I opened the front door and the cold hit me. I stepped out into it. The sun was just coming up in San Antonio, and the outside colors were muted and tending toward the grayscale. We live a short distance away from Loop 410, the Alamo City’s inner ring road, and I could hear, even as I walked down the sidewalk toward the truck, a roar—the collective voice of a million cars being pushed along by human beings.
It was cold as I slid into the seat, closed the door, inserted the key, and fired up. I shivered, blew steam from my mouth. I punched a button that would, in a few minutes, get heat going into the cab. The truck was ready now, so I released the handbrake, put it in reverse and left.
I know a way to avoid the nearby school zone. San Antonio is a big city that is filled with people, many of whom have children. For the commuter, school zones mean slowing down and pausing for buses and children crossing streets. For the commuter, these delays are maddening. What we commuters turn into, at 7 a.m., is something single-minded and harried. We curse those things we would normally tolerate. We become something other than what we naturally are.
There is a moment, shortly after I turn off Marbach Road, when I can see the on-ramp to Loop 410. I punch it then and my machine, made by the Nissan Corporation, makes a guttural sound. I feel like an astronaut in the early moments of liftoff. The force of acceleration pushes my head back as I rocket toward the great flow of vehicles.
I know this route and routine well. I am one of a million now, jockeying for position, weaving in and out, and watching for signs of danger. We are heading south. Soon, I will make the big eastward turn and the sun, just peeking above the horizon, will cause me to squint. The sky is becoming more interesting, moment by moment. I would love to spend more time studying its shapeshifting clouds and nuanced colorations, but I have to remain wary. Surrounded by these machines, madness, and speed, anything, at any time, could happen.
We pass by all sorts of landmarks, including the factory that puts out plumes of steam or something else. The place produces God knows what. It marks the moment we turn toward the east, and I adjust the visor to keep my eyes shaded. What I am witnessing now, all around me, in this great flow of machines, is the human condition writ large.
I eventually take the Palo Alto College exit and the frenzy dies down. I have a left turn to make and then two right ones. A sign tells us we may drive our machines at forty miles per hour but no faster than that. I make those turns and then pull into a lot where I turn the key in the ignition, putting my machine to rest. Its engine pings and pops as it begins to cool down. It will spend the next few hours resting up and preparing to carry me home as the day moves from light to dark.
I envy my machine as I step away from it. It’s now my time to roar.
Last Saturday I met Charles Bukowski at a Starbucks in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in San Antonio, Texas. He was arriving just as my wife and I had finished up our coffees and were gathering our belongings to leave.
Because he could see that we were getting ready to take off, he walked right up to us and asked, “Are you finished here?”
“Yes,” I answered as I stared at his acne-scarred face and misshapen nose—the bulbous proboscis of a wino.
“I ask because you’re at my favorite table, and I want to claim it if you are leaving.”
“You can put your stuff here if you’d like while we get ready to head out. By the way, has anyone ever told you that you look exactly like Charles Bukowski?”
“Charles who?” he asked gruffly.
“Never mind.”
In fact, he was a spitting image of the renegade poet-madman-drunkard.
Because we’d bought books and had to put on coats and scarves to gird ourselves against the cold, it took us awhile to get our stuff together. During this period, a conversation began to blossom. “So you come here often?” I asked him.
“Every Saturday. You see, I’m retired, but I give private lessons on the side to people who want to learn English. Right now, I’m working with three young girls from Djibouti. I always teach them at this particular table.” After saying this, he leaned in to me and whispered, “Their English is very weak.”
Azza, my wife who speaks Arabic as her mother tongue, is not really a shy person, but she sometimes has a hard time inserting herself into a conversation between Americans when they are speaking a hundred miles an hour.
“I bet they’ll learn very fast, though,” I told him. “They will probably be better at learning our language than we would be at learning theirs.”
“Maybe. But who would want to learn whatever it is that they speak?”
“Ask them to speak their language to you and really listen to what they say. I bet what you hear will sound beautiful if you open your ears and mind. It’s my opinion that more Americans should learn a second language.”
He kind of frowned and then said, “So many people from crap countries want to come here. They are just flooding in. They have to learn English because it’s the lingua franca.”
I could feel the hair stand up on my neck. Only days earlier, Donny Trump, the Hairpiece, had called African countries “shitholes.” I had the feeling this old fart was likely a Trumper, and a part of me wanted to snarl.
