“After the divorce, my father’s world would only become increasingly alien to me. Mostly, I experienced him as an absence, a mystery filtered through my mother’s mythologizing eye.”
On the phone, my father tells me he is leaving for Egypt. A month-long visit to his homeland. “Maybe longer,” he says, “depends.”
“I have to go,” he tells me, cutting off. “I’ll be fine.” Maybe, I think. But a 70-year-old with health issues shouldn’t put himself at such risk. On the television screen, Dorothy was still in black and white singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Was I supposed to cry? My mother seemed to expect it.The word was a pyramid, a hot place baking in the sun where sphinxes spoke., a place as distant and mythical as Oz. I’d only been once when I was five. I remembered a public bus in Cairo, staring up at my mother’s face which was staring straight ahead. Gripping her hand as we moved through a foreign place.
“The Arabic way,” she said as if she knew. She still wore the cartouches and ankhs and Eyes of Horus that my father continued to bring back from his travels.., she’d say, beaming, if someone asked. But this exoticism, trinkets winking on her white skin, was something she could easily cast off. She only used her married name to dodge creditors.
After 9/11, I remember calling my father, who was away. “Dad,” I said, “what is this going to mean? For us?”When I learned one of the attackers, indeed one of the pilots, was Egyptian, I remember feeling not only shame and anger but fear. Not just of the assault and its fallout. Or of future attacks. Fear of being associated with, though I felt fury. I wasBy this time, I was already beginning to experience trouble at the U.S. border, just as I knew my father was.
After I returned home from the airport, I got a phone call from him. “Well, I missed my flight,” he said. “I got detained by the police.”
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Naya Rivera's father explains how they handle difficult conversations with her young son'We handle him and we talk to him just like he's a 5-year-old going on six,' George Rivera said.
Read more »
Naya Rivera's father gives update on how her son Josey is coping with her deathNaya Rivera’s father discussed how the family is closing ranks to help care for his late daughter’s son, Josey, 5.
Read more »
Why John Stamos Feels He 'Could Have Never Been a Father' Before Getting Sober - E! OnlineIn an exclusive chat with E! News' Daily Pop, John Stamos talked being six years sober, his 'loving' son Billy and more.
Read more »
Naya Rivera's Dad Opens About How Her Son Josey Is Doing (Exclusive)ET sat down with the late actress' father, George Rivera, for an emotional conversation ahead of his first Father's Day without her.
Read more »
The guilt Craig Melvin carries with publishing his new bookIn chronicling his journey to reconciliation with his father, Melvin feels bad about someone he overlooked.
Read more »