisite to these other three, I have no doubt that they left it off simply because they found it obvious and didn’t want to belittle posterity by spelling it out.

But, for the record, sleep deprivation is inhumane. Criminal even.

Does my opposition to sleep deprivation stem from a disgust at the torture mechanisms employed at Guantanamo (and, doubtlessly, in innumerable prisons worldwide)? Perhaps.

Actually, my interest in the issue is an utterly selfish one.

Since I bade my college single goodbye and reintroduced myself to a bunk bed at home, I realized that things would never be the same again. Before, only the voice of my alarm invaded my dreams. Now, the invasion is tenfold. Instead of a little blaring beep, I have four human sirens (and several electronic ones) going off sporadically.

Whereas my parents’ sleep is uninterrupted (or is uninterruptible?), the children’s sleep is fair game. Siestas are therefore only as long as the most bored family member allows them to be. And to sleep-in is sometimes harder work than waking up.

Between my parents, Baba is the one who comes up with especially innovative ways of jolting us out of bed. He’ll sing, at the top of his healthy lungs, Bedouin shepherd songs he’d heard in his childhood. Songs that make the walls want to crumble and the dead toss and turn in their beds. (It’s not that his voice isn’t beautiful — there is beauty in it. Or that the songs are uninteresting — they are, sometimes, when comprehensible. It’s just that they were crafted by lonely wayfarers for audiences of expressionless sheep and composed for the listening pleasure of deaf grasslands.)

One fine sleep-worthy morning, Baba realized that, with my sister and me, direct combat wasn’t the way to go. I heard him come into our room, take a look at our decidedly sleeping forms, then leave us be. Or did he? To my sister’s and my gusto, Baba closed the door behind him and knocked. He knocked. And knocked. And knocked, as if our door were locked. My sister eventually let him in, then promptly pounced back into bed.

With his son, Baba is usually more hands on. Suddenly, my brother might find himself without a comforter, for example. In one particularly memorable morning episode, Baba pulled my brother’s pillow from under his head and pounded him with it. My brother’s half-awake reply: “Ahad. Ahad.” Even Baba had a good laugh then.

—

For those of you unfamiliar with the story of Bilal, here’s a synopsis: Bilal, a slave, was one of the first contemporaries of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) to accept Islam. As a punishment for his rejecting the gods and ways of Mecca, his master threw him down on the hot desert sand and tortured him by placing weights on his chest. When told to recognize Hubal (one of the pagan gods), he famously replied, “Ahad. Ahad.” That roughly translates to “One. One.” — a reference to the One True God. He was later bought by a wealthy Muslim and freed. He is recognized as one of the most prominent sahaba (companions of the Prophet, pbuh).

swinging to the moon

Grassy hills with a perfect slope for tumbling. Trees with roots wrapped around their bases. A softball field with powdery red sand. Basketball hoops standing back-to-back. Not one, but two playgrounds.

Welcome to heaven — er, the park.

At a picnic yesterday, my sister and I welcomed back a ‘ammu (uncle) who’d just returned from Libya. He told us that you could not find a single park like this in the entire country. So much potential. Little infrastructure.

My sister and I thought about that as we broke off from the predominantly parent-and-young-child party to take a stroll.

I asked my sister, “How do you build infrastructure? I mean, why isn’t there infrastructure? All it takes is a little money and you should be able to make this all happen.”  After all, Libya is, by no stretch of the means, poor.

“Corruption.” My sister replied. The money’s there, but not there. “Still, if people took initiative, they could do whatever they wanted. If one person in every city built a park for her community, using personal or public funds, it would be done.”

As my eyes revisited the green stretch of land that ends where stately houses begin, I imagined a careworn dusty Libya. I thought about how, as the daughter of immigrants, I may very well have been born and raised elsewhere in the world had things turned out differently. I might never, then, have enjoyed this breeze, this view, this grassy seat on a hill.

Later that day, when the sun king had fled and a yellow crescent presided in its place, my sister and I hit the swings. Most of the children had gone, so the playground was vacant. The night gave us a delicious sense of privacy in a public place, and we set off, gliding into a velvet sky.

Then two little boys arrived. Polite little boys, I might add. I moved to let them sit next to each other on the swings, and my sister and I took turns pushing each other, as if we were as little as they. As I prepared to make my “launch” to the moon, the little boys did the countdown.

