The market had exotic broccoli last weekend.  I am always enamored by Romanesco or fractal broccoli whenever I find it.  The flavor is right in between cauliflower and broccoli and the pretty Christmas tree shape fascinates me.  I cooked a platter of them on Christmas day in Umbria, I think there were 7,  and the science teacher/students in our group examined them all around for the Fibonacci numberness of their composition.

Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org

I sometimes wonder why we don’t consistently have broccoli here as we do cauliflower.  After living in South Asia, however, I think it is just that cauliflower is such a more durable product than broccoli.  It could be the bleakest height of winter in Kathmandu, but the vegetable peddlers,  selling vegetables from homemade metal baskets on the sides of their bicycles, would have huge snowy heads of cauliflower that had been transported into the city via open-bed trucks, not unlike cord wood.  I love the term truck-farmer, and here, farmers actually fill the beds of their trucks with produce:  at the moment, oranges, and then sit by the roadside with scales selling directly off the bed, all day.

We had buttery chickpea soups in Italy that were so good they elicited some sort of vocalization from you with every bite.  This recipe is worthy of your best imported chickpeas, but it is also just fine made with canned ones, which will allow you to make it at the end of a good long day of work.

Chickpea Soup

Bon Appetit, February 2013

1 1/2 cups dried chickpeas, or 3 15-oz cans chickpeas, rinsed

3 Tbsp. olive oil

2 large onions, coarsely chopped

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1 sprig thyme

1/2 cup dry white wine

4 cups vegetable (or chicken) broth

Sea salt

1 bunch broccoli, stems reserved for another use, cut into small florets

Flat-leaf parsley and fresh tarragon leaves (for garnish)

6 servings

If using dried chickpeas, place in a medium bowl and add cold water to cover by 2″.  Let soak overnight in refrigerator.  Drain chickpeas.

Heat oil in a large heavy pot over medium heat.  Add onions, garlic, and thyme sprig; cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are soft, 10-15 minutes.  Add chickpeas and wine.  Bring to a rapid simmer;  cook until wine is reduced by half, about 2 minutes.  Add broth and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until chickpeas are very soft, 1 1/2 -2 hours for dried chick peas, or about 30 minutes for canned.  Discard thyme sprig.

Working in batches, puree chickpea mixture in a blender or with an immersion blender, adding water by 1/2 cupfuls if needed, until smooth.  Season with salt.  Chickpea soup can be made 1 day ahead.  Let cool;  cover and chill.

Meanwhile, cook broccoli in a large pot of boiling salted water until crisp-tender, about 4 minutes.  Drain; rinse under cold water.

Reheat soup.  Divide soup among bowls and garnish with broccoli and herbs or drizzle with chili oil.

Such a strange, strange week.  It began first thing on Monday morning.  Allan is usually up before me on weekdays, checking news and email.  On Monday, he immediately woke me up with the words you dread to hear no matter where you live, “Get up, your Mom is in the hospital.”  All we had at that time was an email from my niece, giving us what they knew at that point:  My dad had called an ambulance on Friday when my mom suffered her third spell that week of shortness of breath, dizziness, and chest pains.

It was too late for me to call anyone in Montana at their time of night so I had to wait until the end of my work day to call home.  In the evening, I finally reached my dad in Mom’s hospital room.  He said it wasn’t clear to the doctors that she was suffering from a heart attack so they had been systematically checking everything from her brain, to her lungs, to her heart.  He sounded so sad and exhausted.

My parents have been married for over 65 years.  They are both in their mid 80s.  They have each had some surprise medical emergencies, but because they are so clear-minded and committed to their life together, they have helped each other and manage to maintain a happy level of independence.  It is unimaginable that one would be without the other.  The entire day I had to wait to get information about Mom, I thought about this.  At 51, I still live in the luxuriously naive state of assuming my parents are going to continue to be OK, that they will be there to answer the phone when I call every Sunday.  I know other people have parents who have died and one carried on without the other, but that isn’t possible for my parents.  They need each other.

