When I was in China, so long long long ago, it was just after the Cultural Revolution. Everyone wore navy blue or gray, the air in the capital city was foggy with the gray of coal dust burning in little wheels in small homes and apartments shared with many.

In the winter piles of Chinese cabbage - it's more like lettuce than American cabbage, but more substantial than lettuce - lay about the campus where I studied. Covered with a layer of hay. The cafeteria cooks would go out and pull the cabbages they needed to cook for the day, peel off the outer leaves and that was that. I hear before refridgeration people in the US had dark cool places to store the vegetables that might survive the winter.

We rode our bikes in schools of bikes crowded like sardines, sharing the side of the street with large buses that would push in in front of us like whales. Or we could ride the buses and feel like packed sardines.

My friend Shu Hua, I don't know now how I met her, was studying psychology. Many of her friends and relatives thought it was like reading people's minds and were mistrustful of it.

Everywhere I went, though clothed in navy blue padded clothes myself against the cold, I stood out. I was a minority there - not one of their minorities, but a minority none the less. It weighed heavy on me to be so noticeable, to be watched and talked about. (I wasn't imagining it, I could understand Chinese.)

Now I am in America, this very moment. Hopefully it is just AFTER the worst time since the great depression. We all wear all kinds of colors. The skies in North Carolina are clear and brilliant with huge fluffy clouds.

We don't keep our vegetables outdoors. We buy them in grocery stores and they come from all over the world. I've sold my bike and either walk for exercise or drive a car. The only buses here I have to deal with are school buses just before and after school.

Psychology is well-accepted by many, not everyone, but many.

Here I am invisible. I'm just another middle aged woman. Sometimes I can tell when I meet people that they aren't very interested in me. That's the down side of being kind of invisible. But even when I was an attractive young lady, people still weren't very able to ask in depth questions or extend curiosity very far, so the best way I found to deepen relationships was to learn to ask the questions that interested me, and engage people that way.

China is a long long long way away now. Though every store I go into is filled with amazing products made in China. Those years in post-cultural revolution China are nearly ancient history. Yet they happened. Years that we didn't experience in the US, but that we need to know about to be wary of extreme measures that were justified for the ends.

The days slip by like minutes and the months like hours and the years like months, too fast, ever too fast unless I slow down.

The Crusaders in the Mountains of Lebanon

Watching one of the Lord of the Rings movies showing soldiers in mail (is that what it's called, chainlink armor?) Driving through the gorgeous treed mountains where wild baby iris and cyclamin grew in the rich dark brown earth, we stopped a small crusader museum displaying the armor that crusadors wore.

Part of what that does is help make the story real. We know we tell it as history, but there are so many stories these days, so many movies and novels, real, fictionalized and full fiction, that it can be hard to fully retain what is history and what is mere story.

Stone walls, or concrete. Stone floors, or concrete. Very simple displays. History preserved in a walk through vault.

Beirut

Beirut had this most beautiful wide walk along the sea where you could walk and walk feeling the breeze off the Mediterranean, and seeing the palms wave with their orange colored fruit.

We saw our first snow in the mountains outside of Beirut. A long beautiful ride through forested hills then mountainside. Stopping to see the wildflowers, small iris and cyclamin growing wild. Like a dream. We have to buy these flowers now to have them.

Sipping in a mountain stream, a tiny trickle of silver water bouncing off of rocks as it made its way down the mountain. Cold, fresh, connected to the earth.

The symbol of Lebanon is the great cedar tree, big beautiful trees. You can see them on gold pendants that women wear.

Long ago. Many wars ago. Yearning for peace.

The Hills Beyond Jerusalem

Remembering the late 1960s, after the six day war, when we arrived in Jerusalem to live for three years, I wrote this short poem, hoping to keep the feel of the open dry countryside with sheep and goat herders, often kids, walking their herds.


In the hills beyond Jerusalem
Only the goat bells clanged
Before dawn.

