Walks, walks, walks.
An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day, wrote Thoreau.
I took the children on walks, which they didn't really enjoy anymore.
Wandering in the wasteland, I thought.
During one walk on a sunny late-winter day, our son started screaming so much that I felt compelled to take him out of the stroller and put him in the backpack-carrier that Asaph had bought. I had never used it.
I put him inside and tried to make sure all of the straps were correctly snapped tight. I even asked some kind-seeming passers-by if it looked like he was properly situated.
As I pushed our daughter ahead in the stroller, our son fell asleep, and slumped over on my back. Even though I had felt confident that he was secured, he seemed to be shifting around quite a bit. I started to hunch over so that he would rest more horizontally on my back. I looked ridiculous.
"You're a super-dad!" proclaimed a passer-by.
I felt a bit proud of myself.
I arrived home.
"He's not properly secured!" screamed Asaph.
I felt awful. What if he had fallen out on Amsterdam Avenue?
I watched a video, where a young Israeli man was interviewed. I thought that he looked like my son might look in the future.
I read an article about an anti-Israel event in New York. The writer had been steeped in the identity politics of my crypto-Maoist college days, and identified everyone at the event who spoke in defense of Israel as a "white, Jewish, [non-heterosexual] male" and speculated that this demographic supported Israel because of some financial rewards that they accrued.
I wondered if I could just give up on the outside world. I vowed again not to read anything that had been written after 1950, at the absolute and total latest.
We went on a so-called play date with a male same-sex couple and their two non-twin children. Asaph was intimidated by this couple because of their good looks, prestigious medical professions, and involvement with Kabbalah (קבלה). They were not going to cut their sons' hair until they were three-years-old (on ל״ג בעומר), in accordance with a non-ancient tradition (حلاقة/חלאקה/אפשערן) that had originated among religious Jews in pre-Israeli Palestine and that had recently spread in popularity. Their elder son was only two, but he already had long blonde hair that they tried to control with a tie.
Asaph and I had many debates about what we were going to do with our son's hair. Since it grew up and not down, there was less chance that he would be mistaken for a girl, but still, it seemed a bit cruel to do to a kid who would already have a lot of identity issues to deal with.
We met the attractive Kabbalist doctors at the large playground at the southern end of Central Park. It was a sunny and warmish late-winter day. We allowed our son to crawl on the ground in the mud, while keeping our daughter up in the backpack carrier.
I realized that this was terribly sexist. Our children were no longer a controlled experiment, since they were old enough to observe things around them and spent 10 hours each day with Audra, our paid childminder. But we had tried to treat them in a relatively gender-neutral manner, taking our cues from them to know what they liked or disliked. Our son almost always liked to be thrown up high into the air; our daughter did not seem to enjoy it so much. Our son liked to spend long periods holding and analyzing a toy, book, or other object; our daughter wanted to show the object with us. Our son was happy to be held by strangers; our daughter sometimes refused to even look at anyone but Asaph, Audra, Carmen (our semimonthly maid-of-all-work and semiweekly assistant child minder), or me, and would howl and scream in rage if held by anyone other than these persons.
But letting our son crawl around on the ground while our daughter observed from a safe perch on Asaph's back -- this was a textbook example of differential sexist treatment!
I started to object and to demand that our daughter be allowed onto the ground. Then I saw how dirty our son had gotten, dreaded dealing with two filthy kids, saw that our daughter was perfectly content and smiling, and decided to perpetuate the patriarchy.
The Kabbalist doctors invited us back to their apartment. One was from France and one was from Quebec. They were both Jewish, of course, so the Quebecker was an Anglophone and the Frenchman's family was from North Africa (as most Jews of European origin in France had been murdered during the War).
They gave our son a change of clothes, and we played with remote-controlled firetrucks, which, surprisingly, scared our son. I hadn't really ever seen him scared of anything. Our daughter kept charging around, using her trademarked loud crawling style.
I kept secret the fact that I could speak and understand the French language. I could be a spy, I reasoned.
We had a nice time. I wished that I had become a Kabbalist doctor. Or that I was French, or at least a Francophone, although Quebec Jews were classified and categorized as Anglophones, mostly.
