Tricks and treats

First, the trick:

P.C. McPrince died Monday, Oct. 30, 2006, from complications of a virus after a weekend of failed life-extending measures. He was about 3 years old.

The Hewlett-Packard laptop served us nobly, surfing the Interweb, bringing us into the blogosphere and ably handling many a vacation photo - though grumbling over multitasking while working with large image files.

Survivors include his father, Seth; mother, Amy; brother, Wiley; and a son, Mac, who was born shortly after his death.

Remembrances to charity. Arrangements by Apple.

----
Now, the treat:

Had our second-annual Halloween carving/costume party Sunday night with our westside gang and extended family.



We had a cowgirl and a Leatherman, a couple of pirates, a stagehand, a wee princess and a tiny Jack-o-lantern, and a Britney and a K-Fed. Guess which one we were?

Roots

This morning I spied a squirrel zipping from limb to limb in one of our two redbuds in the front yard. The commotion jostled a few golden yellow leaves loose, sending them drifting gently to the ground. Although seemingly nothing special, it made me pause and smile because of the change it symbolized.

Amy and I planted those about a year and a half ago where nothing was before. We specifically picked redbuds because they are Oklahoma's state tree. They went into the ground as spindly tangles of branches staked up to protect against the wind, clearly with potential to thrive, but still too weak to support anything.

A year and a half after planting those redbuds, and nearly three years after moving in, we feel real roots growing here. We have good friends throughout the neighborhood, the sort of people with whom we celebrate births, mourn deaths and travel around the world. We go to our favorite restaurants around the corner, end up befriending the owners and maybe even influencing the menus. There's a sense of community taking hold, and it feels good to be part of it.

Our jobs are changing for the better. Much better, in Amy's case - but that's her news to share in due time. Family is coming here for at least one, hopefully two, holidays. It'll be our first time to host a McPrince Thanksgiving or Christmas. I can already imagine the joy of seeing our giant dining table covered with a lovingly prepared meal and surrounded by family and friends.

Somehow, we've turned the once-trashed shell of our house into a warm, vibrant, inviting home. Our late friend Richard once said, rightly so, that the neighborhood "still had a little West Virginia in it." Now that same neighborhood has a little momentum in it instead.

And this year, those trees out front - trees that'll stand long after we're gone - are sturdy enough to support a squirrel. Maybe next year, it'll be a nest.

Camping and crabbing

We spent the weekend camping and crabbing (or at least trying) with Jake and Tiff and Dan and Karin at the Oregon Coast.

We had outstanding weather for any month at the coast, much less almost into November. Highs in the 60s and 70s, not a drop of rain and hardly any wind. Felt almost like summer again - perfect for first-time coast campers. Jake said one of us must be good luck for such fine weather.

Spent Saturday afternoon hanging out around camp, taking a long walk with the group down Nehalem Bay to watch the sun extinguish itself in the Pacific, and then cooking - mushrooms, corn, veggies, steak and potatoes - on the campfire and visiting over drinks.

Up early Sunday morning thanks to Tiff's wake-up call: the dialog track of Robin Williams' "Good morning, Vietnam!" from a CD player pressed against the tent at 7 a.m. (Thankfully, she decided the 5:30 a.m. start would have been too traumatic.) In the boat around 8 and dropping our first rings minutes later.

A few hours later, Jake joked that one of us must be bad luck for crabbing. Turns out it's a bad season for crabbing in that area. We caught nothing big enough to keep. But we watched the sun come up over the Coast Range, dinked around in a boat for a few hours and learned how to crab for next year.

We'll be back, and we'll catch our breakfast rather than relying on some clams and half a "sympathy crab" from the shop owner back on shore. But even if we didn't catch it ourselves this year, it's tough to beat eating a fresh crab sandwich while sitting 15 feet from the water on a sunny morning on the Oregon Coast with friends.

Why we travel

The New York Times has an appropriately headlined travel piece up, Under Morocco's Spell. The story is longish, but check out the audio slide show if you're just after the essence.

The story is based in the High Atlas mountains, which we crossed during our drive north from the Sahara into Marrakesh. Stunning doesn't begin to describe the vistas.

