Soinbhe

“I always keep an open mind about the gentlefolk, you see.”

At her desk overlooking Ireland’s cliff shore set with a pale inlay of the North Atlantic, Soinbhe whispered as if the books surrounding us might hear. In Donegal, you still avoid saying “fairy” whenever you can.

Shelves of classic literature and accounts of the Troubles, fairytales and other Irish history covered three walls of her study, the fourth a window onto the dark-green seascape below. As she handed me a mug of coffee and the wind tapped outside, she pulled one volume from a corner of the library that had her name on the spine: A Hive for the Honeybee. “This one’s quite feminist.” She winked and told me she had been an author before age stole her ability to concentrate. A week later, I would read it cover-to-cover lying on the floor of the Cancun airport on my way to Cuba.

Her voice was so low that I could barely hear what she said, so I leaned in to ask about the collection of fairytales that also had her name on the spine. What was it like to live in Ireland? Do people still believe them? Her eyes twinkled as she smoothed wisps of white hair and deployed a bit more brogue, very very softly.

“D’you see the ringfort over there,” she said, glancing at the shock of green hill closest the sea and pointing inland. “There’s a fairy path from it to the other one there.” Ringforts were ancient grey ruins all over the landscape, I had read. Many attribute their construction to the “gentry” or the “gentlefolk.” The so-called ley lines between them are set apart for the otherworldly creatures in a kind of fragile truce, and rarely do people in Ireland build a house on a known ley line, even today. Soinbhe explained that it was particularly dangerous to be caught unawares when you cross one. “You have to tuck your thumbs into your fists like this.” She held up both hands to teach me the technique—with some urgency, I thought. “Otherwise, they lead you away by your thumbs. I always do it just to be safe.” She sipped her coffee.

“One day I walked my dog over there, and I must have forgotten, because hours later I stumbled home from the forest with no recollection where I’d been. My husband rushed me, panic-stricken, to the hospital to check my wits.” She leaned back. “And there was nothing wrong with me a’tall.” Far below, the waves crested along the entire length of the bay in aching, slow, endless rows.

That night when I crossed the beach in the dark, hearing the rush of surf unseen to my right and sensing the mass of rock face ahead that I would ascend by a narrow path, I kept one thumb tucked into my fist, the other out.

Ilmari

When we met under the stars in the western corner of the Sahara Desert in Morocco, I invited Ilmari to a dune away from camp to tell me his story. I listened in pitch black to his faceless voice, dipping my fingers in the cool sand as he said he grew up raising reindeer in Lapland, the remote north of Finland, and escaped soon as he could to find tech work in Poland. It wasn’t till he left home that he first realized not everywhere has an aurora borealis. At sunrise, I photographed our camels as they left us.

When we met at a cafe in Helsinki, Ilmari announced that he was experimenting with rejection therapy. “The goal is to be rejected,” he said, “so you make requests you know people will reject. The purpose is to get past those unnecessary fears that stop us from living, to get used to being rejected. First, I went into the street in Helsinki and asked a random person for a ride 45 minutes away. The person stroked their chin, looked at me, and answered, ‘Sure, why not!’” Ilmari burst out laughing and shook his head. “So then I went to my barber and while she was cutting my hair, I told her, ‘Look, my dog just gave birth to all these puppies and I don’t know what to do with them. Will you take them?’ She paused, looked at me, and answered, ‘Sure, why not!’ So then I had to explain that I didn’t really have any puppies. Damn, I thought. How am I gonna get rejected in Finland! Everyone is too nice!”

When we walked down out of the sprawling Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives behind the Old City in Jerusalem, Ilmari stopped and stared up at the barbed wire surrounding the Dominus Flevit Church. I pointed at the shards of green glass embedded in the stone lip of wall and he gasped. “Damn. Why would they do that?”

Dorje

I first saw Everest over my shoulder as I was digging through a side pocket in my pack on the roof of a bus in Tibet. Everest stood taller than the other peaks like a blue cuspid in a row of teeth set in the dun jaw of the horizon. I knew the shape by heart. Even at a distance it pierced me with fear. I found the Imodium and clambered back down into the bus. Allison had buried herself in the back seat under a pile of fleeces. She couldn’t even eat. No one among the dozen passengers spoke English, so I couldn’t tell how much longer till we would cross the Himalayas and arrive in Nepal, but the smile next to me revealed a gold tooth. Dorje, my seat mate, had his hair fastened up in a knot with a turquoise brooch and wore coral earrings. Sticking out of his backpack between us and tapping me with every bump in the road was the lifeless black hoof of a goat.

