Surge Music

What kind of friends do I have? For the last fifty years or so, they’ve probably all been running around, listening to Pavel Chesnokov, and sniggering to each other that, “hah, Marc still hasn’t caught on yet!” Damn it, guys, have I ever held back on you?

All right, let’s be charitable: you could be just as ignorant as my computer, but if so, you’d seriously be missing out on some beautiful music especially if, like me, you have a taste for Russian liturgical music.

At least, that’s what it turns out it’s called; I knew it only as all that gorgeous, mystical, complicated yet lulling music that—usually—all-male choirs sing. What I didn’t know was how complicated the whole affair is.

I am presuming, Dear Reader, that you had something else to do in your college days other than to pursue advanced studies in music theory, but me? Well, I hung out in conservatories a fair amount, and while it’s true that I spent more time in the practice rooms than the classrooms, I’m still unable to tell you what this, stolen from Wikipedia, really means:

Znamenny Chants are not written with notes (the so-called linear notation), but with special signs, called Znamëna (Russian for "marks", "banners") or Kryuki ("hooks"), as some shapes of these signs resemble hooks. Each sign may include the following components: a large black hook or a black stroke, several smaller black 'points' and 'commas' and lines near the hook or crossing the hook. Some signs may mean only one note, some 2 to 4 notes, and some a whole melody of more than 10 notes with a complicated rhythmic structure.

The stolp notation was developed in Kievan Rus' as an East Slavic refinement of the Byzantine neumatic musical notation.

The most notable feature of this notation system is that it records transitions of the melody, rather than notes. The signs also represent a mood and a gradation of how this part of melody is to be sung (tempo, strength, devotion, meekness, etc.) Every sign has its own name and also features as a spiritual symbol. For example, there is a specific sign, called "little dove" (Russian: голубчик (golubchik)), which represents two rising sounds, but which is also a symbol of the Holy Ghost.

Here is my best—and it’s not very good—translation. Think of a language, such as English, which works with letters. By combining three letters—c-a-t—we can create in everyone’s mind the animal now sleeping (wouldn’t he just?) on a pile of mail in the chair in front of me. And that’s also how Western music works, with notes arranged on a page. These notes tell you the speed and the pitch; other instructions tell you the overall speed of the piece (fast or slow) and how loudly or softly to sing.

There’s another—not very good, but who am I to say—way to do language, and that is to assign an image, a picture, that will represent a cat. That seems to me to be the equivalent of what the Russian chants use. Am I right? Sorry, but it’s my best guess. My second guess, by the way, is that this music has been handed down for centuries, and that the Znamëna are serving as general aids to the memory.

What I do know is that this music—and very frequently music spun off from it, think Arvo Pärt—is both mesmerizing and lulling. You want it to go on forever, and in a sense it does, for even when a piece ends, some part of it is still rolling out into the expanding heavens.

And when I say, “music spun off from the tradition,” I go straight back to Chesnokov, the professor of choral composition at the Conservatory of Moscow, and the director of the choir at the Cathedral of the Divine Savior, also in Moscow. And here is where the story darkens, since Chesnokov, after having written over 400 sacred compositions, was barred from writing church music after the Communist Revolution. That was bad, but he switched to secular music.

The final blow, however, came when the Russians decided in 1931 to tear down the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, of which Chesnokov was choir director. Chesnokov was desolate, and stopped composing music for the rest of his life. He died in 1944, in what was probably the darkest part of World War II.    

The story has a semi-happy ending: the cathedral was rebuilt and closely resembles the original. Here it is!

Famous in Cyprus

“Never a dull moment,” said Lady, looking up from painting her houses. We were sitting in her other store, Mi Pequeño San Juan. I was there, since there had been a mini-hurricane the night before; the water had backed up in the street, to such an extent that the pipes draining the roofs became vents for the street water. So the Poet’s Passage now has a swimming pool on the roof. What doesn’t it have?

Electricity.