At the end of the slide show the reporter says:

"We live in complicated times and you read the paper and get a sense of a very dangerous and threatening world. And then you travel abroad and you meet people who defy all expectations and any over-simplifications that you might develop sitting at home by yourself in America."

Not to sound too preachy about it, but that's exactly the sentiment that sticks with me from our travels this year.

In April, we visited Oaxaca in the days before Easter, when it was rich with religious symbolism and pageantry. Shortly afterward, the city turned into a riot zone with protesters beginning a months-long occupation of the zocalo where we sat and ate fresh pastries and listened to the scratchy whisk-whisk of people using brooms made from twigs to sweep the promenade clean.

In September, we flew into Casablanca in the days before Ramadan. Three years earlier, Islamic extremists' suicide bombings had killed more than 40 people in that city. Terrorism-related arrests continued in the days and weeks before our trip. But despite some concerns people raised going in, the joy of why we travel - the beauty of defied expectations and unraveled over-simplifications, if you will - unfolded before us time after time in our two-week journey all over Morocco.

It was true in the High Atlas. It was true in the Rif. It was true in the Sahara and in the souks. The fear of the unknown, of assuming the worst of anything unfamiliar, is so prominent in this increasingly isolated post-9/11 world. But its fallacy was never more clear to me than when we sat on a rooftop in Fez at sunset, 14 Westerners utterly transfixed and silenced by the beauty of the call to prayer slowly starting, building volume, echoing around that ancient city and into our brains. The reverberations were powerful enough to shatter any preconceived notions of Islam.

So, for me at least, that's the why we travel: To shed some of that baggage we allow ourselves to be burdened with at home. Without fail, we come back lighter for the experience.

Housekeeping

As you can see, we've redesigned the site. Here's hoping it's better organized and easier to follow. I was sick of the old, original look. Plus, I just like how the photos pop off the new black backdrop.

Beyond the changes in color and typography (both straight from a Blogger template), new features include:

• Neighbors - links to some family and friends
  
• Escapes (and escapades) - links to this year's Mexico and Morocco trips
  
• Tags - a key-word organizing system to search posts by content

Also, Amy has started her long overdue foodie blog over at The Dinner Hour. Check it out. She'll be writing about food, its role in culture, kitchen tips and tricks and, of course, translating her knack for making up a dish on the fly into easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes.

Leave a comment here or there to let us know what you think.

In other news:

• Finally got to see James McMurtry in concert. Fitting that we went with friends Mike and Susan, who introduced us to his music in the first place. Line of the night, upon introducing "Choctaw Bingo," "This is for all the crystal methodists in the house..." The man may live in Texas, but he's got Oklahoma down pat.
• We're off next weekend for a crabbing trip at the coast with friends.
  
• More to come on Morocco. The day-by-day retelling was boring even me. So instead, I'll be writing about highlights from various cities as the mood strikes, as with the recent piece on Marrakesh. Look forward to the stories of my new scars - plural. See, this guy wanted to barter for Amy...
  

The magic of Marrakesh

We've been back for around two weeks now, and Morocco is still as fresh in my mind as the smell of just-squeezed orange juice served in the sprawling main square of Marrakesh.

I can't get the country - that city, specifically - out of my head.

I was sitting at work last Friday, about 4 o'clock Portland time, watching the rims fill up and knowing a long night was ahead of me. My mind drifted back to Jemaa el Fna, where it was 11 o'clock.

I imagined Amy and I, sitting at the cafe we'd visited days ago, perched on a raised patio overlooking that giant square, sharing a bottle of wine we'd managed to scare up from a friend with connections. Ordering on paper because the waiter speaks French and we know nothing beyond "Oui." Watching the blur of humanity drift back and forth in every direction at once. Listening to the buzz of thousands of voices, picking up bits of conversations left and right in the late-night, fast-breaking revelry of Ramadan. Arabic here. Berber and French there. Some Spanish and German in that direction. Tidbits of Dutch behind us. And, at our little table for two, laughing as we realize we are inadvertently bouncing from English to Spanish to the little bit of Arabic we know.


