Ticket Trouble

It seems like time for some humor in my life, and hopefully in yours, too. So, here is another of Doah's stories.

Mommy travels a lot, so you would think that she would learn how to handle airports and tickets—but she does not. I guess she is a slow learner. She keeps making mistakes about which airport to go to, when to go, and where her ticket is.

Very recently, she had flown into Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC without incident. Wow! A first! She was so pleased. When she returned, she went to the airport early. That was a first, too. She usually runs in at the last minute. She was so proud. Moreover, there was no line as she walked up to the counter to get the boarding pass for her electronic ticket.

"I am on your noon flight to Phoenix," she told the ticket agent.

"That cannot be," the ticket agent replied. "We have no flight to Phoenix."

"But," Mommy protested, "You must have. I have a noon flight listed on my itinerary." She handed the itinerary to the ticket agent.

The ticket agent looked at the itinerary, then looked at Mommy rather strangely. "Ma'am," he said, pointing with his finger, "You do have a noon flight, but not from here. It is from Baltimore-Washington International Airport." Oops!

That, of course, was a little better than the time Mommy arrived at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow, en route to Siberia. She looked and looked for her ticket, but it was nowhere to be found. Oops! That was a problem because she did not have very much money with her. In fact, she had just enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Siberia. She figured she could somehow get back from Krasnoyarsk, the city she was going to in Siberia, and she did.

A one-way ticket to Siberia was something that Mommy got a lot of times. Mommy really likes to travel to Siberia. She likes it so much that she will even go on a one-way ticket. Some people get sent to Siberia, or at least they did in the old days, which weren't all that long ago. That was a different kind of one-way ticket, but my Mommy is not at all worried about getting stuck there.

Once, with my sister, she went to Akademgorodok in Siberia on a one-way ticket deliberately. She figured she could get a ticket back while she was there. So, one day she and my sister took the bus from Akademgorodok to the airport. Everything worked out well, and Mommy soon had return tickets. She went outside to catch the bus back, but there was no bus stop to Akademgorodok. She asked some people about that. Yes, they told her, the bus comes here from there, but it does not return. Mommy is sure a one-way Mommy!

Another time she was at the airport in Kemerovo in Siberia with my brother. She was very proud of herself because she had gone to Kemerovo on a roundtrip ticket.

"This is the first time I've been in Siberia with a return ticket," she bragged to my brother.

He looked at the ticket and said, "Don't be so sure, Mom. This ticket is for yesterday." Poor Mommy! She just cannot get out of Siberia very easily. (She says that Siberia has always been a difficult place to leave.)

Conclusion: Before you leave home, make sure you have your ticket, but if you do not have it, go, anyway. It may be an interesting experience.


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This story is excerpted from a collection of vignettes that I helped Doah, my severely mentally challenged youngest son, to write and publish several years ago (copyright 2003). It was my attempt to help him understand literacy and the purpose of writing and reading.

The Angel's Instructions

There once was a man who was traveling through the desert. The journey took longer than he expected and soon all his provisions were gone except for a small jug of water and a loaf of bread. An angel carrying water and food was sent with this command: "When he drinks the rest of his water and eats his last loaf of bread, give him the water and food."

And so the angel observed the man from a distance, waiting for him to drink his water and eat his loaf of bread. But the man was so afraid of finishing his supplies and being left with nothing that he simply couldn't get himself to do so. Whenever he was about to drink or eat, he would say to himself, "But what will happen to me if I were to finish my water or eat my last loaf of bread? I must hold on to them, they are all I have left."

And so he would continue to walk and the angel would continue to observe from a distance.

Sometime before sunset, the man collapsed on the sand. In one hand, he held that very last loaf of bread, and in the other, that small jug of water. The angel, still carrying the food and water, kept on observing until it was clear that the man had died.

"How strange are the children of Adam," the angel said as it ascended to the sky.

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The above story is excerpted from a book, Metaphors of Islamic Humanism, by my friend, Dr. Omar Imady, copyright 2005. I originally posted it on Blest Atheist but felt it would be better posted here since I have subsequently posted other stories here from the same book.

Escaping the Design

A man who lived in Baghdad once saw the angel of death in the market. It was obvious that the angel of death was staring at him.

"He must have come to take me," the man said to himself. "I must escape!"

And so the man went quickly to the governor's house who was his friend. "You must help me. The angel of death is here in Baghdad. He has come to take me."

The governor said, "How would you like me to help you my friend?"

"Send me, send me away on your fastest horse to Damascus."

And so the governor ordered that the fastest horse in Baghdad was to be given to his friend. In only three days, a record speed, the man arrived in Damascus! No sooner had he arrived, however, than he saw the angel of death near the eastern gate.

"You actually are here," the angel said.

"What could you possibly mean?"