OK—so Stephan and Naïa, tutor and tutee respectively, had moved to the front window, where there was sufficient light. I speak briefly to Zorba, Lady’s brother, who lives above the café and, now, under the swimming pool. He was up from one to five in the morning, coping with the situation.

It’s odd, the stuff that happens in the tropics that never seems to happen anywhere else. Where else does it rain so hard that the street water backs up the drains and floods the roofs? Or consider what Zorba reported:

“The transformers began exploding so bad it sounded like a war zone….”

Well, it’s been an improbable week, starting on Saturday, when a woman came into the café, eager to meet Lady, who is a poet as well as house painter. Lady had left a few minutes before to go to the movies with Naïa, and the woman was crestfallen. So she fell back on second best: me.

“I’m from Cyprus, but I’m here for a convention of chiropractors,” she said. So we chatted; she’s a music teacher and a poet, but not, it turned out, a chiropractor. That’s her husband.

“Hey, Marc, did you know I’m famous in Cyprus?” said Lady casually, a couple days later.

“What?”

“Yeah, there was this lady hanging around the café, and she couldn’t wait to meet me. Elizabeth kept calling me, asking when I was going to get there.”

Elizabeth being the manager of the gift shop….

“So she says everybody in Cyprus—well, everybody who reads poetry, that is—knows me and reads me. And when they heard she was going to Puerto Rico, they all got jealous and told her she HAD to meet me. Who knew? I’m famous in Cyprus!”

“Wow!”

“So then she asked, would I be willing to go to Cyprus, to give a lecture? So I told her: two first class tickets, and a week’s stay in a hotel. You wanna go?”

This is, of course, improbable.

As was my reaction, several hours later.

It was Monday, you see, and I had woken late, and was out of sorts. And then I had gone to the café, which now has air conditioning (after a couple months without), but Internet? It had checked out several days before.

All of that created a peculiarly excellent agar for a petri dish overflowing with….

A.   Envy

B.    Resentment

C.    Self-Pity

D.   Annoyance

E.     All of the above, and by the way? This is the answer….

Why, I raged, should Lady get to be famous in Cyprus when I have written what the six people who have read Iguanas say is a great, a wonderful, a landmark book, destined to blaze brightly against the literary skies of not just Wisconsin, not the United States, but verily, the entire world—and assuredly the whole of the solar system. What was so special about her? What about me? Sure, she’s been at it for twenty years, and I only drifted in the door—and the back door at that—a couple years ago, but WHAT ABOUT ME! At this point, I am raging in circles in the living room.

“Dammit, people love her poetry so much, they’ve even tattooed it on themselves! Remember that lady who came into the coffee shop and peeled her shirt down? And there it was—still red and glistening: Little by Little. Dammit, and then Lady has to sit down and remark that it’s the SECOND time someone has tattooed her poetry on themselves. Dammit!”

The cats scatter….

I stormed up the street, and tore into her shop.

“I just want you to know,” I said meanly, “that if the entire ISLAND of Cyprus came outside and begged me to be famous there, I WOULD SAY NO!!!”

“Marc?”

Well, I thought of Franny, who had once remarked, “well, we’re just going to have to meet at my current level of immaturity….” She had been playing a board game with Tyler, her 10-year old grandson, and there was a dispute about the rules. He dug his heels in, she dug her heels in, and if Jeanne hadn’t dragged Franny off by the ears to the kitchen, they’d still be at it.

“Well, I would,” I said defensively, and then turned to go.

Lady knows—sometimes words don’t help things; she hugs me instead.

“Hey, Marc, you see that lady over there?”

It’s the next morning, and yes, I had seen the lady, and had noted that she was cachectic—a fancy way of saying that she was looking only slightly better than your average concentration camp victim.

“She’s only got twenty days to live—that’s what her husband told me. He called and asked if it would be OK if they came from Portland and spent her last days in the café. See? Her whole family is there….”

