The rain stopped a little. I moved all my clothes back outside onto the lines and watched to see how the incoming storm clouds would behave. I took a chance the wind would stay dry a while and went for a walk around town.

It’s the off-season and many restaurants and businesses just close shop on rainy days. Kids were barely getting out of school, so there were plenty of long, rainwashed streets with no action whatsoever. I went extra deep into unknown sidestreets and perched myself on the steps in a quiet little nook of a closed store, kept a sharp eye on the clouds in the sky in case of more downpouring, and let my frustration from being shipwrecked here fade and wash itself clean.

I started seeing kids walking home from school, many in uniforms, playfully tagging and chasing each other, filling up the air with that kids-playing noise.

Three girls across the street stopped in their tracks when they saw me and made a beeline for my porch. Without a word, they came over and quietly sat down right next to me, giggled a little and shyly waited… as if they had asked me a question and were anticipating a reply (but nothing was ever spoken). I was struck by their sweet curiosity and courage as they cautiously examined me like they were visiting an attraction at the zoo… scrutinizing my strange clothes… taking in as many details as they could before darting their eyes away…

I broke the long silence after a few minutes and pretended to assume they spoke English, I made no attempt at being understood, and rambled a lengthy, comprehensive sentence, “How are you guys doing, wow school must have just let out, I bet you’re happy and excited to be going home so you can do your homework because that will make you smart and successful in life.”

They looked at each other with desperate glances, then back at me, stymied and mute. I asked if they spoke any French. No. Spanish? No. English? No.
They huddled up and started grilling each other in Arabic, wondering if they knew ANY words in ANY other language, then laughed and conceded with disappointed shrugs.

It was comical and strange, they sat there in silence for 10 more minutes, occasionally sneaking another peak at me, the zoo monkey. One ran away down the street to another group of their school friends. Quizzed each of them. They all nodded “no,” looked up the street and sauntered back altogether to our stoop. I was now surrounded by 9 or 10 uniformed high school girls, all gazing and staring and giggling at the scientific specimen find.

Ten more minutes passed… more giggling… more curious staring. Nobody spoke English, but they were perfectly content to encircle me and study me in awkward silence. More friends came and went, giving his or her crack at some English, then would give up and move on. This went on for ONE HOUR.

At one point, a businessman stopped and tried to communicate and interpret questions from and to each other in his own form of stunted English.

Then, without any warning, they decided to clear out and off they ran, as happy and contented as they first came… all looking over their shoulders, each yelling her TV version of Bye! Ciao! Au revoir!

I started back to the hotel and was intercepted by my recent new good friend, Rhedwine. For the past couple days, he has been bringing homemade feasts over to the cafe, insisting that I join him and his buddies. Giant plates of chicken and vegetable couscous, chicken and beef Tajine.

Once again, he demanded I join him for fish and bread and he led me across the town square to get freshly baked bread from the bakery, then back to where his coworker, Brahim, (fellow parking guardsmen) took the baton, ran into the side entrance of a restaurant, and returned with the bread and a plate of fried sardines.

We crossed the street to the jardin park for our makeshift picnic and were immediately surrounded by a built-in audience of attentive kittens. It felt more like we were part of the garbage scrounging alley cats as we devoured the meal and picked apart those sardines until the plate was clean. Neither seemed to care that we hardly spoke the entire time. They were just content and pleased that they could offer me a meal and hang out…. and their doting kindness and generous caring was quite touching.

I felt some sprinkles on my face, looked up at the dark clouds and remembered my laundry hanging on the rooftop clothesline.

I made a mad dash back, past the medina gates, down the beach to my hotel, the last one on the edge of the cliffs… up the stairs to the roof… in time to get all my clothes out of the next rain… everything was mostly dry, as I hauled it all back to my room… then realized… I had just handled… all my clean clothes…

with SARDINE HANDS!!

Tomorrow is a new day…

I’m sick of this town… partly because of how heartbreaking it is to see they’ve turned their beautiful beach into a landfill of garbage… I was planning on getting out this afternoon and went to collect my laundry (dropped it with the hotel owner a couple days ago). I finally found it… left hanging on the rooftop clothesline… where it was soaking up all the rain that was pouring down since this morning (as forecasted)…

I am paranoidally(?) certain the hotel owner did it on purpose so I would have to stay an extra night (they cleared all their valuable possessions and furniture off the terrace, but left my stuff out).

I pulled everything down, wrung it all out, and rehung it anywhere I could find in my room on makeshift hangers and window sills…. looks like I am trapped here another night…

Last night, I wandered the neighborhood, made new friends, shook hands, struck up conversations with passing strangers, and followed the wind wherever it led me…

Victor, from Argentina, told me all about his residency at a hospital on a tiny island off the coast of Spain… Abdul and Muhammad invited me to sit and sip tea at their table… we people-watched together, as they broke open and reloaded their cigarettes and told me everything they knew about California…

I asked them to tell me a Moroccan joke, something that made them laugh super hard… something considered really funny in Morocco… Abdul explained how observing normal life situations and finding humor in them is what they mostly laugh about. “Like how the comedians do this. They see real life.” I prodded him for a specific example.

Abdul: “In our fishing town, sardines are very cheap. You can buy a whole pallet of hundreds of sardines for only 6 dirhams! Why are these sardines so very cheap? I say it is because… they HAVE NO PERSONALITY!! ha ha ha ha ha!!!”

He retold the same joke (in Arabic) to the rest of his friends sitting around the table. They, too, all exploded in laughter!! then Abdul repeated the punchline to me in English, making sure I got the joke. “Because… they… have… NO… PERSONALITY!!!” and they all laughed again together while keeping one eye on my response to make sure I was laughing, too.

