Precious Cargo

From my desk, I can see the coastal curve of Malibu. Today, it's barely visible through an eerie brown haze. 

Hundreds of thousands of acres -- including almost 100,000 in Malibu -- have burned around Los Angeles for the past week. Images on the news -- an otherworldly wall of smoke sweeping evacuees down Pacific Coast Highway, a lone horse hitched to a lifeguard tower against a red sky -- sink the heart. The human death toll is at 48. And all day and night, firefighters, police, EMTs, and just regular people keep going back in to get others out.

A few days before my first office hours at the Marion Davies Guest House at Annenberg Community Beach House, I got a voicemail from Naomi Okuyama, Cultural Affairs Supervisor: A letter had arrived for me. 

It's funny how remarkable a letter is, these days -- a handwritten one even more so. So remarkable that it wouldn't just be slipped under the door with my other mail. There isn't any other mail. 

I was pretty sure who'd sent it. I asked Naomi if the envelope had super-neat, kind of chubby printing. It did. 

J, a dear friend since college -- writer, actor, physician, teacher, husband, father -- has sent me a postcard or letter several times a year since about 1990. Sometimes the missives are literary, sometimes humanitarian, sometimes absurd, sometimes transcendent, often all of the above. What a fine thing, don't you think? Even finer when you consider that I am totally delighted by every missive but rarely write back because I'm a big jerk and my handwriting is terrible. 

In this letter, J shared with me Sea Prayer (Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2018) by Khaled Hosseni, author of The Kite Runner. Sea Prayer is a short work of first-person poetic fiction in the form of a letter from a father to a son. Hosseni was inspired by Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, a toddler who in 2015, along with most of his family, drowned while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Lebanon to Greece. Images on the news -- of the boy's body face-down on a Turkish beach, of a police officer carrying him away -- were heartbreaking, infuriating, unforgettable, yet too easy to flip past because, after all, that's somewhere else. And everything everywhere is falling apart.

Sea Prayer's language is simple and direct as it moves between awe, adoration, and plea. It is about indifference, power, love, and hope:

...all I can think tonight is

how deep the sea,

and how vast, how indifferent.

How powerless I am to protect you from it.

...Because you,

you are precious cargo, Marwan,

the most precious there ever was.

I pray the sea knows this.

Inshallah.

How I pray the sea knows this.

When self-sufficiency, human kindness, and even human cruelty is dwarfed by nature, we negotiate. With the divine, with ourselves. In the face of indifference, when we are at our most powerless, love drives us -- even non-believers like me -- to risk and to pray. 

We're all here. There isn't somewhere else. 

Thanks, J. I wrote you back.

-- Catherine Coan, 11/14/18