Then later, warmed by each other and the wine as the desert air cools, we stroll through the square itself, people-watching up close. So close you brush shoulders, smell new aftershaves and catch flashes of eye color deep in the throng. Surrounded by people in every direction, alive and full of life, as midnight nears. The snake charmers and fortune tellers, just waiting to spin their magic, it seems, directly into your soul. The restaurant barkers, the call of their voices no match for the aroma of their food, but both working to lure you to their table for another in an endless menu of dishes whose spices are sure to dance on your unfamiliar tongue. The musicians, their rhythms rolling out of the drums and pinging off the banjo strings, washing across the onlookers and working into our ears, flipping some switch in our brains and involuntarily setting some part, any part, of our bodies into motion -- hips swinging here, a head nodding there, maybe just a toe tap, tap, tapping halfway around the world from all you knew before.


Now, back here, I find myself reading all sorts of pieces about the place I just visited. Stuff I'm sure must have run all the time before, but stuff I never noticed.

Maybe it's my little attempt to keep a piece of the Moroccan spirit present in me today rather than tucked away as a memory to be recalled in some distant tomorrow.

Here's a great quote from one such piece, a profile of Spanish expatriate novelist Juan Goytisolo, from The New York Times Magazine:

"People ask, 'Why do you live in Marrakesh?'" Goytisolo told me with a chuckle. "I ask them, 'Have you seen it?'" In Jemaa el Fna, Goytisolo explained, he finds all the heterogeneity that is in danger of disappearing from Western cities. "In the '70s, when I was very poor, I was offered a permanent teaching post in Edmonton. I realized I would rather starve in Marrakesh than be a millionaire in Alberta."

So as all the pressures, the demands of work, the stresses of life try to creep back into my brain, here's hoping that Moroccan mojo helps fend them off and keeps me balanced in ways I wasn't before the trip.

Perspective, I suppose, is everything. And my view from Marrakesh is mesmerizing.

Slideshow: Third time's the charm... I hope

Well, damnit.

I can't get the slideshow to embed in a posting. Worse still, for some reason Blogger's not letting me delete the two bogus attempts to embed it.

So for now, you'll have to go view it on the Flickr site where I built it:

Morocco '06 slideshow

(Thanks to Quentin for the great tip on batch-processing the photos to resize them for the Web. Saved a ton of time.)

To repeat, here's some notes for your guided tour:

The 150 pictures - we edited down from 700-plus, I swear! - run in this sequence:

1. Casablanca
Scenes from Hassan II Mosque

2. Rabat
Begins with a bureaucratic-looking building

3. Children from around the country
Awwwww...

4. Chefchaouen
Begins with landscape shot of this town, famed for its blue-washed walls, in the mountains

5. Volubilis, Meknes and Fez
Begins with the ruins of Volubilis, then on to the gate and market of Meknes and then to the skyline view of the overwhelming, ancient and mosaic-filled Fez

6. On the road
If only I could pair this up with a good travelin' song

7. Sahara and the south
Starts with Amy at an oasis, followed by me playing in the world's largest sandbox

8. Marrakesh
The sign makes clear you've arrived at our favorite city

9. Essaouria and Casablanca
The gulls at the coast swarm Essaouria's "Castles Made of Sand," then it's back the Casablanca for one last night before flying home.

You can set the display time between 1 and 10 seconds, to take as long (our family) or as little (everyone else) as you'd like with each image.

Enjoy.

Day 1, cont.: Rabat

After visiting the Hassan II Mosque, we drove about an hour north to Rabat. With around 1 million people, it's considerably smaller than Casablanca. And being the nation's capital, the city has a certain bureaucratic feel to broad swaths of its newer streets and architecture.



Here was our introduction to something we'd see across Morocco: Ville nouvelle versus medina. Or, more simply, new city versus old city. Each town's original core - the medina - is like a city unto itself, often nestled behind the walls that centuries ago offered protection. Crossing those walls, we learned, was like stepping into a different world.