“By the way, I’d like to introduce you to my wife, Azza. She’s from Africa. Her country and the people who call it home are beautiful in many ways.”
“I’m sure it is and that they are,” he said a touch snarkily.
“I think Americans should be a little more careful about judging others. Don’t you think this country has its share of problems?” I asked him.
“Compared to other places, America is el paradiso,” he said, suddenly shifting to a foreign language. “By the way, where, in Africa, is your wife from?”
“Egypt,” she said, finally asserting herself.
The man’s face suddenly changed and he started speaking Arabic to her. As it turns out, he was born in Egypt and lived there as a child. He asked her where, in “Misr,” she was from, and she said Cairo. He, as it turns out, had been born in Alexandria.
From that point forward, I faded into the background because the language shifted to Arabic. At one point, he asked her what her religion was and she said Islam. He then called himself a “Yehudi,” which means “Jew,” and explained that this fact had played an important role in why his family left North Africa. He shared some stories about how they had been victims of religious persecution under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Hearing these personal accounts saddened my wife.
We ended up talking until his three students showed up. They were sweet girls. Before they arrived, we found plenty to laugh about—the irony of an Egyptian Muslim and Jew meeting at the same table in a Starbucks at a Barnes and Noble bookstore in San Antonio. We were reminded how small the world really is and how big it is too. And how much we have in common despite our superficial differences.
About four months ago I was hired to manage the Integrated Reading and Writing Learning Center (INRW LC) at Palo Alto College (PAC) in San Antonio, Texas.
“INRW” stands for “Integrated Reading and Writing.” Our center is a place where students can come to participate in reading and writing workshops and get hands-on tutorial help with tasks that have been assigned by their INRW instructors who teach in the Department of English.
I absolutely love the job for a whole bunch of reasons. For one, I get to supervise several extraordinarily talented tutors and oversee the daily operations of the INRW LC. I also get to design and lead workshops as well as work with student-writers on a one-to-one basis. They bring drafts of papers they’re composing, and I act as reader and consultant as they go through the writing process. Our ultimate goal, as we work collaboratively, is to have them produce pieces of writing they’ll be satisfied with and that will receive positive evaluations once they’re turned in.
Before coming to PAC and the INRW LC, I was employed as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo (AUC), a position I held for seven wonderful years. What I like about my current job is that I still have the opportunity to teach but get to provide more personalized assistance, thus turning teaching and coaching into acts of great sharing and intimacy.
Students often ask me what it takes to become a really good writer. There’s a lot that goes into answering such a question, but if I’m forced to boil it down, I’d say that the single most important thing a person might do to get better at writing is to focus on becoming a more skilled thinker. I make this claim because writing is really just thinking on paper, in a visual form that can be shared with others.
In my case, I started getting much better as a writer when I became a graduate student and professors started pressing me intellectually. By holding me to a really high thinking standard, I had to evolve as a communicator because words were the things I was using to share the ideas I was positing. If I wanted my ideas to be compelling and precise, then my language had to be compelling and precise.
Graduate school is Boot Camp for would-be intellectuals, and my professors were working hard to turn me into a kind of Thinking Ninja. I was being tested and stressed and worked out so that I could become formidable. Because we live in a world where ideas matter, the strongest ideas, presented the most strongly, end up mattering more. Those who hold them and become skilled at sharing them, become very powerful.
This is why I ask so much of all the students I work with. I want to empower them. I want to help them gird them for battle.
Often, when people find out that I’m married to a woman from Egypt, they ask me, “So, how did you two meet?” The following is the story of how I came to know my lovely and talented wife.
***
I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on Azza. It happened on a hot April day in Cairo in 2011. Only months earlier, in January to be precise, the famed Egyptian Revolution, the upheaval which would result in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long-time dictator, had kicked off and the nation was still jittery and recovering from those cataclysmic events. Anyway, on that fateful April day I happened to have a day off—I’d come to Cairo in August of 2008 to teach at the American University in Cairo—and was working out at the gym at the Community Services Association, a hangout for expats and English-speaking Cairenes. I finished up, toweled the sweat off my body, and left. On my way out of the compound that housed the gym, coffee shop, café, and other CSA facilities, I passed by a group of tables where several women were selling international dishes. Behind them, on the wall they’d positioned themselves in front of, was a big placard that read “Cook’s Day Off.”
