4 am and I still haven't learned

I never sleep before traveling. I take for granted that something drastically different is about to happen and I lean into it, like a gift. I pack with ease. I take a rest and stare at the ceiling. I convince myself of the elasticity of time and space that’s about to take place. I won’t sleep now, I think; I’ll sleep tomorrow or the next night or I’ll push through and then sleep for two weeks straight. Anything is possible when you’re about to travel.

When I went to print my plane ticket, I realized it coincided with ftour. As I walked around Hassan, the streets emptied. The shops closed. My search for a printer turned into an inadvertent stroll. Just me and the lowering evening. Traffic lights changed for no one. My heart alternated feeling like a balloon in my chest and a stone in the sea.

I went to give a thank you gift to the concierge who works in my building. I was knocking on his door, and then – how so often happens – I was sitting at his table. His wife was patting my hand. I was eating braywatt and chebekhia and drinking tea. His little sons were pretending to be lions around my feet.

It takes so long to get from the hallway to the table in some places, and others no time at all.

At last, I went to my old host family’s to say goodbye. They hugged and kissed me in the doorway. I couldn’t imagine going out of it, leaving them there. How had I not always known them?

It’s a wonder to form attachments. The well of tears refills – for better and worse. Tomorrow I’ll be home, and that sounds as foreign to me as Morocco sounded a year ago.

And it hasn’t even begun to come together, to coagulate.

But a few things are clear as day. What affects me on a deep level, is and always will be people. What I’ve learned from the people I’ve met this year is that there is no limit on how many you can draw close and share life with. It’s like after clutching a cup of water your entire life, you see the ocean for the first time.

There is so much tea. There is so much chebekya. There is so much room at the table.

Distance

Last month, I visited a high school in Kenitra to talk to the students about the US and my experiences in Morocco. Before my talk, I listened in on the first part of their class. The students were in tenth grade, between 14 and 15 years old. I sat in a desk like everyone else. The girl beside me pushed her textbook towards me to share. 

The lesson was on technology, and the class was discussing its advantages and disadvantages. The teacher spoke in a crisp English that the students imitated. She inserted bits of other languages to make sure everyone was following along, like in a sermon - Fhmti? D’accord? Am I lying to you? The class responded in unison – Eh, oui, no. 

Advantages first. And what are they? It makes far people close, one student said. Right, said the teacher, it shortens distance. And the disadvantages? It makes close people far, they determined. It shortens distance, but it also sets a distance. A couple in the same bed can be on their phones and, therefore, on different continents, in different worlds. 

She talked about how technology has played a hand in Morocco transitioning from a collectivist society to an individualist one. Instead of the singular TV room, each family member has their own personal screen.

The teacher put the book down.

“Why don’t your parents understand you?”

The class paused.

“Because they didn’t grow up with this. These are new issues. New problems. They didn’t have to deal with them at your age.”

It was interesting to hear an adult talk like that. When I was in high school I remember a lot of adults saying things like, “We were your age once too,” and “IIIII remember what it was like.” Instead here was an adult acknowledging that large factors have changed the child’s experience of youth from that of their parents’.

Young and old. Here and there. The world compresses and expands at once.

I wake up to texts from my family. I miss calls from my mom, who recently figured out international calling. I think how I miss my high school friend Kelsey, pick up my phone to send her an email, and have a response from her by the time I’ve put it back down.

We are in many places at once.

I’ve been in Morocco this year, but I’ve never been more aware of America in my life. I follow the news daily. I have conversations with strangers about the upcoming presidential election. In November I attended four Thanksgiving dinners. The introductory question isn’t, What do you do? but Where are you from?

I was talking to my friend Asmaa at the university the other day, a graduate student, who was telling me about her recent studies. There are two ways culture affects our lives, she said: culture as geography and culture as the map we carry within us.

She said that when I go back to the US, my own inner map of culture will have been changed by Morocco.

I’m writing from my room in Rabat, but I can so clearly picture my room in Virginia, the childhood trinkets, the window overlooking the stream, the world map on my wall whose Atlantic Ocean I traced with my finger to imagine what it would be like to cross it.

