“How was your trip to Egypt?” the Radiology doctor asks as he’s about to examine my breasts.
“It was great,” I say, and my husband echoes my words from where he’s sitting in the examination room, holding the clothes I was told to take off.
“You picked a bad time to go,” the doctor continues.
I look at him puzzled, recalling how much we enjoyed being back in my home country.
“With all the unrest that’s going on,” he clarifies.
“Things were fine in Egypt,” I respond, although it’s not really what I want to say. I want to ask if he knows his geography, if he has looked at a map to see where Gaza is located, its southern border across from the Sinai, not near Cairo and the rest of the country. I want to tell him that when there is conflict in one part of the Arab world, it doesn’t mean the entire region is in upheaval. I want to tell him that everyone in Egypt is aware of the genocide (not unrest) that is happening in Gaza, but life still moves normally with people going to work and school, struggling to make ends meet with the inflation rate rising, that it’s a country of beauty and generosity, that we spent time with family, that we watched a dervish performance with dancers twirling in meditation, that we swam in the Red Sea with its waves carrying us. But I say nothing else as I lie down obediently and he examines my breasts, makes sure that the right breast where the cancer was found and removed through a lumpectomy is healing well.
“Everything is fine,” he says, and I’m relieved that I don’t have to see him again for another year.
My doctors’ appointments often come with a dose of politics, especially if anything is happening in the Middle East. My first recollection is the dentist who asked me why they couldn’t get along over there. With my mouth held open so my teeth could be cleaned, I couldn’t explain the long history going from the Balfour Declaration, to the founding of Israel in 1948, the land stolen from Palestine, and the Nakba that resulted in the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.
In November 2023, when I went for my gynecology appointment, the nurse, who is required to be in the room because my doctor is male, casually mentions that the Hamas attacks were awful. Already on the exam table wearing the required robe, I respond that Israel’s retaliation has been awful. I sense a look of incomprehension across her face, but this time it’s my doctor who surprises me and says, “Yes, I’ve worked in Palestine and the conditions are terrible.” He continues, affirming the violence of Israel’s retaliation while I get my pap smear.
Two days after my appointment with the Radiology doctor, my husband and I decide to take a walk on the greenway. He has just come back from a morning Tai Chi class, and when he suggests a walk, I know that if I don’t go out now, I will be too lazy as the day continues. We decide to go to a closer greenway instead of the further one he initially suggested. I take my purse with me, tucking in an article on Arab American literature that I’m reviewing for a literary journal, thinking I might go to a coffee shop later to read it. We park in a small gravel lot. This is the same place where my husband drums with a group of friends every Sunday morning. It’s not one of the busier greenways, and there is only a large truck, pulling a lawn mower. I leave my purse under the corner of the seat and make sure my husband has locked the car.
We walk along the Roanoke River, over a steel bridge, and enjoy the quiet of the morning with a few other walkers. There is a group of children with swimming tubes about to get in the river. At one point, we think about turning around but decide to walk a little longer. We run into friends that we don’t see very often and, when we do, it’s usually on a greenway. We stop and chat, hear the updates on their granddaughter, ask how retirement is going since we’re approaching it, and enter into the current politics and our concerns about the future with the upcoming election. We continue our walk together, and we separate when we reach the lot where they parked their car.
It begins to rain, and fortunately I’ve taken my hat with me. We finally get to our car, and as I’m about to open the passenger side, I notice that there is green colored glass on the ground. Perhaps I just didn’t notice it when we parked. I open the door and there is a mosaic of shattered glass all over the seat and the floor. A few seconds until my mind registers that the glass is from our car. I look at the window and see a few broken pieces still clinging to the edges. I must’ve said something to my husband or he realized it at the same time. He comes over to where I’m standing and looks around for a rock or something that someone might have used to break the window, but there is nothing in sight, and I wonder if it could’ve been the weather, the rain that came unexpectedly.
We pick up the pieces of glass as best we can and loosen the ones still holding onto the window, so they will not fly off as we’re driving. Once it’s good enough, we get in the car. I climb into the back seat behind the driver’s side where there doesn’t seem to be any slivers of glass while my husband goes to throw away the larger pieces we gathered. I remember my bag, and I’m about to get it but decide it’s not a good idea to open the passenger door again. When my husband gets in the car, I ask him to hand me my bag, but before I finish the sentence, I know it’s not there. And the reality of what happened hits both of us. The window shattered, my bag stolen, the violation of our property, what has been taken from us. Each item in my bag appears like a slideshow, ending with the small backpack I bought in Barcelona, that I use all the time, that is the perfect bag. In the back of my mind, I recognize that this is manageable—it’s not breast cancer or a stroke, which my husband experienced a couple of years ago. I’m entering a state of numbness as my husband calls the police, provides the information they ask for. He hands me the phone and I rattle off some of the items that were in my bag.