When we did begin the ascent, snow started as night fell. We passed one outpost of concrete shacks where another bus had spun out of control and been abandoned. Ours began to fishtail wildly in the deep drifts on the road. Then there was nothing. Only a sheer white drop covered by clouds on our right and grey rock face to the left. Allison and I held hands as the driver lit a cigarette, narrowed his eyes, and careened toward a curve on the ice-covered road with seemingly no traction. I accepted that I would die.

The bus got stuck half an hour later and a couple freed their baggage from the netting on the roof and took off on foot in the darkness. I asked Dorje frantically “How long?” through wild gestures. He flashed ten fingers and his calm smile. I looked to Allison. “Think he’s saying ten minutes?” I threw our bags off the roof as the bus reversed then lurched away back in the direction we had come, its taillights disappearing and leaving us in silent darkness.

After our first hour walking, the couple’s tracks disappeared. After two we ran out of water. After three, I noticed dirt under my footsteps and looked up. At the very top of the black sky where the silhouetted peaks ended was an almond gash of stars. After four, we saw the glow on the horizon that was the border village of Zhangmu, midway along the “Friendship Highway” from China to India.

Xun

Thirteen years ago I made students in China indulge my dream of being a filmmaker. Their English cinema class wrote and filmed a short which I then edited and soundtracked and they named “Taste of Reality.” It was about unrequited love.

Ten years later, out of the blue, I ran into one of them in Mexico City where he covered Latin America as a videojournalist for a leading Chinese news agency. He said the idea came from our class. He had never imagined he would be a filmmaker until that project awoke something that altered the path of his life. We sat across a wide table in the dining room of the hotel where Gabriel García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude in exile, and Xun ordered plate after plate that obviously neither of us could finish—enchiladas suizas drizzled in white cheese sauce, sautéed shrimp, chili poblanos—all the food of the best city in the world. When I protested, he brushed aside my hand, saying, “You are my teacher. I must.”

He said that covering the earthquake in Oaxaca was the first time he had witnessed death. It was on such a large scale he still couldn’t process it. He just filmed and reported. He marveled at how he had grown up honoring his ancestors every Mid-Autumn Day in China, cleaning their graves and bringing offerings, but nothing prepared him for Mexicans’ relationship with death. He watched families in Yucatan disinter and scrub clean the bones of their departed. 

When Fidel Castro passed away, Xun covered the funeral parade along the length of the island of Cuba. Halfway he met an old Chinese man who materialized from the crowd, elated at finding a long lost compatriot. The man had immigrated in his youth when China and Cuba formalized their relations around shared Communism. After just a moment, the man’s excitement faded to sorrow as he realized he could no longer understand Xun’s Mandarin, and he faded back into the cheering crowd.

Andrea

Andrea taught me how to pick olives in Tuscany. You spread fine mesh nets under the trees in early October and shake their trunks for all you’re worth, sometimes with a machine, so the olives all drop down and you can scoop them up and take them straight to the local press where they ooze a neon green I’ve never seen in the yellow bottles of olive oil in grocery stores in the U.S. Standing in the grove after we worked, sweating beside a row of cypresses near the house, he scratched a halved clove of garlic across the face of a toasted wedge of bread, closing his eyes and snuffing the aroma, then drizzled the neon green fresh olive oil over it and all over the white cloth underneath, handed it to me and a glass of red wine, raised his own with his childish smile, and gave me the strongest buzz I have ever experienced—just from the fresh oil and garlic.

Andrea also taught me how to find truffles in the forest. We followed his little white dog, Bella, as she darted on and off the path snuffling at the roots of particular trees here and there and pawing delightedly whenever she found one. He would kneel his powerful frame beside her and delicately excavate the black knobbed truffle, give Bella a treat, and then tenderly caress her ears till she smiled. I noticed she was missing her front teeth. Altogether she found five truffles our first time out, and in the middle of a clearing, Andrea produced a table, a series of local sheep cheeses, a hotplate on which he scrambled eggs with one of the sliced truffles, charcuterie, and a bubbling bottle of Prosecco. Then he explained the missing teeth. His passion project is rescuing strays and retraining them to be not only premiere truffle-hunters but also highly sought-after cadaver dogs. He tours Italy solving crimes and giving lectures on the olfactory arts. He said that often, the men who sell truffles yank out their dogs’ teeth so they don’t eat the truffles they find. Andrea’s red face softened tearfully as he stroked Bella’s chin. “Why can’t people understand? You just have to love them.”