It comes back to me—those days of waiting for the end, of holding on and letting go, of having your love torn out of you, wrenched away, of screaming silently and going away to wail in the woods and coming back and coping again until the next time you had to vent it.

There’s something else as well, something almost unbearable to say: you want your loved one to die.

Not all of you, not even most of you. But there is a part of you saying, “if it has to be—and I know perfectly well that it does—then for God’s sake GET IT OVER WITH! Because I cannot stand this pain, and it’s doing her no good at all anyway….”

You’re living with every last nerve ending firing standing next to a volcano in a hurricane. Oh, and did I mention the earthquake? In these moments, you are as close to the life source as you will ever be.

And they had come to Lady’s café? At such a moment?

OK, I decide.

She can be famous in Cyprus….

Ode to Wal-Mart

It’s a curious matter—for the last two days, I have had waking dreams in which I was back working at Wal-Mart. OK—that’s explicable: after you have spent seven years of immersion therapy, you don’t come out of it unchanged.

Immersion because, physically, the building swallowed you up. True, it was capable of holding 600 workers, or so, plus providing a cafeteria and a huge auditorium, but it only had five or six windows, all of which were in the cafeteria. But so photophobic were we—note that pronoun there—that we kept them covered with translucent hurricane shutters, no matter what time of the year, or what chance there could be of a hurricane.

It was more than that. There was never a meeting in which the corporate “culture” wasn’t trotted out, but it was a culture honored in word only. Don’t think, however, that there wasn’t a true culture operating—one very much against the official, expressed culture. It wasn’t about doing your work or producing something, it was about going along with the herd, sending defensive emails, printing them, and then producing them, if anyone attacking the herd happened to single you out for the kill.

You ran, ideally, as much inside the herd as possible, since obviously the people on the outside, or—God forbid—the stragglers behind, were the logical victims to be picked off. And it was also true—you didn’t want to be out front. So that meant never, ever thinking outside the box, no matter how often it was urged on you.

This was a lesson lost on me. At one point in some meeting, the quality assurance lady gave a talk in which she stressed that fruits and vegetables must be rigorously kept away from meats, with their potentially leaking cellophane packages. All of that dripping blood, you see, is a perfect medium….

‘So why do we have the shopping carts that we do?’ I was thinking.

“You see, we have the basket on the right side of the cart in red, with pictures of meat cuts and chicken and so on—so that we don’t have to translate into Chinese or Korean or whatever for our foreign markets. And on the left side, we have a green basket, with pictures of bananas and apples and oranges. See? We’ll be an industry leader! We’ll save countless lives! We’ll reduce the number of food poisoning incidents by 333%!”

“We’ll see, Marc….”

That was five years ago, and if you go, as I did last week, into Wal-Mart today? The same stupid carts from the 1950’s, in which fruit and vegetables and meats can fornicate as much as we people ever did in the sixties.

Even after two-and-a-half years away from it, I still think of it, occasionally, and that makes sense to me. But here’s my question—why was it that yesterday, I dreamed of being chased down, and told that there was an important meeting, an urgent meeting, a mandatory meeting, at which everybody but guess-who was? And when I got to the meeting? The topic was poetry.

Yes, poetry. And the good Human Resources ladies (my apologies to the other three men in department) had done their best, which…

…wasn’t very good.

One speaker was awful, in fact. She was cowering behind a PowerPoint presentation with mutilated, hideous slides that were unreadable and anyway swung about unpredictably. Oh, and the speaker was mumbling into the microphone and painfully nervous.

This morning’s dream?

Elizabeth, the woman who first hired me, has told me to go to Sam’s Club, where I am to teach math. OK—do that, leave for lunch, get back, start to grade the tests that I have given. Except that—being math—I have no idea what answer is right. Elizabeth reappears and tells me that she’s sure I’ll have some pertinent remarks about poetry.

I protest—I know nothing about poetry. “Certainly, you do,” she returns. At this point I wake up.