I ask the woman on the phone how likely it is that the police might find anything, and she’s honest, telling me that if there are no cameras, it’s not likely they’ll find anything. After we hang up, I walk around, look in the garbage bins. There is nothing, but I note two signs that say there are cameras and 24-hour surveillance. One sign is on an old building that seems abandoned. It doesn’t appear very hopeful, but we call the police again and tell them that there might be cameras.
At home, while my husband calls to make arrangements for fixing the car window, I cancel the credit cards that were in my wallet, call the bank to replace the ATM cards, request new insurance and dental cards. It’s hard to recall everything that was in my wallet, and I hope I haven’t forgotten anything crucial. Fortunately, my license and my faculty ID were in my phone, which I had with me. And fortunately, too, I had my favorite hat for the potential of rain.
I make a list of the items in my bag:
My wallet (that I bought in Barcelona—we went there after I did a writers’ residency in Morocco. I took that trip a year after my breast cancer, still feeling uneasy about my existence in the world. The trip rejuvenated me, and I felt again that I could live in the world, that I could have new experiences, that I could continue to grow. After the residency, we stayed in Barcelona for a week, a place we had never been. We wandered the streets, had dinner with my cousin who lives there, saw an amazing flamenco performance, and shopped at the stores where at one of them, I bought the small wallet.]
Inside the wallet, my credit card, my insurance cards, my AAA card, my business cards identifying me as a professor of English & Creative Writing, perhaps fifty dollars, ten dollars I found on the ground on my last birthday, a small crescent moon given to me by a Bedouin shop owner in Egypt for good luck.
My reading glasses. [I bought those on a recent trip to Durham, NC, where we went to attend the wedding of a friend’s daughter. The reading glasses were 25 dollars, more than I had ever spent on reading glasses but all my other ones had broken and I decided to splurge.]
My eyeglasses. [I usually wear contact lenses but at home I wear my glasses, and these transition to sunglasses, so sometimes I wear them when I take a walk. They were expensive, and although my prescription had changed slightly, I hadn’t gotten new ones.]
The hydrocortisone for my eyes that get itchy from allergies, the tissues I always carry with me, the tiny container of Vaseline for my dry lips, a small comb, a spare pair of contact lenses, the article I was going to review, the red pen for making notes on the article.
And the bag itself, which I cannot replace.
That night as the day is finally over, I remember the car keys were also in my bag and perhaps the house keys too. [The key chain is the goddess of fertility given to me by my closest friend who lives in Cyprus because we had difficulty conceiving until we were fortunate enough to have our two daughters.] This means we will need to change the locks on the car and the house.
The next day, we begin the process of replacement:
The car window: $400.10.
The reading glasses: $27.00
The wallet: $12.00
The eyeglasses: $319.40
Replacing the locks for the car and the house: TBD
Changing the ringtone on my phone to “It’s a Jungle Out There”: $1.29
I remain shaky, reminded of when our apartment was broken into when we were adjunct teaching, scraping by on minimal salaries, and our computer among other things was stolen. At the time, we had no money to replace what we lost. I’m grateful that now I can at least attempt to replace some of what has been taken. It has been a long journey from being adjuncts to being professors—years in graduate school, student loans, credit card debt, finding permanent teaching positions, paying off our debts, finally buying a house in our fifties.
It’s the intrusion of someone entering your life and taking from you. I wonder what this thief will do with the items they find in my bag. Will they read the article on Arab American literature? Will they use my reading glasses? Are they itchy somewhere where the hydrocortisone might help? Will they use the keychain from Cyprus? Are they nearsighted that my glasses might help them? Is there anything of use in there besides the small amount of cash?
(If that person is ever caught, I would like to tell them the story of my belongings—one by one so they can know what they have taken from me.)
I never worried about safety while we were in Egypt. As the trip came to a close, my desire to return home and to my life was tempered by my fear of the violence in America, the racism that hovers at the edges of our life as an Arab/African American family. On the first night we arrived in Egypt, my cousin drove me to the supermarket, and there was a police car next to us as we were parking. For a moment, my heart fluttered, then I remembered that in Egypt, the police will not harm us based on our appearance/race.
The unrest is in America, a country where violence floats beneath the surface of our lives, especially for those of us who are not white. A place where the upcoming election brings with it fear. A few weeks earlier, sitting with a group of colleagues at a friend’s house, discussing the current politics, my vision moved around the room—these friends are from France, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, St. Lucia—some of us naturalized citizens, some of us with a green card, some of us with only a work visa. [The possibility of taking citizenship away from those who were naturalized, of deporting people, of denying green cards.] Our lives are held in the balance of the upcoming election.
I know that I will survive the theft—material possessions are not what matter. I will replace what I can and let go of what I can’t. But that feeling of unrest as I live my life in America will remain.