"Well, I was very surprised to see you in a market in Baghdad because I knew that I was supposed to take your soul three days later in Damascus. How you managed to get here this fast is beyond my comprehension!"

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The above story is excerpted from a book, Metaphors of Islamic Humanism, by my friend, Dr. Omar Imady, copyright 2005. I originally posted it on Blest Atheist but felt it would be better posted here since I have subsequently posted other stories here from the same book.

I Am The Root of All Evil

I am everywhere: I infect your daily life; I appear at nearly every turn, at every transaction. My power is immense: I make decisions for you; I determine victories in war; I determine what is produced, what is not and who gets what. I overthrow governments, subjugate poor populations and exploit the natural resources of the planet, leaving environmental ruins in my wake. I am money. I am the new God.

My actual material make-up seems harmless enough. I most often appear as a mere scrap of paper, yet my shape takes many forms. I can appear as a bank statement, a check, a gift certificate,a winning lottery ticket,a plastic credit card, even a surreal maelstrom of billions and trillions of electrons that are fired across the planet every single day in a matter of seconds. I maintain an illusion of interest, an unbiased objective tool, a mere medium of exchange. But I am much more than that.

A geographical analysis of the world reveals how the operation of the current social organization that humans have chosen is structured to accentuate my power. Cities are located largely on sea ports, perfectly positioned to ease my movement from one port to another, from one country to another. Millions, perhaps billions, of miles of cables have been laid, satellites have been launched into orbit, and microwave communications have been developed in order to better accommodate my electronic flow.
Walk through the downtown section of any major city in the world and look up at the buildings. Not even a hundred years ago, the tallest buildings were churches of another faith. Now they are temples erected in my name: banks, institutions that produce absolutely nothing and exist only to further my power.

Christianity itself, the dominant ideology of the western world for the last millennium, has waned in the face of my new religious following. Historically, we know that early coins emerged from temples, and the word Moneta, “She who warns,” was the title of the goddess Juno, whose temple was used by the Romans as a worship to make coins.

People purchase goods with me, get paid for their work with me, and regularly invest me in order to increase my power. The word used to describe my system—Capitalism—is just another way of saying moneyism. People worship me every single day of their lives, not just once a week on Sunday. Large returns are a sign of my blessing.

The United States of America has declared itself the crusading paladin of my faith. America is the self-proclaimed protector of my sacred church: the free market. Any person, organization or country that holds views at odds with my religion will be destroyed in my name. The Cold War was largely a manifestation of this crusade.
Marx’s communism was the largest and most powerful heresy and therefore required obliteration to satisfy me. It’s not the authoritarianism of Marxism that was blasphemous. Many brutally authoritarian governments in Latin America have the blessing of my archangel, the United States. Even the ostensibly Communist countries, such as China, have my favor. It is heresy against me that is not allowed.

I have a way of perpetuating my power, even by those who remain unconscious of my power. I am a mere scrap of paper, yet I gain power in every time you use me. I am worthless unless I am transacted. This is the beauty of me—if you posses me, you must worship me. It’s like an addiction: once you join my system, you can’t exit. Consumerism breeds more consumerism.

My church is changing everything. Anything that is not ready to sell must be transformed into a commodity. Only then can I grow. The environment is worthless unless it is exploited, creating capital and thus enlarging my congregation. I care not for the destruction of ecosystems. I need only production and consumption.
I have changed the entire way society looks at itself. People used to grow food to eat, wove clothes to wear, and built shelters to live in. Now, everything is done for me. People don’t work with the idea that what they are doing is necessary to themselves and the commodity at large. They are merely fulfilling an individualistic need to worship me.

Even better, people are no longer human beings. They are mere cogs in my great machine. The more a person can conform to this reality, the more holy a person becomes and therefore receives more of my favors. People are referred to as “consumers” or “producers.” Read the newspaper. It never reports that “a human being died today.” No, instead it might report that “a doctor died” or “the President died” or “a police officer died.”People are defined by how well they worship me. Those that worship more are remembered more than those who worship very little. Bill Gates, my new high priest, is well known, but who is the guy on the downtown street corner? I do not care, and neither will you.

If I did not have this power, why is it that millions of people starve and billions go malnourished daily while the world produces more than enough food to adequately feed everyone? Why is it that a person must go without necessary medical attention merely for the fact that he or she hasn’t the means to properly worship me? I am so very powerful.

The most important element of this faith is the fact that it is nearly impossible for members of my religion to even envision a world without the father, the son and the holiest of ghosts: private property, money, and the so-called free market. Language has been constructed to discourage such an undertaking. Any words that were created to describe a society structured differently, without me, have been altered with negative connotations or have been forgotten—words like socialism, anarchism, collectivism, solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomy.

