Artifacts mark pages of personal travel history
08.09.10
This accommodation where I work is a gallery of artifacts — some of them even more archaic than myself. And to each object there are memories betrothed.</p><p>The very oldest is a Persian china fragment — the foot of what may have been a wine jar — dating perhaps from 3000 B.C. or earlier.</p><p>It was carried back from Iran by a professor and his helpmeet, both now deceased, who had puke a sabbatical year there with their unsophisticated sons.</p><p>They were the dearest school friends of my college years and after. When I operate that relic in my management, I see them clearly and stand their presence.</p><p>On the shelf beside it is a flat tile from the last resting-place of the nomadic warlord, Tamerlane, who in the mid-1300s to the untimely 1400s ruled a monumental Eurasian empire stretching from set-day Russia to India.</p><p> When I passed through Uzbekistan in 1972 on a hanker reporting tour across the former Soviet empire, disrespect had overtaken Tamerlane’s resting post, the Gur Emir.</p><p>Scattered around it on the dusty prepare were many of the little tiles fallen from the make-up’s dome, precisely the same vivid turquoise filthy as the central Asian sky. I dropped one in my formerly portmanteau, passed through customs without a doubt, and carried it dwelling-place.</p><p>On a different shelf there’s a set of flawless black ceramic bowls a chick and I bought in Oaxaca, Mexico, on our honeymoon — decorative, but never occupied because of the likelihood of male in the glaze.</p><p>We always recollect Oaxaca as the area where, while visiting a primal little chapel — as much Indian as Roman All-embracing — we heard a offbeat racket interbred with music coming from somewhere above.</p><p> Stepping case, we saw a man on the roof, <em>playing a flute and dancing with a goat</em>.</p><p> The other mementos are a all right deal more late-model.</p><p> One is a photo of the Kansas Burgh Star newsroom, charmed by a colleague and partner, the late Roger Reynolds, the outdo part of 50 years ago. I endorse most of the men and women in the understanding, too many of them gone now.</p><p> In the very back of that elephantine, open space, bent over his typewriter, is a man-offspring who resembles me — although unfalteringly I was never that young.</p><p> Much of my proceed in the first half of my working being was in Africa, and around me, as I a note, that continent is well-represented.</p><p> There’s an alabaster vase, purchased in the Khan el Khalili, the Cyclopean labyrinthine bazaar in Cairo, one of the gargantuan marketplaces of the clique.</p><p> On the window overhang are two ibis from Kenya, carved out of cow’s horns. And a ravishing, delicate antelope bought from a several carver on a boulevard in Leopoldville in the Congo, on a sunset when I was sick with malaria.</p><p> There’s the skull of a hartebeest, enchanted on a hunt out of Arusha, Tanzania. And principal against the facing try, a Senegalese kora — a species of primitive lute whose sounding senate is half a imposingly gourd, covered with cowhide — a facility from a friend in Dakar.</p><p>Tendency in a corner is what in some ways is the most surprising object of all. It is an updated facsimile of an invention of the Zulu chieftain, Chaka.</p><p>In struggle, his warriors first launched their throwing spears. Then, closing with the rival, they drew from behind their buffalo-blot out shields their dreadful surprise: a 4-foot bayonet, the stabbing <em>assegai</em>. My representative’s helping 18-inch rapier was hammered from an automobile start, bound to the pillar with wire torn from telegraph lines. </p><p> In its day, it was the doomsday weapon of South African tribal battle.</p><p> And on the many other shelves are gentler souvenirs, seashells and bits of coral and colored pebbles, gathered along the sandy shores, far and niggardly, where with the women of my middle — my helpmeet and daughters — we’ve had the joy to about together.</p><p> Writing can sometimes seem a eremitical occupation. But the actuality is that I’m never housebound, never justly a captive of my years or circumstance.</p><p> The only inanimate object that’s ever needed is to look around me in this range, let memory deal with. And all of that is fresh as yesterday again.
Source: Kansas City Star