You know, Mom, you might want to consider switching up your routine, my older son said to me. That way, if someone doesn’t see you for a few days, they won’t think Rex died.

It’s not like I walk the exact same route at the exact same time every single day, but I do often enough that in the days following my return from Morocco, I was stopped no less than fifteen times while walking Rex to be told that my presence on the greenway was much missed. Some, but certainly not all, were people I know by sight and talk to regularly. One older couple said, frantically, Where WERE you, we were so WORRIED that something happened! They looked with wide-eyed significance at Rex, who was engaged in the serious business of Sniffing A Tree.

Well, it’s nice to be noticed, although as my sister-in-law’s boyfriend says Big black dog, big red hair, you’re hard to miss. In any case, it’s nice to be home, and the fall colours have been incredible.

People are very interesting and we never really know what’s going on in someone’s life, although we might think we do. We were the first zone to be called for boarding on our flight from Paris to Casablanca, but as soon as we all finished going through the check zone, we were stopped. All of us in zone 1 stood in the walkway for over thirty minutes, and although there was an announcement about it, I didn’t really understand. It was something to do with customs, which made a lot of sense after we finally boarded the plane. I settled in with my Kobo when I heard incessant screaming and yelling.

I don’t know about you, but an adult shrieking is not something I want to hear when I’m on a plane. I tried to see what was happening, and then thought maybe craning around in my seat wasn’t a smart idea, so I quietly shrank a little. What was happening, which the man next to my husband informed us, was that a person was being deported back to Morocco and that there was a large police presence on the back of the plane. The flight was delayed over an hour before the man was taken off the plane, still screaming. My husband’s seatmate, who is a Moroccan national but works in Algeria, necessitating long flights through Paris to get home, said that there is such an occurrence on almost every single such flight, which made me unbelievably sad on multiple levels.

Because of this, we were delayed getting into Casablanca, but it was nothing compared with the six Australians in our group who were delayed by DAYS and who just barely made it before our tour left the city. They were delayed in Rwanda, then stuck in Dubai, before finally making it to Morocco, and somehow 5 pieces of luggage made it there as well. The sixth, belonging to our new friend Greg, arrived five days later and the reunion was cause for much celebration in our group. He would track it daily with his Air Tags, letting us know that now, somehow, it’s in South Africa, and the like. This is why I never check luggage. I was incredibly stressed on Greg’s behalf, and I only just met him.

In any case, I was very happy to have the Australians join our group, which up to that moment consisted of another Australian, a couple from Ottawa who had defected from Romania in 1985 and who were absolutely fascinating, and a woman from New Zealand. The seven Australians and two Canadians were pure delight, but the woman from New Zealand was, to put it mildly, not.

As an example, Ms NZ made all eleven of us, plus two guides and a driver, wait for fifty minutes on the bus, and then, when she finally boarded, she did not apologize for being so late. This was at nearly six pm, after we had been on a walking tour since nine in the morning, and all we wanted to do was shower and eat. Not eighteen hours later, we were stopped by the police because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, which led to a prolonged, agonizingly heated discussion between our guide, the driver, and three armed policemen. I didn’t know we needed to wear seatbelts, Ms NZ said defensively, again not apologizing.

All of that could have been forgiven – we all make mistakes, although apologizing is a thing that people do in society – if she did not constantly complain. By the time the Australians joined us, I was already wondering how I could bear two weeks with this woman. She complained endlessly about our hotel: the elevator didn’t stop at her floor (it stopped at ours), the hair dryer didn’t work (it worked in our room), and the tea kettle needed a plug converter (we take a converter with us). I tried to feel compassion about these annoying little blips, but then she yelled at the desk staff that she wanted a cup of tea and she wanted it NOW, and if there is one thing I cannot abide, it is a person who is rude to service staff. After breakfast the next day she complained that no one brought her coffee, and since I had only known this woman for twelve hours at that point, I thought I was being helpful by pointing out that it was buffet-style, and one only needed to ask the man at the counter to prepare a cup of wonderful coffee. Maybe she didn’t know how it worked, I thought. All one needed to do was ask, and delicious coffee appeared. Why should I have to ask? she said to me. He’s walking around, he could just do his job.

Well. How does one respond to that, except to say You’re a cunt, which I did NOT do. Do we go into Starbucks and sit at a table, waiting for someone to bring us a Tazo chai with coconut milk? NO WE DO NOT. She also complained incessantly about garbage by the side of the road, including when we were on a walking tour in a village with a guide who lived in that village. People live here! Those people might not understand the words, but they definitely understand what you’re saying, and what you’re saying is RUDE and implies that they are living in a trash heap.

It got to the point where I wondered if our guide was starting to hate the sound of his own name, since Ms NZ would shrilly call it out every five minutes to ask another of her inane questions while the rest of us had twitching eyebrows. What are those trees, why are they all trimmed that way, who decided that it was the best way, why is it the best way to trim the trees…ad infinitum.

And I realize that had I not been, as they say, a donkey on the edge, I would have happily tuned all of this out. I would have cheerfully half-listened to our guide patiently talk about branch pruning in Morocco, but as it was, I wanted to murder her. Thank god for the Australians and the Romanian-Canadians! And was I sorry that she not only contracted the Traveller’s Tummy but also some kind of virus that caused her to sleep – on the bus, in a restaurant, in the accommodations – for almost forty-eight hours? No, I was not. I am a firm believer in karma, and we were all happy to have some blessed silence.

Weekly Reading

I have SO many books to tell you about, that I read while on buses and planes, but I think I will keep those for a separate post. For now, this is what I read this week – and wow, it was a good week!

Songs at the River’s Edge. I had such a craving to reread this book about a British social anthropologist who lives for eighteen months in a rural village in Bangladesh, circa 1987. It was a twenty-year journey for me to get this book at all, and the details of that are here. She details how she is accepted into the family and describes all the various customs, relationships, and social hierarchy within. There is relative prosperity and desperate poverty, and the stories are moving and beautiful, about the power of community and family, as well as the dire straits of the people who try to move away in search of a better life. The stories about women and their marital fate are fascinating and often very sad. 

Motherness. I have known Julie Green, the author of Motherness, for over a decade; we used to work together at YMC. Truly, I didn’t know her well; her beat was “Buzz,” and she wrote several newsy and current events-related articles a day, while I wrote one recipe post a week. She lived in Toronto and I in Calgary, and once or twice a year I would fly out to see the whole team. I remember those parties very fondly, but I didn’t talk much to Julie. She was pretty quiet and, I assumed, shy. What I didn’t realize – and what she didn’t realize, either – is that she is autistic, and these parties, she writes, were a source of terror and anxiety for her, causing her many sleepless nights and to hide in the bathroom for most of the time. I had no idea. And this is the important part of this memoir, the idea of “masking” that autists do, particularly women. They get along to get along, so to speak, and the stress of the masking, Julie says, “comes at a cost to mental health and can lead to low self-esteem, stress, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and even suicidality.” She goes on to say that autistic women are often misdiagnosed with depression, anxiety, and mood disorders, which makes me wonder how many women are walking around without appropriate help. Probably many. She is the mother of an autistic child, and she writes openly about the struggles and joys and the agony of trying to fit your child into a world that doesn’t fit them. It’s raw and vulnerable and very moving. Highly recommend this incredible memoir. 

October has been such a strange month for me, what with travel and then birthday celebrations and then coming back to earth! I can hardly believe it’s the last week. I hope you are all, like Humpty Dumpty, having a great fall. xo