shokufeh is…home

I’m suddenly realizing that tomorrow is April Fool’s day.  I knew March was ending today, but I hadn’t connected that with April starting tomorrow.  It seems like it’s too soon to be April.  I’m not ready.

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I’ve been under the impression that I blogged a week ago. Turns out it’s been ten days. In my defense, a week ago, I did actually write something. But it got lost between save and publish. What I wrote was something along the lines of…

This morning, I went to Lance’s funeral. Or, rather, the visitation. A sad way to start the day. I’ve been trying to hold on to the image of how he was in life, rather than how he looked in the casket. Other images I’ve also been focusing on:

• His father, standing in front of the casket, studying him. As I think about it, I’m reminded of the way sometimes Sam and I watch MrMan while he’s sleeping, as if we can’t get enough of him during his waking hours.
• A group of teenage girls that were going to the church as we were leaving. Two were dressed up, teetering in high heels and short skirts. The other three were sporting tshirts with Lance’s picture and name and colorful designs. I particularly admired the girl who was wearing bright red shoes and a matching purse.

That night was the Naw Ruz party. Where we discovered that yet another friend, who was among the twenty-five people at the party, also knew Lance. The smallness of New Orleans. You think that the fact that we’re all so interwoven here would mean we would all just get along.

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I’m still reading Century of Light with my breakfast these days. This morning, parts of pages 89 – 90 really spoke to me.

… materialism emerged full-blown in the second half of the twentieth century as a kind of universal religion claiming absolute authority in both the personal and social life of humankind. Its creed was simplicity itself. Reality—including human reality and the process by which it evolves—is essentially material in nature. The goal of human life is, or ought to be, the satisfaction of material needs and wants. Society exists to facilitate this quest, and the collective concern of humankind should be an ongoing refinement of the system, aimed at rendering it ever more efficient in carrying out its assigned task.

… materialism was soon facing no significant challenge in most parts of the world. Religion, where not simply driven back into fanaticism and unthinking rejection of progress, became progressively reduced to a kind of personal preference, a predilection, a pursuit designed to satisfy spiritual and emotional needs of the individual. The sense of historical mission that had defined the major Faiths learned to content itself with providing religious endorsement for campaigns of social change carried on by secular movements. The academic world, once the scene of great exploits of the mind and spirit, settled into the role of a kind of scholastic industry preoccupied with tending its machinery of dissertations, symposia, publication credits and grants.

Whether as world-view or simple appetite, materialism’s effect is to leach out of human motivation—and even interest—the spiritual impulses that distinguish the rational soul. “For self-love,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said, “is kneaded into the very clay of man, and it is not possible that, without any hope of a substantial reward, he should neglect his own present material good.” In the absence of conviction about the spiritual nature of reality and the fulfilment it alone offers, it is not surprising to find at the very heart of the current crisis of civilization a cult of individualism that increasingly admits of no restraint and that elevates acquisition and personal advancement to the status of major cultural values. …

To accept willingly the rupture of one after another strand of the moral fabric that guides and disciplines individual life in any social system, is a self-defeating approach to reality. If leaders of thought were to be candid in their assessment of the evidence readily available, it is here that one would find the root cause of such apparently unrelated problems as the pollution of the environment, economic dislocation, ethnic violence, spreading public apathy, the massive increase in crime, and epidemics that ravage whole populations. However important the application of legal, sociological or technological expertise to such issues undoubtedly is, it would be unrealistic to imagine that efforts of this kind will produce any significant recovery without a fundamental change of moral consciousness and behaviour.

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Since Friday, Lance has been on my mind, on my heart. That is the boy’s name: Lance Zarders. It’s interesting how well my experience in health departments has trained me. My original post included his name. But I removed it when there was not other mention of it to be found in connection with his death. That has since changed. A couple of the uses of his name are by others who knew him, better than myself. A couple of the uses are by the press. I thought that this would make me feel better. But there is no feeling better when it comes to the murder of a 17 year old boy. Especially when the suspect is 15 years old. And if I’m feeling this sad, brought to tears every day when I think of Lance’s smile, I can’t even fathom the anguish of his parents.

