Farah Rocks Florida

by Ruaida Mannaa

  When we finish, Mr. Delacroix asks him, “Hey, you going to the lighthouse?”

  “When is the trip?” Dr. Fisher asks.

  “This weekend. We have a couple of spots left on the shuttle.”

  Dr. Fisher shrugs. “I’ll think about it.”

  He shows Mitch his saw and how it operates. “Really neat,” Mitch says. “I have some things I’m building. Maybe I can come over one day and use this?” Dr. Fisher nods.

  When we all leave, everyone thanks him for showing us his collection.

  “Thank you,” he says, blushing again. “Thank you for coming.”

  Chapter 13

  The night before the lighthouse trip, I ask Sitti if she will go, and again she says no.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I am busy.”

  “Doing what?” I want to know, and she makes the fist and opens a finger for each item.

  “Cooking, cleaning, tatreez…”

  “You do that every day.”

  “Exactly.”

  Holy hummus, I think. I encourage her. I tell her everyone wants her to go. Then I explain that it’s good to get out and see things besides the grocery store.

  Finally, I try guilt.

  “Sitti, if you don’t go, I can’t go. I have to have an adult with me.”

  She grumbles. “Fine,” she says. “I will go.”

  The next morning, she wears a new thobe, a black one with blue embroidery—there is the bulbul again, but also some lilies. I have been working on my own embroidery a little, and my bulbul is taking shape.

  I have spent most mornings here exploring outside. Then, when the sun gets too hot, I come indoors to work on my homework and then on my embroidery. Sometimes, Sitti and I cook together as well, and she teaches me cool things, like calculating measurements. It reminds me of the article that explained how cooking and baking are really chemistry and science.

  She still doesn’t let me bring my rocks into the condo, though. I have to leave them with Dr. Fisher.

  “I like your thobe,” I tell her, but then I notice her shoes. She’s wearing a pair of her flip-flop sandals with leather straps. “You should wear sneakers,” I suggest.

  She shrugs. “I don’t have sneakers,” she says, and we leave the condo. It’s already hot outside. As we get on the shuttle, Mr. Delacroix says that it might hit one hundred degrees. (He has to move a lot of his books out of the way because the shuttle is so full that Mitch sits up front with him.)

  Sitti reaches into the front of her dress to pull out a small fan. “It’s going to be too hot,” she mutters in Arabic, waving the fan across her face. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”

  Then I see Dr. Fisher board the shuttle. He is wearing the same palm-leaf print shirt he wore that day on the plane, and he looks grouchier than ever.

  As he walks past our seats, he looks down, sees us, and stops. He starts to scowl, but then he stops. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a petrified wood stone, which he hands to me. “Just finished polishing this one last night,” he says in his gruff voice.

  “Thank you, Dr. Fisher!” I exclaim.

  And then, slowly, so slowly that I wonder what’s wrong with his face, he cracks a smile. He even shows his front teeth.

  “We can find more, maybe, at the lighthouse. There should be some interesting rocks out there,” he says.

  “No more. No rocks,” Sitti cuts in. I guess she understood him.

  “Fay,” he says to my grandmother, “I know you don’t like them, but your granddaughter has a real interest—”

  “Rocks so dirty!” she says stubbornly.

  I sigh, and Dr. Fisher shrugs as if to say, “What can you do?” and continues to his seat.

  As Mr. Delacroix drives us to the shore, where we can see the lighthouse, I think about the fact that I have been here for three weeks. I’ve learned to really like Sitti, and I’ve learned a lot from her, but there are some things that I will never understand.

  The lighthouse sits on the far shore, Mr. Delacroix tells us. It was built in 1824, but it replaced an older watchtower that was built in the 1500s. I translate as much as I can for Sitti. Her nodding and the way her eyebrows scrunch together tell me that she is interested too. At one point, she reaches into her bodice and pulls out a small notebook and a pen and jots down some notes in Arabic, writing from right to left across the page.

  We get off the shuttle and walk up a long, sandy road to the lighthouse, which stands like a black and white striped candle on the shore. Its red top is like a little flame. We are allowed to climb up to the top, if we want. Most of the people from Grand Bums don’t want to, because they worry about the tall, steep staircase that curls around sharply.

  Dr. Fisher suddenly stands next to me. “It has two hundred and nineteen steps,” he says.

  “Does that scare you?” I challenge him.

  “Ha! Ready to go?” he asks.

  “Come on!” I say, laughing.

  And we climb up, up, to the very top, until we are standing behind the glass windows. The Atlantic Ocean is spread below us like a blue picnic blanket on the ground.

  “I can’t believe I’ve missed this trip every year for the last five years,” Dr. Fisher says.

  “Why did you?” I ask.

  He sighs and exhales deeply, like a gust of wind blowing out of his lungs. “After my wife died, I just didn’t really want to go anywhere, I guess,” he says. “I actually still don’t. I like to explore the natural environment, add to my collection, read up on what I find.” He shakes his head. “But I think now it’s good to get out and have some friends too.”

