Thank God and Greyhound

For the last couple of days I've been visiting my beautiful Tajik classmate Zamira in St Paul and its been great. After a good catch-up after a long time, Zamira and I went to the science museum to see a lot of dead Germans in an exhibition called Body World ("more than 200 real human specimens"), and took some pictures in a park in the freezing cold.


Zamira

On the bus ride here, while motoring past the beautiful fields of rural Wisconsin, I was able to get through almost all of King Leopold's Ghost -- an amazing and tragic tale of the Belgian colonization of the Congo. Life is funny like that isn't it? In our hearts and minds we are in two (or more) continents at once, each just as real as the other.

A couple of guys in America once came up with the country and western song Thank God and Greyhound (She's Gone). One of the guys was from Indiana -- a neat kind of thought to have when riding on a Greyhound bus from Indiana, through Illinois and Wisconsin, and onto Minneapolis St Paul.

Thank God and Greyhound, you're gone
That load on my mind got lighter when you got on
That shiny old bus is a beautiful sight
With the black smoke a-rollin' up around the tail light
It may sound kinda cruel but I've been silent too long
Thank God and Greyhound, you're gone.

Where did she go, the woman of this song? Did she come to the rolling rural land of Wisconsin, where barns nestle up against groves of trees, basking in the late light of the day, fields of golden corn shimmering resplendently? Did she see family homes with devoted parents and content children, or homes with men who beat their women and children? Did she see the fading glory of the fall trees, green, yellow, orange and red? The endless stream of hotels? Did she smell the tawdry odors emanating from the McDonalds found everywhere, especially at Greyhound rest stops? Did she ride on a bus full of white college age students, like this one, or dominated by lower class blacks and whites, like the previous one headed into Chicago?

And what of the man who inspired the song? Did he love the woman? Were they lovers? Probably. Did he regard female orgasms as an expression of biological anarchy? Probably not. Did she think he was hick? Maybe.

What a vast and steamy metropolis America is, gleaming, rural, voluptuous, more compelling than it is forgettable.

Sprinting to God

Two rows of men were neatly lined up for prayer in the Al Noor Mosque in South Bend tonight. As is the custom, the women were partitioned off in another side of the prayer hall. The men, old and young, were close to one another as they submitted themselves to God. One father had his young boy with him, an enthusiastic little fellow who took great delight in sprinting joyously across the prayer carpets and up and down the stairs while the elders were solemnly praying. His magnificent smile and sparkling eyes rippled across the room as he positively galloped back and forth. Occasionally he made room for himself in the tiny gap between his father and another man, boldly squeezing in his small body, forcing the men to shuffle sideways. His head barely came up to their waists, but he knew how to pray and his lithe body made the older men's bowing and kneeling seem labourious in comparison.

The little boy reminded me of a story from my Jewish friend Eliyahu McLean. When Eliyahu was a student in New York, like many other students he eagerly anticipated meetings headed by Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), a highly prominent Rabbi in the Chabad/Lubavitch branch of Chassidic Judaism. Emotions were running high among a large proportion of Schneerson's followers that any day the Rabbi would announce publicly that he was the Messiah. Many of his followers believed he was the Messiah, and he did nothing to dissuade them of this belief. Students had their pagers set to alert them when Schneerson was to appear at a meeting. When they were studying together, their pagers would all go off at the same time, and they would sprint through the streets of Brooklyn to the large meeting hall. Despite Schneerson being partially paralysed by a stroke and unable to speak, his presence was nonetheless electrifying. He never did announce his role as Messiah, and today his followers are are divided as to his status. Chabad/Lubavitch Jews who believe he was merely a normal Rabbi have a normal sized picture of him on the wall of their synagogues, whereas those who believed he was indeed the Messiah typically make do with a truly enormous portrait of Schneerson.

Believers all make their own way to God, some a little quicker than others it seems.

The boy who learned to cook

I recently made a new friend from Kenya. He knows how to cook, being taught by his mother from a young age how to not only cook, but also wash dishes and generally make himself helpful around the house. When he was a small boy, he thought nothing of this, because for him this was normal. When he became older, however, and played with other boys, he realised this was far from normal. He realised the other boys had to do none of these things. Instead, the women and girls of the house did everything. He questioned the wisdom of his mother's approach, and began to rebel. One day his mother sat him, his three brothers and two sisters down and had a talk with them. She pointed out that as there were only two girls, and four boys, it was unfair to expect the girls to do all the work for the boys. She had a valid point there, my friend had to admit. But we all know that inequity is often insufficient motivation to change people's personal behaviours, especially if it involves them doing extra work. She then asked the children if one day they might like to be married.

"Of course!", replied all the children.

She said to the boys, "What do you think of a situation where one day you come home and you are hungry. There is a lot of food in the house, but you do not know how to prepare it. Imagine some reason why your wife cannot prepare the food for you. Maybe she is not there, or maybe she is not feeling well. How would you feel that all that food was sitting there, and you could do nothing?"

The boys admitted avoiding such a situation would be a good thing.

Then came the clincher. She asked the boys if they wanted to grow up to be real men.

"Of course!", replied the boys.

"Imagine if you cannot cook," she continued. "You can see that your wife can make all kinds of demands from you. She could say 'I want this and I want that, and if you want dinner, you have to do it for me'. If you are totally dependent on her for your food, she can do that. Do you want to be controlled by her? Do you think you would be a real man if she controlled your life like that?"

My friend learned to cook and clean. His mother is a clever woman.