Desperate Measures

This explains a lot of mischief that occured when our late cat William was still alive. I'm glad we did not have a porcelain gnome outside of our door. William is the same cat who fashioned himself a hammock out of our kitchen window screen.

Snack--Back to my Roots

photo: Southern Living Magazine

I grew up eating something I believed to be called "paminna cheese." We ate it on sandwiches, celery sticks, crackers. Most of the time we bought the ready-made kind in the deli section of the grocery store. (now that I think about that stuff...ick!) When I got braces as an adult and was in great pain, unable to bite into anything, this stuff sustained me.

My grandmother used to make a batch of it at Thanksgiving, where we'd see it displayed atop the celery sticks. This was probably the one time a year I could devour several stalks of celery in a single day.

I honestly did not know that its true name was pimiento cheese until I was much older and had started studying the Spanish language. You know, pimiento means "pepper," which made it quite clear that the red stuff in a tiny jar my mother used to buy and put into the mixture was actually the pimiento part of the spread. If you are not from the southern part of the United States, you have not yet experienced the way southerners can take a simple looking word and turn it into something completely different. Case in point: pimiento=paminna. Say them aloud. Are they remotely related? You decide.

I made a big bowl of it on Friday and put it with our Friday breakfast. If you've never attended an Arabic-style breakfast, the utensils we use are loaves of bread. The only spoons I ever put on the breakfast table are the ones for stirring tea. We are scoopers and dippers.

Anyway, my kids went nuts for it. My husband likes it, too. If you've never made it, give it a try. It's a true comfort food and makes a great summertime lunch; it's also a big hit at those potluck luncheons when you do not have lots of time to prepare anything.

Pimiento-Cheese Spread

• 1 nice-sized block (8 oz.) of sharp cheddar cheese--the sharper, the better--finely shredded


• 3 tbsp. mayonnaise, Hellmann's if it is available, but others may substitute (adjust mayo according to your liking)


• 2 to 8 dashes of Tabasco or other hot sauce, depending on your preference


• 1 beautiful sweet red pepper, diced--I do this the day before, sprinkle a little salt on the diced-up pepper and cover to allow the lovely sweetness to come out


• dash or two of black pepper

Mix until the mayonnaise no longer looks like mayo; the final product will be bright orange with red specks all throughout, and it is a thickish consistency. For the perfect sandwich, choose a thick bread you can toast lightly. Sahtain wa a'afiyah.

The Best Part of Waking Up...

is, well, just waking up. I'm increasingly thankful for each day that comes, by Allah's permission.

The second best part of waking up is (non-coffee drinkers, you are excused from reading further) : coffee.

Especially the kind brought to us by traveling friends from afar, who made room in their luggage for 1.49 kilograms of ground delight.

And yes, it's Folger's, so you can sing that little jingle now.

Diaspora

Today is Blog about Palestine Day.

The following quote was taken from the war diary of David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel: “The strategic objective [of the Jewish forces] was to destroy the urban communities, which were the most organized and politically conscious sections of the Palestinian people. This was not done by house-to house fighting inside the cities and towns, but by the conquest and destruction of the rural areas surrounding most of the towns. This technique led to the collapse and surrender of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, Safed, Acre, Beit-Shan, Lydda, Ramleh, Majdal, and Beersheba. Deprived of transportation, food, and raw materials, the urban communities underwent a process of disintegration, chaos, and hunger, which forced them to surrender.”

The day the Jewish forces entered the part of Jerusalem where my husband's mother was born, she and her sister had been doing the family's laundry. Situated at a prime location in at-Toor, or the Mt. of Olives, their house held a view of the valley below, including the pathway from the top of the mountain that still winds down into the heart of the Old City. My mother-in-law was nineteen that year--the year of the catastrophe.

Her first instinct was to flee. She dropped the aluminum laundry tub where she was standing, grabbed her sister's hand, and began running down the path eventually leading to al-Aqsa mosque. Shots were being fired in all directions, making it impossible to determine who was shooting whom. They ran, cowering down as low as they could, frightened by this uncertainty and chaos in their neighborhood--perhaps the most religiously diverse and significant stretches of road in all of the Holy Land. They reached the gates of the convent run by the silent order of French Carmelite Sisters. My mother-in-law told me that these nuns used to cover their faces. These nuns provided the frantic and scared young girls a place to hide for nearly two days. She has never forgotten the sisters' benevolence.

When she and her sister Fatima left the convent and returned safely to their house, the gunshots had ceased, and the clothes they had dropped had rusted from sitting wet in the aluminum tub. The world had also changed.

My mother-in-law grew up in the Mt. of Olives speaking Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish. Her best friends and neighbors were Jews whose origins were Spanish; they were Sephardic or from el Sefardim. Some of the Sephardic Jews boast ancestors dating back to their expulsion from Spain by the Crown in 1492. My mother-in-law roamed the markets with her Spanish-speaking friends, bought vegetables from Hebrew-speaking merchants, recognized Shabbat with her neighbors who would invite her to share their Saturday meals. Her father was much loved among the Jews in Mt. of Olives; when he died, his janazah was attended by more Jews than Arabs. My mother-in-law grew up blissfully unaware of any ideological differences between her family and the families living harmoniously around her. In fact, just last year her most loved childhood friend, now an Israeli, then just a neighbor, came looking for her. She was so happy to find out that my mother-in-law is still alive, although not living in at-Toor.

