Back in Marrakesh, I went looking for the Morocco where my parents met. The Morocco where the love story began that would become legend in our family. The Marrakesh for which my sister is named. The story that makes this blog merely a sequel. But it wasn't there. I looked in the souks, but only found piles of spices unfamiliar to my mother's kitchen. I looked in the square, but the snakes' mouths were all sewn shut and the monkeys only looked saddened by their short leashes. Or worse yet, they weren't even sad anymore, just depressed and resigned to an existence of tourist shoulder-climbing for the jingles of a few dirham and the closing shutter of a camera. The campground where my father wowed my mother that first night cooking creamed eggs in a tent long before it could even be considered and ultimately excluded from a family menu. It was replaced by scrambled eggs with dill and tarragon by the time I came around. The campground like the creamed eggs no longer exists.
That Morocco was the prequel. The beginning of a story of love and romance four decades long that would close with a twist of plot and a tinge of tragedy. A story that would take my father and my mother to tell, but really can't be captured in mere telling. Just hinted at, like a shadow in a single yellowed photograph. The tinge of tragedy began in 2009, days before the wedding of their youngest son. As Annette and I prepared for our nuptials, my mother suddenly was diagnosed with cancer. I remember sitting on a couch in Oxford Mississippi when my mom first decided to write a blog about her experience, at my brother's urging. She was a journalist to the end.
It is a story I have told many times, but lived only once. Sometimes the telling is robotic, as if I am a distant observer of the story that is being told. Other times it is emotional. Even now as I write about it, tears well up in my eyes. There is a part I never quite found words for... and still haven't. Over the six months between diagnosis and death, my father took care of her in a way far beyond words. Far beyond four decades together. Far beyond newspapers, families or summer vacations together. Their relationship was a model that sometimes seems unachievable to me. And my own marriage is a process of remembering that it is a model, not instructions, and not a stick to measure against. And surely,in that remembering, Annette and I will create our own story, beautiful, romantic, enchanted. My mother's illness cast a shadow on our honeymoon. It kept us close, not wanting to ever be further than a phone call away should my mom's life slip even a bit.
She passed on March 1st, 2010. In her will, she left money to each of her children. My brother put it towards his business. My sister bought her's. Annette and I yearned for some freedom and a chance to explore the world together as a foundation for our own story. So we put it towards this journey. For my parents, the meeting place was Morocco. For Annette and I, it was post-Katrina New Orleans. I already have a sense of how that part of the story will be told to our children.
And now, here in India, I realize that these places of magic and romance move between generations. The Morocco where my parents met is no longer in Morocco. If it is anywhere, perhaps it is here in India. I remember my dad describing to me how the signs in Arabic made him feel like he was in another world, some place exotic, completely unfamiliar. Some place that doesn't operate with the same concepts of time and space. A place where the gods are different. And the people.
And my father's stories have photos. The photos we went through as my mom grew sicker and as we prepared for her memorial service. Photos feebly attempting to catalogue a life. Little windows into times and places I never visited. Times and places that no longer exist. Photos of my mother with some stylish piece of jewelry or belt that clearly was neither born nor bred in the United States. No, these items, like the look in her face, contained a bit of the exotic, a bit of enchantment. Some of that raw material of romance, of love.
I think what happened to Morocco is not unique. That enchantment became a bit buried, a bit commercialized. The legend of one generation came to be exploited until it became an imitation of what it once was. Or perhaps, the change is less in the place and more in the people. One generation's source of wonderment is reinforcement for another's cynicism. Perhaps that is what my father would say about India. This place that seems to be the Morocco that lives in his memory. The Arabic is Hindi, its characters not just another language, but portents to another world. A world that is ancient and mystical. The possibility that God could be almost anywhere here. The possibility that God has been here and religions built upon the discovery of God in this land. And temples, ornate and exotic with practices unfamiliar but beautiful.
It attracts people. Like the young woman Annette met today on the beach who just finished serving in the Israeli military. She planned to come here for one month but is staying for six, until her Visa expires. She is only a representative, one of the generation of Israelis who have come seeking something after serving their country. And they come from all parts of the globe. They grow their hair. They hula hoop. They lie on the sand and let the waves push and pull them on the inhales and exhales of the Arabian Sea. They drop out. Surely in India, this is not generational. This has been going on far longer than the blip in time that is a generation. It goes back to the days of Jesus and Buddha, when they were children. Told in Sanskrit before it was ever written.
I wonder what part of the story of romance and love that belongs to Annette and I India will play. What will we tell our children about our time wandering from Om Beach to Half Moon Beach while the dolphins play off shore? Will our children discover this sliver of their parents past that makes them cool even to a 21st century teenager? Much the way my siblings and I discovered the Grateful Dead, Moody Blues and Jethro Tull in my parents record collection. Or my dad's Ram Dass books and D.T. Suzuki Zen Buddhism books. Signs that our parents were more filled with mystery and wonder and wisdom than we had thought. I wonder what our children will say about our time in India.
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