I started this blog with a small quote from "The Happy Prince." It is essentially the swallow happily singing "tonight I fly to Egypt." As I wrote then, one reason for beginning the blog with that quote was the memory it conjures up of watching the "The Happy Prince" as a film reel in elementary school. The memory of the film, and the film itself are painfully nostalgic. There is a second reason. I lived for nine months in Cairo, Egypt, celebrating my 22nd birthday there. That time in Egypt has had a profound impact on my life. Among other things, if I had not lived in Cairo, I don't believe I would have opened up enough to fall in love with my wife, Shin. For at least a year after moving back to the States from Egypt, my memory and imagination daily lingered on my life on the Nile River.For another, Cairo was where I had to become a man, of sorts. It was my sharp division between childhood and adulthood. Yes, I was student who partly lived off of the charity of my parents and grandparents, but in all other respects small town, sheltered, American me had to survive on my own in a wildly different culture, a city both dense and vast and full of filth where few people spoke English and where I had to mold my modern standard Arabic into something useful for communication. No one in my family said good bye when I left. They weren't home. One of my Dad's art students drove me to the airport in Atlanta, four hours away. Arriving in Cairo I had two weeks before my classes started and no information to go on other than the university campus' address. This was 1996, essentially pre-internet and very much pre-cell phone. I knew no one. I had no where to stay. No Egyptian pounds or piasters for money. I carried an unwieldy duffle bag and one of my Dad's old backpacks, travelers checks, and a hand drawn map of of downtown Cairo. In the first week I stayed in three different hotels and two different apartments before an advertisement board at the university presented me with a room for rent in an apartment with flat mates who accepted me. For my first month in Cairo it was all I could do each day to stop myself from fleeing to the airport and returning home.
Above all else, the division came when my domineering father came to visit for three weeks. The experienced traveler, spelunker, mountaineer, river boater, environmentalist, awkward socialite, philosopher, handyman, mechanic, artist who is my Dad had a nervous breakdown in the chaos of Egypt. Our roles reversed. I had to care for him, guide him by hand across streets, select food for him, pay for him, speak for him. Good bye childhood.
And now I can turn my thoughts towards other events and episodes that have had an obvious impact on my life. There was the summer anthropology field school with UGA that took us from Athens, Georgia, to the Georgia coast, to the California coast, and back again, all the while camping out under the stars and taking copious notes in our field journals about such and such rocks. The day we departed Athens, our professors told us point blank that the experience would carry a profound influence into our lives. For me, it influenced my first year of college and introduced me to the game of toli.
Toli, called stick ball, or otherwise known as the Little Brother of War. It was a native American ball game I played during my UGA years. Along with the company of Tom Deitz, stick ball introduced me to another side of the South that had much greater interest and meaning for me. I also met a lot of very interesting friends who were just as far gone from mainstream society as I was. It was one of the few areas in my life where I felt comfortably at home in my own skin. The last game I played outside of Athens was one of our Moundville, Alabama games, a year after I had graduated from UGA. I flew in from Arizona, took a shuttle van from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa, and then walked, jogged and sprinted the 15 miles from Tuscaloosa to Moundville. The game wasn't much because the Choctaw did not show up, but the night spent walking around the ancient mounds in the cool, silvery mist is enshrined in my memory.
The summers from 1989 to 1993 spent with my family in the mountains of the American (including Canadian) West. There were a lot of miles spent in cars or the old VW van watching landscapes empty of people pass by, listening to cool classic rock and folk music like Pink Floyd and Paul Simon. There were lots of small backpacking trips and a good many mountains climbed. It was one of the few times I seriously dreamed about a future job - smoke jumper. These are also the best memories I have of my Dad. The first two summers we had our best friend from Texas, Casey Dickman along. The last two summers we had our best friends from Georgia, David Schert, along.
Of course falling in love with and marrying Shin has had the most present impact on my life. Next I should write "enough said", however I must add that I fell in love with Shin at age 24. Prior to that I had never had a girlfriend, never kissed a girl (or boy), and had promised myself that I never would. So, falling in love with Shin was a big thing for me.
Quite a few painful events must be included here as major life influences. These include the year I spent teaching English in Singapore, my five months of student teaching horror two years later in the United States, multiple moves as a youngster, the worst of which was the move to Georgia, and finally the death of my Mom and her mom, Grandma Diss.
What I find strange is that despite the prominence of these events and experiences in my life, they have had virtually no presence in my memories since Solveig was born. The past two and a half years have all been random memories, mostly from my life prior to Georgia.
And now I can turn my thoughts towards other events and episodes that have had an obvious impact on my life. There was the summer anthropology field school with UGA that took us from Athens, Georgia, to the Georgia coast, to the California coast, and back again, all the while camping out under the stars and taking copious notes in our field journals about such and such rocks. The day we departed Athens, our professors told us point blank that the experience would carry a profound influence into our lives. For me, it influenced my first year of college and introduced me to the game of toli.
Toli, called stick ball, or otherwise known as the Little Brother of War. It was a native American ball game I played during my UGA years. Along with the company of Tom Deitz, stick ball introduced me to another side of the South that had much greater interest and meaning for me. I also met a lot of very interesting friends who were just as far gone from mainstream society as I was. It was one of the few areas in my life where I felt comfortably at home in my own skin. The last game I played outside of Athens was one of our Moundville, Alabama games, a year after I had graduated from UGA. I flew in from Arizona, took a shuttle van from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa, and then walked, jogged and sprinted the 15 miles from Tuscaloosa to Moundville. The game wasn't much because the Choctaw did not show up, but the night spent walking around the ancient mounds in the cool, silvery mist is enshrined in my memory.
The summers from 1989 to 1993 spent with my family in the mountains of the American (including Canadian) West. There were a lot of miles spent in cars or the old VW van watching landscapes empty of people pass by, listening to cool classic rock and folk music like Pink Floyd and Paul Simon. There were lots of small backpacking trips and a good many mountains climbed. It was one of the few times I seriously dreamed about a future job - smoke jumper. These are also the best memories I have of my Dad. The first two summers we had our best friend from Texas, Casey Dickman along. The last two summers we had our best friends from Georgia, David Schert, along.
Of course falling in love with and marrying Shin has had the most present impact on my life. Next I should write "enough said", however I must add that I fell in love with Shin at age 24. Prior to that I had never had a girlfriend, never kissed a girl (or boy), and had promised myself that I never would. So, falling in love with Shin was a big thing for me.
Quite a few painful events must be included here as major life influences. These include the year I spent teaching English in Singapore, my five months of student teaching horror two years later in the United States, multiple moves as a youngster, the worst of which was the move to Georgia, and finally the death of my Mom and her mom, Grandma Diss.
What I find strange is that despite the prominence of these events and experiences in my life, they have had virtually no presence in my memories since Solveig was born. The past two and a half years have all been random memories, mostly from my life prior to Georgia.
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