Lucyloo

I am not prepared for this. I walk in thinking that I will perform the mandatory coo and then walk out, serenely immutable. Life has other plans for me, as it usually does.

I’m an obvious baby-greeter: card, flowers for Mom; wrapped gift for Big Sis, and an unwrapped teddy bear for Baby are all somehow balanced in my arms as I ask for Maternity. I’m pointed down the hall: fourth floor.

And I open the door and there they are: my beautiful sister, alone again in her body, exhausted, holding something that is far too small to be a person. I’m surprised by how little she is, as I always am. She’s a good pound bigger than her sister was at 15 hours old, and that’s a lot when you weigh seven pounds. But she’s simply too tiny.

“Hey! Come meet Lucy,” my sister says in the slanted afternoon light.

I dump everything everywhere, descarf, unjacket, fling sunglasses and clamber onto the half-raised hospital bed. Lucy, meet Lizzy. My sister hands her over.

She weighs less than my cat by a long shot. She doesn’t frown, really, just barely squirms or adjusts for a second as she settles into my smaller arms. My sister doesn’t think she looks like anyone, but instantly I’m thinking that she reminds me of baby pictures of my sister that I’ve memorized. Her lips are like her sister’s. Her eyelashes, tucked up tight in her swollen newborn lids, are pale. Her eyebrows barely make a shadow on her forehead. One hand is peeking out the top of her cocooned blanket, the nails long and square and soft, never touched by anything. Each finger slowly curls around my pinky if I touch it to her palm, as though it’s automatic. Affection is easy, instinctive.

I was expecting to draw every analogy between Lucy’s arrival and the rest of ours, but sitting there on the bed, I don’t. I smell her, sweet, and it takes me about an hour to rack up the courage to kiss that flower-petal skin. I’m afraid I’ll break her.

Why are babies the easiest things in the world to love? I love her. She’s never spoken to me, or at this point even looked at me – I don’t even know what color her eyes are. She won’t know my name for months, maybe a year, maybe more if I go far away to school – and I love her. I forget myself with Lucy in my arms, and find myself thanking God after I hand her back to her mother that I don’t have kids yet.

She has a feel, which is more than the newborn feel, and I’ve either forgotten about this or I’m clueless because she’s really only the second baby I’ve ever met still in-hospital. Adalee was a showgirl even then; she was full of faces, smiles, she stared at us like she didn’t like how much we were staring at her. Lucy feels…calm, steady, and I realize that there’s a soul in this body, that she’s already a person with a fate and talents and interests. A person I don’t know yet. She’s so quiet and good-natured, so easy, so unassumingly accepting of all the caresses we are offering, so uncomplaining, that I imagine she will become the shy sister, the bookish one. At some point she opens her eyes and we all race to catch a glimpse, but she blinks quickly, as though the dim inside of the maternity ward is too much to take in, as though the world is overwhelming.

I am engulfed by a desire to take her and tuck her somewhere safe, where the world is slow and dark, and brightness can be negotiated in stages. Why? She has parents. She’s not my kid. There is a whole family, so many people we have here, to love her and cuddle her and make her feel like the specialest center of the world there ever was. It’s not my job. I don’t know why I feel so in love with her. Is it some parahormonal function of being a woman? Is this what I felt last time? I don’t think so; but memory is a funny thing. It moves to conform to the present.

And this child, this Lucyloo, in my arms, with almost-my name, she feels like tranquility in a blanket. I was once told that the reason we bond so swiftly and lovingly to some and just never feel as enthralled by others is that some souls were created nearer to each other. Souls that were close to each other in the beginning retain some cosmic affinity – they find each other here on earth and click, they are bonded to each other, they love each other unreasonably, they long for each other’s company. And others, they may be perfectly amiable or charming, perfectly beautiful or moral or interesting, but it’s like silk on silk – you just touch and slip off one another, taken by some other breeze. The Near Souls, you stick to them like velcro. One touch, and you’re going to have to rip yourself off. It doesn’t happen on its own.

