“After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: if anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late. Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—non-alcoholic—and the two little girls from our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade, and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”
— Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”
you’re either a dishes girl or a laundry girl and i’m a dishes girl i will do the dishes for every single one of my housemates before i lift a singular sock off my bedroom floor
There’s a quieter “contact” call that they make while they’re skulking about the underbrush. If you learn to recognize it you’ll occasionally notice them coming up to check you out for a moment before they disappear back into the bushes.
The one in the blurry, rainy photo in my checklist was particularly curious. He or she definitely seemed to be wondering what possessed me to be on the trail in those conditions.
Fun fact: Wrentits are “highly philopatric.” They spend their whole lives within a breeding territory a few hundred yards across, typically not far from where they themselves were raised. I remember when I learned that, how it added to my sense of loss for the chaparral I’d grown up birding that had been turned into endless tract housing. What happened to those wrentits? 😞
The last shot of the “Good Morning” number, with Don, Kathy and Cosmo falling over the couch, tookforty takes to film. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN dir. Gene Kelly + Stanley Donen
Because I really like the premise of the show and I have also seen and liked all of the things that the Tin Can Brothers have created so I trust that they will create something equally as good. The thing is when you follow a group of creative people and you follow all of the shows and sketches that they make, you start to develop this trust and adoration for said group of people. That is how I feel about the Tin Can Brothers, I know they care for their fans and I know they will not disappoint me on this new project. But let’s say I watch the show and I end up not liking it, I will still watch it because I like the people making it and I will also still follow and support everything the TCB do. Sometimes you just have to take a chance on something.
First things first, even if they’re obvious: !!!!! Wow! It’s a total work of genius, the performers were all fantastic, and I’m incredibly lucky to have gotten to see it! More specific response below the cut.
Leslie Jones is getting a lot of racist hate on twitter. If you have time to make something or send her a nice note, it might serve to make the world a marginally happier place for her.