I was intrigued so I stopped to have a look. The first woman I happened to notice was someone who looked to be from the Indian Subcontinent. She spoke up and said, “Would you like to buy my Indian food?”
“Maybe. What is all this?” I asked, waving my hand to refer to the spread of food on the tables in front of me.
“We’re with Cook’s Day Off. We sell international food here at CSA twice a week. These are small-sized portions for you to eat when you get home this evening or you can stock your freezer with them.”
“I see,” I said, and then I noticed that there was an Asian woman selling food from Thailand and someone—she didn’t look Italian—hawking perfectly packaged smallish portions of various raviolis and lasagnas as well as tiramisu and some other things I was not able to immediately identify without reading the attached labels.
I began to pace back and forth in front of the tables and look down at all the varieties of food. Suddenly, the woman selling Italian spoke up and asked, “Do you like ravioli?”
“I do,” I said, and then, for the very first time, I looked directly into her eyes.
“Are you Italian?” I asked, thinking, all the while, that she was stunningly attractive.
“No. I’m Egyptian.”
“But you cook and sell Italian?”
“Yes, because I was trained by an Italian chef and partnered with her in the past.”
“I see.”
In the end, being the bachelor that I was and perfectly helpless in the kitchen, I bought a little bit of everything, including two packages of spinach ravioli and two Italian tarts that featured chocolate.
On the way home, I couldn’t get the Egyptian woman out of my mind. I started thinking about how wonderful it would be to go out with her on a date, but how would I ever get to know her name or find a way to make contact with her?
I was on foot, and I suddenly stopped on the crowded sidewalk. People began to jostle into me but I took no notice of them. I reached into the Italian bag and retrieved one of the tarts as I remembered that each package bore a label. I took off my glasses and brought the tart up close to my face so that I could read the fine print right below the production date and list of ingredients. Right there, in black and white, were the words “Azza Omar” and a telephone number. That discovery prompted a huge smile to turn up the corners of my mouth.
I put the tart away and rushed home. As soon as I got inside my apartment, I popped the plastic cover off the tart and cut a slice which I immediately crammed it into my mouth. A plan was forming while I chewed. Immediately upon swallowing, I took out my mobile phone and looked at the label again. I then composed the following text: “Hi. My name is Troy. I just bought two of your chocolate tarts. As soon as I got home, I tried one and it was great. Thank you.” I clicked send as soon as I’d checked it for grammar and spelling errors. I then began to pace back and forth in my kitchen. In about two minutes, she responded, “You are welcome.”
***
Three weeks to the day after buying tarts from Azza and then texting her, I was sitting in front of my computer in my office on the campus of AUC. My phone was sitting next to me and it rang. When I looked down and didn’t immediately recognize the number, I let it ring until the caller eventually hung up. I had a class to teach in about an hour and was busy prepping for it, so it was easy to ignore the call I’d just gotten. A few minutes later, my phone rang again. It was the same number belonging to the same unknown person. I sighed and then decided to answer it. “Hello,” I said.
“Hi. May I speak with Troy?”
“This is Troy. Who am I speaking with?”
“Azza. You bought some of my Italian food two or three weeks ago.”
“Oh, hi, how are you?”
“I’m fine. And you?”
“I’m good, thanks. I’m sorry but I’m at my work today and won’t be able to come to CSA to buy any of your goodies, but I promise that I’ll come soon and get some more.”
“Actually, I’m not calling about my food. I just wanted to say hello and to see how you’re doing.”
“Really? You’re calling to say hello?”
“You seemed like a nice person when we met, so I thought I would see how you’re doing.”
“You seemed nice too. Hey, would you like to meet in Maadi sometime for coffee or a Coke or something?”
“I’d really like that,” she said.
“I’d like it too. How about this coming Thursday at six or seven in the evening? Would that be a good day and time for you?”
“That would be great. As it just so happens, I’ll be in your neighborhood at exactly that time to deliver an order to a customer. I also cater and do a lot of parties, especially for Italians.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“It is. Anyway, Thursday evening is fine.”
“Great! Let’s meet at CSA then.”
“CSA is perfect.”
