The Many Different Worlds

    It’s great what you can learn at the county recreation center, in the hot tub after a good swim, or upstairs on a stationary bike or treadmill where you can bull shit with somebody next to you. That’s how I met Kamal and learned about my favorite food – Pillsbury crescent rolls wrapped around an Oscar Meyer wiener, or all by themselves fresh out of the oven with butter and honey.

    Kamal was surprised that I knew about another person with the same name as his – Kamal Ataturk, the first leader of the nation-state of Turkey following the collapse of the Ottoman empire following WWI.

    “Not many people I meet here are familiar with the history of that part of the world,” he said in between deep breaths on the workout machine.

    I told him I was a newspaper reporter and wanted to be a good one and so I had long been interested in everything.

    He nodded his approval.

    “Like about you,” I said in between deep breaths. “Where’ya from? From your accent I can tell you’re not from New Jersey.”

    He laughed and then my wife joined us on the row of stationary bikes overlooking the rec-center’s indoor basketball court where teenagers did amazing things with their bodies and a ball and made lots of noise. My wife is a retired professor with a PhD in Romance languages and pretty soon she was chatting with Kamal about all the different languages spoken around the world and all the French words that came from Arabic.

    Kamal, as it turned out, had been born in 1948, the same year as my wife and I. He grew up in Lebanon at the intersection of many languages, the “Romance languages” of Europe (my wife’s specialty, especially French) being only one of them. His father was a teacher. His mother was always home. He had friends and sisters. Like many middle-class families, they had a second home in the mountains to escape Beirut’s intense summer heat. They were Christians in a predominantly Muslim culture, but they’d all been living together for over a thousand years, so it was not a big problem. The country had not yet freed itself from French colonial rule. He studied at the American University in Beirut, got a degree in engineering and then a job with a big international firm. He lived all over the world where people spoke many different languages. Now, retired, he lived in Colorado with his daughter.

    It was obvious right from the start that we’d have lots to talk about so first we made plans for coffee at a Village Inn and then we had him over for dinner. I cooked. I made my famous French meat pie I learned to make from my Great-Grandma Thibault. Then we sipped modestly priced wine and talked for hours about what we knew, or thought we knew or wanted to know about.

    As the conversation evolved, I felt like there was something fundamentally different about Kamal, not of degree, but of kind. Then it struck me. He had a sense of universal history. He knew about Custer’s “Last Stand” and Norman Rockwell and that the Dodgers had started out in Brooklyn, but in his next breath he’d be talking about Tariq ibn Ziyad and the Muslim world’s 8^th century conquest of Europe’s Iberian Peninsula; Harun al-Rashid’s caliphate at the dawn of the 9^th century when Baghdad was the center of the universe; the 11^th century’s Ibn Sina, known to history as Avicenna – physician, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, polymath – and the awakening of a Golden Age of Islamic learning while Europe was lost in an Age of Darkness

    From what I’ve experienced over the years, I think your typical American doesn’t think much about what happened prior to Valley Forge; like with the coming of America there was a clean break with what had come before; like snapping a pine branch over your knee to build a fire in the woods in winter; like there had been an Old World that had some dates in it that you were supposed to remember, and a New World, the only one that mattered.

    I smelled the Pillsbury crescent rolls I’d popped into the oven to go with our wine. Not everybody agrees, but I think they make the perfect combination to serve at a high-class meeting of minds. “Mmm. Wonderful,” Kamal said.

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    My wife said the French word for crescent roll, “croissant,” means growing, just as the crescent moon is growing into a full moon.

    Kamal said the idea of making crescent shaped bread originated in Austria in 1683 following the Battle of Vienna when European Christians temporarily put aside their differences to defeat the Ottoman Empire’s invading army of 150,000 Muslims coming up the Danube valley. “Had the Christians lost,” Kamal said, “all Europe would soon have been Muslim and the history of the world up to the present moment would have been much, much different.”

    He went on: “To celebrate the victory, Viennese bakeries began making bread in the shape of a crescent, the symbol on the banners for which the Muslims fought. People bought and ate the bread and triumphantly said they had taken a bite out of the crescent.”

    I asked Kamal if he thought it was a good thing that the Christians had defeated the Muslims in the Battle of Vienne.

    He didn’t hesitate.

    “Yes,” he said. “It’s better to have many worlds getting along than just one.”

    The next time I make Pillsbury crescent rolls I’ll be thinking less about the calories and more about the many worlds getting along.