Maybe I could be an allophone, I thought.
We headed home for dinner, bath, and bed for the kids. We walked through our old neighborhood.
It is a great art to saunter, wrote Thoreau.
I felt some nostalgia. We used to live in the middle of things. We currently were living slightly to the side of the middle of things.
I took the kids on more walks.
I saw vestiges of former peoples.
I wondered what the Roman Catholics thought about the new Bishop of Rome.
I didn't think much about that subject.
I wasn't crazy about our neighborhood.
I did not feel at home.
A chain fitness center, with many branches in the Eastern United States and in Germanophone Switzerland, was being installed at our building.
In spite of the bottomless nature of our needs, financial and otherwise, I thought I would just stay a member of the expensive gym that we had joined a year prior, since it cheered me up, seeing all the beautiful people and celebrities.
While the kids napped I tried to touch up some stains on the wall, caused by the projectile hurling of food.
The paintbrush, made in China, fell apart instantly.
I wished we could boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on China, since it was a truly wicked country, but we couldn't. We were slaves to the Chinese, although it was our own fault.
I lay in bed reminiscing about my early adolescence or pre-adolescence.
I watched vintage music videos on my smartphone. Only later did I learn that the star of a music video from the time of my tonsillectomy had become a large reality-television star in the two-thousand teens.
I had dreamt of a glamorous life, back in suburban Ohio.
I had been certain that it would be around the corner.
Even though my adolescence had been spent volunteering at a zoo and watching nature documentaries, I had dreamt of an alternate path.
I wanted to go to exotic locales. Later I would go to college and learn that the word "exotic" was racist.
I started looking at vintage films I had watched in my early 30s.
I had romanticized Mediterranean Europe, with much justification.
Mediterranean Europe was pretty nice. Or had been nice.
The 1960s had been pretty nice too.
I remembered the intense Francophilia of my high-school years.
Thinking about France in the 1980s had filled me with frisson after frisson.
I had moved on to an infatuation with Spain as I became somewhat disillusioned by French jerkiness and assholism.
I remembered seeing Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios with my mother at an arthouse cinema in a wealthy, old, tree-lined suburb of Columbus, Ohio.
We left the theater feeling elated. Grandes esperanzas.
My obsession with the director had been guaranteed after seeing his films of an explicitly non-heterosexual nature.
I made my mother watch one on our videocassette player. She was a bit shocked.
I stayed faithful, even when his films were condemned by my crypto-Maoist college colleagues for their sexism and misogyny.
While living in San Francisco, a beautiful city where ugliness was praised, I dreamed of living in Madrid or Barcelona.
I had no idea that the Centfocs era was on the horizon.
My connections to the Mediterranean had continued, but, sadly, not as I had envisioned.
I complained to an Israelophile friend who was married to an Israeli (he had also converted to Judaism and was quite a religious scholar) that I wished that the Levant was more like Spain or Italy or France or even Greece. Jews and Arabs were so depressing, with the obvious exception of Lebanese Christians.
He sent me a clip from an Israeli movie that had an Almodóvarian look to it.
It wasn't quite the same.
Too many voiceless uvular fricatives, minor keys, and non-decorative hair coverings, I thought.
Nice try.
The kids spent the night at the house of our paid childminder as we had committed to go with friends to a so-called bar crawl in honor of the patron saint of Ireland.
We walked across the park as snow fell in silence.
I had taken many wintry walks by myself while in college.
Even Asaph enjoyed the situation.
It was too bad that one couldn't really combine colorful glamour with the natural world.
We arrived at the Upper East Side. It was a strange land, and we were strangers.
Where am I? I wondered. Dépaysement total.
Maybe total was an exaggeration.
We arrived at the second bar in the so-called crawl. Many former friends and acquaintances were there, and we greeted them with verve and vigor.
It was good to see them.
"I like following your life on [a social-networking service launched in February 2004]," said one. "The path I didn't choose."
I wasn't sure what to think of that.
Several former pals and buddies asked me why I wasn't drinking alcohol.
"It will disrupt the antibiotic I am taking to treat a virulent case of syphilis," I said.
