"All I can say is that my life is pretty plain
I like watching the puddles gather rain"
-- "No Rain" by Blind Melon
We live in a two-story apartment with four bedrooms, three upstairs and one downstairs that we initially thought was a den and much smaller than it actually is. But when we arrived -- bleary-eyed in the middle of the night -- we discovered it had been set up as a bedroom. This is now Sam's room; Peter and Clementine have each claimed their own room upstairs. Though the rooms are just this side of dungeon cells. They're big enough, sure. But have only a twin bed and dresser for furniture, austere, spartan living conditions, giving the impression both occupy cells at San Quentin.
We have just enough flatware and silverware to get us through meals but not enough we don't have to wash it all by hand after each one. It's a little bit like camping in that respect. My office provides us with bare essentials to scrap together some semblance of an existence: one or two pots, a skillet, one spatula, a coffee maker, sheets and towels. They call it the 'welcome kit' though there is little welcoming about it. This, too, is like camping. The welcome kit came with kitchen towels that are like baby's blankets, two soft fluffy blankets for cuddling or swathing, one light blue the other bright, hot pink. We've come to not-so-affectionately call them 'wubbies'. They don't dry anything, only push water around.
The kids walk to and from school. Peter is running cross country, and Sam and Clementine are swimming. They finish practices at different times. They don't carry keys to the building, so they text Elise on our family WhatsApp chat, "I'm outside outside" to come let them into the building. I guess to mean they arent right outside the front door to our apartment but all the way outside of the building.
Our neighborhood is pleasant, a shady, treed oasis in the desert, with coffee shops staffed by young earnest Egyptian men eager to test their English and lots of dogs and cats. One dog behind our apartment building has been barking non-stop 24/7 since we moved in five weeks ago; the mongrel has amazing stamina. Elise has tamed the street dogs and, surprisingly, shown affection for the cats lazing in clay pots out of the noon day sun.
It's here I've discovered a new color, the lavender mauve of the desert sky at dawn and dusk, it's name in Sherwin Williams catalogs and Crayola boxes, but I couldn't tell you exactly what to call it. Only I know I've never seen the color before.
It was also here I first realized the night sky is not an expression of the vastness of space but of the incalculable width and breadth of time, that the field of stars is not a road atlas of the galaxy as we may think of it, a map from Betelguese to Rigel or Sirius to Antares. Each point of light represents a different point in time, epochs in the past, touching Earth at the same moment, as though they all started their journeys at different times to reach their destination together.
I have a feeling similar to the one I had when we first arrived in India. I second guess whether this is the right move for our family. Though -- like in India -- the move made sense for all the right reasons in India, the landing has been rougher than I thought it would be. The plan on paper was sound, and a part of me knows here, too, we won't give up. Through a lot of hard work and perseverance, we'll make Egypt our own. Like all those distant points of light, the trip through space will take longer for some than for others.
Most of what I've seen so far of Cairo has come on my drives to and from work. The drive is about 30 minutes to the office in the morning and 45 home in the afternoon, by far the longest commute I've had in awhile. I do feel some guilt for not having done or seen more of Egypt since we arrived one month ago. There's a part of me that feels like we should have rushed out to see the Pyramids of Giza our first weekend here. But there is a difference between living in a place and visiting it. We've prioritized setting up our new home and getting settled; We still don't quite have our 'grocery footing'. For now, we're suppressing our inner tourist for getting the kids established in their school routine and making sure they have time and space on the weekends to defrag from the long, hectic weeks.
This Labor Day, we had one of those rare, golden days when the kids have school but I have the day off from work. Elise and I took the opportunity to explore a part of town we hadn't visited before, Zamalek.
