Princess of Zanzibar and Oman

My older one is off to the Philippines this morning.  I haven’t been there in twenty-five years.  She is apparently going on this school trip to learn how to surf.  I think we went to Philadelphia to see Liberty Bell or Western Mass to see the Shaker Village on school trips in my day.   Just what will all that remarkable internationalism mean for this cohort of this generation?  I got her up at 6:00AM and took her over to school a half an hour later.   We had to double back as she recalled that she’d be needing a passport to leave this country and enter the next.

I had old friends over last night as guests.  I looked and without much thinking, plugged in some Randy Weston, the remarkable jazz pianist, composer who grew up in Brooklyn but lived much of his life in Morocco and West Africa.  They seem to have about twenty albums and well over one thousand songs of his there on Spotify and I’ve just let it roll ever since.  Marveling at his muscular manipulation of the ivories, sitting here as I caught up on a week’s worth of blogging notes.

It’s chilly, or at least it is here in the house, which is strange on this early day in June.  I’m in shorts but I have a hoodie on as I can’t seem to decide what sort of day it is or ought to be.  Once again, this evening I’ll be flying.  Or I’ll be hoping to be flying if the damn thing is delayed.  Usually the flights at the end of the day are necessarily behind schedule, as each flight before it, back and forth, increases the likelihood that one of them had an issue.

I’ve started a book that I’d ordered a while ago and just arrived.  We’re planning to visit Zanzibar this summer and so understandably “Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar” was a title that caught my eye.  We’re there now in the palace bath houses with her as a ten year-old.  Her father, whom she adored, royalty from Muscat, Oman, was living on the island in the mid nineteenth century.  Emily Ruete, born Sayyida Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, will later marry a German man and raise a family, alone, after his death there in Europe, where she pined for East Africa.  She apparently wrote the memoir as a story to her children, not unlike this blog effort is for me.  I’m hoping I can get my girls to have a look at the book, as well, before we set foot on the place.

Sunday 06/04/17