Yesteryear Nearby

Nostalgia has exercised more influence on my thinking over the years than it should have, but I often find some psychological comfort in returning to places that evoke memories of past experiences.  I indulged myself yesterday in one such sentimental journey, and found it to be an enjoyable and fruitful exercise.

I took the 30 minute train ride from Rabat to Kenitra, the town where Denise and I started our Moroccan odyssey over 34 years ago. The U.S. Navy sent me to work at the Naval Communication Station at Sidi Yahia, Morocco, a small village 20 miles north of Kenitra.  Naval personnel living off-base had to live in Kenitra, which housed a Moroccan Air Force Base, as well as support facilities such as a commissary, hospital, school, chapel and other military requirements such as a nine-hole golf course for the American military.  Denise obtained a Civil Service job as a Purchasing Agent and worked at the base in Kenitra.

The decision to move all U.S. military personnel out of Morocco had been made by the time we left in 1972, and by 1974, the force reduction was complete.  Most Americans here, then, held the imperial view that Kenitra would become a ghost town soon after the military left.  In fact, just the opposite has happened.  It is a vibrant, growing city whose population is at least twice what it was in the mid-seventies.  During the years we lived here since then, we had never taken the time to revisit some of the sites which were once so important to us.

I walked down from the train station past the Studio Hotel, where we rented a studio apartment for the first month or so we were in country.  When we moved to the apartment building at 38 Avenue Hassan II, we only had enough “stuff” that I effected the transition by making two trips on foot, carry two suitcases each time.  We led a simpler life then!  Being upwardly mobile in those days, we later moved to the Immeuble Becmeur, the apartment there providing a little more space, even though it, too, contained only one bedroom.  Those locations are included among the 40 or so different mailing addresses we have had in the course of our marriage, evidence that somewhere along the way we bought into the “gather no moss” syndrome.  All the residences, like me, have been adversely affected by the passage of time.  They are a little run down, tired-looking, somewhat in need of a make-over.

I saw the small restaurant, Le Village, where we ate Christmas dinner in 1971, the first time either of us had ever been away from family during that important holiday.  The Ambassy Hotel is still operational; we celebrated the completion of my tour of duty here by having dinner at its nice restaurant on April 15, 1972, the date before we left the country, not returning until August 1985.  The patisserie near the bus-stop, where I would sometimes buy hot croissants for breakfast after coming in from work on a mid-watch, still provides sensory pleasure as the aroma from the ovens wafts out into the street.

But not all my activity dwelt on the past.  I located the parents of a Moroccan girl Denise and I helped relocate to Alabama in August last year.  She had won a lottery visa, and moved to Oklahoma in 2003 but had been having a difficult time.  A friend of hers, who happened to be a colleague of mine at the university in Ifrane, put us in touch with each other.  Eventually, we worked out a plan for her to relocate to Huntsville, where she is now studying.  Her parents gave me a warm reception, and prepared a big meal for me, the culturally appropriate way to express hospitality here.  Before the father took me back to the train station, he drove me around the city and I saw other landmarks which bought back pleasant memories of times long past. 

One site is a factory that produces orange juice for shipment to Europe.  When we lived in Kenitra, the director of operations was a German native, who happened to be married to a South African.   An unusual sequence of circumstances brought us together and we spent a lot of time in their home the last 8 or 10 months before we left.  That couple significantly expanded the provincial view of the world I had at the time, helping me to realize how vast and different are the people who inhabit the globe, and in some way, likely preparing us for the subsequent segments of our journey that we had no inkling would occur.  That time helped shape and form attitudes that made our adjustment here much easier, infecting us with a concern for this country and its people that still compels us to be involved.

It seems that life has a way of forcing me to confront reality, lest I become too pompous in my description of the importance of what we experienced.  Reading the paper on the trip home yesterday, the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes performed that function more than adequately.  Three frames are used for the father to reminisce about the old escalators in downtown department stores; the ones with narrow, wooden stairs, and how in many ways they were superior to the sleek, metal ones we have now.  Calvin in the last frame says, “I’d hate to think that all my experiences will someday become stories with no point.”  I trust that my children’s assessment of these old stories are less severe.  I think that old song about taking a sentimental journey contains the lyrics, “gonna set my heart at ease.”  Maybe that is what I tried to do yesterday; I think it worked.


Fred

---

Submit items for news releases by using the request form at http://www.jsu.edu/news/requestform.html.