The gang was nonplussed and smiled uncomfortably.
We went to the next bar. The fellows were raucous and ribald. A man was vomiting as we entered. Even though it was almost guaranteed to have been from alcohol overconsumption and not norovirus, I steered clear.
"Why don't you have a drink?" a former friend asked.
"I've converted to Islam," I said.
Since this band of friends, for the most part, did not appear to be non-heterosexual to non-homosexuals, some women began paying attention to the most conventionally attractive ones. Or perhaps it was simply owing to drunkenness. Drunkenness was the standard way to honor the Apostle of Ireland who used the shamrock to explain the doctrine of the Holy Trinity to the pagan indigenous population.
I had to look away.
My formerly iceblond friend screamed at me. "Why don't you have a drink?"
"It interacts with lithium carbonate in a problematic way," I said.
He was nonplussed. And nonblond.
We went home early.
"Why are you going home?" screamed the crowd. "You have a babysitter!"
It was true. The children wouldn't be our responsibility until noon the next day. But we were so tired.
So, so, so tired.
"We're really tired," I said.
We vowed to see them soon. It had been fun. Although now that I was basically androgynous -- lacking any discernible masculine characteristics but without any feminoid campiness -- I wasn't sure how I fit in with this demi-monde.
We took a taxi back to the west side.
I couldn't wait to get into bed.
In the morning I went to go fetch the children in Brooklyn.
I had to alight at a station with an undignified name.
This was no Sèvres – Babylone.
There was tight security at Audra's apartment.
It smelled wonderful -- like mild curry. Indo-Trinidadian music was playing in the background.
Audra's adult daughter was there -- her hair in some sort of special, bejeweled bun as she had just been in some sort of a Caribbean fashion show -- along with her granddaughter -- who was obsessed with our daughter -- and another young girl whom Audra used to mind who had spent the night to be able to go to a birthday party that morning.
That party was already over, and she had come back to Audra's. It wasn't even noon. Crazy children with their early parties!
The kids were happy to see me, although it looked like they had been having a pretty good time in my absence.
There was wall-to-wall carpeting and the furniture was covered in plastic. Audra showed me the room where the children slept.
I want to live here, I thought. It was cozy and warm and comforting. I almost asked if I could take a nap. Why did I have to go back home? This was much better. I could live here with the babies, and Audra wouldn't have to commute to stupid Manhattan.
I wasn't sure that she would be in favor of this plan.
Our daughter developed another rash. I was concerned, so I took her to the doctor at their new, especially inconvenient location. It was also over on the Upper East Side.
An application on my phone told me that walking and taking the bus would get me there in the same amount of time.
We finally arrived.
"She has a rash," said the doctor. We paid and left. It was a nice office, with light fixtures that looked like balloons and wall decorations licensed by the estate of artist and social activist Keith Haring.
On the way home we passed a food cart selling halal (حلال) meat.
I wondered if this decoration was orientalist or occidentalist.
I had a doctor's appointment myself.
"You and [Asaph] need to be having more sex," he said.
I smiled in a polite manner.
"No, I'm really serious. You have to do it for the children." He continued to talk about this topic or subject for around 10 minutes. I was nonplussed.
Asaph's young sister arrived from Israel for a week-long visit in honor of Passover.
The kids loved her suitcase.
They were skeptical of Asaph's young sister, even though our daughter had adored her when they last saw one another in Israel. But those were much different times. That was half a lifetime ago for our daughter.
She would scream if Asaph's young sister tried to pick her up, but she didn't mind talking to her from a position of equality.
Asaph's young sister allowed both children to grab handfuls of milk-soaked cereal from her bowl.
Yuck, I thought.
The children were still terrified that she was a babysitter, and so they followed me around in a mild panic.
Asaph's mother and stepfather arrived from Israel. They stayed with us for a few days before moving into the residence club in which Asaph's aunt and uncle from Miami owned a share. Asaph, his young sister, and I slept in the living room on the floor. It was kind of fun. My fondest memories from childhood had been of times when relatives stayed over. I had always slept best when the house was full of sleepers, and dreaded the rare time when there was only one parent in the house.
