After a big rain the wind in the trees rushes and withdraws, then rushes and withdraws, then rushes and withdraws. And the shivering leaves, in communion with the wind, whisper like the sea.

It's late and I’m at the grocery store pretending to pick out an eggplant, but really I am eavesdropping on the two store employees working the produce section: a woman in her early thirties with a dark sense of humor, a nose ring and a streak of blue in her hair; and a quiet, serious eighteen year old kid with a moustache and a thick Hispanic accent. The two of them talk business across the aisles while they restock the apples and celery. They say the shipping orders for the month don’t make sense, that no one’s buying what they’re stocking. “You know why it is…” the woman snickers and trails off. She gives the kid a long look across a pyramid of oranges. The kid does not look up from his cart of celery and carrots. His shoulders shrug slightly as if to say: what can you do?

A broad chested white man in his early forties bursts through the swinging plastic doors that lead to the back room. He shines with good health and strides magnificently down the aisles; he waves at the woman and the boy, they wave back at him, and for a second everyone is silent and wearing thin plastic smiles

I have had friends who spent months in solitary confinement in Israeli prisons. I have had friends whose older brothers were shot dead on their university campus by the Israeli army because they broke the curfew to turn in a final project the evening it was due. I have had friends whose brothers died as fighters. I knew a window shop mechanic who proudly pointed to a martyr poster on the wall and told me it was his cousin. I knew a boy who at the age of two saw a man shot through the head.

And I have known hundreds more who resolved to live and love in the face of it all, to fight despair with laughter and camaraderie, to carry on like any other normal person, like everyone anywhere should have a right to do.

I realize now, so many years later, that I had known all along these people existed; it just takes a little imaginative empathy and a moment of honesty to admit to one's self that such people surely exist, their stories surely true. In Palestine, in Israel, in all places of the world where suffering and injustice are found.

I went to Palestine in part to try to make amends in some tiny intangible way, but mostly I went to meet the people I already knew were there, because I hoped that once I could know them as living breathing human beings, the memory of their friendship and acquaintanceship would seal in me the moral responsibility I owe to them and to everyone anywhere who has endured as much or worse.

My memories of Palestine will keep me honest, and inshaallah will keep me on a path to do some good in the world.

Rain

Sometimes it’s important to stand in the rain. To feel its tickle and kiss, see it curve in the breeze, come at you from the side, or down from the sky in straight-arrow lines, let it dampen your clothes, run in rivulets through your hair, down into your socks. And you scream and laugh and jump up and down, and sing a happy song, or a sad one if you like.

Sometimes you’ve just got to stand out there. To know it won’t hurt you. To know you’re alive. To know what home and shelter mean again.

Sometimes it’s important to stand in the rain.

(Life is) ... the flash of bare white ankles and designer heels when a woman in burka hitches up her long black skirt and runs across the street to get out of the rain.

When I was fifteen I saw a boy get hit by a car.

School had just gotten out. I was walking home with my friends Mollie and Tim. Our homes were in the same general direction, and sometimes I would stay at Mollie or Tim’s house until my mother picked me up after work. We used to stop at the drive-through dairy market across the street from the high school. The cashier was a college student named Paul whom Mollie and I knew from the ymca. He had a fondness for wearing baseball caps and not shaving regularly. I remember that I bought a caramel apple lollipop. I always got a caramel apple lollipop after school; it was an addiction of mine. Then, purchases in hand, we said good-bye to Paul and began our walk home.

We were half a block away from the drive-through dairy when we heard it: the slightly thunderous noise of a something solid impacting against sheet metal, the same sound a closed car door makes when you kick it as hard as you can. I turned just in time to see a body spin over the top of a four-door sedan and hang twisting in the air for one impossible second—so tiny and frail, almost childlike in flight. Blue dumpsters had been put out on the street and Mollie remembers that the boy’s body flew far higher than the dumpsters before plummeting to the ground.

If there was a sound of bones breaking or of flesh thudding onto blacktop, I did not hear it. To me, the second impact was silent.

The next thing I remember, I was sprinting back to the dairy market shouting at Paul to call 911. He must have already heard something—a scream, the squealing brakes, the expletives of passers-by—because he had stepped out to look down the road, and he dialed 911 as soon as he understood, from my shouting or what he could see with his own eyes, that someone had been hit.

When I returned, the boy was crumpled over on one side. He did not move and he did not speak. A woman in a beige and black patterned dress lay beside him. She held his hand in one of hers and with the other she cupped his face. As she spoke to the boy there was urgency and an eerie calm in her voice.

‘I’m here. Momma’s here. Just keep breathing baby… help is coming, just keep breathing for me, ok? Just keep breathing, do this for me... do it for me, baby…’ The woman tore her gaze from the boy and glanced wildly left and right. After a second of confusion she registered the presence of the small crowd that had developed on the sidewalk behind her, and only then did she burst into tears. ‘Someone please help me! What should I do?’

The four-door sedan, a beat-up white Mazda had come to a stop just a few yards down. A trio of girls had gotten out and stood huddled together at the rear of the car as if sheltering from a storm. The two girls on either side had their arms half extended toward the girl in the center like they wanted to embrace her but could not quite do it. The girl in the center, a pretty girl with long blonde hair, covered her face behind her hands, but only just high enough to cover her mouth and nose. Her eyes were staring over her fingertips and fixed with horror on the figures of the mother and the boy in the street. I could just barely hear her saying over and over, ‘I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I didn’t see him… I’m so sorry…’

A few people who thought they could be of some help had gone over to the mother and her boy in the street, but most hung back on the sidewalk. They murmured amongst themselves.

