Greetings,
He gave him a wooden bowl.
“This is the traditional way. Put your choices in the bowl. We can discuss the price later.”
He accepted the wooden bowl and, to be polite, because he was a guest in their country, wandered around a showroom looking at inlaid boxes, handled daggers with fake stones, silver rings, bracelets, bangles, beads, earrings and silver necklaces in provocative gleaming displays.
In another reality he carried his begging bowl through dirt streets in the world. It felt cool and smooth in his hands as his fingers caressed a worn oval surface. The begging bowl had a consciousness.
He reflected the horror in his mirror. He re-calibrated true bearings and measured his way inside third world countries thumbing open his useful ragged egalitarian existential foreign dictionary.
It was filled with myths, symbols, images, ideographs, pictographs, virus inoculations, sliding scales, musical interludes, sonatas and vibratos. It held journey notes, sardonic Irish flies, bleeding tomatoes, broken hearts, fried home truck stops, haiku, khata scarves, pure mirror paper, type-A negative blood donor manifests, rose thorns, the game of life and empty wooden bowls.
Tiznit boys wanted him to fill it up. They wanted him to be greedy. They wanted to hear the sound of silver strike wood. They had great expectations of wealth based on his desire. He wanted to hit the bricks. He found one interesting bracelet and it clattered, spinning silver.
He became a Tuareg Berber.
“I’ll give you 100. Take it or leave it,” he said in Tamashek. The boy was shocked to hear his language, his dialect. He had no idea. They were on common territory.
Peace.
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