November 2012 Salon

Josephine Wall: Breath of Gaia

The other day I flew to Newark, New Jersey, to give a benefit lecture on behalf of the Trenton Soup Kitchen. I have been involved with the TSK for five years now and I consider the work this charity does to be absolutely magnificent. Anyway, I arrived midday and was met by a lovely, middle-aged driver. Within minutes we were in his immaculate car heading to our destination, which, according to his GPS, was an hour away. My first reaction was, “Ugh, that’s half the flight time from Chicago.” My second reaction was, “I hope this guy isn’t a chatterbox because I need to make notes for my talk.”

Heading out of the airport, the driver and I both settled into our normal routines. He got his GPS going and I pulled out my notebook. Then he asked, “Is the temperature okay for you?” All he wanted to know was if the air in the car was warm enough, right? That required a yes or a no and a thanks for asking. But instead, something in me found his accent very curious. Why? I grew up in a home in which half my relatives had foreign accents, as did half the people in the neighborhood. People with accents are so common in my life that I hardly notice them, but I noticed his. Then I noticed that I needed to know where he came from – I mean I absolutely needed to know. Why? I don’t know why.

So I asked him, “Where are you from? I am intrigued with your accent.”

He smiled and said, “Where do you think?” I looked at his face through the driver’s mirror and the deep lines around his dark brown eyes blending in with his warm smile told me that this was a good man, a very good man.

I said, “Persia.”

His eyes sparkled, “Very good, but not quite. Close. What’s next to Persia?”

I froze for a moment. My mind went blank. I needed to bring up the globe in my mind’s eye. I said, “Okay, just a minute. You’re not Turkish. You must be from Afghanistan.”

“Yes, I am Afghani. I came here when the Russians invaded my country. I had just completed my degree at the university in Kabul. You can’t imagine how beautiful Afghanistan was before all these wars. Now I have two sons and a daughter here.”

I put my notebook down and we began to discuss his life, his journey, his world. He told me how the turmoil of decades of war in Afghanistan has affected his family and the lives of so many people he knows. And then he told me that he lost his job when the company he was working for let go of many of their employees. As a result, he was losing his home. That struck him as among the more overwhelming events of his life, as he did not think such a thing could happen in America. I told him about how many people I knew in that same situation.

Lest you think his man was complaining about the events that had unfolded in his life or drowning in his sorrows, that was not at all the case. Rather, he presented these chapters of his life with a type of “matter of fact” voice that was devoid of self-pity or anger. I was the one pressing for more details, asking him to expand on how and why events happened as they did in his life. I was the one picking at his wounds. If anything, he should have dropped me off at a bus station and told me to catch the next bus to Trenton.

Then he said, “I should be quiet now. I notice you have work to do.”

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