Phon

<By Emma Scirocco>

When I left Italy at the age of nineteen I vowed to reject three rather specific things: Ancient Greek, criticism towards my excessively pale skin, and hair driers. You may think I was young and rash. But this is not a story about rashness, and seven years down the line, I think the resolution has served me rather well. Nightmares featuring sweat-inducing in-class Thucydides translations keep me from idealizing Italy just as effectively as unemployment rates. Also, whenever I feel like an outsider in some foreign place, I remember how people in my own country often suggest I go get myself a tan to mask the awful Nordic complexion I inherited from my American mother. Finally, having grown up in a country where blow-drying one’s hair is seen as a panacea for all diseases, nothing feels more like freedom than walking around with wet hair.

So you see, it was especially unpleasant for me to accept that—in the middle of Laos—I might be smothered at any moment by a huge backpack containing a hair drier. Of course, the fact that the pack was my friend’s only made it worse.

“Cazzo,” I muttered as the bus hit the second pothole in less than a minute causing my friend’s backpack to slide off the stack of baggage behind me and onto my head. The French guy who shared the cramped seats in the back section of the bus with me and the large backpacks exclaimed “Ah! Italiano!” He seemed delighted at my swearing. His girlfriend’s teeth glistened cheerfully next to him. How could they ever be so cheerful while sitting among backpacks that threatened to topple at any minute was a mystery. I smiled back as I elbowed the pack away from my neck.

Sweat was dripping from knees. I wasn’t sure what heat-strokes feel like, but I decided that if I breathed slowly enough I wouldn’t find out.

“I wish there were a window back here,” I remarked as casually as possible. They nodded understandingly and pointed at the sweat-stains on their shirts. I shifted uneasily trying to put some space between me and Serena’s pack. It was heavy with unnecessary objects—like hair driers. The French couple, on the other hand, didn’t know Serena and was happy to ignore her pack.

“..And is this your first time in South-East Asia?”

I nodded. I glanced outside the window onto the dusty road and the burnt fields. “You?”

“Ah, yes, we travel for.. troi week already? N’est pas cherie? Oui, three week. Cambodia, Vietnam, now Laos. But we do not want to stay here, we go to la Thailand.”

Ah, they are going to Thailand. Typical destination for Europeans. Not so cool, I decided. It was so hot on the bus I couldn’t move. I also couldn’t move because I risked making all the luggage stacked behind my head come tumbling down.

“You travel alone?”

“No, I have two friends, they are sitting over there. We go to Savannakhet.” I made a vague gesture with my hand towards Sara and Serena who were sitting several rows ahead of us.

After being delayed at the border, we had been lucky the bus hadn’t left without us. So, while Sara and Serena each sat next to an old Dutch man and a dorky-looking Australian guy, I was stuck in the back with the packs, the French, and the hair drier (thankfully this embarrassing detail was unknown to the French).

I guess I had known Serena was a hair drier kind of Italian when we became friends in Kunming. But in my mind it was one thing to bring a hair drier from Italy when you’re going to be living in China for a year, and another to carry it around in a backpack in South-East Asia. So, when I had found her casually drying her hair in the Hanoi hostel where I had joined her and Sara, I had not been happy.

“Who carries a merda di PHON to a country where the low is 45 C?”

“It’s very useful.”

“Madonna! How Italian can you get? ”

“I am Italian”

Serena nonchalantly dismissed my outrage along with my swearing. “You Romans. So melodrammatici! I’m Tuscan. I should be the one swearing all the time. Sara, did you know that Tuscans are known for swearing the most in Italy?”

Sara did not know.

“I am the one carrying the backpack, so if I want to bring a phon, it’s my business.” She had a point. I swear a lot in Italian. I also get outraged a lot—in all languages. Sara was too American to understand my hatred of hair driers, but she did find Serena’s hate for the French rather unsettling.

“We Italians hate the French. They are arrogant.”

“Ilaria doesn’t hate the French.”

