October 7, 2012

A flat gray sky and wind, the cold front has moved through making my wind chimes ring, and bringing the feel of November.  Overhead a sky so flat it feels like a lid sliding over the horizon, close and smooth.  Everything is moving, wind descending from a great height, touching us with chill from a climate we do not usually have any connection to, almost like a breath of cold from the dark of space.  The can, top heavy with bloom is bending over and struggling to rise up again.  If the wind did not seem to alter direction every little bit, I'm sure the cane would remain bent and horizontal.

As I watch through my Sunday morning readings, the sky has receded and slowly turned a white-shrouded blue, but the wind is still with us.  The trees seem to have yellowed overnight, as if the leaves are responding in some deep way to cold they did not anticipate this early.  The first sunny Sunday I have not heard the sound of lawnmowers, so you know fall is deepening.  The saw toothed oak's leaves look like they are spinning in the wind, the other trees have . . . fluttery leaves but this one has spinning ones, long and jagged and loose on their stems.

Today being Sunday I have spent time looking for the blessing, and have been blessed in the looking.  Today I'm not sending a poem, but something by one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet whose father is Palestinian.  She has written a lot of my favorite poems, some about living in two worlds, citizens of both, and my favorite poem about kindness.  Everyday you hear about bad things happening at airports, searches, people being asked to get off a plane because of their babies crying or what they are wearing.  People looking at everyone with suspicion and fear.   It seems a metaphor for what is happening in the larger world, so much distrust, so many changes in simple routines, giving up freedoms for safety, perhaps a necessary part of the world we live in now.  But . . . today, when I read this I was grateful for another view, and I, too, want to live in the world of Gate 4-A:

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been detained four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”  Well – one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.

“Help,” said the Flight Service Person. “Talk to her. What is her problem?  We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. “Shu dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “You’re fine, you’ll get there, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.” We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her – Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends.  Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions.  She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies – little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts – out of her bag – and was offering them to all the women at the gate.  To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo – we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend – by now we were holding hands – had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in.  The shared world. Not a single person in this gate – once the crying of confusion stopped – seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
I would like to think this can still happen anywhere.  Not everything is lost.  For today, I am going to believe in the world of Gate 4-A, a world where people will take the sweetness handed to them without fear, where children will look around and see people being kind, where everyone has traditions that help them be comforted in the world, that ease fear and lonliness.  We are all connected, even if we forget that sometimes, and any kindness done in the world strengthens those connections, shares the grace we all share, blesses the world we all inhabit.