I’ll be home within the next two weeks, and what’s close to me now will once again be far, just as the far will be close. My inner map will have changed. And I imagine I’ll trace that same 6-inch paper, Atlantic Ocean on my bedroom wall – back and forth, back and forth – to make sense of where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and what it could all possibly mean. 

Laayoune, in shorthand

It's four hours to Marrakech from Rabat, four more to Agadir, and 12 hours from Agadir to Laayoune. 12 hours on the road in almost constant view of the ocean. Cities tottering on the edges of cliffs, coves appearing out of nowhere, stark, high dunes, the flat, green tide pools. No one around. No camera could capture it; a comforting thought for me who didn't have a camera. The question of what to do with it all. How to hang on to it, that is.

It's very easy to hang onto on this sofa in the living room of my friend's house in the dark, where the house smells like the ocean and tonight we ate the best fish pastillas I've ever had, (although, to be fair, I'd never had them before tonight.)

The wind is strong in Laayoune and sounds like my dad's imitation of the wind. When my sisters and I were young, how he'd tuck us into bed. "Wshyoooooh," he'd howl, "It's negative 30 outside. There are wild animals on the prowl. But you're safe in your little igloo with your pack of dogs on guard, wshyoooooh." 

Today I felt tuned into the simplest pleasures, like a radio transitioning from static to the clarity of voices. The two bus drivers taking turns napping, breaking bread at a gas station, peeling an orange for my friend and I, tearing it in half to share, the juice running down my arms. They all seemed to me ancient gestures. The hot shower tonight. And now, soft sheets, a warm blanket. My friend gave me a clean kaftan to sleep in while her mom washes my clothes. In the other room, the voices of people who love each other, who won't go to bed yet; they have too much to say and, even more beautifully, nothing at all. 

This morning I said goodbye to the sisters we'd been staying with in Agadir, their mother, their friends. I didn't want to leave, they had grown so familiar and dear. So many people out here who, as they put it, "get in the heart very easily." Their hugs and kisses this morning, people who were strangers just two days ago. So many little rooms, so many bright faces, all the roads between them.

"Don't worry," says Mary Oliver, "sooner or later I'll be home / red-cheeked from the roused wind, / I'll stand in the doorway / stamping my boots and slapping my hands / my shoulders covered in stars."

Neighbors

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

-                                                                                                                                                                 -       Ernest Hemingway

The other day my host sister and I were talking about our favorite songs. Her favorite: "What a Wonderful World." Her favorite part: "I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do." She joked that in Morocco, that's why they ask how you are so many times over the course of a conversation; they’re really saying I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

In greeting someone, you’ll get one kiss on one cheek and one on the other. After you see someone you've met before, you get one on one cheek and two on the other. As someone explained to me the other day, that second cheek on the second side is to say: Where have you been? Where did you go? You’ve been missing from me.

Now that I ride the train to and from Kenitra every day, I do a lot of people watching. I watch this daily exchange: the numerous questions, the kisses, the outburst of joy on people’s faces. I see this and I’m moved by it.

It’s no secret that the region is known for, prides itself on hospitality. But what sticks with me aren’t the grand gestures; it's the little, repeated acts that make up day-to-day life.

When I walk past my laundromat, Ahmed and Mohammed call out my name from the street. They ask me how my parents are. They ask me how work is going. They pour me coffee and show me a video of an American woman singing in Amazigh. I never leave within 30 minutes.

Maleka runs the hanut across the street from me. She teaches me Darija; I teach her English. We write lists of words we hear for the other to translate. We scribble drawings for each other on the edges of envelopes and make gestures to convey "garlic" or "cheating."

When I got back from Barcelona, Said ran across the street. Said is the security guard for the street that I live on. We had never talked apart from greeting each other each morning. “Is everything okay?" he asked. "I haven’t seen you in a while. I was worried!"

When my parents were visiting, I walked my mom through the neighborhood one evening and introduced her to everyone I knew, everyone I come across in my day to day life.

