The other day a friend suggested I write something for this blog. It is fair to say I’ve be thinking of writing something since the pandemic began, but there is a kind of resistance or inertia that prevents me from doing so. Then yesterday one of my sons asked me a couple of questions: What's on your mind these days? What looks like something worth your attention? Good questions those, but do I answer them honestly or BS my way through?
I am by nature a wonderer and yes with an ‘o’ and not an ‘a’ is in wanderer, though if you look back on my life I’ve done a good bit of wandering, including from birth to the present relocating over 50 times. Blessedly since the summer of 2007 we have been in the same house. The second longest stay was seven years in Vermont. Surely that would make a great movie title, though not as exotic as Seven Years in Tibet. Ah I digress, one of my favorite pass times or as a professor once called it-chasing alligators.
I wonder constantly. If I had a nickel for every time I use those two words I would indeed be wealthy beyond imagining. Well do allow me that one, ahemmmm, slight exaggeration. Can’t promise others won’t follow.
So, I wonder. Indeed I even wonder why I wonder! But let’s not go there.
My earliest, clear, indelible memory of wondering goes back to the fifth grade. One afternoon at Travis Elementary in Houston Texas, I found myself alone in my classroom. The afternoon sun bathed the room in bright light drenched in dust motes that danced around my hands as I held them up. A moment later my focus shifted to my hands--small, short fingers, smooth skin. I found myself wondering what they would look like in old age. Would the veins rise up creating a landscape of blue mountain ridges, rivers, and creeks? Would the knuckles wrinkle; the skin dry? Sixty-six years later the answer to these wonderings is a resounding yes.
Posted to Pinterest by Bethany Roesler
I drive my long suffering husband nuts on car trips-- I wonder what is growing in that field. I wonder what the population of this little town is. Wow, look at that tree I wonder how old it is, how hold that pueblo is, why people can’t think of others and wear masks during this pandemic—on and on. Sometimes my husband tries to respond to my query. But these are not really questions. They represent unquenchable curiosity about everything. They are thoughts escaping my inner universe, finding voice in ‘I wonders’. If my smart phone connected to the internet on road trips, I could find out (maybe), but then I would miss the next ‘I wonder’ moment while my head is bent before the oracle of Google.
So what is worth my attention? I am an equal opportunity ‘wonderer’. Nothing too miniscule or anything too immense escapes my voracious appetite. The how’s, how much’s, how many’s, what’s, why’s, when’s, who’s, which’s—they all fall prey to my urge to know, to understand.
In my back yard, I wonder what the birds are saying, why the mole is so afraid to peek out of his hole, how the ten baby quail wound up in our drainage culvert, how the chipmunk can move so fast, why the lizard does pushups, what attracted the snake to our front door, what would I see if the wind were colored, if trees communicate, do plants really hear me sing, if so, does it scare them or fill them with joy, why is the tail of one squirrel visitor scraggly and the other bushy, what’s going on in the rabbit warrens, indeed all the animal warrens, why the colors of autumn fill me with achingly sweet nostalgia.
On the plaza of downtown Prescott, Arizona, my wondering changes focus, as the historical aspects of this mountain town prick my curiosity. As I stand in front of the Bucky O’Neil statue I wonder what this area looked like two hundred years ago. What early indigenous person walked right here and why—searching for food, water, enjoying the unfettered view of Thumb Butte, I wonder what they called Thumb Butte, what were they wearing and most of all what were they thinking, feeling…The ‘I wonders’ tumble forth and the busyness of Whiskey Row disappears as my imagination reconstructs the landscape of the past.
In the near past, so many of my ‘I wonders’ could be answered by Elisabeth Ruffner who came to Prescott in 1940 from Ohio. Her insatiable curiosity and commitment to her new home shaped her into a walking encyclopedia of all things Prescott. Her passing in the spring of 2019 just short of her 100th birthday was a great loss. I wonder if in the future we can download a person’s experience, memories, knowledge. Perhaps not a good idea. We humans do manage to warp ideas into something unsavory. Perhaps this notion would just be all to intimate. I do wonder nevertheless. I do miss her. I do wonder how so vibrant a person can just cease to be. I miss her, but this is not an ‘I wonder’ why. I know why.
Living five years respectively in KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and twenty years later in the UAE (United Arab Emirates) really put my ‘I wonders’ in overdrive. There’s nothing like living in a foreign country to set the mind afire with questions. Despite reading AT THE DROP OF A VEIL by Marianne Alireza, a California woman who lived 12 years in a harem in Saudi Arabia and attending orientation sessions given by the Arabian American Oil Company’s (ARAMCO)headquarters in Houston, I was really unprepared for my introduction to a world unlike any I’d ever experienced.
It seemed to begin in our stopover in Paris. As I wandered around the city taking in the sites, men kept offering to help me in some way—water, a seat, sitting next to me at the Eiffel Tower striking up a conversation.
Off to KSA with Stopover in Paris, July 1977
At the time I was HUGE, three weeks away from giving birth to my youngest child. I wondered why all the attention. And coincidentally or not all the men were dark skinned, a rich deep brown. I wondered if they thought I would be a great breeder as I proved already capable of the task. One even said I was beautiful. But then I wonder if they just thought I looked about to drop to the ground and give birth, offering their aid out of a bred in the bone desire to protect the gestational female of the species. I do wonder.
