The Observer Effect

"In the strict formulation of the law of causaltity—if we know the

present, we can calculate the future—it is not the conclusion that is wrong

but the premise."

Werner Heisenberg

The act of using a thermometer to measure the temperature of any system or body necessarily changes the temperature of the system or body through the absorption by the device of some portion, however so small, of some of the present heat. There is no way to sidestep the conclusion that when observing any system, any body, any scene, the observer is not observing that system, body, or scene as it existed before the inception of said observation. There are two closely related principles which describe aspects of this phenomenon, and the two are often and commonly confused to be one and the same. They are not.

In 1927 Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist, made the revolutionary and astute, dare I say, observation, that “the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.” His addition to the growing scientific understandings about the nature of the sub-atomic realm dictates that one can not measure or investigate parts of the sub-atomic world without changing the motion and/or the position of the observed particle. The quantum world is the term that refers to the realm of quanta (the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction), the bits of matter and energy (remember that matter and energy are phenomena which are interchangeable and linked through Einstein’s famous equation) that form everything. All matter exists as both particles and as wave form energy patterns; Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that particles (meaning everything) changes its “momentum” when it’s “position” is observed. In observing wave form energy every act of measuring a wave interferes with that pattern of that wave—think of putting your hand into a body of water to feel the strength of the waves--does it not follow that the wave passing around your hand is now changed by the presence of your hand measuring it? As the man himself said, in a statement which has crushingly profound implication despite its seeming innocuousness, 

        “measurement does not mean only a process in which a physicist-observer

    takes part, but rather any interaction between classical and quantum objects regardless of any observer."

The other principle, the one often confused with Heisenberg’s, is what is called “the observer effect.” This supposition states that by watching something, in other words simply by being there, the physical (representation of the) universe is altered to a state different from what it was or what it is prior to the presence of the watcher. This principle arose originally, it seems, from the discovery that the photons (which are the particles that make up light—the famed particles that act as particles when observed and waves when they are not (see the double-slit experiment) when used to observe an electron, necessarily interacts with the electron and thus disrupts its position and momentum. One of the byproducts of this understanding is that quanta, meaning, again, essentially everything, exists in a state of “superposition” when it is not being observed—meaning that every possible “position,” or every “possibility,” is happening all at once, all the time, time having no fixed position itself apart from when it is observed; the particle is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, awaiting the act of observation before manifesting. The observer effect is the notion underlying the famous “Shröedinger’s Cat” paradox—the cat in the box, precisely because it is unobserved and therefore its status is unknowable, is neither alive nor dead (it is in fact both half-dead and half-alive in probability terms) until the box is opened.

So as the science of quantum physics has originated in these strange and, to quote Einstein, “spooky,” and still unexplainable laws that lead us today to the ideas of intention in physics, meaning that one’s thoughts alter reality around us, as has been proven and is no longer questioned in the laboratories (see Rupert Sheldrake’s work on intention changing the odds in coin flips or random number generation as easy to find examples), what does that mean for a father who wants to go to visit his son in his son’s new, “natural habitat,” one of the jewels in the crown of the Emerald Isle, Galway City. I mean is my kid half-alive and half-dead because I can not observe him? Is he half-studying and half-not studying? Will my being there change how he behaves? As any parent can tell you, of course it will. But, be that as it may, do I go anyway? Well as I have always been the guy to walk right up to that cardboard box and open it to check on the condition of the cat, of course I go.

Galway city is a frighteningly beautiful place. Makes me understand even more that I simply prefer countries other than the one that I was reared in. The place is clean, aesthetically perfect, cobblestoned in the downtown, pedestrian only streets that are lined with colorful awnings full of laughing, drinking, smoking patrons jabbering away as the buskers play traditional Irish tunes, the jingling rhythms and brogues of which resonate along the narrow canyons of ancient stone buildings. The evenings are festive but not aggressive, the weather, while often drizzly, is mild and just as often sunny and blue skied. As Teo's roomie Johno put it, "It's always either just about to rain, raining, or it just finished raining." It is a smiling place, filled with effervescent dispositions, joking, pleasantries, and, of course, Guinness.