There have been heretics through the ages, such as Gerard Winstanley of England, Jean Varlet of France, Peter Kropotkin of Russia, Emma Goldman of the United States, and Che Guevara of Argentina, who have dared to dream, but I had them harassed, brutalized or murdered for their optimism. Just as heretics of the Catholic Church were erased from memory, so too, these prophets have been removed from the history books by my new inquisition.

I am God; I am money; and in God you will trust.

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This essay was written by Hana Qashu, a student of mine in a senior-year Writing for Publication course I taught at a university in Jordan, and published in a collection of stories written by people living in the Middle East at the time. I thought folks in the West might find it interesting to see how a talented young girl in the Middle East thinks.

Stealing Doah

Yesterday, by request, I posted an excerpt from my book, Blest Atheist, on the Clan of Mahlou site about how many years ago Doah was dying at Renboro Hospital (name changed) and with Doah's pediatricians' implicit consent (not explicit -- he would not have been able to give that kind of encouragement), Donnie and I literally stole Doah from the hospital in a very dramatic, made-for-the-movies episode in our lives. It's a story that Doah never tires of hearing. Here are the first paragraphs. If you are interested, you can read the whole story, including how once again God was able to bad into good, at the Clan of Mahlou site. (Sorry about the repeat for those of you who are followers at that site; there is a few followers who overlap, but most do not so, since followers here have come to know Doah a little through the excerpts from his book, I figured information about this posting might be interesting.

Told by doctors at Renboro Hospital that Doah would die for certain, the trail ahead of us to bring him into adulthood seemed hopeless and far, indeed — except that I simply have no idea what the word, hopeless, means. To me, where there is life, there is hope. Clearly, though, to maintain that hope, we would have to do something about the attitude of the doctors and hospital in which Doah was being followed.

We did not have to think long. Matters quickly came to a head at Renboro Children’s Hospital. Our knock-down-drag-out fights with doctors there pitted parent against doctor in a war that was not going to serve Doah well. In June 1980, that cold war heated up rapidly. I refused to sign papers for a fundoplication, an operation that would repair Doah’s hiatal hernia at the risk of losing him because of his breathing difficulties from a subglottic stenosis (narrowing of the trachea) that were treated by a tracheotomy. (Nowadays children's with tracheotomies have decent survival rates; back then, most of the children died.) Doah’s pediatrician, Dr. Paul, was one of our strongest supporters. He would come to the hospital, mediate disputes, and provide me with his medical opinion. Dr. Paul researched the surgical procedure. He learned that the operation (in 1980) had only a 25% survival rate in cases like Doah’s and, if the patient survived, there was only a 50/50 chance that the surgery would take care of the problem. In any event, the surgery would have to be repeated every few years. (Over the years, the surgery success rate and survival rate has approached nearly 100%, but the surgery does still have to be repeated every five years.) Given these statistics, the pediatrician agreed with us that surgery was not wise.

Bent on what we assumed was their pursuit of medical training and the chance to do what was then a relatively new procedure, the doctors insisted that Doah have the surgery. Part of me wondered whether they just assumed he was going to die, anyway, and therefore he was a good candidate for “training” surgeons on a new procedure. In any event, the doctors did not accept my refusal to sign papers authorizing surgery and took the case to court, requesting that the court grant custody of Doah to Renboro Children’s Hospital so that they could do the surgery. We were not told about this court proceeding; apparently, we were going to be deprived of the opportunity even to be in courtroom and defend our rights as his parents. Shades of American democracy as it sometimes perverted by evil forces! I found out about this intention because I read promiscuously —- books and journals and articles and medical records: all Doah’s surgical reports, all the nurses’ notes, all the medical entries of any sort. And that is where I found it. In Doah’s four-inch-thick file was a scrawled note about our being unfit parents because we would not sign for the surgery and the date of the court proceeding. The date was only two days away.

What to do? A daring plan entered my mind: steal Doah from Renboro Children’s Hospital and take him out of state to Beanton Children’s Hospital where Noelle had been treated for her spina bifida and related birth defects three years earlier. I trusted the doctors because they listened to me. The doctors I knew there even liked me. I quickly found out more about Noelle’s former urologist, Dr. Colodny, and learned that while he was at that time specializing in lower GI problems, he had at one time worked in the area of upper GI problems. He could be Doah’s doctor, I reasoned. That thought comforted me, but we still had to get to Beanton.

We developed a step-by-step plan to steal Doah from his hospital room. I shared the plan, but not the details or the timing, with the pediatrician. He looked at me thoughtfully. Then he said, “I cannot condone what you propose. However, if you do happen to end up in Beanton, please be aware that Bob, the son of my partner, is an intern there. He can provide the link back to us and make the transition of records and information smooth.” He disappeared from the room and came back in a couple of minutes with Bob’s phone number. The pediatrician’s implicit encouragement was all that I needed to put our plan into action.