“Well, Ilaria isn’t REALLY Italian”

Sara’s American common-sense made it hard to understand the subtleties of European national identity. I always told her she was lucky to be my room-mate. I didn’t complain about coffee and didn’t carry around hair driers. I also did not have any opinion about the French.

The French couple on the bus was extremely friendly. They were from Marseille. Was I excited that the soccer World Cup was coming up? Ah, when France and Italy play again. It was hot here. Could I believe this was the weather in February? They had met some Italians on their trip, but mostly French and British, and Australian, and some Americaìn. I sounded like an American, how was it I didn’t have an Italian accent? Ah, très interesting.

“So… you travel only ten days?” I knew that look, the backpacker’s moment of truth: measuring the other to see who was the toughest. I decided to drop the bomb.

“I’m on vacation for two weeks. I live in China.”

“Aah!” shock and respect. I had earned my position in the backpacker hierarchy. I was bored with Westerners and their coolness contests. So I stared out the window at some dirty children along the side of the road. They waved. I waved back. As I moved my arm, sweat dripped from my forearm and Serena’s pack slid closer to my head. I wondered if the French blow-dry their hair.

“China! What is it like?”

I smiled. He grinned, his girlfriend laughed. We all knew it was a silly question. I felt bad about snubbing them.

Outside the window some barefoot people watched us as we drove by their shed. They were burning something. The whole countryside was yellow from the dead grass. It reminded me of the pictures of the African Savannah from my grade-school textbooks. Smoke and dust filled my nostrils, along with body odor from inside the bus.

“Is it not strange, how the countryside changed from Vietnam? There, all green, all… terrace gardens? How do you say? Here… no agriculture, no trees. It is all burned?” I nodded in agreement. He turned to chirp with his girlfriend.

By the time we made it to Luang Prabang a week and a half later, I had grown to appreciate Laos. The more we went north the cooler it got. There were more trees, more water, more temples. But there, on the road from Hue to Savannakhet, there was only desolation, poverty, and the marks of deforestation. When driving across the border to Yunnan, a few weeks later, what struck me was how green everything looked north of the border. “Twenty years ago, China also was like Laos, now we reforested and we buy wood from Laos and Myanmar,” said the Chinese tourists I was traveling with.

I never got a chance to tell the French couple. I never saw them again after getting off the bus in Savannakhet.

Mainly a pit stop on the way to Thailand or Vientiane, there was little do to for tourists in Savannakhet. So, really I have no explanation for why we stayed. Maybe Vietnam, with its hordes of foreign tourists, had been too overwhelming. Maybe Lonely Planet’s glowing review of the Dinosaur museum convinced us there would be something to do aside from hiding in an air-conditioned internet cafe. Whatever the reason, while most of the people on our bus left early the next day, we stayed.

Savannakhet had some charm, we decided after a couple of days there. If Serena hadn’t fallen into the hole, we might have actually enjoyed its five decrepit French colonial buildings and the brightly colored motor-rickshaws, or tuk tuk, that constituted the main form of transportation in the city. Then again, if Serena hadn’t fallen into the hole, I might have never felt bad about being so strict about hair driers.

Obviously, we went to see the Dinosaur museum. Christmas lights and amateurish drawings decorated the large bones.“This was very inspirational. When I grow up I want to be a dinosaur,” someone had written on the guest book. I wrote something equally silly that seemed really clever at the time. Serena and Sara told me I was ridiculous and laughed.

The Dinosaur museum was astutely located next to the Thai consulate and a little cafe where a lady-boy served cold coconut juice and fried rice. Clearly, the people crossing the border to renew their visa to Thailand were a major source of business. We sat at the cafe for a few hours and overheard two men discussing their visa and life issues. The French man explained to the Irish one that in Thailand he lived off of an invalidity pension from France.

“Invalidity for what?”

“Insanity”

Serena gave us a knowing look.

“The Francesi you see? They are insane.”

Sara burst out ranting about inter-European racism. I sipped my excessively sweet coconut juice and looked at the Mekong while Serena became red with indignation and the effort of defending her position in a foreign language. When they calmed down we walked along the side of the road for a bit. We drank fruit smoothies and watched the sunset on the Mekong. I pointed out some tall buildings on the other side of the river, in Thailand. Some guys on motorcycles stared at us and giggled. We giggled back.