I wake up wondering—has Wal-Mart decided to do to poetry what they did to the grocery business, which was to trample it? Or am I to write poems about Wal-Mart?

Confession: I have just made the attempt, and there isn’t much there.

It was a time in my life when the poetic impulse, or any creative impulse, was thoroughly squelched. Except that, in a curious way, it wasn’t. I am perhaps the only person you’ll ever meet who designed and created an office-wide ESL website in PowerPoint, complete with narrated lessons, quizzes, games. I devised a word-of-the-day scheme that I remember, even now, as being quite beautiful. And then, of course, there were all those batty but good ideas—like the new and improved shopping cart—that somehow never got anywhere.

I am the person least suited to corporate America, and after I got used to that realization, I then realized: the ax would fall when it would fall, so really, there wasn’t much sense worrying about it. I could have tried harder, I suppose: tried to fit in more, gone to more meetings, learned to love the box. But why bother?

Fear and lethargy

Walked hand in hand down

The grey-clad aisle,

Past the cubicles where

Bamboo shoots pointed up

To the florescent lights,

Where workers slouched

Eyes glazed, minds numbed

Their hands caressing the mouse…

And Crest snuggled, in

Three thousand stores,

Six inches to the left of

The Colgate, though in fact

The two had hated each other for years,

Despite their wives having gone to

School together….

And their kids?

After never having spoken,

They developed a strange

Taste for dope,

Which could be satisfied,

After hours

Underneath the gondola,

That metal rack that sails

Down the aisles of

Big box stores,

Propelled by mustachioed black-haired

Blue and white striped burly

Consumers, ardent, burning           

Maddened to sample the new

16-ounce Crest—24 hour cavity protection!

O Sole Mio, sing the packages,

And the waves recede,

All passion spent.

Right! Did it!

The Mufti Speaks Out!

Yeah?

I can give you the standard line, because I’m a liberal, I’m (mostly) politically correct, and, besides, who hasn’t heard it? So here goes:

Islam is a religion of peace and love, there is no place either in the Quran or in the practice of the religion for violence against women or those who do not share the faith.

Then it goes further: Islam, unlike Christian religions, is non-hierarchical. There is no pope, no Archbishop of Canterbury who speaks for the believers. Rather, each Imam is the spiritual head and teacher of a mosque or university. Yes, some mosques for historical or theological reasons are more important than others, and thus some imams are more prominent than others, but no imam speaks for all.

How convenient!

I say this because the world has sat around for three weeks and watched as the Nigerian government did nothing about getting the 276 still-missing kidnapped girls freed from their captors, members of a group called Boko Haram. The group attacked the girls at bedtime in their boarding school, and the scene must have been horrific. And the head of the group issued a rambling-à la-bin-Laden speech promising to sell these girls in the marketplace. Oh, and that’s no idle threat, since Nigeria is a major…well, here’s NBC News on the subject:

The Global Slavery Index, an annual survey by the Australian anti-trafficking group the Walk Free Foundation, ranks Nigeria fourth on its list of nations with the highest number of people living in “modern slavery,” behind India, China and Pakistan.   

Right—so all the world has to sit around and watch this atrocity, but that’s not all. Because God forbid we should even breathe the suggestion—I’ll take a sledgehammer to the keyboard after I write this—that there’s something more than usually blood thirst about Islam. Readers, you’re my witnesses—I have more than once tsk-tsked the Catholic Church, and I refuse to comment on reports that this blog was more than a little responsible for the unprecedented resignation of Ben 16, or whatever the number was. My point? Not too many Christians out there are carrying out attacks on girls’ schools.

Oh, and there’s another thing. Since no one can speak for this religion, and since you, Dear Reader, are very likely doing other things, like working to pay your bills and raising children, then you have to assume that some imams out there are speaking out and decrying this atrocity….

Are they?