My father and his consort arrived in town. I showed him my new office.
They would be attending the Passover meal that was being organized by members of Asaph's family. My father's consort was a convert to Judaism, but you would never have guessed that she hadn't been born that way.
Asaph's great uncle, his parents, my father and his consort, and some of Asaph's American cousins came over for a brunch while we could still eat leavened products.
There was discussion regarding our son's hair.
Asaph stated that he had hoped to wait until the Lag BaOmer (ל״ג בעומר) following his third birthday, like our fancy Kabbalist doctor friends. I stated that I could not confirm or deny my feelings on this matter.
"The only people who do that are real wackos!" protested Asaph's mother. She wanted him to have a haircut right away.
My father and his consort sat quietly on the couch.
Asaph's young sister used technology to contact Asaph's young brother, who was living in Singapore (新加坡共和国/சிங்கப்பூர் குடியரசு).
Her attempts were fruitful.
Asaph took our son on a "food tour" with his parents, and my father and his consort went to a museum. I took our daughter on a walk.
Since the time of taking the kids on walks by myself began, I had noticed a troubling thing. It was the kind of thing that depressed people would have noticed, I thought. The conversations that I overheard, especially in neighborhoods like Hell's Kitchen, were all things that I had heard before -- or said myself. People were just saying the same things over and over, and they weren't the kind of same things that seemed sweet or cute, like "I love you" or "what a pleasant day!" or "My father says that there is only one perfect view--the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it" or "When the next wave comes, the turtle can return to the sea, can't it?"
No, people -- and by people I mean people in my demographic, although up to 20 years younger -- were just saying the same mundane things that I had heard a million times before, things like "it is what it is" and "I was so [expletive] [vulgar slang] last night that I totally [vulgar slang] [expletive]" and "[vulgar slang] that is so [expletive] [unoriginal slang]" and "she is a total [expletive]" and "[expletive] the [expletive] [expletive]" and "[lazy slang] is [expletive] [vulgar slang] [lazy slang] [unoriginal slang] [expletive], you know?" and [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] tennis [expletive]".
But they were under the impression that they were being clever or naughty or fabulous.
I walked by a building that reminded me of an interview I had read that had been conducted by a virtual acquaintance -- I couldn't remember if I had met him in person -- of the sardonic American author Fran Lebowitz, whom I had once seen in the 59th Street – Columbus Circle subway station back when I was young and full of optimism and some small portion of cockiness.
"A studio in a place called the Film Center, which used to be an out-of-the-way place, 9th Avenue and 40-somewhere, I can't remember. But now, of course, it's smack in the middle of the 8-billion horrendous tourists."
I walked back home, passing an outpost of young Roman Catholicism.
Good luck, I thought.
The next day, scandalously, I went to Palm Sunday services.
Asaph told his family that I had gone to work. But a spy (κατάσκοπος) caught me and broadcast a photo into the internet.
Something was wrong with the incense, but otherwise it was lovely.
I was a little shocked during the Prayers of the People.
I went home, pretending to Asaph's family that I had been at work, although my father and his consort knew the truth.
We prepared for the holiday. Search-and-destroy missions against crumbs were launched. Our families ignored us.
Asaph's young sister showed me an old Haggadah (הגדה).
I went to work on Monday. It was a difficult day. That night there was to be the Passover meal at the residence club in which Asaph's aunt and uncle from Miami owned a share. They would be there, along with their three children, their son-in-law, their new granddaughter, Asaph's mother and stepfather, Asaph's great-uncle, my father and his consort, Asaph and the children, a few other unknown relatives, and me. Asaph's cousin and husband were staying there, so they would be able to put their baby to sleep in the next room. I didn't understand what we were going to do with our children. Asaph told me not to worry about it.
But of course I did.
With an unleavened heart, I walked to the residence club.
Immediately I had to spend most of the time keeping the children from getting stepped on or grabbing dangerous items. How my pre-parental self would have mocked my post-parental self! But I had realized that you didn't really have much of a choice in these matters anymore.
Our daughter yanked a glass of wine from a counter, spilling it all over the carpet. Luckily it was untinted.