That night we hand-washed our clothes in the sink. Serena blow-dried her jeans.

“You see? It is useful.”

I remained unconvinced.

The next day, she fell. I am not sure how it happened. After all, we had walked on that same street several times before. I was probably thinking about hair driers, or maybe about Italy. Whatever the case, Sara and I only turned around when we heard the scream, and by then it was too late. Serena’s head floated just an inch above the ground.

Neck-braces and surgery rooms haunted my mind as we rushed towards her. So I was relieved to see there was no blood and that she could move her upper body as we hoisted her out of the hole. Then, still speechless, she rolled up the jeans she had so carefully blow-dried the night before. To this day, I don’t understand why she was wearing long pants in that weather, but I guess that is not an important question. What did seem important was the white foam began frothing from a gash on her calf. Serena trembling pointed at a metal bar in the hole, indicating that it had ripped through her skin.

“Cazzo, Serena, did you get an anti-tetanus shot?” I knew I hadn’t.

“Clinic! Tuk-tuk!” a woman exclaimed and pointed towards the main road. Sara, who had been on the track team in high-school sprinted off after the two promised visions. I muttered a few swearwords, while trying to soothe Serena. By then, a crowd of Lao women had gathered around us. They started touching her, rubbing tiger balm on her skin.

As long as they don’t touch her wound, I thought.

Just about then a woman tried to put some tiger balm on the wound. The lady who had directed Sara towards the tuk-tuk slapped her hand before she could touch Serena’s leg and barked something. The crowd of women walked behind the tuk-tuk as it drove us off to the clinic–two blocks away. It turned out that the “clinic” consisted of two rooms; one for waiting and one for treating patients.

A few young, giddy nurses cleaned the wound with rubbing alcohol and placed ice on it. “The ice must be applied directly to the wound for 15 minutes,” the doctor explained when we asked if they could at least put some plastic or a towel around the ice. “Where did he read that? The internet?” whispered Sara–she didn’t care about being politically correct anymore. Serena gnawed her teeth. Sara told her she was a trooper and I explained what that meant to her in Italian. We laughed because by then it was clear that neither neck-braces nor surgery would be required.

After the pretty nurses dressed the wound, we bought medicine at the clinic’s entrance. I said madonna a few times in disbelief as the make-shift pharmacist spooned acetaminophen and antibiotics out of a large jar and placed them in two small zip-lock bags. Serena and Sara giggled.

When Sara asked the man to write the name of the medicine he wrote “antibiotic.” He was slightly annoyed when we requested he write the scientific name. This time Serena said ‘cazzo‘ as well. Suddenly, everything was actually foreign. We were hundreds of miles from home where antibiotics come in boxes and individually wrapped blisters. We weren’t so cool anymore, just silly girls in a strange place. We missed China where we spoke the language. We missed Europe and America, where more  than just he language felt native to us. And I began to accept that a hair drier is just a hair drier.

On our way back, the lady who had stopped the other woman from touching Serena’s leg came up to us and inspected the bandage. She seemed satisfied. “A shot?” she gestured. “Pills” we gestured back. She seemed thoughtful and then nodded. I would have thanked her, but didn’t know how. We left the next day for Vientiane. After that, I carried Serena’s backpack—hair drier and all.

Ilaria currently lives in Queens, but she’s wandered a lot before getting there. She’s spent the most time in China and Hungary, two countries united only by their love of pork meat. Read her other story on While I was Away: Lydia

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The Keys to Everything

<By Rob Williams>

 I’m always getting hung up on the details, both minor and major ones, and every kind in between. I can’t seem to distinguish between these two categories—minor and major—since, properly considered, everything seems potentially worth obsessing about. So when Sergio, my host in the Dominican Republic, dropped a heavy ring of eight keys into my palm—“For your independence,” he said, smiling and squinting in the blazing mid-afternoon sun—I shuddered. Keys, keys, keys. So many keys. I knew I was going to be stuck on this train of thought for a while.

