What Possessed Me

The Mali Magillah: The Day Is Done

It's taken me seven months to write this post. I'm staring at these final photographs of my time in Mali and I still don't know how to tell you all the things that are in my heart. Will pictures and poems suffice?

It it this deep blankness is the real strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were.¹

My head swims with memories of Tuareg tents, stringy goat roasted over a fire, nomad children selling silver trinkets from their pockets.

We are in Timbuktu again. The Festival Au Desert honors the annual gathering of the Tuareg tribes

who still convene from all over the Sahara once a year to socialize and share information. The Festival is about Malian and West African music, but the Tuareg are still in evidence, perched on sand dunes and guarding their camels, looking on.

The days are searingly bright and hot, best spent in what little shade is provided by our four person tent. I share this small space with a slightly unhinged German whose hair-raising stories of motorcycle rides across Africa with compound fractures make the rest of us lily-livered mortals blanch. The transplanted Texan, the disgruntled Brit and I circle around each other sniffing, noses twitching. Something is off. Do they detect fear? Eagerness? Or - God forbid - ENTHUSIASM? We are not off to a good start. I am determined to be liked god damn it all! and by sundown we are as thick as thieves.

The music starts - the vast majority of the acts are brilliant and inspiring, and a very few are fucking awful (harmonica guy from Connecticut or wherever, I'm talking about you. Stop embarrassing me with your pretend New Orleans bit - it gives me eczema.)

We sit atop the dunes and listen until we are moved to dance. The Tuareg children join us, showing off their moves while simultaneously trying to pry cadeaux from our hot little hands. The crowd, full of Malians, is ecstatic, rapt, full of unbridled joy. When Oumou Sangare comes out, it's like the second coming of Jesus.

While the German is off breaking his neck somewhere, we three laugh and play and roll down giant sand dunes. All deeply miserable in our own ways, this unexpected lightheartedness is a salve for invisible sores.

And the night shall be filled with music
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.²

The Tuareg men are dandies. They wear six foot lengths of fine cotton cloth wrapped around their heads and faces, the color contrasting with their indigo robes. Some of the more benighted gringos mimic the style, which is, let's face it, Fucking Embarrassment Number II. Leave it for the Tuaregs, bitches! They're harder than you are, and much better-looking. I say this with my inside voice, but with great emotion.

While the Tuaregs race their camels, I watch idly as two boys play with a rusty razor blade in the sand. Hey look! Kids playing with a rusty razor blade! Do they cut themselves? No. Do they get tetanus and die? No. Does someone lose an eye? No. Neurotic mothers of the United States, please take note.

Three nights of belly laughing, goat carving, sand dancing and star gazing seem too few. It is over before it ever began. The adventure has come to a close, the day is done.

Sprawled out on a far dune staring up at the night sky, I think about what Achilles said to Briseis in Troy, perhaps the worst film ever made:

 

You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again. 

And it all seems too heartbreakingly true.

* * *

Here endeth the Mali Megillah. To read earlier installments, click the category "Mali Megillah" under this or any of the other relevant posts.

__

Pictures: Mine, except for the second, third and fourth brought to you by CH, one of the Unholy Trinity of Timbuktu.

Poems: 1. "Let It Go" by William Empson, 2. "The Day Is Done" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

 

A pair.

I grew one.  

I finally quit my job today. I quit the job that kicked my ass six ways to Sunday for the past two years - the one that scared me silly, rubbed against the grain, left me depleted, worked me harder than I've ever worked. I made it out alive. No - more than that. I fucking killed it. I turned that shit around and quit on a high note. I'm proud of that.

This is what I made before I quit - a reminder of what I had to do so that I'd do it:

But it was all wrong.

I took one look at my boss's face - crumpled, shellshocked, hurt, baffled - and I didn't feel rebellious or triumphant or jubilant. I didn't streak down the hall skipping. I felt like absolute shit.

It's a terrible thing to let someone down, especially when that someone hand reared you like a newly hatched chick when you were lost and confused, and believed in you when you were down and out. 

It downright broke my heart. I went back to my bile green pod and cried my eyes out, pulled myself together, and hit the Peppermint Patties. Even under the influence of the Patty, I had to remind myself: This is not what you want. This doesn't make you happy. You can't spend your life making other people's dreams come true when your own are languishing.

So I went through with it and got what I asked for - a blessing. In about six weeks, I start something new, something I hope will hit more of the right chords. And I'm so unbelievably scared.

But better to be scared and moving than scared and standing still.

Love you all very much. I mean it. Thank you.

Forgive me for I have sinned.

Gluttony

 

After an ill-fated attempt at making peach hand-pies for a dinner party, only to have the tasteless, labor-intensive little lumps mocked openly as "hair pies" (another thing entirely, I soon learned)  I made nectarine brown butter buckle cake this weekend and it was divine. DIVINE, I tell you. Because I am incapable of following instructions, I used more fruit than called for, added plums to the mix for color, and at the last minute added a little glug of almond extract to the batter. People, the almond flavah sent it over the edge into a place that made it unsafe for people with no willpower. I am deeply disgusted to report that Fauxhawk and I ate the ENTIRE THING while watching Mad Men. Foul.

