Smoking, take two

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(Note: this is a rewrite of a blog I wrote back in 2011, with maybe a few updates, in the light of recent events.)

Both my parents smoked. I have distinct memories of sitting in the front seat of our family car, with my father in the driver’s seat on my left and my mother sitting to my right, both of them puffing away, the ashtray overflowing. I couldn’t breathe. I finally spoke up about it when I was about nine or ten years, and it actually inspired my mother to quit smoking.

This, however, didn’t stop me from taking up the habit myself. I got a free sample of Lucky Strikes at Fenway Park in 1983; I smoked one or two of them; soon after I was in Morocco, and smoking a pack a day; soon after that I was in Tunisia and smoking two packs a day.

I kept this up until 1998. Remembering the family proclivity for cancer, I resolved to quite when I was forty, and I managed it, just a few months shy of my forty-first birthday.

I have been reasonably healthy on and off since.

And now, fifteen years later, I discover that I have throat cancer, the main risk factor for which is – ahem – smoking.

Go figure.

I freely acknowledge that it’s my own fault. I knew there were bad genes on both sides of the family, and I knew that smoking could only be bad for me. But I kept it up for fourteen years.

Foolish, naturally. Most of those fourteen years between ’84 and ‘98, I was just smoking out of habit; I even (as do most smokers) kept it up while I was sick with colds and the flu. I even smoked at meals. I was smelly and utterly obnoxious, and probably nearly burned myself to death more than once. I realize that now.

But I remember one beautiful morning in Tunis, before I developed my two-pack-a-day habit. I left the house around 8am, bought a pack of local cigarettes, lit up, and –

That first puff was heaven.

So it wasn’t all bad.

But it probably wasn’t worth getting cancer for.

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For Ramadan: Harira

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Ramadan began last week. I have some Muslim friends on Facebook, so I see lots of “Ramadan kareem!” messages going back and forth.

The Islamic months don’t correspond to the seasons as ours do; their year is roughly 354 days long, so Ramadan happens roughly twelve days earlier every year. In 1984, my first year in Morocco, the first day of Ramadan was roughly the first of June. (There was some trouble that year. It’s not officially a new month until the new moon is sighted in Mecca, and the weather was bad that year in Saudi Arabia. Finally, around the third or fourth of June 1984, Ramadan was declared to be officially begun, almost by default.)

Summer is a bad time for Ramadan, and June is the worst of all, because June days are the longest days of the year. Muslims are enjoined to fast from the time in the morning when it’s light enough “to distinguish a black thread from a white thread” to the prayer-call at sunset. “Fasting,” in this sense, means no eating, no drinking water (very devout Muslims won’t swallow when they’re brushing their teeth, and there’s a lot of spitting in the street going on, because swallowing your own spit might qualify as drinking), no sex, no smoking (tragic in a culture like North Africa where everyone smokes).

That first year, in 1984, I tried to fast. I couldn’t do it. I realized, after two or three days, that no one could see me eating during the day if I just closed the window blinds.

Later, in Tunisia, I was more casual. I knew I was a “kouffar” (unbeliever), and so did everyone else, so I closeted myself in my office and smoked and drank water and coffee to my heart’s content. One of my Tunisian coworkers, who’d studied extensively in Europe and who was very worldly, joined me.

Then, a day or two later, someone else joined us.

After about two weeks, the whole office was smoking with me, on and off. It was okay, because they were with an unbeliever, and I was exerting an undue irreligious influence on them.

Ah, kids, those were the days.

There was a restaurant in Tunis not far from our house, which was also not far from the az-Zeituna mosque, one of the most famous mosques in Tunisia. During Ramadan, about fifteen minutes before sunset, we’d go there. They’d seat us and serve us soup.

But no one ate.

We waited for the boy at the mosque to give us the signal that the evening call to prayer was complete.

Then, in unison, we all dipped our spoons into our delicious thick chicken / tomato / chickpea soup, and broke our fast.

