Jordan is a new country on the map here in the Middle East, it’s been built mostly since 1921. The buildings are new white stone, in modern Bauhaus style, with added Doric columns. It is attractive for the desert. Security is quietly evident, especially in the up-scale neighborhoods. A three-pat body search is unobtrusive but standard at the mall and at international hotels. For the Middle East, this is a country that has no natural wealth, indicating that Jordan should have a secure future. The city, built on seven hills, has only two or three notable historic monuments. There is little excitement, according to my host, Usama, who prefers Beirut, which turned out to be a let-down.

For the rest of our vacation, I try to get Usama and Maile to fly to the newer Gulf States like Dubai and Abu Dabi, where it is exciting and things are happening. “It’s already June,” he says, “too hot,” and drags us to Beirut, Lebanon, the place of his youth. The city depresses me. There is so much lost hope here. Buildings are abandoned, many not occupied since the recent civil war and the invasion of 2006. It’s a time to move on, the crest has fallen. Israel, its neighbor, which periodically erupts in growing pains, will have to come into its own, settle down and not spew its military might like a volcano across the border. My sense is this will take another 30 to 40 years, a good generation and a half.

We sit in cafes. I dream of dancing, sexual trysts, and imagine lascivious physical engagements with a beautiful crippled Arab man sitting near me. I imagine how long it would take for him to crawl up my legs, have full pleasure, then back again . . a long time. We are having tea and pastries. It comes time for him to leave and he manages to life himself enough to slide into a custom designed Audi. Another time, an Arab man with a gorgeous, craggy face catches my eye. He looks straight at me, a forbidden act for a man and woman who are strangers in this part of the world. His look takes me to my knees. I literally cannot recover from the sight of him in his dusty djellabah. On sandaled feet he continues his glide away from me. He is possibly 33 years old. His life will not change, nor his class, nor place in the world. What haunts me was that purest moment of male/female connection. Then alas, he disappears and I am left with nothing but the power of this virile image.

I cannot get into Gaza. The news is that the Israelis are about to invade. It would take two weeks to get permission from their embassy. This is not to be, they will not allow me to cross the border. Moreover, I could not bring anything and would have to walk on soft sand for a long, long way. As of June 17, I am no longer walking much.

12:15 AM, Beirut—there’s chaos in the streets, honking horns, drivers gone amok! Barricades in zigzag patterns are set up next door at the Intercontinental Hotel. Is Secretary Rice leaving at this hour? She had arrived this morning. Diplomats talk, pedestrians squawk. Have they no manners out there? Don’t laws exist here in Albuquerque—I mean Lebanon? Damn, New York cab drivers have more patience. By this time I am audibly groaning from my growing misery, frazzled by the disrespect of those unconscionable brutes out in the street. I stomp to the balcony in my pink nightie and finally the drama unfolds. “It’s the Italians,” laughs Usama, leaning over the stone carapace. “They’ve won the soccer match.” Young people are pouring out of the Hard Rock Café on the second floor of our hotel and piling into cars, blasting their horns, streaming up and down, up and down along the famous Mediterranean promenade boulevard of this once fair city.

The next day, Adnan, 77, Usama’s poorer, disinherited cousin, picks us up and gives us a tour of the city. He is knowledgeable about politics and, in particular, Palestinian matters. Usama visits his alma mater, the American University. We drive through the Christian section, north of Beirut, and have a most wonderful lunch at a sea shore restaurant. No war has come to this part of the city, Usama proudly points out, yet it is still depressing. The economy is down. I am down. I am frustrated, I can’t even access my e-mail on the Internet.

I had intuited, somehow predicted, that this trip would intrigue, but less than satisfy, me. Nonetheless, the experience did bear fruit in the kindness of my traveling companion Maile. Because of the outlay of her heart, nothing fell apart. She is quite simply a flawlessly kind person who always knows what you need. In my case, it was a shoulder for my unsteady gait and a pillar to acquit my more sufferable outrages. She is a blessed being, the one who tolerates the worst and the best of us. That is Maile.

