personal news

The world traveler is home, tired but happy. Great to see her. Great to have her back home. Not so glad to hear that she wants to go live in the Middle East. But never mind; we’ll cope with that later. For now, we’re just glad to have her safely home.

And what did the traveler bring us from Jordan? Go ahead, think about it; I’ll give you a minute. Ready?

Whatever you thought, that’s not it.  Here’s what she said was in the plastic bags I helped her carry from the car: mud. I haven’t seen it yet, but that’s what she said, and I believe it. Mud. I guess she wanted to bring a little piece of the Middle East home.

If any further understanding develops (on my part), I’ll be sure and pass it on.

Edit: Okay, it wasn’t a little piece of Jordan coming home with her, it was facial mud. Which she bought. (Don’t ask me. This is not a guy thing.)

Another email from Lexi in Jordan, this one typed on a borrowed laptop, rather than a phone:

In addition to staggering around on donkeys and camels and getting supremely sunburned, I’ve been enjoying AMAZING food and extreme hospitality. Everyone here is very friendly (though not always the best kind of friendly), and eager to invite strangers in for tea/coffee. They don’t hesitate to talk to people (though there is obviously sort of an odd dynamic between men and women, because men have to initiate conversation). On the flip side of that, I try to avoid eye contact with men in the streets and often have to choose between being extremely rude (ignoring or glaring) and smiling back at what I gauge to be well-meaning friendliness. Aside from that, I feel very comfortable here. It feels like a place I could, maybe, actually live and work someday (Mom, don’t glare at me).

We’ve gone to see some pretty amazing ruins. Everything just looks ancient. The hills here look like crumbly mountains, layers of sandstone and rock strangely inlaid with the occasional patch of grass. They have “camel crossing” signs instead of deer crossings.
I’ve had some fun encounters with strangers, including the Bedouin camel owners who told me that they’ve seen pictures of their camels on Facebook (apparently they have a generator in those caves), and a middle-aged man selling scarves who showed me how to tie a hijab by demonstrating on himself (he was very amused as he wrapped the scarf around his head and indicated where to pin it; “Very good, right?”), and the time I wanted to buy some traditional Jordanian spices. (Forgetting just how little spices weigh, I bought half a kilo (!) and ended up with a truly enormous bag. No wonder the guy behind the counter gave me the look of, “You clearly have no idea what you’re asking for.” Yay for being an ignorant foreigner…)

I think that when I return home I will be very amused by the driving in Boston. While truly awful in comparison with the rest of the states, those of you from outside the U.S. know that it’s nothing compared to the rest of the world. People swerve all over the lanes, go backwards down the breakdown lanes (and sometimes the streets), and they often forget to put up signs to indicate speed bumps in the road (go from 100 km/h to 30 in about three seconds and see how you feel).

I still haven’t picked up much more Arabic than “thank you,” but that’s all right.

That’s all for now.

And that’s all for now from me, too. 
 

Well, that’s poetic license, because I’m not sure if she’ll actually see the Jordan River—but my older daughter Lexi took off this afternoon for ten days in Jordan, traveling with some other folk from our church. They’ll be staying with families there, and hoping to meet and pray with some Muslim groups, and generally open some lines of conversation. I don’t know as many details as I would like, because, well, she’s twenty-two. She doesn’t exactly withhold information; she just doesn’t stop moving long enough to fill us in on everything. (I suspect other parents will know what I mean.) She’s traveling with one of the pastors of our church, a woman who has been to the Middle East several times, so that gives us some reassurance.

She was excited and nervous when she left. Allysen and I are awed, proud, and—yeah—a little nervous.

It runs in her blood. When she was fourteen, she traveled to Armenia with a local exchange group. Since then, she’s been to Mexico and Nicaragua. She gets it from her mom.

Edit: Got a text msg: “Safely in Amman.” Probably the last we’ll hear for a little while. 

Thank God.
 
 
 

…the living room?

Almost. Something seems to have died in one of our living room walls. Mouse, probably. God, does it stink. We now have a fan running in the window 24 hours a day, venting the fumes. I forget how long it took to subside the last time this happened. A week? Two? I’m just grateful that we’re having mild weather, so while it’s driving up our heating bill, at least it’s not happening during a cold snap.

I’m starting to think “three strikes and you’re out” might be my new rule for rodents. First, mice chewed the spark plug wires in our car, to the tune of a few hundred bucks. Then the squirrels ate the wiring on our outdoor Christmas lights. Now this. I wonder if it died of insulation or copper poisoning.

I just hope it didn’t chew the house wiring before it died. Auggh. Now, there’s a thought.

Thought we were done, were we? No such luck. Today [now yesterday] I was feeling a strange pain in my chest all afternoon — not much of a pain, but enough to annoy me. In the evening it started to get a little more pronounced — still not particularly bad, but enough to make me think about chest pains… men who ignore chest pains, and then drop dead. I sat and took my pulse. 96. Well, that’s certainly a little high, isn’t it? I went and took an aspirin, just to be on the safe side, and then checked it again, several times. Still 96. Damn. Why so high? The pain felt a little stronger, and it felt more like tightness or pressure than muscular ache, and it was right over my heart. I asked myself: Which is stupider — to make a probably unnecessary trip to the hospital, or to ignore chest pain, when you know you have family history of heart disease? Allysen wasn’t home yet, and Alexandra was making dinner. Take me back to the hospital? I asked her with a sigh.

Then I thought about how long it can take to be seen if you just walk in, and I thought, the EMTs can make a better evaluation of this than me, and the pain was still there, so… Deep breath. I called 911. They were there in three minutes flat, sirens wailing. And soon I was on my way back to the hospital.

Have you ever seen the Star Trek: Next Gen episode where the Enterprise is caught in a time loop, and each iteration is just a little different? (I recently saw part of a sitcom that took off on the same idea.) Well, that’s what it feels like to sit in the ER, with someone new coming in every forty minutes or so. Sometimes the new guy is a fresh-faced doctor (or doctorish person) the age of Doogie Howser, and sometimes it’s an Indian fellow, and sometimes it’s a guy who looks like you might look if you were a doctor — and each new person starts with, “So, can you tell me what brought you in here tonight?” I swear, it makes me want to record my story and just hit Playback each time.

As I type this, I’m sitting here in my ER room, waiting to be moved to a room upstairs. They’re keeping me overnight, so they can repeat some enzyme tests every six hours, because it turns out that the tests that show heart damage become more accurate over time. The most likely scenario is that the pain was caused by inflammation from the pneumonia, and that my heart is fine. But the only way to be sure is to follow up with these blood tests.

I have a feeling I won’t be getting much sleep tonight [I didn’t]. Pray I don’t catch some godawful bug while I’m here.

I’m glad I got some writing done this afternoon!

I wrote the above on my tablet while in the hospital. I’m home now. The blood work was fine; they woke me at 7:30 for a treadmill stress test, and that was fine. By about noon someone finally signed off on it, and I got to leave. Still with the chest pain, by the way, which is either a side effect from the pneumonia or a pulled muscle from coughing too exuberantly.

It was hard not to feel a little silly about it all. But as the lady who administered the stress test said to me, Would you rather have been like my neighbor, who refused to go to the hospital after his wife called 911, and later that evening dropped dead of a heart attack? I guess not, when you put it that way.