Standing Still
Omar and I are watching the Tyson-Williams fight on television, and the euro-beer is doing nicely as a stand-in for white wine with my homemade fettuccine. Tyson is down for ten, walking out of the arena with his girlfriend and the boom makes both of us look at each other in that way the two professionals look at each other when you both hear the sound of shit hitting the fan.
We have two choices, Omar and I. Before we choose, we pocket the weapons lying around the table and walk outside into the street with the rest of a growing crowd of our neighbors. Straight down the avenue, past Technology street and perhaps one street over, smoke starts to flow upwards through the date palms and gets blacker and thicker as we talk in Arabic and English about what it might be.
Growing up in a small town, I remember watching with complete attention as airplanes flew overhead; I tracked satellites in the night sky as if each one were a UFO; my red English-style bicycle carried me each day on my paper route and sometimes, if I were lucky, it carried me to the pot of gold at the end of the fire-truck’s rainbow to see flames billowing up through the night sky. Who lives in that farm, I would wonder. Are there any animals in the barn?
I carried that sense of curiosity into my twenties, stopping for every accident and hitchhiker that crossed my path. One fateful night I wrestled with God and lost; sometimes there is nothing to be done.
Today is like that. Actually, every day is like that here. We came back inside the house, and I took another swig of the beer. My curiosity is gone. I didn’t even think about grabbing the fully-stocked aid bag and running down the street to the scene of the bomb or accident or whatever it was. There is no point here. Someone would see me and mark me as the next kidnap victim, even as I would be applying a saline drip to a burn victim.
So I watch Tyson give up and see his ugly girlfriend throw some stupid looking stuffed animal back at the crowd. It’s better like this; just pretending that it is all on television and changing the channel.
We have two choices, Omar and I. Before we choose, we pocket the weapons lying around the table and walk outside into the street with the rest of a growing crowd of our neighbors. Straight down the avenue, past Technology street and perhaps one street over, smoke starts to flow upwards through the date palms and gets blacker and thicker as we talk in Arabic and English about what it might be.
Growing up in a small town, I remember watching with complete attention as airplanes flew overhead; I tracked satellites in the night sky as if each one were a UFO; my red English-style bicycle carried me each day on my paper route and sometimes, if I were lucky, it carried me to the pot of gold at the end of the fire-truck’s rainbow to see flames billowing up through the night sky. Who lives in that farm, I would wonder. Are there any animals in the barn?
I carried that sense of curiosity into my twenties, stopping for every accident and hitchhiker that crossed my path. One fateful night I wrestled with God and lost; sometimes there is nothing to be done.
Today is like that. Actually, every day is like that here. We came back inside the house, and I took another swig of the beer. My curiosity is gone. I didn’t even think about grabbing the fully-stocked aid bag and running down the street to the scene of the bomb or accident or whatever it was. There is no point here. Someone would see me and mark me as the next kidnap victim, even as I would be applying a saline drip to a burn victim.
So I watch Tyson give up and see his ugly girlfriend throw some stupid looking stuffed animal back at the crowd. It’s better like this; just pretending that it is all on television and changing the channel.
posted by tomk at 10:43 AM
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