I hovered between giddy and nauseous today.  I don’t have any relatives in Iran, Jerusalem, or Dubai as far as I know.  None of my nephews or nieces serve in the American armed forces.  But I am a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. The agony of the parents of dozens of girls murdered in that first ugly strike sickens me.

I stand in the southeast corner of Andrus Island, in rural Sacramento County, California, in the United States of America.  I lean out of my car window and gaze eastward at the moon rising as the golden globe slips to the horizon in the rear view mirror.   A bird lands on the wire near a pole which warns of danger.

My day held moments of incomparable human interaction.  From the gift of home-made marshmallows to the Iranian woman who left a note in Farsi on the shop’s Gratitude Wall, I spent the day bouncing from joy to joy.  Yet my mind kept returning to the horror, to the images, to the feeds from Israel, Tehran, and Tel Aviv.  Push has come to shove.  I can no longer pretend that none of it touches me. 

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, my glib response to an inquiry after my health has been to quip, No bombs falling on my village.  I had a tangential connection to that war through a friend in Kansas City.  She sold some of her photographs of Kyiv to raise money for her brothers who served in the Ukrainian Army.  My dollars contributed to the purchase of boots and a night scope.  Her images hang in the waiting room of the California law firm in which I work.

But I do not know anyone involved in the new war into which our government has thrust the reluctant world.  Until the lady asked if she could write on our Gratitude Wall in her native language, it had been years since I conversed with anyone whom I knew came from Iran.  My son had a classmate whose father was Persian.  He spoke in his native language at times, though he worked as a civil engineer in the city where we lived.  Otherwise, I know many people from Lebanon and a few from Israel.  My mother’s paternal family came from Syria.  But my name comes from my father’s grandmother and I have clear blue eyes.

As I tarried beneath the moon, strains of an old song drifted through my mind.  Hmm mmm mmm. . . something about being under the same moon although we are far apart.  Its tune and lyrics elude me, but the idea grips me and not in the romantic way that the song intended.  Somewhere on the other side of the world, a frantic mother stands under this same gleaming orb, desperate for news of her child whom she will never again embrace.  I cannot bear the vicarious stab of her inconsolable grief.  I cast my eyes downward, start the car, and finish my drive. 

In front of my tiny house, I sit for a few minutes, gazing at the bakery box with the last of the marshmallows after a day of sharing.  When I lift it from the car seat, a sprinkle of powder sugar drifts through the air.  Suddenly I find myself sobbing as I dust the flakes to the ground.  All those children who will never taste the deliciousness of handspun confections!  I think of my own son, whose absolute rejection of everything about war and the military brooks neither equivocation or dissent.  It is time to take sides.  If neutrality ever lingered as an option, no such luxury persists.  You are for peace, or you are for war.  You cannot straddle this fence.

I shifted the car into park and turned off the engine.  In the silence of the evening, I said a prayer to whatever deity might exist, asking comfort for the mothers and the fathers,  the sisters, and the brothers; but most of all, for the broken bodies and sweet souls of the little children who went to school one day and did not return.

Then I went into the house and closed the door.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

For those who wonder:

  I did not look at the lady’s note.  I could not bear to do so.  I should have asked her what it said but I did not think of it.  She purchased a fused glass pocket heart.  As I wrapped it for her, I asked from where she came.  She said, very quietly, “I am from Iran, but I live in Sacramento now.”  I asked if her people at home were safe.  She held my eyes and whispered, “So far.”  I am not a religious person, but I instinctively pressed my hands together and bowed my head.  “May it remain so,” I heard myself say.  She replied, simply, “Thank you.”