It’s hardly scientific, what I’m doing, but it’s more than I’ve seen anyone else do. I googled “top imams“ and got this link from ranker.com.

Are they really the top imams? Who knows, but I took each one of the top ten and googled his name (a curious lack of women in the group, by the way) and the words “Boko Haram.” And—perhaps unfairly—I gave them just one page of search, under the assumption first that it was a fairly narrow search and, second, that it was certainly topical.

So here it goes:

1. Abdul Rahmen al-Sudais is described in Wikipedia thus:

Abdul Rahman Ibn Abdul Aziz as-Sudais (Arabic: عبد الرحمن السديس‎ (ʻAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʻAbd al-Aziz as-Sudais), born Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1960)[1] is the imam of the Grand mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and was the "Islamic Personality Of the Year" in 2005. Al-Sudais has called for efforts to combat terrorism,[2][3] preached Islam's opposition to "explosions and terrorism",[4] and has called for peaceful inter-faith dialogue.

OK—the Google search turned up nothing related to Boko Haram, but did, at the bottom of the page, have this:

Despite his sectarian, racist incitements that Jews are “scum…rats…pigs and monkeys,” the chief cleric of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al Sudais, has been welcomed and invited to preach at the East London mosque in Whitechapel tonight, Tuesday evening, 4 August 2009.

Al-Sudais, who has close ties to the Saudi elite, has also insulted Christians and Hindus, referring disparagingly to Christians as “cross-worshippers” and Hindus as “idol worshippers”.

He has been banned from Canada for his anti-Semitism.

Guys? The imam of the Grand mosque in Mecca has been banned in Canada? Not looking good.

2. Abdul Rauf, whom you will know as the Ground Zero imam. In fact, the search was a bit problematic, since there are a basketball player and a Nigerian politician with almost identical names. So I added “Imam Abdul Rauf Boko Haram” and hit the enter button.

And I’m pleased to tell you, the Imam has been tweeting up a storm: “Six reasons the World Should Demand Action” he tweeted yesterday. But any public statements? New conferences? Op-Ed pieces? No, though there was this:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Accused of Embezzling Millions from Mosque Fund

Right—when a bunch of his guys abscond with over two hundred girls, what did this guy do? He tweeted!

3. Imam Abdul Wahid Pedersen is a Danish guy, and half of the search results were in…Danish. Right, but there didn’t seem to be anything much in the way of denunciations on the screen, though I dropped in on the Wikipedia article on him, and discovered that he was convicted and sentenced to over a year in prison for “buying and selling 5kg of hashish.” But look, he was 29 at the time (though he had converted to Islam a year earlier….)

4. No, there’s nothing recent about this guy from Queens—but I do give you this, from the Wikipedia article on him….

Ahmad Wais Afzali (b. 1972 (age 41–42)) is an imam, formerly from Queens, New York. He was deported from the United States in 2010 as part of a plea bargain after lying to the American FBI regarding a conversation he had held with acquaintance Najibullah Zazi,[1] a man later convicted of terrorism charges in the United States.

Guys?

5. Imam Ahmed Yassin—OK, this guy was a problem, though maybe it’s just that my brain has gotten dazed by so much ole-time religion. The problem? I kept getting results for Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and I didn’t think I wanted that. But I pursued the sheik, and he may be our man. And who was he? A founder of Hamas, who died in 2004.

OK—look, I was going to be fair. My father, I have no doubt, would have gotten all the way down the list of the top ten imams: he would have found some imam willing to step up to the plate and bat one for religious moderation. And in fact, I can report that the Egyptian mufti (and wouldn’t it be fun, by the way, to be a mufti? Just for a day or two, you know, kind of check it out…)....

Sorry, I was about to tell you that the mufti has come out and “slammed” Boko Haram! Hah! Take that!

I started out skeptical, but guess what? That’s fallen completely by the wayside!

Whew….

So, unable to endure any more, I have called my sports consultant, who happens to be my brother.

