Unicorns and Fairy Dust

We keep a running shopping list on the door of our fridge. In my never ending quest to make my wife smile or be simultaneously annoyed and amused with me, I sometimes put in requests.

Unicorns.

Pixie dust.

Elvish magic.

To my great disappointment, none of these can be found at our local supermarket.

I think it’s time to make a few requests of this world and the people stumbling through it.

For starters: and just as an example, let’s all agree that breaking into a house and stabbing a teenage girl to death in her bed because you don’t want her, her bed, her house, or her whole people to exist in your rocky sandbox is murder, and not political or religious discourse.

Next, can we please work towards a world where it isn’t news when a Muslim couple helps a Jewish family get out of an overturned car, when the family has been shot at?  I’m not saying we shouldn’t help each other.  But how have we reached a place where this is news, and the labels mean more than the activity?

Just stop.  All of it.  Stop.  Listen.  See what we have become.  Is any piece of land worth the blood that we are dumping all over it?  And if it is worth it, then maybe the land would do so much better without all that blood.  Or tears. 

It’s like the old songs about teaching our children.  They have to know who they are.  But they have to know who everyone else is also.  And we have to teach them that most people just want to live and love and laugh a bit and grow old with the sun on their face and breeze in whatever hair is left for them, and with the sounds of their kids and grandkids all around. 

It’s time to start now.

 
Please leave your suggestions on the fridge.

Friday 3:30 AM

Sitting on the couch with my son in the middle of the night.  Passing the time with a movie, waiting for the pharmacy to open so that when the inevitable prescription for antibiotics is written it can be filled, the bug-killers taken, and the hoped-for process of recovery from strep throat can begin.  The kid sent me in search of a bucket; because you never know when you’ll need a bucket.  My search took me outside onto the patio.  And I heard the singing.  

We live in sight of several villages, each with a green-lit minaret reaching for the sky.  Depending on the breeze, and the volume of the loudspeakers, the call to prayer can often be clearly heard. Lying in bed in the pre-dawn dark, I hear them calling; starting a new day as the old one ended, but tonight was not a call.  Tonight was a love song. Sometimes, ritual can become devotion.  Tonight I heard it, curling through the darkness as soft and sweet as the smell of the citrus blossoms on our tree right now.  I came back inside (with the bucket), sat beside our boy and didn’t start the movie. “Listen” I said.  “Can you hear the singing?” 

And the wind shifted, and the song faded away.  We started up the movie again, and the sounds of Roger Rabbit filled the room again, but I couldn’t help but think about the pre-fast meals taking place just across the highway.