Right of Way 202

 If you're a small vehicle and you want to cross the main flow of traffic, you pretty much have to wait until there's a clear spot to go. The only other option is to get a bunch of other small vehicles who are going the same direction, the more the better. Then you all slowly but surely inch forward into the cross traffic, together. Sooner or later one of the big vehicles is going to give way, then the others going that way have to stop, then you can all cross.

Right of Way

It's the antique car show in Frostburg this weekend, and a lot of fancy cars are driving by with people having fun in them. And I just heard a horn beep.

In India, many different kinds of horns punctuate every trip to anywhere. On the open road, between cities, the most common are lorry horns, loud shrill blasts that rival the roaring of the engines. They tell villagers they're approaching, warn animals and small children off the road. Lorries also use their horns at curves in the road, of which there are many in the mountains, to tell other drivers to find a spot to get out of the way. At night, you're supposed to dip your lights, but more likely you'll get a horn blared instead. The lorries get the right of way over everyone else, and their horns say so.

In the old days, the lorries all had air horns, with the rubber air bulb within easy reach of the drivers hand so he could give a quick honk-a whenever he needed to. Nowadays, they're mostly electric.

The long distance busses blast their horns in the same way, but many busses have unique musical sequences, very loud. If you're riding the bus you need to get to know your bus horn, because when the driver finishes his lunch you need to be back in your seat when he blows the horn, or have a very good advocate, so you won't be waiting for the next bus. If a bus meets a lorry at a curve, the bus has to move out of the way.

As you get closer to the city, of course the volume increases, by number and by frequency. Now you can hear, in order of right of way: large government and VIP vehicles whose sophistocated single-tone horns let foot traffic know to pay attention; city busses don't have fancy horns as often, but drivers are never afraid to hold the note for as long as it takes to get the right passengers for the trip; taxis use smart, multiple beeps to communicate the importance of their trip; minibusses used for mass transit get a slightly lower rank and often have a caller, the driver's apprentice, who adds his voice to the long drawn-out horn tone to announce routes and departures; then come any number of private cars -- each driver develops his own rhythm, put-puts and motorcycles whose high squeaky horns give them away, cycle rickshaws and bicycles who use the same metalic ringer to establish their spot on the road. Horse drawn tongas, ox- and camel- carts and coolie-drawn cargo carts get last place, using the drivers' sticks to play the spokes on the wheels as they roll.

It all works amazingly well, if you follow the system.

Smells Like Yak

There's a funny sweet smell in the van, especially when we turn on the heater, in winter. We know that smell; it's antifreeze. We've had leaks before. When we finally have a chance to get it looked at, it turns out there's a pernicious leak into the inside of the van, right under the driver's feet. Don the Mechanic patches it up for us.

Next time I ride in the van, it doesn't smell like antifreeze anymore. It smells a bit like mechanic. But it's a little bit different. I sniff again. "It smells like yak," I say. 

My husband laughs, "You are the only person I know who would actually know what yak smells like!"

Once when I was pretty little -- little enough so I can just barely remember it -- my family went on a trek to Jomsom. I was so little they had hired a coolie just to carry me, in a basket on his back. One day we came to a wide-open, barren plain, high in the mountains, that was strewn with round black rocks. I remember my coolie put my basket down and cracked a rock open for me, and inside was a fossil of a curled up sea creature. Even at that young age, I was pretty impressed. We were high in the Himalaya in a dry plateau! I still have that fossil somewhere.

In my memory, I walked across the high plain without my coolie. The wind was so strong my mom and I leaned into it steeply while we walked. On the far side there was an old plane wreck, perched at an odd angle, empty windows leering hauntingly, just begging to be explored.

As we climbed the gentle slope out of that flat valley, we passed a yak train loaded with wares to trade or sell in far away places. The yak drivers asked, "Kahaa jaane ho?" Where are you going? It's the polite greeting on a trail in the Himalaya. I remember being given some cubes of yak cheese to suck on. The locals ate the cheese dry and hard, so that they could carry it with them for days and savor the flavors and nutrition.

That night, in my memory, we stopped at a village home to spend the night. Our family sat in the dark kitchen around the cozy cooking fire with the family whose home it was, while our coolies chatted in the shadowy corners. Behind them, the family's yaks munched solemnly and peacefully near the manger.

I don't know why the van smelled like that. We don't have to worry about antifreeze anymore though, because now we drive all-electric.

The Stream

I observe the stream, sourced from a clear mountain spring. It's on a journey to something great, something global. On its journey it passes over and through meadows and boulders and pebbles and forges its course with a single purpose. Its energy is closer, though, determined to find the best way forward, encouraged by gravity and elevation. It instinctively knows where it's going, but it experiences here and now to the fullest.

The stream follows channels previous waters have formed, and also branches out, adapting to new obstacles and circumstances. On its journey the stream spreads (mostly) life and joy, breezes and melodies - sometimes peaceful, sometimes excited, sometimes ambitious - but sometimes an overabundance of resources leads to flooding, destruction and ultimately new courses being carved out for the future. 