  “I think my grandmother is starting to feel the same,” I say, as I point out the window. He leans over and squints to see what I see. Sitti is standing on the sand with Mitch and Agatha and Mr. Delacroix, and they are all laughing together. Her white head scarf and her black thobe flutter with the gentle breeze that blows off the water.

  We climb back down and explore for a bit with the group. I find a bunch of interesting-looking rocks under a tall tree, and I gather some up so Dr. Fisher can take pictures of them for me with his camera phone.

  Sitti is standing with Dr. Fisher and Mr. Delacroix, and suddenly, she points up into a tree.

  “Bulbul!” she says. “Izz a bulbul!”

  “Where?” I cry, dropping the rocks in my hands, except that I drop them right on her sandaled feet.

  She shrieks and takes a step backward. Her foot slips on yet another rock I have dropped. Even though Dr. Fisher and Mr. Delacroix reach for her, she topples backward, flat on her back, in the sand with a soft plop.

  Chapter 14

  The thing is, there really was a bulbul, I later think to myself in the shuttle. Dr. Fisher said so. “It was, from what I could tell, a red-vented bulbul, which is common in this part of the state,” he explained.

  But at that point, Sitti didn’t care anymore.

  Because her thobe was dirty.

  And her toes hurt.

  And her back was sore.

  And she was as mad at me as a pot of boiling chickpeas.

  “Why do you carry big rocks? Why do you need them?” she asked me over and over on the ride home.

  I told her the same answer, “Because I collect rocks, and I’m curious.” But that never seemed to satisfy her.

  When we return from the lighthouse, Sitti hobbles out of the shuttle in pain. Mr. Delacroix and Dr. Fisher help her off the shuttle and into the condo.

  I’m really upset when I see the pain in her face. She’s so little, I think when I compare her to the two men, who tower over her like two big lighthouses. They walk across the plastic runners on the carpeted floor and help her into her room. A few minutes later, she hobbles out, wearing a clean thobe.

  The men help her sit on the
couch while I bring a chair from the kitchen so she can prop up her foot.

  “No!” she says to me sharply in Arabic. “I can’t put my feet on the cushion.”

  So I bring a plastic trash bag and drape that over the seat, and then she’s willing to put up her foot. I pull off her sandal, and her ankle is puffy and swollen. The nail on her big toe is cracked from the rock that I dropped on it.

  The two men leave while I get her a glass of water with lemon and mint. She shouts instructions at me from the couch into the kitchen. “Put in just three mint leaves! Squeeze the lemon!” I do as she says, and soon I have a tall glass of water sitting before her.

  She tells me that the thobe will have to be cleaned very carefully, washed by hand, in fact. From the look on her face, I know she means that I will be the one to do it.

  And I will do it, because I feel bad that she got hurt.

  There is a knock on the door, and Dr. Fisher is back. Sitti motions toward his shoes. He slips them off and leaves them by the door, then comes in to sit down on one of the chairs. When I ask if he’d like some water, he says he would, and then he passes Sitti a book.

  When I return with his glass, I see her paging through it. It’s a book of birds, and specifically, a book on Passerine Songbirds. That’s what it says on the cover, just so you know. She has the book open to a page where I can see a bulbul, with a red spot of feathers near its tail.

  “That’s the red-vented bulbul she saw today,” Dr. Fisher says. “I remembered I had a book on them.”

  “These izz from my country,” she tells him, “but izz yellow.”

  “Yes, the yellow-vented one is not found here in North America,” he begins to explain. I move to pass him the water, but I trip over the leg of the chair that Sitti is resting her foot on. I lurch forward.

  He shrieks. I shriek. Sitti shrieks.

  But in the end, there is no help for it.

  Dr. Fisher has a glass of water splashed all over his lap, and when he stands and turns to look at the chair cushion, I can see the damp stain all over the back of his shorts.

  Holy hummus.

  Again.

  But this time, instead of glaring at me, he snorts.

  Like a Minotaur.

  By the third snort, I realize that he’s laughing.

  “I’ll go change my clothes,” he says, “and I’ll be back.”

  Sitti mutters that at least I didn’t spill the water on her couch.

  Later, I put a new bag of ice on Sitti’s ankle while she fiddles with her cell phone. She keeps trying to call my mom, but every time she pushes the number eight, her finger hits the five instead and she hangs up, then starts again.

  Finally she gets through to my mom, who tells us that Samir is doing great. He will be coming home in three more days, and I can fly back home myself next week.

  “Your ticket is flexible,” Mama explains. “You can use it whenever you want.”

  “Can I stay just a few more days?” I ask her. “I’m having a lot of fun with Sitti.”

  Sitti’s eyes mist over, and she leans over, mumbling at me to adjust the ice bag, but I know she is happy.

  Chapter 15

  Being back in Harbortown is a wonderful feeling.

  Being back in my own room is amazing.

  Being at the dinner table with my brother Samir, and seeing him eat like a horse, is not something I can describe.

  Just kidding. Of course I can.

  When I see Samir eating like a Minotaur, I feel relieved and happy and sappy and weepy all at once. Because I know he is healthy and getting better all the time. The doctors said the hole in his heart is fixed. He might even be able to sign up for soccer this summer.