We went into the room where the meal would be served. To our knowledge, our children had not yet had meat. Asaph had wanted them to eat only kosher meat, and we had been waiting until this Passover meal to give them some. We put them into high chairs after Asaph's cousin's baby had finished her dinner, and placed pieces of chicken in front of them. Then we waited.
They started to enjoy the poultry with great gusto. They were finally getting their kosher meat! Then I looked at their sippy cups.
"Maybe you want to take the milk away from them?" I said.
"[G-d] damn it!" said Asaph.
The formal order of the meal began, but we had to preoccupy the children. The room was so crowded that I didn't end up sitting at the table; I just hung out with the kids in the living area, where they quickly ran out of options. Eventually they crawled into the master bedroom and started banging the door back and forth. Asaph's cousin's husband came in.
"Yeah, could you keep them from doing that? [His daughter] is asleep in the next apartment. If she wakes up it's really hard to get her back to sleep."
I was nonplussed.
Our kids were too young to just sit and entertain themselves: they wanted to pull lamps off of tables and rip up books. It was already the time when they normally went to bed.
Asaph and I went into the adjoining apartment.
"We'll put them to bed in the stroller," he said.
Oh, brother, I thought.
They immediately started screaming.
"[His cousin's husband] is going to come in to tell us to keep quiet!" I said.
After a few minutes, I decided that I would just take the kids home and put them to sleep. Our apartment was only 10 minutes away.
"Fine, you got what you wanted. Happy?" said Asaph.
"It's not what I wanted, it's what I predicted," I said.
Maybe it was a little bit what I wanted.
I decided not to go back in to tell everyone I was leaving, because then there would be a prolonged period where everyone would try to come up with other solutions that would ultimately not work and would worry about what I was going to eat and would fret and fume in a semi-sincere manner.
I walked home and put the kids in their cribs. They fell asleep immediately.
"What am I going to eat?" I wondered aloud. I had only had a half of a piece of matzah at the dinner.
Luckily we followed an easier, Middle Eastern, set of rules, so I enjoyed a big bowl of arsenic-filled rice. Later my father and his consort came by to spend some time with me before their departure the next day. They said that they had had a nice time.
"Everyone was very animated," my father said.
"That's how those people are," I said. Those people were now my people.
The next day I took off from work so that we could go to a lunch at Asaph's conservative and religious uncle's house. We went to the train station.
I was always nervous about taking the kids on public transit, or any transit, but the station seemed pretty empty.
On the train an indigent man pushing a cart filled with belongings and plastic bags came to stand by where we were sitting. The train was almost empty, but we had put our stroller in a space for wheelchairs, and he had put his cart in the adjacent space for wheelchairs. I saw that he was drinking an oversized can of beer. He had some trouble finding money for his ticket; he interacted with the conductors. I couldn't tell if they ended up allowing him to ride for free.
Asaph's mother, his stepfather, his great-uncle, and his sister sat talking while Asaph and I tried to keep the children entertained. Asaph's great-uncle didn't speak Hebrew, but sometimes the rest would forget that and the conversation switched to that language.
The indigent-looking man started talking to us. All of the muscles in my body tensed up, although not in a way that would improve muscle tone or definition.
"Are you Jewish? Are you celebrating Passover?"
Asaph's mother started talking with him, in a polite but appropriately detached manner.
"I want to learn some Yiddish," he said.
Good grief, I thought. I grabbed our son tight. "Look out the window!" I said to him.
After some back-and-forth between the man and Asaph's mother, Asaph spoke up.
"Sir, we're very preoccupied here with taking care of the children, would you mind leaving us alone?"
The man didn't like that.
"I just wanted to learn some Yiddish!" he bellowed, drunkenly. "This is America! I was an Army Ranger! You are rude!"
"Look out the window!" I said to our son. I felt a bit guilty that I wasn't being very Christian. Then I realized that I didn't have to be, given the context.