The stories people tell about the animals they love reveal so much—Anja, Tony, Anna.

Angel

Being a house painter in Boston made me wonder, in awe, for the first time in life, what it actually feels like to immigrate to the U.S. Our crew came from all over. Bogey would place a towel on the seat of his Lexus at the end of the day and ease behind the wheel covered in paint, careful to not even graze the upholstery with the dried splotches on his elbows. A microbiologist, he came from Mongolia when his wife took a job at Harvard. George, a grizzled old-timer from Greece, beckoned me close over lunch on my first day—fresh from the long drive from Chicago—and declared with raised eyebrows, “You know … Jesus was married,” then disappeared into his van to get high.

Angel, my most frequent partner, came from Puerto Rico. Just a little older, he took me under his wing despite speaking English only in phrases. When we stood face-to-face bracing a forty-foot ladder, he pumped a bicep and scowled playfully, “Like a man!” He sang every song on the radio, but when his favorite—“Breathe (2 AM)” by Anna Nalick—got to the chorus, he stared into my eyes and swept his arms imploringly.

One day at 5 am I printed out MapQuest directions as usual to the address of the new job site and followed them to a street in Brookline, one of Boston’s wealthy neighborhoods. I parked behind Angel’s white van and went into the house; the front door was unlocked. “Angel?” I called into the spacious foyer. “Angel? Are you there?” I took off my shoes and climbed the grand staircase, the hairs slowly standing on the back of my neck. At the top I took one step toward the master bedroom when I suddenly saw a woman in bed there through the open door, her arm draped to the floor, the man sleeping next to her shirtless. I froze, realizing I was an intruder and anything could happen if they woke up. I backtracked as silently as I could, adrenaline surging. I grabbed my shoes and jumped out of the house and into my car, panting and double-checking the address. When I rang the doorbell across the street, Angel opened with a smile and sang, “Juuuuuust breeeeeeeathe.”

Vicente

My first night in Santiago, Chile I said hi to the older man gathering up the ends of carrots he cut next to me in the kitchen of our hostel. I asked how long he was staying. Vicente was 85, wearing a beige cardigan, his eyes watery. When my Spanish flailed, he switched to English and said with a pained smile, “I am just waiting to die.” It was the only time I didn’t ask the story. I went back to my room with a nod.

Desalegn

At the last minute I found a professional to look over my taxes here in Edgewater in Chicago. Desalegn saved me a few thousand dollars! As he punched in the numbers, he asked why I had a grant from the government, just making small talk. When I explained the English Language Fellowship and that I taught in Israel last year, he got a faraway look and said how much Ethiopian Christians like him long to visit Jerusalem. This is one of the smallest best gifts you can ever give a person I’ve found: to say sincerely, “I want to go where you’ve come from.” We both lit up when I reciprocated with how much I long to visit Ethiopia. He added that there is an Ethiopian Orthodox portion of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the supposed site of the cross and the tomb. I said I know and showed him this photo of pilgrims I snapped there. I only intuited they were Ethiopian though—having never been or really had an Ethiopian friend and not having asked their story. We both burst into smiles under our masks as Desalegn confirmed, “Yep, definitely. Based on the clothing I can tell.” Now we’re going to meet for coffee and I can’t wait to tell this story whenever I finally visit Ethiopia and I just love pulling threads over the world and how having traveled infuses the most mundane act—like paying your taxes—with wonder.

Abdullah

Down an alley in Marrakesh, I knelt to photograph a mosque beside an archway. A man slumped against the wall—orange in the glow of the streetlight—rustled, let go of a bottle next to him, and mumbled, “You have to pay.” “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know,” I said and started to move away. He got to his feet, tilted his head back, and thrust his hand toward me, “What’s your name?” “Ismi Yousef,” I answered.  “You’re Muslim,” he asked, half-smiling. When I shook my head, he squeezed my hand and said, “Pay.” Face to face, I could smell the rum. I pulled away but he squeezed harder and whispered, “I’m ISIS. Pay.” I said no and left.

