Sunday was a bad day for football with both the Cowboys and Saints losing pretty close games. I had anticipated a more severe Cowboys beating by the Seattle Seahawks, and as usual us battered fans were treated to moments of brilliance amidst the overall error prone performance. This was the first football Sunday with the new TV unit and all the audio components fully installed and functional. I’m really happy with Diana’s design and how it all turned out.
While I was enjoying football, McD was hacking away at bushes with her new power tool – please keep a safe distance! That’s actually the neighbours’ side yard beside our driveway that’s she’s attacking.
I watched the movie “Youth” during elliptical exercise time. Starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, the movie tells the story of two friends on the verge of turning eighty, vacationing at a resort in the Alps, and looking to each other for support as they face momentous career landmarks, realizing that time is no longer on their side. Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, to say this is a quirky movie would be quite an understatement – just flat out weird in some places. It was a pleasant distraction from the boredom of aerobic exercise.
On Friday we loaded up and made the all day drive from McKinney to New Orleans to visit the Ogans for a few days, prior to all caravanning over to the Florida panhandle for a week by the beach. The drive was relatively leisurely with a stop at Athena in Shreveport for some fantastic Mediterranean cuisine. We were amazed at the quality of everything we ordered in this unassuming restaurant. The hummus was some of the best we’ve had. Our second stop was in Opelousas for coffee prior to arrival on Webster Street around 7pm.
Saturday began with two laps around Audobon Park for Diana and me – the weather was gorgeous and perfect for a nice long walk. This is the least humidity I remember experiencing in New Orleans. In the afternoon we made a short visit to the French Quarter with a stop into Cuban Creations for a cigar and a drink. Bourbon Street was very quiet with the majority of bars and clubs shut down and all boarded up.
Dinner on Saturday was at Patois – a short walk from Chez Ogan. We’ve been here several times over the years and always loved the food and ambience. This is the restaurant that was featured on the Treme HBO series with the female chef inspired by Susan Spicer. Even with very few tables, due to density restrictions, the menu was still pretty extensive. We started with pumpkin and crabmeat soup (bursting with flavour) and chicken liver mousse. I couldn’t resist a fancy meat pie as well. Denny and Anne shared some of the crabmeat gnocchi and crab claws they chose with us as well. It would be easy to have a good meal of a couple of appetizers.
Denny and I both had the beef short rib special – so much amazing flavour again. I made an omelet with my leftovers this morning.
We’re currently debating where to go for brunch and Saints game watching. No firm conclusions have been reached. It’s a process with Anne involved.
I finished “The Beekeeper of Aleppo” by Christy Lefteri this week – a recommendation from my Mum.
Lefteri was brought up in London and is the child of Cypriot refugees. The Beekeeper of Aleppo was born out of her time working as a volunteer at a UNICEF supported refugee center in Athens.
The book begins with the violence of the Syrian war starting to ramp up and destroy normal life in Aleppo:
“Things will get bad. We all know it, don’t we? But we’re trying to continue living like we did before. He stuffed a dough ball in his mouth as if to prove his point. It was late June, and in March of that year the civil war had just begun with protests in Damascus, bringing unrest and violence to Syria. I must have looked down at this point, and maybe he saw the worry on my face, for, when I glanced up again, he was smiling.”
Nuri and his wife Afra resist leaving Syria when it would have been dramatically easier than their escape ended up being:
“When the trouble first started, Dahab and Aya left. Mustafa convinced them to go without him. As his fears began to be confirmed, he very quickly made plans, but he needed to stay a while longer to see the bees. At the time I thought he was being too hasty.”
A description of a simple act of kindness that says so much more about the horror than any description of conflict could:
“A middle-aged woman knelt on the floor next to another bucket, full of water. She was going to clean the faces of the dead men, she said, so that the women who loved them would recognize them when they came searching. If I had been one of the dead men in the river, Afra would have climbed mountains to find me. She would have swum to the bottom of that river, but that was before they blinded her.”
