Magister Ludi (Master of Games)

She drums her pen against the kitchen table. The journal page in front of her is empty except for a few names and a five-point prompt: who, what, when, where, why. She is trying to crystallize an idea, a description. An image. Her search circles around defining a significant detail, a single characteristic. Does one characteristic reveal important information about a person? What is a characteristic? A trait? A feature? How does it translate into behavior? Are characteristic and behavior connected? She leans back and allows her neck muscles to relax until her chin touches her chest and her eyelids hide the silent march of the clock’s hand on the far wall.
He sits on top of the desk in the first row, facing the class. Smiling. It was almost fifty years ago that he had kept the minds of his students focused on the Gallic War. De Bello Gallico - it might as well have been a love story. Caesar and her Latin teacher were one and the same. Every battle opened with a warning: read the whole sentence before you try to translate. At the height of Caesar’s glory there would be a brief vision: imagine what it must have felt like to be a conqueror. When the conflict was over, a reminder: write down your homework assignment or you’ll forget what I asked you to do. His instructions carried the weight of a benign ruler’s proclamation and a hint of Tabak cologne, both trailing him like trustworthy soldiers united in their efforts to capture his students’ attention.
“Any questions?”
Her Liebler’s voice pushes into her meditation. She marks his name on the page with an asterisk. Exactly what was it that made him everybody’s favorite teacher?
“Gisela, you are frowning.”
She looks at him. His wavy black hair is cut short on the sides. The window reflects in his dark brown eyes and gold-rimmed glasses. A smile plays with his lips like the echo of a lullaby. His hands punctuate the air with excitement while he dissects a sentence. Distance in time and space now allow her to ask the questions she did not ask when she was his student. When she was young they mattered as little as the answers. Only his intonation of the hero’s journey mattered.
“Herr Liebler, did you know that we adored you? I still take sentences apart and study them to the rhythm of your pointed finger.”
“You girls seemed to be in your own dream world most of the time; I am honored it included my ancient phrases.” He walks to the blackboard and writes, “Fide et amore.”
Gisela copies the words. She circles them and draws a line with an arrow pointing to the question about his effectiveness as teacher. “By trust and love,” she translates. She notes that she admires the harmonious confluence of his features, his gestures, his words.
“I looked at old photographs this morning,” she says, “I found one of our group, tramping through the mountains during winter camp. We followed you single-file, eager to show off our new boots. Eager to be praised. After plowing through the snow in each other’s footsteps for a long mile, after bombarding you with questions and snowballs, we stood in line, impatiently waiting for you to rub our frozen hands back to life. You shook your head and smiled when we fought over your attention. It was a contest, Herr Liebler. Whoever could claim the longest touch, bragged about it all evening while we gossiped and played chess and pitched our battle hymns against the steely groans of a guitar. Most of us were madly in love with you. Did you know that we fantasized about what could happen if one of us were alone with you?”
“I think I did. Yes, I did. You girls were teenagers, overflowing with drama. You practiced ‘I am seductive’ on me. Yes – I knew. And I knew that you walked past the Helmholtz Gymnasium, on your way home, giggling, hoping to be noticed, but afraid to be addressed by one of the boys who were equally as shy and eager as you. Believe me, it wasn’t easy for a forty-year old man to teach in a school filled with playful little sirens. What you needed from me, and what you thought you wanted, were two different things. Sometimes I wanted to report your escapades to your parents, especially during camp week, when you piled up against my patience, and whispered and teased and tested until late into the night. I was angry with myself when my ego rose to your moves or worse, when it fell into the trap of short hemlines and sun-bronzed skin.
You all had such important lessons to learn. Tricky lessons – about self-esteem, about interpretations, about boundaries. I had the obligation not to respond to your budding desires while showing you that touch in itself is not wrong. Do you remember Renate? She flaunted lipstick and silvery hoop earrings and she twisted her bangs to say, ‘I’m seventeen and I know I’m very sexy.’ And then there was Reingart, the exact opposite. She probably thought she was not very attractive. I’m pretty sure she wore an older sister’s hand-me-downs. Her translations were flawless, but her voice was barely audible. Some of you had secure relationships with your parents, but some of you hated to go home after school. You had a problem with your family dynamics, didn’t you? You lived with an abusive stepfather if I remember right. You tried hard to please everybody.”
The teacher paces, the way he used to pace between rows of desks, looking over a shoulder, pointing at the gender specific ending of a noun, asking for the predicate of a sentence. “The predicate,” he stressed, “gives you the clues you need to translate a sentence. It is a signpost for tense and voice in a scramble of fact and assumption.”
Gisela remembers the heat wave spiraling through her body when he stood next to her. The red shadow crawling across her face and strangling her breath when she conjugated a verb. She remembers how her heart beat even faster when he said, “Sehr gut.” Very good. Adults claimed that learning had its own rewards, but in her Latin class the reward was Herr Liebler’s smile.
As he fades back into the past, Gisela writes quickly, summing up her investigation. Verbs cluster around his name, lyrical notes that try to capture past affection. A list of attributes sprawls across the paper and clauses line up for analysis. She looks at the clock. Before she closes her journal she draws a heart next to a group of phrases that would soon compete for the title of her memoir.