Down another alley in Marrakesh, I noticed a flame glowing at the bottom of a black stairwell and the flutter of a man stoking it with a long pole. I descended, and he pulled aside the cloth covering his face to smile sheepishly. He pointed at the bubbling black pots of tangia, lamb from the neighbors that would roast all night. We were underneath the hammam, the neighborhood bathhouse. I had read about this in the guidebook. I nodded a thank you and ascended.

Down another alley in Marrakesh, a man pulled me through row after row of rainbow-colored hanging silks and wools to his shop where I bought a shimmering violet-rose scarf. A teenager emerged next door holding a length of bright blue wool his height steaming in the sunlight. Inside, I saw a fire glowing and thick white clouds billowing up from a vat of black water. A man stabbed it with a pole and agitated the steam which swirled as he lifted up the netted wool now a deep deep fresh indigo I had never seen before, and smiled. Abdullah’s hands and face were dyed too.

Stefan

I found Jesus in Spain. 

Over several agonizing months I searched for him because at some point, I started to sense that he could change my life. One day he appeared holding his cross outside the Cathedral of Seville. So I ordered an espresso at a cafe across the street and waited. His hair fluttered in the breeze but he never moved, almost never blinked. Even from a distance, his eyes pierced me.

When he shifted the weight of the cross off his shoulder and began to lower it, I paid for my coffee and ran over. He pulled a white filter from his pocket and set it between his lips, then a folded paper into which he pinched tobacco. Up close I could see that he had fashioned his crown of thorns from coaxial cables and had drawn lipstick blood down his forehead into his eyebrows.

Stefan was from Poland, and not sure of his English, so I only learned a little. He averaged 100 Euros a day, working three hours. All he had to do was stand still, which he excelled at. I asked if people ever treated him like God, ever confessed anything. He said all the time, but that whenever that happened, he just disappeared into stillness until they left.

I asked why he did it, and he looked at me confused, then rubbed his fingers together and answered, “The money.”

I couldn’t help but push. “Are you a Christian? Is faith some part of this too?” He seemed lost in thought at first, but when I saw that his eyes were looking straight through me, I realized he had gone back to work. So I dropped a 2 euro coin in his suitcase with a clink and left.

Herman

In high school, I gave up on my friends and started eating lunch in the hall alone, sitting on the floor, back against the wall, reading. When they came to check on me, I kept a finger in my battered copy of Moby-Dick till they left. Now that they’ve turned out to be great people, I look back and question what I was really looking for. I barely understood a word during the six months it took to read, yet the occasional sentence did punch through my ignorance. “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”

In New Bedford, Massachusetts on January 10, 2016, Allison and I joined the 24 hour Moby-Dick Marathon the night before we moved to Spain. Under the bones of a whale hung from the museum ceiling, sitting on a replica ship next to coiled rope, in the chapel across the street where Father Mapple sermonizes on Jonah, we listened to volunteer readers progress through the novel with a New York Times journalist, whole families collapsed in the hall in their sleeping bags by the third watch, and experts from around the world devoted to Herman Melville. We read at 3:50 am and 4:00 am, respectively, survived the night.

I asked an expert whether Melville had rubbed off on him, what his own best travel story was. He said in Fiji at the end of a year of travel in his youth, he was robbed and came back with nothing. He found his way to an island where the men sit and drink kava for hours on end. In fact, to get there he hitched a ride on a fishing boat whose pilot made him find roots to present the chief. He observed that the two daily tides swept in an abundance of shellfish. “So whatever they needed to eat was just left on their doorstep each day. Like Melville in Typee, you felt as though you were free from the penalty of the Fall.” During the full moon on his last night, he followed the girls of the village up a creek bed to collect periwinkles by the light of beer bottles filled with kerosene.

I don’t know whether Melville seduced or saved me.

Jane

Jane Addams tried to stop World War I. She chartered a ship to The Netherlands to negotiate peace with the first International Congress of Women. Governments laughed, then murdered 20 million people.

At Hull-House in Chicago she spent her life with immigrants studying poverty, watching for ways to enhance their assimilation through art, vocational training, simple shared presence. “Residence, research, and reform,” she said. “The new must be dovetailed into the old as it were—if it were to endure.”