In the end, the doctors couldn’t find anything they thought they could improve through surgery:  good news.  They gave Dad some tools and strategies to help her at home if she has another attack where she can’t breath:  also good news.  They didn’t make the possibility of this happening again go away:  less good, but livable.  By Thursday, they got to go home together to their comfortable house, now with an oxygen tank, but sleeping in their own bed and carrying on the sweet life they have.  We were saved.

But then Wednesday, we had a political assassination here in Tunis, something practically unheard of in this country where citizens don’t own firearms.  The man killed was Chokri Belaid, leader of the secularist party in opposition to the increasingly unpopular Islamist party which is in control of the government at the moment.  We don’t yet know who killed him, but it looks bad for the Islamists.  On Friday, the day of his funeral, an almighty wail went up from Tunisia.  Possibly close to 1,000,000 people thronged to the cemetery.  Thugs, terrorists, and opportunists also went and burned cars, beat people, and stole whatever they could get their hands on.  It was both sad and ugly.

Photo by Gabel Bredy

As sometimes happens, maybe some good can come from this.  The prime minister has vowed to replace the political appointees in the government cabinet with technocrats who should be able to more effectively keep the country running while the government figures out the new constitution.  His own party is against the idea, but they might have to back him up or risk throwing Tunisia back into a full-fledged revolution.  This week will be telling.

Finally, the weather turned unusually cold, with low temperatures, wind, and icy rain.  Compared to the weather in New England at the moment, this is nothing, but it did add to the unsettling atmosphere of the week.  We found some teeny, tiny Mediterranean clams at the market on Saturday called tellines.  They are so little and delicate compared to our Northwest clams.  We steamed them in the Provencal style of shallots, garlic, lemon, butter, cracked black pepper,  and a bottle of good white wine.  Picking through ladles full of these delicacies, and dipping chewy, buttered bread into the broth, calmed our nerves.

I won’t try to tie it up in a nice bow.  It was an odd week.  It could have gone differently,  but we experienced some grace within it.

My youngest son said this week, “I haven’t read your blog in forever.”  I told him I hadn’t really posted anything since November and that post was entitled “Things that Stain”.  Silence.  “Wow Mom, that’s a little Goth.”  I agreed that it did reflect a time-specific state of mind.

When I think back to that time, I feel like a small airplane in the big, Montana sky, quite solitary and small and sounding like a fly buzzing in the distance.  Then, I start to sputter and cough some dark smoke and almost unnoticed, I spiral out of the sky and crash into a farmer’s field creating just a little poof of dust.  It was devastating to me, but the world pretty much just went on.

I have a friend named Dan who has known Allan and me for 30 years.  When we have just made some big life change, like having a child or moving, he has asked us if this is a new paragraph, chapter or book in our lives.  I have definitely experienced a life change in the past 5 months and my answer is teetering between a new chapter or possibly, even, a new book, it was that big.  Strangely, I was right here the whole time, but my world swirled in change around me and I came to see that ways I thought I understood people were not only incorrect at that moment, but had likely never been correct.  Dan also pointed that out to me and it was one of the most useful observations I’ve ever received.  It helped me stop fighting behaviors I thought were uncharacteristic of people and begin telling myself that I don’t know how they are thinking.  And with that, I could stop trying to make sense of it.  I think it has altered my perceptions of people forever.

This year was supposed to be my “bump” year.  I have a justifiable theory that the third year you live somewhere is the year when all of the hard work that went into making the changes required by a move pays off.  You get to finally just live in a place rather than constantly discover or adapt to it.  After last fall, I dismissed any hopes of a bump year.  Everything looked like tearing apart and rebuilding, no staying still and enjoying.

But then, a number of things and people started getting better, including me.  A counselor who has worked with our school on PTSD made a simple but profound statement:  People will spontaneously get better.  We slogged through a Christmas season with pasted-on smiles and nearly trampled one another to get to the airport to go someplace else for a few weeks, but amazingly, many people were really happy to get back here to their Tunisian homes and our school and each other.  I was.