Here’s a recipe for harira, the traditional Ramadan fast-breaking soup:

Harira

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Makes about 12 cups

·         1 whole chicken breast, halved

·         4 cups chicken broth

·         4 cups water

·         a 28-to 32-ounce can whole tomatoes, drained and puréed coarse

·         1/4 teaspoon crumbled saffron threads

·         2 medium onions, chopped fine

·         19-ounce can of chick-peas, rinsed

·         1/2 cup raw long-grain rice

·         1/2 cup lentils

·         3/4 cup finely chopped fresh coriander

·         3/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley leaves

·         dried chick-peas, picked over water

In a heavy kettle (at least 5 quarts) simmer chicken in broth and water 17 to 20 minutes, or until chicken is just cooked through, and transfer chicken with a slotted spoon to a cutting board. Add to kettle tomatoes, saffron, onions, chick-peas, rice, and lentils and simmer, covered, 30 minutes, or until lentils are tender. Shred chicken, discarding skin and bones, and stir into soup with salt and pepper to taste. Soup may be prepared 4 days ahead (cool uncovered before chilling covered).

I find this recipe incomplete. It needs ras al-hanout, the traditional North African seasoning (you can buy it online, or make it yourself from regular ol’ supermarket seasonings), and some eggs (Ramadan harira usually has pieces of hard-boiled egg in it).

Also: if you make this soup, serve it with lots of Italian or French bread, for scooping and dipping.

And if you don’t feel like cooking soup the long way, especially during this long dismally hot summer, I’ve discovered that Campbell’s makes some very nice soups in plastic bags, which are pretty authentic. Their “Moroccan Chicken with Chickpeas” is a very passable Moroccan shorba, verging on harira.

Pinch a penny and spend a couple of bucks and buy a packet of it, and enjoy it.

With some Italian bread, and a lemon wedge to squeeze into it.

Ramadan kareem.

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Pennies

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Canada recently decided to stop making pennies. “What will they do?” Apollonia wondered.

“Presumably,” I said, “they will start rounding prices at the five-cent point.”

She grimaced. “I wouldn’t like that.”

“No one much cares what you’d like,” I said. “Pennies are a curiosity, a thing of the past. Get modern, babe.”

In Tunisia we had aluminum coins worth five millimes: five one-thousandths of a dinar, less than an American penny in those days. It was the smallest change available on a daily basis. Street vendors sold single cigarettes for a few of those coins, which were called “durus.” Quite a few people didn’t bother to spend them.  I knew people who had huge jars full of them. Some people actually threw them away.

Smaller coins – worth one or two millimes – were available, but you seldom saw them. Everything in the market was generally priced in a rounded amount – 1 dinar 500 millimes – but your electric bill was always precise: 7 dinars 879 millimes. And, when you paid it (say, with a ten-dinar note), they gave you exact change, in coins smaller than the nail of your little finger.

Ah! That was fun.

Also back in those days, when the Italian lira was 2000 to the American dollar, they gave you change in hard candy. If your change came to 25 or 30 lira, they’d gesture to the bowl of hard candy on the counter and say, “Take one!”

All things considered, Canadians (and Americans, eventually) can live without the penny.

Who doesn’t like a little piece of candy once in a while?

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Harissa

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Harissa is a Tunisian condiment, made from red peppers and garlic and olive oil. It burns like fire. In Tunisia, when you go to a restaurant, they begin by giving you a little plate of bread and olive oil and harissa; you learn, after burning your mouth a few times, the right way to combine them.

 

 

Harissa is delicious, once you get used to it. I, frankly, can’t live without it. But it’s not easy to find in the United States. I bought a tube of it – yes, a tube, like a toothpaste tube – in the Morocco section of Epcot in Disney World, over a year ago. I use it up very slowly, in eggs and vegetable dishes. And it always reminds me of my time in Tunisia.

 

 

My Tunisian friends always got a kick out of how Americans reacted to harissa. They’d trick them into eating it straight, and hoot with laughter when the Americans choked and spat it out. What fun!

 

 

Then an American friend spent a few weeks back in the USA, and came back with assorted oddball American delicacies you couldn’t find in Tunisia: nori, and graham crackers, and pickled jalapeno peppers. She and I were eating jalapenos straight out of the jar in ecstasy. “What’s the big deal?” a Tunisian friend said. “Are they hot?”

 

 

“Very hot,” we both said. “But delicious.”

 

 

“They can’t be that bad,” he said. And he fished one out of the jar, and ate one.

 

 

And my American friend and I hooted with laughter as he shrieked and ran around the house in pain, because the jalapeno was too hot for him.

 

 

Evidently, “hot” in one culture is not the same as “hot” in another culture.

 

 

Now: how about some nice wasabi?

