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Phobos & Deimos
Two Moons, Two Worlds
John Moehl
Phobos & Deimos
Two Moons: Two Worlds
Copyright © 2016 John Moehl. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-3992-9
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-3994-3
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-3993-6
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Foreword
Mars has two moons: Phobos and Deimos. Like our own moon, always pulling on Planet Earth, creating tides that wash across the globe. My personal world has been pulled by the forces of two different moons. These forces have created two worlds; a bipolar life that is the catalyst for the present work: a collection of short stories.
It is my hope the reader will find in this work a glimpse of lives that may at first seem very foreign; so different as to be pure invention. These are fictional lives and fictional stories; but they are based on real events, real people, and real places. I hope the reader can get of taste of these worlds. I hope I will have been able to communicate to the reader that, even when there are tremendous differences, there are also commonalities. Life is a challenge for all who live it.
Preface
This work represents a series of short fictional writings revolving around my years living and working in various parts of the Africa Region; these years tempered with extended stays in the land of my birth, living in various parts of the United States, from the Northwest to the Southeast. The first contribution attempts to set the stage for this multiple-personality syndrome; the last trying to fix the negative that will yield a lifetime’s portrait. Other pieces deal with various aspects of this split personality; observations from a contemplative newcomer on different cultures that link to a universal oneness. Sandwiched between these slices of cerebral whole grain is a filling of episodes depicting various aspects of daily life, the challenges encountered, and the way one must cope with the unexpected. The hoped-for collective thread running through this multi-ethnic goulash is the commonness of humanity. When stripped of all, including our culture and skin color, we are variations of the same organism that is struggling to survive in an often inhospitable world. Most of the tales, modeled after the lifestyles of the 70s and 80s, show evident, and at times striking, differences between life in the United States and Sub-Saharan Africa. What is not so obvious is the humanness we all share.
Acknowledgments
My efforts have been made possible by my Wife who has helped me see things through the eyes of others. The stories are possible due to her guidance and due to the tremendous generosity of those people across Africa with whom I have had the privilege and pleasure to live and work; people who have given much more than they received. This text would not have been possible without my Wife’s further loving support and encouragement nor without the exceptional assistance from Marie, backstopping from her perch in the Tetons.
Two Worlds
Have you ever been getting out of a boat, when you had one leg still in the boat and the other firmly planted on the dock. The boat begins to drift away and you feel like you are going to be torn apart. This may, in some strange way, partially describe my life where I have two worlds, or at least, like Mars, two moons. One of my moons shines over a “normal” 1950s childhood in the rural Pacific Northwest, when houses and cars were unlocked, drugs came from the drugstore, button-up jeans and a flannel shirt were dress for all occasions, water and air were clean, cars had real chrome metal grills and bumpers, and you could get a “Coke High” at the drive-in after school. This is not to paint too rosy a picture, because I did not particularly like those days when I was living them; and have equally tepid feelings of them when seen through the filter of six decades.
My other moon lights a tropical sky, a postcard photograph of a saucery moon dyed ruby-red by dust, backlighting a skeletal acacia tree on a savannah ridge. This moon casts long shadows that blur fact and fiction, reality and make-believe. The man in this moon at times laughs a belly-wrenching guffaw that mocks man’s silliness. The man in this moon cries oily tears for man’s desperate condition. This moon illuminates much, but little that is “normal”.
However, my moons are not yin and yang, good and evil, light and dark. Each moon has its own gravity and establishes its own atmosphere. Each is its own world. But, as moons, each world is linked to one planet, and part of the same system.
The Super Market
Markets are not all the same. Albert had seen pictures in the old newspapers he used for wrapping cloth; pictures of beautiful expansive stores with shiny floors, bright lights, and shelves upon shelves of wonderful merchandize. They called these supermarkets. Well, that may be all well and good, but here in the Central Market, the marcado, he knew they, too had a super market.
This was the Big Market and it was truly super with everything anyone could imagine. Whatever you could eat, wear, put in your house, or use on your farm was to be found somewhere in the vast expanse of the market. There were rows upon rows of small market cubicles located around a maze of narrow byways that amounted to footpaths, albeit the pedestrians had to share them with bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, pushcarts, and even the occasional horse. The shops themselves were a conglomerate of corrugated roofing sheets, wood, and whatever scraps might have been considered useful in constructing some sort of structure to keep out the rain and thieves. Inevitably, regardless of how flimsy the stall, it sported a disproportionately large padlock; a case where size really did not matter because, irrespective of how big, most of these cheap Chinese imports flew open with a good solid rap on their shackle.
The alleyways twisted left and right and back on themselves, the vendors selling dry goods interspersed with small lean-to chop houses and mimbo bars. These lanes were more like grooves, worn deep in the soil under the feet of thousands of market-goers. The hard under-surface was overlaid with a smooth ooze of all variety of detritus which took on major proportions in the rainy season. These ruts would be literal streams in the rains, changing to a trickle in the dry season when they transported mostly human by- and waste-products. The combination of these rich liquids and sludge imparted a pungent fragrance to the market that mingled with the tang of cassava, a myriad of special spices, aging fish and meat, along with over-ripening vegetables.
The food-selling portion of the market was located on the Northeast corner of the plaza. Here the goods were sold in long sheds with cement floors and more structured drains. Under the metal-roofed hangers, which burned like ovens in the hot season, the foodstuffs were arranged along wooden tables, the men and women selling the produce sitting behind on a variety of stools and chairs, their children scurrying about. Each vendor had a plastic sheet that corresponded to his or her part of the common table, the fruits or vegetables stacked neatly and artistically in the center of the sheet, loose change carefully secreted under one corner, readily available when needed. The sellers called across the hall to each other, as they hailed customers and screamed after their children while they nursed younger infants or took care of bodily functions perched on pots that took the place of stools.
Outside the greengrocers, in the more open air, there were more bedraggled tables and slabs where the butchers and fish mongers displayed their wares to the buying public and the