I asked Allan a week or so ago how the new hires are doing in their waiting period and he said, “Great, do you want to see them?” and he started pulling up an info. sheet he had made about them on his computer.

I said, “No, not yet.” Very soon, all of those new people will become a priority for me as we work to greet, settle and integrate them into our school community and Tunisia, but at that moment,  I was just sensing the beginning of being able to simply converse with people I’ve groomed friendships with for two years and longer.  We were finally eating lunch together, again.  We were starting to laugh and plan little outings.  I wanted to have one season, at least, in the present before we have to start taking things apart this spring and saying goodbyes.  It made me think of the song Blue Umbrella, by John Prine?

Just give me one good reason
And I promise I won't ask you any more.
Just give me one extra season
So I can figure out the other four.

I think I’m going to get my season.   A few of us had a soul-expanding day yesterday in the Tunisian countryside tramping around on an organic olive, honey and wild thyme farm.  We worked up a big appetite and devoured a vat of fava bean couscous.  Then, like a bunch of happy babies, and alongside the happy babies, we napped on the bus all the way back to Tunis.  We were happy together and I thought, saha.

Saha is an Arabic word my friend Dorsaf anoints me with when I share with her about a good experience I have had or thank her for some way in which she has treated me.  Saha, saha she says and she explains that you say it like the Kiwi, “Good on you,” or just basically,  I am happy that you experienced something nice.

Many of us have read Anne Lamott’s new book, Help, Thanks, Wow, recently.  She writes about asking the “Great Someone” for simple help when we realize we are choking the life out of ourselves and others.  When our squid-inky hands are making a mess of a situation even worse and we can’t seem to stop.  Breaking out of the black hole requires one to breathe, stop talking and let some air and light get into the situation, which incidentally is what is needed for the healing of all wounds.  Healing comes when we let it and feeling new growth elicits a spontaneous murmuring of thanks, thanks, thanks,  it’s good, it’s good, it’s good.

When I am in  certain European countries, those that were Nazi occupied during World War II, and I see these little old-fashioned trains, I am pricked with a feeling of nostalgia and a little morose.  I have felt it in Brussels, Prague, Munich, Krakow, and now, Vienna.  The mass movement of people was such a theme during that time.  I can picture regular citizens trying to get by, catching the train from, hopefully, a job to, hopefully, a roof over their heads.  I can also picture frightened Jews as the circle of their worlds diminished until they finally submitted to board the trains that took them to their deaths at Birkenau, Auschwitz and many other death camps.  I can’t help this association.  I want to be all about the pretty architecture and chocolates, but it is these trains that sober me and make me wonder if I could live in one of these cities.  All of these 50 years plus since that era, I believe those societies still hold the collective memories of the compromises that were made and the grand-scale societal shortcomings they would like to think themselves incapable of, but aren’t entirely sure about.

My friend Tina grew up in Austria.  I met her when we taught together at the Lincoln School in Kathmandu.  Tina, though not an old woman, was already a knowing expat by the time I moved there.  She, herself, moved to Nepal as a teenager of 19.  She was having a religious philosophical discussion with some friends in Austria at that time in her life and based on her viewpoints, someone said, “Tina, I think you are a Buddhist.”  Like the Christian call, take up your cross and follow me, Tina moved to the primitive suburb of Kathmandu called Boudha, moved into a monastery, studied Tibetan, and subsisted on the simple street food of dal bhat.  When I met her, years into her life’s commitment, she taught full-time at the American school and then studied and served about an equal amount of time at the monastery.  A mutual friend said of her that she was perhaps the only true Christian she had ever known and it could be true.

My birthday is on March 4th.  I have always loved the pre-spring awakening and extending daylight hours of my birthday, but a librarian I once worked with had made March 4th into her own little holiday.  It was, for her,  a celebration of marching forth into spring and the year I worked with her, she put a John Phillips Sousa march on the all-school PA system and then went classroom to classroom to file the children out and into a grand march around the school.