The next day, the doctors were in court, and we were at the curb outside the hospital. Charles kept the car running in a “standing only” zone. What I was about to do would not, could not, take a long time, we reasoned.

Click here to read what I did: continuation of Stealing Doah.

Our Poisoned Guest

Once a friend of Mommy's came to visit. His name was Steve, and he and Mommy were writing a book together.

Mommy decided that Steve would sleep in one of our guestrooms. However, that particular room had a nearby bathroom that had not been used in a long time, and the toilet was discolored. Mommy asked a friend who knows a lot about taking care of houses what she should do. The friend told her that Clorox would turn the toilet white again. Mommy was very happy. She bought a jug of Clorox.

When Steve arrived, he wanted to use the bathroom. Mommy proudly showed him the sparkling clean bathroom.

Then we heard two loud sounds, one right after the other. Slam! Slam! The first slam was the bathroom door, and the second slam was the door to the outdoors. Steve streaked past us screaming. His words started out loud, then in a Doppler effect, got quieter as he dashed past us, down the stairs, and into the streets, "It's a **!!$%!* gas chamber in there!"

Mommy's friend had not told Mommy to use only a little bit of Clorox, so she used the entire two-gallon jug. Poor Mommy!

Mommy forgot to flush the Clorox away before Steve came, so when he flushed the toilet after using it, the whole room filled with Clorox bubbles, just like in a real gas chamber. Poor Steve!

After that, Steve started calling Mommy "Little Miss Homemaker." It sounded like a compliment, but I do not think that Steve meant it that way.

Conclusions: I guess that means Mommy will not be selected as Homemaker of the Year this year. Poor Mommy!


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This story is excerpted from a collection of vignettes that I helped Doah, my severely mentally challenged youngest son, to write and publish several years ago (copyright 2003). It was my attempt to help him understand literacy and the purpose of writing and reading.

Mohammed, the Street Vendor

Mohammed was a street vendor on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. He was clearly a Middle Easterner from his speech, but his limited English did not prevent him from doing a booming business. Rather, his smile and good nature brought him return business all the time, and there was often a line, which he served patiently, efficiently, and pleasantly.

Mohammed not only served his customers, but he also served as a friend to his customers. The reason I learned Mohammed's name was because once a customer was relating to him some personal issues, to which Mohammed was responding with sympathy. I thought that they must be friends or at least acquaintances, and so I waited patiently for the conversation to conclude. At the point of conclusion, I was quite surprised to hear the customer ask Mohammed his name.

Most street vendors do not have names. Well, obviously, they have names, but their customers do not know their names. However, many people seemed to know Mohammed's name.

Mohammed's philosophy was announced to the world on two small stickers pasted on his lunch wagon. The first says: "Have faith, for it is the will of Allah." The second says, "Faith has two parts: patience and gratitude." He clearly patterned his behavior after those stickers.

One day I stopped to buy a hot dog, a $1 purchase -- not much in the grand scheme of things. However, one would have thought I had spent ten or twenty that amount. He patiently made sure that he had the order exactly the way I wanted it, smiled, thanked me for stopping by, and wished me a pleasant day. Something about his smile made me (and obviously others) understand that he really meant all those pleasant words.

Most street vendors in the United States do not have block-long lines. The exception was that vendor on Massachusetts Avenue. I would stop to buy even if I was not hungry. I would not stop for food as much as I stopped for the warm personal interaction. That is why I think the many people in front of me in line also stopped.

One evening on the way home (later than usual), I noticed that Mohammed was closing his stand. There was no one else there, but I stopped, anyway, and bought a drink. We started talking, and I learned that he was from Alexandria, Egypt, the father of two young girls, devoutly religious, and a really nice person. He taught me several Arabic expressions, including "insha Allah" (God willing) and "Allah maak" (God be with you). The next morning, he taught me more. (Little did I realize at the time that I would be able to use these expressions when I landed in Jordan a few years later.) I did not learn a lot of expressions back then because I was an infrequent visitor to Washington. Still, Mohammed always remembered me.

One evening on the way home I bought a drink of a type that I do not usually buy. I had a dollar in my hand, but the drink was more than that. I asked Mohammed how much the drink cost. He saw the dollar, smiled, and said "For you, one dollar only." Mohammed seemed like such a friend that I knew I would miss him if he were not there.

That day did come, the day that I would not see Mohammed. On one visit as I was saying goodbye to Mohammed, he told me that he might not be there when I returned. Through diligent work for several years, he had managed to save enough money to buy a home for his family in Alexandria and was returning there to raise his girls not as an absentee father but as one grateful for every day that he would be able to be with them.

Mohammed clearly understood human motivation. He got what he wanted by handing his customers what they needed. No, not food, but plain old human caring. And both he and they went on to have a good day!

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Excerpted and adapted from a collection of vignettes, copyright 2003.