In KSA a year later an Arab man offered me 3000 riyals for my toddler. I wonder to this day if he was serious. I believe he was as sons are so highly valued in Arab culture. But pitfalls abound when trying to communicate in broken English and broken Arabic. Nuances of gesture, facial expressions, diction, tone were lost on me.
So I was in a state of constant wondering in the kingdom. I wonder if I heard him right, I wonder how children recognize their mothers when all the women are cloaked in black. Yet, unerringly each child always finds his mother. I learned later that the sway of the abaya, the length of stride, the shape of the shrouded figure all guide the little one to the correct black cloaked figure. I wonder how the women handle the heat of black polyester head to toe in the blazing Arabian sun made even more unbearable as it shines down through the heavy humidity hanging over the Arabian Gulf, Persian Gulf if you’re in Iran.
Saudi Women
I wondered how a society could accept the killing of a young girl by an uncle who raped her because she brought dishonor to the family. I wondered how sand roses formed beneath the grey sabkhas (coastal flat areas),
how that man can walk across the searing sand in thin sandals with no water,
The Empty Quarter, KSA
why women in so many countries including my
own are deemed inferior to men. I wonder
where, why, how and when that initial notion rose up. I wonder when women of KSA will find equal
footing and at what cost.
I remember in the UAE sitting at a Starbucks with a friend. After getting our drinks I said to her, “So tell me everything, from the moment you got off the plane in Mecca, KSA to your return to Al Ain, UAE. Palestinian by birth with very good English she described the Hajj in marvelous detail. As an infidel I would never be welcome there. It is not a tourist attraction; it is a communion. Moreover I hate crowds. But my friend satisfied my ‘I wonder what the Hajj is like’.
I spend many of my ‘I wonders’ on people. I wonder where that wine merchant I met in Nice is now, how is Vijay, my husband’s assistant in the UAE, is he well, has he returned to India to retire, whatever happened to that Aussie who played King Phillip in A Lion in Winter which I directed in KSA, that young man who, near the back entrance into Camp Pendleton, killed another young man we found in the middle of the road, where is that Afghan man who helped me up an embankment in an oasis, my first heart throb in the fifth grade.
And then there is the forward leaning ‘I wonders'. I wonder what my five granddaughters will be when they grow up, what heartbreak and joys they’ll face, will they remember me at all and if so how, I wonder what I’m doing right now that will live on in their memory. I wonder if I will live long enough to see them all reach at least 18. That means I have to manage 89, thirteen more years.
And that brings me to the more existential and cosmic ‘I wonders’. I wonder why some people from virtually identical backgrounds thrive and others don’t. I wonder if there are miracles. Indeed I wonder what the definition of a miracle is. Perhaps a miracle today is a humdrum part of daily life in the distant future. I wonder.
I wonder if we will ever be able to time travel. I am forever wondering what some historical figure would think if he or she could be in my present. Recently I find myself wondering what Abraham Lincoln would think of the state of our union in 2020. Oh how I wish he could be here, take a grand tour of the country and then sit down with artists, laborers, farmers, doctors, soldiers, inventors and perhaps President Obama--and of course me. I promise not to wonder out loud.
I wonder what the word infinite means. I wonder how a word given sound from the voice box, expressed in letters and symbols can possibly describe the notion of something without end, without borders. Every time I imagine an infinite universe and travel in my imagination further and further out beyond the solar system, the star
systems in our neighborhood, galaxies 
-- I find myself slamming against a
border implying a delineation of an end at the
border and something beyond, but then can infinity have borders? I do wonder what is out there beyond the
limits of my imagination. And I do
wonder if humanity will survive long enough to probe beyond the last, hmmm
whatever—but can there even be a last whatever?? I do wonder.
At these times I must rein myself back in, retreat from infinity, step by step until I feel anchored once more, back in my skin. I look at my pores, the tiny sun bleached hairs, and my mind begins to navigate the ever diminishing size of the components that make up my body. Hydrogen atoms make up the smallest element, comprising nine percent of body weight. But is that the smallest? I wonder if there is an infinity to explore here, another step or two into a universe too miniscule to imagine.
And I do wonder about my death—the day, the hour, the place, whether I’m alone or not, my last words, my last sound, my last vision, my last thought. I wonder where this entity called Gail disappears to. If my ashes are scattered in nature, will I give rise to new life, be a part of a bear seeking honey, a squirrel racing up a tree, a flower, an aspen quaking in the chill of autumn. Could any part of the energy that makes up this me, could that become part of a new human? I wonder.
I sometimes
wonder if I’m alright with believing that death is an end, simply an end, no
afterlife, with pearly gates, and a pantheon of gods, goddesses. I think I am.
This life, however accidentally conceived, is a gift. I can wish perhaps that I might have
accomplished more with it. But I am so
grateful for what I’ve been granted whether by chance or design. I do wonder what that infinitely thin border
between being and not being is like.
Will there be a nanosecond of realization that this is it, that it is
time for the next great adventure as my mother-in-law put it before her own
passing? Will there even be a next great
adventure? I do wonder.
Matt, I do wonder if this answered your questions.
And Barbara Jacobsen, thank you for the nudge.
Hokusai Katsushika (1760-1849)