If the Nile were split and part of it the East River and part of it the Hudson, Zamalek would be the Manhattan of Cairo. And the streets had a definitive Greenwich Village vibe about them. We've made the acquaintance of a local driver, Nader, who -- in his beat-up blue, four-door sedan -- drives us through the streets of Cairo. We compete against donkey-drawn carts methodically clopping their way down the middle of the Corniche, out of time, seemingly oblivious to the modern world that has risen up around them. Delivery drivers on mopeds wobble and weave through traffic, one hand on the handlebars, the other holding a cigarette; I didn't think it possible to smoke at such speeds. They skim the wake of traffic, skidding into the loose dirt on the side of the road if they feel that path offers a faster avenue, dusty, rail-thin kittens showing their slatted ribs dart under the chassis of parked cars before them. In a city of 22 million people I didn’t think it possible to see the same person twice, but I've now seen a man wearing a white flowing jalabiya and white, brimless kufi puttering atop a three-wheeled motorcycle three times, his wispy white beard streaming over his shoulder behind him like a giant mound of albino Spanish moss facing tropical storm-force winds from the bough of a weathered oak tree.
We started our walk of Zamalek, up there where the satellite dishes bloom, at Starbucks. In truth, we would have both been perfectly content to have made that our only stop. It felt good to get out of the house. In truth, it felt good to have a cup of coffee with my wife. Sometimes, it's the little things. Simple pleasures. We're mostly easy that way. Everything else was bonus. A flower shop with a facade that looked like it should have been on a Parisian rue, an elusive, long-sought-after art store, a late Lebanese lunch of kibi and grilled haloumi, a box of doughnuts for the kids. Someone recently asked me how Cairo compared to Amman. Cairo is hip. It's where the cool kids hang out. In a city of 22 million people there's very likely a lot of astonishing shit going down. It's an aesthete, radical thinker, the center of modern civilization, a rock star.
We've been in Cairo a month, but still only have the things we brought with us on the airplane. Had I known how long it would take our shipments from Sri Lanka to arrive in Egypt I would've packed more. I think Elise is getting pretty sick of me wearing the same four t-shirts. The difference between what we want and what we need has been confused. The absence of material things is made more poignant by the expectation that we should long for them. Yet, there is some sense of lost identity. Without the things we've collected surrounding us, we can drift, untethered. Sam may never fish in the Nile, but if he has no pole, no tacklebox, no flies, is he still a fisherman at heart? While there are certain items it would be nice to have -- a blender, a board game or two, or our chess board, a familiar pillow -- we're mostly doing okay.
Some days.
Others? Not so much.
The kids take turns being miserable. I get it. Most kids don't have to leave their school, all their friends, their home of four years, and move to another country where they have nothing to occupy their time, don't know anyone, have no friends, and it's regularly 100 degrees outside and too hot to go anywhere. Yea, it sucks. But it's starting to wear on Elise and I, too. We're strong, but you can only keep someone afloat for so long while you're treading water yourself. Try keeping three bodies above the surface. It's not long before the deep green sea will drag you under and deposit your remains at the bottom of the metaphorical ocean.
This time in our lives is not unlike the pandemic or the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, a completely unique set of circumstances we've never experienced before. It's not easy, but we will emerge stronger, closer for having suffered through it together. I remember during the pandemic hearing parents say how sad they were for their kids because they were missing certain rites of passage, summer camps, Halloweens, birthday parties. And, yes, it was sad, but I don't recall any kid being guaranteed an idyllic childhood of white picket fences, lemonade stands, and games of kick the can in the street. In fact, I'd argue this idyllic upbringing many parents mourned losing during the pandemic was fiction for most kids. Our kids moved to Egypt. Elise moved from La Grande to Cheney. I moved from Florida to Manvel, Texas and back, and it sucked. But there was no alternative, and no one mourned my stolen childhood. Yet, we scrape them from the pavement when they stumbled, put them back together when they fall apart.
The streets of Zamalek are behind us. This week is long and dark. The heat oppressive. A sandstorm blanketed the leaves of trees with a new layer of yellowish-brown dust, obscured the skyline, hiding high-rise apartment buildings in a game of atmospheric hide-and-seek.
And then, finally, after a month, it rained.