BATMAN, the poor guy is lost under the camouflage of costume, grittily garbled voice and a passionless sex life. Enough said about him. Like the six movies shown in previews before it, our unquenchable hero struggles but can’t survive the over-weighted dynamics of the studio’s special effects department.

I love the Fourth of July and its twenty minutes of super incendiary fireworks. The Dark Knight is 2 - hours of pyrotechnical megalomania. The film is 1 - hours too long, unless you like watching men snarling at each other with nothing further to do and crowds cowering at men snarling at each other with nothing more dramatic to do. There are snarky eighteen wheelers somersaulting around and over each other—that was good. The best detonation scene was a sequential blowing-up of Gotham Hospital—good. Otherwise, I was numbed by the repetition and excesses—though it’s just what the kids like. I was the parent who went along for the ride and felt as if she’d been stuck in the Holland Tunnel for a three-day weekend.

Excitement level: (honestly?) D+.

Heath Ledger, as good as he tried to be, could have used more help from the camera. Remember the angles on the Batman TV series? We could have seen him upside down, through a tunnel lens, or being zapped suddenly into scenes. He didn’t feel scary enough to the audience to have sent all of Gotham City to the bone house. And where was the humor? OK, no humor. What about terror? A slow ride up the roller coaster of fear would have helped. Remember Hitchcock’s seductive shower scene in Psycho? That kind of on-screen intimidation makes the up-coming scene of blood spattering annihilation work. I could have stood in the street outside the theatre after glazing myself at a bar and had a more wrenching experience. Frankly, I yawned loudly and yearned for some deep comfort, which the seats at the Mann Theatre in Santa Monica were not.

I think I’ll watch a rerun of “The Red Shoes”.

That word!

How did it get out? It was surely the decade of the ‘90’s wherein the momentum had become unstoppable. First men used it freely. Then women who wanted to be noticed for their unassailable “freshness”. I’m here, get me. . modern girl. Their well-mannered sisters, such as I, lengthened their steps away from such pollution. “Never that word, not us.” Actors would use the word like new toothpaste, filling their mouths with it. You’d hear it coming from the monitors high up on the walls of cheesy video stores, sounding out of context to your own thoughts, much like an unexpected burp in church. Boys growing facial hair had a fondness for such language. Those of us who kept holding out wouldn’t even consider it “language”. And again actors, those Eighth Avenue Actors Studio style actors, would use it incessantly in double D movies when they were given license to improvise. I knew the word was going to take hold everywhere . . . but it would not flow from my lips, not in public. In private, I do swear, rather liberally—when dropping bobby pins, or when all four windows of the car are rolled up and someone cuts me off. I can’t break that habit, though I’ve tried. “It” always slips out before I can do anything about “it”. I apologize quickly, to no one in particular. Trouble is, swearing in the moment just feels good.

I never remember my parents using the F. . . word. Not even my dad, not ever. And he was a Second World War fella. Don’t tell me those guys said it! When I see films with modern actors spouting modern dialog during that era, I immediately know the director doesn’t know his stuff. In my mind, not knowing your social history is a turn off. English film makers don’t make that mistake. At least not as often. Back to my mother and dad. Even when it was hush-hush, the-kids-won’t-hear-it dialogue, even when mother had had a martini, though not more than one, or dad would lose his temper, “it” never happened, that four letter word. Never. Even darn or damn was quite out of order. And the F… word was certainly held back, kept enthroned for the pleasure of the good act itself. Not debilitated in loose talk, diluted of its magnificence. It just didn’t belong to lesser mortal acts. How dare they, I thought, deflate it from its primal mighty place. Those plebeians, hard at work deflating the only good sin. I’ll never be one of them, never! Well . . . until I listened around and realized . . . I had started scattering these precious pearls, reversing meaning, dulling the reverence of the favorite unspoken word.