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Unhygienic travel stories

 

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It’s lucky that most of us do our heavy-duty adventure traveling while we’re young. We’re more resilient, and can take it in stride, more or less, when strange things happen. (And we know that it’ll make a kick-ass story when we get back home.)

 

 

For example: my student assistant Jennifer told me that, in China, you can use a dirty public toilet for free, but you have to pay to use a clean one.

 

 

But that’s nothing.

 

 

How about the time I chased a rat down the hallway in Morocco, until I saw it jump into the toilet and disappear?

 

 

How about the time I was having kamounia at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Tunis, and found weevils cooked in with the couscous? (I just picked them out and put them on the side of the plate. I didn’t complain. I’d just paid twenty-five cents for dinner; I certainly didn’t expect the Waldorf-Astoria.)

 

 

How about those kvass dispensers in the USSR back in 1978? (Kvass is a light beer, very refreshing, and I wish they sold it here. I think they make it by soaking bread in water and fermenting the result.)  It was sold in drink machines, just like soft drinks and coffee in the US, except that everybody used the same glass. (There was a little water-spout you were supposed to use to wash the glass out when you were done.)

 

 

But the best story of all belongs to my friend Mike, back in Morocco, as follows:

 

 

He moved into a simple house in El-Jadida, a beautiful beach town on the Atlantic coast. The house had no toilet; you had to use a privy out in the garden.

 

 

His first night there, he went out in the dark to use the privy. As he sat, he could hear an odd rustling around him. This gave him the creeps, so he finished his business, went in the house for a flashlight, and came back out to see what the noise was.

 

 

It was bugs. The walls and ceiling of the privy were alive with insects, mostly huge flying cockroaches, more than he’d ever seen.

 

 

He shrieked, ran back in the house, grabbed the insect spray (which, in Morocco in 1984, was probably straight DDT), and ran back to the privy to kill the bugs.

 

 

Do you see the flaw in his reasoning?

 

 

He went into the privy and started spraying, and they all started dying. And as they died, they fell, by the dozens and the hundreds, all over him.

 

 

I still twitch whenever I think of that story.

 

 

I dare you to top it.

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The recent unrest in the Muslim world

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You almost certainly know about the recent unrest in the Muslim world, and the riots, and the death of the American ambassador to Libya.

 

 

I subscribe to a Tunisian news service – one of those things that just gives you the headline and the first sentence – and, last Thursday, it was “Le film qui tue!” (Translation: “The killer movie!”)

 

 

Oh no, I thought.

 

 

You see, this whole manifestation in the Arab world was brought about – supposedly – by the release of a movie mocking the Prophet Mohammed. This movie was – supposedly – made by a Jewish American.

 

 

Except that the movies was probably never made as such, and the man behind the project was an Israel-hating Egyptian Copt, who is (apparently) living in the USA.

 

 

More than that, though; the idea that the movie was the impetus behind the killing irritated me. Aristotle teaches us that, while guns may be the material causes of death, the real causes are the people who pull the trigger.

 

 

But then I read the article in webdo.tn.

 

 

I was much reassured. True to my experience of Tunisia and Tunisians – thoughtful and intelligent – the author weighed the tension behind Islamists (who are spoiling for a fight with the West) and Islamophobes (who would like to spark a fight, and then create as much havoc as possible).

 

 

Both are to blame for the general situation.

 

 

Chris Stevens’s death is certainly the fault of the Islamists. I wonder if the simultaneity of the riots in the Muslim world has been very carefully planned (you’ll notice that it took place in September, not long after the commemoration of 9/11).

 

 

And the Egyptian / Copt / American provocateur, who produced the “movie,” also appears to have known what he was doing, provoking Muslim reaction at a very key time.

 

 

Partner and I are going to France in a few weeks. France (and especially Paris) is inhabited by a lot of North African Muslims.

 

 

We will let you know what we find out.

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Going to the beach

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When you grow up in the Northwest (as I did), going to the beach is a unique experience. The Northwest seashore is cold and foggy most of the time, even in the summertime, and not terribly welcoming.  Still, we went at least one day a year. It was a two-hour drive each way, to a little town called Long Beach, Washington, which was the usual beachfront honky-tonk town, with arcades and candy stores (I associate it with the smell of cotton candy, and I was there a few years ago, and am pleased to tell you that it still smells like cotton candy). 

