Thursday, July 28, 2011

The next day Celeste is up, it seems, at dawn and I fully intend to turn over and go back to sleep but instead I pick up my notebook and begin writing. Jim is up, too, and soon I hear him in his office. I hear him and Celeste talking softly. I shower and dress and find the coffee. While I lay in bed and write Celeste comes in and uploads her photos; Jim passes through occasionally to drop amiable complaints about his work and offer simple hospitalities.

Eventually Celeste walks downstairs to visit JoAn and presently I follow her. The three of us sit around the breakfast table down there and the subject of Celeste's Iran Flickr set comes up. She had scanned them from a set of slides JoAn had kept from the late 50s of a long-awaited visit of President Eisenhower to Tehran. The photos, I said, were rare objects from an era of friendship that neither government cared to admit right now. JoAn regretfully shakes her head. She remembers diplomacy and even amity when she lived in Shiraz with her husband Bill, an officer for A.I.D., and her kids Jim and Janet. There were concerts over which she presided as a then-untried voice teacher and even a cultural exchange with a pop singer whose song she can still remember; she sings a bar or two, but the rest is gone for now. Later Deborah comes downstairs with a pitcher and asks who wants to join her in a wine cooler. We all say yes and Celeste takes an inventory of the refrigerator. There's sweet white wine and a mango nectar blend and ginger ale; it's all poured into the pitcher and the result is pretty good.

Celeste says I don't like mangoes and Deborah asks me "What don't you like about them?" "It's their fibrous texture," I say. She assures me I haven't had a good one. "In Mexico we had a mango tree, a lime tree and an avocado tree. There was a man who helped us and he would go that way to get the laundry. He would pick some mangoes and they were real firm and smooth." "Like a peach," Celeste puts in. "Yeah, like a peach– just slightly more dense than a peach– and they were delicious– and not at all fibrous." I finish the pitcher after everyone else declines.

Later we get into some red wine over dinner– a pasta dish– and Jim and JoAn talk about Nigeria and Botswana. Politics comes up and Jim says that the best features of Botswana's self-government endured while Tanzania's socialist experiment remained as an uncomfortable legacy, a jacket that didn't fit. Celeste says that Nyarare's policies led to better health care and education in the long run. She complains loudly about the diffuse, shrill May Day rallies of years past and the lack of any clear source of concentrated anger. Jim agrees that there's an apathy problem but thinks that the next round of elections will reveal a new geography that may point to a way out of our gloomy swamp.

I seem to be even more tired than the night before, so much so that I can't remember any of my dreams.