I had fallen. I was tainted like the others, pushed into saying something I didn’t mean, didn’t like hearing, and that branded me as accepting the status quo. In private conversations I began using it for the most emphatic attack, as a further thrust to my aggression. Using it in that mean, dumb way was like graffiti on the Statute of Liberty, noise pollution at the Grand Canyon. Some things I wanted kept sacred, though they no longer were. The word has become a slap in the face to our ardent values, become somebody else’s dirty language laundry. I just wanted it to mean something. Was my desired verbal primness just a virgin’s curse, a little like tidiness and cleanliness?

Should I let silence be my protest? Or do I say F . . . It and do my best to stay modern, to keep up with the rest?

June 21, 2008 Amman, Jordan

Damn, Damn, Damn——this whole trip is about my friend Usama. What he wants, his restaurants, his family, Lebanon, his past. I am angered that I have come all this way, spent all this money, used up all this time to have a quite mediocre experience.
I am angry that so little has happened of importance to, for, or from me. I have not benefited anyone much, nor they me. I am . . . disappointed.

I wanted to go to Gaza. But no one put a hand out to help me. Instead, the experience was all about just getting by—sitting at a mall, hanging out at the St. Georges Beach Club, maneuvering street barricades in war-damaged Beirut, visiting Usama’s displaced Palestinian relatives. But not Gaza and the children, not the Alfaluna School for the Deaf. That’s what I wanted to visit, to experience, to know. “You can’t bring anything,” Geraldine Shawa, the head of the school had said. The children don’t have batteries for their hearing aids, or paper to write on. We can’t feed them because we don’t have oil to operate the stoves. The used cooking oil is all we have now for our cars, which sputter and smoke and make our eyes tear. “Our school had to close a month early due to the Israeli blockade.”

Why doesn’t someone help these people? One million or so stranded, justifiably angry people. A feeble rocket up against billions of dollars of armaments. Is this insane or what? Why do I sympathize? Am I, like them, this symbol of nothing, this zero, this helpless soul, so insignificant as not to be heard? How tiny are we all when overcome by the deepest of fears—insignificance. How can you be heard, O Palestine of my heart? Is not every iota of all of us important? Must the others have hatreds, Hitlers, horrendous events against which they push in order to rise and shine? Who watches out for us, O Cambodia, Laos?

“You probably won’t be able to cross the border, even if you get permission from the Israeli embassy and that will take two weeks. Then there is the sand. You will have to walk a great distance in soft sand. That’s why you’ll not want to carry anything.” Not even those behind-the-ear hearing aid batteries.

How would I make it? I can no longer walk without support, not even 50 paces. How do the weak help the weak? What do I do? Your people have been in my heart for so long. Silenced, quiet, sputtering, determined, never hopeless.

I want all of you, and the all that is me, to be valued, acknowledged, appreciated, though you occupy the least valued place on this earth, you are the most valued,for without you, there could not be a full earth. Know that, treasure that.
Always be who you are. We need you dearly, for without you, before long,
we would not exist.

Rami Esam Samara. Born in Kuwait, Parents, Palestinian refugees. Sunni.
36 years old. Tall, at least 6’1”. A brother, 2 years older. A sister, 10 years younger. Flying to London for his engagement in three days—to a Shiite girl!
Her love: Mathematics. His love: A new family.

He asks who I am as he stands behind me at the airport in Amman, Jordan.
“You are so elegant, a celebration.” He was enormously quick witted, bright, respectful, apologetic. I touched his cheek, “Never apologize . . . just be.”
He is quite magnificent. “I am a lowly computer guy,” he says, apologizing again.

He has made a film on his cell phone, which he now shows me on the big PC he carries in his backpack. His brother was misdiagnosed in Britain for colon cancer (it was actually cancer of the appendix), but was saved by a French doctor in Lyon. Both brothers were overjoyed. There had been stress between them. His father was a very successful engineer. Excitedly he tells me about this overriding development with his brother, his thoughts on life and death, stories about his father’s expulsion from Jerusalem in 1948.