Zampano Hill

Zampano Hill, the slope behind my house, has been slashed, whacked, chopped and chain-sawed. Where ivy circled the birdbath and feral cats hid from raccoons in the thick tangle of pampas grass, a new order will have to be established. The squirrels will have to take detours. Next time the skunk leaves a message for me, he’ll probably have to run away along the ditch, no more fruitless mulberry to hide behind. And the Blue Jay, that shrieking puffball of indignation, when he comes back later in the spring, he’ll have to complain from somewhere else because his swaying oleander lookout has been deconstructed. Only the mocking bird will be happy; he can still practice at four every morning since the pine tree has been labeled as “growing to the ground, not falling to the ground.” The tree specialist said I could sleep in the back bedroom again, even during a storm. And you, dear musical mocker, will see to it from your seat at the top of the pinecone factory, that I will be awakened early.
At the end of last year I surrendered my rights to the hill. I had tripped and rolled several feet down into the junipers during an intense weeding project. While I had been trapped in this prickly nest I assessed the impact, and I admitted to myself that I was getting too old to control the landscape. Let the community administrator take care of it.
Yesterday trucks lined up in the street and men came to clear Zampano Hill. Oh yes, they did clear the hill.
“Please, mind the water pipe that runs up the side.”
“Yes.”
“And the bench. Don’t take away the bench. That’s where I meditate.”
“Yes.”
“I used to grow tulips up there. And daffodils”
“Yes.”
I sounded pathetic. What do men with chain saws care about the stories that hide in the pyracanthas, stories that bend under sagging redwood boards, stories that glow purplish when the sun wakes the morning glories?
“Yes.” The young man nodded and cut into the ivy- covered branches of my chestnut tree.
That’s when I realized that he didn’t understand me. The man in poison green safety vest and orange pant protectors who stabbed his shears into my paradise didn’t speak my language at all. And suddenly I was embarrassed by my passionate plea.
Later, when he piled pampas grass stalks into a heap, when his saw stuttered through brittle rosemary bushes and juicy yucca stems, when he reduced a canopy of oleander into short naked stubs, I watched. I followed his moves like a stalker, from the back porch, then from the bathroom, then from behind the blinds in the kitchen .A mad woman who had lost control over her past and her common sense.
The spiraling, bursting, crazy components of my thoughts spun themselves into a bullet and propelled me toward a bookcase of journals and photo albums. For the rest of the day I ripped pictures from yellowing pages and copied fragments of events into a computer list. I tried to collect twenty years of memories while the man on the hill slashed their concrete expressions.
When I moved into Timber Cove in November of 1987 I had envisioned ribbons of red geraniums trailing down from the hillside, but soon learned that the area had once been a dumpsite and leftover toxic waste made for a difficult environment. The previous owners must have gathered enough information to plant accordingly – mainly evergreens and ivy.
They had attached a rope to the fence at the very top. The only way to climb the steep terrain was to hold on to the rope. I cut steps and walkways into the rocky ground. The next year I cleared a small platform at the top for a table and chairs. A couple of seasons later, by the time my grandchildren were able to walk, we had picnics on the hill and Easter egg hunts, and chats with blue jays, squirrels, and the hissing mothers of wild kittens. I bought a rainbow colored umbrella.
By trial and error I learned what the ground rejected and what it would support. The few geraniums I planted didn’t last because it was too hard and too dry. I hauled soil and fertilizer up the hill for a bed of red poppies. They only bloomed one season. A grouping of gladiolas looked pretty for a while, until they tilted and leaned into each other. But one day I bought a bag of bearded iris rhizomes from a catalog. Must have been fifteen years ago and still, every April, some of them sprout their lavender and white flower heads on sturdy upright stems. And the naked ladies – I don’t know where they came from – they shoot into the air, three of them, or five, or sometimes seven, every August.
Joe used to carry a blanket up the hill to keep me warm when we watched the stars together. He sprinkled the walkway with rose petals when I was in a bad mood. We chalked messages for each other on a big sandstone rock or scribbled them on the backside of seedling envelopes and stuck them in a toy mailbox. We built a tiny deck by the pine tree and watched the mother cat drag her kittens into the dugout below.
After Joe’s death I found five empty vodka bottles in a shallow grave. No matter what I planted in his memory – it died. First the weeping cherry. Then the crabapple tree. Fifty red tulips only bloomed once. Even the daffodils succumbed to an overdose of oxidized metals or maybe they were killed by his ashes.
The only thing that is left of him on the hill is the sundial. It remembers that he died at 1:30 in the afternoon. I can still see him the way he looked the last time he climbed all the way up – haggard – half his weight lost to cancer. He carried a piece of hot dog wrapped in a napkin for the cats. After he sat down he pulled a flask from his coat pocket and loaded the syringe with vodka. Then he opened a can of Ensure and dumped its content into the bushes. I spied on him the way I spied on the landscaper yesterday, hiding my sadness behind the blinds.
Even before Joe’s restless spirit haunted the hill, my mother had taken her place among the Zampano ghosts. After she died in 1991 I imagined her gliding down from the clouds and landing in the corner where sunflowers tilted their heads with the time of the day. My mother loved sunflowers. And she loved the color purple. I can see her purple gauzy gown flutter in the wind. She shakes her finger at me, the way she used to do when I was a child.
“Vorwärts gehn,” she says. Go forward.
She always warns me when I climb too deeply into retrospect. Though I have only just begun my list of hillside memories I stop writing and walk outside. The men have hauled away a truckload of trees and bushes, have reduced the landscape to evergreens again. I climb to the top, clean a plastic chair with my bare hand, and sit until it begins to rain.