 

 

Down the road from Long Beach is Ilwaco, a fishing port at the mouth of the Columbia.  (Ilwaco doesn't smell like cotton candy; it smells like low tide and fish guts. But it has its charms too.) My father sometimes went salmon fishing on a charter boat out of Ilwaco; they'd go out very early, spend the day retching their guts out (the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia is famous for being choppy), and come back empty-handed.  Then, on our way home, we'd stop in a little town called Chinook and buy a huge whole salmon for fifteen cents a pound, and pack it in ice in the trunk of the car. Dad would clean it when we got home, and we had a freezer full of salmon steaks to eat all winter long. 

 

 

In 1978 I relocated to Rhode Island, the Ocean State.  Here you're never more than eight or nine yards away from a nice beach: Goosewing, Horseneck, Misquamacut, Narragansett, Moonstone.  (Moonstone was for a long time a nude beach.  Then the state decided to protect the piping plover, which (coincidentally) nested on the nude beach. And that was the end of that.)

 

 

In the Peace Corps, I was lucky enough to be posted to two places with beaches attached: Kenitra in Morocco, which has a lovely beachtown called Mahdia Plage nearby, and Tunis, with its long arc of beaches stretching out through Carthage to La Marsa. 

 

 

For one dangerous moment in Morocco I thought about becoming a professional expatriate, living in Tangiers with Paul Bowles and William Burroughs and the rest of the louche lowdown American crew I found there. 

 

 

Good sense talked me out of it.  But it would have been wonderful to wake up and look down at the Strait of Gibraltar every morning while having my morning coffee.

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Tunis and Dream-Tunis

 

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I lived in Tunis for two years. It was (and, I’m sure, still is) a beautiful city.  I lived in a house not far from the shoe market and the gold market and the perfume market, down the street from the coppersmiths' district, within shouting distance of the az-Zeytouna Mosque. My walk to work took me through the busiest part of the tourist / merchant area, past the rug merchants and the spice merchants and the olive-wood merchants, past the British Council library, out through the Bab Bhar, down Avenue Habib Bourguiba, past the French-built Cathedral of Saint Vincent de Paul, past the statue of the fourteenth-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldoun holding his book against his chest.

 

 

It was a sunlit city, warm, funny, full of unique and wonderful neighborhoods.

 

 

I dream of it all the time.  Dream-Tunis is not quite the same as the real Tunis in which I lived.  Dream-Tunis is full of dramatic landscapes and vistas.  In Dream-Tunis I’ll walk down a boulevard and see the entire city from a height, or realize that there’s a whole stretch of seacoast I never visited.  Or a mosque, or a whole stretch of old buildings.

 

 

I think it’s because the real Tunis was (to me, in the mid-1980s) just as dreamlike.  I remember, one Saturday, deciding to walk north (an unfamiliar direction) through the medina, to see what I’d find.  I found residential areas, and more markets, and roofed streets, and unroofed streets.  I found a housewares market, like an open-air Walmart.  I found another shoe market.  I found quiet neighborhoods full of palm trees growing between the houses. 

 

 

I didn’t want to go home.  I wanted to keep going forever. 

 

 

I think that’s why I still dream about it.  Tunis was a labyrinth, but all of its secrets and revelations were beautiful.  I always wonder: what would have happened if I’d turned left instead of right?  What doorway would I have found?  Another spice market?  Another thousand-year-old mosque?  Another Turkish palace?

 

 

My friend Nejib (who now directs a large technology operation in the city) keeps inviting me back to see “the new Tunisia.” 

 

 

Maybe I will someday. 

 

 

I hope it’s still as intricate and beautiful as I remember.

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The travel checklist

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About ten years ago, an Internet acquaintance came to visit New England.  He was a San Franciscan, very funny and witty (on the Internet, at least), and wanted to see Boston.

 

 

And he had a list.

 

 

He wanted to see the State House.  He wanted to see Mother Goose’s gravesite.  He wanted to see the Old North Church.

 

 

Literally.  See them. I still remember: we walked in front of the State House, and he said “check.”

 

 

See, he’d asked Internet “friends” what he should see in Boston.  They’d volunteered ideas, and he had made a list. And he was literally just “seeing” them. Mostly from a distance.

 

 

Recently, on Facebook, I saw this thing called “100 Places To See Before You Die.”  Being a world traveler and a sophisticate, I took the quiz.  I got 10%.  I have seen 10 of the 100 places they listed.