One year in Kathmandu, my birthday fell on a Friday, the day we had an extended all-elementary assembly.  The organizer of the assembly and I decided that in honor of my day, we would put on some march music at the end and march the students out of the assembly and back to their classrooms.

Tina came to me after the assembly.  Being as honest as she is kind, she needed me to understand something.  She didn’t want to diminish anything from my birthday, but she and the other European teacher had found the march activity disturbing.  Having grown up in Belgium and Austria, respectively, they were highly sensitive to marching music and in fact, it had been outlawed throughout their childhoods.  They understood that for Americans, marching was victorious and patriotic, but for them, it was terrifying and shameful.  I was so grateful to her for teaching me about that cultural difference.  It is part of what I feel when I am in Europe: the restraint and carefulness, and it explains a lot.

We are working through our own tragedy here at our school in Tunis.  There was the event and then there have been layers upon layers of compounding loss, most of which have been in the form of relationships.  Someone recently reminded me that death and tragedy show you who your friends are.  I never actually understood what that meant.  I thought it meant that those events called your friends out to help you or not, like show up to spend time with you, and that is part of it.

The other part is that these events illuminate your friends’ priorities and how they think, predominately, whether mostly about themselves or about others.  I have seen some confounding behavior from friends in this circumstance that has left me in actual, physical shock.  And what is additionally tragic for them is that they are sometimes making further self-destructive decisions.  Quitting their jobs and moving to escape a traumatic event like we have experienced throws them into additional stress stemming from unemployment, uprooting and moving.

I ask myself, am I going to lose friends over this incident?  And then I think another way to frame the thought is that those friends may have become lost to me through this experience.  The relational structure we previously had isn’t there anymore.  There is no more trust and there are far too many topics that we can’t touch upon in conversation, making communication a verbal landmine field. I am not trying to intentionally carve people out, but I am wondering if some relationship branches are losing life and may need to be pruned, eventually, to promote new growth.

Another friend recently pointed out to me that we are still very much in this experience.  It isn’t past yet.  We are in a different stage of it, but it is still happening.  Knowing that helps me understand why I feel like I’m still responding and not quite yet moving past.  I think I will be soon, but there are still parts of the fallout that continue to rain down.  I am trying to find a way to be kind and also true to myself each day.

I borrow the title for this post from the beautiful Young Adult novel called When Your Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.  Her chapter heading came to me at a significant time in my process this fall and has remained as a guiding theme.  Our school will have a stain, now.  We are marked with tragedy and it will be part of our legacy.  Will that be our defining characteristic?  Absolutely not.  We have a bigger than usual group of bright, dedicated educators joining us next fall and some wonderful prospects for growth on the horizon.  The new recruits know about the tragedy we recently experienced and some are inspired by it and intentionally want to be part of the rebuilding.  The rest have decided it doesn’t affect their feelings about living here.  I personally think we are going to  use our badge of pain as a launching point, and then reinvent ourselves into what we always wanted to become.

Oh, the bleating.

Today is Eid al-Adha in the Muslim world.  This day involves the sacrifice of a sheep and a celebration of God’s provision of the lamb in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice from the monotheistic texts.  I have the wonderful opportunity this year, in my new humanities class, to take an in depth look at the path of monotheism through history and I am learning more than I anticipated.

In August, I was visiting our renown Bardo Museum in Tunis which reputedly holds the world’s most vast collection of mosaic murals.  We came to this tile and our guide casually explained it as the sacrifice of Ishmael.

“You mean the sacrifice of Isaac,” I corrected.

“I am speaking from my cultural point of view,” he countered.  And that was the first I had heard of that.  Muslims, maybe some and maybe all, believe that Abraham almost sacrificed Ishmael, upon God’s instructions, and not Isaac.  See how culturally insulated I have been to not know that until now?  People talk a lot, me included, about the common lineage of the three monotheistic faiths, but as I am getting into it, with classes of students reared in all three faiths, I am learning that there are distinctions that may not be so slight.