It’s hard to know what to do. There’s a part of me that wants to use this to wake myself up to paying attention when others lose their lives, instead of just taking note that the killing happened in another part of town from the one in which I live. That wishes someone in a profession that better lends itself to such, would start a blog similar to this one, for New Orleans. To remind us that behind every “17-year-old male lying in the street,” there was a life, a smile, parents. There’s another part of me that wants to continue in isolated fashion, as I don’t like feeling sad.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Why I’ve been so focused on Lance’s murder. Of course, a huge part of it is because I knew, and liked, Lance. I’ve never known any other person this young to die in this way. Today, as I drove around town, I noticed the billboards. One with a white man’s smiling face, offering $20,000 for information leading to the capture of his killer. Another big billboard with four black men’s non-smiling faces, with “WANTED” written across the top. Thinking about those billboards, thinking about other people I knew who died young, thinking about the paucity of press coverage, I feel like part of the tragedy in Lance’s death is that we, as a society, expected it.

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This has been the week for sadness at my desk. This awkward episode of crying in Cubeville was brought on by the news that one of the students at my mom’s school was killed last night.

New Orleans police are looking into the murder of a teenager in the 7th Ward.

Police have no motives or suspects yet in the case, but said a dark van was seen fleeing the scene.

He was a student I liked, despite his reputation of trouble. I hoped, I guess against the odds, that he would succeed, that he would overcome his personal set of challenges and become a carpenter, like he’d once mentioned to me he wanted. But, instead, he’s dead.

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Life is better now. Sometimes in the heat of the moment, things can seem so doomsday. But thanks to:

• comments from you
• phone calls and hugs
• realizing that if Sam hadn’t, by chance, stopped at home, we wouldn’t have known about the power being out and probably wouldn’t have had it restored until the next day
• getting in the car that evening and my necklace immediately falling off – a porcelain necklace I made (similar to this one, but not so nice) – and thinking about the fact that if it had fallen two seconds earlier it likely would have broken

my emotions got sorted out.

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• Serenity now!
• For all my days of Ra-ra-New-Orleans-I’m-so-glad-I-moved-back-here, there are days I regret having returned to my hometown. Today’s one of those days in the latter category. When I’m looking down at my shabby clothes, wondering why I never got the electric bill, or the disconnection notice, crying over the fact that I had to charge the unexpected $400 to my credit card, and realizing that if I lived in another city my job would pay me enough.
• I love New Orleans! Running into a friend from my younger days. When he was even younger, yet funny. Exchanging info for future lunch.
• Is it ironic or contradictory to say I can’t afford to stay in this job? Despite the fact that I don’t have to wear fancy clothes to work?
• Today is a gorgeous day – the sun shining, the breeze blowing…. I should keep a collapsible chair at work and pull it out to the parking lot, along with a book, for days such as this.

Yeah, a lot of floating, differing thoughts on the state of Shokufeh today.

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One of the things I enjoy about the Fast is the solitude and serenity of the early morning. Yes, it’s a struggle for me to get out of bed. But once I’m up, I’m up. And generally make use of the time between eating (and sunrise) and my regular morning routine to say prayers and read the Baha’i Writings. It’s like finding extra time that seems to disappear the rest of the year, part of what makes this time of the year special.

But this whole shifting-daylight-saving-time-a-month-earlier thing really puts a kink in this. This morning, being a Sunday, wasn’t a big deal. But tomorrow? I am not looking forward to. With the shift, sunrise isn’t until 7:15-ish, a time when I’m normally up (or at least should be). And a time when Sam and MrMan are up, usually having already eaten their first part of breakfast. (Yes, my guys are the early risers around here.) So, unless I self impose an even earlier waking and eating time, my solitude will disappear. I picture myself pulling a Frank Costanza and yelling, “Serenity now!” all day.  Maybe the trick is to get up earlier than my stomach requires me to and have prayers before breakfast.  My internal clock will find this painful, especially tomorrow, but my soul will appreciate.

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Walking down the steps of the library, I caught a familiar whiff. It smelled like the Chicago El in the early spring. The one that comes with the spring thaw, the melting snow, the renewed deterioration of fall leaves. You know the one. Apparently it’s not limited to train cars.  Nor Chicago.

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I’ve really been enjoying my breakfasts the past few days. They’ve all included:

• Eggs – scrambled with Bragg’s amino acids and nutritional yeast
• Silk beans – cooked by and given to me by a Baha’i couple here who seem to get how much I love the beans, especially these
• Whole wheat tortillas – one of the staples I always get from Whole Foods
• Guacasalsa
• Hot tea
• Water
• Century of Light

I’m going to have to modify the combo for tomorrow, though, as I’ve run out of beans.

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