Natasha Regehr
We are climbing up a mountain, and the landscape looks like Mars. Alternately rocky and sandy, the trail requires steady feet, but our shoes slip and slide over the red dust that coats everything. Other than the odd cactus dotting the steep slopes, this is a wasteland.
This is what it’s like to audition for a choir in Casablanca.
First, you email the director, in impeccable French (or, should I say, infantile French that has been nicely elevated by your conveniently bilingual pal back in pleasantly predictable Canada). The director emails you back –eventually– in a casual French that lacks the standards of punctuation and capitalization to which you have grown accustomed in such exchanges. No matter. She is a native speaker. You will allow her this linguistic license.
The content of her message is, essentially, “call me, maybe.”
The second step in auditioning for a choir in Casablanca is a brief moment of panic. Continue reading
I am beginning to think that everyone in this world has an analogue somewhere on another continent. And that a great many of them live in Morocco.
I’m sure you know what I mean: that niggling feeling that someone reminds you of (or perhaps is) someone else. In fact, one of the very first people who greeted me in Casablanca has a vocal cadence much like one of my synchronized swimming buddies in Canada. So, in my head, I call her “Morocco Sharon.” In the confines of this small campus, I have also met Morocco Dave, Morocco Catharine, Morocco Sarah; Morocco Tania, Stephanie, Krystal, Vera, Crystal, Paul, and Darlene; and, most curiously, Morocco Snow White and Morocco Barbie.
My practically perfect house is more than perfect. It is flawless. I am sitting in my beautifully staged living room, enjoying the clean, airy feeling of a place that is ready to “show.” And it will be shown, tomorrow, I hope, before my strategically placed flowers begin to wilt.
For those of you who have been kindly offering advice and making inquiries on my behalf, here’s the deal (or lack thereof…), when it comes to my house:
Sometimes life strikes me as a continual circuit of hopes and disappointments, with a minor victory thrown in from time to time, just to keep the optimism from completely expiring.
Is this a morose perspective? I suppose so. On my better days, that sentence might read, “Life is an ongoing adventure of hopes and challenges, ever prodding us on to new forms of optimism.” Victory has nothing to do with it, from this viewpoint. It’s all about the effort.
But perpetual effort can be tiring, don’t you think? Without little victories, the circuit can wear us down, no matter how resilient we may be. We become caught in this flux of energies, which we constantly misplace and rediscover, in varying proportions. Does anyone else ever feel this way?
I have a lovely little h
ouse. It is, as my childhood idol would say, “practically perfect in every way.” And I am learning, in increments, to let it go.
Part of moving to Morocco, you see, is selecting someone else to inhabit my treasured domicile while I’m away. So far, that has been an emotional process. It requires trust — both in the potential tenant, and in providence, to provide that tenant when the time is right. Strengthening one’s “trust muscles” can be a gruelling task, especially when one feels interminably caught in Fortuna’s spinning wheel.
Who would have thought that moving to Morocco would arouse a sort of grief?
But it has – a strong and foolish grief that has me paralyzed with inactivity. I call it house grief. And I don’t mean that I’m feeling inconvenienced or annoyed (as in, “This broken zipper is causing me grief”); no, I’m embarrassed to say I am grieving over a carefully constructed pile of bricks.
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