This is a week of holiday in Saudi Arabia, the Eid al-Adha break, and I have come to Ireland to visit my eldest son, Teo, who is finishing the second week of his Masters program in environmental, social geography at the National Irish University of Galway, NUIG. He is thriving. A posse of positive, energetic, good looking young people surround him, the many of them together forming a nucleus of semi-rowdy ribbing and camaraderie. There is his best mate, Johno, a lad doing Heritage studies, originally a Dubliner. And Mierko, a German, tall, handsome, a slow talker. And Cieran, a Galway native, tall, red haired, a swagger and a grin with a heavy, grinning, Irish brogue. Noami, from Belgium, cute as a button, inquisitive, bright eyed, one of the gang. Osasu, a citizen, having immigrated from Nigeria five years back, studying pharmacology. Greta, a German bombshell, all gorgeous blonde hair and Revlon good looks with serious move star blue eyes. Ian, an Irish lad of about twenty, blondish-brown hair, a wispy beard and mustache, who shared a smoke with me outside the Hostel Kinlay where they all live, centered in downtown across the street from the central green, Eyre Square; he told me of meeting my other son, Paolo, who spent a month here visiting, and said that he had told P that he could kick my ass, that he could kick any man’s ass, but that now, having talked to me, that I was a good bloke and that he wasn’t so sure. I remain uncertain if he meant that he couldn't kick my ass because I was not as wimpy as he supposed or if he simply meant that I was too nice a guy. In either meaning I took it as a back-handed compliment.

Being here is like strolling through a lucid dream. The incredible sensations and realizations that come about when one strolls amidst buildings that have stood as they now are for many hundreds of years, when every new corner that one turns becomes an entirely novel exploration of the universe, when drinking Guinness straight from the tap of an earthy, polished wooden bar that has poured nothing but this chocolate brown elixir for centuries, pales in comparison to being able to drop in like the proverbial fly on the wall to see how my boy lives, where he lives, who he lives with, to see the excitement and outright jubilation in his eyes and his spirit. What a lucky man am I. To see that my progeny has broken through the erroneous belief structure that so many Americans possess that our country is some how the be all and end all, the greatest country in the world, and the only place that any of us would ever want to live.

Growing up I, along with my two older brothers, Marco and Leone, were shuttled back and forth between our parents with great regularity. In 1969, when I was a four year old blonde haired, blue eyed toddler and my oldest brother, Marco was seven, our folks split. Our father moved from our family home in Wisconsin to Washington State and the ensuing parenting arrangement dictated that we three travel the seventeen hundred miles four times each year—out to our father’s farm for the summer months and back to school in Madison, and then for one month at Christmas-time and back again. This process of always leaving, always saying goodbye, while it haunts my emotional self like a small army of keening banshees, did prepare me for the eventuality of leaving home upon entering adulthood. We moved around a lot and I went to six different schools before graduating from high school. Learning to deal with the new and the unknown, to be comfortable and to exist like a turtle with my home and my understanding of self firmly in place, has proven to be a useful place from which to engage with the wide world around.

At the age of seventeen I moved from our rural community of fourteen thousand to the "city that care forgot," New Orleans, to begin university and I did not find the shift a difficult one. For me it was just another move of a couple of thousand miles to begin school again, and like so many other years in the previous thirteen, it was another year of making new school friends, having new teachers, learning a new system and a new physical surrounding. Often I think about how the process of moving out of the home for others, for my children. As I go now to see my beautiful son in his new surrounds I wonder how it is for him. Unlike his younger brother, Paolo, Teo did not leave home to go to university, choosing instead to get his BA at Central Washington University in our hometown of Ellensburg. He has travelled a lot and has shown himself to be quite intrepid and unfazeable in these regards. Yet to move away and to be away for a year and to do so in a manner that really brings him to the phase in life, the age, when he may not be returning to live at home for a long time, if ever, I have a wobbly and knife edged pain inside to imagine that he is at this time facing this knowledge and that it causes him to feel alone, cut off, unsafe, uncertain.