Rolls of Barbed Wire

Moving to Jerusalem after the 6 day war, barbed wire was common. Some of it fresh. Some of it from the 1948 war. Today seeing the rolls of barbed wire protecting the airfield at Fort Bragg reminded me of how much barbed wire was part of the scenery in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Fall 1967

The six day war was over. We were evacuated out of Beirut amid protests and car burnings in front of the American embassy. All through the night we waited on the university campus, waited for our names to get called on flights leaving for Athens, Greece. We would spend a month in Greece and two in Italy, while our father was in parts unknown, somewhere between Jerusalem and Bagdad, where we were supposed to be going.

But when September rolled around, Daddy was in Jerusalem, so that's where we went. Jerusalem, my Jerusalem, the City of Gold.

Early on we were invited to tea in a home in the old city by one of the gates, stone gates of the city of Jerusalem. Inside the stone home it was cool. Stone kept the heat out. There were usually patios and sometimes fountains. That day there would be a procession of holy people carrying holy relics up the stairs into the old city. We could sit by the windows right along the steps and watch this ancient tradition take place.

There was a funny feeling to watching these events, events that we, as Americans were not part of, and so could only witness, as foreigners. A funny feeling of surreal - especially being a young girl with no historical context in which to place the sights.

Yet now, half way through my life, now I have perspective into which to place these memories, a way to see them and value them. Finally a way to acknowledge, when some say, "Oh what an amazing life you have led; the things you must have seen." Now, at last I am able to hold what I've seen, and acknowledge for myself, "I have had an amazing life in what I have witnessed in countries around the world, learning different languages, traveling all different ways, living for long periods in different cultures."

It is this cross-cultural, international experience, that while hardly unique - all the British expats for one had that experience all over Asia and parts of Africa (and the French too, although I spend less time accessing their literature) - while hardly unique, I have wished, since I was twelve, if not earlier, to name the experience that was mine in moving from country to country as the daughter of a diplomat. So it is, I am doing this, in bits and pieces as they surface, in this blog.

The Donkeys

In Saudi Arabia, we lived down a dirt road, in a stone house with a stone wall. Next to us was a villa, with 3 separate family quarters, and a row of servants rooms, all walled in.

Down the road a bit workers were building another foreigners' compound, a walled community.

We, kids, in second and third grade and younger, would watch the rickety carts come down the road with supplies for the workers, pulled by donkeys. We'd see the handlers whip the donkeys to make them pull faster, harder. We saw bleeding sores on their backs. Sometimes we would chase after them and taunt them. We were very angry at the way they treated their animals.

When it rained the road turned to mud. We actually put on rubber boots and ran out into the mud puddles, stomping and making the biggest of splashes. We were filthy when we finallly came in, tired, and oh so happy. Mud is so much fun.

Sometimes the carts would carry water in large tin containers. Other times the carts carried waste, and would smell terrible. Sometimes it was metal rods. Other times different things.

Sometimes we would go to where the building was happening, sneak around and explore. In the hot afternoons of Jeddah, Saudia Arabia, the workers would take naps sitting next to the buildings in the shade, heads fallen over their chests, or over to the side, wrapped in the classic white and black or red and white scarves called "keffiahs".

If they awoke and saw us we would run away. It was very exciting. Sometimes they would throw rocks at us. Sometimes we would too.

One day, when we saw a donkey who had open sores on his back we decided that we would steal the donkey. ....   For the rest of the story... ask!

The Day of the Dog Shooters

Brownie. Cleo. Tiny. Saudia Arabia. Every so often they, who? Some group of officials, would come to kill the stray dogs. In our neighborhood, on the dirt road that our stone house was on, there was a friendly pack of stray dogs. Brownie was like a german shephard, and the leader of the pack. Cleo was like an australian sheep dog, a mum. Tiny was one of her puppies.

We would hear gunshots. And Mom would tell us that it was probably the dog shooters. They did it close to Ramadan, cleaning up the area.