“I’ve never seen you so outgoing,” she said.

It's true that something in me has changed, but I think it's more than a personality trait. Living here has changed my idea of community.

Because language is culture (and culture is everything), learning another language gives you a different way to move through the world. Learning and using Darija in my day to day life has given me different grounds for relating to people. The words "loving concern" are an idea I spend my days circling. What do all these questions do"? What do answering them do? What does asking them do? 

I used to think of a community in terms of sharing something specific in common: an artist community, farming community, expat community. It was a rather foreign concept to me for a community of people to be bound to each other simply because they lived near one another, to look out for each other like brothers and sisters.

In the Williamsburg neighborhood I lived in as a child, I can remember one time that neighbors came out of their houses to interact. A tree had fallen during an ice storm, blocking the road leading out of the cult-de-sac so that no one could get to work. Other than that, people kept to themselves. To each his own.

In the here and now, I would describe my life as full. It's the kind of life I hoped for myself as a child, trying to fall asleep at night on that quiet cul-de-sac, wondering if anything would ever happen. The difference between fullness and busyness, I think, has to do with people. The makers and breakers of happiness, as Hemingway would say. The elevators of the mundane. The enrichers of routine.

Kif dayera? Labas? Bikher? Culshi mezyan? If the greetings and questions never went deeper than the surface, it could become tedious. But, what I’ve witnessed is that this gesture of care and emotion, over time, gives ways to genuine care and emotion. I feel invested in my neighbors lives; I feel as though they’re invested in mine. I know their children and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives. I genuinely care how they’re doing. The questions and cheek kisses have led to sharing our lives with each other.

When I arrive in the doorway of my old host family’s house, I’m greeted with a kiss on one side and about ten or fifteen on the other. This is repeated five to seven times over for each member of the family until I’m suspended in space and time. Of all the places to be in the world, it's one of my favorites.

What you get to keep

My airbnb in Barcelona was an apartment seven floors up in the middle of the Gothic Quarter. It was spacious, brimming with art, lined with books. The couple who lived there was equally as lovely. Luis, perhaps in his eighties, had a sunny smile and slicked back white hair. Pilar had bright blue eyes and never sat still for long. They glowed with grace and graciousness, and I longed to communicate with them.

I tried to introduce myself the first night, to thank the two for their hospitality. I reached for my Spanish, but in its place was Darija. I tried the basic phrases I knew from past Spanish classes, from my childhood, from general knowledge, but instead of Como esta and encantado, out came Labas and Mucharfin. I rummaged within myself. But no, eight months of language study and exhaustion, left me at a total blushing loss. Pilar and I could speak French with each other, but Luis and I were left with gestures and makeshift sign language. The MOST rudimentary Spanish on my part, a few words of English on his.

Luis knocked on my door the first night, asked how I was, asked what my name was, and checked to make sure I had the key for the front door. I assured him his son had given me the key. All was well. A few minutes passed and there was another knock on the door. Again, what was my name? Was I doing alright? Did I have the key? Lindsey, great, yes I had everything I needed, thank you! This time ten minutes passed before there was another knock and we confirmed the information of the last two conversations.

I woke up the next morning to the most beautiful piano music I’d ever heard. I assumed it to be coming from another guest or perhaps Pilar, who looked like an artist. Elegant and spry, it was easy to envision her at a music stand or easel. By the time I dressed and left my room, the foyer was empty and the piano had its cover on. Maybe it had been a record, I thought.

The next day I walked out of my room and there was Luis, focusing all his energy on putting one foot in front of the other. His walker was behind him. He smiled, seemed a little embarrassed, shuffled back a few steps.

“Paso y paso,” he said.

The next morning I woke again to the music and this time I followed the sound. I walked down the long hallway to find Luis hunched over the keyboard. His arms reached out to each side, his hands moved up and down, falling on the keys like a marionette’s. I sat down, transfixed; I had tears on my cheeks that I wouldn’t realize until later. It sounded like there was a thunderstorm in him. It felt like I’d never heard music before.