She made a pilgrimage to Russia to meet her hero, Tolstoy, whose take on Christianity inspired all her work: love your neighbor in as practical a means as possible. When they came face to face, he reached out and pulled the bunched fabric at her sleeve to its full extravagant length, clucking disapprovingly that it alone could clothe a little girl. Addams was crushed. She went back to Chicago, simplified her wardrobe, started baking bread in the Hull-House bakery every day, and eventually, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

On a pilgrimage to Hull-House, I learned that her career began just after college as she toured Europe, when she watched, stunned, the violence at a bullfight in Spain. “It was suddenly made quite clear to me that I was lulling my conscience by a dreamer’s scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a defense for continued idleness, and that I was making it a raison d’être for going on indefinitely with study and travel. It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.” She went back to Chicago and founded Hull-House.

I keep searching for what might wake me.

Primo

Primo Levi says, “Remember the time before the wax set, when everyone was a seal. Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; in each the trace of each.” Every one of Primo’s books explores this idea, the effect we have on each other as humans, the story whispered in a train, the apple halved and shared in a drainage pipe at Auschwitz, the moment of arriving home unrecognized.

When the Russian army liberated the camp and sent him to the Soviet Union, he became a kind of Ulysses to find his way south and westwards again to Turin, Italy, on foot, hitching rides, relying on the kindness of strangers and his own nascent cunning as he crossed postwar Europe. Each encounter shifted the course of his journey, recorded in his book The Truce, and inflamed and then distilled his curiosity and warmth to the wisdom: “Remember the time before the wax set." When he did finally ring the bell at 75 Corso Re Umberto, his face uncharacteristically bearded, swollen and reddened by malnutrition, his mother and sister wept. They hadn’t known he was alive. The Nazis took even the joy of homecoming, because to look at Primo then was to see their violence, to see the number tattoo 174517 stamped on his arm.

I found 75 Corso Re Umberto where his children still live and rang the bell with my heart in my mouth. “Buongiorno,” a feeble male voice answered. “Buongiorno,” I said in my rehearsed Italian. “Sono qui solo per dire che amo i libri di Primo Levi. Vengo per dire grazie.” The voice continued under me repeating, “Grazie, grazie, grazie.” Then there was a pause in which I hoped improbably they might invite me to share wine and let me study their faces and see in mine my gratitude, the glow of another pilgrim touched by their author father. After one more grazie, the voice concluded, “Arrivederci.” I bowed my head and said, “Arrivederci,” and left. “Remember the time before the wax set.” Also wax melts.

Sigmund

Climbing the steps to Freud’s office in Vienna, I imagined all the stories rehearsed there and wondered what gets a story right. I passed through the cloud of his clients to his door and pressed the button to ring his bell, enacting the ritual that must have become Pavlovian. The director of the museum led me to a plush couch and began explaining the book they had just published, “Freud and Travel.”

Freud made the analogy of a train journey central to psychoanalysis, inviting his patients to close their eyes and imagine they were staring out a window and that the landscapes passing by were their thoughts and memories, to simply describe what they saw as he listened. What impresses me most about him, what seems lost in the way he has been taken up by our culture, is how deeply he cared about people, that he dedicated his life to listening. He allowed people to tell him what they needed to tell, however false or mistaken, analyzing only later why and delicately.

The director said Freud’s own favorite journey was to Croatia where he loved to wade out into a lake smoking a cigar at dusk with his brother. But he added that perhaps the most telling story was when Freud visited Athens. He apologized he might be misremembering but that Freud wrote a letter describing how he had come down from the Acropolis and gotten lost in the city’s meandering alleys. Freud speculated that this was the unconscious expression of his desire to remain longer in Athens than he could. Later, when I found the letter, that was, in fact, not the story at all.

Una

Someone in Ireland told me, “Wherever you go in life, if you have three stories, two jokes, and a song, you’ll be fine.” Una seemed like she could do all three at once, and juggle a pint of Guinness, a curling iron and the neighbor’s dog while watercoloring the Cliffs of Kerry with her eyes closed. Hair poked out of her head in every direction. “Artist’s hair,” she winked.

She led us up a stairwell in a derelict schoolhouse in Limerick and pointed at a pig’s head with floppy ears on a dining table. “Just like in the book!” Against the will of locals (we learned in frequent conspiratorial asides that sent her eyebrows into the clouds), she had converted Frank McCourt’s school into a museum dedicated to his memoir Angela’s Ashes. “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood,” he begins, “is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Above all—we were wet.” Not everyone appreciated his depiction.