The streets inside the old cities are narrower, more congested, but not with cars. Instead, people are everywhere on foot and on bike. Horses, donkeys and people haul all sizes of two-wheeled carts. Everything seems to be in a constant state of motion. There's no block-by-block grid. And the buildings, if not actually tying on to the ones adjacent to it, look as though they could slouch against one another for support if too exhausted to stand fully erect after centuries of use.




Although nondescript from the street, the buildings were generally astonishing on the interior, as we observed at our lunch stop, the Center for Cross-Cultural Learning. Our guide compared it, in a sense, to the princple of the veil many Arab women wear. The outside world sees little of the wonders within.


After filling our stomachs and resting a bit, we heard a presentation on Islam that gave us a good base of knowledge for the rest of the trip. We were fading fast after so much travel and so little sleep. So soon the group headed to the first hotel, got cleaned up for dinner and got to sleep.

Day 1, cont.: Casablanca

We hit the ground running, heading from the airport directly to the Hassan II Mosque, whose 689-foot minaret is the world's tallest.

The site is considered the apex of North African Islamic architecture.

Overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and named for the former king, the site was built between 1986-1993 with money raised by public subscription.

It made for a stunning introduction to the Muslim world, spinning into a discussion of the principles of Islam and the importance of mosques in the layout of cities.

Day 1: Portland to Casablanca

From Seth's notebook:

The sun has just risen before us - filling the cabin with a pink-to-orange-to-red glow at 30,000 feet - minutes before we're to land in Morocco.

What a welcome to Africa. And what a way to shake off the groginess from 24 hours of travel. We left our doorstep at 3:40 a.m. Saturday, lifted off the ground at PDX at 6:10 and now are about to touch down in Casablanca around 7 a.m. the next day. It's sure to be a whole new world to us.

I've been reading the 9/11 issue of The New Yorker on and off during the trans-Atlantic flight. We've heard a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle concerns from people about this vacation. And the international terminal of JFK might well have been the most diverse place this Oklahoma kid's been until, well, a few more minutes from now. I've started into a timely article by George Packer, who is also from Oklahoma if I remember right. It includes this passage to bear in mind as we start this trip:

"Islamism has taken on the frightening and faceless aspect of the masked jihadi, the full-length veil, the religious militia, the blurred figure in a security video, the messianic head of state, the anti-American mob. At Islam's core, in the countries of the Middle East from Egypt to Iran, tajdid and islah (revivial and reform) have helped push societies toward extremes of fervor, repression and violence.

But on the periphery, from Senegal to Indonesia - where the vast majority of Muslims live - Islamic reform comes in more varieties than most Westerners imagine. At the edges, the influence of American policy and the Israeli-Palestinian siege is less overwhelming; and it is easier to see that the real drama in Islam is the essential dilemma addressed by (Mahmoud Muhammed) Taha [whom the article is about]: how to revive ancient sacred texts in a way that allows one to live in a modern world."

Judging from what I've seen so far -- from the adorable boy wearing a "soccer champ" shirt sitting with his mother and grandmother, both with heads covered and wearing full-length jalabas, or the woman in the flowing sunny yellow robes and head scarf complete with the Georgia Tech logo - I have to agree.

Here's to the beginning of what's sure to be an amazing and eye-opening two weeks, for us and others, I hope.

Meet our guides and driver:

MOUDEN ABDESLAM
A childhood friend of Abdul's from Chefchaouen, we call him Abdeslam. He is president of a professional guide association in Chefchaouen, where he still lives. In his late 30s, he's married with one child, a son. He speaks Arabic, Berber, Spanish, French, English, for starters.

ABDELMOUGHIG AKDI
Our friend in Vancouver, the inspiration behind this trip, goes by Abdul. He owns the Mint Tea import store in our neighborhood with his wife, Jenna. In his late 30s, he's married with one child, a son. He speaks Arabic, French, English, and maybe a little Berber and Spanish.

OMAR
A friend of Abdeslam's who lives in Tangier, he is our driver for the trip. Abdeslam wanted him, in particular, behind the wheel after working with him in the past. He's married with one child, a son, whom we'll meet along the way. He speaks Arabic and French, and a little Spanish.