  Allie comes over for dinner too, and I tell everyone about my time in Florida with Sitti. I tell them about Dr. Fisher, and the spilled soda, and Mr. Delacroix, and Cal the cook, and the trip to the St. Augustine Lighthouse.

  I also pass out some souvenirs.

  For Mama, I have a bag of dried hummus beans. “Because I plan to help you cook more now that I know some of Sitti’s recipes. We can start with hummus.”

  For Baba, I have a piece of fabric, embroidered with my bulbul. He recognizes it. “This is the same bird that all the ladies wore on their dresses back home, that all the billows and tabestries were decorated with.” I tell him that I’m going to embroider some pillows for our house, to remind him of where he grew up.

  For Samir, I give him a tiny, polished bird skeleton that Dr. Fisher let me have. He helped me wrap it up in bubble paper so it wouldn’t break on the flight home. “Can I keep it in my room?” he asks Mama and Baba, who nod and say sure without hesitation.

  For Allie, I have a chunk of petrified wood. She and Baba exclaim over it, and they ask me all the questions I asked Dr. Fisher. Baba gets the family iPad and searches for it on Google. We find a lot more pictures and information. I’ve brought home six pieces with me, which Dr. Fisher also helped me wrap carefully.

  “You know what I’m thinking, right?” Allie says, holding one piece of wood up to the light to watch the minerals glitter.

  “What?”

  When she tells me, I exclaim, “Holy hummus! What a great idea!”

  The Magnet Academy Rock Stars festival takes place only two weeks after I get back from Florida, but Allie and I are ready.

  We spread a blue cloth on the table and set up our trifold, which is decorated in big blue letters with our title: WOOD YOU BE PETRIFIED?

  We have pasted charts about petrified wood, the minerals, even a timeline of how the process happens. I emailed Dr. Fisher in Florida for some of the information, and he sent me back links to cool websites that helped us with our research.

  He also told me that Sitti signed up for a trip to go with the residents of Grand Bums to Cape Canaveral to visit the Kennedy Space Center. She even asked Mr. Delacroix to drive her to the store so that she could buy a pair of sneakers.

  “I think your visit did her a world of good,” he says in his email. “I think it did a world of good for me too.” He tells me that his son is planning to come and visit him in the summer for two weeks. He doesn’t add more than that, but I can imagine how happy that makes him.

  Ms. Maximus walks around with the judges, who are the science teachers, to examine every exhibit. They stop at our table and spend a lot of time looking at our charts and examining the pieces of polished petrified wood we have laid out as samples. “These are great samples of petrified wood,” says Mr. Beaker, who is one of the coolest teachers in the school.

  “Fascinating,” says another teacher. “Where did you discover these?”

  “She spent a month in Florida,” says Ms. Maximus, looking at me strangely. I think, maybe, she is smiling. Ms. Maximus always looks so grim and fierce that this smile is more like a little crack in her mouth. “She managed to keep up with all of her schoolwork and do a little exploring of her new environment, as you can see.”

  “What is your name?” asks the teacher. “I teach eighth grade, so I haven’t had you as a student yet.”

  “This is Farah Hajjar,” says Ms. Maximus. “We call her Farah Rocks, because… she really does.”

  Tatreez Artwork

  Palestinians call the art of embroidery tatreez. Every Palestinian village has its own symbols and designs. It works like a code! The symbols on a dress or tapestry can tell you which village or town the artist is from.

  One of the most famous and oldest tatreez designs used is the Star of Bethlehem. It has eight points and represents the ancient Palestinian town of Bethlehem.

  Tatreez uses traditional cross-stitch, which takes time to learn. However, you can make your own Star of Bethlehem tatreez artwork!

  Supplies:

  1 sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch graph paper

  pencil

  red marker
/>
  markers of three other colors

  glue

  scissors

  ruler

  1 sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch cardboard or sturdy paper

  1 sheet of red construction paper

  Steps:

  On your graph paper, make a replica of the eight-pointed Star of Bethlehem following the guide on shown above. Put a small dot on each square. (Note that each row of the star’s eight points is built with five “stitches.”)

  Using your red marker, put an x in each box that contains the points of the star.

  Using your other colors, “x” in the rest of the graph paper until you have a design around the star.

  Glue the graph paper onto the cardboard

  Use your construction paper to cut two 1 x 11 inch strips and two 1 x 8.5 inch strips. Glue them around the borders of the graph paper to form a frame around the edge. Now your star is sitting in a lovely frame. Decorate it with your markers!

  Glossary of Arabic Words

  asfour —

  bird

  habibti —

  my love (to a girl)

  inshallah —

  God willing

  magloubeh —

  meaning “upside down,” a dish of rice and meat that is cooked in a pot and flipped into a serving tray

  qahwah —

  coffee

  sah —

  correct

  tatreez —

  embroidery, an essential part of Palestinian culture

  thobe —

  a traditional, usually embroidered gown worn by Palestinian women

  waraq —

  paper or card