His outlandish storytelling seemed to have rubbed off on her, and I was as fascinated by her fascination with him as my own. After glossing over that she had once saved her husband’s life on their honeymoon, pulling him out of the sea on an island in Greece and performing brisk CPR that sent a lungful of brine choking up out of him at the last possible second, she said her best story might have been in Amsterdam. As a maid abroad in her twenties just looking for an escape from Ireland, she had been called to deliver room service at the hotel where she worked. “I opened the door and stumbled directly onto the set of a blue film!” Una threw her head back laughing. Naked actors sprawled all over the room, on the bed, on the furniture, amid a tangle of cameras and lighting gear. Another conclusive wink left it to us to decide whether she was saying she had joined in.

Ismail

“Oh yeah, the guy pulled a machete and snatched my bag,” said our waitress in London. It suddenly seemed everybody had a story about being robbed in Marrakesh where we were headed next. 

The following week, our taxi driver let us out there at the edge of the old market place, staring into the mouth of a shady warren of unmarked streets. Men clutching cell phones eyed us from doorways. Once we passed they whispered into their phones. All we knew was our Airbnb host was supposed to meet us somewhere near a certain alley but we had no way of knowing which.

A man leaning against a corner unfolded his arms eagerly and stepped forward to ask, “Can I help you? Where are you trying to go? I can show you.”

Allison instinctively turned her back, so I stepped between her and him, and we ignored him. “Let’s just call the number. Maybe they’ll answer.” She dialed and we heard a ring echo off the red walls of the alley. I turned and the man held up his ringing phone to show us our call displayed on his screen. “Allison,” he asked curtly. “This way.”

We followed him, mortified, to the traditional riyad he and his dad rented out, where he held up the key, inserted it into the grating old black iron lock, made me practice, and then showed us our bedroom on the second floor over the courtyard.

When Ismail took us to breakfast weeks later, we found out he splits his time between Morocco and Hong Kong, where he works with a team researching a device that could one day surpass the speed of light and is a professor of astrophysics.

Tony

A woman in the aisle of the Greyhound in Fort Worth, Texas pleaded we return her wallet. “I don’t know who took it, but just give it back, please. Just leave it in the bathroom for me. No questions.”

I glanced at my seat mate, who raised an eyebrow, and I noticed a curled railroad track tattoo above it. The woman glided forward, mouthing thank you to the driver and holding up the wallet. As the door whooshed shut behind her and we set off, a movement at my feet startled me. There was a dog looking up. My seat mate smiled, “Hope you don’t mind!”

Tony called himself a semi-retired hobo. He had ridden the rails since escaping foster care and was crossing from California to North Carolina now to reunite with his wife and son. After nine years riding freight together, they were settling down. He had stayed behind to finish out the season growing marijuana in Humboldt County.

"Every time we pass a train I like sit there and stare. So like this stuff right here,” he pointed out the window. “We’re near Dallas, so all these containers right here … that’s like important stuff. That’s called the intermodal right there. That’s high priority cause it’s got electronics and mail. That’s what you want to get on.”

One morning in an abandoned Appalachian town, he saw a puppy poke its head out of a bush. “We thought for sure, oh man, this guy’s not gonna make it another day or two.” The dog’s face was furless, covered in ticks, stomach all swollen with worms. “We took him in, fed him, gave him water and everything, like we just wanted to treat him good before he died. You know cause it was like sad. Like, damn, this puppy’s never been loved by anyone before.”

The dog pulled through and that first hot August together, they laughed at how the dog rolled in every mud puddle to cool off.  “He’s two years old now. He’s seen more than most people have. His first birthday we like threw him a party in the Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin. His second birthday, he was in the redwoods. He’s ran with elk in the Grand Canyon.”

Tony chuckled and pointed to the second tattoo on his face, which was the dog’s name. “That’s cause that’s like the best thing that I got out of the road, is Pig.”

Adinda

In Chicago, when I asked Adinda why she stopped wearing her hijab, her voice started to shake and she paused. A cough from the audience broke the silence. I chose the Hull-House Museum for the first live show of my podcast because Jane Addams, my inspiration, had devoted her life’s work to immigrants there. I chose Adinda’s story because I could see she had changed since we first met in South Korea. I didn’t know what I was asking of her, which was a mistake.

She explained that in moving from Indonesia to South Korea six years earlier she found out, “They don’t really understand about foreigners.” They pestered her with questions about her religion because the sight of a hijab was so rare there. “Not all Koreans,” she added. “Just some.” 

That’s when we met, both of us newcomers at the university. Something about her sincerity and the nervous way she sometimes covered her nose with three fingers when she spoke in my class bonded us, and she became my first close Muslim friend. 

