The old man that sells prayer beads and tissues, a row of them beside his begging bowl, sits on the concrete pedestrian bridge over University Boulevard. He’s there all day, most days. People come and go to the hospital or the pharmacies, from the tramway or the buses. Many are young, but there are old ones and sick ones too. The old sick ones look most miserable crossing the parapet. The old man that sells the prayer beads and the tissues looks skinny and leathery. He does not look up at the people. He stares straight ahead. He is somewhere else. In the spring his life looks almost enviable. But spring never lasts. He is beyond pity. He is there, not quite in the way. The people who give him money need to give him money more than he needs money. Mercy does not look like one thinks it should. It is a river that flows both ways with an ocean at either end. Still, there are so many ways to drown, even in a dry land. The other night a dust storm came. My first one. I am native to a humid land. I swore the other night a thunderstorm would brew. But then a great yellow cloud turned brown. It was like the creeping death that took the Pharaoh’s firstborn son, in the old Cecil B. Demille movie. It sucked all the moisture out of the air and dusted all the leaves and rose petals, and choked out the air. The whole city had to close its windows. This is a hard land. There is snow in the winter, and a summer that cooks the spirit. The roses, like spring, can’t last. The creatures of earth turn to dust. The creatures of fire seem to rule the season. I remember the snowman I made with my daughter last winter. For a day, after an especially heavy snow, Gaziantep was like an American Midwestern city. I know where old men who beg sleep in Midwestern cities—in shelters if they’re fortunate, or otherwise in filthy encampments or in the gutter. In the heat of the night, the air clean enough to open the window, my fan blowing in the moon cooled air, I wonder where the man on the parapet sleeps. I wonder and worry about anyone trapped in a dust storm, from here to Syria or Iraq. I think of my friends who’ve survived California wildfires. I think of a one legged man I once knew who was plucked off a rooftop in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I think of Pharaoh’s children and wish them good health and long life. I think about the rest of us and wish the same. I keep my faith in Mercy, like a snow shovel and the wonder of a daughter, like a vaccine, like lamb’s blood, like the Ninety Nine Names you can recite with beads, like snot rags in a dust bowl.
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Beautiful, Joe.