I did laugh. But for all the wrong reasons. At how awesome and hilarious it was to hear their unguarded happy laughter. At how there must have been something lost in the English translation. At myself, for pretending to understand the punchline to not hurt their feelings. At the infectious laughter feeding itself into swelling laughter…

It feels good. My first train ride in Morocco… freedom and some personal space and a break from the go-go-go…
At one stop along the way, I slipped out to get some fresh air at the back of the car. For some reason, the car door did not close when we began moving again. I sat there in the open doorway drinking in the wide scenery of green hills, shepherds and sheep, orchards of oranges, tiny children running in the dirt, wild hobo cats, gangs of gentlemen playing checkers, shanty towns, and palm tree gardens…. taking it all in like a dog hanging out of a pickup truck window, ocean wind in my face… After several cities and stops, a conductor eventually made his rounds back to our last car. I pretended not to see him coming and acted like I belonged there… until he reached over me, shut the car door, and scolded me in Arabic about how dangerous it was… I pretended to suddenly understand that he was right and how it never occurred to me that I could have fallen out…

Sometimes you have to break the rules… and keep pushing forward… until someone tells you to stop…

I finished my stroll through Rabat’s ginormous cemetery overlooking the behemoth, crashing waves and the ocean (I think this is where I’d like to be buried… AFTER I’m dead, I mean) and wandered around the kasbah and French colonial gardens inside…

Ah, and it wouldn’t be a day in Morocco without someone asking me to buy hash… “No, sir. Thank you.” Not sure why I have to be so polite in my declining their stalwart, entrepreneurial efforts, but it’s become my trusty, failsafe mantra here, like a six-gun shooter at my side… and I keep my itchy, FRENCH trigger finger ready at all times… “No, Monsieur. Merci.” Boom – done! “No, Monsieur. Merci.” Bam – back away!

I sat to rest my weary self outside the impressive and massive front kasbah gate… when two girls came up to me, asked if they could sit, and proceeded to try out their scant English against my non-existent Spanish/French/Arabic. Sisters, I deduced, on a shopping excursion to the big city to escape their family and small town for a quick daytrip jaunt. I thought for sure they were prostitutes, not by how they were dressed, but by how intensely friendly and immediately, gregariously comfortable and curious they were with me as they sat down and started chatting.

Once again, my cynical guard and cautious defenses were shamed by true kindness and innocent sweetness. We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out at a restaurant where Najat took exceptional pride in ordering the entire meal, sending my plate back when the wrong dish was served, insisted on paying… Afterwards, we taxi’d to the train station so I could treat them to ice cream while they waited for their return home, back to their tiny, Moroccan village, back to their huge family…. and off they went…

I kept exploring for the next four or five hours… getting super lost again in the sardine-packed, ant hill, cattle herd crawl of the medina…. outside the medina walls, I finally stumbled on a beachfront seafood restaurant for dinner and found myself surrounded by all the Rabat lovers, gazing out across the ocean and over their lovers’ dinners… I think it was quite noisy (as when any crowd chatter swells), but I couldn’t tell… I was too enchanted by my seafood spaghetti, and a day’s worth of thoughts to sort through… perfect peace and quiet in my secret head…

Waiting in the bus station to go to Rabat, I heard a loud yelling match break out in front of one of the bus stalls… groups of men pulling the two yellers away from each other (picture an overdramatic episode of Jerry Springer… in Arabic).

While all this commotion was stirring around me, a sweet janitor insisted on helping me watch out for my correct bus… and chatting with me. I think English visitors are more rare, at least that’s how most react when I’m found out. It was important to him that I know who his favorite bands were… no other English was spoken. Only bands mixed in with Arabic. “Jimi Hendrix hhkalla jiabshalla prayamechka Bobe Deelahn khallak shwell hhhalla… Croezbee Steelz Nosh khhhhahlla awahkkalla Laid Zeppelin bshhal wakhkha nshoofha…”

He saw my eyes widen and light up when he mentioned Led Zeppelin… and I stoked his fire with “Je t’aime!! Je t’aime!! Je t’aaaaaaaaime! C’est TRES Bon! Aw yeah, Monsieur! Tres Bon!!”

My long travel day ended in a lengthy taxi ride, and longwinded argument in broken French about the driver’s fluctuating meter charge (I won), then having to search out the hotel into the windy maze of the medina (that the taxi driver didn’t come CLOSE to)… I finally caved in and ate at McDonald’s… while I sang the theme song to “Team America,” dedicating it to Mr. Rabat Taxi Man…

I’ve only been out for four weeks so far… and it feels like I’ve been gone for four months… funny how time gets stretched and distorted and becomes a lost buried manuscript in some forgotten tomb… like I’m an astronaut and have gone into space, and when I return, everyone else will have aged and grown in documentable, noticeable distances… time and history will have moved ahead in measurable blocks… while I, the cosmonaut in a tiny capsule on a different plane of time, remain lost in space…

I feel like I’m constantly carrying this crushing weight everywhere I go… I witness, or am confronted by, true kindness and true honest selflessness…. there are so many people here with a simple pure heart of giving and caring about other people…

During the 2 and a half hour bus ride to El-Jadida, everyone practically climbed over each other to drop change in a blind beggar’s hand as he walked the aisle with his blind man’s cane. The boy sitting next to me then jumped off the bus at one of the roadside stops, and came back with his lunch… a banana, an apple, a sandwich… he started cutting into it with his trusty pocket knife… using the only 3 words he knew in English, he insisted I take half of everything and I ate with him for the rest of the ride… what probably cost him half his day’s wage, he joyfully fed me and kept checking on me to make sure everything was alright…

I tried to think of something to share back, I gave him a “whisp” toothbrush… so strange and alien to him, made him smile hard with great curiosity and intrigue as he spent the next 20 minutes with that thing in his mouth…