As Allan and I have traveled around the world this past decade plus, we have noticed the theme of blood sacrifice from culture to culture.  Singapore was the first time we ever encountered the actual ritual sacrifice of animals.  We were taking some out of town guests on a tour of the quay area, a very touristy part of the city.  Walking past the urban mosque, we noticed that the courtyard was jam-packed with sheep.  Livestock not being a familiar sight, we took a peek through the gate.  A man greeted us and invited us in, explaining about this celebration of slaughtering sheep in honor of the sheep God provided Abraham to reward his obedience and spare him the killing of his son… whichever one that was.  The meat is then eaten in family feasts and also shared with the poor, one of the five tenets of Islam.

Something fairly similar takes place in Kathmandu, a Hindu nation.  In the fall, during the Dashain holiday, goats are brought into the city by the hundreds of thousands.  Every household that can afford one takes one home, transporting it any way they can which may be in the trunk of a taxi or held by the wife on the back of a motorcycle.

Allan’s first autumn as director of the Lincoln School, we were specially invited to school for the goat slaughter.  We arrived on campus, early in the morning, to see all of the school vehicles and everything else motorized such as the lawn mower and power tools washed and laid out on the basketball court where they would later receive a blessing of a little blood and a tuft of goat hide.  Our friends from school asked us to accompany them to the small Hindu temple behind the school gates.  There, our transportation director, who was also the Hindu priest of his village, conducted the ceremony.  He brought a goat down the steps into the shrine where 8 to 10 Hindu gods were carved around the perimeter.  He then sprinkled a handful of water on the goat’s back.  Someone explained to us that when the goat shuddered to shake off the water, it was an indication that he was ready to become the sacrifice.  As predicted, this goat did shudder and immediately, Rajendra took his super sharp knife, cut the juggler vein in the goat’s neck and opening the head from the body, like some sort of machine gun, sprayed the goat’s throbbing blood across all of the statues in the temple.  We were stunned and nauseous.  I had to look down and noticed a tag on the shirt of a little neighborhood girl that said Hanna Anderson.  You might know that as a Swedish manufacturer of extremely precious children’s clothing, no doubt donated to Nepal by some charitable organization.  It was a moment of clashing eras for me, which happened all the time in Nepal.

Some of our expat friends are grossed out by the do it yourself slaughter element of  today, but Allan and I both grew up on farms and we are comfortable with knowing and being thankful for the animals that give their lives to feed us.  We have slaughtered our own Thanksgiving turkeys before and in fact find that to be a sincere and authentic way to ritualize a day of commemoration for sacrifice, provision, and deliverance from struggle.

I actually find today to be quite sweet.  Every family has their sheep and the extended family comes together to prepare and enjoy it with good hearts.  We hear the entire pageant over the garden wall we share with our neighbors.  First, we could smell the sheep last night.  This morning, we heard the kids playing with him, then there was the hour of the bleating, all over the neighborhood.  Soon after, it got quiet and we could smell the charcoal fires lighting up.  Not long after, there was the clanking of dishes mingled with the laughing and talking of children and adults.  They are happy and it made me a little homesick for my family on such a day.

We have these rituals to express things that are mysteries in life.  For reasons we can’t entirely explain, we have what we need, we have largely been spared the most devastating of possibilities and we have people around who buoy us.  We somehow know, whatever our belief system, that God provides.

We didn’t mention it much, but the dusting of our lives here in Tunis involved more than the sacking of our school.  Remember hearing about a little kerfuffle going on over at the American Embassy right before they turned their attention to our little school?  Well, we also lived a considerable amount of our lives over at that compound.  We co-own a beautiful swimming pool with the embassy where we have year around swim lessons and swim team, a commissary, and most importantly to us, a marine-caliber gym where we went to de-stress and pump up at least three times a week.  After work, the gym was filled with teachers from ACST staying strong and proactive.  We have really missed that rhythm.