In Ellensburg, lovely and friendly and positive as it is, a very, very old building dates from the 1890s. It is therefore a hard-to-grasp understanding when one is confronted with the reality of bridges spanning the green brown waters of the River Corrib that were constructed six or eight centuries ago. I mean how does one process that? It is akin to trying to comprehend the size of the universe or what it means to have ten billion dollars. The mind is built to understand scale based on known schema, known points of reference. To be amidst the ancient world, to be walking and talking to people speaking Irish (Gaelic), to read the names of shoppes and streets printed in this native tongue, is an all out mind bender, plain and simple.

Apparently the night before I arrived, while I was in the middle of my more than twenty-four hour travel to get to Galway, Teo and friends were tying one on. T said he doesn’t really remember the end of things so well, but does remember finishing a bottle of gin and then only what others told him, of answering his door naked, of wandering the halls to the bathroom where a mate found him curled on the floor of the shower with vomit around him. He felt quite bad for the janitor and, as he has been baking cakes lately, made one for the poor guy and decorated it in such a way as to commemorate the occasion and to apologize all at the same time. Living large. Love it.

Two nights this week Teo and I decided to make food for ten. I was spending enough going out to eat, taking Teo and occasionally his best mate, Johno, that picking up groceries from the Tesco grocery store and walking it back to the hostel to feed many just made sense. Teo is also becoming a bit of a baker, having apparently three pineapple upside down cakes in the six or so weeks that he has lived in the hostel. He picked up a boxed cake mix of the vanilla persuasion, some chopped up, fresh pinapple, some dark brown sugar, and butter. We settled on picadillo tacos with fresh pico de gallo and refried beans for the first dinner party. Using a recipe learned from my mother, we cooked up ground beef with coriander, cumin, black and white pepper, salt, red pepper flakes, garlic, onions, raisins, and fresh lime, and cooked it up until it was a rich, braised pile. Teo made the pico de gallo with the help of Noami, and I heated the 24 medium sized flour tortillas, as corn tortillas are not to be found in these parts, and we brought all of it plus some bags of shredded cheese and two new bottles of hot sauce, to the table. A pack of Coronas and three bottles of red wine and a few of Guinness rounded out the food fest.

The meal went smooth and comfortable like a dinner party amongst great friends, laughter, lots of oohs and ahhs about the food, passing bottles of wine and beer, refilling glasses and plates, laughter and ribbing, a raucous milling of personalities. For me it was a delight. Set there in the circle of Teo’s buddies, watching them interact and josh one another, flirting, playing, eating and relating. The brown sugar and fresh cake smell of Teo’s desert hit us before we finished eating and immediately after the dishes were cleared and cleaned, he brought it out and served it up. Two to four other residents of the Hostel Kinlay, following their nose and the sight and sound of a grand time at the far end of the dining area, sidled up and grabbed a stray taco or three. Teo told me that his crew had shared desert before but this was the first collective meal that they had shared. Words like “legend,” and “amazing” were bandied about throughout and after the gathering and Teo and I both felt a visible amount of pride and pleasure is being able to plan and execute this well-to-be-remembered evening.

On Tuesday while Teo was attending his classes and meeting with a fellow student afterwards to finish preparing for a presentation and the leading of a two hour class discussion in his political geography class the next day, I walked the two miles to Salt Hill, a lovely stretch of seaside community on Galway’s western end, read some of Ulysses, studied some Arabic script, ate a small lunch that I had packed down on the beach, my bare feet squiggling in the fine, gray sand. After my repast I put my head on my bag and closed my eyes for about twenty minutes, the warm sun and the sound of the little lapping waves priming my brain waves perfectly for some easy and slow vibrations.

