Small World Limits

It would be nice to be able to stay at my leisure, to have the balance and physical capacity to be a Jack-Of-All-Trades. I’m not saying I would have stayed and bummed from job to job, meeting people like Marina, seeing new situations, challenging culture. Having the option to do so would be nice. In my story “The Cheeky Lad” from Finding me — and Them: Stories of Assimilation I write about traveling to a remote part of Scotland. The stories in the book show how I’ve stumbled, learned, gotten ahead, and been burned as a disabled person. When I went to the Egypt in 1989 I went to see my biological mother who was teaching English as a second language. I visited her in Alexandria and saw the lighthouse, one of the “7 wonders of the world.” I went to Siwa, an oasis village near the Libyan border. I came back with a severe case of culture shock and stayed inside at my mother’s place nearly agoraphobic. Let’s just say that, in my travels to very poor and rarefied Siwa, I had experienced humiliation and suspicion, resentment and ridicule that made getting stopped by the cops in Scotland look like a day at the beach. After days as a recluse, having descended to a personal low of watching “Knots Landing,” my mother finally got me to venture out again. I ended up in Tel Aviv. <a href="https://michaelpamram.medium.com/small-world-limits-aedb12afc006">Website</a>