Excuse me while I lapse into self-congratulation here for a moment, but did I mention the incredibly delicious bourbon chicken liver pâté I made recently? That we spread on little toasts with cornichon? That would go really well with fig jam? Or the milk braised chicken with lemon and sage that I served with lemon risotto for a grand total of 75,000 calories? Hell's yeah. 

While all of this can be counted as part of Fauxhawk's sanctioned post-smoking binge-fest, such behavior is NOT ALLOWED FOR PEOPLE WHO NO LONGER FIT INTO ANY OF THEIR CLOTHES. Seriously, I blame it on the knives. The best part of getting married? Deluxe cooking tools. 

I've spent my entire adult life cooking with a cast iron skillet, a dutch oven, two sauce pans and a set of knives as sharp as a bag of wet mice. I was happy, the way you're happy eating cabbage every day of your life while chained to a radiator. I had a vague idea that cooking gear existed, but lived in a beautiful place where unicorns go to die. Then I got married and people started giving me knives. Insane, expensive, beautiful knives that could split the hair of a winsome wallaby. I now have a fucking meat cleaver, people!  I'm cleaving shit left, right and center! I slice! I dice! I shear poultry! it's amazing. Now all I want to do is cook and eat and bake and eat and assemble and eat, and as I report this I am now fatter than a Republican in a tub full of poor people. I shudder to think what will happen when I finally get up the nerve to open my new pots and pans. They will have to coat me in Crisco to get me out the door.

Sloth

 

Somehow my enthusiasm for cooking has not extended to keeping an orderly apartment. When you live in 550 square feet with another person and two Fucking Cats, a magazine thrown casually across the coffee table gives the apartment the air of a Newark crack den. Though Fauxhawk and I are not particularly tidy by nature, we managed to relegate the disorder to the bedroom, proclaiming the living room a Zone of Serenity. As we got busier, shit got out of hand. Piles of wedding related crap, correspondence, pictures, tax documents, magazines, and assorted items of little and great import teetered precariously on various surfaces. 

I finally called my mommy.  "I've lost the Zone! The Zone is gone!" I wailed into the phone. "I need your help." (If you're thirty-four, it's probably not cool to call your mommy to help you clean your shit up, but I promised to make lunch with my new knives.) Together, we took care of business. It was ruthless and incredibly therapeutic. Why didn't I do this sooner? 

Answer: Because I am lazy and can't be bothered to deal with the harsh realities of adult life. 

Envy

 
Enough said.

Pride

Categorically refuse to go to gym because:

• Current pair of track pants has massive hole in crotch
• Working out is undignified unless you are Mohammed Ali or whatever
• Unspoken competition of treadmill jockeys and their level 200/incline 400 runs
• Unnecessary mirror time
• Postage stamp sized towels reveal more of left ass cheek than is necessary
• Prefer to spend time contemplating international women's movement and other high minded pursuits

Greed

 

I dare you to read Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide and not feel like a spoiled, over-fed (see above), whining (see entire archives of WPM), useless piece of flesh. I dare you to read it and not feel incredibly moved, awe-struck, and motivated to get involved in improving the lives of women across the globe. Though a lot of the issues the book outlines aren't particularly new to me, the profiles of the women featured inspire action. The shocking thing is how high impact even small contributions can be, especially in the developing world, where women's lives and livelihoods can be utterly transformed for the equivalent of a month's worth of double tall lattes. I got interested in micro-lending (which is by no means a panacea) and made a modest loan to a collective of Malian women farmers. Here's a picture of them (above) - aren't they beautiful? Dude, that's what they wear when they're farming. I'm so excited to hear about their progress. I'll let you know how the process goes, in case anyone out there is interested in experimenting with micro loans. Anyway, all of this is to say that the book is wonderful as an inpiration for change. I find that very little moves me to action these days, so when something does, it's worth sharing.  Check out the website, which is really handy in breaking down organizations by issue. Has anyone out there sponsored a child or adult? What was your experience like? 

Lust

Shortly after transforming into Mother Theresa, I spotted this doctor's bag 

 

and these shoes 

 

on Topsy Design. I want them. I want them both. 

Am I a bad person? Even though I am a pretend doctor and need a proper bag to go with my pretend medical practice? That cures women of vaginal fistulas in Ethiopia?

Wrath

So incapable of drowning out the douchebag at the neighboring table last night that I spent our entire anniversary dinner:

• Muttering "douche" a tad too loudly
• Thanking the sweet baby Jesus that I never have to go on another first date with a doucher EVER AGAIN (second benefit of being married - after sharp knives)
• With my mouth literally agape at the outrageous and audacious douchebaggery
• Incapable of carrying on a conversation with my husband for fear it would interfere with my ability to bear witness to the douchiness

Photo credits from top to bottom:  Smitten Kitchen, Everybody Likes Sandwiches, Flickr, Fine Little Day, Kiva, Topsy Design.