Gotta say that the crew that my boy hangs with is composed of some truly sterling characters. His top bloke is Johno, Jonathan, a ginger from one of the downtrodden areas of Dublin, from the area where the “shinners” are known to live, those Irish who strongly support the Sinn Fein party, the Irish nationalists, those who in earlier years supported the IRA thoughout the years of  “the troubles,” the war with Britain that eventually resulted in Ireland establishing its independence. Johno is a mile a minute, impish sort, mischievous, grinning, spewing forth “ya geme?” (you get me?) with the frequency that a Valley Girl says, “like.” In these parts the phrase “good craic,” pronounced “good crack,” means the same as “good shit.” It is a very common quip. Johno is into Irish, what the locals call Gaelic, and he explains a lot of words and meanings, sayings, as we walk the city late at night, fetching cans of hard cider or beer from the off license stores, the liquor stores, and wander the edges of the canals, the river, the docks, telling stories, dreaming of great things, guffawing. This guy could be my Gaelic child. He is warm, draping his arm around you from behind when you’re seated, telling you he loves you, ever positive, ebullient, festive.

Now Noami is quite something. She is first off cute as a button, sort of the sexy librarian type with blondish brown, kinky hair, small frame, clear, large blue-grey eyes, and a Belgium accent that is most every American man’s dream. Like Mierko, Noami is at NUIG to better her English. She is working on a Masters in Victorian literature, finishing her reading of Mary Barton during my time there. I spoke with her a bit about what she would write her thesis on and she admitted to being a bit stumped but stated that she really liked Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and thought that it shared some “monster” themes with The Picture of Dorian Grey (written by Galway’s own Oscar Wilde I feel compelled to point out), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula, and that she was hoping to mine some idea from the overlapping themes of these four tomes. She strikes me as the kind of gal that can be a good friend without the boundaries of friend and girlfriend always being too present to mess things up. More so than Greta or Bianca she was most usually present when we hung out in the Kinlay, helping to prep food, hang out in the main room, eat together.

Mierko is a gentle, trim bearded, bespectacled mate. These three, Teo, Johno, and he, are the three that I spend the most time with. He is spending a semester at NUIG bettering his English. He is a business major, but as an EU member this university is available to him as cheaply as it is to a native of Eire. He is soft spoken, strong in physical as well as personal aspect. He is quiet, more of an observer, but always listening, interacting in a way that displays his obvious intelligence and awareness, never intrusive or loud, or downright giggly like Johno. This tendency towards the laconic increases the value of every syllable that Mierko, in the end, produces. Stand up guy. Solid.

And then there is Cieran, a tall, red headed sweetheart with a swagger. He is local, quite local, having been reared just to the east of Galway. He is a bit like a Gaelic John Wayne, but less stiff and better looking. He must be six foot two, with a disarming grin and gelled back hair. I gotta say that this guy kind of stole my heart, and I am speaking here about my parental, familial heart, not the romantic one. He is a football playing pal of Teo’s, a central midfielder.  After the first of our two dinner parties Cieran told me that he had never been involved in such an event, that it was “epic.” One of the times that Teo and I met up for lunch at The College Bar on the NUIG campus, Kieran had been scheduled to meet us, but sent a text instead: “Have located the enemy and am asking permission to lock and load.” Otherwise engaged, we did not see him that afternoon. When we went out on the penultimate evening that I was in town, after treating Johno, Teo, a guy we met along the way named Pigeon, to a pint and then headed over to grab a late night slice of pizza at Napoli, Cieran and I chatted away and he told me that he wanted to keep in touch, that he would like it if I emailed him from time to time. I was quite touched and assured him that I would.

The room I stay in is in a small boarding house about one plus kilometer from the heart of the Latin Quarter, the traditional, cobblestoned center. The walk from my house at 10A Newcastle Road across the canal, across the Corrib River and over to Teo’s Hostel Kinlay and back, usually taken two times each day to allow for a glorious and chillaxing couple of hours in the mid afternoon for reading and napping, affords me some time for thinking, for just looking at the wondrously novel and picturesque surroundings, at the Gaelic language on street signs, on businesses, for exercise, for grinning and hearty self-congratulations on getting myself to this small bit of paradise on earth, for being able to share this time in my son’s life with him.

As for the observer effect and the cat belonging to the German man with the umlaut in his surname, who can really say. I mean if the glory and the giggling and the bawdiness and the bravado and all of the little shining moments of glinty-eyed, raucous connection that I am sharing with my twenty-two year old are not what they would have been had I not been here, well, I can live with it. In some ways I suppose that a person should, in a theoretical universe, aspire to place the true and the ideal above the delightfully observed and participated in, but as for me, I am not quite that much of a purist. Sure, perhaps my presence changed the temperature slightly, sucked a bit of the heat out of the room, maybe, but I'm thinking I kicked it up a notch or two as well.

He is no longer that little guy who sits on my knee and giggles and begs me to tell him stories about a character that I invented named Mongo. He doesn’t cry when he skins his knee. It has been years since he thought that kissing a girl would be a stupid thing. No, the Teo Fiann Bicchieri that I behold today is a world travelling, GQ dressing, reddish-brown bearded, bar hopping graduate student at a top international university. He is a young man with oodles of potential, the kind of student that teachers say is one of the really smart ones, the kind of employee that employers say they will sorely miss. He is the kind of son that a parent gets a misty eyed gleam, a head shaking smile, and a small frog in their throat when they tell you that though they are so very pleased that he is off and launched into this crazy big world, they feel a poignancy and a pride each day that borders on a fine and slicing pain when they contend with the simple and inevitable knowledge that he no longer lives his days in the same house with them, can no longer be hoisted aloft upon their shoulders.

In Spite of Everything, Yes

In Spite of Everything, Yes

  “On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves 

the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

James Joyce supposed that most people’s lives were made unhappy through the lack of fulfillment of their idealistic and romantic goals or ideations about how their lives would or should turn out to be. That a reasonable and thus proper temperament, therefore, for an individual to possess may be a non-idealistic and a non-romantic one—don’t aim for the stars, in other words, don’t expect the best, because to do so is to set oneself up for disappointment. I say bullocks. I say dream and dream large, lo aim for the furthest moon, the bluest sky. Joyce lived as part of the modernist movement, experimenting with life, with language, striving to reconcile the rapid change in culture that bridged that age whence the engine replaced the horse, whence modern weapons of war slaughtered millions in the mud yuck trenches of that monumental stalemate called the First Great War.

Realism meant, at that time, to a large degree, pessimism and disillusionment. Twas indeed the end of the gilded age. Out with Byron, out with Marvell and his Coy Mistress. No, make no mistake, the modern age had arrived with the sturm and drang and the cacophony of a steam locomotive blustering and thumping through the London fog. The nihilistic cloud that descended upon the great cities of the western, industrializing world was not misplaced. Cultural change could in no way keep up, and the resulting malaise gripped the many like a nueraly transmitted bubonic plague. Fair enough. If nothing else man is a learning animal.

Yet at some point the task becomes not to numb oneself down, but rather to raise oneself up. For God or no God, the fact of the matter is that it really comes down to a choice. A single choice. One that each of us is faced with on a more or less daily basis. As the immortal bard inserted into the mouth of his equally unkillable Prince of Denmark, it boils down in the end to the most famous of lines, to be or not to be: “Whether is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or, to take arms against a sea of trouble, and, by opposing, end them.”

In other words, in spite of everything, yes.

Am sitting in the Sky Bar on the fourth floor of the Bahraini International Airport, my wallet laden with riyals, dinars, dollars, and euros, awaiting my 1:25 am flight to London.  It is the start of the Eid al-Adha break, the holiday that celebrates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his first born, Isaac, in the hopes of pleasing his God, the same story and the same God that reigns over the followers of all the three biggies in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim triad. This very story and the fact that it is celebrated seems to me to be very much in keeping with the realist mentality—sacrifice, give up one’s happiness in order to assuage the dark interests of the universe. The closest I can do at this time is to suck down the Foster’s lager in front of me and see if that pleases anyone, other, that is, than me. It seems to be already working. God really does work in mysterious ways.

My trip here got started in a bit of a frenzy as I had the darndest time trying to get a cab set up to take me to the hotel in Dammam, the Carlton Al Mubaid, from which my Gulf Air bus would leave to cross the King Fahad Causeway and bring me here, meaning, of course, to BIA, not so specifically to the Sky Bar. As a newbie here in these parts I hadn’t understood the necessity of arranging a driver to pick me up so many days before I actually needed to go. So I found myself getting more and more frustrated over the past seventy-two hours as driver after driver, service after service, explained to me in the poorly inflected and therefore very hard to understand, Indian accented English that given the multitudes of people, especially students, leaving for break, the drivers availability was limited. It was very, very limited. I finally found one yesterday who agreed to pick me up at seven pm and I was set, until about eleven this morning when he called to say he was canceling on me. Damn. Stress. Press on.

I had been given a list of about ten drivers from a seventy something year old colleague from Ireland after he heard me bitching yesterday, and I began calling, starting at the top, well, second from the top as the bloke at the top had been the one who had just cancelled. I finally got a hold of a man named Ansar who said that he could come for me at seven. Great. I spent the rest of my day doing laundry, cleaning, reading, shooting hoops, getting some items from the co-op, and packing. I had decided to call Ansar at five to see if he was really coming, as that might still give me enough time to find someone else if he too vanished, morphed into a desert djin. Good thing I called. He said that as we agreed, he would be at my place at six. I gotta say, there is something odd that happens in this part of the world; things just do not happen as one expects. So, rather than cause a fracas and risk his not coming at seven, as I had worked so hard to arrange, I just sucked it up, jumped in the shower, finished packing, and was ready to go when he arrived.

When I first came to the Kingdom I had a few goals. Making the money that I needed to both help my two boys finish their college lives and to pay off my current debts was certainly one of them. The others were to see the world, to learn to speak passable Arabic, and to befriend a local family. Well the first two are underway and as of two days ago, the last two are as well. My team teaching partner, an American man named Tom, originally from the Chicago suburbs by way of nine years spent in Jordan, a fluent Arabic speaker himself, mentioned to me that his wife knew a Saudi woman who was looking for a tutor for her twenty year old son, Abdullah. I let Tom know that I was interested and Abdullah’s mother ended up calling me. We arranged for me to come by their house in the Ferdaws neighborhood located in the southern part of the KFUPM campus.

(In this photo one can see the Belltower, KFUPM's iconic center of campus, Academic Ring Road, which circles the 4 square kilometer campus, and the security wall of the edge of the Saudi Aramco compound, the island of America in the peninsula, movie theater, church, golf course, and all.)

I walked down to Ferdaws, quite unfamiliar with this part of campus, never having reason to venture this far south, and promptly came to understand that I could not locate the family’s residence, nor the street even upon which it lay, Abha Street. The humid evening air was still this night, my thoughts hurling to and fro, alive with ideas about what it was that I was about to do. What would these people be like? Would Abdullah be a spoiled twenty year old who needed help because he just did not care enough about his schooling to study, preferring jet setting, video games, and youtube instead? What would it be like, what would it mean to interact with a married Saudi woman, would it lead to something strained or borderline culturally uncouth given the restrictions on communications between married women and any man not their husband or non-marriageable kin? How would her husband, Abdullah’s father, feel about her contacting me, talking to me on the phone, texting me?

I called, not wanting my lateness to be misinterpreted as a sign of sloth or of uncaring, and was informed that Abdullah would sally forth in a car to find me, which he promptly did. He immediately struck me as a sweet kid, kind of goofy, shy. Abdullah wears glasses, which make his eyes appear slightly larger than they really are, his hair is black, short, somewhat fluffy. His speech soft and smiley.

It is with not a small amount of anxious anticipation that I step out of his car with him and walk to their door. They live in the family housing for the staff at KFUPM. Sort of a hodgepodge clustering of units piled together in a bit of a maze like a claustrophobic conglomeration of concrete clusters, all angels and overhangs and myriad small sets of stairs going in various directions. We walk into the foyer, one door leading left and another right, take off our shoes, as is customary in this part of the world, and go into the room on the right, a room set up for hosting, what is referred to as the majlis in the Arab world, a word which means both the room for hosting gatherings and also for official or semi-official gatherings, especially when those gatherings are for civic or tribal purposes. Three tall backed, carved wooden couches with plush, brown fabric covering both the seat and the back, a low table in the u shaped space between them and a large, a large and ornately framed mirror on the wall, and a short threaded, oriental patterned carpet made up the furnishings. Two small plates of sweets and a thermos-styled carafe of Arabic coffee set on the table with the small, white, two-ounce porcelain cups that are used to serve it were placed on the table in anticipation of my arrival. I am wiping the greasy sweat that accrued during my walk down in the ninety degree, wet evening air, from my forehead and my eyebrows. First impressions and all that.

Abdullah’s father, Mohammed, comes in, my age, a bit of a greying comb over happening, a gap between his upper front teeth, smiling, wearing slacks and a button shirt. Having received a Masters Degree in Business at a small university in southern Illinois, Abu Abdullah (meaning the father of Abdullah) is a Vice Rector at KFUPM, and is in charge of the campus newspaper, both the Arabic and the English versions. We two sit and Abdullah pours us coffee and brings me two plates of sweets, one consisting of small balls about the size of doughnut holes but sort of crunchy on the outside and holding a honey flavored cakey confection on the inside; the other plate holds squares of a sweet, nutty consistency, something akin to pecan pie but without the pecans and with a bit more of a cardamom, coconut, vaguely allspice flavor—“lazeez!” I say (delicious!), “shukran invijilan” (thank you very much). After some minutes of introductions and pleasantries, how long have you been here, do you like it here, etc., we discuss Abdullah and the desires of his parents for helping Abdullah to pass his courses in English.

Forty minutes or so later, after his father leaves, Abdullah explains how his grandfather (his two grandfathers, incidentally, are brothers, a common cultural practice in this region which holds tightly to tribal/familial affiliation) slapped him upside his head in the process of teaching him just the right way to hold the pitcher of coffee and the small cups when serving guests. “Like this,” he says, which, by the way, is an exceptionally common phrase for Saudis to say.

Meeting Abdullah and his family, interacting with his mother, mostly by text, breaching the believer-infidel wall, invigorates me. Living in the west has created within me a lurking uneasiness with the Muslim world. Though I resist the pull, CNN and Fox News and their ilk do an effective job of creating fear and anxiety about the dastardly aims that lie within the breast of the varied nations of Islam. But I was born into this world with a smile and a glint as my shield. I was created to test the boundaries of difference and of discomfort. I have roamed far and into places both real and imagined, both geographical and psychological, that have tested and bruised my ability to shine. I have aimed for far ports and for simple goals, new friends, stunning vistas, have worked to break through barriers and to blaze trails of personal achievement and relationship. I can’t say or know what may transpire in my future as it relates to befriending the Al Shehri family, but I do know that it shall not be by my hand that the friendship will end.

Before I leave their home, Abdullah’s mother brings a brown paper bag with home cooked Arabic food for me to take home. Then she sends me a text later in the evening, after I return to my home. In it she asks me how much I will charge them for the tutoring of their son, informing me that as they have a large family—there are eight children, Abdullah being the eldest—that they will need to budget for it. My colleagues charge, depending on who the client is, between 150 and 200 rats (Saudi riyals) per hour. I respond and tell her simply that I am happy to have a new friend and am interested in learning Arabic and will happily trade these experiences for the service.  I also write that if she wants to give me food sometimes that that would be terrific and that if they find that they have extra money at the end of any month that I will accept some payment so long as it is a small amount.

Four beers and a cognac later, a fine dish of lamb moushcush supped, I walk out of the Sky Bar to find Gate 11, three hours of airport time met head on and bested, my eight hour flight to London about to begin. The flight is not bad. It runs about seven and a half hours and as it departs at one-thirty in the morning Dhahran time, I sleep for all but about an hour and a half of it, waking at some point drowsily to ingest a decent breakie of scrambled eggs, potatoes, orange juice, a croissant, before falling sideways again down into the murky corridors of sleep. In London I check through customs quickly, grab my bag, go outside to find a bus to Galway City, as they often call Galway in these parts.

I befriend the driver, a Hungarian immigrant who speaks good English after ten years of driving buses here in Ireland. We two chat it up for a solid twenty minutes before the bus leaves, standing alongside a metal railing which borders the sidewalk where the bus is parked. Passengers come up, pay him the nineteen euros for the one way passage, place their luggage under the bus and then climb on up as we two blather on about how he learned his English, about 1980s music, about country singers like Shania Twain whom he has always loved and that formed the foundation for his learning to speak English to begin with. He is a solidly built bloke, a squarish face with a bit of a buzz cut, about forty-two or forty-three years old, a nose a bit like a boxer’s, dressed in the short sleeve, white button shirt and navy slacks of a bus driver.

(Heading west on the M4-a highway designation-towards Galway. The bus driver is off to the bottom right of this photo. The Polish gentleman is directly behind him.)

He encourages me to sit in the left front seat on the bus so that he, in his right side driving position, and I, are almost sitting next to each other, with my position being the row behind, but far enough to his left so that as he drives he turns his head and converses. They really do drive on the opposite side of the road. It really is green, green here, with small farms, shallow hills, copses of round, fertile trees. The road signs all are written both in the Queen’s English and in Gaelic, what is called here, Irish. The ride is two hours and forty-five minutes in length, and spans the waist of the small nation, from the Irish Sea in the east to Galway Bay, which lies on the Atlantic Ocean, on the west. The entire country of Ireland is roughly equivalent to half of the size of the state of Washington.

Soon we are talking immigration policies, and he gets fired up about the thousands of middle easterners literally pushing over the fences at the Hungarian border and stampeding in. Dammit! He came to Ireland legally, yeah? There is a process, there are rules to follow. The Polish man sitting opposite me and therefore directly behind the driver, and also like me about two steps above the driver, chimes in. His accent is heavy, and he is a bit pudgy, has a thin and wispy beard and a round face and head, almost no hair. He too has serious concerns about the foreigners pouring into the EU. He suggests that instead of sending tax money and rules to those who live near the borders and who try to protect them, that instead the governments of these countries should send guns and bullets and that that would be a much more effective manner of securing the borders.

It’s ISIS. It’s those people. It’s the mess that is the cauldron, the crucible of the Middle East. It is again the modern age, the calamity of the changes that are evolving in the world around us. And how do we face this? What frame of mind do we adopt? Are we fearful of the other? Is the other a man with a skin that is either lighter or darker than our own, does he have a sword or gun in his hand or a murderous hatred in his heart? Or is the other man just a man, as we are, just a person who desires for his children to have a home to come back to after school at day’s end, a home that contains a mother to prepare food for them and to hug them and a father who has a job that gives him enough compensation so that he can hold his head high enough when he passes his neighbor at the market to look him evenly and assuredly in the eye?

As for me, I believe that the world’s great teachers, the Christ, the Buddha, they are enshrined in the hallowed halls of perceived greatness precisely because they looked at each trouble that they encountered, be it personal or cultural or international, and they believed that it was not a problem that they beheld, but rather that the situation simply called for a plan. Tolerance, acceptance, the desire to work through challenges and to seek out the solution to any event instead of simply retreating and building thicker and higher walls, be they figurative or literal, is an act of faith and history shows us over and over again that when one leads with faith and with a smile and a certain bravery built on the understanding that we can do so much more than we often think that we can, good things happen. To hell with the “realists.” To hell with shedding your own optimism in preparation for the broken glass and indecency of this modern world collapsing around us.

               “The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose tobacco shreds catch                    fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones under his peep of day boy’s                   hat. How the head centre got away, authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil,                   orange-blossoms, drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.”

James Joyce

In spite of everything, yes.