It had none of the uprightness of sheet music, nothing of the rigid form of a known concerto. It poured out of him and turned, changed streams, wound around stony bends. It followed the strength of its own flow, evolving and growing, breathing life and strength. He came to a conclusion and turned around, looking at me as though I’d walked in on him washing the dishes.

“Su nombre?” he asked. I told him.

He nodded and pointed to the piano, whose sound just a moment before had been tearing out my insides. “This song. Its name now… Lindy.”

I spent the rest of the mornings I was there on the couch by the piano, listening to his daily compositions.

“Since I was very small,” he said one morning in between songs, “music and I are friends.”

I made a sound that was part laugh-part sob. I thought to myself, you bought a plane ticket to sit on this couch, listening to this man to whom you can’t speak three words.

I’d spent the past year living in a city built around the business of selling songs. If I rub these two pennies together like this, maybe it’ll be a hit? But I couldn't believe that the aim of music is a business or that the height of expression is a competitive TV show. It has worth outside of money and acclaim. It's got to be the closest we can come to the soul.

And as for the music I made, had been making for years in fact... At best, I felt self-conscious about it. At worst, I worried it was a waste of my time, ceaselessly coming up with tunes in my bedroom, toiling over lyrics I’d sing for no one.

But wasn't this proof of its worth? That you can get to an age where nothing can be taken for granted. You can struggle to walk; you can forget your own name. You can lose your muscle, your memory; you don’t get to keep it all. But my friend Luis had music in him as a little boy and he had music in him now. He got to keep this.

Back in Rabat now, there are days when I can get by in Arabic. There are moments where I converse freely in French. Sometimes I’ll teach an English lesson that feels clear and exciting. But many days, the words I reach for aren’t there. Sometimes it feels like all my efforts have been for nothing. For having built a life out of words, there are some days when they fail me miserably. But every night, I come back home to my little apartment. I pick up my guitar and I play.

And every morning, seven floors up in the middle of the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, there’s a man sitting at a piano, speaking a language I can understand.

Barcelona by myself

I think one of the most important lessons in travel is just seeing that it’s possible. I romanticized travel (or rather, people who traveled) so much when I was younger. I assumed that people who traveled were innately smarter, more cultured, more beautiful, better. They knew something I didn't. They had secrets they chose not to share. But, alas, it's not as tidy as that. As with everything, it’s not as much about what you’ve done or where you’ve been as what you choose to get out of it.

In the break after my first semester, I bought a ticket to spend a week in Barcelona. It was the cheapest flight on Google Flights and I needed to leave the country soon for my visa. I had no plans, no contacts, no obligations and no knowledge of the Spanish or Catalan language.

My first night there I was so excited I went for a walk in the rain. I rounded the corner outside of my AirBnB in the Gothic Quarter and stopped in my tracks. It was the cathedral of Barcelona, appearing out of nowhere, like the page of a pop-up book.

I stood there for a while, looking at it stabbing the night sky. Then a stranger gave me gave me a map of the city, a nice, big, beautiful map, and I went to a little, twinkle-light lined restaurant where I ate fries and finished Thunderstruck, a collection of short stories by Elizabeth McCracken. My family had picked it out at Parnassus in Nashville and mailed it to me for Christmas. I loved living inside those stories, the blended worlds of loss and joy and oddness and wonder. After I finished it, I sat there a while and thought of things I hadn’t remembered in forever.

I thought of the first time I traveled by myself, when I took a train to Montreal one summer, where I didn’t know anyone and blushed anytime I tried to speak French. That first day, it felt like I had to be breaking rules of some kind and then I had to keep reminding myself that there weren’t rules, that I was kind of a grown up. And that realization made me buy an ice cream cone and walk in big circles around the Canada Day celebration, feeling very old and young and nervous and excited until I went back to my dorm room and watched the ceiling fan until I fell asleep at 9 pm.