I wonder how we tell this. Sometimes it becomes apparent later…short friendships that were too comfortable to explain, the only people we ever let hold our hands indefinitely, people who let us be ourselves before we even knew who that was. We look back on these marvels later, or those around us look in and say: bizarre. Sometimes, and this is hard, you realize it as it’s happening, a steeping of your heart in this new color that you know is going to stain. The moments are intoxicating, they are vibrant, you feel like something special is happening to you, that you’ve been selected for some extraordinary sensation that the rest of humanity cannot know or understand. It feels unreal, dizzying. This is what it’s like to hold this child, my niece. She feels like home.

What life lies in wait for her, this quiet one? Will life be kind to her, gentle, because hers is an embered glow? Prayers are pouring out of me as I watch her in the space between sleeping and waking. May this life be to you, Lucyloo, as extraordinary and pleasant as it was for me to meet you. Let me deposit you back in your tired mother’s arms. Visiting hours ended an hour ago. I have work tomorrow.

I’m unnecessarily worried, agitated, for the drive home. The city suddenly feels insignificant; 93 is in freefall. The apartment is quiet, the doors are shut, the kitchen light out.

Proof

There are three of us, and a fourth orange chair-plus-desk sits empty to our left. It’s life at the bottom of a well this next hour; we’re looking out at a modest mostly-if-not-totally Muslim audience. We’re here to tell our stories: the tall, white redheaded brother, the punkish hijabi in a ripped jean skirt and All-Stars, the blue-eyed first grade teacher in black abaya.

I never know what I’m going to say at these things. How many times have I told “my story”? Dozens? More than a hundred? It’s always slightly different. I don’t know why. Every time I omit something else, or leave out what feels like a whole pile of important details – and have some new thing that is central to the story. Today it turns out to be the story of Islam coming and finding me, and taking hold of my heart, and dragging me, kicking and screaming (partying and piercing?) into the world of Islam. I hear myself telling it as though it’s one unified string of events and nothing else belongs in the narrative. But you can’t lay out your life at the feet of strangers in a 15-minute span. A heart can’t fit in that space.

I’m the middle person in the panel. It goes like this: The Scientist (The Rational Surveyor of Tradition), The Reluctant Believer (The Dancer), The Born-Believer. So the ginger-haired boy who inspected every religious tradition for truth and Truth precedes me. I speak next, the free spirit who lived in the same house as a Muslim for almost a decade before she noticed that she belonged to the same religion, who would get drunk and declare that she needed God (though of course I omit this) and declare things along the lines of, “I will never become Muslim if Muslims can’t have dogs,” and ask things like, “But can I still dance?” I finish, disturbed by how moved I always become when I describe the choice I felt I was making when I became Muslim (in one hand, the world; in the other, a relationship with God….), make the sign of the horns and tell them, “Never look back, right?” They laugh. I’m glad they do. It puts my feet back on the ground.

Rock hard, Mozlems. Rock. Hard.

And then there is the girl after me. In a quiet voice, she describes a shy child who imagined sleeping in the hand of God and said the shahada for the first time at fifteen, stirring pasta sauce alone in a midwestern kitchen.

And that’s it: three converts. Three stories. Three souls in three safety nets, still swinging above the spikes of a purposeless existence, praying the net holds. And as we’re swinging in our orange chairs, before the enraptured faces of those born into a safer web built by generations of their forbears, I realize that we’re a proof of the very thing we hold dearest.

Because here we are: male and female, gregarious and introverted, tall and short; punk and put-together, bearded and hijabed, intuitive and intellectual. We are dancers and musicians and engineers; we are religion majors and science geeks; we are married and single; we are wild and we are tame; we are gentle and we are rough; we are soft and we are loud. And all three of us walked some winding road to here: in this classroom, at this university, in these chairs – the embracers of this religion, this Islam, this precious hot coal burning into our palms all the time that we will not let go. We’re all three here. For three different reasons, with a multitude of different struggles.