Both main couples in the book lose children through the conflict and much of the story is dedicated to showing their differing reactions to the loss:
“sitting down at his desk, he opened the black book and wrote:
Name – My beautiful boy.
Cause of death – This broken world.
And that was the very last time Mustafa recorded the names of the dead.”
Finally, and almost too late, Afra agrees to leave Syria with Nuri:
“‘Nuri,’ Afra said, breaking the silence, ‘I’m done. Please. Take me away from here.’ And she stood there with her eyes moving about the room as if she could see it all.”
In an email from Mustafa to Nuri:
“Spend your money wisely – the smugglers will try to get as much out of you as they can, but keep in mind that there is a longer journey ahead. You must learn to haggle. People are not like bees. We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good – I’ve come to realize this now.”
Mustafa adjusting to British behaviours:
“Apparently queuing is important here. People actually form a single line in a shop. It’s advisable to take your place in the queue and not try to push your way to the front, as this usually pisses people off! This is what the woman in Tesco told me last week.”
Nuri enjoying the simple pleasure of a cup of coffee during his journey to England:
“and when my coffee was brought out I savored it, sip by sip. I never thought I would be sitting down somewhere, next to other families, drinking coffee, without the sound of bombs, without the fear of snipers. It was as this time, when the chaos stopped, that I thought of Sami. Then there was guilt, for being able to taste the coffee.”
“‘You’re lucky you’re rich,’ he said. His eyes in the mirror were smiling now. ‘Most people have to make a terrible journey through the whole of Europe to reach England. Money gets you everywhere. This is what I always say. Without it you live your entire life traveling, trying to get to where you think you need to go.”
As I was reading a passage where Nuri finds a bee in the English boarding house garden that has a genetic defect and no wings, my Spotify playlist was serving up “Beeswing” by Richard Thompson with the lyric:
She was a rare thing
Fine as a beeswing
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away
Weird how coincidences like that happen – or are they really coincidental and not something more?
“I know that Mohammed will not be coming – I understand that I created him, but the wind picks up and leaves rustle and there is a chill in the air that gets beneath my skin, and I imagine his tiny figure in the shadows of the garden. The memory of him lives on, as if somehow, in some dark corner of my heart, he had a life of his own. When I come to this realization, it is Sami who fills my mind.”
Mustafa and Nuri finally reunite in England:
“In my pajamas and with bare feet, I go down the stairs, and standing there, with the full light of the morning sun behind him, is Mustafa. And the memories flash before my eyes – Yuanfen, the mysterious force that causes two lives to cross paths – and our apiaries, the open field full of light, thousands of bees, employees smoking the colonies, the meals beneath the canopies. It all flashes before my eyes as if I am about to take my last breath.”
“And there we both stand, battered by life, two men, brothers, finally reunited in a world that is not our home.”
In the Author’s Note at the end of the book:
“I met Dr. Ryad Alsous, a refugee living in the north of England, who had once been a beekeeper in Syria. He taught me a lot about the life of bees and how they are a symbol of vulnerability and life and hope.”
“The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a piece of fiction. But Nuri and Afra developed as a result of every step I had taken beside the children and the families who made it to Greece. I wanted to explore the internal conflicts, the way memory is affected, the way were are with the people we care about most in the world when we have suffered so much loss that we are broken. I wanted to set forth the idea that among profound, unspeakable loss, humans can still find love and light – and see one another.”
Yusuf/Cat Stevens has just re-recorded his classic 70s album “Tea For the Tillerman”. I’m not really sure why – the original is wonderful and I don’t hear anything meaningfully better in the new version. Take a listen on this video of “Where Do the Children Play”.
I got a bit optimistic in my piano piece for this week. Always having enjoyed the chromatic sound and triplet rhythm of “Firth of Fifth” by Genesis, from the 1973 album “Selling England by the Pound”, I thought I could tackle the introduction.
I don’t even have the first page really down yet, so will spare you my performance. Here is an amazing performance of what it could sound like:
In other music news this week, the Band of Heathens were all together in Austin for the first time in months and broadcast a great sounding show: