silkroadcowboy

It always takes two days in Cairo to get visas on the way to work in Ethiopia. It may be 1985, but that doesn’t mean the bureaucracy is streamlined.

With Evie along on this trip, that does mean mandatory tourism. Tourism means the Pyramids, even though we saw them quite well out the airplane window on the approach to the airport.

Tourism is not my cup of tea.

On the way to the hotel:

“Let’s take a tour of the Pyramids”, she said.

“Let’s not”.

“Honey, seriously”.

“Seriously, let’s not.”

“It’ll be fun! We’ll ride camels!”

“It’ll be a shit-show. We’ll be hustled to buy all sorts of stuff we don’t need.”

“Honeeeee…”

“You know I hate this sort of thing.”

“It’ll be fun!”

Yeah.

So, we sit in the shop belonging to the brother-in-law of the camel tour-guide being hard-sold perfume essence. After what seems like hours, just to get it over with, I shell out enough money for a week of fine dining and we mercifully escape to a cab.

Evie dabs some musky scent on her wrist which she holds under my nose.

“Nice, huh?”

Nice, I have to admit.

Now a dab behind her ear. She leans in to me.

In a huskier voice, “Nice, huh?”

Much as I want to get straight back to the hotel right now, I tell the cabbie to take us to the Gold Souk.

Evie leans back, smiles and scrunches up her nose.

I am such a sucker.

It was not his habit to rise so early, but he was up before the sun on this Monday.

November at this latitude was crisp and today was no exception. There was no snow, but a heavy hoarfrost blanketed the field which dropped away to the wood beyond.

Light shone through the bare branches of the larch and birch and filtered through the hemlock and white pine. The sliver of the crescent moon graced its beams on the field, and the hoarfrost shimmered in thanks.

It was still very early. Twilight had not yet blanched the stars.

His father, once a navigator in his youth, had taught him the stars and their significance when he was a boy.

His mother, ever the romantic, the origins of the names of the days of the week. This was Monday, Lundi in her native French. The moon’s day.

How fitting, he thought, to stand here beneath the stars before dawn and watch the moon rise on the moon’s very day. That this moon day was one year to the day since Papa and Mama had passed, together, seemed mystical.

This mystical morning lovingly cradled the cynic he had become in middle age.

It held him close to its bosom, nestled him and whispered that he was still the bright-eyed child of wonder he had once been.