 

 

And then I thought: Well, Jesus!  I have seen Casablanca, and Tunis, and the Tophet in Carthage.  I have seen the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state.  I have visited Cabo Rojo in Puerto Rico, and I have looked across the Caribbean at the misty shore of Hispaniola.  I’ve looked across from a café in Tangiers at the Rock of Gibraltar.  I have gone to the Hotel des Invalides in Paris and looked down at the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte.

 

 

Aren’t these enough?

 

 

Why do I need to check things off a generic list?  I’ve seen some amazing things that most people will probably never see.

 

 

And I didn’t just walk past them.  I stood and marveled at them. Most of the time I actually touched them.

 

 

So nyah.

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Root canal

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Apollonia was clutching her jaw the other day.  “Broke a toof yefterday,” she lisped.  “Emergency woot canal wast night.  Tewwible.  Dentist gave me too much Novocaine, and it didn’t wea’ off until midnight.”

 

 

I find baby talk enchanting.  “Poor thing,” I said.  “Back in Battle Ground, Washington, in the 1960s, I had a dentist who’d worked at the state prison.  He gave jumbo Novocaine shots.  Once he gave me one that didn’t wear off for three days.”

 

 

Apollonia stared at me darkly.  “Why?” she croaked.  “Why you always gotta top my story?”

 

 

“Oh, I can do better than that,” I said.  “I once had a root canal without any Novocaine at all.”

 

 

She shrieked and ran away before I could tell the story. 

 

 

Here it is:

 

 

While serving in the Peace Corps in Tunisia in the 1980s, I had a dental problem, and was sent to a very nice Tunisian dentist whom I still remember fondly; she liked me because I spoke good French and she could gossip with me. (I also found that I could speak French with that suction thing in my mouth, which is doing pretty well, if you ask me.)  “You need a root canal,” she told me.  “I know Americans prefer anesthetics, and I have Novocaine, if you prefer it.  But frankly, most of my patients don’t use it.  For one thing, I can work more quickly and accurately if I don’t give you Novocaine.”

 

“Ah,” I said.  “Go ahead.  Why not?”

 

 

So we did it.  Honestly, it wasn’t bad.  The worst part of a root canal is the drilling, which is like the Indy 500 going on inside your head; it doesn’t hurt, it’s just incredibly annoying, and you really wish it would stop, and no amount of Novocaine makes it less unpleasant. 

 

 

I was very pleased with myself by the time the dentist finished the major drilling; it hadn’t really hurt a bit.  Then she turned to me with a sober expression.  “Okay,” she said.  “I need to find out if there’s any soft tissue left inside the tooth.  I can do it with a mirror and a pick, and it will take a long time, and I still won’t be sure.  Or I can do it the quick way.”

 

 

“What’s the quick way?” I asked, my heart sinking.

 

 

She held up a safety pin.

 

 

I thought for a moment and chose the quick way.

 

 

There was indeed some soft tissue left inside the tooth.

 

 

Oh, reader, I will never forget that moment.  I think blue flames shot out of my ears.  It only lasted a millisecond, but I can still recapture it very precisely.  I could even taste the pain.

 

 

But it was over in a flash.

 

 

“Okay,” she said, withdrawing the pin from my hollow tooth.  “That’s all I needed to know.  A little more drilling, and we’re done.”

 

 

What can I tell you?  I lived through it.  (An American dentist told me a few years later that it was one of the best root-canal/crown jobs he’d ever seen.)

 

 

But I still flinch whenever I see a safety pin.

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The places where revolutions begin

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The Stonewall Inn is nothin', really. Partner and I were on Christopher Street in Manhattan a few years ago when we suddenly realized we were right in front of it. There were some tacky signs in front, and the usual gay-bar postings – bands, drink specials – but there was nothing distinctive about it.

 

 

On June 28, 1969, a couple of weeks before the first moon landing, the police raided the place, as they used to do periodically. The regulars were sick and tired of being raided, and fought back. The protests went on for several days. Then they spread. Activist groups sprang up.

 

 

It was, as Malcolm Gladwell might say, a “tipping point.”

 

 

I've been following Tunisian politics lately, as I lived in Tunisia for two years, and I still have friends there. The Tunisian revolution which happened very suddenly this year found its tipping point in a smallish town called Sidi Bouzid. A young vegetable vendor was harassed by a member of the police, who insulted him, slapped him, and confiscated his wares.