My mother-in-law is blessed to have been born in a location so dear to the three Abrahamic faiths. No real destruction of any kind has taken place in the Mt. of Olives; it is still one of the most attractive tourist destinations for people from all over the world. Her brother still owns and lives in the home in which they were born, which boasts the most magnificent view of the Dome of the Rock. The Church of the Ascension and the Church of Mary Magdalene are just blocks away from my mother-in-law's childhood home; the silent order of nuns are still where they were in 1948. Not much has changed. They are among the lucky few.

I once called in a radio program hosted by a prominent right-winger in Alabama. They were interviewing a Palestinian intellectual who had come to Birmingham to speak about the Palestinian issue. This was pre 9/11, but in Alabama one could be hard pressed to find a sympathetic general audience willing to listen to anyone who criticizes Israel and its sovereignty, much less the US government's policies regarding the state of Israel. You know, it's the only democracy in the Middle East.

Anyway, the radio host was taken aback by my analogy (and this may sound cliché) of the Mexican Army marching into Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, wiping out cities and towns, setting up its own government, denying all property owners the rights to their homes or lands, stripping the people of their citizenship, and expelling them into places that do not want them. I asked him if he thought any American in his right mind would just bow down and concede, or would it be expected for every able body to take up arms against his oppressor. "Whoa now, you sound like you're for them," he said to me.

For them. The Palestinians. One of the most displaced populations in the world. They constitute one of the largest diasporas, around six million. Six million. Six million. Six million. Six million.

Diva and The Jo Men

This, from Umm Zaid. It's all so true.

One admitted fault exposed here, one that even I cannot cover or explain away, however, is the inexplicable fondness of young men for Celine Dion. The women suffer from it too, but it’s more pardonable in a woman. It is very… interesting to go to a cafe in the richest area of town, and the young Arab kids (Jordanians, Gulfies) go “Oooh” and smile and mouth the words when the world’s favorite Canadian chanteuse comes on the track. Or when you walk past a store tended by a young pointy haired, pointy shoe’d guy (ie, the epitome of cool style here) and he’s blasting Celine. I’m not kidding.

Does anyone remember (maybe 8 years back?) that SNL actress who played Celine? I used to laugh like there was no tomorrow. Wait, I still do.

Liar, Part Deux

I wrote part one a long time ago.

I do not want to find anything out about you. I want to make no new discoveries. I am not a CSI wannabe. I do not deliberately investigate. Facts just fall into my lap, time and time again. Most of the time I keep them to myself, but sometimes I just want to expose you, not in a vicious way, but enough to let you know that I know.

I know!

I also know that it is pity you seek, although you claim otherwise. You want to paint this picture of your life for those who have not already been down that exhausting path with you. Paint that picture, go ahead. For what it is worth, I do not pity you.

I told someone the other day that 22,000 + people in Myanmar are not dead because they made innumerable bad choices or lacked life skills. I pity those victims of natural disaster. I pity those without a handful of rice to sustain them. I pity those whose lives--wrought with real struggle, who searched for a new day, a new opportunity, living under a despotic regime--were cut short. People drinking sewage or mothers whose babies will die from dysentery. They deserve pity.

I pity the Palestinians whose struggles I am waiting to write about--the ones with no decent living conditions, land deeds that hold no legal value, fathers who have buried their sons, mothers who have buried their husbands, entire families whose homes have been wiped out by the bulldozer or bodies caught in a crossfire. I pity those children who are brilliant but have no one to teach them, the voices that must be heard but are continually muzzled by the power of their occupier. They deserve pity.

Your trivialities are just that. Trivial.

But I keep you in my supplications.

However, please wake up. The time is now to be thankful.

Regalito

I am not sure if I can call what happened to me yesterday serendipitous, because it wasn't really a discovery.

I suppose it was just a heartfelt surprise gift.

I am waiting for something to happen to me that can be termed serendipitous, because I like the word. It can be its own line in a Haiku.

Anyway.

My friend picked me up to go to a lesson yesterday morning, and handed me a card she'd been waiting to give me for a week. In it was a little note, basically telling me that I work too hard and to take time out for myself; along with the sentiment was a gift certificate for a massage, and an offer to drive me to massage venue if necessary.

I love her!

Stretch marks, anyone?

I spoke to a baseball Dad yesterday at the game whose mother delivered babies for sixteen years straight: each year beginning in 1964, and ending in 1980, his mom had a child. He jokingly said, "Finally, she decided to take a break."

And we dare to ponder why paradise is at the feet of the mother.

Daughters Marching

Those little girls I used to teach have grown up.

From me they begrudgingly learned about the Great World Wars, latitude and longitude, the capital of French Guiana, how to take notes while listening to the teacher speak, and the lunacy of Henry VIII.

Do all kids innately detest Social Studies? If they hated it when they came to my class, I think they left liking it, just a bit.

I miss those days--those pre-9/11 days when we viewed and lived in the world differently. I miss sharing funny stories with my class; I miss clutching the podium while standing before them, wanting to shout to the rooftops, encouraging them to change the world with their words and actions, to not miss opportunities to learn, to travel, to experience.

I've already attended the wedding of one of my special girls from those days long gone. I'm invited to another wedding this summer in Beirut, Lebanon. Another one of them is landing in Amman tonight, and I can't wait to see her. I used to sit and grade their reports, correct their ESL spelling and grammar tendencies, and think, "What is going to become of them?" By the grace of God, they have come into their own, found their ways, made their marks, marched on.

I have three biological daughters but I had many, many more back there, in that little school I poured my heart into. I still have the trophy they gave me when I left the school, the one that reads, "You have taught us more than you will ever know."

The same goes for you all, my daughters.