Senior Spring

Just like the last few months at Haverford (15 years ago), I've met some cool people at the tale end of our stay. Kasia, a Polish woman (married to a Québecois) lives with her family just around the corner on the bottom floor of our building. Hazel and I walked over the other afternoon for tea (and espresso) and good conversation -- her almost-one year old Stella tottering at the edge of the couch, testing her legs. She's an acupuncturist. Her husband was let go from his golf course job sometime in the winter -- he was criticized for being too friendly with the people under him, working for him. We talked for a bit about that -- the remarkably aristocratic attitudes toward underlings that smack of colonialism. Is it in fact a caste system here? Some system, anyway, where economic and social roles are fixed, where those in power stay there. Not unlike our own, in some ways, no?

The house is in an uproar, cardboard boxes and bags and rugs, toys and half-empty boxes of tea, emptying containers of laundry detergent, dish soap. We weigh this bag and that one, shuffle stuff here and there, hoping that tomorrow morning at the Maroc Poste, the douane will be in a good mood when he surveys our three 20-kilo boxes and three 15-kilo bags, and rifles through it all before, fingers crossed, giving us the nod.

Walking back last night along the exhaust-choked and Saturday-night-packed Mohammed V, I saw a man on the sidewalk bent over putting on his shoes beside a flattened cardboard box prayer mat. A couple yards away was a line of tourists queued up at a bank machine. I was telling Abderrahman about this moment today in his shop -- we were talking about the difference between spiritual nourishment and corporeal. Anyway. He was tending to the soul, the tourists to the body. Who knows, really. That's just the way it looked. Collecting images and moments. I wonder how all of this will feel on the flip side.