Before I left New York, I’d already been obsessing about keys—the keys to my own apartment, specifically. The plan was for my brother to deliver them to my subletter when she arrived. I suppose most people would have let the matter drop there, but I couldn’t. I was convinced that something would go awry. Not because I doubted the people involved: I had complete confidence in my brother’s and my subletter’s respective abilities to fulfill their roles—he would be on time to deliver the keys, and of course she would be there to receive them. The problem I foresaw was with the keys themselves—there were too many of them, and the instructions for their use was too complicated for me to believe they could even be used at all.

Nevertheless, I laid out the specifics in an e-mail:

Subject: Keys

You will have four keys—two long ones, a medium one, and a short one.

• The long unmarked one is for the front two doors to the building.
• The long one that’s marked with a blue ring is for the bottom lock on the front door of the apartment itself (a deadbolt).
• The medium one is for the lock on the doorknob of the apartment itself.
• The apartment door does NOT lock on its own when you close the door, so use one of the deadbolts while you’re inside. Whenever you go out, you should lock the doorknob lock from the inside (by twisting the little knob on it while the door is open), AND use the long blue-ringed key to lock the bottom deadbolt from the outside.
• The small key is for the mailbox, just inside the front door to the building.

Reading my instructions over, I was confident that they were either totally thorough and clear or totally incomprehensible gibberish. The fourth bullet point in particular sounded like nonsense, but I couldn’t come up with a better way of phrasing it. And did I even need to? Perhaps it was obvious that the door wouldn’t lock on its own and would need to be manually secured two ways every time it was closed. On the other hand, I could easily imagine my subletter breezing out of the apartment on her way to run some errand or other, and just slamming the door behind her carelessly (as my neighbors used to do), taking it for granted that it was locked—only to return later to find the place ransacked, all my expensive sportcoats and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia DVDs gone forever.

When I left for my trip, I’d hoped to leave these minor obsessions where they belonged, back in New York City, and lay in the Caribbean sun and focus on some of my major obsessions for a while instead—like The Future, The Way the World Really Is, and The Nature of My Relationships with Women. But I’d only been in the Dominican Republic for about two hours and already Sergio had upped the ante on my key confusion … and its attendant anxiety.

I don’t speak Spanish, which I’d been told is pretty essential for traveling in the Dominican Republic, but I planned to learn a bit while I was there and thought I’d be able to get oriented enough with Sergio’s help. He’s Italian, and based on his e-mails to me about the room I was renting, I thought he spoke pretty decent—if oddly formal and idiosyncratic—English. The e-mails contained plenty of amusing little snippets like: “Remaining at your disposal, we cordially greet.” I liked the odd blurring of the future and present tenses—there was something almost mystical about it. However, as soon as we did actually meet and cordially greet, he informed me with a sheepish smile that he had composed those e-mails with the help of an online translator program and barely spoke any English at all.

Nevertheless, the meaning of the eight (8) keys needed to be explained. Casa Lily & Coco, where I was staying, was a well-secured property, after all, with all manner of locks and other security devices. Sergio took special pride in pointing out that the barbed-wire fence that ran along the wall of property was electrified. And of course there was Lily, the dog, who seemed friendly enough, but who I was sure would take a man down by the throat in a second if provoked, as all dogs would. The property itself was about a 10-minute walk from the beach (Playa Bonita) and perhaps a 30-minute walk from town (Las Terrenas), through a pretty impoverished-looking barrio (if the naked children playing in the dirt yard next door were any indication), and the road in either direction was dusty and unfinished, traversed mainly by huge trucks, motorcycles, and construction crews.