 

 

So he set fire to himself.

 

 

Within weeks, the country was (metaphorically) on fire too.

 

 

As revolutions go, the Tunisian revolution was pretty brisk and effective. There was violence, but only on a small scale. The government collapsed in short order. The replacement government (which was quite obviously the old government in disguise) got laughed off the stage within weeks.

 

 

I was recently chatting online with a Tunisian friend, in the usual mix of English / French / Arabic. He speaks very proudly of “la nouvelle Tunisie,” the new Tunisia.  There are still problems - he didn't hide that - but he's happy.  No, actually, I would say that he's exhilarated.

 

 

And wouldn't you be?

 

 

And, as I write this, the United Nations has just endorsed a resolution confirming gay rights.

 

 

And the state of New York (holla, Cuomo and Bloomberg!) has just legalized gay marriage.

 

 

And it all begins in a small town in Tunisia.

 

 

Or in a seedy bar in downtown Manhattan.

 

 

Revolutions start in the damndest places.

 

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Tophet

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When I moved to Tunisia, I stayed for a few weeks with an American couple who lived out on the Bay of Tunis, in Carthage.

 

 

You know I'm a history/folklore nerd. So of course my eyes were spinning in my head. I had an old National Geographic image in my head of a Roman soldier and a Carthaginian soldier fighting sword to sword, with the city burning in the background, and Cato screaming Carthago delenda est!

 

 

Nowadays Carthage is a gentle archipelago of suburbs curving north and west of Tunis. A commuter train, the TGM, runs up and down among the communities on the way. I remember riding the train and seeing the Bay of Tunis littered with dirty-pink flamingoes, beautiful from a distance but filthy-looking close up.

 

 

I ended up living in the Tunis medina, which is a story in itself. But I had a copy of the Guide Bleu, the French travel guide, which listed every ruin in Carthage. And I had time on my hands.

 

 

So, over a period of months, I visited every single ruin in Carthage.

 

 

There are the remains of third-century Christian churches. There is the Altar of Saint Monica – just some stones in a cow-pasture, it took me forever to find them – where Monica prayed for her son Augustine before his departure for Rome. There are the spectacular (and largely restored) Baths of Antoninus. There is the Byrsa, where Queen Dido/Elissa measured out her kingdom with an oxhide. There is the nineteenth-century Cathedral of Saint Louis, on a hilltop, with a lovely view, perfect for a picnic.

 

 

And there is the Tophet.

 

 

I first encountered the word in a Kipling poem, and didn't know what it meant, although the context was grim. The Tophet in Carthage is a small field behind a gas-station, or it was in the mid-1980s. It is full of small stones, and a flat dark foundation.

 

 

This (according to history and legend) was where the Carthaginian god Moloch demanded that children be thrown into the sacrificial fire.

 

 

We are on debatable territory here. According to the Romans, the Carthaginians flung their infant children into the flames here, to satisfy Moloch. To make it worse (how can this be worse?), rich families bought children from poor families and sacrificed them, to avoid sacrificing their own.

 

 

Well, the winners always portray the losers as nastily as they can.

 

 

But the caretaker at the Tophet (after we gave him a small tip) showed us his collection of dozens of small clay jars, with the skeleton of an infant in each one.

 

 

Horrible, horrible.

 

 

Please tell me we've changed, and that human beings would never ever do such a vile thing again.

 

 

Although, frankly, I don't believe it. We're just as vile and stupid as they were. We'd do it again, if the situation arose, and we believed it fervently enough.

 

 

As Seinfeld said: “I hate people. They're the worst.”

 

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Insects I have known

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Every region has its insect population. Back in Washington state, we had all kinds of crazy critters: lime-green katydids, stinkbugs by the millions, spittlebugs in the weeds (there's nothing like taking a walk in summer though the tall grass and getting slimed all over with gobs of spit).

 

 

Rhode Island has nice dragonflies in summer, as well as meat-eating yellowjackets and teeny-tiny ants that boil by the millions out of cracks in the sidewalk.

 

 

Something bit me in Morocco.  I barely felt it, but within a few days my thigh turned blue, then purple, then red and orange in waves. “That's a spider bite, all right,” the Peace Corps nurse said.  It was eerily beautiful, like a sunset at sea. It took months for the colors to go away.

