so i've been living in this apartment since about november. for awhile it was a grim and horrible place, full of misery for me and i think for her too. now she has her own apartment and mine is once more full of light, i have brought in fresh flowers, and i am basking.

when i fell in love with this apartment rob warned me that the pool hall across the street makes it a bad neighborhood. while the management company processed our application we went and visited the pool hall, spoke to the very nice woman who runs it and admired the beauty of the few men playing pool in the early afternoon. so i have been waiting for the sun to come out and the bad neighborhood to materialize-- i know you can't always tell what things are like in the winter--but i just love it more and more.

the first thing that i noticed was that when we started bombing Iraq during Ramadaan i actually felt safe here. a lot of my neighbors look arab and there are a lot of women walking around in hijab; i hadn't anticipated another wave of hatred against arabs would make this neighborhood a refuge but it did. i don't think they've figured out that i'm arab yet, i'm not sure if they connected me to the woman who wore hijab and lived here for a few months; and i'm shy of claiming a connection that i'm not sure really exists. i'm light-skinned and queer and i live with men. but i am happy to live here and it makes a huge difference in my sense of personal safety to be living among Muslim families.

the next thing that happened was that a woman screamed outside my apartment in the evening. it took me a minute to realize what the sound was; then i gathered my courage and went outside to see if i could help. my neighbor came running up the stairs shouting that she had been robbed and just called the police; she looked frantic but physically unhurt. i went back and found my keys and joined her outside to wait for the police.

a number of the people from the neighborhood were there, talking about what happened and asking if she was okay. four people had heard the scream and immediately called the police; two young men had witnessed the purse-snatching and one of them had chased the teenagers who took it for several blocks. so had my neighbor. several witnesses spoke to the police; everybody advised my neighbor to remember to cancel her credit cards and cell phone; and once i introduced myself as a new person people told me about the other crimes that have happened here. (five years ago someone broke a car window; two years ago a homeless man camped out on one of the stairwells.)

okay, in order to understand how extraordinary this was for me, my apartment before last was across the court from a man who regularly beat a woman. i phoned the police every night, and they took hours to arrive; i was the only one in the neighborhood to call.

then, late last night, i went with ricardo to the all-night giant a few minutes drive away. when we walked by the wine section to the frozen foods, a very tall woman in hijab came up and started speaking in broken english to ricardo. she was looking for sherry. we read the bottles and found some, but it wasn't what she wanted after all; i wished passionately that i spoke arabic but was too shy to try out the little i know. after many apologies on both sides we left her there, but it felt too weird so i asked a woman who i thought might speak arabic and english if she'd be willing to help the woman out and she said yes.

that one left me a little sad. i should speak arabic; i should have been able to help her find what she needed. she didn't even recognize me as arab; i think that she stopped ricardo because she thought he was.

but here's the thing that i thought about as we were driving away:

if i had grown up in this neighborhood of arabs and immigrants, instead of in the english-speaking white suburb where i did, i might speak arabic today. those classes when i was a kid might have had more effect if i had come home from them to a neighborhood where arabic was spoken.

ah well. booklah in'shallah.