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November 05, 2010
There is a song in my head this morning, one that has no name, no words, no tune. It is all songs, it is mathematical, it is inside my ear, it is what comes before nothing. It is that mid-autumn sort of thing, a day off from living, hazy, sun morning low in the sky, nothing to do. I behold because I cannot merely look or stare, the asters in the courtyard of my safety here in the center of the continuous perhaps never ending denouement of a five-part tragedy in a thirty-years war, vigorous yellow rich blooms I could eat, hundreds, and I perceive after all, life, the same life that is born and re-born when an orphan girl whose blood can trace a thin unimaginable line all the way to Ghengis Khan himself tells me she cannot play Zeus, there are too many lines, and does, when she says she cannot do the drama of Mother Courage, sacrifice one child to save another, and does, or when a second orphan scampers after a soccer ball, her impossibly long black braid trailing after her like a cord tied to the dusk of the fading sky, the ruins of Darulaman, and the full bleeding moon rising over the incisored dust-brown mountains of Kabul, or when a third orphan, tall and skinny, scribes a rendering of her name, her father's name, the place of her birth, a village so remote as to honor the remoteness of its name, Hindu Kush, and finally her unknown make believe date of birth on a whiteboard in bright red erasable ink and tells me in her curtseyed voice it is her passport, when I ask her where in the world this conjured document will bring her, and she answers coyly, impishly, "I'm going to America..." when she does not know or even think she is one who will ever go, ever leave this trembling city, not in this story, not in this life. Now I know and cannot turn away, these are the moments that compose the song I speak of, they gradually fill my body, waiting for a day such as this to silence my fears. The three girls who will accompany me to the United States for three months have been selected. An Uzbek from Kunduz, a Pashtun from Jalalabad, a Tajik from Takhar. The winter ahead of them they cannot possibly imagine and yet, oddly, I think it is the girls who will recognize a New England Christmas more than anyone, because they only know it from the over sentimentalized cards they've seen and that we Americans have grown not to believe, the ones depicting the season as a mythological candy land of red and green and white, home fires burning, safety singing and happiness inside the heart of a cold, cold world. Tucked within these Afghan orphans is the dream of a mystical land where human kindness becomes one with a season, the wind, the night, the stars. There will be footprints in snow, a sleigh weaving through evergreens laden with powder, there will be a small house huddled against a hill, and a many-paned window, yellow, aglow. And there will be such love. Along with the joy I anticipate in watching the girls experience this new world is the joy I will feel in watching unsuspecting Americans experience what the girls bring with them. The gift they bring is that song I speak of; and along with this gift, at the very least, now at last you will know why I am here.
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comment by: | November 05, 2010
nice photo