All three of us say the same thing: the story we’ve just told? It’s only the beginning.

Safe journeys, ye travelers!

Hot hipster lovin’

Saturday morning in a Somerville cafe: in stroll the hipsters. They come for the open doors, the walls covered in art, the outdoor patio and killer fritattas…who knows why they come? Maybe they just happen to be the people living within a stone’s throw of The Biscuit, our favorite closes-too-early-because-of-course-I-forgot-I-live-in-Boston spot. Anyway, in they stroll in their unwashed-hair, unmatching-in-a-surprisingly-fetching-way splendor.

Raise your hand if you don't want to be one of the people in this picture...didn't think so.

I’m, well, ungracefully trying not to stare at these gum-chewing dislays of companionable affection and discipline myself into reading a novel that I am not enjoying one bit. People-watching proves to be the far more compelling pastime (why do I end up feeling like every time I read a novel translated into English it’s full of unnecessarily exhibitionistic excalamations of premature emotion?), and Snow gets ignored, sitting closed by my cooling coffee.

The most charmingly in love couple takes the table next to me (!) before they place their orders. The man is sitting opposite me, and as his girl stands next to him (to better see the menu), he sort of absentmindedly lets one hand travel up and down the inside of the thigh closest to him. She seems not to notice – absorbed instead by the sandwich selections. Embarrassed to be intruding on such an intimate moment, I avert my gaze, yet again, back to my disappointing literature.

Later on, these two chat about some common project on their (shared?) overgrown Mac. He leans over as if to kiss her cheek – doesn’t – whispers something in her ear, and BAM. They disappear.

I start to think about this. At work, we’ve just finished a house meeting campaign, which basically means that we’ve gone around and asked hundreds of people who are part of the Boston Muslim community what issues they’re facing. These were both among the top issues:

1. getting married (as in, we’re having trouble doing it)

2. staying married (as in, we’re having trouble doing it)

And looking at my idealized fantasy of hipster love, I’m wondering if a little of this ain’t what we’re missing:

Matching, hugging, absorbing L-O-V-E.

Now one could argue that this is, for a lot of reasons, not the appropriate model for Muslim relationships. I’m going to ignore that whole side of it for now, hoping you’ll forgive me – as I explore What the Hipsters Have and We Don’t.

Speaking with some of my (not that much older) married friends, these are prominent commentaries on marriage (slash advice):

1. People think that married people don’t get lonely. Married people are often really lonely.

2. Dishes. Every day. Be prepared to do them. And be prepared that he won’t.

3. You should be picky, because this is the man you’re going to obey for the rest of your life.

Fantastic! Where do I sign up?

And then I’m looking around me at all the marriageable people, and I’m thinking, No freaking wonder we’re still single. I mean, here we are, for better or worse, completely immersed in a culture that not only prizes romantic love very highly, but displays it prominently – both in person and in the media. I don’t need Disney to form a warped, idealistic picture of romance – I have the thigh-touching, whispering, disappearing hipsters next to me. So we’re trapped – maybe not unpleasantly – in a world in love, surrounded by a bunch of married Muslims who are either not in love with each other, or who don’t show us that they’re in love with each other because they consider it to be inappropriate.

I’m not asking for people to start making out with each other outside of Eid prayers or anything. That would be kind of gross. But, like, a little something? Like holding hands with each other, maybe, or the occasional smile from across the room as though you share a private joke? That would be nice. That would make the rest of us maybe find marriage a more attractive state – not some sort of elaborately disguised prison.

The conventional wisdom goes: romantic love does not last; therefore, it’s an illogical and doomed reason to get married. Better to marry for the sake of common values and a synchornicity in thinking about gender roles within marriage and how Islam should be practiced/Muslim kids should be raised – 10 years later you’ll thank us.