The indigent man continued to mutter and sputter. Having children had really changed everything. All I could think about in this situation was protecting the kids, even though they were in no real danger of any kind. But since there was a theoretical possibility that he could reach over and rip my son's head off, I had to be on guard. I was no longer anything like the Franciscans who had shaped my life after college and given me some spiritual direction. I was now like any other so-called soccer mom. Or hockey mom. I was like American politician, commentator, failed 9th Governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
I had to get up because our son was getting impatient and wriggling and jiggling shortly before we arrived at our destination. The indigent man spoke to me, his words in a slurry.
"That was rude. That's not how things are supposed to be in this country. I just wanted to learn some Yiddish."
I nodded and smiled. It took an incredible amount of restraint not to correct him and say that absolutely no one had been speaking Yiddish.
We arrived.
ברוך השם, I thought. Praise Jesus.
We walked to Asaph's uncle's house. I thought of my dead grandmother. Or, one of my dead grandmothers.
Men and boys in black hats passed us by.
גוט יום־טובֿ, they would say.
Now that's Yiddish, I thought. It was very exotic.
We arrived at Asaph's uncle's house. I knew all the rules: it was like take-off or landing in an airplane.
I actually loved coming to this house. There were always lots of people and lots of good food, and it felt surprisingly welcoming. I was quite fond of Asaph's uncle's wife, whose brother was married to our pediatrician.
Some of Asaph's visiting relatives got into a huge fight regarding child-care issues. Our children kept crawling around, our daughter continuing to use her special loud-crawling technique, oblivious to the tumult. I tried to stayed detached. I noticed a young girl who was very conscientious about her mezuzah (מזוזה) kissing. College-age males wearing ties and kippot (כיפות) kept arriving.
One of Asaph's conservative cousins had written a scholarly article in favor of same-sex marriage. We discussed it while our son tried to crawl up stairs. Who would have guessed? I thought.
After some time, we had to leave. We said our goodbyes and walked back to the train station.
Despite my dread, the return trip was uneventful.
The sun now set over the children as they ate dinner.
Asaph's young sister was leaving for the airport for her ascent back to Israel.
Our kids didn't seem to care.
When everyone was asleep, I sat and read Arabian Sands, by the British explorer, Orientalist, and travel writer Wilfred Thesiger, his account of his crossing of the Empty Quarter (الربع الخالي), the gigantic sand desert that then straddled Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, in 1945 and 1950.
He wrote in a way that would not be acceptable in the early part of the twenty-first century.
I wondered idly how many Arabs there were in Arabia ; between six and seven millions is, I believe, the generally accepted figure, and of these only about a quarter are Bedu. Yet only Bedu can live in the deserts that cover all but a small part of Arabia. The other Arabs have settled in the few places where it is possible to make a living from the soil. Except for some serfs and the rabble in a few of the larger towns, all these Arabs are tribesmen. Most of them live in the Yemen, that fertile corner of Arabia which the Romans called Arabia Felix; perhaps it was there that the Semitic race originated. They themselves divide their race into the Arab al Araba, or pure Arabs, who they say are descended from Qahtan or Joktan and originated in the Yemen, and the Arab al Mustaraba, or adopted Arabs, descended from Adnan, the offspring of Ishmael, who originated in the north. European experts have confirmed the existence of two races in Arabia, the round-headed southerners and the long-headed northerners; but both have been in Arabia since earliest times. Shut off from the outside world by the desert and the sea, the inhabitants of Arabia have kept their racial purity. The neighboring countries, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, have been highways for invading armies and migrations, but there is no record of any migration into the Arabian peninsula. Abyssinians, Persians, Egyptians, and Turks imposed their uneasy rule at intervals on the Yemen, Oman, the Hajaz, and even on the Najd. They held the larger towns and waged intermittent and often unsuccessful war against the tribes. Their mercenaries spawned in the garrison towns, but they never mixed their blood with that of the tribesmen. No race in the world prizes lineage so highly as the Arabs and none has kept its blood so pure. There is, of course, mixed blood in the towns, especially in the seaports, but this is only the dirty froth upon the desert's edge.