Canning a Greasy Tradition

George Foreman’s Lean Mean Grilling Machine sings health and convenience. Between its Teflon coated jaws sizzles a chicken breast – a breast no thicker than a deck of cards – and within minutes its pale pink flesh morphs into a doctor-approved piece of protein. I taunt two slices of cholesterol-free, dark bread with a pat of Smart Balance margarine, dribble a few drops of olive oil over a sliced tomato and spritz it with balsamic vinegar. Dribble and spritz is my latest, minimalist approach to salad dressing. For dessert I pick key lime Yoplait, which carries the Bestlife dot com seal of approval. I know Mr. Bestlife is one of Oprah’s friends and product validation is all the rage. To add a touch of fizz to my routine, I open a can of diet soda. My lunch is ready.

After I came to America at the age of 25, it took a few years to banish my cravings for potatoes fried crisp in bacon grease. I missed the curdled, peppered blood that oozed from a sausage when you poked it with the tines of a fork. Over time I taught my taste buds to accept Spam and corn on the cob and the bland all-time favorite of American children: macaroni and cheese. Eventually we all learned about the dangers of cholesterol-rich and vitamin-poor meals. The effects of sugar gained attention. Salt became the enemy. I’m not sure it all went in the right direction, but I know that most modern meals point away from my German childhood favorites.

