Indigestion Confession

Last night, as I lay curled in a fetal position on my bathroom rug, I found myself pondering two not unrelated topics. 1. Would I even realize it if I accidentally flushed one of my kidneys? and 2. Death.

As the far too often repeated mantra “I’m going to die…in a bathroom…in Africa, I’m going to die…in a bathroom…in Africa,” mouthed across my lips I reflected how if I did, with the exception of to a handful of people, it would be little more than a short footnote in the lives of people around me. Don’t panic. Don’t think of this as a cry for help. My life is great - exceptional really. Amazing wife, brilliant son, good job, clear purpose. Other than choosing to eat far too much Indian food at a recent birthday party, I don’t have many regrets.

Think about how quickly people become passing anecdotes shared as pages are flipped through a yearbook.
“Her husband books travel for Brittany Spears. Or maybe he drives the bus”
“Isn’t he in jail?”
“She’s married to a guy from The Normals.”
“I should have asked her out.”
“This guy died when he washed down an empanada with a Coke and then his colon exploded - just like that Mikey kid and the Pop Rocks.”

And yet there’s nothing wrong with that. In the country I’m living in now, the “official” mourning period is more than a month. During that time, the immediate family doesn’t work, or go grocery shopping or do anything outside the home. Instead, they pitch a tent in their yard and make coffee for the people who will stop by. The visitors will bring sugar or coffee or tea and sit with the family. The family is expected to wail and look gloomy and, basically, mope. The death, which is understandably hard on the family, becomes more of a social obligation than a process of adjustment and healing. For the next few months, there will be additional ceremonies and more wailing. I know death hurts the living but when society deliberately prolongs that process…?

Yes, I want people to remember me but realize that after I’m gone from here I’m not finished yet. Celebrate that. Tell silly stories about me and things you heard and remember. Share with classmates that math protest I led in junior high or how I would forget my locker combination after every vacation in high school. Mourn if you need to but continue with life.

And at the visitation, be careful with what you eat.

P.S. An apology needs to go to A.M.’s mom (no, not Betty). Half a decade ago I spent the night curled in a fetal position on your basement bathroom floor after a family meal. I thought you really had tried to poison me. Given what happened last night here in Africa, I could have been wrong. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Unless, of course, you somehow managed to follow me here…

Dusty thoughts

Today I walked into a room that had only been opened twice in the last two years. The language lab was thick with dust and spider webs, broken chairs and locked cabinets with lost keys. Tape recorders and headphones, televisions and language texts. Think of a room belonging to a Jules Verne scientist with a bit less Frankenstein and a bit more WKRP in Cincinnati. It should have been filled with students panicking over not being here the difference between the English voiced and unvoiced “w” or trying to remember what “duck” (a bird they’ve never seen) is in French (the language of a country they’ll never be allowed to visit). Wearing oversized headsets, students should be mouthing Italian and Arabic, German and French along with a range of languages rarely heard off this continent. Instead, it is left unused and wasted.

A satellite dish sits on our roof that doesn’t work; a neighbor’s looks like a rusted out World War II antiaircraft gun. Every house in this country has a fireplace but I have never known one to be used. Sitting in a storage room near here is a collection of crumbling records – the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the soundtrack to Hair. Doorbells here occasionally work, as does the internet.

It’s easy to be critical when you experience something like this but don’t all of us let much of what we have go to waste? How many opportunities do we ignore? How many people do we meet in a day who could be our teachers but are never asked a question? We waste our day, not enjoying our time but trying to kill it. How many talents do we leave undeveloped to gather dust because we don’t see how they might be used in the future? We leave doors locked and the dust seeps through.

In the next few weeks I’ll be opening that room daily. I’m looking for an instrument to start playing again. I’ll be reading more – important things, not just email and the few English novels I’ve tracked down here. I’m trying to relearn much of the local language I have forgotten. And the language lab? In the next few weeks I’ll be opening that up, dusting off the equipment and putting it to use.