A Postcard from Egypt
By Deb Forssman '94
Nonfiction Writing
Writing Objective: Write an essay in the spirit of Montaigne.
My mind scanned the list of people I knew but couldn’t come up with anyone that would be on the northeast side of Africa in September. I wanted to know.
On the front of the postcard were four mini-postcards. One corner framed the four colossal statues of Ramses II at the entrance of Abu—the Simbel Rock Temple (Ok, I only knew this because I read the description in fine print at the bottom of the back side). These four statues were giant bearded men made of stone seated around the pyramid walls with their feet pedastaled on stone foot rests, every joint stiff and straight and starched. Next to the temple was a photo of four camel riders in front of the Pyramids of Giza, lined up in stair-step descent. Below the camels was an oriental dancer in front of the Sphinx with yellow stones stacked around her which looked like giant bales of hay. And my favorite—an enormous, turquoise, earthenware hippopotamus with strange black markings, resembling stems and leaves, stripped its sides and snout. The hippopotamus was the largest image on the postcard—even larger than the sphinx or the seated stone men of the temple.
I flipped the postcard over and began reading:
Dear Deb, Ha! And you thought you would never get a postcard from me! OK so it took a while but here is your very 1st one and a beautiful one it is—I might add from Cairo! This place is absolutely bonkers but I really, really love it. So far I have ridden a horse around the pyramids, tried a Feluka boat ride on the Nile, visited the Valley of the Kings in Luxor—that place was awesome but it was 115 degrees there by noon so all we did was lie by the pool! I think I could get used to this kind of schoolwork! This weekend I am going to go snorkeling in the Red Sea which should be really fun! Then our group heads off to Israel and then India! How is school going? I hope you are doing well! Say hi to Posy for me and take care of yourself! Bye!
Love,
Sarah “Goddess of the Nile”
I could not think of who Sarah was. I knew at least five Sarah’s and two Sara’s, and I couldn’t remember where everyone was and what they were each doing this year. I kept going through each Sarah or Sara in my mind and nothing clicked. Here I was in Pella, Iowa, with a postcard from Cairo, Egypt, and I didn’t know who had sent it to me. Sarah, Goddess of the Nile, was going bonkers on a Feluka boat ride in scorching temperatures, and she was wishing me well at school and asking me to relay a greeting to a mutual friend of ours nicknamed “Posy.” At least I knew who Posy was.
It crossed my mind that the postcard had been sent to me by mistake. But I checked the name again and, sure enough, it was me. I thought that the planet “Earth” and “Milkyway Galaxy” might have been helpful additions next to the “USA” Sarah had written on the card; this obviously had come from someone very far away. The Goddess of the Nile was on her way to Israel and then India, probably with the help of a magic carpet. I felt like an idiot or like someone was playing an early April Fool’s joke. Was I dreaming? This seemed like something that would only happen to Joan Didion. After two days, I finally remembered which Sarah it was.
This whole incident is a glimpse of my generation. Only in 1992, would a junior in college not remember which of her friends was traveling in Egypt and living abroad. I tried imagining my mother back in the 1960’s when she was in college. First of all, she wouldn’t have had any friends studying abroad, because no one did that at the Iowa State Teacher’s College of Northern Iowa back in 1963. And second, if my mom would have had a friend studying abroad, it would have been so unusual that my mom would have known her, stamped her friend’s face from the yearbook on her own memory, and would have probably written the friend every day. I realized that I hadn’t been that shocked about receiving a postcard from Egypt. I was a bit stupefied when I couldn’t place the Sarah or Sara, but the news about her world seemed to blend together so nicely with her comments about my world that nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Almost anything seemed possible and likely. The strangeness of the postcard hit me later when I realized how unstrange this all seemed.
A couple of weeks ago I received a letter from my younger sister who is a freshman in college. She had just been to a blues concert and wondered if I had ever had the experience. “When I went back to my room after listening to the blues concert, I just felt so happy,” she wrote. My mind stumbled over that line because I was struck by the irony of it she hadn’t even realized what she had said. The blues, to me, meant suffering and pain. Yes, there was something healing about the blues, a released communal voice of suffering. But still, her reaction seemed odd to me, but not really.
Last Sunday in church I watched a six-year-old girl seated in front of me, perched on a metal folding chair as the congregation recited the Lord’s prayer. She was reciting it too. I looked down at her pad of paper and noticed the Lord’s prayer scribbled out in her own young hand. At the top of her paper were the words “Hineran— hormone for hypersensitive males in mid-life” printed in bold black letters. I wondered if God would find that amusing or insulting. Would He find it strange? The little girl’s mother just smiled and patted her daughter’s head as she read from the child’s tablet.
A French friend recently pointed out to me that in the United States we don’t ask “Why?”. We just listen, take everything in, and accept without wondering. We have friends traveling around the world whose names and faces we can’t recall; we have sisters happy about the blues; and we have small children scribbling on tablets advertising hormonal drugs. And no one stops to question this strangeness. Maybe it’s the strangeness that we like. Or maybe it’s that we can’t even recognize what is strange anymore because there’s so much of it. The poet Neal Bowers talks about the “familiar strangeness of our lives.” If strange is familiar to us, then how can we recognize the unfamiliar? If we can’t see strangeness, can we ask “Why?” Why couldn’t I remember that Sarah in Egypt? Why do the blues make my sister happy? And why is a little girl writing the Lord’s Prayer underneath a hormone for hypersensitive males? Should we ask “Why?” to unpuzzle the puzzle or puzzle it more?