I remember the wild side of my grandmother’s kitchen. Sparks flew when she poked a dying fire with an iron rod. Onion rings danced in a pan of hot grease and sent their greeting throughout the house on the wings of steam and smoke. A black cast iron stew pot blew bubbles that exploded and scorched my arm when I lifted the lid. Oma fried brains, kidneys, livers, tough to chew gizzards. She boiled pigs’ feet, Sauerkraut, red cabbage, and soups that lasted for days. I always ran to obey her orders.

“Pull up some carrots and snip a few sprigs of parsley.”
“Set the table for supper.”
“We need buttermilk. Go. Don’t dawdle. The store closes in a few minutes.”

One of the most used items in our kitchen was a blue and gray stoneware pot. It sat on the cabinet right next to the stove. With a big wide-bladed knife Oma cut thick slices from a slab of bacon, cubed and fried them until they crumbled into bits and swam in their own transparent liquid. She poured it all in the blue and gray pot where it cooled and solidified. A smooth layer of fat, replenished weekly, treasured almost as much as the barrel of Sauerkraut in the cellar. Every morning she covered a huge slice of dark bread with a thick layer of bacon grease, salted it and covered it with a second slice. That was lunch during my grade school years.

My mother was a less intense kitchen master than my grandmother. She preferred reading to cooking and she was often too busy in my stepfather’s photo shop to spend much time on preparing meals. But she inherited my grandmother’s grease pot and she continued to make my favorite lunch. When I was teased by my high school classmates in the city about my “poor country girl’s taste buds,” she reassured me.
“Don’t pay attention to them,” she said, “Your great-grandfather ate bacon grease sandwiches every evening with his apple wine. He was a good, strong man.”

Years later, when I was married and fried bacon for breakfast, I sometimes let the leftover fat sit until I could spread it on a slice of bread. But all my efforts to interest my children in it failed. America was in love with Wonderbread and peanut butter while they grew up.
“Disgusting,” I heard my daughter say when I stuck a knife into the grease.
My son bent over the pan and sniffed. “Yuk!”
My mother-in-law drained her bacon on paper toweling and discarded the fat. My husband ate mustard and mayonnaise and bologna sandwiches.

I didn’t own a blue and gray pot. My grease hid in a coffee can behind a jug of cool-aid and a pickle jar in the refrigerator. It was too gross to be left out on the counter, I was told. A once thriving tradition turned into solitary, occasional indulgence and would eventually be banned from my life as an artery clogging health hazard.

When my granddaughter was six or seven, I told her about my childhood lunch favorite while she sucked in a piece of spaghetti. She nodded and gave me a blank stare. “Whatever, Grandma,” she seemed to say.

Since I retired I spend more time analyzing foods than cooking them. Doctor’s orders. Bacon grease hadn’t entered my mind for years, until last September, when I spent a month in Germany. One weekend I attended a Medieval Festival in Heidelberg. University Square was crowded with knights in armor and maidens in costumes. Cobble-stoned Main Street thronged with pork-munching, mead-guzzling Germanic tribal life. On the sidewalk musicians, storytellers, pig roasters, and candy makers vied for attention. As I squeezed through a split in the crowd I suddenly stood in front of a stall that offered Schmalzbrot. I hadn’t seen the German word for bacon grease sandwich in more than 40 years. Was I dreaming?

“Schmalzbrot – 1.00 Euro”

My face must have shown delight when I ordered a piece.

“That’s what we ate when we were children, didn’t we?” The saleswoman’s laugh jiggled her body under the sackcloth apron. Her voice beamed with knowing.

I pulled out my camera and zoomed in on the single slice in front of me. While I bit into the dark bread and let the salted bacon grease tease my palate, my grandmother’s kitchen came back to me. I was happy, the way a child is happy. I watched Oma hold a loaf of bread against her chest, cutting into it with her big knife. I saw her dip the tip of the knife into the blue and gray stoneware pot by the stove. I might even have heard her say something like,
“You want another slice?”

I smiled at my medieval hostess and shook my head, “No thanks. One’s enough.”

Baksheesh
Culture clash: Bring respect, practice tolerance, learn acceptance, and end up in total confusion.