“If you could plant any flag on the moon, what would it be?” I asked them, in a series of off-the-top-of-my-head questions. “America!” came the answer, faster than I’d expected.

“If you could paint the moon any color, what would it be?” was the next query.

“Black.” One of them said. “Red,” said the other.

Hah. I thought. A grim world that would be that had a black moon lost in a black sky, or a red orb looking down on a planet where red sadly evokes the color of blood. (Why did I not think of red as the color of carnations instead? Perhaps I’ve seen one too many horror movies. Or was it too many episodes of the evening news?)

As I felt myself rise nearer the moon (albeit only inches nearer), I saw skating parks on those craters. Snowboarding on the white slopes. Houses, cars, parks. An unlikely vision.

I realized how alarming it would be to look up at the night sky and see civilization — and corruption — painting itself across the face of that crescent. After all, I hardly look to the moon to see a reflection of my world.

The moon, I realized, is like the park — one of this life’s adornments. Free for everyone or, more accurately, anyone who stands within the U.S.’s borders. Unlike the park, however, the moon is universally accessible. It is operational without the least human maintenance. And it is visually if not actually out of this world.

If Libya’s would-be-parks are as bald as the moon, I shall still think there is goodness in the world so long as we can all look up after a long, tiresome day, and be comforted by a crescent neither black nor red.

daddy’s driver

My sister and I complained to Baba once again that we’d hardly heard any of his childhood stories. So he told us:

- When I was in my twenties –

- Childhood, Baba, we said childhood. (Alas, with Babas, we ask, but they need not answer.)

- As I was saying… When I was in my twenties, I was my dad’s driver. Drove him everywhere. My father, Sheikh Abdissalam, would climb in with his cane, his rday (Libyan men’s wrap) and up-curled moustache and I’d take him wherever he wanted to go. Once, we went to go dine with one of his friends out of town. I drove him there and, as we ate, the friend, Tayyib, remarked: Abdissalam, do you remember how, when you were a youth, you’d go a-galloping around on your horse and I’d sit and watch like a little kitty? To that, my father Sheikh Abdissalam replied: Of course I remember. Bring me a horse right now and I’ll go a-galloping around and you’ll still sit and watch like a little kitty.

flicker with an ‘e’

The lights in my house have been a-flicker lately.

A couple days ago, Mama smelled smoke coming from the laundry room and noticed that the dryer was spitting fire (sparks, really). My sister immediately did what most responsible adults do: dialed the police. I, on the other hand, hit up my brother, who had gone with my dad to pray at the mosque. To my confused listener, I explained the overzealous, potentially explosive dryer situation. ‘There’s a glow under the dyer,’ I told him, alarmed. He handed the phone to Baba. My dad’s reply: It’s supposed to have a fire underneath it. It’s a dryer.

‘But, Dad–’

‘Just unplug it.’

We mustered our collective courages and pulled the plug. We told the police that the threat of a fire had subsided (as far as we amateurs could tell). But the firefighters, like stereotypical generous Arabs who insist on buying you lunch even though you’ve packed a lunch, came anyway.

They offered the following diagnosis: there was lint collecting underneath the dryer. (Could the reason be more mundane?) They left the house, smiling like victors returned from battle.

Did my brother and dad call after that, just to check up on us and to make sure that the house hadn’t gone up in flames? No. Had they rushed back to our rescue? Don’t dream of it. When I called my brother back, ready to share with him my melodrama, he innocently asked me what on earth I was talking about. Instead of an explanation, therefore, he earned a rebuke, which he took goodhumoredly. (He’s a goodhumored kind of guy — even on those rare occasions where a fiery passion should be in order.)

Though the firefighters didn’t find  a flame to extinguish aA, the electricity in half the house was magically extinguished. (That, my brother, will tell you, was the most trying test of all. No internet. No Lakers. You might as well add No air.) The electrician blamed Edison and Edison replaced the wires, and, after all was said and done, the lights continue to flicker.

What did I learn, at the end of the day? 1. That my routine is precariously hinged on the presence of internet (shocking, I know). 2. That dryers do indeed have a fire within. 3. That the night is actually a pretty dark time if you don’t have a million watts going at the same time. 4. That lighting candles and hanging laundry evokes a surprisingly gratifying rustic feel. With darkness or light (or any combination thereof), home is home to me.