The two small keys (1, 2) were for the wardrobe—a flimsy looking piece of furniture that I immediately imagined someone taking to pieces with a hatchet. In fact, I’d seen a few guys working on the road outside that looked like they could turn the thing into tinder with their bare hands. The main door to the room took the Yale key (3)—“Yale, Yale,” Sergio kept muttering as he fumbled around with the huge ring. Again, this door looked like it could be easily dispatched with a solid boot kick, but I tried not to think about that—and I hadn’t seen any guys wearing boots around here anyway. The outside door, however, was made up of metal bars and looked very secure—“Cisa, Cisa,” Sergio said as he searched for the key to this one (4). Then there were the keys for the wall around the property itself, which had two gates—a person-sized one and a car-sized one, each with its own key (5, 6). These keys didn’t have names and Sergio was able to identify them only by relative size. Then there was the gate to the road itself, a groaning pink monstrosity with a large padlock. Sergio mumbled, “It’s a K … K,” as he identified its key (7). When I asked him what the last key (8) was for, he smiled and shrugged, either to indicate that he didn’t know or that it didn’t matter and his English wasn’t good enough to communicate it anyway. I could certainly relate to that.

Staring at the pile of metal pieces in my hands, I was sure I’d never be able to remember which ones went where, how this piece of metal fit with that one, just as I was sure I’d never be able to piece together the foreign sounds of the Spanish language, how this “lla” fit with that “ve,” despite having $500 worth of Rosetta Stone software on my laptop, and just as I was sure I’d never be able to make the pieces of my life fit together in a coherent way either, despite all of the time spent on my major obsessions …

********

And yet, every evening, when I come back to my room (“Coco,” it’s called, after Sergio’s parrot) after a day spent lying on the beach being obliterated by the sun or wandering around town cursing my lack of Spanish skills and refusal to plan things properly, I’m astounded that the keys work at all. No, what I mean is that I’m astounded I remember which of the keys—los llaves—is which. “Cisa goes here, Yale there,” and so on …

But I do.

So perhaps I am learning a few things after all. Perhaps I should be more patient. Perhaps I should obsess about the details less, trust that things will work themselves out. That I will learn Spanish. That The Future, The Way Things Really Are, and The Nature of My Relationships with Women don’t need to be understood today. In fact, how could they—since everything is only understood in retrospect anyway. I always feel that way—that I only grasp the meaning of things afterward, and even then just barely. It sort of makes me queasy though, this feeling, that my understanding of things will never quite catch up with life itself, that even when I’m old and dying I’ll still be scrambling to understand what’s been happening to me all these years.

And yet, I feel pretty well ensconced here in my room—in this walled-off little house on a dusty road on the edge of an island in the Caribbean. I spin a globe in my mind and my finger lands on exactly this spot. I shake off the nagging feeling that I should e-mail my subletter and remind her to lock the door when she goes out, the nagging feeling that it’s the minor details—or even the major ones—that are the keys to everything. It’s quiet, with a faint breeze blowing in through the window, the Spanish broadcast of the Yankees game on the television, insects chirping faintly beyond the screen door, the occasional dog barking in the distance, cars passing in the night, a mosquito fluttering here, a small lizard frozen on the wall there, relative calm inside and out.

Rob Williams is a mercenary copywriter and copy editor who lives above a meat market in the East Village. Read his other story on While I Was Away: Prague Dream Hunt. You can find more of Rob’s stories on his website.

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If the Shoe Fits

<By Rebecca Beckum>

My grandmother was always a well heeled woman. She wore high heels and hose every day of her life until she died at ninety one. She felt that quality shoes were an essential investment for a woman and where the bulk of your wardrobe budget should be spent.

Years ago when I was in Atlanta, I saw the perfect pair of shoes for me. They were Stewart Weitzman, candy apple red stiletto fashioned in a patent luster.  I love how they made me feel. I love how tall I stood in them and the gait I had with them on. I couldn’t afford them though. I’ve never forgotten them and I am always looking for them. If I were to see them one day, I would put them on plastic if I had to.

I have found in my life that some things are worth the interest.

While I had to leave this pair behind, my steps thereafter have been no less clad with style. It was a complicated decision narrowing down what collection would accompany me to Japan for the year. I settled on eighteen pair in  the final edit. My first night in Tokyo led me afoot in a six hour hunt for my new apartment. I wore the soles of the previously unworn suede and embroidered flats off on the narrow and isolating streets as I searched on with a courageous strut.

