Forget About It

Twice within a couple of days on our road trip through Mississippi attempting to pay for coffee, I was told to forget about it, the phrase pronounced as one word. This was a new experience for me. The first time was on a warm, breezy afternoon in Tupelo at Sweet Peppers Deli. We wanted to stick around after lunch to use the free Wi-Fi on the patio, so we ordered two coffees. The African-American waitress brought large red mugs of delicious java and said, “Forget about it” when we offered the cash. A little later she brought us two more mugs!

The second time was when I was in a chain restaurant, Waffle House, outside Jackson in the take-out line. When it was my turn, the African-American waitress filled both travel mugs to the brim, asked me if I needed cream and sugar, and said, “forget about it,” when I tried to hand her a twenty. “Forget about it,” I repeated. One thing to have paid for a nice lunch and be “comp’d” coffees, but at a chain restaurant when it’s all I’m having, I thought. The African-American man at the counter chuckled at my reaction. The waitress repeated it so that I understood not to insist on paying. I thanked her and left.

That phrase stayed in my mind as I visited historic landmarks along our route to New Orleans. One was the mural depicting the famous eleven-year boycott of local businesses by the African-Americans of Port Gibson, Mississippi. The town’s main street retains the commercial scars of that time with empty storefronts and faded signs, but the Supreme Court ruled that the boycott was legal and many of the demands of those activists have been met.

African-Americans walking around today come from a line of ancestors who have survived generations of violence, injustice and agony. This part of our national story is so alive in Mississippi. Natchez, for example, a lovely river town of fine homes and gardens, had slaves bought and sold on most every corner of the downtown at one time.

At morning coffee on fine spring mornings, smile at your neighbor and give a stranger a cup of coffee to start the day right. I’m beginning to understand something about survival and the New South where, at least superficially, there is some harmony and mutual concern across color lines.

Out of My Skin

Twelve days on the road and plenty of lessons. First, do not apply sunscreen above eye level. How many times do I have to feel that stinging ooze in my eyes to remember? Also, take tissue everywhere – car, bag, bike, and backpack. I had none on first three bike rides: I’ve improved my spitting ten-fold.

More significantly, do not entrust the health of your bike to your bike guys even if it’s right out of the shop. Test it. The front derailleur was stuck leaving me no low gears. Better than its being stuck in low as there are some hefty hills on the northern, Tennessee end of the Natchez Trace Parkway where we started outside of Nashville. Brian at Bicycle Pacelines in Tupelo replaced the cable fast and cheap today.

Volunteer travel is about looking for challenges though, and I found mine the second afternoon 700 miles from home. Taking a walk around my friend’s neighborhood outside Cincinnati before she arrived, I realized how uncomfortable I was where African-Americans live. I got a little lost in the twisting turns of the side streets and sensed that a man who’d passed me and turned his car around was following me on foot. I was embarrassed by my reaction. He yelled. He’d spotted his runaway dog. Chewed that dog out just like I do mine when she takes off. I stayed in the neighborhood long enough to see how good a place it is.

Then I had the same reaction in Jackson, Tennessee. Out walking at end of the afternoon near our motel on the strip, I realized everybody else was African American. Wished I’d left my wallet at home and brought a cell. Broad daylight on a busy street didn’t matter. The next day a friend we stayed with in the Ozarks of Missouri chided me at one point of a heated discussion about where America is headed by reminding me I live in Vermont.

What do I know about what most Americans believe? And what do I know about living out of my skin color and culture living in rural northeastern U.S.? I’ve got a lot to learn before I live the infinite oneness of the world. Maybe this feeling and that question are a start.

Leaving Home

I set out from Vermont March 15 in car with husband, dog, bikes, and tent with an itinerary taking us to the Gulf of Mexico and back again over four weeks time. Nothing wrong with where I live except for the sporadic nature of spring north of Albany, New York. However, I longed for a change, the kind that needs forcing with warmth and stronger light. For that, heading south was the answer. Within a day’s drive we had a motel room close to the shores of Erie, PA. From the empty lot next door I heard the first of the spring peepers, a sure sign of the turning of the earth.

The trip meant a last scheduled talk with my friend in Kabul for a while. Hard to know when and where I can get online during the hours she is available. Before I left we discussed a radio interview of an orthodox Jewish woman, Chani Ovadva, on NPR’s “The Story” on March 13th.

Chani described leaving her faith shortly after completing training to teach in a religious school. She’d had to find a different job, of course, and when she was ready to make the break she went from work to her new life in an apartment without telling her parents. Her decision to choose what life to lead in spite of the cost reminded me of my friend’s decision to leave her family and their country of refuge to return to Afghanistan alone.

How much my friend has changed since leaving home at about Chani’s age. When under a different roof, how much easier it is to question the beliefs and assumptions of our elders. Religious leaders around the globe forbid adult children from leaving their home with anything less than their parents’ blessing knowing how transformative it can be.

The experiences of young Afghans outside the strict parameters of how to be a pious Muslim, as interpreted by today’s leaders, will  challenge and eventually change their society. I shiver a bit in the early morning air of March in Pennsylvania. I am looking forward to subtle changes in myself and the huge changes that will transform Afghanistan.

Cycles

The world sounds livelier, younger, awake. The snow geese are headed here on their way to Canada’s northern tundra for nesting. Spring is breaking through Vermont’s  winter-lite.