“Marrakech is not for the fainthearted,” I read somewhere before I flew to Morocco. I also read that its people are kind, that the cuisine is a mix of French, Berber, and Bedouin, that it would be in my best interest to cover arms and legs, and that I should not use my left hand in public.
Tourists, of course, are always allowed a few slips in etiquette as long as they are trying to do the right thing, but I learned soon that it was difficult to do the right thing and relax at the same time. A phrase in the Lonely Planet guidebook should have warned me. “The combination of hustlers and heavy sell has had an adverse effect on the city’s tourism. According to a government study, 94% of first-time visitors never come back for seconds! This is one of the lowest rates for a city in the entire world.”
I was well informed, I thought, but I was not prepared for the contrasts that forced me to pay attention with all my senses. Car horns, donkeys, overloaded mopeds, women covered from head to toe in black, palm trees, litter, stray dogs, spicy street foods, beggars, the call to prayer, and then the cool trickle of a waterfall in the elegant Imperial Borj Hotel atrium and the spotless, soundproof luxury of my room. On the street everybody wanted something from me; upstairs I was totally alone with overwhelming thoughts about poverty and culture clash.
It was my first trip since I retired, my first trip ever into a non-western country. I saw it as romantic homage to my mother and my early childhood preoccupation with the storks on our church steeple. Long ago my mother had announced my September birthday with a frown and a hint of sadness in her voice, “It must be getting cold soon; the storks are getting ready to leave for Marrakech.”
Even at the age of six I had felt a vague urge to follow them into a land of sunshine and date palms and desert sand. The adults shook their heads when I ran across the stubbly wheat field in back of our house in an attempt to fly; when I leapt from the garden shed and sprained my ankle they shook their fingers at me. “No more of that nonsense.”
It took almost 60 years before I flew to Marrakech - on the wings of Royal Air Maroc. On a sunny May morning my guide in white djellaba and pointed slippers stood across from me on the grounds of the El-Badi Palace when I heard the sound of clapping beaks from above the ruins.
El Bissouri Moulay Hachem smiled and placed a hand over his heart, “Madame, the storks of Marrakech welcome you.”
Because I didn’t want to eat lunch by myself I invited Moulay to join me, an offer he reluctantly accepted. The tour company didn’t pay for his lunch and he usually went home to his wife and little daughter at noon. The restaurant was located in the newer part of town and was run by two sisters. I wondered if this was a compromise to soothe a westerner’s disdain over the machismo of a male dominated society. Or were they the sisters of the head of the travel agency?
I handed my prepaid coupon and an extra twenty-four dollars for Moulay’s meal to the beautiful middle-aged woman who wore Western style clothing. Later, after lunch, after she had sprinkled rosewater on our hands and my guide had discreetly withdrawn to the street, I slipped a ten- dollar bill under the lamb stew tajine.
I wasn’t sure if this was appropriate. In the West we don’t tip proprietors. I had already spent quite a few single dollar bills on men who opened the elevator door for me, men who turned the light on in my room, men who pointed me in the right direction toward the pool, men who told me where to buy bottled water. Men who stared at me until I realized that they expected to be reimbursed for efforts that I had mistaken for courtesies. I was confused by the constant demand for baksheesh - alms to insistent beggars - tips for minor unsolicited services – outright bribery with the promise of better service. But I was also aware of well-heeled tourists’ arrogant expectations. I had been told of tight-fisted Germans who angrily turned away from outstretched hands. “Let their government feed them.” This woman, I decided, was kind and patient with a newcomer to local customs and dishes. She had accommodated the unexpected pair, the young local guide and the foreign gray-haired lady, politely. She deserved a reward.
These two hours at Al Fassia, on Avenue Mohammed V, were the most intimate time I would spend with a Moroccan during my three days in Marrakech. Moulay came from Rabat where he had studied at the university and where his mother still lived. He was a linguist. He was working on a paper about Moroccan Arabic, about schwa, the unstressed vowel. He was a devout Muslim. A Sunni Muslim, like 99 percent of Moroccans. He spoke fluent French and broken English. Drinking too much soda pop had given him an ulcer, that’s why he refused the dessert of cinnamon sprinkled orange slices. The Qur’an allowed him four wives but he could only afford one for now. He thought I must be rich to be able to come to Marrakech. Did I inherit money from my husband? Certainly my husband must be dead, why else would I travel alone?
Moulay’s eyes opened wide when I told him that I had been married three times, and even wider when I said I didn’t have a god to guide me in my daily life.
“No, I’m not rich. No, I didn’t get money from my ex-husbands. I worked for a water company for the last nineteen years, because I wanted to be independent. This is my first trip abroad except for visiting my homeland, Germany. Yes, most Americans believe in God. Yes, I think Morocco is beautiful. Tell me more about schwa.”
After a day of horse-carriage rides to palaces, mosques, the famous Djemaa El Fna, and a walk through the labyrinthine alleys of the souq, I said good night to my guide. Au revoir Msr. Moulay. A domain. Until tomorrow. I gave him a ten-dollar tip and my apologies to his wife and daughter for stealing him away from them at lunchtime. I thanked him for helping me buy a CD and for keeping close watch over me in the souq.