The eighteen pair were worth the extra baggage fees at the airport and I learned that no shoemaker in this part of the world would craft a pair to fit my American supersized foot. I also found it painful to take in the tantalizing  Japanese shoe season that year knowing that not a single pair would compliment my mammoth shoe size. .  I was satisfied however to stand statuesque in my favorite American designers where I felt the earth rumble beneath my feet and I learned that you can survive on a smile as your only means of communication.

I became a savvier traveler by the time I moved to South America. I got the shoe count down to fourteen and from there to the essentials and a low maintenance twelve pair by the time I moved to Mexico. I remember being in the desert and tossing the thirteenth pair of multi hued pointy toe pumps in a dumpster by the check-in counter. I had hauled them around with me for long enough. They had been my favorites for so long but I knew it was time to say goodbye and embrace a new style.

I accepted my far from sample size feet when I moved to the Caribbean and shopped for open toe options for the first time in my life. It was liberating to wiggle my unsightly toes in that sand and to feel that heat beneath them. That rhythm moves them to this day.

When I came back home, I kicked off my heels one evening and signed up for an online dating site. I think I created my profile more for myself than to serve as an advertisement for men. It really gave me the opportunity to think about who I am and what I am looking for in a partner. I have never searched for guys online but rather let them come to me. I guess because I am still running in the league of women that prefer to be called than make the call themselves. I enjoy going through my inbox and the messages from strangers. Narrowing down candidates for online dates can become an exhausting process. I recently had a date planned with a guy from the “out of town” pool of contenders. As date night approached however, I became rather unmotivated to transform my look from haggard into fabulous after such a long week.

I was not sold on his profile. It was unremarkable to be honest, but I loved his messages to me. He messaged me the day before our date that he hoped “I was gorgeous and fascinating!” At 32, gorgeous is subject to opinion. Fascinating…. I was fairly certain I could deliver. He won me over when he wrote to me that “Many women can turn a man’s head, but very few can turn on his imagination.” Living up to someone’s imagination is a great deal of pressure so I cancelled.

The following Friday, the restaurant where he had held our reservation called and said that there was a mysterious package for me there. He found a pair of red stilettos while travelling to Mexico on business and thought they would make the perfect gift. I was hopeful as I opened the package, savoring the possibilities with each tear along with the staff from an entire restaurant I had never even dined in.

I thought about my last date. He was a filmmaker whose most significant work and fifteen minutes had since passed and now relied mainly on income from a contract with a popular yet ill stitched, generic shoe company. I am still in recovery which warranted a move and over $300 dollars in spa treatments. I even had Reiki done in that spa package; what Mr. Miyagi did to Ralph Macchio in the Karate Kid. The Reiki master worked his way to the soles of my feet and said: “You are always walking. Sometimes your steps are hurried and sometimes you walk slowly, but that at all times your steps are deliberate.”

I think in gauging dates, it is critical not to compare one dinner to the next. I think it is important to keep an open mind and be willing to try new things that you initially may not find appetizing. The shoes my cancelled date sent were not the red shoes I fell in love with years ago and the reflection I saw in that delicious patent leather  has since changed, but I loved where this pair might lead me with deliberate steps ahead and further down a yellow brick road.

Rebecca Beckum is a writer, artist and graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has worked in varied fields but predominately in photography and education. She has spent the past four years writing and shooting internationally in Japan, Mexico and South America. Rebecca is currently working on a collection of essays from my travels and a novella about online dating.

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Here for a While: The View from My Room

<by David Moser>

I have a room here in Palestine. In my room I have my water bottle I bought on a rainy day early last spring on the Jersey shore. My parents and brother and I were visiting my grandparents at Easter. My grandfather can’t walk more than a few steps now. He feels worse than he has to because he lets himself get dehydrated. It’s very hard on my grandmother to care for him all the time. After a while in the living room, with the TV turned up high, we get a bit of cabin fever. When it’s cold and cloudy like it was this Easter we don’t really want to go to the beach, so we go the mall. That’s where I bought my water bottle.

