essaouira day 9, morocco day 42:
lady’s tormented. her grandmother appears to be dying. her grandfather died last december, and i read that statistically when one of a close long term couple dies, the other fades within 6 months.
my mom lasted 15 years after dad died. of course she moved in with me for the duration, and life was so weird in artist-poet land, she stuck around just to see what oddness was next. plus my 4,552 film collection from 1894 through present helped distract her.
lady’s thinking of ending our trip right now, 4 months early. tried to tell her to fly back, see granny, then come back to me, but she won’t leave me. i find the thought of returning to america now abhorrid. probably feel the same way in 4 months, but by then i’ll have arranged a few poetry readings and an art show to take the bad taste out of my mouth. i’m also looking forward to our scheduled reading in august in london at the poetry cafe.
lady’s grandpa and granma were her home in the early days of family turmoil, so i understand. plus granny’s a nice lady with a sly sense of humor. comes down to whatever lady needs, we’ll do. i’ll let you know when i know. life is weird, brought to you by monty python, and then you die.
. . .
we didn’t have any coins left to give the beggars, so i plotted paths around them to not disappoint. but the lady beggar to our left moved down to our right and caught me. fortunately i had 1 coin in my pocket for her. it is nice, yet disturbing, to have the beggars smile in happy recognition when they see you coming. it’s cool to make someone’s day by giving them 12 cents – but it’s hard work finding the coins. no one will make change. lady says there’s 2 levels of life here – the 200 hundred dirham bill people, and the 1 dirham coin folk.
we can’t store food due to bugs, heat, no refrigerator, and lack of safe storage – so we must go out and buy 2 to 30 dirhams of food for each meal – but we can’t buy the food because we have no coins because we’ve given them all to the beggars and the shops can’t break what the bank money machines dispense.
no matter how much we give away, there’s always more to break your heart.
a blog reader suggested we were fascinated by poverty – they couldn’t understand because “we have poverty in cleveland too”. poverty appalls and repels me. i come from a poor family, so know what it’s like, how it eats at your mind and self esteem. but the poor in america would be considered fortunate here. america even as screwed as it is still has a few shelters, a few free clinics, a few food lines – here the sole service offered is they cart your body away when you die. there are too many poor in america, but the number is astronomically exponentially greater here. the odd part is no one feeds the poor, but many feed the cats. think if i were poor here, i’d start eating cats.
we’re living in the midst of it and would have to be fools, blind, hard hearted, and dishonest not to blog about it.