I took a short nap and bathed in my spacious tub. I guess I did travel in style. Travel in Style was the name of the San Francisco based agency that had arranged this trip for me. Azza Hussayin had put together the package. It was supposed to have been a group of ten people, but the number shrunk as the date of departure came closer. Political unrest in Morocco. Sickness in the family. Other problems. Mohamed alias KingTut916 had emailed me emergency contacts, mobile phone numbers, and a reassuring promise of greeters, guides, drivers, and of course the website of the fabulous “Imperial Borj International Hotel” in Marrakech. One day before I left home he offered the option to cancel. When I arrived in Casablanca I found out I was the only member of the tour group. I knew that drivers and guides expected ten tips of five and ten dollar bills at the end of each day. They were visibly disappointed. “Where are the others?” Moulay had asked. I wasn’t happy either about the extra pressure of being the only guest. Usually I hang back, take pictures, pay selective attention.
At five I opened the door to my patio and listened to the call to prayer from the nearby medina, the old town. It was an eerie sound, unfamiliar to my ears and, as I would find out, hauntingly unforgettable. I walked out on my fourth floor observation deck to watch the local life that goes on without my participation. I had the full view of the intersection, the back of my hotel and the front of the hotel across the street. Cabs were lined up on both sides of the street and the drivers got out of their vehicles to pray. Some kneeled on cardboard pieces, some on handcrafted carpets. A white-bearded old man, dressed in dark long-sleeved jacket and knit cap, stepped off his horse-carriage, unfolded a mat, took off his shoes and laid them in front of the mat. He washed his hands in a small bucket before he began the ritual of bowing, praying, kissing the ground. I was amazed at his agility and wondered why, in spite of yoga classes, I was not able to get up and down with the same speed and grace.
As commuter traffic increased, the speed and aggressive attitude of drivers became more frantic. Nobody stopped; it was a challenge to see how far one could get into the intersection before hitting another driver. Small beige hatchbacks, the local petite taxis, competed with the Mercedes grande taxis that take passengers from town to town. A woman, in black robe and headscarf sped her moped with gloved hands into the middle of the intersection until she was forced aside by a donkey-cart filled with hay.
Later that evening – it was getting dark – I watched three men load a truck with close to a hundred large trash bags. We tourists enjoy our packaged snacks and bottled juices; we create a lot of garbage that has to be hauled away daily. The men were joined by two teens who left their load of old tires across the street. A man and woman on a donkey cart stopped around the corner. While the old woman whipped the donkey every time it tried to move, the man picked up twenty bags of water bottles and strapped them onto the cart. Finally all six men sat down on the ground next to the hotel wall and talked. A waiter came up the walkway from the kitchen and placed a large pot of stew between them. Then a platter of rolls. Two scrawny cats circled the men, one cautiously, the other attempting bold attacks; eventually pieces of food were tossed in their directions. After half an hour of dipping and slurping and finger licking the old man with the donkey cart hollowed out a roll and filled it with stew. His wife had waited patiently with the donkey; I imagined a glint of happiness in her eyes when she tilted her head to let the thick soup run into her mouth. Within minutes the empty pot and platter were deposited at the kitchen door and all the men drove or rode off. One of the cats licked a few leftover traces from the sidewalk. Two policemen stood in the intersection talking to each other while traffic continued around them. As starlight began to glitter on the fronds of palm trees, traffic died down.
I closed the patio door to the echo of clip clopping hoof sounds and thought that this had been a good lesson in Moroccan culture. A lesson about working together for the common good. My upbringing under the Benedictine motto Ora et Labora – pray and work – was not so different from the Arab Ensha’llah – God willing. We work, we hope for a better life, and we cling together for comfort. As luck had it, I was born into a society where existential problems were less pressing than in Morocco. Even though war had robbed many of us of family members and homes, reconstruction was unstoppable. Bribery has, in general, been replaced by deal making in Western business situations. Alms are reserved for those without protective networks. With the luxury of being a modern woman I inherited the luxury of free thought and dependence on organized contracts. I live on social security payments and a pension and in an emergency I could request food stamps, Medical, public assistance. Public assistance? Isn’t that a kind of collective baksheesh?
Before I went to bed I counted my dollar bills and Dirhams. Maybe I was rich. I fell asleep with the smug intent to spread my insight and newfound wealth the next day. Of course it all fell apart when a horde of taxi drivers mobbed me in front of the hotel in the morning. Some followed me around the corner and offered to be my protectors, “Not good to walk alone.”
I smiled, “No thank you. Non, merci. Shukran. I’m not going very far. Just a few pictures.” I pointed at my camera and walked faster.
“Hustlers,” I grumbled, “they just want my tourist dollars.”