As I rode along I reflected that nowhere in the world was there such continuity as in the Arabian desert. Here Semitic nomads, resembling my companions, must have herded their flocks before the Pyramids were built or the Flood wiped out all trace of man in the Euphrates valley. Successive civilizations rose and fell around the desert's edge: the Minaeans, Sabaeans, and Himyarites in southern Arabia; Egypt of the Pharaohs; Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria; the Hebrews, the Phoenicians; Greeks and Romans; the Persians; the Muslim Empire of the Arabs, and finally the Turks. They lasted a few hundred or a thousand years and vanished; new races were evolved and later disappeared; religions rose and fell; men changed, adapting themselves to a changing world; but in the desert the nomad tribes lived on, the pattern of their lives but little changed over this enormous span of time.
Then, in forty years, less than a man's lifetime, all was changed; their life disintegrated.
Indeed, their way of life continued to disintegrate.
He hated the way that modernity had altered a way of life that had gone on for centuries.
Abu Dhabi (أبو ظبي) was no longer "a small town of about two thousand inhabitants". One could only imagine what he would have thought of what would end up happening to grotesque Dubai (دبي).
I woke up the next morning to a hearty breakfast.
Our children adapted to the dietary restrictions of the week. They liked crunching crunchy things. I thought it was funny that a holiday that began with an obsessive-compulsive search for crumbs ended up with the creation of gigantic amounts of additional, if unleavened, crumbs.
I had arranged to celebrate the Holy Triduum.
I always enjoyed what I had been told was Mozarabic chant. Tears fell onto my service leaflet upon hearing the words "countless throngs".
I skipped the Agape, lest I should be defiled. I rested in the nave.
Easter was just out of reach.
I went to work in the morning.
The latest trends had been implemented in our office. Oh well, I thought.
I headed downtown for the annual unpleasantness.
Oh, the drama, I thought.
People were lined up for their Good Friday cupcakes. Probably "red velvet" or some other disgusting type or kind. I overheard unoriginal conversations as I passed by.
The chill and gloom was lessened a bit by some thoughtful expenditures by ultra-high-net-worth individuals living in the neighborhood.
The Roman Catholic hospital that had played a key role in the health crisis of the 1980s was being turned into luxury apartments.
Oh well, I thought.
We went on another walk the next day.
I had looked at my activity on a social-networking website launched in February 2004 since the time that I had joined it in 2007.
I saw that I had basically said the same things over and over, year after year.
Even when I had thought that I was writing something new and original, it was something I had written before, with only minor modifications.
And when I had thought I was writing something original and new, it was just something I had written previously, with only small changes.
I was no better than all of the people whose trite conversations I had overheard and criticized.
But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people, I thought.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live, Thoreau thought.
I was abruptly brought back to 1976.
I reminisced about my childhood a lot after the kids arrived. Maybe I could dredge up an original thought from that past, I wondered.
I had named my cat Diana, but it wasn't because of the princess.
We had once taken care of a poodle for a month, but it had defecated in my bed while I slept.
My mother had killed my first budgerigar, Pierre, by holding it while I cleaned its cage after one week of residence in our house. I killed my second budgerigar, Pierre II, a year and a half later, by leaving its cage by an open window in early spring.
We had had a second cat named Nigel who, after being struck by a car, moved in with a different family one street over.
Were these things interesting?
I headed down to the Vigil. I knew it would be exactly the same as it had been for the past 14 years.
I was surprised by some lovely music that I hadn't remembered. But I obviously couldn't trust my memory.
The next morning I made myself a festive breakfast.
We took another walk. There was a mockingbird.
"Look, a mockingbird!" I screeched. Two fashionable non-heterosexual gentlemen who had been promenading stopped.
"A mockingbird, you say?" one asked.
It was a chilly and gray early Easter Sunday.
That evening I headed to my old friend Vince's apartment near the Kill Van Kull.
Quel dépaysement, I thought.
It didn't seem so bad when I got off the tram.
The environment got progressively more foreign.
And hostile.
And ominous.
I could barely scarf down the first course when I had to leave to get back home. The trip took two hours each way.
I had to change seats to avoid sitting near a tubercular old man as we barrelled under the Hudson.
When I got home I received a real surprise: a photo of me from ten years prior!
Mutual unrecognition, I thought. That guy was a person of interest.