I can sit in my room here and notice my bottle and remember that afternoon with my parents and brother and how we laughed about how we dislike the mall. That afternoon my brother moved an expensive copy of the Bible to the “Religious Fiction” section of the Borders Express.

On my desk here I have a postcard of the Cloisters in New York. I lived in Inwood off and on for nine months and spent afternoons in Fort Tryon Park reading short stories and noticing the seasons changing. That’s where I read the first story of Dubliners and thought of how cruel the sun is to leave us as it does after the summer. How quickly it seems to lose interest. Of course the first cool day feels great. To be warmed by our bodies inside of wool or cotton rather than the fire of the sun. We warm ourselves! But by March we are very cold. The park is also where I sat and thought of how Tegan, too, cooled to me. I walked through the park when my heart was still beating hard knowing I was moving to Palestine. I walked there before I told my parents.

From my room, I hear fireworks most nights. The first time I was very scared. My first night here I heard booms from the street. After the booms I heard bottles breaking. I was nervous and didn’t know what I could be hearing. It wasn’t fireworks. It sounded like demolition maybe. I didn’t know what demolition sounded like. I went to sleep. My second night here I was taken out for argelia and tea. We smoked a block from the huge ugly wall those who follow events here hear so much about. It’s covered in political paint: slogans, maps, promises. That night my hosts drove me home. We turned a corner and found Israeli soldiers blocking the intersection to my building. One of them pointed his rifle at us and screamed “Lech, lech lech!” (go go go) as he approached our car. It was dark. I think he was scared. The other soldiers kept focus on the men down the block.  The men down the block stood behind dumpsters tipped on their sides in the road to block the army jeeps. They knew the soldiers would come that night. The dumpsters made booms as they were pushed on their sides and bottles fell out and broke. It hadn’t been demolition. We made a three point turn and drove away from the fighting. I was in the back seat and shaking.

We drove to the back roads. I asked my host if he was scared. He told me only a little, and that Kevin Costner was one of his favorite actors. I thought of Field of Dreams and playing baseball with my father. On weekends he took me to the little league field and pitched to me and hit me ground balls. There were no soldiers on the back roads. When I got to my apartment my hands were still shaking when I unlocked the door. And still when I locked it behind me.

The third night here I stayed in. I spent the night with my laptop. I like telling people that Barack Obama gave me my laptop. A year ago I was in Poplar Bluff, Missouri working for the campaign. I spent days organizing democrats and nights reporting numbers and printing canvassing materials. By the end of the campaign I had a guard with a gun at the office twenty four hours a day. It was also a scary place to be at night. I don’t tell many Palestinians that Barack Obama gave me my computer. Many would not be impressed. It was the third night that I first heard fireworks. I didn’t know they were fireworks. I did know there had been street fighting the night before. I thought the new booms were guns. I would have enjoyed a quiet night, and think many others might have also, but a wedding calls for fireworks here, and the show goes on. The happy nights and the terrible ones both come with booms.

Many years ago on the Fourth of July my parents took my brother and me to see the Pittsfield Mets play in Wahconah Park. They were a triple A team, full of young, hard-working players chasing their major league dreams in a park named after a princess of an exiled and exterminated Indian tribe in a city depressed by addiction and the closure of the General Electric plant. After the Fourth of July games, fans could walk onto the field and watch the largest fireworks display in the county. I remember feeling the booms in my ribs and leaning against my parents. I only came up to their chests then. After the fireworks we would avoid the heaviest of departure traffic by going through the back streets of residential Pittsfield. In that neighborhood, fat old white women watched us pass from their porches where they had also watched the fireworks.  On those car rides home, I usually fell asleep.

David Moser teaches writing at the  Al-Quds Bard Honors College in the West Bank. In his free time he rides the bus. You can find this story, as well as Dave’s other stories at Ramallah the Big Olive. Read David’s other stories on While I Was Away: On the Bus, Feast of the Sacrifice

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