“Johnny, what do you call it when one team is getting slaughtered and nobody can stand it any more?”

“The mercy rule.”

Mercy, indeed!

Judgement down the Centuries

She was, by all accounts, a pretty tough woman, this woman born in 1881 on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin to a 58-year old man and 35-year old woman, both immigrants from Norway.
 

She was my father’s mother; her name was Sarah Gustava Tillotson, though her father was Ole Trondson Tillorson. Had the name been changed in Ellis Island? Or was Ellis Island even operating at that time? Because the family came in the first or second wave of immigrants: her father’s first child, Henry, was born in New York in July of 1846.

I barely knew her, though I distinctly recall having to eat beet greens that had been boiled from about the beginning of time. And I remember that her hair was falling out, probably due to the chemotherapy she was taking at the time; she died of cancer when I was ten.

“She was a fine woman,” said my mother, with real respect in her voice. And the feeling must have been mutual; apparently my grandmother had remarked, when told that my mother couldn’t come to a family gathering, “but how will we have any fun?”

So I don’t know the woman, and I may not even know the stories. Because I seem to recall that she heard that the ladies in church were scoffing that she was too poor to buy a car. So what did she do? Went out, bought a Cadillac, drove it to church, and then drove it back. Then she parked it on cinder blocks in the front yard.

True? Cousin Ruthie says no, and she should know, being slightly older than I, and having known the woman.

OK—so what about the story about my father, who wanted a quarter to go to the movies? “Move the woodpile to the side of the house,” said his mother, “then come back for instructions.” Jack appeared half an hour later.

“Now move it back,” she said.

She was a religious woman, this lady who endowed a wing in a Chicago children’s hospital, and who bestowed an annuity from the Moody Bible Institute on my mother. The annuity was for twenty-five dollars or so; notwithstanding, the institute was in the habit of sending a man out every year to make sure that Franny was still living. Invariably, he arrived in January; just as invariably, he got stuck in a snow bank on the long road to my mother’s house.

“Would you like to join me in prayer,” the man would ask.

“No,” my mother would reply. But pleasantly….

“She was tall, and ramrod straight, and pretty unapproachable,” said John, my brother, who remembers her, apparently, just as vaguely.

What is it about old pictures? Did she believe, when this was taken, that this would be one of the few photos of her that would be taken, photography being—relatively—in its infancy? She looks out at us, as if challenging us. Have we measured up? Are we slackers? Giving in to vice?

I do my best, or so I think. I have my collection of people to whom I give money—one of whom invariably asks for more. I try not to cheat or steal or bear false witness.

Why do I think that’s not enough?

Note to Naïa's Uncles

“Nico told me I should send your blog to Naïa’s uncles,” said Lady, the owner of the café and mother of 12-year old Naïa. “They think I am ruining her….”

“Why,” I asked, ”she seems perfectly fine to me.”

“Well, they say I’m doing a terrible thing by home-schooling her. They say that she needs contact with other kids, and that she won’t get socialized, and I don’t know what all. Anyway, I’m a terrible mother.”

“Naïa’s more normal than I am,” I say. “At least on the face of it. I think kids are tremendous conformists, most of them. Remember that time I spilled something, and we had that argument about the “wet caution floor” sign?”

“Hunh?”

“Maybe you were off painting houses,” I said.

Yes, Lady is also a house painter, but a sensible woman as well. So why get outside and climb ladders in the blazing tropical heat when you can sit at the bar, drink a beer, chat with passersby, and paint little decorative plaster casitas? Lady does good business selling these for sixty bucks or so—given the obvious advantages, you’ve got to be seriously dumb to do the other kind.

“Anyway, I spilled some water, and it was a big thing at Wal-Mart: everyone, even the English teacher, knew that if you spilled water, one person had to stay at the site and warn people, the other person had to get the “wet caution floor” sign.”

“Wet caution floor?”

“What is this, genetic? Or is it a girl thing? Haven’t you ever read your own sign?’