So as her story unfolded beside me on stage in Chicago, her trembling voice made me fear what I had unknowingly asked her to share.

“I stayed at school usually till night and I have lots of my colleagues at school,” she said, referring to mostly male peers in the computer science lab. “And well, um, when friends getting together, they usually hugging each other and making physical contacts, but the thing is just getting too deep.” When she paused again, I wondered what went unsaid.

She felt unsure how the authorities would respond and said nothing. When a confidante suggested it was the head scarf that set her apart and made the boys treat her that way, Adinda came to the conclusion, “Either you leave the country or you try to get used to it. That was the only options.”

She stopped wearing her hijab. “And there was really big changes with them. They don’t touch me. It’s completely different. Until now I don’t really understand about it but that’s what happened. And yeah, that’s pretty much the story. I’m sorry I’m shaking.”

Evuška

In a clearing in the forest behind C.S. Lewis’s house, I met a woman in a scarlet hijab sitting on a log. 

It wasn’t until I had just knelt at his gravestone, moments before, that I understood exactly why he meant so much to me—pilgrimage works that way. The Chronicles of Narnia were the first books I loved, so I owed him not only my pleasure in reading, but my career and way of life. An orange cat witnessing the epiphany locked eyes with me from across the churchyard and picked its way over. I let some warm tears go.

Evuška had no concept of C.S. Lewis. She had simply sought escape from the bustle of Oxford. His walks with his pipe through that forest inspired a children’s classic, I tried to explain. “I wish I could find some fancy words to describe how magical this place is,” she said. She came from Slovakia years before only with the plan to study English and ended up converting to Islam.

“There is no amazing story. Just that my mind started changing slowly step by step. And then I thought I could be somewhere in between religions. You know you say that to people and they give you the most confused look ever.” So she decided to convert fully and even change her style of dress. Putting on the hijab turned out to be a relief.

“You may not be aware of this, but when you have lip gloss and wind blows your hair, it gets stuck and gives you a mustache. With a scarf on my head I didn’t worry about this anymore,” she laughed. “You become a bit less vain. I liked the change. Maybe it made me realize how vain I was before.”

I told her how much the character of Emeth meant to me in the last Narnia book. Lewis puts a Muslim soldier in heaven that baffles the main characters but whose inclusion forever changed my outlook as a child. She responded, “I don’t know if the Bible says this at some point, but this is what the Koran says, ‘God himself will be making the choices.’”

When we said goodbye, she added, “You are very lucky you get a chance to travel and meet so many people, for yourself or even for others, because it makes your life much richer. A lot of people get lost in their own lives.”

Gala

I met a sage in Bosnia once.

Majda wouldn’t stop talking about her. Gala was one of the smartest people she knew. Gala became an international model in Panama. Gala just curated an art gallery in Italy. As my Airbnb host, Majda dispensed a fair share of wisdom herself in a gorgeous cigarette voice she attributed to the war. “I started smoking when we fled to Sardinia.” The wall across from her front gate was still pockmarked with bullet holes. Her voice lowered in awe whenever Gala came up.

Every morning over coffee the suspense built with each latest update on Gala’s whereabouts. Heating a copper pot slowly on open flame till just before the velvet crema rose past the rim, Majda sketched in the details of her daughter’s brilliant career. I asked where she got the name Gala. She said it came from the wife of her favorite painter Salvador Dalí. Finally one day she announced, “Gala is here.”

Sure enough there in the courtyard, her feet on the table, sat a young woman reading a book. My voice lowered in awe as I asked Gala what possessed her to split her time between three countries. She said that after a difficult youth she attended the School of Peace in a castle in Tuscany and it opened the world for her. Their method of housing “rivals” together, an Israeli and a Palestinian for example, made her come to understand her Serbian roommate firsthand rather than through the mist of propaganda and witness that people are more complicated than we can imagine. Alongside university studies, they practiced peacemaking techniques and upon graduation were meant to swoop back home in every direction sowing peace like swallows, rondine in Italian, the school’s namesake. That, to some extent, is what carried her back and forth over the sea.

Years later, Gala’s words pierced me with insight. “Seph, you give so much to people. It’s good, but be careful. People like that give what they feel they’re missing. And usually, they’re trying to fill a void.” To be seen and seen through so thoroughly left me reeling.

I wonder what wisdom I have yet to stumble on, whose words I have neglected to seek, and where. And if they might finally fill the void.