It’s happening in Kabul too where the winter was severe. Yes, due to snowfall the power was off from morning till night yesterday  where my friend lives, but it is not as cold, not as dark, and warmer weather is expected this week.

An American leaves his barracks after midnight, bursts into several Afghan homes and kills 16 people in cold blood. It’s hard not to think of this as a sick reaction to the Afghan demand that NATO cease its night raids. In the wake of the Quran burning and the subsequent death of 30 Afghans in the protests, it’s not impossible. The unimaginable happens in war.

We dread the news, my friend and I. We talk  Nowruz (New Day), spring’s official arrival March 21 and the beginning of the new year . Traditions among Afghanistan’s peoples vary, but house-cleaning, making/buying of new clothes for the whole family, preparing or buying special foods, and visiting family and friends  are common. More importantly, it is time to for making peace, reconciling with relatives and neighbors, and starting fresh.

All of us recognize the arrival of spring and renew our relationship with the natural world to some degree. In the spirit of this awareness, let’s remember that countries too go through cycles. This is not the first time that Afghan-American relations have been on the rocks, and it will not be the last. That’s doesn’t mean they will always be so. Change is in the air.

One Kind Gesture

An article about the burning of Qurans in Parwan, Afghanistan, in the New York Times Asia Pacific March 2 generated a lively debate among its readers. I was happy to see the first comment echo that of my Afghan friend in Kabul who believes the Quran in not Islam and its destruction not worth injury or death of any human being.

From there the comments veered left and right, but they share our desperation about U.S. losses in this distant land. To sum up a few dozen of them: to apologize is weak; get out and bomb Taliban back to Stone Age as needed; support our troops regardless; punish the soldiers who undermined this mission; President Obama must go.

Muslims, “they,” Afghans, believe, say, think, do – many comments lump them together as one monolithic body. No one asks, who is protesting? Who is behind the men in the street? What power-seekers are being served?

Would readers who feel all Afghan Muslims think alike in turn want to be identified with the spokespersons for Occupy Wall Street for example? We have been brought close to economic ruin by our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and suffered permanent injuries and deaths. How can we be patient while our President apologizes and the U.S. military investigates its own operation?

An Afghan friend decided to leave Iran because of discrimination against Afghans there. In leaving permanently the only home he’d known in his twenty years, he had to pack carefully.  He took just three things. The first was a photo album from his school days to remind him of the good times, and the second his library card identifying him as Afghan. This to remind him why he had left. The last was a birthday card from a boy in his class, an Iranian, to remind him that not all Iranian people are against Afghans.

Not all Afghans are against Americans or even the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Beyond the Fire of Burning Symbols

A college-age student friend in Kabul and I discussed the protests after word got out of smoldering Qurans at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. With our different news sources, we couldn’t agree on why this had happened, only that it had. The student was certain NATO forces had intentionally burned them and had intended for Afghans to discover their holy books in the trash. I’d gathered that both the burning and the discovery were more a failure in judgment. The student had heard nothing of the use of Qurans by prisoners to send messages.

We turned to the protests plaguing the country. This friend experiences how they worsen security and speculates this as a motive for the burning.

“This is really stupid!” my friend declared.

“The burning?” I asked to be certain that was her point.

“No, no, Afghan protests. Six have been killed and thirty wounded. Three already dead today. The dead leave their families without a breadwinner, and that is very hard here.”

An Afghan who believed foreign forces had deliberately insulted Afghans, perhaps to set off violent protests, and yet who was more disturbed by the Afghan response. Why?

“Quran means human,” the student continued. “Quran is in your heart, not in a book. Mohammed taught that books are not Islam; I am Islam. “

What about flag burning? My friend reminded me burning the American flag is part of Iranians’ annual celebration of their Revolution. “This doesn’t affect my country one way or the other,” I suggest. My friend relays a family saying about such activities: “It may destroy the donkey’s saddle, but leaves the donkey untouched.”

We share a smile, and, inside our hearts and minds, we hold our deepest values safe from the masses that react impulsively and violently around us.

A Mindful List

Going cold turkey is not working.  List-making is a multi-tasker’s charm, and its results admired by those a safe distance from what it takes to pull off. Not admired so much by those closer. As one teacher/author said, “My husband wants to know where that centered, soothing voice is that I use in my books?” Was he noting her high-shrilled calls for help around the house, impatience with roadblocks at work?

How to ease out of the tyrannical clutches of my To-Do list?

A canvas bag loaned to a college student friend was returned recently during her whirlwind visit. When I later noticed there was something in the bag, I found a copy of Mindful Living with Awareness and Compassion. Gift?  Mistake? I didn’t ask, but now that I’ve read it, don’t have to. It is a gift. It describes one way out of my list-making obsession in the column A Mindful Calendar by Janice Marturano. The writer suggests we pay attention to sensations in our bodies while looking at a single calendar page from our schedule. If we’re able to notice how our bodies are reacting with tension, we start asking questions.

I’ll substitute list for calendar and concentrate on sensation in my jaw while asking

• is this what I want to do
• what are the consequences of not doing this
• will it bring joy
• does it square with my beliefs about how to live

The questions will change over time. I’ll make mindful choices. The list will shrink. One item is not a list, and  surely I can remember one thing I want to do.