 

 

In Tunisia: bedbugs! You wake up and find three, four, five little tiny bits on your skin, all in a neat row. Live and let live, right? What's a little delicious blood among friends, am I right?

 

 

Once in Tunisia, I was in the living room with a bunch of friends. They were all seated; I was standing in the doorway. All at once something crawled out from under the sofa.  I was the only person who was looking down, so no one else saw it. It was maybe five inches long, and it was bright red, with a million little feet, and it was undulating across the floor in the most prehistorically evil way you can imagine. I yelped wordlessly (I think everyone thought I was having a stroke), picked up a nearby Arabic dictionary (the heaviest thing I could find) and threw it at the thing. I hit it, and it leapt (I do not kid you) into the air writhing and thrashing. I forget how we disposed of the corpse. Next day at work I described it to my friend Halim. “It was red?” he said. “Good thing you killed it. Those are pretty bad.”

 

 

I never found out if he was kidding or not. I didn't want to know.

 

 

On the lighter side: one lovely autumn day in northern Morocco, I was coming down a staircase on the outside of my apartment building (it was a converted villa, very nice). Everything was littered with falling leaves. As I ran my hand down the railing, I felt a leaf cling to my hand. I looked down at the leaf -

 

 

And the leaf looked back at me.

 

 

(You know those Disney nature films with bugs that camouflage themselves as sticks and fallen leaves? They're not making that stuff up.)

 

 

I shrieked. I jumped into the air, waving my hand and screaming. I was terrified. My friends, waiting for me at the base of the stairs, were in hysterics.

 

 

I probably frightened the poor bug into a heart attack.

 

 

And it serves him right for scaring me.

 

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Djerba

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Djerba is a big molar-shaped island lying off the southern coast of Tunisia, near the Libyan border. It is flat, flat, flat. It is littered with palm trees and resort hotels. The first time I went there, a friend and I flew down from Tunis together (we pretended to be married so we could get cheap tickets, and I hope someone at Tunisair is reading this, ha ha we fooled you!). We arrived at night and took a cab from the airport to the hotel, under a full moon, with those perfectly-spaced palm trees whisking silently by, and I thought: this is one of the most perfectly beautiful things I will ever see in my life.

 

 

The beach was very nice. We loved especially watching the Germans go splooshing into the water in the nude. It was wintertime, and the Mediterranean (while warmer than, say, Lake Michigan) is cold that time of year, so the Germans were pretty blue and shriveled when they came out of the water. But they always pretended they were enjoying it. Who knows? Maybe they were.

 

 

I had learned most of my meager Arabic in Morocco. All my Tunisian friends mocked my Moroccan vocabulary and accent, so I generally stuck to French. I was delighted to discover that Djerban Arabic was very similar to Moroccan Arabic, and – for the first time in Tunisia – I was more fluent than any of my acquaintances. I had long conversations with everyone, storekeepers and hoteliers and cabdrivers, and I was able to haggle like a tiger, yelling and waving my hands in the air, instead of whispering and simpering as I usually did.

 

 

There is a beautiful delicate old synagogue in Houmt-Souk, the island's main city. It's said to be the oldest synagogue in the world, and its Torah is one of the oldest in the world too. The building is plain on the outside but full of curvaceous intricate blue woodwork on the inside. For a few dollars, the Old Testament caretaker tottered over and brought the old Torah out for us to see.

 

 

In 2002, al-Qaeda blew up a truck outside the synagogue, killing several dozen people, mostly tourists.

 

 

But the old delicate synagogue still stands.

 

 

I hope I can visit it again someday.

 

And I hope it lasts another thousand years.

 

 

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Eating guts

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My father raised his own beef cattle, on a small scale. He'd buy one or two calves at a time, raise them to maturity, then have them slaughtered and butchered. We knew a butcher who'd take care of the whole operation – slaughtering, cutting up, grinding, wrapping – in return for a quarter of the entire animal. A small cow yields at least a couple of hundred pounds of meat (usually more), so there was plenty to go around, and our basement freezer was always full of steaks and roasts and hamburger.

 

Once, the butcher left a bucket on the back steps after the deed was done: liver, kidneys, oxtail, heart, et cetera. The tongue was lying on top, and there is nothing bigger or slimier-looking than a raw cow's tongue. “The neighbors can have 'em,” my mother said. “We don't eat guts.”