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Class

I don’t remember her. Not her face. Not her voice. Not her clothing.
Not even her written words of approval or criticism in the margins of my papers.

Last week I filled out an admission form for West Valley College. I received an email with my student ID and began the online registration process. Spring Semester 2007. Creative Writing 070A. After I hit submit I encountered an error code. “This course is a repeat and does not meet the allowed grades requirement.” I had no idea what it meant.
I called Admissions several times. When I finally reached somebody I was informed that the system was down and that no information was available. “Call back after twelve.”
I went to see the movie Freedom Writers with my friend Margie and afterward she drove me to West Valley College. Some errors require personal attention.
“Oh, I talked to you this morning.” The young woman punched my social security number into the keyboard and stared at the computer screen.
“You’ve already taken this class.”
“No I haven’t.” Immediately CNN reports about stolen social security numbers swamped my mind. “Maybe somebody else used my number.”
She turned the screen so I could see the entries and continued. “You took 070A in 1988.”
“I don’t remember!”
Later, at home, I would search our conversation for a hint of embarrassment. There was none. I didn’t take the class before. The computer was wrong.
What happens now?”
“You’ll have to fill out a petition form.” She handed me a sheet of paper.
I wrote my name, my address, my social security number. When I came to the big empty space, titled Reason for Repeat, I was still irritated and wrote: I don’t remember taking English 070A.
On the way out Margie and I laughed. What else could we do? Stuff happens. If I started to dig into my memory to put the year 1988 into perspective, I didn’t voice it.
“That was nineteen years ago,” Margie said, “We were still working downtown.”
I admitted to some paranoia. “I thought they aren’t allowed to ask for a social security number. That woman made me say it out loud and I had to write it on the petition.” Paranoia is a rather bizarre, nonsensical and helpless shadow that seems to be getting larger as we get older. Margie knows all about it. She thinks the UPS driver stole her checks. Somebody stole them. It took months for the charges to stop. Months for the phone calls from stores to stop. Now she shreds everything that has her name on it, even mail addressed to occupant. It’s a sign of the times, we agree.
On the way home, between suspicions and speculations, I began to think about the possibility that I had really taken a class I couldn’t recall. “I’ll have to look at an old calendar and my journals.”

