departing notes

(June 8)

I went to the dentist yesterday to have a cavity filled. She put some kind of a jaw-opener inside my mouth so that she could work easily. My face was numbed with anesthetic, but I could feel my jaw muscles cramp from the force of the device pushing my mouth open. I made her take it out. Today I have an earache. I wanted to swim this afternoon, but I don’t think I’ll be able to.

On the way to the dentist, Arshad, a Kashmiri Muslim taxi driver told me a story. His English was very choppy. It took very careful listening to follow the story. This is basically it:

Moses was going up the mountain to pray. A lady on the side of the road said to him, “I’m getting old, and I don’t have a baby because my luck is bad. I want to have a baby. When you’re talking to God, please ask him if I’ll have a baby.” Moses said, “Okay, I’ll ask.” He asked God, and God said, “No. She can’t have a baby.” Moses went back down and told the lady, “Sorry, God said no.” A short time later, there was a holy man who had fasted for an entire year. When he was ready to break his fast he asked, “Who will bring me food and open my fast?” The lady cooked him some food and gave it to him. He said, “Since you gave me food, I’ll pray for whatever you want.” She said, “I want to have a baby.” One year later, Moses was on his way to the mountain, and he saw the lady with a baby boy. She told him what happened. Moses went up the mountain and asked God, “Why did you let that lady have a baby? You told me she couldn’t have one.” Then God gave Moses a knife and plate. “I want a sacrifice of human flesh. Bring me back a plate full of human meat, and then I’ll tell you.” So Moses went traveling around to find somebody. He traveled all over the land asking if anyone would be willing to cut flesh from his own body and give it to God. Wherever he went people laughed at him. Finally he came to the holy man. The holy man took the knife and cut meat from his own arms and legs and put it on the plate. Moses took it up the mountain to God. “Here’s the human flesh,” said Moses. “Now can you tell me why that lady had a baby after you said she couldn’t?” God said, “Moses, you went all over the places asking people to cut flesh from their bodies—why didn’t you take the knife and cut your own body? That holy man who cut flesh from his own body for me asked me to give that lady a baby, so I did.”

There is so much discussion that could come out of this story. I have a lot of questions for Arshad. May one infer from this story that God travels with us through time and may freely change his mind at any given moment? If so, how do the various world religions accommodate the possibility of a fluid and fluctuating God? Why would we ever want to see God as a being who would ask for self-mutilation, even if it’s just metaphorical? Why doesn’t the story present God as telling Moses to do some act of kindness and charity instead of going after a sacrifice of human flesh? Is it because God really is that way, or is it because applying our own economy of give and take is the best we can do? Of course I didn’t get to ask any of these questions, because the language barrier was too great, and there wasn’t time. Anyhow, Arshad was so happy to impart this wisdom, debate would have spoiled it for him. I told him he could take me to the airport on Friday morning, even though I know I could get a cheaper fare from another driver.

We had a field trip on Thursday to a big fancy bowling alley with a full-service McDonald’s inside. It was my mom’s birthday, and since she likes bowling, I especially enjoyed it. I kept saying, “This one’s for you, Mom,” before throwing the ball, thinking that it would be cool to get a strike for Mom. (Didn’t work.) The kids spent the day going back and forth between bowling and eating pancakes and french fries at the McDonald’s. I bowled a game with the boy who wrote about the Monster Dog who fell into the radioactive well. Remember him? He and the other kids stopped bowling right in the middle of the second game because they were bored and they just wanted to go sit at the table at McDonalds and eat and talk. I recruited some of the other teachers to jump in and finish the game. The guard rails were up because many of our students had not bowled much in their lives and were just throwing straight gutter balls. Whether it’s because they are “special needs” or not is hard to say. Anyhow, even with guard rails up, I still didn’t break 100. By the way, I recently learned an interesting lesson about “wasta” from the Monster-Dog boy. (“Wasta,” for those who forget, is the power of influence, pressure, and connections that rules all dealings in the Arab world.) I was going to fail him because he doesn’t do any work, and my coordinator wrote me an email and suggested that I find a way to give him at least a B so that he could make the honor roll. Okay, this is a kid with hugely rich and powerful parents, and my coordinator knows them personally, etc. I started to get uptight for about 30 seconds, and then I thought… why not. He’s got a serious case of ADD or whatever it is, and he’s in a special needs school. I can be tough and try to “teach him a lesson” or I can let him do some make-up work, tweak his grade here and there, and give him the B. If I ask myself the question of whether it’s going to matter ten years from now, the immediate answer is that I don’t have to wait that long—within a week it won’t matter to anybody. Still, I had to get my little dig in, so in the computer server document for his report card I wrote in the comment section, “Student received this grade only because of WASTA.” I am on friendly enough terms with the coordinator to goof around like that. I changed it to something more professional and tactful the next day after I was sure he saw it. But it did get me thinking about what “wasta” really is, and why it persists. It comes down to a “what the hell” attitude. Are our lofty principles really worth the battles? In many cases, no. Things really don’t matter as much as we think they do. So God says, “Hey, unless you’re willing to take that knife and cut hunks from your own arms and legs, just shut up.”