But the pack of dogs, perhaps left behind by expatriats who came an went, were our friends. We played with them. Named them all. Watched them. Watched them do what dogs do, fight, mate, run, bear puppies, look for food in trash.

Cleo got pregnant. She had a number of puppies. In the canyon. What was the canyon? In the back of our white stone villa not too far, was a big gully that had a lot of trash in it. There were several junked cars. Trash that included cans. Broken glass. And in the middle was a high point, with a seat that was like a throne. That place was very symbolic for us.

Tiny was one of Cleo's puppies.

When the dog shooters came we were always terrified about finding some of our dogs dead. We did find dogs dead. We knew the smell, the look, the insects that came to take the dog back into the the cycle of life.

more to come

Jerusalem, 1967

Jordan

We lived in a low-rise stone and cement apartment building on a dirt road. At the end of the street was the dry sparsely vegetated rocky land that one thinks of when thinking of the Middle East. At the end of our street lived a bedou family. They had a large tent. Brown goat smelling wool tent. Drapped over poles, with several rooms. The children dressed in motley clothing, unmatched and in need of repair. Usually their noses needed wiping and their faces washing. Their parents were dressed in the traditional robes. Women in long black dresses with embroidered fronts. Men in long white robes, with headdresses.

England

First impressions?
Huge trees. Moss and grass. Gray skies and light rains.
Smarties, the English equivalent of M&Ms, but better because they came in a neat cardboard tube with a plastic top that clicked in. And, the eternally beloved Cadbury's chocolate.

I was in England very young, for which I have no memories that I'm aware of.

We went back at least one other time, and then I do have memories. Most importantly Cadbury's chocolate.

To this day, my own dear mother, gets the huge bars of Cadbury's shipped in from England, because it tastes differently than the version that is produced in America. It is creamier. She loves the kind with hazelnuts best. I like the fruit and nuts. And the purple foil that it comes wrapped in makes it as precious as royal robes.

More to come

I grew up in the foreign service.

It's as if I were in my nineties, and I've only just started my fifties, but still it was a long long time ago, in the early sixties, that we lived in the countries of the Mediterranean, bathing, sunning and shelling on its shores, listening to Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish, and occasionally, when we went touring in a VW bus, we heard Serbo-croation, Turkish and Greek.

Jordan.

Egypt.

Saudia Arabia.

Lebanon.

Jerusalem - we always said, as if it were a city state like Singapore, acknowledging that too many peoples hold it dear, the Jews, the Muslims, the Armenians, the Greek Orthodox, the Christians.

Tunisia.

Kuwait.

Baharain.

I remember I had to ask my mother and father where we had lived, because I didn't remember. I wrote it down. Wrote down a full page of all the places we had lived, and when we moved, and then I studied it. Practiced saying the list aloud. There's a rhythm to the list. Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon. Jerusalem, Italy, [Maryland (US)]. Tunisia, [Massachusetts (US)], Kuwait, Bahrain. The US states are in brackets because they don't really count when someone is asking me where I've lived, after I have said: "I grew up in the foreign service."

Because it doesn't feel so good to start saying where I've lived and watch people's eyes glaze over, or hear them start to cut me off, I usually say something to warn them that it's a lot of countries.

The early sixties and mid seventies were a long time ago in human time, in this century, because of the enormous advances, and the enormous changes we've put our earth through.

Before my time is through, I'd like to pass on what our lives were like, growing up as children in the US Foreign Service, studying many languages, having friends from many countries, living in many places, traveling to yet more. Seeing too many churches, some mosques, and so many ruins. So many experiences and sights relinquished to remote memories, mostly triggered now by senory moments, a breeze, the smell of cooking from a restaurant, the light on a local pond or lake, and then the flood of memory arises for a moment. Ah, it was true. I did have these experiences, for whatever that means in the current of life.

Content coming in June, 2008