Living Together Forever

There are jackals and stray cats and all manner of needy beast wandering the streets of Marrakech. It’s hard to account for the people. Why I didn’t know this is not the issue. I mean I did know it, in the historical this is the way people lived for thousands of years kind of way. But I can hardly coordinate the notion of a city the way I grew up in one and the notion of a city the way i experienced Marrakech. I can begin to see it, the way I felt about the neighborhood I grew up in, which was on the very outskirts of New York City and thus was more suburban then urban and how my ever widening circle of travel from place to place in the Bronx, the tunnels and highways out to Queens and Long Island and the bus rides into Manhattan for movies and museums informed my fears and fascinations of the city, all cumulating in the time I got lost in high school trying to get home from David Jablonski’s in the 70’s on the west side of Manhattan and ending up taking train after train uptown to 125th street and downtown to 42nd street, not wanting to ask for help, afraid to ask for help, getting the right directions eventually from an elderly black man who had reminded me of the elderly jewish man who used to explain the pyramids and the bible and the story of moses to us back of my grade school(PS 68) on windy fall days.

Yeah I know that was so far afield and off topic it was almost painful.I just have to note here the beggars and the hucksters and the boys just trying to get a durham and the hungry merchants and kindly merchants and even wise merchants and the pushy pushy cab drivers all were looking to do us a service and to then be rewarded. And they wanted to do the service not because they necessarily perceived a need we had but to satisfy a need they had. We were just the means most available at the moment. The transitory nature of this, the fact that we were passing through and were worth a shot but hey if it didn’t work out, there’s another one over there marked me a little. The persistence, the fierce almost determination of some of the hustlers absolutely frightened me. know the scheme is to be as annoying and in your face as possible in order to shame you and yes scare you into given up a coin or two or twenty. (I confess it was equally annoying to me to confront the bored and uninterested in what we did look on the girl who was minding the Dar Tabna bookstore. I should have been refreshed by it but it smacked of contempt, although a contempt of a different nature then that of the hustlers.)

Doris suggested this morning she sell her house and buy a place where we all could live and the place and all her money would be Bonnie’s when she died, if we just gave her a room. The notion is generous and selfish at the same time. She is terrorized that we would put her in a nursing home, like Sand’s Point. This has never been an option and I wonder where she got the idea it was. Bonnie has always talked about finding her a home in Mexico, with a staff of 3 or 4 and people coming down to visit on a regular basis. But really the subtext of the gesture she was talking about making was that she loves the detail and attention to need Bonnie supplies her and the warmth and kindness I show to her and she would like to set that up on a permanent basis. It sent a chill through both Bonnie and I. We had talked about something like that and we shivered. It would be a cage of the most cruel and torturous proportions.