Those of us who used the gym scattered throughout town to various gyms, hoping the gym might reopen within about 6 weeks.  Allan and I, after trying one option and another, have settled on a gym at a hotel on a cliff overlooking the sea.  This is a hotel where we lived for about 3 weeks the year before we moved here for good and we have fond home-like associations with that place.  The traffic is a little thick getting up there after school, but once we get up there, ahhh, the view over the Mediterranean makes all right with the world.  It’s so worth it.

For now, instead of dashing to the marine gym to get in a quick workout after school, we are taking a drive to the neighboring suburb and indulging in a destination workout with the healing bonus of this view.

And as we are driving back to Carthage, we pass by attractions we have possibly overlooked for one or two years.  I discovered the ruins of St. Augustine’s basilica in August, but Allan wasn’t with me so I pulled him in there on Saturday afternoon to experience the magnificent siting and wonder what that church might have been like back in the first century.

And finally, I have put in my kitchen garden.  I have a shady small yard and though I have been gathering seeds for awhile, I haven’t found a good site.  This weekend we cleaned some concrete planters on a terrace facing the sea.  We are putting in a new table and chairs set and I’ve finally planted some cool weather greens.

It can be good to change up your patterns.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Vilseskogen

I hope you were never one of those kids who kicked an ant hill all to pieces whenever you saw one and had the protective footwear for such destruction.  Where I grew up, on a high altitude plateau called Fort Lewis Mesa, we had lots of ant hills, red ants.  I have a childhood memory of playing under a cedar tree in our farm yard when I was about 4 or 5 when I suddenly became aware that I was playing near a red ant colony.  Panicking, I felt like the ants were crawling all over me.  Trying to get away from them, I got myself backed against the trunk of the tree where I stood calling and calling to my mom who was far away in the kitchen of our farmhouse and couldn’t hear me.  I was tethered to that tree in fear, unable to break away and I can see the black patent leather Mary Janes I wore in pictures from that age, balancing on an exposed root from the tree as I fixated on inspecting my feet for the invading army, trying to gain a slight bit of higher ground.  Finally, I somehow got the courage to make a run for it.  I hysterically burst in on my mom, who was working peacefully in the kitchen, thinking I would receive commendation and comfort.  But as much as I tried to impress on her the terrible danger I had just escaped and the immense amount of courage it had required, I could tell that she didn’t really think it had been a big deal and that I had overreacted to a common situation that I could have easily avoided.

I don’t think I hated ants after that, but I did continue to regard them as my nemesis throughout childhood and yes, regretfully,  I do remember sometimes intentionally stomping on an ant hill or two in the following years, but only when I was in a position of clear advantage.

Have you watched what happens after you kick the stuffings out of an ant hill?  The ants scatter around, confused and defensive, looking like they’re going in circles.  Remarkably quickly, however,  they reorganize, start working together again, and rebuild their home within about a day.  Tenacious critters.

We got our kids all back in school this week and the whole week, I couldn’t escape the image of being part of an ant colony.  Some bullies whacked our hill, no question about it.  They got us good and we were dazed and hurt.  But then we let our instincts and discipline reign, rather than our fear and anger.  We sorted through our remains, retrenched our nest, sharing spaces and creating new ones where needed.  And this week, we were back at our excellent work. It felt so good to do what we are meant to do.

Yesterday, with a choked voice, the director thanked the staff with the simple statement, “You saved the school,”  and it is so true.  If we had given in to our disorientation, our students’ families would have migrated to other schools and our school would have become irrelevant or nonexistent.  Instead, we opened with over 90% of our previous enrollment and have a waiting list of new students ready to join us.  Our work will continue to be interesting and full of surprises, I’m sure, and for those reasons, and others, I wouldn’t choose to be in any other colony, anywhere.