Homework Avoidance Issues

I'm halfway through my last bag of Latvian Ketchup Chips. I saw them at Ramstore this morning and again at New World Supermarket and I didn't buy one bag!......Only because I'm going home in two days and no one else will eat them but me. I wasn't going to open this last bag, either, thinking that if I ate them all I'd never get my shoes back on after consuming all this salt and flying for 6 hours. But the hell with it, I'm living dangerously today. Tomorrow I can live bloated and drink lots of water.



New World Supermarket had been closed but has now reopened all fixed up and remodeled. I think I am going to like that store, it has fairly reasonable prices and Aunt Jemimah Just-Add-Water Pancake Mix. They also had Betty Crocker Cake Mixes for 2.40 manat, which is way better than the 6.00 manat I saw the last place I went. I haven't exactly bought a cake mix in about 5 years it's comforting to know they're out there.

I came across an English weekly newspaper the other day which had an article on the traditions of Novruz. What I found really interesting is how similar traditions can an be across cultures and religions. It also enlightened me about some things that seemed just plain odd around the neighborhood. First of all I couldn't figure out why people were tending the gardens of the houses that are unoccupied on the street.....unoccupied meaning a cinder block skeleton still under construction. For a lot of them, there hasn't been any building activity going on at all but last week people were out working on the yards. Cleaning up the gardens to be, turning the soil around trees and generally sprucing up their construction sites. There is a house across the street that has a large lot attached to its side full of sapling trees. Two men spent the week there, in that dust patch, primping those leafless trees.

I figured they should probably work on the house instead.

Anyway, I learned that Novruz is the New Year celebration and it's full name is Novruz Bayram. And like I said before, almost everyone is off work for eight days. It signals the end of winter and the beginning of spring and the symbolic beginning of a new clean life. The first order of business to get that new clean life is a top to bottom scouring of one's house. Old and useless things are discarded.....the article qualifies that husbands are kept. Once everything is perfectly clean, then the other preparations for the holiday can begin. The cleaning carries out into yards which must have all debris, including dead leaves from trees removed and burned. It was an amazing thing to see the concentrated effort on city boulevards and in front of office buildings.....there seemed to be this real sense of purpose I had never seen displayed by the gardeners on the boulevards of Katy, Texas. They were gardening well into the night and they were planting flowers and raking with the same kind of fervor one sees at the mall on December 23rd.

John and I decided to get in on the home improvement thing, bought a pair of weed diggers and set to work on some of the gnarly bits growing up in the courtyard grass. John kept reminding me that the landlord was responsible for the yard work but it didn't seem right somehow that the whole city was up to its elbows in horticulture and we were sitting around doing nothing but watching our weeds grow. As a reward for at least taking a stab at it we found that one of the cedars was full of lady bugs.....hundreds of lady bugs.



The preparations for the holiday begin four Tuesdays ahead of the actual holiday and there are festivities on each of those days that relate to the four elements: water, air, earth, and fire. Bonfires are a big part of Novruz.....just like New Year's Eve on top of the levies in New Orleans....except I doubt they're torching salvaged wood from crack houses. The fire gives warmth and light, and burns away all of the bad that happened during the previous year. Each Tuesday people gather around bonfires they build in their yards and one by one they jump over the flames. As they jump they say..."All bad things of last year go into the fire and all of the good things stay with me." Ya think flame retardant underdrawers would show pantie lines? The fire has to die on its own and its ashes, which contain all the bad stuff, are thrown far away from the house to keep it from coming back...the same trick I tried with the empties one New Years Day morning.

The tip off that there was some kind of big holiday coming up was when these plates of grass started to show up everywhere. It didn't matter where I went, I encountered one of these plates called semeni. I found this "Chia Plate" at a car show.


Traditionally, housewives will start the plate with kernels of wheat and the bright green grass grows as a symbol of spring and the new year. It provides the centerpiece for the holiday, like our Christmas trees do.....and in the same way, you can also buy one down at the grocery.

It is believed that the way you greet the new year is the way you will spend it, so no crying or anger is allowed on Novruz. Enemies must be forgiven and the poor not forgotten. I think that the day the white Mercedes cut us off last week was the fourth day of the holiday and I'd lay money that's why Ali apologized to him. Near the start of the holiday, a Monday, a black cat crossed our path on a narrow street as we were driving to the office. Ali immediately pulled the Prado to the curb and spat three gigantic ones out the window in the direction of the cat, who slithered off behind a fence. I slithered down in my seat a little in case anyone was watching....but made a mental note to remember it....spit three times at a black cat. Got it.

If I was a single girl, on Novruz I would have thrown a shoe over my right shoulder towards the door. If it landed with the toe pointing toward the door then I'd be married by the time the year passed. If it landed the other way, I'd be spending another year in my father's house. I wonder who, in a house full of sisters, gets the lucky Manolo? Maybe a nice cross cultural twist back home would be for the bride to throw a white satin pump into the waiting throng of single women at her wedding instead of the bouquet. A good pair of shoes will take a girl a lot farther than a handful of flowers any day.