Starbucks Casablanca

This feels familiar:

I am sitting in a Starbucks working on a paper for a class that is due now. I like what I’m wearing and  I really appreciate the intellectual engagement with the paper. I miss my “H”.  I miss her so bad. What I wouldn’t give to see her gliding through the doors with a bag, way bigger than her, hanging off of her shoulder. Slenderly sitting herself across from me and arranging her hair on one side of her head. She would probably then exhale, ask me how I am, listen, look at what I ordered, look at the counter, kind of half limp over to it very casual and careful all at the same time.  Geese…I miss you lady. Everytime…everytime I come to Starbucks I miss you so bad.

And “K”…one would think it would remind me of you too but it doesn’t as much. It was so far beneath your full capability. But it was always the only place I could have you captive, behind a counter and unable to slip off into your world without me. Although…truth be told you are so f’ing thorough and artistic with anything that you do that you more often that not always slipped off into that world too...leaving me standing there and waiting on you to come back until I got the point that you were busy and I knew you wanted to talk but always knew it was never the time or place.

There is a dead dog outside on the side walk and a tapas bar behind me. I have been apartment hunting in this neighborhood and want back here regardless of the dead dog on the sidewalk. I want back so that I can come here more, walk my kids here (MY KIDS – that girl that I was when I was here all the time now has KIDS) so that they can know and love it too.

I know some people would accuse me of killing the indigenous culture but honest to god a simple silver or aluminum teapot of black tea and mint leaves will never be dead in the Maghreb, NEVER. It runs way thicker than what Starbucks can do. 

The people that work here are Moroccans but they work at Starbucks and they seem genuinely interested in understanding, communicating with and pleasing the hoards of American pilgrims and Moroccan converts. I love them. They are a sweet team always smiling and genuinely trying to do it right. 

This is a safe place for me now in a time when I don’t have many. This is a safe space for me. 

From here I can write again. From here I can feel again. I want to finish my masters sitting at this table and then always remember what my life was and who was in it when I was here doing this. Yeah…that’s a good plan. 

Life in Casablanca...Update

Thank goodness that freaking series is over. It turned into my reason not to blog. Anyways, I am glad I have the Moroccan living room. I sit in it every day. Here is a more general update of my life lately.

I have decided that I hate Casablanca…kind of…not really…ok I am still just as back and forth wishy washy as ever about casa and Morocco and all things really. 

 

Summer is nearing and I have a heavy heart from a lack of outside space. 

My kids are full on talking, totally bi-lingual in English and Arabic and really crack me up on a regular basis.

Spring time always inspires me to want to do more than I actually have the energy to do. For example, I want to plant and craft and paint and dance and work out and be outside in nature all the time. I want to take the girls to visit their grandma once a week and walk in parks and cook amazing dishes at home…but really I just go back and forth to work mostly. 

There is some magic still…maybe it will help if I list it:

• I taught the girls to race each other and they love that
• I went scuba diving
• I swam in the gorgeous clear Mediterranean sea and I was in heaven
• I still walk back and forth to work even though sometimes lately the car has been slipping in the picture
• We went to the beach on Sunday and had an absolute blast. We bought the girls a small blow up pool on the side of the road and then laughed so hard at how stupid we were for thinking that we could fill that thing and then easily pull it back up the sand to where the towels were. It took us like 10 minutes to get it back to the towels, laughing and grunting and incurring many a looks from other beach goers
• I am hosting a cous cous party for the teachers that work for me this Friday
• I went to visit a very sick woman that was in a coma and she WOKE UP while I was there, she continues to slowly recover
• Planning on demanding a date out of my husband very soon, he doesn’t know it yet

Thanks…I feel better now!

The Fabric: Part 3

Finally this is the last installment in this series…this procession of posts that I never finished and therefore totally avoided blogging because of:

The fabric… the most emotional, white knuckling, hand wringing, intense part of what is the Moroccan living room. There was only one person that would suffice as a partner in crime for the fabric (it’s called tissue in French). That person??? You know who:

We open scene on she and I standing, me stunned, her pensive, on the second story of a fabric shop. When I say shop, I of course mean a decrepit building that looks like a shack from the outside but is impeccably clean, well lit and fabulous smelling on the inside. A place you find down a cramped side street that you feel uncomfortable even browsing on at first for the shop keepers calls to the magical fabrics they have hidden tucked in between and stored above in hidden compartments only accessed by ladders and stools. 

We have just stumbled upon some of the most gorgeous, patterned, modern, traditional fabric that I have ever seen. These are fabrics that I will never be able to afford either (except I wasn’t ready to admit that to myself). I kept being drawn to the whites…she kept reminding me of my small children and I kept wanting to forget that part!

Sometimes you see something, and it strikes you as so beautiful that you never forget it, but then you do. You don’t purchase it and you go on about your day, weekend, life, never even remembering it exists, sometimes though…you never forget it.

There was a pair of light blue linen pants that I saw on the Italian island of Procida when I was 22 years old and skinny enough to have worn them but too broke to have purchased them…I still remember them and exactly where how they were displayed in the shop.

Certain patterns that she and I saw that day are still as fresh in my mind as if I saw them yesterday…I imagine these images will stay with me for a while.  We did manage to tear ourselves away from the shop eventually and pick out a more reasonably priced option which I still really like…I guess…kind of…it’s not the same but damnit man we couldn’t have shopped any longer than we did. This process needed to end already just as this blog series needs to end so that I can write about things other than my freaking living room! 

So without further ado…

Before:

 After:

and there you have it!