I would counter with, “What about the Obamas?”…But I’ll admit that they are the exception and not the rule. So this may very well be sage advice. Nevertheless, I’m not positive that it’s responding – or suitable – to our cultural milieu. It may very well be unwise, but Muslim kids grow up watching their peers fall in love again and again – Muslims see people around them in love all the time. The common cultural narrative goes like this: boy meets girl in some sort of meet-cute, they exchange some pleasant witticisms and then numbers – or maybe they friend each other on Facebook first (baby steps), then they agree under some pretense to meet for coffee (perhaps they happen to be reading the same book, which one of them only read because the other was reading it…), they flirt, they walk to some other destination (someone’s class? The bus stop? He walks her home?), navigate the awkward first goodbye (are we kissing or hugging?) but not before making plans to see each other again. They meet a second time – in the evening, so as to make looking hot and kissing more plausible, have a surprisingly wonderful time, and end the night with a kiss – which, if it’s sublime (and why wouldn’t it be?), will initiate a love affair that may or may not involve thigh-touching at the local cafe, much to the Muslim next door’s chagrin – and, if everyone’s amenable and things go well, could very well end in marriage, kids, and a plot at the local community garden.

And…apart from the kissing, etc. pre-marriage, what’s wrong with this picture? Are we telling ourselves to want something we can’t want?

I feel like we might be approaching it like this: the married community (to the extent that such a thing exists) is telling the unmarried community, “This [i.e. romantic love] is what’s broken in your culture [self].” So we’re supposed to want to get married for very practical reasons: to have a family, to have religious support, to not sin. But I don’t think that’s why we really want to get married. We’d like to be swept off our feet by an experience that makes us feel like taking on responsibility and adulthood with this person will feel less of a burden, and maybe even fun – we want to lose sense of ourselves, to desire someone – hopefully for deep and shallow reasons, we’d like to come across a person who makes us feel like all this waiting we’ve done is insignificant, erased, by the pleasure of his/her company. We’d like our minds to be blown – and eventually think about a family, support each other, happily not-sin together.

It’s not that we’d like to marry someone with terrible character and a tendency to shirk responsibility. It’s that we don’t want it to be just that. Who wants to end up in Charlotte’s marriage to Mr. Collins?

Practical? Very. Hot for each other? ...I rather think not.

Now, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy? There’s a better model. The beauty of this fictional match is that neither partner compromised on the ideal character of their imagined beloved – they both dreamed of marrying refined, interesting people of superb character. Perhaps Elizabeth imagined herself with someone a tad more outgoing, and Mr. Darcy imagined himself with someone a tad more rich – but these things are not the glue that holds people together. They loved and respected each other, and with good reason. And no surprise, happy ending there.

I like this much better. Much.

Why should we be trying to fit ourselves into a box that…doesn’t fit? If we want to love our spouses, I mean – isn’t that okay – isn’t it desirable? It only needs to be tempered with some sort of reasonable wisdom or reason – of course it’s possible to lust after, or even to be infatuated with, a person who is all kinds of wrong for you. Of course. It happens all the time. But that is very different than feeling deeply in love with a person you respect and admire, and therefore want to spend your every day with. Maybe he doesn’t rake leaves, and maybe she’s not so on top of the dishes, or the laundry, or whatever. But I’d so much rather do without a few of the teeny little chore expectations I had and have someone I actually like spending time with. Isn’t that what marriage is? Time? I’d so much rather enjoy it.

So I think it’s hot hipster lovin’ or bust. This unhot transactional nonsense has got to go, dig? Can’t nobody defenestrate that but us, one lovemonkey marriage at a time. Ready?

Because properly married people should stand like this. Really it's indecent not to.

