XIII: Food and Fall

30 October 2009

Spinach comes in two kilo bunches here. Massive leaves and long stalks tied with black string and caked with mud. It takes time to pick through and clean it; the lower half ends up in the garbage (a kilo of stems) but there’s spinach for days. We eat it for breakfast (with poached eggs on top as my father used to make), and for dinner, sometimes on its own, sometimes mixed into pasta.

Cooking around here really improved with Peter’s visit and afterward. He’s always creative in the kitchen where I’d just as soon make beans and rice. And day after day, even beans and rice decked with garlic the way Katie makes them so tasty, needs a break.

So we bought piles of apples from the street vendor near the Fulbright House, and made applesauce and hot apple tea. We bought a hand blender at the Duty-Free Shop on the way back from Syria and Katie makes juice from kiwi and pomegranate. We baked banana bread; we stir fry the great vegetables of the Jordan Valley; we roast eggplant and garlic; I made my “famous” Spanish tortilla.

It’s less than a month since Peter went back. We never had our date with arguilla but we did tour the Roman Citadel atop one of Amman’s great hills and heard the call to prayer bouncing through the valleys at dusk; we watched a performance in the Roman amphitheatre, sitting where human bottoms have sat for centuries for entertainment. We ate falafel at Hashem’s – far more famous than my tortilla, and went to the local police station to extend our visas for three more months. This entailed a blood test to prove absence of HIV. The nurse in a hole-in-the-wall clinic pulled blood from me faster than anyone in my life. Not a mark on my arm, either.

Syria came close on Peter’s departure. If “Damascus” raises exotic aromas and images in your imagination they are all right on. Staying in the old city was like a moment out of the Tales of the Arabian Nights. That’s how I remember Baghdad from our 1976 trip: ancient and contemporary; magical and hard-nosed; narrower-than-narrow streets, higher-than-high covered souks, and a sky as high as the history of the city is old. Besides the hand blender, we came home from Syria with a small carpet, a lamp that’s perfect to hang in our cabin in Maine, pistachios and pomegranates.

For the pomegranates are in and they are good. They were squeezing fresh pomegranate juice in the Damascus souks. “POM” brand can come here and bow. We are devouring them like peaches in summer. If Persephone’s pomegranate penalty applied here, Katie and I would be in Jordan several lifetimes.

***

“Fall” in Amman means falling rain. It rains hard. And people don’t seem to flee the downpour. The water is welcome. Children squeal in the park across the street although the birds quiet down. Folks hang out at the hospital door. Taxis still beep for riders. And almost no one uses an umbrella.

We asked a taxi driver why not one evening, as we flagged one down and got in soaked to the bone. “Umbrellas,” he said in very good English even though he’d never left the country, “look silly on a man. They are not masculine.” Umbrellas are for wimps, in other words. And for women? “They make a woman look even more frail. It’s OK for a woman.”

It was a two-dinar ride with this guy searching for the American Center for Oriental Research, up a hill opposite the University of Jordan. We walked in wet to a reception for the deans of admission for Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard – they and the few local alumnae of those esteemed institutions living here. The deans are recruiting in several Arabic-speaking nations. Several of them made a beeline for Katie.

***

After we dropped Peter at Alia International Airpot, Emad brought us to his home for tea with his mother and father. It was a sunny day. The tea was sweet. We stumbled through conversation with fractured language and smiles. He wants his mother and his wife to teach us to cook local food. We’ll go to the market, the people’s market, he says, and buy the freshest ingredients. That’s the guy we hire to drive us places.

For a week we lived off the eggplant parmesan Peter made before he left. Tonight I made shrimp scampi with the frozen shrimp that were also his legacy. On Friday, Emad says, if he’s not driving others to Petra, we’ll cook.