On Hammers, Nails, and Wheels that Squeak

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As a child, my father appeared to me to be entirely vice-free. He was a quiet, consistent, thoughtful man, whose occasional evenings with a pipe seemed well deserved. This, considering that his cleaning-filtering-tamping ritual took at least 30 minutes of patient, restrained preparation, such that he seemed less an addict than a connoisseur, a supplicant at some temple of pleasure that he revered, and did not take for granted.

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His other pleasures were likewise reverent and ritualistic. He did not listen to his favorite, Fairouz, while in the car or in any way distracted from that singular experience. He listened, brow furrowed, in silence broken only by the sound of his own breathing, his attention so concentrated that he would forget to mute his very exhalations. For my father, the attentive parent, this was not a time for children. And for my father the workaholic, this was no time for multi-tasking. And for my father the writer, this was not a time for lyricism, appropriately outfitted though the mood may seem to have been for just that.

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He wrote poetry, and did so in many notebooks similar to the one I keep for these ramblings…but the hardback nature of our notebooks is where any similarities between them begin and end. While mine show the pattern of my thoughts – erratic where I am running after a tenuous idea or phrasing, scratched out and with arrows pointing to my many changes of heart and mind – his drafts read like manuscript copy. His writing is neat and measured, his penmanship impeccable. His draft is sure of itself, evidence that he put pen to paper only when all of the elements of rhyme and rhythm, meaning and aesthetics had aligned perfectly in his mind, when he was sure that they needed no revision.

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My father forgot himself though, around Flight Simulator. He reacted to it as a Persian does to catnip – in a manner inconsistent with his otherwise austere, distant, elegant, world-weary air.

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I write all of this now from a terminal in the Cairo Airport, where the men making up the majority of the passengers are eerily silent. I would not be surprised if these were men my age, for my generation has readily bought into those instruments of temporary isolation known as iPods and laptops and e-readers*, and we brandish them wheresoever we go, to protect ourselves from the company of our fellow 20-something-year-olds.

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But these are men of my father’s generation, or slightly younger. They do not read in airports, nor do they listen to tinny music audible to themselves alone. These are men who are talkers, who make friends in every queue, every congregation, every time they travel somewhere, anywhere. These are men who are patriarchs, who are used to leading conversations, mostly about themselves, at the heads of dinner tables. These are men who nightly go to hookah cafes, and have been going since before there was an English word for what those were, before fruity tobacco flavors were acceptable candidates for smoking by anyone other than the weakest, most moneyed of men.

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I am noticing them now for their silence. Even those who are on their cell phones are speaking in uncharacteristically quiet tones, hushed and reverential, far from Egyptian. I hadn’t realized the depth of the quiet until the lull between one podcast episode ending and another beginning, having chosen in this instance the safety of temporary isolation. I wonder if I’ve just missed some sobering announcement – perhaps that our flight to Kuwait has been delayed yet again, on top of the two restless, unscheduled hours already spent wasting at the airport. I take my ear phones out, banishing the New Yorker for another time when the low decibel level is less concerning, less out of place.

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Ears perked, I listen for announcements for a few minutes, but the loudspeakers have news only of other flights and other destinations to tell me and my fellow congregates at Gate 5. My puzzlement grows, as I look around once more to the silent men around me.

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I then realize that their eyes are all trained outside, trying to make out behind the glare reflecting off of the floor-to-ceiling windows the plane, into whose belly we are about to embark. They are bewitched by this miracle of human invention, as is every Arab man I have ever had occasion to see around anything and everything aeronautical.

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I think of my older brother, who was so enamored of the possibility of a life spent sky-bound, that upon failing to meet pilot criteria, he promptly forgot the five painstaking years spent in engineering school, and considered instead a lifetime of scented towel and cookie distribution as a flight attendant. I think of my friend M______, whose tastes did not otherwise conform to what is considered in Egypt to be the masculine normative, but who was still under the spell of any thing both metallic and winged. M______, who would eventually become a makeup artist, M______, who did not know the makes of the more common car, M______, for whom even soccer held no appeal. M______, who seemed the least likely candidate to tap successfully for mechanized knowledge of any kind, nevertheless knew when the retirement flight of the concord had been, and mourned the end of that era with true, heartfelt grief.

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And it is all of this that has finally brought me to think of my father, than man of noiseless, discreet, respectable passions. For the only moment I can remember seeing him be anything but collected was when he was in aerodynamic, role-playing bliss.

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It is Microsoft Flight Simulator that held this fascination for him. That software was somehow capable of turning my father into something of a stranger. Inattentive, quick to anger when interrupted or distracted from his task – to fly a poorly pixelated airplane over an equally rough-drawn landscape (this being 1996, when graphics were mostly representational), and safely down onto an unimpressively rendered strip of grey tarmac.

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I tried playing it myself a few times, of course. When my father bought our first computer, he and I and my twin brother approached it as an adventure, but also as a family task. Whether it was figuring out how to access a directory in MS.DOS mode, or mastering a level of whatever new games we’d installed – we went at it as a threesome.

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But MFS could never capture more than my most fleeting interest. There was certainly an issue of over-complexity. I was too young to understand the dials, to treat the journey as anything requiring preciseness or finesse. Who, after all, knows what that is at such a young stage? And even knowing, the unrestraint of youth worked against me constantly. Then of course there was the issue of how minimalistic it was, how anticlimactic. Whether one crashed or landed, there was grayness to look at, and nothing but self-satisfaction as a reward – there were no fireworks, no victory video clips, nothing. Even if one were to plummet dramatically out of the sky and spiral down into certain doom, the screen cracked only half-heartedly, and there was not even the smallest puff of dust stirred up by the demise of plane, pilot, and passengers.

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And so it is that all of the men surrounding me in the terminal are looking at the airplane as an object of desire, an object of relinquished childhood dreams and bygone passions. For Egyptian boys, “pilot” is the quintessential response to that oft-repeated question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That is, until they turn into young men, and the concerns of the real world, that most wretched of places, descend upon them.

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Being in Cairo for even the shortest amount of time messes with my head, for the people I know within it have one thing in common; they are all successful providers who have long abandoned their Plan A. Most, it must be mentioned, slide like newly-minted keys into the slots that their fathers have created for them; the contracting company, the private dental clinic, the all-you-need-to-do-is-not-fuck-up position at a family friend’s telecom services firm. Most have abandoned their childhood wants, and have woken up to the improbability of actor, ballerina, writer, pilot, have abandoned their attempts, and have decided as marker of maturity not to mourn the loss.

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But most Egyptian men I know have the latest version of MFS on their computers, and are struck silent in airports. At night, after those they are providing so staidly for have gone to sleep, they creep away and settle onto their computer chairs. They sit, in their off-white undershirts and their drawstring pajama bottoms in front of screens that can merely simulate 3-dimentionality for them, and allow themselves the short, controlled bursts of that alternate reality that my father meted out to himself so judiciously. And I wonder often, whether it is they whom life and its quotidian expectations have defeated, or if it is I who will discover the ruination of false promises, of optimism beyond reason, and too late at that to settle into Plan-B-Providerhood. One American proverb promises that the squeaky wheel gets all the grease, and another warns that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Which one of those two will life make me out to be?

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*This last is an embellishment, for though we listen to music, we, the Egyptian nation, do not read.

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