***
So, that’s how things got started between the two of us. The rest, as they say, is history…
From 2008 to 2015, I lived in Cairo, Egypt, and taught at The American University in Cairo. In the spring of 2011, about midway through my seven-year stint in North Africa and only two months after Hosni Mubarak was pushed out of office by an enormous uprising of fed-up Egyptians, I met Azza, a born and bred Cairene and the woman who would become my wife less than a year later.
When I met Azza, she had a successful catering business, specializing in Italian food. Now that we are living in the US—in interesting San Antonio, Texas, a place that feels a little like an American city with a whole lot of Mexico mixed in—my wife is once again considering starting her own enterprise. This time, though, she’s looking at opening a home bakery. (The Lone Star State doesn’t heavily regulate the cottage food industry, thus incentivizing those who wish run such a business out of their own kitchens.)
We just finished up with the Christmas holidays. By the way, my wife is a Muslim and she just loves this time of year. In fact, she single-handedly destroys all the ugly stereotypes that many close-minded people—I’m thinking mostly about the Trump Evangelicals as I write this—have about practitioners of Islam. I bring all this up because she did a ton of baking in the run-up to the twenty-fifth of December, and as is usually the case, because she is such a professional in the kitchen, she wrapped a turban around her head to keep stray hair out of the food she was preparing.
One morning I saw her with such a wrap on her head and told her she looked like Aunt Jemima. Knowing that wouldn’t understand such a reference, I tried to explain who this person was. As luck would have it, I went to the grocery store a few minutes later and found the appropriate aisle—the one where they kept the syrups for pancakes and waffles and such—and took a picture of the label with America’s beloved Aunt’s photo on it, only to discover (and quite surprisingly too) that the Jemima of today bears little resemblance to the Jemima of old.
The conspiracy theorist in me immediately jumped to the conclusion that they took her turban off because it looked too much like a hijab. I figured that Quaker Oats didn’t want to feature a character who looked too foreign or too exotic or too Islamic. After all, this is Trump’s America and the rest of us are only living in it.
As it turns out, there was a reason for the company to modernize Aunt Jemima’s image, but it had nothing to do with them trying to make her look less like a Muslim. I’ve included a video that explains the whole interesting story about the politics behind the revamping of the image of this cultural icon.
Life takes some incredible twists and turns. About a million years ago, I was born in San Antonio, Texas, a city that’s a little bit America and a little bit Mexico, and then, back when I was still pooping in diapers, mom and dad carried me off to Garland, a suburb of Dallas. Over the decades, I have had one or two opportunities to return to my birthplace, but only as a tourist and only for very brief visits. Mostly, I’ve been estranged from the locale that could rightfully be called my hometown.
Then, in the latter days of September of 2015, a few months after I’d left my post at The American University in Cairo, a very sudden job offer in San Antonio came my way while Azza—my Egyptian wife of five years and new America émigré—and I were camped out with family, in their guest bedroom, in another part of the Lone Star State. Of course, I signed on the dotted line, right where my new employer told me to. We then loaded up, headed to south Texas, down where the beautiful language of Spanish is ubiquitously spoken, and set up house.
All these years later, I am back in San Antonio, the place where I (literally) got my start. From time to time, when I’m tooling around the city, I get this weird déjà vu feeling. As a matter of fact, this past weekend, Azza and I went to the San Antonio zoo, and while standing in front of the flamingo cage, I had this odd sensation that I had stood in this exact spot before. The bird scene before me seemed bizarrely familiar. I lifted my camera, took a few photos of the pink, hook-nosed birds, while goosebumps rose on my arms.
We spent three hours among the animals and enjoyed our time more than I can accurately articulate here. I’ve always been a nut for creatures—this nuttiness was especially acute when I was a tyke—and I felt that old delight resurface as we moved from cage to cage. For some reason, on this particular outing, I especially liked the fish in their various watery enclosures. They swam past us, flashing a zillion neon colors as they went. In fact, I was so captivated by them it took me a while to actually notice that in one particularly large aquarium there were two hippos, their grotesquely large bodies magnified by the water, floating among those finned and gilled darters.
I’ve included a few photos here and am upset with myself that I didn’t get a good shot of the gibbons as they swung through the treetops, picked insects off on another, and otherwise reminded me of how humanlike they are. While watching them do their monkey business, I got so enthralled—my mouth was probably agape—that I simply forgot to lift my camera and click the shutter.
Thinker Boy: Blog & Art 