 

Well, times change. I discovered in adulthood that I have a taste for liver: it's rich and interesting. Partner, who does not share my enthusiasm, refers to it as “the cow's carburetor,” and reminds me from time to time that it's just a big meaty filter. That may well be. It's still pretty tasty.

 

A British friend in Morocco prepared kidneys for me more than once, and they're pretty savory too, though (after all) they're just filters too. I love the flavor of tongue, but the texture is a little gelatinous. (There used to be a restaurant in Tunis that did tongue in aspic as an appetizer; it was very pleasant, and I never had to worry about sharing it with anyone, once I explained what it was.) Oxtail's good, though gluey. Heart has a nice flavor, but I can't help noticing all those little veins. In Tunisia, I often ordered an egg-and-hot-peppers dish called ojja; I never really asked what was in it, so it wasn't until much later that I realized brains are a main ingredient.

 

 

And then there are all the other organs.

 

Once, in a restaurant in the Tunis medina, I was having lunch with my friend Ahmed, who was moaning as usual about his job, his love life, etc. He ordered fish, I ordered kamounia. Kamounia is a stew usually incorporating liver, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, etc.

 

But it doesn't have to be liver.

 

The waiter brought our dishes to the table. Ahmed kept talking while dissecting his fish (which was, as always, served whole). I glanced down at my plate and saw – well, a large whitish sphere.

 

Now what organ could that be?

 

Ahmed didn't notice. He just kept talking and sawing away at his fish. I thought about it for a long time. I'd always wondered what the organ in question tasted like.

 

So what the hell? I ate it.

 

 

Flavor: nothing special. Texture: a little spongy.

 

Just in case you were wondering.

 

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Tunisia

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Tunisia has been going through interesting times lately. I lived and worked there for a couple of years back in the 1980s, and I still keep in touch with some of the Tunisians I knew and worked with. They're all okay so far; they're posting on a daily basis on Facebook, and I wish my Arabic were better, because the videos and news stories are pretty interesting. I wish them, and all Tunisians, a prosperous and happy future.

 

I was there during the last few years of the presidency of Habib Bourguiba, the original President of the Tunisian Republic, le Combattant supreme. He was then in his eighties and very frail, but the country was stable and open (lots of coming and going to Europe; decent relations with most of the rest of the Arab world, with the exception of Libya – but in those days, no one got along with Libya; a broad and very effective educational system, which emphasized secondary education). It was, as we said in our office communications, “the crossroads of the Arab world.”

 

 

I lived in the old city, about two blocks from the Casbah. We were within hollering distance of two of the most famous and most beautiful of Tunis's mosques, the Zeitouna and the Youssef Dey. Both had real muezzins who intoned the call to prayer five times a day (most mosques use recordings), but the muezzins in those two mosques managed it so they never faced one another as they circled their parapets. Sometimes we'd go up to our rooftop at sunset to listen to the muezzins and watch the lights come on all over the city.

 

 

I shared the medina apartment with a number of different people, all women. The elderly landlord was baffled by this, but refused to admit it. Naturally he deferred to me as the head of the household. All of my female housemates were referred to, politely, as “Madame.”

 

There was a good restaurant not far from the Zeitouna mosque, on one of the roofed streets in the Medina. During Ramadan (when you can't eat while the sun is in the sky), we'd get a table around fifteen minutes before sundown and order harira, the thick wholesome traditional Ramadan soup. They'd serve it about five minutes before sundown. We (and all of the other diners in the restaurant) would toy with our spoons. Finally, faintly, we could hear the muezzin begin the sunset call from the Zeitouna mosque. After a minute or so, a little boy stationed down at the end of the street would frantically wave his arms, signalling to us that the call was completed, and we'd pick up our spoons and begin to eat.

 

 

My apartment had a very small balcony facing north. From there, we could see the summer thunderstorms lining up over the Mediterranean. They never came inland, but we saw the lightning flickering from the clouds at night.

 

 

One day in winter, there was a little sleet mixed in with the rain, and one of my Tunisian officemates turned to me as we watched the weather from the office window and asked: “Is this what snow is like?”

 

 

Toward the end of my time there, two of my friends drove me to an undisclosed destination. It turned out to be the very tip of Cap Blanc, the northernmost point of Africa, overlooking the Mediterranean. We watched the sun go down from there.

 

 

It was very beautiful.

 

 

Here's hoping for a peaceful and happy outcome to the Jasmine Revolution.

 

 

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