Of course I have to go get the sign—why can’t I back away from a fight?—and we take a look at it. You’ve seen it a zillion times, of course, and if I had Internet—it’s Sunday, so the damn thing is taking the day off—I’d show you a picture of it. But there it was, the yellow collapsible thing that says:

Wet

Caution

Floor

“Caution, wet floor,” says Lady.

Right, Marc is now in complete fight or flight, because guess what? I know the argument, which is that the “caution,” being bigger, means that it goes first. It’s sort of the bully argument.

“Caution, wet floor,” repeats Lady, and you know what? I decide to drop it….

“Anyway, I think Naïa has great social skills,” I say. “Every time someone comes to talk to Neruda, she runs over and gives them an in-service on the bird. Complete strangers, and she’s chatting away. I was seven before I worked up the courage to address my own mother….”

Neruda, at least in the Poet’s Passage, is the green Dominican parrot who, having nothing else to do, squawks at any passerby.

“Yeah?”

“Well, not really, but I was really shy. The point being that Naïa talks to anyone, but she’s also pretty savvy.”

“Well, Nico wants to put her in the Episcopal Cathedral School…”

“WHAT?!”

I see these kids on the bus, and they’re all wearing a little blue uniforms and black Mary Jane shoes. Naïa wearing flowing blouses, pants, and Crocs. If it were the sixties, you’d find her on Haight-Ashbury. The Episcopal Cathedral School is definitely Junior League. 

“Well, she’d get a good traditional education,” says Lady.

“To my mind, she’s already getting a good, traditional education. I’m amazed, really, that nothing seems to have changed in the half-century since I was in school. You know, she has spelling tests—of which I approve, generally—but I really wonder about that. Short of writing thank-you notes to Michelle Obama for a lovely dinner, is she ever going to need traditional spelling? Spell check has done away with that, in a sense.”

“So what would you do?”

“Put a lot more attention on those words like “their / there / they’re” or “adapt / adopt”—words that have to be used correctly, and can’t be detected by spell check. Anyway, it’s incredible, some of the stuff she has to learn.”

“Like what?”

“’Lebanon is a country roughly the size of New Jersey’,” I recite.

“Hunh?”

“It’s one of the sentences I heard her tutor read her, and I thought it was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard.”

“Why?”

“Look, has she ever been to New Jersey? How many kids are reading that sentence and memorizing it, so that they can answer the question: ‘What is the approximate size of Lebanon?’ on the test. Anyway, why don’t they teach her the real dope on Lebanon?”

“And that is?”

“Lebanon was a paradise for centuries, a paradise that is part of the region called the Levant. And it was famous for its civilization, for tolerating all religions, all views, for accepting Jews, Christians, Muslims equally. People walked around, arm in arm, ideological enemies cordially having passionate discourse on the most violence-producing topics, and eating dates!”

“Yeah?” says Lady, who has a good nose for when I go a little off.

“OK, but you know what I mean.”

“So what happened?”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

“You know, that’s exactly the question I would ask Naïa. How, in a remarkably short time, did the country fall into a terrible civil war? What happened? Then I’d go off and write something and she’d research it and come back tell me. But telling Naïa that Lebanon is the size….”

“Hey, why don’t you tutor Naïa?”

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “First, I’m not good with kids. Second, well, Naïa takes school with all the seriousness it deserves. She wants to be told the approximate size of Lebanon, because it’s perfectly easy to park that fact in her mind just long enough to drive it out onto the test. Remember her answer when I asked her the state capital of Oregon?”

“What?”

“That was last year!”

It’s not just the Levant, I think. How fragile all societies are! How changing one thing would change everything—what if Jorge were not making the coffee and Neruda were not squawking and Lorca, the toy Chihuahua, were not begging for food? Could we have the Poet’s Passage without Naïa, flopped on her tummy, absorbing the fact of the approximate size of Lebanon?

She ain’t going anywhere!