‘Does anyone know who got hit?’

‘She musta been driving straight into the sun; I bet that’s how come she didn’t see him.’

‘…in front of his own mother… fuck, that’s messed up.’

‘…he was running across the street to meet his mom; I think she was waiting to pick him up...’

The three of us watched in silence. Tim’s face had hardened and his upper lip curled back as if he had just tasted something not to his liking. Mollie shook her head and said in a hush: ‘I know the girl. She’s in ASB with me.’

We waited. Mollie, Tim and I. The crowd on the sidewalk, the mother, the boy, the girl with the long blond hair—everyone waited.

The mother kept telling her boy to breathe. Even from the sidewalk we could see him breathing. For awhile all my attention focused on the shallow rise and fall of the boy’s chest, and I silently wished him from one breath to the next. I began to worry—maybe it was my imagination—that each breath was coming slower than the last.

Finally sirens sounded in the distance. The ambulance came into view and cut around the minor traffic jam that had developed around the accident. As soon as the ambulance stopped the paramedics leapt to the ground: one went straight to the boy and began to question the mother; the other brought the stretcher out. In a matter of seconds they had cut the boy’s clothes away with a pair of medical scissors, and as they positioned the boy onto the stretcher we caught glimpses of his naked body: a pale upper thigh, a bare arm, a skinny torso.

All of a sudden policemen and firemen were everywhere. They cordoned off the area. Walkie-talkies blared from long black holsters. An officer was already questioning the girl who had been driving the white Mazda. She had been crying but stopped now, and her face was pale and expressionless as she answered. The girl’s two friends stood behind her, watching from a distance but still staying close; one of the two had gripped the other firmly at the elbow as if she meant to never let her go.

Mollie turned away.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to watch this anymore…’

We walked. Mollie dabbed at her eyes. It was slightly overcast but the sun had lit up the hills to the west. The air was warm. The houses to our left were old, squat, and well maintained. Many of them had white picket fences and the lawns were decorated with cute odds and ends—a porcelain duck holding a welcome sign in his bill; a swinging bench hung on chains from an ornate ironcast frame. For a long time we walked in silence.

‘Shit this is depressing,’ said Tim.

‘Did you guys hear them saying his name over the walkie-talkies?’

‘No. Why? … did you?’

‘I thought I heard them say his name was Omid.’

‘Omid? Omid Navron?’

‘Yeah. He sits next to me in AP Euro.'

‘I know Omid. It can’t be him though. We would have recognized him.’

‘But we never saw his face.’

Tim shook his head. ‘We would have recognized him,’ he said again.

We had gone a few blocks by the time we heard the sirens blare. We turned to watch the ambulance start its run to the hospital, and then we continued walking home.

The next morning there was an empty seat next to me in my AP European History class. Everyone had talked about it in passing period, so when class began the teacher just confirmed what we already knew: Omid Navron had been hit by a car last afternoon and was in the hospital; he had broken several ribs which had punctured his left lung; his skull had cracked; and he was now awaiting brain surgery. His odds were good but he was still in critical condition.

One of Omid’s best friends was in our class. He stared at the top of his desk the entire hour. After class some of us hung around in the hallway to talk some more and he joined us. For awhile he just stood there, mournful and distracted, not really listening.

When the conversation hit a lull, he spoke up. ‘I heard that bitch was going forty when she hit him,’ he said. ‘I swear if I see her around campus today …’, his mouth worked silently like a mute trying to speak. His face turned an ugly red and he punched a nearby pole so hard that it rang. He cursed and shook his hand out. We didn’t say anything. As we walked down the hall to our next period class I took care not to look too closely at him; I felt certain that I would see him crying.

The following day report came that Omid’s surgery had been a success. The hemorrhaging had stopped. He was going to be ok. A few days later he was awake and receiving visitors. Weeks went by and the incident passed from gossip into memory. Oddly, everything went on as normal.

I don’t remember exactly when Omid came back to school. It was some weeks if not months after the accident. He never rejoined our AP history class—he had already missed too much to catch up—but I saw him around campus.

Omid hit a growth spurt soon after he returned; he shot up several inches overnight. It was strange to see him crowding around with the popular kids during lunch period. Just another teenager: awkward, skinny, all bluster and fragility.

We had a few mutual friends, though not any close ones, so we never became friends ourselves. The most we exchanged was a head nod or a hello (‘sup? ‘sup dude). I don’t think I would have felt right being his friend anyways. He seemed so eager to be just another normal kid, to get on with his life after having so nearly lost it—and I never really could have seen him that way. I would always remember him as the kid who lay motionless in the street while his mother hung over him and begged him to stay alive, and whenever I saw him a part of me would always want say with relief, “Hey man, I’m just so glad that you’re alright.”

I woke up late today and lay awake in bed for two hours. A pale light was drifting in through the heavy winter drapes that cover my two front windows. From the hour of the day and the weakness of the light, I knew it must be overcast outside. I stared at the ceiling. An hour passed. I was hungry but felt no inclination to get up. If I just lay here forever, I thought, eventually I would die. If somehow I lost the will to get up from bed, I would starve to death.

What strange thoughts.

I turned back to the windows. There was so much serenity in those windows and the pale, diffuse light come drifting through. I don’t know why, but it occurred to me then that we know so little about ourselves.