(cont. June 9)
Every time we go on a field trip, a dust storm hits. It happened again while we were bowling, and the dust still hasn't cleared. The sky was blue when we left the school that morning, but by the time I’d ordered my coffee from the McCafe, the wind was blowing and visibility was quickly diminishing. One of the teachers jokingly surmised that we actually instigate the dust storms by the energy create when we impose our chaotic selves on the world outside the school walls. It is kind of strange how dependably it occurs. This one kicked up on Thursday and still hasn't cleared. Temperatures of 110 and wind blowing thick dust. Yesterday, W (who believes in genies ) and I decided we would go swimming anyhow. My earache was gone. The school’s pool is in a kind of enclosed patio with a mesh roof to provide some shade. The mesh doesn’t keep out the dust. There was a kind of dirty film over the entire surface of the pool, but we wanted swim, so we just dived in and tried to mix up the dirt as much as possible by splashing and kicking hard. It’s amazing how you create the illusion of cleanliness by evenly distributing the filth. Swimming with W is so good for my ego. I basically taught him how to swim. He regards me as an Olympic-caliber coach, and I do nothing to discourage that thinking. I give him constant advice. It’s all run of the mill basic swimming stuff like “breathe in with your mouth and out with your nose.” What’s so cool is that W’s swimming has improved incredibly. He is just about as a good a swimmer as I am. Not that I’m a great swimmer, but before he was splashing around with his face scrunched and his head sticking up like he was afraid to get his hair wet.

We had a nice swim, but I decided I didn’t want to sit and meditate in the prayer room afterwards. W has to get in his obligatory prayers after swimming, especially if we’re going to eat koshary or something which means he has to get the praying out of the way. I asked one day if I could just sit in there while he did his little stand-kneel-bow-bow routine. It turned out to be a wonderfully peaceful, quiet room with comfy thick carpet. The powerful air conditioning also made it preferable to waiting outside in the heat and dust by the bathtub-sized turtle pond in the lobby. I found that I can sit in zazen style on a hunk of rolled up carpet by the door and get in a nice 15 minute meditation. But yesterday I didn’t want to go in. Something he said made me think that I didn’t want anybody to assume I was warming up to Islam. W had explained to me that it would never be acceptable for a woman to swim in swimming pool when there were men around, because even if she were wearing a full wet suit, you would be able to see the shape of her body, which is haram (sinful/forbidden). I told him that I thought this was very stupid thinking. Impervious to any criticism of his beloved Islam, he smiled and said that it was fine that western men and women swim together because they don’t know the Quran so the rules don’t apply, and therefore it was no problem. I told him that maybe it would be better if we didn’t talk about such things. “No problem, really,” he said, “I like to talk about what you thinking.” I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t out of politeness that I felt the need to avoid such subjects—it was because it bothered ME to have to keep listening to ideas that I think are so wrong and foolish. Still he didn’t get it. So I thought maybe it’s time to sit outside with the turtles. There used to be five of them. They’re down to two. I guess the heat is too much for them. One of them was balanced on a rock, completely still, its legs hanging down. I watched it for about five minutes. There, I thought, is a true zazen practitioner. I dipped my finger into the water and let one drop fall on its shell. It shifted its head ever so slightly, but did not open its eyes.