Coming home, take 473

I’m sitting on a plane that left from Detroit at an indecent hour. Having left an immoderately bright morning behind us, we are descending into a dreary midday sky over Boston. I am crooking my neck over the two slumbering figures between me and the oval window, which is finally showing us the grey-navy bay water and some pentagonal memorial-looking stone structure. I blush, reminded yet again of what a horrible Bostonian I am. I don’t go to Red Sox games, I’ve never been to Walden Pond, and then there’s this new something that I have yet to visit and admire. We sink shakily, and I feel like my spine has wrapped it’s arms around my belly button and is squeezing. It’s the same thing I feel when I meet people whose books I have read wonderingly, the same thing I used to feel in junior high when a boy I wasn’t sure liked me looked at my lips. It is magnified on the plane, accompanied by my breathy la ilaha ila Allah’s. But the delightful-scary sensation isn’t caused only by the plane playing hopscotch on the wind. I’m excited to come home. Then I realize what I have just thought: home.

For years, maybe ever since high school, whenever I have come back to the place I am most rooted in at the moment, I have always thought about it like this: I’m going back to New York. I’m back in Amherst. I’m returning to Cairo. Everywhere, including Boston, has been the place that I happen to be living at the moment. I haven’t lived – that is, haven’t placed my bed – in any one room for more than nine months at a time since I was seventeen. That was nine years ago. Nothing has felt solid. It was all slipping through my fingers all the time, and this too might be slipping, but at the moment I’m ignoring that possibility. Suddenly, magically, Boston has become my home.

Few things can compare to the shivery thrill of the familiar. The beauty of this particular pleasure is so rare. New, bright and shiny things have an easy time fascinating us. But when you find yourself peculiarly enthralled by, say, your toaster, as opposed to the new iPhone sitting on your desk – that is a special moment.

Oh, how I love thee. Let me count the toasty mornings...

Now, I know that I have an unreasonable tendency to romanticize anything and everything that could possibly be construed as wholesome or New Englandy. Let’s leave that aside for the moment. Because what I want to say is this: what is familiar, known, comfortable already, the love of these types of things offers us a comfort incomparable to what is new and exciting.

This is what is easy: it is easy to fall in love with the new curve of a soft cheek, the sharp green smell of a new jacket, the inevitably surprising softness of a new hand. This is what is difficult: to hold hands for the 857th time and feel your heart jump a little, the priviledge of being beloved, and companionably touched, by this person still impossible to take for granted. To fall in love is no achievement. To stay in love? A feat of wonder.

You knew I was going to do that.

Of course, I’m as clueless as everyone else (except, apparently, our darling President and his lovely wife) when it comes to the actual realization of this feeling with another person. Generally, I am enamored more of the old than the new. I’m hoping this is a good start. But I’ve found myself changing, as well – where I used to think that I would never manage to be anything other than a die-hard country bumpkin, I find myself more and more unable to imagine living in Amherst again – or any place like it. I have started to enjoy the smallness of the city and its possibility, the thrill of meeting someone at my local cafe and then realizing as I walk home that we live on the same street. I find that there is something peculiarly enjoyable in having so much access to so much life by foot and bike, and in passing so many people on the street. I used to think that there was nothing I would trade for the pleasant, breezy solitude of an aimless country drive – but I find now that a stroll by the river or through residential streets with a friend is preferable.

It is not the promise of newness that the city offers me. The city is, in most ways, just as mundane as the country. We have routines just as those in the suburbs do. We have circles of people we are used to seeing, grocery stores we visit, the baristas that can greet us by name. I don’t attend every lecture or exhibit; I am not persistently aware that the next person walking through the door of my office could be someone I’ve never met before – I don’t live my days in anticipation.

What is it? Perhaps Boston has bred into me a love of rotaries and an endless supply of unnamed streets – or the Irish-y tendency to nickname places with the most endearing possible epithet: Southie, JP, Dot. As though the places are good childhood friends.

Maybe it was only a matter of time, and no matter where I had laid my head for most of the years since graduation it would have been the same. Perhaps I could have felt the same way about Cairo, or L.A., had I remained in either place. Perhaps it was a matter of knowledge and connectedness; I know more Boston history (what could be more charming than a whole sprawl of roads built on cow paths?) than any other place – excepting maybe Amherst. And then there is that so many of those I admire and wish to emulate have at least passed through this city: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Barack Obama, Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Malcolm X, Jhumpa Lahiri.