Whenever I travel, I get the strongest hankering to read. I told this to Rachel who so succinctly said that “seeing more of the world makes you want to see inside people’s heads, which is what reading lets you do!” I found an English bookstore called Come In English Bookstore and blissfully read my way through the rest of my week.

I didn’t get lonely while I was there; I didn’t wish I was traveling with someone. I liked watching couples have their pictures taken, hearing study abroad students gossip loudly in English. I thought of my grandmother a lot over the course of the week. I thought how she never minded doing something by herself – going to the Rose Bowl, traveling across the country, taking a hike on her 12^th birthday. For her, being the only one to do something was never a reason to not do it.

Despite enjoying myself, a few days in, I was overcome with homesickness. I missed my family: dad’s crackly laugh, mom’s sunniness, Katie’s humor, Rachel’s company. It hit me out of nowhere, and so there I sat in the corner of a café, eating a pork sandwich and having a little cry to myself. Traveling is all well and good, but people need people, I decided, and I will always need mine.

 

I managed to shake my melancholy though while I explored the city. Flying in, I was struck at the diversity from above. Most regions are defined by either ocean, mountains, or city. But Barcelona has all three, in what looks like from above, the photographic rule of thirds. I walked everywhere. I tried to see everything. I spent a day just walking down by the port, looking at the water. I took a day trip up to Montserrat, a monastery nestled in the mountains outside the city.

 

On Friday I met up with my friend, Wade, and we went to the home of a Fulbright researcher where we had a giant potluck made from rummaged vegetables. That weekend we visited the Hospital Sant Pau and afterwards had an enormous lovely, paella lunch. We talked about oral history and The Great British Baking Show and living abroad. After spending so much time by myself, it felt lovely and warm to be around people I enjoyed, to laugh, to linger over food and wine.

When Wade and I were in Chefchaouen, he had said offhandedly, “Traveling is actually just eating.” At lunch with the other Fulbrighters, we imagined a public art piece, one of those giant chalkboards, that says “Traveling is actually just…” and then passersby finish the sentence. We speculated possibilities: traveling is actually just burning through money. Traveling is actually just getting from here to there. Traveling is actually just asking for the wifi password. Traveling is actually just looking for a good cup of coffee.

Being around so much art, history, such a different culture and language, and then talking to researchers made me get back in the mood to learn, teach, study, read, explore, to conjugate verbs and listen to music, to make lists and forget about them. The main thing it did was hit the reset button. I boarded the plane back to Rabat ready to invest again. 

What a gal

Today would have been my grandmother’s 95^th birthday. I think of Hester Clarence Green more and more every day – and I’ve always thought of her quite a bit. But since I’ve been here I’ve noticed more and more resemblances between our characters: our penchant for traveling, our love of laughter, and being totally, completely okay with doing something alone. I’d hope to think I have her resilient optimism, but check back in with me in 70 years.

A lot of people grow bitter with age, and if Grandma had, I don’t think anyone would have blamed her. But her tough exterior cracked and softened over the years to reveal a gentle sunniness that was so genuine, it must have been there along.

I was so thankful to be there for the service in October. Yes, it could have waited. No, I didn’t HAVE to be there but I realized after the fact how important it was for closure. It’s important to get together in a big room and say, hey, I cared about this person, I’m going to miss this person. This person was here with us physically for 94 years and now they’re not and I feel that.

A death out of season is so tragic, brings up so many questions, pierces us again and again, that it’s almost impossible for funerals to not be somber. But a funeral for someone who made 94 years' worth of people laugh, who, even pushing her walker around was sheer LIGHT, whose last lucid words were, "Well, it looks like the end of the run..." That really does feel like a celebration of life. That brings up other questions, like: how do I get to be THERE? (Grandma would say a glass of milk a day.)

Whatever you chalk it up to, it’s quite a feat to live that long and then fill a conference room with people of all ages who cared, who are going to miss you, who wished you didn’t have to leave.

A few years ago, I asked her the secret to a happy life. She turned kinda thoughtful and said, “To have people that you love who love you too.”

I wish she didn’t have to leave, but oh, what wealth she left in her wake.