“Sit next to me on the plane,” I say. We are both going to London. He smiles and nods, then disappears into the crowd.

My friend Maile helped me through customs. At the “Ladies Cubicle” a gorgeous Arab woman in high heels, hair tightly covered, garbed totally in black, pats me sweetly in two places, then steps back, allowing me to pass. “Shukran”, I thank her, for some reason, delighted to have learned at least one useful Arab word.

I guess he’s taking another plane. I look for him, my imagination running wild. I’d been bored on this trip. And he said he would be here. Arab people are very respectful, no foolishness. Families, especially, are treated with devotion. There are premarital arrangements, not about who gets what in a break-up, but what they will do for each other in furthering the other’s life. The voice of the Muzzein gently reminds them of their devotion to higher principles every five hours or so in tones so very haunting that I look forward to even the pre-dawn call to prayer. It is the same Cante Hondo that I remember hearing in the caves and dance halls in Seville when I was fifteen. Sung with the eyes closed, a cry searching down, down to the belly for some sacred cataclysm of satisfaction, each half tone twisting and turning through a new anguish, grasping, descending further, holding and re-holding a desired pitch, while the callused finger of a guitarist chases after, tumbling, ripping, faltering with the singer on their mutual descent into hell. It puzzles the soul. It grabs you and takes you to the bottom. It is revelatory.

I see him walking toward me on the plane, his face shining, open, animated, so happy to see me. He sits next to me and we talk about Palestine, his future, the world.

I ask him why he thinks this conflagration is going on in the Middle East. I want to hear the big ideas. He quotes this and that, history, the past. I try to focus on the overall picture, the need for change, maybe a wondrous awakening for his people. I prod him, “See the story, these developments, as your Maker would view them, neither bad nor good, but as a wake-up call.”

I ask him what was the greatest gift the Jews gave the world. He answers, “The Maccabees on the . . .? Moses in the . . . ?“ More history lessons. “No, you are not even close,” I say. He genuinely admires the Jews. He is very quick and open minded. English educated, he is a citizen of the world. He met his fiancé on the internet. I ask him again and again, pressing him to think. He likes my challenges, has many answers but not the one I am hoping for, the big answer . . .It is Christ. “The Jews gave us Jesus.” And the magnificent civilization that developed in the 2000 years that followed, rivaling any on earth. “Think of Europe before and after the Reformation, the music, great orchestras, museums, art, Paris, London, the forgiveness Christ offered that launched so much spiritual and human development.”

He is fascinated with numerology. The energy of numbers. The power that numbers hold for names, titles, and addresses. “What would be the best name for the fund my father had started?” he asks. His father, once a penniless refugee, was awarded an education by the British for being one of the smartest in a group of Palestinian boys. He, in turn, is determined to set up . . . “Samara Fund” (as we decided to call it) to educate the new refugees. The idea of rewarding these children through the fund greatly excites Rami Esam Samara. He loves the idea of these new boys growing strong and confident, as his father had.

After lunch he fell easily to sleep for an hour, but wakes up slashing at the air, horror on his face. He says he has the same nightmare over and over again. “I am decapitated, my limbs are being cut off.” “What has happened to cause this?” I ask. “I can’t get this project up and going. I love it, but I can’t get started.”Quite forcefully, I tell him he must stop avoiding the fear, get himself ready, grasp the opportunity, then go straight into this fear, go right to the center of it, and when he gets there the fear will disintegrate into a thousand tiny “lights” and he will behold the answer.

I tell him the method I use of writing to solve any questions, reminding him that in the question is the answer. He does not need an outside source. He is the source, the source from within. I teach him about Intention. How to Focus. To set up an hour in the morning for deep focus, to question his progress, to determine what he can do better. It is a pleasure to have such a young, beautiful man be so eager to know himself more and for me to know I can touch the light within him. For me, this is the gift. For him, many new trees will grow in Palestine.