As it flows, it joins other streams and changes its character as they share a purpose and offer their origins and become a new branch - then join other tributaries until they all together become a mighty river, much different than the bouncing, flouncing mountain stream. When did they cease to be tributaries? And all the while, the heart is still of a mountain stream singing to the trees melody and harmony together.

Audio in - Audio out - Video (Pan/Tilt/Zoom?)

God made us to live in community, and living in community means communicating. Many people send and receive messages by using their voices and ears and brains. That's not to mention the emotional messages that go back and forth between communicators: how you're feeling today, past experience, if you're in pain or not, reading body language and tone of voice.

Is it any wonder that providing a meaningful, genuine worship experience electronically is a challenge? What's the audio source? Who needs to receive it? How? What's the video source? What's the best angle? How do  you include people who are worshiping online and people in the building? And what if the answers to those questions are different than last week's answers?

The Chorus of the Trees

The cicadas are coming out of hiding, getting ready to start their next 17-year life cycle. In the hot days of early summer, they serenade us with their intense mating call. I guess they'll be joined by more and more of their brothers in the coming weeks.

The tree peepers have already been in song, ever since the days and evenings first got warm. Some friends have an on-going discussion if they're frogs or bugs, then another friend called them peepers, and of course that's what they are. I refuse to Google it! (I did Google the "periodical cicadas".)

For me, it's the chorus of the world around us. In the foothills of the Himalayas in the early summer, the cicadas sing in the treetops in anticipation of monsoon's imminent arrival. The volume crescendos till the first drops of rain, then they are quiet until next summer.

We all have parts in the song. We people just sing along the harmony. Together we make a beautiful symphony.

as interpreted by Sesame Street

Kismis for Christmas

It’s an old story whose flavor gets better with the telling, just as fruitcake improves with age.

In 1968 in Nepal, nobody knew it was Christmas time except the few of us foreigners. The big holiday celebrated here is Desai, back in October, with lights on rooftops and windows, huge tall swings hung from branches, hand-made-foot-operated Ferris wheels, dancing and exchanging gifts of festival foods - slightly sweet sel-roti and crunchy, smoky flavored chewra.

My sister and brother had arrived in early December, home from their first semester in boarding school. Judy went to explore the bazaar with Mom. In our dusty, provincial market, a woman selling foodstuffs and various sundries saw them shopping and called out that she had the most wonderful treasure from far away. The vendor's enthusiasm for her stash of rock-hard, pale, dirty-looking dried dates sparked an idea in my sister's head. She bargained for the gems, then pulled out the cookbook GramB had bequeathed her when she left for the other side of the world.

After that first Christmas fruitcake (featuring mainly, you guessed it, dates), a tradition grew. Starting in August when she first got back to boarding school in India, my sister would portion out her monthly pocket money (she had to buy her own shampoo and toothpaste, too) and hunt for ingredients. She bought black and golden raisins (called kismis), cashews, sometimes even almonds, goodies from Kashmir and further west - food of Persian and Moghul kings and queens -  and stored them safely in her trunk until Going Down Day. 

Going home was days of travel by train, rickshaw, bus, or jeep, and walking. At home, she learned where to go in our little bazaar for ghur, fresh-milled flour, and walnuts. What is ghur called in English? There really isn't a translation - it's partway along the process of sugar cane juice becoming sugar. Think of not-quite "jaggery". We didn't have brown sugar in the village in those days, so she improvised. Over the years she researched and shared recipes to make candied orange peel and pickled watermelon rind to add to the recipe. 

From the kismis we picked out stems, ant and bee bodies, rocks, and clay clods that got swept up off the clean, sun-soaked roof top in Kashmir where those grapes became raisins. I remember helping to pick through the raisins with my little kid fingers. The bigger people all helped crack thick-shelled walnuts and almonds to get the meats out, working around the dining table by lamplight after dinner. I didn't even like fruitcake at the time, but I loved helping my big sister clean the raisins and stir the ghur on the top of the kerosene-gas stove. There were sticks of straw and other sweet-loving creatures to pick out of that too, as I stirred.

We put up a homemade Swedish Christmas tree with three branches - we now affectionately refer to it as the Charlie Brown tree. There were handmade decorations, and our gifts were simple. That first year in Pokhara, we had some gifts that arrived in packages from the States in various states of wholeness, but in later years we made gifts for each other: stitched shirts, painted pictures, handmade wooden boxes, warm cable-knit sweaters. They were made with love and care because we couldn't always get what you thought you needed in Pokhara in those days. We usually took down a puzzle from the shelf in the attic and kept it on the table for everyone to work on.

From a handful of hard, dry dates discovered in the Pokhara bazaar in 1968, Judy's gift grew to making and giving away four, then six, then more fruitcakes at Christmastime. After she graduated from high school and settled back in the States for college (where she bought all the ingredients at the supermarket), she mailed 20-some fruitcakes in time for Christmas to family and other loved ones. Many years later she passed on the tradition to my daughter Clara, where the time-tested recipe has morphed into a yummy gluten-free version as Grampa Bob eats GF ("Grampa Friendly"). It still gets sent around the country to people we love, in time for the holidays -- even in 2020 with COVID mail!