And now I know. I wrote a four-page poem in that class. Thirteen times thirteen lines. Thirteen syllables per line. I called it Breakfast of Champions. It was my obituary. As assignment I had to keep a journal of constructing the poem – six days, twenty minutes a day. I find other signs that point back to 1988. A memoir piece that I edited in 1993. A fictional story about a traveling button. The description of a room. And a list of favorite words, written on September 19, 1988. Words like Hottentotts, Klapperschlange, Bumblebee, and Knickerbocker.
These pieces were composed on my first computer, Twobits, the one without Windows and without a graphics card. I recall its Undelete button. I never quite trusted its capacity for bringing back eliminated text. I remember that I printed my homework by pressing Shift and PrintScreen. Something prevented me from transferring the material to a new computer later. It had to do with new software that didn’t accept WordPerfect documents, though some survived on yellowing sheets of continuous paper. I found them in a folder of unsorted writing.
But who was the instructor? I still don’t remember her.
I see a flickering image of women gathered around a table. Is that a classroom in the Language Arts Building at West Valley College? Or is my mind flipping through scenes from Freedom Writers?

I think her name might have been Sanchez. I think she was young. I think we read “Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg. A ten-dollar paperback. I think she inspired me to write during a time of self-doubt. I turned 50 in her class.
Now I am 68. I have to wait a week before I know the outcome of my petition. Because I wanted to be prepared I already paid fifty-five dollars on Amazon.com for three textbooks. They are used and in need of slipcovers, but the new ones would have cost more than 200 dollars. How can kids afford to go to college nowadays?
I am excited about this class and look forward to interaction with young students and the instructor. Her name is Lenore Harris. Will I remember her in another nineteen years? In 2026 when I am eighty-seven?

Person of the Year

When I heard the news that I was proclaimed Person of the Year for 2006 I was thrilled. I would grace history on the same list with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Well, there was Stalin too. And Hitler. But I would do my best to be one of the good guys.
I bought Time Magazine to see myself reflected in the glory of the front page.
“You,” it said. “Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”
I have to admit that I don’t quite live up to the image of a controller. I am not one of 120 million myspace inhabitants; I have never seen an envelope from Netflix in my mailbox and I have just begun to download iTunes. But I do keep up to date with MyFamily.com and several groups on Yahoo. I take online classes in anything from “Ancient China” to “Scrapbooking.” My connections to CNet, Travelocity, Bookcrossing, and Virtual Tourist are well known. Occasionally I shop on ebay. Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble have my full financial backing. Periodically I engage in online dialog with AT&T and Waste Management, and several banking institutions. My screen glows past midnight and my mouse gets very little sleep. And yes, of course I use google, or as our president says “The Google.”
Am I interactive? You bet. The list of my Favorite Places has grown to more than 300. You should see the amount of temporary Internet files I had to delete the other day. Well, I stock more cookies than Safeway keeps on their shelves. Yes, I am definitely interactive, though I wouldn’t call it “in control.” More often than not my “Submit” button pays a bill or asks a question.
To verify my compatibility with others who really control the Information Age, and to show my solidarity with the New World Order, I clicked on youtube.com. I wanted to see in which way ”a couple of regular guys built a company that changed the way we see ourselves.” (Time magazine says so!) It took a while to load the page because I don’t have a fast connection; I still use my telephone line. What came up on the screen was not at all what I expected. As I read the captions to the featured videos of the day I became discouraged. This is how control of the Information Age is exercised? How can I be part of this world?
The first video was entitled “A stop motion battle between two friends turned enemies.” It had been viewed 564,844 times. The number two spot was taken by “Handfarting the Star Spangled Banner,” viewed 102,237 times. A third video reported on “Spit Art” viewed 212, 397 times.
I do want to belong to the “Generation Network.” I promise to listen to streaming radio and to download podcasts once I get a DSL or broadband connection. To show my sincere efforts in communicating my thoughts, I have acquired this blog. Though I will probably never outshine 54-year old Harriet Klausner from Georgia who has written 12,896 book reviews on Amazon.com, more than any other user, I, too, have lots of things to say. My three- inch “work in progress” binder is filled with more than 500,000 words.
As pacifist I can’t produce a fight video and I don’t have enough spit to draw a landscape on the sidewalk, but this morning, after several minutes of practice, I produced a faint, somewhat sweaty sound with my hands – I think it could be counted as a genuine Person of the Year handfart. Thank goodness, I am starting to belong.