It could also be my stubbornness. It might be easy to love Florida, with her sunny promises, or L.A., because she flirts with fame – or even the slick, forward New York, all gaunt limbs and labels. But Boston, who has given us so many people that make us proud to be American, whose people do ridiculous things like throwing tea into the ocean and naming walls in ballparks ‘The Green Monstah,’ what of her? Maybe we could use some more street signs; perhaps we could do without a Bertucci’s or Cheesecake Factory here and there. Perhaps we’d have more good, old-fashioned summertime fun if we didn’t risk serious infection by dipping a toe into the Charles – but really, where’s the excitement in that?

I don’t need things to be so easy, so sunny, so sophisticated. The New Englander in me recoils a bit from these things – the moment I decided I couldn’t stay in L.A., I was watching a nipped-and-tucked woman draped in gold lamé and skin-tight everything shuffle into a hippie-vegan brunch spot in stilletos. On a Saturday. I don’t want to be that stylish – or primped – I just want to eat my organic tofu scramble in my jammies, thankyouverymuch. I mean, what are Saturday mornings for?

Seriously?...like, in the daytime?

Ultimately, I suppose, this feeling continues to be a mystery. And now that I am so close (less than five months – and counting) to maybe-leaving Boston, it feels more present – and more precious. What is it to be home? To love a thing?

Muppie takes the Fifth.

Thaw

And suddenly the world is liquid again. It seems that the grass has forgotten how to be grass; the river has forgotten how to flow. The sidewalks don’t remember the crush of walking feet. We can feel the crocuses coming before they get here. Like smelling sea blocks from the beach, we hear the yellow burst of daffodils. And like last year, to find the world alive is shocking.

Today was the first day of walking in the park and admiring the ducks in their muddy splendor. While we mere mortals looked for parking, someone proposed marriage to his lover on a park bench. By the time we turned the corner onto Beacon, they had forgotten the world. We found magical parking two store fronts from the restaurant. People wandered into lunch without jackets, and wandered out to walk without a destination.

Nothing is pretty yet. This is only the prelude to life, the sounds of the orchestra pit ten minutes to curtain. The weeping willows sag a yellow brown, covered in manic, fat squirrels. The pond in the park is still drained, one long sorry puddle wallowing beneath the foot bridge. Last summer’s grass will prick your bare feet with stiffness, and a still-melting, grey snow litters the curb.

We are no better, perhaps. We have rushed outside in our sweats, too eager for breathing the damp, musty air deeply to stop and preen before a mirror. We are pale. We look like we haven’t stretched all winter. We are too used to being huddled and cold, and the desire for a lover that blooms with rains and barbecues is barely moving somewhere inside our spines.

Nothing is beautiful yet. The sky turns that warm blue-grey reserved for spring skies and the sun sets vaguely behind cottony clouds. The air is thick with everything that is yet to happen; winter’s impoverished breezes have escaped to someplace sick with lack of imagination. We dream, vividly, of past and present and future together in a moment that makes sense. Old friends reenter gracefully, new faces are familiar, and we awake with a rush of this wet air promising tulips and lilacs and idle afternoon strolls.

Out at the Common pedestrians forget to heed walk signals, but cars with their windows open and music hushed pause graciously for the absentminded. Iced coffee sweats into the eager, chilled hands of these Sunday strollers, dogs rediscover squirrel-chasing and digging in soft earth, leaving leashes to trail in the mud. There is nothing to see out here, no scents to entice would-be couch potatoes away from their Wiis, and yet the world is inside-out in celebration or anticipation. Someone even wears sandals.

To wake this way is bewitching again and again. It is something beach-braggers in Florida, I imagine, miss without knowing it. To walk outside one day and discover that you have been neglectful and sonambulent; to sense your body melt and move and to feel all the desires you forgot you had: this is the thaw.

Stubborn and irreplaceable, Boston's charm sings again.