I just checked my refrigerator to see if my wallet was in there. Can you relate to that? When I have too much to do, things find their way to the most unlikely places. Well, it wasn’t in the refrigerator. My latest taxi driver Mohammed-Iqbal (who says his name like “mama-dickball”) called me to see if I found it, and just as he called, I found it in one of the side pockets of the same backpack-briefcase that I’d already checked about six times. Mohammed-Iqbal was happy to hear this. I owe him money for this morning. He said I could pay next time. He is a Muslim from Chennai, India, and seemingly in the process of converting to Christianity. The first time he took me to the cathedral, he asked me for a picture of Jesus. I didn’t have one, so I went to the little bookstore on the cathedral property. I figured maybe they would have a holy card or something. They didn’t have any, but the guy working there had a memorial card from somebody’s funeral or something that showed the Jesus of Divine Mercy. That’s an image that depicts Christ holding up his right hand, while his left hand points to his heart from which a spectrum of rainbow light shines downward. The first time I saw that image was on a sticker in a gift shop at the Basilica Shrine in Washington DC. I bought it because it struck me as a symbol of Christ having some loving connection to gay people, who often use the rainbow as their symbol. It’s still stuck to the cover of one of my old journals, now packed away in a box in my sister’s garage. Mohamed-Iqbal kissed the plasti-coated memorial card I got from the cathedral bookstore and thanked me for it. I didn’t remind him that as a Muslim he should consider all graven images as unlawful. I figure that’s between him and Allah. It will be interesting to see what happens. He said he would like to come to mass with me some time. They have a mass in Tamil, his language, a couple times a month. Maybe I’ll try to take him to one.
Oct. 13, 2008
It’s 2-something in the morning. I was awakened by the sound of a dog barking. One doesn’t hear dogs barking in Kuwait. Dogs, in general, are feared and reviled in the Islamic world. I remember Mir Ali, the guy from Hyderabad I befriended when I was in high school, nervously backing away from our little white cockapoo, Bridgette, as if she were a 500 pound gorilla. A couple who joined the staff this year had their dogs flown in from the states. They walk them in the morning. One of them was the service dog who lived with their disabled son for many years before he (the son) died, and the other has been that dog’s companion since the death. The husband works with me in the middle school. He recently has a look of horror on his face – the realization that he is committed to living in an unpleasant place for a long period of time. It’s existential shock. I recognize it. I hope the barking dog wasn’t one of theirs. Anyhow, it’s stopped, thank God. As I lay there wondering whether I was going to fall back to sleep or get up, I mused about the terrible futility and honesty of the poor dog. The domesticated dog is not really prepared to live in a natural environment anymore, and see where his fate takes him—to pace in small apartments in cities wherever his master chooses to go. I interpret his barking: free me, pay attention to me, let me be who I am meant to be, or kill me. Is this not a prayer as eloquent as any we can compose?
Mohammed Iqbal stopped taking my calls last Wednesday, a couple days before he was scheduled to receive his monthly salary and pay me back the money I loaned him. (I know, it's a bit confusing--I said I owed him money. I paid him back, and later he borrowed a sum from me... a substantially larger sum.) I thought about never telling anyone about my bleeding heart gullibility, but why pretend? I tend to trust people, I have made the same mistake before, and I will again. I know plenty of people who are defensive and suspicious. I don’t admire them. Some of us gamble at the slot machines and some of us gamble with destitute taxi drivers. You win some, you lose some.
About two weeks ago, during Eid, I was invited to go with a Kuwaiti friend on his father’s yacht. It was something like 50 feet, with two huge motors. We traveled for about one hour out into the Persian Gulf, to a tiny patch of rock and sand called Kuber Island. We didn’t actually go on the island, but we anchored there, did a little fishing, ate a lunch of Kuwaiti “machbous diyai” chicken and rice, and swam around the yacht. Another guest, an Italian national who works at the Italian embassy, and I were both stung by jellyfish. An old retired doctor, a friend of the owner who was also along for the ride, informed us that the best remedy for a jellyfish sting was urine, and he said that in the old days if you got a jellyfish sting you would get your buddy to pee on you. I just suppressed a smile and sipped on my pepsi. Unfortunately, the shoulder that was stung is still hurting, almost two weeks later. I think that I probably coincidentally pulled a muscle in the same spot where I was stung, but I can’t help wondering if I should have taken the good doctor’s advice more seriously.
I went to mass tonight at the cathedral. Sunday is not church day here in Kuwait, but it was packed just the same. There are 140,000 Catholics in Kuwait, and only three legally permitted churches. The people were reciting a pre-mass rosary when the electricity went out. The bishop came to say mass by candlelight. Given no sound system, the Bishop’s unfortunate weak voice and Italian accent, and the fact that the congregation consists almost entirely of people who are not native speakers of English anyway, I’m quite sure that nobody understood his homily. But the mass itself could be followed easily enough, and it was very beautiful to experience reverence and calm among the few thousand people jammed into one building with no light but a few candles.
Meanwhile the world teeters on the edge of economic armageddon. I am guilty of harboring a tiny impulse of glee at signs of rain on the greed parade that has defined American culture and society for much of my life. Forgive me, but I want to see people plant potatoes in their back yards. If the meager efforts we’ve made to concern ourselves with the environment, global warming, social justice etc. have only been extravagant fancies to entertain after everything else is crossed off the shopping list, then those things are probably going to be serious casualties, and somebody will come back to say, “We’re all poor and miserable and the earth is ruined. Are you happy now?” We like to say that change is good. Here comes the test.
OK, I’m going back to bed.
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