In the city

So now we really are here, despite the subtitle up above. Because I'm-not-sure-why, it takes a thousand years to switch from one screen to another, from one "I want to post now" to another "now it's time to add peeps to my list of who can read me" -- so apologies beforehand for whatever the final version reads or looks like to you -- it will take a bit of doing to get what's in my head or on my camera onto the screen. The computer part is mostly a mystery to me anyway, made all the more so by the Moroccan air through which these signals and blips are moving. World Wide Interweb, indeed.


I've written a bunch already on my own laptop, but so far Maroc Telecom won't let me onto our wireless configuration at home, so I'm hunched over Paul's laptop while both of us sit here on the black leather banquette, drinking Flag Pils and glorying in the fact that the girl has gone to bed, we have wireless, we skyped with Paul's folks and with mine this evening, and the dust of the first 72 hours is settling, albeit haphazardly and in fits and starts. (The sudden thunderstorm last night at 7:00 made some dust settle, I'm sure -- Hazel came running down the hall from the back of the apartment into the living room shouting, "It's raining! It's raining!" in her way -- and sure enough, great ropes of water were tumbling down and then the boom and flicker and clouds above us moving swiftly, the green fan of a palm on the roof of our building bobbing away in the wind. Still it must have been in the 90s. It's hot here.)


It's amazing how the old life falls away (the Cheeseboard, the baths at home, the trips to the park with her pals and mine and the patch of grass that Hazel liked best to run in) -- not really of course, but the present is so consuming, with its green tiles and sandaled feet, the smells of piss and incense, the toothsome grin of the gentleman across the street from whom I bought a head of cauliflower, 3 zuccinis, 1 red onion, 3 tomatoes, 3 oranges, 1 bunch of parsley and 1 free banana for Hazel all for $2 -- these things, faces, new corners and smells leap up in the now.


So this is the first post here -- we are here. We did make it out of Casablanca (only after the two hour layover turned into five -- there's a strike at Royal Air Maroc and we were lucky even to make it out that day), and though we don't all of us have wireless right now, at least one of us does, Hazel has been sleeping beautifully and generally marching through her days with joy, we have each other, and so the year begins.